It’s important to take time every year to reflect on your progress and what you have learned within that time. In today's episode I reflect on the past year of podcasts and the incredible things I've learned along the way. Listen in to hear some great tidbits of wisdom and motivation that will help you gain control of your life and get the results you need.

The topics today will span from lesson learned while coaching and working with clients, to new revelations about controlling your thinking and feelings – and I'll share some insights into the thought model used in my coaching as well as some new ways to think about it. One of the focuses of this episode is to help you stay aware of your thinking and habits, even after we have found success, because it's so easy to get sucked into new negative patterns. I'm excited to share the conversation today and want to continue to emphasize the value of continuous learning and being intentional with your time and efforts.


Listen To The Episode Here:


In Today's Episode, You'll Learn:

  • Why Katrina values who she works with and how she works with them
  • The value of consistency and commitment when it comes to weight loss and podcasting alike
  • How to watch out for, and be aware of, issues and addictions that replace the main one you’re fighting
  • How your life can be so much different when you know how to control and buffer feelings
  • The importance of taking the drama out of your narrative and self talk
  • Why it’s so life changing to learn how to accept yourself and be forgiving of yourself

Featured In This Episode:

Lessons-Learned-Over-the-Past-Year


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Read the Transcript Below:

Katrina Ubell:      You are listening to the Weight Loss for Busy Physicians podcast with Katrina Ubell, MD, episode number 55.

Welcome to Weight Loss for Busy Physicians, the podcast where busy doctors, like you, get the practical solutions and support you need to permanently lose the weight so you can feel better and have the life you want. If you're looking to overcome your stress eating and exhaustion and move into freedom around food, you're in the right place.

Well, hello there, my friend. Welcome back to the podcast. Did you notice something different? Did you notice the annoying lady's voice is gone. This is my actual one year anniversary podcast. Leading up to this, I wanted to do something special. I thought wouldn't it be fun to just revamp how all of this sounds. You may have also noticed that I changed my picture to reflect more accurately of what I look like now. So when you first went to start playing this podcast, you might be like, “Wait a minute. That picture's different.” That picture is much more updated. I thought that was a great update for sure at a year.

But you know that voiceover lady? I never liked her. That was B- work, right? Talk about B- work. I had actually always envisioned having a dude. What I wanted was a guy with an accent, like an Australian or a British accent. For some reason, that sounded cool to me. I must not have communicated that well to the podcast team that helped me get this all set up. So when they gave me all the voiceover options, they were all women. I didn't really like any of them, but the one that I picked was the one that the coach thought was the best. I was like, “I don't like any of them. So fine. We'll just do this one.” I could have put it off, but I really had my heart set on a certain launch date. I didn't want to change that. I had already had that in my head as when we were starting. So I thought okay. B- work, let's just do it. Get this thing out there. Clearly it has not been a problem, because many of you have listened.

But every now and then, I listen to my own podcast for quality control purposes. I often learn something. Isn't that so funny? I'll be like, “Oh, that was good. Oh, yeah.” It's so funny. Anyway, I always fast forward through that intro, because she was just I don't know. I just didn't care for it. So I decided who better than me, right? I'm just going to do it. It can be my voice. The music is fine. We'll keep the music, but we'll just change it over. So that is my one year anniversary gift to you. You don't have to listen to her voice any longer. I hope that makes you happy.

You know what would make me even happier is if you went onto iTunes and left a review telling me what you think about the new picture and the new intro and outro. Just a little shameless plug for iTunes reviews. If you wouldn't mind doing that, I'd appreciate that.

So the reason it's episode 55 and it's the one year anniversary is because, when I launched, I launched with three episodes. That's what's recommended so that it looks like to your new listeners that you've been out there already for a little while. If someone listens, and they're like, “That's amazing. I want to listen to the next one,” then you actually have something there. So it really was 52 weeks plus three. So that gets us to 55.

So here we are. It has been one year. So the topic of this podcast is Lessons I've Learned in the Last Year. Can't wait to share this with you. I was actually just on a plane recently brainstorming all of my ideas. It was really actually such a great exercise to go through to sit and think what have I really learned in the last year. I highly encourage you to do that, because it was really cool to think did I know that or did I just really hone that in this year, what is it. So can't wait to share these. So let's get into it.

So number one what I learned is that there is a great need to help physicians lose weight and change their thinking and, therefore, their lives. When they get the help they need, they get ridiculously amazing results. This is one of those things that was a bit of a leap of faith. I knew that I would have hired me back when I was in practice. I thought that other people probably would be interested in that, too, but I didn't really know for sure. I definitely learned in the last year that that is for sure the case.

I also learned that when you start a podcast, you can't ever take a week off. People expect to hear from you every single week. It is such a great way to connect with people and help people for free and provide incredible value. I always give away my absolute best work and content for you for free on the podcast. But sometimes, you go on vacation, you think, “Oh, man. I got to get a podcast out there.” I love doing them, but there was an acceptance period, let me put it that way, of just realizing, okay, yeah, every single week. Now, I love it. I think it's so fantastic.

Okay. Number two, the longer you keep up your weight loss, so the longer you maintain your weight loss, the easier it gets. I have found in the last year that I've become even more fat adapted. I thought I was totally fat adapted. My body is even less interested in making me freak out when I'm not able to eat or not wanting to eat right in that moment. My body really, really knows how to access my fat stores for energy, and it doesn't make me feel horrible physically in the process.

You also end up with fewer thoughts that drive you to emotional eating. It really does get better and better and better and better as you go along. It's not one of those things where you go, “Oh, I woke up today. Oh my gosh, I don't think that way anymore or I don't have that issue anymore.” But when you reflect back over a year, I can definitely see how much better I am. I thought I was good a year ago. So my point in offering you this is that sticking with this pays off. It gets better and better and better when you put the effort in. So good.

Okay. Number three, women physicians are so much fun and so motivated. I personally think they are just the best clients in the world. They want to feel better. They're willing to put the effort in to create that. It just completely changes their lives in every facet. It's so great.

Number four, your life explodes with awesomeness once you learn to feel your feelings and stop buffering them away. It sounds like that is not the case, right? Hedonism, right, let's just enjoy everything and have all the joy and all the amazingness. Well, that's what we tell ourselves, but in the long run, remember, it's that net negative. What we're doing is we're still hiding from our emotions. We're still running away. When you really, really allow yourself to feel the negative feelings and don't make them go away with food or alcohol or whatever your buffer is of choice, your life will open up with amazingness when you do that. I know it's a leap of faith. I'm not sure if I totally would have believed it or trusted, but, seriously, that is when people talk about an authentic life, that, to me, is an authentic life really learning how to be your true authentic self, feel exactly what's coming up for you, and change what you want to change and allow what you can't change and move forward and just create incredible value for the world. It's so good.

Okay. Number five, the better I get at coaching, the more it helps me personally. What I mean by that is I've always told my clients in my coaching groups that you can learn so much from watching other people being coached. I myself have has some huge breakthroughs on issues I didn't think were a problem for me at all from watching other people being coached on their issues. When you're actually the person doing the coaching and you're helping people through their issues, helping them to come to the thoughts that serve them, and helping them to lose weight, it only changes you on the inside even more. It holds me accountable personally to be doing the work. It makes me think about all kinds of things I've never thought of or ways of thinking about it I've never thought of. It's this back and forth. The more I do the work personally, the better coach I get. The more I coach, the better I am doing personally. It's so great.

Okay. Number six, this is what I learned. There is no wagon and there is no cliff. This was a huge, mind blowing concept for my current group that I'm coaching, this idea that there is no wagon to fall off of, there's no cliff to dive over, right? We have this idea of I fell off the wagon. Now, I got to get back on the wagon. There is no wagon. Okay? Literally, you eat food every single day. Some of those foods are fuel for your body and some aren't. It literally is an neutral as that. This concept, this mind construct of being on the wagon, off the wagon, being over the cliff, or at the edge of the cliff, or whatever, all that is is drama. It's all just making this experience harder than it has to be. It really does not have to be that experience at all.

So no wagon, no cliff. There really is no upside to thinking about your life in that way and your actions in that way. It's so much more useful to think about am I living in integrity with myself, am I doing what I said I was going to do, do I have the kind of relationship with myself where when I say I'm going to do something I do it. So much more important, and gets you so much better results.

Number seven, self coaching is so incredibly important. You can listen to all the podcasts you want. You can read all the self help books you want. You can talk to your friends. There is nothing like coaching yourself. Whenever my clients are losing traction or reaching out to me and saying they “fell off the wagon” or they're saying I need a reset, I need you to help me, I'm all over the place, my first question to them is are you planning and what are you doing to manage your mind. So, so, so important. If you are not managing your mind, it's very evident, right? It's always obvious. Whenever I ask that question, it's almost a rhetorical question. What are you doing to manage your mind? The answer, the vast majority of the time, is nothing, right, because they are having this spin out experience. They're not doing what they should be doing, or they're not having the experience they want, because they're not creating it for themselves by doing self coaching.

When I say self coaching, what I mean by that is by committing to journaling your food every single day, which I still do every single day, doing a thought download every single day, and doing models every single day, just giving yourself that opportunity to look inside your head with your eyeballs, okay, you can't do these in your head. You need to actually get it out on paper or computer screen so that you can really look at those thoughts and see what the results are of them, right? Just doing a thought download isn't enough.

Sometimes, it can give you a lot of clarity, but when you put that into a model, you start seeing what the result is of that thought, and you just start going, yeah, that thought feels true, and it seems believable. I believe it right now, but the result of it is terrible. I'm going to stop thinking that thought. Every time I see that thought bubble up, I'm going to just hit that delete button, right? Get rid of it. It's just an error. It does not serve me. Even though I can come up with a whole argument for why it's reasonable to think that way, if it doesn't have an upside, if it doesn't serve you, if it doesn't give you the result that you want, there is no sense in thinking it and allowing yourself to continually think it.

So the way that you work through all of this is by developing a consistent self coaching practice for yourself. What that can look like, for you, there's such a variation on this. But what I find, too, with my clients when they tell me, I was just so upset, or I was just yelling at my kids, or whatever was going on, I was so mad at my office manager, whenever they tell me what they did, it's usually I did a thought download in my head or I could recognize that my thoughts weren't serving me, but that was it. That was all that they could get themselves to. That's totally fine, right, because they're still learning. Doesn't mean that what they're doing is wrong or they haven't figure it out yet or any of that. We're all learning

I'm learning. I'm continually learning and improving and learning how to utilize the model better in my life. So this is a continuing ed kind of situation. This isn't a definitive end point, like you've made it. You've reached nirvana or something, this utopian life. That is not at all how it is. I really this year had that sink in for me that your self coaching practice is literally the difference between having the life that you want and not having the life that you want. So I strongly encourage you to do that if you aren't already.

All right. Number eight, you can put anything you want in our R line of the model. So if you aren't totally familiar with the thought model that I teach and coach with, the model is the first part is the C, which is circumstances. These are your neutral facts. The next is the T, which is your thoughts. We have thoughts about the circumstance. Then those thoughts create our feelings, which is the F line. Those feeling drive our actions, which is the A line. Our actions create our results, and that's the R line.

So you think about a blank model. CTFAR, you literally can put whatever it is you want on the R line. The only thing that creates your results is a thought. So follow me on that, right? How do you get a result? You take action. What drives you to take that action? Your emotions, your feelings. What creates your feelings? Your thoughts. This is so important. So it's you're distracted, come back to me. Okay?

If you are not getting the results you want in your life in any area, it could be weight loss, it could be something totally different, then what you first need to do is change your T line. You need to change your thought. You don't need to change the circumstance. You don't need to start thinking about changing the action, the A line. That's typically what we do. We say, “I'm doing this, and I'm getting this result. I want a different result. So I'm going to do this action.” We want to see if that will give us that result. But the thought is still the thought that doesn't give us the result that we want. You follow me on that? If you don't change your thinking, you will not create a different result.

So, again, here comes your self coaching practice. I'm not getting the result that I want, you can backtrack up, right, what is it that I need to be doing, what kind of massive action do I need to be taking so that I get that result? How do I need to be feeling so that I do that? What is the thought that feels true and believable that makes me genuinely feel that feeling? Then you try that thought on for size, right? It's like trying on clothes. Try on that thought, and see if it works. Does it truly create that emotion for you? Does that emotion truly drive you to take those actions? If it does, then you will get that result. This can be a financial result. This can be paying off your med school debt. This can be your weight loss, getting your body to your natural weight, your ideal weight. This can be showing up in a certain way in your relationships. It literally can be anything you want.

That is how powerful this tool is this thought model. It's so good. You don't need to be immediately thinking you need to do different things or change the circumstance, try to make your outside circumstances different so you can get that result. What you need to be doing is looking at what you're currently doing, what result you have, what you're doing that's creating that, what the feeling is that's driving that action, and what the thought is that's creating that feeling. You need to know where you are first before you can switch to something else. Then you do a new model with the new result and the same circumstance, and then you start thinking that new thought intentionally, deliberately, on purpose, and go about creating the result that you want in your life. You can literally create whatever you want. It's so good.

Okay. Number nine, it is super easy to find a new buffer instead of food and alcohol. A lot of people will give up food as their neutralizing agent of choice, neutralizing their emotions, and then some of them pick up drinking, right? Some of them pick up smoking. Some of them pick up over exercising or over working or shopping too much. I find a lot of women start buffering with Amazon or eBay, just shopping, shopping, shopping, looking for that next dopamine hit. It's so important for us to be really aware of it.

A really classic one is social media. We think, oh, I'm just going to get on Facebook. I'm just checking. Three hours later, right, you're like, why am I watching this video where they're making this ridiculous pastry or something, right? Why? I told myself I'd get off and I didn't get off. Your brain is just giving you dopamine hit after dopamine hit after dopamine hit. So what does it do? The primitive brain says keep doing that. That's good. Let's do it some more. Then the net effect is you stayed up way too late. You didn't get anything actually done. My point is you don't like the result of having done that.

Same for watching a bunch of TV or Netflix, streaming stuff, getting totally sucked into the couch, watching things. It really can be so many different things. Watching YouTube. You really do need to be on the look out for those new buffers coming up. So you stop neutralizing your emotions with food and alcohol, then it's really important that you're paying attention to what your brain is offering you instead. Your brain's like, oh, okay. I guess we're not going to eat or drink anymore for these emotions, but what if we just go look on Amazon a little bit? I mean, there is that one thing you needed anyway. Then before you know it, you're totally down that rabbit hole like crazy spending a ton of money, get a whole bunch of junk you don't even want, all the clutter in the house, right? It really does have a downside.

You want to be intentional about how you're spending your time. Get your 24 hours every day, and so many of us feel like we don't have enough time, and we're so busy, and we're so exhausted, but yet, we still find time to buffer with something. For you it might be food. If you've given up food, it very likely is something else. So be really, really aware of that and watch for that and be deliberate about choosing not to pick up a new buffer habit. All right.

Finally, number 10 of the lessons I have learned in the last year of this podcast, there is nothing wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with who I am. I am exactly the mom I should be. I'm exactly the coach I should be. I'm exactly the business owner I should be. I'm exactly the wife I should be. I'm exactly who I'm supposed to be right now. What that means, the reason I know that, is because what that looks like and believing that is accepting yourself, accepting that it never was going to be any different. I am supposed to be that way today because that is who I am.

When you stop resisting who you are and what you look like and stop struggling against it thinking that we should be better, thinking that when we approve this, then we'll actually be a better person. We'll feel better about ourselves, that that will be the solution. Really, these thoughts, these negative self talk hidden in this shroud of personal improvement, and this idea of I just want to be like that super patient mom who never gets upset. Who is she? Do you know her? I don't know her, right? We don't even know what moms who seem like they have it all put together on the outside are like inside, right, behind closed doors. I know a lot of coaches who coach moms, and they're like, “It doesn't matter who you are, everybody yells at their kids.” It's universal for all of us. Maybe some of us more than others, but it is just how it is.

So it's so important, it's like I knew this, but in the last year, it sunk in for me, that it really is the opposite. You get better. You start showing up as a person who is following their eating plan and losing weight. You show up as the mom you want to be. You show up as the doctor you want to be when you accept yourself with love and compassion for who you are right now first. That has got to happen first for you to then decide, you know what, this is all fine. It's all good. But, you know what, I do want to do it a little differently. And from that place, that place of love and compassion, is how you start actually making real progress in your life and you start really changing the mom you are, the doctor you are, the wife you are, the friend you are, the sister you are, all of those things.

So this is really the same for weight loss. You really start to lose weight when you stop resisting what your body looks like now. You cannot be feeling incredible disgust and hatred for yourself and expect to keep weight off forever. You might be able to white knuckle it and lose all the weight, but what we think is we'll lose the weight and then we'll think differently about ourselves. We think that's when I'm going to start loving myself. That's when I'm going to be nicer to myself. That's when I'm going to have more compassion for myself, but that's not at all what happens. Our brains are exactly the same, our bodies are different, and our brains will find all kinds of other new things to pick up apart over and create all those same emotions that you're having now.

So if you want to not only have that thin body, but actually be that person that you want to be, you have got to work on compassion and self love first, accepting yourself for who you are, knowing that I'm a mom who yells at her kids and gets frustrated sometimes, and that is okay. I'm for sure going to mess them up, because everybody does that. If I act one way, then they'll be messed up in this one way. If I act another way, then they'll be messed up in that way. When you just release that idea that there's a right way of doing it or you're doing it wrong or everyone else has it figured out and you don't, you just release that, it's absolute freedom. I guarantee you, you will show up as more of the person that you want to be than you are right now. It's so, so good. I can't even tell you who much this lesson has changed my life.

All right, my friend. Those are those 10 lessons I've learned in the last year. It's been a year. Is that not so fun? I can't wait. I can't wait to see what we do in the next year. I already have the whole year mapped out even into 2019 some. I've got some amazing things up my sleeve, cannot wait to share it with you.

In the meantime, please leave me an iTunes review, if you wouldn't mind. Do it on your computer. It's so much easier. Just get on there, PC or Mac, it doesn't matter. Just flip it open, give yourself a reminder on your phone to do it tonight when you get home from work, and just give me a little sentence, one little something. Tell me what you think about the new voiceover. I'd love to hear your opinion.

All right. Have a wonderful, wonderful week. I will talk to you next week. Take care. Bye bye.

Thanks for joining me today. If you like what you heard here, be sure to hit subscribe in your podcast app so you never miss an episode. You can also get my Busy Doctors Quick Start Guide to Effective Weight Loss for free by visiting me over at KatrinaUbellMD.com.

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