Episode 122 | How to Make Weight Loss Your #1 Priority

A lot of people who haven’t lost weight for the last time wonder what it is that’s holding them back.

Most of the time, the answer is that they just haven’t made it a true priority in their life.

And the truth is, If you want to lose weight for the last time, it has to be your #1 priority. Every day. Now obviously I’m not saying you need to stop looking after your family and kids, but it has to be up there right after that at the top. If it’s not been up there on a daily freakin’ basis for at least 6 months, this is what needs to change.

So if you haven’t actually considered what your real priorities are, and if you’re just kinda letting life happen to you without taking charge of your schedule, then you’re in the right place. This isn’t your fault and it’s not about blaming yourself for that. In fact, society almost sets us up to not have priorities we commit to long term. That’s why I’m going to give you the tools to help you prioritize weight loss and finally reach your forever weight.

What is a priority?

A priority is something that is considered more important than other matters. A lot of us don’t even know in the first place what our priorities are or what we want them to be. It is so easy to just let life happen to us and to fill our days with other people’s priorities. 

If you don’t decide ahead of time what your priorities are, your life will feel like it’s happening to you and like you have no control. There’s nothing bad about that, but is it how you really want to live your life? Our culture is set up this way because there are a lot of people that know they will benefit if you always say ‘yes’ to them. They love that you don’t really have that clear priority. 

So ask yourself just out of curiosity (not to beat yourself up), are you the one that is creating your life? Treat this as an awakening exercise and not at all intended to create shame.

How to Decide your Priorities

Let me start off with my own example. My priority this year is to serve 200 Yummy Mummies and be fully committed to enhancing this community. 

Trust me in that once you identify your priority for the year, you will really not want to fall through on it.

So let’s decide right now and allow yourself to want it. I believe that desires are planted within you for a reason - ignoring them is gonna create so many more problems than just listening to them. So listen to your true desires and decide what it is you so badly want deep down. If you had just this one thing, your life would be MWAH (chef’s kiss). What is it? Don’t lie to me! If you had to give me an answer, what would it be? 

Naming it doesn't mean you have to get rid of intentions around other things in your life, like going to book club or cultivating friendships. Just because my priority is getting 200 Yum Mums over the finish line to losing weight for the last time, doesn’t mean I’m not interested in game nights with my kids. It just means that when push comes to shove, I choose my priority. If there’s a choice between watching The Morning Show or serving my clients, I serve my clients.

So what is your one priority going to be?  For a lot of people in the Yummy Mummy community, it’s to lose weight for the last time.

Shiny Object Syndrome

The dreaded SOS as I like to call it. 

Usually around a month or so after you decide on your priority, your brain starts wandering.

For me, it was filled with visions of investing in real estate, along with around 72 different ideas each day. As much as I’d love to engage with these thoughts, I know this isn’t for 2023 Laura. It’s maybe a 2024 Laura thing. And that’s fine, because I already identified my priority for the year: my community. So when these things crop up, I simply park them in my parking lot to free up space in my head for things that serve my main priority. 

It’s so important to notice when your brain wants to play ‘shiny object syndrome’ with you after you choose your priority. It's part of the course. Your brain is gonna want to talk you out of that priority and talk you into a new one. That's why I recommend you pick one priority for the year because it makes it easy to decide and not slip into this syndrome. 

Your brain will try to negotiate what you've already decided. It’s so easy to succumb to that because ultimately, your priority is gonna get boring. But the people who are the most successful in habit change have a willingness to be bored. Yes it’s fun in the beginning when you get that hit from seeing a lower number on the scale. But what about when you hit maintenance and you don’t get that any more? You need to be willing to be bored to keep your priority in place. You have to be willing to do your priority over the other shiny objects that are thrown at us every single day. Shut that sh*t down!

The Eisenhower Matrix

So I want to make it easy for y’all to prioritize.

One of the best tools to help you learn about your behavior and the way you spend your time is what’s known as the Eisenhower Matrix.

You can find more about how this works by watching this quick vid.

Put simply, there are 4 quadrants in the Eisenhower Matrix, which looks like this:

The point is, all of your activities go into one of these four quadrants.

So I want you to consider, where does losing weight for the last time go? 

The answer is In the upper right hand quadrant, important but not urgent.

Some of you are probably thinking omg but it’s the most urgent thing in my entire life.

But not when it comes to the day to day activities that you need to do. They are important, but not urgent. So you simply need to schedule a time each day that you’ll commit to it (this doesn’t have to be hours btw!)

The people that spend the most time doing things that are important but not urgent, are the most successful people.

Activities I recommend are things like journaling every single day, for example. Whatever the priority is, the activities that will get you to achieve the result that you want, will be in the ‘important but not urgent’ category. This is where you should be spending your time.

Of course, there are genuinely things that come up in the ‘important and urgent’ quadrant like when you have to pick your sick kid up from school. But a lot of things we think are urgent, are actually not. People can wait 24 hrs for a response from you if it’s not life or death. 

It's more urgent for you to do your priority, not someone else’s. Yes your brain wants the dopamine hit from checking things off but I want to encourage you to be living in the land of ‘important but not urgent’ and doing the activities on a daily basis that don’t give you that big freakin’ hit.

So start to notice where you're spending the most time in terms of these 4 quadrants.

And I am by no means perfect at this, but what it does is it gives us a guiding light. It’s not another thing we use to beat ourselves up against. We just have to use it as a way to learn about our behavior and the way we spend our time - think of it as an awareness tool. 

For losing weight, the daily activities are very important. A couple weeks in, they may not feel urgent any more but they are.

That’s why setting the priority in the first place is so important because it makes it easy and clear for you. At the end of the day, when you’re deciding whether to scroll Insta or complete your weight loss journal, it means you’ll choose the latter because you know it’s your priority.

for the year and you stop choosing other freakin’ sh*t!

If you do everything at 20%, everything will be a half-ass attempt. And we don’t want that with weight loss. You want your dream body so you need to make it a priority.

This is why I highly encourage you to put yourself in a container where it’s a little easier to make it a priority, where you have somebody breathing down your neck to get you on a coaching call, and to do your Yummy Mummy homework. Put yourself in a space where it makes it easy to remember what your priority is and not have shiny object syndrome.

And on that note, you better get your booty over to the waitlist to work with me asap!

Once you’ve done that, we will email you with details of exactly how to apply (it’s super simple). You will be notified BEFORE the general public and therefore be able to apply before the general public. The April 2023 YMX will fill up. Applications are taken on a first come, first served basis. Once we are full, enrollment will close. So get to it, mama!

Have the best week ever!

Adios xo