150. Why I still eat overnight oats

Today I had a surprising realisation over breakfast. It turns out, I still love overnight oats. I first discovered them during my Slimming World days. So why am I still eating them now, years after letting go of food rules and diet plans? Because I actually enjoy them, and I think that’s worth talking about a little bit.

This episode explores how we can reclaim foods from our dieting past, how some meals still serve us, and how others (like pasta salad!) might be worth revisiting in a whole new way. If you've ever questioned why you eat what you eat, or avoided something that reminds you of old diet habits, this one’s for you.

What You’ll Hear:

• Why it’s okay to enjoy a food you discovered while dieting
• How to tell if a food is serving you now, or just sticking around from habit
• Foods we avoid because they trigger diet culture memories
• Reclaiming and reinventing old meals on your own terms
• How to tune into satisfaction instead of rules

Let’s Chat!
Do you still eat foods from your dieting days? Or have you avoided something you might actually love? I’d love to hear your story. Send me a message, or tag me on socials!

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Transcript

0:09

Welcome to the Intuitive Eating and Body Positivity podcast. I'm Terri and I'll be talking about all things intuitive eating, body positivity, and health at every size. And shaking off weight stigma, diet, culture, and food rules so that we can all have a better relationship with food and our bodies. Alright, my lovely, the sun is shining. It is a beautiful day. The washing is out. It's good drying weather. Are you like me and have some serious satisfaction from putting washing out on the line? Honestly, I love it. I love doing the washing. I love the washing drying. I love the washing basket being empty. I don't love ironing. And that's the problem when you stop using the tumble dryer, isn't it? Everything comes out the tumble dryer, relatively crease free. Things do not come off the washing line crease free. I suppose that is the price that we have to pay for having good weather though, right? It's so lovely outside. The clocks have changed here. So now it definitely feels more spring-like and like we're going in summer. I love it. I love it so much. So brace yourself.'cause you know that when summer comes round, every episode I start it with, oh my goodness, it's such a lovely day. Oh, it's so hot outside. It's just so nice. I get so, um, what is the word? What is the word I get? I get a real feel good vibe. When the sun is out, I really appreciate being out in the air and in the sun, and it really makes me feel good, like physically feel good as well. So I'm excited for this. Yay. Let's have a little cat update. Honestly. Will I ever have a cat that's not broken in some way? I don't think I will. I think we are destined to always have broken cats. Luna has been with us 12 months next month. How mad is that? Does it not feel like two minutes ago that I was telling you that she'd just come to live with us? We are still not much further forward in the anxiety stakes, though she is still very, very nervous. Somebody sent me a message after the last episode where I talked about her and do you remember I said. If you had any suggestions, please give them to me. How can I make her less nervous? How can I make her less anxious? And somebody sent me an idea for a supplement that you can put in their food. I looked it up. I don't think I can get it here in the uk, which is a real shame. But I'm gonna have to call the vets this week and ask them if there is anything I can give her, because I realized that in the diary for this Thursday. Is her vaccinations now. We haven't yet managed to pick her up. We cannot pick her up and cuddle her. She will come and sit by us on the sofa. She'll put her head on our laps. That's lovely. Will she come and stand on us? No, she will not. Last night I thought I'm going to do a bit of a trial run. Ahead of Thursday, I'm gonna see if I can pick her up and whether it'll be possible to put her in the carrier. So she was all settled on the sofa, and I came up behind the sofa and she looked at me and I went to pick her up. And there was a split second where she went, what the hell? And froze. And then she went, what the hell? And. Well, she pretty much tore my skin to shreds trying to get away from me. I have got scratches across the top of my chest. I've got scratches on my arm. Honestly. She spun around in some weird kind of 360 degree thing, you know. Cats have got no kind of middle, have they? Their, their hind legs can be facing a completely different direction to their front legs. It's quite amazing. I dunno how they do it. If I tried to contort myself like that, we would be in hospital. But needless to say, she can do that.'cause as she spun herself around, she put her claws in every part of my body that she could get them into. It was painful. Took me back to Tilly and when we had all that drama with her, remember that? So I think I'm gonna have to ring the vet and ask if there's anything that I can give her to calm her down.'cause otherwise she's not going to the vets this week. I can't get her in the carrier. Absolutely not. And. That means that she can't go outside 'cause she can't go outside if there's no vaccinations. And she would love to be out in the sun I'm sure.'cause she lives on the front room window sill where there is loads of sun and it's warm and lovely. So wish me luck people, if you have any more ideas, I'm all ears. I'm, I'm, I'm up for it. Whatever, just I'll try anything right now. There is a thing called Pet remedy, which is like a spray. It's a calming spray. I will use that. I don't know if it's enough. I am also today gonna order some of those plugins. You know, you can get plugins that put this stuff out into the air and calms them down. I'm gonna get some of that too. I don't hold out much hope for this being a solution for Thursday, though we will see. Hopefully the vet will say, here's a sedative. Stick it in her food. She'll be drugged up and you can bring her in. Ugh. Any who? Any who? I'm sat drinking bubble tea. In other news. Do you like bubble tea? I only discovered it probably 12 months ago, but I love it. If you dunno what it is, it's basically an iced tea. And then you put these bubbles in called Boba and they're like little syrupy bubbles and you have to have quite a fat straw because you suck these bubbles up through the straw with the tea, and then they pop in your mouth and it's lovely. So yeah, that's what I'm drinking while I'm talking to you today. Bubbly goodness. This morning I started having my breakfast and I had overnight oats. If you don't know what that is, it's basically oats shock and yogurt, probably a bit of milk and some fruit or you know, whatever you choose to put in with it. So I like to have a chopped up banana and some seeds and, um. What else? I have a flavored yogurt, so I don't need to put much else in, but I might chop up some other fruit or something depending on how I feel changes day to day. Some days I put peanut butter in it. It really does depend how I'm feeling, but basically it's oats, milk and yogurt, and then whatever flavors and extras you wanna add in. Some people make them the night before, hence the name overnight. Oats, I don't, I tend to just eat them. Pretty much straight away, so I just make them and eat them. I don't need to leave them overnight. I think it changes the texture if you leave it overnight. Anyway, this dish, this breakfast, is something that I found when I was doing Slimming World. It was a breakfast that I found was filling, satisfying, tasty. I've got a sweet turf. I could make it a sweet thing. Yogurt's quite sweet by nature anyway, isn't it? I think. And it became a go-to breakfast for me when I was on Sliming World. I ate a lot of it and I really love it. I really loved it. Now, since my slimming world days, I've done an awful lot to untangle the food rules and to get rid of things that don't serve me food wise. All those little things, like you can only have a small matchbox size piece of cheese, you know, that sort of rule. I've done a lot of work to get rid of that, and along with that is things like you can have so many grams of oats, which in my head I always think equates to the lid of a fry light bottle. Yeah. Remember them? We've always got these funny little ways of measuring, haven't we? And that was mine. So for Overnight Oats it was a little, the, the lid of a fry light bottle that equated to the right amount of oats for the Slimming World Plan. I've done some really hard work on trying to get rid of those thoughts and feelings and when I was sat eating my breakfast this morning, I thought, you know, I really actually. Love this breakfast. I'm not eating it because I'm supposed to. I'm eating it because I want to. I'm eating it because this morning, that is what I need to eat. That's what I feel like I want. It's what I feel like will satisfy me. And then this kind of spark the thought for me of what foods are we still eating or what foods are we avoiding because of dieting history. When we're on a diet like Slimming World or Weight Watchers, a lot of foods get labeled in our minds as safe or free or on plan. You know, there's things like ti, remember coi, spaghetti spiralized, this, that, and the other N percent yogurts. Really lean meat. So buying a 5% mince maybe instead of a 15 or a 20% fat mince, that sort of thing. Sweetener in everything, not sugar. There's lots of different things that are safe and free when we're on plan. Also, things like pasta, rice. Potatoes, those sort of things. They're all given to us as these foods that are safe for us to eat. And then when you're a bit more experienced on your diet plan, there's the idea of meal tweaking, right? So we would turn certain foods that we should be counting into other things because then. We've got something different to eat that vaguely resembles the thing that we actually want to eat. So I remember making tortilla chips out of lasagna sheets. No, they did not represent actual tortilla chips. They did not the same way that roasted chickpeas. Did not taste like nuts. They didn't, but we did these things because, because we needed the stuff that we were missing out on. Now, diet plans and diet clubs, they encourage repetition, right? They encourage certain combinations of food, certain quantities of food. How many times were you told to put cottage cheese in something because it was an alternative and a safe alternative. What about pastas? What about, oh, cork. Do you remember cork? Oh, now I quite liked cork, but only if I put an absolute shed ton of sweetener in it because then it tasted like a nice, sweet yogurty thing. A bit like a Greek yogurt or a high protein yogurt, but it was not. It was this stuff that's supposedly free and I'd put more free stuff in it to make it palatable. Diet plans though, are all right with this. They encourage you to do these things. They encourage you to eat all of these foods, and it's all for this end goal of calorie restriction. Basically, that's what these plans are all based around now. When I look back, how much of that, how much of what I ate on that plan was about the enjoyment of the food and how much was it about compliance with the plan? Chickpeas roasted in the oven to create a nut replica, definitely for me was about compliance. Tortilla chips made outta lasagna sheets, definitely about compliance. Turning yogurts into ice cream in an ice cream maker. Definitely about compliance. I didn't want any of those things. There was no enjoyment there for me. Oh no. Hang on. I can see out the window. My neighbor's about to start mowing her lawn, so if you can hear it in the background for the rest of this episode, apologies. Not within my control. Hopefully I'll find a way to edit it out though. So that will be all good. And you can ignore this last 30 seconds of bumbling. Anyway, back to the food. Much of what I was eating was about compliance. However, things like the overnight oats, that was about enjoyment. When I was on the plan, it was about compliance, obviously, but definitely also about the enjoyment. I had that breakfast all the time, and I'm not a person who likes to have things repetitively, so I really, really enjoyed those oats, and that's why I kept having them when I was on the plan. I'm having them now. I enjoy them. So there are things possibly if you look into what you like to eat that have been introduced to you through dieting, but that you actually genuinely like now, things like fake aways are another one for me. Remember the whole fake away thing. Don't have a takeaway from the Chinese or the Indian or the pizza place. Here, here's a recipe. Create this instead. And there was a way to make these meals that tasted like you'd got them from the Chinese or the Indian. I remember Slimming World having an actual book called Fake Aways. There was some really good recipes in there. I'm not gonna lie, I don't still have that book. I got rid of the dieting books a long time ago. But I really, really like some of those recipes. There's an old chicken pie. No, there is not an old chicken pie. There is a recipe, an old recipe for a chicken pie that I continue to make. It comes from a very, very old Weight Watchers book. I think the book came from my mom actually. I love this pie so much that now it is the pie in our house. It's known as the pie. My daughter has the recipe for the pie. She doesn't know that it comes from a Weight Watchers book. I mean, she might do if she listens to this. I dunno if she listens or not, but, huh. Surprise, love it comes from a Weight Watchers book, but I don't stick to the Weight Watcher side of it now. So instead of using a skim milk, I'll use the milk that we have, that sort of thing. Um, but the pie is a prime example too. I genuinely love it, so I will continue to eat it. It just feels different now because there's no rules attached to it. So I don't weigh and measure my portion size when I put it on my plate. I don't measure my oats when I make my overnight oats in the morning, that sort of thing. I'm not writing down what I'm eating, I'm not counting the calories, that sort of thing. So it's actually okay. To enjoy food that used to be a diet food. If you are eating it from a place of freedom, that's what I want this episode to bring to mind for you. It is okay to eat foods that used to be diet foods. There is a really good question that you can ask yourself if you are questioning whether you are coming at this from a diet place or from an enjoyment place, then the. Question you can ask yourself is, would I eat this? If there were no rules attached to it overnight, oats, would I eat them? If there were no rules attached, yes I would. Chickpeas in the oven and lasagna sheets turned into tortilla chips. Would I eat those if there were no rules attached to them? No. I absolutely would not. I would have a bag of nuts and I would have a bag of tortilla chips. So if you are eating it in places of something else, or if you're eating it with rules attached to it, then you're still in a diet place without food. But it is okay to still have these diet foods that you used to be eating on your diet plan if it comes from a place of freedom. Maybe it's going the other way though. Maybe you are avoiding. Foods that used to be diet foods. A big one for me is things like pasta salad and rice salad. Oh, I can't tell you how many times I used to eat those meals on Sliming world and I would eat them for lunch all the time because. I've got a big appetite. I've always had a big appetite, and a pokey little salad at lunchtime is not going to sustain me for the afternoon. It is not gonna satisfy me while I'm eating it. I'm not gonna put my lunch box away thinking, God, I really, really enjoyed that today. Pasta salad, rice salad, that sort of thing became a necessity because it was filling. I could make it kind of enjoyable. I did like pasta. I did like rice, and it just became something that that made me feel like I'd had a lot of food or enough food while still being completely on pan.'cause all of this stuff is free. Remember, you can have as much pasta as you like. You can have as much rice as you like, and then you check the stuff in it that's free and you can have as much of that as you love. That now means that now I don't love pasta salad anymore. I don't love rice salads anymore. And they can be really tasty, can't they? But every time I have pasta with a bit of lowfat mayo in it and some chopped up salad veg, like some peppers. It's some cucumbers, and chuck some sweet corn in and tin tuna. I'm right back to dieting space. I'm right back there. So when it's things like this, we need to reclaim it. We need to do things in a way that feels new and satisfying. Changing in ingredients up the pasta salad, for example. Maybe I could make it with a little bit of olive oil with some full fat cheese on the top, you know, with sprinkling a greater cheese on it. Maybe I could put a really nice dressing on it. Maybe I could chuck some avocado in there. Oh, don't eat avocado on Slimming World. No, no, no. But maybe for this salad, maybe I'll put it in maybe a few toasted nuts or something. I don't know. There's lots of ways to mix it up so that now it feels like a really enjoyable meal, not an old basic dieting meal. Also, changing where you eat it or how you eat it is a really good way to make it feel less. Diary. So I might take my lunch out and sit in the sun today. That would be nice just for the enjoyment of it. And then maybe that pasta salad feels a little bit nicer because I've got a few different ingredients in there and I'm sat out in the sun, and that doesn't remind me of dieting, and I'm not gonna eat it out of a scabby old Tupperware box. You know, with a, with a sticker on it that says how many syns it had in it, or how many calories it's got in it, I'm gonna have it on a nice plate or in a nice dish. Or if I am out and about or I've gone somewhere else to work, then maybe I've got a really nice lunchbox and a really nice set of cutlery with me, you know? There's lots of ways to make it more pleasurable rather than old diety behaviors. And I particularly love adding back the things that diets used to restrict. This is very much a rebellion thing, obviously, but that's what diets do to us. But adding in things like that. Aca add, add A what? Avocado the nuts. Some croutons, maybe. Full fat mayo if that tastes better. That sort of stuff. Putting those things back in is an act of rebellion. Yeah. But it's also a way of getting enjoyment from the meal you're about to eat. So if you've got these meals that you don't go anywhere near anymore or you do, but they just bring back all these dieting thoughts, then ask yourself, what can I do to make this food mine again? What can I do to make this food feel like my choice again? What can you add in? What can you take out that you don't enjoy? How can you mix it up? It's all right to feel weird and conflicted about all this, right? Especially if you are early on in your journey as well. This stuff really takes time. But you know, here I am years down the line and I'm still, when I'm putting my oats in my bowl in the morning going, oh, would this be more or less than a cap full of oats? It just, it's ingrained in there. It just happens. Okay, so it's all right if you feel a bit weird and a bit conflicted by this stuff. You just have to acknowledge it, right? You hear these messages, you hear your thoughts, and you go, I know where this comes from. Moving right on, please. Now it's about building trust in your choices. Checking in when you are deciding what to eat. Do I actually enjoy this? Am I satisfied when I eat this? Would I choose this again tomorrow if I wanted to, because I enjoy it so much. It is all about finding your way, rebuilding, trusting your preferences, not what somebody else is teaching you to eat, not somebody else's plan, not somebody else's ideas of what's right and wrong food-wise. You've gotta rebuild your own trust, your, your faith in your yourself to be able to make the right choices for you. So if you are in a place where you are doing a bit of work on yourself around this stuff. Here's some stuff that I invite you to mull over. Think about foods that you currently eat that came from dieting, and then ask yourself if you genuinely enjoy it or if you are eating it because it's come from dieting and you still feel like you should eat it. Are there foods that you are not eating because they are kind of trigger foods and make you think of dieting? And in which case, can you try it again in a new way? What can you add back in? It's okay for you to like what you like, right? You are allowed to like whatever you like. You don't really have a choice in this stuff. You like things that you like, you can't, well, I don't know if you can teach yourself actually to like other foods, but you just have the tastes that you have. I tried teaching myself to like coffee once when I was 16, I had an apprenticeship and I was working with a girl who loved coffee and she would make the tea round and she'd be like, oh, can you have coffee? Because I don't like making tea. And so I tried to like coffee, but I just couldn't. I just don't like it. It's just never gonna be a thing for me. And actually still to this day, it's, I think it's a real shame that I don't like coffee because there are so many coffees out there that look so lovely. A nice cappuccino or a latte or something. You know, something from a coffee shop. When you walk into a coffee shop, there are so many choices on the menu. This coffee, that coffee, this flavor, this topping. What do I have when I go to a coffee shop? A cup of tea or a juice or, I mean, you know, it's not, woe is me. It doesn't really matter. But some days I wish I liked coffee. So you are always gonna like what you like is my point. Your tastes are your tastes. You can't really change them. As far as I know. Don't quote me on that, but it's your body. It's your taste buds. It's your rules. Okay? It doesn't matter what other people say you should eat. You need to eat what you like and know that it's okay to like whatever it is that you like. Does that make sense? Message me. I'm so intrigued to know. What it is that still sat around from old dieting days like this for you? You know, do you have lunches that you don't eat anymore? Do you have breakfasts, evening meals that you will never eat ever again because you can't bear the thought of it taking you back to dieting days? Or do you have meals that you discovered in dieting days and now you love them so much you're still eating them? I'd love to know what those things are for you. You can go to the show note and there is a text, the show option, and that's a nice little feature because you can just text me and I will get it. And there's also a link to my WhatsApp there. You can WhatsApp me, but I'd love to hear it. I'd love to hear what those food hangups are for you and you know what you've left behind and. What you'd like to start eating again? Maybe, you know, do you have the same sort of thing as the pasta that I have? And you'd love to find a new way, a new way of eating it. Maybe I've inspired you today to make a change. Maybe you do try a new pasta and you're like, God, this is the best thing ever now. And then you wanna tell me about it? Well, tell me about it.'cause then I've got some ideas as well for. Different things. I can chuck in my pasta, but yeah, why not get in touch? I really like that. I'd really actually like to create a section of this show that is just your thoughts, your comments, your feedback. I listen to another podcast and they've got this sound off section it is called, and it's all just messages from listeners talking to them about things that have come up while they've been listening to an episode or whatever. Um, I think they also ask a question each week, so they're, they have a sound off question. Well, this would be my sound off question for you this week. What foods have you left behind because you can't stomach them anymore after dieting, or what are you still eating that you love so much even though you found it in your dieting days? There we go. That's my question for you this week. Drop me some messages and I will do a section in the next episode. How's that? Does that sound good? I'd love that. Right? I'm gonna love you and leave you gonna go create myself a lunch and sit out in the sun with it. Have a really, really lovely week, and I'll speak to you soon, Tara.