Podcast: Why "Only" Losing One Pound Feels Like Failure (And How to Fix It)

Introduction

Are you your own worst enemy when it comes to reaching your health goals?

If you're the type of person who achieves your target but still feels disappointed, who focuses on the handful of mulberries left unpicked rather than the hour you spent harvesting, or who secretly sets impossible standards then beats yourself up for "only" meeting your original goal - this episode is for you.

Dr. Orlena dives deep into the hidden psychology of hyperachieving and reveals how this seemingly positive trait might actually be sabotaging your weight loss and wellness journey. You'll discover why your brain's secret goals are setting you up for failure, learn to recognize the achievement blindness that keeps you feeling inadequate despite real progress, and understand why mastering fewer changes completely trumps attempting everything at once.

Whether you're frustrated by "slow" progress, constantly moving your own goalposts, or find yourself giving up just when you should be celebrating, this episode will help you transform your inner critic into your biggest cheerleader. It's time to break free from the perfectionist prison and start acknowledging the incredible work you're already doing.

Perfect for anyone who's ever felt like their best isn't good enough - because sometimes the problem isn't your effort, it's your perspective.

Transcription of Podcast

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to Fit and Fabulous with me, Dr. Orlena. I hope that you're feeling amazing today. We went camping at the weekend. We live in Spain, so we live about an hour from the border up front, and we went camping just to stay at a campsite. There's a swimming pool there that the kids can enjoy, just really for a few days of not doing very much other than eating so much.

Oh my goodness. It was fun. We enjoyed it. One thing that I found was really interesting was that the price of fruit and vegetables in France is a little bit more expensive than here in Spain, partly because they import a lot of their fruit and vegetables from Spain. And so we go there and we have to pay for things to have been bought up.

But also I noticed that the price of ice creams, for example, ice creams in the supermarket was a little bit cheaper than. The price of ice creams here in Spain, so it just pushed food and vegetables to more expensive than ice cream, which for me is really [00:01:00] sad and dangerous place to be when we have really processed food.

And I'm not saying you should never eat ice cream. I have kids, I enjoy ice cream, but when ice cream is cheaper than buying fruit and vegetables, that's a dangerous and not.

So happily for me in Spain, it is much cheaper for me to buy fruit than it is to buy ice cream, which makes it really easy for me to constantly buy fruit and my kids to live off fruit with the occasional ice cream rather than the anywhere other way around. Anyhow, that is not what I wanted to talk to you about today.

What I want to talk to you about today is. Being a hyper achiever, what does it mean and how does, how do you recognize it and what impact does it have on your life, and specifically your health and weight loss journey. So a hyper achiever, it takes one to know one, I will put my hand up and say that I'm a [00:02:00] hyper achiever.

And you may think, oh, hyper achiever, that sounds really great. There are some positives, but there are also some negatives, and it's really the negatives that I want to highlight today and highlight how they can impact your life. So a hyper achiever is somebody who, when you do something. It's almost like you have a secret goal.

So for example, I remember talking to one of my clients once and she said to me, oh, I've only lost a pound this week. And I was like, wait a minute, it's wasn't that your goal? And she was like, oh yeah, it was, but you see secretly in her brain, she had a different goal, which was, I want to lose two pounds.

Now you might think, okay, it's good to have extra goals. It can be really demoralizing if you set unrealistic goals and you never achieve them, because then that's where you give up. So for me, what I notice is I'll do really well at something, but I never acknowledge that to [00:03:00] myself. What I always see is the bits that I don't.

For example, a really mundane example, I have an amazing mulberry bush. It is now giving me loads of mulberries, and I like to go and pick the mulberries. I'm gonna put them in the freezer because I can't eat that many mulberries, and I want to make sure that they don't stay on the tree too long because they get over ripe and then they start attracting flies and birds and things like that.

Okay? The birds are allowed from time to time. Okay? So when I have spent. Let's say an hour picking mulberries and I finish and there's a few left over. Instead of me saying, Hey, you've done a really good job, you've been picking mulberries for an hour, isn't that great? What I see is, oh yeah, but there's still a handful of mulberries that you haven't picked.

And what my brain will naturally do is go, you haven't done this. You can see if you're watching the video, my fingers are still slightly blue. But I don't acknowledge the good stuff. And I do acknowledge the stuff that I haven't done, and this has consequences particularly for my kids. I suspect [00:04:00] that this is my narrative that I give for my kids when they are doing things.

I don't go, it's not my natural place to be like, Hey, you've done really well. My natural place is, yeah, but you haven't done it perfectly. You haven't done this, you haven't done that. Where do you see this? Where do I see this? With clients that I work with in terms of their health and wellness. So they make loads of changes.

They're doing so well. They're doing more exercise. They're eating more healthily. They're doing fabulously. But what they're focusing on is the changes they haven't made yet, or the fact that the scales haven't come down as much as they would like them to come down. And so instead of celebrating what you have done and going, yeah, I'm doing really well, I'm making some changes.

There's always this constant niggle, which goes, yeah, but you haven't done enough. You haven't done enough. You haven't changed this. You haven't changed that. And the big danger with this is your brain then goes, yeah, but this isn't working, is it? It's not working. I'm not getting the results as quickly as I want.

It's not [00:05:00] working. And then you go if it's working, there's no point in doing it. And then you give up and I'm like, wait, stop. Stop. That is not true. You are far better off doing, let's say the changes. There's 10 changes. You're far better off consolidating five changes and really doing them.

Rather than aiming for nine or 10 and doing them for a week or two and giving up, you are much better off really ingraining those changes and then coming back and doing the other five later on down the line, which you more to do if you that doing well, say.

There's 10 changes that you want to make. I'm just inventing these numbers and you are a hyper achiever. So you've aimed for 10, but you've only made five, and then you're like, oh, I'm gonna give up. I'm not gonna do any. But if you aren't a hyper achiever and you recognize, okay, I've made five. I wanted to make 10, but let's just stick to this five for now.

[00:06:00] And I'll bring in the other five. When it feels right, you are gonna get to the 10. You can see how being a hyper achiever sabotages your thinking and your efforts makes you feel like a failure even when you aren't failure failing. And actually, if we take a step back and look at this. I really recommend reading a book called Positive Intelligence by a gentleman called Doctor called, sorry, not doctor, called Sheard Charmine.

And in his book he describes positive brain and negative brain. And your negative brain says, I don't like it. And it has nine saboteurs, which help it say I don't like it. And we have all of those nine Sabo. Some, or we all have some which are particularly strong. We'll have two or three, which are particularly strong.

So I have hyper achiever, I have controller, and I have hyper analytical and [00:07:00] understanding this means that you can make changes. So you might not have hyper achiever, you might have different things. Now, the thing about these saboteurs, yes, if you're using them in positive brain, they helpful. The positive side of being a hyper achiever is that you get things done.

You're like, I'm gonna do this. Yes, I can take on this giant project. It's gonna be exciting. I'm gonna make it happen. You make things happen because you're constantly aiming for the moon, but when you slip into negative brain, it's that sabotaging voice, which is, you didn't do good enough, you didn't do good enough, you didn't do good enough.

And it doesn't have to be. I think the name Hyper Achiever means that it has to be about a career and you've achieved loads and loads. It doesn't have to be about your career. It can just be about picking mulberries or doing some exercise or the way you eat. It can be about mundane things. I think the name makes it sound like, oh, you can't be a [00:08:00] hyper achiever unless you are a corporate CEO.

I'm not a corporate CEO and I'm still a hyper achiever, so there you go. It doesn't have to be something super. Career driven. So I think the question really is what can we do about it? Why do we want to do something about it? We want to do something about it because if we can recognize our achievements and congratulate ourselves, we are more likely to keep going rather than to give up.

We don't want to give up. And also, it's just nicer to do things from a place of positive brain than a place of beating yourself up all the. So steps to change this. Number one, recognize it. Really understand that this is you and that it actually a negative impact rather than a positive impact. Recognize when it a.

So for example, not necessarily hyper achiever, but I can see the controller in me when I come to my chick kids and my kids the other day, [00:09:00] my daughter, I dunno, she had stolen my shoelaces or something and I think she thought she'd stolen an old shoelace, but she'd actually should stolen. A new shoe lace.

And when I see this, I can feel myself getting tense and crossed and thinking what is going on? And when I stop and analyze it, it's my controller basically thinking, oh my goodness, do I have to do everything by myself? Can my kids not do anything, a mundane thing? Can I not just leave them to get on with things?

That is what is going on underneath. But it doesn't. It doesn't, I don't see it like that in the moment. In the moment. I just feel frustrated and. Narky. Do you know what I mean? Talking in a sort of like voice as opposed to, oh, I see that you've got my shoelaces. Do you think you could give those back so that I can actually use my shoes?

And when I turn up in that narky kind of voice, then obviously my kids a hundred percent more. Inflate that, and that is thanks to mirror neurons. So the hu humans have these things called mirror neurons, where we reflect each other's [00:10:00] emotions. And if that's a negative emotion, it sometimes seems to mushroom out of nowhere.

Someone's a little bit annoyed, and then the next person is super annoyed, and then the next person is super, super annoyed, unless obviously we do something to stop that. Okay, so the first step is recognizing this, seeing that, yeah, my brain is going, I don't like it. Here's why I don't like it. It is this hyper achiever voice that is talking to me.

It's saying you haven't done enough, rather than actually recognizing what you have done, the next step is to be able to retrain your brain so that it's not the loudest voice in your brain. So that another voice will say, yeah, I'm going to celebrate the things that I have done. I'm going to counterbalance this.

I'm going to get into this habit of just recognizing, yep, I did this today. It. In terms of healthy living, one thing that I think is [00:11:00] really important to recognize are those habits that we have really ingrained. I went swimming today in the sea. Hey, you know what? I go swimming in the sea pretty much every day in the summer.

Today, marked the first day of summer swimming. 'cause I went without my wetsuit and I saw a stingray. It was amazing. I also went by myself 'cause all my friends are going at a little bit of a later time. But you know what? I could just go, but you go swimming every single day. How is that an achievement? It is' an achievement because it's a habit that I do without thinking about it.

It's a non-negotiable, which actually means it's already ingrained as opposed to those new things. Our brain always wants to see new things, and it always wants to congratulate yourself for things that are new. But the problem with this is the goal is not to constantly be making changes. The goal is to make some changes and stick to them and keep sticking to them until they become ingrained, and then we stop seeing them.

We don't think of them as oh, [00:12:00] I'm a healthy person. If you brush your teeth, I hope that is a habit that you have. Do you think of yourself as a healthy person because you brush your teeth? Probably not. You probably just think of yourself as a person who brushes your teeth like most of us do. But here's the thing.

If you stopped brushing your teeth, you would get gingivitis, you'd get bleeding gums. Your teeth would turn black and fall out, as I say to my kids, and you would notice the difference. Whereas you brush your teeth, you don't notice the difference. 'cause you're so used to having a healthy set of teeth because you brush your teeth and that's where you want to get to with exercise and healthy eating and the mindset piece as well.

So you want to get to this place where you are not constantly beating yourself up because you are a hyper achiever. You are constantly acknowledging what you have done. Not in a gloating way, but just in a hey. So really just getting to retrain your [00:13:00] brain and celebrate the things you do, even if they all are habits, especially when they are habits.

So just to recap, the problem with being a hyper achiever is that you. Beat yourself up because you haven't reached some ridiculous goal that you would never set for anybody else, but you expect yourself to do it, and then you beat yourself up. And this means that you give up because you feel demoralized, as opposed to recognizing this, celebrating what you've done, being more realistic and keeping going.

So let know. Let know if you are a achiever and if this resonates to you. So my friends have a lovely week and I will be back in two weeks time and if you haven't signed up for my email list, please sign up for my email list to keep in contact and I will tell you all the things that are going on. You get a podcast.

There is now a free program, which has got some videos in it and some handouts. Super helpful [00:14:00] things. I look forward to seeing you in two weeks time. Goodbye.