When You've Decided to Eat Better....How to NOT Change Your Mind in the Moment

It’s one thing to decide you're going to eat better—it’s another to actually follow through when the moment comes.  This is the hard part.

In this episode, I share my current challenge of giving up coffee for my health and take you inside the exact mental strategies I’m using to honor my decision when temptation strikes. You’ll hear how I recognize the sneaky ways my primitive brain tries to talk me out of my plan, how I reframe my story so it feels empowering, and why celebrating even the smallest wins is helping me create lasting change.

Let's go!

Courtney

Interested in speaking with me about how we can work together? Click here to head to my website: https://www.modernbodymodernlife.com/ and schedule a free consultation with me.

Transcript

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Sarah, welcome to modern body, modern life, the podcast for women who want to feel powerful, healthy, strong and confident, inside and out at every age. On this podcast, we talk about becoming a woman who is fully in control of her eating and movement, so weight loss, strength and energy become permanent. We also talk about something bigger, becoming the woman who takes her deepest desire seriously and goes after more in every area of her life. I'm body and life coach Courtney Gray, and I believe you can get in the best shape of your life at any age, and when you do, it becomes a catalyst for everything else, your relationships, your confidence, your joy, because when you feel like you and your body, all of life gets better. Let's get started. Welcome to the podcast episode 98 when you've decided to eat better, how to not change your mind in the moment. This is going to be a good one. I am going to really take you into a present day example that I am doing right now. I'm trying to make a change in the way I'm eating, and I'm going to really give you, it's almost like I want to give you a download of everything that goes on in my head, so you understand the work it takes to really become a person who has this dialed so I'm going to go into all that in just a minute. I'm going to use a present. As opposed to talking about how I have overcome things in the past and teaching from a past or teaching from other clients, examples, I'm going to give you a present in the moment, example of something I'm working on. And I really hope it helps you understand that this takes work, and not from a, oh god, this is exhausting. It takes work. But from a, you've got this. It takes work at every point in your life. You can do more work to change your life in any area. And I'm gonna, hopefully you will hear my example, and it will inspire you and make you understand what to do next time you've decided to eat better and then you're in the moment, and how to stick to that plan, how to not change your mind. My husband and I just got back from a beautiful weekend in Tahoe, Lake, Tahoe, California. My cousin was getting married, and we had such a magical time. One of my cousins has four little kids, and her children are just delicious, and it was I could have literally just watched them the whole wedding, not well, not really partake in anything else. I could have just watched these four little kids and them running all over the place. And my cousin is and her husband, they're such good parents. It was just so fun. I'm so far removed from that chapter of my life that it was really fun to be witnessing it all over again. And my husband and I had a wonderful time in Tahoe. It was just absolutely a magical wedding. So, so fun. And to be with family that I haven't been with in a while was really, really a great time. And now I am back, and I am here before I go shopping, before I do my meal prep for the week, I am here talking to you. So first, let's talk about the very first sentence in the title of this podcast, when you've decided to eat better. When we think of that sentence, it's a plan. It's, I've decided to eat better. I don't know about you, but for me, many times it was, I'm going to eat better tomorrow, a decision has been made. Right? For a lot of my clients, it's, I've decided to eat better starting Monday, or I've decided to eat better in three weeks when I'm retired or after my vacation, right? We have a plan, and what happens when we have this plan, when we make a plan in the future, it really takes the pressure off of the present. We're so much more confident like, Oh, this is going to be no problem, because I'm doing it in the future, right? But what I want to teach you is to take it the next step, and how to the second sentence in this podcast title is How to not change your mind in the moment. That's going to be the magic. And in order to do that, in order to not change your mind in the moment, really, you need to do the work that it is going to take for you to become the woman or the man. I know I've got many listeners to the podcast, the man or woman who becomes a person that you just live that way now. You just do things differently. Maybe you've decided that you just want to drink less. So what that means is, is you don't want to drink less for the month. You want to become a person that doesn't have to drink as much as you currently drink. If you're wanting to eat less, if you know that portion control is a big problem for you. You don't just want to eat less. You want to become a woman who naturally just eats less. It's just who you are. You've heard me many times in the podcast say, I really love dessert, but I wanted to become a woman that didn't necessarily have to have dessert every single night. And for some of my clients, they love dessert so much that they're like, I want to have it every night. I just don't want to have to have so much. So whatever it is, the goal is to really change your self concept, to really change how you move in the world, and to really start acting from a new self concept that you just live differently. I. So using the mindset and strategy tools that I teach on this podcast, I have drastically changed my relationship with food, my relationship with alcohol, my relationship with my body. I feel very much in control of my decisions. However, I am not perfect. I am not a perfect human. I'm not a perfect coach. I do not have all the answers, and I find in order to continue to up level my own health, I have to always be going back to what I teach. It's a beautiful thing. It's It's something I never want to stop learning. I never want to stop growing. So I spend hours each week coaching my clients to understand themselves at a deeper level, so they cannot change their mind in the moment, right? So they can become the women who just do things differently. And I am always trying to up level myself. So for this podcast, I want to let you in to my brain as I am doing this work with the decision I have made. First, let me give you a little backstory so you understand. If you've listened to the podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about I've been on and off coffee. At points. I've been on and off eggs and sugar and all the thick gluten, all the things I have pretty bad acid reflux. Now, let me just say, in terms of conditions or diseases or any of the things, I'll take it. I realize I am very lucky that this is my cross to bear right now. So that, that being said, it's something that I really do want to fix. I don't want to get esophageal what do they call it esophagus cancer, or esophageal cancer? I don't know, but it's pretty bad, and it's been getting worse. I've been dealing with this for about three years, and so the doctor told me long ago, you know, go off coffee. And I did. I went on coffee for, gosh, maybe six months, and it did in the acid reflux was still really bad. And so then when I went back on coffee, it didn't seem like it like made the it worse. And so I'm like, Well, I don't want to be going off this. If this isn't the answer, just because I had one doctor tell me do this really quickly. Like, you just very much, like, go off coffee. That'll that'll fix all this. And it really didn't fix it. And let me just say too. We all have things that we love. We all have things that we just crave. And I love and crave and feel very attached to coffee, like the whole experience of it. Like the thought someday that I'm gonna go to Italy or Spain and not be able to go to a cafe and have coffee there, makes me possibly want to cry. And it's not even just the caffeine. I just love the taste of coffee. I drink it black. I just I love it. I also feel like I eat really healthy. I don't drink alcohol anymore. So taking coffee away. Seems unfair. Okay, and so for this podcast, here's one thing I'm going to do for this podcast, is I'm not going to remove any of my you're going to hear it all the time. I go through I edit my podcast, and I edit out all of my with my acid reflux. But you're going to hear it. It is, it really is, affecting my life. It's making you know, when I'm coaching my clients, I have to mute myself every time I want to clear my throat. It's just a pain in the ass, for sure. Okay, so the the doctor has told me to go off coffee. I went off for a while. Didn't seem like it made a big difference, and then I went back off it again because I thought, let's give this another try. I'm really trying my my hardest to be a good patient, and I have noticed now for whatever reason, that it actually is helping when I go out, or maybe, I guess, the other way to say it is when I go on coffee. When I drink coffee, my acid reflux gets way worse. And it's not just coffee. I've discovered it's caffeine which makes me want to cry, because at first the doctor told me you can have tea, you just don't have coffee. And so I he didn't give me more information, and I should have asked more questions, but so at first I was trying decaf effort. So anyways, let me just stop and let's not get get onto that soap box. But the bottom line is no coffee of any kind, no caffeine of every time, of any kind. So let me just say where my mind has been in the last two months, I've been very, very victim, even though I said I'll take it, if this is my cross to bear. I realize it could be so much worse. That is true. But I also have felt very victimly, very sad for myself, very pity party. I've had a lot of thoughts like, I ate so healthy, like, and I don't even put any milk or sugar in my coffee. This isn't fair. And now I can't drink tea. And now I can't even, you know, I have some friends that take caffeine pills if they don't do coffee. I'm like, I can't even do that, um, and so I'm like, this is I might my thoughts have been like, this isn't fair, and it's made it really difficult to not drink coffee with the story I'm telling myself. So again, back to the podcast from a few weeks ago. The coaching tool that will change your life. What I'm going to really want you to hear is how these thoughts have been affecting me. So when I'm having all these thoughts over the last. Few months, this isn't fair. I eat so well, I drink it black. I shouldn't have to do this. Why am I having to deal with this? All of those thoughts make me feel sad and angry. When I'm feeling sad and angry, it is very, very hard for me to stick to not drinking coffee. And there's been many times, probably five times, over the last two months, that I've finally just got the fuck it. So I'm like, I'm having a cup and then I have a cup of coffee, and then my acid reflux gets even worse, which means I'm having to stop and start this podcast so many times, every time I need to clear my throat, it's making me have a hard time sleeping. It's anytime I go to the gym. I mean, thank god everyone at the gym has ear buns in because when I'm at the gym, it's, it's on fire. I'm constantly, constantly at the gym. So anytime I tell myself, this isn't fair, as one of those versions of that thought, This isn't fair, I feel victimy. I feel mad or angry, and then I just drink coffee. I In the end, the result I'm creating, if we're thinking about that model I taught you in that podcast, is I'm creating less health for myself, less good health for myself. I'm creating a more miserable life experience for myself in so many ways. The other day, I was journaling, and I said, I really need to change my thoughts around this. I really need to get out of being a victim from this. And so I thought, what are some other thoughts that I could come up with that feel kind of a little bit true to me? They have to feel a little bit true. And so I said, you know, I can drink coffee. That's the first thought is, I keep telling myself I can't, that's not true. I can think about all the people in the world that doctors have said you need to eat less sugar, you need to do this, you need to lose weight, and they're not doing it. So I say, I don't have to do this. I can tell my doctor I'm sorry. I'm not willing to give up coffee. So by telling myself this is my choice, first of all, that's a little bit empowering. Telling myself this is my choice, I don't have to give it up, is empowering. And then the next thought I came up with is, I actually do want to give up coffee because I want to be as healthy as possible. I really want to set myself up to win with this condition I have. I want to know that in the end, I did everything I could to help myself. So I want to tell myself a different story. I actually, even though there's a part of me that doesn't want to give up coffee or tea, there is a part of me that does want to give it up. And this is the one thing that's so interesting, and I encourage my clients to do this all the time, is we say, you know, in the moment we're like, we want the thing that we said we weren't going to eat in the moment we don't want to go to the gym, even though we said we did want to go to the gym, you need to realize there is a smaller part of you that does actually want to do what you had planned. The decision you made is still inside of you, but in the moment when we're thinking, This isn't fair, everyone else gets to have it, and I don't, and all those kind of thoughts, we're not actually looking at the small part of ourself. She's still there that wants to be aligned with the decision. So I wrote down, I actually do want to stop drinking coffee. I want to do my best. I want to go to the doctor and say, yeah, it's been about two months I have not had coffee just so he has that as a baseline on how to help me. If I go to him and say, Nope, I've been drinking coffee, so no, you told me to, but I can't do it. He's going to be like, I don't know what else to do for you, because this is kind of like the first line of defense. Now he's going to be able to say, Oh, interesting. Okay, she's gone off coffee, and this is still what I'm seeing from this endoscopy, this treatment that, this procedure I'm going to have that's going to help me, but I have to tell myself the truth, that there is a part of me that does want to go off it. And so here's what happened to me. I went to move my son into his second year dorms at Cal Poly last week, and I was getting up really early at 6am to drive back, because I had to be home at a certain time. So I had a bunch of coaching calls. So I was driving back, and first of all, I love a long drive. The drive is about six hours for me, and I love it. I love listening to podcasts. I love messaging, voice messaging my girlfriends. I love listening to audio books. I love even having just music on or no music, and just thinking. I truly do love the time by myself. My sister and I are both that way. We love a long car ride, even by ourselves. But I was really finding myself that morning, really going back and forth like, you deserve coffee. This was my primitive brain. My primitive brain was saying you deserve coffee. You You know, didn't sleep that great last night because I slept in a hotel. You know, I never sleep quite as good when I'm not in my own bed. So my primitive brain started telling me, you know you deserve coffee. You have a six hour drive home. You need the caffeine. And even though I didn't sleep that great, I still slept enough hours I was not this was not a dangerous situation. So my primitive brain starts saying, you deserve it. My primitive brain says, you know the fact that you came in. Drove 12 hours in 24 hours. You deserve this. You're such a good mom. You deserve this. You need it, or you're gonna fall asleep at the wheel. Okay? So I stopped myself and said, Okay, this is my primitive brain. It's totally going against me right now, because it wants me to have the most pleasure in the moment, and the most pleasure in the moment is a coffee on my drive home. It's a Americano, a beautiful black Americano. Oh, sounds so good. Okay, so I was a very present with this is my primitive brain. It's telling me to get this. And I decided, no, there's another part of you, Courtney that wants to just have either nothing or just cold water or an herbal tea. So I'm trying to fall in love with herbal tea. In fact, there's a girl here in town, and she has a business, I think it's called, I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right, legume, I might be pronouncing it wrong, legume infusions. She does these tea parties, and she does all, I think, all kinds of tea, green, herbal, black, and you can kind of create your own blend. So I actually have messaged her, and I've said, Hey, I need a caffeine free tea. I would love to create my own blend. I would like to because when I go to Starbucks, all they have is this. They have two options, and I don't love the option. So, like, I need to create my own blend. So what I'm doing when I message this girl, Brittany, who owns this company, what I'm doing in this moment is I'm trying to actually dial into my own happiness. I'm trying to make decisions that are aligned with what I truly want for myself. And I'm trying to make it a little bit more fun, as opposed to just going, ugh. The herbal teas at Starbucks sucks. I'm just gonna, you know, have to bear with it. I'm like, How can I make this fun? How can I make the decision that I truly want for myself made with my prefrontal cortex? How can I make it a little more fun for me? And so that's what I did. So I messaged her, and she actually, she does tea parties. So there's one coming up on the fifth of October that I'm gonna go and I'm gonna go to this Tea Party, and I'm gonna make my own blend. But anyways, so I am just getting ready. I'm checking out of my hotel, and I am getting ready to go to Starbucks to kind of I'm sad about my two herbal tea options, because I don't really love them very much. And I just said, Hey, Courtney, how can we make this more enjoyable for ourselves at the same time sticking to our plan? My plan is, I've decided to not drink coffee or caffeine. How to not change my mind in the moment is, can I make this a little bit more fun for myself? Because I really don't love the options at Starbucks. And then I remembered what my favorite if I was was gonna be getting coffee in San Luis Obispo before my drive, they have this Scout Coffee Company, neat that I really love. And I was like, that's what I should do, is I should go to scout coffee, not get the coffee and see if they have an herbal tea there. That's better. I gotta believe a local coffee shop has a better herbal tea than Starbucks. Says, no, no, no. Shame on Starbucks. I love me Starbucks. But I said, Yes, that will make it fun. So now you would think, okay, Courtney, sounds like you're doing great. You're managing your mind. You're identifying your primitive brain trying to get you to just have pleasure and have coffee in the moment. You're deciding what you want to think. No, I want to think that this is the decision I'm aligned with. There's a part of me right now that, yes, wants coffee, but there's also another part of me that wants to stick to my plan, and then I've decided to make it fun. How can I make this fun for myself to stick to my plan? But the primitive brain is not done with me yet. So here's what I want you to see then. As I'm parking and I'm getting ready to walk into Scout coffee, I know Scout coffee, and they have this really big case of delicious pastries. You know, they are baking these in town, they were probably baked. Someone was probably up at 3am baking these pastries. So my primitive brain starts telling me, Well, because you're not getting the coffee, you deserve one of the pastries. Okay, so this is where most people that haven't been doing this mindset work long enough stop and then they actually get the pastry. And then they go, Oh, afterwards, if they're trying to not eat pastries, but I'm onto myself, my friends, I know how this works. I know my primitive brain up until I order and start drinking that drink, my primitive brain is going to come up with every single reason to get me to get more pleasure in the moment, and pastries is not on my food list. I just don't do it most of the time. It's not going to make me feel good. I don't need it. It's not going to help me with my health goals. It's just nothing about that is what I want for myself, but my primitive brain is saying you deserve a pastry. And so what do I do? I say, oh, there's my primitive brain again. Of course, it's telling me to go to the pastries. I knew this was coming. And so that's one thing I want to encourage you to do, is when your primitive brain is telling you to do things. Things that you don't want to be doing. You have to recognize it as your primitive brain. You have to separate yourself from it. You have to go there it is. I knew that was coming. And then when you solve for that, you need to know five minutes later it's going to give you another reason. And so I ordered my herbal tea, which was absolutely delicious, because, like, I thought it would be. They had like, seven different flavors. It was absolutely delicious. There was a little bit of lavender in there. It was absolutely delicious. And I walked out of there. And then here's what I did. I said, fucking well done, Courtney, fucking well done, sticking to the plan. But here's another thing to remember, Courtney, yes, I talk to myself a lot. You need to talk to yourself a lot too. Don't listen to yourself. Talk to yourself, right? We listen to ourselves, and it's usually our primitive brain that's speaking, so we need to talk to ourselves. But I said I'm really proud of you, Courtney, but we know this is a six hour drive, so we need to know that you're gonna get a little bit sleepy, and instead of pulling off for a coffee, you're gonna have to pull off and go to the restroom and grab another water or something else like that. Now I don't have to go through this all day. You know when I talk on this podcast about getting to a place where you feel food freedom, you feel like you're not as much a victim to your primitive brain, when you feel like you're more in control of your eating, those things are true for me, but this is something new I'm doing. That's what I want you to hear this coffee is, decision is, is fairly new. I made it and then I went off, and I'm remaking it again, but I'm making it again better at this time because I have a sneaky feeling that I probably won't be able to ever bring coffee in again unless there's something they discover, something with this acid reflux that you know, is like, oh, here are you. Here's the answer, and I can go back to coffee. That would be amazing. I I'm gonna meditate, I'm gonna try to envision that. Maybe it'll put some coffee on my vision board. But for now, this is something new that I am doing, and so that's why this is harder for me. That's why I'm having to give it more focus. That's why I'm having to give it more of my attention. And this is what you're doing. If you're one of my clients right now, this is what you're doing. It's going to get to the point where you are going to feel so much more in control. But right now, it's going to be hard. And that that morning, right when I woke up, I had about 40 minutes while I was getting ready and getting on the road where my primitive brain was wailing at me, and it was hard. You have to let it be hard. I think I have a lot of clients sometimes that they'll hire me and they hear me say, Hey, here's where we're going to get you. We're going to get you to where you really become the woman that you feel in control. But that's going to take time. It's going to take time, and now that I am deciding to do this with coffee, it is taking some time, but I think because I have done this so many times with my business, with making money, with my children, with my body, all the things, I now know that it's taking time, and it's going to be hard sometimes along the way, but I'm going To get there. I know I'm going to get there. I know I'm going to feel the same way about coffee someday as I do about alcohol. Every once in a while, I'm going to be like, Oh, Mojito sounds so good right now, but we just don't do it. And I'm going to move along. I'm going to someday say, Oh, coffee, latte sounds so amazing, or americano sounds so good right now. But you know what we're going to move along, and it's going to be no problem. It's what I do with the gym. Oh, you know what? It sure would be nice to not go to the gym, but you know what we're going and I just do it, and I have become the woman that I just live that way. But you need to be willing to give it some time. You need to be willing to let it be a little bit hard in the moment. So the goal is not drinking coffee becomes no big deal. And I'm allowing it in the moment from time to time to be hard, and when I get pissed off about it, and sometimes I do, even though I decided some new positive thoughts, to think that there is a part of me that really wants this and that I am choosing this. It is this is my choice. There's still a part of me that every once in a while goes ah, and gets frustrated, and that's okay. You're not going to ever get to a place where you never want a cupcake. You're never going to get to a place where you never want those things, but you can get to a place where you feel in control of it and you're proud of yourself. It's really important after you do this work, even if you have a moment where you have success, you walk out of the coffee shop with your herbal tea, or you walk out of the bar and you've only had two drinks, or you walk out and you have a to go container because you've only eaten half your meal. It's so so important that you pat yourself mentally on the back that you don't negate what you have just done. That is part of what is turning you into a woman that does this work naturally. So often, for some reason, we belittle ourselves. But no, after I walked out of. That coffee shop with my herbal tea, I was like, fucking well done, Courtney. I possibly said it out loud, fucking well done. And then when halfway through that trip, when I started getting a little tired, and I pulled off, and I got a water and I went to the restroom, I was like, well done again. Courtney, well done again. So I'm doing this work right along with you. The beautiful thing that happens when you get better and better and better at doing this work, you will come up with new things you want to do for yourself. I mean, this coffee thing is not something that I have as a goal of myself, for myself, but when I think about doing new things, like my goal to do a pull up, my goal to start swimming more often and get you strong, and that I have these different goals, and I know that I'm gonna do them, and it's going to be hard, and there's going to be times I'm like, why am I doing this? There's going to be times like I don't even want to be doing this, and I am going to get better and better at doing the hard things in pursuit of my goals. So I hope that breakdown of what was going on in my mind, and teaching you about how my primitive brain still rails at me, still to this day, our primitive brain is never going away. I hope me diving into that was helpful for you. If it was, I would love to hear from you. Let me know what you think of the podcast. I would love, if you don't mind for you to rate and review my podcast. It means so much to me. All of you that have rated and reviewed the podcast. I have a new client that I started with last week, and I said, How'd you hear from me? She goes my podcast app just suggested you. And I'm like, Yes, and I did a little thank you to all of you who have given me some stars and reviews, because that is how the algorithm pushes my podcast out to new people who also can hear about my work and can make their lives better. So thank you in advance, and I hope you have a lovely Tuesday for information on how we can work together. Head to modern body, modern life.com. To schedule a consultation with me. I'm currently coaching women privately, and I offer group coaching programs you.