Your Belief About Food

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Related Episodes:

• Getting Out of the Dieting Cycle
• Overeating and Your Brain’s Job
• You Are NOT Your Eating Habits
• Sugar Cravings and Your Brain

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Full Episode Transcript:

Your Belief About Food

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. I’ve been thinking a lot about belief lately and I decided that I wanted to talk to you today about your belief about food. The reason is this. Your belief about something will always affect your outcome.

So, if you are struggling with eating certain types of food that you want to limit, or you’re overeating, or whatever your eating habit may be that you are struggling with, your belief will have a major effect on the outcome you have with that food or amount. I’m going to go through some examples of common beliefs you can have about food, and how they ultimately will have an effect on your result.

Speaking of amount, before I get too deep into this episode, I do want to invite you to a free online workshop I’m hosting on November 22nd at 7:00 PM Eastern Time.

This workshop will help you to get better control of overeating, specifically how to stop an overeating habit. This will be especially useful over this holiday season and throughout the winter, where our brains just tend to want to eat more calories than we need. This is partially due to our survival days.

So, in this workshop, I’m going to help you to get some control over this. The workshop is about an hour long and there will be a replay available for a limited time. It’s limited to 50 spots, and they are filling up, so grab yours.

It’s also an opportunity for you to get some free one-on-one help because I will be answering questions at the workshop after I teach, and you can even pre- submit a question ahead of time. I will answer the pre submitted questions first before I open up the floor to other questions. And, the best part, if you attend live and then become a member of food freedom, I’ll send a gift package to your home. So fun.

All right, back to beliefs. So, your belief will have a major effect on the outcome you have with a specific food or amount that you’re trying to get control of. The reason is this.

Your belief will always elicit a feeling in your body. That feeling will then cause you to do certain things. Or it will cause you to not do certain things. Those certain things of course are actions. Actions will always create a result. Or inaction will always create a result.

Going back to belief, a belief is just a thought in your head. So, if you put it all together, a thought in your head will cause a feeling in your body, which will then cause an action or inaction, or mixture of both. The action, inaction, or mixture will directly lead to a result.

So, if you have a certain belief about food, that will generate a feeling in your body, which will then cause action, inaction, or a mixture of both, which will then produce a result.

Let me give you an example. If you see a big salad on a table and your belief about that salad is that it looks unappetizing compared to the cookies that are next to it. The feeling that might be generated from that would be maybe disinterest in the salad or resistance to the salad. Of course, that feeling is going to cause you to not eat that salad, right? The result would then be that you don’t get the benefit of the nutrients in that salad.

Another person can see that same big salad on the table next to the same cookies. That person could have the belief that that salad has so many more nutrients than the cookies and it will serve them much better to eat the salad first before any cookies. The feeling generated from that belief might be eagerness to eat that salad. This causes the action of eating the salad and the result is that your body gets all those nutrients from that salad.

So, this is just a really simple example of how two different people with two different thoughts have two different results. Now I want to get into some examples of your belief about food that may be causing results you don’t want.

All right, so one of the biggest beliefs about food I see is that food has a hold on you. Almost as if the food has the power. Like it somehow has this superpower over your brain and body. Like a magnet, it draws you in. I want to share something with you though.

Food is just literally matter. It’s molecules. It doesn’t have any power over you. Not even sugar. That’s all amazing news. It means you have the power. Not the food. And more specifically, it means that your thoughts about food can be changed, which then means that your results can be changed.

So, believing that food has the power and has a hold on you is very limiting. It holds you back. It takes away your power. It leaves you feeling as though you’ll never escape the terrible prison that the food holds you in. The food does not have a hold on you though. Like I said, it’s just molecules.

You might have a desire or craving for the food, which feels like a magnetic draw to it. It feels like it controls your brain. But I promise you it doesn’t. The feeling of the desire or the craving, is just generated by the thought you’re having about that food.

So, cookies for example. You might see them and think, “Oh those look so delicious. I deserve one of those right now.” That thought then creates a desire or craving for it. The food didn’t cause that feeling in your body. Your thought about the food did.

Even though I have a really good handle on my eating habits and feel completely in control, my brain still sometimes goes to the place of I won’t be able to control myself around doughnuts if they’re in the house. But because I know I control my thoughts and my thoughts are what cause my craving or desire for doughnuts, I quickly go back into control mode.

I may still have a love for doughnuts; however I have complete control over the craving or desire. And I love that. Because it means that I can have a doughnut and enjoy it, without feeling as though I did something wrong, and without feeling as though I’m going to lose control. That’s even with being surrounded by doughnuts because of the season we’re in. There are a ton of apple cider doughnuts everywhere we go it seems. Those and plain ones are my favorite.

So, I want to just offer to you that when you remember that food is literally just molecules and it does not control your feelings, more specifically your desire or craving for it, it gives you the power back. You can then be more deliberate about your decision to eat that particular food that’s available to you, or to not eat the food. This also carries over into quantity of food.

When you realize that food does not have a control over your brain and body, your brain is in control and you’re then able to have a thought like “No thanks, I’ve had enough food. I don’t need seconds or thirds.”

Commonly I see women with beliefs about sugar, that it has this draw on them. Now certainly, sugar and other foods will cause a release in dopamine, the reward hormone. This is literally a chemical in your brain that assists with brain communication. This can make cravings more intense, the more you eat sugar. However, cravings are still a feeling, and a feeling is still always a result of a thought or a belief.

So, you can see the sugary dessert, and still have the thought “I don’t need that dessert right now.” Your brain may then say, “but I do need it.”

Just know that your brain is going to offer you lots of rebuttals especially when you really want that dessert, but you can still take control and say no. Inside Food Freedom, I have lots of different tools to help you with this as well, to make it easier to say “no.”

Alright another belief that I commonly see about food is that food is bad and causes weight gain. This, I believe is why a lot of people get into that dieting cycle. If you haven’t listened to that podcast episode, I recommend that you do. I will link it on the episode page. That was last week’s episode, so you can also easily find it in whatever podcast app you may be listening in.

Many diets are all about restricting and eliminating foods and acting as though certain foods are evil and are only going to cause you to gain weight. This is just simply not true. When you get into the belief that food is “bad” and “causes weight gain”, what kind of feelings do you think this will generate? Let’s pick it apart. Let’s go with the belief that “food causes weight gain.”

So, what kind of a feeling do you think the statement or belief, “food causes weight gain” would elicit? It could be fear, frustration, even disdain. The feeling is going to be different for different people of course. So, let’s just choose fear as the feeling. What would then happen if someone had a fear of food causing weight gain?

They might avoid eating food. They might significantly restrict their calories. They might even avoid social events where they knew food was going to be. They could even potentially avoid having food in the house. Or they could start over-exercising in fear that the food they did eat was going to cause weight gain.

What do most of these actions have in common then? What kind of result? Most of these are going to result in over-hunger, which then is going to make it highly likely that they overeat. They’re going to get so hungry, that they’re just going to lose control and overeat.

This is not going to be helpful for the person that is trying to get control over their eating habits, right? Or even the person who’s trying to lose weight. Because avoiding food in general, is not necessarily the healthiest or the best way to go about it. It could potentially even cause more weight gain. Because it’s not sustainable.

So, isn’t it interesting that the belief that food causes weight gain can result in overeating? And certainly, if there is a different feeling generated from that belief, it would potentially cause a different result.

So, let’s just say that that belief food causes weight gain elicits a feeling of frustration. What kind of actions do you think might result from that feeling of frustration? Or what kind of inactions do you think might result from that feeling of frustration?

Frustration is not going to be the fuel that will cause you to do actions to get better control of eating habits. Or to lose weight. Frustration is going to be more likely for you to give up. More likely for you to have inaction. Throw in the towel.

And if you give up or throw in the towel on the steps you were trying to take towards getting control of your eating habits or breaking bad eating habits, of course you’re not going to get the results that you desire.

So, you’ve probably noticed that when you have a negative belief about food it’s going to generate a negative feeling typically. Negative feelings are typically not going to be great fuel for doing the actions that you need to take to get the results you want.

On the contrary, if you have positive beliefs about food, this will most likely generate positive feelings about food. Positive feelings about food you might think we’ll just make you eat more of the food that you’re trying to avoid; however, this is not the case typically. new line so let’s examine that.

Now it’s easy to think of a positive belief about a salad of course. Salads are typically very very healthy. But let’s do a positive belief about a food that’s not generally seen as super healthy. Let’s pick a positive belief about peanut butter cookies. Or better yet, apple cider doughnuts.

Let’s say that we’re going to choose a positive thought about some apple cider doughnuts that someone is offering. Now your brain may want to go to a negative thought of “Oh if I eat those doughnuts, it’s just going to cause weight gain.” But you’re going to be intentional and deliberate about your thought you’re going to choose what you would rather believe.

And of course, there are several examples of different positive thoughts we can have about the apple cider doughnuts.

However, let’s just say we decide to have the thought, “I haven’t had an apple cider doughnut yet this season, so I am going to enjoy one right now.”

What kind of a feeling do you think this will generate? Maybe a feeling of anticipation of enjoying the flavor of that doughnut. And anticipation of enjoying that doughnut of course is going to lead you to eat the doughnut, right? But also, when you’re focused on really enjoying that doughnut, maybe you might eat it more slowly and really savor every bite.

Then when you eat the donut, but slowly, and savor every bite, what do you think will end up resulting? You might feel really satisfied and in control. You allowed yourself to enjoy that doughnut but make the decision deliberately to enjoy the doughnut. You can also feel satisfied with just one donut because you took your time eating it and really focused on enjoying every bite of it and the flavor of it.

Now you might think well I wouldn’t stop at just one I would then want to eat two or three. You can get the result of stopping at just one though. You practice the skills of getting the control, which is what I teach in Food Freedom. You practice the skills of understanding that your thoughts ultimately have a major impact on your results.

Alright, sign up for the workshop, Get some help with overeating. Come to it live if you want to get that gift package when you become a member of Food Freedom. You can sign up for the workshop on the episode page, or you can visit https://katemjohnston.com/workshop. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll see you there.