0:00: There is a pattern I see again and again with people who struggle with their weight.

0:05: In fact, it’s so prevalent that I would honestly call it an epidemic.

0:09: Most people who experience this believe the problem is that they lack willpower or discipline, and that’s why they can’t seem to stay consistent with weight loss.

0:19: But the truth is that they’re actually caught in a powerful subconscious pattern that keeps pulling them back again and again.

0:28: So in this episode, I am going to walk you through the cycle so you can begin to recognize it for yourself, and I also share tools to help you start breaking free from it.

0:40: So, come on in.

0:49: Did you know that our struggle with weight doesn’t start with the food on your plate or get fixed in the gym?

0:56: 80% of our weight struggle is mental.

1:00: That’s right.

1:01: The key to unlocking long-term weight release and management begins in your mind.

1:07: Hi there, I’m Rita Black.

1:08: I’m a clinical hypnotherapist, weight loss expert, bestselling author, and the creator of the shift weight mastery process.

1:16: 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.

1:29: And after two decades of failed diets and fad weight loss programs, I lost 40 pounds with the help of hypnosis.

1:36: Not only did I release all that weight, I have kept it off for 25 years.

1:42: Enter the Thin Thinking podcast where you too will learn how to remove the mental roadblocks that keep you struggling.

1:50: 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.

2:03: Sound good?

2:05: Let’s get started.

2:06: Hello, hello, hello, everyone.

2:08: Oh, so nice to see you.

2:11: Have a seat.

2:13: And I am I am really thrilled to be here with you this week, in the month of March, because as I mentioned last week, I don’t know if you were here with me last week, but March 2026 is the five year anniversary of the Thin Thinking Podcast.

2:31: So, if you’ve been with me for a while, thank you for being.

2:35: Such a loyal listener.

2:37: And if you’re new, come on in and join the party.

2:42: Around here, we empower ourselves in the world of weight, mastery, self-leadership, and honestly, learning to have a little more of a love fest with ourselves along the way.

2:55: Now, as a part of celebrating 5 years of the podcast, I am hosting a live master class with weight release hypnosis.

3:05: It’s free, it’s powerful.

3:09: I love, love, love teaching stuff live, so please come, come and join me.

3:16: we are going to work on how to break through the subconscious cycle that keeps you struggling so that you can confidently release weight.

3:23: I’m going to touch upon that today, but we are going to dive way deeper in the free master class.

3:30: So that event is happening March 25th, 26th, and 28, 28th.

3:39: And the seating is limited.

3:42: So get on in there, www.shiftweightmastery.com/live is how you get in or you’ll find the link in the show notes.

3:55: And you know, I just, like I said, I love teaching this.

3:58: I give 110% in these master classes.

4:02: People have a great time and we will be doing.

4:05: An amazing hypnosis, weight release session.

4:08: So, if you have never experienced hypnosis, you’ve got to come.

4:12: you’re also going to learn a lot about truly beginning your journey towards long term, mind you, not short term, but long term permanent weight mastery.

4:24: So, click the link in the show notes or like I said, head to www.shiftweightmastery.com/live and come on in and join me.

4:35: And join us.

4:36: Now, today I’m going to walk you through the five part weight struggle cycle.

4:40: This is actually A part of some new educational content I am creating for YouTube.

4:46: And one of my new adventures in year 5 of the podcast, you know, I keep trying to add on, right?

4:55: So, more, more, more, more, more education, more than thinking, more weight mastery.

5:02: So, I would love to share it with you here as well.

5:04: So, let’s dive in.

5:09: Have you ever been going along, losing weight, doing really great, and then it’s like this other part of your mind just comes along and pulls you off track?

5:20: And it keeps happening over and over and over again.

5:24: It keeps you from getting consistency or getting traction for long-term weight loss.

5:30: Well, in this video, I am going to get into the five-part weight struggle cycle, which is a deeply embedded subconscious pattern that plays itself out over and over again, and I’m going to give you some simple mind shifts that you can start using today to help you break free and get some traction so that you can, Get going on your long-term permanent weight mastery journey.

5:53: My name is Rita Black.

5:55: I am a clinical hypnotherapist and weight mastery expert.

5:58: I released 40 pounds 30 years ago with the help of hypnosis, and I’ve kept that weight off ever since, not by being super disciplined or dieting harder, but by using my mind more effectively, and I’ve helped thousands of others do the same over the last 25 years.

6:16: And so now, Let’s just get into it.

6:19: Right.

6:20: So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna walk through the five-part cycle with you and then I’m gonna show you a mind shift for each of these parts that you can start using today.

6:30: So, part one is we feel bad and we want to lose weight.

6:35: This is an interesting part because this is the starting point.

6:39: And most of the time when we’re struggling with weight, we feel bad.

6:42: We feel bad physically a lot of the times, we just don’t feel comfortable in our body.

6:46: And then mentally we feel bad because we spend a lot of time beating ourselves up and feeling bad, so it’s a painful place to be in, right?

6:55: So, what do we want to do?

6:57: Well, the natural thing, we want to get out of the pain as quickly as possible.

7:03: So that puts us in a very vulnerable position where we are looking for some sort of solution outside of ourselves.

7:11: Why are we looking outside of ourselves?

7:12: Because we do not believe in ourselves and our ability to be successful in the long term.

7:19: If we have Seemingly failed over and over again.

7:23: We see ourselves from a very negative and disrespectful standpoint.

7:27: There’s a part of us sort of crossing their arms and like, I don’t believe in you and I don’t respect you.

7:33: So we’re first of all starting off from a very disadvantaged place because we have a very little lack of belief in our ability to take the weight off even on Anyway, a loss attempt.

7:45: So what that does is it makes us very prone to give up on ourselves very quickly.

7:50: We’re going to cycle back to this, but just let’s say is that we’re in a place of pain and we want to get out of it as quickly as possible.

7:58: The disadvantage of part one is we don’t believe in ourselves really on a subconscious level.

8:03: We do not believe that we are going to even be successful before.

8:07: We even begin any weight loss attempt and, and typically we have chosen some sort of structure outside of ourselves, not from the inside out, but on the outside of ourselves that we can fall off and nothing changes from the inside out.

8:21: So, we’re starting already from a disadvantaged place if that makes sense.

8:27: OK.

8:27: Hopefully, hopefully it does.

8:31: Now, part two is we lose some weight and hey, I have no doubt you could write your own New York Times bestselling weight loss book and you would, the challenge here is a long-term weight loss, right?

8:47: I know you know how to lose weight, but what happens is that when we go into weight loss mode, we’re being good.

8:54: And that’s a very interesting place to be because when we’re being good, it’s, it’s, it feels good, right?

9:00: We’re losing weight, we’re getting on the scale every day, the scale’s down, we feel awesome.

9:06: we’re eating the chicken and broccoli or the chicken and tofu or whatever, we’re, we’re being good and so the way we view ourselves is, oh, you’re being good, and so we feel good, it’s like a little high, the scale is going down, bing bing bing, all the dopamine gets released, and we are on cloud nine, but on a subconscious level, the challenge is we are being good.

9:34: More later on that.

9:36: We’ll come back to that.

9:38: So, what typically happens is then in any weight release journey, we will hit a struggle point.

9:46: And struggle points actually are natural parts of a weight, any long-term weight management journey.

9:55: You’re going to come into a lot of challenges along the way.

9:58: Life doesn’t just wait for you to lose weight, right?

10:01: Like, oh, something always comes up, whether it’s external or internal, and, and most of us have a Habitual struggle points that typically come up after we’ve released some weight.

10:16: maybe we lose focus, maybe we get bored, maybe we go away, maybe we go out with our friends, maybe we go through a stressful time and we get overwhelmed.

10:26: But whatever the thing is that happens inside or outside of us, it gets us off track in some way.

10:34: So, We’ll, go out and eat too much with our friends and then overeat the whole weekend.

10:41: we’ll go away and do something similar or the same.

10:45: we’ll go through a tough week at work and we’ll be stressed eating and drinking at night.

10:50: And like I said, we kind of gain weight in the same places and the same times and, you know, a lot of the same situations over and over again.

10:58: So, so we hit one of our struggle points and we get taken off track.

11:05: And what happens is we now are not being good, right?

11:09: So here’s the challenge of being good is now we see ourselves as having been bad.

11:15: So, it’s a fall from grace, and there’s an internal critical voice within us that starts to beat us up.

11:24: you blew it, see, you thought you were doing good and you blew it, and you did bad, and you’re never gonna be successful, and you’re broken, and your body’s broken, and yada yada yada.

11:36: Or you could have just hit a plateau.

11:38: And you start doubting yourself and doubting your ability to lose weight or your body’s ability to lose weight, but whatever is happening, the internal feeling starts to feel bad.

11:49: We start to feel shame, we start to feel distressed, we start to feel overwhelmed.

11:55: So this other phenomena happens in our brain because we don’t like to feel bad.

12:00: is that this other part of our mind will step in what I like to call our little inner rebel.

12:07: So we have our inner critic beating us up, telling us, you know, you’re no good, you’re a jerk, and then our inner rebel will really step in to try to save the day because it really is trying to get us out of this very stressful internal dialogue, and it will say, It’s OK.

12:28: We’ll start again tomorrow, or we’ll start again on Monday, or we’ll start again at the beginning of the year, or, or whatever.

12:33: We’re gonna start in, in the future, not now.

12:37: We’ll be good tomorrow or Monday or next month or next year.

12:45: What this does is something quite magical.

12:48: It takes us out of feeling bad and into a sense of relief, like, and to the degree we promise to be good today, you know, we make that promise today for a future time.

13:04: What does that do?

13:05: Well, it, it gives us permission to be as bad as we want until that future time.

13:14: you know, and then, so usually, if we’ve, like, let’s say, I ate a cookie and my inner critter is like, well, you blew it, now it’s all over, you know, then my rebel will come in and say, well, we’ll start again tomorrow.

13:30: Don’t sweat it, honey.

13:31: And then, I’ll eat the cookie, and then guess what I’m gonna do?

13:36: I’m gonna eat another cookie and another cookie, and then some pizza, and then a margarita, and then la la da da da da da da, and I’ll do what I call under the radar eating.

13:47: And one What’s under the radar eating.

13:51: So, part 4 is the promising to start over.

13:54: And what under the radar eating is, is simply a psychological phenomenon where we are eating.

14:01: And we don’t even often enjoy what we’re eating, but because we know we’re gonna start over tomorrow and everything’s gonna be taken away from us, and we’re gonna be deprived.

14:14: It’s back to chicken and broccoli on Monday, you’re gonna be good, so I’m gonna get, I’m gonna be eating things I never eat.

14:21: I mean, we get into this crazy head where we’re eating stuff and it’s just like, well, I might as well because I’m gonna be good tomorrow.

14:29: OK.

14:29: Hope this makes sense and rings a bell.

14:34: So, so we promised to start over.

14:37: We get into our overeating.

14:43: Mode And then, you know, we gain whatever weight we lost and we are back to feeling bad and, and then we get hooked in over and over again.

14:56: Now, I want to look at this really quickly, just why do we get stuck in the cycle?

15:02: Well, the reason why we can get stuck in the cycle is it’s, it’s addictive because there’s addictive pieces to it, right?

15:10: We’re feeling bad here.

15:12: We go on a weight loss journey, and that does a couple of things.

15:16: It pulls us out of the chaos of feeling bad about ourselves.

15:21: It, it structures us because a lot of times when we’re struggling with weight, we feel very chaotic.

15:26: We don’t know where to turn, how am I gonna lose weight?

15:28: What’s, you know, And then once we make a decision, it makes us feel committed, less chaotic and structured.

15:36: So, that, that feels good to our brain.

15:37: We’re like, oh, that feels good.

15:39: So our brain gets a little addicted to that.

15:41: Then we start losing weight, and again, we have that dopamine ding, ding, ding, the scale is going down, I’m seeing myself in a positive way.

15:49: That’s another Positive yee-haw in our brain.

15:54: Now, when we hit a struggle point, it doesn’t feel so good, but the weird thing about our brain is it doesn’t remember feeling bad, it just remembers feeling good.

16:02: So, guess what?

16:02: It cuts right to, and then we do that fun thing where we just get ourselves off the hook, and then, oh yeah, that feels good, that, you know, eating whatever I want, that, that release from the restriction.

16:15: that, and so it’s easy to fall into this over and over again.

16:21: And once we fall into it 123 times, it becomes a habit in the brain that then plays out over and over again.

16:33: All right.

16:33: So now, I’m gonna come back and we’re gonna talk about some mind shifts that we can make in order to shift out of the cycle.

16:42: All right.

16:43: So now, my friends, I wanna walk us through 3 mind shifts that we can make today.

16:47: We don’t need 5 because there’s really the 1st 3 parts of the cycle, if you can stick with it here and keep moving forward on your weight release journey, then you can Start to build momentum and build consistency.

17:01: So, the key is really to cut, cut everything off at step 3, so let me walk you through this.

17:09: So, first of all, from when we are feeling bad and we want to release weight, That, I have a, I have a saying, and it’s not my own.

17:19: I will be honest with you.

17:20: But the pain pushes until the vision pulls, right?

17:24: Pain pushes until the vision pulls.

17:27: Often, when we are struggling, we’re just in pain and like I said, we’re gonna grab anything outside of us, quick fix to get out of the pain.

17:37: But a long-term permanent weight mastery journey, if you really think about it, you want to think about the you, not even just at your ideal weight, but you as somebody who’s sustaining your ideal weight long term.

17:54: Who is that person?

17:56: you want to start to take ownership of a journey of weight mastery.

18:02: I have studied long-term permanent weight management and I’ve been involved with it, like I said, for many, many years.

18:10: And there’s a huge psychological shift when we go from reacting and, you know, pulling anything, I’m gonna fast on Monday or no carbs for me to I’m going to really own who I am, where I’m at, so we’re, we’re, in essence, I have a term called loving ourselves down the scale, right?

18:32: So we’re starting not from a place of disrespect and disowning ourselves until we get to some future weight where we’ll all of a sudden love ourselves, which never happens anyway, because how often have you gotten to your ideal weight and had imposter syndrome or said, oh no, now I need to lose more because I still don’t like myself.

18:52: So, so I really believe and, and where I, you know, work with people on is, is really owning themselves and, and loving themselves one step at a time down the scale.

19:05: Listen, you have a lot of knowledge, your body isn’t broken, and when you start from a place of being empowered, meaning believing that you can do this, that you are going to stay with yourself every step of the way on a journey.

19:20: And you’re owning the journey, you’re not putting it on something outside of you.

19:25: You know, you can use structured ways of eating, you can use fasting, you can use whatever you want out there, but that isn’t the cure you are.

19:35: You are the powerful person taking back your power from all of that nonsense out there and saying, I know how to do.

19:44: I’m gonna, I may not know how to do this today, but I’m gonna take it one step at a time.

19:48: I’m gonna love myself down the scale.

19:51: So, start to think of it as an identity that you’re taking on is that, that identity of yourself, not You know, skinny on the beach, you know, pie in the sky, but really a powerful person in your future who’s kept your weight off long term, and, you know, it’s making healthy choices, really taking care of your body, moving your body respectfully, beautifully, energetically.

20:19: and, and that way you’re, you’re turning on a powerful part of your brain, your reticular activation system, that vision is really pulling you forward with this new idea of yourself.

20:32: And another thing is to really step into a learner’s identity, because this is a learning journey.

20:38: It’s not about being perfect.

20:39: I’ve never met anybody.

20:41: Listen, I’ve been managing my ideal weight for 30 years, very, very imperfectly.

20:49: Oh, so imperfectly, you can’t believe it.

20:51: But, and, and many of my students have kept, had very long-term permanent weight mastery journeys very imperfectly, but we’re learners and we keep learning.

21:04: We make mistakes, we learn, we make mistakes.

21:06: Every other part of your life that you have.

21:10: succeeded at, feel good about, you didn’t, you weren’t perfect.

21:16: You reiterated, you learned and, oh, made a mistake, learned from the mistake, move forward, made a mistake, learn from the mistake, but the diet culture has put us into this very black and white, on and off, good or bad, all or nothing mindset that we’ve gotten habituated into and we have to break that first.

21:36: OK.

21:37: So that’s one.

21:38: So, number 2, lose some weight.

21:41: I’m all for you feeling good about releasing weight, don’t get me wrong.

21:45: But when we label it as I’m being good, what does that do in your brain?

21:51: And there’s another part of you thinking, when are we going to be bad, right?

21:57: So, what we want to do instead is instead of labeling things as good or bad, because I’m going back to this idea of being perfect, we don’t care about being perfect, but we care about learning and what works and what doesn’t work.

22:11: So, we want to become kind of like scientists.

22:13: We want to observe what is working.

22:16: So when things are going well for you, notice what, what’s working for me.

22:20: How am I feeding myself in the morning that’s stabilizing me for the next 4 hours?

22:24: What, what did I do?

22:25: What did I eat?

22:26: How much did I need?

22:28: Oh, I ate some naked carbs in the afternoon and then all of a sudden I felt super hungry and that made me a little munchy at dinner time.

22:36: I ate a little too much.

22:37: I’m not being bad.

22:39: I’m learning a powerful lesson about making sure I’m not super hungry when I get home or maybe I need to eat something with that, carb in the.

22:49: Afternoon, maybe I need to eat some protein as well to stabilize myself so that then I can be, go to dinner time feeling a little more stabilized and be a little more successful with my plans.

23:04: Makes sense?

23:05: So, so we learn from what doesn’t work from us and then we start to build momentum that way.

23:11: we, I like to use the term inner scientist.

23:14: I’m becoming an inner scientist about my behavior that puts us in the rational brain rather than the emotional reactive brain, because after years of struggling with our weight, we are very trigger response to happy, you know, like, well, it’s not happy, it’s trained in our central nervous system and we get overwhelmed and we become very quick to give up on ourselves, and it’s, it’s like a trigger response.

23:40: So, we want to take a breath, bring ourselves to our rational scientist’s brain and go, what happened?

23:47: What did I learn?

23:48: What can I learn here?

23:49: And it immediately brings us over to that more rational part of our brain.

23:53: OK, now, Hit a struggle point.

23:57: So, when we hit a struggle point, again, it’s a learning event.

24:02: we can absolutely, one, forgive ourselves in that moment because when you hit a struggle point, often that inner critic will is going to come into play, you know, you blew it, you did bad, and there’ll be a sense of shame, right?

24:19: Like that, that part of us is we, we quickly go to that shame point.

24:24: That will probably happen, but if in the moment you bring this other part of you, like, I like to call it your inner coach, and that part of you is very loving and compassionate, and I’m not saying I think people are afraid like if I forgive myself, then I’m going to be even worse and misbehave and that’s actually not true.

24:43: Even studies have backed up that self-compassion with behaviors like any type of behavior, but they even studied weight management and they see that self-compassion actually aligns you with yourself, gives you that self-respect that you need to then, OK, I forgive myself.

25:06: Now let me look around and see what happened.

25:09: Like, just acknowledge, wow, I just ate 5 pieces of pizza.

25:13: I didn’t mean to do that.

25:14: I care about myself.

25:16: I love myself.

25:17: This doesn’t feel good.

25:20: What can I do next time?

25:22: Like what, what happened beforehand?

25:24: Let me have a look at that.

25:25: Let me see, oh, I allowed myself to get too hungry.

25:27: I went out with my friends, I wasn’t thinking about it, you know, whatever, you have a lot of things to learn when you’re an inner scientist, and then next time you go out, you could say, well, next time that this is going to happen, what do I need to do to protect myself, to make sure that that doesn’t happen again.

25:48: There’s many more pieces to that, but if you, if you can just get behind this idea of when you get off track, it’s not the end of the world, and it’s a huge learning opportunity, and you take the next action, which is to eat a healthy meal, to, drink some water, to go out for a walk, show up for yourself, then whatever the 1000, 2000 extra calories, whatever, right?

26:17: Or the, you know, the macros or whatever system you are using to manage your weight release, you’re gonna get back on track and keep on going.

26:30: Here’s the thing, long-term weight management is a series of getting back on track and really flexing that get back on track muscle.

26:43: it isn’t about being good forever.

26:45: Like I said, I’ve never met anybody in my life who said, oh yeah, I was perfect for the last 20 years.

26:51: Quick review, feel bad, start to lose weight.

26:55: Instead, we are going to step into that powerful vision of ourselves and see ourselves as owning our weight mastery journey.

27:06: 2, we are not gonna be good.

27:09: On a diet, but we are going to really own our journey and we are going to be learners on that journey and we aren’t going to be good or bad, but we’re going to be inner scientists learning about what’s working for us and what doesn’t work for us.

27:26: And when we hit a struggle point, we’re going to forgive ourselves, be compassionate, learn from what happened, and then move ourselves forward.

27:35: To the next place.

27:36: So, I hope today’s episode has been of service to you.

27:40: And like I said, if you’d like to go deeper, please come and join me for the live master class and free weight release hypnosis session.

27:48: You can grab your seat at www.shiftweightmastery.com.

27:53: That’s/live.

27:55: And fun, inspired, packed with powerful insights, and designed to help you get started on the path towards long-term permanent weight mastery.

28:05: So, have a wonderful week and remember that the key, and probably the only key to unlocking the door of the weight struggle is inside you.

28:15: So, keep listening, keep exploring, and You’ll find it, and I will be with you here next week.

28:24: If you want to dive deeper into the mindset of long term weight release, head on over to www.shiftweightmastery.com.

28:35: That’s www.shiftweightmastery.

28:38: Dot com, where you’ll find numerous tools and resources to help you unlock your mind for permanent weight release, tips, strategies, and more.

28:48: 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.