63. Forgiving: Letting Go of the Past to Move Forward

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger dives into the power of self-forgiveness and how releasing guilt and regret can free you to make a fresh start in the new year. Learn how to let go of past mistakes, clear mental clutter, and embrace self-compassion to set the stage for mindful planning and achieving your weight loss goals. Discover actionable tips to break free from negative thought patterns and start 2025 with a clean slate. If you’re ready to move forward and create positive change, this episode is for you!

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Transcript

All right, guys, welcome back. The only way to move forward is to let go of what’s holding you back, and that starts with forgiving yourself—especially for the things that did not go as planned. And that can be a little harder than it sounds. So, I wanted to dive into forgiveness a little bit and how releasing some of the guilt and regret will really help us make a fresh start for next year. So, if you are ready to make 2025 an amazing year, this is definitely an episode for you. This is so important for personal growth, and it often gets overlooked. We did our assessment last week; we talked about how most people don’t do an assessment, but after that assessment, the next step would be forgiveness, and specifically about how to forgive ourselves for any mistakes or missed opportunities from last year. It can really just free us and let us move forward with clarity and peace.

So, if you’ve been holding onto guilt about falling short of last year’s goals, that’s totally normal, right? But it is holding you back. So, forgiveness is really an unnecessary step in moving forward. If we don’t release the baggage, it’ll block us from being our healthiest self.

OK, what is forgiveness, really? It’s not just forgetting. OK, forgetting and forgiveness are not the same. Forgetting at the core is about releasing yourself from the weight of these past mistakes, judgments, and regrets. So, this could be forgiving yourself for anything, right? For not sticking to a plan, for things that have held you back in the past. If you’ve started listening to your self-talk and it’s negative, you can forgive yourself for that. No matter what your weight on the scale is today, we can forgive everything that got us to that point. We have to sort of release this emotional baggage because it’s weighing us down emotionally, mentally, and sometimes physically. These non-forgivable events in our mind really just help with the negative thought patterns, and we want to get rid of that and release it and make space to grow. Holding onto guilt and regret will keep you stuck in the past. Letting go will free up space for new positive thoughts and goals. That’s why I wanted to do this episode before we get to goal-setting, because I think we need to just let it go. We need to free ourselves from any shame, guilt, or disappointment in ourselves that we have from the last year or years and really let ourselves start with a fresh, clean slate.

Self-critical voices run in a loop, OK? And if you’ve been listening to your talk, I’m sure it’s right. Forgiveness is the only thing that’s really gonna break that cycle and give you some mental freedom to focus on moving forward. This is how we clear some space, right? We open, like, that closet in our mind with all the past regrets and disappointments. We need to start clearing that closet out and envision this, like, beautiful, empty space where we get to fill it with our beautiful plans for next year. Self-compassion is how we do this. OK? It is OK. Everything is OK. Whatever got you to this point, it doesn’t matter anymore, right? We can argue with the past, but we will never win. Whatever has happened has happened. It’s done. We can’t change it. The "what ifs" and "I should’ve" are useless. They are just adding garbage to that full closet of shame and guilt and disappointment. And we want to empty that and free it and make it clean and open so that we can design the future of our dreams. And I know that sounds very corny. I’m, like, cringing a little when I’m saying it, but I’m a big visual person, and my clients always get these weird visuals from me. But I really do think that all of these past regrets that are holding us back are the equivalent of, like, this little space in our house where we’ve just collected all the garbage, and we kind of shut the door, and we only think about it when we’re sad, right? Or when we wanna be more disappointed. We, like, open the door and use all that garbage as evidence, like, “See, I should be disappointed in myself.” And I just think if we can clear that out—like, I feel my body getting lighter when I’m talking about clearing it out and creating an empty space. OK, then that empty space, we get to make it whatever we want. I think it’s the same thing as sort of decluttering your house. This is decluttering your brain. So, we wanna get rid of all of these past regrets, all of the shame. Everyone has this dirty closet in their brain, OK? Everyone has areas in their life where they feel guilty or disappointed or ashamed. That’s normal, and it’s fine, but it can really keep us stuck because we just replay them over and over again. And I thought we replay them the most when something else happens where we’re disappointed in ourselves. So, if I eat something I shouldn’t, I didn’t wanna eat, right? If I overeat, I go back to this dirty closet and I look at all this past evidence of, like, "See, look at all these other times she did this too. Look at all these other times you tried to lose weight and you couldn’t." And it’s like—that’s where all this ammunition for the shame spiral comes from is this closet of garbage that we carry around because we haven’t forgiven ourselves. Whatever has happened to have your health, weight, or your life where it is, we just—it’s OK. It’s done. It happened. We can’t change it. All we can do is move on from here.

Part of this is accepting imperfection. OK, nobody is perfect. Nobody is perfect. So, if we are having shame and guilt and disappointment because we didn’t do something perfectly, here is your doctor's note to immediately rid yourself of all of those. OK? Quickly clear them out. We are not supposed to be perfect; we are humans. Humans are imperfect because our brains are imperfect, and our life is not supposed to be perfect. We are supposed to have the full range of human emotions. Our life is, like, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes disappointing, sometimes elated, right? We get to experience all the emotions—that’s the human experience. And we do that with a very flawed brain, OK? And so everyone can interpret the world differently. That’s why sometimes people can be disappointed in our actions and we can be disappointed in other people’s actions because we’re all interpreting the world differently. What I’m suggesting is that we take whatever is holding us back, wherever, like, our brain has a tendency to go when it starts the same spiral, and find a way to forgive. We have to learn and grow from this. Whatever those challenges were that we didn’t do perfectly, it’s OK. Like, what was the lesson? We learned. Let’s move on.

The most effective way to let go of guilt is compassionate self-talk. You know this. I talk about it all the time. We have to start saying nice things to ourselves. One of the exercises that I like to do is, whatever you’re saying to yourself, imagine saying that to your best friend. Would you still talk the same to her? Or what about one of your kids? Would you say the same things you’re saying to yourself to them? Probably not. So anytime we hear "should’ve," right? "I should’ve done better. I should’ve done that. I should’ve stuck to that." Let’s, like, switch it to compassionate self-talk like, "Oh well, it didn’t work out last time, but maybe I can do it differently. It taught me not to do that." I actually love that one now: "I know what not to do." Right? A tuition of life that didn’t go as planned. OK, now I know what not to do. So, instead of saying, "I failed," "I didn’t meet my goal this time," "I learned it didn’t work right," I learned something that worked, some things that didn’t, and at least you’re trying. Do not forget to give yourself credit for trying. There are so many people that get so afraid of these feelings of guilt and regret and disappointment that they just stop trying new things. They stop trying to do anything better. They stop trying to grow and evolve into the next best version of themselves because they don’t like the negative feelings. We can feel those feelings, and we can also get to this compassionate place with ourselves where we can let go of a lot of them so they don’t just keep adding on and adding on like putting weights on your back. Like, let all the old ones go. The way our brains work, we will try and add new weight to our back as the year goes on, so let’s at least start clean. Start fresh.

One of the ways you can do this, and it’s a little bit, but it works for—it works. OK? If you can write a letter to yourself saying whatever you need to say to forgive yourself, right? It also works if you’re holding onto some disappointment that someone else did, right? What would they need to say or do for you to forgive them? That’s how we write this letter, right? What would I have to do or say to forgive myself for whatever the scale said this morning? What would so-and-so have to do or say for me to forgive them for this hurt that I’ve been carrying around? And we can write them a letter, whatever we think they would need to do or say. Write a letter to yourself from them. You write it. At the end of the day, all of these things—all the things we think we want other people to say or we want other people to do, other people to do for us to forgive them—that’s all just to make us feel better, and our feelings come from our thoughts. So we can do this whole thing without them. If I need someone to say, "I’m sorry I didn’t consider your feelings," I can write that to myself, like pretend it’s from them or "they didn’t consider your feelings, and that’s OK." I bet there’s times I do things and I don’t consider people’s feelings. I didn’t know to consider other people’s feelings, right? We forgive ourselves. We forgive the other people. We can start with a clean slate. Once we’ve written these letters, we can symbolically release them. We can have a bonfire in the backyard. We could throw them into the fireplace. We could tear them up, bury them in the ground. Whatever ceremony you would like to have, right? Physically releasing the letter will help your body complete the circle. It’ll help your brain truly release it, and it’ll help with this fresh start.

So, I want to challenge you. I want you to find one thing that is holding you back—one thing that you need to forgive yourself for or forgive someone else for—and over the next week, do whatever you need to do to let it go. OK? Whether you need to talk it out with someone, whether you need to write a letter, whether you need to journal about it, say it out loud to yourself, paint a picture, however you need to get it out of your brain and let it free into the world. This fresh start will be such a game-changer for you as we step into the new year, and we step into goal-setting. We do not want this baggage, this junk from the full closet, to hold us back. OK? We want to start free and fresh and light and ready to create something magical in 2025. You are worthy of a fresh start. This forgiveness is just about being kind to yourself. No one else is gonna forgive you for the things you’ve done to yourself. This is like an inside job. You just have to let it go. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what we do from here on and the steps we take to make change and the way we change talking to ourselves and the way we change talking about ourselves. This all starts with letting go of whatever is holding us back, and that’s forgiveness. Forgive yourself for whatever it was that got you to this point, whatever is holding you back, whatever your brain replays as evidence of not being good enough. Let’s try and let that go as we move into 2025.

All right, guys, I hope this has been a helpful episode. It’s a little heavy. I’m sorry about that. Kind of not really. I think we need to do it. We need to do this stuff, and then we will get started with amazing goal-setting, getting clarity of our purpose for 2025, maybe picking a word of the year, and then I will teach you how to set goals that are absolutely achievable. And we are gonna make 2025 the best year yet. All right, if this is helpful, please share it with a friend, and I will see you next week. Bye.