Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ready to lose 40 plus pounds without giving up happy hours, weekend brunches, or date nights. Then it's time to uncover the hidden link between binge eating and toxic relationships. And finally break free from both. Welcome to the Hungry for Love podcast with Jillian Scott. Y' all ready? Let's go.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Hey. Hey. Welcome back.
All right, we are diving into the survival mode of weight loss, or maybe the survival modes plural.
So I started thinking about our nervous system and the different responses that we can have your basic fight, flight, freeze, or appease.
And I started noticing how a lot of these mirror some of the challenges that we face with weight loss.
It's really easy to just get frustrated with ourselves, to feel like something's wrong with us, we can't get it, we'll never get it. Maybe we should just be happy in this bigger body. Like, we don't actually give ourselves the opportunity to go after what we want because we aren't solving the right problem. We aren't looking at the real issue. When I started thinking about it from this lens of, okay, we are addressing both diet trauma and relationship trauma. And diet trauma is going to have just as much, if not more of an impact on our weight loss journey and our ability to lose weight and keep it off.
And so really recognizing how these same stages of our nervous system responses also run parallel with these other aspects and challenges with weight loss.
Let me just start explaining it because then I think it'll make more sense with fight. I see that as self sabotage and weight loss of I do the opposite. It's I'm gonna fight against the rules and I'm gonna do the opposite of what I'm being told to do. If the rule is you count calories, you say, fuck it. I'm not counting anything.
Our brains like to be drama queens. Okay, let's not lie. That's just how we're wired. But it's often we do the opposite of what we say we wanna do. And it's the age old. Why is it that I do what I don't want to do and I don't do the things that I want to do? Paul talks about this in the book of Romans. This problem is as old as dirt. Okay? This problem has been around for the last 2000 years. I guarantee it was around 2000 years before that. I guarantee it's going to be around for the next 2,000 years. And the way that we can better understand the issue and what's at play here is to better understand our thoughts and our emotions that are now driving the action, we have to really become aware and now take control of our thoughts and our emotions and also recognize the nervous system response that we have as well. And so self sabotage is self protection. You can go back the last couple of weeks, there were some episodes around self sabotage. And really at the core it is. Your brain is trying to protect you. It's trying to keep you safe. And safe means alive. When we can see it now from this aspect of my brain or my body is trying to keep me safe. Now we can see it through this lens of there's something not safe about weight loss and it doesn't make sense, right? Like logically it's not going to make sense. There are no downsides of losing weight is what we're going to tell ourselves. But subconsciously there is an aspect that is not safe. It's not okay. Something could go wrong and your brain is simply trying to keep you from that. This is why the self sabotage piece is here. Because often we are trying to fight the rules. We are trying to fight against what we are being told to do. And so this might look like Monday, you plan to start a diet and then Monday comes and you say screw it and you just go off the rails. And maybe sometimes Monday comes and it's like you eat worse than you had even eaten the week before when you, quote, weren't on a diet.
It's like the diet and the rules almost instigate this rebellious side where you're like, screw it, I'm not following any rules and you just throw them all to the side. You eat your face off, you overeat, you binge eat. You eat worse when you are now quote, on a diet than when you were not dieting.
So I don't know if you can relate to that at all. But that's what I see as the fight mode.
Okay, so then we have flight.
Flight I think of as escape. This is your emotional eating or binge eating. You are just trying to escape and feel better. And your brain has learned that food or sometimes alcohol has created a rapid, reliable and effective sense of relief.
That's it. Okay, so this flight we are trying to escape thoughts, emotions.
Sometimes it's the nervous system response that we have that's been created in our bodies. So we feel really agitated, really anxious, our stomach's churning, our chest is tight. Sometimes that causes us to not want to eat. Sometimes that causes us to reach for food or to reach for alcohol as a way to re regulate.
So we feel dysregulated. And now it's Food will make me feel better, food will calm me down. Food will have me not feeling so irritated at my co worker who can't seem to get his shit together and do his damn job. This is often what comes up in the real world.
We are just trying to escape, we are trying to flee.
Sometimes it's the situation, a lot of times it's the internal things, it's the thoughts, it's the emotions.
Next we have freeze. This I see as self sabotage, which looks like do nothing.
So we can have different forms of self sabotage, a variety, right? But in this form of self sabotage it's do nothing.
So this might be. I physically can't go back to the old diet. I can't restrict like I used to. Maybe the first time you did a diet it seemed easy or at least doable. Like you could at least muster up enough willpower for four to six weeks to do it. And then once you lost the weight, you fell off the wagon a little bit. And let's be real, sometimes you jumped off the wagon and you were like, hallelujah, thank you Jesus. Finally I've lost this weight and now I can go back to eating cheeseburgers.
Now I can go back to having fun and happy hours and eating out and enjoying the holidays and I don't have to deprive myself anymore. That's usually what happens, right? We're like, ah, thank goodness I've lost this weight and now I can go back to eating the old way. And sometimes we have good intentions around slowly reintegrating and slowly getting back to normal and peacefully moderating having a sensible meal. We have good intentions, but we are only ever taught how to be at war with food. What happens is it gets harder and harder to get back on the diet wagon.
The first time was doable. The first time you had willpower. The second time it got harder. The third time was like, all bets are off.
There is no telling what could happen. It's like it requires so much mental and emotional bandwidth, it feels so hard to get back on track. And so self sabotage. I see as we do nothing, we have good intentions, but we fail miserably in the sense that we don't do anything.
We're just stuck, we're frozen.
We think about doing good things. Maybe you make a plan, but you don't follow it. It's that, oh, I have the best of intentions at 8am but by 8pm all those good intentions are out the window. And then we have appease. And appease. Looks like following your protocol for three or four weeks and then saying it. And now we go back to normal. So either you lose steam, you get bored, life happens, you go on vacation, it's a holiday, you get sick, your kids get sick, something happens that throws you out of your normal routine. Because all you ever learned how to do was to lose weight in a vacuum. So you need these ideal set of circumstances, you need ideal thoughts and ideal emotions. So the moment you get stressed, bored, anxious, tired, you're running late, your boss is mad, client fires you, whatever it is, like something happens, and now it throws you off your game, it throws you out of the loop, and you don't know how to get back on track, and you don't know how to maintain your habits and still enjoy your life while on vacation, over the holidays, while it's summer break, or you're at the beach, or you have people over for the pool every single weekend in the summer, right? There's all kinds of different things where it's like we are just trying to figure out how to love and enjoy our lives and still lose weight. And you can do both together. That's the beautiful thing.
You can love your life and love and enjoy your life while still losing weight. The key is that you are creating intentionally a life that you love, a life on purpose, a life that lights you up, where food is no longer the primary source of your joy and pleasure and relaxation and comfort and adventure.
Food is no longer the primary way that you meet your emotional needs.
Same thing can be true of alcohol or sex or social media or a dating app, or dating in general.
Because one of the things that I learned a couple years ago was that I wasn't turning to food, I wasn't turning to alcohol, but I was turning to a dating app to give me that hit of dopamine to make me feel better about myself, to see who I would match with next, to see who thought I was pretty or worth their time. It was one of those, oh, shoot moments.
And even though I could realize it, even though I noticed it, there was still a part of me that didn't want to give it up.
We might know what we're doing, but we don't really want to change it, because that is how we are getting our needs met. And this is what it looks like to better understand trauma with weight loss. This is a very complex topic, and this is something that I dive deeper into. So there is a Trauma 2.0 episode, which is actually called something else. Let me look it up here really quick. Episode 159 is how to decrease food noise without medication.
So this is what I see as like a diet trauma 2.0 episode. So the first episode, the original one, is episode 55. It's from July of 2022 called Overcoming Diet Trauma.
And this is, interestingly enough, right before I woke up to all the trauma in my life, there were little breadcrumbs, little seeds starting to sprout. I was following the breadcrumbs, but it was August of that year that I really had my mind blown wide open.
So July, this is right before I realized everything in my life, just before the beginning of the end. It's really what it comes down to. But that is a really great episode. And then 159, I go deeper into this concept around diet trauma and what it looks like, how we experience it. What I mean by that, because so often that is the core core of this issue, and so how I've seen these weight loss challenges play out is part of diet trauma. It is the mental and emotional baggage that we carry from our past attempts to lose weight, most of which that have failed. And so we develop a lot of fears and anxieties around food, around eating. We cling on to diet rules and we hold tight to them. That's also a trauma response, is to really be very dogmatic with our rules. What's allowed to be very perfectionistic in that way. It leads to a lot of fear, anxiety, dysfunction around food. And that's the core, that's what we have to do, is we have to heal our relationship with food, with our bodies, with exercise, with how we see ourselves.
That's what it comes down to.
As I started playing with this idea though, of survival mode and piggybacking off of the previous episode and this overarching topic of trauma, really starting to see how these different challenges when it comes to weight loss, how it falls into these different nervous system responses that we have. And here's the thing. I hate big, fancy names. In fact, I'm going to figure out a better way to talk about it than the sympathetic versus parasympathetic. It's just too much for my brain to even understand. I'm like, I don't care. Tell me why I care like that. And that's the core of what I teach, right? Like, I don't care what. Don't give me the name. Tell me why. Tell me why you're reaching for that food. Tell me why I should care about this. I don't care about the name or the term or whatever it is. Tell Me why it matters. Let's look at the implementation of it. Why do we care? This is the type of work that we are doing inside the body you crave accelerator, the weight loss program that is designed to help you lose weight, end emotional eating, break free from binge eating or binge drinking habits as well, and to truly heal your relationship with yourself.
And it's designed specifically for people who have been through trauma, diet trauma and relationship trauma.
We have the same dysfunctional and toxic pattern with food that we often have with people.
And we can be a narc magnet and attract a lot of narcy people to us, just like we can be toxic diet magnets.
And we can not only attract in, but we are attracted to, to these dysfunctional things. And it's learning and identifying where and when and how to break the patterns. We have to see the cycle and then we can figure out where to break it. Another great episode is break the trauma bond with food. So 1 27, this is from February of this year. There's a YouTube video that goes along with it if you are a little bit more visual. But I mirror and overlap the abuse cycle with our diet cycle and how it very similarly mimics and mirrors that cycle, same cycle.
And this is helpful because we've got to know where to break it. But we need a lot of self love and compassion in order to look at it, in order to see these patterns in ourselves.
And that is one of the biggest things is really helping clients to understand and decode their emotional eating or overeating habit. Or even anytime that you don't follow your plan, you make a plan and then you don't follow it. Right. We wanna understand why rather than being apathetic and being like, oh well that happened, whatever, or beating yourself up often. We live in these two extremes. It's either I don't care and I don't do anything about it, or I beat myself up and I feel like crap for days and it takes me weeks to get back on track or to get back into doing it, or I stop tracking. I stop planning. Because it's a written log of all your failures and it just triggers shame and this pit of despair. That's why I stopped tracking. I remember doing this program, total side tangent. But I did a program with Jillian Michaels back in the day and the protocol was fairly open in terms of what you could eat, but it was very calorie restrictive. So I was supposed to exercise once or twice a day and only eat 1200 calories. That was way too little for how much I was exercising.
And I felt like no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't eat that low of a calorie amount. Even eating healthy, even eating normal foods, real whole foods, even doing soups and protein bars for breakfast. And I was like, I just couldn't figure out how to not overeat. And it was just, it required me to eat too little.
And so I tracked for a couple of days. I might even still have the booklet somewhere. I know I found it recently, but I tracked for two, maybe three days. And then it was like, screw it, I'm always over.
And it was just this written log of how I was a failure, how I wasn't good enough, how I didn't have enough willpower. And it triggered and activated so much shame. And I already had enough of that. I already carried enough shame as it was. I did not need this written log of all my failures. Now with food, it was really easy to give that up.
Now I didn't give up the dysfunctional patterns and habits and food rules. There was a lot of work still left to do because I was around 24, going on 25.
Yeah, I still had a long way to go. But there is hope, there is freedom, there is peace with food, with your body, with yourself.
And I'm going to teach you how to love yourself now and all the way down the scale. This is the work. Screw the burpees, we don't need those.
This is the real work, the mental and emotional side of things. And when you are willing and you are able and you decide that you are ready for it, this is when your life will radically transform like never before.
So if you want some help, I will drop a link if you would like to set up a free consultation and just talk more about what it looks like to work with me. Whether it's one on one or in a small group setting, I am the best fit for you. If you have been through a toxic relationship, if you find yourself emotionally eating or binge eating or emotionally drinking and you want to lose weight, you want to heal your relationship with food, you want to heal your relationship with your body, you want to think and talk nicer to yourself, I am the best person to help you and the only person bringing these two concepts together in this way. To create the life and body you crave. To create a life so good you don't need an escape from it. Here's to creating the life and body you crave.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: If this episode resonated with you, it's time to break free from destructive cycles around food, alcohol and toxic relationships. Your next step Book your free Break the Cycle call where you'll finally see why your binge eating and relationship patterns are so deeply connected and how to break free from both for good.
You'll walk away with fierce clarity and a game plan to step into a life full of fun, adventure and self love. Grab your spot now at www.bodyyoucrave.com VTC. See, it's time to Break the cycle.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: I'll show you how.
