THE FEMINIST WELL-BEING PODCAST

It’s Beyond the Food Podcast

Join well-being expert Stephanie Dodier as she guides on how to feel damn good by reshaping your mind instead of your body. Let’s go beyond the food and fight diet culture & patriarchy by living powerfully. Through solo episodes and special guest interviews, you’ll walk away with ressources to embrace your well-being & health in a way that will expand your freedom and power. 

Subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.

THE WELL-BEING FEMINIST PODCAST

It’s Beyond the Food Podcast

Join well-being expert Stephanie Dodier as she guides on how to feel damn good by reshaping your mind instead of your body. Let’s go beyond the food and fight diet culture & patriarchy by living powerfully. Through solo episodes and special guest interviews, you’ll walk away with ressources to embrace your well-being & health in a way that will expand your freedom and power. 

Subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.

Our Most Recent Episodes

354-Overcoming Resistance To Do What You Want To Do

354-Overcoming Resistance To Do What You Want To Do

Overcoming resistance

LISTEN ON ITUNES PODCAST

LISTEN ON GOOGLE PODCAST

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

Overcoming resistance 

Overcoming resistance to do what you want to do is where people get themselves stuck. The number 1 mistake people make is resisting the resistance. 

In this episode, I’m going to walk you through another approach to overcoming the resistance.

Powerful questions to ask yourself to discover your relationship to resistance

  • What if the resistance was to deliver an important message straight from your intuition? 
  • What if partnering with the resistance was the most easeful way for it to release the resistance and move forward with your transformation/goal?
  • What if the process of partnering with your resistance created more trust within yourself?

What you’ll learn listening to this episode on Overcoming resistance:

  • 6 steps to overcoming resistance in your transformation
  • Why fighting resistance is getting your stuck
  • Self-leadership approach to transformation
  • Why creating safety for resistance is the path to overcoming resistance

Mentioned in the show: 

Health Habits Checklist

Quiz: Is It You or Your Diet?

Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

Episode Transcript:

Going Beyond The Food Ep354-Overcoming Resistance To Do What You Want To Do

This is episode 354 of The Beyond the Food Show, and today, if you are struggling with resisting doing what you need to do to get what you want, this episode is for you. I’m gonna show you and teach you a way of approaching resistance that’s gonna allow you to melt the resistance and do the damn thing.

Ready? Stay tuned.

Hey, my sister. Welcome back to the podcast. The title of this episode is Overcoming the Resistance to Do What You Wanna Do. And I was inspired to share this podcast with you because I have figure it out, a way to overcome my own resistance to a particular project that I have in my business, and it’s about to come to life. So I successfully overcame a resistance that was present for close to one and a half year. And a lot of the work that I do inside of Undiet Your Life or Undiet Your Coaching is learning from my own journey, application with client, seeing what work and what doesn’t work, and coming up with a body of work, coming up with the methodology that can then be applied to masses.

So this particular project in my business has been a learning ground for me for one and a half. I am not gonna reveal to you what this project is and it’s about, because that is not the purpose of this episode. But if you’re listening, live to the podcast, know that within the next two weeks, so this podcast is being released on April the 13th, know that by April the 23rd, this project will be public.

With that being said, I’m gonna leave the project behind for the rest of the podcast and I’m gonna talk about resistance. And I wanna explain to you how I experience resistance. I have this desire to do a thing, and I know it’s for the highest good of me and the highest good of my environment and the people around me. So I want you to think about that in the application and into your own life that it is to, let’s imagine you are a woman who has children, has a child, and you know that you want to break the intergenerational trauma of dieting that your mom passed on to you and you don’t wanna pass it on to your children. You know that you need to do your personal work un dieting your life, learning to eat in a peaceful way, making peace with your body, learning to accept yourself, detox your language and your family in your house, how you speak to yourself to really peel di culture from you. You know that’s right for you. You know you’re gonna live a better life, a bigger life and a bolder life if you do that, and you know it’s going to positively impact your children. I want you to think about that it is you that I’m describing right now, or perhaps that’s not you, but I want you to think of this, one of this big project in your life that you know can be similar to that and have positive impact for you and for people around you and you know it’s the right thing to do, but you’re resisting. You’re resisting. You perhaps describe yourself being stuck. You know it’s the right thing to do, but you just can’t bring yourself to do it.

How do we overcome that resistance? And that resistance is present very often for me inside of Undiet Your Life for people prior to joining Ondi Your life. They have something that happened in their life, becoming a mother, being diagnosed with a health condition, wanting to move forward in their career, wanting to liberate themselves so they can move and leave a relationship, like there’s a trigger in their life. In your life, your listener, and you know that joining my program is the right solution for you. It’s gonna enable you to achieve this big thing, but you just can’t bring yourself to press the buy button.

So what can you do? I’m gonna walk you through six steps for you to overcome that kind of resistance and bring yourself to a place of just doing the damn thing. And the number one step or the number one place where you wanna start is thinking about your relationship to yourself. And I really want you to think about you leading yourself. Self leadership. How are you leading yourself in approaching this transformation, this goal you want to create in your life? Are you leading yourself in this journey? And if you are, how are you meeting the resistance that you’re experiencing? Are you fighting that resistance? Are you the type of leader who gets angry at the resistance at the problem? Are you victim of the resistance? Are you saying, why is this happening to me? Like, why, why is only happening to me and all these other people can do it? Like, are you in the victim mindset? Are you leading yourself at this place in your transformation as a victim of? Are you leading yourself with compassion? Are you leading yourself with acceptance of the resistance as one of the many part of the journey towards your goal? Are you creating safety for that part of you who is resisting doing what’s best for you.

And most often we don’t. Most often we don’t because of how we have learned to lead ourselves through our years being oppressed by DI culture. For many of us, our self-leadership or the way we approach our own transformation is through blaming. It’s through pressure, it’s through fighting. It’s through being an oppressor to ourselves, beating ourselves up like we created this and what’s wrong with me? And like, depriving yourself of goodness in your life because you’re resisting, right? It’s a really, it’s a punitive kind of relationship, right? Think about the old school way of parenting, right? You wanted your child to behave in this way and you imply that punishment was needed in order to create the behavior in the child. That’s what DI culture does to us, right? It punish us, it deprives us until we behave in the way that DI culture says we need to behave in order to get the infinite 2% or 5% result that it promises. For many of us, we’ve been in that mindset since our teens, and that’s the only way we know to relate to ourselves. But when it comes the time to overcome the resistance to do what’s right for us in a non-punitive way, we just don’t know how to engage with resistance.

My invitation for you is to lean in to the resistance, is to meet the resistance you’re experiencing with compassion, with understanding. Oh, it makes total sense that I would be resisting accepting my body because I was, for 20 years since my mid-teens, socialize to hate my body. So now I’m having to do the opposite of what I’ve done my whole life. For sure, it’s gonna be hard. I’m gonna be resisting thinking in this new way.

So lead yourself in a compassionate and safe way. Be the leader you want to experience. You wanna experience safe leadership, compassionate leadership. Lead yourself in that way. And step number two, don’t forget that creating safety as a leader is creating safety for the thoughts you’re having about the resistance, but it’s also creating safety in your body. It’s actually embodying the safety, not just telling yourself, oh, it’s totally normal that I’m experiencing that resistance, but also bringing it to real life into your body by allowing the resistance to be there, to make friend with that resistance. Invest time in being with the resistance in this new way. Invest resources, whatever they are, money, time, mental space, emotional space, to make the resistance you’re experiencing safe for you. Once you’ve embodied, when you’ve led yourself to embody safety, both in the way you’re thinking about the resistance you’re experiencing and into your body, then move into asking yourself consent.

I know this is gonna blow your mind, probably. We live in a society right now, which is very focused on consent, right? Externally, organization, asking their client consent or professional, asking their clients consent. Like we live in a consensual phase of our society, but what we often forget, is that we need to ask ourselves consent in our own relationship to ourself. Remember, you are the leader of your own transformation. Do you ask yourself consent? Do I want to do this? Do you give yourself the option of saying no, or do you operate from I have to. I have to, I have to. I’ll go back to this example of mom, the mother of a child who wants to break up the intergenerational trauma of DI culture. Does she walk into the project of accepting herself and undying her life with I have to and I have to do it fast and it has to happen now or she creates safety for what she is right now and the fact she hates her body and she gives herself the time to sit with what she’s realized that Dia culture is a thing, that she hates her body and it’s just a result of socialization, and then she takes time to ask herself, do I wanna do this work? Do I want to invest time to read new information? Do I want to invest time to show up to being coached, like literally to take an hour off my schedule and have somebody help me understand my brain? Am I ready to do this work? Do I want to do this work? And am I willing to make the arrangement in order for me to do this work?

So asking ourselves consent, and whatever the answer is, allow it to be. And allow the next resistance to move in, right? Perhaps you are asking yourself consent, you’re like, yes, I want to do this. But then it comes to scheduling it into your calendar, and now you hit the new level of resistance, right? You’re looking at your calendar, you’re like, no, I don’t have time for this. It’s impossible. I’m gonna have to sleep less. And then your brain goes back to the old way of leading yourself again, right. These layers of resistance are gonna be throughout your entire creation of your goal, the pursuit of your goal, of your transformation. Once you’ve overcome the first, it’s like peeling, I always say that to my students, like appealing an onion. You gonna peel one layer and another layer will appear.

Allow. Allowance is the path. Allowance is the path for you to overcome the resistance, no matter which layer it is. Allow it to be there and need it. Need that new layer of resistance with compassion and neutrality. And then move into that next layer with the same place. Allow it to be needed with compassion and create safety, and then ask yourself, okay, do I want to say no to certain things on my calendar in order for me to make time and invest my time in becoming and learning and practicing being someone who accepts her body? Do I want to do that? Again, consent. With every layer of the onion, we repeat the same thing. We then ask consensual consent, and then we take the action from that place and we make room in our calendar. We stop doing certain things to do the new things are gonna lead us to become this new version of ourselves.

I’m gonna leave you with three powerful question to ask yourself. You’re not familiar with powerful question, these are a question we coach and teach that within all of my program to help you think, help you create a new way of thinking for the goal you’re going to achieve or for becoming the version of yourself who has the goal, the transformation completed, and practicing thinking like this version of yourself who has transformed herself or has achiever goal. So powerful thinking is a training ground for you to train your brain to think differently in order for you to achieve your transformation and overcome the resistance.

So I’m gonna give you these questions. You may wanna write them down. I’m gonna put them also, as I’m thinking about that, I’m gonna put them in the show note, if you want to copy and paste them. I have them in a Google Doc here, so I’m gonna drop them quickly in the show note. You can go to stephanie 3 54, which is the number of the episode.

Okay, number one question is, what if the resistance I’m experiencing wasn’t there to prove me wrong, but instead to deliver an important message straight from my intuition, wisdom or God, depending on your belief system. So if you’re a God person, replaced the word intuition from God, my innate wisdom, my intuition. It’s like, what if the resistance I’m experiencing right now was there to deliver an important message from my intuition?

Question number two. What if partnering with my resistance was actually the most useful way for this resistance to be release, to be melted away. Explore that. Ask your brain that question, like put yourself in front of a blank piece of paper. Just put your pen, write the question at the top of that journal Norlan entry and ask yourself that question until your brain starts thinking of an answer, and then just start writing.

Third question. What if the process of doing that, of accepting, leaning into my resistance created more trust within myself? What if the action of leaning into my resistance actually allowed me to create more trust within myself? What if that was the gateway of trusting yourself? And just as a side note, trust is the baseline of un dieting your life. So if you’re listening to this podcast because that’s your transformational goal on diet your life, know that the entire journey of accepting your body, of changing the way you relate to health and weight and food is going to be to learn to trust yourself in each one of those circumstance. Learn to trust yourself with food, which your health, with your body, with yourself, with your thinking, with your emotion, because that’s what oppressive system, a K a di culture, patriarchy, steals from us is the ability to trust ourselves. So we have to rebuild this ability to trust ourselves. So what if learning to lead yourself with compassion and safety towards the resistance you’re experiencing was just another way for you to learn to trust yourself?

I hope this helps you approach the resistance in your particular life. I know for me, creating this way of approaching resistance specifically for my community, allowed me to bring a project that has been on my mind for, as I mentioned, a year and a half in the most compassionate, powerful way. And I know that because I approach the resistance in that safe, loving way. What I’m creating when I’m about to put out in the world is going to be safe and powerful and how you are going to experience it if you join me in this new project that I’m creating.

As always, if you have any question, you can submit that at [email protected]. I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next podcast.

 

Going Beyond The Food Ep354-Overcoming Resistance To Do What You Want To Do

This is episode 354 of The Beyond the Food Show, and today, if you are struggling with resisting doing what you need to do to get what you want, this episode is for you. I’m gonna show you and teach you a way of approaching resistance that’s gonna allow you to melt the resistance and do the damn thing.

Ready? Stay tuned.

Hey, my sister. Welcome back to the podcast. The title of this episode is Overcoming the Resistance to Do What You Wanna Do. And I was inspired to share this podcast with you because I have figure it out, a way to overcome my own resistance to a particular project that I have in my business, and it’s about to come to life. So I successfully overcame a resistance that was present for close to one and a half year. And a lot of the work that I do inside of Undiet Your Life or Undiet Your Coaching is learning from my own journey, application with client, seeing what work and what doesn’t work, and coming up with a body of work, coming up with the methodology that can then be applied to masses.

So this particular project in my business has been a learning ground for me for one and a half. I am not gonna reveal to you what this project is and it’s about, because that is not the purpose of this episode. But if you’re listening, live to the podcast, know that within the next two weeks, so this podcast is being released on April the 13th, know that by April the 23rd, this project will be public.

With that being said, I’m gonna leave the project behind for the rest of the podcast and I’m gonna talk about resistance. And I wanna explain to you how I experience resistance. I have this desire to do a thing, and I know it’s for the highest good of me and the highest good of my environment and the people around me. So I want you to think about that in the application and into your own life that it is to, let’s imagine you are a woman who has children, has a child, and you know that you want to break the intergenerational trauma of dieting that your mom passed on to you and you don’t wanna pass it on to your children. You know that you need to do your personal work un dieting your life, learning to eat in a peaceful way, making peace with your body, learning to accept yourself, detox your language and your family in your house, how you speak to yourself to really peel di culture from you. You know that’s right for you. You know you’re gonna live a better life, a bigger life and a bolder life if you do that, and you know it’s going to positively impact your children. I want you to think about that it is you that I’m describing right now, or perhaps that’s not you, but I want you to think of this, one of this big project in your life that you know can be similar to that and have positive impact for you and for people around you and you know it’s the right thing to do, but you’re resisting. You’re resisting. You perhaps describe yourself being stuck. You know it’s the right thing to do, but you just can’t bring yourself to do it.

How do we overcome that resistance? And that resistance is present very often for me inside of Undiet Your Life for people prior to joining Ondi Your life. They have something that happened in their life, becoming a mother, being diagnosed with a health condition, wanting to move forward in their career, wanting to liberate themselves so they can move and leave a relationship, like there’s a trigger in their life. In your life, your listener, and you know that joining my program is the right solution for you. It’s gonna enable you to achieve this big thing, but you just can’t bring yourself to press the buy button.

So what can you do? I’m gonna walk you through six steps for you to overcome that kind of resistance and bring yourself to a place of just doing the damn thing. And the number one step or the number one place where you wanna start is thinking about your relationship to yourself. And I really want you to think about you leading yourself. Self leadership. How are you leading yourself in approaching this transformation, this goal you want to create in your life? Are you leading yourself in this journey? And if you are, how are you meeting the resistance that you’re experiencing? Are you fighting that resistance? Are you the type of leader who gets angry at the resistance at the problem? Are you victim of the resistance? Are you saying, why is this happening to me? Like, why, why is only happening to me and all these other people can do it? Like, are you in the victim mindset? Are you leading yourself at this place in your transformation as a victim of? Are you leading yourself with compassion? Are you leading yourself with acceptance of the resistance as one of the many part of the journey towards your goal? Are you creating safety for that part of you who is resisting doing what’s best for you.

And most often we don’t. Most often we don’t because of how we have learned to lead ourselves through our years being oppressed by DI culture. For many of us, our self-leadership or the way we approach our own transformation is through blaming. It’s through pressure, it’s through fighting. It’s through being an oppressor to ourselves, beating ourselves up like we created this and what’s wrong with me? And like, depriving yourself of goodness in your life because you’re resisting, right? It’s a really, it’s a punitive kind of relationship, right? Think about the old school way of parenting, right? You wanted your child to behave in this way and you imply that punishment was needed in order to create the behavior in the child. That’s what DI culture does to us, right? It punish us, it deprives us until we behave in the way that DI culture says we need to behave in order to get the infinite 2% or 5% result that it promises. For many of us, we’ve been in that mindset since our teens, and that’s the only way we know to relate to ourselves. But when it comes the time to overcome the resistance to do what’s right for us in a non-punitive way, we just don’t know how to engage with resistance.

My invitation for you is to lean in to the resistance, is to meet the resistance you’re experiencing with compassion, with understanding. Oh, it makes total sense that I would be resisting accepting my body because I was, for 20 years since my mid-teens, socialize to hate my body. So now I’m having to do the opposite of what I’ve done my whole life. For sure, it’s gonna be hard. I’m gonna be resisting thinking in this new way.

So lead yourself in a compassionate and safe way. Be the leader you want to experience. You wanna experience safe leadership, compassionate leadership. Lead yourself in that way. And step number two, don’t forget that creating safety as a leader is creating safety for the thoughts you’re having about the resistance, but it’s also creating safety in your body. It’s actually embodying the safety, not just telling yourself, oh, it’s totally normal that I’m experiencing that resistance, but also bringing it to real life into your body by allowing the resistance to be there, to make friend with that resistance. Invest time in being with the resistance in this new way. Invest resources, whatever they are, money, time, mental space, emotional space, to make the resistance you’re experiencing safe for you. Once you’ve embodied, when you’ve led yourself to embody safety, both in the way you’re thinking about the resistance you’re experiencing and into your body, then move into asking yourself consent.

I know this is gonna blow your mind, probably. We live in a society right now, which is very focused on consent, right? Externally, organization, asking their client consent or professional, asking their clients consent. Like we live in a consensual phase of our society, but what we often forget, is that we need to ask ourselves consent in our own relationship to ourself. Remember, you are the leader of your own transformation. Do you ask yourself consent? Do I want to do this? Do you give yourself the option of saying no, or do you operate from I have to. I have to, I have to. I’ll go back to this example of mom, the mother of a child who wants to break up the intergenerational trauma of DI culture. Does she walk into the project of accepting herself and undying her life with I have to and I have to do it fast and it has to happen now or she creates safety for what she is right now and the fact she hates her body and she gives herself the time to sit with what she’s realized that Dia culture is a thing, that she hates her body and it’s just a result of socialization, and then she takes time to ask herself, do I wanna do this work? Do I want to invest time to read new information? Do I want to invest time to show up to being coached, like literally to take an hour off my schedule and have somebody help me understand my brain? Am I ready to do this work? Do I want to do this work? And am I willing to make the arrangement in order for me to do this work?

So asking ourselves consent, and whatever the answer is, allow it to be. And allow the next resistance to move in, right? Perhaps you are asking yourself consent, you’re like, yes, I want to do this. But then it comes to scheduling it into your calendar, and now you hit the new level of resistance, right? You’re looking at your calendar, you’re like, no, I don’t have time for this. It’s impossible. I’m gonna have to sleep less. And then your brain goes back to the old way of leading yourself again, right. These layers of resistance are gonna be throughout your entire creation of your goal, the pursuit of your goal, of your transformation. Once you’ve overcome the first, it’s like peeling, I always say that to my students, like appealing an onion. You gonna peel one layer and another layer will appear.

Allow. Allowance is the path. Allowance is the path for you to overcome the resistance, no matter which layer it is. Allow it to be there and need it. Need that new layer of resistance with compassion and neutrality. And then move into that next layer with the same place. Allow it to be needed with compassion and create safety, and then ask yourself, okay, do I want to say no to certain things on my calendar in order for me to make time and invest my time in becoming and learning and practicing being someone who accepts her body? Do I want to do that? Again, consent. With every layer of the onion, we repeat the same thing. We then ask consensual consent, and then we take the action from that place and we make room in our calendar. We stop doing certain things to do the new things are gonna lead us to become this new version of ourselves.

I’m gonna leave you with three powerful question to ask yourself. You’re not familiar with powerful question, these are a question we coach and teach that within all of my program to help you think, help you create a new way of thinking for the goal you’re going to achieve or for becoming the version of yourself who has the goal, the transformation completed, and practicing thinking like this version of yourself who has transformed herself or has achiever goal. So powerful thinking is a training ground for you to train your brain to think differently in order for you to achieve your transformation and overcome the resistance.

So I’m gonna give you these questions. You may wanna write them down. I’m gonna put them also, as I’m thinking about that, I’m gonna put them in the show note, if you want to copy and paste them. I have them in a Google Doc here, so I’m gonna drop them quickly in the show note. You can go to stephanie 3 54, which is the number of the episode.

Okay, number one question is, what if the resistance I’m experiencing wasn’t there to prove me wrong, but instead to deliver an important message straight from my intuition, wisdom or God, depending on your belief system. So if you’re a God person, replaced the word intuition from God, my innate wisdom, my intuition. It’s like, what if the resistance I’m experiencing right now was there to deliver an important message from my intuition?

Question number two. What if partnering with my resistance was actually the most useful way for this resistance to be release, to be melted away. Explore that. Ask your brain that question, like put yourself in front of a blank piece of paper. Just put your pen, write the question at the top of that journal Norlan entry and ask yourself that question until your brain starts thinking of an answer, and then just start writing.

Third question. What if the process of doing that, of accepting, leaning into my resistance created more trust within myself? What if the action of leaning into my resistance actually allowed me to create more trust within myself? What if that was the gateway of trusting yourself? And just as a side note, trust is the baseline of un dieting your life. So if you’re listening to this podcast because that’s your transformational goal on diet your life, know that the entire journey of accepting your body, of changing the way you relate to health and weight and food is going to be to learn to trust yourself in each one of those circumstance. Learn to trust yourself with food, which your health, with your body, with yourself, with your thinking, with your emotion, because that’s what oppressive system, a K a di culture, patriarchy, steals from us is the ability to trust ourselves. So we have to rebuild this ability to trust ourselves. So what if learning to lead yourself with compassion and safety towards the resistance you’re experiencing was just another way for you to learn to trust yourself?

I hope this helps you approach the resistance in your particular life. I know for me, creating this way of approaching resistance specifically for my community, allowed me to bring a project that has been on my mind for, as I mentioned, a year and a half in the most compassionate, powerful way. And I know that because I approach the resistance in that safe, loving way. What I’m creating when I’m about to put out in the world is going to be safe and powerful and how you are going to experience it if you join me in this new project that I’m creating.

As always, if you have any question, you can submit that at [email protected]. I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next podcast.

 

 

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353-Listener Q&A Vol.5: Good Fear versus Bad Fear & How to Distinguish What My Body Needs

353-Listener Q&A Vol.5: Good Fear versus Bad Fear & How to Distinguish What My Body Needs

Listener Q&A Vol.5

ITUNES PODCAST

GOOGLE PODCAST

SPOTIFY

This is another edition of Listener Q&A Vol. 5.

Today I answer two questions:

  1. How do I discern when it’s good fear vs bad fear?
  2. How do I distinguish my body needs if all food fits?

What you’ll learn listening to this episode on Listener Q&A Vol.5:

  • Why there is no such thing as good or bad fear.
  • We will talk about interoception awareness: our ability to feel what our body needs
  • Gentle nutrition tenants that you should be aware of

Mentioned in this show Listener Q&A Vol.5:

Health Habits Checklist

Quiz: Is It You or Your Diet?

Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

Episode Transcript:

GBTF353-Listener Q&A Vol.5: Good Fear versus Bad Fear & How to Distinguish What My Body Needs

===

This is episode 353 of the Beyond the Food Show, and today we are back with a Q and a volume five from our listener, and we’re gonna answer the question, is there good fear and bad fear, and how to discern what my body needs? You ready? Stay tuned.

Hello my sisters. I hope you’re doing well today. We’re gonna talk or answer two of your question and one’s gonna be really about coaching in the purest form, which is about good fear and bad fear and is there a distinction between the two, and if so, how to recognize it? And this is really towards working towards a, whatever the goal is, how do we distinguish how to make decision based on. And the second question really gonna be about how to use gentle nutrition or even help promoting habit in alignment to what our body wants.

So I’m gonna get started with the very first question, which is about. And this is something that comes very often in the context of a diet your life because we teach about goal. We teach about goal first in the context of you setting the goal to become body neutral, to create confidence, and to peace with food and self-trust with food, but very quickly, people starts to use this principle or the way we teach you how to approach food, body, and health in other area of their life. And one of the things that we teach is to not let yourself be stop in your pursuit of your goal because of fear. And that our emotion, fear in this case, is simply a piece of information.

I want you to think of your emotion as a radar screen. If you’ve ever seen movies about air control or seen a radar screen from air control, you will see its global dots on the screen, and then there’s a scanner that goes around the screen, there’s a scanner that scan a specific area of the air control for this particular air controller, and that detects where the planes are on the screen of the air controller. Your emotion, I want you to think about your emotion, as that radar screen. Emotion are not who you are and this is a big misunderstanding. We think we are our emotion. Like I’m scared, I feel fear, this means I’m scared. And a great example, another great example of that is stress, right? People will often say, I am stressed. They take the identity of the emotion of stress, instead of saying, I feel stress, I feel the emotion of stress.

So when you think about fear, I want you to think about it that way as well. You are not scared, you feel the emotion of fear. You on your radar screen right now, you are detecting that you are experiencing the emotion of fear. You are not fear, you are not scared, you are experiencing fear. Now, the powerful question to ask yourself is why? Why am I experiencing the emotion of fear right now? And the answer is, at the highest level, your thoughts. The thoughts that are floating in your brain, conscious or unconscious, create the fear you are feeling in your body that you are experiencing, that your radar is detecting. So your emotion is only a signal to bring to your attention the thoughts your thinking.

I want you to really start thinking about your emotion in that way as a tool, the same way I teach you in body neutral neutrality that your body is a tool to experience life. Everything that happens in your body is a tool to experience your life. Well, guess where your emotion happens. It happen in your body. Your emotion are simply sensation traveling through your central nervous system in your body in the vehicle you were given to experience life. That’s all. So it’s a piece of information. It’s a signal for you to look at your thoughts. If you can bring yourself to that place and you can grab a pen and a piece of paper and start dumping, we call that a thought download, start dumping all of your thoughts on the piece of paper and examine them, oh, look at that. I’m thinking, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, no wonder why I feel fear, right? I’ll give you an example in the context of movement, right? You could have the thought, over the last 10 years, I spent thousands of dollars paying gym membership and I never used them. Or it’s the sixth time now that I’m paying a gym membership, that I’ve paid a gym membership and ended up using it only for one month. No wonder why you feel afraid now of committing for the seventh time at your gym membership. Because you’re all, you’re thinking about because of the human negative bias that this last seven time that you went through the pattern of committing to a gym membership, you didn’t use it. You quote unquote wasted it.

So now you’re relating to this new experience of committing to moving your body in the gym as if it was one of the other sixth time before. No wonder why you feel fear. Oh, okay, that’s why I feel fear. It’s not a fact that it’s gonna happen again. It’s just that my brain is bringing attention to all the times that I felted before. Okay, cool. And I guarantee you, once you can pinpoint the thoughts that create the fear, the fear will dissipate by quote unquote magic. Why? Because it has achieved its purpose.

All the reason why we feel emotion is to bring attention to our thoughts and our beliefs, and when that purpose has been fulfilled, it breaks the wave, the emotion are quote unquote release. The way to release your emotion is by bringing attention to what creates the emotion and then deciding, am I gonna continue to think this way? Is it true that, these are the question you need to ask yourself as you put those thoughts on paper, do I wanna continue to think, do I want to continue to this be my opinion. You have a choice. You have the authority to think what the freak you want to think. Now that’s, it takes practice to own your authority over your thoughts and beliefs cuz you’ve been conditioned to not live in that space of authority over your own thoughts and belief. You’ve been conditioned to adopt society’s belief and adopt other people’s belief system and not have your own. So it’s a practice.

So is there a good fear and a bad fear? No. There’s no good fear and bad fear. There’s the sensation of fear in your body that you call fear and there is a thought that creates that fear. And then the thought in itself is not good or bad, it’s just you have to make a decision if you’re gonna continue to think that thought or not. So that was our first question. Interesting, right? I bet youyou didn’t expect me to go there.

Let’s go to a second question.

I am almost complete with the intuitive eating process. This is actually one of our student who submitted a question in this podcast. So she says, I’ve almost completed peaceful. Peaceful is our intuitive eating module with an UN diet Your life. And she says, wow, what a game changer. My question is about nutrition science. I know there’s no good or bad food, and I’m working on changing my perspective on healthy and unhealthy food. But then, if I don’t have the reliance of science to tell me what is good or bad, or healthy or unhealthy, how do I distinguish what my particular body needs? Thank you.

This is a really good question and that brings us to the world of gentle nutrition. And I wanna point out to all of you listening to this is that gentle nutrition is one of the step of becoming an intuitive eater, and it’s the very last one. So I’m very happy that this student of mine, also listener of the podcast, is going through the process that we’ve outlined inside of on dietary life to become an intuitive eater. She’s not jumping the gun to go to the module on gentle nutrition. So, kudos to you. And if you’re doing intuitive eating on your own, be sure to not jump the gun to gentle nutrition because if a healthy relationship to food is not in place, it is almost impossible to pursue a gentle nutrition, especially if you’ve been a chronic dieter and any form of nutrition advice has been under the guidance of restrictions.

So, how do you know what is good for you, what your body needs?

The number one guidance I can give you is how you feel when you eat a certain food. Now I’m simplifying this in the sense that I’m asking you to pay attention how you feel when you finish eating, how you feel an hour after, how you feel, four hours after, how you feel until the next meal, acknowledging fully that the way your body digests food is much longer than a four to six hour window.Digestion of most food takes, in most cases, between 24 and 36 hours.

So you can’t really say, how I feel right now is the result of the last thing that I eat, because it could actually be the meal you had 24 hour prior. However, typically, when your body doesn’t like a certain food, it will let you know very quickly. It will be very rapid in what your body will tell you. It’s either going to be through mental signal like fogginess and not being able to concentrate. It could be through your overall energy level. It could be directly in your digestion. It could be in heartburns, like what happens in the stomach, what happens in the colon or the lower digestive system. It could be very quickly. So I want you to look at how you feel overall is an indicator if certain foods are good for you or not.

Now, I also want you to be aware that eating to support your body is a lots, L O T S capital Bolded letter simpler than you think. I’m saying that fully recognizing that all of us have been indoctrinated to believe that nutrition is complicated and it’s hard. Okay? Because there’s profession like mine, I mean, there’s entire degrees in your university dedicated to nutrition, so it must mean it’s complicated to nourish ourselves for what our body. That is not true. Most bodies have a large resiliency in front of food and a large capacity to eat a lots of different food and thrive on a wide variety of foods.

Now that being said, if you have a particular health condition, you have a diagnoses that require management of your nutrition, what I just said probably don’t apply to you. This is when you wanna go seek the guidance of the very smart people who studied complex nutrition advice for medical condition in university. That’s a small percentage of the population. I don’t know, call it 10% of the population who needs specific, complicated advice. This is when you pay someone who specialize in the field of nutrition to give you specific advice. But if you are part of the general population, have a general status, you can thrive on very simple tactic towards nutrition.

The way that we teach nutrition within on diet to your life, there’s only three tenant of nutrition and that’s how intuitive eating nutritionists teach nutrition, okay. Now fully understanding that you’re not part of that small percentage of people who need specific nutrition advice, your general population, here’s three gentle nutrition tenant for you.

Number one, having enough food, eating enough food, like we gotta hit this baseline. The vast majority of the women that have had the honor to work with over the years don’t eat enough food. For a very simple reason, they’ve been dieting for a long time and they have got themselves into a habit of thinking this is just as much as they should eat. So very often the first step towards eating what your body needs is eating enough food, eating against your hunger and then satisfaction. And this is the key to honor what your body needs, is understanding what makes you feel satisfied. Because what makes you feel satisfied is very often aligned to what your body needs. These cravings that we have are often what our body needs. And now let’s not get cut up into like intuitive eating gives you craving for chocolate and chips and pizza crap, this is just demonizing intuitive eating by diet culture. Once you pass through the healing of your relationship to food, it is not true that you crave pizza and chips and chocolate all the time. That is how DIA culture scares you off of intuitive eating. Once you get past the pendulum swing and all of that, you can lean in to what you are craving that makes you feel satisfied as a way of determining what your body needs. So we’ve got eating enough food, eating what makes us feel satisfied, and then balance.

Balance is a tenant of gentle nutrition, not perfect balance. So here’s how simple nutrition is, truly. There’s three macronutrients, carbohydrate, protein, and fats. That’s it. Inside of Gentle Nutrition, we give you like a PDF with what is a protein and what is a fat, and what is a carbohydrate. But I think many of you know what that is. Have a balance of it. At every meal, try to hit the tree. Have a carbohydrate, have a protein, and a little bit of fat. That’s it. And it’s not every single meal. That’s the other thing, your brain will try to get you to a place where you have to hit perfection all the time. That is not true. You don’t need to be perfect at every meal. Most of the time try to hit balance.

And then the last is no rules. There is no rules even when you get the gentle nutrition. People are often as a spirit to get to like gentle nutrition. Are you ready for gentle nutrition? We have a, we have a little quiz to get people like, are you ready for that? And then people are like, I wanna be ready for it, because they want the safety of getting rules again. There won’t be any rules. You have to learn to trust yourself at the deepest level so you can live your nutrition life the rest of your life without rules and without perfection. That would be my advice to determine what your body needs.

I hope these two listener question were helpful to you. If you are listening to this and you wanna submit a question, email [email protected] and it’ll be my pleasure to take 10 or 15 minutes to answer your question. And until then, I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

 

Episode 353- Listener Q&A Vol.5: Good Fear versus Bad Fear & How to Distinguish What My Body Needs

This is episode 353 of the Beyond the Food Show, and today we are back with a Q&A Listener Vol. 5, and we’re gonna answer the question, is there good fear and bad fear, and how to discern what my body needs? You ready? Stay tuned.

Hello my sisters. I hope you’re doing well today. We’re gonna talk or answer two of your question and one’s gonna be really about coaching in the purest form, which is about good fear and bad fear and is there a distinction between the two, and if so, how to recognize it? And this is really towards working towards a, whatever the goal is, how do we distinguish how to make decision based on. And the second question really gonna be about how to use gentle nutrition or even help promoting habit in alignment to what our body wants.

Listener Q&A Vol.5: Good Fear versus Bad Fear

So I’m gonna get started with the very first question, which is about. And this is something that comes very often in the context of a diet your life because we teach about goal. We teach about goal first in the context of you setting the goal to become body neutral, to create confidence, and to peace with food and self-trust with food, but very quickly, people starts to use this principle or the way we teach you how to approach food, body, and health in other area of their life. And one of the things that we teach is to not let yourself be stop in your pursuit of your goal because of fear. And that our emotion, fear in this case, is simply a piece of information.

I want you to think of your emotion as a radar screen. If you’ve ever seen movies about air control or seen a radar screen from air control, you will see its global dots on the screen, and then there’s a scanner that goes around the screen, there’s a scanner that scan a specific area of the air control for this particular air controller, and that detects where the planes are on the screen of the air controller. Your emotion, I want you to think about your emotion, as that radar screen. Emotion are not who you are and this is a big misunderstanding. We think we are our emotion. Like I’m scared, I feel fear, this means I’m scared. And a great example, another great example of that is stress, right? People will often say, I am stressed. They take the identity of the emotion of stress, instead of saying, I feel stress, I feel the emotion of stress.

So when you think about fear, I want you to think about it that way as well. You are not scared, you feel the emotion of fear. You on your radar screen right now, you are detecting that you are experiencing the emotion of fear. You are not fear, you are not scared, you are experiencing fear. Now, the powerful question to ask yourself is why? Why am I experiencing the emotion of fear right now? And the answer is, at the highest level, your thoughts. The thoughts that are floating in your brain, conscious or unconscious, create the fear you are feeling in your body that you are experiencing, that your radar is detecting. So your emotion is only a signal to bring to your attention the thoughts your thinking.

I want you to really start thinking about your emotion in that way as a tool, the same way I teach you in body neutral neutrality that your body is a tool to experience life. Everything that happens in your body is a tool to experience your life. Well, guess where your emotion happens. It happen in your body. Your emotion are simply sensation traveling through your central nervous system in your body in the vehicle you were given to experience life. That’s all. So it’s a piece of information. It’s a signal for you to look at your thoughts. If you can bring yourself to that place and you can grab a pen and a piece of paper and start dumping, we call that a thought download, start dumping all of your thoughts on the piece of paper and examine them, oh, look at that. I’m thinking, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, no wonder why I feel fear, right? I’ll give you an example in the context of movement, right? You could have the thought, over the last 10 years, I spent thousands of dollars paying gym membership and I never used them. Or it’s the sixth time now that I’m paying a gym membership, that I’ve paid a gym membership and ended up using it only for one month. No wonder why you feel afraid now of committing for the seventh time at your gym membership. Because you’re all, you’re thinking about because of the human negative bias that this last seven time that you went through the pattern of committing to a gym membership, you didn’t use it. You quote unquote wasted it.

So now you’re relating to this new experience of committing to moving your body in the gym as if it was one of the other sixth time before. No wonder why you feel fear. Oh, okay, that’s why I feel fear. It’s not a fact that it’s gonna happen again. It’s just that my brain is bringing attention to all the times that I felted before. Okay, cool. And I guarantee you, once you can pinpoint the thoughts that create the fear, the fear will dissipate by quote unquote magic. Why? Because it has achieved its purpose.

All the reason why we feel emotion is to bring attention to our thoughts and our beliefs, and when that purpose has been fulfilled, it breaks the wave, the emotion are quote unquote release. The way to release your emotion is by bringing attention to what creates the emotion and then deciding, am I gonna continue to think this way? Is it true that, these are the question you need to ask yourself as you put those thoughts on paper, do I wanna continue to think, do I want to continue to this be my opinion. You have a choice. You have the authority to think what the freak you want to think. Now that’s, it takes practice to own your authority over your thoughts and beliefs cuz you’ve been conditioned to not live in that space of authority over your own thoughts and belief. You’ve been conditioned to adopt society’s belief and adopt other people’s belief system and not have your own. So it’s a practice.

So is there a good fear and a bad fear? No. There’s no good fear and bad fear. There’s the sensation of fear in your body that you call fear and there is a thought that creates that fear. And then the thought in itself is not good or bad, it’s just you have to make a decision if you’re gonna continue to think that thought or not. So that was our first question. Interesting, right? I bet youyou didn’t expect me to go there.

Let’s go to a second question.

Listener Q&A Vol.5: How to Distinguish What My Body Needs

I am almost complete with the intuitive eating process. This is actually one of our student who submitted a question in this podcast. So she says, I’ve almost completed peaceful. Peaceful is our intuitive eating module with an UN diet Your life. And she says, wow, what a game changer. My question is about nutrition science. I know there’s no good or bad food, and I’m working on changing my perspective on healthy and unhealthy food. But then, if I don’t have the reliance of science to tell me what is good or bad, or healthy or unhealthy, how do I distinguish what my particular body needs? Thank you.

This is a really good question and that brings us to the world of gentle nutrition. And I wanna point out to all of you listening to this is that gentle nutrition is one of the step of becoming an intuitive eater, and it’s the very last one. So I’m very happy that this student of mine, also listener of the podcast, is going through the process that we’ve outlined inside of on dietary life to become an intuitive eater. She’s not jumping the gun to go to the module on gentle nutrition. So, kudos to you. And if you’re doing intuitive eating on your own, be sure to not jump the gun to gentle nutrition because if a healthy relationship to food is not in place, it is almost impossible to pursue a gentle nutrition, especially if you’ve been a chronic dieter and any form of nutrition advice has been under the guidance of restrictions.

So, how do you know what is good for you, what your body needs?

The number one guidance I can give you is how you feel when you eat a certain food. Now I’m simplifying this in the sense that I’m asking you to pay attention how you feel when you finish eating, how you feel an hour after, how you feel, four hours after, how you feel until the next meal, acknowledging fully that the way your body digests food is much longer than a four to six hour window.Digestion of most food takes, in most cases, between 24 and 36 hours.

So you can’t really say, how I feel right now is the result of the last thing that I eat, because it could actually be the meal you had 24 hour prior. However, typically, when your body doesn’t like a certain food, it will let you know very quickly. It will be very rapid in what your body will tell you. It’s either going to be through mental signal like fogginess and not being able to concentrate. It could be through your overall energy level. It could be directly in your digestion. It could be in heartburns, like what happens in the stomach, what happens in the colon or the lower digestive system. It could be very quickly. So I want you to look at how you feel overall is an indicator if certain foods are good for you or not.

Now, I also want you to be aware that eating to support your body is a lots, L O T S capital Bolded letter simpler than you think. I’m saying that fully recognizing that all of us have been indoctrinated to believe that nutrition is complicated and it’s hard. Okay? Because there’s profession like mine, I mean, there’s entire degrees in your university dedicated to nutrition, so it must mean it’s complicated to nourish ourselves for what our body. That is not true. Most bodies have a large resiliency in front of food and a large capacity to eat a lots of different food and thrive on a wide variety of foods.

Now that being said, if you have a particular health condition, you have a diagnoses that require management of your nutrition, what I just said probably don’t apply to you. This is when you wanna go seek the guidance of the very smart people who studied complex nutrition advice for medical condition in university. That’s a small percentage of the population. I don’t know, call it 10% of the population who needs specific, complicated advice. This is when you pay someone who specialize in the field of nutrition to give you specific advice. But if you are part of the general population, have a general status, you can thrive on very simple tactic towards nutrition.

The way that we teach nutrition within on diet to your life, there’s only three tenant of nutrition and that’s how intuitive eating nutritionists teach nutrition, okay. Now fully understanding that you’re not part of that small percentage of people who need specific nutrition advice, your general population, here’s three gentle nutrition tenant for you.

Number one, having enough food, eating enough food, like we gotta hit this baseline. The vast majority of the women that have had the honor to work with over the years don’t eat enough food. For a very simple reason, they’ve been dieting for a long time and they have got themselves into a habit of thinking this is just as much as they should eat. So very often the first step towards eating what your body needs is eating enough food, eating against your hunger and then satisfaction. And this is the key to honor what your body needs, is understanding what makes you feel satisfied. Because what makes you feel satisfied is very often aligned to what your body needs. These cravings that we have are often what our body needs. And now let’s not get cut up into like intuitive eating gives you craving for chocolate and chips and pizza crap, this is just demonizing intuitive eating by diet culture. Once you pass through the healing of your relationship to food, it is not true that you crave pizza and chips and chocolate all the time. That is how DIA culture scares you off of intuitive eating. Once you get past the pendulum swing and all of that, you can lean in to what you are craving that makes you feel satisfied as a way of determining what your body needs. So we’ve got eating enough food, eating what makes us feel satisfied, and then balance.

Balance is a tenant of gentle nutrition, not perfect balance. So here’s how simple nutrition is, truly. There’s three macronutrients, carbohydrate, protein, and fats. That’s it. Inside of Gentle Nutrition, we give you like a PDF with what is a protein and what is a fat, and what is a carbohydrate. But I think many of you know what that is. Have a balance of it. At every meal, try to hit the tree. Have a carbohydrate, have a protein, and a little bit of fat. That’s it. And it’s not every single meal. That’s the other thing, your brain will try to get you to a place where you have to hit perfection all the time. That is not true. You don’t need to be perfect at every meal. Most of the time try to hit balance.

And then the last is no rules. There is no rules even when you get the gentle nutrition. People are often as a spirit to get to like gentle nutrition. Are you ready for gentle nutrition? We have a, we have a little quiz to get people like, are you ready for that? And then people are like, I wanna be ready for it, because they want the safety of getting rules again. There won’t be any rules. You have to learn to trust yourself at the deepest level so you can live your nutrition life the rest of your life without rules and without perfection. That would be my advice to determine what your body needs.

I hope these two listener question were helpful to you. If you are listening to this and you wanna submit a question, email us at [email protected] and it’ll be my pleasure to take 10 or 15 minutes to answer your question. And until then, I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

 

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352-My Personal Fitness Goals

352-My Personal Fitness Goals

Non-Diet Fitness Goals

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Non-Diet Fitness Goals

In this episode, I’m sharing my journey in healing my relationship to fitness.  

Over the last 2.5 years, I have been working with a non-diet fitness coach to help me change my recurring unintentional thoughts about moving my body.

Last month, I achieved the last goal I had set for myself back 2.5 years ago so it was time to set new goals.

In this episode, I’m sharing my new fitness goals with you.

What you’ll learn listening to this episode:

  • The step by steps approach I took to heal my relationship to fitness 
  • Why I hired a coach to help me become someone who loves to go to the gym
  • My new non-diet fitness goals go forward.

Mentioned in the show on Non-Diet Fitness Goals

The Rebellious Eating Solution Masterclass

Health Habits Checklist

Quiz: Is It You or Your Diet?

Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

Episode Transcript:

Going Beyond The Food Show 352-My Personal Fitness Goals

This is episode 352 of the Beyond the Food Show, and today I’m gonna share my personal fitness goal and how high healed my relationship to exercise. Y’all ready? Stay tuned.

Hello my sisters and welcome to this very special episode that they’re going to be on the food show because this is gonna be a very personal episode. I am going to take you into my personal life and talking to you about how I journey true healing my relationship to exercise and the reason why I decided to do this episode is because just a few weeks ago, I achieved my last fitness goal that I had set up two years ago with my fitness coach and I kind of ticked the last box on the list of goals that we had set together, and I was ready for a new set of goals in my journey of working with her and in my journey with fitness.

So as I was writing these goals on my phone in my note app, I’m like, oh, that would be a cool podcast episode for all of you. So here we are effectively three weeks later. I am recording this episode. So this episode is not scripted. It’s literally me talking to the microphone and for those of you who are listening to me via video, talking to the video and sharing my journey.

So I wanna, before we get to the current goal, I wanna set the tone and to show you how, where it came. So I, when I was growing up to the age of about 10 or 11 years old, I moved my body naturally and with pleasure. I did a ton of bicycle and running around. It was a what people called a tum boy. Like I played with boys a lot when I was young and we were built forth and drive around our bike and jumped on sand dun and all of that stuff. And then I got into organized sports. I was a competitive swimmer from probably the age of 10 to the age of 14 years old. And something happened at the age of 12, which a large number of you probably are aware of and if you’re not at 12 years old, was my entry point in the world of dieting. So at 12 years old, I was introduced to Weight Watcher and I went on to understand that my body was wrong, that I looked ugly and that I needed to shrink my body.

So conclusively up to the age of 40, I thought that my body was a tool, or not a tool, but something to be fixed and that happened in the middle of my journey of being a competitive swimmer, and it affected deeply how I viewed myself in sport. Because as many of you are aware, when you go to Weight Watchers, yeah, it’s about the food, but it’s also about exercising so you can quote unquote lose calories. So in that little girl’s brain, it started to equate that playing sports was about potentially shrinking your body and get to a place where your body is okay or good enough so you don’t feel the discomfort of being in that ugly body, and you can get rid of that whole part of you and please the adults in your life that you are in a okay body.

So, within the spano I would say a couple years, I started to not liking moving my body at all because it became a journey of expanding calories, that’s what it became. And I wasn’t allowed to not move my body because I needed to expand calorie. Like it came to a point where I didn’t enjoy swimming at all and I was faced with the choice, you either continue swimming or you do another sports. You be inactive. I don’t remember being told exactly it’s because you’re gonna gain weight but I was smart enough to make one plus one in my head, like, I cannot not move. I have to move. And that began my understanding of moving your body is I have to. It’s not about pleasure in any way, shape or form, you just have to. And that carried on with me as I pursued what I call my PhD in dieting. I have a solid 25 year career in dieting. So from the age of 12 to the age of 38 years old, I dieted and associated moving with my body with managing the size of my body and I have to. There is no pleasure in moving your body, and that’s just what it is.

So, this is the way that deep play, I believe, moving your body was. I, I was hearing other people around me in my adult life running for pleasure or playing hockey for pleasure and I could not comprehend how someone could enjoy moving their body because for moving My body was no pain, no gain. I had to go all in like sweat, like crazy, and being a ton of discomfort throughout because I needed to expand as much calorie as I could, which resulted a lot in, in and out, in and out and out. Like I would go into the gym and I would go like all in six days a week for an hour and a half, three months, and then I wouldn’t go for the rest of the year. And that my in and out on exercise was also along the line of dieting, right? So I would diet hardcore and restrict myself to an insanely low calorie count, go to the gym, and I couldn’t sustain it. And then I would abandon both, feel into, oh my God, my life is still terrible, gain all the weight and then up and down and up and down and up and down. And I did that for 25 years.

So fast forward to 40 years old when I’ve decided to no longer diet, I didn’t exercise. I didn’t move my body at all because I was quitting dieting, which meant I quit moving my body. And that resulted in me having a lot of pain in my body, lot of physical tightness, pain in my body. So one thing that I’m bringing forward and telling you the story also an awareness that I have a health condition, a chronic health condition that is called a scoliosis. So for those who don’t know what a scoliosis is, is a curvature of the spine. It’s a bending of a spine that should be straight. It happens in different area of the spine. For it is in my lower back area. It’s in between L one and L four, so Lu one and Lu four. So really right in the middle of my hips and above my hips, which leaves my hips to be unbalanced, which leads me to be really tight in one side of my body and creates a lot of subsequent pain around my body. And the only thing I knew about this part of myself is I felt better when I was moving my body to a certain degree. And because I was abusing my physical body in the gym in order to lose weight, I actually made something that was positive for my body, which was to move my body to help with managing the pain of the scoliosis, actually worse, because I was over exercising and doing things in the gym that actually created more pain in my body.

But, that’s not my specialty. I am not a physiologist. I’m not a kinesiologist, I’m not a personal trainer. I didn’t understand all of that, and as a result, I associated going to the gym, moving my body, doing sports, doing exercise as causing me pain. And that was just a thought, that wasn’t a fact, that was my perspective on the whole thing. And I honestly think I allowed myself to think that thought because it allowed me to not go to the gym, which I needed for a period of time.

So there’s a a period of time from the time I stopped co-opting diet culture to actually the time where I decidedI was ready to heal my relationship to exercise to be a six year period almost where beyond moving from my desk to the car to go see some family, like just normal, basic human living, I wasn’t moving my body beyond any of that. And that I think is a part of the rebellion of leading diet culture behind. I needed that break, I needed that space of time. I had chosen to do the work on healing my relationship to food and going through intuitive eating and all the things and focus on food, and then I integrated the body and focus on that, that required a lot of my mental space, my emotional space. A lot of my energy was expanded in those two and by the time food was no longer a thing, I had a completely neutral relationship to food, and I was like 75% there with my body. I had this energy space available in my life to improve on another part of me, on self-improvement. And I took that space and I gave it to my relationship to exercise and I knew I couldn’t do this on my own. Just like I knew that I could not heal my relationship to food on my own, I hired a coach. I work with Evelyn Tripoli to coach me on intuitive eating, and I became a certified intuitive eating counselor. I did her training program and then I hired a coach for a body image, another fat woman who had herself work on her body image. I hired, I invested in myself. I believed in myself that I was going to be able to become someone who’s body neutral, but I needed help. Well, I did the same thing when it came to exercise. I hired a coach. I hired an expert who has studied a background in exercise, who has herself a very productive relationship to exercise. I hired a woman, right, and I explained to her where I was coming from. I told her, I gave her my boundaries and the things I was willing to do and not willing to do and what I believed, and I asked her to coach me. I paid her and I asked her to coach me.

So effectively, two and a half years ago, in October of 2020, I had my first session with her, and that was the first time I moved my body in a supported way, in an organized way, in almost sick six years. And we set up goals, right? As any coach would do, when you start working with a coach, you set up goals, right? So you hired your coach and you say to your coach, this is where I wanna go. Your coach’s job is to coach you to get there. And that’s what she did. My goal at the time was to be able to go back to public speaking and to stand on stage delivering a 90 minute to a two hour presentation and not be in any pain.

And I wanna step aside to say, I was a public speaker for years in my corporate work, I love public speaking, I love engaging with people that’s why I have a podcast. But towards the end, and even when I began my business in as a nutritionist, I used to do public speaking, but I was in so much pain that I could not deliver an engaging public speaking event because I had so much pain in my body because of my scoliosis and all the arthritis I have. And all the knee pain that I have is just, it was so overwhelming that my concentration could not be on delivering the best presentation for people, and I had to stop. Combine that with me gaining weight and being ashamed of gaining weight, I retired from public speaking almost seven years ago.

And I always in the, the deepest part of me, I always wanted to go back to public speaking and at just another anecdote, that’s the reason why I started a podcast. One of the reason that I started a podcast is when I officially quit public speaking seven years ago, I needed another outlet to talk to the world and share my value into the world, and that’s when podcast started. Because I could not go on stage and speak with people, I started a podcast. And that was a very safe place for somebody who has, who had at the time deep body image suffering is I could hide just behind a microphone and I would be allowed to share my thought without anybody seeing me. Funny enough that today I’m recording this podcast with a camera filming me and this just to show you how the impact of how you think about your body, of your quote unquote body image has on how you live your life, on how you pursue your career, and how you pursue your business. I’m on, I’m in front of a camera, an HD 10 80 pixel camera, and I’m not even, I forget that the camera is there now. I don’t care if you’re seeing my roles, like right now, I’m pitching my role, I’m looking at the camera, I don’t care anymore. This is like how far I’ve come.

So I think I got to that. I’m talking to you about that because the goal, yes, that’s what, it’s, the goal I had given two and a half here to my coach was to build my fitness, to build my strength, to be able to go back on stage and go back to my passion of talking to people. And I did it. On March 8th, 2023, I deliver my first public speaking event at the University of Idaho for the first time in seven years. Yeah,I’m recording this on March the 21st, it’s already had happened. You will see a lot of video about that coming up on our social media. I’m officially back to be a public speaker. Here’s the relationship to the goal. I was able to stand in front of people for 90 minutes with zero pain. And I’m saying that to you, and I’m almost like my throat is tightening up right now as I’m sharing that to you because that, I couldn’t have never imagined being able to say that one day. This is how much pain and suffering I was in three years ago before starting my fitness journey. I chose that goal because it was almost unachievable, like it was so big to me to be able to do this, that I, yeah, I stretch myself to do it, but I don’t know if it could really happen.

If you’re listening to this and you’re suffering for whatever reason, you have physical pain for whatever reasons, I want you to listen to this from a place of possibility. It may be not the case for you that you won’t be in pain at all, but I want you to hold the possibility that maybe you would, could be in less pain. And not being in pain hane or solving the pain shouldn’t be holding you back from moving your body. And that was a thought error that I was in for a few years prior to hiring my coach. I was running from doctor to doctor, specialist to specialist thinking, in order for me to move my body, I need to resolve the hip pain, I need to resolve the inflammation, I need to resolve the knee pain. And I spent a lot of financial resources into that. I spent a lot of time, I spent a lot of mental space thinking about that, and nothing was working, quote unquote, nothing was working. I think it wasn’t working and I wasn’t finding the solution because the pain was the gateway for me to move my body. It was the motivator for me to move my. So I came to movement with that goal of going back on stage of at least alleviating some of my pain, and it took two and a half years. It took two and a half years to achieve the on stage to achieve the pain, but to also create an enjoyment for moving my body, to create the habit of wanting to move my body. It took two and a half years. I knew from being a coach myself, I knew from having gone through the journey of changing my relationship to food and to body, that it was not gonna be overnight, that it was not gonna take three months, six months, it was gonna be for the long haul. So I organized my budget, I organize my resources in order for me to commit for the long term.

And I want to tell you something. This is how good my coach was, and obviously I’m skilled in selecting a great coach because I’m a master coach myself, so I picked her for a reason. Do you know that the first four, almost six months,for sure we were talking about that, for sure the first four months we worked together, so, October, November, December, January, and almost February of 2021, I only had one appointment a week. She knew that that’s what need. I needed to create the thoughts and the feeling, the basic thoughts and feelings for me to show up for myself to move my body for half an hour once a week.

And I did. It took me four months to not resent having to go to that training session and I had to coach myself, like I had to apply our self-coaching framework. I had to apply all the coaching technique, and then after four, six months, whatever, we increased it to twice a week. And I stayed at twice a week for almost a year. For almost a year, I work with her for half an hour, twice a week. But as soon as I moved to twice a week, I started to see result with pain. I started to have less, it’s kind of a muscle pain attack, like my whole spine spasm. And I started to get less and less of it, and I started, like instead of being a nine out of 10 outta pain, it was a eight out of 10. It was a seven out of 10. And she made me track all of that. And I could start seeing, after eight months, started to see a reduction of pain. I had to believe in myself so much cuz the result weren’t instantaneous. Like I was at the same level of pain for the first eight months and then it started to reduce a little bit and it reduced a little and it was like very small, almost untrackable. And because of the coaching she was giving and all the techniques she was telling me to track and track, I could see it and the attention she was bringing me over, the small result that I was getting a long time, over a long period of time, I stuck with it. And I can tell you honestly that if I didn’t pay her to show up, it was on Zoom, it was during the Covid time, so it was on Zoom, I would’ve probably given up. This is how much work mentally I had to do. Like there was a lot of neural pathways to reprogram when it came to my exercise. So I had to keep investing my money in paying her to show up and create the habit and create the habit, and create the habit and see the reward and create the habit, and create the habit and keep showing up and have her coach me through all the thoughts. Like I remember in summer of the session, I was so angry. I was angry because I was like not getting it right, and I wasn’t like my result weren’t coming fast enough. She had to coach me through all of that. Would, has she not been there, I guarantee you it would’ve quit before.

And so I’m gonna share with you another milestone, a year and a half into that, I walked into the gym for the first time. Like for a year and a half, we worked out together on Zoom in my house with barely no weights, just my body weight and a amount, and that was it. And I was in a location, I was traveling and I was a location where there was a gym, and she could sense that I started to be mentally ready for that. So she challenged me to go to the gym with her, right. So we had the first session into the gym and it brought a new level of challenge for me, and I enjoyed it. And I kept, as I was traveling, kept looking for a gym to go without making any commitments, I just kept looking for a gym and paying month to month to month, and I started to enjoy it and my body started to respond, in that I was lifting heavier weight.

I was going from five pounds to four months later, or three months later, 10 pounds, and I could see that my body was getting stronger, I was getting up of the couch easier. And I,I have a low bed in my condo here. I would get up of the bed without having to push myself off the side of the bed and the same thing on the toilet. You know, this is like crazy day-to-day to day movement that started to improve and I started to notice I was getting up the toilets easier. Like I remember one day, this is really personal, I was getting up of the toilet and I was doing something on my phone. Yes, I have my phone sometime in the bathroom and I got up of the ba of the toilet while doing the thing on the phone and then it dropped on me, oh my God, I didn’t have to think about doing the movement. The movement just happened. It was like magic, and it happened because I had done squats week weeks after weeks after weeks, in every goddamn session. I was doing squats and squats and squats and squats, and I slowly, gradually reprogram a proper posture, a proper squat, build the strength in my, knees, and in my hips, and in my feet, and poof, it just happened naturally.

That’s why we exercise. We don’t exercise toto lose weight, to look better, to look thinner. We exercise so we can live our life. And that was my goal all along. My goal was my body is a tool to experience my life. I need to respect my body by moving my body, by giving my body what it needs, which is structural functional movement. We didn’t do any body building crap and CrossFit crap. We just did functional movement, squatting, , walking lunges, right, presses, like pulling to hold your grocery bag. We just did the basic functional skills that my body needed so I can operate my life, so I can live my life.

And as soon as I started to challenge my body with the weight and getting stronger, I started to not only have a lot less pain, but do a lot more with my body and my life. I remember I was, where, I was in Portugal and I visited. So I’m a history fan. I love history. I love sociology. I love anthropology. It’s a thing with me. I love that. So when I go to cities, I go to the old part of the cities and I do all the walking tours, and I visit the church in the museum and I walk on those cobble street, which are very unstable for the body. And typically I would be in pain. I would have to stop every hour to rest my hips, to rest my knee, and I remember being in Portugal and walking and walking and it was four o’clock in the afternoon and then it dawned on me, you’ve been walking since breakfast, whatever, nine or 10:00 AM nonstop. And you didn’t have to stop and sit to relieve the pain in your knee or in your hip. It was just like my whole being just got shaken by this realization. Of me taking care of my body, changing my relationship to exercise, changing my thoughts and my emotions around exercise, changing my belief system about exercise resulted in that. It resulted in me being able to walk for nearly six hours in cobblestone street for 14 kilometers. When I went to my phone and looked, had been walking for 14 kilometers, whichhadn’t, I don’t remember ever doing that and had no pain.

And then I stood on stage in March of this year, delivered a presentation, which I was able through my body to building the strength and changing my relationship to exercise, to deliver my talk, fully engage with the people listening to me. And I touched so many life that day. I know it’s a gift of mine. The podcast is a gift of me talking, but I am telling you, if you were to see me physically face-to-face, it’d be magic. I have this magic, I have this gift. I have this capacity, and the only way for me to be able to share that gift with the world was to change my relationship to my body, to become body neutral, and then invest in changing my relationship to exercise so I can build the strength in my physical body to be able to use my gifts and create the magic that I can when I talk face-to-face with people.

So here’s my new fitness goal for, we don’t know how long. We never have a timeline. I don’t believe in timeline. I believe that timeline creates toxicity in setting your goal. So here’s my goals that I shared, withthat I gave my coach. Number one most important goal. Stabilize and prevent any further damage to my spine, to my disc in my spine, to my stenosis, to my SI joint, and to my left knee.Strengthen the structure of these parts of my body that can protect me from further damage as I’m. I am fully owning that I’m 47 years old. I am getting older. My body is supposed to struggle, so I want to prevent deterioration, by far my number one goal. Number two, goal, prevent and reduce, if possible, the inflammation in the arthritis in my lumbo spine and my leg joint. Goal number three, build up my endurance to be on stage for longer period of time, up to one full day. Here’s what my goal is. I want to host intensive retreats, with all of you. Like I wanna rent a resort somewhere and have conferences, which requires me to be up in front of you on stage for like four to six hours, and I wanna be able to do that day one, day two, and day three. I need to build the endurance to do that. And goal number four is hiking and walking, not climbing, at fear of height, hiking an unstable environment in nature, and walking for a long distance when I’m traveling and when I’m discovering new cities. So I want to keep the endurance of walking for six hours. I want to do more hiking in nature and not experience pain during and not experience as much pain after. I’m always gonna be in some kind of pain because of the inflammation, because the damage is done to part of my body, but I can minimize it. So these are my fitness goal. I’m using my fitness. I’m using moving my body just like I’m using my nutrition, just like I’m using my health habit so I can support my body, so I can fully live my life.

This is what I wanted to share with you. I welcome any question that you may have. You can send me an [email protected]. I hope it serves you. I hope it inspires some of you of what is possible when you invest in yourself, when you invest in a coach, and when you invest in believing in yourself, in your body. That you can live your full life, whatever that means for you, and that your body will be there to help you achieve your life. I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next episode.

 

Episode 352-Non-Diet Fitness Goals – My Personal Fitness Goals

This is episode 352 of the Beyond the Food Show, and today I’m gonna share my personal fitness goal and how high healed my relationship to exercise. Y’all ready? Stay tuned.

Hello my sisters and welcome to this very special episode that they’re going to be on the food show because this is gonna be a very personal episode. I am going to take you into my personal life and talking to you about how I journey true healing my relationship to exercise and the reason why I decided to do this episode is because just a few weeks ago, I achieved my last fitness goal that I had set up two years ago with my fitness coach and I kind of ticked the last box on the list of goals that we had set together, and I was ready for a new set of goals in my journey of working with her and in my journey with fitness.

So as I was writing these goals on my phone in my note app, I’m like, oh, that would be a cool podcast episode for all of you. So here we are effectively three weeks later. I am recording this episode. So this episode is not scripted. It’s literally me talking to the microphone and for those of you who are listening to me via video, talking to the video and sharing my journey.

So I wanna, before we get to the current goal, I wanna set the tone and to show you how, where it came. So I, when I was growing up to the age of about 10 or 11 years old, I moved my body naturally and with pleasure. I did a ton of bicycle and running around. It was a what people called a tum boy. Like I played with boys a lot when I was young and we were built forth and drive around our bike and jumped on sand dun and all of that stuff. And then I got into organized sports. I was a competitive swimmer from probably the age of 10 to the age of 14 years old. And something happened at the age of 12, which a large number of you probably are aware of and if you’re not at 12 years old, was my entry point in the world of dieting. So at 12 years old, I was introduced to Weight Watcher and I went on to understand that my body was wrong, that I looked ugly and that I needed to shrink my body.

So conclusively up to the age of 40, I thought that my body was a tool, or not a tool, but something to be fixed and that happened in the middle of my journey of being a competitive swimmer, and it affected deeply how I viewed myself in sport. Because as many of you are aware, when you go to Weight Watchers, yeah, it’s about the food, but it’s also about exercising so you can quote unquote lose calories. So in that little girl’s brain, it started to equate that playing sports was about potentially shrinking your body and get to a place where your body is okay or good enough so you don’t feel the discomfort of being in that ugly body, and you can get rid of that whole part of you and please the adults in your life that you are in a okay body.

So, within the spano I would say a couple years, I started to not liking moving my body at all because it became a journey of expanding calories, that’s what it became. And I wasn’t allowed to not move my body because I needed to expand calorie. Like it came to a point where I didn’t enjoy swimming at all and I was faced with the choice, you either continue swimming or you do another sports. You be inactive. I don’t remember being told exactly it’s because you’re gonna gain weight but I was smart enough to make one plus one in my head, like, I cannot not move. I have to move. And that began my understanding of moving your body is I have to. It’s not about pleasure in any way, shape or form, you just have to. And that carried on with me as I pursued what I call my PhD in dieting. I have a solid 25 year career in dieting. So from the age of 12 to the age of 38 years old, I dieted and associated moving with my body with managing the size of my body and I have to. There is no pleasure in moving your body, and that’s just what it is.

So, this is the way that deep play, I believe, moving your body was. I, I was hearing other people around me in my adult life running for pleasure or playing hockey for pleasure and I could not comprehend how someone could enjoy moving their body because for moving My body was no pain, no gain. I had to go all in like sweat, like crazy, and being a ton of discomfort throughout because I needed to expand as much calorie as I could, which resulted a lot in, in and out, in and out and out. Like I would go into the gym and I would go like all in six days a week for an hour and a half, three months, and then I wouldn’t go for the rest of the year. And that my in and out on exercise was also along the line of dieting, right? So I would diet hardcore and restrict myself to an insanely low calorie count, go to the gym, and I couldn’t sustain it. And then I would abandon both, feel into, oh my God, my life is still terrible, gain all the weight and then up and down and up and down and up and down. And I did that for 25 years.

So fast forward to 40 years old when I’ve decided to no longer diet, I didn’t exercise. I didn’t move my body at all because I was quitting dieting, which meant I quit moving my body. And that resulted in me having a lot of pain in my body, lot of physical tightness, pain in my body. So one thing that I’m bringing forward and telling you the story also an awareness that I have a health condition, a chronic health condition that is called a scoliosis. So for those who don’t know what a scoliosis is, is a curvature of the spine. It’s a bending of a spine that should be straight. It happens in different area of the spine. For it is in my lower back area. It’s in between L one and L four, so Lu one and Lu four. So really right in the middle of my hips and above my hips, which leaves my hips to be unbalanced, which leads me to be really tight in one side of my body and creates a lot of subsequent pain around my body. And the only thing I knew about this part of myself is I felt better when I was moving my body to a certain degree. And because I was abusing my physical body in the gym in order to lose weight, I actually made something that was positive for my body, which was to move my body to help with managing the pain of the scoliosis, actually worse, because I was over exercising and doing things in the gym that actually created more pain in my body.

But, that’s not my specialty. I am not a physiologist. I’m not a kinesiologist, I’m not a personal trainer. I didn’t understand all of that, and as a result, I associated going to the gym, moving my body, doing sports, doing exercise as causing me pain. And that was just a thought, that wasn’t a fact, that was my perspective on the whole thing. And I honestly think I allowed myself to think that thought because it allowed me to not go to the gym, which I needed for a period of time.

So there’s a a period of time from the time I stopped co-opting diet culture to actually the time where I decidedI was ready to heal my relationship to exercise to be a six year period almost where beyond moving from my desk to the car to go see some family, like just normal, basic human living, I wasn’t moving my body beyond any of that. And that I think is a part of the rebellion of leading diet culture behind. I needed that break, I needed that space of time. I had chosen to do the work on healing my relationship to food and going through intuitive eating and all the things and focus on food, and then I integrated the body and focus on that, that required a lot of my mental space, my emotional space. A lot of my energy was expanded in those two and by the time food was no longer a thing, I had a completely neutral relationship to food, and I was like 75% there with my body. I had this energy space available in my life to improve on another part of me, on self-improvement. And I took that space and I gave it to my relationship to exercise and I knew I couldn’t do this on my own. Just like I knew that I could not heal my relationship to food on my own, I hired a coach. I work with Evelyn Tripoli to coach me on intuitive eating, and I became a certified intuitive eating counselor. I did her training program and then I hired a coach for a body image, another fat woman who had herself work on her body image. I hired, I invested in myself. I believed in myself that I was going to be able to become someone who’s body neutral, but I needed help. Well, I did the same thing when it came to exercise. I hired a coach. I hired an expert who has studied a background in exercise, who has herself a very productive relationship to exercise. I hired a woman, right, and I explained to her where I was coming from. I told her, I gave her my boundaries and the things I was willing to do and not willing to do and what I believed, and I asked her to coach me. I paid her and I asked her to coach me.

So effectively, two and a half years ago, in October of 2020, I had my first session with her, and that was the first time I moved my body in a supported way, in an organized way, in almost sick six years. And we set up goals, right? As any coach would do, when you start working with a coach, you set up goals, right? So you hired your coach and you say to your coach, this is where I wanna go. Your coach’s job is to coach you to get there. And that’s what she did. My goal at the time was to be able to go back to public speaking and to stand on stage delivering a 90 minute to a two hour presentation and not be in any pain.

And I wanna step aside to say, I was a public speaker for years in my corporate work, I love public speaking, I love engaging with people that’s why I have a podcast. But towards the end, and even when I began my business in as a nutritionist, I used to do public speaking, but I was in so much pain that I could not deliver an engaging public speaking event because I had so much pain in my body because of my scoliosis and all the arthritis I have. And all the knee pain that I have is just, it was so overwhelming that my concentration could not be on delivering the best presentation for people, and I had to stop. Combine that with me gaining weight and being ashamed of gaining weight, I retired from public speaking almost seven years ago.

And I always in the, the deepest part of me, I always wanted to go back to public speaking and at just another anecdote, that’s the reason why I started a podcast. One of the reason that I started a podcast is when I officially quit public speaking seven years ago, I needed another outlet to talk to the world and share my value into the world, and that’s when podcast started. Because I could not go on stage and speak with people, I started a podcast. And that was a very safe place for somebody who has, who had at the time deep body image suffering is I could hide just behind a microphone and I would be allowed to share my thought without anybody seeing me. Funny enough that today I’m recording this podcast with a camera filming me and this just to show you how the impact of how you think about your body, of your quote unquote body image has on how you live your life, on how you pursue your career, and how you pursue your business. I’m on, I’m in front of a camera, an HD 10 80 pixel camera, and I’m not even, I forget that the camera is there now. I don’t care if you’re seeing my roles, like right now, I’m pitching my role, I’m looking at the camera, I don’t care anymore. This is like how far I’ve come.

So I think I got to that. I’m talking to you about that because the goal, yes, that’s what, it’s, the goal I had given two and a half here to my coach was to build my fitness, to build my strength, to be able to go back on stage and go back to my passion of talking to people. And I did it. On March 8th, 2023, I deliver my first public speaking event at the University of Idaho for the first time in seven years. Yeah,I’m recording this on March the 21st, it’s already had happened. You will see a lot of video about that coming up on our social media. I’m officially back to be a public speaker. Here’s the relationship to the goal. I was able to stand in front of people for 90 minutes with zero pain. And I’m saying that to you, and I’m almost like my throat is tightening up right now as I’m sharing that to you because that, I couldn’t have never imagined being able to say that one day. This is how much pain and suffering I was in three years ago before starting my fitness journey. I chose that goal because it was almost unachievable, like it was so big to me to be able to do this, that I, yeah, I stretch myself to do it, but I don’t know if it could really happen.

If you’re listening to this and you’re suffering for whatever reason, you have physical pain for whatever reasons, I want you to listen to this from a place of possibility. It may be not the case for you that you won’t be in pain at all, but I want you to hold the possibility that maybe you would, could be in less pain. And not being in pain hane or solving the pain shouldn’t be holding you back from moving your body. And that was a thought error that I was in for a few years prior to hiring my coach. I was running from doctor to doctor, specialist to specialist thinking, in order for me to move my body, I need to resolve the hip pain, I need to resolve the inflammation, I need to resolve the knee pain. And I spent a lot of financial resources into that. I spent a lot of time, I spent a lot of mental space thinking about that, and nothing was working, quote unquote, nothing was working. I think it wasn’t working and I wasn’t finding the solution because the pain was the gateway for me to move my body. It was the motivator for me to move my. So I came to movement with that goal of going back on stage of at least alleviating some of my pain, and it took two and a half years. It took two and a half years to achieve the on stage to achieve the pain, but to also create an enjoyment for moving my body, to create the habit of wanting to move my body. It took two and a half years. I knew from being a coach myself, I knew from having gone through the journey of changing my relationship to food and to body, that it was not gonna be overnight, that it was not gonna take three months, six months, it was gonna be for the long haul. So I organized my budget, I organize my resources in order for me to commit for the long term.

And I want to tell you something. This is how good my coach was, and obviously I’m skilled in selecting a great coach because I’m a master coach myself, so I picked her for a reason. Do you know that the first four, almost six months,for sure we were talking about that, for sure the first four months we worked together, so, October, November, December, January, and almost February of 2021, I only had one appointment a week. She knew that that’s what need. I needed to create the thoughts and the feeling, the basic thoughts and feelings for me to show up for myself to move my body for half an hour once a week.

And I did. It took me four months to not resent having to go to that training session and I had to coach myself, like I had to apply our self-coaching framework. I had to apply all the coaching technique, and then after four, six months, whatever, we increased it to twice a week. And I stayed at twice a week for almost a year. For almost a year, I work with her for half an hour, twice a week. But as soon as I moved to twice a week, I started to see result with pain. I started to have less, it’s kind of a muscle pain attack, like my whole spine spasm. And I started to get less and less of it, and I started, like instead of being a nine out of 10 outta pain, it was a eight out of 10. It was a seven out of 10. And she made me track all of that. And I could start seeing, after eight months, started to see a reduction of pain. I had to believe in myself so much cuz the result weren’t instantaneous. Like I was at the same level of pain for the first eight months and then it started to reduce a little bit and it reduced a little and it was like very small, almost untrackable. And because of the coaching she was giving and all the techniques she was telling me to track and track, I could see it and the attention she was bringing me over, the small result that I was getting a long time, over a long period of time, I stuck with it. And I can tell you honestly that if I didn’t pay her to show up, it was on Zoom, it was during the Covid time, so it was on Zoom, I would’ve probably given up. This is how much work mentally I had to do. Like there was a lot of neural pathways to reprogram when it came to my exercise. So I had to keep investing my money in paying her to show up and create the habit and create the habit, and create the habit and see the reward and create the habit, and create the habit and keep showing up and have her coach me through all the thoughts. Like I remember in summer of the session, I was so angry. I was angry because I was like not getting it right, and I wasn’t like my result weren’t coming fast enough. She had to coach me through all of that. Would, has she not been there, I guarantee you it would’ve quit before.

And so I’m gonna share with you another milestone, a year and a half into that, I walked into the gym for the first time. Like for a year and a half, we worked out together on Zoom in my house with barely no weights, just my body weight and a amount, and that was it. And I was in a location, I was traveling and I was a location where there was a gym, and she could sense that I started to be mentally ready for that. So she challenged me to go to the gym with her, right. So we had the first session into the gym and it brought a new level of challenge for me, and I enjoyed it. And I kept, as I was traveling, kept looking for a gym to go without making any commitments, I just kept looking for a gym and paying month to month to month, and I started to enjoy it and my body started to respond, in that I was lifting heavier weight.

I was going from five pounds to four months later, or three months later, 10 pounds, and I could see that my body was getting stronger, I was getting up of the couch easier. And I,I have a low bed in my condo here. I would get up of the bed without having to push myself off the side of the bed and the same thing on the toilet. You know, this is like crazy day-to-day to day movement that started to improve and I started to notice I was getting up the toilets easier. Like I remember one day, this is really personal, I was getting up of the toilet and I was doing something on my phone. Yes, I have my phone sometime in the bathroom and I got up of the ba of the toilet while doing the thing on the phone and then it dropped on me, oh my God, I didn’t have to think about doing the movement. The movement just happened. It was like magic, and it happened because I had done squats week weeks after weeks after weeks, in every goddamn session. I was doing squats and squats and squats and squats, and I slowly, gradually reprogram a proper posture, a proper squat, build the strength in my, knees, and in my hips, and in my feet, and poof, it just happened naturally.

That’s why we exercise. We don’t exercise toto lose weight, to look better, to look thinner. We exercise so we can live our life. And that was my goal all along. My goal was my body is a tool to experience my life. I need to respect my body by moving my body, by giving my body what it needs, which is structural functional movement. We didn’t do any body building crap and CrossFit crap. We just did functional movement, squatting, , walking lunges, right, presses, like pulling to hold your grocery bag. We just did the basic functional skills that my body needed so I can operate my life, so I can live my life.

And as soon as I started to challenge my body with the weight and getting stronger, I started to not only have a lot less pain, but do a lot more with my body and my life. I remember I was, where, I was in Portugal and I visited. So I’m a history fan. I love history. I love sociology. I love anthropology. It’s a thing with me. I love that. So when I go to cities, I go to the old part of the cities and I do all the walking tours, and I visit the church in the museum and I walk on those cobble street, which are very unstable for the body. And typically I would be in pain. I would have to stop every hour to rest my hips, to rest my knee, and I remember being in Portugal and walking and walking and it was four o’clock in the afternoon and then it dawned on me, you’ve been walking since breakfast, whatever, nine or 10:00 AM nonstop. And you didn’t have to stop and sit to relieve the pain in your knee or in your hip. It was just like my whole being just got shaken by this realization. Of me taking care of my body, changing my relationship to exercise, changing my thoughts and my emotions around exercise, changing my belief system about exercise resulted in that. It resulted in me being able to walk for nearly six hours in cobblestone street for 14 kilometers. When I went to my phone and looked, had been walking for 14 kilometers, whichhadn’t, I don’t remember ever doing that and had no pain.

And then I stood on stage in March of this year, delivered a presentation, which I was able through my body to building the strength and changing my relationship to exercise, to deliver my talk, fully engage with the people listening to me. And I touched so many life that day. I know it’s a gift of mine. The podcast is a gift of me talking, but I am telling you, if you were to see me physically face-to-face, it’d be magic. I have this magic, I have this gift. I have this capacity, and the only way for me to be able to share that gift with the world was to change my relationship to my body, to become body neutral, and then invest in changing my relationship to exercise so I can build the strength in my physical body to be able to use my gifts and create the magic that I can when I talk face-to-face with people.

So here’s my new fitness goal for, we don’t know how long. We never have a timeline. I don’t believe in timeline. I believe that timeline creates toxicity in setting your goal. So here’s my goals that I shared, withthat I gave my coach. Number one most important goal. Stabilize and prevent any further damage to my spine, to my disc in my spine, to my stenosis, to my SI joint, and to my left knee.Strengthen the structure of these parts of my body that can protect me from further damage as I’m. I am fully owning that I’m 47 years old. I am getting older. My body is supposed to struggle, so I want to prevent deterioration, by far my number one goal. Number two, goal, prevent and reduce, if possible, the inflammation in the arthritis in my lumbo spine and my leg joint. Goal number three, build up my endurance to be on stage for longer period of time, up to one full day. Here’s what my goal is. I want to host intensive retreats, with all of you. Like I wanna rent a resort somewhere and have conferences, which requires me to be up in front of you on stage for like four to six hours, and I wanna be able to do that day one, day two, and day three. I need to build the endurance to do that. And goal number four is hiking and walking, not climbing, at fear of height, hiking an unstable environment in nature, and walking for a long distance when I’m traveling and when I’m discovering new cities. So I want to keep the endurance of walking for six hours. I want to do more hiking in nature and not experience pain during and not experience as much pain after. I’m always gonna be in some kind of pain because of the inflammation, because the damage is done to part of my body, but I can minimize it. So these are my fitness goal. I’m using my fitness. I’m using moving my body just like I’m using my nutrition, just like I’m using my health habit so I can support my body, so I can fully live my life.

This is what I wanted to share with you. I welcome any question that you may have. You can send me an email at [email protected]. I hope it serves you. I hope it inspires some of you of what is possible when you invest in yourself, when you invest in a coach, and when you invest in believing in yourself, in your body. That you can live your full life, whatever that means for you, and that your body will be there to help you achieve your life. I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next episode.

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351-Listener Q&A Vol.4: Navigating Diet Culture with Family & Does Undieting Mean I’ll Never Lose Weight

351-Listener Q&A Vol.4: Navigating Diet Culture with Family & Does Undieting Mean I’ll Never Lose Weight

Listener Q&A Vol.4 Navigating diet culture with family & Does undieting mean I'll never lose weight

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Listener Q&A Vol.4 

In this episode, I answer two questions:

  • How to  navigate diet culture with my family – my mom is a chronic dieter…
  • Does undieting my life and quitting dieting mean I’ll never lose weight again?

What you’ll learn listening to this episode on Listener Q&A Vol. 4:

  • How to overcome being triggered by other people dieting 
  • The long term solution to be able to be with family that have different choices then you
  • Why being in rebellion against diet culture isn’t the most effective way to heal
  • Why compassion is key to move to changing how your experience life without diet culture

Mentioned in the show: 

Health Habits Checklist

Quiz: Is It You or Your Diet?

Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

Episode Transcript:

Going Beyond The Food Show Episode 351

This is episode 351 of the Beyond the Food Show and today we’re back with another amazing question, actually actually two question from our listener. And the first one we’re gonna tackle together is how to navigate diet culture with family member, particularly those that are still dieting.And the second question is about losing weight. Does un dieting my life, stopping dietingmean I’ll never lose weight again.You ready? Let’s answer those questions. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to the podcast. Today we’re gonna answer two question. The question you guys are submitting are amazing and I’m encouraging you to submit more. You can send your question with a little bit of [email protected] and I’m gonna try to squeeze it in the upcoming listener q and a.

The first question we’re gonna talk about today is navigating diet culture with family member, particularly those that are still dieting. And it’s very interesting that this question is a wonderful reflection of one of the topic we coach the most often inside of Diet Your life, which is, our student women un dieting their life and having difficulty at first with their own mothers.

And there’s a very good reason why that is. And I’m gonna explain it in answering the question. And I wanted to put this question in early on in the listener q and a series, because if it’s such an important struggle point with my student inside of Onai your life, it is the same percentage of you out there who are not privileged to be coached by us inside of Onai at your life, you’re struggling with that too.

So let’s give you some tool to navigate that. I’m gonna read the question first, and then we’re gonna go into the answer.

I need help with my mom, exclamation mark. She’s a chronic dieter. I attended your training, rebellious eating training, and I realized that I learned dieting from my mom. Since my early twenties up to last year, we actually dieted. I love my mom dearly, but now she’s triggering me badly. I wanna spend time with her, but it’s so hard for me to hear her talk about diets all the time. What can I do?

The first thing I wanna do for you submitted this question is to say congratulations and good work. One of the most empowering action you can do to transform anything in your life, including your relationship to food and body and health, is to ask yourself reflective question. And that was part of the rebellious eating training, I gave you some reflective question and you clearly did the work, and you’re coming here with question about the work you did, which is amazing.

For those of you perhaps listening to this podcast who haven’t attended the Rebellious Eating training, know that it’s now available for you to listen with the recording. So you can go to our website, stephanie do.com, and right there on the homepage, you will have an option to get the recording of that training.

So you clearly are reflecting and asking yourself some very good question and you have added the dots. You have learned how the struggle you’re currently experimenting with came to you. And the other thing I really like aboutthe way you formulated your question is you’re not blaming anyone. You’re not blaming your mom. It looks like you are taking self responsibility, which, by the way, is the only way to create sustainable, permanent change in our life, is when we take responsibility for what we create in our own life. No transformation to at least permanent transformation will come to you when you look at other people being the cause of your problem.

So you’re doing that, you’re taking responsibility, you are acknowledging how it happened to you without blaming, which is amazing. But you’re being triggered by your mom. Although you learned dieting from your mom, she taught you dieting. She invited you to join her in dieting because she was herself at that point socialize the diet culture. She had thoughts and belief that dieting was going to change her life.

What we have to remember here is that diet culture happens in our mind. DI culture is a system of beliefs that leads us to think thoughts on the daily about dieting, about our body, about body size. So when we’re looking at navigating in your question, di culture, we have to look within our mind to find a solution to this. And the first thing we need to acknowledge is all the other people in our life have the same thoughts we used to have about dieting. They’re not thinking about dieting and diet culture, and they’re not talking about it because they wanna arm hus or they want to create a reaction in. They are themselves indoctrinated under the charm of the DI culture. They’re saying these words that trigger us because that’s their reality right now. And it sound like or looks like that your mom hasn’t done the work that you’ve done. She hasn’t yet come to choose a different way to think about bodies, about food, about diet culture.

So the first step I would coach you on is to have compassion for your mom. Is to have compassion for her because she’s in pain, in the same pain and the same probably anxiety that you were on before you came to choose another way to think about bodies and foods and DI culture. She’s feeling exactly what you were feeling back then. She just hasn’t chose yet another way. She perhaps doesn’t even know it’s optional for her to choose another way. Perhaps she’s deadly afraid to choose another way.

The second step is for you to continue the work of dismantling all your thoughts and beliefs that you’ve learned from di culture in your own brain. The long-term solution for you not to feel trigger in the presence of your mom or how to be able to be with your mom without wanting her to change and not feel triggered, the solution to that is in your own mind.

I wanna talk about being triggered for just a moment here because there’s a lot misunderstanding about being triggered, that it is with DI culture or with literally anything. You have to remember that when I coach, when I talk about mindset, I talk about it in the context of food and bodies and di culture, but these principle, these coaching principle applies to everything in your life. Funny enough that we have a training program for professional, and we use the same coaching principle, we use the same coaching at the mindset level for them to build and grow their business as we use inside of AK life with food and body image.

So let’s talk about being triggered. Being triggered is often an analogy to being have our button pushed. But truly it’s not buttons, it’s our wounds. Our wounds from the past are being activated. That’s what trigger is. And it’s an opportunity for you to heal and grow. Every time you are triggered, every time you feel triggered, it’s an opportunity for you to stop and reflect, what is being activated in me right now? When we react to other people’s thoughts, feeling, needs, problem, and opinion in a way that makes us feel triggered, it’s a gift. It’s a gift for us to look within and figure out why we are being triggered. These triggers are from our past, as I mentioned earlier. And the more reactive you are, the more triggered you are, say on a scale of one to 10, for an example, the more traumatic your past in this particular circumstance has been.

So we’ll take the question around dieting and mom dieting. Being shamed for your body size or shaming yourself for your body size and restricting food is a trauma. So when you see your mom dieting and you’re being triggered, what really is happening in your brain is you are activating, you are reliving a past experience that was really damaging, traumatic to you, which is dieting and probably body shaming and hating your body and hating yourself, these are traumatic experience. We don’t hear dieting being talked about from a trauma perspective simply because we live in a fat phobic society. We live in a society that is entrenched, that is built upon diet culture.

But I guarantee you that 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, when we look back at dieting and diet culture and body shaming, we will acknowledge that these event were trauma. We’re just not ready yet for that globally in the population. In my world, in the world of people who help other people heal that, we know these are traumatic events. We just don’t have the agreement of the majority because the majority is entrenched in fat phobia and DI culture.

So I’m gonna come back to the question when you are being triggered, it’s a sign. It’s a sign for you that you have wounds, that you have trauma, that you need to heal for yourself. You need to bring these thoughts back to the surface, and you need to have compassion for yourself. It’s not your fault. You were born in a society that believed in DI culture, that believed in shaming people for their body. You didn’t consciously choose to do that. You just were socialized to do that. So have compassion for yourself and then change your beliefs and your thoughts about bodies, about food, about health, about you as a person, and only you can do this work because that is internal work. We teach a framework to help women change their thoughts and their beliefs that will lead them to no longer be triggered when they come to circumstance of being with other people, the diet. But the best free tool that I can give you right now is the tool of reframing your thinking about dieting and your past experience in food and social. What may need to happen for you is to set boundaries with your mom. For a time while you do your internal work of changing your belief system and changing your thoughts.

The very first live q and a that we did, episode 3 47, I did a answer question specifically on boundaries. So I’m gonna let you go to that podcast to get tools and resources on boundaries. And then I’m gonna close this question here. And I wanna add one more thing. So you’re doing the work and changing your thoughts and your belief so you can feel differently. You have boundaries with your moms while you’re doing your personal work. One of the thing to heal the trauma of years of dieting and body shaming is to learn to be with your emotion. Be with your emotion of shame, be with your emotion of anger. We call that riding the wave, learning to feel your emotion, process your emotion, and then release them.

So you may want to Google that, how to process and release emotions safely. So every time you feel trigger, every time you feel the anxiety and the anger, don’t avoid it, but be with it. So these would be my three steps or my three advice for you to help you navigate diet culture with your mom.

I’m gonna move on to the second question. I’m gonna read it first.

I’ve quit dieting just a little over a year from now. At first, I did it as an act of rebellion. An act of rebellion when I first realized that DI culture was a thing. Amazing that after 25 years of being a feminist, I didn’t even know DI culture existed, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. Anyway, I have since gained weight, which I’m okay with, but does this mean I’ll never lose weight again if I don’t diet?

This is an excellent question and at first I want to say this, many of us, me, including gave a big FU to die culture when it came to our awareness. Like when somebody sat me down and explained to me what DIA culture was and how he was playing with patriarchy and how it was a tool to oppress women in compliance, I just went through a massive stage of anger, massive change. And I know many of you. And most women enter undying their life from that place. It’s part of the journey, but it’s not the whole journey. Dismantling di culture within ourselves cannot be done from a place of anger. It has to be done from a place of compassion.

So perhaps for you that’s the next stage, is learning to have compassion for yourself and for even diet, culture, and why it existed in order for you to create the space, the mental space, and the emotional space within you to be able to dismantle the belief system within you. Rebelling in outwards in hope of changing the system is amazing, but that’s not how we do the work within ourselves. These are kind of two separate sector of work. This is what we call activism. When people dedicate time and resources to dismantling DI culture at a systemic level, but then the work still need to be done within us, and that work cannot be done from a place of anger.

So that’s the place where you are in and meeting yourself with compassion and one of the belief system that di culture uphold is that our body, us, cannot be trusted. Cannot be trusted with food, cannot be trusted with decision around health, we always need an authority outside of us to make decision for us. And that’s part of, it’s one of the belief system we need to change that we can trust us, ourselves, we can trust our mind, we can trust our emotion, and we can trust our physical body. We can trust the wisdom of our body.

So you’ve gained weight. You stop restricting food. I don’t know if you were over exercising. You stop those behavior and you experience what we call diet backlash, right? The pendulum swung the other way and that happens to many of us. Now, what will your body decide to do with that? Is that your weight that you should be at for the rest of your life? I don’t know that. You intellectually do not know that, but your wisdom inside of your body knows, and that’s the work. The work is to lean in to your body wisdom, lean in and build your capacity to trust your body, therefore, yourself.

We can’t control our body. We have the illusion that we can, that’s what DIA culture sells us, but it’s not true. Our body are a unit on its own. It’s a being on its own that knows what it needs to do. Now, this is also where the world of body acceptance comes in, right? So I don’t know how you came to the world of culture. Is it true food? Is it true body? But the work of body image is also part of dismantling the belief system of that culture, that all bodies are good bodies, including your now body, which is heavier than the thinner body you had before. It’s still a good body. So that’s another belief you need to build within you.

At the end of the day, your job is to build trust and respect for your body, accepting the fact that you can’t control your body weight. It was just an illusion sold to you by DI culture. And that’s the work. And that’s the work that needs to be done from a place of compassion. As a feminist, you can continue to do the outward work if that’s your area of work, of dismantling systemically and influencing the world. But don’t forget that the work has to be done within you as well in order for you to change how you experience life, but also to be able to sustain the work in activism for the rest of your life. Because many activists get burned out because they do the work of changing systemic oppression from a place of anger, and that is not sustainable long term. So that was my thought for you.

I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next episode.

 

351-Listener Q&A Vol.4: Navigating Diet Culture with Family & Does Undieting Mean I’ll Never Lose Weight

This is episode 351 of the Beyond the Food Show and today we’re back with another amazing question, actually two questions from our listener. And the first one we’re gonna tackle together is how to navigate diet culture with family member, particularly those that are still dieting.And the second question is about losing weight. Does un dieting my life, stopping dietingmean I’ll never lose weight again.You ready? Let’s answer those questions. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to the podcast. Today we’re gonna answer two question. The question you guys are submitting are amazing and I’m encouraging you to submit more. You can send your question with a little bit of [email protected] and I’m gonna try to squeeze it in the upcoming listener q and a.

The first question we’re gonna talk about today is navigating diet culture with family member, particularly those that are still dieting. And it’s very interesting that this question is a wonderful reflection of one of the topic we coach the most often inside of Diet Your life, which is, our student women un dieting their life and having difficulty at first with their own mothers.

And there’s a very good reason why that is. And I’m gonna explain it in answering the question. And I wanted to put this question in early on in the listener q and a series, because if it’s such an important struggle point with my student inside of Onai your life, it is the same percentage of you out there who are not privileged to be coached by us inside of Onai at your life, you’re struggling with that too.

So let’s give you some tool to navigate that. I’m gonna read the question first, and then we’re gonna go into the answer.

I need help with my mom, exclamation mark. She’s a chronic dieter. I attended your training, rebellious eating training, and I realized that I learned dieting from my mom. Since my early twenties up to last year, we actually dieted. I love my mom dearly, but now she’s triggering me badly. I wanna spend time with her, but it’s so hard for me to hear her talk about diets all the time. What can I do?

The first thing I wanna do for you submitted this question is to say congratulations and good work. One of the most empowering action you can do to transform anything in your life, including your relationship to food and body and health, is to ask yourself reflective question. And that was part of the rebellious eating training, I gave you some reflective question and you clearly did the work, and you’re coming here with question about the work you did, which is amazing.

For those of you perhaps listening to this podcast who haven’t attended the Rebellious Eating training, know that it’s now available for you to listen with the recording. So you can go to our website, stephanie do.com, and right there on the homepage, you will have an option to get the recording of that training.

So you clearly are reflecting and asking yourself some very good question and you have added the dots. You have learned how the struggle you’re currently experimenting with came to you. And the other thing I really like aboutthe way you formulated your question is you’re not blaming anyone. You’re not blaming your mom. It looks like you are taking self responsibility, which, by the way, is the only way to create sustainable, permanent change in our life, is when we take responsibility for what we create in our own life. No transformation to at least permanent transformation will come to you when you look at other people being the cause of your problem.

So you’re doing that, you’re taking responsibility, you are acknowledging how it happened to you without blaming, which is amazing. But you’re being triggered by your mom. Although you learned dieting from your mom, she taught you dieting. She invited you to join her in dieting because she was herself at that point socialize the diet culture. She had thoughts and belief that dieting was going to change her life.

What we have to remember here is that diet culture happens in our mind. DI culture is a system of beliefs that leads us to think thoughts on the daily about dieting, about our body, about body size. So when we’re looking at navigating in your question, di culture, we have to look within our mind to find a solution to this. And the first thing we need to acknowledge is all the other people in our life have the same thoughts we used to have about dieting. They’re not thinking about dieting and diet culture, and they’re not talking about it because they wanna arm hus or they want to create a reaction in. They are themselves indoctrinated under the charm of the DI culture. They’re saying these words that trigger us because that’s their reality right now. And it sound like or looks like that your mom hasn’t done the work that you’ve done. She hasn’t yet come to choose a different way to think about bodies, about food, about diet culture.

So the first step I would coach you on is to have compassion for your mom. Is to have compassion for her because she’s in pain, in the same pain and the same probably anxiety that you were on before you came to choose another way to think about bodies and foods and DI culture. She’s feeling exactly what you were feeling back then. She just hasn’t chose yet another way. She perhaps doesn’t even know it’s optional for her to choose another way. Perhaps she’s deadly afraid to choose another way.

The second step is for you to continue the work of dismantling all your thoughts and beliefs that you’ve learned from di culture in your own brain. The long-term solution for you not to feel trigger in the presence of your mom or how to be able to be with your mom without wanting her to change and not feel triggered, the solution to that is in your own mind.

I wanna talk about being triggered for just a moment here because there’s a lot misunderstanding about being triggered, that it is with DI culture or with literally anything. You have to remember that when I coach, when I talk about mindset, I talk about it in the context of food and bodies and di culture, but these principle, these coaching principle applies to everything in your life. Funny enough that we have a training program for professional, and we use the same coaching principle, we use the same coaching at the mindset level for them to build and grow their business as we use inside of AK life with food and body image.

So let’s talk about being triggered. Being triggered is often an analogy to being have our button pushed. But truly it’s not buttons, it’s our wounds. Our wounds from the past are being activated. That’s what trigger is. And it’s an opportunity for you to heal and grow. Every time you are triggered, every time you feel triggered, it’s an opportunity for you to stop and reflect, what is being activated in me right now? When we react to other people’s thoughts, feeling, needs, problem, and opinion in a way that makes us feel triggered, it’s a gift. It’s a gift for us to look within and figure out why we are being triggered. These triggers are from our past, as I mentioned earlier. And the more reactive you are, the more triggered you are, say on a scale of one to 10, for an example, the more traumatic your past in this particular circumstance has been.

So we’ll take the question around dieting and mom dieting. Being shamed for your body size or shaming yourself for your body size and restricting food is a trauma. So when you see your mom dieting and you’re being triggered, what really is happening in your brain is you are activating, you are reliving a past experience that was really damaging, traumatic to you, which is dieting and probably body shaming and hating your body and hating yourself, these are traumatic experience. We don’t hear dieting being talked about from a trauma perspective simply because we live in a fat phobic society. We live in a society that is entrenched, that is built upon diet culture.

But I guarantee you that 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, when we look back at dieting and diet culture and body shaming, we will acknowledge that these event were trauma. We’re just not ready yet for that globally in the population. In my world, in the world of people who help other people heal that, we know these are traumatic events. We just don’t have the agreement of the majority because the majority is entrenched in fat phobia and DI culture.

So I’m gonna come back to the question when you are being triggered, it’s a sign. It’s a sign for you that you have wounds, that you have trauma, that you need to heal for yourself. You need to bring these thoughts back to the surface, and you need to have compassion for yourself. It’s not your fault. You were born in a society that believed in DI culture, that believed in shaming people for their body. You didn’t consciously choose to do that. You just were socialized to do that. So have compassion for yourself and then change your beliefs and your thoughts about bodies, about food, about health, about you as a person, and only you can do this work because that is internal work. We teach a framework to help women change their thoughts and their beliefs that will lead them to no longer be triggered when they come to circumstance of being with other people, the diet. But the best free tool that I can give you right now is the tool of reframing your thinking about dieting and your past experience in food and social. What may need to happen for you is to set boundaries with your mom. For a time while you do your internal work of changing your belief system and changing your thoughts.

The very first live q and a that we did, episode 3 47, I did a answer question specifically on boundaries. So I’m gonna let you go to that podcast to get tools and resources on boundaries. And then I’m gonna close this question here. And I wanna add one more thing. So you’re doing the work and changing your thoughts and your belief so you can feel differently. You have boundaries with your moms while you’re doing your personal work. One of the thing to heal the trauma of years of dieting and body shaming is to learn to be with your emotion. Be with your emotion of shame, be with your emotion of anger. We call that riding the wave, learning to feel your emotion, process your emotion, and then release them.

So you may want to Google that, how to process and release emotions safely. So every time you feel trigger, every time you feel the anxiety and the anger, don’t avoid it, but be with it. So these would be my three steps or my three advice for you to help you navigate diet culture with your mom.

I’m gonna move on to the second question. I’m gonna read it first.

I’ve quit dieting just a little over a year from now. At first, I did it as an act of rebellion. An act of rebellion when I first realized that DI culture was a thing. Amazing that after 25 years of being a feminist, I didn’t even know DI culture existed, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. Anyway, I have since gained weight, which I’m okay with, but does this mean I’ll never lose weight again if I don’t diet?

This is an excellent question and at first I want to say this, many of us, me, including gave a big FU to die culture when it came to our awareness. Like when somebody sat me down and explained to me what DIA culture was and how he was playing with patriarchy and how it was a tool to oppress women in compliance, I just went through a massive stage of anger, massive change. And I know many of you. And most women enter undying their life from that place. It’s part of the journey, but it’s not the whole journey. Dismantling di culture within ourselves cannot be done from a place of anger. It has to be done from a place of compassion.

So perhaps for you that’s the next stage, is learning to have compassion for yourself and for even diet, culture, and why it existed in order for you to create the space, the mental space, and the emotional space within you to be able to dismantle the belief system within you. Rebelling in outwards in hope of changing the system is amazing, but that’s not how we do the work within ourselves. These are kind of two separate sector of work. This is what we call activism. When people dedicate time and resources to dismantling DI culture at a systemic level, but then the work still need to be done within us, and that work cannot be done from a place of anger.

So that’s the place where you are in and meeting yourself with compassion and one of the belief system that di culture uphold is that our body, us, cannot be trusted. Cannot be trusted with food, cannot be trusted with decision around health, we always need an authority outside of us to make decision for us. And that’s part of, it’s one of the belief system we need to change that we can trust us, ourselves, we can trust our mind, we can trust our emotion, and we can trust our physical body. We can trust the wisdom of our body.

So you’ve gained weight. You stop restricting food. I don’t know if you were over exercising. You stop those behavior and you experience what we call diet backlash, right? The pendulum swung the other way and that happens to many of us. Now, what will your body decide to do with that? Is that your weight that you should be at for the rest of your life? I don’t know that. You intellectually do not know that, but your wisdom inside of your body knows, and that’s the work. The work is to lean in to your body wisdom, lean in and build your capacity to trust your body, therefore, yourself.

We can’t control our body. We have the illusion that we can, that’s what DIA culture sells us, but it’s not true. Our body are a unit on its own. It’s a being on its own that knows what it needs to do. Now, this is also where the world of body acceptance comes in, right? So I don’t know how you came to the world of culture. Is it true food? Is it true body? But the work of body image is also part of dismantling the belief system of that culture, that all bodies are good bodies, including your now body, which is heavier than the thinner body you had before. It’s still a good body. So that’s another belief you need to build within you.

At the end of the day, your job is to build trust and respect for your body, accepting the fact that you can’t control your body weight. It was just an illusion sold to you by DI culture. And that’s the work. And that’s the work that needs to be done from a place of compassion. As a feminist, you can continue to do the outward work if that’s your area of work, of dismantling systemically and influencing the world. But don’t forget that the work has to be done within you as well in order for you to change how you experience life, but also to be able to sustain the work in activism for the rest of your life. Because many activists get burned out because they do the work of changing systemic oppression from a place of anger, and that is not sustainable long term. So that was my thought for you.

I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next episode.

 

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350-The 75 Intuitive Challenge

350-The 75 Intuitive Challenge

The 75 Intuitive Challenge

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Today I’m introducing you to an amazing opportunity to get started undieting your life!

The 75 Intuitive Challenge

This challenge is a 75-day transformative program that will permanently change how you approach health and well-being – mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. It’s more sustainable, less pressure, and makes YOU the authority of what health means to you. Click here to learn more about the challenge.

The three main pillars of the program are: consistency, confidence and compassion.

What you’ll learn listening to this episode:

  • What is the 75 intuitive Challenge
  • How to determine if this challenge is for you
  • How to join for free

Mentioned in the show: 

Register for the 75 Intuitive

Quiz: Is It You or Your Diet?

Health Habits Checklist

Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

Episode Transcript:

The 75 Intuitive Challenge

This is episode 350 of The Beyond the Food Show, and today we’re gonna talk about something you may have heard of the 75 Hard Challenge, and we’re gonna offer you an option. Because as you probably can imagine, the 75 Hard Challenge is not something that I think is good for you. So I have an amazing opportunity for you today to do a 75 challenge, but the undieted way, stay tuned.

Hey, welcome back, my sister. Today I’m gonna share with you an amazing opportunity for you to get started undieting your life very gently, very softly with the people that I trust the most on this planet. These are my students. So today it’s gonna be a combination of us talking about why the 75 Hard challenge is actually very toxic and dangerous for us as women. An option, which is called the 75 Intuitive challenge.

And we’re gonna do that in a beautiful group setting. Five women, me plus four other women. And those four women are all my students. They’ve all graduated from my training program and they came together as a community, as a group to offer you an opportunity to get started undieting your life. What they have learned with me and their unique perspective on it, and they wanna share this message with the world so that it’s a free challenge that you can join, it’s 75 days of being exposed on dieting your life and being exposed to their magic.

So here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna roll in the interview that I did with them to introduce them to you. And I wanna say to you, if this is calling on you right now to join this challenge, it’s absolutely free. You can go to the show notes right now of the podcast, either on your app. Or on our website, click the link and join the challenge right away. If you’re not quite sure, listen to the interview. Meet these four amazing women, and then I guarantee you’re gonna want to put your name into this challenge and be exposed to their magic.

We have three people on the podcast today. Been almost a year since I did, how do we call that? A threesome is three people. Where are actually four people here on the podcast today. So there’s me and there’s three of my student on the podcast that have a wonderful news for all of you, my listener, to share with you a beautiful initiative, and I am gonna be the host of them sharing that with you today.

Stephanie: So we’ve got Kim, that’s with us. Hi. Then we’ve got Ardelle. Hello. And then we’ve got Kate. Hi.

Stephanie: So they’re gonna take the center stage of this episode today to share this magnificent, beautiful opportunity for you to take advantage of. So tell me about this exciting event that you have coming up.

Ardelle: Okay. So yeah, we are really excited about this. A big group of, your students, actually intuitive eating coaches, came together and decided that we were going to run a challenge. Being able to share all of our unique expertise, but what we are doing is we are running the 75 Intuitive challenge.

Ardelle: So yeah, it’s a 75-day transformative program that will permanently change how you approach health and wellbeing. It’s going to cover mental, emotional, physical and spiritual aspects of health promoting behaviors. It’s sustainable. There’s no pressure, and it also makes you the authority of what health means to you.

Ardelle: That’s a big goal for this program is to ensure that people know that when they complete it, they are in charge of their body and their health, and that there isn’t ever going to be a list of action items or behaviors that everyone should engage in. It’s built on the three pillars of consistency, confidence, and compassion.

Ardelle: We’ll go into more details in a bit, but it’s going to start April 1st and run until June 14th.

Stephanie: So today is March 16th, so as people listen to you guys on the interview, it’s available for them to join this event. That’s right. Now I can’t not notice that this 75 intuitive is similar to another thing that people may have heard of, this thing called 75 Hard.

Stephanie: So it reminds me of that, and I think it’s purposely done from you guys’ perspective. So tell me more about the 75 hard, 75 intuitive, the parallel between the two.

Kim: Yes, there’s a definite parallel, but this is going to be the exact opposite of Hard. So for anybody who might be listening, if you’re not familiar with the 75 hard, it’s a very popular challenge that goes on in wellness culture and out there in the general public, and it involves 75 days of following a strict diet, exercising, I think twice a day for 45 minutes per time, doing 20 minutes of reading, self-help a day, drinking an enormous amount of water, and I think there are a few other habits. And it is supposed to be hard. And though it is marketed not as a weight loss program, it’s a mental toughness challenge, and it’s supposed to be hard.

Kim: And the whole idea with it is that you have to do each day perfectly. And if you don’t, if you fail to do any one of the habits, you have to press the I failed button on the app and start all over again. And this was going on back at the end of last year, as the whole new year, new you stuff was going on in the marketing. And our coaches group chat started lighting up with people saying, if I have to see one more person saying that they’re starting the 75 Hard, I’m gonna lose my mind.

Kim: And we just got talking about how problematic that is and how it really sets people up to feel like failures and create all kinds of disordered habits around eating and movement. And through that conversation we thought we need to do something different. We need to show people that it’s not that hard, that it can be simple. And we tossed around a few different ideas, 75 easy. But we really landed on 75 Intuitive because that’s what it’s all about. Like you have all of the knowledge within you. You know how to feed yourself, you know how to move yourself. The issue is not trusting that you know what you’re doing, and that’s what we really wanna help people build up.

Stephanie: So 75 Hard is what you said the two words together. Mental toughness. Yeah. So the ideology behind this is that you build toughness in your mind and the toughness will be the base of you doing things right?

Kim: I guess so. Yeah. Right. That if you are strong enough and tough enough to repeat these habits for 75 days. I guess you’re a better person or something, right?

Stephanie: Or that will be the how you will be able to do the right thing in your life by developing toughness in your mind. Mm-hmm. Wow, that is like so wrong and so not how the brain works.

Stephanie: Forget about food, forget about body image, just from the place of coaching and understanding how the brain function, this is not how the brain functions. So the whole philosophy of 75 hard is based on principles that are not even effective in building habits for human.

Kim: Right. Mm-hmm. , right. The whole ideology is that you repeat these actions enough times and your thoughts and your feelings will change. And we know that’s not how it works.

Stephanie: No. Well, and then you can draw the parallel to diet culture, right? That’s exactly what diet culture tells. If you’re strong enough, you’ll be able to restrict food and you will be able to then lose weight and maintain the weight. So 75 Hard, although it claims it’s not about weight loss, it’s another version of diet culture.

Kim: Yes. And though they say it’s not a weight loss challenge, yeah, if you look at the marketing on their website, all you see are before and after photos. Yeah.

Stephanie: Even without going to the marketing, what they’re operating from is just creating another oppressive system for people to feel they’re becoming their own oppressor. The goal is to beat yourself hard enough into compliance. Yes. It’s fucked up.

Ardelle: Yeah. It caught my attention when I first heard about it. I actually saw a colleague, who, she wasn’t trained in intuitive eating, but she’s a body image coach, and she was doing this and she got a large, yeah, a large group of her communities,

Stephanie: But people don’t see my face right now. I’m like, what?

Ardelle: Yeah. I wish we could. Yeah, right. The same. That was exactly my face, and I saw this because what I saw that marketing around it was that it’s not about weight loss. But like Kim said, all you see are before and after photos. But then, like the way they described it, it’s not about the weight that I lost, it’s about how I feel. It’s about what I was able to accomplish. But then why are we using before and after photos to sell it? Right.

Ardelle: And also, is it really the fact that this program made you feel better or is it the fact that you attach worth to being able to stick to something and that’s actually what you’re feeling better, so you’re complying to diet culture.

Stephanie: Yes. And I’m just curious about this body image coach who’s supposedly coaching people in body image, how is she coaching them if it’s not a place of changing your thoughts and your beliefs?

Ardelle: I question the same thing but I like this entire program, 75 Hard doesn’t implement any coaching aspect. Right?

Stephanie: But I want people to listen to this story because that’s, so if you’re looking for somebody to help you with body image . You have to like, you have to do some investigation on the people that are actually helping you because they could be harming you. Yeah. And clearly, this is the case here.

Ardelle: Yeah. I honestly think it’s from that play on the whole Love yourself to change. You know, so that you can still aim to change your body, but as long as you’re doing it from a place of love, then that’s acceptable.

Stephanie: And then you can love yourself by beating yourself.

Ardelle: Yeah. So like, love yourself then.

Stephanie: Oh, I get it. I get it. Oh, I get it. So you can, if you beat yourself enough, then you’ll fall in love with yourself.

Kim: I think it’s more if you loved yourself, you would always eat the right foods or you would move your body. You would do all the right things because you love yourself.

Stephanie: Then love is conditional, right? If you loved yourself enough, you would behave in the right way. So this is all the things that is wrong with 75 hard, how is your proposition, this challenge different?

Kate: Yeah, so first of all, just to be really clear with people, there’s no food rules in 75 Intuitive. There’s no mandatory twice a day workouts or any mandatory movement, no before and after pictures, no perfectionism, no all or nothing thinking. No mental toughness required, right?

Kate: Those are things that are really important for us to just like, this is what we stand behind. And so we wanna switch this, turn it upside down and say, okay, in 75 Intuitive, our goal is to help you connect with your body to regain and build your awareness around your hunger and fullness and satisfaction cues to be able to trust yourself around food and movement again. That you don’t need these lofty goals to trust that you’re gonna move your body or eat well. That you, it becomes second nature to you. That you can pursue your health goals on your terms with self-compassion and a supportive community.

Kate: I think some of these internet challenges, what people are looking for is connection and community and motivation from other people. Especially after the last few years, we’re all craving that connection and community. So there’s a piece that people are looking for, but we wanna put it in a framework that really feels good to people, is not beating themselves up.

Kate: And we know as intuitive eating coaches, it’s gonna set them up for long-term success. I have lots of thoughts, and then the other goal is to create confidence, right? Real confidence, not mental toughness. That it’s about having confidence about yourself and your body, no matter what the number is on the scale or how much you’ve worked out or what you’ve eaten, that confidence is an inside job that we build through our thoughts and our feelings.

Stephanie: So what you’re saying, if I hear you in the most simplified ways, you are going to show people, teach people, and challenge people to do what’s right for them without beating the shit out of themselves. There’s another way.

Kate: Yeah. Yeah. There’s another way.

Stephanie: There’s another way. So why is it constructed under, or is it proposed or formulated under a challenge over 75 days.

Kate: Well, what we’ve put together for these 75 days is a community of 12 coaches that are gonna be showcased throughout those weeks. So you’re really being exposed to a whole non diet community of practitioners with a variety of specialties and focus. So each week is gonna have a theme and a different teaching and also live coaching.

Kate: But some of the experts that we have in this group are intuitive eating counselors, body confidence and body acceptance coaches, licensed mental health counselor, weight neutral personal trainer and fitness coach, perimenopause health coach, intuitive drinking coach, and a food behavior nutritionist.

Kate: So just from those titles, you can hear the variety of expertise that we’re bringing to people, and this will be a venue where they can learn about different non-diet approaches and different habits that they’re gonna wanna focus on.

Stephanie: What I really like about what you just said now is that you’re gonna, people can experience not only hear, but experience that the whole spectrum of health can be provided without making it about weight loss, making it about mental toughness, making it about behaving a certain way. So everything that has to do with your health, from food to exercise to thinking can be done in a non-diet approach. Yeah.

Stephanie: That’s amazing. So who is this for? Like if I was to say to the people listening to this podcast right now, how would they know if it’s for them?

Ardelle: Well, definitely the people that have been victimized by 75 hards, so who have engaged with that challenge, okay, and left it feeling like they were the problem because they lacked, quote, willpower. So definitely those people are going to see that this program will offer them a much more compassionate way to engage with health promoting behavior.

Ardelle: And honestly it’s anyone who is interested in intuitive eating that has maybe practiced it a little bit on their own and are struggling and want some guidance, or those that are completely brand new. It’s great for beginners because like, Kate had said, we have such a range of topics and it’s really good for those who are craving that community and are wanting to be able to engage with health-promoting behaviors, but are constantly feeling like the only way to do it is if they join a really hardcore challenge or a diet.

Ardelle: And so it’s going to offer them a brand-new revolutionary way of being able to achieve results. This isn’t a weight loss program though. We have to make that very clear. So when I say results, it’s being able to, like, the result is you’re listening to your body. You’re gonna feel so confident that you get to choose what habits you engage in. And so that in and of itself is such a powerful, powerful mindset shift.

Stephanie: Well, people, you say you get to choose. One of the things that I hear very often from people who are beginning in this journey is, I’d like to choose, but I don’t even know what to choose from. Will there be guidance to at least have a proposition of what they can choose from in order for them to make the choice?

Ardelle: Yeah, so we’re not doing it the same way that 75 Hard has, where there’s like a list of whatever, like eight or nine I, I don’t know how many habits that everybody has to do each day.

Ardelle: Like we are going to give guidance in what is it that you want to accomplish during these 75 days? Yeah. And with the range of topics that we’ll be covering, for instance, we’re gonna talk about hunger and fullness. We’re gonna talk about building confidence. We’ll be covering movement. So of that selection of different things that you’re learning on a weekly basis, it’s more from if you join this group from a place of curiosity and you engage with the coaches, you listen to what they have to say and you take out of it what you need, that’s going to help you guide in choosing, okay, where do I wanna start? What do I wanna do, each week.

Ardelle: And the other really cool thing that we are doing, Every week there’s a lesson video at the beginning of the week, and at the end there’s going to be a coaching session. Oh. So you get to actually engage with that coach that if you’re struggling or if you’re finding that, that diet mentality is starting to appear, we can work with you. We can coach you through that.

Stephanie: And so this, like you, there’s gonna be coaching session, there’s gonna be lessons, there’s gonna be proposition, there’s gonna be them learning to trust themselves in confidence, it seems like a lot of value. So what is the cost of this?

Ardelle: No monies.

Stephanie: Are you saying the word free? Yeah. Yes.

Stephanie: Okay. So 75 days is how many weeks down? 75 days. 12. I’m not good in mental math. About 10 and a five weeks.

Kim: It’s about 10 and a half weeks.

Stephanie: So it’s two and a half months of a container that people can put themselves in to experience learning, to trust themselves, learning to find what they need within them, with supervision from people that are expert like you.

Stephanie: And all the people, when, when we started the beginning, I just wanna precise that you’re listening to my podcast, obviously you’re into going beyond the food. All the people are graduates from my training programs. So they’re all people who speak to the same lingo, like you’re not gonna land on the body image coach that does the 75 Hard challenge.

Stephanie: Like that’s not the kind of people that are gonna be in there. Right. So you’re getting 10 and a half weeks of that for free. Yep. That’s amazing.

Stephanie: Where can people sign up? I have a feeling people are listening to this, they were expecting a price tag, now you’re saying free so they’re gonna wanna

Kim: Start the car! Yes. So there is a website that we created that has more information. I’m gonna give you the link to put in the show notes. It’s a Canva webpage and the URL is really long. So I’m not gonna read it out loud, but I will give you the link where they can get more information.

Kim: Or they can go to Facebook and search 75 Intuitive Challenge. That’s the name of the group that we’ve opened up. And if they click on that, they can request to join. There’s a few admission questions that they have to answer, and once they do that, one of our admins will approve them and they can come into the group. Right now there’s a little bit of conversation and engagement happening in these two weeks before the challenge officially starts on April 1st.

Kim: The coaches are in there, we’re introducing ourselves. We’re just kind of getting people warmed up and excited. So they are welcome to join us in the Facebook group at any time.

Stephanie: Okay, so what you’re saying, I’m gonna repeat that. There’s gonna be a link in the show notes. So if you go to the show note of this podcast episode, there’s gonna be a link. They click, they’re gonna be asked to give their first name, their email address. They’re gonna join this Facebook group and they’re gonna be entertained right from the time they sign up.

Stephanie: So if they sign up today on the 16th or tomorrow, the Facebook group is open to welcome them. There’s gonna be some entertainment for two weeks and officially starts April the first.

Kim: Exactly, exactly.

Stephanie: And if people hear this episode after the first, because we have a portion about 20% of our listening that are after, sometimes weeks after. So today is April the 10th. Can I still join?

Kim: Absolutely. There is no deadline. As long as they join us before it’s over the middle of June, they’ll be welcomed.

Stephanie: Okay. Amazing. I think this is a wonderful opportunity for people to dip their toes in. Mm-hmm. .. This is the perfect container for people that don’t feel good doing what they were doing before, that it is dieting, wellness culture. They’re like, they’ve heard this thing Intuitive eating, but they quite don’t know it. They don’t know what it means. I think this is the perfect place for people to jump in and get started.

Stephanie: So I didn’t give you a chance at the beginning to introduce yourself, but since you were still here, can you guys, as we close, go around the table from Kim, Ardelle and Kate to introduce yourself and where people can find you.

Kim: Sure. So I’m Kim Hagle. I’ve been on the show before. I am a size-inclusive personal trainer and body image coach and you can find me on, social media at Radiant Vitality Wellness or my podcast is the Joyful Movement Show.

Stephanie: That’s amazing. Adelle Adel.

Ardelle: I am an ex-weight loss coach and ex-wellness-obsessed coach turned intuitive eating and body image coach.

Ardelle: I love working with women who have developed their past patterns on the pillar of perfectionism. And so we’re gonna pause perfectionism. I do this all inside of my signature program called Authentic Appetite, which obviously covers intuitive eating principles, but also mindset coaching as well as just an overall, we take this beyond food, we look at so many other areas of their life.

Ardelle: And you can find me at aromasandavocados.com. And that’s also the handle for all of my social media.

Stephanie: Amazing. Kate.

Kate: Hi, I am Kate William Stone. I am an intuitive eating health coach who focuses primarily on women in their forties in perimenopause. I’ve been in recovery personally from disordered eating for over 20 years, but my health challenges during perimenopause really shook me as far as my relationship with food and body, and it also exposed me to how much wellness culture is out there for women in midlife, telling them their bodies are wrong and need to be changed when natural hormonal body changes are going on.

Kate: So that’s how I support women. You can find me on Instagram at katewstone, and then my website is katewilliamstone.com.

Stephanie: Amazing. And there’s gonna be nine more of views. That’s right. Nine. These are just three of the 12 people that will be in this event. So there’s gonna be nine more amazing people like what you heard today. So I invite all of you listening to this podcast no matter when it is to go into the show note and to register yourself or dip your toes in the water and feel the energy and see the possibility of how this approach can impact and change your life.

 

The 75 Intuitive Challenge

This is episode 350 of The Beyond the Food Show, and today we’re gonna talk about something you may have heard of the 75 Hard Challenge, and we’re gonna offer you an option. Because as you probably can imagine, the 75 Hard Challenge is not something that I think is good for you. So I have an amazing opportunity for you today to do a 75 challenge, but the undieted way, stay tuned.

Hey, welcome back, my sister. Today I’m gonna share with you an amazing opportunity for you to get started undieting your life very gently, very softly with the people that I trust the most on this planet. These are my students. So today it’s gonna be a combination of us talking about why the 75 Hard challenge is actually very toxic and dangerous for us as women. An option, which is called the 75 Intuitive challenge.

And we’re gonna do that in a beautiful group setting. Five women, me plus four other women. And those four women are all my students. They’ve all graduated from my training program and they came together as a community, as a group to offer you an opportunity to get started undieting your life. What they have learned with me and their unique perspective on it, and they wanna share this message with the world so that it’s a free challenge that you can join, it’s 75 days of being exposed on dieting your life and being exposed to their magic.

So here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna roll in the interview that I did with them to introduce them to you. And I wanna say to you, if this is calling on you right now to join this challenge, it’s absolutely free. You can go to the show notes right now of the podcast, either on your app. Or on our website, click the link and join the challenge right away. If you’re not quite sure, listen to the interview. Meet these four amazing women, and then I guarantee you’re gonna want to put your name into this challenge and be exposed to their magic.

We have three people on the podcast today. Been almost a year since I did, how do we call that? A threesome is three people. Where are actually four people here on the podcast today. So there’s me and there’s three of my student on the podcast that have a wonderful news for all of you, my listener, to share with you a beautiful initiative, and I am gonna be the host of them sharing that with you today.

Stephanie: So we’ve got Kim, that’s with us. Hi. Then we’ve got Ardelle. Hello. And then we’ve got Kate. Hi.

Stephanie:So they’re gonna take the center stage of this episode today to share this magnificent, beautiful opportunity for you to take advantage of. So tell me about this exciting event that you have coming up.

Ardelle: Okay. So yeah, we are really excited about this. A big group of, your students, actually intuitive eating coaches, came together and decided that we were going to run a challenge. Being able to share all of our unique expertise, but what we are doing is we are running the 75 Intuitive challenge.

Ardelle:So yeah, it’s a 75-day transformative program that will permanently change how you approach health and wellbeing. It’s going to cover mental, emotional, physical and spiritual aspects of health promoting behaviors. It’s sustainable. There’s no pressure, and it also makes you the authority of what health means to you.

Ardelle: That’s a big goal for this program is to ensure that people know that when they complete it, they are in charge of their body and their health, and that there isn’t ever going to be a list of action items or behaviors that everyone should engage in. It’s built on the three pillars of consistency, confidence, and compassion.

Ardelle:We’ll go into more details in a bit, but it’s going to start April 1st and run until June 14th.

Stephanie: So today is March 16th, so as people listen to you guys on the interview, it’s available for them to join this event. That’s right. Now I can’t not notice that this 75 intuitive is similar to another thing that people may have heard of, this thing called 75 Hard.

Stephanie:So it reminds me of that, and I think it’s purposely done from you guys’ perspective. So tell me more about the 75 hard, 75 intuitive, the parallel between the two.

Kim: Yes, there’s a definite parallel, but this is going to be the exact opposite of Hard. So for anybody who might be listening, if you’re not familiar with the 75 hard, it’s a very popular challenge that goes on in wellness culture and out there in the general public, and it involves 75 days of following a strict diet, exercising, I think twice a day for 45 minutes per time, doing 20 minutes of reading, self-help a day, drinking an enormous amount of water, and I think there are a few other habits. And it is supposed to be hard. And though it is marketed not as a weight loss program, it’s a mental toughness challenge, and it’s supposed to be hard.

Kim: And the whole idea with it is that you have to do each day perfectly. And if you don’t, if you fail to do any one of the habits, you have to press the I failed button on the app and start all over again. And this was going on back at the end of last year, as the whole new year, new you stuff was going on in the marketing. And our coaches group chat started lighting up with people saying, if I have to see one more person saying that they’re starting the 75 Hard, I’m gonna lose my mind.

Kim: And we just got talking about how problematic that is and how it really sets people up to feel like failures and create all kinds of disordered habits around eating and movement. And through that conversation we thought we need to do something different. We need to show people that it’s not that hard, that it can be simple. And we tossed around a few different ideas, 75 easy. But we really landed on 75 Intuitive because that’s what it’s all about. Like you have all of the knowledge within you. You know how to feed yourself, you know how to move yourself. The issue is not trusting that you know what you’re doing, and that’s what we really wanna help people build up.

What is 75 Hard

Stephanie: So 75 Hard is what you said the two words together. Mental toughness. Yeah. So the ideology behind this is that you build toughness in your mind and the toughness will be the base of you doing things right?

Kim:I guess so. Yeah. Right. That if you are strong enough and tough enough to repeat these habits for 75 days. I guess you’re a better person or something, right?

Stephanie: Or that will be the how you will be able to do the right thing in your life by developing toughness in your mind. Mm-hmm. Wow, that is like so wrong and so not how the brain works.

Stephanie: Forget about food, forget about body image, just from the place of coaching and understanding how the brain function, this is not how the brain functions. So the whole philosophy of 75 hard is based on principles that are not even effective in building habits for human.

Kim: Right. Mm-hmm. , right. The whole ideology is that you repeat these actions enough times and your thoughts and your feelings will change. And we know that’s not how it works.

Stephanie: No. Well, and then you can draw the parallel to diet culture, right? That’s exactly what diet culture tells. If you’re strong enough, you’ll be able to restrict food and you will be able to then lose weight and maintain the weight. So 75 Hard, although it claims it’s not about weight loss, it’s another version of diet culture.

Kim: Yes. And though they say it’s not a weight loss challenge, yeah, if you look at the marketing on their website, all you see are before and after photos. Yeah.

Stephanie: Even without going to the marketing, what they’re operating from is just creating another oppressive system for people to feel they’re becoming their own oppressor. The goal is to beat yourself hard enough into compliance. Yes. It’s fucked up.

Ardelle: Yeah. It caught my attention when I first heard about it. I actually saw a colleague, who, she wasn’t trained in intuitive eating, but she’s a body image coach, and she was doing this and she got a large, yeah, a large group of her communities,

Stephanie: But people don’t see my face right now. I’m like, what?

Ardelle:Yeah. I wish we could. Yeah, right. The same. That was exactly my face, and I saw this because what I saw that marketing around it was that it’s not about weight loss. But like Kim said, all you see are before and after photos. But then, like the way they described it, it’s not about the weight that I lost, it’s about how I feel. It’s about what I was able to accomplish. But then why are we using before and after photos to sell it? Right.

Ardelle:And also, is it really the fact that this program made you feel better or is it the fact that you attach worth to being able to stick to something and that’s actually what you’re feeling better, so you’re complying to diet culture.

Stephanie: Yes. And I’m just curious about this body image coach who’s supposedly coaching people in body image, how is she coaching them if it’s not a place of changing your thoughts and your beliefs?

Ardelle: I question the same thing but I like this entire program, 75 Hard doesn’t implement any coaching aspect. Right?

Stephanie: But I want people to listen to this story because that’s, so if you’re looking for somebody to help you with body image . You have to like, you have to do some investigation on the people that are actually helping you because they could be harming you. Yeah. And clearly, this is the case here.

Ardelle: Yeah. I honestly think it’s from that play on the whole Love yourself to change. You know, so that you can still aim to change your body, but as long as you’re doing it from a place of love, then that’s acceptable.

Stephanie:And then you can love yourself by beating yourself.

Ardelle: Yeah. So like, love yourself then.

Stephanie: Oh, I get it. I get it. Oh, I get it. So you can, if you beat yourself enough, then you’ll fall in love with yourself.

Kim:I think it’s more if you loved yourself, you would always eat the right foods or you would move your body. You would do all the right things because you love yourself.

Stephanie: Then love is conditional, right? If you loved yourself enough, you would behave in the right way. So this is all the things that is wrong with 75 hard, how is your proposition, this challenge different?

What is 75 Intuitive

Kate: Yeah, so first of all, just to be really clear with people, there’s no food rules in 75 Intuitive. There’s no mandatory twice a day workouts or any mandatory movement, no before and after pictures, no perfectionism, no all or nothing thinking. No mental toughness required, right?

Kate:Those are things that are really important for us to just like, this is what we stand behind. And so we wanna switch this, turn it upside down and say, okay, in 75 Intuitive, our goal is to help you connect with your body to regain and build your awareness around your hunger and fullness and satisfaction cues to be able to trust yourself around food and movement again. That you don’t need these lofty goals to trust that you’re gonna move your body or eat well. That you, it becomes second nature to you. That you can pursue your health goals on your terms with self-compassion and a supportive community.

Kate: I think some of these internet challenges, what people are looking for is connection and community and motivation from other people. Especially after the last few years, we’re all craving that connection and community. So there’s a piece that people are looking for, but we wanna put it in a framework that really feels good to people, is not beating themselves up.

Kate:And we know as intuitive eating coaches, it’s gonna set them up for long-term success. I have lots of thoughts, and then the other goal is to create confidence, right? Real confidence, not mental toughness. That it’s about having confidence about yourself and your body, no matter what the number is on the scale or how much you’ve worked out or what you’ve eaten, that confidence is an inside job that we build through our thoughts and our feelings.

Stephanie:So what you’re saying, if I hear you in the most simplified ways, you are going to show people, teach people, and challenge people to do what’s right for them without beating the shit out of themselves. There’s another way.

Kate: Yeah. Yeah. There’s another way.

Stephanie: There’s another way. So why is it constructed under, or is it proposed or formulated under a challenge over 75 days.

Kate: Well, what we’ve put together for these 75 days is a community of 12 coaches that are gonna be showcased throughout those weeks. So you’re really being exposed to a whole non diet community of practitioners with a variety of specialties and focus. So each week is gonna have a theme and a different teaching and also live coaching.

Kate: But some of the experts that we have in this group are intuitive eating counselors, body confidence and body acceptance coaches, licensed mental health counselor, weight neutral personal trainer and fitness coach, perimenopause health coach, intuitive drinking coach, and a food behavior nutritionist.

Kate: So just from those titles, you can hear the variety of expertise that we’re bringing to people, and this will be a venue where they can learn about different non-diet approaches and different habits that they’re gonna wanna focus on.

Stephanie: What I really like about what you just said now is that you’re gonna, people can experience not only hear, but experience that the whole spectrum of health can be provided without making it about weight loss, making it about mental toughness, making it about behaving a certain way. So everything that has to do with your health, from food to exercise to thinking can be done in a non-diet approach. Yeah.

Stephanie:That’s amazing. So who is this for? Like if I was to say to the people listening to this podcast right now, how would they know if it’s for them?

Ardelle: Well, definitely the people that have been victimized by 75 hards, so who have engaged with that challenge, okay, and left it feeling like they were the problem because they lacked, quote, willpower. So definitely those people are going to see that this program will offer them a much more compassionate way to engage with health promoting behavior.

Ardelle: And honestly it’s anyone who is interested in intuitive eating that has maybe practiced it a little bit on their own and are struggling and want some guidance, or those that are completely brand new. It’s great for beginners because like, Kate had said, we have such a range of topics and it’s really good for those who are craving that community and are wanting to be able to engage with health-promoting behaviors, but are constantly feeling like the only way to do it is if they join a really hardcore challenge or a diet.

Ardelle: And so it’s going to offer them a brand-new revolutionary way of being able to achieve results. This isn’t a weight loss program though. We have to make that very clear. So when I say results, it’s being able to, like, the result is you’re listening to your body. You’re gonna feel so confident that you get to choose what habits you engage in. And so that in and of itself is such a powerful, powerful mindset shift.

Stephanie: Well, people, you say you get to choose. One of the things that I hear very often from people who are beginning in this journey is, I’d like to choose, but I don’t even know what to choose from. Will there be guidance to at least have a proposition of what they can choose from in order for them to make the choice?

Ardelle:Yeah, so we’re not doing it the same way that 75 Hard has, where there’s like a list of whatever, like eight or nine I, I don’t know how many habits that everybody has to do each day.

Ardelle: Like we are going to give guidance in what is it that you want to accomplish during these 75 days? Yeah. And with the range of topics that we’ll be covering, for instance, we’re gonna talk about hunger and fullness. We’re gonna talk about building confidence. We’ll be covering movement. So of that selection of different things that you’re learning on a weekly basis, it’s more from if you join this group from a place of curiosity and you engage with the coaches, you listen to what they have to say and you take out of it what you need, that’s going to help you guide in choosing, okay, where do I wanna start? What do I wanna do, each week.

Ardelle: And the other really cool thing that we are doing, Every week there’s a lesson video at the beginning of the week, and at the end there’s going to be a coaching session. Oh. So you get to actually engage with that coach that if you’re struggling or if you’re finding that, that diet mentality is starting to appear, we can work with you. We can coach you through that.

Stephanie: And so this, like you, there’s gonna be coaching session, there’s gonna be lessons, there’s gonna be proposition, there’s gonna be them learning to trust themselves in confidence, it seems like a lot of value. So what is the cost of this?

Ardelle: No monies.

Stephanie: Are you saying the word free? Yeah. Yes.

Stephanie: Okay. So 75 days is how many weeks down? 75 days. 12. I’m not good in mental math. About 10 and a five weeks.

Kim: It’s about 10 and a half weeks.

Stephanie: So it’s two and a half months of a container that people can put themselves in to experience learning, to trust themselves, learning to find what they need within them, with supervision from people that are expert like you.

Stephanie: And all the people, when, when we started the beginning, I just wanna precise that you’re listening to my podcast, obviously you’re into going beyond the food. All the people are graduates from my training programs. So they’re all people who speak to the same lingo, like you’re not gonna land on the body image coach that does the 75 Hard challenge.

Stephanie: Like that’s not the kind of people that are gonna be in there. Right. So you’re getting 10 and a half weeks of that for free. Yep. That’s amazing.

Stephanie: Where can people sign up? I have a feeling people are listening to this, they were expecting a price tag, now you’re saying free so they’re gonna wanna

Kim: Start the car! Yes. So there is a website that we created that has more information. I’m gonna give you the link to put in the show notes. It’s a Canva webpage and the URL is really long. So I’m not gonna read it out loud, but I will give you the link where they can get more information.

Kim: Or they can go to Facebook and search 75 Intuitive Challenge. That’s the name of the group that we’ve opened up. And if they click on that, they can request to join. There’s a few admission questions that they have to answer, and once they do that, one of our admins will approve them and they can come into the group. Right now there’s a little bit of conversation and engagement happening in these two weeks before the challenge officially starts on April 1st.

Kim: The coaches are in there, we’re introducing ourselves. We’re just kind of getting people warmed up and excited. So they are welcome to join us in the Facebook group at any time.

Stephanie: Okay, so what you’re saying, I’m gonna repeat that. There’s gonna be a link in the show notes. So if you go to the show note of this podcast episode, there’s gonna be a link. They click, they’re gonna be asked to give their first name, their email address. They’re gonna join this Facebook group and they’re gonna be entertained right from the time they sign up.

Stephanie: So if they sign up today on the 16th or tomorrow, the Facebook group is open to welcome them. There’s gonna be some entertainment for two weeks and officially starts April the first.

Kim: Exactly, exactly.

Stephanie:And if people hear this episode after the first, because we have a portion about 20% of our listening that are after, sometimes weeks after. So today is April the 10th. Can I still join?

Kim:Absolutely. There is no deadline. As long as they join us before it’s over the middle of June, they’ll be welcomed.

Stephanie:Okay. Amazing. I think this is a wonderful opportunity for people to dip their toes in. Mm-hmm. .. This is the perfect container for people that don’t feel good doing what they were doing before, that it is dieting, wellness culture. They’re like, they’ve heard this thing Intuitive eating, but they quite don’t know it. They don’t know what it means. I think this is the perfect place for people to jump in and get started.

<p><b>Stephanie:</b> So I didn’t give you a chance at the beginning to introduce yourself, but since you were still here, can you guys, as we close, go around the table from Kim, Ardelle and Kate to introduce yourself and where people can find you.

Kim: Sure. So I’m Kim Hagle. I’ve been on the show before. I am a size-inclusive personal trainer and body image coach and you can find me on, social media at Radiant Vitality Wellness or my podcast is the Joyful Movement Show.

Stephanie: That’s amazing. Adelle Adel.

Ardelle:I am an ex-weight loss coach and ex-wellness-obsessed coach turned intuitive eating and body image coach.

Ardelle:I love working with women who have developed their past patterns on the pillar of perfectionism. And so we’re gonna pause perfectionism. I do this all inside of my signature program called Authentic Appetite, which obviously covers intuitive eating principles, but also mindset coaching as well as just an overall, we take this beyond food, we look at so many other areas of their life.

Ardelle And you can find me at aromasandavocados.com. And that’s also the handle for all of my social media.

Stephanie: Amazing. Kate.

Kate: Hi, I am Kate William Stone. I am an intuitive eating health coach who focuses primarily on women in their forties in perimenopause. I’ve been in recovery personally from disordered eating for over 20 years, but my health challenges during perimenopause really shook me as far as my relationship with food and body, and it also exposed me to how much wellness culture is out there for women in midlife, telling them their bodies are wrong and need to be changed when natural hormonal body changes are going on.

Kate:So that’s how I support women. You can find me on Instagram at katewstone, and then my website is katewilliamstone.com.

Stephanie: Amazing. And there’s gonna be nine more of views. That’s right. Nine. These are just three of the 12 people that will be in this event. So there’s gonna be nine more amazing people like what you heard today. So I invite all of you listening to this podcast no matter when it is to go into the show note and to register yourself or dip your toes in the water and feel the energy and see the possibility of how this approach can impact and change your life.

 

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349-Listener Q&A Vol.3 Resisting Trusting Myself & Ingrained Feelings

349-Listener Q&A Vol.3 Resisting Trusting Myself & Ingrained Feelings

Listener Q&A Vol.3

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Listener Q&A Vol.3 Resisting Trusting Myself & Ingrained Feelings

In today’s episode, I am answering two more questions from our listeners. Can I really trust myself? & How to release old emotions that keeps coming? 

The answer to both of these questions will reinforce the importance of mindset work and body image.

What you’ll learn listening to this episode on Listener Q&A Vol.3:

  • The answer to the question, “I know in my head what I’m doing is right but my feelings towards myself are so ingrained. I feel like I can’t change them. Help!”
  • The answer to the question, “I don’t know if I can trust my body: What does it mean? Where is it in my body? Can I really trust my body?

Mentioned in the show: 

Rebellious Eating Masterclass

Quiz: Is It You or Your Diet?

Podcast Roadmap

Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

Episode Transcript:

Listener Q&A Vol.3 Resisting trusting myself & Ingrained feelings-Ep 349

This is episode 349 of The Beyond the Food Show and today we’re gonna answer two listener’s questions. The first one is about the difficulty of releasing emotion, and the other one is the difficulty in trusting ourselves. Stay tuned!

Welcome back, my sister. It is the third installment of listener Q&A, and I’m getting some good feedback thus far about this series of podcasts, but I would love to hear from you. If you haven’t listened to the first two, perhaps do that and then shoot me a DM on Instagram or an email at [email protected] and let me know if this is a format of podcasts you’re enjoying and at the same time, if you do have a question, please submit it on the email, and we will add it to the list of question we have upcoming for the other listener Q&A that we have lined up.

Just a quick reminder to everyone about active listening. So active listening is a principle that I teach to anyone who joins me in group coaching program where you are exposed to other people being coached, to direct your mind to benefit from other people receiving coaching around you.

So there’s two intentional thoughts that I want to give you as I am coaching those two questions. Number one, focus your brain to think, “I always hear what I need.” And the second is asking yourself a question, “How can I apply this coaching to my life, my situation, and my current problem?”

With that in mind, we’re gonna start with the very first question, which is this one.

I know I’m in my head. And I know what I’m doing right now towards my feelings and my emotion is not working for me because I cannot let go of some of the emotions I have been experiencing nearly all of my life. Some of my feelings towards me feel like they’re ingrained, and honestly, I had to look up the definition of ingrained as a French person to make sure I understand it. But ingrained literally means built-in. So this listener is having feelings about herself that feels like they’re just embedded in her. She can’t release them. She cannot let them go and she says, I can’t change them no matter how much I try. Please help me.

So if you are in a position where you say, Hey, Stephanie, I can’t release, I can’t change my feelings, you are 100% right. I could stop here, but I’m not.

100% right, you cannot change directly your feelings. And I know some of you’re gonna be like, what? You’ve been talking about this for like 300 episodes. I know, but I never said to you, change your feelings. I said over and over and over. Change your thoughts. And your thoughts create your feeling, and when you change your thoughts, when you change your mindset, your thinking, that results in you having a different emotional experience.

We cannot change directly our feelings. So I’m gonna give you a short lesson in anatomy here, in nervous system anatomy, particularly. So your brain is part of your nervous system, right? The brain is the commanding officer of the entire body, including your nervous system. Your nervous system is a collection of organs and tissues in your body that commands your experience of life. Your brain being part of that, it’s like sit at the top of your body, that’s the starting point of your nervous system. And then attached to your brain is your spine. And attached to your spine is thousands and thousands and thousands of nerve endings that travel all the way to the tips of your finger and the tips of your toe.

The way your emotions are created in your body, it’s via your nervous system. But it just doesn’t start in your body. It actually starts in your brain. Your brain processes the world, the environment you’re in, and it has an opinion, a perspective on what’s happening in your life.

So for example, this person talks about her opinion of herself. Let’s contextualize that into how she views herself. Let’s imagine she sees a reflection in the mirror. As she sees her reflection in the mirror, her brain within millisecond has an opinion about that. Likely along the lines of diet culture, probably you’re too fat, your belly’s too big, you’re too old, all the too much, right? That’s what diet culture does, tells us with too much.

So she has a thought and that thought then travels to the rest of her body via her central nervous system, her spine, and her nerve endings. And then when it lands again within a millisecond in the nerve ending and the rest of the body, it’s like an electric current; it has sensation. And we name these sensations as emotions. But really what emotions are is simply sensations in the body.

Most people about body image, they feel disgusted, they feel shame, and that typically shows up in the midsection of the body and heat and cold and tightness. And when you have these sensations in your body, your brain is like, Ooh, you feel a shame. It labels the sensation as shame. And that’s why you say, I keep experiencing the same thing and I cannot release the shame. You cannot release the shame until you change the way you think about your body. If every time you see your body, you have the thought, you’re too fat, it’s gonna create shame. There’s no stopping that. The only way to stop that would be to cut the central nerve, like cut your spine.

This is not like serious, like for all my science geeky people, like, I’m just making an analogy here. But I’m just saying there’s no way of stopping the mechanism. Once it has started in your brain, it will transfer to the rest of your body and you will experience shame. The way to release your emotion is to change the way you think about the circumstance that causes you the emotion.

So, you can do that on your own, like grab your blank piece of paper and start putting your thoughts about your body, about yourself on a piece of paper. And then decide which thought you wanna move forward and not with. Or you can use a framework like cognitive behavioral coaching, right, which is an adaptation of cognitive behavioral therapy done with a practitioner. It’s arranged so you can do it on your own. It’s a framework, it’s a step-by-step process that allows you to figure out your thought that creates your feelings. And then you go into your brain and then you change the way you think, which will then change your sensation in your body and your emotional experience. That’s how you release your emotion.

And I understand that there’s different messages out into the world about releasing emotion. A couple of days ago, I was trying to explain to a colleague of mine, Mindset Coaching. And I said to her, it’s very unfortunate in today’s world where we are at right now with social media, we have a large number of influencers, of people out into the world who are trying to help the world and they are not instructing people on how their brain and their emotion are really working and they’re saying just manifest another sensation in your body, just manifest love for your body. You should see my face as I’m saying that. Right, and it’s the whole like mindset is manifestation. It is not true. Like you cannot just manifest love for your body out of a green, lush mountain somewhere. That’s not how the human anatomy, the human body functions. That’s not how the nervous system functions. There’s more to it than that. And I’m sorry if you’ve had this kind of narrative given to you and that’s why you’re stuck today. You’re saying I can’t release those emotions even though they’re telling me I should just be able to release them. We can’t. We can’t intervene at the emotional level. We have to intervene at the cognitive level. We have to change our opinion. We have to look into our belief system, and that will change our emotional experience. If you wanna do this, we’re here to help you. We have an entire structure for that.

Second question. I don’t know if I can trust my body. What does it mean to trust your body? Where is trust in my body? Can I really trust my body? These three questions are spinning in my head all the time. I’ve listened to the last 150 episodes of your podcast, and I can’t seem to find the answer to those three questions. What does it mean to trust my body? Where is it in my body, and can I really trust my body? I would love your help with that.

This is a great question. So, we’ll simplify it to begin with. Trusting your body is a feeling. Trust is an emotion. It’s a bunch of sensations in your body. This is a perfect question following the last one. So trust is an emotion that you are experiencing in the context of your body. So when you think about your body, you are, right now you’re not, but the goal is for you to experience the sensation that will lead you to think, I trust my body.

So we’ll go from the last question, if it’s a feeling, if it’s an emotion, then that means the way that I create trust is through my thoughts. It’s through the opinion that I have about my body. So to answer your question, where is it in my body? It’s a sensation that you are experiencing when you think certain thoughts about your body.

That’s all. That’s the simplified answer to your question. Now you’re saying to me, can I really trust my body? Otherwise said, can I really create the sensation of trust in my body?

The simplified answer is yes, you can. You can create any sensation in your body. You can decide to experience any emotion you so desire to experience. All you have to do is think along the lines of the emotion you want to create. So if you want to create trust, you’re gonna have to think trust-based thoughts about yourself and your body. So can you really create it? Absolutely. But you’re gonna have to change the way you think about your body.

What does it mean to trust your body? That’s a more complicated answer, but the way that I like to experience it for myself, the way that I think about trusting my body is trusting myself. I am my body. Without getting too spiritual here, I’m gonna talk about this in terms of spirituality, also recognizing that for people who believe in God, replace the spiritual term with God, it means the same thing.

But for me, my body is a physical vehicle. It’s an envelope. It’s a container that I have that houses, that is the host of my spirit. Or God. Or God in spirit, however your views are. We’ll talk about it in term of spirit but my physical shell is the house of my spirit, the thing I can’t touch. The thing that makes me, who I am, my personality, my thoughts, my emotion, the untouchable. My physical body is what I can touch. If you can hear it right now, that’s my physical body. That’s the thing I can see, I can feel. That’s how I show up in the world, but it’s only the container of who I truly am, which is my spirit.

So what does it mean to trust my body truly is trusting myself, because I am my body. That’s what it means to trust yourself. It means that, for example, you trust your body to guide you on when to eat, how much to eat, what to eat. You use the sensation that your body is communicating with you to make decision about food. You use your sensation in your body to decide when you should move your body, how you should move your body, what type of exercise or movement you enjoy, you like, that makes your body feel good. You trust your intuition, your gut feeling about who you should connect with, the people that you get along with, that should be in your life.

You trust your intuition, your gut feeling, your thoughts about the next decision of the next move in your life. That’s what it means to trust yourself. Now, as I’m saying that, probably makes sense, and then you’re gonna say to me, what I don’t have that. I always doubt myself. And to that, I wanna say, it’s 100% normal. By the remainder of the question that was given to me that I’m not gonna share here, you are a woman and you are in your fifties. You have been dieting, as you said most of your life, so you have learned to not trust yourself.

Without directly implying it, saying, I don’t trust myself, you’ve learned probably in your twenties to not trust your body for feeding yourself. And then somewhere along the line, you started to overexercise and you started to feel pain or a non desire to go to workout, and you overridden that because the diet gurus and the fitness guru was saying to you, no pain, no gain. You gotta be in pain, right? It’s gotta be painful for it to be worth it. So you started to discard all your intuition about movement and you discarded about food. And then everywhere in your life, the structure, the conditioning, the social environment, we’re telling you no, you’re not good enough to decide. Like you don’t know, need validation externally.

So everywhere you were repeated over and over, not to trust yourself. So that’s why today you are on this journey of trusting yourself and it feels so foreign. It’s normal.

My advice to you in the way that I coach women through regaining self-trust is with first of all, food. We start practicing self-trust in one tiny area of your life. We go through a journey, like a process to trust yourself with food, and then you build self-trust with food, and then you build, you build, you build, and then you go to another area of your life, and then you rebuild your trust. Perhaps it’s with movement, perhaps it’s with relationship or career, or your body image or your health. Pick one area of your life and focus on that one tiny part of your life and start getting familiar again with self-trust. And then, once you’ve understood how to create a trustful relationship with your body in which yourself in that one section of your life, then expand the other area of your life. That’s what has made me successful in my life. That’s what has made my clients successful. Not try to change your whole life at once, and focus on one area.

That’s my advice to you. I hope the way that I’ve explained it to you, it made it more concrete so you can connect with self-trust.

I know many of you listening to this podcast needed that message here. Somehow I have this intuition, and I’m gonna trust it to say, as you listen to me talk about self-trust, I guarantee you that your brain has more questions. Please bring them into us so I can do a part two self-trust, listener Q&A in the upcoming weeks. Simply send an email to us at [email protected]. Tell us you’ve listened to that podcast episode and you’ve got more questions. And then I’ll build on that, to give you more guidance on self-trust.

Until the next podcast episode. I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you next week.

 

Listener Q&A Vol.3 Resisting trusting myself & Ingrained feelings-Ep 349

This is episode 349 of The Beyond the Food Show and today we’re gonna answer two listener’s questions. The first one is about the difficulty of releasing emotion, and the other one is the difficulty in trusting ourselves. Stay tuned!

Welcome back, my sister. It is the third installment of listener Q&A, and I’m getting some good feedback thus far about this series of podcasts, but I would love to hear from you. If you haven’t listened to the first two, perhaps do that and then shoot me a DM on Instagram or an email at [email protected] and let me know if this is a format of podcasts you’re enjoying and at the same time, if you do have a question, please submit it on the email, and we will add it to the list of question we have upcoming for the other listener Q&A that we have lined up.

Just a quick reminder to everyone about active listening. So active listening is a principle that I teach to anyone who joins me in group coaching program where you are exposed to other people being coached, to direct your mind to benefit from other people receiving coaching around you.

So there’s two intentional thoughts that I want to give you as I am coaching those two questions. Number one, focus your brain to think, “I always hear what I need.” And the second is asking yourself a question, “How can I apply this coaching to my life, my situation, and my current problem?”

With that in mind, we’re gonna start with the very first question, which is this one.

I know I’m in my head. And I know what I’m doing right now towards my feelings and my emotion is not working for me because I cannot let go of some of the emotions I have been experiencing nearly all of my life. Some of my feelings towards me feel like they’re ingrained, and honestly, I had to look up the definition of ingrained as a French person to make sure I understand it. But ingrained literally means built-in. So this listener is having feelings about herself that feels like they’re just embedded in her. She can’t release them. She cannot let them go and she says, I can’t change them no matter how much I try. Please help me.

So if you are in a position where you say, Hey, Stephanie, I can’t release, I can’t change my feelings, you are 100% right. I could stop here, but I’m not.

100% right, you cannot change directly your feelings. And I know some of you’re gonna be like, what? You’ve been talking about this for like 300 episodes. I know, but I never said to you, change your feelings. I said over and over and over. Change your thoughts. And your thoughts create your feeling, and when you change your thoughts, when you change your mindset, your thinking, that results in you having a different emotional experience.

We cannot change directly our feelings. So I’m gonna give you a short lesson in anatomy here, in nervous system anatomy, particularly. So your brain is part of your nervous system, right? The brain is the commanding officer of the entire body, including your nervous system. Your nervous system is a collection of organs and tissues in your body that commands your experience of life. Your brain being part of that, it’s like sit at the top of your body, that’s the starting point of your nervous system. And then attached to your brain is your spine. And attached to your spine is thousands and thousands and thousands of nerve endings that travel all the way to the tips of your finger and the tips of your toe.

The way your emotions are created in your body, it’s via your nervous system. But it just doesn’t start in your body. It actually starts in your brain. Your brain processes the world, the environment you’re in, and it has an opinion, a perspective on what’s happening in your life.

So for example, this person talks about her opinion of herself. Let’s contextualize that into how she views herself. Let’s imagine she sees a reflection in the mirror. As she sees her reflection in the mirror, her brain within millisecond has an opinion about that. Likely along the lines of diet culture, probably you’re too fat, your belly’s too big, you’re too old, all the too much, right? That’s what diet culture does, tells us with too much.

So she has a thought and that thought then travels to the rest of her body via her central nervous system, her spine, and her nerve endings. And then when it lands again within a millisecond in the nerve ending and the rest of the body, it’s like an electric current; it has sensation. And we name these sensations as emotions. But really what emotions are is simply sensations in the body.

Most people about body image, they feel disgusted, they feel shame, and that typically shows up in the midsection of the body and heat and cold and tightness. And when you have these sensations in your body, your brain is like, Ooh, you feel a shame. It labels the sensation as shame. And that’s why you say, I keep experiencing the same thing and I cannot release the shame. You cannot release the shame until you change the way you think about your body. If every time you see your body, you have the thought, you’re too fat, it’s gonna create shame. There’s no stopping that. The only way to stop that would be to cut the central nerve, like cut your spine.

This is not like serious, like for all my science geeky people, like, I’m just making an analogy here. But I’m just saying there’s no way of stopping the mechanism. Once it has started in your brain, it will transfer to the rest of your body and you will experience shame. The way to release your emotion is to change the way you think about the circumstance that causes you the emotion.

So, you can do that on your own, like grab your blank piece of paper and start putting your thoughts about your body, about yourself on a piece of paper. And then decide which thought you wanna move forward and not with. Or you can use a framework like cognitive behavioral coaching, right, which is an adaptation of cognitive behavioral therapy done with a practitioner. It’s arranged so you can do it on your own. It’s a framework, it’s a step-by-step process that allows you to figure out your thought that creates your feelings. And then you go into your brain and then you change the way you think, which will then change your sensation in your body and your emotional experience. That’s how you release your emotion.

And I understand that there’s different messages out into the world about releasing emotion. A couple of days ago, I was trying to explain to a colleague of mine, Mindset Coaching. And I said to her, it’s very unfortunate in today’s world where we are at right now with social media, we have a large number of influencers, of people out into the world who are trying to help the world and they are not instructing people on how their brain and their emotion are really working and they’re saying just manifest another sensation in your body, just manifest love for your body. You should see my face as I’m saying that. Right, and it’s the whole like mindset is manifestation. It is not true. Like you cannot just manifest love for your body out of a green, lush mountain somewhere. That’s not how the human anatomy, the human body functions. That’s not how the nervous system functions. There’s more to it than that. And I’m sorry if you’ve had this kind of narrative given to you and that’s why you’re stuck today. You’re saying I can’t release those emotions even though they’re telling me I should just be able to release them. We can’t. We can’t intervene at the emotional level. We have to intervene at the cognitive level. We have to change our opinion. We have to look into our belief system, and that will change our emotional experience. If you wanna do this, we’re here to help you. We have an entire structure for that.

Second question. I don’t know if I can trust my body. What does it mean to trust your body? Where is trust in my body? Can I really trust my body? These three questions are spinning in my head all the time. I’ve listened to the last 150 episodes of your podcast, and I can’t seem to find the answer to those three questions. What does it mean to trust my body? Where is it in my body, and can I really trust my body? I would love your help with that.

This is a great question. So, we’ll simplify it to begin with. Trusting your body is a feeling. Trust is an emotion. It’s a bunch of sensations in your body. This is a perfect question following the last one. So trust is an emotion that you are experiencing in the context of your body. So when you think about your body, you are, right now you’re not, but the goal is for you to experience the sensation that will lead you to think, I trust my body.

So we’ll go from the last question, if it’s a feeling, if it’s an emotion, then that means the way that I create trust is through my thoughts. It’s through the opinion that I have about my body. So to answer your question, where is it in my body? It’s a sensation that you are experiencing when you think certain thoughts about your body.

That’s all. That’s the simplified answer to your question. Now you’re saying to me, can I really trust my body? Otherwise said, can I really create the sensation of trust in my body?

The simplified answer is yes, you can. You can create any sensation in your body. You can decide to experience any emotion you so desire to experience. All you have to do is think along the lines of the emotion you want to create. So if you want to create trust, you’re gonna have to think trust-based thoughts about yourself and your body. So can you really create it? Absolutely. But you’re gonna have to change the way you think about your body.

What does it mean to trust your body? That’s a more complicated answer, but the way that I like to experience it for myself, the way that I think about trusting my body is trusting myself. I am my body. Without getting too spiritual here, I’m gonna talk about this in terms of spirituality, also recognizing that for people who believe in God, replace the spiritual term with God, it means the same thing.

But for me, my body is a physical vehicle. It’s an envelope. It’s a container that I have that houses, that is the host of my spirit. Or God. Or God in spirit, however your views are. We’ll talk about it in term of spirit but my physical shell is the house of my spirit, the thing I can’t touch. The thing that makes me, who I am, my personality, my thoughts, my emotion, the untouchable. My physical body is what I can touch. If you can hear it right now, that’s my physical body. That’s the thing I can see, I can feel. That’s how I show up in the world, but it’s only the container of who I truly am, which is my spirit.

So what does it mean to trust my body truly is trusting myself, because I am my body. That’s what it means to trust yourself. It means that, for example, you trust your body to guide you on when to eat, how much to eat, what to eat. You use the sensation that your body is communicating with you to make decision about food. You use your sensation in your body to decide when you should move your body, how you should move your body, what type of exercise or movement you enjoy, you like, that makes your body feel good. You trust your intuition, your gut feeling about who you should connect with, the people that you get along with, that should be in your life.

You trust your intuition, your gut feeling, your thoughts about the next decision of the next move in your life. That’s what it means to trust yourself. Now, as I’m saying that, probably makes sense, and then you’re gonna say to me, what I don’t have that. I always doubt myself. And to that, I wanna say, it’s 100% normal. By the remainder of the question that was given to me that I’m not gonna share here, you are a woman and you are in your fifties. You have been dieting, as you said most of your life, so you have learned to not trust yourself.

Without directly implying it, saying, I don’t trust myself, you’ve learned probably in your twenties to not trust your body for feeding yourself. And then somewhere along the line, you started to overexercise and you started to feel pain or a non desire to go to workout, and you overridden that because the diet gurus and the fitness guru was saying to you, no pain, no gain. You gotta be in pain, right? It’s gotta be painful for it to be worth it. So you started to discard all your intuition about movement and you discarded about food. And then everywhere in your life, the structure, the conditioning, the social environment, we’re telling you no, you’re not good enough to decide. Like you don’t know, need validation externally.

So everywhere you were repeated over and over, not to trust yourself. So that’s why today you are on this journey of trusting yourself and it feels so foreign. It’s normal.

My advice to you in the way that I coach women through regaining self-trust is with first of all, food. We start practicing self-trust in one tiny area of your life. We go through a journey, like a process to trust yourself with food, and then you build self-trust with food, and then you build, you build, you build, and then you go to another area of your life, and then you rebuild your trust. Perhaps it’s with movement, perhaps it’s with relationship or career, or your body image or your health. Pick one area of your life and focus on that one tiny part of your life and start getting familiar again with self-trust. And then, once you’ve understood how to create a trustful relationship with your body in which yourself in that one section of your life, then expand the other area of your life. That’s what has made me successful in my life. That’s what has made my clients successful. Not try to change your whole life at once, and focus on one area.
That’s my advice to you. I hope the way that I’ve explained it to you, it made it more concrete so you can connect with self-trust.

I know many of you listening to this podcast needed that message here. Somehow I have this intuition, and I’m gonna trust it to say, as you listen to me talk about self-trust, I guarantee you that your brain has more questions. Please bring them into us so I can do a part two self-trust, listener Q&A in the upcoming weeks. Simply send an email to us at [email protected]. Tell us you’ve listened to that podcast episode and you’ve got more questions. And then I’ll build on that, to give you more guidance on self-trust.

Until the next podcast episode. I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you next week.

 

 

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348-Listener Q&A Vol.2 Eating Past Fullness & Confidence at Work

348-Listener Q&A Vol.2 Eating Past Fullness & Confidence at Work

Listener Q&A Vol.2 Eating past fullness & confidence at work

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Listener Q&A Vol.2 Eating Past Fullness & Confidence at Work

We are diving into two more questions from our listeners. 

Why do I keep eating past fullness?

A very common question that comes up in the non-diet coaching space is, “Why do I keep eating past fullness?” The reason this question is so common is because of the perpetual message coming from diet culture that all bodies are meant to be thin, and one of the ways to be thin is to control the amount of food we consume. 

Moreover, if you are still immersed in diet culture or new to undieting your life, then it’s normal that your brain reacts to eating past fullness. It’s likely that you respond to the sensation of fullness with self-judgemental thoughts such as, “I’m a failure,” “I’m so bad for eating past fullness,” or “I’m going to gain so much weight.” 

For years, your brain was conditioned to believe that fullness was something you should avoid. It was a sign of “self-control.” When this conditioning goes unchecked, your reaction to the sensation of fullness will most likely continue to result in a desire to restrict your food intake. 

In fact, nothing has gone wrong. The key to creating a different outcome isn’t a matter of taking different actions. Instead, it’s a matter of committing to mindset work. 

Mindset work is the foundation of eating normally. 

Is there a link between confidence at work & body image?

The answer to the question, “Is there a link between confidence at work and body image?” is an easy one. HELL YES! 

We cannot hate a part of ourselves and be confident externally in the world. In fact, if we seek confidence outside of body image, we’ll end up overcompensating for the lack of confidence in our bodies. It’s often why women overwork in the corporate world, trying to prove their worth. 

The more women who are liberated from diet culture and on a journey of self-acceptance, the more women who claim promotions, more money and achieve their career goals. 

If you have a question that you would like us to answer, please submit them! 

What you’ll learn listening to this episode on Listener Q&A Vol.2 Eating Past Fullness & Confidence at Work:

  • The answer to the question, “Why do I keep eating past fullness?”
  • The answer to the question, “Is there a link between confidence at work & body image?”

Mentioned in the show: 

Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

Quiz: Is It You or Your Diet?

Rebellious Eating Masterclass

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347-Listener Q&A Vol.1

347-Listener Q&A Vol.1

Listener Q&A Vol.1

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Listener Q&A Vol.1: How to Handle Your Mom’s Comments On Your Body 

If you’re like the listener who submitted the question about how to set a boundary with your mom, it’s normal that you may feel triggered when someone, including your mom, comments on your body. 

It’s normal to think that the way to handle comments is to change how the person who said the comment thinks about you. That approach creates a false sense of control and leads to further disappointment. 

Triggers are your biggest teacher. In the case of receiving a comment about your body, that’s an invitation to create a new opinion about yourself. 

The work isn’t about changing other people’s thoughts but instead changing your own thoughts, which is easier when you set some boundaries.  

Why Emphasizing Intuitive Eating Should Be a Priority

The next question we received was: 

“Can you explain why emphasizing Intuitive Eating should be a priority beyond food obsession?”

It’s normal that when you experience benefits from something, to want to share it with everyone. It’s also normal that when you experience pushback, you try convincing them to understand your decision.

While having the knowledge of the health benefits of Intuitive Eating is important for your own sake, it’s not necessary to share it with everyone unless they ask. Make your journey about you and only you. 

If you have a question that you would like us to answer, please submit them! 

What you’ll learn listening to this episode on Listener Q&A Vol.1:

  • How to set boundaries with your mom when she comments on your body
  • The truth about setting boundaries 
  • Why emphasizing Intuitive Eating should be a priority beyond food obsession
  • Health benefits of Intuitive Eating 

Mentioned in the show: 

Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

Quiz: Is It You or Your Diet?

Rebellious Eating Masterclass

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346-Here Is What I Want Every Fat Woman to Know

346-Here Is What I Want Every Fat Woman to Know

Here is what I want every fat woman to know

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Here is what I want every fat woman to know…

Before I start, I want to address those who may find self-identifying as fat as triggering. I want you to have a lot of love and compassion for yourself. 

This message is for anyone who identifies as fat and who is struggling with the size of their body, regardless of what pant size you are or how you relate to the BMI.

Here is what I want every fat woman to know

Here’s what I want you to know:

It’s not fair. 

It’s unfair that society doesn’t welcome you and your body. It’s unfair that regular everyday tasks are more challenging such as shopping for clothes or sitting at a restaurant booth, or that airplane seats don’t accommodate your body. 

Despite this unfairness, you have a choice. You have a choice to allow these hurdles to stop you from being who you are. 

The reason why we suffer from fatphobia is that we decide to let it affect us emotionally. 

The only person responsible for your suffering is you and the thoughts you have toward the circumstance. 

Fatphobia wins when it prevents you from showing up in the world. The only way to stop that is by taking full responsibility for your emotions. 

I share this with you so you can see the possibility of what is on the other side of taking responsibility for how you experience fatphobia. 

Acceptance of Fatphobia  

Acceptance of fatphobia doesn’t mean that you agree with it. It means that you learn how to manage your mind so that you can stop suffering from living inside a large body. 

Changing your thoughts is simple but not easy. It’s simple because all you need is you and awareness of your thoughts. Once you have identified how these thoughts make you feel, the next step is to choose to change your thoughts. 

This process can be done alone or via investing in working with a coach. Regardless of how you choose to work on it, knowing it is possible is the most important factor. 

The return on investment will be endless. Learning to manage your thoughts and emotions is a tool that can be used in every area of your life. When you break through the limiting beliefs around living in a fat body, you will see all the other areas that are possible for you. That job promotion becomes attainable, handling issues with your boss becomes easy, setting boundaries is a breeze, shopping for clothes is fun, going to the beach is exciting, and walking into a room feeling confident is natural. 

Externalized fatphobia is a fact. How you experience it is up to you. 

What you’ll learn listening to this episode on here is what I want every fat woman to know:

  1. The surprising truth about fatphobia
  2. Three simple steps to changing how you experience fatphobia 
  3. What’s possible for you when you choose how you’ll experience fatphobia

Mentioned in the show: 

Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

Quiz: Is It You or Your Diet?

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345-What Happens When You Undiet Your Life?

345-What Happens When You Undiet Your Life?

What happens when you undiet your life?

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What Happens When You Undiet Your Life?

You’re invited! The Undiet Your Life 2023 Live Experience is here!

Once a year, we create a unique container for women wanting to create change rapidly.

When you join Undiet Your Life Coaching Program now, you can join the live experience and fast-track your results.

The Undiet Your Life Live 2023 Experience is when we get a group of women together for 2 months and study our 3 steps of Undiet Your Life process with a very focused and intense approach to facilitate your transformation quickly. 

We start with an intensive class on Sunday, February 5th, 2023, where you master the mindset coaching tool in 1 day AND over the next 8 weeks we apply it to food, health, and body image.

You get 2 months of my energy, passion, and accountability to move yours thru this life-changing transformation of undieting your life.

2023 Undiet Your Life Live Experience classes date and time

  • Mindset Coaching Intensive
    • Sunday, February 5th, 10-2 pm EST
  • Peaceful Eating
    • Friday, February 10th, 17th, 24th and Thursday, March 9th – 12 noon EST
  • Liberated Body Image
    • Friday, March 17th, 24th, 31st and Thursday, April 6th – 12 pm EST

All live classes will be recorded, and you will also have access to the on-demand version of the classes.

Additional to the 2023 Live Experience, you also get access to the regular on-demand program for 1 full year so you get access to … 

  • The 3 Courses – Confident mindset self-coaching tool, Intuitive eating, and Body image. On-demand pre-recorded video teaching on average 10 minutes per lesson. (the same content will be delivered live by Stephanie in the 2023 Live Experience)
  • Private Podcast –. Short bites 10 mins solution and action-driven episodes. (Over 123+ episodes now and counting…)
  • Bi-Weekly Group Coaching– Each week, we hop on Zoom together, and coach students. 
  • Immediate access to Email Coaching – anytime you have a question or need coaching, you submit a question anonymously to Coach Corner and a coach helps you via email. 
  • Daily Accountability Check-Ins – Receive a text on your phone at 6 am EST everyday. 
  • Private Community –  A community of women committed to creating their better, fuller, and bolder life.

And a complete suite of Life Coaching Tools

  • created specifically for women leaving diet culture: Boundaries Setting & Hard Conversation, People Pleasing Detox, More Than Enough Masterclass, Setting Clean Goals, Believing in myself, Reset Exercise Mindset (with guest teacher Kim), Other People Opinions, Getting Your Nervous System on Board, … and free access to any upcoming workshops I may host for 1 full year.

All of the above for $777 (payment plan available).

Enrolment is open now until February 3rd midnight – in order to join the 2023 Live Experience but everyone I talk to tells me that they wish they joined sooner and didn’t wait. 

Don’t wait.

Enroll to secure your seat in this amazing experience – Undiet Your Life 2023 Live Experience

See you inside!

What you’ll learn listening to this episode on what happens when you Undiet Your Life?:

  • What does it mean to undiet your life
  • What can you expect to see in your day-to-day life after undieting your life
  • Why this is NOT a quick-fix process 
  • The 2023 Live Experience details

Mentioned in the show: 

Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

Quiz: Is It You or Your Diet?

Podcast Roadmap

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344-Rebellious Eating, Self-Responsibility and Mindset

344-Rebellious Eating, Self-Responsibility and Mindset

Rebellious eating, self-responsibility and mindset

Rebellious eating, self-responsibility, and mindset:

Have you attempted intuitive eating, hoping you would easily eat according to your hunger and fullness cues, only to end up with rebellious eating habits? 

This is totally normal. 

Before I explain the reason why rebellious eating happens, let’s discuss exactly what it is. 

What is Rebellious Eating?

Rebellious behaviour is essentially about reclaiming your power or authority over your life in response to a limitation, rule or restriction. Rebellious eating is behaviours that are fundamentally centred around you claiming back your power over your eating choices. It is the opposite of peaceful or normal eating. 

Peaceful eating is what happens after you heal your relationship with food and the damage that was done by restricting food. 

Rebellious eating examples include:

  • binge eating
  • overeating
  • compulsive eating 
  • night time eating 
  • emotional eating 

Causes of Rebellious Eating

These eating behaviours occur when your innate body wisdom responds to any form of food restriction.

For example, suppose there is a particular food you resist bringing into the house for fear you can’t control yourself around it. In that case, there is a good chance the moment that food is present, your body will rebel against the arbitrary rule that you shouldn’t eat it, resulting in you binging on the food. This pattern will continue for as long as restriction exists. 

Diet culture encourages the use of willpower, self-discipline and, in some cases, shame tactics to control rebellious eating habits. If dieting were never introduced 60-plus years ago, these behaviours also wouldn’t exist.

The food itself is not the issue. The issue lies in the thoughts and mindset you have toward certain food. 

Self-Responsibility and Mindset

The only way to end rebellious eating is to take responsibility for your eating behaviours. Taking responsibility is being able to look at your eating habits with curiosity and compassion without judging or blaming yourself. For as long as you give away your power to the external source telling you how to eat, you will continue to struggle with rebellious eating behaviours.

When looking at your behaviours, first investigate how you were feeling before you engaged with rebellious eating. Feelings are created by your thoughts so the next step is to explore the download of thoughts that created the said feeling. 

For example, after you binged on a bag of chips, you discovered that you were feeling shame because you had the thoughts that you can’t have chips, chips are bad and therefore you are bad for eating them. The solution isn’t to stop eating chips but to change your thoughts toward them so that you no longer feel shame and binge eat them. 

It’s entirely possible to change your rebellious eating behaviours by creating peaceful thoughts toward food.

What you’ll learn listening to this episode on rebellious eating, self-responsibility and mindset:

  • What rebellious eating habits are 
  • Why rebellious eating happens 
  • 3 steps to creating peaceful eating habits 

Mentioned in the show: 

Rebellious Eating Training

Undieted Health Habits Checklist

Quiz: Is It You or Your Diet?

Podcast Roadmap

Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

 

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343-Does Intuitive Eating REALLY Work? How?

343-Does Intuitive Eating REALLY Work? How?

Does intuitive eating REALLY work?

Does intuitive eating REALLY work, and HOW??? This question came from one of our listeners, and we thought it was so good that we had to share it with everyone. 

The listener proceeded to further explain by sharing that most people she knew who had tried it for at least 6-8 months failed miserably. And that is where the question got really interesting. 

First, know that you can’t fail at Intuitive Eating… 

Most people who have the perception that you can fail at eating intuitively misunderstand what Intuitive Eating is designed for. They often approach it with the same mindset they had when starting any past diet. 

Intuitive eating is a process to undo the damage that diet culture has on our relationship with food. It only exists because food restriction was introduced by diet culture. 

Intuitive Eating Misunderstandings

Intuitive eating is not a diet, and therefore, you can’t approach it with the same mindset. It’s not just about food, but when we make it just about food, that is when it won’t work. 

Intuitive Eating is 80% mindset and 20% nutrition. It’s much more about your belief about yourself, your body, and your health than it is food. You can’t be successful with eating intuitively if you believe that certain foods are bad and others are good, or that weight equals health. Judgment of food and your body will keep you in the binge and restrict cycle, ultimately making you feel like you are failing. 

This is why Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch designed the first principle of Intuitive Eating about mindset. 

Powerful Questions to Ask to Discover Why Intuitive Eating Isn’t Working

If you think Intuitive Eating isn’t working for you, ask yourself these powerful questions: 

  • What are you making that mean? What is your definition of failure?
  • Why? 
  • What is your thought about that? 
  • How do you feel about that? 
  • Why do you feel that way? 
  • What action do you take when you feel that way? 

The bottom line is that Intuitive Eating is beyond the food and requires a highly conscious commitment. The moment you decide to detangle your worth from your body and health behaviors, Intuitive Eating will work for you. 

What you’ll learn listening to this episode:

  • The misunderstanding about Intuitive Eating that leads to it not working
  • Questions to ask to discover why intuitive eating may not be working for you
  • 10 case studies of real women from Undiet Your Life about why IE didn’t work when they tried it on their own

Mentioned in the show: 

Undieted Health Habits Checklist

Quiz: Is It You or Your Diet?

Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

 

read more
Podcast Stephanie Dodier

Welcome!

I’m Stephanie Dodier

Feminist Nutritionist & Coach.

I guide women on how to feel damn good  by reshaping their mind instead of their body. Let’s go beyond the food and fight diet culture & patriarchy by living powerfully. You’ll walk away with ressources to embrace your well-being & health in a way that will expand your freedom and power.

Is the problem you or your diet? 

I asked myself this question for years…and I figure you likely have the same question so I create a assessment for you to figure it out. Take the quiz now.

© 2021 Stephanie Dodier

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