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Season 10 Theme: Research-Based Weight Loss: Rebuild Your Biology + Psychology Feedback Loop
There are many definitions of self-acceptance when it comes to accepting our bodies. I used to think self-acceptance meant resignation. And that didn’t feel like freedom. I was living in a body that didn’t feel like a warm, welcoming home. It was not only uncomfortable on the outside, but also on the inside with my cravings, reflux, horrible IBS spasms and depression.
What I came to realize was that if we define self-acceptance as responsibility for our bodies we can begin to make true peace and acceptance with our bodies. This process includes identifying what being thin means to us (in other words, what magic do we think will happen when we are thinner?).
In today’s episode, we will look at:
- How to redefine self-acceptance for our food choices using the four stages of competency theory to master self-acceptance for our goals and food choices. This will allow us to embody the full range of our true, abilities and capabilities (and this whole season can support you with this mastery).
- How taking responsibility for our food allergies (which can severely block our intuitive eating abilities) can enable us to become intuitive eaters and powerful leaders in our lives.
- How to not feel deprived with food allergies or life for more eating consistency
Mentioned in This Episode
- Truce with Food Program
- Pros and Cons of an Elimination Diet with Jen Fuego
- Dr. Zach Bush’s interview on Goop about how glyphosate affects us.
Transcript
[INTRO]
Welcome to Insatiable Season 10: Research-Based Weight Loss: Rebuild Your Biology + Psychology Feedback Loop
Have you ever read about the past and thought, I can’t believe people actually believed that? In the 19th century, doctors thought that “bloodletting” could cure illnesses and Dr. Joseph Lister was shunned for his thesis and early research proving that bacteria caused disease. While Dr. Lister was being denigrated, Charles Darwin was being celebrated, falsely claiming that women were less intelligent than men. In Darwin’s time women rarely went to advanced schooling, they needed to preserve their limited energy for baby-making. The 20th century wasn’t immune from junk science and outrageous claims, Domino’s sugar advertised a sugar diet as a way to lose weight touting that it had less calories per gram than fat. Cigarettes were also marketed as healthy.
It sounds laughable to most of us now. But only because brave, curious thinkers were willing to question, test, and disprove the status quo and limited thinking.
In Season 10 of Insatiable, Research-Based Weight Loss: Rebuild Your Biology and Psychology Feedback Loop, we’ll explore emerging research and viewpoints, now on the periphery, that will make the current mainstream thinking of weight loss as willpower and calorie-cutting look just as misguided as soothing babies and colds with morphine syrup (which was a medically endorsed thing in the Victorian era).
We will explore how taking the steps towards weight loss individually and societally can be a form of resistance against the toxicity and industrialization of our food supply. We’ll question the convenience of telling women that weight loss is giving into the patriarchy and male gaze—and how this silences deeper questioning about why we all have gained so much weight and what other consequences come with this physically and mentally.
We will do this by taking an integrated and holistic look at the biological and psychological feedback loop that goes into maintaining a natural weight and how our industrialized society has disrupted it.
We’ll discuss how what you eat informs how you feel and your habits which in turn influence what you eat as a constantly self-reinforcing infinity loop.
We’ll examine how our culture and thus education and medical systems are not holistic, and results in a siloed view of human biology and health which allows the public and experts to continue to frame weight loss as about willpower and only about food…. and how very convenient this is for those who set and profit from our industrialized agriculture policy.
We laugh about Domino’s sugar diet, but the same reasoning still informs our modern dietary guidelines. Even the mainstream is noting that “The Sugar Research Foundation” with the help of three handsomely compensated Harvard scientists in 1967 handpicked studies placing the blame on fat rather than sugar for heart disease. In 1977 one of these researchers would become the Head of Nutrition for the USDA and outline nutrition guidelines, enabling the low-fat weight-loss craze to become a thing, and we’d all get fatter, sicker, and more depressed in the years to come.
If in your gut, you feel there are more important (and potentially revolutionary) root causes to your weight battle or if you want to learn the viewpoint that people will likely have 50 years now— that willpower and a simple view of calorie counting as the key to weight loss makes about as much sense as giving morphine to babies—this season is for you.
[EPISODE]
There are many definitions of self-acceptance when it comes to accepting our bodies. I used to think self-acceptance meant resignation. And that didn’t feel like freedom. I was living in a body that didn’t feel like a warm, welcoming home. It was not only uncomfortable on the outside, but also on the inside with my cravings, reflux, horrible IBS spasms and depression.
What I came to realize was that if we define self-acceptance as responsibility for our bodies, we can begin to make true peace with and accept our bodies. This process includes identifying what being thin means to us (in other words, what magic do we think will happen when we are thinner?).
And then asking how do we make that happen now, when we’re not at our goal weight?. Deconstructing skinny = magic starts with noticing when a personal interaction or outcome doesn’t go how we want, automatically thinking, “If I were thinner, this would’ve turned out differently.” The more we deconstruct what it is that we think thin will bring, we can better realize that we are likely capable of getting these things and experiences with who we are now.
As Carl Rogers, one of the most influential psychologists in the evidence-based coaching world said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself, then I can change.”
When we can operate from an “I am capable” orientation, we take responsibility not just for our wider goals but also for our food choices. With this, we are able to view habits like “I reward myself with food” or “I can’t eat just one cookie” as symptoms, not as destiny or a definition of who we are.
The further we lead our lives with this orientation, the more our food choices are a tool to support our life of rebellious adventure – not an end means to weight loss.
So how do we get there? This requires unlearning that we lack choice in our health and who we are. Both of these assumptions allow our story to control us. Our stories that make us see ourselves in a fixed, defined way prevent us from knowing the full range of our own abilities, resilience, and creativity. This blindspot makes many project that power onto weight loss with the view point that this is the only way to achieve transformation. Our stories are designed to protect us and often to minimize risk, which atrophies our abilities, resilience and self-trust.
Yet by reorienting to, “I am capable”, we can stop the patterns and protective mechanisms, often birthed from trauma, to rebuild new patterns that allow us to turn our pain from trauma into post-traumatic growth. This is what ultimately unlocks the freedom and ease we believe weight loss promises but fails to deliver, which is why we always think we have another 10 pounds to go even if we arrive at a goal weight.
For today’s episode, we will look at:
- How to redefine self-acceptance for our food choices using the four stages of competency theory to master self-acceptance for our goals and food choices. This will allow us to embody the full range of our true, abilities and capabilities (and this whole season can support you with this mastery).
- How taking responsibility for our food allergies (which can severely block our intuitive eating abilities) can enable us to become intuitive eaters and powerful leaders in our lives.
- How to not feel deprived with food allergies or life for more eating consistency
Taking responsibility for our health with our food choices to become what I’ll refer to as an empowered intuitive eater is a skill that can be learned. To understand how we truly master skills, I’m going to use Competency Theory.
Competence theory is a guided framework whose variations are used in business management, education and other arenas like adult learning to describe the four stages we must go through to master a skill.
Competency theory looks at skill building as a pyramid:
The first or base stage of competence is Unconscious Incompetence: this is where our intuition has no orientation and is therefore, fairly useless. We don’t know what we don’t know nor do we value what we don’t know. I think of the people who pride themselves on being junky eaters and say, “we are all going to die one day anyway”. It usually takes a health scare or seeing someone else’s success for people at this stage to want to move to a stage where they value nutrition.
The second or next stage is Conscious Incompetence: this is where we can think our intuition is good but it’s actually poor or we can’t hear it. Here we value the skill yet or end goal, yet we have a wrong analysis of success. This may be someone who is concerned with nutrition but only values food in terms of weight loss and calories and can’t understand why they can’t execute of fall off track. Here, many will feel “ they fell off the wagon”, not that the approach was unsustainable nor that it overlooked trauma.
The third stage is Conscious Competence. At this stage, we now know how to do the skill but it takes a lot of concentration and thinking. This might be when you first started learning to ride a bike or master another sport. With food, this is where we connect our food choices to blood sugar and gut health and are eating out of alignment with our goals or within our story. While at this stage it still requires a lot of thought and effort, we begin to choose differently and correlate our choices with feeling better and increasing freedom, which is the incentive to keep going, not weight loss per se.
The fourth stage is Unconscious Competence. At this stage, the skill becomes second nature and is very easy. In a sport this might be like having muscle memory. This is where we can be quite intuitive because we haven’t just studied the subject matter, we’ve experienced how to be successful. If we think of food choices, this is where we are consistent enough with our food and have released the old story we had that made us fall off track and are embodying a new one, more aligned with the true range of our capabilities.
Becoming an empowered intuitive eater by learning our body and owning our story are skills we can all learn.
We do this by learning what foods work best for us and then how to be consistent with those by owning the story that makes us fall off track with our food so it doesn’t make us feel out of control in our lives or with food. In this process, we come to understand food and belonging are powerful medicines and mediums to reveal our true, powerful selves.
The four stages of competence are how we arrive at accurate intuition, which requires self-awareness. Intuition – both intuitive eating and “being who we are” or our authentic, true self as is popular in today’s zietgiest – is based on recognizing our physiological and psychological patterns. It’s about discernment of what foods work for us and who we truly are versus who we’ve been conditioned to be out of protecting ourselves and the resulting story we’ve built to do so.
Becoming an empowered Intuitive eater requires not allowing processed foods and your story gaslight your intuition.
We make our best “gut reactions” or intuitive choices when we have experience and expertise in a particular matter. I can’t make intuitive choices about the stock market. I don’t study it. But I can make intuitive decisions about my food, body, health-care and life because I’ve spent time getting to know my body, a broader range of choices available to me and what I really want for my life, not the pre-packaged food and ideas I thought I wanted because of my story.
So this is the overall progression of empowered intuitive eating. Two areas I find that block intuitive eating while working through these stages of competency are food allergies and having so many other “shoulds, have tos and musts” on our plates, which creates an emotional restriction in our lives. When we aren’t emotionally restricted enough – when we feel free – we often have things in our life that make us want to be as healthy as possible. For example, if you found a love of Soul Cycle versus before you dreaded exercise, you will now want to eat well to improve your performance there. For many of my clients, they start taking bigger risks in their careers and personal relationships and eating well becomes a tool to help them be as focused, clear and creative as possible.
When we can get out of our story, which creates a number of emotional restrictions, there’s risk and a sense of possibility that makes us want to be at the top of our game. Here we want to eat to feel calm, energized, rested and creative. Here we find an increased sense of freedom and meaning, which is what we all need yet think is dependent on weight loss.
When it comes to the food, the topic of food allergies and an elimination diet is one I think that intertwines with diet culture and this idea that health is about restriction. And many people suggesting elimination diets don’t understand if you have to restrict food more and more, you have a deeper gut issue. The elimination diet isn’t a lifestyle. Or, there isn’t a “how to do” eliminate so many foods while living in the real world with a job, kids and no personal chef while struggling with battling food is something that has to be incorporated into accepting food allergies and sensitivities.
I did an entire podcast about the pros and cons of the elimination diet with my friend and clinical nutritionist Jen Fuego. Will link in the show notes to that episode. The big takeaway from her episode was the difference between allergies and sensitivities and if you have to keep eliminating more and more foods, you are most likely not addressing the underlying gut issue root causes. This is a really important point because more and more research is showing how a diverse diet is key to a healthy gut microbiome.
There was a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal recently (link in show notes) highlighting a major study done by Dr. Jennifer Wargo at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer that was published in Science last year, having to do with melanoma patients. What they found was those patients who had healthier microbiomes responded better to immunotherapy, which is one of the most current approaches to treating cancer. And they found that the healthiest gut microbiomes was that with the greatest diversity of microorganisms. Researchers found that eating whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and a high-fiber diet responded best to immunotherapy with melanoma patients. This is another huge problem with industrialized food: because of food subsidies and monoculture farms that “scale”, we are mostly only eating soy, corn, wheat and sugar. There isn’t a lot of cultivation of all the types of vegetables and fruits there used to be. Charles Einstein, in his book Ascent of Humanity, talks about how there used to be dozens of different kinds of apples alone!
And what’s crazy is we are finding that probiotic supplements often hinder this diversity because most probiotic supplements have only a few strains in them. Relying on probiotic supplements without a diverse diet is now proving to be a detriment! I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole about supplements here…because there is a time and place for probiotic supplements in a therapeutic targeted sense. But over the long term and for health maintenance (versus a healing diet, which is temporary), a diverse diet is important. Over the long haul, your money is better spent on a quality whole foods diet, not on probiotics! Elimination diets can be helpful therapeutically and in the short term therapeutic manner, but the overall goal should be to give your body the space and therapeutic benefits as you uncover and heal the root causes. The elimination diet isn’t a life-long diet.
So I want to state that when we are talking about food allergies or sensitivities, this isn’t accepting that you have three foods to eat for the rest of your life.
Now what’s tricky about this from an intuitive eating perspective is food reactions – allergies, sensitivities or intolerances – cause body stress. The body responds by producing endorphins, which are in the opiate family along with morphine. Opiates make us feel good, so we end up craving and consuming more of these same foods in an effort to get more of these addictive, “happy” chemicals. On the outside, it almost feels like a relaxant, which is how I felt “on gluten” in the short-term. And if we are wound up all day, you can see how eating foods we will react to like this becomes an emotional solution.
But then increased consumption lead to more addictive chemicals…and we embark on a continuous cycle of craving and reacting.
As I discovered a gluten intolerance – and this was 15 years ago before there were so many GF choices, I found myself bingeing on gluten and the GF foods like Reese’s Pieces and York Peppermint Patties because I felt so restricted by not being able to eat gluten. So I have a lot of personal experience with this because it took me nine months to go gluten-free without bingeing in reaction to the restriction. I had to take radical responsibility for my physical health and where I was emotionally.
Here’s what helped me find the freedom in the restriction of gluten. I’ll use my IBS diagnosis as an example (but going gluten-free was also instrumental in reversing my depression too):
1. Know food elimination isn’t a silver bullet. Trying to be all-or-nothing with elimination diets is often a residue trauma response of thinking every choice or decision is life or death, success or failure, blissful love or devastating rejection.
Think of elimination on a continuum because there’s a learning curve.
Because our stories mold how we view the areas of our lives we feel consciously incompetent in, they influence how we view healing and intuitive eating. It’s important to explicitly state that there is no silver bullet to life-transforming healing. Removing foods your allergic to, if any, is only one piece of the equation. This can be disheartening AND liberating as you realize there are many steps to healing and you aren’t going to make or break your health with each choice.
So realizing your body has been functioning all this time while eating the foods your allergic to and there’s many things you can do that will heal you outside of food will start to make you more comfortable in the learning curve.
And any improvements will enable your physical body to get to the next level and you will feel more skilled and differently about your next steps when you get there. I think of it like a yoga class – no matter how beginner or beautiful you look in a pose – everyone is getting the same stretch as they are going just beyond what is comfortable and that’s how you get healthier. Nature requires resilience.
2. Focus on one food at a time and start with what will give you the biggest bang for your buck so to speak. Because the more you heal, the less foods you will react too. The big foods that give people reactions: gluten tends to be the biggest if you are sensitive. Dairy, corn, soy and eggs are also big reactions. For me, I started with gluten. With my IBS, I reacted to all raw vegetables and dairy. But I started with gluten because that is when I would feel the most out of control with cravings, my mood would dip – I can’t explain it. I would just be going along and then feel super alone and weird – that is what gluten did to me. And it would make me exhausted. And it increased my heartburn a lot. And it wasn’t hard to stay away from raw vegetables… I just cooked veggies!
The discrepancy between how I was feeling when I wasn’t eating gluten and was became so much greater the more time I kept learning how to be gluten-free that how I felt about going gluten-free shifted. The consistency added up. And in the process, I was learning that antacids were actually making my IBS work as I had too little stomach acid and not enough, which is often the case with IBS, GERD, etc. Oh the things you learn as you move on up. So I was able to amplify and accelerate my healing by using raw apple cider vinegar, which adds stomach acid and has probiotics in it! And it’s much cheaper and has no side-effects, unlike antacids.
3. Identify the freedom granted by giving up said food reaction. The “addition by subtraction” for eliminating gluten was: I didn’t have to take antacids, I didn’t have to wait three hours after eating dinner to sit upright before I could go to sleep, my bloating and cramping went down, my energy increased, my moods were much more stable and I loved that I didn’t crave gluteny carbs as much when I was off gluten. If you have a genuine food reactivity, you will start to see there is freedom in eliminating them.
4. Focus on what you need to add in. With food as medicine, it’s as much as what we add into our diet and lives as what we take out. With my clients, I always love for them to start to add in healing foods so we can expand their choices first. For example, I had a client the other day who is reading an anti-diet book and trying to address her Hashimoto’s with a cookbook that says you have to eliminate about 7 foods for Hashimoto’s. It’s unlikely she needs to eliminate all seven foods forever or that all seven foods are having as severe an autoimmune reaction as some of the main triggers like gluten, dairy and potentially soy for her. She was already gluten-free and understood how much food could affect her daily well-being. That was huge…really connecting how it makes us feel instead of being a way to restrict and lose weight. So we focused on dairy, which is another major one for Hashimoto’s and forgot about the rest while focusing on adding bone broth and prebiotic foods in. If dairy doesn’t work for her now, she will most likely feel a difference.
If you have an auto-immune condition or depression, both of which involved inflammation as root causes, you may have different foods that trigger more severe reactions for you like nightshades or corn or eggs. I used to not be able to eat a lot of the nightshades like tomatoes and eggplants and now I can. But I actually couldn’t even feel their reaction until I got out the gluten first. As we get healthier, we get more intuitive based on our biofeedback loop versus having to follow the steps or exact protocols of others. As I shared in last week’s episode, I still don’t do well with dairy. But I know how much I can eat and get away with when I want it! But I can’t do that with gluten and frankly, with all the information about glyphosate and gluten, I would feel safer off of gluten even if I didn’t have a genuine food reactivity.
When I was first discovering I was gluten intolerant, there was this collective argument that there was no research to prove gluten intolerance was a thing. And Anti-Diet books will often cite lack of research connecting food to health issues as why restricting certain foods is about diet culture and not health. However, lack of evidence doesn’t mean there is none. This is the challenge with natural medicine: there is some Western, scientific evidence and there’s no money in truly natural cures that get at the root issue (I’m not talking about the supplement industry… we did a whole episode on that about Vitaminia).
Even with lack of dedicated funding, we are learning how glyphosate, otherwise known as RoundUp and sprayed heavily on wheat, affects cells and our bodies. I have a few clients who can eat the wheat in Europe with no problem but American wheat gives them stomach cramps. It could be the hybridization of American wheat, which used to have 14 chromosomes but now has 43, as Dr. William Davis cites in his Wheat Belly book. It could also be the glyphosate, which is toxic to the human body.
I’m personally not going to wait around for enough evidence to mount to tell me what my body is telling me today. I’ve had enough experience to trust my body and hold that science is a process, not a destination and so what we believe today will be radically different than what we believe in 10 or even 30 years.
So in summary, food reactions can interfere with our Intuitive Eating abilities. Understanding why we crave them and how genuine food restrictions can create more health freedom and life ease and simplicity is essential!
Now moving onto how our story creates a sense of restriction that can make being consistent with food allergy restrictions feel too hard so we aren’t consistent enough to get the results that are possible from radical responsibility for our food choices. This is also important for consistency sake AND also, there’s always an emotional component equal to the food changes. For example with my IBS and depression, yes the food mattered AND so did seeing how my story was causing “stress” and my stomach to spasm. Or the more chronic sadness or depression that came from not living in alignment with my values, including wanting to be healthy to prevent cancer as much as I could.
Often the sense of restriction that comes from eating a certain way comes from the lack of ease when eating out, feeling isolated and alone because you have a certain food restriction or diagnosis or because you are trying natural methods, or feeling like you have to explain yourself about, “what will people think you are trying now that you might eventually fail at? Or, because of how foods we are allergic to react in our body, we often turn to the foods we are allergic to when in our story!
All of these concerns come back to our story! When we are consicously incompetent at our healing path, we aren’t aware of how our story makes us especially turn to foods we are allergic to OR, how food allergies can make us feel more connected and at ease with others, not less. Or how important emotional health is to healing.
Our overall sense of restriction when we feel like when eating for our health feels like a drag is a symptom of feel restricted emotionally in our life and by our story. We might be able to identify only the food restriction but over time, if the food elimination isn’t getting easier, it’s because there’s not enough risk or sense of possibility that is blocked by our story and so “why bother?” if there’s no where all this health is useful. Everyday, this translates to more “shoulds”, “have tos” than wants. All of our lives are on a continuum. No one’s life is all puppies and rainbows and no one’s life is all bad, for the most part.
The end goal with health isn’t to be healthy to be healthy. It’s to have the focus, clarity, creativity and resilience to enjoy our choices and overtime, make our life feel like it matters. Health is the vehicle to where we want to travel too, whether it’s training to walk the Camino in Spain for your 40th birthday or nailing a big presentation in the morning. Having some risk enhances your life and provides motivation for health goals, but it’s hard to have healthy risk in our lives when we are minimizing all risk because of our stories.
When we are in our stories, we aren’t as clear as we need to be on how we are unconsciously creating emotional restriction in our life. We are often at the unconscious incompetence stage because these patterns and choices have been going on for so long that they feel like normal. Dr. Antonio D’Amasio, a pioneering neuroscientist who is reuniting the body and brain’s influence on us, talks about these feelings as “background feelings” that are chronic and influence us more than acute feelings of passing stress.
These chronic patterns or ways of being result in a general assumption that “I am wrong” and thus, a defensive position. So we try to fix things or avoiding conversations – including about our food allergies all together – because what will it look like if I can’t win or what’s the point? This is the exact protection dialogue we often here in our heads.
This shows up in being afraid of opening emails because of assumed criticism, having the same fight with your partner, or unconsciously assuming you have to be perfect at eliminating gluten or dairy instead of on a learning curve.
This is where we use the quote in Truce with Food, which Gloria Steneim and Erin Brokovich made famous: The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
We create a self-fulfilling prophecy of emotional deprivation in our stories often from lack of choice. It’s not so much about eliminating behaviors as it is about adding in new behaviors. These patterns and behaviors didn’t start off as emotional deprivation. They started out as self-protection to preserve emotional belonging.
But overtime, we stopped being able to accurately discern when we needed protection and when we didn’t. Our stories and patterns got built up, cutting us off more and more from intuitively knowing where and how we wanted to belong, i.e. be in the type of relationship we want to be in, work in the spaces we know we are capable of working in, etc.
Because when we are in our stories, in the same way we think an elimination diet or eliminating gluten will be a silver bullet, we tend to think every decision, email exchange or choice could result in wild success or devastating failure, or being wrong and rejected or right and wildly popular. Neither extreme is likely to happen and so regardless of what the outcome is, we feel we’ve failed, are behind, or what’s the point.
We think there is “an answer” versus pieces of the puzzle we need to learn. This cuts us off from the belonging or intimacy with ourselves and others we most need to heal and will make daily and long-term life healing with its fulfillment.
When you are trying to use food as medicine or do anything hard and outside of your comfort zone, you need a community to belong to, even if it’s a community of rebels. It’s funny how life can come full circle sometimes. I did an undergraduate thesis on this psychology theory called optimal distinctiveness. It’s that as human beings, we have a desire to be a part of a group and unique. And various factors influence how much “sameness” versus “uniqueness” we each need. But I do know when we are doing things rebellious or out of the box, we need a group of rebels or others on the road less traveled even more because we are being unique or different.
And community can be one person. One person who knows your long-term goal and what you’re working towards and can support you there. It can be a coach you hire. It can be a friend. It can be a partner. It can be a therapist. The only requirement is that it’s a relationship where you can show up as you are, where you are, i.e. show up in process, just like science 8-) In the U.S, we have a highly individualistic narrative – which is deeply problematic. We can only get better together. The more we realize we are interdependent on Mother Nature and others, the more radical our healing.
I had a client ask me how I deal with the visibility of having a strong opinion like I do on Insatiable. And it helps that I feel deeply knowledgeable from an academic and personal standpoint. But what’s enabled me to be more visible with my opinions is that I have a community of clients and listeners who want to have these conversations and pursue this radical path. Being interdependent instead of independent has been one of the most healing medicines I didn’t know I needed. Especially as I’ve become a Mom. I got the theory it takes a village and now I get it on a deeper level.
But what blocks this intimacy and belonging is our protective patterns in our story. In last Insatiable episode about Not Being Controlled by Food, I introduced the concept of choice, and knowing we are always choosing. And now I want to build on that and give you a way to see your different choices: it’s the tool of space, not reacting right away.
Now, the more we are in our story, the less ability we have to be in choice because our nervous system is in fight or flight mode (Episode 2 of this season more thoroughly identifies what triggers our F-F nervous system. The threat of unbelonging is a main trigger of the Social Engagement Nervous System). So when starting to practice this successfully, don’t start in an area where you feel your weight is impacting the quality of your life as your story is controlling you a lot there. I suggest picking an area where you feel relatively confident and you experience stress.
And if it’s food allergies, think about how you haven’t communicated what you need from someone who would support you. How you haven’t found a community of people who understand the learning curve. How you don’t ask the waiter or waitress what is gluten-free on the menu and assume there’s nothing you can eat. Or not picking a restaurant with friends that you all can enjoy.
Or when you get the email, are ready to enter into the same fight again with your partner or are about to say yes when you want to say no: take a pause. That pause could be 10 seconds. It could be 10 minutes. It could be 2 days.
But I want you to not react right away, and then ask yourself, “What if I’m not wrong here?” This will most likely put you in a different orientation. If it’s the same old fight you have with your partner, you might not jump to defending yourself and have them feel actually heard. You’ll often hear things differently, maybe without the subtext of all the reasons you’ve failed. Or if it’s afraid to open an email or start on a project, you can remind yourself you’re not only not wrong, you’re capable and getting started gives you the information you need to have a successful outcome.
Or I’ve even been shocked at how I still thought I read something I didn’t because I assumed a conflict where there was none! Right now, my big stress is having enough time for work. Eca and work are my main priorities and obviously, I have less time than I did three months ago!
Just the other day I checked my email before bed time and my VA had sent me an email and I misread what she wrote, because I assumed I had forgotten to do a social media component to promoting this podcast. I assumed because I have a story that I don’t have enough time right now and that’s a small example of how I’m looking for data to confirm my story (and we all do this). I didn’t react right away to do what I thought I had forgotten.
I relooked at in the morning and she actually sent me what I thought I had forgotten to do! I was more stressed than I needed to be because I kept thinking, “I hope I can fit it all in and on time”!
By not reacting right away, we can see the situation more clearly AND it often gives our intuition – not our defensive reactions – about how to respond time and space to come through.
And, it allows our nervous system to unwind a bit and so we can better shift into the fullness of not being right or wrong but rather, being who we are and in alignment with that. Because our protective patterns can often feel like gut feelings of what we need but aren’t our intuition at all.
So in summary, from a story perspective, we feel emotional deprived because we are often in a defensive position. We have more “have tos”, “shoulds” and “musts” on our list then “here’s how or what I want to do”, which creates daily and lifelong emotional deprivation. Healthy eating becomes one of too many “to dos” and we don’t have the sense of risk and possibility that makes health a vehicle to more emotional fulfillment and meaning.
Next time you feel that “I shouldn’t, I should, I have to”…try not reacting right away. Give yourself some space and time for your intuition – not your defensive protection – to come through.
But now that you know in theory a defensive posture leads to emotional deprivation, you can become Consciously Incompetent or Consciously Competent, depending upon where you are in your journey, at how to choose differently and more in alignment with what you want.
Conclusion
Self-acceptance can mean taking responsibility for your food choices which leads to radical awareness of how powerful, resilient and creative you and your body are.
Food allergies, sensitivities and intolerances interfere with our intuitive eating abilities by making us crave what we are allergic to.
Restricting these foods can lead to more health freedom when you understand food allergies aren’t a silver bullet, and that it’s as much about adding in new foods and finding others who can support you on your learning curve than taking things away.
We need to make choices in our lives that are risky and create a sense of possibility so our health is a vehicle to more fulfillment, not the same emotional restriction our story creates.
We start with adding in more “I want tos” by not reacting in our stories right away, recognizing we aren’t wrong and then allow our intuitive ideas, questions and answers to come through.
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