There’s a trap that keeps a lot of smart women overeating and it’s often unrecognized. It springs from the way that diet mentality teaches us to think about how to make changes. When you understand how change really works, it empowers you to break free from vicious cycles with overeating, food, and with weight.
This episode is the second of a 3-part series I taught on how to use psychology to stop overeating. If you’ve heard about how psychology, mindset, and your emotional relationship with food might be driving your overeating - but you don't know how to apply these things in a helpful way; you’ll want to catch these episodes where I’ll help you wrap your brain around what’s possible when you shift your thinking and how addressing your mindset can dramatically change your approach and your results.
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Full episode transcript:
So let's talk about freedom and let's talk about specifically freedom mentality. Today, I'm sharing with you the second episode in a three part series over the course of a few podcast episodes, I'm sharing a three session course that I taught last month on how to use psychology to stop overeating. Now, if you missed part one, don't worry, I have the link to it, and I'm going to put it in the show notes for you, but you definitely want to check that out. This series is in its entirety all about how to use the power of your mind to change your relationship with food. Because here is the truth- your brain is your most powerful asset. It is your most powerful asset for creating changes in your eating and in helping you reach your goals.
This is episode two, and it is all about freedom mentality, the shift that you need to make, if you want to create real true freedom from overeating and emotional eating. So let's dive in. Today, we are talking about how to exit the hamster wheel with overeating and with weight and with the scale and with food and with all of these different things.
And what that really means is talking about what I call freedom mentality. So we're going to be talking about freedom mentality. I have a visual aid today that we're going to be using and there will be time at the end for questions. And, I am up for doing some coaching. So if you have a situation that you would like to get some coaching about, if something that we're talking about, you would like to get more clarity about, or you're confused about it, which by the way is completely normal.
When you start learning about anytime we start talking about a different way to. Think about something or a different way to conceptualize something. Our first response as human beings is to feel vague and confused. It does not mean you're not smart. It does not mean you miss something. It does not mean you're not picking things up quickly enough.
It's a sign that your brain has just been kind of like caught off out of its tracks and it doesn't know what to do. So feel free to ask questions and think about if there is some coaching that would be helpful to get here, because I think we're going to have time for that today. Let's talk about freedom mentality.
Last time if you were in the last session and if you weren't, you want to be sure to catch the replay. I talked about diet mentality and we talked about the obstacles or the kind of the mindset mistakes that get people stuck in these endless loops with food and with overeating. What I'm going to do is I'm going to give you an overview, just a contrast of the difference between diet mentality and freedom mentality.
And then I'm going to talk more about it so that it will make more sense. And I think you'll start to see what this can look like in your own life and, and what the differences are. Diet mentality. You know, you are deep in the heart of diet mentality. If you are focused on having this kind of perfect strong control over food.
That's what diet mentality is focused on. Perfect control over food, freedom mentality. You don't need to control food. You don't need to be focused on staying on top of things because freedom mentality is about taking the power away from food you are solving. Remember, we talked last time about the mindset of.
Respecting the fact that there's a reason that you're overeating when you start to solve for that. When you start to pay attention to the reason, instead of the food, you start to deflate the power that food has in your life, and you don't have to focus on it and you don't have to focus on this whole idea of control anymore.
Diet mentality. You know, you are in diet mentality. If you find yourself in cycles of starting. And failing and starting over again, blowing it. It's the blowing it, uh, the whole mentality. Right? I ruined it today is ruined. I didn't do it right now. I have to start over. So I might as well eat everything in sight because I'm going to have to start over on Monday anyway.
And it's already ruined that is an artifact of diet, mentality, freedom mentality. Is there is no such thing as failure, and there is no such thing as starting over. You are, you are moving forward. And the only way you can't be moving forward is if you fall back into diet mentality, which is it's ruin because as long as you are learning from even the very worst day you've had in a long time, as long as you can learn from that, And take something from that to make your next step a little bit more effective.
You are moving forward. There is no more starting over in freedom mentality, which I will tell you, your brain won't know what to do with when you start to create that for yourself. We are so used to just that whole all or nothing, kind of perfectionist thinking in diet mentality, you are very focused on going without.
And what you are not going to do and depriving yourself and denying yourself, which is one of the reasons there's such an emphasis in diet mentality on having to be strong, right? Because it's control, it's winning the struggle. It's denying yourself. Freedom mentality is about feeding yourself what you really need.
Sometimes that is food. Sometimes that means adjusting the food so that you're getting what you really need. But it's also about feeding yourself the things that you really need that within diet mentality, food becomes a really poor substitute for. We use food for lots of things that have nothing to do with a need for fuel and nutrition.
And that's very human. It's not about blaming yourself. Right. But, but when you start to solve for, and pay attention to the real needs that you have, and then you feed yourself those things, again, part of freedom mentality is that food loses its power. And then the last thing that's really important. And check in with yourself and see if you're stuck in this one diet mentality.
When you are in diet mentality, weight loss, or it might be fat grams, or it might be points, or it might be the waist size of your pants. But weight loss is the only metric that you're paying attention to. You are succeeding or you are failing based on that metric. Freedom mentality, you might be using a scale you may not be using a scale. There is not one right answer that works for everybody, but the metric for freedom mentality is that your plan feels good and your plan fits you and your plan doesn't feel like some awkward outfit that you are wearing. And you're just wondering how long you can stand wearing it because it itches and it doesn't really fit you. Right? And you're very aware of it all the time. Like a tight pair of jeans. Like you can't stop thinking about how uncomfortable it is and you can't wait to go home and take it off.
Freedom mentality, it fits you. It's just who you are. I talk a lot about a relationship with food. It's your relationship with food. It's just comfortable. So what does this all mean? We're going to go left a little bit, but we're going to come back because this is all connected. One of the thought errors. That I talked about in the last session was the thought error that changing your eating equals focusing on food all the time. If you want to change your eating, you focus on the food.
Here is why this is a thought error. And we talked about this some last time, but I want to be a little more specific about this. I want you to think about the reasons that you tend to overeat or that you tend to emotionally eat, or that you tend to go off whatever plan that you have put yourself on.
There's some common reasons that smart, busy women tend to overeat, and I will give you them. And I want you to just picture them as you relate to them and how they show up in your life if they do. So, we tend to overeat when we're exhausted. There's scientific evidence for this it's physiological. We overeat when we're exhausted.
We overeat when we have emotions that we don't know how to deal with or don't want to deal with. We overeat when we have stress. We overeat when we are in a place where we want to avoid things. And that might be because of the things I've already mentioned, it may be because you don't want to deal with it or you don't feel like you have the bandwidth to deal with it, or you don't know how to deal with it and you just want to push it away or push it down or, or you don't have the time to deal with it.
We overeat because kind of in line with all of these things, we are too busy. We feel like we're too busy to meal plan or we're too busy to think about what to eat or we're too busy to take time to get the kind of food that would really nourish. We overeat often smart, busy women because we're frustrated with ourselves.
It can be either a way to feel better or it can be a way to punish ourselves. Right. But we, we overeat for these reasons. So think about this exhaustion, emotions, stress being too busy, wanting to avoid things, being frustrated with yourself. Not only are these all powerful reasons for overeating, but. They compound one another.
Sometimes when I'm talking about this, I say like, draw this out, like a wheel where there's an arrow, connecting each of these things to each other, because one thing leads to another and they can exacerbate each other and it be, it becomes a vicious cycle. Okay. Now take a deep breath and think about your diet mentality and you decide you're going to change your eating because you're fed up with, whatever's been going on for you.
You're going to change your eating and you're going to focus on the. Makes perfect sense. I want to change my eating. I will focus on the food. Guess what does absolutely nothing about the stress about the being too busy about the exhaustion, about the overwhelm, about the wanting to avoid things about being, maybe it will fix some being mad at yourself for a brief moment, just a hot minute, because you feel like you're doing something effective there, but none of the reasons, none of that to go back to the struggle for control that you feel in diet mentality.
Nothing about focusing on the food, takes the power away from the food. It just gives you the extra hard job of having to have more control so that you can try to feel powerful around food, which has all this power, because of all those things that are going around in a circle that I just mentioned. And then you end up eating to cope and eating for stress.
And yes, it actually just adds things to manage. It's one more thing. And now you're now you're overeating because not only are you exhausted and you have emotions, but now you've got. Food plan that is stressing you out, focusing on food addresses, none of those things, even though your brain will tell you, it is the most logical thing to do here is what works.
And then we're going to go into there's some nuances about this. Okay. So what works is creating a different kind of cycle which starts with, and it includes some of the things we talked about or all of the things actually that we talked about last time, but getting your needs. When you start to get your needs met, you shift out of that one cycle.
You start to shift into another one, right? You're addressing the reason starting to gather tools and strategies for handling the emotions. And that can look very different for, for each of us. Sometimes we need to know different ways to deal with conflict or to deal with anxiety or to tolerate it, or to sit with it or to have a tough conversation, or to allow ourselves to take a break from it tools to deal with emotions.
One of the things that is so critical for creating a freedom mentality and freedom from over were eating is tackling the guilt. And the self blame and be honest with yourself. How many of you tell yourselves that? Well, I should feel guilty. Of course. You know, when I, when I get this stuff cleared up, I will feel better about myself.
I'll be nicer to myself when I'm, when I'm being nicer to myself with food, doesn't work that way. So tackling the guilt and the self blame, a huge one, we spend a lot of time on this in the missing piece program is getting clear on what you can do instead. We are so good at declaring these things that we're not going to do anymore.
And then not having a clue what we're, what we're going to replace them with or what are we going to do when that situation comes up, other than sit on our hands and like, just like count the minutes until the situation is over. So sometimes one of the key, well, almost always one of the key pieces and creating freedom from overeating is figuring out what are some options.
And being honest and compassionate with ourselves that, that maybe you're stuck in this cycle, because right now you haven't felt a lot of options. It is not that you're lazy or that you're undisciplined. And then here's the key one that most people just kind of say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And they skip over doable steps that fit into your life has to be do.
To create a relationship with food to create a way of being with food that you want to be with forever. You have to want to be with it forever. So it has to be doable. So that's the big kind of picture here. And remember the quote that was helpful. Last time was Abraham Lincolns. The quote I have is give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the acts.
And a lot of this freedom mentality is spending more time sharpening the acts than, than maybe you feel like you're allowed to take. And interesting thing is I've been looking into that quote and, uh, apparently there's a lot of controversy about how many hours he said he would sharpen the ax and how many hours he would devote to the tree and all that kind of stuff.
One of the things that we underestimate is the value of a strong foundation. And also the time that is valuable to put into creating a foundation. And that's why in the missing piece program, you don't start with a food. Well, there are a lot of reasons you don't start with a food plan, right?
We don't focus on the food because it doesn't get you where you want to go. But we start by building a really strong foundation. What I want you to notice about this new cycle that I just talked about, right? Doable steps and taking care of what you're really hungry for. Feeding yourself is that you're creating a foundation that is going to feel firm to stand on.
With food and getting your needs met, but you're doing that at the same time. You are starting to create freedom for yourself. It's kind of a twofer. Here is the place where people kind of mess up. And here is the place where I get to use my visual aid. If you've been on a call with me before where I've pulled out my slinky, you kind of know a little bit about where we're headed, making peace with food and creating freedom from overeating is not a one and done kind of.
We talked last time about the mistake of creating this perfectionist thought error. That if you can get things perfectly right, you and the rest of your life will be perfectly perfect. And you won't have these struggles anymore. Guess what? You are going to have cycles of being stressed and being too busy and being overwhelmed and having emotions you would rather not deal with.
And guess what that is, life you're going to have them, you and I we're going to have them for the rest of our lives. And there will be times when we cannot predict when they come up. This is a vicious cycle. This is that circle, that loop that we can get stuck in. And we, we create freedom from overeating. We move out of that vicious cycle.
When we give ourselves permission. And when we learn to treat it as a spiral, instead of a circle, when we stop expecting change to be perfectly linear, I'm here. And I go here and then I'm done. This is what life looks like. We go around. We go through loops. We go through the same things repeatedly. There are the same stressors that come up the same visit with your, with your lovable or challenging mother-in-law or the boss that drives you nuts.
Or the week before the holidays. That's absolutely crazy. We have the same challenges, but within freedom mentality and giving ourselves permission to learn and to grow and to change each time around instead of, oh, I ruined it. I ruined it. I'm back at the beginning. I need to start over. We start to get somewhere, but we get somewhere with food in a spiral, not in a straight line.
And there's a whole system for this called spiral velocity. I have a whole training program on spiral velocity. There's actually a whole daily planner and morning routine that we use in the missing piece program around spiral velocity. This shift in your thinking. This psychology that I'm teaching you here is key to getting anywhere you want to go with food, whether it is weight loss, whether it is ending emotional, eating, whether it is eating the way that you want to and getting rid of overeating at night, this is really, really, really important.
And remembering not only is it a spiral, but you heal and deal at the same. So each time around you are trying to learn from what's going on. You may be healing what's going on. You may be finding ways. If you are stress eating, you may be finding ways to get rid of the stress or manage the stress better.
So it doesn't impact you, but maybe you're not because you're human. So you're also you're healing, but you're also dealing part of creating freedom from overeating is realizing that sometimes there are things that are beyond our control. Sometimes there's stress that we cannot eliminate. There are tough emotions that we don't know how to deal with and finding ways to move through those things and not get tangled up in diet mentality, and overeating and emotional eating.
This is what really brings you freedom. This idea of change being as. Spiral. And the fact that we are continually healing and dealing is one of the reasons that I am so proud of. And so passionate about the missing piece program, because one of the lovely things about how that program works is that when you join the program, there's a coaching component and there is a training component.
When you join your missing piece, you get lifetime access. To the training and by training, I mean, there are videos, there are workbooks, there are guided visualizations. There are checklists, you get lifetime access to that. And I'll give you an example in a minute of why and how that is so valuable, but you've got this library of smart strategy and skills and, and techniques to shift your thinking in your mindset.
And then. You have this other component, which is 16 weeks of coaching with me. So you've got the 16 weeks of coaching to cement in what you're learning, but also to get unstuck from the, the things that the obstacles, the interior obstacles, the self sabotage, the ways of thinking, we don't even know that we have, right.
That keep us. Going down that same little path over and over again. And also the exterior obstacles that are getting in your way that you have been throwing up your hands and, and maybe making that thought error that I talked about last time, which is, well, there's nothing I can do about it. So I'm stuck that coaching piece.
We, we do that, you know, for 16 weeks at the beginning, so that you have that, but I want you to be really clear on we're healing and dealing, and you're going to be doing that for the rest of your life. So for instance, I was reminded of this when I was putting together my notes this morning. There's somebody who participated in your missing piece, had a great experience in the program.
She, she went through all the training, really benefited from it. When she was winding up in the last part of the program, she was really satisfied, felt really good about things. After she left the program, she had a personal crisis. That just was one of those whole life encompassing crises and unpredictable right.
Part of the spiral of life. She was in that place of exhausted and being too busy and stressed and emotions that nobody wants to deal with. And as she was going through this, she did reach out to me and she said, you know, this has happened. And I really want to thank you because I'm very proud of how I've gotten through this experience.
And I never would've been able to do that without the work I did in the program and without the things that I learned, and I, I keep finding that I'm applying them in these amazing ways. Fast forward another six months. And there's a Facebook community for Your Missing Peace. She's she shows up in the Facebook community, and she's sharing that she has started to go back through these materials, because guess what? Life is a spiral and she's healing and dealing. And she's like, you know what? I'm back in module one. And this stuff is amazing. This is amazing. And she started talking about the there's something called the motivation magnifier.
That is one of the very first things that you do in the program to really. Put in place a plan to, to motivate you something that will motivate you to just stay with things, even when you aren't feeling particularly motivated. And she's like, oh my gosh, this is fantastic. Well, she had done it before, and it's not that she hadn't seen this before, but a freedom mentality means that you are using strategies, which is the kind of stuff I'm going to teach you in your missing piece.
But you're using strategies that grow with. So that every time you revisit them, just like, just like life is a spiral, you know, your mind and your thinking and your capacity to grow is a spiral. And so here she is going through module one of the program for the second time. And it's completely new to her because she's new.
She's been growing and learning and changing and also struggling at times. But this tool isn't just, well, you need to start counting your points again. Need to get back on the program? Well, no, and by the way, she's, it's not like she slid back to start she's in a different place than she. What you want are tools that support you, that encourage you to think in a way that will always have you growing that will encourage you to strategize and problem solve and ask questions that will continually take the power away from food and put the power in your hands so that food doesn't take up your energy so that food and, and.
All of this stuff is just a no brainer. It just happens because you are eating in a way that fits you, fits your body, fits your life. There is so much more to getting where you want to go with food and with weight. And with being able to walk into your closet, know that knowing that your clothes fit, there's so much more to that than beating yourself up around food and a food plan.
And as long as you are stuck in that relationship, none of this other growth really has space to happen. That is what I want to share with you today. I want to hear your thoughts and reactions, raise your hand, and I'm going to jp into the chat in a minute. Hello. If you have a stressful situation and you want to grab for food, then I hear you say, we look to an instead activity.
I like that idea, but what do you do if you were truly hungry? Can your eating choices be what we want to eat rather than being on a meal plan. Like my question is what do we eat? Or am I in the diet mentality by asking this question? I love your last response there because our first response always is so how am I supposed to eat?
And it's avail, a two. Two points to that. Yes. It's often a diet mentality kind of response. And two, it's a really valid question. One of the things we do in your missing piece is, and, and people often come into your missing piece, like, okay. Yeah. But how really let's talk about how we're supposed to eat.
Right. Tell me how to eat. I have been doing this kind of work since 1989. I have worked with enough people to be absolutely 100% confident that there is not one way of eating that works for everybody. And I would never presume to tell anybody how they should eat or presume to think that the way I eat is going to work, you know, for anybody, the next person I meet on the street and it is important to figure out how to eat.
We've got to separate the eating part from the diet mentality part. And so your missing piece really starts with taking your power back and getting that foundation in place. And you also get a whole new way of thinking about food and like, how can I start to ask these questions and unhook them from diet mentality?
Here's the other piece, if you are like, just about everybody I've ever worked with, uh, and being a woman on the planet, you have collected more information about nutrition and food and eating ideas and ways to lose weight and how you should eat that. You know, you've probably collected more, more information than you ever wanted to, and it probably is confusing and it's probably overwhelming part of what we do in the program is we detox that stuff.
Let's drop all the stuff that isn't useful. How do you find out what is useful? It's another mindset shift. It is acknowledging that you are the only person who has lived in your body, your entire life. And you know, some things. You may be disconnected from some of those things.
You may doubt some of those things. You may have lost your confidence in some of those things, but you're the only one who's lived inside your body, your whole life. And so part of the missing piece process is helping you get your confidence back and helping you learn to trust yourself again, so that you can take that bajillion, you know, facts and ideas and theories that you have in your head about how to eat and you can filter them.
Through your own inner wisdom, and you can start to make choices based on, you know, expertise that is out there that you may not necessarily have and how it connects with you, because expertise that does not run through your own filter expertise that does not fit you. Isn't valuable. I would venture to say that probably everybody on this call has been thrown to some expertise that didn't fit them at all and has probably spent way too much time trying to contort themselves like a pretzel to make this expertise work for them.
And it's probably just left you feeling miserable and blaming yourself when it hasn't worked. That is my, my soapbox answer to that question. What do we have nice to meet you. And this is, this is really, , surprisingly awesome in everything. And I have to say, I've never, I've never really thought along these lines before.
I've always gone towards the, the. Like the massive control focus of, and I was just, before I kind of saw this email about this, what you're doing, I was about to like go and reimburse myself into portion control, you know, pocket, like, you know, like what to eat first thing in the morning, what to eat second, all that kind of stuff.
And, and I was like, I don't want to go there. I don't want to do it, but at the same time, there's like a level of excitement of like, oh, wait, I have a solution. I can go do that. I can just get, do the portion controls and then it's just going to be done. I'll just do it. And it will be done. And there's almost like a, a feeling of like going shopping and just having a nice, like a, like, Just throwing.
It was like, kind of like throwing, not even money at it, but just like a, a solution. And, , and I, so I found myself, I watched the replay yesterday, uh, of Monday session and I found myself today just going like kind of being a little bit like, wait, am I hungry? I don't know that I'm hungry. I think I'm feeling something.
What am I feeling? What am, what is this feeling that I'm, and then like actually paying attention to it. And it was really, it was pretty amazing. There is so much powerful stuff that happens when we can slow down. And again, it's like healing and dealing at the same time. Right? Sometimes there's some feelings going on that we don't, we really don't feel equipped to feel, or we don't know how to feel.
And, and so when those come up, trying to figure out what to do with those, it's not all or nothing. Right. And it's nothing all at once. And that is one of the reasons that. Kind of looking at all the pieces and in the next session, we're really going to talk more about what are the pieces of the puzzle, what are the missing pieces and giving yourself permission to not do it in a linear way, but to kind of bounce around and bounce back and forth is so important.
Yeah. , alright. So I said, yes, coaching. I don't really know what my question is. So can you start me off? Well, what brought you? What intrigued you? You know, what brought you to this? I struggle with figuring out what to eat, how much to eat and feeling the sense, like I want to keep control of my weight and so that it doesn't like go off the rails and I have this.
Yeah. And I guess I just kind of have the sense. Oh, no, it'll just get better. It will just get better. Things will get better. And I will just somehow lose the 10 pounds that I would like to lose. And, and then it will be all good and, and it just doesn't happen. And I'm finding myself kind of looking like looking at desserts in a different way, like in a kind of more voracious sort of way.
And, and, and, and not sending off alarm bells of like way no something's going on. What's your sense of what's going on? That I have a bunch of like control issues, power, like sense, like a, my own sense of my own power is really in a, in a shaky point right now. So I think I'm, I'm looking to eating. As just an easy way to almost like process things and think about things and be, and not, I don't know, not have to not have to feel that kind of ickiness, but it's not easy is my sense because it's, it's causing you discomfort.
Yeah. It's causing me discomfort in the sense of, I. I mean, I just, yeah. And it's, it's really around, you know, like looking at myself in a mirror. Right. And so like, there's, there was a thought that I had, which was like, well, maybe just don't have mirror, you know, like don't have mirrors don't and then I'm like, well, no, that's not, that's not right.
And I really do want to just like, love my body and be super good with it. Tell me if this fits for you, because I think some, for some people. For a lot of us, , we can have a goal. Like I want this thing. I want to feel this way. I want to feel super good with my body, but also not really have a clear picture of what that would be like.
And sometimes with food, it can like, you can listen to somebody talk about something like I'm talking about today. Like freedom from overeating, real freedom and oh yeah. Okay. That's like, yeah. But then when you try to apply it to your own life, and I think this is particularly true with food. For so many women, your relationship with food, not feeling good, goes back so far and has so many layers to it.
Right? Whether it's personal or cultural or, you know, stuff from media or that it can be really hard to imagine. That can be different.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I'm yeah, exactly. Yeah. I can't even imagine. Like, I think my experience with not caring and being free type of thing is where like, I'll just gain 10 pounds. You know, like, yeah. And, and that's where I'm like, but I, I don't want that. I don't want that. One of the, and I, I keep catching myself going back to the program, but it's because the pieces of the program are the things that help.
One of the first things we do in module, one of the program is to create something called your unstoppable self vision, your, your vision of yourself when, , when you are unstoppable. And we use that a lot throughout the program and the first mistake. That everybody, including myself makes when they sit down to really dig into this exercise and create their unstoppable self is to create this version of this weird Barbie doll perfection.
My unstoppable, like the, what's that smile called that the Perran. Yeah. You know, with the, my unstoppable self never gets angry and my unstoppable self never has cravings. And my unstoppable self never buys extra chocolate and my unstoppable and. because, because it's really hard to imagine that we can just be happy and we could be at ease and we could be easy with ourselves and still stay within some kind of a system that works for us that allows us to be either eat the way that we want to eat or live at the weight that we want to, you know, or have a, have our clothes fit us correctly in the, you know, the clothes that we have fit us correctly. There's so much mental that goes into how we see ourselves with food and what we believe is possible.
Are you ready? Are you ready to lose your overeating and emotional eating habits? Are you ready to find a relationship with food that fits you? One that's deprivation free. Then you need to join your missing piece.
Enrollment is open and now is a perfect time to join us. Go to TooMuchOnHerPlate.com/your-missing-peace, or click the link in the show notes to take you there. Your missing piece is the program where I show you step by step. I walk you through the process of creating freedom from overeating, with a unique combination of.
Personalized coaching with me and smart strategy. You'll learn how to reclaim your power, ditch the diets and create results that are built to last. Check it out at toomuchonherplate.com/your-missing-piece. And I'll see you inside.
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So let's talk about freedom and let's talk about specifically freedom mentality. Today, I'm sharing with you the second episode in a three part series over the course of a few podcast episodes, I'm sharing a three session course that I taught last month on how to use psychology to stop overeating. Now, if you missed part one, don't worry, I have the link to it, and I'm going to put it in the show notes for you, but you definitely want to check that out. This series is in its entirety all about how to use the power of your mind to change your relationship with food. Because here is the truth- your brain is your most powerful asset. It is your most powerful asset for creating changes in your eating and in helping you reach your goals.
This is episode two, and it is all about freedom mentality, the shift that you need to make, if you want to create real true freedom from overeating and emotional eating. So let's dive in. Today, we are talking about how to exit the hamster wheel with overeating and with weight and with the scale and with food and with all of these different things.
And what that really means is talking about what I call freedom mentality. So we're going to be talking about freedom mentality. I have a visual aid today that we're going to be using and there will be time at the end for questions. And, I am up for doing some coaching. So if you have a situation that you would like to get some coaching about, if something that we're talking about, you would like to get more clarity about, or you're confused about it, which by the way is completely normal.
When you start learning about anytime we start talking about a different way to. Think about something or a different way to conceptualize something. Our first response as human beings is to feel vague and confused. It does not mean you're not smart. It does not mean you miss something. It does not mean you're not picking things up quickly enough.
It's a sign that your brain has just been kind of like caught off out of its tracks and it doesn't know what to do. So feel free to ask questions and think about if there is some coaching that would be helpful to get here, because I think we're going to have time for that today. Let's talk about freedom mentality.
Last time if you were in the last session and if you weren't, you want to be sure to catch the replay. I talked about diet mentality and we talked about the obstacles or the kind of the mindset mistakes that get people stuck in these endless loops with food and with overeating. What I'm going to do is I'm going to give you an overview, just a contrast of the difference between diet mentality and freedom mentality.
And then I'm going to talk more about it so that it will make more sense. And I think you'll start to see what this can look like in your own life and, and what the differences are. Diet mentality. You know, you are deep in the heart of diet mentality. If you are focused on having this kind of perfect strong control over food.
That's what diet mentality is focused on. Perfect control over food, freedom mentality. You don't need to control food. You don't need to be focused on staying on top of things because freedom mentality is about taking the power away from food you are solving. Remember, we talked last time about the mindset of.
Respecting the fact that there's a reason that you're overeating when you start to solve for that. When you start to pay attention to the reason, instead of the food, you start to deflate the power that food has in your life, and you don't have to focus on it and you don't have to focus on this whole idea of control anymore.
Diet mentality. You know, you are in diet mentality. If you find yourself in cycles of starting. And failing and starting over again, blowing it. It's the blowing it, uh, the whole mentality. Right? I ruined it today is ruined. I didn't do it right now. I have to start over. So I might as well eat everything in sight because I'm going to have to start over on Monday anyway.
And it's already ruined that is an artifact of diet, mentality, freedom mentality. Is there is no such thing as failure, and there is no such thing as starting over. You are, you are moving forward. And the only way you can't be moving forward is if you fall back into diet mentality, which is it's ruin because as long as you are learning from even the very worst day you've had in a long time, as long as you can learn from that, And take something from that to make your next step a little bit more effective.
You are moving forward. There is no more starting over in freedom mentality, which I will tell you, your brain won't know what to do with when you start to create that for yourself. We are so used to just that whole all or nothing, kind of perfectionist thinking in diet mentality, you are very focused on going without.
And what you are not going to do and depriving yourself and denying yourself, which is one of the reasons there's such an emphasis in diet mentality on having to be strong, right? Because it's control, it's winning the struggle. It's denying yourself. Freedom mentality is about feeding yourself what you really need.
Sometimes that is food. Sometimes that means adjusting the food so that you're getting what you really need. But it's also about feeding yourself the things that you really need that within diet mentality, food becomes a really poor substitute for. We use food for lots of things that have nothing to do with a need for fuel and nutrition.
And that's very human. It's not about blaming yourself. Right. But, but when you start to solve for, and pay attention to the real needs that you have, and then you feed yourself those things, again, part of freedom mentality is that food loses its power. And then the last thing that's really important. And check in with yourself and see if you're stuck in this one diet mentality.
When you are in diet mentality, weight loss, or it might be fat grams, or it might be points, or it might be the waist size of your pants. But weight loss is the only metric that you're paying attention to. You are succeeding or you are failing based on that metric. Freedom mentality, you might be using a scale you may not be using a scale. There is not one right answer that works for everybody, but the metric for freedom mentality is that your plan feels good and your plan fits you and your plan doesn't feel like some awkward outfit that you are wearing. And you're just wondering how long you can stand wearing it because it itches and it doesn't really fit you. Right? And you're very aware of it all the time. Like a tight pair of jeans. Like you can't stop thinking about how uncomfortable it is and you can't wait to go home and take it off.
Freedom mentality, it fits you. It's just who you are. I talk a lot about a relationship with food. It's your relationship with food. It's just comfortable. So what does this all mean? We're going to go left a little bit, but we're going to come back because this is all connected. One of the thought errors. That I talked about in the last session was the thought error that changing your eating equals focusing on food all the time. If you want to change your eating, you focus on the food.
Here is why this is a thought error. And we talked about this some last time, but I want to be a little more specific about this. I want you to think about the reasons that you tend to overeat or that you tend to emotionally eat, or that you tend to go off whatever plan that you have put yourself on.
There's some common reasons that smart, busy women tend to overeat, and I will give you them. And I want you to just picture them as you relate to them and how they show up in your life if they do. So, we tend to overeat when we're exhausted. There's scientific evidence for this it's physiological. We overeat when we're exhausted.
We overeat when we have emotions that we don't know how to deal with or don't want to deal with. We overeat when we have stress. We overeat when we are in a place where we want to avoid things. And that might be because of the things I've already mentioned, it may be because you don't want to deal with it or you don't feel like you have the bandwidth to deal with it, or you don't know how to deal with it and you just want to push it away or push it down or, or you don't have the time to deal with it.
We overeat because kind of in line with all of these things, we are too busy. We feel like we're too busy to meal plan or we're too busy to think about what to eat or we're too busy to take time to get the kind of food that would really nourish. We overeat often smart, busy women because we're frustrated with ourselves.
It can be either a way to feel better or it can be a way to punish ourselves. Right. But we, we overeat for these reasons. So think about this exhaustion, emotions, stress being too busy, wanting to avoid things, being frustrated with yourself. Not only are these all powerful reasons for overeating, but. They compound one another.
Sometimes when I'm talking about this, I say like, draw this out, like a wheel where there's an arrow, connecting each of these things to each other, because one thing leads to another and they can exacerbate each other and it be, it becomes a vicious cycle. Okay. Now take a deep breath and think about your diet mentality and you decide you're going to change your eating because you're fed up with, whatever's been going on for you.
You're going to change your eating and you're going to focus on the. Makes perfect sense. I want to change my eating. I will focus on the food. Guess what does absolutely nothing about the stress about the being too busy about the exhaustion, about the overwhelm, about the wanting to avoid things about being, maybe it will fix some being mad at yourself for a brief moment, just a hot minute, because you feel like you're doing something effective there, but none of the reasons, none of that to go back to the struggle for control that you feel in diet mentality.
Nothing about focusing on the food, takes the power away from the food. It just gives you the extra hard job of having to have more control so that you can try to feel powerful around food, which has all this power, because of all those things that are going around in a circle that I just mentioned. And then you end up eating to cope and eating for stress.
And yes, it actually just adds things to manage. It's one more thing. And now you're now you're overeating because not only are you exhausted and you have emotions, but now you've got. Food plan that is stressing you out, focusing on food addresses, none of those things, even though your brain will tell you, it is the most logical thing to do here is what works.
And then we're going to go into there's some nuances about this. Okay. So what works is creating a different kind of cycle which starts with, and it includes some of the things we talked about or all of the things actually that we talked about last time, but getting your needs. When you start to get your needs met, you shift out of that one cycle.
You start to shift into another one, right? You're addressing the reason starting to gather tools and strategies for handling the emotions. And that can look very different for, for each of us. Sometimes we need to know different ways to deal with conflict or to deal with anxiety or to tolerate it, or to sit with it or to have a tough conversation, or to allow ourselves to take a break from it tools to deal with emotions.
One of the things that is so critical for creating a freedom mentality and freedom from over were eating is tackling the guilt. And the self blame and be honest with yourself. How many of you tell yourselves that? Well, I should feel guilty. Of course. You know, when I, when I get this stuff cleared up, I will feel better about myself.
I'll be nicer to myself when I'm, when I'm being nicer to myself with food, doesn't work that way. So tackling the guilt and the self blame, a huge one, we spend a lot of time on this in the missing piece program is getting clear on what you can do instead. We are so good at declaring these things that we're not going to do anymore.
And then not having a clue what we're, what we're going to replace them with or what are we going to do when that situation comes up, other than sit on our hands and like, just like count the minutes until the situation is over. So sometimes one of the key, well, almost always one of the key pieces and creating freedom from overeating is figuring out what are some options.
And being honest and compassionate with ourselves that, that maybe you're stuck in this cycle, because right now you haven't felt a lot of options. It is not that you're lazy or that you're undisciplined. And then here's the key one that most people just kind of say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And they skip over doable steps that fit into your life has to be do.
To create a relationship with food to create a way of being with food that you want to be with forever. You have to want to be with it forever. So it has to be doable. So that's the big kind of picture here. And remember the quote that was helpful. Last time was Abraham Lincolns. The quote I have is give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the acts.
And a lot of this freedom mentality is spending more time sharpening the acts than, than maybe you feel like you're allowed to take. And interesting thing is I've been looking into that quote and, uh, apparently there's a lot of controversy about how many hours he said he would sharpen the ax and how many hours he would devote to the tree and all that kind of stuff.
One of the things that we underestimate is the value of a strong foundation. And also the time that is valuable to put into creating a foundation. And that's why in the missing piece program, you don't start with a food. Well, there are a lot of reasons you don't start with a food plan, right?
We don't focus on the food because it doesn't get you where you want to go. But we start by building a really strong foundation. What I want you to notice about this new cycle that I just talked about, right? Doable steps and taking care of what you're really hungry for. Feeding yourself is that you're creating a foundation that is going to feel firm to stand on.
With food and getting your needs met, but you're doing that at the same time. You are starting to create freedom for yourself. It's kind of a twofer. Here is the place where people kind of mess up. And here is the place where I get to use my visual aid. If you've been on a call with me before where I've pulled out my slinky, you kind of know a little bit about where we're headed, making peace with food and creating freedom from overeating is not a one and done kind of.
We talked last time about the mistake of creating this perfectionist thought error. That if you can get things perfectly right, you and the rest of your life will be perfectly perfect. And you won't have these struggles anymore. Guess what? You are going to have cycles of being stressed and being too busy and being overwhelmed and having emotions you would rather not deal with.
And guess what that is, life you're going to have them, you and I we're going to have them for the rest of our lives. And there will be times when we cannot predict when they come up. This is a vicious cycle. This is that circle, that loop that we can get stuck in. And we, we create freedom from overeating. We move out of that vicious cycle.
When we give ourselves permission. And when we learn to treat it as a spiral, instead of a circle, when we stop expecting change to be perfectly linear, I'm here. And I go here and then I'm done. This is what life looks like. We go around. We go through loops. We go through the same things repeatedly. There are the same stressors that come up the same visit with your, with your lovable or challenging mother-in-law or the boss that drives you nuts.
Or the week before the holidays. That's absolutely crazy. We have the same challenges, but within freedom mentality and giving ourselves permission to learn and to grow and to change each time around instead of, oh, I ruined it. I ruined it. I'm back at the beginning. I need to start over. We start to get somewhere, but we get somewhere with food in a spiral, not in a straight line.
And there's a whole system for this called spiral velocity. I have a whole training program on spiral velocity. There's actually a whole daily planner and morning routine that we use in the missing piece program around spiral velocity. This shift in your thinking. This psychology that I'm teaching you here is key to getting anywhere you want to go with food, whether it is weight loss, whether it is ending emotional, eating, whether it is eating the way that you want to and getting rid of overeating at night, this is really, really, really important.
And remembering not only is it a spiral, but you heal and deal at the same. So each time around you are trying to learn from what's going on. You may be healing what's going on. You may be finding ways. If you are stress eating, you may be finding ways to get rid of the stress or manage the stress better.
So it doesn't impact you, but maybe you're not because you're human. So you're also you're healing, but you're also dealing part of creating freedom from overeating is realizing that sometimes there are things that are beyond our control. Sometimes there's stress that we cannot eliminate. There are tough emotions that we don't know how to deal with and finding ways to move through those things and not get tangled up in diet mentality, and overeating and emotional eating.
This is what really brings you freedom. This idea of change being as. Spiral. And the fact that we are continually healing and dealing is one of the reasons that I am so proud of. And so passionate about the missing piece program, because one of the lovely things about how that program works is that when you join the program, there's a coaching component and there is a training component.
When you join your missing piece, you get lifetime access. To the training and by training, I mean, there are videos, there are workbooks, there are guided visualizations. There are checklists, you get lifetime access to that. And I'll give you an example in a minute of why and how that is so valuable, but you've got this library of smart strategy and skills and, and techniques to shift your thinking in your mindset.
And then. You have this other component, which is 16 weeks of coaching with me. So you've got the 16 weeks of coaching to cement in what you're learning, but also to get unstuck from the, the things that the obstacles, the interior obstacles, the self sabotage, the ways of thinking, we don't even know that we have, right.
That keep us. Going down that same little path over and over again. And also the exterior obstacles that are getting in your way that you have been throwing up your hands and, and maybe making that thought error that I talked about last time, which is, well, there's nothing I can do about it. So I'm stuck that coaching piece.
We, we do that, you know, for 16 weeks at the beginning, so that you have that, but I want you to be really clear on we're healing and dealing, and you're going to be doing that for the rest of your life. So for instance, I was reminded of this when I was putting together my notes this morning. There's somebody who participated in your missing piece, had a great experience in the program.
She, she went through all the training, really benefited from it. When she was winding up in the last part of the program, she was really satisfied, felt really good about things. After she left the program, she had a personal crisis. That just was one of those whole life encompassing crises and unpredictable right.
Part of the spiral of life. She was in that place of exhausted and being too busy and stressed and emotions that nobody wants to deal with. And as she was going through this, she did reach out to me and she said, you know, this has happened. And I really want to thank you because I'm very proud of how I've gotten through this experience.
And I never would've been able to do that without the work I did in the program and without the things that I learned, and I, I keep finding that I'm applying them in these amazing ways. Fast forward another six months. And there's a Facebook community for Your Missing Peace. She's she shows up in the Facebook community, and she's sharing that she has started to go back through these materials, because guess what? Life is a spiral and she's healing and dealing. And she's like, you know what? I'm back in module one. And this stuff is amazing. This is amazing. And she started talking about the there's something called the motivation magnifier.
That is one of the very first things that you do in the program to really. Put in place a plan to, to motivate you something that will motivate you to just stay with things, even when you aren't feeling particularly motivated. And she's like, oh my gosh, this is fantastic. Well, she had done it before, and it's not that she hadn't seen this before, but a freedom mentality means that you are using strategies, which is the kind of stuff I'm going to teach you in your missing piece.
But you're using strategies that grow with. So that every time you revisit them, just like, just like life is a spiral, you know, your mind and your thinking and your capacity to grow is a spiral. And so here she is going through module one of the program for the second time. And it's completely new to her because she's new.
She's been growing and learning and changing and also struggling at times. But this tool isn't just, well, you need to start counting your points again. Need to get back on the program? Well, no, and by the way, she's, it's not like she slid back to start she's in a different place than she. What you want are tools that support you, that encourage you to think in a way that will always have you growing that will encourage you to strategize and problem solve and ask questions that will continually take the power away from food and put the power in your hands so that food doesn't take up your energy so that food and, and.
All of this stuff is just a no brainer. It just happens because you are eating in a way that fits you, fits your body, fits your life. There is so much more to getting where you want to go with food and with weight. And with being able to walk into your closet, know that knowing that your clothes fit, there's so much more to that than beating yourself up around food and a food plan.
And as long as you are stuck in that relationship, none of this other growth really has space to happen. That is what I want to share with you today. I want to hear your thoughts and reactions, raise your hand, and I'm going to jp into the chat in a minute. Hello. If you have a stressful situation and you want to grab for food, then I hear you say, we look to an instead activity.
I like that idea, but what do you do if you were truly hungry? Can your eating choices be what we want to eat rather than being on a meal plan. Like my question is what do we eat? Or am I in the diet mentality by asking this question? I love your last response there because our first response always is so how am I supposed to eat?
And it's avail, a two. Two points to that. Yes. It's often a diet mentality kind of response. And two, it's a really valid question. One of the things we do in your missing piece is, and, and people often come into your missing piece, like, okay. Yeah. But how really let's talk about how we're supposed to eat.
Right. Tell me how to eat. I have been doing this kind of work since 1989. I have worked with enough people to be absolutely 100% confident that there is not one way of eating that works for everybody. And I would never presume to tell anybody how they should eat or presume to think that the way I eat is going to work, you know, for anybody, the next person I meet on the street and it is important to figure out how to eat.
We've got to separate the eating part from the diet mentality part. And so your missing piece really starts with taking your power back and getting that foundation in place. And you also get a whole new way of thinking about food and like, how can I start to ask these questions and unhook them from diet mentality?
Here's the other piece, if you are like, just about everybody I've ever worked with, uh, and being a woman on the planet, you have collected more information about nutrition and food and eating ideas and ways to lose weight and how you should eat that. You know, you've probably collected more, more information than you ever wanted to, and it probably is confusing and it's probably overwhelming part of what we do in the program is we detox that stuff.
Let's drop all the stuff that isn't useful. How do you find out what is useful? It's another mindset shift. It is acknowledging that you are the only person who has lived in your body, your entire life. And you know, some things. You may be disconnected from some of those things.
You may doubt some of those things. You may have lost your confidence in some of those things, but you're the only one who's lived inside your body, your whole life. And so part of the missing piece process is helping you get your confidence back and helping you learn to trust yourself again, so that you can take that bajillion, you know, facts and ideas and theories that you have in your head about how to eat and you can filter them.
Through your own inner wisdom, and you can start to make choices based on, you know, expertise that is out there that you may not necessarily have and how it connects with you, because expertise that does not run through your own filter expertise that does not fit you. Isn't valuable. I would venture to say that probably everybody on this call has been thrown to some expertise that didn't fit them at all and has probably spent way too much time trying to contort themselves like a pretzel to make this expertise work for them.
And it's probably just left you feeling miserable and blaming yourself when it hasn't worked. That is my, my soapbox answer to that question. What do we have nice to meet you. And this is, this is really, , surprisingly awesome in everything. And I have to say, I've never, I've never really thought along these lines before.
I've always gone towards the, the. Like the massive control focus of, and I was just, before I kind of saw this email about this, what you're doing, I was about to like go and reimburse myself into portion control, you know, pocket, like, you know, like what to eat first thing in the morning, what to eat second, all that kind of stuff.
And, and I was like, I don't want to go there. I don't want to do it, but at the same time, there's like a level of excitement of like, oh, wait, I have a solution. I can go do that. I can just get, do the portion controls and then it's just going to be done. I'll just do it. And it will be done. And there's almost like a, a feeling of like going shopping and just having a nice, like a, like, Just throwing.
It was like, kind of like throwing, not even money at it, but just like a, a solution. And, , and I, so I found myself, I watched the replay yesterday, uh, of Monday session and I found myself today just going like kind of being a little bit like, wait, am I hungry? I don't know that I'm hungry. I think I'm feeling something.
What am I feeling? What am, what is this feeling that I'm, and then like actually paying attention to it. And it was really, it was pretty amazing. There is so much powerful stuff that happens when we can slow down. And again, it's like healing and dealing at the same time. Right? Sometimes there's some feelings going on that we don't, we really don't feel equipped to feel, or we don't know how to feel.
And, and so when those come up, trying to figure out what to do with those, it's not all or nothing. Right. And it's nothing all at once. And that is one of the reasons that. Kind of looking at all the pieces and in the next session, we're really going to talk more about what are the pieces of the puzzle, what are the missing pieces and giving yourself permission to not do it in a linear way, but to kind of bounce around and bounce back and forth is so important.
Yeah. , alright. So I said, yes, coaching. I don't really know what my question is. So can you start me off? Well, what brought you? What intrigued you? You know, what brought you to this? I struggle with figuring out what to eat, how much to eat and feeling the sense, like I want to keep control of my weight and so that it doesn't like go off the rails and I have this.
Yeah. And I guess I just kind of have the sense. Oh, no, it'll just get better. It will just get better. Things will get better. And I will just somehow lose the 10 pounds that I would like to lose. And, and then it will be all good and, and it just doesn't happen. And I'm finding myself kind of looking like looking at desserts in a different way, like in a kind of more voracious sort of way.
And, and, and, and not sending off alarm bells of like way no something's going on. What's your sense of what's going on? That I have a bunch of like control issues, power, like sense, like a, my own sense of my own power is really in a, in a shaky point right now. So I think I'm, I'm looking to eating. As just an easy way to almost like process things and think about things and be, and not, I don't know, not have to not have to feel that kind of ickiness, but it's not easy is my sense because it's, it's causing you discomfort.
Yeah. It's causing me discomfort in the sense of, I. I mean, I just, yeah. And it's, it's really around, you know, like looking at myself in a mirror. Right. And so like, there's, there was a thought that I had, which was like, well, maybe just don't have mirror, you know, like don't have mirrors don't and then I'm like, well, no, that's not, that's not right.
And I really do want to just like, love my body and be super good with it. Tell me if this fits for you, because I think some, for some people. For a lot of us, , we can have a goal. Like I want this thing. I want to feel this way. I want to feel super good with my body, but also not really have a clear picture of what that would be like.
And sometimes with food, it can like, you can listen to somebody talk about something like I'm talking about today. Like freedom from overeating, real freedom and oh yeah. Okay. That's like, yeah. But then when you try to apply it to your own life, and I think this is particularly true with food. For so many women, your relationship with food, not feeling good, goes back so far and has so many layers to it.
Right? Whether it's personal or cultural or, you know, stuff from media or that it can be really hard to imagine. That can be different.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I'm yeah, exactly. Yeah. I can't even imagine. Like, I think my experience with not caring and being free type of thing is where like, I'll just gain 10 pounds. You know, like, yeah. And, and that's where I'm like, but I, I don't want that. I don't want that. One of the, and I, I keep catching myself going back to the program, but it's because the pieces of the program are the things that help.
One of the first things we do in module, one of the program is to create something called your unstoppable self vision, your, your vision of yourself when, , when you are unstoppable. And we use that a lot throughout the program and the first mistake. That everybody, including myself makes when they sit down to really dig into this exercise and create their unstoppable self is to create this version of this weird Barbie doll perfection.
My unstoppable, like the, what's that smile called that the Perran. Yeah. You know, with the, my unstoppable self never gets angry and my unstoppable self never has cravings. And my unstoppable self never buys extra chocolate and my unstoppable and. because, because it's really hard to imagine that we can just be happy and we could be at ease and we could be easy with ourselves and still stay within some kind of a system that works for us that allows us to be either eat the way that we want to eat or live at the weight that we want to, you know, or have a, have our clothes fit us correctly in the, you know, the clothes that we have fit us correctly. There's so much mental that goes into how we see ourselves with food and what we believe is possible.
Are you ready? Are you ready to lose your overeating and emotional eating habits? Are you ready to find a relationship with food that fits you? One that's deprivation free. Then you need to join your missing piece.
Enrollment is open and now is a perfect time to join us. Go to TooMuchOnHerPlate.com/your-missing-peace, or click the link in the show notes to take you there. Your missing piece is the program where I show you step by step. I walk you through the process of creating freedom from overeating, with a unique combination of.
Personalized coaching with me and smart strategy. You'll learn how to reclaim your power, ditch the diets and create results that are built to last. Check it out at toomuchonherplate.com/your-missing-piece. And I'll see you inside.
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