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.
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.
Winter Is Coming …
Fire and Ice: Contrasting Forces in Seasons of Change
Winter is getting more insistent. The birdbath in the background has ice on it, and snow decorated my car this morning. I got out my heavy winter coat.
Seasons are changing but the lifestyle changes I have put in place are not. Today's haul: kale, peppers, kohlrabi, beets, cabbage, broccoli, rutabaga, and pumpkins.
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.
Sharing My Story: Embrace The Teachings of My Hunger Drive
My social media arm has been working late with Transform Shadows to encourage you to register for the Thrive Against All Odds Summit. The whole Transform Shadows team encourages you to register. (Just to be clear, that means me, myself, and I lol.)
My story will air on October 25. I previewed my interview last night, and it truly was an honor to interview with Tim Kaufman. He and Heather Barlow Kaufman are doing great educational work. The conversation I had with Tim is authentic and real around making and sustaining significant lifestyle changes.
This is my first step into this world of online interviews for other people, and I have learned a lot in the process. My health, wellness, and weight loss journey has taught me a lot my own strengths and fallibility, and this new experience adds to that learning.
Epic Struggles, Everyday Actions: Wanting Do-Overs in Life
Do-Overs in Life: Living with Myself
To see this “promotional square” humbles me. I have no organization, no mailing list, no sponsors, no group, no affiliation, no social media arm to promote this Summit. I most certainly feel out of my league. I am a small-scale, one-woman endeavor motivated by a vision and commitment to sharing information that helped me find a better way of living.
Like so many things in life, I wish I could have a do-over for this interview. It was a sweltering hot, humid day in August, and I was literally in the middle of a decision-making process with others that was stressful (and that resolved positively shortly after the interview).
Choose Health: Fail for Success Series, 1
SHADOW BOXING
Fighting Myself for Myself: Failing Within Boundaries
I am in the middle of several back-to-back travel experiences that make it difficult to keep a health routine. And, I am in the busy season in a new job that I am still learning. This is a recipe for failing grandly.
I have a history of failing grandly in times like this. The details were different, but the feeling was the same. To stay successful, I have had to let some things go and keep my eye on the big things for long-term success. And, I have fallen off my usual game – within boundaries of short-term failures that make long-term successes possible.
I Wanted to Change the Trajectory of My Life
Finding My Golden Center
People often ask why I made the decision to lose weight. At the golden center of it was my health and wellness. For years, I knew what I should be doing, but I didn’t know how to do it and sustain it. Because this is such a hard process, people need to find a why, a golden center for making the change.
My golden center comes into focus most profoundly between 10:00 pm and 6:00 am, when I no longer live in fear about what my choices were doing to me, when I feel freedom from a lifelong conflict around food. I knew nutrition and health facts as well as anyone, if not better than most. But, I could not find a way to act on what I knew.
Eat When Hungry: My Journey into Shadows, Episode 2
Mindset is everything and nothing.
Mindset and the mental processes around my personal changes are shadows of my transformation.
Mindset plays a starring role in every change I have made. Yet, mindset alone would never be enough to succeed in losing half my weight.