353-Listener Q&A Vol.5: Good Fear versus Bad Fear & How to Distinguish What My Body Needs

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This is another edition of Listener Q&A Vol. 5.

Today I answer two questions:

1. How do I discern when it’s good fear vs bad fear?
2. How do I distinguish my body needs if all food fits?

What you’ll learn listening to this episode on Listener Q&A Vol.5:

• Why there is no such thing as good or bad fear.
• We will talk about interoception awareness: our ability to feel what our body needs
• Gentle nutrition tenants that you should be aware of

Mentioned in this show Listener Q&A Vol.5:

Health Habits Checklist

Quiz: Is It You or Your Diet?

Undiet Your Life Coaching Program

Episode Transcript:

Episode 353- Listener Q&A Vol.5: Good Fear versus Bad Fear & How to Distinguish What My Body Needs

This is episode 353 of the Beyond the Food Show, and today we are back with a Q&A Listener Vol. 5, and we’re gonna answer the question, is there good fear and bad fear, and how to discern what my body needs? You ready? Stay tuned.

Hello my sisters. I hope you’re doing well today. We’re gonna talk or answer two of your question and one’s gonna be really about coaching in the purest form, which is about good fear and bad fear and is there a distinction between the two, and if so, how to recognize it? And this is really towards working towards a, whatever the goal is, how do we distinguish how to make decision based on. And the second question really gonna be about how to use gentle nutrition or even help promoting habit in alignment to what our body wants.

Listener Q&A Vol.5: Good Fear versus Bad Fear

So I’m gonna get started with the very first question, which is about. And this is something that comes very often in the context of a diet your life because we teach about goal. We teach about goal first in the context of you setting the goal to become body neutral, to create confidence, and to peace with food and self-trust with food, but very quickly, people starts to use this principle or the way we teach you how to approach food, body, and health in other area of their life. And one of the things that we teach is to not let yourself be stop in your pursuit of your goal because of fear. And that our emotion, fear in this case, is simply a piece of information.

I want you to think of your emotion as a radar screen. If you’ve ever seen movies about air control or seen a radar screen from air control, you will see its global dots on the screen, and then there’s a scanner that goes around the screen, there’s a scanner that scan a specific area of the air control for this particular air controller, and that detects where the planes are on the screen of the air controller. Your emotion, I want you to think about your emotion, as that radar screen. Emotion are not who you are and this is a big misunderstanding. We think we are our emotion. Like I’m scared, I feel fear, this means I’m scared. And a great example, another great example of that is stress, right? People will often say, I am stressed. They take the identity of the emotion of stress, instead of saying, I feel stress, I feel the emotion of stress.

So when you think about fear, I want you to think about it that way as well. You are not scared, you feel the emotion of fear. You on your radar screen right now, you are detecting that you are experiencing the emotion of fear. You are not fear, you are not scared, you are experiencing fear. Now, the powerful question to ask yourself is why? Why am I experiencing the emotion of fear right now? And the answer is, at the highest level, your thoughts. The thoughts that are floating in your brain, conscious or unconscious, create the fear you are feeling in your body that you are experiencing, that your radar is detecting. So your emotion is only a signal to bring to your attention the thoughts your thinking.

I want you to really start thinking about your emotion in that way as a tool, the same way I teach you in body neutral neutrality that your body is a tool to experience life. Everything that happens in your body is a tool to experience your life. Well, guess where your emotion happens. It happen in your body. Your emotion are simply sensation traveling through your central nervous system in your body in the vehicle you were given to experience life. That’s all. So it’s a piece of information. It’s a signal for you to look at your thoughts. If you can bring yourself to that place and you can grab a pen and a piece of paper and start dumping, we call that a thought download, start dumping all of your thoughts on the piece of paper and examine them, oh, look at that. I’m thinking, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, no wonder why I feel fear, right? I’ll give you an example in the context of movement, right? You could have the thought, over the last 10 years, I spent thousands of dollars paying gym membership and I never used them. Or it’s the sixth time now that I’m paying a gym membership, that I’ve paid a gym membership and ended up using it only for one month. No wonder why you feel afraid now of committing for the seventh time at your gym membership. Because you’re all, you’re thinking about because of the human negative bias that this last seven time that you went through the pattern of committing to a gym membership, you didn’t use it. You quote unquote wasted it.

So now you’re relating to this new experience of committing to moving your body in the gym as if it was one of the other sixth time before. No wonder why you feel fear. Oh, okay, that’s why I feel fear. It’s not a fact that it’s gonna happen again. It’s just that my brain is bringing attention to all the times that I felted before. Okay, cool. And I guarantee you, once you can pinpoint the thoughts that create the fear, the fear will dissipate by quote unquote magic. Why? Because it has achieved its purpose.

All the reason why we feel emotion is to bring attention to our thoughts and our beliefs, and when that purpose has been fulfilled, it breaks the wave, the emotion are quote unquote release. The way to release your emotion is by bringing attention to what creates the emotion and then deciding, am I gonna continue to think this way? Is it true that, these are the question you need to ask yourself as you put those thoughts on paper, do I wanna continue to think, do I want to continue to this be my opinion. You have a choice. You have the authority to think what the freak you want to think. Now that’s, it takes practice to own your authority over your thoughts and beliefs cuz you’ve been conditioned to not live in that space of authority over your own thoughts and belief. You’ve been conditioned to adopt society’s belief and adopt other people’s belief system and not have your own. So it’s a practice.

So is there a good fear and a bad fear? No. There’s no good fear and bad fear. There’s the sensation of fear in your body that you call fear and there is a thought that creates that fear. And then the thought in itself is not good or bad, it’s just you have to make a decision if you’re gonna continue to think that thought or not. So that was our first question. Interesting, right? I bet youyou didn’t expect me to go there.

Let’s go to a second question.

Listener Q&A Vol.5: How to Distinguish What My Body Needs

I am almost complete with the intuitive eating process. This is actually one of our student who submitted a question in this podcast. So she says, I’ve almost completed peaceful. Peaceful is our intuitive eating module with an UN diet Your life. And she says, wow, what a game changer. My question is about nutrition science. I know there’s no good or bad food, and I’m working on changing my perspective on healthy and unhealthy food. But then, if I don’t have the reliance of science to tell me what is good or bad, or healthy or unhealthy, how do I distinguish what my particular body needs? Thank you.

This is a really good question and that brings us to the world of gentle nutrition. And I wanna point out to all of you listening to this is that gentle nutrition is one of the step of becoming an intuitive eater, and it’s the very last one. So I’m very happy that this student of mine, also listener of the podcast, is going through the process that we’ve outlined inside of on dietary life to become an intuitive eater. She’s not jumping the gun to go to the module on gentle nutrition. So, kudos to you. And if you’re doing intuitive eating on your own, be sure to not jump the gun to gentle nutrition because if a healthy relationship to food is not in place, it is almost impossible to pursue a gentle nutrition, especially if you’ve been a chronic dieter and any form of nutrition advice has been under the guidance of restrictions.

So, how do you know what is good for you, what your body needs?

The number one guidance I can give you is how you feel when you eat a certain food. Now I’m simplifying this in the sense that I’m asking you to pay attention how you feel when you finish eating, how you feel an hour after, how you feel, four hours after, how you feel until the next meal, acknowledging fully that the way your body digests food is much longer than a four to six hour window.Digestion of most food takes, in most cases, between 24 and 36 hours.

So you can’t really say, how I feel right now is the result of the last thing that I eat, because it could actually be the meal you had 24 hour prior. However, typically, when your body doesn’t like a certain food, it will let you know very quickly. It will be very rapid in what your body will tell you. It’s either going to be through mental signal like fogginess and not being able to concentrate. It could be through your overall energy level. It could be directly in your digestion. It could be in heartburns, like what happens in the stomach, what happens in the colon or the lower digestive system. It could be very quickly. So I want you to look at how you feel overall is an indicator if certain foods are good for you or not.

Now, I also want you to be aware that eating to support your body is a lots, L O T S capital Bolded letter simpler than you think. I’m saying that fully recognizing that all of us have been indoctrinated to believe that nutrition is complicated and it’s hard. Okay? Because there’s profession like mine, I mean, there’s entire degrees in your university dedicated to nutrition, so it must mean it’s complicated to nourish ourselves for what our body. That is not true. Most bodies have a large resiliency in front of food and a large capacity to eat a lots of different food and thrive on a wide variety of foods.

Now that being said, if you have a particular health condition, you have a diagnoses that require management of your nutrition, what I just said probably don’t apply to you. This is when you wanna go seek the guidance of the very smart people who studied complex nutrition advice for medical condition in university. That’s a small percentage of the population. I don’t know, call it 10% of the population who needs specific, complicated advice. This is when you pay someone who specialize in the field of nutrition to give you specific advice. But if you are part of the general population, have a general status, you can thrive on very simple tactic towards nutrition.

The way that we teach nutrition within on diet to your life, there’s only three tenant of nutrition and that’s how intuitive eating nutritionists teach nutrition, okay. Now fully understanding that you’re not part of that small percentage of people who need specific nutrition advice, your general population, here’s three gentle nutrition tenant for you.

Number one, having enough food, eating enough food, like we gotta hit this baseline. The vast majority of the women that have had the honor to work with over the years don’t eat enough food. For a very simple reason, they’ve been dieting for a long time and they have got themselves into a habit of thinking this is just as much as they should eat. So very often the first step towards eating what your body needs is eating enough food, eating against your hunger and then satisfaction. And this is the key to honor what your body needs, is understanding what makes you feel satisfied. Because what makes you feel satisfied is very often aligned to what your body needs. These cravings that we have are often what our body needs. And now let’s not get cut up into like intuitive eating gives you craving for chocolate and chips and pizza crap, this is just demonizing intuitive eating by diet culture. Once you pass through the healing of your relationship to food, it is not true that you crave pizza and chips and chocolate all the time. That is how DIA culture scares you off of intuitive eating. Once you get past the pendulum swing and all of that, you can lean in to what you are craving that makes you feel satisfied as a way of determining what your body needs. So we’ve got eating enough food, eating what makes us feel satisfied, and then balance.

Balance is a tenant of gentle nutrition, not perfect balance. So here’s how simple nutrition is, truly. There’s three macronutrients, carbohydrate, protein, and fats. That’s it. Inside of Gentle Nutrition, we give you like a PDF with what is a protein and what is a fat, and what is a carbohydrate. But I think many of you know what that is. Have a balance of it. At every meal, try to hit the tree. Have a carbohydrate, have a protein, and a little bit of fat. That’s it. And it’s not every single meal. That’s the other thing, your brain will try to get you to a place where you have to hit perfection all the time. That is not true. You don’t need to be perfect at every meal. Most of the time try to hit balance.

And then the last is no rules. There is no rules even when you get the gentle nutrition. People are often as a spirit to get to like gentle nutrition. Are you ready for gentle nutrition? We have a, we have a little quiz to get people like, are you ready for that? And then people are like, I wanna be ready for it, because they want the safety of getting rules again. There won’t be any rules. You have to learn to trust yourself at the deepest level so you can live your nutrition life the rest of your life without rules and without perfection. That would be my advice to determine what your body needs.

I hope these two listener question were helpful to you. If you are listening to this and you wanna submit a question, email us at [email protected] and it’ll be my pleasure to take 10 or 15 minutes to answer your question. And until then, I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you in the next episode.