Welcome to the Mastering Midlife Podcast where we talk about all the crazy fun things that happen when you are a midlife mama. I'm your host Heather London, let's dig in. Hey and welcome to Episode 20! Today we're talking about The Pleasure Trap. Now this is a book that I just recently read by Doug Lyle and Alan Goldhammer and it was amazing and I wanted to kind of give you the Cole's Notes version because it's so related to what I do in the world.
My mission in life is to help midlife mamas find their purpose and love their lives and love themselves and just go out and achieve everything they've ever wanted to achieve. Why? Because I'm a midlife mama and I'm going through it and it's relatable and it's hard and when we have our kids somewhere along the way we lose ourselves and when our kids no longer need us and go off on their own boohoo it's time for us to get back to who we are and we've forgotten how to put ourselves first
and so that's where the journey gets really, can be really hard sometimes. When I was reading this book it was relative to hunger and eating and why we weigh as much as we do and I translate it to us midlife mamas and that's my job but the book is based on it talks about okay human desires like
our whole purpose for being here is to survive and then reproduce though that's our animal instinct and back in the day that's what we did and over time it's getting easier and easier and easier and easier to do that like you can see when you look at history why it was so hard to survive it
was literally survival of the fittest and now times of change but we still have this innate desire in us and the way society is created there's an over consumption so our triad our pleasure triad is this there's three things that our brain is designed to do the human brain seek pleasure
number one avoid pain and conserve energy and so when we look at that from our hunger drive point of view basically back in the day it was hey we feel hungry that's the pain we eat that's the pleasure and then it goes away and we try to do that by conserving as much energy as possible
and every animal is designed to eat and get food in the most conservative way energy conservative way as possible and so when you look at the law of satiation which is hey we've had enough because when you look at nature and you know that I believe that nature has all the answers because you
just look at a tree or you look at a flower a plant and you know that it just does what it's naturally designed to do there's no thinking it just does what it's instinctually designed to do and everything works out well and there's so many mechanisms that go on behind the scenes that
it's mind blowing the same as the human body the human body is mind blowing but we're designed just the same as those plants because we are also nature we always forget that we are nature and so there's three mechanisms of the satiation the satiation is designed so that we don't overeat
and those are hormones that regulate that there's hormones that are released that say hey you're hungry there's the grilling that's a hormone and then there's hormones that are released that say hey you've had enough and that's the leptin so hormones rule our body but the three mechanisms
of satiation are when the stretch sensation when we eat our stomach stretches and this neural signals go to a brain being like hey there we go we've had enough to eat number two is the nutrient sensation which means there's receptors for carbs fats and proteins going okay yep we've got
enough carbs we've got enough fats we've got enough proteins and fiber and water all of those things and then there's the yawal circuits which are short-term energy stores fat reserve monitoring systems that kind of thing and that these the signal discourages eating so all three of those
together would equal satiation but the way it was designed it worked really well in the past but now because of our modern day diet it's so artificially concentrated it's so dense and polluted with all of the addictive substances and so concentrated that our it doesn't work anymore
because we're eating foods that are so calorie dense that it doesn't fill up our stomach and we don't get those cues we're not getting our our macronutrients and so we're overeating but we're malnourished all at the same time it's the craziest thing this is the the plight of modern
day society is we're killing ourselves by the foods that we eat and over consuming and what is in our foods is killing us as well so if we are trying to go by the laws of nature but those have been studied by scientists who are being paid a lot of money to figure out how do we
crack these codes and then the all the ways to the pleasure of the pain and the conserving of energy is added into our foods to make it really desirable from us so that we can't resist it because the pleasure is the sugar the pleasure is the fat the pleasure is the salt
the pain is not having it and the conserving is we can literally order this stuff to our door we don't have to expend any energy at all to get highly condensed foods highly condensed calorie condensed foods delivered right to our door minimal energy and this is what's creating this epidemic
right now and so when we understand it a little bit better we can do better and when we take our health into our own hands then we realize that prevention is the best medicine and we're in charge of that our modern day diet is artificially concentrated with high fat animal products oil
sugars and other refined carbs our ancestors rarely consumed as much as 20% fat and today 35 to 80% of it's fat wild animals if you look at wild animals they never overeat when they have had enough they stop why because their hunger cues haven't been hijacked they're still following the laws of
nature the way their body is designed to behave your hunger you better eat where you could die and then whoop you've had enough don't overeat because you could die because that would be bad too when we deviate from that that's when all of the chaos ensues today like one of the main things in
our food that helps us to feel satiated that helps us to stop overeating is fiber fiber and water and both of those things well it's fiber water and nutrients and all of those things are removed from food so that they can have a longer shelf life so that they can sit on the grocery store for
longer so that they can be sold and shipped overseas but the bulk has been removed and that's what helps keep us satiated all the societies in the world that do still consume large amounts of fiber have way less heart disease and stroke and diabetes and digestion issues like all of these modern day diseases are way lower in the societies that still have fiber in their diet it's really important that we get back to what our bodies are designed to do and the books suggest five golden
rules five things that are really really important because there's a lot to do but if you make it simple it'll be doable number one no junk food in the house mm-hmm true facts I always say if it's in your house you're gonna eat it might not be today and it might not be tomorrow but when you're super
stressed when you've had a fight with somebody when you had a bad day you're gonna like tear your house apart looking for that chocolate bar that you hid or those cookies that you bought for your kids I like the one and I do this too of where when I'm at the grocery store I might be like I'm
gonna buy this my kids would love it and like in my subconscious I know that I'm buying it for me for the time when I need it it's like catch your brain doing tricky stuff like that no junk food in the house because of it's in your house you will eat it eventually and you want to do a weekly
menu number two weekly menu if you think about this if you if you were to live another 30 years just for math sake that's 10,000 days and if you're having three meals a day that's 30,000 meals so I think that that that huge volume deserves some efficiency in organizing because efficiency is
key remember one of the triad is conserving energy so if you can make your meal prep is easy as possible that's gonna your brain is gonna love that and it's gonna be easier to do and so you want to plan out your meal do your grocery list go shopping if you have non-parashables buy them in bulk so you only have to buy them once a month or once every couple of months like chickpeas I eat a ton of them I just buy them by the case fall and then I don't have to worry about them every shop so you're
setting yourself up for success when you pre-plan your meals because your brain too has made a decision ahead of time oh I'm eating this meal okay good less chance that your monkey brain is gonna come in and change it and then number three you want to cook in quantity so you want to
make your meals prep your meals food prep batch create your foods I usually do it on a Sunday I'll make like I'll steam like 20 white potatoes and my kids now love it they'll once they're cooked they'll just eat them raw or eat them cold they'll chop them up and put them in the air fryer they
love making potato chips or wedges out of them now they're like self-sufficient and they can cook that up anytime and it's super super easy so it's really important that you batch cook the three things that I like to pre-make are your starches because that's key and then your soups because that's more veggies right and then your sauces the more veggies that you're gonna put on top of your veggies so if you can prep those three things you are headed for success my friend and then you want
to the book says create a car pack I like talk about like a snack but like a case of emergency thing always be prepared with some sort of healthy food in case you get hungry and you're stuck and you don't have anything boom if you're hungry and there's nothing else to eat you're gonna eat
whatever you can get your hands on so try to avoid that and number five the recommendation is get help food prep like order the food boxes or like I like to now buy frozen veggies because then I always have some on hand the fresh one I go through them pretty fast in my week
and so then I can always turn to the frozen ones because they flash reason they're just as healthy and sometimes you can get them like prepped with salt and pepper and you just heat them up heat them and eat them that's the easiest way to go so the easier it is the less resistance the
less energy you're gonna expend the more throne you are to be successful and repeat it over and over again and making those healthy choices okay you also want to other things to consider you want to move your body every day now calories in calories out is a thing but it's not a thing
here's how it works yes you want to take in less calories or expend more calories than you're taking in but you don't want to count calories you never want to count calories because not all calories are created equal you want to keep your mind open to this concept here all calories have
a density so where all foods have a calorie density so there's some foods that are low on the calorie density which means you can eat a lot of them and you're not going to go over on your calorie intake and then there's other foods on the opposite side of the spectrum that are super
duper high in calorie density and you're gonna get like a little amount this much for the same amount of this much of the other one on the other scale so you're gonna get sorry for the people that aren't watching this you're gonna get like a handful we're talking about oils are on the
on the calorie dense side and then the other side you can get huge huge bowls full of vegetables vegetables are at the on the lowest 100 calories per pound and then on the other side we're talking about 4,000 calories per pound of the oils so you can see calorie density what's gonna fill you up
what's gonna make you feel satisfied the huge mounts of broccoli or the small small amount of an oil and that's how it works and when I teach my clients I take the best of all that I've learned over the years and put them together like and we've talked about the start solution in the
50-50 plate and the volume eating and all of that together comes together to make an amazing lifestyle of healthy eating where you feel satisfied and you're never in restriction or depraving yourself depraving yourself or limiting what you eat because in your brain is gonna lose it
if you say hey you can only this much doesn't matter how hungry you are stop it you've done for the day and that's not sustainable but what I'm talking about is very very sustainable and that's why I'm so passionate about it is because when I do my Instagram videos I talk about
eat this to lose weight and the reason I say lose weight is because the societal construct is we need to lose weight to be lovable we need to have a nice body that's lovable so I say that to get people's attention but what I'm really saying is every food you eat makes you healthier sick you
can eat lots of healthy foods you don't have to restrict how much you're eating you just gotta know what you're eating and when to eat it and then you can take away all of the energy you put on thinking about food and thinking about your body and thinking about how much you weigh and
thinking about what clothes you can wear and thinking about if you're lovable because of your weight you can eliminate all of that from your life and you get down to what's really important of doing all the things that you love giving your attention to the people that you love and
doing things that light you up and not having to expend so much energy on weight loss because it's not about that you want to heal your body with foods and a side product of that a benefit of that is weight loss so when we can retrain our brain to think how can I get as much food into my
body and as many nutrients like I want people to think about eating and food from a place of nourishing my body because that's what it's designed to do but throughout the years the food industry has totally hijacked your dopamine and now it just is in control they've spent hundreds
of thousands of millions of dollars on figuring out the pleasure center of your brain and how to control it to make you want more and more and more I recorded this podcast once and then it didn't save to my computer so I'm going to tell you this story again it's like in the book they talk
about the frog that they put into a pot of water and then they slowly heat the water up and the frog doesn't notice because it's adapting to the temperature and the frog just stays in the water until eventually it dies because it got too hot for it but it didn't notice it and that's what's
happening with the food industry is there's so much sugar addictive chemicals and fats and flowers and salt those are all highly addictive but the more we eat them the more we get used to that being the normal and we become the frog not realizing that we are killing ourselves with
the foods we're eating just because it's we become accustomed to it our bodies are adaptogens something's going on our body's going to adapt to it and try to level it out it's always like an ebb and a float too much of this how do I get it out how do I add a little bit more of that or get
rid of some of that that's how our body works it's it's ingenious we just want to get it into homeostasis which is a neutral state and it will take care of the rest and the way we do that is with our food and we also do it with our thoughts with what we watch social media who we hang out with
the music we listen to all of it everything that we consume food and otherwise is going to make up who we are today and so I really really really I'm so passionate about this but I want to know that you have the power you bake the choices everything you eat is a choice every bite you take matters
and you're either going to eat something that's making you healthy or you're eating something that's making you sick and question everything and ask what am I eating why am I eating this and this is the work I do with my clients I help them to see what they're what they're creating through
their brain through the the triad through the pleasure trap how do we take our dopamine center back our pleasure center how do we be in control of what we're craving because our body isn't supposed to have all of these dopamine hits all the time everything you see and eat is now a dopamine hit
and it's an overload for our system it's not meant to to be having all these hits all the time it's meant to like every couple of days have one and what sustains us along the way is the happiness the serotonin and then the dopamine is the anticipation the pleasure and they're different and so
now we want to be able to take back our dopamine centers reclaim our brain reprogram our body so that it's working the way it's supposed to and I would love love love to share my knowledge with you to help you with this a lot of times we can't see what we're doing because we're in our brains and
our brains are running the show but when you have somebody looking at your brain and showing you that's how I figure out what goes on with my clients is ice from the outside I can see their brain from a different perspective and then we can get to the unconsciousness that's running
the show that's why they don't know it's going on because it's literally unconscious remember the uh can like our brain wants to conserve energy so anything that we do all the time our brain puts it on autopilot because it doesn't have to think about it and therefore it saves energy so when we
have thoughts that are repetitive they're not conscious they're subconscious because our brain thinks that every day all day so we don't need to consciously think about it so all the bad habits all the old um philosophies and thoughts that we have that came from our upbringing our parents are
teachers all of that they're subconscious and we want to look at them and we want to expose them and see if they service anymore and then move on to something else and one of the big ones is food food as a fuel source and why we eat because the social construct of food and being a part of
something like how hard is it to go to a party my friends and say no to the cake or whatever it is people are like what and then the social pressure happens that's all part of it so I would love to help you with this you can hit me up I'll put my link in the show notes and you can reach out
and book a free consult if you are struggling with this it's not your fault and you are not alone I can 100% help you with this so please do ask for help all right my friends thank you so much for listening I wish this I could just go on forever about this because I'm so passionate about
our food and our health and so thank you for listening and you're here because you two care about your health and you are in charge and you can make a difference always always always love yourself first and have an amazing day