017: Breaking Free From 'I Can't'

What happens when you tell yourself you can’t do something? Are you calm and accepting or do you have a mental tantrum: “It’s not fair! Why me? This stinks.” Today we’re looking at a single thought that comes up again and again for my clients: “I can’t have that.” And how this thought can have unintended consequences and keeps us stuck with flabby arms. Pause Hi, everybody, and welcome to The Arm Coach podcast, episode #17. Before we get started I wanted to remind you that at the end of the month I’m sending one of you a $100 dollar Visa gift card. It’s going to someone who has written a review for the Arm Coach podcast. So if you’re loving this podcast, be sure to leave a review on whichever platform you’re listening. So how are you? How are you doing? I’m really good, I’m back in the midwest, spending time with the granddaughters. Kids are such a trip. I was sitting on the couch and one dragged over this little toy piano she has, dragged it over to me, sat on the floor and started to play the piano with her feet and singing a song to me. I love that little kids are like I don’t need to sit in front of a piano and play with my fingers, I’m going to sit and play with my toes, so there. Who cares? I’ll tell you, as a life coach, hanging out with a toddler is so instructive because it is the perfect way to witness the unsupervised brain in action. My coach Brooke was the first one to introduce me to this idea, that you need to actively supervise your brain, and that’s what we use life coaching tools for. So the brain, when you think about it, it’s on the lookout for danger all the time. That’s what kept us alive back in the day, seeing danger around every corner was an evolutionary advantage. It prioritizes pleasure and it wants to avoid discomfort because both of these things were linked to survival, and the brain wants to do all of this as efficiently as possible, and that’s why our brain loves habits. But sometimes, these three things – seeking out pleasure, avoiding pain, and forming habits can lead you in a direction that you don’t want to go, like eating too much, right? A direction where you’re not getting great results. So you don’t like your flabby, undefined arms, waking up bloated and inflamed or having all these empty calories or worrying about what the scale says or having to wear something to cover your arms. But no one has ever shown you how or given you the tools to supervise your brain. So when you try to cut back, it often doesn’t work and what will happen is you’ll make a little bit of progress, and then you’ll have a setback, and you’ll find that you’ll flip-flop back and forth between the two; back and forth between where you want to go and where you currently are. And most people will do this: they will start to tell themselves that sculpted arms isn’t possible. But it is possible. It’s just that no one has ever shown you how to supervise your brain. No one has ever given you these tools. So I was hanging out with my granddaughter, she’s 2 and a half, so she cannot supervise her own brain. She needs my daughter to help her do that, and you know what? My granddaughter is not all that into being supervised. This weekend she was going around, she had this spray bottle full of water and she was happily spraying everything around the house, including the cat, and that’s when my daughter intervened and said, “Listen, you can spray anything you want, but you can’t spray the cat with water.” She was so mad, she was so mad, her little face scrunched up into a scowl and she was not having it. She wanted to spray whatever she wanted to spray, including the cat. And it got me thinking about how adults act when we are told that we can’t do something. So we’re adults, we’re not toddlers, so we’re probably not throwing a tantrum and stomping our feet, but you know, a lot of us are kind of doing that on the inside, right? You guys know what I’m talking about. That kind of silent tantrum inside your head when somebody tells you you can’t do what you want to do. So today I’m devoting an episode to a single thought, because I see this thought come up again and again with my clients in regards to their arm-sculpting nutrition, and it came up for me too when I was first working on changing my eating and my arms. But not only that, not only do I see it come up all the time, but I see how it holds people back and how it keeps people stuck. It did that for me, for a very long time, and it made me feel pretty terrible and a little bit like I was having a silent tantrum until I learned to stop thinking it. So the thought is, “I just can’t eat that.” Have you ever thought this to yourself? Right? Have you ever gotten so sick of the repercussions from eating too much that you had this thought in the back of your mind? ‘Well, maybe I’m just one of those people who can’t stop when I eat those things?’ I know I did. A lot of people who struggle with their eating to sculpt their arms will at some point think this thought, usually after their efforts to reign themselves in doesn’t work. They’ll think, maybe I’m just someone who can’t stop when I eat those things. And if you’ve been on diets in the past, you have probably practiced this thought. “I can’t eat that” over and over and over again to keep yourself in line. I know I used it for an entire decade when I was trying to lose weight and sculpt my arms. The entire decade just telling myself you can’t eat that, you can’t eat that, you can’t eat that. And you know what? I mean, it worked sometimes, I could lose weight, but I also felt miserable. I also felt like I was missing out the entire time. So here’s what I want you to know, and for some of you listening, this is going to be kind of controversial. What I want you to know is this: you can eat whatever you want. You can, you can always make that choice; you and everyone else in the rest of the world. Now, I know a lot of people out there are going to say, yes, that’s not really true. My aunt really can’t eat sugar because she’s diabetic. Or my co-worker really can’t eat peanuts because she’s allergic. But you know what? You’re wrong. Everyone can eat whatever they want. Every single person out there. And telling yourself that you can’t do something, for a lot of people will do more harm than good. Now, the thought, you can eat that, flies in the face of everything you’ve probably heard about people who struggle with their weight and sculpting their arms. Most people think and most of us are taught that the first step to change is to admit that you can’t eat desserts or chips. We’ve gotten this message over and over and over again in subtle and not so subtle ways, that telling yourself that you can’t eat that, is the only path to start the process of change. But I want you to consider for a moment, what if this is wrong? What if you don’t need to admit to being powerless? What if you don’t need to tell yourself that you can’t eat that? What if telling yourself that you can’t do something actually has the opposite effect when it comes to changing your eating and sculpting your arms? We’ve talked a lot in the past about the think-feel- act cycle, but as a reminder the cycle is this: all of your actions are driven by how you feel, and all of your feelings are created by what you think. So you never feel an emotion until you think a thought first. You never take an action unless it’s driven by a feeling. You think a thought, which creates a feeling, which drives an action. That is the think-feel-act cycle. It’s always working in the background of your brain, and most of us are completely unaware of this cycle. We are unconscious to it, so we struggle to understand why we do the things we do and why it is so difficult to change the things we do and to feel better. So what I want to do is show you how the thought “I can’t eat that” works in the think-feel-act cycle. When you think the thought “I can’t eat that”, most of you, not all of you, but most of you likely do not feel a positive emotion. Of course, this is going to be different from person to person, no one sentence in our mind creates a universal feeling for everyone. But most of you, when you think, “I can’t eat that,” are not going to feel good. You’re probably going to feel bitter or resentful or angry or jealous, powerless, embarrassed, ashamed or wronged. Now, you know that your feelings drive your actions, so what do you think you do when you feel embarrassed, jealous, bitter, resentful, angry, powerless? How do you act? Now, I’ll tell you, maybe you’ll silently seethe or complain about your lot in life, maybe you’ll obsess about food and think about every way in which you’re missing out. Maybe you’ll fixate on how unfair all of this is and how not eating that makes you different from everybody else in the world. Maybe you’ll stick your head in the sand and pretend like nothing is wrong and just keep going about your merry way, and maybe you’ll go thru the drive thru, because at least that way you can feel better. At least then you’ll have a quick and easy fix to stop feeling bitter, resentful, angry, powerless, embarrassed, ashamed and jealous. Now, are any of those actions getting you closer to the goal of following the nutrition formula? Are any of those actions getting you closer to your goal of feeling better, feeling more in control, having sculpted arms? I don’t think so. And I should know because I did all of this. I told myself that I couldn’t eat certain things. I told myself that over and over again, and I will tell you that it was the fastest route for me to feel miserable. But now remember, I – probably you as well, I was eating to escape how I felt in the first place. I was eating to escape feeling awkward, feeling insecure, feeling anxious. I already had plenty of negative emotions, and now I was telling myself that I couldn’t eat that, and that was creating a whole new set of negative emotions for me. So now on top of the anxiety and insecurity and awkwardness that I had, now I also felt resentful and embarrassed. Can you see what’s happening here? You’re eating to get rid of a negative emotion, you’re eating so that you can take the edge off of feeling lonely or bored or anxious, whatever it is for you, and after a while, when you keep turning to food to change how you feel, you’re going to start to get negative repercussions. Repercussions that you have to deal with. You don’t like how your ams look, you don’t like how you feel, you don’t like how your clothes fit, you don’t like feeling like something has more control over you than you would like. So then you decide that the solution is to tell yourself okay, you can’t eat “that” anymore. And for most people when they do that, they feel resentful and angry on top of the negative emotions they were already having and already trying to deal with by having a treat. So does this sound like a good idea? No. You’re just layering a negative emotion on top of other negative emotions. Now, let me tell you, if you’re someone listening who has told yourself that you can’t eat that and this thought feels positive and motivating and self- affirming and non- judgmental, then by all means keep on doing what you’re doing. Really don’t stop if that thought feels good for you. But in my experience, most people who tell themselves that they can’t eat certain things more often feel miserable and bitter and resentful, and that my friend, is the problem when you think about the cycle. It’s a problem when you understand how think- feel-act works. The truth is this: the truth is you can eat whatever you want. Once you’re an adult, you always have the choice to go to the grocery store and stock up on chips and ice cream, or to order a dessert at dinner or to open up the fridge and grab a soda. Whatever it is, but that’s not really the question. The question is, do you want to eat that? Do you want that third scoop of ice cream? Do you want to have entire bag of chips when you’re sitting on the couch watching tv? When I ask this to most people, their immediate reaction is yes, duh, of course, of course I want to eat that. Right? And that’s what I thought for a long time too. But once I started to go through all the negative results they’re getting, feeling embarrassed about their arms, carrying excess weight, waking up in the morning feeling swollen, having disturbed sleep, worrying about whether their clothes will fit, then all of a sudden what they want is not so clear cut. Here’s the other thing: I don’t ever, ever, ever tell myself that I can’t eat something. Never. I learned that I had to shift that language. Telling myself that I couldn’t eat certain things, that ‘I can’t eat that’ was so negative for me, and you know, it also wasn’t the truth. The truth is that I can eat whatever I want any time that I want to, but I have thought about this so much and I have considered this so much and I have understood, you know what, it’s not that I can’t eat that, it’s that I choose not to. And those thoughts feel so different in my body. So here’s what I want you to consider this week. If you’ve ever told yourself or if you are telling yourself right now that you can’t eat certain things, first, just ask yourself, how does that thought feel? Does it produce a positive or a negative emotion? And is the emotion its producing – is it getting you closer to your goal of changing your eating and sculpting your arms? So that’s the first thing. Then I want you to consider the thought you can eat that, because the truth is, you can always choose to eat it. Always. But the thing is, maybe you want to decide to choose something else. Maybe you want to choose not to eat that, and when you think this thought, I can eat that, but I’m choosing not to, I can have ice cream, but I’m choosing not to, as opposed to I can’t, or I shouldn’t, how does that thought feel for you? I can eat ice cream, but I’m choosing not to. I can have chips, but I’m choosing not to. Pay attention to this. It may seem like such a small subtle change, but when you understand the think-feel-act cycle, when you understand that every thought you think creates an emotion and those emotions drive what you do, you will realize that there is no such thing as an insignificant thought. You have to pay attention to what you are telling yourself. You have to pay attention to how it makes you feel, and more importantly, you have to start to notice if the actions that you’re taking are putting you in the direction that you want to go, or if you keep being stuck in this world of flip- flopping back and forth. So pay attention this week, ask yourself these questions. Ask yourself how these two very similar thoughts, but distinctly different, how I can’t eat that, and how I can eat that but I’m choosing not to, how they feel. How do they work in your own individual think- feel-act cycle? So, that’s it for today everyone. Let me know what you think or if you have any questions. And remember to get entered to win a 100 dollar visa gift card by leaving the show a review. Thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you all next week.