Stop Overeating

You can "get it done" everywhere else. You can handle what life throws your way. You always seem to know what to do and how to do it.

So, why is healthy eating any different?
Why can't you make it work?


In this 45-minute video masterclass, you'll learn exactly why you're overeating now, along with what's stopping you from having control with food long-term.

HINT: It has nothing to do with discipline or willpower.

FREE MASTERCLASS

For High-Achieving Women

Mar 23

Letting It Be Simple

Letting It Be Simple Kat Rentas

You’re willing to do whatever it takes to lose weight. You may even be enthusiastic about the prospect of planning protocols, prepping meals, and tracking food metrics.

But herein lies the problem. Because you assume that “doing it all” is necessary for long-term weight loss.

This is a common mindset of high-achieving women. We will sell ourselves on the path of highest resistance so we can feel accomplished, capable, and deserving of success in the process.

This approach to weight loss is not sustainable. You are an eater for life. You have a body for life. There is no finish line.

To lose weight permanently, you will need to change your approach. Instead of focusing on feeling accomplished, you must focus on feeling at ease in the process.

In this episode, you will learn how to let healthy eating and weight loss be simple, so you’re not hustling to the results you want.

Because, the truth is, you will need to be willing to take the path of least resistance with weight loss so your results become permanent.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | RSS

Here are some extra resources to go along with this episode:

Episode Transcript

Download Transcript

Hello, welcome back to the podcast. This week I am so ready to talk about today’s topic, which is the concept of letting it be simple. And what exactly I’m referring to is letting healthy eating be simple, letting permanent weight loss be simple. And really this is one of the most undiscussed topics when it comes to healthy eating and weight loss. Specifically when we’re considering ourselves as women who really like to achieve, we like to perform, we like to see what we’re capable of.
We’re very type A. If any of these concepts resonates with you as a human being, then this episode is going to be very valuable for you. Because the truth is, in order to eat healthy long-term and lose weight permanently, we have to create a version of those things that feel simple, maintainable and sustainable. And where we want to be mindful is most of you and most of us are willing to do whatever it takes to lose weight.
We’re willing to plan all of the things, micromanage our decisions and perform highly in order to create that result. And so what’s interesting is we actually will get a little excited and enthusiastic about the prospect of doing it the hard way. So we’ll get excited about planning the protocols, prepping all of our meals, tracking the food metrics. This is like catnip for our Type A brains.
We love it. We love to feel like our results are guaranteed that we’re making progress, that everything is organized in a very specific way. But I really want to offer you that this is actually the biggest problem that you will come up against when it comes to creating long-term change with food and body. Because this is the thought error that so many high achieving women have is that you will assume that all of these things are even necessary for you to eat healthy and lose weight long-term.
So in other words, you will assume that doing it all and performing highly is even necessary for long-term weight loss. This is the biggest misconception we make as high achieving women when it comes to this work. And what happens is not just with this work, but in other areas of our lives, we will sell ourselves on the value of the path of highest resistance. So we will sell ourselves on doing it the hard way.
Where it requires more micromanagement, organization and planning. And really why we tend to do this is the reason why we become very high achieving women is because of how we want to feel. Everything we do as the humans is because of how we want to feel. And for those of us who identify as very high achievers, we tend to love the feelings of accomplishment. We love to feel capable and we love to feel deserving of our success in any process.
We love to feel like we earned our success and that we climbed the mountain, we reached the finish line, and we overcame all of our obstacles. There is no better feeling right to feel like we really committed and to feel like we showed up each and every day to cross that finish line. It’s an amazing feeling of satisfaction that we get. Now, here’s where , the bad news comes in.
If you identify as a high achiever, this approach to weight loss is not sustainable. We cannot approach weight loss and healthy eating in this way that we so love because there is no finish line and there is no mountain peak to reach. You are an eater for life. You have a body for life. You cannot solve weight, you cannot solve food because it’s not there to be fixed. It is there to be understood, worked with, and you need to learn how to meet your needs indefinitely with food and weight loss.
And so we wanna be careful because so much of the time as achievers, we genuinely have this mindset with everything in our lives that there is a possible finish line to achieve and to get to. And this is a thought error that will keep us stuck because it’s not accurate. We can’t think this way and approach healthy eating and weight loss with this finished line mentality.
I promise you you know this. This will serve you in other areas of your life to think this way. It’s what allows you to show up with this tenacity and this grit and this determination when you picture yourself overcoming obstacles, crossing a finish line and creating a result. It’s just not how healthy eating and weight loss works long-term in your life. So that means for those of us who identify as achievers to lose weight permanently, you will need to change your approach.
You’re going to have to learn a different method of creating the same results that you want. And the trade off happens in that instead of feeling accomplished in the process, we want to focus on feeling at ease in the process. And I want you to picture those two different emotions. There’s feeling accomplished, which you likely know how that feels for you in your body.
But then the emotion that might feel more unfamiliar to you is ease. And I want you to picture that emotional experience, how different that is from that feeling of accomplishment. For a lot of us high achievers feeling at ease feels a bit uncomfortable. It requires that we slow down. It requires that we take the less vigorous path. It requires the belief that we’ve done enough without needing to achieve highly. And so this is the trade off that needs to happen with healthy eating and weight loss.
For it to occur permanently and sustainably, we have to trade feeling accomplished for feeling at ease in the process. And for those of us who are high achievers, this is where the growth is. It’s interesting because for some people the growth will be to push themselves a little bit harder. It will be to show up more, to put in the determination that grit.
These are not the types of women I tend to coach cuz y’all are very much like me. And we actually, in order to create permanent results, have to lean back more in our approach. We need to not hold on so tightly because in doing so, we’re creating this continuous stress response in our body because of this energy that we’re constantly putting with these goals. And that’s gonna compel you to eat more and it will increase your cravings and you’ll retain weight from this constant stress.
We need to learn how to create results with food and body where you lean back in the process from ease. This is how you create the results you want. And the difference here, it doesn’t mean you are not committed to the process. Every client who joins my program is deeply committed to the process. They show up ready to go and ready to create results.
But where they experience a shift is that their commitment is no longer to prove what they’re capable of with food and body. It’s not to cross that finish line and perform. Their commitment goes towards finding the easiest, most accessible way for them to lose the weight now. So their focus becomes on committing to themselves that they will make it as easy and sustainable as possible to create the results they want.
And here is the theme of what these clients go through is they have to be willing to let healthy eating and weight loss be easier. The key word here is letting. Now you may think that logically this is what you want. Of course it is. You want healthy eating and weight loss to be easier. But I want you to consider emotionally what this will bring up for you if ease was what was available to you each day.
When it come to these changes, here’s what comes up for my clients, and this is where the coaching comes in so they can get coached on their brain throughout this work. What happens is they tend to feel like they didn’t earn their results as much. They tend to feel like their results are a bit less stable because they didn’t work so hard to get them. They tend to question whether any of it is real and whether it’s actually working because they don’t feel like they’re putting in the work. See this, this is going to be the difference for you a lot of the time.
Why we hustle as high achieving women is because we want to feel deserving and certain that we are the ones creating our results. It brings us a sense of stability and safety. And in order to create healthy eating and weight loss long term, we kind of have to remove this blinky a little bit.
It’s like our safety blanket where we depend on that feeling to feel certain about the results we’re creating. Where most of my high-achieving clients need coaching is in learning how to feel certain about their results from ease. So they don’t feel the need to micromanage what they’re eating to implement unnecessary planning and tracking. They can just allow it to be easier in their body.
So I want you to ask yourself, and you can take a moment and think, how would healthy eating and weight loss look different if you were willing to let it be easier? And I want you to take a moment for this question because your initial inclination might be duck hat. That’s exactly what I want. Of course I want it to be easy , but I want you to really consider the experience I’m offering to you here. If you did not plan, if you did not micromanage, if you did not type A your results into place and you operated from ease and certainty, how would healthy eating and weight loss look different for you?
Because here’s what’s important for us to understand as high achievers is the reason why we hustle and micromanage and rush weight loss is because of our perfectionism, which is actually just fear in disguise. For those of us who identify as perfectionists, or maybe you don’t, but you tend to micromanage things. It’s based on fear and it’s because we want to feel more certain about the results we’re creating and we want to feel accomplished when we create them because that indicates to us that those results are safe to have and to maintain and to keep.
We depend on that dopamine hit of accomplishment to feel certain about our results. So I want to offer that if you find you hustle, you want to micromanage, you want to rush weight loss in a certain way that’s laced with perfectionism. This is because of your fear. And in order to create permanent weight loss and eat healthy long term, you will need to surrender this.
You will need to give this up. You’re going to have to surrender into letting weight loss be easier for you because it requires you to trade that feeling of accomplishment for ease, and for someone who identifies as a high achiever ease, although vibrationally in your body, it feels really tolerable, it’s going to feel uncomfortable at first because for my high achievers, ease to them almost feels like they’re giving up the results because they don’t know or haven’t learned yet how to create healthy eating and weight loss without the grit, without the determination, without the hustle.
So to them, giving up those emotions to create the result feels like giving up the result. I tell this to my clients, the results they want are non-negotiable. Those are done, but we want to provide them different fuel to create it. What’s happening? If you think about a car , right?
And you’re driving to your destination, which is the permanent weight loss that you want. What happens when we fuel that car with determination, grit, all of these more harsh emotions that require us to hustle, that car’s gonna break down before it reaches the destination. What happens when we fuel the car with ease, with certainty is that car is able to sustain the journey and to create the permanent weight loss that we want.
It is more useful fuel for that car. So we are not negotiating the destination that you want to get to with weight loss. This is a tactical decision to trade that feeling of accomplishment or ease. It is a tactical decision to stop making weight loss require more from you and to take the path of least resistance instead because here’s the thing, you need to be willing to take that path of least resistance tactically because this is what makes your results permanent.
Sometimes my clients will tell me, but I can do it the other way. I’m capable of doing it the hard way. I’m capable of micromanaging all of these things into place and the tough coaching comes in because the first thing I tell them is if they could, they would have already. So this is just a lie we tell ourselves oftentimes as high-achieving women, we really don’t account for our humanness. We really don’t account for the facts that we have a limited amount of emotional energy.
We really put ourselves on this pedestal that we can sustain a certain amount of willpower and hustle and determination for life. And this is a lie we tell ourselves as high achieving women. What’s interesting is we’re really good at performing, but we tell ourselves a lot of lies about what we are capable of. And it’s not that we’re not capable of amazing things, it’s that we’re also human.
And so know this. If you really feel that pool to perform for the weight loss that you want, first I would ask yourself why? Why is it so important to you that you perform and show what you’re capable of when it comes to this area of your life? And this is perfectly normal, this is the work. But I want you to have an actual conversation with yourself and answer this question, why is it important that you earn your weight loss by working harder?
And if you decide to let this be easier, what will you be giving up? For me personally, when I think into my past, there was a strong sense of satisfaction I received whenever I followed through on a diet or a protocol or I prepped my meals. There were so many elements of that work that felt incredibly satisfying and it increased the concept I had of myself, as in I felt better knowing that I could follow through with those things.
But it all came crashing down when it stopped being sustainable. And this is what’s happening for so many of you. You’ll feel attached to the micromanagement aspects of healthy eating because of the dopamine hits it provides us, but that’s not sustainable and it all comes crashing down the moment you quote unquote fall off track and it’s not sustainable. So you have this high concept of yourself where you feel organized, you feel successful with food and weight loss, and then you stop eating healthy or you gain the weight back.
So it’s this up and down, these peaks and trs of the concept you’re having of yourself. One month you’ll feel on top of the world and like you’re capable and the next month you’ll feel hopeless. And what we want is for your experience of healthy eating and weight loss, to not feel so emotional and to not be so tied to your self-worth.
We want healthy eating and weight loss to just feel like this small element of your life that’s just done. And then you will have more brain space and focus to achieve an other areas of your life. And this is a good time to mention, I have not given up that part of me that loves to achieve, loves to accomplish. I think it’s fairly obvious in the way I speak, in my demeanor that I have not given up that type a part of my brain. I just have developed a strong awareness of when that part of me serves the results I want.
And that part of me does not serve my results with healthy eating and weight loss. I do it differently. And this is exactly what all of my clients learn how to do. Your type a high achieving gifts are amazing. They’re what make you so capable in so many areas of your lives.
But you don’t even have to think about letting this be simpler as giving up those qualities. You’re just adding another skill to your tool belt. You’re adding the skill of working smarter, not harder to your tool belt when it comes to healthy eating and weight loss. So from this episode, I want you to ask yourself, why would you be resistant to giving up the path of highest resistance with healthy eating and weight loss?
And what would it take for you to be willing to let it be easier? I want you to sit with those questions today. And for those of you who identify as high achievers and you want this result to be done with a process that takes you step by step through it, this is what my program own Your Eating Habits was designed for. So own your eating habits, teaches you that path of least resistance. So you’re going to stop emotionally eating, meet your body’s needs and make clear food decisions.
So if you’re willing to let this be easier for you now that is the place for you. So you can go to cat retu.com/coaching to begin. Alright my friends, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your week and I’ll talk to you next week.

 

share this post:

Ready to take this work to the deepest level?

own your

EATING HABITS

The Program

The exclusive coaching program for high-achieving women who want to eat naturally healthy – without restriction, effort, or willpower – so they can better focus on the things in life that matter to them most.

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 placeYou can read my full story here.