Celebrating Cinco de Mayo and worried about eating too much

All right, looks like we are live on Facebook. Do a little audio check. Yep, can hear me. All right, happy Thursday, y'all. Happy Cinco de Mayo. So I'm gonna minimize this screen, maximize this screen. Got it. Good. I think I'm gonna try something new today and whiteboard electronically and see how that works. All right, y'all, back again for another Jennifer Live. Whoo, allergies making my nose itch. For those of you who are new to me, my name is Jennifer Dent-Brown and I am a certified life and weight loss coach, and I help women learn to stop dieting forever. I teach y'all how to lose weight without dieting, and I know when you hear that for the first time, you're like, there's no way. That can happen. I'm here to tell you it can happen, and I will teach you how to do it. So what I've been doing every week— hello, if you're on Facebook, go ahead and write hello in the chat. If you're watching the replay, say hello. I'm checking in to the comments later. But what I have been doing every week is coming on live on my Facebook business page. I also repost it on Instagram. And on YouTube, so you can go follow me on those two places if you're, if you're not already. But I'm answering questions that, that I receive that you guys are sending me through email, through DMs. I'm also addressing some common issues that may be popping up in my community. So right now we are in week 1 of the Stop Dieting in 30 boot camp, and the question that I'm addressing today actually came up in the coaching session for the Stop Dieting in 30 Bootcamp. So if you're interested in learning more about what that is, how you can get involved in it, again, you can simply go to jenniferdent.com/bootcamp. But today is Cinco de Mayo, it's the 5th of May, and we had our group coaching call with the boot campers on Tuesday, and the first person that raised their hand was like, hey, I'm going out to eat with my husband, Cinco de Mayo, on Thursday, and I am concerned. She actually didn't say concerned. She was like, can you give me some thoughts or something I need— I can think so I don't end up eating too much? And so I coached her very thoroughly on her thoughts. But what I want to offer you today, and this is whether you're going out for Cinco de Mayo tonight or not, or whether you're just going out to eat maybe for the weekend, If you have a social event and you're going out to eat and you're worried about eating too much because that's what you've done before in the past, I want to offer a very brief solution. It's two things that you can do ahead of time. OK, so let me just reiterate what the problem is. Person is going out to eat and they don't want to eat too much and derail their weight loss progress. Now I might add about this particular boot camper, as she was explaining the problem to me and in the group coaching session, she said this is a restaurant that her and her husband have gone to a lot. The food is really good. And y'all know I love food. I'm a foodie. So when she gave me the name of the restaurant, I was like, oh yeah, I've been there before. Yeah, the food is really good. So I was like, I get it, I understand. So she wanted to go out and celebrate, and she said usually she goes to this particular restaurant. They always get like a pitcher of drinks. They always get like, she said, some type of tacos, the chips, the salsa, all the things. And she said when— and I asked her, well, how do you usually feel when you leave that restaurant? And she went just like this. I was like, I know exactly what that feels like, right? It's that bloated stuff, like that moment when you get up from the table and you're like, ah, I ate too much again, right? But the food is so good, you don't know how to not eat so much. So that was kind of like her issue, and everybody was like nodding their head. They get it, they understand. I totally get it and have been there. So I have developed kind of like just a solution, right? It's So this is, this is the problem. This is what happens when you go to a restaurant and you're just used to eating a lot of food there. You're just like on autopilot. And like my client was, she's been in this restaurant before. She'd been there with her husband. She always overeats. And she said when she usually leaves a restaurant because it's so good, she always feels like she ate too much. Now, her strategy for going to this restaurant was to eat light during the day And essentially she's telling herself, well, I'm just going to restrict my calories. She didn't say this, but that's what eating light means, right? I'm going to restrict my calories in the daytime, and so when I go out at night, I can afford to eat more. But what does eating light mean? What does eating more mean? It's all relative. And she's like logically trying to solve this problem for overeating. In a way that doesn't work because she's completely disconnected from her physical body and knowing when it's time to eat and when it's time to stop eating. So if you're one of those people who are like, I'm just going to eat light in preparation for eating later— in fact, that just reminds me, my dad always used to say, like, before we would go out to eat, he'd be like, you don't want to steal your appetite, don't want to take your appetite, like, don't eat anything, you want to, like, take your appetite. So I kind of, like, grew up with that mindset of, like, oh, we don't eat before a big dinner because, you know, we don't want to take our appetite— we want to be able to sit down and like be hungry so we can eat all the food. So just notice if your brain wants to do that as a solution. Just— it doesn't work. Okay, so this is what I want to offer you before you go to that favorite restaurant and you're looking forward to eating that really good food, but you don't want to overeat like you've done before in the past. The reason why you're overeating is because your brain is like on autopilot. It's just like it's connected this favorite restaurant to eating this really good food, and you don't know how to stop, right? That is literally the thought loop that's happening in your head. And so somehow you get to planning to go to favorite restaurant to leaving the table at said favorite restaurant, and you're stuffed. You've overeaten. And there's no intentional thinking in the middle from here to here. So what I want to offer you right now, the solution, is to intentionally think about you before you— when you go from here, planning to go to the restaurant, to getting up from the table, and intentionally thinking about what's going to happen here in the middle instead of letting it just play out on auto repeat. On autoplay. Okay, so the first thing is— two things I want you to do. The first thing I want you to do is to just like what I call a pre-meal check-in. And actually, one of my private clients came up with this strategy, and I was like, oh, I love it. It's called a pre-meal check-in. She wasn't doing this before she went out to eat. She just does it every time she eats dinner, period, at home. Okay, so the pre-meal check-in is essentially acknowledging any emotions that may cause you to overeat. That's it, right? Because if you're an emotional eater, and most of my clients, including me, are emotional eaters— means that we eat when we're happy, we eat when we're sad, and we eat because of all the other emotions in the middle— when you are like feeling some type of way and you sit down in front of a table full of food and you're looking at a menu with all of your favorite foods, guess what we're going to do? We're going to eat because those emotions mean that we eat. So when you do this, what I call pre-meal check-in, you're just asking yourself this question: How am I feeling right now? Like, how am I feeling? Like, what's going on? Is there anything lingering from my workday that I need to kind of like mentally resolve? Is there any like other emotion that is happening? Uncomfortable emotion that like could hinder me from listening to my body when I go sit down to eat at this table tonight. So just doing this pre-meal check-in and giving yourself the grace and the space to take care of that emotion, whatever it is, just acknowledging what it is. Hey, it just could be excitement, right? Excitement is a great reason for us emotional eaters to eat, right? We're like, hey, everybody's eating, come on, let's go, pass me the chips and salsa. So just doing this pre-meal check-in, it's like you're redirecting your brain. You're like pausing the autoplay, the loop in your head, and you're saying, hey, this is how I'm feeling right now. And then it's like you, in that like little sliver of time, you get to decide, like, do you want to manage this emotion? Do you want to handle this emotion by eating? Right? It's just giving yourself that awareness. That's the first thing, the pre-meal check-in. The second thing that you're going to do before you go into the restaurant— and I don't know if I said this before, but you want to do these two things before you're even in the vicinity of the restaurant, because something happens when you are in the vicinity of your favorite restaurant and your brain is like, oh, party time, and you can't think of anything else. So you do this work before you even get into the vicinity of the restaurant. Maybe in the car on the way there. The second thing you're going to do is you're just going to decide how you want to feel after the meal. How do you want to feel when you get up from the table? So this is different from like going to the restaurant and deciding ahead of time, I'm going to eat this, this, and this, like make— and that is fine. That's definitely one strategy that I teach my clients. You can certainly look at the menu ahead of time. And make that decision about what you're going to eat. But I also want you to take it a step further and say, how do I want to feel ahead of time? Like, how do I want to feel at the end of the dinner? Because there's so many times we forget, right? We're so excited about going to said restaurant, we forget how we normally feel when we leave that restaurant, right? It's like our brains just conveniently forget. So I want you to think ahead of time, like, do you want to feel, as my client said, stuffed, right? If not, then how do you want to feel? So one of my favorite emotions when I, when I used to do this all the time is like, I wanted to feel buoyant when I got up from the table. Buoyant. B-U— I can't even spell— B-U-O-Y-A-N-T, I think, which to me is like light. I still feel light. I feel satiated. I feel good. I enjoyed the food that I ate, but I didn't overeat. And this is why now when I go out to a restaurant, I always have a to-go box. I always end up bringing stuff home because I— my intention is to still feel buoyant when I leave the restaurant, and that means for me not to eat everything on my plate. And I intuitively know, like, okay, we're done. And then I'm like, excuse me. Can I have a to-go box? And then I go home and that's it, and I still feel good. I don't feel bloated, I don't feel stuffed, I'm not beating myself up because I ate too much. I feel perfectly at peace and I'm fine, and I go on about my day. Okay, so those were the two things I wanted to share with you, kind of like the two steps that you want to do before you go out to eat, especially if it's your favorite restaurant. I just want to try something. If you guys have questions, if you're on Facebook, you can go ahead and type them in. I see a couple of people are watching live. I want us to try something real quick as an experiment and see if this works. So I have a reMarkable, which I love. And you can do this really cool thing where you can share your reMarkable as if it were a whiteboard. So it looks like— ah, there it is. Okay, so if we talk about the 2 things that you want to do before going out to eat. Now, like this, because it has lines on it. Which is easier than sometimes writing on the whiteboard. Okay, so you're going to do your pre-meal check-in, right, and which is just checking in and acknowledging how you're emotionally feeling in the moment. And then two, you're going to decide ahead of time how you want to feel after dinner or after the meal. In the boot camp, we talk all about emotional literacy, and you will learn, if you decide to become a boot camper, how to become emotionally literate. Most of us don't know how we're feeling at any given point in time. We're either like good or bad, or like, eh, in a funk somewhere in the middle. Okay, so these are the two things I wanted to offer you as recommendations if you're going out to celebrate Cinco de Mayo tonight. Alright, so I will see you guys— I will see you next week. Yes, I will be live next week. The week after, I will not be. But if you have questions you want me to answer, if you have challenges you want me to address, send me an email, jennifer@jenniferdent.com, or you can shoot me up on the instant DMs and on Messenger or on, um, Instagram. All right, so enjoy your Cinco de Mayo, friends. Live luxe, and I will see you all later. Bye!