Why Intuitive Eating Is Making You Gain Weight

Ladies, if you’ve been “intuitively eating” your way through bags of chips and chocolate, this one’s for you. In today’s episode, I break down why intuitive eating might be the reason your jeans are screaming for mercy. We’re talking emotional eating, cravings, weight gain, fat loss after 40, late-night snacking, food guilt, self-sabotage, mindset shifts, and yes—why you need to stop listening to your stomach when it’s basically lying to you. If you're still confused about how to lose weight without giving up your favourite foods, this episode is your new BFF

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Transcript

(0:00 - 0:16)

What is up, you gorgeous, fabulous creatures? Welcome to another fresh out of the oven episode of the Losing It podcast. You're here with Kylie Pax, your emotional eating coach. I hope you have had an amazing week since our last, I want to say our last call last week, since our last episode.

(0:16 - 6:42)

As you may know, I have been on a wee little journey over the last 90 days. I did a little project with myself. I know that we tell ourselves all the time, God, I wish I could just eat whatever I want.

I just want to be able to eat like her. You look at the skinny girls who it looks like they just eat intuitively and they just do whatever they want and they don't have to exercise like a crazy person. And how come they're so skinny and you just want to be like that? Okay, buckle yourself up sister, because I am going to explain to you today why intuitive eating is complete bullshit.

Well, slash in parentheses for you, because it will never work for emotional eaters and let me tell you why. So as you know, for the last 90 days, yes, I was on like a, I mean, I was on a junk food, just binge really. I mean, I didn't even know how I could describe it.

I gave myself complete and utter freedom to eat anything I wanted anytime I wanted it for 90 days and see what happened. Is it really as amazing as we all tell ourselves that it would be? I mean, I used to sit and watch episodes of Sex and the City and Carrie would be there looking thin as a little toothpick and dancing around the city in her high heels and eating pizza the whole time. I thought, I just want to be like that.

Why can't I be thin and gorgeous and glamorous and dance around Manhattan with greasy pizza in my hands? So I did it for 90 days. I mean, without the Manhattan bit, but I ate anything I wanted for 90 days and I gained seven kilos. So it turns out that just because you can eat anything that you want or just because you do crave junk food doesn't always mean it's a good ass idea to eat it.

So if you're an emotional eater like me, you know that very often intuitive eating is just a code for I eat when I'm happy or I'm sad or I eat because it's Tuesday. That's not intuition, that's excuses. This is what I learned the hard way over the last 90 days, that eating when you're actually hungry, listening to your body, working with my eating codes, which as you know, is eat when you're hungry, don't eat when you're not.

Make sure you follow your plan, not your mood. And when you do eat, make sure you stop eating at 80% full, act like the person you want to become. There's like five of them.

Five, if you haven't got my free course yet, they're all laid out there in, I think it's three videos or two videos. It's really short. Anyway, you can grab the whole lot.

I explain them to you in the videos. But if I let my mood decide what I want to eat, I am going to be face planting into a tub of peanut butter every single night. And you know, my body would happily let me do it, happily.

She'll be fucking ecstatic. But here's the thing. If you want to lose weight and feel good in your skin, you cannot, as an emotional eater, this will work for girls who have a fabulous, easy, healthy relationship with food.

I've got besties like this. They can intuitively eat and it works great for them. I've never seen them overweight a day in their life.

But me, no. If I'm going to trust my intuition, I'm going to fuck myself over every time because I'm craving chips at 10 p.m. And I'm wanting sugar every single afternoon. And I dream about eating pasta when I'm having a stressful day.

My intuition, those signals are so fucked up and mixed up inside of my emotions that I really can't tap into them. Intuitive eating might be something as an emotional eater that you can get to eventually as you work through your relationship with food. But I'm telling you, in the beginning, it's ridiculous to even try.

To tell yourself I'm going to go on an intuitive eating journey is never going to be the case. It's not your body talking most of the time. For us, it's our emotions talking.

And it's your brain looking for a dopamine hit. So my question to you then is, are you actually hungry for food? Or, of course, as we know from emotional eaters, do you want some comfort or distraction or just something to fucking do? I'll eat at night just so I don't have to go to bed, wash off my makeup and go to bed. But here's the other thing to remember.

The reason intuitive eating cannot work for emotional eaters, and I'm just laying this on the line, this is my opinion, this is not hardcore facts, you're not going to find this in Wikipedia, but this has been after 30 years of experience. This is why I can tell you, I can tell you with a lot of certainty, if you're going to start working on your relationship with food, then you need to parent yourself, which is what my fourth eating code is all about, which is your feelings don't get to vote. Nobody tells us that when we turn 18 years old, we need to parent ourselves.

What I mean by this is when you were a wee little youngster, and your parents gave you all the guidance in the world, don't touch that, it's hot, don't drink too much of that, you'll get hyper, or it's got too much sugar and you'll get hyper. We were fully guided and we appreciated it. They set boundaries for us, they gave us structure, and we needed that, otherwise we would have been wild animals.

And so it's good, but nobody explains to us, oh listen honey, by the way, when you turn 18 or 21, this job actually becomes yours. We think, and society kind of expects of us, that the job is over. The minute you turn 18 or 21, that's it, it's done.

The job is done, you're a full grown ass adult, and you should be able to handle all of life's issues, all of life's problems, all of life's challenges, and yourself at the same time. That is just not the case. You need to remember that your first and foremost job is to parent yourselves.

You have a toddler brain, and it's going to kick up a stink every single time you say, but I want to eat, my intuition, my intuition is telling me that I should have Chinese for dinner. Because after all, I have got my menstrual cycle happening, and I'm on my cycle, and this is just a thing, and I need to have Chinese for dinner. That's not intuitive eating, that's you trying to cover yourself because you feel like shit, because you're bloated, and you've got your period.

Listen, I know better than anybody that binging is an instant way for you to zone out, eliminate bad feelings, and just elicit the beautiful, blissful feelings. But it's so temporary, it's so fleeting, and the cost is so high. If somebody told you, you could have $100 bill now, or like I always say, I'll give you $100 now, or I will give you $100 million in a year's time.

Only a complete moron would take the $100 now. But that's what we do every single time. We opt out, and we just say, it doesn't matter, it's just one more time.

(6:42 - 8:05)

Who cares, I'm going to get the Chinese tonight, I don't care, I'm on my cycle anyway. That's fine, you can have the Chinese, it's fine. But when you already had Mexican, and In-N-Out, and we don't even have that stuff here in, we don't even have In-N-Out here in Australia.

But when you already had 5,000 nights of takeaway, you know, every day before that, is that really your intuition talking? Or is it possible that your body actually is craving a vegetable, but you just don't want it because you've had a really challenging emotional day? I'm always going to tell you straight up, the things that other coaches don't often talk about, maybe they don't know, maybe they don't understand, maybe they've not been educated, but there are three types of hunger that we all need to be aware of. There is head hunger, mouth hunger, and then there is body hunger. Body hunger, we all know, that's your stomach growling, that's you feeling super hungry, like I am at the moment.

I'm absolutely starving, I just ate like half an avocado, because I've gone, oh my god, I don't have time to eat for quite some time yet, and I need to eat avocado. Not because I was even craving an avocado, was that my intuition? No, I wasn't craving fucking avocado. I was in so much discomfort in my stomach, and I'll use the word discomfort, but what I mean is I was so hungry, that the reason you binge when you get super, super hungry, or the reason I just chose an avocado was because I was using my nails, and I don't want to dive into the packet of crackers that's in the pantry.

(8:05 - 8:28)

But the reason that you binge when you get really hungry is not even because you want the food you're binging on. You want the discomfort, the crazy discomfort in your body to go away, and you'll just fill that space, that empty space, with the best, quickest, fastest thing that you can, which is usually going to be the fast food and the junky food. But I digress.

(8:28 - 9:18)

So three types of hunger, head hunger, mouth hunger, and body hunger. Your body hunger, like we said, we know what that is. That's you actually being hungry.

But the other two types of hunger are the things that if you're not savvy with these, it's going to be really hard for you to make some kind of intuitive, great intuitive eating choices, or even to be able to nourish your body really well and escape emotional eating. Head hunger is where you either see something, hear something, or someone says something, and it makes you think about a certain type of food. So you might be watching TV late at night, you see the Maccas commercials come on, and now you're craving a burger and fries.

Well, it's not even that you're particularly hungry, you probably aren't, maybe you've just already had dinner, but that is head hunger. You are thinking about something, and now you want it. The second type of hunger is mouth hunger.

(9:18 - 11:41)

This happens, and I've never heard any other coaches talk about this ever, but mouth hunger is where you can be maybe sitting around on a hot day, I can feel it now in my mouth, and you might be thirsty. Very often thirst will be mouth hunger, whereby you're thinking, I just want some fruit, or I feel like some fruit, or I feel like some berries, or this will happen to me all the time, I used to think I want some lollies, but when I stopped to think about it, I didn't actually want lollies, I was thirsty. So if you break it down, the effect of eating some lollies or some berries or having some frozen fruit would be that you would get a lot of saliva in your mouth, you would salivate a lot.

You are fucking thirsty, go and drink a fucking glass of water. And then of course, then we've got the third type of hunger, which is your body hunger. And again, if you are not really tapped in and tuned in to all those types of hunger, and really, really in control of all your emotions and feeling like a fucking rock star all day, intuitive eating is going to be a challenge for you.

It always will. The best option that you have as an emotional eater is to start by giving yourself structure daily. Your feelings cannot have the space to vote.

If you give them a slip of paper, they will run off to the polling booths, and you just don't have the emotional bandwidth to be able to live like that anymore. Your job is to give yourself structure, which is what I talk about in my free course, and it's everything that we cover inside of the bombshell blueprint. We use my journals and planner every single day to ensure that we have a rock solid blueprint slash structure to make sure that we are not flying by the seat of our pants every day.

We know exactly what we're doing, when we're doing it, how much of it we're doing and why, so that we can lose weight consistently, which FYI, just as I forgot to tell you at the start of this episode, so I did have 90 days of eating whatever the heck I wanted over the last 90 days, and I gained seven kilos, but now I'm doing the flip or the reverse of that, and I'm doing the complete opposite for the next 90 days. I'm one week down, and I'm one and a half kilos down. So that's like, what is that? How many pounds is that? Kilos to pounds.

(11:41 - 13:24)

Here it is. So that's 3.3 pounds for those of you that are living in the imperial world. Okay.

So my loves, please, please, please, first and foremost message that I want you to take away from today is if you have tried intuitive eating and you've struggled with it as an emotional eater, it's really natural. It would be freakishly like bizarre for you to just take on intuitive eating and rocket if you've had a history of emotional eating. We are too caught up in our emotions and wild amounts of self-judgment to be able to just slide on into an intuitive eating journey with absolutely no drama at all.

But I will remind you of this before I go, that I know one of the biggest challenges that we do struggle with, whether we are trying to do intuitive eating or we're just trying to do with our emotional eating, is that we very often focus on getting a perfect eating streak. But it's really important to remember that perfect eating streaks are not going to build your confidence. What they actually do is build fear because you think then that the only reason you lost weight in that particular week or day was by getting your eating perfect.

And that one little slip up is going to fuck up everything and ruin everything. But whereas consistency, on the other hand, is what's going to build your confidence, because that way you know that you have the ability to show up and get results no matter whether the circumstances are perfect or not. And that's how you lose weight.

Over the last week, sure, I lost 1.5 kilos, 3.3 pounds, and it's great. It's jolly. But was my eating perfect? Oh, hell no.

But that's the beauty of the eating codes. It doesn't have to be perfect. Yesterday, I met up with Phil and I went out with our, well, they're my stepkids, they're his kids.

(13:24 - 13:53)

And we went out for, they had churros. I had part of this red velvet, what was it, like a red velvet cookie thing or something, had white chocolate drizzled all over. I can't even, I mean, I swear these are the things that I will be eating in heaven nonstop.

That's definitely my plan. And then the kids had ice cream. And it was amazing.

We had the most incredible time. And I had Thai for dinner on one of the other nights. You don't have to get your eating what we would normally call, quote unquote, perfect in order to lose weight with my eating codes.

(13:53 - 14:52)

You just need to follow the codes. That's all you need to do. I got a message this week from another client inside of the bombshell blueprint.

She had lost three kilos this week by using the codes. I'm telling you, it is all you need. So if you are ready to dive on in, you can head on over to carlybax.com forward slash blueprint, or just hit the link in the show notes.

But until next week, my gorgeous ones, remember, if your life was a movie, would you watch it? And if you did, how would you rate it? Because honey, if you're not giving it five stars going back and watching the reruns 1000 times over, it is time for you to make some changes. I'm sending you love. I will see you again next week.

Until then gorgeous ones. Bye for now. Thank you so much for tuning in.

Remember to shimmy your bar over to carlybax.com and join me inside of the bombshell blueprint so you can stop emotional eating and start losing your way now. You'll also find helpful notes and resources inside my past podcast that will help you lose your weight without losing your sanity. I will see you next week.