You’ve tried everything to eat healthy and lose weight; without the results to show for it.
You might think you just haven’t found the right method, but the truth is, permanent change isn’t about a method or protocol. It’s about how you approach healthy eating and weight loss from the start.
In this episode, I’m sharing the top healthy eating and weight loss truths you need to know before starting your journey.
We’ll discuss:
→ The clear difference between short-term and long-term results with food and weight
→ What has prevented you from changing the way you eat for the last time
→ Key perspectives you’ll need to establish with yourself at the beginning of your weight loss journey
→ What’s actually required from you to eat healthy and lose weight in the most efficient manner — without hustle or burnout.
The best part of becoming a naturally healthy eater? You completely remove your food struggles. You’re able to reach and maintain your ideal weight effortlessly.
Which means, there’s no time to waste. Now is the moment you can decide to commit to eating healthy and losing weight in the most foundational way.
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Hello everyone. Welcome back to the podcast this week. I’m happy you’re here spending time with me today. So I wanted to have an episode devoted just to talking about healthy eating and weight loss truth. So I have spent the past decade mastering how to help type A women eat healthy naturally and lose weight permanently. And there is a ton of expertise I have developed in terms of how to help you achieve this result in the most simple sustainable way.
And needless to say, it is very easy to get overwhelmed and confused with all of the information available when it comes to making these changes. And it’s always my mission to teach you how to make healthy eating and weight loss as simple as possible and as effective as possible. So this episode today is going to help you do that and I was just thinking we spend some time together where I just list out the top healthy eating and weight loss truths that I want you to know.
So I want you to hear each one and really let it sink in. Take inventory of your life and notice where you’re not doing this and how you can start implementing these truths now to help you make the changes that you want to make this year. So without further ado, let’s just get into the truths I have for you today. Number one, one of the most important things you will need to know to lose weight for the last time and eat healthy sustainably is that you can’t just focus on what you eat.
All right? So in order to make permanent changes, you cannot just focus on the foods. So you can’t base your long-term changes on having the kitchen stocked with things that you see as healthy or following nutritional recommendations or sticking to a diet plan. To make lasting changes, you will need to focus on how you eat or your behaviors with food.
One of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to healthy eating and weight loss is that those things are created by changing the types of foods that you put into your mouth. And my friends, changing the types of foods you put into your mouth will do nothing for you if you are not changing the way you eat those foods. Whether you stop eating those foods when you’re full or you overeat, whether you comfort eat those foods when you’ve had a long day or you process your emotions instead, all of these skills that change your behaviors with food are necessary to build so you can make these changes long-term.
And here’s what happens when you don’t change how you eat and you only focus on what you eat, you will need to depend on perfection in order to see results, you’re going to feel so attached to eating the right things and.
You’re going to believe that you have to cut out foods you love in order to see results, and then you’re going to get frustrated with why you don’t have the results you want. This is going to be the most limiting and exhausting version of making these changes. And the key to being able to have a relationship to healthy eating without restricting foods you love is to prioritize changing how you eat food, not what you eat first. So that’s what I want you to know about that, and I really want you to consider that concept. The next truth is you do not overeat because you are hungry or because you love food.
Alright? You overeat because of your stress levels. So a lot of us will think when we’re struggling that why we’re eating too much and not losing weight is because we just have a ton of hunger that we’re supremely hungry and we can’t help it.
Or sometimes we think I just love food too much, I could never give it up. I’m addicted to chocolate, I’m addicted to cheese. Just speaking about my past examples here, and that’s actually not the case, none of us can ever be addicted to any food to the point where we stop having control with it. None of us experience hunger to the point where we stop having control with food. We always have the ability to make conscious deliberate eating decisions. If you overeat and you feel a pull to overeat, that’s high.
It’s because of your stress levels. And what happens when you experience stress levels is your brain and body is in a state of fight or flight. So this naturally causes your body to increase your cravings for food because when your body is in a stressed state, it primitively tells your body that you’re also potentially in a state of famine where there’s a shortage of food.
This is a really interesting fact about how your stress works. So when your body thinks a shortage of food is coming, it’s going to retain your weight and it’s going to increase the cravings to take in more energy and more food. So how to solve for your eating habits at the root level is to learn how to regulate your stress so you naturally reduce your cravings to overeat and you stop blaming why you overeat on the fact that you’re so hungry or because you love food.
I promise you my friend, that is not the case. It is not a you problem, it is just a skill building problem. And the skill you need to build is stress regulation so you can naturally lower your cravings. And if you wanna become a master at this in a really foundational way, join own your eating habits. This is what we learn how to do in that program.
Next, the truth I want you to know is that there is a difficult part of weight loss that many of you don’t expect, and that is letting healthy eating and weight loss be simple. So, so many of us as a coping mechanism will confuse ourselves. We’ll make healthy eating and weight loss complicated and we will gravitate towards trying a lot of things, consuming a lot of information. And this keeps us from having to take action on these changes. Why do we avoid taking action on these changes?
Because a lot of us don’t wanna fail and we wanna keep ourselves safe from that experience. But that means that a big growth area for you will be being firm with yourself. That healthy eating and weight loss is simple. If you watch yourself being confused or making it complicated, acknowledge that that is just your way to cope because you’re resisting getting started.
Alright? So I want you to think about where are you potentially stopping yourself from implementing because you’re making it complicated. Now, what would happen if you let healthy eating and weight loss be simple and you focused on the actions that you’re going to take next? Such a helpful concept to consider. Alright? The next truth is that the most important skill of long-term weight loss is changing your relationship to failure. Alright? So like I said, as the humans, we will avoid failure and a lot of you will be avoiding solving this problem for the last time because you don’t wanna fail again.
You’ve tried all the diets, you’ve tried all the programs, and you do not want to have something else that provides you evidence that you are a failure. But it’s going to be very important that you distinguish not getting a desired or expected result, which is neutral failure from personal failure, which is you believing that you are a failure and something is wrong with you.
We can’t possibly be failures. This is just a judgment or an opinion that we can have of ourselves and it’s not a very nice one. As the humans will have some not very nice thoughts about ourselves, and this is one of them. Do not let a judgment about yourself keep you from taking action in the way that’s necessary for this result. The relationship to failure you will need to have is that failure is data. Failure is necessary in your journey to naturally healthy eating and permanent weight loss because you’re going to be building skills with yourself.
You’re going to do it wrong. You’re going to evaluate your progress and move forward incrementally based on what you learn in own your eating habits. This is exactly what our women do. They are constantly failing and the most successful clients do so on a pile of failures because they are the ones who got in the ring and experimented the most with the process.
So that is how I want you to think about failure, and I want you to consider what would change if you saw failure as more neutral and made it less personal about you. The next truth is that you are not actually enjoying your food when you’re over consuming it. So a lot of us will identify as loving food so much and there’s foods we just can’t get enough of. But I want you to consider what actual enjoyment of food is, right? It’s appreciating the textures, it’s savoring the taste, it’s truly enjoying the experience of eating the food.
And I want you to consider that overeating or quickly filling up with these foods is not enjoying it and you actually can’t enjoy foods in the way they should be when you’re overeating. True food pleasure comes from savoring the foods in a present way without overeating.
So even just now, I want you to start considering this concept. This is a really game changing concept I teach my clients in my practice because it teaches them that they can experience more pleasure with food than they ever have and lose weight. And that’s something that’s available to you too. I want you to consider that next, I want you to know that discipline and willpower won’t cut it long term. So some of you may have already caught onto this, some of you may have not, but just think about this because what a lot of us type hes miss is that we are human.
You will need to humble yourself and accept that no matter how dedicated you are to this area of your life and the results, you are still a human with limited amounts of daily emotional energy, which means you will need to be mindful with the emotional energy you are fueling.
This goal with discipline and willpower will burn through you and lead you to burnout, right? It’s not something that you can sustain all day every day with your eating decisions. Understand that you are a human, which means you have to be mindful of how you think and how you feel about this area of your life. Understanding that discipline and willpower aren’t tactically valuable for your permanent weight loss is the difference between learning to eat healthy for a season and learning to eat healthy for life.
If you rely on discipline and willpower, you will create these results for a season and then when you do not have the emotional capacity to harness that discipline or willpower, your results will no longer be present. Alright? And this will inform a lot of you for why your results haven’t been consistent. This is why. So you can consider this.
The next truth is that to have these higher level results of naturally healthy eating and permanent weight loss, you will need to be willing to build expertise with both your body and eating preferences. So when women enter own your eating habits, something that they learn is they are not joining as a student, they are joining as a scientist. So they are not there to perform highly and get an A. They are there with a leadership mindset where they are taking ownership of the results they want with food and body in a very adult way.
So to create these results that you want in a lasting way, you’re going to need to be willing to adopt that leadership mentality where your goal is to be the expert of your own eating habits and your own body. You are no longer wanting to outsource this result to anyone else in your life or to any other method.
You want to be that expert and caregiver of this result in your life. So it’s kind of like that one phrase, right? You give a woman a fish, you feed her for a day, you teach a woman to fish and you feed her for a lifetime. So if someone gives you a fish, this means someone gives you the food plans, the nutrition recommendations, the protocols. If you go that route, you will quote unquote have results for a day or be fed for a day if you learn the skill and learn how to fish.
So in this case, you establish emotional control with food, you acknowledge your own body cues, you learn to make your own healthy food choices. Then you can quote unquote, feed yourself for a lifetime. So I hope that analogy makes sense here. It is exactly the same concept with this area of your life.
The next truth is one that I really want you to sit with because it is the truth. You are never too busy or too tired to eat healthy
The naturally healthy eating approach does not depend on time or prep. It means you know how to be resourceful and make healthy eating decisions at any moment in any circumstance. It is the most adaptable version of healthy eating that can exist no matter what’s going on in your life.
So you are never too busy or too tired to eat healthy, but you may be too busy or too tired to diet
So you must step out of the student mindset where you outsource this result and you think, just tell me what to do, kind of like a child would. And you commit to stepping into a leadership mindset where you think I’m figuring out what works for me and my body, where you start seeing yourself as the adult caregiver of your results.
Notice how that difference in maturity with how you think about this area of your life. I like to poke fun with my clients because it really is true. The process of learning these foundational skills is really us maturing in this area of our lives. I think diet culture infantilizes us and teaches us that we can’t possibly solve this without outsourcing all of these things constantly. And a lot of this is you getting back your confidence, your leadership, and your adulthood in this area of your life.
So to change your eating behaviors for life, you must change who you are as an eater and you must step into that leadership energy, which is a process that you can do and is possible. And then the last truth I wanna offer you today is if you don’t commit to those internal behavioral changes necessary to become a naturally healthy eater, you won’t lose weight permanently.
I like to define naturally healthy eating as learning how to eat healthy the way that nature originally intended. Because listen, it may go without saying that nature did not intend for us as humans to have to create a food plan or prep our meals constantly or micromanage our eating habits. Your body has everything you already need to eat healthy naturally and create and maintain your ideal weight. We have ways we can regulate our stress now and lower our cravings.
We have the ability to hone our body cues and listen to them and to make decisions with those cues. We have the ability to enjoy food at the optimal level, which lowers our urges to overeat those foods. This is about you learning how to work with your body and lose weight permanently in the way that nature has already primed you for which is having a human brain and having a human body, and then just learning how to work with those things.
So I hope that makes sense y’all. And I hope that you took some insight from today that can help you on both your healthy eating and weight loss journey now. And for those of you who want to take this work to that most foundational level, join us inside on your eating habits. This is where you will enter the most efficient container to create these results for yourself. Where women inside are learning to eat healthy naturally and lose weight for the very last time. You can learn more at cat rentals.com/coaching. Alright, my friends, I hope this episode is valuable to you.
Thanks for being here today 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.