146: The Power of Imperfection, Community, and Support While Working on Health Goals

In this episode, I talk about the Drop It Club, our plant-powered weight loss program that’s been changing lives since January 2025.

I share insights from this first year and emphasize the importance of sustainable, long-term weight loss through whole food plant-based eating and compassionate coaching. I’m honest about the fact that there’s no magic bullet, and how real change comes from meeting ourselves exactly where we are and giving ourselves more time than we think we need to reach our health goals. 

I highlight how flexible the program is, how powerful community support can be, and how transformative it has been for our “Droplets.” This episode is a must-listen if releasing weight is on your radar. 

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Clean Food Dirty Girl helps people eat more plants while celebrating imperfection. Subscribe to our podcast for whole-food plant-based eating inspiration and permission to be perfectly imperfect.

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Transcript, auto-generated, may have errors
Hey there, this is Molly Patrick. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clean Food Dirty Girl podcast. I want to talk today about Drop It Club and about plant-powered weight loss. If releasing some weight is something that you’re interested in—and maybe you don’t have a ton of weight to release and you just want to get really, really healthy—this can also really apply to you.

We released Drop It Club last January. I was working on creating this program all of 2024 and even 2023 to some extent. We released it in January of 2025, so this year, and now I’m recording this and it is November 2025. So we’ve almost been at it for an entire year.

When we first released it, there were a lot of people who wanted to join, but they wanted to see how it went first. And I totally get that, right? You release something new and sometimes people are like, “Yes, I want in, I want to be the first to try it.” And there are some people who are like, “I’m going to wait and see if it’s any good first before I sign up.”

We did have a lot of people who signed up right away. A lot of these people were people who were familiar with me and who have done past resets and who really trusted that the stuff that I put out and that Clean Food Dirty Girl puts out is always really high level. We don’t put out stuff that doesn’t work, because we’ve been around for 11 years and you just can’t put stuff out that you can’t fully get behind.

So a lot of these people knew that and they signed up. For a lot of people, they wanted to wait and just say, “Well, let’s see how this specifically works for other people and then we’ll think about it.”

I thought it’d be fun just to jump on here and talk about some things that have really been reinforced this year to me as far as releasing weight in a plant-powered way—some things that I’ve learned, some highlights, some reminders, and things that have been really powerful for people who have gone through the program so far.

This is a program that is open. When I created it, I really didn’t want to create something that was four weeks or six weeks or eight weeks, because I knew—I have done resets like that in the past and they’ve always been popular and people have always had great results—but they’ve always been too short of an amount of time for people to get sustainable results.

I wanted to offer something where people didn’t feel rushed. That’s actually been a huge thing—I’m going to talk about that in a moment. I knew that I wanted to offer something that, once somebody joins, they can be part of it for as long as they want.

What’s interesting is that when you sign up, you sign up for the first three months (one payment), and then after that, you pay a monthly fee to be part of it, and then you can cancel when you’re ready. The thing is, the most common reason for people to cancel is because they’ve reached their goal weight and they feel so good and they feel like they’ve got this going forward, which is fantastic. This is the best outcome possible.

What’s funny is that I’m in some communities online—some weight loss communities online—just because I like to see what other people are doing. Also, I’m a life coach, and so in my coach world, I’m involved in a lot of coachy kind of stuff. There are a lot of coaching programs specifically for weight loss.

What’s funny is that in some communities I’m in, people are in those communities for years and years and years with the goal of reaching a certain weight or fitting into a certain pair of jeans or being a certain size. They’re really in there for year after year after year after year. I’m not knocking those communities at all. I think people are getting something from them if they continue to pay and to be part of that.

But I knew that if I were to combine my coaching knowledge with my knowledge of whole food plant-based eating and kind of bridge those two worlds, it would be so powerful. I knew that we wouldn’t have people in Drop It Club for two, three, four, five years. I knew that people would get results and they wouldn’t need to be a member forever because they’ve done what they came to do. I knew it was going to be really powerful.

That’s not to say that somebody might not want to stay just because of the support and the camaraderie and the community. But as far as actually reaching the goal, people are and people have. Over this past year, a lot of people have come with that intention, succeeded with that, and canceled and are now doing it on their own, which for me is the ultimate thing to see. That is fantastic, because that’s really the goal. That’s kind of an exciting thing to see happen.

We’ve had people join who are at all different stages of their whole food plant-based journey or their health and wellness journey or their weight loss journey. There are really a lot of different types of people. We have people who have been whole food plant-based for a long time and who’ve had a hard time losing that last 10 or 15 pounds. We’ve had people wanting to release like seven pounds and just get the processed food out of their diet, and they’ve stayed for three months and—boom—that’s done.

We’ve had people who have 100 pounds to lose and have lost over 50 pounds so far this year. We have several people who are in that category. We’ve had people who, over the course of these past 11 months, have released 20 pounds—with just really steady, consistent process. It ranges.

But I can say with certainty to those people who were wondering, “Well, is this going to stand the test of time? Is this going to actually work for people long term?” I can say, yeah. I’m going to tell you in—I’ll do another podcast in two years and reach out to the people who have lost a significant amount of weight or just lost any amount of weight and check with them to say, “Have you kept it off?”

But here’s what I am seeing happening: when people cancel or when people reach their goal weight, they’re so excited because they don’t feel like this is something that they will stop doing. They feel really confident moving forward, and it feels like part of their life. They don’t feel like they’re trying to maintain their goal weight. It’s almost like this shift of, okay, they’ve reached their goal weight; they’re no longer really thinking about their weight. They’re just thinking about all the healthy choices they’re making because they want to. That’s a really powerful thing for people.

That’s only something that can happen as you go through this. I think for a lot of people, that wasn’t the intention necessarily, but that is what kind of naturally happens through this process.

A few things that I wanted to reiterate and really share with you that I have been reminded of—and a few really powerful things that have been very helpful for people in the program so far.

The first thing is just realizing that there’s no magic bullet. For many people who have gone on a lot of different diets and tried a lot of different flash-in-the-pan things, I think there’s this idea that, okay, well, there’s got to be this one thing that works, whether that is a pill or a shake or some kind of food bar or herb or tea, because so much of that stuff is marketed to us. There’s this idea or this hope that this one little thing can be incorporated into your life and that it kind of does the trick. Then all of a sudden, after a certain amount of doing that one thing—having that one herbal supplement or that one bar for X amount of weeks—all of a sudden you’re going to be at your goal weight.

It’s not how it works. I know that there are a lot of weight loss drugs out there, and I know that the popularity of those has really risen over the past couple of years. That’s a very interesting topic. If anybody is curious about that, Dr. Michael Greger put together a fantastic resource about weight loss drugs, including Ozempic and all the other ones. There are a lot of videos about those on his website, nutritionfacts.org. I really recommend anybody who is thinking about doing those—getting on the weight loss drugs—to check that out first.

Who knows, that might be a good fit for you. That might be a good match for you. I’m not knocking it. I think that everybody has their own way of doing things. But I also know that what I understand from those drugs is you have to be on them forever. They work up to a certain point and then your weight loss kind of stalls. There are some pretty serious side effects from them that are really uncomfortable. For more details, go to nutritionfacts.org, just search “weight loss drugs.” We can probably link it in the show notes.

But that is this magic bullet solution that’s being marketed to people, and it may not be so magical all the time. So do go into it being educated about it for sure if that’s the route that you want to take.

People want the quick fix, and I get it, it’s easier. But what really makes the biggest difference is the stuff that’s just really, really basic and not fancy. It’s eating healthy, it’s moving your body, it’s not over-consuming calories. That’s what it is. It’s not very sexy, but it’s effective, and this has been effective for a long time. The side effects of doing it in a really plant-powered positive way are only benefits as a side effect.

Understanding, okay, I’m going to do this in a way that might be a little bit more work and I’m going to change things in my life more than maybe I would like to—but understanding that this is the way it goes if you want to do this in a sustainable, healthy way. Coming to that and making peace with that.

One of our droplets, it was really important for her to understand this so that she didn’t have FOMO—she was having a fear of missing out. She was like, “Okay, I want to go all in to this, but I keep thinking, well, maybe it’s something easier. Maybe there’s something that I could just buy and take and maybe there’s something easier.”

We have our weekly coaching connection calls, and in those calls I reminded her, look, there’s a lot of things being marketed like that, but just being consistent with what you’re doing is going to get you where you want to be eventually. Just remind yourself that there is no one-size-fits-all magic bullet solution out there.

The other thing is to meet yourself where you’re at. Always meet yourself where you’re at. This has been huge, because so often we have this idea about what we want to do, how we want to do it, the time in which we want to do it by. We don’t always come up with those ideas in a way that tracks and is realistic with who we are and our life and our schedule and our bodies and our history and everything else.

When we’re thinking about this, when we’re looking at this, it’s really important to meet yourself where you’re at. That looks different for everybody.

For example, if you have this idea that you really want to do a lot more cardio and you want to do that in the form of running, and you have this idea that, “I’m just going to run more,” and you have knees that aren’t so good or you have an ankle that isn’t so good or maybe you’re recovering from something and you can’t really do a lot of cardio right now—that’s going to be unrealistic. There’s going to be a lot of disappointment with that when you go to try to do that and you just can’t. That’s not to say you wouldn’t be able to run again in the future, but maybe today that’s not where you’re at.

You might have this idea that you want to batch cook every weekend and you want to eat a perfect whole food plant-based diet throughout the week, and then one week your stove stops working. Okay, then you have to meet yourself where you’re at. There are so many scenarios and situations that this can be applied to. This really has to do with life in general, not just weight loss.

If we meet ourselves where we’re at with love and compassion and understanding and patience, it’s going to be so much easier for us to do that.

Here’s a good example. One of our droplets, Gwen, she’s doing really well. She’s following the guidelines. She’s doing the program. She’s kicking ass. Then she had a work thing and she was staying in a hotel, and she was really struggling with everything while she was in this hotel for her work, while she was having this business trip.

She got on a coaching call and after talking to me, we realized that, hey, what you’re doing is you’re trying to replicate your regular routine that you have at home with where you are now in the hotel. You’re in a whole different environment. You’re totally out of your routine. Everything looks different now. You can’t expect to have your same routine from home transfer to the hotel and the state and the city and the town and the schedule that you have because it’s completely different.

So let’s figure out where you’re at now, what you have available to you now, and come up with a new routine that matches where you’re at—physically and literally, in your hotel. What do you have access to? What grocery stores do you have access to? Do you have a gym? What is your schedule like? What does that look like?

By not meeting herself where she was at and having these expectations of her usual routine, she was making it much more difficult for herself than she had to, because she wasn’t going to be able to do her regular schedule in the hotel. Meeting herself where she’s at and then tweaking, making adjustments, pivoting a little bit, all of a sudden she was like, “Got it.”

She was able to spend, I think she was there two or three weeks, do really well, her number continued to go down, and that was great. Now, when she goes and does a business trip next, she has that plan and she has that routine that she can pull out and use for where she’s at then. That’s just a small example, but it’s stuff like that—always just meeting yourself where you’re at and making the best choices available to you in the moment. That is going to change from time to time depending on your level of energy, depending on what’s going on emotionally, depending on what’s going on with your family, your kids, your schedule, your parents, your siblings, your school, your work—a million things.

Meeting yourself where you’re at is such a gift of love and compassion, and it’s really tending to yourself. I love that phrase—tending to yourself. I use that a lot in our coaching because that’s what we really learn to do: tend to ourselves.

The next thing is, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Although Drop It Club does have guidelines—basically, you start and you take two weeks to get ready. We give you a list of things. There are prompts that you fill out. You go through your kitchen. We have checklists for you. You do some writing exercises. You take a couple of weeks to get ready. Then you start with phase one. There’s a certain set of guidelines that you follow for a minimum of two weeks. You want to stay with those guidelines until and if your weight plateaus.

For a lot of people in the program, they have reached their goal weight with the phase one guidelines and they never needed to move to phase two or phase three. For some people, they’ve done like 10 weeks in phase one and finally they’re at a plateau. They move to phase two, and then phase two has a new set of guidelines—a little bit different, not huge, but little tweaks here and there. Then they start to release weight again.

We’ve had only a couple of people need to go to phase three, and most people reach their goal in phase one or two or are really on their way to meeting their goal depending on how much they have to lose.

So we do have these guidelines and these phases that everybody goes through, but within that, there are certain things that really make a huge difference for people, and those things are going to be different for each person. Some people, when they move to phase two, one of the guidelines in phase two is to avoid nuts. For some people, that makes all of the difference, and for some people, it doesn’t.

I’ve just really had that reminder this year: how unique and how different each of our bodies are. Having a set of guidelines like we do is a great starting point, and the beauty is that you’re going to stick with them long enough to see what’s working before you change.

This is not a one-size-fits-all. One of the guidelines in all three of the phases is to not eat after dinner and then stick to fruits and vegetables if you need a snack between meals. For a lot of people, this works. They really enjoy that structure. But for some people, for X, Y, and Z reasons, snacking on just fruits and veggies doesn’t work.

That’s when they will come to a connection call. They’ll tell me what’s going on, and then we’ll say, “Okay, let’s make this work for you. Let’s figure this out in a way that’s going to be supportive and not just kind of sabotaging your efforts, but let’s make this work in the healthiest way that feels doable for you.”

I coached this one woman a while back and we decided that for her it made sense to bring to work a little bento box of snacks or a little Tupperware container full of different types of snacks so that she has more choices. This was somebody who had, in the past, struggled with disordered eating. For her, she really needed a lot of choices. She didn’t want it to be fruit or veggies or nothing.

So we decided: put some hummus in there, put some baked tofu, put some edamame beans, put some fruit in there as well, put a couple of little handfuls of walnuts, and then maybe put some apple slices and even a little bit of almond butter. Then when you need a snack, you have all these beautiful choices to choose from. That felt so good to her. The pressure was off. She could feel good. She didn’t have to feel stressed about this. It really helped her avoid just going for potato chips or donuts or cookies or whatever else was in the office or where she was working.

Is that one of the guidelines? No. But that is what was most helpful to her and it was really effective. Although there are these guidelines, there’s a lot of flexibility within the guidelines depending on what you need and depending on your history and depending on what’s ultimately going to work well for you.

I don’t ever want to—there was one woman who was like, “I really want to eat whole food plant-based. That’s my goal, but I really am feeling like I should have a little bit of chicken.” She was having a really hard time with that. I said, “Okay, well, why don’t you just have a little bit of chicken then?” She’s like, “Wait, I can do that? I can do Drop It, and that’s very plant-powered, very plant-forward, and have a little bit of chicken?” I’m like, “Yeah. Yes, you can.”

This is why I wanted to create this program and be a coach and show up and have a presence in this and really help people—because everybody is unique, everybody is different, and everybody is where they’re at. That’s all different. So there’s no one-size-fits-all for sure. Even within the guidelines, it’s important to give yourself flexibility and to figure out what’s going to work best for you. That’s been a really wonderful thing to be able to do with people.

The next thing is—this is one of the biggest things—taking imperfect action. One of the rules that we have is that you don’t start over. Maybe you are in week four of phase one and you go to a birthday party and you just eat a bunch of cake, and you might be tempted: “Well, I’m going to start over at week one.” No, no, no. You’re not going to start over at week one. You’re just going to keep going. You’re going to keep going where you were. You’re going to keep going from where you left off.

That has been really game-changing for people because so many of the people who have joined this program are used to starting and stopping and having this idea of perfection. Then if and when they don’t reach that level of perfection—which, FYI, none of us do, none of us do—they throw in the towel and they say, “Screw it.” They beat themselves up and they just go off the rails and eat anything and everything.

Having this rule of not starting over has really helped people not do that and not self-sabotage in that way. It has really helped people get out of that mindset of the all-or-nothing or the perfectionism trap. That is a trap. That shit does not work. How you get out of that trap is you mess up and then you allow yourself to move forward with the next best choice. You don’t dwell on it. You don’t beat yourself up. You chalk it up to a human incident and you keep going.

Of all of the things, that has been such a relief for people in a way and it has really kept people from just saying, “Screw it.” I think if there was a rule of, “Okay, you have to start over,” we wouldn’t get very far because we’d always just be starting over, because we’re all human and we all mess up and we aren’t perfect. Again, meeting yourself where you’re at and allowing yourself to be imperfect while moving forward—that is how you reach your goals. You don’t want to allow perfection to get in the way of progress. That has been so clear, so evident over this past almost year that I’ve been running this program. It’s amazing how much of a game changer that has been for people.

Another one is: if you want to be good at something, you’ve got to be open to sucking for a little bit—for as long as it takes. Everybody who tries something new, we suck in the beginning. I don’t care if it’s embroidery or mountain biking or yoga or ukulele or a new way of eating, water coloring, speaking French, starting a business, having a new friendship. New things are hard, and you have to really be open to not being good at them in the beginning, for as long as it takes.

For people who are new to batch cooking, for example, and eating really plant-based, we can give you guidelines, but you’re going to be in the kitchen cooking the stuff. You’re going to be going to the grocery store and chopping and dicing and following the recipes. Just that, as one little example, might take you longer in the beginning, and you might not feel like a natural, flowing in your kitchen in the beginning. That’s okay.

Allow yourself to suck. If you aren’t great at something, don’t take it as a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it. Just take it as a sign that it’s new and of course you suck, and just keep going because eventually you’re going to get better. That’s been really helpful for people too—just being open to sucking. A lot of us don’t like to suck. A lot of us don’t like to be bad at things. But that’s what it takes in order to get better: being bad first, being not great at it in the beginning. Being realistic about that and being open to sucking—that’s been super helpful for people.

Normalizing doing the things you don’t want to do in the moment that will benefit you later. That’s another big one. We talk a lot about instant gratification versus delayed gratification.

For a lot of people, when they’re not consistent with their self-care, with taking care of themselves, there’s this idea that you’re somehow—if you’re spending three hours on a Sunday in the kitchen, you could be doing something better instead, whatever that is. Maybe sometimes that is true. Maybe you want to spend an hour and a half in the kitchen and make it a shorter amount of time. That’s fine and that works.

But generally, when you are eating this way, when you’re on this plant-powered journey to release weight, it does require you to move your body some and to cook your own food. It does require you to do some planning. It requires you to stay engaged. All of that—the more you do of that, the more it’ll benefit you later.

Normalizing making those things a priority in your life and prioritizing those things. Yeah, you might not want to do them right now, but you’re going to be really, really happy that you did them later on in the week or later on in the month or later on in the year, for that matter.

Getting up and taking that walk or taking that bike ride or joining that class or cooking that food or not going for that glass of wine or deciding to not have that piece of cake and making a whole food plant-based muffin instead—those can all be hard choices in the moment because we like instant gratification. It makes us happy. It gives us a dopamine rush. It’s very pleasurable.

But doing something differently so that we can benefit from that later—that’s even more gratifying. It’s harder to do that, but you will practice that through the program. You do practice that, and then you get to enjoy it later instead of right now. Really normalizing prioritizing the things that will benefit you later instead of just always going for that instant gratification is a huge thing.

Changing the lens that you look through. This is a huge one. A big part of this is really coaching, and a big part of coaching is taking responsibility and understanding how you are creating your reality and you are creating the environment for yourself in your head.

Because I come from a coach background, I use a tool called the model. What that really shows is we think that our outside circumstances really create our results. In actuality, it’s not the outside circumstances that we can’t control that create our results. It stems from how we’re thinking about those circumstances. How we’re thinking about those circumstances is what creates our feelings. Our feelings drive our actions, and our actions create our results.

If you’re looking at something in a way that is creating a lot of stress or negativity or anxiety or feeling defeated, then it’s not going to help you reach your goals. How can we shift that lens and look at that same thing in a different way so that it creates a different feeling, so that we can take different actions, so that we can get a different result? That’s really important. That oftentimes is just changing the lens that you look through.

Here’s an example. Somebody in the program was going into phase two. They had done phase one for, I think, a few months, maybe even four months. Finally, they were at a plateau and they were going to switch to phase two, but they were really, really afraid to cut the nuts out. They were having a lot of anxiety about this. They came to a coaching call and I said, “Okay, let’s look at this nut debacle then.”

She was looking at avoiding nuts through a lens of a lot of scarcity, and it meant that she can’t have something. She felt like it was really depriving, like it was deprivation. I thought, okay, is there an opportunity to look at this in a different way? Can you look at this with curiosity? What would serve her better?

This is the little cliff notes, but what she came up with is thinking about this as an experiment. This doesn’t have to be forever. We don’t know how this is going to turn out, but can she look at this with curiosity and just do this as an experiment, just to see what happens? After two weeks of removing the nuts, if there’s no change, then she can go back to having some nuts. But if there is a change and she wants to keep going, then she can do that.

Just kind of taking back that power and knowing that at any point you don’t have to do any of this, and understanding that it’s all a choice and it’s all an experiment and we’re all just figuring out what’s going to work for us. Through that shift, through that coaching, she was able to look at avoiding nuts with a completely different lens. She was able to do it. And guess what? It really helped her release some more weight. She was no longer at a plateau, and she’s still in phase two and still releasing weight.

So often it’s just about how we’re looking at something. It’s not like there’s one better way to look at something than another way—there’s no wrong or right way to look at something. What I’m more curious about is, what way can we look at this that’s going to help you reach your goals? Which way can you look at this that is going to support you? Which way can you look at this that is going to make it easier for you? That’s what I’m interested in. We do a lot of that work, and that’s been really, really helpful.

Celebrating progress instead of beating yourself up for not being there yet, and celebrating progress instead of beating yourself up for not being perfect. I’m all about celebrating the wins and focusing on that instead of beating oneself up for not being at their goal weight yet, for not following the guidelines, for whatever. It’s a waste of time to beat yourself up for not doing something. You’re going to have a much better result if you focus on the progress, on the wins, on the things that you can be proud of yourself for. Focusing on that is going to help you move forward. Focusing on the lack of progress you’ve made or the fact that you didn’t do something perfectly—that is going to get you nowhere fast.

We’re always shifting, focusing on the progress. Now, we can look at the fact that you haven’t reached your goal yet. We can look at the fact that you went off plan and had a run-in with the drive-through. We can look at all that stuff. I’m not suggesting that we just toss that under the rug and ignore it. But when we look at that stuff, what I want to do is look at it with curiosity and ask: how can we use that in a way that’s going to help you moving forward?

Beating yourself up isn’t going to help you moving forward. Focusing on those wins, focusing on that progress is a way to move forward. Then, acknowledging all those areas where you’re messy and imperfect—but instead of using it as ammo and using that to weaponize your progress, how can we look at that to learn and to move forward and to give yourself a blueprint of what to try next time?

There’s no bad behavior. There’s no good or bad food. There’s no good or bad way of doing things. I talk about this all the time. There are consequences to things. You do this, you’re going to get this result. You do this, you’re going to get this result. So there are different results, but there are not bad choices to be made. You aren’t bad for eating the donut.

We talk about that a lot—the difference between that and what that looks like. That is a game changer for people when they can start to zoom out a little bit and see the choices that they’re making as being more neutral. Then, okay, where do you want to go from here? Being more deliberate with your choices instead of spiraling and being full of shame and dread and just not wanting to look at it anymore.

That’s been huge. The thing that can really help that is focusing on your progress and really celebrating that and then looking at the other stuff in a light of curiosity.

This has been great: when you understand which feeling drives the action of overeating for you, then you know exactly what feeling to practice sitting with the next time it comes up. So if you know that you often overeat when you’re bored, then you know that you can practice being bored and allowing yourself to be bored. When you know that anger drives you to overeat—which just means you’re eating when you’re not hungry, you’re eating when you don’t need fuel—then you can practice being angry and sitting with that anger instead of eating.

Just one caveat to that: I will say people who have trauma—for them, sitting with their feelings could be really scary and hard and maybe not recommended. If you are somebody that does have trauma or PTSD and you haven’t seen a therapist or did this work in a professional setting, then I recommend doing that.

But if that’s not you, then opening up and allowing yourself to feel whatever feeling drives that overeating instead of overeating. You just want to pause. How can I feel bored? Can I feel bored? When you can open up and feel that feeling and accept that feeling and let it be there, you’re not going to need to eat the thing because you’re not trying to make it stop.

That’s really what you’re doing, right? If I feel bored and I don’t like feeling bored and I reach for something, I’m going to make that boredom go away. But if you allow that boredom to be there, then all of a sudden you’re not trying to make it go away and therefore you don’t have to reach for the thing. It’s learning how to sit with your emotions and to process your emotions and to be with your emotions rather than eating them. That’s been a big game changer for people and a really new way of doing it.

There are so many things. I feel like I could talk about this for the next two hours because I absolutely love running this program. I love coaching this program. I love all of our droplets—present droplets, past droplets. It’s been such a wonderful thing to have this community and to offer this kind of support in this way. It means so much.

This is based on eating a whole food plant-based diet. One reason why this is so effective for managing weight is because it is really low in calorie density and really high in nutrient density. For example, a pound of kale is 100 calories. A pound of potatoes is 350 calories. A pound of tofu is 344 calories. A pound of chicken is like 730. That’s a lot of numbers, but basically you could have a pound of kale, a pound of potatoes, and almost a pound of tofu for the same amount as a pound of chicken—which is like three times more food for the same amount of calories. We eat about three to five pounds of food in a day. When those three to five pounds are naturally lower in calories, guess what? You’re going to be eating more and naturally getting fewer calories, which is why this way of eating is so effective for maintaining weight loss and reaching a really healthy weight for your frame.

When you break it down like that, it makes sense. A lot of people know this. A lot of people are like, “Yes, I know whole food plant-based eating is the way to go for sustainable weight loss. It’s just doing it consistently.” This is really why I wanted to pair the whole food plant-based eating with the coaching part, because it’s about the food, but there’s so much more to it than just the food. If it was just about the food, then everybody would eat that way and everybody would reach their goal weight and then—easy peasy. But that’s not the case, because there are a lot of feelings that come up about it. There’s a lot of other stuff that has to be unpacked and untangled and looked at in order to then allow yourself to easily eat like this and have this be your life. That’s the best way I can put it.

A lot of that work is allowing yourself to be imperfect, allowing yourself to be human, allowing yourself to have feelings, making small tweaks that work for you and your schedule and your history. There’s so much that goes into this.

I guess that is where I will wrap it up, even though we’re not aiming for perfection. We’re aiming for realistic. We’re aiming for doable. If you can’t do something long-term, if it doesn’t feel good to do in the short term, then it won’t work long-term. So often what I’m doing is, “Okay, what’s the healthiest way to do this that’s going to be doable for you, that works?” What does that look like?

In phase one, the guideline is 10 minutes of moving your body every day. Some people have a challenge with that. They say, “Okay, can you do five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening? Does that feel more doable for you?” Everybody is different. It’s a program that does have specific guidelines and specific phases, but there’s so much flexibility within that.

I encourage anybody who is interested in releasing weight and staying there and not having to worry about it again to join Drop It Club. If you know anybody who’s struggling to lose weight, even if they’ve tried so many times, send them my way and I will help them. The link to join is in the show notes. We do have a sort of end-of-the-year deal coming up, which I’m really excited about, so we will post that in the show notes as well so you can find out more about that.

If you have any questions about this, please email at [email protected] and I’m happy to answer your questions. This is such a powerful way to change your relationship with food, change your relationship with your body, and learn a ton about yourself and really get to your goal weight in a way that is healthy and that feels good and that gives you loads of other benefits.

I have to say, because I’m so passionate about this, a lot of people will sign up with the goal of, “Okay, I want to weigh X amount of pounds.” They’re getting there. They’re releasing the weight. They’re on their way. But somewhere in their journey, they’re like, “This isn’t about the weight anymore. The weight’s great and that’s kind of a benefit, but this is so much more than that.” Really, it’s a way to live your life that feels joyful and that feels good and that gives people a lot of meaning.

There are so many stories I could tell. People being so afraid of the scale, right? Jumping on that scale and having that number dictate how they’re going to feel that day or having that number dictate how they feel about themselves or what they’re going to go do during the day, when really that number is just information. That’s information. That’s feedback. We can use that to our advantage without creating a story about it.

There’s just so much to this, and I would love to be your coach. Again, if you know anybody, send them my way. You can go to cleanfooddirtygirl.com and right on the homepage there’s Drop It. There’s a big box that says “plant powered weight loss.” You can look at the show notes here. If there’s somebody in your life who you do want to refer but you don’t feel comfortable saying Clean Food Dirty Girl, you can send them to mollypatrick.com and that’ll get them there as well. For some people that’s just easier. It’s M-O-L-L-Y-P-A-T-R-I-C-K, mollypatrick.com, and that will get them to where they need to be as well.

Some people feel kind of uncomfortable with sharing our name with certain people, and I get that. Totally fine. We’ve created mollypatrick.com so that it can be a little bit easier for people.

Again, if you have questions, let me know. I’m here for you. I would love to work with you and I would love for you to get started this year. Something that I hear a lot from people is, “I’m so glad I started this before I was ready, because what I realized is I was never really going to be ready.” Starting before you’re ready, starting imperfectly, making just a few shifts can be a great thing to kind of get ready and head into the new year feeling like you’re a bit ahead of the game and knowing that you can do this imperfectly. It’s such an empowering thing.

Thank you for listening, and have a wonderful day. Now I think I’m going to go eat some plants. Yeah.