Done with Dieting Episode #9: Trust Bank

You are listening to the Done with Dieting Podcast Episode number nine

Hi, I’m Elizabeth Sherman, former corporate high tech executive turn life and weight loss coach. But it wasn’t that long ago that I was searching for that perfect diet, the one that would finally be the golden ticket to lose the weight that I so desired.

Fast forward past tons of failed diet attempts, exercise fads and painful lessons learned, and although I still have not reached the state of Nirvana, body love, my relationship with food exercise in my body is infinitely better than it was not only when I started this journey, but even as recently as three years ago.

The journey that has allowed me to ditch my scale, stop logging my food and exercise, eat food that I didn’t prepare and easily maintain my weight – something that I never thought was possible for me.

I created the Done with Dieting podcast to give you simple, easy to do and sustainable strategies to help you do the same without all of the drama that I went through.

If you’re a woman who’s looking to create a better relationship with food and her body, get off the diet roller coaster and free up a bunch of headspace spent on calories, how you should look what you should eat and beating yourself up for not doing what you think you should be doing. You are in the right place.

Let’s get started.

Hey everyone, welcome to the show. So I am going to dig into what we’re talking about today because I am fired up. And I am really excited about this topic.

So if you really want to be done with dieting, one of the concepts that we really need to understand to a level of being able to feel it in our bones is the idea that food is just food, that there’s no morality associated with it. And that ice cream isn’t any better or worse for you than broccoli, for example.

And don’t worry, I can hear you all screaming at me, hey, Elizabeth, if ice cream was the same as broccoli, then I would eat ice cream all the time. You can’t tell people that ice cream isn’t worse for you than broccoli is because then people eat ice cream all the time. And ice cream has just a ton of fat in it. And ice cream has all this sugar and sugars. bad for you, isn’t it?

And what I want to say back to you is that might be true to some extent. But ice cream in and of itself is not a bad food. No food is terrible.

It’s just that we want to eat foods that are more nutrient dense and have lower calories, if that’s how we want to accomplish our goal of losing weight.

And so ice cream might not be the best choice, if we have a goal of losing weight. However, that doesn’t mean that if you want to lose weight, that you can never eat ice cream. Again, it’s kind of like having the same train of thought of if you’re trying to save money if you’re trying to get out of debt that you should never spend money again, right?

I just want to offer you that all food is equal in its worthiness. Okay, so let’s try that on for just a few minutes and see how it goes.

When we release the judgment around food, we release the judgment on ourselves for eating that food. Let’s take for example ice cream.

If I’m on a diet, and someone offers me ice cream, I have this internal battle in my head, all of a sudden, should I eat it or shouldn’t I, I really want it but I’m not supposed to eat it, I really would love to have some ice cream, but I’m not supposed to or This food is not my diet.

Then if I decide to eat the ice cream, we have this other internal battle of You shouldn’t have done that. Now you really screwed up, you’ve ruined everything. And now I’m bad for eating the ice cream.

But I want to offer you that ice cream is just ice cream, that it’s possible to eat the ice cream and enjoy it without all of the drama that we have in our heads about it. Right? In fact, I want to offer to you the thought that there was probably a time in your life when you ate the ice cream and did just that. You enjoyed it and you moved along and didn’t even think about it again.

Now you were probably nine at the time. But it happened.

And then at some point, you were told that ice cream was bad. Or that maybe a less offensive version of that is that ice cream isn’t good for you, and that you shouldn’t eat it.

And so one of the common objections that I get from my clients when I introduce the idea that food is just food and that we can eat whatever we want without the self judgment that comes along with eating it is, Well, Elizabeth, if that’s the case, what’s preventing me from eating ice cream all day long? I’m just going to eat it all the time.

And my answer to that is two things. One, if we’re paying attention to how we actually feel, eating an excess amount of ice cream doesn’t actually make us feel good. And Two, what we’re really talking about is our ability to trust ourselves. We’re talking about our ability to trust ourselves around food and make good choices for ourselves long term.

Recently, I’ve started thinking about and presenting this new idea to my clients. And it’s an idea that explains how we start to build self trust. There are a couple reasons why we don’t have trust with our bodies. And one of them is that we’ve learned to not trust ourselves.

Maybe parents told us that we shouldn’t trust ourselves that we should do something that we didn’t really buy 100% into but because we trusted the parent or the teacher or the adult and They had a really good reason. Or maybe they had control over us that we went along with it.

And we assumed that because we were a kid that the adult knew better. And there’s some truth to be said for that. Clearly, we can’t allow our children to self parent themselves. But I think that it runs deeper than that.

And what we’ve learned is not to trust ourselves with many of the decisions that we make in our lives.

The second reason that we don’t have self trust is that, quite honestly, the relationship that we have with our bodies, is a very entitled one. Now, what do I mean by that, to explain that a little bit more, the Merriam Webster dictionary definition of entitlement is having a right to certain benefits or privileges.

Now, stick with me here, and I’m going to back up a little bit.

Four years ago, when Gary and I moved to Mexico from the United States, I moved my business 100% online. And in order to do that, I had to start doing something called value based marketing. value based marketing is the idea that I give value to people who follow me. How I do that is I create social media posts, I write blog posts, I write emails to the people who subscribe to my email list, all with the intention of creating value or giving something away.

So tips and tricks and techniques, and maybe some tips on how to clean out your kitchen so that you can set up a better environment, there are lots of different ways that I can provide value to the people who are interested in that type of thing.

Now, as I provide valuable content, what happens is people who are interested in what I have to say, tune in. People who are interested in health are going to tune in, and people who aren’t, aren’t.

And eventually, as they get to know like, and trust me, if they eventually need some help, they may choose to hire me. So again, this is called value based marketing.

When I learned this technique four years ago, I was told by my coaches, that if I produced value, if I started writing social media posts, and when I started doing Facebook Lives and writing emails to my list, that people would become attracted to what I had to say, and they would want to hire me. And so I did all of these things.

Then after a few months, I was like, Where are the people? Why aren’t the people showing up giving me money, I look back at that period of my life, and realize how entitled I was as a new coach.

Because these people didn’t know really who I was, through creating these Instagram posts or these Facebook posts and writing emails, people were starting to get a sense of what I stood for. But I hadn’t gained enough trust with my audience for them to want to hire me. And for them to trust me with their weight loss struggles with their health struggles.

I just thought that I needed to show up and write a few posts and do some stuff. And then all of a sudden, people would show up and want to give me money. And so I struggled a lot.

And it wasn’t until I started getting a few clients. And I started really understanding how I could serve them better. And I really started becoming more passionate about being able to help other women, the energy behind the content that I was producing, completely changed.

And it wasn’t about me getting clients anymore, But how do I serve my audience?

Because I started shifting how I was presenting myself. And this goes back to the think feel act cycle before, when I was producing content with the idea of getting people to hire me, the energy behind that content was probably very manipulative. And the people who were reading my content, probably figured out that I was just trying to get them to buy from me, I wasn’t really trying to help them at all.

But then eventually, as my purpose shifted, what happened is the energy behind those posts and that content that I was producing also shifted from a place of giving versus giving with the intent to take, if that makes sense.

Now why am I spending all this time talking about value based marketing when this is a show about being done with dieting and weight loss?

It’s so brilliant that this example Also goes along with weight loss, right? Okay. And so let me connect the dots.

When it came to marketing myself in the online space, I was told that all I had to do was show up, provide value, write emails, write Facebook posts, and people would start to hire me.

And we’re told the same thing when it comes to weight loss, we are told that all we have to do is cut calories, and move more. And when we stand on the scale, we will lose weight.

So then what happens is we get on the scale, the scale doesn’t validate our efforts, and we lose trust with our body. The same thing happened with me and my followers.

I was getting really irritated with them. And I’m sure that they could, in fact see it, the energy behind my posts was one of being almost antagonizing the energy behind my posts was, I did for you, now you need to show up for me.

And how many of us have that same attitude when it comes to our bodies, we stand on the scale, and we’re like, I gave you vegetables, I took you out for a walk. Now you need to repay me, by losing weight. It’s a very one sided relationship. And it’s a very entitled point of view, we believe that all we have to do are these certain things. And when we do those things, that our body is naturally going to comply with us.

It’s the same exact type of entitlement that I deserve this, I gave you what I was supposed to. Now you give me what I wanted. The trust hadn’t been earned with the people who followed me. And the trust hasn’t been earned with our bodies.

One of the biggest ways that we degrade trust with ourselves, is doing things that are against our self interest, doing things that are important to us, and then not following through with that commitment to ourselves. And women do this all the time to ourselves, don’t we? We make a commitment to ourselves, we’re like, I’m going to work out tomorrow. And then tomorrow comes and someone needs something from us. And we decide that someone else’s needs or wants, because it’s not really a need some times that their needs are more important than what our needs are, we need to start putting ourselves on the list. Okay.

And one of the ways to do that is to start to create super small, simple commitments to ourselves and adhering to them.

And one of the ways that we can do that is actually dropping the all or nothing thinking that so many of us have. And how we do that is we get super in touch with the thoughts that our lower brain offers us, those thoughts that are in our head, that offer really super unhelpful suggestions that we just blindly follow along with.

We think, oh, I don’t have time to go exercise for a full hour, I only have 15 minutes. And that’s not enough. And so we don’t do anything.

Or maybe we’re out to dinner, and we eat most of our meal. And we have this thought of, Oh, well, there’s not enough left to be a second meal. So I should just finish it, or it would be a waste to throw it away.

And here’s one that I think that many of us don’t even notice when it pops up into our heads the thought of I’ve almost finished the pint of ice cream, I may as well finish the rest of it, or I’ve already eaten about 600 calories. What’s another 200. And these thoughts are super not helpful. Because over the course of every single day, another 200 calories here and another 200 calories there. It all adds up.

What I want to suggest is that a calorie here or a calorie there, if you can start to think this way, you can start to get away from the all or nothing thinking you can start to get away from what I call the eff-its, right? The eff-its are where we think to ourselves, Oh, you’ve already ruined your diet. Why not just keep going eff-it eat everything else.

You can start disbelieving these tiny little thoughts that your brain offers you. And so if we want to be healthy, what we need to do is we need to make small deposits in our Trust Bank and start to believe that every little bit counts. that everything adds up. that it all matters.

It’s kind of like a bank account. Right? That a penny here or a penny there matters.

And so the same thing is true when it comes to eating. The same thing is true when it comes to sleeping. The same thing is true when it comes to exercise, everything that we do matters. And it all adds up.

And great habits and discipline and commitment doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not one huge deposit. It’s small deposits every single day that ultimately create the habits that we want to start building that ultimately lead to us having an amazing relationship with our bodies.

So I have some final thoughts. Because I think that when we look at our bodies, building trust with yourself, and your body is like building trust within any relationship. whether it’s your relationship with your clients like me, whether it’s a relationship that you have with your child, or your partner.

We build trust within a relationship, by taking small risks, and seeing how each of those small risks plays out.

Building a relationship out of control is not going to be a trusting relationship. So many of us feel like we need to control our body, we control our body through the food that we eat, through over exercising.

We don’t pay attention to our bodies. When we’re hungry, we don’t give ourselves enough water, or we don’t give ourselves enough sleep, we completely take our bodies for granted that they’re always going to be there. And they’re always going to be healthy.

And so we degrade this relationship with our body. Because we are telling our body what it needs instead of listening and allowing our body to communicate with us and saying, Hey, I hear you. And I’m going to give you what you need.

Because think about that in like a relationship with your partner. If your partner was telling you, I’m not going to give you what you need, but I still expect you to give me what I want, you’d probably hightail it out of there.

You certainly wouldn’t be lovingly giving back by cooking for them or doing whatever it was that they wanted. You’d be resentful.

And so I want to offer that maybe your body is doing the same thing. And once we start to listen to our bodies, because this is what happened with me. It wasn’t until I released attachment to the outcome. It wasn’t until I started producing content without the goal of creating clients, and just providing value that I truly started attracting clients. And the same thing was true with my body. It wasn’t until I started feeding and exercising my body from a place of giving my body what it needed, and not what I wanted, which was a weight loss.

But the weight finally came off, when I started paying attention to the cues that my body was giving me and I started honoring those cues. That’s when my body actually started paying me back.

And so part of earning that trust is understanding how your body communicates with you, and that it needs to sleep. It needs to relax, it needs vegetables and water once in a while. And occasionally it wants ice cream too that ice cream is totally okay. Because we all need some fun in our lives.

Building trust with yourself is a skill that we need to really learn as adults. It’s a skill that we had as children. And that unfortunately, we lost because we assumed that other people had the answers for things that we were the only ones that could possibly know what was right for us.

And so the process of building a good relationship with our bodies starts off by creating small deposits of trust between yourself and your body. And one of the ways that we do that is starting to give our body what it needs.

Alright, that’s all I have for you this week. I hope you enjoyed the show. I’ll talk to you next time. Bye bye

Hey, thanks for listening!

If the show resonates with you and you have a friend, mother, sister or anyone else who you think would benefit, I’d love for you to share the podcast with them. You can leave me a rating and review in Apple podcasts which helps me create an amazing experience for you. And it helps other women who are done with dieting and want to get off the diet roller coaster to find it as well.

See you next week.