Welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body, it’s Katy here. The other day I was in therapy talking about how I was worried about something for the school year with one of my kids, and I wasn’t sure if I should preemptively do something about it to hopefully prevent a bad situation from happening, or wait and see how it goes. And my therapist immediately clocked how I was letting my fear and discomfort run the show and tempt me to do something I didn’t really need to do. She said, “Ok, let’s look at the facts” and we walked through the actual facts about the situation, and it helped me see what I did – and didn’t – need to do. I had to stop operating out of my emotional mind, and start operating out of my logical mind.

And as I was preparing for this episode it occurred to me that this was so similar to what I do with my clients when you guys come to me and you’re all triggered and anxious and you’re wanting to go back on another diet. 

There are literally 4 things that I do with SO MANY of my clients, and these things are what will allow you to walk right on by when you see a scale in your friend’s bathroom, or when your coworkers are talking about their diet or how much weight they lost on a GLP-1, or your doctor told you that you should eat low carb, and you’re feeling so tempted to go back on a diet – and  mark my words, if you do these 4 things and take them seriously it is going to get you out of this limbo that you’re living in where you’re in that messy middle of this process so that you can leverage intuitive eating and gentle nutrition for your health goals so you can make educated choices that SUPPORT your health, rather than creating a bunch of rules you feels deprived by and guilty about breaking. 

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: Sugar feeds cancer 

“Cancer and parasites love glucose – stop eating sugar”

This type of messaging is so infuriating, misleading and harmful to people. 

And if you know me, you know that I have zero tolerance for people messing around with people who have cancer. 

Let’s unpack this:

Every healthy cell in your body uses glucose. Aka your blood sugar. Your blood sugar is how your body is delivering fuel to your cells so that they can do their job. It is how the cells of your heart, pancreas, intestines, lungs, liver, eyes, muscles, and your brain have the fuel they need. The reason you feel so terrible if your blood sugar gets low is because if it goes too low you die. Your body literally cannot survive without glucose. 

Do cancer cells also use glucose? Yes. But this nonsense that not eating sugar “starves” your cancer is false and absurd.

If not eating sugar was going to cure anyone’s cancer researchers would have figured that out decades ago and it would be prescribed to all cancer patients. But alas, that’s not the case. 

The other flaw in this logic is that it implies that the only source of glucose in your body is from eating sugar. That’s not how blood glucose works…

So not only is this nonsense thinking to say stop eating sugar to stop feeding your cancer glucose….That’s scientifically and biologically not how that works…

But it’s also straight up harmful advice. Now you’ve got people with cancer feeling guilty like they might have given themselves cancer by eating sugar. And you’ve got people with cancer feeling like they are giving themselves a death sentence if they eat a cookie. 

This type of fear mongering is ignorant, unhelpful and disgusting. 

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…The 4 Core Steps to Not Feeling Tempted to Start Another Diet

First, let me preface this by saying, these shifts don’t magically happen overnight. 

The process of finding peace with your body takes time.

We can accelerate that healing process through intentional strategies and inner work. Let’s dig into what exactly we did to get her to where she is no longer on a rollercoaster ride with dieting and obsessive food and body thoughts. 

I’m going to walk you through how I used these 4 steps with one of my clients so you can see how it works in action…

1. Actively choosing to step away from dieting
   1. This means saying “NO MORE” to going on new diets and healthy eating kicks that have only made her weight (and self-esteem) go up and down like a yo-yo. She had to get firm in her commitment to NOT do this, even on the days she felt the most insecure and tempted to do something to “fix” her body.
   2. Here’s what you can do if you’re in this phase:
      1. Unfollow accounts that are promoting dieting or restrictive behaviors
      2. Bow out of the company-wide weight loss challenge in January
      3. Go back to making the regular recipes you used to make, not the low-carb version
      4. Sit with the discomfort of ordering a hamburger with a bun on it
      5. Take the batteries out of your bathroom scale
2. Set up an eating structure to provide her body with reliable + predictable opportunities to eat throughout the day
   1. This decreased her intense cravings and binges, because her body knew & trusted that SATISFYING food was going to be available. 
   2. Here’s what you can do if you’re in this phase:
      1. Breakfast doesn’t need to be an omelette “hold the cheese” or a protein shake only – but it DOES need to contain a protein, a source of fiber, carb and fat, and be within 90 minutes of waking up.
      2. No longer demonizing snacking, but you’re actively and intentionally adding them in.
      3. Add in a 30 and 60-minute checkpoint after your meals to check in on your hunger/fullness cues to guide your future intake.
3. She learned to listen to (& trust) her hunger & fullness
   1. This allowed her to reconnect with and rely upon her body’s internal signals to tell her how much food she needed (rather than relying on calories, points, macros, etc. that left her frustrated and deprived). SHE STARTED TO TRUST HER BODY AGAIN.
   2. What you can do if you’re in this phase:
      1. Instead of beating yourself up, every time intense cravings hit go through your own checklist to evaluate timing, emotions and a 24-hour snapshot of your nutrition and what’s missing.
      2. Delete MyFitnessPal or the calorie calculator from your phone.
      3. Pausing before you eat to determine your hunger level (and if you’re even physically hungry in the first place vs emotionally wanting food or bored)
4. We applied BODY NEUTRALITY and BODY ACCEPTANCE
   1. By using these frameworks, she was able to let her scale collect dust in the corner of her bathroom, while working on being kind and compassionate towards her body. Over time, the self-loathing started to melt, and she began experiencing PEACE with her body.
   2. What you can do if you’re in this phase:
      1. Not telling your friends and family to delete specific photos of you or not post them on social media because you don’t like how your body looks.
      2. Keeping clothes in your closet that are too small “just in case” they fit again later.
      3. Not picking yourself apart in the mirror when you’re getting dressed.
      4. Telling yourself you’re “just going to check and see” what your weight is when you’re at the doctor or gym (or in you friend’s bathroom).

Here’s where this client is now after us working together to implement these steps

• She’s no longer in the “messy middle” or what i call “no man’s land” between hating her body and feeling like maybe she should go back on a diet, vs embracing IE and making peace with her body. 
• She said “I always thought that having the right body would produce peace with it – but now I have peace with my body and it hasn’t changed.”
• She’s listening to her hunger/fullness signals, and she’s no longer constantly battling food thoughts, cravings, guilt or binging.
• Much less time and energy on food thoughts

Isn’t that incredible?! If you are:

• Telling yourself you can’t wear shorts until you lose weight and get rid of your cellulite
• Dreading Monday mornings because it means you have to start over and try to “be good” with food all week long
• Tired of telling your family things like, “Get these chips away from me, you know I can’t stop after just one!”
• Sick of your weight going up and down (along with your confidence and self-esteem) and you’re exhausted from the constant food and body obsession in your mind
• …..Changing this starts with rewiring your mindset to identify the patterns leading to your food obsession, intense cravings, feeling out of control with food and feeling tempted to start another diet.

This is going to allow you to wave goodbye to the twists and turns of dieting, and say hello to a life of food freedom and body peace. 

This common misconception is what keeps people attempting intuitive eating, month after month, year after year, staying stuck, feeling like you’re in the same place and worrying that your health is going to get worse. 

What changes this is a food neutralizing approach that allows you to achieve peace and neutrality with your body image and weight (without the scale controlling your self-esteem anymore) 

❌ This doesn’t happen from eating whatever you want, whenever you want. 

❌ This doesn’t happen from ignoring hunger and fullness and letting the leniency of the approach and impulsively eating whatever you want, whenever you want guide your meals.  

❌ This doesn’t happen from simply dismissing the basics of nutrition entirely. 

✅ This starts with rewiring your mindset to identify exactly which patterns are directly leading to food obsession, intensive cravings, and feeling out of control with food. 

If you’re ready for this to change starting today, you can still hop inside SOTDR. We just kicked off this live 4 week group this week, and you can still get inside where we are going to implement all of this together. 

If intuitive eating has been worsening your health – yeah, we need to look at that, because that’s NOT how intuitive eating is supposed to work. 

The second you start working toward getting out of the chokehold that the scale has on you, by implementing the mindset strategies you will undo years of conditioning that has no longer allowed you to trust your body. 

This is going to create a reality where you can actually have your favorite foods in the house – dare I say EAT THEM – and not be tempted to step on the bathroom scale the next morning. 

This is exactly why I created the Stepping Off The Dieting Rollercoaster Live Group Experience, where you’ll get over $1100 of guidance, tools and coaching for less than $200! 💸

Even if you are super busy this month or on vacation, no worries – everything is recorded and can be accessed right from your phone. You can catch up on our first group call that happened last night and you’ll be off to the races. 

If you’re ready to make this the year that you finally changed your actual mindset (and not just your behaviors) so that you can TRULY and FULLY make peace with food, I would absolutely love to support and guide you! Click the link in the show notes, or DM me for details about SOTDR 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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