Welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body, I’m Katy Harvey your host, and I want to start off by asking you a question:

Why does a freaking cookie or bag of chips have so much power over you?

I hear you guys saying things to me all the time like: 

• You can’t keep certain foods in the house because you’ll “lose control.”
• You eat something “bad” and think about it for the rest of the day.
• You feel proud of yourself for ordering the salad instead of the fries.
• You promise yourself you’ll only have one, then suddenly you’re four deep and thinking, Well, I already blew it.
• You eat something you consider unhealthy and immediately start thinking about how to compensate.

Why does FOOD get to determine how you feel about yourself?! You’re giving food way too much power, and today we’re going to fix that.

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: The women’s fitness industry (I’ll do one on the men’s fitness industry at some point as well)

I was listening to a business development podcast the other day and the person being interviewed was talking about their client who is a fitness coach who is making $40k/month selling her services. This was WILD to me, so I looked this woman up, and what I found was so disturbing. 

She’s basically selling people on the way she looks by telling them that if they just do what she does, they’ll look like her too. Which in and of itself is false (explain…)

But the bigger issue I have here is that this woman looks ill. And this is not me trash talking someone’s body – that’s why I’m not even going to name this woman. I’m talking about my clinical spidey senses going off here.  As an eating disorder specialist I used to work in a hospital in an inpatient program for people with severe eating disorders, and this was what a lot of our patients looked like. And as a dietitian I’m trained in doing nutrition-focused physical exams for malnutrition, and she is showing many signs of malnutrition. 

So here’s the specific aspect of this that I want to call out as wellness woo – that there are enough people out there in the general public who are so desperate to look emaciated that this person is making $40k/month selling it. 

This is sick.

We need to STOP glorifying extreme thinness, having no body fat (which your body NEEDS btw). (Explain what happens w/o body fat)

It’s so sad and troubling to me that there are so many people out there who are this desperate to look this way. It’s not normal. It’s not healthy. 

So next time you see a fitness coach promoting their services – I want you to scrutinize are they selling you actual fitness, or are they selling you a disordered aesthetic? Strength and fitness aren’t a look. In fact, if you look at the bodies of a lot of the power lifters, and olympic athletes like Ilona Maher – they don’t look crazy toned or emaciated. And they’re the fittest people in the world. Diet culture has brainwashed us to think that fitness looks more like a body building competition than actual health. And I think most people can look at the individuals who do those body building competitions and see that it’s not healthy – like you get the ick from it because you know it’s not right to look that way…but right now fitness culture is selling us a lite verson of that AND IT’S NOT HEALTHY EITHER.

If you have an example of Wellness Woo that you want to share, DM it to me on FB/IG or email it.

Ok, that’s enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic…If You Want Food to Have LESS Power Over You, Stop Doing This

THE THING I WANT YOU TO STOP DOING: Putting food into moral categories. We need to NEUTRALIZE your judgements about food – because they’re causing more of your problems than you realize. 

Now let me be clear…Food neutrality does NOT mean all foods are nutritionally identical.

It means food doesn’t have moral value. Broccoli and brownies offer different things nutritionally – and that’s a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. AND, eating broccoli doesn’t make you good. Eating brownies doesn’t make you bad.

And neither food, eaten in isolation, tells us anything about the overall quality of your eating or your health.

And so even though you’re letting yourself eat the foods that were off limits when you were dieting – you’re still telling yourself that they’re bad/crap/junk/unhealthy – and it’s literally sabotaging your IE process and rendering it ineffective for you. 

The hidden meanings you’re STILL assigning to food even if you don’t realize it

Based on what food you eat, you’re still telling yourself:

• “I’m being good.”
• “I’m taking care of myself.”
• “I’m going to gain weight.”
• “I’m being unhealthy.”
• “I have no self-control.”
• “I deserve a treat.”
• “I’ve blown it.”
• “I’ll make up for this tomorrow.”

The problem isn’t the brownie itself. The problem here is everything you’ve been taught that eating the brownie MEANS…It’s the stories that you’re telling yourself in your brain..That meaning creates guilt, urgency, scarcity, compensation and obsession. This is a mindset problem – not a nutritional problem. (And sure, it can lead to nutritional problems that stem from your all-or-none thinking – not from eating the darn brownie).

The paradox: Trying to control food can make food MORE controlling

Walk through the cycle:

Food is “bad”
↓
I shouldn’t eat it
↓
Scarcity / heightened desire
↓
I eat it…and you want MORE of it because your brain has created that heightened desire from calling it bad – so you eat more of it than you would have if the food is neutral

 ↓
Guilt + “I blew it”
↓
Eat more because tomorrow I’ll be good again
↓
Restrict/compensate
↓
Food becomes even more charged and you distrust yourself even more. And in your brain this “proves” that you were right to call it bad and to stay away from it.

Therefore: You think the solution is becoming better at controlling the food. But the need to control it is what’s giving it so much power.

When I say we need to neutralize your judgments about food and stop judging food, and that all foods are morally equal – that doesn’t mean that they’re nutritionally equal. 

“But, Katy, some foods ARE healthier than others.” or people on social media yell at me all the time and say “SOME FOODS ARE UNHEALTHY!!”

Foods are nutritionally different.

Some provide more fiber.
Some provide more protein.
Some provide more vitamins and minerals.
Some are more satisfying.
Some give quick energy.
Some are mostly for pleasure.

Different doesn’t mean good/bad. It means different.

You can know about the nutritional properties of a food without turning that information into “I should/shouldn’t eat it.”

We can care about nutrition without needing fear, guilt or morality to guide our choices.

THE REFRAME GAME

THIS is the mental rewiring you need to do with food in order for it to feel neutral…and I’m going to take this a step further and tell you that if you want to actually be able to accurately listen to your body with IE, then this is not optional. (explain the cookie cycle slide that I have)

Where this leads you…Food becomes just food and it’s relatively uninteresting. 

And you’ll have a plate of cookies and sometimes you might want 1-2, and it’s easy to stop yourself without going overboard. And sometimes the cookies will be there and you’re not that interested in them, or you’d rather have something else instead….Because the food no longer has power over you now that you’re not labeling and judging it. 

I want to hammer this home – that this isn’t a food problem. It’s not that the food is too addictive, or that carbs are the devil, or that there’s any single food that’s so bad it’s going to destroy your health if you eat it (and on the flip side there’s no food that’s so good that it’s going to magically make you healthy if you eat it). This way of thinking is both untrue, and it’s making things worse for you. 

That’s why we are going to be hitting this mindset stuff really hard inside SOTDR starting next week, and I think you’re crazy if you’re not inside this program. We are going to be rewiring and retraining your brain to think differently about food in order to take the power away from it so that you can have the peace and neutrality with food to eat the cookie or chips or burger if you want it, without eating excessive amounts of it, and without feeling guilty…AND you’ll stop having intense compulsions and cravings for those foods, and you’ll be able to easily say no to them when you’re not hungry or when something else would actually feel better or be more satisfying instead. You’re taking back your power from food, and giving yourself choice that doesn’t feel like rules or restriction. All because you changed your mental wiring around it – not because you tried to be more controlling with the food or just not buy it. 

If you’re ready for food to stop having all this power over you, get inside SOTDR, and if you’re listening to this in the future after the program is already over, feel free to reach out to me to see what coaching offers I currently have available and we’re going to tackle this together. You can know all the basics about IE and “listening to your body” and not restricting foods anymore – but if you haven’t done this mindset work then IE is going to fall short for you. 

And I want you to know that inside SOTDR we’re not going to just talk about this mental reprogramming stuff in a fluffy way – I’m going to give you exact steps and strategies in order to do it, and it’s going to be extremely clear on HOW you will make this happen and WHAT you are going to be doing differently with food. 

So grab your spot NOW before you forget. The link is in the show notes. Or just type in nondietacademy.com/rollercoaster. Reach out to me via email or DM if you want to chat about other coaching offers if this one has passed, or if you have questions. And i’ll see you inside. 

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

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