What are outcomes of intuitive eating? What can you really expect? Intuitive Eating offers ten principles you can apply into your life – but in order to know which ones to use, you need to ask yourself: what does future you want?
In this episode, she’ll show you how to decide what to do next in order to *REALLY* progress in your Intuitive Eating Journey simply by asking: what does future you want?
If you’ve ever felt like you *know* what to do, but you’re just not doing it when it comes to food… this episode will help you avoid future feelings of regret by helping you organize yourself into action. This is the best way to get more benefits and freedom from Intuitive Eating!
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This episode was sponsored by No More Guilt with Melissa Landry. Reminder that though we are dietitians, we’re not *YOUR* dietitian. Podcasts don’t constitute treatment. If you have concerns about your dieting behaviors, seek out guidance from a medical or mental health professional. And if you’re looking for the process, support, and focus you need to live life without food guilt apply for a coaching program from today’s sponsor. No More Guilt with Melissa Landry is currently enrolling clients into 1:1 programs, group programs, and, recently added a do-it-yourself learning format: the Ex-Dieter’s Guide to No More Guilt.
[what does future you want?] transcript
Melissa Landry 0:02 Hi there, I'm Melissa, a registered dietitian specialize in intuitive eating for on again off again, chronic dieters, and I'm here to help you take the guilt and stress out of eating so you can be the first in your family to break the diet cycle. I'm interested in helping you unlearn generational diet trauma, so you can be who you are without food guilt. Be sure to follow on Instagram at no more guilt for more support between these episodes. Are you ready? Let's jump in. I'm here for my very first solo podcast episode. And I'll be honest with you, for the past 10 weeks, if you've been keeping up, I have been sharing a replay of the episodes, Dalina and I did walk you through the principles of intuitive eating. And when I program those episodes, let me tell you, I said, Okay, we have 10 weeks 10 principles, Melissa, it'll be the summer, you're gonna know exactly what you want to do with the podcast next once those episodes are done. Well, that time came in when and I still had no clue what I wanted to do with this podcast. And so I thought about you guys, and I thought about how so many of you tell me, You know what to do around your intuitive eating journey, but you're just not doing it. And I thought to myself, you know, I know what to do. I know how to do a podcast, I know how to fill the time and teach and entertain and be vulnerable and share. I've been doing it for five seasons, but I'm just not doing it. And so if you resonate with that feeling of like, knowing you want to do something that it could benefit you and others that it might be fun, or cool or neat, but you're just not doing it. That's what today's episode is going to be all about. By not knowing what to do, I knew exactly what to do to kick us off. Now I'll tell you this season, we're gonna go on a little journey together, I have queued up some clients who are going to tell their stories, I'm so excited to share them. I think one of the things that's often so missing in the work you're doing out there is that you don't know anybody else who is trying to break the diet cycle to heal their relationship with food to figure out what your life looks like when you don't have diet. So you could definitely expect some interviews with them. We'll see how this goes maybe some more solo episodes with me. And I'm hoping to bring on some guests because there's nothing more that I love than a good conversation. But today we're going to do an exercise today we're going to walk through a technique that I used to help myself figure out what to do next with this podcast. And I want you to apply it to what you should do next and your intuitive eating journey. Because look you just finished if you've been following along 10 weeks, teaching you the intuitive eating principles. So if you felt like you knew what to do, you're just not doing it before all that now you probably have even more ideas and inspiration to practice. And if you're still not doing it if you're still not figuring out ways to apply intuitive eating into your life, here's where I'm gonna do full disclosure I learned this technique from one of my favorite podcasts armchair expert I don't know if there's other listeners on here that like that podcast. Sometimes I find they're not totally up to speed on the anti diet culture worldview so I do sometimes have to cover my ears and monitor my frustration with both Dax and Monica when they get diet culture a but they had a guest on that was talking about the emotion of regret. And I it was weeks ago, you'll have to DM me if you listen to this episode to maybe I'll put a link to it in show notes. If you want to listen to it yourself. It rattled my brain. It was one of those things where you listen to you and you're like, Ah, okay, I hadn't thought of that before helpful. And what the episode is talking about is how so many of us feel regret in life, and how we can avoid that feeling of regret if we could imagine our future selves and what we might think or feel or want. So many of you tell me you regret the time you've lost to diets. So many people tell me Oh, if I only had known about setpoint weight theory, if I had only known that this was going to make me you know lose weight gain weight to wind up at a heavier size. If I had only known it would it would instigate or cause disordered eating to flare if only I had known. Maybe I would have done something different and what you are describing is regret. Now look dieting is not your fault. You and certainly not your fault. We are told that that is a good and moral and right thing to do if you're anything like my mom, depending on the shape or size of your body growing up, you were probably prescribed and praised dieting. And so on the one hand, it's normal to feel that regret. But on the other hand, we can't know what we don't know. But now we do. Now we do know. And so if we're not taking action, this is actually the moment where regret can sneak in. I knew I would regret not coming back to this podcast. And the way that I tapped into what I should do, around this idea of regret, was using a question that this podcast taught me, which is what does future Melissa want? What would future Melissa be asking current day, Melissa about her life, to make sure she was doing everything in her power to set her up for her experiences and her values. And that is something that you can do too. So we're going to bring it to your intuitive eating journey. I wish I knew your name. I wish the podcast could like Taylor right now. And I can say your name, but I'll just say you so what this future you want to hear from you? What is future? You? What would they ask you? If they were like, Oh my gosh, did you do x, y, z? What are you up to? What would they want that answer to be you know, when I work with clients, one of the very first things we do is we take time to establish what's called a vision statement. And if you haven't yet my three step guide gives you a modified, kind of abbreviated prompt for this exercise I do with clients. And the reason I do it is not to get all like, let's pretend we're in the future magical state. But instead to help clients really center and connect with why they want to become intuitive eaters beyond survival mode of like, oh, well, I just don't want to be guilty and miserable all the time anymore. Like yeah, that's a great motivation. But what's possible with intuitive eating is that not only do those feelings go away, but you actually can thrive and step into what you want instead. That's the real scary part, I think, right? We can imagine the absence of the guilt. But we cannot imagine what's life, like what life is like without it. So I want to acknowledge that can be a scary, vulnerable place. So if you if you want to engage in this exercise with me, I'm going to show you an example of questions that after Listen, that podcast I wrote down for myself. And I actually keep them on yellow sticky notes inside of my moleskin planner, because as much as I do use digital cameras, but cameras, digital calendars, but I need a paper calendar. I don't know that I could ever sometimes I don't use the paper calendar for weeks, but I always kind of come back to it because I love a paper calendar. So what I did was I took these holding them right now these little sticky notes, and I wrote these questions that I would want future, Melissa. Future Melissa would have asked me if I was doing in my life. So I'm gonna give you an example of them. And they're, they're all things that I worry about in my day to day. So it also helps me to organize myself and make sure that I can let my mind rest and say you know what you're doing all the things myself. So in the spirit of applying what you know about intuitive eating, and applying it into your life, here are some example questions that I asked myself. So here's one: Do your friends and family feel seen supported and part of your life? I asked myself this question. Because future Melissa imagines herself with her friendships that she's had for a really long time. Future, Melissa imagines herself as a part of a community and connected to other people. I have identified through this pandemic, through moving through my 30s, as we all grew up feelings of loneliness. And so this is a great question for me to be asking. So do your friends and family seems supported in part of your life? And when I look at that question, I go, they actually do a great job with that. Or, you know what, I don't know that I've been in contact with folks that a little while and that might prompt me to make a call or make a plan. You know, for folks that have disordered eating, eating disorders or body image struggles. This type of a question might resonate with you because the answer might be no, because I haven't felt safe and secure to go out and eat in public lately, or my body image has been flaring up in a way that I haven't been able to be there for the people in my life the way that I want to. So you can see the power of this question how it activates you to think like, oh, yeah, this is important to me, and I'm not attending to it. And so now I'm more likely to take those Intuitive Eating skills off of the shelf and and practice them and do something with them rather than rattling my bread say I should. I should. I should. I should. I should, I should oh gosh, that repetitive tape in your mind if you have anxiety. So I know that tape you probably do too if you experience it. Here's another question future Melissa would ask Melissa today, it would ask are you growing as a teacher? Oh, I love teaching. I'm a registered dietician. But I really love teaching. It's another reason that the podcast was a no brainer for me to come back to like, this is one way for people to learn not everyone's going to read the intuitive eating book, which lol we love Elise, we love Evelyn, we love the co authors. But it is the textbook, it is a textbook. And if you don't have the time, space bandwidth, or that's just not how you learn, okay, we don't have to use the textbook podcasts are valid. So it helps me grow as a teacher to be here. I'll be honest, I don't even know this is uncomfortable right now. I have no feedback recording this podcast. I've no idea. I won't know until it airs if it lands with any of you. But I'm practicing. And so future Melissa, I think would be really pleased with me doing this podcast. So what you know, think about your work your profession, and even if you're not working or you don't really connect with your job that much. What is something that makes you light up? Are you growing as a knitter? Are you growing as a movie watcher, you could ask that kind of a question instead of mine, which is are you growing as a teacher? So I like that question. I'm gonna keep thinking about how to how to become better at this become more masterful. Here's another one. Are you exploring new places? At the moment, I own a private practice. I work from home. And one of the things I noticed is that my life got really wonderful. I love my job. I love the freedom. I love working with you. But my life got geographically small. It's geographically small, I go from my bedroom, to my office and to my living in the night. You see me on stories, if you follow on Instagram, I take my walks and I come back and I met was missing exploring new places the pandemic shut things down. I wasn't able to do stuff. So that's another question. Future Melissa wants to know, what are you planning to explore a new place? Because she wants to look back and enjoy all those adventures? Another question I asked, Are you having fun? Are you having fun right now? Oh, my gosh, I am prone to the serious you can tell I have a little little silly vibe to me too. But I am prone to the serious. And sometimes I forget to explore the silly fun side of myself. So are you having fun? I would say lately I am. I don't know if you know, but I took up a wee bit of a pickleball habit. So that is one way I'm having fun. I'm enjoying that. More questions. Here's one. Are you taking care of yourself? Are you taking care of yourself? Future Melissa wants to know. Was I? And maybe are you taking care of yourself doesn't mean physical. That's something I want to challenge you to think about as intuitive eaters, maybe it means mental, social, emotional, you could be taking care of yourself by letting yourself off the hook by speaking kindly by asking for help by delegating something. So I have a very broad definition of this. And that's because I've done the work to see taking care of myself beyond, you know, exercise and nutrition. Those are important aspects. But it's not the only things. My clients work on that to where they're kind of expanding that definition. So that question can be broad. You know, these questions might not align with you. There may be different questions. And so I want you to think about that. Maybe not right now. Maybe we're like driving or cleaning or doing something. But I want you to think about future you and what questions future you would ask about your priorities, your focus your intentions, the way that you're being with yourself right now. That is a really powerful exercise. And one of the outcomes of doing this, for me has been that when I do the little questions, oftentimes I'm like, You know what? I'm doing all right. There's less to fix than I thought there was. That is a huge, huge part of my practice is helping clients to identify what success is for them beyond eating less and moving more, because there's more to it. As we've learned from copious podcast episodes, you're able to give them some some some frickin credit like give yourself some credit for the small little ways that you're moving toward all of those wants that you have I told you my questions. Let's say you do identify like, like my example with like, do my friends and family feel seen and supported that question I asked myself, if the answer is Um I don't know or know, that gives me a thrust or a push to focus on it. And like I mentioned in my three step guide, before, I actually give you some tools to help you focus on goal setting in that way, because that's when goal setting comes in. When you have identified something that's important to you, that's not happening. And you need the goal to prompt and structure the process. So that's my invitation to you today is to ask yourself, what would future you want? Maybe you come up with some questions like I did, maybe you start engaging with those questions. Some more, you can certainly use my free guide to develop your ideas. If you already have my free guide and you haven't used it or you used it a while ago and you haven't reconnected with it. Guess what time to go back to it time to reconnect, we can use those tools over and over again. All right. Now we have all of our eyes pointed on what we want what future US wants, and that means upcoming episodes. Hopefully it will be even more powerful for you to imply into your lives. Upcoming as I said, we're going to have more solo episodes like this one, we're going to have expert guests, former clients. I am going to cover topics about for example how watching Love Island mess with my body image. I never watch reality shows but dabbled into love islands I want to give you my critique on that. We are going to break down set point weight theory that is my most popular blog post and a question I get all the time we've never really covered it on the pod I'm gonna walk you through that. I'm going to take you through some more background on my experience as a former weight loss researcher so I hope this has a lot to offer you up ahead episodes will come out weekly so follow this podcast if you're not doing so yet make sure you don't miss them. And lastly, if you're super inspired by what you're hearing on the podcast and you know that you need a little bit more support and structure with someone specialized in us who can take you every step of the way. I am accepting one to one clients at this time. So if you've been looking for a one to one coach I want you to apply you can do that on my Instagram page at no dot more dot guilt. You can apply at WWW dot Does anyone need the www anymore? I don't I think we get that's how you start a website anyway Melissa Landry nutrition.com I will be in touch with you. We'll meet for 30 minutes. I want to hear your story. I want to hear what's working, what's not working and let you know how coaching would or would not help you at this point. Thanks for sticking with me. Thanks for sticking with this podcast DME what you like what you don't like I want to hear about it. This is for us to hang out and to grow as we break the diet cycle because that's what this mission is. We don't want one more person going through guilt and shame around food or bodies and I appreciate you for being part of it. Until next time, be good to your good body.
