You are not a bad person 🥹

If there is one thing we will expect this week from clients, it is check-ins where they assign moral values to food. The good weather seems to encourage more eating and drinking, and that’s ok, but I’m already expecting some sentences like: 

“Oh god, I was so bad yesterday.”

“I was being so good but then ‘X happened’ and now I feel so guilty.”

“I am such a failure”

“I went for a glass of wine with my Granny and then another with my mum, I feel terrible”

(this one actually happened)

Our job as coaches is to help change these ladies' points of view when it comes to nutrition.

I remember replying to the last client and asked why she felt terrible, and asking if she had anything to be grateful for (e.g. the opportunity to spend time with loved ones).

Even writing these things down in the check-ins can help the clients realise that it might be a little extreme.

We are human - we eat food. We do not need to feel guilty. (or as our coach Hazel says “unless you robbed it off a child”!)

Yes, eating more than you had planned might alter your results towards your goals slightly (more on that tomorrow), but by just practicing acceptance around it, it can stop you restricting yourself to ‘make up for it’ or ‘to be good again tomorrow’ (another moral value for food).

And when you stop restricting, you often stop overeating.

Our job is to help women to stop drastically restricting themselves, while also helping them get to their goals (which are mostly fat loss goals, that switch into body acceptance goals, and then just freedom and happiness).

This is where the journaling comes into it.

Say you did eat a meal deal for 4 from Dominos and you feel terrible, but in a physical sense.

You write that down. Not with any moral values.

You can then acknowledge that you don’t feel physically great, and you question how you want to feel.

Then you think about what action you can take in order to feel that way.

After a few weeks on The Furnace, you realise that doesn’t mean you have to start restricting yourself.

It just means you go back to your usual targets, and then next time, you might only order a meal deal for 2 because you acknowledged that eating that much didn’t make you feel good (again, physically).

It’s a complicated one to explain, and I will talk about the law of averages tomorrow, but what it takes, is putting these methods into practice and learning each day how to improve your body image and relationship with food.

In the mean time, if you would like to start putting the work in, with our help - we still have 25% off The Furnace.

Click the button below to get one of the last few spaces for July.

If you have any questions, feel free to reply and I’ll be able to answer.

Thanks for reading,

Siobhan “What if you steal a meal deal of a kid tho” O’Hagan