ASK US ANYTHING! Lisa Answers Listener Questions

from a listener. Her name is Teresa, so this one goes out to Teresa. Teresa says, good evening. I'm an avid listener to Outweigh, and I've learned so much from each episode. I've been on my own journey of recovery from disordered eating, and I'm proud of myself for the steps I've taken. It's very hard and constant work. I'm reaching out because I noticed a red flag in myself lately and I realized I need to put the extra energy back into my recovery to get back on track.

I'm someone who developed and needing disorder later in life. So I think my story is unique in a few ways. So I'm shooting my shot to see if you have any time for a quick combo so I could ask some questions. Part of getting back on track is diving into recovery, exploration and learning more. I have a few questions that haven't necessarily been touched on any episode, and I'd love to hear your input. I've really looked up to you and your openness regarding disordered eating, and it's

been helpful along my journey. I know you're busy and totally understand if you don't have time, but I wanted to take a shot. So again, thanks for a great podcast and for being such an encouraging voice. So Teresa submitted four questions. I'm going to go through each of them, starting with what to do when you slip into an

unhealthy mindset. Will get into suggestions for what to do when you're going through a stressful event and you turn to food, how to respond to those negative thoughts that pop in, and how to tell the difference between listening to your body and being proud of yourself or being proud because of old habits. So I'll get into detail

about each of those. I want to thank Teresa and all of you for seeing Amy and I as people that you can trust as your friends and coming to us for really advice, I know for me, you know, coming to me from my registered dietitian point of view or professional point of view, and maybe just coming to Amy to kind of just look up to her journey and watching it as it beautifully unfolds. So let's start with question number one. Teresa wrote, what should you do

when you start to slip into unhealthy mindsets? And what are some of your techniques for resetting your mindset? Great question, and I think we're going to break this down into a few different things. So the first thing I always say, fork the noise is because you need to first be able to notice when you're not being your best self.

And the best way to do that is to first recognize that your brain has been infiltrated, that it's in some sort of a fear mindset, that it is no longer you taking the best care of yourself, but rather you coming from this false sense of protection. Point. So the first thing you really need to start to do is to understand your body when your mindset is being unhealthy, and that might sound really weird, but your body is

constantly sending you signals of when it's in fear. You might get a little bit of a hot flash or a jolt, or your stomach might tense up, or something else might tense up in your body. But I want you to start to get to know your body's reaction to fear because that sometimes precipitates what's happening in our mind, and it's really tangible when we can feel those changes in our body. Once we feel those changes in our body,

we can recognize that we're no longer at baseline. So step one is to really get to know when you're being triggered. Then, and I want you to challenge yourself. So whatever that unhealthy mindset is telling you to do, I want you to do the opposite. Challenge yourself. If it's saying don't eat this food, eat that food, because you want to continue to neutralize that food, not allow it to build up on itself. The second thing I

want to suggest is getting an accountability friend. So I actually had somebody say something triggering to me last night. I went to dinner with a friend and a mail came over to the table and he said something to me that he thought was being nice, but I found myself triggered. Now, for me, a triggering situation does not lead to action, so I did not think about, you know, monitoring my food intake or changing it in any way.

But I did notice that I was affected by the comment that was said to me, and I felt kind of like out of my body for a moment. And as soon as I left the dinner, I texted one of my girlfriends and I was like, this just happened. And she then told me she's getting married soon, and she told me about all these comments she's been getting from people about you know, losing weight for the wedding

and blah blah blah. And I step back from that conversation, and then I returned to it, and I said, Oh, I just want to let you know if any of that stuff is ever coming up for you, you can always text me and we could, you know, talk it out. And I just know for me, having that safe place to text a friend and be like, can you believe this person said that to me really allowed me to get it out of my head and into the hands

of somebody else who could hold space for me. And I was no longer negatively affected by it, if that makes sense. So have an accountability friend, have a safe person that you can say, oh, this just happened and I'm feeling really triggered. Maybe it's somebody that can give advice and talk you off the cliff, or maybe it's just somebody that you just said, Hey, when I'm going through it, can I just text you this and you don't need to actually respond, because sometimes we just need

to get it out there. The third thing I want you to do is journal. So if you notice that you're slipping into an unhealthy mindset, I want you to grab a pen and a paper, and I want you to just let the ledgates open and just right because oftentimes when we are retracting to unhealthy mindset, older ways of being, or habits, it's because something else is going on, so it triggers are not necessarily obvious. So for me, the comment that was said to me was very surface

and easy to understand why it took me there. But in other situations, you might find yourself going back to unhealthy ways because of less obvious things that are happening in your life. Maybe it's a loss of control in some other situations at work in your personal life and your romantic life. Maybe there's just some sort of disalignment or lack of alignment happening in your life that is kind of like an undercurrent, not obvious to you or

the outside world. But if you start journaling, if you start letting it all out, going to be able to get to the bottom of it a lot more easily, and therefore the mindset is going to change as a result. The last piece of advice I want to give for this question is to do what I call emotional sifting. So I try to do this every morning, if not every few days, if not once a week. But emotional sifting is getting to the bottom of what's really going on, and most of us don't take time to kind of

clear that clutter. We go through our days, we go to sleep, we wake up, we do it again. When you take time, whether it's meditation or just quiet time throughout the day, all that stuff that's kind of bubbling inside of you has a chance to come up and get air, and by getting to the bottom of it, you can really reset the foundation of your being. A lot of times when things are wrong, we grab a solution, but we don't make our way to what's causing the problem. Right,

we don't get to the root. If your stomach hurts, you're likely to grab pepto bismol that will make the problem go away. But did you really get to the bottom of what was causing that stomach ache? Right? Instead, I want you to pull the roots out of what

is going on in your life. So emotional sifting is taking time to sift through the emotions that we are pushing down one at a time, and I have found that it is an incredibly healthy way to keep your mindset healthy and really understand where things are coming from as they come up for you. So those are some things you can do when you start to slip into those unhealthy mindset. Challenge yourself eat that food, or do the opposite of the behavior that your mind is telling

you not to do or to do. Get an accountability friend journal, and start your emotional sifting journey. But are some of your suggestions After going through a stressful event. During emotional and stressful times, I turned to food. I know that isn't necessarily unhealthy, but it often leads to binges for me. I'm trying to have better tools in my toolkit for being compassionate for myself during these times. Love at This person is on their journey of bringing

compassion and recognizing that eating during stressful times isn't bad. However, she still does believe that eating food when stressful is bad right, doesn't want to believe that it sounds like

but that is where she's at. And I did a whole webinar for free earlier this year on emotional eating, and the main theme is that in order to elevate our consciousness and know what to do, how to best take care of ourselves in that stressful state is to give ourselves permission to eat when we're emotional and stressed, and pair that with the idea that eating during these

times is perfectly okay. When we are stressed. When we are emotional, we are activating a different part of our brain which is not as logical as being at baseline and being in our front seat, and our minds are very quickly hijacked to kind of move over to this other dimension. And once we're in that other dimension, and it's very hard to take care of ourselves in any way other than what is habit or what simply feels good,

and food as we know feels good. Oftentimes the foods that we gravitate towards help us produce serotonin that feel good hormone. So you're not broken for gravitating towards food when it feels icky in your body. In fact, you're being your own best caretaker. Given that you were in the secondary dimension, you're in a really uncomfortable place, and you're just doing what you have to to swim out

of the mud that you're stuck in. However, if we can bring ourselves back to the frontal cortex, the part of our brain that is logical, that you know makes sense, we can really say, Okay, what do I need right now to take the best care of myself? And sometimes the answer really is food, even in the absence of physical hunger. So food can be the best way to take care of ourselves. Eating, eating a lot, even a binge can be the healthy this thing that we do.

So I want to repeat that again, a binge can be the healthiest thing that we do. And compared to a lot of other coping mechanisms, I really argue that it's a far more healthy coping mechanism than you know, things like drugs or alcohol or other self sabotaging things that could really put us in a dangerous situation. So I want to introduce you to what I call emotional eating and the five P action plan. This is where we really start to tackle emotional hunger as I call it,

or emotional eating in a new way. So the five piece stand for pause, pry, pick, persevere, and process. So the first P is for pause. So when you start to feel stressed and you're turning towards food, can you pause? Oh it's so hard to do, trust me, I know, especially because we so badly want that pain away. But if you can step dead in your tracks, if you can breathe, take one inhale, one exhale, then you can recognize that there is an emotional and a chemical shift

happening in your body. From that state, you can pry. You can look inward. You can ask yourself what's going on. Maybe you can label the emotion. I feel anxious, I feel stressed, I feel tired, I feel unhurt, I feel unappreciative. With that clarity, you can pick. You can pick your action. What do you need right now? Is it food or is it another resource? Resourcing means using your self care toolbox, looking within and looking at the coping strategies that you

have to calm down. Is it going for a walk, breathing essential oils, giving yourself a hug, or is it eating and either of them. If we did that first step, which is really neutralizing the idea that eating food is bad, or eating food at a certain time or amount or a binge is bad, only then can we really know what we needed in that moment and give it to ourselves radically. So if you ate, we're going to move into that next p which is person fear, move on.

There's no guilt because we made an active choice to eat. When we picked our action, we said, I feel stressed and food is going to help me right now. Yes, it won't solve my problems, but I am too activated right now to really use my other resources. I am too upset, and I need to feel a little bit of good before I can kind of get through what's

really going on. So when we really pick, we're elevating consciousness and that is really the main difference between that and emotional eating as we know it, feeling stressed, finding ourselves, you know, knee deep in a bag of chips or chips and then granola, and then ice cream and then blah blah blah, where we're like, whoa, what just happened? Right when we pause, pry and pick, it says this

is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna eat. There's no guilt, there's no feeling bad because we were doing it with the consciousness of this is what I'm going to do, which is completely completely different. So if you ate, you persevere, you move on, no guilt, you did it with awareness. And lastly, you're going to process. Once you're in that commerce state, can you take time to sit with the emotion, to sit with the stress and allow it to fully

come up to the surface. Just because emotions feel badly doesn't mean that we need to get rid of them all. In fact, I truly believe that as humans we need to understand that difficult emotions and pain is part of our process. Sometimes even in the same cup, if you will, as the good feel so many things are bitter sweet, and allowing for pain I think is really critical to

decreasing our suffering, if that makes any sense. Again, if we choose to eat, we've owned it, We've picked that I feel upset, I'm turning to food and that's a new shift. It's bringing cognition and awareness to the situation and we're not going to do so with guilt and shame and we're simply going to move on. And I also want to mention here that a lot of people talk about forgiveness after eating. I think that's something that

we really need to move away from. And I want you to flag if you feel like I need to forgive myself for eating, because that's continuing to further the idea that what you did was bad and you should forgive yourself. Right, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't offer yourself forgiveness for other things. But I think around food and eating, it's a little bit too serious of a tone and it's making it into a much bigger deal and atonement process then it should be, which only further

is the idea that what you did was good or bad. Again, with that raised awareness, following the five P action plan, I think you'll see that you have a really different experience. And by the way, anyone feel free to rewind take notes after everything that um I'm saying here If this resonates with you or you feel it could be helpful, but could be helpful, maybe not in this moment, but

in a moment when you do need it. Next question is how do you respond to yourself when a negative thought pops in I'm doing much bad are at identifying those negative thoughts and not repeating them, But I still find myself looking in the mirror sometimes and thinking gross. What ideas do you have to responding to those negative thoughts? So I know for a lot of people, positive affirmations

can be really grounding. Even starting your day looking in the mirror saying some positive things can be really helpful. I think for me, I like to say those things out loud. So if I'm if that thought pops into my head that says you look gross, you look blah blah blah blah blah blah, I'll say it out loud, you look this. And it almost becomes comical to say it out loud, because would you say that to a friend?

Saying it out loud, getting it outside of your head, even just within your you know, just you and the mirror talking to yourself really changes that. It really kind of, in my opinion, kind of lightens the mood. It's like, why would you say that to yourself? That's a ridiculous thing to say, and I might even turn it into a hug or a moment to soften into myself. I might even ask myself, would you speak that way to a friend? I might ask myself, what's really going on?

Because a lot of the times when we look in the mirror and we see something back, we're having a bad body image day, it doesn't actually come from our body. It actually might come from a different feeling of unworthiness or a different feeling of insecurity. And I would find perspective with breath. I would take a breath in, I would zoom out for a second and say, okay, well, what about this is making me feel so fearful? What types of pressure am I putting on my body to

look a certain way? What else do I offer to the world. Why am I falling prey to the idea that I need to have a six pack, or why do I believe that my body shouldn't have roles or whatever it is that's coming up for me that day, And start to kind of unpack and untangle that and and really questioned societal's expectations, societal's viewpoint of how we should be and recognized, Okay, you know what, I'm going

to wear clothes that fit me today. I'm going to move my body in a way that feels good and really take your power back. So how do you respond to yourself when a negative thought pops in? Positive affirmations can be grounding. Say that thought out loud, turn it into a moment to hug yourself. Ask yourself, would you speak to a friend that way? Ask yourself what's really going on that day and find a little perspective does

this really matter? Next question is how can I tell the difference between listening to my body and being proud of myself? Or am I proud of myself because of old habits. Sometimes at the end of the day, when I didn't have anything on my previous naughty list, I feel proud of myself, but I can't necessarily discern if that's because I listened to my body and I'm proud of that, or because I'm subconsciously still celebrating not eating bad foods. What Teresa is asking is if I don't

have let's say her naughty food is chocolate. Right, If I don't have chocolate, I feel really proud of myself. But do I feel proud of myself because I honored that need. Or do I feel proud of myself because I went a day without having chocolate. So these are some of the mind games that come up frequently for people, especially as they're learning to listen to their body. And I think that pride and self righteousness really emit a

different frequency in our body. So if you're feeling self righteous about it, like oh, I didn't have that food, and then the next day comes on and you're like, oh, I didn't have that food again, and then the next day and you're like, three days I haven't had it, I should go five days. That sounds like it's self righteousness happening, and it's likely going to turn into a

problem shortly thereafter. So what I want you to do, Teresa and our listeners is to come up with what that naughty list is right now, right what's on your bad food list? The foods you shouldn't have and today today, I want you to start neutralizing those foods, bringing them into your life even if you don't necessarily want them or crave them. So what do I mean by this?

For me? French fries was this food that every time I ate them, I went bananas so I would either have all the French fries or none of the French fries. And that was just kind of how it went back and forth for me. And I started to neutralize French fries by ordering them even if I didn't really want them, and eating them even if I didn't really want them. And you might say, why would you do that, you know, if you don't really want them, why would you have them?

But by allowing myself to eat my salad or my sandwich and have a fry or two with it, even if I wasn't craving it, or it wasn't the weekend or even the evening, allowed me to just have a normal relationship to French fries. Take a look at your good and bad food list and start to break down and neutralize and challenge yourself with those foods that are on that list. So at the end of the day, you can be proud that you ate the cake or that you didn't eat the cake, but that pride right.

How to distinguish is it pride or am I am I? Restricting is to really ask yourself, what was the intent? Why did you not have it right? And really ask yourself to come from the place of I just didn't want it, or did it come from this place of I didn't want it and I really knew I shouldn't have it, So I didn't have it right because there's a restraint versus I just wasn't in the mood, or I wanted something else that was sweet, or I wanted salty, or I didn't even think about that food. So I think,

ask yourself, why did you not eat it? Can be a helpful way to kind of uproot that and get to know what's really going on. And I think the whole point of this is to really recognize that if we're not constantly tackling these thoughts, if we allow ourselves to kind of subconsciously have these foods that we believe are naughty, they build up as restrictions, and even if you go a day or two where you don't eat them,

eventually it piles over. You do eat them at some point and you go back to feeling badly about them. So I think this is really about neutralizing the food and getting to know your intent. So those were Teresa's questions that we answered on this episode. I hope it was helpful to hear from me. If you've got any other questions you could send in to Hello at outweigh podcast dot com and like I said, Amy and I do our best to read and respond to listener emails.

Thanks so much for being here. If you haven't rated and reviewed our podcast, please give us some stars and leave us a review would be so grateful. We'll see you next week. On that way,