How Your Thoughts Are Keeping You Overweight

Nov 1, 2024

Learn how your thoughts create your weight loss results can help you lose weight as a female in your 50s.

As an over 50 weight coach, I hear a lot of comments from females in their 50s who want to lose weight like those outlined below.

“I like Snickers.”

“I want to lose weight (but I'm not).”

“I want something yummy.”

“I can't control myself.”

“I have a commitment problem.”

“A meal without refined carbs feels like it isn't enough to sustain me.”

These are all real “before” thoughts my clients have given me.

Now you, dear reader, may not be a coach, but can you see the issue already?

None of these thoughts are focused on health.

None of these thoughts are focused on the benefits of losing weight.

None of these thoughts are focused on the joy of being in a single digit size and everything in the store being cute on you.

And therefore, none of these thoughts will help you lose weight as a female in your 50s.

What we focus on expands, and all these thoughts are focused on being unable to stop eating unhealthy foods that cause weight gain.

A coach can help you see these thoughts, which are basically invisible to you.

A coach can help you shift your focus from your current reality to your desired future.

A coach can help you with tips, tricks, strategies and information that can get you where you want to go.

A coach can help you lose weight.

Let's start working together today. As a female in your 50s, you absolutely can do it. You just need a different approach to lose weight.

P.S. You absolutely can do this once you have the right support. Jump on a Zoom call with me and we'll get you started. Just find a time on my calendar.

3 Ways to Stay Full

Oct 15, 2024

Wondering how to lose weight without starving? Losing weight doesn't require being hungry all the time.

Ready to lose weight without starving? There are 3 key ingredients that you want to put into your meals to keep you feeling fuller longer, so you are not hungry between meals.

Fiber

Fiber a great low-calorie way to feel full so you can lose weight without starving. Foods such as fruits, vegetables, and natural grains, like slow cooked oatmeal, will fill your stomach up. The body has receptors that let you know when your stomach starts to stretch so you know it’s time to stop eating.

Fat

Fat got a bad rap back in the 80s, but it turns out the science isn’t really there. Fat can actually be a great way to create a feeling of satiety, so you are satisfied with what you are eating. Look for plan-based fats, like avocados, and monounsaturated traditional fats that are produced with minimal processing, like extra virgin olive oil.

Protein

Have you ever had a big steak and felt it sort of “sit” in your stomach? Protein slows the emptying of your stomach, so you stay fuller longer, allowing you to lose weight without starving.

I do believe most Americans eat too much meat, so try to use meat as a garnish and for flavor rather than as the main show. For example, consider a steak salad versus a steak. And try to incorporate proteins that have omega-3 fatty acids, such as salmon, and limit the amount of processed meat like salami.

Are you ready to get coached? Schedule a time to get started by clicking here.

Why Snacking Is a Problem

Oct 1, 2024

How to stop snacking when snacking is knocking you down.

Wondering how to stop snacking?

If you are over 40, you probably grew up with 3 meals a day, plus maybe a small snack after school. And you probably remember that as a kid, even the adults were not as overweight as they are now. While the problem of obesity in America has a lot of causes, I believe one of them is the prevalence of snacking. Keep reading to more about the problem of snacking and how to stop.

When we snack all day long, we keep our insulin elevated all day long. This keeps our body in non-stop fat storage mode. We never allow our insulin to drop to get us into fat burning mode.

Our grandparents didn’t eat like this. Remember the idea of not “spoiling” our dinner?

Cutting out snacks gives our body a chance to oscillate between fat storage and fat burning mode. If we never get to fat burning mode, we can't lose weight.

But how do we stop snacking?

To stop snacking, it's important to take apart what snacking is doing for us.

Snacking is a habit. So part of what we'll have to do is break the habit.

Another aspect of snacking is that certain snacks, especially sweets and refined carbohydrates, actually set off a cascade of happy chemicals in the brain. So in addition to breaking the habit of snacking, we need to look at why we are feeling down and therefore need a snack to boost us up just to get back to “even”.

Breaking the habit plus digging into the root causes of why we feel bad can help us feel better without needing a snack, helping to make stopping snacking possible.

Are you ready to make a change? I'm trained and ready to help you do it. Book a call to learn more by clicking here.

“I’ve Done The Mindset Work.”

Sep 15, 2024

Weight Loss Therapy/Coaching That Works

In this article, we discuss how to find weight loss therapy/coaching that works, and how to know if you are finished with the mindset part of weight loss.

I was talking recently with a friend of mine who wanted to lose weight and during the conversation she said in passing, “I've done the mindset work.”

Wait, what? No.

You see, your thoughts determine your feelings, which drive your actions, which create your results.

So if you don't have the result you want, I know you haven't done the mindset work. Not fully.

You either have not yet found the right approach that works for you, or you haven't finished your work.

I get this sentiment – after I came out of network marketing I had leveled up so much that I thought I was done. And I was. For 15 years, I had what I needed to go where I wanted to go.

But in 2018 when I started my coaching business, I realized there was a whole other level.

So if you don't have the result you want, be open – there may be another level to which you could go.

Keep learning and growing and reaching.

Try out a lot of different mentors and methodologies.

If we haven't worked together yet, I'd love to help you out. Click here to schedule a call to learn how.

P.S. Want proof that weight loss therapy/coaching works? I'm not a therapist, but my coaching clients have gotten great results. Check out the testimonials page to learn more.

How Buffering Is Making Us Overweight

Sep 1, 2024

Buffering? You may need a Certified Life and Weight Coach who trained with The Life Coach School, because checking out mentally and emotionally can lead to weight gain.

So, you may be wondering, what's buffering?

I first heard the term buffering while training to be a Certified Life and Weight Coach through The Life Coach School, and it explained a pattern I'd seen many times before, but never been able to understand before.

I'd stopped my “retail therapy” overspending, only to start overdrinking.

Then I stopped overdrinking, only to pile on the pounds.

The problem was not the specific coping tool I was using, but the fact that I was using a coping tool instead of dealing with my emotions.

I was buffering.

You see, life is a mix of positive and negative emotions. As a society, we aren’t taught what to do with the negative ones.

If you’ve ever seen a toddler in a grocery store, you know our natural inclination is to react to a negative emotion. But as we get older, we understand we aren’t supposed to do that as adults.

So most of us go to resisting negative emotions, and one of our favorite ways to resist negative emotions is by taking false pleasure and using that to distract from or cover up the negative emotion. This is called buffering. And buffering is exactly what I learned how to beat when I trained at The Life Coach School to be a certified Life and Weight Coach.

We know we are buffering when the distracting activity has a net negative effect. So for example Netflix is fine when it’s for an hour in the evenings, but it becomes a problem when it’s for four hours during the middle of a work from home day.

It’s the same with food. Healthy food you eat for fuel because you are hungry is fine. Unhealthy food you are eating to cover up negative feelings that later manifests as weight gain is a problem.

I was talking to a lady just the other day who had mentioned she’d moved in with a friend who was sick to help take care of her, and she’d been hiding donuts in her room to eat. She ended up gaining 10 pounds from the experience. That’s a classic example of buffering.

Looking for an LCS trained certified Life and Weight Coach to help you stop buffering so you can lose weight? Let's work together.

Schedule a call at https://lisaduke.net/schedule

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Motivational Secrets

Aug 15, 2024

How to stay motivated to lose weight by ending self-sabotage.

Wondering how to stay motivated to lose weight?

First, it's important to know that the only thing between you and what you want is your primitive/survival brain.

Your survival brain is programmed to be efficient, avoid pain, and seek pleasure.

In that way, we are very like every other creature on this planet.

Even an amoeba will move toward food, away from danger, and avoid wasting energy whenever possible.

That's the gear that got us here.

The problem is, for most of us, survival is kind of a given.

And we want more than mere survival, right?

We want to thrive.

To succeed in this new phase of human history, we have to not be efficient (aka lazy) and put in the work to make our dreams come true.

We need to move toward pain – to open our hearts to hear what others are saying and to see what we can learn about ourselves from our reaction to it.

We need to avoid pleasure – at least excessive, engineered pleasure as it comes in the form of food products.

We have to reverse everything that's gotten us this far.

That's why it feels so awkward and so weird.

But the good news is that we can do it.

We can clear our limiting beliefs.

We can make a decision to plan ahead of time and to follow our plan despite the fact that we don't want to in the moment.

We can overcome, we can achieve, and we can do more than we thought possible.

So you see, the answer to the question of how to stay motivated to lose weight is just to remove what's stopping you from doing what you want to do, allowing weight loss to come with ease.

Need support? I'm here for you. Jump on my calendar for a free goal setting session. If you want, after we complete that task you will have the option to learn about my program. Book by clicking on this sentence.

The Secret to Being A Happy Human

Aug 1, 2024

Weight Loss a Secret to Happiness?

Are you wondering if weight loss is a secret to happiness?

The culture definitely tells us it's true.

That if we can just look the way we are supposed to look, we'll feel the way we are supposed to feel.

So is it true that weight loss is a secret to happiness?

Well, I think I may have figured out the secret to being a happy human.

If you can realize you are safe in this moment-

If you can learn to recognize and own your good qualities-

If you can look at, embrace, and forgive what you are ashamed of with compassion-

If you can speak your truth and ask for what you want without trying to control-

If you can accept the reality of what is and even see the beauty in it-

Then you can start to relax and enjoy the ride.

From this base of acceptance we then can set a vision for where we want to go… while at the same time surrendering to the divine.

As women over 40, we are taught that weight loss is the secret to happiness.

And the truth is, I do feel better – physically, mentally, emotionally, now that I've improved my health by losing weight in my 40s.

But I don't just feel better because I'm skinnier.

I feel better because of HOW I lost the weight.

For me, my effort to lose weight to improve my appearance and my physical health opened the door to a journey of self-discovery.

I learned how to carve out time for myself in my schedule.

I learned how to carve out investing in my mental and physical well-being in my budget.

I learned how to change what my past meant to me, so my past was no longer controlling my future.

So yes, weight loss can be a secret to happiness – if you use your weight loss journey as a way to heal your past, soothe your inner child, learn self-love, self-acceptance, and a bunch of other hippie nonsense I thought I didn't need, but which ended up being the keys to both weight loss and happiness for me.

What do you think?

What am I missing?

What’s working for you?

Email me at lisa@lisaduke.net to let me know.

Why We Self-Sabotage and How to Stop

Jul 15, 2024

Stop weight loss self-sabotage by understanding our primitive brain's agenda.

Wondering how to stop weight loss self-sabotage?

Your cave woman brain only wants you to do three things: avoid effort, avoid pain, and move toward pleasure. To lose weight, we need to do exactly the opposite. Here's how.

Back when our early ancestors were focused on just surviving, our brains needed to be focused on three main things, which we call the motivational triad.

1. Avoiding effort (which is why your brain always tells you that you don't need to work out). Back in the day, calories were hard to come by, so any time your brain could keep you safe in the cave and not wasting energy was a great thing.

2. Avoiding pain. In the cave, this kept us from walking into the fire in the cave. Pain bad.

Nowadays, though, there's really not too much risk of physical pain for most of us most of the time. We have seat belts and most of the tigers are in cages. So our primitive instinct to avoid pain is mostly focused on avoiding emotional pain.

Sometimes the emotional pain isn't some deep seated childhood drama – it's the pain of telling ourselves we won't have a cookie because it wasn't on our plan, but that we can put it on the plan for tomorrow. Your brain will always steer you away from pain. It thinks it's helping, but it's really undermining our ability to get what we most want in the long term by recommending we give in to short term desires.

3. Moving toward pleasure. Again good when we needed a reason to take the risk of getting out of the cave to get berries and to procreate. But today, food scientists have taken a naturally sweet berry and turned food into food products, scientifically determining the maximum sweetness we can tolerate so they hit the “bliss point” and keep us coming back for more.

Our poor primitive brain is no match for the planning brains of the food scientists.

So given the fact that our primitive brain is wired to survive in olden times, not thrive in modern times, what's a savvy lady to do to maintain her health?

Well, good news. We've got newer hardware up there – the fancy modern prefrontal cortex. The planning brain can put together a plan for our long term benefit, and then the conscious mind can choose at each moment to ignore the arguments from the primitive brain and stick to that plan.

Your primitive brain doesn't have any control as long as the conscious mind is in control.

The way we keep it in control is shining the light of awareness on the chatter of the primitive brain and making conscious choices to ignore it or to persuade it to get on board with the plan.

And the way we do that is with coaching. Coaching helps us stop weight loss self-sabotage.

Are you ready to get coached? Schedule a time to get started by clicking here.

We are told “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, but I always thought that was B.S.

Jul 1, 2024

I just realized today that I've gotten to a point where food is actually kind of boring.

And that's a good thing.

For too long, I was overweight because I was using food products as a buffer between me and my negative feelings.

Some of y'all are self-aware and know you are emotional eaters or stress eaters.

I had no clue.

I was using food products to bump my brain chemicals so often that I didn't even know what I was really feeling.

That's why stopping using food to numb out is so hard.

It requires choosing to sit in discomfort today in order to feel better tomorrow.

Almost impossible, but with tools and support I did it.

Now, food is fuel, and fuel is kind of boring.

It's about as exciting as gassing up my car.

Don't get me wrong, I do still get jazzed about a beautifully plated or an especially delicious meal.

But it's the kind of delight you might feel seeing a really pretty garden or a sunset.

It's an appreciation, not an obsession.

I was able to get free of something I didn't even know I was basically addicted to, and that feels amazing.

We are told “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, but I always thought that was B.S.

What's true is nothing feels as good as freedom.

Do you want help?

Accepting new clients now.

https://LisaDuke.net/schedule

Client Case Study: “I’m Too Tired.”

Jun 15, 2024

This weight loss success story shows that what you think about you bring about.

Here's a mini-success that led to a bigger weight loss success story.

My client Christy had decided she wanted to create the habit of going for daily walks.

When I checked in with her the next week, it was not going well.

She'd planned to go for a walk after work the evening before our call, but she'd been too tired.

I asked her what she'd done with the time instead.

She'd taken that hour to watch TV… and that hour had turned into staying up until the wee hours of the morning.

So needless to say, the next day when she'd planned to get up early and go for a walk while it was cooler, she was too tired.

Then a whole day of work on just a few hours of sleep. Exhausting.

So OF COURSE she'd also be too tired to go for a walk tonight.

“Do you see how the thought ‘I'm too tired' brought you more tiredness?” I asked.

In that moment she got it.

This is a crystal clear example of how what we focus on expands.

She's realized that thought, “I'm too tired,” is just that. A thought. And in and of itself, it doesn't have the power to force her to do or not do anything.

When she has the thought “I'm too tired,” she can choose to go on a thirty minute walk while she's tired, which will help her body process through some of the stress chemicals that are in her body from the work day, which will help her reduce that “wired but tired” feeling that's keeping her up all night (but with only the energy to watch TV).

And once she's more physically tired, she's also more likely to be able to fall asleep early in the night. Which will help her feel more rested the next day. Which will make her brain less likely to offer the “I'm too tired” thought when it's time for a walk.

And even if it does, she now knows she doesn't have to obey her primitive mind in the moment. She can stick with her plan.

That repetition helps create the new habit.

And that's how she'll become someone who just goes for a walk without questioning it.

That's how one small shift can lead to results over time. And enough small shifts can help you write your own weight loss success story.

Are you ready to have your own breakthrough moment?

I can help get you there.

Schedule a free initial consultation by clicking here.

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