Are you ready to redefine your relationship with food? This powerful conversation uncovers how to rewrite your food story, moving beyond diets to a place of true transformation. Join author, speaker, and food story whisperer Michelle Petties, who shares insights from her book, Leaving Large, revealing how emotional eating became a survival tactic and why understanding the “why” behind what we eat is key to a healthier, more conscious life. Discover how separating food from feeling can lead to lasting change, as Michelle challenges common beliefs and exposes the hidden truths behind our eating habits. This episode will empower you to make intentional choices, transforming your relationship with food from a struggle into a journey of self-discovery and lasting well-being.
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What Are You Really Hungry For? A Conversation With Michelle Petties, Author Of Leaving Large, Food Coach
Everybody, I know people are starting to get ready for summer, and then that gets everybody freaked out about, “I don’t look great in a bathing suit. Maybe I’m just sharing some of my own challenges that I have.” What if the key to our future wasn’t just about what we eat, but why we eat it? Are we even thinking about what we’re eating? In this next episode of the show, I sat down with Michelle Petties, who’s the author, speaker, and the ultimate food story whisperer, if you will. Her book is called Leaving Large.
This was something that Michelle tackled after a very successful corporate career, beating sales targets and such. At the age of 60, she thought, “Hold up. I am achieving so many things in other areas of my life, but I just don’t feel good. I don’t feel healthy.” Enter Leaving Large, but Michelle does so much more than just help people manage weight and lose weight. She helps them lose the lies they’ve been told.
They continue to tell themselves about food, hunger, and most importantly, worth. Her book, Leaving Large, is not at all a diet plan. It’s a deeply personal and eye-opening journey through the stories we attach to every bite we take. From soul food to soul searching, we talk about what it means to rewrite your food story, how emotional eating became a survival tactic, and why true transformation starts way before the first forkful.
It’s really about shifting your mindset. Once you realize and understand and comprehend that food is fuel, you’ll realize why sometimes, when you think you’re hungry, you’re thirsty, or really, you’re something else. Before you take that bite, ask yourself that question. Why am I eating? Am I hungry? I’ve got to say that Michelle’s honesty is seriously as nourishing as her wisdom.
Fair warning, she’s going to completely make you rethink your relationship with some of your favorite standbys. Whether you’re getting ready for the summer or you’re trying to figure out a way to, I don’t know, just feel better and healthier, this you will learn a lot from. I cannot urge you to listen all the way to the end, where I give my KB’s takeaways. With that, enjoy the episode.
Beyond The Book: Michelle Petties’ Journey
We’re so fortunate, especially as we go into summer, to be able to spend some time with Michelle Petties, author and food story coach. Welcome to the show.
I am so excited to be here, Kate. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation.
As have I. Let’s just go ahead and jump right in. I know we’re going to spend some time talking about your amazing book called Leaving Large, but before we get there, I’m really curious. It takes courage and grit and all sorts of things to write the book, but tell us a little bit about your journey prior to the book.
Sometimes people will ask me, “How long did it take you to write your book?” I’ll say, “40 years.”
Isn’t that the truth?
That is the truth. That 40 years speak to that time period from the time I was twenty until the time that I was 60, when I struggled. I battled with stress eating, emotional eating, yo-yo dieting, and I didn’t even know what I was fighting. I didn’t even know that was the war. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, quite frankly. I was in this place where I feel like, “I am climbing the corporate ladder. There ain’t nobody in this job that can do this job, can do this work better than I can. I’m the same color, any quota, I’m busting it out. Nobody working harder, ain’t nobody.”
This weight thing, I don’t understand how I can be successful in my career and be a failure, not just feel like a failure, but be a failure when it comes to managing my weight? What is it? What happened for me for all that time, and now I look back on it sometimes, can I get really sad? I think as bad of an ass as I thought I was when I was working before I could do any of that, before I could show up in my career.
Every morning, I had to battle through all these doubts and thoughts about my weight and my body. Not necessarily because of the body shaming, I don’t want to get into that, but just because I didn’t feel like I was being my best. There was something that I hadn’t conquered, and it was weighing on me. It was a burden. It was literally weighing on me. In order for me to do whatever I did to be successful, every morning, I had to work through that stuff first to be able to even be able to show up.
That is exhausting when I think about that in so many ways. I think so many people completely empathize, but the level of oomph that it takes and the self-talk, and also the amount of you feel like you’re letting yourself down. You haven’t been the steward of you, I guess.
For anybody that’s reading, I want to address that. You haven’t been the steward of you, that piece that you said. I’ve never heard anybody say it quite as eloquently as beautifully as you just framed it, but you do feel that. I also want people to know that it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It wasn’t my fault.
We live in a culture that doesn’t give us the tools that we need to manage this. It’s framed and called everything but what it is. For anybody that says and admits and knows I’m an emotional eater, good, it’s a good thing that you know. Many of us are like, “I didn’t even know I was one.” When my doctor said to me, “Michelle, it’s stress. It is stress, and stress will kill you.” I was like, “What do you mean it’s stress? I love my job.”
“I’m doing really well and I’m beating all the quarters and I’m all the fame.”
It didn’t even occur to me that I had a stressful job. How could a job that I love be stressful? Not only that, but that was the only place where I felt secure, where I could perform, because I certainly couldn’t do it when it came to managing my weight. I was leaning into doing the thing that was causing my health to go into decline. I had this realization, Kate, that it wasn’t really what I wanted. What I wanted, what I thought I wanted, was to be able to go into Ann Taylor and buy something off the mannequin and wear it. What I thought I wanted was to be able to go into White House black market and wear that thing. That was my goal.
I want to do that. I want to show up looking like that. Even though I got to the point where I could, after I wrote my book, after I figured this out. I also figured out that wasn’t the goal. What the goal was, not even my health, but my life. That this isn’t what it’s framed as. This is how you eat to protect your life? How do you eat to save your life? How do you eat to thrive? How do you go beyond the lies that are pushed upon us about what food is and what it can do so that we can show up like we’re supposed to show up?
Unmasking Food Lies: Beyond Hunger
Question for you, and spot on on all of that. Let’s talk about some of those lies and stories because obviously those are what way so much upon us both figuratively, but and pun intended for sure. What was the first moment you realized that your relationship with food wasn’t just about hunger? It was when you were talking with your doctor, right?
Even when I was talking to my doctor, I didn’t get it right away. It took a little while. It took a little while for it to set in. I want to talk about the big lie.
I was just going to ask, what were the stories you told about food when you were growing up, or whatever, and how did you end up believing it?
I want to go do the big lie, and then we can go into the tributaries.
Cool.
I want to do the thing that has most people stuck in what I want. I want people to understand. When I am coaching people, when I am talking to people, most people will say, “I’m an emotional eater.” I’m an emotional eater. I eat when I’m stressed. I eat when I’m lonely. I eat when I’m bored. Maybe when I’m sad and a few other things, maybe 5 or 6 things.
Lonely, bored, sad, something else. I’ve done the research. 75% of people admit that they are emotional eaters. They know that that is the problem. They say that is the problem. That’s 75% of people. The reality is that the other 25% are, too. They just don’t know it. Everybody eats emotionally. The reason that everybody eats emotionally is because eating is a behavior.
Eating is an action. Every action, every behavior is driven by an emotion. We have complete ability to manage emotions because emotions are built on thoughts and beliefs. We come to this world believing nothing. We come to this world thinking of nothing. That means everything that we think and believe is something that has been poured into us.
That means that we can pour in different things so that we can believe different things, new thoughts, new beliefs, and then have different emotions as a result of it. That’s on that side. Even if we don’t deal with the 25% of people that don’t admit that they’re emotional eaters or even know it, we just deal with the 75% that say, “I’m an emotional eater,” and that’s a problem for me. Just 75%. What that means is I am looking to food to solve an emotional problem. I know it, but here’s what we don’t hear in this direct language. We don’t hear that the only problem that food solves is hunger. We don’t hear that over and over again.
“The only problem food solves is hunger.” Its only purpose is nutrition and nourishment. Nutrition, nourishment, and energy. Food can do one thing and one thing only. What we get is we get all the programs over here. We get the pills, we get the keto, we get the Atkins, we get the Weight Watchers, we get the Mediterranean. We get all of that. We get all the programs that deal with behavior. We just know, the research tells us that 75% of people say that behavior is not the problem.
They say that thinking is the problem. They say that belief is the problem. We got 75% of people saying, “It is my thinking, my belief, my emotions that are my problem.” The solutions that people are presented with all address behavior, all address food, all address a program, all address appeal, and all address a diet. These solutions will never solve that problem.
It’s because they address the outcome, not the origin, not the source.
Exactly, but people are continually pushed to these solutions that will never solve the problem. As a result, people feel like it’s their fault, that they’re a failure, that they don’t have any willpower, that they don’t have any self-control, that they don’t have any self-discipline. The problem is that the solutions don’t fit what the real problem is.
That then causes stress, which then causes more eating, which then gets that little flywheel going prrr.
Here’s the other thing. They know it.
That’s probably the most frustrating of all.
I didn’t know any of that. I didn’t know any of that when I started on this journey. When I wrote my book in 2021, I didn’t know that the name of my book is Leaving Large: The Stories of a Food Addict. If I had known then what I know now, even what I figured out two years later, the title of the book might’ve been something else. It might’ve been Leaving Larger: Stories of Processed Food Addict.
True.
What I got clear on is that I didn’t have a weight loss problem. I had an addiction problem. You don’t deal with weight loss and addiction in the same way. Addiction changes the brain. That is what I set up in the very beginning of this conversation about emotion being on those side and food being on the other side, because it’s an addiction issue.
You don't deal with weight loss and addiction in the same way. Addiction changes the brain. Share on XWe have to get clear, and I got clear through this process on what food is, not just nourishment and nutrition, but what it looks like, because marketers will tell us that chips are food. They’ll tell us that Twinkies are food. They’ll call it junk food, but food nonetheless. When our bodies are saying, “Feed me, I’m hungry,” we’ll pick up chips and the soda. Our body is saying, “I want some broccoli.”
“Give me something green.”
“Give me something green. Give me some broccoli. Give me some green beans. Give me some good quality protein.” We give it chips and a soda. We know it’s junk food, but we don’t think of it as poison. We don’t think of it as dangerous. We think of it as unhealthy. We put it in that can. We know it is. I shouldn’t be eating this, but I’m going to eat it anyway.
That’s actually true. We don’t think of it as potentially deadly.
No, we don’t. If we start changing our thinking to start viewing these things as potentially deadly because they kill our body’s ability to function at its highest level. That kills our brain’s ability to function at its highest level. Over time, that gives us health problems that we cannot even recognize.
Confronting The Truth: Weight Loss Vs. Addiction
I know that you have said, and you might’ve just said a few minutes ago, that you didn’t have a weight problem, you had a truth problem. What was the truth you were most afraid to tell yourself that it opened up, maybe this, “I’ve got a thing with this, and it’s above and beyond?”
It wasn’t a truth that I was afraid to tell myself. It was a truth that I didn’t know.
You were ignorant, got it.
It was a truth that was obscured. I didn’t know that the reason to eat was nutrition and nourishment. It just didn’t even occur to me because we are conditioned in this culture to eat for appearance, taste, smell, and pleasure. That’s how we make our decisions. You go out to eat, you’ve got your menu. What looks good to you?
We are conditioned in this culture to eat for appearance, taste, smell, and pleasure. That's how we make our decisions. Share on XI was just going to say, too, when I think about it, it’s almost as if certain restaurants are like coffee table books where there’s some people that put things on there that are part of their brand. When you go to certain restaurants, that’s the brand. When you eat that, that’s part of the brand. It’s all those crazy misperceived actions that then result in shame and perfectionism.
Part of this brand thing that you’re talking about, and understand that’s been 40 years in advertising and marketing. We are convinced, we have been taught to make decisions about what we eat based on what I just said, appearance, taste, smell, and pleasure. Boom, over there. As a result of that, it has warped our view of what food actually is. We don’t see it as nutrition. We see it as a status symbol. We eat for status. It becomes social currency. It becomes entertainment. It becomes an activity. It becomes everything but what it is. If we feel like we are lacking in some way in any of those things, then we look for food to fill that.
Fill the void.
It’s a status symbol. It’s that. None of that has anything to do with nutrition and nourishment.
Hearing Your Own Voice: Escaping The Noise
That’s for sure. What finally made you or helped you hear your own voice above all the noise and the blah, blah? I was thinking about that. You and I both share Grey Advertising, I believe. I was going to say it’s true. I hadn’t really thought about just how even working in certain industries, especially in sales, having been in sales, and it’s entertainment, and it’s French food. It’s the culture that is so focused around that connection.
The experience. What I feel like there were a number of pivotal points. This was a defining moment for me. I don’t know if you can tell by listening from me, but I’m from the South. I grew up in Texas. I live in Maryland outside of Washington, DC. Maryland is still the South. A lot of people don’t know that, it really is.
No. We’ve got family.
I grew up in Texas, and I was home years ago on my family farm. I grew up part of the time on a farm, and we were on my uncle’s farm. It was a cookout barbecue, something, and we brought out the watermelon. Black people, barbecue, watermelon. There you go. I said to my uncle, “Billy, do you want some of this watermelon?” He said, “No, I don’t eat watermelon.” It’s okay. I heard him, then I had that same place.
The same place you have. I had that face. “What do you mean you don’t eat watermelon? We’re on your farm.” He’s like, “I just don’t eat it.” I’m like, “Do you mean you don’t like it? Do you mean put some later?” I’m asking these questions, and he just kept saying, “I just don’t eat it.” I’m like, “There’s got to be a reason.” Finally, I wore him down, I broke him down, and so I understand my uncle was like 65, 70 years old right then.
He finally told me that when he was a little kid, he and somebody stole a watermelon from a neighbor’s garden. I’m going to stop right now and say that when my uncle was a little kid, that means he was in 1930s Marshall, Texas, in the segregated South. Let me go there for a second. When my grandfather, his father, found out about it, my grandfather was not happy. Let me stop again. My grandfather was a church trustee, and my grandfather was a railroad worker. Now, the one person that a little kid that just stole the watermelon, just stole anything, does not want to meet is that guy.
True. I can imagine.
When my grandfather found out about it, he beat my uncle. He beat him so severely that my uncle never ate watermelon again. If you’ve ever heard that phrase, “I’ll beat the taste out of your mouth.” He did that.
That was achieved.
Mission accomplished. When my uncle told me that story, Kate, I felt it. Even though I felt this really deep sorrow for him, I asked him a question. Back in the ‘90s, I didn’t even understand the importance of the question that I asked at the time. It wasn’t until I wrote this book that the importance of this question bubbled up. I said to my uncle, “Do you think maybe the lesson was supposed to be thou shalt not steal?”
My uncle said, “I don’t eat watermelon.” That was the end of the conversation. Now, before I go deeper into this, I want to stop and break apart a few things. This is what I call a food story. Our food stories are based on the memories, the events, and the experiences that inform how we interact with certain foods. We all have them. Our food stories impact every food decision that we make, even though we might not even realize it.
Our food stories are based on the memories, events, and experiences that inform how we interact with certain foods. Share on XIf my uncle had been by himself, he wouldn’t have stolen a watermelon. He wouldn’t have just been walking down the street and said, “I’m going to steal this watermelon and eat it.” He was with a group of people. He was with his buddies. It was like, “Let’s do something fun.” This is when food becomes entertainment. Food becomes an activity.
It becomes something exciting to do. I think about myself, the times I’ve said, “Let’s go someplace fun to eat.” They do that. The restaurants create an experience about it. They probably were not even hungry. It was summertime. They were probably hot. They probably just wanted some water. How many times have we eaten before we were actually thirsty, but we didn’t know it?
My mother told me so often that I know that is true. I catch myself that that’s such a statement. You often ask yourself first, “Wait, am I thirsty or am I hungry?” More often than not, you’re either tired or thirsty.
When you ask that question and this question is a key component of my coaching. What you just said, “Am I thirsty or am I tired?” When you ask the questions, when you’re willing to sit with the question and then solve the answer, then the desire to eat goes away. If we’ve got these 75% of people that say that they are emotional eaters, if they’re willing to delve into the emotion, figure out what the emotion is, and answer the emotion.
The desire will desire to eat will go away, but we aren’t taught how to do that. My uncle, so that’s still a watermelon. Now it becomes like a group activity. I know I’ve been at home many times. I’ve been at home minding my own business, reading a book, maybe not reading a book, watching TV. I’m full, not even thinking about food. Somebody calls me and says, “Girl, we’re going out to eat. You want to go?” “Yeah, girl, where are we going?”
Yes. “Want some popcorn, or let’s get some chips. We deserve it.” That’s another one.
People don’t talk about that when they talk about emotional eating, and this all comes up in this story. The other thing I think about when I think about this story is I think about my grandfather. There’s no way my grandfather was going to have anybody thinking that he could not afford to feed his family. He wasn’t going to let it, “Pete Pettis is out stealing food.”
He worked too hard. My grandmother didn’t even work. My grandfather made sure of that. They didn’t call her a stay-at-home mom back in the 1930s, but she was. He wasn’t having to getting around town that his child was stealing because he couldn’t afford to feed them, nor was he going to have anybody saying that he was raising somebody that was a thief. That became a matter of honor.
Exactly, and integrity, yes.
The other thing is, like I said in the beginning, this was 1930s Marshall, Texas. He needed to make sure that my uncle got that lesson and did not steal from the wrong person, somebody that might kill him.
I was going to say that he could live, so he could live.
You might not believe in corporal punishment. You might have whatever your beliefs are, but my grandfather’s thought, I wasn’t there, I don’t know, I wasn’t even born, but I know this, it was about saving his life.
I believe that a 100 gazillion percent. There’s not a doubt in my mind. That’s the wisdom of the times and the context of the times. It seems like it’s an offense, but it’s a relatively simple offense, but in those days, there was nothing simple about any of it.
Not at all.
I would say it hasn’t really changed that much either today.
We’re in that same moment now. We’re in that same moment now with respect to what we eat. What we eat is going to heal us or it is going to hurt us. There is no neutral territory. What we eat is going to kill us or it is going to cure us. It’s not neutral. It’s about saving our lives.
I hear you on this, and I’ve got a question for you because it’s not only the food, the sugar, the food, the chemicals in the food, but now we’ve got all this plastic in the food. There are so many unseen factors. I just want everyone to understand it’s not just about your partially, yes, you’re hypoglycemic or whatever, but it’s so much more beyond sugar and sodium. It’s literally about plastic that’s rained from the sky and the soil. All of the things and the hormones that are causing all of that.
It is the food supply.
Feeding Yourself Differently: Beyond The Physical
True. What are some ways that people can, and I guess playing on the word feeding, way that people can feed themselves differently? That could be, yes, food, or emotionally, spiritually. What do you recommend? How do people start?
I say start with one thing at a time because it is a lot. You can get overwhelmed thinking about it. The reality is that there are some things that we cannot do anything about, but there are some things that we can do something about. The one thing that we can do something about immediately is to start educating ourselves, is to start changing the way that we think. We are so trusting. We’ve got to start questioning everything that we believe about food and how we consume food. We have to assume that it’s a lie.
Is it even my belief, or did I inherit this from somewhere? It could be from an ad or from a friend, or from a family member.
That got it from the marketers and the advertisers. Most of what we know about food and what we eat and why we eat it and when we eat it and how we eat it in the mountain and what and whatnot comes from the people that are selling it, come from the marketers. It comes from them. No, Kate, I’m old enough to remember a time when you would buy a bag of chips, and the bag of chips would be one serving. It would say, a serving is an ounce, and a serving is 150 calories. That’s what it was.
Now they decided that “That’s fine. That’s okay.” That was the standard. Now you go into wherever you go, not that I’m buying it or eating it, but I’m certainly looking at it. You’ll see a bag and the bag will say, “Servings per container, three. Total calories in the bag, 450.” Why is the total calories in the bag? It’s because people eat all three of the servings. They don’t just don’t count out ten chips and eat them. The formulation, the size, the color, the cut, the crunch, the ingredients, all of that, they test and they test to make it so that it is addictive. You try to fight it, and the other thing is it’s not even food.
Food stuff.
When we get the line in the sand for me, Kate, now I’ll go back to that story. When that story bubbled up for me. I was like, “My uncle didn’t eat watermelon because the event was so traumatic. It was so hurtful. It was so painful that he couldn’t separate the event from the food. That’s why he didn’t eat the food.” I said, “The opposite is what’s true for me. It’s when stuff is so pleasurable, so good, I associate with these times, the experiences. I don’t really want the food. I want what the food represents.”
You want that feeling that it brings back. It’s akin to when you hear a song.
Yes, exactly. You want the experience, you want the feeling, you want the association that the food reminds you of. That’s not just me, that’s for everybody. When that became clear to me that I needed to separate the food from the feeling, when it became clear to me that the neuroscientists know that, the neuro marketers know that.
They are constantly creating experiences around food that people can identify with, that people want to lean into, and make the food represent that. That’s why you can eat something that tastes like crap. That’s why you can eat stuff that’s not nutritious. That’s why you can eat stuff that will kill you eventually, because the picture of the experience is so powerful.
That’s why when everyone, of course, also now has the Wheaties box cover, you have influencers who are now, “So and so eats blah, blah, blah.” The truth is they may, but especially if it’s a professional athlete. They’re not eating it, and they’re also working out like crazy, but more of they’re getting paid to eat it. They’re not eating a full serving. Thank you. One chip friend. Not all nineteen.
I got to tell you something. I do something, Kate, called a Mind Over Meals Retreat. It’s an eight-day online retreat where I tell people the truth about why they eat what they eat. I have one coming up. I’m not sure exactly when I’m going to do it, but I have one coming up on advertising. I spent a lot of time in airports. I saw this picture of somebody in an airport. It was like just a cute model girl with a hamburger and French fries. The burger was just up to her mouth. She hadn’t even bitten into it. She wasn’t going to bite into it. It was just up to her mouth, and she was smiling.
Unhealthy Habits: Questioning Common Practices
I will never forget one of my first jobs in advertising was that I had to go to a food shoot, which is a whole other thing for anyone who’s ever gone to them, where they design and they craft and swirl the whipped cream, which is really just whipped Crisco to a certain angle. The cherry makes a difference if the stem is to the right or to the left. There’s such a science behind all of it. You’re absolutely right. It’s what takes you away from where you are to where you think you potentially want to be. What’s one healthy habit that isn’t healthy, speaking of tales we’ve been told?
How about drinking water with your meal?
Unpack that one a little bit.
This is one reason why I say, “We need to question everything.” Why do people drink water with their meals?
People are told to drink the water with the meal. If you drink it before, it’ll fill you up and you won’t eat as much.
Not before, with your meal.
With your meal. To wash the food down. Think about that, everyone. It just gave me the answer right there, so you can have a little more.
It means you’re not chewing it. It means it goes down more quickly. If it goes down more quickly because you’re not chewing it as much, that means it’s taking it longer for your brain to register that you are full. If you don’t have water and you chew your food longer, that means you’re going to eat more slowly, giving your brain enough time to understand that you are full. Here’s the other thing, our bodies, our stomachs have something called digestive juices, which help us digest the food. When we drink the water while we’re eating, the water dilutes the digestive juices, and your digestion is not as efficient.
The Book’s USP: A New Approach To Food
That’s the thing I love. Talk a little bit about the book. What are some of the key things that you think will be the most helpful in terms of that makes it different than all the other? What’s its USP, being an advertising person?
Here’s the thing. For 40 years, I tried to lose weight and keep it off. I couldn’t figure out what to do. If they had had the GOP back in the ‘80s and the ‘90s when I was doing this, I would have taken. I went to my first bariatric doctor, and I didn’t even know what a bariatric doctor was in 1980. I went on my first 500-calorie diet with medication then and tried it over and over, and always gained it way back.
When I went to the doctor this last time, I did go to a doctor for this final round, but I did a couple of things differently. First of all, I prayed. Whether you’re a praying person or not, you’ve got to get to this place where your mind is open to that you don’t know or understand. That was my prayer. “Help me understand what I don’t know about this. There is something that I’m missing because I have got to get off this hamster wheel.” I let that set.
I let that settle with me. When the doctor gave me the plan, when she gave me the shots, Kate, I knew I would be able to do it because I had done it many times before. It wasn’t an issue for me whether or not I would be able to stick to the plan and lose weight. The issue was that I need to understand. I need to figure out, I need to be able to maintain this. I took it and I went along. I was going along, losing weight, everything’s moving along fine.
This question is still out there. There came a time during the course of this journey where I wanted to eat. I thought to myself, “Why do I want to eat right now?” I was 60 years old. I had never asked myself that question. “Why do I want to eat right now?” When I asked myself that question, that’s when my uncle’s story, what I call the watermelon story, that’s when bubbled up. After that story came to my consciousness, I did something else.
I went to Google and I looked up the definition of food. That’s why I’m so deaf on it now. I had been eating for 60 years. I’d never looked up the definition of food. I looked it up, and there it was nutrition, nourishment, energy. I’m like, “Its purpose is just fuel.” It became clear to me that what I had been doing for decades was unconsciously eating too much of the wrong stuff for the wrong reasons. Unconscious, wrong stuff, wrong reasons. I figured out that I needed to do two things.
In the past, I would get a diet plan, and my immediate thought was, “What can I have and how much of it can I have? What and how much can I have?” Those are the two things. I never focused on consciousness. I never focused on the reason. When I started working on the consciousness, getting aware, and the reason is that 75% that we first talked about, everything shifted in my world. It’s completely shifted in my world. Being armed with that information, just those things. It started to give me a blueprint to follow that led to my own empowerment around food that was beyond a particular diet or a particular program.
It transcended all of that.
It transcended all of that because it started to deal with a belief system. It started to deal with thinking. It started to deal with understanding. When you fundamentally change what you think and believe about food, your body has to follow. When you change your thinking, that’s why I say relationship with food. That’s why I don’t say disordered eating, because it is not. It is a thinking problem.
When you fundamentally change what you think and believe about food, your body has to follow. Share on XWhen we change our minds, when we change our beliefs, when we change our thinking, our bodies have to follow, and it is no longer a struggle. It is no longer a battle. You don’t have to worry about gaining the weight back because your thoughts are transformed. That’s why, I don’t have children, but I watch a bunch of babies. That’s why we don’t have adults crawling because once you learn how to walk, you don’t go back to crawling because your thoughts about how you move in this world are completely different.
You also got that understanding piece, you comprehend, which goes back to the beginning of our conversation of what the issue is and what an intelligent solution would be. It would make it so obvious. If it’s really this, the last thing I have to do is do that because that has nothing to do with this. There’s no relation, no correlation whatsoever. It would be forever in it. You couple that with asking yourself the question, “Why am I eating right now? What am I doing?” It goes back to being conscious and being present where you are, not necessarily in a juju way. Not that that’s bad either, but just here understanding what you’re with intentionality.
BRAND NEW Thinking: The Power Of Questions
Kate, I have this framework that I use, it’s called BRAND NEW. You have the brand new thinking to manage food with a level of mastery and skill that is brand new. What we’re talking about with the questions is the E in BRAND NEW, which is Evaluate, ask, and think. Who is ever listening to me, if you don’t get anything away from this conversation, write this down because it is Evaluate, Ask, and Think. It’s EAT. That’s the acronym. We have got to question everything we put in our mouths. I do it to this day.
Before I put anything in my mouth, I have a series of questions that I ask. First of all, is it really food? Is it safe? How do I know it’s safe? There’s plenty of stuff they sell in restaurants, there’s plenty of stuff they sell in grocery stores, no shade on Whole Foods, but there’s plenty of stuff in there that will kill you. Is it safe? Why do I think it’s safe? Do I trust the source? Am I hungry, or am I something else? Not just am I bored, lonely, tired, or sad, am I frustrated? How about that? Am I feeling jealous that somebody’s eating something that tastes better than mine? How about that?
That is such a true thing.
Am I curious about what something tastes like? Am I afraid that I’m missing out on something by not having this? There are at least 52 other emotions that I teach people how to identify that are attached to the food that we never even hear about. Am I hungry, or am I something else? If this food will not give me, not just the body I say I want, but the life, the health, if it’s not going to give me that, why am I eating it?
First, we have to figure out what body life and health we want. A lot of people don’t even know what that is. A lot of people don’t even think they deserve that. They’ve never seen it. They’ve never felt it. We have been unhealthy for so long. We don’t even know what it looks or feels like. We don’t. We have been duped. When you’re in the darkness, sometimes you don’t even know you’re in the darkness until you just get a little glimmer of light and you’re on the other side and you’re like, “Is that what it looks like?”
Those questions, it sounds like a lot, but after you practice, you can go through them all in about two seconds. What those questions do is they empower you in a moment to make a different choice. They empower you to make decisions that are rooted in nutrition and serving your body and your mind on a higher level, rather than in a place that is from a space of addiction.
Connect With Michelle Petties: Retreats And Resources
I want to make sure. If people want to go and want to take a look at your retreat and hopefully participate, and if not in this one, in future ones, how best do they get in contact with you? Your website?
My website is MichellePetties.com. My book is Leaving Large: The Stories of a Food Addict. If you just go to LeavingLarge.com, put in your information, I will send you a free chapter. When you get that free chapter, that will now get you on my mailing list, which will tell you about all of my upcoming retreats and other workshops that I do.
Everyone, you can also get the book to Amazon, I’m assuming.
You can get it from Amazon. If you can get it from Amazon, you can get it anywhere. You can get it directly from me. If you get it directly from me, then I will sign it. I will sign it and send it to you. If you reach out to me on my social media is @Iambrandnewnow. You can reach out to me on my website if you’re interested in having me conduct a workshop. I do what I call healing through reading, writing, and storytelling because Kate, that is the secret sauce to retraining and reclaiming your brain.
When I teach you visualization, the affirmations, the meditation, and the prescriptive writing, which is writing for healing. This addiction and obesity issue that we’re dealing with is a disease. It’s a disease, and we can heal from it. We can heal from it through those four things that allow us to reclaim our brains so we can make decisions that serve us on a higher level and keep us armed up against this toxic, not just this toxic food environment, but this toxic emotional environment that we have not over time been given the tools to manage.
This addiction and obesity issue that we're dealing with is a disease. It's a disease, and we can heal from it. Share on XThat’s heightened across every every possible system that we’re involved in engaged with even what I’ve been working with my daughters on a lot is “If you’re sensing you’re upset you’re angry you’re sad wake up and you’re trying to figure out what the heck, ask yourself is this even mine?” It got picked up because being very empathetic, that’s a natural thing to do, and then slow you roll, and then I can imagine how these practices that you have would help people. I just want to say gear up, suit up for the day, not in armor, but in a suit of light. It can just help you take a few steps away from the seeming dark stuff.
I love that. I’m going to use that suit up.
Please do. Michelle, thank you so much. I could talk more and more with you. Thank you on behalf of all women advancing this readers that will be picking it up and for all the ripples effect that that’s going to make. Thank you for everything that you’re doing to heal everybody and help us all learn how to forgive ourselves and perhaps some of the others who have think some of these thoughts and aren’t necessarily ours.
Thank you, Kate, so much for this conversation, holding space for this platform because we need it for sure.
Thank you.
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Talk about food for thought, but a bunch. Sorry. Very bad. Michelle Petties, a lot of wisdom there. There are so many different directions I could take this. To me, the three key takeaways were this notion of food stories and how we can get a little bit lost in a reverie. First off, food is a way of empowerment, and how it’s about by understanding our relationship with food it’s an extraordinary opener to empowerment.
I’m not talking about getting control, not talking about any of that. It’s just really understanding the emotions and the triggers at the very core of when we find ourselves running away or getting lost by eating, and also by non-eating. Michelle shares this notion of questions to ask, and her framework is really the acronym is EAT. It’s Evaluate, Ask, and then Think about why you’re doing these things and what you can be doing.
The third was some of these things, beliefs, myths that we think are healthy practices, actually aren’t necessarily. One of them being, which blew my mind, drinking water along with your meal. If you drink it before, A, great, that’s probably the best time to do it because it does help fill you up. If you’re doing it with your meal, you’re ending up diluting your digestive juices that are in your stomach that break down the food, which means you’re also more likely to eat a whole bites which slows down your brain saying well we’re full which of course would stop you from eating as much so.
I think in so many ways it’s a disservice to think that this is all just about how do I get thin and all that, but it’s how do I really step into my power? How do I become a better steward for myself and support myself? By doing so, how can I get to where I want to get to? Thanks so much for reading, and I look forward to the next time we get together.
Important Links
- Michelle Petties
- Michelle Petties on LinkedIn
- Michelle Petties on X
- Michelle Petties on YouTube
- Michelle Petties on Instagram
- Leaving Large: The Stories of a Food Addict
About Michelle Petties
Michelle Petties illuminates the profound connections between food, emotion, and identity through her transformative work as a Food Story coach and TEDx speaker. After decades of battling emotional overeating and experiencing dramatic weight fluctuations totaling over 700 pounds gained and lost, she discovered that lasting change comes not from another diet, but from rewriting the stories that drive our eating behaviors.
Her award-winning memoir, Leaving Large – The Stories of a Food Addict, transcends typical weight-loss narratives to offer a compelling exploration of how memory, cultural inheritance, and emotional wounds—rather than physical hunger—shape our relationship with food. The book serves as both a personal testament and a universal guide to healing and wholeness.
Drawing on her extensive background in media sales and leadership at Radio One, Disney/ABC, and NPR/PBS member stations, Michelle harnesses the power of storytelling as a catalyst for transformation. Through workshops, retreats, and her ebook Mind Over Meals, she guides others to uncover their food truths, rewire limiting thought patterns, and create sustainable change from within.