Eating Habits and How You Experience Life

Listen Below:

Related Episodes:

• Why Willpower Fails
• Getting Out of the Dieting Cycle

Tired of struggling with the same bad eating habits?

I can help you transform your eating habits and lose weight sustainably in my 1:1 coaching program, Eat with Intention, Lose Weight Sustainably.

Imagine going through your day feeling healthy, confident and free.

Why delay feeling your best yet? Book your free 60-min. consultation with me now.

Enjoying the Show?

Help make the show more discoverable to others who are frustrated with their eating habits by leaving a rating/review.

Just use the links below (or go right onto the app you normally listen on). Thank you!

• Rate/review on Apple (iTunes) HERE
• Rate on Spotify HERE

Know someone who’d benefit?

Just send them a text with a link to this page.

Full Episode Transcript:

Eating Habits and How You Experience Life

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. So today I have a super important podcast episode for you. I am so passionate about how healthier eating habits and freedom from less healthy eating habits has such a profound effect on your life and how you experience life.

So, I really want to share with you the really special relationship between eating habits and how you experience life. Because there are some things that I know for sure you haven’t thought about yet. And I’m going to be the person to bring that to you. So fun.

Before I jump in, I really just want to explain what I mean by how you experience life. How you experience life means collectively how you think about your life, other people, things, ideas, everything around you, life’s circumstances, how you feel about your life and how you feel just every moment of every day, also how you show up meaning your actions and behaviors.

Regarding your eating habits and how you experience life, I have broken this down into several different categories, I think 8 to be exact, but there are even more than that!

So, the first one I want to talk about is more energy.

When you change your eating habits, more specifically form healthier eating habits and break some less healthy eating habits, you will feel more energized. This is typically because you are eating foods that are more nutrient rich, which your body needs to really optimize energy production and usage.

You’re also eating less of the foods that tend to make you drowsy and feel a lack of energy, like refined sugars and flours, just because of how they react within your body.

So, choosing foods that provide higher quality more efficient fuel is going to be much better than foods that provide very low-quality fuel.

Feeling more energy benefits so many different areas of your life including work. So you tend to be able to do more in less time at work, which means that you’re less rushed may be less stressed. You also might have more energy to get out for a short walk during your lunch break.

If you’re more productive at work, think about what could potentially happen, you might end up getting a promotion or at least getting recognized more.

If you’re feeling less rushed and less stressed because you’re not in a time crunch since you’re being so productive and efficient, work tends to be more enjoyable. With less negative emotions being experienced at work, of course it’s going to be more enjoyable. And it’ll be even more enjoyable if you feel like you have some energy to get outside for even just a 10-minute walk.

When I was working as a Physician Assistant, my surgery jobs didn’t enable me to really do this very often. However, when I was working primarily in the office, I was able to get outside for a walk on my lunch breaks and I felt so much better for the rest of the day. It was unreal how just a walk around the block made me feel refreshed and not mind the rest of the work day.

With healthier eating habits you’ll also experience more energy at home. This allows you to enjoy your family more, have the energy to do more activities, get out more in nature and enjoy nature.

When you’re eating habits leave you feeling a lack of energy, you’re going to be more tempted to just stay at home, sit on the couch, and watch a movie. When you have increased energy, you’re not going to want to sit on the couch and watch a movie. When my eating habits were not so great back in the day, I found it much easier to relax on the couch and watch a movie.

Now, if my husband Paul wants to watch a movie, I actually have a tough time sitting still for the entire movie.

Also, you’ll find that you’ll have more energy for relationships. You’ll tend to be able to put more effort in which can better the relationship. If you’re dating, you will have more energy to go on more dates and be more excited and energized for them.

If you have children, you’ll find that you have more energy to interact with them and do activities with them. You’ll have more energy to go out with friends and really enjoy the experience with them.

You’ll have more energy to be part of your community, find groups of people that do activities that you enjoy, and participate in them.

Alright, so clearly healthy eating habits result in more energy that has so many different benefits when you really think about all the little things that sort of branch off.

The next category I want to hit is losing weight. In general, the healthier you’re eating habits are, most likely this is going to result in weight loss period specifically, weight loss that is natural and very sustainable. The benefits of weight loss are profound. How weight loss changes your experience of life is profound as well.

For example, it’s easier to be physically active and you’ll probably be out of breath less often. If you have joint pain or back pain, you might notice that that is decreasing as you lose weight.

You’ll have more confidence which is not from the number on the scale, but more so from the thoughts that you have about the number on the scale decreasing. If you’re having more confidence, that means you probably won’t hold back from going to more places, wearing what you really want to wear, carrying yourself differently around people. This typically means you’ll attract more people to you.

You may even set new personal or career goals because of the increased confidence from your thoughts about your body weight now that you’ve lost some weight. You might get noticed more at work because of your confidence.

Maybe even apply for that higher position or go for a different career entirely. One that you didn’t think was possible for you.

There are even more ways that losing weight changes how you experience life, but if I were to get into all of the little ones, this would be a very long episode. So, moving on to the next one which is less negative self-talk.

So how does less negative self-talk result from healthier eating habits and how does less negative self-talk change the way you experience life?

Well, I’ll tell you.

So if you have a bad eating habit that you’d like to break, or several, think about all the times that you have thought a negative thought about yourself or your capabilities. Or shamed yourself after eating more dessert than you planned on, or the negative thoughts that came up when you looked at the scale.

Negative self-talk, also known as that inner critic, or that inner mean girl, results in a negative emotion. Examples of such could be guilt, disgust, as I mentioned earlier shame, angry, frustrated, sad. Who wants to walk around feeling these things constantly just because of poor eating habits? No one.

When you improve your eating habits, you start talking to yourself less negatively.

In fact, when I work with clients via one-on-one coaching, we work extensively on inner dialogue. So how you talk to yourself, what you think about yourself. This is so incredibly necessary when you’re trying to lose weight, stop emotionally eating, break any other “bad” eating habit, all of the things.

The reason is this.

The way you talk to yourself, affects how you feel and how you feel affects how you behave. If you’re feeling negatively, your actions or behaviors are not going to be the ones that are going to effectively create the results that you really want. So, this is hugely important. And the other benefit is that you just feel better.

That’s why this less negative self-talk is one of the reasons why improving your eating habits changes how you experience life. If you’re walking around feeling badly about yourself, your experience of life is not going to be as good as if you were walking around feeling really good inside. Or at least feeling less poorly, right?

So, as a coach when we work together, each week we make small eating habit changes that make it as easy as possible for you to reach your goals and maintain them. And, I also help you to think and feel better and increase the likelihood that you’ll be able to keep creating more of the results that you want to create for yourself.

There are lots of ways that the human brain can make it more difficult to do the things we need to do to get the results we want, so, we address all of that as we go.

Next up for the relationship between the eating habits and how you experience your life, is that it’s easier to form other healthy habits.

You’ll find that once you start getting control of your eating habits, it’s easier to have better habits in all other areas. This includes drinking water, sleep habits, exercise habits, maybe even less alcohol and less caffeine if those are things that you’d like to decrease.

When I help my clients lose weight, we address these things, but even if we didn’t address these things individually, because I help you with the habit part of things, these are all habits that you can strengthen or weaken as well. These are especially useful if you are trying to lose weight and just get healthier in general.

And there are certainly other habits you can form that improve how you experience your life. You’ll just be better at forming these habits because you’ll have developed the skill already. That’s really my take-home point.

Another way that eating habits affects how you experience life is when you get help with getting control of your eating habits you no longer need to escape your emotions with food. That means, you’re able to experience your emotions more fully, which is part of being a human being. You experience them more fully without reacting by eating.

Emotional eating is really just buffering your emotions with food, meaning lessening or even trying to take away your emotions with food. When you get in the habit of doing this, that means you also don’t experience positive emotions to their fullest either. When you get control of an emotional eating habit, which really is more common than you think, you learn the skill to be able to experience your emotion without having to react to it.

You develop the skill of being able to tolerate negative emotion and not feel like it’s something that’s so terrible that needs to go away quickly. You also develop the skill to be able to fully experience those positive emotions that you want to experience. This is at least how I help people with emotional eating by helping with that skill to experience the emotion without reacting to it by eating food.

I think most life coaches help their clients with emotional eating in the exact same way. That’s where I learned it through, life coaching.

Alright, next up is you save money when you change your eating habits. If you are saving money, that means you have more money to spend on other things that can provide you more enjoyment.

Here’s how you end up saving money by changing your eating habits.

You’ll find that you’re eating out less or you’re at least getting two meals out of one meal right? You’re eating less takeout or getting two meals out of one period you’re getting less groceries. Some may say that healthier food is more expensive but not really. So Wholefoods, the store, is not the only grocery store with healthy options my friends.

Vegetables, beans, fruit, are all very inexpensive. Chicken breast, not that expensive. Yes, maybe if you get grass fed organic chicken breast from a local farm it may be a little bit more expensive, but maybe not. And if it’s a little bit more expensive, like a dollar or two more a pound, isn’t your health worth it? You’re going to find in general you are going to save money.

In fact, 100% of my clients have noticed that they’re saving money and I would say all within the first month or two of working together. They have all said it to me, unprompted. In fact, just yesterday one of my clients told me that she is saving money and we are only a month into working together.

So remember, the more money you save on food from here on out for the rest of your life, the more money you have for other things that provide true enjoyment for you. Like experiences, maybe even redoing your decor in your home, or traveling more.

You can take a small fraction of the money that you are going to save for the rest of your life, and buy yourself an entirely new wardrobe to fit your new body after the weight that you’ve lost. If you have a weight loss goal.

The next two ways that changing your eating habits changes your experience of life also save you money. This next one I’m going to talk about is that you have more time. You have more time because of more energy and productivity.

Also, less time spent worrying about your eating habit problem or your body weight. Less time wasted researching, less time being wasted on fad diets, less time wasted suffering from health issues, less time spent in the doctor’s office. Maybe you won’t notice that now so much, but for sure, later in life.

Also, you have more time because improving your eating habits will extend your life expectancy. There are lots of studies that show this. There are lots of studies that also show that too much sugar increases your risk of heart attack.

Changing your eating habits can literally give you more time on this earth. I cannot stress how valuable that is.

So, if you could buy yourself more time, by effectively changing your eating habits so they last, why wouldn’t you? The only reason I can think of, is because you don’t think you’re capable. I can assure you, with small changes that your brain will find easy to handle, anyone can do it.

So of course the benefit of having more time because of better eating habits, is going to change how you experience life, because you’re going to have more of it. You’re going to therefore be able to experience more of it.

The last one of course ties in with this, and that is better health. If you have better health in general from healthier eating habits, which you will, how you experience your life is overall going to be better. You’re going to have a better quality of life.

Again, less time spent in the doctor’s office or in the hospital, less time worrying about your health and suffering from medical issues, less medications being taken. Some medications affect how you feel throughout the day, right?

Also less money spent on medical bills, because we all know that health insurance is getting to be more of a pain in the butt these days. And you end up paying a lot of money out of pocket especially when you haven’t met your deductible yet.

Alright, so I felt that I had to bring this episode to you, because otherwise I’d be doing you a disservice of not letting you be aware of how changing your eating habits really branches off into so many areas of your life and really affects how you experience your life.

If I sat down and brainstormed, I could think of even more ways that your life experience improves because of things that branch off of what I already presented to you. So, really think about these things. decide for yourself if you want to optimize the way you experience your life. You may not want to, but I’m guessing that you do.

I’m guessing that you would love to feel better in general, have more energy, maybe even lose a little bit of weight or a lot of weight, have less negative self-talk, save money, have more time, better health, and even maybe a longer life span, right?

You’re certainly deserving of all that, just like every other human being on this earth. So think about it my friend. Think about the possibilities. Actually, I should say the probabilities. Many of them practically guaranteed.

So fun.

Thanks for listening, take care and I’ll talk with you soon.