Hello and welcome back to Rebuilding Trust with your Body. It is Katie here, and I am sitting here. It just started raining outside and I just got home from a run. I squeezed it in before the rain hit because I knew it was coming, and I wanted to get this run in because I am training for a race. That is coming up this summer.

And while I was out running today, I thought, okay, I need to share this on the podcast when I get back because I know that there is a good chance that you struggle with this mindset block around exercise, and I wanna help you work through it here. So while I was on this run, I was focusing on. Really pushing myself when I was going up a hill.

So anytime I encountered a hill, I would make myself run like really hard up the hill. And by the time I get to the top, I am huffing and puffing and my heart feels like it’s beating out of its chest. And, uh, my, my youngest son, Lucas, he would say, my heart’s beeping. It’s beeping. It’s so cute. Um, so my heart was beeping.

I am, you know, gasping for air and. It made me think about the conversation that I have had with so many of you that when you are exerting yourself and you feel out of breath, whether it be exercise or just, you know, walking from one place to another, going up the stairs, you go to this place of shame, you think, shame on me.

I’m so outta shape. I’m so overweight, I’m such a loser. I’ve really let myself go. And it turns into this really self-defeating thought spiral. And what I thought to myself today when I was breathing hard and when I was completely winded and my legs are burning and my heart is, is beating hard, instead of thinking, oh, shame on me, I thought.

My body is getting stronger. I thought, okay, this was good. I challenged myself, this is making me stronger. This is helping me get ready for this race that I’m gonna run. And that felt really encouraging and it felt like, okay, I did something positive. It felt like self-care for my body to challenge my body in this way.

And I know that. When you’re thinking, shame on me. This is a reflection of how outta shape and how I’ve let myself go and all of this negative stuff. It’s not empowering, it’s self-defeating, and it makes you want to hide and want to avoid activity. You don’t want anybody else to see you breathing hard because you assume they’re gonna judge you negatively and it perpetuates the issue where maybe you do then.

Become more and more deconditioned over time. So I wanna help you with that mindset shift the next time you are breathing hard because you’ve exerted yourself. Instead of thinking, shame on me, I want you to think, okay, cool. I challenged my body that, you know, that was a challenge for my body that is making my body stronger.

So there’s your little mindset shift for the day. It doesn’t have anything to do with our topic that we’re gonna cover, but. It was timely and I needed to share it with you. Uh, before we dig into our wellness, woo, I do want to encourage you to share this episode with a friend or maybe your partner or perhaps a sibling, because what we are going to be talking today about is your childhood food rules and how they still control your eating habits, the things that you learned to think and do with food as a child.

Are probably still impacting you today, whether you know it or not. And so as you’re listening to this episode, you may be realizing, oh my gosh, you know, so and so in my life needs to hear this. And you know, I could see it with a sibling where it’s like, oh my gosh, you know, do you remember this from when we grew up?

And mom and dad would tell us, you gotta clean your plate or eat your veggies to earn your dessert, or whatever it might be. Or maybe with your partner, you want them to understand. What you grew up with and how it is impacting you today. And to have those insights or, uh, maybe a friend who can relate to this.

So share this episode and let’s have some of these conversations because when you can connect to these dots and have these conversations with other people in your life. It, it has that ripple effect or that butterfly effect where we start to chip away at diet culture, like bit by bit, piece by piece. So, um, do me a favor and, and send it to somebody who, you know, that would appreciate this topic, who might be able to relate to it or who you want to help them understand more about where you’re coming from.

Okay. Be before we dig into all of the childhood food rules and how it’s impacting you today, let’s do some wellness. Woo. 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 genetic tests for your diet and exercise. And I wanna shout out to listener Courtney who submitted this topic. She said, Hey Katie, have you done this on Wellness Woo yet? And I was like, no. But it is such a good idea. So I’m not talking about like 23 and me, that type of genetic test that is not what we’re talking about today.

I’m talking about these genetic tests that will allegedly tell you how you should eat and what type of exercise you should do based on your DNA and. I’m not saying that this is complete nonsense in the, in the sense that it, there’s no scientific truth to what these type of tests are saying. This type of nutrigenomics has been around for a while.

What I am saying. Is that, I don’t think we’re there yet in terms of actually delivering this to people and making recommendations for how they are eating and exercising in everyday life. So I can remember like 15 or 17 years ago, I was in grad school at Ed and I’m, I’m there, I’m doing my internship and I went to this lecture and they were talking about.

Nutrigenomics, epigenetics, um, SNPs, polymorphisms, all of this stuff that is wrapped up in this type of genetic testing that we’re talking about here. And so, you know, this is something that’s being studied and it’s been studied for a while. And I think we may get to the point where it can be more personalized recommendations for nutrition and healthcare and things like that.

But again, I don’t think we’re quite there yet. What I am seeing, especially online, is this type of testing being sold by coaches and practitioners who are then gonna do this fancy scientific sounding test and give you this report, and then they’re gonna tell you that they’re gonna give you this personalized program or protocol for you to follow.

With your eating and with your exercise based on it. And that’s the woo part is where I think this is being capitalized on and we’re taking it and running with it in a way that is not necessarily I. Completely valid. And I want, I want you to be careful with this type of thing. In fact, I, uh, this has been a couple years ago now, I was working with a, um, another healthcare professional.

We’ll leave it at that. And she was telling me. How she had had this test done by some dietician she was working with and how cool it was, and I was just kinda like, oh yeah, cool. And she brought the thing in the report for me to see, and I’m flipping through it and I’m just like. Okay, so it’s spinning out all of this information about, you know, your body, you know, metabolizes this nutrient in this way, and therefore like these foods would be really good for you and you have this type of muscle fibers, and therefore this type of exercise would be really good for you.

I’m, I’m sitting there looking at this and I’m like, okay, so I mean, even if it’s true that, that her body metabolizes these certain nutrients in this way, I mean, how much utility is this in terms of what is she gonna put on her plate for lunch today? And, and that’s where I think it falls apart is these types of things.

Even if there’s truth to it. I think the practical side of. To what degree do you need to alter your eating or build your eating around it? That’s the woo part. And these things can really interfere with our relationship with food, and it gets us further disconnected from our bodies. It gets us very much in our head reading this piece of paper, trying to decide what we can and can’t eat based on some hypothetical report and.

It prevents us from being able to listen to our hunger and our fullness and our food cravings and our desires, and it sets up that feeling of guilt. Well, what if you eat something that that report says like, oh, that’s not good for your body. Now you feel guilty for it. Now you’re worrying about your health.

And I just think that there’s a lot of exaggeration in terms of like the impact that this is gonna make. Now, I may be wrong, and in the future we may see a ton of this and it may become a really normal thing that we do. I’m, I’m still skeptical that, that that will be the case. We may move in that direction though.

I’m open to that, but again, I don’t think we’re there yet. Let me give you another example real quick. On the exercise side of things. I am confident if I went and had one of these tests done, it would tell me that I tend to have more fast twitch muscle fibers than slow twitch because I can tell just from the way my body operates that I am.

More naturally, um, inclined towards sprinting, for example, than I am towards distance running. When I did track in high school, I was a sprinter. I was much better at running fast for short distances than I would’ve been for long distances. And you know, when you look at like Olympic athletes, there is a certain body type of person that is a sprinter versus a marathoner or a distance runner, right?

And part of that is their DNA and their genetics and the type of muscle that their body most easily builds. And so I think I would fall into. One of those categories that is more sprint, sprinting side of things. That said, if I got a report like that that said, oh, you know, sprinting and hit workouts, or what’s best for your body, that’s what you should do.

I would feel like that’s what I had to do. But you wanna know what I enjoy doing as an adult? I enjoy distance running. Am I good at it and naturally talented at it? Not particularly. But it’s what I enjoy and I’m afraid that people reading these types of reports, again, it would disconnect you from what do you want to do?

You don’t have to do the type of exercise that you might be best at. You get to do what brings you joy and what works in your life. And if I wanna go, you know, run a distance race like a 5K or 10 K or half marathon or whatever, like I can go do that, even if technically I might be better at sprinting. So, you know, I, I would encourage you to consider these things as you’re hearing about and thinking about these types of tests that are going to give you advice that’s, you know, quote unquote personalized for diet and exercise.

I think there’s a lot of woo and I think there is a lot of preying on people and. You know it’s a money grab bottom line, so we’ll leave it at that. If you have an example of wellness Woo that you wanna share, send it my way at Rebuilding Trust with your body at Gmail or shoot me a dm. Okay? Moving on to today’s main topic, how your childhood food rules are still impacting you.

So we talk a lot on this ep, on this podcast about how diet culture is often in the driver’s seat diet. Culture is controlling our actions, but sometimes it’s not diet culture, per se that’s in the driver’s seat. It’s your 8-year-old self who was told that she couldn’t leave the table until her plate was clean.

I have this vivid memory of being like. Probably four or five. It, it was before I went to kindergarten ’cause I was at the babysitter. I’m at the babysitter’s house and we had peas for lunch. I am not a picky eater. There are probably less than five foods that I just, I. I just do not like, and it is just, you know, I, that I will refuse to eat.

I’m, I will eat almost anything. I might not, you know, love every single food, but like I can tolerate most foods. There are very few and very specific ones that I’m just like a hard, no. And peas are one of those things. And so I have this memory. Peas were served for lunch and I was told I could not get up from that table until I ate my peas and.

In my mind, I think I sat there all afternoon until my mom picked me up. Probably. I sat there for like five minutes. I don’t remember if I ate ’em or not or what happened, but I remember sitting there after all the other kids got up from the table and I was sitting there because I refused to eat my peas, and I was told I couldn’t get up from the table until I did.

So, you know, in my imagination, I sat there all afternoon probably that’s not what happened, but who knows? It doesn’t matter. So, you know, it’s things like that that like this is burned into my brain 30 some years later and. Another thing that I think about when, when I’m reflecting here on my childhood food rules and the messages I was receiving, I think back to how my grandfather, so my mom’s dad, he grew up during the Great Depression and there was very real food scarcity, food insecurity, and because of that, he did not like to see food go to waste.

So when you were at his house. It was nobody was forcing you to clean your plate, but it was known that you did not take something that you did not intend to finish. And if you didn’t finish something that was on your plate, he, he would take it and he would finish it. Like he couldn’t throw the food away.

And it makes so much sense. And I remember being very aware of that when I was at my grandparents’ house, that if at all possible I was going to clean my plate. Now one of the other foods that I just as a kid did not like, which I like now as an adult, was pie crust, and my grandma made the best pies. In fact, I would request pie for my birthday instead of birthday cake.

She made this rhubarb pie with rhubarb out of the garden. That’s. So good. And I loved the pie, but I did not like the crusty bit on the outside of it, you know? And so I would always give my crust to my grandpa. I don’t know if he liked pie crust or not, but he sure thing he was going to eat it. So, you know, we internalized some of these messages and.

If you grew up in a household where there was food scarcity or where there was a lot of messaging around, we don’t waste food, then it makes sense that that may have carried with you. You may have a hard time stopping at fullness, leaving food behind on your plate, throwing things away. So I want you to be thinking about this as you’re listening to this episode and, and to see if you can pinpoint any of your food rules.

I’m gonna give you some examples throughout that will help you identify them. And then I have a journal assignment for you at the end. But I, I really wanna emphasize that even if you’ve ditched dieting, if you have not done this work to unpack your childhood food rules, they might still be making food decisions before you, even if you’re like, Katie, I’m not on a diet.

And that’s why it’s important that we’re having this conversation. And when we look at our relationship with food, it begins when, when we’re babies, honestly. You know, when we are babies, we expect to be fed when we’re hungry and when we cry and our caregiver gives us a bottle and then we feel happy and content right?

And then once you start table food and you’re eating just, you know, normal people food. You’re developing a relationship with food and your body, and that evolves throughout your life. And what’s interesting with young kids is they don’t have the judgments about food. You were not born thinking of food as good and bad.

You were not born thinking, oh, I need to save up for this, uh, you know, dessert that I wanna have later. You weren’t born thinking, oh, I better eat it all now because I might not be able to have this again later. It’s, those are things that you learn through experiences and messages that you are given usually throughout childhood that we then carry with us.

And the food rules that we internalize often come from our caretakers and authority figures, like maybe a babysitter or teachers. In our lives and some of the food rules are tied to safety and love and approval and it, you know, it maybe just was how it was and there wasn’t really an option for you to do otherwise.

So maybe you were told you had to finish your plate. You know, clean your plate club is a really common thing that people grew up with. And again, if, if we look back on generations, you know, maybe why was that valued? It very well could be that there were generations of your family that grew up with food scarcity or the great depression like I was referencing.

Uh, but what this does, the inadvertent message is don’t listen to your fullness. You need to clean your plate, whether that’s what your body wants right now or not. Another example is being told you have to eat your veggies or you have to eat your meat if you want dessert. Now what we’ve done is we are assigning this hierarchy to food.

We’re making it so that you have to earn dessert. So dessert is now being put on a pedestal. It has to be earned. It is to be coveted. It is to be desired. And there’s, I can almost picture it. It’s like got, you know, metaphorical sprinkles all around it, and you can’t get to it unless you’ve paid the price of eating.

Whatever else is on your plate. Let’s use veggies as the example. And so now you’re choking down veggies whether you wanted them or not. Now we’re creating more fullness, and then by the time you get to the dessert, by golly, you’re going to eat it whether you’re hungry for it or not, because you worked hard to earn it.

Another example of a childhood food rule is being told something like, well, you don’t need a snack right now. Look, we all know the kids love to snack, and kids would snack themselves all day long. They’ll snack you outta house and home on goldfish and fruit snacks if you let ’em. That’s why it’s important that we’re following the division of responsibility from Ellen Slaughter, and we are creating structure around food with meal times and snack times.

But if you’re hearing that message. As a kid, you don’t need a snack or you can’t possibly be hungry. We just ate an hour ago. What that’s teaching you is that your hunger is not to be trusted, and that’s a problematic message when you internalize that. If you think about the long-term impact of believing that.

That’s a problem that really is gonna interfere with your ability to listen to your body and honor your hunger and fullness. And so these types of rules and these judgements and these thoughts become subconscious patterns into adulthood. I will often ask my clients, where did you learn to believe that carbs are bad?

Or, where did you learn the idea that weight loss and dieting are health-promoting behaviors? And of course current diet culture. Reinforces these notions, but a lot of times a person’s first introduction to these ideas was from their parents. Like if I had a dollar for every time that I’ve heard a client talk about going to Weight Watchers with their mom at a young age, I would be sitting on a private island right now.

This is such a common scenario and it messed up so many people in their relationship with food, and I have all the compassion in the world for the mothers who did this because they thought they were helping, they thought they were helping their child not have to suffer in the ways that maybe they did, and yet it just created more suffering.

And just imagine if we could go back and rewire your brain without that messaging. Without the messaging that carbs are bad and you should feel guilty for eating sweets. And that weight loss is good and weight gain is bad. And that dieting is something you do when you wanna get healthier. Like if we could go back and erase that and you never we’re taught that belief system in the first place.

Your, your relationship with food and, and your life would be so different. Imagine a world where you never had those messages baked into your existence, and it never would’ve led you down that path of dieting and restrictive eating and that back and forth with binging and feeling guilty with food. And then going back to restriction and feeling like food is this thing that controls your every thought and your every move.

And then what’s interesting is. Sometimes the the childhood food rules and judgements that we accumulate, that they don’t just stay the same. They might evolve or take on a new form in adult life, they might present themselves a little bit differently. It might kind of morph. So for example, clean your plate might now translate into don’t waste money on ate food.

Don’t waste money on buying things like veggies. They’re just gonna rot in your refrigerator, so don’t even bother. Or the no dessert until you’ve eaten your veggies. Thing might become, oh gosh, I better eat a salad to earn this cookie that I want. Or the no snacking thing might turn into, I shouldn’t be hungry again yet.

If you’re like, oh, my body’s telling me I’m hungry, but ugh, I shouldn’t be hungry because think how many times you heard that when you were a kid. So these aren’t just habits. They are neural pathways in your brain that formed in childhood and were then reinforced by diet culture later. And these rules, part of what makes this so challenging is they can masquerade as healthy habits in our culture.

And it makes it seem like it’s just a valid and truthful way to think and operate. And that’s part of what makes these even harder to identify and to reckon with is because it just seems like it’s a truth with a capital T. And so the fix for this is not as simple as just listening to your body because I get it.

You are trying to listen to your body. Those old scripts are louder and more pronounced and feel more true than you realized. And a lot of you listening are in what I call the messy middle. You have let go of diets, but you still feel conflicted and confused about your food decisions. You still feel like, Ugh, I’m not dieting, but I do feel kind of guilty for eating that brownie or those chips.

And you want body trust, but that guilt and that doubt and those old narratives creep in and it makes you feel like you can’t go all in with body trust because you’re gonna become unhealthy and exponentially gain weight if that happens. And so if you feel stuck here in this messy middle where you’re not dieting, but you’re not fully eating intuitively either.

Either you’re like in between and you’re not sure which way to go, and you feel stuck there, it’s not a sign of failure. It actually means that you’ve outgrown the surface level work. And this is where a lot of my clients are when they first come to me. Like they’ve done the surface level thing. They have, they sort of get the point that, okay, dieting does not work as a long-term solution.

And that the, the concept of intuitive eating and having freedom with food. Okay, sure, that sounds like a good idea maybe, but they’re not totally convinced and they don’t completely know how to do it. And so they’re, they’re straddling that line in between. And so it’s really cool, like you’ve done the surface level thing, you’ve gotten the main big picture concept, but now it’s like, okay, how do we go beneath the surface and do the real life-changing work that is going to allow you to have lasting peace and freedom with food?

I. So I, I wanna tell you the story, to give you an example here. So one of my clients who started with me, she started inside my mini course, stepping off the dieting rollercoaster. She’s very much in that messy middle when we first began, and she had come to the realization that dieting does not work. At the same time, she cared very much about her health, which most of my clients do.

But like health was very top of mind for her and a very high priority in her life. And she wanted to make nutritious decisions with food. And she’s wrestling with, how do I do that without dieting? How do I do that without judging food when I also know that like different foods have different nutritional value?

Then how do I listen to my body and how do I eat without feeling guilty? Like how do I reckon with all of that simultaneously? And on those days where her body image was worse, the self-doubt and all of the old narratives and, and all of those old things that started and initiated in childhood would kick back in.

And she would sometimes get to that point where she started doubting not just herself, but the whole intuitive eating process. Like, oh, maybe this was a bad idea. But rather than bailing and running away, she leaned in for support and she wanted to understand the science. She was always asking me, Katie, like, what’s, what’s the science of this?

Or do you have any research on that? Or, you know, where can I read more about this? Because I. She had a background in health and fitness and so her brain was kind of wired that way and, and that was what was gonna help her believe it and create new neural pathways. And so bit by bit we poked holes at those old narratives and she worked on rewiring her brain to let go of her old food rules and to create trust and neutrality with food.

And she had outgrown the surface level work of just saying, you know, screw it, I’m done with dieting. She needed to go deeper to rewire the actual thoughts and feelings towards food so that she could truly listen to her body. And we, we focus heavily on that inside this mini course because the mini course is really designed to.

Meet you at that place of the messy middle. And and the reason I mention that is because if you’re interested in this, I am going to be taking a group of people through this mini course in the month of June. So this is, um, just kind of a quick side note here. Normally I offer this mini course, it’s called Stepping Off the Dieting Rollercoaster.

I offer it self-paced, but right now I’m doing a special live cohort where you still get the modules that are prerecorded and you watch it on demand like you would Netflix. So it’s very. Busy schedule friendly, but I’m gonna spend the month of June with you in a private support group where we will talk about the course with accountability and implementation challenges and mindset trainings with yours truly.

And so if you wanna figure out how to get out of that messy middle where you’re technically not dieting anymore, but you’re also not. Fully in a groove with intuitive eating and trusting your body, and you still feel kind of guilty when you eat things like pizza or french fries. Then stepping off the dieting rollercoaster, it is such a no-brainer for you, especially because it’s one of my most accessible and cost-effective offers.

So go check out the details if you’re curious. It’s at non diet academy.com/rollercoaster. I would absolutely love to work with you this summer, and even if you’ve got vacations planned, and June is gonna be kind of chaotic with your schedule, no worries, because I’ve designed it with this in mind and you’ll be able to do things on your own timeline, and it’s not a big, long commitment like non Diet Academy is.

So if you’re thinking that you need some more support and some accountability, and you’d like my personal guidance. Get inside this offer, and the sooner you sign up, the sooner you can get started because you get instant access to all the materials. So you can dig in right now, and then in June you get the coaching and the implementation with me, and tons of opportunities for q and a so that you can get really clear on how to truly let go of these childhood thought patterns and the rules with food.

That diet culture has reinforced. They’re just so hard to dismantle and to rewire it on your own. And I know that it might feel impossible for you to truly let go of your food rules and to eat without feeling guilty, without second guessing whether you’re harming your health and, and I also have the deepest confidence that it is possible for you and that you can create peace with food.

And that it is so worth the effort that it takes to get there. And so why not make it faster and easier for yourself by joining us inside stepping off the dieting rollercoaster. And one last side note on this, if you have already done the mini course and you wanna join us for this live coaching experience, to revisit it.

I have a super special deal for you to join us live for really, really cheap. So just reach out to me for details on that because once you are in my world, I’ve always got your back and I wanna roll out the red carpet for you. So let’s, let’s think about like, what, what is the path out? How do we deconstruct these invisible scripts that are in your mind that have been there since childhood?

The first thing, you will often hear me talk about this, we gotta put our scientist cap on. We’ve gotta become a food rule detective. We need to get curious and to ask yourself, where did I learn this belief? So if you think about something where you feel guilty with food, let’s say you feel guilty for eating anything that has sugar in it.

So anything sweet? Well, where did you learn the belief that sugar is bad? And does this belief serve you right now? What are you afraid will happen if you don’t follow this rule? So maybe you think, okay, well I learned the belief that sugar is bad because my parents used to tell me that if I ate too many sweets I was gonna give myself diabetes.

Um. Maybe you also had it reinforced by diet, culture, and all of the things about like, sugar is toxic, sugar is addictive, it’s like cocaine, you know, all that nonsense. And then if we ask ourselves, does this serve me? Now, there are a lot of you who are gonna cling onto that and be like, yeah, it does.

Because if I eat too much sugar, I’m gonna become unhealthy. And so, you know, I can’t stop myself and I can’t trust myself with, so it’s like you’re justifying all the food rules. But I want us to slow down and back up. Is it really serving you to have a thought and a judgment about food that makes you feel guilty when you eat it?

Because just imagine for one second, just like hypothetical humor me here. If we could wave a magic wand and reduce, well, not reduce, eliminate the guilt that you have with eating sugar. And if you could eat it where like you can have it when you’re hungry and when it sounds good, you can stop without going overboard.

It’s just not a big deal. Like you’re totally chill around it. If we could eliminate the compulsion to eat large quantities and the guilt that you feel for eating it. How incredible would that be? Like that would just be so relieving and so freeing. Right. And you might be sitting here like, yeah, Katie, and when pigs can fly, that will be me.

I have a colleague side note who, uh, one time her client said something about like, when pigs can fly, I’ll be able to keep. Chocolate or something in her house. And um, one day she brought in this little figurine of a pig with wings because she had gotten to that point where she thought she was addicted to the food and had made peace with it.

And so she, it was like this little joke between them that she’s like, okay, here’s the little pig that can fly. Because guess what? It happened. And I love that. I, I love that visual. So, you know, is it serving you to have a belief that makes you feel guilty about eating something? It’s not. I can promise you it’s not because you don’t need to feel guilty about eating any food.

Food is not a moral issue. You’re not a good or bad person based on what you do or don’t eat. So anything making you feel guilty, unless it’s like you stole the food from the grocery store, then. That’s not serving you. And I think the question, what am I afraid will happen if I don’t follow the rule is very revealing.

So what am I afraid will happen if I let myself eat sugar? Well, I’m afraid I’ll eat too much of it. I’m afraid I’ll become unhealthy. I’m afraid that my blood sugar will go up. I’m afraid of diabetes. I’m afraid of weight gain. And it’s all of those fears that keep us hooked in. And so I want you to see if you can identify what are some of your hidden rules, and then we can trace them back to messages that you received in childhood.

So let me give you an example here. I, uh, I had a client who we uncovered a hidden childhood food rule that was basically sabotaging her intuitive eating process. So. We looked back on her relationship with food from growing up and what food was like in her family of origin and what it was like as a kid and as a teenager.

And we, we landed on how. Her mom did not believe in snacking, and I’m not trying to rag on moms here, but this is a theme that I do here over and over again because especially in generations of the past where like food was more of the woman’s realm and the kitchen was more of the woman’s realm from like a traditional gender role standpoint.

And so I hear this a lot, but certainly fathers have these attitudes too. So, you know, I don’t wanna let let the guys off the hook here, but. In this example, this particular client I’m thinking of, her mom did not believe in snacking, and her mom was very rigid in her belief that people should only eat three meals per day, and so therefore, they were essentially an ingredient household.

This was kind of a trendy phrase on social media, I don’t know, like a year or two ago. And the idea is that they didn’t have like snack foods, they just had the ingredients for making meals and maybe, you know, making like baked goods from time to time when there was an occasion for it. And so my client couldn’t come home and have like.

Traditional snack foods like chips or cookies or crackers or anything like that. She would come home from school and she would have to creatively find things to eat. And she would do that, you know, if her mom was out of the house and um, I think her mom worked at the time, and so her mom wasn’t home yet.

So she would come home and she would end up binging on things like cinnamon toast or chocolate chips from the pantry or marshmallows. Because those were the things that were available. She could put it together from in ingredients, and the thought would be, oh, I’ve got to eat this all before anybody gets home.

And I’ve gotta get rid of the evidence so that I don’t get in trouble. Because if my parents find out I was snacking before dinner, I’m gonna get, you know, scolded for that. And then of course this part’s very predictable to me ’cause I hear it all the time. When she would go to friends’ houses, she would go nuts with their snacks.

It would be like, oh my gosh, this is like the best, I have access to all of the snacks that I’m not allowed to have at my house. And she would eat herself like practically sick on it with the snacks and the sodas and the things that they didn’t have at home. And so now as an adult, she’s been on and off diets her whole life.

And she was drawn to the types of diets that declared no snacking. And so even when she ditched dieting and, and started embracing intuitive eating, she would still feel guilty for snacking even when her body was saying, Hey, I’m hungry right now. She would feel like she was doing something wrong and unhealthy by having a snack, and so we were able to really take that and make sense of it.

And then to keep coming back to, well, what does your body need? And then also I was able to help her understand just like. Scientifically and from like a nutrition and food science perspective, you know, the, the benefits of snacking. I’m very pro snacking over here and I’m also very pro eat when you’re hungry.

But just the simple awareness is not enough. You can have all the awareness in the world and it doesn’t change your behaviors or your thoughts, quite frankly, unless you intentionally rewrite and rewire these beliefs and take action to show your brain that it is emotionally safe to let go. And that’s where the deeper kind of reprogramming needs to happen.

And here’s what needs to shift and, and when you can shift the internal, uh. Ways that you are thinking about and that you are approaching food and you can let go of the rules and create a new way of thinking about and relating to food into your body. This will shift everything for you. So here’s what needs to happen.

We’ve gotta get clarity on your personal food rules and, and the BLE best place. ’cause if I said write down all your food rules, you’d probably be like, I don’t know. You know, you’d be like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. So the best place to start is to figure out when do you feel guilty for something you ate?

Because if you feel guilty, there’s a rule beneath that. And you would also want to think about what were the messages and the beliefs about food during your upbringing. That will often be very revealing. You might think about what diets have you followed, because a lot of times there’s still gonna be some of that that’s like in your mind somewhere guiding your eating.

You know, if you were someone who always counted calories or points or always did low carb, then there probably is part of you that still feels like things high in calories are bad, or things high in carbs are bad and feels guilty about it. So I want you to think about when does the guilt kick in, because that the guilt is attached to some type of food rule or judgment, and we, so we’ve gotta identify the rules and we’ve got to, to intentionally rewire your brain to understand that.

That is not a helpful or accurate way of thinking about and approaching food any longer. And that’s where with my clients, I really like to leverage some of the just nutrition science to really tap into like, here’s why that actually is not a necessary or helpful way of thinking. And the next thing we wanna shift is.

Helping you to stop swinging that pendulum back and forth between restriction and chaos. And we wanna stay with the process of honoring your hunger, building trust with your body. Doing that without getting freaked out and shifting back into dieting. So we don’t want you standing and continuing to straddle this messy middle with one foot in dieting and one foot and intuitive eating because that will keep you stuck there.

And when you’re doing that, when you’re in the messy middle, like you’re not really doing either thing very effectively. And being in the messy middle, it feels bad. You know it, it’s, you don’t feel good about how you’re eating or about yourself because you’re not following the rules of dieting. So you’re constantly feeling guilty about that, but you’re not fully, I.

Doing and getting the hang of, and being empowered by intuitive eating when you’re not fully doing all of those things and when you’re still kind of one foot towards dieting. And so that’s not gonna feel very good for you either. And that’s, I feel so strongly about getting people out of this messy middle.

So. You need to have tools and you need to intentionally be working to build real self trust from within instead of continuing to outsource your trust and wisdom to some type of rule or food plan or like one of those, um, I. You know, genetic nutrition, things that we were talking about with wellness. Woo.

It’s disconnecting you from your body when you’re relying on these external things that are telling you how to eat. Your body has very wonderfully calibrated signals to let you know when you are hungry and full. And for most of humanity, that is how we ate. Like the concept of calories and nutrition is actually relatively new in the grand scheme of humanity.

And so you need to build your connection and your attunement with your body’s signals and be able to accurately decipher what your body is telling you, and then from there, be able to respond according to what your body needs. Whether that be food or whether it be that your body is telling you that you need something outside of food and it’s the attunement that will allow you to know what it is that you need and what your body needs.

And I get that all of this might sound like a lot and it can be confusing to do it on your own, which is. Why this is exactly what we’re gonna be doing together inside stepping off the dieting rollercoaster, and I will be holding your hand to do it with you. What I really want you to understand here is that the type of healing we are talking about is an inside job.

It’s not going to happen. When you’re basing your eating off external rules and calorie prescriptions from dieting or from your childhood food rules, your best gauge of what your body needs is going to be your body’s signals and wisdom, and it becomes infinitely easier to listen to your body and to accurately interpret what it is telling you.

When you don’t have food rules, guilt and diet culture muddying the water and clouding your judgment. We call those attunement disruptors. And one of the keys to successfully doing intuitive eating is to remove these attunement, disruptors. And sometimes doing things like eating while distracted, that’s gonna disrupt your attunement.

So it’s kind of this external thing, but often the thing that’s getting in your way and disrupting your attunement, it’s happening in your head. It’s the thoughts, the fears, the judgment and the rules. Often the rules that became, that began back in childhood. That have been fertilized all these years by diet culture, and that’s what I want you to take some time to be curious about and to work intentionally on.

I mentioned earlier that I have a journal prompt for you, and so here it is. If you’re taking notes, this is it and we’re gonna wrap up. So the journal prompt is, what rule did you learn about food as a kid that still echoes in your decision today? What were some of the rules that you learned about food as a kid, and how did those echo in your decisions today?

And if you’re not sure, go back to that earlier part of this episode where I was talking about how these things will morph into adulthood. I. But a really good starting point is just to think about what were some of the attitudes and phrases and rules around eating in your household when you were growing up, um, whether it be at home with your parents and your family of origin, whether it be grandparents or aunts or babysitter, daycare.

What were some of those early childhood messages that you were receiving? What were the rules and, and the judgements about food? Or for some people it was a free for all and there was no structure, and so you didn’t have any guidance. That can also be just as problematic. So I want, if that’s your your situation, I want you to think about, well, how did that impact you?

And then to think about are there ways that you’re still living by some of these judgments and rules or those things that still go through your head today? And once we’ve identified those things, now we have the opportunity to actively rewire, reframe, and reconnect with your body, and that you get to actively break those rules to show yourself.

I don’t have to feel bad about quote unquote wasting food. I eat leaving food on your plate. I get to honor my full. I don’t have to feel guilty about eating ice cream. I am allowed to enjoy something sweet. I don’t have to avoid carbs. I can trust my body to tell me when I’ve had enough. So we get to do that rewiring, and then you get to put that into practice with your actual eating and that is how you build trust with your body and you make peace with food and you let go of all the guilt and the rules and the shame that have kept you trapped in this chaos with food going back and forth between restriction and overeating and making you feel obsessed with food.

So I want you to journal about that and I would love it if you emailed or dmd me. With one of your food rules about your insights, uh, about, you know, connecting these dots back to childhood. And then if you need help brainstorming how to break free from it and how to rewire your brain, I’m happy to offer you a little bit of, of guidance and some ideas on that.

So do the journaling, shoot me a dm. I would love to hear your examples and if you need any help figuring out how to reframe it, I can help you with that. And in case nobody has told you today, you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.