Stop Overeating

You can "get it done" everywhere else. You can handle what life throws your way. You always seem to know what to do and how to do it.

So, why is healthy eating any different?
Why can't you make it work?


In this 45-minute video masterclass, you'll learn exactly why you're overeating now, along with what's stopping you from having control with food long-term.

HINT: It has nothing to do with discipline or willpower.

FREE MASTERCLASS

For High-Achieving Women

Mar 16

Your Healthy Eating Identity

Your Healthy Eating Identity Kat Rentas

Micromanaging food doesn’t make you a healthy eater. Because true healthy eaters don’t put in effort to eat healthy. They just do.

For them, food isn’t micromanaged. Plans, protocols, and regimens aren’t necessary. Eating decisions are simple and accessible. It’s just who they are.

If you believe micromanaging food is necessary, you’re not being a healthy eater. You’re behaving as someone who doesn’t eat healthy with ease.

In this episode, I’m sharing why food was never the problem for you. It’s that you identify as someone who struggles with food in the first place.

To make permanent changes, you will need to become a healthy eater. As in, you will need to become someone different with food. You will need to begin thinking and making decisions as someone who doesn’t struggle to eat healthy.

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Episode Transcript

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Hello, welcome back to the podcast this week. Today we really need to talk about your healthy eating identity. And really, if you are not changing who you are as an eater, you will not be able to be a healthy eater for life. You will not have the permanent results with your body that you want for life. So in this episode, I really want to introduce you to the concept of developing a healthy eating identity.
Where healthy eating isn’t just something you do, it’s who you are. And if this concept sounds a bit fluffy to you, I want you to have an open mind today because it really is time that we stop assuming that mindset work and thought work is fluffy. And we really need to treat it like it is the most tactical work we can do with our eating habits. Because if you are thinking as someone who struggles with food or who doesn’t have the results with your body that you want, you will not create them.
You will keep creating the same results that you have now. So the concept of this episode, what it will introduce to you is that you can decide to develop a healthy eating identity ahead of time. So when you develop new eating habits and you lose the weight, it just feels like who you are. And what this will do is it will make your results stable, predictable, and permanent, where you don’t feel like you have to hustle for them.
This is what makes this process so foolproof, so effective. So before we get into that, I want to talk about an example of this work and I wanna talk about my client Sarah. So Sarah, she’s a lawyer, she is a mom, she is a wife, and she lost 32 pounds with the own your eating habits process without sacrificing any time and any energy.
And it’s really important that we see examples of what is possible with this work because when Sarah and I first met together, she was overworked, overwhelmed, and burnt out completely in her work as a lawyer. So she came to me jokingly comparing her work to Wolf of Wall Street and she said her days were her waking up very early, working very late, and she said her work deadlines felt like they were constantly competing with her role as a mom and in her marriage with her partner.
So she really struggled with emotional eating and weight gain. Her own health and body didn’t even feel close to.
The top of her priority list, but it’s something that she strongly desired was to be healthy. It’s something she was always thinking about. It’s something she always wanted. And due to the very high work stress in her position, she felt disconnected from her body and she felt very helpless to the results she was creating with it. And she said one of the worst parts to her was that food wasn’t even feeling enjoyable to her, but she just constantly found herself filling up with it throughout the day.
So she came to the call with me knowing something had to change. She was completely ready to make a shift, but she did feel very discouraged and she wasn’t quite sure if it would be accessible to her because of the demands of her job and what felt like the biggest problem to her was time. So she believed that she would have to find extra time or sacrifice the time she had to lose the weight.
And to be honest, she really didn’t have the time to waste. And so what I told her, which is something I would likely tell so many of you, is that to lose this weight effectively and change your eating habits long term, you need a method of healthy eating and weight loss that doesn’t require more time and a method that gives you back more time in the process. So not only will it not take more time, you will gain access to more time.
Of course, she wholeheartedly agreed that time. If that’s something she could solve for, then it would make her results inevitable. So how Sarah created this 32 pound weight loss with the all of the circumstances that she had, the first thing we did was to heal her hustle and burnout. So I’m sure like so many of you and myself as well in the past, she was living her life in this all or nothing mode.
So she was either putting in maximum effort in her workplace or she was completely running on empty at home, which means that she would perform highly at work and feel like she couldn’t enjoy her time with her kids and her partner at home. So what we did is we taught her how to heal her perfectionism so she didn’t feel the need to put in the maximum effort in her tasks. She detached from her work hustle, which allowed her to reduce her emotional stress.
So something important to know is you cannot solve for your cravings or your emotional urges with food without solving for your stress levels. This has to come first. And so when she did that, her nervous system started healing. She started feeling like she had more energy, more logical brain space to focus on this problem. And then what she did was she began treating her body as the expert.
And all that means is she started listening to her body every single day. And rather than outsourcing her eating habits to a diet, she just started checking in with her body to determine what it needed. And because her stress levels were so much lower, she was more able to effortlessly access her natural hunger and fullness. So this allowed her to very simply start eating when she was hungry and stop eating when she was full. The last really big pillar for Sarah was that she just started making valuable food decisions very quickly.
So a big piece of her work was to teach her how to stop relying on more time to make eating decisions. So she learned how to make eating decisions without prep, without planning, without research, we took all of those things away that she’s used to relying on to make healthy eating choices and this is going to be the work for so many of you as well.
She taught herself that healthy eating decisions can be made in a moment because more time is not actually required to have control with food. So all of this really did allow her to become the best expert of her eating decisions, and of course it increased her confidence and self-trust as a result. So this is how in six months inside own your eating habit. She lost 32 pounds as a corporate lawyer without sacrificing that time and without sacrificing that energy.
And this is about learning to eat healthy and lose weight by working smarter, not harder just by doing this, it allowed her to stop the work hustle, heal her burnout and better her relationships to her husband and kids all because she did not wait for those circumstances of her life to be ideal. That was one of the first things she came to me with, is that she was fully aware that the circumstances of her life were not going to change.
She was going to have the demands of her job and have her role as a wife and as a mother. So she needed to learn how to create a manner of healthy eating and weight loss without needing any of those things to change. So that’s just to say you can eat healthy and lose weight now without the circumstances of your life being ideal. Life just goes and I can tell you, working with hundreds of women that the circumstances of your life will not be ideal and you cannot wait for them to be so before you decide to make these changes and come up with a way to make them that adapts to your life not the other way around, this is how you create permanent unshakeable results with your body because then we learn how to eat healthy under any conditions.
So to create your own version of the shift that Sarah had join own your eating Habits, it’s going to give you the support and the expertise you need, you can do so at cat rent us.com/coaching.
Another thing that Sarah is an example of is the theme of today’s episode. So she didn’t just change what she was eating, she changed who she was being as an eater and really as a woman in her own life. She did not focus on eating healthy. She really focused on being a healthy eater. And that’s really what I want to talk about today because for so many of us starting this work, this is a completely different way of looking at solving this problem.
And to start off, I really want you to know that micromanaging your eating habits, tracking food type, aing your results into place does not make you a healthy eater. And here’s why I want you to think about this. Healthy eaters do not put an effort to eat healthy. They just do. It feels natural to them. It’s as simple as brushing their teeth in the morning.
They don’t need to micromanage when they make eating decisions. They don’t need to type a protocols into place. They just know how to make eating decisions that serve them and it feels simple and accessible no matter what the circumstances are in their life. So if you have a very type A organized personality, I really want you to consider that micromanaging food into place will never make you a healthy eater. And I have a very type A brain too.
So this may sound like I’m the bearer of bad news, but I want you to let this sink in because you don’t wanna have to micromanage food into place for the rest of your life. You want to reserve your type A gifts for other areas of your life because you don’t want food and weight loss to be a problem. You are constantly solving for naturally healthy eaters do not put in effort to eat healthy.
They just do. And this result is what is possible for you. Now for these types of eaters, plans, protocols, regimens, tracking aren’t even necessary, right? Because eating decisions are simple and accessible and it just feels like who they are. I want you to picture what you think of when you think of a naturally healthy eater. So you can either think of your future self being this person or you can think of someone else who you may have come across.
They are not endlessly tracking, planning or doing protocols. And if you believe now that micromanaging food is necessary for you to eat healthy and lose weight, you are not being a healthy eater. You are thinking and behaving as someone who does not eat healthy with ease. So you’re thinking and behaving as someone who struggles to do those things. And if that is the concept you have of yourself, if that’s the identity that you are in, food and weight loss will always be a struggle because you will believe that micromanagement is necessary to have those results.
So I’m hoping you see that distinction here. It is so specific. This is why food was never the problem for you. It’s not about the eating choices, it’s not about making the right decisions. It’s the fact that you identify as someone who struggles with food in the first place. And this is compelling you to lean towards solutions that are micromanaging and really focused on forcing actions with food into place.
It’s all how you are perceiving yourself to make permanent changes. You will need to become a healthy eater, not just eat healthy, as in you will need to become someone different with food. And this can sound quite dramatic and intimidating if you have not done it before, but it is tactically just as simple as creating a food protocol. Just because we’re talking about thought work and identity work doesn’t mean it’s fluffy and unpredictable.
It means you need to learn how to take mindset work and learn tactically how to use it and how to create results with it, which is exactly what I do. And it’s exactly what we do in my practice. What will need to happen is you will need to begin thinking and making decisions as someone who does not struggle to eat healthy. So you will need to understand how a naturally healthy eater thinks, how that version of you thinks when you have the results and you need to start showing up as her now you need to start being her now.
So I want you to consider does that version of you who eats healthy with ease and has the results with your body that you want, does she micromanage food? Does she plan? Does she use protocols? Does she adhere to strict regimens? If not, then what does she do instead?
How is she different? I want you to really sit and consider this individually for yourself because it’s going to be different for every human in own your eating habits. There is not a rule book we give you for how it will look for you to show up as a naturally healthy eater. We find your way, we evolve you into that identity throughout our time together. So by the time you create naturally healthy eating habits and have the weight loss, it feels like you designed it yourself.
So consider, what does it look like for you to eat naturally healthy with ease and to have the results with your body that you want without micromanagement? How does your environment look different? So when you think about food, maybe it’s the foods you have in your house or it’s how you eat your meals, it’s the meal timing.
What does that look like? How is that different? When you identify as a naturally healthy eater and it’s just who you are, picture how any part of your environment looks different. A lot of you will be tempted to think that your environment looks perfect, meals always look beautiful. You’re creating these perfect meals from these recipes that you found on Pinterest. I want you to take it back when your brain goes to perfectionism land cuz this is a fantasy. This is actually not how naturally healthy eaters have the results they want.
They can have their life look like a total mess and still create the results that they want because it’s just not something that’s negotiable in their mind. So I want you to picture genuinely with the same circumstances of your life. Now, if you are being a naturally healthy eater, what is different about your environment?
It’s probably going to be very small things. Then I want you to observe your thinking when you are a naturally healthy eater, how does this version of you think differently? How does she think differently about food, about her body, about the time required to eat healthy and lose weight? A lot of you will be tempted once again to go to positivity that this version of you’ll be thinking positive thoughts about food, positive thoughts about their body.
Maybe you believe that you’ll be thinking, I love my body, my body’s amazing. No, when you just have the results with your body that you want, it’s no longer a problem in your mind and it takes up no brain space. You’re probably just thinking, I have a body and I know how to meet its needs. It’s gonna be very boring and very matter of fact. But that is what I want you to do here.
Really get yourself to the place as someone who just has these results without much effort and observe the way that that version of you thinks. It’s not going to be hyper positive because it’s just going to be who you are at that time. Then observe your actions. Observe what you do. How do you show up in the world when this is no longer a problem? How do you make eating decisions? Is a lot of prep or micromanagement required?
How do you show up with your body differently when you have the weight loss results you want? How do you move your body? How do you meet its needs? What do you do differently? I want you to really spend some time here. You could refer to this as a visualization exercise where you take yourself to a different version of yourself and I want you to come up with very specific answers.
Sometimes when we go into the realm of mindset work or visualization work, your brain will be tempted to think this is a little bit fluffy. It’s not really my vibe. This is the most tactical thing you can do to change the way you eat and lose weight permanently. So get comfortable doing this work where you see that it is necessary to change the way you think and to go deeper and evaluate who you will need to be to have this result. And I really want you to get to know her.
Get to know this version of yourself because this is not a how problem. And I want to declare that very strongly for all of you here. If you are listening to this podcast, it is highly likely that you don’t need any more house when it comes to food or body. You do not need another meal plan or protocol in your life.
You do not need to indulge in more nutritional research. You do not need any more how-tos with food. You have all of the knowledge you will ever need there and now it is time for you to become someone different with food. So you actually take action because what’s happening, if you’re focused on searching for all of the food, how-tos is you are behaving as someone who struggles with this and someone who believes they struggle with food and body doesn’t create the results they want because they’re seeing themselves as less than.
It’s a very disempowering place for us to be in. I want you to step into the mindset as a woman who knows exactly what to do to lose weight and eat healthy and to sees herself as her own best expert. This is not a how problem for you. This is a who problem.
This is about you stepping from struggle energy into leadership energy to solve this problem. Because the truth is you really don’t create permanent weight loss by focusing on what you eat that creates short-term weight loss. We’ve all done that , right? Permanent weight loss is focused on who you’re being with food when you become someone who eats healthy and that is your identity. The how with food takes care of itself because you have all of the information you will ever need there.
This is what makes your results inevitable. And this is 100% available to you now. It just requires a different approach that requires you to create the eating habits you want from within and from changing who you are, rather than outsourcing the how. Two things outside of you. Alright my friends, I hope you have a fabulous rest of your week and I will talk to you next week.

 

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Kat Rentas, Healthy Eating Coach

Hey there! I'm Kat Rentas. I’m a certified life and health coach for women who believes that eating healthy should feel simple and sustainable. I teach hundreds of high-performing women to change their eating habits without the overwhelm. Want to change your eating habits in a way that is aligned with your needs, preferences, and goals? You’re in the right placeYou can read my full story here.