Eating more vegetable & really how to change any health habits is going to be the focus of this listener Q&A edition Vol.6 of the Going Beyond The Food show
Here’s the question:
I’m 57 and I live in a large body. I’ve been doing IE for 1.5 years now. I’m struggling with adding more nutrient dense foods into my meals. I am not trying to lose weight (I’m past that) but I do want more nutrients in my body. I never ate veggies growing up. However, I see IE posts where IE nutritionists will say you will eventually crave them. What if you never ate them?? Only forced yourself each time you went on a new diet. It doesn’t come naturally for me to reach for veggies. Can this be changed?
What you’ll learn listening to this episode on eating more vegetables:
- How to change any habits including eating more vegetables
- Why awareness is what creates changes
- Cognitive Behavioral Coaching model to create new habits
Mentioned in the show:
Rebellious Eating Solution Webinar
Undiet Your Life Coaching Program
Episode Transcript:
Going Beyond The Food Show Ep356-Listener Q&A Vol.6: Eating More Vegetables & Changing Health Habits
===
This is episode 356 of the Beyond the Food Show and today, we're back with volume six of listener q and a, and I'm gonna answer a question around how to become a person who eats more vegetable, and I'm gonna approach it from the angle of changing any health habits and any really habits in your life. You ready? Stay tuned.
Welcome back my sister to the podcast. It's volume six. Can you believe that, of listeners q and a, and this question literally just came in. It came in actually yesterday and I had this session for recording podcast that was scheduled today. So I thought, I'm gonna move to the top of the list of question because it is a question that I can expand to any habit formation. We're gonna talk about it to answer very specifically a question of this particular listener around eating more vegetables. But I want you to think about this with any health habits or habits you want to create in your life.
So let's go right in with a question.
I am 57 years old and I live in a large body. I've been doing intuitive eating for one and a half year now, and I'm struggling with adding more nutrients, dance food into my meal. I am not trying to lose weight. I am past that, but I want more nutrient in my. I never ate vegetables growing up, and I see intuitive eating social media posts where intuitive eating nutritionist will say that eventually you will crave them. What if you never ate them? Only force yourself to eat vegetable when you went on a new diet. It doesn't come naturally for me to reach for vegetable. Can this be change? End of the question.
The answer is, absolutely it can be changed. This is simply a habit that needs to be created for you. And it's important to understand, it's a habit to have to be created because you've never had it. You're not coming back the habit prior to dieting. It's a habit you've never had. So you're gonna, I want you to think about that with approaching it from ground zero. And if you are listening to this and you're like, yeah, but it's a habit perhaps that I had before I stopped doing it when I was in diet culture. Is it the same process? Absolutely, it's the same process.
Now let's get to the specific of the question around eating more vegetable. So if you are new to peaceful eating and intuitive eating contexts, know that the last step of the intuitive eating process is called Gentle Nutrition, where we go back to nutrition, how to approach food in order to fuel our body, to feed our body. But first we need to do the work of unraveling what intuitive eating called the food police, and all the rules we have about food and really neutralizing food. So that step is not to be done at the beginning of the process. And it's very clear in the question that this personhas been working on unpacking all the first step of intuitive eating.
So gentle nutrition is the last step because that's when we go back to understanding that there is some guidelines around how to bring food into our body that will support our body best. Now, one word that I picked up from the question that I wanna highlight to you, listener, is the word nutrient, dance food. And that, first of all, I would like for you to really listen to what I'm about to say and then really put in question who you are learning. The term nutrient dance food is a term created by that culture and wellness culture. It's a term, I'm gonna read it word for word, the description: food that are high in nutrient, but relatively low in calorie. There's probably all kinds of alarm bells that are going off in your brain. The term nutrient dance food originate from diet culture, then got overtaken by wellness culture, where then we deemed the value of a food not necessarily on the low calorie, which is what DI culture does, but instead on the quote amount of the right nutrient in the food.
So based on the philosophy or the paradigm you're under with nutrition, that could be food that are higher in protein and lower in carb, food that are lower in fat and higher in carbohydrates, depends on what you are co-opting as far as your philosophy into wellness culture. Do you see how tricky this whole concept of nutrient dance food is?
I personally do not label food in any way, shape, or form, including nutrient dance food. And there's a very specific reason, first of all because I don't co-opt any of those terms. I would say there's two reasons because I don't co-op any of those terms. And then two, because it continues to support that certain food are better than other food, which is fundamentally a principle that is not supported by intuitive eating. And then when you start looking into the world of how your brain functions and how we create habit in our life, you will then meet up with a lot of resistance, a lot of rebellious behavior when you're trying to do something that's supposed to be bettered than something else.
So when we label food as nutrient dance food, we, a, co-op wellness culture and diet culture, but we tell our brain these foods are better to eat than the other. Very subconscious, right? These foods are better and I should want, and you say that than your question, I should want to eat these food but I'm not. So something must be wrong with me. And then we start triggering rebellious behavior.
So listener, if you haven't yet watched my free class on Rebellious Eating, go to my website, ww.stephanie.com, and right on the first page, you will see Rebellious Eating Solution, go and listen to that. To, stop labeling food as nutrient dance food and then three, learn how to create habits. To answer your question, can this be changed? Yes. If you know how to create any habits into your life. And this is where the understanding of your brain will come in. I wanna give my opinion on this comment given by intuitive eating nutritionist, quote, it will just come to you naturally to eat vegetable, end of quote.
That's a problem in our industry in which nutritionist, how we are trained, no matter how long our degree, our master degree, our PhD is, we are not trained in behavioral change. We are trained in the science of nutrition. We are trained into medical nutrition, but we are not change on how to create behavioral change in our client.
I know this is crazy. For you as a consumer of our service, you're like, what? No, we're not. I just spoke at the University ofi Idaho, and I had the entire professor staff in front of me and none of them had any understanding of cognitive behavioral change. I was training them and I was teaching them. I know this from training professionals. My professional training, on dietary coaching, the biggest component of it is cognitive behavioral change or, how to coach behavior in your client, cuz that's the missing piece we're not trained on. So that this nutritionist who said that it will just come, bless her heart, but she does not understand how behavior are created in human.
Let me tell you how it's created here right now. Okay. This is from the World of Neuroscience. This is from the world of cognitive behavioral therapy. You can Google that, C B T, cognitive behavioral therapy, where we understand, based on our research on how the brain and human behavior work that our thoughts create the emotion we feel in our body and the emotion we experience in our body ignite a reaction, a behavior into the world.
So the way you think about vegetables creates the emotion you have towards vegetable, resistance in your case, and then you act towards vegetable from a place of feeling resistant. So you're probably having some rebellious behavior. No, I know I should, but I can't, but I don't want to. What am I gonna do? I'm lost. I'm confused, right? You're having all those thoughts because you're resistant, because you're experiencing resistance because of the way you think about eating vegetables.
We teach that process, cognitive behavioral coaching in on your life at a very easy to understand an application process and we teach it at a more complex level for a professional so they understand the behind the scene, but I want you to think about it in this easy process: pause, investigate, decide.
Pause is what you're doing right now. By asking me the question, how can I go about eating more vegetable, you've paused. You're like, something's not working. I'm resisting this vegetable thing, I don't wanna force myself, that just doesn't feel right to me, so let me pause and figure out the answer to that. Right. You're, you want to stop just trying to force yourself, so you're asking question, you're becoming your own leader through your transformation, in this case, in the relationship to vegetable. By the way, we just released a podcast 3 54 on resistance, that could be really helpful for.
So then investigate, why. Why are you feeling resistant towards eating vegetables? Awareness is what creates change. Awareness, becoming aware of why you are creating the feeling of resisting vegetable is what will create change, not forcing yourself. But you know that right? You told me that like, but anybody listening right now, they think that white knuckling yourself is the path to creating any habit? No, it's never gonna work. It will work until it doesn't. What I'm explaining to you right now, the path of investigating, pausing, and investigating, why am I being the way I am right now? Why am I not moving my body? Why am I not drinking water? Why am I not eating vegetable? Understand how currently you are creating this experience you have with vegetables. Understand the now and then once you understand why, and you had a great clue in your question, you said something about your childhood. There's an experience in your childhood with vegetable that you are continuing to carry with you right now. So there's a way of thinking about vegetable, either a traumatic experience, something your parent taught you, because for whatever reason, you are continuing to think in alignment to the same way you were when you were a child.
And that's why you are not eating the vegetable, and that's why you're resisting eating quote, nutrient dense food because there's a conflict in your brain on the way you're thinking about vegetables. So figure that out, literally what we call, do a thought download of what you're currently thinking about vegetable, and then look at your thought. And I want you to decide, in order for me to eat vegetable, I'm gonna have to change some of these way of believing and thinking about vegetable. Do I want to do this? Ask yourself consent, like this thought, this thought, this thought will have to change. Do I want to do this? As a 57 year old woman, am I willing to change the way that I think about eating and vegetable? If the answer is yes, move forward to creating a new way of thinking about vegetable and do that in a partnership with yourself, not by white-knuckling yourself, but by being very compassionate and safe with yourself.
So I thought could be it's possible for me in the future to enjoy. And then one of the action you can take is go buy or download from the internet, a cooking book that you feel attracted to that talks about vegetables, that gives you recipes and way of giving an interpretation to vegetable that sound appealing to you. That's one of the principle of intuitive eating is satisfaction, right? So based on what makes you feel satisfied, how can you engage with vegetable? For a lot of people who are new to the world of vegetable, it's adding things they like to the vegetable, right? Could be sauces, it could be cheeses, it could be frying the vegetables, right? Enter prep, cook the vegetable in a way that will sound appealing to you and make it fun for you. And think thought that will align you to create those action in your life.
That process, pause, investigate, the sign, is the same for any habit you want to create in your life. The most difficult part is the pause and investigate. We're just not used to that. As a society, we wanna jump to the result right away. We're not comfortable being with ourself as we are and going into our brain and understanding what is creating the current circumstance that we want to change right now. But that's the secret, quote unquote secret, to changing any habit.
I hoped I helped you with that. I have given you a lot of information here. If you want to come and join us, you're saying you're not in our program and you had the word yet, please come and join us. There's two ways for you to work with us in on diet your life. You can do the self-study experience or you can hire one of my coaches in my team, the one that I trained in a professional training program to help you apply the Unat your life process and create a version of yourself who will eat vegetable.
With that, my sister, I love you and I'll see you on the next podcast.
Going Beyond The Food Show Ep356-Listener Q&A Vol.6: Eating More Vegetables & Changing Health Habits
This is episode 356 of the Beyond the Food Show and today, we’re back with volume six of listener q and a, and I’m gonna answer a question around how to become a person who eats more vegetable, and I’m gonna approach it from the angle of changing any health habits and any really habits in your life. You ready? Stay tuned.
Welcome back my sister to the podcast. It’s volume six. Can you believe that, of listeners q and a, and this question literally just came in. It came in actually yesterday and I had this session for recording podcast that was scheduled today. So I thought, I’m gonna move to the top of the list of question because it is a question that I can expand to any habit formation. We’re gonna talk about it to answer very specifically a question of this particular listener around eating more vegetables. But I want you to think about this with any health habits or habits you want to create in your life.
So let’s go right in with a question.
I am 57 years old and I live in a large body. I’ve been doing intuitive eating for one and a half year now, and I’m struggling with adding more nutrients, dance food into my meal. I am not trying to lose weight. I am past that, but I want more nutrient in my. I never ate vegetables growing up, and I see intuitive eating social media posts where intuitive eating nutritionist will say that eventually you will crave them. What if you never ate them? Only force yourself to eat vegetable when you went on a new diet. It doesn’t come naturally for me to reach for vegetable. Can this be change? End of the question.
The answer is, absolutely it can be changed. This is simply a habit that needs to be created for you. And it’s important to understand, it’s a habit to have to be created because you’ve never had it. You’re not coming back the habit prior to dieting. It’s a habit you’ve never had. So you’re gonna, I want you to think about that with approaching it from ground zero. And if you are listening to this and you’re like, yeah, but it’s a habit perhaps that I had before I stopped doing it when I was in diet culture. Is it the same process? Absolutely, it’s the same process.
Now let’s get to the specific of the question around eating more vegetable. So if you are new to peaceful eating and intuitive eating contexts, know that the last step of the intuitive eating process is called Gentle Nutrition, where we go back to nutrition, how to approach food in order to fuel our body, to feed our body. But first we need to do the work of unraveling what intuitive eating called the food police, and all the rules we have about food and really neutralizing food. So that step is not to be done at the beginning of the process. And it’s very clear in the question that this personhas been working on unpacking all the first step of intuitive eating.
So gentle nutrition is the last step because that’s when we go back to understanding that there is some guidelines around how to bring food into our body that will support our body best. Now, one word that I picked up from the question that I wanna highlight to you, listener, is the word nutrient, dance food. And that, first of all, I would like for you to really listen to what I’m about to say and then really put in question who you are learning. The term nutrient dance food is a term created by that culture and wellness culture. It’s a term, I’m gonna read it word for word, the description: food that are high in nutrient, but relatively low in calorie. There’s probably all kinds of alarm bells that are going off in your brain. The term nutrient dance food originate from diet culture, then got overtaken by wellness culture, where then we deemed the value of a food not necessarily on the low calorie, which is what DI culture does, but instead on the quote amount of the right nutrient in the food.
So based on the philosophy or the paradigm you’re under with nutrition, that could be food that are higher in protein and lower in carb, food that are lower in fat and higher in carbohydrates, depends on what you are co-opting as far as your philosophy into wellness culture. Do you see how tricky this whole concept of nutrient dance food is?
I personally do not label food in any way, shape, or form, including nutrient dance food. And there’s a very specific reason, first of all because I don’t co-opt any of those terms. I would say there’s two reasons because I don’t co-op any of those terms. And then two, because it continues to support that certain food are better than other food, which is fundamentally a principle that is not supported by intuitive eating. And then when you start looking into the world of how your brain functions and how we create habit in our life, you will then meet up with a lot of resistance, a lot of rebellious behavior when you’re trying to do something that’s supposed to be bettered than something else.
So when we label food as nutrient dance food, we, a, co-op wellness culture and diet culture, but we tell our brain these foods are better to eat than the other. Very subconscious, right? These foods are better and I should want, and you say that than your question, I should want to eat these food but I’m not. So something must be wrong with me. And then we start triggering rebellious behavior.
So listener, if you haven’t yet watched my free class on Rebellious Eating, go to my website, ww.stephanie.com, and right on the first page, you will see Rebellious Eating Solution, go and listen to that. To, stop labeling food as nutrient dance food and then three, learn how to create habits. To answer your question, can this be changed? Yes. If you know how to create any habits into your life. And this is where the understanding of your brain will come in. I wanna give my opinion on this comment given by intuitive eating nutritionist, quote, it will just come to you naturally to eat vegetable, end of quote.
That’s a problem in our industry in which nutritionist, how we are trained, no matter how long our degree, our master degree, our PhD is, we are not trained in behavioral change. We are trained in the science of nutrition. We are trained into medical nutrition, but we are not change on how to create behavioral change in our client.
I know this is crazy. For you as a consumer of our service, you’re like, what? No, we’re not. I just spoke at the University ofi Idaho, and I had the entire professor staff in front of me and none of them had any understanding of cognitive behavioral change. I was training them and I was teaching them. I know this from training professionals. My professional training, on dietary coaching, the biggest component of it is cognitive behavioral change or, how to coach behavior in your client, cuz that’s the missing piece we’re not trained on. So that this nutritionist who said that it will just come, bless her heart, but she does not understand how behavior are created in human.
Let me tell you how it’s created here right now. Okay. This is from the World of Neuroscience. This is from the world of cognitive behavioral therapy. You can Google that, C B T, cognitive behavioral therapy, where we understand, based on our research on how the brain and human behavior work that our thoughts create the emotion we feel in our body and the emotion we experience in our body ignite a reaction, a behavior into the world.
So the way you think about vegetables creates the emotion you have towards vegetable, resistance in your case, and then you act towards vegetable from a place of feeling resistant. So you’re probably having some rebellious behavior. No, I know I should, but I can’t, but I don’t want to. What am I gonna do? I’m lost. I’m confused, right? You’re having all those thoughts because you’re resistant, because you’re experiencing resistance because of the way you think about eating vegetables.
We teach that process, cognitive behavioral coaching in on your life at a very easy to understand an application process and we teach it at a more complex level for a professional so they understand the behind the scene, but I want you to think about it in this easy process: pause, investigate, decide.
Pause is what you’re doing right now. By asking me the question, how can I go about eating more vegetable, you’ve paused. You’re like, something’s not working. I’m resisting this vegetable thing, I don’t wanna force myself, that just doesn’t feel right to me, so let me pause and figure out the answer to that. Right. You’re, you want to stop just trying to force yourself, so you’re asking question, you’re becoming your own leader through your transformation, in this case, in the relationship to vegetable. By the way, we just released a podcast 3 54 on resistance, that could be really helpful for.
So then investigate, why. Why are you feeling resistant towards eating vegetables? Awareness is what creates change. Awareness, becoming aware of why you are creating the feeling of resisting vegetable is what will create change, not forcing yourself. But you know that right? You told me that like, but anybody listening right now, they think that white knuckling yourself is the path to creating any habit? No, it’s never gonna work. It will work until it doesn’t. What I’m explaining to you right now, the path of investigating, pausing, and investigating, why am I being the way I am right now? Why am I not moving my body? Why am I not drinking water? Why am I not eating vegetable? Understand how currently you are creating this experience you have with vegetables. Understand the now and then once you understand why, and you had a great clue in your question, you said something about your childhood. There’s an experience in your childhood with vegetable that you are continuing to carry with you right now. So there’s a way of thinking about vegetable, either a traumatic experience, something your parent taught you, because for whatever reason, you are continuing to think in alignment to the same way you were when you were a child.
And that’s why you are not eating the vegetable, and that’s why you’re resisting eating quote, nutrient dense food because there’s a conflict in your brain on the way you’re thinking about vegetables. So figure that out, literally what we call, do a thought download of what you’re currently thinking about vegetable, and then look at your thought. And I want you to decide, in order for me to eat vegetable, I’m gonna have to change some of these way of believing and thinking about vegetable. Do I want to do this? Ask yourself consent, like this thought, this thought, this thought will have to change. Do I want to do this? As a 57 year old woman, am I willing to change the way that I think about eating and vegetable? If the answer is yes, move forward to creating a new way of thinking about vegetable and do that in a partnership with yourself, not by white-knuckling yourself, but by being very compassionate and safe with yourself.
So I thought could be it’s possible for me in the future to enjoy. And then one of the action you can take is go buy or download from the internet, a cooking book that you feel attracted to that talks about vegetables, that gives you recipes and way of giving an interpretation to vegetable that sound appealing to you. That’s one of the principle of intuitive eating is satisfaction, right? So based on what makes you feel satisfied, how can you engage with vegetable? For a lot of people who are new to the world of vegetable, it’s adding things they like to the vegetable, right? Could be sauces, it could be cheeses, it could be frying the vegetables, right? Enter prep, cook the vegetable in a way that will sound appealing to you and make it fun for you. And think thought that will align you to create those action in your life.
That process, pause, investigate, the sign, is the same for any habit you want to create in your life. The most difficult part is the pause and investigate. We’re just not used to that. As a society, we wanna jump to the result right away. We’re not comfortable being with ourself as we are and going into our brain and understanding what is creating the current circumstance that we want to change right now. But that’s the secret, quote unquote secret, to changing any habit.
I hoped I helped you with that. I have given you a lot of information here. If you want to come and join us, you’re saying you’re not in our program and you had the word yet, please come and join us. There’s two ways for you to work with us in on diet your life. You can do the self-study experience or you can hire one of my coaches in my team, the one that I trained in a professional training program to help you apply the Undiet Your Life process and create a version of yourself who will eat vegetable.
With that, my sister, I love you and I’ll see you on the next podcast.
