Welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body, I’m Katy Harvey. I’m fresh off of vacation and we had the best time in Florida (for the most part). Some of you saw on my stories that I ended up in urgent care and you were worried about me, but don’t worry it was just a UTI (explain). I wasn’t wanting to be click baity or dramatic about that. Anyway the trip was lovely and we got to spend lots of time in the ocean, at the pool, on the beach, in the sun and we even went to a water park where I did all of the big slides with my oldest son Jackson…

It’s times like that where I’m so aware of and am so grateful for the peace that I have with food and my body after all the years I struggled with it. Vacations are such a test of your relationship with food and your body image, especially beach vacations. And I saw all types of bodies at the beach, it was beautiful. I loved the diversity, and seeing people enjoying themselves, relaxing, having fun, existing in their bodies, wearing the darn swimsuits. 

Really quick before we do our woo today, I have some exciting news!! I am going to be running my mindset program called SOTDR! Some of you have taken this in the past, and this time we’re doing it differently. We are going to be doing it as a 4 week Mindset Rewiring Intensive. That means that we are going to be focusing on reprogramming your brain to think about food like a person who has peace with it, and to think about your body like a person who has peace with it, and to think about your health like a person who effectively honors their health without being diet-y and obsessive about it. We are going to change the thought pathways in your brain so that your mindset fully supports what you’re trying to accomplish here with intuitive eating, and to break you free from your old ways of thinking like a person who is still on a diet and the ways that diet culture has brainwashed us. We need to get rid of all that and replace it with the new and helpful thoughts that will make this all so much easier and more sustainable for you. It’s going to be so awesome. You can DM me ROLLERCOASTER for the details, or go to nondietacademy.com/rollercoaster. If you’re inside NDC you get this program for free so don’t pull out your wallet and buy it – get your coupon code from me to get your complimentary access. For the rest of you, I’ll see you inside! 

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: Slimming World – s/o to Joyce!

Slimming World is a weight loss programme like no other

Millions have reached their dream weight with our generous, no-hunger eating programme. Add an activity programme that starts when the time’s right for you, plus mindset-shifting, habit-changing support that will get you to your weight loss target and help you stay there.

It also appears to be an MLM – which you guys know how I feel about those. 

The woman who founded it later bought a yacht company and a theater, if that tells you anything about how much money the diet industry continues to make

“Food optimising” will set you free — (or it will create food obsession and keep you trapped in the yo-yo diet cycle until your 77yo??)

How it works:

• You can apparently eat what they call their “swips” (Slimming worlds individual picks)
• You eat mostly “free” food – which they call a “liberating concept”
• Measure everything that’s not “free”

If you have an example of Wellness Woo that you want to share, DM it to me.

Ok, that’s enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic…How Successful Intuitive Eaters Think Differently

1 – You can’t expect the results you want of peace with food and comfort in your body from the work you didn’t do to actually heal your issues.

• Wanting peace with food doesn’t create peace with food.
• Listening to intuitive eating content isn’t the same as applying it when your own crap comes up.
• “I’ve been doing intuitive eating for two years” doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve spent two years actively working on the things keeping you stuck.
• Ask: What have I actually done to heal the issues I keep complaining about?
• You don’t need to blame yourself for struggling, but you do need to take ownership of changing it.
• This is actually empowering: if there’s work you haven’t done yet, your current struggle isn’t evidence that intuitive eating failed. 
• Stop measuring how long you’ve “been intuitive eating.” Start looking at how deeply you’ve been willing to do the work.

2 – “Food freedom” isn’t just eating donuts and cheeseburgers without feeling guilty.

It means having EQUAL freedom to say “yes” to food…and to say “no” to it too.

• Early IE work often requires intentionally saying YES to foods you’ve restricted.
• But that’s not the final destination.
• True freedom means:
  • I can eat the donut without guilt.
  • I can also realize I don’t actually want the donut.
  • I can choose vegetables because they sound good or because I want to support my health.
  • I can leave food behind without worrying I’m secretly restricting.
• The question shifts from “Am I allowed?” to “What do I actually want/need?”
  Restriction says, “I can’t have that.”
  Food freedom says, “I can have that. Do I want it?”

3 – Weight loss doesn’t fix your body image.

YOU DO.

Almost everyone who wants weight loss believes they’ll finally feel better about their body once it’s smaller.

But if smaller bodies automatically produced positive body image, nobody in a smaller body would hate theirs.

And many listeners have already lived the evidence:

• You’ve lost weight before.
• Did you permanently stop worrying about your body?
• Or did the goalpost move?

Weight loss can temporarily produce approval, excitement, reassurance, compliments, clothing changes, etc.

Those feelings aren’t the same thing as healing body image.

Body image work teaches you how to live in a human body that will inevitably change – without placing requirements on your acceptance..

4 – Healing your relationship with food and your body is going to take longer than you think it should, and it will be harder than you’d think. You can’t lose if you don’t quit. It’s TOTALLY WORTH IT.

• Most people dramatically underestimate how deeply diet culture is wired into them.
• You’re undoing decades of:
  • beliefs
  • habits
  • identity
  • fear
  • social conditioning
  • coping mechanisms
  • reinforcement from other people
• Of course six weeks of listening to hunger cues doesn’t erase that.
• There will be seasons when it feels easy and moments when something exposes another layer.
• Success isn’t never struggling again.
• It’s becoming increasingly capable of navigating struggle without running back to dieting.
• You can’t lose if you don’t quit…imagine another 20 years spent dieting versus investing a few messy years into finally changing the relationship.

5 – It’s not about the food. And it’s not about your weight.

If you don’t know what I mean by this, you aren’t doing deep enough work.

“I can’t keep cookies in my house.” Maybe it’s not really about cookies.

“I need to lose 30 pounds.” Maybe it’s not really about 30 pounds.

Dig into what is underneath all of this – WHY do you feel you can’t keep cookies in the house? What’s your belief, and your past experience with that? And what are you telling yourself that says about you as a person? 

• control
• certainty
• worthiness
• belonging
• fear of judgment
• perfectionism
• identity
• safety
• self-trust
• emotional regulation
• fear of taking up space
• believing health makes you morally good

You could give them your repeated-question exercise:

“And what would that mean?”

“If I gained weight, I’d hate my body.” And what would that mean?

“I wouldn’t feel confident.” And what would that mean?

“I’d worry people were judging me.” And what would THAT mean?

We need to keep digging. Just because your weight is the thing your brain is obsessing about doesn’t mean your weight is actually the problem.

6 – You can’t expect to undo 40+ years of dieting simply by reading a book, listening to a podcast or taking a course. Those things can be helpful – but bringing your struggles to coaching conversations is what will address your blind spots and the root of your issues.

Books, podcasts and courses can be phenomenal.

But there’s an inherent problem with trying to coach yourself: You can’t see your own blind spots, and you don’t know what you don’t know.

Your old beliefs that you aren’t even questioning whether they’re true or helpful or not are keeping you stuck because they often don’t even FEEL like beliefs. They feel like facts.

“But my situation is different.”

“But I really do need to lose weight for my health.”

“I’m not restricting. I’m just trying to make healthier choices.”

“I’m already giving myself permission.”

As a skilled coach and dietitian, I can hear what you can’t hear. That’s why you need to be able to talk about it with people who get it who can call you out (lovingly of course), who can challenge you, who can show you different ways of thinking and doing things. Otherwise you’re just living in your own echo chamber.

This is what we’re going to be doing inside SOTDR by the way…

7 – If you’re still living in fear of weight gain, you have not yet mastered intuitive eating. You might feel confident in your IE skills, but you’re not all the way there yet if you haven’t developed the deep trust with your body that allows you to let go of the weight gain fear.

I’m not saying:

• A successful intuitive eater never has a negative thought about weight gain.
• They’d be delighted to gain weight.
• They have perfect body image.
• Feeling uncomfortable about body changes means they’ve failed intuitive eating.

I’m saying that if you don’t have the trust with your body, and the acceptance of your body’s natural weight range at this phase of your life (and let’s remember that weight range will change throughout your life) – then you’re not going to fully have peace with food. Because you’re still scared that what you’re eating is going to make you gain weight. You need to get to where for the most part your weight is stable because your eating and your appetite cues and your gentle nutrition are dialed in to match what your body needs, AND you need to be prepared to accept that over time your weight might change for various reasons with things like stress, life changes, hormone changes, perimenopause, grief, changes in your daily patterns, retirement, pregnancy, all sorts of things. And if that’s ONLY ok with you if the scale goes down, but not up, then you’re not at peace. That’s not to say we can’t be curious about weight gain and weight changes, so that we’re compassionately paying attention to what your body is saying. But that’s different from living in fear and living in body hatred because you haven’t done the body image work part of this. 

So much of this is about your mindset and your mentality – and a lot of people either skip or don’t know how to do that work, which is what I love helping my clients do. I’ve put together some free custom body image journal prompts for you to help with this part and to show you what it looks like to actually do that part of the work. You can grab them at nondietacademy.com/bodyimage or DM me and I’ll send them to you.

Wrapping Up:    

What does someone who is successful with intuitive eating look like in her life? My most successful clients who graduate from my coaching because they have healed and resolved this issue in their lives are people who:

• do the deeper work instead of chasing another surface-level fix
• have genuine autonomy around food
• take responsibility for healing their body image rather than demanding their body change
• expects the process to take time
• gets curious about what’s underneath her food and weight struggles
• are willing to receive support and have their blind spots challenged
• trusts their body without living in constant fear of weight gain

I want you to take what you heard in this episode and pick just 1 of the areas we covered and implement it. 

In case nobody has told you today – you are ENOUGH ALREADY. We’ll talk again soon.

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