I’ll also be talking to you about the similarities and differences between my approach to weight loss and what I have seen effective for women. depending on what stage of weight loss they’re in. So I hope that by the end of this podcast, you have some clarity on what will work best for you, because the truth is that that’s exactly what one of the guiding principles of my approach to weight loss is. And from here on out, I’m just going to be using the terms, my approach to weight loss and weight loss with the Holy spirit interchangeably, because we lost with the Holy spirit. It’s all about my approach to weight loss. 

And the number one principle for my approach to weight loss is that you get to discover what works for you in this season of your life. And so although something may have worked for you five or 10 years ago, or even last year or after your first child, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to work for you now.

And I just want to give you permission that you’re not doing anything wrong. And that you get to go on this journey to discover what works for you now  in this season of your life, because you’ve never lived whatever day you’re living now, ever.  And so that is one of the guiding principles of my approach. I got this idea because one of our members asked me about intuitive eating.  And the truth was, and the truth is that although I think I could give you a general overview of what, in, Intuitive eating is, I didn’t really know exactly what the definition was, so I went to intuitive eating.org and found that there are 10 guiding principles to that philosophy,  and so I’d like to unpack those. 

Now, the other interesting piece of this is that the approach that I have to weight loss is a way of living.  It’s a way of integrating the Holy Spirit into every area of your life, including your food and weight loss. It is not just how to eat. It is not just about weight loss. It is not just about the physical. 

It is about incorporating the Lord into every area of your life. And so, in my approach to weight loss, we have morning and evening practices, as well as things that we do throughout the day.  We also have a system of how you approach your life when life happens because so many of us know exactly what we quote “should be doing or want to be doing”,  but the stresses and overwhelm of life get in the way of that. And so I also have a framework on how to deal with life, whether it’s in your marriage, your parenting, or your self care. Any area of your life, anything that could be blocking you  from being at a healthy weight. Again, it’s not just a way of eating, it is a way of life. And finally, I think it’s very obvious that all of the work that I do is grounded in the truth and beauty of our Catholic faith. All of the work that I do will continually lead you To what the Holy Spirit wants you,  what the Holy Spirit wants to say to you. So we teach you how to quiet the noise of your life so that you can hear that still small voice of the Holy Spirit.

And so I guess what I’m saying is initially on the outside, I would say that the differences between intuitive eating, although I support a lot of the principles and we’ll be going through that, The difference is between intuitive eating and my approach to weight loss,  weight loss with the Holy Spirit, is that I have an approach to how you live life  and it is a way of living, not just a way of eating. 

Okay, well let’s go through the principles because it’s super fun and if you didn’t know that there were 10 principles to intuitive eating, I encourage you to listen up and adopt some of these. These may be exactly what you need to hear. So two of the principles  are that they reject the diet mentality, which means ,  we’re not going to follow other people’s food rules. We don’t need to live in restriction and deprivation and punishment to lose weight. And intuitive eating supports that as well.  They also have this principle called challenge the food police. And how I see that play out in our community is so many women come into our community with a list of food rules that are continually playing in their brain.

And so I teach them how to quiet that voice and continue to give them permission to discover what works for them. And so I absolutely support rejecting the diet mentality as well as challenging that food police. You see, our two food rules are that you enjoy the food that you eat. And that you feel good about it.  Let me say that again, that you enjoy the food you eat and that you feel good about it. It’s not about what works for someone else. And that goes back to the number one principle of the weight loss with the Holy Spirit program, which is really just discover what works for you in this season of your life.

If a food rule worked for you five years ago, that’s awesome.  Great. It worked. But it might not just be giving you the peace and the serenity that you want to have with your food now.

A couple of their other principles are that they suggest you make peace with food.  They said, stop fighting food. Give yourself unconditional permission to eat.  If you tell yourself you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and often binging.

And that is a quote from intuitiveeating.org. Yeah, hello! That is exactly why we have the two food rules. And the other piece of intuitive eating that supports our two food rules is they said discover the satisfaction factor. Which means just stink and enjoy the food that you eat.  And over and over we have been taught and conditioned to lose weight with deprivation eating food that we hate.

And so continually in our community, we are reminding ourselves that nope, we’re not eating should foods. We’re eating the foods we love and that we feel good about. We just get to retrain our brain on that, but I love all of those principles that I just. Reviewed. And I totally agree with all of them. 

Another one of their principles is to cope with your emotions with kindness. Cope with your emotions with kindness.  And you’ll continually hear me remind you to quiet that mean girl in your head, cope with emotions with kindness.

Now that principle of intuitive eating,  we embrace thoroughly in a couple different ways. I see two pieces to that. The first one is to cope with emotions. And so often emotional eaters, stress eaters, are not given a framework on how to even cope with emotions beyond, feel your feelings. Well, that’s not really helpful. Feeling your feelings is one piece of it, but in the Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit program,  we give you a framework on how to not only feel your feelings, but then what do you do after that? How do you make sense of them? How do you make this a productive, healing experience? Just feeling your feelings kind of feels a little flat and lonely, doesn’t it?  And I love the other piece of kindness and the weightlessness with the Holy Spirit program.  You learn to treat yourself first, how the Lord would treat you. In traditional dieting. There’s this concept that you’ll be nice to yourself once you meet your goal. And that’s just not true. In my approach to weight loss, it starts with self care.

It starts with love, it starts with kindness, and it starts with tenderness. And I’ll tell you, I could not use that word love for a very, very long time authentically. And so I just had to use the word  tender? Like, I understood tender because I can be tender with a child and I could recognize starting to be tender or more kind to myself. So this principle of coping with your emotions with kindness,  absolutely. And I believe that’s actually the first place to start. When someone comes to lose weight with my approach, we have a starting place.  And that starting place helps you begin to take steps  Slowly by slowly by slowly, so that you can be free from stress eating, emotional eating. 

This whole concept of being able to cope with your emotions with kindness is exactly one of the biggest overarching goals of the Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit program. I believe this is how you can maintain a healthy weight for the rest of your life. Unless you learn how to cope with your emotions, without food to get through the ups and downs of life without food. It’s impossible to be at a healthy weight for the rest of your life.  In my opinion,  which brings me to two of their principles that I want to chat with you about, and you might love the concept of intuitive eating, but I want to give you permission that two of these principles just  might not work for you, or you just might not be that far in your journey. and there may be something that you need to work on before that. And these two principles are number one,  honoring your hunger,  and the second one is feeling your fullness. Don’t get me wrong, I think being able to eat by hunger, is beautiful and a beautiful connection to our bodies. I believe being able to stop eating when you’re full is again, another beautiful way that we show that we’re in tune with our bodies  and that we don’t need extra food. 

But, what I want  to give you permission is that those might be more advanced skills. That you can learn later after you’ve learned to detect your stress and emotional eating.  Because on the outside, doesn’t it sound fantastic to just eat when you’re hungry, stop eating when you’re full?  But , for some people, including myself, that is an extremely advanced skill. 

And I’m still learning what that means.  I’ve been in food recovery for 10 years, and I don’t make it mean that I don’t have freedom from food,  and I don’t make it mean that I can’t cope with my emotions,  but I will say sometimes eating by the clock instead of my hunger gives me a feeling of safety and works for my life. 

It feels more predictable. It feels like more control. And I’m choosing that. I’m choosing that that’s what I want.  And sometimes I see myself eat beyond fullness. But I’m still happy with the amount that I ate. I didn’t feel like I was overeating. And so these are, I believe, more nuanced skills that come later in your weight loss journey. Unless, of course, they don’t. They might come early for you.  I have a couple women in our community who say they honor their hunger. They don’t eat until they’re hungry. And they love it and that works for them.  I have some women who leave food on their plate  to practice knowing that they’re, they’ve had enough.  I’ve had some women who say that’s too scary. They want to clean their plate. They feel like there might not be enough food. They want to eat everything that they put on their plate.  Either way is totally fine. It goes back to that first principle of just discovering what works for you.

And I do believe that feeling your fullness  and honoring your hunger are worthwhile endeavors and skills to learn.  But like I said, in my approach to weight loss, we start in one place and we progress.  And if that’s not something that your body is ready to do, or there’s some underlying fear, it’s totally okay. You can still get to and maintain a healthy weight for the rest of your life. I don’t think that Those two skills are necessary for that. At least that hasn’t been true in my life, because I’ve maintained a healthy weight for several years. Not going on just the hunger or fullness principle. Okay. So you get to decide if that works for you, and if that’s something that you want to work toward.  A couple other things. They say respect your body. Yeah, of course we want to respect our body. Here’s what intuitiveeating.org says. They say, accept your genetic blueprint.

Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile and uncomfortable to have a similar expectation about body size.  But mostly respect your body so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body size and shape. All bodies deserve dignity. Amen. And of course we believe that.  But knowing that that’s true and being able to internalize it and believe it for yourself can be a challenge. Especially if you have childhood roots and are always seeking thinness or finding safety and emotional comfort in food. And so although that’s a beautiful principle, I do want to remind you that my approach to weight loss gives you a framework on how to actually achieve and believe that we use our framework to address your feelings about your body.  And no matter how you’re feeling about your body right now, I just want to remind you that those are the glasses that you’re wearing.  And that I teach you how to be tender and kind and caring. And you can start to value and enjoy and appreciate and believe that your body is beautiful by this framework that we use.

I do love that principle. One of their principles is movement. It says, feel the difference. They say, forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Essentially, they’re saying, move your body because it feels super yummy and good. And I do support that.  In my approach to weight loss, we don’t first focus on exercise. You can incorporate exercise because it’s fun and it feels good and you like it. And you can do it if you’re being nudged by the Holy Spirit to exercise. But if you don’t, that’s totally fine. You can add exercise down the road. It’s not one of the most essential things. To get to and maintain it, maintain a healthy weight. I just don’t believe that I don’t believe the amount of exercise that you are or aren’t doing is standing in the way of your weight loss. I think there’s other things standing in the way and we address those first because that will give you the most relief and the most results. It’s just the place to start. 

And their final principle is to honor your health with gentle nutrition.  They say make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember, you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or become unhealthy from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts. And this goes just back to that simplicity of our two food rules. Enjoy what you eat, and that you feel good about it. There’s a lot of women in food recovery that eat the same thing over and over because it brings them peace and freedom, keeps them at a healthy weight, and they don’t get bored.  But mostly they do it because of the emotional freedom that they feel. So, in general,  My approach to weight loss, the Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit program, totally supports all of the intuitive eating principles. But we prioritize our attention on what is really holding you back from losing weight. And we tackle that. First,  and we don’t progress until you are ready.

So you learn a skill, you practice it, and then , we gently layer on something else and gently layer on another thing. And although that sounds like a slow approach, you actually get a lot of momentum going in that way. And women see amazing results in eight weeks. Not only do they find their energy improving,  their pants are getting looser, they may have even dropped a pant size or two, or up to ten pounds. But they just find their relationship with food and the freedom that they experience around food and their enjoyment of food increase drastically. And so Although I love all of the principles of intuitive eating,  it just doesn’t seem like a step by step framework  that would have worked for me. 

And it didn’t show me how to integrate these beautiful principles into my life. And that’s exactly what our community does and what my program does. And so, in closing, I want to give you permission to discover what works for you. And if intuitive eating and those principles resonate with you, and that’s exactly where you want to put your focus, I’d love for you to do that. If you’d love to be surrounded by a community of women, who are taking a step by step approach to addressing what’s really standing in the way of their weight loss, then I invite you. to our five day weight loss challenge or heck just jump into our community at weightlosswiththeholyspirit.com. All right, everybody have a blessed day.​