Why Mindset Matters More Than Calories – Episode #002

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Welcome to the soul science nutrition podcast where you’ll discover that when it comes to your health, you’re so much more powerful than you’ve been led to believe. And now your host, she’s a holistic nutrition and lifestyle coach, chef, author, and Yogi Christine Okezie.
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Hello and welcome to episode two of my soul science nutrition podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in today and I am so excited to dive into today’s topic why mindset matters more than calories. Yeah. Okay, so let’s dive in. Let’s talk about healthy living, healthy lifestyles, right? What does that all boil down to? Well, healthy living really boils down to a series of habits, habits around self care, what we do when we’re eating, exercising, finding that work, play rest, balance. You might even say that our bodies are literally shaped by how we spend our time thinking and behaving repeatedly and automatically day in and day out. If that’s the case, the success of any plan to improve our health release, excess weight needs to be focused fundamentally then on how we break bad habits and how we form good ones. It’s the behavioral change piece.
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That’s all too often missing from restricted dieting and why is that important? Well, the behavioral change piece works with our mindset, which we’ll show today, informs our habits as well as our physiology. Let’s take a common example of a food behavior that I see a lot in my clients that leads to unwanted weight gain, low energy, overeating, digestive issues, and ultimately increases their risk for metabolic disease. What is that habit? It’s irregular meal timing, erratic eating schedules, right? Either skipping meals, eating late at night, this variability in their eating schedule or lack of consistency in meal timing wreaks havoc on the signaling system that governs our appetite control, our digestion, calorie burning and fat storage. There is ample research that supports that our circadian rhythm is intimately connected to our metabolism, meaning that it’s not simply about the amount of food or calories that we eat when it comes to affecting our weight.
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It’s actually so much more about the, when you might have heard the saying eat breakfast like King lunch, like a Prince and dinner, like a popper. Well. That adage sums up what traditional healing systems understood to be, which is the relationship between the energy flow in our body to the daily movements of the sun, meaning certain Oregon and Oregon systems have naturally optimal functions depending on certain times during the day. Well, today we have scientific studies on how this body clock of ours interacts with the food we eat that support that. There’s plenty of wisdom in this ancient teaching. In fact, the complex process of metabolism depends on numerous interactions occurring in the body, in our gut and our liver and our pancreas and our fatty tissue and the science shows that irregular sleeping and eating schedule significantly breaks down the messaging that happens in the organ systems in our tissues.
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This leads to increased inflammation and a decrease in insulin sensitivity, both of which create conditions in the body that over the long term have been actually shown to increase our risk for various diseases including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Now we can get into a super deep discussion about intermittent fasting, which I’m sure is coming to mind at this point in this conversation. But we’ll have to do that perhaps on another show. I’ll share a link in fact to my article that I wrote on intermittent fasting, intermittent fasting 101 that’ll go a little bit deeper. But for now for this show, I just want you to have an explanation of why establishing regular eating, consistent eating schedules, supports natural weight loss and a healthy body. Okay. But back to mindset over calories. So I can tell my clients all this wonderful explanation and I think it’s very important actually for us to understand the knowledge.
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But ultimately we have to get to underneath what’s driving the habit of erratic eating schedules. And that gets into the primary habits, the real habits that we need to shift, how we think, our attitudes, beliefs and perspectives around the eating, exercising, and sleeping habits that we want to change. So the first thing we have to bring awareness to actually has nothing to do what we do really, but rather noticing the stories we tell ourselves in our mind. So if I was to ask you, you know, why do people skip meals? Why do people have inconsistent eating schedules, eating late at night, snacking mindlessly throughout the day, or not having time to prepare healthy meals to eat on a regular basis? Well, here are some of the stories that are all too common. All too human, right? Too busy. Other things are more important. What I’m doing isn’t enough.
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Why bother? It’s my genes. I’m too old. It’s selfish to take time for myself, right? Some of these mental thought patterns that we may or may not be in touch with, but we take them as truth and they certainly create a certain way of feeling in the body. So the habit now becomes as a result of those stories, procrastination, rationalization, worrying, living in overwhelm, scolding ourselves, negating ourselves, feeling like a victim and any one of those habits of how we’re feeling creates a chronic stress in the body, producing hormones that flood our nervous system and these pro inflammatory chemicals that are now activated by our mental and emotional bodies have widespread effects on important bodily functions, our metabolism, our immune system, the function of our heart, brain, gut, et cetera. And not to mention that the resulting low mood that comes from living in overwhelm, feeling like a victim, et cetera, saps our motivation to make positive changes.
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This is exactly why our mindset, what we think and the emotions we feel are the actual real habits that need changing and ultimately what affects the results we want when it comes to our health and weight goals. So I’d like to share a simple yet powerful exercise to help you tap into a source of motivation to make a real change. Step number one, take inventory of your eating and sleeping schedule or lack thereof. And first be happy that you may have just discovered that modifying your meal timing and your eating schedule is actually a proven tool, a new tool to achieve your natural weight other than another calorie restricted diet. Step number two, notice the story that’s running in your mind that’s leading to the erratic timing or the skipped meals or the mindless eating right and identify it. Maybe once again, it’s the story of I’m too busy.
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Other things are more important. It’s selfish to take time for myself and next. Notice the real habit, the actual behavior that we want to turn around and perhaps once again that’s procrastination or feeling like a victim or negating ourselves. Notice the connection between what you’re thinking, I. E. The story that’s running in our mind and the resulting emotions of how we’re feeling and relating to ourselves and our bodies and our prospect for any positive change. Now shifting this heavy energy and shifting our state of being you can probably appreciate right now is not going to be done through more willpower or more self-discipline. In other words, we can’t really think our way or push our way out of this dilemma yet. That’s what most diet approaches will tell you. That’s all you have to rely on. But I want to share with you. Step number three, step number three is a fundamental step that gets lost when it comes to setting personal goals or embarking on any lifestyle changes.
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or creating habits, for example, around how we eat and care for ourselves. I call it the Big Why. Now the Big Why recognizes that we have to go even deeper. We have to go underneath the noisy chatter of our minds and plug into a deeper sense of purpose. Your big why is connected to what really matters to you, how you really feel about something, because ultimately it’s important to your soul. So ask yourself, why should I make myself a priority? Why does having great health or losing weight or improving my eating? Why does that matter to me? Why do I say I want those things? And for whatever the answers are for each of these questions, ask yourself and why is that important? This is a beautiful journaling exercise by the way. So I encourage you to take out a pen and paper after this call and when you have a quiet moment and recognize the process that needs to happen in order to really shift an unwanted behavior and more importantly, the energy that’s driving it.
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So as I mentioned, as you answer the questions, why do I say I want to improve my eating? Why should I make myself a priority? Dig deeper by asking why is that important? Well, because I want to feel good. Well, why is that important? Because I want to live longer and more productive life. Great. Well, why is that important as you’re doing this very, um, gentle inquiry, right? Um, just observe any feelings, um, any sensations that come up for you. The gift in this exercise is the actual inquiry process itself because it’s in the process that you get in touch with your authentic you again, underneath the busy chatter of the supposed to the should. In other words, this is not a head exercise. Your head already did its job by understanding all the information and taking in the knowledge about in this example why a more consistent eating schedule and eating pattern would support a healthier body.
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Now we have to do the inner work, the inner work of summoning the power and the wisdom in your heart to get your mind on board. Because when we do this, I get all three green lights, Greenlight in the mind Greenlight in the body Greenlight in the soul. And that my friends is when real lasting change happens. So we begin with a deep dive into looking at our habits, our behavioral habits and the emotional and mental thought patterns and habits that drive them. And we bring a level of conscious awareness to those underlying thoughts and emotions so that we can shift the behavioral change and over time what happens is we get to the root cause of where our sabotage lies, where our resistance is, and where we lack alignment in what we say we want and what we do. So to sum up why mindset is more important than calories is that when it comes to lasting weight loss, it has to begin with number one, getting to the root cause of the unwanted behavior and number two, adopting a system for real positive habit formation and this begins seeing our mind’s tendencies and the emotions on this deeper level and using the strategies of mindfulness, conscious awareness and self inquiry.
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So please, let’s forget the no pain, no gain approach. Let’s let go of deprivation diets simply because they’re so scientifically flawed. Let’s shift our emphasis to self awareness and understanding, questioning why you did something or about to do something. We’ll put you more in touch with the what’s making it so difficult for you to lose weight or create a healthy habit. This self inquiry also stirs up a curiosity in ourselves and it sheds the light on health derailing behaviors and perhaps any self sabotaging mind games that play out. This mindful approach to our behaviors. Getting to the root of it is simply about noticing, noticing more about yourself and what you do and why you do it. And when we engage in this process of compassionate self inquiry, the body can relax even further. We get out of the thinking mind, we get out of the storymaking mind and we are able to contact a part within ourselves, deep within our soul, if you will.
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That allows the body to relax, to come into its natural state, creating the optimal physiology once again for health and healing to take place. When the body relaxes, the mind also relaxes allowing us access to a view, a big picture perspective on our health and in our life. What has profoundly and positively changed my life and the lives of so many folks that I’ve worked with is this understanding that changing our mind and working with our emotions on this deeper level on the soul level gives us amazing new experiences and powerful insights. And in doing this, we’re no longer bound by the chains of our beliefs and our past experiences. We live in a greater view, and appreciation of what’s possible for our body and what’s possible for our health. Because we understand that the biggest challenge really when it comes to weight loss really has more to do with adherence and compliance.
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And so once again, this is where we need tools to shift the underlying causes of the behaviors. And that’s working with the mindset. So if you’re carrying excess weight, the primary reason probably isn’t solely what you’re eating, your lack of exercise or even a lack of willpower. Yes, perhaps all these factors play some role in what we do to take care of ourselves and how our body feels and appears, but really they’re just a manifestation of an even deeper reason. And being open to exploring these deeper energetic psychological reasons is the work of getting lasting results. And finally, I hope that today’s show has highlighted the, the importance of finding the right motivation. Because all too often when it comes to weight loss motivation, what often comes to mind are the hollow phrases like no pain, no gain, or the conditioning from mass culture to assume that being skinny and fit will bring us everything we want and make us our lives whole and complete.
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And usually these assumptions, this dieting mindset, if you will, isn’t even conscious. So what’s truly important and powerful in this work is that we get to rewire any of those beliefs and you know, deeply ingrained perspectives, perhaps the programming of our own or certainly within our culture. And we dig down deep and we find out why we really want what we want. And we’re able to identify and align with what really matters. Our core values in life. And from this place we are able to step into our power. We take ownership of our vision and it’s those values and that vision that give us the mindset to guide us in the right behaviors. And it’s that mindset actually that is the authentic motivation, the inner fuel, if you will. So I hope this episode has given you the inspiration to reflect on your mindset when it comes to embarking on your weight loss and healthy living goals. Shifting your mindset about how to lose weight is the biggest factor in getting the results that you want. Healthy bodies are indeed created from the inside out once we have the correct inner resolve and intention. So thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode. Please hit subscribe to sign up for future episodes of the soul science nutrition podcast, and I invite you to check me out on my website, www/energetic nourishment.com as well as on Instagram. I’m Christine Okezie. Sending you lots of light, love, peace, and great health. Bye for now.