Hello my friends, welcome back to the Healthy Eating for Busy Women podcast. I am your host, Kat and I’m so happy you’re here. If you’re new, welcome to the space. So I’ve really designed this podcast to help you eat healthy naturally without relying on hustle restrictions. So if that sounds like your jam, I’m so happy you’re here. And I hope you learn a lot from this podcast.And […0.5s] if you have been listening for a while, if you could do me a very quick favor and leave a 5 star review with a little tidbit from this podcast that helped you, I would very much appreciate it. That helps our show get in front of more women. It could help and it really supports […0.6s] this work.So today we’re gonna talk about being in charge of your eating habits. And I know that might sound quite aggressive, but I really wanna hone in today on the concept of having full control with food. Because I think so much of the time we’ll find ourselves in this all or nothing pattern with healthy eating. And we want it all to feel balanced and consistent. And what I want you to keep eyes on is how you may feel like you’re relying on emotional highs and lows along your healthy eating journey. Sometimes you’ll feel like you have it all together and everything’s working. Some days you might feel totally discouraged and helpless. And we want to find that balance that allows you to […0.5s] eat healthy consistently so you can achieve the results you want regardless of what’s going on for you emotionally. Because what I know for you is you wanna feel study, you wanna feel clear, and you wanna be able to trust yourself healthy eating and weight loss. So being in charge of your eating habits is really going to connect that.So that is what I mean by being in charge of your eating habits. It’s to establish that […0.5s] stability with food.Now here’s the problem. I mostly see that comes up. So we’ll step on the scale and let’s say some weight has gone down, so we’ve been in this healthy eating journey for a hot minute and we notice some progress happening.What happens when we first start seeing progress is maybe we feel this sense of […0.6s] excitement, validation, relief. So we’ll feel this surge of dopamine, right? We’ll think it’s finally happening, it’s working, I’m doing it, right? Everything’s working out in my favor.And then here’s the other side of the coin. Maybe it’s a few days later, a week later, a month later, the scale stalls or it goes up a couple pounds or you overeat […0.5s] and then you feel like you lost control now. We’re thinking it’s not working anymore, I’ve lost progress, I’ve ruined it, I knew I couldn’t keep this up.And so I really want you guys if you’re having all or nothing patterns with healthy eating to understand that those all or nothing patterns stem from the all or nothing of your emotional experience. So we will have high highs where we feel excited, we feel validated, we feel relieved, and then we’ll have the low lows where we feel discouraged, hopeless, helpless, shame. And that is where this roller coaster comes in and what’s happening here in this all or nothing, it’s not about your weight.It’s about your emotional roller coaster relationship to natural progress and the role you are playing in that natural progress. Because here’s the thing and it’s the problem most of us have. And I want you guys to know if you’re new, there is no judging or shaming ourselves here on this podcast.Because I work with the most ambitious type, a high achieving women from all walks of life. Whether someone is a mom or an Olympian or a teacher or a celebrity. I’ve worked with all types of women and all of us have a brain that functions pretty similarly when it comes to our eating habits. And here is something that is universal. All of us will have what I like to call a child mindset with our eating habits somewhere, in some way. So this is when we will approach our eating habits from this childlike helplessness. So we’ll wait for signs that things are working for us.We will ride emotional highs when things look good and feel good and kind of spiral when they don’t. We will hope results continue, but don’t fully believe that we’re the ones creating them. And it will feel like results are happening to us, not because we’re the ones doing it.I want you guys to just know you’re gonna have this part of your brain because this is the more primitive side of your brain.We all have this childlike mentality that isn’t the part of our brain that harnesses responsibility and resourcefulness. It feels more tender. And I want us as maybe more Type a or professional women to normalize this because it’s important we acknowledge that this exists.This is the part of us that will make the entire journey of healthy eating and weight loss feel unstable. No matter if we’re in the high highs or in the low lows, we never quite feel in charge of the results that are happening.So to shift into stability with your eating habits, the kind that will last, you need to learn how to step into the parent mindset.So here’s how the parent mindset is different from our child mindset. The parent recognizes that our results with weight loss don’t just happen, they are created by us through consistent care, attention, and action.The parent does not rely on emotional excitement to take action. And they also understand that plateaus, overeating, and off days are just part of the journey.They are not signs of failure. And overall, the parent holds firm and study […0.5s] when the child, part of us wants to sabotage and panic. That is the big difference.And the work that we are doing together on this podcast in my programs is to solidify the parent when it comes to healthy eating in this mindset. Your self worth isn’t on the line based on how you’re eating. You will not interpret every dip or setback as a failure, and you’re not gonna interpret every win as a miracle that just happened. You see your progress with the proper factual context, and most importantly, right, you lead yourself when it comes to your eating decisions and your progress with weight loss, even when things feel uncertain. So you don’t need certainty, you don’t need to know a to Z, but you lead yourself step by step from point a to B, B to C so an analogy, I really love, and it is no secret if you guys are my client or you’ve listened to this podcast for a while. I love the analogy of being a gardener when it comes to healthy eating.So I’m gonna introduce an analogy about gardening here that has to do with this dynamic.So imagine you are a gardener who tends a garden […0.5s] every day, and you’re not alone. You have a child who accompanies you each day to tend to this garden and she’s a small child. She has the mentality of a child and we expect that she’s going to emotionally be like a child, but you are the gardener.You’re an adult who has context. And what you understand that the child doesn’t is the conditions that support growth in the garden. You know that results take time.You know progress isn’t always visible on the surface of the garden because there’s roots that need to establish. And you know that seasons exist in progress. Some seasons allow us to grow, some allow us to rest.You have all of this context about how to create results with the garden that the child doesn’t know. Now the child, […0.6s] it exists in the garden with wide eyes, right? So when a flower blooms or a plant gets bigger, she screams, oh my gosh, it’s working!It’s finally happening! She’s very excitable. And her emotions can go to positive 100, and then her emotions can go straight to negative 100 the next day where a leaf falls off or nothing grows for a day and she cries and she thinks it’s ruined, it’s not working anymore […0.5s] and she feels helpless.So the child only sees single moments, but you as the parent and the gardener understand the bigger picture. And here’s what we need to understand. I want you to picture this whole analogy as your healthy eating and weight loss journey, right?The problem isn’t that the child is there. There’s no problem that she’s has these high and low emotional experiences, right? Of course, she has big emotion. She’s supposed to. This is your primitive brain in the process of your healthy eating and weight loss journey.The problem is when we as the gardener let her dictate the entire process, when we believe her emotions as facts instead of holding space for them and continuing to leave, when we take more time trying to fix the emotions of the child rather than letting her learn to regulate so we can keep taking action when we don’t speak to her and offer her context and we just bulldoze through her emotions and force her to cooperate.All of us as women, as adults have a child part of our brain and an adult part of our brain. And when we are not creating the results we want and we’re in an all or nothing pattern with food is because we have not Learned to parent our inner child.And what I want you to understand is, yes, you are tending to this garden to create growth and create the results you want, but there’s no opting out of bringing the child with us.And if you’re in an all or nothing pattern of excitement or discouragement with healthy eating and weight loss, it’s just because we haven’t established the parent gardener role. And if you’re pushing forward and finding yourself burnt out, you’re existing as only the gardener and not looking out for the child. Does that make sense?I love my analogies here, so I’m hoping this one connects with you. So […0.6s] let’s talk about what this will look like in practice with healthy eating and weight loss where you’re going to assert control […0.5s] as the gardener.So we know you’re gonna have to bring the child along and that’s gonna be part of it. But how do we establish […0.6s] staying in charge of our eating decisions throughout our journey? Here’s what this looks like. No. 1. You will need to notice your emotional swings.Notice the pendulum when you’re in the positive 100 positive excitement or the negative 100 discouragement. Do you feel on top of the world when things are going well and devastated when they aren’t going well? Right?That’s the child reacting in extremes, it’s totally normal, it’s not a problem. But you will not build consistency from staying in those emotional swings you will have to, which is No. 2. Here, acknowledge your role as the parent and the gardener. So you created the conditions for results to occur.Even if the child gets really excited, thinks she just got lucky, thinks it’s magic and thinks it just worked.You as the parent know that on the days that the plant grew, it came from […0.5s] days or weeks of you establishing the right conditions in the soil, putting the plants in the right light, all the things we do as the gardener, your job is not to feel constant excitement from this high excitable belief that things are working.It’s to keep tending neutrally to the process each day. Then also, if something slows down and doesn’t work, you adjust, and you also don’t indulge in the panic you want to.No. 3. Respond with leadership, not emotion. So when the scale stalls or you overeat, the child is going to say, I messed it up, I’m back at square one. What are we gonna do?What you will say as the parent is perhaps, oh, interesting. Let’s look at what happened there. What might we need to change or support? How does this make perfect sense?Because what you know as the parent is, it’s all solvable and none of it is personal. It’s just that the child is more emotionally tender and she will experience the highs and lows that do not have the actual context of how your results are created.And lastly, I really want you guys to understand firmly with yourself why you are co gardening […0.5s] with your child.I think the struggle that many of us have as type a women is we think we’re supposed to only be the adult. So we hold ourselves in a very high regard for this adult side of us will think, oh, I’m just a perfectionist.I’m very type a, I’m very ambitious, high achieving, […0.6s] but this is gonna be a humbling process to acknowledge that you have this tender child within you that needs to be parented, cause we are the parent and the child. So we can’t shame the child for having her emotions that she supposed to have.But we also as a parent, aren’t gonna follow her emotions blindly and let her lead. We’re gonna parent ourselves firmly but with kindness.So we wanna hold ourselves through the UPS when we’re losing weight, eating healthy and everything’s working, and the downs when it’s time to learn a lesson, be patient or evaluate progress […0.5s] overall, this is what keeps the garden growing.So another example is, let’s say you have a week where […0.5s] everything clicks. This just happened to a client of mine. Everything clicks, you feel in control, you lose a few pounds, you feel amazing. So I actually just had a client come into on your eating habits and she said this to me.She said the first week she went through, I think it was the first step in the modules and she already lost weight, she feels better, her cravings have gone down. And then she said the second week it just felt really visceral because she went to the other side of the spectrum.So first week she came in her head, she’s like, yes, it’s all working. I’m finally fixed. I found the solution.But then the second week in the program, she saw areas of work with, I think it was over eating or emotional eating. And then the child part of her then thought, nope, I failed, I’m broken again. Maybe […0.6s] this isn’t working.So where the coaching went is where the parent needs to go, right? Oh, nothing’s gone wrong. I’m still in charge. It makes sense that this is where my progress is now. Here’s what I will adjust and keep going. It’s holding space for our roller coaster emotions without making them the truth.That is what it will feel like to be in charge of your eating habits, no matter where you’re at. You do not have to master naturally healthy eating to feel in charge of your eating habits.You can feel in charge of your eating habits today in the process of building the skills of naturally healthy eating. Because it’s not about perfect performance that creates being in charge of your eating habits. It’s establishing the parent role in how you’re showing up.Feeling in charge of your eating also isn’t about being emotionally neutral all of the time.It’s about knowing who’s driving the process, the child or the adult. When you step into the parent role, you hold space for the emotional side without losing your footing. You trust the process even when results aren’t dramatic or instant.And you stop spinning with healthy eating and weight loss, and you start leading with action.This is the difference. So I want you to consider being in charge of healthy eating as less of this aggressive lean forward approach and more of a leaning back approach where you need to stay in this parent role even when the child is getting really excitable and we need to bring her back down to earth or she’s feeling really discouraged and we need to put some ground underneath her feet with perspective.So my friends, if you want a process to step into this parent role with healthy eating, make sure that you check out my on your eating habits membership at catrentice.Com forward slash membership. This is how you learn to eat naturally healthy and lose weight for the last time. In my very humble opinion, I think all of us need to be in this program because it will […0.5s] allow us to create naturally healthy eating habits in a way that lasts and in a way that feels like you. So I hope to see you there. Thank you so much for being here and I will talk to you next weekweek