The Benefits of Boundaries
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>> Hi.
Nice to be with you again.
Join me, if you will, on a brief mental journey.
If you feel comfortable, close your eyes.
Now imagine a place with no boundaries,
a place without any structure, norms, rules,
or even guidelines.
A place where you can do whatever you want to do
without limits and a place without repercussions and guilt.
You're free to choose and do whatever you please.
What would you do?
How would you act?
How would you be different than you are now?
Okay, open your eyes.
At first, a limitless place might sound
pretty fantastic, right?
But tell me this.
In imagining this place,
did you consider the fact that a place with no boundaries
means that other people don't have any boundaries either?
What might that mean for you and your supposed freedom?
Consider this idea.
Having boundaries actually gives you more freedom.
Or to be more specific,
having boundaries that you draw for yourself
gives you more freedom.
Grab your journal,
and spend a few minutes thinking about that.
Why might creating your own boundaries be freeing?
Pause the video now.
What did you come up with?
While boundaries might, at first glance, seem limiting,
they're actually the opposite.
Understanding their benefits can help you empower clients
around emotional eating, an idea that we'll explore today.
Boundaries are essentially the limits
that we place around food and eating,
or your sweet spot with food.
When defining boundaries,
it's important to stay mindful of not becoming too rigid
or jumping too far off the deep end into extreme patterns
that end up doing more harm than good.
Rigidity and extremism can lead to things
like eating disorders and orthorexia
and may even trigger binge-eating.
Here, like everywhere else, moderation is key.
The purpose of boundaries,
or finding a bio-individual sweet spot,
is to honor personal food values.
That said, for the purposes of today,
we're starting with the benefits of having them.
So many of us struggle to create boundaries around food
for reasons we've discussed throughout this course,
including one size fits all mentalities
and pressure to fit into objective ideals.
Our relationships with food are often complicated.
Many clients come to you not for information per se
but to help them make changes
because they feel so stuck in their habits,
even if they know they're not helpful.
In fact, that in and of itself is one place
where boundaries are crucial.
As an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach,
it's important to ask permission
before asking possibly vulnerable questions
around food relationships and eating approaches.
In fact, that in and of itself is one place
where boundaries are crucial.
As an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach,
it's important to ask permission
before asking possibly vulnerable questions
around food relationships and eating approaches.
Why?
Because your clients have boundaries.
Yes, you want to challenge them to take proactive steps
towards their goals,
but you also wants to meet them where they're at.
This means respecting their boundaries,
which includes the language
and strategies you use as a coach.
A lack of personal boundaries around food
can perpetuate emotional eating habits,
including disconnection, yo-yo cycles of dieting,
and compulsive overeating, using food to cope,
and feelings of stuckness and powerlessness.
The beauty of helping clients find their sweet spots
is that it honors the subconscious need for safety
while empowering them to bravely build their own healthy
and satisfying food relationships.
Let's explore the five benefits of creating boundaries
and how you can use this, as a tool,
for empowering clients around emotional eating.
Boundaries are based on bio-individuality.
As we've discussed,
emotional eating can be influenced by trying to fit
into one size fits all ideals and biases.
Empowering clients to draw their own boundaries
honors their bio-individuality.
For example, some clients benefit from going cold turkey
and completely stopping certain eating habits
or giving up certain foods without exception.
Their boundaries might be more clear
and straightforward lines.
Here's a helpful quote,
"Never can be a lot easier than sometimes."
Whether it's because they haven't yet built up
the self-trust for a more intuitive approach
or because they thrive on concrete rules,
some people naturally think in more black and white terms
rather than shades of gray.
Words like moderation might feel elusive or confusing.
Some clients need a little more structure
at least in the beginning.
In fact, setting very clear and defined boundaries
can be a positive challenge that propels movement
because now they have a plan.
Some clients might need to abide by clear lines
and completely avoid certain unhelpful eating habits
versus exploring all of the whys behind those habits first.
Sometimes the why doesn't matter.
This approach can simplify the cognitive process,
kind of like the idea of just do it,
as in just put the sneakers on in the morning
or even sleep in your gym clothes
to increase your chances of exercising.
On the other hand,
some clients might benefit from the discomfort
caused by eating intuitively and allowing room
for flexibility versus resorting to easy fixes of rigidity
or temporary deprivation.
These clients might benefit
from exploring some deeper roots first,
and their lines might be a little more meandering
rather than straight and clear cut.
As an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach,
you might have beliefs
around which approaches might help clients most.
But remember two things,
you and your clients are different people.
What works for you might not work for them.
And your job is to empower clients to do their own work
in their own ways while providing support
and accountability along their journeys of transformation.
Boundaries require adaptation.
As we've discussed,
emotional eating can create
and perpetuate feelings of stuckness,
not only around food but in other areas of life.
Empowering clients to draw their own boundaries
requires them to adapt as needed.
Your clients will come to you with their own versions
of normal,
and guiding them through transformation
means that those normals will change over time.
But change can be scary.
And the idea of setting internal limits around food
might feel threatening to clients
who are used to eating based on external limits.
Here's the thing.
The body and mind adapt if we give them time.
For example,
choosing to drink a glass of water every time a craving
for sugar hits can decrease those cravings over time
because you have a new norm.
Another example, eating sugar after not eating it
for a long time can make you more aware
of how sugar affects you
because you have a new norm now.
Perhaps your first sugar boundary is don't add sugar
to coffee in the morning,
but it develops into minimize all added sugar
throughout the day or add less sugar to coffee.
In other words, it's a continual process,
not a onetime set in stone decision.
You can help clients notice their eating triggers
and emotional eating cycles,
and adjust boundaries as needed.
We'll talk more about habit change later on in the course.
For now, grab your journal,
and spend a few minutes thinking about
how this creates freedom for adaptation.
Pause the video now.
Were you able to make some connections there?
Before we move on,
I want to leave you with a name Andy Goldsworthy.
If you're not familiar with his work,
we included a link in your Skill Building Activities.
He's an artist who works with nature
in a rather transient way.
By this, I mean that his work changes naturally.
He might create an intricate artwork out of leaves
or a pile of found stones, photograph it,
and then release it to the elements.
In other words, his art doesn't last.
The leaves scatter and the stones fall.
He essentially manufactures his own boundaries
around adaptable art.
Does that make sense?
This might be a helpful metaphor to use with clients.
In short, drawing personal boundaries
is a continual process that requires adaptation,
a skill that can be applied to many different areas of life.
Boundaries promote self-nourishment.
As we've discussed,
emotional eating is essentially a coping mechanism.
It's a way of using food to nourish emotions
because we don't feel nourished in other areas of life.
The irony being that it doesn't end up
nourishing us at all.
Empowering clients to draw their own boundaries
serves as a tool for self-kindness and self-protection.
First, self-kindness.
Emotional eating often includes disconnection
from personal needs and values.
Honoring the borders that you set for yourself
is a way of taking care of you.
You're telling yourself, "I respect my needs,
my values and what I'm comfortable with."
To give you an example,
imagine you have a client who struggles
when he is eating with a certain peer group
who always pressures him to eat junk food,
which he knows is contributing to his low energy levels
and his mental focus at work.
Helping this client set boundaries
around eating with friends is a form of self-nourishment
because he's choosing to honor habits
that make him feel better
and they're aligned with his personal goals.
Do you see that?
My second point on self-nourishment today.
Along with promoting self-kindness,
boundaries help satisfy a need for self-protection.
Remember how many people use food as control or comfort
because their subconscious brains need to feel safe?
A lack of boundaries can feel unsafe.
Have you experienced this?
It can show up in a variety of interactions with others.
One example is personal space.
Different people have different circles of personal space.
Have you ever engaged in a conversation
with a close-talker?
Maybe you yourself are a close-talker.
I once had a client who spoke of a favorite teacher
who happened to be a close-talker
and the internal struggle that this brought up for him.
He wanted to connect with his teacher
who genuinely valued him as a person.
But my client always felt he wanted to back away
during conversations.
It just felt a little too close.
He didn't feel threatened by his teacher at all,
but his subconscious brain was saying danger,
too close for comfort.
Boundaries protect us,
yet creating them around food is hard for many of us.
We have boundaries in other areas of life,
from personal space to work schedules,
to how far we're willing to go to reach our goals.
Yet when it comes to food,
we just can't seem to figure it out,
even though it's such a common struggle.
To wrap up this point,
helping clients draw their own boundaries
promote self-nourishment
through self-kindness and self-protection.
As such, it might help curb eating emotionally
either for comfort or for control.
Let's move on.
Boundaries motivate mindfulness and self-connection.
As we've discussed,
emotional eating can lead us away from these.
Empowering clients to draw their own boundaries
promotes connection to values, bio-individual body tunes,
and to the present moment.
It honors emotions
because they decide what makes them uncomfortable,
which helps you identify their wants and needs.
It's also a helpful way of externalizing
the emotional eating voice.
Again, habits like overeating, restricting,
and compulsive eating are often a battle
between two internal voices,
the self-judgment voice that says should
and the emotional eating voice that says go for it.
Neither of these voices are helpful.
However, if you take time to build some boundaries,
you can adjust them based on
what ultimately makes you feel genuinely good.
In doing so, you're practicing mindfulness
and self-connection as well as neutrality and acceptance.
And finally, boundaries empower.
This really applies to all of the points I've made today,
but it deserves its own point.
As we've discussed,
emotional eating can make us feel powerless.
Creating personal boundaries shifts the locus of control
to internal because you're honoring your chosen boundaries
rather than trying to fit into those
externally imposed on you.
Many emotional eaters tend to restrict what
or how much they eat
after indulging in certain foods or overeating.
But this restriction is a should,
and it's different than setting boundaries
which is a chosen act.
Can you see the difference?
Drawing boundaries provides responsibility.
Clients are reframing and rewriting their own stories
about eating based on where they are right now.
This is an act of self-care
rather than an act of punishment.
Finally, it supports self-respect.
Clients are boosting self-worth by honoring
what works for them versus aiming to please everyone else.
They're fitting out of other people's boundaries.
They're saying no when they mean no
and yes when they mean yes.
They're asserting themselves
because they're committed to their boundaries,
and they get to decide
whether or not to step out of those boundaries.
We take time to build boundaries for a reason.
And once we figure out what those look like for us,
it's important to commit to them.
We're often quick to commit to others but not to ourselves.
Clients who honor their personal boundaries
are committing to themselves.
Okay, quick recap.
While boundaries might, at first glance, seem limiting,
they're actually the opposite.
Helping clients draw them around food
can empower them around emotional eating
as well as in other areas of life.
There are many benefits of drawing boundaries,
including the five we covered today.
They're based on bio-individuality.
They require adaptation.
They promote self-nourishment.
They motivate mindfulness and self-connection.
And they empower.
Remember that the purpose of boundaries
or finding a bio-individual sweet spot
is to honor personal food values.
Also remember the importance of honoring
your clients' boundaries as a coach.
Ask permission before diving
into possibly vulnerable discussions
and meet them where they're at.
This is their journey of transformation.
This week, in your Skill Building Activities,
we're asking you to apply this material
by researching Andy Goldsworthy,
and how he challenges the limits of both art and nature
as well as how you can apply these ideas to coaching clients
around building food boundaries.
Take a look at that,
share your thoughts in the Facebook group,
and I'll see you again soon.