ShelbyMcDaniel Logo White

Shelby

What Is A Healthy Relationship With Food?

by

We live in a diet-focused weight focused society. Sad, but true. In fact, 50% of Americans struggle finding a healthy relationship with food, yet we are encouraged to get “healthy” through dieting, the very means that leads to an unhealthy relationship with food over time for so many. 

Just to confirm what your gut instinct you may already be telling you, an unhealthy relationship with food can resemble any of the following: 

  • Repetitive restricting / binge eating or overeating cycles
  • Guilt and shame around foods
  • Cutting out macros or food groups
  • Feel completely lost intuitively knowing when, what, and how much to eat
  • Always trying the next best “diet” 
  • Avoiding social situations around food out of fear of losing control
  • Constantly thinking about food
  • Fear and or anxiety around food (or specific food groups)
  • Feel hunger is bad
  • Feel pleasure with food is bad
  • Label food as “good” “bad” “clean” “cheating” often
  • Eating feels like a job, mechanical, and NOT nurturing and enjoyable
  • No internal trust or guidance regarding when, what, and how much to eat
  • Use food as a primary means to emotionally cope 
  • Use food to numb out
  • Avoid food/eating as much as possible
  • Have an all-or-nothing approach with food
  • Let the scale dictate what you eat/don’t eat on a day to day basis
  • Can’t stay in control without a hardcore meal plan or food logging
  • Repetitive gain and loss of weight year after year (yo-yo dieting)
  • No other knowledge on how to eat other than dieting
  • Believe you are addicted to food, sugar, fast food, or other

If you can relate to any of the above, we are glad you’re here. The good news is, no matter how long you have struggled with food, you can turn this ship around! 

If your “normal” is an unhealthy relationship with food, you might have trouble envisioning what a healthy relationship with food even looks like? In fact, that’s a great question we LOVE to ask our personal coaching clients. What does a healthy relationship with food mean to you? What do you want your day to day eating to look like? It isn’t always an easy question to answer. 

Allow us to lay out what our professionals AND our clients see not only what is a healthy relationship with food, but what is 1000% possible for you too!  

Eat When You're Hungry, Stop When You're Full

How nice would it be to know when to eat, eat when you’re hungry, and stop eating when you’re satisfied, and move on with your day? That is what each and every one of us is wired to do! Unfortunately all of the diets you have done in the past have moved you further away from this intuitive connection and trust factor. Yo-yo dieting over the years can also skew your metabolism and hunger and fullness cues, making it even more challenging to restore without mindful eating intervention. 

Your body is meant to signal you to eat, so you eat, and don’t die and become extinct. You know that ravenous feeling you get when you have waited too long to eat? It feels painful because your brain and body are trying at that point to force you to eat and nurture your beloved vessel. Point is, hunger is an absolute friend that you need to be able to feel confident about when to eat without all the tracking and food rules. 

Feeling ravenous however, is not the full definition of hunger. It’s a level of hunger, big difference. It’s like defcon 5 level of hunger where all the alarm bells and whistles are going off to ensure you eat, which is why it’s painful and gets your attention bigtime! 

There are, however, more gentle levels of hunger provided by the body too. These are more of a gentle tap or nudge, we call them hunger “pangs” not “pains” for a reason. Unfortunately, our busy days, chronic stress and anxiety, and overall lack of mindfulness causes many to completely miss these cues, leaving them ravenous, and reinforcing their belief that hunger is bad. 

healthy relationship with food

A good first step to re-engage with your hunger cues is to first wrap your brain around the fact that hunger isn’t the enemy. Once you do this, you can begin to try to work on being mindful about what you notice (or don’t notice during the day) regarding your hunger and can take baby steps from there. Eating when you are at a Level 03 hunger pang will help you get the most experience from you food while avoiding the pain of feeling the Level 01 Ravenous hunger. 

You Feel at Peace Around Food

The intention of intuitive eating becomes to eat to “feel good” vs “be good”. You’ve probably been trying to “be good” for a really long time. The more you chase this in your efforts to “feel in control”, the further away you are actually getting from having a loving relationship with food because you stop listening to your own body wisdom while you simultaneously grow that self sabotaging criticism about your eating performance.  

It’s easy to unintentionally eat to “be good” all the time, and thus morally judge yourself as “good” or “bad” based on what you ate (or didn’t eat). Have compassion for yourself here. Think about ALL of the rules, numbers, and tracking that you’ve been brainwashed with. 

One of the game-changing practices we teach to begin the process of feeling at peace around food is something called Relaxed Nourished Eating. In fact, it is a non-negotiable fundamental strategy for any unwanted eating behavior and for anyone wanting a loving relationship with food. 

Relaxed Nourished Eating is a pattern interrupt for the diet-mentality approach of trying to “be good” around food all the time. But what does this actually mean? Saying to yourself “relax around food” is like saying, “just don’t eat it”. If it were that simple, right? We get it! This is where you need some step-by-step strategies like the ones below: 

healthy relationship with food

If you are not practicing relaxed eating, you are engaged in what we call, stress-state eating. When you body is stressed, you further increase cortisol and insulin production, reduce metabolism, further de-regulate your appetite, feel reactive around food (mindless), and you miss the entire experience of the meal, leaving you feeling less satisfied and craving MORE food regardless of what you physically ate. Relaxing at the plate literally will help you boost metabolism, decrease your cravings and overeating, and help you think LESS about food!

If that wasn’t enough, Relaxed Nourished Eating also helps you ENJOY food again. Wait, what? Yes! A key component to having a wonderful eating experience that leaves you feeling satisfied with less food revolves around if you actually ENJOY the food you are choosing for yourself. So often when we try to “be good” all the time, eating food to simply check a box like a good girl/boy, instead of choosing it because we enjoy it. 

All of us humans are wired to find pleasure with food. In fact, pleasure is JUST as important as the components in your meal, being responsible for 40-60% of your digestive, assimilative, and calorie burning power! 

When you don’t want to pay attention to your food because you feel food is the enemy, or you race through your meals because you don’t prioritize yourself, you miss the eating experience. When you miss the eating experience, your brain doesn’t check the box fully that you ate and that you’re ok, causing it to scream HUNGRY! 

In fact, here is a free PDF of Relaxed Nourished Eating strategies. The more you improve this practice, we promise, the more improvements you will see with overeating, binge eating, and overall cravings! 

You Establish Balanced Eating

Your day to day eating is the perfect balance of eating for nourishment and pleasure that works for YOU. No extreme swings of being “on” or “off” or restrictive or out of control. Have that one cookie versus the whole row, or that handful of fries without thinking you need to make an entire weekend of it since you “already screwed up”. 

Balance is a variation in the type of food we consume without guilt and shame. Avoiding certain food groups out of fear (i.e. proteins, fats, carbs) is certainly NOT balanced and is a clear signal of an unhealthy relationship with food. Simply put, “everything in moderation.” Just like there is a time and place for everything in life, there is a place for everything in your eating. 

Balance also means flexibility. Sometimes you have to call the audible and just go with the flow, freely accepting and welcoming nonconformities to preferred foods as a natural part of life and NOT as a criticism of your worth. With a healthy relationship with food, you don’t panic when your sister takes you to a restaurant that doesn’t serve “clean” options or serves “junk.” You allow for this flexibility and enjoy the meal regardless. It’s critical to give yourself this freedom and allow for this flexibility of making unplanned food choices. 

A good first step we suggest is to give yourself permission to explore your perfect balance. What would that look like for you right NOW? Meaning, how can you meet yourself where you are at right NOW with the type of balance you need? That balance will surely change over time. 

If you need a small dove chocolate right now daily because that’s what you feel you need, do it. You may not need this 4-6 weeks from now because as you give yourself permission to explore, the urgency to “take advantage” of certain foods when they become available will fade over time. You’ll find yourself forgetting about those Doritos in the pantry or ice cream in the freezer. 

You Deal with Triggers in a Healthy Way

Simply put, you’re not using food because you’re sad, mad, anxious, bored, tired, or other frequently. Instead, you have the mindfulness to understand why you are wanting to eat when you’re not hungry, and you have the tools and action steps to RESPOND in a healthy way to these triggers, versus REACT mindlessly. You can meet your true needs and understand how to truly take care of your physical, emotional, and spiritual needs without food being the central focus or placeholder. 

Sometimes we are triggered because we are tired, we see those goodies on the counter, or because of an emotional trigger like stress, anxiety, loneliness, even our own inner negative self talk can trigger our emotions that cause us to eat. We can easily train ourselves to use food to cope with these uncomfortable feelings or fill a void repeatedly if we are not taught any other way to handle triggers or meet underlying needs we don’t even know are yearning for our attention. 

One of the first steps you can take to help you bring more mindfulness to eating when you’re not hungry is, when you get any urge to eat, practicing pausing and asking yourself, “Am I Hungry?”. It’s not the cure all, but it’s a great first step to bring awareness to what is triggering you to eat when you’re not hungry. 

Healthy relationship with food

You Know What To Eat For YOU and YOUR Body

You understand what your body both wants and needs in terms of nutrition, balance, and energy, regardless of what your last diet, trainer, or tracking app says. When you begin to eat to feel good vs to be good, let me tell you, you start seeing a lot of things you didn’t before. That donut you have the stare down with at the office starts to become more unappealing because you feel like sh*t after having it, or that lull in the afternoon gets your attention that you need a little more substance at your lunch, or more protein to balance out your blood sugar levels better. Your digestive upset may call for less dairy, or more fiber. 

Point is, mindful eating and upping your intuitive GPS will guide you to become YOUR best nutrition expert. There’s only one of you on this planet, and therefore, can only have one best nutrition expert – YOU.

Does that mean you NEVER eat foods that don’t make you feel good? No, that’s not realistic, again, everything in moderation. Instead you develop patterns where most often you are eating what your body both wants and needs. 

At this point, it would be fair to assume that you know quite a bit about nutrition.There are probably foods that you have been exposed to in your past dieting attempts that you could easily conclude what you feel good with and what you don’t. Pluck some of that knowledge out and begin to apply it one baby step at a time. 

For example, maybe you felt more energized with a high plant based diet, great! That doesn’t mean you have to go totally vegan. Instead, start with a single meal a day where you could boost your veggie intake more than it is now. 

You Invest Your Energy Into Living

What would you do with all the energy you used to put into obsessing about your food and weight? What would you want to do with it? Those that have a healthy relationship with food are able to experience this Diet Freedom daily. Until you are able to step out of the bondage you may feel food has over you right now do you really understand just how small your world has become surrounding food and diet obsessions. 

The key is to begin to live your life NOW. Do not wait to do so until you lose the weight. Losing weight has no personal happiness guarantee. It is not a magic wand. You have to stop surviving and start living now. 

The more that you get back into your life, the less hyperfocus you will devote to food, weight, and eating performance, and right now you could use any bit of emotional relief you can get from food and diet obsessions. 

What is ONE small step you could make here for yourself? What lights you up inside? What brings you joy? What interests do you want to reconnect with, or perhaps discover for the first time? There are no right and wrong answers. These are all “get to’s”, not “have to’s”. 

Do You Believe You Can Have A Healthy Relationship with Food?

We hope you have more clarity on what a healthy relationship with food looks like. 95% of our new clients know that a healthy relationship with food exists, but they just aren’t sure that they personally can achieve it. We get it, and we are here to tell you it is absolutely possible! 

In fact, it can happen faster than you think, especially when you get some extra tools and guidance. We invite you to check out our various ways we can help you move forward towards this amazing and freeing relationship with food that you so deserve. It’s all about taking small steps. If you take small steps every day, over time, that’s going to add up to big results!

If you enjoyed this article, please share it with those you feel could use the extra support!

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Top 5 Reasons Why Diets Fail

by

Ever wonder why diets fail? How all that hard work, the sacrifice, the restriction, the missing out on your favorite foods never seems to be sustainable, and ironically always find yourself back where you started? (or even GAINED a few extra pounds!) Here’s a truth bomb: diets DO NOT work. In fact, they do more than not work – they FAIL! F-A-I-L! 

Living in a culture where “thinner is better” and “thinner = healthier”, no one dares to criticize dieting. After all, this is how food industries and businesses make money. Plus, when “everyone else is doing it” it is easy to jump onto the bandwagon for fear of missing out. WARNING: Once you step onto that wagon, be prepared to fall off, hard.

Did you know 96-99% of people who lose weight on a diet gain it back within a year? For every diet one goes on, he or she gains 11 pounds. Yes, GAINS! I bet you haven’t seen these statistics in the fine print. The only thing one loses on a diet is a zest for life, self-love, social and mental freedom, willpower, time, strength (i.e. muscle loss), just to name a few. Our dieting culture makes it easy to get sucked in by quick weight loss diets, drugs, or supplement false promises. Sadly, as a society, we have lost touch with our bodies and are being blinded with what we’re truly doing to our health and metabolism by continuously playing society’s yo-yo dieting game. So why exactly do diets fail?

#1 Reason Why Diets Fail: Not Eating Enough

When we artificially restrict caloric intake (which is what characterizes most diets), our bodies go into what’s termed a “survival response.” Scientifically, this is a physiological stress response following a prolonged period of food supply cut-off. Our bodies view this as famine or a natural disaster and automatically go into survival mode. Intelligently enough, with the main goal of keeping you alive, the brain then signals the body to hold onto body weight, to store body fat, to stop building muscle, and to burn as few calories as possible. Quite the evolutionary advantage back in the day, and our primitive brain still operates in the same way today. The body thinks it is starving. It thinks it is on a desert island with very limited food supply. Its means to survive and preserve energy is to physiologically slow down calorie-burning metabolism and increase your cravings for food. This is why so many GAIN weight after dieting. The body experiences scarcity, it was threatened, and therefore will ensure THAT doesn’t happen again so your body can put on more weight to protect itself. Isn’t this the opposite of what diets claim to do? Yep, it sure is. 

Most still believe the outdated calories in calories out as the key to weight loss. If this were the golden rule we would not have an obesity crises on our hands and you’d be at your weight loss goal already. Throw this garbage out the window. This belief not only causes you to not eat ENOUGH while dieting (which flips on your survival response) but it also causes many to choose low calorie “diet foods” that are not nutrient dense and often filled chemical ingredients, just to save a calorie or two. Unfortunately, not all calories are created equal. Those low fat, sugar-free muffins you’re eating are actually increasing hunger, spiking your insulin levels, and leaving you hungry shortly after when they crash. Plus, let’s be honest, most of these foods taste not-so-great. Now your brain not satisfied, causing yes- MORE cravings. Can you see already why diets fail? Go grab that whole grain avocado and egg toast instead for that protein, healthy fats, and complex carbs your body so desperately needs and stick to REAL food. Your brain and body will thank you! 

why diets fail

#2 Reason Why Diets Fail: Poor Eating Rhythm

Majority of diets cause many to skip meals, intentionally or not. By skipping breakfast and then having a tiny lunch as an example, the body’s natural bio-nutritional circadian rhythm gets out of whack. Yes – you have an eating circadian rhythm, just like you have a sleep circadian rhythm! Naturally, our bodies burn the most calories during mid-day hours between 12-1:30 pm. When dieting your body during the times of day it needs the MOST energy, your body slows down calorie and fat burning. 

Not eating enough in the front of your day with nutrient dense foods will also increase overeating and binge eating in the evening. If this sound like you and you are eating like a little birdie throughout the day, eat real food and more of it in the first half of your day. Whether your first meal or second meal is bigger right now is irrelevant. Just focus on eating a little more and you should see a positive impact with any evening eating concerns almost immediately. 

But what if you don’t feel hungry until 2pm? Changing your bio-nutritional circadian rhythm is similar to your sleep rhythm. If you want to change your natural sleep rhythm to go to bed earlier so you can wake up earlier, what do you do? You set an intention to go to bed by a certain time whether you are sleepy or not, and then you get up at the early time whether you feel like it or not. Eventually you develop the sleep/wake circadian rhythm you desire over time. The same can be applied with your bio-nutritional circadian rhythm. These are the moments you may WANT to stay intentional with eating hungry or not to simply help you develop a new, healthier bio-nutritional circadian rhythm which will over time create a new natural hunger rhythm for you. 

#3 Reason Why Diets Fail: Restricting Fat Intake

Since most diets focus on calories, they frequently make you restrict your dietary fat intake. This is because fat, out of all the 3 macronutrients (i.e. carbs, protein, and fat), has the highest caloric content per gram – 9 compared to 4 for carbohydrates and proteins. Many of us equate dietary fat (i.e. fat in food) to body fat. This is FALSE! It is an old, outdated science. In fact, fats, specifically EFA’s (essential fatty acids) are vital to life. When we are too low in fat, not only do our brains become foggy, but our bodies become clinically fat deficient and thus lose the ability to lose weight. But wait, it gets even worse. Get ready to say goodbye to that Loreal model’s shiny hair, reproduction chances and instead welcome constipation, dry skin, brittle hair and nails, digestive weakness, fatigue, poor memory, mood issues, secondary amenorrhea (i.e. the cessation of a females’ menstrual cycle), need I go further? If all those are fine with you, then go ahead, grab that zero percent Greek yogurt for breakfast and skip that salad dressing. Otherwise, add back in healthy fat sources from organic olive oil, nuts, seeds, fatty fish like salmon, avocado, or ghee. 

why diets fail

#4 Reason Why Diets Fail: Food Becomes the Enemy

Remember how I said earlier you lose joy, and social and mental freedom when on a diet? That’s because when you diet, it’s not fun and you learn to hate food. Food becomes the enemy on a daily basis. Appetite, too, becomes your nemesis and so you do anything and everything to suppress it with your thoughts and emotions. These thoughts that food is bad, hunger is bad, appetite is bad are simply biologically absurd as food is essential to life. Fighting the need and desire for food is like fighting the need for oxygen, for blood flow, to go to the bathroom. Just this reason alone is enough to explain why diets fail – could you hold off that innate urge to pee? Of course not, if you tried, your body would be pretty stressed! It’s the same when you try to suppress any aspect of appetite or desire for food. 

During this ongoing battle with our appetite and denying our body its innate, primitive desire and need for food, we ONCE AGAIN expose ourselves to a physiological stress response. You become vulnerable to your BFFs increased cortisol and insulin secretion, both which signal our bodies to hold onto weight and to burn fat as slowly as possible, proving once again, why diets fail!

#5 Reason Why Diets Fail: Lack of Pleasure

If the above wasn’t enough for you to say “hasta la vista” to dieting, then I hope this final reason does the trick. Diets fail because they deprive us of pleasure. God forbid we allow ourselves to have that slice of chocolate cake. Instead we automatically do one of two things: 1) respond by punishing ourselves with more restriction because we “gave in” or we “cheated.” Or 2) Say, “What the heck! Might as well eat the entire cake!” We lose control and eat way more than we emotionally and physically need (i.e. bingeing), leaving us feeling mentally and physically sick. When pleasure is diminished and is instead replaced with self-hatred, blame, and regret, our body becomes even more hungry, more greedy. The more you deny yourself the pleasure of food and nourishment, the more readily you will go into that physiological stress response and the more weight-loss resistant you will become. 

So let us all jump off that diet bandwagon and get back into real nourishment. When you cut ties with endless dieting, not only will your body find its true, NATURAL weight, but you will rekindle old ties and make friends with food, appetite, and pleasure. On the other side of restriction is physiological relaxation. On the other side of dieting is FREEDOM. 

Enjoy this article? Join the movement to change the conversation around food and diet culture by sharing this post! 

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

How Stop Obsessing About Food: Shelby’s Top 5 Tips

by

“Just don’t think about it.” “Just don’t eat it.” Oh if it were that easy to stop obsessing about food, am I right?! Unlike other substances, we cannot NOT eat food as a means to reach our goals and eliminate all the head games and triggers surrounding food. Thoughts about food will always be part of our life, because we’re human.

Many people struggle silently thinking about food for what feels like 24/7, interrupting what is most important to them such as family, happiness, professional development, and or other personal goals. Here are 5 tips to help you reduce the emotional weight around food and stop feeling obsessed.

#1 Stop Weighing Yourself

Take a looooong vacation from the scale. Oftentimes, our obsessions with food and overwhelming pressure to “be good” in our everyday eating is linked to an intense focus on weight loss and weighing yourself often.

Seeing what the scales says you weigh (or don’t weigh) can trigger your mind to set strict rules for the day OR opposite, cause you to feel like throwing in the towel and having a “F*ck it” kind of day of eating, both of which will never lead you to a sustainable way of eating.

Weighing yourself daily or too often in general may have started off with good intentions but it can quietly intensify behind the scenes and before you know it, your world is small and completely food and weight focused. An attempt to lose weight can cause eating disorders, a feeling of guilt and even food addiction.

Removing the scale will help you change the environment to which you operate in. If you were trying to get sober, would you try to learn how to change your life and stop thinking about alcohol while sitting in a bar? Absolutely not, that environment would be a total distraction and intense trigger no matter who you are.

The scale can create that same unhealthy environment in the minds of many which is why it is important to get yourself OUT of that environment if the scale intensifies your food obsessions.

ONLY when you’re in the mindset that you can be objective about what the scale says and feel confident that the number on the scale does not define you or all your progress to date would I recommend you revisit weighing yourself no more than once a week.

Focus on how you mentally feel, physically feel, how your clothes fit, or how other secondary symptoms improve such as IBS, sleep, fatigue, and cravings as a means to “measure” your success.

Only when you no longer have the scale in your life will you see how interruptive it truly was for you and will open up new opportunities to find more peace in your every day eating and mindset around food.

EVERY new client of mine is instructed to NOT weigh themselves until further notice for these very reasons. It’s not always easy to just stop weighing yourself, so if you have to give your scale to a neighbor or to your spouse and tell him or her to just hide it somewhere for you, do it. It is time to burn your boats with the scale.

How to reduce food obsessions

#2 Focus On Feeling Good vs Being Good With Food

When you can remove the scale from your life, it will make it much easier to focus on feeling good vs being good with food. This is a total mind shift which sounds easy but it is not easy to do necessarily.

Many of my clients are Type A personalities. They like to win, they are successful in many areas of their lives and know how to work hard. When they try to apply the same “all out” mentality with their food it increases food obsessions, creates a bland, mechanical, annoying experience with food, and sets a high bar of perfectionism with eating.

Mindful eating is about feeling good and not about being good so lets let go of perfectionism. Eating is not static.

You are a human being and not a robot. You have emotions. You can’t just stop eating.

In fact, your mind and body REQUIRE you to get pleasure from what you’re eating. And when you don’t because you’re trying to “be good” all the time with your eating, your brain will scream, “hungry!!!” and your thoughts and obsessions about food will be at large. 

You are not a bad person if you want and need some foods that intellectually you know are not “healthy” or high quality. Part of “normal eating” will still include on occasion overeating or eating when you are not hungry. IT’S OK!

It’s important you FEEL GOOD with some balance in your life and with your eating. You can still win without being perfect, I promise, you just have to get out of your own damn way! Food rules and restrictions lead to eating certain foods–”bad foods”–instead of intuitive eating.

The hard step here is just initially giving yourself permission to LET GO of perfectionism in order to approach your everyday food decisions from a feeling good approach. Once you do, you’ll feel a high level of relief almost immediately from food obsessions.

#3 Check Your Intentional or Unintentional Food Restrictions

Sometimes our food obsessions and compulsions are physiologically driven. When there is fear around eating the wrong things or fear about gaining weight, it is easy to actually not eat enough.

When your body does not get enough food or specific macronutrients while you simultaneously demand your body exert a ton of energy daily, it will become stressed in its need for more food. You need a certain amount of food intake. You would die without it.

Primitive, evolutionary survival instincts kick in in the search for food, and naturally you will find yourself thinking more and more about food and your cravings will increase like you are a devouring wolf as a means to ensure your survival.

how to stop thinking about food

So instead of getting mad that you’re in this position of thinking so much about food, perhaps we pause and listen to what these urges may be telling you.

Have you been avoiding carbohydrates? Healthy fats? Has the obsessions increased since you have been trying to be 100% plant based and lowering your protein intake?

You could do a quick inventory without food logging and find your answer, and if your answer is YES to both, begin adding a little of what you feel you have been depriving your body of and continue to assess how that impacts your food obsessions.

If you are not sure, you can log your food for a few days to get a gauge. This is where food logging can be used as a tool without being abused.

If you are under 1200 calories as a female, you’re not eating enough. If you are under 1600 calories for a male, you’re also probably not eating enough. Log for no more than 7 days to get the answers you need.

If you think you may be missing valuable energy or macronutrients overall, begin to nourish your body with a small amount of high quality food of whatever you may be missing (healthy fats, carbs, proteins) over the coming weeks and see how things improve.

#4 Sprinkle More Joy In Your Life

I have found over the years that food oh so often is simply a placeholder for other things, one of the biggest being a source of joy. “It is the only thing I do for myself that I enjoy” is a common statement I hear. If your only source of joy is food then naturally you are going to find yourself thinking and obsessing about food a LOT.

Stop and think, ‘what are other sources of joy that I could add into my life? What are people, places, activities, things that simply light me up for a few minutes?’ Think small such as scented candles, a made bed in the morning, watching birds from your window, feeling the sun and wind on your face, seeing your puppies get excited when you walk through the door after work, etc. THESE are the little things that make life so fulfilling. They are all around you, I promise.

It may not come to you easily when you try to stop and think about other sources of joy in your life, but be patient. Literally make what I call a Pleasure Inventory list as you identify more and more things that bring you a little hint of joy. Engage in anything on your lists as often as possible and you’ll find that your food obsessions will naturally decrease significantly.

how to stop obsessing about food

#5 Ask For Help

Regardless of who you are, how successful you are, or how much you know about food, sometimes you just need a little help putting all the pieces together regarding the “how-to” stop obsessing about food.

We all know eating can be just a huge head game with you at the very center, making it very difficult to see things clearly and objectively. Plus, this is not your expertise, so you just may not have all the solutions you think you need.

Having a high level of support and accountability is a game changer when it comes to lowering food obsessions.

Our members often need permission to follow their gut instincts, a compassionate conversation to help them unpack all the chatter in their head and emotions that are coming up for them in the process of bettering their relationship with food. I have worked with other coaches, fitness experts, psychologists, amongst many other professionals who in their minds “know what they should be doing”.

Getting help comes from a place of strength, NOT weakness. Here is another great resource for you to check out, my free training, The 4 Shifts to End Your Binge Eating, Emotional Eating, and Lifelong Dieting. If you’re looking for coaching, we offer multiple levels of coaching to help meet you where you are at, you can learn more about these options here. Getting unstuck can happen a LOT faster when you have the right people in your corner.

Enjoy this blog? Please share it with those who could also benefit from extra support with food and weight struggles…

View Programs

How To Stop Your Fear Of Food

by

If you are looking for how to stop your fear of food, you are in the right place. A fear of food can feel absolutely paralyzing, like you are sleeping with the enemy every day. 

Many fear food for various reasons, top reasons being fear of weight gain, fear of losing control, fear of giving into cravings, fear of messing up and making mistakes which are followed by a lovely handful of guilt, shame, judgment, failure, take your pick… 

Unfortunately, we MUST eat food to live. We cannot practice abstinence with food as we can with other substances such as alcohol (otherwise we all know what happens). 

To stop your fear of food, changing your relationship with food from being the enemy to food being nourishing is vital. What? How?! I know that sounds scary, maybe even impossible. However, I promise you CAN make this change!

Overcome Fear of Food with Pleasure...

One of the most effective ways to stop fear of food is through creating new paradigm shifts surrounding your relationship between pleasure and food. Our relationship with pleasure profoundly informs the health of our relationship with food and the health of our body and is present at the most fundamental architecture of our physiology, and yet again, many people with food and body challenges fear pleasure. 

We often believe that pleasure from an eating experience is “bad” because of past overeating or binge eating experiences on some of our favorite foods. We think more pleasure with food will make us want to eat more! We also might believe that if we experience pleasure with eating, we’ll never want to stop. A toxic belief system is created: 

Pleasure = Loss of Control = Weight Gain

Food easily becomes the enemy, appetite becomes the enemy, and when it comes time for meal time, we don’t want to have anything to do with it. We eat quickly to get it over with, we try to justify ways to eat as little or as less often as possible to avoid such fear and pain around food. We restrict, count, and begin to focus on an analytical goal and not the journey, and therefore continue to suffer in disordered eating, body hate, self-judgement, and obsessions around food. Without pleasure, eating becomes empty and meaningless for SO many…

Resisting pleasure at meal times it is inherently stressful to the body and will indeed generate some degree of a physiologic stress. It is like resisting your urge to use the bathroom, you resist that urge you’re going to find yourself pretty physiologically stressed too! So not only do you have problem A: fear of food, but now this has created problem B: stressed state eating.

Stressed state eating is your enemy when it comes to weight loss, cravings, and overall well-being. Stress shifts your body into sympathetic nervous system dominance, the same “fight or flight” state you would be in if you were being chased by a tiger lurking in the woods. Why does this matter?

Stress literally increases your cortisol and insulin, which tells your body to stop building muscle and losing weight because it’s now on alert. It decreases your metabolism to save energy for potential tough times ahead. It deregulates your appetite which interrupts your ability to know when, what, and how much to eat leaving you dependent on numbers, apps, and meal plans. Stress state eating also causes nutrient excretion which means you no longer are able to assimilate or digest nutrients at full capacity because your brain is stressed about a potential threat which leaves your brain and body to be dissatisfied and call for MORE food because it feels deprived.

overcoming fear of food

Stress Also Desensitizes Your Feeling Of Pleasure!

Feeling alert and fearful all the time around something in our mind kinda sucks, who would want to continue to keep up with that relationship? Exactly. This makes sticking to your analytically, pleasure-absent daily eating regimen virtually impossible and will never be a long-term game plan for you.  

When you welcome pleasure at a meal, you’ll feel it all over your body, your body will feel complete and say “aaaaah, thank you! I’m finished.” You’ll feel more satisfied with less food, you’ll crave less food between meals, your metabolism and digestion will be optimal, and you’ll experience less overeating or binge eating episodes and in the best position possible to find and sustain your natural weight. Overtime, this will help you welcome more pleasure and intention at meal time and help you relax more around food. 

When something is truly, soul feeding pleasurable, it is easier to naturally want to continue to do it!  The brain is programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Every organism on the planet is designed this way. Pleasure is not something frivolous. It’s a literal psycho-physiological need. With a deficiency in pleasure, the body becomes even more hungry, more ravenous. Pleasure is SO important to eating that it’s commonly referred to as Vitamin P, and YOUR BFF when it comes to stopping your fear around food.

It makes sense that food is literally designed to give us this psycho-physiologic need called pleasure, why? So you eat and don’t die. Period. To survive, pleasure from food is very important to our brain and body and requires it! Same with procreation, intercourse is pleasurable so you procreate and we don’t die as a species. It lives in our physiology and our inner, personal world. To deny pleasure is denying our most innate needs as humans. 

Now, I’m not talking about being a pleasure junkie, we can’t all go around eating chocolate all day every day. Pleasure requires wisdom and maturity, explore it and understand it, and learn to say yes AND no to pleasure.

To further drive home the importance of pleasure, let’s talk about something called…

Cephalic Phase Digestion Response (CPDR)

fear of food

If you struggle with overeating and believe you have a willpower problem with food, you don’t. Willpower has absolutely nothing to do with overeating. The problem is actually that you don’t really eat when you eat.

There’s something scientists call CPDR – the Cephalic Phase Digestive Response. This is a fancy term for taste, pleasure, aroma, satisfaction, and your visuals of a meal. “Cephalic” means “of the head,” so this term really describes the “head phase” of digestion – everything that happens in your brain to help metabolize a meal.

It just so happens that the sum total of all the research on the cephalic phase digestive response shows that approximately…

40-60% Of Your Digestive, Assimilative, Calorie Burning Power At Any Meal Comes From Pleasure or “Head Phase of Digestion”

Thats taste, pleasure, aroma, satisfaction, and your visuals of a meal. So, if you do the simple math, if we miss this phase – meaning we don’t pay attention to the meal, or we eat too fast, or eat under stress, or multi-task while eating all of which interrupt our ability to receive pleasure at full capacity– we are metabolizing our meal at only 40-60% efficiency. That’s actually a pretty astounding fact!

What’s even more important, if we miss the experience of taste, pleasure, satisfaction, etc. – the brain interprets this missed experience as HUNGER. In other words, if you rushed through a meal and failed to notice it for whatever your reason, the brain isn’t smart enough to say, “Hey, you were in a rush and not paying attention to your food.” The brain simply says “Hungry.”

We are literally physiologically driven to eat more even if we’ve eaten a huge meal. The brain has commanded us to eat because it didn’t get what it needed – the eating experience.

If you’re a fast eater, you rush through meals, you work while eating, and you don’t pay attention to the food because you fear it, hate it, or simply don’t care, that’s the problem. Your solution then is really about relaxing, slowing down, taking time, and nourishing yourself.

Aim to Feel Better AFTER the Meal Than Before You Started.

Then, and only then, will your appetite be naturally regulated and satisfied.

The Bottom Line...

Eating is inherently pleasurable and we must make friends with it if you want to stop your fear of food. Now you know IT’S OK TO FIND PLEASURE FROM FOOD. (Deep breath)…An empowered relationship with pleasure will help create a healthy relationship with food and body and will bring you to your most natural metabolism, and puts you in the best position to reduce your overeating, binge eating, and meaningless eating experiences that feed the yo-yo dieting cycles. By getting you off of the stress-inducing dieting roller coaster and back into real eating, real nourishment, your body can begin to find its true, natural weight and a restored, nourishing relationship with food. And most importantly, get out of head around food and back into your life! 

Enjoy this article? Join the movement to change the conversation around food and diet culture by sharing this post! 

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Exploring the Relationship Between Stress and Emotional Eating

by

What is Emotional Eating?

The relationship between stress and emotional eating are like brother and sister. I don’t have (or have had) one single client who isn’t stressed by the demands of today’s modern world and finds eating as the easiest means to cope. After you’ve coped with food enough times, your brain picks up the message, “Feel bad. Eat Food. Feel Better.” and your autopilot cycles are born.

When you are triggered to eat by an emotion such as stress when you are not truly hungry, we call this emotional eating. In other words, WHY you are eating is due to some external trigger, rather eating due to hunger cues telling you it is time to refuel your body. Although one can practically eat due to any emotion (even happiness!) stress is by far the biggest emotional trigger that most individuals struggle with.

How Does Stress Affect Metabolism?

Stress chemistry is what happens in our mind and body when your brain senses or sees stressors or threats, like a tiger or lion lurking in your backyard, or a work deadline that you may fall short of. It is the psychophysiological shifts that you, me, all of us humans go through that shoots us into a flight, fight, or freeze response. It’s a natural, survival mechanism built into every single human being that happens automatically.

Today’s crazy demanding world creates different kinds of stressors or threats to the body like a lion or tiger once did with our ancestors, yet our brain and body are still wired the same today in terms of how it responds to stress, let’s dive in!

Increased Cortisol

An Increase in cortisol over time tells your body to stop losing weight and stop building muscle. Why? Because your survival brain thinks it has more important things to focus on like a tiger lurking in your backyard! Remember, the brain cannot differentiate between a tiger or a work deadline. 

Lower Daily Calorie Burning Capacity

Decreased day in day out calorie burning capacity happens because your survival brain thinks it may need to save your energy for tough times ahead.

Nutrient Excretion

You are eating food but not actually assimilating all the nutrients because the body has more important things to focus on like that supposed tiger than to focus on digesting food in your belly. This means even if you are analytically on point with your calorie intake but you’re constantly stressing over fear of gaining weight, the body will be craving for you to eat more because it’s literally not getting what it needs from what you eat, even though you are eating. This is not a will power problem, it is biology.

Decreased Thyroid Output

Having a decreased thyroid and growth hormone output makes it tough to lose weight don’t you think?!

Lower Appetite

When a tiger is lurking in your backyard, your mind body connection is designed to keep your attention on that tiger a.k.a stressor, and not get distracted by hunger. This way, when the tiger is approaching you’re not like, “ooh a cookie!” and get distracted and put yourself in danger. Why is a lower appetite a bad thing, wouldn’t that be beneficial when you are trying to lose weight? Well, what tends to happen however in today’s world however, is when you do get to finally relax aka at the end of a stressful day after around work or food, your brain snaps out of survival mode, and your mind and body start chit chatting and realize, ‘holy crap we need to eat…WHERE’S THE FOOD?!!!’ Hello overeating, hello bingeing.

De-sensitivity to Pleasure From Food

This means you need to eat MORE food for your brain to feel satisfied. ALL HUMANS are designed to find pleasure in food-why? So we eat and survive as a species! When you don’t have enough pleasure at a meal, your brain struggles to register all that you consumed, and biology will signal you to eat more food regardless of how many analytical calories you have accounted for that day. Again, do you see this is NOT a will power problem?

Adverse Impact On the Executive Decision Making Portion of Your Brain

When you are in stress chemistry, you are in a survival state. You react. Automatic, subconscious habits take over. It is really difficult to bring mindfulness into the picture. It is really hard to stop and think, “hmm, do I really want to eat that piece of cake? How will that make me feel?” 

Binge Eating

When your brain sees those real or self imposed stressors, when it sees the tiger, the body can enter a fight, flight, freeze OR FEED response. When the body is overly stressed by something being tightly controlled like your diet, like your work schedule, like your obsessive thoughts about food….the body can enter a FEED response to alleviate this built up stress and balance it out. If you struggle with binge eating, check out my How Do I Stop Binge Eating At Night article.

stress and emotional eating

How Can I Relieve Stress Without Overeating?

When you’re experiencing stress, your impulse might be to power through, freak out, stick your head in the sand, or continue with the same unwanted habits that are not really serving you because that’s your default right now. Behaviors such as busyness, overworking, overeating, drinking alcohol to excess, isolation, or taking your frustration out on others are actions that simply perpetuate the stress chain reaction. It’s really not removing the underlying stressors.

Next time you feel stressed and have the urge to eat, apply our F.E.A.S.T Strategy: Focus, Explore, Accept, Strategize, Take Action

FOCUS

Focus your attention inward. Pause. Move away from food. Close your eyes if possible. Take a few deep breaths to put a pause between stimulus and response. Focus on the present moment.

EXPLORE

Do a slow head to toe scan. Become aware of what you’re thinking, feeling, how your body is reacting, and what you’re doing as a result…without judging it. Just observe what is there. As you explore your feelings, you may notice boredom, loneliness, anger, frustration, happiness, and a myriad of other emotions. Emotions provide information so practice noticing what you’re feeling. I highly suggest you also explore any self -attacking THOUGHTS. Until you pause to become aware of your thoughts, you may not be aware that they are a sneaky source of your stress.

ACCEPT

It is what it is, and what you resist persists! Denying your feelings, avoiding difficult situations, pushing things away, or stuffing them down with food works like a spring: it takes a lot of energy to hold it down and it will pop back up, often when you least expect it. Instead, accept things as they are without judgment. Admittedly, this is not always easy but it is very effective.

Respect your personal limitations. Let’s face it, our society places a lot of demands on our energy and time. This often creates unrealistic expectations (sometimes coming from within) and a sense of urgency, leading to stress. It’s important to respect your own personal strengths and limitations and use self-compassion when you are experiencing stress: “I’m feeling overwhelmed and tense. I can’t do everything on my to do list; no one could, but I’m doing my best-and that will have to be good enough for now.” Or “I can choose to either resist this or allow this. Resisting this situation is futile and is increasing my stress.”

When you accept the situation (and yourself) as it is in this moment, and just allow it to be, you won’t compound the stress response by overreacting to it.

STRATEGIZE

What could you do to manage stress more effectively than eating? Put things in perspective: When you’re feeling overwhelmed, stop and ask yourself two questions:

“What difference will this make one week or even one year from now?”

“Is this really important to me?” If the situation will have no long-term consequences and does not hold true importance in your life, it deserves less of your energy. If you are in an “over-reactive mode,” go back to the Focus step.

TAKE CHARGE

If you notice that you’re feeling out of control (a common source of stress), ask yourself, “Can I change this? If so, how?” Take a baby step in the direction you want to go. Here is great go-to list of 175 Things To Do Besides Emotionally Eat to help you on your way!

stress and emotional eating

Do you see how walking around day to day in chronic low, medium, or high stress chemistry impacts your metabolism and eating behaviors? The good news is, it is not all happening because you’re not disciplined or do not have willpower. It’s just biology! Taking proactive steps to manage your stress will without a doubt have a positive impact on how you do food as well! What small step will you take to help you manage stress?

Enjoy this article? Join the movement to change the conversation around food and diet culture by sharing this post!

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Can You Get Addicted to Sugar?

by

Do you feel addicted to sugar?

Believe you are addicted to sugar?

Always craving something sweet? 

I hear it ALL the time from my clients:

“I am addicted to carbs.”

“I am addicted to sugar.” 

“I am addicted to food.”

Prior to working with me, my clients have had therapists, programs such as Food Addicts Anonymous, or self-development books convince them that they are food or sugar addicts. Aaah! So frustrating! 

Let’s poke holes in this belief system that you are a sugar or food addict by diving into some dynamic eating psychology. 

Why Do I Feel Addicted to Sugar?

#1 Your Evolutionary Brain

There are many good reasons why your body strongly craves sugar, starting with your evolutionary brain! Did you know you actually have a genetic preference for sweet foods? Yep! Starting at the very beginning of life with mother’s milk. In our primitive hunting and gathering days, our ancestors learned that any foods in nature that were sweet, rather than bitter, were not poisonous. Therefore, the brain learned sweets = safe. Sweeter, high-calorie foods like fruits were essential for survival and were not usually available year-round, unlike today, where you can practically get any seasonal fruit and carbohydrate at any time of the year. Winter used to be a time where gathering food was difficult and a time when higher caloric foods like sugary fruits were unavailable. Therefore when these high-carbohydrate, sugary foods were available, the brains sensed, “Summer is here! Better stock up now while it’s still available so I can store up for winter!” The primitive response was a natural increase in cravings and drive to consume sugars and fruits to stock up on body fat, which was an essential means of survival for the upcoming scarce winter months. And that drive is still within us today, millions of years later!

Unfortunately, the brain doesn’t know that Whole Foods, Super Walmart, and Costo (and others) are now available all the time, and our brain doesn’t know winter isn’t around the corner when you’re eating sugar year-round. So this is not a willpower issue, it’s not about addiction. It’s simply how your brain is designed to crave and want more sugar because that was previously an evolutionary advantage.

#2 Our Sneaky Food Industry

Our sweet taste buds are on your tongue to make you feel good and for food to taste pleasurable, so you eat and don’t die. It’s as simple as that! You know who else knows that? Our very good friends in the food industry. They are geniuses surrounding what lights up our brain and understand that we have what they call a “bliss point” when it comes to eating certain foods. It’s the ideal combinations of fat, salt, sweet, crunch and/or other flavor X factors that “hook us” – and drive the brain to call for more.

Does that mean you can get “addicted” to food?

Some use the term “addicted,” but that is a loaded term. In Dynamic Eating Psychology, there is a significant distinction between a food addiction and being a food addict. In nearly all cases of food addiction, the eater has a physiological or emotional addiction to a specific food or a substance within the food (such as sugar, salt, or fat). Labeling oneself as a food addict can lead to a fearful, if not antagonist relationship with food in general.

Food addiction occurs when a particular food or substance hijacks our normal brain chemistry response (thank you, food industry) and literally takes over and compels us toward over-consumption of that food, consequently creating health problems and weight gain. Food addiction, however, is not the same as being addicted to alcohol, drugs, tobacco, sex, media, or other external stimulants. You require food to survive; by that token, you cannot be a food addict. Classifying yourself in this way can create an addiction consciousness and set you up for a lifetime of battling food and diverting life energy to managing your addiction while also, in some ways, keeping you connected to it. 

What is important to know is that foods can be engineered to hook you, so you eat more. There’s a tremendous amount of science, research, expense, and brainpower that (sadly) goes into figuring this all out. Classic junk foods are highly engineered in this way. Researchers know excess sugar will stimulate the brain in a “feed-forward loop” to want more food. Soft drinks designed to “quench thirst” that are highly sugared do no such thing and actually drive the brain to want more.

Basically, we are at a disadvantage of being trained and conditioned to overeat on engineered foods, especially sweet foods. You just learned how our drive for sugar dates back to our ancestors millions of years ago as a means for survival, and unfortunately, the food industry takes very, very good advantage of this. This does NOT mean you are a sugar or food addict. 

Still, it is important that you are aware of the manipulation in our food industry, respect the power lower quality highly engineered foods can have on the brain, and begin to incorporate higher quality foods into your diet on a more frequent basis.  

#3 You’re a Good Trainer

Our brain is conditioned every day by the things you see, experience, feel, and interpret, causing subconscious hardwiring to take place without you even knowing it. This hardwiring determines how you see yourself, the world, your decision making, and creates wanted and unwanted behaviors in all areas of your life. Your brain is like a self-learning computer. It learns A (thoughts) = B (Feelings) = C (DO THIS – The Outcome). Train it well enough, and everything becomes automated, for example:

“This job sucks” = Feel mad = I EAT SUGAR

“Let’s celebrate” = Feel happy = I EAT SUGAR

“Oh, screw it!” = Feel sad = I EAT SUGAR

“I’m stressed about work” = Feel overwhelmed = I EAT SUGAR

You do this over and over enough your brain will learn that “oh, well, when I’m mad, eat sugar!” or “When I feel defeated, eat sugar!” and *BOOM* you wonder how you mindlessly found yourself at the bottom of the pint of ice cream.

The brain is meant to learn from repetitive training (by you) and automate it so it can operate on a subconscious level about 90% of the time; why? To save you energy from having to think about every single thing you do every single day.

See, this isn’t about will power either, and again you’re not addicted to sugar; this is simply about retraining your brain! So to rid these unwanted urges and eating behaviors (the outcome), you’ve got to reverse engineer and overhaul the very THOUGHTS (A) that are driving your urges and feelings (B) that lead to your unwanted eating behaviors (C).

#4 Nutritionally Deficient 

Your body has a LOT of wisdom. Sometimes we crave sugar because literally, your body needs carbohydrates to function! Oftentimes when we are dieting and trying to lose weight, what is the first thing we tend to cut…CARBS! Carbs break down into sugar because sugar is the body’s primary energy source. Your brain needs sugar, and your cells need sugar to support your immune system, cardiovascular system, digestion, recovery, muscle building, motor skills, and MORE. And when all of a sudden it doesn’t get sugar for 10 hours because you jumped on the latest carb-cutting craze, it’s gonna say, “Hey, what the heck? I need sugar!” and your body will crave it! So if this sounds familiar, lean INTO your body’s call for high-quality carbohydrates (including fruit) to help give your body what it truly needs!

If you are not trying to cut the carbs yet you are craving them, your body may be experiencing A) excess poor quality carbohydrates (which increases the primal drive for more) or B) low intake of high-quality essential fats or protein in your diet. Explore with some changes in either and see how your cravings improve! 

#5 You Feel Deprived

When you are trying to “be good” to lose weight, control your overeating, emotional eating, or binge eating, you tend to eat what you “should” rather than foods that BOTH truly nourish you and bring you pleasure. So if you have been eating bland, boring, diet foods all week with zero pleasure, and that cookie, ice cream, or candy crosses your path, of COURSE you’re going to be going for something that you find truly interesting and enjoyable! It makes perfect sense! It’s like you’re breathing stale air for five days, and your first opportunity to get fresh air is a no brainer jump to get some! In this case, again, you are not addicted to sugar or are a food addict; you just need to ensure you are finding more balance with the foods you are choosing and bring a little more pleasure into all of your eating experiences.

https://vimeo.com/488123537

I hope the above was helpful for you! If you feel that you have an addictive relationship with certain foods, then check out my various coaching programs that are here to help you incorporate powerful Dynamic Eating Psychology techniques that will break these habits quickly and help you find your way to a healthier relationship with eating.

Enjoy this article? Join the movement to change the conversation around food and diet culture by sharing this post! 

 

Sources: Institute for the Psychology of Eating, Module 03 Part 4 of 4: Overeating. Accessed December 2020.

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Ready to develop a loving relationship with food and with your body that leads to sustainable weight loss?

Discover the 4 shifts necessary to be 100% control and peace around food, without fear of gaining weight, self sabotaging, or having to be perfect…

Yes, Show me the free Training
Shelby McDaniel

Free Masterclass

The Diet Freedom Model™

The 4-Step System To Achieve Freedom From Emotional Eating, Binge Eating, And Lifelong Yo-Yo Dieting

…without counting, weighing, having to be perfect, and no matter how long you’ve struggled

Click here to access
Shelby McDaniel
Facebook Linkedin Instagram Youtube