Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. How has your week going? I hope you’re taking care of yourself and having a good week so far before we get into today’s episode. I want to share something that’s coming up a lot with my clients lately. And whenever this is the case, I always want to share these things with all of you. So you can know what to expect from this work as you move forward with it, because here we’re doing healthy eating at the deepest level truly, and something that’s come up with my clients a lot lately is the separation in their mind with who they want to become as an eater and the concept of overeating and emotional eating.
So what I mean by this is they see the concept of overeating and emotionally eating as extremely negative and shameful. Like it’s not who they want to be as a human being.
And because of this, there is this huge separation between the eating habits they have now and the eater that they want to become. And they really make their eating habits personal. Like something has gone wrong with who they are as a person. And as the coach, this tells me exactly where their mind is that with these topics, which I’ve been here as well, and it’s likely you can relate.
These clients are believing that their eating habits or more specifically their overeating and emotional eating are personal. That it means something about the type of person they are, who they are as a human for them to do these things. And this is really where most of us start, we’re not really taught that as humans, we will be emotionally compelled to overeat.
And of course, emotionally eat. We’re not taught that all of the humans on this planet will have experienced these types of urges.
We are taught by much of the diet and even the health industry that something has gone wrong with us. If we feel the urges to overeat, or if we partake in overeating and emotional eating, and this can be hard at first for many of my clients, because when they make their eating habits mean something is wrong with them. They will feel a resistance to even looking at those patterns closely.
They will avoid evaluating their overeating and emotional eating at the deepest level, which is exactly what you learned to do in my program in own your eating habits. We teach you how to be the best expert of how you’re eating now. So you don’t need outside methods to make food decisions for you. And what this requires is for these clients and for you, if you’re in the same place to change your perspective on what overeating or emotional eating means really anything, when it comes to your eating habits, none of it means anything is wrong with you.
It’s not personal. And it actually can’t possibly be personal. What’s happening is you and I in the past, we’re simply not taught how to solve for overeating and emotional eating long-term. We weren’t taught to solve for our natural urges to partake in those eating behaviors. We have been taught that we should just change what we’re eating.
So we’re given the diet protocols and the meal plans as if that’s going to solve the urges. We feel to throw that meal plan away and overeat all of our favorite foods. And in case it wasn’t already obvious this doesn’t work changing what we’re eating, doesn’t solve, or the overeating or emotional eating piece. That work is deeper. But long story short, I just want to mention this because if you’re creating this big separation in your mind with the healthy eater you want to be, and the concept of you emotionally eating now, then you’re only making it personal and keeping yourself further away from the results you want.
Because the truth is you can be someone who overeats and emotionally eats now because you’re human and it’s safe that you have those current behaviors. You know, it means nothing about you or your ability to get the result. Long-term you just need to learn how to manage that in a different way. That’s the difference. So I hope this makes sense. I just wanted to offer that quickly or not so quickly since it’s something that I see come up quite a bit with my clients.
All right, moving on. Let’s get into today’s episode. I want to talk about the fear you will experience on your journey to healthy eating on your journey. To permanent changes with food. You will experience the natural fear that you will not get the result you want when taking a long-term approach. So maybe the result you want is weight loss or it’s to feel healthier and lighter in your body, or maybe it’s to experience some other specific result with food or your body.
It doesn’t matter. There is a result you want from food that you are putting on a pedestal. And if you’re like most of us, you have desperately craved that result with your body. For years. You think about it before you go to bed at night, you imagine how much better it will be over there than where you are now. And you really want this result to put it lightly. This is perfectly natural.
And if we look at this in the context of you wanting to lose weight, for example, this is very much ingrained in our minds from a young age that achieving a certain weight or body type will bring us lasting happiness. So we have this really kind of brainwashed obsession with achieving that result. And I know brainwashed is a loaded word, and it’s not a word I use lightly, but I truly see evidence of this.
We are so, so conditioned to hyper focus on the end result of healthy eating, where it becomes this laser focused tunnel vision obsession. It happens to all of us now, separately from this, what happens with my clients, especially is they do come into my practice wanting the long-term permanent approach with food.
They want to remove their food struggles for life and from a very firm logical place. They decide they want to solve for that in that way, where they’re ready to do the deeper work, not skip any steps and become someone who naturally eats healthy and gets the results with their body in a sustainable way. They’re committed to that. Truly. Now, the thing about these clients who enter my practice, the amazing capable humans that they are, they still have human brains that were raised with the mindset that hyper focuses on that end result, right?
They also have this low grade obsession to that end result with their body. It comes with the territory of where we’re at. When we begin this work, you can be committed to a long-term approach and also have a part of you that desperately wants to quick fix your way to that end result because you’re attached to it. And I’ll say that one again, because I want you all to hear me.
You can be committed to a long-term approach and also desperately want the quick fix approach. Of course, this makes sense who doesn’t emotionally want that quick fix approach. Of course we do. Logically. We know that you want the long-term permanent approach because you’ve tried the quick fixes and you know, they don’t work for you if they did, you wouldn’t be here.
And I really wouldn’t be hosting this podcast. They don’t work, but it’s safe to acknowledge that emotionally, you will be drawn to that and crave that just because a strong part of your brain is believing that over there with the results you want will be better than over here.
Now, here’s how all of this relates to the fear you will experience on your journey to healthy eating. And when I talk about a journey to healthy eating, let’s be honest. It sounds a bit fluffy, right? But what I mean is the long-term approach to becoming someone completely different with food, to becoming a naturally healthy eater, to gain the ability to make food choices, without drama, to remove mental chatter.
You’re constantly having with food. So this is a journey my clients go on and it’s the journey you may be starting now. And in this type of journey, you’re doing the deeper work, reaching certain milestones to achieve this result. And you’re not leaving any stone left unturned. So we’re addressing all of it. So with my clients, we determine where they’re starting from.
And then we don’t skip steps to rush them to the end result.
From that quick fix mindset, we leave no stone left unturned and prioritize all of the deeper changes for as long as it needs for those changes to happen permanently. We’re really changing their brains in the process. As in, they can’t go back to who they were before they made these changes. Now I’m explaining this in detail because I want to make it clear that to make long-term changes, you must commit to a longterm approach regardless of how long it actually ends up taking.
Sometimes the end result you want happens fast. Sometimes it takes a bit longer. It’s all relative. Your mindset must go into a process like this, being willing for it to take as long as it needs to for the changes to become permanent. This is the only way you will show up to the process in a way where the result is guaranteed.
This is the mindset logically my clients have. So they’re doing all of the longterm changes, moving forward, doing the deeper work. And then what happens is the quick fix desperation mindset starts sparking up a conversation in their mind. So I’ll use an example of a specific client. Recently, she joined my program and pretty much right away within a couple of weeks or so, she stopped experiencing strong cravings for foods that she loved, and she was able to stop mindlessly smacking.
So huge, right? It’s incredible for her. This was actually the biggest struggle she came to me with. So the fact that she was capable of taking the work in the program and creating that result for herself was huge for her. So we really took time to celebrate that fact. It was lovely and amazing from that point, we moved forward in supporting her through growth and longterm changes.
And what ended up happening is her brain started panicking to put it lightly. After about a couple of months in this spear came up for her and her fear, what her brain was telling her, was that what she was doing, wouldn’t be enough to get the results with her body that she wanted. Her brain began telling her it wasn’t working. She wasn’t capable all of the really nice encouraging and supportive things.
Our brains like to tell us, basically her brain was having a fear-based stress response from her moving successfully through a long-term approach. Now, what she wasn’t able to see in that moment was that she was beginning to self-sabotage because of this mindset. Luckily, I was able to show her this. So she moved through it. But I want to explain for all of you how this works, so you can observe this in yourself.
So what was happening is she was believing that these types of thoughts were legitimate, that they must be true because she was thinking them. She didn’t question them. So when she was experiencing the spear of never getting the result and thinking this isn’t going to work for me, what ended up happening is she would neglect a longterm approach, reach for the quick fix methods and eventually sabotage with food and find comfort in the foods because she was indulging in this mindset that felt so terrible.
And this can happen very quickly. When the spear gets triggered in your brain and your body, it will go to work, to sabotage where you’re at now, because it doesn’t feel safe. So in a nutshell, she was making progress on a longterm approach, which is different than what she’s done in the past because of this, her fear brain freaked out because it’s not yet convinced that a long-term approach will be enough.
So it created an emotional experience that was compelling her to throw it all away and self-sabotage, and you know, what’s really fun. Her brain was telling her it’s not working. And she literally hit goals within the first couple of weeks, working together that she had coming into the program. And this is normal because she was having a human brain that wasn’t focusing on, that it was not focusing on what was working for her human brains scan for danger.
So what was coming up with all of these made up pieces, evidence, why it wasn’t working for her. Now we all have human brains. So this example with this client could apply to myself in the past. Many of you or to multiple of my clients. This is what human brains do. When you commit to a long-term approach with food from your logical brain, your emotional brain that wants the quick fix from a very desperate place will have hang ups.
It’s going to have concerns. And if you end up taking action from that part of your brain, you will, self-sabotage your progress. And to keep yourself stuck. I truly think that this is one of the biggest reasons why coaching is so necessary for someone to watch our minds and tell us what’s reality. And what’s just our mindset, because when you’re deep into the sphere, it’s hard to see that perspective because it feels so emotionally heightened.
What I’m able to do for these clients is first help them alleviate and manage the spear response. So it comes down and so it doesn’t feel so reactive. Then at that point, they can give their logical brain space to see that things actually are working, how they are moving towards the results they want. Long-term. And what happened is that self-sabotage brain just had a lot of fear because of how attached it is to that end result, emotionally.
That is all that happens here. And this really is such valuable information for all of you. I want you to hear this because this will come up for you in your journey to healthy eating. When you’re committing to these long-term permanent changes with food, this will be the difference between you moving forward and you keeping yourself stuck. It will not be because of the long-term approach.
It will be because you didn’t question that fear part of your brain. That’s having a lack of belief in that approach. My goal for all of you is for you to feel as safe as possible when the spear response occurs, because it’s going to happen. We’re humans. We are very emotionally tied to the end result with our bodies. And we’re going to have a fear-based response when we decide to take a long-term approach, but it is our job to manage that.
So we don’t self-sabotage, it is our emotional responsibility to notice the fear question it then decide to keep taking action on a long-term approach that we’ve already decided we’re committing to. Again, the biggest takeaway I want you to have from this episode is that you can be committed to a long-term approach with food and experience attachment to a short-term approach.
How we still get the long-term results is by committing to that long-term approach while parenting the part of us that wants the quick fix. It’s like that little kid that wants the candy in the grocery store, right? If we’ve been giving it candy or the quick fixes for our entire lives, and then we take away that candy, that child brain is going to have a tantrum and scream. We have to parent that brain and not give it the candy.
Because as the parent, we know our reasons that we like we’re doing that.
This is all that’s necessary and it is necessary doing this is a non-negotiable. It’s not always easy, but all of us are capable of saying no to this urgency for the quick fix, because ultimately we want those permanent long-term changes with food. This is what will guarantee the results you want with food and your body. Despite how urgently your fear brain is trying to tell you that it won’t work.
That brain can just be wrong. Allowing this fear is how you don’t skip steps and you solve for your food struggles permanently. So here’s to not letting that fear of not getting the result when this is just an emotion and you get to ultimately decide what you make the fear mean. You get to decide how you take action from that fear. All right.
I hope this was helpful for you. This is a deeper concept. So if you’re like, I kind of get it, but it’s still a little fuzzy. Let this digest a bit and sink in and then come back and relisten to this. If this is something that comes up for you, it’s so important to me that I’m making you all aware of exactly what to expect when making these long-term changes. All right. Thank you for being here with me today. I’ll talk to you next week.