What if cravings aren’t a personal failing?

Transcript

One of the biggest problems that I find so many women struggle with is actually setting aside regular scheduled time to actually nourish themselves with some space to breathe, with some self-reflection time of like getting out of the jibber-jabber and constant freneticism in their mind, and also to nourish themselves with vitality from the sun and the vitality from food.

So often women just push and push and push their body. They just keep on overloading themselves with responsibilities because they’re super capable.

It means that their body actually starts having to revert into a fight-or-flight mode, even famine mode. Your body thinks that there’s some level of threat happening, that it has to protect itself because there’s a shortage of food, there’s a famine approaching or there’s a winter approaching.

It actually kicks our body into this starvation mode where you start slowing your metabolism down, craving high fatty foods, storing fat really stubbornly, and feeling really sluggish and lethargic so that you don’t burn any excess energy that you need to store for winter.

As a result of being in this fight-or-flight mode, you actually start having these excess outer layers, these excess stored fat that is protection, stored energy and warmth that your body’s trying to keep you safe with.

So many times women actually look at this external symptom of the underlying condition and think, “There’s something wrong with me. I don’t have enough willpower. I’m not disciplined enough. I love food too much. I love wine too much.”

But actually, it’s a problem with this fast-paced lifestyle and always putting the needs of others ahead of yourself. But just like the oxygen mask, you’ve gotta put that mask on yourself before you can be of any use to anybody else.

One of the big things that women struggle with is actually setting aside time to eat in regular intervals. Often it’s like, “Oh, you know, I’m not snacking, I’m just having breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

That would actually suit various people with different body types. But what I find is that for women who have been just so disconnected from their bodies and not been listening to it and eating so much inflammatory foods like sugar to get you through the crash, the afternoon slump, coffee to pep you up and get over that fatigue… A lot of high GI foods, bread, gluten, and dairy – all those types of foods create inflammation in your body. It’s like you’re eating foods that speak to your body in a language that just sounds like white noise. So you can’t actually listen to your body. There’s all this poor gut health happening, there’s leaky gut, and your body’s kind of trying to protect itself from this inflammation.

What I always encourage women to do is just to start creating scheduled time and breaks to eat regularly to make your body go, “You know what, there’s an abundance of food, I don’t need to hold onto this. There’s plenty around.” So you’re not even depriving yourself or restricting yourself. Because even if you’re doing it in your mind, your body’s going to be like, “I’m going to have to hold on to the fat as much as possible.”

If this was just like a conscious choice, we’d just be like, “Right, I will do it.” But there are some deeper layers like, “Food is my enemy, I can’t possibly eat this much food and still achieve the weight loss goals that I want.” But it’s actually based on a fallacy. That’s old diet mindset propaganda that says that the only way to manage your weight is to do calories in, calories out, exercise more, eat less, when actually fat is a hormonal issue. There’s something going wrong where your body’s just feeling like there’s a shortage of food.

By making sure that you have those regular breaks and really nourishing your body and staying away from the inflammatory foods, you actually can start listening to your body better. And that’s why things like intermittent fasting or just three square meals a day works for some people. But what you’ll find is that you will have a certain response from that where you’ll get some good weight loss results – but you’ll also find there’s a plateau.

And within that plateau, it’s good to try different things out, it’s good to stimulate your metabolism. It’s good to experiment and go on a bit of adventure and see what it’s like to eat low-carb, high-fat meals and do that for a few days in a row, a couple of weeks in a row – and just see how you feel. And use data. So, actually take your measurements, not just the measurements on the scales – but start taking your water weight, start taking your circumference, take your bioimpedance if you’ve got something available that can do that.

Just by tracking and seeing what happens when you do these different experiment adventures gives you some feedback to figure out: “Do I want to keep on doing it or don’t I?”

But so much of the time women actually stop doing it – because in order for them to eat more regularly, they would have to put themselves first, which is sabotage zone, red zone, or they would have to tell other people no and push back and say, “This is my boundary.”

But if you actually have a look, especially if you work for yourself, if you’re constantly in a brain fog, low energy, you’re not going to be performing well, your family is going to get the version of you that’s exhausted on the couch, and you’ll never really get that time off. Or when you do have time off, you’ll probably end up having to pay back all that energy and spend it all on the couch, or worse, get sick.

That’s happened to so many women who have suffered from this kind of burnout because they just don’t nourish their body.

When you realize that you have to fuel your body like a mental elite athlete, when you start activating your athletic archetype, your inner athlete, and realize that just because your body can withstand these periods of massive action and hardly any nutrition doesn’t mean it should and doesn’t mean it’s not meant to as well.

All you have to do is put RescueTime, an app on your desktop, and actually start measuring your performance, measure your quality of sleep when you wake up, how you feel from day to day, where your cravings are at. And if you can start seeing monitored improvements in that, you know you’re on a good goer.

A lot of times you can even speak to your superior or your boss about just having a little break or time out.

There’s so many nurses that work with us – because they’re such amazing caregivers but they don’t care for themselves. And it’s like, “I’ve got unconscious patients I’ve got to look after.” It’s like, “Well, what happens if you don’t look after yourself and you’re the one looking after the unconscious patients?”

If you can’t sit down to a meal… You know you have to go to the toilet. Like what if you had to go to the toilet and have a bowel movement? It’s going to take you 5 minutes, 10 minutes, who knows? If you’re really clogged up it might take you longer. So there’s always ways where you’re actually costing yourself more. If you just go away and find an easy thing… You can suck down a green smoothie without having to sit down and eat with a knife and fork. You can have amazing little quiches and eat them on the run. There’s plenty of healthy options.

If you are outcome and positive-focused in your choices, if you are aware of the excuses that you’re telling yourself and noticing where you’re getting validation from putting other people first instead of yourself. And then also being aware of those archetypes that we’ve spoken about before: Are you being the child right here? Are you just looking to the authority figure and never questioning them because it’s easy for you to be dependent on them? Or would you actually want to stand in your empowered self and go, “Hey, guess what, I can be way more focused and I can give my patients the best possible outcome if I nourish myself” and “How am I being somebody else’s caregiver if my cup isn’t full?”

When you’re looking at the saboteur… Is this really something that you cannot stick to? Is this really something that you cannot incorporate in your life for three days, a string of 3 days, 21 days? Or are you just using this saboteur, this fear of failure, or this fear of what might happen if you actually got all your wishes to come true? Where are you actually giving yourself permission to not be your best self and where are you sabotaging?

Just by understanding those little different archetypes and realizing the different ways that we actually hold ourselves back from not just our own greatness but the people around us experiencing our own greatness, that is the key for you to be your best self, for you to be a picture of shining health from the inside out, and really feeling like the reflection that you see in the mirror is like an accurate depiction of who you really are.

Because so many of the women that I speak to, they just feel like this person with low mood, snappy, fatigued, not really able to have fun unless it’s depending on the crutch of food or alcohol, just really not giving the best of themselves to their loved ones.

Just by doing something simple as reclaiming some of your own time just to fuel your body and treat yourself like an elite mental athlete will actually help you unravel a bunch of those negative consequences – and you will be really really surprised at how fueling yourself like an elite athlete can actually create a cascade of positive benefits in all these other areas of your life.

Let me know how it goes. We’ve got amazing training and resources. You can join us in our Facebook group. I also have a really cool Body Confidence Blueprint that you can download.

Have an amazing day.

Bianca x

The advice I’ve shared with you today lies in FAT Switch which is one step of my signature system the Body Confidence Blueprint. You can download your free training by clicking the banner below.