Welcome to today’s episode of the podcast. I’m so excited. I don’t know if you guys can hear my puppy in the other room. He’s chewing on his squeaky toy. He’s about 12 weeks old and I swear sometimes he just needs to cry bark or chew his squeaky toy at the most inconvenient times, like a podcast episode or a coaching call.
And I swear, it’s like he knows when I’m about to record.
He silent every other hour of the day. So I know my moms with kids relate to this on a whole different level. I’m always telling my clients who are the moms I’m getting baby fever and they’re like, just stick with the puppy for now. It’s fine. So if you hear that in the background, occasionally I apologize. We’re just going to keep on rolling. So today I want to talk about being in partnership with your body.
And this is so, so important. It’s something I’m always talking about with my clients. And I’ve mentioned it a bit on the podcast, but I don’t think I’ve ever explained it in the exact way. I’m going to explain it today. And all of you listening to this podcast, you want to learn to eat healthy and get the results with your body that you want in a way that lasts you for life.
So you’re done picking up methods and putting them down your done with the often on approach with food and you’re here because you want to learn how to become someone where healthy eating feels natural and sustainable for you. So in today’s episode, I want to talk about how and why being in partnership with your body is a non negotiable for that. And don’t worry, some of you do get hang ups because you want step by step processes for each concept.
I talk about all of my lovely, a brains here, and I’m going to walk you through specific ways, how you can implement this now at the end of the episode. But first you have to understand what I even mean by this. When I talk about being in partnership with your body. So in the beginning, when we want to eat healthy and change our eating habits, we are not in partnership with our body.
For most of us, what we are in partnership with is weight loss, feeling better about ourselves, our own self-interests, and we’re not wrong for this at all. This is completely normal. This desire for weight loss is very driven by the diet industry. We become very desperate and attached to it, but notice how these reasons for wanting to eat healthier, have nothing to do with what your body wants or really means at all, which means you will have a very disconnected and just associated relationship to your body when it comes to food.
So you will attempt to eat healthy in more restrictive ways that produces quicker results, because you’re focused on having your body meet the needs of your own self-interests with weight and other things, rather than seeing what your body actually needs and then meeting the needs of it. So really you put yourself before your body, in a sense, you don’t put your body first.
You don’t really even put your health first and today, I want to talk about why being in partnership with your body really does matter when it comes to getting those results that you want. Not because it’s a cute romantic, fluffy practice, but because this is the only way you will get lifelong results with food and your body. This is a tactic.
And it’s funny because some of my new listeners, I love them so much. Sometimes they hear things like this and they get a little uppity. They get a little bit of that healthy eating entitlement, where they’re like, I just need you to tell me what to eat. I don’t have time for this. It’s very much that energy that I’ve also been guilty of in the past. And even for my longtime listeners, they’re going to know what I’m talking about here. It’s just urgency to do it right with healthy eating.
So you can get the results you want with your body faster. But what happens when you have that mindset is you skip steps. You skip the deeper work that is necessary for you to change who you are as an eater. So you inevitably eat healthy and get the results you want. Long-term so knowing this, I just want you all to hear me when I introduce concepts like I will today because they matter, you cannot achieve lifelong results with your body when you are ignoring its needs and you are not in partnership with it.
So I encourage you to really consider why what I’m teaching you today is actually a very tactical non-negotiable practice and not something that’s just cute and fluffy, because it has to do with your mindset. It’s very normalized in our society to de prioritize the mindset work because we don’t see it as tactical and as useful.
And this is a myth, especially as it relates to the work we do here. So just keep that in mind. I should probably do a whole episode on just that moving on. So as mentioned, when you’re not in partnership with your body, you will not be paying attention to its meats. It just will not be your focus. You won’t be eating healthy because of what your body needs. You won’t be losing weight because of what your body needs.
You actually won’t have contact or communication with your body at all. And as I like to say, you’re trying to eat healthy and lose weight from your head versus your body. So you’re trying to logic and think your way to the results you want. I piecing together tactics rather than checking in internally with your body’s needs physically and getting the answers they’re checking in with your body’s needs is eating healthy the way nature intended.
So without having to do so through more time, effort, planning or energy, when you attempt to solve for healthy eating, I ignoring the body. It will require so much more from you than if you learn to do so by listening to what your body needs, by listening to what it’s telling you each day. So to give you a really simple example, I’ve seen women spend years trying to piece together what healthy eating should look like to them and on what a long-term weight loss solution should look like to them from their mind.
So they try to problem solve and logic the results they want in two place, meaning they attempt a bunch of meal plans, weight loss, regimens, diet restrictions, different meal timings throughout the day, right? All of the strategies they are trying to strategy their way to the results they want with food and their body.
They’re trying to piece together the right actions to get the results they want. And sometimes they manage to stumble upon a solution that works all right for some time, but it takes so much from them. It takes so much time, so much energy years and years of picking up logical strategy-based solutions and putting them down because none of them were ever based individually on what they needed from food and what their body needed from food.
They did not learn just like I did not learn in the past. And you may have not learned how to eat healthy. I checking in with your body losing weight, by checking in with your body and just seeing what she needs from you each day with food, we are taught to place our trust or the healthy eating answers to an outside source. This is what most of us are taught from a very young age.
We’re taught to transfer that responsibility to diets, weight, loss, regimens, health experts, whatever. We are not taught to be in partnership with our body first for the results we want with it. So that’s the first thing I really want to point out here in order to get the long-term results with food and body that you want, you will need to see your body as the best expert. It is the guide.
It wants the same thing you want. And this realization is the first step to being in partnership with your body. Your body is the best expert, and here’s the other thing you really need to know about your body. This is so important. Your body does not care about your reasons for wanting to lose weight more quickly or achieving perfection with food.
It doesn’t care about any of that. Its focus is on keeping you alive.
All right, that is the body’s only focus is on keeping you alive and healthy. It is working 24 hours a day, all of the time to keep you alive and it’s doing whatever it needs to do to make that happen. It does not care about eating the right things on a meal plan. It does not care about your feelings when you don’t lose weight in the exact amount of time, you wanted to lose it. It does not care that you had a long day and that you think you deserve to overeat foods that you love.
It doesn’t care about any of that. It cares about you, but its job is the most important job in the entire world, which is to keep you alive. Now I’m very sensitive to the things you want because I’ve been there. And I don’t want you to feel like your desires for healthy eating or weight loss are invalid or legitimate.
They’re not, but it’s really important to know that your body does not care about any of that because it’s focused on keeping you alive. And this relates back to weight loss, entitlement, which I talked about a couple episodes back where you are not entitled to quicker results with your body. That fit your timeline because your body doesn’t care. It always has this higher focus of doing what it needs to keep you alive and healthy.
And nine times out of 10, you forcing healthy eating or weight loss quicker is not in service of your longterm health or long-term results with your body. So your body isn’t going to be on board with this. And the thing about your body is that it will always have the upper hand over your results because it’s the one that keeps you alive. It’s the one that creates the weight loss long-term.
So if you’re fighting your body and you’re attempting to force weight loss or manipulate food to do it quicker, your body’s going to fight back and it will have the upper hand because our bodies are expertly designed to keep us alive. Even when we’re putting it through the stressors of losing weight quickly and restricting ourselves with food. So for example, let’s say that you are wanting to lose weight quickly.
So your restricting food, your body will fight back because it’s sensing that it’s in danger. If you’re not feeding it enough and giving it what it needs, it has emergency processes in place to compensate for that. And these are all of the things that you do, not like that you blame your body for you think your body is fighting you, but really it’s trying to protect you from the stressors you’re placing on it.
So it will introduce things like cravings, weight, retention, lower metabolism, all because it believes that you restricting food means you’re in danger and it wants to do everything to keep you alive. That is all it cares about. So if you’re trying to force your body and stress your body and rush your body to get the results you want with it, it will put roadblocks into place to ensure that it’s staying alive, keeping you safe and doing what it knows is best for you.
So cravings will go up. You will experience weight retention and you’ll lower your metabolism amongst a ton of other symptoms that come up when you are not in partnership with your body, you have to be in partnership with your body to achieve longterm results, or you’ll always be going to battle with your body and fighting it all while it’s just trying to keep you alive and safe.
Is this clicking. I hope you all are hearing me. We have been fighting our body for most of us a number of years. And it really makes sense when we consider that our body’s only goal ever is to keep us alive and how this puts us at odds with it. When we restrict with food. And when we attempt to punish our body to the weight loss results we want. So let’s talk about how to be in partnership with your body.
This is the ultimate goal. So the first thing you will need to do to be in partnership with your body is to deliberately choose how you will think about your body. And what’s going to happen is most of you will have thoughts that argue with your body. So there’s this energy of helplessness and resentment. You have to your body based on the results you have created with it in your past.
And examples of thoughts. I see both from myself in the past and my clients are thoughts. Like, I don’t know why this has happened to me. I shouldn’t weigh this much, or I shouldn’t be eating this way. Something is wrong with me. It’s just this energy that our body is wrong and we are wrong for the results that we have now. And this just creates a relationship with our body where we believe that our body is against us and we are against it.
So the first step to being in partnership with your body is you genuinely have to have thoughts that are in partnership with your body. So you need to believe that you and your body are on the same side. You both want the same thing right now. There’s a part of you that may want different paths to get there. So logically here with me, you do want the same thing as your body.
You want to eat healthy, get the results with your body that you want in the most longterm and healthy way. But there’s going to be a piece of your brain that urgently, once things like weight loss as quickly as possible. And this is just your toddler primitive brain that wants to have a tantrum and get there ASAP because your brain is believing that over there is going to be better than over here. And spoiler alert is not.
You will still have problems as a human. When you eat healthy, lose weight, get the results you want, but there’s going to be a part of you that is attached. So that’s where you’re going to feel compelled to take action from, with food. But it’s always useful to know that logically, you want the same thing as your body, your body, and you want to be healthy, lose the weight in the most long-term sustainable way.
And you can always just know that your body’s got you. It knows better. It’s the guide. It knows when it’s time for you to change the results with your body in the most sustainable way. It knows when it’s the safest time for it to release the weight or release the symptoms that you don’t want with it based on how you’ve been treating it. So choose deliberate thoughts about your body that allow you to be in partnership with it.
The second thing you can do is to decide what you and your body both want so firmly decide. What do you both agree on? So maybe you both agree that you want to stop feeling over full to the point of sickness after you eat. Maybe you both agree that you want to lose weight for the very last time and not rush it or skip steps.
Maybe you agree that you never want to force yourself to give up foods. You find pleasurable. Maybe you agree that you can enjoy foods without having to overindulge in them. The minute you get home from work, think of it like a truce. You’ve been fighting your body for a long time with food. You’ve potentially been ignoring its needs. Consider what developing mutual respect and a truce with your body would look like for you.
What would you both agree on? Probably not rushing and restricting with food, to get the results with your body that you want quicker. Your body’s going to have hangups with that. So what can you agree on? So you can ensure that you’re in partnership with your body and guarantee the results you want with it. Long-term then I want you to consider what does your body need from you now?
What is your body telling you daily when you’re willing to listen to it?
So some examples, when is your body most hungry during the day? When has your body had enough food? And how can you tell for yourself, how does your body tell you which foods it finds most pleasurable? How does your body tell you when it’s most satisfied from food? Now it’s interesting because some of you will get antsy because I’m not giving you a step-by-step blueprint here to your individual body.
I’m not coming up with the answers for you because I actually can’t do this. There’s no cookie cutter blueprint. It does not exist. Nobody can do this for you, really sit with these questions here and practice being the expert of your own body and seeing for yourself how you would answer each of these questions. You want to become a naturally healthy eater.
So you’ve got to do the deeper work. It is so worth it to answer these questions and to learn how your body communicates.
I do consider my coaching practice very special and effective because I know as the coach that I am not the expert of your eating habits or body, my position as the coach is to teach you how to step into the role as the expert of your own eating habits of your own body. So you’ll never need anyone outside of you. Again, the only other entity you’ll need to check in with is your own body.
One of the biggest misconceptions I see in the health industry is that you need someone outside of you to tell you how to eat or how much to eat or the answers with food. Almost all of you listening will already have that inside of yourself. If you are just willing to be in partnership with your body on your journey, to healthy eating and the results with your body that you want, this is the partnership that never ends.
And if you are committed to being in partnership with your body, all the way to the results you want with it, this is how you create healthy eating habits that feel natural and enjoyable to you. It will not feel forced. All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful to you. I hope it gave you new perspective. Thanks for being here with me today. And I’ll talk to you next week.