How to Trust the Process When Fat Loss Feels Slow

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If you are somebody who has a poor mindset around your journey and is stuck in wanting to see these results, it's not whether you go and do more workouts. It's not whether you're consistent with your macros even more. You need to fix that aspect of the poor mindset you have around wanting these quick results, wanting them fast and wanting them yesterday, or trying to work out harder and slash your calories because you want quick results. That's not the answer.

What's going on, you guys? Welcome to The WarriorBabe Show with Nikkiey Stott, co-founder of WarriorBabe. On this podcast, we talk about mindset, methodologies and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong and feel insanely confident.

I'm your host, Nikkiey Stott, and welcome to today's episode. This is episode number 198. We are two away from the 200th episode of this podcast. Let's go. I hope you guys are enjoying these episodes. I freaking love sitting down here and getting to pour into every single one of them, just hoping that you gain insight, value, knowledge, something you can take away and apply to your life. And then hopefully, in turn, you get some type of positive result from doing that, from listening to this episode, from me sitting down here and recording them. It's so crazy that we are so close to 200, and there are so many more to come. Thanks for being supporters of this podcast.

So for today, I told you guys in the last episode, I think, that I put up that little questions box on my Instagram story asking what topics you want me to bring to the episodes here on the podcast. One of you mentioned that you wanted to hear what it actually means to trust the process. That's what we're going to talk about today.

But first, I want to start with something I found on Instagram that was going viral. It was shared amongst our entire coaching team in our company communication channels, and I think it's really good to start off with this.

This is what the post said: "So you're telling me that for a decade, you binge drank alcohol and caffeine, took Adderall and hormonal birth control, pulled all-nighters, skipped meals, over-exercised, depleted all your mineral stores, avoided carbs like the plague except for 4 a.m. greasy drunk food, lathered yourself in poisonous tanning lotions before fake baking, put bleached tampons in your vagina every month, were addicted to chaos and toxic relationships, lived in moldy apartments, spent years performing, people-pleasing and comparing yourself to the fake lives of IG influencers, and now you're frustrated that you're not miraculously healed three months into your health and healing journey? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but healing from an abusive lifestyle can take years. It's going to take time, consistency and surrender to communicate to your body that it's safe and its needs are being met before you notice drastic shifts."

I'm not saying that you did all of those things. Maybe you did all of them, maybe you did some of them, maybe a few, maybe one. Regardless of that entire statement, what I want you to take away is this: think about all of the things you did to your body over the years, and how many years you did them for. Probably the past decade, maybe 10, 15, 20 years that you've been wanting to be on the right path with your fitness journey, your healing journey or your health journey. You have to remind yourself that you did 10 years of that, 15 years of that, 20 years of that. So it's going to take time. If you are three months into your journey and you're not miraculously seeing the results you want, I hope this is a really solid reminder that you just spent the last 10 years doing harm to your body, and it's not going to be solved in three months.

It's going to take time. It's going to take consistency. It's going to take you surrendering and accepting that this journey is possibly going to be a year, two years, maybe even five years, maybe even eight years to get everything right. There are going to be different phases of your journey. At one point maybe it's aesthetics, or maybe it's internally fixing something, or maybe you need to stretch, and who knows? All in all, it's going to take time to see the dramatic results you want to see.

It's not going to happen overnight. I always say people want to put their body in a microwave for 30 seconds and have a toned body come out. It takes time. So I want to really talk about what trusting the process looks like and dive into that. You've probably heard that phrase over and over again, especially in the fitness world. Trust the process. Your coach says trust the process. You've been telling yourself trust the process.

What does that actually mean? That's what we're going to dive into today. So to reiterate: if you're feeling frustrated that you're not seeing progress or your progress is too slow, if you've ever wondered whether you're doing everything the right way, or you think you are doing it the right way but you're still not seeing the results you want, then I hope today you grasp the concept of trusting the process and why patience and trusting the process are the real keys to unlocking the true potential within yourself.

It has nothing really to do with macros and nothing to do with workouts. This is more the mindset aspect. If you can accept that this is the key to unlocking your potential along your journey, and truly understand the patience that's required of you to trust the process, that's all I hope you take away from this podcast.

So first, let's break down what trusting the process really means. Personally, I think this phrase gets thrown around a lot without people fully understanding the true depth of it. It's very surface level when people say it: you've got to trust the process. But trusting the process means believing in the journey you're on wholeheartedly, even when you don't see the immediate results you want. It's about sticking to your plan, whether that's your workout routine, your nutrition, your overall approach, the language you're using with yourself, the narrative you're telling yourself, the beliefs you're breaking, and sticking to that plan because you understand that real progress takes time.

When you trust the process, you're essentially committing to a long-term vision for yourself. This is where I think a lot of people break, because they get into it wanting to see immediate results next week or the week after. When that doesn't happen for them, they get frustrated or discouraged that this isn't working, and so they try to change everything up.

You have to commit yourself to a long-term vision. You have to tell yourself at the start: this is going to take 12 months. This is going to take 18 months. This is going to take two years. This is going to take five years, wherever you're at. If you have 100 pounds to lose, it's going to take time. You didn't just put those 100 pounds on. If you have the last 10 pounds to lose, mind you, the last 10 pounds are sometimes the hardest to lose. So you have to give yourself that time. You have to be realistic with yourself and commit to the long-term vision.

It doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen in a week. You have to be willing to put in the work consistently, even when it feels like nothing is happening. I know that can be tough. We live in a world that values quick results. You can get same-day delivery on just about everything. You can binge-watch an entire series in one weekend.

You get Amazon Prime the next day. And you're constantly exposed on social media to before-and-after photos of transformations that seem to happen in a matter of weeks. But listen to me loud and clear: fitness, health, true transformations don't work like that. There are some people promoting transformations online that happen in three months or six months, but there are also probably a handful of people who aren't being promoted on social media who are taking a year or two years. That is seriously what we pride ourselves on at WarriorBabe.

We celebrate the women who have had results no matter where they are along their journey, but especially the ones who have been with us for two years and have had a true, full-blown life transformation. All in all, what it really means is believing in the journey you're on. You have to believe in the journey you're on. And I think that's really hard for people when they're just at the start of their journey, because belief in self is hard to come by. That's why I think working with a coach, or finding a program you love and committing yourself to doing it, helps: you buy belief.

The coaches are believing in you before you believe in yourself, so that helps you trust the process a little bit more. But it's not only believing in yourself and the journey you're on. It's also sticking to your plan regardless of whether you're seeing results or not, because you understand that progress takes time, that you have to commit yourself to that long-term vision, and that your body takes time to adapt. It takes time to change and time to grow stronger. That's where patience comes into play.

So that's really what trusting the process means. But there are other buckets of the process you have to trust when it comes to patience and the reality of long-term results. So just put those buckets in your brain, and I'm going to tap on them a little bit.

Patience in your fitness journey is one of the hardest but most important qualities you can develop. When you're working toward a goal, especially something as challenging as building muscle, losing body fat, transforming your physique or correcting something internally that may be off, like your gut health or your hormones, it's so easy to get discouraged when you aren't seeing instant results. I know that through and through, because we see women inside our community who are with us for three months, and they're frustrated and they take their frustration out on their coach. But here's the thing: your body is still constantly working, even if you don't see it right away. That's what I want you to understand.

Behind the scenes, after every single workout, your muscles are repairing and rebuilding. Your metabolism is adapting to the new nutritional intake you're giving your body that maybe you once weren't giving it. And your strength is increasing little by little with every single workout. So think of it like planting a seed. You won't see the plant sprout immediately. But you trust that when you water it on a day-to-day basis, give it the right sunlight and give it the right time, that plant is going to grow, right?

Fitness is the same way. Your journey is the same way. The process you're on is the same way. Every workout, every meal, every rest day, every positive thing you tell yourself. Because it's not just every workout or every macro you eat, the surface-level things that help you get to your goals. It's really the mindset you have behind this. If you can accept what I'm saying here, every single one of those efforts you put forth on a daily basis is like watering that seed.

You might not see the progress every single day, but that doesn't mean nothing is happening. It doesn't mean change isn't happening. It is, and sometimes it's really hard to see. I know from years of coaching women that they're putting in the work on a regular basis, two or three weeks in a row, and because you see yourself every single day, it's really hard to see the small changes that are actually happening. Then maybe you walk into your dentist's office or your chiropractor's, somewhere with people who don't see you every day.

They see you maybe once a quarter, once every three months, and they're like, "Oh my god, you're looking so good. What are you doing?" They can tell you're toning up, that you're showing a little more definition, right? I know that happens, and it's an example of how, because you see yourself every single day, you probably don't see the progress daily yourself. But it doesn't mean nothing's happening. It doesn't mean change isn't happening. Those things are still happening behind the scenes.

These small changes are going to add up over time. You just have to be patient with yourself and patient with the journey. But it all starts with what I said at the beginning of this episode: you need to understand it's going to take time. I hope this is making sense to you guys. I know you hear "trust the process" all the time. But do you believe in your journey? Are you still sticking to your plan, even if you aren't seeing the results you want?

Are you committed to the long-term vision? Because essentially, if you have those three things down, patience will come. If you feel like you're slipping into not being patient, you're going to remind yourself of those three things.

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So ask yourself right now: do you believe in yourself to do this journey? Are you still sticking to the plan even if you're not seeing the results you want? And are you committed to the long-term vision you have for yourself, maybe in two or three years? Have you even thought about that? What does that even look like? Maybe you need to spend time in that thought process. Because then it comes down to understanding that, with you doing the work and maybe not seeing the changes on a daily, weekly or sometimes even monthly basis, long-term results take time.

Whether you want to see fat loss, more muscle gain, or you just want to maintain, the timeline for real, sustainable change is longer than people expect. That's the hard truth. What's that saying? Rome wasn't built in a day. Neither was your dream physique. Neither was your dream body. Neither was the dream mindset you have along this journey. Fast results are often unsustainable results, and I want to remind you of that. When you're doing extreme dieting or overtraining, or all those weird things I said at the beginning of the podcast, you'll give anything to get quick results.

So you'll try quick fixes. But those approaches often lead to burnout, to plateaus, or even to regaining lost weight. Slow and steady truly wins the race, because it gives your body time to adjust and adapt to the changes you're making. For example, when you're building muscle, it takes time for those muscle fibers to repair and grow stronger. You might not see visible changes in the mirror for weeks, but that doesn't mean you're not progressing. The same goes for fat loss.

It's not just about seeing the number on the scale go down quickly. It's about creating a sustainable lifestyle that allows you to maintain the progress long term. Those are really important concepts to understand. Sometimes they're hard to understand, because we all want quick results. We all want things to happen pretty fast. But again, go back to this: are you in alignment with those three things I mentioned? If not, which bucket do you need to spend more time in? Which one do you need to create more of a thought process around so you can get back behind it?

Maybe it's a narrative. I think the narrative in a lot of people's brains is what's stopping them from moving forward on their fitness journeys. It's "I can't do this. This is too hard. I'm not good enough. I don't believe in myself." All of those things may be creating past emotions that you then live in, and therefore you aren't taking the necessary action. It's kind of like what I talked about in the mindset episode, maybe five or six episodes ago, where I talked about Joe Dispenza.

Which, by the way, you guys: Joe Dispenza. I highly recommend listening to his content and immersing yourself in his message. Because if you are somebody who has a poor mindset around your journey and is stuck in wanting to see these results, it's not whether you go and do more workouts. It's not whether you're consistent with your macros even more. You need to fix that aspect of the poor mindset you have around wanting these quick results, wanting them fast and wanting them yesterday.

Or trying to work out harder and slash your calories because you want quick results. That's not the answer. So where are those thought processes coming from? Understand that they're affecting the way you think and feel, and the way you think and feel is how you're going to progress throughout your day. You could be stuck in old emotions from the past that you don't even know about. Maybe you saw your mom dieting over and over again, so now you have those thoughts, you do the same thing, those thoughts attach to feelings, and those feelings are how you take action on a daily basis.

I could go down a whole spiral on that specific concept, but I think it's really important to nudge in there for you to think about. If you have emotions or thoughts that aren't supporting your journey, how can you rewire them to be more positive in your day, so that you create new feelings and therefore new actions that move you forward toward your goals?

On top of that, it will help you understand the patience and trust in the process even more. You can trust the process at a surface level: believe in yourself, commit to the plan, stick to the plan, commit to the long-term vision. But basically what I'm saying with all of this is that if your mindset isn't there to allow yourself to do those things, you have to fix the mindset. You have to fix the narrative, fix the belief and fix the stories you're telling yourself, so that you create new, better feelings and emotions that drive you into action, to actually accept patience and the hard truth.

That sustainable change takes longer than you think, and that long-term results take time. Let's go. I hope that landed. If it didn't, go rewind it so you can listen to it again.

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Visit warriorbabe.com/apply today to start your transformation. That's warriorbabe.com/apply. All right, let's get back to the show.

It's a pretty high-level, complex thought process to break down and understand. But if you do, and you put your energy toward the right things that are going to help you, which is your mindset, then it'll serve you.

That's probably the golden nugget of this entire podcast. Now I'm going to go into some common mistakes I see people making, and practical tips for trusting the process. You know that's what I like to do in these episodes: give you takeaways. If you are experiencing this or feeling this way, here's how you can take it and apply it in a practical sense in your day-to-day.

First and foremost, the big common mistake, and I get it, we're all human. I want to say that first. It's so easy to feel frustrated when you don't see the progress you want to see. But that's when these big mistakes happen. The first is constantly changing your program. You fall into the trap of program hopping, from one program to the next or one app to the next. You do one workout for a few weeks, you don't see the results you want.

So you immediately switch to another program. Here's the problem: consistency is key. Jumping from one thing to another doesn't give your body enough time to adapt and grow stronger in that specific protocol and routine. People in the WarriorBabe program, maybe after four or five months, try to jump to another program because they're not seeing results and they feel stuck. Or they only have 12 months, because that's what we offer at WarriorBabe, and if they don't have their results in the first three months, they jump to another program.

But think about what I said at the beginning of the podcast again. You just spent the last decade or 15 years basically harming your body and doing extreme things, or whatever you've done. So it's going to take time for your body to adapt to a new protocol. When you come into WarriorBabe, we always want to bring in more food, and it's going to take time for your body to adapt to that if you spent the last decade under-eating. You can't jump ship after three to four months.

You have to allow your body enough time to adapt and grow stronger with that specific protocol. So that's a big mistake I see: constantly changing programs because people aren't seeing the results they want fast enough. The other ones I pretty much talk about all the time in these episodes. Number two is extreme dieting. If people don't see quick results from their diet, they often cut their calories in half or even more. They eliminate entire food groups.

They eliminate entire macros. And I'll be honest with you, that's going to work temporarily. But it's going to lead you to fatigue, to nutrition deficiencies, and eventually to binging or giving up. The key to success is a balanced, sustainable plan that you're able to follow and stick to long term. That's why at WarriorBabe, and I'm just naturally bringing in what I've built over the last six years that has helped 20,000 women...

This isn't the only thing I know how to talk about, but it's a protocol that's been embedded for the last six years in how we support our women, and that's with macros. I don't expect you to be tracking macros for the rest of your life. But I do expect you to understand, learn and gain insight, knowledge and education around macros, which is basically nutrition and a sustainable plan for you to follow.

That's what's going to stick with you long term. I talked about that in the episode on intuitive eating and how to confidently transition to eating intuitively. Macros are basically the first step, and they're a balanced, sustainable plan you can stick to long term. So that was the second mistake, extreme dieting. Don't eliminate entire food groups. Don't slash your calories. Please just give it time. If you're new to WarriorBabe and you're three months in, you're not seeing the results, but you're eating more food, just trust the process.

What I mean by trusting the process is that you're believing in yourself, you're sticking to the plan even when things aren't happening, and you've committed to a long-term vision of yourself. Think about those three buckets. The last mistake I see, because people want things to happen so fast, is that they're not tracking small wins. They're only focusing on the end goal and not celebrating the small victories along the way.

Did you lift heavier this week? Did you do one more pull-up than you could last time? Did you track all your macros and eat all your meals more consistently? Did you focus on healthier food choices more consistently? Those are wins, and they matter. That is you watering the seed on a daily basis so the plant can grow. The progress you're going to experience along your journey is not always linear, and it's important to recognize that the little things you do on a daily basis add up over time.

So another mistake I see is not tracking or paying attention to these small things because you're so attached to getting to the end result, and getting there quickly. If you do that, you're going to disappoint yourself over and over again. When I say you're committed to the long-term vision, I mean you're committed to the long-term vision, but you're sticking to the plan no matter what on a daily basis. That requires a level of patience, consistency and commitment, and almost a detachment from the end goal.

Because you know the day-to-day matters more. If you do the day-to-day and it compounds over time, it's going to get you to the end goal no matter what. And you believe in yourself.

Okay, so here are some practical tips you can take away from this episode and apply in your everyday life. Track non-scale victories. It's easy to get caught up in the scale, but remember, progress isn't just about your weight. There are other wins. Track how your clothes fit, track the strength gains you're seeing, track the narratives, track your energy, track how you're feeling, track your emotions.

Are you feeling better three months into your journey than you felt three months ago? Your energy level matters. Those are often more telling indicators of long-term success. Celebrate small wins. That's really important. As I just reiterated, progress is progress no matter how small. And remind yourself of the long game. This is the most important one I think you could take away.

When you feel impatient or discouraged, remind yourself why you started. Why did you start this journey? This one is so important, and it's one of the things our coaches do inside WarriorBabe. We don't just talk about your goal. We talk about why you want that goal. What does that goal mean to you? And it's not surface-level stuff like "I want to lose 10 pounds." Why do you want to lose 10 pounds? "Oh, well, I don't want my kids to grow up like my mom."

"I saw how my mom was with dieting and doing all these things. I want to set a better example and be a role model for my kids." That's a deeper why. That's going to make you want to get up every single day and do the things you know you should be doing that are in alignment with it. Or when you get even a little deeper, maybe there are some things with your partner that you feel you could be more confident in. So you want to lose 10 pounds to feel more confident in your own skin so you can show that for your husband.

Maybe be naked with the lights on when you're having a night together. You know what I mean? Those things are deeper, and when you have that why, you're able to remember why you're on this journey. When you're able to remind yourself why you started, that's going to make you feel more patient and give you more courage to show up on a day-to-day basis. Fitness is about creating a lifestyle you can sustain for years.

I've talked about that so many times. It's not just about achieving a quick fix. So keep that long-term vision in mind and trust that each day you show up and do the work, it's bringing you closer to that goal. All right? So those are some practical takeaways: track non-scale victories, celebrate small wins and remind yourself of the long game. Also, maybe journal. That one's coming up for me now. Journal on a daily basis about how you're feeling about the process and how you're feeling about your goals.

But overall, what it means to truly trust the process is showing up consistently, doing the work, and believing that even when you don't see immediate results, progress is happening. It means having patience with yourself and with your body, and knowing that the things you did for the last 10 years that fucked your body up are going to take time to fix. It's not going to happen overnight. It's not going to happen in three months. Maybe it'll take you a year. Maybe it'll take you five years.

Just have patience. It's a long game. If you stay committed, you will get there. This is the thing: you only fail by giving up. Think about that. If you stay committed, you're going to get there. It's not about perfection. It's about consistency. It's about how you can show up today in a way that's still in alignment with where you want to go and the goals you want to accomplish. So believe in yourself. Stick to the plan even when you're not seeing the immediate results week after week.

Know that it's happening, maybe month after month. And commit yourself to the long-term vision. That's what trusting the process really means. Along the way, show up consistently for yourself. All right, guys. Love you all. Hope you enjoyed this episode. I appreciate you guys, and I'll see you in the next podcast. Peace out.

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