Welcome back to the podcast this week. I’m so happy you’re here with me today and I’m also very excited because a lot of you reached out to me after last week’s episode on the new year’s resolution and it really hit home for so many of you, which always makes me very, very happy. And a number of you reached out and confirmed with me that you are or ever done setting the extreme new year’s resolutions with food and that in 2022, you are more focused on setting foundations for naturally healthy eating and having control with food in a way that doesn’t feel forced and doesn’t come from harnessing willpower.
So I’m always so happy to hear that. And I’m so glad that was helpful. Another exciting thing is this business and this practice of mine has gotten a rebrand. So you’ll notice a lot of things are changing. They’re being very upleveled if I do say so myself, so it’s really, really fun for me to see this business have evolved over the past year. And it’s so representative of the number of women who are joining own, your eating habits, who are changing their lives with food.
And while this is my practice and my business, I really feel like the mission of this work is ours. Collectively, even as women who have been raised in the diet industry and in diet culture, I feel like that this work is so pivotal to all of us. And so I am so full of love and empowerment every day that I grow this business.
And I hear from all of you how much it’s changing your life and helping you along the way. So that is just my little check-in for today. And I want to talk about eating decisions today, because this is something that brings up a lot of drama for all of you and my clients. And this is something that did bring up drama for me in the past as well. So I want to talk about exactly what creates the drama with eating decisions and how you can see eating decisions more clearly here today.
So basically what happens is all of you and all of my clients will come to me with all of your food struggles, which is perfect. That is exactly what I’m here for. And they will all look a bit different, but generally the struggles will be things like not having enough time to eat healthy, not having enough energy, not having enough support from friends and family, not having the resources that you need, not having the knowledge that you need to make healthy eating decisions.
And all of you will believe that these things are in the way and what I see, which you’ll know this. If you’ve been in it, there’s a lot of ruminating and overthinking that comes with our food struggles. We’ll kind of find ourselves in this tailspin of thoughts and thought patterns where we’re just constantly overthinking why we have the food struggles we do. And what will happen is you’ll come to me with all of the problems and all of the reasons why it’s not working for you, which is totally natural.
But my goal with this episode today is to clear up that noise a bit so he can feel a little less heavy and the solution will be more clear for you. So the first thing we need to know, which sounds a bit silly is that eating decisions are just the food that goes into your mouth.
All right? Like, this is really it. It’s the food that goes into your mouth. In that moment, you made an eating decision and it really is this simple. This is just the math. Now you are making eating decisions daily, no matter what. So these decisions are already happening, but notice how you may have a story and reasons that seem like you’re being stuck from eating decisions that you want to be making.
The truth is you’re making eating decisions every day. Anyway. So all of these things that feel like are keeping you stuck from eating decisions you want to make, we want to just question, and this is a safe space to question yourself, my friends. Just question why we think those things are stopping us from making the eating decisions we want to make. When we’re all ready, making, eating decisions throughout our day, we’re already putting food into our mouth.
Now, if you feel like that, there’s a lot of reasons outside of you for your food struggles and why you’re not making the eating decisions you want. I want to validate you for a minute. I want you to feel safe here. If this is coming up for you, because this is perfectly natural. When you’ve been having struggles with food, when you are struggling to feel like you have control over your eating decisions, this is when the brain is going to try and make sense of all of it, right?
When the brain doesn’t understand why you’re having these problems, it doesn’t understand where control comes from. It believes you don’t have control. It’s going to start coming up with the reasons why this is happening to you, because it doesn’t know why. So it’s going to dig and it’s going to come up with reasons why you’re struggling and the reasons that I most see your brains come up with, or that you don’t have time.
You don’t have the resources. You don’t have the energy. You don’t have the support. You don’t have the knowledge. You need to make those decisions. You don’t have access to the right foods. That’s what I see a lot. None of this is actually true. And I don’t want to be convincing. You hear that. What you believe is the problem. Isn’t true. I always say I’m never in the business of convincing any of you, that your thoughts are illegitimate.
That is not the point here. The point is just for you to lovingly question it a bit question. All of these obstacles that your brain has created to the eating habits you want. And what I want to offer here is how each of these things doesn’t really add up or make logical sense. And this is going to be a time when we can lovingly call ourselves out of it here in the best way.
So first let’s talk about the obstacle of time that our brain has. We will believe we do not have time to change our eating habits. We do not have time to prioritize healthy eating. And this is a very easy one for my clients to go to because I work with very high achieving women. So these are women who they’re busy moms or they’re corporate women. They own businesses maybe.
And they definitely have tasks that are prioritized in their day. So very naturally it’s easy for their brain to come up with time as the obstacle for why they’re not eating the way they want to. Right? Because as I said, they don’t really know why it’s happening. So their brain will try to make sense of it. But as I also mentioned, we’re already making food decisions, right?
Because we have to eat to survive. It’s kind of a non-negotiable if you’re a human and when you really unpack this, you don’t need more time to make a food decision, right?
There’s food that goes into your mouth. It doesn’t require more time. You don’t need to cook these impressive meals. You don’t need to meal prep to change your eating habits. Anything that requires more time. Now, I want us to stop and take a breath for a minute, because this is going to be mind blowing for some of you. It’s going to stretch your mind, set up it because so many of you really truly believe that you need to take more time to eat healthy.
You need to do all of the things. Time is not. What’s causing you to overeat and binge eat. When you get home from work or overeat past fullness. When you go out to dinner at your favorite restaurant, all right. Think about it. The lack of control piece with food, where you feel like your eating decisions just happen to you.
I so know what that feels like. And so do my clients, that piece of it has nothing to do with time, because it happens in a moment. And in that same moment, that feels like you don’t have control. It would also be available for you to make different decisions with food. So question it, my friends time has nothing to do with making the food decisions that you want to make. And it’s totally safe.
If your brain offers you that we’re not here to make your brain feel less legitimate or make you feel less legitimate and safe. But just question it. What if this just weren’t true? What if I didn’t need more time and I can promise you, you do not. So take that for what it is worth, but we’ll move on. The next thing we want to question is whether making healthy food decisions requires more energy or effort.
Most of you will genuinely believe this. And of course you do because the diet industry has presented you solutions that require a lot of effort and a lot of energy and a lot of willpower because they suck. You never wanted to do those. Of course, they require your energy, but you never needed more energy, right? You never needed more effort to make healthy food decisions.
And the biggest reason why is because healthy eating decisions can be decisions that you genuinely want to make. When you’re looking at it through that lens, my clients learn how to eat healthy based on food decisions they genuinely want to make. Doesn’t require more energy. It doesn’t require discipline or willpower. They learn how to access healthy eating decisions from what they want to be eating rather than what they should be eating based on what a diet or quote unquote expert is telling them to eat the solutions from the diet industry, tell you more effort is necessary because more effort will be necessary when you’re eating in a way that feels boring and is not something that you want to be doing.
My friends, you never have to eat in a way that you don’t want to be eating. And that’s going to feel a little inaccessible to many of you, because right now you believe you want to be over eating certain foods and you want to be eating foods. You find pleasurable, which makes sense. But that goes into other work where then we have to learn that you can eat foods you want, that are pleasurable, and you can want to eat foods that make your body feel good and get you the results you want.
So when the foods you want to eat, whether for pleasure, or for nutrition become clear, which is what my clients do at that point, you’re able to make food decisions without more effort or energy. All right. So now let’s talk about when your brain is believing that circumstances are getting in the way of the eating habits you want.
So circumstances in your life that feel like they’re not the most ideal. Your brain’s telling that that is what’s in the way of making changes with food. So most commonly women will come to me telling me that things that work are getting in the way of the eating habits they want most recently, the holidays are getting in the way of the eating habits. They want things at home with their kids, especially we’re still in the midst of COVID.
Kids may still be at home. That that is the reason why your food decisions, aren’t what you want them to be. And I hear you for those of you who have these struggles, where circumstances in your life may not be the most ideal to prioritize healthy eating. But what I want you to know is that your version of prioritizing healthy, eating based on your past is restriction, discipline.
And again, a lot of effort. So we know for sure you don’t have time or energy for that. And I would offer that none of you do, I certainly do not have time or the willingness to engage with methods that require restriction effort or willpower, and you never have to, but this is why your brain may be believing that the circumstances of your life currently will keep you stuck because you’re believing that that effort is necessary.
Now that may never be a priority for you, especially if you are a mom, you own a business, you are focused on your career. Of course, learning to eat healthy in that way is never going to be a priority. They never need to be. And when we’re talking about food decisions, as in the food that goes in your mouth circumstances, can’t get in the way they were never getting in the way in terms of the control piece with food.
And they are not the cause for your lack of control with food. So hopefully that will make a bit more sense. Now, if you’re able to consider that restrictive methods with food that required a lot of effort were never necessary. So if that’s the case, then things in your life that are not ideal, not ideal circumstances do not get in the way of making a food decision.
Another struggle you all come to me with is not having enough knowledge. So this is where I hear a lot of, I don’t know, you’ll say, I don’t know what I’m supposed be eating. I don’t know what the right way to eat is. And once again, let’s validate the heck out of us for a minute. This makes sense. Why we believe that this is an issue because in diet culture, we’re taught that the answers and the solutions are to have the right diet, to have the right plan, to have the right, how to with food.
We are taught that the way to achieve the eating habits we want is to have the right how. And so when none of the house we’ve tried have worked, we’ll think, I don’t know how so I must need to have more knowledge and learn more to figure it out, which by the way, you will spend a lifetime trying to figure this out because no one else can tell you what the right way is for you.
That’s something that your brain and body tell you, you don’t need to read. I feel like I should do a whole episode on this. You don’t need to read more personal growth books. All right, read more nutritional articles or research, take more classes, any of it, anything where you’re searching for the right way to eat, because the best expert as my clients really learn is your own body.
Your body is perfectly designed to tell you what it needs from food. The healthiest eating habits are the eating habits that you create based on what you genuinely want with food. Not based on what someone else told you to eat. No, that will feel incredibly unfulfilling to you personally, as a human. And it won’t feel satisfying to your body over time.
You can learn to figure out the right way for you based on what your mind and body provide to you. Based on the information it gives you. You don’t need more knowledge. This one’s going to be really hard for some of you, because all of you are like me. Most of you, and you love to learn. You love to grow. You love to take in more information because it feels really safe, but also productive, right?
And it’s just busy work, which is always a bummer for my clients to hear.
I really understand this. It’s a bummer when you learn that no more learning is necessary, that you have all of the knowledge you need within yourself to make food decisions that you want to be making. All right? The next thing I hear that is getting in the way of the eating habits you want is that you feel like you don’t have enough support. So most commonly I’ll hear that spouses or partners don’t support you enough in the eating decisions you want to make.
So maybe they’re not willing to change for you. They’ll still keep certain foods in the house that they should treat you differently or change the way they eat. So you can be successful. And this is something that can be hard for us to sit with because our brain just really, really loves to blame things outside of us. This is a really primitive, I think all of our brains will offer us this.
But once again, there’s just the food that goes into your mouth. There’s just food decisions that you make. Anything else outside of you, including how other people are supporting you in that or what they are eating has nothing to do with you losing control. That is all a decision you make, despite the circumstances happening outside of you. And once again, let’s validate you in why you believe this.
This is just your brain making sense of why you don’t believe you have control right now. Why it’s not working for you. A lot of you, including my past brain will offer that it must be other people not supporting us enough or other people not being willing to change the way they eat for us. And that never had to be the case. My friend, you can have control with food, despite what anyone else is telling you or doing in your life.
Now, the most common obstacle I hear from all of you in terms of why you’re not eating the way you want to is not having the right foods available to you. As in physically in your home, you do not have the right foods in front of you. And your brain is believing that this is what creates control. That if your house is filled with the right foods, that now you’re just going to have control and we’ll never eat the quote unquote, wrong foods, and we’ll never lose control.
Now, this couldn’t be further from the truth, but again, I really want to validate you and make you feel safe and heard because if we’re believing that the problem is not having the right foods, it’s because of the diet industry approach we have taken, right? Once again, we are heavily taught that the problem is not having the right foods in front of us all the time at our disposal, and that if we have the chocolate or the bread or the cupcakes in the house, that this is what causes us to lose control.
If the right foods are in front of you, that’s what causes control to leave the building. And this is not where control comes from foods outside of you. When you see them, can’t possibly cause you to lose control. It may seem like this on the surface, but control comes from within. This is not something that can keep you stuck. And my clients, a lot of the work they do is learning how foods were never the problem.
They learn exactly where that control comes from how to create it. So no matter what their family likes to eat, or no matter what foods they have in the house, they know they have control control happens when you’re able to have the circumstances in your life, the things outside of you be any type of way. And do you know that food decisions are still yours?
You know, that you are still in control, always control does not mean getting rid of all of the foods in your home that you find pleasurable because you’re doing that because you don’t believe you have control.
See that if you’re doing that, you do not believe you have it. Therefore you don’t. So all of these things that I walked you through, where I’m disproving each of these obstacles, I just want you to consider and think for a moment. What if that were just true? Not in a convincing way towards yourself, but just in a way where you expand your mind and consider what if these things were never a problem.
All right. Because what happens is when you feel like you don’t have control, that’s when the brain gets to work, creating what I lovingly refer to as a sad food story. So we all will have a really sad food story. I definitely have one. And this is the story that we believe is truly keeping us stuck from the eating habits we want. And I really want to offer that it is safe for you to question this story bit by bit, because this is just your brain, trying to make sense of why you don’t have control.
It will offer that time is the problem. Energy is the problem. Knowledge is the problem. The foods are the problem, just because it wants to make sense of why you’re struggling, why you don’t have control is not because of things outside of you. It’s because what you’re doing has not worked yet. So your brain is just trying to make sense of that control is there. It has always been there.
What we need to focus on is where it actually comes from, which comes from managing your mind and your emotions and listening to your body. It comes from separating your emotional state from food. So you’re able to have control with it. It comes from honoring your body’s needs very intentionally. If you’re not doing these things, you’re not creating real control my friends. All right.
So this was a very high level view of some things I see in terms of obstacles towards the eating habits you want.
I appreciate all of you for opening your mind up to this today. This is a lot to think about for some of us in the beginning. And if you’re ready to dive deeper with this work and really question all of it for yourself and create an entirely new relationship with food, then I encourage you to join own your eating habits. I would love to coach you inside. All right. Thank you for being here. My friends, I love you. I’ll talk to you next week.