Don't Just Eat in Moderation...Do This

Oh, hey, this is Food Freedom. Welcome. Y'all are here at the first installment of Food Freedom Friday. I had this idea, um, that I wanted to really inspire you all to understand that food freedom is available to you. And I just know when I was struggling with my weight, I felt like it was never ever going to end. I felt like the struggle was never going to end. Every time I would try something different, I would have like this glimmer of hope, like, this is the thing that's going to work. And then about 2 weeks in, nothing. Nothing. And I always fall into this, like, I call it— now I call it Problemville. But I would fall into Problemville. And everything that I did was just a problem. Let me just fix this real quick. Okay, so when I think about what I do as a health coach, as a certified life coach and weight loss coach, the ultimate goal I want y'all to experience is food freedom. Like, that's my movement. I want you to stop dieting so you can experience what food freedom is. And I was thinking about that specifically this morning, and I was like, what exactly is food freedom? Food freedom is the place where you give the middle finger to the oppressive diet rules and regulations that you believe that you need to follow to lose weight. Food freedom is a place where you no longer have to use scare tactics to try to stop yourself from eating. How many of us have been like, you know, "Girl, if you eat this thing, you're gonna blow up." Like, you try to scare yourself out of eating food. Oops. Food freedom is a place where you can go out to dinner with your friends and not experience guilt. How fun is that? Sherry gets to go out to dinner tomorrow with her husband, and she's not gonna be experiencing guilt because she's working on achieving food freedom. She's very close, Sherry. Hey, Rebecca. So when I think about my weight loss process, Stop Dieting Forever, it literally is like the step-by-step thing you do every single day to achieve food freedom, to get you to that place of food freedom. And the result is weight loss without the drama and without following a diet. So I'm glad that y'all came today to hear about eating in moderation, because eating in moderation is one of those rules that we feel like we just have to follow. And for those of you who have tried, can you just write something in the chat? Give me a 1 in the chat if you have tried to lose weight by following the rule, oh, let me just eat in moderation. Just type a little 1 in the chat if that is something that you have tried to do. Only 1 person. I see 1. OK, here we go. Here we go. The 1, 1, 1s. Yeah, so I really want to talk about eating in moderation because eating in moderation is the thing that I tried on my weight loss journey when I felt like, oh, I got it. Like, I understand what healthy eating is now. And actually, let me back up for a second and introduce myself to those of you who— I don't know some of these faces, but it's beautiful that I'm seeing new faces here. I'm Jennifer Dent-Brown. I'm a health, life, and weight loss coach. And I help women get off the weight loss struggle bus and stop dieting forever. And my journey with my weight was a very, very long one, over decades long, 2+ decades to be exact. And in 2013, I enrolled in school to become a health coach. I enrolled in the Institute of Integrative Nutrition to become a health coach because at that point, I had learned about the mind-body connection. I worked with a health coach for the first time. That was my first time working with a coach, even knowing what a coach does. I was unfamiliar with the coaching industry. And so I enrolled in IIN. And Nikki Sears, she's a fellow alum. At the time, the program was a year long. And so I learned all about nutrition. I learned so many things about the food we eat, how it affects our bodies, all the things. And I was very knowledgeable at that time. And I was like, OK, this is when I'm going to start eating in moderation because now I am familiar with what healthy food is, right? I traded in my tortilla chips for kale chips. I understood that sugar is hidden in all different types of foods and comes in like 66 different ways that are hidden from us. I learned and studied all of these things, so I felt like I know how to eat healthy. Like, yes, I know how to eat healthy. I'm not eating Kraft macaroni and cheese anymore. I am eating organic cheese and, you know, grass-fed butter. I'm eating all the healthiest foods, so now I can eat in moderation, right? Because my thought at the time was like, well, I just need to like eat the healthier food and I can lose weight. But did y'all know you can eat kale chips and raw cheese and— I'm trying to think of another super healthy food. Oh, chickpea crisps. Like, you can eat all those super expensive, healthier foods and still not lose weight. Who can relate with that? That was my experience. I see some thumbs up and some nods. Yeah, that was my experience. So I was like, what the hell? If I know how to eat, if I'm eating all the quote-unquote healthy things that are supposed to be like flooding my body with nutrients, why am I not losing weight? Well, what I learned is it's not exactly— weight loss isn't just exactly what you're eating. Yes, that is part of the, the picture, the bigger picture, but it's also how much you're eating and why you're eating. So fast forward a little bit. In 2018 or 2019, I was introduced to life coaching. I was introduced to a very specific model that helped you understand habits, like why you do the things that you do and how your thoughts really drive your eating decisions. And so when I was able— and I got certified as a life coach and I finished in 2020— but when I put all of these things together, it was like everything began to really, really click and make sense. So I wanted to just share that, my experience with you, very quickly to explain to you Health coaching, nutrition is 100% key, but you also need the mindset part. You also need to understand your thinking, and you also need to understand why you do the things that you do in order for you to lose weight permanently, right? So this is why I say I help my clients achieve their forever weight. I mentioned that because— and this is the reason why I'm talking about moderation today— a woman messaged me on Facebook. I love when y'all message me on Facebook and, and Instagram, and you send me emails, because I like to know what you're struggling with. I like to know how I can help you. And so she sent me a very specific message, and she's like— and it's so fascinating because, um, in Facebook you can see like your history, your message history. The same woman had messaged me like 2 years earlier, and she was telling me about her weight and how she was unable to lose weight. So she recently messaged me a couple of weeks ago, and she came back, and she was like, I worked with a health coach, and she said very specifically, I'm trying to stick to eating healthy foods and eating in moderation. I was like, ooh, that sounds familiar. That sounds very familiar. So if you have been trying to eat in moderation, and now you feel like you know what healthy is, and it's not working, I know that feeling of frustration. I get it. I know that feeling of frustration. I know you feel like your self-esteem is shot. And I know that you're trying to go the moderation route because there's a part of you that doesn't want to give up food, right? There's a part of you that just doesn't want to give up the foods that you like. And following a restrictive food plan like paleo or keto or like going plant-based, like, that's just not an option for you. So you're like, all right, they say if you just eat in moderation, you should be able to lose weight. But 99.9% of y'all don't know what moderation actually is. So for shits and giggles, I Googled how to eat moderately and lose weight. I just wanted to see what came up. So this is what came up. 6 things that came up for the first, the first response when I Googled how to eat moderately and lose weight. Number 1, use smaller dishes. I laughed at that because I was like, oh, I learned to do that on Weight Watchers. Right? It's like, oh, let me trick your eyes and put your food on a smaller plate. Second thing it said, make the healthy choice the easy choice. I'm gonna go back and like dissect these in a second. Third thing it said: Before eating out, look at the menu online and decide what you're going to order. How many of us have done that before? The fourth thing it said: Eat raw non-starchy veggies as an appetizer at home before going out to a restaurant or party. I was like, oh yeah, I learned that in Weight Watchers too. Or maybe that was LA Weight Loss, I don't remember. But I do remember that hack. Um, the fifth thing it says, check your emotional state. And the sixth thing it said is avoid trigger foods. Now this, this is the number one term, a result that came up on Google of how to eat moderately and lose weight. This is not going to help you lose weight, y'all. Using smaller dishes, you can eat off of a smaller plate. But what happens when you eat off of the smaller plate the second time, the third time, the fourth time in one sitting? That's what I used to do. I used to love eating pasta dishes, and I'm like, "Yep, I'm gonna put it on a dessert plate and eat with a small fork." And the food was so good, I would eat my whole small plate of food and go put a little bit more on my small plate of food and eat that too. So using smaller dishes sounds good, but that's not realistic. And honestly, when you go to other people's houses, when you go out to eat, are you going to be like, "Excuse me, can I have my food on a small plate, please?" No, it's not going to happen. The second thing that it says that you need to do is make the healthy choice the easy choice. Okay, well, that's fine when you're feeling wonderful and amazing and you're in a really good headspace. I'm going to make the healthy choice. I'm going to have the kale chips instead of the potato chips. I'm going to have the healthy salad instead of the potato salad. I'm going to make the healthy choice. But you throw in life, a life circumstance, right? Your kids are driving you up the wall. You finally get them into bed at nighttime and all you want to do is sit on the couch with some popcorn and a glass of wine. Are you going to be like, no, I'm going to make the healthy choice right now? No. Your brain is going to tell you that popcorn and wine is a better idea. Or how about for those of you who are entrepreneurs and who can relate, like, your income is variable. And it's kind of like up and down. And you got to pay people. And you have to do things. And you have a client that quit. Or you have a client that's not happy. Are you going to be like, I'm making the healthy choice today because I had an awful day? No. Your brain is going to be locked and loaded on, you know what, I think I'm going to hit up Taco Bell on the way home. I just coached a client on this too. We talked about our brain's uncanny abilities. Like, once you get into your head that you want something, like, nothing— you have blinders on. She was like, if I decide I want Taco Bell, she's like, and I know I have food at home, and I know that I can eat something healthy at home. She's like, I'm going to get Taco Bell. Like, there are— there's no other option. Your brain is locked and loaded because life circumstances are happening. And so your old default programming of going to certain foods for comfort, for to feel better, as a distraction, whatever it is, that thought is going to override, oh, I need to go have a healthy choice. I need to go eat something healthy. Yeah, that's not going to work. The third thing Dr. Google said is before eating out, look at the menu online and decide what you're going to order ahead of time. Now, there is some sound advice in that, right? I actually— that's one of the things I teach my clients to do is like, just be intentional and make a decision before you go out to eat. And we're going to talk about why it's so important to make an intentional decision versus an emotional decision. The fourth thing it said is eat raw non-starchy vegetables as an appetizer at home before going out to a restaurant or party. If you guys listen to me on the podcast, I have— I am a host of a podcast. It's called the Stop Dieting Forever podcast. It's the best podcast on the internet for weight loss. Go check it out if you haven't listened to it. But y'all know I like food. I enjoy eating. I like really good food. I'm not going to eat raw celery before I go out to a restaurant. Like, that's just not happening. I'm not gonna eat raw celery just in general because I don't like raw celery. So that's not gonna work for me. This other thing, check your emotional state. Now that right there is spot on. Dr. Google, you got that right. Number 6, avoid trigger foods. Okay, that's all well and good until you go to the office. One of my clients is a nurse and she works a night shift and she's like, there's always food in the break room, always sugar, always like donuts, bagels. There's always stuff. And you're working late at night, you're tired, you're stressed, you're dealing with cranky patients. Are you going to avoid your trigger foods? When it's sitting right there in front of you. Willpower does not work long term. It is not a long-term weight loss strategy, OK? So Dr. Google, mm-mm. Eating moderately to lose weight permanently is not going to work. All right, so here's what I want you to do. Here's what I want you to focus on when it comes to eating in moderation. And again, If you've tried eating in moderation, I applaud you because I know that you're not willing to give up your favorite foods. You're like, there has to be some way where I can enjoy chocolate cake, I can enjoy a piece of chocolate, I can enjoy a burger. Y'all know I love my burgers. And still be— and still lose weight, still be able to keep my weight off. And not be, you know, super unhealthy. So one of the things that I'm doing, one of the reasons why I'm doing Food Freedom Friday is, again, as I mentioned before, because I want everyone to experience what it feels like to experience food freedom, right? That is my goal. I'm leading this movement. We are learning how to stop dieting forever so we can achieve food freedom and live our lives enjoying food and not being afraid of food. And I want you to understand that I am a trained, certified coach. This is what I do full-time, 24/7. I have been coaching since 2014. I can only imagine how many tens of thousands of hours I have spent coaching and how many hundreds of women I have spent coaching. Their brains. And we are more alike than we are different, which is so fascinating. But when I work with my clients to help them achieve food freedom, yes, we work on your nutrition because I think that's really important. And that was one of the things that the woman that messaged me on Facebook, she was saying, I worked with a health coach, but I'm really struggling to eat in moderation. So working on your nutrition is fantastic, but it is not the first thing that we work on. It is not the only thing that needs to happen for you to achieve your forever weight. I want you to write this down. The first thing that is going to change for you to be able to lose weight permanently is that you've got to change your way of thinking first, right? And this is why my training as a life coach comes in handy, because I understand very, very clearly how and why you do the things that you do. You can't see it yet. Because if you could see it, you would change your habits. You would change your actions. You would change your behaviors. So learning how to identify what's happening in your brain, what your thought process is when you see your trigger food, when you have a hard day at work, when your client— your kids are getting on your nerves, understanding what those thoughts are and those patterns are and how to disrupt them is what I help you with. And then once you get that, then we're going to work on your nutrition and cleaning that up and teaching you how to enjoy the foods that you want to enjoy by eating intentionally versus emotionally. So Dr. Google got it right when it said one of the ways to eat moderately is to check your emotional state. Like, well, who does that? We weren't like— we didn't learn how to check our emotional state in college. In grade school, in high school. We have to learn this as an adult. So as an emotional eater, your eating is always going to be triggered by your emotion, whether it's a happy emotion, sad emotion, angry emotion, whatever that is. Most of us are very, very emotionally illiterate. You don't know anything beyond, I feel great, I feel terrible, I feel angry, I feel sad, and that's it. As a human on this planet, we have a whole range of emotions that we can experience, but many of us don't know how we're feeling and we can't put a name on it. So I help my clients become emotionally literate. We work on that every single day because when you can name your emotion, that's when you begin to disrupt this thought pattern of like, I gotta eat the Taco Bell, I gotta get the thing. And then you can change your behavior. You can change your action. The result is gonna be weight loss. Alright, this is how we, we begin to lose weight without dieting. So again, I love food. I enjoy food. I want you to learn how to eat and get pleasure from eating really good food versus eating mindlessly. Because you're driven by some type of emotion, right? You know, when you're just like, you inhale a bag of popcorn and you're like, well, darn, what happened to the popcorn? Are you just like, you're just eating mindlessly and you're like, where did the food go? So helping you understand how you can get to the point of eating for pleasure, which is simply learning how to eat intentionally versus emotionally. The other thing we want to work on, or I want to work on with you as a client, is that we're going to stop all these rules, right? Eating in moderation is one of them. And thinking you know what moderation looks like for you is a rule that we need to break because it doesn't work. I'm going to teach you the 5 different types of hunger. If you listen to the podcast, I did a series, I think last month, where I did 4 weeks and I broke down the different types of hunger. Go back and listen to that series. But when you understand the different types of hunger, you're not going to be, uh, eating emotionally as often. When you understand what true physical hunger is, that's when you can eat for pleasure. That's when food becomes like, oh, this is so good. And when you're eating for pleasure You can have 2 bites of chocolate cake and be so satisfied, and you don't feel compelled to have to eat the rest of it because you're eating intentionally versus emotionally. I'm going to tell you about one of my clients real quick. She's a private client. She came to me. She was eating dessert every night and feeling guilty about it. She just said, I just love sweets. She was eating randomly and sporadically throughout the day. She's a person who works from home, so there's food always available. She always had a plan to cook at night, but she always ended up ordering takeout when she didn't feel like cooking. She struggled with what to eat when she had to travel for work. And she was just tired of feeling uncomfortable in her body. She was tired of comparing herself to other people. And she was tired of feeling frumpy. Those were her exact words. So I want to share just this week. She sent me a message this weekend, and she said, so many wins from the weekend. She said, I made desserts for my boyfriend, and I wasn't inclined to eat any at all. I had a bite to taste while I was actually making it, she said, but that was it. She didn't feel compelled to eat the desserts. She said, "Overall, I've gotten so much better with being in my own food routine and being happy about it. Food isn't the only way to connect." One of the things she was working on was like her boyfriend had his eating schedule, she had her eating schedule, and she was like trying to keep up with him and eating late at night with him in addition. So we worked on separating those two things. She also said, She stuck with energetic meals and made an— even made an energetic meal, which is an authentic dish. It's authentic to her country of origin that she hadn't had in years. And she said it felt so good. And all of this— and officially, she said, I hit my lowest weight since we started working together as of today. So just a little example— not a little example, it's really, really big. And I celebrated with her. But this is one of my private clients. Of this wind. So it's so interesting when my clients learn to release and annihilate these diet rules like eating in moderation. They learn how to eat real food. They learn to eat what they want. They learn how to plan ahead instead of, uh, emotionally. You don't have to worry about eating in moderation because it's, it's just, it's just what you do. You don't have to worry about eating in moderation. So I want you all to understand and know I am filling spots for private coaching. If this is something that has been calling to you, if you've been struggling with your weight for decades like I was, and you've tried all the things, and eating in moderation was maybe the last straw, then maybe it's time to work one-on-one with a certified health and life coach. We're going to work on all the things. So I want you to experience exactly what my client experienced recently over the weekend. She had all of those wins in one weekend. That— she's on her way to living her life, experiencing food freedom, period. Okay, so when you follow the Stop Dieting Forever process, not only are you going to lose weight, but you're going to know exactly what to do to keep it off. And what to do when you run into obstacles, when life gets lifey. You can message me in between our weekly sessions. You can message me on Slack. So we're at the top of the hour, but I just want you to— if this is calling to you, if this is something that you're interested in, you want to explore it, go to jenniferdent.com/privatecoaching. See how I work with my clients, read some of my client testimonials. We got some videos up on there. And book a call with me. Book a call with me. It's 100% free. And we can start your journey away from trying to eat in moderation. OK, y'all, I have to go because I have to coach. If you have any very specific questions you want me to answer, you can go ahead and email me at Jennifer@JenniferDent.com. But I'm glad that you all were here. To understand that you don't need to eat in moderation to lose weight. There is another way. Okay, have a good weekend, everyone. Bye. Oh, thanks, Keisha.