And you know that because you’ve done that several times over and over and over thinking, it’s the right plan for you, but it’s not. So we just continue to have this experimental playful mindset on how we take steps forward in your weight loss. We need to find what works for you. What resonates with you that helps you eat in a way that you feel good about that gets you the results that you want. And I like to call this “Eating in God’s Will. 

You see all of the work that we do at weight loss with the holy spirit and all the work that I do with my individual personal clients is to teach them how to reorder their food. But not in like the strict staunchly way, but in the way that the Lord created us to experience food, of course he wants food to nourish us. But the other thing you guys do is he does want us to enjoy food. That’s why he gave us taste buds. And he wants our bellies to be full. Test stop that hunger signal.  Wouldn’t you absolutely love to be able to eat food that you love that fills your belly. 

And you can stop when it’s enough. And it gets you to your healthy way. Of course you would. That’s what we all want, that’s where we’re listening to this podcast. So when I look at  the women that I work with, and this includes myself, one of the things that is really helpful to get clear on are not only the foods but the eating habits that are causing chaos in our lives. That seemed to be the same hole that we just kept falling in all the time, we walked on the sidewalk, we fell in the hole. We walked on the sidewalk. We fall in the hole. We walked on the sidewalk. We fall in the hole. We walk in from work and we go straight to the pantry. We put the kids down for a nap and we went straight to the refrigerator. 

The husband goes up to bed and we go straight into the kitchen. So it’s these patterns that were our brains are in. And when I mentioned chaos foods, a few podcasts ago, I did a whole podcast on what chaos foods are, how to find your chaos foods. And once you find them what to do about them, but in general just know that chaos foods are foods that are causing chaos in your life. They’re taking up a lot of brain space. You feel obsessed about them. You will probably get out of bed to go eat them. You’re thinking about when you can eat them, even while you’re eating them, you’re craving them. So they’re creating brain chaos in your life. In this podcast, I want to talk to you about the chaos behaviors, identifying them. 

And then from there creating what I like to call that safe eating plan. Okay, so to find your chaos behaviors, it is a very simple exercise. I’m going to try my darndest to explain in detail with no video, but I think you guys will really understand this. So, maybe you can listen to this podcast once and then replay it while you’re sitting with a piece of paper. But what you want to do is get out a piece of paper and we’re going to be using a tool. I was introduced to an idea  by Dr. Carolyn Leaf. And it’s a way to organize your thoughts that uses your right and left hemispheres of your brain. It’s really fun. It’s really creative. It really helps you step outside of these chaos food behaviors. In these chaos eating situations, and look at them with a little more playfulness, with more objectivity and with a more critical eye, like a detective, instead of that shaming wagging your finger at yourself way. 

So before we begin, you’ll want to think of one time that you can remember overeating, binge eating, eating in a way that you felt out of control. And I suggest you do this in two to three different scenarios. Go through the whole process for one, then go through the whole process for the other and then go through the whole process for the third one. It’s really simple. But going through there will help you see what the commonalities are and we’ll just make creating that safe eating plant even more succinctly. So the first thing that you want to do is imagine that scenario. First I’m going to go through the steps and then I will lead you through the steps and an example, for me. So the first thing you want to do is imagine a time when you have overeating and binge eating.

Visualize it as if you were watching a movie. And now you would create a made Metacog. And at the top of the paper you’re going to put what the scenario was. Are you in front of the TV? Are you at a 50th birthday party? Are you hiding in your pantry? When your family goes to bed, are you envisioning Halloween? Are you envisioning Christmas of 2014? What are you envisioning? Just put a title to it. From there, you will then create subcategories, location, who else is there?  The food you’re eating. What time of day was it? Would be a behaviors are you observing yourself doing? And then you can go into that scene deeper and list the feelings. 

And really you can write any detail that sticks out to any category that you feel like you would like to write. And I just put a line from the title. So I circle the title and then I put a line from it and then I’ll put feelings and I’ll put a circle around the feelings and I’ll list all the feelings. And then I’ll put a line from the main title. Step three, as you reread what you wrote and add any other details. 

And it’s literally that easy for the first step. Okay, so let me take you through an example that I have, and this was when my kids were younger I used to make them extremely elaborate cakes. I should pull out some pictures. I know I say that all the time, but I really should put some pictures because if you’re a real cake decorator you probably even be like, wow, those are pretty, that’s a lot of icing. So I would make these elaborate cakes for them and it wasn’t necessarily the cake that was elaborate. 

It was the decorations  because it would be a theme that they picked. And then I would just really try to go to town impressing my three and six year old, right, with my cake decorating skills. It would take days to make these cakes. There would be so many different colors of icing, so many pounds of butter and powdered sugar and milk and bowls and mixing and, oh my gosh. So that is the title of my Metacog decorating the cake. And so my subcategories, so I circled decorating the cake, I drew a line from decorating the cake to where I put it in the kitchen. I circled where, and then the kitchen. That was just it. I drew another line down to another category who’s there. And I said, I’m alone. I drew another line to another category. 

And I said, what was my posture? Now posture is important to me, but this could also be listed as behavior, but I said, I’m standing. You might see while you’re laying on the couch. You’re standing, you’re sitting, you’re in a specific chair. Then I put, what is the food? I put a line from decorating the cake all the way down to a sub category food and I circled the word food. And the food that I’m eating. I mean, I icing, I mean, the ends of the cake. And I also put I’m eating unplanned food. I think that I added that actually in the second part when I asked. When I’m asked to reread it and then add more. There’s another line down to when and when I’m envisioning this picture in my brain, this one time it was in the evening. Then I drew another line to the word behaviors and I circled behaviors and I listed all the behaviors. 

If I’m watching a movie, what would I be seen Denise do? You would see that I’m icing the cake? It would also see that I’m looking around, making sure that no one can watch me so I’m hiding. And looking at my fingers and looking the spoons. I’m sort of in this rushed hustle sort of energy. And I did say here that you can see that I’m standing. All right. 

And then I drew a line to another sub category called feelings and I listed all my feelings. I’m tired. I’m overwhelmed. I feel like, ah, nobody appreciates what I’m doing. Although it’s a hundred percent of my choice to do this cake, I was always a little anxious during this because I didn’t know if it would work out if it would last till the party. If my kids would like it, it was just all of this uncertainty. 

I also felt like I was doing something wrong because I knew my husband hated that the kitchen would be honestly quite messy for several days, or if there were moments of it being clean, it would be very messy again. And I was doing this a lot in the evening when he was watching the kids. So he would be home in an experiencing that. And I could just tell that that stressed him out. So I felt like I really shouldn’t be doing this. 

And then I also had this fear of, oh my gosh, am I even going to get this done? Will it be done in time? I mean, you could just see, much mind chaos going on.  And I’m just stuffing, stuffing this down and stuffing this down with icing. I mean, you can even tell, like I’m kind of getting into the emotions of it now, but that’s not what the Metacog is supposed to do. 

So step one, as you imagine it; step two, as you write the Metacog; step three, as you reread it and add any other insights. Okay, I suggest you do that with a couple different scenarios. So if I were going to do this in my different scenarios, I did the one with you right now with decorating the cake. I’ve done this before on eating chocolate chips in dumping chocolate chips in peanut butter. And then another one might be restaurants. 

That would be a good one. If you’ve ever found yourself over eating at a restaurant. And you guys, you just can’t get this wrong. This is just a way to bring some awareness. This isn’t recording every nuance of your history. It’s just to bring some awareness to you. To create what’s called a safe eating plan. And so what you’re going to do is you’re going to look at everything that you wrote there. And really focused on the behaviors or anything that stands out or any commonalities. Now, listen while you do this, your brain wants to be really confused and be like, this is so overwhelming. I want to tell you, you can’t do this wrong. 

This is only to increase awareness. If you notice yourself judging yourself while you’re doing this. I’m going to ask for you to just to suspend that and to just say at this point, I’m growing in awareness. I never have to do this again. I’m getting clarity on this so that I know what to do instead. Because the truth is that if you guys had a different way of doing the scenarios that are sitting in front of you, you would not have done them. Isn’t that the truth? And so that’s what we’re doing now is we’re creating a safe eating plan where identifying what does create chaos or common situations that have created chaos for you. And then how can we create some safety around them? Okay, so you want to focus on the behaviors. And now let’s take out another piece of paper. 

And on one side of the piece of paper, we’re going to write all the behaviors that you see. And on the other side, we’re going to write the opposites of those behaviors. It doesn’t that sound like so much work? I’m going to tell you, It’s really not. So from everything I just listed. I noticed that there were a couple of behaviors or situations that were chaotic and then on the opposite I wrote what is calm or the opposite of that. 

You don’t even have to like, judge, is it calm or not? Just what is the opposite of that chaos? So I’m going to go through each one and then tell you the opposite that I listed. I really suggest that you go through and list all chaos behaviors first. And then go through and list the opposite, which I’ll tell you what I noticed from my Metacog. The chaos eating that I noticed, I was alone in hiding. I was standing, looking at my fingers in the spoons. I was rushed. I was icing a cake. I was in the kitchen when I was tired. Okay, so the opposite of being alone is to be around people. The opposite of hiding is to not hide. The opposite of standing seated. The opposite of rushed is to be slow. The opposite of icing a cake is buying a cake, which I’ll tell you about just a little bit. The opposite of being in the kitchen when tired is not cooking when tired. 

Do you see how simple that is? And oh, one of the things I noticed was that I was eating impulsively. So the opposite of eating impulsively is to eat planned food. And that’s really you guys all it is is that. Now you look at that opposite list and that is your safe eating plan. So if I was going to look at the opposite, I’m going to list my opposites again, so for me to stay safe. Is it the opposite are I eat with people? I don’t hide. I seated slowly.  I buy cakes. I think that’s funny. I’ll get to that in a second. I don’t cook when I’m tired. And I eat planned food. 

And so some of that I don’t put in my daily plan, like I’m not going to go buy a cake every day and I’m not going to eat with somebody every day. But I’ll tell you if I notice that I want to hide. That is really a clear indication for me to check in with myself that something’s probably cooking.  So now I want you to take a third piece of paper. And on this piece of paper, this is the one at the top you’ll write when I’m eating with the holy spirit I am eating, or when I’m eating in God’s will, or when I’m safely eating. And this is what I call the safe feeding plan. So when I’m eating with the holy spirit, I am eating seated, slowly, planned food. 

Now I’ll tell you from other metacog that I’ve done. I also know that one of the chaos behaviors for me is eating off other people’s plates or eating food while preparing or cleaning up meals.  So in addition to my safe eating plan, being seated slowly and planned foods, I also said that it’s food that’s been prepared for me. See, I don’t eat off other people’s plates and I also say it’s food prepared for me, assuming it’s already prepared. I don’t eat while I cook, or when I clean up, that’s a huge cast behavior for me. And to indicate that on my safe eating plan, I put the words, I eat food that is plated, not eating while preparing or cleaning up. 

So, this is not something you have to do a hundred percent. Once you know this, you guys, this is a guide. It will take practice. It will take problem-solving. It will take lots of problem solving and we’re not worrying about perfection. This is just growing in awareness that if you were looking at you eating calmly. If I were looking at me eating calmly, I would be eating, seated, slowly, food I plan to eat that was plated and prepared for me. And it wouldn’t be eating off other people’s plates. It wouldn’t be hiding. It wouldn’t be eating fast or standing. Can’t you see the difference? So, like I said, it will take some problem-solving. And so when I came into food recovery, I decided that I would stop baking for a time. And instead I started to buy my kids birthday cakes.  And guess what they survived. I made it fun for them. We went to bakeries and I think we did that not for them, but for me so that I felt better. 

So I didn’t feel like they felt they were getting the short end of the stick ’cause, it was really fun for me to give this to my kids baking cakes, because that’s something my mom did. But I realized that I was risking so much of my own food sanity because I wasn’t strong enough yet. And so I chose to problem solve for that and the kids still have awesome birthdays. Other problem-solving things I started to do is I started to ask people to scrape their own plates. And here’s another thing I tried. I started chewing gum while I was cooking or cleaning up and I’m going to tell you guys I chewed way too much gum. 

And on one hand, it really helped me get through this. But I’ll tell you, I think that I would not recommend that now for the women that I work with. I think we can come up with some other non-chaotic behaviors because truthfully gum became then a chaos behavior and a chaos food for me to the point that I don’t even to gum anymore. And we just like, choose not to and I have so much more peace in my life without it. But it was one of the tools in my toolbox at that time. And it really did get me over the hump. See now each day when I plan my food, I get to read the safe feeding plan and the women in the weight loss with the holy spirit program, we do this. We just take a peak and remind ourselves how we eat to stay in the Lord’s will, how we eat to stay safe. 

And once you create these guidelines, these boundaries. It’s a great reminder that when you’re stepping outside of those you weren’t doing something wrong, but it is a red flag for you to check in with yourself. I like to say eating this way to stay in the Lord’s will so we hope this has been helpful for you. This is not something that I do perfectly. But I do know that if I want to eat something standing up, something’s up with me. If I want to eat something impulsively, there’s something going on with me. And so I hope you can use this as one of the tools in your toolbox to gain awareness. On how you can eat in the Lord’s will and create the safety plan for you that isn’t like a straight jacket that isn’t like a bunch of rules. A gentle way that you can stay connected with yourself and say, hey, listen, this is what we’re going to practice. 

This is what we’re going to cultivate because the majority of the women that I work with, they want to feel good about the way they eat. And if you would like to cultivate feeling in control around your food and to get to a healthy weight. I invite you to join the weight loss with the holy spirit community, where we start our foundation’s challenge today where you learn everything that you need to get to and maintain a healthy weight for the rest of your life, no matter what your life looks like. So why don’t you go to weightlosswiththeholyspirit.com and get signed up today.