Episode 143 – Myths About Long Term Relationships with Marjena Moll
One of the longest relationships you’ll have in your life is the one you have with food, and that’s why my dear friend and colleague, Marjena Moll, joined me in this conversation. I can’t tell you how excited I am to show you all the connecting pieces between our relationships with our spouses and our relationship with food. You’ll be amazed.
Marjena is a coach from the Netherlands and this is one of the first places where she shared her wisdom, brilliance, and genius in English. I am so proud to host her in the podcast and on the blog!
Marjena’s focus is on helping women lovingly redefine their relationship with food and lose weight without dieting.
We also talked about some of the myths about long term relationships, including how they apply to both marriage and changing your relationship with food, and how to make sure they aren’t keeping you stuck.
Let’s dive right in.
Why Marjena is passionate about changing your relationship with food
Marjena’s origin story is one that I know will resonate with so many of us, especially those of us that grew up socialized as women and who had mothers who engaged in diet culture.
“At the age of 14, I went on a diet, not because I was terribly overweight, but my body just changed from being girly to female.
I grew breasts and hips, and I thought that that meant that I was overweight. And since I had a mom who was always dieting, I thought, ‘Hey, it’s like a rite of passage.’ My brother starts shaving his face, I go on my first diet. That put me on the path of restriction, and I became obsessed with my weight and I became obsessed with food.
In my early twenties, I had to find another way – which took me many years. But I figured out I could create an amazing relationship with food. It’s become a movement, and that’s what my teaching has become, and what I offer people who are dissatisfied with their relationship with food.”
Whether it’s with your spouse or with food, focusing on the problem doesn’t solve the problem
I’ve heard so many people talk about the body, how you eat, and all these different words, but the way Marjena talks about it, I can tell she’s a relationship coach. Where I deal with the marriage relationship, she deals with the food relationship.
The connection Marjena made between resistance and attraction was one of my favorite insights of the podcast.
“In all those years where I was restricting and dieting, my mental focus was solely on the things that I no longer wanted. The fat that I wanted to get rid of, eating that I wanted to get rid of, and my lack of control that I had to solve.
But what happens when you create attraction towards the things that you do want?
What do those things look like below the surface level of the scale? How do I want my relationship with food to feel? That opened up a whole new territory for me.”
One of the myths about long term relationships is that focusing on the problem solves the problem.
As you may know, I practice solution-focused coaching. And the analogy I like to use is how Formula One drivers operate. They’re going 200 miles per hour, and they have to look where they’re going because wherever they look, their body follows, and the car follows.
But we’re the drivers of the car of our lives, and looking backward does not get us to the finish line.
Marjena said, “When it comes to food and we’re very much restricting, our brains become so afraid of overeating – of not messing up – that it creates a tension in the primal brain where the primal brain is already staring at how it might go wrong today.
And we build up this whole arc of tension where we then wind up overeating.”
Myth busted: the focus on the problem just creates more of the problem. We can’t stare at the wall – or stare at how things might go wrong – and expect to cross the finish line.
Smaller steps of progress are more sustainable than drastic change
Another thing that’s very similar in changing your marriage and in changing your relationship with food is the myth that making progress requires making huge changes.
Marjena said, “It’s the big decisions that we think are required. It stems from negative emotion, and it’s never our best decision. It’s just an escape that we desperately seek to get out of pain as fast as possible, by thinking that a big decision is going to solve all of it.”
I loved that she made this point. We never want to make decisions from negative emotions.
We want to observe them. Sometimes they’re very useful in that they can inspire us to make important decisions, but never in the moment.
We need to step away and create space first, because most of the time when we pause, breathe, and then decide, we make higher quality choices.
We don’t have to swear off sugar to change our relationship with food, or pack our bags and move to Bali to create change in our marriage. Progress is made by tiny, daily tweaks and moment to moment awareness.
Get the tools to build a stronger relationship
If you want to stop being frustrated with others’ behavior and how you respond to it, and start showing up as the person you want to be, I want to invite you to enroll in The Marriage MBA.
The Marriage MBA — the Mindset Breakthrough Activator — is the 6-month group coaching and mentoring program that teaches you the relationship skills you weren’t taught in school.
What you’ll learn inside draws upon cognitive behavioral psychology — how your thoughts and feelings impact your actions and outcomes — to equip you with the kind of mindset that activates breakthroughs in ANY area of your marriage that feels less than 5-star.
You have so much more power and influence in your marriage than you realize. In The Marriage MBA, you’ll build the skills and tools to and deepen the level of connection in your marriage, then use them over and over for the years to come.
If you’re ready to figure out how to have a stronger relationship for yourself and your honey, this program will help you.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: