Coaching & Cocktails
Coaching & Cocktails
S4 Ep 11 - From Competitive Dieting and Macro Tracking to Food Freedom
Ever wondered what it's like to be a competitive bodybuilder, meticulously tracking macros, and then shifting to intuitive eating? We're back this week with Erin P. as our special guest host where we'll go on a journey from tracking every morsel to food freedom and intuitive eating.
As if that's not enough to satisfy your appetite, we serve up a feast of wisdom on mindful eating. Erin and I open up about our personal struggles with emotional eating and how we've learned to manage it. We share the tricks of the trade—competition preparation, tracking macros, and the most important ingredient, mindful eating. We also dish out tips on how to avoid mindless eating and the benefits of taking time to genuinely enjoy our meals.
Finally, we wrap up our conversation with a hearty discussion on weight maintenance and food freedom. We underline the importance of trusting your body to make healthy choices and the significant role of mindfulness in overall well-being.
Don't get weird, use your head, it'll all be OK!
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Hello, hello, Hi everybody. Who do I have with me again today? Miss Erin.
Speaker 2:I gotta come back. I just love it so much.
Speaker 1:You know we got so much good feedback, erin, on the first podcast that ended up being two podcasts the interview that we did with you so many there was just like everybody just really was like into it. I just figured, since Brandi is so busy these days raising children and with the holidays and stuff, I thought we Erin would be my co-host for a little while and we have some other topics and things we're both really passionate about, so I thought it'd be really cool for us to be able to chat about a few more things together. What kind of feedback did you get from people on the podcast, like competitors and non-competitors, like? Did you have like I'm curious from your friend group or whatever? What the feedback?
Speaker 2:was the biggest thing was a lot of okay. So they got a better picture of what PrEP was like and like the difficulties through it and how I was navigating. Because you know when they would check in with me and say, hey, how's it going? I would be like I'm tired but I'm good. But they don't. Nobody knows the inner workings of it unless you're in it or unless you are a bodybuilder. So you know, having to explain everything was hard for me, but when they listened to it it was really interesting because a lot of people resonated with things that I said, even though they're not bodybuilders. So you know, like the tracking, I have some friends that do track. I have some friends that do weigh their food, obviously, that weigh themselves, go into the gym. You know the motivation for that and you know when they wanna incorporate things like the journaling and the meditation and the self-care things, they will everybody's like. So ready for part two. So you need to drop that one.
Speaker 1:Well, it came out on Monday. Oh, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:Because they were just like oh my gosh, we want to hear more like you guys were great. So I was so excited about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, part two came out this past Monday, so it was the November 27th, so the Monday after Thanksgiving was part two. So it is out there. But that's great. I'm glad because I feel like even you know all the years that Brandi and I have been doing these podcasts, even our competition focused ones and air quotes have something to take away for everybody. Right Like it's it really it just comes down to lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, some of the stuff is like real specific to like you know a particular show or we're doing feedback on a show or something like that, but there's always a nugget in there that's going to apply to somebody in their life. Or even just being able to hear what competitive bodybuilders do and overcome to be successful, right Like there's just there's just how to be successful in life, kind of things in that. Right so health, fitness, mind, body, all of those. So really what Erin and I wanted to do was kind of extrapolate some of those topics we got into in her interview, because I think sometimes what's lacking in some of the conversational podcasts is like, okay, well, that's really cool that Erin did all those really great things and yay for Erin, but I don't know how to do it right. So what we wanted to do is kind of take some of those topics and sort of maybe walk through the process and some of the challenges right that come along with it and hopefully have some like actual actionable steps that people can take from the conversation about how they might be able to apply that for themselves right. Like that's kind of our goal, so hopefully we'll achieve that. Yeah, so the first topic we wanted to get into today, which I think was it's a really challenging one for a lot of people and it is really just I kind of the way I wrote it out in our podcast topics.
Speaker 1:It was kind of like soup to nuts how Erin went from like she wasn't tracking shit right Back when we first started to she thought she was tracking ish to like meal plan, to like super tracker, like doing your own meal planning, to intuitive eating right. So how did you get from I've never tracked a macro in my life to intuitive eating right, with some competitions in between there. And I'll first say there's been such a big push, like in the wellness community, like you know. You see people like intuitive eating and mindful eating and like all these things cool, great, get it. But there is no intuitive eating without actual intuition about what the fuck you're doing. Yes, period, right. You do not get to go from zero, right? You couldn't have gone from Erin 1.0, right To Erin 4.0, four years later with intuitive eating, without all those things that happened in between. They had to happen.
Speaker 1:You don't go from zero to intuitive eating or mindful eating without understanding how to eat in the first place, cause otherwise your intuition is going to be to eat whatever you've always eaten, right? Intuitive eating is not about well, I'm gonna eat whatever I'm craving and I'm gonna eat whatever my body tells me I want I want to eat. My mind tells me, oh, that's not intuitive eating, right. So I want to make that really clear. So that's why I think it's really important to kind of go through this process, because I think that the process you went through is really exactly how it does go to the legitual place of intuitive eating, right. Yeah, so do you want to try to? So we can kind of start from? I mean, we talked a little bit of detail in the first half of the podcast about how you started tracking and your tracking wasn't really tracking right.
Speaker 1:So how, I guess, maybe like what did you do and what were you learning along the way, like what was clicking for you along the way that allowed you to get where you are now?
Speaker 2:So the beginning and this is before this is when you and I first met and I remember you said log or write down in an email like three days worth of food, don't think about me. And like, oh, if I have some chips that Tina's gonna get mad. Just log whatever you eat, right? So I remember doing that and I sent them back to you and I had worked with a trainer before this and she kind of told me to do the same thing and both of you said you're under eating, like you're not eating enough. And in my you know and again I wasn't trying to, like you know, skim off things or like eat better or like healthier quote unquote, because you guys were looking at my logs but a lot of people don't eat enough. And that was the biggest thing for me and that's one of the biggest things I've learned about myself through eating is, yeah, I'm eating a lot more and everything and it's good stuff, but, like you guys, we have to eat. We have to eat. So that was the number one thing. I was like whoa, so I'm supposed to be eating more than this for breakfast and lunch and I'm supposed to have more than one snack a day, because I was the one, just like many other people, who I wasn't eating enough during the day. And then when I got home, that three o'clock before dinner time it was oh my God, I am like ravenous. I just want to eat whatever's in the pantry. I am, I don't care, you know. And then dinner time comes around and then you want big helping at dinner, and then you want a snack afterwards, and then it's, the cycle starts all over again. So I am definitely far from that person anymore.
Speaker 2:But going from not tracking to tracking was very hard because I'd never done it before. You know, nobody's taught me how to do that. I've never weighed my food before, I've never had an app that would kind of tell me how much I was eating and what I was eating. So that was hard. And when I started doing it, like I said in the last podcast, you know, I lied to myself like I would weigh a certain amount of food and I would be like, well, there's an extra spoonful here, let me just put that in there. Nobody's going to know, kind of thing.
Speaker 2:And that was really bad for me as a person trusting myself too. So you know, and after we figured out, okay, that's not working. You're not losing the weight that you need to. Let's come back to the you know standard diet, like I'm going to like map out what you're going to eat and then we're going to weigh it and you have to be exact. And then, once the weight started coming off, then I was like, oh, that's how you track. Okay, that makes sense. You can't lie, because it's going to come out in the scale and the in the pictures.
Speaker 1:So yeah, what I always tell people is like, whether you track it or not, your body does right. So, and and and also, to be clear, like my, fitness power isn't the only tool. There's lots of apps but there's lots of ways to quote, unquote track your food right. So, whether you're just writing out on a napkin your food diary or in a paper log or a spreadsheet or, you know, taking pictures Some people do picture logs you know you cannot go anywhere without knowing where you currently are, right. So like literally. So just to kind of reiterate that the number one thing is to know where you are. You have to do some level of tracking right. It doesn't have to be to the macro, it doesn't even there has to be some level of calorie and nutrition accountability. To start, you got to know where you are to know where you want to go, right. So that's kind of the first place to start. Yeah, Yep.
Speaker 2:So you know, after I got the hang of it, then I feel like that's where I'm going to throw the word addiction out there. That's where it was like I had to have my phone on me at all times to figure out okay, am I eating an apple? I need to weigh how much an apple is and log it. But, honestly, part of that was because of the competition prep too. You know you have to. You know any other person? No, I would never recommend unless there's some sort of a special circumstance Like I would never recommend to any of my family or friends to get my fitness powder to track their food. I think that's totally unnecessary, but for the sport of bodybuilding it has to be. You have to do it because it makes you accountable and it keeps you on track, like you know. But so once I got the hang of it you know it was I could do it in my sleep, you know and it got to the point where, you know the last prep that I went through, I could eyeball a measurement of 100 grams of rice, like it was. So it's really cool to see that too, like I would be. So like, oh, my gosh, the scale. I don't have my scale, but it was. I could figure out what I was eating and how much. It was just based on all the other times I logged.
Speaker 2:So I gradually kind of got away from the scale a little bit and there were times in prep where we didn't weigh anything and I was still maintaining and that to me was like really, really big, because I was like, wow, I'm still losing the weight or I'm maintaining my weight, I'm not really logging anything. I must have really grown from, you know, three years ago when I started all this stuff and I definitely have because, like I said, I wasn't weighing and I wasn't tracking for a little bit and I was still making the strides that I you know of the competition in the prep. So and then eventually we were like no scale, let's not do it, let's not do my fitness pal, and the biggest weight was lifted off my shoulders. From that I am so much happier now that I'm not a slave to that app or my little scale in the kitchen. It is so nice and I don't overeat. That's the thing it's really.
Speaker 2:I think I needed to weigh my food for a little bit and kind of track to get to where I am right now of not tracking, because you know, for my entire life I never tracked anything. I never cared really enough to figure out what I was eating and you know if I was under eating or overeating. But this whole process made me like my eyes were wide open. I was like, oh my gosh, yeah, I need to eat more here, or I need to add a little bit of stuff here, or I maybe skim down a little bit here, and it's really nice to see that growth that I had from the beginning until now.
Speaker 1:So we should probably talk a little bit about you know so, like, how that all works. So, yeah, so for competition purposes, if we're talking about, like a competitive bodybuilding athlete, nutrition to the gram is important, right? Like you're just not going to get away from weighing your food and tracking it in some form, right, my fitness pal or whatever app you'd like to use, so that aside, for the average human being, right? Or people who even my competitive athletes so you know I do very much, you know, try to help my competitive bodybuilders in their growth seasons have periods of not tracking, right Now. So there are people who tend towards under eating and there are people who tend towards overeating. So having some accountability, even in a growth season, for my competitive bodybuilders, right, tends to, you know, be necessary.
Speaker 1:But we still encourage, like you know, untracked meals. I do not say cheat meals. You will never hear the word cheat in my vocabulary unless I'm cheating on a test. My taxes are my husband, which would never happen, okay, so we don't cheat on our. I always say you do not cheat on your health and fitness goals, right, you may have an untracked meal, a treat meal, you may just decide to eat more period, right, but we don't cheat. It's not a cheat. So you know you have to. If your goal is to lose body fat, right? If your ultimate goal is to lose body fat, some type of calorie restriction is necessary, period. Do you have to use my fitness pal? Absolutely not. Do you need to in some way track your calories? Yes, you do, right.
Speaker 1:So again, start with the. Let me just log what I'm eating, right? Every single athlete, a client that I, lifestyle or a competitive bodybuilder, I gotta know if they're not already tracking them, like just long, for a week or two, right? My favorites are the ones that come back saying they're eating 1,200 calories and they're 50 pounds overweight. That's not a thing, right? I just wanna make I wanna.
Speaker 1:The harsh reality is you are not eating sub 1,000 calories a day and 50 pounds overweight. Your metabolism is not broken. This is not how science works, right? So I'm gonna call bullshit on everybody and anybody listening. I don't wanna hear yeah, but cause that's just not how it works. What's actually happening is you're restricting, restricting. You're restricting all day or all week, and then you're blowing out your wide in calories on the weekends, or again.
Speaker 1:You're not being honest with yourself, right? So, first and foremost, you have to love yourself enough to be honest with yourself. Right? It's not necessarily about being honest with me. You're relying to yourself first, right, I can see that it's not working. So you're you know you're lying to yourself before you're lying to me.
Speaker 1:So the number one thing is to be honest with yourself, love yourself enough to really identify where you are right. Are you under eating? Are you overeating? Both are detrimental, right. So see where you are and then track in some way, right.
Speaker 1:So portion control right, there's so many ways to do portion control. My, putting your weight, your food, on a scale or in a measuring cup or into my fitness pal works. But so do things like the hand method, right, you could say the palm of your hand, and everybody's palm sizes are different, and that's by design, right? I have a smaller palm than Erin does, so I probably should have a smaller amount of protein for my palm size than Erin should. Or the size of my fist, for you know my carbohydrates, or my fruit or my vegetables, whatever. So there's lots of ways to track. Picture logging is a thing, right, so snapping a picture of your meals to kind of track so that you know what's going on pen and paper, right, so all of those things. So you just at least have an idea of what you're doing, or start to reduce your calories or even increase your calories if you find out you're under or overeating for your goals. But then right. So then it becomes of okay, well, but how do I get from? Now? I'm tracking my food and Erin. Maybe you can provide some insight on how this worked for you.
Speaker 1:What changed for you that made you want to eat healthier, right? So it's not just you know to get to intuitive eating. It really is about you know eating for your goals, right, eating for health, eating for longevity right. We're not talking about just you know you were never eating calories. Just eat calories, right? This is not a if it fits your macros approach, I don't. I mean, fine, that's fine if you want to call it that, but it's not about eating pop tarts and pizza and whatever fits into my calories, right? How did you get to that place? So, tracking or not tracking what made if you had 3,000 calories, what made you want to eat 3,000 calories of something more nutritious than crap? When you have 3,000 calories, you could eat like two big macks a day.
Speaker 2:Right, and this is what's fun.
Speaker 1:Or two impossible burgers or whatever that bullshit vegan that vegan bullshit is. Vegans don't kill me, but that's bullshit. Don't eat that shit. It is, and no, as a vegan.
Speaker 2:It is, don't eat it, Don't eat that, but it's so, it's really. It's sad because you know the state of America right now everybody's sick, everybody has something going on and internally, and you know people are like, oh, we're living longer and stuff. And I think of my grandparents who just passed within the past, you know like a couple of years, and you know they weren't living. They were 85 years old, 90 years old, and they were lying in a bed. They could barely talk, move, eat, and they were like that for like five years. And I was like I do not want to be like that, I cannot, I cannot see myself. I'm about to turn 40 next year and I'm like that's 40 years away, that's really not that long of a time. And I'm like I don't just want to live another 40 years, I want to live until I, you know, into my hundreds and I want to be moving and, you know, mobile and still doing things on my own, like I don't like thinking I have to rely on people all the time, you know, and I just thought about my future and I didn't want to be another statistic and I'm like. So I always ask myself I'm like, okay, if I eat this. How am I going to feel an hour from now? And when I did that I was like, oh my gosh, okay, yeah, an hour from now I'm going to be like Erin, why did you eat that bag of chips Like? That's probably not what you should have done. So I asked myself these like questions. You know, is this going to help me tomorrow when I'm training you know, when I'm squatting, like eating these cookies and these chips? Is this going to help me build the muscle that I need to lift heavier tomorrow or to be successful at school the next day and sleep better? So when you start asking yourself those kind of questions, you're like, okay, yeah, and then you stop for a second instead of just going into the pantry and indulging. You kind of have that pause, moment of okay, is this really going to be helpful to me in the long run? Or, you know, is this?
Speaker 2:I always talk about the emotion out of an eating too, because I my mom is an emotional eater. I was, I feel like I definitely was, and when I first started with Tina, 100% I would be eating, and because I was sad or because I was upset and I didn't process the emotions and then I would feel bad about myself a couple hours later, being like, oh my gosh, I'm so fat, why did I eat all that? And I would never fix that cycle. So, and then, finally, as I started learning, okay, let's take the emotion out of it. Am I sad right now? Yeah, okay. What can I do to help me with the sadness? What do I need to do? Oh, let's take a walk, okay. And if you're, if you feel like you want the chips after the walk, then yeah, you can have some chips. And nine times out of 10, didn't want the chips.
Speaker 1:I would have chips. I know I do love chips. I know me, I love chips. But you know, and to add to that, erin, I would say you know there's been the rare and I work only with females there's, I would say there is a rare female athlete that I work with or lifestyle client that is not an emotional eater or an emotional not eater. Right, that food is tied to emotion period. Right, and I'm glad you said that and hopefully that's something that you got from me at some point in our coaching relationship, because that is true, right Like you. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go both sides of the emotional eating thing.
Speaker 1:So I do very much believe that we take the emotion out of eating, especially when we have a, an athletic purpose in mind. Right Like that. And I think that's something you learn through this competition process. It's something you learned through all of this tracking, not tracking. You know, whatever you learn to control your emotions, cause when you're in bodybuilding, when you're in competition prep, you're eating to your macros. You do not get the opportunity to emotionally eat. Right Like I'm sad but I literally have five grams of carbs left, so fuck my life, right Like there's no, I can't do it.
Speaker 1:I cannot eat my emotions right now. So I think that's actually one of the really cool things about you know I talk about there's a lot of. You know we always talk about the negative stuff, but there are so many things that that you can learn from this and I I can speak from my own personal experience, cause that's how I learned to overcome this sort of like disordered eating that I had emotional eating, binge eating, like just a lot of mindless eating. So that's a really cool part of the process and being able to like hold yourself accountable to a set of macros or what have you right.
Speaker 1:And it is even an experiment that anybody could do. Right, like hold yourself accountable to a meal plan or something of that. That regards, right, that's doesn't feel overly restrictive. Right, that says, okay, well, I can't eat, that I decided I'm taking decision fatigue out of this process. This is what I'm eating today and this is all I'm eating today. You take the emotion out of it and that's just what you do. That's one way to do it. The other side of the emotional eating coin that you know I always say I actually don't subscribe to the you can never emotionally eat program. I just don't, because sometimes it's okay to eat the chips, because chips are comforting If you have a healthy relationship with your, if you love and trust yourself enough to make the decision to consciously eat the chips, because it's just something you really want right now.
Speaker 1:I always used to talk about when I would go to my grandmothers and she would make fried pork chops. I've talked about this so many times Fried pork chops. She had an angel food cake. It's mashed potatoes. There's literally nothing healthy about my anything my grandmother would make, but it was delicious and it was so emotionally fulfilling to me to have that meal. It was emotionally fulfilling to my grandmother for me to have that meal, and I never felt any guilt about it, I looked forward to it. People were like, oh my God, you're eating angel food, cake and fried pork chops. Fuck, yes, I am, because it felt so good in that moment.
Speaker 1:And but again, so where we take the emotion, there was an emotional aspect to the eating. But when you take the negative emotion out of the eating I made, when you use and so that pause you just told everybody about, is mindfulness right? So we'll do a whole another podcast on mindfulness, so how you develop that. But that's what that is right Stopping and asking yourself those questions Am I really hungry? Am I actually thirsty? Am I tired? Am I emotionally eating? How is this going to make me feel? Is it going to help me with my goals? Is it going to keep me further from my goals? Is it going to enhance my experience in this moment? So those are the kinds of questions you ask yourself and all that is is a moment, that space between stimulus and reaction, which is what mindfulness is right. That gives you a minute to think, right. And so, yes, you have to develop mindfulness skills, and we'll get to that in another podcast.
Speaker 1:But when you have that ability, then you can make very conscious decisions. Do I go for the walk and then eat the chips or am I going to fuck the walk and just eat the chips? Right, and whatever you decide because you make a conscious decision to do it, there is no more emotion involved, right? There is no guilt, there is no shame. Trust me, I have made very conscious decisions to eat four more chips than I should and then my stomach hurts. But I can't feel bad other than physically going God damn it. My stomach hurts, right, and I'll be like, oh well, right, I'm not going to beat myself up over it. I've made the decision to do it. I knew it was going to make my stomach hurt and I did it anyway. Right. So decisions and consequences, but there's no emotion in that. Right, you just do right. So that's kind of where that I think that comes from. That's to take the emotion out of it. But it's also okay to eat with emotion if that's what you're choosing to do.
Speaker 2:Does that make? Do you think that makes?
Speaker 1:sense to people to say it that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and to kind of piggyback on what you said about your grandmother's food and everything. Totally get that, because similar I mean everybody has that meal that they remember a family member, or like sitting down with family or friends that they love to indulge in, or they. I mean it's December now, so everyone's doing like the holiday parties and the holiday family dinners and whatnot, and like my family's doing a pasta dinner next weekend, a big Italian thing, and but we don't do that every week or every day. So it's like those kind of things are fine to me. Like if you're eating two bags of chips every day, that's a red flag to me. Like, okay, what is happening? Like there's something going on there. But like, yeah, that part of emotional eating, totally great.
Speaker 2:I think that's totally fine too, because food is love and you make food because you love to prepare it for people, and vice versa, you love when somebody makes you food. So it's like that connectedness too. But I think it becomes a problem when you're saying to yourself oh yeah, I can have these cookies today, it's fine, my grandmother made these. And then the next day, well, I can have this cake too, because my mom thought it was nice and she would want me to have it, and then the next day, oh yeah, I can have all these chips and pretzels and popcorn because, well, my kids eat it, so I can eat it.
Speaker 2:So, it's like the cycle you gotta remember. Okay, let me stop for a second. Okay yeah, it's emotional because I love my kids or I love my grandparents or I love my parents, but am I getting what I need out of it? You know on a daily basis, kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and into that point, right, like you don't have to eat everything, right, that's made for you with love, right, or all of the things right. So I have a lot of clients that are like, oh, this, I'm nervous to go to this function and this function and their love language is food, but I'm restricting food and all of this. I'm like you know, again, I'm going to go on both sides of the coin here. On one side of the coin, you again, you need to love and trust yourself enough to make the decisions for you. You do not have to eat food that other people offer to you to be nice. Yes, I don't. There were plenty of things. My grandmother God bless my grandmother, I miss her so much.
Speaker 1:But there's a running joke between me and one of my other clients that, like mayonnaise and mayonnaise is a food group. It was my right, it's just. Like mayonnaise. And corn and coleslaw like it's a coleslaw is a vegetable, corn is a vegetable, mayonnaise is a food group. That's just. It's a joke, but it's. But that's how it was. So there were plenty of things that I turned out right. I chose the things that that were really nostalgic to me and very important to me, and guess what? I didn't eat pounds and pounds of it right.
Speaker 1:I had a pork chop and a scoop of mashed potatoes. I don't eat. I didn't eat everything that was offered to me.
Speaker 1:And sometimes I said no because when I knew it was going to, really it just wasn't worth. Right, it wasn't worth the stomach or whatever, whatever that feeling was going to be. So you have to make those choices. So you can eat the food, but maybe don't eat all the food. Right, like you're going to have this big pasta dinner but you probably don't want to feel like super full and like shit afterwards, so you're going to eat a reasonable portion, right? Right, it's like going to a restaurant. You go to the fucking what is it? Cheesecake factory and like a portion of pasta is like 2000 pounds. It's like who is eating that's? That would be enough to feed five people on one plate. Right, if you're eating reasonable portions, so you know you don't have to eat all of it. If you're going to potlucks this time of year like potlucks and holiday parties and stuff I tell my clients all the time and don't avoid it, yeah, because you're going to then you're going to end up like running back there in the room when everybody's gone and woofing down all the food. You're going to get this like restriction fatigue. You're going to get this willpower fatigue. We don't have. We have finite amounts of willpower.
Speaker 1:Allow yourself to go and eat small amounts of what you want to eat. Don't eat all the food just because it's there, right? Have a small bite of everything. Yeah, everything you want, not everything, right, so I will. I'm very choosy about like what I'm like. This looks good, that doesn't look good. I'm not just going to pile everything on my plate because I'm going to be nice, because people at work made this, so you know. So there's, there's ways to still enjoy those things and not over overdo it, right? So again, it's about portion monitoring. It's about loving and trusting yourself enough I think really that's the theme to maintain some control and then getting into understanding the mindfulness of stopping, stop, drop and roll, yeah, maybe we should add that stop.
Speaker 2:I like that.
Speaker 1:And only make it like stop, drop and do push ups before you yeah. It's not a new thing. Did we just come up with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like that.
Speaker 1:So it's not a form of punishment, it's just a means to, like, make you stop. You stop drop, drop and roll before you reach for any food, right? Just so you can stop and really think about, like is this something you really want, right.
Speaker 2:And I and also to kind of go along with that too, is I eat fast and that was something that I'm still working on it to a degree, because I had gotten better, you know, with that. But you know, as a as an educator, it was hard. You know, like you only have a certain amount of time to eat, so you have to wolf your boot down in 15 minutes because you got five minutes to get back to class or whatever it was. And luckily now I'm a little bit more. You know I can kind of be like, okay, I'm going to shut my door and I'm going to eat for a little bit, so nobody comes in, kind of thing. But I know a lot of people don't have that.
Speaker 2:But when, when I was eating so fast, I didn't realize how full I was actually getting, and then by the time I was done my plate and maybe had a dessert or something else with it, I was like, oh my God, I feel so sick, Like my stomach was so full. So eating slower has helped so much. So like, if you're at a holiday party and you see all this, you know the spread out like, yeah, take a couple things and then wait 20 minutes and be like Okay, am I still hungry enough to go back and get more? If the answer is yes, and it's a genuine yes, go back and get more. If it's now, I think I'm okay, maybe a little bit later, then wait a little bit longer and then go back.
Speaker 2:We're not saying don't eat all the junk food or don't eat what you want. I don't want to be like that kind of person. But at the same time, I want you to really like work with your body and say, yeah, I'm actually really for it now. Do I really want that cupcake? I want it, but I think I'm going to wait, you know, and then if I'm hungry now or later and the cupcake's still there, then yeah, I'll have it.
Speaker 2:But I think that's really important too. You know, taking your time and again, that kind of goes along with the mindfulness too, but like taking your time and sitting with your food, enjoying what you have in front of you and then evaluating if you want more or something else, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah and like and adding on to that. So you know, slowing down is important for so many reasons, not just to pay attention to your hunger cues right, your hunger and satiety cues but also for digestion. I mean, it's just like if you find yourself bloated and indigestion and you know all you know constipate or whatever. You know it's a lot of times just slowing down and thoroughly chewing your food, taking a breath between each bite, right like. If you really want a way to, like, make yourself slow down, take a bite, put your fork down to your food. Another fork bite doesn't go back to your mouth until you chewed it thoroughly and you swallowed it. That might sound ridiculous, but it is a way to train yourself.
Speaker 1:If you're eating in front of the television, eating in front of your computer and you're typing, and you're typing and you're eating your time, if you could see me, I'm actually typing. If I'm typing and I'm so animated You're, you're going to, you're going to. You're shoving food in your face. You're not paying any attention. Am I actually hungry, am I not? Your body can't keep up and then you know, all of a sudden you're going to have indigestion. You didn't actually enjoy any of the food, you just ate, you just walked it down and didn't care, right? So, again, you're not really being loving and trusting of your, your body, when you're doing that, and food is meant to be nourishment for your body it is, you know.
Speaker 1:Do we have to enjoy and love everything we eat? No, right, Because a lot of times it is just food for fuel. But you should enjoy it in the sense of what it's doing for you right? Or if you've decided to, you know, emotionally, eat the fried pork chop that your grandmother made you, right? That's that's enjoy those things, right? So, yeah, so, eating to like about 80%, full slowing down, that's, you know. Again, using mindfulness, enjoy the food right Like, the taste, the texture right, like, instead of like, whooping down, like, if you want, if like, if you're a chocolate lover, like, get some really good quality chocolate, have a square.
Speaker 1:I love those lit squares, they're such a perfect like little piece and like the tazza is one of my favorites because it's like dairy free. But like savory, Don't shove the. I yell at my husband about this all the time. Like like goldfish, I also love gold, so for sure, my son you see, you know goldfish. I kind of miss him not being here, but thank God the goldfish aren't in the house anymore. I'm a one goldfish at a time. I'm a one in the name at a time.
Speaker 1:I will eat something for an hour. When it comes to like little foods like that, my husband handful shove it in the mouth, right. Like jelly bellies is another one. And just like it sounds like all I ate is junk food. But this is how I'm, but it actually is strategy for me. When I am eating something like jelly beans, I could shove the whole handful in my mouth, but I take one at a time. I choose a jelly bean and then I might have another one, right? So there are ways to make your food last and savor it a little bit longer. When you're shoving handfuls in your mouth, You're going to overeat in a heartbeat, right? But you know, really, slow down and enjoy what it is that you're eating, whether junk food or healthy food, right. What, what am I? What otherwise, what are we doing? Much for Right.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly. And the boredom too. Yeah, that's another thing that I hear a lot about with people. They're like well, I just, you know, got home from work and I was just eating because I didn't. I was just like walking around the house and I didn't know what to do and get myself into and I was just, I was just eating whatever was in the fridge and I'm like, oh my gosh, that's another problem. If you're bored, don't go to the refrigerator, don't go to the kitchen.
Speaker 1:Get the fuck out of the kitchen. If you're bored, get out of the kitchen. Do something productive.
Speaker 2:Think of something and scrolling on your phone. That's not something productive. Just do something that's gonna give you joy, or create something like clean the bathroom, if you really have something prepared For a walk Go for a clean bathroom?
Speaker 1:Yeah, do something more productive than that. So just to wrap things up, so hopefully we gave people some ideas of what they can do. But listen, if you really have a goal of losing weight, we have a goal of being healthier. If you have a goal of gaining muscle, being stronger in the gym, what have you? Tracking your food in some way is important, right, because the athletic goal that's involved, or the aesthetic goal that's involved in the health goal, the health goal that's involved in that.
Speaker 1:If you don't know where you are currently tracking in some way first, then learning how to eat for your body, that was the space in between. That, the bodybuilding competition kind of right. I think you realized through the competition process that healthier foods because that's what fit in your macros made you feel better, right, and when you, it wasn't about restriction, it was about I have this goal, I'm gonna eat for my goal, right, didn't mean you could never have pizza, pasta, cookies or what have you. You just you know. And then you realize there's this meme that I saw years ago and it's always stuck out to me. It's like most people have no idea how good the body's designed to feel, cause we're just a walk around in a perpetual state of feeling like shit, Like you said.
Speaker 1:You know, and the epidemic in America is everybody is sick, Everybody has some things wrong with everybody. So you know, when you start to focus more on like your health and your longevity and how things make you feel right and even have food journal in that respect right, so not tracking for calories necessarily, but like here's what I ate today, how did I feel? Yeah, Right.
Speaker 2:I had energy. That's a good idea.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean, I do that with a lot of clients as well, right? So it's not about calories, it's about tracking this is what I ate today. And then there's actually some really cool already pre-printed journals you can get on Amazon that are kind of like how did I feel today, how did I sleep today, what was my exercise, what did I eat? And I think those are great because then you can record like emotionally, how did you feel?
Speaker 1:Were you emotionally eating? Did you feel like shit because of the food you ate? Did you have indigestion? Did you feel lethargic? And then you can kind of keep these like symptom journals right, that kind of go along with your foods and start to see what makes you feel good, pay attention to those things, right, yeah, and like the times that you eat.
Speaker 2:you know like people aren't eating when they're at work because they're so like into their work and what they're doing, and then when they get home they're like, oh my gosh, I don't know what to do. Let me just eat. So like you can track that too. Okay, well, what can I do after work? That's gonna be nice for me to decompress after work. That doesn't have to involve, you know, eating a bunch of sweets or you know bad things because I'm bored and I don't know what to do. Kind of thing, right.
Speaker 1:Coming up with healthier strategies than just diving into food, right, right, so there's, it's always good to like kind of have a strategy in place. It's like, okay, well, when I start to get the if I know, my be-witching hour is like as soon as I get home from work, like what is the thing I can do to decompress before I start making dinner and get the kids to practice and all the other things, right. So it's like just replacing, right? We're not saying you can't eat something, we're just saying replace that with a habit that's probably that's going to help you achieve whatever your goal is, right. So, with something that's just a little bit healthier than diving into the snacks and stuff. So how do you so? Just real quick, to wrap things up, how did do you feel now? Like intuitive eating? How do you base how you're eating? Are you still eating like gotta eat it at five and 10? And you know, are you still like on the schedule? Are you really paying attention to your hunger signals and kind of just eating when you're hungry?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when I was on prep, I kind of figured out, you know, like you just said, the timing. I would have to eat at nine o'clock and then I would have to let that spread through until about 11, 11, 30. And then I would have a little bit of lunch and then I would take a little break. It was very time-regimented, but now it's fantastic. It's absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 2:I have a smoothie in the morning for, like, my pre-breakfast, and sometimes that fills me up enough and sometimes it doesn't. But when it does, I'm like okay, should I eat my oatmeal now? No, you can probably wait a little bit. Or, you know, I actually am really still really hungry. I'm gonna eat this oatmeal too, or half of it, and save it, you know. So it's just really nice to see how I'm working with my body now instead of like telling it what to do. You know, I think that's the biggest thing we're getting there. Oh, I love that. Yeah, it's so much, I feel so much better. I really do, and I just wish everyone could feel like this, because it is so nice to be like, yeah, I'm gonna have an apple right now, or I'm gonna have this right now, and because I want to, and because I'm hungry or because you know what I mean, I'm not at some sort of a schedule or anything like that. You know, it's just very freeing and I love that.
Speaker 1:And I'll say you know me too, right, like we were talking about before we got on the podcast, I think, like I have been tracked a macro and over a year too, aside from like a spot check here and there, and you know, I'm just like let me really see where my calories are. Right, like I'm just like why am I eating these days? And I can tell you, it is like dead on the money the same thing I was eating when I was tracking for the last five years and, like you and I were talking about, I had gotten so addicted to tracking and claiming that I like. Well, I need all this data. Yeah, but I wasn't using the data for anything. I was literally just tracking to track. I use the data for nothing. Right, I was like you know, yeah, I could look and say, well, some days I'd eat like around 1700, 1800 and some days I'd eat 2500. So I probably average about 2,300 calories a day. But was I using that data for anything other than to go I know how many calories I'm eating today? Who fucking cares? Right, like I was like it wasn't changing my eating habits. I wasn't like using it to gain weight, lose weight, maintain weight nothing, I was literally tracking to track when I it was hard, like I will admit.
Speaker 1:When I first stopped tracking, I was like, like you know, my little fingers didn't know what to do with themselves while I'm preparing my meals and the scale, and like I'd go to get the scale and I'm like, no, I don't need the scale, right. And so, like I was like, and now and then, when I would go back and like spot check in the last year, like I think I've done it like maybe a handful of times, I'm just like the scale's annoying. This is annoying. Trying to tear, you know, the trying to zero out the scale and then put this in, and this is just too fucking time consuming. I don't want to do this anymore and I don't right. So I literally have probably maintained my weight. I've probably maintained my exact weight for the last five years. Yeah, that's interesting, though, and even when I was tracking, like I said, I wasn't really using the data for anything. Great.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, it is very freeing to be able to just, you know, and it actually it took me a long time, I mean, cause I ate on this like schedule since I started competing back in 2005,. Right, like I certainly had made progress, but I even still I was like, well, okay, I just ate, it's eight o'clock and I should probably eat again by 12 and I should probably eat again by like three and I should probably eat again by whatever. And I just, you know, I just I stopped all that and now I really do just like. I mean, my body still is kind of like hungry right around those you know the time it's like it's been a couple of hours spinning on the way, eight, but now it's just very freeing to just be like, oh, I'm hungry, yeah, I think I will eat something right now, right, exactly, and it's still the same principles. You know, once you learn what works for your body, once you learn how to eat, you have to know how to eat first, and we did not actually discuss in detail in this podcast what to eat and how to eat. Maybe we'll do that in another podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but you know, I still nearly every meal I have has at least some lean protein in it. Every meal has I'm obsessed with, like vegetables and fruits, like there are just certain meals that I do not compromise right, like I must have these greens and I must have these fruits and I must have my main proteins, because I love protein, and then I might, and then I can add the bag of chips later if I want to. But that's you know. You still eat the same way.
Speaker 1:I still eat the same way I've always eaten, and it's really because it's what makes my body feel good, it's what makes me, you know, mentally feel good. It gives me the energy to do all the things that I'm doing and I, like you and having, you know, watched, and my grandparents were very active as long as they could be active, but I don't want to be sick, right, like I deal with lupus and you know I already have enough issues that I don't. You know, I need to treat my body with some kindness and you know, again, love and trust, loving, and I think that was a really good theme that you brought up, because it really is, to me, the biggest obstacle for women being able to make the right choices for themselves, to be as healthy as they can be right. It's not. I mean, yes, a lot of that, you know. Learning the tools, that's very important. Getting to practice these things.
Speaker 1:It's not easy, none of these things that we, erin and I, just made this sound like we're just gonna glide right through. This was years long process. Right, we're still learning. Right, I'm still learning. I'm still adjusting. I'm getting older. I'm, you know, going into my 51st year now. I'm just like you know. So I'm always adjusting. I am never I'm not doing the same things that I did 10 years ago.
Speaker 1:You're not gonna be doing the same thing if you can't. So you have to just listen to your body and keep you know and keep kind of analyzing what's going on and using the mindfulness that we're getting ready to talk about in our next podcast. Because I'm gonna say I go out on a limb and I say learning mindfulness techniques is the key to life period, it is the key to having joy in life, it is the key to being able to eat and be healthy, it is the key to stress reduction. To me, learning mindfulness techniques and is the longevity key. Yeah, no, I agree with you and I don't think my the limb I'm going out on is very fragile. I think it is pretty solid, I think. But we'll talk about that next and we'll see why it's so hard for people to get into. Yes, anything else? You wanna add on the food stuff to our podcast that was supposed to be shortened and in a new?
Speaker 2:No, Although I think we kept it less than an hour at least, we'll stop here and we'll see where the next one takes us.
Speaker 1:All right, so I taught Erin. I told her she's gonna be our, my co-host. She had to learn the catch phrase. I'm gonna let her say the goodbye phrase today.
Speaker 2:All right, guys don't get weird, use your head, it'll all be okay.
Speaker 1:Yay, bye, bye.