Replace ‘Should’ With Positive Self-Talk! This ONE THING Helped Me Hit My Health Goals
Replace ‘Should’ With Positive Self-Talk! This ONE THING Helped Me Hit My Health Goals
Ok. I’m guilty. I’m guilty of it too. I’ll admit it.
Let me tell you what I’m talking about.
It’s the self-talk
WE all do it, many of us do it when we’re trying to change our eating habits
In this episode I’m going to lay out the facts why this is so damaging and I’ll give you three tips to change that self talk
Transcript of the Episode
Andrea Heyman 00:00 Hi friends, it's Andrea Heyman here with another episode of Adventures In Feeding My Fam. Okay, I will admit it, I am guilty. And guilty of it too. Let me tell you what I'm talking about. It's the self talk, or I should say the negative self talk that we all do it. Many of us do it when we're trying to change habits. And in this episode, I'm going to talk to you about why this is so damaging, and how it can be so self sabotaging to the habits that we're trying to create. I'll give you three very specific actionable tips to help change that self talk. And I am going to implement it with you today.
So self talk is actually a topic I cover in detail in my ecourse. That's called from emotional eating to food freedom. This four week course is designed to help you understand your history around emotional eating, and why it's such a hard habit to break, identify the difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger, identify emotional eating triggers, retrain your brain around thinking around food. And then I also teach you how to utilize mindfulness techniques to promote self talk. So traditionally, when we lose weight, or we try to get healthier, we set up all these tactical things like meal planning, meal prep, food rules, do this, don't do that. healthy snacks, all the things, and these tactical things are important. However, I think it's only about 10 to 20% of the success equation. Even more important is addressing why how and when we emotionally eat, and when we eat without being mindful and kind of aware of what we're doing. And I believe that without addressing these factors, that it's really really rare for individuals to meet their wellness goals or their healthy eating goals long term. That is why people start a healthy eating routine or diet. It works for a while and then they go off of it after a while because they're not addressing those inner things that emotional piece that is so ingrained in wired into our subconscious. And that's what that course addresses very specifically. So if you want more information on the course, go to adventures and feeding my fam.com backslash course.
Adventures In Feeding My Fam is a weekly podcast discussing the challenges and fun around feeding your family healthy meals. I'm Andrea Heyman, and I've been a registered dietitian for over 25 years. So I know the importance of good nutrition. But I'm also a mom of three so I understand the challenges and humor that comes along with trying to make this happen. In this podcast, I'll share my tips, tricks and menus, but also share the stories and food prep failures that come along the way to interview guests. We'll discuss family food traditions, how to strengthen bonds around the family table, as well as their favorite family recipes. There isn't one right way to feed your family. But there are countless stories, you can take bits and pieces and learn from all of them.
For those of you who don't know, I am a registered dietitian and I have been for 25 years. I have a specialty in weight management and then a couple other certifications related to weight management. So I like to follow up with my clients really frequently. I prefer every week to every two weeks, but a lot of times folks will come to talk to me every two weeks. And I swear that first five minutes of appointments. It's like a confessional for many of my patients. And they will say things like, oh Andrea, I've been bad. I have to be more strict with myself. I really messed up. I fell off the wagon, things like this. And these words pop out at me like big red flags. It's like, I know that these folks would never ever be using these words to describe someone else or they wouldn't use those words to just talk to someone else. However, the things that they're saying out loud to me. I know for a fact that the internal dialogue what they're saying to themselves, is even harsher, ruder and crueler I know you can relate because I do can relate to I, I am there regularly. But this language is absolutely not good and not successful in meeting your healthy eating habits. So you don't need to be an expert on self talk or behavior change to know that in these kinds of situations, you absolutely know how things are going to turn out. If you are telling yourself that you're bad, you can't do it, you're no good. Guess what's going to happen, you're not going to be able to do it. And this is very shocking and eye opening when I point this out to the people that I work with. But self talk is really so so important. Now, there's a lot of information and research about this topic. And I am definitely not an expert. But I'm just going to go in a little bit, talk about how we can make a few simple shifts, so that you can approach things to really affect your future success as it relates to your eating habits. So interestingly, experts say that 95% of our actions come from our subconscious rewiring, that means only 5%, around of our conscious thought is responsible for our behavior. So in order to make our eating behavior that we want, your eating behavior, goals, or reality, we really need to know how do you affect that subconscious wiring, and awareness. So our goals are made by our conscious mind. But our subconscious mind is really in charge of things. And to get our subconscious mind to align with a conscious mind. That's really the trick. So sometimes we want something so badly, but our identity, or our mental programming is not consistent with this. So how do we get things programmed into our subconscious mind. So there are a few ways to do that. However, today, we're really just going to focus on one area, and that is repetition. So the idea is that if you do something over and over and over again, if you repeat it, then it gets programmed into that subconscious. And we're specifically going to reprogram and focus on repetition around self talk. So that is why if we're constantly saying negative things to ourselves, when around, related to our eating habits, that we're reinforcing that message to our subconscious mind. So we need to shift that talk so that our subconscious mind rewires itself and begins to think otherwise. So I have three specific tricks to change that negative self talk around food. The first is to evaluate. So the first step is really increasing awareness on what you were doing. If you're not even aware that every time you have chips, you are saying, I deserve this, or I worked really hard today. So I should have a treat. If you are saying things like this to yourself, but you don't even know it. That is really the first step of rewiring and retraining our self talk is to evaluate and have an increase awareness of what our behaviors actually are. So I suggest spending some time taking note of how you talk to yourself around food, no judgment, no, you know, spiraling into stories about it. Just take note, I would do this for about a week. And you'll get a pretty good picture about how you begin to talk to yourself around food. Okay, once you've done that, then you can move into some real specific strategies here. And the first thing I recommend is gratitude. Yep, showing gratitude for your food. Because sometimes we have so much shame or specific rules around what we should or shouldn't do. A little gratitude can really shift your perspective. A few years ago, I was going through a yogurt yoga teacher training, I almost said yogurt. I was going through a yoga teacher training and part of the day so every on the weekend, we would have we'd be together for like eight hours straight. So everyone would bring a potluck dish. Okay, so the idea is if we had 30 people in our group, then every single person would bring like a bite sized A piece of food. And we would pass the food, sit in a circle, pass the food around, you could not eat anything, until we express Brett gratitude. So it was sort of like saying prayers, but it was much more of a gratitude practice around it. So it was, you would hold up your plate of flute food, you would look at all the beautiful colors, you would smell all the sense. And then you would think thank you to the farmers, appreciate the colors, whatever you would do. But you know, we sat there in gratitude toward the food and thank all the steps that it took and all the people that took so even like the driver that that took the food from the farm to, to the grocery store, the person at the grocery store, who unpacked it, to think about the process and how many people were involved in getting this food to you. So that's the first thing I want you to do is show gratitude to your food. Start with meals. But not only that, I want you to think about every piece of food that you put into your mouth and show gratitude for it. That includes a cookie. So in your mind, you can say thank you, thank you cookie, or a piece of chocolate, or your dinner meal, whatever it may be, show gratitude. So the first step was to evaluate. The second piece was to show gratitude. And finally, I'd like you to have some really positive affirmations about food. If you can retrain how you identify, that can begin to change your subconscious mind. So saying things like, I'm a healthy eater who makes wise choices, things like that. But I want you to make sure that you're keeping these affirmations in the positive. So I don't want you to make an affirmation. That's something like I'm a healthy eater who doesn't eat after seven o'clock, because what you're doing is you are re putting emphasis on the eating after seven o'clock. So now your mind is going to say focus on eating after seven o'clock. So everything in those affirmations, you can have one or two, but a couple of statements that are kind of like three identifying how you are around food. So I'm a healthy eater who meal plans and prepares food every week, something of that nature. And I want you to say this to yourself twice a day, preferably once in the morning and in the evening. And any additional times that you say, are extra bonuses. So evaluate gratitude, and affirmation are the three tips that I'm offering today to begin to change your self talk and rewire your subconscious mind about how it reacts to food and the choices that you're selecting for yourself. So I hope this was helpful for you. If you liked this episode, then rate review and subscribe, tag and share it with a friend who you think will also find value from the information that I'm putting out. So I mentioned earlier the emotional eating to food freedom course. I'm leaving you the link in the show notes so that you can find that as well. In addition, there are a couple other new links of where you can find me, including my facebook group and my Instagram account. Until next time, take care