Never Diet Again: Healing Your Relationship with Food
In this episode of Get Sculpted, hosts Marilynn, Tijana, & Jordanna discuss healing your relationship with food and creating a new mindset around eating.
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Are you ready to heal your relationship with food once and for all? Join us for this transformative episode to break free from the soul-crushing cycle of yo-yo dieting. Jordanna, Tijana, and Marilynn reveal why traditional diets sabotage your progress and destroy your confidence. Together, we’ll discuss the psychological and metabolic damage caused by restrictive eating and explore how dieting leads to a negative self-image, extreme hunger, and an unhealthy relationship with food.
We’ll introduce you to a new approach focused on sustainable habits, community support, and viewing food as fuel for your best 2.0 self – not a punishment. We’ll teach you actionable strategies for building consistent, manageable lifestyle changes instead of falling into the "start again on Monday" trap.
In this episode, we cover:
How extreme dieting damages your metabolism and creates a self-destructive cycle of weight loss and regain
Strategies for maintaining healthy habits during busy times, like the holiday season.
Why yo-yo dieting destroys confidence and creates a negative self-image
Reshaping your belief about having a lack of discipline in your eating habits
The critical role of accountability and connection in achieving sustainable fitness goals
By the end of this episode, you'll better understand how to make manageable lifestyle changes that foster long-term success. We'll share our personal experiences with various diets and the lessons learned from those challenges. This isn't just another podcast episode; it's a masterclass in developing a healthier relationship with food and fitness.
Whether you’ve tried one diet or 100 diets, you're not a failure—you just need a smarter, kinder approach to your health that goes beyond restrictive eating. We’re here to teach you how to heal your relationship and repair your mindset around food – once and for all!
When we're consistent, that's how we become confident. That roller coaster that we ride is so detrimental to our mindset, our confidence, our ability to follow through, our ability to even see ourselves as somebody who sets and achieves goals.
-Jordanna
So, are you ready to transform your approach to health and fitness, not through drastic measures but by cultivating sustainable and enriching habits? Come share with us on Instagram what strategies you plan on implementing to maintain healthy habits during the holiday season
Mentioned Links & Resources
How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world
Connect with Get Sculpted:
Thanks for joining us on this episode of Get Sculpted! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on Apple or Spotify to help us reach even more women ready to cut through the noise and get the real deal on fat loss, muscle building, and what it really takes to build their 2.0 sculpted self inside and out.
This podcast is brought to you in partnership with Leah Bryant Co.
More about the Get Sculpted Podcast
Welcome to Get Sculpted, the podcast designed for women ready to transform their bodies and level up their lives with science-based strategies and actionable advice.
We dive into the essentials of fat loss, muscle building, and metabolism optimization by helping you work smarter, not harder.
This isn’t about quick fixes or fad diets; it’s about creating sustainable habits and stacking wins. We’ll help you fuel your body, strengthen your mindset, and build your 2.0 sculpted self from the inside out.
We’re your hosts, Jordanna, Marilynn, and Tijana. We have over 20 years of collective experience in the training, nutrition, and body transformation business, with over 1000 transformations and counting.
Ready to get stronger, more empowered, and embrace a healthier, more resilient you? Join us every week and start sculpting the life you deserve!
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of the Get Sculpted podcast follows:
And I bet you are someone who's listening that has gone through yo-yo dieting. Maybe you've started again on Monday more times than you care to admit. And this time of year, you're probably thinking, I'm just going to put all this health and fitness stuff on pause until the new year.
But we are diving in to give you the total, unfiltered conversation about yo-yo dieting and how it is holding you up from actually achieving your goals. How to stop yo-yo dieting so that you don't have to diet again. Right, girls?
Like this is one of the number one things that we see in our business at Get Sculpted with our clients. And you know what? For myself, this is deeply personal. I was the poster child for yo-yo dieting growing up.
The Yo-Yo Dieting Cycle: Personal Stories and Patterns
[Jordanna] I have tried it all, much like many of you listening. You know, I could name probably at least 30 different diets that I have tried. What are some of them?Oh my gosh, really? Do we wanna go there?
[Tijana] Yeah, I wanna know.
Okay, I have tried the cabbage soup diet. I have tried Weight Watchers more than once. I have tried the Atkins diet.
I have tried fasting. I have tried extreme caloric restriction. I have tried no carbs.
I have tried no fat. I have tried yes fat with no carbs. I have tried balanced macros and macro tracking.
I have just tried—oh my gosh—the list goes on. I have even done diet pills. I have tried 75 Hard.
I have tried so many of these 12-week bootcamp challenges and all the things as I was growing up. I even tried doing everything by myself. And I think that was probably the hardest because while you're trying all these diets and you think you're getting the support, you feel really lonely in the process.
And feeling lonely in that process doesn't really get to the root causes of why we're not able to be consistent. And a lot of the time, it's because we're being way too restrictive. And all of those diets are on the extreme end of trying to get to a weight loss goal more specifically versus building a healthy and fit lifestyle.
Why Restriction Fails: The Pendulum Effect
[Jordanna] For me, that start again Monday mindset always came around when I took the approach of going way too extreme, falling off that extreme diet—pick any one of them, they were all the same—and then having this idea of, Okay, well, I need to now recover from that diet that I tried.Then you go on this pendulum of extreme restriction. Then it swings the other way to extreme indulgence and saying, I need to treat myself now. I need to recover. I need to be kind to myself.
But it didn’t feel like kindness. It actually felt like another type of punishment. And then it would swing again back the other way because I still wouldn’t be happy with the results I had.
The Psychological Impact of Dieting
[Tijana] So what's standing out to me is this is such a hugely psychological process. And Jordanna, you being an ED psychology coach, I think that this is the cool thing about working with each other in this capacity because I’m a very practical, logistical, kind of in the body kind of person, if that makes sense.So I always thought about the physiological effects of dieting. That’s the only way that I looked at it, which is really important. But what I’ve realized is, like you said, this is gonna have a profound effect psychologically on all elements of your life when you've been through this cycle.
It’s gonna affect how you perceive yourself. You see yourself as a failure, and that kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Understanding Metabolism and Its Adaptations
[Tijana] On the other side of the coin, too, there are negative effects to your body. And I wanna start off by saying that you cannot damage your metabolism forever.Right, you're not broken.
It’s not something you turn on and off. Metabolic adaptation and your metabolism regulating based on the energy and output is a completely normal process.
To put it simply, when you’re eating less food over time, your metabolism’s gonna down-regulate. You’re gonna expend less energy. It’s gonna make every effort to conserve the energy that you’re burning.
Sustainable Planning: A Smarter Approach
[Jordanna] And so T, how would you approach setting up a plan for a perpetual yo-yo dieter who’s coming in saying, I’d like to lose 20, 25 pounds. I’ve never really been able to do it successfully long-term. I’ve seen that weight loss, but never been able to keep it off.
The Power of Slow, Sustainable Weight Loss
[Tijana] I love this question. I love the nitty-gritty because here’s the thing: people always say, Oh, I did a 1200-calorie diet and it worked.And I’m like, yeah, okay, but number one, you’re not a toddler.
[Jordanna] That’s what I always say too. My kids are eight and four, and they’re like eating a lot more than that.
[Tijana] So we wanna make sure, number one, that we’re not in too steep of a calorie deficit. So whatever we calculate based on their energy needs, based on the amount of muscle they have, their frame, how tall they are, how much they weigh—all that stuff—then you want a 10 to 15% calorie deficit. No more.
Because this is when that down-regulation is gonna kick in, and we’re gonna have all those negative effects happening.
And then I set the realistic expectation, most importantly, that you’re gonna lose about 1% of your body weight a week, like half a pound to a pound a week.
[Jordanna] And they might say, Well, I did the cabbage soup diet. I dropped five pounds.
[Tijana] Honey, that was not all fat, number one.
If you did some kind of diet, quote-unquote, where you pooped a lot, you weren’t pooping out fat. So there’s that.
And we’re setting the standard and the expectation that the weight loss you achieve might feel slow to you, and the food that you’re eating might feel like a lot to you, but to get a different result than you’ve had, you have to do things differently than you’ve done before.
So it’s not gonna be as fast as you think.
[Jordanna] That’s right.
[Tijana] And in that process, you’re gonna actually lose body fat instead of losing muscle—God forbid—which you don’t want. And you’re not gonna down-regulate your metabolism.
So it’s like, do you wanna lose fat fast, or do you wanna keep it off forever? That’s the question.
Shifting Mindsets: Enjoying the Journey
[Jordanna] That’s a great way to look at it because you ultimately would want to take a slower approach, but you can also enjoy the journey.Because the more you get to eat on this fat loss journey—if we’re just talking about fat loss specifically today—the more you’re gonna enjoy that process.
You’re gonna have less of that food noise. You’re gonna have less of the obsession around when you’re gonna eat next because you are gonna feel still satiated at some level.
Now, fat loss does come with more hunger, right? Because you are in an actual calorie deficit. But you’re eating enough to allow you to still have the energy you need to get through your day and be consistent.
That’s the key here: in order to stop yo-yo dieting, we need to create the conditions for follow-through.
And that means being less restrictive, having more food than you would normally be used to, especially as a yo-yo dieter going from extreme to extreme so that we’re creating the conditions for success.
You’ve said this before, T, like if you can’t do 75 Hard, try—what did you say? [Tijana] You don’t need 75 Hard; you need 365 Sustainable.
[Jordanna] Girl, there you got it. Thank you. I love that because you wanna step away from those extreme thoughts and step into something that is more doable, consistent, and establishing that middle ground for yourself.
Recognizing Red Flags in Yo-Yo Dieting
[Jordanna] Mare, I’d love to hear from your perspective. What are the red flags that you’re seeing around the yo-yo dieting mindset?[Marilynn] Well, that’s what I was gonna say—aside from the fact that we know it doesn’t work. And I always come back to when women say, Well, I did this diet and it worked.
And it’s like, well, I’m gonna be honest: tough love here.
If it worked, we wouldn’t actually be having this conversation if it worked. Mic drop. So there’s that.
The Emotional and Physical Costs of Dieting
[Marilynn] But the other thing is: how do you feel? So we’ve talked about the psychological impact, the metabolic impact. But what is your day-to-day feeling?When you’re on an unsustainable diet, there are some really awful things you’re dealing with daily: extreme hunger, constant cravings.
I remember myself being moody. Like, I was quite—I won’t use profane language—but I was not a nice person to my husband, my family. I constantly felt deprived.
It basically painted my entire life with this brush of, I hate everything. Like, I can’t have this. I hate everything.
Breaking Free: Food Freedom and Body Kindness
[Jordanna] And that’s what being consistent is all about. That is what never dieting again is about. That is what never starting again on Monday is all about.And really for you, going into the next few weeks as we round out the new year, we want you to avoid dieting and build habits that last.