Dancing on the Razor’s Ledge: Centering Health in My Life
Dancing on the Razor’s Ledge was almost the title of my endeavor to share my story of losing half my weight and finding greater health and wellness. This phrase still fits my message in powerful ways — even though I don’t dance, lol.
Dancing metaphorically is something I do all the time on this journey. Dancing captures the celebration that comes when I act in my own best interests for my health.
Most importantly, I celebrate eating the foods that promote health, lifestyle disease reversal, and prevention of illness and disease. Losing half my weight is part of that.
Eat When Hungry: Journey into the Science of Satiation
Trust Our Bodies, Not Our Foods
More specifically, don’t trust the foods of the standard American diet because they will lead us astray and this episode goes deep into the answer of why that is — deep into the center of Eat When Hungry into the science of satiation.
Trusting our bodies is truly is one of my favorite messages from my latest episode of Eat When Hungry with Dr. Doug Lisle. This episode looks at my most profound personal insight of moving into plant-based living and losing half my weight: I was not broken, and I am not fixed.
Eat When Hungry: Journey from the Desert to the Theme Park
Understanding Mirages of Food, Hunger, and Eating
In this episode of Eat When Hungry, Dr. Lisle and I discuss food, hunger, and eating. Like mirages in the desert, this episode is not what it seems. Barely an actual food is mentioned in our broad, sprawling conversation.
Dr. Lisle takes us from the desert of human origin and survival to today’s theme parks as a symbol of our society where supernormal foods and their pleasure trap reigns supreme. I share my personal experiences from an educational perspective, having been caught in this trap for decades.
We probe what is under the surface to help us understand what humans are up against in the modern food environment. At the heart this problem: humans were not meant to solve the problem of supernormal foods in our environment.
She Showed up at the Gym
Face Shadows to Transform Shadows
Going to the gym after losing 100 pounds was an important step for me – especially since I still had significant weight left to lose.
Things were just opening up after Covid, and everything felt vulnerable. I felt raw and vulnerable.
Taking yet another first step was hard, perhaps harder because going to the gym is such a public action. I have never been athletic, and I had certainly never worked with a trainer.
Eat When Hungry: Journey into a Rat’s Paradise
Understanding Binge Eating through Templeton's "Veritable Smorgasbord"
The fourth episode of Eat When Hungry uses the beloved rat Templeton from Charlotte’s Web as a springboard into a deeper understanding of the human hunger drive. Dr. Doug Lisle and my conversation begins with what we can learn from rats and science.
The discussion moves into personal stories and breaking down assumptions that permeate mainstream thinking about weight and binge eating. An important theme emerges toward the end: Subtlety matters, and it is rarely discussed.
Eat When Hungry: Journey Down the Up Staircase, Episode 3
Transforming My Shadows: Overriding the Pleasure Trap
Journey Down the Up Staircase focuses on the override: the override of eating addictive foods, the override of failure cycles, the ongoing override of myself to maintain a lifestyle of greater health and wellness that, for me, involved losing more than half my weight.
Most certainly, this is a weighty episode. Dr. Doug Lisle and I speak of the extraordinary struggles and the extraordinary positives that come out of succeeding to find greater health and wellness in overriding The Pleasure Trap, which is the book that he and Dr. Alan Goldhamer wrote about the modern food environment.
Name My Shadows: My First Step into Success
Name My Shadows: An Important Foundation for Success
One of the most important steps I took toward better health was taking a few weeks to observe the patterns around food, healthy eating, success, and failure in myself.
These were the truths that I observed in myself again and again. My repeated failures during that time made clear patterns I had to address in myself.
I took this planning time in November and December with the knowledge that these were my hardest months for success because of the holiday season.
Halloween: Haunted by the Shadows of Myself
I Was Not Broken, and I Am Not Fixed.
This message is important for me to remember today, a day when my former size feels palpable and when addictive foods beckon me with their wicked wiles.
Halloween has haunted me as far back as I can remember. Halloween highlights all my shadows of struggling with food addiction. And, there are many shadows in my story.
Choosing My Language Carefully: Uprooting Social Stigma
Language Matters: Choosing How to Speak about My Hunger Drive
My story centers around drilling into a deep understanding of my hunger drive, so I could lose more than half my weight – a number well into triple digits.
I frequently talk about my hunger drive and the way hunger works in me. I have deliberately chosen these to help me speak as I break my silence about transforming my shadows around weight.