Rita Black: For years, I struggled with the scale caught in a self criticism and frustration cycle, but everything changed when I stopped being my own worst critic and became my own curious forensic scientist of my beliefs and habits and body around weight. Instead of beating myself up, I got curious about my habits and beliefs and the results I was seeing. And that curiosity helped me not only release 40 pounds, but keep it off for nearly three decades. In this episode, I’m gonna share with you how I shifted my mindset and how you can do the same. You’re gonna learn how to turn self-criticism into self-discovery, break free from unhelpful patterns, and finally get to the root of what’s keeping you stuck. So grab your lap coat and come on in.

Rita Black: Did you know that our struggle with weight doesn’t start with the food on your plate or get fixed in the gym? 80% of our weight’s struggle is mental. That’s right. The key to unlocking long-term weight release and management begins in your mind. Hi there, I’m Rita Black. I’m a clinical hypnotherapist weight loss expert, bestselling author, and the creator of the Shift Weight Mastery Process. And not only have I helped thousands of people over the past 20 years achieve long-term weight mastery, I am also a former weight struggler, carb addict and binge eater. And after two decades of failed diets and fad weight loss programs, I lost 40 pounds with the help of hypnosis. Not only did I release all that weight, I have kept it off for 25 years. Enter the Thin Thinking Podcast where you too will learn how to remove the mental roadblocks that keep you struggling. I’ll give you the thin thinking tools, skills, and insights to help you develop the mindset you need, not only to achieve your ideal weight, but to stay there long-term and live your best life. Sound good? Let’s get started.

Rita Black: Well, hello everyone. Hello, you! Come on in. Welcome, welcome. I hope you are doing fantastically. Welcome new listeners. Make yourself at home. And thank you for being here. And welcome back veterans thin thinkers. You know, I love you. Come on in and have a seat. I hope you are loving life and feeling good here in the middle of January of 2025, our baby new year. I do wanna send a shout out to any fellow Los Angelenans who were affected by the horrible fires we had this month. We are all recovering from the shock here. It’s been just insane and very moving though to see the city mobilizing and supporting everyone. I know my local YMCA we’ve been donating lots of things, water and clothing and blankets for people, but it’s just, you can’t even fathom the extent of the damage. And just people are starting to realize just like the ramifications this is having. So my heart goes out to anybody that was horribly impacted. I hope you and your families are safe, and I’m wishing love and well wishes to you.

Rita Black: So today I am feeling the need to discuss something that I speak to my students and people in my membership all the time about, and that is turning self-criticism into curiosity so that you can truly solve weight challenges rather than just having them always get you off track and keep you stuck. So here’s the deal. A lot of you probably got super focused in the beginning of January, right? And hey, good for you. You got back on track after the holidays, the loose holidays that we all kind of fall under the spell of the holidays. And now you are in this focused feeling, releasing weight, feeling healthy. But here’s my guess, that either around now or somewhere down the road, things will start to happen that may throw you off.

Rita Black: And these things happen not because there is something wrong with you or your commitment to health or being your ideal weight, but because these things are the things, what I like to call struggle points that are subconscious obstacles. Whether they are limiting beliefs or habits or both that kill the mojo in your weight release efforts as you are progressing in your weight release. And these struggle points, they’re not a surprise. Often they are the very same things that always come up for you. Usually what happens is we’re chugging along doing great, and then bam, a struggle point pops up on our path and we fall off track. We feel bad, we make it mean something like we’re hopeless, and that we’re never over gonna overcome that struggle point. So we end up getting stuck at the same places over and over and over again.

Rita Black: Just keep starting over, hoping this time we’re not gonna have something come up in our path. And inevitably it does, and we start over again and over again back at square one. And this has to stop because the key to long-term permanent weight management isn’t about being perfect as we talk about all the time, but it is about turning that self-criticism and into deep curiosity about yourself and deep self-compassion and your behaviors. So getting super curious about yourself, especially your struggle points.

Rita Black: So today I’m gonna walk through my own initial journey with managing my struggle points on my journey of releasing 40 pounds and maintaining for almost 30 years. And yes, believe me, we have struggle points even in maintenance. And many people who get into maintenance in my community are like, wait, we still have struggle points? I’m like, yep, you still have struggle points. And the good news is though, it’s a skill curiosity, building curiosity is a skill curiosity around your behavior so that you can self-correct. This is an incredible muscle that you can build so that when you do really lose your weight and are maintaining it, even though struggle points pop up, you know how to manage them and handle them. And that’s how we attain that long-term permanent weight management.

Rita Black: So before I dive in, I want to give you a warning and let you know that if you’ve been on the fence and thinking about joining my self-study 30 day hypnosis based shift weight mastery process, we are raising the price and the reason we are doing this because we’ve held off on it for a very long time but inflation has, you know, really forced us because this year, literally we had, we, it takes a lot of softwares to run our, you know, community and the program through which we have an app so we use a lot of different softwares and you know, even though I’m a very untechnical person our, our company, we do have a lot of softwares that run our world.

Rita Black: So they all either double or tripled their prices. So this is why we’re doing it, and we aren’t raising the price that much, but we are raising it. So if you’ve been sitting on the fence is a perfect opportunity to join. And the last day to join the prices are going up on January 30th, 2025. And so if you enroll now, we are having, we offering our discounted price with as a ticket to the live either spring 2025 shift or the fall 2025 shift, you can choose. The spring one is in May. The fall one is in October. And so that will be a free ticket plus you get the program for a year. So you get access to all of the goodness for a year, and you get a bonus program, which is our five top hypnosis downloads that include hypnosis on drinking, exercise and stress and a bunch of other things.

Rita Black: So check it out. You can go to the show notes and the offer is there, or you can go to www.shiftweightmastery.com/bonus30. That’s www.shiftweightmastery.com/bonus30. And check it out. And like I said midnight January 29th is the last time to get in at that discounted and our low price, it will be going up and that will be that.

Rita Black: Okay, so this is how Curiosity killed the fat. I wanna start with a you know, just, there was a professor, professor Bergman, a research scientist at Stanford University, and I love this quote, it is better to have failed and know why you failed than to have succeeded and not know why. I’m gonna repeat that because I love it so much. It is better to have failed and know why you failed than to have succeeded and not know why. And isn’t this the truth? I feel like for years I dieted and I could diet, I could lose the weight, but I never knew how I lost the weight. I mean, I know, oh, I restricted or I didn’t eat certain things or I exercised, but I didn’t know the mechanics, like what I was doing internally that was allowing for the success. It just seemed like a magical era where I was willing to have some willpower and then it all faded away and I didn’t know why. Right? But then I never looked at why I failed. I never looked at like, what were the things that led up to it? What were the things that, what were the problem, what got in my way? I just failed and then went and tried to find some other shiny penny to, you know, program or diet or whatever to, you know, start all over again, right?

Rita Black: And so we wanna really adapt this looking at our what doesn’t work for us in a way and make it possible so that it becomes you know, part of who we are, you know, getting curious about our behavior rather than critical.

Rita Black: So many of you know, but the, for those of you who are new to this world I, you know, I started struggling with my weight when I was pretty young. I was around eight and I started gaining weight. My mother was obese and she was also a nutritionist. She was very smart about food. She knew everything, all the ingredients and the, you know, biology of, of most foods and, and the nutrients and micronutrients. And, and she would talk all the time about healthy food. And yet she emotionally ate and over ate and, you know was significantly overweight.

Rita Black: So and then I started gaining weight. And though there was always food around and et cetera, et cetera probably my story is somewhat similar to yours. If you are somebody who struggled earlier in your life, I know some of you may have started later in life but for those of you who are early starters, like myself, our stories are probably somewhat similar. We realize we’re overweight. We, you know, felt shame about this and tried to lose weight in whatever weight, you know, usually a diet. And that was me. So for many, many years, I, I would diet, I could lose the weight, I would gain it back. I mean, you know, I didn’t always lose all the weight I wanted to, most of the time I didn’t, but I could, you know, lose 10 pounds, lose 20 pounds, and then, you know, yo-yo, all the way through high school, through college, you know, even like my wedding, I bought a dress that was really you know, my, my, I my husband proposed to me.

Rita Black: We were living in New York City. I had gone to school in New York. He had gone to school. I was a downtown girl. He was an uptown boy. We met literally in midtown Manhattan. Isn’t that crazy? In the late eighties. But and I, I didn’t, you know, I wasn’t, I was pretty young. I was I, when I think about it now, my daughter’s 22, and I realize, like, I’ve gotten engaged when I was 23, 24. Gosh, I don’t, I can’t even remember the exact age I was, but I was married when I was 24. So yeah, I was 23. Oh my gosh. So anyway, I went to go find a wedding dress and I, I went into this boutique in Manhattan and I didn’t have any money. Like I was, you know, impoverished. And I went with my, my roommates from college, and the very first dress I tried on and, you know, and I was overweight.

Rita Black: I was a couple of sizes. I was, I was, you know, I had dieted, so I wasn’t my highest weight, but I wasn’t my lowest weight. So I was once, somewhere in between. So I tried on this dress though, and it was a beautiful dress, and it was a little pricey. And anyway, long story short my roommates were like, you have to get this dress. This dress was made for you. And it was, it was, it was a, it was a beautiful kind of like a mermaid and kind of hit a lot of my flaws and accentuated what worked for me. And and I told my mom, like, ’cause it was, it wasn’t horribly expensive, but it was expensive enough. And I said, oh, there’s this great dress, but it’s too expensive. I’m gonna just keep looking for something cheaper.

Rita Black: And she wrote me a check. And that was like, I want to cry now. ’cause That was so great. So anyway I got this dress and I was going to lose weight, and of course take it in, but unfortunately, I got so stressed out about the wedding, I gained weight, and I could hardly, I’d like, it was just like a scene out of a, you know, a rom-com movie. My mother trying to like, tell me to suck in my gut and, and zip up this dress on my wedding day. Anyway, so that was me though, like up and down, up and down, up and down the scale. Even, you know, my wedding couldn’t get me to lose the weight. In fact, I gained. So and, and you know, of course that along the way what happened was I developed a very powerful inner critic, right?

Rita Black: Every time I failed, that inner critic was right there in my head saying, see, you blew it. See, you will not be ever be successful. See, you are a fat pig. See, you are a carb addict. See, you are a lazy bum. See, you know, like every insult you could throw at me, my inner critic knew how to do. So you know, I got married, you know, and I continued to struggle with my weight up and down the scale. And then, you know, there was a day about, gosh, how many years later, about eight years later, where I got on the scale I had been on yet on yet another diet, and my dieting was really impacting my life, right? Like this limiting belief and a horrible relationship with myself. I mean, you know, this is the point I wanna make, is like, we think, you know, sometimes we get into these moods, I know because of all my students andclients is that, oh, I shouldn’t even worry about it.

Rita Black: It’s not that big of a deal, but this is the way we communicate with ourselves, right? And it’s really a, it’s really an abusive relationship and a self-abusive relationship. And we are in the habit of it. It’s not like we’re doing it, it’s doing us. It, this, this, the way we communicate our, with ourselves in this very negative degrading, disrespectful way is a mental habit, a thought process, habit. It’s a loop. So, you know, I was stuck in this loop. I was, you know, just, you know, it impacted my relationship with my husband. It impacted my relationship with work, and it impacted my relationship with my friends. And I didn’t wanna go out anymore. And I was always like, you know, if I was feeling fat, I wouldn’t go out. I, you know, and so it was really impacting my life in a big way.

Rita Black: And then I went on this diet, and then all of a sudden you know, like I got on the scale one morning and I had lost weight, but I just kind of, I couldn’t do it anymore. You know? Like, I kind of like the years of, you know, it was over 20 years that I had been struggling. And I know for some of you, that seems like a very small amount of time because you’ve maybe been struggling 30, 40, 50, 60 years. But you know, it just, after a certain point, it’s kind of like when you’ve struggled, you know, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, like that, you know, you get into this place and, you know, the length of time it, at a certain point doesn’t matter. It’s just like, yes, I’ve been struggling, and this is, I feel like I can’t even escape this horribleness in my head.

Rita Black: And, and I just said, I can’t do this anymore. And I got on the scale, I cried. Like, if you’ve read my book, if, if you’ve done, if, if you’ve gone on my program, you know, all this. So my apologies. But the, the point I’m I’m making is I said, wait a minute. No, I’m not gonna do this anymore. I’m never gonna die it again. I’m gonna just figure out a new way forward. I’m, I’m gonna figure this out and I am gonna be nice to myself. And you know, I kind of, in that moment, this like, different voice came to me, which I, a voice. I call my inner coach. And I was like, I, you know, like, I’m gonna coach myself down the scale. I’m not gonna criticize myself anymore. But here is the thing. So even though I had this wonderful shift in my mindset and you know, I was on my journey in the beginning, I still had a loud critic, and my coach didn’t have a lot of power.

Rita Black: You know, she started piping up. But I, I needed to really work on this ’cause I would still beat myself up for overeating, even though I didn’t allow myself to diet. I didn’t allow myself to ever start over. I would still get mad at myself. And it doesn’t go away just because you wanted to. I think you need to know that it’s like it, you know, you need to get your mind in the habit of shifting into curiosity. And you need to get your mind in the habit of self-compassion because the brain isn’t wired that way. You know, you need to get in the habit of red flagging self-criticism, because right now your mind thinks all those things, those nasty things, those horrible, awful things that your inner critic says are true. I’m sorry. I know it sucks. And this, by the way, is something that hypnosis and meditation really helps with refiling our negative thoughts and diminishing them.

Rita Black: And this is something that we really, really focus on in the shift process. And, you know, this is what I, this is my jam. So let’s talk about and take a moment just to talk about self-criticism. You know, I’ve never met a weight struggler who wasn’t hypercritical of themselves, that wasn’t crueler to themselves than anyone, like their worst enemy, right? So why are we so self-critical about our weight behavior? Well, first of all, the brain is negativity, biased would be right? Like, so it’s always looking ahead, looking to protect us as hypervigilant. And a weird way, in a weird way, the brain is just trying to control us. And, and by punishing our behavior, it kind of thinks it’s helping out. And you know, it’s so interesting because I ask people all the time, and they tell me, I say, you know, is one of the reasons why you’re hypercritical of yourself is because if you weren’t, if you were nice to yourself, ’cause people would say, if I’m nice to myself, then I’m gonna just let myself get away with crazy behavior because I’m an uncontrollable beast.

Rita Black: But we have seen with research that this is not true. We actually, the more self-compassion we use, actually, it helps us realign ourselves and be consistent with better behavior, interestingly. But we do have this underlying belief and it does get in our way. So here’s another th thing that you know, the, the self-criticism and why it is works against us instead of for us, is it, it triggers our stress response. And when our stress response is engaged, you know, our cortisol goes up and, and the actual thinking part of our brain, the smarter part of our brain gets shut off because the, the brain and body want all of the energy of the body accessible. Because, you know, in our ancestral caveman days, you know, we had to run across the savanna to escape the lion. And we needed all of our energy reserves to do that.

Rita Black: So the brain would shut off any sort of thinking, you know, ’cause you don’t wanna think, you don’t wanna think, oh, well, should I run or should I not? It’s just like, run. And it was an impulse and it was a primal deep brain impulse to run. And so that that frontal brain frontal lobe was turned off. And so usually in a stress response we’re beating ourselves up. And then, so we’re heading into our predetermined behavior, which is oh, well, you know, I was bad. And I’ll start again tomorrow. And then we overeat. And that’s another thing is like, when we’re stressed out, we want to eat to comfort ourselves. That is, you know, a habitual behavior. And then that feeling of self shame. We don’t like feeling bad. You know, when the critic starts to kick up, we can feel a lot of bad feelings internally.

Rita Black: We don’t like feeling bad. We wanna push those bad feelings down. And often what we’ll do is we will make a deal with ourselves. We’ll say, well, I’m gonna be good tomorrow. And that, then that bad feeling immediately goes away or often goes away. And then we make this deal, okay, I’ll be good tomorrow. That bad feeling goes away. And to, you know, and again, another research shows that to the degree we promise to be good, gives us license to be bad. So we get into these cycles of promising to be good, then going into overindulgent behavior. But then guess what? The critic always comes back. So, you know, we could be spending years, decades struggling in this zone, you know, good, bad, good, bad. And what we realize is one of the first things we have to do is interrupt this mental struggle cycle.

Rita Black: And there are a number of ways to do this. And I just wanna walk through a process that will help you, you know, be able to intercept and self-correct rather than criticize and go numb or start over, or ju know. Just get off track. So one of the things that’s helped me in the beginning of my journey was just taking a breath. I had started, you know, doing some hypnosis and I’d started doing some breath work. And we do a lot of breath work in the shift process. We have this thing called the shift breath, where we anchor a really nice feeling of empowerment to a breath. And why a breath is very helpful is when you take a deep breath in, a lot of things go on in, in your mind. And one of them is kind of like a, I wanna call it like a mind machete.

Rita Black: It, it intercepts. Like just taking a breath sends this energy up through your frontal brain and it kind of slows things down. And that immediate limbic response, which is the emotional response that we usually have, like when we’ve eaten something we didn’t wanna eat, you know, it’s an, an emotional response and a habitual response. When we take a breath, it kind of cuts through that to the frontal brain where we can bring down our smarts, we can bring down our mind, we can bring down our inner coach and say, okay, wait a minute. What is going on here? Let me bring my smart brain to this so that we can start to be rational rather than emotional about what’s going on here. Does that make sense? So that breath really is kind of like you, you’re slicing through the old neural loops that your, you know, brain has gotten in the habit of going into and saying, wait a minute here.

Rita Black: We’re gonna do something different. We’re gonna try a different approach. So that helped me a lot just to kind of take a breath. For instance, I’ll, I’ll give you a, a a for instance. Like, let’s say I went to the refrigerator and opened it up, you know, habitually and scanned it and, you know, I was fridge surfing. Have you ever done that? Surfing the fridge? Hmm. Well, it looks good here. You know, just kind of mindlessly, kind of in a trance state almost. Well, definitely in a trance state, you know. And if I reached for something, grabbed it, like, let’s say there was a piece of cheesecake in there, and there often was, I would, you know, grab it, eat a couple of bites, maybe the whole thing. But and then, you know, my inner critic would say, oh God, you are such a fat pig, and why did you do that?

Rita Black: You blew it. Right? And so I would take a breath, or, you know, I would take a breath before I even reached for the cheesecake. ’cause I would open up the fridge and go, why am I standing at the fridge? Take, you know, a breath and shut the fridge. But if I got into the negative behavior and then my critic popped in, I would take a breath. And then I, so what that did was it, it kind of just slowed everything down in my brain and, and it allowed me to bring in my inner coach. It was like me calling for my inner coach. That breath was like, okay, inner coach, come on in and help me. ’cause I need some help, help against this critic, right? And this coach was also, I, I like to point out a scientist, right? Like a forensics expert.

Rita Black: So my coach was multifaceted, very smart, and so is yours. So I would start to have an inner dialogue with the coach. And, but before I did that, I would thank my inner critic for doing what she did. I, I would thank my critic. I would say thank you critic for pointing that out to me. And now you can go take a nap. You know, I had a friend who told me, those of you who are dog lovers my dog barks. He’s 16, and he’s demented now. I’m pretty sure of it. Oh my gosh. And has the worst breath in the world. But that’s, he is a small dog. So anyway, he’s demented and but he’ll, he’ll bark. And, and my friend is a dog trainer. She trains she actually helps people train dogs for blind people, right? So that first couple of years, the dog is trained to be a blind coach, or a, a i, i forget what they’re called.

Rita Black: But anyway, she does that. And so she’s really smart about dog behavior. And she said, you know, if your dog is barking, and this is early on in their life, ’cause I, my dog’s way too old to retrain him, but I have tried this. It didn’t work so good. But she said, you, you thank them. ’cause They really think that they’re protecting you. So if you go, thank you, thank you, now you can rest. You know? ’cause They get anxious. Oh, you can rest now. That, that can often break the behavior. You thank them. And then, so I would thank my coach my critic. I was like, thank you critic. And you know, now you can go take a break. So then I bring my coach in, I take a breath, and I’d say, and, you know, my coach would say, okay, well what happened?

Rita Black: Like, let’s just observe what happened. So we’ll sit and go. Well, I opened the refrigerator. I was bored. I walked in the kitchen, I opened the refrigerator, I reached in and ate some cheesecake. And the second part is to kind of own it. So we’re doing this all in one time. I’m taking a breath, pulling in my coach, and then observing the behavior and then owning it and acknowledging that I did it without shame. And this is the big caveat without shame because we’re just, we’re just owning it. I did it. Yep, I did it. You know and that was me. I own it. Instead of pushing it down into the subconscious dark realm where it will stay, but then it’s gonna fester and turn into really nasty stuff. And we just wanna own it. Bring light to it. We’re gonna just shine some light on it.

Rita Black: Yep. I reached in that fridge and I grabbed that cheesecake and I ate it. And then we’re gonna get curious about it. Okay, so you ate the cheesecake. Okay, cool. And then this is where we become kind of Colombo or Angela Lansbury, or is anybody watching? Okay, you people in the future when, you know, in a couple of years, you’re not gonna know. But Lydia poet, the law, according to Lydia Poet, she’s kind of this, it’s an Italian series where, and it takes place in the 18 hundreds. And she’s a female who wants to be a lawyer, but she’s not allowed by the Italians to be a lawyer yet. But she works with her brother and she’s she’s really great at collecting clues and forensics, right? So you’re, you’re becoming a forensics expert and you’re saying, okay, what happened here? What happened before this incident?

Rita Black: Right? Like, what was going on three hours before? What was going on two hours before? What was going one hour before? What was going on 15 minutes before, five minutes before? Like, you wanna get curious about like, did I allow myself to get too hungry? Did I eat something carby earlier and that was making me feel snacky? Did I you know, know, have some feelings that were going on and I needed to comfort eat? Was I bored? You know, the, these would be the things that I would start to dive into and get really curious about because I was, I was fact finding, right? So I, and, and this is can be really fun if you allow it to be, you know, and you, and you wanna start to look for things like patterns, repeated behaviors. And this is where when you collect this knowledge, this data, it’s kind of like a data collecting.

Rita Black: You just start to get insights because you’ve brought your smart brain into this, and your smart brain can’t unlearn things. It’s like, oh, okay, it’s four o’clock. I usually get bored around this time. And this is the way I am entertaining myself and creating a little drama in my life and or also soothing myself from boredom or feeling like, you know, I’m working and I don’t know quite, quite how to solve this problem at work. So, so the more insight I, you know, bring to it, the better, because then I can start to self-correct. And then once I kind of gather my evidence and, and start to think, well, you know, how could I do something different tomorrow around four o’clock? If every four o’clock I start to rummage through things in the kitchen, what could be something? Could I do something different?

Rita Black: I seem to be bored. I’m not really hungry. Maybe I could go out into the garden instead. You know, like, I, so I’m starting to come up with alternative behaviors, or maybe I’m really hungry and what I really need to eat instead of cheesecake is maybe I need to eat a healthy snack either then or maybe a couple of hours earlier so that I’m not feeling hungry. So there’s, once you start looking at it, then you can start finding the root cause of what is going on. We’ll look at this a little more, but I just wanna walk you through these steps and then I’ll review these steps for you at the end. So then you wanna forgive yourself. You wanna just forgive the behavior. I think it’s an important step, even though you might think it’s, you know feels very like religious or something.

Rita Black: You know, just forgive yourself. Like, I forgive myself for eating the cheesecake because I think you kind of need to melt that resentment that you might have a, against yourself and to really give yourself that compassion and self-respect. And then the last step is just to take the next step. And the next step would be to, you know, make your next meal a healthy one. Or to sit down and kind of figure out what you need to do to take care of yourself. Often I’ll go for a walk, you know, if I feel I’m feeling off track, exercising always helps me to kind of just get in my body and, and, and sort of get all my feel-good endorphins, you know, my endorphins going. So when you do this, when you slow down and get curious, instead of critical, you are doing two amazing things.

Rita Black: You are learning obviously, and giving yourself an opportunity to self-correct and create a new habit or thought. So hopefully you’re gleaning, you know, like you’re seeing that this is something that is of an opportunity for you here is to really just learn about your behavior in a nonjudgmental way. Take what you need to learn. And then, and then hopefully you’ll have a thought like, wow every night, Friday night when I go out, or if I go out, I overeat at the restaurant, or I make bad choices at the restaurant, you know, and now what can I do to self-correct? Do I need to eat a little before the restaurant? Do I need to look at the menu ahead of time? Like then, then you’re problem solving. Instead of going, God, I always overeat at the restaurant and I’m this bad person.

Rita Black: ‘Cause I do that, that does nothing. You learn nothing by being critical, but you learn so much by taking a breath and getting curious and, and really curious about your behavior. So that’s one thing is you learn to self-correct. And the other thing that you learn is you are pulling yourself, you know, from the emotional brain into the rational brain, and you’re just calming yourself down in the moment, right? So, and, and I talk people through this all the time because we get into that emotional brain and we start making judgements of ourself, and it’s really hard to get out of it. But the great thing about the brain, and, and when you know this, and you really practice this, this is a skill, is when you’re like in an emotional state and you started asking yourself rational questions like you, you know why did this happen?

Rita Black: What happened an hour before this? You know, you’re bringing yourself into a different part of the brain where the emotions tend to fade away and it engages that different like fact finding part of your brain. And it is so cool ’cause you can literally feel yourself begin to calm down and, and think of yourself differently, you know, in a, in a self-respecting way, a compassionate way. But it’s, it’s really, you know, that curiosity I’m telling you, it kills the fact. So so here’s, here’s the thing that, here’s the bonus or the benefits of getting curious and around your struggle points. One is that there’s the opportunity to solve your struggle points. And, you know, here’s a caveat. You may not solve them immediately. Like, but there’s many things that you can solve pretty quickly. Like maybe it’s something simple like not bringing a food into the house that is always a problem for you.

Rita Black: I don’t know, we hit ourselves over the head all the time with this. Like I think I can bring this food into the house now. And we never can, you know, like there are just certain foods or trigger foods, that’s another episode. But whatever it, it’s like, it might be simple like recognizing, you know, this is a real problem for me. I was, I was sharing with my membership pecans became a problem for me over the holidays. I had bought them for a recipe. You know, they had been kind of a problem in the past. I have been known to eat large amounts of pe pecan pies and, and things that contain pecans, but I always thought it was the sugar or the carbs around the pecans and not the innocent little pecans themself. But I bought this bag of pecans ’cause it was on sale.

Rita Black: And you know, we’ll be doing an episode about like cheap food and free food soon. But I had this in the house and I used part for the recipe, and then I just found myself going back and grabbing a couple of pecans here and there. I’d passed by, you know, I had had my surgery, so I was like, oh, I had my surgery, so I have to, you know, take care of myself. And I was like, oh, this is becoming a problem, these pecans. And I was like, as hard as it was, because they’re cute little things, those pecan nuts. And, and some of my members were like, yes, pecans, they’re a trigger food. I was like, how could a pecan be? Yeah, nuts can be a trigger food. But anyway, I got rid of the pecans. Long story short, I solved that problem.

Rita Black: But so that is, or eating something before you go out and are social that you know something so you solve it immediately. So, or you learn that something is missing, that you are using food for. Like maybe you do have you know, like emotional eating often, we really don’t need food, but we need to be nurturing of ourselves or take a break or something. So when we start to get under the lid of what is really causing the eating there’s always that opportunity to solve the problem by giving ourselves what we truly need. And we are not going to solve that. If we just, you know, say we’re bad and, you know, get on with the day and overeat and then start again tomorrow. So, you know, questions I would ask myself is like, what, what’s really going on here?

Rita Black: You know, am I really hungry? What is it that I really need? Did I really need that cheesecake? Or did I need nurturing? Did I need a timeout? And I wasn’t willing to give myself a break? Did I need to let off steam? Am I mad at somebody? Do I need to communicate with them? You know, they, it is so amazing when you start getting curious, all the interesting things that are going on underneath food. It’s far more fascinating, honestly. Okay, so another benefit is you might learn that there are just vulnerable times that you need to stay mindful about or create alternative behaviors. Like for me, it is like the witching hour for many people is around 4:00 PM in the afternoon. You know, I’ve put in a very big busy workday. I often am up at 6:00 AM in meetings, and I am you know, tired and vulnerable.

Rita Black: And that is often where I find myself taking a break. And and, and sometimes I, I feel like I’ve got a routine now where I go out in my garden and I do some gardening, and I, you know, give myself a break because I know I need it. But I had to problem solve that I had to, you know, and you might find that if you change your schedule around your vulnerable times change. Often I will see clients change jobs or change what they’re doing. Like maybe they’re in one climate and they’ll go to a warmer climate for the winter. They changed the structure of their life, and now their vulnerable times become different times, and they don’t see that. They just think they’re being bad. So really look at where your vulnerable times are. That is the opportunity of getting curious. So in this way, you know, my cur my curiosity, instead of criticism started this inner and outer evolution.

Rita Black: I started learning about myself from a place of self-compassion, curiosity. And this really helped develop my inner strength, my inner resilience, and ability to advocate for myself. And once I got started, there was no stopping me. And I, so I wanna kind of walk you through just some of the areas of my life or some of the things that I got curious about that made you a huge difference in my long-term success. So I’ll just give you some examples and then I’m gonna run through these things again for you. The five steps.

Rita Black: So one of the things that I got super curious about was food choices that led to fake hunger or trigger food eating. I am, and I often, this is when I work with clients, and when, when we do the shift weight mastery process, we go through a whole training of really looking at, you know, like the idea is that we wanna learn to eat in a way that we love, that allows us to live our life at our ideal weight. And that takes a lot of curiosity, that takes a lot of tuning in and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. And when we’re coming from a model of good or bad behavior, you can’t get curious and you can’t learn what foods work for you and what foods don’t work for you, how much foods work for you, and what foods don’t work for you. So a very specific example was when I was struggling with my weight. One thing I ate all the time for breakfast was Cheerios. You remember like, maybe you eat Cheerios. Well, for me, Cheerios were like a trigger of food, and I didn’t realize that I always ate trigger. You know, I, people ate cereal for breakfast, I ate cereal. I would have a bowl of Cheerios, and then I’d have another bowl of Cheerios, and then I would have another bowl of Cheerios.

Rita Black: And then about an hour and a half later I was hungry and, and I never felt satisfied. And then I’d want something carby. And then, you know, that led to another snack. So by the time noon ran rolled around, I was eating carbs. I had probably consumed, you know, over a thousand calories. And I you know, was already feeling, you know, my energy levels dropped, all of that stuff. But I never tuned in and said, Hmm, I, I was just like, well, you know, I’m only gonna eat one bowl of cheers. And, but it wasn’t about the cheers. It was like about eating these, this really refined cereal as healthy as they touted it to be. It didn’t work for me because it made me hungry. It didn’t satisfy me. So when I changed that around and I ate, it, ate a more stab, stabilized, you know, breakfast that, or first meal of the day, I should say.

Rita Black: I don’t necessarily believe in breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I eat, you know, I, I eat when I’m hungry you know, at times where my body needs fuel. And, and again, I didn’t learn that until I got curious about when my body was hungry, you know? So, so it really is about, once I learned, oh, I’m, I get hungry, you know, I’m not really hungry when I wake up, but I’m hungry a couple of hours into the day, and when I feed myself then, and I feed myself, well, I don’t think about food and for hours, you know, until later in the day. And then I eat, you know, a snack and then I’ll eat a dinner. But I, you know, like I didn’t learn that until I got curious and compassionate about it. ’cause You know, for years I was trying to eat in the traditional breakfast, lunch, dinner model, and it wasn’t working for me, but I just thought it was me that was wrong, rather than maybe I’m just not feeding myself at appropriate times for my body.

Rita Black: So so does this make sense? So getting curious about just eating and the way you fuel yourself can really answer a lot of questions. And again, take away a lot of the self blame because it’s like, no, it’s like if you eat a naked carb a food, you know, like a car, a refined carbohydrate on an empty stomach, you are gonna feel hungry or you are gonna feel triggered, and that isn’t you. But it’s just that, that was bad timing with that food at that time. And when you avoid that and you choose better foods for you, at better times, it might work out better for you. But you gotta get curious about that. So the same with alcohol. When I drank alcohol and, you know, look, I I drink alcohol occasionally, not so much anymore very rarely. But when I do I’m hungrier the next day.

Rita Black: And in the old days when I was struggling, if I drank alcohol, I usually was drinking a sugary drink alcohol, like a margarita or something that had sugar in it. And that not only made me wanna drink more, or a chardonnay or something like a white wine that made me maybe want that had that spiked my sugar, made me wanna drink more, but then my resistance would fail, and then I’d eat a ton more, right? And I know a lot of, some of you might struggle with this, and some of you might not, but the, the point I’m making isn’t about alcohol. The point I’m making is about observing. And so I started to observe this, and the next day, instead of beating myself up and going, you drank last night and you were outta control and blah, blah, blah, I’d be like, wow, I feel don’t feel good.

Rita Black: And in fact, I’m thinking about food. I’m feeling hungrier. Why is it, oh, because I drank two glasses of wine last night. Hmm. Okay. So one thing I would do is then eat more protein that day after I drank. So that would, that would help me rather than in the olden days, I would wake up be, you know, and and then start eating carbs and then fall off track that day. So really learning that again, how my brain and body worked around alcohol, what worked for me, what didn’t. If I drank a vodka instead of a wine, did that make me less likely to want more? You know, so everybody, and you know, there is no cookie cutter answer here for, ’cause everybody’s body is different. That’s why I never tell people what to eat or what to do. I give suggestions and there are parameters that are helpful.

Rita Black: However, everybody’s life is different and everybody’s body is different. And this is why you need to take your power, and you need to get curious so that you can find your own answers and own them, right? Then and then like with emotional eating, I, you know, noticed the times. Like I, I would started to get curious about like, okay, I’m emotional eating. What time is it? Is this a pattern? What are the foods that I’m choosing to eat? Is, are they really serving me? Could I eat something more healthfully? So if I need to emotionally eat, can I eat a bowl of broccoli instead of, you know, a, a cake, a piece of cake? You know, the, those kinds of thoughts helped me, you know, start to manage my emotional eating and get down underneath it and start giving myself the actual needs for my emotions rather than food.

Rita Black: But it was a process and it started by getting curious. Or being mad at people like my husband or something like that, if I was resentful. You know, often resentment makes us want to eat. Resentment is one of the most fattening things. And so often when I was like, I off with somebody, I, I had to get curious and I was like, wow, I’m really off with them and I want to eat. Can I forgive them so that I don’t have to eat? Am I going to eat over this? Well, if I’m going to eat over this, let me forgive them. Not for them, for me. So, and another thing was when I got on the scale and the scale was up, or flatlined, you know, because I had plateaued you know, I see this all the time, people getting really upset when the scale goes up, but the scale goes up all the time.

Rita Black: And it’s not because we’ve gained fat, it’s because we’re made of water. And the, there is often water weight. So when I got very scientific about the scale, and I started to see patterns, and I started to see, oh, and, and get clear on, you know, my goals and how much I needed and what my energy input and output were it made so much more sense. And, and when I got curious rather than critical even when the scale went up, I was like, oh, I know why the scale’s up. I ate salt yesterday, or I was ovulating, or I worked out yesterday. And often when we work out, we are retaining water the next day. So I could really work with myself on the scale so that I wasn’t making it mean something that it didn’t need to. And then giving up and, you know, feeling like I’m never gonna do this.

Rita Black: You know, this, there’s so much of this is just self-management. And that self-management really, really is fueled by curiosity. So so yeah, so like night eating, being social weekends, those were all big projects that took time to solve. But I stuck with it and I just stayed curious. And the pieces of the puzzle went together. I was solving these issues for myself, and I was releasing weight, but in a different way. I was creating a healthy lifestyle based on me, right? Not based on something outside of me. It was based on me by working with my curious inner coach it didn’t feel like I was on something being good, but that I owned it and I was never gonna gain that weight again. Gave me that confidence and self-respect in this area of my life that I had never had before.

Rita Black: And this is something else. Curiosity gives you self respect because you figure things out and it makes you feel so smart and capable. And I see this again and again in my students who are going through the same process of owning their lives and solving these solution points like Sherry, you know, always over ate on the weekends. And, you know, when she went to her family’s house and over ate and she figured it out, like she got really curious about her weekends. She got really curious about how many drinks she was drinking and the thought processes she was having before she’d go out to the restaurant. And, and she, she figured it out and she did not figure it out in one weekend. It took a little while, but she released 45 pounds and she’s kept it off. Or Denise, who had a kind of a, I wouldn’t call it a drinking problem, but she was over drinking quite a bit and from stress, and she started to again, get compassionate about her drinking instead of critical, and started to really look at how she wanted to feel instead of you know, I can’t drink.

Rita Black: She just said, I wanna feel good by the end of the day when I go to bed. And she started doing yoga at night instead of drinking. And, and she started just changing her life that way. But she got curious and she managed her stress. You know, she was like, how can I manage my stress? And a friend of her mentioned yoga, and she just said, well, what would happen? She got curious. She was like, what would happen if I did a yoga session? I can still drink tonight if I feel like it after yoga, but I’m gonna do yoga first and see how I feel. And she did, and she felt great. And she was like, I don’t even wanna drink. And then, you know, so she released 63 pounds and has kept it off now for like six years. But that is just like a huge level of curiosity that it took to get it going right?

Rita Black: Or like Bob, who thought he was a carbo holic and he realized he was just setting himself up for failure with the times he ate and the food choices, much like me. And this is something that a lot of people who go in the shift program, they start to go, aha. Oh, I see. It’s not that I’m this horrible person and I can’t control myself. I’m just not eating the right foods at the right time in the right ways for my body and for my life. And he started using protein to stabilize, and he rid his house of all the trigger foods and boob booby traps. And he released seven, eight, sorry, 87 pounds sile for three years. So, so have I convinced you that curiosity might be the way forward? ,

Rita Black: Sorry, I’m, I’m hitting a little hard today. You know, when I lived in England, some of those, those of you who are from England there was this, or, or if you visited London, there’s a soap box at park in Hyde Park, I believe, I forget it was, it’s been a while, but, you know, people could get up on their a box and preach about, you know, like whatever they wanted to preach, which is really cool. I bet they don’t do it anymore. But anyway I, I’ve been up on my little box today, so, but I care so much about this because I hate, hate, hate. I just watched my mom my whole life seeing how critical she was of herself, and she was such an amazing person. And it just, I hate it when people rob themselves of self-esteem and self-respect and self dignity because of things that aren’t even true because of this, this horrible weight struggle cycle that we get into.

Rita Black: Not because we are bad, but just because the brain just doesn’t work that great in this way and we have to learn to work with it. So anyway, here are the steps that I think are helpful to break out of self-criticism and into self curiosity. Take that shift breath so you find yourself getting self-critical about something. Take that breath, cut through that inner critic loop and thank your inner critic for sharing and say, inner coach, come with me. And, oh, just FYI. This is kind of this is a, an acronym. I call it the shift acronym. And it’s S-H-I-F-T to remember this. So first is the shift breath. So s first step is shift breath. S the next step is to harness your coach, own what happens. So bring in the coach, get your coach. Hey coach, come on in. And then say what happened here?

Rita Black: And, and just really observe what happened without judgment and without shame. So I ate the cheesecake. Okay, got it. You ate the cheesecake. Great. Next is I for investigate. Get your Lydia poet or your Colombo head, your Angela Lansbury head, or whoever that your your CSI agent is the crime scene investigation. And get very curious do that for forensics. What happened before? What were the thoughts? How did I not set myself up for success? Is this a pattern? When does this happen? What are the other things I could do instead? Was I off with my husband? You know, like, just get curious and ask yourself a, a bunch of questions and, and get to the root of it. And if you don’t get to the root of it right away, it’s a practice. So just keep practicing, you’ll get better and better, I assure you for forgive it.

Rita Black: So if s breath h harness your inner coach, I investigate. Get curious for forgive. Forgive yourself. I forgive myself for eating the cheesecake. How human I know that I’m going to solve the solution. Figure this out. But for the moment, you know how human, I forgive myself. And then the last thing is tea. Take your next step. So if, you know, when I ate the cheesecake, my next step would be, okay, I ate some cheesecake. Let me take a walk and think about it and have a healthy meal tonight. And just keep moving. Just keep going and just stay curious. And if this approach to weight and finally solving those deeper challenges that always pull you back interests you, please take advantage of these last few days to get the shift weight mastery process, the hypnosis based 30 days of hypnosis, meditation, and coaching.

Rita Black: It’s a process, it’s a foundational process. It’s not just hypnosis. If you’ve done hypnosis before and you’re like, hypnosis didn’t work for me, you know how many diets have you done? , but you kept dieting, try hypnosis again because this is 30 days and each session builds upon itself. And it’s not just like hypnosis like one off session. It is like a lot of hypnosis, but it’s also foundational, deep reaching really about your inner communication with yourself, which is the most important piece. So and building the skills of weight mastery. So and you’ll get to come to the shift live for free, which in and of itself is o worth over $300. And and also there are bonus sessions in the li the, the self-study. There’s one on carbs, like a carb savvy workshop a workshop on consistency, emotional eating.

Rita Black: So there’s lots of value in this. I mean, people really do, can’t believe how much value is in it. And it’s really available now at the discounted price. So go to www shift weight mastery.com, I’m sorry, www shift weight mastery.com/bonus 30. That’s bonus. ’cause There’s bonuses and it’s 30 days. So that’s how you remember bonus 30. And learn, you know, you can, there’s lots of information about the program there. You can learn all about it and enroll or, you know, make your choice to enroll or not to enroll, but you know, you can learn more there. Or the link is in the show notes. And I will look forward to seeing you on the other side because I’m there in the community. We have an amazing Facebook community that is very active and very kind and loving and generous. So thank you.

Rita Black: And thank you for your attention today. One of the most important things that you have. It’s very valuable. So thank you for sharing it with me and have a great week. And remember that the key and probably the only key to unlocking the door of the weight struggle is inside you. So keep listening and find it. I will see you, my friend here next week.

Rita Black: Thanks for listening to The Thin Thinking Podcast. Did that episode go by way too fast for you? If so, and you wanna dive deeper into the mindset of long-term weight release, head on over to www.shiftweightmastery.com. That’s www.shiftweightmastery.com, where you’ll find numerous tools and resources to help you unlock your mind for permanent weight release tips, strategies, and more. And be sure to check the show notes to learn more about my book from Fat to Thin Thinking. Unlock Your Mind for Permanent Weight Loss, and to learn how to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode.