Why: My Golden Center for Change
Lifestyle changes can be challenging work as we go through the ups and downs of life. Knowing our reasons for making long-term change is important, especially during challenging times. Our reason(s) for change is often known as our why.
I love Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, which places the why in the center of action, change, and doing. I have found this way of thinking to be helpful in many areas of my life. I continually think through making and maintaining my lifestyle changes through my why.
Eating Less Frequently
I typically eat either 2 or 3 meals a day, depending on my hunger, my day, and my schedule. Getting rid of addictive foods changed how I experienced hunger, and once I felt that change, I was able to eat at meal times instead of more frequently.
Changes: Follow Me Here
Lifestyle changes are inevitable, and they can be hard to navigate. I am currently reflecting on what these changes mean for me. Creating new routines around changes takes time, patience, and grace—all of which I need right now.
Eat When Hungry: Decisions of a Lifetime
Eat When Hungry. This idea takes on different meanings every day, and I want to highlight the ongoing nature of my health, wellness, and weight loss journey. This is a process, not a destination, even if losing half my weight looks like a final destination.
I made big changes in 2020 around the idea of eating when hungry, and I found greater success. These changes still define my life. Even so, I am learning, growing, and changing in how I understand myself. I am only starting to think deeply about the ongoing nature of the journey, largely because others think I have arrived in some way.
Eat When Hungry: Journey into Food and Fires
Learning to Avoid Garbage Fires In a Corrupt Food Environment
Dr. Lisle and I dig deeper into hunger and the complex processes that I went through to understand my hunger drive and to make lifestyle changes in myself. In doing so, I moved from fueling myself with the explosive garbage fires of junk foods to the slow-burning fire of satiation with a plant-based lifestyle. As always, Dr. Lisle brings powerful science and deep wisdom to our conversation.
Processes are important in self-discoveries, and there can be important variations to understand about our individual hunger drives. To that end, I focus heavily on sharing my own processes and my individual learning which may include different details from others.
My internal agitation around food comes from what and how much I eat. When I don’t eat right, I feel agitated and go on the prowl, which means looking for the corrupt junk foods that cause garbage fires in me — overeating and binge eating.
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.
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.
Keeping My Footing in the Seas of Change
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
I am in the midst of change right now. A lot of it.
Since I last blogged, I retired from one career, traveled several places, and am on the edge of starting a new career. All of this is good.
Changes, even good ones, can be unsettling and upset the balance in my routines, in my life. These changes turned my foundation into a slippery slope – more than I expected.
To keep my footing, I have had to catch my balance several times in the past weeks. Catching my balance always means failure in some way.
I enjoy the beach much more at half my size. I feel younger, better, and more energetic than I ever have in my life, even though my age now gets me some senior discounts.
And, I have failed. More I than planned, and more than I would like to admit. Failure works that way.
But, failures are a natural part of the self-improvement process, the ongoing process of being me, of facing myself, of understanding the shadows that shape my life.
Eat When Hungry: Discovering My Golden Circle
Discovering My Trigger Foods, Part II
A couple years into my weight loss, all looked well from the outside. I had lost half my weight; I stabilized at a healthy weight; and I radiated improved wellness.
On paper, my numbers looked comfortable, controlled, and predictable. The patterns looked like successful maintenance.
I had even started to get a few comments about my success in maintaining my weight loss. These unsettled me. I felt like a fraud.
Inwardly, I was flailing on the razor’s edge, about to tumble off into a chasm all too eager to devour me back into the 97% failure rate.
I knew this space intimately. Looming failure always won. I clung to the sharp edge of success, barely making it day-by-day. I was missing something, but I did not know what.
Then, I came into a direct standoff with what I did not yet understand: Eat When Hungry.
Swallowed by Holiday Foods
Holidays are times of food vulnerability for people who struggle with weight, foods, food addiction, health, and wellness.
There are a lot of people white knuckling the next couple weeks. I am one of them, even though my foods look much different than they used to.
The holiday season has always exposed the biggest gap between who I want to be and who I am around food.
Who I want to be is someone who is a moderate, someone who indulges some but not too much, someone whose willpower is as natural as her smile.
Who I have to be is someone who eats whole, unprocessed plants without salt, oil, and sugar. I am indulging more than I should, but I will recover quickly.
But, that has not always been the case.