Ep 34- Be a Pickier Eater to Become a Natural Eater
September 26, 2024
If you look around at the natural eaters in your life, you’ll notice that they are very selective about what foods they eat and why.
However, binge eaters and overeaters tend to say yes to any and all foods because they’re operating from a diet brain in a scarcity mindset.
What if you started to only eat foods that were worth it to you?
Today I cover…
raising your food standards to be pickier
why getting pickier with your food can help you stop overeating
how to be a food minimalist
Before I dive in today, we have an upcoming free five day challenge on mindful eating. This is going to be an interactive week to help you stop binge eating for good. So whether this is the first time you are trying mindful eating or you already have some experience, you are going to learn the science backed Tools around mindful eating and how it can help you change your eating habits for good So we are going to have daily bite sized lessons that I am teaching on zoom every single day at 10 a.m Mountain time you're going to get actionable eating exercises and you're going to have support and accountability Because this whole challenge is taking place Facebook support group This challenge is happening Monday, September 30th through Friday, October 4th. Again, it is totally free. If you were listening to this after the challenge has happened, you are so welcome to join my free Facebook group to get all of the replays and the link to join will be in the show notes below.
Hope to see you in there.
Confident eaters. Happy Thursday. Today we are talking about how to become a pickier eater because being a picky eater is something that natural eaters effortlessly are. So we're going to be going over not how to just be picky with what you eat, but why you eat and how much you eat. So you can build the skill of someone who doesn't overeat and just eats naturally, effortlessly, and intuitively.
- So what does it mean to be a picky eater? I am defining being a picky eater as only eating foods that are worth it to you. So some people, it's totally worth it to have the big giant plate of pasta because they love pasta, it's their favorite. To others, it's worth it to have the fresh baked cookie from the bakery down the street. It's defining what this means to you.
Now, when we look at natural eaters, one thing you'll notice is they are a little pickier. Now, what I mean by picky is not in the traditional sense of they don't like vegetables or they don't eat certain types of meat. They're not picky like that. I actually think most natural eaters enjoy a very wide variety of food and are open to trying new things, but they are picky in the sense that if a natural eater doesn't like something, if it's not up to their standards, they don't eat it.
They stop eating it, they throw it away, they don't continue on with it because they know That it's just not worth it to them. It's not worth eating. It's not worth the extra calories It's not worth using their hunger on. It just isn't the experience that they desired from that food So they don't continue with that experience.
Natural eaters don't care how expensive something was, or who made it. It doesn't matter if someone baked it fresh for them, or they just spent $20 on it. They can easily say no, or stop eating it, or throw it away if they need to.
Dieters on the other hand are like the least pickiest people ever and people who have had this diet mindset before Are people who usually will eat anything and everything because they are just so obsessed with food and I totally felt this way Where I didn't care what the food was My diet brain was causing me to overeat anything and everything.
I would binge on Two week old cookies that were from the grocery store that were so dry and crumbly, but they were cookies And so I was in a lot of scarcity around them. I wanted to get them all in I'd overeat on french fries that had been sitting out for hours and were cold and bland and soggy But I still ate them.
Dieters tend to think that everything tastes good and is special when it's really not.
Do you notice how your brain creates this, like, rainbow butterfly magical unicorn fantasy of the foods, and then when you eat it, it's not actually that way? That is your diet brain. Fantasizing about the food that's not actually that good. Now, I did not realize that food was not that special until I came out of this dieting brain fog that I was in, and I started to realize that yes, food can be good, but Majority of foods are actually pretty mediocre.
Most of the times we eat, it is not some life changing, mind blowing experience. It is just a way to fuel our body. Once we realize that, we release this attachment to food, and we release this Desire to get all of our pleasure from a meal. We recognize that yes, eating can give us some pleasure, but ultimately there's so many other pleasures in life that are so much better than just food.
So I want you to think about the difference of someone who is a hoarder with things in their house versus someone who is a minimalist. And this is a really good example because it showcases how these mindsets around things are very different. So when you think about someone who's a hoarder, this is someone who thinks all items should be kept, all items have value and are important and they have a really hard time letting things go.
They might have five different spatulas because they think, well what if I break one. What if I need a different type of one? And so they have all this extra stuff that is causing them a lot of extra stress because they have to store it. They have to manage it. They have to maintain all of this stuff.
But they're coming from this place of scarcity of what if it goes away? What if I lose it? And this is very similar to our dieting mindset. Now, on the other hand, if we think about someone who is a minimalist, they are very selective about what things enter their home. Like if someone gives them a cheap candle, they like will donate it, they will throw it away. They don't need it because they love to let things go that don't have value to them. They love the feeling of having just what they need and not being cluttered with extra.
So if you don't like the food very much that you're eating or you're just not hungry for it, that food no longer has value to you. It is just taking up unnecessary space in your body.
So you want to become a food minimalist where you only want to have the best, highest quality, useful things in our homes, which are our bodies. Our bodies are the place we live every single day. And if we are Overflowing them and giving them extra things that it doesn't need in the name of saving money or what if we need the food? That's gonna cause us to feel really weighed down in our body and in our life.
So this week I want you to practice becoming a pickier eater. I want you to practice having really high standards for the food you decide to put in your body. There's the scene in Ratatouille that I love if you have not seen the movie. A professional chef is going to go into the restaurant to judge the food and he says, If I don't like it, I don't swallow.
Now you don't have to go to that extreme, but I think it's a really good mindset to have that if something is not amazing and it doesn't feel my body, there is no use in me eating it.
Now, going back to my beginning definition of what it means to be a picky eater. Yes, taste is a factor in making our food decision. That is for sure. It's a big factor in how we make our food decisions. But I don't want you to just be picky on how things taste. I want you to be picky on the quality of food.
So, really having the best quality chocolate, getting yourself the fancier chocolate, maybe it's a dollar more expensive or whatever, but it's going to feel so much more satisfying than like, The plasticky, hard, gross little Hershey's. Like, I hate Hershey's. I think they're disgusting. I'll have one on occasion if it's like, I don't know, Halloween.
But like, I love good, dark chocolate. So I am really picky on the quality of my food. I also, I hate tomatoes that have been in the fridge. I only like tomatoes when they have been out on the counter and they are fresh and ripe. So I'm picky with my food quality that way. Sure, I might eat a tomato still if it's like, on a burger, but I'm not going to go out of my way to try to choose the tomato if I bite into it and it tastes gross. I don't eat it. I don't care that it's healthy, because to me it's not worth eating it.
So be picky on the quality of food and be picky on what you use your hunger on. We only have so much hunger in our body to use each day. So use it wisely. Choose the things that you really want to put in your body that matter to you.
So do you really want to use your limited amount of hunger on food where you're not getting in your necessary nutrients, it doesn't taste good, it's really not doing anything to help your body in any way? Probably not. Our body needs so many different nutrients every day, both micro wise with our vitamins and minerals, but also macro wise, making carbs, protein, fats, fiber. All of those good things in our body each and every day.
And if we're wasting our hunger on just chips and pasta all day, we're not going to be able to get all of these other necessary nutrients. So not to say you can't eat chips and pasta all day, but that probably might not be very worth it to you because you're going to be feeling really bad in your body, and then you don't have space for putting anything else that could feel good in your body into it.
So ask yourself before every instance of eating, is this worth it to me? Is this food worth me spending my limited amounts of hunger on today? Then you want to really tune into the taste and how this food feels in your body. So describe this food like it's You're talking to an alien. What is the taste like overall? Is it too sweet? Is it not sweet enough? Is it too salty and Is it not salty and oily enough? Is it too hot, too cold, too crunchy, too soft? Really getting curious on what food preferences you have and what tastes good to you. But then also how it feels in your body.
So if you're noticing something feels really shitty in your body You might decide this is not worth the five seconds of pleasure I got from putting it in my mouth. Yes, that piece of cake might be yummy, but ultimately it's from the grocery store. It's kind of bland It's kind of dry and I know if I have the second piece of cake i'm going to be sluggish all afternoon I'm going to be angry at myself. I am not going to feel proud I am going to be having to figure out my slip up I'm going to be using all this time and energy towards food this afternoon and that's just not worth it to me.
So be pickier this week, my confident eaters. This is a skill that natural eaters do so effortlessly and you can learn to do too. You don't have to go out and remove everything from your life that's mediocre, but I'd encourage you to raise your standards for food. Have a good week. Talk to you next Thursday.