Have you spent a lifetime overeating, mindless eating, binge eating, comfort eating or stress eating? Does food feel like it’s in control? Does always thinking about and even obsessing over food all day long leave you drained and exhausted?
The journey out of that hell is not a journey that the latest diet or fitness fad can fix, yet so many of us go on this journey alone unsure of where else to turn.
In today’s episode, we dive into important factors you might want to consider when you are deciding to “go it alone” or get support. We’ll cover things like:
- A good reason you might decide to do it alone (AND the self-sabotaging reasons)
- The myth of: I’ll figure it out on my own
- Learning how to say YES to yourself (and why it’s so hard to do!)
- The special considerations when your goal is to feel normal around food
- And a whole lot more!
Resources and Links:
- Take the FREE Path to Food & Body Freedom Challenge!
- I’d love to hear your thoughts…Drop me a DM on Facebook or Insta!
TIMESTAMPS:
[00:00:00] Benefits of having support.
[00:04:38] Plan of action calls.
[00:07:03] Freedom from food obsession.
[00:11:34] Success that doesn’t last.
[00:15:37] Coping mechanisms and food freedom.
[00:19:01] Trauma and healing.
[00:22:00] The importance of support.
[00:25:09] The power of our primal brain.
[00:28:29] Mindset shift and going it alone.
[00:32:08] Investing in oneself financially.
[00:35:36] Regulating the nervous system.
Full Episode Transcript:
Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome. I’m super excited for this episode. It is been on my heart to talk about, the benefits of what it means to have support, the benefits of what it means to have other people on your side, in your court, helping you get moving and getting going versus going alone.
And I think that sometimes we might choose to Go on certain epic journeys on our own and other times it might make sense to get support. So we want to be really clear with that and we’ll talk about that in context of the work that we do here at Hello Body Freedom and really compare that to the differences between what Maybe a personal trainer would do or nutritionist would do or there’s a lot of other ways you could get support.
And we’ll talk about what we do here in Hello Body Freedom is a bit different and how the support works with that as well. So really excited to dive into that with you. But before we get started this is our podcast. We are in the infancy at this point. We are maybe a couple of weeks in and it has just been, So well received so many amazing reviews of people just sharing what the podcast has meant to them.
The just even, gosh how logical it is. Like whenever we start to understand, how do we start to pull apart our relationship with food, overeating and mindless eating, comfort eating, emotional eating, and really untangling that on a sustainable weight loss journey, right? The differences between going completely black and white and following a food plan and getting all crazy about it versus taking a deep breath and finding your own path in a way that works for your body works for your nervous system.
And yeah, that’s what we do here. I’m very excited to dive into this with you today, but before we do. We do this podcast where all over podcast land, but we also you can hop in our YouTube channel as well and check it out there. We record all of them live. In my office mostly, but sometimes not, but I just have to say, cause I’ve got like a towel back there and I don’t know if I move my head, you can see probably, I’m not sure how well you can see.
It’s two little blobs, but I have been fostering two kittens. And I never. Josh and I have talked about how fun maybe it would be later in life to maybe, foster little kittens and, have a rescue come in and, take care of them, but we’ll foster them until they find their home.
And I just got dumped into the world of fostering kittens, everybody. It’s been crazy. It’s not like something that I wanted to do. A house in the neighborhood that I lived in got abandoned and she abandoned her animals. And so the city I live in, the animal control came with rescue to get the dogs, but they don’t, they have rules around.
They just don’t ever do anything with the cats. Oh, these poor kittens. I noticed them. Maybe a few months ago maybe a month to two months ago, just, I was watching other people feed them. And in my mind, I’m like, Oh, it looks like they’re doing okay. And then one of my neighbors came up to me and was like, Oh my gosh, if you can help me, I can’t take this cat in.
I know it’s hungry. And I’m like, Oh my God, I don’t know what to do. What do we. And all of a sudden it became 110 degrees here, like daily between 106 and 110 every single day. And they were, and I just, oh, my heart was just like bleeding. And so I won’t get into all the crazy gory details but it has been.
It has been fun and a pleasure. And so if you happen to be in the Dallas Fort worth area and you want the sweetest little teenage kittens for crying out loud help because it’s been fun, but I’m definitely ready to get my house back to a normal again. So that’s what’s been going on over here in Audra land.
In addition to fostering cats, I have been on a lot of phone calls as women are coming through the five-day path to food and body freedom challenge. If you have not been a part of this yet, please go to hellobodyfreedom.com and at the very top of the page, you will see where it says, join the free challenge.
It is a five-day challenge is very life-changing. It is very powerful if you actually do it and actually go through it. It can be very altering. And one of the things I do as a part of this challenge is I offer a plan of action call. You have to get through a lot of the challenge first. So that way you have a level of education and knowledge about what’s going on with you and your challenges.
So that way I can actually do this plan of action call with you where we can really dive into your individual unique concerns, where we can take my two and a half decades of knowledge and career really, and really tailor and look at where you are getting stuck very easily for me or I shall say, I should say it is very easy for me to see where most people are stuck, where most people are getting blocked, where they can’t see it. And that’s a real beautiful reason to do a plan of action call so you can get moving forward. And so you can actually, move forward and take the data and the information that you’re learning from the path to food and body freedom challenge.
And you can just move forward and get unstuck even faster. So I love these plan of actions calls, but I’ll tell you, some people decide that they want support and some people decide that they don’t want support. And that’s what I wanted to talk about today because I had a call earlier. Was it last week, maybe?
And it was really interesting to me because it was so very clear that this person and when I say clear to me, yes, it was clear to me that the, that what we do here at Hello Body Freedom could definitely help this person. And it was very clear to her as well that, wow, this really, if I spent a year in this process and program of what it would mean to get to the other side, gosh, wow.
And then yet she came back to me saying that she decided that she wanted to go it alone. She’s you know what? You have so many resources. You’ve got this podcast. Now you’ve got all these things. I’m just going to listen and I’m going to, I’m going to just figure this out on my own. And it really perplexed me because I’m like, and so I really started asking questions.
I’m like tell me more. I need to understand like what’s going on. I want to hear because a lot of times what I can do is I can really hear maybe self-sabotaging behaviors come up. Maybe and we’ll dive into a lot of different ways that we self-sabotage our own success, right?
There’s this underlying fear of when things actually do change, what does that mean for my life? And then there’s fear there and so then we just don’t do anything, right? If your goal is to stop overeating, emotional eating, you’re sitting here living in a body that doesn’t feel good. That you are stress eating, comfort eating, emotional eating.
You can see if you’ve been through the challenge, maybe that there’s a connection to unresolved trauma. There’s a connection. To not being able to process our emotions and instead of processing our emotions, we’re stuffing them down with food and we’re stuffing them down with booze and we’re stuffing them and stuffing them.
And there’s this desperation to get to the other side of it. I do not want to feel obsessed about food anymore. I want to feel good in my body. I want the freedom of this just, Eating because I’m hungry and then moving on with the rest of my day and how much mental energy I would get if I wasn’t just so damn obsessed with food and body all the time.
If I wasn’t looking in the mirror and just throwing daggers at myself because I don’t like the way that I look and I don’t like the way that I feel and because my health is going down and I’m this close away from metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes. And I just want to tell you these are words that I hear.
All the time, every day, whenever I’m doing these plan of action calls, it is real. This desire to get to the other side, right? And then poof, there’s actual science-based, research-backed evidence, a program to show you step by step how to get to the other side. It is like this magnificent, Oh my gosh. Like I’ve been searching.
I’ve been looking out for diet after diet. I’ve been on supplements. I’ve done hormone. This I’ve done this planner, that plan and this personal trainer and this nutritionist and all these things. And nothing has worked all the way till now. I have even purchased magic pills that promised me that if I took a pill a day, The weight would shut off.
Now that part, we all yeah, we probably know those magic pills don’t work, but how many times are we going in the wrong direction whenever something is handed to us and now we see the right direction and we’re like, Oh my God. There’s usually a lot of like eye-opening feeling like this level of like empowerment of wow.
The answer is literally sitting in front of me and I see that it’s not a magic pill. I see that it takes time. I see that it’s about sustainability. I see that it’s a step-by-step, right? And there’s more to it. This is, I’m talking about what we do inside of Hello Body Freedom. And all of a sudden the decision of, you know what, I’m just going to do it on my own.
So let’s have that conversation because what I am starting to see is not just the self-sabotaging behaviors or the self-sabotaging thoughts that basically end up keeping us stuck. But really, I want to look at what it would mean to go it alone, versus getting support.
Okay. When I look at maybe starting to work out, or if I’m looking at maybe starting to eat healthier or making these different changes I can definitely see what it means to go it alone to I can maybe do this at my own pace, maybe there’s a sense of privacy.
I don’t want anybody to know about it, so I’m going to keep it private. These could be reasons. There could be this sense of gosh, I really love information. I love data. I love knowledge. I just want to compute everything in my head. I want to learn. So I’m going to read this book and then I’m going to read this book and I’m going to learn, I’m going to read that book.
And that’s definitely a reason as well, for sure. These are all really powerful reasons that I hear to really do this work alone. Privacy. I’m going to do it at my own pace. I don’t want to get too overwhelmed and whatnot. And so I want to ask the question, which is, have you Done it alone in the past? Have you decided to go on a weight loss journey? Have you decided to figure out, I’m gonna get my food under control? I’m gonna figure this out. I’m gonna figure this out. Have you done it in the past? And the next question is, did it work? What I often hear with clients is it did work this one time.
I went really crazy on this diet. I worked out three hours a day. I basically starved myself for six months. I was able to lose 90 pounds. I did all da. I hear this. All the time. And then my next question always is, and I promise you that I will ask you this question too if we ever do a plan of action call and you give me that kind of answer, which is great.
I’m glad that worked. Then my next question is, why are we on the phone? Then it clearly stopped working. Is that what happened? And then inevitably the answer is always yes. Things got really crazy. I’ve got two small kids, my husband and I, and then he got in a bicycle accident and he was in the hospital and that nervous system stress response came up and I was so scared and so fearful I was going to lose my husband.
And I’m like, Oh my gosh, I can see what happened. And then, the story goes inside of the next three months, I gained the weight back. I really locked down. I busted, I did all this stuff. And then I went through a divorce and then he was awful and we did this or whatever the partner did, and I gained the way back.
Okay. So you’ve had success, but it didn’t last. It didn’t work. So you did it alone. You did whatever the thing to buckle down and to make it happen. And now you’re still sitting here in the situation where you’re back to where you started. And this is a really important point.
Whenever you go through my five-day challenge, you will hear me talk about a lot of science around these old survival behaviors that most of us, not all of us, but a lot of us learned these behaviors as children when we did not get certain needs met, right? We didn’t get the love we needed, the attention we needed, the belonging we needed, whatever it might’ve been in that moment.
Maybe our parents were well-meaning. All parents I believe do the best that they can. But in certain moments in all childhood. I don’t think anybody escapes childhood without this happening. There are moments that we don’t get our needs met.
And in those moments, there’s an absolute nervous system stress response. It does not feel good, right? Whether it’s our parents fighting. Whether it’s, an accident in the home, whether everybody’s just too busy and you’re just left alone and it doesn’t feel good.
And for kids, one of the things that we do have access to is food, right? So we, a lot of us learn at a very young age that food makes us feel better. And quite frankly, it does. We’re not here to shame eating. Eating does make us feel better. It like, it takes us from hunger, which feels a little irritated and not great to satisfied, the food is delicious.
Ideally, we’re eating food we love, right? And so when we learn at a young age, either on our own or caretakers who notice when we’re not okay. And then they go let’s go get some cookies or let’s go get some ice cream. And so we have the super strong habit loop of using food in order to fix how we feel.
And what’s so important about this is even once you’re an adult, even once you get to this place where your prefrontal cortex, the smartest part of your brain goes, damn it, I know this is not what I want. I’m ready for change. And even those of you who have gone through my challenge, even those who’ve gone through the path to food and body freedom challenge, you are very educated.
You are learning science, research back science. You’re learning like evidence as to what goes on and to why this doesn’t work. And let’s go ahead and go through that right now. What usually happens is even whenever we have a lot of knowledge, and I just had a call today or yesterday with an amazing woman that she is so acutely aware of when she is stress eating, bored eating, mindless eating, binge eating.
When all of these habits, she has such consciousness around it because she’s learned so much. But the consciousness and the prefrontal cortex techs knowledge about it is not where the problem is. The problem, the thing that you’re trying to fix on your own is lower. It is inside of subconscious unconscious parts of our brains.
It’s limbic system or primal brain control, which means that when you are feeling a feeling, And you haven’t learned how to feel that feeling, process that feeling, what to do with that feeling, be able to hold it, expand your ability to be with that feeling, right? And what you have is a strong habit loop of using food or booze to fix it.
It does not matter how much knowledge you have in that moment. It does not matter how many books you have read in that moment without the lived experience of being able to work through what’s happening at an unconscious and subconscious level at a survival level in terms of your autonomic nervous system, right?
Fight flight survival mode versus thriving. We’re in survival mode. What you have learned. These old patterns, coping patterns, if you will, there it is. And then we get to the other side of it and we’re like, Oh, what is my problem? Why can’t I get to the other side? And I think this is very important because the work that we do here at Hello Body Freedom in terms of support, in terms of getting the support that you need, it is very specific because we know that the things that you are struggling with in order to get to that place of food freedom in order to get to that place where you actually have a normal insane relationship with food, where you’re not obsessing with it all over the time, where you are actually able to have a really bad day and a real intense moment.
And not have to pour yourself a drink and not have to reach for sugar or whatever else, these coping mechanisms that don’t actually process what you’re feeling and what they do is they just stuff them down. You just stuffing food on top of it, stuffing some booze on top of it. It definitely feels good in the moment because now you’re figuring out something to fix it, but it doesn’t actually heal at that nervous system level at that inner level.
Okay. And that is the work my friends. And so I want to differentiate maybe what other programs or other, working with a personal trainer and having somebody call you to make sure you show up to your workout. And that is great. All of those things are great. And inside of Hello Body Freedom, we have those accountability structures too.
We really want to make sure, Hey, you said you were going to do this thing. Let’s help you. Let’s get you moving. And accountability is a huge reason to get support. But I think what makes hello body freedom so powerful in terms of the coaching team that we have, that’s there to support you is that we have structures in place to help pull you out of moments when the shit’s hitting the fan, when you have reverted back, right?
I think what happens is people think, Oh my God, there’s this thing in front of me and now I’m learning about hello body freedom and VIP coaching. Oh my God, this is so much fun. This is great. And then they think Oh, I’m just going to like, not do those things anymore.
I’m just going to quit binge eating. That’s actually not going to happen, right? These old patterns are actually pretty strong. What you are going to do is go back into old behaviors because they are so deep and they are so ingrained and they are so learned. And the process of getting out of those It’s not as easy.
And this is where a very important point needs to be made. I used to be a personal trainer, this whole idea of suck it up, buttercup, strap your tits on. I’ve heard that before. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps, shut up, buttercup, get it going, move it that kind of.
I don’t even know if the right word is motivation, but it’s actually not helpful because what it does is it makes what you’re doing wrong. And ultimately what we have to do is heal the thing that thinks that you’re doing something wrong ultimately. And that process really requires a different level of support.
It’s trauma-informed instead of trauma-inducing. It is gentle and it helps to unravel the intensity in the body that is created within the inner game, that is ultimately what we don’t want to feel. So we go eat the food or drink the alcohol. We’re learning how to work with that in a way that doesn’t just shove it under the carpet or shove it into the closet or make it wrong or telling ourselves to just suck it up.
And so what do we do? We go do a couple of shots and then we’re good to go. No. That is not where the healing is at. Okay. And so this feels very important because what research has shown us in the pioneering fields of trauma resolution, the work of Bessel the work of Peter Levine especially, is that we actually need other humans to help us.
To co-regulate, we are social creatures and quite frankly, most of us are struggling with our body because of unresolved past trauma, whether it’s little t trauma or big T trauma. There is stuff and whenever I want to be really clear, whenever there’s a boundary violation, whenever there’s big T trauma, little T trauma, when our needs didn’t get met, when our boundaries got violated, either in big ways or small ways.
We want to make sure we understand that another human almost always is on the other side of that violation. And coming to a place where we have a safe container, a container of safety, trauma-informed, specialized coaches, who know, What to do in this moment, right? This right here becomes the container.
It is with the humans that the boundaries were violated and is inside of a safe container that we heal. And the safe container includes co-regulation. It includes being in community with, and in conversation with, and in therapeutic process with. Either people going through what you’re going through and, or professional trauma-informed support and accountability as well.
And the reason for that is working at the nervous system level is. I’m literally saying working at unconscious and subconscious levels, working at body levels with you, who maybe have been cut off from, the neck down, always living up in your head, spinning out over here where the healing is waiting for us at the body level, this connection with the body.
And I have seen and Peter Levine, Kolk, like these pioneers in trauma research. I have seen it in my own practice that I’ve been doing since 2017. And. And I see it every day with our clients is that we, they actually get the results they came for at a pace that’s just right for them when they show up and say, I’m not going to do this alone anymore.
I need support. I want support. And this is powerful. Okay, so let me share my screen with you because I have a, not a slide, but it’s like a thing I want to show you.
It’s a infographic that I know I’ve put up before.
I love this because it really shows what research shows as well is that if you’re looking for results, and if you’re looking for understanding yes, can you do it toward like just by yourself?
Yes, you can. But what. I don’t know, like the questions I asked you before is have you tried it by yourself? Has it worked? I will give you my personal experience, which is every time I would go to lose weight, every time I would feel so out of control around food, I would just tell myself to buckle up and you can do this and you can control this.
You’ve got this, you’ve got this, you’ve got this. And I would say this to myself over and over again, and I would mark it on my calendar and I would put the weight down and then I put two pounds down for the next week and two pounds down for the next week. And I would be in this kind of vacuum by myself and it never, ever worked.
And then you can see that as you move up through this kind of upside-down triangle here, right above self is family and friends, right? So if you have friends and family who are supportive, that’s great. And sometimes we have really supportive friends and family, but they don’t really understand what you’re going through.
They don’t struggle with their relationship with food. They don’t struggle with their relationship with body. They don’t really get it. And they might love you and be supportive. And that’s a ideal situation. I will tell you, that’s not always a situation. We’ve got a lot of clients whose husbands are quite frankly, not very supportive.
And so they are learning how to do this without that kind of support from friends or family. But even with that, when, as you can see, as you go up this, upside down triangle, even having just like-minded community. So if you’re going to go it on your own, can’t, going to the gym.
I just talked to a gal today and she’s got a great regime going where she goes to classes and she’s met new friends and now her fitness is just like getting better and she’s getting stronger and stronger. It’s very powerful. That’s like-minded community inside of HelloBodyFreedom. We also have like-minded community, right?
We have our private client Facebook group. We hold each other. We have community gatherings. It’s like community is important, right? We actually need each other. We need each other. But as you look at this, if you look at like the levels, it’s not just getting support and accountability.
It’s not just getting, the personal trainer to make sure you did your workout or the nutritionist making sure you’re counting all your macros and whatnot. It really is the right kind of support and accountability and the right kind of support and accountability really.
I’m going to go ahead and let me try to stop the screen. Okay. I hope that worked. It might’ve not worked. It’s okay. If it didn’t work, you heard my voice. And if you’re listening to the podcast, you can’t see it anyway. But understanding that this actually is a very big powerful and important part of what this is.
The last thing I want to say about going at this alone and this, we can’t underestimate the power of our primal brain, the part of our self that just basically wants to keep us safe and alive, that does not care that you’re on, meds, does not care that maybe you need to lose 50 pounds or a hundred pounds, does not care that you want to get healthy.
There is this prefrontal cortex smart part of you that wants to get healthy. Yes. But whenever we start to realize there’s also a part of us, that’s probably scared. What’s going to change? I don’t know. What if it doesn’t work? What if I fail myself? And these are usually the real reasons behind feeling like I want to go it alone.
I want to do this alone. Okay. And with that said, I just want to share a little bit about my own personal experience of going and really being just like hyper, hyper-independent. So I’ve been on my own since I was 17. I’ve had a job and making my own money since I was 14. I moved out to California when I just turned 18 on my own.
I found roommates out there. I waited tables when I got there and I like, I can do it. I can take care of myself. I can figure things out. I can make things work. This is, these are strongly held beliefs that I’d had for a very long time. From the time I was a kid, there was this very strong, I’ve got, I can do what I need to do.
I can do what I want to do. I can take care of myself. I felt very grown up, very young, but later you find out that’s a trauma response. And then moving through my career, like I’m, I get to this place where I have a fitness and nutrition company and I’m like, I have the degrees, I have certifications, I’ve studied nutrition, I have studied kinesiology, I’m ready to rock this out.
I have all the information. I know the answers. I know the answers. And that is true, right? These self-sabotaging thoughts sound really true at that phase of my life. I did. I had degrees. I had a lot, I had a degree in kinesiology, had tons of certifications and qualifications in working with the body and working with nutrition and gosh, darn it.
I’ve started a company and it was very successful and it just kept flying and I’m handing people food plans. I’m handing people exercise plans. We’re keeping people accountable. We’re making it happen, right? And then I start to notice. People fall off three months later, six months later, a year later, I don’t hear from them.
Don’t know where did they go? What happened? And then they eventually come back in my life. And 90 to 97% of them, which is straight with the statistics that I give inside the path to food and body freedom challenge, they gained the weight back or they gained more. And it wasn’t just the clients. It was also my story as well.
I felt completely out of control around food. I struggled with obsession around food, struggled with my body, struggled with my weight going up and down. The harder I dieted, the harder I lost weight, the faster I put the weight on the intensity of that time of my life, of feeling out of control and binge eating and feeling awful.
And whenever you think you know the answers, when you think you can go it alone, when you have been, all right, I can do it. I can pull myself up from the bootstraps. I can go alone. I can do this. And you just keep going and going. I don’t know about you, but for me, it was a breaking point. It really was a breaking point of a really a mindset shift.
It was a mindset shift. And the mindset shift was maybe I don’t know. Maybe going it alone is always the thing that I’m used to doing, but maybe this is a place that I clearly don’t have the answers. And if you see that in yourself, if you see that you have gone on every diet plan, you have lost weight and gained weight you have tried countless ways.
You’ve tried willpower. You’ve tried exercise, you’ve tried the supplements, you’ve tried all of these different things and you just keep getting stuck and you can’t seem to get out of it. I cannot tell you how many clients I’ve had that have done hormone replacement. They’ve worked with functional diagnostic nutritionists who had them on just a quadrillion supplements and nothing was budging.
And that is usually because There are deeper reasons that need resolved. There’s somatic processes that we need to go through, and there is a resolution and a processing of unwinding of a nervous system out of survival mode into thriving mode and doing this in a way that is integrated and connected with a normal way of eating a normal relationship with food.
One that is not so obsessive where we feel like we have to think about food all the time and also not so like the way a six-year-old would be with food if they were in charge of food, which is like anything I want, whenever I want, neither of those are normal relationships with food, right? There is a middle ground.
And whenever we do this work this is not the work that I’ve seen any nutritionist. I actually partner with a functional diagnostic nutritionist. She’s brilliant. I love her. We partner because she doesn’t, she knows that what we do here she doesn’t have right. Her clients need what we do here in Hello Body Freedom, right?
And so the point that I’m making here, really, let me just reign this back in a little bit is that. Maybe you don’t know, right? If I’m going to do it alone, I’m going to figure it out when we really start to understand that this work requires levels of attention at subconscious and unconscious levels at a body level of reconnecting to our own inner attunements.
When we’ve spent possibly a lifetime disconnected from our body spinning up in our heads. It actually does require help. It actually requires that level of trauma-informed support and accountability. Whoo, man. So for all of you out there starting to recognize where you are tripping yourself up. When you’re getting scared to take better care of yourself, when you are getting scared to uplevel your life, this is very important because at the end of the day, the feelings that you’re going to feel, I, for me, it was, I already said it.
One of them, which is I got this. I know this, I can do this. I’ve done it on my own. I’ll just do it again. I got this, right? It was always like, I got this, but underneath that is I’m too scared to share my story with somebody else. I’m too embarrassed about how hard this has been to me. I feel like I’m the only one who struggles with any of this. I see everybody else going and eating all the pizzas and burgers that they want and they’re thin. And I’m sitting here eating salad every day. And nothing is shifting and changing for me. This doesn’t feel good. So I’m just going to keep this front upright. That’s what’s underneath it.
Okay. The other big one for me was I don’t know. I can’t afford it. I don’t have any money. I can’t afford this, right? I waited tables forever before, I had to pay my way through school. I didn’t have somebody hand me anything, right? So all of these things, it’s there’s always a reason. I don’t have money. I don’t have money. And these were always my excuses all the way into my mid-30s until I finally was like, What if I could figure out how to make it work? What if there was a way to make it work? What if the answer is to invest in myself in a meaningful way so that everything starts to change mentally, psychologically, emotionally, physically?
And I wonder who I will be on the other side of that in all ways, not just health-wise, not just body-wise but financially, like who will I be on that? And let me tell you, as I started looking at my own self-sabotaging that seemed real, beliefs that I had that seemed very legit and real. And as I started pulling them apart and making decisions not on these beliefs that, and not questioning them, but instead questioning them, do I really know everything?
Can I really not figure out how to make this work? There’s not one way that I could figure out how to cut back. Lord knows I drink a lot of Starbucks. Lord knows I overspend at the grocery store and like half of it rot in the veggie, drawer. Am I willing to look at my beliefs?
Am I willing to go maybe I don’t know? Maybe there is a way and that my friends, when you can have that opening, this is where your power is. Your power is not in staying stuck. Your power comes of going, maybe I don’t have the answers. What can I do? What does make sense? I think that’s what worked for me.
And then with that mindset, it literally sent me on paths that led me to where I am today. And it has been the most epic, epic journey ever. I will tell you that in terms of food and body, it was a good decade. I did not have any answers. I did not know how the hell to get to the other side but damn it. I was willing.
And I did some twists and turns and wines. And year after year, I would say it started in 2011 and I really, finally, truly started putting all the pieces together around 2017. So 17, eight, nine, 21, 22. So it’s been, I’m in six years in now of working with clients in a way where we spend a year together on a level of support.
That gets them to the other side. And think about that, if you spent a year really working on the things that truly will get you to the other side, not following another food plan, not sitting here saying, I’m just going to go work out harder. I just talked to a woman today. I’ve been working out like amazing.
I feel so good. I’m so proud of my workouts. I’m really feeling fit and I’m feeling strong. My mental health is better. And I’m like, congratulations, good work. And she’s yeah, but I know that this isn’t like it’s, my weight isn’t changing. I’ve got, a solid 40, 50 pounds to lose from a health perspective.
And I feel really great. And of course, we won’t get into this because that’s not what this podcast is about. This is for another podcast. I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, and I’m sure I’m going to talk about it, at nauseam later. We’re not going to talk about the fitness part right now, but she knows that her issue isn’t that it is her relationship with food over and over again.
So looking to get the right kind of support. Looking to get trauma-informed support, looking at what it means to overcome obstacles, looking at what it means to have a level of really getting the emotional support you need, the consistency that you need. And quite frankly, like the learning part, right?
Like real, the skill development process of. It’s one thing to learn how to measure your food and plan and grocery shop and cook and try new foods. This is like super important. But what about the actual skill sets of regulating your nervous system, the actual skill sets of processing the intensity that you’re feeling in your body?
So instead of using food to cope, you’re actually learning how to work with, regulate and process what’s going on. That is skill development 101. And let me tell you, when you go on a sustainable weight loss journey, while you are also working on these deeper skill sets to feel what we’re feeling, to expand our capacity to feel, to regulate and process the inner world of what is going on so that we don’t need to go reach for food or booze.
That is the skill set to develop. All right. Whoo. I hope that this was a little helpful. I know I was a little all over the place today, but it’s just perplexing to me and the reason it’s perplexing is because when I finally just said, I don’t have all the answers, when I finally just said support actually is what I need.
When I finally said, I’m just going to get the support that I need. 9. 9 times out of 10. That’s a lot. That’s a really high number. It has always been, not always, but 9. 9 times out of 10, it has been the right answer. It has moved me forward and progress on my journey and my evolution into being a fully-lived human.
Aren’t we here? Hello, body freedom. It’s not, it’s freedom in the body. It’s to feel good in the body. It’s to be able to walk on this planet and live a life and paint the life. That we want, that we desire, that we deserve. All right, my friends, thank you so much. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and you can send a DM, you can DM me on Instagram, you can DM me on Facebook.
I’m on Facebook a lot more than Instagram, but DM me anywhere, any questions or anything of the sort, and I will see you next time. Bye, everybody.
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