Welcome back everybody. So I thought today we would do a podcast on a common question that I get inside my no BS membership. But a lot of women I think feel almost shameful even asking this question and they think that something's wrong with them and I wanted to cover it today, and it is why do I miss being full? If you do the things that I teach you inside this podcast, you know we're going to be eating to enough and enough is not full. There is a small little gap between the two. The way I like to think of it is when I eat to full, just I'm a little uncomfortable. I'm not super uncomfortable, but I'm just a little uncomfortable. I know for damn sure I've ate, I have probably cleaned my plate. I'm probably burping a little bit. My breathing might even be just a tad labored because there's just no more room in the end.  

I don't necessarily feel like going out for a wall. The food doesn't really energize me, but I'm not talking about a full on binge either. Now for some of you, when I say why do I miss being full? You are equating being full to when you binge and then now you're going to eat to enough and there is a wide gap. But for some of us, including myself, because I never was a binge eater, but I will say looking back when I weighed two 50 and for most of my life I ate a lot, I always tell my husband, even now I have to watch and really pay attention to enough. It is more of my natural way of being to eat like I am an offensive lineman or maybe a defensive tackle. I have got the appetite of an athlete and your girl is not an athlete.  

I work out, but I ain't working out to where I need to feed myself as if I'm fixing to play in the NFL. So I say all that because I just remember for years and years and years eating that way and I wanted to even let you know kind of how I experienced it now because I think there's this idea that you are going to lose weight, and when you lose weight, you never have food problems ever again. You never have anything you have to pay attention to, and that is just not true. Naturally thin people pay attention when they're eating. I have several friends that have never, ever, not one second in their life, had any kind of weight problems, but then when they eat, they're paying attention. Why? They don't want to feel full. They have ate past full before and you're just like, oh, that's kind of uncomfortable.  

I really don't want to be like Thanksgiving full. I have one good friend, my best friend in the world, her husband most of the time just eats. Normally he just eats and whatever, but when they go out to a nice restaurant or it's the holidays or stuff, he says he likes to eat to don't touch me full and don't touch me full is where you eat enough to where it's like, Ooh, I just need to lay down. Please don't touch me because he's so uncomfortable. There are just certain times of the year he wants to enjoy food and he knows he's going to pay a price, he might gain a little weight, he might be miserable on the couch and stuff. So I say that because I think that we as women, we just kind of think that in every way we must be broken when it comes to losing weight, and this is another one of those things.  

So let's talk about why we might miss being full. I'll tell you a little bit about my history with it and kind of what you can do about it. So my client asked that. She's like, why do I miss being full? And she said, it's crazy, right? Nobody else feels this way. That was literally in her post and I'm like, oh no, I think a lot of us feel this way. And then the comments came streaming in. So many of my NOBIS members all felt the same way. A lot of them, they now are over the part where they miss it and they were giving her advice. Some of them were in the thick of it, and I was so grateful to read all of them talking about their experience because I think in the podcast what is valuable for you is when I share the member experiences, you don't get to feel normal.  

Very often my members do. My members are in there posting about stuff like this, and they get the opportunity to feel normal because other people are thinking and feeling the same things. It's when you're in this isolation tank trying to do this all by yourself is when this shit gets really hard. So it's another reason why I want to talk about it. So she wanted to know is it normal? What is this about? And so if you have ever missed feeling full or you think, I just wish I could just eat to full, or I just want to be able to eat however much I want, let's really talk about it because that will be something that could get in the way of your weight loss. So like I said earlier, I used to love being full. And when I started losing weight, that was one of the hardest things for me in the very beginning was when I started tapering back how much I was eating, I realized like, oh my God, I don't know what to do with myself.  

So one of the reasons why we miss being full is that number one, we don't know what to do if we're not full. For us, eating has almost become a pastime. So you might find yourself, especially in the evenings, you get home, you eat a little bit until the second shift starts. Second shift is when you got to start the homework. You got to start the family stuff, you got to start the dinner and junk. Then we graze while we're making dinner because we're making dinner and we're just over here just a nibbling. Next thing you know, well, we're going to eat the dinner. We made the dinner and then we make the dinner and it might be the first time that we've sat down all day, and so now we're going to eat past full because when we stop eating, guess what we got to do?  

Clean up the kitchen, do some other stuff. So what I want to tell you is a lot of times fullness represents other things. It is not that you actually want to eat to full. It is I want to be full because when I'm full, here's what I get to experience. Here's the payoff of that, here's what it's doing for me. And we have to solve that because it's what being full does for you. So back in the day when I used to just sit and eat a half a gallon of ice cream at night, I really wanted to lose weight. I hated being overweight. I was miserable as fuck. But by the time my husband came home after taking care of my son all day long and they would go upstairs, I would eat ice cream until I was full for two main reasons. Number one, when I ate that ice cream, it was the first time during the day where I felt like I could check out the entire day was spent taking care of my son.  

He was a very, he needs child and I did not stop all day long with him unless I was eating. The second thing is I felt like such a loser back then. Not only was I hard on myself about my weight loss or my lack of weight loss and what I weighed, I was over two 50. I worried that my husband would leave me because I was overweight. I had no reason to think that, but God, my brain plagued me with that every night. I just assumed he was going to leave me one day if I didn't get my shit together. So I was scared as fuck. I felt guilty because he worked all day and I just couldn't wait for him to get home and for him to take care of the kid because I needed a break. Well, because of the way society is, because I didn't have a job, I would sit around and I would feel really guilty.  

And then the worst part of it, and the reason why I think I wanted to be full back then is, and this was the heart of most of my pain. When I decided to lose weight, I didn't like being a mom really felt like something was wrong with me. I felt like the one mom who didn't love it. I was regretting second guessing, questioning my life choices, and that made me feel terrible. I felt like a bad person. And so you can see eating to full, no matter how bad I wanted to lose weight did not. It was never wanting to lose weight was never going to do for me. What Full was doing for me full was allowing me time every day to not feel like a failure, to not feel like a bad person, a bad mother. So it is what that food represents.  

A lot of times for a lot of us when we are eating to full, it's an escape hatch from our life. It's providing something. Maybe you just have lots of food rules in your head, and if you're trying to lose weight the way I teach it, you want to eat to full. When you eat foods that you still think are bad, because I'm trying to get you to normalize your relationship with full, you may want to eat too much of it because your brain is just sitting there yelling at you, yelling at you, yelling at you, telling you that you're a loser. You shouldn't be eating that. Oh my God, you're never going to lose weight. Another thing is when your body is full of food. So I want you to think about this. If you're full, it's harder to actually feel the physical sensations of your emotions.  

So when you have an emotion, whether that's hopelessness, happiness, despair, elated, whatever emotion you have, there's a physical manifestation that happens in your body. So think about if somebody scares you, what happens? Your heart rate beats faster and you notice it. I usually, when I get scared, I will get a sudden tingling sensation all over my body. All feelings have these physical vibrations that go through us. And for most of us, when we don't really understand that an emotion is really just the physical vibration and if we're not taught how to ground ourselves, how to calm ourselves down, and most of us aren't, so don't feel bad if you aren't. Then when we're full and when we eat, it's the only time we don't feel all that bullshit coursing through our veins. So if you have anxiety and no one's ever taught you ways to take the physical manifestation of anxiety, panic or whatever, shame, whatever it is, if you don't know those things, food becomes a grounding technique.  

And this is important for all of you because this is stuff we teach inside the membership that I think that diets are never telling us, and then we're sitting around feeling like broke ass bastards and bitches because you don't know this and you just think you're broken. Well, let me tell you, food is one of those grounding techniques. It is a way for your body, number one, to have so much food in it that it can't feel those big emotions. They're scary for us. The other thing is it does is when you're chewing, most of us eat in a rhythm. Now, when we are anxious, we probably eat in a fast rhythm. You'll say, I was scarfing my food down. When you are busy and you're feeling like the anxiety of a deadline, you probably eat faster. So we match what's going on when we are eating, any type of a rhythm will ground our nervous system.  

So that is why a lot of times we just think that when we eat food, it is just the dopamine, it's just we're addicted to sugar. That's not the full story. That's why I tell people all the time to be real careful about thinking that you're addicted to sugar because most of the time emotional eating goes way beyond that. All these people out there who are just acting like it's just addicted to sugar as much you get off of it, everything will be fine raw because if you've been eating sugar as a grounding technique, that cutting sugar out has not solved why you're anxious, stressed, unhappy, sad or whatever to even begin with. So it's really important that we know these things. So when we are eating past full, there is something that represents to us and we need to figure that out. So if any of this sounds familiar, I just want to promise you that you're not crazy.  

This is a very normal theme. So another way that this can be showing up for a lot of people is if you grew up without a lot of access to food, that can be poverty. I grew up in poverty and very often I remember we would go out to buffets. My mom worked all the jobs and buffets were cheap and they were quick and we could eat a lot. So we would go to a buffet and I remember her saying, eat all you can because I don't know when we'll eat again. So for me, I made a quick attachment that, oh, when you eat to full, this means we're safe For a little while. We carry that. We learned that as children, we can carry that over into our adult years. We may still want to eat past full, just to reassure ourselves, there is plenty of food even if you logically know that there's plenty of food.  

The problem is, is that most of us don't know how to remind ourselves of that. We just kind of get caught up. And then if you're in the cycle of eat to full because you've got this old unconscious narrative running, then you immediately go into beating yourself up afterward. You never really process why you were eating past full. You start making crazy assumptions like something's wrong with me. I'm a failure. I can't lose weight. I'm just broken. We start saying shit like that and that's how we explain away this rather than eat past full. And then the moment that you can think again, you start asking yourself, I wonder why. I wonder what was going on underneath that? What is food doing for me? So it's really important that as you're trying to lose weight, that you don't just try to eat when you're hungry, stop it enough, make a plan, get your water and your sleep in.  

Those are the basics for a reason because they are the basics we want to get back to. That's the things we do. But what you learn when you work with me is that there are a lot of things that are in the way of those like fullness. We say we're going to stop it enough, but if what we're craving is a way to not feel guilty, if we're craving relaxation, if we're craving a break, if we are anxious and we can't tolerate our feelings and we need a way to ground ourselves, guess what? Stopping at enough becomes hard, difficult, if not impossible, especially to do it consistently. And so we have to back the truck up. I use the basics as a way to insert basic principles so that we can highlight. So which one of these is not working? Let's figure out why. Because when we take a step back and we think about it, it is normal to wait for a little hunger.  

It is normal to eat to enough. Unless you've got a lot anxiety and bullshit and worry and angst and fear of foods and things like that, those things won't be a problem. So we want to work on those things because that will give you a better life. Alright, so here are some things that you can do if you are missing fullness. The very first thing is just listening to this podcast. It's recognizing what you're really missing in life. Because like I said, you're not missing the sense of fullness, you're not missing the actual food. You're missing what it represents to you. It's the feeling that food is giving you. Is it giving you some type of comfort in thinking like, oh, everything's going to be okay. Even going back to when I was talking about being poor. If you dieted really hardcore most of your life and you went through periods where you did unhealthy things, eating to full is a way to ground your body to let it know, oh, we're not doing a dumbass diet.  

Your body might fight you every time you try to lose weight by sending up extra urges because it thinks like, oh my God, send the panic button. She's getting ready to do something dumb. Again, even if you're not, your body is drawing on past trauma. That's why we call it diet trauma. So you could be eating for the comfort so that your body is like, Nope, we're going to be okay. We're going to be okay. Nope, there's plenty of food. Some of us eat because it's distraction. We're trying to distract ourselves from some of the crap we think about ourselves. Sometimes we're just trying to distract ourselves from a boring life. I have a lot of clients who they like to eat past full because if they don't, they're in the second season of life. They don't have their own hobbies. Their kids have left the nest and they realize that they sit at home alone every night maybe with a partner, but y'all ain't on the same page anymore.  

Y'all are on the same page when you were a band parent or a football parent. But now that y'all having to sit there and be married again and be a couple, again, you feel lonely. So you want to recognize what it is that that sense of fullness is really doing for you. Then the second thing is you can use what we call finding new comforts. So let's say that fill in full is like a safety blanket for you. It's the only time of the day when you feel full, the only time where you feel safe, everything's going to be okay. Think about other things that could give you that sense of feeling like things are okay. A lot of my clients like weighted blankets. Some will every time that they're feeling really bad will drink something warm and sit wrapped up in their favorite hoodie because it's just like that feeling of cocoon, the feeling of being able to block out the world and warm themselves up from the inside.  

So think about some stuff that you could do that would mimic or get, and I'm not saying it's going to be as good as eating past full, but things that you could start trying that signal to your body, whatever it is that the fullness is signaling to your body. Another thing is also just doing some of the work we do inside of no bs. So if you are one of my members, I know a lot of my members actually listen to the podcast. This is where I want you to go to ask coaches, and I want you to talk about I miss the sense of feeling full. I know that that is a struggle. It's one of the reasons why I'm eating past enough. I have thought about what it might be, what reasons it might be for me. And then the coaches can ask you some really good questions.  

They can offer you some advice. They can point you to the direction of videos or courses that we have that will target exactly what it is. If this is a I'm not good enough thing, they can target you to the self-love course where you can learn how to start feeling enough and stop feeling not good enough. And then the last temporary fix, and this is the one that I had to start with, and this is one that I often advise and it's continuing to eat in volume, continuing to eat to full, but you are not going to be able to eat a whopper to get there. So when I was losing weight in the very beginning, I barely was having to make changes and I could lose weight. And so I wasn't missing the sense of fullness in the very beginning. I was just tapering back just a little bit at a time.  

But then there became a tricky point where I couldn't just taper back. I really was like, okay, I'm not at the point yet where I feel safe, and I've changed how I think to where I can not feel all of these yucky emotions like 90% of the time. So I started eating in volume. So when I would make pasta instead of all pasta, I would do half steamed broccoli, half pasta to give me a sense of fullness. And it's not because the pasta is bad for you, but I would do that because I was like, well, let me get some vegetables in. I get to taste the pasta and I still get to feel full while I'm still working on myself. So for some of you, it's doing some little hacks like that. But the thing is you can't just, like everybody at some point will stop losing weight if you continue to eat way past full, even if that's chicken and broccoli.  

So in the beginning, while you're doing your emotional work, while you're figuring out why do I overeat? Why do I feel like I need to eat these things at this volume? Whatever it is that's going on for you, then you can use that as a temporary, what I would just call, let's say that you got shot in the leg. Eating in volume by making those subs is like saying, okay, I'm going to grab a belt and I'm going to cinch it so I can stop the bleeding until I get to the hospital, have surgery and recover. Adding in broccoli to your pasta so you can keep feeling really full so that you don't have to feel not good enough is not a solution. The solution is do that while you're working on yourself. Also, while you're working on your self-talk, this is really important for all of you to hear because I do not want to help anyone lose their weight and feel as miserable as they do.  

Now, you may feel better about some stuff when you lose weight, but if you are a people pleaser, if you are someone who is always on guard about other people's thoughts and feelings about you, if you tend to be highly anxious, you easily get overwhelmed. You take on too much responsibility in life. You never ask for help. I do not want you to be a thin version of that person that's fucking miserable right now. You think you're miserable because you're overweight. You're overweight because of all that shit. You're eating to compensate for all of that stuff, which is causing you to be overweight. And I will not sit and teach women how to be thin at their own expense. So you have to be doing the internal work too if you want this to work long-term. Because if you don't work through these things, what will eventually happen is your feelings will come back.  

You might feel good about your body for a little bit. You might get excited that that scale's going down and it will give you just enough good feelings to drown out some of the other bullshit. But eventually you get used to that. The old shit starts coming back. And if you're not dealing with it, your body's going to be like, well, if you're not going to deal with it, I should probably ask you to start eating to full again. I should start asking you to eat lots and lots of food again. And I don't want that for anyone. So here's what I want you to do this week. I just want you to notice is this, are you eating past full for a reason? Be you curious about why does it feel good to me? It's not because I'm broken, it's not because something's wrong with me.  

There is a payoff that I'm getting every single time and I would love to know what it is. I'd like to pay that off in a different way. And like I said, if you're one of my members, take it to our coaches. You'll be able to solve it this week. Literally go to the Ask Coaches, come to a coaching call, post it in the Facebook group and let's talk about it because we can solve this pretty fast, but we can't solve it if you're not working on it at all. Alright, everybody, y'all have a good one. I'll talk to you next week.