Hello, welcome back to the podcast this week. I’m so happy we’re spending this time together today. And before we get into today’s episode where we’re going to talk about making time for healthy eating, I want to announce that we recently wrapped up enrollment for the own Your Eating Habits program. So for those of you who are new, this is my group coaching program exclusively for high achieving women who are ready to end their struggles with food, where they master the skills of naturally healthy eating so they can achieve long-term sustainable weight loss.
It is the most effective container to create these results. So if you missed our recent enrollment, not to worry, we will have an upcoming enrollment. So make sure to prepare for that transformation. Now, if you want to join, you can join our wait list to get all of the details on when we’re opening next and what you need to prepare in advance for that upcoming enrollment.
So you can find all those details at cat renta.com/waitlist. That’s cat renta.com/waitlist. Alright, so let’s get into today’s episode. I want to clarify what it really means to make time for healthy eating. There are a lot of misconceptions in terms of the time required to eat healthy and lose weight sustainably in your life.
And a really common thought that a lot of us can have in the beginning is, I don’t have time for healthy eating. I don’t have time to prioritize these changes now. And what I want to establish today forevermore in your life, I want you to solidify this new belief that this never has to be true. Healthy eating does not need to take more of your time. And that’s what I really want you to get yourself to today as we walk through this together.
But here’s why you will have this thought that you don’t have time for healthy eating. It completely makes sense that this is there because you likely have been taught that eating healthy requires a lot of your output in terms of energy and actions. So for example, when we have a history of dieting or rigid weight loss protocols, really invasive methods, we will learn how to eat healthy and lose weight by doing a lot of crap , right?
Like doing a lot of things. We will learn how to micromanage our food metrics and track all of the things we will learn how to food.
Prep and meticulously organize our foods in the fridge. We will essentially depend on energetic output in our external environment to eat healthy. And that is a method that does require more time. And so what this has us learn is time scarcity when it comes to solidifying healthy eating in your life. And when it comes to naturally healthy eating, which is what I teach, that is absolutely not the case and it is not the case by design.
I want you to really envision what you believe a naturally healthy eater looks like, how they move through the world, how they think about food. And I really want you to imagine a version of a naturally healthy eater who doesn’t put excess time and energy into taking action on healthy eating. These are the individuals that can eat healthy at any time, at any moment. Naturally healthy eaters are so adaptable and they make it work.
And so that is the skill I teach my clients. And what I want you to learn here today is that in order to eat healthy and lose weight in the way you want to, it is not going to require extra time. And I’m going to walk through step by step exactly how you can begin incorporating that into your life now. So the very first thing that you’re going to have to do is cut out unnecessary healthy eating tasks. So this is the big one. These are the things that are needlessly eating away at your time and they aren’t actually necessary for you to eat healthy and lose weight.
And like I mentioned, right, when we have a history of dieting, we will depend on time related tasks. To eat healthy will depend on the planning, the prep, the tracking. And what I want you to see is that this comes from the belief that you don’t actually have control of your eating decisions.
You see yourself in that light. So what we do from that mindset is we gravitate towards methods that require us to micromanage our external environment to increase the likelihood that we’ll eat healthy, right? This is why we prep all the foods we do, all the planning we track because we almost want to force ourselves to comply. We want to force ourselves to follow through with healthy eating because we don’t trust ourselves to do it at any moment and we don’t believe we’re in control.
So I want you to just see that, that this comes from the belief that you don’t have complete control over your eating decisions at any moment. This is what will keep you gravitating towards time consuming tasks to eat healthy. So that means that you’re going to have to start building the belief of yourself, that you always have the ability to make simple, healthy eating decisions in your life.
Because until you allow yourself to believe this about you, you will keep putting in time and prep into healthy eating. That’s not necessary. ’cause at the end of the day, healthy eating decisions are made in a single moment. It happens the moment that you choose how you will eat during a meal when food is presented to you, that is what determines your weight loss result. It is not in the planning prep or tracking. None of those things create weight loss.
So this is what I want you to consider work on switching your belief from I’m not in control with my eating decisions and I have to micromanage my external environment. Two, I have the ability to make simple, healthy eating decisions at any moment. Time prep and tracking is not required for me to do so. Alright? So from there, the second thing I want you to consider is you’re going to need to determine the non-negotiable essentials for weight loss.
So this is the other end of the spectrum where now that we’ve cut out all of the time consuming unnecessary tasks, you need to establish what actually is 100% required for you to lose weight. And everything outside of these non-negotiables is optional. Alright? So all of the time dependent tasks like planning, tracking, prepping, those are all optional things that you can do if you want to, but they are non non-negotiables.
The non-negotiables for healthy eating and weight loss are not time dependent by design. So the essentials are skills that you adopt in your lifestyle as a healthy eater. And that’s what my practice focuses on. Teaching women in own your eating habits, they learn to master these skills so they can eat healthy and lose weight without spending excessive time or energy. So here are the non-negotiables. The first skill is to make decisions to start eating based on logic or natural hunger, not emotions or stress.
So in other words, it’s learning how to eat based on your hunger, not your emotion. So you stop emotionally eating. The second skill is to stop eating when you’re full so you don’t overeat. The third skill is to enjoy foods at the most optimal level without overindulging in them, without overeating them. And then the fourth skill is to make food choices that support the goals you have with your body, whether it’s more nutritious foods or less nutritious foods, right?
If I’m eliminating chocolate from my diet or I’m attempting to do that, that actually doesn’t serve the goals I have with my body because at some point I’m going to feel like I’m restricting myself from the things I want. So just to highlight that, making food choices that support your goals means you are really honest about your needs and your preferences with food. And you go about eating in a way that doesn’t put your weight goal at risk and you learn how to do that and own your eating habits.
So when you join, if you’re planning on doing so, that’s something you will master. But what I want you to establish here, really thinking about this, is that there are skills you will need to develop to eat healthy naturally and to lose weight permanently. None of those things are time dependent, right? So none of these things require that prep, require that planning, they simply require your intention and they require your decision making to choose these things.
When you are out in your life making eating decisions, I really wanna offer that. If you’re putting a lot of your energy into the planning, the prepping, the tracking, it’s because you’ve already decided that you’re not going to take a hundred percent responsibility over your eating decisions at any time without those things . And I think that’s very direct and it might be a hard pill to swallow, but I think this direct statement could really shine a light on where some of your mindsets are with this area.
What if you putting more energy towards the planning prep and tracking is you already giving up responsibility for deciding to eat healthy at any moment in your life? This is what I want you to consider, and this will help you start to tease out what’s actually non-negotiable for weight loss and what’s just taking time away from your life. So the third thing I want you to consider is decide how you’re going to hold yourself accountable with minimal time required.
So this actually kind of piggybacks on what I just said. When you’re really focused on the organizing, the prepping, the planning, it’s almost like you’ve already decided that you’re not going to hold yourself accountable. You’re going to delegate that accountability to a plan or to prepping. So you make it more likely that you’ll follow through because you’re not going to hold yourself accountable. Really.
I want you to think about it differently. I want you to think how you could hold yourself accountable with minimal time required at all. So in other words, how will you ensure that you’re checking in with how you’re eating throughout the day so you’re eating naturally healthy in a way that doesn’t take up your time? So to not emotionally eat, to not overeat, to enjoy food without overindulging and to make healthy food choices in a single moment.
Maybe this means you deliberately schedule your mealtimes rather than reactively making food decisions, right? Maybe this means you decide what you will eat each day the night before, so your eating decisions aren’t spontaneous. Now you can make healthy eating decisions in a moment. You do not have to plan ahead. This is what my clients learn, but you also get to help yourself as you build these skills and this level of intention with your eating habits.
So a valuable question could be how will you support yourself to build these skills with the minimal amount of time required from you? Because you’ll want to overly prep plan and track because you’ll want to delegate responsibility to those things so you feel more certain that you’ll follow through. Instead, I want you to think what is the approach you can take to hold yourself accountable that doesn’t require vast amounts of time?
And this comes from the belief I have the ability to make simple, healthy eating decisions at any moment. It comes back to that belief that you are holding yourself responsible and capable for making decisions with food. So much of our mindset has delegated that responsibility of decision making with food to those plans and the prep and the tracking. And what I’m asking you to do here is to start redirecting this into empowerment and responsibility.
Because alternatively, if you attempt to hold yourself accountable from the belief I’m not in control of my eating decisions, you’ll always attempt to micromanage healthy eating into place outside of you. And this will always be time consuming. This is why we put in a lot of time to eat healthy because we’re not allowing it to be simple, because we don’t truly hold ourselves accountable for the way we eat at any moment. So I offer you to reflect on that and see how that could be true for you.
It can be so valuable to have awareness of this. Next, you wanna be able to evaluate your progress efficiently. So as you’re building the essential skills of healthy eating that don’t require excessive amounts of time, set aside check-ins every week for you to evaluate your progress, you have a brain that will want to ruminate, overthink, and constantly solve for this problem.
It will want to designate a lot of time to solving this problem in your brain. So compartmentalize that into a set time each week where you evaluate progress and tweak your approach if necessary. You will save so much time when you deliberately set aside scheduled time to evaluate because you’re eliminating the need to constantly address your healthy eating progress throughout your days. And if you’re planning on joining us inside own your eating habits, there is an entire module on evaluating your progress.
So this is something that you will master inside that process. So when you join, that will be something that you become highly, highly skilled at. So these are all effective strategies I want you to think about to make more time for healthy eating or really get more of your time back. If you practice these, you will begin to access more naturally healthy eating without it taking more time.
However, in order to begin making these changes the correct way, you must begin entertaining the belief that healthy eating and weight loss doesn’t need to require more time or effort. Weight loss occurs when you make different eating decisions, when you stop emotionally eating, when you stop overeating, et cetera. Those decisions are made in a single moment. So technically you researching how you’re going to make those decisions, planning for those decisions, prepping foods for those decisions isn’t what explicitly creates weight loss.
And I really want you to let that sink in. The only thing that creates weight loss explicitly are the eating decisions you make in a moment. Everything else is optional. It doesn’t create your results. And there’s going to be a lot of things that you’ve tried or are maybe doing now that actually aren’t contributing to your weight loss result. They’re just taking up your time.
And like I mentioned before, they also might be hindering you because they might be keeping you stuck in this belief that you can’t possibly be responsible for how you eat without those things. So I really want you to think about that. I wanna offer that you be firm with yourself as you change this perspective and this belief system around food. The more transparent you can be with where you’re starting from, the more easily you’ll be able to transition into a naturally healthy eater as you continue on this journey.
Alright, my friends, I hope that this was helpful to you. Thank you for joining me here today, and I will talk to you next week.