Ep. 50 How to Stop Overthinking Food
Hi and welcome to the Mindful Shape podcast. I’m Paula Parker, and I’m a life and weight loss coach.
It’s kind of funny because sometimes I sit down to do this podcast and I’m like, what can I possibly say here. You know when you’re just kind of in it - it’s been a week let me just say. I was sick, my toddler was sick, my husband was away for work - it was a lot. So I really scoured the depths of my brain on this one and here’s a topic that I really do feel I can confidently speak to today because it is something I truly have overcome. I know there are a lot of weight loss podcasts out there to choose from and I get the sense that most of them are coming from the after photo, yeah know what I mean? Ah - not so with this one! We are probably more in this together than you might think.
Okay here’s what I would really love to share with you if you are finding yourself overthinking food and your weight. Let’s talk about how overthinking food shows up for you, why this is happening and what to do about it.
FUTURE:
Spend more time than you want thinking about what you’re going to eat trying to plan for every possible event, when to eat given your schedule
or fantasizing (Either - creating overdesire, or entertaining thoughts about snacking or eating foods that don’t serve your body)
how you ‘shouldn’t’ be thinking so much about food or wanting the food, OR dreading restriction
PAST: Ruminating on what you ate - whether you ate too much or not enough. That creates fear - either fear of hunger or fear you will gain or maintain your weight. Thinking you ate too much can also lead to guilt, shame and thinking you might not have eaten enough can lead to overwhelm and confusion - even panic about being too hungry later. You basically start second guessing yourself and you might even fall into all or nothing thinking here - either you give up and think it’s hopeless anyways you might as well eat what you want or you consider a super strict way of eating. Like cutting out sugar and flour forever or fasting for a day.
If any of this resonates with you, know that you’re not alone and these thoughts are very common to those of use who have been on a weight loss journey. And they’re thought patterns that have been etched in our brain over and over which is why we keep thinking them. Our brain uses a lot of metabolic energy so to conserve energy it will use the same neural pathways it always has - the ones that are memorized in your brain - because it’s simply more efficient and requires less energy.
Up until this point, you might have believed this is just your reality as a person who’s trying to lose weight. And you hate it - you want out but you’ve been doing it since you were a teenager and so it’s kind of like the only way you know how to be at this point. Ruminating on what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat and feeling a lot of doubt about it - is it going to help you lose weight - what if you feel like crap?
And so that’s why meal plans or really specific diets can be attractive - we want someone else to tell us to eat this and you’ll get what you want. But it usually doesn’t last - either because it’s too expensive to eat like that forever, or it’s not convenient or you just don’t feel satisfied eating what they tell you. So instead I want to offer that it’s much more valuable to you to instead get to know your own body and become your own weight loss strategist. What happens when you do this is that you learn how to build trust with your body, you know how to make decisions around food and you have far less rebellion because you’re creating the rules. When someone else tells you how to eat, you’re just not likely to have as much buy in from your brain as when you’ve made the decision from a place of confidence.
So if you’re like, that sounds great but how do I even do that? If you want food to be simply a part of your life - something that nourishes you and you enjoy and eat in healthy but not dogmatic way, and then once you’ve eaten you don’t ruminate on what you ate, you must start living as if you are someone who trusts themselves around food and makes decisions ahead of time. Let me explain what I mean by that.
I want to zoom way out and get to the heart of why ALL of this overthinking is happening. That’s your foundation - like the foundation on the house. If we get that right, we will stop all of this overthinking at the root. Often our tendency is to think that we can simply keep making habit or dietary changes and that’s the problem - like if I could just stop snacking after dinner or stop eating candy, I wouldn’t be thinking about food all the time.
But that’s like putting down new tile on a crooked floor. For over a decade I lived in a building in Vancouver that was pretty much rent controlled - and it had a ton of character, let's say. So it was built in the 20’s and it had its quirks. Like the kitchen floor was slanting into the center of the building. If you dropped a marble it would roll right in. I did my best to spruce up the place with the tiny budget I had. I put those sticky tiles on the floor. It was an improvement for sure - but it was never going to address the structural issues of that building. After I moved, they gutted it and turned it into luxury apartment suites but I’m so curious if they were able to fix that floor issue.
So back to the main topic - what I’m suggesting is that we turn you into someone who can trust themselves around food. Because if you think about it - when you’re at your natural weight that’s what you want. You don’t want to be skinny and still have food drama. So let’s do it now and make the whole process calmer.
An Identity shift is required here - focus not on your end goal but on who you want to be today - how you want to show up in the world and support yourself through this weight loss process. That’s key so I’ll repeat it - instead of focussing on the 10, 30lbs or 60lbs you want to release, instead focus - put your time and attention to the kind of women you want to be around food.
Let’s make this really practical. Let’s say you want to be someone who trusts themselves around food. That’s your foundation.
From there, if you were acting as if you DID trust yourself, how would you make these 3 decisions:
1)When to eat. If we think of hunger as a communication tool and we can respond either by letting our body use its fat stores or eat food, we can decide in advance how hungry we will allow our body to get before eating.
I know I’ve talked about a hunger scale before and I’ve updated that. I find it better to use a hunger scale from 0 to 10. Where 0 is not hungry at all and 10 is ravenous. So it’s a matter of degree. So for example, if you want to let your body use up some of your fat stores, you could intentionally allow more hunger. So you might wait until you get to a 7 or 8 on the hunger scale before you eat. I personally find this works better for me than creating a timing rule for myself which I have done in the past - like I don’t eat before 11am or something. If my goal is to trust my body and nurture that relationship, it makes more sense for me personally, to decide on a hunger level and let my body tell me when it’s time. Because it really changes depending on what I ate the day before, how much sleep I’ve had, and how active I’ve been. When you’ve decided I trust my body and myself, you can choose a hunger level for each meal and you’ll always know exactly when to eat.
Sometimes I get questions about scheduling - like what if your hunger level is 7 but you’re about to start a long shift and you’re only at a 3? In this case you can decide to wait and allow your body to use its fat stores while you’re working or you might want to eat but less than you would at a hunger level of 7.
Which brings me to my next decision you’ll make as if you are someone who trusts their body: 2) When you will stop eating. How much do you need to eat when you’re trying to lose weight? How much is too much or not enough? The only way you would ever have these questions and second guess yourself is if you’re not paying close attention to what your body is telling you. Your body knows how much to eat to be at your natural weight. Oftentimes we spend all of our time thinking about food EXCEPT when we are actually eating it. Oftentimes we rush through our meals to get it over with. That can happen a lot for those of us who have restricted and have a residual negative association with allowing ourselves food and the pleasure of eating it. If you’ve ever counted calories or macros with the idea that less is better, this might be happening for you. So instead what you can do is slow down, enjoy what you’re eating - ps only eat foods that taste good to you - I’ll talk about that in a minute - and notice when you are satiated and have had enough.
I think this is maybe the most challenging one for a lot of us. It’s so easy to continue eating past the point of being satiated because we’ve been trained to finish our plate or it simply tastes really good and we want more. So this is a refined skill of getting really clear on how you want to feel in your body after you’ve finished eating and using that as your guide. The discomfort of stopping when you mentally want more but your body doesn’t is far less that the discomfort you feel when you’ve overeaten and not living at your natural weight. So it’s worth it to build this skill even if it takes longer than you’d hope.
Lastly you’ll want to explore What foods work for you - what foods make you feel great and energized and in which quantities? Which foods allow the scale to go down and which keep it stagnant? We know that alcohol, sugar, flour and deep fried foods aren’t conducive to weight loss and typically don’t feel that great in our bodies, but to what degree is going to be unique to you. Also, sometimes you’ll want to have these foods knowing that you might not feel so amazing. That’s totally allowed by the way. When you are someone who trusts their body and themselves, you’ll allow yourself foods simply for pleasure once and awhile and it won’t be a big deal.
So what’s the big takeaway here? To stop overthinking food, you need to be someone who trusts themselves around food and to do that you need to decide ahead of time when you’re going to eat (how hungry you will be), what satiation feels like in your body to know how much, and which foods will make you feel the best.
Once you get into the habit of making these types of decisions, you’ll start building that trust with your body. Your body will tell you when it really needs food, when it’s had enough and which foods work best. You’ll know based on how you feel energetically, what’s happening with digestion, hunger cues and fullness cues.
Will you follow through every time? Of course not! Perfection is not necessary. And it’s very important to mention that when you don’t follow through - you don’t make it mean something terrible about you and what you’re capable of. You just take notes - oh wow I didn’t allow my body to get to 7 before eating, why? What could I try tomorrow that would allow for that? Or I really ate past satiation last night - what would have been required of me to not go for seconds? You get curious, you strategize and try things.
Now maybe you’re like, umm isn’t that overthinking again? That’s a lot of thinking about food again. I hear you but it totally serves a different purpose. It’s the type of thinking and attention that is going to move you closer to what you want. Whereas overthinking that has the energy of remorse and uncertainty only leads to spinning your wheels. If you’re going to be focussed on releasing weight - there is going to be some thinking about food required. We just want to make sure it’s the type of thinking that’s useful.