There's Plenty of Ways to Save $1000/month and There's Just As Many Ways to Burn 1000 Calories/week

I was speaking with a friend about marketing.

She was telling me that the things that were most appealing and drew her to concepts of Intuitive Eating were the idea you could eat “anything you like”.

She saw women in photos that looked thin and were eating things like granola, ice cream, and other foods that contain more calories and sugar than nutrients and thought, “I want that!”

She shared that she experienced- like almost all the clients that come to me that have tried Intuitive eating- rapid weight gain when she threw off conventional “diet rules”.

Seeing this amount of freedom with food usually causes women to trust themself less around food and feel angry and confused.

What they need to understand is how food and exercise actually fit into a philosophy like intuitive eating and health in general.

Eating “what you like” speaks to the inner child the way getting a credit card would to an underearner.

The solutionto feeling restricted.

She gets excited and starts creating a pull, away from conventional teaching and toward all the treats.

This is like a kid in a candy store- literally.

I used the analogy of a weight loss plan being like a budget, where calories= dollars.

When I was learning how to create a budget, the first step everyone suggested is “know what/where you’re already spending”.

Very simply, there are things you’re always going to have to pay for i.e. your housing, food, utilities, etc- and money that’s for everything else.

In your health, you will always need a certain amount of nutrients each day for your body to function and then discretionary calories- the calories that don’t necessarily contribute to health but can enhance your wellbeing (for reference, ~100cal/150cal a day for women/men respectively).

With the money you have left, the discretionary income, you have the freedom to choose how you spend it.

I often encourage clients to use these calories to enjoy life; this is based on your values, your needs, and goals.

Get ice cream with your kids, make pancakes on the weekend, create memories that can be special to you later in life.

But let's say you are wanting to save for something larger like a vacation, you have to dedicate the resources to pay for it.

You also need to create a calorie deficit (aka the vacation fund) to promote weight loss.

Some people save a few dollars a month by rearranging what they have- adjusting the thermostat a few degrees, using coupons at the grocery store, or going to fewer movies for a few months, etc.- to prioritize their goal (vacation).

This is the diet equivalent of leaving a few bites at each meal, swapping a starchy food for a veggie, or cutting back on the number of sodas in a week.

You will find, at the end of the week, you have used less than usual and can “bank” those calories.

This will set you up for a gradual weight loss.

Saving ~200cal/day would be like $10/week- it doesn’t feel terribly uncomfortable but needs to be maintained for a longer period to create the sum you want.

Or, what would move the needle faster than saving money is to also create income.

Enter exercise into the weight loss equation.

You could get a side hustle doing more of what you already do trading time for money (or calories for energy, like cardio) or you could think of how to create passive income too (this is where strength training fits).

I usually find the best fit for my clients is usually a combination of working toward adding both types of “income” (exercise) in addition to making a few minor adjustments to their “spending” (nutrition).

Potentially ~200 cal/day from activity would be like adding $10/week to your vacation fund.

Combining the two, you'd have $20/week going into that fund… it can add up more quickly as long as it’s dedicated for vacation and not used for other things.

When people say nutrition is 80% of the weight loss puzzle, it’s not that exercise isn’t important.

It’s simply saying your house, car, food, and basic living expenses make up a large proportion of your budget.

We need a certain amount of calories to stay alive.

Having income simply reduces the stress it would create to try to acquire the things we need.

This part is quite straightforward and there are lots of strategies to create excess funds for a “vacation”.

The confusion, for most of my clients, comes in understanding why it *feels* so difficult to stay on their 'budget'.

Similar to money, following a weight loss plan can make sense logically and be a different experience to implement.

After all, no one wants to lose their shirt, or gain weight- this is why they are asking for guidance.

As humans, we make decisions with our emotions more often than we would care to admit.

And there’s a certain amount of vulnerability we experience when it comes to meeting our basic needs.

Getting our food and money "right" creates the same anxiety- they feel like a risk with which we can’t be trusted.

And as we mature and develop, these basic needs are required to support us becoming the fullest expression of who we are meant to be.

By learning how their emotions are trying to help them get what they want (vitality, a different shape, more energy, fewer symptoms, etc.) it becomes easier for my clients to trust themselves and stay the course.

They being to master allowing food to support them instead of using it to comfort them.

Intuitive eating, as I teach it, prioritizes the inner experience to increase the ability to discern what situations and experiences trigger a ‘spending frenzy’ so that my clients can keep saving for their dream vacation (goal weight) instead of using their vacation fund to pay off the credit card each month.

Using their emotional and physiological experiences- both healing the past and using them in the present- helps prioritize the budget to get what they really desire and feel good about the process too.

Having clarity inside allows them to trust themselves to choose the right foods, follow their body’s signals for portions, and release the pressure to “do it right” that used to create so much tension.

This is counterintuitive and this is my expertise.

In my transformational self-study course, Nourished, I go into greater detail about the emotional components that promote action taking (masculine energy), identifying and trusting the ‘correct’ actions (feminine energy), and calming the infamous “overspending” (the inner child).

When these three components are in harmony, it flips the weight loss paradigm on its head, in the same way creating a budget that accounts for the things that are actually important no longer feels like a burden.

This course contains 6 modules (5+hours of recorded materials) to clarify healthy relationships (internally and externally), the psychological components that fuel your decision making, how to engage the most common roadblocks differently, as well as basic nutrition strategies to get started building the right “budget” for you.

Each module contains worksheets intended to shift your awareness, create more clarity, and identify what relationships specifically need to be healed, as you unwind these long-held habits.

To support further integration, I include voice messaging support for more personalized feedback.

While the course can comfortably be completed within 12 weeks, plan for 0.5 hr/week of self-study and reflection.

The women that create the best results from this are naturally creative and ambitious.

They often have creative ventures of their own- or dream of them- and have done some personal development work to get to where they are but haven’t been able to translate that to their health and wellness.

Her health journey often feels more undisciplined and sporadic than she thinks it should, causing her to jump from plan to plan.

While she knows she can create big things in the world, she’s ready to heal the relationship she has with food and her body so she can enjoy her health instead of feeling pressure to maintain it.

If you’re interested in deeper healing through 1:1 support, email me (CSchandNutrition@gmail.com) to share what “clicked” for you from this post and I’ll make sure you have what you need to get started.