Cracking The Code To Over Eating with Lia Pinelli

Today's guest, Lia Pinelli, was able to crack the code after decades of yo-yo dieting and disordered eating and now she helps others do the same and reclaim their mental energy that used to be spent counting calories. She knew how to go on a diet, she knew how to lose weight, but she didn't know how to heal her relationship with food and stop sabotaging herself.

As humans, we're hardwired to want things to feel good. If a diet sets us up for constantly restricting and depriving ourselves, that's not fun and it doesn't feel good and we won't stick with it over the long run.  Lia found a trick to really address the reason for her overeating and self-sabotage and has found her body's true size where she feels the most vibrant, energetic, and strong.

Find Lia's free training at her website: https://liapinellicoaching.com/eatingwithoutfear

Transcript

Magic Barclay: 1:00

Welcome back to a Magical Life. I'm your host, magic Barclay, and today I am joined by Leah Pinelli, and we're talking about cracking the code to overeating. Leah is one smart cookie. Despite holding degrees from both Stanford and uc, Berkeley, she was unable to crack the code on her struggle with overeating for decades. With a career as a school administrator in full swing and a new baby at home, she decided to ditch the diet, drama, and focus on what really mattered her career. Her. and her community. In 2016, she began life coach training with Dr. Martha Beck, and learned not only how to finally end her struggle with overeating, but also how to uproot the cognitive structures that were keeping her stuck and overwhelmed as a professional and as a. Today. She lives happily with her family in California and is at peace with food without counting calories or carbs. She's on a mission to teach other women how to end overeating at wit, overwhelm, and create the lives they crave unapologetically. Welcome,

Lia Pinelli: 2:12

Leah. Thank you so much for having me. Magic. I'm so happy to

Magic Barclay: 2:16

be here. I'm so happy to have you here. Now let's talk. Everything that happened for you, so everything was going ahead with your career and you know your study and then what you just. Food took over or what do you think was the key before you cracked the code? What was happening? Yes.

Lia Pinelli: 2:41

Such a great question. I mean, I really struggled with food and weight for pretty much my entire life. I, my first diet, um, started at the age of nine and I was really dieting off and on ever since, and I. Struggled a lot with, not just my weight, but often with my relationship with food. Like I knew I was eating more than other people. I knew I thought about food more than other people. I knew that, you know, when everybody was sitting around, I was the only one who was obsessively thinking about the brownies in the kitchen while everyone else was enjoying the conversation in the living room. So I always, you know, struggled. My relationship with food. And it really wasn't until I, had my career in full swing and my son that I just decided, you know, I'm done with this. I don't have time for this. None of this works. Diets don't work. I can't ever seem to really heal my relationship with food. The more I diet, the more I think about food. The less I diet, the more I gain, you know? And so it just felt like a losing battle. And so I really decided. Right about my mid thirties that I was just absolutely done. That I was going to eat what I wanted to eat and I wasn't gonna worry about it anymore. And that, that worked out fine, except for, I mean, in terms of my weight, you know, I was overweight, but I, you know, I didn't care anymore. I believe in body diversity. I believe that Kirby women are beautiful, you know, so I had come to kind of accept my body, but I was. Still struggling with my relationship with food. I was still really looking to food for comfort and finding myself overeating on a very regular basis, which I really I wasn't comfortable with. I wasn't happy.

Magic Barclay: 4:14

I hear you. I think through my childhood and certainly even after having my kids, my relationship with food was, Something I wouldn't wish on anybody. And now post-menopause, that's all catching up to me because it probably only took me till maybe the last 10 years to conquer that relationship. To make it something that was friendly. Yes, to me. And of course now hormones have changed and here I go again.

Lia Pinelli: 4:45

Yes. So I

Magic Barclay: 4:47

would really love to. Get something here for the listeners. So your expertise after your, your learnings, your teachings, everything that you went through. What can your expertise do to help people accelerate their health?

Lia Pinelli: 5:01

Yeah, well, you know, so I started Life Coach training in 2016 and it was not Weight loss coaching. I went to life coach training because I was working with teenage girls. in particular I was running empowerment programs for them. And, I felt like an imposter because while I was. Preaching body diversity and self-love. I was still struggling with myself and my relationship with food and so I decided to go to life coach training to actually. Acquire some tools that I could then impart on my girls so that they could actually have tools to navigate their lives instead of just me giving them my opinion about, you know, whether or not they should dump that boy or how they should love themselves. And so, while I was in life coach training, I had heard about weight loss coaching and I had the thought, literally, this was my verbatim thought in my head when I heard about weight loss coaching. I. Well, that sounds like a scam because if that worked, I would've done it by now because I had done every diet in the book. And so I quite literally would walk the opposite direction of any conversation happening about weight loss coaching, cuz I just didn't. I was done. I didn't wanna hear it anymore. I didn't want this diet scam. I didn't want any part of diet culture anymore. But what ended up happening was in 2017, I stumbled upon a tool. I was actually listening to a podcast, and I stumbled upon a tool that is used in weight loss coaching. And actually, I teach this tool for free. It's called Eating Without Fear, and you can get it for free on my website, leah pen.com. But that is the tool that I stumbled upon. That I then implemented and it was a mindset tool magic. It wasn't even a, you know, count this or do this with your food or put your food on smaller plates, or, you know, only eat after 11:00 AM. It was nothing like that. It was, it was actually a tool that I could do with my mind to connect me with my true hunger and satiety levels. And I was like, well, you know, there's no harm in trying. It wasn't about weight loss, it was actually about recalibrating my, uh, hunger and satiety levels. So I tried it and I couldn't believe it because I lost seven pounds over the course of a few weeks without trying to lose weight. It was the first time in my life that I lost weight without trying. And from there I just had to know more. I was like, okay, what is this weight loss coaching thing? Like what is it? Because I always kind of was suspicious that for me it was something in my mind that was the quote unquote problem. Cuz I knew how to go on a diet, I knew how to lose weight, I just couldn't figure out how to stop sabotaging myself. And that was the missing piece. That was how I cracked the code, was actually understanding the root of my self sabotage. Why was. Sabotaging, why were diets not working in the first place? And here's a pretty obvious hint for you. It's because diets really suck. they're not fun, they don't taste good. And guess what? We as humans, we're hardwired to want things to feel good. And so if we're signing ourselves up constantly for deprivation and restriction, we're not gonna stick with it in the long run. So really what it came down to, Really getting at the root of why I was self sabotaging in the first place, and addressing that, addressing the root of my overeating, combined with finding a way of eating that actually tastes good, that I enjoy eating this way, but it also allows me to live at my natural weight with very minimal effort. And when I was able to combine those two things together, ultimately what ended up happening was I was able to use the science of weight. Combined with the psychology and neuroscience of, you know, the human brain, I was able to combine those things together to actually address all three of those things. The psychology, the neurology, and the practicality, the how do we actually lose weight and keep it off in the long run, and views all of that with actual, joyful pleasure in the process. And you come up with a way of living and eating that feels great and is totally sustainable for the rest of your life.

Magic Barclay: 9:00

That sounds fantastic. And listeners, we will mention Nat Freebie again a bit later. Leah, we talk about wealth here, so not just financial, but also personal and emotional wealth. What would be your top three tips to creating wealth?

Lia Pinelli: 9:16

Oh, this is a great question. so I personally, magic I have a mission. I, I very much have an agenda here and everywhere I go. I am on a mission to free up the collective mental real estate that women are currently using, counting calories and carbs and worrying about whether their pants are gonna fit or if they have rolls hanging over the, you know, the tops of their jeans. I am on a mission to free up all of that mental real estate so that we women can actually use our precious mental space for things that really matter to us and to the world. Right? Like I, Katie Couric, uh, has a, a quote. She says that, you know, if women were to give just a 10th of the amount of time that they currently spend on dieting and weight, if we just devoted a 10th of that time to, you know, other things, we probably. Solve the world's problems by now. So I'm very much on a mission to, you know, to your point of, of, of wealth. Three tips for wealth. We have a wealth of brain space. We have a wealth of wisdom and knowledge and expertise that I truly believe is. Currently being held captive by diet culture and by this kind of struggle that we have, and when you can remove that, this is what happened for me personally. When I stopped struggling with food and stopped struggling with weight and found a way to live 30 pounds, I lost 30 pounds nearly five years ago and have kept it off ever since with very minimal effort. I found that I had all this extra mental energy that I. Do do. And what I ended up doing with it, I started a business, like here I am. I ended up leaving a job that was sucking me dry and starting a business that gives me life that I, I wake up excited to do every day. I'm helping other women to free up their mental real estate so that they have a wealth of it's time, wealth. Right, like cuz we're no longer spending time reading diet books and researching, can I eat this? Can I eat that? Download the shopping list. You know, like we're no longer spending our time and our energy on that. So we can focus on whether it's running for office or raising children and being present while raising them instead of, you know, measuring and weighing your, you know, steamed broccoli and your brown rice in the kitchen. It's about really being present for our lives and having a wealth. Time and mental real estate when you can free that up for yourself. So my, my first tip would be to really do that work of freeing yourself from the ball and chain of diet culture, and from the ball and chain of, you know, what I call over hunger and over desire and emotional eating. Freeing yourself up from that is going to give you more wealth. And I think you can imagine, I actually had one woman, she, she was never a client. but I, I give a lot of. Content and free help on social media. And she's just been following me for a long time and never paid me. We've never worked together, but she's been following my work. She was losing weight. She was finding that food freedom that I always talk about, and she said, you know what, now that I've found food freedom by following you, I actually, I'm bored. I dunno what to do with all the time that I used to spend counting calories or carbs or whatever it is. And so she also started a business, she started her own business, and she ended up creating a sauce and selling it at farmer's markets. So, that to me is such, well, it's the mental freedom and it's also time freedom. I mean, that might count as two tips for wealth. But the other, the other tip that I wanna share there for wealth is actually, One of the things that makes me feel the most abundant and the the wealthiest is having a very strong, sense of trust with myself. And this is one of the core tenets of what I teach my clients is, one of my strongest areas of, uh, expertise is around self sabotage because all of my clients are participating in self sabotage and I used to as well, and that self sabotage. Almost always coming from a place of not trusting yourself. And often when we don't trust ourselves, we feel like we then need to control ourselves. And in fact, that goes with anything. Glennon Doyle, the author, she has said that when we don't. Trust someone, we then try to control them. It's kinda like what we do with kids. Like I don't trust my kid to cook dinner on his own. He's eight. So I'm definitely going to control the environment, right? But if I'm doing the same thing with my husband, I don't trust him to cook dinner, so I'm gonna control the dinner making process. You know, that that's not as pleasurable of a relationship that we're gonna have. And it's the same thing with ourselves. When we don't trust ourselves to have cookies in the house, we don't, when we don't trust our. To not overeat or not drink too much of that bottle of wine. When we don't trust ourselves, then we start to get into this relationship with ourselves of needing to control and use willpower and discipline and restriction. And just like in any other human relationship, it doesn't feel good. So when we really learn to stop self-sabotaging by learning how to trust ourselves and learning how to hold our own selves in high esteem, how to feel worth. Of trust and worthy of self-love, when we can actually invest in that. That is where the greatest abundance for me comes into play. The greatest amount of wealth. Because if I can trust myself to always have my own back, to be my own best friend, then I don't have to worry about sabotaging myself cuz I would never sabotage my best friend. So why would I sabotage myself?

Magic Barclay: 14:45

Does that make sense? That makes perfect sense and I really do love that analogy of cooking dinner. I was. Writing notes about that as you said it, so thank you. Good, good. Now we do talk about our own weight loss journeys here, and you know, I know a lot of listeners have mentioned to me on the Magical Life Facebook page at a Magical Life podcast that how can they listen to people? Their weight loss journey because these people must be skinny and never had a problem. So most of us coach from our own experience. What was your experience with weight? I know you touched on it earlier, and what can you offer the listeners to really grasp that? There is no perfect size.

Lia Pinelli: 15:39

Yes. Oh yes, absolutely. So my experience was, as I mentioned, I started dieting at nine and it was off and on ever since. And I, I do, uh, go into detail actually on my Instagram. I have a highlight, called My Story, and I share the whole detail with pictures, lots of pictures and before and afters and things like that. Uh, but not just pictures of me, but me also as like a nine year old chubby kid who got put on a diet, you know? and, My, my experience with that was not just limited to yo-yo dieting, but also I had experience with disordered eating in college. I felt a lot of pressure you know, I was new at uc, Berkeley, and, being a, a top school, I felt. A lot of pressure to perform and that pressure, combined with my own self-imposed and socially imposed pressure to be slim. so the pressure from school coupled with the pressure from, diet culture and dieting, and I was over exercising, led to, binge eating disorder at that time for me. and also in high school I suffered from a, a disordered eating called Orthorexia, which um, is not as well known, but it's a fixation. Quote unquote healthy foods or foods that you think are healthy. And back then, this was the nineties, it was all about fat-free foods. And so I actually had a, a total phobia of eating fat. And so I didn't eat any fat at all. I don't know how my brain developed at all because, you know, newsflash, our brains need fat so I definitely struggled a lot with food and my relationship with food over the years. and then when I gave it up, like I said, by the time I hit my mid thirties and I was just over it cuz I could see nothing works, so why bother? and I do believe in body diversity, meaning I am a huge supporter that we are not all supposed to look one way, nor would I want for all of us to look one way. genetics play a role and different shapes and size. are what makes the world go round, and it's what makes this beautiful and diverse. But for me, I was carrying an extra for me, and I am the only one who gets to decide what extra means. We don't need to use A B M I, although you might want to use the B M I, but you, it's not necessary. You decide what feels good on your body, and when I weighed an additional 30 pounds, I did not physically feel as good as when I, what I weigh now, and, and I know that. I had experienced, you know, having a smaller body versus a bigger body over all the years of yo-yo dieting, and I knew that this body, the one that I currently am in, was actually the one that I felt most energetic, most agile, most competent, the strongest, The more at home I felt, but I couldn't figure out how to stay in this body. That was the problem for me. And so once I gave it all up, once I decided I'm not doing this anymore, that was when I really started to, like I told the story where when I started to then kind of dabble a little bit in some of these tools and I found that when I don't struggle with it, and this is probably the most important thing that I can say about to your point about, you know, that there is no one perfect weight or one perfect size because what I teach my clients is actually that, we are not striving for some kind of idealized weight that the B M I says, you should weigh. It is truly. Your natural weight and your natural weight, what you know is your natural weight is whatever your body weighs with minimal effort. When you are not, struggling with food and you are not dieting. So what, what I mean by that is you're not overeating. So when I say struggling that often is you're not overeating, you're not having super strong cravings, you're not eating for emotional reasons, and you're enjoying. you're enjoying your meals, you're enjoying your, your relationship with food, and there's no power struggle there. There's no abusing food. There's no self-sabotage with food. When you have actually checked all of those boxes and said, Nope, I've got a really healthy relationship with food. I don't use it to beat myself up. I don't use it to comfort myself. I don't use it to punish myself. I enjoy food. I enjoy what I'm eating. And this is what I weigh. That is your natural weight. And so that for me is, well for everyone, it's gonna look totally different, right? There are some women, I'm five seven and I weigh 150 pounds. There are some women who are five seven and weigh 240 pounds. There are some women who are five seven and they weigh 130 pounds. No one of those shapes or sizes is better or worse than the other, but what's important is that That none of us are struggling with food or with weight, that none of us feel that food has power over us or that we need to use food in ways that don't actually feel, like I say, we wanna only use food in ways that really feel like love. Some

Magic Barclay: 20:15

very sage advice there. Listeners, you can find leah@www.leahpinelli.com on Facebook at Leah Pinelli Coaching and that freebie that we mentioned, eating Without Fear. Jump onto www.leahpinellicoaching.com/eating without fear. This was your episode 1 58. Leah, would you rejoin us in 1 59?

Lia Pinelli: 20:45

I would love to. Thank you so much for inviting me back.

Magic Barclay: 20:48

Fantastic. Listeners, thank you so much for your time. Go forth and create your magical life.