Lies We Believe: Not Controlling Food Means Out of Control Around Food [Podcast Transcript]

Title: Lies We Believe: Not Controlling Food Means Out of Control Around Food 

Podcast Date: September 13, 2022

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Description

Most of us hate that "out of control" feeling. That's why diets are so appealing. They give us a plan and help us feel like we are in control. When we're "off" the diet we feel out of control, so we try another diet or "health plan" so we can feel our sense of control restored. Today we tackle the truth behind why our eating patterns are disrupted by diets and overly controlling behaviors. We look a bit at the science as to why we feel like we can't be "trusted" around food or are "out of control" when we go off a diet. We also talk about how there is a way to eat and enjoy food and feel in control, without being on a specific food plan. If you struggle with swinging from "in control" to "out of control" around food and if you long to have freedom in this arena, today's show is a great first step for you!

Do you feel out of control with food when you're not on a diet? You're not alone. But what if that out of control feeling is really more about your body trying to get what it's been missing out on while you were following your plan? We tend to believe we have so much control over our bodies, yet our bodies want what they want and are determined to help us stay alive! What if our bodies craving for foods or certain foods isn't a problem to be tamed but a good and necessary part of our biology!

Outline

00:00 Introduction: Addressing the Lies About Controlling Our Food

05:06 Hunger Does Not Mean You Lack Willpower

12:06 God Designed Your Body To Eat

17:09 God Does Not Shame You For Your Cravings

20:58 God Is Not Disappointed In You For Eating

Introduction: Addressing the Lies About Controlling Our Food

Heather Creekmore [00:00:00]:

Hey, friend. Heather Creekmore here. We're in a series all month long on the Compare To Who Show about lies we believe. And for most of us, I think there's a lot of lies stuck in there. That's what we do in group coaching as we try to sort through, okay, what are these lies you've been believing? I do this in my individual coaching too, and I'll be taking new individual coaching clients starting in October. So if you're like, oh, man. I really need some help sorting through all this, reach out to me. Let's get something on the schedule because you can stop believing these lies and start believing the truth.

Heather Creekmore [00:00:40]:

You know, science is showing us all kinds of things about the malleability of our brains, of our neural pathways. And for some of you, these lies have been part of your neural pathways. They've been things you've been believing for decades, but they can change. You just have to know how to do it, and I would love to work with you to help you change these lies you've been holding on to and living by. Friend, there is a way to feel freer about your body image, and getting rid of these lies is step 1. So today, we are talking about a lie that I've believed. Okay. I'll just say it.

Heather Creekmore [00:01:22]:

The lie is not controlling food means I'm gonna be out of control with food. Now I'm not a dietitian. This is not medical advice. Okay? If you're following a plan, talking to your doctor, talking to your dietitian, keep talking to them. But I just wanna share with you what I believe is the heart behind this lie and why it keeps so many of us trapped. So that's where we're going today. I hope you enjoy today's show. And if you do, hey, leave a review.

Heather Creekmore [00:01:51]:

That would be awesome. Here we go. Welcome to Compare to Who, the podcast to help you make peace with your body so you can savor God's rest and feel his love. If you're tired of fighting body image the world's way, Compare to Who is the show for you. You've likely heard lots of talk about loving your body, but my goal is different. Striving to fall in love with stretch marks and cellulite is a little silly to me. Instead, I want to encourage you and remind you with the truth of scripture that you are seen, you are known, and you are loved no matter what your size or shape. Here, the pressure is off.

Heather Creekmore [00:02:31]:

If you're looking for real talk, biblical encouragement, and regular reminders that God loves you and you're not alone, you've come to the right place. I hope you enjoy today's show, and, hey, tell a friend about it. Okay. So friends, today, we're tackling the lie. If I don't control my food, I will be out of control with food. And, again, I repeat, I am not a dietitian, but I have been on a journey away from dieting into a more intuitive style of eating for the last few years. And I'm starting to learn things about my body and my journey of relating to food in a poor way. I know I had an eating disorder.

Heather Creekmore [00:03:17]:

I have had disordered eating all around that eating disorder. What I have learned about just eating and food and what God intended for us to do on all these things is really blowing my mind. And so hear my heart today in this way. I am not trying to shame or condemn you. If you're listening, you're like, Heather, I hear you, but I really need a plan. Maybe that's just where you're at right now. In fact, women coming out of eating disorders often need a plan to renourish their bodies, refuel their bodies. There's no shame in that whatsoever.

Heather Creekmore [00:03:59]:

Okay? And there's no shame if you're not to the same point I am at in your journey with food and dieting and eating. Right? When I wrote Compared to Who?, I talk about dieting in there because God started with me by working on my body image. And it was years & years later before he started working with me on the food side and the dieting side. I don't think I really fully knew the depths of my eating disorder when I wrote my book Compared to Who?. So just know that we're all on a journey, and no matter where you're at on the journey, that's okay. As long as you keep traveling, as long as you keep asking good questions, as long as you keep digging into “why is my heart stuck here?”, That's what we need to be doing. And so the lie today, I'll just repeat it one more time, is that if I'm not controlling food, I'm out of control with food. And thing one that I've learned about this is that half of this, I don't even know if I can quantify it…

Hunger Does Not Mean You Lack Willpower

Heather Creekmore [00:05:06]:

Let me say it this way. A lot of this is physiological. Right? This is your body being hungry and your experience in not controlling food and feeling out of control with food is more about your body being hungry and doing what it needs to do to stay alive and to keep you alive. You should say thank you. It's more about that than it is these things we hear about, like willpower and self control, which, biblically doesn't mean that. Go listen to that episode I did with Amy Carlson a few months ago. But we confuse what our body needs, that our body was designed to run on food and fuel, we confuse that with these concepts of being able to control our body and control what we eat and not crave things and all these things.

Heather Creekmore [00:06:04]:

And so point one is, if you feel out of control around food because you're not controlling food, chances are there is something disordered going on with your eating. And chances are you are depriving yourself of food too much, and your body is just trying to help you out by eating. Your body is, like, okay, that was nice that we had that little famine time. Now we're gonna eat because I need to keep you alive. And so most of the time when we feel out of control around food, it's this response to something very physical. It's a response to needing to eat. It's a response to ignoring hunger cues or being too busy for hunger cues.

Heather Creekmore [00:06:51]:

And our bodies are, like, hello! You're gonna eat. And you're gonna eat not just anything. You're gonna eat all the things because we are hungry. Right? There's this binge-restrict cycle that we can get into. It can turn into full blown binge eating disorder, and there's different ways that a professional could quantify that for you. Right? But just even beyond the disordered label. Let me just tell you how this used to look in my life.

Heather Creekmore [00:07:20]:

I like to see how long I could go without eating. It was just kind of a thing. Because I believed that somehow that would help me stay thinner. I kinda thought, oh, if I can make it through breakfast, oh, that's a win. Right? I save those calories. And then, oh, I can make it through lunch. Oh, that's another win. I saved those calories too.

Heather Creekmore [00:07:40]:

And then what would happen is late afternoon or midafternoon sometimes, I would start eating. And when your body is overly hungry, when you start eating, you're not like, I'm gonna fix myself a nice salad, and I'm going to cut the carrots and the cucumbers and wash the vegetables. Like, no. Your body doesn't have time for that. Your body is screaming, get me calories fast. And you know what your body wants? Your body wants high sugar and high fat because it knows those are the quickest ways to get calories and to help you feel better. Get your blood sugar regulated. Right? Get your body feeling, like, okay.

Heather Creekmore [00:08:20]:

I could do this. I can keep going. And so you're gonna grab for the sweets and salty stuff. You're gonna grab for the quick sugar. You're gonna grab for the quick granola bar, the cereals, the things that will give you quick energy. And there's nothing wrong with those foods. I'm not trying to make any kind of moral assessment of those food choices. But I'm saying if your goal, if your heart is you wanna be healthier, then starving your body all day long and feeling like that is control, only will will yield to being out of control later.

Heather Creekmore [00:08:54]:

Now that's kind of the micro example of this. The macro, the larger perspective example of this is a cycle I think most of us are familiar with. You're on the plan or you're off the plan. You go on the diet. You control your food really well for 20 days. And then day 21, you're, like, exposed to a food that's not on the plan, or you don't have your special foods with you, or you're at a dinner party or something, and you want to celebrate, and you go off the plan. But instead of going off the plan in just a little way, you go off the plan in a big way. And you continue to just eat all the things that you haven't been able to eat because they weren't on your plan for the next week or weeks or month.

Heather Creekmore [00:09:44]:

And you convince yourself that you are out of control because you are not on the plan. Friend, my thesis for you today is that you are out of control because of the plan. The plan that restricted your eating made you feel deprived. You weren't satisfied. You weren't getting enough calories. You're hungry. And so the first chance you got to meet those needs for satisfaction, to nourish your body, to fulfill your hunger, you took it. And that's not, again, about your willpower or your lack of self control around food because when you're not on a plan, you're out of control.

Heather Creekmore [00:10:25]:

No. No. No. Friends, that's just physiology. 

So I think where some of us need to start as we think about this - controlling food or not controlling food or being on a plan and being out of control when you're not on a plan, I think what we need to do is we need to kind of back up, and I think we need to think about how God made our bodies.

God Designed Your Body To Eat

Heather Creekmore [00:12:06]:

Okay? Because there's a lot of, I would say, distorted beliefs around food, even in the church, that have worked their way into our psyches where the fundamental lie may be a lie where we're not actually believing the truth about how God made us. So that truth is God made your body to eat and run on food. Okay? There's no shame in eating food because that's what God designed to sustain us. He didn't have to do it that way. He could've, I don't know, made us not live on food. He could've given us manna every day, and that was the end of the variety of food. Right? I mean, that's what the Israelites did. He could've come up with another system, but he didn't.

Heather Creekmore [00:13:00]:

Okay? So the reality is your brain needs glucose, and it needs fats in order to run, good fats, in order to run correctly. Right? Your muscles need protein. They need amino acids, the building blocks of protein in order to develop and sustain themselves. Right? You need carbohydrates, you need protein, you need fat. You need all 3 macronutrients to run your body. And I did an awesome episode with my friend, Tracy Brown. It's called Fear of Bread. Go listen to that.

Heather Creekmore [00:13:37]:

Tracy really digs into this even more. But for today, let me just kinda throw it out there. You need all 3 macronutrients. So if you are on a plan that is telling you you are gonna have more control over your body by completely eliminating one of those 3 macronutrients, the carbohydrates, the fats, or the protein, friend, your body, at some point, is going to feel off. It may work, and I'm putting “work” in air quotes. It may work for a while if your desired outcome is a smaller body. Your body may respond in that way, and you may drop some weight at first. But here's what's gonna happen eventually.

Heather Creekmore [00:14:18]:

Your body's gonna say, enough is enough. I need carbohydrates already. Enough is enough. I need fat already. Most people aren't fat free anymore, but we were in the eighties and nineties. Your body's gonna say, give me more protein, because that's how your body was designed. And that's it's not necessarily laid out in scripture, the whole carbohydrate, protein, fat thing. But scientists have known that for a long, long time.

Heather Creekmore [00:14:53]:

There's so much research that has come out about how our bodies work and how they function. Right? So that's just kind of the basics is we need all 3 macronutrients to make our bodies run well. We also need minerals and vitamins and those kinds of things, and sometimes those are in the same foods that contain those macronutrients. But friends, there are a zillion different influencers on Instagram and YouTube telling you, if you leave out this macronutrient, your body will look like this. Or if you just, like, control your food in this way, you'll get the hot body you want. And, friend, I just wanna challenge your fundamental belief here. Do you believe that God created your body to run on food, first of all? And can you believe that God created your body to run on these 3 macronutrients? And if you say yes, that you believe all these things, then my question for you is this, are you being kind to your body by restricting food and by eliminating different macronutrients? Is that what's best for your body? Now okay. I'm gonna put a big disclaimer in here.

Heather Creekmore [00:16:00]:

Some of you are following special plans because of food sensitivities, allergies, all those kind of things. Like, I'm not going there. Right? That's not what I'm talking about. You know, like, I know that a ketogenic diet is really helpful for people with epilepsy. Yes and amen. I pray that works. I pray you stay seizure free. Okay.

Heather Creekmore [00:16:19]:

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the woman whose goal and hope is just to keep her body at a smaller size. And by doing that, she is restricting food, eliminating food groups, hoping that it will help her stay at a smaller size. I tell you, first of all, the science says that won't work long term. And second of all, is that what's best for your body? Is that you know, we say, oh, Christian circles. Oh, Lord help me. We say be a good steward of our body, take care of our body. But if God created you to run on food, and he created you to run on these 3 macronutrients, and you're not doing those things regularly, are you really being a good steward of your body? Is that really health? Those are things I think we have to understand and process.

God Does Not Shame You For Your Cravings

Heather Creekmore [00:17:09]:

And so, friend, to go back to my example, I was skipping meals because my goal was to have a thinner body. I was skipping macronutrients because my goal was to have a thinner body. I was trying to control my body because I very much believe that I would be out of control unless I did. But what I have learned through my own experience is that by allowing my body to eat when it's hungry, by feeding my body regularly and I'll tell you, like, I had turned off hunger signals. So I didn't eat breakfast because I never ate breakfast, and I wasn't hungry at breakfast. But now I have taught myself to eat first thing in the morning because I've realized that I work better when I have food in my system. And that might sound like a really strange thing to say. Right? Like, we all know, oh, don't send your kids off to school without a healthy breakfast.

Heather Creekmore [00:18:00]:

Right? But for ourselves, it's like, oh, I can get by. In fact, I kinda feel good without it. Like, oh, I'm getting a little buzzed. Right? That's adrenaline. That's cortisol. Right? Those are hormones coming in to help you because you're not eating, and that's not healthy for your body. Save those hormones for when you're really needing them. Alright.

Heather Creekmore [00:18:19]:

Save that cortisol for when you're really stressed out, and then it'll help you take the edge off. But you don't have to stress your body out every morning by skipping breakfast. Just eat. My friend, you were designed to eat. Just eat. That's how God made your body. Just eat all 3 macronutrients because that's what God designed your body to run on. And if your fear is that you're gonna be out of control unless you're following a plan, then talk to one of my non-diet dietitian friends.

Heather Creekmore [00:18:46]:

She can help you. One of these women can help you develop a plan that can help you feel comfortable, like you're following a plan until you get more comfortable relating to food. Like, I get it. But my question for you today is, I think you feel out of control. I should phrase this as a question. Do you feel out of control around food because you are not regularly giving your body what it needs, and not regularly responding to the needs that God created your body to have? There's no shame in being hungry. There's no shame in craving things.

Heather Creekmore [00:19:25]:

Right? A lot of times our cravings relate to what our body needs. Yeah. Okay. There's emotional cravings and all that stuff. Yes. There is. But I think most of us get too stuck with that, like, emotional eating, emotional craving stuff because we're not just doing what we need to do on the front end. We're not eating regularly.

Heather Creekmore [00:19:43]:

We're not getting all 3 macronutrients regularly. Okay. Here's an absolutely silly example. Right? Because I took a nutrition class in college. I think a lot of us who have been on a lot of diets have been trying to control our body size and shape for a long time have studied this a lot. Right? And so the basics of these 3 macronutrients, the basics that you should try to eat a little bit of everything at every meal, you should eat regularly so your blood sugar doesn't get too low. Like, all of these are just basic things that I feel like all of these diets that we've been following just, like, kinda give the middle finger to, for a lack of a better way to say it. Right? It's, like, yes, that's the basic truth, but you're not basic anymore.

Heather Creekmore [00:20:25]:

You're special, and you're gonna have the hottest body of all because you're following our special advice, which is, don't believe that stuff. Don't believe those basics. But friend, I can promise you, I have started trying to eat all 3 macronutrients at every meal, and it's the weirdest thing. Like, I feel better. I feel more balanced. I can think better. I have more energy. I didn't have energy for so many years, and I blamed it on all these different things. I blamed it on food sensitivities.

God Is Not Disappointed In You For Eating

Heather Creekmore [00:20:58]:

I thought, oh, I ate that. Now that's made me tired. But the truth is I just wasn't eating enough to have enough energy to do what I needed to do every day. There are so many deceptive messages out there around our food, friend. And if you're confused, if you're frustrated, can I just encourage you to get some help? I have friends that can help in this area. There is no need to stay stuck in this. And there's also no good reason to believe the lie that you can't be trusted around food. God trusts you around food.

Heather Creekmore [00:21:32]:

He does. Does that strike you strange that I said that? I feel like someone needs to know that today. God trusts you around food. He's not disappointed with you for eating. He's not disappointed with you for doing what your body's asking you to do when you starve it all day and you eat a bunch. Right? No. He's not disappointed. He knows how he made you, and he made you to eat.

Heather Creekmore [00:21:59]:

That's all I have for you today. I hope something today has challenged you, made you maybe rethink the way you're relating to food, if that's a problem in your life. And, hey, share this with a friend. Talk to your people about it. Process it. You know, I think that is the best way for us to come to a place where we can, like, really dig out these lies and start to believe the truth is when we talk to friends, talk to people we know about it. So don't just listen and take it in, and then just go on with your life. Share this with a friend, chat about it, engage in deeper conversations, challenge these cultural messages that the new diet is the best diet.

Heather Creekmore [00:22:41]:

Because I promise you, friend, whatever new diet there was last year, there's gonna be a new diet next year and the next year. And we have this food schizophrenia. We just keep bouncing from eliminating a macronutrient to eliminating another macronutrient. There's nothing new under the sun, King Solomon said. Right? There's always gonna be a new diet. There's always gonna be a new plan. There's always gonna be a new way to get hot. So challenge these ideas with the people you know.