The Path to Food Freedom - Part 4
Your Longterm Strategy
In this part I’m going to take you through some stand-alone practices that can help to change your relationship with food and pull the strings of dieting culture out of your thinking.
Each of these practices can be done on its own and in no particular order. You can skip any that feel too overwhelming to do right now and embrace the ones that feel doable. And, it’s absolutely okay to read through this part and say, ‘nope, not right now’.
Your relationship with food has been developing since you had your first bite as a baby. There are many habits, ideas, and beliefs that may have very deep roots into your life, and challenging them may feel wrong. That’s okay. Stay open and find any opening you can to shift and adjust your food/body relationship.
Having some support from a therapist or councilor can be enormously helpful as you work through this part, especially if you’re struggling. Past trauma might be connected with your food behaviours and getting help from a trained therapist can help to release and heal from those traumas.
The book Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribble dives deeper into most of these practices. It’s a really great book, period. It’s especially fantastic if the rational part of your brain needs a bit of convincing that all methods of dieting can’t work.
Challenge Your Food Beliefs
Changing your behaviour can be easier than changing your beliefs…but there’s great power to shifting any beliefs that aren’t currently working for you.
Every day our unconscious beliefs guide us through our day. They affect, positively or negatively, how we interact with people and the things in our life. Our beliefs around money can drive how we work, plan, and save. And our beliefs around food, both positive and negative, can drive a lot of our experience around food.
When we drill down into our belief system, our behaviours shift automatically.
Some examples of food beliefs that may not be true:
- my weight determines my health
- I will be more valuable in society if I was thinner
- I eat too much
- I’m a glutton, I’m always hungry
- I will be unhealthy if I eat ‘bad’ food
- I need to stop eating carbs (or fat) to lose weight
Grab a journal and write down your food beliefs, just get them down on paper. Keep the paper handy, because you might notice some pop up as you go about your day (the critical voice in the back of your head might remind you of a few :).
Then, take a look at them and determine if any beliefs don’t feel true to you anymore. Or, are there ones that might feel true, but you have a sneaking suspicion that they might not be.
Pick a belief or two and challenge it – can you find ways that it might not be true? If yes, follow that path. Find articles, practitioners, or friends that agree that it’s not true and keep reading. This is one path to change this belief.
Develop a Nutrition Ally
When you think about food, do you feel ruled by The Food Police? Or a Nutrition Ally.
This is a great concept that I’ve pulled from the book Intuitive Eating because it perfectly sums up the difference between these two statements:
I should eat a healthy diet (Food Police)
I like to eat more whole foods and vegetables. They give me energy and they keep my body happy (Nutrition Ally)
I greatly dislike the word ‘should’ especially when it comes to food. It’s full of judgment and The Food Police LOVES that word and all of the judgment that surrounds it.
One easy way to know if you’re hearing from your inner Nutrition Ally or The Food Police is through your inner 2-year-old. The Food Police awakens your tantrumming toddler better than anyone else. The Food Police also likes to count calories, macros, and tell you if a food is bad for you. They also like to blame you for your choices and cravings, it’s a very diet-centric, judgmental voice.
On the other hand, the Nutrition Ally is gentle and kind. This inner voice might say something like, ‘how about try a bit of dark chocolate to tame that sugar craving before grabbing that bag of cookies’. Or, ‘how about we make a batch of those yummy black bean brownies?’.
The Nutrition Ally guides you to find the food that will feel best for your body while allowing you to enjoy the food you love and crave. This voice might remind you that a certain breakfast might cause a blood sugar crash later, but with no judgement if you choose to eat it anyways. There’s no hidden agenda.
There’s no guilt with the Nutrition Ally but TONS with The Food Police.
Distinguishing the difference between these two voices can be a powerful way to move away from The Food Police and embrace your kind and lovely Nutrition Ally. The more times you listen to your Nutrition Ally the stronger this voice becomes.
Habituate Your Cravings
This is the best way to make a screaming, difficult to control, just a few bites won’t do it, kind of craving to go away for good.
Do you have a kind of food that you can’t keep in the house because if you have even one bite you can’t stop.
This is a very common side effect of restrictive eating, especially chronic dieting. Most of you who’ve been on multiple diets will have a food (or many foods) that is your Achilles heel. The food that you crave the most and had to banish from your life.
And, I’m about to tell you to do the opposite. But first, a little background.
Remember, there aren’t really any ‘good’ foods and ‘bad’ foods. Yes, there are ones with more nutrients than others. And some that are more pleasurable than others. If all foods were thought of equally, your body would easily balance your diet between nutrient-dense foods and pleasure-dense foods.
It’s our labels that have made those ‘bad’ foods so hard to resist. And, because health experts keep changing their minds about which food should be on the ‘bad’ list, our lists keep growing (it’s much easier to add food to the bad list than to remove one)
Lately I’ve been streaming episodes of The Golden Girls. There are certain TV shows that I find wonderfully comforting and this is one of them (The Gilmore Girls is my usual go to).
In a recent episode I watched, one of the characters went to the fridge and grabbed a bagel, and it reminded me that in the ‘80s, a dry bagel (even a white flour one) was considered wonderfully healthy because it was low in fat. Bagel stores were on every corner and they offered a variety of low-fat cream cheese flavours to slather on top.
Today, ‘carb-free’ bagel-shaped products have taken their place and people are encouraged to slather as much fat as they’d like on top. The low-fat ‘guilt-free’ bagel of the ‘80s is now on the ‘bad’ list.
But, it’s neither good nor bad. It’s just food. And if we were to look at it without judgment, we’d see that it’s actually kinda dry and tasteless. I’d rather a slice of sourdough bread any day.
How to habituate your cravings –
In a nutshell, the only way to stop your cravings is to stop denying yourself of that craving.
For a yelling, screaming, feeling-out-of-control kind of craving, this means eating it as much as you like. As much as you want for as long as you want, with a promise to your body that you will never deny this craving again. Yes. That idea might sound really scary.
And, you might be thinking – how does this work with my weight loss strategy? Short answer – it doesn’t at first, but it will in the long run.
It’s important that during this phase of habituating your craving that you don’t focus on weight loss. You’re only focused on giving your body as much as this food as it wants. And, eventually, you WILL be done eating it. That always happens.
It may take a few days, a few weeks, or even a few months, but eventually, your body will say, enough. Thank you, but I’m done. Then, keep this food in your life and eat it anytime you feel the urge. Banishing it, even when you’re sick of it, will just give it power again.
You may find you don’t even like this food. That’s the surprising part of these cravings – saying no can make these foods so tempting that you don’t even really taste them. But, during this process you get a chance to really REALLY taste them and see…do you even like it? You might say yes, you might say no.
If you have more than one food that feels All Powerful, do this process with one food at a time or everything altogether, whatever feels more comfortable to you.
Don’t hesitate to reach out to me either through email or in our Facebook group if you need some support.
Honour Your Hunger
Do you feel hungry?
After years or decades of dieting and being forced (through the diet protocol) to ignore your hunger, your body may have stopped sending your brain that signal.
It’s true, you might not feel hungry anymore. But, it can come back.
This is why I use cravings as the first way in to understanding the body’s language. When hunger gets quieter, cravings get louder. And the more you deny them the louder they get. But, the opposite is true for hunger, the more you deny your hunger the quieter this voice gets.
Dieting culture also paints hunger as the bad guy you need to overcome, instead of what it really is – a biological signal that your body needs some food. It’s necessary for life!
Take some time to explore your body’s signs of hunger. What does it feel like and where in your body do you feel it?
Some signs of hunger to consider:
A gnawing feeling in your stomach or throat
Tiredness or low energy
A dull headache
Low mood or anxiety
Low energy
Thoughts of food
The more you consider your hunger signals, the louder they get.
Once you reconnect to these feelings, begin to honour them. When you feel symptoms of hunger, eat something. Be curious about your hunger, when is it quiet, when is it loud? Does it fluctuate day by day?
This can take time, so be patient and curious. Honouring your hunger is a beautiful way to show love to your body ❤️
In Conclusion –
It might take your body some time to trust you, to know that you’ll keep feeding enough food every day before it starts to release some of its energy stores. Your body has built up its energy stores after every low-cal diet and is worried you’re going to starve it again.
By balancing your meals and focusing on building strength, your body will change. First, you’ll trade a bunch of fat stores for muscles, and you’ll notice that your clothes are fitting differently. This means your body fat % is going down and your body LOVES this.
It can be hard not to lose hope when the scale doesn’t move at first. But…that number on the scale means absolutely nothing. It doesn’t represent your health and it REALLY doesn’t represent your worth in the world. It’s just a measure of gravity.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’ve read through this masterclass and you still don’t quite know what to do next. Your feedback, questions, and frustrations will help to open up this masterclass even more. ❤️
Got any questions or comments? Comment below, jump to our private Facebook Group, or the Ask Lisa page :)