Don’t Fight What Is (#062)

Awareness
Awareness
Don't Fight What Is (#062)
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Although it is something we all enjoy, food can sometimes get in our way of living a healthy life. Our relationships with food and our food habits can have a substantial impact on our quality of life.  My guest today is someone who dedicated her career to exploring how our emotions connect with our behaviors around food. Andrea Montoya, Certified Food & Body Coach and founder of the Ditch the Scale Academy, joins us today to talk about finding the true reasons behind the connection between food and emotions and how we can build healthier relationships with food.

Show Notes

Food & Emotions – The roots of the relationship between food and our emotions go as far as our childhoods. The way we are brought up and parenting techniques can have an influence on our relationships with food as adults. Andrea dives into how these factors start at a very young age and what we can do to shape our relationships with food.

Presence and Awareness – Andrea emphasizes these two concepts as some of the most effective ways to connect with our bodies and establish healthy relationships with food.

Root Cause – We talk about the value of exploring the root cause of a problem instead of opting for a band-aid on a bullet wound sort of a solution, especially when dealing with a food-related issue.

Pain and Power – According to Andrea, one of the biggest problems we have as humans is that we believe we shouldn’t have problems. She dives into how we can find power in our pain and turn our problems into things that drive us to achieve more.

Self-sabotage – Andrea shares her thoughts on some of the most common ways she has seen people get into self-destructive behaviors, how we can identify these behaviors, and how to avoid falling into these traps.

Contact Andrea Montoya

Website: www.thingsandreasays.com
Instagram: @thingsandreasays

Mentioned in the Episode

The Dance of Anger by Dr. Harriet Lerner
goodreads.com/book/show/31312.The_Dance_of_Anger

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck
goodreads.com/book/show/347852.The_Road_Less_Traveled

Bobbi's Takeaways

I hope that you took a lot away from that conversation. There were so many great insights into why we get the results we get and what we can do to change. Here are my three insights for thriving.

  1. We cannot heal something that we’re not aware of. Back in 2011, or 2012, I was lucky enough to attend the Harvard coaching conference. And I got to see john Whitmore speak. He is a legend in coaching. And one of the things he said that day is that often, awareness is curative. The key is becoming aware. And I think that what Andrea talked about is so important; we need to take that deep breath; we need to tune into our bodies and our emotions and look at the data that is there. Now, of course, to do this, we have to have some margin, some space, so that we can do this sort of processing work. But healing begins with awareness.  

  2. Don’t fight what is; I feel like this is a drum that I often beat. But in coaching as many people as I have. I see this all the time; we put all of our energy and all of our effort and our resources, our mental efforts into fighting the existence of the problem, instead of just dealing with the issue at hand. If it’s raining, don’t shout at the rain, get an umbrella. I truly believe that when we fight the problem, we are giving away our power.

  3. I loved the example of asking for patience and then having the kids screaming in the background and going through that experience. As I mentioned in the conversation, that reminded me of hearing someone say, we aren’t given strength, or courage or patience, or confidence. We are given experiences that bring forth those qualities or that teach us those things.

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