Hello, my friends, I am currently bundled up in two layers of sweaters right now. It is freezing here in Florida. And I know when a lot of Floridians say it’s freezing the rest of the world, rolls their eyes a bit and doesn’t believe them, but it is in the forties today. I am in north Florida, so it is cold and I’m sitting here bundled up in all of the blankets, the sweaters.
So that’s just what we’re doing today. And before we get into today’s episode, I do want to shout out my client, Jennifer, who is about two weeks into the program. And she sent me a lovely message about her experience so far in own your eating habits and really with all of the clients who enter this program. The first two weeks is a lot about watching them gain a ton of awareness.
So I have the privilege as the coach to watch these women who have struggled with food for so long aims.
So many answers in a very short period of time. So this is something that came up for my client, Jennifer, and the message she sent me is very representative of the experience that these women have. So here’s what she sent me. She said we’re only two weeks into the program and I haven’t felt this type of clarity in the last 30 years of dieting. You have no idea how much this means to me.
I cried with my husband, not because I was sad, but out of relief, my only hangup is why wasn’t I taught this sooner, and this is very related to her personality. She’s fun, but I just wanted to share her kind words about her experience, because this is what I want. All of you to know is possible. If this work is for you, you get a taste of this awareness on the podcast, and I really want you all to know how powerful awareness really is, how life-changing it can be to just gain access to what you don’t know.
This in itself can create massive ships. And this is especially true for the women I work with. They very much know how to get it done, and they know how to take action on what they are given. And for a lot of these women, it’s just about them knowing what actually will work for them. And it’s so lovely to see once they have this awareness that they can just hit the ground running and take action on those things in a way that no longer wastes their time or their energy.
And just this awareness piece is something I see that is very, very underrated in the health industry. And it’s something that may not seem like it matters that much to you in the beginning, just because you’ll be so hyper-focused on the end result that you want with healthy eating. So whether that’s stability with food, weight loss, or better health, you’ll find a lot of the time your brain is in a rush to get there.
When you’re struggling with food, it’s like this desperate energy we all start with, and this is not a problem at all. I just want each and every one of you to stop and consider the gravity of simply learning exactly what will work for you and what will not work for me. This was the most painful part of my struggles with food. I was someone who always seemed to have the answer, and if I didn’t have the answer, I was always able to find it.
So when I was struggling with food and I couldn’t figure out what the heck worked and didn’t work, that was really painful. And this is something I see with so many of you. So this is the power of awareness. When you gain this awareness, you stop wasting your time on the wrong things, and you get back energy and focus that you were previously wasting.
And for clients like Jennifer, this is such a massive shift that can happen pretty quickly. So today I want to talk about what works, how you gain that awareness and what you can really expect in your journey towards healthy eating and with my clients. I talk about it in the context of phases of healthy eating. So these are different phases that they can expect on their journey to becoming a naturally healthy eater.
So on their journey to becoming someone who has control with food without requiring any extra effort. And there’s a series of things that need to happen to create the result of becoming a naturally healthy eater. So there is a very specific process to this and each of my clients goes through the same process. Now, when most of you think of phases or a process, you’re going to picture actions that you need to take to achieve the result you want.
So things that you will do or not do. And this is true in a sense there’s things my clients do. And don’t do technically speaking to get the result of becoming a naturally healthy eater. But I want you to notice how your brain may be perceiving taking action towards that end result. So for many of you taking action to get the result will mean eating the right things at the right time, in the right way to get that result.
So when you think about taking action, you think about micro managing the food. And in my program, we do things very differently. So we solve for the root cause of your eating habits of the way you eat. So you’re able to take action with foods in a way that doesn’t require effort in a way where you’re not feeling like you need to overindulge in that food.
So this means clients learn how to manage their minds and bodies. So they naturally make the eating decisions that they want to be making. And this is all because they learn how to solve for that. Cause. And why I’m explaining this is I want you to know that for this to happen, there’s not specific actions with food that they take per se, but instead they’re specific phases of awareness that need to happen.
So in the beginning, I talk about how the power of knowing what works with food and what doesn’t work with food is your awareness and awareness with food is what allows you to an expert of your eating habits without any external sources. And when I say external sources, I mean, when you gain awareness, you no longer have to rely on diets, weight, loss, regimens, anybody to tell you how or what you should be eating.
So you will need to understand who you are as an eater. Now, what needs to be managed to unlearn those patterns. And then once this is done, you can take action based on the eater you want to be. So putting it a bit more simply with my clients, it’s really the before, during and after phases. And why it’s important to talk about this is many of you will be struggling with food and you will want to rush to the last phase, which is the after phase.
And this is just to, because you really are attached to that end result. You really believe that the end result, whether that’s better health or weight loss will allow you to feel better emotionally. And this is a thought error. This cannot happen from any of the external results that we want. And this is why you will feel compelled to rush to that after phase.
But I really want you to know that any solution that implies it can rush you to the after, as in the last phase, that’s necessary will not serve you because you will be skipping over the foundational work that allows you to make these changes permanently. On the other hand, solutions that won’t serve you are the ones that imply.
They’re going to tell you the exact right actions to take with food. If you’re relying on solutions with food, that don’t change who you are as an eater, you’ll end up in the same place as when you started to become a naturally healthy eater where you’re the expert of your eating habits. You need to become someone different with food, which means you’ll need to understand completely the before, during and after phases with food or yourself.
So it sounds a little ambiguous, but I’m going to explain each phase in detail.
So the before phase is where every client starts. And in this phase, this is where they learning exactly why things did not work for them in the past with food, exactly why they didn’t have control with their eating habits before. And the reason why it is so important to live in this space is because we really want the client to understand that their eating struggles were not personal.
That the reason why they struggled with food had nothing to do with the amount of discipline they had, how capable they were, how strong they were, how much knowledge they have. All of these clients come into this program with a long list of very sad, personal reasons, why they struggled with food, which I want you all to expect that you’re going to have these reasons because when your brain can’t define exactly why you’re struggling in a very concrete way, it will come up with a reason why you’re struggling.
The brain will always come up with answers. And when you can’t determine exactly why you’re struggling with food, the only other option your brain has is to decide it’s personal. So all of the clients come in with the stories and the thoughts about why their eating struggles were personal. And in the before phase, we get to really show their brains why it was never personal. And we get to show them the math of why they struggled in the past and exactly why it didn’t work for them.
And as I mentioned previously, with my client, Jennifer, this can bring so much ease almost instantly because as women who really crave information and the answers for why things are happening, picture how much ease will be available to you. If you finally know what works and what doesn’t. So in the before phase, you really examine your food history.
What led to your food struggles now, and then also in this space, each client learns the tools that allow them to examine and solve for their eating struggles moving forward in the program. So we can consider this almost the prep phase. So they’re learning how to use the tools to become the detective and the scientists of their eating habits.
They learn how to identify and manage emotions, how to check in with their body. And it’s always important that I’m very clear about the fact that these clients learn how to become the expert of their eating habits. I am not acting as this all-knowing third party that tells them how they should be eating, how they should be feeling, what they should be thinking. This process really is so unique in that they are learning how to be the expert of their own eating habits, because they’re the only one who can be.
So once we’ve really built this foundation in the before phase, we move on to the during phase. So this is that middle phase where we take all of the tools we’ve learned, and we begin experimenting. We begin being the detective and the scientist, and we observe what isn’t working currently, why we’re overeating, where we’re emotionally eating when and how are we losing control with food?
We get really, really clear on our patterns. And I often call this the awareness building phase. This is when the client really examines all of the ways that they’re not managing their emotions with food, checking in with their body, with food. And what this requires is for the client to gather all of this data, which they can only do. I noticing patterns after their food failures, right?
So in order for them to learn what makes them tick with food, they have to be willing to observe from a curious mindset, how those failures occurred after they happened.
Because in this awareness building phase, you’re not going to have awareness in the beginning and how you build awareness is by failing with food, but then evaluating exactly what happened. So then moving forward, you’re able to catch your behaviors, continue building that awareness, and really grow as a person who continues to create more control with food as your awareness increases.
So that is a very general way to describe it. But I’m hoping that makes some sense here, how they’re starting off with no awareness of why they fail with food. And the only way to build that awareness is by studying their failures and moving forward each day. Now what the client also needs to do in this D-ring phase is they need to develop the skill of not beating themselves up and self-sabotaging with food.
This is what has kept so many of us stuck in the past with food, we’ll make changes with food, but then when something goes wrong and we fail, we beat ourselves up and make it so personal.
I was no different. My friends, this was something I very much struggled with, but you can develop the skill of learning to not beat yourself up and instead study your failures of valuate, what went wrong and move forward from them. And for my clients, when you’re learning this skill, of course their brains will want to go towards beating themselves up. And this is exactly the importance of a coaching container.
This is where coaching comes in. These clients have a very supportive container with me as their coach to help them manage their mind as they’re navigating the failures and moving forward. So they’re able to not self-sabotage and continue the growth. This is everything. And what this does is it creates an identity shift for these clients with food.
Because coming into the process where we start is as someone who struggles with food, we almost feel like a victim of our eating habits and our food failures.
If you’re able to create the skill of not beating yourself up, when you fail and moving forward, despite or failures, you evolve into this person who is the expert and the detective and the scientist of your own eating habits. You’re the expert of your own patterns with food. And there’s so much empowerment to doing this for yourself.
This sense of control and empowerment. I see this trickle into all other areas of my client’s lives. It is a very, very underrated skill, and I’m very passionate about it. If you can not tell. So the during phase is really the experimentation phase, the awareness building phase. Then they graduate from the student to the expert in the after phase.
So this is where they have all of the answers for what will not work for them, with food and exactly what does work for them individually. They know exactly what needs to be managed emotionally for themselves to have control with food.
They know how to do this, and they have all of this data that they’ve collected. They also know what their body has been missing with food and what it means to feel healthy and satisfied. They know why they’ve struggled with food in the past, how to solve for their struggles. Now, because of this time that they’ve been willing to spend observing and learning. So for all of the clients, this is when they’re able to decide that they will never go on a diet again, never because they’re so clear on why that doesn’t work for them and what does work for them.
This is an insanely powerful shift to witness. They know themselves has an eater better than anyone, better than any outside source, way better than I do. They really are the expert. And I always described to my clients, even starting out in my program, that the journey we’ll go on together is to teach them how to graduate from the student to the expert.
My goal for them is that they will no longer need any expert outside of themselves to eat healthy in a way that feels amazing for them, that they can have the self trust. And when you become this expert, the self-trust and confidence, this Springs is everything. It is incredible. It will trickle into every area of your life. You can only become a naturally healthy eater when you’ve become an expert of your eating habits, where you truly see yourself as the best expert to know what you need with food.
I always say own your eating habits. It’s kind of like getting your PhD with your eating habits. You really are becoming an expert or studying yourself and you graduate having your PhD with your eating habits. It’s fantastic. So this is really the goal I have for every client in this program. It is possible for anyone.
And I’m hoping that giving you a very broad overview of how this can work, we’ll allow you to see that when you learn to eat healthy in this way, your results are guaranteed with food, with body or with any health goals. You have any goal that you had, that you were really attached to in the beginning of your health journey becomes inevitable.
When you create this type of control with food, what happens when you create this control is now you’re not desperate to achieve your health goals, because you have created a self-sufficiency with food and body that is shakable. It all feels easier and calmer for you. And really it’s not taking up as much of your brain space or effort.
It is the most incredible thing. So I hope that this episode gave you a peek into what is possible when you do this work very intentionally and you commit to a longer term approach. It really is accessible for anyone who wants to change who they are as an eater and create that lifelong control. All right. So I hope this was valuable to you. I love you. And I’ll talk to you next week.