Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast this week. I’m so happy you are here with me today. In today’s episode, I want to talk about the concept of not enoughness and we can define enoughness here as the state of being enough of feeling adequate or feeling sufficient. And I want to talk about why this is of utmost importance when it comes to changing your eating habits or getting the results you want with your body.
And this is something I talk about at length and coach my clients on, at length in my program. So I want to go into that today and to start, I really want to open up about the fact that I’ve gone through my own lengthy journey with enoughness and what I find so much of us as women have in common is that so many of us are operating from the belief that we are not enough as we are now, or we don’t have enough right now, or we do not do enough right now, which creates this constant feeling of inadequacy, or maybe it’s doubt it’s shame.
It’s just this void that we experience because we think we are not enough as we are, which implies that we need to accomplish more. We need to do more in order to measure up to what will feel like enough to us personally, and what this looks like is it looks like a lot of effort and it looks like a lot of hustle in order to change the results in our lives.
So as a health coach with women in my practice, this looks like them hustling to change the way they eat or lose weight or get a different result with their body. And what happens with all of this hustle is they’re operating from a lot of willpower and grit, and they’re really punishing themselves to a result. They’re taking a lot of action at the expense of their human needs and their nervous system.
So eventually they burn themselves out, which ends up creating self sabotaging action because they can’t keep up with same actions they were taking.
And with burnout comes feelings of apathy, lack more inadequacy. And what we create is even more, not enoughness thereby looking for other ways that we can do more and finally feel like we’re enough. So this is a cycle that I have been in with food and my body and with plenty of other things in life. And this is something that I really want to talk about more today, because the big thing about the belief that we are not enough, or I do not do enough, or I do not have enough as I am right now, is that it is a belief.
And it’s important to know that this is a belief system that we have, because that means it will never feel like enough that bar or that ceiling will always be going up no matter how much you accomplish. And when we are conditioned to believe that we are not enough as women and we constantly have to give more of ourselves, we are setting ourselves up to chase enoughness constantly, which means we’re always trying.
We’re always putting an effort and we’re always hustling. And how that relates to your eating habits and food and body is it is very important to acknowledge that as women, we are conditioned to believe that our primary value in this world is in our physical appearance and our body. So you combine these two things, the belief that we’re not enough as we are now, and we need to do more.
And the belief that our value exists in our body and our physical appearance, this means we will constantly feel a need to measure up and do more and accomplish more when it comes to our body. And this is just for you to take a moment and consider if this is true for you now. And if it doesn’t feel true, I want you to think back to a moment, maybe in your childhood or when you were a teenager, when this did feel true for you, that the most important thing to add value to your life was in changing the external result with your body.
At a certain point in our lives, it was everything to us. It truly felt that if we could change the external appearance of our body, specifically, when it comes to our weight, that we would finally feel like enough and achieve fulfillment and growing up for many of us, or when we were younger, the method of achieving weight loss or changing our external appearance was diet programs and weight loss protocols and restrictive meal plans.
So this means we would develop this obsession with healthy eating micromanaging food and weight loss. We would develop this focus on hustling with food in order to force the weight loss results we wanted. And this is all stemming from these beliefs that our body is not enough as it is right now. And we think enoughness that that feeling will be created after we eat perfectly and lose the weight, or get the result with our body that we want.
And a really important thing to note about this topic is that I’m not telling you, and I will never tell you as your coach, whether you are my actual client or whether you’re a podcast listener, you will never hear me say that you shouldn’t want to lose weight, or you shouldn’t want to change your body. Whatever the case is, it’s safe for you to have those wants logically and to acknowledge that you want to be healthier, or you want to change your appearance, or you want to lose weight.
It is safe for you to have those wants. But the most important thing to understand is to achieve results with your body long term in a sustainable way, you have to create a sustainable emotional experience of being a human. And when you are attempting to lose weight, for example, or get different results with your body, from the emotional state of not enoughness and inadequacy, where you’re hustling, you’re going to burn yourself out.
And that is not a sustainable experience of getting those results you want. And I say this because I know there are a lot of sources that claim that you can’t want to change your body or lose weight and accept your body and love your body as it is right now. And that’s actually not the case. You can create enoughness and acceptance for the exact body you have today. The body you have listening to this podcast, right now, you can start practicing the belief that you are enough exactly as you are, and that nothing needs to change for you to create that safety emotionally in your body.
And you can create that safety emotionally and logically decide. I want to change the results with my body or lose weight, because I like my reasons for doing so. And that’s really what this is about. When you feel like you are not enough right now, and you chase healthy eating, or you chase weight loss in order to feel like enough and fill that void.
That’s not liking your reasons for healthy eating or weight loss. This is when, what we call a toxic relationship to food or weight loss can occur. It’s when you don’t like your reasons for taking those actions. So it feels very unfulfilling. It feels restrictive, and it feels forced because you are fighting yourself. You’re taking action in a way that doesn’t feel like something you want feels like something you should do or something that you have to do.
When you create sufficiency emotionally in the body you have in your current circumstances where you believe I’m doing enough right now, I have enough right now. I am enough right now. Then things like healthy eating and weight loss. Just get to be your choice, your decision, because you want to do those things. I say to my clients all of the time, it is a huge part of the work we do together.
We need to remove all of the shoulds from food and body in order to access your wants, because what you want to do long term with food, with weight, with body that is there for you. But right now it’s likely that it’s clouded by a lot of shoulds because you’re feeling like you’re not enough right now. And there’s a whole lot of lack of self trust happening. And when you create an experience of enoughness with your eating habits, now your body now, and your current circumstances, then you are not trying to change the way you eat or your body to fill a void.
You’re doing it because you want to. All right. So I know this is more of a rant episode , but I’m hoping this does make sense to you. It is very important to understand that when you have not enoughness thoughts about your body, you’re going to think enoughness will be created by changing your body and eating perfectly to do so.
So you’ll go on diets, try and follow restrictive meal plans that aren’t sustainable for you because it’s not in line with your integrity and what you want to be doing. So you’ll have to hustle in order to maintain those inauthentic methods of eating. And you’ll burn yourself out, which a burnout leads to apathy and resentment, which leads to self sabotage. And when you self sabotage, you quote unquote, fall off track with food.
You maybe gain some weight. And then you go back to the start of this pattern where you think I’m not enough now. And I need to hustle go on another diet in order to fill this void. And really what’s always happening with healthy eating, changing your body, but really just for us as women in general, we are always chasing that feeling of adequacy, confidence, sufficiency, wholeness.
I want you to consider how you would name this particular feeling in your body.
For me, this just describes the emotion of total fulfillment and safety in my body. This feeling that we’re constantly chasing does not come from an external result that we create. It does not come from eating perfectly, getting the promotion or people pleasing those around us and getting that validation. That is not what creates adequacy, confidence, sufficiency, and wholeness.
Emotionally, that only comes from our thoughts, which means on your way to chasing that enoughness, you’re going to miss what is more than enough right now, you’re going to miss what you’ve already created right now in your life, because it’s never going to be enough. And specifically with changing your eating habits, you can expect this to come up in your journey. And I see this come up for women in my program very often.
And what will normally happen, which is normal is they will be making beautiful progress.
So they’re changing their brain. When it comes to food, they are no longer obsessing over food. They stop overeating. They start honoring their body cues. And what’s really interesting is they’re creating all of these results that they wanted to create in the beginning of the program. And it’s incredible, and it’s amazing, but they don’t feel like they have permission to acknowledge what they’ve created because they don’t yet feel like they’ve measured up to what enoughness is in their mind.
That ceiling always keeps going up. So if they’ve stopped obsessing over food, they’ll think, well, I haven’t stopped eating when I’m full. And then they stop eating when they’re full. And they’ll think, you know, I just am not finding pleasure in my food. And then they start finding pleasure in their food. And it’s amazing. And they’ll think, you know, I’m just not at that weight loss goal that I want.
And then they’ll lose the weight and they’ll think, you know, this isn’t enough. And then they’ll set another goal. And it’s this pattern that if they’re not aware of it, that will keep happening for them in their lives. They’re not giving themselves permission to think that what they’ve created is enough that what they’ve done deserves to be celebrated. And it’s this emotional state of inadequacy and insufficiency that can lead someone to self sabotage, where they give all of their progress up.
And they go back to old patterns because this is how you end up feeling really crappy on the way to the result you want. And it will never work long term because you will burn yourself out and then want to give up completely. So really with my clients, what ends up happening is they learn how to manage both sides of their brain and in their primitive side of their brain or their emotional brain, it’s never quite feeling enough.
So they’re changing their eating habits. They’re accomplishing all of these things that they never have before. And to their surprise, they find emotionally that it doesn’t feel ultra satisfying yet because there’s this conditioned part of their mind that still believes this isn’t enough. And what these clients learn in this process is that this is just a belief. It was never real. It was never tangible. When you believe it’s not enough.
Now you will not think it’s enough then. And I have to tell you, I have seen clients create some pretty incredible results during my program and with the mindset of it’s not enough, they missed these incredible results that they wanted from the beginning completely. And this is not a problem. It’s just for you to understand that feeling enough was never about food. It was never about your body.
It was never about weight enoughness is created from your mind and the belief that I have enough exactly as I am now.
And it’s necessary that you create this emotional safety of enoughness in your body to create a sustainable experience of changing the way you eat. It is a non-negotiable. So a really big part of my practice is teaching women how to transition from the hustle with food and body to slowing down and moving from that stress response to a relaxation response.
So the results they create are sustainable. And sometimes this brings up a lot of resistance and fear in the women I coach, because they will have this belief that more is always required from them to get a result with food or body. And they’ve really trained themselves to believe that perfection is what is necessary to change the way they eat, or to get a result with their body. And this is just a thought error.
It’s not true. It’s just coming from the belief that it isn’t enough and it will never be enough and more will always be required.
And the purpose of my program is teaching women how to remove the hustle from healthy eating. And it’s really important to know that hustle doesn’t have to do with the actions you take, whether you’re doing more or you’re doing less hustle is emotional and hustle is when you’re burning yourself out with your emotional state as you’re taking action. So this is just to say, it’s not even about the diet protocols or the meal plans.
You are attempting to follow. We can acknowledge that you may not want to be eating that way, but you’re not failing because of those things. It’s because you are attempting to take action with food from the thought I need to do more. And I’m not enough now, which creates feelings of inadequacy. And that’s the emotional fuel that’s driving your actions, which eventually stops working for you because it burns you out that is heavy, emotional weight to be carrying.
And this is being in a stress response. So when we talk about removing the hustle from healthy eating, it’s from creating enoughness emotionally, we remove the hustle. When we step into enoughness emotionally in our body, this is what creates a relaxation response. And all of that is to say that not enoughness is a mindset.
It only exists in your head. The only place where enoughness can be reached is with your thoughts. It’s from having the thought I am enough. I do enough. And I have enough right now to get this result. And if that’s inaccessible for you right now, and it feels like you’re arguing with yourself a little bit, you don’t have to go there. I just want you to consider the possibility of creating enoughness for food and body.
Now you can even begin asking yourself what if I was enough right now?
What if I’m doing enough right now? Because this emotional experience is the only way you can change your eating habits long term and lose weight sustainably. How you get there is how you will keep those results. In order to become a naturally healthy eater, we need to train your brain and your nervous system that you are becoming someone who doesn’t put more effort and hustle into making, eating decisions, or into making decisions that serve your body.
That all starts from creating enoughness and safety in your body. Now, all right, I hope this was helpful. If you learned something from this episode or you got value from it, I would love to know you can find me at cat, rent us on Instagram and tag me in your stories or reach out to me and tell me what you learned from today’s episode. All right. I love you. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day and I’ll talk to you next week.