Ep #298: Lessons Learned from Masters Live

Katrina Ubell: You are listening to the Weight Loss for Busy Physicians Podcast, with Katrina Ubell, MD, episode number 298.

Welcome to the Weight Loss for Busy Physicians Podcast. I'm your host, master certified, life and weight loss coach, Katrina Ubell, MD.

This is the podcast where busy doctors like you come to learn how to lose weight for the last time, by harnessing the power of your mind. If you're looking to overcome your stress-eating and exhaustion and move into freedom around food, you're in the right place.

Welcome, welcome back my friend. Or if you're here for the first time, I'm so glad you're here too. Thank you so much for joining me today. I have a really fun episode for you. I'll tell you the whole story in just a minute. I'm really excited about it.

But couple things I want to tell you. So, as you listen to this episode, my book is now live. It's available for purchase. You should check it out if you haven't already, so exciting. It's called, How to Lose Weight for the Last Time: Brain-Based Solutions for Permanent Weight Loss.

Now, I have to tell you a little secret; I'm recording this before the book is actually out. So, if you're like, “Why did she sound like she's not totally … her heart’s not a hundred percent in it?” It's because for me, as I'm recording this, it's not actually out yet because there is a little bit of a lead time for these episodes. And so, it's not out yet.

But when you listen to this episode, it will be out. It will have been out for a whole week. And I'm sure there's so many exciting things to come. I actually was inspired with today's topic when I started getting ready for the Guarantee your Weight Loss Success Workshop that I'm offering. Now, by the time you listen to this, that workshop will have already passed.

But the good news is, is that when you pre-order the book – well, not pre-order, no, because pre-ordering is done. When you order the book or purchase the book at a store, save your receipt. And then you can go to my website, enter the order number or the receipt number, and you can get the video playback, like the replay of the Guarantee your Weight Loss Success workshop for free. So, you can totally get that still available.

But anyway, the point is that I needed to get my flip chart, like the stand that holds the flip chart up here to my attic. And so, my attic is an attic, which means that the walls are slanted. And so, the reason I haven't had this flip chart up here is because it doesn't really fit to be honest because it's kind of tall, it doesn't really work, but I want to use it for the workshop. And so, I brought it up here and I'll tell you the rest of the story on the topic for today. It's so, so fun.

Final thing, I just want to tell you, of course, like check out the book if you haven't yourself. Please, if you're part of any kind of Facebook groups or other groups, online or in person, and you think people could benefit, I sure would appreciate you sharing about the book, would really love for you to leave an Amazon review if possible or Goodreads review.

Amazon reviews really seem to kind of do the most to help the book, but I'll take whatever you're willing to give me. If you're willing to help the book in another way, I think that's great too.

Actually, someone today, I just did a live stream in our book ambassador's group, the circle group that we have. And this one woman was saying like, “I can't wait to have a copy of this book in all of my exam rooms.” And I was like, “Oh, that's such a smart idea.”

So, there's so many different ways that you can help to get this book into the hands of the people who need it most. And that might be you, and that might be someone else that you know, or that you care for. So, of course, check that out.

The other thing that I need you to know is that I have heard you loud and clear, you need day and time variability, when I do the trainings that I offer. So, if you've been around for a while, you know that I offer periodically different trainings on different subjects and we have a global audience and I don't want to work in the middle of the night.

So, I typically have chosen time that works best for me and my family schedule. But we realize like you know what, doesn't work for everybody. It actually doesn't work for a lot of people. And so, I have a free training coming up here very soon. It's called, The Missing Piece to Permanent Weight Loss that I want to invite you to.

And it's going to be offered at a couple different times on two different days. This is going to be something new that we're experimenting with. And I'm so excited for everybody who's been like, “Yeah, I'd love to go to that, but I'm still at work,” or whatever it is; “It's the middle of the night for me,” or whatever it is to be able to actually attend it.

So, I'm going to be offering these on Wednesday, October 5th and Thursday, October 6th. And they're going to be at various times.

So, what you will do is just go to katrinaubellmd.com/loseweight, and then there, you'll be able to select which day and time works best for you to be able to attend live. You'll be able to register, get your link to attend.

So, very excited to be able to offer that because listen, I cannot even tell you the number of times that I've signed up for something, knowing that I couldn't go at that time and being a hundred percent determined. Like I mean it, I want this information, I'm going to watch the replay, and then I never watch the replay.

Ooh right, it's so hard. Like what's best is always, always, always to attend live, if at all possible. So, now there's going to be more options and let's see what we can do to make it so you can attend live.

So, what you're going to learn is, The Missing Piece to Permanent Weight Loss. Like why do people struggle so much with weight loss? Why do people find that they try all the different things and they still end up regaining it back? Maybe even more, they feel miserable, it's an awful experience. Like why is it like that?

Well, I'm going to explain to you why; you're going to learn what is not taught by the mainstream diet industry. These are the important things that you need to know so that you can actually have the success that you want. And in this case, it's completely free.

So, very low barrier to entry. You don't even have to buy a book; you can just come. And so, you'll leave knowing exactly what needs to change for you to get those results that you're wanting, which is taking care of whatever the weight issue is that you may perceive that you have.

But more importantly, to me, is actually finding peace and freedom around food, which means that you may not really even desire to lose weight or very much weight; regardless, whether you do or you don't. What we want to do is get to a place where we can be around all of our favorite foods, all of the foods we feel like we can control ourselves around.

We want to have like the most stressful day at work, totally have an argument with our partner or whatever it is, all the things that kind of set us up to over eat or possibly over drink as well. And like have those things happen in our lives and not need the food or possibly the alcohol to help us get through it. So, that food is for nourishment, it tastes good. We get pleasure out of it, but it's just for that purpose.

And then all the other things in our lives, like that we use food and alcohol for, we know how to handle those in a different way. And that is the most important thing that people are just not talking about, and I'm going to teach you all about that.

So, go to katrinaubellmd.com/loseweight and you will be able to select the day and time of your dreams, that will work out perfectly for you.

So, today, we're going to be talking about lessons learned from Masters Live. So, you might be like, “Well, what is Masters Live?” Well, first of all, let me back up even from there — Masters is the continuation program from my Weight Loss for Doctors Only program.

So, Weight Loss for Doctors Only is my flagship program. That's what I've been offering now for many years. And so, that's a six-month long program. And after that, some people want some additional support. They want to continue their journey, they want to continue with coaching. They want to be able to expand their knowledge.

And what's even also more awesome about Masters, is there's a community component. So, we offer accountability groups, and we offer live events, and those live events are called Masters Live.

So, the Masters program is six months long and we offer these live events every quarter. So, every time someone signs up, they are invited to come to two of these events.

Now, we used to do them all live in person, then of course, with COVID, we went to virtual and now we've been kind of doing a combination of both. So, this is coming from a Masters Live that we did before COVID even hit. So, this is pretty old.

So, I told you that I needed to get the flip chart, like holder thing from my basement up here to the attic. And so, my husband got it up here for me yesterday, and it still had a pad of paper on it that had the last sheet of paper that we used at this Masters Live.

And what it is, is a list of key takeaways. So, at that event, we did a whole bunch of coaching all day long, and then we spent a little time passing the mic going like, “Okay, what are you taking away from today? What was most impactful for you? What made the biggest difference for you?”

And so, people would say things, then I would write them on this flip chart. Well, I still have this paper. It's actually kind of funny because the black ink is kind of faded. It's almost like a grayish-green kind of color. Like that's how old it is, several years old.

But these key takeaways are so good. It would've been just as easy for me to rip this off, rip off the paper, and just throw these in the recycle bin. And instead, I was like, “Oh no, I need to share this stuff. It's really good.”

So, I'm going to share with you what's on just the first page. I actually could do more, but there's just not time on this episode, but there's some really good ones here and I can't wait to talk to you a little bit more about them.

So, you might even want to jot some of these down. Or if I say something that you're like, “Ooh, that's so good.” Like pause it, put it in the Notes app on your phone, like make sure that you're taking this really in and really understanding it.

And so, just recognize that these are lessons learned from people who've been at this for a while already. So, you're learning from people who have been really doing this work and these are their key takeaways, their big breakthroughs, their minds being blown on certain subjects, and you might be like, “Ooh, that's good. I needed to hear that too.” I needed to hear all of them. They're so good. It's always so good to repeat them. So, here we go. Number one, the first one:

“That difficult person can be our greatest teacher.” So, who's that difficult person in your life? I actually was just coaching in The Weight Loss for Doctors Only Program yesterday and coached a client on her sister. And those difficult people, man, they stretch us. They really, really stretch us. And it's some of the best work that we can do.

Not because we can change that person, but because we learn so much ourselves. How is that difficult person our teacher? Well, we have things to learn, there’re opportunities to grow, opportunities for us to recognize, and understand what we truly, really want for ourselves, what our needs are, how we can advocate for ourselves.

I can even tell you, I spent like a whole year in coaching. I think it was in 2019 with this one coach, basically, trying to get up the guts to actually say what I really believed or felt or like pushing back on someone in my life who was a very dominant presence, very dominant personality, and it was very much that person's way or the highway, it was so, so hard for me to actually say no to that person, to push back, to say, “No, I actually don't want it that way. I want to do this instead.”

The point is that you can be like a very strong and accomplished person and still struggle in a lot of ways. And these people that push back on us, that are a challenge for us, that's like such a great opportunity for us to learn.

Now, what I know for a fact is that when we are confronted with a difficult person, we have the opportunity … or like we're being invited to change, to grow, to learn from that experience. And we don't take that invitation, we decline the invitation — that same thing keeps showing back up in our lives.

Maybe it's not with that person, but then there's something, it gets like variations on a theme. Like the next person or another person enters into our life and we are being invited to learn the same lesson again.

And so, I feel like I've seen that so many times now for myself that when I'm really confronted with something, I'm like, “Okay, well, I can learn it now or I can learn it later. How about I try to just learn it now, and try to go in a little bit more head first, like run toward it instead of trying to avoid it.”

So, who is that difficult person in your life? What are they there to teach you? You might be a very reluctant student. You're like, “I don't want to learn that lesson, I don't want to have to figure that out.”

Okay, they'll be waiting. Can tell you how many of our clients have been with us for a while. And then finally, they're like, “You know what, I've changed my whole life. Everything is so much better. There's just this one person that I've been avoiding doing this work on, and I know I have to do it.”

And it really, really changes us for the better, even when it's super hard. So, that difficult person can be our greatest teacher.

The next takeaway, “Thoughts create results.” So, let's just talk about again, we talk about the thinking cycle, which is cognitive behavioral therapy. Aaron Beck is the psychiatrist who first defined that.

So, thoughts, we have thoughts. This is our brain cells, our neurons connecting together, chemically having connections through our synopsis. And we have thoughts. Our thoughts create our feelings. They create our emotions. Chemical cascade that goes into our bodies, that's what we feel. How we feel drives our actions and what we do and don't do, our actions, create our results.

Therefore, our thoughts create our results. Literally every time, whether we're getting results we want or results that we don't want. So, if you're like, “Oh yeah, I could apply that to my life.” No, it's already happening in your life all the time.  Every result you have that you like it's because of thoughts that serve you, every result you have in your life that you don't like, it's because of thoughts that don't serve you.

This is so, so, so important because we need to be reminded of this. It's the way we think that creates our results. We are often very flippant with our thinking. We don't really value it in the way that it deserves to be valued.

If it's true that our thoughts create our results, which it is true. Then wouldn't it make sense for us to spend some time on those thoughts and really to make sure that they're good ones that are driving us toward the results that we want, what often happens is we get results we don't want. And then we sit around complaining about it and being sad.

The most empowering thing to do is to recognize that, “Hmm, I think I inadvertently created this for myself, because I wasn't monitoring my mind as I was creating it.” And certainly, I'm not saying that this is like a blame issue or anything like that, but the more we can take ownership and responsibility for our own inner life, the more results that we want to show up in our lives, this is just how it is.

So, our thoughts create our results. Let's try to not forget that. And then we'll forget it. And then we'll remember again.

Next one; “Self-worth is where it's at.” And I love this one. It's so fun. I think that — and I know this because I know it for myself and I know it for so many of the clients that I've worked with; we are like, “My self-worth is good. I think I'm pretty good.” Some people are like, “Yeah, my self-worth is in the toilet. That's not so good.”

Okay. So, we know that we got to work on that, but there are a lot of very accomplished women physicians in particular who are like, “I don't really have a problem with that,” until we start really actually digging in. And what I would argue is that if you're really struggling with your food still, there's going to be some element of a lack of self-worth somewhere in there.

Like there's something to be found. There's an area that is raw, that is unhealed. It's like a little tendril of something that's still there. There's something more to be addressed.

And so, when we're like, “Why am I eating all this food? How is that even connected to self-worth? How does that even make any sense?”

As you do this work and follow the path it often, very often ends back up with self-worth. Self-worth is how worthwhile do you think you are. Like the word worthy, for some reason, like never resonates with me. I don't know what it is about that word. But like worthless, I understand.

So, like worthy just means with worth, worthful, worthy. That's worthy. But anyway, that word always seems kind of weird to me. But like you are filled with worth, you are a perfectly imperfect human being, extremely valuable, exactly as you are.

That is so important for us to really absorb into our bones. Not to just understand it on a cognitive level, but to take it in, to live our lives and treat ourselves from that place of wholeness, of worth. And when we're like, “Well, I don't even know where to begin,” that would be a great place to begin.

What would be a great place to start with is if you have resistance to thinking that you are worthy person, finding out more about that resistance. Why do you believe you are worthless or lack worth? Let's find out more about that. It'd be so, so interesting to work through that.

The next one, “It is okay to have an amazing life and want more.” Ah, this is so good. Well, first of all, let's just say so many people do not have an amazing life, and they should want more. And for sure.

But the people that I was talking to in this space were all women physicians who are in clinical practice and arguably most, if not all of them look around and go, “I got a good life. This is a good, amazing life that I've got.”

And when we are thinking about that, it is not uncommon for us to start going, “I feel guilty that I want more,” or we end up self-sabotaging ourselves, subconsciously, inadvertently, because we believe that we can't have even more amazingness in our life. We can't have this great, amazing life and not struggle with our weight and food, that would be asking for too much.

Now, typically, this isn't a belief that's top of mind, often we have to build some awareness around this, but that's why I want to bring it up, to offer some awareness because there's going to be someone listening going, “Oh my God, that is it. That is what I struggle with, that right there.”

Believing that we don't deserve to have more, that we don't deserve to have peace and freedom around food because we've already got so many great things.

Now, of course, the thing to recognize is you having peace and freedom around food does not take away or detract from anybody else. You having a more amazing life does not take away some amazingness from somebody else. If anything, the more amazing we feel, particularly as accomplished women, the more we are able to do in this world in terms of impacting it positively and really making a difference.

So, often “We're like, well, I always was taught, like, don't be greedy. Don't take more than your share.” That doesn't make sense in this paradigm, in this framework, it's not even a useful way of thinking about things. And if anything, it holds you back from creating the impact on the world that you're capable of.

So, no matter what, it is okay to have an amazing life and still want more.

And the next one, “Run your own race.” I love this. We cannot help ourselves with the comparison. “So and so did this and they lost weight at this rate. So and so did that. So and so looks like this.” We just cannot even help ourselves.

I always think of it as like that young version of me was just trying to figure out like, “Am I okay or not? Let me look around and see.” And that's all that's happening when we're comparing, “How do I stand up to other people? Is this okay or is it not?”

And when we're not aware and we're not really on top of our thinking, we will start thinking that everybody else has it better than we do. And then we start feeling bad about ourselves. A lot of self-pity, a lot of compensatory eating, potentially not a good thing. So, we need to run our own race.

We can appreciate what other people do, we can be avid supporters of them. We can be their cheerleaders, but we need to run our own race. We are not all in the same race. We're not even playing the same game. We're doing our own thing.

And the more we can focus on what we're trying to do, the better the results are. The more time we spend focusing on what other people are doing and comparing that to us, it only slows us down. It's like putting on one of those parachutes that they put on those really fast cars to slow them down.

The next one, “When you give yourself space to mess up, you'll try new things. When you give yourself space to mess up, you'll try new things.” I cannot tell you how many of my clients are deathly afraid of what they call failure. Not doing it perfectly the first time, not getting the A plus every second of every day, not getting the gold star.

But I cannot say it enough, you will not figure this out when you give yourself such narrow parameters to define success. It is a total success for you to mess up and try something different, and figure it out so that you don't mess that up again. But you have to be willing to try new things.

You give yourself space to mess up. If you aren't sure that something will work and you're definitely afraid of failure, then you won't try the new thing because you're waiting for the certainty that it will work first. Well, sorry to tell you that is not really how life works usually.

So, we have to know that when we try new things, we will have our backs no matter what. “I made this decision from a good place, it made sense that at the time, it didn't work. And these are the reasons why, what I've learned about this is this. And moving forward, I will make this change.”

There's no room in there for beating ourselves up, telling ourselves we knew it wasn't possible. “Why did we even bother to try this? It's such a waste, a waste of time, a waste of money, a waste of everything.”

That narrative has got to stop. When you give yourself space to mess up, you will try new things. You have to be willing to try new things to create something new that you haven't created before, such as permanent weight loss, peace and freedom around food. You have to give yourself space to mess up.

I will also tell you as a side note, this is excellent advice when you're raising kids, you have to give them some space to mess up. You have to let them try new things and have it not work out, so important.

The final message today, final takeaway, because I don't want to take up hours and hours of your time. I appreciate you listening this far. This is so good, “All roads lead back to your opinion of yourself.” So, kind of along the same lines as the self-worth conversation we were just having, but your opinion of yourself, these are your thoughts of yourself. What do you think about yourself?

Like I said before, probably, your first answer to this question is, “I don't know, I think I’m pretty awesome, I don't think there's really a problem there.” And then we just want to sit with that. Is that really what we think about ourselves? What is your opinion of yourself as it relates to how you eat and how you take care of yourself, and how you approach your body and what your thoughts are about your body?

All those things are your opinion of yourself. Your opinion of yourself is very reflected in your self-talk. What is that inner narrative that you have as you're going about your day? When you have a positive opinion of yourself, that narrative is supportive, it is loving, it might be fun and entertaining even.

I've told you about my friend who, oh God, I love her so much. My friend, Brittany, she's like, “I just love being with myself. I'm a good time.” And she is, she's just such a fun person.

That's what you get when you have a positive opinion of yourself. If you find that being with you, just in silence is a miserable experience, that's not a very positive opinion of yourself. Because we know this because you don't like being with you. If you don't like being with you, that's hard because you're with you until the end. So, that might be a good place to look.

Now, here's the other reason this is important, when you don't like being with you; what I mean by this, is like drive in the car without turning the radio or a podcast on, drive in silence, do something in silence.

If you can't even be in the shower without having your phone on, why is that? What is it about being with you and your own thoughts that's so uncomfortable? When that is the case, that being with ourselves is so uncomfortable, we are looking for an escape.

So, that can be constantly having on music or podcasts or an audio book in the background, which, you know, if you want to listen to my audio book, that's okay; How to Lose Weight for the Last Time available now in Audible.

But besides that, what do we do? We do other distraction behavior. We eat, we watch shows until we can't keep our eyelids open. We drink alcohol to get that voice to be quiet.

So, if we want to stop doing those things, we want to go to bed when we're tired, we want to stop using food in ways that don't serve us, we want to stop drinking more alcohol than we know is good for us — we have to figure out a way to be with ourselves, to really be on our own side, to be that supportive cheerleader that we always wish that we had that positive, supportive and loving voice. That is your opinion of yourself.

So, no matter what you struggle with, that's what this message is saying; no matter what you struggle with, all roads lead back to your opinion of yourself, they all do.

And what some of us think, I've talked about this, I think before, but we talk about it in my programs as well, is we often are like, “Well, I just need to find that really horrible black rotten core in me and fix it. And then I'll have a positive opinion of myself.”

What I want to offer to you is the idea that there is that black rotten core bad part of you that needs to be fixed, that thought, because yes, it is a thought not a fact, is the problem. The fact that you believe the thought that there's a black rotten core inside you that needs to be fixed is the problem, because it's just not true. It's totally made up.

You might have been believing it for a long time, but it is not the truth. It's not the truth about you, it's not the truth about me. It's not the truth about anybody listening today.

So, all roads back to your opinion of yourself. You don't know what your opinion is of yourself. That could be a great starting point. What do I actually think about me? And you'll probably have those like yeah, “I'm thinking pretty okay. I’m a good doctor, a good mom.” Sit with it more. What else do you think about yourself?

What do you think about yourself in terms of your relationship with that difficult person in your life? What do you think about yourself in relationship to the way you show up at work? The way you show up for your patients, the way you show up for the office staff or other people organizations in your life.

And I'm not saying that you necessarily have a poor opinion of yourself. I don't want you to go like, “Well, Katrina said there's something bad there, I got to go find it.” I'm just saying that if you struggle with your weight, if you struggle with food, you struggle with alcohol, there's probably something there.

And coaching can be really helpful with that, if you're having a hard time finding out what that is on your own. Or you might be like, “Whoa, I actually had never paid attention. It's not really very nice up there in my head. Hmm, interesting.” That might be the place to start.

And so, I'm going to be addressing that in The Missing Piece to Permanent Weight Loss. So, you're going to want to make sure that you come and listen to that. So, like I said, there's going to be various times on both Wednesday, October 5th and Thursday, October 6th.

So, go to katrinaubellmd.com/loseweight, so that you can get your hands on that time, get yourself registered for that day and time, that's going to work for you in order for you to be able to attend live. That's always, always, always the best experience for everybody.

And check out that book and leave an Amazon review my friend, please. If there's somebody that you know, who might benefit from the book, even if they don't purchase a copy, lend them yours or whatever it is. Like let's just get this message out. People need to know about it.

Oh, the other thing is libraries. I found out, this is very interesting, like how do books end up in libraries? Well, the most important thing is that people, like the patrons of the library ask for the book.

So, particularly, if you take care of patients and you would like your patients to be able to access the book at the library, in whatever that local area is, where you live, like reach out to the local library and say, “Hey, I'm going to be recommending this book a lot. I was wondering if you could have at least one copy of this book available in your library for people to be able to check it out.”

Not everybody's going to have it in their budget to be able to buy a book or just reading isn't their thing or whatever it is, we want to be able to have access available for people to find out this information. So, so, so good.

Hope to see you at one of these Missing Piece to Permanent Weight Loss trainings. So good and take these key notes. These key takeaways into your heart. Maybe there's one today that you can really take some action on.

Just to review them quickly, “That difficult person can be our greatest teacher. Thoughts always create our results. Self-worth is where it's at. It is okay to have an amazing life and want more. Run your own race. When you give yourself space to mess up, you will try new things. And all roads lead back to your opinion of yourself.”

So good my friend. I'm so glad that I was able to share this with you, that these key takeaways could live on and inspire some more people. So good.

Well, thank you so much in advance for your support of this book. I seriously appreciate it so much. I have just felt so called to get this message out and I just am relying on other people. It takes a village to get this book out there. So, really, really appreciate you. Thank you so much for everything that you've done and even just your kind words and messages.

Have a great rest of your day and your week. And I will talk to you next week. Take care bye-bye.

Ready to start making progress on your weight loss goals? For lots of free help, go to katrinaubellmd.com and click on free resources.