How I Lost 30 Pounds & Healed My Relationship with Food (Exact Strategies and Timelines)

Have you ever felt like you know you want to lose weight, but you have no idea what healthy weight loss actually looks like?

In this deeply personal episode of Isn’t She Powerful, I’m sharing my full story. From the years when I thought skipping meals to lose weight was the answer, to finally learning how to create a sustainable weight loss journey that helped me lose 30 pounds without obsessing over food, this is all of the nitty gritty details. 

For a long time, I believed that eating less meant I would weigh less. I spent years stuck in a cycle of restriction, food guilt, and confusion around what it meant to be healthy. Even after losing weight, I realized that my biggest transformation still needed to happen: I had to heal my relationship with food if I wanted lasting freedom.

Inside this episode, I walk you through the exact timeline of my 30-pound weight loss journey, the mindset shifts that changed everything, and the steps I took to stop living in the exhausting cycle of dieting and start building a healthy lifestyle that felt sustainable.

If you’ve been struggling with:

• how to lose weight without dieting
• healing your relationship with food
• food guilt and binge eating
• sustainable weight loss
• how to stop obsessing over food
• healthy habits for weight loss
• breaking the restrict-binge cycle
• losing weight without cutting out everything you love

this episode will remind you that lasting change is possible.

In this episode, I share:

• How my unhealthy approach to weight loss started
• Why skipping meals made everything worse
• The turning point that changed my health journey
• How I lost 30 pounds in a realistic way
• The steps I took to heal my relationship with food
• How to create a healthy lifestyle you can actually maintain
• Why your mindset matters as much as your meals

This episode is for the woman who is tired of starting over and wants to finally understand how to make healthy weight loss feel sustainable.

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WORK WITH ME: 

• Seismic Shift: Group Health Coaching (code POWERFUL for 10% off)
• 1:1 Coaching

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💌 Connect With Laura:

1. Website: Health Coach for Teachers & Busy, Working Women
2. Instagram: LAURA B. | Teacher turned Health Coach | Podcaster🎙️ (@laura.b.healthy) • Instagram photos and videos
3. TikTok: Laura B. | Health Coach (@laura.b.healthy) | TikTok

Keywords in this episode:

healthy weight loss, sustainable weight loss, heal your relationship with food, how to lose weight without dieting, 30 pound weight loss journey, food freedom, healthy habits, stop food obsession, binge eating recovery, realistic weight loss journey

🎧 Tune in now and hear the full story behind my weight loss journey and healing of my relationship with food.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, ladies, and welcome back for another episode of the Isn't She Powerful podcast. I am so excited to have you here with me today because I'm going to be talking with you about how I lost 30 pounds and healed my relationship with food within just a couple of years' time span. I'm so excited to share this story with you because I was recently being interviewed by Sarah Gleshemer and Susan Jones on their podcast, Her Wealth Unscripted. And they asked me. They were asking me all about my own personal journey, about the things that I had done, how I helped my clients, like with their relationship with food, with building habits that they can actually stick to. And they asked me, they were like, okay, well, I want the details. Like you said that you lost 30 pounds, you said you healed your relationship with food, but like what was the day-to-day like? What were you actually doing? And so in this episode, I want to give you a few things. A timeline. How long did it take me to do this? What were my mile markers, for example? Like, what were the things that I was accomplishing and in what time span was I doing that? And I want to give you some of the things that I was doing to accomplish these goals. Like, what did my day-to-day look like? That's what I want to share with you in this episode. Now, as you're listening to this, if you're thinking, I really want help achieving those same goals. I want to be somebody who has these habits that she's talking about. I want to be somebody who has the relationship with food that she's talking about, who is building a lifestyle like the one that she currently lives. I would love to invite you to join my program, Seismic Shift. You can check out all of the information for it down in the show notes below. But if you've heard of it before, just be aware that Seismic Shift is now Seismic Shift 2.0. It has changed just a bit. I've added some really wonderful components to the program, weekly goals that have been set out for you to start you off really small and build onto it over time to really truly change your lifestyle without it feeling like you're just going off the deep end and trying all of these new things. It's just meant to gradually get you from step A to B to C to D instead of going right from A to Z. Now it also has recipes in there. There are live components to the program. There's so much that's a part of this program now. I am so proud of it. And there are amazing women who are already benefiting from being inside the group. I would love for you to be one of those people. So head down into the show notes to check out the link for seismic shift or go to behealthyhabits.com/slash seismic dash shift. Welcome to the Isn't You Powerful Podcast. I'm your host, Laura B, health coach, educator, and founder of the Bee Healthy Lifestyle. I'm here to bring you all of the health education and motivation so that you can sign off each week feeling equipped and empowered to tackle all of your health goals. Come along with me as I teach you the basics of healthy living so that you can have everyone in your life safe. Isn't she powerful? Alright, so let's get into it. I am going to be so straight with you. I did not grow up in a healthy home. I did not have a healthy lifestyle prior to becoming the person that I am today. Like none of this is a year's like lifetime in the making, right? Like that is not how I used to live. When I was growing up, it was a lot of fast food. It was a lot of like frozen junk type food. We ate a lot of candy. We ate a lot of Debbie cakes. Like we did not do healthy things. I had soda for breakfast rather than ever drinking water. Like we never drank water. So it was one of those things where once I started doing this, I was kind of lost and confused. When I was in college, I really, really was justn't I it wasn't like I ever really even wanted it. I just had really unhealthy habits in college. I ate ice cream for breakfast, and you think, oh wow, she did that one time and she's talking about it. No, that was my regular breakfast. I ate like literally a gallon of ice cream. I had the cookies and cream from great value. That was my favorite one. I would literally get a serving spoon, like one of the big ones, scoop it out, and walk out of the door with my Coke in one hand and my serving spoon of ice cream in the other hand, and that was my breakfast on the way to my classes or my internship, my senior year. That was my norm. I was eating a lot of sugar, a lot of fast food, a lot of fried food, a lot of junk food. I had so much soda, and it was to the point when I was in college that my stomach hurt a lot. Like I would lay on the couch in the evenings, and I specifically remember I can still put myself back onto that little brown tweed couch, laying in my apartment in Rock Hill, South Carolina, texting my mom and saying, I don't know why my stomach hurts every single night. I feel nauseous every single night. And then I would go to bed, I would wake up in the next morning late for class, and I am not a late for class kind of person, not at all my personality, but I was oversleeping so much, and I think because my body wasn't getting what it needed, it was trying to compensate by sleeping more in the mornings. So, with all of that being said, I want you to get a clear picture of where I was coming from. Not a healthy person, no clue what it meant to live a healthy lifestyle. I was confused. I had been following so many different diets for years. I had tried keto once, like post-college, I tried keto with a couple of friends. I had tried 21-day fix while I was in college. I had tried multiple other beach body programs, P90X, whatever else. I had tried like if it was a diet, I had tried Weight Watchers. I can't even think of all of them right now, but I had tried so many of them. I even during high school would go to Walmart once I was able to drive. I would go to Walmart without my parents. Nobody would know I was there. This was before you could track people, and so it would go before and nobody would know that I was there. I would go to the little supplement section and I would get weight loss pills and I would sneak those into my house and I would sneak taking them because I thought that that was gonna solve everything. If I could just take this pill, then it would make all my problems go away. And I took the pill and then in high school I did lose weight. I was very unhealthy in high school to the point of I skipped a lot of meals. Like you could you could probably call it an eating disorder, even though I I don't actively call it that. I pretty much was living that lifestyle. And I so I would skip a bunch of meals, I would exercise hard multiple times a day. Like I would literally finish cross-country practice and then go home and do a P90X workout. And if you've ever done P90X, those are hard workouts. So I would do that and then not eat dinner and not eat breakfast and not eat lunch. Like I would have like a pack of crackers, and that would be everything that I would eat for the entire day. So even though I was losing weight, I don't know if it could be attributed to those pills that I was taking off the shelf at Walmart. I don't know. But I do know that I did lose weight in a really unhealthy way then. So post-college, whenever I was like, okay, I've put on 30 pounds during college, I put on like a lot of weight during college because honestly, I got happy. I met my people. There was no more me trying to fit in, me needing to look a certain way in order to be accepted. And so I just started eating whatever I wanted to. Again, a lot of fast food. We ate cookout, we had the milkshakes and the fried chicken and all the things I and my Chick-fil-A. They knew my name through the drive-thru. They said, Hey Laura, do you want the same thing you normally get? I said, Girl, you know it. And so I was I I was living a really unhealthy lifestyle. That's the entire point that I'm trying to get here is that I did not come from a lifestyle where I knew what it meant to live healthy. So post-college, whenever I decided I want to get serious, like I really want to start taking care of myself. I want to feel better, I want to look better, I want to feel more confident in my clothes. It was coming from a place of I just really want to feel better for the first time ever, versus previously it had been I need to look this way so that I can fit in. This time it was more so, I just want to feel good for the first time ever, right? And so at first I didn't I felt like I needed to do the same things that I had done in high school to lose the weight. So immediately I was like, okay, well, no more breakfast. We're skipping breakfast again. I gotta save those calories. We're not eating breakfast. I'm not able to eat any dessert type foods, no candy, no nothing. And I was working in an elementary school and I did a lot of rewarding my kids with candy, and so there was a lot of candy around, and so it was very challenging. But I would eat as little as possible for lunch, and then by the evenings, I was trying to eat as little as possible, and that lasted like Monday through Wednesday, and then by Thursday through Sunday, I was like, I'm hungry, and I would eat so much food, and then Sunday would come around, I'd feel like crap again, and I'd say, Okay, we gotta be better on Monday. And again, that cycle would repeat over and over and over again for a couple of months until finally I was like, This is not it. Like, this is this can't be how it is. Clearly, starving myself is not the option. This isn't gonna work for me, and so that's whenever I decided to start approaching things from a different lens, and that is where really my health journey story begins. In March of 2020, obviously, you guys can put yourself back in your shoes of March of 2020. We all know what was going on around that time. I was working in a school, as I had previously said, and so nobody was going back to school. Like it was one of those, okay, we're all for the next two weeks. Oh, it's two weeks more, okay, two more weeks, okay, we're done for the rest of the school year, see you next year. And so it just kind of was one of those where I was at home a lot, and I was like, if I'm just gonna be sitting here all day, I might as well do something with that time. And so this is whenever I started working out. That was my first step that I took in my journey. I was staying with my parents because I was getting ready to move to Florida to be with Shane, and instead of staying in my apartment by myself, an hour and a half away from my family, I decided I would go back to my parents' house, stay with them for a couple of months until I was moving in with Shane. So during that time, I was working out like literally every single day. I would put on a YouTube video, I would go out onto my parents' carport, and I would do my workout out there. And I'm telling you, it was the easiest videos. It was like 10 to 15 minutes. It was nothing insane. I didn't even have weights. I was literally using wine bottles as my weights for my workouts because I didn't have them. And so it doesn't have to be anything fancy and it doesn't have to be you need an hour in your day. 10 to 15 minutes is all that it takes. And in my program seismic shift, I talked to you previously in the intro of this episode about the weekly goals. Those goals start out smaller than that, smaller than that, because I want you to get into the routine of setting aside 10 minutes of your day to go on a little walk to get your body moving, and then that 10 minutes becomes 15, and then that 15 becomes 20, and then that 20 becomes 30. And over time you find like, oh yeah, if I can set aside 10 minutes, I could set aside 30. It's really not that hard. You actually do have so much more time in your day than you think that you do. It's all just about, okay, where am I using my time unwisely? Am I sitting around too long after dinner? Am I sitting on the toilet after I go to the bathroom scrolling when I could be getting up and doing something productive? Like I know how we are. I'm I'm that person too. And so you have to learn to utilize your time a little bit more. But in 2020, I decided I'm gonna start exercising. I didn't worry about nutrition because I was staying with my parents, my nutrition really wasn't up to me. I really wasn't in charge of being able to say, okay, well, we're gonna eat this or I want to have that. I was just going with the flow of what they were giving me. And some of you are in that situation too, maybe not staying with your parents, but you live with somebody where it makes it more difficult for you to make healthy choices whenever it comes to your food. And so all you have to do is start somewhere. Something is better than nothing. Okay, so for me, it was exercise. That's where I started in March of 2020. By July of 2020, I had moved in with Shane. We had moved to Florida, and I was now in charge of my nutrition. And because I was, I decided I want to figure out how to actually eat healthy. So this was the start of me deciding to learn what it meant to live a healthy lifestyle and eat healthy foods. Like, what is healthy? Like, what is healthy food? I didn't even know because for so long I just thought healthy food was less food. If I'm eating less, then I'm healthy. And that is not at all what it is. And so I had to learn that, right? I had to learn what what are macronutrients? Everybody's talking about counting their macros. What even is that? I don't even know what you mean. I had to learn how to actually eat healthy food and what healthy food truly meant. So by July of 2020, as I said, I was doing a lot of research, I was learning as much as I could, and I was starting to implement it. So I was still, I was building onto the habit of having my exercise figured out, building on to that to start with my nutrition. My exercise didn't go anywhere. It was like the foundation of my health and wellness journey from the beginning. By July, I was adding on another layer to that journey. And I know I keep coming back to it, but again, this is so much of what I do with my people inside of my program, seismic shift. I'm teaching you all those things that you need to know. If you're like me and you're like, I don't even know what healthy really actually means, I'm confused because I've been on years and years of diets. Seismic shift, I teach you all of that. There are live coaching classes where I literally teach you all of this stuff. And if you can't come live, all the replays are there, all that, you know the gist. But there comes a point where you have to accept, I'm confused because I've been on all these diets. I don't know what's black, what's white, what's right, what's wrong. I need to figure out from somebody who knows what they're talking about. So you join the program, you take that initiative to say, I'm gonna get it figured out. And as I was saying, my program also gives you that foundation, and then you build on it, and then you build on it, and then you build on it until you've created a new lifestyle. That's what I did for myself, and that's the mentality that I've used to create this program as well. Raise your hand if you're a details person. You need to know every single detail before making a decision because personally I'm that person. I need to know who, what, when, where, and especially why before I make any type of decision. So if you've heard of my group coaching program and you've been thinking, sounds great, but I'm gonna need a little more detail before I can make a decision, then let me break it down for you. The number one thing that I hear as positive feedback for Seismic Shift is that it takes away the guesswork when it comes to health and wellness. Every single week, you are given specific goals for nutrition, exercise, and water. The goals come in two versions, starter and advanced, so that they meet you exactly where you are, depending on where you are in your journey, but you don't get overwhelmed or lost. These goals have been designed by me, someone who's certified in habit change, to help you build a new lifestyle. They are intentionally small, realistic, and designed to fit your actual life. Over time, they build into real, lasting change, a healthy lifestyle that you're proud of. Inside of Seismic Shift, you also get access to a library of healthy recipes: breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and side dishes. And I've created them as an integrative nutrition health coach to be intentionally well balanced. They have the proper amounts of protein, fat, and fiber so that you don't have to guess or try to figure anything out. They are already well balanced for you. Once again, it takes the guesswork away. On top of all of that, we also have two live components to the program: live group coaching calls with me every single week where we dive into mindset and nutrition and habit building, plus a daily group chat where you get to share your wins, your frustrations, your struggles, your challenges, every single thing that's coming up for you. You get it solved in the moment rather than having to wait to talk to someone later. So you're not doing this alone and you're not guessing at it anymore, just throwing things against the wall, hoping that it sticks. And if that sounds like exactly what you've been missing in your health and wellness journey, you can join me right now at behealthyhabits.com slash seismic dash shift, or simply visit the link down in the show notes. Again, that's behealthyhabits.com slash seismic dash shift, or head down to the link in the show notes and find us there. And podcast listeners get 10% off for life by using the code Powerful. So use the code POWEFUL at checkout to get 10% off for life. I can't wait to see you inside of seismic shift. So for most of 2020, I was exercising and Shane was working. When we moved to Florida, he was working six days a week, 14 hours a day. It was really hard being in a pandemic, in a new state, all by yourself. That was really hard. But what did I do? I was like, well, I don't have anything else to do. I don't know anybody. I can't go out and meet new people. So I just kept on working out. I literally worked out pretty much six days a week, at least five days a week. I was doing some kind of workout. And once again, they weren't anything extensive. They were little simple workouts that I was doing following YouTube videos, or eventually I joined Beach Body and was doing Beach Body workouts. But no matter what, they were short 30-minute workouts. I was doing those every single day. I was spending some time learning about nutrition and implementing those things for most of 2020. By the end of 2020, from March, whenever I started working out to December, I had lost 12 pounds, which means that I had lost about two pounds a month, half a pound a week, which in the grand scheme of things is a really slow way to lose weight. However, I don't regret that. I am so proud of the fact that it took me a long time to start seeing that weight loss because one, I'd never seen weight loss in the past in any other way that wasn't me starving myself. So I was really proud of the fact that the scale was going down. Even if it was going down slowly, I was praising myself for being consistent and sticking with it and allowing it the time that my body needed to lose that weight. I also knew that at the end of the day, I was building habits that I was going to be able to maintain. I was learning what I needed to learn, and I was doing it in a way so that I was actually going to be able to stick to this beyond just this weight loss journey. It was more than that at that point. This was a true lifestyle that I was building for myself that I was really proud of that made me feel so good about myself. I continued to stick with it. I continued to eat all of the things that I was learning that I needed to be eating, how to have well-balanced meals, all of those types of things. When it came to nutrition, everything that I now teach, I was doing those things, as well as my workouts and drinking my water. And by June of 2021, I had lost a total of 24 pounds, which means that in the next six months, I lost 12 more pounds. Again, slow weight loss that was sustainable. And I've since learned how good that is for your body. Like I'm not saying that it needs to be half a pound a week, it could be a pound a week, and you would still be losing in a really sustainable way for your body. But if you lose weight too quickly, you're likely losing muscle rather than fat. And it's gonna be really hard for your body to adjust. Your metabolism is gonna slow down too much, your your hormones are gonna go kind of wacky, wacky because they're just not sure what's going on. You're changing their environment so drastically, so quickly. So by doing it slowly, I know that I was benefiting my body in ways that I'm gonna be forever grateful for. Now, that was June of 2021. The second half of 2021 is where things kind of started to get a little bit more challenging for me. My relationship with food at that point took a really negative turn. I had not been really trying to heal my relationship with food at all during this, and I didn't really know that I needed to. The term relationship with food, I was like, I don't even know what you mean by that. Like I that that didn't make any sense to me. I had no idea that the things that I was feeling and thinking when it related to food were causing so much harm in the long run. For example, I was waking up every single morning and I was thinking, today I've got to be good. If I eat sugar, then I'm gonna be so bad today. I'm going to stay away from the sugar. And then I would go the entire day. I'd walk into the school building and I would see the donuts and I'd say, nope, not today. We are not eating those. Those are so bad for me. I'm gonna be good today. Remember what we said. I'd go into my classroom and see the candy there, and I'd say, no, Laura, you're not having that. That's bad for you. You're bad if you eat it. And then I would continue on throughout the day saying no, no, no, no, no, resisting and fighting it with willpower and white knuckling my way through the entire day. And then by the end of the day, I would say, you know what? Screw it. I don't care anymore. I'm tired of fighting the voices in my head. I now know that all of that is food noise. Me constantly thinking about food. I literally felt like food followed me around. It wouldn't leave me alone. All I thought about was food. All I could think about was the foods that I shouldn't be eating, how I'm bad if I eat those foods. I've got to stay away from them. And so by the end of the school day, I would say, you know what? Screw it. I don't care anymore. I just give into it. I'd eat so much candy. Like the amount of candy that I would eat would create a giant pile of wrappers on my desk. And then I would take those wrappers, bunch them up in a small a small amount as I could, and then put them underneath all kinds of papers in my trash can in my classroom so that nobody would know what I had done. The janitor didn't know, nobody could walk into my classroom and see the evidence of what I had done. In fact, I even had my door locked and my lights turned off and my blinds closed to my classroom so that nobody would be able to. To see what I had done or what I was doing at the time with all of this binge eating. And it got to the point where this was happening every single day. And it was happening because I so badly wanted to lose a little bit more weight, but I felt like my body was at a standstill. And so I felt like I needed to restrict. I needed to get really dialed in, right? Like all those things I've got to lock in and get dialed in, and all of those, those terminology that we use, get my life together. And so I was being really stringent with myself. I was being like very cautious, logging everything that I was eating, like all of those things that I I had done to lose the first 24 pounds that felt really simple and really sustainable. I was going against all of that. And I was getting really restrictive with my habits and the food that I was really telling myself that I should allow into my body. But as we know, that restriction just led to me binge eating. And so the second half of 2021 was very challenging in that I was binge eating probably four to five times a day. Like I'm saying probably four, but it was usually more like not five times a day, five times a week. Like it was happening every single day in the afternoons. I was binge eating. And it got to the point where I was sick again. Remember how I said I called my mom and I was like, I don't know why I feel this way. Why am I sick every day? It was happening again. I was feeling sick every single day. I was feeling so tired, so lethargic. I could not seem to get my brain fog to go away. I couldn't concentrate on anything other than food, it felt like that was the only thing in my brain all the time. And because of that, my weight went back up a little bit. And that was the opposite of what I was trying to do. And so every single day I would look in the mirror and say, Laura, you're so fat. You're so disgusting. I would pinch my stomach and pinch my arms and make sure that I knew that I was disgusting. Like I was making sure that I was telling myself how gross I was and how these habits that I had of eating so much candy, how that was the problem. And if I didn't stop eating the candy, I was gonna get fat again. Like I was being so negative to myself. And now I fully understand that having that negative relationship with food and having those binge eating habits were a result of my relationship with food, and also the way that I was speaking to myself was a result of my broken relationship with food. So eventually my husband came home from work and he saw me laying on the couch sick again, and he said, Laura, you've got to do something. This isn't normal, you can't be feeling this way all the time. And I was like, I think you're right. I don't think this is normal, and I do think I need to do something about this. So what did I do? I started doing some more research again. I started looking into it. Why was I feeling this way? How could I make all of this stop? And that is whenever I came across the terms relationship with food, I came across the terms of all or nothing mindset, I came across the term of binge eating, which I kind of, I mean, like I already knew that term, but I didn't apply that to my life at the time. I didn't realize what I was doing was binge eating. And it wasn't until many, many years later that I even discovered the term food noise, but now I know that that is very much what I was experiencing. So I decided, okay, we're going to start learning how to heal this relationship with food. And this is where everybody's like, well, how did you do it? How did you heal your relationship with food? And I'm gonna tell you a couple of things that I did. Number one, I stopped weighing myself and I stopped looking in the mirror and picking the spots on my body that I hated. I st I changed the way that I spoke to myself, is essentially what I'm telling you to do. You cannot be that mean to yourself and expect any long-term changes. It just isn't gonna happen. Because let me tell you something. The version of you that you're trying to become, she's not the version who hates herself. You cannot approach this weight loss journey, this health journey, whatever you want to call it, you cannot approach it from a place of hatred and expect it to make you love yourself. Let me say that again. You cannot hate yourself into a life that you love. If you are approaching all of these goals and all of this, I want to lose weight, I want to look a certain way, everything, because you hate yourself and you hate the body that you currently live in, then you doing all of this stuff isn't gonna magically make you love yourself. You have to approach this journey because you love yourself enough to do it. You have to say, I'm going to wake up in the morning and eat a healthy, well-balanced breakfast because that's a way to show my body love. I'm going to choose to drink water over soda. I'm going to choose to get up and go for a walk versus sitting on the couch for hours. I'm going to choose to do healthy habits because I love myself enough to do them. That's the mindset that we have to shift into approaching this health and wellness journey from. So that's the number one thing I did. I started doing this because I love myself, not because I hate myself. And my language proved that. I also changed my language around the way that I spoke about food. It was no more good and bad because when we assign moral value to an inanimate object such as food, and then we consume that inanimate object, we take on the moral value of that food. By saying, this food, which is a pineapple, is good. We magically think, oh, I'm good because I consumed it. You're not good because you ate a pineapple. You're good for many other reasons. You're good because you love people, because you're a great mom or you're a great friend or whatever it may be. You're good for a lot of reasons. It is not because you ate a pineapple. And same on the flip side of that. We like to think, oh, I'm bad because I ate a brownie and that's a bad food. No, baby, a brownie is not a bad food. Okay, and if you could think that eating a brownie makes you bad, then that is at the root of the relationship with food that we have to solve first. Now, don't get me wrong, there are certain foods that we should have better boundaries with. Brownies, cookies, all of those high sugar foods that don't really do much for our bodies. Sure, we should have some boundaries with those foods. I'm not saying consume those and those be the only thing that you eat all the time, every single day. And you're not bad if you do it. Now, you aren't bad if you do it, let me clarify. But that is not going to help you get closer to your goals. That is not in alignment with the lifestyle that you are trying to create. Neither is you speaking negative to yourself. So I want you to start asking yourself, every time you go to do something, every time you go to make a choice, whether that be how you talk to yourself, whether it be a food that you're gonna eat, a choice to sit on the couch or get up and go for a walk or something like that, I want you to ask yourself, is this choice in alignment with the lifestyle that I am trying to create? And when you can ask yourself that question, and that that tells you everything you need to do, right? It tells you, okay, if this isn't in alignment with the life I'm trying to create, then then it's not for me. That's not something that I want to do. Furthermore, to heal my relationship with food, I did not cut all of those dessert type foods out. I found some dessert foods that I truly enjoyed. I stopped just choosing whatever was there. Because let me tell you something, I hate Twizzlers and I was eating Twizzlers a lot because it was just what was around. I guess my students also hated Twizzlers, so they picked around those in our candy basket. And so I was choosing the Twizzlers because they were there. And I decided I don't want to eat the Twizzlers. I don't like the Twizzlers. They're doing nothing for me but making me feel bad about myself. So I started finding some things that I did enjoy. Chocolate is my go-to. I just love some chocolate. So I found some good quality dark chocolate that actually tasted good, that I really truly enjoyed. And that was part of my snacks in the afternoons, and it was part of what I was eating as dessert, either after lunch or after dinner. I made that boundary with myself. I said, I'm not gonna eat foods that I don't enjoy anymore. Unless it's fully something that I'm like 100% yes, then it's out. I started planning ahead for my afternoon snacks because for a while I was saying, okay, I need to eat less food, and so I'm not going to eat an afternoon snack. But then by the time the afternoon came around, I was absolutely starving and I needed a snack. So instead of allowing myself to say, I'm not gonna eat anything in the afternoons, that was like me being delirious. I'm gonna be hungry, so I'm gonna eat something. And if I don't plan ahead for it, then I'm gonna end up eating junk food. So instead of that, I said, okay, I'm going to plan ahead for a snack that has both what I want and what I need. It's gonna have protein, it's gonna have fiber, and I'm gonna give myself a little bit of a sweet treat with it as well. So every single day, my snack included something that of each of those categories: a protein, a fiber, and something sweet. Some of my go-to's, like one, for example, would be a yogurt cup. I would add some nuts to it, almonds, walnuts, whatever nut you want. And then I would add some of those hue chocolate gems. They're like big chocolate chips. I would add those to my yogurt, mix it together, and that was a wonderful snack. Another one of my common go-tos was some of those small individual size bags of popcorn. I would get the Lesser Evil brands. I would add in something like nuts or something like that that added some healthy fats and some fiber to it. And then again, I would add in about two tablespoons of chocolate chips, huge chocolate gems, whatever that may look like. And that was my afternoon snack most days. That hit the spot. It gave my body what it needed, and it gave my body what it wanted. I started to understand that there was so much more to the cravings that I was experiencing, and I'm not gonna go into full details with it now because this would be like an entire this this is so much of what I teach, and I do this broken down over many weeks. I can't give you everything all at once because your head would be exploding and you would be like, I don't even know what to take away from that. I just got so much info from her. But I came to learn that there was so much more going on. Sometimes my body really did need food, and that was what was causing all of the food noise. Sometimes it was more emotional, and I needed to get to the root of why I felt like I needed to eat, even though I wasn't hungry. And so that's a lot of the work that I do with my clients is helping them understand what type of craving are you experiencing? Where is that food noise coming from? And how can we figure out for you specifically how to get you from constantly feeling like you're hungry, constantly feeling like you have food noise and that you need to be eating to at a place of peace with food. So, anyways, for most of 2022, I was healing my relationship with food. I was doing all of the things that I just talked to you about. I was understanding where my cravings were coming from. I was changing the way that I spoke about myself and the way that I spoke about food. I was learning so much about this stuff and applying it. And that is what I now help people do. Learn the things and then apply the things. Because you can learn all you want, but if you're not applying them, then then you're not getting anywhere. And if you're applying things that don't actually work, that are hurting you more than helping you, then you're in a pickle as well. So now I help my clients truly understand what they need to know and start applying those things. But by the end of 2022, my relationship with food was so healthy, like it was the best that it had ever been, and it still is. And I had lost a total of 31 pounds. So here are some of the things that I want you to take away from this. Number one, a true sustainable health and wellness weight loss journey takes time. It is not something that you are going to wake up tomorrow and you're gonna be down 20 pounds. As lovely as that would be, as wonderful as it would be to wake up in a brand new body, you wouldn't have the habits that are required to maintain that. And that is so much more important than waking up tomorrow with it already here. You need to build your way there. It's gonna take time, and that is a beautiful, beautiful thing. Don't try to rush the journey. Allow yourself the time that you need to build these habits that are actually going to stick so that you're not back in this place again next year. Number two, you are going to have to become a learner. You're gonna have to be able to get uncomfortable, you're gonna have to be willing to put yourself in situations where you don't know things and where things feel a bit uncomfortable for you in order for you to grow. That's just the truth of it. That's the truth of life, right? Like that's not just about your health and wellness, that's about life in general. You're gonna have to get uncomfortable in order to grow. But it's specifically true in this situation of trying to get you to the place of losing weight, having a healthy relationship with food, you are going to have to grow alongside of that by learning, by implementing, by getting the help to help you do those things. So, with all of this being said, if this story resonated with you in any way, if there is anything in this story where you saw yourself in me, in my journey, if there's anything that I said, I would love so much to get to support you through the same things that I went through inside of my program Seismic Shift. I've explained a little bit about it, but in this program, you are going to learn how to heal your relationship with food. You are going to get rid of your all or nothing mindset, and you are going to build habits with food, exercise, and water that you can actually stick to. I promise you that every little piece of it, I have been where you've been. And if I haven't been there, then there's somebody in the group who has been there. I work with women of all ages, from all types of lifestyles, all backgrounds. I promise you that even though I haven't been through perimenopause and menopause, many, many women that I work with have been. I haven't had a baby, but many women that I work with have. And so where I can't relate and help you directly with going through the emotions of those things, there are people in the group who can make you feel seen and help you feel supported. And I know so many things. Like I've done the research, I've learned all of about these situations. And so even though I haven't specifically been in some of those situations, I help women through those and I can help you through those situations as well. I would love so much to have you. You can go down into the show notes to visit the link for behealthyhabits.com slash seismic dash shift. There is a link down in the show notes to take you directly there, or you can go to any web browser and type in behealthyhabits.com slash seismic dash shift. There is a monthly payment plan and a quarterly payment plan. You can stay in the program as long as you need in order to reach your goals. And I would be absolutely honored to get to support you in your health and wellness journey. Thank you so much for being here, and I look forward to seeing you again in the next episode. Thank you so much. I can't wait to see you again next week. And always remember the more you know, the more you grow.