Are you ready to finally end your war with food, learn how to listen to your body, put a stop to overeating and rediscover peaceful, intuitive eating in 2024?
A few weeks ago, I was invited to be an expert guest on The Binge Cure, a radio show on Voice America with Dr. Nina Savelle Rocklin, Psy.D. - psychoanalyst, author, and radio show host specializing in food, weight and body image .
What was originally supposed to be a conversation about improving your body image & self-esteem by reprogramming your mind quickly turned into an extremely powerful conversation about:
So, if you're struggling with binge eating, food obsession, emotional eating, guilt & shame, feelings of failure or body image, you will gain SO much from this episode.
RESOURCES
Connect with Sabrina:
Are you ready to finally end your war with food, learn how to listen to your body, put a stop to overeating and rediscover peaceful, intuitive eating in 2024?
A few weeks ago, I was invited to be an expert guest on The Binge Cure, a radio show on Voice America with Dr. Nina Savelle Rocklin, Psy.D. - psychoanalyst, author, and radio show host specializing in food, weight and body image .
What was originally supposed to be a conversation about improving your body image & self-esteem by reprogramming your mind quickly turned into an extremely powerful conversation about:
So, if you're struggling with binge eating, food obsession, emotional eating, guilt & shame, feelings of failure or body image, you will gain SO much from this episode.
RESOURCES
Connect with Sabrina:
And I recognize I am giving up my entire life. I'm giving up my time, my mental energy, my sanity to get into a body. For what? So it was really hitting that rock bottom of realizing that if I keep doing this when I'm in my 30s and 40s and 50s, what is the quality of my life going to be like?
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Live, unrestricted podcast, a show where you'll learn how to heal your relationship with food and your body so that you can focus your time and energy on more important things, like your personal growth. I'm your host, sabrina Magna, food freedom coach, and my mission is to help make your life happier and healthier, without stress, overwhelm or guilt about food. If you love the show, please do go out and share it, and if you're looking for support with your relationship with food, details about my programs are in the show notes. Thanks for spending time with me today. Now let's jump in.
Speaker 1:So a couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed as a guest expert on the binge cure with Dr Nina.
Speaker 1:So the binge cure is a show hosted on Voice America Health and Wellness, and Dr Nina Savelle Rocklin is an amazing colleague, psychoanalyst, author and radio host specializing in binge eating disorder, and we had a really good conversation that ran the gamut from how to transform your self image. She asked me about emotional eating, about my own history with disordered eating and my eating disorder, and it was just a really great conversation, and so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to play that interview with you, because there's a lot of different points that I know is going to help you on your journey towards healing your relationship with food, and so normally I like to give you some talking points of what we hit on, but really, if you're someone who struggles with food obsession, body image, disordered eating, emotional eating we touch on all of that during this, um, I think, almost our long conversation and I know it's a little bit longer than usual, but it is worth listening to until the end. So I'm just going to go into it and play that for you, enjoy it and let me know what your biggest takeaways were by just sending me a DM on Instagram. I really love to hear that. So enjoy this conversation with the amazing Dr Nina Hi welcome to the binge cure with Dr Nina.
Speaker 2:I am your host, Dr Nina Savelle Rocklin, I am a psychoanalyst and I am here to help you liberate yourself from emotional eating, take back control of your life and feel good in your body, all without dieting, spending hours in the gym or counting a single macro. How good does that sound? So today we have a special guest, Sabrina Magnan, and she's going to be talking about how to transform your self image. Let me tell you a little bit about Sabrina. She's going to talk about how to heal your relationship with food and your body and create healthier habits, because she is an intuitive eating health coach who helps people break free from the cycle of dieting guilt and food obsession oh, the worst. And after her own personal journey of struggling with these issues, she made it her mission to guide women to eat peacefully, think better and liberate themselves from the shackles of diet culture. My kind of woman.
Speaker 2:Sabrina, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. So why don't we just dive in with your own personal story? How did you get to this point? What did you go through? Tell us everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so, as many people in this field, or anyone who gets into their career of helping other people, often do it because they struggled with it themselves, and so my struggles with food and body image started when I was in my teenage years. As a young girl, I was a synchronized swimmer, so that is a sport that is very highly focused on body image. If you look at synchronized swimming teams, it's very much like ballet, where everyone is tall, thin and there's a lot of conversations around body types and you look at people and they have not an inch of fat on their bodies and you're going for the long, thin legs and I had this like one obsession with having a thigh gap and I would just look at other people's bodies and it's just not something that my body could do and I would be so envious of that. But while I was training, I didn't really struggle with food that much because I was training so hard that I didn't have to worry too much about what I was putting into my body. But as I was coming in on my last year of swimming and I knew that I was retiring, a lot of people would make comments about the fact that, like, if you don't change the way that you eat. Now you're going to gain weight, and I would hear that from peers, I would hear that from people in my family and it kind of got reinforced in my mind that gaining weight was the worst thing that could ever happen and I developed this really intense fear of my body changing.
Speaker 1:So when I retired from the sport at 16 and inevitably my body started to change my hips got bigger, my butt got bigger and I just started to grow into my adult body but at the time I didn't recognize this. I saw this as a problem. I saw it as I'm doing something wrong. I must be eating too much because I'm gaining weight. And that's the message that we're being told all the time is. Gaining weight means inherently that you're doing something wrong, when really, when I look back at the time, I have so much compassion for that 16 year old version of myself because really all I was doing was becoming an adult and nourishing my body normally. So I did.
Speaker 1:What anyone else would do is I started looking online and looking at ways to lose weight and you start cutting out carbs and counting your calories and what started as like this innocent desire to lose weight quickly turned into unhealthy, into this obsession, and I would over exercise and under eat and for years that triggered just yo yo, dieting of doing one thing and not recognizing that it was unhealthy at the time. But I would eat really clean Monday to Friday and then binge on the weekend. And then when I got to university and I got a Fitbit, then I could really control everything. I could count my calories, I could see how many calories I was burning and that's where I developed orthorexia, which is this unhealthy obsession with being healthy. Every ingredient in my food mattered.
Speaker 1:I didn't want to go out to restaurants because I was afraid of what would be in my food and because of that I got socially isolated. I got very anxious. The thought of deleting my fitness pal was super anxiety producing for me. So at the time I didn't recognize that any of this was problematic, like it really was just what seemed normal and I finally hit my rock bottom and recognize this is not the kind of life that I want to live, like.
Speaker 1:I'm doing all of this to get in a body that I think will make me feel happy, will make me feel confident. That's what that's the reason why we go after any goal is not because of the goal itself, but the feeling we think we're going to get from it. But here I was, in the smallest body that I had ever been in and I was not getting those things. I was not happy, I was not feeling accepted or worthy or loved. I wasn't getting all of those things that were promised to me. So it was really hitting that rock bottom of. And it was Nina, because it brings light and it has a conversation about things that don't get talked about enough.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and good for you for having the wherewithal to, so young, be able to recognize that the illusion that the diet industry sells us, which is, hey, if you just get to this weight, then you're going to have this life, and you're going to have this feeling of what an illusion and a lie. That is so amazing that you're able to take your experience and everything that you learned from it and now you are helping other people, other women, escape the trap. So I want to ask you a question that I hear a lot, and it's this. It's people saying well, I don't like my body and I really do want to lose weight, but I'm getting these messages that I'm supposed to be body positive and accept my body. So what do I do?
Speaker 2:So now they're in this horrible position where they don't like their weight, they don't like their bodies, they don't feel comfortable in their own skin. They want to lose weight, not for some, you know, magical illusion of a better life, but because they just want to feel better. But now they feel guilty about that because they can't just accept their bodies. Can you speak to that? What would you tell someone who's in that place?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So there's this movement of body positivity, which is it's great, you know, and I think that the goal would be being body positive. But it can be really unrealistic for someone who has lived their entire life hating their body and then society also telling them that it is not okay to live in a bigger body. So to go from body hatred to body love is a really steep jump, and so for anyone who is trying to do that jump then has of course that guilt that I'm not feeling that way about my body. It just adds more negative emotion. So the way that I approach it with my approach and my clients is we have to first get neutrality, body neutral, and so when we're thinking about a neutrality, we're not thinking of how can I love my body, but how can I respect my body, how can I give it the nourishment and the compassion and the gentle movement and food that it would need? How can I respect it? And that could look like what can I appreciate about what it's done for me?
Speaker 1:I know that a lot of women struggle with their postpartum bodies after having kids. But if you're able to look at and ask yourself the one question, which is, why do we have bodies, like all human beings. Why do we have bodies For women? We have been conditioned to believe that we have bodies to please other people, to make other people feel confident, comfortable around us. And so, if we look at the reason why we have bodies, it's to help us experience life. It's to help us move and grow and travel and connect with people. And so if you can get clear on the reason why you have a body, which is a vehicle to help you experience life, then you can stop and ask yourself am I actually using this vehicle to experience life, or am I living life with a perspective that I have a body to shrink it as much as I possibly can, and in that pursuit of shrinking it, I miss out on its very purpose, which is to live my life?
Speaker 1:I'm sure that you've heard this before of so many women who feel like there's so many pictures I didn't take with my kids because I didn't like the way that I looked, and there's so many trips I didn't do, and there's so many swims I didn't take, and so there's so many things that we miss out on. So, instead of viewing your body as something that you have to love and you don't have to look in the mirror and think I love what I see. You're going to have bad body image days, no matter what body you're in, I still have them. But the difference is, when I have bad body image days, I don't see it as a sign of my worth as a human being. If we can disconnect how we feel about ourselves and our worthiness and our sense of I am enough from the way that your body looks, and see those as two different things, that is the first step towards that acceptance.
Speaker 2:Oh, you are speaking my language and I know that the listeners here are absolutely gosh I don't want to say eating it up, because that would be just the wrong phrase, but they are. I know it's really resonating with people and I also want to invite anyone who is listening and wants to ask Sabrina a question or share a comment on this topic. The number is 866-472-5792. I welcome your calls, 866-472-5792. So you know, one of you didn't actually use this word, but body dysmorphia is really something that you were alluding to not being able to see yourself with clarity. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about you? Know what you see in terms of people who struggle with body dysmorphia and how to guide them out of that hellish place where you, you know, you wake up and you look in the mirror and you do not see yourself as you are. You see yourself through this distorted, like Disneyland, crazy reflective.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so I can speak on my own experience because, as I was talking about before, when I got to the lowest point of my weight, I was about 30 pounds under my set point weight, which is a pretty large difference given my frame, and at the time I had no period. I was losing my hair, like I was really on that unhealthy side. But I remember looking in the mirror and always thinking it's not enough and not being able to fully see what I look at now, when I see pictures and I see someone who was really just deeply struggling and deeply unhappy and wasn't able to see herself as it is. So if you're someone who feels and I hear this a lot of women who maybe didn't have weight issues early on in their teen years or maybe even in their 20s and then maybe it was something like a hormonal issue or after having kids or life changes where they find themselves in a bigger body and they don't feel like that's who they are and they keep having that same point of reference from who they were before, what ends up happening is you feel like that's not your identity, right? Because your identity starts to get wrapped up around what your body was like before and what it's like now. So really good, first step would be to find ways to detach your identity from your body.
Speaker 1:That was something that was really huge for me, because I remember when I started working on healing my relationship with food and my body, one of the biggest things I was scared about was that I saw myself as the skinny friend, as the healthy friend. I thought that's how other people saw me too. I thought that that was like a kind of distortion I had, that people loved me because I was so disciplined and I showed up at the gym every day and then I ate salads all the time and I had so much willpower. And the funny thing is that when I actually allowed myself to gain weight and I became who I really was which is more loving, more open, because you have more love to give when you love yourself more People started to love me more, and so I recognize it was through that exposure that I recognize that when I really am who I am meant to be and I'm my authentic self, it has nothing to do with my body, and if you fear that someone in your life, if one of your listeners, you fear that someone in your life would reject you for your body changing. That's not someone that you want to keep in your life. So creating an identity that is rooted not in what you look like but in who you are. So like maybe even just sit down and talk.
Speaker 1:I do this with my clients and they end up having a really hard time doing this. I ask them what are things that you love about yourself? And they're really taken aback because they're so used to being mean to themselves, having such negative self-talk, that for them to just take the time to intentionally have that self-love and self-acceptance not about what they look, but about who they are can be really difficult. So if you're someone who you're listening to this and you're like God, I don't even think I could do it.
Speaker 1:I challenge you for the next, let's say, 14 days every day, either at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day, I want you to write three things that you appreciate about yourself, that you're proud of yourself for Things you've accomplished in your life. Maybe you have two beautiful kids, or you have a great career, or you have a great house that you're really proud of, or you're kind and you're generous and you're funny and you treat people with respect, because if you can tune inwards and stop looking at your life's success or meter of success from if you failed or succeeded on a diet or if you got to your goal weight, and you can actually change the definition of success in your life, then your life becomes a lot more full and you recognize what you really are all about.
Speaker 2:I love that no one has ever said, wow, I liked my friend before, but then she lost 20 pounds and now she's even more awesome. Yeah, oh, I liked her, but she gained 20 pounds and now I don't like her so much. The thought is absurd. And yet that's exactly what so many people do to themselves and forget all the qualities of. We talk about self-care. What self are we talking about? Not just our bodies, ourself, to your point. All the aspects of ourselves need our attention.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I also want to really make sure that this point is clear, that there's a difference between knowledge and knowing. So you could have the knowledge of all of this. This could make sense to you. Of course, I'm more than my body. Of course people don't love me because of the way that I look, and this could all make sense on your logical level, but if, subconsciously, you don't feel that, then you need to make sure that you actually do the work. So you challenge your beliefs, you challenge the things that you tell yourself every day, and I'm a big fan of journaling. It's not for everyone, but journaling is the number one thing. Write down all of the fears that you have. Oh, I love that. For anyone who doesn't see, she's showing me her binge-cured journal, yeah, so you probably agree that journaling can really be transformative when it comes to changing your mindset.
Speaker 2:Excellent, excellent point. And it was just something I was going to say, and now, with this talk of journal and my journal and all of that, I forgot it. But oh, I know what I was going to say. Yes, it's not logical, it's psychological. And we have to figure out not only what are these false ideas that we have, but where did they come from in order to challenge them. And that's how you go from knowledge to knowing. Yeah, okay. So let's say someone says okay, I recognize I'm a good person, I'm nice, I'm good, I'm smart, I'm kind, I'm accomplished, I'm whatever, but I still don't feel good about my body. So what can you say if people say, well, yes, I know, I'm all those things, I get it, I get it, I get it, but I don't feel good about my body. So how can people feel better about their bodies, specifically their bodies, while they're in a place of working to change their bodies?
Speaker 1:let's say so what I would say is I always want to bring it back to habits and behaviors, because we can't wake up one day and decide I'm going to feel good about my body or I'm going to be 150 pounds Like. Those are, unfortunately, just things that we cannot control, but what we can control are our habits and our behaviors. So the first thing I would do is I would tune inwards and I would ask yourself what are some habits and behaviors that I'm either doing or not doing that is making me feel less good in my body? So I actually did this with one of my clients yesterday and she had that very question and I asked her like what is a habit that maybe you feel like needs improvement or would help you feel better? And she said well, I haven't moved my body in a couple of months now.
Speaker 1:I used to be really consistent with exercise and something happened with my family life and I just kind of fell out of it. And, of course, movement is something that is not just like great physically but psychologically. It makes you feel like you're achieving something hard, it makes you moving, it really makes you feel like you're moving forward. So that could be a really great start and this doesn't look like go hit the gym for 30 minutes. The way that we started together is okay. I want to start something that is a consistent practice, and the best way to be consistent with something is to start really small and be able to do it consistently. So we started with five minutes a day. I'm going to go outside, I'm going to move my body, I'm going to get some sun, and that can already make you feel better in your body.
Speaker 1:Now another thing could be I never. I never wear makeup, I never do my hair, I never get out of my PJs. I kind of feel like a slob, of course, like if I were to do that, I would feel terrible in my body too. So maybe that could be somewhere that you can start. I just I'm going to wake up and I'm going to do my makeup and I'm going to do my hair and I'm going to dress nicely, even if I work from home. Right now, I'm wearing leggings on the bottom but a nice top on the top.
Speaker 1:So looking at ways, looking at habits that maybe have fallen by the wayside when you had kids, when you started getting busy in adulthood, and starting with something that could really care for your body, maybe physically, psychologically because if you go after working out, for example, and you think I'm going to work out so that I can lose weight, so that I can feel good about my body, then feeling good about your body is like the last step there, so it's contingent on you losing the weight. And then if you're working out is contingent on losing the weight, but then you're not losing the weight because of working out, then working out is going to fall by the wayside and then everything falls apart.
Speaker 2:Such excellent points. Thank you, sabrina, and let's just switch gears and talk about intuitive eating a little bit because I've heard something along the lines of this many a time.
Speaker 2:If I check in with my body about what I want to eat, my body will say I want all the ice cream in the freezer. People have said that they've been dieting their whole lives. Something has been telling them what they should eat, some rule they've been following diet mentality, diet rules. They have no idea how to tap in to the knowledge and wisdom of their bodies. Where do they start?
Speaker 1:Yes. So intuitive eating really big misconception is just listen to your body is the hunger and fullness diet, and for anyone who is just starting out and learning about it, I understand why you would think that way. But intuitive eating is a mix between your body, your mind and your emotions, and so when we're thinking, if I tune into my body, all I would ever want is ice cream. That's actually your mind talking, and that's probably because you're so used to being told that you can't have ice cream or it's bad for you that if you had to choose between having an apple and having ice cream, and ice cream is something that keeps getting taken away or restricted, or you're always starting again on Monday then any intention to nourish your body is no longer urgent because you want to have that thing. That's being taken away from us, and that's the thing about dieting is that it takes away your autonomy and your independence in making food choices for yourself, and it gives that power to Weight Watchers or Keto Diet or my Fitness Pal, and so you end up feeling powerless all the time because you're no longer getting to choose what you want to do, and then, when you do choose to have the cookie, you have that food police voice in your head that's saying you shouldn't be doing that. That's unhealthy for you. So if we're going back to the beginning and we're talking about intuitive eating, as like intuitive eating for beginners, the simplest way to understand what intuitive eating means is if you look at someone in your life, maybe a young toddler, for example. The way that we're born, we have this innate guidance system that's within us on how to eat, to thrive and to grow and to function optimally. When you look at toddlers or you look at really young infants, they will cry until they get food, they will be fed and then they'll turn away when they've had enough. And until we get those signals disrupted by people telling us what we should or shouldn't be eating, when the rules start coming in and the mind starts getting consumed with rules and information, until then we will make a wide variety of choices.
Speaker 1:I think of my niece, who's five years old, who is very much an intuitive eater, and there are some days where, when she gets home from school, she just wants blueberries or cheese and crackers. Sometimes she has a little bit more of a sweet tooth, but the reason why she doesn't always crave that chocolate is because when she does say, today, I really want chocolate, then we offer her the chocolate. Maybe have like an apple on the side or something else to make sure she doesn't have a sugar crash, but we don't tell her this is something that you should put on a pedestal, this is something you should avoid. So the next day, if she's craving blueberries, well she knows that she can have the blueberries, and if the next day she's craving chocolate, she has the freedom.
Speaker 1:So when it comes to intuitive eating, it means letting, yes, your body guide how your food choices are. But you will also see that if you were to eat chocolate and ice cream and hot dogs and burgers all day long, your energy wouldn't feel great, you wouldn't feel super vital, you wouldn't maybe be as productive or as focused as you would like. So the first step is really tuning back in, not to the rules and the shoulds and the external world, but the physical sensations that you feel inside of your body, which can be difficult if you've been dieting for a long time, because that tends to get muted and it tends to get numbed, so you end up feeling very disconnected from your body.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is exactly why when my girls were little I would, and now they're 16 and they're 20s, she's in her 20s I would say, oh, do you want like cheese and crackers or an apple? Do you want carrots and hummus or some ice cream? Do you want cookies? Or? And sometimes they would choose the apples and sometimes they would choose the cookies. And I never wanted to disrupt that intuitive eating, which is why some you know, a few years ago, when we were on, we were out trick or treating and she had a friend whose, like mother, thinks that sugar is the devil and worse than heroin and was basically like I'm taking your sugar, I'm taking your candy away from you as soon as you get back. So that kid is like scarfing chocolate the whole time. And my daughter was like I'm hungry and my husband said you have candy, like, eat the candy. And she said no, I want real food. And I was like oh, yes, thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it really is when we, when we, when we allow ourselves to not have deprivation, which is diet mentality, then we can't. We actually have choice right.
Speaker 1:Yes, and what you demonstrated is a really good like, a really good proof of how important it is for the relationship with food to start at the top. Because the fact that you had such trust and you were able to know that if we want our kids to develop these healthy habits, like wanting the real food and we're not talking real food in terms of like, bad or good, but just having food that's going to be more substantial than the importance of having a mother and a good role model of what is a healthy relationship with food, because I understand that it can be so scary to see your kids like eating five Kit Kats in a row, but reminding yourself that one meal one day, even one week of eating, is not going to impact the rest of their lives, but the relationship with food will.
Speaker 2:Great point. Now you just mentioned good foods and bad foods, diet mentality. We are exposed to that diet mentality really early and then of course, it becomes oh I was good today. You hear people say, oh, I was good today I ate salad. Or I was bad today I had carbs. So heartbreaking when we're talking about, like, professional people who are intelligent and accomplished but they feel good about themselves if they eat a salad. Oh, all right, I digress. So when someone comes to you with that good food, bad food mentality, what do I say?
Speaker 1:What?
Speaker 2:do I say?
Speaker 1:So the way that I look at it is if you keep telling yourself there are good and bad foods, then you're putting it in two different categories, and the more that you diet, the more the bad food category is going to get bigger, because you're going to do low carb and carbs are going to be the devil, and then you're going to do some other diet that tells you that dairy is the devil, and then that bad food category even if you're not officially on the diet, those rules get stored in your subconscious and even if you're not following them, you'll feel guilty for breaking them. And so the amount of good quote unquote good foods that you can eat become smaller and smaller, and it becomes harder and harder. You start to feel like there's nothing that you can do that is right or wrong, and so the way that I want my clients to look at it is to look as food as having different functions, because there are going to be some foods that are there to nourish your body, and then there's going to be other foods. Your goal might not be to be the most nourishing, but they're there to nourish your soul, and the best analogy to think of it this way is you don't work 24 seven, you have breaks, you have nighttime, you have weekends, you take longer vacation, and the reason why you do that is because you know that if you were to work 24 seven, eventually you would be forced into a burnout. It would not be sustainable. And so instead of taking intentional breaks every day, then you're forced to take an unintentional extended break that was caused by your mental health crumbling. So the same thing applies with food.
Speaker 1:If you're not intentional about including foods that are really just there for flavor, for play, for connection right, if you're not intentional about doing that, what ends up happening is you're super rigid, monday to Friday, I'm only going to eat clean food, and then one piece, one slice, one bite of chocolate or pizza sends you spiraling and it ends up feeling very unintentional. We've all experienced this before, where you kind of zone out, you're eating really quickly, you're not really tasting the food, and then at the end of it you're like, wow, well, I just ate all of that food and the goal of that food is to be enjoyed and I didn't even fulfill on its goal because I felt so guilty and I was going so fast and I felt like I was doing something so wrong that now, here I am, I feel uncomfortable in my body. Now I have to restart tomorrow. So, if you're really intentional about having those foods, I do that every day. I have dessert. Every day I have this little bowl of fishies that I eat every night as I'm watching TV.
Speaker 1:The more habituated you get to those foods, the less urgent it feels You're able to enjoy it more, and the poison is in the dose. If you overeat anything, if you overeat carrots, if you overeat yogurt, you're going to feel like crap. So, being intentional about having those two functions in your life, yes, you might want to have more nourishing foods, because those are going to make you feel better and more optimal and more vital. So that's another piece too is one different functions and then two tuning into how do different foods make me feel? I noticed that when I have a good, nourishing, filling breakfast, I'm ready to take on the day, I'm energetic, I'm vital, I'm focused. If all I have is like a croissant, for example, I'm probably going to have a crash an hour later, and is that the way that I want to feel? I could choose to say yes or no, but now I get the decision, not the diet I'm on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you mentioned clean eating, which is, I mean, that's orthorexia, right? Yeah, clean eating on steroids, but this idea that everything should be we should always eat clean and whatever, and only eat to nourish our bodies and I love what you said about actually enjoying food. Sometimes we eat to nurture and nourish our bodies and sometimes we eat because it's yummy. Yeah, that's my one food rule it has to be yummy, whether it's a drink or just a treat, right? Yeah, I shouldn't even say a treat, just like something on people's bad foods list. So what happens if someone comes in and they're just really trapped in this, like I've got to eat clean? I can't lose weight if I eat fishies every night.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the first thing I would ask is whenever you want to get somewhere, you want to know two things you want to know where you're starting and where you're ending. So I always want to know where this person is starting. Right, so what are your habits like now? Because if they're telling me that I'm eating mostly really good, nourishing foods and I'm terrified of eating this one bowl of fishies, then we're definitely going towards the orthorexia disordered eating. Because if they're like I really need to lose weight, but I'm eating really well, I'm nourishing my body, I'm moving my body, but I really need to lose weight, I would ask where is this belief coming from? And maybe what is the fear there? Because I know for me, I was there, I was under my set point weight and I thought I really need to lose weight, but really there was something deeper that was going on.
Speaker 1:But if I'm talking to someone who's like I'm not making the most nourishing choices, I don't feel like I have the right habits in place, I really do feel like I don't feel healthy, I don't feel good in my body, and then, on top of that, there's all of the fear around having junk food.
Speaker 1:Well, that tells me that a lot of the time when they're eating, they're feeling fearful, they're feeling anxious, they're feeling guilty. So very good chance that they're not being super mindful while they're eating, because it's hard to mindfully eat when you're super anxious and you're feeling really guilty and you're counting every calorie in your mind. So it's really hard to slow down and tune into your body and know how foods make you feel. So of course, you're rushing through your choices, you're not really thinking it through and it becomes really hard to make healthy choices when you're coming from a place of. Every food is bad. Every food is going to make me gain weight. It's very counterintuitive, but the more fear that you have around food, the more likely you are to have, let's say, maladaptive eating habits.
Speaker 2:Yes, so I guess you were talking about body neutrality, going for food neutrality too. Instead of these two columns of acceptable foods that I feel safe eating and unacceptable foods that all are nothing mentality it's oh, I had one, I might as well have all of them. It's to take those two columns and combine them, because it's just a food is a food is a food. Some were healthier than others, but I like your point. Some are healthy for your body, some are healthy for your soul.
Speaker 1:Yes, and what's important to also note is that we're not saying that chocolate has the same nutritional properties as an apple. When it comes to intuitive eating, like I said, it's mind, body, emotions. And so you are able, when you, when you've really healed your relationship with food and then you start tackling on gentle nutrition, you are able to take into account the fact that, yes, chocolate might not have the same nutrition properties as an apple, but one does not make me better or worse. And let's say, I just finished my lunch and I always like to end with something sweet and I can ask myself do I need something that's going to be more substantial and do I want something that is really going to be fresh, for example, or do I? Am I craving more of a chocolate, like a little something sweet that may be not as filling as an apple? So, just looking at the different functions of those foods and deciding, what do I want right now, what does my body want right now?
Speaker 2:And would you say that that is the premise of gentle nutrition?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the gentle nutrition piece, which is the last principle of intuitive eating, is okay now that we've unraveled the diets and the food police and the rules and we're coming from a good place, right, that's like the intention. Behind your food choices at this point is everything because, again, I could choose to have the apple because that's what I'm craving and that's what my body wants, and it comes from a place of self love and that's the intention. Or I could choose to have the apple because I think it's going to make me morally superior and I'm going to feel good about it, and then that's coming from a place of restriction and punishment.
Speaker 1:So when we get to a place where your relationship with food is good, your intention is of love and of nourishment, then we can start bringing in some of those gentle nutrition principles. We can start talking about nutrition and the way to make meals in a way that is nourishing and not focusing on subtraction but on what can I add? If you don't eat any vegetables, all right, then maybe we can start with one portion a day, not because it's going to make you a good person, a successful person, but because it's going to feed your body and nourish your body, because nutrition and health is really important. Like healing your relationship with food, does not mean anti health. It means it is the first step towards creating a holistic, authentic health in your life.
Speaker 2:And you mentioned you know you've mentioned mindful eating. Mindfulness, that is one of those words that means so many different things to different people. Yeah, can you share a little bit about? When you say mindful eating, what do you mean and what is it really?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I guess that in my definition I would call it present eating, being present with the food. How many times have you eaten the food and not really recognized what it tasted like, how it felt, tuning in to how your body felt? So then you eat and then you realize I ate that too fast, now I'm way too full. Or you're having a conversation and it is really important to be present in conversations but you're so distracted Maybe you're scrolling on your phone or you're watching TV and you're not really present for your meal.
Speaker 1:So I have a few practices that can help your listeners practice mindful eating. So one of those things could be I hesitate with saying getting rid of distractions, because then people are going to be like God, I have to eat without distractions all the time. But this could start with one meal a day, or even one meal a week, where you try to get rid of distractions. You turn off the TV, you turn off the phone and it's just you and your food, and at the beginning it's like a muscle that you practice, and so I don't really eat free of distractions anymore because mindful eating has become natural to me. But if you're not used to doing it, you're not used to paying attention to the food, then that can be really helpful to have no distractions.
Speaker 1:Another thing that can be really helpful is I call it the describe it to me method, where imagine that I'm sitting next to you, I've never tasted this food before, I don't even have taste buds, and you have to describe exactly how this food tastes the texture, the flavors.
Speaker 1:Is it spicy, is it hot, is it cold? Like what are the flavors that are going on in your mouth? Because most people don't chew, they don't pay attention and then they feel like they don't enjoy their meal as much or they feel like they need to eat more of that food to really take all the flavor. But if you were to fully be present with each bite and take away as much enjoyment as you can, you actually notice that you don't need to eat as much, and there's a lot of research that shows that when you mindfully eat, you tend to eat less. And then another really good technique is to just practice putting your fork down between each bite, just slowing down, putting your fork down. I know that my boyfriend he'll be eating and then he has food in his mouth and he's already going for the next one, and so it's like slow it down and I know that can be hard in a fast-paced environment, but it really is possible and it becomes easier the more you practice it.
Speaker 2:And also, when you do that, you can become more aware of the blocks, the feelings, the thoughts, the uncomfortable emotions or conflicts that might be leading you to distract yourself with food. Yes, so in that regard, it could be really helpful. Oh, that's what I'm avoiding by focusing on food.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's something that becomes hard for a lot of people who are used to using food as a distraction. We end up having to confront some things that we have been pushing down for so long and that can be scary for some people. But it can also be so liberating, because you're going to live the rest of your life. You're going to feel stress, you're going to feel negative emotions. I see life as being 50-50, 50% positive, 15% negative and if you can learn to not be so afraid of those negative emotions and you can sit with them and you can tolerate them without running away and turning to food to just kind of push that down, then food can start to be something that adds to your life instead of something that distracts you. I know, for me, when I had my eating disorder, I just felt numb all the time. There was no ups and there was no downs. It was really just numb.
Speaker 1:And I remember when I went to Italy, which was like the life-changing trip for me that made me reevaluate my relationship with food. I remember looking at these beautiful sights and just thinking I don't feel what I should be feeling. I'm not fully present for this. I'm here but I'm not present. And now I was telling my boyfriend this a couple of days ago. Like everything, I can remember really distinctly. I can remember the smells and the taste of all these important moments in my life because when you can bring mindfulness, not just in eating but in all experiences, and you shut off that noise of how many calories you're eating and what are people thinking about my body, like you just shut off that voice, you can really be present and it's so freeing and just like it gives you your life back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like living in black and white and then just stepping into color and diet rules. The diet mentality really is black and white. It's either you're either good or you're bad. You're either clean. I guess what is the opposite of clean eating, dirty eating, and when you stop that, either, or mentality and you live in the color between black and white, because I never liked shades of gray anyway, and now that has a whole different connotation, can't talk about that. So you really step into like living and not existing, your life, just constantly thinking about fat grams and being good or bad, or measuring your self-worth on the bathroom scale, which is dreadful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and I would say that anyone who's listening to this and who might feel, on one hand, very inspired but, on the other hand, very scared. A lot of the times, when we think about healing our relationship with food and allowing our bodies to do what it needs to do, we look at the worst case scenario what if I lose everything and I gain all this weight? And, like our brains, they love to keep us in our comfort zone, they love to keep us safe, and so it will come up with really elaborate stories of the worst case scenarios. But I encourage you to actually journal on this and to write down what's the best case scenario. What is the best case scenario of what could happen? I could, instead of saying, god, I could gain weight, yeah, but you could also gain your life.
Speaker 1:I have had clients who have gotten in new relationships and gotten new jobs and bought houses and, like their life, have expanded so much. Because when you're like focusing your entire life on shrinking your body, you're shrinking your life in the process too. So, shifting that perspective of, yes, fear will be there, no matter what. That's normal when you're going outside of your comfort zone. But can there be excitement? Can there be inspiration, can there be something that you can really look forward to, instead of fearing and letting that fear take over?
Speaker 2:Well, those what ifs are terrible, because then we end up having anxiety about the future that doesn't exist, but we have the anxiety in the present. And then, if you don't know how to cope with it, how to express it, how to respond to it, how to feel it, why there's food to help you deal with anxiety. So stopping those what ifs and turning them into potentially good what ifs is a great strategy. All right, so we only have a few more minutes left. I just want to say, for someone who is Just like thinking about changing their lifelong diet, mentality, habits and they're on the fence about trying intuitive eating, what would you say to them and what would you say is their first?
Speaker 1:step? Yes, great question. First step is start with the end in mind. I want you to think if you want to go to a new destination, then you need to plug that destination into your GPS, because if you just turn left, right, left and you just hope that it's going to get you somewhere, you're probably going to end up somewhere you don't want to be.
Speaker 1:Start with the end in mind. I want you to write a letter or write down, when you're 60, 70, 80 years old, that future version of yourself. What does your life look like? You wake up in the morning, what do you want to think about? Do you want to think about food? Do you want to step on the scale when you're 80 years old and let that number dictate your day? Probably not. What do you want to do instead? What do you want your data look like? What do you want your relationships to look like? What do you want your career to look like?
Speaker 1:Get super clear on what life you want to create, and then you can start moving backwards, because then you can decide if I want to create that in the future, then what needs to change now? Because a lot of the times people don't act with urgency and so they just hope that one day things will just change. But you need to take action towards that change. So get clear on what is my end goal and then work backwards. If you don't want to still be in diet culture at 80 years old, then you don't want to be in diet culture now.
Speaker 1:So cut the ties, unfollow accounts, get rid of the books, get rid of the scale. Do the uncomfortable actions that are going to be needed, because it's either you do them now or you do them in 40 years, when you've lost another 40 years. So start taking those actions, even when you don't feel ready. They're going to be scary and it's really helpful to find someone like Dr Nina ora coach or a program to help you and support you and hold your hand through the fear. But if you need a buddy or you need a coach or you need someone who's going to hold you through it so that you're not doing it alone, that's even better, because doing it alone can be difficult.
Speaker 2:Or someone like you, Sabrina. So thank you. So this has been so inspiring, educational and helpful. Please let people know where can they find you and what do you offer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they can find me. I have a online group coaching program called Food Freedom Academy. So this is really what I do is I work with women to heal the relationship with food and their bodies, become intuitive eaters, become mindful eaters. And if they want to know more about me, they can find me on Instagram at Sabrina Magnon Health, and you can also listen to my podcast, which is called Live Unrestricted, and I will be more than happy to connect with you there and tell you all about the work that I do.
Speaker 2:Well, you're doing amazing work and I really appreciate you and I appreciate you coming on the show today and really enlightening people, not just telling us about intuitive eating and body dysmorphia, but also really giving us actionable steps to take. So, thank you, thank you, thank you and that is our show for today. Thank you so much for joining me here on the Binge Care with Dr Nina. It really is possible to ditch dieting, stop thinking about food 24 seven and banish binging so you can get back to living your life while being healthy.