Hey everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. If this is your first time here, welcome, and I hope you will find this helpful and that this information resonates with you. And if this is not your first time here, I have a favor to ask.
It would mean a lot to me and would be very helpful to the podcast if you could do a couple of things. If you could make sure that you are following the podcast, wherever it is that you listen to your podcast episodes, usually there’s a plus sign in the right-hand corner or somewhere on that site. If you can make sure that you have clicked that to follow the podcast, that will make sure that you are notified whenever I upload a new episode. And you’re following the podcast helps that podcast become more visible to other people so that other women can find this information.
In addition to following or subscribing to the podcast, if you would take just a few seconds to leave a rating, those stars will pop up and you can just give it five stars or whatever you think it deserves. and if you are given that option to leave a short review, again, that makes all the difference in making this information visible and available to other people. Thank you.
So today I want to talk about something that you have heard me talk about quite a bit in other episodes of the podcast, which is the value and the reason for taking small steps.
I want to talk about why you should do less to stop overeating than your brain is probably telling you that you need to do. And I want to give you some examples from members of my community of what it looks like to take small steps. What small steps they are taking that are working for them. And the way that they have let these small steps create success in their relationship with food. And create changes in their eating and in their attempts to end overeating. All right?
So let me give you a short list of why you should do less to stop overeating. In other episodes, I’ve talked a lot about how your brain, particularly when it is in a perfectionistic mindset, tends to be very all or nothing. Very dramatic about what it takes to create change. Your brain is very good because it’s a human brain at telling you that you’re not doing enough. Or that you could do more. Or that you should push yourself harder.
And when you combine the way our brains tend to work with diet culture, and diet mentality and all the things that you have learned through a lot of marketing and other sources about the weight loss industry. It is really easy to be hooked into a pattern of never believing that you’re doing enough. And always believing that you need to do more. And never letting the small things count.
So, let’s talk about why you should do less to stop over eating. And just to be clear, by doing less, what I’m specifically talking about in this episode is smaller steps. Why you should take smaller steps to stop overeating. And I always think about this as, what’s a smaller and doable step that I could take?
How could I make this smaller? How could I make this a hundred percent doable? How could I be more certain that if I promise myself, I’m going to do this thing, I will actually do it and be able to keep doing it?
So, when you choose smaller steps to change your eating, and that might mean, as I said in an earlier episode, not choosing a hundred percent goals. Trying to do something 30 percent of the time. Or trying to make a change only in the couple hours after dinner. Or experimenting with something that you’re doing in the middle of the afternoon.
When you take a smaller step, you are so much less likely to overwhelm yourself. All or nothing thinking, I’m going to do this every day. I’m going to do this all day long. I see this a lot with mindful eating. People who feel like it would be really helpful to experiment with mindful eating. Which is being present without distractions when you eat.
Because when you’re present without distractions, when you eat a meal or a snack or anything else, you are more likely to taste it. You are much more aware of when you are full and whether you are hungry when you start. You are much more able to take satisfaction from what you’re doing. Mindless eating is not satisfying. You’re not aware of it. You’re not tasting it. You’re not present with yourself.
But what I see all the time is a situation where somebody will hear about mindful eating. They understand why it could be useful to them. It is the opposite of what they have been doing.
And so, they decide, okay, now I have to eat mindfully all the time. And it feels overwhelming. It doesn’t sound pleasant. There’s a reason they haven’t been doing it in the first place. And so, day after day, sometimes week after week, they tell themselves, oh, you know, I really need to do this mindful eating thing. And it doesn’t happen.
Which is another reason why You should consider taking smaller, more doable steps to change your eating. It is easier to get started. Not only is it easier to get started building that new habit, experimenting with the new thing, learning about mindful eating and how that might work for you.
Eliminating sugar if you’re feeling like that leads to energy crashes in the afternoon. Experimenting with eating more protein. Experimenting with doing something else instead of getting a bowl of ice cream in the evening. A small doable change instead of an all the time change is less overwhelming. It’s easier to get started with. It is also easier to be consistent when you Decide that what you’re going to commit to is something that is small and doable.
And I am here to tell you that consistency beats perfection a hundred percent of the time. Building consistency in your habits, in your thinking, in your choices, that is what is going to lead to change when it comes to eating. Building consistency, aiming for perfection, and then quitting when you don’t get there, which is inevitable, is not going to get you out of that trap. And instead it’s actually going to solidify vicious cycles with overeating and emotional eating.
Another reason to choose small doable steps is that it is easier to restart when you get off track. And you’re not perfect, I’m not perfect as a human being, you will get off track, life will happen to you. And if you have some big, dramatic, complex plan that you need to start all over again, now you have to work up the motivation to get started. Now you have to wait until it’s a good time. Or you can get to the grocery store. Or it’s a full moon. Or the kids are back in school.
When, when the next thing to do is simply a small doable step, you can just take it. There doesn’t have to be all the drama about restarting. In fact, it is much easier when you are taking small steps to just think about continuing onward. I’m just going to keep going. That last step didn’t go very well. I’m just going to take the next one.
The other thing about small steps, or another thing about small doable steps, is that they are easier to take when you don’t necessarily want to. It is easier to do the small doable thing. It is easier to keep your promise to yourself when you’re low on motivation. Or when you’re tired or when you’re really busy. Or when you’re being pulled in three million directions.
If I have decided That I’m going to take three minutes for myself before I go on to the next thing, that’s a lot easier to do than I’ve, if I’ve decided I am going to meditate for 30 minutes every single day. And neither of those things are natural behaviors for me. They’re not something that I am comfortable with. They’re not muscles that I have developed.
If I decide that I want to try to walk most days for fitness or for stress relief. It is going to be so much easier to do if my small doable step is I’m going to get out that door every single day, even if all I do on some days is go to the mailbox. The goal is to get out the door. That is going to be so much easier to do when I don’t want to, or when it’s raining or when the day has turned upside down.
Then if I have decided that my small doable step is that I’m going to walk for 45 minutes or 10, 000 steps or whatever it is, seven days a week. Right?
Again, I’m going to give you some examples from people, members of my community, members of Your Missing Peace about how they are using this in real life. I just want to be clear on why this is so valuable.
Here’s another thing. And this is something that members of my program discover all the time. And that I remind myself on probably a weekly basis. The idea that doing more is what we need for good results is a myth. It’s not true so much of the time.
We live in this productivity culture. Right? This, this culture where we are driven to be doing and producing and working. The idea that doing more is what you need to do to get better results is a myth. And actually, it leads to the whole cycle of overwhelming yourself with expectations and projects and being too busy, getting overwhelmed, getting exhausted, blowing it.
And I am talking about food here. So, let’s, let’s put ourselves in that place where I, the ideas, if I’m going to do this, I got to go big or go home. Right? This is, I’m going to do more. I’m going to pull out all the stops. I’m going to clean out the pantry. I’m going to be really strict with my eating. I am going to push myself to do all the things on the list of what I have told myself it will take to eat the way I should eat in air quotes. Right?
And then I can’t sustain it. And so I blow it. And now it’s ruined. And now I feel bad because I’ve blown it. And so now I really blow it. Or it doesn’t matter so I might as well just eat all the things I wasn’t allowing myself to eat anyway. And now I’m going to have to start over. I’m going to have to start over.
It’s not about just taking the next small doable step, because at this point, my brain is telling me that if I want to see any results, if I really want to have an impact here, I got to do big things. And so I got to rest up. I got to be ready to dive back in again, because this last go around, it really exhausted me.
Small doable steps that you can be consistent with. That you can build your muscles around. That you can build your habits around. That you can build new ways of thinking around. These things are going to take you much farther.
Here’s another important thing to know about taking small doable steps. When you do this, it is so much easier to see what is working and what isn’t working or what isn’t working well, or how you could improve it.
It’s so much easier to do that when you aren’t changing everything at once. I have talked to so many women who are so good at throwing themselves into big, dramatic overhauls of their eating. Plans that make them miserable. But then when I asked them specific questions about, so, you know, what was it like for your energy level to be eating this, or you said that you didn’t eat between these hours of the day. Did that make you more tired?
And they don’t know. They don’t know. These are, these are astute, observant, insightful women. But these food plans, and all the stuff they’re trying to keep, it’s like balancing a bunch of plates in the air. All the stuff they’re trying to keep going is so complicated, it’s hard to even know what’s working and what isn’t. So that you could refine the plan so that it would really work for you.
And before we dive into specific examples, there’s just one more thing that I want to share about this idea of committing to small steps and keeping it doable. And this is something, there’s a whole specific exercise on this that we do in the very first module of Your Missing Peace. And it is always so fun to bring it with people because when they go through this exercise, what they realize, very specifically in their own relationship with food, but what I’m here to tell you about in your relationship with food is that the truth is you don’t have to fix a hundred percent of your eating.
In almost every situation that I have come across in all the women that I have worked with over all the years. Much of your eating is just fine. Much of your eating is working for you. There are times of day or pieces of your eating that don’t need to be fixed. And there are places in your day or places in your eating or places before you eat that when you focus your attention on them, when you home in on those places and give those places, make them a small project. Make the changes in that area, the changes that you see will reverberate in ways that will amaze you and surprise you.
The truth is you don’t have to fix a hundred percent of your eating. And if you are focused on big, massive changes and trying to change everything and trying to do it all the time. Just like the mindful eating experiment I gave you. Most people do not need to be mindful of their eating a hundred percent of the time.
I know that some of you are gasping at that because I feel like there is, there’s this perfectionistic idea out there that if you’re really successful, that is what you’re doing. It isn’t true. The way you get to success is you get really strategic. And there are things that will help you with that. You get really strategic about where you can best focus your attention.
You get really smart about what are the small steps that will help me. Because, I was going to say I don’t know about you, but I think I do know about you. I know about me, and I know about the women that I work with. We don’t want to spend the majority of our lives focused on our eating and fixing our eating and doing hard things.
So small strategic changes that are doable, allow you to get your confidence back. They allow you to make promises that you can keep to yourself. And so much of the time they lead to the big changes that you want without having to jump in there and try to fix a hundred percent of the things when a hundred percent of the things aren’t broken.
So, I asked members of the Your Missing Peace community to share places that they have found small steps to be particularly useful. And I got some comments that I’m going to share with you. These are small steps that have worked for individuals. Your small steps are going to be your small steps.
Some of these small steps will not sound useful to you. They might be the opposite of what would be useful for you. So, I’m not sharing these because there’s any right or wrong way to do this. I just think it is helpful to be able to give some examples of what this looks like in the real lives of real people.
So, this missing piece member said my small step is instead of a medium food item, I order a small food item.
Also, I have this thing called sneaky exercise, which is a wonderful small step, which I’ve incorporated. Examples of sneaky exercise include parking my car further away from the store I want to visit. Mopping my two-level home by filling my downstairs utility sink with mop water and walking up and down the steps at least 10 times to rinse and refresh when needed.
That’s a lot of steps. Finally, I timed my housekeeping tasks to 10 minutes to dust the furniture, vacuum, et cetera, just about any chore. If I sweat, I count it as movement. All of these small steps have led to me thinking about my food choices. Have given me a more positive outlook. And finally, have taken me down the path to losing 130 plus pounds over 13 years.
I know, a slow pace, but I would not trade the pace because I have managed to keep it off. P. S. she says, my trainer says sneaky exercise doesn’t count. I say, if I sweat, it does.
Here’s the thing, you all, we get to choose what our small doable steps are. And did you hear what this member of Your Missing Peace said about them?
They’ve got her thinking about her food choices. They’ve got her moving. They’ve given her a positive outlook. And guess what? She lost her weight and has kept it off. Also, because I always have to point this out, do you hear the ease with which she talked about these habits?
So, here’s another member of Your Missing Peace. She says, I had the habit of putting too much food on my plate, especially when I’m hungry. Very much like when visiting an all you can eat buffet. Until I realized there’s just too much food and I can’t finish it all. The small habit of pausing before deciding on what I want to eat, as well as putting just a serving of vegetables, a serving of protein, et cetera, on my plate, and then seeing how I feel afterward has really helped me a lot.
I’ve become more aware and in tune with myself. And I’m able to ask if I’m satisfied after a plate of single servings. I’m also able to ask myself if I want to go back for another serving. Small step. She doesn’t make a long list of what she’s going to eat or what she’s not going to eat, but putting one serving of these things on her plate in a way that makes sense to her has worked for her.
Dehydration or trying to stay hydrated is an issue for so many women. So, here’s another small step that somebody shared. She said, I rarely feel thirst and I don’t drink enough water. I didn’t use to drink enough water. I began drinking a small Dixie cup of water every time I use the bathroom. This has added up to a lot of water over the course of the day in the evening.
I have learned that small cups are doable and I don’t have to sit down with a gallon jug to get hydrated. She kept it simple and it’s working for her.
Another missing piece member says, for me, it has been consistency over quality. I’ve been working on new habits and sometimes I’m not exactly doing it perfectly, but I just keep going. Consistency over quality.
This is from another member who’s fairly new to Your Missing Peace and has really loved the idea of small steps. She says, small doable steps matter so much! Exclamation point. I can easily be kind to myself, or I can easily eat more slowly, or I can try to tune into my hunger. These things are doable.
Other times I have been so focused on what not to do, and that list was big, and it was hard. It is nice to take the pressure off and focus on what I can do. And also what I’m doing right.
I really love this next comment from a member. She says that, smaller steps have made this journey so much less daunting. I feel so overwhelmed when my brain starts to tell me I need to do more. And stopping and making it smaller opens up so many more possibilities.
And one of the reasons I really love this comment is that something this member of the program has really done as made that idea of stopping and noticing what her brain is telling her a small step. It’s something that she’s been practicing.
It is a win for her when she notices I’m being hard on myself. It is a win for her when she notices that her brain is saying, I have to eat that cookie or I have to go home and binge after work. It has been a win for her to notice the conversation. Instead of making it all or nothing, that it’s only a win if she notices the conversation and she does something different or she shuts it down or she changes the conversation.
She’s pursued this in small steps. And some, some days it has felt like a struggle. It’s one of the reasons that having the coaching and the support in the program is so valuable. But now it is paying off incredibly for her because these little small things are showing up all the time. And she is seeing some amazing changes.
In fact, she just posted the other day, something that I hadn’t planned to share with you, but I’m going to do that. Cause if it’s in here so well. She said, I literally thought I would never be able to say this, but I’ve gotten to a place that food does not consume every thought of my day. I think about it when I’m hungry, but otherwise I have so much space.
It is the small doable steps and the effort to be imperfectly consistent that have led to these kind of changes. And I’m going to say that those statements that start with, I never thought I’d be able to say, or I never believed it was possible, or I can’t believe I’m saying this, almost always are the kind of changes that are built from that focus on consistency. That focus on, okay, what can I, what can I commit to?
What’s a promise that I can actually keep? What is doable? What is a small enough step that I can stick with it? And if I fall off track, I can keep coming back to it. This is what leads to creating freedom from overeating.
The last comment I want to share is again from a missing piece member. And she says, she, she kind of sums it all up. She says, my smallest steps are the ones that have led to profound lasting changes. One small step at a time has made huge differences in my eating, taking off and keeping off a lot of weight. My brain kept repeating diet mentality, that it has to be restrictive. It has to be hard. It has to be a perfect diet.
But small sustainable changes were where it was at for me. When I started, and she gives an example here, she says, when I started, I had pizza, so I added a salad. And then I cut down on the number of slices of pizza that I would usually eat. Now, I can’t remember the last time I had a pizza. I never thought that would be right for me, but for right now, it is.
She gives an example for activity. She said, my goal with activity, my simple step was to just be more physically active. A little at a time is good enough. I started with 10 minutes of walking and my brain really did not like this as exercise is supposed to be long and hard in order to count. I just kept repeating every little bit helps. And by the way, there was research to back it up. I love that.
So, I hope I have convinced you that you can go a long way with small doable steps. And there’s one more little piece of advice that I want to give you because brains are tricky, at least my brain is. And I know you’re yours probably does the same thing, which is that it is so easy for me when I start thinking about a small doable step, especially when I get the right size, something that is absolutely doable, something that is small, something that I know I could be consistent with for the next two weeks, you know, to see if it’s, it’s going to have an impact.
Because it is so doable, my tricky little brain almost always wants to add another one in. Well, if you could do that, you could do this. I mean, those are just two little things. Right? And then before you know it, there’s three or four or half a dozen.
Start small. A doable step. Pick one thing. See how it works. If it leads to other things eventually, that’s great. But you want to, you want to think about this as strengthening muscles. Building consistency and building your trust in yourself again. This is about trusting yourself. This is about learning to promise yourself things in a way that you can keep your promises.
Because when it comes to trust, when it comes to peace with food, when it comes to freedom from overeating your confidence and your belief in yourself and your trust in yourself is everything.
So, play with some small steps and let me know what you come up with.
I will talk to you soon.