Hello there. How’s it going? I hope you’re doing exceptionally well this week. If you’re not doing well this week, just know it’s safe to feel whatever you’re feeling and it will pass. But I do hope you’re doing well. Today, I want to talk about a specific thought or belief that many of my clients come to me with. They’re often left with this belief after years of attempting and failing to eat healthy. This is something I’ve been talking a lot about on my Instagram lately, which if you’re not following me, be sure to go do so at @KatRentas. That’s my username. I’m always sharing more goodness there. But I’ve been talking a lot about this particular thought that clients come to me with and it’s highly, highly likely that you have had or currently have this thought as well. I had this particular thought in the past for many years and it kept me stuck with my old eating struggles for a long time. And that thought is, “I’ve tried everything”. Whew. Even just saying it out loud is exhausting. “I’ve tried everything”. “I’ve tried everything to change my eating habits” or “I’ve tried everything to eat healthy” or “I’ve tried everything to change and nothing is working”. Now, I want you to get really honest with yourself. This is a safe space, I promise. I want you to get really honest and consider, is this something you think is true now? There’s no right or wrong answer. But, is this something you genuinely believe about you and eating healthy? That you’ve tried everything possible to do so? If you believe this in any capacity, then this podcast will be very valuable to you. So I want you to listen up and let it all soak in while you’re here with me today. Before we get into the nitty gritty I need to explain why I’m even bringing this up. Why thoughts even matter when it comes to your eating habits. The reason why your thoughts or beliefs matter is because they are what create your emotions. Your feelings. So, to put it simply you have a thought, or sentence in your mind, that creates a particular emotion in your body. And I want you to just think of your emotions like vibrations in your body. They’re vibrations in your body that are created from a sentence in your mind. Sometimes those vibrations are comfortable and sometimes they’re uncomfortable. But emotions don’t need to have drama or meaning attached to them. Emotions simply come from a single thought. This is why if you’re my client, you know that I keep it very simple. I try not to term emotions as positive or negative, I refer to them as comfortable or uncomfortable emotions. Now, here’s ultimately why this matters. Your emotions drive all of your food actions in life. Every single food decision you make comes from an emotion you’re feeling. And as mentioned, your emotions come from your thoughts. So your beliefs when it comes to food and yourself create your emotions which ultimately drive all of your food actions. Your eating habits. This is why thoughts matter. And, something important to know is that you can’t force healthy eating habits with thoughts that don’t serve you. That’s what willpower is. It’s when you’re believing something that creates an uncomfortable emotion that doesn’t drive you to eat healthy naturally. Thoughts with food need to be addressed, always. Now, that’s just some background as to why our thoughts with food matter. Knowing all of that, I want you to try the thought on, “I’ve tried everything to eat healthy”. And when I say “try the thought on” I mean practice thinking this thought. Try thinking right now “I’ve tried absolutely everything to eat healthy” and observe what emotion is created in your body. Really consider this. Most of my clients come into my program with this thought. That “they’ve tried everything”. And for them it usually creates the emotions of doubt, frustration, helplessness, sometimes fear, even panic – things like that. All very heightened, uncomfortable emotions that we don’t really want to experience. And this is why emotions drive your food actions, right? They drive your eating habits. These particular emotions created from the thought “I’ve tried everything” are super uncomfortable. Your brain is going to want to escape these emotions and seek comfort from them as soon as possible. It’s just what your brain does. So, let’s say you think “I’ve tried everything to eat healthy” and you feel frustration, your brain is going to compel you to seek comfort in some type of way so it feels better emotionally. And what’s the most readily available source of comfort to our brains? It’s always, always food. Food is a primary reinforcer, it’s something we all need to survive, so your brain’s like “Yep. This is a great source of comfort”. This is where emotional eating comes in. It’s very simple. You think a thought that creates an uncomfortable emotion and your brain compels you to seek comfort in food from that emotion. And it’s worth mentioning that this is exactly what your brain is conditioned to do. Seek comfort and avoid pain. So when you feel compelled to escape emotions with food, nothing has gone wrong per se. We just know consciously it’s not something you want to be doing. Now, when you feel an uncomfortable emotion and you seek comfort in food, we know that this is what drives you to overeat, emotionally eat, or fill up with food in some type of way. But, it’s never just about your eating habits. Seeking comfort in food is just one of the many ways you’ll react when you feel frustrated, or whatever other emotion you create from the thought “I’ve tried everything”. On top of overeating, you’ll likely procrastinate other tasks in your life, seek comfort in other ways, so maybe that’s spending money, watching Netflix, etc. Basically, you’ll react in a number of ways that look like you hiding from your life. Seeking comfort from your life. Which is just you seeking comfort from the emotion that was created from the thought. Make sense? And I want you to consider when you think “I’ve tried everything to eat healthy”, how does it make you feel emotionally, and what actions do you take from that feeling? Get really specific with the ways you react when you experience that emotion. Be totally honest with yourself here. Because for you right now the most important thing is that you’re understanding why your thoughts matter. You want to provide yourself evidence of how your thoughts are affecting your actions, not just with food but in your life. The belief that “I’ve tried everything to eat healthy” really affected how I showed up to my eating habits and my life in the past. I was continuously overeating and emotionally eating to escape the frustration I felt. This frustration strongly affected my job where I found myself not performing at the highest level because I constantly wanted to feel better. I would procrastinate tasks, constantly binge watch Netflix – just genuinely hiding from my life. And this is what I don’t want for you. At the end of the day, there will be thoughts, like this one, that come up for you with food. But you get to ultimately decide if you want to add to that story and indulge that thought. And if you’re indulging in the story that “you’ve tried everything and nothing is working” then it’s going to show up in your eating habits. One million, a gajillion percent. Now, here’s the part where I’m going to honor those of you that really feel like this is a fact. That you have, in fact, “Tried absolutely everything to change your eating habits and eat healthier”. If you genuinely believe this is a fact, I’m not here to make you feel illegitimate and I’m not here to prove you wrong. If this feels like a fact to you, perfectly natural. That just means you need more evidence that it’s not a fact and you need more practice with this work. We all start from that place where we think our limiting beliefs are true and every single one of my clients starts here. When they begin working with me, they come in with a whole host of non-useful thoughts that feel like facts to them. It’s only after they join that they begin the process of unlearning these non-useful thoughts. Which takes time and intentionality. This is how they become someone totally different in the coaching process where they change their identity from someone “who’s tried everything to eat healthy” to someone “who’s a naturally healthy eater”. But, they always start from the place where they believe these thoughts are the facts of life. This is totally fine and should be expected. So, let’s say you think it’s a fact that “you’ve tried everything to eat healthy”. The first thing I would ask you to really consider here is if this is true? Really consider this for a moment. Is it true that you’ve tried absolutely everything? Spoiler alert, if you haven’t joined my coaching program yet, it’s definitely not true. But, we’re not here to argue with your brain. If you believe this is a fact and it’s true, let’s honor that. The second thing I would ask you is “Even if this is true, is it serving you? Is it going to provide you the emotional energy to make the decisions with food that you want to be making?”. If we consider everything we’ve talked about so far, you’d likely agree that the answer is no. The thought “I’ve tried everything” will not bring you the energy to create the eating habits you want. It’s going to feel incredibly disempowering and keep you stuck. Now, I want you to know that if you genuinely believe this thought, that there’s legitimate reasons for it. Because your brain is a computer. It takes all the past evidence you’ve given it to create beliefs. And for many of us, we’ve spent years attempting diets and meal plans that didn’t work out long-term. So, to your brain, it has strong evidence for believing “We’ve tried everything”. Kind of makes sense. So this is to say that every single thought or belief you have is there for legitimate reasons. But, it doesn’t mean that those beliefs are true. In this case, we know it’s not technically true that “you’ve tried everything”. We can find evidence for that as well. But your brain is believing the evidence that it has tried everything. This is such an important distinction. Your brain wants to believe these disempowering thoughts because it wants to keep you stuck. All your brain cares about is keeping you alive in the way that requires the least energy. As mentioned, when you’re thinking “I’ve tried everything” you’ll likely seek comfort and hide from your life. This is ideal for your survival, primitive brain. But not so ideal for the part of you that wants to achieve your health goals. Now, here’s the most important thing I want to let you know about this thought “I’ve tried everything”. Nothing about this thought is personal. Believing this doesn’t mean anything about you or your abilities to become a naturally healthy eater. This is the most important thing for you to keep in mind. As of right now to join Own Your Eating Habits I require each client to apply and attend a private consultation call with me. So this is how I ensure that each client will be a perfect fit before joining the program. The purpose of this call is for me to observe each client’s struggles with food and the thoughts and beliefs that they’re having now. Pretty much every client has various limiting beliefs that are holding them back from the changes they want to make and one of the most common is this thought “I’ve tried everything”. Which is incredibly disempowering for these clients. And I want to share with you what I share with these clients. I tell them that if they’re genuinely believing this thought “I’ve tried everything” then what’s next for them? I’ll ask them this after they say “I feel like I’ve tried absolutely everything and nothing is working”, I’ll often say, “So, if you’ve tried everything then now what? What’s next?”. And most of the time they’ll say “I have no idea. I don’t know what to do next”. And what’s interesting is they’re on this call with me because they want to join my coaching program. Because they believe that this could be the solution for them. Because they’ve listened to this podcast and they realize, “Oh, that’s different. I haven’t tried that before”. But because of this ingrained belief that “They’ve tried everything”, even when they’re on the consultation call, they’re still feeling stuck. Like, they don’t know what the best next step is. For these clients they’re going to experience this separation. One part of their brain believes “We’ve tried everything. Nothing is working. We don’t know what to do. We’ll never get the results we want”. And then the other part of their brain is the side that applied for my coaching program. Where it’s thinking, “This is the best next step. I haven’t tried this yet. This could work”. What I always want these clients to be aware of is that the part of your brain that thinks “I’ve tried everything” is quicker and stronger. Because it’s that primitive, survival brain. That smaller, intentional, logical brain is the other part of it. It’s slower. The key is to begin making decisions from that intentional brain rather than that fear brain. To join my program each and every client has to be willing to say NO to that fear brain that’s genuinely thinking “We’ve tried everything and nothing works”. On our consultation call I let them know that if they wait until they stop believing that thought to move forward and change their eating habits, then they’ll be waiting their entire lives. You’ll have to accept the belief “I’ve tried everything”, have total compassion for that belief, and then commit to subscribing to another story instead. So, the other side of the story is “How could this approach be perfect for you?”, “What haven’t you tried yet?”, “How could this be possible right now?”. The belief “I’ve tried everything” is disempowering. It will keep you stuck. The key is to switch from disempowering thoughts to empowering thoughts. Since empowering thoughts means you’re making decisions and moving forward. Another thing I tell these clients is that I personally don’t feel attached to them joining my program or not. My life doesn’t change drastically either way. This is about them. Whether they join my program or not, I want them to like their reasons for doing so. I want them to feel empowered by their reason and the decision that they make. Limiting beliefs like “I’ve tried everything” will leave you feeling frustrated, disempowered, and stuck with the eating habits you have. Consider what thoughts you could create for yourself that would indicate, “Maybe I haven’t tried everything”. See where that takes you with your eating habits instead. Alright my friends. Thank you for being here with me today and I’ll talk to you next week.