195: Breaking Up With Food

Do you have a problem with when you’re doing errands and you’ve been out for so long and all of a sudden you see a Dairy Queen and you hear that Buster Bar saying, “I’m here. I’m available.” 

Or what about at night when you’re so exhausted after such a long day and you know there’s a half a pint, a Ben and Jerry’s in the freezer, or that you could actually just melt some chocolate chips and put them and dip them even like some apples, or make some popcorn or something because you’re so tired and these treats, these foods keep calling you and you know it’s, they’re not good for you, but you do it anyway.

The problem is, of course, those things, those that food does actually. Impact your health. It adds calories. And when our bodies have just filled up with more calories than we need, we just become storage units. So I’m so glad you’re here for this episode. Is episode 195 breaking up with Food, the Quilters Coach Podcast

I’m Dara Tomasson and I’m a professional quilter turned life coach, and I have helped thousands of women learn how to change their relationship with food, their body, and their life. And so this podcast purpose is to help you think about things in a different way and provide you with opportunities now.

If you’ve learned a lot from this podcast, that’s amazing. But if you take the next step of actually doing the work, learning the tools and getting the help, it is unbelievable to see what happens in the lives of my members and with the women that I work with one-on-one. Now, I wanted to say, if you’re listening to this at real time, I have just opened four spots for one-on-one coaching, But truly the membership is incredible. 

We have three coaching calls a week and just it blows my mind what’s happening. In fact, I always like to share. So this one I actually wanted to share about one of my clients who she’s been in the figure skating world for a long time with her daughters and now her granddaughters, and lived very, lives, very close to where the terrible accident happened.

And many of the figure skaters. Died on that plane crash. And it’s been really challenging for her to process all these emotions. And one of the things that she did recently was went to a performance and by professional figure skaters, all different figure skaters to commemorate the loss of these people.

So she was able to actually go to that event, support that event, and has been able to work through so many of these really challenging emotions. As she’s been working through this and bringing these to the coaching calls and asking for help, is that she’s not using food, in the same way. 

She’s not baking all the time. She’s not going to the peanut putter all the time. She’s not overeating all the time. She’s not having nighttime snacking. Like her relationship with food has changed so much. And one of the things that I do wanna say is, she’s 63 and she has lost 70 pounds.And she still wants to lose about 40 to 50 more pounds. 

The thing that’s amazing to me, especially as these women keep showing up for the coaching calls and getting that support and help, is that she’s less shaming herself for not. Losing more, but actually learning how to accept that she is really good at weight loss because she’s lost the 70 and been able to keep it off for I think two years or so. 

And this episode is gonna be really helpful to look at. Why is it so hard to break up with food? And break up with even friendships? Break up with different patterns like shopping or like every time you’re sad, do you start filling the cart? Or do you scroll on Instagram or I’m working with a client right now who has some friendship problems and she, it’s so bizarre to her because at her age she thinks I’m almost 53. Like I have lots of friendships. But this is the thing, and this is what we’re actually gonna be talking about in this podcast, is we’re talking about how when we grow, we evolve and change. So just like when we were little kids, we would outgrow our shoes and that’s just, that was just a normal part of growth.

And so I. As my clients learn these tools and apply them, they start changing and they, so we’re gonna talk a little bit more about the friendship part in a bit. 

But so what I wanted to do was talk about how so first of all, why is it hard to break up with things? So even though we know that Ben and Jerry’s is not solving the problem or and I’m not, and actually popcorn is fiber, but the problem is if you put like a ton of butter and you’re eating it late at night and it’s sitting in your stomach and you’re eating without being conscious of it, that’s where the problem happens, right? That pattern.

There’s nothing wrong with a Buster Bar every once in a while, right? It’s like food is not good or bad, it just has different effects on our body. And so the problem is the pattern. So the pattern of going to those foods, thinking that will solve your problems and they never do food, solves food problems.

That’s it. And so if you are eating more than what your body needs, then now you’re creating new problems for yourself.

I wanna talk a little bit about neuroscience. When I was a school teacher, I taught grade five and six mostly. I would take these big concepts, and I’d make them really simple, simplified. And that’s what I like to do with life coaching and how I help my clients.

Because if you don’t understand it, just like if you got a financial advisor and you never understood what they were saying. Chances are they’re messing you over, right? So it’s really important to learn these skills and make them understandable. 

Alright, so our brain, we are wired what’s it’s actually called the motivational triad. So we’re wired to seek pleasure, conserve energy, and avoid pain. So if you’re watching this on YouTube, you’ll see I have my worksheet. Now, the reason I make these worksheets for you, they’re all available. In the show notes is some of us, the way that we think, the way that we learn. It’s actually really helpful for us to have a guideline.

I enjoy podcasts, but sometimes I feel like there’s a part of my brain that says like, where are we going with this? What’s gonna happen next? And so we’re all just, different learners. So if it’s helpful for you, you can go and download. And I actually have a individual worksheet for every single podcast just because I know that will help certain people and I’m happy to help.

So this motivational triad is to seek pleasure, conserve energy, and avoid pain. The problem with that is that and the reason we are wired for this is because in the past, we didn’t have reliable food. Back in the day when we didn’t know when our next meal was gonna come from or how we were gonna get food, this actually served us really well and seeking pleasure. Even though we knew, like when you think about it back when life was dangerous and scary.  And you would question yourself of should I bring children into this world? Was pleasure and so we were instinct of. 

Having that pleasure eating sweeter foods, right? That had a higher sugar content provided pleasure because we needed to have that reward system, that feedback loop saying, yeah, you really need to eat a lot of this because, we didn’t know when we were gonna find the next berries or if we were gonna catch fish or if we were going to, catch that buffalo or whatever that was. 

And then conserving energy, of course. We need to be really careful of how much energy that we expend because we don’t know where our next meal’s gonna come from.

And then avoid pain. Yeah, that’s just a way to stay safe. It’s oh, if that’s the, if that’s causing me pain, I better not do that.

Okay. So this is what’s called the motivational triad. And the problem is that we have wired ourselves. So we actually physically wired to get a dopamine hit for when we eat food. So even if it was like gross. Like grass or like bitter leaves or something. There is a trigger in our body that says, oh, that’s good.

You ate food. That’s good. We need to eat food. So we’re wired for that. But then we have now every day we have more sugar, refined sugar, refined flours, which give us even more impact, more of that pleasure response. And so now we have a big problem because we now get this kind of false pleasure that reinforces the habit of, oh, I’m sad and I eat the chocolate. And now we’re getting, so we’ve rewired our brain to depend on that. 

And so with that problem, we now and our brain are always looking for patterns. And so like when we were little, there were babies. We were, and if we were given a bottle, we didn’t know how to like even hold that bottle, right? It required both hands working together, adding the equal pressure.

And then once we figured that out, then it was hard to bring it to our mouth and actually get our mouth. So there’s like a lot of things that have to be automated and we now, our brain is looking for patterns. So the brain says, oh, it looks like we need to in order for us to feel better, we need to have a lot of sugar.

And then just even taking Ancetiphetomin, when I was a kid, I had lots of ear aches, and after a while the doctors are like, yeah, this isn’t gonna work anymore. We have to try a different one, because you’ve become so resilient to it. So even. Prescription drugs, the body grows like an immunity to it, and then we need more and more of it.

That’s the same thing with the sugar. And then we’re just not getting that same we’re not getting a relief and we always know that it’s not a perfect one anyway. It’s not actually resolving the issue. So that’s why in my membership that’s called Love Yourself Thin. We learn that weight loss really is not about the food. 

And so it’s all about these patterns that we’re talking about. So when I bringing up this podcast of breaking up with food we’re having to rewire a lot of thinking. And so when you look at how our brain, so our brain looks for habits just like when we started driving a car or maybe how we do half square triangles, our brain is always looking for how do we consolidate this?

How can we make this easier? And now we have a lot of our thoughts and the way we do things is subconscious. And so you think about an iceberg and 95% of our thoughts now are automated. They just happen on autopilot.

That’s why we can’t use willpower to lose weight is because we actually have only 5% consciousness of all the things. But 95% are automated It’s like when we blink or digest or whatever that is. So we have to have an intentional purpose going into. Weight loss or into over scrolling or overshopping or whatever we’re distracting ourselves with.

I wanted to share some ways that we can change without having a lot of pain. Now, one of the first tools that I’m sharing is called Math versus Drama. It’s actually the very first podcast I ever recorded. And the thing that I love about this is that, you know how I talked about our brain likes to have patterns.

If it has a lot of drama, then it actually can be addictive, right? It’s gonna want more drama, it’s gonna want more of those kinds of things. 

And math versus drama is a tool that says, Hey, wait a minute. So let’s give the example of someone, let’s say you have a friendship that is struggling. So a friend said words and you were surprised, so you maybe responded and said, “Oh, like I, that’s not how, what I meant that I didn’t mean to say it that way I’m so sorry.”

And then if they respond and say, “Oh, this is just so hurtful and I just don’t know how to handle this,” and they just make it all about them and their life and all of that. 

So this is now you can make a decision. You can decide, am I going to allow myself to go into this drama of “I can’t believe it like what is wrong with her? Who does she think she is? Like how old is she? Haven’t we progressed since junior high?” 

You could do that drama or you could just have math of my friend said these things. She said this. What do I want to think of what she said? Okay, so the more that you can just take that step back and say is this, and then, because when you do the math, when it’s just like neutral, now you can ask yourself, is this a relationship that I want to pursue?

Is this the kind of friend or the like? Maybe I’ve outgrown this friend, maybe. Maybe I’ve changed, maybe I’m just, I used to always worry about what other people think and now I don’t do that anymore. And so maybe I’ve outgrown this friendship. Kinda like I outgrew my shoes when I was a kid. 

And maybe like when you look at your fabric stash, you bought stuff 10 years ago. And maybe you don’t like those anymore. I made a granny’s flower garden, queen size hand pieced granny’s flower garden. I made it when I was pregnant with my fourth child. I don’t really like it. I don’t really like those colors. I would not choose those colors again. And it makes me sad ’cause it was a lot of work, but I just have outgrown it. It’s not really, it’s not what I would choose today. 

So that’s one tool. So when you think about breaking up with food, could we just say, you know what, food has a lot of additives. Food has a lot of unhealthy things and they actually don’t work very well for me, so I’m actually gonna just change the way I approach food and the way I approach self-care and, I’m just not gonna worry about it, or it’s just not, it doesn’t have the same hold. 

Okay, so the next thing I wanted to share was a tool called Circumstances. So a circumstance would be a fact. So your how much you weigh, that’s a circumstance. Your address the kind of car you drive, your marital status, number of kids.

These are all things that we could prove in a court of law. Even words that people said. so when you can start looking at food and the way that you’ve been handling food, you could say I, when I was sad on Thursday night, I went in the kitchen and I made myself I melted a bunch of chocolate chips, I cut out some apples and I dipped the apples in chocolate chips.

So that’s a circumstance. Now because you’ve been able to like, that’s just a fact. That’s what you did. Now you can decide, what do I wanna think of it? It’s oh, I, in the moment I thought that the chocolate chips and the apple would make me feel better, but now I realize it just actually made me feel more agitated and, then I was disappointed with the number on the scale the next day, or I was disappointed with my own self-trust ’cause I actually didn’t solve the real problem. It’s frustrating when I do that. 

So the third thing I wanted to look and think about when you look, when you consider, what does it mean to break up with food is the human condition.

And when we’re talking about breaking up with people or feeling guilty about things using old coping strategies, I like to think about the human condition. For example, a long time ago we didn’t have running water. And in fact my son, who’s a missionary in Africa, the people downstairs were stealing his water. So he experienced what it felt like, what it was like to live in a house without running water. Actually having to scrub his clothes, he said is like one of the worst things in the world. Taking cold shower buckets of cold shower. And he, like we had, that was the human condition.

And now we have new ones. The reason I bring this up is that we can actually just change the way that we think about things. We can just, if we don’t want to be going and bucket bucketing in water, we can figure out how to get underwater pipes and get clean water, and we can figure out this infrastructure, we can change.

And that’s what happens in semi-membership. So just because the human condition was a certain way. It doesn’t have to stay that way. And then we can create a new human condition for us. 

The fourth one, is wiring of the brain and pathways. So one of the things that is just so fun for me, for my own life and for the life of my members and the woman I work with, is how they’ve changed the way that they act.

So in the past. If I was, I used to have pizza night, Fridays. I made pizza every Friday night. I made bread every Monday. Like we just did certain things or when we went on road trips, it was all about the snacks, all about the food. And it’s really interesting for me to see how I can just buy pizza for my kids.

I can buy junk food and they can eat all that stuff and I don’t have to do that. And that’s the same thing with the members in my membership, they literally have rewired their brain. They have new ways of thinking of what does it actually mean to have self-care? How do they truly take care of themselves?

And, my kids are burning like thousands and thousands of calories a day. They’re growing up. They’re 12, 15, 18. Like it’s okay and I am not saying, remember what I said about pizza? Pizza’s not bad or good. It just has different effects. And as a 51-year-old woman who does not play five hours of basketball a day, I do not need to be eating pizza.

Okay. And the last thing that I wanted to share in this podcast about breaking up with food. Is just this idea of permission granted that you can change. 

So my when I think about my grandma, one of the things that she did and one of her identity pieces was she did chocolate every year for Christmas. She did tons of baking. It was just like part of who she was. It was part of her identity. My mom, did the same thing for Christmas. Oh my goodness. She made so many different cookies. She made so many different things, and it was like a huge ordeal. And guess what? I don’t do that. I haven’t baked for Christmas, probably five years, six years.

I actually gave it to my mom. I said, oh, if you wanna bake with the kids, you can. And it’s so liberating because. Is it fun to bake? Maybe sometimes. But do I need to, do I want to, is that how I wanna spend my time? Or would I rather just help people? With my, with my friends and my kids, and would I rather be present at their basketball games? Which by the way, why do we have to start basketball before Christmas? I don’t know. But would I rather be present with them or would I be stressed out about if I’ve made the seven or the 12 different cookies?

I just made a decision. Okay. I just gave myself permission. All right, so this is just I feel like this podcast episode is a really…talk about permission granted, it’s a way for you to think differently about your body and about food and about the way you use food, and what would it be like to break up with food for real. … to not go down in the kitchen and make some nachos, to not go down and eat a bunch of like ice cream at night.

Like what would that actually be like to actually start just feeling feelings, treating yourself with more kindness? Because at the end of the day, you cannot fight science. My friends, when you eat. More than what your body can use, you will start storing that food on your body. You cannot change that. 

And so in order for you to – it’s not that we all wanna be I don’t know. I’m not gonna speak for you, but I don’t want to be a bikini model. Even there, I don’t need to have a six-pack. I’m not really concerned about that, but I am concerned about being the healthiest, strongest version of me, and being thinner helps.

It’s less on your joints and in fact, some of the things that I’m doing now in my life is I’m using these things these bands. I’ve got different levels of them and I’m practicing using them throughout my day because I know that the more I use these. The healthier and the stronger, the more toned I’m gonna be.

And my 60, 70, 80, 90-year-old self is gonna be so happy that I did this. So how are you doing with that? And if you don’t trust yourself, that’s okay, but what would it be like if you actually learned some tools and then got the support so that you could actually break up with food? And you could create a life that feels amazing.

And that’s what I do every day inside. Love yourself thin. So I would love for you to join me. And I also want to invite you to come to the Quilters Life Summit, where we’re gonna have over 30 presenters. It’s gonna be amazing. And we’ll be crafting at night and then you’ll get a workbook of me helping you overcome. If you’re feeling guilty right now, try this. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by this instructor and this technique, try this. If you are feeling fear of failure, try this. 

So I’m actually gonna be teaching life coaching tools to help you to enjoy the summit, to become more productive and to get the most out of it.

So I look forward to seeing you there, it’s free for seven days and, I look forward to connecting with you there and also on Instagram. I would love you to come over on Instagram and say hi to me. I check my Instagram every day so you can always share insights that you got from this podcast.

And it’s Dara underscore Tomasson. All right, take care. Bye.