I’ve decided that my special word for 2024 is Reboot.
Much of my last year was consumed by the reboot of the Weighless program–a coaching program that I launched with Brock Armstrong 7 years ago, and which has now been now relaunched in a new format that I think is its best version yet.
The Change Academy is not about weight management, per se. My goal in this podcast is to give you tools that you can apply to create positive change in any aspect of your life. But in this episode, I want to talk more specifically about the Weighless Program and take you behind the scenes of our recent reboot.
If that is not of interest, you might want to check out our introductory series The 8 Things You Need to Create Change, or the more intensive series called the 50,000 Mile Tune up. There are free listening guides available for both of them and either one of them would be a great way to charge up your batteries for your own reboot, or whatever else 2024 has in store for you.
Behind the Scenes of the Weigh Less Program Reboot
Introducing the New Format of the Weigh Less Program
Shortened Commitment and More Affordable Program
FAQs: Dietary Restrictions, Global Access, and Partner Discounts
Success Rates and Defining Success in the Program
Overcoming Hurdles and Addressing Medication Use
Join the Change Academy and Start Your Reboot
I’ve decided that my special word for 2024 is Reboot.
Much of my last year was consumed by the reboot of the Weighless program–a coaching program that I launched with Brock Armstrong 7 years ago, and which has now been now relaunched in a new format that I think is its best version yet.
The Change Academy is not about weight management, per se. My goal in this podcast is to give you tools that you can apply to create positive change in any aspect of your life. But in this episode, I want to talk more specifically about the Weighless Program and take you behind the scenes of our recent reboot.
If that is not of interest, you might want to check out our introductory series The 8 Things You Need to Create Change, or the more intensive series called the 50,000 Mile Tune up. There are free listening guides available for both of them and either one of them would be a great way to charge up your batteries for your own reboot, or whatever else 2024 has in store for you.
Monica Reinagel has been helping people create healthier lives for more than 15 years through her Nutrition Diva podcast, books, online coaching programs and in-person workshops. As a licensed and board-certified nutritionist, her approach is grounded in science but is also practical and realistic. Monica is also a former professional opera singer.
Editor
Brock Armstrong
Brock has been working in audio since the 1980s (the late 1980s to be sure) and has focussed his expertise on podcasting since 2007.
What is Change Academy?
Learn how to cultivate a more productive mindset, form sustainable habits, and create a lifestyle that supports both your goals and your wellbeing with host, Monica Reinagel. Drawing on decades of expertise and experience, Monica provides guidance on navigating the challenging process of behavior change in a fun and accessible way. Learn more and find show notes for every episode at https://changeacademypodcast.com
Monica:
Happy New Year. This is a time when we are typically focused on the future, all the shiny new plans we have for the new year. And I've definitely got a lot of new start energy around the brand new version of the weight loss program that launched this week after months of planning and hard work. But any new start, if you're smart, will contain the best lessons from all your previous starts, both those attempts that were successful as well as those that failed. What we're really talking about today is the power of the reboot.
Announcer:
Alright. Alright. If you want, take your seats or lace up your sneaks. We're about to get started.
Monica:
Welcome to the Change Academy podcast. I'm your host, Monica Rineagle. And in this show, we talk about what it takes to create healthier mindsets and habits in our own lives, as well as how we can create healthier communities and workplaces. Whether you're working on your own health and well-being or promoting healthy behaviors is your job. We're gonna talk about what works, what's hard, what's needed, and what's next.
Monica:
Let's jump in. I've decided that my special word for 2024 or at least the 1st few weeks of 2024 is reboot. And not the sad kind of reboot where they reassemble the aging cast from a wildly successful sitcom from 30 years ago and try to find the old magic. I'm talking about the kind of reboot that deletes unused files, defrags your hard drive, scans for malware, and updates all your drivers. I'm speaking metaphorically, of course.
Monica:
That's pretty much what I have spent the last year doing, and I'm looking forward to the machine of my life and my business running more efficiently as a result. So much of my last year has been consumed by the more literal reboot of the Weylas program, a program that I launched with Brock Armstrong 7 years ago, and which has now been relaunched in a new format that I think is its best version yet. Way less, as the name implies, is a program focused on weight management. And this podcast is not about weight management per se. Rather, it's about behavior and identity change more broadly.
Monica:
But This podcast grew directly out of the work that Brock and I were doing in that program and what we learned there about what it takes to actually create sustainable behavior change in any realm of your life. As I look back through the 100 plus episodes in our archives here, I can remember the specific challenges, realizations, or conversations with clients that triggered many of those episodes. And it was so fun to translate those insights into more general principles and practices through which we can better understand ourselves and create genuine transformation. To the extent that I regularly hear from therapists who recommend this podcast to their clients as a way to support the work that they are doing in therapy. And that is still the focus of this podcast, giving you tools that you can apply to create positive change in any aspect of your life.
Monica:
But in this episode, I do wanna talk more specifically about the Weylas program and take you behind the scenes of our recent reboot. Now if that is not of interest for whatever reason, no hard feelings, you might want to check out our introductory series, the 8 things you need to create change, or our much more intensive series called the 50,000 mile tune up. There are free listening guides available for both of them. I've got links in the show notes. And either one of those would be a great way to charge up your batteries for whatever reboot 2024 has in store for you.
Monica:
Those of you who have been listening to the podcast for a while will remember that my original cohost, Brock Armstrong, made the decision earlier this year to step away from the mic in order to prioritize some other projects. Brock was essentially doing a 50,000 mile tune up of his own and decided to make some changes in his professional life. Although we didn't share this publicly then, part of Brock's reboot also involved wrapping up his active involvement with The Way Less program when the current group reached the end of their program year, which was in December. Although I was definitely sad to be losing my coaching partner, I was really happy for Brock and inspired by the way he was walking the talk that we talk, both in the weight loss program and in this podcast. Walking that talk is not always easy.
Monica:
It often involves significant uncertainty and disruption, but bringing our lives into greater alignment with our values and priorities, that is always worth it. Relaunching the program without Brock also presented me with a great opportunity to do a comprehensive reboot of the Wey Less program. Now I'll be honest, it has been a ton of work, but an opportunity to take everything I've learned over past 7 years, and then completely reimagine how the program could be made even more efficient and effective, totally worth it. Now the most important things have not changed. This is a behavior modification program, and in it, I help you create and then practice and strengthen the habits, the mindset, and, ultimately, the lifestyle that allow you to maintain a healthy weight without dieting.
Monica:
You won't get meal plans from me or workout schedules. If you are looking for somebody to just tell you what to eat and what not to eat and when to work out and how many calories you get, you will probably not be very happy in this program. Those strategies can lead to weight loss, But in my experience, they rarely lead to the kind of permanent behavior change and identity change that allow people to comfortably maintain a lower weight over time. So how do you know what to eat or how much to exercise? Well, in this program, we're gonna take a look at your current eating patterns, your current movement patterns, your lifestyle, and how your day is arranged, and how your environment is arranged.
Monica:
And we're gonna identify the places where we might be able to adjust your current patterns in ways that are aligned with weighing less. And we're also gonna be looking at habits that are not aligned with your goal of healthy weight maintenance, the ones that are getting in your way. We need to figure out why they're not working, what is out of balance, what needs are not being met. And then, We're gonna design some interventions to start reshaping those habits. So as you're probably kind of getting, this is not a quick fix.
Monica:
This is a slower process, one of investigation, experimentation, iteration, or, as you've heard us refer to it on this podcast, the attention, intention, action cycle. This is a process that we go through on an ongoing basis to bring ourselves more and more into alignment with the practices and the lifestyle and the style and the habits that allow us to sustain a lower weight. Now, historically, since 2017, there has only been one way to participate in this program, and that was in a 12 month group coaching program. Every week, for an entire year, you would get a new topic to work on, and there was a community forum where people were able to post their questions or insights or observations, where they could ask for support or offer support to one another, and every month, we would meet for a group coaching call where we would talk through what we'd been working on, what was coming up, what needed more support or explanation or clarification, and that was the program. It was a 12 month ride, and it cost for the last several years $1200.
Monica:
So now in addition to completely updating and revising the curriculum, I've also redesigned the way we're gonna deliver this program in ways that make it more flexible, more convenient, and more affordable. So one big change, the program is now self paced. So you will have access to the entire program, the entire curriculum from day 1. You don't have to wait each week to get the next topic. You get it all at the beginning, and that means that if there are parts of the program that you feel like you can implement and move through a little bit more quickly, you can do that.
Monica:
If you see something further on, further ahead in the curriculum that you feel like you could use now, you access it when you need it. But more importantly, if you need more time, if something takes you a little bit longer to implement, if you need to take a pause because of other things that are going on in your life, or if you need to slow down for whatever reason, you now have as long as you need to complete this program because your access to the materials will never expire. So you go through at the pace that works for you and for your life. And you can go through the program, the curriculum as many times as you want. You can review it as you need to.
Monica:
So you access both the program and the community on our secure membership site where the topics are presented in both audio and written formats, and a typical topic will take you 10 to 20 minutes to listen to. And if you'd like to see exactly what's in the curriculum, I'll put a link in the show notes where you can preview the entire program. There's also a new feature that I am really excited about, and that is that the entire program has now been recorded and published as a member's only private podcast feed. So as a member of the program, you will be able to subscribe to this private podcast in whatever your favorite podcast listening app is. Wherever you're listening right now, the program podcast will sit right next to your other podcasts, like The Change Academy or maybe The Nutrition Diva.
Monica:
In the private podcast feed, there's also bonus material interspersed throughout the main program topics to add just a little bit of extra insight, another angle, something else to think about, little midweek motivation boosters. The new version of the program still includes the private community forum, which is So on our membership site and our monthly office hours because, honestly, this has always been one of the most valuable parts of the program. Now a while back, we actually shared an excerpt of an actual office hours here on the Change Academy just to give people a sense of what happens in our office hours. Now out of respect for our members' privacy, we didn't share any of the parts of that session where our members we're talking. You you only hear my voice, but it does give you a sense of what those meetings are like, and I will link to that as well in the show notes.
Monica:
Okay. Here's another big change. We have shortened the initial commitment. So instead of having to commit for 12 months, the initial commitment is now just 6 months, and then you can continue on a monthly basis for as long as you're continuing to find it helpful. And this has allowed us to make the program more affordable.
Monica:
And for those of you who are very independent and self directed learners who don't need or want a lot of interaction with other people. You're somebody who can just do the work on your own, get the benefit. If you are one of those unicorns, you can now access the entire program on a do it yourself basis at a significant additional savings. As you can hear, I'm really excited about this reboot, and I'm also very excited to finally be able to welcome people back into the program after such a on hiatus while we were rebuilding it. And if you want to find out how to join us, our enrollment page is at way less dot life slash enroll.
Monica:
So I'll just take this time to answer a few frequently asked questions. It is not a problem if you are gluten free or vegan or have any other dietary restrictions or preferences. As I said, I'm not gonna give you meal plans. We're gonna build your meal plan around your dietary needs. It is also not a problem if you live in Europe or Asia or Australia or anywhere else.
Monica:
The only synchronous portion of the program is our monthly office hours, and our practice has been to move these around onto different days of the week, different times of the day so that we can accommodate as many people's time zones and schedules as possible. And we also record all of those meetings, so you'll have access to the recording afterward. We sometimes have partners who want to do the program together. And we really wanna support that because that can be such a valuable source of support for people working on behavior change. So if 1 person in your household signs up, a 2nd person in that same household can sign up at a 40% discount.
Monica:
Another frequent question is about success rates. So one thing that's really easy to measure and to track is the amount of weight people typically lose on this program. I have to tell you that, although it's easy to track, it's a very imperfect measure of success for this program for a couple of different reasons. For one thing, we have a significant minority of people who come into the program without a lot of weight to lose. They may be at or close to a comfortable, healthy weight, and what they are really there to lose is the dieting behaviors that they've been relying on to get themselves to that weight.
Monica:
So they're not really here to change their weight very much. They're here to change the habits, the behaviors, the strategies that they're using to maintain their weight. So for them, at the end of the program, they may not have lost very much weight, but their work has had an enormous impact on their quality of life. And, in fact, when I talk to people about their experience in the program, very frequently, the amount of weight that they've lost is sort of a throwaway result. They'll say, yeah, I lost £25, but what I'm really excited about is the change in my relationship to food or in my thoughts about myself and my body, in my anxiety levels, in my life satisfaction, in my relationships.
Monica:
One of the things that they're often so excited about is the new confidence that they feel that this is sustainable. They know that they now have tools that they can use in the future should they ever need them. Okay. With all that said, I can share with you that 59% of the people who finish this program have lost at least 5% of their starting body weight by the end of their 1st year. But now, let me put that number into context for you.
Monica:
If I were an employer and I were considering investing in the weight loss program for my employees, that would be a really meaningful statistic for me because it would give me an idea of my return on the investment in terms of the likely impact on my health care costs for my employees. What percentage of people are going to lose at least 5% of their starting body weight? It's a really good question for an employer to ask before they buy this program for their employees. I'm not sure it's as helpful for individuals as a way to gauge their success or their chances of succeeding. That stat does not mean that you have a Six out of 10 chance of succeeding in this program because you're not going to do the program 10 times.
Monica:
You're gonna do the program once, and you're gonna have one outcome. So if you are trying to assess your chances of success, I think there are other questions that would be more valuable, such as, what would constitute success for you? How would you define a successful outcome? Secondly, what are you willing to do? What are you willing to change?
Monica:
What are you willing to let go of? And that could be anything from a habit to a belief, to an identity, but what are you willing to change? Because something's gonna need to change. So it's important that we think about what we are and are not willing to change or give up in order to create a given result. And to the 3rd question I want you to think about is, what is most likely to get in your way?
Monica:
What's going to be the thing that keeps you from succeeding? Deep down, you probably have an idea were a concern. And if you know what that is, that puts me in a much better position to tell you whether or not I think we can help you past that hurdle. And finally, a question that did not used to come up, but it sure does now, and that is whether this program is appropriate for someone who is using a weight loss medication such as Wegovy. These medications have been absolutely game changing for people who suffer from a dysregulated appetite or metabolism, which makes weight loss extremely difficult.
Monica:
Addressing those physiological issues, extremely difficult. Addressing those physiological issues with a medication makes it easier or even just possible for these people to reduce their food intake and to lose weight. So it's not like these drugs, when they are appropriately used, are giving these people an unfair advantage. It's more like we are leveling what has been an extremely unlevel playing field, but the behavior change work still needs to be done. You could start eating a whole lot less and lose some weight, but still not have terribly healthy eating habits.
Monica:
You may still need to work on developing good movement habits, planning skills, emotional eating, and all of the rest of that. This program would give you the tools and the process and the structure to address all of that. So those are some of the most frequently asked questions. But if you have questions I haven't answered here, I'm more than happy to answer them. And if you're ready to join us to launch your own reboot, and finally move past the endless dieting drama, I would love to have you join us.
Monica:
You'll find all the details at way less dot life slash enrollment.
Announcer:
Alright. Thanks, everyone. This has been the Change Academy podcast with Monica Reinagle. Our show is produced by me, Brock Armstrong. You'll find links to everything Monica mentioned in today's episode in our show notes as well as on our website at changeacademypodcast.com where you can also send us an email or leave us a voice mail.
Announcer:
If you're finding this podcast helpful, We hope you'll subscribe or even better, give our show a rating or review in your favorite podcast app. Or best of all, Share this episode with a friend or colleague you think would enjoy it. Now here's to the changes we choose.
