450. Making Peace with Food

Welcome to episode 450, Making Peace with Food.

What percentage of your thoughts are about food or bodies, what you’re going to eat for your next meal, whether or not you should have a snack, what you ate earlier and how you shouldn’t have eaten it? If you’re like most people, especially women, it’s an embarrassingly high percentage of thoughts you have around food and it’s exhausting. Today’s episode is for you if you want to think about food less and still be healthy and strong. Let’s do it.

Welcome to Better Than Happy. I’m Jody Moore and I’ll be your coach today.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to our podcast episode. Thanks for joining me today. As always, I want to give you a quick reminder that we have a podcast hotline. So if you have a comment or a question about what you hear either today or ever or just a general life question, I’m loving so much hearing the questions that come in. And we’re going to be doing more episodes where we address questions. So you can send those in any time to 1888 hi Jody M. That’s Jody with a Y and M as in Moore, 888 hi Jody M and leave me a message.

And we might play your question on the podcast if we think it would be really helpful to the larger audience, but even if we don’t, I will be listening to it. So please feel free to call in and talk with me.

Today we’re going to talk about making peace with food. And of course, the reason I want to talk about this is because it’s something I have been working on, well, it feels like my whole life. But I put a bunch of extra effort in over the last three or four years off and on. I should say I haven’t non-stop been focused on it, but I worked with Brad Jensen for about a year, during the pandemic and made huge leaps in my mindsets around food and my habits around food and my health in general.

And then I started working earlier this year with Jen Pinnell, who also works for Key Nutrition with Brad. And I am just kind of adding on now to the work that I did with Brad and it’s been amazing. And on top of all that, I recently got some lab work back saying that I’m pre diabetic, which is not surprising to me. I have just a lot of health history and things that led me to believe that that was headed my way if I didn’t change my habits a little bit.

And so that’s actually put what I think is some really healthy pressure on me to really master this topic and really get healthier both in my head about food and bodies and also in my lifestyle and my habits. So I think that the best coaches out there probably do this from time to time. I hope anyway that we treat ourselves like our own first client and we figure out ways that work for us and then we offer them and share them to others. Not to say it’s the only way, but we pay attention first and foremost to ourselves.

And as we get some mastery around ourselves, we’re able to offer that to others. And that’s what I’m going to be doing for you here a little bit today. So I want to talk to you about the main concepts that I feel like for me, I had to master to get to peace around food. And I want to be careful about talking about this as though I’m done, I did this, yay, look at me. Because that’s not the case although I am light years ahead of where I was four or five years ago.

And I feel like I’m starting to embody this stuff now, and it’s starting to become part of who I am and part of my habits and routines. That doesn’t mean by any means that I don’t still have to focus on it and work on it. And maybe I’ll have to my whole life.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Make Peace with Food, a four week challenge with me, Jody Moore. If you want to learn more about today’s podcast topic and you want help applying it in your life, don’t miss this. It’s our next deep dive workshop in The Lab, so Lab members will be able to participate already. But if you’re not in The Lab, you can join the challenge for just $29. Yeah, for 29 bucks, you’ll get multiple video lessons from me each of the four weeks and live Zoom calls weekly where you can bring questions and get coaching.

If you’ve been looking for something new to motivate you to make peace with food, consider this your sign, it’s time. Head to jodymoore.com/food to join today. That’s jodymoore.com/food. I’ll see you there.

I think that one of the first things I want to tackle is the way we think about food in general. What I mean by that is, are you categorizing food in sort of a moral way? Do you make certain foods good and other foods bad in a heavy way? I have never found that to be useful myself. I do know a couple of people who find it to really serve them to just put certain foods on a blacklist and never eat them and say those are off limits. But I myself have never been able to maintain that for very long.

And instead of making my life simpler, it has stirred up a whole bunch of other drama and thoughts in my head. And so what has helped me a lot more is to decide that there is no food that’s off limit, actually. And there’s not good food and bad food. There’s just food that exists in the world. And I would just offer to you to try that on. I have a lot more to say about that, a lot more to teach you about how to wrap your head around that.

If you grew up or at least have been socialized in some way in a world that has said these foods are good and these foods are bad, I’ll tell you how to unwind that, but just understanding that they’re just stories. Food is good and food is bad. That’s just a story. Food is neutral, food is just food, there’s no good food and bad food. That’s another story. These are all stories. Stories are optional. What we want to do is find the stories that serve you best to achieve whatever you’re trying to achieve, both in your peace of mind and in your habits around food.

The next thing that I want to teach you is to make decisions about the role you want food to play in your life. All of us by nature, being human beings, are subject to needing food as fuel. So it’s going to need to play the role of fuel in your life. And I can’t imagine any reason why you wouldn’t want it to. But what other roles do you want it to play in your life? And what roles does it play in your life right now? Is food your best friend? Is food your entertainment?

Is food your way of celebrating? Is food your escape? And PS, I’m not saying any of these things are wrong. I just want you to choose it consciously and decide what role you want food to play in your life. You might choose that you want it to be your Friday night bestie. I’m in. You might choose that you want it to be the way that you connect with family and friends. By the way, you can choose these things and still achieve health the way that you want to, I do believe.

Obviously you can’t just probably eat anything you want without paying attention, but there are ways to create exactly what you want in your life. And if you want food to serve as some form of pleasure or joy, I’m in. I personally do like it too. I have stopped the argument in my head that I used to try to have around it shouldn’t be my joy. It shouldn’t be my escape. It shouldn’t be pleasure. It should just be fuel. I could never get there in my head.

And instead now I choose consciously the role that I want food to play and then I make decisions and take actions accordingly. And I’m going to teach you how to make those decisions if you want to come and get more help from me, which again I will tell you about in just a moment.

The next thing I’m going to have you understand is what to do with cravings and urges. And I want to say a little bit more about this particular topic because I have a unique way of thinking about cravings and urges. And this is just my own way of thinking about it. But I like to think of cravings as biology. I get hungry sometimes because of biology. There is a hormone released in my body that tells me it’s time to eat, that is biology. And I have the craving for food.

I get sugar cravings sometimes because of biology, because of, I don’t know, insulin resistance or whatever you want to call it. Well, it’s low blood sugar that gives us sugar cravings. That is biology. Maybe you are this person because this is not uncommon. Many people I talk to who are trying to change their eating habits will say things like, “Well, I’m not really hungry”, when they eat on their meal plan, if they’re trying to reduce their food intake and they’re trying to lose some body fat or something.

And they’ll say, “I don’t really get hungry, I just want more food.” And I always think well, that would be nice because I do get hungry. Whenever I try to restrict calories or eat less sugar or whatever, I feel hungrier. I get cravings. And of course then I also get urges. So I think of cravings as being biology, urges are psychology, in other words, urges are coming from my thoughts or from not wanting to feel my feelings. Urges are like I should just go have a snack because I don’t really want to work on the thing I’m supposed to work on next.

Or I really want to eat ice-cream because everyone else is eating ice-cream and I don’t want to miss out on ice-cream. But I don’t have that low blood sugar kind of craving necessarily. I just have the mental desire, which then can translate actually into emotions and feels similar to the biology, but it’s starting in the head and then traveling the body. Instead of a craving that starts in the body and travels to the head and says, “I need or want this thing.” Are you with me?

So I want you to understand both and to pay attention to both and of course there’s a lot of overlap. When we have a craving, we have an urge. But they need to be addressed appropriately and they both, if you struggle with both of them, they both require attention. I used to really only, mostly pay attention to urges because I understand psychology. That’s the world I live in is the what’s happening in your mind. It wasn’t until I started diving deeper on a deeper level, I shouldn’t say I didn’t do any work around cravings.

I do understand the importance of protein and things like that. But I gained sort of a deeper understanding of what is causing my blood sugar to rise and fall and I’m continuing to learn about that actually, on a personal individual level. But I mean on an overall level, nutritional level, as I’ve learned more about hormones and how fiber plays a role and the timing of your food and things like that, how that plays a role with cravings. It’s made it so much easier to manage my urges because they both, when they get doubled up, feel really tough to navigate.

The next thing I want you to think about if you want to make peace with food is this idea of falling off the wagon or being really good. Let’s say you decide this is how I’m going to eat. This is what will serve me in the long run. This is what will help me with whatever your health goals are. And then some days you ‘fall off the wagon’ and other days you’re like, “I’ve been really good today.” I don’t find either of those to be useful ways to think about what’s going on.

What I’m going to encourage you to do is to stop making everything so dramatic, to get off the roller-coaster of all or nothing. Because when we tell ourselves we’ve fallen off the wagon, then it’s like, well might as well just eat whatever we want now. Can you relate to this? And when we tell ourselves, “Well, I’ve been really good”, then what we’re saying is, “So I deserve a break. I deserve a piece of chocolate cake”, which is going to just sabotage all of the good eating I just did all day.

So I’m going to talk to you about how to navigate those two mindsets, why they’re so powerful. And I want to encourage you to question them. And what we want to do is get off the roller-coaster and just be on rolling hills of, yeah, that was disappointing and that was cool. But it doesn’t need to be a roller-coaster of high and low. When you don’t eat on plan, it’s okay, it really is. You don’t need to beat yourself up about it. You don’t need to get all dramatic and upset about it.

And when you do eat on plan, it’s great, but it’s not something that we have to celebrate. And if you are restricting and doing what we kind of call white knuckling it in order to eat on plan, then that’s going to be a problem. That’s why you’re going to feel like you need relief from it. So that’s something you’ve got to dive in and learn how to not restrict, but just allow urges. But there’s no such thing as falling off the wagon because there’s no wagon. And there’s no such thing as being really good because you’re not good or bad based on what you eat.

You just already are an amazing, complicated person who is both good and bad, weak and strong and whether or not you ate on plan, doesn’t change that. So we’ve got to keep a healthy perspective on that.

Lastly, I want you to be in it for the long game. This has been so essential for me to clean up my drama around food, to make peace with food. I have to remind myself that I am a 49 year old woman. I’ve been working on this, like I said, really consistently now for about four years. So let’s just say up until I was 45. I have 45 years of developing certain eating habits and certain mindsets and being socialized in certain ways around food and bodies.

And if I think that I’m going to reverse all that in three months, I’m fooling myself. It’s going to take longer, but isn’t that what we ultimately want? Don’t we want to ultimately not have to put so much focus on this, not have to think about food and bodies all the time, not have it take up such a huge percentage of our thoughts? I’ll tell you how I know I’ve made huge strides in this, because for me the thoughts are the most prevalent, the most dramatic when I’m on vacation.

When I go on vacation with my friends or my family, I don’t know if it’s because I have a lot more free time, I’m not busy focusing on work. Maybe it’s because I’m in a swimsuit many times. I like to travel to tropical places where  I’m in a swimsuit, people around me are in swimsuits. Maybe it’s because we’re eating out a lot more when we’re traveling. But when we’re on vacation, I have the most noise and drama about food and bodies. And the last couple of vacations I have been on, I have noticed that there’s just not the same percentage of thoughts about either of those subjects.

I can’t say I don’t think about it at all, but the percentage of thoughts about food and about my body and, of course, as that percentage has gone down, as the drama has gone down so has the all or nothing behaviors around food. The restricting or really overeating has minimized as well. And a lot of us think that once we can get our eating habits in order and we can get our body to a certain point, then we’ll be able to think in a healthy way about them.

But for me and everyone else I’ve worked with, it has to be the opposite. I have worked on my mindset about food and about bodies, which has made it easier to then get my eating habits under control and my body ends up healthier and leaner and all the things I want it to be stronger as well.

So listen, come and join me. I am going to do a four week challenge because I’m so on fire about this topic right now. I’ve been learning from the Glucose Goddess who you can follow on Instagram. I have been learning from and talking a little bit too, and buying some fiber supplements from my friend, Brittany who is Mind body Brit on Instagram and you can go look her up too. These are great people.

As I’ve implemented all this and I’ve worked with my coach, Jen and I’ve added on to what I learned from Brad and I’ve used all the coaching tools that I already understand as a coach. I am so excited about this topic because I feel hopeful. I feel like I am so close to embodying all of this. And I feel hopeful that it’s possible for anyone who truly desires it. So I’m doing a four week challenge. It’s only 29 bucks and it’s called Make Peace with Food.

And I’m going to give you a couple of video lessons each week that will give you specific things to do and then I’m going to be available live every week on Zoom as well for you to come and bring questions, tell me how it’s going. I want to celebrate your wins. I want to hear what you’re struggling with. I want to coach you around anything you’re not sure how to implement. For 29 bucks four weeks, we’ll be spending together.

Now, if you’re in The Lab, this is going to be our deep dive workshop in The Lab. So you will already get to participate. You’ll get all the content. You’ll get to come to the coaching calls live. You don’t need to worry about signing up for this. But this is the first time I’ve ever done this where I’m going to let people who are not in The Lab just pay 29 bucks just to join this four week challenge. And my team and I have put so much work into it. I’m so excited about the progress that I know you’ll be able to make if you implement it.

And so you can head to jodymoore.com/food and sign up today because we start in just a couple of weeks. So again, jodymoore.com/food. I cannot wait to hear what’s going on for you around this topic. I promise you it is possible. I promise you, there’s tremendous relief available to you. And whether you’re trying to lose weight or you just don’t want to have all this chatter or you need to gain weight or you’re trying to gain muscle or whatever your end goal is, these tools can help you get there. So I will see you at Make Peace with Food, our four week challenge coming up.

Thanks for joining me today everyone, I’ll see you next time.

If you find the podcast to be helpful you’re going to love The Lab. In Better Than Happy: The Lab we experiment with applying all of it in your real life. Whether you’re in the middle of a challenge and ready for some relief or you’re ready to commit to pursuing your dream goals and making them a reality, come join me in the lab at jodymoore.com/thelab. That’s jodymoore.com/thelab.