Healthy eating and weight loss isn’t hard. You’re just addicted to feeling accomplished in the process.
As a high-achieving woman, you will be accustomed to hard work. It’s a strength you have. You know how to show up and get it done. You love the feeling of accomplishment when you check something off your list.
The problem? This isn’t sustainable for long-term healthy eating and weight loss. Because there is no finish line with food or body. You can’t indefinitely “check off” either of those things.
Which means, it can’t feel like hard work to be sustainable. It can’t feel like you’re accomplishing a feat or climbing a mountain. It needs to feel natural and easy.
In this episode, you will learn the difference between healthy eating accomplishment and healthy eating ease.
Since, if you want to eat healthy naturally? You will need to learn a manner of healthy eating and weight loss where you don’t feel accomplished in the process. You feel at ease.
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Hello, welcome back to the podcast This week. Today I wanna talk all about food accomplishment. And what I really mean by this is when you feel attached to feeling accomplished in the process of achieving any goal or creating any result in your life. So I am a coach who works with very high achieving women. I work with women who have confidence in what they can produce in the workplace, in their personal lives, in their relationships.
But when it comes to healthy eating or weight loss, they’re not quite creating the results they want. And in this podcast, this is going to give you a lot of awareness where you’re keeping yourself stuck from those results. Because if you are someone who feels addicted to feeling accomplished in the process of achieving your goals, then you’re going to overcomplicate healthy eating and weight loss.
Because here’s the really important thing, and this is something that is not talked about enough.
Healthy eating and weight loss is painfully simple, you guys. It’s painfully simple. The actions that it takes to eat healthy and lose weight are simple. And for most of you who have taken an interest in learning about healthy eating, there’s likely no more knowledge you will ever need to be able to create the results you want. Because what you need to do is simple, but if you want to feel accomplished in the process of healthy eating and weight loss, you’re going to overcomplicate it and turn a simple solution into something that requires more work.
And so I’m going to explain exactly what I mean by this. And if you consider yourself a type A woman
You’re going to be proficient in taking action, prioritizing, delegating. This is a strength you will have so you know how to show up somewhere and get the job done. And why we are like this is we love that feeling of responsibility and accomplishment that we get in our body when we check something off our list, when we complete a project, when we get it done, this is an amazing quality to have.
This is what makes us the leaders of the world. It’s what makes us very productive and efficient at our careers and in our relationships. But the problem with healthy eating and weight loss is this relationship to the world you’re having will not be effective in eating healthy and losing weight because this energy where you want to feel accomplished and successful is not sustainable for long-term healthy eating and weight loss.
And this is the big reason why it sounds obvious, but I really want you to hear me.
There is no finish line with food or body. Alright? We are eaters for life. We have a body for life. You cannot indefinitely check off either of those things. So if you are someone who craves feeling accomplished, the energetic state that you thrive in is really motivated to cross a finish line, to feel that sense of achievement and accomplishment. You feel compelled to check things off of a to-do list to give you that sense of achievement and satisfaction.
But this relationship to healthy eating and weight loss will not be fulfilling. It will not be enjoyable and it will not be sustainable for you long-term. I can tell you right now, the first two weeks that I would create a new food plan or protocol felt amazing to my type A brain because I would follow through, check off all the things, even watch my weight go down and notice the progress.
And I felt right in my element, but then life would come up and my sense of responsibility and accomplishment would need to go towards work or other things. And it just wasn’t enough to be able to harness that type of energy towards healthy eating and weight loss. I got burnt out. My motivation left the building and I couldn’t keep up trying to produce satisfaction and accomplishment with a protocol or a to-do list with weight loss.
What I’m really saying is that I couldn’t long-term eat healthy and lose weight when it felt like hard work because as a high achieving woman, you’re going to love hard work. You’re going to thrive in it. It’s going to feel highly satisfying to you. But with healthy eating and weight loss, we have a body every day. We make food decisions every day. So we have to be willing to acclimate to a version of those things that doesn’t require us to work hard.
So what I’m saying is healthy eating and weight loss for it to be permanent for you cannot feel like hard work to be sustainable. It cannot feel like you are accomplishing a feat, cannot feel like you’re crossing a finish line. It can’t feel like you’ve checked off an entire to-do list and it cannot feel like you are climbing a mountain to reach the peak where you’ve proven something about yourself. I know we love that feeling. It needs to feel natural and easy to you.
Alright? And I want you to consider this difference, that feeling where you’ve proven to yourself that you can do hard things, that you can follow through on a food plan. Some of us who really have a strength in this will have created results with healthy eating and weight loss in this way for maybe even a year or more. But then when we stop doing it, we gain all the weight back.
You will need to create a version of healthy eating and weight loss. That’s that does not require you to achieve and succeed in order to create those results. It needs to feel natural and easy for you where it’s not even the top priority in your life. It doesn’t even require you to feel accomplished to create and maintain those results. Now, what I want you to consider with this insight is I want you to just think, see what comes up.
How have you been making healthy eating and weight loss unintentionally complicated, confusing, and difficult? So I want you to think about what method of healthy eating and weight loss you feel most compelled to. And if you identify as a high achieving type a woman, it’s probably going to be more rigid approaches that would feel very satisfying and accomplishing to complete. So this may be the tracking, this may be the protocols, this might be the plans.
But I want you to think how have you been unintentionally making it more complicated, rigid and difficult for you, even if it doesn’t feel difficult when you first do it because of how you’re used to showing up in your life. So I want you to just consider that. Now, I watch my clients do this all the time, and this is the work they go through in my program because once again, I work with very type a high achieving woman.
They have a very high self-concept of themselves where they see themselves as a very hard worker. So they come into my program ready to put in the work, which is the fun part for me as their coach. Because actually what the coaching teaches them is to release the reins of wanting to work really, really hard for a result they want. For some people, they need to be compelled to sit up a little straighter and put in the work.
That’s not the women I work with. The women I work with know how to work hard. They know how to get it done. And the work that we go through is teaching them how to lean back in their lives, how to go through a manner of healthy eating and weight loss where they can let it be easier without feeling like they crossed a finish line or climbed a mountain. Now here’s what will happen is when they come in to coaching the work is to untangle their brain, their current mind.
So they think about healthy eating and weight loss completely differently. So I say this a lot, if you join my program, you’ll become someone totally different as an eater. That is the goal. And how you lose weight long term is very simple. You want to stop overeating, honor your body cues and make food decisions.
Those are the three pillars and these are skills that as my client you will learn to build in a very simple way. Now my clients get their brains coached so they can take deliberate action on these things week after week and create results in a very simple bare bones way. Where the coaching comes in is I will watch their brains who are addicted to the feeling of accomplishment and crossing a finish line make this complicated.
They will make it complicated so they will know exactly how to stop overeating and emotional eating and they will make the process of doing that complicated. They will know exactly how to honor their body cues and they will make that harder in their minds. They will know how to make simple food decisions and they will add more steps and add more prep to doing so. And they’ll come to me at first with a lot of questions and a lot of chatter about why it can’t just be that simple for them though
And where the coaching comes is that this is their brain trying to keep them safe. It is their brain wanting to feel accomplished in the process of this work so they can get that dopamine hit. And I often refer to my method of healthy eating and weight loss. It’s a maturing of this work. It is stepping into a more adult, a more empowered version of creating this result because a lot of us are going to have this kind of scared inner child that wants to be certain of all of the things.
And how do we feel like we feel more certain is by making things a lot harder and more complicated so we feel more secure in the results we created. This is why a lot of us lean towards hard work and hustle because we will feel more deserving and secure in the results we’ve produced in our lives.
But what happens is these high-achieving women enter this process and they begin losing weight in such a bare minimum way. And I’m talking that these women will start releasing weight, having weight loss and healthy eating, not even be close to the top priority in their day. It’s so simple to them. And this is where they need the coaching because this is where they’re gonna have that urge to get in their own way, add more steps and make it confusing and they need to lean back and allow it to feel easier.
So really what I’m saying here is that to eat healthy and lose weight long-term, you’re going to have to be willing to feel differently about that process. You’re going to have to learn a manner of healthy eating and weight loss where you don’t necessarily feel accomplished in that process. You will have to trade the feeling of accomplishment for the feeling of ease, for the feeling of relief.
And I know a lot of you listening
And if it ever serves a client, I will absolutely make sure they have exactly what they need. But it’s never the case here. It’s just their brain wanting to feel more certain about what they’re creating. But the work is for you to feel just as certain with your weight loss as when it requires less from you than if you were hustling for it, where you feel at ease in the entire process of it.
You never had to hustle and you still feel safe and stable in the results you’re creating where you make healthy eating decisions without ever overthinking them. You listen to your body without a second thought, you honor your fullness rather than overeating, you lose weight without having to work hard for it. This is an ease, useful process of eating healthy and losing weight permanently because these are the skills of someone who eats healthy naturally.
These are the skills you must build to do this permanently. You cannot create long-term healthy eating and weight loss in a process that is made for someone who struggles. Think about a naturally healthy eater. Are they out there doing it the complicated and hard way so they can feel accomplished when they make a healthy eating decision so they can check off the thing on their list so they can track their food metrics perfectly?
No, they don’t give a flying f
Because what this will do is it will allow you to stop micromanaging healthy eating and weight loss into place. So no more food protocols, diet regimens or tracking no more making it hard. What I want you to expect is that you may resist this. There might be kind of this contraction in your body where you’re like, Ooh, I want that.
I don’t know if I’m ready for that. I might need to do more prep. I might need to do more research, more listening to this podcast before I let it be easier and make this problem solved. Allow weight loss to be done. This is normal, but resisting it is a natural part of this process and you cannot wait for yourself to be convinced before you allow it to be easier. You will have to surrender into letting this be easier and more simple for you.
You will have to surrender all of that micromanaging and planning and protocols because there is going to be a part of you that is attached to them because of how you wanna feel when you do it right, because of how accomplished you wanna feel when you cross this perceived finish line of healthy eating and weight loss as if you don’t eat or have a body for the rest of your life.
There is no finish line. It’s completely made up
Why have you not created that yet? What I can tell you from experience with myself and hundreds of clients is that all of the perceived obstacles your brain has created that it thinks are in your way are bs. Okay? Nothing is in your way. We just have brains that will reject what is unfamiliar by design.
They will want to be efficient and do what you’ve always done and they will seek to keep you in a place with weight and healthy eating the same place that you are now. And so what your brain will expertly do to keep you where you are now is it will overcomplicate any solution that makes this done for you. It will create a lot of perceived obstacles as to why you cannot solve this problem, eat healthy and lose weight long term.
It’s that little voice we have that says, oh, I’ll allow this to be easy after I’ve just tried this diet. I’ll allow this to be simple after I’ve done this protocol. When you learn to eat healthy naturally with ease, this is the skill that anyone can build. Anyone can learn this. You will lose the weight sustainably and permanently, which means you will no longer have to work hard to keep the results you get to maintain and keep the results with ease.
Losing the weight was easy and keeping the weight off is easy. You will no longer need to feel accomplished when it comes to food or body because you’re going to feel at ease. It is such a worthy trade off my friends to trade that feeling of accomplishment for ease with this part of your life. And I want you to think very genuinely for yourself. What would it take for you to be willing to do that, to be willing to trade that feeling of accomplishment?
That feels so good. Trust me, I understand for ease with food and body where you’re no longer leaning forward energetically with these results, you’re leaning back, having a sustainable and fulfilling relationship with food and you’re watching your results be created. I want you to reserve that amazing feeling of accomplishment for the things in your life that require temporary discomfort.
So don’t use your eating habits and body as a means to feeling accomplished. That is not how our bodies were designed. It is not how our relationship with food was supposed to be. I want you to reserve feeling accomplished in other areas of your life where that serves you. This is exactly what I do. I love to feel accomplished. I have not demolished my type A even a little bit perfectionistic ways completely. They are still there, but I have a really good awareness of when that part of me serves me and when it doesn’t.
And with food and body, this craving you have for accomplishment will not serve you here. You have to be willing to have different emotional fuel with eating habits and body. And the one I’m offering here that is available to you is ease. Alright, so I hope this was helpful. If you are ready to stop working hard for weight loss, I encourage you to sign up for my coaching program, own your eating habits.
It is for you. You’ll receive expert level coaching and support so you begin eating healthy and losing weight with ease. And most importantly, you will stop over complicating healthy eating so your weight loss becomes done. Alright, have an amazing 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.