To eat healthy naturally, you will need to make empowered eating decisions.
This means, you’re making eating decisions from the belief: “I am in control with food and I make deliberate food choices”.
That being said, you must know that getting to healthy eating empowerment doesn’t mean you force yourself to make the “right food decisions”. It doesn’t imply that you should attempt to access willpower, grit, or determination to eat healthy.
Instead, it means you begin intentionally parenting the disempowered beliefs you have with food now. You access empowerment with food so you can provide compassion, safety, and validation to yourself when disempowerment comes up along the way.
In this episode, I’m sharing how you can move from disempowered healthy eating to empowered healthy eating.
Keep in mind, we’re defining empowerment differently here. Empowerment no longer implies that we’re pushing ourselves to the results we want faster, from overly excited energy. That’s not useful.
Empowered healthy eating means you have calm awareness of your disempowerment with food and you choose to intentionally process it fully. This shift is what will allow you to take sustainable, measurable steps towards the results with food and body that you truly want.
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Hello, my friends, how are you doing this week? I hope you’re doing very, very well. So today I want to talk about the concept of disempowered healthy eating. And this episode will pair with an episode I will release next week, which will be called empowered, healthy eating. So there was just too much to talk about for one episode. And my goal for these episodes is for you to understand the difference between being in that disempowerment with your eating habits and what it will take to switch that to empowerment.
And I know these terms are very general, but what I’m really saying when I say disempowerment or empowerment is the feeling of, of course feeling empowered. But to me and to my clients, this most often means feeling 100% in control of our. So we acknowledge that healthy eating is a process and we acknowledge that there’s things that we need to learn skills to build and failures happen.
But at the end of the day, we acknowledge that we ultimately do have control with healthy eating. And so that’s kind of how I want you to picture disempowerment versus empowerment. And today we’re going to start off by really highlighting what it means to be in disempowered, healthy eating. And here’s the reason why I am covering this specifically in these episodes. And this is a very strong theme in my coaching and how I help women create naturally healthy eating habits.
It’s the concept of who you are being mattering and who you’re being on the way to the results you want with food and body does matter. So the version of yourself that you show up as whenever you make an eating decision, is what will determine the results you get because who you are being determines, how you show up with food and body, which ultimately creates your results and who you are being is just a product of your energy, your emotional state, which is a product of your thoughts.
It’s how you are seeing the world, how you are seeing your self, your thoughts and opinions about food, your body, all of it. Now it is no secret that most of us humans who have struggled with food in the past, no matter what that looked like for many of us, it will have been restrictive dieting, weight loss protocols, really vigorous exercise, all of the things that got us to where we are now or where maybe you are now, where you’re getting started on your journey to becoming a naturally healthy eater where you’re making permanent changes with food without restriction, without punishing yourself, without skipping steps.
Along the way where we all start is from a place of somewhat disempowerment, where we just have the conditioned belief that we are not fully in control, that we are helpless. We are powerless with the results we want to create, and like any other mindset we may find within ourselves.
We don’t want to demonize this. If we notice this being present, we don’t want to make ourselves wrong for noticing thoughts that create disempowered energy, but we want to be really, really aware of it. So we’re not subconsciously letting this mindset dictate how we show up in our journey to the results with food and body that we want. So what will happen if we’re not aware of this disempowerment energy is will of course believe that we’re not in control.
We do not have the capacity within ourselves to create the results we want. So of course, this leads to the energy of feeling the need to depend on someone or something outside of you to create those results. And I think this mindset is very much a needing to be saved mindset. So oftentimes I’ll see women who are struggling with food, whether that’s from the podcast or they are a potential client.
And they’re in this mindset where they really do believe that they need to be saved by someone to create the results they want, which really means that they think they need to be saved from who they are now to get results. They think they need to be saved from their overeating, from their emotional eating, from their cravings, from their body, from their, their weight, all of it. And notice what kind of relationship you are potentially having with yourself, with your body, with your eating habits.
If you think you need to be saved from those things, because if you are believing, you need to be saved from those things. You are thinking you are wrong for having those things in the first place. So this can mean you think you are wrong and something is wrong with you for emotionally eating, for weighing the amount you weigh for having shameful thoughts about your body.
You do not need to be saved from those things because there’s nothing wrong with those things. You have legitimate reasons for why those things exist. And when you learn to partner with your needs and your limitations right now, you learn how to create healthy eating habits, despite those things being present. And that’s more in the empowered, healthy, eating realm of things. But I want you to really see where we start from when we’re in disempowerment, where we’re making ourselves wrong, our bodies, wrong, our eating habits wrong, and what is possible when we move to empowerment.
When you are in disempowerment, you are making all of it wrong. And a problem, of course, you’re going to subconsciously believe that something needs to swoop in and save you from yourself. And this really isn’t accurate what’s happening here is we’re just further being driven by a dieting mindset, because this is why a lot of us keep attempting diets as well.
We have logical awareness that restriction with food doesn’t tend to work out for most of us, but we keep doing it. And why we keep doing it is because we’re really believing that some protocol or diet will come along. That will finally take away the suffering. It will save us. It will do the work for us, and it will create the results that we want externally. So long story short, when we’re in this needing to be saved mindset, it really is an understandable product of being in that diet mentality.
And this will just leave us relying on a process, relying on a method or a protocol to do the work for us externally so we can get the results we want externally without ever considering what can be transformed internally within ourselves. Something I’m constantly saying to my clients is to change your eating habits permanently.
You have to change who you are as an eater, which is essentially the transformation. All of my clients go through. When they join my program, they are one person with their eating habits, which is normally a place of disempowerment. And then they go all the way to becoming someone completely different with food, where they just reach total empowerment with it. They know they have everything they need. So I’m hoping this makes a bit of sense right now, and I’m hoping it can give you some potential insight into where your mindset is now.
And I want you to look for where disempowerment could potentially exist for you right now. And what I find when it comes to evaluating what’s occurring for us, we tend to shy away from looking for the negative things or the parts of us that we struggle with. And I want you to hold yourself safe here, commit to not judging yourself and really open yourself up to where disempowered healthy eating and this mindset could still be there for you right now, because this will absolutely contribute towards what version of yourself is trying to create the results you want.
Now, in order to help us understand the difference between disempowerment and empowerment more clearly, I want you to assign these two parts of your mindset roles, and how I often like to offer this is to assign the roles between the child and the parent when it comes to your disempowered self and your empowered self. Now, when I say to assign the disempowered self as the child, I’m not saying that we’re looking at this version of yourself as someone who is weak as someone who is foolish as someone who needs to essentially get over herself so she can make the changes that she wants.
We are not focused on disciplining her, and we are not focused on making her wrong or judging her. So I just wanna say that right off the bat, this is not how we will be assigning the role of your disempowerment mindset as being a child.
What we mean by this is disempowerment exists in this child, part of our minds for good reason. All right, she’s been through some things and as a child, she does not have the capacity or logic to understand why those things happened, why she’s feeling the way she’s feeling. So for example, if we have the disempowered thoughts, I am not in control with food. I am not capable of the changes.
I want. Those types of thoughts feel incredibly disempowering. And they feel really heavy, emotionally, nothing about them is based in logic, but it doesn’t mean they should be dismissed or ignored. These are thoughts and emotions that need to be addressed. And the version of you that is having them is this internal child who is feeling all of these things, thinking all of these things without a logical understanding of why she’s having that present.
And I think it can really help for, especially those of you who are my mom’s picturing what it’s like for a child to really be struggling with something emotionally she’s having all of these thoughts. Or maybe if you have a son he’s having all of these thoughts. I normally like to refer to it as a she, because it’s also what exists within our own brains, but I want you to picture how a child reacts to emotional experiences. And we’re not judging her for reacting that way, because she is a child.
But I want you to picture how, when you are in disempowerment, how you may have been treating this child in the past, have you been judging her? Have you been making her a problem? Have you been ignoring her completely? Because what I tend to find is that we judge this part of us for having these thoughts and emotions, and we see it as non-useful and we see her, this child brain as a problem.
And the fact that she’s having these emotions and the fact that she exists, isn’t a problem. It just makes sense based on what this child has been through. Now, obviously I’m using a role of a child to describe our own primitive brain, our conditioned brain, and where it has been in the past, why it has the beliefs it does and the feelings it does. But we all have this inner child existing within us that has unprocessed emotions that really need to be heard.
And most of us have been making this part of ourselves, a problem judging ourselves for it. And we attempt to force ourselves through these emotions, to the results we want with food and body, which is willpower. That willpower will always run out. That child will scream louder, and we won’t be able to push through to the results we want in this punishing way.
Another thing that happens for most of us before we find this work is we’re not even aware of the fact that she’s there in the first place. So we’re caught up in our jobs. We’re caught up in things in our lives, and we’re not even checking in with our thoughts and emotions. So really what’s happening here is we just expect her to parent herself because we don’t check in with her. We don’t ask her what’s going on. Why are you thinking this way? Why are you feeling this way? We don’t actively parent this part of ourselves because we have no relationship to it.
And because of this, most of the time what’s actually happening is you are not assigning the roles. Clearly. You’re not understanding that you, your logical self is the parent. And this version is the child. You are believing that you are the child, and that, that is your experience.
And that you are not in control. You are not capable of the results you want, and something is wrong with you. If you are able to see this part of you as a child who needs a bit more nurturing and tender care, because she has good reasons for why she believes what she believes, then you can step outside of that role, be the parent and address these thoughts, address these emotions from a higher place that can actively move through things like this and make new food decisions.
So something I talk a lot about in my practice with my clients and we work on this at the deepest level is learning how to be a parent to yourself. And it’s really funny because most of my clients are very type a go-getters high achieving women. And at first, when they hear this, I can tell what they think I mean is to discipline themselves more, to really punish themselves more when they don’t do things the right way.
And really, it just highlights for all of us who can relate to this. How so many of us never learned how to nurture ourselves and parent ourselves that way. And when I say nurturing, I don’t mean coddling or engaging with self pity. I mean, validating ourselves, the child as to why she’s experiencing what she’s experiencing, why it makes sense and how it’s all going to be, okay, we are capable.
We are in control and there’s nothing wrong with us. We can make the changes with food and body that we want. So what I invite you to do, because today I want to just highlight the disempowered part of us in our brains that can lead to disempowered, healthy eating. That is not something we want to create, but what we want to acknowledge is having a disempowered mindset is perfectly normal, especially given where we’ve been in the past.
And I invite you to have the courage to acknowledge this child. Part of yourself that has really struggled in the past, that is having thoughts and emotions. Now that create disempowerment. And that desperately wants to be heard for most of us. This inner child will represent a part of ourselves in the past that wasn’t parented, that wasn’t heard that wasn’t seen and we get to be the parent for ourselves in the way we need.
Now, next week, I’m going to talk more specifically about empowered, healthy eating, and exactly how we can parent this child in a safe way. So we can move from disempowered, healthy eating, to empowered, healthy eating. But the first step is to have an actual relationship to this child, part of our brain and not judge her or dismiss her right away, but just be willing to see what’s even there.
That part of us is waiting to be saved because she’s having a lot of thoughts and a lot of feelings about herself not being in control and not being capable. But if we think about it, it makes complete sense why our inner child selves would believe this because she’s a child. And we also have the parent part of our brains that can step in and address all of it. All right. So I know this concept will be new to many of you. If this more introspective work is something that is new to you, welcome to the podcast but also I invite you to keep an open mind and to really try this concept on and to explore it within yourself and see what’s there.
I am excited to continue it next week to talk all about empowered, healthy eating, all right, my friends take care. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, and I’ll talk to you next week.
Hey there! I'm Kat Rentas. I’m a certified life and health coach for women who believes that eating healthy should feel simple and sustainable. I teach hundreds of high-performing women to change their eating habits without the overwhelm. Want to change your eating habits in a way that is aligned with your needs, preferences, and goals? You’re in the right place. You can read my full story here.