You’re ‘Weightproof’ When You Can Eat Anything, Overeat Guilt-free, Yet Don’t Actually Gain Any Fat. Here’s How.

Why Weight Loss Is A BAD Goal

Your goal should not be, “oh, I will kind of always struggle with weight loss and I just want to lose a few pounds now.” No, your goal should be “I will become the person who is naturally at my goal weight and never struggles and has freedom from food, doesn’t need to worry about what I’m going to eat, or care what I eat or what’s my next diet going to be.” This should be your goal. So you’re, what you should be solving for is how will I become this person?

I’m Maria Brilaki the founder of the Fitness Reloaded Habits Academy and the author of the best-selling “Surprisingly…Unstuck: The power of small healthy habits in a world addicted to instant results” that has already been read by over sixty thousand people.

In this course, I’m going to teach you how to go from being stuck to losing thirty pounds or more, keeping it off as a female leader who has a family and wants to have it all.

Well, first of all, let’s discuss, why should you listen to me? You should listen to me because I too used to have a weight problem and I was stuck. I did not know what to do because all I could see was doom and gloom.

Yet despite that, I figured out the way for me, OK? To lose weight, keep it off and never worry about my size again, which is really what we’re talking about here. Actually, what I have created for myself has allowed me to have freedom in my life that other people could not even imagine of having. And let me give you an example. A recent one, ok? So two weeks ago I received a big forty-five pound package from Greece. So originally I’m from Greece, I lived in the United States, my mom sent me a package and a big part of the package was food and a big part of that food was cookies, ok? So after the package came, I really like those cookies.

I spent about two days on the “cookie diet” — without worrying about my weight

That meant I was replacing my meals with just eating cookies and I really, really enjoyed that. And guess what? Never once did I worry about my weight. Also, guess what? I did not actually gain weight. My friend was like, “I don’t understand why you’re not obese.” Now obviously, I do not recommend that you go on the cookie diet, ok? But the point is that if you have a really good lifestyle, ok? Then you don’t worry about regaining the weight. And also, even though you might be doing splurges, like the one that I just mentioned, and it’s really nice to have the freedom to eat whatever you want and not worry that this will go directly to your hips or your belly or your thighs, and not feel guilty about any of it.

OK? So we’re not just talking about losing thirty pounds, forty pounds, fifty pounds, sixty pounds or whatever the number is for you.

We’re talking about having freedom: Gaining ultimate freedom from having weight loss as a problem in your life that you need to solve.

And definitely freedom from having weight loss be a chronic problem in your life that just never seems to get solved, ok? So this is exactly what we’re going to be doing in this course. And there are three things you need to know, ok? And I’m going to address them one by one. Whether you have thirty pounds or fifty pounds or seventy pounds or a hundred pounds, this process will work for you.

So let me tell you more about my story.

I did not start out being into health and fitness.

In fact, I was not really exercising as a child. The PE class was not my favorite one. I wasn’t really doing any sports extracurricular activities when I went to college. I would sometimes exercise, sometimes I wouldn’t. I wasn’t really paying that much attention to what I was eating. I was mostly focused on academics, so I did well. I got my degree in engineering, ok? Then applied to grad school. So I did really, really well on those applications. I got accepted by all the universities I applied to, including MIT and Stanford. I chose to go to Stanford. I did my graduate studies there.

I did my internships, and then I found myself having gained weight, ok? I had gained a significant amount of weight and I thought, “Ok, I do not want this. This is not what I want.” So I have to do something to go back and you know go be slim again. So I thought “I guess I have to go on a diet.” The only problem is the only people I know who have actually gone on a diet, were not successful, ok? So they were ranging from extreme examples like let’s say my aunt and my uncle who had at least seventy pounds to lose each one of them. And after many failed diets, they went to a weight loss clinic, ok? And they followed their program, they had a meal plan, they had to exercise multiple times a week in their facilities.

OK, so they were going there. They were doing all this work within nine months they were completely transformed, ok? And then I got to watch them through the next few years, regain all that weight back, and then actually become even bigger than what they used to be before they got started with this weight loss clinic, ok?

So there are those examples of people who get to lose a lot of weight, but then they regain it. And then there are other people who just lose a little bit of weight, ok? They lose a little bit of weight and then they get stuck because they give up.

By month 2 they’re feeling like they can’t do this anymore and they quit. So they never go, they never continue to keep on losing the weight. And usually what happens is that they also regain the little weight that they lost, ok? And at the end of the day, all of those people have this one thing in common, and that is guilt after eating food or guilt after overeating, ok? So every holiday season at the end of the holiday season, oh, we overate. OK, now we have to go on a diet like year after year after year after year. They’re worried about. “Oh yeah, I’m having some trouble to button my pants. I need to go on a diet again.” And that just, that cycle just keeps on going and going and going. And I didn’t want this for me.

I did not want it. I want it to be free of that. OK, like I tell my clients, there’s so many problems you can have in this world, weight loss does not need to be one of them. I know it’s not a very exciting way to think about it, but weight loss, really, you can cross it off. You don’t need to have the problem. You can get to your ideal weight, you can get to your goal weight and then figure out, and by that time you will have figured out your life in a certain way, if you do what I tell you to do, OK? So that you don’t need to worry about it again, ever, OK? But back then I had not developed a method just yet.

OK, so I thought, OK, if I do a diet, it doesn’t look good.

Because I don’t know anybody, I don’t know a single person who had a weight problem, went on a diet to address that problem, and now lives free.

No examples at least that I know of. I had no examples. So I asked myself, so who lives free? Who has this type of freedom? Who does not worry about their weight? And I thought there are two types of people who don’t worry about their weight, OK?

The first type of people is the people who are very naturally skinny.

You know, sometimes it also tall, those people who just don’t seem to gain any weight no matter what they eat, ok? Those people have really good genetics. Now, I knew I was I was one of them because if I were one of them, I would have never had a weight problem to start with. OK? So genetics that, that was not me.

Now, the second type of people who also did not have a weight problem were…

The people who seemed like they always were into health and fitness, OK? And usually they started being at the very least into exercise since they were kids. And then they were eating accordingly. And then this is who they were. It was who they were, doing all the right things, all the healthy things, and not feeling that any of those things were chores, but just doing them because this was who they were.

Now, the problem was, I was not one of them either, because I did not grow up this way and I could not change the past, to go have a different childhood, so that I would grow up to be one of them. So what was I to do? They did give me a clue. And the clue was, check this out. Those people, their identity is that they are the types of people who do all the healthy things, ok? The other people, the chronic dieter people, their identity is we are the type of people who have a weight problem, OK? And we always struggle with weight and we’re going to try a lot of different strategies to solve our weight problem. Well, we’re not really the people who will enjoy making better meals, who will enjoy exercising consistently, and who will enjoy all those behaviors that will make us slim and get us to stay slim.

So I thought, OK, I have a clue here. I have a clue, even though it does look very bleak. Because I don’t know of anybody who had a weight problem and solved it and got freedom. And I have a clue and the clue is the identity and the habits. So I decided I would make this a priority because I figured out that what is really important in my life is for me to live a long and healthy life.

I thought to myself, why do I want for my future? And I thought, when I’m old, I want to be a kickass grandma. And I want to be in really good health and live a really long life, and that is important to me.

So if that is important to me, and this is what I want to get and this is the grandma I want to be, and this is exactly how I was thinking.

This is a grandma I want to be then why do I need to do today? And what I decided to do was to study habits. And that was actually brilliant. Why? Because when you go ahead and create the right habits, then what happens with habits and why they’re so powerful, is that they make the right behaviors, they put them on autopilot, ok? So you just do them without really thinking about them. So let’s say if you were to take exercise as an example, if exercise is not your habit, it will be a struggle, you might even have to debate it with yourself about to do it or not to do it.

But if exercise is a habit, then you will crave it. You will do it because you crave it. This is the power of habit. That means that if you have bad habits, then this is what you will crave. And if you have good habits, also this is what you will crave.

So habits get formed all the time. The question is what balance of habits do you have? And those habits, do those habits help you get to your goal or do they oppose your goal? But if you could just figure out how to create the habits that you want, then you would get to your goal, ok? Because ultimately weight loss is the result of you doing a number of different behaviors, ok? That ranges from eating, cooking, how you think, which will discuss in a later video, exercise, all of those behaviors affect your weight, ok?

So if you were to create the habits that help you lose weight, ok? And this is what you would do without even thinking about it and weight loss would become very, very, very, very, very easy because you wouldn’t have to think about it, it would just happen, ok? And that is freedom. This is exactly what I wanted.

It’s like when you drive a car in the beginning, when you learn how to drive a car, you have to think about everything, ok? You have to think about how to turn the wheel, when to press the gas, the brake. If you were learning manual, you have to know how to change the gears. But then once you learn how to drive and it becomes a habit and you don’t have to think about it and that is freedom.

This is the exact freedom that I wanted. I wanted freedom from thinking about weight, freedom from debating with myself about doing all the healthy things. I wanted to be the type of person who just naturally does all those things. I didn’t know how. I really did not know how because I was not one of those people. But I knew that unless I were to get to that level, I would never succeed. And now would then be forced to join the people in the chronic dieter bucket, ok? Because unless you become that person who wants to do all those healthy things, then whatever you do, you will do it for a little while, and that might give you some results, but then eventually you will stop doing it, and then we all know what happens, ok?

And also, unless you make a behavior into habit, a habit that you just want to do, and it just comes out naturally, it will always be a struggle.

You will always have to think about it, ok? Well, if it becomes a habit, you don’t have to think about it! You just do it, ok? That can be your choice of breakfast, what you eat for lunch, when you cook, your meal planning, your grocery shopping, the choices you make at restaurants, all sorts of things affect your weight. If only you could create the right habits, you could just go there because there’s no other way.

So that was a game changer for me. And once I had this realization, I trained together with Stanford Professor B.J. Fogg, ok? Who is an expert in habits, and I finally understood why I had tried so many times different habits like exercise, for instance. And it never stuck, ok? I understood also why my healthy eating endeavors were so short-lived and also why they didn’t stay. Today in this video, I’m going to share with you the things you need to do to make sure that your brain is actually wiring the habit, because if you don’t wire the habit, it’s just a matter of time until whatever endeavor you’re into will come to an end and the results are going to be mediocre.

And I don’t want for you to be disappointed. I want you to be free of having to think about weight all the time. And if you want to be truly free, then you have to create those right habits that make you do all the right things without you thinking about it. How does this sound?

So let’s talk about why people do not create habits, ok? I love the fact that most people do not discuss what you need to do to create habits. I mean, that is not what is discussed. People discuss about what to eat to lose weight, they might discuss about the best workout program. No, is it high-intensity training? Those are the things that people like to talk about. Nobody talks about how to rewire your brain, to make your brain wire those habits so those behaviors actually stick.

OK, because that’s what we’re after. We’re after creating healthy behaviors that will stay with us. The first reason that this doesn’t happen, is that people have this expectation that they need to rely on willpower to lose weight, ok? So if you want to do something that feels hard because you think it has to be hard for it to be effective, then what people do not know is that you’re actually giving negative reinforcement to your brain and your brain will not wire the habits. No matter how many times you repeat the behavior, because people think I’ll just stick to it, you know, I’ll just make myself do it over and over and over again, the behavior will not stick as long as you give it negative reinforcement.

So if you force yourself into shape, if you force yourself into a restrictive diet, then the clues you’re giving to your brain is that this thing sucks and your brain is like, “I’m not making this into a habit. In fact, I will do everything in my power to make you not do this thing that sucks,” ok? So brains react to celebration. You need to celebrate and it has to be easy. It has to feel something that you look forward to. “What do you mean, Maria? I will look forward to losing weight?” Yes, you will look forward to lose weight. This can actually happen. You can look forward to each one of the behaviors that will help you lose weight. And as you look forward, and they don’t have to be big behaviors, they can be really small behaviors.

OK? As you look forward to those small behaviors, your brain is like, “yeah, I want you to do more of those things that make you feel good.” So you go ahead and wire those habits. OK, let me give you some different examples. For instance, let’s say all your friends are having a glass of wine and you decide to have a glass of wine too because you want to have that sense of belonging. Sense of belonging is positive reinforcement. So your brain is like “habit!” Every time you are with your friends and your friends have a glass of wine, you will also just naturally pour yourself a glass because positive reinforcement, I want to get that sense of belonging. OK? Another example. You eat chocolate, chocolate taste good, pleasure. OK?

So your brain is like, boom, “I’m going to wire this habit because I want you to get that positive reinforcement of pleasure.” Pleasure is good. Diet, now you have to go on a diet and you have to eat chicken with salad for the fifth consecutive time. And your brain is like, “that sucks, that sucks.” And you’re thinking, this sucks. You don’t feel like eating it. But this is what’s on your meal plan you have to eat bland foods again. So your brain is like, “I do not wire this habit. You are not the person who will be eating chicken with salad.”

OK? So you see how that works. Now you might be wondering, hey, how do I make myself look forward to doing those behaviors? Because right now they might sound unappealing. OK? And if that is you, let’s discuss a little bit more. First of all, people think they have to do unappealing things. What if you actually had to do appealing things to lose weight? “Oh Maria, but there’s nothing appealing I want to do that will have me lose weight! All the appealing stuff I want to do, have me gain weight, they don’t help me lose weight.” OK? That is not true.

It’s not true. It’s a story you’re telling to yourself, ok? I’m pretty sure there are things that are appealing to you right now and you just don’t have them top of mind. And if I were to start talking to you about meals, for instance, that actually will help you lose weight and maybe you have tried or have not tried those meals, maybe you have never thought that those meals will actually help you lose weight, yo’re like “oh, that’s interesting. Oh, I would like to try that. Yeah, that’s interesting.” You can find a lot of those things. And again, I want to ask you, if you were to start losing weight today by doing something that’s appealing to you, what would you do? Now maybe you’d go for a walk. Now, you might start thinking, “but Maria going for a walk will not make me lose fifty pounds!” Yes, going for one walk today will not help you lose fifty pounds.

But if you are the type of person who eats healthy and moves, ok, regularly, then chances are you will be at a lower weight than what you are right now, ok? And you will not be risking to regain that weight because you are the type of person who likes to go for a walk. So since we started talking about a walk, if you do like, if you like going for walks and it can be just five minutes, go ahead and go for a walk. There you go. Something appealing that you want to do. And if it’s not appealing, it’s not because the walk itself is not appealing, ok? It’s because you are talking yourself out of it. Which we will discuss later, but you’re talking yourself out of it by judging it as too small.

OK? And as soon as you start judging, you give yourself negative reinforcement. Now, that’s negative reinforcement. Now, your brain does not want to wire this habit. So if you go out and walk and all you can think is “yeah, it’s not going to make me, what am I even doing? This will not make me any, any, any, any thinner. It will not make me any thinner, ok? It’s just a small walk.” If that’s what you’re thinking, then your brain is not wiring any habit. You will not be the person who suddenly craves to go for a walk. You will not get there because you’re judging yourself. So what are the conclusions so far?

Conclusion number one, if you rely on willpower, if you come up with the plan to lose weight, that relies on willpower, then you put yourself in the chronic dieter bucket. You will not succeed. You need to focus on things that your brain will want to wire into habits, ok? And your brain wants to wire behaviors into habits when it gets positive reinforcement. So weight loss has to feel good. And if you’re trying to lose weight in a way that feels bad, then your brain is not going to collaborate with you. It will not wire any habits, and that means you will either give up or if you manage just stick it through and lose a lot of weight, you will regain it because no habits will have been built.

If your starting strategy is to go on a restrictive diet or an excessive exercise program to lose weight, this is not going to work very well for you, ok? You’re going to get to the chronic dieter bucket. But let’s say that you don’t want to get into the chronic dieter bucket and you indeed have the best of intentions to create habits, ok? Many people are like this. They’re thinking, you know, “I’m going to maybe, you know, if I were to start this type of exercise, maybe if I were to start going to my barre classes, maybe I’m going to like this and then the behavior will stick.

OK? And or maybe if I were to do this diet, maybe if I were to do low carb well, maybe if I were to stop eating gluten or maybe if I were to stop eating dairy or maybe if I were to just eat less, ok? Then maybe I would learn to eat less. You know, maybe that habit will stay with me. I don’t really know.”

So this is the haphazard strategy, the spaghetti strategy that I throw spaghetti on the wall to see what is going to stick. But it doesn’t have to be this way, ok? Because you can know for a fact if what you’re doing will stick, or will not stick. And that has to do with whether you’re liking it or not liking it, ok? And if you’re like, oh, OK, how will I like it? Listen, you have two options here for you to do things you like so that you can create the habits and go ahead and lose weight and never worry about your weight again.

OK? Option number one, you make the behavior really small and if the behavior is small, then you have no reason to dislike it. OK? So if you were to change part of your breakfast, ok? Let’s say you include a fruit, ok? Or you include a salad with your lunch. OK, if you were to make a small behavior like this, your brain will really offer no resistance unless you start judging it. OK? So one way for you to go ahead and do things that are appealing is to start out with small behaviors. OK? This is exactly what I talked about in my book. It works really, really well. And it is actually what I did back in the day to change my habits. Now, the second way, if you don’t want to start out with really small behaviors, nothing bad will happen by you doing small, healthy things for yourself.

Only good things can happen from that. And if you choose not to do them, that’s on you. OK? Option number two is you choose to go bigger, oK? You don’t start out with small behaviors, you start with big behaviors. Now you can go ahead and do that but your brain will offer resistance. It will start giving you a myriad of excuses about why this is not the right time, why you cannnot do it today. Oh, you had a difficult day and you deserve to eat the whole ice cream can, you have to deal with a lot of mine dram. OK?

And this is something that we address in the Fitness Reloaded program. So to give you your options here, that if you are going for bigger behaviors, then you will have to encounter a lot of mind drama, and you have to be ready for that, because if you let your mind drama overpower you, then that will create a negative reinforcement to your brain and no habits will be built. OK? So point here. You can absolutely lose as much weight as you want to lose, ok?

And if you want to go a little bit more slowly, you can start creating small healthy habits today, ok? So you have no excuse to not start doing that. You really have no excuse. I want to challenge you today, right now to think “what is one healthy thing that I can do that will help me lose weight today?” And then I want you to think about that tomorrow as well. I want you to make a habit of thinking about “what is one, small, healthy thing I can do for myself today?” How about you create the habit? Let’s say after I wake up, I ask myself “what is one small healthy thing I can do for myself today?” The second option is to do bigger things, for that option to be successful and not put you on the chronic dieter bucket. First of all, you have to choose things that are appealing to you, ok?

So if let’s say you really like eating pasta, don’t go do low carb, like that’s not going to work. OK? So if it’s an obvious mismatch, don’t pick a method that is clearly not made for you, OK? So pick something that sounds like, “hmm, you know, that sounds interesting. I can imagine myself living this way.” OK, so if you want to go bigger, think about “how do I imagine myself living? If I were this person with this new identity and I want to like those things, those healthy behaviors, how do I imagine myself living my life?”

OK? And that is your property. OK, that is your imagination. It’s your property. You don’t, your blueprint, the blueprint you create in your head, that does not have to match anybody else’s. OK? So if your friend found great success doing keto, you don’t have to imagine yourself trying to do keto if that sounds unappealing, like completely unappealing, don’t aim for things that are unappealing. OK? So let me give you an easy example.

For example, I do not want to have the compulsion to eat when I’m out for dinner. What that means is, that after everybody has eaten, I don’t feel like I have to, let’s say finish everything that’s on my plate or I have to keep eating the leftover appetizers if I’m no longer hungry. This is a habit. It’s a habit, and it’s a habit to not have the desire to overeat.

OK? How does that sound? Appealing. Yes, so appealing. So if you choose bigger behaviors that will give you mind drama that you have to address and we will discuss in this program how to address your mind so that you make it your friend and your brain starts wiring those habits, ok? Your mind, the moment you start overeating will use this as evidence that you’re failing, oK? And that you’re being bad. And it will give you feelings of guilt that might also lead to further overeating. And the cycle is bad. I want you out of that cycle.

So to sum up, if you want to lose 30 pounds or more and keep them off, you have to change your identity, this should be your goal. Your goal should not be. “Oh, I will kind of always struggle with weight loss, and I’m just going to lose a few pounds now.” No, your goal should be “I will become the person who is naturally at my goal weight and never struggles and has freedom from food, doesn’t need to worry about what I’m going to eat, or care what I ate or what my next diet is going to be.”

This should be your goal. So you’re what you should be solving for is “how will I become this person?” Now going into your homework, “what is one small healthy behavior I can start doing today that will help me lose weight?” Notice, your mind might start out already. Oh, “but it doesn’t matter if I start doing something that’s more, this will never lead anywhere” or “I need to know all the steps before I start doing something healthy,” ok? That is completely irrational and it’s completely irrational.

If you do something healthy, you’ll be better off than not doing it and you know it. OK? If you let your brain tell you lies and you pretend that you believe your brain, that’s on you. Take responsibility, ok? So let me know what is this one healthy behavior? And in the meantime, in the next video, we are going to talk about what you should be eating to lose 30 pounds or more as a female leader who has a family and wants it all, ok? So we’ll address that very soon. For now, think about your new healthy behavior.