Hello, my friends, welcome back to the Healthy Eating for Busy Women podcast. I’m happy you’re here. And today we’re gonna talk about a bit of a lighter topic which is how to eat healthy when you do not have the energy to care.And I want this […0.5s] topic of today’s episode to be as validating and relatable as possible because I think a lot of you listening relate to me and that your type a, your ambitious, you really value getting the results you want and doing them correctly.And I think there’s this really confusing experience that can come up when you have all the best intentions and with solving this problem, whether that’s weight loss or healthy eating, and then you find some days you just don’t have the capacity or energy to care. And it’s like all motivation has left the building.And I think for me personally in the past, this was one of the most painful experiences and confusing experiences because […0.5s] how can we possibly want this result so much and be so intent and clear and qualified with solving this problem and then wake up some days without any fuel or motivation to show for it?So I wanna talk about that today, and I want to help you solve for it really specifically.I think that we really feel as a culture that we need to feel motivated to do the things we wanna do, and that’s really not the case. But in this episode, I’m not going to sell you on discipline or willpower or pushing yourself actually.Instead, today I want you to be able to take an exhale while you see exactly why this is happening, and also how to take action with healthy eating and weight loss even when you feel exhausted, but in a way that doesn’t further burn you out.So let’s get into today’s episode, and I hope it’s helpful for you, so here’s where this problem normally starts, right? You know exactly what you want with healthy eating and weight loss. You’ve taken all the courses, you have all the knowledge, you’ve tried all the things and you have a lot of experience, right?Most of you listening relate to this podcast because you’ve done all the stuff. So you probably some of you could teach a class technically on what to eat to eat healthy. Your actions and results just aren’t matching your intent with what you want in this area of your life, and you aren’t consistent enough to see results.You want to eat healthy, you follow through for some time, but then things always come up, so work deadlines start looming, kids have more needs, maybe there’s just other personal things going on in your life that call your attention.And you really feel like that there’s never a perfect time, but at the same time you remain hopeful that the perfect time will somehow come upon you because that’s the only way it’s ever going to work with the business of your life.And really what’s happening is we live in a society that very much normalizes burnout and exhaustion.So what I know about you likely, if you’re listening right now, is you’re tired. You’re just so tired. You’re, you want all the things because you care about your well being, but it feels so inaccessible with the go go, go, that is your schedule.And the thing about our society in modern day is no one’s going to question this, especially in […0.5s] our western culture, it’s actually prized to be someone who works hard and is busy.Notice how we will almost carry that as a badge of honor. I think that when we think about the concept of being busy, it’s almost something that we attach to our self concept as being a higher performer or being more successful.And it’s interesting, right? Because in our culture, we do pride ourselves in that and there’s other cultures that don’t see that as a value at all. So just […0.5s] to really see that we are a culture who prioritizes that hustle.And then in the same scope, we also were set up for failure because how we’re taught to solve for healthy eating and weight loss is by putting in more effort, more discipline, more planning, more tracking. It’s always more.And then you will find you have nothing left to give in terms of your focus or energy, because you’re putting the more into being a mom, having a career, being a partner, whatever your things are. That’s how we are taught to fuel what matters to us.And at some point we’re gonna have to close that loop because right now, what’s probably happening is you wanna meet your needs, eat healthy, lose weight, just have that experience of being in your body.And you can’t because you have no more energy or focus left to give. And really you no longer have a capacity to eat healthy and meet your needs in the way you want to.So today let’s make sense of all of that. Let’s breathe. Let’s lean back and just take a moment to observe how this is potentially happening in your life right now.In these episodes I offer you, I really want y’all to make it a practice to not be a critic or to judge yourself for anything that’s happening or to judge the situation.I just want you to be a scientist with me here and objectively observe where this might be true so we can effectively solve for it.So the very first thing we want to do together with this concept is to separate physical tiredness […0.5s] from emotional exhaustion.And this is something I walk my clients through right away when they join my coaching or my membership, is we’ve got to separate the concept of you being physically tired versus you being emotionally exhausted.What I like to offer to simplify everything is that you can’t actually exhaust yourself physically easily, right?So most of us living day to day are not exhausting ourselves based on what we do in our calendar. We are exhausting ourselves because of what’s going on internally in our emotional state. And so here’s actually how first we can define tiredness.So tiredness, again, it’s physical and these are more things that you can notice symptomatically. So imagine that you’re going to the doctor and they’re checking off a list of what would indicate that you are tired.So maybe that’s drooping eyelids, you have some brain fog, you feel physically fatigued, maybe you notice some grogginess, whatever that is, I want you if you can right now to actually distinguish what symptoms of physical tiredness look like. And these are gonna be things that are really simple.So for me it’s definitely the drooping eyelids, logical thoughts aren’t as quick, I have brain fog and I just feel physically sluggish.So I don’t have any […0.5s] negative opinions about this when I’m looking at this objectively. It’s just physically what we can observe similar to if we had a head cold or we were having cramps, right? Although I do have a dramatic relationship to my cramps every month. But here let’s focus on tiredness.Now we want to separate that neutral observation of tiredness from emotional exhaustion. And here’s what often indicates emotional exhaustion. You find you do not have any motivation to take action. You feel very confused, you feel a bit helpless, doubtful, maybe inadequate, perhaps hopelessness.You feel this desire to do a lot of planning and getting your external circumstances together to be more successful. There’s a lot of ruminating and overthinking, and most importantly, you notice that there’s very little action that creates results.So this is all indicative that there is emotional exhaustion happening. And I want you to notice how complicated emotional exhaustion will feel versus physical tiredness. One will feel very simple and obvious.The other is gonna feel quite muddly and confusing. And this is because tiredness is the body’s creation, whereas emotional exhaustion is the brain’s creation from your thoughts and feelings, or more specifically how we handle the experience of our brain having thoughts and feelings.So we’re going to make specific sense of that today, so you can start watching out for this. And I will give you a practical example of how tiredness and emotional exhaustion can come up.So the relationship we ideally wanna have with physical tiredness is we can just see the symptoms and observe them. So maybe we notice […0.5s] the drooping eyelids or the fatigue or the brain fog, and then we know how to solve, for tiredness is most of the time getting more sleep, right.So when we notice tiredness, we see the symptoms, we know the cure, we know if we prioritize more sleep and meet those needs, then we will not be as tired.Ideally burnout, an emotional exhaustion is always gonna feel complicated, and it’s not something that is solved specifically with changing something outside, right. So it’s not like just getting better sleep will leave us never feeling perpetually exhausted.And I think somehow we know that even if y’all aren’t aware of this yet, which is why when you’re exhausted and someone says we’ll just get more sleep, it kind of pisses you off a little bit, because it’s like, you know that, that wouldn’t solve the problem, and you would actually be correct because here’s where exhaustion comes from, exhaustion comes from the way you handle your thoughts and feelings.So this is when everything in life might feel too much. You may feel like you don’t have energy for much of everything, and you feel like you’re in survival mode. This all comes from how you are witnessing and managing your inherent thoughts and feelings as a human being.And it’s when people will tell you just get more sleep if you’re tired or exhausted, or just eat healthy, just meet your needs. It’s simple. And you feel like you just don’t have a capacity. And know this meeting your needs will always be solved simply.So getting more sleep in this example is a simple solution to solving this problem. An emotional need will feel complicated. And it’s not simply solved for by changing something on the outside where it is simply solved for is focusing inward where it all begins.So let’s use a practical example here. Let’s say that a thought that you have top of mind throughout your days is I’m busy and there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it.Now I want you to see in this example how perpetuating thoughts like this without realizing it will actually create, let’s say overwhelm in the body.So I want you to think for you, the thoughts you may be thinking throughout your day that make you feel overwhelmed when you really sit and observe them. In this case, we’re looking at the thought I’m busy and there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it.So here’s the thing, this thought and feeling on its own is, okay, we’re gonna have them. But when you’re not aware at this is fuel that you’re fueling your days with, it’s gonna keep layering.So I want you to consider how many times a day or a week you’re thinking perhaps I’m busy and there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it or similar thoughts. This is going to layer the overwhelm in your body without being processed.And what emotional layering does when it’s not processed is it creates stress on the body. It’s going to promote weight retention. And actually this is what’s going to create an energetic leak that eventually leads to burnout.So I want you to consider burnout as emotional exhaustion and that is created from how we handle emotions, is when we take one emotional experience that’s a thought and a feeling and we turn it into 20 that are piled on top of each other because we’re not sitting with it and looking at it.So in other words, the facts of all of this are that you have a to do list. Let’s say it’s not that you’re busy and that there’s too much to do and not enough time. That is an emotional experience that’s being perpetuated by your ongoing thoughts.And when you really indulge this type of thinking without question, you perpetuate this constant cycle of overwhelm that’s piled on and then eventual burnout.And that’s what we don’t wanna happen, because where we all need to humble ourselves is you cannot out discipline or out will power or out commit […0.6s] a burnout problem.If you are someone who is not yet aware of your thoughts and feelings, and you’re not taking responsibility of how those are fueling your day to day and burning you out. It’s going to be nearly impossible to follow through consistently with healthy eating.Because your logic is not enough. Your expertise, your experience, your past knowledge of what you’ve tried will never be enough. Because we need you to have energy levels to actually see through the actions you wanna take, no matter how simple they are.I think that I have had to go through a very humbling process with myself to understand this. And I know a lot of you are very similar to me.So you relate, […0.7s] it’s understanding that we can logically have all the expertise and experience in the world and the know how, and if we do not have a regulated nervous system emotionally, we will not take action on the things we want. It’s not possible because you will not have an energetic capacity to do that.And here’s the thing. When you’re in this cycle, you’re gonna begin to feel helpless and out of control without your consent, right? And it’s gonna feel like this really confusing experience because you hold yourself in a high regard with what you know and the data you have, but you’re not doing the things.And this whole episode is my invitation for you to feel more in control of all of it.It’s just understanding what needs your attention and what doesn’t. And if you’re emotionally exhausted and burnt out and you don’t have a capacity to take action, we need more of your attention on your emotions and thoughts, not on external fixes like planning and tracking. So I hope this makes sense.The key is to understand that tiredness is physical, burnout or exhaustion is emotional, and you can prevent burnout.You can prevent that experience day to day of just not caring enough to take action with healthy eating and weight loss, which will be key to creating an experience of naturally healthy eating that feels sustainable in your life. So let’s talk about how to do that.First, you’re going to have to understand how your circumstances and experience in life aren’t what contributes to your exhaustion. If you feel like work or the kids or your relationship is what is creating your exhaustion and burnout, you will always feel like the victim of your life.And this is easy for any of us to do. If you notice this happening, I do not want you to judge yourself for it because I’ve been here too. It’s what is so easy for us to do is to attach our work to feeling burnt out and feeling exhausted all of the time again, right?We’ll even pride ourselves for this. If we’re burnt out from the career we have chosen to do, then we must just be such hard workers and committed and look at ourselves on a pedestal for feeling burnt out sometimes.Maybe not all of you, but I certainly did. And if you feel like a victim of the circumstances in your life, you will never have the energetic capacity to prioritize healthy eating and weight loss. It’s not something that will come at you at a good time in your life. It’s not something that will ever feel sustainable, will be necessary to stop blaming the circumstances in your life for why you feel exhausted. This is such a crucial courageous first step.And if you’re feeling burnt out or like you don’t have a capacity to do the simple things to eat healthy and lose weight, it’s because there’s piled on emotional experiences that we haven’t yet questioned. So let’s just start questioning them gently to see what’s there.What thoughts do you often have about the circumstances in your life day to day? And they might be sneaky, but a really good exercise for you to do that can also be interesting is over the next 24 hours, just notice the thoughts that you most think about the circumstances in your life. What thoughts do you notice you thinking about work while you’re there today?What thoughts do you notice about your kids, your family, your friendships, anything? And the key here, you guys, is to have the courage to see them and to really be honest about them, but without judgment.Because I want you guys to know that you have permission to not see yourself in the thoughts you think you are not your thoughts actually, this is something that comes from a primitive brain that is conditioned and has nothing to do with you, really.The parts of you that make you, you are your logical brain which houses your values and your opinions. But make it a practice of noticing what thoughts you have about the circumstances in your life. And I recommend writing them down.I promise you guys, I have a journal and notes […0.5s] of the thoughts that my brain most commonly thinks. And they’re not pretty. They are not things that reflect who I see myself as, but they’re human and they’re important for me to be aware of. So maybe you’re my target audience.You have a thought day to day that you are busy. So the thought I’m so busy comes up every so often. And I want you to ask yourself, how does whatever thought you notice make you feel? What is the feeling in your body that comes up? So maybe it’s overwhelm, maybe it’s inadequacy out shame, anything that is super fun for us to look at.But just be really honest and vulnerable for a moment and let yourself observe what’s coming up there. I promise you exercises like this are not just to get in the feels for the sake of it. This is the most tactically important thing we need you to do to solve this problem for the last time.So here’s the thing. Let’s say the feeling is overwhelmed without you objectively witnessing these thoughts and feelings, and objectively noticing them. They are going to pile on, and they’re going to create again stress on the body and burn you the heck out.This will remove your ability to prioritize simple healthy eating actions in your life. So you can have the results with your body that you want. So instead, I want you to just observe your thoughts and feelings in your everyday life. Make it an identity that you are now.Someone who is emotionally aware. Step outside your head, and notice what thoughts come across you during your day. Drop inside your body and notice how those thoughts make you feel. Doing so is going to cause this layering to come down over time.So you’re gonna get some energy back, because here’s the thing, and this will also help stabilize this whole practice. Is having any thought and any feeling isn’t the problem at all. It is safe for you to have any unsolicited opinions and thoughts from your brain that create feelings.What actually creates this energetic burnout and exhaustion and not caring is because it piles on so much without question that now it’s creating stress, right. So don’t think that the problem here is your thoughts and feelings. It’s just the lack of awareness you’ve had around them.Next, I really wanna make sure you are separating tiredness from burnout, right, because this is such a common misconception for many of us, me included. We’re not actually helpless, we are not actually unable to take action on the things we want, we are just emotionally exhausted.So when you notice physical tiredness, I want you to notice the relationship you have to that.So I’m gonna give you guys a breakdown of how it works for me. And this is very vulnerable, but y’all know I share all of my stuff with you, so how it normally looks is I will experience symptoms of tiredness, right. So I’ll have some fatigue, some drooping eyelids.And it’s really funny because my primitive brains relationship to tiredness is, I just can’t right now. I cannot do this when it comes to anything. So I will just have the thought, if I’m tired, I just can’t right now. And the emotional experience that comes up is helplessness.And I am just someone now who’s very aware of my brains innate relationship to tiredness. I sometimes joke around that we haven’t really changed this part of our brains from when we’re toddlers.There’s still a small part of us that has these like helpless, immature thoughts when we feel physical tiredness. And that makes sense for infants because then the caregiver can come in and meet their needs, but now we are our own caregiver.So of course it’s important for me to be aware of these kind of immature thoughts with physical tiredness and to not pile on the helplessness so it burns me out in an unhealthy way. So this is a great example of addressing thoughts and feelings.What I do is I always expect it, cause I have really sharp awareness of these thoughts and feelings.And when helplessness comes up in my body, when I’m physically tired, I know it’s not true that I can’t do something. I don’t indulge it because I’m aware of it, and I see it. And I allow my body to process the emotion of helplessness without believing or indulging that I am helpless.Does this make sense? So really, when it comes to you taking action with healthy eating and weight loss, even when you feel like you don’t care, it’s a two parter. On one end, we wanna help heal the not caring, and we want to bring you back more energy by you learning how to process some thoughts and feelings. So they’re not building up overtime and exhausting you.And then on another end, we want you to be aware of the potentially upper lack of better words, you guys, immature and dramatic relationship you’re having to physical tiredness. My brain has an immature and dramatic relationship to physical tiredness.Yours probably does too. It’s very common. So just notice the helpless relationship your brain might be offering you with physical tiredness.That is perfectly normal, right? And this is something that is a continuous practice for me. It has served me so well in my life. And it is possible to turn physical tiredness into emotional burnout based on your thoughts about it. So it’s so worth being aware of.And here’s why this is so worth prioritizing because here’s the thing. If you were expecting today to hear what to put in your fridge and what to track, that is something I want you to assume you already know if you’re with me here, chances are maybe you already have all of the information you need to solve for what to eat and what you would do […0.5s] if you had the energetic capacity to do it right? All we need for you to solve for healthy eating and weight loss is to have the consistent energetic capacity to follow through.Once that’s done, this problem is solved and you can actually get the return off of the inconsistent actions that you’ve been taking in your life. We just want those actions to be consistent enough to produce a result. Doing these simple practices, you’re gonna gain back more energy and you’re not going to burn out.And once that has occurred and you have less stress on the body now you can actively start objectively solving for healthy eating and weight loss.Something that happens in my coaching a lot is, of course, we’ll go into it thinking that we must have a knowledge problem in terms of healthy eating. So we’ll think, oh, maybe I just need to find the right foods or I just need to track properly or organize properly. And really we just need you to regulate your nervous system so you can take action consistently and not burn out. And so what’s really lovely about my membership or clientele is you will watch these women heal their nervous system and heal some burnout, and then they can start making really effective healthy eating decisions with the knowledge they already have simply. And that is what I want for you. I want you to have the willingness to stop making this a food problem and to perhaps just make this an emotional problem that you can solve for no less simply tiredness is tolerable, exhaustion isn’t.And if you feel like you just do not have a capacity to care about healthy eating, I wanna offer that there’s some burnout happening and that’s okay.This is actually the best place to start if you are solving for healthy eating and weight loss for the last time, because that means you don’t really have a capacity anymore to push and will power yourself to a result. It’s gonna require a more holistic, grounded, softer approach.So on that note, if you are ready to solve this problem for the last time, I highly recommend to join the Owner Eating Habits membership, which is my exclusive community where you will learn the process to do this and you will have coaching and a community of women all working towards the same goals. You can go to catrentice com forward slash membership to join. And if you decide to join us, I cannot wait to coach you.But until next time, I hope you have a wonderful week. I hope there was a piece of this episode that connected with you, and I will talk to you next week.