71. Weight Loss Isn’t an Emergency- How to Stop Stressing About the Scale

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger challenges the urgency often associated with weight loss and encourages a sustainable, long-term approach. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by quick-fix diets or societal pressure to lose weight fast, this episode is for you! Dr. Heimburger explores the importance of setting realistic goals, adopting mindful planning, and focusing on slow, steady progress rather than perfection. Learn how to manage stress, avoid burnout, and build habits that lead to lasting weight loss. Tune in for practical tips and a mindset shift that will help you stay consistent on your weight loss journey!

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This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher: www.ThePodcastTeacher.com.

Transcript

Welcome back to Weight Loss Made Simple. I’m your host, Dr. Stacy Heinberger, and today I want to talk about something that I heard a couple of years ago that has really helped me reframe the timeframe for my weight loss: Weight loss is not an emergency.

Now, I know it’s still early in the year, and there’s a lot of pressure to lose weight, right? We’re bombarded with all these messages—“Let’s fix it right now!” New year, new you! But I’m telling you, weight loss is not an emergency.

Treating it like one adds stress and frustration to the process, that makes it much more likely that we won’t follow through. So, it’s almost like it does the opposite. We try to create this urgency, but the only thing it urgently gonna make us do is quit.

Why Does Weight Loss Feel Overwhelming?

Let’s talk about why this urgency feels overwhelming and how we might be able to shift our mindset. Urgency is really ingrained in our society—there’s a lot of societal pressure. We live in a quick-moving, “fix-it-now,” instant gratification society. That’s just how it is.

We see the end results on social media, giving us a warped perspective of how long success takes—not just with weight loss, but with everything. We see successful people and assume they became “overnight successes.” We love that term, but we rarely acknowledge that they’ve likely been working hard for a long time.

And then, we start believing we need to do it right now. We’re only seeing the outcome or not seeing the work that went into it, so we have the whole side but then all the messaging reinforces that so everyone’s weight loss marketing is this quick fix, “lose 10 pounds today!” or “drop two dress sizes in a month!” But these intense quick-fix methods only lead to frustration.

As you know—if you’ve been listening to me—when we have big feelings like frustration and overwhelm, they often lead to overeating. Emotional eating is a real thing. And it’s not just a sad feeling, it can be any feeling and then we start creating, potentially, really unsustainable habits.

For example, take the “cabbage soup diet.” Sure, you might lose 10 pounds, but can you eat cabbage soup forever? Absolutely not.

Sustainable Weight Loss: The Reality

It’s still early in the year, so I wanted to bring up this episode because you might have been sticking to an unsustainable habit this whole time. But we have to ask ourselves: What’s actually normal when it comes to weight loss?

Sustainable weight loss is only about 0.5 to 2 pounds per week. And on top of that, weight loss is not linear. I could follow the exact same calorie deficit, eat the same macros, and one week I might lose 2 pounds, while the next week I lose nothing.

That’s how weight loss works—it’s not a steady 2-pound drop every single week. Instead, we can to average between 0.5 to 2 pounds per week over time.

And while I’m a big proponent of GLP-1 medications, I think we sometimes hear stories of people losing 20 pounds in a week, or 20 pounds in a month, which can really warp our perception of what’s normal. Even with weight loss medications, the goal should still be an average of 0.5 to 2 pounds per week. If we are really trying to fix something that we have been struggling with for a long time, losing.

Now, think about this: Would you rather lose 10 pounds quickly, only to gain it all back? Or lose 2 pounds a month and keep it off forever? Which one do we really want?

We are trying to build sustainable habits to make choices that are easy or easy that we can do that don’t dip into deprivation so our brain doesn’t freak out. We want to find foods that serve us that we enjoy. 

We want to find movement that feels good that we enjoy and we need to learn how to manage our stress and our other emotions so that or just feel and process our emotions so we don’t feel like we need to eat to make them go away.

Using Time as a Friend

I encourage you to use time as a friend. We’re not rushing. This is a long-term investment in our health and happiness. We do always say its not about perfection, progress is not perfection, that is 100% true, if we can make 1 small change per week, and stay with it, that’s 52 changes per year–and if those small wins don't feel like a lot, but it absolutely adds up.

Slow, steady weight loss is far more likely to result in long-term success compared to rapid weight loss and that’s because slow weight loss means we’re adopting sustainable habits over time.

When you start feeling overwhelmed—when you feel like it’s not happening fast enough or you’re getting super discouraged because the scale only dropped 0.5. I want you to take a step back and just breathe for a minute.

We are not falling behind.

When we start to feel like we’re falling behind, that frustration can be paralyzing. When we are spinning in frustration, we are literally stuck in place, we are not moving forward, so our weight-loss is going to be stuck, whatever else we are trying to do--we are going to be stuck and we want to keep moving forward. When we start having thoughts that this isn't working fast enough, or this is not working. Even though if we look at the numbers, we've been averaging 0.5 pound per week, or a pound per month.

If we are averaging a down decline in some way thinking its not working does not serve us at all because its not true and all it does is put us into a spin of frustration and overwhelm leading us not to continue our forward progress. We want to focus on being consistent, making choices that serve us, we are not trying to be perfect.

Progress, Not Perfection

Now, I want to clarify something about perfection.

A lot of people misunderstand when I say, “I want you to be perfect.” I want you to create a reasonable, realistic food plan for the day, and then I want you to execute it perfectly.

We want to focus on being consistent, making choices that we are not trying to be perfect now. Note that we are together some pretty perfect days but here’s where I see the problem with perfection and this is where I think there’s some confusion when I say I want you to be perfect. I want you to have created a reasonably realistic food plan for the day and then I want you to perfectly execute it so they’re perfection is the execution of something that is reasonably realistic and you can stick to so if I make a food plan for the day that is eat one meal and it’s a salad that is not reasonable or realistic for me, my hunger, my activity level, that’s not not sustainable. I can’t do that forever. I’m not looking for perfection that was flawed and set up for failure from the beginning. So I think what I’ll do next week is I’ll talk about protocols and food plans and how to make sure we’re really setting ourselves up for success.

But for now if I have set myself up with a reasonable food plan, I want to stick to that more days than not. So when I say it’s about progress, not perfection, that doesn’t mean every day I cannot follow my food plan and that’s progress. My food plan progress is in realizing I don’t need to follow anyone else’s rules when I make my food plan. I don’t need to look at anyone else’s food plan and make it look like theirs. The progress is in the compassionate realization that my food plan is for me and it’s for whatever is happening for me that day or that week, it is taking that caring time to make sure I can execute that plan to perfection and it’s about following my plan.

And then if I have a minute where I don’t follow my plan, I do the work to figure out why I didn’t follow it. I’m gonna learn from that. That's progress right? If I'm not perfect in my plan, the progress is I take a minute and figure out why, I don’t just say “oh well.” I need to figure out why I did not follow my plan, was it unrealistic did I forget about an obstacle, did i forget we were supposed to eat with someone did i forget it was book club, what did i forget, i need to learn from any mistake on my food plan, I need to learn what food plan works for me.

Weight Loss is Not an Emergency

I need to execute that more than none of that is a fast fix. Did any of that sound fast? It is now, weight loss is not an emergency, it is small changes overtime that add up. What we see when everyone’s like the end took over a year it was perfect, but it was progress and I never stopped and kept making small consistent and now here two years later, its been 100 pounds, and now I have sustainable habits that will will carry me throughout and if there’s a back slide, if something happens, I have taken the time to learn all the tools to learn from my mistakes so that maybe it won’t take me six months to get back on track like it did after my surgery maybe I’ll be able to bounce back faster.

we have to learn. We have to be mindful. We have to celebrate small wins. We have to reframe our setbacks. I would love to say I didn’t fully panic when I started gaining weight after my surgery but I have to just keep reminding myself there is a season for everything. My body went through a lot. That was a traumatic experience for my body to have that big of a surgery and my body put on some weight in response. My cortisol was up, that is what happened. It made me learn more about cortisol. It helped me really tune in to managing my stress so that was a learning experience so that I could implement new habits to sustain me moving forward, when we are frustrated because we think these things should happen overnight and they don’t, it is not an encouraging feeling to keep going, feeling like it’s failing or it’s not working or it’s not happening fast enough. All of those frustrating feelings are not motivating. Tough love is not motivating. None of that works.

We just have to take a look at what’s happening right now, make one small choice for the better and do that as many days as we can.

We don’t need to panic on the scale or rush through this process, sustainable change takes time. Slow and steady wins the race every time because we’re building consistent habits that will get us where we need to go. So if you’re feeling stressed and overwhelmed and frustrated, just remember it like a whirlwind or like a tornado, when you are wrapped up in that spiral of discontent or frustration of stress, you are not able to move forward at all.

We have to break that spiral and the way to do that is to take a deep breath, remind yourself there is no pressure to lose weight within a certain timeframe. If you’re setting a goal for weight loss, I love that for you but just make sure it’s realistic there are 52 weeks in a year and I’m talking to you the beginning of March, we’re less than 52, so if i say my goal to lose 100 pounds this year and I’ve only got 40 weeks left that is not realistic, that is gonna cause frustration, that is not fair. It’s just not a nice thing to do for myself. If I’ve got 40 weeks left and my goal is to lose 30 pounds, there we go, that’s a good one, somewhere between 20 and 40, great, love it.

Normal weight loss, half a pound to 2 pounds a week and that’s not gonna be every single week. Weight loss doesn’t work like that. We’re gonna lose lose lose stall, stall, stall, lose, lose, lose stall, stall stall stall gain stall but when you go back and look at your weight for the entire year, there will be a downward trend and that is what we are looking for and if you have been overweight for a long time, your body is gonna be a little resistant to keep up that weight because it feels safe, right where you are so it gets confused as to why you would want to change that so we’re sitting here 20 pounds 100 pounds overweight and we’ve been that way for a couple of years or more our brain is just like why are you trying to change anything, so keep our goals realistic keep our choices realistic make small changes that feel easy that don’t make you feel deprived that are sustainable and we’re gonna build those great habits and our goal is gonna be inevitable. We will reach it.

If you found that helpful. Please share with a friend that would be amazing until next time. Let’s just make small simple changes.