January 18, 2021 • 36 mins
Diets and "healthy" eating fads are a January fixture - but few of us stick to these harsh regimes. And when the dieting ends, we often go back to the "bad" foods we craved during our fasting.
Psychotherapist Andrea Wachter says this dieting "roller coaster" makes our minds obsess over food and causes our bodies no end of harm. Andrea stepped off the roller coaster by taking a kinder and calmer approach to the foods she consumed. She tells Dr Laurie Santos the key rule - feed yourself like you'd feed someone you love.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin year after year. One of the most common New
Year's resolutions is losing weight. Many of us start the
new year hating what we see in the mirror, and
so we resolved to fix it not by eating just
a tad healthier, but by completely overhauling our entire food intake.
(00:39):
January can feel like a time when everyone is on
some eating regime. Our social media feeds fill up with
diat ads and articles about paleo and quito and master
cleanses and cabbage soup. Our friends download calorie counting apps
and pledge to cut out carbs and sugar. It's hard
not to get swept up and all the fresh start
diet culture frenzy, especially if you're not feeling all that
(01:01):
positive about how you look after the holidays. I know
all this very well because I too, have had my
fair share of January diet overhauls. I have started many
many a new year hating what I saw in the
mirror and obsessing over my own eating habits and what
was the result of all district dieting. Weeks later, more
often than not, I wound up beating myself up for
(01:23):
not living up to that perfect picture of health i'd
envisioned on New Year's Eve, a resolution I thought would
make me happier ended up making me feel more disappointed
and more depressed than ever. It's been hard for me
to break this annual cycle. But last year, around this time,
Andrea Walkeder came to my rescue. Andrea is a psychotherapist
who specializes in disordered eating and the problem of diet culture.
(01:45):
She's been studying effective ways to eat for over thirty years.
I decided to take her meditation course Getting Over Overeating
on the Insight Time ra app and it was like
a light bulb went off. Hello and welcome to lesson one.
I'm so glad you decided to join me on this journey.
If you've been struggling with overeating or binge eating, the
(02:07):
most important thing to know is that it's not your fault.
Like all the other experts in this New Year mini
season of the Happiness Lab, Andrea has discovered that a
more self compassionate approach is the key to becoming happier
with our bodies and healthier in what we feed ourselves. So,
if you are ready to learn more about how you
(02:29):
can be healthier and kick that destructive diet habit through kindness,
then join me doctor Laurie Santos for another special New
Year mini season edition of The Happiness Lab. The topic
of what I'm supposed to be eating has taken up way,
(02:49):
way more of my thinking than I care to admit.
I have spent an embarrassing chunk of my adult life
plotting and planning new diet regimes. I've spent hours fantasizing
that this time I really will perfectly adhere to that
unnecessarily uber strict new eating plan, and I inevitably become
sad and disappointed when, surprise, I fail again to live
(03:11):
up to the superhuman diet goals I've set for myself,
and because I then feel like a loser, I wind
up comforting myself with whatever off limits food I was
trying to limit in the first place. And that's why
I was so taken by Andrea and her work. She
knows exactly what all this feels like, because she went
through these very same behaviors and worse for years. I
(03:31):
think it's really important to be open about the troubling
relationship that many of us have with food and eating.
But knowing Andrea's personal history, I was a bit nervous
about asking her to share all the details. What was
once the biggest shameful secret of my life is now
my career, so there's kind of nothing. I don't talk
about it anymore because there's no shame anymore, because I
(03:52):
know it wasn't my fault and I know it was
all passed down innocently, and having found a way to
climb out, I'm happy to share what I've been through.
So with that permission, I asked Andrew to explain her
journey towards eating with greater self compassion, beginning with her
very earliest memory of when body image and disordered eating
took over her life. Basically, I started dieting when I
(04:17):
was about twelve years old, and it was the first
time I remember having someone comment or say something shameful
towards my body. Up until that point, I don't really
remember thinking all that much about my body, even though
my mom and still is a chronic diet or. But
when I was about twelve, I got teased about the
(04:39):
size of my thighs. And I call it a dart
in the heart moment where something happens and you feel
terrible about it, usually terrible about yourself, usually make decisions
as a result that are not generally healthy or helpful,
and so I felt terrible about my body. Decided that
I needed to lose weight, and I started my first diet.
(05:02):
And like I said, my mom was already dieting at
the time, my older sister was already dieting, and I
just op on what I now called the diet riot
roller coaster. So talk about what it was like to
be on that diet roller coaster inside. Well, once I
started obsessing, it was this constant soundtrack and it colored
my life. Now. Some people can diet, I call them
(05:24):
lightweight dieters pun intended. Some people can diet and it
doesn't take over their lives, and some people it's a
real huge obsession and leads to problems. And then many
people it leads to full blown eating disorders. And that's
what happened with me. I just became obsessed, which is
the natural response to dieting. I started sneak eating all
the food that I wasn't supposed to have on the
(05:46):
diet and had huge weight fluctuations. I did have a life,
like I went to school and I eventually went to college,
and I had lots of friends and summer jobs but
on the inside, no matter what I was doing, there
was this constant soundtrack of what I was eating, what
I wasn't eating, what someone else was eating, and not eating,
(06:06):
what my thighs looked like compared to this. I was
constantly obsessed and that really colored my life. So this
sounds like a horrible soundtrack to turn on in your
own head. But here we are at the start of
the new year, and so many people are willingly jumping
on this diet roller coaster. Tell me kind of how
that makes you feel, as somebody who's studied this for
so long. Well, it's sad because it's kind of the
(06:29):
solution that people are given. And even though the diet
industry is hugely successful and multibillion dollar industry that continues
to grow, it's got pretty much a ninety five percent
failure rate. People think that they themselves are failing, that
(06:50):
they're just failing the diets. But really the solution that
we're given to body image issues and to binging or
overeating is to diet, And the solution that we're given
the diet is part of the problem. So I feel
sad about it, and I know what it's like to
spend your life upset on food and going to parties
(07:11):
and not being able to eat what others are eating
or what you really want, or eating out of control
once you quote slip or break or go off the diet.
So I know that only too well. And I also
know what the effects of dieting are. And there's it
is a roller coaster. So what were some of the
(07:31):
negative behaviors you noticed in yourself? You talked about your
obsessive thinking, but did you also have behaviors that made
you worry that something wasn't right, that you were on
this kind of a strange roller coaster. Oh? Absolutely, I
snuck ate constantly. I tried to eat what I had
deemed good foods in front of people, and then naturally
(07:51):
ate what I deemed bad foods or what I was
taught were bad foods. I would throw food away in
an attempt to get rid of it, and then get
it out of the garbage and eat it again. I
mean just They call it in Alcoholics Anonymous, in the
twelfth Step arena, they call it incomprehensible demoralization that I
never dreamed I would do. There were even times I
(08:12):
would steal people's food when I was out of control
with food. What's amazing about your story is that you
really realized the bad part of this diet riot roller
coaster firsthand. Right, Yes, But after decades of dieting and
rioting and severe eating disorder and going on one diet
after the next and yo yo weight fluctuations, and then
(08:34):
I finally found help that actually helped, and I started
working on the deeper issues. And so how were you
able to get off this diet riot roller coaster? Well,
I began getting sufficient support that took me deeper than
just my body size. Support that helped me learn what
(08:57):
I was eating over not just what I was eating.
Support that helped me stop restricting and start having a
new relationship with food and learning how to approach food
according to how it would make me feel rather than
how it would make me look. And one of my
biggest doovers was deciding that I was going to let
(09:20):
go of my obsession to change my body and instead
learn how to treat my body respectfully and then make
peace with whatever that body was going to be as
a result. And so, in some ways, ironically, it was
this attempt to get over this diet mentality that allowed
you to kind of come to terms and love your body,
which is what people who are starting out on diets
(09:42):
want in some sense in the first place. Exactly. People
think that if they change their body, then they love
their body. But the way they love your body is
to love your body like you cut out the middle
guy and you work on that, and it's work on
it's roll up your sleeves, work on it. Because of
the culture we live in, talk a little bit about
what happens and what the diet mentality does to our
brains in our minds. Oh, let me count the ways
(10:05):
what it does to our brains in our minds well mentally.
First of all, when we deprive ourselves, we become obsessed.
If someone is cold and they don't put on a sweater,
they're going to be thinking about how cold they are,
and when they put on that sweater, they probably don't
continue thinking they're cold. Or if someone's tired and they
(10:27):
continually deprive themselves of sleep, they can't stop thinking about
how tired they are and feeling tired. But as soon
as we sleep and get rest, we're not likely to
obsess on being tired the next day because that need
was met. So when we diet and chronically restrict ourselves
of delicious food and enough food. Then our minds obsess
(10:50):
on food because they're not getting what they're needing, so
it's a natural response. So that's the first huge effect
of diets. Secondly, there are hormonal changes that happen in
our body as a result of dieting and attempting to
lose weight. Unnaturally, have hormones that are responsible for hunger
(11:12):
and fullness, and when we die it and we lose
weight unnaturally, our hormones will adjust to try to get
us back to natural So our hunger hormone will increase
because it wants us to eat more, and our satiety
(11:33):
hormone will decrease because it wants us to get more
food to get more calories because we need it. So hormonally,
our bodies are very unhappy when we die it, and
when we are eating in a loving, respectful way, which
means we don't starve and we don't stuff ourselves, then
our hormones regulate, and similarly, metabolically, that's a third area
(11:57):
that changes and that gets affected by diets. Our metabolism
will adjust if we deprive ourselves and if we try
to go lower than our natural weight range. We all
have a natural weight range, just like we have a
natural foot size and a natural height. Our natural weight
(12:18):
range isn't one number, opposed to what we're taught people
try to get to be one number. Our natural range
is a range. It fluctuates, and when we diet, our
range tends to fluctuate enormously and unnaturally, and our metabolism
will try to adjust to try to get us back
to our natural range because it's natural. So that's another
(12:41):
effect to be metabolically happy. We want to stop stuffing
and starving ourselves. And when we stop starving ourselves, we
stop stuffing ourselves. And you use this wonderful metaphor of
all these changes is this kind of diet roller coaster.
So talk to me about what you mean about this
roller coaster. Yeah, I call it the diet riot roller coaster.
So there are certainly many people that just riot. They
(13:05):
just binge and painfully overeat and they don't die it.
But I've never met anyone that doesn't diet in mentality.
So I like to say, whether you're dieting in reality
or mentality, it's still going to have that rebound effect
of rebellion. So if somebody deprives themselves of food on
a diet, whether it's official diet in a book or
(13:28):
a doctor, or it's your own deprivation and rules of
food groups and foods that you're just not allowed to
have because they're bad or they're fattening or whatever. So
when someone does that, it sets up this natural response
to just want to eat everything the diet mentality tells
(13:49):
us not to eat. And again there's people that just
binge and overeat and they say they don't diet. But
I've never met someone who didn't have diet mentality thinking
that they should be dieting, And that still sets us up.
And so you know, I grew up in diet culture obviously.
I mean I took your course on Insight Timer, which
I adored. Everyone who's listening to this should take her course.
(14:10):
If you're struggling with this stuff, thank you. But even
though I know this stuff, it's sometimes hard for me
to believe that it's possible to kind of take care
of your body and lovingly feed it in a way
that doesn't feel so obsessed. But you've argued that we
can all do this if we kind of listen to
that voice deep down inside of us if we put
some work in to kind of listen to it. We
(14:31):
do have this voice, but it's a deep voice. It's
kind of in our hearts. It's a natural knowing of
how to treat your body, just like you know, if
you're cold, you grab a blanket. You know, if you're tired, hopefully,
if you're caring for your body, you go to sleep
or rest. And we've been so robbed of this innate
(14:52):
knowledge of how to feed our bodies because of the
diet industry. So this process is about getting it back.
So I think people at the start of the new
year really want to do something positive for themselves, right
like they want to in some sense be healthier or
be fitter, but they unwittingly end up jumping on this
diet riot roller coaster that leaves them in some ways,
like mentally and maybe even physically, worse off than before. Absolutely,
(15:15):
And it's like looking at one piece of a puzzle
and missing that there are so many components. I like
to talk about a four legged table, and that in
order to be healthy and in order to heal from
if somebody doesn't feel comfortable in their body or their
treatment of their body in order to feel more healthy
(15:36):
and more balanced. We have to deal with all four
legs of this table in order for the table to
be stable. I love a good rhyme. So the four
legs or areas to work on if someone wants to
start the new year and work on being healthier. The
four areas are physical, which is letting go of that
extreme diet riot and learning how to feed yourself lovingly
(15:59):
and respectfully. And then it's emotional, which is learning how
to cope with and tend to your emotions rather than
think certain ones are good and certain ones are bad.
And then there's mental, which is looking at your thinking.
And I think disordered eating is really disordered thinking, so
looking at the quality of your thoughts, how you're speaking
(16:21):
to yourself all day long. And then the fourth is
spiritual and how you're feeding yourself spiritually, how you're connecting
with yourself or deeper areas of life. And so when
we deal with all four of those areas physical, emotional, mental,
and spiritual, not dealing with them perfectly or overnight, but
(16:43):
we really work on all those parts of ourselves and
our lives. That's how we get healthier in the new
year or any time of the year. We're going to
take a short break now, but when we return, I'll
have Andrea explain exactly how we can make sure all
four legs of that table are sturdy, and how kindness
and self compassion, yet again are key. The Happiness Lab
(17:04):
will be right back. Psychotherapist Andrea Walter describes her experience
(17:28):
of disordered eating as like being on a diet riot
roller coaster. It's an analogy I can relate to because
it's not just that the ups and downs of strict
denial and drastic over indulgence are like a fairground ride.
There's also a disorienting and deafening inner monologue that comes
with this mental ride. It can even sound like a
creaky old roller coaster. When you're dieting and rioting, you
(17:51):
often can't hear that quiet, kind, calming voice inside you,
the one that knows what a body really needs to
feel healthy and happy. After years of riding the roller coaster,
Andrea had to make a special effort to hear her
own calm, inner voice over all that diet noise. I
would ask myself over and over if I was feeding
(18:13):
someone else who I love, how would I feed them
right now? And I always had to add the someone
who doesn't diet or riot part. If I'm feeding someone
else I love who doesn't diet or riot, how would
I feed them? Because if you love someone, some people
put loved ones on diets, and some people stuff their
(18:33):
loved ones and say here, take more. I love you
so much, eat more. So if you're feeding someone who
doesn't diet or riot and you love them, how would
you feed them? Because I didn't have that intuition for
a long time, that intuitive eating in the early years
didn't work for me. I was like, I don't know
how to eat intuitively. I know how to restrict, and
I know how to binge. But when I started asking
(18:55):
myself that question and asking what feels loving, what feels respectful,
then I would get little inklings until it became the
new normal. And so I mean, I've tried to be
on this path myself of sort of hearing that inner voice,
and it's hard, in part because of all these kind
of cultural norms, but it's also hard because I think
if you have it listened to the voice, in a while,
(19:16):
it becomes hard to genuinely hear it. You know, Sometimes
when I hear you know, how would you feed yourself lovingly.
I think it's got to be the healthy stuff, you know,
avoid the cookies, Right, Like that kind of idea of
good and bad sort of gets in there. And so
in your course you talk about three things to pay
attention to when you're picking food that should feel loving, nutritious, delicious,
and moderate. So talk about why that's kind of a
(19:37):
good cue for those of us in the baby steps
towards mindful eating. Yeah, I use nutritious, delicious, and moderate
as a little checklist because we need to nourish our bodies.
And a lot of times when people say I'm not
dieting anymore, no more diets for me, than they're perhaps
not getting enough nourishing foods. So we do need to
(19:59):
nourish our bodies. Whatever that looks like or feels like
for anybody is it might be different, right, but there
are food groups and there is a way to nourish
our bodies. And again we begin to tune into that
inner knowing or ask ourselves how we feed someone we
love who doesn't diet or riot we can get a sense,
so how do you nourish someone? You're not likely to
(20:19):
give a child a banana for breakfast and send them
off to school for the day. When we think of
how would you feed your child, you're more likely to
give them a nourishing meal, so nutritious delicious when we
die it, we often eat kind of tasteless food, and
so we need to make sure that it's delicious food. Now,
(20:39):
if I'm just focusing on the deliciousness, then we might
not be getting nutritious. So when I first started trying
this all on many many years ago, and I was, Okay,
I'm not dieting anymore. I'm just going to eat what's delicious. Well,
it's not loving to just eat cookies, and it's not
(20:59):
loving to just eat donuts, and it's not loving to
just eat salad. So we've got some nutritious and some delicious,
and they can over lap. Too. Many nutritious foods are
delicious to us, and hopefully we do just eat what
we like and love and then moderate is what's a
loving amount, a respectful amount for your body. Our bodies
(21:21):
know when they're satisfied, so it's learning how to listen
to that. And this is all easier said than done,
especially if we haven't worked on the other legs. So
I can't stress that enough. This is a four pronged
process here, and so let's talk about one of the
other legs. I think kind of the mental part, right,
you know, so talk about how you would sort of
work on that leg of the table as you put it. Well,
(21:42):
we need to look at what's the nature of our thoughts.
I talk about three different mind moods. We have an
unkind mind, a kind mind, and a quiet mind. And
oftentimes when someone is living on the diet Riot roller coaster,
they're really hanging out on the unkind mind channel. So
we need to have an upgrade in our thinking the
(22:04):
quality of our thoughts. And again, just like how would
you feed someone you love, how would you speak to
someone you love? And looking at the way we're speaking
to ourselves and we need to be speaking to ourselves kindly.
And then there's also which internal voice are you listening to?
Are you listening to the dieter voice that's telling you
(22:24):
that's bad, you shouldn't eat, that, you shouldn't look like that.
Are we listening to the rioter voice that says, give
me everything that I never am allowed to have? Or
are we tuning into love? What is respectful, loving, compassionate,
treatment and self talk. I think the unkind mind is
so important to talk about right now at the New Year,
(22:44):
because I think so many of us, in an attempt
to better ourselves on January one, end up talking to
ourselves in a really unkind way. Yes, So it's bringing
consciousness to the way we're talking to ourselves. So often
we just have this monologue going and we don't even
stop to question it because it just feels so real,
(23:04):
sounds so real. But that's often where safe support can
come in, getting help from someone who can say, wait
a minute, that's really not a kind way to speak
to yourself, or would you ever speak to someone else
like that? And really beginning to take a look at
how am I speaking to myself? And would I speak
to someone else who I love in this manner? And
(23:27):
so another part of the table is to really pay
attention to the physical cues that we have around eating
and kind of what's causing us to eat. You know,
we often assume we just eat because we're hungry, But
then when we really pay attention to what's causing us
to pick up that sandwich or that cookie, sometimes it's
not hunger at all. Right, Yes, and if you've got
a history of dieting and rioting, you're likely to be
(23:49):
pretty cut off from your natural hunger and fullness signals.
When I first started that piece of the process, I
couldn't really distinguish so much between was that a feeling?
Was that a hunger? Paying was that anxiety? Was At first,
I don't know what's going on in there, because so
much happens in our guts. So for me in the beginning,
(24:11):
I just kept going with what feels the most loving?
How would I feed someone I love who doesn't diet
or riet? Well, I probably would give them some food
upon awakening within a reasonable time an hour or half
an hour or something. And it probably it wouldn't be
a box of donuts, and it wouldn't be a yogurt.
It would be what's a loving meal? And I just
kept asking myself that it was. I call it the
(24:33):
biggest doover of my life when I decided, as I
approach the kitchen or open a menu, I am going
to ask myself what feels loving, what feels respectful to
this body? And I'm going to move aside, step aside
that voice that thinks I need to change my body
(24:54):
in order to be lovable and acceptable, and I just
kept doing that over and over, and it was hard
at first, because just like meeting someone new, you don't
know them. It takes time. It takes time to get
to know that voice inside of us. You know. One
of the things I observed when I to do this
is that when I was craving food in the beginning
of this journey, oftentimes it had nothing to do with
(25:14):
my hunger cues whatsoever. The food was trying to fill
something else. And this gets to I think your spiritual
leg of the table. We need to kind of figure
out what else is missing, because it seems like sometimes
we kind of go to food when there's some other
thing we're looking for. Absolutely, we were somebody I read
once that binging or dieting our attempts to find spirituality
(25:37):
but going to the wrong address. You know, it's like
a good valid try to get filled up, or to
get some more sweetness in your life, or to get
some comfort. I say, good try. We're just doing the
best we can, trying to fill ourselves up. But when
we really fill our spirits, we feel better afterwards. We
feel fulfilled, afterwards, we don't feel regretful or stuffed. Or
(25:58):
like we hurt ourselves or deprived ourselves. I always encourage
people to make a spirit filler list and to gather
ideas as you go and to find ways to fill
your spirit in a way that you feel better afterwards.
And so, what are some examples on your spirit filler list,
because I think this will be really important for our
listeners to hear some of good examples. Oh, my spirit
(26:20):
filler list, rest and getting in nature and yoga and
taking a bath and meditating and connecting with loved ones,
watching a comedy or reading. I paint rocks. I decided
a few years ago I needed something off the screens,
so I started just doodling and painting on rocks. So
(26:41):
there's lots of ways that people fill their spirits, mostly
to me, going into nature, going to the beach or
the woods or swimming, and everybody has to find what
fills them and ways that even if it's just resting
in a way that's guilt free and you're filling back up,
that's what we're looking for getting comfort. I'm glad you
mentioned the resting thing because one of the early experiences
(27:03):
I had after taking your course on insight Timer when
I was trying to pay attention to why I was
eating things. Was you know, I was actually working on
podcast episodes in fact, and started writing, writing, writing, and
I had this craving to like head downstairs and get
like a cookie or get some chips or eat something.
But I knew I wasn't really hungry, And as I
was kind of walking down, I realized, actually what I
really needed was just to like stand up, right. I
(27:25):
was sitting in that chair writing for hours, and I
think my body just wanted to like get up, move around,
get a change of scenery. But the only thing that
I would allow myself to do if I was like
taking a break, was to go eat something. And that
was a really important moment because it made me realize, like, oh,
my body doesn't want food right now. It just wants
a break. And sometimes the only way you think you
(27:46):
can give yourself a break is with like eating something exactly,
especially if that's a habit. It's kind of like if
the baby starts crying, you want to rule out all
the reasons, right, So maybe it's hungry, maybe it's tired,
maybe it needs a diaper change, maybe it's something's poking it.
We have to rule things out. So if we want food,
we have to rule out am I hungry or unsatisfied
from my last eating experience? And if you've eaten and
(28:09):
then it was a delicious, nutritious, yummy meal or smack, okay,
I'm probably not hungry. So now am I having feelings?
Do I need to tend to some emotions that I'm having?
Or what am I thinking? Are my thoughts kind of
sending myself in an unkind direction an unhelpful direction, or
am I needing something? Or is there a deeper need
here and needing something more spiritual or to connect with
(28:31):
or even just to rest or to stand up or
sit down or whatever. And all of the strategies you're
giving us fits with something we talk a lot about
on the Happiness Lab, which is the simple act of
mindfully paying attention right. You know, for me to notice
what was going on with my craving, I had to
kind of be there and pay attention right to my emotions.
But I think also to notice that you're eating nutritious,
(28:51):
delicious stuff, you also have to be there when you eat.
And this is something I struggle with, is like simply
being present and not checking my email or ignoring it
during the simple act of eating. So talked a little
bit about some strategies people can use if they want
to kind of pay more attention during eating and be
more mindful. Well, I think this process is about paying
more attention in general. Right, It's really about waking up
(29:14):
and being more conscious. And that's the only way that
I have found to make sustained change is to be
more aware and kind of parent ourselves. And loving parent
doesn't just send a kid off and just let them
roam the house all day without care. And so it's
really caring for our body, caring for our mind, caring
(29:36):
for our needs, and tending to ourselves and being awake
at the wheel, so to speak. So being awake and
aware when you're eating, being more awake and aware when
you're not eating, what you're needing, what you're feeling. And
so often people with whether it's a full blown eating
disorder like I had, or just disordered eating, people have
(29:59):
had kind of a hypnotic spell cast upon us, and
it leads us to be pretty checked out. With these
screens is constant scream use, and with just obligations and
now all the anxiety in the world, it can leave
us pretty numb. So what's being asked here is a lot,
(30:21):
but you get a lot as a result, you get
a lot back. So it's a worthy cause. But it
is about being more aware of how you're treating yourself
and how you're speaking to yourself. So as we put
all these legs of the table back, I think a
final thing we need to pay attention to is kind
of trying to avoid these cultural forces that led us
onto this diet riot roller coaster in the first place.
(30:42):
And I feel like there's nothing harder than to do
that during the new year, where it feels like, you know,
there are forces screaming get us to restrict our foods
or to eat keto or eat healthy. You know, any
hints for how to fight these forces, especially at this
time of the year, Well, the first hint is you
have to believe in what I'm saying here, what we're
(31:02):
talking about. You have to buy in to the idea
that the diet is not the solution to a body
image issue or feeling unhealthy in your body. The diet
is part of the problem. So you'd have to believe that.
And once you believe it, it's about really standing by
that belief and acting according to that belief. And so
(31:26):
once I believed that dieting is not of interest to
me anymore and that it only sets up obsession and binging,
then no matter what other people were doing, it didn't
matter it maybe it wasn't as enjoyable. I remember in
the early years when I was first trying to make
the shift, and I would go be with people that
(31:48):
were still dieting, and I remember there would be times
where let's say I was visiting family and we were
going to go out to dinner, let's say, and it
was lunch time, it was mid afternoon, and I'd say, oh,
I'm gonna eat lunch, and they'd say, oh, we're going
to have a big dinner, an early dinner. I'm going
to skip lunch. And I'd say, okay, well I'm going
to go have a lunch. And I would just it
took it was brave to go against the culture. Or
(32:10):
I want to maybe dessert with my breakfast and nobody
on they thought it was weird. Or I don't want
dessert with my dinner because I'm full of sort of
going against the cultural norms is brave. But once you
know this is what I need to do to get
my own relationship with my body back and to get
off that diet riot roller coaster, and you're committed to it.
(32:31):
And once you know wholeheartedly that dieting is part of
the problem, not the solution, then it's about being brave
and taking a stand and doing it differently. Sometimes I'll
say to my clients, if someone in your family has
to go to the bathroom, do you think you should
automatically go to You know, it's like we get to
have different bodily needs and it's brave on this one.
(32:53):
And so how has this approach changed your life? I mean,
you've talked about this being a moment that has changed everything,
So talk about how it's changed your relationship with your
body but also your happiness only completely, only every day.
Just I used to be completely obsessed with food and
my body, and I was either restricting and obsessing or
(33:17):
overeating and binging and obsessing and white knuckling or out
of control. And again, you don't have to be as
extreme as I was to still deserve and warrant help.
And now I eat food when my body tells me
it needs food, and I choose just exactly what I
like and what I want and there's no longer. In
(33:40):
the beginning, when I was learning this, there was a
lot of inner committee dialogue of is that loving to
have that? Is it restricting if I don't have that?
As it felt like every meal was a big committee meeting.
And now I just know exactly what I want and
I just go get it. Fortunately, I'm fortunate enough to
be able to have resources and have what I want
in my home. So now that frees me up. That
(34:01):
frees me up so much time. I think about all
the time I spent thinking about food and my body
size and just missed out on life. And I don't
think anybody gets to their deathbed and wishes they were
a different size. I've had so many clients in their
eighties and late eighties who have said that they don't
(34:22):
even have a memory of eating naturally and feeling comfortable
and peaceful in their bodies. So so many people just
lose years out of their lives thinking about food and
body obsession. So for me, I've gotten that back. I
have a lot more free time, and that frees me up,
and I get to read if I want to read,
and go walk in nature or sit down or do
(34:44):
a podcast with a lovely person. So it just frees
me up to be able to see what else there
is in life. It doesn't mean I'm happy all the time.
That's not natural either. It just means that I'm not
obsessed with food all the time or at all. Since
learning of Andrew's work, I've tried really hard to reduce
(35:05):
the amount of mental time and emotional energy I spend
thinking food and eating. I'm still more influenced than i'd
like to be by all the cultural pressures to look
a certain way or eat a particular thing, or to
think of food as good or bad. But this year,
I'm trying to find that kinder, more compassionate voice in
my head, and so my eating resolution for twenty twenty one,
(35:26):
unlike the diet riot urges of years past, is to
ask myself the question Andrea suggested. If I was feeding
someone else who I loved, how would I feed them?
Right now, it sounds like a tiny step, but for me,
it's been a game changer. In our next and final
episode of this New Year mini season, we'll tackle another
(35:46):
super common resolution that also causes us to be unkind
to ourselves and to our happiness. Exercise. So if you
want to learn more about how you can engage with
fitness more self compassionately. I hope you'll come back for
the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Doctor
Laurie Santos. That Penis Lab was co written and produced
(36:13):
by Ryan Dilley. The show was mixed and mastered by
Evan Viola, and our original music was by Zachary Silver.
Special thanks to the entire Pushkin team, including Mela Belle,
Maggie Taylor, Carl mcgliori, Heather Fame, Sophie Crane, mckibbon, Eric Sandler,
Jacob Weisberg, and my agent Ben Davis. That Penis Lab
(36:33):
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by me,
Doctor Laurie Santos,
Pushkin year after year. One of the most common New
Year's resolutions is losing weight. Many of us start the
new year hating what we see in the mirror, and
so we resolved to fix it not by eating just
a tad healthier, but by completely overhauling our entire food intake.
(00:39):
January can feel like a time when everyone is on
some eating regime. Our social media feeds fill up with
diat ads and articles about paleo and quito and master
cleanses and cabbage soup. Our friends download calorie counting apps
and pledge to cut out carbs and sugar. It's hard
not to get swept up and all the fresh start
diet culture frenzy, especially if you're not feeling all that
(01:01):
positive about how you look after the holidays. I know
all this very well because I too, have had my
fair share of January diet overhauls. I have started many
many a new year hating what I saw in the
mirror and obsessing over my own eating habits and what
was the result of all district dieting. Weeks later, more
often than not, I wound up beating myself up for
(01:23):
not living up to that perfect picture of health i'd
envisioned on New Year's Eve, a resolution I thought would
make me happier ended up making me feel more disappointed
and more depressed than ever. It's been hard for me
to break this annual cycle. But last year, around this time,
Andrea Walkeder came to my rescue. Andrea is a psychotherapist
who specializes in disordered eating and the problem of diet culture.
(01:45):
She's been studying effective ways to eat for over thirty years.
I decided to take her meditation course Getting Over Overeating
on the Insight Time ra app and it was like
a light bulb went off. Hello and welcome to lesson one.
I'm so glad you decided to join me on this journey.
If you've been struggling with overeating or binge eating, the
(02:07):
most important thing to know is that it's not your fault.
Like all the other experts in this New Year mini
season of the Happiness Lab, Andrea has discovered that a
more self compassionate approach is the key to becoming happier
with our bodies and healthier in what we feed ourselves. So,
if you are ready to learn more about how you
(02:29):
can be healthier and kick that destructive diet habit through kindness,
then join me doctor Laurie Santos for another special New
Year mini season edition of The Happiness Lab. The topic
of what I'm supposed to be eating has taken up way,
(02:49):
way more of my thinking than I care to admit.
I have spent an embarrassing chunk of my adult life
plotting and planning new diet regimes. I've spent hours fantasizing
that this time I really will perfectly adhere to that
unnecessarily uber strict new eating plan, and I inevitably become
sad and disappointed when, surprise, I fail again to live
(03:11):
up to the superhuman diet goals I've set for myself,
and because I then feel like a loser, I wind
up comforting myself with whatever off limits food I was
trying to limit in the first place. And that's why
I was so taken by Andrea and her work. She
knows exactly what all this feels like, because she went
through these very same behaviors and worse for years. I
(03:31):
think it's really important to be open about the troubling
relationship that many of us have with food and eating.
But knowing Andrea's personal history, I was a bit nervous
about asking her to share all the details. What was
once the biggest shameful secret of my life is now
my career, so there's kind of nothing. I don't talk
about it anymore because there's no shame anymore, because I
(03:52):
know it wasn't my fault and I know it was
all passed down innocently, and having found a way to
climb out, I'm happy to share what I've been through.
So with that permission, I asked Andrew to explain her
journey towards eating with greater self compassion, beginning with her
very earliest memory of when body image and disordered eating
took over her life. Basically, I started dieting when I
(04:17):
was about twelve years old, and it was the first
time I remember having someone comment or say something shameful
towards my body. Up until that point, I don't really
remember thinking all that much about my body, even though
my mom and still is a chronic diet or. But
when I was about twelve, I got teased about the
(04:39):
size of my thighs. And I call it a dart
in the heart moment where something happens and you feel
terrible about it, usually terrible about yourself, usually make decisions
as a result that are not generally healthy or helpful,
and so I felt terrible about my body. Decided that
I needed to lose weight, and I started my first diet.
(05:02):
And like I said, my mom was already dieting at
the time, my older sister was already dieting, and I
just op on what I now called the diet riot
roller coaster. So talk about what it was like to
be on that diet roller coaster inside. Well, once I
started obsessing, it was this constant soundtrack and it colored
my life. Now. Some people can diet, I call them
(05:24):
lightweight dieters pun intended. Some people can diet and it
doesn't take over their lives, and some people it's a
real huge obsession and leads to problems. And then many
people it leads to full blown eating disorders. And that's
what happened with me. I just became obsessed, which is
the natural response to dieting. I started sneak eating all
the food that I wasn't supposed to have on the
(05:46):
diet and had huge weight fluctuations. I did have a life,
like I went to school and I eventually went to college,
and I had lots of friends and summer jobs but
on the inside, no matter what I was doing, there
was this constant soundtrack of what I was eating, what
I wasn't eating, what someone else was eating, and not eating,
(06:06):
what my thighs looked like compared to this. I was
constantly obsessed and that really colored my life. So this
sounds like a horrible soundtrack to turn on in your
own head. But here we are at the start of
the new year, and so many people are willingly jumping
on this diet roller coaster. Tell me kind of how
that makes you feel, as somebody who's studied this for
so long. Well, it's sad because it's kind of the
(06:29):
solution that people are given. And even though the diet
industry is hugely successful and multibillion dollar industry that continues
to grow, it's got pretty much a ninety five percent
failure rate. People think that they themselves are failing, that
(06:50):
they're just failing the diets. But really the solution that
we're given to body image issues and to binging or
overeating is to diet, And the solution that we're given
the diet is part of the problem. So I feel
sad about it, and I know what it's like to
spend your life upset on food and going to parties
(07:11):
and not being able to eat what others are eating
or what you really want, or eating out of control
once you quote slip or break or go off the diet.
So I know that only too well. And I also
know what the effects of dieting are. And there's it
is a roller coaster. So what were some of the
(07:31):
negative behaviors you noticed in yourself? You talked about your
obsessive thinking, but did you also have behaviors that made
you worry that something wasn't right, that you were on
this kind of a strange roller coaster. Oh? Absolutely, I
snuck ate constantly. I tried to eat what I had
deemed good foods in front of people, and then naturally
(07:51):
ate what I deemed bad foods or what I was
taught were bad foods. I would throw food away in
an attempt to get rid of it, and then get
it out of the garbage and eat it again. I
mean just They call it in Alcoholics Anonymous, in the
twelfth Step arena, they call it incomprehensible demoralization that I
never dreamed I would do. There were even times I
(08:12):
would steal people's food when I was out of control
with food. What's amazing about your story is that you
really realized the bad part of this diet riot roller
coaster firsthand. Right, Yes, But after decades of dieting and
rioting and severe eating disorder and going on one diet
after the next and yo yo weight fluctuations, and then
(08:34):
I finally found help that actually helped, and I started
working on the deeper issues. And so how were you
able to get off this diet riot roller coaster? Well,
I began getting sufficient support that took me deeper than
just my body size. Support that helped me learn what
(08:57):
I was eating over not just what I was eating.
Support that helped me stop restricting and start having a
new relationship with food and learning how to approach food
according to how it would make me feel rather than
how it would make me look. And one of my
biggest doovers was deciding that I was going to let
(09:20):
go of my obsession to change my body and instead
learn how to treat my body respectfully and then make
peace with whatever that body was going to be as
a result. And so, in some ways, ironically, it was
this attempt to get over this diet mentality that allowed
you to kind of come to terms and love your body,
which is what people who are starting out on diets
(09:42):
want in some sense in the first place. Exactly. People
think that if they change their body, then they love
their body. But the way they love your body is
to love your body like you cut out the middle
guy and you work on that, and it's work on
it's roll up your sleeves, work on it. Because of
the culture we live in, talk a little bit about
what happens and what the diet mentality does to our
brains in our minds. Oh, let me count the ways
(10:05):
what it does to our brains in our minds well mentally.
First of all, when we deprive ourselves, we become obsessed.
If someone is cold and they don't put on a sweater,
they're going to be thinking about how cold they are,
and when they put on that sweater, they probably don't
continue thinking they're cold. Or if someone's tired and they
(10:27):
continually deprive themselves of sleep, they can't stop thinking about
how tired they are and feeling tired. But as soon
as we sleep and get rest, we're not likely to
obsess on being tired the next day because that need
was met. So when we diet and chronically restrict ourselves
of delicious food and enough food. Then our minds obsess
(10:50):
on food because they're not getting what they're needing, so
it's a natural response. So that's the first huge effect
of diets. Secondly, there are hormonal changes that happen in
our body as a result of dieting and attempting to
lose weight. Unnaturally, have hormones that are responsible for hunger
(11:12):
and fullness, and when we die it and we lose
weight unnaturally, our hormones will adjust to try to get
us back to natural So our hunger hormone will increase
because it wants us to eat more, and our satiety
(11:33):
hormone will decrease because it wants us to get more
food to get more calories because we need it. So hormonally,
our bodies are very unhappy when we die it, and
when we are eating in a loving, respectful way, which
means we don't starve and we don't stuff ourselves, then
our hormones regulate, and similarly, metabolically, that's a third area
(11:57):
that changes and that gets affected by diets. Our metabolism
will adjust if we deprive ourselves and if we try
to go lower than our natural weight range. We all
have a natural weight range, just like we have a
natural foot size and a natural height. Our natural weight
(12:18):
range isn't one number, opposed to what we're taught people
try to get to be one number. Our natural range
is a range. It fluctuates, and when we diet, our
range tends to fluctuate enormously and unnaturally, and our metabolism
will try to adjust to try to get us back
to our natural range because it's natural. So that's another
(12:41):
effect to be metabolically happy. We want to stop stuffing
and starving ourselves. And when we stop starving ourselves, we
stop stuffing ourselves. And you use this wonderful metaphor of
all these changes is this kind of diet roller coaster.
So talk to me about what you mean about this
roller coaster. Yeah, I call it the diet riot roller coaster.
So there are certainly many people that just riot. They
(13:05):
just binge and painfully overeat and they don't die it.
But I've never met anyone that doesn't diet in mentality.
So I like to say, whether you're dieting in reality
or mentality, it's still going to have that rebound effect
of rebellion. So if somebody deprives themselves of food on
a diet, whether it's official diet in a book or
(13:28):
a doctor, or it's your own deprivation and rules of
food groups and foods that you're just not allowed to
have because they're bad or they're fattening or whatever. So
when someone does that, it sets up this natural response
to just want to eat everything the diet mentality tells
(13:49):
us not to eat. And again there's people that just
binge and overeat and they say they don't diet. But
I've never met someone who didn't have diet mentality thinking
that they should be dieting, And that still sets us up.
And so you know, I grew up in diet culture obviously.
I mean I took your course on Insight Timer, which
I adored. Everyone who's listening to this should take her course.
(14:10):
If you're struggling with this stuff, thank you. But even
though I know this stuff, it's sometimes hard for me
to believe that it's possible to kind of take care
of your body and lovingly feed it in a way
that doesn't feel so obsessed. But you've argued that we
can all do this if we kind of listen to
that voice deep down inside of us if we put
some work in to kind of listen to it. We
(14:31):
do have this voice, but it's a deep voice. It's
kind of in our hearts. It's a natural knowing of
how to treat your body, just like you know, if
you're cold, you grab a blanket. You know, if you're tired, hopefully,
if you're caring for your body, you go to sleep
or rest. And we've been so robbed of this innate
(14:52):
knowledge of how to feed our bodies because of the
diet industry. So this process is about getting it back.
So I think people at the start of the new
year really want to do something positive for themselves, right
like they want to in some sense be healthier or
be fitter, but they unwittingly end up jumping on this
diet riot roller coaster that leaves them in some ways,
like mentally and maybe even physically, worse off than before. Absolutely,
(15:15):
And it's like looking at one piece of a puzzle
and missing that there are so many components. I like
to talk about a four legged table, and that in
order to be healthy and in order to heal from
if somebody doesn't feel comfortable in their body or their
treatment of their body in order to feel more healthy
(15:36):
and more balanced. We have to deal with all four
legs of this table in order for the table to
be stable. I love a good rhyme. So the four
legs or areas to work on if someone wants to
start the new year and work on being healthier. The
four areas are physical, which is letting go of that
extreme diet riot and learning how to feed yourself lovingly
(15:59):
and respectfully. And then it's emotional, which is learning how
to cope with and tend to your emotions rather than
think certain ones are good and certain ones are bad.
And then there's mental, which is looking at your thinking.
And I think disordered eating is really disordered thinking, so
looking at the quality of your thoughts, how you're speaking
(16:21):
to yourself all day long. And then the fourth is
spiritual and how you're feeding yourself spiritually, how you're connecting
with yourself or deeper areas of life. And so when
we deal with all four of those areas physical, emotional, mental,
and spiritual, not dealing with them perfectly or overnight, but
(16:43):
we really work on all those parts of ourselves and
our lives. That's how we get healthier in the new
year or any time of the year. We're going to
take a short break now, but when we return, I'll
have Andrea explain exactly how we can make sure all
four legs of that table are sturdy, and how kindness
and self compassion, yet again are key. The Happiness Lab
(17:04):
will be right back. Psychotherapist Andrea Walter describes her experience
(17:28):
of disordered eating as like being on a diet riot
roller coaster. It's an analogy I can relate to because
it's not just that the ups and downs of strict
denial and drastic over indulgence are like a fairground ride.
There's also a disorienting and deafening inner monologue that comes
with this mental ride. It can even sound like a
creaky old roller coaster. When you're dieting and rioting, you
(17:51):
often can't hear that quiet, kind, calming voice inside you,
the one that knows what a body really needs to
feel healthy and happy. After years of riding the roller coaster,
Andrea had to make a special effort to hear her
own calm, inner voice over all that diet noise. I
would ask myself over and over if I was feeding
(18:13):
someone else who I love, how would I feed them
right now? And I always had to add the someone
who doesn't diet or riot part. If I'm feeding someone
else I love who doesn't diet or riot, how would
I feed them? Because if you love someone, some people
put loved ones on diets, and some people stuff their
(18:33):
loved ones and say here, take more. I love you
so much, eat more. So if you're feeding someone who
doesn't diet or riot and you love them, how would
you feed them? Because I didn't have that intuition for
a long time, that intuitive eating in the early years
didn't work for me. I was like, I don't know
how to eat intuitively. I know how to restrict, and
I know how to binge. But when I started asking
(18:55):
myself that question and asking what feels loving, what feels respectful,
then I would get little inklings until it became the
new normal. And so I mean, I've tried to be
on this path myself of sort of hearing that inner voice,
and it's hard, in part because of all these kind
of cultural norms, but it's also hard because I think
if you have it listened to the voice, in a while,
(19:16):
it becomes hard to genuinely hear it. You know, Sometimes
when I hear you know, how would you feed yourself lovingly.
I think it's got to be the healthy stuff, you know,
avoid the cookies, Right, Like that kind of idea of
good and bad sort of gets in there. And so
in your course you talk about three things to pay
attention to when you're picking food that should feel loving, nutritious, delicious,
and moderate. So talk about why that's kind of a
(19:37):
good cue for those of us in the baby steps
towards mindful eating. Yeah, I use nutritious, delicious, and moderate
as a little checklist because we need to nourish our bodies.
And a lot of times when people say I'm not
dieting anymore, no more diets for me, than they're perhaps
not getting enough nourishing foods. So we do need to
(19:59):
nourish our bodies. Whatever that looks like or feels like
for anybody is it might be different, right, but there
are food groups and there is a way to nourish
our bodies. And again we begin to tune into that
inner knowing or ask ourselves how we feed someone we
love who doesn't diet or riot we can get a sense,
so how do you nourish someone? You're not likely to
(20:19):
give a child a banana for breakfast and send them
off to school for the day. When we think of
how would you feed your child, you're more likely to
give them a nourishing meal, so nutritious delicious when we
die it, we often eat kind of tasteless food, and
so we need to make sure that it's delicious food. Now,
(20:39):
if I'm just focusing on the deliciousness, then we might
not be getting nutritious. So when I first started trying
this all on many many years ago, and I was, Okay,
I'm not dieting anymore. I'm just going to eat what's delicious. Well,
it's not loving to just eat cookies, and it's not
(20:59):
loving to just eat donuts, and it's not loving to
just eat salad. So we've got some nutritious and some delicious,
and they can over lap. Too. Many nutritious foods are
delicious to us, and hopefully we do just eat what
we like and love and then moderate is what's a
loving amount, a respectful amount for your body. Our bodies
(21:21):
know when they're satisfied, so it's learning how to listen
to that. And this is all easier said than done,
especially if we haven't worked on the other legs. So
I can't stress that enough. This is a four pronged
process here, and so let's talk about one of the
other legs. I think kind of the mental part, right,
you know, so talk about how you would sort of
work on that leg of the table as you put it. Well,
(21:42):
we need to look at what's the nature of our thoughts.
I talk about three different mind moods. We have an
unkind mind, a kind mind, and a quiet mind. And
oftentimes when someone is living on the diet Riot roller coaster,
they're really hanging out on the unkind mind channel. So
we need to have an upgrade in our thinking the
(22:04):
quality of our thoughts. And again, just like how would
you feed someone you love, how would you speak to
someone you love? And looking at the way we're speaking
to ourselves and we need to be speaking to ourselves kindly.
And then there's also which internal voice are you listening to?
Are you listening to the dieter voice that's telling you
(22:24):
that's bad, you shouldn't eat, that, you shouldn't look like that.
Are we listening to the rioter voice that says, give
me everything that I never am allowed to have? Or
are we tuning into love? What is respectful, loving, compassionate,
treatment and self talk. I think the unkind mind is
so important to talk about right now at the New Year,
(22:44):
because I think so many of us, in an attempt
to better ourselves on January one, end up talking to
ourselves in a really unkind way. Yes, So it's bringing
consciousness to the way we're talking to ourselves. So often
we just have this monologue going and we don't even
stop to question it because it just feels so real,
(23:04):
sounds so real. But that's often where safe support can
come in, getting help from someone who can say, wait
a minute, that's really not a kind way to speak
to yourself, or would you ever speak to someone else
like that? And really beginning to take a look at
how am I speaking to myself? And would I speak
to someone else who I love in this manner? And
(23:27):
so another part of the table is to really pay
attention to the physical cues that we have around eating
and kind of what's causing us to eat. You know,
we often assume we just eat because we're hungry, But
then when we really pay attention to what's causing us
to pick up that sandwich or that cookie, sometimes it's
not hunger at all. Right, Yes, and if you've got
a history of dieting and rioting, you're likely to be
(23:49):
pretty cut off from your natural hunger and fullness signals.
When I first started that piece of the process, I
couldn't really distinguish so much between was that a feeling?
Was that a hunger? Paying was that anxiety? Was At first,
I don't know what's going on in there, because so
much happens in our guts. So for me in the beginning,
(24:11):
I just kept going with what feels the most loving?
How would I feed someone I love who doesn't diet
or riet? Well, I probably would give them some food
upon awakening within a reasonable time an hour or half
an hour or something. And it probably it wouldn't be
a box of donuts, and it wouldn't be a yogurt.
It would be what's a loving meal? And I just
kept asking myself that it was. I call it the
(24:33):
biggest doover of my life when I decided, as I
approach the kitchen or open a menu, I am going
to ask myself what feels loving, what feels respectful to
this body? And I'm going to move aside, step aside
that voice that thinks I need to change my body
(24:54):
in order to be lovable and acceptable, and I just
kept doing that over and over, and it was hard
at first, because just like meeting someone new, you don't
know them. It takes time. It takes time to get
to know that voice inside of us. You know. One
of the things I observed when I to do this
is that when I was craving food in the beginning
of this journey, oftentimes it had nothing to do with
(25:14):
my hunger cues whatsoever. The food was trying to fill
something else. And this gets to I think your spiritual
leg of the table. We need to kind of figure
out what else is missing, because it seems like sometimes
we kind of go to food when there's some other
thing we're looking for. Absolutely, we were somebody I read
once that binging or dieting our attempts to find spirituality
(25:37):
but going to the wrong address. You know, it's like
a good valid try to get filled up, or to
get some more sweetness in your life, or to get
some comfort. I say, good try. We're just doing the
best we can, trying to fill ourselves up. But when
we really fill our spirits, we feel better afterwards. We
feel fulfilled, afterwards, we don't feel regretful or stuffed. Or
(25:58):
like we hurt ourselves or deprived ourselves. I always encourage
people to make a spirit filler list and to gather
ideas as you go and to find ways to fill
your spirit in a way that you feel better afterwards.
And so, what are some examples on your spirit filler list,
because I think this will be really important for our
listeners to hear some of good examples. Oh, my spirit
(26:20):
filler list, rest and getting in nature and yoga and
taking a bath and meditating and connecting with loved ones,
watching a comedy or reading. I paint rocks. I decided
a few years ago I needed something off the screens,
so I started just doodling and painting on rocks. So
(26:41):
there's lots of ways that people fill their spirits, mostly
to me, going into nature, going to the beach or
the woods or swimming, and everybody has to find what
fills them and ways that even if it's just resting
in a way that's guilt free and you're filling back up,
that's what we're looking for getting comfort. I'm glad you
mentioned the resting thing because one of the early experiences
(27:03):
I had after taking your course on insight Timer when
I was trying to pay attention to why I was
eating things. Was you know, I was actually working on
podcast episodes in fact, and started writing, writing, writing, and
I had this craving to like head downstairs and get
like a cookie or get some chips or eat something.
But I knew I wasn't really hungry, And as I
was kind of walking down, I realized, actually what I
really needed was just to like stand up, right. I
(27:25):
was sitting in that chair writing for hours, and I
think my body just wanted to like get up, move around,
get a change of scenery. But the only thing that
I would allow myself to do if I was like
taking a break, was to go eat something. And that
was a really important moment because it made me realize, like, oh,
my body doesn't want food right now. It just wants
a break. And sometimes the only way you think you
(27:46):
can give yourself a break is with like eating something exactly,
especially if that's a habit. It's kind of like if
the baby starts crying, you want to rule out all
the reasons, right, So maybe it's hungry, maybe it's tired,
maybe it needs a diaper change, maybe it's something's poking it.
We have to rule things out. So if we want food,
we have to rule out am I hungry or unsatisfied
from my last eating experience? And if you've eaten and
(28:09):
then it was a delicious, nutritious, yummy meal or smack, okay,
I'm probably not hungry. So now am I having feelings?
Do I need to tend to some emotions that I'm having?
Or what am I thinking? Are my thoughts kind of
sending myself in an unkind direction an unhelpful direction, or
am I needing something? Or is there a deeper need
here and needing something more spiritual or to connect with
(28:31):
or even just to rest or to stand up or
sit down or whatever. And all of the strategies you're
giving us fits with something we talk a lot about
on the Happiness Lab, which is the simple act of
mindfully paying attention right. You know, for me to notice
what was going on with my craving, I had to
kind of be there and pay attention right to my emotions.
But I think also to notice that you're eating nutritious,
(28:51):
delicious stuff, you also have to be there when you eat.
And this is something I struggle with, is like simply
being present and not checking my email or ignoring it
during the simple act of eating. So talked a little
bit about some strategies people can use if they want
to kind of pay more attention during eating and be
more mindful. Well, I think this process is about paying
more attention in general. Right, It's really about waking up
(29:14):
and being more conscious. And that's the only way that
I have found to make sustained change is to be
more aware and kind of parent ourselves. And loving parent
doesn't just send a kid off and just let them
roam the house all day without care. And so it's
really caring for our body, caring for our mind, caring
(29:36):
for our needs, and tending to ourselves and being awake
at the wheel, so to speak. So being awake and
aware when you're eating, being more awake and aware when
you're not eating, what you're needing, what you're feeling. And
so often people with whether it's a full blown eating
disorder like I had, or just disordered eating, people have
(29:59):
had kind of a hypnotic spell cast upon us, and
it leads us to be pretty checked out. With these
screens is constant scream use, and with just obligations and
now all the anxiety in the world, it can leave
us pretty numb. So what's being asked here is a lot,
(30:21):
but you get a lot as a result, you get
a lot back. So it's a worthy cause. But it
is about being more aware of how you're treating yourself
and how you're speaking to yourself. So as we put
all these legs of the table back, I think a
final thing we need to pay attention to is kind
of trying to avoid these cultural forces that led us
onto this diet riot roller coaster in the first place.
(30:42):
And I feel like there's nothing harder than to do
that during the new year, where it feels like, you know,
there are forces screaming get us to restrict our foods
or to eat keto or eat healthy. You know, any
hints for how to fight these forces, especially at this
time of the year, Well, the first hint is you
have to believe in what I'm saying here, what we're
(31:02):
talking about. You have to buy in to the idea
that the diet is not the solution to a body
image issue or feeling unhealthy in your body. The diet
is part of the problem. So you'd have to believe that.
And once you believe it, it's about really standing by
that belief and acting according to that belief. And so
(31:26):
once I believed that dieting is not of interest to
me anymore and that it only sets up obsession and binging,
then no matter what other people were doing, it didn't
matter it maybe it wasn't as enjoyable. I remember in
the early years when I was first trying to make
the shift, and I would go be with people that
(31:48):
were still dieting, and I remember there would be times
where let's say I was visiting family and we were
going to go out to dinner, let's say, and it
was lunch time, it was mid afternoon, and I'd say, oh,
I'm gonna eat lunch, and they'd say, oh, we're going
to have a big dinner, an early dinner. I'm going
to skip lunch. And I'd say, okay, well I'm going
to go have a lunch. And I would just it
took it was brave to go against the culture. Or
(32:10):
I want to maybe dessert with my breakfast and nobody
on they thought it was weird. Or I don't want
dessert with my dinner because I'm full of sort of
going against the cultural norms is brave. But once you
know this is what I need to do to get
my own relationship with my body back and to get
off that diet riot roller coaster, and you're committed to it.
(32:31):
And once you know wholeheartedly that dieting is part of
the problem, not the solution, then it's about being brave
and taking a stand and doing it differently. Sometimes I'll
say to my clients, if someone in your family has
to go to the bathroom, do you think you should
automatically go to You know, it's like we get to
have different bodily needs and it's brave on this one.
(32:53):
And so how has this approach changed your life? I mean,
you've talked about this being a moment that has changed everything,
So talk about how it's changed your relationship with your
body but also your happiness only completely, only every day.
Just I used to be completely obsessed with food and
my body, and I was either restricting and obsessing or
(33:17):
overeating and binging and obsessing and white knuckling or out
of control. And again, you don't have to be as
extreme as I was to still deserve and warrant help.
And now I eat food when my body tells me
it needs food, and I choose just exactly what I
like and what I want and there's no longer. In
(33:40):
the beginning, when I was learning this, there was a
lot of inner committee dialogue of is that loving to
have that? Is it restricting if I don't have that?
As it felt like every meal was a big committee meeting.
And now I just know exactly what I want and
I just go get it. Fortunately, I'm fortunate enough to
be able to have resources and have what I want
in my home. So now that frees me up. That
(34:01):
frees me up so much time. I think about all
the time I spent thinking about food and my body
size and just missed out on life. And I don't
think anybody gets to their deathbed and wishes they were
a different size. I've had so many clients in their
eighties and late eighties who have said that they don't
(34:22):
even have a memory of eating naturally and feeling comfortable
and peaceful in their bodies. So so many people just
lose years out of their lives thinking about food and
body obsession. So for me, I've gotten that back. I
have a lot more free time, and that frees me up,
and I get to read if I want to read,
and go walk in nature or sit down or do
(34:44):
a podcast with a lovely person. So it just frees
me up to be able to see what else there
is in life. It doesn't mean I'm happy all the time.
That's not natural either. It just means that I'm not
obsessed with food all the time or at all. Since
learning of Andrew's work, I've tried really hard to reduce
(35:05):
the amount of mental time and emotional energy I spend
thinking food and eating. I'm still more influenced than i'd
like to be by all the cultural pressures to look
a certain way or eat a particular thing, or to
think of food as good or bad. But this year,
I'm trying to find that kinder, more compassionate voice in
my head, and so my eating resolution for twenty twenty one,
(35:26):
unlike the diet riot urges of years past, is to
ask myself the question Andrea suggested. If I was feeding
someone else who I loved, how would I feed them?
Right now, it sounds like a tiny step, but for me,
it's been a game changer. In our next and final
episode of this New Year mini season, we'll tackle another
(35:46):
super common resolution that also causes us to be unkind
to ourselves and to our happiness. Exercise. So if you
want to learn more about how you can engage with
fitness more self compassionately. I hope you'll come back for
the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Doctor
Laurie Santos. That Penis Lab was co written and produced
(36:13):
by Ryan Dilley. The show was mixed and mastered by
Evan Viola, and our original music was by Zachary Silver.
Special thanks to the entire Pushkin team, including Mela Belle,
Maggie Taylor, Carl mcgliori, Heather Fame, Sophie Crane, mckibbon, Eric Sandler,
Jacob Weisberg, and my agent Ben Davis. That Penis Lab
(36:33):
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by me,
Doctor Laurie Santos,
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