(Please note this is just a transcript of the podcast episode - I have not edited for errors :) )

​

Hi, welcome to the first episode of the mom like weight loss, podcast, this episode I'll be telling you a little bit about myself, so you can get to know me. Plus, I'll talk a bit about being a dietician, my views on weight loss, and then I'll go into some detail about what you need to be thinking about when we're talking about weight loss in general, and the importance of motivation. Make sure you stick around until the end because I'll be sharing the tip of the episode. It's something that I do with all of my clients when we start working together, so don't miss it.

 

All right, a little bit about me. So, Hi, I'm Laura, I'm a mom, a wife, a registered dietician, and a weight loss coach. I have a husband, our, and two children, my eldest is a girl, she's a little tiny version of me. And then we have bvF, who's our pandemic baby he was born at the beginning of the pandemic. But he is super chill, and he's obsessed with his big sister and he's just been a joy for us this past year of craziness. We have two cats, and yes, I am a crazy cat ladies so you'll definitely be getting some you know cat spam in your lives if you follow along with me.

 

As a dietitian, I have a little bit of a different background, I actually have two degrees, my first degree is in animal physiology with a lot of people think is hilarious, but I really do love animals, it was something I wanted to pursue, but I changed my mind and so after university I went and I worked in the not for profit world for a little bit while I decided what I wanted to do next. And I chose going back to school to become a dietitian, and that was mostly driven by my love of health. I love food, but mostly my desire to help people. And so I thought it was one of the best ways that I could put all of those things together into one.

 

So a little bit about, you know, what I've done in my past career before starting this business is, I started my work as a dietitian, in what we call the clinical world so I worked in the hospital setting for a number of years, I worked all over I worked in you know in the intensive care units I worked in cardiology in cancer care and long term care, and then after working in the hospital world for a little while, I chose to leave the hospital life, and I moved out and I took a job in outpatient clinic, and I worked at Cleveland Clinic, Canada, and I worked in their executive health programme doing nutrition assessments, And that is actually where I got my start in the weight loss world. There's a dietician there. Her name is Jacqueline Pritchard. She also runs a private practice working in weight loss, and I will link her Instagram accounts you can check her out in my show notes which you can find on my website, Laura Vermander.com/podcast. I'll put her information there. She's really, my mentor. She got me started in the world they have a weight loss programme there, and she really taught me the beginnings of weight loss and teaching me how to work with clients and so I worked in their weight loss, programme for a number of years, and then I got pregnant!  

 

I went off on that leave, and I became a mom, and I felt like it became a whole new version of myself when I became a mom, you know my mindset around what was important to me and to my husband and to us as a family, all changed, and we made the decision to move out of Toronto, which was crazy because I grew up there, and we moved to Collingwood which is two hours north of Toronto, it's a little small town. My parents live here so we are closer to family. It's very outdoorsy we've got lots of space we ski we swim in the lake we sail in the summers, but really it was also to support my dream of growing this business and giving us that flexibility. And along with that I changed my path a little bit, and I decided that I really wanted to focus on helping other moms, and I really just want to help moms to gain confidence and be their best self. And so I hope that we can do that together through this podcast, and that this provides you with a little bit of support and guidance, and hopefully some laughs along the way. And I'll probably have a cat with me as we do it all.

 

Okay, so next I'm just going to talk about, you know, my views on weight loss. And I think it's important to cover this off because I think you know, in the overreach of the weight loss industry and diet culture, is the fact that everyone has a different opinion, and it can seem very confusing and there's what I call like a lot of nutrition noise out there. And so I just want to put it out there, you know, my motto, and how I view things and so that you can learn a little bit more about you know where I'm coming from. When I'm gonna be talking about different topics as we move along through different episodes of this podcast. So the most important thing to me about ditching the diet culture, and helping you guys to end that overwhelm with the diet, weight loss industry is that it's important to me to help you simplify to, you know, this is how we keep it simple. This is how we put it into your life, your family, there is whereby big sustainability factor comes in, it must be sustainable. And, you know, whatever you do to take off, weight is generally what you have to do to keep the weight off. And so, I don't you know have a one size fits all strategy. We'll talk about all different types of ways that you can eat all different things that you can do to try and take weight off and just know that, you know, there's lots of different things that you can try and you know what works for your bestie might not work for you, and that is okay and I'm going to talk about all of it.

 

And the other important thing, I think has moms to discuss too is that, you know there's a lot of talk about, you know, body image, and how we feel about ourselves and society making us feel like we have to be a certain way, and after you know having a baby, we're gonna lose the baby weight and get back to our pre baby selves and that whole social media society, getting getting that pressure on us and I really struggled a little bit with, should I talk about weight loss should we frame it in a different way. And I really just want to say that I truly believe that you can love yourself, and want to lose weight to, and you can project, you know, a healthy attitude, for your children, and still have the goal of losing weight, I think that they don't need to be separate, they can go hand in hand together. If you want to lose weight, that is great if you want to listen to the podcast to just get, you know, learn more about nutrition and get some healthy tips and, you know, how to make better habits, then that's great too. Weight lost doesn't need to be the goal, but it's okay if it is.

 

Okay, so now let's move on to just some of the basic things that I want you to start thinking about when we're talking about weight loss and setting up your mindset in terms of how we're going to move forward in future episodes when we're talking about different strategies and things that the weight loss industry puts out for you and how we can kind of make them fit for us and again provide clarity for you guys. So the big one that you hear a lot about is calories, calories in versus calories out. It's not that simple. Obviously, there's a little bit of, you know, timing and quality over quantity. But, you know, we, I do talk about how keeping a food journal is an important part of losing weight, which I'll cover in a later episode. And so I do you talk about calories, but it's not to say you must count calories but it is something that I will talk about because it works for a lot of people in their journey.

 

The next thing that we always want to think about when we're talking about weight loss is vegetable. I mean I'm a dietitian guys didn't think I was going to get through a whole podcast and not talk about vegetables. So you're going to have to eat vegetables in order to lose weight, I'm sorry to say if you don't love vegetables, then we're going to figure out a way to make you love them.

 

On that same track, we'll move into, You know, carbohydrates, a lot of people feel like they're not going to be allowed to eat carbs in order to lose weight. So, I don't want you to be afraid of carbs if you want to eat bread, and lose weight. We can do that. And if you don't want to eat bread and lose weight, then that's cool too.

 

The other big one that I hear a lot about is exercise versus diet, and I'm sorry to say but you can't out exercise a bad diet, 80% of weight loss is generally from what you're eating, and 20% is from what you're doing for physical activity. And we can go in more detail later on about, you know, all the different watches and apps and estimating calories and eating before after exercise. But I just want you to know that, you know, it's much more what you're eating, and what you're doing on a day to day basis with your eating habits than it is about what you're doing activity wise activity is great, I love it. But really you can't act out exercise a bad diet.

 

The next thing that we think about when we're talking about the basics of weight loss is that scale, do you get on the scale, do you not get on the scale. And you can do both. You can just go by how your clothes fit, you can measure, measure your waist, you can just see how the trend goes over time. And there's no set rule about the scale being the only measure of success in your weight loss journey.

 

And along with that, I think it's important to address the idea of actually redefining what you consider your ideal body weight to be. And that mostly means that your best weight is the weight that you can stay at. Keep it off over the long term, and be happy and healthy. And the last thing is that I do not subscribe to, sheets for moms, it's crazy. We've got a lot going on. If you eat dessert drink that glass of wine, have a bag of chips. It's not going to derail you, it's part of real life, we just pick ourselves up, and we keep going forward and so it's really important that you keep that mindset. As you go through and we just need to give ourselves a little bit of grace, but I truly think as a mom, we're pretty hard on ourselves. I just want to say that I hope that I can you know help give you the strategies and tips and things that you can do to give yourself that grace, and to make new habits, so that you aren't living in that mindset that you're having a cheat day or that because you went to your best friend's birthday party and eat a slice of cake that you've ruined your whole diet I really hope that together we can work through that mindset, and move on from it and that helps us be our best selves.

 

Okay so now let's just go through my last topic for today's podcast is motivation and motivation is really important because you know it's the main thing that we talk about when we get started, in wanting to make a change or you know, losing weight or anything like that. So, one of the most important things that we talk about when we look at motivation is, what are motivators, you know, why do you want to achieve this goal that you've set for yourself. And so some of those are what we call intrinsic motivators so something that's inside you, and some of those are extrinsic motivators something that's outside of you. So for example you know you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you that you need to lose weight to improve your health, or you know you have this red dress and eat in your closet, and you really want to wear it. Those two are what we would consider extrinsic motivators so things that are kind of outside of yourself, that are motivating you to want to achieve your goal. But let's say you know you exercise every day because it gives you this nice, you know first of endorphins and gives you a sense of accomplishment, or you know, every day you have vegetables with your lunch because that feels good for you and gives you the energy that you need to go through the rest of your day. So those two things are intrinsic motivators so that's inside you, it's not you know an external thing outside of your world that's motivating you to make that choice for yourself.

 

Both of these different types of motivators matter, extrinsic motivators are good for you know getting you going, getting that ball rolling on you know what you want to achieve the little gentle nudge, and it helps you kind of achieve those short term goals. Feel good about that. And then that motivates you to keep going. But the intrinsic motivators those internal motivators, we need those so that we can continue on for the long term, you know, once we've had some small successes we need those internal motivators to keep us going. Internal motivators are little bit harder to come by. So, what I say is you know you just need to find it, identify it and then acknowledge it, things that can help you do that, are setting, short term small goals which we'll talk about more because I love goals and I love goal setting, but I love small goals I don't like big ones, keeping a journal, and acknowledging and celebrating your successes, I think you know we don't do that enough like let's celebrate a small success, let's set, you know, a goal. And then let's set something that we're going to do when we achieve it and celebrate ourselves.

 

This brings me into my tip of this episode. This is something that I do with every client when I start working with them so I want to do it together with you. So what I want you to do is I want you to think about what your goals are. So, is your goal that you want to eat healthier, is your goal that you want to lose X number of pounds. Whatever your goal may be because your goal, and then think about why do you want to achieve this goal. And I want you to list out. So, write it in your phone on a posted on a piece of paper in a journal, whatever, write out all the reasons why you want to achieve this goal. Once you've got that list so maybe it's, you know you've got that pair of jeans, you know you want to be able to run up the hill with your daughter at the park and not feel winded, whatever it is, write them all down, then I want you to just identify what each one is so is it an intrinsic motivator, or is it an extrinsic motivator, look at your list and try and make sure that you have at least one that is that intrinsic internal motivator. If you don't, maybe you just need to spend a little bit more time brainstorming about something that might go into that category. And that I want you to keep them somewhere where you can see them. Okay, so if it's on a post it, put it on your bathroom mirror on your phone. Perfect. Keep it somewhere that you can check on it and look back to it often, because we're going to use them again in the future.

 

Alright so today I talked a little bit about myself so you can get to know me, we talked a little bit about my perspective of weight loss, and some things that we should be keeping in mind when we're talking about losing weight, and we covered the different types of motivation, and so I've left you with that strategy to brainstorm of what your motivators are for achieving your goals. I've got lots of topic ideas for shows so stay tuned for everything from body image Stages of Change, meal plans, and why I don't like food journals busting nutrition myths, and so much more. I love feedback and ideas. So if you have a burning question, or something that you want me to cover, please let me know you can follow along and message me on Instagram @laurav.weightlosscoach and you can message me there. Alright so that's it. Let's get on with writing those motivators down.

​

​

Transcribed by https://otter.ai