Sticking to Your Food Plan When Life Goes Wrong

Learning how to stick to your healthy food plan EVEN when life gets hard is a game changer.  Because life is going to be hard.  You will have bad days, and feel a range of negative emotion.

When this happens, you don't have to eat perfectly, but you do need to get better at not throwing in the towel, or going completely rogue on your goals.

When you learn how to do bad days better, you can lose weight permanently and navigate challenges better too!

Interested in working with me? Find my website here: https://courtneygraycoaching.com/workwithme

Transcript

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Music. Welcome to Modern body, modern life, the podcast for women who want to lose weight permanently, feel in control around food and learn how to stop obsessing about their body and food, a modern way of thinking about your weight, your body and your life includes mindset. I'm body and life coach, Courtney Gray, and each week I'm going to teach you the mindset tools that are necessary for changing the way you eat forever. We will uncover why you're eating when you said you were going to stop, what to do when you're really craving something, and how important it is to decide what you want to believe is possible for you. I believe we can get in the best shape of our lives at any age, a modern body, a modern life, all starts in your mind, and when you learn how to manage that, losing weight permanently becomes so much easier. Welcome to the Podcast, episode 60. Sticking to your food plan when life goes wrong. It is the middle of January, and I am still working my way through closing out 2020 4am. I the only one I was talking to a few of my clients this week, and they were like, what's your Word of the Year? What's your goal for this year? And I said, You know what? I'm not there yet. I am still. I haven't been lazy, I haven't been just laying around, but I am still very much kind of closing up shop from two businesses. And I mean, I literally just took down my Christmas a few days ago. That's very intentional. I love my tree so much that I keep it up until, usually the second week of January. But still, I feel like I'm it's usually takes me to the end of January before I'm like, okay, 2025 Let's go. So I'm excited to do that work, but I have been working a lot. Yesterday I did something really fun. There is a local women's networking group here in my hometown, and I offered to speak to do like a goal setting workshop, which ended up becoming a goal setting but really more of a goal achieving workshop. And I'll tell you what I told them in making that decision is a lot of times setting goals can be pretty easy. This is my thoughts. Setting goals can be pretty easy most the time, if someone is having a hard time setting a goal. Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes it could be that they're kind of telling themselves they're confused, but it's not that they're confused, it's that they really don't believe that they can get what they want. So when that happens, a lot of times we go to I don't really know when really the underlying belief is what I really want is not available. And the reason they think what they really want is not available to them is because they've never done it before and they don't know the exact exact steps. So I talked a lot about this in my workshop. So we just took, like, the first 10 minutes, and like, we set our goals. I gave them some strategies on how to set their goals, and then we dove into how to accomplish our goals. And you know, the way I talked to them was very similar with the way I talked to you on this podcast. We talked a lot about emotions, and I said, if you are going to we talked a lot about business specifically. So I said, if you are going to create a lot of money in your business, double your business, start working with a different type of person, or constrain your business, or whatever up leveling you want to do in your business, you're going to have to be willing to feel the negative emotions that come along with taking the action it's going to take to do those things. You are going to be scared. You are going to have doubt you are going to feel like nervous about being judged, and for most people, when you really trace it down, the underlying emotion is fear. And so it was a very fun day. So I did my little workshop part, and then my friend Brie did a painting exercise, and so she brought these little I think they're probably five inch by five inch canvases, and everyone had chosen a goal in my workshop, and so she had everyone like paint their goal on a canvas to remind them of the day. It was amazing. It was two hours of amazing. And I was just so impressed by everyone who came. And it was just a really, really, really cool event, and I was very happy to be a part of it. If you follow me on Instagram, you saw I posted a little bit and then I reposted. So many people were posting and tagging me, I eventually had to stop reposting. It was awesome. So let us dive into the podcast. Today. I want to help you stick to your food plan when life goes wrong, because we are in the middle of January. And my hope for you, if you started out the year like mama is changing things up, I want to lose weight. I want to get I want to get my shit together. I want to take this seriously. Fantastic. I'm sure that's why you're here. And so I want to help you do that. And the best way I was thinking this morning, I was actually thinking of many of you. I. Some of you, some of you, personally, I know you know who you are, who listen to the podcast, and I think about you like, what does she need to hear from me? What does she need to hear from me? And I was like, Where is she at right now? And I really need to teach you how to actually keep going with whatever, whether it's your food plan, your workout plan, whatever it is, how to keep going. When life goes wrong, when shit goes sideways, when everything is upheavald, because it's coming, you know it is right. I mean, life is up down, up down, up down. And we need to take those up moments and enjoy them, because we know at some point something's going to go wrong. It's just how life is. And if we can get better at doing better when life goes sideways, we can be more consistent, and we can lose the way we want to lose and keep it off. So in order to become the woman that eats better, most of the time, you're going to need to eat better, even when you have a bad day, even when shit hits the fan, even when your kids are not doing well, your animal passes away, you have a parent that is getting sick, not from a place of perfection, but from a place of doing better. And so what I want to talk about is not necessarily you going like, I'm sticking to this plan, but it's like, Wait a minute. How can we possibly modify the plan but still do better than how we've done in the past. Because for a lot of my clients, what happens is, is, if they do really well, until something goes wrong, until, you know, their kid breaks a leg, and then all of a sudden they're in the ER, into this and this, and then all of a sudden it's like, well, I didn't get to do this what you know. And then that ends up lasting a few days before they, quote, unquote, get back in the wagon. What I was telling my client, what the other day was, if we need to get you to fuck up better. And she was like, Yes, that's what I need. That's what I need. So sticking to our healthy eating plan, and whatever your healthy eating workout, whatever your plan is for you, sticking to your healthy plan takes discipline and commitment, re commitment, even after you change your self concept, like I have, where this is just what I do. I eat a certain way, and it helps me live in a certain body, and I'm constantly getting better and better and better, healthier and moving more and stronger, and all that that is my self concept. But even that that's hard, takes hard work to do that, even once you get the self concept and you lose the weight all that, it takes hard work to live a good life, right? But then throw in a crappy day, throw in things not working out, and, you know, people passing away and illness and failures and bad weather and things being canceled and people being rude and missed expectations, throw in all of that, even if you have the self concept, it's really hard to do Well when you're feeling a negative emotion coming from a circumstance coming from, let's be honest, thoughts about a circumstance. So something happens, you have thoughts, you feel a negative emotion. It's harder in that moment to eat the way you had planned on eating. Even for you, if your self concept is, I've got this. This is just who I am right now. And we know in life things go wrong. We know that we are going to experience all the negative emotion, the sadness, the frustration, the exhaustion, the discouragement, we're going to feel all those and then what is going to probably happen for the rest of your life is emotional eating is going to kick in, emotional eating is going to be presented to you from your primitive brain as the solution to fix everything. So if you are out and about and something goes wrong and you're around food, that will be the solution. If you're out and about something goes wrong and you don't have any accessibility to food, but you have your phone scrolling, might be the solution. Anything that gets you feeling a little bit better in that moment is going to be the solution, because your primitive brain does not want you to feel any negative emotion, because that could mean that you're in danger. And so what we do as a society. What has been presented to us and taught to us as a society is when something goes wrong, we eat to make ourselves feel better. We can come up with so many examples of this, but I have my own example. I remember specific I was trying to come up with examples how I have done this in the past. So you know, you're not the only one. I want to make you feel seen and not crazy and totally normal. I remember this one time when my twins were in I think they were probably in fourth or fifth grade, maybe third, fourth, fifth grade. And I remember they decided to run for like, class president or president. In another school, I don't know. It was some election, and both of them decided to run, like, against each other. My husband and I were looking at each other like, this doesn't seem like a good idea, right? We're like, what is happening? Why don't one of you run for president and run for vice but then who did? It was just a little bit of a Okay, good. You know, you guys do what you want to do, right? These kids have got to learn, choose their own path. But they also ran against one of their best friends, and this friend at the time, and probably is now one of the most popular kids in in their friends group, and at the time, was probably one of the most popular kids in the grade. My kids were popular too. They had lots of friends, but this kid was the kid when my kids came home and said, we're running, and so is Trent. I looked at my husband, I'm all, oh, right, if it were me, I'd be like, hey, I'll be your VP. So they decided to run against him, and Trent won. And my kids were devastated. They were devastated so much that you could tell they were shocked. Both of them were shocked that they didn't get it. And so what did I say to that their little sweet for you, you know, fourth grade, fifth grade faces. I'm like, You know what? Let's go get ice cream. And I literally said to them, it will solve everything. Such, such good parenting at the time. And we went for ice cream, and then we came home, and there were we, you know, processed that out. They were upset about we processed it out, and then it went on, and they were fine. And they're still friends with Trent and he's they're also darling. It's so cute. But I've done it. Society does it. I've done it, and I probably still do that from time to time. If one of my boys came over right now and just said, Yeah, I I really wanted to get this or that, or I would this would happen, you know? And they were disappointed. I'd be like, What can I make for you? I was laughing because my husband and I are watching this movie, right? Not movie. It's a new show that we found called land man. It's with Billy Bob Thornton. It's a really great show. But anyways, there's a girl in the movie who's Mexican, and she talks, she says, talks about feeding, and she goes, you know, Mexican women, we want to feed everyone. So sit down and eat. And I thought, Oh, my God, I'm like that too. I'm like a Mexican woman. I do want to feed everyone. If my kids come over, what can I make for you? Like, oh, you're upset about something, I'll make you something. It's no problem. So there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Food is sustenance. It is love. It is all the things, however we need to be really hyper aware that it is our go to to get out of any negative emotion. Once we're hyper aware, we can actually do better. So remember again, when your things are not going your way, your primitive brain wants to get you into pleasure, which means safety as fast as possible. This is the definition, really, of emotional eating. And so how do we have a shitty day and feel pissed off and not eat your face off? How do we keep going when things go wrong? So I've got some ideas for you. The first thing is become hyper aware of what you've done in the past, your patterns in the past, and take a moment and really think about it. And if you are listening to this while driving this is going to be one of those episodes you're going to want to listen to again, and you're going to want to answer these questions. And I would even write them down. There's so much research that talks about the power of learning something by really writing it down, it will you will resonate with it so much after you write it down there, clarity is amazing. So become hyper aware of what you've done in the past, and think last time something went wrong, what did you do and get really specific and really radically honest with yourself, right? What did you eat? How much did you eat and how long did you go rogue for? Those are some great questions to ask yourself. But most importantly, what excuse did you give yourself to go off plan. What did you say to yourself to make it okay to basically put your own true desires on the back burner? And also, what did you say to yourself to finally get back on your plan? So how long did it take for you to get back on plan? But when you finally did, what happened? Like, what did you say to yourself to finally go, okay, enough's enough. Or, okay, I think I can do this again. Or, What? What? What was it that had you finally get back in the wagon of good eating? It's so important to see your habits, and this is one area that most people gloss over, even with my clients, if they have a weekend that they don't do well, they don't eat well, or they have a holiday, they don't eat well, they're like, but I'm back on track now. It's fine, it's fine, it's fine. I'm like, no, no, we're gonna spend an hour talking about what went wrong. So then when you know in the past what has gone wrong, you can do better in the future. And the cool thing is, is when you do this work, you. You can see yourself going through it all of a sudden, you'll be like, Oh, wow, I'm doing it again. This is my pattern, and you'll be able to stop in the moment and course correct. I'm taking a little break to let you know, if you are loving the podcast, you have to grab my free course lose weight for the last time. The mindset and strategy you've been missing. This free course is available right now. It is for women who are tired of dieting only to gain the weight back. It is for women who want to lose weight permanently and feel like themselves again. I spent years wanting to lose weight every morning. I would promise to eat better that day, and then by four o'clock I would completely change my mind. I would think I don't care. It wasn't worth it. I should just love myself. I'm getting older. This is normal that my body's changing, and it shouldn't matter, but it did matter, and it did matter to me. I lost weight permanently by learning how to feel in control around food, eat better consistently and follow through. And this course will help you do the same. So the link to get immediate access to this free course is in the show notes. It's also on my website at Courtney Gray coaching.com you are going to love it. Now back to the show. So here is really step number two, how to keep on when things go wrong, is create a plan. Now you could call it like your shitty day plan. You could call it like my when things go wrong, plan. Create this plan now when you're doing well, when you figure out this is what I normally do, what can I do in the future? Make sure you make it doable and comforting and lovely. I think my energy is very like, let's go, let's go. Like, kind of like, I'm intense, but this is not a time you're going to want to be intense with yourself. You're going to want to make this plan doable and comforting and lovely. And I want to encourage you to start with compassion. I want you to go into it knowing my plan is going to be like, first, have compassion for whatever is going wrong. It's not the time for intensity. Let's go. It's like, Oh, honey. It's been a hard day. I'm so sorry. Let's give you some extra love today. Like, what if you talked to yourself like that? You literally talked is that like in third person, like you would talk to one of your kids. That should be the first step of your plan. Okay, this does not feel good. I'm really disappointed. Okay, so even as I'm going through this with you, I'm getting a little emotional. I promise I'm not gonna cry. I'm not crying on every podcast, guys, I'm not crying on every podcast. But it's like I feel this. I feel how this is so compassionate that this is what I would do for myself. This would be part of my plan. I would say to myself, Oh my gosh, I'm so disappointed. I'm so sorry for me, but I really want to stick to my healthy eating, because I'm really proud of how I've been doing things. So I'm going to work my plan to really take care of myself as I go throughout this. What would it look like for you? What can you say to yourself? This is a great time to be a little bit cheesy with yourself. Sometimes, like when we think about saying like, it might have been even weird for you to hear me say that, but like calling ourselves honey, calling us ourselves darling, calling ourselves love, sounds a little bit cheesy. Putting our hand firmly on our chest sounds a little bit cheesy. But first of all, no one's gonna know about you and me. I mean, you're not even gonna tell me you're doing it. I'm gonna know you're doing it, but no one's gonna know. But can we be a little cheesy? Can we be a little comforting and compassionate to ourselves? It's what we need. And so what can you say to yourself, and write it down? If you feel like you're gonna need to write it down, write it down. I've been doing this kind of work long enough that I dial into Oh, boo boo. I've got you. I mean, I come up with a bunch of different things that I say to myself in the moment. And what most of us do is, when something goes wrong, we turn to other people in our life, which is a beautiful thing. Aren't we so lucky to have those people? You can probably think about who those people who, if something went awry, who would be the first one to two to three people you'd call and I'm imagining they're people that would give you that love, but what I would love for you to do is give it to yourself first, and they're just a bonus. They're just the love coming from everyone else as a bonus. You can love yourself first your plan after you talk to yourself with empathy and compassion. It might involve tweaking your protocol, your food plan a little bit, but not throwing the whole thing out the window. So if you are like me and like my clients in the past, when we looked at not doing as well, we would basically be like, Okay, I'm not eating that healthy stuff. We're getting pizza and I need a margarita. Okay? So that's what we don't want to do. We don't want to throw out our whole plan what we want to do. Is tweak our protocol. So I'm going to give you an example. I had a pretty frustrating day. I was going to say bad, but it wasn't bad, a pretty frustrating day last week, a day just with business stuff happening. You know how sometimes when it rains, it pours, and it was just one of those days, and by 10 o'clock in the morning, I did this. I already know how I used to do years ago, so I don't have to go there anymore. I get to skip I get to skip that step. But I went right to, okay, I'm so sorry that you're having a bad day. I'm so sorry that didn't work out. I'm feeling sad. And then I right away said, okay, so what is my plan tonight? Because in the past, I would have been like, all bets are off. I'm gonna make cookies. Maybe I'd have a vodka soda i Let's order in. It would be like, scratch all the plans and just eat whatever I want. But now I have my healthy eating plan in place, but I want to tweak it to support myself. So I texted my husband. He already knew I was kind of having a day and I was struggling, and so I texted him and said, I already have dinner planned, but after dinner, I want you to make popcorn. I want to cuddle on the couch, and I want to watch a movie, and I get to pick the movie, and I'm probably going to cry at some point, and I need you to love on me. That was my tweaking of the plan. And he was like, of course, I've got you, no problem. I'm very lucky to have the support in that way. But that was a tweaking. I wasn't planning on having any popcorn that night. I wasn't planning on binging TV. I actually had some other things I was going to do for work, but no, we watched three, four hours worth of TV. But I so I stuck to my plan, except for I added some things in. I allowed some TV, I allowed some crying, for sure, and I allowed some popcorn with butter, even though I don't normally, it would have been a night that I normally wouldn't have anything. And here's what happens. Here's the beautiful thing that happens is I went to bed feeling good because I didn't eat like shit. I went to bed feeling good, and I woke up the next day feeling mentally better because of the way I was showing up for my life, and I was still being like, living in alignment with who I really want to be. And I also slept better because I ate well and I didn't fall off the wagon, the wagon of my healthy eating. Consider this, when we are ready or in a moment that is frustrating, sad, discouraging, all those things when we're already in a moment, right? Having a shitty day, having a frustrating moment, things not going well, and feeling all the emotion I know our primitive brain wants us to eat, to feel a little bit better. But the reality is that that almost makes the situation worse. Think about it. It does make the situation worse, because now not only do you have this circumstance, the situation that's happening, but then on top of it, now you are off your plan. You now are not living into your goals. You're not doing what you truly desire. So now we've just made everything even worse. Now we don't think about that in the moment, because our brain, our primitive brain, is just telling us this is going to feel good, and it does feel good. You know, a cookie in the moment for two minutes does make everything better, but in the end, it really is a net negative. In the end, it doesn't make anything better in the end, it really only makes things worse. So what I want for you is to have something go wrong, whether it lasts a day or three days or a week, and you come out of it still winning. Because you know, eventually it's going to turn around. Whatever it is things are going to turn around. Even really hard things in life will turn around. But at the end of it, if you've completely self sabotaged and you've gained 510 pounds, then you're losing again, and then there's more to be frustrated with. Think about like for many of us who are my age, we know at some point our parents are going to end up in the hospital. It's hard to even say that, but we know it's coming. We know it's true. How can you still take care of you in that moment? It really only takes some intentional, quick planning to still show up for yourself. I think we kind of we let our primitive, primitive brain give us these excuses, almost kind of like, we can't do anything for ourselves now, because our parents are in the hospital, it's like, Wait a minute. If you're a runner, you might not be able to run for two hours like you normally would. That might be a little bit off the table, maybe. But can you still hit rayleigh's on the way to the hospital and grab something healthy? Can you still make a healthy choice when you go to the hospital cafeteria? Can you still say hey when I, you know, get my shift swapped with a loved one? Can I make sure I eat something really healthy, because I want to support myself in this because it's already so hard, let's not make it even harder. So by completely sabotaging our health. And here is what is going to happen when you have a moment that goes rogue and you do it better than you've done it before, you are creating evidence that you are becoming a woman that can eat better forever. I hope something, not something too bad, but I hope within the next week, you have something happen that is frustrating or discouraging, or something goes wrong. I'm hoping it because here's why, because it's inevitable going to happen for you anyways. But then you'll have this podcast in your ear, and you'll be like, Oh, this is what Courtney was talking about. This is my chance. And you're going to be like, what was my plan? And maybe you'll listen to this podcast if you have time really quick and make a plan. Maybe if you're awesome enough to already have a plan, like, as you're listening to this podcast, you're making one, keeping it in your phone when shit hits the fan. Here's what I'm going to do next time. And you will get experience working that plan. And then after you'll say, did I like how I did that? How could I do better next time? Can I have have more empathy? Can I talk to myself nicer? Can I put myself at the top of the list even when I'm helping other people? I was talking with one of my clients this week because we were like, evaluating how she ate over the holidays. And we were talking about why it's so much easier to just kind of say, Fuck it and just eat whatever you want in the moment. And we were talking about it, and I said, Oh, it's, I think it's so much easier, because it's so much easier to just say, Yes, I'm just going to eat what everyone else is eating. You know, people pleasing is always easier. To not have someone question what you're doing is always easier. But also the food tastes good, and then you kind of get that dopamine hit from the food. No one's asking you questions if you eat too much, as opposed to if you don't eat enough, people are asking you questions. But the bottom line is, the food just tastes good. That's why it's so much easier to just say, Screw it and go back to the way it was. But you will find as you keep doing this work, you keep being radically honest with yourself, you keep being compassionate with yourself, and evaluating and doing it better and better and better and better, this actually does get easier. And what you will find is you'll get to a place where I'm at where I eat really, really well 95% of the time. And every once in a while I don't, and then I go, ha, well, that was fascinating. What do I think happened there? And it's something new in my life that maybe hasn't happened before, and I evaluate, and I think, oh, wow, okay, next time, we're gonna do better in that situation. I'm not mad at myself. I don't gain a bunch of weight. I don't shame myself. I'm just curious, and I grow. And I'm curious and I grow. In fact, this whole concept I'm delivering you here today on the podcast about sticking to your food plan when life goes wrong. Has been really my work for 2024 I felt like for years now, when things were going well, I was pretty dialed, but this was the area I really worked on this year, how to do better when I wasn't feeling great, whether it was mentally or physically. So this was a powerful one. This is one you might want to listen to again. I hope you have a great Tuesday. If you are ready to lose weight and keep it off permanently and feel confident and at peace around food, I invite you to head to Courtney Gray coaching.com to learn about how to work with me. I work with women privately, one on one, and I also offer small group coaching. There is a link to my website in the show notes you.