Episode #1: When the Magic Starts

Hey, I'm Dr Priyanka Venugopal, and you're listening to Weight Loss for Unstoppable Moms episode one, When the Magic Starts. That's right. This episode is going to introduce you to the magic of discovery. It starts with your brilliant mom brain.

For years, I've heard moms refer to their mom brains as some kind of crutch every time they forget something or do something less than perfect. No more friend. We're obliterating that here together.

If you want to reach your ideal weight and create lightness for your body, you need to have simplicity, joy, and strategic decisions infused into your life. I'm a physician turned life and weight loss coach for ambitious working moms. I've lost over 60 pounds without counting points, calories, or crazy exercise plans. Most importantly, I feel calm and light on the scale and in my life. There's some delicious magic when you learn this work and the skills I'm going to be teaching you. Ready? Let's get to it.

Welcome unstoppable friend. I'm so thrilled to be here in each other's orbit. If you could see me right now tucked away in my attic office, you would see me with the biggest chipmunk smile on my face. Really, it's because I'm sitting here thinking of you, a fellow ninja mom who is listening to this podcast.

You're here because you've struggled to create lightness for your body and struggle with permanently being at your ideal weight. Maybe you're able to do the grit and grind for a little while or feel the occasional burst of motivation on a Monday morning, only to backslide by the end of the week.

I get you, and you're in the perfect place. You're going to be getting tangible tools starting today. But before I tell you about me and the skills and tools that you're going to be learning in this podcast, let me first tell you who this podcast is for. It's really for any human who wants to connect with their body again, and fundamentally shift their relationship with food to lose weight without counting calories or points.

More specifically, this podcast is for women who have grown up in the patriarchy and have cultivated an inner monologue that is laced with tough criticism. Even more specifically, this podcast is for the ninja working moms who just want to feel content, calm, and fulfilled in their life, and, of course, reach their ideal weight.

So what's your ideal weight? Simply it is something that is just for you and your forever home, your body. If you measure it on the scale, then it's just your gravitational pull on this earth. It's just the pull that feels magnetic and perfect for you. This isn't what the magazine covers say, or your mom or your bestie or your partner. You have the great responsibility of deciding what feels right for you. This is your forever home, and she is in your charge friends. She's just waiting for you to deliciously take care of her.

If this sounds like something you want, this is the best place. This podcast is going to be sprinkling in love and magic into your ear every week. Let me tell you a little bit about me and my philosophy of unstoppable magic. To permanently lose weight and create the lightness you want, you have to infuse simplicity and joy together to create the magic sauce for weight loss. That's right, simplicity and joy. Isn't that magical?

Let me tell you, for me, the working mom who has been in the grind and struggled up and down for decades, simplicity and joy sounds pretty magical. Now, don't get me wrong. There's absolutely work to be done to create massive change and permanently reach your ideal weight. We're totally going to get to that together. But it never, ever, ever has to be too hard for you ever again.

Here's why simplicity and joy are the cornerstone for my process. When things are too complex or joyless as humans, as a women, as working moms, we just will not want to keep up. Let's be perfectly honest with ourselves. After a few days or weeks, our brilliant brains are going to say no thanks, as it should. Why subject yourself to a complicated, joyless experience? You're working hard enough already.

We've all done the grind, felt the struggle on the scale, the up and the down. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it works and then it stops working. Then we come back to the heaviness of frustration. It's no wonder that heaviness has translated to our bodies.

Let me tell you, infusing simplicity and joy back into your weight loss journey is what allows your forever home to release the precious resource that she has stored. That's right. Any weight that you perceive as excess for your body is a precious resource.

In Unstoppable, this is how we talk about our bodies and our forever homes. She has served you so well so far. She's taken you places, gotten you off the ground when you have fallen. She's gotten you through the rigors of school or becoming a mother for the first time. Your forever home has done all of that for you.

Here's the coolest thing. When you learn how to infuse simplicity and joy into your weight loss journey, and you think of your body as your forever home, treat it with incredible care, your body will more readily release this precious resource. Yes, that makes this joyous. Here's the other cool thing. When you do this, you learn how to infuse simplicity and joy into your life, at work and at home. This is why it's so magical.

So now you know why simplicity and joy are necessary for the magic sauce. Yes, there will be moments of discomfort and work, but I know you're ready for the challenge. Let me tell you a little bit about me and how I created this philosophy.

I'm a board certified OBGYN physician now turned life and weight loss coach. I have struggled with my body and resisted the scales up and down for years. I've tried literally everything. I've tried all the apps, gotten all the gorgeous fancy planners, downloaded interesting things off the internet, counted points and calories. Yes, this all does work for a few weeks, for a few months, or even a few years, until it would stop working.

I remember when I was trying to lose weight for my wedding, I ate those 100 calorie oatmeal packets for five months straight and tracked every food I ever ate. Yes, this totally worked until the day after my wedding when it slowly started trickling back and then some. All of those things can work. They do. The counting and the calculating does work if you're willing to do it forever. That's just not me. I want to live my life in a way that feels light, not just for my body, but for my mind.

If there's one thing I've heard time and time again from all of the clients I've ever worked with, it is that they want to feel calm in their minds around food. That's where the magic starts.

When I think back on the decades of struggle, every New Years and birthday, I would say to my best friend, this is the year right? I would feel a burst of motivation and even excitement, but somehow it just never stuck. I never got real traction and any progress I did make slipped away so easily.

I can say for as far back as I can remember, I've always had some thoughts about my body and my weight. It wasn't a strong driver, but I probably became somewhat conscious of my appearance as early as elementary school. I wasn't really overweight as a child, but I always was very aware of looking different. It was probably around this time in my early childhood that a little seed of belief was born for me, that I wanted to look and feel different than I was. Talk about baring a little seed of heavy.

I saw the other girls in my class, the Disney movie processes, the idolized icons of the 80s, the movie posters and magazine covers, and somehow I just didn't fit in. I felt a little deflated because I looked nothing like them. Given that humans have an inherent desire to belong to their communities, this naturally posed a problem for my little child brain.

As I grew up and got older, I collected more and more evidence and reinforced these beliefs with my upbringing and everything I saw around me. This little seed of heavy started to grow. Of course, it became the filter for how I perceived myself. This filter is what cultivated my earliest inner monologue to do more, be smarter, and work harder. This is how the voice of my inner critic was born.

Probably around middle school or high school, my weight came more to the forefront. It's when I started to tell myself listen, you need to lose little bit of weight, okay? It became a part of my subtle monologue. My inner critic would come and go in whispers all the time. She didn't rule my life as far as I can remember, but she was always there.

Every time I saw my photograph or caught my reflection in the mirror, the whisper was back. I wish you looked a little different. I wish you lost a little bit of weight. I wish your hair was just a little different. I wish you spoke just a little different. I wish you were a little bit funnier or smarter.

Here's one thing I will tell you. We all have these whispers. For some of us, it might be louder and others it's quieter. So here we are together. Women who want something different. I'm going to tell you this inner critic of mine did serve me well in my younger years. She worked me hard.

She got me through medical school and OBGYN residency. She drove me to study really hard. She pushed me when I was feeling the fatigue of becoming a mother for the first time. She helped me pass my board exams while being a new nursing mom. I would say partly in credit to her I became a multitask master highlighter loving ninja.

But I'll also tell you this, this inner voice and the whispers of do more, work harder also created a heaviness in my experience of my life as a physician, as a mom, as a wife, as a friend, in my own body and with my own self. Before I discovered the world of coaching, which we are going to be exploring together, I didn't even know I was experiencing this heaviness.

Because really if you looked at my life on paper, everything was pretty amazing. It is amazing. I created amazing things, even despite this inner critic. So she seemed incredibly useful. But it's also no wonder I over ate and poured the extra glass of wine in the evenings. We all just want a little well deserved break from this inner critic. This, friends, is what creates heaviness on the scale as well.

Here's the thing, this inner voice has been cultivated over for decades, and she has been trying her best to love you. Yes, seriously, think about it. The little whisper that started out in your early years just wanted you to belong, to do more, to be better, and to work harder out of service to you. She thought she was helping you.

She thought that being a harsh critic was the best way to light a fire under your butt because it felt like that. In some cases, it did work, didn't it? But it's hard for your body to release its precious resource if she's in a constant state of running with a fire under her butt. In fact, she'll want to do the opposite.

This podcast is an invitation for you to get to know yourself intimately and learn how to put out the fire. This is where my philosophy was born. You deserve to experience your life without the fire under your butt and heal this inner monologue so you can create calm and confidence on the scale and in your life. It's this philosophy that has led me to lose over 60 pounds and keep it off with ease. It's how I help my clients lose weight week after week.

The tool that I want to teach you in today's podcast is inspired by the think, feel, act, cycle, which is a principle in modern day psychology. Our thoughts are created by two neurons that fire together. When this happens, it generates a feeling in your body. The beautiful thing about these feelings is that they are the fuel that drives how you show up in the world. They drive you in every way, every behavior, whether it comes to your food, your children, your home, your work.

What happens when you take these behaviors day to day, they compound into literally every result in your life. Every task accomplished, every experience had, every pound gained or lost. You know what's amazing about this? The way that our neurons fire and the way that we tell our stories matter, and they're optional. Yes, our thoughts are optional and moldable. We're going to cover them here together thread by thread.

Really this is what coaching is and why it is so incredibly powerful. Because when you learn this skill, you start to change how you feel deeply in your body. You'll heal the fuel you've been using, which will inevitably change how you show up in the world. How you show up with food, your work, your kids, yourself.

I know. I had a brain exploding emoji moment when I really sat with this. Listen, I think it's so common for women to believe that they are just over extended. Their mom brains, their task lists, their work hours, and responsibilities are the problem. It makes so much sense that we spend so much bandwidth searching for the perfect plan to solve for these circumstances.

But the reason this doesn't gain traction is because the thoughts were never unraveled or revealed. Most of us have been in some form of autopilot, never really paying attention to how we're telling the story. For most women I've worked with, their thoughts are laced with an inner monologue that whispers to do more, work harder, and be more productive.

I've already laid out in this episode your inner voice is practiced. She's worked well for the short term grind of your years in study or training. The do more, work harder grind is not the best quality for sustainable weight loss. You cannot treat your forever home with the same grind. It won't work sustainably to create forever weight loss results.

But yes to my highlight fanatics and planner lovers, the plan does matter. We will be getting into that in future episodes. But more important than the plan is the quality of fuel and the way you’ve been thinking that you've been using so far.

Now before you can really deeply create the magic sauce with simplicity and joy as your fuel, you first need to take an inventory of the fuel you've been using so far. You can't heal or change that which you don't intimately know.

So that brings me to the very first tool I want to teach you in this inaugural episode. I call this the narrator tool that will guide you to start paying attention to how you're telling your stories about food, your body, and weight loss. How is your brain narrating your life? What labels have you given yourself? Up until now, this has likely just been going on in the background without you actually noticing. But today, you get to start paying closer attention.

Let me share some of my personal labels that I've uncovered over the years. These were the labels and threads of stories that led to heaviness. That's just how I am. I have so much to do. I'm just an all or nothing person. I'm just a perfectionist. I just love pizza. I deserve a break. It's just one more bite. I'll start tomorrow.

These were my self-inflicted stories for years. Let me tell you, these are rigidly boxing you in. The thoughts that we have about our food and our bodies matter. But here's the best news. These stories are pasted on, as my daughter says, with a little bit of goo. Some hold fast and some goo is stronger, but no thought or story is ever permanently a part of you unless you want it to be. So together, we can safely peel back the stories and peek underneath to the glorious ooey-gooey goodness of open possibility that is waiting for you.

So after you finish listening to this episode, grab a piece of paper and a pen, and take step one of the narrator tool to write down the stories you have. Just start by paying attention to how you tell the story. Become aware of the sentences in your mind. You can do this for any aspect of your life. Your food, your body, your relationships, your weight. This step is to guide you to intimately hear your stories and become aware that these stories are optional. They're just familiar and practiced.

Here's the thing that I have found to be so fascinating when I discovered this. Because I had goo-ed on these labels and the stories that I had told, I had no idea for years that they were optional. I really believed that that's just how I was. That's just what I do. That's just how I operate. That's just me. Me just starting this first step with this very first tool, noticing and narrating, allowed me to discover what was possible for me.

This tool is going to help you more intimately know yourself. We aren't in a rush to change stories here. Right now we're starting with intimately knowing. To create space for infusion of simplicity and joy, we start here. Humans have thousands and thousands of thoughts per day. You don't have to apply this tool to every single one, just the ones that speak louder. The ones that you notice or call your attention.

When you feel strong emotion in your body, like overwhelm, stress, pressure, desire, take a short pause and utilize this tool. Ask yourself what are you telling yourself that makes you feel this way? This tool will take practice and that's okay. Let it. We have plenty of time.

Your mom brain is going to become your most brilliant asset. It is a compilation of all the firing neurons, and you're ready to intimately take agency back. This is what has inspired me to create the Unstoppable Mom Brain, to help working moms infuse joy back to their life by taking ownership of all their beautifully firing neurons.

So to recap, complexity and joylessness creates more heavy in your life and for your body. It doesn't work for sustainable forever results. Your forever home wants to be cared for. She will release precious resources when she is. Creating simplicity and joy starts with uncovering your current stories. Discovering how you narrate the stories of your food, your body, and your life. This matters because those stories create every emotion and the fuel you're using to show up in the world.

In the next few episodes, I'm going to be teaching you additional tools that specifically address over hunger and over desire. You're going to hear the chocolate peppermint biscotti story, and I'm going to be sharing a little bit of brain science with you. If you're a story lover and a research nerd like me, you're going to love it.

I want to celebrate the launch of this podcast with you, the amazing ninja moms who are ready to create some extra ooey-gooey magic. To celebrate us now being in each other's world, I'm going to be giving away a pair of Apple air pods to three lovely listeners who subscribe, rate, and review the show. I know that working moms are on the go, and I want to help you listen on the magic of your favorite music, audiobooks, and of course podcasts with joy.

I would love your honest feedback so I can create an awesome show that honors your time and provides you golden nuggets of value. Visit theunstoppablemombrain.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the celebration and how to be a part of the magic. I'll be announcing the ninja rockstars on the show in an upcoming episode. See you there.

Thanks for listening to Weight Loss for Unstoppable Moms. It's been an honor spending this time with you and your brilliant brain. If you want more information or resources from the show, visit theunstoppablemombrain.com.