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Today I’m talking with Elizabeth Dall about how to find Body Love and Food Freedom when you’re a busy wife and mama. Because as our bodies change from pregnancy and the stress of getting older, it can be hard to find anything beautiful in the mirror. Not to mention that keeping up with healthy cooking and meal planning often just feels like one more thing.
But if you’re ready to finally let go of the diet mentality and step into true food freedom, even in the middle of your busy mom life, then keep listening because this episode is going to totally transform your mindset.
You Get To Choose What Eating Well Looks Like
There’s no way to escape the fact we need food to survive. But that doesn’t mean our lives have to revolve around meal planning and being a slave to the kitchen and diet plan.
Diet culture teacher us that we need this rigidity to “get it right.” But that’s not always the case.
Emotions Surrounding Food Are Not All Wrong
Emotional eating can be a gift. It’s not all bad.
Usually the idea that emotional eating is bad comes from the fact that the way we turn to food is often not supportive.
To be a healthy mom, you have to try to find a way to recognize that our feelings around food are important, just like other emotional connections that we have.
Food connects people. When someone’s had a baby and you bring them a meal. Or when someone’s sick. When a neighbor brings you over a warm chocolate chip cookie as a treat.
But instead of always feeling like our emotional eating is bad, what if we reframed our mindset to see the opportunity. Like when we’re lonely and we run to food. We recognize that, stop, and then make a different choice.
This helps us become more in tune with our bodies.
Why Dieting Doesn’t Work
Our actions, especially around food and dieting, often act like a pendulum. We swing from extreme to the other. Like being all in on a diet to eating whatever we want, whenever we want. There’s no balance.
When you’ve been a diet cycle for so long, your body has been up and down – weight gain, weight loss – and your body isn’t sure when you’re going to binge or when you’re going to restrict, so they go into this hold onto everything mode.
But when you start consistently giving your body food, you retrain your body to use that food as fuel and burn the extra weight rather than holding onto it.
Healing Takes Time
When you’re super busy and trying to be a healthy mom with so many things competing for your attention, it’s hard to have patience. We want to fix it all, right now, and be done with it.
But the issues that have caused weight gain, and gut issues, and hormonal imbalances didn’t happen overnight. And they’re going to take time to untangle.
Sometimes it’s as simple as eliminating gluten or dairy, but sometimes it means journaling through the food stories that have caused you to overeat or binge since childhood.
Weight Loss & Body Love Is A Process
We so often believe that when we lose weight, then we’ll be happy. But who you are inside – baggage and all – won’t change just because you’re thinner.
It’s like renovating your house. It usually happens over time. Over years and projects that add up to your dream home. But shouldn’t you find ways to be happy in your home in the meantime? Can you bring joy into the space you have?
Because if you can’t keep this home clean, you’ll never keep your dream home clean either.
It’s good to have goals, but make sure you’re celebrating the steps along the way. If you can’t find joy in the body you live in right now, how will find joy in the renovated one later?
Food Freedom
When you have a good relationship with food, it’s not a fear based thing. When you’re restricting and bingeing it’s out of fear that you won’t have control, or you’ll overeat, or you won’t be able to keep going with what you’re doing.
But food freedom is feeling safe around food.
Note: Food freedom doesn’t necessarily come with weight gain. But if it does, that’s not a bad thing. Weight gain is not good or bad. It’s just a side effect. And weight loss is a side effect of consistent, daily behaviors.
What’s The Right Way To Lose Weight
Start by asking turning your “need” for weight loss into a tangible want by asking: what will weight loss bring me? Maybe journal through the question I want weight loss because…
Then shift into action by remembering that your outcome will always match your level of commitment. Assuming your hormone levels are balanced and your body is in a good place of healing, ask yourself: how can I show up day in and day out in a way that matches the outcome that I want to live?
So if you don’t want to live carb free forever, ask how can I have a healthy, balanced relationship with carbs in my life?
It’s not usually that we don’t know what to do, it’s choosing to stay consistent with the habits we know we need to do. It’s matching your desired outcome with your commitment.
So start small. Ask yourself: what would be my next easiest thing to change? Is it getting rid of my late night snack? Then as you become consistent with one habit, add another.
Another important thing to ask yourself is: do I want to do this forever? Do I want to count calories forever? Do I want to quit soda forever? Then create your habits around your desired outcome. Like finding a happy balance with soda or creating food habits that don’t require calorie counting. Because the habits you create actually do need to last a lifetime, if you want lasting change.
More From Elizabeth Dall
Hit play to hear my full conversation with Elizabeth Dall about simple choices you can make to become a more healthy mom.
Elizabeth Dall, M.S., CEP, is the owner of awomanofwellness.com and helps women heal their relationship with food and their bodies and experience joy in wellness. Elizabeth believes every woman has the knowledge of what she truly needs deep within herself and that they can learn to love their bodies, heal their relationship with food, and find joy in exercise and movement. She helps by offering online programs & personalized coaching to women searching for food freedom and a desire to live a happy, healthy lifestyle without limitations.
Ditch the diets guide: www.awomanofwellness.com/nomorediets
Food Freedom course: www.awomanofwellness.com/foodfreedom
Overcome emotional eating free mini-course: www.awomanofwellness.com/overcome-emotional-eating
Resources we talked about in this episode…
It Was Me All Along by Andie Mitchell
Sugar Poem by Rebecca K. Reynolds
Beginner’s Guide to Purposeful Motherhood
Freebie ALERT!
Unbusy Your Mom Life!
Hey mama, I see you – hustling hard. Doing all.the.things. But mom life doesn’t have to be ruled by your to-do list. Let me show you how to Take Back Your Time with my FREE toolkit!
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