Ready to join me inside Ditch the Diets? Find out more and claim your space here.

If you want to know what happens inside, you can also listen to THIS bonus episode.

In today's episode:

You've already tried stopping diets, eating more mindfully, or intuitive eating. But when it tipped you into just feeling completely out of control you decided it didn't work and you're "just one of those people" who needs a plan.

But I believe everyone can eat more mindfully (and cut out the food noise at the same time). There's just one step that's missing to help you finally nail it. Today we'll talk about:

• The real difference between intuitive and mindful eating, and why our expectations make us feel like we're failing at it.
• Why "one slice of cake and then stop" isn't mindful eating. It's another diet rule in a nicer outfit.
• How years of dieting have trained you to override your body's signals, so "just listen to your body" feels like being handed instructions in a language you don't speak
• The missing foundation: rebuilding trust and communication with your body before you try to eat mindfully
• An introduction to the React to Respond method: going from "oh shit, I need to fix this" to noticing what's actually going on, with curiosity instead of judgement

Ditch the Diets doors close Friday 2nd October. If you're done dieting but don't trust yourself without it yet, this is where we build that trust together, with individual coaching on your own patterns. [JOIN HERE]

Find me on Instagram: @lifeeditwithalix

Welcome to the Busy Woman's Guide to Wellbeing.

I'm your host, Alex, and I'm here for every single one of you who is nailing so much in your life and is so busy looking after everybody else's wellbeing while your own, well, it often ends up getting put on the back burner.

Here's where we fix that.

Today we're talking about why mindful or intuitive eating might feel like it hasn't worked for you even with your very best intentions.

Let's get into it, Right?

Mindful and intuitive eating.

That is what we are talking about today.

And we are talking about why it might feel like it hasn't worked for you.

Because I definitely believe that we are all capable of becoming more mindful eaters.

But a lot of us have tried it and a lot of us have decided that it just doesn't work for us.

And you know, I get a lot of women coming to me saying, I just want to be more mindful about what I'm eating.

And it makes complete sense, right?

Because we love the idea that we can make healthy choices and we can do that by ourselves, without all the rules that usually go with what we eat.

We want to feel like we are competent at making choices, right?

We have a lot of other areas in our lives where we feel very competent, we feel very accomplished, we feel like we have made progress, we are able to make decisions, we're confident about, you know, what we're doing.

We have had our promotions at work, we've done all of these things, right.

And we want our experience with food to line up with that as well.

We want to feel like we are naturally making these healthier choices for ourselves.

And it feels like mindful eating, intuitive eating, is the pathway to a calmer, more peaceful relationship with food and one where we are naturally making the kind of choices that we want to.

But the problem is that for a lot of us, it feels like it just doesn't work because we've done it before.

We've ditched the diet.

We have started to try eating when we're hungry, stopping when we're full.

We've tried to start responding to our hunger signals and all of those things, but we end up second guessing ourselves, feeling a bit lost, or we end up just feeling completely out of control.

And so of course we conclude it doesn't work for me.

I'm just one of those people that has to track, has to have a plan.

And we feel like we've proved, you see, I can't be trusted around food.

And so we bounce right back to where we start, started.

But I think that all it is is that we're missing a key little step in this process or a key foundation in this process that is going to help that to work for us.

And I believe that we do all have the capacity to eat more mindfully without completely losing control.

But the two key reasons why it feels like it doesn't work for us are, number one, our expectations of what intuitive or mindful eating are.

And I think the second one is the way that we've conditioned our brain and body around food and around hunger over years and years of dieting.

So let's start with the first one.

So intuitive eating, mindful eating.

I'm actually going to split these two up because I believe that they are slightly different things, and I believe that what we believe they are is slightly different as well.

So intuitive eating, the whole idea behind intuitive eating is that we.

We literally go with it, right?

That we literally throw away all of the rules that we have around food.

We throw away all of the diets, all of the track, all of the idea that there are right and wrong foods, things we should eat, things we shouldn't eat.

We get rid of all of that overnight.

And that is literally the whole idea behind intuitive eating.

But many of us go into intuitive eating thinking, oh, well, it's just me recognizing when my body is hungry, recognizing when my body is full, understanding what my body needs.

But intuitive eating in its purest form is actually throwing it all away and really just going in with the idea that, yeah, I'm gonna overdo it at first, I'm gonna eat too much, I'm gonna eat the wrong things.

Some days I'm gonna eat an entire packet of biscuits for dinner.

And all of those things are going to happen.

When you first start intuitive eating.

The idea is that then you start to come out the other side, starting to understand what your body needs.

But there may be quite a long period in between where you are literally out of control.

So that is intuitive easing in a nutshell.

Obviously, it is more complex than that, but that's it in a nutshell.

And the idea is that, yes, you will be out of control to start with.

It's inevitable.

But over time, you release the conditioning.

You start to understand better what your body needs, and you start to find the balance.

The problem is, for most of us, that feels pretty damn unsafe.

It becomes proof of our complete lack of discipline.

It becomes proof that we cannot listen to what our body needs at the start because we are going to overeat, we are going to eat things that make us feel full.

We are probably going to put weight on in that situation.

And so an intuitive eating approach requires a huge amount of longer term trust and an attitude that says, I'm going to let this happen and I trust that I'll eventually find my way.

So intuitive eating is not for everybody.

Some people work really, really well with it.

I would say that probably 95% of the women that I work with would find it to be unsafe and super bloody scary.

We don't want to let go of that level of control on ourselves.

So that's what intuitive eating is.

And I think that's why it often feels like intuitive eating doesn't really work for us, because in order to do it, we have to let go entirely.

And for most of us, that is not going to happen.

I think mindful eating is probably what most of us kind of lean towards or are talking about when we're talking about intuitive eating.

The problem is, again, we tend to have a bit of a skewed idea of what mindful eating actually looks like.

Now, often when women talk to me about wanting to be more mindful, they will say, do you know what?

I want to be able to just have one slice of cake and enjoy it, but then say, no to more.

But the thing is that that is not mindful eating either.

What mindful eating actually is is being able to make a mindful choice that says, actually, I'm not hungry right now, I just have an emotional need.

Or it's about having a slice of cake and letting that be.

Whether we have another one or whether we feel satisfied with just one.

It's not about putting a limit on it, it's about having it and seeing how it makes us feel.

And essentially, mindful eating is about eating without judgment.

It's about being able to begin to notice what is actually going on for us.

Oh, I had that slice of cake.

Was I actually hungry?

Was it satisfying an emotional need?

Was it just something that I just felt like having?

And that's okay as well.

It's really about being able to observe, being able to see what's going on, observe what's going on.

Not using it as another tool to try and control ourselves, not going, oh, I'm going to eat more mindfully in the hope that if we say it, somehow our body's going to go, oh, right, okay, yeah, no problem.

I get exactly what that means and I get that you're just going to eat one slice of cake.

And then not have any more.

That's not really how it works.

And I think this is about mindfulness more broadly as well.

So, for example, when I talk to people about meditation, they'll say to me, I really struggle with meditation because I can't clear my mind.

And I'll always say to them, it's not about clearing your mind.

Meditation or mindfulness is actually about observing what's going on.

It's about being able to take a step back, to not get dragged in by the emotion or the thing that's happening and to be able to look at it and say, oh, okay, that's interesting.

I wonder why that's happening.

I wonder why I made that decision.

I wonder if I might make a different decision in the future.

That's what it is about.

And that's the same with mindful eating.

It's not another way to control yourself.

It's not another way to try and have more willpower.

It's a way to be able to understand why you're making the decisions you're making, is being able to understand it without the judgment.

So again, what happens is we go into mindful eating with this idea that, oh, it's going to help me to stay in control, it's going to help me to say no more.

And then of course we can't do that, or we find it very difficult to do that, or we start second guessing everything and then we make the conclusion, okay, mindful eating does not work.

But actually, mindful eating is exactly what I teach people to do when I walk them through the react to respond method.

I'm going to talk to you a little bit more about that in a moment.

But essentially I am leading people towards this place of being able to make decisions around food without judgment, being able to notice what is going on, and being able to use that information to make decisions.

Okay, And I think the second part of this is that often intuitive and mindful eating doesn't work because of the way that we have conditioned ourselves.

Because mindful eating assumes you can already hear your body.

And if you've spent years dieting overriding the signals that your body is giving you, then that may well not be true.

In fact, it very likely is not true that you can actually hear what your body is saying.

So the idea of just, oh, I'll just listen to my body overnight, it feels virtually impossible.

It feels very out of control because we now have created an inbuilt lack of trust in the things that our body is saying to us.

We have also Learned to ignore what our body is saying to us.

And you know, let's add to that, that many women are living entirely in their heads most of the time.

That knowing what our body is saying to us has become something of a kind of dark art.

Now we've done this to survive.

We live in our heads to survive in the world as it is.

But.

But it doesn't help us very much when we are actually trying to be mindful about what we're doing.

We have to be able to actually feel things in our body, not just hunger, but emotions too.

That it is important that we do that if we want to eat in a more mindful way.

And like I say, what many of us have done is we've conditioned ourselves and set ourselves up for that to actually be very difficult.

And so when we go, right, I'm just going to start being more mindful, of course we go, oh, how do I do that?

What is this mindfulness that people speak of?

I don't understand when I'm hungry, I don't understand this emotion.

I don't understand what's happening in my body right now.

And so we then come to the conclusion it's not working for me.

But literally all it is is that we're missing this step.

And the step is to rebuild the trust and the communication with our body first.

So beginning to notice hunger and fullness without judgment.

Being able to just be the detective who is gathering evidence.

Because judgment is a surefire way of just sending us back into restriction.

We need to start getting rid of that.

We need to start being able to observe what's going on without judging it.

That's part of rebuilding trust.

Part another part of it is actually learning to recognize emotions.

Learning to recognize the difference between hunger and being bored or stressed or overwhelmed or tired.

And also recognizing why we make some of the decisions that we do.

So for example, it's Friday night and I always overeat because I feel like I deserve it at the end of a long week.

And again, it's about not judging that, not going, oh my God, I'm so weak willed.

Why do I always do this to myself?

What's my problem?

What's wrong with me?

I've eaten really well all week.

I don't understand why I do this.

Instead it's going, whoa, let's take a step back.

Let's create that space.

Let's be the detective.

Let's look at, okay, why am I doing that?

Why do I feel like I have to treat myself at the end of A long week.

What else is actually going on behind this?

And I think the final part of it is recognizing what else we can be giving ourselves in the moment.

That's another part of rebuilding that trust, rebuilding that communication.

So recognizing what's actually going on without judgments, the hunger, the fullness, the emotions.

It's recognizing what the emotions are and why we make some of the decisions that we do around food.

And it's recognizing what else can I be giving myself in that moment.

And this is what I call the react to respond method, which is essentially going from a very reactive space where our survival instinct essentially kicks in without rational thoughts.

And it's the reason that you end up having half a packet of biscuits before you even realize what you're doing.

Or it's why you see yourself in the mirror.

And your reaction is to make yourself instantly feel better by saying, it's okay, I'll start another diet tomorrow.

I'll sort myself out.

So in that very reactive place, we make decisions not based off reason and ration and all of those kind of things.

We make decisions based off, oh, shit, I need to do something about this, basically.

And what we do is we take you from that into a more responsive place.

That responsive place where we are able to observe, where we are able to notice what's going on with curiosity instead of judgment, and where we start to really make space to make different decisions for ourselves.

And that, for me, is the foundation we need to actually start feeling successful when it comes to being mindful around food.

So it's not that it won't work for you, it's just that you've likely jumped in with both feet and you've missed this little step in the process, this little step around creating that trust.

And that's because nobody's told you, ever told you before, we're just like, yeah, just start intuitive eating.

Just go for it.

It's fine.

Just start listening to your body.

And you're like, that's a load of crap, because I don't know what that bloody well feels like.

So it's just this.

What's this little piece in the puzzle that's missing right now?

Now, if you are nodding away thinking, yeah, that's exactly what I need, then I have got you.

Because this is exactly what we're going to be doing inside.

Ditch the diet.

So we're going to bridge that place between, I really want to stop dieting.

I'm really sick of doing this to myself and becoming more mindful around food when you feel like you don't quite have the trust to let go yet.

So we're going to take those first steps together.

I'm going to coach you individually through this react to respond method and this is really valuable stuff because we are going to make sure that this works for you.

Everybody that comes into this space has a slightly different need, has a slightly different story going on, has slightly different patterns going on, and we're going to work with those individual patterns to make sure that we make it work for you.

Now don't hang around though, because the doors are going to close on Friday 2nd October.

If you want to know a little bit more, I've actually put together a mini bonus episode that talks you through how all of it works, what you're going to find on the inside.

So if you are interested, go have a listen.

That will be very enlightening on how it's all going to work.

I'll put the link in the show notes as well, but for now that's where I'm going to love you and leave you.

And if you have enjoyed this episode, make sure you share it with a friend who needs it.

And of course make sure you're following me over on Instagram @lifeeditwithalex.

I will see you back here at again next time.