Is Eating Healthy Preventing You From Losing Weight

Related Dish On Ditching Diets Podcast Episodes

• Why Deprivation Diets Never Work Long-Term
• Why Self Criticism Sabotages Weight Loss
• How To Have A Healthy Relationship With Food
• Eating Clean and Not Losing Weight
• Symptoms You’re on the Wrong Diet
• How to Change Your Mindset to Lose Weight

Is Eating Healthy Stalling Your Weight Loss Podcast Transcript

Today I want to talk about why eating healthy might be preventing you from losing weight because of the diet rules in your brain that keep messing you up when you’re trying to lose weight. Because of the good and bad food mentality you have.

Because of your deprivation and restrictive diet mindset and because of the underlying emotional and stress eating you may be doing.

I know before I lost 80 pounds, I just thought I needed to discipline myself and eat good, and my definition of good was eating cantaloupe and carrots. I always thought if I could just eat only healthy foods, I be good, I could lose weight then I could eat like normal. But that approach never worked and now I look back and understand why.

It’s funny because when I started losing weight, I didn’t think about eating healthy too much. I didn’t pressure myself into doing that. I just started eating a little less of the things I normally ate. I was a consultant traveling weekly, working crazy hours and I had a routine where Monday I would go to Pei Wei, Tuesday I would go to Chipotle and Wednesday usually we had a team dinner out.

I didn’t stop that routine. I didn’t stop ordering the things I normally ordered. In the beginning I just ate less of what I normally ordered. I never gave up anything, so I never felt deprived, and I think this is where many women go wrong.

They pressure themselves to completely overhaul their diet because they believe they can only eat healthy foods to lose weight, or they use eating healthy foods as a morality. I drink a smoothie every morning so I’m good!

Very often when a woman has a weight loss consultation with me, they tell me I’m eating healthy. “I don’t understand why I’m not losing weight. I eat healthy.”

My response always is what does that mean? What do you mean when you say I eat healthy? I mean if I asked 10 midlife women what eating healthy means, I would get 10 very different responses.

And I’m not surprised by that because there have been so many diet trends the past 50 years and now with social media every day there’s a video of someone saying this one food is unhealthy, it’s killing you, it’s making you fat, it’s making you inflamed, it has too much sugar, it spikes your blood sugar.

Like every marketing buzzword is attached to these fear mongering videos and so you have generations of women who’ve grown up with all these diet trends and now we have people on social media saying scary things like fruit makes you fat. Oatmeal’s bad for you!

I promise you, the reason you’re overweight has nothing to do with the foods you are eating or with the type of foods, you eat, or the type of ingredients in those foods. You are not overweight because of the foods you are eating.

You being overweight has everything to do with how your mindset, your mentality about food and how you deal with emotions and stressors of your life.

For example, if you’re in the kitchen eating a bag of Doritos because you’re ticked off at your husband, the Doritos are not why you have a weight issue.

The problem is you won’t go talk to your husband and tell him why you’re mad at him. You don’t communicate how you are feeling, and you won’t have conversations with others in your life that you need to have. You’re eating your feelings and telling the bag of Doritos how you feel.

The common issue I see with my clients is they say Doritos are unhealthy, I shouldn’t be eating them, Dorito’s are making me fat because every time I eat them, I eat them out of control and once I start, I can’t stop. I’m getting fat. I overate Doritos and my pants are now tight. I need to lose weight right now. Why do I keep doing this?

So, I’ve been coaching midlife women for 11 years now and the interesting thing is when you’ve been coaching women on sustainable fat loss for as long as I have, you see the same issues over and over and over and over and over again.

The Doritos aren’t the problem. The issue is every time you feel stressed or have a negative emotion, you eat the Doritos. Every time you need comfort, you eat Dorito’s. Every time you have a bad day, you eat Dorito’s.

You eat Dorito’s because you’re uncomfortable, don’t know how to deal with a situation, have anxiety, are mad, sad, bored, lonely, need to relax, looking for pleasure, tired, need to unwind or whatever. Insert any food that in place of Doritos – it’s the same issue.

Because Doritos aren’t the problem. It’s all that emotional stuff that’s the problem. You think you can manipulate your diet, cut out things you enjoy, have discipline, lose all your weight and keep it off forever without ever dealing with any of that crap, which are the real reasons why you are overeating.

You can’t calorie count your way out of emotions and stress.

The problem for most clients I have worked with is they’ve absorbed so many diet rules over the course of their life that they think they’re eating healthy, but they’re actually eating in a very disordered way.

They cut out all the foods that they tend to overeat or classify as bad or unhealthy. Then they try to be good and then something emotional happens, or a situation that’s stressful, or they just have a bad day and then they overeat those foods like a jerk and then they say why am I like this?

They try to guilt and shame themselves into losing weight. Why do I always do this? These foods are bad for me. What’s wrong with me? I see this pattern constantly. This behavior pattern of being strict with rules then something happens and there’s an emotional spiral followed by guilt and shame.

So, you’re not actually eating healthy if this is what you are doing and 9 times out of 10 this is what I have seen from clients. For some of my clients, eating healthy is code for I cut out all sugar.

Other clients it means I don’t eat bread and potatoes as if bread and potatoes are the problem. People have been eating bread and potatoes since the beginning of time and people didn’t have a weight problem then. That’s because people couldn’t afford back then to emotionally eat.

I want you to think about this. When you villainize sugar or bread or potatoes, usually your thinking is laced with I don’t eat those things because I’m afraid of them. I’m afraid they’ll make me fat or I’m afraid I’ll eat them out of control. I just can’t have them. It’s all fear based.

Just the other day I saw a post somewhere that said bananas make you fat and that bananas spike your blood sugar so therefore, bananas are why you’re overweight. And I was like what?

When I was 215 pounds, I guarantee you I did not have a banana problem. I didn’t sit around all day eating bananas like a monkey in the wild.

My problem was after a long and hard day working, I would come home and overeat because I was lonely, sad, depressed, tired, stressed, annoyed, looking for pleasure and in pain with a bad hip.

Coming home and eating food was something I looked forward to. My weight wasn’t because I had a banana problem, and bananas are not why you have a weight problem either or any other food that spikes blood sugar.

When a client tells me they don’t eat something like ice cream because it’s unhealthy, I’ll say what does ice cream do to you? Any they’ll say well it’s not really doing anything to me but when I eat one bowl of ice cream I end up eating four and lose control.

That doesn’t mean ice cream is bad for you. That’s not a healthy issue. That’s a losing control issue, not an ice cream issue. The reason you lose control is because you have so many diet rules. Forbidden food rules.

You have so much anxiety around certain foods that the moment you get around these foods, you eat them because you fear never having them again then you feel shame and guilt.

Shame and guilt lead to lack of motivation. Then you eat all of it to get it out of your system and then you try to cut it out, abstain from it and then get stuck in this loop of cutting it out and overeating it.

Your mind is used to deprivation and restriction and good and bad food rules, and you think this is how you’re supposed to lose weight, and that is why you overeat these foods. Think about it when you eat a salad, you think to yourself I’m being good. If you eat pasta, you think to yourself, I’m being bad.

When you say no to cake, deep down you’re telling yourself I’m being good. I’m so disciplined. Look at me. I’m so proud of myself! Let’s say you skip breakfast because you’re a fasting maniac, you’re thinking I’m doing so good!

And then let’s say you end up eating breakfast because you’re hungry instead of fasting. Then you tell yourself I’m not committed. I’m lazy. I have no willpower. Or if you eat the cake, you tell yourself I’m being so bad. Might as well eat more cake since I was already bad. I’ll start over tomorrow or Monday!

Many of us who have struggled with our weight, associate our eating behavior with our morality. I’m a good or bad person if I do this or that with food. If you really think about it, it’s quite disordered.

Most of us think this is normal way of thinking and behaving with food and then we try to count our calories and lose weight and try to take all this junk along for the ride and wonder why we don’t lose weight, or we don’t keep it off.

It’s because you can’t out diet or calorie count this dieter’s mindset driving your behavior with food. Not fixing your dieter’s mindset is the real issue. That’s why losing weight is so hard.

The second you do anything outside of following your strict food rules, your brain lights up the guilt alarms. I’ve ruined everything. I’ve messed up! I’m weak! I’m a failure! Gotta cut calories tomorrow and be good because today I was bad.

Somewhere along the line you began using food as a measurement of you own self-worth and you’ve turned foods into rules and use it as a morality score card for yourself. When you’re eating healthy foods, you say I’m being so good!

When you’re eating anything unhealthy, you say I’m being bad! I suck! What’s wrong with me? I shouldn’t have eaten that. I feel bloated. I’m going to get fat now. And that right there is the real problem with your weight.

You can focus all you want on eating healthy foods and manipulating your diet and calories, but I guarantee if you’re measuring your morality and using diet rules as a morality score card then this is why you’re struggling with weight. It’s not the food.

If you’ve been dieting for years and decades, your brain thinks it knows what’s right and wrong when it comes to eating. And the second you eat something outside the righteous rules it freaks out.

Why did you do that? You ruined everything! You’re never going to be able to lose weight. You’re hopeless. You’re too far gone.

All that self-criticism, self-judgement and shame come rolling in and that is just not motivating. And it is even more fuel for binging and overeating. It’s like throwing gas on the fire of eating your face off.

When you label foods as good and bad, your brain stores that information. Sugar is bad. Cake is bad. Ice cream bad. Bread is bad. Your brain now puts sugar, cake, bread, ice cream, whatever you have classified as “bad foods” in the same category as murderers, hurricanes, tornadoes, killers, fires, robbers. Ice cream and robbers are a level 10 threat. Bread and killers are a level 10 threat.

When you label food as bad, dirty, junk, toxic, fattening, anything like that, your brain doesn’t know the difference between a killer and bread. And when your brain doesn’t know the difference, it has to react to bread with the same panic and anxiety as if you were trapped in a room with a serial killer. It’s crazy, but that’s how our brains operate.

This is why it’s so important for you to distinguish what’s actually bad for you vs. what you have labeled as bad for you. You eating rat poison is bad for you. You eating bread as a sandwich for lunch is not toxic, bad, fattening, dirty or whatever.

As a side note, I lost 80 pounds eating a sandwich for lunch on bread almost every day. Regular whole wheat bread. It wasn’t the fancy expensive kind. Dave’s Killer bread wasn’t even a thing 16 years ago when I lost weight. I ate regular Sara Lee bread and when I was traveling for work subway was my lunch many days.

You eating six slices of bread because you freak out over eating one slice of bread is because deep down you’re scared you’ll never get it again because you’ve labeled it a bad food. Well, yeah eating six slices of bread may not be great for you and it may make you gain weight.

But you’re not gaining weight from the bread, you gain weight because you freak out that you ate one slice of bread because you have labeled the bread as bad and toxic and whatever. Therefore, you feel bad. You feel guilty and you freak out and eat six slices. Your mindset is causing the weight gain. Not the bread.

When you eat something that’s not on your healthy list, your brain flips out. You feel like a complete failure that you ate bread. You don’t think rationally to yourself like well, that was a choice and move on. You think what the hell is wrong with me? Why don’t I have any control? Why do I keep doing this? I’m going to get so fat!

What this means is you have to deconstruct your mindset around what you’re thinking is healthy. I guarantee for most of you – your weight has nothing to do with whether you eat healthy foods or not. It has everything to do with what you think about foods – the ones you do eat and the ones you don’t eat.

Especially the ones you keep trying to cut out of your life over and over and over again. Chances are high you want to enjoy these foods in your life from time to time. You don’t want to cut them out for the rest of your life. You will never know how to eat those foods in control if your solution is always deprivation.

Sometimes you will be able to have some and move on and sometimes you will have more than you intended then go to screw-it-ville, double down and restrict more and that right there is the weight problem. It’s not because you have them sometimes, it’s because you flip out when you have them and eat more.

So, the issue isn’t that you haven’t found the right food list or right diet plan, your issue is you have too many strict food rules, an unhealthy relationship with food from having a deprivation mindset and you eat in response to emotions and stress. You don’t have good coping mechanisms.

I wish every woman could really understand that you can have foods you enjoy and that satisfy you and lose weight. You can’t eat like a jerk every time you eat them and lose weight. You can’t eat them every time you feel bad or stressed or need comfort and lose weight.

But if you put them in your plan here and there and you really enjoy them then that food is not going to be harmful. In fact, it’s better for you to occasionally enjoy them vs. deprive yourself and then binge on them.

For example, I love chocolate chip cookies. But chocolate chip cookies taste way better on a day where I’m in a good mood and I sit down and truly enjoy eating them.

Chocolate chip cookies aren’t great when I’m sneaking in a cookie or bite here and there all day because I’m stressed or ticked off at someone and rage eating. I’m thinking about being ticked off while eating. That’s not me enjoying the cookies.

So, when you’re eating foods that you keep saying are bad for you, the problem isn’t the food. It’s because you eat foods like this or in reaction to something. Healthy eating doesn’t fix that. Losing weight doesn’t fix that.

It just makes things worse because now forbidden foods become forbidden comfort. It becomes I’m not supposed to have cookies but that’s the only thing that makes me feel better.

The cookie now represents the only way for you to relax, to self-soothe, get relief and you’re also saying I can’t have moments where I feel bad.

When your diet says you can’t have cookies. You can’t have the things you’ve always had to cope with life, then you struggle. At some point you just give into the feeling bad, and you binge on cookies. And that’s what happens when we try to eat only healthy foods and have strict food rules.

When you lose weight, you’re going to go through life with the same exact stresses, exhaustion, bad feelings that you have today. That means you must figure out how to deal with those things in new ways and that’s what causes many individuals to never lose weight even though they eat healthy foods.

It’s not because you don’t want it bad enough or that you have no discipline or that you’re addicted to sugar. No, no, no. It’s because you’re trying to fix how you feel with some impossible food rules instead of fixing how you feel and figuring out what in your life needs to change so that it’s not a tug-of-war with food when life is hard.

You keep putting rules around food because you think food is the problem, but food is not the problem. You’re drowning in these underlying issues and trying to out diet them. It’s crazy to me how we focus on these isolated things and become afraid of certain foods, but we never dig deeper into what’s really going on with our eating patterns.

We always want to avoid doing that deeper work because it’s easier somehow in our minds to just manipulate foods we eat by telling ourselves that these foods are bad for me, let’s see how long I can cut it out, see how good I can be because cutting it out means I’m disciplined which we tell our selves is a moral badge of honor only to feel like a big fat failure when we overeat it. Then round and round we go.

I think one of the most important questions a woman can ask is what is going on in my life? Many women I’ve coached are not happy. Sadly, I see this daily. They aren’t happy and they think losing weight will fix them and fix their unhappiness.

Many women I’ve worked with cannot say no to anybody. They are the only person on the planet they ever say no to which leads to resentment.

They never get what they want to disappoint or hurt other people’s feelings, but it always comes at their own expense. I had a client who told me recently she went to a graduation party and ate like a jerk. She couldn’t figure out why she ate like a jerk and as we were digging into this, she realized she didn’t want to go to the party.

She ate like a jerk because she resented being at the party. She had other things to do, and I told her you should have just said no. This is the perfect example of what I’m talking about. Setting boundaries with other people, learning to say no and giving yourself what you need.

Your goal is to keep weight off you lose long-term. Lose it and keep it off. Because if it comes back, it will come back with a vengeance. When people tell you to cut certain foods out of your diet because of some pseudo-science that’s trendy right now and that may not be popular in 5 years, and now you’re calling these foods bad or fear them, you’re cutting out the wrong thing.

The food is not the problem why you can’t lose weight. A lot of women are good at being strict on a diet temporarily because they have so much shame and guilt about being overweight and that is MORE painful than the pain you feel for being overweight.

Then eventually, you lose just enough weight to where you don’t feel that emotional pain anymore and you’re not thinking horrible things about yourself and your weight every day. And when you have no more weight to lose and haven’t fixed the issues I talked about today, guess what?

Your brain will remind you a little food won’t hurt. You should eat this. And if the entire time you were losing weight, you thought certain foods were bad, the second you start eating them after cutting them out your brain goes… oh my God I screwed up.

Here were go again. You know you shouldn’t eat those. And that’s where you regain weight. You don’t deserve that. You deserve better and you deserve a life that you want to live where you’re not a prisoner to food and food rules like this.

Because what do you want to solve? Not eating Doritos and having a life filled with feeling like you can’t communicate to your spouse? Or do you want to understand why you don’t feel safe communicating with your spouse or saying no to a graduation party?

You deserve to become someone who helps you communicate better and recognize the deeper issues going on driving you to overeat food so that you don’t need to rage eat Doritos every time you’re ticked off at your spouse. That is real weight loss and eating healthy foods is great, but doesn’t fix any of these deeper issues and it’s exactly what I see with clients and why they’ve been stuck.  

A woman will have a consultation with me and say I’m eating in a calorie deficit, I walk every day, I exercise, I’m doing all the things, and nothing works for me. And I will start working with them and see these things going on.

You can’t out diet or calorie deficit your way out of these behavior patterns. These inner things need to be worked on in order to keep weight off forever so, if you’ve been doing these things and thinking what’s wrong with me? Why do I keep doing this? Hopefully, this sheds some light on what’s going on!