Ep 23- Eat What You LOVE

July 11, 2024

Do you eat the same boring meals every day?

Think you have to eat large amounts of bland vegetables & protein?

Binge eating even after volume eating?

Most people have totally confused food pleasure.

The truth is the best way to not end up in the cabinets after a meal is by INCREASING your enjoyment of meals.

Today I cover…

• the problem with volume eating and low carb

• how enjoying your food helps you eat LESS, not more

• tips to increase satisfaction

 ​Hey, confident eaters. So before we get into the episode, I want to let you know that I am doing a free masterclass in two weeks on how to stop emotional eating. So if you are someone who wants to learn, how to manage your emotions and stop going to food, then you are going to want to make sure you sign up for this masterclass. 

It's going to be on Thursday, July 25th at 5:00 PM mountain time. And I am doing it as a co-taught class with another health coach, Christy Romano. So you will be getting double the goodness and information. You're not going to want to miss that. The link will be in the show notes. So you can register. 

Okay. 

So today we are discussing why you should eat what you truly love. And why it's so important in your journey to stopping overeating and healing your relationship with food and really just feeling confident around your eating decisions. 

Most people think that you can't eat what you love, because that's the problem that's, what's making you overeat. If you love the food too much, you're just going to want to keep eating it. 

Now I will say, of course the foods we tend to overeat on are the ones we like. We tend to not be overeating on the foods that we don't like.  

But there can be some things that don't work in reality with this mindset. In my experience in most of my clients, the exact opposite has been true, where the blender and more boring of foods we eat, the more you actually overeat in the more you have these bigger binges, because you're not actually getting the food pleasure that you want. 

So there's a couple occasions I see this coming up. A lot of people out there will suggest that if you want to stop binge eating, if you want to lose weight, you should be volume eating. If you're not familiar with volume eating. Volume eating is trying to eat a very large quantity of food to try to help you not want to eat large quantities of the quote unhealthy foods, right? 

Like if you really want to eat so much food, Let's just give you really low calorie filling food. So you'll be filled and not want to binge. I used to do this. I specifically am thinking about cauliflower rice where I would make like so much cauliflower rice and I would feel physically full. Of course. But it was like this bloated empty feeling of fullness where it was physically ,yes my stomach was expanded. But I still felt super unsatisfied and that is because our body needs more than just large quantities of vegetables and protein to be satisfying. 

This also comes up when people are not eating a lot of carbs, they are trying to do low card because someone told them that you must be low carb to lose weight, which is not in fact true. I lost about 20 pounds eating many carbs every single day. And so many people have to, it is definitely not necessary, but when you're not eating carbs, you're not getting this like very necessary nutrient and our body prefers carbs. That's its preferred energy source. 

So if you were not getting enough of them, and you're trying to just think, okay if I just stuffed myself with protein and veggies, I'll be filled. You might be, but you're not going to be fulfilled. Right. You're just going to feel full in this way that you don't really feel like you're done yet. 

So then what might happen is even though you're full you end up going back for more and that is a really miserable experience because then you are like stuffed. That is when it feels like a full binge. That is when you just feel like you need to lay down, you can't do anything the rest of the day, because then you're really bloated. You just feel so sluggish and heavy.

There's also this mindset that if you make your food as bland as possible you're not going to want to eat it as much either. I remember seeing this tip on Reddit somewhere to stop binge eating, and it was like, just don't season any of your food make it tastes disgusting. And just like super bland and healthy, and then you're not gonna wanna overeat on it, it's magical. 

Again, that makes your life very very boring. And you're not going to enjoy your food very much. And eating  isn't going to be a fun experience and eating is meant to be pleasurable. Eating is meant to be fun. And it's the most fine when we're eating foods we love in amounts that our body also loves. 

So ultimately you don't want to be forcing yourself to eat things that you don't really enjoy. That is not a healthy relationship is if you are miserable every time you sit down to eat, that is not something you're going to want to maintain longterm. And this is all backwards of what actually works. As someone who is now a better recovered binge eater for four years and has taught hundreds of other women how to do the same. You need more than just to make your food bland and cutting out carbs and volume meeting. Okay. 

So let's think about what happens when you're doing this bland way of eating and you don't feel satisfied. I want you to ask yourself what has been my experience when I do that. Does it actually work or do I just imagine that at works, but in reality, what's happening is I finished my meal. I feel so unsatisfied. And then I spend the next 25 minutes browsing through the cabinets, eating 10 different snacks because I never got fulfilled. 

I never felt happy with what I ate. And so I went for all the exciting foods. I went for the chips. I went for the dried fruit. That's what I like dried fruit. I went for the cereal. I went for all the yummy candy bars, because that is what truly makes me satisfied. And that's how I get the food pleasure. 

And then I  finally feel like I got what I needed. Because you got the carbs that your body might need it. You got the pleasure that you wanted. 

Now the biggest thing that comes up when we start to think about eating what we want. Is, it's not what you think. Where you imagine you're just going to eat endless junk food. Have you thought this before? Well, if I just eat what I want, Amber. I'm going to eat nothing but junk and I'm going to be super unhealthy. I thought this too. Don't you worry? This is not something you were alone with. I was so scared to give myself permission to eat the delicious food, because I was like, Clearly I have problems with them. And if this is you consider joining my confidence eater program, because this is exactly what we work on in a month too, with my trigger food process. So I have an exact process to help you get out of this. 

But what I really struggled with was ice cream and I would always eat Arctic zero ice cream. I don't even think this is around anymore. Thank goodness. If you don't know, or if it's not around. Arctic zero ice cream was like 40 calorie per serving ice cream, which essentially meant it was like water, protein powder and fake sugar. That's what it tasted like. But I was like, that's what I need. And then I could eat the whole pint if I wanted to eat the whole pint, it was only like 200 calories or something like ridiculous. 

So I would be eating my arts zero and I would just like one, I wasn't really enjoying it. It was disgusting.  You know, it tastes like frozen water. It wasn't discussing disgusting, but it definitely was not as satisfying as like Ben and Jerry's. But I still felt like I was obsessing over ice cream and I just would want to eat it all day long. 

So once I took myself through the sugar food process that I teach my clients, I realized that, you know, this was not an overnight process. 

One, like I did not just go overnight from like,  bingeing on Arctic zero to like having one bite of Ben and Jerry's and feeling good about it. But over time and with a lot of practice and changing my thoughts in my brain around this food I realized I started eating Ben and Jerry's and I don't even like ice cream that much. 

I will say Ben and Jerry's is one of the better ones. I am a person I like the ice cream with like all of the goodies and bits in it. Like I hate plain vanilla ice cream. I think it is grubbed. It is so boring.  And I am not a boring person. I like the fun ice creams. 

So anyways, over time I realized that it wasn't really the food that I was obsessing over. It was this idea of I needed to get endless pleasure and I needed to always satisfy my urges. So that's what I had to work on. I didn't actually have to get rid of the food and take it out of my life. 

 Now I am also sure that there are a lot of healthy foods and nutritious foods that you love. So eating what you want and getting pleasure out of food does not have to equate to eating processed food all day. 

Eating what you love can be eating a fresh right summer tomato. Eating, what you love could be eating a warm stew and bean soup. Eating, what you will love could be having a crisp salad with freshly cooked chicken on it. That can be just as delicious and satisfying. As something like chips or a candy bar, and maybe even more satisfying, like let yourself explore that, how those things could even be, what you love more because you love the way it makes you feel. 

Your body also wants you to be healthy. Your body does not want you to be sick and overweight and ill at all times. It wants you to thrive so your body is going to ask for healthy food once you get out of this diet mindset.  

If you feel like your body isn't asking for healthy food right now, that's probably because you're still stuck in some dieting thoughts where you feel you have to get it all in right now. But the truth is like, think about when you get back from a vacation and you're like, oh, I just want a salad right now. I want some veggies. That's probably because you didn't have a lot of veggies on the trip or you had denser caloric food. And so your body, knowing that it wants you to be healthy, sends out signals in cravings for nutrients, and then you crave a salad. So you can crave these healthier foods and love them and enjoy them. So think about those types of foods that you do love, and that do feel satisfying to you. 

Now, this is not mean you have to make every single meal of your life, a five star meal. Sometimes your meals are just going to be kind of mad. And you can accept that and move on knowing that more food pleasure is always coming. So, yes, I'm going to give you a few tips in just a second, about how to make sure you love your food, but also note that if you do not a hundred percent feel satisfied don't let your brain give you the excuse of, well, you have to leave this meal satisfied. So go eat more. You don't have to leave a meal satisfied. It's just helpful and it feels better most of the time. 

Okay. So some tips and tricks to eat what you love and to increase your satisfaction around food. 

I first want you to redefine what it means to eat what you love. Again, going back to this beginning idea of, do you think that if you eat what you love, that's just eating endless amounts of processed food. And I want you to redefine that. What else could eating, what you love mean? What else could it look like? How else could you think about it? What else might your everyday life look like if you were eating what you love. 

I also want you to include feeling good in your definition of eating what you love. You love to feel good. You love to feel light and energized and excited to take on the day and not way down. That's also what you love. So when you're eating what you love, it also contributes to that goal. The other goals you love. So you can think about eating what you love, eating what you want does it have to ignore how your body feels. You can include that in your definition. 

I want you to do an experiment and I want you to tune in and see if you actually like these foods, as much as your brain is telling you that you like them. 

So the next time you're eating a food, maybe it's ice cream for you. Maybe it's Oreos, maybe it's peanut butter. Maybe it's gummy bears. I dunno, whatever your thing is. Sit down, eat it mindfully and ask yourself, do I actually like this as much as my brain is telling me? My guess is probably not. Our brain creates a lot of magical rainbows and butterflies and unicorns around the stories of food sometimes. 

So the truth is you might not love something as much as you thought and imagined, which is they find a moment to have. If you've ever watched the movie Ratatouille. There is a it's about like a mini rat  chef. And there's a food critic that comes into the restaurant. And the food critic says if I don't like it, I don't swallow. I think this is a really good mindset to have. In less, you love the food. Don't eat it. Why would you waste your hunger on something you don't really enjoy? Even if it's like healthy, unless it's medically necessary for you to eat it. Like, I'm sure there are other things you can eat to be healthy  besides forcing down some dry chicken that's six days old. 

Okay. So a few other things for you, I would recommend writing out a list of foods you love, maybe looking for some new meal recipes, just finding some ideas of like, how can I make my meals more satisfying? Maybe that just adding in some more spices or sauces of sauces are scary right now for you. Maybe challenge yourself this week, adding some sauces, maybe making your own.  You can buy some healthier ones at the store too, but just so you can add more flavor. And again, remembering that. Yes, you might be eating a little bit more because these things might be a little higher in calorie, but if you save an entire thousand calorie bins, because you included a hundred calories, more of sauce on your food and you felt satisfied, that's worth it to me in my eyes. 

And finally just consider what percentage of the time you're feeling satisfied with your food right now? 

I feel like I'm satisfied with my food probably like 70% , 80% of the time, like a large majority of the time, again, not a hundred percent of the time. Cause sometimes like my food just is a little overly ripe or underly ripe, or I cooked it a little too long or I under cooked it. Like, that's just part of being human and not being an expert, chef and cooking. Trying to get through our day just being fed. 

So it doesn't have to be a hundred percent, but if you are not in that, like 70%, 80% range of feeling satisfied with your food, think of ways that you can start to increase that. 

Alright, thank you guys. All for tuning in today. Hope your summer is going amazing. And I will talk to you next week.