Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast this week. I am so happy that you’re here with me and that we can spend this time together. So today I really want to talk about What to do when you feel really, really busy and like you just don’t have the time or the mental and emotional bandwidth to eat healthy.
This is something that it’s probably no secret comes up a lot in my coaching practice with the women That are my clients and hence the name of the podcast, right? So I thought it was about time that I actually devoted an episode Exclusively to the concept of being busy and what to do with healthy eating when this is coming up for you First off before we get into the teaching for today I want to mention that enrollment is open now for the march cohort of Own Your Eating Habits.
So what this means is this is my exclusive program [00:01:00] for high achieving type A women who want to learn to eat healthy naturally and lose weight permanently. The expectations and goals of this program is to remove your food struggles for life and to lose weight for the last time. So if that is a result you’re seeking, then this is the program for you.
We teach you step by step how to create this result. You will be coached by me along the way and you will join a group of like minded women all working together and supporting each other towards the same goal. So it is a once in a lifetime experience truly. There is nothing like it.
So to join us in March and to solve this problem for good Leave your food struggles behind and to become a naturally healthy eater go to catrentus. com forward slash coaching to enroll now. Spots are limited so do not wait. All right, so let’s get into today’s topic. So when we think about [00:02:00] the problem that a lot of us are having, It’s just that we feel too busy.
So we feel too busy to eat healthy, to do the things we need to do to lose weight, but I really want to specify today what it even means to be too busy, right? We use that language just offhandedly as a society, but sometimes we’re not even Really unpacking what we’re saying when we feel too busy. And I want you to think about what language you use around this.
Maybe you say things like, I don’t have time. Or things are just really difficult right now. Or maybe you literally just say, I am too busy to create the results I want. And that’s okay too. But what I want to offer here, and stay with me, is that you can only be busy in your mind. Thanks. Okay, so you can only be busy in your mind, and this is not Anything crazy, excessive, or spiritual that I’m offering you here.
I’m [00:03:00] going to explain what I mean by this, but I want you to just consider what I’m saying. You can only be busy in your mind because naturally healthy eating, which is what I teach, can fit into any schedule, right? So I teach healthy eating in a way that’s not time, energy, or effort dependent. Women in my program learn how to create healthy eating habits.
Without needing to rely on things like planning, tracking, prepping, anything like that. And they learn how to eat healthy based on listening to their body cues, lowering their cravings naturally so they don’t emotionally eat and enjoying food at any moment without over indulging. So. If we’re considering that result, there is no moment when you can be too busy to eat healthy. So these are two parts I want to consider here and then I’m going to explain them more. First, you can only be busy in your mind, which we’ll talk about, and then also It’s important to create a manner of [00:04:00] healthy eating that can fit into any schedule even when you have a lot of things going on.
So these are two things that are going to meet in the middle here to accomplish this goal. So first let’s talk about what I even mean by the fact that you can only be busy in your mind. It sounds kind of crazy, right? But what I mean by this is that when we say I’m so busy right now, what most of us are referring to is how our stress levels are feeling, what we’re emotionally feeling, right?
I know when I say I’m just really busy right now because I’m guilty of this too, what I’m actually saying is that it all just feels like too much. This feels like a lot. And what I’m actually referring to is the emotion of Overwhelm. And for most of my clients, this is what is actually occurring as well.
And it’s because the way that they’re thinking about their work or about their life or about their to dos creates [00:05:00] an emotional state of overwhelm. And this is actually the experience of what it means to be quote unquote busy. And so I want you to establish that for yourself. And I want you to just
Be willing to entertain this with me in today’s episode. If we think about being busy in this way, I want you to think about your current circumstances that are feeling busy. So what are they? Is it a to do list? Is it work tasks? Is it your schedule? What exactly feels busy? Get the facts of it. And then I want you to consider What are you thinking about the facts of your life now?
What are you making it mean? What lens are you viewing those things through? So for a lot of you, because I coach y’all, it’s gonna be thoughts like, I don’t have enough time. This is too much, I have to do all these things, etc, etc. You’re going to have certain [00:06:00] sentences and thoughts you’re spinning in that are creating a state of urgency and overwhelm in your body.
And I just want you to notice the fact that your thoughts and how you think about your life create your emotional state. Thoughts create feelings. So the way you think about the circumstances in your life that are quote unquote busy really, really matter. Because what we want to help you do is that when external circumstances are factually busy, like maybe you have a fuller schedule, or you have more tasks to do, or you have more upcoming things to accomplish, we don’t want you adding unnecessary stress to that experience because of the way you’re thinking where we’re piling on unnecessary overwhelm to that experience. So what I want you to see is that we can have external busyness, which is just the things on our schedule and our to do list. And then there’s internal busyness that happens based on the way we think [00:07:00] about those things.
And how most of you are thinking about those things is creating a state of pressure and overwhelm. And when you say, I’m just too busy, that is actually what you’re referring to. Here’s how you’ll know if this is true for you. If when you say, I’m just too busy, gives you a sense of stress, urgency, or discomfort.
Right, if it were just factually true that we were busy and we said it like it was math, we wouldn’t have an emotional reaction to it. We would just acknowledge that our schedule is fuller than normal, or we have things that we want to get done. That is not where it’s coming from. I want you to notice that if acknowledging the busyness of your life feels overwhelming, stressful, and pressuring.
That’s because it is existing in your mind. And that’s not a bad thing because that means we can help you navigate that here. So the goal with this end of the spectrum, right, because we want you to solve for the busyness in your mind [00:08:00] so it’s not affecting your outside world, The goal is to lower your stress around your work schedule or the tasks in your life, so you can actually make proactive decisions with those tasks and with food.
Because what’s happening is, is if you’re having high stress, With your work schedule or tasks, you’re going to make reactive decisions with all of these things because your stress is so high. Something important to know about stress levels is when you’re in that fight or flight state in your body, your logical brain is going to shut down a bit and you’re going to be thinking very primitively and reactively and urgently.
And that doesn’t put you in a very productive, sound place to get things done that you want to get done. So it’s going to be necessary that you regulate your emotions, and you stop indulging thoughts about your work schedule or your to do list that aren’t serving you. It’s really important to understand that our [00:09:00] thoughts really, really matter and also the functionality that our thoughts have is they create the emotional state that we take action from.
And so I talk about it in Own Your Eating Habits like decision fuel. And the goal is to provide decision fuel that makes it a lot simpler and more easeful to take action. So if you want to take action on a fuller work schedule or to do list, you don’t want to be choosing fuel in your thoughts and feelings that exhaust you.
And that’s what overwhelm and pressure is going to do. So I want you to be willing to humble yourself a bit. I have to humble myself all the time with my thoughts and just be willing to Notice your current thoughts about your schedule and your life and work on changing them. Work on shifting them to something more useful.
Because the busy tasks you want to complete are not going to be [00:10:00] completed if it’s competing with a busy brain. So we’ve got to take care of the busy brain. Notice the thoughts you’re having that are creating a state of pressure, urgency, and overwhelm with the tasks you want to complete. And just observe them.
Let them process, notice them, and then be willing to change them to something that better serves you. What this will do is it’s going to help you lower the urgency, lower the cravings, so you’ll not only be able to make more proactive decisions with your work and your to do list, you’re also going to be able to make more proactive decisions with food.
And this is how you can start losing weight and eating healthy, no matter what your to do list. looks like. So some of you might be wondering, well Kat, what thoughts do I need to start thinking in order to stop being overwhelmed? And here’s what I want you to know. This is something we really master in On Your Eating Habits, but in order to start practicing this now,
here’s what you’ll need to know to get started. First off, you [00:11:00] can’t turn your thoughts off like a light switch and then replace them with pretty ones, with positive ones. That’s not how it works. You’re going to have to be willing to hold space for your thoughts and feelings when they come up. For when your brain is telling you that things are too much right now.
But how you properly hold space for that moment is you stop piling on extra thoughts about your work and instead you breathe and let it settle in your body. Notice the pressure, notice the overwhelm in your body, and let that process as best as you can. Sometimes things for this that are really great are body scans, meditations, working out can be a really great thing.
It puts awareness on your body.
But you don’t need to do any of those things. All we want you to start doing is to be present with this emotional state when it comes up. Once you’ve done that, Then you can consider how do you want to think about work in a way that’s useful to you? How do you want to think about your to do list?
[00:12:00] Sometimes it’s as simple as acknowledging, Here’s what I’m going to do. Here’s what I want to get done today. Here’s what I’ll try. Notice how thoughts like these are more neutral, they don’t take a lot of emotional energy to, state, and they’re very proactive, they really bring you into action very efficiently. So, this is what I want you to start trying on. Just start lowering the busyness in your mind by being aware, and then shifting your thoughts to more neutral thinking that allows you to take action on The busy tasks and to dos.
This is going to help your cravings and it’s going to help you make more proactive decisions with food. So, the other end of the spectrum that I talked about is also acknowledging, right, that rather than trying to depend on tracking And planning, which are time and energy dependent things to eat healthy, you want to start establishing a version of healthy eating that can fit into [00:13:00] any schedule.
And this is what we master in Owner Eating Habits, guys. We really teach you how to become a naturally healthy eater so weight loss and healthy eating is always adaptable and accessible to you. But here’s what you’ll want to know now. Because why you want to learn the skills of naturally healthy eating is so you can have that version of healthy eating and weight loss that is adaptable under any circumstances.
So even on your busiest, most unpredictable day, you know that that area of your life is set. It’s not even a concern to you. That’s what we want. So remember two things are going to meet in the middle here. You’re going to lower the busyness in your mind, but then you’re also going to go about healthy eating in a way that is adaptable to any circumstances in your life.
So that means just focusing on more sustainable, healthy eating practices and weight loss practices. So how I like to describe naturally healthy eating is learning to eat healthy in the way [00:14:00] nature intended. Pretty simple, right? It’s just eating healthy based on what our body is telling us, based on Where our stress levels are at, our emotions are at, and this podcast is such a great resource to start helping you do that.
But what I more so want you to think about now is having the intention to create healthy eating and weight loss from this angle where you’re not doing so in a way that requires more time, effort, and energy from you. Because what will happen is the moment your external environment becomes It’s easier, you’re going to feel like you don’t have the resources to create this result because those things are dependent on your time.
So we want you to feel really adaptable. And here’s how that happens. And I want y’all to hear me because this is where a lot of your growth is. You will need to give up needing to. Be perfect in this area of your life to get the result. Okay, so you will need to give up feeling like you [00:15:00] have it all together in this area of your life with healthy eating and weight loss to achieve that goal.
You’re gonna have to find what I like to call your messy middle. So let’s go through a really practical example of this. I want you to imagine what most of us are attached to with healthy eating and weight loss. So, this is when our foods are planned, prepped, we track it all to a T, and we really meet the mark when it comes to those things.
We make the grade. That will leave us feeling really satisfied and sure that we’re going to hit our goal. But then I want you to imagine a really adaptable version of this that doesn’t look as pretty. Where you have nothing tracked, nothing planned, and nothing prepped,
and the best you can do that day is to make very quick decisions that impact your goal positively. So you do not have the space to micromanage. You do not have the space to track. You just make really quick, adaptable decisions that don’t look the prettiest all of the time, but they still help you meet your goal.
What you will need to give up [00:16:00] is feeling like you’ve got an A plus or Feeling accomplished. I want you to see what I mean here. Most of us feel accomplished when we have a pretty version of progress that looks really perfect. And I want you to be willing to give that up where the focus is just on the result of weight loss, and it’s not on the version of healthy eating you use to create that weight loss.
Do not get attached to a perfect version of healthy eating to lose weight. Be willing to Accept a more adaptable version of healthy eating that may not look as perfect and pretty, but it still creates the result. And this is such a big area of growth for our women in Own Your Eating Habits. We teach them how to lower the stakes with healthy eating, so they can lose weight more excessively.
This is a very, very real thing. So, what will happen if you’re willing to do this? Is you’re going to teach yourself to eat healthy and lose weight in the most fair, minimum way. If [00:17:00] you’re willing to give up the perfection and the micromanagement for it to look pretty, imagine if you were willing to just get it done in the most messy way, adaptable way possible.
What would that look like? How much more accessible would your weight loss be? Where it wouldn’t even matter how busy your schedule was or what your external circumstances looked like. But why this is so worth it to do it in this way is you’re going to teach your brain how accessible your weight loss is, and that is everything.
Because you’re going to then release perfectionism and pressure from this area of your life, which is a non negotiable to losing weight for the last time. So, work on bringing down the busyness in your mind, be willing to create an adaptable version of healthy eating when you’re busy, and changes will start happening, my friends.
It’s going to massively transform the way you show up in this area of your life. [00:18:00] All right, be sure to go to katrentis. com forward slash coaching to enroll in our March cohort of the Own Your Eating Habits program to take this work to the deepest level and create this result now. I cannot wait to see you there. Have a great rest of your week and I’ll talk to you next week.