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Five Truths About Your Brain (And Why It Sometimes Lies to You)
Five Truths About Your Brain (And Why It Sometimes Lies to You)
Natalie Ellis has five kids, a degree in human development, and a podcast called Motherhood Matters, and this conversation started as something for moms and turned into one of the most useful frameworks I've come across for anyone trying to change a habit, food included. Five truths about how your brain actually works, not theory, just brain science, laid out plain.
Truth one: your brain often lies to you. Natalie described a familiar scene: your kid has twenty good things happen at school and one small rude comment, and guess which one they come home talking about? That's the negativity bias, an old survival mechanism from when we genuinely needed to scan constantly for tigers. It's not a flaw in you specifically. It's a flaw built into every human brain, and it applies just as much to how you talk to yourself about a food choice as it does to how your kid processes a school day. The fix isn't pretending the bad thing didn't happen. It's deliberately giving equal airtime to the good, because your brain won't do it for you automatically.
Here's the part I think matters most: beating yourself up after a slip doesn't work, even though it feels like it should. Natalie's reframe is to picture two parts of yourself, a mom brain and a toddler brain. The toddler wants what it wants. A loving mother doesn't scream at a toddler for having a want. She puts an arm around her and says, of course you wanted that, it's okay, let's move forward. Compassion calms the brain down in a way that shame never does, and shame tends to trigger the "well, I already blew it" spiral where one cookie turns into the whole box.
Truth two: whatever you avoid controls you. Natalie used the Encanto reference, the song "We Don't Talk About Bruno," where the entire village spends a whole song not talking about Bruno while talking about nothing but Bruno. Avoidance doesn't make a craving, a hard conversation, or a feeling smaller. It just makes it take up permanent rent in your head. The fix isn't forcing yourself into every uncomfortable situation immediately. It's making a plan ahead of time so you're not spending all day white-knuckling a decision you haven't actually made yet. If you know you're going to a fast food place tomorrow with your family, decide now whether you're having the burger or bringing your own food, and then stop thinking about it. The exhausting part was never the burger. It was the all-day deliberation.
Truth three: you are not who you think you are, you're who you practice being. This comes from James Clear's Atomic Habits, specifically his point that people who successfully quit smoking don't just stop smoking, they stop thinking of themselves as smokers. Every action is a vote for the type of person you're becoming. Natalie's practical tool here is what she calls a bridge thought: instead of "I have no willpower," try "I'm learning so much about how to nourish my body." It doesn't deny where you are. It just leaves room for where you're going.
I told her about a genuinely humbling day of mine: my first time on my own building a blog post on our website, four pages of steps, no husband around anymore to help me figure it out. I said a quick prayer, told myself "I'm not technically inclined, but I'm a smart girl and I've figured out other things," and timed myself. First one took 58 minutes. By the fourth, I was down to 13. Natalie's point: that's identity shifting in real time. You weren't someone who could do that yesterday. You are today, because you practiced it.
Truth four: you're wired for emotion, but built to regulate it. Natalie made an important distinction here. The goal was never to feel nothing. A friend of hers on antidepressants once said the medication helped, but she couldn't cry anymore either, and it broke Natalie's heart a little, because numbing out the bad also numbs out the good. The tool she teaches is the same one I use: name it to tame it. When grief hits, or a craving, or disappointment, just naming it out loud, "this is grief, come and get me, I'm not afraid of you," takes it from a vague, looming thing into something you can actually stare down and let pass through you. It never takes as long, and it's never as bad, as it is when you're avoiding it.
Truth five: you're going to suffer either way, so choose what you suffer for. This one reframed something for me. Suffering isn't optional in life. But which suffering you take on is, at least partly, a choice. You can suffer through the consequences of staying stuck (feeling terrible, getting sick, carrying weight you don't want), or you can suffer through the harder, shorter work of building new habits and sitting with cravings. Both are hard. Only one gets you somewhere. Natalie brought up Corrie ten Boom, who found a silver lining even in a flea-infested Holocaust barracks (the fleas kept the guards away, which meant the women were left alone), as proof that a reframe is available in nearly any circumstance, if you're willing to look for it.
If you take one thing from all five of these: your brain isn't broken, and it isn't fixed by trying harder in the same old way. It's built to run on practice and repetition, in whatever direction you consistently point it. Point it somewhere new, even in small, imperfect steps, and it will follow.
You are not alone. Healing is possible. Your story matters.
You’re not broken, and you’re never alone. If you want ongoing encouragement, practical resources, or a supportive community of women walking this path, join my email list or grab our book, Real Food Recovery: If Food Isn’t the Answer, What’s the Question? And catch our weekly podcast here!
You are strong. You can do this. And we’ll walk it together.
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