When we’re going through challenging times, we think there are two options - eating on track (eating that optimizes fat burning) or eating off track (free for all!) But there’s a third option available which I map out specifically for you to get you out of all or nothing thinking.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• Why we go into a free for all around food sometimes

• What decisions need to be made when it’s harder

• My exciting update!

Hi, and welcome to The Mindful Shape Podcast. I'm Paula Parker, and I'm a life and weight loss coach. All right, so it's been a little while since I recorded a podcast and I did hear from some of you which was very touching, just checking in on me and wondering why there hasn't been a podcast in a little while.

So I thought I would just begin today with a little personal update. And for those of you who are brand new and you're not really that interested in my life, , I totally understand. That's okay. You can go ahead and skip forward. I do not mind at all. I know when I first start listening to a podcast, I don't really care that much about the host , and then I'm just there for the content.

And then as I listen more, I become more interested in their life and. I, I do care. So if that's you, if you are interested, then I just wanted to give you a little, little insight into what is going on for me right now. So, as you might be able to tell I'm a little nasally. I am getting over Covid right now.

So I was sick for a little while testing negative for a few days, and then most recently testing positive. So not sure if I had covid the whole time. In any case, I've been sex for a couple of weeks, but that's actually not the reason why I haven't been recording a podcast that is much more exciting. And that news is that I'm pregnant.

So I am just going into the second trimester right now, and the first trimester was really challenging. So my first pregnancy a couple of years ago, I had some mild nausea in the first trimester. , but nothing like this. This was much more intense and just I noticed changes in my mood and my energy and just being so nauseous and throwing up and the whole thing.

So I wanted to maintain my client calls and be rested and be focused on those calls. And so outside of the calls, I didn't really do anything. I just rested. And so that's why the podcast hasn't been happening. However, as I said, I'm getting over this cold. I'm moving into the second trimester and already feeling better, so I'm really hopeful that it will just continually improve and I will be able to get out all my podcast ideas cuz I have so many ideas that I wanna share with you.

So the first one is just really about this. It's okay, what do we do when we're going through some really challenging circumstances, right? It's like there's sometimes where it's gonna be big, where maybe there's something medical happening that's outside of your control, or you lose a job or you're, maybe you lose somebody or a pet and you're grieving.

or it could just be lots of little things like an increase in demands on you because maybe other people in your household are sick or whatever it is that you're going through when it's really, it feels extra hard. A lot of us, I think, think there's two options and likely we go to giving up on the weight loss.

right? So we go to, well, now is not the time. I just can't handle this. It's too much. And so we kind of swing into this free for all and, and then the alternative we think is just like being a hundred percent on track. So I just wanted to talk about that because I think that there is a third option and I really wanna map that out for you, just to give you a perspective of if you are going through a challenging time some options for you to.

All right. This is also gonna be true just if you tend to be an all or nothing person, which I know so many of us can fall into that line of thinking. So I think this will be helpful for you as well. So, as I mentioned, oftentimes we'll go into thinking there's only two options, either eating on track, I'm just thinking of that as.

Eating in a way that really optimizes fat burning, or we're eating off track, which is, we think there's, it's just a free for all, and we're in the screw it mentality when it comes to food. So what that looks like. We're all pretty aware, I think, at this point, but you're just not paying attention, right? So you're not paying attention to your hunger levels.

You are just eating whenever there's food around, whenever food is offered to you, whenever it's mealtime or just whenever you. Thought about food. You will eat something you're not paying attention to. Am I physically hungry? The other thing you're not likely noticing is how you're feeling while you're eating and after your meal.

So how much food do you need? Are you satiated? Are you satisfied? Oftentimes we'll just eat out of pleasure. We just eat because it tastes good. And we kind of ignore our body cues to like, okay, I've had, I've had enough. Right. And then another thing that falls by the wayside when we're in this free for all is we don't do any planning.

So often times we're not thinking about. What we want our protocol to be. We're not meal planning, anything like that. Another thing with planning is you're not deciding how many exceptions you're gonna have, and when I talk about exceptions, I'm just talking about things that really spike your insulin and put you into fat storage mode, like refined sugar, refined flour, alcohol, and deep fried food.

So when we're in a free for all, oftentimes we're not keeping track of how many servings that we're having of these items. We can likely be in fat storage mode for the greater part of the day, even into the evening sometimes. And of course, if we're gonna be in that mode, then we're gonna gain weight. , and we do this because there's valid reasons like we're, but we just, we're misinformed, right?

We think we're gonna get temporary relief from either physical discomfort or emotional discomfort. Our tendency is to want to hit the escape button whenever we're in this and reach for the food, thinking that it's gonna make us feel better. Right? Does for like maybe a second , maybe 10 seconds. It makes us feel better, really, really temporarily.

But of course that's not the truth. The truth is that it's actually not any less painful, and here's why. In case your brain is still telling you that food is a solution, when you're not feeling great or when you're stressed or going through a challenging time, there's three main things that I identify.

One is physical discomfort. . So when you overeat or you're choosing foods that don't sit right in your body, you know, there can be stomach upset, there can be heartburn, that kind of thing. And then I think there's physical discomfort too. If you, I know for me, if I eat lots of carbohydrates, I can feel it in my body.

It's like I retain water and my clothes feel different. That's physically uncomfortable. . The other thing is overthinking food. So sometimes we'll go on vacation or I have a client who she said before, you know, when I go on vacation, I didn't plan because I didn't wanna overthink food. But then of course when we talk about it - what we can see is that not planning, because you're thinking, I don't wanna overthink food.You actually end up thinking about food way more than you would've if you just planned and followed through the plan. And when I say plan, I'm not talking about the specific food, although that can work. Oftentimes you're on a vacation, it's just not realistic. But what you can plan for are things like your hunger levels, how you wanna feel in your body, and whether or not you're gonna have an exception.

And if so, how many? Those are the types of things that you can plan. When you're thinking, I don't wanna overthink food, I don't wanna plan. What ends up happening is you do think about food all the time because you're thinking, what am I going to eat? Maybe I overate, and all the drama and thoughts about that.

Then of course, there's all of the thinking that you do when you get back from the holiday that you're now planning. You're kind of dwelling on maybe the result that you have now on the. What you ate. Maybe you shouldn't have eaten that, beating yourself up, all of that, right? So we kind of tell ourselves this lie that we're not planning because we don't want to think about food all the time.

And then of course we end up thinking about food all the time. And then the third one is really that we think we're gonna get out of emotional distress. Like we're gonna lessen the emotional pain. But actually for most of us, Ends up increasing the emotional distress just later on, right? Just kind of pushes it out a little bit.

It's not like we're gonna alleviate feeling disappointed or feeling boredom or feeling unease or feeling stressed. We're still gonna feel that. We're just gonna feel it after we've gone through this like tidal wave of eating and distracting ourselves. So just a reminder in case your brain's like, no food is the solution here.

It's actually not. And in the moment, , you won't believe it oftentimes, right? It's hard to change the thinking in the moment when you're having an urge, but even listening to this now you're planting the seed. So you're changing your thoughts about this now and then in the moment, it will be easier. You might not be able to change your thought exactly in the moment, but you'll just have this sense of like, I actually know this isn't really serving me right?

So you're just poking holes in those thoughts, not trying to change them in the moment. I always think it's much easier to change your thoughts beforehand, like you could be doing right now if you're open to this, and then perhaps you have the urge and then you reflect, and then you also change your thoughts afterwards.

Don't worry about trying to like willpower your way through in the moment to try to change your thinking, trying to talk yourself out of wanting the food. It's okay if your brain's like, no, you're really gonna feel better. And you, and you believe that in the moment, that's okay, but you will also know.

intellectually that of course you won't, and it does help. I will say in my own experience, it does help just being able to tell myself, oh, it's so interesting. My brain is offering up food as a solution, that food is looking really enticing when I'm not hungry. I wasn't planning on eating the leftover Halloween candy, but my brain is kind of offering that up as a suggestion.

I can now recognize. , because I've done this work beforehand, which just by listening to this, you're doing it right now, and so you can remind yourself like I do. Oh, that's so interesting. My brain just wants to feel better. It's offering up the Halloween candy, but it's just saying. . I wanna feel better. And yes, it's January and we still have Halloween candy in the cupboard.

I'm just gonna sit there forever. Okay. Another thing that happens is we want temporary relief from emotional discomfort when we're in this free for all, but we also have the tendency not to make decisions. And so I wanna talk about this third option is how to make those decisions when you're not feeling motivated.

you really don't wanna do it. Okay. So I'll talk about that. But before I get into that third option, I wanna talk about one other thing that I think can be really helpful, and it's something that I personally noticed in these, I'd say last couple of months. And it's something I knew before, but it was so interesting to see how it came up, which.

You'll probably notice this for yourself too, when your desire for things in your life is low. Desire for food is really high. And so I'll talk a little bit about my experience. So I think because of the first trimester, your hormones are kind of all over the place, right? And I didn't experience this the first time around, but in my first pregnancy, but this time around, I really noticed my mood was different.

So I wasn't depressed, but I was. Not as interested, not as enthusiastic, not as excited as I normally am about the things that I care about, about the things that I'm interested in. I'm talking about hobbies and things that I normally do that I get a lot of pleasure out of, and things that I have a lot of desire for.

And so what I notice is that when, for instance, as you might know, I'm writing a novel, a thriller and . And so usually I will have a lot of desire to write and to work on that, but I had none. And what I noticed is when I didn't have desire for that, then my brain wanted to fill that in. It's kind of like the desire exists somewhere in your body and it needs to go somewhere.

And what I noticed is my brain was offering up more desire for food. I just had more desire for food. It's really interesting. So all of that to say, it's really good to know that desire needs to go somewhere. If you notice, if you're having a lot. Over desire for food. Then I implore you to really start building that desire for the other things in your life.

So focusing on other things that will give you pleasure, that you have desire for. Because what I noticed in my experience too, the more you can transfer that desire onto those things and build momentum in that area of life, the less you'll even desire food. Like that desire will go. . Okay. So just something that I wanted to share with you that I thought was interesting and I, I think could really help.

Okay, so let's move on to what I see as a third option in your approach to eating when you're going through a challenging time. So this might not even be about releasing weight. So for some people, I'm gonna explain exactly what I'm talking about in terms of the approach. And for some people, you will release weight and some people you might not. Okay. For me, like I'm pregnant. I'm not interested in releasing weight, but I still am interested in being at peace with food and not overeating. And that's what I'm talking about is the third option. So it's not a free for all, it's not optimal fat burning, so you're not gonna release a ton of weight, but it's simply not overeating and being at peace with.

So here's exactly what it looks like. First thing is you eat only when you're physically hungry. Now, when you're optimizing fat burning, you wanna allow your body to get pretty hungry, like really hungry, maybe not ravenous, although of course that happens and it's not a problem. But you are allowing your body to use the fat stores that it has instead of glucose, and that's how you burn the fat off your body, right?

So you're gonna allow a lot of physical hunger when you are. Kind of a more moderate approach. You still wanna allow physical hunger, but it might not be as high. So let's say if you're using the hunger scale that I use, 10 is ravenous. Instead of going to like an eight or nine, you might be eating it like a five to seven, that kind of range, right?

So you're just modifying when you normally eat. , you might go from eating two meals to three meals, something like that, right? And changing your hunger scale. The second one is about how much you're eating. So again, this third approach, you're just paying attention. So you're stopping when you're satiated and you don't eat one bite more.

So we don't need to overeat. When you have this moderate approach, you're still just listening to your body and you're not undereating of course, but you're just eating till you're satisfied. And then the third component of this is of course, what you're eating. And so if you're going through a challenging time and your focus isn't optimizing fat burning, then you may wanna include more exceptions.

you might think of the number like per week that you wanna be having. That usually works for most people. And then you can decide either the day before or the day of, okay, today I'm gonna do my exceptions. And so this number is gonna be different for everyone, all my clients. It really ranges and it just depends on your lifestyle, depends on the pace at which you wanna lose weight and also how your body responds to these.

Food. So again, exceptions are refined sugar, refined flour, alcohol or deep fried food. So if you are taking this moderate approach, you still wanna be thinking about exceptions, but that number might be a lot higher than when you're optimizing fat burning. And if you're trying to, if you're like, I'm not really sure what number that should be, here's kind of a guideline is to think, okay, what number would be so that I wouldn't even be keeping track. Like it would just be kind of all over the place. And then what number would be really challenging and be in my mind, optimizing fat, burning, and then pick somewhere in the middle, right? There's no wrong way to do this. You're just deciding for a week, following through, and then you can always change it.

So this third option really still requires you to pay a lot of attention, but it's done in a more moderate approach that is realistic for what you're going through and for what your goals might be at this particular time. And it's not easy because it still means that there's no eating to cope with emotions and there's no overeating just simply for pleasure or out of desire.

But what I'm basically suggesting is, , you choose a more moderate approach and you still are making decisions ahead of. If our free for all is on one side and optimal fat burning is on the other, this is somewhere in the middle, and you get to kind of decide on what part of the continuum that falls. The nice thing is you're not gonna gain any weight if you take this approach.

Okay? You might in fact release weight, but just at a slower pace than you would if you really, you know, allowed more hunger, ate to less satiation and chose fewer except. But I really think that turning to this more moderate strategy can really offset that all or nothing mentality and the swinging back and forth like that pendulum that we go through when we are.

Going through a challenging time, cuz we're just more susceptible to that and we're more susceptible to it because we're trying to feel better. So we're trying to feel better either by turning to food and overeating, and then we try to feel better by deciding, oh, I'm gonna restrict the next day. This is an opportunity to avoid that whole thing and just decide, you know what, I'm still on track.

I'm just gonna do it more moderately. Okay. And this can also be a good strategy if you're like easing off of the holidays. I know it's now towards the end of January, but for some of us, we're still kind of coming off indulging more in the holidays or indulging after vacation.

This can be really helpful for those of you who on vacation, tell yourself, well, you know what, when we get back, I'm just gonna be super strict. So instead of doing. While you are on vacation, just say, okay, I'm gonna take a more moderate approach while I'm on vacation, and I'm also gonna do a moderate approach when I get back.

So there isn't this huge swing of overdoing it and then restriction, because oftentimes when we tell ourselves we're gonna be restricting, then we give ourselves license and permission to really overdo it. . Okay. So again, this is a way to avoid that. And then the last part I just thought I would mention about this is some advice for when you're going through some challenging times, and it's just from my personal experience I thought I would share, is one is just having awareness.

Part of that awareness for you could be just noticing that over desire. So when you notice that your brain is starting to. More thoughts about food that can be your cue. It doesn't, it's not your cue to mean like, oh, it means I have cravings. It means I want more food. It could just mean, oh, there's something going on for me emotionally and I wanna feel better.

Why? Why do I wanna feel better? What am I thinking about my current challenges that I need to feel better right now in this moment? Because for me, it was a real learning about. So I got coaching on this, which was really. Where my head was at was I just wanted to be out of it. I just wanted it to be over.

I was like, this has gone on too long. I'm done with this. But this thought of this shouldn't be happening was preventing me from accepting what was happening, which, you know, a lot of that is outside of your control, especially if it's medical and. It prevented me from really embracing the moment and being present with myself and being compassionate with my body.

And the opportunity really was to have the thought that, you know, I'm just gonna be there for myself. I'm gonna be there for my body for as long as I need to be, however long it takes. I don't need to white knuckle my way through and just wait till it's over. Cause waiting has such like a heavy, like has a certain energy to it.

Instead, I could. Show up and just be there wherever I was at that day. Okay. So that's what I'm gonna offer. And then the last thing is just making decisions ahead of time. So this can so easily fall by the wayside. But I thought I would bring this up because. When we are not making decisions, it means we're in indecision about something.

And this can be small or big. So for example, do you know what you're having for dinner tonight? If you don't, that's kind of like a little mental baggage that's running in the background of  something, a decision that needs to be made that's undecided. And there's gonna be lots.  If you take a look at your life, there probably are some decisions right now that you just haven't made yet.

They're kind of weighing on you. And so that's such an energy drain. If you're already going through a challenging time, you wanna try to make as many decisions ahead of time as you can just to. Provide that space just to inject some energy back in. So little things, whether it's, you know, I'm gonna do the laundry today, or I'm gonna do the laundry tomorrow, like just your to-do list, like organizing that or bigger things of like, am I gonna take this course?

Am I gonna start this company? Am I gonna, whatever. You just make a decision. So often I think we don't make decisions because we put so much weight on what we think that would mean. What we can really start doing is being like, it actually is gonna be okay either way. And if it was, then what would I do?

And just get into the practice of making decisions quickly. That's something I'm working on, is just making decisions more quickly so that I'm moving faster, I'm moving at a greater pace through life. All right. Maybe a little bit of a rant there at the end, but just wanted to share that and some of my insights, some of my learnings over the last little.

If you are currently going through a challenging time, I get it. I am with you. You're gonna get through it. Embrace it because you don't know what you might be learning even in this moment, that later you're gonna either use for yourself or maybe share with others, and that will really help them. And if you're wondering about coaching with me and you're wondering about how the pregnancy is gonna factor, Don't worry, I am still taking on clients over the next year and I have that all mapped out and all organized, so I still have a wait list.

Please go to my website and get on that wait list if you want help because I have that all figured out and I will be able to coach you. Okay? That's it for me. I will talk to you again soon. Bye.