Hello, my friends, welcome back to the Healthy Eating for Busy Women podcast. I hope you’re having a great week so far and that this episode can give you some much needed downtime. And even if that’s just you driving on your way to work or you doing the laundry or making some dinner or just resting, I hope that this episode today can give you a moment to focus on yourself and give yourself some care. Because today I really want to talk about what it will take to solidify healthy eating habits. And this is a loaded concept.

I know a lot of you have probably been taught, much like I was, a million different ways to solidify healthy eating habits. But my hope for today’s episode is just to give some clarity with how habits are built, specifically with naturally healthy eating.

I think that when we think about habit formation, the goal a lot of us have is for something to become almost automatic, right? So if we want to have a habit of eating healthy or exercising or brushing our teeth, whatever it is, […0.5s] you want it to not feel like it requires effort.

I want you to know right away in today’s episode that this is the goal, and this is actually the goal that I help women with in terms of naturally healthy eating. It’s learning to eat the way nature intended, which is learning how to make eating decisions without emotional effort behind it.

Right now what we wanna be careful with that, I see a lot and I have been guilty of is that we don’t equate having a habit with not having thought behind doing the thing, with it being automatic.

There is a difference between having a habit that doesn’t require emotional effort versus having a habit where there’s no logical thought or deliberateness behind it. And that is not something that is actually achievable.

I think for a long time I made the mistake of thinking that I was doing something wrong. If something didn’t feel […0.7s] automatic, like it was just happening for me and no matter the day I was having or no matter how I felt, I would just do it. That never happened.

And I was wasting so many years waiting for habits to stick when they didn’t feel “automatic,” right? What I want you to have today is proper expectations as to what forming healthy eating habits will require from you.

What it will not require from you is hustle, it will not require emotional exertion, and it will not require discipline, willpower or harsh emotional energy. What it will require is […0.4s] your caregiving to yourself. It will require deliberateness. It will require intention, but I really wanna teach you how to take action with healthy eating without feeling like you have to emotionally work for it. And this, in my opinion, is what habit formation really is. And it is what I teach.

Something I also wanna touch on right off the bat is that forming a habit also does not mean perfection. You’ll know if this resonates with you. I have a very type a brain, and I know a lot of you do too. So it probably will connect.

Sometimes a lot of us when we think about forming a habit with healthy eating will think, okay, amazing. That means I will never miss a day. I’ll perform highly. And we’ll have like this pretty picture of what habit formation will look like in the end.

And what I want you to know about someone who actually has solidified healthy eating habits is all of their days don’t look perfect. They don’t even necessarily eat as pretty as you would think. It’s just they know how to create the results they want with their body and provide their body with the eating it needs to do so, but the stakes are way lower. So there’s no high performance involved. They’re not constantly giving themselves a grade.

And something I touch on a lot with type AERs who want to eat healthy is a lot of the time our brain will be more attached to the performance with something rather than the actual end result. Okay, so I want you to think of this as you where we care about performance more than the end result.

What this means is we’ll care more about how we eat healthy, and whether or not we did it to our expectations or not, versus whether it makes us feel the way we want to, or it gives us the weight we wanna be at, or whether it actually provides the needs of our health.

It is not wrong to be attached to good performance with healthy eating, but I say this with so much love, because I have been there.

Prepare to be disappointed if you want naturally healthy eating to stick long term. Because you’re gonna have days where you’re not gonna perform perfectly. But I want you to not equate performing perfectly with forming healthy eating habits, because then the stakes are gonna be too high. See the habit formation through. So I hope that makes sense.

We’ve got to lower the stakes on what healthy eating habits are even gonna look like for you.

If you’re thinking about forming healthy eating habits for the rest of your life realistically, how might your expectations have to change, right? What realistically will it look like for you and your person with your life to eat healthy? Maybe your plates don’t look super pretty. Maybe it looks like a hot mess even. But what if that’s […0.4s] enough? So I hope that connects in a way that works for you. And I wanted to touch on that right off the bat.

So a big element of forming naturally healthy eating habits is consistency. This is a topic that’s brought up to me a lot and a lot of us will equate habits with consistency, right? It’s the more we do something, the easier it will get. And this is true. This is how our brains do work.But something that a lot of type aers, like you maybe and me miss […0.4s] is that consistency does not mean perfection. It means simply showing up with the intention to take a certain action. So for example, here’s what tends to happen when clients of mine have struggled in the past.

So what happens is they will set a goal to build healthy eating habits and consistently […0.5s] eat healthy. So maybe they have a plan or a protocol or they have in mind some foods that are right to eat or wrong to eat. And then what happens is they succeed at this for a bit and they perform highly for maybe a week or a month or even a year.

And then what happens is a wrench goes into their plans where, however, they were taking action before is no longer sustainable. So maybe they have a child […0.5s] or they move or they change their career, and then all of a sudden, the level of performance and the rules they set for eating healthy consistently can no longer apply. What happens is they haven’t learned how to build the habit of naturally healthy eating. They learned how to perform with healthy eating.

Okay, I want you to really consider the difference between healthy eating habits versus performance with healthy eating. Feel like if we even think about a really basic habit like brushing our teeth.

Okay, I know this is so, so minimal, but imagine the experience of performing highly with brushing your teeth.

I feel like I would equate this with every morning, you do not trust yourself and your nervous system and your brain to do that thing and take that action. So every day to brush your teeth, you follow a series of steps […0.5s] perfectly to get it done. So maybe you have No. 1 get out of bed, No.2 go to the bathroom, No. 3 go to the sink, No. 4 you pick up the toothbrush. You get the idea, […0.4s] and so what you are equating with getting the action of brushing your teeth done, and having clean teeth is following those steps correctly. And that is what you equate as having a habit to brush your teeth. It’s performing those steps right now.

Stay with me here, cause this will apply versus the habit of brushing your teeth.

I want you to really think about that habit, right. Brushing your teeth will happen no matter what, no matter what environment you’re in, no matter how much time you have, no matter how tired you are before you go to bed.

I will have days where maybe we’re so tired we forget, but that’s beside the point. I want you to think about a habit that you do not, quote unquote, even think about. It feels like, but it does always happen, and the reason why is because it’s a priority.

It’s something that you are so sold on the value of, and most importantly, you have really relaxed into the fact that you can always make it work. Mistakes are not high.

So you equate having the habit of brushing your teeth with you just being someone who does it. You do not equate the habit of brushing your teeth with following a set method to do so and to take that action. Does that make sense?

So I want you guys to think about habit formation. Do you see habit formation as a series of steps or rules or expectations that you have to follow in order for the habit to be formed? Or do you just see it as something that’s so simple because it’s something you prioritize, and it’s who you are, and you can always make it work.

Notice those two relationships to building a habit in general, and what I want you guys to know is a lot of you will come to me being really good performers with healthy eating.

This is where I started too. I was really, really highly performing with healthy eating until I wasn’t, and I was really struggling. It was this all or nothing all of the time.

What I want you to get to is truly having healthy eating habits is not feeling like you have to push or perform to make healthy eating decisions. It’s resting in yourself and in your body throughout the day. Knowing when it’s time to make a healthy eating decision, you can trust yourself to do so.

Now I wanna validate all of you who feels like this might be too simple, because there are steps to getting yourself here. There’s some nervous system regulation that has to happen.

You wanna get in tune with your body cues. Imagine if you don’t have cravings, there’s no more urgency around food. You’re not thinking about it all the time, you know, when your body tells you when it’s hungry and when to stop eating, when it’s full, […0.5s] you can enjoy food but without overindulging in it. These are actually skills that you can learn with naturally healthy eating. And when you learn these skills, you can make naturally healthy eating decisions in a moment, kind of like brushing your teeth, right? You don’t think about brushing your teeth all day throughout the day in order to take that action at night.

What a lot of you are equating with building a habit in a beginning is constantly thinking about it, making sure you really follow through with these expectations in this plan, to trust yourself to do the thing.

In my coaching practice, what we help women with is not sticking to a series of steps to make sure they take the actions with healthy eating. It actually immediately is regulating their stress, so they can start to relax, lean back, and learn that they can trust themselves to take simple actions with food without relying on these constant steps and constant plans to do so.

So we’re talking pretty openly today about habit formation and how you can change your perspective, all the things. But I wanna make sure to give you, kind of a step by step piece here to building healthy eating habits so you can start to do this now.

And if you’re new to me here, welcome. We do not scratch the surface of anything. We focus on solving our eating habits for the last time. So I am going to talk about deeper work here, but I hope you have an open mind with it and you reflect on how this could apply to you now, so we can help you solve your food struggles for that last time. So No.1, I want you to normalize that overeating, emotional eating, falling off track, whatever it is, is a normal part […0.7s] of human air when it comes to healthy eating.

Hear me out because I know a lot of you come to me to solve for things like this, which you can, […0.6s] but something we don’t solve for when becoming naturally healthy eaters is human error. And a lot of us think that routines and habits will solve for the human errors with healthy eating. Cause we believe that perfection is necessary to get the results we want. And that is the big lie that’s gonna keep you stuck. My friend is thinking that you have to perform perfectly with healthy eating.

So actually the very first […0.5s] step and mindset shift I recommend when looking to form these habits is to assert with yourself, okay, human error with healthy eating, no matter how prepared I am or no matter how much I wanna build these habits, it’s gonna happen. And the key is to know this ahead of time, so you expect it, it doesn’t surprise you. And so you don’t spend all your energy solving for the human air versus […0.4s] a data where you evaluate it and keep on going the next day. We don’t need you to not have human error in your journey towards building healthy eating habits. We need you to not be rattled by the human error so you can continue building the healthy eating habits.

And that brings me to No. 2. When you do have a human error moment with healthy eating, so you have the best intentions to eat healthy, but then something occurs where you don’t take action in the way you want.

I want you to calmly evaluate it after the fact, you’re probably not gonna do this in the moment, especially at first. If you’re just starting this work, it’s going to occur you’re gonna over eat or emotionally eat.

And then maybe the next day or later that night, you’re gonna think, oh, I really didn’t need that food. And that’s when I want you to just reflect on why it happened, what you could do differently.

And then put a period at the end and just keep showing up. I want you to spend less energy and less time solving for the human error piece. And I’d rather you spend your energy being curious as to how you can improve next time.

Curiosity and intention is the only thing you need to build healthy eating habits.

And here’s the thing, I’m not sitting here saying, okay, here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna eat this much, follow this plan and do these things. Because if you’re here with me today on this podcast, and you’ll know if this is you, you’ve tried to do all those things, you’ve tried all the plans, you’d probably have a good idea as to what intake or types of foods are good for your body.

Now that means all that’s left for you to do is trial and error, going in and taking action with healthy eating as best as you can. But then when you don’t take action in those ways, you calmly evaluate and try again next time. This is the stuff that no one wants to hear.

To build naturally healthy eating habits, you do not need to perfect anything because you can actually. You just need to work the muscle of showing up again after imperfection occurs. No one wants to hear this because we are attached to perfection, but it’s gonna make your life a lot easier, and you’re gonna see quicker results.

Trial and error, my friend, that is a secret to all of this and building healthy eating habits No. 3. I know sometimes it is easier said than done, believe me. But I want you to notice the self judgment and criticism along the way, and try to objectively notice it and leave it at the door.

Because here’s the thing you will have this perfectionism pressuring side of you that thinks to have the results you want and build these habits, you’ve gotta perform really highly, right? You have to meet the mark, you have to do it, right.

This is no joke. If you have been in this frame of mind for a while, not just with healthy eating, but in other areas. That is the brain that is predominantly gonna be speaking to you when building these habits.

So I want you to just be aware of self criticism that comes up when you have a human moment. Because it’s listening to this talk that is gonna stop you from building these habits the moment you have human error occur.

I wanna honor the fact that a lot of the time our self criticism can be really sneaky. For most of you, it’s gonna sound useful. And here’s an example of what I mean. So my biggest self criticism thought with pretty much anything, but especially healthy eating, was I could have done that better.

All right, now I want you to think about a thought like that I could have done that better. It doesn’t necessarily feel super invasive or critical or disciplinary, but I want you to notice how that probably made me feel.

And I’m gonna tell you, it honestly just made me feel inadequate and shameful because that’s the lie.

The lie is I could have done that better because I was still believing that I can always take action if I know the right plan, that perfection was possible, that high performance all of the time was possible. And it never was.

But I was constantly living with this belief I could have done that better. And that was constantly being self critical when instead I could have been curious as to what I Learned and how I could improve, what I wanted next time.

I really want you guys to see the difference. It can be very, very slight. No. 4, and I think this is the most important when you build healthy eating habits and you’re doing that work. We just want you to stay the course. We just want you to keep […0.4s] going and to keep taking action. And in order for you to do so, you’re gonna have to love your reasons for taking those actions.

If your reasons for building healthy eating habits are because you should, or because it’s the right thing to do, or because you need to prove something to yourself, that’s gonna feel like a lot of pressure.

And I promise you, I say this with so much love for you, you’re only gonna let yourself down. We’re all gonna let ourselves down. If we go into a habit building process to prove something to ourselves or to prove we can do it perfectly, you’re not gonna do it perfectly, and that’s okay.

The stakes were never that high. So I want you even now to find reasons you like that, maybe even feel indulgent to you to form these habits. What if the only reason to form these habits is because it feels good? Or what if the only reason is because you wanna lose weight, because you’d feel better if you did, or because you want to, whatever the reason is, that feels true to you, and feels like an exhale, and brings you back to your power and your consent find that reason for building these healthy eating habits.

Because a lot of us have this really sneaky part that feels desperate to build and solidify habits, because we think it’ll make us a more worthy human.

The thing to grieve a lot of the time is that it never does. But if you find reasons for building a habit that you love, that bring you back to your grounded caregiving energy, you’re gonna be able to stay the course of this habit formation.

That requires your trial and error in the process of doing this, and going about habit formation this way with healthy eating, you are going to change the way your brain works. You’re going to be evolving into someone who sees themselves as a healthy eater rather than seeing themselves as someone who has to work for healthy eating.

You can go about habit formation and more of the action based way where you focus on the plan and the protocols. And there’s nothing wrong with those things. But if you’re doing it as a checklist versus becoming someone who does those things, then that’s gonna be short term.

So if you have had trouble forming healthy eating habits, and you want to begin doing so, I really hope this perspective gave you something of value to play with. I know it is a very different perspective of healthy eating. That is what I am known for. And if my perspective resonates with you, and you wanna be coached by me, I highly recommend you join me inside my Own Your Eating Habits membership community. We have women from all around the world working on these skills and becoming naturally healthy eaters. The results there are absolutely beautiful to witness. So I would love to have you inside. You can go to katrentas.com/membership to learn more and check it out.

Alright, I love y’all. I hope you have a great rest of your week, and I’ll talk to you soon.