Ted Talk 105: Help! I Keep Losing And Gaining The Same 10-15 Pounds

Podcast Transcription: Help! I Keep Losing And Gaining The Same 10-15 Pounds 

Ted Ryce: Have you ever wondered about why you fall into the same traps, where you lose weight, but then gain it back, and you repeat this cycle over and over again? Well, we’re going to talk about what’s behind that, why it doesn’t have to do with nutrition most of the time. We’re going to talk about what really is behind this yo-yoing of our weight, this yo-yoing of going on and off diets. 

So, if that’s something you feel like you’ve been sucked into, that you have this pattern that you’ve been repeating, you’re going to want to listen to this entire episode today.  

What is up, my friend? Welcome back to the podcast, I’m your host, Ted Ryce, coach to entrepreneurs, executives, and other high-performing professionals. 

And today, I want to share with you a conversation I had with a client, a new client, she joined recently, she’s already down 5 pounds in 8 days, her motivation is high, but she came to her first call and said, “Ted, I feel really bad, I wasn’t able to work out this week, and I feel really bad about that. My business, it’s doing well financially, but I have some issues with some employees, I had some other issues where I scheduled...” - because she had hired a personal trainer, but wasn’t getting fat loss results with him, so she ended up ending her contract with her personal trainer, but she was supposed to show up for that last week, and she paid $600 for the sessions, and she didn’t make it. 

She told me it’s like flushing money down the drain. And not only that, she was going to apply for a $20,000 grant to help her business. It would have been money that wasn’t taxable, and she wouldn’t even have to pay it back, it was a grant, because she’s in education. And she wasn’t able to file the grant on time, because she was so busy, because the stress levels were so high.  

So we spent most of our first call talking about that stuff, and then I asked, “Why do you think we’re talking about these things? Why do you think we’re talking about these things that have nothing to do with nutrition or exercise? Why do you think we’re talking about it?”  

And she, being the introspective person, very smart, very self-aware person that she is, she said, “Well, because, Ted, I know that when the stress gets too high, I end up not working out, I ended up calming my emotions through eating, and I know that this is part of why I keep struggling. I don’t know all the right information, and I know you’re going to help me with that. But even if I have the right information, if I don’t solve these other problems, they’re just going to keep coming up and up and up.” 

And I said, “That is exactly right, that is why.” And that’s why what I do is very different than what other coaches do, because she had been working with a coach previously, she hired someone to help her track her macros, to calculate and count the calories and to get those results, and guess what? She didn’t get results with that other coach, she ended up just leaving that coach.  

She’s been trying desperately, she told me, “I’m desperate to get results, I keep trying things, but I keep not getting the results that I want.” And I told her I was confident, and one of the reasons why I’m so confident to help my clients is because I go to the root of the problem. 

And the root of most people’s problems are this: number one, they need the right education, because if you think you need to get rid of aspartame, if you think that drinking full sugar or soda is better than drinking diet Coke, because it has aspartame.  

If you think that eating organic Reese’s peanut butter cups is better for fat loss than the regular peanut butter cups. If you think eating a 500 calorie Asahi bowl is better than having bacon and eggs, which are much lower calories, depending on the size, the portion size, of course. 

If you think those are the things that you need to do, well, you don’t have the right education. You’ve been misled, you’ve fallen for the marketing, and it’s okay, but that’s the truth. If you think that drinking a 300-calorie naked juice is better for fat loss, and it’s a healthier choice and better for fat loss, than drinking a soda, which is a hundred calories, well, you’ve fallen for the marketing. 

But that’s easy to solve, because that’s an education issue. Even with the right education, people struggle with this stuff. I know, because I work with those people every week, for years, and years, and years.  

What a lot of it comes down to, is how we manage stress in our life, and I’ll bring it to you like this, I’ve said this many times before, and I’ll keep repeating it until the world’s a better place.  

So, I guess I’m going to keep repeating it until I die, although I do believe the world is always getting better. Human beings are always getting better, we’re always getting more self-aware.  

Even with all the craziness on social media, it’s given us an awareness that we never have before. Yes, or no? Of courses, it’s giving us an awareness, we’re aware of too many things now. 

But it comes down to this: there’s health, there’s wealth, there’s our relationships. People come to me because they want to fix their health, they want to get in bad-ass shape, they want to lose fat, they want to get down to 10% body fat, they want to get down to 18% body fat if they’re a woman, maybe 10, if they’re a guy, or 15, if they’re a guy, depending on how motivated someone is to learn what they need to learn. But inevitably, people have different issues. 

And so, if we’re working together on your health, that takes the stress away. “Oh, I don’t know what to do for nutrition, I don’t know what to do for exercise, what do I need to focus on? What’s important here?” Well, I got your back, that’s my wheelhouse, I have all those answers and more. I have more answers to questions you didn’t even know you had about health. 

But the thing is: people have issues in either their career/business, if they’re an entrepreneur, career, if they’re a CEO, or salesperson or whatever, accountant, engineer. And then there’s relationship, and some people have problems in both, because if you have relationship issues with your children, with your wife, with your husband, with your family, and those relationships are taking away from you, because you need to change what you’re doing, you need to change your strategy there in some way. So, if you’re having these issues with your career, or with your business, or with your relationships, those things need to be addressed. 

Now, the great news is you don’t have to solve the problems, but you’ve got to make strides towards solving the problems. And I use that term solving problems very specifically, because as I’ve talked about in the past many times, there’s two types of coping: there’s emotional coping, and there’s problem solving coping.  

Emotional coping, we’re all aware of the bad ones, “oh well, I get drunk, I drink every night to deal with the stress of my relationships or my career or my business. I do drugs, I eat a lot, I gamble” ... the list goes on and on.  

But there’s other ways of coping that are healthy, meditation, exercise, having fun experiences. I’m in Mexico right now, I’m going to go scuba diving, not tomorrow, but the day after, I’m going scuba diving. That doesn’t solve any of my problems, but it makes me feel great. 

And so those are healthy, but sometimes what we do is, we do these healthy emotional coping practices, like exercise, like meditation, like going and having fun experiences. And we do those because we have stressful..., “Oh I need to work out, I’ve got a lot of stress, or I need to just take a break today and go do something fun, I’ve got a lot of stress.” But the thing is... “I need to meditate every day, because I have a lot of stress. “ 

But the problem is this, if the stress is because, “Oh, I need to hire someone in my business, I need to fire someone in my business, I need to get this work done, I need this other thing done,” and you’re meditating in the morning, and it’s taking time away from you solving that problem, well, you’re in this cycle where, oh, I have this problem, it needs to be solved. So, instead of solving it, I’m going to meditate, I’m going to exercise, I’m going to do something fun, and that’s going to bring down the anxiety, the stress, and then I’m going to have to do it every day, because I’m never taking time to solve the problem.  

I make a joke on social media a lot, about like sometimes the best morning routine isn’t waking up and journaling, and meditating, and exercising, and writing down five things that you’re grateful for, is waking up, sitting your ass down and solving the problems. That’s awesome for productivity— and excuse the loud noises, I’m not sure if you really hear them in the background, but there’s construction going on in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. So, forgive the interruptions, if you do happen to hear them on the recording. 

But our best morning routine is to wake up and start getting our work done sometimes, it’s to skip the gym, it’s the skip the meditation. Why? Because if we solve those problems, then we don’t need to meditate to deal with the stress that’s caused by them. Does that make sense? Sometimes we meditate, and meditation is really procrastination. Sometimes we exercise, exercising is really procrastination from solving the problems that need to be solved in your life.  

Is this resonating with you? What is this bringing up for you? Because if you’re starting to see, “Ah, you know what? I tell myself…” I used to do this all the time by the way. I would go to Jiu-jitsu, I would work out, and I worked out a lot in my 20s, I worked out a lot, and I was having problems with my business, I had a personal training business, I didn’t know what I needed to do to make that business successful. I love doing it, but it was so frustrating, because I can never figure out what to do to make it successful. 

And as a result, it would cause me a tremendous amount of anxiety and stress, because my clients would all train like crazy, and then they’d all—they are very wealthy people, they’d go out of town for 3 months and traveled to Europe over the summer, very common thing for my clients to do.  

And so, I was making money in the fall, in the winter, in the spring, but during the summer for three months, I was out of income. That’s what drove me to like, “Man, I got to find a way out of this,” and eventually I ended up developing what I do now, and guess what? I don’t have that problem anymore. I solved the problem; I didn’t need to be in the gym all the time. 

So, unless we solve our problems, the stress never goes away, we have to constantly manage it. And some of us manage it with more healthy approaches, we exercise, we meditate, we do other things. And then some of us do unhealthy things, we smoke weed. That was me in my 20s, I was high almost every day, because I was so stressed out. We drink alcohol, we shove food in our face, I did all three of those things.  

Luckily for me, I worked out so much that I just wasn’t hungry because of all the hard training I was doing in Jiu-jitsu, but I would binge eat, and I never even realized I had an issue with food, because, oh, I’m ripped, but I would binge eat all the time, it was a common thing.  

Also, being on a low carb diet didn’t help, being on a strict low carb diet and doing all those mistakes that I talked about in the beginning that I thought was important for fat loss and health, and they turned out not to be as important as I thought. 

So, we have to solve the problems in our life. And if you’re not ready to take action - it doesn’t mean you have to figure out a hundred percent how to solve the problem - but if you’re not willing to take action on those things that are driving your behavior, and causing you to overeat, causing you to drink too much, causing you to come home and need that glass of wine or two every day, or need that scotch with dinner every day.  

If you’re not willing to do that, you’re going to be stuck in a cycle, that’s what I help my clients with. Not all my clients need that, but I’d say 50 to 60% of them do.  

So, I want to ask you, what are you doing? What problems in your life do you need to switch from that emotional-based coping to problem-based coping? 

Because if you hate your job, but you go to the gym every day, that’s not sustainable, it’s going to catch up with you, eventually you’re going to have to find a solution. Or if your business is stressing you out, because like me, you’re just, you know, I’m very gifted in other ways, but knowing about business? Knowing about how to run a business?  

Look, I hired a business coach for a year. I paid 26,000 for a business coach, I put my money where my mouth is, like I don’t want to deal with these problems, I want them solved. So, we invested in it, me and my business partner, and guess what? It’s taken away the stress, it’s given us a path forward. Now, I knew how to make money, I learned how to do that last year, but I didn’t know how to make money in a way that was sustainable. 

I was having a lot of the problems that so many people have with dieting, they know how to lose fat when they eat zero calories, or go on Keto, or whatever it is that they do, go on a juice detox, and drink a thousand calories a day, but you don’t know how to sustain it.  

Well, I had that same problem with business, and I invested in fixing it, because if I didn’t, I’d be making money and then working so hard to serve all the clients that we signed up, and not able to enjoy my life and get stressed out. It’s not the lifestyle that I’m after.  

And also, it’s only a matter of time before my clients would have started to suffer if I did that, because if I’m not showing up for myself, eventually I won’t be able to show up a hundred percent for other people. 

We always have to show up for our self if we want to show up in those other areas of our life, if we want to show up for our relationships, if we want to show up for our business, if we want to show up for our career, if we want to show up for our partners, our wives, our girlfriends, our husbands, our boyfriends, whatever it is that you have in your life, your children, your parents, we’ve got to show up for ourselves. 

It starts with health. Because it’s hard to feel good when your body is feeling bad. It’s as simple as that, it’s hard to feel good when your body’s feeling bad. Probably one of the single most important things that happens to people as they get older, is there’s much higher rates of depression with elderly people, because there’s so many things that start going wrong as we get older. It takes a lot of proactive work to keep our health together as we get older. 

And when I say work, I don’t necessarily even mean more hours, I mean you’ve got to get better strategies. For example, if you’re going into the gym, and you’re doing these workouts, but afterwards, your shoulder aches, your knee hurts, your back is in pain, but you’re like, “No, I got to keep working out, that’s how I avoid letting age get the best of me.” Well, you’re right, except that you’re going to make it worse, because you’re causing inflammation in those different areas of your body. 

You need a sustainable approach, something that’s going to last you. And I see so much of that, people destroying their bodies, they’re like, “No, but exercise is good for me.” I used to say the same thing in Jiu-jitsu, I’ll go to Jiu-jitsu, “No, exercise is good for me, it’s good for me mentally, it’s good for me physically, my heart, etc.” But guess what? My joints were hurting, I was in a lot of pain, and I had to change my behavior. 

I still train martial arts, but I don’t do it in the same way, because I want longevity, I want long-term health. I don’t want to be the person when they’re in their 50s or 60s, telling people stories that they don’t want to hear about how I was in such great shape a decade before. Nobody wants to hear that crap, it’s not that impressive, what’s impressive is when you keep it together as you get older.  

Why? Because there’s so many people with the stories of how they were great 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. There’s a lot less people who keep it together as they get older, that’s the real flex, that’s the real unicorn, right? That’s the real like, whoa! You feel good, you’re older, you look great, yeah, your hair’s a bit gray, or in my case, disappearing, but you kept it together, that’s impressive. 

I want to talk about the emotional coping versus problem solving coping a little bit more, because one thing I had to learn—you know my story, and if you haven’t, go listen to the first episode of this podcast, I share a bit of the story, of my story in that. But I’ve been through a lot of shit in my life, a lot of things that people would call traumas, it involves suicides and murders, deaths of family members, terrible things, abuse, alcoholism, neglect.  

And so, one of the things that I learned was that it’s not just about the problems in my relationships, it’s not just the problems in my career that I needed to focus on solving, I needed to work on the things emotionally that happened in the past. That’s a story for perhaps another day, another podcast, but things like therapy, things like breath work, things like ayahuasca and other psychedelic assisted therapy. 

You don’t have to drink the jungle juice or take mushrooms or anything like that, but if you’re carrying around some weight like I was, carry around some baggage like I was…And actually, my client, the story of who I told you today, she’s got quite a story too, can’t share it with you, because I didn’t ask her permission, but she’s got quite the story too. But the reality is we all have it, so, we have to do that work.  

So, if you find yourself excessively doing things, exercising, eating, drinking, drug use, sex, gambling, I don’t know anybody with a gambling issue, but I’ve heard of people with gambling issues, kind of a strange one, but it exists. Strange one for me at least, but it exists. And if you’re working on solving the problems in your relationships, and you’re working on solving the problems in your business, and there still feels like some background anxiety going on, you’ve got to look a bit more into your past. So, that’s a little bit of a bonus tip there.  

Feels funny talking about something so deep and profound, so like the trauma we go through in life is a bonus tip, but it’s true, we’ve got to look at those things if we want to get to the next level.  

And if you’re listening to this podcast called Legendary Life, you want to get to the next level, because that’s what a legendary life is like. It’s not having a lot of money and being a wreck with your health and your relationships, it’s not being great with your relationships, but being broke and unhealthy. It’s not being super fit—this was my case, by the way—it’s not being super fit, and everybody’s like, “Oh wow, you’re so fit, wow, you must have it all together.” But I was a mess in my business, and I was a mess in my relationship. 

Being legendary, having a legendary life, I feel, my definition, I believe, it’s having those three things taken care of. And if you’ve got work to do from things that happened in the past, you do the work.  

And again, if that feels overwhelming to you, it’s not about solving the problem right away as fast as possible, it’s taking steps, because the great thing is we don’t need to solve the problem, but most of us, we don’t even take steps to solve the problem. What do we do? We just ruminate, we ruminate, we ruminate, it keeps us up at night, it wakes us up a few times a night. We ruminate about how something needs to change in our relationships, or with our work, but we don’t take steps, and the steps could be as simple as start listening to podcasts about solving that area. 

In fact, I say this frequently, maybe this isn’t a podcast that you need to listen to, maybe it’s something to help you with that other area of your life, with your relationships. Maybe this is the sign you’re looking for. It’s that other area of your life that you need to focus on, and focusing on your health is actually a distraction from that, because you’ll never be able to get healthy if you don’t handle that other area. 

So, I’m going to wrap up now, but I want to ask you, what stood out from this conversation today? What stood out on this episode today? What was the big takeaway from this episode? And more importantly, as I always say, what is the action that you can take?  

Don’t think about it, don’t ruminate, don’t say, “oh yeah, that’s a good idea, I need to do that,” and then do nothing. You want to know why the world is so messed up. Because people don’t take action, it’s not because of any of the reasons we say, people don’t take action, and maybe even especially when we know we need to. 

Start being more action-oriented, thinking about the problem doesn’t solve the problem, in fact, a single action taken is worth a hundred episodes of your favorite podcast, or library of self-help books, because if all that knowledge just sits in your head, it’s just potential knowledge, it isn’t actual knowledge. You’ve got to get out there, you got to do it, you’ve got to take action on it.  

So, with that said, what is that thing that you can take action on right now? That’s the thing to focus on, that’s the thing to do. And pay attention, how after you do that action, how it changes how you feel.  

That’s it for me. Hope you enjoy this. Have an amazing weekend, and I’ll speak to you on Monday.