Being that a third of my business is about nutrition and another third is about online business (the last third is fitness), something struck me very recently:

Forget corporations, forget Big Pharma, forget Monsanto, forget General Mills, forget anyone outside of your own brain—if you want to quit constantly stressing about food, change how you think about it.

Here’s an example:

A few months ago, I was with my mom and we were out shopping. She’s huge on bargains and threatens to disown me whenever I pay full price for anything, often bragging about her coupons, sales and membership discounts get her something at 10th of the original price.

It’s truly awe-inspiring to witness.

But I can’t help but start to tease her when she talks about “BOGO”—you know, Buy One, Get One (Free). She loves BOGO. But here’s the thing about BOGO, because it’s such effective marketing, we’ll often spend money we weren’t planning on spending just to get the deal.

“So…” I asked my mom after she came home with some Dove Chocolate bars that I have literally never seen her eat before, “you got those because they were BOGO?”

“Yep, I couldn’t not! It’s a great deal. And I actually feel like I saved money!”

Lol. We had a huge laugh about it because even as she’s saying it, she kind of knows it doesn’t make much rational sense, but here we are, all of us buying things that don’t really serve our goals simply because of some marketing tactic.

I am not throwing my mom under the bus (love you, Mom!) because we all do this kind of thing. There’s a reason why discounts and gimmicks and fast fixes are so popular. They use tactics like urgency and exclusivity and scarcity to prompt us to buy. And not only buy, but BUY RIGHT NOW, and also, BUY SOMETHING YOU WEREN’T EVER PLANNING ON BUYING OTHERWISE!

All of these are thought patterns have become ingrained in how we interact with food on a daily basis.

And though these constructs are normal and common, they aren’t serving us or our goals. Think about it: eating more food that we really want to, and eating things that we don’t really want, but perceive as treats, rewards, deals or free just for the sake of it, is keeping us struggling.

I’ve written on Situational Eating and Food FOMO before. These are examples of exclusivity and scarcity, respectively. The exact same tools that marketers use to entice us to buy products, we are voluntarily falling prey to in our own minds!

You’ve heard of The Food Police before. And while it’s often annoying when people comment on your food—like, “Really? Not your business, bro,”—sometimes we might even ask people to help us stay on track by reminding us of the things we shouldn’t be eating. Maybe you’ve recruited your friends and family to keep you accountable.

The only thing is: this backfires.

Not only does it become annoying, and just actually not work (because any kind of permanent change to your eating needs to come from YOU and not because you’re going to be reprimanded by someone else). BUT, it can even backfire to the point that you overindulge even more.

Anytime we villainize certain foods, we're not only perpetuating the all-or-nothing approach to eating, but we are putting these off-limits foods on some kind of special pedestal where they’re this illicit thing that now we have fear.

Being scared of certain foods? That’s absurd. But so many of us fall into this trap: “Oh no, I can’t even have ice cream in the house! I don’t trust myself!”

While I get why we think that, realize that when we “food police” ourselves, we are effectively doing just that—making foods more powerful in our brains than they actually are. And I don’t know about you, but as soon as something isn’t an option, I want it even more. Ugh.

Instead of putting them up on some scary pedestal, normalize them.

How? By removing labels and learning to have any food around any time and be able to handle it. You might overindulge a little at first, but over time you do stop wanting to eat it all until it’s gone.

The key here is exposure. I wrote a whole blog on it.

And then mindfulness. Expose yourself to certain foods and then watch. Stay aware, practice that low level of awareness of things like your fullness, degree of hunger, degree of satisfaction, and practice abundance (you can always have more later, no?).

When nothing is ever off-limits, the urgency of needing to eat everything right now dissipates. No “starting on Monday.” No “this will be my only opportunity!” No “it’s free!” No “it’s BOGO!” Lol.

This takes TIME! And a ton of practice! And a commitment to being fine with not ever being perfect again ;) Because you wont be, and it will be precisely because of that that you’ll succeed long-term.

I just finished a new blog all about the psychology of “Calorie Matching," another nutritional construct. Check out the article HERE.

Wishing you a great (and moderate) rest of the week!

Xo,

Jill