Hello my dear friends. Welcome to the 100th episode of the Healthy Eating for Busy Women podcast. I, if I’m being honest, can’t actually believe that we are already at 100 episodes. It feels like yesterday that I started this podcast to help more of you, to reach more of you and to take the work that I do in my practice to a wider scale so more women could understand what is available for them when it comes to healthy eating weight loss, and feeling like they have fulfillment and control with food.
And truly, I just wanted to take a moment to say it is an honor and a privilege to help you all in this space every week. I was thinking about coming on this episode today and giving you all examples of messages I’ve gotten since this podcast has started from women who have completely changed their trajectory with food and body because of these episodes every week.
But I figured a lot of those messages are really intimate in private conversations I have with y’all and they mean so much to me. But for those of you who have messaged me over the years to share with me the impact that these episodes have had, it keeps me going and it makes me want to help you all at such a higher level every week. And I just couldn’t be more grateful for this community that we have assembled here.
And what I wanted to do is to create a sister episode to my very first episode, which was why you are not eating healthy. And if you’ve been with me since the beginning, you may have seen how much this podcast has changed and grown. And when I listen to older episodes, I really feel so much love for the version of me who started this podcast cuz I’m gonna be honest with y’all, I did not know what the heck I was doing.
I was just trying to get in front of a mic, , teach you all the things and just get this work out there. And I truly see such a difference in how the episodes are presented every week. So I wanted to check in and essentially do a 2.0 episode of why you are not eating healthy. Because obviously that is why all of you are here. You want to be able to eat healthy in a way that feels natural and there’s not this resistance that you are having to overcome to make healthy eating decisions lose weight and be that best version of yourself.
So we’re gonna dive right into it today. I’m going to give you an updated version and it’s my hope that for those of you, maybe it’s your first episode with me, that this will give you clarity on where you can start with your work.
And if you’ve been with me for some time on this podcast or you are my client, this will be a refresher for you to check in and see where the gaps are for you in order for you to eat healthy. So let’s just dive right in. As usual, I want to start with where you may be getting it wrong a bit. And I really want to address all of the reasons why you may think you struggle with food now because there is so much confusion and noise that I see in the health community and from all of you in terms of why it’s not working, why you’re not eating healthy and why food decisions aren’t simple for you.
So here’s what you need to know. In short, you do not struggle with food because you aren’t eating the right things. So believe it or not, it doesn’t have to do with the actual foods that are going into your mouth.
does not have to do with you loving a certain food too much or you being addicted to a certain food or a certain food being wrong. Second, you don’t struggle with food because you need to create a better food plan. For my fellow type A women out there, we really will believe that if we just had a better plan, if we organized our decisions ahead of time better, that somehow it would all click and fall into place.
And I love planning and I’m sure you do too. So this really does feel like the solution, but you do not need a better plan. That is not what is going to create healthy eating habits. Third, you do not struggle with food because you lack sufficient time, energy, or willpower to do so. So when we feel like we don’t have control with food and we don’t know why, of course we’re going to blame it on having a lack of something that we perceive as the problem.
So for a lot of you, you really believe that you don’t have enough time. And my friends, it does not take any more time to make healthy eating decisions. You’re already making food decisions to survive, right? It’s already happening. So to make different ones doesn’t take more time. And if this is a hangup you are having right now, totally safe, I hear you. But just stick around so you can get a bit more perspective here. You don’t struggle with food because you don’t have enough energy or willpower.
So making healthy eating decisions, if it’s taking a lot of energy or willpower to do so, it’s because of things you are resisting and it’s because you are not doing it in an emotionally collaborative way. So we’re going to get into that. But if you’re having a ton of emotional resistance to eating healthy, that’s because you’re not processing your emotions.
And lastly, you don’t struggle with food because you don’t have control with food. So I know I talk a lot about having control with food, but really if we’re getting to the nitty gritty, you always have control. It is always available to you and nothing can take that away. You can think about it more like you are just not actively tapping into it with the right tools and the right approach. So in this episode I want to talk about the simple and solvable reasons why you struggle with food now.
Because if you struggle to eat healthy, it’s not because of any one of these things I listed here. There are specific reasons why this is coming up for you. So the first main reason I see women struggle with food is because of an attachment we have to quick weight loss. And this is when we feel really compelled to make the changes happen quickly.
And that means that instead of focusing on long term changes with food or with weight, we rely on willpower and discipline and grit to force healthy eating decisions into place so we can force our body into the weight loss we want on our timeline. So what this means is we skip steps and it prevents us from making these changes permanently. And I say this all the time, in order for you to permanently lose weight and become a naturally healthy eater, you have to change who you are as an eat or as a woman with a body.
You can’t think about either of those things in the same way. And so there’s deeper work involved that anyone can have access to. But essentially what’s happening when you are attached to quick weight loss, you’re trying to force healthy eating and weight loss as someone who still believes that getting weight loss quicker will make them happier.
And you believe that you are not in control with food. So you have to impose restrictions. And if any of this is resonating, congratulations, you’re a human. I think we all start here, but here’s how you can get out of this particular struggle. First, you will need to determine your why for taking a longer term approach. So I’ve mentioned before, but this is actually a really big factor I look for with clients who enter my practice, they really need to know their why for taking a long term approach and for making these long term changes because that is what is necessary.
It’s kind of like having a child when you have a child, you’re not thinking about what is the quick fix short term approach I can take to raise this child so they can get a nine to five and they can start providing for me in my old age, no, you see it as a long term parenting process in order to cultivate that relationship.
And this may be a stretch of an example, but go with me here. Essentially eating healthy and losing weight permanently is a lot of self parenting. You learn how to meet your needs. And so if you compare it to how you would meet a child’s needs, you are not looking at this quick fix. You would be focused more on a long term approach because you are an eater for life. So a long term approach to solving this problem is non-negotiable.
Next, you want to validate the reasons why a quick fix approach hasn’t worked for you in the past. A lot of the time as humans, we will feel compelled to just keep doing the same things and it’s no different when it comes to quick fix methods of weight loss. We will just keep gravitating towards the quick fix solutions despite having all of this evidence that they do not work for our particular struggle.
So take a moment to really validate that and sit with your specific reasons why you know, a quick fix approach will not work. And then last, and most importantly, you have to be willing to experience and allow the urgency and frustration of delayed gratification, right? Because we have a human brain that really wants that dopamine hit and you anticipate getting to your goal weight as a huge reward, right?
There is no debate about that and that is perfectly fine. You are a human, but in order for you to parent yourself and commit to a long-term approach and long-term changes, you just have to be willing to allow that urgency and frustration of delayed gratification. So essentially, I do this with myself too. It’s just allowing my internal tantrum to kind of happen when I don’t yet have the result I want so I can keep parenting myself taking intentional action and moving towards long term healthy eating and weight loss.
All right? So if you are attached to quick weight loss and doing it faster, this portion will really, really be necessary for you. Another specific reason why you struggle to eat healthy is when you have perfectionism with food. So once again, if you are a type A person like me, you probably heavily identify with being a perfectionist. So when you have perfectionism with food, you focus on eating the right things and it creates a lot of stress and pressure with food, you tend to experience a lack of fulfillment with food and your body.
And the biggest reason why this becomes a struggle is it causes you to avoid failure, which means you keep yourself stuck from evaluating progress moving forward and being your own best expert with your eating habits. Now the reason why perfectionism runs so rampant with healthy eating is because a lot of us are raised in a hustle culture and some of you may be not realizing that you are in a hustle culture because what a hustle culture teaches us to believe is that we should always do our best.
And I want you to think about how you show up to the world when you think I should do my best. What happens is you give a lot of emotional energy and effort to results that you want probably more than necessary. You believe that to get results that you want, you will have to work hard. And this looks like throwing spaghetti at a wall and just seeing what sticks. We’re working harder, not smarter. And with healthy eating and weight loss, it is a non-negotiable that you don’t engage with perfectionism or hustle to get the result because once again, a lot of us see this work as a finish line, but you never stop being an eater, my friends, you never stop having weight and you never stop having a body.
So you will have to develop a manner of eating healthy and having weight that feels sustainable and that feels natural to you.
So what I’m saying, saying is we don’t want you to do your best every day, right? We want you to have an experience of healthy eating that feels sustainable With perfectionism. You will have this black and white thinking with food where food is good or it’s bad, you make right decisions or wrong decisions. And this means your results with your body will be black and white as well. You’ll either be constantly on track to hitting your goal weight and maybe you’ll reach it or you’ll just be falling off track overeating and feeling like it’s all out of your control.
And here’s what you really need to know, and this is how you move past the perfectionism. Long term results with healthy eating and weight loss are created in the gray areas of progress. So it’s not black and it’s not white, it’s that gray area where it does not look pretty and perfect.
The progress can look a little messy where setbacks are involved, but making progress in this way is livable and sustainable because it accounts for the fact that you are a flawed human who is incapable of perfection long term. It’s the three steps forward, two steps back approach where we are intentionally accounting for the fact that two steps back moments will occur. And this is a really big struggle for a lot of you in the beginning.
I have certainly been here as well, where we really want progress to be the gold star, a plus experience where we can validate that we’re a good student, we did our best and true progress with food and body isn’t pretty. And sometimes I joke around with y’all, progress with this work will not look picture perfect in your little planners or food trackers or whatever manner of validating yourself that you like to partake in , I see you, I am you all right.
But true progress is not the prettiest. You’re going to fail. You’re going to have setbacks and there will be times when you don’t take action with food in the way you planned. There will be times when your weight goes up or it plateaus or your body is taking time to adjust to the changes that you are making. This is all when you must evaluate, learn how to work with your body so you determine what to try next. Aiming for perfection and pretty progress keeps you from progress at all because you are not willing to fail and get messy or evaluate the failures, you set the standards and the stakes way too high.
So if you are a self proclaimed perfectionist like I was, this will really, really help you to really remove yourself from that narrative so you can actively get in the weeds and make progress towards the results you want.
Another specific reason why you struggle to eat healthy is you are not someone who processes your emotions fully, which means you will emotionally eat stress, eat or overeat. And really this means that your food decisions are at the effect of how you feel emotionally day to day. And as humans, of course, we’re emotional beings, we are emotionally driven. So this will become problematic for you because now your results with food and body depend on your emotional state over time.
What happens if you are not processing your emotions? Your urges for food will get stronger because your emotions are in a pressure cooker and your cravings will increase over time. So if you are having a lot of emotional cravings for food and really strong urges, it’s just because we haven’t actively learned how to process our emotions. And I wanna validate all of you in the fact that most of us were not taught how to process our emotions or reach emotional adulthood.
There were plenty of things I learned in school, growing up, processing my emotions was not one of them. And so I really want you to know that this is a basic skill that we really need to have as the humans, but a lot of us were not taught this skill. So it’s almost like learning to reparent ourselves in adulthood in a way that maybe we weren’t parented in the past. This piece of it is the essence of coaching.
So for those of you who are new to what coaching is, this is what coaching teaches you how to do. It’s having someone witness your thoughts and your emotions so you can learn to become aware of them. And if this is a skill that you are completely new to, I personally would recommend you looking into coaching, whether it’s my practice or another practice, really just look into what it could be like to get coached on your mind, but to give you an idea of how this works.
So you can start doing this now, what this will look like is you need to take the focus from your head as a logical type a human to your body so you can see the emotional vibrations that are present for you. Most of you, if you are like I was and a lot of the women I coach will actually not have a very good idea of emotionally what’s occurring for you day to day, that is where I recommend you most definitely start.
Just intentionally start taking the focus from your logical brain to your emotional feeling body, even when you feel an urge to eat, rather than thinking about how to sulfur that externally so you can create control, focus inward and uncover in that moment emotionally what’s coming up so you can better meet your emotional needs and allow that urge to overeat. Something to consider as well is most of the emotions that will compel you to emotionally eat will have nothing to do with food, right?
So maybe it has to do with your relationship to work, your marriage, being a parent. So with the emotional work, don’t pigeon yourself and try and uncover the emotions that you are having with food. It likely has nothing to do with food. This has to do with outside areas of your life. And once again, this is where a coach can really, really help you get to the root of what is happening here. Another reason why you struggle to eat healthy is you are not listening to your body cues.
So things like hunger and fullness. This happens because if you are continuously emotionally eating, your body will have difficulty communicating with you. Your body cues will have been suppressed over time, and what happens is your body won’t have the ability to tell you you are hungry when you are very hungry and it won’t have the ability to tell you you are full until you’re stuffed.
So just know that this is where intuitive eating practices can be unaccessible. For some of us in the beginning, if you are emotionally eating, this means that you’re acting on your emotional mind rather than your body cues to make eating decisions. So this just means your body will have less of an opportunity to communicate with you. And if you are not honoring your natural hunger and fullness, know this, your body is not receiving the support it needs to lose weight permanently.
So losing weight is a collaborative process between you and your body. If you force your body into submission and do not meet its needs in the way your body needs its needs met, that’s a lot of needs , then weight loss will not happen permanently. Your body will start to fight you. So start listening to what your body is telling you. This will be harder in the beginning, especially if you are emotionally eating, but just get curious and start exploring that.
Now, once again, we wanna validate the fact that a lot of us were not taught this growing up. We were not taught to actively check in with our body and form a relationship with our body cues to make healthy eating decisions. So what do we do? We start to struggle with food gain weight, and then we look for the answers in external solutions like diets and protocols. Your body is the best expert and it has all of the information and communication you need to tell you what it needs.
With food, I cannot stress that enough. The last reason you struggle with food, and this is the one that blows y’all’s minds, , you actually don’t prioritize pleasure enough with food. And we’re not talking about the knee-jerk urgent pleasure that you think you’re having. This is not actual pleasure with food. This is emotional comfort that you are seeking.
Pleasure is enjoyment of food. It’s enjoying food at a deeper level rather than in this surfacey wide level way where you’re constantly just filling up with the pleasure. Your body was meant to experience actual pleasure with food and it wants you to have a satisfying eating experience. Right now, you may see pleasure with food as a reward that you earn based on good behavior, or you may see pleasure with food as something that causes you to lose control.
In order to eat naturally healthy sustainably in a way that fulfills you. You will have to learn how to prioritize pleasure with food intentionally. This is a step you want to focus on after you’ve established with yourself. That control with food is always available to you from within yourself because when you believe you have control with food, pleasure with food doesn’t feel threatening. And you will need to teach yourself that you can experience pleasure with food without sacrificing your control or your goals.
Because once again, our body was meant to experience pleasure with food and it wants you to have satisfying eating experiences. If you solve for these things, my friends, you will become a naturally healthy eater, guaranteed you will become someone who has control with food no matter where you’re starting from. Once again, celebrating 100 episodes of this podcast, I am so happy you are here. No matter if this is your first episode or if you’ve been with me since the beginning.
And if you are new to this work, welcome. This podcast will be such an excellent resource for you. And I recommend just continuing on with the episodes to really see how this work can be approached differently. So many of you have created insane results from this podcast, and if you’re ready to take this work to the deepest level, my coaching program might be a good fit for you. You can learn more and apply at cat rent.com/coaching. This is for those of you who want a set process and support system to make the permanent changes you want with food and with body.
All right, my dear friends, thanks for being here with me today. Have a great rest of your week and I’ll talk to you next week.