Eat When Hungry: Journey Down the Up Staircase, Episode 3

Eat When Hungry: Journey Down the Up Staircase wrangles the idea of overrides in making personal changes centered around my plant-based eating lifestyle changes, especially around the pull of rich, unhealthy foods.

There are clear ideas for consideration without reducing anything to quick fixes or easy answers. In so many ways, the topics covered here are ongoing active processes to continue to make and sustain change in myself.

Transforming My Shadows: Overriding the Pleasure Trap

In this third episode of Eat When Hungry, Dr. Doug Lisle and I focus on the concept of the override: my override of eating addictive foods; my override of failure cycles; and my ongoing override to maintain a lifestyle of greater health and wellness that involved losing more than half my weight.

Most certainly, this is a weighty episode. Dr. Lisle and I speak in different ways 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.

For some of us, the override of the pleasure trap includes weight loss; for some of us, it doesn’t. For myself, I had to break down the assumption that my size was not and is not directly proportional to the pull of addictive foods in me: an important but unspoken override.

A important starting point for Dr. Lisle and my discussion includes how eating unhealthy foods feels right and how eating healthy foods feels wrong – just one of the many discombobulating and challenging parts of my own journey. Dr. Lisle shares his work, and the ideas are part of my journey in the visual aid linked at the end of this post. 

Overriding a History of Failures: Leaving the Standard American Diet Behind

After years of failure and trying to live in a world of moderation, I finally faced my shadows to admit that plant-based lifestyle without processed foods was the only way that I could be successful in a health, wellness, and weight loss journey.

When I made the decision to leave the standard American diet behind for a whole foods, plant-based lifestyle, the world I was entering truly looked and felt like a descent into a world of hellish restriction. Truth be told, the changes were so dramatic and difficult to make that I almost did not make them. I almost could not make them.

Like many others, I felt uncertainty, discomfort, and fear around making these changes. I had failed so many times, and I feared failure again; not trying or saying “I will start tomorrow” became a protective mechanism against that failure.  I worried that I would be up to the task if I actually started, and I feared that I would not be able to navigate these changes through all facets of my life.

I tried to live in two worlds for a long time: the plant-based eating world and the world of the standard American diet in moderation or small amounts. My truth was hard to accept; I was always doomed to fail around the standard American diet. My pathway to success required leaving the standard American diet behind.

I knew that the foods I was eating caused a plethora of lifestyle diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, and some kinds of cancers. I also knew that plant-based living offered potential healing and protective qualities. The older I got, the louder I heard the call for change around a different way of living.

Four years later, I am still learning about my hunger drive and understanding more fully about how the standard American diet wreaks havoc on my whole body and system. My food choices deeply impact every aspect of my life. Truly, my hunger drive works exactly the way it should when I remove the foods that agitate it.

I have learned the agitation that trigger foods cause in me, even in trace amounts, and I stand a fighting chance of making the right choices now — although these choices still require mental actions, willpower, planning, and commitment. But, not to the degree they used to. Like I said, I have a fighting chance against myself now.

Overriding Myself: Getting Fed Up with Being Fed Up

My breaking point came when I became fed up with being fed up – in literal and figurative ways. As I looked to start yet again, I also became fed up with the weight loss world, its overly simplistic explanations that did not speak to my experiences, and anyone who tried to make the process of losing half my weight seem easy.

This image illustrates the broadest view of the changes I have made. When I Eat in Color, I Live in Color, and this is the process I have used to Transform Shadows.

In many ways, this episode is a direct result of getting fed up. I decided to drill into hunger to understand myself – a process that ended up taking several years. I took on my shadows to name, face, understand, fight, reframe, and even transcend them occasionally.

I lost more than half my weight and kept it off for more than 1.5 years before I even understood what it meant to Eat When Hungry. To read more about that process, see my blog entry Eat When Hungry: Discovering My Golden Circle.

When I am transcending my shadows, I live in a sensuality of wellness. I come in and out of this place more often than I would like. But, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this place exists and that it starts and ends with my food choices – although exercise plays an important supporting role. 

I do not know or understand completely the science that Dr. Lisle uses to offer a potential explanation for my experiences. Since we taped this episode, life events have given me the ideal opportunity to experiment, to make sure I am sharing with you what I experience. Recently, I lost and regained entry into living in that sensuality of wellness, and that gives me more confidence in speaking my truths.

Most certainly, food profoundly impacts all aspects of my life – the depth of that truth is something that I continue to learn. My experiences are truly “integrative” as Dr. Lisle calls them, and I like that word. And, these integrative experiences have been overwhelmingly positive beyond my wildest imagination. Dr. Lisle noted that speaking of the positives was my favorite part of this episode. He’s right, of course.

The positive impacts are the best parts to share, and part of why I share today. Even so, it’s a challenging journey, full of ups and downs.

Overriding Expectations: Finding a Better Way of Living

My journey to get to this place has been a complex, challenging labyrinth, and staying here can be a complex, challenging labyrinth. too. There are periods of time where everything seems so smooth and easy that I wonder how I could ever struggle, and there are periods of time where everything seems so challenging, I wonder how it could ever be smooth and easy.

I developed my Transform Shadows mental framework to illustrate the mental processes that I go through to make and sustain my lifestyle changes.

Sometimes, the hardest step is the first one: naming my shadows. If I am not starting from a position of honesty about myself, I can’t make any enduring change for myself.

To be clear: even with the challenges, my plant-based lifestyle feels better beyond measure all day and all night. No longer do I feel the physical and psychological pain of eating unhealthy foods at night.

If I veer too far off course, all that psychological weight of not acting in my best interests returns, especially at night like I describe toward the end of the video. I have learned to use how I feel at night as motivation for my actions.

The positivity I now feel comes from a variety of places as Dr. Lisle discusses. Beyond feeling better physically, I feel the rise in my self-esteem and my sense of moral rightness in acting around my own best interests. These positive feelings were the first to develop, and they are the first sign of personal failure when I stray, even within my boundaries.

Overriding the Pull to Addictive Foods: An Ongoing Process of Discovery and Commitment

I have gotten to know my hunger drive as a central, active gravitational force in my life. More than five decades into my life, I understand it, without shame. I understand the balance of foods that give me the greatest peace, the greatest satiation, the greatest sense of wellbeing; all of these are part of the sensuality of wellness.

My journey to health began with the desire for a release from foods I was eating  – a world where I was entrapped by the addictive foods of the standard American diet. I wanted to avoid a future filled with lifestyle diseases of diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune conditions, and cancer if at all possible.

What I could not see was how positive that pinnacle of health and wellness could feel – although I only reach this pinnacle with plain, unprocessed plants in balances that work best for me. Figuring out my equation makes it possible for me to speak out. I always know my action plan, and that empowers me.

The journey to get here has been full of discomfort, struggles, and facing my own fears. Yet, it has been worth every effort that I made and that I will continue to make to override the forces of pleasure trap foods. The pull of these foods runs deep, and I will continue this battle off and on for the rest of my life. Sometimes, I will lose battles, but I plan to win the war.

Living at my pinnacle in the sensuality of wellness makes all these battles worthwhile. Of course, I want to share that idea with people I love, with people I know, and with people who are looking for a better way of living. And, I will continue to work to live in this positive space as much as possible, even if I balance on a narrow ledge.

My only regret is that it took me so long to trust the process, to know my hunger drive, to understand how to make changes in myself – to Transform Shadows.

Cheers to you, to find your power around your own shadows and to be the hero of your journey (even if the journey doesn’t feel heroic at all).

This is my visual aid that illustrates the process I go through. Going down the staircase and removing problematic foods felt, at first, like a world of hellish restriction.

This is a discombobulating and disorienting journey, and there are many mindset shits along the way — in the physical processes around food and in the emotional processes of changing how I live with family, friends, work, and society.

Over time, these processes that feel negative and restricting ultimately take me up the staircase, to a profoundly positive place. And, when I act in optimal ways around my health, I feel a pinnacle of positivity, the sensuality of wellness.

This is the highest form of self-actualization I have experienced, and it only happens when I am eating whole, unprocessed plants in balances that I have come to understand for myself.