Hello my friend. Welcome back to the podcast this week. I’m so excited you are here right now, because in today’s episode I’m going to address all of that resistance you’re facing when it comes to eating healthy. By the end of this episode, you’re going to understand exactly why simple healthy food decisions that you want to be making feel so damn hard right now. But before we get into that, I want to invite you to apply to my private coaching program Own Your Eating Habits. So enrollment is currently open. And this is for the women looking to master the tools to create healthy eating habits that feel natural and sustainable for them. So in this program, you’re not getting a strict cookie-cutter meal plan where you’re forcing yourself to eat certain things and punish yourself along the way. This program is completely customized to you, so we can meet you exactly where you’re at. This is the only way you can create naturally healthy eating habits that are sustainable to you. We go much, much deeper than a basic diet protocol. What makes this program so unique and effective is it teaches you exactly how to eat healthy naturally in the way nature intended. So this means you learn how to manage your mind, so you’re able to separate your emotional state from your food choices, where you’re able to stop overeating and emotionally eating. This means you learn exactly how to access your own body wisdom so you’re always knowing when to start eating, stop eating, when you’re satisfied from food. Before clients work with me, they’re used to searching for the “right ways to eat” outside of their own bodies, and this program teaches you how to come up with those answers for yourself. And then, this means you learn the tactics to healthy eating as well. So we cover everything you need to know about time management, creating your own food plans, healthy eating strategies – all of it. It is a hub of tools and coaching resources that will take you from feeling out of control with food, to becoming someone who owns their eating decisions. So, I invite you to sign up for a free consultation and apply at katrentas.com/coaching. Now, let’s get into today’s episode topic which is healthy eating resistance. I am very excited to talk to you about this, because almost all of you will relate to this. And there are two pieces to focus on here. There’s the simple food actions that you want to be taking. So these are the healthy meal plans you carefully set at the beginning of the week. And then, there’s the massive, brick wall resistance that you feel when it’s time to follow through with those simple food actions. So, in other words, there’s the healthy food decisions you make ahead of time and then there’s the massive resistance that seems to mess it all up. Now, this will look a bit different for each person, but you likely have an idea of what I’m referring to here. And today I’m going to share exactly what this resistance is and where it comes from, along with what you need to do to move past this resistance. And, if you’re in a place right now where you don’t have the results with food you want, I really want you to pay attention. Because this is the foundational problem for many when it comes to their food struggles. So, first, I want to explain why this resistance feels so difficult. Obviously, it’s difficult because it seems like it’s what prevents us from eating the way we want to be eating. But, there’s a bigger reason why this resistance is so hard. It’s because firstly, because you don’t know why that brick wall of resistance is there. You don’t know why there’s that separation between the simple food actions you want to be taking and yourself. So, this is the first reason why this resistance is very difficult for us. The second reason it’s difficult, is because you’re going to come up with really personal reasons as to why it’s there. Which means you’ll beat yourself up because of that resistance. So, this means, you feel resistance to changing your eating habits. And because you don’t know why it’s happening, you’ll think it means something personal about you. You’ll think “Why is this happening to me?”, “I’m not capable of eating healthy”, “I can’t be trusted with food.”, “What the heck is wrong with me?”. For many of you, if you’re anything like I was, you may find that you beat yourself up with these kind of thoughts for years. You’re stuck in a cycle of healthy eating resistance, that brick wall, and you convince yourself that the reason you have resistance is because something is wrong with you. My friends. There is no worse place to be in with your eating habits. The amount of suffering that happens from this place is huge. I see this with most of my clients who come into my coaching practice, and I know this was the case for myself in the past. Any time you make a part of your human experience mean that something is wrong with you, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Because there’s no way you’re going to move forward with your eating habits thinking you’ve been dealt a crap hand. It’s never true. And if you’d like more on this specifically, be sure to back to the Beating Yourself Up episode. That will be really helpful. But, moving on, this is why resistance to changing your eating habits feels so painful. It’s because of what you’re making this resistance mean about you. Now, what’s interesting about this, is we never find ourselves solving for the resistance, right? None of us do this. We’ll create a simple healthy meal plan and have massive resistance to following through with it. So, we self-sabotage. But then, what do we try next? We’ll think that it’s the meal plan that was the problem, not the resistance. So we try diet after diet, we’ll download tons of meal plans off of Pinterest, trying to change what we’re eating over and over again. This right here is why action-based food plans don’t work. It’s why you can’t just change what you’re eating from the get-go. You’re not solving for what’s stopping you from making those healthy food decisions. At the end of the day, you likely have an idea of how you want to be eating, so why aren’t you? It’s because of this brick wall, this resistance that’s there. So we need to understand it. This is what you’ll need to solve for. And this is a big part of what we solve for in Own Your Eating Habits. This is what makes my program such a game changer for the women who join. Because they finally get the tools to solve the cause of the problem, the resistance, rather than the symptom of the problem, which is how they’re eating. I actually had the same exact experience in the past as many of you. I would try every single diet in the book, from the age of like 10 years old, desperately trying to find “the right way to eat”. It was never what I was eating, it was the resistance to eating what I intentionally planned to eat. Now, let’s talk about exactly what this brick wall resistance really is. And that’s really what it feels like, right? It can seem like this impenetrable brick wall that is separating you from the food decisions you want to be making. So, here’s what the brick wall of resistance really is . It’s your beliefs and emotions about yourself as an eater. It comes from your mind. There’s nothing dark or sinister outside of you coming in to build that brick wall and sabotage your eating habits, this is all coming from your brain. It’s where that resistance is created. And this resistance is representative of your self-concept as an eater. Your self-concept is how you see yourself. It’s your opinions about you. And what’s happening when that resistance is present, is you’re having beliefs about yourself that contradict the food choices you want to be making. Right now, your brain is having a concept of you as someone who doesn’t eat that way and make those food decisions. So, I’m going to give you a specific example. To be perfectly honest, almost every client needs to solve for this resistance in some way when joining my program, which is perfect because that’s what my coaching program is for, but I’m going to share an example from one particular client. She came into the Own Your Eating Habits program with so many opinions and judgements about herself. She had a very set self-concept of herself as an eater. Whenever she attempted to eat healthy and change her eating habits, a lot of thoughts would come up for her. Thoughts like, “We won’t stick with this long-term”, “This won’t matter anyways”, “We’re going to mess this up”, etc. Which constantly made her feel doubt when it came to her following through with the eating decisions she wanted to be making. Following through with her food plan. This was her brick wall of resistance. It was these judgements she was having about herself as an eater, and the doubt that came from those judgements. Now, here’s something really important to note, that I explained to this client as well. She had really legitimate reasons for those judgments. Those judgements were even necessarily “negative”, wrong, or toxic. Any judgement she was having, or any judgement you have for that matter, is just a sentence in your mind. And it’s there because of evidence you have provided to your brain. This client was continuously in the past, providing evidence to her brain that “She wouldn’t stick to the food plans long-term” and that “No matter how hard she tried it wouldn’t matter anyways”. She provided past evidence for that thinking. Now, these beliefs about her were present for a reason. And really, it’s because she was attempting unsustainable methods of eating in the past that she couldn’t stick with long-term. So, while those judgements about herself make sense as to why they’re there, they’re not really giving us the whole story. She failed to eat healthy in the past because her methods were too restrictive. But now, she’s left with all of these judgements and opinions about herself as an eater, because of that evidence she provided her brain. Her judgements and doubt are her brick wall of resistance when it comes to healthy eating. Before joining my program, she was really suffering with this, because she didn’t know where this brick wall was coming from. She thought it was because something was wrong with her. And once she realized that her resistance wasn’t personal, that it was simply due to her thoughts and emotions, it became a huge weight off her shoulders. And that’s what I want for you right now. The brick wall of resistance feels hard, but it doesn’t have to feel personal. It’s perfectly natural. Now, I want to tell you what this client did differently moving forward to get through her brick wall of resistance with healthy eating. The first thing she did was acknowledge the brick wall when it came up. She began identifying exactly what thoughts and emotions were creating the resistance. You can think of the thoughts and feelings like the bricks that create the brick wall. Each brick represents a thought or opinion about yourself. And the entire wall represents the overall emotion that you feel. This allowed her to disassociate with it a bit so it wasn’t personal. She could see the brick wall for what it was. Then, the second thing is she allowed herself to accept the experience of the brick wall. So, in her case, this means she was allowing the doubt to be there without fighting it. She learned that the doubt was natural and that the doubt was there for legitimate reasons, so she started to intentionally allow that doubt in rather than resist it. A lot of people are really afraid to feel their uncomfortable emotions, but really this is the key to not letting those emotions have power over you. Once she committed to feeling the doubt rather than resisting it, those bricks in that brick wall started to become less firm so to speak. So, instead of a brick wall, when you’re willing to feel whatever emotion is present, it turns into a wall made of sticks or straw. Kind of like the three little pigs scenario. When you’re willing to feel the resistance the barrier to healthy eating becomes less strong. The third thing she did was begin providing her brain new evidence. So, at that point her brain had evidence that she was someone who “Couldn’t be trusted with food”, “Would fail with food”, “Was going to mess it up”. These are the bricks that built her wall of resistance. So, she started to provide her brain evidence of the opposite. She began meeting herself where she was at, following through in small ways, and showing up to the food choices she wanted to be making, despite the brick wall being there. Every time she did this, she provided her brain with new evidence. That she was someone who could be trusted to make food decisions. That she wasn’t going to mess it up. And you can look at this part as dismantling the brick wall entirely over time. Brick by brick she was taking it down each time she provided her brain new evidence for what it already believed about her as an eater. And I want you to start thinking about the simple food decisions that you would like to be making right now. Really think about this for yourself. If you could be a naturally healthy eater, what food decisions would you be making? Now, think about what’s stopping you? What does your brick wall of resistance look like? What thoughts and feelings create that wall? And how could you begin accepting that brick wall, making it less strong, and providing evidence to the opposite? Really good stuff here. I want you to sit with this. Listen to it over if you need to. I can’t wait to see what you come up with here and I want to hear about it. Find me on Instagram at @KatRentas. You can share your progress to your stories, tag me, I always love to reshare everything we’re doing as a community so we can inspire each other in this work. Alright, my friend. Thanks for being here with me today and I’ll talk to you next week.