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We believe everyone has the right to love their food and feel proud of how they choose to eat. Join the coaches at Confident Eaters as they share their insights and advice to ditch diet culture and step into your power. They've guided thousands of people out of emotional eating, compulsive overeating, and stressful relationships with food. With science based tools and inspiration, what awaits you? Body confidence, food freedom, and joyful ease with eating.
How to make the most of your efforts
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Christina: [00:00:00] Hey there, listeners. Welcome to the confident eaters podcast. My name is Christina, and in today's episode, we have another conversation between Haylin and Georgie, who are covering three of the most common questions we hear from clients about their nutrition. Some people who come to us for support are looking for something very prescriptive, like a meal plan. You're going to hear from Georgie as she explains why we take a different approach than using meal plans to help our clients. We believe in supporting our clients by helping them to maintain their autonomy, develop trust in themselves and feel empowered and confident on their eating journey. The second topic you will hear us cover in today's episode is all about effort. Have you ever wondered how much effort you should be putting in to changing your behavior? We will share with you how we coach our clients to direct their effort in the most important places that will lead to the biggest result. And how to determine how [00:01:00] much effort that requires based on the capacity you have and the life that you want to live. And lastly, listen, in on a topic that many people are interested in, which is what does it mean for a body to be in fat burning mode? And how is that different from fat loss? Want to hear what Georgie and Haylin have to say about these things. Then stay tuned.
Georgie: Welcome to the Confident Eaters Podcast, where you get proven methods to end overeating, emotional eating, and stressing about food. We are heading for harmony between your body, food and feelings, hosted by me, Georgie Fear, and my team at Confident Eaters.
Hey, how's it going, Haylin?
Haylin: Hi, wonderful. I'm so happy to be here and pepper you with more questions.
Georgie: I am ready. Pepper me
Haylin: all right, we're gonna dive in. I've got wonderful [00:02:00] questions for you today. And we're going to start with well, you and I may call the prescriptive approach.
Often clients want to be told just what to do. Just tell me what to do. Give me all the guidelines and the rules, and I'll just do it. I'll just follow along, not have to think about it, make it easy for me. And then soon all my problems will be solved.
Georgie: I think everybody who works in this industry has had that like, well, you just tell me what to do.
Just, just write a meal plan for me. And, you know, I get emails still from people that are like, how much do you charge for a meal plan? And I'm like, do you know what I do? Clearly not.
Haylin: I'll write you a nice plan.
Georgie: Yeah. If it worked, I'd do it. Very simple. The reason that I don't write meal plans for people, and I think the reason that a lot of professionals don't write meal plans for people, is because that the chance of somebody executing a meal plan decrease as time goes on.
So like, they'll give it a fairly good shot, maybe [00:03:00] even follow it to a tee for 24, 48 hours. By day three, they're switching some things about it because they don't like salmon and you put salmon on there. By day four, they've decided they're tired of something that you've put in there too frequently. When the meal plan doesn't fit somebody's exact food preferences, they're prone to change it because we're used to being able to eat what we want to.
Secondarily, the meal plan is inevitably an imperfect fit because It's frequently going to be too high energy or too low energy. In other words, not enough food or too much food. And I can't, you know, I can estimate that reasonably well with a calculator and some equations. But day to day we all have different energy expenditures and our appetites are going to be higher or lower.
So if somebody just has different workouts during the week and a rest day or two, the same meal plan may not work for, you know, the higher output day and the lower output day. I don't want somebody to be super, [00:04:00] super hungry on certain days and then other days be eating more calories than they need. So that's why I like the appetite management approach.
And so I'll usually, instead of meal plans, give people more of a, what I call a flexible template. And so it doesn't exactly tell someone what to do. It still treats them like an adult. Like you can choose what vegetable you want to put on your plate. What I'm going to do is Hold you to the big picture, which is that we want to make sure we're getting fruits and veggies into our meals.
So I give people the flexible template, which may look like have this much protein with each meal. And we'll talk about what sources they want to get it from, or this much fat, or you know. So we kind of go skill by skill, but the appeal of the prescriptive approach of the meal plan is people are like, I don't want to think.
I don't want to think. And sometimes it's because they're very busy and they have a lot of demands on them. They're the CEO of a company or they [00:05:00] just don't want to make any more decisions related to food because they're so occupied on their other demands. Other times it can happen because somebody is Low confidence that they'll make the right decision with some air quotes there because we know there's no right decision But people are worried.
They'll screw it up. They feel like obviously I am screwing this up Somebody else take the wheel just somebody else tell me what to eat and then I won't screw up unfortunately that it just doesn't work for the reasons I mentioned before and the idea that While we want to give up control And have somebody else take responsibility.
We also crave control. And so as soon as somebody else mandates what to eat, we want to push back and tell them what we want to eat, or change it. So, hope that, hopefully that answered your question about the meal plan approach. If there's something that, if somebody really feels who's listening, like, But I really want a meal plan!
I'd say look up some recipes that you enjoy, [00:06:00] and plan them, and make a grocery list. And that's probably a really good step for success.
Haylin: So two more points on that.
Georgie: Okay.
Haylin: You could apply what you just said, basically to a diet for many of the same reasons, right? It takes away choice for the most part.
Georgie: Yeah,
Haylin: or a lot of the choice. And you can't use it in a lot of situations, like a meal plan in a lot of social situations won't work.
Georgie: Totally. Yeah. So you find yourself at a steakhouse and your meal plan says, Sesame chicken and rice, and you're like, I don't think they have that on the menu. Now, what do I do? So the flexible template means you look at the menu and you go, okay I want something with some protein, with some carbs, and with some vegetables.
And I know about how much total size I want. So you can take it on vacation. It travels well.
Haylin: And one of the other things that really resonated with me that you taught me was around the low confidence thing and the fear that people are going to make a poor decision was [00:07:00] getting them to think about other decisions that they've made in their life and really let them prove to themselves that they are a good decision maker.
Georgie: Yeah.
Haylin: With the context of giving them some guardrails to make decisions within they really are a good decision maker.
Georgie: Yeah, there's no wrong decision between like exact food options here or there it's just general principles and I tell them like, I'm going to teach you the important stuff.
This is preference stuff. It's, it's fine. Whichever way you go.
Haylin: Yeah, right. One of the things that You also said to me that is helpful is about like being able to make decisions that you feel good about and feel comfortable with and feeling the power and the sense of success when you do make a good decision and you don't want to take that away from someone.
Georgie: Yeah. I think there is some, something really powerful in that. You know, thinking like, I can decide what to eat, I can stick to my intentions, I can do this.
Haylin: [00:08:00] Yeah, cool. Let's move on to this idea of effort.
Georgie: Okay.
Haylin: Two parts to this level of effort. One, from a coaching standpoint. How do you determine how to challenge someone? Like what is the appropriate challenge level and how much effort do you ask them to put in? So that's the sort of part one. And then from the client side of things, how can they determine how much effort they're putting in and whether it's the appropriate amount of effort.
So not so much that they're like, they're just making excuses and not putting in any effort, but also not being on the other end of the extreme and thinking they're putting in too much effort and white knuckling it and trying to follow all the rules.
Georgie: Right. Yeah. That's an awesome question. As coaches, it's similar to like, how much weight do I put on the bar?
Depends on the client. So some clients, you know, can lift a lot. And so you can load them up a little heavier and some clients aren't ready to handle that much load. And [00:09:00] so you hit him a little lighter. So in terms of the challenge level with a new client, you have to ask a lot of questions. Like, how do you feel when I talk about the idea of being hungry before meals?
Does that freak you out? Does it seem like no big deal? You know, so, so you have to do a lot of communicating and listening for your client to get those little bits of talk about they're freaked out by this level of challenge or like. It's in the bag. That's sounds good. A lot of coaches will use a 1 to 10 confidence scale.
If you're having a hard time getting a read on a client, especially if it's over the phone and you can't see them, you can say like, okay, so I have, you know, this idea that I want to work on. If we state it this way, how do you feel on a scale of 1 to 10 that you can pull it off this week? You know, zero is.
There's snowballs chance in hell, 10 is it's in the bag. I could do it with my eyes closed and see what they say. And so that will help you get it right. As a coach, I try and aim for something [00:10:00] that is not so easy that it's boring and not so hard that it's frightening. We want a pleasant level of challenge, similar to how hard you'd want a game to be.
Wouldn't be any fun if you were like, you know, nobody's shooting at you in the video game. You just walk in and get to get the prize. So, so something that's got some challenge to it, but that they feel equipped and ready to handle. So that kind of
Haylin: you want some confidence that you can win the game. You don't want to go to the game knowing you're going to lose every time.
Georgie: Yeah. Or at least make some progress. so that's kind of like from the coaching side. Also you want to take into account what's going on in the person's life. So if you don't know, ask. Do you have the time to put into this the way that we've talked about doing it? Or is this week just one that's like, you're really slammed with work?
And you might not have that much bandwidth or, you know, we're, we have finite mental and time resources to put in and see what the person says. And on the professional side, I think one more thing to, to point out is that the level of effort can [00:11:00] change day to day. Some days were just more harried than other days.
And so the way that we execute a habit might be to a greater degree on some days. And some days were like plan B, like I didn't get the seven hours of sleep, but I got six and a half. Which was, you know, the best I could do under those circumstances. So. On the client side, when it comes to figuring out how hard we're trying, I think that's a great question to ask because often we're not asking ourselves that sort of question.
We kind of focus on, am I doing or not doing? am I achieving? Am I not achieving? And sometimes we forget to tune in and go like, how hard am I working here? So when I ask clients that, there's no right or wrong answer, always something interesting comes up. Sometimes they'll say that they're actually, they'll, they'll confess, like, I didn't even try that hard.
And that's an interesting conversation. Like, okay, so something was in the way of you trying hard. Because if you still want this goal, and you're really [00:12:00] not trying hard, something big is in the way. Maybe it's fear. Maybe it's self sabotage. It's always going to be a good talk. Now, if somebody's not succeeding and they're like, I'm trying like 9 and 10 out of 10 every day.
First, I'm going to give them specific positive feedback of like, if you're putting in 9 and 10 little effort day after day, kudos to you for not quitting because that is a lot of strain. Let's figure out what we need to get out of your way or what tool we need to give you or have we chosen something that's just too hard.
So we kind of figure that out. There's also the chance of somebody's putting forth a very high effort level that they're not putting it in the right place. So as a coach, we want to make sure we're leveraging their effort, like right onto the lever that we want them to pull. And sometimes people will say, you know, I'm spending so much energy on my eating, but throughout the conversation, you realize they're trying so hard to eat organic and avoid gluten and do all these things that are not part of what you're trying to get them to work on that you need to say, Hey, this is a distraction. And it's [00:13:00] sucking away a lot of your effort. I think you can make your life easier and have more effect if you put your effort just on this one pedal here.
Does that make sense?
Haylin: Yeah. And that's one of the other most important things that you conveyed to me, like one of the most important jobs as a coach is to help the client direct their effort in the most important places that is going to lead to the biggest result. So
Georgie: Totally
Haylin: again, setting up guardrails so that your effort is going to lead to the change that you want, instead of wasting the energy on things that won't really matter or move you in the direction you want to go.
Georgie: Yeah, exactly. I think it's natural for a lot of us if we're, you know, just generally trying to eat well and be good people.
It's like, we're putting our efforts in so many different directions all of these roles. And so at least when it comes to eating, rather than trying to do 15 things. The benefit of having a coach is they're like, no, I really want to help you with this one skill. Let's, let's stay on it until you improve it.
And so your effort doesn't get like spread out in all directions. [00:14:00] Awesome.
Haylin: All right, Georgie. . So I'm going to tell you a conversation with a new client that I had the other day.
Georgie: Okay.
Haylin: And I'm curious to see how you would approach it.
Georgie: Awesome. I love real client scenarios.
Haylin: This is our first call, asked the individual to describe a typical day of eating for me.
Georgie: Okay.
Haylin: Like a 24 hour recall. And so she describes she has some coffee in the a. m. because she's got no time for anything else.
Georgie: Okay.
Haylin: And then she intentionally skips lunch and doesn't have anything to eat until she gets home at around 5 p. m. and has a snack of some cheese and crackers.
Georgie: Okay.
Haylin: Then has dinner and then treats in the evening are typically more cheese and crackers. So yeah, so just to reframe, it's cheese and crackers around five dinner, more cheese and crackers, and that's all the food throughout the day, except for coffee in the morning. So I asked if she was hungry during the day and she said, yes, she absolutely is [00:15:00] hungry during the day but she had read in a book.
Not too long ago that if she doesn't eat during the day, she will be in fat burning mode. So that is her goal and what she's trying to accomplish by not eating during the day. Albeit she hasn't been particularly successful with losing weight or burning fat by taking this approach.
Georgie: Awesome.
Haylin: Yeah.
Georgie: Okay, so the idea of fat burning mode comes from the knowledge that this is fact here, that our bodies run on two main fuels. We largely burn carbohydrates and we burn fats. Now the interesting thing is we're kind of like hybrid cars, where we can like use either of these two fuels.
And what tends to happen is right after we eat, partially because we get insulin and carbohydrates into our bloodstream, our metabolism shifts so the cells in our body are burning mostly carbohydrates, and they drop down in terms of the percentage of fats that they're burning. And then As the hours past your meal go by, you tend to [00:16:00] use up the carbohydrates that you've taken in and you kind of switch back to burning more fat.
So when you wake up first thing in the morning, your body's actually running on 70 80 percent fat calories because it's been a long time overnight, assuming no midnight snacks without eating. So, fat burning mode is something all of us are equipped to do. Just by being human. So we can all burn fat.
Now, the question is, so I'm burning fat, great. How do we get to fat loss? As in, smaller waist, less extra tissue on our bodies in the places that we want to see it shrink. So how you get into a net fat loss is that it still comes down to calories. Because the thing that your body also can do is store fat.
So if you're in a calorie excess for the later hours of the day, then your body's simply storing fat, which it can then use to burn off to keep you up and walking around the following day. So if you're not creating a calorie deficit, it's awesome that you're in fat burning mode. [00:17:00] Having that nice flexible metabolism can do good things for blood sugar control, but it's not going to lead to body fat loss unless you reduce the calories enough.
to create a net calorie deficit. That way your body will burn fat and not replace all of it each day, and so you end up with a deficit at the end of the day. Does that make sense?
Haylin: Makes great sense. Where might you have this person start? What might be their first step then, if they're open to the idea of making a change from what they're doing right now?
Georgie: Yeah, I mean, I hate to hear that somebody's walking around all day being hungry. It just like kind of breaks my heart because it's it's not fun. It's not fun to walk around and be hungry all day. So I would probably say, you know, let's start responding to your body cues. And get you something to eat during the day so that you don't have to walk around hungry and just try and be hungry before your meals and if you're trying to be hungry before each meal, that can be a non counting way to get into that calorie deficit and see a gradual weight [00:18:00] loss. So, I'd see if they were open to that. If they're really, really enjoying the meal pattern that they have of not eating during the day and eating all at night, it's not a deal breaker.
I'm not going to tell somebody, like that's it I'm not helping you, but what I would probably do in that case would be talk about what they're choosing in the window of time where they are eating. So if they're having, you know, a lot of cheese and crackers, sounds delicious. I love cheese and crackers, but we want to make sure that they're also getting a lot of fruits and vegetables in.
So you want to make sure you're getting vitamins and minerals and a filling volume of food. So I might say. Maybe we'll trade some of the cheese and crackers for apples and carrots. So maybe the plate that you're making with the cheese and crackers, like a little less of each thing and a little bit more of fruits and veggies on the plate and swapping things like that to just drop the calorie density so that the person can finally start seeing some success.
Cause anybody that's deliberately not eating while they're hungry is a very hard worker. So I would like for that person to see some results from their hard work. [00:19:00]
Haylin: Awesome. Cool. I love that. And it's reasonable.
Georgie: Awesome. Thanks for the chat. See you next week.
Yeah.
Christina: Well, what do you think? I hope you found some helpful insight on your journey to becoming a confident, sensible eater. Whether you're ready to try some new recipes and pay attention to your energy needs rather than signing up for that meal plan. Or taking some time to evaluate how much effort you want to put in to changing your behaviors. We want you to know that we care a lot about you and we want you to have the same success that so many of our clients have had. If you liked this episode. We'd love to hear your feedback by leaving us a review on your favorite podcast platform. It helps us to reach more people, just like you. If you have any questions or challenges that you need a hand with, please reach out to us by visiting [00:20:00] us@confidenteaters.com.
And as always, I hope you have a great week and we will catch you in the next episode.