Food no longer controls me
For a couple of decades, I would say food controlled me. I didn’t think about it all the time, but I had a pretty messed up relationship with food and I definitely use it as a crutch to ignore my emotions.
After a period of particularly stressful emotional eating and mismanagement of my health and well-being as a result, I started to learn about mindset, mindfulness and taking care of myself
Fundamentally I was neglecting my emotional well-being and this was manifesting as erratic emotions, unpredictable responses to stress and quite predictably, uncontrolled over eating.
As a personal trainer, this was a source of deep shame for me because my job revolves around helping other people to get their ducks in a row, to support their well-being to support their health to get better stronger to build their mindset
And here I was completely failing
I’m not the type of personal trainer that believes that you have to look or be ‘perfect’ to be able to do a good job and to be able to positively influence and impact my clients and their goals….
But I do think that coaches have a responsibility to take care of themselves and to an extent lead by example when it comes to promoting health and well-being (whatever that looks like for you as an individual)
So when I finally started to realise the power of all the advice that I was giving to other people (and started taking it myself) funnily enough it made a huge difference to me
It’s not like I didn’t believe in what I was telling other people, for whatever reason I just wasn’t ready to take those steps myself yet
I look back at that time and sometimes feel a bit sorry for my old self because I was very lost and very ashamed, but I don’t regret that I went through that because it has actually made me into a better trainer, a better coach, a better person and now a better mum
I can say for absolutely certain that food no longer controls me
This is so liberating for me and lots of the clients that I’ve worked with over the years who I hope I have helped to see the power of building a strong mindset and working on those issues the impact food choices and emotional over eating
A person much wiser and clever than me coined the phrase ‘give yourself unconditional permission to eat’ (Martin MacDonald)
When I first heard this, when I wasn’t in a strong place with mindset, my fear was that this sentence would lead me towards over eating binge eating and getting out of control
But what I learned overtime was that when I took away the rules that I had put in place around food and food choices……
When I allowed myself to eat things that I wanted to eat, things that I really liked, but I felt that I wasn’t allowed to eat…..
When I did those things, those things no longer had any power over me
If I’m allowed to eat it, it no longer becomes a source of shame and guilt
This is now what I do with my clients and I can’t say it’s always an easy road because a lot of the people that I work with are coming to me from doing sometimes 10 or 15 different types of restrictive diets over the last few decades
The only thing they know around food that has rules and restrictions
The way that we approach nutrition at Rossell fitness is not about throwing all of the rules out of the window because this can be quite stressful for somebody who has not reached the point where they feel comfortable doing that yet
But we gradually work towards a place where each individual person feels safer around their food choices and more confident with variety and choice and freedom
I would say alongside this that just adapting your approach to nutrition is probably only going to be effective in part unless you also are prepared to do a bit of mindset work and some introspective work that helps you to understand where your stress comes from, and how your stress impacts your choices…. and then how your choices impact your overall well-being and the goals that you have
If it were easy then everybody would be able to do it without the fitness industry
Unfortunately, with the size and breath of the fitness industry being absolutely enormous with everybody shouting as loud as they can about their diet plan and how it’s the best one for everybody in the world … this does make it harder and more confusing to know where to turn
I hope that what you get from this message today is that you can see that we take an approach that is more personalised to what you are dealing with
We don’t believe in anyone nutrition approach but what we can do is explore lots of different options with you. Talk about it. Experiment. Use a bit of trial and error and find out what really works for you as an individual and as part of your family.
We do all of this as part of our women’s group personal training too!
This is the stuff that we do outside of the group gym training on an individual basis so that our members truly find a method and a set of habits that really work for them long term!
If you have any questions or you want to know more about this and how it could help you to achieve more freedom and flexibility around your food choices building towards strong sense of confidence so that you can give yourself unconditional permission to eat, drop me a line
Be kind to yourself <3
Nicola