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.
FREE MASTERCLASS
without tracking and planning
Nov 28
Eating Healthy When You Have No Time To Cook
Does your packed schedule make it seem impossible to cook healthy meals at home?
In this episode, we’re going to take a deep dive into how you can maintain healthy eating habits and achieve lasting weight loss, even when cooking just isn’t in the cards for you.
We’ll explore together:
→ Realistic ways to embrace healthy eating that don’t rely on home-cooked meals or strict meal plans.
→ Practical strategies for making smart eating choices in real-time, no matter where your food comes from.
→ The importance of focusing on your actual eating behaviors, rather than your performance level with healthy eating.
→ Stories of clients who created success and reached their health goals without needing to cook their meals at home.
Feeling pressured by the idea that your goals require homemade meals each day? Let’s lower the stakes on what’s required to actually eat healthy.
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. I am so happy to be here on the mic recording this episode because it’s been a hot minute since I recorded our last episode here. And in the coming episodes, I’m going to talk about some things that have been happening behind the scenes, personal transformations I’ve been going through and personal development I have been involved in.
So I’m going to give you guys all the updates, but for today, I want to offer you an episode that has actually been highly requested over the years. And I’m not sure that I’ve devoted an entire episode to this topic. And if you saw the title, it’s all about eating healthy when you have zero. time to cook.
I know this can be a very common struggle, especially when we’re in that mindset that a lot of us are taught, where we have to cook all of our meals to be a healthy eater, that that’s a measure or a standard we have [00:01:00] to live up to. So I want to support all of you today and offer you a perspective that lowers the stakes in this area.
And Allows you to question whether this is even true. Do we really have to cook our meals in order to eat healthy? So I hope this is helpful and I’m going to offer a lot of hot takes in this episode as usual. So take what serves you, leave what doesn’t, but use everything to inform you of the best next step for you.
So here’s the main problem I see when it comes to all of this is, uh, Most of us, if we identify as type A or high achieving women, we will believe that our success with healthy eating or weight loss is determined by our performance with food. Okay, so we base our success with healthy eating By our performance.
And when we think about healthy eating performance, this is actually different than the [00:02:00] result of healthy eating. So the result of healthy eating, it’s providing your body with the foods it needs, whether the actual foods are the behaviors, it needs to be actually healthy. Now. Healthy eating performance is totally separate.
It’s the grade that you give yourself at the end of a day when you reflect on how well you did in terms of healthy eating. And this is all based on judgment and it’s really aiming for the A plus with healthy eating and doing it in this perceived right way. When, what if the C plus or the B minus was enough to have the results you want with your body and the health you want.
And that’s something I talk a lot about in my practice with my women, we are learning how to separate healthy eating results from healthy eating performance, which unknowingly a lot of us will be actually striving for. And even just [00:03:00] now together, I want you to. Think for yourself how those look different.
How does the result that you want from healthy eating look different than performing highly with healthy eating? And what would it potentially look like for you to perform average, on an average level with healthy eating, but still be creating the results you want? Really, what it would probably look like is that your progress just isn’t as pretty.
It’s not as aesthetic. It’s not something that you want to post about as often on social or tell people about. And maybe it doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything really monumental with your progress, but it is sustainable. So I have a lot of clients who, They’re creating results, losing weight and making different eating decisions, really changing their eating behaviors at the most foundational level.
And a comment I’ll hear ever so often, which is so relatable is they’ll say cat. I’m [00:04:00] creating all the results I want. It feels so much easier. It feels maintainable, but I’m not super satisfied. Like I’m not feeling like I accomplished much. And what I tell them is that they’re doing it right.
If this is how they’re feeling, because healthy eating sustainably wasn’t meant to feel like climbing a mountain every day. It wasn’t meant to give you this dopamine rush of feeling accomplished because you conquered something. It was meant to feel a little monotonous and. Dare I say boring, because you know how to create the results you want without high performance daily.
What tends to happen is cooking all of our meals to eat healthy is kind of like putting on a performance with healthy eating, whether it’s for everyone else, or even just yourself, when we set a goal to eat healthier, so many of us will think about how it needs to look on the outside, We picture this [00:05:00] elevated version of ourselves where we glide throughout life, eating the most beautiful, fresh foods, cooking all of our meals, and just being indefinitely happy and calm.
And I want you to know that Healthy eating and the result with your body that you want has to exist in any circumstances of your life. And I’m talking the weeks where it feels like straight up chaos. Things are not put together. You do not feel calm. In fact, you are a hot mess and maybe
all structure feels like it’s flying out the window. All of us will have these weeks and let’s not put our results with healthy eating to that standard. And here, what I want us to consider is let’s not set the standard that in order for you to eat healthy, you have to be cooking all of your meals from scratch.
All right. How much more accessible with healthy eating. And as a result, weight loss B, if you were willing to give up good performance [00:06:00] when it comes to the food you eat, how it’s prepped, when you eat it, what it looks like. I promise you guys for so many years. I valued good performance with healthy eating so much more than I did the result.
And I didn’t have the results with my body that I wanted. I had excess weight. I wasn’t feeling healthy. I was bloated. I had bad skin. Like it just really was a struggle. And there were so many results with my body that I wanted to change. But even more than that, I still felt this pool to have it all look like that a plus where I performed really highly.
And on the outside, it all looked very pretty and perfect.
And then what would happen is I would set a goal, for example, to create a food plan, decide what I was going to eat for the week and cook all my meals from scratch. And then what happened is I would use motivation, determination, and willpower to really power through those standards for a couple of weeks to a couple of months, I would say.
And then it would just stop being [00:07:00] sustainable because I no longer had that effort. To put towards all of those actions with healthy eating other things needed to come first like my career or even just my personal life. So then, I stopped eating healthy altogether, because the manner in which I was attempting to do it by those performative standards wasn’t sustainable.
When actually, what I could have been doing is to have a version of healthy eating that didn’t require me to cook all my meals, that didn’t require a plan, that really didn’t require any of it. And that’s what I needed to figure out for myself to actually sustainably and permanently create results.
Healthy eating is not determined by performative standards of success. All right. I feel like we all need to let this sink in. Healthy eating is not determined by performative standards of success. So whether you cooked a meal or not, whether you hit a calorie goal or not, it’s determined by how you eat the [00:08:00] food.
Which this actually occurs in a single moment that the food enters your mouth. So we can cook meals at home, plan food down
to the hour and track all of our calories and still overeat. Still not make the best decision with food in a single moment and then not create the results we want.
I want you to start basing healthy eating skills as what happens the moment that you. Make an eating decision that moment when food is about to enter your mouth. How do you eat it? Why are you eating it?
What is your experience of that food going to be like do you reactively eat? Emotionally, do you eat past your natural fullness all without properly savoring and digesting your food? Or are you working on eating really? intentionally stopping when you’re full and take the time to actually enjoy and digest what you’re eating.
If you focus on foundational behavioral changes with food that occur while you’re [00:09:00] eating, you’re going to create results, which will then lower the pressure you put on yourself to perform highly with healthy eating. So I’m going to give you a client example that
Relates to this topic. So my client, Simone, she came to me really having a strong interest in healthy eating. So she had all of the knowledge about nutrition, macros, calorie counting. Everything. And she couldn’t understand why her results with healthy eating and weight loss were so inconsistent throughout the years.
And she came to me wanting to do it more naturally. She wanted it to feel more stable.
So, she started mastering the really foundational skills that you learn in my program. , she learned how to lower her stress naturally, minimize her cravings, honor her body cues, enjoy food without overindulging, all the really foundational skills. But what was interesting is, in the back of her mind, she still believed that she needed to perform highly.
In order to have the weight loss results she [00:10:00] wanted, which was keeping the results from being accessible to her. So while she was trying to prioritize all the foundational skills. She also was thinking she still needed to track all of her food, cook at home, count her macros. And she told me, I just feel like I don’t have the effort for those things anymore, but I’m scared because that’s what I used to create results this whole time.
Those were the standards she had set for what it looked like to eat healthy. So she did it in the past,
but to surrender to the level of accessibility and ease she wanted, she needed to deliberately be willing to give up good performance in this area of her life. So she needed to give up all of those. micromanaging things
and lower the stakes. What we found in her coaching, which comes up a lot with my clients is why that was hard for her to give up. Isn’t because she was attached to doing those things necessarily. [00:11:00] It’s that doing those things made her feel like she earned her weight loss. Or the result she wanted and what was a struggle for her is letting it be simpler and no longer cooking all her meals at home or planning or tracking.
She started losing weight without feeling like she earned it or deserved it, which caused it to feel almost unstable to her, which is interesting because it’s actually more stable the more ease you have in creating it, right? But she created her weight loss. She breached her goal without planning tracking.
Or cooking at home, putting in that effort. So she ordered takeout. She went out to eat and
this was really necessary for her in the season of her career she was in. And what we decided for her is that she was only going to focus on changing her eating behaviors in the moment it was time to eat. So she reached her goal weight and taught herself that she didn’t need to perform highly to meet her needs with healthy eating.
Or weight loss. That [00:12:00] was not the goal. And then what happened, which relates to our subject here, is that’s when she found herself wanting to learn how to cook more meals at home when she did have the time, because now it was just enjoyable to her, not because she thought she had to do it to create the results, and she had to make all this space for it, but because she just found it a relaxing activity and a way to
Come up with meals that felt really satisfying to her and this actually happens a lot with my clients Where the healing work occurs is clients will come to me doing all the micromanagement Performance tasks with healthy eating I was no different and then they realize that that’s not sustainable And they want to learn the more foundational natural skills where you change your eating behaviors And this allows you to create the results in a way that doesn’t require more time or energy.
So then clients create their goal weight just with those foundational skills, none of the micromanagement [00:13:00] tactics. And then what’s really interesting is all of the things out there, like counting calories, tracking macros, cooking all your meals at home, whatever those things are. Now, once you’ve gotten to that place, you can just decide if you want to do those things, cause that’s your preference.
Or not, but now it’s not from a hustly place because you don’t think you need to do these time consuming tasks. To have the result at all. And that’s why you do not find me talking about right versus wrong with healthy eating a whole lot because it’s not that any of these more micromanagy approaches are wrong per se.
We just need to see why we’re doing them. So why are you believing that you need to cook all of your meals at home to eat healthy? For example, what’s the emotional fuel behind those decisions when you set that as a priority? Transcribed If it’s because you think you have to to create this result, you’re going to burn yourself out, no longer do it, and then feel like you’re stuck.
If [00:14:00] you’re going to do those things that are time consuming and also take energy, then it’s going to have to be because you want to, not because it’s entirely necessary to create your result. With your body. And this can be a really healing thing to see that there’s actually nothing wrong with those methods.
It’s just your relationship to it. And we’ve got to take you back to a more natural approach that you were always meant to have with healthy eating in your body. And then once you’re creating results with just that, and it’s feeling easier, then you just get to decide. If you still want to do those things, I’ve coached a lot of athletes to the same result.
And a lot of them go back to some of the more micromanaging things because they want to, or it helps them out in their goals. But now it’s just a totally different relationship to it. So I want you guys to consider that when you think about cooking your meals at home and what’s going to be necessary to do it without [00:15:00] hustle,
because you do not have to do this. In order to create the results you want with your body,
the result of giving up good performance for the longterm
result is actual consistency with healthy eating and lasting weight loss. You’re going to lower the stakes with what is necessary to show up where you’re not aiming for the a plus and to do it all in a pretty perfect way. You’re just going to show up every time you make an eating decision and decide, how am I going to eat this food?
How am I going to honor what my body is telling me? How am I going to enjoy the food without overindulging? You get to let it be simpler, which will then open up space, energy, and emotional bandwidth for you to cook your meals if you want to. And this is a much more enjoyable experience. I remember thinking about all the weird people out there.
Which is at the time how I saw them who love to cook and they had these really relaxing experiences with it. I’m [00:16:00] like, hold on. I do not enjoy this. I just feel like I have no choice. And in my mind, I didn’t because I wasn’t seeing that that wasn’t the only way. You will not cook meals long term unless it’s from your own agency, not because you have to, but because you want to, and it adds value to your life.
So I hope this was helpful. Again, there are a couple of hot takes here, but take what serves you and
Feel free to reach out to me and let me know what you thought of today’s episode You can find me at Kat Rentis on Instagram or go to katrentis. com To learn more about me and my work. Alright friends. Thanks for being here today, and I’ll talk to you soon
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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.
