Ep 59- Making Eating Decisions From Love vs Fear

March 27 ,2025

You can choose to eat 1 cookie and whether or not you feel satisfied by it, is determined by whether you make that decision from a place of love or fear.

Today you’ll learn…

• The difference between love-based and fear-based eating choices

• How fear leads to guilt, restriction, and binge eating

• A simple question to ask yourself before every meal

TRANSCRIPT:

   Hey confident eaters. How is your week going? I am here in Hawaii for my last week. I have been here for almost two months, but I'm going to be heading back to Colorado this weekend and I'm excited because I am going to go back and ski with my family and with some friends and now it is luckily getting much warmer there so it will not be so cold and dark.

But today we're going to talk about a concept of making decisions from love versus Fear. This is something that can apply to so many areas of your life, and I use it all the time when I'm making decisions, When this came up was with a client this week when we were troubleshooting the trigger food process.

So the trigger food process is something I teach in my ConfidentEater program that helps you eat any food in moderation and remove the good bad food labels, feel neutral around foods, so you can have just one of something and move on. And my client has been working on some black and white cookies that she has felt obsessed with for a very long time and she's been very diligent doing this process of including them at her meals with the trigger food process. But she was still feeling like she wasn't quite satisfied with just one.

And she kept talking about how she had this guideline of herself of I'm just gonna have one and I'm gonna move on but I keep having this desire for more than one and when we dove into it a bit more what I realized is I could tell just by the way she was describing this guideline of I'm just gonna have one that she was feeling restricted. Her body was tensing up she was pointing the finger at herself like I just am gonna have one and then we need to tell myself I'm going to stop.

And then I noticed so clearly that What her unconscious brain was doing, which is something that is so sneaky. And I asked her, what energy are you deciding to have just one cookie from? Okay, and this is something I want you to ask yourself, too.

When you're making a food boundary for yourself, what energy are you making that decision from? Now, what I mean by this and when you want to ask yourself this question is when things are starting to feel like a rule and when you're eating decisions are starting to feel difficult and you're feeling powerless against them. So knowing this concept will make your eating decisions more effortless and peaceful.

So why it's important to look at what energy you are making your eating decisions from is because you can be taking the exact same action but getting very different results.

And I think another way I could put this is what emotion are you taking action from? Because I know sometimes what energy you're making decisions from can be a little woo woo. So think about like what emotion am I taking actions from? And what this might look like is for my client, she was doing this action of choosing just to eat one cookie.

But there's a very big difference in choosing to eat one cookie from this energy of fear versus this energy of love. When she was making this decision of I want this cookie from fear, she was eating it quickly. She felt the desire for more versus when we say I'm going to choose to eat only one cookie because I love myself. That's when we truly enjoy it and feel satisfied.

So let's talk about a bit more about what this looks like specifically. If you are making a decision, From this emotion of fear, it feels hard, it feels strict, it feels authoritative, like someone is whacking their finger at you and saying, don't do this. It's like putting up a giant caution sign. Fear decisions feel needy and you feel insecure when you're making these decisions. It's coming from a place of lack.

Decisions from love, on the other hand, feel soft and gentle. It's like a loving parent. You feel desire to do it versus this need for it. And you have this underlying sense of security and trust.

Fear decisions look like thinking, I have to eat super clean today because I went overboard last night. It's something I must do. You feel anxious, guilty, and determined to make up for it versus a loving decision is when you wake up and think, I want to nourish my body today because I deserve to feel good.

You feel calm, intentional, and in control of your choices.

Fear based decisions can stem from guilt from eating too much or the wrong foods, in quotes, anxiety about weight gain, fear of losing control, having this external pressure to eat a certain way, whether that's from diet culture or social expectations, and what this might look like is skipping meals the next day to make up from eating too much, forcing yourself to eat a salad when you actually want something else.

Overeating because you're thinking, this is my last chance before I get back on track. Saying no to dessert, not because you don't want it, but because you're afraid of what will happen if you eat it.

Fear is what keeps us trapped in this cycle of restriction, obsession, and binge eating. And it disconnects us from our own body's wisdom. So see if you can resonate. Where am I making decisions out of fear? Out of scarcity? Out of thinking, I'm not going to have this food again? I must make control for myself.

Right now on the other side, love based eating is when you choose food based on what actually makes your body feel good. It's trusting that all foods can fit into a balanced life, tuning into your hunger and fullness instead of external rules, enjoying food without guilt or stress.

So this can look like choosing a meal based on what feels satisfying, not what's allowed. So this might look like you might still choose to eat a salad, but you're doing it because it actually sounds good, not because of what a diet told you to do. It might mean savoring your dessert without feeling guilty afterwards.

Or allowing yourself to eat something fun just because it looks good and it's meant to be enjoyed. This is what true food freedom looks like. It's not about eating perfectly. It's about eating in a way that makes you feel empowered, at peace, and fully in charge of your choices.

My favorite question to ask myself is what would I choose here if I fully loved myself?

When you're going to decide what you're going to have for lunch today or dinner, what would you choose if you fully loved yourself? And that doesn't always mean eating the quote healthiest things. Sometimes truly loving yourself means saying it's okay to have a scoop of ice cream tonight, or sometimes truly loving yourself says, Hey, we're not going to have that soup of ice cream tonight because we've already had three today.

You can also think about what would I choose if I treated myself like a loved child or a pet with this unconditional care for myself? Because even though we love our pets, we're not gonna give them treats all day long because we know it's not healthy for them. We give them a few but then we also want to give them the best nourishment.

To end today, don't forget to go to the show notes and make sure you get your accompanying worksheet for this episode so you can dive even further into this concept of making decisions from love or fear.