Nutrition Coaching

The podcast discusses the importance of nutrition in weight loss and the limitations of strict meal plans. The host emphasizes the need to focus on changing behaviors and finding moderation in food choices. Stress eating and emotional eating are identified as common challenges, and the importance of addressing underlying feelings rather than using food as a coping mechanism is highlighted. The host introduces the concept of Moderation 365, which promotes eating anything in moderation every day of the year. The host offers coaching programs that help clients develop healthy behaviors and create a calorie deficit for weight loss. Mindfulness is emphasized as a key element in successful weight loss. Hi, my name is Bess, and you are listening to the Canada Fitness and Nutrition Podcast, where we are hanging out at the intersection of fitness, nutrition, and cannabis. Thank you so much for pressing play today. I have what I hope is an interesting topic, because we're going to talk about nutrition. And when we talk about nutrition, we're talking about weight loss, and we're talking about how to achieve that, and what nutrition coaching is. And I'm also going to talk a little bit about how cannabis can enhance all of that, weight loss and nutrition. So, I'm going to just start by kind of explaining where I come from when I talk about nutrition coaching. So, about 15 years ago, I started as a personal trainer, where I was simply helping clients work out, get strong, lose weight from that angle. But I quickly realized that everyone needed a nutrition aspect to that, because you have to monitor your intake, we can't just exercise, right? We also have to watch what we eat, and especially if you're trying to lose weight. So, for a while, I was sending people to a registered dietician or a nutritionist to obtain a meal plan. So, they would come back with a meal plan, and it would prescribe exactly what to eat, however many times a day that that professional prescribed, and then it would lay it all out, which at first seems like a fantastic idea, right? Okay, so you're going to eat this for breakfast, and then you're going to eat this for a snack, and then you're going to eat this for lunch, and it would tell you how much, right, and what exactly to get. Now, here's the thing. As time would go on, so they would start, and then I would see the client a couple times a week and continue to check in on them, how's it going. And at first, it goes fine, but then, usually the first weekend in, usually that person would come back after the weekend and be like, well, I didn't follow it over the weekend because we went X, Y, Z, we went out with friends, or we went out, or we got takeout instead, or we went away for a vacation, or we went away for the weekend. Weekends are the hardest, and I think now I know at this point, it's unrealistic to expect someone to adhere to a very strict diet meal plan on a weekend, when now you've got social involvement, you've got your partner or friends involved, or family, and they're not going to follow that. They don't necessarily want to do that, and also, we're not, we're just average people. We're not out here stepping up on a bikini stage to be judged in a bikini at all. We're just trying to fit into our jeans again, look good in pictures, feel good about ourselves, drop a few pounds. So, you know, it's one thing to see, you know, again, bikini competitors, to see them follow a strict, strict diet, you know, seven days a week, but for the rest of us, it's just not necessarily realistic. So as soon as usually that first weekend happened, and they didn't follow it, then it would vary. You know, some people were able to get right back on it on Monday, and continue in through a week, and some people got really discouraged after that, because the weekend happened, they weren't on their diet plan, and then they would get discouraged, like, well, I can't do it. Obviously, this isn't working. So when I noticed that, I started to realize early on in my career that it was really the behaviors that needed to change, not so much that people needed a prescribed meal plan. Here's the thing, nutritious information is out there, you know, it's out there everywhere. In fact, there's probably too much of it, if you really think about it, I mean, I'm a product of the 80s and 90s, so I've seen everything from cabbage soup diets, to Atkins, to South Beach, remember that one? Now it's, you know, Keto, and Paleo, and Whole30, so there's always nutrition information out there. And in essence, all those same plans are trying to do is to limit intake, right? We're limiting intake. So at the end of the day, what really matters is limiting intake. So we need to find ways to do that, right? And then, again, the more I talk to clients, and the more I shared my own experiences, I realized that it's the behaviors that needed to change. For example, again, I'm a product of the 80s and 90s, so there was lots of information. Low fat, that was a big thing for a while. And I tried, I dabbled in all of the things, you know? I would see an article in a magazine, and it would say, you know, eat this for breakfast, this for lunch, and this for dinner, and you'll, you know, lose pounds. So you know, I would try that. But I quickly found, in a variety of different settings, that as soon as I had to limit certain foods, and they told me to eat food, certain foods, but not the foods I liked, I didn't want to eat those. I wanted to eat what I wanted to eat. So if they told me, for example, if they said, you know, you're going to eat a, you know, a piece of fish and broccoli for lunch, right? Well, I don't really care for fish, and I didn't feel like eating broccoli for lunch. So if I ate that, then all I could think about was what I really wanted for lunch, which was maybe a sandwich from Jimmy John's, right? So eventually, and now we've studied this now, so now we know the research supports the fact that if we restrict certain foods, we will eventually go back and obtain them and eat them, right? It's, I believe it's called the white elephant experiment, something like that. And so if you say white elephant, right, and I say don't think about a white elephant, then it's really hard not to think about a white elephant, right? So you get the idea. It's really hard to overcome a strong desire in our brain. So if you really enjoy having, you know, if you really enjoy having certain foods for dinner, then me telling you to eat, you know, four ounces of tilapia and some asparagus, yeah, that's going to make you lose weight. But if you don't care for that, you're eventually going to just succumb to whatever it is that you really want to eat for dinner. So given all that, and my own experience, again, with trying to restrict but then just ending up overeating, I realize that it's the behaviors that need to change. We need to change our behaviors and find a way to eat what we like but in moderation. Now on top of that, on top of that, I also quickly realized that stress eating, emotional eating, boredom eating, that these things were off the charts. I've experienced it myself, and I believe I shared a little bit about that in earlier podcasts. But just so you know, you know, there were a lot of years where I was unable to control the urge to eat, and I didn't know why. But what I realized through some therapy and through some, you know, getting assistance from a coach was that I was actually dealing with feelings and not hunger. So I thought I was hungry, but I was really just having feelings, and I was using the food to feed those feelings instead of dealing with the feelings themselves. So for example, if I was sad or lonely, I would think that I could be satisfied by a sandwich. But really, the sandwich, I'm not hungry for a sandwich. I don't need a sandwich. I really needed to let out my feelings, maybe call a friend, and, you know, not feel quite so lonely. So deal with the feeling that was actually happening and not the craving that I was trying to cover up the feeling with. So that really became clear that this was a real problem for a lot of people, and I do tend to primarily work with women. However, I have noticed that it is not only women that experience anxiety, stress eating, and emotional eating. It is men too. So no matter your gender, it applies to all of us. And I think that, you know, it's a really easy way to use food to cope because we have a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety, and it's hard to deal with emotions. And so food is an easy go-to. So fast forward, and I found a certification called Moderation 365, where the philosophy is that we can eat anything we want in moderation any day of the year. So 365 days. We don't eat special on certain days. We don't eat more or less. There's no cycling. There was carb cycling, if you remember that one, but there's no cycling to it. It's just day in, day out. We eat what we enjoy because food is pleasurable, right? We're supposed to get joy from eating. It's social. It's nourishing. We're supposed to enjoy eating and being able to do that every day, but in moderation, which means that we need to be working on the behaviors. And then when we drill down even further, what drives our behaviors, getting away from our emotions driving our behaviors or our social settings driving our behaviors, are natural sensations of hunger and fullness and energy and satisfaction. Those need to drive our behaviors and not just our social environment. So I became certified in what's called Moderation 365, and I learned a lot of tools. Some I already knew because I've been doing this intuitively for a while, but I learned a lot of tools, and that became a good part of my coaching programs that I do online or with clients. So I have some set programs that I do. One is 10 weeks. One is 12 weeks, but I also do what I call a la carte, which is dealing with whatever the client needs to work on. So that's the basis of nutrition coaching. It is finding the way you need to eat for your lifestyle that reduces your intake, optimizes the nutritional factor, creates healthy behaviors, but also gives you a calorie deficit so that you can lose weight. And I keep you accountable for all of that. So really the successful element when we're talking about that is mindfulness. Now, I don't love that word because I feel like as soon as I say mindfulness, people's heads, their eyes roll back in their head, and they just kind of get a glazed look when I say mindfulness. Mindfulness is just paying attention. Okay? Paying attention. That's all it is. So the successful elements of weight loss with this method are paying attention and accountability. Right? So paying attention to what you're doing and then being held accountable to make the choices that you need to make for success. Right? And what I'm finding is that that works fantastic. So learning these behaviors, relearning the behaviors that you need to, working within your lifestyle, and then being held accountable forces the change to happen. Yes, it is a slower process. If you want a quick weight loss, you can eat cabbage soup every day for every meal, and you will lose weight. But that's not sustainable. And I can tell you that because I learned the hard way. Right? I tried all the things. I tried... Well, speaking of carb cycling, I did that. Now, carb cycling was you ate a certain... You had to track all your carbs, first of all, and then you were able to eat more one day, fewer the next day, fewer the next day, fewer the next day, even fewer. I think you ate zero one day, and then you would just cycle back through that. Talk about exhausting. That's not sustainable at all because what if the zero carb day fell on my birthday? Like, heck no, I'm not going to not eat cake on my birthday. Right? So it just doesn't always fit your lifestyle. So if you're looking for a lifestyle approach, something that fits your lifestyle, then I highly recommend this because it does work. And I'm going to give you some examples of some of the stuff that my clients are working on. So one of my clients is looking to lose some weight, and one of their lifestyle factors is that they like to travel and they like to go out to eat. Actually, I have several clients that really like to go out to eat. They like to try new restaurants. They like to consider themselves foodies to some extent, right? Where you like to enjoy and you like to try different things. And that is a very social, it's a great, honestly, it's a great hobby. You get to try new things and different things and have new experiences. But that can be challenging, right? So one of the things that we really focus on in those cases is paying attention to the hunger and fullness cues. Because your body will tell you when you're hungry. And I have a hunger scale that we use to help determine where you are and help you assess when you need to eat, right? You don't want to get yourself so hungry that you overeat. Because if you've been in a position where you've waited all day to go out, waited all day to eat so that you could go out to dinner and splurge on dinner, then you probably have experienced when you are so hungry by the time dinner rolls around that you will eat everything that that restaurant has to offer, right? You'll dig into the bread basket. You'll get appetizers. You'll get a meal. You'll get dessert. And then you leave feeling stuffed. I have definitely done that and experienced it. And I know from working with clients over the years that that happens quite a lot. I mean, it is really the essence of Thanksgiving, no? Where we go in, we try to not eat, right? So we can save ourselves up for the big meal. And then you eat everything you can get your hands on. And then you are stuffed and you feel disgusting, right? So that's not necessarily a sustainable behavior either. So one of the things that we work on is honoring our hunger. So if we are hungry, having food so that we're not starving when we get to the meal, right? So it's called preemptive eating. So you're eating so that you don't end up starving. Because one of my mottos is that we make poor decisions when we're hungry. We make poor decisions when we're hungry. We just do. I think if you've probably experienced that, and if you haven't, then you will. And I recommend that you just try not to get too hungry so that you don't experience that. But it tends to happen. So working on honoring our hunger and not letting ourselves get too hungry. Part of that, and again, this is a lifestyle, I consider this a lifestyle change, is being prepared. So meal planning, snack planning, having things on hand. If you find yourself on the road a lot, or if you live far away, which again, one of my clients lives kind of in the country. So it's not just a quick trip to the grocery store if they want something. It's a drive, right? And so sometimes you get really hungry because you have a pretty big span of time between when you're going to be home and where you are. Or maybe the only option on your long drive home is the Burger King. And you find yourself so hungry that you know Burger King isn't ideal, but you stop there anyway because it's quick and convenient. And I think, so planning ahead is huge in these cases. And having things on hand that you can snack on is big. So one of the big things we work on is working on our hunger, not letting ourselves get too hungry by planning ahead and being prepared. Right? It sounds a little like a Girl Scout. Be prepared. But that is so true. Because if we can have things ready and ready to go for whatever comes up, then we'll be good to go. So if you find yourself, for example, one of my clients, you know, work from home is really common. So I've actually heard this from several clients is that when they're working from home, when they want to take a break, they wander into the kitchen. And then what's in the kitchen? Food, right? And then they graze and they pick at whatever seems good at the time. Now, if you are, you know, I call that boredom eating. So if you're bored of eating and you're grazing the kitchen for something to satisfy you and you have chips on hand, chances are those are going to look pretty good, right? Over, you know, especially if that's all you have is those are going to look real good. So, you know, planning and preparing to have other options on hand. And I'm not saying you have to eat carrot sticks, but having something that is satisfying, but that you enjoy. So working on, you know, trail mix. One of the big things right now is the edamame snacks. So things like that, right? We're working on the behaviors. Why are we doing that? And also digging down a little bit deeper into, you know, what else can we do if you're taking a boredom break from work and you're grazing the kitchen looking for something to satisfy you, then what's the deeper meaning of that, right? Are you exhausted? Do you need a mental break? Is there something else you can do to give yourself a mental break from work? We all need breaks. We all need mental breaks. You know, what else can you do besides graze the kitchen, for example? So again, that's an example of behavioral. So back to my clients that like to go out to eat. We're working on hunger. We're also working on fullness. And this always comes as a surprise to clients because I don't think this is talked about enough is honoring our fullness factor. So learning and practicing to eat to what we call about 80% full. So you want to be full and satisfied. But there's a fine line between being full, about 80% full and satisfied. And when you get to 100% full, you start to feel uncomfortable. So it takes some practice. But thankfully, we get to eat all day, right? We get to eat at least three times a day. So we get lots of practice in eating to that 80, 90% fullness. So you're not completely full yet, but you are just about full and satisfied enough. Because what we want to get good at is recognizing the point where you know, if you took a couple more bites, you'd be stuffed. And try not to get to that point because that's our body's natural way of saying enough. Enough food. That's enough food. I have enough. But what we're used to doing is finishing our food, right? Especially if you go in hungry, you take more than you need because our eyes are bigger than our stomach, right? And we take more than we need, pile up the plate, and then we just finish the plate without thinking about if we're full or not. Most of the time, I would say. One of the biggest behavioral issues right now is eating past fullness. I see it in just about everybody. And this is what's causing a lot of the excess weight. And the weight gain is eating past fullness. And again, it's not paying attention. It's not deliberate, necessarily. We're not all out there stuffing ourselves. It's simply not being mindful or what we call not paying attention or mindless eating, right? I see this a lot. Snacking at night is a big, big issue for a lot of people because, one, it's our way to kind of unwind, right? Lay on the couch with a bag of chips and unwind watching TV. But we're mindless eating, right? It's not so much that you're eating at night. That's not always the problem. It's that it's mindless and we're not paying attention. So some of the behaviors that we work on are, one, paying attention, right? So paying attention to what we're choosing, the amount that we're choosing, and having little tricks and tools to keep that limited and then paying attention to our fullness so that we are stopping when we're full and not eating when we're not hungry. Coming up with other options so that if we do need a way to relax and unwind, that it's not just food, right? And this is where cannabis starts to come into as an option. So behaviors, I'm talking about behaviors. These are the things that I work on in nutrition coaching. So for example, so here's a great example. So one of my clients was on vacation just the last week or two ago. And I love this example because they were, she was planning, because one of the things we've been working on is they go out to eat for dinner a lot. They go out for breakfast, eat a good breakfast. They tend to go out for dinner and her family tends to not eat in the middle of the day. So they end up going to dinner hungry, starving, we'll say. She, knowing that, she planned to have snacks and things ready to eat in the middle of the day so that she wouldn't go into dinner starving, right? So here we go, one day. She had breakfast, she was hanging out by the pool or whatever and had some snacks or a light lunch during the day. So it was dinnertime, they had reservations. The family members went into the reservations for dinner starving, right? Because it's a long time from breakfast to dinner. But my client had had something for lunch. So she wasn't starving, right? So they go to dinner. My client orders her meal. She orders, I think it was a bowl of chili, right? Because everybody else did. Everybody else ordered a bowl of chili and an entree. And they all housed the chili and the entree. Now my client, as soon as she ordered the chili, she did it because everybody else did, she almost, right before the server would disappear, she was like, you know what? I'm not actually hungry for that. But she decided she was going to cancel it but she decided to keep it and then just wrap it up to go. So she only ate her entree, right? She had leftover that she had ordered that she didn't end up eating because she was paying attention to her hunger levels. And she knew that she didn't need all that food because she had already eaten lunch. She wasn't starving where her mates, her family members were starving. So they ended up eating that and dinner and dessert and overeating because they weren't paying attention to it and they didn't strategize ahead of time. Whereas she was able to order something that she wanted, right? Eat it in moderation. I believe she took home the chili that she didn't eat because she decided she wasn't hungry enough for it. And it was either this instance or a different one where she went ahead and just wrapped up the rest of her food. And she's actually getting really glad to eat a lot. She's getting really good at taking home leftovers because that's mindfulness. And I said, this is really epic mindfulness right now because of all the different ways she paid attention. She paid attention to the fact that she wasn't hungry enough to have soup and a meal. She paid attention enough to know that she was full and wrapped up the rest. She paid attention enough to know that she needed something to eat in the middle of the day so that she wouldn't be starving, right? And she had a thousand examples and I could probably just go through all of them. One of my other favorites was they went out to seafood restaurants, seafood restaurants, right? Pretty straightforward. It's usually seafood and then some sort of carb, right? At most restaurants. And again, I'm all about enjoying the food. I get what you want. So she ate her meal. They had ordered, I believe, hush puppies and they split them. But she, knowing that that's not the most ideal food, she ate them, but she ate them slowly and then savored them and enjoyed them. And she made a point to do that. And she made a point to bring it up and tell me that. And that, like I said, is epic mindfulness because she's truly enjoying those hush puppies, right? If you like them, eat them. But you don't necessarily have to eat them by the handful. You can enjoy them. And then you know what she said, which is my favorite term ever, is I was good. I was good. That's my favorite. When my clients get to the point where they say I'm good, then we know that they're right on track because that is paying attention to what you need. Not depriving yourself, but paying attention to what your body needs and when your body's had enough. And I know it sounds almost like too simple to be true and it is nuanced, but that's why I do what I do. It's because as a nutrition coach, I really wish I had had this at certain points in my life. I had to figure it out myself. But to be able to troubleshoot, going on vacation, going out to eat. One of the things that we work on, honestly, is like with one of my clients is, the weekends are kind of hairy with social, socializing. So we strategize through the weekends. The weekdays are kind of routine, but weekends we strategize. And we go, okay, where are you going? What are you guys going to do? What are the options? What can you do to make sure that there's healthy choices? What can you do to keep things in moderation? Paying attention to the fullness means that you are taking home leftovers, wrapping things up, not just eating everything on your plate. And there's a lot of mindset factors that come with that because I know it's been ingrained in a lot of us not to waste food as a society, right? We don't like to waste food. So getting over some of these hurdles can be hard. So there's a lot that goes into it. When it comes to cannabis, now the thing about, the cool thing about cannabis, and again, when I say cannabis, I'm talking about both CBD, which is the non-psychoactive, there's no high to CBDs, and THC, which is the psychoactive component. Both of those types of cannabis, which are the two main types, both of those heighten our senses. So what that means is that we can really tune into our natural sensations of hunger and our natural sensations of fullness. We just have to slow down and take a breath and listen to our body. Cannabis helps us slow down. And that's one of the great things about it. And that's why it's so great to relax, which is the other point, which is when, you know, stress eating and emotional eating are coming into play, it's largely because we need a way to relax. And we've gotten into the habit of using food to relax or an alcoholic drink, right? That's a huge go-to for a lot of us. Is to sit down with a drink. But the problem is a drink lowers your inhibitions and makes you more likely to go ahead and get up and get those M&Ms because you want them. And M&Ms are delicious. But cannabis, it doesn't lower your inhibitions in that way. It heightens your senses so that you can actually become more aware of what you're thinking. So while your brain might originally go, ooh, get the M&Ms. With cannabis and using that, you slow down a little bit so that you can say to yourself, I call this the pause. You can say to yourself, wait a minute, do I really want M&Ms? Wait a minute, if I eat M&Ms, then I'm gonna consume more calories than I want to. Or if I eat M&Ms, I'm gonna get a sugar rush. Or if I eat M&Ms, you know, I'm not gonna feel good. Or what else could I eat besides M&Ms? What else do I have? Do I have grapes? Or do I have some other form of a healthy sweet? Do I have some yogurt? Or something else that's a healthier option. It slows you down so that you can make a better decision about what you want to eat. So cannabis can come in handy in that way, especially when it comes to stress and anxiety and emotional eating. Because one of the major things that cannabis does is relieves anxiety and stress. So it calms us down and brings us down, but not in a inebriated way. And that's why microdosing and small doses of cannabis are becoming the trend, is because we're able to function better without being inebriated. Because as soon as you're inebriated from alcohol or from too much cannabis, then you're starting to make, your decision making is getting cloudy and we don't want that. So low doses are proving to be extremely beneficial in this case and enhancing the mindfulness. And I had one of my cannabis clients love this. And she uses a low dose of cannabis in the after work, in the evening, and is able to really monitor what she's eating for dinner and not overeat and not make poor decisions because she's got that heightened awareness from the cannabis. And again, it's a low dose. You know, we're not all out here getting stoned. I mean, you can if you want to, but to really optimize your nutrition, your weight loss and your fitness, we're talking about low doses here. So cannabis can heighten your senses, helps you overcome the obstacles like anxiety, stress eating, because essentially we all need a way to relax. We all need a way to kick back. We all need a way to get our minds off of the demands of the day. And I know alcohol's been kind of the go-to for years and years and decades and decades, but cannabis is the new way because again, we're not getting inebriated. We're not getting into that poor decision making factor. We're heightening our senses but slowing our minds down. So a couple more examples and then I'm going to wrap it up. But for nutrition coaching, we work largely on planning and organization. So meal planning, organizing your lifestyle, having snacks prepared, things like that. Basic nutrition, so increasing protein intake, you know, keeping tabs on the overall intake, not so much counting calories per se, if that's not your thing, it's not necessary. You can monitor your intake in other ways, but making sure that you're getting adequate protein, not overeating carbs because that's easy to do, you know, healthy fats, you know, balancing what you like. Working with your lifestyle. So again, if you like to go on, if you'd like to go out to eat or you have a really busy social life where you're not always in control of what your meal planning, if you'd like to go on vacation, if you like certain foods or if you consider yourself a picky eater, you know, that's some of the stuff we work around. Trying to eat fewer convenience foods because one of the big issues that I see right now is that convenience foods are easy, right? So it's really easy to order Grubhub. It's really easy to get Uber Eats and it's really easy to get things out of convenience that aren't necessarily healthy. So other ways around that. Organizing. And then ultimately the real key to the success of this is the accountability, which is why I meet with clients weekly at first to establish these great goals and then we can slow down as things get into more of a routine. But there is a period where, you know, it feels messy to do this, but it is 100% worth it. And when I see my clients getting into this rhythm and finding these great behaviors and making these changes, it's just everything because I know that with these consistent good behaviors, that's when the weight loss happens. And if you think about, you know, the times you maybe have tried, you're like, okay, I'm gonna get it together. But then as soon as, you know, a hard weekend happens or something throws a wrench in it, maybe someone gets sick or you have to work late or whatever, you know, and then you're off track, right? Immediately off track. And most of the time what I see clients do is they're like, well, you know what? I'll come back to that in a few weeks or in a couple of months. So I'll come back to that. I need to get, you know, get into a better place to deal with that again. But then if you keep waiting months and months to try again, you're never gonna get into the rhythm of it and never going to really see any change. And I think that's honestly a big part of the problem in our obesity epidemic right now is that it's not easy to work with these things and it's not easy to keep going when there's obstacles. So that is why I do what I do. And that is just a little bit about nutrition coaching. I'd be happy to share more details or specifics. If you're interested, please just shoot me an email or find me on Instagram. And if you have any questions that you'd like me to tackle or if you'd like me to elaborate more on certain aspects of fitness, nutrition, or cannabis, please let me know. I'm here to, hopefully this is all helpful information and I'm here to educate and I'm here to help. My email is Beth at cannafitnessnutrition.com, which is all one word. And I'm on Instagram. It's Beth underscore cannafitnessnutrition. You can find me on there. I'm on Facebook as Beth Skinner-Jedzynski. So find me, message me, and if this is helpful to you, I would love it if you would share this with anyone that you think might also benefit from it. And if you can, click on the star rating. Apparently that helps pump it up in the algorithm. But all in all, thank you so much for pressing play and listening to me. I appreciate it and I hope that you have a great week.