MakeSumGains

Why letting go of control was the key to food freedom (& why you might need to do it too)

• Summer • Episode 89

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In today’s episode, we’re diving deep into the power of letting go of control around food and why it’s the key to breaking free from cycles of restriction, bingeing, and feeling out of control. We’ll unpack how extreme control over what you eat can actually keep you stuck and how you can reprogram your brain to believe that food is always available—without panicking.

I’ll share my own journey with food freedom, including how I spent months restricting food for a bodybuilding competition and why I had to break free from that mindset to actually heal my relationship with food. You’ll also learn why the “messy middle” phase of feeling out of control is necessary for your growth and how to start building self-trust with your food choices.

Key Takeaways:

  • The difference between permission and giving up on your goals when it comes to food.
  • How extreme control over food can lead to an obsessive, binge-eating cycle.
  • Why you have to let go of control to rewire your brain to eat healthily without obsessing over every calorie.
  • What food freedom truly feels like—and how it’s not about perfection, but about trust and balance.
  • How to move from restriction to a place of peace and neutrality with food.

Resources Mentioned:

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Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review! Let me know if this episode helped you shift your perspective on food freedom.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Make Some Gains podcast. I'm your host, summer Venowitz, and this is a space where I'll be cutting through the bullshit and stripping away the filter. My aim is to help you reframe your mind, question the norms and push you to achieve new levels of success. Through raw conversations. I'll open up about my personal experiences, my ideas and my struggles. I want to empower you to live up to your full potential. Let's go make some gains.

Speaker 1:

I know this sounds batshit crazy to some of you, but letting myself eat whatever I wanted all the way from the 850 calorie Starbucks frappuccinos, whole thousand calorie pizzas, acai bowls with zero nutritional protein value that I swore I would never have wasted my time on, or calorie budget on was the only way that I stopped feeling out of control around food. There comes a point where you may need to reprogram your brain to believe that it has 100% freedom. This is like childlike freedom when you're one, two, three, four years old, you don't give a damn. You eat whatever the fuck you want to. You eat candy for breakfast because it sounds good. And as we age, as we get older, especially as females, in diet culture, girl world, we are trained to believe that certain foods are good and certain foods are bad. But the thing is, if you want to look good, feel good, feel confident in your body, in your life, in your choices, free around food, if you are not working with your brain, you are working completely against it. So for a lot of us, control especially if you're a high achiever type A bad bitch. We like to have control and with food control it can feel safe, but it may be exactly what's keeping you stuck. So extreme control, like calorie tracking, having food rules meaning you can't eat pizza, you can't eat anything high in sugar, high in fat quote unquote.

Speaker 1:

Clean eating, the paleo diet, the fasting this creates a scarcity effect in your brain, meaning your brain knows it is not in control, it cannot have what it wants. There is a scarcity of pizza, of sugar, of fat, of anything that it actually enjoys, and this is exactly what creates food obsession. Your brain feels scarce, it doesn't know when the next meal is coming around, feels scarce. It doesn't know when the next meal is coming around. It doesn't know when the next good meal pizza, fat, sugar, sweets. It does not know when that's coming around again. And so it obsesses over it. And I'm going to tell you there is a way to trick your brain into craving healthy choices. So if you want to learn how, keep listening. So this restriction, the fasting, the paleo diet, the whole food only, the low carb, low fat, low sugar it often leads to binging, overeating, feeling out of control. The fuck, it's right. Friday night rolls around and you're like, fuck it, I'm going to eat whatever I want. This is not a willpower problem, it is not a discipline problem. It is not a laziness problem. It is not a character problem. It is a deprived brain problem. Okay, rewind.

Speaker 1:

About three years ago I competed in a bodybuilding competition and I spent six months highly, highly restricting myself. I had a coach who preached only whole foods, it's all you can eat. You can't eat anything other than whole foods. My diet consisted of chicken, beef, potatoes, rice. I got to a point where I was blending up strawberries and almond butter to make a quote-unquote healthy ice cream. I was mixing up peanut pb2, like the powdered peanut butter, the chocolate version, and literally licking it off of the spoon to cure my cravings. I had packs of gum in my freaking incentive council.

Speaker 1:

Looking back in retrospect I'm wow. That sounds pretty fucking disordered. Why is? Why is bodybuilding put on a pedestal. We don't know. We don't know. Then go figure.

Speaker 1:

The second that the competition was over I rebounded. I felt like all of the discipline literally left my body. I could not control myself. Around food, I would-unquote be good all day and then go balls to the walls at night and blow past. I would set calorie and macro goals that I would blow past every night, snacking on the pickles and the. I don't really eat chips, but if they're around I would have been eating them crackers, whatever the fuck I could find granola, and I was not able to stop eating. I remember there were many, many situations at restaurants where I would order food. My belly would be so bloated and I had to finish every single bite, every single fry on my plate.

Speaker 1:

Scarcity of mindset cookies at family gatherings oh my gosh. It was like Thanksgiving, christmas time. I remember at Christmas that year, the fucking peanut butter blossoms. I went back for, I swear to god, 10 of them and I'm like what is wrong with me? I had never done that in my life. Um, maybe, maybe, back in my 75 hard days there would be little circumstances like that, but not like 10 of them in one sitting. I was like what the fuck is going on scarcity mindset.

Speaker 1:

So we have this fear of letting go, letting go of control, and it feels really scary to stop controlling, to let go of that control right, the biggest fear is, if I let go, I will never stop eating. I'm just gonna be an endless freaking garbage truck of a human being and the eating will never stop. But the truth is, your body does not actually want to eat junk forever. It just needs proof that food is always available, especially those foods that you love to eat. It needs proof that the food is always there and that it has free will to eat it when it wants to.

Speaker 1:

So this is what I call the messy middle. This is where you feel really out of control around food, your. I look at it like almost my identity, because I don't identify. I've never identified as someone who has an eating problem, who overeats, who like lets herself get out of control, right, because I'm a type A, I'm a high achiever, like we grasp onto that control, and so that was something where, with a lot of type A, high achieving women, this messy middle is one of the most uncomfortable phases to go through because you feel out of control. But this messy middle is it's part. It's the part of the process that so many are avoiding and that's why we sit in this pendulum, this start stop on off zero to 100, over and over and over, because we never allow ourselves to hit this messy, messy middle. So you have to go through this phase where you let go of control and you give that control back to your brain.

Speaker 1:

What this tangibly looks like your brain wants cookies Tangibly looks like your brain wants cookies. Eat the cookies. Your brain wants pizza, eat the pizza. And a huge, huge part of this is reflecting, reflecting on the choices, reflecting on how they made you feel, reflecting on your intention for the day, for the month, for the week. And does this right? Eating endless cookies, eating endless pizza does this fuel your body the absolute best? No, and we can understand that. We can know that and realize it's not forever, it's just a phase. But that's where we're not focusing on what's fueling your body the best in this phase. We're focusing on what fuels your brain the best in this phase. So your focus has to be giving power back to your brain so that, right, we can trick it later on into being healthy.

Speaker 1:

So this process, what it's doing is it's rewiring your brain to believe that it has 100% freedom. Freedom of choice, right? Because, back up, scarcity means your brain realizes that it doesn't have a choice. It realizes that the food might not be there, that you might not be able or you might not let yourself eat it. And so this process is giving your power, rewiring your brain to believe that it has 100% freedom, and a good marker of this is asking yourself could you, at this very moment, go out, go order and go drink an 850 calorie frappe from Starbucks without having an internal meltdown? If the answer is yes, you're solid. If the answer is yes, you're solid. If the answer is no, there is no chance that I would ever be able to do that. You still have a problem, you still have a problem. So there's a difference, right, because you may hear that some of you may hear well, what the fuck? I don't, I don't, I don't identify as someone who would go out and drink an 800 calorie calorie frappe. Okay, amazing.

Speaker 1:

But there's a difference between giving yourself permission to do something and then giving up on your goals. Right, maybe you look at this as that would just be me giving up on my goals, but you can give yourself permission, right? When we look at that one drinky drink, that is one choice in thousands, millions of choices that you make and the difference between permission and giving up on your goals. I'm going to explain that when you give yourself permission, it's from a place of empowerment and balance. You're eating something with awareness and self-trust, knowing that it's part of the bigger picture. So, meaning, right around here, we look at health holistically. It's not just what's best for your body, necessarily your physical body, but also your mental, your emotional body. And so, let's say, brunch with the girls, or I did a Galentine's and we went out for pizza, right? Is that something that a choice that I would make every single day of my life? Heck, no, because it does not make me feel my best. But it's also one fucking choice and I can give myself permission from a place of empowerment, balance, and then go into it with the awareness and the self-trust, knowing that it is playing into my health, because health is not just physical, it's also mental, it's also emotional.

Speaker 1:

On the other hand, when you give up on your goals rather than giving yourself permission, giving up is reactive rather than proactive. It's because you're treating your food choices like a battle that's already lost. You might end up eating or drinking the 800 calorie frappuccino because you've convinced yourself it's the only thing that'll make you feel better, or because you've been too restrictive right, it's. It's not a proactive choice, it's a I can't fucking hang on anymore and I'm gonna go eat the cookies and the frappuccinos and everything. So giving yourself permission comes from this proactive place.

Speaker 1:

Giving up on your goals comes from this reactive place. So if you're in a place where you can ask yourself could you right now go and order the 800 calorie frappe from Starbucks, drink it and move the fuck on? I'm asking from this permission-based place, this completely detached place, this awareness around self, complete empowerment, complete balance. Maybe it's not, maybe you don't even like that. Maybe it's complete balance, maybe it's not. Maybe you don't even like that, maybe it's something else. Maybe it's a thousand calorie acai bowl, whatever it is. You have to get to this point of neutrality around food. So, food freedom I don't even really love that word.

Speaker 1:

It sounds foo-foo-y to me, but true food freedom means not having to track, not having to know the exact calories and everything, and instead knowing how to eat in alignment with your goals, intuitively, and you again, proactively, can track if it adds to your goals, but in no form or fashion should you be reactively tracking, right Meaning oh my gosh, I feel fat, I need to go track my calories, I need to go slash my calories and use this tool to react to the situation. If we're going to use tracking, it should be in this proactive manner. For example, I've taken 2024, I barely tracked at all, and recently I have set a hard set in stone goal of a mini, whatever the fuck you want to call it. Set in stone goal of a mini, whatever the fuck you want to call a mini little bulk. I'm gaining some weight. I, after running that half marathon last summer, I lost a lot of muscle, a lot of weight, a lot of everything and I'm kind of like a little freaking twig and I don't like that. And do I love myself as is? Well, yeah, I'm a sexy, as is? Yes, but we can always get better. And so I am setting a booty growth goal, a body growth goal. I want to get shreddy, but from a muscular standpoint, and, using tracking, I'm reintegrating it, I'm using it to help guide me and to make sure that I am eating enough. That is completely proactive, not reactive, when you get to a completely neutral place around food meaning the frappe example if you were able to go and drink that or eat that and walk away and move on. That's how I know that your brain is truly free, and this is where you can start to trick it back into making healthy choices with ease.

Speaker 1:

So step number one you have to know how to eat. You have to know that you can eat anything, but you don't have to, right? You know? Okay, I have free will. I could go eat an entire bag of trail mix right now if I wanted to, but I don't have to because my brain is completely free. I'm good If I wanted to eat an entire bin of ice cream, if I wanted to go to the store and buy one of every candy, I could. I have free fucking will, but I don't have to. That's step one. You have to get to that point. You have to get to that point and not fear it, right? I don't fear the idea of going to the store and buying a bag of candy and eating a piece of every single one. There's zero fear associated with that. So if there's fear associated, there's still more work to do. So that's step one.

Speaker 1:

Step two, after we already are at this neutral place, you have to build self-trust back up slowly, because throughout this process we may have lost some self-trust right. When we give complete power to our brain, a lot of times we're breaking these boundaries and self-trust with ourselves that maybe we once had right. When I was ordering frappes and acai bowls, there was a lot of trust broken with myself, Not necessarily like heart-wrenching trust because I was actively working and setting the goal of being free around food, but again, like my identity did not match up with that, and so there is some self-trust that needs to slowly get built back up. So this is where I really recommend this is what I recommend to clients is a 24-hour food plan. So this is where it's currently 4 30 on Wednesday.

Speaker 1:

I'm gonna set maybe a 24-hour food plan for tomorrow. I'm going to write down maybe on a piece of paper, maybe on my notes everything that I plan to eat tomorrow. Maybe I track it. And this is where we over fucking shoot. I want you to put so much goddamn food on that plan that you could not possibly eat all of it, right? If? If, right now you're eating one bowl of ice cream, I want you to put two bowls of ice cream on that list, because right now we want to build self-trust, right? We want to come in short or we want to hit those goals every single time. So if you say you're only going to eat one bowl of ice cream and then you eat two, that's trust broken with yourself. So we have to overshoot.

Speaker 1:

To begin with, maybe I'm going to use the ice cream example, right? Maybe currently you're eating two bowls of ice cream every night, so you put that on the food plan and then, after a week of hitting that every single day, building that self-trust with yourself, then maybe you shoot for a bowl and a half, right. And then, after a week of hitting that consistently, down to one and then a half. And then you go to every other day and you're weaning yourself off of this. Where people go so wrong is they try to go from eating two bowls of ice cream to saying, all right, I'm gonna do 75 hard, I'm never gonna eat ice cream again and we're just gonna, we're just gonna, we're just gonna not never touch it. And then, about 45 days in, you're fucking driving to the store at midnight buying ice cream and eating as much as you possibly can. So, no, completely cutting things out, we have to be so fucking honest with ourselves.

Speaker 1:

And then step three is from here. This kind of depends if you have tracked for freaking five years, I would really recommend weaning off of tracking. And you do that the same way, right? You start to build trust with yourself. So you take one meal off and then one day off, and then three days off, and then here and there, and then you're just spot tracking. If you maybe are newer to tracking or you've just tracked calories and you've never really done it in a healthy manner, that's where I really recommend intuitively tracking and really creating a softer effect with it, because tracking a lot of times especially if, if you like, control we love the hardness of it. We love to set hard, cutthroat numbers and hit them every single day. So I really recommend setting ranges instead of goals when it comes to your calories, your macros, and prioritizing your true hunger and fullness cues over just hitting these numbers.

Speaker 1:

And, over time, as you continue to build self-trust right, you continue to do this you wean yourself off of the ice cream and then you do the same thing, weaning yourself onto vegetables, weaning yourself onto the whole foods. What most people are doing is saying, all right, I'm quitting all sugar, the whole foods. What most people are doing is saying, all right, I'm quitting all sugar, all junk, and I'm going to 100 whole foods, and then you do that for as long as you possibly can and then same thing. The site, the, the pendulum swings back forth, back forth. So you have to wean yourself on to making healthy choices part of your life and this takes time. It's not just a day, it's like months, years down the line where now I'm at a point probably I mean, I've competed three years ago now I'm at a point where 90% of my diet is whole foods and I like it that way. I might. I've convinced my brain because I have weaned myself off of junk and weaned myself on to whole foods. My brain actually craves it and if I want a cookie, I know that I have the option to go do it, or I could make a cookie, I could sub it out for something different, and there's no yeah, there's no mindset drama there. So overall, let's maybe do a little bit of a recap.

Speaker 1:

So you have to let go of control in order to gain the control back and the food freedom back. Like I said I know this sounds freaking crazy, but control it feels really safe. But it could actually be what's keeping you stuck right the extreme calorie tracking, the food rules, eating clean, fasting, paleo diets. It creates a scarcity effect in your brain. So in order to flip the script, we have to let go of that control and it can feel scary. Right, it's like if I let go, I'll never stop eating. But you will prove to yourself, you will stop eating and you will get to a point where you feel completely neutral around food and at that point that's when you can start to gain control back. You can start to reintegrate discipline. You can start to reintegrate more of those healthy choices that serve the real you much better than the phase.

Speaker 1:

But remembering that this is all a phase and this phase is extremely messy, it's extremely uncomfortable, but without it, I can promise you I would probably still be stuck endlessly munching on three pound bags of trail mix and living in a body that I felt so fucking uncomfortable in taking pictures of myself and like getting pictures taken on vacations and wanting to literally jump in a hole. So if you are terrified of letting go, if this whole conversation you're shitting your pants, ask yourself truly what is scarier Losing control for a little bit, for a little phase of your life, or staying trapped in the on off, start, stop, zero to 100 cycle for the rest of your life? What's scarier to you? So if you listen to this and you're looking for a space where you're like, wow, I want to go through this process, but that scares the shit out of me. I don't know how the fuck to do it. I don't know how to what. If that's how you're feeling, um, badass, revolution is the place to be.

Speaker 1:

This is the exact transformation that we are going through, and I will leave the link in the show notes. Even if you don't want to join, please listen to this episode again, take notes, really, really apply everything that I'm saying and I guarantee you your fucking food freedom is right around the corner. It's, it's not. I'm going to say it's not easy, but it is simple. It is simple. Maybe not easy, it is probably one of the hardest processes, but it it is simple, it's not complicated. So I love you. I'll talk to you next week.