80. 20 Simple Strategies to Reset and Refocus on Your Weight Loss

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger, SugarFree MD, shares 20 simple strategies to help you reset and refocus on your weight loss journey. Whether you're feeling burnt out, overwhelmed, or just need a mental break, these actionable tips will give you the tools to make weight loss feel easier and more aligned with your goals. From meal planning hacks and mindful eating to simple movement and sleep strategies, Dr. Stacy breaks down each reset so you can prioritize your health without the stress. Tune in to learn how small adjustments can lead to big results and keep you on track with your weight loss goals.

Here's a quick list of the 20 strategies:

1. Try a Meal Service for a Week
2. Focus on More Fiber for a Week
3. Track Protein for a Week
4. Walk Every Day for 7 Days
5. Drink Water Before Every Meal
6. Be Mindful for a Week
7. Take a Mini Break Every Hour
8. Plan Your Meals in Advance for One Week
9. Drop Snacking for a Week
10. Practice Gratitude for a Week
11. Try Intermittent Fasting for a Week
12. Cook All Your Meals for a Week
13. Go Without Processed Food for 7 Days
14. Try a Digital Detox for a Day or Weekend
15. Spend Time Outside Every Day
16. Declutter Your Kitchen or Pantry
17. Practice Deep Breathing or Meditation for 5 Minutes a Day
18. Plan One Healthy Treat Each Week
19. Try a New Exercise Routine for a Week
20. Focus on Sleep for a Week

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

Transcript

Hey everybody, if you’ve ever just been feeling a little burnt out and need a little reset, then this episode is for you. My name is Dr. Stacy Heimburger, SugarFree MD, and welcome back to Weight Loss Made Simple. This is episode number 80, and I’m going to talk about 20 simple strategies to just sort of reset and refocus on your weight loss.

What I find is a couple of different things can happen when we’re in a groove: we’re either in a groove and doing great, we’re seeing changes, and we’re solidifying habits, and they’re feeling really easy, or sometimes we’re not releasing the results and things start to feel really hard, and we start to get a little discouraged. And then one other thing is we can sort of get hyper-focused, and it can get to an unhealthy place where we’re getting just a little bit crazy about tracking and everything else. If you’re in the second camp, sometimes we just need a little mental reset.

OK, so this isn’t necessarily like everything is going great, and I’m going to change it up. This is like, I’m feeling really drained by this, and I don’t want health and weight loss to feel heavy and draining and overwhelming for you. I want it to feel easy. So I consider this more like we’re going to take a week break to just sort of reset and refocus and figure out how we can make this a little more simple for ourselves.

So, if we’re feeling a little overwhelmed and things are a little bit too hard, or we’re getting a little bit too crazy with our tracking and getting a little unhealthy, then here are some ways to take a reset. So, this is your episode! I’m not saying do all of these things. I’m going to give you 20 ideas. I just had to take a little break, a little reset. OK, the point of these is to just give ourselves a mental break for a week, always mindfully knowing, like, I’m not going face down in food for a week. I’m going to let go of one thing and focus on this other thing for a week, all within my health goals, so that I can kind of just feel a little bit better, a little more centered, a little more focused, like things are a little bit easier and a little bit more aligned. OK? I guess that’s what we can call it if you’re feeling a little out of alignment with your goals and they’re feeling heavy and hard. These are some tricks, a little refocus reset to get you back into alignment. OK, so let’s go through them.

Maybe we need a little break from meal planning. Maybe it’s feeling a little hard. Maybe we try a meal service for a week. OK, so maybe we just need to feel a little more taken care of. Maybe I see this being very useful if it’s a time where we have not been able to meal prep for ourselves, and maybe takeout just eased back in a little too much, and we’re feeling heavy and weighed down by our food choices. Maybe we just need a little reset. OK, maybe we need to go to the local health food store and just get a week’s worth of meals and kind of phone it in that way, where we’re still eating things that are healthy but we are not having to do too much. OK, so that’s why we could focus on one thing.

So, number two would be focus on more fiber for a week. So, what if for this week, I was just gonna really try and amp up my fiber? Add more fruits, veggies, legumes—whatever. Fiber is really good for us. So this is not like going face down at a buffet for a week, but instead of focusing on all of our macros or focusing on whatever calorie counter you’re using, if you’re using mine, just one thing. I’m just gonna focus on FIBER. OK, that leads to number three. Maybe we’re just gonna track protein for a week. OK, can we get 1g per pound of ideal body weight? So, that means if I want to weigh 130 pounds, I try and get 130g of protein. Sounds like a lot, but that is actually the upper end of the list of recommendations, but I promise you, with the research that’s come out, this is gonna be the new recommendation. So, this is what you’re gonna see everywhere: 1g of protein per pound of ideal body weight. So, that’s about 30g of protein plus per meal. So, can we just track our protein for a week?

Number four: can we just get moving a little bit? Can we walk every day for seven days? Just 20 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever. This might be, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed with my workout. I’m feeling sore all the time. It’s feeling really hard, and really like, I don’t feel good. Maybe I just need to take a little break and just walk every day instead. OK.

Number five: maybe I just need to play with my water goal this week. Can I just drink water before every meal? Like, I’m just gonna let go of some of the other stuff I’m tracking. Can I just drink one glass of water before every meal?

Number six: can I just be mindful for a week? Can I spend one week eating without a distraction—no TV, no phone, just sit and eat?

Number seven: can I do a little mini break reboot? I left my episode on mini breaks. If you haven’t listened to it, go back and listen to it. OK, five-minute break every hour. It will help reduce stress and keep you from burnout. Just a short little break. So, can I do a little reboot experiment this week?

Number eight: can I plan my meals in advance for one week? OK, just 30 minutes. Just plan them, even if takeout’s in the plan. Can I just plan for the week?

Number nine: can I just drop snacking for one week?

Number ten: can I just practice gratitude for a week? Just a little focus shift, right? Everything’s feeling heavy and overwhelming. Can I just practice gratitude for a week? One thing, just one little shift toward abundance. OK.

Number eleven: maybe I wanna give my body a break. Maybe I wanna try a little intermittent fasting this week—not drastically, but maybe it’s like this week, I’m gonna push breakfast an hour. This week, maybe I’m gonna make sure I really don’t eat after dinner this week.

Number twelve: we’re gonna cook all our meals for this week. Maybe that is a mental break for us, just to cook at home.

Number thirteen: go without processed food for seven days. Maybe we’re gonna try clean eating. I used to be one of my favorite magazines, Clean Eating Magazine.

Number fourteen: what about a digital detox for a day or a whole weekend? Take a break from social media for a night or a weekend or a week and see what that does to that feeling of being a little stuck.

Number fifteen: spend some time outside every day. Time in nature absolutely has been shown to reduce stress and improve your mental clarity. So maybe we just need a little bit of time outside.

Number sixteen: declutter just a little bit in the kitchen, maybe the pantry. Get rid of a couple of unhealthy foods. OK? They can actually reduce our food-related stress a lot, so that might be something helpful.

Number seventeen: practice deep breathing or meditation, just five minutes a day. So, maybe we just wake up and we spend five minutes taking some deep breaths in bed before we get up.

Number eighteen: plan one healthy treat each week. So, maybe that’s a healthy treat, like maybe we go get fresh berries. Maybe we... What else? What do you really love? What do you want to use as a treat? For me, it might be something like, I’m gonna get my coffee out this week. Maybe I’m gonna pick up coffee on my way to work. OK.

Number nineteen: what about a new exercise? Right? Maybe we’re feeling bored with our exercise, but we’re not feeling like it’s really hard, but we just wanna switch it up and try something new. Maybe we go to a different class. Maybe we go take a new yoga class. Maybe we take a dance class.

Number twenty: what about if we just focus on sleep for a week? I just coached my clients on this. I think we all stay up a little bit too late for whatever reason—whether it is doomscrolling on social media, whether... For me, I know, like, that’s kind of the time I get to hang out with my husband. We’ll watch a show together at night. But what if just one night a week we went to bed early? Just like, put the kids to bed and go to bed—like, no judgment as to what time that is. Like, it doesn’t need to be nine, it could be eight, it could be seven. I don’t care. When do you wanna go to bed? If you’re tired, go to bed. One day a week. I love the idea, if you’re on a Monday through Friday schedule, what about Wednesday? Just go to bed early on Wednesday. You will feel so good Thursday and Friday. Work will be so much easier because you will be well-rested, and then maybe when Friday comes, you will have the energy to do something fun. I know for me, like, it’s really hard to have energy to do fun things on the weekend if I haven’t been up late every night and work has been really busy. I love the idea of going to bed early. Well, if you know me, you know, I love to go to bed early all the time, but I don’t like to stay up very late. I get tired, and I like to go to sleep and I don’t apologize for it, but what if it went to bed even earlier one night a week? How good would that feel?

OK, so just 20 little strategies to hit the reset button and change things up a little bit. Again, I’m not saying, like, let’s forget all of our plans and goals and dreams and aspirations and go sit at a buffet and eat all week and not work out. I’m just saying, I know sometimes mentally it can be a little bit tough. And for me, if I overtrack—just that’s my personal story—I used to like, I will never use MyFitnessPal ever again. It made me super crazy, and I would get so discouraged when the scale would not keep up with what it was saying should be happening with my body. I didn’t like the disconnect. I didn’t like that the math was not working correctly, and it was really stressing me out. So I just didn’t track for a week. I still ate healthy and things that I normally would’ve eaten and tracked, like avocado toast and egg whites, whatever it was. And I finally saw the scale move, and I swear it was because I had less stress. Because I had taken this little piece of something I thought was doing good for me that was causing me so much stress, and I just let it go for a week. And then I just found a different way to track when I got back when I realized, like, oh, OK. That was feeling awful and heavy and not productive, but I can track in this other way that does feel good and easy. And so, that’s what I think this break should represent. It’s not that I’m saying just toss it all into the wind. I’m saying, is there something that just feels hard that maybe we can do differently? So if, like, I feel like I’m punishing myself with my exercise, can I just go for a walk and be outside in nature and do some walking meditation? And it’s like combining three or four of the things that I said. Can I do that for a week instead and sort of reenter and think about my exercise and think about moving my body? What do I want that to look like, and what do I want my muscle building to look like? Just get a little rest, centered, and refocused.

So, I want you to think of these ways. These are ways to refocus, not to just forget. OK? We always want to be mindful. So, these are ways to just reshape our mindfulness and stay in the game. OK, so if any of these were helpful, I would love to hear. Please share this with anyone you think might benefit, and I will talk to you guys next week. Bye!