Overthinking and the Weight Loss Journey
Description
In today's episode, I'm talking about overthinking and how to avoid it on the weight loss journey. An AI generated transcript is below. (:
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Begin AI Generated Transcript:
Welcome to the Six Miles to Supper podcast. I'm your host, Kayla Cox, and I've lost over £80 with intermittent fasting six days a week, eating whatever I wanted at my meals, taking a cheat day every Sunday and walking six miles a day. And I'm here to help you on your weight loss journey. Before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to remind you that I do have courses and coaching available.
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In today's episode, we're going to talk about overthinking and why it's not a good thing to do on the weight loss journey and how you can stop it. Overthinking is one of those things that I think some people are just more prone to do, and I happen to be one of those people. I tend to overthink just about everything.
There are good things about thinking deeply about a thing, but it really can derail your progress when it comes to weight loss. So the first place that this can creep in is when you set up your goal weight. Back in March of 2014, that was when I had my I've had enough moment. I was so ready to get the weight off and I was just determined.
But it took me almost an entire year to get on the scale and finally come up with the number that I was shooting for. I didn't really know what a good thing to shoot for was. I, you know, like, I had always had trouble with my weight. I never was able to keep it off. So I kind of thought, well, I don't know.
Like, is the problem that I am getting down to, you know, to overweight and then that's causing me to not be able to maintain it. Like, should I be shooting for something higher? You know, and so I would just debate these things in my mind constantly. But once I finally got on the scale and I saw the number, I thought, okay, I just need to pick a number and try to get down to it and I need to stop overthinking it and just, you know, write down a number, pick a number, write it down, and then just go about the business of trying to lose the weight.
And that was the right thing to do in hindsight. The key here is that you just pick a number because once you pick something, you know, even if it's arbitrary, even if you're not really sure that that's going to be the right number. And look, any goal weight that you pick is going to be arbitrary, too. To some extent and you may not know until you get there whether it's going to be a good goal or not.
It's just an educated guess. So because of that, it's better to just go ahead and pick something. Once you've picked it, then you can start moving towards it When you're not really sure where you want to end up. It's going to be really hard to motivate yourself to stop overthinking your goal weight, to sit down. You know, if you want to sit down with the BMI chart, I think that's a great place for people to start.
And then just look at what a normal weight range is for you. I would pick something on the high end of normal or the low end of overweight. From what I've talked with other people and through my own experience, I'll say that's when weight loss seems to be, you know, fairly easy. It's not it doesn't take like super good consistency or a lot of restriction.
On the other hand, you know, once once you get or at least in my experience, once you get down into the normal BMI, like right there at that cusp between overweight and normal BMI, that's when the weight loss really slowed down for me. Up until that point, it was about a pound a week. Once I got down to that point, it was a third of a pound a week, and that was even with really good consistency.
So just some food for thought. So pick a number and go ahead and make a deal with yourself there. If you feel comfortable stopping earlier because maybe you just shot too low that okay, you can you can stop at a higher number. Or conversely, if you get down to that number and you decide I still want to lose, you know, five or ten more pounds or whatever number, then then you can move on from there.
But it's important to just pick something and start moving towards it. Think of it as the good enough goal, which brings you to the next step in the weight loss journey, which is to pick out your plan. And this is the place where so many people get stuck because of overthinking. They research and research and research, and there's all this conflicting information out there.
You know, if you go on YouTube or just, you know, do a Google search, you'll be able to see that there are a million experts out there with a million different opinions about which plan is best. And it can be overwhelming. It can get you stuck in inaction for years. And, you know, this is a big reason in 2014 that I stayed stuck because I was researching everything and I was so confused about everything.
I was just like, you know, like I would read stuff about kiddo. I would read stuff about veganism. I would read stuff about Carnivore. I would read stuff about, you know, like don't eat sugar or, you know, other people would say, Oh, that's fine. You know, like and counting calories is the way or you've got to cycle your carbs or, you know, and there's so much information out there.
The way to stop overthinking this is to break it down into a really simple equation, which is you need to burn more calories than you're consuming. Now, most people do this through a combination of eating less and moving more. And my own opinion on this is that the most important part is eating less. The moving part, I think, is very helpful for staying encouraged, having your your mental state, you know, in a positive place.
But as far as just from a perspective of can you lose weight without exercise, Yes, you can. So if you're right now, if the big thing that's messing with you is like you don't like to exercise and you don't know how to get yourself to exercise, then focus 100% on the eating and just don't worry about it, because you can certainly still lose weight.
When I look back, you know, I remember I spent days, weeks of just researching all this stuff, just researching, especially exercise. I was, you know, spending hours and hours at the computer thinking about these things, trying to figure out, you know, like, should it be high intensity exercise or is it better to do low state cardio or is it better to lift heavyweights or is it better to do, you know, more volume of reps but with with less weight or, you know, like there is so much stuff that I just filled my head with.
Meanwhile, and sitting there not exercising and I did this for so long. I mean, I look back and I laugh at myself and I think, what on earth were you thinking? You know, like and the same with the plan, the eating plan. I would research and research and research. Meanwhile, you know, I would just be overeating constantly. So by 2015, I was I was doing more towards trying to, you know, practice intermittent fasting and things like that.
I really didn't have a plan yet, though. I was doing a lot of stuff, but no clear plan again, because I was just overthinking it. I was constantly reading contradictory evidence and then changing my plan accordingly and then not really having results and getting frustrated and then changing the plan, you know, And just in truth, not really having a plan, just trying lots of stuff.
One thing that kind of shifted my paradigm a
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