Ep. 12- Listening to Your Body

April 25, 2024

You’ve been told to “listen to your body.”

But what does this actually mean and HOW do you listen to your body?

What if tuning into your body feels confusing? What if you have completely lost trust around your hunger and fullness cues?

Today we will cover mastering this intuitive eating skill so you can become a natural eater.

You will learn:

• Including nutrition into listening to your body

• The difference between a physical cue and mental urge

• Why you’re having a hard time hearing your body’s signals

• Strategies for reconnecting to your body

• Rebuilding trust around food

    Hello, confident eaters. If you are listening to this in real time, I just started something exciting. Every week I am doing a free 30 minute mini training on Tuesdays at 11 a. m. mountain time. They are called coffee chats, and I'm going to have a topic related to stopping overeating that I will teach.

And then you'll have the opportunity to ask me any questions you have and also get personalized feedback or coaching on anything you are struggling with. These are not going to be recorded in order to create a really comfy space for anyone to share and get support, but I would love if you were available this Tuesday or any Tuesdays after to come say hi and come on Zoom with me to get a little more interactive.

So, if you're interested in coming to Coffee Chats, head to theconfidenteater. org slash training or look in the show notes.

All right, let's begin today's topic. listening to your body. You have probably heard me say listen to your body before or other people as you are on your natural eater, confident eating journey but I was not always someone who was able to listen to my body.

I was a big calorie counter for a long time, obsessed with my fitness pal. and I would have full bone panic attacks when my family or friends would cook dinner for me if I could not figure out how many calories are in it because I just had zero trust that my body would let me know when it was full.

I thought I had to know how many calories were in something in order to know how much I was supposed to eat. And I thought if I listened to my body, all my body knew how to tell me was how to binge.

I also recently was talking with one of my friends who I would consider to be completely a natural eater, and she was telling me how she worked with a personal trainer to try to gain weight.

She was trying to build muscle, and the personal trainer had put her on this meal plan that was way more food than she was used to eating. And on her first day, she tried to eat the breakfast, which was something like three eggs and a piece of toast and fruit and avocado. And she was like, I could not even get through the first day.

It was way too much for my body. And that was not what my body needed. And what stood out to me as she was telling me this story was how deep of a connection she had with her body and just this ultimate knowing of what she needed. This is exactly how I want you to be thinking as a natural eater. What does my unique body need?

Not what does a diet tell me? What does the calorie counter tell me? But what does it truly mean to be tuned in to my unique needs?

Let's think about what does listening to your body actually mean.

First, it means paying attention to your physical cues. And if we take a step further, when we're thinking about eating intuitively, it is not only paying attention to those physical cues, but also understanding them and honoring them, doing what they want us to do. So we can think about it as giving yourself food when you're hungry, stopping when you are full.

And I want to include one definition beyond that too, that I think a lot of people leave out, which is noticing how food feels in your body. So yes, we listen to when we're hungry and stop when we're full, but also notice when you eat different types of food, they give you different effects. And we want to honor what our body is telling us in those moments, too.

So, for example, if you notice that dairy gives you a stomach ache. Every time you have cheese, your stomach just feels weird and it hurts. Listening to your body would mean recognizing that sensation and deciding to not eat dairy so much. What a lot of people get wrong about listening to their body is they confuse their body with their mind.

So let's think about the example above. Someone's mind might say, I want ice cream. So they think they should have ice cream. But if they were actually listening to their body, their body would say, we don't want ice cream. And this also happens a lot with urges. When I hear people will say and tell me, but if I listened to my body, I just want to eat endless amounts of junk. That's what my body tells me to do. But the truth is your body is not telling you to eat junk. That is you having an urge in that moment. An urge to do your old habits or to, an urge to overeat because that's what you've always done and listening to an urge is very different than listening to your body. We do not want to be listening to urges. That is a habit we want to break.

So, what if you have a really hard time hearing these body signals if you just don't even notice them coming up?

First, I want you to recognize that if you have Put your trust in diets and outside sources before you have outsourced your body's wisdom.

You have told your body that a calorie count or a point amount or a meal plan matters much more than your internal signals. And some of you have been doing this for For 10,20,30,40,50,60 years, you have been listening to what other people have been telling you about how your body should feel instead of looking at the truth of what your body actually needs.

So you have been sending your body a message for a very long time that what it's been telling you does not matter. And you, because you have ignored it so frequently, it has softened it signals, the volume has been turned down.

Think about all the times you have been hungry, but you didn't have enough calories for that day or you were told you shouldn't eat more than this portion. And so then you ignored your hunger and you just will powered your way through and said, I'm not going to eat any more today.

Your body learned that it's hunger signals weren't important. Same thing with fullness. Think of all the times you have been full, but you looked at your calorie counter and you said, Hey, I got an extra 200 calories or you're doing weight watchers and you have some extra points for the day that you can use or you're on a meal plan and it says you can have dessert, so you think, I might not be hungry, but I'm going to eat anyways because I'm allowed to. So then your body learns, I guess my fullness signal isn't that important either. I'm going to zone that down.

Just think if you had another person in your life that was constantly trying to communicate something to you, constantly trying to tell something to you, and you just ignored it the whole time.

You just put in headphones and said, what you're saying does not matter to me. That person would probably start being a lot quieter and stop talking to you so much. That is what your body has done.

Now, something else that could be going on is if you are dealing with frequent binge eating or overeating, your eating routines are all sorts of off or some days you're not eating until 3 p. m. because you're trying to restrict and then you go on these giant binges or you're just snacking a ton throughout the day and consistently overeating, your hunger hormones could be off, which does make it truly harder to listen to your body, especially if you are binge eating on Super high sugar and carb foods that will bring your blood sugar way up and you're going to have a blood sugar crash which can send off signals of false hunger. So I do want you to know that if this is you if you feel like my eating is so out of whack, It could be having a negative impact on your hunger hormones And this is something we'd want to work on first before zoning in to our hunger and fullness signals So that is something I could work on with you on in my Confident Eater program more in depth.

If we were to work together and I could help coach you through what a regular eating schedule would look like and how we can get you on that so those hunger hormones can start to become more regulated and therefore more reliable to listen to.

Okay, so how are you going to start to listen to your body's signals?

First, you are going to probably be confused in the beginning, and that is normal. I just want to take a second and acknowledge that it can be hard when you've zoned out for so long to tune back in. Going back to that example where when you have ignored a human for so long when they've been trying to tell you something, it's probably gonna be hard to get them to talk again to you. It's gonna take some time and some patience.

Being confused about your body's signals, though, does not mean something is broken or doesn't work. Think about a complicated computer program that you don't quite understand. Just because you're confused about it doesn't mean there's something wrong with the computer program.

It just means you might need time and tools to understand it better and to be patient while you're learning it. So just because you're confused, I don't want you to tell yourself that there's something wrong with you, because the truth is there is never anything wrong with you. You might just need to spend some time relearning it, and that's okay.

But the more time you start tuning into your body and paying attention to it, the louder these signals will get, the more the volume will turn up. And I am going to be here to tell you as someone who used to completely ignore their body signal and think that I could never trust them, it is possible. My fullness signal now feels very loud to me.

If I try to eat way beyond fullness, like if I were to try to binge again, I know I would hear my body literally screaming at me. telling me, please stop. I do not need any extra food. So I am very aware of that signal now, but it's only because I took the time to relearn it and consistently pay attention to what it was telling me.

Your body will always signal in some way and let you know what it needs you to know, we have millions of feedback systems going on at all times in so many ways for our body to tell us what's up, right? We get a cut on our arm. Our body's going to let us know we're in pain. It has signals for that.

Our nose is dry. We get signals saying, Hey, your nose is dry. Moisturize that use a humidifier. We need moisture up there. There is something flaky happening on your scalp and you get itchy. You need to itch your scalp. Again, there are so many different ways our body is constantly telling us what it needs.

And so it will be letting us know and giving us various signals for our hunger and fullness. We need to start building the trust up that we can honor these signals. The reason you have a hard time trusting your body right now is because you have ignored it so many times. You have broken that bond a lot.

And have forgiveness for yourself. Okay, you were always doing your best to just try to figure out this thing called eating that our society has told us we need to totally overcomplicate, but it's actually really simple. But every time you tune into the hunger, and you give your body food that is building that trust.

And every time you are full, and you say, okay, I'm going to stop. I'm going to trust this. That is you getting one step closer to this new relationship with your body.

Listening to your body is so much more than just hunger and fullness though. Listening to your body is knowing when it's time to exercise and move more, and when it's time to rest. Knowing those signals from your body. It's tuning into your emotions and the vibrations in your body. Most people do not do this and it's a tool that I really recommend people start to learn and that I teach in my confident eater program and That is going down into your body and asking what does this emotion feel like?

Is it a shape? Is it a color? Is it a texture? Because that is what's going to help you process emotions. Listening to your body is also that feeling when you go with your gut. You trust your intuition. You know when you just have that feeling that someone is cheating on you, and you go with that gut feeling and you were right?

That is you listening to your body and those signals that are coming up. Or when you know a job is just not right for you and there is something better out there, that is trusting your own wisdom. These signals that are guiding us. Listening to your body it zoning into that little voice inside of you that tells you you were meant for so much more and are capable of anything. It's hearing what your body needs when it's hot or when it's cold. Those signals are there for you to guide you and give you wisdom. So when we are listening to our body, I want you to think about all the ways, one, you are already listening to your body, and two, all the other ways you can practice tuning in, listening to your body.

Because so much of our society has taught us to dissociate, from our body and go into our brain. And when we drop back down in, there's so much power in that and so much can change in your life when we're able to do that.

So this week, I want you to start distinguishing between what your body is saying and what all that mind chatter is saying around food.

All those old habits, what are they saying versus what is a true body signal, not in your mind. And see the wisdom that is there for you. See the wisdom that your body has been trying to tell you all along. I promise you, it is in there. We will get you to the place where you can listen to your body because when you can do that, it is the best thing ever.

Your body signals go with you anywhere in the world, to any restaurant, to any country you want to travel to. I love traveling and I am so grateful every time that I am able to trust my body and I don't have to worry about using someone else's meal plan or knowing the calories and things. So this is a skill that is worth your time to learn and figure out.

Have patience. Keep going. I know you can do this. Talk to you next week.