Lose Weight Permanently
You’ve spent excessive amounts of time, energy, and resources attempting to eat healthy and lose weight.
Needless to say, you’re spent. You’re ready to move on from that approach. I’m here to teach you how.
In this hour masterclass, you’ll learn what’s preventing you from creating the weight loss you want, along with what’s necessary to solve for healthy eating and weight loss for the very last time.
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Jun 17
How To Know If You’re Restricting
Are you caught in the dilemma of wanting to eat healthier without feeling restricted, yet know you need to eat less to lose weight?
In this episode, we’ll dive into the key difference between food restriction and emotional deprivation.
Understanding these concepts is the key to solving overeating without restricting yourself from foods you love.
You’ll learn:
→ The distinction between not eating enough to support your body’s needs and feeling emotionally deprived
→ Examples of clients who successfully overcame overeating challenges without feeling restricted
→ Effective strategies to recognize and manage feelings of deprivation with food, so you can have a freer approach to weight loss
→ How to build trust with yourself to eat in alignment with your body’s needs without overindulging
Turns out, you can have a relationship with healthy eating and weight loss, where you hone the skill of not overeating without restricting yourself along the way.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | RSS
Here are some extra resources to go along with this episode:
- Weight Loss Without Tracking (podcast)
- People Pleasing Eating (podcast)
- Stop Overeating (free course)
- Own Your Eating Habits (coaching)
Episode Transcript
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast this week as usual. I am so happy you are here and I am really excited to talk about today’s episode, which is how to know if you’re restricting with food. And I know this might not sound like the most fun. Maybe you’re listening and you don’t even think it’s applicable to you, but I really want to encourage you to listen to this episode because how this tends to apply to women in my coaching program is women who join.
really tend to have the highest intentions to eat healthy naturally and lose weight for the last time. They are so committed to doing it right. And they really want to make sure that they’re not dieting or restricting with food like they may have done in the past. What can happen is that they are not defining what restricting food is properly.
all of the time. And so what I want to do here today is to clarify how I offer what [00:01:00] restriction with food is in my programs and how you can know if you’re restricting or not so you can feel safe along that journey. Now, something I will say about this topic is just to give a little trigger warning, I will be giving my take on restriction and deprivation with food.
So from this episode, pick what feels right for you and leave what doesn’t. doesn’t. You always are encouraged to use your discernment when listening to these episodes to see what applies. Now, before we get into the juicy goodness of today’s episode, I do want to announce that our next cohort of Own Your Eating Habits will be opening in July.
So I’m very excited for this cohort. This is our mid year cohort. So women who join will be committing to losing weight for the last time and becoming a naturally healthy eater by the end of this year. So very exciting. And for those of you who are new, my own your eating habits program is my group program for high achieving women who [00:02:00] want to master naturally healthy eating and permanent weight loss.
Those are the skills they learn. And that is what we help them create. It is a life changing container, truly. So if you would like to join us, what you need to know is that doors will open on July 1st. First, and we will be starting as a group on July 24th. So now is that time to start planning for that enrollment so you can get all set up and make sure you get that spot when doors open.
I’m so excited to be your coach for those of us who join us then. All right. So let’s get into the juiciness of how to know if you’re restricting and really what I most often see. Where people struggle with this is that you want to eat healthy without restricting yourself. So you want to make sure that’s not happening, but you also know that you need to be eating less.
To lose weight, right? So, you know, you need to be eating less and not overeating to lose weight, but you also [00:03:00] don’t want to restrict yourself. And sometimes with the women I coach, these can feel like conflicting concepts. And so I really want to help clear that up for you today.
Sometimes even just the realization that you quote unquote need to be eating less can activate this part of you that is afraid you’ll be overeating. restrictive with yourself. And so that is valid. It is very common. And I’m hoping today’s episode helps you feel safer to not overeat and maintain control with food to lose weight and not feel restricted.
Okay. So first off, what’s really going to help you is understanding the difference between versus deprivation. So this is what I offer to my clients. It’s that difference between restriction and deprivation. Restriction is what many of you might have been familiar with in the past. I know it certainly was the case for me, where you’re not eating enough to support your body’s needs.
[00:04:00] Okay, so it’s having too low of an intake to support your body or not enough of a certain category of food like proteins, carbs, fats, etc. That is what restriction is. It’s not meeting your body’s needs with food to survive. Very simple. Deprivation, on the other hand, is what most of you will be experiencing when you’re at this level of the work or you are in my program.
So deprivation doesn’t even really have anything to do with the foods per se or your intake. It’s simply a feeling caused by your thoughts. So it’s an emotional vibration created from beliefs like I’m not allowed to eat those things. That’s unhealthy. I can’t lose weight and eat foods I love. So it’s beliefs that are often triggered when you want a food that you find pleasurable, but you have judgments about eating that food on your weight loss [00:05:00] journey.
Okay? So remember, restriction is when you’re actually restricting. Food, that’s necessary to support your body and deprivation is a feeling caused by your thoughts. So those judgments are what create the emotional experience of deprivation. And I want you to expect to have the emotion of deprivation on your weight loss journey.
I want you to normalize it because you likely have a brain that is conditioned to believe that you’re going to have to give up. give up certain foods to create that result. Even the language that you think around it will be super depriving. Like you’ll have to give things up, you’re not allowed to eat that, something is healthy or unhealthy.
Even notice how the manner in which we think creates that feeling of deprivation or for some of you it’s pressure or confined. It’s that experience. Your brain’s judgments about eating certain foods creates the feelings of deprivation because [00:06:00] you believe you can’t eat those foods and lose weight. So this has nothing to do with the foods themselves or actually restricting yourself with foods.
Your body needs to survive. So here’s another example. This is something we supported a client through in Own Your Eating Habits. She was feeling stuck with her weight loss.
And she wanted to keep losing weight, but she felt like something was off. Now, to give you the math of what was occurring, she was overeating, which was preventing the weight from coming off in the way she wanted. And in Own Your Eating Habits, you will learn to solve that completely. And in her case, here’s the coaching that helped her move through this block.
So she knew that to lose the weight, She needed to stop overeating, right? Simple enough, but in the coaching, she initially was having the thought, well, yeah, but I don’t want to restrict myself with food. So that was the justification she had for why she didn’t want to eat less. She just didn’t want to restrict herself.
Right? So I [00:07:00] taught her this. difference I’m sharing with you here, that restricting is just not eating enough to support the body’s basic functions. And that’s not what was at risk for her. That was not what was at stake. So then we were able to uncover that restriction wasn’t actually the issue at hand.
It was just the fact that she was avoiding feeling emotionally deprived in her body. At that time, so she was resisting that feeling because she was having a brain that was believing all need to give up foods. I love to hit my weight loss goal. So that’s why there were these micro self sabotaging moments happening because she didn’t want to give up food.
She loved. Right? So this belief system she had was creating an emotional experience of deprivation for her, which when she was resisting processing this feeling, created higher cravings for those foods as well. So the key she needed to learn was to first acknowledge that she was not in danger of restricting [00:08:00] herself with the own your eating habits process.
That process is very much focused on the opposite and you will master naturally healthy eating in collaboration with your body’s needs as well as learning how to enjoy foods you love. More. So that was set. Then she could acknowledge that she was resisting the discomfort of emotional deprivation from the belief that she needed to give up food she loved to lose weight. She needed to coach herself on this emotion. Each day unlearn that belief and digest that feeling, so her cravings lowered with those foods.
And then once that emotional deprivation settled over time for her, the cravings subsided and it got easier over time. But what she needed to acknowledge was that to lose the weight, she didn’t have to restrict herself, withhold food that her body needed. She just needed to stop overeating, which the path forward for her was acknowledging that [00:09:00] emotional deprivation could only occur from her thoughts, and once she accepted that, she could make the decision to not overeat logically, rather than reacting to the emotional deprivation by eating more.
Okay, so I hope this makes sense. This is a broad overview, but this is how it works, you guys. And , I want you to see how this may apply to you. So let’s talk about how to tactically start doing this work. Again, the first thing you will need to do is to distinguish the difference between the two.
You will need to assert with yourself that difference between actual restriction and deprivation. Then what you’ll need to do is you need to teach yourself that feeling the emotion of deprivation is safe. It is safe to feel emotionally deprived on your weight loss journey because there will be this internal childlike part of us that feels entitled to overeating for comfort and having that [00:10:00] manner of comforting ourselves in our life.
And I’m no different, you guys. My brain has a whiny child in there too that’s like, well, I deserve to eat this way or I deserve to have these things when life feels hard. And when we tell that child brain, no, sometimes deprivation can be the emotional experience of that. Or when we’re having judgments about foods that we really want to eat.
So what I want you to do is to distinguish that Restriction is actually restricting foods from your body, and deprivation is a feeling caused by your thoughts, and any emotion is safe to feel. It cannot harm you. When you start normalizing deprivation along your weight loss journey, as it being just a feeling, you then can create trust that you will not restrict yourself to lose weight because you make those concepts so separate.
So the process of this means you first build the trust. You build the trust with yourself that you will not restrict yourself to weight loss. [00:11:00] What I offer is to specify what you think restriction would look like to you personally with food. At what point will you know that you’re neglecting your body from what it needs?
Really, I like to offer that your body will tell you
When it’s not getting what it needs from food, so you’ll start to feel fatigued perhaps Maybe you’ll have body signals telling you that it’s time to eat and when you ignore them we can know that that’s deprivation This is something as well and own your eating habits. We really help you tease out So if that’s something you want to master definitely come join us But what I want you to do now is just as best as you can specify what restriction would look like to you personally and then decide not to go there.
See if you can do that where you can decide you will provide your body with what it needs to survive and declare that truth. Build that trust with yourself that that is the standards you’re setting for your permanent weight loss. And then along your weight loss journey, you’re going to have You’re going to want to parent this child because there’s an internal [00:12:00] child brain we have that will want to use avoiding restriction as a Justification for overeating so the language is gonna sound really noble in the moment like well I just don’t want to restrict myself, but this is actually an emotional urge to over consume This is how our brain compels us to overeat it will use justifications to get us to engage in that behavior And we all have a primitive child, brain to parent.
I have one too. And this doesn’t mean you have to harshly discipline it. It just means you want to be aware of the way it operates and you want to make decisions as the parent accordingly and not as that child. So how you parent this child, brain is you become aware of when that justification shows up. That is the urge to overeat. So with my client, for example, right, she would have the justification. Well, I just don’t want to restrict myself when she had an urge to overeat.
And once she became aware of that, now she can look for it and [00:13:00] know that when she has that language in her mind, that is just an urge for her to over consume food. It has nothing to do with restriction. Then you want to assert with yourself that restriction, denying food and what’s healthy for your body is not deprivation, which is just the feeling of mentally denying yourself something you want.
Describe that feeling of deprivation in your body really clearly. Create a space where you acknowledge that it is just an emotion and digest and relieve that feeling over time with that awareness. Emotional deprivation does not need to sabotage your healthy eating or weight loss progress. That is what I most want you to know.
You can experience it, normalize it, and take the actions you need for weight loss. And when you do, you will decrease this emotional deprivation over time. And build the trust that you restricting yourself is never at stake, my friends. Again, I hope this episode was helpful. I hope that you took the parts that served [00:14:00] you and left the parts that don’t, or maybe it all was helpful, but regardless, I hope you took something away from this today that can help you now.
So I hope you have a fantastic rest of your week. Thanks for being here with me today, and I’ll talk to you next week.
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Kat Rentas, Healthy Eating Coach
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.
