Hello, my friend. Welcome back to the Healthy Eating for Busy Women podcast. I’m so happy that you’re here and you get to spend this time with me today. And speaking of time, that is going to be the topic of today’s episode. We’re going to talk about what to do when you don’t have time to eat healthy.In case it’s not obvious, time is definitely the topic that I coach on the most in my membership. It’s the thing that our brain tends to have the most drama about, and this is not an accident.Especially in western culture, we are taught to have a very pressuring and overwhelming relationship with time. And that can leave us feeling that we never have time for meeting our own needs, especially when it comes to healthy eating or weight loss.So my goal for you in today’s episode together is to completely shift your perspective on time, for you to see it in a much more manageable way. So no matter what circumstances are happening in your life, you always have time to eat healthy.And if that doesn’t feel like the case right now, I promise you there’s valid reasons for it, and we’re also going to address that today. So the main idea I want to offer you is that the belief we don’t have time is an emotional perception that comes from our thoughts. It never can be reality.And this is never to invalidate us when we really feel like we’re running out of time or we don’t have the time.We want […0.5s] four things, but I want you to really keep that close to your chest in today’s episode, because that is what we have to address, is the difference between the thoughts you have about time versus the actual reality of what time is. And I’m no different from you guys. My brain likes to offer me a lot of drama about time all of the time.That is something that just comes from a lot of our conditioning. But here’s how I love to address time when my brain is giving me these thoughts. I make it a practice of always viewing time as currency because we are given 24 hours a day and we simply just get to choose how we spend it.Now if we consider this as a fact that all of us are given 24 hours of time currency […0.4s] each day to spend, it allows us to separate these facts from all of our thoughts about it.So the most common thoughts I tend to hear and that I have thought are I don’t have time, I’m running out of time, and I wish I had more time. Now again, I want us to separate the facts of how much time all of us get to spend daily from all of these thoughts about time, how I like to picture it.And this is actually how it looks when I’m indulging in these thoughts, is I am making those thoughts my reality. So I’m really thinking that it’s running out, I never have enough, I need more.When really what am I getting accomplished when I think this way? What are any of us getting accomplished? We’re not getting back more time, or we’re not using the time we have in our hands effectively and spending it wisely.We’re just kind of staring in our hands at the time we’re allotted every day having this overwhelming and pressuring relationship, thinking, oh my god, this 24 hours isn’t enough for me.Now stay with me here, cause I’m not saying that any of your thoughts about time aren’t valid. But picture this scenario, right?If all of us are given the same 24 hours of time to spend per day, notice how some of us are having a really useful and abundant relationship with the time in our hands, and some of us aren’t. And I really wanna challenge you to consider what if it’s not about your circumstances. So what if it’s not about the role you are in at your job?What if it’s not about whether you’re a mom or how many kids you have or your relationship to your partner? What if it’s never about the circumstances in the world?And the reason why this is true is it’s not because you don’t wish you had more time and that’s invalid. It’s just that your relationship to the 24 hours you’re given in a day to spend is what creates the overwhelm. It’s not the amount you’re given. Does that make sense?So let’s talk about this more in terms of healthy eating and weight loss and how this may show up for you.Again, you guys know, I relate to all of this, so I am no different, will tend to have a lot of thoughts about not having enough time to do it. So we’ll think, I just don’t have time to prep, to cook, to even think about what I’m going to eat.And so this often looks like us just going to the other end of the spectrum where […0.4s] we won’t think about our eating habits at all. We’ll be very reactionary with it where we’ll just eat whatever, eat however much. And there’s no end point to […0.4s] how much we eat or no thought given to the types of foods we eat. It’s just all reactive.And when we’re in the state, we only eat based on our feelings. And if we’re feeling overwhelmed with time and that’s the main energetic state we’re in, we’re constantly just going to eat more in order to comfort those feelings that come from our relationship.With time, you’re rushing through the day. You’re grabbing whatever food is most convenient because you feel like you don’t even have time to think about it.You’re constantly feeling mentally exhausted. And then by the time you do get home, maybe at the end of the day and you have time to actually […0.6s] see your decisions, you feel guilty because you feel like you lost control and you don’t know why nothing has gone wrong.Here, I want you to know that where this all starts is the relationship you were having to time in general. And the problem is not that you need to work harder or scrounge up more time to eat healthy, it’s that you think healthy eating should require more effort.So if we go with our analogy, it’s like, you think that eating healthy will require more […0.4s] hours or time currency than you actually have in your hands to spend. So then you’re trying to force more time and more energy that you don’t have, eventually leaving you burnt out and then just falling off track with healthy eating completely.It’s a very all or nothing relationship to healthy eating, where we either eat perfectly healthy or not at all. But it’s also an all or nothing relationship to time where we either feel like we’re perfectly organized and following through with the schedule, or we’re just out of control with it.That is certainly an experience I have coached on many times, and I have been coached on many times, because when you have a Type a brain, we do tend to think in extremes. So what happens when you feel like you have no more time to spend with healthy eating?That’s when you’re gonna self sabotage cause we’ll think, well, what’s the point anyway?I always have circumstances that get in the way. I’m too busy. I have the family, I have my relationship. So I’m just gonna eat what I feel like and never make deliberate to sessions with healthy eating, which makes sense. Because if this is our perspective of time, what else is there to do when we have nothing more to give? So this is why I am so passionate about helping you guys with this area specifically with time. Because I want to just demolish this belief that you have, that you need to work harder.I want you to know that you do not need to be spending more time or more effort to eat healthy and create the results you want. If you are a woman that has a career, you’re a mom, you have other things that you wanna devote your time and energy to, that’s not healthy eating rightfully. So as humans, eating healthy was never meant to mean spending excess time and energy to make it work.It was meant to feel natural. So I want to help you do two things that are gonna meet in the middle. I want to help you heal your relationship with time so you feel like you have more of it […0.5s] and you feel more at ease.And then on the other side of the spectrum, I also want you to know that eating healthy naturally doesn’t even need to take up time at all. So I want you to picture that reality for a second and what that might feel like to you.But now let’s talk about how to actually solve for this. So we want to remember that time is just time. It is neutral. It is factual. We get 24 hours a day. You get to choose how you spend it and strategically, that is something that you can solve for.The belief that you don’t have time will always ever be a thought. It will only ever be a perspective of the time that you are given each day.And it’s this thought about time that is creating the overwhelm, the pressure, and the urges to emotionally eat. It’s not the time itself or the hours you have to spend. And as mentioned, eating healthy doesn’t actually take a lot of time.What you think will require dollars and dollars and hours and hours of your time actually requires pennies or seconds. And really, here are the three big reasons why you feel like you don’t have a lot of time.First, your thoughts about time like I don’t have time or I’m running out of time create the emotions of stress and overwhelm.Second, you likely believe that healthy eating requires more time and energy than it actually does, […0.5s] because of your past with dieting really strict weight loss protocols or micromanaging food.You may believe that time is the currency towards your healthy eating or weight loss success […0.4s] when it really isn’t. And then 3, and most importantly, you’ve Learned to approach healthy eating through performance tactics rather than the skills of naturally healthy eating.So performance tactics tend to include things that require your time like meal planning, prep, tracking anything that feels micromanagy and we’re trying to control your external environment to eat healthy. And for a lot of us, the reason why we have a lot of performance tactics with healthy eating is we haven’t established an identity […0.6s] of a naturally healthy eater who has control because when we think we don’t have a lot of time and we’re out of control and we’re feeling overwhelmed in this way, what do we tend to do as a coping mechanism will try and micromanage everything externally to feel like we’re gonna succeed when really we need to slow down, feel more useful about our time, get some time back in our mind, so then naturally healthy eating can feel easier.So I would say these are the biggest perspective shifts that you’re gonna need to have to solidify this in your life to feel like you have enough time and to not micromanage healthy eating.No. 1, really make it a practice of understanding that time is neutral. As best as you can […0.5s] catch your brain when it wants, to indulge in the stories you’re gonna have about time. Know that you’re never running out of time.You have the same amount of time that everyone else does, which is those 24 hours a day. Your emotional experience of time comes from your thoughts about it, not the reality itself.For example, in this is one I like to use, instead of saying, I don’t have time for this, you can think, I’m going to decide how I want to spend my time on this, just to put you back in that reality and responsibility.Sure, it might feel indulgent and good sometimes to think, I just don’t have a lot of time. I’m so busy, I’m running out of time. But where does that leave us? It just leaves us in a pit of suffering and overwhelm.And it’s gonna be really important that you understand that your thoughts matter, and they serve as the fuel for your actions.If you’re constantly indulging in your stories about time, you’re always gonna feel overwhelmed, and you’re constantly gonna have urges to comfort that overwhelm through food.Give yourself permission to let time be neutral, knowing that when you have overwhelmed about it, it’s okay. And that’s human, but it’s coming from your thoughts, not actual factual dangers that are occurring outside of you.No. 2 and related to this, make sure you validate your emotions about time rather than indulging them. So this is something I coach women on regularly, and it is a skill that you can learn instead of spiraling into, I don’t have time. I’m running out of time. Try doing this. Stay to yourself.It makes sense that I’m feeling overwhelmed. It’s normal to feel this way. It’s okay. And I see that it’s coming from […0.5s] the thought. I’m running out of time. This thought is making me feel rushed, and it’s going to compel me to emotionally eat. If I don’t sit with this feeling and address it.What this does is it’s not that it fixes the feeling. That’s not the point. It allows you to start digesting the feeling because you’re separating your emotions from reality awareness of your brain is going to help so, so much here.Third, I really want you to start recognizing that eating healthy takes a single second. And here’s what I mean, you’re already making eating decisions all throughout your day, even if it’s unconscious.So making different eating decisions doesn’t need to require more time. You just have to make different decisions in the moment that it’s time to make them. So without taking extra time to micromanage, to plan, to prep, to track.Right now, you can start changing the way you make healthy eating choices. You can start choosing differently when you decide to eat, whether you stop eating when you’re full, whether you start eating when you’re actually hungry, whether you decide to be emotionally aware or emotionally eat throughout your day.This is not a quick fix. This is a practice. And if it’s something you want more support with, get inside my membership because it’s something I will help you do. But these micro decisions don’t take more time than you’re already spending to eat […0.4s] unhealthy.You’re already spending those seconds eating anyway. Might as well spend those seconds more resourcefully. And this isn’t to get into performatism with healthy eating where you expect yourself to do it perfectly from a shameful place.It’s just for you to start exhaling that you have all of the time you need right now to start making really effective healthy eating decisions and to start building that skill. You don’t need your circumstances to drastically change, and that in itself can feel useful.Next, and very importantly, stop treating healthy eating like a performance. This is something that we’ll all find ourselves doing and it’s totally natural, but I really want you to make an effort to start healing your performatism with healthy eating. Many of us were taught to overcompensate for not feeling in control with food with over prepping, over planning, and overtracking. But performing with healthy eating doesn’t create sustainable results. It’s just gonna burn you out.What’s really interesting is the majority of women I coach who are very much like I was, actually know how to perform really highly with healthy eating when they have time for it and when they have energy for it. But the problem is this never last because being really good at performing with healthy eating has nothing to do with the skill of naturally healthy eating. Actually they can be quite opposite, and this is okay. It just means being open to learning a different manner of healthy eating that actually represents the results you wanna have. So performance based healthy eating takes excessive time and effort and energy, […0.5s] and it will produce results, but they’re not long term because eventually you’re gonna burn yourself out. And then naturally healthy eating when you establish those skills allows you to create the results you want in a sustainable and enjoyable way that doesn’t require extra time or energy.And that leads us to five, which is to start transitioning into […0.4s] a naturally healthy eater.So in case you’re new here, this is quite literally what I teach. It is my bread and butter. And it’s to help you understand that you can eat healthy in a way that feels natural to you and individual to your needs and preferences. And to me, the definition of a naturally healthy eater is someone who can make healthy eating decisions without extra time being involved, so they don’t need to depend on the prep, planning and tracking if they don’t want to. You’re already making eating decisions daily, so why not make ones that better serve you with the same amount of time? That is the skill you want to learn. And I want you to think about how would you approach healthy eating differently if you couldn’t depend on time or extra effort to meet those needs? You probably start paying attention to your hunger and fullness cues more intently. You’d likely have more emotional awareness so you’re able to emotionally process rather than emotionally eat. And you probably make better food choices even if the options presented to you aren’t perfectly ideal or perfectly healthy.The key here is that as a naturally healthy eater, you’d be resourceful with the time you do have. You wouldn’t depend on high performance […0.5s] and extra effort or time to be successful. When you depend on high performance to eat healthy, you do feel like you get a gold star, but you don’t learn how to be resourceful, which is the main character trait I think of someone who eats naturally healthy. When you’re resourceful with healthy eating, you don’t depend on time or energy to get your needs met. And when you have this relationship to healthy eating, none of your circumstances will shake you because you understand that perfection or micromanagement isn’t even necessary to create the results you want.So here’s what I recommend in terms of putting this into action. I want you to just start pausing throughout your day. And I really recommend doing this at first, maybe once an hour, setting a timer for one minute every hour to just check in with your body and see how you’re feeling about time.See how you’re feeling about work, your family, the tasks on your calendar, and notice what your relationship is to time. Are you thinking I’m running out of it? I don’t have enough? And how does that feel in your body?When you can start naming the overwhelm, the pressure that comes up because of your thoughts about time? It’s gonna allow you to digest some of that emotional build up.And it’s also gonna lessen the chatter about time. Awareness is 80% of healing your relationship to time, which when that occurs, will lower your stress and will allow your body to be in a place to more naturally eat healthy and lose weight.If that is your goal, and what I wanna leave you with today is we can’t believe that eating healthy requires more time currency. It’s not going to work, because if you do, you’ll always leave healthy eating as something.You’ll get to one day when you have more time, or your circumstances are less busy, which spoiler alert is never going to happen. And you’ll know this better than I do.If you’ve tried this will think all have more time when, and then it never occurs, or ideal circumstances might occur for a short time, and then they go back to being busy.But if it’s okay that you don’t want healthy eating to be the most important thing in your life, even though you want the results from it, you have other things in your life or care about that you wanna devote your time to. So let’s establish a version of healthy eating that doesn’t depend on the currency of time.Thank you so much for being here with me today. I hope you found this valuable, and if you want deeper support with this, do not hesitate to join my own your eating habits membership. It is a community of women all working to master naturally healthy eating and creating insane results with it. I would love for you to join and support you there. Alright, I will talk to you very soon.