Welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body, I’m Katy Harvey your host. Today’s episode is going to be a little behind-the-scenes. I’m pulling back the curtain to share with you what the conversation sounds like with my clients if they’re slipping back into old habits. 

I want to normalize that this happens, and it doesn’t mean you’re failing, or that intuitive eating doesn’t work, or that you suck in any way. 

It simply means 2 things:

1. This is hard. It’s like swimming upstream to go against the norms and the expectations of diet culture.
2. You have normal human psychological functioning. 

Rather than going into a total shame spiral that makes you just want to throw in the towel and stay stuck forever, or go back to some type of dieting or restrictive eating to make yourself feel better about food or about your body, it’s important to be curious when you’re slipping back into old habits, and to explore what is happening to better understand it so that you can gain clarity on how to move forward.

I’m going to walk you through exactly how I do that with my clients in this episode, and it’s going to be so juicy for you to get that peek into the process that I take my clients through. I’m a naturally really nosy person, so whenever I hear a behind-the-scenes episode like this on my favorite podcasts, my ears always perk up and I can’t wait to hear what they have to say. So for all you Nosy Nellies out there like me, this episode is going to satisfy that curiosity for you. And I think this is an important episode for anyone to hear, because we all slip back into old habits that we’ve been trying to change. This happens to everyone, whether it be with food, or exercise, or going to bed on time, or maybe you’re trying to show up differently in your relationship with your friends or your partner, or as a parent. Bottom line, behavior change is hard, and this conversation is going to help you see how to get through some of the ups and downs so you don’t give up on yourself or your process towards finding peace with food. 

Before we dive into our main topic for today, you know what time it is…We’ve got some Wellness Woo to talk about. 

Wellness Woo is the stuff that diet and wellness culture tells us we should do in the name of health, but it’s really based on pseudoscience, exaggerated claims, or just nonsense. 

Today’s Wellness Woo is some woo I saw out in the wild. I was at the Iowa State Fair a few weeks ago (in case you don’t already know, I grew up in Iowa, and the state fair is a quintessential thing you do in August before the kids go back to school). So we’re walking through the cattle barn at the fair, and they have this section off to the side where people are selling things like shirts, jewelry, cowboy hats, belts, belt buckles, things like that. And then we round the corner and I see this row of people sitting in chairs soaking their feet, and the sign above says The Body Detox Center. 

So for $90, which apparently is “special pricing” for the state fair, you can sit there for an hour and a half soaking your feet and allegedly “detoxify” your body. Meanwhile on the other side of the wall are cows and cow manure. 

And I was so tickled by this because who comes to the Iowa State Fair thinking, “I really need a detox today?” You go to the state fair to see some livestock, gawk at the butter cow, and eat some funnel cakes and corndogs. 

So just the setting and the location was amusing to me. 

But then there’s the nonsense side of it. I wanted to ask these lovely people who took off their shoes to soak their feet in front of everybody walking through the fair if they genuinely think that this is $90 well spent and that it’s actually “detoxifying” their body? 

What’s troubling to me is that I think some people do believe this. 

They think that by soaking their feet in epsom salt or charcoal or whatever was in that water that it’s pulling toxins out of their body. Spoiler alert – it’s not. That’s not how “detoxification” works.

There is no foot soak, or supplement, or tea, or special food or drink that is doing to detoxify your body. 

Your body has built-in mechanisms for any detoxification that needs to be done. That happens within your digestive system, your liver and your kidneys. If your body isn’t properly detoxifying itself, then you have bigger problems and you need to see an actual doctor. 

Everything else promising detoxing is nonsense and utter Wellness Woo.

If you have an example of Wellness Woo that you want to share, send it to me at rebuildingtrustwithyourbody@gmail.com. 

Ok, that’s enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic…What I say to my clients if they’re slipping back into old habits.

First, we have to remember that any type of change in life isn’t going to be linear. Each day won’t be better than the day before. Change is messy, it has ups and downs and if you go into it with perfectionistic expectations, you’re going to end up frustrated, disappointed and probably feeling like it’s not working – when that might not be the case at all. 

Let’s say that you started off your intuitive eating journey and initially you’re feeling great about it. You’re eating the foods that you want, you’re listening to your hunger and fullness, and you are no longer dieting or binging. You’re thinking, “This is great! It’s working!”

Then you have a day where nothing goes right, you’re frustrated at work, your kids are being a handful, you didn’t sleep well the night before, and after everyone else is asleep you find yourself out in the kitchen pouring your 2nd or 3rd bowl of Lucky Charms. 

The next morning you think to yourself, “Well, crap. Maybe this isn’t working as well as I thought I would. I shouldn’t be eating all that sugary cereal. What’s wrong with me? Maybe I need to just get rid of all the cereal so that won’t happen again.” And then you feel curious about your weight so you step on the scale to see what’s happening and it’s up, and it ruins your day. 

It not only ruins your day, but it makes you question your entire intuitive eating journey. It makes you wonder if you’re ever going to be someone who feels normal around food. You wonder if you’re doomed to hate your body and to worry about gaining weight forever.

These struggles, these ups and downs, they’re part of the process. Truth be told, they are actually beneficial and necessary for us to gain the skills and nuggets of wisdom that we need to sustain this for the long haul. 

The 5 Phases of Becoming a Non-Dieter

One of the things that I go over early on with my clients is a roadmap for what the typical journey towards becoming what I call a “non-dieter” looks like. A non-dieter is someone who is an intuitive eater (they’re no longer dieting, they trust themselves with food, they are listening to their body), who has body acceptance (they treat their body with kindness and respect, even on the days they don’t necessarily like their body or their weight), and a non-dieter is committed to taking a stand against diet culture and actively staying out of diet culture so that they don’t get sucked back in. 

Non-dieters also view their health as something that is part of self-care, but also recognize that there are a lot of aspects of health that aren’t 100% within our control. You aren’t going to magically be totally healthy just because you control all the food you put in your mouth, reach a “healthy” BMI and exercise consistently. You might do all of those things “perfectly” (whatever that means) and still have health issues. Because that’s how bodies work. Only about 30% of our health is determined by lifestyle factors, and lifestyle doesn’t just include diet and exercise, it also includes things like alcohol use, smoking, and other behaviors that impact our health. 

So for a non-dieter, they do things like go to the doctor, take medications, have their preventative health screenings, and they practice health-promoting behaviors like getting good sleep. But they don’t get sucked into Wellness Woo nonsense anymore. And I want to emphasize that taking care of your actual health is very much a part of this journey. 

With my clients I use a roadmap called the 5 Phases of Becoming a Non-Dieter. It breaks the process of healing your relationship with food, your body, exercise, and your health into 5 phases.

Because now that we have some clarity on what we’re aiming for within the work I’m doing with a client, the next question is: How do you get there?

It starts with understanding where you’re at. Let’s say you’re getting ready to go on a road trip with your family or our besties, and you’re going to a new city you’ve never traveled to before. When you put your destination into your GPS it needs to know where you’re at and where you’re headed in order to give you accurate directions. If you start driving aimlessly, chances are you’re going to get lost, drive in circles, and end up where you don’t want to be.

The path to finding peace with food is similar. If you don’t know where you’re starting or where you’re going, it’s hard to find your way there. 

Let’s break down the 5 phases of becoming a non-dieter so you can try to identify where you’re currently at and what the next phase looks like. This is something I teach right away in the first module of my course Non-Diet Academy because it’s SO foundational to have a mental roadmap for where we’re headed. 

And a lot of times my clients will say, “Katy, I think I’m in 2 or 3 of these phases all at once – is that normal?” And my answer is YES, absolutely. These phases aren’t meant to box you in, and they’re not always linear. It’s kind of like the phases of grief where you can cycle in and out of different phases at different times. 

Let me break down the phases for you here, and if you want a written version of this, you can download it at nondietacademy.com/phases. So don’t feel like you have to take notes right now. Just listen and think about what phase most matches where you’re currently at. I know a lot of you are probably driving, or working out, or are running errands or folding laundry while you’re listening to this, so just keep listening and grab the guide to refer back to later.

• Phase 1: “I hate my body.” You have negative body image and wish your body looked different and that you weighed less. This takes up a lot of your mental energy.
  
• Phase 2: Dieting and restricting. You’re attempting to change your body in order to feel better about yourself. You get an initial high from feeling like you’re “doing something” to solve your problem (the problem being that you hate your body), and then the low of feeling like a failure when you can’t sustain the dieting, restricting or healthy eating. It’s that feeling like you “fell off the bandwagon” or like you’re “being bad” because you didn’t stay on track. And this often sends you back to phase 1, which then leads you back to phase 2 of trying to fix it again.
  
• Phase 3: Fed up. Hitting rock bottom with dieting. Realizing that you can’t keep doing this for the rest of your life, although you might not be sure what else to do yet.
  
• Phase 4: Un-learning the dieting rules. Rebuilding trust with your body and reconnecting with your body’s appetite cues as well as your emotions and needs outside of food that you might have been numbing or distancing yourself from while focusing on so much dieting and weight loss. This is where you are actively learning the skills of intuitive eating, body kindness, self-compassion, joyful movement, self-care and all of the other skills that I teach inside Non-Diet Academy.
  
• Phase 5: Intuitive eating and body acceptance. This is where you have found the peace with food we were talking about earlier and you’ve become a Non-Dieter!

Let me recap these really quickly (recap briefly)

If you want to do a self-assessment of which phase you’re in, I have a written version of these phases in a free guide. In the guide I also talk about steps you can take in each phase that will move you forward to the following phase. I’ve even got some journal prompts in there for you, so go grab it at nondietacademy.com/phases. This is a tool that’s really going to help you visualize where you’re at, and what you need to work on to move forward. 

A lot of times what happens when a client is slipping into old habits, is they’ve slipped back into an earlier phase. This can happen for so many different reasons. 

One thing we know about human behavior change is that during times of high stress or transition in life, we tend to slip back into old habits and default patterns. We revert back to what is familiar to us, and what we can do on autopilot, because our brain power is needed for the thing that’s stressing us out or the transition we’re experiencing in life. 

Let’s say you’re starting a new job, and you’re really excited about it. You’re going to make more money, it’s better hours, and you really enjoy the type of work you’re going to be doing. So this is very much a positive transition for you. However, with any transition there comes stress. It means a new routine, doing things differently, and using a lot of your daily brain power navigating your new normal. You might find yourself skipping lunch because you’re so busy with onboarding at work, or binging on ice cream at night. You might get completely out of your exercise routine that was working well for you, or you might skip your doctor’s appointment while telling yourself it’s because you’re so busy, but at a deeper level it’s because you’re worried you’ve gained weight since you started your new job and you don’t want to get on the scale or have your bloodwork checked. 

Building New Habits – What Does Neuroscience Tell Us?

Noticing when we are slipping back into old habits is the key for getting back to the new habits we’re trying to create. The sooner you can recognize this, the easier it is to pivot back to the direction you want to be going. 

There’s some really cool neuroscience behind this. I promise I’m not going to get too far into the weeds here, but I want you to appreciate the biology of what’s going on when you’ve slipped back into old habits. 

I heard this analogy from a fellow dietitian, Tammy Beasley, who is such a rockstar. She talks about how the thought pathways, the “neural pathways,” in our brains are like the ruts on the old Oregon Trail. 

The Oregon Trail is the path in the US that settlers used as they were moving out west. There were no roads that existed at the time, so the wagons of people would follow the grooves in the soil from the wagons before them. And over time these grooves got really deep, and it would be hard to veer off and get lost, because your wheels are way down in there.

Our thoughts and behaviors that form our habits are the same way. These neural pathways in your brain that have been repeated over and over become well-worn grooves like the wagon wheel ruts on the Oregon Trail. If you’ve always skipped breakfast, and you were working on eating breakfast consistently (which is one of the strategies that I teach), eating breakfast initially is like getting your wagon up out of those ruts and forming a new path that hasn’t been driven before. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, and you might get lost at times, but if you repeat it often enough you start to wear new grooves in the soil – which is like creating new neural pathways in your brain. 

During periods of high stress or transition, it’s easy for those wagon wheels to slip back down into the old ruts and just go on autopilot. It’s easy to just follow that familiar path. Your brain does the same thing. It will revert back to old patterns if you’re not consciously continuing to build those new neural pathways. And often this happens because you’ve got a new stressor, a transition or something else in your life taking your focus and attention away from your intuitive eating process.

Regrouping and Moving Forward When You’ve Slipped into Old Habits

When this happens to a client, I talk with them about 3 things:

1. What happened – “Collecting the dots so we can connect the dots.” (I’ll tell you about this in a minute)
2. Where they’re at (what phase they’re in)
3. What to focus on now

Exploring What Happened

I always start with compassion and curiosity. We don’t learn, grow or change when we are in shame. One of the saddest things to me is when a client feels so much shame and disappointment with themselves that they just decide to bail. They blame themselves, tell themselves they’ve failed, and that this isn’t going to work for them, and they don’t give themselves to work through these VERY NORMAL challenges, and to grow from them. 

With every backslide, there are nuggets of wisdom to be learned. It’s an opportunity to know yourself better, to understand your triggers, and to be able to make this less likely to happen again in the future. Plus, every time you work through a struggle like this, and get back in the saddle, you train yourself to do it more efficiently. You don’t stay stuck as long.

We start with compassion. I think a lot of times when people first start working with a dietitian or intuitive eating coach, they assume that it’s going to be like going to the principal’s office or having an encounter with the food police. (And sadly, many of my clients have had that experience with previous dietitians, usually not ones who are trained in intuitive eating though.) 

If someone is struggling, I always have empathy for that struggle. I get it. I get how hard this work is. I get that there are so many reasons why you might have found yourself binging, or you might have returned to restricting or skipping meals, or you signed up for Noom because they spoke to your deepest desires. I’m never going to be mad at you for any of that. I simply want to help you understand what led you from point A to point B, and what it is that you’re truly needing – with food, and outside of food.

Usually when a client is beating themselves up, or they’re feeling shame about what they’ve been struggling with, receiving empathy and compassion helps to melt that shame. Like Brene Brown says, shame thrives in secrecy. As they learn to be more empathetic and compassionate towards themselves, clients find that they struggle less and less over time.

I had an NDA client a while back who said that she was enjoying the freedom she had gained with food, but she was feeling like she took it too far. Someone she was close to in her life commented about her weight, and it sent her into an epic shame spiral. Based on this negative comment she got about her body, she felt like she needed to tighten the reins and go back to dieting, even if it meant she’d have to give up her freedom with food. She felt undeserving of freedom with food. She felt like she needed to punish herself for gaining weight. 

By bringing this struggle to our group coaching session, this client was able to talk about what happened, how she was feeling and she got so much love and support. She heard from others that they have been through similar things, and that they sometimes feel that pull towards dieting too. 

By realizing she wasn’t alone, and that this didn’t mean she has to abandon the journey she was on towards healing her relationship with food and with her body, this client could see that this person’s comment about her weight touched on an old wound that was still scabbed over and hadn’t fully healed yet. 

We helped her in that group coaching session to give herself compassion, to see that the other person should never have commented on her body, period, and that she has come so far and has gained so much from this journey and that deep down she doesn’t want to give up on it. That’s the power of talking about it when you’re feeling this way, rather than keeping it bottled up inside and going into fix it mode with whatever diet culture has dangled in front of you.

So, we start with curiosity, compassion and understanding what happened. We gather data, and “collect the dots” so we can “connect the dots.” When my clients and I can trace back what happened and make sense of it, we can usually connect it to deeper reasons why they returned to old habits. We can see that they still have some deeply held beliefs that they usually learned from a young age, either from their family of origin, or from diet culture, usually both. 

Assessing Where You’re At

Once we understand what happened, and why, we want to look at where they’re currently at. I’ll often start by asking them, “What have you eaten today?” Their answer to that often gives me insight into what their current thought process is with food, how well they’re fueling their body, and what immediately needs to happen to get them back to a helpful pattern with food.

We’ll also talk about how they’re feeling, what’s happening with body image, and what else is going on in their life outside of food and body-related stuff. 

Often times there are other big things going on, and we talk about those things and how to directly address them. Recently I’ve had a few clients who had either kids or parents who were dealing with some pretty significant health stuff. It can be hard to focus on your relationship with food when there are other much more pressing things happening in your life. 

What we might talk about based on their circumstances is how they can best care for themselves and their bodies amidst the stress and complexities that life brings.

To me, discussions about food and body image have everything to do with context in a person’s life. My conversation with a client who is an empty nester whose own mom is dying of cancer is going to sound different from a woman who is working full time while also running her 3 young kids around to all their appointments and activities.

I care deeply about what’s happening in the lives of my clients. 

What to Focus on Next

I like to start with the here-and-now which is why I’ll often ask what they’ve had to eat that day. If they’ve hardly eaten anything yet that day, we’ll talk about what they can get to eat after we’re done talking. Or let’s say they’ve been on a food bender and just eating whatever, whenever, we’ll talk about how to bring back in some structure with food. 

If they’ve been in diet mode, we might talk about whether they’re feeling ready and willing to step away from that. If not, we’ll look at what it’s doing for them, and some ways that they can inch their way back to listening to their body. Maybe they’re tracking their calories and this is giving them a sense of safety and security. I might help them look at whether they’re eating enough calories and if what they’re aiming for is going to fuel biological deprivation or not. 

I’m all about meeting a person where they’re at, and figuring out together what is going to help them move forward to be able to listen to and trust their body more. That’s going to look different for each individual, which is part of what’s so fun and life-giving about doing this work. It’s not just a generic process. It gets to account for you and your unique needs and life circumstances. 

Client Case Examples

It can be a scary conversation to have for a client who feels like they’re slipping into old habits. A lot of times they worry that I’m going to be mad at them, or that I’m going to be disappointed in them or think that they’re failing – which couldn’t be further from the truth. These fears are normal human fears. Of course we don’t want to disappoint others around us or to be seen as failures. 

But that’s not what this process is about. It’s not about being perfect, or never struggling, and it’s certainly not about my clients needing to please me. I’m here to support my clients through thick and thin, and to be a compassionate non-judgmental place for them to talk openly about what’s going on in their relationship with food and their body.  

I want to leave you with a couple of client examples from 2 individuals who struggled through the ups and downs, who at times felt like they had completely reverted back to old habits, and who kept showing up for the process and the hard conversations. 

Client #1 told me: “Since being on a diet for 50 years I am now having so much more enjoyment eating the foods that I love and satisfy me. Since starting IE I don’t find myself binging anymore. I used to think I was a sugarholic. If I ate one piece of candy I’d eat the whole bag. Now I can have a few pieces and be done. I am so grateful to IE and all the support I get from this group.”

• Isn’t that incredible? She had literally dieted almost all of her life, thought that she was addicted to sugar, was frequently binging…and now she can eat a couple pieces of candy and be done. THIS is a perfect example of what finding peace with food can do for you. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows though. She reached out to me one day after this and said, “Katy I need to schedule a 1:1 session with you. I’m struggling and I need help figuring out what to do.” So we met, and we explored what was going on, where she was at, and strategized about how to move forward. Once she had that clarity and some specific things to work on, she was able to feel clear and connected to her intuitive eating process again. 

Client #2 is an example from one of my other Non-Diet Academy students. She said: “I went to the doctor this morning and they weighed me. I was heavier than expected and for a second I had that old feeling of panic but it didn’t last long. I took a big breath and reminded myself: My weight doesn’t define me, my health is way more complex than that. What is important is how I feel and my actual (unbiased) health. And right now I feel I have both. For the first time ever, I actually stepped down from the scale and I felt truly fine, not happy, not upset, just neutral, in the same way I felt after she took my blood pressure. It was a great feeling!”

• This really captures the essence of someone who has found peace and neutrality with their body. She didn’t get there without struggles along the way. There were times she wanted to go back to dieting to lose weight so she could feel like she was doing something about her health and her body image. What she realized though, was that she wasn’t going to hate herself into loving her body. And she wasn’t going to truly have peace with her body if it was always contingent upon the number on the scale, or the size of her pants, or even of her health status.
• Her weight might have been higher than she would have liked to see, but it didn’t send her into a spiral. She recognizes that her worth as a human being is more than the number on the scale, and that the scale is not the only determinant of health either. The fact that she felt totally fine and neutral after getting off the scale is a game changer – because then she’s free to listen to her body with food because she’s not scheming up her next plan for how to lose weight. 

Wrapping Up

I’m going to leave you with a couple of tangible steps YOU can take today. It’s one thing to listen to podcasts like this and to feel inspired and encouraged, but if we don’t take ACTION then nothing changes. 

So here are some things you can play around with:

• Download the 5 Phases to Becoming a Non-Dieter guide I mentioned earlier so you have something concrete in writing that will help you nail down what exactly to work on based on the phase you’re in. Again it’s at nondietacademy.com/phases
  
• Set aside about 20-30 minutes to go through the guide and to do a self-assessment of where you’re currently at. You’ll be able to identify which phase(s) you’re in, and I’ve provided ideas and recommendations for things you can work on based on each phase to help you move forward.
  
• Lastly, if you are thinking that you might be a good fit for my course and group coaching program, Non-Diet Academy, reach out to me via email or DM. I have another cohort starting in September and I’m happy to share more details about that with you if you want more information. What I often tell people is that if you think you’re a good fit, chances are you probably are. This program includes the actual course curriculum where I teach you the skills and give you the tools that you need to work all the way through those 5 phases we talked about today – but it also includes coaching which is invaluable because it’s one thing to have the information, it’s another thing to have the guidance and feedback from a coach AND to do this alongside others who are on the journey because you’ll learn so much from each other. That’s why I run this program in cohorts because you’ll find that the input and support from others in your group is INCREDIBLE. My cohorts aren’t huge either. You’re not going to be in there with hundreds or even dozens of people. It’s usually about 10-20 people which is a nice intimate size that allows me to give each person plenty of individual attention. So if you want the deets, reach out and I’m happy to share. In fact, I have a special discount going on that’s only for podcast listeners so if you do reach out make sure you tell me that you heard this on the podcast and I’ll give you the discount code!

Ok, that’s all for this episode. I hope you had some ah-ha moments or some things that really stuck with you and resonated with you. In case nobody has told you today – you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.

Resources Mentioned:

• Grab the Free 5 Phases to Becoming a Non-Dieter Guide
• Click here to DM me on Instagram for the discount code for Non-Diet Academy (or click here to DM me on Facebook)

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