001: How does eating more help me avoid binging on snacks & treats?

This episode is THE episode that had to be first.

I wanna tell you WHY you must eat more than you think. 

I'm gonna kinda walk you through two different reasons, two different frameworks for why eating more is going to help you eat less and why eating more is going to help you have fewer moments of self sabotage and not feel as out of control around food. 

The first is mental and it's based on the thoughts you’re telling yourself and really the way that your brain's reward circuitry. I can actually tell you why your brain is making it hard on you when you create a list of forbidden foods. 

And second, I want to talk about the metabolic and hormonal perspective (yup, eating less may be hurting your metabolism). There’s a mechanism inside your body that is driving up your hunger when we cut calories too much, and I want to walk you through it!

I will tell you exactly why restriction actually causes overeating so you can start reframing how you look at food and eating - and hopefully, it will help you get better results, even faster! 

If you only listen to one of the first 3 episodes - make it THIS ONE & then come message me and let me know what you think!

🧡 Shift to Shed: 3 Day Challenge STARTING MONDAY OCT 12: Sign up HERE

🍋 Apply for 1:1 private coaching: HERE 

🍿 Let's be IG friends: @eatmorewithjulia

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi guys, I am so excited you're here. And before we start today's episode, I just have to say thank you. I also want to let you know that we are celebrating this launch with a super special giveaway, and I will be choosing three lucky winners to win some amazing prizes. The first place winner is going to receive an $100 Amazon gift card, which if it were me, I would probably spend it on activewear. The second prize winner is going to get a free custom macro count with a strategy call from me valued at $150. And the third place winner is going to win a box of element electrolytes, which I take on a daily basis. All you have to do to enter this giveaway is to subscribe to the More Mindful Podcast, follow the More Mindful Podcast, give it a five-star rating, and then leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Before you hit the submit button, make sure you take a screenshot of your review and send it to me on Instagram at Eat MoreWithJulia so that I can count you in for the giveaway. I'll even give you a bonus entry if you screenshot one of your favorite episodes, and then share it on your Instagram stories and tag me. If you're private, just take a screenshot and then DM it to me again to just make sure I get you that bonus entry. If you do not have an Apple device or an Apple phone, you're not listening to Apple Podcasts, that is A-OK too. Just send me a quick DM on Instagram and let me know what you're loving about the show. This giveaway starts today, August 6th, and is going to end on August 20th. I'll be announcing the winner the next day, August 21st on my Instagram. And finally, if you did not catch all of that, check the caption below for all the giveaway details. And the thing is, we just cannot outsmart our metabolism. Our bodies are these beautiful, insanely brilliant machines. We have, I think, like 40 trillion cells in our body, and our metabolism is part of that, keeping all these cells alive. So the goal of the metabolism, think about this, is to keep 40 million cells, no, 40 trillion, sorry, cells in your body alive. You better believe it's gonna have some tricks up its sleeve to make sure that if you are starving yourself, that you you stop soon. Welcome to the More Mindful Podcast. This podcast is all about helping you be more conscious of your own power to choose your one-of-a-kind healthy life. I'm Julia Lynch, former Class Pass junkie and yo-yo dieting addict, turned certified nutrition coach, and now I'm here to teach you how I use nutrition, movement, mindset, the truth about my metabolism, and everything in between, including all the nuance that comes with it, to transform my body and my life, just like I've since coached hundreds of women to do the same within my practice eating hour with Julia. Each week on the podcast, my guests and I will share simple but implementable ideas and insights that might fit into your own unique healthy lifestyle because you are not one-dimensional and your health isn't either. Every week I'll challenge you to take these words with the spirit of curiosity, and I hope you'll walk away from the More Mindful podcast every time with the deep belief that your healthiest life is just a few choices away. So grab your headphones and maybe your sneakers too, and let's dive into this week of the More Mindful Podcast. Hello! I am so excited to be here. I have to be honest, it feels surreal that I have finally made this podcast a reality. I have wanted to start this podcast for so long. And if you are listening right now, you are listening to the very first episode. And oh my god, I am so excited. I just feel already that this is going to be a place where we get to have like real conversations. And if you listen to the trailer episode, you hear me mention nuance. And if I had to say the one thing that I think the health space needs more of, it's nuance. And I am committed to making this podcast a place where we cover the nuance and you get to decide what you want to think about things. You get to decide what habits work for you. And there's no this is the right answer. It's more of like, hey, here's a way to consider it and here's why this works for some people. And also if it doesn't work for you, that's okay too. So I am just beside myself with joy that I am sitting here recording this podcast, that you are here listening to it. Um, I have to start by saying, if you could share this episode with a friend if you love it, I would be so grateful. Um, I want to reach as many people as possible. Like I'm on a mission to help women see that the gray and in health and in fitness, it belongs here. They're not doing anything wrong when things don't feel black and white, and that honestly black and white does not exist. And if you could share this podcast with someone, it'll help them start to learn that alongside you. And it would just mean the world to me because that is how I reach more people. Um, so for our very first episode, I had to do something that had to do with the topic of eating more. And the reason that I want to talk about eating more is one, if you didn't know this, I have a nutrition coaching business called Eat More with Julia. And it started on the premise of my personal realization that I had spent years trying to starve myself, trying to just like get skinny, be smaller, avoid, you know, junk food, thinking that the cleaner the better. And when I finally stopped trying to eat less, when I finally let myself eat more, I saw a transformation in my body, in my mind, that I I honestly didn't think possible. Like I was someone who really believed that I was just like destined to be overweight. Like I was like, this is just who I am. It's my body, it's my brain, it's like I'm addicted to food, I'm big boned, because I was, you know, heavy in high school, I'm gonna be heavy now. Like I just like didn't, I looked at people that were fit and toned, and I was just like, that's genetic because I'm working out seven days a week. I'm trying to avoid all these foods. I gave up cheese, I gave up gluten, I gave up, like you name it, I gave it up, and it never worked. And so I am obsessed with the idea of eating more because it changed my life. And so the cool thing about it is the more that I've learned about it, the more that I've studied it, the more I've come to realize that there is actually like cognitive and scientific and metabolic reasons why eating more actually helps you reach your goals, whether it's weight loss, whether it's weight maintenance, whether it's getting stronger, eating more is actually the key to not overeating, to getting the results you want, to being able to have whatever sort of like restraint and you know moderation that maybe you're looking for in your journey. And by intentionally eating more, you are going to accidentally eat less. And it is a concept that I'm just obsessed with. Like it's truly, truly life-changing. And it changed my life. And I've lost almost 20 pounds since I started eating more. And I really believe that you can too if if you're on a journey of trying to figure out what what the like actual solution is to the frustration you're feeling. If you haven't yet tried eating more, I think you should. And if you're looking for help, I want to remind you that I have coaching programs. I work with women across the country, honestly, across the world. I've had a few international clients, and this is what I help women do. So I want to plug that in case you are wondering, in case you are new here and new to you know me. But I'm also gonna use this podcast to teach you a lot of the things I teach clients. So keep coming back here, keep listening to the podcast, and it will be a really great way for you to start to learn how to eat more and do it on your own. So here's what you can expect in this episode. I'm gonna kind of walk you through two different reasons, two different frameworks for why eating more is going to help you eat less and why eating more is gonna help you not be, you know, having moments of self-sabotage as often, not kind of feeling out of control around food. And there's two main frameworks that I want to walk through. The first is more mental in nature. So, like it's based on the thoughts we're telling ourselves and really the way that our brains like reward circuitry works. And then the second thing I want to talk about is from a metabolic and hormonal perspective, how our bodies actually, if it if they don't feel like they're getting enough food, will start to work against us and drive our hunger so that we eat more. And those are kind of the two different systems that we're gonna chat about today. I wanna start by thinking through why restriction actually causes overeating. So I'm gonna start with why eating less actually causes overeating instead of starting with why eating more stops overeating, just to kind of get us on the same playing field. So the first reason why is really mental in nature. And the reason is that there's this thing called the scarcity principle. And when something is perceived to be scarce, its value increases. We can think about something like a real diamond versus a like a man-made lab-grown diamond, the cost of real diamond is way higher. And why is that? It's because there's a finite number of diamonds that exist in the world. Like they have to be taken out of the ground. So there's just fewer diamonds that exist. And so because there's a finite number of diamonds that exist, they have more value. Whereas a lab-grown diamond, it is made in a lab. And so, because of that, it means tomorrow someone can make one just like it. And so that is why it's cheaper. The way our brain thinks about things like food is similar when we put boundaries on the food that we love. So when we think about something like, let's say you love cookies, but you don't let yourself eat them, you're like, I cannot eat cookies if I'm trying to lose weight because I can't control myself around cookies. You are putting that food on a pedestal. You're treating that food like it is a scarcity. It creates this idea that it is this precious food on a pedestal. And by you obsessing over its scarcity, by its lack of availability, you are pushing it higher and higher in your mind as something that is valuable. I was um doing some research to back up some of the claims I want to chat through. And there's this book called The Psychology of Persuasion. And the author actually says opportunities seem more valuable to us when their availability is limited. So it is actually like a psychological truth that in our brain's reward circuitry, when we place higher value on something, it is going to be something we think more about. We feel like the reward will be greater, and we obsess about it because we feel like it has this higher value, which makes us think the reward is gonna be so good. Like, have you ever not eaten something for a long time? And you're like, oh my, like Pop Tarts actually. That comes to me as an example of something that like I didn't eat Pop Tarts for years, and then I was like, oh my God, I'm not, I'm gonna let myself have a Pop Tart. I ate a Pop-Tart and I was like, this is good, but like wow, in my brain, I had like put Pop Tarts on this pedestal, like they were going to be the best thing I'd ever eaten. And when I finally let myself eat them normally, I was like, yeah, this is good. It's obviously full of sugar and it tastes yummy, but like you start to create this idea of the like experience you're gonna have eating these forbidden foods because of the scarcity that you are coaching yourself to believe exists around this food. And so we're driving the value higher and higher and higher in that like brain reward circuitry system. And the truth is by the time we actually eat it, we realize the reward is not even that good. It's that we've like created this illusion of how it's going to be so good. And then I really want you to think about like last time you ate the food that you were like, I don't let myself eat it, did it even taste as good as you expected? Because one of the reasons why eating less does not work as a solution is because of this scarcity principle. And so let's talk about how this shows up in reality. You tell yourself you can't eat cookies, you don't keep them in the house. You every day when you're like thinking about your diet, you're like, as long as I stay away from cookies, as long as I stay away from cookies. So even though it's not actually like a like a fact of law that cookies are gonna make you gain weight, you have convinced yourself that that's the case by putting it on that pedestal, by giving it uh all that value in your like psychology, um, and by really thinking of it as something that's like a scarce food in your life. So when there's a plate of cookies in front of you, the reason that you overeat them is because you are obsessed with cookies, right? Like, think about if someone like put a plate of diamonds in front of you after you thought about how diamonds have so much value. You would like put as many in your pocket as you could. And so, because you're like, I don't know the next time that someone's gonna offer me a diamond, I better grab as many as I can because this is a one-time opportunity and this might never happen again. That's how we talk to ourselves about the foods that we aren't allowing ourselves to have. We're like, I never let myself have cookies. I'm gonna have as many as I can today because I see them on a plate in front of me at this party, but then after today, I'm never eating them again. And so, because of that like in intensity that we're putting in that moment, our brain actually does not know how to control itself because we've driven this artificial value of cookies in our head so high by putting it on his pedestal that we're like, we don't know the next time we're gonna allow ourselves to eat cookies. We better make the most of today. And that is why when we try to avoid eating something, it backfires every single time. Your brain is working against you, and your thoughts, that reinforcement, when you tell yourself every day, I can't be trusted around cookies, I can't be trusted around cookies, that creates the sensation in your brain of like, the next time I get to have a cookie, I am gonna make a big deal out of it because this is something I've convinced myself I only get to have very, very rarely, if ever, right? And so I want you to be mindful of that story you're telling yourself about the foods that you don't let yourself have, and if that could actually be sabotaging you. The solution for this scarcity that we are giving to food, or I guess placing on food, is a concept called food habituation. And the word habituation talks about how we make something habitual. So if you think about a habit, we associate a habit with something that's done every day, right? And so when we are habituating something, we are making it more common. The novelty of something wears off if we do it habitually. So when we are habituating something, when we're trying to create food habituation, we give ourselves access to something more often. And then it creates a response where basically the stimulus that we feel towards the thing is decreased. And so instead of every time you see cookies, you're like, oh my gosh, I love cookies. I never eat cookies. Cookies have so much value to me. If you ate cookies after lunch every day for a month, on the 31st day, you're not gonna feel that same sense of value, that same sense of reward, that same sense of excitement because you're gonna be desensitized to it. And so when we think about food habituation, it's kind of about giving ourselves an opportunity to become desensitized to these foods. Because, like I said about the Pop-Tarts, when you eat something day in and day out, you're gonna start to be way more conscientious of what you actually think tastes so good and what you've created a story about tasting good because you won't let yourself have something. And so we let that novelty wear off when we create an environment where we can have habituation around food. And so in the book Intuitive Eating, the fourth edition, which I love the concepts from intuitive eating, I am not an intuitive eating counselor, and I do believe that we can lose weight on purpose, which is something that's a little bit outside of the realm of what people consider like intuitive eating principles, but I love what they teach about something that they call making peace with food. And they talk about how food habituation is a form of neurobiological learning in which repeated eating of the same food causes a decrease in behavioral and physiological response. Dieting and restriction heightens the novelty and desirability of forbidden food. They also talk about a 2011 study that actually showed how long-term habituation of a certain food worked when a group of women were given the same food daily for weeks and weeks and weeks over a five-week period. And over that five-week period, they actually saw how there was like higher habituation and lower stimulus response. So by the fifth week of this experiment, the women were eating less of the food that they used to find highly desirable. The studies really do show that consistent exposure to these foods that we've put on a pedestal can actually allow us to feel and experience more peace of mind and control around them. And what's really happening when we are going through this habituation process is that there is a relearning and experimentation of hunger cues. Because when we remove the value that food has when it's just coming from scarcity, like if a food only has value because it is scarce, we disconnect from the actual value that food has. Do we actually really like this food, or have we just created value because of its scarcity? Do we actually want to eat this food, or do we think we want to eat it because we've put it on a pedestal? And so when we have that repeated exposure, that food habituation, we allow ourselves to reestablish the value coming from the food itself. And maybe we find it doesn't actually taste as good as we thought, or we find that it doesn't actually satisfy us as much as other foods or other treats, or maybe it doesn't keep us very full for long. And when we start to pay attention to that during the habituation process, its value decreases because we're kind of opening the lens to say, what do I really think about this food now that I'm experimenting with it in a way that has nothing to do with its scarcity and only to do with the value that this food has in our life? The cool thing is that the only way that you will be able to come to the belief that you actually are able to feel in control around food is to go through the experience. And I think that that can be one of the hardest parts about the process. And I talk to clients about this all the time, and it is the scariest thing. But we cannot know how it is going to feel to trust ourselves around these scary foods until we do it. And the only way to do it is to do it. And it is the best part about it that like we get to just we could wake up tomorrow and decide to do it. And also that's terrifying. The intuitive eating book talks about this metaphor, which is you would never try to learn the guitar by reading a book about music theory, right? Like, and it's funny how in certain realms of life we're like, well, obviously, I'd have to practice. Obviously, I'd have to be bad at something before I'm good at something. But when it comes to our eating habits and our eating behaviors, we have this belief that we should just suddenly be good at something. We should suddenly be comfortable with something that is not a skill that we have, not a comfort level that we've established. And so it really is important to think about I'm learning a skill. Like I'm learning how to play the guitar. And the only way to learn how to play the guitar is by actually playing it. And the cool thing is that I have actually done this with clients, and one of my clients specifically comes to mind, and she felt this way about peanut butter. And she wouldn't eat peanut butter, she wouldn't keep it in the house because every time she was around it, she felt incredibly out of control. And we actually started having her eat it on a daily basis. So we took the peanut butter, and if you try this at home, I definitely recommend that you start with just one forbidden food and increase its exposure. Like, not all the foods that that can be quite overwhelming, but really picking one food and letting yourself eat it every single day for like a month or two. Like really give yourself a longer time period than like I'm gonna eat this two days this week. Because the thing about mentally telling yourself that you're gonna allow something, but then like in the back of your head, you're actually thinking this is a bad food, it's not really permission. Like that's like pseudo-permission. And it actually can make things feel worse because you're putting yourself deeper into the cycle of this food being on the pedestal. If you're like, okay, I'm gonna do this, but you only do it for two days. And then on the third day, you're like, oh my God, I can't trust myself. I have to go back to, you know, having this food be off the table. So I want you to think about could you find a food that you feel really like unsure about or that maybe in the past you felt a little out of control about? And can you have just a serving of it every day for a week? Because eating more of it might actually be the way that you learn to control yourself around it. And it really isn't, I I want to be careful too. Like the mission of eating more isn't that the ultimate goal is that we have control. The ultimate goal for me when I talk to my clients and when I'm working with them is I want them to have choice. And I know that choice and control are pretty close, but I really think that there's a difference in the way that we enter a situation. I want you to be able to walk into a party and see those cookies and be able to make Make a choice of if you want it or not. And that choice is not based on its scarcity that you've placed on it. That choice is not based on the fact that it's a good food or a bad food. The choice is based on what you as a person want or need in that moment, uniquely based on your current goals and how to support your long-term health. And you being able to have choice in your decisions around nutrition is my ultimate goal for you. And that is why creating this really healthy relationship with food through food habituation, by taking food down off the pedestal, you're going to give yourself that choice back and take back that autonomy around food. And so it's not about controlling your portions, but it's about creating this self-trust where you get to choose how you want to feel your body without having to rely on rules or on any sort of external structure because you can trust yourself. Outside of food habituation and the scarcity cycle, being the reason why eating more can actually help us eat less, if that's our goal or if we're trying to not overeat as often, is our hormonal implications and how our metabolism actually works. And if you aren't aware of this, the definition of your metabolism is actually the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life. And I think that this definition is so fascinating because we don't think about the metabolism as maintaining our life. We think about it as burning calories. And the funny thing about that is our body actually does have to burn calories in order to maintain life. And that is how our metabolism keeps us alive. We eat food, our body converts that food into energy, and then it burns that energy in order to keep us alive. And 60% of the calories that are burned by our metabolism on a daily basis are literally the calories needed to keep us just alive. Like our brain, our heart, our liver, our lungs, those are honestly using more calories than I think you even can imagine. And so if you have this idea of like, I'm gonna eat as few calories as possible, I want to remind you that 60% of your daily calorie needs are literally going to essential life processes. So when we think about trying to eat less, because our metabolism actually is created to keep us alive, it is going to do anything it can in light of not having enough energy to find a way to get your brain to seek food. I want to say that again because I want you to remember that there is nothing wrong with you. So often when we are in this cycle of dieting and restricting and giving up and we feel like we're self-sabotaging and we're blaming everything on ourselves. I want to remind you that you are a human being. Human beings are animals at the end of the day, and we are controlled by our bodies. Yes, we have brains, yes, we have minds, yes, we have independent thought, but the way our hormones are regulated when it comes to metabolism is directly related to the energy that we are providing our body and the confidence that our metabolism has that the energy available to it will keep it alive. So if your body feels like you are sabotaging its livelihood, if you are trying to eat so little that your body feels like it cannot maintain life, you better believe that it is gonna start doing things to try and make you eat food. So if you are like, my willpower sucks, I wanna remind you, your metabolism also might just be incredibly gifted. And when you are trying to not eat enough, when you're trying to starve your body, your metabolism is like, yo, we need more energy up in here. Let's send Susie some brain waves that are gonna tell her to start eating everything in sight because we need energy. And I want you to divorce yourself from the fact that your mind is stronger than your metabolism because at the end of the day, we are living, breathing things, and our metabolism is really running the show and doing things that science hasn't even discovered yet. And so, specifically, I want to tell you about two different hormones. They're called leptin and ghrelin, and they are hunger hormones in the body that work to drive hunger and to decrease hunger. And so leptin is actually a hormone that suppresses hunger. And so when we have higher amounts of leptin in the body, we tend to feel less hunger. So when we have an environment where a person has very, very low energy, or like, like let's say they're dieting really restrictively, or we have a person that has very, very low body fat percentage, maybe from past dieting, maybe for like, you know, health reasons, both of those people have been seen to be associated with lower levels of circulating leptin because their bodies are like, we don't want this person to feel satisfied because we want them to eat, because they've either been dieting for a long time and the body is like, we need more energy, or if someone has a very low body fat percentage, their body doesn't feel safe that like in crisis they will be able to maintain life. So, like, think about from an evolutionary perspective. Our bodies were not getting meals regularly. Like, even until the last like two or three hundred years in history, meals were very hit or miss for human populations. Like, we didn't have processed foods, people had to farm food in order to eat it. And even 100 years before that, they were like chasing animals and like having to slaughter animals to find food. So people were not able to just eat as often. So our bodies developed in an environment where they were like, we need to make sure that we always have enough body fat in case we don't eat for a week. And so I want you to think about the fact that like you as a human have evolved from this place where your body's really smart and it doesn't want to burn fat when it doesn't have to. And if it has a very low body fat percentage, it's probably not going to trigger hormones that are gonna make you feel really satisfied because then that might put it at risk in the future. So leptin makes us feel satisfied. It's a hunger hormone. And when we have been dieting for a long time or we have too much energy restriction in the form of calorie restriction, leptin levels go down, which means your satisfaction hormones go down, which means you're gonna be hungrier. Okay. So when we can eat enough, when we can be in a shallow calorie deficit. So we're in a calorie, like let's say you're trying to lose weight. I'm not saying that you should never go on a diet. If you want to lose weight, you're gonna have to go on a diet, but when you make it a less aggressive diet, you are at less risk of messing with your leptin levels and creating an environment where you have a ton of hunger, okay? So by eating more, we can create an environment where we don't end up losing more of our satiety hormones than necessary. And that is going to help us actually stick to our calorie deficit. Because what is most essential if you are trying to lose weight or you are trying to maintain your weight is that you are able to adhere to whatever sort of diet you are creating. And if you are ravenously hungry all the time, you might not be able to stick to it. And so we want to try and create an environment where we are setting ourselves up for success. And so the TLDR here is if you are trying to lose weight and you are in a super aggressive calorie deficit, your leptin levels, which is your satiety hormones, will likely go down. And that could put you in a position to really be ravenous and tend towards overeating later, which is likely gonna take you out of this calorie deficit that you are trying so hard to stay in. So a less aggressive calorie deficit is going to be better on leptin levels. Additionally, on the other side of leptin is this hormone called ghrelin, and it's like a yin and yang. So as leptin goes up, ghrelin goes down, and vice versa, which means that ghrelin is the hunger hormone. Ghrelin stimulates hunger. So in most cases, when we see leptin go down, satiety hormone goes down, ghrelin or the eat more hormone goes up. It tends to stimulate appetite and stimulate food intake. And ghrelin, again, which makes you hungrier, has been shown to increase after fasting, that makes sense, and decrease after eating. So when you eat, your ghrelin goes down. That would make sense, right? If a hormone is trying to drive you to eat right after you eat, we would expect that it would be the lowest. And so, similar to leptin and managing to leptin, we want to try and manage to ghrelin by eating regular meals, by not fasting longer than is necessary. In most cases, I don't recommend super long fasts for my clients, just again, from this perspective of appetite management and actually being able to stick to the plan you have, regular meals are super important. To go back to this concept of the metabolism, leptin and ghrelin work inside your metabolism. And so your metabolism, remember, is trying to keep you alive, which is why it deploys leptin and ghrelin as an asset. And so when it feels like it doesn't have enough energy, your metabolism is gonna be like, let's pump up the ghrelin. It's gonna stimulate her appetite, and then she's gonna eat more, and we're not gonna have to be worried about having enough energy to maintain life. And so, really being cognizant of making sure that you are not in too aggressive of a calorie deficit, that you're eating regular meals, that you are being mindful of, you know, how you are fueling your body is going to help you work with your metabolism instead of you working against it. And the thing is, we just cannot outsmart our metabolism. Our bodies are these beautiful, insanely brilliant machines. We have, I think, like 40 trillion cells in our body. And our metabolism is part of that, keeping all these cells alive. So the goal of the metabolism, think about this, is to keep 40 million cells, no, 40 trillion, sorry, cells in your body alive. You better believe it's gonna have some tricks up its sleeve to make sure that if you are starving yourself, that you you stop soon. So I want you to think about how I can work with this system instead of against it. This is the good news I have for you, which is that I wanna walk you through some foods that are known to really help you work with your metabolism, to stimulate leptin. Again, leptin is satiety, to decrease ghrelin, ghrelin is hunger stimulating. These foods are protein and fiber. And I might be a broken record here. If you follow me on social media, I talk about protein and fiber all the time. But in addition to just eating enough calories overall, eating protein and fiber are shown to support these hormones in a way that is going to give your body what it needs to feel safe and support it and like it has the building blocks it needs to keep providing energy to your body. So protein and fiber are going to be so important, alongside, like I said, eating adequate calories. So, what that is for you is gonna be totally unique to your activity level, to your body. If you've never used a total daily energy expenditure calculator, that's a great place to start for how many calories your body needs a day to maintain its weight. I also, in all my coaching programs, group programs, um, one-on-one coaching, I calculate all this for my clients. So if if getting support on understanding how many calories you need and what your protein and fiber targets should be, I would love to work with you. Feel free to reach out. But those things are gonna be really powerful in helping you kind of feed the beast. I joke, I say that with my clients. Like our metabolism needs to be served, and protein and fiber and adequate calories are going to help us do that. The other thing that I like to point out is really important for satiety is fat. So many women go on diets and they slash the amount of fat that they're eating. And the truth is, fat stimulates satiety from the moment that it touches our tongue, which is so crazy, isn't it? Our bodies are just like amazing organisms. But when we eat fat, our brain actually gets a signal of like this is gonna be satisfying because it can taste the like thickness and viscosity of fat. You know what I mean? Um, I don't have like a more elegant way of saying that, but essentially fat is going to stimulate satiety. And so when we put ourselves on diets that are super low fat, it's going to feel not satisfying. Okay. So I'm really, really big with all my clients and making sure they're getting enough fat, enough protein, enough fiber, enough calories. The other thing I want to remind you is that variety is really powerful. You know, eating the same thing every day is wonderful if for, you know, when you're trying to get into a routine, but it's also okay to like throw in some like, you know, new stuff from time to time, or let yourself have a different snack every day. When we're thinking about satiety, it is about eating more, but it's also about pleasure. Like food is not just meant to be fuel. It is important that we see food as fuel to like keep our metabolism happy. But I want you to remember that like emotional enjoyment around food matters. And so when we give ourselves variety, when we don't restrict things, it's really letting our brains feel taken care of as well. And that is also a part of why mindful eating works, because we let it be emotional and physical, and then that actually creates more physical satiety, which is so, so powerful. Our brains and our bodies are so connected. The other thing to think about when you are practicing with eating more and you are wanting to like, you know, enter into this in a way that feels supported and maybe safer, I really want you to think about a couple different questions. And the first is like, are you enjoying your food? And if you're not enjoying it, how could you enjoy it more? Is it changing the environment? Is it changing what's in your food? Is it maybe more variety, like I was saying? Um, is it getting more playful in the kitchen? Like, how can you enjoy your food more just in general? The other thing that is so simple but makes a huge difference is chewing slower. There's a study I read about. It essentially took two groups of women and they were given the same amount of calories, but one group was told to eat it in six minutes, and one group was told to eat it in 24 minutes. And so, again, the food, the meal was exactly the same. One group ate it fast, one group ate it slow. And then three hours later, they gave them a different meal, but they didn't control the calories. They were just like, eat as much as you want. The women that had eaten in six minutes the first time ate more calories the second time than the other group, which is to say, when you eat slowly in meal one, you will likely eat less in meal two because of the way that you are creating that satisfying experience around food. You are letting your body catch up with your eating. We think about that um leptin rising in your brain, leptin being that satisfaction hormone. We give leptin time to rise appropriately when we eat slow, and that can help actually give us a longer-lasting feeling of satiety. And this study showed that when someone ate a meal slower, they naturally, without being controlled, naturally ate less at the next meal. The other thing I want you to think about is are you eating something because it's just there or do you want to eat it? And that goes back to my concept, like I was talking about a couple minutes ago, of like choice, really taking back ownership of like, I'm a picky eater. Like, let yourself be a picky eater. Actually choose to eat the things you want to eat and say no to the things you don't. There is a dietitian I love following on social media, and her name is Dr. Rachel Paul. And she talks a lot about this idea of when we get, you know, offered a donut or something and we're at work, but we don't let ourselves maybe have donuts on the regular, we tend to be like, oh, I should eat this donut because I never get donuts and I'm gonna eat it, even if it's like a crappy Dunkin' Donuts donut. And her point of view is like, if you love donuts and you see that crappy donut in the break room, instead of just eating it because it's there, why don't you take yourself to get a nice ass donut over the weekend? Like, why don't you make it an act of self-care and an act of actually giving yourself what you enjoy and what you want instead of just eating to eat because someone offered you a donut? Like really being thoughtful and choosy about the food that you eat and letting it be something that you're doing for yourself instead of to yourself. And that's what I have for you on why eating more is the key to success. Because one, we get rid of that scarcity mindset. We take away that artificial power and value that we're giving, you know, junk food just because we are telling ourselves we can't have it. It doesn't actually mean it tastes better. It doesn't actually mean there's anything special about it, but because we're putting it on that pedestal, we tend to overeat it. And so the solution to that is food habituation, letting ourselves have these foods more often and letting ourselves build that experience, the hunger cues around it, that sense of peace and self-trust around those foods, and knowing that the only way we cultivate that self-trust is by going through it. We can only get better at it. We can only learn how to play guitar by learning to play guitar, right? We can't read about learning to play guitar just like we talked about. The other thing I want you to remember is that your metabolism is so smart. And so by giving your metabolism what it needs to make it feel like you are safe, it is going to play back with you and give you the right hormones in return. When we try to starve ourselves, all we're doing is telling our body that we are in a state of stress, that we are not getting enough energy, that there is a crisis of energy availability, and that flies in the face of everything you want. And that's gonna create more hunger, more dissatisfaction, and that's gonna make it really hard to stick to whatever food plan you're on. So by eating enough, we are able to work with our metabolism, create that sense of safety for our metabolism. And so our hormones are less likely to drive us to eat. And that is what we want, right? Like we want to feel like we get a say in what happens next. And it's not just our hormones that are running the show. The final thing we talked about is the three foods I definitely recommend eating more of if you are trying to drive more satisfaction. That is protein, fiber, and fat. I also recommend variety and I recommend mindful eating practices, which is just asking yourself before and during a meal, do I want to eat this and am I enjoying it? And slowing down, chewing slower, really letting yourself enjoy the food in front of you and being super picky. Your curiosity and consciousness homework for this week is the following. And I guess I should introduce what that even means because this is our first episode. Every single week, I'm going to give you some journal prompts to think about coming out of listening to this episode. So whether you jot it down in your notes app or you have a journal nearby, or you maybe save this episode and come back to it when you have a little bit of quiet time later. I really want this podcast to be a place that you are inspired to take ownership of your own health and you are given the tools to do so. And one of the tools that has been so powerful for me in my journey is really understanding how I think and what my brain has going on and what thoughts are coming in there that I didn't even realize were there because I was subconscious to them. And creating more consciousness is so important to me and getting curious about what we find. We bring that consciousness into our brains, we start to see our thoughts that we're subconscious, but then instead of judging those thoughts or getting angry or frustrated, really getting curious to say, okay, why is that thought there and what can I do about it next if it's not serving me? So I'm gonna give you some questions every single week during the episode that you can walk away with and you can work on. Um, and I'm so excited to hear how this serves you. So here are the questions I want you to walk away with this week. And send me a DM if this is helpful, if you have any cool revelations. It would mean the world to me to hear from you. And yeah, let's get into it. So, so here are the questions that I want you to take away with this week. Number one, how is scarcity impacting your life? You know, when I talk about scarcity, when I walk through what it means to me, does that resonate? Are you like, yeah, I have some scarcity around food and I need to think about what it is. So I want you to think about how is scarcity around food impacting my life? The other thing is I want you to think through have you felt the implications of eating too little in your life before? Have you noticed that when you are on a really aggressive diet, that you do find your hunger to be so high? And maybe that is part of like the hunger hormones at play. So I want you to think about where in the past have maybe you actually felt the implications of not eating enough? And then have you explored what it would mean to intentionally eat more? Have you ever had a period of increasing protein, increasing fiber, increasing fat, increasing calories? Have you ever experimented with what that could look like in your life to fuel your goals and actually help you get the body you want instead of sabotaging you? And if you haven't, does the thought of it scare you? Does it scare you to open yourself to the idea that eating more might be what you need to get the results that you want? And why does it scare you? Why does it scare you to consider it? And what would it take to overcome that fear? I am so grateful that you are here. I encourage you so much to listen to the other two episodes that dropped today. Yes, we are celebrating the More Mindful podcast launch with three episodes. So please share this with a friend. Go download the other two episodes, tell me what you think, tell me which one is your favorite. You're gonna be getting episodes from me every single Tuesday from here on out. And I want this to be the most valuable podcast that you have in your in your app. So let me know how I can do that. Keep coming back. If you haven't yet, I would love, love, love if you could leave a review, rate this podcast, help others find it more easily and help it impact their lives in a way that hopefully it's impacting yours. And I will see you next week.