Ahhhh…the weekend is here! But wait…the loooonnnng weekend is here! For those of us on a journey to better health, a better relationship with food, and even a weight loss journey…these weekends can be really stressful. But no more!
In this episode I’ll give you 6 practical steps you can start using immediately to make sane decisions around food, habits, weight loss, and your body during you next celebration, vacation, or long weekend.
And if you want even more support, make sure you join the totally free Food & Body Freedom Challenge!
See ya on the inside!
Resources and Links:
- Take the FREE Path to Food & Body Freedom Challenge!
- I’d love to hear your thoughts…Drop me a DM on Facebook or Insta!
TIMESTAMPS:
[00:01:22] Fostering and finding forever homes.
[00:05:06] A normal relationship with food.
[00:07:20] Learning a normal relationship with food.
[00:10:57] Enjoying the holiday weekend.
[00:14:06] Birthday cake boundaries.
[00:17:30] Decide what you want.
[00:22:30] Untangling diet culture ideas.
[00:24:30] Levels of enough and satisfaction.
[00:27:47] Obsession with food and guilt.
[00:32:31] Regulating the nervous system.
[00:35:09] Survival mode and stress response.
Full Episode Transcript:
Hello. Hello. Welcome to the Hello Body Freedom podcast. I am Audra. I’m so stoked to be here with you. Just a personal update for everybody. If you are following the podcast and you’re listening, we already have a thousand downloads. This has been the funniest freaking thing ever. I love, love, love doing this.
So I’m really happy to be doing this, just so we know. And if you are watching, so you can listen to this on all of the podcast platforms, but you can also watch on YouTube. You might notice I don’t have a total disaster and I don’t have psycho cats around because the foster kittens that I’ve been taking care of, and they have unfortunately been stuck in my office.
It’s not a bad office. I wouldn’t mind being stuck in here. But for a whole month. A whole month. And man, they were getting ready for their forever at home and ended up, one of my clients reached out to me and she lives seven hours exactly north of me. And we did a road trip to meet right in the middle.
And her husband was like, Oh my goodness. We love them. And so they found their forever home and I am so happy. I did not mean to be a foster person. I actually have three cats. I don’t even want to get into that. I never thought of myself as a cat person, just so we’re clear. I have like my dog and I’m in love with him.
He’s a five-pound Yorkie Pooey. I call him my soul dog because he’s just so special and such an amazing dog. But I have been blessed with a family who, they are really into cats, like really. And I was against them forever because two of the crazy cat people in my family are also allergic to them.
It’s like how are you allergic to, and yet you still want cats anyhow. I’m not going to get into the story. That’s a story for another day of how we ended up acquiring three cats since 2020, but we have. To have to foster two other cats. It was insane. So I am just like so happy I’ve like completely cleaned my office.
I have a nervous system downregulation. Knowing that these kittens have the most amazing forever home, knowing that my own cats who were like, where have you been for the last month? They’re like coming back around and my family’s happier because they weren’t thrilled that, it was a lot.
It was a lot and I have so much respect for people that foster. I have met some unbelievable, like angelic people in Dallas and the Dallas Fort Worth area rather since I started this process, I know of 40 different rescues and fosters. And if I, if there’s one like thing I can get behind. Like one real like political thing I could get behind is every single effing one of us should be spaying and neutering our pets because then we wouldn’t have a pet problem.
The reason I couldn’t find them a home is because no other fosters could take them because they’re just. They’re just filled. I had to do it or they were going to be lost in the streets and there’s just no reason for that. We don’t have to have overpopulation of pets because there’s plenty. We just need to spay and neuter our pets and let them be pets.
Yeah, that feels really important to me now after, after everything I’ve been through this month. That is my personal life and I am really excited to be over on this side. The other thing I want to talk about. is birthday season, just as another little fun thing.
And I wasn’t planning on talking about this, but I want to share with you y’all, especially like my life and from a standpoint of how do I manage birthdays and this and that. So my birthday was July 21st and I’m recording this in August. And so my partner’s birthday is, my mother’s birthday is on the 17th of August.
My partner’s birthday is the 24th of August. There’s, it’s just like birthday season. And anyhow, I was just thinking of you all because we had this amazing dinner planned And we went to a steakhouse. We do live in Texas and it was freaking delicious. I don’t eat steak very often, but I do love a filet.
I love it with a glass of wine. I love it with baked potato. I got a twice-baked potato. There were vegetables on my plate, but they just didn’t seem worth it. There were mushrooms and mushrooms unless it’s like a Bordeaux mushroom sauce. I’m generally not going to like wolf-down mushrooms.
I’ll eat them totally. They’re really good for you. And bell peppers. I just wasn’t like feeling it. And then we started with fried calamari. So the dinner was fried calamari. It was like this, and just to be really clear about my filet, it was bacon wrapped with, a crusted blue cheese sort of thing on top of it.
So it was just this epic. Epic dinner and I was with two of my favorite people. I was with my mom and my man and It was both of their birthday celebrations And both of them were complaining at the end that they didn’t want to eat any dessert and I was upset because I wanted to do something for their birthday or something.
But we ended up getting some it was a, like an ice cream cake kind of thing where it has Oreo cookies on the bottom and then the thing on the top, the cake thing on the top, and some drizzle of something on top of it. Anyhow… All three of us like finished that puppy off, like with our three spoons, one dessert, and we thoroughly enjoyed it.
And so I’m just, I’m putting this out there to you for a few reasons because what you need to understand is that a normal relationship with food is not restriction dieting. It’s not to deny yourself the pleasures of eating, because quite frankly, Food and eating is a huge pleasure. But when you have like guilt around it and shame around it, and I shouldn’t have eaten this and this is awful.
And then you start to go down a shame spiral. Then the next thing, you’re just now you’re binging. I mean that’s the problem here, but like restricting like that is just not a normal relationship with food. And on the other side of that, eating whatever you want. Whenever you want, as if you were a six-year-old with a free key card into every, cookie and candy store on the planet, that is also not a normal relationship with food, right?
A normal relationship with food is someplace freaking in between, and that is what makes it so hard. That’s what we do here in Hello Body Freedom is that, how do you get to a place where you know that you can go have this big-ass steak dinner, vegetables on the side, dessert. Oh, and then my mom got Josh this weird ice cream maker.
And if you guys are watching, I’m quote unquote ice cream maker, you put frozen fruit in it. So we added Two frozen bananas and then you add, we had like mixed berries and you push it through this thing like, like the way I would do my juicer and it literally comes out the other side like one second later and it looks like ice cream and it tastes like ice cream.
So I had like banana berry flavored ice cream. It was the weirdest thing ever. So that’s my point. It was like another dessert on top of the dessert that we already had on top of this amazing dinner, right? Zero guilt, zero weight gain. Like all the things and quite frankly, because it was birthday, season in July, I could tell you three or four other dinners that have been exactly like what this has been as well.
So what we have here is a situation of how do I learn how to be in a normal relationship with food where I don’t have guilt in these situations where I learn how to boundary myself. And I’ve heard this quote and I can’t remember who said it. I think she was a licensed social worker that specializes in helping people with food.
I literally can’t remember her name, but I love her quote. It is, we are learning, if we want to really talk about a normal relationship with food, what we’re learning how to do is how to say yes to food and no to food in the right balance in a way that works for our health, our body, our social life, right?
And what happens if we are struggling in our body, we have not learned how to do that. We have learned how to diet ourselves down, which is to say no to food and to massively restrict, which always leads to screw it. I’m going to eat all the things, right? And I don’t know. I just wanted to share that with you because
it’s just not a thing. We have junk food in our pantry all the time because I have an 18-year-old in my home and our 20-year-old was home for summer. And quite frankly, my man eats a lot of junk food. My experience of living in a house with a lot of junk, like I say junk food, I really should say fun food, but , it’s like real, like highly processed, high sugar, high salt, high fat, low nutrient density food that’s in my cupboard all the time. But my relationship to it is neutral. My relationship to it is I can take it or leave it. My relationship to it is calm. It’s like nothing. And this is what we teach at Hello Body Freedom.
And so if you are not there, there is work to do. There is work to do. So with that said I’m going to, first off, if you want help with that, you go to HelloBodyFreedom.com. You could just go to HelloBodyFreedom.com. And then when you click on that, you are going to see an option for joining our Path to Freedom Challenge.
It is a completely free challenge. You just got to get in there. You got to join. If you haven’t done it yet, what are you waiting for, dude? What do you have to lose? It’s effing free. Come on. Go do that. And so we start taught, we really go deep into understanding what it takes to get to this level.
So just thought I would share that. And finally, we’re going to get to what we’re actually supposed to be talking about today, which is holiday weekend fun without blowing it. And what’s great is, holiday weekend fun could also be like birthday month. It’s very similar. It’s like when you have a situation where it’s, not the norm, it’s not the normal Monday through Friday, Clean the house on the weekend, whatever.
It’s where, Oh, it’s a party. It’s a celebration. It’s something different, right? How do you actually enjoy what the thing is without blowing it? All right. And so here in the States Labor Day weekend is this weekend. I literally didn’t realize that until about an hour before this podcast episode. I’m like, that’s what we need to talk about.
We need to talk about how it’s Labor Day weekend. It’s a three-day weekend here in the States. And quite frankly, it’s like the last hoorah of summer, it’s barbecues and beaches and fun and out to eat and booze and there’s a family like it can be, it doesn’t have to be that way, but it can be like a fun three day weekend.
I know we’re getting together with family and we’re going to be going out to eat and things like that. And so what are we going to do? How do we handle this? How do we work with, how do we work with, we have goals for ourselves, right? We want things that we want for ourselves in terms of relationship with food, relationship with body.
A lot of us are on a weight loss journey. I’d say 90% of everyone that comes into my world is yeah, and trust me, weight loss is a part of this healing journey as well. So what the hell do we do? So I’m going to go over one, two, three, four, five. I’m going to move six. I’m going to give you six. We’re going to go over six steps, six steps to enjoy this holiday weekend without blowing it, unless you want to blow it.
That’s very important that you hear that unless you decide that you’re okay with blowing it. So let’s start with step one, the very first thing. And today, hopefully you’re listening to this before a holiday weekend or before any like big event or something like that, because really it’s whether it’s Labor Day or whatever day, whatever bank holiday, whatever Memorial Day, whatever, this is your process.
So get ready to rock party people. Number one, and this is very important, You need to make a decision. What do I mean by that? What normally happens is you don’t even think about it. You have all the anxiety. When I say you, I mean me, all the people we have all the anxiety, we’re freak out, it’s not even that we freak out.
It’s just that we start to notice that this event comes up and this event comes up and we’re going to, we said yes to this and we’re going to be at this restaurant and this, and we’re not actually making decisions about what to do about the scenario when it comes to food. And so when you think about the holiday that’s ahead, you think about the long weekend, whatever it might be, what actually do you want to have happen?
Okay? Because for some of us, it might be like, I don’t care about anything. I’m going to get shit-face drunk. I’m going to eat myself into a coma and that’s what I want, bitches. And what I want to say is high five. Good for you. Fist bump. All the things you do you. All right, there is something really powerful with making a decision that this is how it’s going to roll, which feels very different than eh, I’m not sure.
I really hope I’m not, I maybe, Oh, I really hope. And then you still end up shit-face drunk, eating yourself into a coma. And then on the other side of that. Like just having a real serious I’m making a decision here. What do I want? And if you want that, then you own it.
One of the things we’re learning how to do here is taking self-responsibility. We are not the victims to anything anymore. Now, I’m not saying that trauma isn’t a thing. There’s a lot to work with in terms of nervous system and untangling emotions, but it’s got to start with a decision, my friends.
It’s got to start. And when you start claiming that, when you start owning the thing that you want. You can’t really move forward before that. So now on the other side of, I’m going to get shit-face drunk and eat myself into a coma. The whole other restrictive side of that is I’m trying to lose all the weight.
And so I’m not going to go out with anybody and, I’m not going to say yes to that party. And I’m going to like only eat carrot sticks and then I’m going to go to this party and I’m just going to put a piece of lettuce in my mouth. Freaking crazy too. Okay. Clearly you can see which one I prefer versus doing that.
But my point is that what you want to do is get some clarity for yourself. Okay, whichever, so I’m handing you two extremes right now and I do have clients, like I had a client recently, it was her birthday and we had a big conversation about it because she’s I am on a roll. I feel like I need to give myself these boundaries.
And quite frankly, I really feel like one of those boundaries is I don’t want to eat cake. I don’t want to eat sweets on my birthday this year. I just don’t. I do it every single year. It’s always a thing. Most people do, but I’m really feeling like that matters to me. And so for some of us, and I even, I will tell you, even for me, I’m listening to her.
And I’m like my birthday is around the corner and I’ll be damn straight if I’m not going to have a piece of cake, or a cupcake or something like, I know that’s what I was thinking, but as a good coach, I’m not like pushing my shit on her. I’m like, what feels true for you? Does it feel obsessive?
Does it feel desperate? Do you, are you having like desperation or does it feel in alignment with your deepest truth and highest consciousness? And we got quiet, closed the eyes, took a couple of deep breaths, put a hand on a heart and a hand on the belly. And I don’t know why that works, but it works all the time when you can pause and just get still and quiet.
And she’s this really matters to me. And I’m like, great. Okay. What happens if let’s say you do it. You decide not to have the thing what’s going to happen on the other side of that? It’s your birthday. Are you going to be like upset and frustrated victim? Or are you going to be proud of yourself?
And she’s I’m going proud of myself. Boom. She made the decision. Okay. So I’ve given you two ideas. I’m going to eat all my, eat myself into oblivion, drink myself into oblivion, or, don’t even go out, have a piece of lettuce, don’t have sweets on my birthday. We have two big extremes, but in the middle, which is what we do in HelloBodyFreedom in terms of learning how to find middle ground, especially for a long weight loss journey.
Is what does that middle ground look like? So the very first thing is just to decide. It does not matter if you go in extreme one direction or if you hang out in the middle, but the very first thing must be decision. And so if you are deciding, okay, does this decision include food? And what does that look like?
If I’m going to go to this party, what does eating the food seem like? Can you envision what it’s like? How many of us go to parties and then the next thing we know we have one or two things in our mouth, we have one or two drinks down our body and then we’re sitting at the food table the whole time just absolutely lost and just eating and eating, right?
What you’re trying to do is create like future pace what really feels good for you. So I’ll have some clients go I think that I probably shouldn’t drink at all because every time I have a little bit of a drink, then the whole thing happens and the next thing I know it’s a shit show. And so that’s their decision.
I have others that go, okay, I have a. Two drink max or a one drink max. And when I have that, I’m going to sip it and I’m going to enjoy it. I’m going to carry it around with me. And then after that, I’m going to get a fancy non-alcoholic drink, something with like ice cubes and a little umbrella sticking out of it to make me feel fancy.
Cause I’m at this party or something like that. And they make that decision because it’s in alignment with deepest truth and highest consciousness. They’re like, this is what I want to do. I want to make sure I show up to this party hungry because I want to enjoy the food at the party or restaurant or at the barbecue or wherever you happen to be, or if it’s just your own home and your own dinner, I want to make sure to eat slow and I want to really tune into my body cues.
That’s a decision you are making like practical, tactical, tangible decisions on the things you’re actually going to do. in the scenario of the holiday weekend or wherever you’re at in that moment. Okay. So I know I’ve spent a lot of time on this, but number one, decide what you want to do. Get clarity.
Very powerful. Okay. Number two, I recommend on your holiday weekend that if you’re not in like severe pain and debilitated, that you move, that you actually move your body more than you normally do. So that means maybe you, for me, I have to go hit Costco. We have to run errands. That means cleaning up the house.
That means going for a walk. That means maybe taking a yoga class or doing some fitness things or doing some squats or having a dance party, but seriously, when you move your body, you are going to feel better. And if it is a holiday weekend sitting around, around the boob tube all day and, just lost in oblivion, it’s actually not going to say that’s the worst thing ever, but I am saying that if you move your body, it is good for your mental health.
It will make you feel better. It’s like the glass immediately gets half full instead of half empty. Move your body people. Even if that’s just five minutes out your front door, you turn around and move five minutes back. Let movement be a part of what it means to be you, what it means to be on this planet.
Your body is meant to move. And so any way to make this happen is going to help. And it’s going to make you feel better. Notice. I did not say get a killer workout out or in so you can burn 8, 000 calories so that we could eat whatever you want. That’s a shitty way of thinking that will always keep you stuck.
That will always be an excuse to eat more food. That is the absolute opposite of what I’m saying. I’m saying move your body because it’s going to make you feel better. All right. There’s number one. There’s number two. Number three, connect into the sensation of when you’re actually hungry. That’s a little different for everybody.
If you’ve been dieting for a long time, they’re usually pretty extreme sensations. So you often can’t feel it unless it’s crazy hungry or unless you’re crazy stuffed, right? But the truth is that there’s this whole plethora of hunger and satisfied in the middle of these extremes. And when you start to eat, not because it’s time, not because you feel like it, not because you’re bored.
Not because you’re walking through Costco and oh, there’s 18 samples. I guess I’m gonna eat all 18, right? When instead you’ve changed the focus to wait, am I actually even hungry? Is there some sense of physical hunger emptiness, right? And whenever you do this on a holiday weekend Or a birthday weekend, like what I was talking about with my family.
Freaking powerful party people. Freaking powerful. Paying attention. Oh, but what if it’s a party, and it starts at 5, and what if I’m not hungry? You’re not going to be hungry because you ate something at 3. And if you want to be hungry at 5, probably don’t eat something at 3. You know what I mean?
Start to go, wait a second, I really want to enjoy this meal and feel like I’m eating because of physical hunger. So then that requires learning how to say no to food before the thing in a way so that your body has the opportunity to digest whatever you had for breakfast. I’m just thinking out loud, there’s so many different scenarios of how this works.
There’s consciousness around this, right? You’re not just like walking through the day and going to, Oh, I guess I’m hungry. I guess I better eat. No. You’re thoughtful about it. All right. Again, notice how so much of this is about thoughtfulness, consciousness, readjusting relationship, not based on old patterns of behaviors of I’m bored.
I’m lonely. It’s here. I want it. It’s noon. I guess I have to eat cause it’s noon. What? No. Body cues. So noticing when you’re hungry. Okay. And here’s the fun thing. So decide what you want to do. Make sure you’re moving your body through the weekend. Like really practice eating for the sole purpose of physical hunger.
That’s really powerful. Now here’s the fun part. When you are actually physically hungry, I actually want you to eat what you want. Y’all, when I had that steak dinner, I knew exactly what I wanted. I knew exactly what was happening, and man, I was excited to eat it because boy, I was hungry. I was hungry. I started getting hungry.
Way earlier than I wanted and I’m like, Oh, gosh, darn it. I know if I eat something that I’m, I don’t want it to kill my appetite. Food tastes better when you’re hungry. It’s amazing how that happens, right? And so I was looking for a snack about two hours before, not to overstuff myself, but to be really thoughtful of the snack.
So my snack had carbs, protein, and fat in it. And it was not very much. And it was, maybe. 200 calories or something like, it was a snack. It was like an itty bitty little snack and it was exactly perfect. It was just enough to calm a little bit. So that way, but not too much.
So that way I’d end up stuffing myself before this amazing steak dinner. And if you’re wondering what that snack was to help you untangle your diet culture ideas, that snack was peanut butter-filled pretzels. So it’s like a pretzel square with peanut butter in the middle of it. Nutrient-dense? Eh, it’s got protein because of the peanut butter.
It’s got fat because of the peanut butter, and it’s got carb because of the pretzel. Best snack on the planet? No, but I wanted it. I was hungry. It was macronutriently solid. I’m not just having a sugar bomb, which would be a real mess. And quite frankly, it did the job, right?
Boom. Done. Woo! Ready to go. Okay. And what did I do with that snack? I ate what I wanted. I learned how to say yes and no to food based on the decision that’s happening in this moment. I’ve got to think about the steak dinner. I want to eat it. I want to be hungry for it. I don’t want to overeat this. All of a sudden I have all this consciousness going on, all of this mindfulness of going slow, right?
Deciding on what I want to eat based on my body cues. So let’s go over what we’ve learned so far. You must make a decision for your weekend. Don’t just walk into this willy-nilly and think it’s all going to work out. You must make decisions and they need to be like tangible steps. This is what I’m doing, not this is what I’m hoping for.
Not I really hope this works out. No, this is what I’m choosing to do because it’s in alignment with deepest truth and highest consciousness. Number two, move your body. It’s going to make you feel better. Number three, re-align your eating with hunger, right? So eating when you’re hungry. And then number four is Eating what you want, eating what you want based on the decision you made above, right?
Based on the number one, I’m making this decision and then tune in. I’m hungry. Yeah. Here’s the food. This is the plethora of food at this restaurant or at this buffet or at this barbecue, whatever. This is what I’m choosing. This is what I want. And then the next part, just like I did with the peanut butter pretzels, I stopped at enough.
I was like, okay, like really? And it was a little bit more strict with that enough. I’m like, nah, we’re not going to make, we’re not going to mess this up. I want to really enjoy those dinner, right? The enough that I had for that snack, totally different than the enough that I had with my yummy birthday steak dinner with, for my mom and my man.
Okay. And what does that mean? That means there’s different levels of enough and satisfied and full. And this is based on sensations in the body. And again, if you’ve been lost in diet culture for a long time, very likely, The only ones that you’re really like attuned to are incredible hunger, which is what strikes you to overeat, and then incredible fullness and taking it over to the top, right?
This is why we have to have mindfulness to slow it down a little bit and start to practice feeling. So I had much more of a full feeling. After the fun steak dinner with the ice cream thing we all shared. But I did not feel icky. No part of my body felt like I overdid it. I did not have pain or suffering.
I did not feel like I needed to go into a food coma. None of that happened. I felt satisfied And a fullness that felt really good. Okay And so there it is eating when you’re hungry, eating what you want and stopping it enough. And now you’re listening to what happened to me and my jam on Sunday of how I made this happen.
And you get to do this weekend. This is a very practical way that you can enjoy the food of the holiday, right? It’s a three-day weekend. You’re going to be out places like let’s figure out how to do this in a way that works in alignment with your goals. Okay. And now here’s. the hard part for people who use food for a million other reasons.
And this is step six. So we’ve talked about deciding what you want to do. We’ve talked about moving your body, eating when you’re hungry. Number three, number four, eating what you want, right? Number five, stopping at enough, like what that means, what the different feelings and sensations of that is. And the only way you’re going to get.
Any of this right, by the way, is to practice it. The only way you like, but no, you’re going to get it right. You’re going to get it wrong. I still get it wrong sometimes. It just doesn’t happen very often. Why? Because I’ve got a lot of practice. I started practicing this shit in 2011. Y’all it’s 2023.
That is a 12 years. That is 12 years of practice. I promise. But you got to start somewhere. You just start taking steps. Okay. Now here’s step six. So now we know all this. Once you’ve waited until you’re hungry, you’ve got, you know what you’re doing. You’re eating what you want. You’re learning how to say yes and no in just the right way.
You’re paying attention. Oh, enough. Satisfy whatever it is I’m done. And now that moment is over, this part is so important. You’re done eating. It’s over. Move on with your life. Go live life. Do something awesome. Sit around and relax. Talk to people. What, like whatever, do anything. But the understanding is that food is on purpose in our life.
We need food, but we also need to not think about it all the time. It should be a sense of desire when you’re hungry. It should feel like this pleasure when you’re eating and it should have satisfaction when it’s over. Whether it’s a burger or a salad or a steak dinner or donut or peanut frickin butter pretzel things, right?
This is how it works. And whenever you learn this and you start to embody this, you then the next practice is to move on, kitchen closed. Put the shit away. Go live your life. How many of us just are sitting there just obsessed with food and obsessed with this and then we, Oh my God, I shouldn’t eat this.
Now I feel guilty. Now I feel ashamed. I don’t know if I did it right. It’s Oh my God, let it go. Move on. Enjoy your life. You deserve to not live a life of feeling stressed, overwhelmed, and depressed. Now, listen, I know we’ve talked about a lot, but if you need help with all of these things, you need to go to hellobodyfreedom.com and join the Path to Food and Body Freedom challenge. It is a free, completely free five-day challenge. We hold your hand. You have a challenge mentor. When you get in there, we walk you through we talk, everything we’re talking about right here is really, it’s day one, it is day one of a five-day challenge.
So if you feel like you’ve gotten value out of this. Get into that challenge and start to really be like, Whoa, what else is there besides that? Whoa, mind-blowing. What will likely happen is your mind will be blown. Okay. So please go take that challenge. Now I have one bonus for you before we get going before we’re finished.
All right, here we go. Bonus, join the challenge. That’s a bonus. No, just kidding. Definitely join the challenge which you’ll get a lot of bonuses for sure. But the bonus that I have is for this episode, so I wanna recap it. Then I wanna give you a little bit of bonus number one, you are making decisions for yourself.
You are learning self-trust because you are saying, I am choosing the thing that’s going to happen this weekend. I’m choosing it and I’m doing what I say I’m going to do. All right. You’re doing right and making honest decisions about what matters most. Some of us are like, screw it. Some of us are like, no, I’ve got huge goals.
I’m in, this matters right now. And some of us are like, man, how do you still enjoy it in the middle ground and still Reach your goals, right? Wherever you are, make the decision. Number two, move your body. It’s just going to make you feel better. Number three, number four, and number five are all about your relationship to body and relationship with food, right?
Which means number three is when you start, let eating happen because of physical hunger. Let the process of choosing, I’m going to eat this food. Let it be to connected to there’s actual empty physical hunger here. Let that be the first thing. All right. Number two, eat what you want. This is where you’re learning how to say yes to food and no to food in just the right way.
All right. If you don’t know, you’re never going to know unless you try. Okay. You’re going to get it right. Sometimes you’re going to get it wrong sometimes, but the more you practice, the better and better you get. And then when you’re eating, there is an actual thing that is happening where you are connecting to the food.
You’re connecting to the body. Even when there’s family, even when it’s a happy birthday and you’re paying attention, like where’s enough, what does enough feel like is, the enough for the snack I had was very different than the enough for the steak dinner that I had later that evening. But stopping at enough is number five. And number six is once you’re done, move on, kitchen closed, live your life. Trust me, there will be another meal and another opportunity to eat. And guess what? When you follow this process of eating when you’re hungry, eating what you want, you can have whatever the hell you want when you’re hungry again, y’all.
It’s all good. Okay, now here’s the bonus because I also know that this can stress people out. You’re going to go down a hole. You’re going to mess up. Things happen. We have all this obsession around food. We have guilt around food. We have nervous systems that have learned that when we feel a certain intensity, if I feel bored, I eat.
If I’m sad, I eat. If I’m angry, I eat. If I’m lonely, I eat. If I need to be comforted, I eat. If I’m just going through Costco, I’m eating because it’s all those damn, samples. And so what really you’re doing is instead of being able to feel the feeling of bored, you’re just stuffing food on top of it, right?
Instead of being able to smell the smells at Costco and see it and go, Ooh, that looks good. And you’re, instead of you being able to just walk past it, which feels like, Oh, maybe I’m missing out. That’s a feeling. That’s an emotion. That’s a sensation in the body. Instead of what we do is we like shove food on top of it.
So what I’m really asking you to do is to learn how to feel a little uncomfortable by saying no, unless you’re physically hungry. And so here’s the bonus. The bonus is an actual nervous system, bottom-up thing that you can practice anywhere. And I will tell you right now, when you very first come into Hello Body Freedom as a client, this is one of the very first things that we teach in terms of skillset of regulating your nervous system.
And this is I got this from the Huberman lab. I’m a huge fan of the Huberman lab. It’s just so juicy, such good juicy science in there. But I love he had this whole episode on breath work and we have to use body-based tools if we want to be holistic and we want to get through this.
If not, we feel a feeling, we’re just going to go drink some alcohol to make it better. Or we’re going to go like stuff some food in our face to, to numb out. What we’re learning is how do I feel what I’m feeling and then regulate it down. And so this is a really cool practice and we’re going to do it together.
And it’s so easy. Okay. So you’re going to take two inhales and an exhale, but it’s not like half inhale. You’re going to take a giant inhale and when you don’t think you’d get any more air in, then you take another inhale. So it’s like you’re trying to get like extra sips of air in. Okay. And then you just exhale like just normal.
I usually like to exhale a little slow and all right, so I’m just going to do it with you and I’m going to use my arm so you can see her here. So let’s see, I’m going to go. Here we go. Let’s go. Here we go.
There it is. Woo. Always makes me yawn the first time I do it. But I want to do it again. Here I go. This time I’m going to do the whole thing through my mouth.
So good. It doesn’t matter if it’s through the nose or through the mouth. Let’s do it one more time. You guys ready? Let’s really do it. Big inhale, then another extra sip to get to the top.
That made me yawn. Woo. So this is a 100% bottom-up practice. You don’t have to know breathwork. You don’t have to know crazy stuff. There’s so many bottom-up practices that we practice inside of HelloBodyFreedom, somatic work using the body. But this one, y’all, you can do anywhere. You can do it in the grocery store.
No, but I’m exaggerating if you’re watching this on YouTube, but you don’t have to exaggerate it. You can do it in the car, you can do it walking, you could be doing while you’re eating even, right? But it literally has a physiological response of moving you further away from that sympathetic nervous system, which is the stress response, right?
It’s a biological thing that happens in the body. When your stress goes up, all these different things start to happen in the body that move you into that stress state, fight, flight, I like to call the survival mode, right? Whether it’s low or high, there’s a lot of biological consequences with that particular part of your autonomic nervous system does.
But when you do this breath, what it literally does without you having to. Do positive affirmations without you having to do weird shit like tap your forehead with it. Whenever you do all this, you literally takes you out of that and back over closer to center or more to that relaxation state, which is the sympathetic nervous system where I call that rest and die.
A lot of people call that rest and digest. Okay. And that’s it. It’s really that simple. You can do it a trillion times a day. You can do it whenever you want, but it’s especially good to use when you just start to notice you’re feeling a little funky, right? You’re feeling like a little emotional or this or the nervous system’s getting a little jacked or hijacked.
Great bonus for you. All right, my friends. So that’s what I have for you today. If you want more awesome, make sure you go to hellobodyfreedom.com. Sign up for our five-day path to food and body freedom challenge. All right, my friends, thank you so much. Have an amazing time. I’ll see you in the next episode.
Bye.
Important Links
