Making It Real talks with Jan Niemand, an expert and coach in energetics - a next-level approach to mindful and intuitive eating. His expertise ranges from cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor theory, anthropology, psychology, and the latest field of neuro-coaching with a specific focus of corporal-neuro integration theory and techniques.

Show Notes:

3:47 - Jan explains energetics

“Grant Soosalu, one of the founders of the mBIT movement and also mBraining, teamed up with Shirley Blackmeyer, who also had an interesting approach to food.

This whole concept was brought together in the energetics process where Shirley provided her foundation, and Grant substituted a lot of the neuroscience and understanding of what is busy happening in your multiple brains as you food or do fooding.

And it turned into this beautiful process that I enrolled for purely for the sake of taking control of my own size and weight.”

7:05 - Turns out it’s not about the size and weight

“And that revolutionized my size and weight to the point where I realized during the process, as Shirley predicts, you come to the conclusion, "It's not about the size and weight. Life is difficult. And the sooner we realize this, we are able to transcend it."

Scott Peck writes that in his book, The Road Less Traveled, and it so resonated with me. And it really transformed how I do fooding, how I view exercise, how I view good and bad food, how I understand proper nutrition, eating intuitively, all these concepts, but I was able to embody it. It wasn't just head knowledge thrown at me from studies and peer reviews.

I could feel it in my very being, shaping my patterns and behaviors towards food.”

9:00 - The first principle of mindful eating: eat what you want.

“The first principle that I had to embrace was eat what you want. That one took a few weeks. I was like, ‘But I want to eat cheesecake all the time.’"

When I started mindfully understanding, "What do I want to eat?"

As I started unearthing, what do I truly want to eat? All I got back from my body was static. I had no idea what I wanted to eat. I had no idea.

This was weird because once I started getting through the sugar cravings and starting to become worried about my caffeine addiction and that type of stuff, and as the layers came off, the weirdest stuff started happening to me. Like sugar became too much. I couldn't stomach the amount of sugar and caffeine even. And my body would cap what I would take in per day, eventually per three days, eventually per week, and then per month.

I could literally see my fooding patterns shift because I ate what I wanted to. The very first time in my life, I asked my body, my gut brain, from an mBraining perspective, ‘What do you want to eat?’"

11:33 - The second principle of mindful eating: provide choice.

“It's choice. Food freedom implies choice. You see the thing is, many times when we engage with a diet, or with a prescription, or anything like that, we know from experience, and intuition, and from human history, that the moment we'd remove choice, human beings get weird.

We will push against something purely for the sake that I don't have any other choice, but the moment you give them the choice, they go, "Okay, no, no, I'm fine. I'll follow the way that you wanted to in any case, but don't remove my choice." And that's the point, hey? Is giving back food freedom implies giving back choice.

The moment that sank in, I can choose to eat the ice cream if I want to, then all of a sudden, my body did something weird where it said, "Okay. But no. Now, I want beans."

I'm serious. It's weird. And I'm not making this stuff up. I can't eat as I did before food freedom was introduced and total choice was introduced because I can eat ice cream anytime I like now. It's not going to evaporate. It's not going to run away. Our society is not going to go through a revolution where ice cream is, all of a sudden, banned. Well, I surely hope not.”

13:18 - The third principle of mindful eating: there will always be enough food.

“I don't need to stock up as if there is a famine. It was the weirdest sensation. One evening, I sat journaling, and I was like, "Okay, I've lost about 17 kilograms now. And it's weird because it's sustainable, and I'm not doing anything particularly extra. I've got bean cravings."

And as I was journaling through this, this idea popped up from my parents. My parents got a divorce when I was about seven. And as it turned out, the one parent was the responsible one. The other parent was the more fun one that said, "Come to me every second weekend." And my dad would stock his cupboard with sweets and chocolates, and... And my mom would obviously just buy normal food.

I built in a belief because come Monday, I'm back to not having, back to famine. And that eating pattern perpetuated. The moment freedom and choice was introduced, this weird belief, all of a sudden, surfaced. And as I wrote it in my journal, I could feel my body going through tingles and warming up. It was the autonomic nervous system going haywire. And I burst out in tears where I was like, "I don't need to live like this." And after that, I dropped another 10 kilos. Sustainable because all of a sudden the idea of food abundance was created. There will always be enough food. I can relax. I can let go of the storage. And so, I continued with this because the whole mindfulness thing is recording what you're eating.”

15:44 - Recording your eating does not mean calorie counting

“It's not calorie counting. It's literally writing down your hunger. The hunger scale. Many people are very, very comfortable using it.”

15:55 - The fourth principle of mindful eating: hunger isn’t a bad thing.

“The fourth principle of eating from hunger got cemented into my gut of hunger isn't a bad thing. On the contrary, it's a very natural, normal feeling, and you can eat total food freedom, eat what you want because what you want to eat will shift, in any case.

Eating without guilt, without any shame from hunger, and your body will drop size and weight naturally because it's not the focus. The focus is my relationship with food.”

22:28 - How to find that bliss point

“So, the bliss point also has to do with how comfortable are you in your own skin and with your own identity. That if I struggle to connect with my own identity, I'm going to struggle to connect with true hunger because hunger strips off all the nice and fluff, and it reveals the true us. Right? That's why we've got this practice of fasting in so many religions. It strips us off all the fluff and lays the you bare. And I'm sorry, Western society is not a society that fasts because we don't like being confronted with the you…

And here's the big thing. Food is just the projection of how life is going. So, if you start working on food, life's going to surface. If you start working on life, food is going to become part of... It's all interconnected.”

If you enjoyed this interview and would like to know more about working with Jan, check out Rescript Coaching. You can also find him on Facebook or via email at jan.niemand@rescriptcoaching.com.

Further Reading:

4 Tips on How to Create Meal Plans Your Clients Will Actually Follow

How This Nutritionist Teaches Clients How to Make Daily Decisions for Long Term Success

Why Feeling Calm Matters for Both You and Your Health Coaching Clients

Understanding Body Dysmorphia (& How to Navigate It With Your Health Coaching Clients)

Client Engagement

‍