Hosts Coach Jo and Coach Kim explore the challenges of maintaining healthy eating habits. They highlight how the struggle is not about a lack of knowledge or awareness but stems from deeper issues, including stress, habits, and emotional triggers. They emphasize the importance of understanding these triggers, rewiring unhealthy habits, and setting up the right environment and mindset for success. Coach Jo and Coach Kim cover practical strategies such as mindfulness, cultivating awareness of thoughts, and gradually replacing old habits with new, supportive ones.

Listeners are encouraged to prepare mentally and physically by being proactive—keeping healthy options readily available and creating a supportive environment. Coach Jo and Coach Kim also stress the significance of a balanced mindset, avoiding the pitfalls of all-or-nothing thinking, and recognizing that one mistake doesn't erase progress. Ultimately, they suggest listeners seek guidance, like working with a coach, to dive deeper into the underlying factors beyond just food choices. With the advice and awareness presented in this episode, you can allow for more sustainable, positive change in your life.

Contact Joely Churchill and Kim Berube | Iron Lab:

Transcript:

Coach Jo 00:09

Welcome to Perfectly Unfinished Conversations, the Iron Lab podcast with Coach Jo…

Coach Kim 00:14

…and Coach Kim…

Coach Jo 00:15

Where you ride shotgun with us as we have raw, real, unfiltered, and unfinished conversations about trying to eat, sleep, train, and live with some integrity in a messy, imperfect life.

Coach Kim 00:27

We're all about creating a strong support system, taking radical personal responsibility, having fun, and being authentic. And one of the most common themes you're going to find in this podcast is the idea that we create positive momentum in our life, by doing what we call b-minus work.

Coach Jo 00:45

We’re making gains and getting ahead and loving life without self-sabotaging our goals by striving for perfection. We get it done by moving ahead…

Coach Kim 00:55

…before we're ready…

Coach Jo 00:56

…when we aren't feeling like it…

Coach Kim 00:58

…and without hesitation.

Coach Jo 1:00

Be sure to subscribe now on Apple or Spotify, so you don't miss a single episode. It’s good enough. Let's go.

Coach Jo 1:12

Hey everyone, welcome back to perfectly unfinished conversations. We're on Episode 10. Yahoo! Today we're gonna dig deep into something that I know resonates with a lot of you. Most of us already know what to eat. We've heard all of the advice, lean proteins, veggies, healthy fats, whole grains. Do the meal prep, plan ahead, and so on and so forth. It's being thrown at our faces daily on social media and in the conversation amongst your peers. But yet, for some reason, we find ourselves struggling to stay consistent, at an impasse, rebelling against all the things we know we need to do in order to feel good. The reality is, it's not the lack of knowledge holding us back. It's all the other stuff, the stress, the habits, the emotional baggage and how everything else in life comes together to impact our eating choices. This is a massive trigger for so many of us, and today, we want to spend some time unpacking how we can marry those two realities, which is the knowledge of what to eat and the everyday chaos that often derails us. So trust us, you're not alone in this journey, and today we're going to talk about how to make these two pieces of the puzzle fit together.

Coach Kim 02:38

So let's get real for a second when I first meet with Blueprint clients, and we deep dive into nutrition, and Jo and I, Amber, we all meet with clients and do a deep dive when we start working with them, and I usually tell them, I want to know what Monday to Thursday eating looks like, and then what Friday to Sunday eating habits look like, because we see this as such predictable behavior, you start your week strong. You have all the groceries, ideas, motivation to get it done, and even maybe you're a meal prepper. So you've done that on Sunday, and your fridge is stocked with healthy options, and you've got, you know, you have got the mentality that this is going to be the week that you nail it. And so Monday and Tuesday, we start start super strong. We're really structured that that's very, very typical. And by Wednesday or Thursday, things start to sort of go sideways, sideways. You've been worn down by the bullshit of the week, and your stress is beginning to accumulate. And so if you've had a rough day at work or the kids need attention. Suddenly that healthy meal doesn't sound so appealing at all, and pretty soon you're choosing to order skip the dishes or find a quick fix, fast food or the snack that's easy but not aligned with your goals. It happens to the best of us. You're only human, and it's not because you don't know what to eat. It's because life happens, and because our brains are really tricky.

Coach Jo 04:09

Here's where it gets interesting. Food, for many of us, becomes more than just fuel. It becomes a comfort, a reward, a stress reliever, or even a way to escape like your coping mechanism. Food has also been tied with you know, family friend get togethers. You're always bringing something to the potluck. We celebrate, we eat, we die, we eat. We eat, not because we're hungry, but because it serves a purpose in the moment, a purpose that has nothing to do with actual nutrition. How many times have you reached for food, not because you were physically hungry, but because you were emotionally drained, or how many times have you poured yourself a glass of wine after a long day, not because you wanted to celebrate, but because you needed to unwind? How often have you found yourself mindlessly snacking in front of the TV, and not because you were hungry, but because it felt comforting after a stressful day, or it's just what I do at the end of my day, right? Maybe it's boredom, maybe it's stress, or maybe you're just craving some comfort after a long day. That's what we like to call emotional hunger. It's different from physical hunger, and it can be a lot harder to manage.

Coach Kim 05:24

So, it’s really important to remember that the human brain is actually wired evolutionarily for three things. It wants to avoid pain, it wants to seek pleasure, and it wants to take the path of least resistance. It wants the easy road. It is a survival mechanism, and it's the equivalent of the installed software that is running on your supercomputer, like we this is the way everybody's brain works, and this is what makes it so difficult to stay 100% true to your best laid plans, because it's your primitive brain that's telling you, I just...