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In this episode of the podcast, we discuss how you can potentially go about improving your relationship with food. As part of our female health series, discussing what you can do to improve your relationship with food is a key episode as unfortunately, quite a lot of women suffer with their relationship with food.
Transcript
The following transcript is AI generated, so please excuse any errors or deviations from the video.
Paddy
What is up guys? We are back again with another episode. And today we are joined by the beautiful Brian and he was on the last episode. For those who are following along with this series next week, the other two co-hosts, if you can call them that, will be back. But Brian has some valuable information that we want to share in this female series.
And also just in general, like obviously this is pertaining to the female series, but it does also apply to you know, people who eat, which is most people. So this is a really important episode and I’m basically going to take a backseat, which regular listeners to the podcast will know that I don’t do because I just fucking talk so much.
But hopefully, you’ll hear more of Brian’s voice than you’ll hear of my voice today. And with that in mind, Brian, and I’ll let you introduce the topic and then also maybe give them a bit of background in terms of why they should listen to you about this. Like, you know, is this something you talk about a lot? Is this something that you research a lot?
Is this something you deal with? A lot? Why should I listen to you? And what are we talking about?
Brian
Hmm? Thank you, buddy. Yeah. So we’re going to be talking about relationship with food, how to improve that. And then obviously, in the context of this female fat or female fat loss series, female health series, this is you know, we’re going to have a female spin on this because, you know, women generally are more predisposed to having issues with this sort of stuff, you know, issues of their relationship with food, issues with their body image, issues with disordered eating, eating disorders, all this stuff ties together, basically.
And we’re going to we’re going to talk about it in the context of woman’s relationship with food. I don’t think I’ve ever done a comprehensive podcast on these topics, like I’ve talked about them in some shape or form for probably a couple of years now. It’s hard to gauge time after COVID, like you say, couple of years ago on energy four years ago.
But I know it’s an area that I’ve had a lot of success in in recent years working with clients, something I’ve seen more and more. And then obviously when you have more success with people on this stuff, then you start to get more people or you want this sort of help. So it’s led me to this point where, you know, I’m extremely interested in this kind of overlap of nutrition and psychology and disordered eating and how all this stuff takes place and then how we can improve upon it, which, you know, this podcast is going to be very practical.
I don’t want to just wax philosophical about, you know, the nature of this stuff. And what I want to give people good points that they can take away and hopefully implement because so many people struggle with this stuff. And we’re going to get we’re going to get into reasons why that is. But that’s the work that I do with people on this.
Like when you see the breakthroughs that they have and how it was quite literally changed their lives as kind of corny as that sounds, it’s it’s extremely rewarding and obviously just makes you want to do more of it and learn more and be the guy when it comes to this sort of stuff. So that’s what we’re going to that’s we’re going to look at.
So yeah, that’s that’s the nature of the podcast and why you even have me on here in the first place talking about it.
Paddy
And this is there’s two reasons we’re going to be talking about this today and in this context of the series. And that’s because I know a lot of coaches have clients that deal with this stuff and they don’t really know what to do. You know, like this stuff is not taught to you in your personal training courses. You know, it’s just not taught there.
And even if you go online and it’s, you know, you it’s hit or miss, you can have really good content or you could have fucking awful content put your way, you know. So it’s very hard if you are in this space and you’re trying to help other people, you know, just a general population client, you know, you’re just like, oh, you know, you have an issue with your food and I don’t know how to deal with, you know, and I’m supposed to be the person that helps people with their nutrition, their health, etc., you know, But then also, I want this to be practical for, you know, just your average person listening to this that
maybe needs to improve their relationship with food, which is a lot of people I mean, a lot of times they don’t even realize that they do actually need to improve their relationship with food. It can be for some people really overpowering and overcoming like it’s very front and center in their mind. But some other people can kind of brush it under the rug.
And this happens all the time in more fitness oriented circles in terms of they can kind of get away with some of these disordered eating patterns purely because they’re exercising so much and they don’t necessarily see the negative consequences in terms of like, you know, accumulating body fat or they don’t see it in terms of, oh, my performance is still good, so it shouldn’t really matter.
Or they don’t see that the negative health aspects of this, you know, But then, you know, sport usually ends for people at some stage in their life. And as a result of that afterwards, you know, we opened Pandora’s box, you know, and that’s it. All hell breaks loose, right? But when we’re talking about a good relationship with food, I suppose it makes sense to set some ground rules, I suppose.
And what is a good relationship with food? What does that actually mean?
Brian
Hmm. So I. I don’t know. I guess if you Google, you know, what’s a good relationship with food? I don’t know. I haven’t looked. I’m going to tell you what I think it looks like from from my perspective in terms of like, you know, the study that I do on this stuff and then the actual client experience that I have and how we’re talking, we’re going to talk about it like rather broadly.
It’s basically where you can go day to day and week to week and not have food, occupy a huge amount of your head space and that you’re maybe worrying about what to eat, how you’re going to eat is potentially your control over how you approach your food. You know, do you worry that, Yeah, if I have one biscuit, then I eat the whole package and feel out of control.
In that sense, though, I have issues with obviously disordered eating patterns where I’m binge eating regularly or, you know, being overly restrictive in my food intake. And like you said, they’re a lot like the fitness industry. You know, the pursuit of fitness can mask a lot of this stuff. And like someone asked me recently, it’s like, you know, if you look at a, you know, kind of say, prep prep competitor or competitor like a physique competitor who’s doing a practice like the things that they do in relation to their food, like is that disorder.
And so like pretty much yeah, right. But at the same time it’s usually short term if there’s a good plan in place afterwards, hopefully it gets better. But in a lot of cases it doesn’t get better. A lot of places it’s terrible and it’s just masking the fact that you’re on a prep for a certain period of time and therefore, you know, you can hide it behind, say, dedication, let’s say, or something like that.
But basically you want to be able to interact with your food day to day in a way that, you know, it doesn’t generate any undue amount of negative feelings or emotions, I would say. So you’re not like you’re not having this worry. You don’t have an anxiety. You’re not feeling guilt about eating certain foods, you’re not stressed about like, you know, is this the right thing for me to eat or not?
Those are of things I’m looking at when it’s not as good like, you know, for you and I party, we have good relationships, food. We don’t think about it that much. Day to day. We kind of think about, okay, what are we going to eat? Yeah, I want to eat something that’s nice and then helps you with this second part of this, which I would classes like, you know, Does your food help you to live a life that you’re happy with, basically that you want to live or does it pull you down a little bit?
And I think that’s a really good distinguishing factor because for the people that I work with on this stuff, it’s nearly always the case that it’s it’s dragging them down to a large extent. You know, it’s occupying this huge amount of headspace, huge amount of energy, like physical and mental energy. Like, I find this quite interesting and, you know, for anyone who wants to talk about like food is, you know, physiological, it’s like why?
Why do people who binge eating exhausted as a result of binge eating, you know, they’ve consumed so much energy, right? So they’re definitely eating out of calories. You know, there’s nothing else wrong from that side of things. Yet they feel exhausted, mentally taxing, 3D, mentally draining that they have to deal with this shit. So for me, it’s those your relationship with food, compliment your life.
And again, you can add certain elements of fitness. You can mask this stuff because it’s like, Oh yeah, I know. It helps me get shredded, you know, And so that’s clearly what I want to do. What’s what’s behind and what’s underneath. All that is like, you know, why do you want to get shredded in the first place? That comes from a good or bad place, which is something that we to talk about.
And in the course of this podcast as well. Well, for me, that’s basically what a good relationship with food would look like and what I’m trying to define it here.
Paddy
Yeah, I often describe it with clients. Well, in the past at least, I’ve used the kind of analogy of walking a dog, right? Like if you’re walking a dog, the dog is in control. Like you see people walking their dog and their dog is pulling them along. You know, the season on a dog over here all those days and it’s back and forth and it’s it’s dragging them along.
Right? And in that case, that the analogy here is that’s the diet. Being in control of the diet is, you know, or, you know, the food over here, I need to go over here and you do this and you’re just being pulled along by the diet. You’re at the whim of the diet right now. Some people try to gain back more control.
Right. And they try to be controlling. And you see these people walking their dogs and pulling back the dog. You know, really like it’s it’s always a battle here. You know, the the dog, the diet that the bad relationship with the diet is constantly pulling them in this direction. Oh, there’s the biscuits over here or there’s the cake or whatever.
And it’s just this huge amount of energy mean expended to like pull back the diet or you know, pull back the dog. Right. But what you really want or what I often describe it as you want to be in charge. Right. If you’re in charge of your your dog the diet here, you’re not controlling. You’re not controlling the dog.
You know, you can go over and you can go over to something that is, you know, something that would excite your dog. But the dog knows you’re in charge. You know, the dog is like, okay, well, I’m not going to do this on this. My owner here says that I’m allowed to do this, you know, so you can let the dog off the leash.
It’s still going to be at your heel because you’re in charge and that’s effectively where we want to be with the dog. If you want to be in charge, you don’t want to be controlling, you know, because that’s often what people try to do to overcome this stuff. You don’t want the diet to be in control. You just want to be in charge, you know?
Brian
Yeah, yeah, I love that analogy. You always have such good analogies, buddy. Good man.
No, that’s great. And it’s like, yeah, maybe to add to that, you could talk about it being like, effortless control, you know, So not not trying to exert your will forcefully over your diet where at any given moment they could all just, you know, fall apart. And diet does not really control like you said, it’s definitely something that happens a lot as people try and double down on this control aspect, which often just looks like overeating, being over restrictive or there’s other things in their life that aren’t going as planned and food and their nutrition is something that’s an exercise as well.
It’s something that they can take a good hold of. You know, So it’s like, it’s fine, I have control of this, but everything else is kind of burning down around me. So that’s a pretty common response that you see, like in this areas, you know, certain things aren’t going well. What’s something that people have learned to do is exert control over their nutrition.
And then, you know, it’s just it’s not really helpful, but it’s just a coping mechanism of sorts.
Paddy
And like, you see this all the time with full blown eating disorders, you know, someone who say is anorexic, like they’re trying to exert their will, they’re trying to exert their control. They’re trying to claim back some of that control by, you know, excessively restricting calories. They’re just like, I need to get these as low as possible. And that’s going on to be in control, you know, But you’re still not in charge then, you know, you’re not the one that’s in charge.
You’re still being consumed by these thoughts around the diet. You know, the diet is still dictating where we go with this stuff, you know, And you see this in the fitness industry a lot. It’s this kind of quasi disordered eating disorder, you know, space where people talk about this stuff. Right. And you can still see that these people are battling with these demons, these issues, because they’re still talking about it all the time, you know, And it a hard thing to kind of go around where it’s like, yeah, you want to bring attention to this stuff, right?
But the fact that you talk about this every single day or every single week still shows to me that this is something that is consuming a large part of the mental real estate for you, you know, whereas people who are, you know, they have a good relationship with food, they’re not being dictated by their food choices. Their food selection, whatever.
They just don’t think about this stuff. Yeah, no. So it’s a hard one to to navigate because you want to bring attention and you want to educate, you want to help.
But yeah.
You don’t want it to be all consuming.
Brian
As one of these ones that’s especially prevalent, you know, you know, this kind of lack of authenticity in the fitness industry at times, you know, you can this, this happens a lot. So you know, someone can be posting, looking like everything is happy. And Mary, but then you, as their coach, are looking at their check ins and you can see it’s very, very different to that.
I think that’s obviously my kind of sample is is somewhat biased here. But I think that’s what we see a lot of with this relationship with food stuff because like someone can be talking about, you know, loving themselves and X, Y or Z and, you know, like giving off the appearance that they have a good reaction to it, but then use their coach.
That was not actually the case because they’re so working with you very diligently on this. And that’s you know, it’s not a not a problem that they need help, but there is sometimes a disconnect and use reminding of their own terms what you’re talking about that, you know, the fact that someone’s talking about this stuff so much, you know, are they still are they actually in a good place with it?
And, you know, I want to make this very clear as well for any especially any professionals listening to this, you don’t need to have this stuff together for you to be able to help people. All right. That’s that’s something that I see so much. You know, they come to work with me. You know, they’re like they have a correlation.
But through they have issues with this stuff and they’re like, you know, how can I go and try and help people when I don’t have this shit together? It doesn’t matter, right? You have the skills to help people and you have the capacity as a coach to do that or you don’t. It doesn’t really matter that you have your own shit together because none of us have our shit together completely.
Right. And I think that’s good to get that as a public mass are more public message like in this context. Yeah.
Paddy
So let’s get really stuck into this. Why, why, why might women be more at risk for this stuff? Why might they be at more risk of a a poorer relationship for food?
Brian
Yeah. So if you look at the eating disorders like football, eating disorders, they they’re more prevalent than women, for sure. And that is, you know, there’s potential reporting issues on that could be why that is. But, you know, there’s many, many psychosocial factors that play into how these might come about. And I will say that that binge eating is about 5050.
So about same proportion of men and women deal with binge eating specifically. But things like bullying, anorexia seem to be more women dealing with that stuff that we know of. And I think a large so a large part of this like one of the biggest driving forces for, say, disordered eating, correlation with food, a lot of it comes back to body image and trying to manipulate what you look like for various reasons.
Right. So if you if you’re listening to this, I’ll put the question to you is like, how do you know what you’re supposed to look like physically? Okay. And give that some thought for a minute, right? Because it’s quite often something nobody has ever considered. But then when you point to that, you’re like, Oh, that actually makes a lot of sense.
And then when you look at like things like, you know, media, you know, cultural and beauty ideas, these kind of social pressures, especially for women like men have these as well. And it’s more in line right now because these are ever changing and we shouldn’t get into that. And second men, you know, it’s more like, you know, you need to be fucking jacked, right?
Shredded and muscular. That’s kind of the the beauty ideal, if you want to put it like that. But it’s different for women. And again, this stuff changes, like depending on like what’s trendy essentially in society right now because, you know, if you go back maybe to maybe like 1950s or thereabouts, yeah, you can find literal ads for women like in magazines and stuff to say, you know, you know, it’s a more border on your food so you can be more curvy, basically.
Right. And then if you look at kind of the nineties, like the feminine ideal was more like this, like a supermodel, like super skinny clock. And now where we’re at currently, it’s more like this kind of Kim Kardashian type physique where you have, you know, big ass, big boobs, small waist, generally lean, but again, very kind of voluptuous.
I’m like, this is what you land on. So I you know, I’d like people to actually think about, you know, what is actually telling you what you’re supposed to look like and should you pay attention to that. So we’ve got like by culture factoring this. And boy, I think a lot of a compound that is like pressure for women to control what they look like in order to meet these ideals for whatever reason, you know, that you’re sold on on so many different things, like, you know, you’ll have basically a happier life if you meet these ideals and you know, you will you’ll have a better time finding partners.
You just succeed in your life overall. And just life is just better if you can meet these criteria. Now it’s obviously not the case oftentimes depending on how people go about this. And so that’s why. So basically women land on the idea that they’re supposed to look a certain way. They start to implement measures to, you know, change how they look essentially.
And and in doing so, you know, their body image by default is generally not very good. Don’t say always am. And they basically land on this conclusion that I have to look this way. So I start trying to do things to make that happen. And that’s basically the path down to having a poor relationship with food, having poor body image get into these disordered eating issues because, you know, we get to talk more about how this will develop unless you all keep telling us you want to jump in on anything here.
Paddy
We’re just on the like I often find asking clients, male or female, like, why do you feel you have to look a certain way? Like, well, let’s let’s actually go through the evolution of this. Like what? Where did this start? What world, what were the thought processes? Because it’s very easy to blame society or like, you know, you see a lot of people that are talking to make it seem like like, oh, it’s the patriarchy fault, you know, or this person’s fault or whatever.
And it’s just lazy to think like that because it’s actually the media that you consumed as an individual, right? Like, for example, like both of us are, you know, nineties kids. So a lot of the girls we would have been hanging out with when we were teenagers or whatever, they would have been exposed to sort of, you know, the, the kind of Tumblr esthetic which was like, you know, thigh gap and like skinny legs, that kind of thing, you know, But in different areas, in different parts of the world, they were being exposed to different things, you know, So it’s very easy to go like, I can guarantee you that there was very few guys
on Tumblr, you know, So that was that was a cultural phenomenon that was driven by certain individuals within that community that like that certain look that they propagated that certain look, you know, and it’s not nefarious. It’s just that’s what happens. You know, it’s like with any culture, with only like a microcosm of a culture like these ideas propagate, you know, And some cultures are going to like this thing and some cultures are going to like this thing.
And that’s going to change throughout the years based on whatever like we discussed in the last episode, I’m like, you can pretty much trace like a low rise jeans and stuff. I’m like, okay, well, that like leads to people getting eating disorders, but also it leads to a certain aesthetic. It leads to a certain like, Oh, you have to have like washboard abs to wear these low rise jeans because that’s the aesthetic.
That’s the look, that’s the ideal. But, you know, we go through like eons, the whole ages of humanity. Like it has changed. Like if we always like, you know, people always using like the male skater, like, oh, the kind of Greek god ideal. You know, you look at these Greco-Roman statues and stuff and you’re like, Oh, that’s the idea.
If you dig up the skeletons of ancient Greeks, they’re like five foot eight and they don’t look like highly muscular. You can tell by different cultural sites and stuff like the muscularity of these individuals, you know, So even they were talking about a certain idea, you know, we’re probably fabricating a little bit like, you know, they’re like, oh, you know, he was a Goliath or whatever.
And it’s like, yeah, he’s probably like six foot, you know, which is distinctly bog standard, average, you know. Yeah.
Like, you know what I mean? It’s like there’s all these ideals that we have created in our mind. You know, obviously they’ve been influenced by the culture, they’ve been influenced by what you’ve been exposed to. There’s so many factors that go into this, but when you actually dig into it, you know, why do I as an individual, you know, you can’t you can’t you can’t lay the blame anywhere else.
So you have to ask yourself, why do I as an individual, you know, why do I believe this? Why do I look at this certain look and go, this is the look that I want, This is what I think is the esthetic, etc., etc.. Like you have to actually take responsibility for, not take ownership for that, you know, might not be your fault.
It might literally be the culture. The culture is like I was like, this is the look that we want. This is what gets, you know, favorable media airtime, etc.. But why did you take that on board as something that you should look like? You know, and you see this as well in terms of, you know, people will have a certain ethnic characteristics, You know, like you might be a Persian and you might have a more Persian nose, for example, and people like, Oh no, I want that more Western nose or I want that, you know, more like Caucasians like nose.
And it’s like, why? You know, it’s the culture that is being put upon them, you know, But it’s ignoring their own culture, it’s ignoring their own lineage. You know, it’s ignoring what they have that their people found attractive for thousands of years, you know? And it’s like, why do you actually feel that? You know? So we have to we have to actually contend with all that stuff.
And it’s very hard.
Brian
Yeah, I know. It’s super hard. Like everything you said, there is. Correct. But most people don’t stop and actually think about this stuff. And you know exactly when when they hear us talk about it, they might be like, Oh yeah, that actually makes sense. But until now, tangibly you’re just going along, bought into this stuff, all right? And you’ve decided like, okay, this is the stuff I’m being exposed to or I’m exposing myself to and I’m going to take it on board.
And, you know, the broader question that we have to ask people basically like, you know, what kind of life do you want to live and what kind of person you want to be? And that sounds, you know, maybe a bit esoteric in the context of this podcast, because literally, you know, I’ve had clients who have had so much time and energy consumed by binge eating that once we resolve that, they have to ask themselves, like, I have all this extra energy and headspace, what kind of person I want to be.
Because up until now I’ve just been a person basically who to a large extent is just being consumed by binge eating and trying not to binge. And at least it leaves a gaping hole in their identity. Right. And that’s something they actually have to deal with and go through. Some like, you know, value setting exercise and people like, all right, well, what kind of things are actually important to you in your life?
How can we do more of those? Because, you know, this is where we’re kind of jumping around a little bit here. But people will often use these body manipulations in the pursuit of that to achieve a goal that may not it may not be the best way to go about it. And it’s sort of akin to if all you have is a hammer, all you see is are nails.
Right. So, you know, a common one that you might see is like, okay, you know, why are you trying to get in better shape, guys? Not be the only reason put like this to say for this example, you know, I want to attract and get a partner. I want to have a boyfriend or a husband or whatever it is.
So I’m going to change my body shape, you know, to be more attractive and to meet that goal, basically. But they never and because of these things that you’re kind of sold in the media, like we just spent some time discussing, you may not consider us like what else is actually important in trying to achieve that goal. Like, is that the only thing that’s going to change how I look and then bam, I’m going to be in a healthy, thriving, happy relationship.
Like, not necessarily like, you know, you need to be able to connect with another person is real first guy. Make it so you can go and meet people you know, you need to overcome any issues. My habitat. So there’s like so many things that you that you work on when you actually examine what your goal is, what are you actually trying to get out of this stuff.
And you’re not just trying to change your body, to change your body like you’re trying to achieve something as a result. So what are you trying to achieve? And are you are you taking the most direct route? Are you making things harder for yourself or not even actually aiming properly at where you’re trying to get to at all?
But I like some of the other ways that people, you know, maybe like we all end up with these like beliefs around food and like what our body should look like and so on and so forth. And that’s obviously the context of this podcast. And so, you know, presumably you don’t have to buy into all the things we just spoke about right.
In terms of the cultural influences, let’s just call them that. And but something always I often find is, you know, people inherit these beliefs along the way. You know, And like a lot of this idea comes down to your parents, you know, if you’re or if your mother has as dealt with this stuff, like for a large part of her adult life and, you know, she’s in and out of what, slimming world or Weight Watchers or whatever it may be.
They’re just generally what you know, what I tend to see, you know, you as her daughter, fortunately, probably have inherited some of these beliefs about both. You know, what you’re supposed to look like, what foods are good and bad, You know, what foods have sins and what don’t. And basically, you inherit a lot of your relationship with food from from your mother and usually the mother, because, you know, depending on what age somebody is, listen to this.
Like the fathers didn’t have as much pressure on this sort of stuff, I don’t think. Put on them now. Now it’s a little bit different. Everything, I think, is more pressure on man to satisfy some of these ideals. But, you know, I think I think dads could just look like dads and have that bottom. It was no bit no major issue.
And and then you may inherit more beliefs around this stuff through the process of trying to change them. So, you know, maybe you go to like Weight Watchers yourself and you start to pick up your beliefs from them. Maybe you hire somebody trying to help you get into shape. Maybe it ends up being one of these crash diet approaches.
So you learn that, okay, the way I succeed when with this stuff is like I eat 1200 calories a day and I train six times a week and I follow this meal plan and there’s no flexibility on that. And that’s how I get results. You know, you’re obviously not going to have a good relationship with food if that’s what you learn.
Works, you know, erroneously, you learn that that is the way. So you’re kind of taken like this, layers this off. So in one sense, the way that you may be trying to achieve a certain goal by manipulating your body shape, then you might be trying to achieve that body goal through a crash diet, because that’s maybe all you’re doing is, you know, if you hire somebody in Italian or coral based your carbohydrates, how do you expect to have a good relationship with carbohydrate foods when you believe that they are a limiting factor in you achieving this goal that you want to achieve with relation to your body, which then leads on to another goal that
you’re ultimately trying to achieve, essentially being happy and like enjoying your life. Basically, that’s a lot of it just boils down to that. You want to put her in the same kind of and you know, there’s so much of this stuff perpetuated online and like the way the increase in popularity of like what do they call it, it’s like mixing reels, You know, we’re on Instagram where like, like what Gary did with James Smith’s video the other day, like, whatever that’s called, it’s called mixing or something like that.
But I it’s terrifying the conviction that these idiots speak with about certain topics related to nutrition and health. And it’s like so cringe because like they’re so wrong in so many aspects and they’re like, Yeah, bet you didn’t know that, did you? That you know, whatever the fuck they’re talking about. And it’s actually scary like seeing some lots of like a crop of more and more now because people like us are using it for content basically, and you know, people that be in the same sphere.
But like the amount of conviction that I know has gone off without a conviction they speak with is terrifying. And, you know, it’s it is a literal minefield for people to try and navigate this stuff. So you’re getting bombarded with all this stuff that tells you basically this is how you achieve your goal. And, you know, basically you need to detoxify your body and that’s why you’re carrying the amount of body fat you’re carrying.
So just do this juice cleanse and that’s going to solve the problem. So getting into all these fad approaches that teach people that certain things are good, certain things are bad, can’t do this, can’t do that, have to do things this way leaves people with just an awful relationship with food because then they get this fear and guilt and anxiety and, you know, some people will have experiences where they berated better coach or trainer or whatever it is for, you know, having a bad week or a high the one the one where, like, they’re tackling, they’re like texting them on if they see they’re on a night out on Instagram.
So like, I don’t even know. I’m like, you’re there and I’ll be very up in low cal drinks. They’re all ridiculous shit. Just culminates in someone having a terrible relationship with food potentially. And I’m going to stop at this and let you actually add something.
Paddy
That was fantastic. Like you, we see this all the time when we do a we’re going to call them sales calls. We’ll call them when someone’s coming to us and they’re like, Look, I want to see if you guys can help, right? And we often bring them through a kind of exercise on the call where we’re like, Right, well, what are we actually aiming towards?
What’s the end goal with all of this? Like, what are we if you were to work with us now for, let’s say, next five years, what would you come away from that and go, Yeah, I learned absolutely everything that I needed to give me results, to get results, to sustain results for the rest of my life, you know, And you kind of need to look at that from the longer term perspective.
You need to look at it from the like, what am I going to look back when I’m 70 and think, you know, what am I to look back? Have you taught my children these same hierarchy, same tools? Like what am I going to think? Did I give them the best tools for the job or did I just give them the only tools that I had available to me?
You know? And when we do this on the call and you’ll often hear people say like, oh, they want to know what to do with all this health and fitness stuff so that it’s not, you know, it’s not front and center of their mind, you know, like this stuff is not their higher purpose on earth. You know, the stuff of like, oh, I have to calculate my calories.
I have to really track my macros, I have to really manage micromanage my nutrition. I have to really micromanage my training not to do all X, Y, and Z. That’s not their main purpose in life. They want to have, like we said at the start of this, they want to have a diet health fitness paradigm that actually allows them to live their life.
You know, it’s contributing to their life. It’s not detracting from their life. It’s not becoming the main focus of their life, you know, And what we often describe it as, like a lot of people find themselves in a position where they have these sheets of paper, you know, and that’s all their health and fitness knowledge. It’s like, here’s how to squat, here’s how you do your leg training and here’s how you do your nutrition.
And a lot of these piece of paper, they’re actually just wrong. You know, they’ve scribbled stuff down that they heard somewhere else. And, you know, they got it from social media, like you’re saying, or, you know, the information is actually just not correct. Right. But they still can see that this kind of all goes together in some sort of health and fitness book.
Right. But true. A combination of them missing information. They don’t have the full context through them having, you know, poor information and simply just not knowing both what to write in its place, not knowing how to actually write the chapters, paragraphs, etc., and then also not knowing how to put it all together in a sustained manner. There are left in this position where they’re always just trying to reshuffle the papers around, kind of like put this together with not it doesn’t work.
I know that doesn’t work. And it’s very frustrating. It’s very hard to find this like signal through all the noise. All right. So what we aim to do in our coaching is okay, here’s what we have to do. This is the end goal with all this stuff. We want you to know how to do this stuff. These are the tools.
This is how we think about this stuff. This is how we organize this stuff. And the goal at the end of our coaching is to come away from it and go, Oh, I have health and fitness book. And it’s not just this generic health and fitness book, it’s the specific health and fitness book for you as an individual, right?
So that’s generally how we’re or something that we sometimes do on those calls is go through that know what do you actually aimed towards right. And people want that book but they might not even realize that they want that book right and mother left doing is I always call it the health and fitness merry go round They try this approach they reshuffle the pages around.
They try to approach the go round, the merry go round and they step off and they’ve been putting in a lot of effort. They’ve basically been pushing that merry go round themselves and then they step off and they’re in the exact same position they were beforehand, you know, probably with another disordered eating thought or another issue, another something going on, because they’ve expanded all this energy and, you know, they’re having a bad time of it, but they’re no closer to their goal.
At the end of the day, they’re potentially even further away from it because they’re dizzy. Now their disoriented. You know, they’ve expend a lot of energy. And it’s it’s very hard for an individual to navigate that stuff effectively on their own. You know.
Brian
What they’re often left with in that situation is the assumption that they just need to do. They have to do something now more extreme to actually improve this, because, like, you know, I tried, I tried X, Y, Z, it didn’t work. I came off this merry go round, you know, better off and worse off if anything. And and then it just it’s a kind of a dark path to go down because, like, all right, well, I tried this and now let’s try something more extreme.
And you’ve made the situation worse and worse and worse. I can think of an example of a client I worked with last year who, you know, basically fits that bill. And she revealed to me like a few weeks in that when I initially told her how we’re going to start things, she’s a bit like, you know what the fuck?
Like I that’s too simplistic. And I have tried saying after thing after thing. I clearly need something special here and you’re not giving it to me. But then, of course, she did realize that what I was giving her was what she needed. And I got the results. And getting just more extreme with it was just sending her further in the wrong direction.
So yeah, just to just be aware of that, that, you know, it’s not a case that you need to become more extreme, more restrictive, whatever, whatever it ends up being is probably not going to get you to where you want to be. I wanted to add as well that people will use obviously food as a coping mechanism in many ways.
So essentially like to simplify this, like, okay, you feel a certain way, you don’t want to feel that way, you want to do something about it, do something about it. For a lot of people that I’m honestly working with on this stuff is is okay. So again, you could learn that this behaviour for you works, right? Is one of the main reasons we engage in behavior is like they have some sort of benefit.
So that’s something I always like to point out to people is like, you know, say you do binges in response to stress or some sort of emotional angst. You know, you are getting something from that. So the way I like to phrase, because people often feel like they’re fighting against themselves, they’re like, why do I keep doing this?
What do I keep doing this? Like, that’s that’s often the the internal dialog and then external dialog when they’re talking to me about it. But In reality, I want them to think about like, what are you actually gaining from your eating behavior here and what does it do for you? And it’s, you know, in a lot of cases it’s self-soothing, makes them feel better, you know, temporarily, obviously, and toll them all.
That kind of food guilt and stuff washes over them. And that just makes things worse. But in the moments they feel better, they’re not having to feel Maybe there’s not many things out and I’m having to feel whatever it is they were feeling that they want to deal with, you know? So anyway, our behaviour is there to solve the problem of some sort of the problem in this case is you feeling a certain way that you don’t want to feel that way, you know, and you are happy to, like, sit with it and actually examine, okay, why do you actually feel this way, which is really the direction you need to go with this stuff,
you know? And then sometimes that can be, you know, lead you to dark places, depending on what you’ve experienced in your life. And all of this is coming from some severe traumatic event and starting to do this with a professional and not me. Like I’m not a professional in that context. But you know, there’s layers to this as there is to everything.
But basically you learn that, okay, I have this problem. The solution to it is eating. And this is very, very common. I’ve seen people that obviously with the people that I work with. And so it is a response that you’ve learned works well, even if it does seem, you know, self-destructive at times. It does serve a purpose. But that’s obviously another big element to if someone has a poor relation to food that’s not obviously that’s not helping them live their best life.
Paddy
Mm hmm. Yeah. Like I always like describing it like you do as well as, like, turn. This is your current solution to this current problem, right? So we just need to figure out better. I’m not in quotes, solutions to this problem. Now, we as professionals in this room might have certain tools, but we might not actually be able to solve this problem because you might actually need like counseling to solve this problem so we can put a Band-Aid over it and give you better coping mechanisms or better tools, better solutions here.
But that doesn’t necessarily take away the problem. You know, for some people it might work. For some people it might be, you know, this is just another tool that you have in your toolbox, but it’s not fixing all of them. So I suppose the next point becomes like, how do we actually go away improving our or your relationship with food or mean we have a client that’s dealing with some of this stuff.
Like what? What, what, what’s the process?
Brian
Yeah, the process is going to look like any like anything you want to work on and outlooks and goals. All right. So obviously you’ve come in to work with me or Dean and you said you want to improve your relationship with food. Okay. We have to guess somewhat clear on what that looks like. Okay. So basically, I will ask everybody who comes in with these sort of goals, number one, how would you describe your relationship with food right now?
And number two, how would you like it to be different? So let’s say you do, you know, five months of coaching or whatever is what’s going to be different for you in your relation with food at that point? And this can be more challenging than, say, a body composition goal because it’s quite easy to say something like, Oh yeah, I like to be ten kilos lighter, her lean or whatever it is, right?
So with this one in the goal setting here, you often have to consider, okay, I the way I like, I frame it for me, you know, basically you wake up in the morning, you know, five months down the line, this stuff is all massively improved. What’s different about your life? You know, you get up and you know, it’s going to look like things like, you know, I get up and I’m not immediately thinking about how I’m going to manage my food intake all day, not immediately thinking like, shit.
Am I going to binge later, going to throw this stuff in the bin so I don’t eat this exact sort of stuff? And that ties back to what we talked about at the beginning in terms of defining what is a good relation of food. So and what I just said there is that’s quite obviously occupying a huge amount of headspace for that person.
So the like moving towards a situation where we won’t do that or this is going to be, you know, slightly different for each individual. So they need to think about this things saying what am I actually trying to get out of this and what that feels like, what’s different? And then, you know, we can potentially get to work on that and see because then we have something to Amma like until you until you go through that exercise, you already have something.
And the way like I’d say, nearly 100% of people describe it to me, you know, either they’ll say it to me or I’ll say to them, like people often say, Put it like this. They don’t have a normal relationship, but they always use that word normal, right? Which which goes back to what we talked about earlier. It’s like kind of a it’s kind of a non thing when I’m when it comes to my nutrition and which may sound a bit counterintuitive because like, you know, we all know how important nutrition is for someone’s overall health and well-being, but you’re just in such a good place with us that you can kind of almost effortlessly coast
through and like walk the dog and do all the things you want to do on that walk. Basically, to borrow your analogy, because that’s good. I’m going to keep using it in the future. Excuse me, But yeah, that’s that’s basically where you’re going to start. You’re going to have to say, all right, what are my goals? What I want to get out of this.
Okay. And then if I’m working with people on this, a lot of it, to be honest, is about having a dialog with them like I like you. Obviously, this kind of depends on what exact issue they’re working on and but basically all the stuff that we already talked about, basically all these beliefs that you’ve latched on to or inherited or have invaded your space and your in your mentality, we have to start untangling those to a large extent.
So, you know, if you’re essentially afraid to eat bread, then we have to have a dialog about essentially why is Brad bad? You know, in what context is it bad? Why do you why is it that you hold on to the belief right now that it is not something that you can eat and if you do, it triggers a reaction that, oh my God, I mean bread and also eaten bread.
I’m going to eat like three loaves of bread and they’re going to never eat it again because that’s it. That’s the mentality people have of this stuff, right? Because they get very, very black and white. They get very rigid with all these food rules. You know, if you have a lot of food rules, you know, that’s usually a red flag for not having a good relationship with food.
And in terms of like, you know, I can eat this, but not that, you know, obviously outside of some sort of medical reason or, you know, some good reason that affects your digestion or something like that.
Paddy
But you can also have them for like, you know, this distinct period of time. I know I overconsume on these these foods, so I just want to get rid of them, whatever, and we can work on other stuff in the meantime. But yeah, in general if you see a lot of food rules, it’s, you know, generally not a great, great, a great set up here.
Brian
Yeah. So a large part of, of this process is us going through, it’s like do you have a list of bad foods basically that you’re not supposed to eat? And then we have to just kind of take that list and start going through it and trying to understand your psychology behind it. So I’m framing this in terms of someone working with me.
You’re trying to do this on your own. You have to kind of sit there and do this work by yourself. All right? So you have to say, okay, what what is my list? And then you have to write down like, okay, why is that my list? And, you know, hopefully going to be more things that you can utilize now.
And in the second book, you know, I’m trying to take you through it step by step in terms of what this really looks like. So, you know, why do you hold these food beliefs? And, you know, you can ask me what would be true if these were accurate, You know, so it’s kind of like a cognitive approach. Like this looks very like CBT in a lot of ways and which is very, very useful.
I find in this in this kind of situation. And you know, example I often use is this desert island example which if anyone is listening to my podcasts on, like when I’m asked about sort of stuff, I nearly always use this example. Many clients, if they’re listening to this, will recognize it basically, you know, applied. If you say that like bread is is bad for you and you can’t have it and it’s on your bad list, it’s one of the many foods in your bad list.
Well, if you look at why that is, I might say, okay, let’s imagine that I’ve transported you to this desert island. Right. And it’s a very, very on ideally desert island. It doesn’t have like, you know, loads of coconuts and mangoes and things like that. There’s not lots of game for you to hunt with your bow and arrow that you would assume ably fashion.
And basically you’re just sit, you’re sat there on this desert island with nothing except water. And for whatever reason, I can fly a drone into every day and it drops down a bottle of Brennan’s white bread. Okay, So in that situation, is this food now good or is it bad? Because in your initial paradigm, it’s like bad. I can’t eat that food in this context.
Literally going to keep you alive. Okay, is the only thing that’s going to keep you alive. Give you a source of energy? Yeah. You’re not going to run into micronutrient deficiencies like the Bradley some fortified and you know, so it’s not you’re not going to thrive but you will continue to exist. Okay. So how then can we decide that bread is just bad as a blanket statement?
Okay. And then people might argue that, okay, yeah, that’s fine. Fine. Well, when I eat bread, I just can’t help myself. Okay. And that’s something we need to get into. But what I described already is usually why that comes about. So if you tell yourself you can’t have something and then you end up having it and quote unquote breaking, you’re going to absolutely go to town on that stuff and all the other stuff that you that you’re denying yourself, because you’re quite literally in your mindset saying, I can’t and I shouldn’t eat this stuff, so I’m never going to eat it at this point.
That’s basically your goal. So you have this goal that I’m never going to eat bread, so I fucked it up. Now I’m eating bread. I may as well make the most of it because I know, you know, you want to go the next 40 years eating it. That’s the mentality and I know it sounds a bit daft type laying it all out like this now, but that’s what it looks like.
And then what we’re going to do is, you know, take this list of bad foods and start working them into your diet in small quantities. Right? So this is kind of like exposure therapy that we’re going to do. And you’ll generally want to start with the foods that are like least bad in your and your mindset. So let’s see if bread is enemy number one then.
I don’t know. A banana could be could be a good example of something that’s like, yeah, I’m not really supposed to eat that because like fructose and sugar, but it is fruit. So maybe, you know, there’s a bit of leeway on that one. So we might just start, you know, start adding in some banana a little bit, you know, if you’re having porridge or something.
I put a few slices on, see what happens because it is something I say to all my clients in this capacity. It’s like, I can tell you all the things that I’m going to tell you. I can lay it all out, okay? This is how it’s going to going to go down. Well, until you get actual in the trenches evidence that this stuff is working for you and everything doesn’t fall apart when you eat some banana, you won’t really fully believe me.
You might 80% trust me, because you know real estate. You signed up to work with me. You’ve okay everyone else, you know, they talk about this context gets a lot of testimonials. He helps people with this stuff. This is why I’m going to try. But you might be on the 80% there until is that see this stuff that’s working for you?
You see, you’re not bingeing. You see that you have a banana. It doesn’t destroy your health or your body composition. Okay. So we’re going to try and do that with basically all the foods that you have issues with, essentially. And a lot of this is going to incorporate mindful eating practices, you know, a lot of which we discussed on the previous podcast, because they’re useful in a digestion context.
So they’re also useful here. And because I like generating more mindfulness and self awareness is a big part of improving this situation because. You know, basically binge eating is the opposite of being mindful. Like binge eating is characterized by literally tuning out people often described as being like, I feel like I was literally outside my body watching myself do this.
Okay, So that is completely mindless, right? And a lot of people’s eating is mindless in this context because again, they’re like thinking, Oh, I’m not supposed to eat this, so focus, get it into me and get it over with. Right before I guess like cough, quote unquote. And so we got to slow things down. We got to give them that reassurance.
They’re like, okay, it’s all right to actually have some of foods. Let’s see what happens. You have to give yourself permission to eat them first and foremost, though. Otherwise you’re just going to panic and, you know, overeat or, you know, throw in the towel or whatever. So a lot of this stuff in reality is uncomfortable, but it’s just like going to the gym, Like you go to the gym and you lift weights and you feel the burn and you don’t want to keep pushing Rex out.
You do because you understand that there is a benefit to be derived from it. So you have most of you have no problem with going through some discomfort, which is kind of ironic in some cases of binge eating because, you know, it’s an intolerance to feeling what you’re feeling at that moment in time. Basically, if you’re going to be mindfully going to generate more self awareness, you need to be able to articulate what it is you’re feeling.
So in the normal pattern, it might be, okay, I’m feeling well. I actually don’t know what I’m feeling because I haven’t stopped to think about it. But there’s something there and I don’t like it. So let me go to the chocolate. May feel and go away or at least block it out. So this is where we use the feelings.
Well, you know, a lot of my clients be familiar with the feelings. Well, because we’re very we’re generally very, very bad at articulating our feelings. You know, people use blankets, you know, if they even get this right, this blanket kind of terminology where it’s like, oh, I felt stress. It’s like I really mean like we all kind of know what it means, but like, what exactly were you feeling at that moment in time?
So you can just look up the feelings, will listen to this. Want to try to do this by themselves? Or if you’ve clients, you want to help with this stuff. And basically the the the goal is to notice a name, what you’re feeling. So, okay, first of all, I’m being mindful of being self aware. Okay, I notice something happening.
How would I describe it? Then you can decide basically. All right, how do I meet the need that this is generating? Because remember, your default has just been to go and eat, right? That’s what you’ve done in this context. And I appreciate it here that I’m kind of flowing back and forth between people who are maybe very restrictive with their food intake versus people who have difficulty with emotional regulation and use food as an outlet for that.
And what a lot of it does come together and there is a lot of overlap. So so bear with me on that. I realize it’s not completely just bullet point. Do this, do this, do this, do this, but this is all important stuff and I’m in flow, so let’s keep it going. So that is an important aspect of this.
And you can see how mindfulness will help just in a very broad sense. Here am and then where we get into is when people have issues with, you know, they have these foods that they say they can’t control. So this is where it comes back to the argument that I made before. So I guess that’s fine. Bryan Like desert Island situation, you know, I’d eat the bread, but when I eat it now, in my just normal day today, I just can’t stop.
All right? I can’t I don’t feel like I can control it. And it’s not true. It’s all these things that we’ve already discussed or I’ve just talked at you more. So all these things that we’ve discussed that lead you to believe that you shouldn’t be doing this, But when you can take a step back, this one, mindful, give yourself permission to have these foods.
We do a mindful eating exercise and there’s many ways that you can label it. One that I like is you imagine that you’re an alien and you’ve come down to earth and this is your first time seeing this foodstuff, whatever it may be, you know. So how would you approach that? You know, you’re there, you’re interacting with all the other humans and you’re seeing that they’re all like tooken away at their stuff.
So it’s probably safe to eat from poisonous, but then what would you do with it? So you’re basically going to look at it and the idea with this exercise to engage with the food, with all the five senses. So what it looked like was a smell like, what does it feel like to eat this, eat it very slowly.
So again, this is for like your so called trigger foods that you claim that you can’t control and therefore never eat them. But the reality is that it’s because you never eat them, that you can’t control them, as I hope I’ve already detailed and explain as to why that is the case. So you’re going to have this foods, so say it’s chocolate and you’re going to take out a reasonable portion, first of all, because you also want to make life harder for yourself.
And I spoke about this in the context of Easter. It’s you know, you don’t want to just sit there with a whole Easter egg in front of it because, you know, me or you, Patty or whoever, you know, an example often using this context is, you know, if you’re at a party and you’re sat in front of like the snack table versus if you go to a party and you’re standing over in the corner like talking, some people like which version of you eat more, it’s not going to be it’s not going to be the exact same, especially if you’re you’re trying to like diet or manage body compositions.
And it’s not going to be the exact same. So the person who’s in that food environment that’s, let’s say, more challenging is going to eat more. So the same thing applies here. So take out sensible portion of whatever this food is. Everything else, no distractions, you know, no being on your phone while you’re doing this, not watching TV while you’re doing this just so common, which is actually go slow, use all the five senses to eat the food, assess how you feel you may want have more.
You might want to have more. That’s all right. And this is a mistake people often make with this exercise. They think that or if I wanted to eat more than like the two squares of chocolate, I failed. It’s not about limiting the quantity of what you’re eating now. It will often do that, especially if you have this tendency just to eat a pack of biscuits after having one.
It’ll often result in that, but that is not the desired outcome. So you shouldn’t have that expectation necessarily. The only thing you’re trying to do here is basically eat the food properly as described, right. Really slowly tasting every bite, noticing what happens as you go through the process of eating this food. And that’s what you’re going to do and what you will basically find.
You find one of two things. You’ll either realize that this food was pretty horrible and you wonder why the hell or they’re making such a big deal about this food. It’s not even nice. And I’ve had all sorts of cool feedback from people about different foods, you know, a guy talking about crisps and he was like, Yeah, I just and it was like a potato mush in my mouth.
And it wasn’t pleasurable at all. And I think I was eating the crisps so fast trying to maintain that flavor, you know, before it disappeared, disappears in like 2 seconds. And I had a girl, I remember telling me this type of biscuit that she used to have that she didn’t enjoy the biscuit, she only enjoyed the chocolate coating.
Yeah. She was eating these biscuits basically just to eat that like two millimeter layer of chocolate with her covered it. Okay. So you’ll learn a lot about your the foods that you’re eating and you’ll find a lot of the foods that you’re eating when eaten this way aren’t what you thought they were. So that’s one thing that will happen.
The other thing that might happen is that you realize that this food is actually class. I was right. Both are going to be very, very happy eating a smaller amount. So I’ve quite literally looks like, okay, I’ll have a guy who eats three bars of chocolate and, you know, has a a difficult relation with food because he just that’s just what happens.
We do this exercise each half a bar of chocolate and enjoys it more than when he was eating three bites chocolate got consumed in creating this difficult emotional situation for himself because he’s, you know, basically not doing what he supposed to be doing, not acting like the person wants to be and all that stuff. So really, really useful exercise.
I don’t know if I’ve ever detailed that as well in a podcast, but there it is for you. And I get people to do this a couple of times a week generally to get practice. And then obviously the ultimate goal is to use this in acute settings or spontaneously, let’s say, and so that they basically see that this food actually is not a trigger, it’s just all these different things that influence how I eat it is what made the difference.
And then they basically realize, okay, I actually have a good or I should be this food now. Okay, let’s take a break for at least a second.
Paddy
And one of the questions that you will often guess when you do try to improve someone’s relationship, food, like all of these things, these great protocols, these great tools to use and, you know, you obviously have to get that initial buy in. That’s the first part of this. You know, you actually have to have someone that wants to change, which is actually quite hard.
You know, you think being like, oh, this is really controlling my life now. But oftentimes people don’t want to put any effort into changing this and that’s okay. And you might not be in the place they might not be in the perfect headspace to be able to deal with this right now because of, I don’t know, whatever else is going on in their life, You know, that’s okay.
Right. But let’s assume we get the buy it right. You’ll often have people that have other goals as well. And we might have done the initial kind of goal setting. You might have gone through. Okay, well, why do you have these beliefs? Why do you think that this physique is the ideal of the pinnacle or whatever? Right. And at least we are leads them to this situation where they want to work on their relationship with food, but they also have fat loss goals, Right?
So two things happen here. They either are binge eating, let’s say they’re binge eating and they’re not achieving their fat loss goals because they’re binge eating right. So they know what they’re currently doing. Can’t it isn’t working. It isn’t producing results. But they’re hesitant to move away from that because they don’t know if the methods you’re going to employ will lead to fat loss results.
But then also, if they just have a poor relationship with food in general and there are cases of like, Oh, this is my trigger food and this is this and this, you’re trying to work through all that stuff. Are we able to achieve fat loss at the same time, or is it a case with both of those things, you know, just, you know, poor relationship with food and then maybe binge eating?
Do we just have to forget about fat loss for now? We’ll do that in the future. But right now it’s the relationship with food that we have to deal with. Well, what’s your kind of timeline with that stuff?
Brian
Yeah, it’s a good question because because of all the things we talk about, the you know, someone may get to that point where they accept and acknowledge that they they need to work on the relationship with food and they know they want that to get better, but they haven’t quite relinquished, you know, the influences of what else I need to look a certain way.
So are they competing goals or contradictory goals? To some extent, I don’t I don’t think so, because I it’s sort of a different conversation to have at times because people can be quite dichotomous about this. Like, you know, you’re anti diet and you’re 100% of day and on like body acceptance, body positivity, health at every size a lot or you’re like, no, everyone can just get to a contract and out of this stuff doesn’t matter And it’s like, you know, I want to tread the line because if someone genuinely wants to make changes to their physique or, you know, could be from a health standpoint, like they could have excess body fat, they want to
lose so that they are healthier and they live longer and they can keep doing the things they want to do. Like that is absolutely not okay to just ignore if that’s what someone wants to do. And I obviously want to assess like where this is coming from. And there’s a lot of context nuance to this, but.
Paddy
Just because blood loss is not inherently bad, you know, you seem to get that it because I know a lot of people, they do make it out as if like if you’re in this space, you’re talking about it. You could read a lot of stuff that makes it sound like, oh, if you even have a thought about fat loss, you’re fucked already.
You’ve got all the those beliefs, you know, disordered, disordered or whatever. It’s like, No, I fat loss is not inherently bad. It might not be a good goal for you as an individual, but that doesn’t mean across the board. Yeah, not at all.
Brian
Well, usually happen here at all. Realistically, like if someone has fat loss goals and they’re binge eating semi-regularly, that is a massive barrier to them. That goal, assuming it’s like, you know, an objective band rather than a subjective band, which could be quite small. But the perceived loss of control is still there, but it’s more often to be objective bands.
It’s be quite a lot of calories consumed like that is a pretty bad situation to be in if you’re also focusing on fat loss because you’re literally only doing a week, maybe two weeks more work in one sitting. And that is incredibly frustrating and difficult for someone to have to deal with. So what I would suggest in this context is that you focus on your relationship with food.
First and foremost. What you will find is that you have an easier time with the fat loss of when you when you’ve taken care of your relationship with food or at least improvement. And like, you know, I can think of a lady I worked with for a good few months there. She recently finished with me and I got on fantastically poor.
You know, I, I told her so many times or the process is like she almost seemed surprised that she was like losing weight quite easily. But I had to say to her so many times, like, you literally have almost the perfect dietary template. It’s only because you were binging so much that you’re just having a difficult time with fat loss and your body weight.
And so she lost like, you know, five kilos in a couple of months. And she’s like, I’m delighted. It’s like I told you this would happen because once you remove that binge eating logjam like you’re lifestyle is so supportive of fat loss, if that’s what you want to try and do. I told that plenty of times and then I eventually did away with binge eating and it happened for like a literally, literally used to use her like food diary as an example.
It’s like, Oh, you’re eating seven on 70 calories. This is like a class 1700 calories. Like if you want to implement that. And I was at someone who had a really bad relation with food issues, binge eating initially. And so basically it just gets you out of your own way if you want to put it like that. And oh, yeah, you need to you need to be very committed to parking the fat loss goals, like being authentic about that and not being like, Yeah, that’s fine.
But like secretly being like, oh, can’t wait for the house to come about. And you guys, like, in most cases it will happen. Both is you’re gonna have such an easier time. But if you make your relation with food better and then you can go and pursue it. So that’s fine. Like I think trying to focus on fat loss being a big calorie deficit depends on where someone’s at.
Like, you know, obviously there’s depends on like their starting point, the kind of foundation that they have with all the factors that are relevant here. And but for the most part I’d be saying, look, at least give us a few weeks where we’re not actively trying because then it’s basically like if you if you decide to fight loss as a goal and you’re still having issues of binge eating, which I will say is common, you know, just because you hire me to help you with this doesn’t mean you never binge again from day one, you know, am And I rarely I really never make that promise.
I never say to somebody, yeah, you know, after X amount of weeks, you will never have a binge eating issue again. But what I do say to people is that it becomes so infrequent that it will no longer negatively impact your life in any way. If it happens, it might happen. You know, relapses, to put it that way, are as much a part of this process as any other part of the process.
So take that in. Like that’s literally the case and, and it’s more about how you respond to those when they occur that makes the difference. You know, I had a lady recently who worked with me long term in the past and had issues with this stuff. I had issues of fat loss for like resolve to binge eating has an easy time with fat loss now.
And what she had she had a really stressful period there recently and she did binge and she felt so bad about it because she felt like, oh, you know, I haven’t binged in two years, you know, kind of the work that we did together. Yeah, I slipped now and that’s terrible. But the way I look at it is like you didn’t binge in two years.
Like what we did clearly work really well, you know, And it’s not some it’s not a failure. It’s like a testament to her abilities now that like, you know, something happens once every couple of years, you know, because you’ve an extremely stressful week in your life and it doesn’t really affect anything long term. It’s not that big a deal.
Paddy
But the analogy I always use, I thought I saw always analogies. I’m like, when you’re dealing with this at the start, you’re offroad driving, you know, it’s bumpy. It’s just the whole the suspension, everything, you know, your feed, the whole car is shaking, you know, every other turn, every other, you know, slight deviation. You’re down a pothole and you fucked it.
I find that literally you’re really struggling with this stuff. You know, eventually we get onto a little bit of a smoother path, but we’re still kind of in the out the the forest are still like twigs or branches, you know, there’s still bumps and, you know, all over the place. Eventually we get onto the road, right? But we get onto the road.
You get onto the highway, the motorway, whatever you want to call it. You know, you might have some nice, smooth, plain sailing, might be, you know, great. Everything’s working fantastically. And then you still hit a speed bump, you know, or you still hit a pothole, you know. So just because you’re on the motorway, you’re on the highway, it doesn’t mean that the roads are perfect from now on.
It just means that a likelihood of you hitting one of those bumps is reduced. You know, you might have tools, you might have better awareness, be like, Oh, there’s a speed bump ahead. I know what I need to do here and slow down. I need to move into this lane, whatever it is. You might have those tools to see it ahead of time.
But like anyone who’s driven for a while, you know you’re going to hit a speed bump and not notice it on the last second know, fuck, you know. So that’s the way I often analogize it so people can get okay, so it is part of the process, you know is thinking of it as failure is is wrong. It’s not failure.
It’s just part of the process and we all go through it. And I am thinking of like four or five clients or I’m like, can see the exact process where it’s like, we have done such great work for so long. And then they have that speed bump and they’re like, Fuck, am I a pack a day one? And that’s rarely the case, you know, it’s rarely the case that you need to start everything over again because you already built up a lot of skills, you already built up a lot of knowledge and mindfulness around all of this stuff.
And then what I often also described as well when we’re talking about this, you know, can we still be focusing on fat loss during this time period? Well, I often say to people as, look, when you’re hungry, do you find it easier or harder to not binge eat or not do whatever the the food issue that we’re dealing with?
When you’re hungry, do you find it easier or harder to deal with that? Obviously, for the vast majority of people, when they’re hungry, they’re not at their best self. They’re not, you know, really dialed in with this stuff. It’s it’s harder. So if we’re going to put ourselves into a deficit to try to lose fast, it’s going to make dealing all of this other stuff harder.
So I usually try to get people to go look for the next while. We’re just eating not maintenance, We’re just eating at a decent level of calories where you feel satisfied. You don’t feel restricted. And we’re just really working on the skills, the tools to harvest, the protocols, whatever it is, so that you don’t have this binge eating or this disordered eating pattern evidence right now.
Look, we’re never going to fix it, cure it, whatever words you want to use in that four week timeframe. But it really gets that commitment to go, okay, I’m actually working on something else other than fat loss. And actually just even giving yourself that oftentimes is such a big job, such a big leap that it can actually really trigger a lot of forward momentum in terms of actually dealing with the issue of you’re not always in this yo yo.
Oh, I’m always dieting. Like, I’m sure you know, you know, so many people that are always dying and are always on a diet, they remain the exact same. Oftentimes it’s because they’re really restrictive. Now for a week, maybe two weeks. I mean, the weekend or the Thursday comes about the issues, you know, could be an issue. And we’re stressed from this whatever we’re binge eating.
And I’ll start again on Monday and ultimately they’re still eating in a circle sort of maintenance across the week. What they’re eating 1000 calories Monday to Thursday, you know, which is not ideal.
Brian
Yeah, No had a girl I’m working at the moment to I don’t know a few weeks ago I said something along the lines of like, you know, when your fat loss phase is dawn and we move on to like just maxing out your performance and you know what I mean? What else I said. But now her response that I was like, geez, like the prospect of actually not just focusing on fat loss all the time is foreign Bush appealing.
So yeah, you just see it all the time where people like have one thing that they attempt to do and that’s to lose body fat. And even when they’re not, even when their behaviors don’t line up with that goal, they’re still engaging with large amounts of cognitive dietary restraint where it’s kind of the same stress on their psychology, even if they’re not getting at dawn, which is one of the reasons why, like on successful dieting, it’s so frustrating.
Like it’s it takes a toll and you don’t get anywhere and you know, the merry go round that you talked about basically is one of the thing I want to I want to talk about in this context, which I’ve alluded to already, was this idea of body image. All right. Because this I’ve found in recent years to be extremely important to also work on in this context as well.
All right. Because I quote Shannon Baer, who’s been on this podcast before a couple of times. I think.
Paddy
She is actually one of our most frequent guests.
Brian
And, you know, she she makes the point she does a lot of good work in this space as well. And as the quote that you could change how you look without changing how you feel about yourself. And then the reverse is also true in change of how you feel about yourself, way of changing how you look. Right. And for the most part, people want to change how they feel about themselves, right?
Because, you know, you see this all the time. It’s like people say, I’ll be happy when I’m X size, you know, in an address or whatever. That’s like, Are you though? Like, it depends like depends on your relationship with yourself and the route you took to get there. It may not necessarily be the case. If that’s not the case, then we’ve of failed you a little bit as coaches because you have to think about what you’re ultimately trying to get out of this.
And then again, you want to be happier, healthier and all these things that the tie in together.
Paddy
So just just on that, like I often say, actually, as we often use a mantra like there’s kind of three goals that you look for with this stuff that we talk about. You’re like, you’ve got health, you’ve got body composition, and then you’ve got performance and performance as both the physical and the mental side of things. You know, health is a bit wishy wash excuse me, can even speak a bit wishy washy in terms of like, what are we actually looking for, what that is it specific metrics, blood panels, like what’s going on there, you know, and body composition.
Again, I think that’s different for everyone. But what you can use as a kind of more practical way of thinking of those three categories and this is in line up perfectly, but it’s how do you look? How do you feel? How do you perform? You know, you could change. You could be focusing all your energy on how you look and it might not change how you feel.
It might not change how you perform. You know, conversely, you can be focusing on one of the other ones. It’s not changing the other ones, you know, and that’s really important to understand that you’ve basically got these three things to look at when you’re you’re assessing what’s going on. How do you look? Do you like the way you look?
Okay, maybe you don’t like the way you look. Why is that you know, it’s a change in how you feel. Okay. It would changing how you look, change how you feel. Oh, it would. Or you think it would. Why is that? That’s actually just our question in. And conversely, it’s like if I change how you feel, like do you care how you look?
For example, if I was to say, you know, you step on the scales, let’s say 75 kilos, your mind is off. Like if I weighed 75 kilos and my step on the scales, I would hate myself. I would, you know, I would be off the charts sad, emotional, angry, frustrated. And then if I was like, Right, you’re going to weigh 75 kilos, but you’re going to look exactly how you want, you know, down to the T if you were to be like our mental map of this is the exact body that I want.
But you weigh 75 kilos. Would the weight matter to you then? Obviously people are like, no, obviously the weight wouldn’t matter to me that, you know. So we have to be really clear in terms of what we’re actually trying to impacts here. And again, I use we often use that kind of how do you look, how do you feel, how do you perform and how do they tie into each other?
You know, would you be happy performing a certain way, you know, being like, oh, I got leaner for my performance time. I wasn’t present with my family. I wasn’t as present in my job. I wasn’t as able to train as hard in the gym or my sport or whatever. Would you be okay with that? You know, are we okay with those offs?
I mean, just have to have those conversations so that we can really dial in on this stuff.
Brian
Yeah, Now hundred percent. And so, yeah, basically we want to also work on this body image stuff simultaneously because you have to ask like, what are you ultimately trying to achieve with, you know, making these changes to your body composition and, you know, can they be achieved by doing some more inner work or if not achieved, at least complemented by because like I said, all right, I’m very to help someone lose weight, lose fat, all that good stuff.
But I don’t want this to come about and they don’t feel any better about themselves. So that’s why we do this body image work and that’s why we do exercises in that regard as well. I guess at the start, like huge amount of what drives this disordered eating and poor relations food is trying to influence your body image to achieve Is there a malcolm that’s detailed to to a large extent already in this podcast?
I don’t need to go through it again, but that’s why we’re trying to do that work. And you know, I can think of an example of a lady just finished working with me and, you know, there’s different things she’s doing. You know, first of all, like binge eating is reduced back to almost nothing. Like I said, it’s never like hundred percent little thing forever, but it’s almost nothing.
And well, you know, she’s doing things like going to dance classes that she would have been really nervous about going to because of like how our body looks going for group C swims again, parts of anywhere. Seeing her in a in a swimsuit, just, you know, a few months ago it just it was just no go. But we do this work on body image and all of a sudden it opens doors, that sort of stuff, which can often lead you to where you want to get to with this stuff.
Like, like I said, already towards the beginning. So we’re actually going to have time to go into much detail on this. I may have to do another episode on this potentially, but basically there’s there’s exercises that we do here to help improve people’s body image. Any clients listen to this, Will, We’ll probably be pretty familiar with them and a lot of it comes down to developing more body gratitude and modifying your behaviors around that that like reinforce negative body image, you know, so things like body checking, that sort of stuff.
And again, really figuring out like what kind of person you want to be and how you want to live your life. Right. And seeing, you know, what ways can we do that besides just changing how much, you know, adipose tissue is on your frame right. And, you know, a lot of that comes back to, again, identifying what your values are, what’s important to you, how do you want to live your life, what kind of person you want to be so again, this may not be like all this stuff may not be what people expect when they they come on board to do nutrition coaching with me to do this kind of work.
But this this is what we do and is what it takes. And it’s immensely rewarding to see so many people have breakthroughs and then be able to go and live the life they want to live and be the person they want to be.
Paddy
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, look, you have to go somewhere and we won’t reveal where, you know, we’ll just sit and the down low and be real cryptic, but you have a hard edge. So we’re going to wrap it up here. But is there any, like parting words that you want to say? Anything where like I know, obviously, look, if someone’s dealing with this stuff and they think they need help, you have coaching spots available.
You know, you’re always available for consultations. Dean is also available. He has coaching spots available, like if it’s more the full coaching aspects like myself, Gary, Nicola and Shane are able to deal with this stuff and obviously we refer to you, You’re our that’s why we hired you. That’s why you’re the head of nutrition. That’s why you’re the guy.
You’re the guy for this stuff, you know? So like if we have an issue, we always lean internally, be like Brian. How do I deal with this person? What do you think we need to do? We might do an internal consult, whatever right? But other than that, maybe someone wants to try. Go it alone. You’ve any kind of parting words for them or any parting information, obviously.
Look, they’ve just listened to whatever, an hour, 40 or an hour, 30 minute podcast. So there’s a lot of information there. But you know yourself.
Brian
Yeah, I mean, basically like putting all the things together that I’ve gone through in this podcast, like those are two steps. Like there’s very little besides the maybe the body image stuff that I didn’t have time to go through. Now, like, of the specifics of those exercises, like I’ve tried to give at least something on those. But as for the rest of it, I think I’ve been pretty straightforward and like this is what it looks like now.
Obviously it’s very different when you hire me as your coach and I’m having this dialog with you and we’re using some of these, you know, CBT techniques, reasons when these techniques or so like, yeah, actually I suppose like doing some personal research into like acceptance and commitment therapies of happiness is a really good book and I like for that.
That’s immensely useful just in general, and it can definitely apply to a lot of these situations. But yeah, I see all the things that we discussed, like need setting goals. You need to understand why your relationship with food is the way it is. You need to start like working with yourself on this stuff and doing the introspection and people don’t like to do that.
Some people don’t like to do. People like to go to the and, you know, scan their stuff on MyFitnessPal. They don’t really like to examine who they are when they’re just alone with their thoughts. Right. But that’s what it takes. Like not one of us like are like 100% comfortable doing that. But that’s what’s going to take.
Paddy
I’m definitely sadistic because I fucking like doing that stuff. If I was in the position that stallion was in would do the same things that he did. You know, like I’m from a position that I’m like, Yeah, okay, I’m actually a fucking terrible person. I probably would do X, Y, and Z. You know, I’m not that special to me.
Brian
Yes. What a nice way to put it, huh? But now, like, it’s all these things I’ve thought about my pleading. It’s like, you know, you have to set up some process goals. Like we have an abundant amount of content on goal setting. You know, there’s clips from you’ve done podcast Gary on this recently now towards the year whatever you know you can listen to those if you need help with trying to establish goals on this.
And this is basically getting to work like it all kind of works the same way. Like you have a goal, you figured out what it is you’re aiming at. You decide what processes are going to get you there. The process is basically all the things that we’ve discussed today, and it’s just about getting to the work and being consistent with those like you would with any other goal.
So don’t you got anything else to add? I think this is maybe the best podcast I’ve ever done, so let’s just leave it there.
Paddy
Fantastic I only have been listening. If you are interested in reaching out, our contact details are below. If you want to find out what we do, you can follow us on Instagram. That’s where we put out the most amount of information. Obviously you can join the email newsletter. You get content that’s not seen anywhere else. You can follow us with any of the links below.
YouTube. Tik Tok where some of us are on Tik Tok or whatever, you know, like you can find information about us, right? But if you are dealing with this stuff, I would just say it’s a very hard journey to alone. And that doesn’t mean that you need to, you know, get coaching from Brian. But what I would recommend is actually talking to other humans, talking to other humans this stuff because once you voice and you actually try to articulate the issues that you’re dealing with, it really does make it a lot easier to actually deal with in your own mind.
All right. And I often say that the human mind is meant for dialog. We’re not meant to just be listening to our own thoughts in just our own head. You know, we’re a hyper social animal. Why would you think that being in your own head is a good thing? You know, like only being in your own head with these thoughts is a good thing.
We’re supposed to work through ideas together collaboratively, right? And so talk to people. Doesn’t have to be Brian, obviously. Look, Brian’s fantastic. Oh, he’d be able to help you, but it could literally just be your granny, your mother, your friend, your brother. I don’t know, you know, someone that is there to just listen to your thoughts. You know and put it in and I guys are going to wrap it.
We will see you again on the next one. Will probably get Brian on, maybe even Shannon as well to do some sort of body image stuff, talk through that stuff. We’ll see how this whole female series goes. And what I would say is it really does help us if you share like subscribe, do all that stuff with the podcast, because then more people see us and you know, that helps more people, which is ultimately the goal anyway, guys, he said.
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