“I Can’t Have Food Freedom and Achieve Results.”

My Story

Have you ever had diet mentality? It may have affected you if you’ve ever been on a diet that gave you specific rules and restrictions. That’s the whole industry; there are certain rules and approaches and plans that you have to follow. There’s so much information out there that it can be so incredibly overwhelming, yet we fall into it. For the first 20 years of my life, I certainly did, for at least 15 or 16 of those years. When I was 5 I can already remember being on my first diet. 

When I was 5, one of my friend’s mothers told me that I was bigger than the other girls, that I’ll need to lose weight, and that I should go on a diet. I can still remember it. Although based on the growth chart I was actually a normal kid, it was already in my head that something was wrong with me. Over the years, that belief led me to find more evidence for why I wasn’t the same as my friends, that I should change and try to be different. That’s how I started experimenting with all the different diets out there: the Zone, Atkins, keto, Suzanne Somers, Weight Watchers, intermittent fasting, the 8-minute diet - you name it, I tried it.

The truth is that all of them will work, but to sustain the results that you get with them, you have to be able to continue doing them. Why did it take me until I was 25 to realize this? 

Freedom

Biologically, humans crave freedom. We don’t want others to tell us what to do. So what happens when we hear, “You can’t have that cake?”. The idea that we can’t do it just makes us want it even more. 

If you have any dieting history, you might think back about all the diets you’ve been on and how hard they were. Yet we somehow still believe that because it was difficult, it’s going to work. It’s the heaven’s reward fallacy, a thought distortion that tells us that the harder we work, the bigger the reward should be. It’s definitely an idea we hear often in clinical practice. As a result, the whole concept of having trust in ourselves goes out the window. 

But in order to find food freedom and get results, we have to start by trusting ourselves.

Defining Food Freedom

Often, when I say “food freedom” to people, they get freaked out. They say, “I can’t eat all the cake and candy and ice cream and pizza and fries I want and still get a six-pack. What are you talking about?” So we have to define what food freedom means to you. Is food freedom really just eating every single thing you’ve been told you shouldn’t have?

In reality, food freedom is tapping into your intuition. It’s noting when you’re hungry and when you’re full. It’s getting in touch with your natural hunger cues and your full signals. It’s asking your body what it wants and needs to feel healthy and vibrant. 

Here is an experiment I want you to do this week. If you’re losing fat, what do you crave? I crave fat. Makes sense, doesn’t it? When I’ve been doing a lot of weight training, my body craves protein. The signs are there. You’ll find freedom when you start listening to the signs. That’s how you’ll get results.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Hunger

First, we listen and start to notice. We want to get good at understanding when we’re hungry. We want to eat when we’re hungry, but before we get to the hangry zone when we can’t even focus. 

It’s important to discover and describe what hunger feels like for you in your body. Next time you’re hungry, think about what your body feels. For me, it’s a burning, radiating feeling in my stomach and esophagus. 

Now, I look for that feeling right before I’m ready to eat, but at a level that I could wait another half hour or so if I wanted to. That’s the prime opportunity to ask your body what it wants to eat.

Fullness

The next step is knowing when you’re full. Stopping to eat when we’re full can be hard and overwhelming for some people. You have to get comfortable with the slow feeling and empty space of being full.

Emotional Eating

Eliminating emotional eating takes a lot of work. It requires allowing the feelings deep inside your body and realizing that everything is going to be okay. If you can eliminate the extra food that comes in when you’re not hungry, you’ll move even closer to a space that your optimal health body wants to be at.

Notice I don’t mention what your goals should be. We’re talking about optimal health, which will look different for every person. You get to determine what your optimal health is. It doesn’t have to involve a scale number. You can choose how to define optimal health for yourself. 

Movement

Another piece of this is loving movement, remembering why movement is present in our lives and all the benefits we get out of movement besides how it can potentially make us look. That’s just another thing that will happen over time as we stay consistent.

Think about the movements that you love doing, because those are the ones that you’ll do again and again. Think about what you love about them. What do you feel as you’re doing these exercises? Creating a mind-body connection will allow you to be in the moment. That’s when exercise can reduce stress, and that’s how we learn to love movement.

Perfectionism

Many women physicians struggle with perfectionism. But if we try to be perfect, it’s hard to trust ourselves. When we constantly set high expectations and don’t meet them, we’re no longer perfect in our own eyes. We believe we did something to let ourselves down. Little by little, we start to lose trust in ourselves. When we lose self-trust, we don’t believe we have the ability to know what we need so we can have freedom and achieve the goals and results we really want.

Gentle Nutrition

When we’re really going for certain results, like total body transformation, gentle nutrition has to come into the equation. Typically when we try to build muscle mass to shift our body fat percentage, we need to have balanced meals that have some macronutrient combining involved. 

Freedom for me is being able to know how to combine foods my way, not having to be at the mercy of a food scale or exact macros. It’s being able to pick exactly what I want to eat and not having to follow a prescribed plan. 

I recommend working within a ten-pound weight range that your body may be in. The lower end is when you’re really dialling it in, having a specific goal and working extra hard to get there, focusing on your hunger scale and keeping your meals balanced and healthy. The other end is about following the intuitive piece but not being so specific about how honed in things are. Ultimately, you can be anywhere in that ten-pound range that you want to be and feel really comfortable and free with it.

The bottom line? We can find food freedom and get the exact results we want to have. It’s all about self-trust and being completely realistic, taking the time to talk to your body.