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Episode 215:
Show Notes
In this week's episode, Dr Mary Barson and Dr Lucy Burns explore the powerful impact of mindset on health and wellness. Dr Lucy opens the discussion, by emphasising the crucial role that mindset plays in enabling individuals to implement desired strategies for their health. Dr Mary shares her current feelings of being overwhelmed and discusses her focus on maintaining a growth mindset as a way to navigate life's challenges. Together, they dive into key concepts of mindset, providing listeners with valuable insights and practical tools to foster lasting change.
- Mindset Definition and Importance:
- Dr Lucy explains that mindset is the crucial element that enables individuals to implement desired strategies for their health.
- Common misconceptions about lacking discipline or being too busy are often rooted in underlying beliefs and thought patterns.
- Understanding and shifting these beliefs is essential for lasting change.
- Fixed vs. Growth Mindset:
- Dr Mary defines the difference between fixed and growth mindsets.
- Fixed mindset: The belief that abilities and intelligence are static and predetermined, leading to a fear of failure and avoidance of challenges.
- Growth mindset: The belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort and learning, viewing challenges as opportunities for growth and improvement.
- Examples and Personal Experiences:
- Dr Lucy shares her experience with crocheting hearts, highlighting the persistence required to master a new skill and the importance of a growth mindset in overcoming initial failures.
- Dr Mary recounts her initial struggles with online presentations, emphasising the progress made through practice and maintaining a growth mindset, transforming fear and discomfort into confidence and skill.
Three Main Discussion Points:
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT):
- Dr Lucy introduces CBT, which is the hallmark of their programs, explaining that it involves understanding and changing the stories we tell ourselves.
- CBT helps individuals observe and analyse their thoughts, feelings, actions, and results, fostering awareness and metacognition (thinking about one’s thoughts).
- Importance of conducting a "thought audit" to identify and challenge unhelpful thoughts, enabling individuals to replace them with more constructive ones.
- Understanding the Stories in Your Head:
- Dr Mary discusses the impact of negative self-talk and the brain’s tendency to find evidence supporting unhelpful beliefs.
- Practical steps to recognise and challenge unhelpful thoughts, such as questioning their validity, considering alternative perspectives, and adopting more positive and realistic thoughts.
- Examples of unhelpful stories, such as the belief in the necessity to finish food to avoid waste, and how these inherited beliefs from past generations might not serve current needs. Recognising and reframing these stories can lead to healthier behaviours and improved self-esteem.
- Self-Compassion and Self-Kindness:
- Dr Lucy and Dr Mary emphasise the importance of self-compassion and self-kindness in cultivating a growth mindset.
- These qualities are crucial components for sustainable change in health and weight loss, allowing individuals to approach their goals with patience and understanding rather than self-criticism.
- Encouragement to be curious about thoughts and gently challenge unhelpful beliefs, fostering a more supportive and positive internal dialogue.
Practical Application in Health and Weight Loss:
- Dr Mary explains how mindset tools, including CBT, self-compassion, and understanding the stories in our heads, are integrated into their 12-week program to help participants develop a healthier relationship with food and body image.
- The program aims to empower individuals with the skills and mindset needed to achieve lasting health and wellness goals.
This episode is a valuable resource for anyone looking to understand and harness the power of mindset in their health journey. Dr Lucy and Dr Mary provide actionable advice and invite listeners to join their transformative 12-week Mind Body Rebalance program to further explore these concepts and achieve lasting wellness. Don't miss this opportunity to take control of your health and well-being by adopting a positive and growth-oriented mindset.
The next round of the renowned 12 Week Mind Body Rebalance starts on August 31st! Hurry and join the waitlist here: www.rlmedicine.com/12WMBR
Episode 215:
Transcript
Dr Mary Barson (0:04) Hello, my lovely friends. I am Dr Mary Barson Barson.
Dr Lucy Burns (0:09) And I'm Dr Lucy Burns. We are doctors and weight management and metabolic health experts.
Both (0:16) And this is the Real Health and Weight Loss podcast!
Dr Lucy Burns (00:17) Hello, my lovely friend. How are you today? Dr Lucy here as always joined by my fabulous. In fact, I'm not always joined by my fabulous colleague, but I am today and it feels like I'm always joined by her. I know lucky us. Gorgeous Dr Mary. How are you today? Lovely.
Dr Mary Barson (00:33) Lucky you. I'm good. I'm feeling very, a bit, bit rushed and put upon by life right now, which I'm sure is something that many people can relate to. I've got a lot of competing demands on my time and my energy on my cognitive load right now with kids, with camps, with school, with daycare, with like my, own issues with parents, with lots of things. And I'm really having to consciously exercise, my tools to manage this. And in particular, really, really focusing on my mindset with regards to growth mindset. And I keep telling myself that I can do hard things, keep telling myself challenges help me grow keep telling myself that you know that I've got this and It's extremely helpful like it's really helpful. I could imagine, time was you know a few years ago if I was suddenly facing this particular little plethora of challenges I would be you know huddled on the floor crying and occasionally sometimes you need to huddle on the floor and cry, but it's genuinely not helpful if that's your only strategy. So that's where I'm at the moment. And I would love to chat more about mindset with you, gorgeous Lucy. You too are extremely knowledgeable about mindset and understand the importance of having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset to help our beautiful people to improve their health. to make lasting, healthy, wonderful changes that mean they can lose weight without feeling deprived, they can reclaim their health and live the life that they want. Mindset is key. So what is mindset? What would you say mindset is?
Dr Lucy Burns (02:42) Yeah, I think that, I mean, mindset gives you the ability to do the thing that you want to do. So lots of people know what they want to do, particularly if they've followed us for a while, or even if they've done one of our, maybe the 4 week program, they've got the strategy for their metabolic health, but they're implementing it. They can't implement it. And they feel often that they're a bit hopeless or they even feel a bit embarrassed to say, I've bought the 4-week program, I'm not doing it. I'm useless, I'm just too busy. So mindset is the tool that you need to develop so that you can implement whatever strategies you want to implement in your life. And for lots of us, we just think that that means discipline, that I'm just not disciplined. We're either not disciplined or we're too busy. They're the two things. And in fact, it's actually neither of those. It's a set of beliefs, the way we like to think about it, it's a set of beliefs that will often be like your default operating system. They govern how you feel about yourself, maybe your environment, or your friends, and they will determine therefore where you prioritise things in your life as well.
Dr Mary Barson (04:07) And the wonderful thing I think about mindset is that it's malleable, it can change and you can develop new mindsets and new mindset skills. But you can only do this– the first step is believing that you can. And in the world of psychology, we define mindsets into two broad categories. You can have a fixed mindset or you can have a growth mindset and not many points for guessing that the growth mindset is the one that is needed if you want to change and grow and improve aspects of your life. People who have a fixed mindset and you can cultivate a growth mindset like this is not set in stone but if you've got a fixed mindset it's not binary, no absolutely. A fixed mindset might make you feel like a failure is the limit of your ability. So if you fail, that's it. You can't do it. I failed before, right? Can't do this. No, just can't. You might feel that your potential is predetermined. I'm no good at, you know, I'm no good at change. I'm no good at maths. I'm no good at this. And you just decide that you can't be good at it. And when you've got that, that fixed mindset at the first hurdle, at the first frustration, and there will be hurdles. and there will be frustrations, it's inclined to give up and just go back to what you know, to stick to what you know. And you can imagine if you want to introduce a new way of nourishing your body, if you want to introduce a new way of moving your body, you want to improve your sleep, you want to improve your life, so that is not going to be your friend. Instead of cultivating a growth mindset, know, failures can become an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to learn. like I said today, challenges help me grow challenges, help me grow. I can do hard things. This, you know, this is a growth mindset, which allows you so much more easily to take on a beautiful, healthy, helpful mindset, a new set of beliefs about yourself, about the world, about your own ability, which can catapult you into a new and wonderful life.
Dr Lucy Burns (06:34) Absolutely. And I think it's super interesting. We help a lot of women who are high achievers. They're very, very skilled and accomplished in many areas of their life, but maybe weight loss is a stumbling block. And I think one of the things with high achievers, and I would possibly put myself in that category, is we don't like to be bad at things. We don't like to be beginners. and it feels hard to be a beginner. And I've got a couple of examples of when I was a beginner at one stage. I had a little love project going where we were crocheting, I came up with this great idea, crochet hearts and send them to doctors, particularly in the pandemic, you know, to let them know that they're being thought of, that their work is appreciated, know that somebody is thinking about them during the night shift when I’ve worked 36 hours etc. I thought this would be great and I got a I went and bought the wool and I got the crochet hook and I got a YouTube clip and I sat down to do my first heart and it took me six hours and it looks so bad and I just thought– my god how am I going to do this this great project that has so much merit and I can't even crochet a heart. So I persisted though. And the thing that happened was that I became really good at crocheting hearts. And so I could end up doing, you know, one every five minutes. I could do 12 in an hour. I could whip up, you know, a hundred crocheted hearts without too much drama. Take me back to that first day of six hours though. And I just thought, my God. So it's, and not only that, the time and energy and then the result was so bad it did not reflect how much effort I'd put in. And so I could have easily given
Dr Mary Barson (08:34) Yep. I still have my crochet heart. I love it. Thank you very much. It's very nice. Actually, my toddler has your crochet heart. He really likes it right now.
Dr Lucy Burns (08:46) You're welcome. good, yes. So that's, I mean, that's an example of a sort of non-food, non-health related growth mindset. But yes, go miss.
Dr Mary Barson (08:55) Yeah. I totally. I could think of another example when we first started doing YouTube videos and Facebook Lives. You and I, Lucy, when we got this fabulous idea to take what we did in our weight loss clinics as GPs and turn it into an online program, we started going out in the online world. And when I started doing that, I was terrified. I needed to put on like this fright mask of makeup as like, you know, this kind of like war paint. you know, couldn't do it without my, you know, my red lips and my eyeliner. And I would be kind of shouting at the camera and would be in a cold sweat, you know, the sweat tripling down the that's right. The sweat dripping down my shoulder blades, you know, as I was doing this. and
Dr Lucy Burns (09:35) Yes, yes, yes! Low carb is the best!
Dr Mary Barson (09:37) Here I am, this is going to go up on YouTube and I'm totally at ease. I'm actually not wearing makeup today, just by choice, couldn't quite be bothered. And I feel quite comfortable with it. There's no sweat trickling down my shoulder blades at the moment. I'm pleased to say.
Dr Lucy Burns (09:58) Yes, absolutely. And this means, in our 12 Week Mind Body Rebalance, when we open up the first week, we talk about learning a new operating system for your mind. It's like learning a new language around health and weight loss. And this is particularly relevant because lots of us have learnt the diet language and we've learned, there's a whole heap of other stories that are in our mind around food, what it means, relationships, things that often no longer serve current us, but potentially served past us, or stories even that have been handed down from generations, which sounds amazing, like you're thinking what, but that don't serve us. They do not help us in our current state. So I thought today, Miss, we talk about some of those stories we'll talk about, the three things I thought we'd talk about, if it's all right with you, I thought we'd talk about CBT or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which is the hallmark of our programs. We talk about understanding the stories that are in your head and then how self-compassion or self-kindness works in your favour. It's not something that is just you use and let's use you off the hook. So I thought we'd talk about those three things.
Dr Mary Barson (11:22) That's good. They're good three things. Yeah. In our program, in the 12 week program each week, we do a new mindset tool. And I think that's lovely three to pluck out and to chat about today. So let's do it. Lovely Lucy, CBT. What do you mean?
Dr Lucy Burns (11:41) Yeah, so CBT. So it's a long, long-standing psychological theory, which looks at our thoughts and feelings, our actions or behaviours, and the results. And I love this because our behaviour or our actions or the things that we do each day are always determined by thoughts or feelings, often thoughts and feelings. but sometimes we don't even know, we don't even know they're automated. And what I love is that we can observe our thoughts. So humans have this amazing thing called metacognition, which is where you can, it's a bit like you're watching a play. If you take the time to do it, if you don't take the time to do it, then you're just in the play. You're like one of the actors of your life. But if you just take a few moments, you can step and can notice your thoughts. You can go, hmm, isn't it interesting? I'm thinking yada, yada, yada, yada. Most of the time we don't do that though. We just think and continue on and live our lives without really any awareness of our thoughts. So the first step for any CBT is to develop awareness of your thoughts. And we like to do what's called a thought audit. So Mezze, could you explain to our beautiful friends what a thought audit is?
Dr Mary Barson (13:17) So a thought audit, the first part is to understand that you're not your thoughts. Your thoughts are something that happens in your head, but they aren't necessarily real. So a thought audit is to think through the thoughts that you think and pick out ones that aren't necessarily very helpful. What thoughts do you have that aren't helpful towards your health and white lost goals?
Dr Lucy Burns (13:49) And what will happen? So thoughts, you know, I like to describe them or we like to describe them as they're a connection between two nerve cells in your brain. And when that connection is used a lot, it's quite a deep connection. It's imagine it's like a thick piece of wire or a thick piece of rope. If you've only had fleeting thoughts or new thoughts or you're learning things, then those thoughts are like thin, tiny bits of, you know, spiderweb like a little gossamer thing that just flits off. So quite often when we start the thought audit, you'll notice that the same thoughts come up time and time again. It's the same because our brain is actually a patterned machine. And what it will do is it'll find bits and pieces of information and try and make sense of it. And it'll use past experiences to predict future experiences. A bit like the stock exchange.
Dr Mary Barson (14:48) That's right. And like the stock exchange, that's not a reliable, reliable predictor of what is going to happen. Common examples of unhelpful thoughts are these thoughts around failure that I can't do this. Everything I've done to try and lose weight, to get on top of my health hasn't worked. I've failed at everything. So I'm going to fail at this. That's just a thought. That doesn't mean that it's true. And our brains, our brains do lie to us, not out of malice, but because we are pattern-recognising machines, we're trying to make sense of the world. And we'll come up with ideas, come up with thoughts, come up with stories that don't necessarily pass the evidence testing, but we still think them. And the wonderful thing is that when you notice these unhelpful thoughts, you become aware of them. That's the first step is that awareness becomes aware of these unhelpful thoughts. Then can start to challenge them and you can change them. You can make new thoughts and new thoughts like I can do this low carb real food is sustainable because I'm not hungry. I'm nourishing my body. This is something I can do forever if I choose to that thought when it first comes, it might be a little thin little bit of gossamer, but if you keep thinking then it's going to get stronger and stronger and stronger.
Dr Lucy Burns (16:18) Absolutely. Particularly noticing if you've got a thought that is, low carb's too hard, I can't do this, it's not sustainable, it's not fair, everyone else can eat whatever they want and I have to do low carb. If they're your thought patterns, and again, they're not, you don't need to judge these thoughts, they're just there, like sentences in a book, they're just there. Just notice them and go, wow. Is this the most helpful way I could think about this situation? We do this all the time because so often there are times when you get what we like to call in the weeds of your thoughts. You're in the weeds. You can't see past it. And which is why I talk to you just about every day, Miss, and you talk to me just about every day, because sometimes you'll go, I'll go, this is what's in my brain. This thought's in my brain. What do you think? And because I guess we trust each other, we will, you know perhaps shine a different light and go well. Is that the most helpful way to think about it? Is there a different way you could think about it? Is it actually true or are you just noticing it and thinking it's true? And an amazing, it's this sort of, it's not a really good loop, but it is a bit of a loop that happens in our brain where when we think of something, we draw attention to it. And so then we'll notice it everywhere. And you've heard us talk about this before. You've heard other people talk about this before, but if you're, you know, in the market for a red car or, you know, you've got a particular brand in mind, you'll suddenly see it everywhere. It's like, I remember when, when I was much, obviously much younger, but you know, we wanted a baby and there were pregnant people everywhere. When I wanted a boyfriend, there seemed to be couples everywhere and your brain sees what it's thinking about but not necessarily with an objective lens.
Dr Mary Barson (18:18) No, and I can say this if I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, I'm thinking, man, know, everything's getting on top of me behind in my work or, you know, forgot my daughter's lunch order or something like that, then there might be this little story that comes into my head that could be, geez, you're a terrible mom. And then my brain might start looking for you know, doing its own little unhelpful audit of all of the reasons why it's obvious that I am a terrible mom. might be looking for them. And of course, I'm not. And of course, it's not true, but my reticular activating system in my brain is looking for the evidence. It's, alert and wanting to reinforce that thought.
Dr Lucy Burns (18:59) Yep. And the great thing is that because the story of I'm a terrible mum is quite emotive and it makes you feel bad, you can remind yourself that it is exactly the same story as if it was a red car. The red car has no emotion. It's just a red car or yellow door or whatever. If you're painting your house green, you notice greenhouses everywhere. It's there on a motive. But when we talk about ourselves, we have that second layer of emotion onto it. And so we go, it's just the same system. Our brain is just doing the same system. It's all it is. It's just a system. And you go,
Dr Mary Barson (19:39) And you can challenge them, which I reckon is a nice little segue into mindset tip number two, challenge those unhelpful stories. Lovely Lucy, you do this coaching call in our 12 week program. So I'd love you to lead this one, the stories in your head.
Dr Lucy Burns (19:55) Yeah, absolutely. Again, stories are just thoughts based on previous experiences and we'll quite often hold it up. They can be quite strong. A great example of a story is around, for example, food wastage. Many of us grew up hearing about the children starving in Africa or India or someplace that was far off where people were a bit more unfortunate than you. And so I think well-meaning parents were trying to encourage their children to eat the food by saying, don't waste it. are children who would basically say there are children who are starving and here you are wasting, you are wasting food. Remember that a lot of those people or those parents also grew up in times of scarcity. Say there were the First and Second World Wars. I know they feel like a long time ago now. You know, more than 100 years for the First World War and the Second World War. But people grew up in times when there was scarcity, but now there isn't. Like honestly, for the majority of us, I'm not saying every single person in the whole world or every single person in our, even in our country, but for the majority of us, we don't actually live in times of scarcity, but the story is still around that. And so we feel bad wasting, you know, wasting food. Rather than waste it, we eat it because that feels better. Even if we don't need it, we don't want it, or we know it's not good for us, we still eat it because that feels less sinful than throwing it in the bin.
Dr Mary Barson (21:44) I'm looking at this lovely little framed phrase just behind your gorgeous shoulder there Dr Lucy and it says my body is not the bin.
Dr Lucy Burns (21:54) No, I know. that's, it's a really powerful statement when you think about that because that's all that we're doing. We're getting, we don't actually want the food. We know we don't need the food, but we want to get rid of it. So people will either do two things. They get rid of it, particularly if they're worried they're going to eat it. I'll eat it all in one go, then it's gone. I mean, think about the logic of that. So flawed, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. If I get rid of it, then I won't have any temptation later on. No, because you've eaten it all. I know these stories well. Throwing it in the bin feels so like bad. People go, I just can't do it. I feel so guilty. I feel so bad. And so often we'll spend time unpacking that and working out, well, what is the most helpful thing that you can do or way to think about, particularly processed food products that are in your house that you suddenly realise you don't actually want. You don't want them. You don't want to give them to anyone else. For God's sake, don't give them to the dog. If you've got compost, sure, put it in the compost, but you're not the compost bin either.
Dr Mary Barson (23:14) you’re not a bin or a compost bin.
Dr Lucy Burns (23:18) So, no. So, it is helpful then to be able to go, you know what, food products that don't suit me, that don't serve me or suit me, I can throw out. I'm allowed to throw them out. I don't have to eat them to get rid of them. So that's one little story.
Dr Mary Barson (23:33) And how would you actually go about the practical steps of recognising and challenging these stories?
Dr Lucy Burns (23:39) So that comes back to step one, which was the thought audit. And again, what will happen is that you'll notice that you're doing behaviours that aren't helping you. So again, for people, know, they've decided they want to do low carb or they want to eat well, it doesn't even have to be low carb. They just want to eat well, but they keep finding that they're eating leftover cake from the fridge or that they've got some old packet of Tim Tams at the back of the cupboard that they keep eating. And so what would happen is you'd be going, why? So the question, it's this curious questioning of your behaviours that can often bring up your thoughts. Why am I doing that? And it's not mean, why am I doing that? She's hopeless. There's no overtone. It's just a why. What's going on? What are the sentences in my brain? And they will bubble up to the surface. And one of the sentences will be, well, I can't waste it. And you go, okay, I can't waste it. Isn't that interesting? And so then you can gently challenge it. What am I actually wasting here? What would happen if I wasted it and you know, using inverted air quotes? What does wasting mean? And what you're doing is you're just asking questions. It's really curious to question your behaviours or your thoughts. And then the question could be–Is this the best way to think about it thinking again underlying a lot of this is I've paid good money for this which is great a common belief I've paid good money for this cake Tim Tams whatever it is so I can't throw it out because that would be wasting money until we often point out to people well you've also paid money to do our program so where's the economy here?
Dr Mary Barson (25:31) We have to, that's right. We have to pay money for the painkillers because of your inflammation pay money to see the doctor or pay money for your prescription medications. That's true. mean, process junk, it might be cheap, but you do pay for it in other ways.
Dr Lucy Burns (25:48) Yes. Yes. In fact, we had a chat about that last week in our coaching call, which was there's no such thing as free food because again, scarcity mindset, especially if it's included in a package or it's like it's on a plane, like a hotel, there's, yeah.
Dr Mary Barson (25:05) the chips that come with your steak you feel like you have to eat them because they're there yep.
Dr Lucy Burns (26:10) They're free, you paid for them. There is always a cost to doing something that ends up that is not necessarily helpful for your body. So, you know, never a true word, never a true sentence is there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Dr Mary Barson (26:26) Hehehe. And the third mindset tip that you mentioned to chat about today is self-compassion, I think is also really vital here. Cause you mentioned before that when you're asking yourself, you know, why am I eating this cake? Even though I don't really want to, you need to approach that with self-compassion and self-kindness. I have a little tip that I know is helpful in parenting. And as we grownups have to parent ourselves, it may be helpful for these beautiful adults listening in, is instead of asking yourself, why are you doing this? Why am I doing this? know, why did you do that? Because that can be quite accusatory and our brain might go, because I'm a stupid idiot who can't possibly change and learn anything new. For some people, another phrase might be, what's going on for me? What is happening? What's going on for me right now? To be a more gentle way to approach challenging your thoughts and challenging your stories because you do need to do it with self-kindness. If you hate and berate yourself for eating the cake, it's actually going to make it much harder in the long term to break that unhelpful habit, to break those unhelpful thoughts and to change that unhelpful mindset if you can approach it through kindness, self-kindness and self-compassion. Change is genuinely much easier. And the wonderful thing is that self-compassion can be learnt. It's a learnable skill. I see it a lot and I certainly have been like this and can be like this in many aspects of my life where I can be pretty fast to hate and berate myself for perceived failings. And that's the little, fixed mindset kind of coming in and In order to be able to cultivate a growth mindset, you need to be able to understand that failure is normal and natural. And if you can view failure and let's say that eating the cake when you don't want to is a failure, I don't necessarily think it is, but it's a slap. It's not a slap, it's a slip or a lapse.
Dr Lucy Burns (28:44) Some slop, some slipping, some slopping, some slapping.
Dr Mary Barson (28:50) Wipe down the computer screen after this. You're doing something that you don't necessarily want to be doing. And if you go straight retreat into, I'm such a failure. I'm such a do, do, do, do, do, exletatives here. Then that's the fixed mindset that's clamping down right now. And you may want to just, you know, keep eating the cake in numb denial. or you might just want to throw the towel in and say, look, I just can't do this, I can't change. But turning that around and viewing the eating the cake for this example with compassion and self-kindness, then it becomes an opportunity to change. This gets better with practice and it is a really learnable skill and has kind of like three components to cultivating that self-compassion. The first one is awareness that we've talked about a lot today. You can't change that of which you are not aware. So, just becoming to notice your thoughts, practice noticing your thoughts and notice when those highly critical thoughts arrive. That's the first part. The second part is just fundamentally understanding that you're human and that as a human, you are beautifully imperfect and you are always going to be imperfect. That's never going to change. I'm imperfect. Dr Lucy's imperfect. You're imperfect. We're all imperfect. And that's just how it is. We are human and that's okay. That's just what it is. So we're never going to do anything perfectly. We are going to have those slaps and slops and slips and lapses and whatever else they are. That's right. Totally. And just understand that's going to happen. And then knowing those two things, being aware, understanding that you're human, accepting your fundamental humanity, being kind to yourself. And that can be a little bit, my heart, you know, I always wanna, you know, often people find that quite difficult. What do you mean I have, I can be kind to myself if I'm eating something I said I wasn't gonna eat or doing something I said I wasn't gonna do. Obviously I need to berate myself and beat myself, you know, with an imaginary stick because I'm such a useless, dull, look at me, but no. No, you cannot berate yourself well or hate yourself thin. And flipping it around might be practising–what would you say if it was your friend who was doing this, someone you genuinely like or a dog that you genuinely like, a pet, a child, you know, how would you approach it if it was, you know, your dog had made a mistake or, know, a toddler who is learning this new skill kept getting it wrong. What would you say to the toddler? And then you can exactly would you?
Dr Lucy Burns (31:45) A middle-aged woman who's learning Would you just go, my god, you're useless, don't even bother, why are you making a heart, hopeless old... Yeah, yeah, stop it, this is ridiculous.
Dr Mary Barson (31:58) What? You're an embarrassment. Just stop it. That's right. Is that what you would say to a toddler who's, you know, just learning to chop the cucumber for the first time? Probably not. You probably wouldn't say to the toddler, you're a terrible embarrassment. Why can't you just do it properly? So when we're learning new skills, it's a bit similar. Sure, we've got better, you know, fine and gross motor control than a toddler. But when we're learning new skills, we're doing things for the first time. You are kind of like a little clumsy toddler. You know, chopping the cucumber takes a while for new skills, and a new mindset to cultivate.
Dr Lucy Burns (32:24) Yeah, there's a couple of interesting points I think that you made. One is you talked about not being perfect. And I think when, so I am not, I'm messy. I'm a messy person. There are neat people and messy people. I am a messy person. And I thought, well, therefore there's no way I'm a perfectionist because I'm messy. I'm really much, I'm very good at done is better than perfect. I'm a bit half-assed. However, when it came to dieting, I wasn't. I also, I then had this all-or-nothing mindset. I was either dieting or not. They were the two options. I wasn't half-assing it. I was either on, I was doing it all perfectly or I wasn't doing it at all. And I think, so when people used to talk about being a perfectionist, I didn't identify with that until I realized, this is just a different way you say it. So, anybody who doesn't identify as a perfectionist but thinks they're an all-or-nothing person with dieting, well then there is that perfectionist mindset popping in there. The second thing that you said that I thought was really great was that people don't want to let themselves like they're worried about letting themselves off the hook. So they don't want to just say, well, I'll start tomorrow because they think that's kind of not quite enough punishment for the sin they've committed the scene, you know, yeah, get out the cat of nine tiles and whip yourself a bit harder. One of the things I would say is that again, you know, people go, I'll start again tomorrow. And then they, a little part of their brain goes, well, what can we get away with tonight? Cause you know, I'm stuck in the all-or-nothing. So I think we can even change that timeframe of I'll start again to just, I'll start again. Not tomorrow, not Monday, not next month. Yeah, now. And what I will do because I'm so kind to myself, I'm actually going to reflect on why this happened in a kind way. What did I need? What was missing? Rather than just pretend it didn't happen and crack on because that's the other thing I think people do is they just go, well, I'll start again. And they do. They just start again. But they haven't ever taken that little bit of time to reflect on what happened, which is why we have that beautiful framework of SLC. So slip, lapse, creep, anything that you're doing that's not in alignment with your goals. And you use self-reflection, learning with compassion to make changes different for next time, because there will be a next time. That's the whole thing. We, life are just on a repeat loop. And I think that's a really super helpful way to think about things.
Dr Mary Barson (35:15) I love it. That's our three mindset tips. And in our 12-week Mind Body Rebalance, beautiful people which is starting again soon. Every week Lucy and I do a deep dive into these mindset strategies that can completely transform the way that you view yourself, the way that you view the world, and your life and really allow you to make healthy changes stick with ease. It's what we love doing and it really can be easy, easy with the right mindset skills.
Dr Lucy Burns (35:50) Absolutely, absolutely. And this is it. I mean, it's a self-development journey. It's actually fun. It's enlightening, as people will often say. And I mean, just speaks to our story that weight loss is more than a meal plan. A meal plan can be helpful. It's a minor tool in the general scheme of things, but learning to know yourself well, learning to understand what drives your behaviour, and then developing skills to change that, that's actually where the gold is.
Dr Lucy Burns (36:25) Alright lovelies, that's us for the week. We will talk with you all next week. Have a fantastic week.
Dr Mary Barson (36:29) See you later.
Dr Lucy Burns (36:32) The information shared on the Real Health and Weight Loss Podcast, including show notes and links, provides general information only. It is not a substitute, nor is it intended to provide individualised medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, nor can it be construed as such. Please consult your doctor for any medical concerns.
