The Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast

BEE #154: The 3 Rs to Food Freedom

• Kristin Jones

Share episode

Message me with comments or questions

Food shouldn’t feel like a fight—and yet for so many women, it does.
 In this episode of The Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast, I’m sharing The 3 R’s to Food Freedom—my signature system that I use inside my coaching program, Breakthrough To You, to help women end emotional eating and lose weight without diets, restriction, or relying on willpower.

This simple, brain-based framework is designed to help you finally make peace with food, trust yourself again, and create lasting change from the inside out:

✨ Routines that create change – Because your brain craves predictability. You’ll learn how to pre-decide meals to quiet the food noise, why eating to satisfied (not full) naturally reduces overeating, and how small habits like walking, hydration, and gratitude shift both your energy and identity.

🧠 Rewiring your mindset – I’ll show you how to uncover the hidden beliefs that keep you stuck, interrupt negative self-talk, and use practical mindset tools—or even hypnotherapy—to reprogram your brain for sustainable transformation.

💬 Radical accountability – This isn’t punishment or guilt. It’s about creating a supportive structure where honesty feels empowering, progress feels possible, and every choice moves you closer to the version of yourself who trusts her body and follows through with ease.

The 3 R’s to Food Freedom isn’t another diet—it’s a mindset and lifestyle shift that makes eating feel calm, confident, and sustainable. When your habits align with your values and your brain feels safe, the weight naturally follows.

If this message resonates, join the waitlist for my upcoming Breakthrough To You coaching program using this link.


 And if today’s episode speaks to you, share it with a friend who’s tired of dieting and ready for freedom. Subscribe, leave a review, and let’s help more women break through the emotional patterns that have kept them stuck for years.

Connect with me online:

1. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristinjonescoaching/
2. You Tube channel, Kristin Jones Coaching: https://www.youtube.com/@KristinJonesCoaching44

3. You Tube channel, Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@breakthroughpodcast-44
3 . Website: https://www.kristinjonescoaching.com

If you want to learn how to stop nighttime eating, get my 3 Day Nighttime Snacking Reset: https://go.kristinjonescoaching.com/nighttime-snacking-reset

Needing more specific and direct support for your emotional eating and overeating? Check out my online course, Stop Dieting Start Feeling, and my personalized coaching program, Breakthrough To You.

If you found this episode helpful, don't forget to leave a review on the platform you used to listen and share it with your friends on your Instagram stories. Also, be sure to follow me on Instagram @breakthroughemotionaleating, and don't hesitate to slide into my DMs to share your thoughts ...

SPEAKER_00:

Do you want to lose weight but struggle to stay committed to a meal plan because you constantly feel hungry? Does food provide you comfort when you're bored, angry, lonely, or sad? If so, you are in the right place. My name is Kristen Jones, and I'm a life coach specializing in emotional eating and weight loss. And I'm also a lifelong emotional eater. I want to provide you with information, motivation, and support so you too can learn to manage your issues with and develop a healthy relationship with yourself. Welcome to the Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast. Well, this episode is a long time overdue. One of the things that I don't do enough speaking about is about the programs that I offer. I come on, I do my podcast, I talk about different things that you can do at home, on your own, to deal with and address emotional eating. And I think that through 153 episodes, I've done a pretty good job, and I'm pretty proud of myself for doing, you know, providing for my listeners and my viewers a path, a number of things to look at in order to address emotional eating. One of the things I don't talk about very much is what I do to help people, how I actually coach someone who seeks out my help. And I think it's amazing when people can listen to a podcast and they can take the information that they're given and they can apply it and they can get the results that they want. I think that's absolutely phenomenal. And I know there are so many people just last week's episode about Allison. Allison did everything on her own. She listened to the podcast. She did some supplemental reading and research on her own, but really she did that all based upon what she listened to on my podcast. And I think that's great that somebody can do that. But there's also a level of support and accountability and step-by-step instructions that many, many people need. And I don't think I do enough to really share with you everything that I do when I work with clients. And I work with, I have lots of clients and I work with clients all the time, but I don't really share or talk openly that much about it. I just recently started working with a new business coach, and that's one of the things that she absolutely instills is that we talk about what we do. How do we help people? And so today I want to introduce something that I've been doing for a very, very long time, but I just haven't put a formal name attached to it. And so today I want to introduce and speak to you about the three Rs to food freedom. And the three R's stand for routines that change that create change. The second R is rewiring your brain for success with food. And the third R is radical accountability and support. So I'm going to go through and explain to you what each one of those, um, which each one of those is. And before I get started, I think it's really important to remember, and I talk about this a lot. I talk about how I do not endorse diets. I don't um I don't put people on diets, I don't tell people what to eat. Um, I support people in creating uh a system and a lifestyle that works for them, that that allows them to have the kind of connection and use of food that's really appropriate and um productive for them. But I don't believe in going on diets. I don't believe in changing dramatically what you eat. And that's how I live. That's how I live my life, and it's what I did in order to let go of the chronic dieting and the obsession with food that I had and the emotional eating that I did for so many years, a majority of my life. And so it's important to remember that that what I do is not about, it's not about willpower, it's not about discipline. It is much more about self-love and it's about how you treat yourself and the worth and the value that you give to yourself and that you are worthy of making these changes and making the decisions to do what is going to be in your best interest based upon the goals that you want to have. Does everybody want to lose weight? No, not everybody does, and that's totally okay. But for anybody who does, or anybody who wants to be their healthiest and feels like it would be beneficial for them to lose weight and they want to do it in a way that is absolutely sustainable and is something that you can do so you can essentially live the rest of your life eating in this way and eating the foods that you love and being able to go out and go to dinner and go to parties and enjoy the holidays and all those things. And that's really what I teach because it's how I live, it's how I live my life. And so it's important that I explain and do a little bit better job of really illustrating what it is that I do because I think that I think that it will resonate with a lot of people and whether or not you I ever meet you or ever work with you, I think it's important that you know who I am and where I come from in a sense of what my philosophy is. Um, because then you can know whether or not you want to continue to listen to me. So I hope that this is um this illustrates and lets you know exactly kind of where I stand when it comes to, when it comes to health, when it comes to being your healthiest and and how I help people uh get to that place. So it really is about making the changes that you want to make and and living the life that you want to have. And so one of the first things that I help people address is what does it look like to have freedom with food, to not feel like you're a prisoner, to not feel like you're locked in with um with a uh uh a relationship with food or a way that you eat food that you know is not healthy, but you don't know any other way. So we that's one of the first things that I I do when I when I work with people. But everything that I do is based upon these these three R's, these three Rs that lead to food freedom. And the first R, there's three of them. The first R is routines that create change. And when I say routines, I mean routines and habits. The second is uh to rewire the way that you think about food and about yourself. And then the third R is radical accountability and support both for yourself and the support that you surround yourself with. So we'll talk about each one of those R's and you can get a better understanding of me and where I'm coming from when it comes to my philosophy about regarding health as well as weight loss and emotional eating management. So the first R, routines, is really what I think is so important for people to establish kind of how they want to live their lives. Because usually when people come to me, their life has gotten to a point, their their eating life has gotten to a point where it is not manageable anymore. And they're not happy with how they're eating, they're not happy with how they feel, they're not happy with their weight, um, and they feel very out of control. And so routines, putting routines and habits in place is the first thing that we do because it really actually allows people to kind of settle in and feel like they have some semblance of control over their lives. There are things in our lives that we cannot control, but the things that we can, we need to create habits and create routines around those things because our brain positively responds to routine and responds to habit. And our brain likes to know what's coming. And so having a good solid routine and a good solid foundation of habits is a really important first step. And everything that I do is based upon the brain and based upon brain research and how our brain responds to certain stimulus and certain surroundings, aspects of our surroundings. And so that really is where I base my program, my program and the way that I help people. It's what I base it on. So there are six different areas that I like to look at when it comes to uh to routines. So the first one is planning what you what you are going to be eating throughout the day, making a plan for yourself. Your brain loves plans, it loves to not have to make so many extra decisions. Um, people talk about like, oh my gosh, all I do is think about food. Well, oftentimes we think about food because our brain is anticipating the anxiety that we're gonna have regarding food. And so all it does is just keeps thinking about it. And when we make a decision and then we set it aside, our brain actually is then able to direct its bandwidth to other things in our lives that are more important. So making a plan, whether it's on paper or whether it's in your own head, uh, making that plan is super, super important. That's the first step. The second step is attached to the first step. So when we make a plan of what we're gonna eat, we also need to follow through on it. And one of the reasons why we need to follow through on the plan is because most of the time when people are either emotional eaters or and that has led to them being overweight, or they're not emotional eaters and they're overweight, is that people most people will come to me and say, I don't know what to eat. And the bottom line is there is no magical food that's gonna make you gain or lose weight. Eating too much food is gonna make you gain weight. And so it there are certain foods, yes, that are gonna be more detrimental and that they're going to, they're gonna create other health issues. But when it comes to your weight, it it's just too much food. You just can't are consuming too much food. So the important thing to remember is that we have to um we have to follow through on what we say we're gonna do, because that follow through allows our brain to start to trust us because most people will come in, most people that I work with come in and don't trust themselves. They don't trust the decisions that they make, they don't know what foods to eat, they don't know what not to eat. And so there's a lot of mistrust when it comes to themselves and their decision making. And so, and our brain is part of that. And our brain oftentimes wants to pull us off and doesn't want us to follow through because we it knows that following through means we have to do something maybe that's unpleasant. Maybe it's something we don't want to do. But life is about being uncomfortable. And that is also something that we have to get used to. And that's a whole nother aspect of the three R's that we talk about. But um in this R, the routine R, we have to learn to follow through. So that's the second, the second um element of the routines is getting into the habit of when I say I'm gonna do something, I'm actually gonna do it. I'm actually gonna follow through. And that trains your brain to trust you that when you say you're gonna do something, you actually are going to. The third tenant of the routines, the third routine that you need to adopt is eating to satisfied. Not eating to full, not eating to stuffed, but eating to satisfied. And there are a number of different reasons why physiologically, emotionally, and biologically, why that is so important. And I will be doing a follow-up um podcast on eating to satisfied specifically. And I'm gonna go over each one of these in a podcast because I think they're all really important. And but it's really, really essential that we know that eating to satisfy forces us to be present, forces us to pay attention to body cues, forces us to not get into that emotional trap that many of us find ourselves eating for emotional reasons as opposed to eating for physical reasons. And so eating to satisfy and stopping before you're full forces you to make decisions and to, again, be present, be pre be top of mind, and allows yourself to really be where you need to be when it comes to your um your eating and how you're actually how and why and how much you're actually eating. So eating dissatisfied is a very important thing. And it's and it's something that I teach people because it is a habit that needs to be taught and needs to be practiced. It is not something that comes naturally, because especially in our society, we eat as fast as we can. We eat in the car, we eat while walking, we eat while watching TV, we do all of these things, we multitask all the time. And so most of the time we end up overeating. And, you know, obesity in our country is a huge issue. And it is because we eat in a distracted manner. And so eating dissatisfied takes all of your focus. And that's something that, again, something that I teach my clients how to do. Uh, the next is something I did just a couple of podcasts ago. I did a podcast on breaking the habit of snacking. And that is far and away one of the most important and overlooked um qualities, uh, strategies for losing weight. Because snacking was created by the food industry. We don't necessarily need, we don't need not necessarily, we don't need to snack. If you are eating meals that are nutrient dense, that are enough to keep you satisfied, satisfied, not full, satisfied, you should be able to get from one meal to the next. And by that next meal, you should be hungry. But many people do not let themselves get hungry. They fear a hunger for a variety of reasons, and many of them are emotionally based. And those are things that I also talk about with clients. But most people don't let themselves get hungry. And so not snacking and allowing yourself to go three to four hours between meals, which would be the same amount of time that it would be if you had your three meals a day. It allows so many physiological things, so many um uh emotional uh elements are brought into it. But one of the things that's really important why we don't snack is because it keeps your blood sugar level low. And so you don't have those spikes of insulin and spikes and then crashes, and you don't get on that blood sugar roller coaster. And so it makes it much easier to sustain and eat eat foods that you that you want to be eating and that you want to eat in the right amounts when you don't allow yourself, you don't allow your blood sugar to go too high and then to drop too low. So snacking is the fourth of the six elements. The next one is staying hydrated and getting some movement as a way of staying hydrated to endure and do movement every single day. I think it's important whether it's 10 minutes a day, we need to move our bodies in some way. And staying hydrated is part of that as well. Um, I can't, I cannot undervalue hydration and how important it is to drink water and to be fully hydrated, as well as moving your body every day. And those two things kind of go hand in hand, especially in warmer climates. And so that is another thing that I really um I really instill in my clients is to make daily movement a habit, make it a routine. It's so good for mental health as well as your physical health, as well as digestion, um, as well as just relationship-wise. When you go out for a walk with your spouse, with your child, with a neighbor, and you have, you know, healthy conversation, it's so good. It's it has so many benefits. And so getting out and moving and being social is is absolutely essential. And I think that that is something that often also that is entirely overlooked by people and and the the social aspect of exercise and how healthy that can be for people who who are looking to lose weight or looking to be their healthiest. And the last part of the R, the, the routines are is a daily gratitude and journaling practice. And when I say journaling, I don't mean you have to journal for a really long time. And when I say daily gratitude, I'm talking about three things that happened in the last 24 hours. Because if you know anything, if you're if you're in any way woo-woo, like I am, and you know um about the law of attraction, and you know about um being grateful, the more we are grateful, the more we display our gratitude, the more that, the more gratitude comes back to us, and the more we are grateful for because things come back to us, and and we have all of these things to be grateful for, and we recognize them, we acknowledge them. And it is just that it's that that circle of energy, of positive energy that just continues to flow. And it it cannot be um diminished. It is really, really essential because also part of making a transformation, part of changing your life, is about changing your mental outlook and your mindset. And journaling and gratitude are all part of that mindset change, and those really are important and they have to be a part of your daily routine. And it has been shown, there's been so many reasons, so much research done that daily journal writing and daily gratitude in you know, a majority of the people that they surveyed, most people will say that their lives are exponentially better because of the daily gratitude practice and the daily journaling that they do. So yeah, I absolutely find that essential in my program that I that I work with people and and and when I help people. I also want to emphasize that when I say a daily gratitude practice, does it have to be written down? No. Journaling, if I'm gonna ask you to write something, it may be two or three sentences. But your gratitude can be done in your head. I prefer when it's written down. I think there's a lot more power in writing things down. Um, but journaling can be one sentence, two sentences, three sentences. We build up. But it really is something that once people start doing it, they realize the value of it and they absolutely can't live without it. So those are the six R R's from the first R of routine. Um and those are, again, essential. I present those to my clients to consider. I don't force anyone to do what I recommend. I recommend, I encourage, I tell them this is part of my program. If they choose not to do it, that is their choice. But when we start to have, if they start to have issues with making progress in the way that they want to make progress, I will always remind them that there are things that they can be adding to it that can really supplement and really help them move towards the goals that they've set for themselves. So these things are put in place for a reason. And I really strongly encourage all of my clients to at least try them and see if they work within their lifestyle. The second R is rewiring your brain for success when it comes to uh how you think about food and how you think about yourself. You cannot change your body until you change your mind first. Your mindset has to come first. And so people, you know, downgrade that. They don't want to talk, they don't, and it's there's very few, very, very few coaches at at this point in time that don't deal with mindset to a certain degree. I happen to deal with it in a huge, in a huge, a huge percentage of my program is about mindset because I do definitely work on the psychological and the mental and emotional aspects of why people gain weight and how people want to lose weight. They need to change that mindset piece. So rewiring the mind is so very important because we've been, we've had these limiting beliefs, these beliefs that that that are holding us back. And sometimes they haven't held us back until something specific happens. But we have to look at changing the mindset that we have in order to make the changes that we need to make. So the first thing that I address when it comes to rewiring your mind is looking at negative self-talk. I think negative self-talk is probably one of the most detrimental things that people can do when it comes to their overall health because our bodies absorb all the energy and everything that we say, our bodies absorb that and it keeps it. And if we are bogged down by that negative energy and we're bogged down by those negative thoughts, it can absolutely do crazy things to us and it can actually make us sick. And so it is so important to immediately start addressing negative self-talk. And I have um I have a system set up, it's called Break Through Your Brain, and it teaches you how to find what the negative thought is, to reprogram it, to come up with a different new thought to talk back to your brain, and then to give yourself an affirmation after you've diminished the negative thought, you then come in with a positive thought to replace it. And it is a very, very powerful system, and it doesn't take long to start to rewire the mind and see the differences in how you feel on a regular basis. The next thing is looking at the subconscious and the subconscious beliefs, as I talked about, the limiting beliefs, the subconscious beliefs that we have about food, about ourselves, about our connection with food, and where those come from. Now, most of you know, if you've been listening to my podcast for any amount of time, that I also am a hypnotherapist and I um in I use RTT, rapid transformational therapy, with my clients that are interested in using that and interested in really going deep and almost kind of taking a shortcut to changing their limiting beliefs. Do you have to do hypnosis to change limiting beliefs? Absolutely not. You can totally do it at a conscious level. It's just gonna take a lot longer and it's gonna take a lot more consistency and a lot of patience. And honestly, most people don't have that. And so it is it's it's a it's a it's like an e-tick it. It's a quick, it's it's a front-of-the-line pass. Um, doing hypnosis really has been incredibly transformational for so many of my clients. And going in and looking at the subconscious beliefs that we hold, where they came from, changing them, instilling new beliefs, and then rewiring the brain to have those new beliefs. And people's lives have been so dramatically changed because of that. And so that's another aspect that comes into play. And again, totally optional. Um, it people are not required to do hypnosis, but it is something that I always offer if somebody is interested and we give it a shot. And in almost all cases, it works very well. Um, the next thing we look at is that degree of trusting ourselves. And we talked about that in the routines. So we have something in place that we do to start to learn to trust ourselves, trust ourselves with the decisions that we make about food, the decisions that we make for ourselves, about about what we do with our lives, who we hang out with, who we spend our time with, um, how we think about ourselves. And so we start to change that narrative, the narrative that a person has about that they trust themselves, that they make good choices with food, that they follow through because they love themselves. All of those things are really focused on. And we create affirmations that go along with those things that people then start to make a regular part of their uh their daily routine. So it can go back up into that routines piece, but uh affirming yourself and saying nice things to yourself. It's not something that's very um in innate to people and they have to practice it, but it daily uh gratitude and daily kind words for yourself can single-handedly, when practiced consistently, can change your life. And it it just it's so important, it is just such a foundational piece of of my program. And it's absolutely necessary that if I work with someone, they have to agree to do that. So for those of you who are rolling your eyes and going, oh my gosh, this is just way too like emotional and way too, I just want to be told what to eat. You can listen to my podcast all you want, but I am not your girl. I'm not the person you want to work with because I need to work with people who know that this goes much deeper than just what we're putting in our mouths. And uh, and so that's where I know the people that that um connect with me, the people that um feel that way and understand that, those are the people that I end up working with. And those are the end, those are the people that end up having the success that uh that I'm able to support them having. Um, and again, the the last piece, the last part of this rewiring your brain is that aspect of hypnotherapy. And it is completely optional, and it is something that can be woven into the fabric of what I do on a daily basis or on a weekly basis with my clients. And uh, and that that hypnotherapy is another option that falls under the second R, which is the rewiring. The third R is the radical accountability and support. And accountability to yourself is so important. And we oftentimes have to start with being accountable to someone else and then start to become accountable to ourselves because in the end, the only person we're left with when it's all said and done is ourselves. People will come and go spouses, kids, coaches, you know, friends, they will all come and go in and out of our lives. The only person we ultimately have to depend upon for any support that we need is ourselves. And so that accountability piece, learning to be accountable to yourself, learning to be honest with yourself about what you do. And that is something when I say that's why I that's why I call it radical accountability, because it's not just accountability to others or accountability with yourself, it's honesty with yourself. And so many people are are thinking they can get away with not doing what they say they're gonna do. And that, well, no one's around, no one's gonna find out. Yeah, but you know, you know, you've got to learn to be the accountability to yourself, it has to be the most important level of accountability that you have. And we talk about that, we talk about why that is so important. Um, but also the personalized guidance. And one of the things that, and I just um I just did a post on Instagram about this, and I I definitely am going to do a podcast about it because I think it's so important to remember. Coaching is not, when it comes to that personal accountability and support, coaching is not about me telling you what to do. Coaching is about me asking the right questions and getting you to figure out what it is that you need because ultimately you're the expert in your life. You know what's best for you, you know what you respond to, you know what you don't respond to. And I know there's plenty of people that when I say, I need you to write your meal plans down, and they say, I can't. And I'll ask them why, and then they explain, and then I drop it. And I say, Okay, do it in your head. Totally fine. Do it in your head. And a lot most of the time that works because for a lot of people, the idea of writing food down takes them back to being penalized for writing tracking food. Tracking food after the fact is very different. There's a lot of shame, there's a lot of guilt associated with having to track what you've written down and or track what you've eaten. And when you haven't eaten well, there's a lot of shame. There's a Lot of just kind of disgust that people have. And so it brings up a lot of very, very negative emotions. And people are absolutely entitled to have those. And I'm not going to force anybody to do that. But that's the coaching relationship. The coaching relationship is more of a collaboration and a partnership. And it's not a dictatorship. It's not me telling you what to do. It's us working together to figure out what's going to work for you. Now I've been coaching for a long time. And so I know what has worked for my clients. And people can either choose to do that or they can choose not to. And if they choose not to, that's okay. And if you found a different way to do it and it still works, awesome. I am so supportive of that. And most likely I'll end up stealing that idea from you. But it I want people to find out what's going to work for them. And my job is just to present you with possibilities, to present you with ideas. If something sticks, great. If it doesn't, we toss it aside and we try something else. But we work together to make that happen. And it's not, it's an equal partnership. It is not one person telling the other person what to do. Super important. And that's also a part of that of that radical accountability is will I challenge you? Will I challenge you to be your best? 1,000%. Will I support you if it doesn't work out? 1000%. Will I give you some suggestions that you can mull over and then decide if you want to do them? Absolutely. Can we talk about everything? 100%. So know that the nature of that's again why I call it radical accountability, because it's it's a very different relationship, but it is a relationship where you will feel completely supported and encouraged to step out on your own, but also to turn to me if there's if there's guidance or there's something that you that you need that you are unsure of. So those are the three Rs, the three Rs to um to food freedom. And the three Rs are not about speed, they're not about perfection, they're not about um just gripping so hard and trying so hard and and and just like being super militant with yourself. It's not about that. It's about relaxing, it's about learning to live your life in a way that feels good to you. And part of our lives is interacting with food, part of our lives is eating, part of our lives is entertaining, part of our lives is having meals with people, with our families, with our friends. And knowing how to do that in a way that serves you, that makes you feel good about yourself, that allows you to come away from that experience feeling 100% amazing about yourself and the decisions and the choices that you've made. That's what I want to do. And that's what I do whenever I work with somebody. So the transformation is there. And the cool part is this is what we work on, and the weight comes off. And there's no, you need to dramatically change what you eat. There's nothing. We put these into place and the weight comes off. And that's the cool part. It's not about, it's not about like, oh my gosh, I've just got to focus and try. No, we've just got to learn to live our lives in a way that works for us, that works for our bodies, and allows us to be our healthiest and our happiest for the rest of our lives. I hope this podcast has been helpful. I hope it's given you a greater insight into me and to what I believe in, and in turn, how I help clients get to the goals that they've set, to the weight that they want, and to live the lives that they've always dreamed of. I will be announcing a new program coming up soon. Um, it'll be in the next few weeks. This is being recorded on October uh 12th. And so I will be releasing a new program in the next month or so. And so keep an eye on that. If you have any interest in being one of the first people to know about this uh new project that I'm doing, um, please, in the um in the show notes, I will have a link to a wait list to be able to learn more about this upcoming program and what it entails and whether or not it's right for you. It will include it will include an application, an application process. So um be on the lookout for that. And if that's something you're interested, just jump on the wait list and I'll let you know. You'll be the first ones to know. All right, take care, everybody. Have a great week, and I will see you again next week.

unknown:

Bye.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for listening to this week's episode. If you are interested in learning more about how I can help you understand and manage your emotional eating, including the use of hypnosis to uncover the root cause of your eating, go to my website, Kristen JonesCoaching.com.