Losing Weight for a Wedding or Another Event (Without Punching Yourself in the Face)

Do you have a special wedding coming up? An anniversary? Family pictures that you're pretty nervous about getting your picture taken for?

If that's you, I am so glad you're here.

My anniversary is coming up soon, and I want to get my picture taken. I go to weddings over the holidays and summer, and I've been thinking a lot about when I got married.

Now that my kids are eventually going to be getting married, I want to look really good. So I'm going to talk to you about a five-step process of losing weight for a wedding or an event without punching yourself in the face.

Why Does It Matter?

Let me ask you - why does it matter?

Really, the wedding is not about you. It's about the bride and the groom, and it's their special day. But there's something about memorializing that day and the way that you look, and I get it. I totally get it.

We want to look our best. We want to represent ourselves how we best want to. So I think it's amazing that you're actually letting yourself dream and feel good about, "Yeah, I'm gonna do this for me."

Where People Fall Down

However, where I see people fall is their approach to weight loss. How we lose the weight is how we keep it off.

Diet culture says it doesn't matter how you lose the weight as long as you've lost the weight. So now we have this whole issue of Ozempic and all these GLP-1s. You get results, but you're throwing up all the time, or you're feeling sick, or you're having all these problems. But you keep promising yourself and saying, "Well, it's all worth it in the end."

We have quotes like "nothing tastes as good as thin feels" and all these crazy ideas. But you're not addressing the real issue. The real issue is weight loss is an emotional journey and it's a relationship with yourself and with food.

The Four-Step Process

Step 1: Make a Decision and Like Your Reason

There's a wonderful quote by Clay Christensen, who is a professor at Harvard: "It's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time."

When you're 98% committed to something, then you truly haven't decided. As a result, you're required to continue making decisions. We get into decision fatigue and we just go down that road.

I want you to make THE decision: "I am going to lose 15 pounds in three months" or "I'm going to lose 10 pounds in six weeks."

Then I want you to like your reason. It's okay to like the reason of "because I really want to wear that one dress and I want to feel really good in those pictures." That's a great reason. "I want to be able to really smile and feel proud of myself at that celebration rather than hiding behind my kids or having all that negative self-talk."

(By the way, you don't actually have to lose weight to get rid of the negative self-talk. I can help you with that too.)

Step 2: Get Help

We can get help from AI or a fitness trainer - there's lots of ways we can get help. But my recommendation is to get a life coach, someone who understands that weight loss is a lot more than just counting calories and tracking steps and checking off a list.

Inside my membership, I have the 90-day plan where I teach the five pillars:

• Weight loss science is simple
• Make your own eating plan and learn to troubleshoot it
• Learn how to feel your feelings instead of eat them
• Stop blaming others and stop shaming yourself
• Build self-confidence

We do three things daily:

1. Weigh yourself every day for feedback
2. Look at yourself naked so you can accept "this is what my body looks like"
3. Plan the food you're going to eat the day before and then honor that plan

Step 3: Stay Committed (100%)

Like Clay Christensen said, you're 100% committed. No wiggle room.

Step 4: Be Willing to Feel Your Feelings

One of the problems with hunger is that it makes us more vulnerable to ourselves. When I'm hungry, I now have this discomfort inside my body, and I think, "I don't really like this feeling."

We look for outs - crackers and hummus, online shopping, scrolling. Because we haven't learned how to just be with our discomfort. We have to be willing to allow all of the challenges, all the difficulties, to feel them as they come instead of looking for an escape.

The worst thing that can happen in life is an emotion. And the best thing that can happen is an emotion.

Step 5: Report Your Progress

We have to report our progress to the person helping us (Step 2). This is what I do with my clients - I help them be accountable to themselves.

Learning to Be Your Authentic Self

One of the concepts that's really challenging for us as humans is that we'll say, "Well, I just wanna be authentic." The problem is we actually don't know who our authentic self is yet.

What do we spend most of our time doing? Worrying about what other people think, feeling afraid, or protecting ourselves because we're not sure how to be with ourselves. So we haven't created our authentic version yet.

When we make a goal of saying, "I want to weigh a certain amount by this wedding," what it's doing is saying, "I want to be the narrator of my own life." It's requiring us to get out of our comfort zone and be with ourselves instead of distracting ourselves with food or scrolling.

Why I Use a Life Coach

I have life coaches in my life to help me create the results I want. If I did not have a life coach, I would not be where I'm at. I would not weigh what I weigh. I would not have the kind of marriage that I have, the relationship I have with my kids. I wouldn't have the kind of money I have in my bank. None of that would be a reality if I didn't have a life coach, because I don't know how to overcome my own obstacles.

Friend vs. Coach

Here's my caution: There is a huge difference between a friend and a coach.

A friend tends to say, "Oh yeah, that's hard" or "Oh, that's too bad." A coach is trained to say, "I see that you say you're 100% committed, but why did you do this last night? Why aren't you getting the results? What's stopping you from being in a calorie deficit?"

The coach doesn't judge, but the coach also doesn't sidle up and say, "Oh wow, life is hard." The coach holds that space for you so that you can make the change and learn how to be truly honest and open with yourself.

Ready for Transformation?

If you're ready for that transformation, whether you work with me or another coach, you can decide. But guess what? The only way that you know if it's going to work with me is if you come on a call and we have a conversation - a curiosity call where we look at what it would look like to work together.

I've made a goal to weigh a certain amount this summer, and it's gonna require me to do some different things. I'm staying 100% committed, so I'm doing this.

What goal would you like to make? And what would happen if you actually followed through?

Remember the process:

1. Make the decision, like your reason
2. Get help
3. Stay committed
4. Feel all the feelings
5. Keep reporting back

Let's do this - but let's take out the shame. Let's take out the "I'm not good enough." Just like with anything else, whether you reach your goal or not doesn't mean anything about whether you're good enough.

Ready to explore what it would look like to work together? Book a curiosity call and let's have a conversation about your goals.