Welcome to It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight, a podcast for women approaching 60 who have been successful at everything but reaching their weight loss goals. Tune in each week for tools and strategies to help you lose weight, create a strong body, and support a healthy mind. Here's your host, certified weight and life coach, Pat Beaupre Becker.

Hello to all you beautiful, amazing women, and this is an incredible experience for me just to even be sitting here because I am ageless, and I am starting something new. And you know, right now my brain is firing on all engines, and that's what It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight is going to teach you, how to use your brain to change the habits and self-sabotage that happened over the years so you can finally reach your goal weight and then stay there, and to give up food chatter forever.



So in this first episode of It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight, I'm going to tell you why I'm here, and if you've struggled with weight and food and self-image all your life, I'm going to share what I have learned from my clients, from my amazing teachers, and the scientific researchers who have been studying the brain and health and obesity just like crazy over the past 20 years. Because just because you're over 50 or just because you're over 60, I do not want you to be left behind.

So I'm going to tell you about my solution to weight loss and healthy living, even if you're over 50 or over 60. I'm going to share a little bit about who I am, my struggles, my wins, and over future episodes, the stories and successes of my clients. So let's get started. So I used to be 35 pounds heavier, a yo-yo dieter, I was up and down, I was size eight, size 10, size 12, size 14 and size 16, and here I am at 35 pounds lighter. And soon I'll be turning 65, and to be here with you, it's an amazing gift because my health, my brain and even my desire to teach and to share is inspired by the process that it took me to get exactly where I am.

So do you have boxes in every size clothes stored above the garage or in your storage bin for future planning, for losing weight and gaining weight? Or if you've given up before you even get started. Because sometimes we just don't want to face failure of starting another diet again. If that's you, welcome, because I used to give up on myself every day because every morning I started a new diet and sometimes I made it all the way to 10am and sometimes all the way to 7pm, and then I would just give in and I would overeat. And the internal chatter in my brain was filled with how I'm going to exercise and eat healthy tomorrow. I'm not going to have dessert, I'm not going to stay up late. And then I would watch exercise videos, like I wouldn't exercise, but I would watch exercise videos, and I was filling myself up with “I'm nots” and “I wills” and “I shoulds,” promise after promise, and failed over and over again.

And now I have learned that I need to take a holistic approach for my life, and so that's what my program is. It offers women a holistic approach so that you can finally deal with all your issues at food because if you are like me, you are at a certain age and you just don’t want to waste any more time, don't want to mess around anymore. So the difference between my coaching and others is I see it as really a holistic approach. We're looking at four prongs. Food, the brain, the body, and even our future. So how does this work? It actually - the proven solution that I have starts with a plan, and on future episodes, I'm going to show you how to create your own plan that's going to guarantee success if you follow it. Because that plan is going to address your food, and it's going to address your life. It addresses learning about our two brains, the limbic brain and the prefrontal cortex. And I like to think of it as the limbic brain is the primitive brain, and the prefrontal cortex is the more evolved part of our brain, it's how we create the future, it's how we are innovative and how we can plan and execute on that plan.

Because really, the most important thing I want for you to believe is that it's never too late, and for what? It's never too late to change your habits, it's never too late to make different choices. It's never too late to find physical and mental activities that challenge you. And you know, it's never too late to find relief of the stress, especially chronic stress. And it's never too late to lose weight, add a bit of exercise, and to learn about what's healthy for you and your body, and to learn about what makes you happy. Like, how do you love your life? How do you feel self-confident? Maybe you need to find some new friendships or deepen old friendships.

Remember, your present is really just the accumulation of all the life decisions that you've made, all the experiences that you've had up to today. And your future? Well, it's going to be all the moments you live from here until now, all the decisions you make from now until then. So with this four pronged approach, we're going to look at the mind, the body, and the spirit, and how they're all connected through food, through visualization. So on the food we're going to look at how much are you eating, what is the quality of what you're eating, how often are you eating. There are different diets or food plans that we can create specifically for you because we're going to see what does your body want. Is it high fat? Is it low fat? Is it intermittent fasting? There are many options that we have to choose from, but we have to figure out what's the best for you.

And then we want to look at the brain, the health of our brain, right? Everyone's talking about keeping a healthy brain, and so we're going to teach you practices, meditation practices, ways to de-stress. And then we're going to add movement to your life, we're going to look at your body, like how do you exercise if you don't like to exercise? Well, I've discovered this amazing new - well, it's not a new concept, it's actually an old concept, and it's called NEAT. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis, and we're going to look at how you can just add movements to your day because sitting has really been found to be very detrimental to our health. So it's how do we keep moving throughout the course of our day. And then of course adding exercise as well.

And then we look at the future, like who do you want to be? How do you want to be? And again, we're going to be using the techniques that are used by athletes when we're going to visualize our future, we're going to use our imagination, we're going to ask our future self to help inform us of how we're going to achieve what it is we want to achieve. So again, this is s a holistic approach for women who are ready for finally dealing with the issues of food, and again, we will start with a plan. So I'm also going to share exercises that we can use like re-sculpting our brain so that we can create new neural pathways using our own intention and attention. We're going to look at understanding how your food impacts your appetite, your mood, your energy, your stress, and again, your brain. And we want to really, crucially understand how the way you think impacts your choices and how the way you think impacts your mood and your energy and your stress levels and your brain. I'm telling you, that's why we have to be holistic, and that's what we're going to be doing on It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight.

So in future episodes, we're going to look at how you can just visualize and look at your life in a different way. So what do you have to do? You have to make a decision; you have to make a commitment. What you have to decide that you're going to believe what seems impossible, and we're going to show you how you can achieve the impossible. So I want to tell you a little bit about my story because really, it seems like my life is the impossible dream right now. And again, the present is just the accumulation of all the little decisions that I made and all the experiences that I've had. So how did I get here? 64 and loving life, loving to exercise, and I can't even believe I said that. I am really loving what loves me.

So a little bit about me is I was born in Brooklyn, in this fantastic large Irish Catholic family, and so many of them, this Irish Catholic family, unfortunately, so many of whom have passed away from emphysema, lung cancer, bone cancer, liver cancer. Hey, I know there's no guarantee about what happens to us and our health, but there's so much we do know. Yet sometimes like, even in my past, it just seemed impossible to change. So you know, my brother passed away years ago and after about a year after he died, I found myself incredibly depressed, deeply grieving and pretty much crying all the time, and I was basically eating all kinds of desserts and sugars and processed food and I was just gaining weight and feeling like I had no control. And at that point, I was introduced to a 12 step program that taught me about the addictive qualities of flour and sugar and alcohol. So I was really shocked and awed because it actually made sense to me. I could see - I didn't understand how I could possibly not eat sugar and flour, but when I did, I stopped eating it and the weight just started to fly off.

And then my emotional life became a bit more balanced. It seemed like when I was eating all this processed food I had no tolerance for stress. I was just like a mess. I mean, I remember sitting in church and just crying and being so embarrassed and humiliated, I would just cry in all these public places. And then slowly, after giving up all this processed food - I mean, it wasn't like I was totally balanced but I started adding meditation to my life, I started writing, and I started sticking with a food plan. And then all was going well, the weight just came off, I was feeling food, and then a friend of mine was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and I saw her go back to eating sugar because like, why give up pleasures when you're going to die, right? So I thought, "Wait a minute, do I want to give up like ice cream for the rest of my life? I mean, what if I died tomorrow? What difference does it make?" Then I decided, well, I didn't want to, so I was going to test the waters and I went back and I started just eating whatever it was that I want, and guess what, I slowly gained back the 30 pounds that I lost plus 10 more.

And here I was again, eating out of control, trying to stop and not being able to stop, and my stress levels were just off the charts. So at the same time I started reading all this latest research about the brain, the discovery of neural plasticity and our brain's ability to grow even into our 70s. That really fascinated me because I thought, "Here I am, giving the power of my choice to this inanimate object." Like, maybe it's a cookie, or maybe it's a fig, right? It's just something that I feel like I have no control over, and then I started to learn that I actually created these habits because there's a link between the reward center of my brain and food. And now also it's been discovered slowly over the years, we have this incredible full-blown obesity epidemic. So I started reading all these books about obesity and about all the studies, and I'm telling you, I've got a hundred of these books.

At the same time, I discovered the tools of life coaching and decided I want to change my career and become a life coach. And I started to understand the cause of my action. So I mean, my brain now is exploding every day with new information, new learnings at the same time that I'm feeling and I'm looking better than I ever have in my life. Because my experience today of being in my body and being in my brain is totally opposite to my experience of when I was a young woman. I was so insecure, I was so fearful. I was tearful all the time and I was just totally feeling unhappy and unloved. And now I realize, these were just a bunch of thought - well, I like to call thought errors. There's this brain, you know, it's like we have these thoughts and we believe these thoughts to be true, we believe these thoughts to be facts. And I thought, if I thought something, it had to be true.

But guess what? It doesn't mean that it's true just because I think it. It's a concept we'll go into a lot in future podcasts, but it's really important because my goal is going to be to teach you to greet your 60s and your 70s in good health, loving your life. And how? Little by little. Because again, as I said earlier, it's never too late to change your habits. It's never too late to make different choices. You can lose weight, you can find and add physical and mental activities to keep your brain sharp, to understand the causes of why you feel the way you do and why you do what you do.

So in the future episodes of It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight, I'm going to share those tools with you, I'm going to share what worked for me in particular, and what works for my clients. I'm going to tell you and share how they faced their urges and learned to change their desires for food that did not serve them. Because we have to find out what is the right kind of eating plan for you. Is it eating two meals? Is it eating three meals? Because everybody is different, and we have to find a plan that's going to support your body to dine in, and that is where you start to eat your own fat and that's how you lose weight. And this plan has to be sustainable over the long term. I mean, come on, we've done this yo-yo, up and down, up and down, but now we're going to develop a comprehensive solution to give up the battle with food and weight loss, and then we're going to focus on your life. After all, it's about time, isn't it? Come on, ladies. I want to teach you how to love what loves you, from shopping to chopping, from stretching to strengthening, and from breathing to feeling, and from creating to loving.

I'm going to challenge your thoughts of unworthiness and I'm going to show you that confidence is built one experience at a time, with conscious choices. Because I've seen women in their 50s and 60s and 70s lose weight, after menopause, after years of struggling, and we're going to talk about how we did it. But if you want to find out how we did it, you're going to have to come back.

So that is it for this episode, and now I want to tell you about a section that I hope to have every week, and that's going to be my favorite things. And what is one of my favorite things? Today, I want to talk to you about the spiralizer. This is one of my favorite food toys. If you probably have seen in the supermarket now, everywhere that I've been, they have these spiralized zucchinis and spiralizer, like these squiggly looking sweet potatoes and zucchinis or butternut squash, and what it is is this is - you can buy them actually spiralized in the market or you can get yourself a spiralizer, and the thing I love about the spiralizer is not only are you getting to create these hysterically fun vegetables by putting them on the spiralizer. You actually get to get some NEAT, which is non-exercise activity thermogenesis, because I'm telling you, the spiralizer I have, you actually have to use some energy in order to spiralize, and as a result you'll be doing a little bit of exercise and you'll be creating fresh vegetables that kind of become like a pasta. You can put a meat sauce on there or if you're vegetarian you can do garlic and oil. You can use it on sweet potatoes and on my favorite actually is the yellow squash or zucchini.

So that's one of the favorite things, so I have created a kit page and if you go there you can find all my favorite things that I'll bring up in the podcast. So that's the end of the first episode. And if you loved this episode and found it valuable, I would love if you could review it on iTunes. And to celebrate the launch of the show, I'm going to be giving away a motive, which is a Fitbit in a ring, and a Fitbit is on your wrist and a motive is a ring. And that's going to go to a lucky listener who subscribes, rates and reviews the show on iTunes. So you can visit www.never2late.com/itunes to learn more about the contest and how to enter. Because once you review the show, you're going to email me the title of your review on iTunes to pat@beauprecoaching.com and then you'll be entered to win. I'll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode.

So I want to thank you so much for joining me today and I look forward to seeing you next week. We are going to continuously talk about how you can lose weight, how you can create a plan that is going to support you in weight loss and lifestyle changes so that weight loss sticks and it doesn't feel like you're deprived all the time. That is what I want to teach you. So thank you ladies, I'll see you next week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight. If you liked what you heard and want more, head over to never2late.info/guide, to download your quick start guide to jump start your weight loss plan and begin creating an amazing life you love.