The Livy Method Podcast - When Calm Feels Wrong: Missing the Chase After Weight Loss

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

You wanted this for so long. So why does getting here feel a little flat? Clinical psychologist and sleep expert Dr. Beverley David joins Odette to explain why reaching your goal weight can bring a letdown instead of a lift, and why that's a normal human response, not a sign you're failing. She breaks down how anticipation and dopamine carry us through big changes, how hedonic adaptation makes even major wins feel ordinary fast, and why calm can feel strange if you grew up watching the people around you go on and off diets. She also shares her three-step approach for this stage and why your next goal may have nothing to do with the scale.Where to Find Dr. Beverley:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drdrbeverley/Website: https://www.yourpsychologycentre.ca/This podcast aligns with Day 4 of our Fall Maintenance Program, members can find video in our Livy Method app or Maintenance and Mindfulness Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ginalivymaintenanceandmindfulness Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

New season, new name, bigger conversations. Welcome to Live Lighter with Gina, because lightness isn't something you find. It's something you create in your body, your mind, your home, and in your life. Real conversations, no bullshit. So let's lighten things up for you. If you're looking to lose weight and you want to keep it off, you have got to check out the Living Method. Our next live session starts September 14th. better than ever, easy to follow. We have the most incredible community, and it works.

Head over to living method.com to sign out today. Well, here we are in Prep Week in our maintenance group, kicking it off, of course, with Dr. Beverly, our first live of this session. So Dr. Beverly, I was thinking about how I was going to introduce you today. You know, most of our members know you, you clinical psychologist, sleep expert, and really just want to say the fixer of all things. I mean, that's a lot of That's really, that's the pressure we're putting on you today. I need to wear a T-shirt with that or have it on my mug because I don't believe it. I don't believe it.

I don't believe my own things. Every time you come, I mean, there is something to be taken away. There's something to be learned. I just feel like you see our members in a way that you understand and they can resonate with what you say. Because you've been, I mean, you've been where they are. You're a livy loser, right? long time ago and, you know, maintaining your weight and living your life through all of the ups and downs. And, you know, I think that's where a lot of our members are now. So whether they are

brand new and just starting their maintenance journey or they've been here for a while, you know, life is lifing for them. They've got to try and find that motivation and get excited and, you know, really just trying to live their life. And one of the things that we have been talking about this week is how do you make this shift? I'm getting right into it today. So how do you make this shift being somebody who who has always tried to lose weight or they've seen themselves as somebody who needs to be a weight loser? And now they're here in this new space and they have to shift that thinking. They have to now think, I need to just maintain my weight. I'm not trying for this goal. I'm not going for this lowest low. I'm not working towards this. So,

So how do I know who I am now? How do I shift my thinking into being that person where I'm trying to maintain my weight and not lose my weight? That's all. That's the first problem to fix. Gosh, what a question. That was a Gina left question. Yeah, I was worried about it. Well, I've learned from her.

Let's maybe go back to the beginning because you mentioned that I was a livy loser. And why was I? Now, I had heard the word on the street, Gina's name was dropping everywhere, you know, in Uxbridge. I was like hearing her name there and here and everywhere. And Uxbridge, Ontario is actually very close to where Gina lives. And I was noticing that people were looking happier, had more energy, had a bit of, I don't know, sparkle about them. And it had been a period where I haven't seen these people for a while because of COVID. And Gina's name kept on coming up and kept on coming

up. And I was thinking, my goodness, this program sounds really, really good. And I see a lot of clients in my private practice where they want to change and they want to embark on something to improve their whole life, their health, their well-being, their energy, how they turn up to things, how they are in their marriage or partnership or family at work or at the school committee, whatever it is. And I just thought, I need to find out more about the Gina program before I start saying it's good because I don't want to, I don't want to endorse anything that I don't know truly what it is because I, you know, that's risky. Of course it's risky. So I thought, right, I've got to do it.

I've got to do it and see what is it? And is this something I want to recommend to people? And it absolutely was this program that really does. And if everybody thinks back to why did you do it? Why did you decide to embark on that first page or that first live or that first way in? Whatever it was, it was for today. It was for the now. Because that's what it promises.

It promises this ability to be able to do it forever, to be able to get to the this bit, to be able to think, okay, it's not constant counting and it's not constant deprivation or restriction or punishment. It was something totally different. And it promised that. It promised to be holistic. It promised to be educational, accessible. it promised to be things that you could buy in the supermarket and you could take with you.

And it would be something that you could implement in your day-to-day life to go to pick up the kids, to go to the hockey, to go to that conference, to travel. That's what it promised. And now here we are. We're in that stage where this is what we want. We want it to be less exciting. We want it to be part of our life. that it's become automatic and you'll hear me say that automaticity word at the very beginning we will have inevitably had some sort of feeling were we excited were we nervous were we full of

dread um were we eager were we ambivalent were we uncertain were we absolute so we had these feelings and along with these feelings we had the thoughts and we talk about the thoughts all of the time. This is going to be it. This is the, this is promised to be the one, the one and only and the last diet that we're ever going to do, dare we call it a diet, because we don't need to. This is a lifestyle approach. So it's, it's that shift that got us there. But like anything, when we're beginning, we also have that beginning body reaction, the dopamine, the adrenaline, the adrenaline, the excitement that goes along with that, the eagerness. So we're all in. And that often brings the motivation. It brings that energy in the morning to think, okay, who's going to be on

the live today? So that anticipation is really exciting and it keeps us in there. And then as we go long and we can we can probably all identify with how it felt even in the first first sort of half of that 91 days we're getting into the weeds we're practicing it we're thinking maybe i'm a bit bored of just this or just that now we might have to expand our repertoire in the kitchen or our fruits or our grief whatever we're eating we're starting to have to adjust but that excitement of the 91 days gives us this focus a little bit like if we're studying for an exam or we're waiting to get our driving license or we're going to go and run our first 5K race or walk off it. So there's this go-all and we're full of this adrenaline, dopamine, reward feeling and it

keeps us going. Just like any project around the house, okay, we get so excited about that thing and we think when I get this, I'm going to be so excited and happy and satisfied and my life is going to be fine. Or when we get the promotion, we think, oh, when that happens, I'm going to be dot, dot, dot. And how many of us have got there? And then we feel a bit, hmm, right? We're here. We've arrived at the destination and it's less exciting than, you know, than we thought. Or this is a bit boring. Or we're fatigued because often we've got decision fatigue when there's been. so much going on. So it's very normal in humans to have this energy at the beginning, maybe this lull in the middle, maybe an energy at the end. You know, we finish hard,

we see that, that finishing line. We, you know, open up all our gears and off we go. And then life starts to just settle down again. And it is very common in psychology. And now we have to try and think, okay, now we're here. I was in the change stage, how to create change, and that brought with it challenges, people thinking, okay, I've got to learn, educate myself, and learn, tell my family, explain it to my friends, maybe sometimes be eating different things than people, and then hopefully they jump on board as well. But now it's less change, but now stability. So first of all, we would

adjusting to think how to create change. Now we're working on how to tolerate stability, how to maintain this and keep turning up and going to that thing, which is now our healthy way. We talk so much in this,

you know, throughout this whole 91 day maintenance program and we started the conversation this week about finding that new why or redefining that new why. And like you said, you know, in the beginning, you said, you know, we had that goal in mind. We were going for that lowest low. We had this plan that we were going to get there and then we get there. And it's about thinking about, this is, you know, where I wanted to be. How do I make this exciting? And it is maybe reminding

yourself that this is what you wanted. You wanted that spark like you said at the beginning, that vibrancy, that happiness. And now that we're here, we feel like maybe our, everything should be fixed. Everything should be all into place. Everything should be right. But it's, yeah, it's really thinking about what do I want in this next stage? Because I think we can get into this place where I wanted to be here so bad. And now, now what?

Now I'm here. When life is still here with you. Yes. Yeah. When we get to these places, stuff is still going to happen. You know, if you're having trouble in your job, it's probably still there. If you're having trouble in the relationship, it might be still there with our children, with our parents, all of these things. Life is still happening.

But this new thing that you had for 91 days might have been this really lovely distraction. And now we're back and it's settling down. and here we are. So now you're right, we've got to think, how do we redefine this next step, this next season? And we might want to use the three ends with that. We might want to name it and think,

oh, I'm in that, you know, holiday blues feeling, or I'm in that I've achieved, and I've got this sort of down feeling of, okay, so this is what it is to feel like I'm here. then we want to normalize it. Okay, that's part of psychology. The anticipation is very powerful. Okay, anticipation excitement is powerful. Our brain anticipates. Our brain looks for progress. We love it. It's reinforced. And when we reach our destination, that momentum might feel like it suddenly disappeared. So it's the difference between I'm getting there and then I have

here. So then we know the hedonic adaption kicks in. Humans are really, we are really good at adjusting to new things that we're so lucky that way. We might not like new things all the time. I think there's a difference between adjusting and liking it. So we don't have to like it, but we're good at adjusting to it. We're so adaptive. It's remarkable. But something that once felt extraordinary can become normal very quickly. It can feel very boring very quickly. And it's like why we see it with our children. Like they may be just desperate to try this thing. Like, mommy, please can I try this thing? It's the thing I've always wanted to try. And they get there and they're like, hmm, you know, and you're trying to remind them.

But you want to do this, don't you? You want to be here. So we want to maybe look for how can we change our goals. Okay, so like we even talk about in the program, it isn't all about that number. It isn't all about the peer of genes we might have wanted to get back into. Hopefully, when you go back to your true why, and maybe you rewrite that, maybe it was to be more confident,

to feel more comfortable, to stop the food noise, to not worry so much what I look like all of the time, to feel successful, to be happy. So these are more sort of intrinsic rewards that we feel different and we're able to turn up for things. So maybe we want to think, okay, this September, have I been braver in something?

Has anybody been inclined to think, I'm going to put my name down for curling this winter or hockey for women or men, whoever you are, or mixed teams, are you able to do something like that? Because you are here, I hope, with more energy, more confidence, more self-esteem, a belief in yourself that you can do hard things. So what now? What do you want to do? Do you want to start a book club? Do you want to start painting? Do you want to go to that walking group? We want to add all of the time because humans will get very bored. And so yes, we want to identify that the name it. This is what's happening.

Normalize it. I'm human. Of course, this is happening. We get bored. Even our, the shows that we watch can get really boring by season five. We're like, really, it's the same story again and again. And then we want to use the third end navigate. How do we want to move through this? Well, Sometimes we might notice, wow, when we do that to rock, and it isn't necessarily sabotage, it's just this rocking of a boat that seems to happen, that we regress, that we then don't do the things, and then we fall back into old habits and start noticing. And sometimes we don't notice very quickly, because we might now be avoiding the things that we were doing, like the weighing in or things like that, that then we,

we find in six months time or a year? We're like, oh, oh dear, something, you know, I'm not where I want to be again. And that then creates that, you know, go for it. Then a yo-yo feeling, which a lot of us may have done in our past. So we want to be mindful and watch out for that. Yeah. And we've heard, I mean, I've heard Gina say before, and whether it was to you or with somebody else, but oftentimes when things are just going well, things feel really good, we almost miss that drama, for lack of a better word. We miss that, we miss that like, I need to get something done here. I need to shake things up. I need to, um, you know, really make things spark around me where sometimes just sitting with those boring

basics is exactly what you need or exactly what needs to happen. Because, you know, if we're trying to create that drama, how do we? Well, I feel calm. I feel good. I feel, I feel, confident this is too easy what's happening here yeah it's unfamiliar isn't it it is unfamiliar and and when we think of our history our family of origin because when we're whenever we're looking deep into psychology we know we come from somewhere so we might even want to think about that you know to think where did I see a hustle all of the time did I see that from my mom did I A lot of us may have seen our mom doing the diet, being on it, not being on it, doing, you know, back and forth, back and forth. And so we've grown up with this Evan Flow.

We might have seen our dad doing a similar thing. What was that like? We might have had siblings doing it. And then we often model it. You know, we either copy or we reject it. We might say, okay, I'm never going to do that. I'm never going to be that way. or I'm absolutely noticing that plant a potato, get a potato.

So we want to be mindful also of that, just like you said, are we used to chasing something? Are we used to that adrenaline and the drive? What does it protect us from? Because sometimes that focus is because we don't like other things. We prefer this sort of drama or this sort of goal to the other bits that we might need to do. like have we cleaned the leaves out of the gutter?

Have we jet wash the patio or whatever it is? Because we put them off because this is more an exciting, appealing goal. And so we want to notice what are we like? What are our patterns? Do we always have to be chasing something? Do we always have to be achieving or in a stress situation? Like when we talk to our friends, are we always like, oh, I'm so stressed. I've got so much going on.

It's that part of our story. and do we want it to be part of our story, or do we want to change that? And what would it look like to change it? But it absolutely is a thing. So watch out for it. I asked my mum the other day, I was like,

mum, if you could tell me one thing about me, what would you tell me? And she's like that when you're sad, you just get busier. You know, you just get busier and busier and busier. And she's like, and I don't know whether you sit with it. And I was like, brilliant, man. That was like a brilliant just observation.

It allowed me to be introspective. But probably we've all got, well, we definitely all have our behaviours that mask certain things, mute things, soften an edge. And keep an eye on that with this. And then know that, again, if you do want that challenge, let it maybe be something else that complements your wellness and compliments your health journey. joining a group, you know, staying in the community, meeting up for one of the walks, talking about it, you know, when we end up sharing and teaching somebody about what we've done, like, hey, I did this program and it's incredible, and this is what you do, and, you know, you end up being able to do it wherever you are, that also keeps us in the game. You know, if somebody,

perhaps they've grown up playing soccer and they can't anymore, maybe they become the coach, maybe they become a parent support person. And that levels us up with a new identity but keeps us linked. So it complements that. It keeps you in the game, keeps you part of it. And you said something. I mean, you've given us so many acriments, whatever that word is.

You've given us so many of those. You've given us so many insightful things. But you just said, plant a potato, get a potato. Yes. And that just sparked something in me that was like, yes, what's your potato now? Like, what are you planting? Because what do you want to get? What is your potato?

So if you've got to plant that, you know, plant that seed, whatever it might be, you know, because you, but you have to understand what you want the outcome to be. What do you want it to be? So when you think, when I think of that, hopefully, you know, I'm going to make sense of this. you're doing the work, you're continuing to learn, you're continuing to stay in the game because your potato at the end is maintaining your weight. It's that spark. It's that vibrancy. It's knowing that you can do this. It's that feel good feeling. It's, you know, being able to navigate life and situations. And this could be a stressful time, sickness. This could be going out and ordering

off a menu. This could be, you know, navigating social situations and holidays. How do you want that to look for you now. How do you want to be able to do that? Maybe that's your potato. So I'm doing the, I'm planting this seed now, doing this work now, because that's what I want to grow and take from that. So what's your potato? That's, I mean, maybe we just think drop it on that and I thought, yeah, you said it's so many versions of the potato story. Yeah. It's, it's, because when I think of that, it's, it's, it's, like an apple doesn't fall far from its tree. So that's, that's, That's the origin, but you're absolutely right. What we plant is also what we get. And we have to water it. We have to tend to it. We have to look after them. You have to harvest it. And enjoy, enjoy, reap the rewards of what we harvest. So absolutely, I hope that everybody puts their goggles on and their glasses on to be noticing what this feels like to be here. Because if we miss this moment, it's just like missing. you know, not going to our graduation ceremony or not turning up to that birthday party or the

retirement. We want to mark this and think, okay, how do I feel? What was I like when I started on day one? How do I feel now? How do I want to bring this into all of my tomorrows? And how can I help myself do that? Because if we know ourselves well and we know that we burn hot and then we sizzle out, We need to be ahead of it. We need to think, right, I am going to put my name down for that thing. I am going to sign up for snowboarding lessons in the winter so that I know I'm active in those snowyer, darker days. We need to be proactive so it doesn't come around until March.

And we're like, how did that happen? How did I not do anything? We've got to plan, just like we would for somebody that we love. If somebody came to you and said, I have a goal, you would help them, you'd break it down and say one step at a time. But to get there, we need to put these things in place. You know, Leo's got his maths. He's really good at maths.

In order to stay good at maths, because I'm less good at maths, do I get him a tutor? Yeah, because then he can keep on top of it. Because I really do struggle with maths. So then he's got her if he ever needs her. But that's what we need to do for ourselves. Look after our tomorrow. self when we do know what they're like.

Oh yeah. What is your potato? Yeah. Well, Judy, we had Judy here. She said sweet potato. She's growing a sweet potato. So she's growing that sweet life for herself here. Perfect.

Well, I mean, I think this is, you know, we're naming it. We're normalizing it. We are navigating through it. We're thinking about what we want to get out of this next part of this phase for us. even though we may have anticipated it and now we're not feeling like we're loving it just yet. I think if we can, like you said, think about your own patterns. Think about how you can create a place where you can stay in the game where you can stay part of it. If you can really redefine what you want to grow from the work that you're putting in,

it's not going to be about just, you know, that cycle of losing your weight to give you that dopamine hit, what you're planting now to harvest later is just as, you know, it can be just as exciting and just as thrilling and just as motivating, even though it is, you know, still work. Yeah. So, Dr. Beverly, thank you so much. I mean, I feel like I could talk to you forever, but we know that, you know, our members need to go and live their lives and plant their potatoes now, plant their seeds. Where can we get more of you? So we can follow you on your Instagram, which is Dr. Beverly.

So we know that you're there and you're active. And what do you have going on right now? So I know our members can get to your website, Your Psychology Center.ca. What do you have going on right now or anything coming up? The next sleep group for insomnia, that's going to be the date will be announced. I'm going to probably announce it today or tomorrow. It'll be an October group for six weeks. That's the gold standard treatment for insomnia.

and it's six weeks, then I'm going to run the catch it, cancel it, correct it group again. So if you go to my website and express your interest in the contact me section, then you'll be first to know those dates and then you'll be able to jump on board if you want. And if you happen to have insurance for psychological services, it gets covered. So that's nice to have that option if you do have that option. We talk about sleep being like magic around here and with the change of season and the days changing and maybe our eating schedules have to change a little bit because it's darker earlier. The time change is coming for so many of us. So there's a lot to navigate over the next few weeks when it comes to sleep and getting that magical good sleep. So yeah. Magic. Magic. It is like magic. Thank you so much. I'd love to have you back. I know our members. There's so much to unpack on this journey, you know, talking about. their belief system, letting go of limiting beliefs, believing who they are, even body image.

And I know that this is something that's so important for our members too, just learning how to live in this body now, seeing it, loving it, accepting it, and trusting it. Trusting it. There's so much to unpack and uncover. So we'll definitely connect and get some more. But thank you for being here today. Thank you for everybody that joined us live or who might be listening after. Check out Dr. Beverly, your psychology center.

And on Instagram, Dr. Dr. Beverly. we'll see you very soon. Thank you. Have a good Thursday. Bye-bye. Thank you.