Eating like a “normal person”… what is it, and why is it so hard for some people to do?

"I just want to eat like a normal person"

This is what women who struggle with a toxic relationship with food often say... and who can blame them!? Struggling with your relationship with food SUCKS and it adds an unnecessary burden to one's life. It's completely reasonable for someone to want normalcy in their life when they haven't experienced it for years, maybe even decades.

So how do we reach this fantasy land of eating like normal?

I've got some insights for you (from my closet today, lol) on what's happening in the brain which is making it extra hard for some to be a "normal eater", and what we need to do to fix it. 🧠 

If you learn something new in this episode or have a request for an upcoming episode, let me know by sending a text message (button is up at the top)!

TOPICS COVERED 👇
What is "normal eating" (01:01)
Burden of food thoughts (03:08)
Challenges of eating normally (04:19)
The cycle of stress and food choices (07:41)
Addressing subconscious beliefs (10:08)

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Transcript

Michelle 00:00:00  We're back with Nourished and Free, the podcast. I'm your host, Michelle Yates, a registered dietitian with my master's in health psychology. And I love talking about how to better your relationship with food and make it more nourishing and balanced, while being free from a lot of the things that we often find ourselves caught up in, like nutrition, misinformation or fad diets or disordered eating like binge eating or yo yo dieting and things like that. And for me, I feel like in order to do that, we do need to blend the world of nutrition and psychology together, which is where I'm what I'm really passionate about. And that's how I work with my clients, is making sure that we attend to both of those things. Because as you're going to see in this episode today, our psychology really does have it plays a huge role in the choices that we make specifically with food and vice versa. And something that comes up a lot in the conversations that I have with individuals who are struggling with food, is that they wish that they could just eat like a quote unquote normal person.

Michelle 00:01:01  Here's a few quotes from women I've spoken to so you can see what I mean. I wish I could just approach food like a normal person and not let it run my life. I want to be able to not think about food constantly and just live my life normally without that voice in the back of my head, always wanting food. I want to live a normal life with food without a constant diet. I'd like to not think about food and all the rules be normal around it. And lastly, I need to be able to have a normal life around food. It's destroying my emotions and hope. So we see this theme of normalcy coming up a lot, right? So many people want to just feel normal around food and normal in their life, but they feel like food is keeping them from that. They feel like they're missing out on some sense of normalcy. What does that even mean? What does it mean to eat like a normal person? Let's try and like kind of tease out what that looks like because you could probably define that very differently from somebody else.

Michelle 00:02:02  One of our clients actually put it really well. When she was talking about her husband, she was talking about how he eats. And perhaps, you know, somebody in your life who who eats the same way. What she said was, I realized a couple of years ago that my husband doesn't really think about food that often. He eats when he's hungry. He thinks about what he's in the mood for or feels like he wants. I was honestly flabbergasted. I don't think I've ever really processed that food. Didn't need it to take up 90% of my brain space. Maybe you relate to that. Maybe you feel like 90% of your brain space is thoughts of food, or thoughts of your body, or both. All that's left is that 10% sliver for everything else in your life. I know that's certainly how I used to feel. I felt like I always say 95% of my brain was thoughts of food or my body, and it was like living with this cloud in my life. I couldn't ever see anything fully or see it clearly because this cloud was in the way and it was these thoughts of food and my body.

Michelle 00:03:08  So here's a few key themes that were gathering in terms of what, quote unquote, normal eating looks like. We're eating when we're hungry, stopping one full, having what one is in the mood for without the guilt or the worry. And we're not obsessively thinking about food or obsessive about it at all. For many people, this is the exact opposite of what their relationship with food looks like. They might eat regardless of how they feel physically. Maybe they don't even notice fullness until they're so sick that they just can't physically bear getting any more food down. Maybe they avoid the foods they crave and find themselves bingeing later. Or maybe they don't binge, but they are left with overwhelming sense of worry and guilt, and ultimately are putting way too much energy towards this food that they want, but they feel like they shouldn't have. A lot of people spend most of their time thinking about food, just like I did what they're going to eat, when, how much, if it's okay for them to eat it, weighing their options of other things they maybe should have instead.

Michelle 00:04:19  But how? It's not actually what they want to have. How they shouldn't have eaten something that they already have, what other people are eating. I mean, if you've experienced this, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's just this constant food chatter or food noise as others call it. I once had a client describe it as a. It was like having a burner on all the time that you couldn't shut off. So why does this happen? Why is it so hard for someone to just eat? Well, normally to explain this, I'm going to share a conversation that I had with a client the other day. She was talking about how she finds it so.

Michelle 00:04:53  Hard.

Michelle 00:04:53  To just.

Michelle 00:04:54  Do.

Michelle 00:04:54  The right thing and fuel herself. Well, when it comes to nutrition. And she's somebody who struggles with that constant thoughts of food, and she's somebody who struggles with those constant thoughts of food. She knows what the more nourishing option is, but she won't choose it every time. A lot of times she doesn't.

Michelle 00:05:13  She'll typically go for the less nourishing option despite knowing better, and then she doesn't feel great after eating it both physically and emotionally. What I told her is that I want her to think about her relationship with food and nutrition is two different sections in her brain. There's the more logical side of her brain that's more deliberate and has long term goals in mind. Then there's the part of her brain that's more emotional. And, you know, it's super freaking hard. And you know what makes it super freaking hard to tap into the logical part of your brain when you've got a whole bunch of emotional junk going on that's clouding up your ability to reason through anything else. It's like you can't get to that side when that part of your brain is in the way. It's kind of like when you're driving and it's raining outside, the rain is coming down on the windshield, making it hard for you to see and make the right decisions about what to do with the car, where to go. But when you use your wipers and you wipe off the rain from the window, you can see better and you can do what you need to do in order to get to your destination.

Michelle 00:06:25  So our emotions and specifically stress is like the rain coming down and making it harder for you to see accurately and make the right decisions. Technically, what's happening in the brain here, from a neurological perspective, is when you have an increased sense of stress, your prefrontal cortex, which is in the front part of your brain, it's the part responsible for judgment and planning and emotion regulation. It's less accessible. We no longer have tight control over our thoughts and emotions and actions. Rather, those things are bubbling to the surface now. We don't have as much control over them, and they're taking over the ability for us to be deliberate and think more about our long term goals, because that part of our brain is just not as activated anymore. It's less accessible because of this heightened sense of stress and these emotions that are clouding things up or the rain on the window. So I mentioned stress. This is super important to highlight here, because if you're somebody who struggles with food noise and negative self-talk, being down on yourself, those concepts of food, right, like that's a form of stress.

Michelle 00:07:41  When that stress is going on, we have less access to the part of our brain that's more logical and deliberate and has those long term goals in mind. So this is why people who struggle with their relationship with food find it difficult to follow through on goals that they have. These aspirations they have for themselves end up being more of a pipe dream than reality, because there is so much stress going on in the brain that it's just psychologically way more difficult for them to access the parts of their brain that they need to, that somebody else who doesn't have that food stress is able to access more easily. Now here's where things get interesting, because what we typically try to do to fix our relationship with food or to fix the the symptoms of a poor relationship with food that we usually notice, like waking or binge eating or emotional eating. We try to fix those things by forcing ourselves to eat a certain type of way, whether it's following a diet or a meal plan from your trainer, or just having more willpower over sweets, keeping them out of the house, not ordering whatever it is.

Michelle 00:08:49  That's actually the worst thing we can do, though. If you struggle with being able to eat normally because if those choices weren't our own to begin with and came from a place of reduced stress, and instead it's a result of having all these rules to follow, promises that you made to yourself, and the goal of losing weight and trying to shrink your body because you're ashamed of your body. Now we're adding on more stress. So all the things that you've tried that you're like, I feel like I'm completely broken at this point. I've done every single day. I've done every single thing under the sun to try and fix this, to try and lose weight or whatever it is. That's why they never work, because they're just adding on more stress, which is making it more and more difficult for you to access the part of your brain that you really need to access in order to become that normal eater. that follows through on your health goals, and that has a sustainable weight and sustainable habits. This is why it's so important and so critical to get into the weeds of your relationship with food and change the thoughts and the beliefs and the value systems that you have so that you're alleviating that stress.

Michelle 00:10:08  Because whatever those thoughts and beliefs and value systems are that you have and that you may not be aware of, they might be very subconscious. Or if you're somebody who's experienced trauma around food or your body, that's a lot of stress. They can be causing a lot of stress depending on what it is. But if we change them in a way so that it alleviates stress, well, that's all. That's where the magic happens. We cannot just keep tacking on more rules to follow or buying new supplements as we try to force ourselves into a smaller body, because that continues to add stress, which brings us further away from being able to successfully do those actions that actually help us move towards who we want to be. When we get deeper into the roots of your story and what makes you, you and what's causing you stress and making it harder for you to access those parts of your brain that you really need to. That's when everything falls into place. Remember that client who was talking about her husband, how he only eats when he's hungry and he eats what he's in the mood for without worrying about it? And she's like, I'm just so flabbergasted by that.

Michelle 00:11:23  How is he able to live a life where he's not thinking about food 90% of the time? A month and a half later, after working with us, where we dug into her specific relationship with food and identified what it was in her story that kept that chronic food stress running on autopilot. and we fixed it so that that stress was reduced. And she was now finding that her prefrontal cortex was more accessible. Of course, like you don't really feel that. Right. But that's what was happening a month and a half after she started working with us, and we were digging into her specific relationship with food, what was causing her stress, and identified what it was in her story that was making it difficult for her to access the prefrontal cortex. And why it was is that chronic food stress kept running on autopilot. She posted this. We had friends over last night for pizza and I didn't stress about what I ate. I had a couple of slices and some fruit and felt comfortably full and moved on.

Michelle 00:12:30  One of my daughter's friends had leftover cupcakes from her birthday. They brought it to our house and left. I had one and then they just have been sitting in the kitchen and I didn't go eat any in secret later or even think about doing that. Typically, I would have either not eaten any in front of people or would have had one, but then gone back for more when no one was around. That was only a month and a half after she shared that she was completely flabbergasted about her husband being able to eat. Basically the way that she ended up eating a month and a half later because we corrected the misalignments in her relationship with food and with her body that were creating more stress, she was suddenly able to, quote unquote, eat like a normal person. If you're ready to do the same, especially before the holidays are going into the new year. Visit the show notes to learn more about joining us in Nourished and Free the Program. There you'll find more information and an application to have me and my team support you in your journey towards becoming more nourished, free, and normal.

Michelle 00:13:32  If you love this episode, let me know by leaving a rating or review and share it to your story. Let me know you're listening and tag me at Yates Nutrition. We'll catch you on the next episode.