Ep #64: The Secrets to Sustainable Weight Loss

You are listening to the Strong as a Working Mom podcast, Episode #64. If you’re truly committed to weight loss, there are some hard truths to know. Let me give it to you straight and sets you up for success.

Welcome to the Strong as a Working Mom podcast. If you’re balancing career, family, wellness, and some days sanity, you are in the right place. This is where high-achieving, busy, working moms get the tools they need to eat, move, and think. I’m your host, physician, personal trainer, and Certified Life Coach, Carrie Holland. Let’s do this.

Hey, how are you? What’s new, what’s good? So, what’s good here, I’m going to give it to you straight today and I’m going to tell you some hard truths about weight loss. So, part of this is coming from the observations I’ve made in the last week, in the coaching sessions I’ve had with a number of clients. It was a good week, and my clients have been seeing some pretty fantastic wins.

But there’s a common theme I noticed. I’ll be honest, and say that most every client I work with comments on the fact that our work together is not easy. So, I’m not sure if I should be admitting that. But since I’m not about sugarcoating, and I want to be real and give it to you straight, it’s a risk I’m willing to take.

Changing your mindset around food, and most importantly, changing your mindset about yourself, those are not easy tasks. For any of you considering undertaking this kind of work, for any of you considering coaching, know that this is not about thinking happy thoughts and sitting back as the clouds part and the sun shines down upon you. I know that’s not what you’re expecting.

But I want to be clear, the work of changing your mindset, and in turn, changing your lifestyle, is real, legitimate work. And not everyone is ready to do that work. I’ve said this before, but I’ve had clients who wanted me to tell them exactly what to eat, when, and how much, and how often to exercise. But that doesn’t work, and I know because I’ve tried that.

I’ll admit, I have made plenty of mistakes as I grew my coaching philosophy. Early on in my coaching career, I would tell people what to eat, and when. I would have all these detailed food and exercise plans mapped out for each of my clients. But then, I would meet with that same client the following week, and she hadn’t done any of it. I didn’t understand why.

It wasn’t until I became a life coach and learned about how our minds actually work, how limiting beliefs can get in your way, and how you create discipline instead of relying on willpower, it wasn’t until I got a handle on that, that things started to make sense. You have to get your thinking in order first if you want your eating and moving to line up. That’s why I’m a life coach and not a strength coach or a nutrition coach.

I do all of it with my clients. We work on their nutrition and exercise because those are essential. But I do it under the umbrella of managing your mind, first and foremost. That’s why I landed on “Eat, move and think” as the foundation of my coaching philosophy.

But most diets are built on exactly the opposite. In fact, I’d argue that most diets don’t even include thinking in the equation, which is mind blowing to me considering eating is a habit. And in order to change your habits, there’s actually quite a bit of thinking involved. Most diet programs and books and systems are based on “eat this, don’t eat that, not too much, not too little.” But they remove most thinking from the equation.

We’ve been conditioned to see weight loss in that way, “Do this, don’t do that, and the weight will come off.” In fact, just recently, I had someone reach out and ask if I could just tell her what to eat because she didn’t want to think. She said she didn’t have time to think.

But that’s not really what this is about, and that’s not what I’m about. What I am about, is doing the work. I am about getting your hands dirty, getting inside your brain and cleaning it up so that you can, in turn, clean up your relationship with yourself and with food. I truly do not think there’s another way to do this.

You cannot strong arm yourself into eating and moving a certain way for forever. Your brain is going to catch up with you and say, “No, thank you. Let’s get back to the way it used to be around here.” And before long, you’re back to eating takeout instead of the salad you make it home.

You’ve got to do your mind work and actually get into your thinking if you want the eating and moving to change. I see evidence of this whenever I have a consultation with a new client who tells me she’s tried every diet under the sun, but nothing’s worked. Keto does not tell you how to think. Intermittent fasting does not tell you how to think. Weight Watchers does not tell you how to think.

What does work for weight loss, is learning how to think differently. That means approaching your negative beliefs about yourself, about food, and about your weight. It means questioning them and then actively practicing new beliefs that result in new outcomes. It also means getting very real with yourself.

So, the other place where I think diets and plans can do the wrong, is that they claim to be a panacea. Sometimes you put so much weight on the plan or on the diet or on the book that you take yourself entirely out of the equation.

I think of it as following a cookbook. It’s like if you add a little of this and a little of that, and just follow the directions, boom, there you go, weight loss. If it were that easy, if it were that easy, all you’d have to do is pick up your diet book of choice, follow the directions to a tee, and be done with it. Just follow the instructions, and the weight will come off.

But it doesn’t work that way. Instead, I want to offer you some legitimate, real, sometimes icky, ugly truth about weight loss. This comes from my own life experience, mixed with my observations of all the hard work my clients have done. So, you can walk away with an understanding of what it really takes to lose weight and change your relationship with food. All right? Let’s go.

First and foremost, this is going to take longer than you think. If you are really looking for permanent weight loss and are looking to change up your lifestyle, expect that it’s going to take time, more time than you anticipate. I know you’ve probably heard that a number of times already, but here’s why I want to hit it head on.

Often, what I see happen is this: you decide on the way you want to eat and decide on new habits you want to put in practice, and then you go and do them. You replace some of the processed foods you eat with fruit and vegetables. You eat out at restaurants a little less often. You stop having wine every night with dinner.

You put all of those things into place, you do them for a few weeks, but when you don’t see results fast enough, you get frustrated. As a result, you question the process. You wonder if what you’re doing is working. Or worse, you declare that what you’re doing is not working and give up on yourself before you’ve had time to make these changes your new normal.

That’s where you’re derailing yourself. I don’t fault you or anyone for it. I fault our culture and the society we live in, and the ridiculous claims that so many fad diets and influencers make. We live in a world where we want what we want and we wanted it five minutes ago; we are not a patient species.

I read yesterday even, that for internet websites you have exactly two seconds for the page to load before the average user gets impatient and exits out; two seconds. Amazon Prime, while totally amazing in its ability to get pretty much any product you could imagine on your doorstep within 24 to 48 hours, that has not helped our world become any more patient.

The problem is our brains have been wired to expect fast results, and you end up selling yourself short by not giving yourself enough time for your changes to work. You think that the lack of immediate success means something is wrong and you get impatient. But consider this, what if nothing is wrong, and you simply need to give yourself more time?

I say this because I’ve seen clients who’ve made tremendous strides, have cut back on processed foods, stopped drinking alcohol often, started eating more whole foods, and then they wonder if what they’re doing is working. Yes, it’s working! Forget about the numbers for just a second and look at the habits you’ve created.

I would argue, based on what we know about processed food and alcohol and fruit and vegetables, that all of those changes are going to work for you both from a weight loss perspective and from an overall health perspective. So, what if you are doing all the “right” things, you’re following your plan, and the only thing left to do is keep following your plan and let the results speak for themselves?

That’s where it gets hard. It means staying the course. That can be really hard for some of you, especially if you have a long history of multiple diets. If you followed previous diet plans that were extreme or restrictive, and you stuck with it for a while, you probably saw rapid weight loss.

It makes total sense that if you were to try to lose weight again, and that was your previous experience, losing weight quickly with extreme measures, it makes total sense you would wonder what the heck is going on when the weight isn’t coming off quickly.

Think about this, that program that offered you fast weight loss, it didn’t really work. It wasn’t sustainable. It didn’t last. If your weight loss did not last, I would argue that your diet did not work. And for most people, the extreme, restrictive, fast approach to weight loss just does not work. But it’s what you know.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the diet that gave you super rapid weight loss, while it gave you those fast results, it ultimately did you a disservice because it wasn’t sustainable and the weight came back on. It can be really hard to remember that because you’re only choosing to remember how quickly the weight came off when you cut out all carbs, or when you did Whole30 for the fourth time.

You forget that while it may have worked for a minute, it didn’t help you in the long run. In fact, it probably hurt you because we know now that yo-yo dieting is worse for your overall health than staying overweight. Instead, I’m going to offer you to wrap your mind around the idea that it will take longer than you think. But it does not mean that things are not working, really.

If you have made positive changes to your habits, and you’re not seeing results as quickly as you’d like, that is not an indicator to stop. I would never tell you, “Yeah, sure, why don’t you go back to having more fast food? Why not go back to drinking every night of the week? Forget those apples and just buy Pop-Tarts instead.” No.

I’m asking you to keep going. I’m going to ask you to be patient and trust that the changes you’ve put in place are going to work, and keep going. Because the other important piece of this, which I’ve mentioned several times before, is this: If you want your weight loss to last, there is no end game. There is no finish line.

There is no point at which you’re done, and you can go back to your old eating habits and expect to stay at your new lower weight. People who are successful at losing weight and keeping it off, they recognize this. They come to terms with it. They accept it, even if they don’t love it, and they commit to playing the long game. This is about being in it for the long haul. Okay?

All right. Another hard truth about weight loss is that you can’t go out it half-heartedly. There is no weight loss “lite” version. I know that may sound crazy, but here’s what I mean by this. I’ve seen some of you try to kind of do it. Meaning, you really, really want to lose weight, but you’re not making the changes that are necessary to move the needle.

As an example, I have a client who for a long time was eating all meals during the week and on the weekends, from either fast food or takeout. Starting with Dunkin’ Donuts on her way to work, followed by takeout at lunch, and takeout or restaurant food with her family for dinner. Every meal. For a long time she was trying to keep that up.

She was trying to make better choices at these places. But that wasn’t really working, so she ended up eating whatever she wanted because she was operating under the guise of, “I’m eating out, I’ll eat whatever.” As you can imagine, it did not go very well for her. She wanted to keep going out for meals but she also wanted to lose weight. She tried, but quickly realized that for her that was just not going to work.

Another scenario I will see often, is that you stick to your plan when it’s easy. But then, on weekends or if there’s a vacation or a social outing, or any kind of challenge, like being at a restaurant or at a friend’s house, you say, “Forget it, all bets are off,” and then eat whatever. It’s that whole “might as well” habit.

Meaning, “There’s no way I can find something that works for me on this dinner menu, so I might as well just get whatever I want.” It’s that mentality, the “might as well” mentality, that’s not going to get you anywhere. That’s the “lite” version of lifestyle change, and that just does not work because there will always be something. You will go on vacation. You will find yourself at a friend’s house for dinner. You will find yourself at a restaurant.

Those things are normal experiences. But if you use those as reasons to say, “Well, I’m going off my plan, because there’s no possible way I can find anything at this party. There’s no way I can find anything on the menu that works. So, I’ll just get whatever,” that’s not going to work and your weight is not going to change.

I say it all the time, it’s easy when it’s easy. It’s easy to stick to your plan when the conditions are good; you’re at home, you’re cooking your own meals, you’re on your regular routine. But I’ve seen this happen too many times, where you let a night out or a surprise visit from a friend or a vacation, you let that mean, “Well, that’s it. There’s no way I’m sticking to a plan.”

But that’s not helping you create a new lifestyle. Instead, that’s letting you slip back into old habits. So, if you’re going to do this, if you’re going to truly change your lifestyle, and you want to lose weight for good, I need you all in. This is not weight loss “lite.” You can try to make it as easy as possible for yourself, and truthfully, when it comes to habit science, that’s the approach you want to take.

When you’re implementing new behaviors, you want the new behaviors as easy as possible to do, and you want the habits you’re trying to get rid of, you want to make those harder. But that being said, there comes a point at which it’s going to get a little hard. I want you to be ready for that. I want you to be prepared for it, and I want you to decide in advance how you will respond when it does in fact get hard.

What are you going to do when you find yourself out at a restaurant three times in a week for dinner? Are you going to say, “Forget it,” and get the burrito, plus the salsa and the chips, plus the margarita, even though you did that the previous two times you were out this week? Or are you going to say, “I can do this,” and get a salad with protein on it instead? Are you going to honor your commitment? Or are you going to slip into the “might as well” mentality.

Here’s where this comes from: Often, when we commit to change, what we’re really doing is trying something until it gets hard, and then we stop. That’s the “lite” version of change and that doesn’t work. I’m asking for more from you. I’m offering to you, from the get go, straight up, that it will get hard. And I’m asking you to stick with it anyway. I’m asking you to allow it to be a little hard, okay?

I’m not talking about torture here, and making yourself miserable by restricting and depriving yourself. Instead, I’m asking you to do the hard work of managing your urges. Allowing the negative feelings to come up. Allow them, instead of trying to avoid them. I’m asking you to practice honoring the decisions you make for yourself in advance, even when it gets hard. I’m asking for more than the “lite” version. I’m asking you to commit all the way.

All right, next. The next hard truth about real, sustainable permanent weight loss, is that it will require you to get super honest with yourself. This is probably one of the most common things that comes up for my clients when we do this work together. This is what they will often cite as being one of the hardest, but most impactful things, to do in order to be successful at changing their lives.

So, at its most basic level, being honest with yourself means recognizing and owning the things you are doing or not doing to keep you moving forward on your weight loss journey. This comes up most commonly when you’re not losing weight. I have a number of examples that I can share from coaching people on exactly this.

First, not realizing that what you are doing on the weekends is undoing the work you’re doing during the week. This one comes up time and time again. For many of you, it’s a lot easier to stay on track and stay on your eating plan during the work week, when your schedule is spelled out and work and kid activities keep you busy. You may find that you’re able to stay on track during the work week, no problem.

But then the weekend comes, you go out to eat a few times, have a couple of glasses of wine, maybe get ice cream with your kids, and you find yourself snacking more because you’re home and there’s more access to the pantry. You may think, “Well, geez, that’s only two or three days. How much could those days really affect the bottom line?”

But it affects the bottom line a lot, and it can keep you from not losing any weight despite the work you put in during the week. For many of you, this is a repeating pattern that keeps you stuck in maintenance. Meaning, you’re not gaining weight, but you’re not losing weight either. The choices you’re making over the weekend are essentially evening out the choices you make during the week, and the net change is zero.

It can be incredibly frustrating for you because you’re doing the work during the week. You’re in weight loss mode during the week, but it has to carry over into the weekend too. What it requires, is recognizing that the habits you’re implementing, those can’t be put on hold over the weekend if you want to see real, legitimate weight loss. Weekends count, too. Okay?

Here’s another example that comes up all the time. You may need to come to terms with the fact that the meals you’re having are too calorie dense, or the portions are just too large, even if you’re eating healthy. I know it sounds hokey to say, but hear me out when I say, healthy food has calories too.

Even if you’ve traded pretzels for almonds, or takeout for salmon, at home, or cookies for yogurt, all of those foods have calories, even the healthier options. It’s important to pay attention to how much you’re eating even if it’s a healthy food. I partly look at Weight Watchers for this because of their points and stuff. So, while some fruits and veggies, according to Weight Watchers, have zero points, that doesn’t mean they have zero calories.

That can really mess things up for you, if you look at it that way, and overeat healthy foods because of their perceived point value. I had a coworker who ate loads of bananas and apples every day. She said she did it because those were zero-point foods. But even healthy foods, when eaten in excess, will be a problem.

Another place where this comes up, is in relation to healthy fats that are in your diet. If you’re trying to lose weight, you may start incorporating more healthy fats into your diet, which is totally awesome. But those healthy fats are still fats, and they are still calorie dense.

So, this is not to say stop eating nuts or avocado or peanut butter. But the important takeaway here is that all food, even healthy food, has calories. If you’re not losing weight, barring any medical issues, you’re eating more than your body needs, no matter what kind of food you’re eating.

Or for anyone who is tracking their food, whether that means writing it in a food journal, or using an app like My Fitness Pal, whatever method you use, remember that tracking your food, in any way, is an estimate, at best, of what you’re doing. So, even if you swear up and down that the tracker said you ate only 1,400 calories every day for over a month and you haven’t lost a pound, something is amiss. Something is off.

Again, if you are not losing weight, barring medical issues, it is because you’re eating more calories than your body needs, whether those calories are accounted for in your journal or not. So, while you’re tracking method may suggest you’re coming in at a deficit, or that you’re not eating that much, something is missing. Because if you’re not losing weight, you’re eating more than you need.

This happens commonly, and one of the end results of this is that you use food journaling or food tracking against yourself. You may get irritated at the idea that you’re doing all this work and coming in at a deficit. Or that according to your food journal you’re hardly eating anything, so why isn’t the weight coming off?

But again, something is missing. Something is just not quite right. And I find that it often comes down to one or more of a number of issues with tracking. Either you’re not tracking accurately, like portion sizes. Or you’re not tracking all of the bites and tastes that you’re taking in throughout the day. Or you’re overly guesstimating. Or maybe you’re tracking at meals but nothing else like your snacks. And then there’s loads of shades of gray in between here.

That’s where I think that tracking and journaling can most definitely be a double-edged sword. While I think it can be super useful for creating awareness and give you an idea of how much you’re eating, it is not a perfect science by any means. It’s only as accurate as you are at logging what you eat. And even then, it is not 100%. It’s entirely user dependent.

So, the estimates you get from your tracking device or your food journal, those estimates are going to be wildly variable based on all of those factors. I would encourage you, if you’re going to track your food or journal in any way, that you take all of that information with a grain of salt.

Instead of relying on the tracker or the journal to tell you if you’re eating too much, get super honest with yourself. Recognize that if the weight is not coming down, it’s not because the tracker is lying to you, or that your food journal is leading you astray. I know that sounds silly to say, but this has come up with so many clients so many times that I want to make this super clear.

The tracking, and the journaling system you choose, gives you an estimate of what you’re eating. But at the end of the day, if you’re not losing weight, it doesn’t really matter what the tracker or the food journal says, because whatever amount of food you’re eating is proving to be too much for what your body needs, and you won’t lose weight.

That can be a really difficult idea to come to grips with. Sometimes it can make you downright mad. And I hear you, I acknowledge you, I see you. But humans tend to very much underestimate how much we eat. It’s been shown over and over again.

The science suggests we underestimate how much we eat by anywhere from 20 to almost 50%, up to 50%. So, even if you’re putting everything in your journal or your tracker, it is still an estimate at best. Okay?

The last place where you will likely need to get super honest with yourself is about your consistency and the impact of your consistency on your progress towards weight loss. And, this is how this most commonly plays out.

So, imagine you started a weight loss plan eight weeks ago. You devise a protocol for yourself, decided what, how much, and how often, you were going to eat, and then you were going to track your progress with food journaling. All that means, is you write everything you eat in a day in your journal, that’s it.

At the outset, when your motivation is high, you start out logging everything. You eat foods that are part of your plan, you stick to eating at the times you said you would, you don’t eat extra snacks, and for the most part, you are on point. But then, a few days in work stress ramps up and you have a hard time keeping up with journaling, so you skip it from Wednesday to Friday.

Then you half track on the weekend, but you leave out a few of the meals because they’re from a restaurant and it’s hard to know exactly what it was in the meal, so you just left it blank. Come Monday, you start over again by going back to your plan, until a few days later when the cycle repeats itself.

So, forget about tracking or journaling for just a second here; take it a step back. It may be, that at the beginning of the week you start with a high level of commitment to your plan, then you make one decision that’s off-plan and you let that derail you.

You use that one off-plan cookie as evidence your failure. So, why bother, and you let that cookie turn into a downward spiral of more cookies, then cake, and then other food choices that don’t go along with your plan. What this all adds up to is a lack of consistency. Honestly, of all the things that will shoot you in the foot and cause the most frustration, it’s this.

Here’s why: Say you’ve been following a weight loss plan for eight weeks. But in those eight weeks, you went off-plan every weekend, from Friday to Sunday. By doing some simple math here, that’s 56 days in total that you had the plan. And of those, you went off plan 24 of those days. So, that means you followed your plan for 32 days. Divide that out, and you’ve got 57% consistency, 57%.

I use this as an example because for so many of you, weekends are a huge challenge. When you do the math, it’s easy to see that weekends can totally throw you off your weight loss goals. Fifty-seven percent consistency is just not going to be enough to see considerable or sustainable weight loss. That’s just not going to work.

It can get frustrating because you might feel like you’ve been at it for forever; eight weeks of doing this and you’re not seeing any results. What’s up, right? But when you really dive in and take a look at what’s going on, you can see that it’s not eight full weeks of being consistent, not at all. It’s four days of being consistent, followed by three days of not being consistent. Rinse and repeat.

That cycle will leave you spinning your sheels, extremely frustrated, and not losing weight. This happens all the time. That’s just one example of how I see struggles with consistency pan out. It may be different for you. It may be that you do fine following your plan on most days, until the evening and then it falls apart after dinner because you end up snacking or having a glass or two of wine and then more snacking.

Or it may be that you travel for work and you do fine when you’re home. But when you’re not at home, you let that be the reason to go off your plan, and the net result is zero change. So, whatever it is for you, the theme is the same, it’s consistency. It may feel like you’re being consistent, but if you put a micro lens to it, you may see that you’re not being as consistent as you thought.

This is true for all of us. Humans 10 tend to overestimate our consistency. When you pair that up with our tendency to underestimate how much we eat, and our tendency to overestimate how much we exercise, it’s really easy to see why losing weight can be such a challenge.

I outline all of these examples to illustrate the one essential underlying message: It is not until we get honest with ourselves that things will really change. It’s not until you get honest with yourself about what you’re doing on the weekends, or the make up and the size of your meals, or the information you gather from food journaling your tracking, or your level of consistency.

It’s not until you get super honest with yourself about those things, that you can make meaningful, sustainable change. That is not easy. It’s a lot easier to swear up and down that you’re not eating that much. But something is missing. Something is missing here. And I would bet that if you were to take a closer look at what you’re doing, you will find places where you’re not as accurate as you think.

I do not say this to call you a liar. Okay? I’m not calling you a liar; I will say it time and again. I say it because I’ve been there. I’ve said to myself multiple times, “I don’t think I eat that much.” But then, once I started paying closer attention, logging what I was eating, and actually looking at my portion sizes, I can see it. I found it. My peanut butter intake alone was eyebrow raising.

Once I started logging what I was doing, I could see it plain as day. I was eating peanut butter in large quantities four times a day. Now I know why I was going through the Crazy Richard’s jars as fast as I was. But I had to get really honest with myself in order to see it.

Not only that, I had to be willing to look for it. I had to be willing to look and see that I was eating more than I thought. I was not blaming it on my tracker. I wasn’t blaming it on my metabolism or any other external factor. I took ownership over myself and my choices, and realized that at the end of the day, it was me and peanut butter. I’m asking you to consider the same.

I’m asking you to look for where you can be more honest with yourself. And that’s where it gets really, really hard. When you realize that you can’t point a finger at My Fitness Pal, or your food journal, or your metabolism. Or once you realize that you’re eating more than you think you are, that doesn’t feel good. Or once you realize that you’re overdoing it on the weekends, and that’s why you’re not losing weight, it doesn’t feel good.

But at the same time, denying it, taking yourself out of the equation while looking for the next fad diet, only to lose and regain the weight over and over again, I would argue that that feels worse. Instead, when you own it, you own the choices you make, and you own the results that those choices get you, when you own all of it, and feel all of the feelings that come up for you when you do this, that is when you are onto something.

That is empowerment. It puts the control of your brain, your food, and your lifestyle, it puts it all back where it belongs, in your hands. Okay? There it is, we just went over hard truth about weight loss. We talked about how it will take longer than you think. That sustainable weight loss is about playing the long game.

We also talked about the challenge of trying to lose weight when you go into it half-heartedly, or what I’ve termed weight loss “lite.” There’s a fine balance between making weight loss easy for yourself and making it too easy, to the point that you’re not losing weight.

Last, we picked apart the many ways you may need to get honest with yourself. Whether that’s related to weekends, the make up of your meals, how you’re keeping track of what you’re eating, and how consistent you’re being. So, I know these truths are not easy to hear. I say this all the time, what I’m sharing with you in this podcast is probably not going to sell any diet books.

I’m totally okay with that, because I would prefer to be totally honest with you and have you know what it takes to succeed, versus painting a picture of sunshine and rainbows that ultimately is not true.

Changing your life in order to lose weight, it’s hard; period, end. There are ways to make it easier for yourself, and I’ve gone over many of those ways in previous podcast episodes. But eventually it’s going to get hard. It’s going to require legitimate change on your part in order to be successful for the long term.

That’s why so many people are not successful. They’re not prepared to do what it takes for the duration, in order to keep the weight off. So, my hope, is that this episode helps to prepare you. If you are new to weight loss, or if you’ve tried losing weight too many times to count, consider the things we went over today and decide where you can improve.

Do you need to be more patient? Do you need to commit and go all-in instead of going at it late and trying to make it too easy for yourself? Do you need to do a reality check, get super honest, look at your behaviors related to weight loss, and be willing to see where you might not be as consistent as you think? Whatever it is, if you are willing to go there and do the work, you will see success.

This is not about following a diet plan to a T. This is not about following instructions and using your measuring cups or tracker. This is not about eliminating food groups. No, not at all. This is about coming to terms with what real, true, legitimate, long-term weight loss looks like. This is about getting into your brain and doing the dirty work. Because on the other side of that is peace around food, and it’s so worth it.

If you want help with this, let’s talk. When you coach with me, I will help you do the work of making long-term, sustainable weight loss a reality. No, it’s not easy. But it is absolutely possible when you commit and go all-in. Check out my website. Go to www.CarrieHollandMD.com/contact, tell me where you’re struggling, and let’s get started. All right?

Thank you for hanging out with me, and I’ll catch you again next week. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please review the show. I would love to get your feedback and ideas. Your suggestions have inspired episodes and will help me make the show better for you. Share this podcast with a friend, text a show link, share a screenshot, or post a link to the show on your social media. Be sure to tag me @CarrieHollandMD on either Instagram or Facebook, so I can follow along and engage with you.

This is how we get the word out to other working moms who want to feel strong, inside and out. If you know someone who wants to feel better or eat and move differently but she is too tired or too busy, it is time to change things up. You know making that change starts with how you think, and that is what we do here on the Strong as a Working Mom podcast. I’ll see you next week.

Thanks for listening to Strong as a Working Mom. If you want more information on how to eat, move, and think, so you can live in the body you want, with the mind to match, visit me at CarrieHollandMD.com.