Podcast appearances and mentions of annie all

25 year old Annie Charlotte from the UK joins the show to chat about her female phenomenon of being born with not one, but two vaginas! We ask Annie ALL the questions we were dying to know to get a better understanding of how it all works... Have a listen for all the details.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ho, ho, ho! The It's About Bravo family is taking some much-deserved time off for the holidays, but do not fret: In the spirit of gift-giving, we've recorded TWO special episodes for you that will air this week and next to tide you over until we're back in the New Year to resume our regular weekly recaps! This week, Zack, Reid, Maddy, and Annie ALL hopped on the mic to participate in our First Annual Housewives Draft! We know absolutely nothing about sports, so this should be a blast.You'll hear who we each drafted for a fictional Ultimate Girls Trip cast, under categories like: The OGThe NewbieThe Woman of GodThe Chaos AgentThe GossipThe MessThe One Season WonderThe Friend-OfWho do YOU think has the best overall dream cast? Let us know on social media @about_bravo who you think won our First Annual Housewives Draft! Stay tuned next week for our second holiday bonus episode: the It's About Bravo 2023 Awards Show! Happy Holidays, and thanks to everyone who supports our show, whether it be a simple stream or a $3 donation on our Patreon channel. New bonus episodes on our Patreon every other week with more on the way right after the holidays! Support the showConnect with us: https://linktr.ee/Aboutbravo06

Annie Weiss ran the Badwater 135 race this year. Running that race sounds like the hardest thing anyone would willingly choose to do. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never run a step in your life. Relationships, careers, parenting, and trauma all push us to our limits at one point or another. Check out Annie's last interview on Episode 23 You find yourself dreaming about the future and all its possibilities. Or maybe you are living in the moment and can’t figure out how to stay in touch with the big picture. It’s a tension most of us live in, pulling us side to side.  If you’re not dying, why stop? It sounds extreme, but it’s true. Whether you’re following a plan or following a whim, go hard. Find Annie on Instagram Annie’s advice on setting intentions: Reflect on the past Think ahead Keep your goals broad (allow for some wiggle room) Favorite Quotes by Annie: “All my mistakes put me where I am today.” “We have to set goals knowing our why.” Brian’s Blog - www.runningwanderer.com Annie’s Book  Patreon Membership - get access to bonus clips and interview sneak peeks. Other Resources Getting to Good  The Untethered Soul Article Find so much more at Pieces of Grit

Writer and performer Annie Lanzillotto discusses the pleasure of wolfing food down and how the "feels like" temperature is measured. ABOUT THE GUEST:  Born and raised in the Westchester Square neighborhood of the Bronx of Barese heritage, Annie Lanzillotto is renowned memoirist, poet, and performance artist. She's the author of L IS FOR LION: AN ITALIAN BRONX BUTCH FREEDOM MEMOIR (SUNY Press), the books of poetry SCHISTSONG (Bordighera Press) and Hard Candy/Pitch Roll Yaw (Guernica Editions). She has received fellowships and performance commissions from New York Foundation For The Arts, Dancing In The Streets, Dixon Place, Franklin Furnace, The Rockefeller Foundation for shows including CONFESSIONS OF A BRONX TOMBOY: My Throwing Arm, This Useless Expertise, How to Wake Up a Marine in a Foxhole, and a’Schapett. More info at annielanzillotto.com. Catch Annie performing her one-person show Feed Time at City Lore in Manhattan on November 15 at 7:30pm. ABOUT THE HOST:  Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as “tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny.” His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA and other museums, he’s a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE:  SHE'S A TALKER was the name of Neil’s first video project. “One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate’s cat and found myself saying the words ‘She’s a talker.’ I wondered how many other other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying ‘She’s a talker.’” A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS:  This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund.  Producer: Devon Guinn  Creative Consultants: Stella Binion, Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue  Assistant Producers: Itai Almor, Charlie Theobald  Editor: Andrew Litton  Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver  Theme Song: Jeff Hiller  Media: Justine Lee with help from Angela Liao and Alex Qiao  Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Roger Kingsepp, Tod Lippy, Nick Rymer, Maddy Sinnock, Sue Simon, Shirin Mazdeyasna TRANSCRIPT: ANNIE LANZILLOTTO: In the Bronx we weren't poor. You're in the Bronx. My father was, working class, had his own business. There wasn't such big class distinctions. It was like Fiddler on the Roof class distinctions, like the butcher ate better. NEIL GOLDBERG: Right. ANNIE: We all had Raleigh Choppers. That was the best bicycle and really, most of us on the block could get that, a Schwinn or a Raleigh, you know? That was it really. That was in terms of being a kid, that was the class distinction. I achieved it, so I grew up feeling pretty rich until I was 13. NEIL: Hello, I'm Neil Goldberg and this is my new podcast, She's A Talker. On today's episode I'll be talking to one-of-a-kind of poet, playwright, memoirist and performer Annie Lanzillotto. But first, I want to tell you a little bit about the podcast itself. I'm a visual artist, but for the last million or so years I've been writing passing thoughts down on index cards. I've got thousands of them. I originally wrote the cards just for me or maybe as starting points for future art projects, but now I'm using them as prompts for conversations with some of my favorite artists, writers, performers, and beyond. Why is it called She's A Talker? Way back in 1993, I made my first-ever video project which featured dozens of gay men in their apartments all over New York city combing their cats and saying the words, "She's a talker." 25 years later, I'm excited to resurrect the phrase for this podcast. NEIL: Each episode, I'll start with some recent cards. Here they are, photo project, the litter boxes of celebrities, those people who have strong feelings about you're saying, "Bless you.", Before they sneeze. Babies making their dolphin noises at a wedding. Those glass buildings that appear curved, but then you realize it's just an approximation of a curve made from rectangle. I am so excited to have as my guest, writer and performer Annie Lanzillotto. Annie and I went to college together many, many years ago and have been dear friends ever since. She produced, what to this day, is still one of my favorite performance pieces ever. A site-specific opera featuring the vendors at the Arthur Avenue market near where she grew up in the Bronx. I remember a butcher singing a gorgeous love aria while frying up chicken hearts. NEIL: Annie has a new double book of poetry out from Guernica Editions, called Hard Candy / Pitch Roll Yaw, which touches on parental mortality, her own struggles with cancer and poverty. And if that sounds heavy, there is so much beauty and joy and pleasure and straight-up polarity in the work. I spoke to Annie very late on a very hot August night in my art studio in Chinatown. NEIL: I'm recording. I'm recording. NEIL: I'm here with Annie Lanzillotto. Okay, Annie. Here are a couple of questions that I ask everyone. What is the elevator pitch for what you do? ANNIE: Oh my God, that's so hard. I write and speak and put my body on stage, and in live and an audience, whoever's in the room, I resuscitate that room. NEIL: Is that what you would say to someone in an elevator who asks, "Hey, what do you do?" ANNIE: No. NEIL: What would you say to them? I resuscitate the room. ANNIE: Some people I say, "Well, I do theater. Oh, I'm in theater." Then they say, "Oh, I saw the Lion King.", or something. Oh, that's beautiful. At some point when I was cleaning out the closets, I found the picture I drew as a kid. I think the question was, what do you do or what do you want to do or what do want to be or whatever? I drew five situations where this stick figure was commanding a story. One was at the table, one was on a corner, one was on the stage, and I thought, "That's what I do." NEIL: I love it. I love it. ANNIE: The truth about my elevator pitch is I'm listening to the other person in the elevator. That really is the truth. I always feel like I'm very good at bonding but not so good at networking. So, that elevator pitch, in my mind, is someone who is in a position maybe to help me advance my work, which is a problem to frame it that way. But in reality they end up telling me about their sick kid and we're hugging and that's really the elevator pitch. NEIL: Right. ANNIE: I'm just listening to- NEIL: Do you do an elevator catch? ANNIE: Yeah. Just listen. NEIL: What did your mom, Annie, let's say a friend of hers asked her, "What does Annie do?" What would she say? ANNIE: Well, she at times, probably would've said, I taught. I did workshops, taught writing and theater. I think with her neighbors, she would really share with them her love and pride. NEIL: How about your grandmother? Why would she say? ANNIE: Oh God. Well, Grandma Rose, she would, Grandma Rose always wanted to know you were eating good. At the time when she was alive, I was hustling a lot of teaching jobs, like Poet in the Schools. Mostly I was a Poet in the School, so I would call her between schools. I was running from one school and another school and she'd just always want to know cosa mangia oggi? What did you eat today? Really that was the conversation. NEIL: Would she, in talking about you with friends, would she tell them what you had eaten that day? How's Annie doing? ANNIE: She's a good eater. She eats good. Mangia bene. No, I don't know. I don't think she talked to her friends that way. NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: But to boil it down, she would want to know if you're making money. And that's the conversation with friends. Oh, she's a good girl. She makes money. She helps her mother. NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: It wasn't about career choice or something. NEIL: Annie, what's something you find yourself thinking about today? ANNIE: One thought I'm having is that prices are arbitrary. The other day I went for breakfast in a diner. I ordered one way, but the waitress understood in a different way. So anyway, it was two eggs, whatever. So she said, "That'll be $17." I said, "That sounds like a lot." She said," Oh well you got this, you got that" I said, "Yeah, but I ordered the combo. It's shouldn't be that much." So she rang it up a different way. She was like, "All right, how about $12?" It's almost seems like prices don't matter and it seems arbitrary. I think this is a new experience for me because in the past I started noticing what my mom, every time we went food shopping, several items were rung up more than they were supposed to be. My mother was sharp at this because I think in ShopRite if you caught a mistake, you got a lot for free, whatever the, there was some bonus like you got that item for free or whatever it was. So she caught them a lot. But it was pretty much every time. NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: I'm cognizant now not to buy too many items at once because then I can't keep track of what the prices were on the shelf. The old way, if you go to the market for two, three things, string beans, peaches and a piece of meat you don't lose track because you're buying, you have a push cart with a million items, how can you keep track? So I guess the thought is that prices have no relevance anymore to what the thing is. NEIL: Okay Annie, let's go to the cards. Shall we? ANNIE: Let's do it. Let's go to the cards. NEIL: Okay. Our first card, the card says the pleasure of wearing things out. ANNIE: I love that you brought that up. Well, I was always wearing out my sneakers and throwing them up on the telephone wires or the light wires, or whatever wires were over our heads in the Bronx and that was the joy to wear them out. My mother, who was a cripple as a kid because she fell out a window, would always say to me when she bought me new sneakers, PF flyers with the sneakers that I wore as a kid, "Wear them out. God bless you, be in good health. Wear them out." Every two months I'd wear out those sneakers, and my grandmother was horrified. NEIL: But your mother would love it? ANNIE: Yeah, because to her that was health. Wear out your sneakers. That meant I was doing the work of a tomboy, of the kid. I do feel worried about wearing out pajamas and things that I don't really have money to replace. So my neighbor saw me sewing a new elastic in my pajama bottoms with the flannel pajamas. She was making fun of me." Why don't you just go buy a new pair?" I was like, "Well this season I really don't have another 40, 50 bucks for LLB or whatever. I want to get through the season.", which is something I grew up hearing, but it stayed with me, like see if he could get into the season out of it. NEIL: I wonder if we'll ever feel that way about our lives. Let's see if I can get another season out of this. ANNIE: Well, I do hear people saying, "I wish I had a few more summers at the beach." Or, "I could, I hope I could have a few more summers." People do count like that. NEIL: That's true. ANNIE: Like seasons. NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: "I hope I see Italy one more time." I hear people, "Will I get back to Paris." NEIL: Right. ANNIE: You know, I hear people saying things like that. NEIL: yeah, ANNIE: So they do try to stretch it out, I think. I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I've done enough. There is a part of me that feels like I've done enough to be satisfied if there's no more. If there's no more, it's okay. NEIL: Okay, next card. ANNIE: I love these cards. It's like playing a game like Monopoly. NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: And you get Community Chest or whatever the- NEIL: I know. ANNIE: Chance. It's like Chance. NEIL: Yeah. Here's this Chance. I think it's important to have access when you are eating something you love to imagine them as they are to people who hate them. For me the classic example of that is dark chocolate, which I love. It's very easy I think, for me to plug into how someone would find this disgusting and somehow my tuning into finding it disgusting, helps me to enjoy it even more. ANNIE: Really? NEIL: Yeah. Do you remember the first time you had coffee? ANNIE: No, because I was probably two years old with expresso on my bottle, like most Italian kids. NEIL: Right. ANNIE: I don't eat things that I know people who, they hate what I eat. But people do, I feel like having a version to my proportions, the amount I eat. I think that freaks people out because I grew up, and I still wolf food down. Just Wolf it down and too much of it. Just shoving it in your mouth. Like your cheeks bulging, you're chewing and you're just yeah. Shoving as much as you can in your mouth, basically. NEIL: In Yiddish, you say, and I think it's related to German, human beings es but animals fres. So, if you're talking about someone eating in a certain way, you say they use the term for how animals eat versus how people eat. ANNIE: Fres? NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: What does that mean? Like that? NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: Like a piece of pizza I could just shove in my mouth, inhale, a good piece, out on the corner. NEIL: Right. ANNIE: I just pull up in Hoboken where my friend is, where she works, there's a great pizzeria right on the corner. She gets free pizza because she does their printing services. So I meet her, she says, "Oh I'll meet you outside" So we get a piece of pizza. Oh you want a piece of pizza. All right, give me a piece of pizza. Fine. I'm an Hoboken, eat a piece of pizza. She gets a few slices. We stand on the corner. Just boom, shove it in our mouth. Wolf it down like folded by. No soda, no water. Just inhale the piece of pizza. NEIL: Is there pleasure in that? ANNIE: Yes. NEIL: Because see I always just associate the pleasure of eating with eating slowly but- ANNIE: No. Not Italians NEIL: Talk to me about it. ANNIE: It's just, this pleasure of your mouth is full of this gooey perfect thing. You just can't believe that you lived another day just to have ... It's like then I want to stay alive because it's such satiation, with just shoving it in your mouth. You're not taking your time because you're not worried there's another bite. It could just be gone. NEIL: See, this makes me feel good because I remember when my dad, after he had a stroke, he couldn't feed himself. He couldn't communicate and we had this person who would help him. She was cold and she used to feed him so quickly, spoonful after spoonful, to get it over with. I knew that my dad actually like to eat slow. I know I talked about with my sister. I was like, you know, do you think I should ask? I can't remember her name, little trauma blocked out, but to feed him slower. My sister said. "No, I think there can be pleasure in eating fast." Speaking of food, but this question doesn't need to just apply to food, what is a taste that you've acquired? ANNIE: Well, coffee, vino, peppermint soap. Dr. Brown's peppermint soap. Myrrh. NEIL: Oh wow. Okay. ANNIE: The street oil from the guys. I've grown accustomed to Myrrh, and the smells of the city, I've learned to groove on in a way. I sometimes feel in the grassy suburbs, I could sneeze hundreds of times and I just need to get to the city and it'll stop. So something about like, yeah, I'm good with the asphalt, tar. My mother used to tell me to go breathe where they're burning tar. She said it clears out your lungs. NEIL: Wow. ANNIE: She said tar ladies and never get colds. NEIL: Okay, next card. I feel really judgmental of people with a strong will to live. ANNIE: That gives me so much good feeling because I'm so tied to having to struggle to live. But the best, Jimmy Cagney in this movie I saw, I don't know what movie. It was on TCN, and he's about to run into this gunfire and he says to his partner, who was hesitating, he says, "What, do you want to live forever?" I thought, "Thank you, thank you. That's just what I needed to hear." I'm so tired of fighting to live, from the cancer and the breathing issues and just, Oh my God, that's a relief. It really is. NEIL: Next card. Life is hard, but how the pitch rises when you fill a water bottle can still be pretty beautiful. ANNIE: The pitch.? NEIL: Yeah. Is that the word for it? ANNIE: Like, how you feel? NEIL: You know when you fill a water bottle and it goes, errr? There's always that still. ANNIE: I like filling my water bottle. I've been filling it in the Britta, so I have to stand there with the fridge open to fill it and then I water the plants and it's the same kind of feeling. I like doing that. I like seeing the plants grow and it's the most pleasurable thing in my life to see in these plants growing and feeding them water. NEIL: I went away and we sublet our place. I have one big plant that really only needs to be watered every two weeks. But I had one plant that needs to be watered, I water it every other day. ANNIE: Every other day? NEIL: Truthfully, this plant, I remember one day I came in, it had wilted, after. I hadn't watered it for three days and I found myself saying out loud, "Drama queen". So anyhow, we were down in DC for a month and I was going to take the plant with me, but we had this really wonderful sub-letter and I just said to her, "Do you think you would be okay watering the plant twice a week? Totally no problem. "If you're not, I'll just take it down with me". She was like, "Absolutely no problem." When I came back, she left me a note that said, I'm so sorry but I killed your plant. ANNIE: Oh my God. NEIL: It was clear it hadn't been watered the whole time I was gone. ANNIE: Really? NEIL: Yeah, I don't think so. I moved on, but my point is, I don't get how a plant could be there in your living room and he could not see it and it could be dying over there without you're taking that in. ANNIE: When I'm someone's house and the plants don't look healthy, I register that in a big way. NEIL: What is that registration? ANNIE: Well, people could think they're so smart or hip or they make such great decisions and doing this. But if you can't take care of a fucking plant, it doesn't mean anything to me. Sometimes I can't go back to people's houses for reasons like that because I can't witness the abuse. NEIL: Plant abuse. ANNIE: Well, any sentient being. Yeah, some of the stuff I just can't stomach, to be honest. The plants dying or no one's ... You're that busy? Then what do you have plants for? Give it away. I just can't- NEIL: I hear you. Do you think of plants a sentient? ANNIE: Yeah, a plant is alive and I think communicates in ways we'll never understand. A plant has movement, responds to light, water, earth, the sky, the sun, everything. NEIL: I just have a card that's called, swallowing pills. ANNIE: Swallowed a big one today. NEIL: Yeah. ANNIE: Before I go to the dentist, I have to take Amoxicillin. In America they give you a 500 milligram pills. You got to take four. NEIL: Wow. ANNIE: They go down easy. But I had some Amoxicillin from Sicily. They were one- gram pills. They were big and I tried to swallow three times. I couldn't get it down. I had to really focused then. Should I bite it, should I swallow it? what can I try? Am I going to choke on it? Finally I got it down this morning, but it wasn't coated so it stuck a little in the mouth. I went through this whole thing with this pill. NEIL: You really have to consciously will yourself. The experience of swallowing pills is such an odd, it's not eating. You have to do this thing where you don't chew something. Swallowing- ANNIE: You got to open the back of your mouth a little bit, the throat a little bit. NEIL: Yeah. And it goes against something really basic or a bunch of things that are really basic. ANNIE: It does. Right. You don't swallow M&Ms. NEIL: Right. ANNIE: You'd never swallow an M&M. NEIL: Absolutely not. ANNIE: Never would you swallow an M&M. it would be like, what are you doing? NEIL: I had a colonoscopy recently. ANNIE: Oh, brother. NEIL: Thank you. ANNIE: Nice and clean? NEIL: One thing, I was telling a friend, I got a colonoscopy and he said, "Oh, you know, I had it. I just did one, a couple of months ago, and my doctor really commended me for how clean my colon was." I realized when I had a, because I've had to have a few because of this history in my family. Every time, they go out of their way to praise what a job, how clean your colon is. So when I was done with the colonoscopy, and I was talking to this friend and he said, "Well did he praise you for how clean your colon was?" I was like, "He didn't." ANNIE: He didn't? NEIL: He didn't, but then I got the report about the colonoscopy and it's like very formal, and it's the patient presented with an exceedingly clean colon or something. ANNIE: Which is abnormal. NEIL: Exactly. ANNIE: Very abnormal. NEIL: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Last card. The feels-like temperature. ANNIE: Feels like. NEIL: You know how you feel when the weather- ANNIE: It feels like, yeah, that's weird. NEIL: What is the feels-like temperature? ANNIE: I don't know but- NEIL: How do they- ANNIE: But today when I felt like, before I put on a jacket, I had to go on the stoop to feel what it was going to feel like. Then I didn't do it. But I don't know how they measure the feels-like temperature. That's a sweet thought. So there's a thermometer, then there's a naked lady standing there saying, "Well the thermometer says this, but it really feels that." That should be a job for somebody. NEIL: Oh my God, to come up with the feels-like temperature? ANNIE: Yeah. Like is it a nipple hard day? Is it what day? What kind of day is it? NEIL: Okay. Annie, this is a quantification question. What's something bad or even just okay that you would take over a good thing of something else. ANNIE: All right, I'll give you a list. A bad eggplant Parmesan hero over a good raw sushi meal. A bad thunderstorm storm over a hundred-degree day. A hard day in the hospital with someone I'm close to, over being at the beach with 10 friends. Take any day, bad or good in the rehearsal room, over chit-chat brunch. A bad rant in the basement of the mental home with my father over a beautiful meal with intellectuals. NEIL: On that note, Annie, I love you. Thank you for being on the show, She's A Talker. ANNIE: She's a talker, baby. Thank you, Neil. You're my favorite host. NEIL: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of She's A Talker. I really hope you liked it. To help other people find it, I'd love it if you might rate and review it on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to it. Some credits. This series is made possible with generous from Stillpoint Fund, and with help from Devon Guinn, Aaron Dalton, Stella Binion, Charlie Theobald, Itai Almor, Alex Qiao, Molly Donahue, Justine Lee, Angela Liao, Andrew Litton, Josh Graver, and my husband Jeff Hiller who sings the theme song you're about to hear. Thanks to them, to my guest, Annie Lanzillotto, and to you for listening.  

Emotional eating can be a real challenge in finding balance. Sometimes there is a sense of helplessness to it. In today’s podcast, Josh Hillis shares his emotional eating coaching strategy to help our listeners find new ways to cope with stress that doesn’t always revolve around food. What you’ll hear in this episode: How effective are cravings control strategies when you have emotional eating issues? Is the answer to emotional eating more control? The emotional release effect when you emotionally eat after tight control The role of acceptance in emotional eating Normalizing the existence of uncomfortable emotions. Diffusing uncomfortable emotions - what does that mean? Gaining perspective around the perceived urgency of feelings The role of mindfulness in managing negative emotions Defining emotional or disinhibited eating Learning to let the monsters ride the bus Being in the driver's seat of how you deal with feelings Introducing a waiting period to delay emotional eating The value of taking time to identify feelings Ways to scale and create distance between you and your feelings Three ways to feel comfortable with your feelings without using food Managing expectations of emotional eating - moving past all or nothing Psychological flexibility as a goal, defined. Identifying and being aware of your “monsters” Thought suppression and the health and wellness industry sales tactics Frequency and emotional eating Rules vs Self-Loving Guidelines Tracking progress - things you can track   Resources: Josh’s Blog Fat Loss Happens On Monday Everything You Know About Emotional Eating is Wrong - blog post Annie quotes Mothers, Daughters and Body Image - Hillary McBride’s book Getting Older: Hillary Mcbride On Women And Aging Episode 13: How Your Body Image Impacts Your Children With Hillary Mcbride Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life Radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight, and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balance365. Together we have coached thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy, and confident in their bodies on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing with amazing guests. Enjoy. Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life Radio. I am so excited for today's guest because today's incredibly smart and talented guest goes way back with Balance365, so far back in fact that he knew Lauren, Jen and I before we were even a business. Josh Hillis has been a longtime friend and mentor to the three of us and I'm so excited for you to hear his wisdom on today's episode. Josh helps people beat emotional eating using a skill-based not diet-based approach that allows people to create a new relationship with their bodies and food and get results that have previously never been possible. Josh is the author of Fat Loss Happens on Monday and the upcoming lean and strong and yet untitled emotional eating book coming out in 2020. Josh has been writing for his blog losestubbornfat.com since 2004 and he currently attends MSU Denver and is doing his thesis on contextual behavioral science and emotional eating. He's the perfect guest for this topic. The current standard answer to emotional eating and the health and fitness industry encourages individuals to just have more control, more control over their diet, over their thoughts, over their emotions, more control over your cravings. But on today's episode, Josh shares why that advice usually doesn't work. For those who struggle with emotional eating and provides multiple practical tools to help you overcome it, I think you're going to love it and joy. Annie: Josh, welcome to Balance365 Life Radio. We're so happy to have you. You go way back with our team like way, way back. How are you? Josh: I'm good. How are you guys? It's so cool to see you guys again. Annie: I know, like, we're still, like, we're still together. The last time we were Facetiming was under a little bit different context. We were Healthy Habits Happy Moms then and we were, you've kind of helped us mentor us as far as like habits and skills and philosophies and you're just a really great coach. Just flat out really great. Josh: Thank you. From you guys, that's awesome. Annie: So we're so happy to have you and Jen and Lauren are here too. How are you guys? Jen: Hi- Lauren: Good. Josh goes way back to like before we were even a thing. Jen: We met Josh the same time we met each other. Lauren: Yeah. Josh: Wow. Jen: Years ago. Annie: Yeah. Josh: Oh Wow. That's awesome. That's amazing. Annie: So you're kind of a big deal to us, are we making you uncomfortable yet? Josh: That's awesome. Jen: When our book comes out we're going to have a page for acknowledgements and I was just telling the girls last week, like Josh Hillis is going to be my number one acknowledgement. Josh: Are you serious? Jen: Yeah, just like all your work and your blog, like it's been so insanely helpful to me. And even just watching you in conversation with people, like, as creepy as that sounds, but just how you handle people, how it's just and you're just so objective and, and really what we try to embody at Balance365 as far as there's no right one right way for every single person and just being open to tools and helping people build a, just a more varied toolbox and they currently have for their health and wellness. Jen: And also the other big thing that we come up against is that, because we're all about self acceptance and embracing oneself, we also often get lumped into a segment of this industry that we all know about, which is basically the anti weight loss movement, which is like weight loss is so bad. Why? Like nobody better talk about this. And a lot of dietitians are on that train as well as psychologists. And so it's just, it's like frightening for me at times. And I found myself questioning, you know, cause you go to the, you see these other professionals and you're like, "Oh man, like, she makes a good point, like what's?" And you've question your own values and what, but ultimately we have risen as like, look, we're just, we're just trying to take a messy middle approach. And there is really nothing inherently wrong with weight loss, changing your behaviors. Jen: And I so appreciate that and you, because I see you as a real leader and professional, not just in the health and wellness industry. Well the health and fitness industry I should say, but you are now a part of the psychology industry. Lauren: Say, "Hey, this is okay. Come on" Annie: And you're not a jerk. Like you're not, like you're not out there shaming people and you're like still able to like help them achieve the goals that they have in a really like compassionate, positive way, which is awesome. Jen: Yeah. And you've got a couple of clients I was reading yesterday on your page that you have a couple of clients that have lost over a hundred pounds. That's like, that's a, that's a life changing, values altering like those clients, like you've totally changed their lives. Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Annie: So now are you uncomfortable? Josh: No, this is like the coolest, most thoughtful, most wonderful compliments I could ever get because you guys are acknowledging me for the things that I've worked the hardest at and that mean the most to me, like in the world. So I totally appreciate it. I totally, totally, totally appreciate it. Annie: Yay. Well, we're like, we can just be your ultimate hype women when you're having a bad day. You can give us a call. Okay. Josh: Can you guys introduce me on every podcast? Annie: We can. But peaking of podcasts, we should probably talk about the topic that I, that you actually wanted to talk about because we've been trying to get you on the show for a while and you're a busy guy. So, when I said, are there any topics that you wanted to jam on and you were like emotional eating, like top on your list. So what is it about emotional eating that you love so much? Josh: I think, so a couple of different things, on like the bigger, like zoomed out level, I think it's access to making the kind of difference that I want to make with people. If they can get, what's really neat is if someone really struggles with emotional eating and they can get that under control it tends to spiral out into other areas of their lives and they have like better relationships and do better at work. I mean like it's, it's really like I don't coach any of that stuff and that kind of thing shows up. The other thing that I like about it is I think it's a place where people feel so out of control and they feel like they can't be this kind of person that they want to be and like they're like, they're being driven by this other thing. And so I like it cause I want to put them back in the driver's seat. and then also the framework that I study, which is contextual behavioral science is just really good for that. And so that's- Annie: I think it's great because I, you have, you have an incredible blog. One of the blog posts you shared with me, you noted that the typical response in the fitness industry to emotional eating is like control, like just control more things and then like, you'll be fine. And,in order to control emotional eating, individuals just they need to control their diet, then control their thoughts, their emotions, their cravings, and you think that that's pretty much crap. Josh: Yeah. Annie: So tell us why, why do you think it's crap? Tell us more. I mean, we agree. Josh: Yeah. So, one thing I just want to preface this with, because it's the most surprising cause I do think it's totally crap and I've gone that way for a while, but I was really surprised this year that I found some studies where they separated out people that had a high degree of emotional eating and cravings, eating and external eating, which is like, you see food and you want it versus people that scored really low on that. And for the people that scored really low on that control was actually fine. Control actually totally worked just just fine. But that's not the clients that I get, you know, they don't hear me. So, the flip side is that control, if you do have issues with cravings or emotional eating, tired eating or and you're procrastinating or any of those things, then control will have an opposite effect. If it works, it always rebounds and the rebound is always, pretty un-fun. Like people really feel like a really, really bad loss of loss of control and they feel kind of gross and they don't feel good about themselves. Jen: So it's sort of that the more tightly wound you are, the faster, harder you'll spin out. And applied to eating, I think people get that release, like they're so tightly wound around food trying to control everything then getting out of control, they just, I mean in the moment it's like a release, right? Josh: Yeah. So you bring up these two really big points. Oh man, it's so cool. So on one hand you've got this like rule based way of living and the problem with having a totally rule based way of living is you break the rule and you're like, I'm off. I'm like explode. Like do it all because this is the last time ever. So, there's that huge like explosion release thing there. And then the other side is that, like, food really does work temporarily for numbing emotions. So, those two things kind of spiral together where people, like, break the rule and they're like, "Oh no, I'm, I'm off my diet and I'm going to go into all the things." And then they start to feel guilty about it. And then they actually are eating to numb the guilty feelings they have about breaking the rules. It's like- Jen: layer one and layer two. Lauren: Wow. The plot thickens. Josh: Totally. Annie: So I understand if you have emotional eating issues or cravings control strategies backfire, like they aren't helpful. What does work? Josh: Great question. So, it kind of all fits in the world of like acceptance based strategies and I get, I like, I have some clients to kind of freak out when I say, like, "acceptance", you know, cause they're like, "I don't want to accept." But that's just kind of like a family of strategies. And what kind of falls inside of that is, the first thing is actually normalizing. It's just recognizing every single time that you have uncomfortable thoughts and uncomfortable emotions, that it's normal to have uncomfortable thoughts, uncomfortable emotions and, like, the foundation is people, like, believe that that's not okay. You know, cause they've heard so much about, like, positive thinking or controlling their thoughts or all of these things or they were, maybe it wasn't cool growing up for them to have emotions or whatever. Josh: But for whatever reason, they think they're supposed to be a shiny, happy person. And just recognizing it's normal to feel sad sometimes. And the number of coaching calls I get on where something really bad happens to someone and I have to say like, "It's okay. It's okay to feel to feel bad. It's okay to feel sad. It's okay. It's okay to have all these feelings." So recognize that it's okay and normal and healthy. Sometimes we can even pair with, well, that's jumping to the next thing. So the next thing is getting a little bit of distance from uncomfortable thoughts and emotions, in act and acceptance commitment training they call it diffusion or fusion. So if you're fused with your thoughts, you feel like they're coming from you, you feel like they're true or true or false, and you feel like there are a command, you feel like there like something that like urgently needs to be fixed. Josh: Diffusion is getting enough enough distance from your thoughts. You can see that like these thoughts might have come from my parents or the media or magazines or whatever. But like, my automatic thoughts aren't me. Right. They aren't true or not true. They're just thoughts. They aren't an urgent problem that needs to be fixed, right? It's normal to have these thoughts and feeling and so diffusion is a matter of, if people have done any kind of like meditation or mindfulness and like, noticing your thoughts and like not so that's where people get caught up. A lot of people have done, I've tried to meditate or do mindfulness in such a way that they were trying to change their thoughts and not have thoughts. So, it's not that, but it's like being able to notice like, "Oh, here are these thoughts and these emotions." Josh: And it could be as simple as saying, "I notice I'm having the thought that blank" versus just treating the thought like it's true. Or probably a little later we'll get to, there's a metaphor for all this called, let the monsters ride the bus and it will kind of pull this together, but, basically get it, get enough distance from those thoughts that you can be with them and that they're not driving and then the third thing is you've got to drive. Like you're the bus driver, but like you can have these thoughts and still take actions that fit your values in your life. And then the last thing is that requires having actually, like, clarified your values. Jen: Right? Right. Annie: This is like my therapy. This is what I discuss with my therapist. Josh: Do you have an acts therapist? Annie: I don't know. But there's, it does feel very similar into that, like just acknowledging like, these are my thoughts. These are my emotions. What is this? Where did this come from? I don't have to act on them. I can just acknowledge them and, and then sitting with them, not like trying to numb them, not trying to run away from them or like avoid them. Yeah. Lauren: I've realized recently that my, I'm very prone to, what did you say? Fusion? Josh: Yeah. Lauren: Where I'm like, this is my thought and I have to fix it right now. Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Jen: We know that about you. Annie: We could've told you that, Lauren. Jen: She's doing that thing again. Lauren: Well, I recently found this about myself. Jen: This is like my inner Spock. Like when my inner Spock is like, "Halt." You know what I mean? When we have to, "Let's analyze this." Yeah. Annie: So, okay, so Josh, what does this, what does this look like? So people have stress, they have an emotion. They have like, I mean, it could be emotional eating, it can be a wide continuum of emotions. It could be happy. It could be- Jen: We didn't define emotional eating either at the beginning. Annie: Yeah. Do you have a definition, Josh, that you, or a way to define emotional eating? Josh: So most of what I'm looking at is disinhibited eating. So that's, like, a feeling of loss of control with food related to strong emotions, good or bad? Good, good or bad. Wanted or unwanted would probably be more accurate, external, like, seeing things and cravings and so it'd be eating in response to any of those things. With my clients I also lump in, to me it's all the same thing. I also lump in procrastination eating, tiredness eating. Those are the other two. Yeah. Annie: Tiredness eating being that you eat when you're tired. Josh: Yeah. Annie: That's me. Annie: I do that I think. Yeah. Okay, so you experience these emotions, any of them. And then you have a behavior around food. Is that- Josh: Yeah. Annie: Any behavior or it could be a wider range of behaviors? Josh: Oh, it's typically like feeling some degree of loss of control. Like you're not, you don't feel like you're choosing to eat the Brownie, like, I woke up and there was brownies everywhere. Jen: It would be different than happy eating cause we had someone in Balance365. I feel like her emotional eating was out of control. She ate when she was sad, but she also ate when she was happy. But it's more of a loss of control aspect to it. Not a, "Oh, I'm so happy. Let's grab a cake. Celebrate." It's right. Josh: Yeah. It's not, "Let's have a bottle of wine at on date night." It's not, "It's my grandma's hundredth birthday. I'm going to have a chocolate cake." It's not that at all. Should I get into stuff like what, what we do about it? Annie: Yeah. Go for it. Jen: If you want to. Josh: So the simplest thing to do is to put in a waiting period. Right. Could be waiting. 10 minutes, could be waiting a minute. Does it matter? All we're trying to do is they've got this really, really ingrained pattern of have an emotion, eat and if we can separate that, we're good. So that means, like, if I've got clients with pretty legit emotional eating problems, we'll start off with, they have an emotion. They wait 10 minutes, they eat the thing anyway, almost every time. That's fine. We can totally start there. Jen: Progress being the waiting period. Josh: Yeah. Yeah. So, the progress is it's not automatic, they might have to like struggle with it for that 10 minutes or they might have to think about it for that 10 minutes, but at some point, but they've got enough time, they get to choose in that case where they're having it all the time, they don't, they don't have a lot of choice. But it's at least we're breaking that pattern where it's automatic, where they might not even know what they're feeling. They might not even know what they're thinking. Which is actually really common, which is really, which is why, another really, so things you can put in that 10 minutes, you can put it in like looking at a feelings wheel and being able to just like pick out this is what I'm feeling, which actually creates some diffusion that creates some separation. And there's something really magical about people being able to figure out like going from, "I feel bad" to "Oh, I'm sad. I'm sad because this the, you know, my boss yelled at me and that sucks." Right? Maybe it's normal to feel sad when my boss yells at me or whatever. Jen: I do this with my kids like they, but Brene Brown talks about how she has some research that shows, she's done research on college age students and they can only, they only identify three emotions and that's like- Josh: Really? which ones? Jen: Happy, mad and sad. And so she talks about how, you know, in order to be in touch with our emotions, we need to be able to identify emotions and we just aren't taught how to identify. I do this with my kids and we, like, talk about all these different range of emotions outside of mad, sad and happy because you can feel so many different things. But it's so interesting for you to talk about this because I also see so much child psychology stuff that actually applies to two grown ass adults as well. Like we need, you know what I mean, because we weren't taught in childhood. So it, yeah. So it needs to be brought in. Josh: All of the emotion regulation stuff for kids I use with adults. It's awesome. Annie: There's Josh Hillis' coaching secret. Kid psychology. Jen: Go grab your feelings wheel. Annie: Where are you on the spectrum? Jen: Next time Lauren has a meltdown I'm going to say "Go grab your feelings wheel." Annie: All of our slack community, our corporate communication is now going to be, "I feel because" statements, so Josh, you, so you create some distance, you identify some feelings or what your feelings, you get really clear on what that is and then you can eat the thing if you want to still, right? Josh: Yeah. And so they're sort of like these, like, kind of guideline-y things, like waiting 10 minutes. Another like guideline-y thing that I'll start off with, like, either don't do it, do whatever you want. If someone is eating the thing every time then we'll add in like a 50% guideline where 50% of the time they'll eat the thing and 50% of the time they'll find something else. And again, that's just sort of like some training wheels to have to like think about it and choose and be like, you know what, I ate the thing three days in a row. Maybe today I should try going for a walk. Jen: Right, right. Annie: And the point is to really just disrupt the autopilot, right? Josh: Yeah, yeah. Jen: Yes. Right. And also sounds like scaling a little bit. Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jen: Rather than, again, what we see big, big, big problem is people try to go from zero to 60 and it never works. It never works. And Lauren had a really good idea for bridging the emotional eating gap. She said if eating a piece of cake is your coping mechanism, try pair it with a bath, go eat your cake in the bath, and then eventually your association can be more, can become about the bath and then remove the cake and then have it be about the bath, right? It's about scaling that towards a healthier coping mechanism. Josh: That's awesome. Jen: Yes. Go Lauren. Annie: Are there, Josh, do you have any other ways to create distance or to even just feel comfortable feeling your feelings without food? Josh: Yeah. So there's always going to be three different things that you can do, three different effective things. One is you can create distance and just sit with it. Like, just accept this is normal. Right? And a lot of times that's really cool. If you're in a situation where you can't do something else, right, Like maybe you're at work and you've got to keep working, and so what you do is you notice those feelings and you come back to being present with your work or your family or whatever's going on around you. Like, you actually get present with that. The other thing would be to have a menu of different self care things that you can do. And so you notice you have those feelings and then you take a walk or do some deep breathing or take a bath or read a book or whatever. At this point I think I've got a list of like 70 different things in like 15 categories. Jen: I want to just say one thing for the moms who listen and the dads, when I find myself emotionally eating, my kids are often a trigger and alternative forms of self care are not available to me. Right? Like I can't go take, I can't check out of parenting and go take a bath or even go meditate or whatever. And so sometimes I'm just freaking eat a bowl of chips. One thing I would say is that I've scaled it from diving headfirst into a bag of chips to like getting out a little bowl and putting some chips in there and then just eating them and going, "Yeah." So I would say like, I mean my emotional eating skills are not, but they have greatly improved over the years. Josh: Well look at that. So there's a couple of great things about what you just said, right. Number one, parenting is a great context for, like, being able to just, like, accept it and be there. Also, you, you did look at, like, separating out the chips and, like, having a certain amount versus just, like, grabbing from the bag, which works for all kinds of treats all across the board. And then the third thing that that brings up is, it's actually, and this is another thing that's such an important thing. It's normal to eat to chill out your emotions sometimes. Jen: I totally agree. I don't think the goal is like 0% emotional eating. It's like, really, how often are you doing it and how, what is the loss of control there, right? Rather than- Josh: Yeah. Jen: Like emotional eating isn't all bad and it's like, really? Is it? Josh: Yeah. Jen: A couple of chips when my kids are losing it? Is that so bad. Annie: Is it problematic for you? Josh: Oh, and it's one those things where like, like the goal is psychological flexibility. So psychological flexibility is the ability to make different choices. Right. It's just an ability to make different choices. Jen: Right. Right. Josh: Like, never emotionally eating is rigid. Jen: Totally. Josh: Always having to, like, where most of my clients had is they've got like a rule, they don't, they don't say it as a rule, but like they've got a rule that if they have emotions they eat, totally rigid. Jen: Right. Josh: If we can get in the middle we're rocking. Jen: Totally. Yes. Annie: That sounds so familiar, Jen. Jen: The messy middle, yes. That's where we like to hang. Josh: I loved that so much. That is like the best phrase in the world. Jen: Brene Brown, I've brought her up a few times now. You can see I really like her. Josh: I like her too. Annie: But- Jen: Yeah, she talks about being in the messy middle, but when you're in the messy middle you get arrows from both sides, which we have also experienced as well. Being in the messy middle between hardcore health and fitness and hardcore body positive anti weight loss. Hanging out in the middle is can be quite lonely and you can get arrows from both sides. But- Josh: I get that. Annie: Okay. So say you're finding yourself, like, face deep in, like, cake or chips or whatever it is and you're, like, you have this, like, moment of, like, "Whoa, what am I doing?" Josh: Yeah. Annie: Like you're like in this middle, like an emotional eating extravaganza. Josh: Yeah. Annie: What do you do? Do the same thing, like, create some distance still or are there different rules? Josh: Oh no, that's, you nailed it already. It's the exact same rules. So, you notice you're in the middle, you separate yourself from it geographically. You give yourself some time to think about it. You do some sort of diffusion exercise. Whether that's, well, where I talked about, like, a feelings wheel, but also I've got some clients that will journal, they'll write out everything that they're feeling and just writing it out gives them a lot of distance. The biggest thing my clients use actually a metaphor called "let the monsters ride the bus" so we might as well dive into that now. So, it's a really, really common act metaphor and the metaphor is, you're a driving a bus and sometimes you get really cool passengers that get on the bus and they're like, "hey, you're great and we love you and high five!" Like that. Josh: And they get on and off when they want. And sometimes they get monsters, they get on the bus, they're like, "Hey, you're ugly and stupid and you always do it wrong" and they get on and off when they want. And your job as the bus driver is to drive the bus and you could always make a left turn towards, like, numbing and controlling, or you can make a right turn towards your valued actions. And what this allows people to do is allows people to realize like, "Hey, I've got these monsters that will get on, will ride along with me and I can still take a right turn towards my values. Even with the monsters on the bus. Like, my job isn't to get rid of the monsters. It's not to not have monsters. It's to let the monsters ride the bus." Josh: And my clients have identified, they almost always have identified, like, what their most common monsters are. And my clients get to a point where they have identified the monsters that they have in the middle of emotional eating. I've got a lot of clients that have a monster that's like, "One more will be fine, one more will be fine, one more will be fine." Or they might have a monster that's like, "You've already ruined it. Might as well go for broke. Let's start again Monday." And so when they have those feelings, again, they don't treat them as true. They don't treat them as, like, them. They're like, "Oh, there's that monster again. And that guy can ride along the bus. And I know that when I'm in, when I catch myself in the middle, my monsters are super loud." Annie: Are you familiar with Pema Chodron's work? She's a Buddhist nun. Josh: No. Annie: This is feels very similar because you have in that blog post, and I think, I think I pulled this quote from your blog posts it said, "The irony is that when people accept cravings as being normal" or I'm assuming these uncomfortable emotions, "they have an increased capacity to tolerate cravings" and that's just very similar to her work. That's like you actually, by just acknowledging the feelings and emotions you suffer less, like, and that's, like, instead of trying to avoid it or like do all these things like this contortionists, like, "I'm going to avoid it in any way possible. I'm going to do all these things so I don't have to feel the thing that I'm trying to avoid feeling." If you just like feel it and like acknowledge it, like, "I see you, monster, you're on the bus, I hear you, but I'm not going to listen or I'm not, you know, whatever." Josh: Yeah. Annie: It's like you can still take action as you notice, what did you, how did you say, that aligns with your values? Josh: Yeah. Annie: Yeah. Even though you hear them, even though they're on the bus- Josh: You nail. Yeah. Yes. The same. And that's a really, really, really big. So, here's the paradox there. You're 1000% right. The paradox is that when you allow the monsters to be there, it is a lot less painful and it's a lot less intense. The paradox is that you don't want to approach it as, "I'm going to allow the monsters" to like force it to be less intense because then it doesn't work. And so that's not actually doing it. But what you're talking about, which is really cool, it's really, really cool, is that there's two kinds of pain. There is normal human pain, which is like the feelings and an uncomfortable thoughts that we all have. And then there's like the added pain that comes from trying to, like, control and fore and not, you know, and so, you do get to avoid all of the added pain and you're not the first person to be, like, you know, there's this Buddhist that kind of sounds a lot like these acceptance and commitment training people. Annie: Well I think it's, I think it's, I don't know if it's just the universe, like, I've been doing kind of this emotional work to like make these messages become really clear to me. But it seems like I've been trying to, and I've talked about this on other podcasts, outsource feeling good or feeling great all the time. Like you said, like we get this message that like, "Maybe I shouldn't be feeling these things" or like "Everyone else feels great all the time and they never have bad days" or "They never have self-doubt" or they never have body image issues. And it's like, "That's actually just not the case. Like, just acknowledging that like you get to feel all the things and you still live, we're going to be okay," like that. It's like, that feels really powerful to me. But I like that you say like, I love that analogy of let the monsters ride the bus. I could see that becoming a big phrase in our community. Can't you Jen? Jen: Yeah, I was already picturing it as a hashtag soon. Josh: That's awesome. Jen: The other thing is I think when I was hearing you say, Josh, is because we have this other guests, she's been on twice now. Her name is Hillary McBride. We have to, we're going to call her Doctor Hillary McBride soon cause she's almost done her Phd and she is also psychologist and she works in body image and she has a book called Mothers, Daughters and Body Image. And so she has sort of encouraged the same process as far as thoughts about your body, like kind of stepping outside of it. But, and then I think her version of monsters on the bus is to acknowledge the monsters on the bus. But to say, is this really true? Just that simple question, is this really true? And I just sort of have this vision of being a driver on a bus hearing all the monsters in the back, but being able to say, "Is that true? Like, do I have to do that? Am I, you know, am I helpless to this? Is that true?" And you know, the answer is often, like, "No, it's not actually true." And then you can kind of just, yeah. Keep doing what you were doing. Josh: Yeah. Jen: Yeah. Josh: Just to, like, it's, like, notice. Jen: Yeah, just notice. Yeah. Josh: Like it's, it doesn't, yeah. Cause we, it is so normal for us to treat it like it's true. Like it's, like, it's so true. Jen: Right. It feels true. Right? Josh: That's awesome. Annie: Okay. So Josh, we discussed, being aware, creating distance, normalizing the experiencing of different emotions. Is there anything else that comes to mind when I'm addressing emotional eating? And again, I do want to recap that this is like as you, as you said at the beginning, that those are tools that work for people that have emotional eating issues. If you don't have emotional eating issues then, like- Josh: You probably don't have to- Annie: Then it doesn't apply. Or what was the difference that you said? That thought control or thought suppression would work for people that,- Josh: yeah. So, here's where it gets really funny. Cause I got really spun whenever the research that thought suppression worked for cravings and emotional eating for people that don't have cravings and emotional eating issues. And but, like, at first I was like, "thought suppression is always bad. Like how does that work?" And so I actually talked to my friend, Amy Evans, who's this brilliant behavioral analyst and she's like, "Well, of course not because the function is different, right? So if the function of that controllers is trying to like push away these uncomfortable emotions and cravings, then it's like an avoidance strategy. But if you don't have issues with those, then it's actually kind of like, maybe it's just like conscientiousness, right? Like it's a totally different thing." And I'm like, "Oh!" So it's good to have genius friends. Jen: Right? So can you give us an example in context? So person A doesn't have ongoing emotional eating issues, so we're talking about, but then something, a craving pops up or, or they're feeling emotional and they're feeling some kind of urge to eat if they don't struggle with ongoing emotional eating issues, then suppression works. Josh: Apparently. Yeah. I mean I don't coach that, but in the, in the research, yeah. Jen: So what would suppression look like for them? Josh: Yes. So, I'm guessing if they didn't score very highly than it's just a simple guideline that they're just like, "Oh, I don't, I don't eat between meals." I don't eat from the, you know, which is, which is totally fine. Jen: Right? Yeah. We call these self-loving guidelines in Balance365. They're not rules. They're flexible guidelines that keep you in a place of self care kind of thing. Josh: Yeah. So like- Annie: Oh, sorry, go ahead, Josh. Josh: I was just going to say if someone doesn't score really high on cravings and they have a little craving, it's pretty easy for them to go like, "Oh, I'm not going to do that." Jen: Right. Josh: "If someone scores really high on cravings- Jen: Then it's a bigger deal to say, "No, I'm not doing that." Yeah. Okay. Annie: I think it's important to note though, as you noted, as we noted in the beginning of the podcast is that that can work for some people, but right now the majority of the health and fitness industry are selling thought suppression. Josh: Yeah. Annie: To everyone. Like, that is, like, the widely accepted common answer versus, "Hey, like, maybe this is normal." Jen: They're also selling emotional eating at any point as as unacceptable. And so, you know, a person who is has an emotional eating episode one day, that's, you know, we're trying to say in this podcast that that's not wrong. And really, if you don't struggle with emotional eating, whether you do or don't engage in emotional eating is not a make or break for anyone's life. Right. It's not, whether you choose the chips or don't, it's just not really an issue. Like it's really a small, tiny little rock that really, you know what I mean? Like we're talking about, there's people that have real loss of control that going on, you know, sometimes daily for them around emotional eating. So, and it comes down to the frequency. How often are you engaging in these behaviors and ultimately what does that end up? What does that look like for you? After three months, 12 months, three years, 20 years, right? Josh: Frequency's everything. Jen: Right. Annie: Josh, you're so much fun to have on our podcast. Do you have more? Josh: Can I throw one other thing out there? The other thing that, the biggest misconception that I've gotten when I've talked to people about this and I've got it so much that I want to make sure not to miss it. This is still a behavioral approach, right? Like they're like, "Oh, you're like deal with your thoughts and like that" but you still, like, you still have to clarify your values and attach behaviors to that. But it's like, so self love guidelines was that? Jen: Self loving guidelines. Josh: Self loving guidelines, or like kind of like more, more intuitive skills or like, all these different things. The whole point of all this is to be able to do those things more frequently. Jen: Right? Josh: Right. So, all of my clients, I shouldn't say all of my clients. The majority of my clients track behaviors, right? So they track how often they have like a mostly balanced meal or how often they have vegetables or how often they, you know, snacked between meals or how often they noticed their hunger before they ate or how, you know, like how often they were full and stopped and like, they track actual behaviors and things that we can count the real world. Monsters on the bus is another thing that they track and count how often they use it. They also track if they didn't need it, like, "Oh, I didn't need it today," but- Jen: Oh interesting. Josh: If they're like, "Oh, I didn't need it and I used it" or "I didn't need it and I didn't use it." Those would be different things and it seems really weird maybe to use like a metaphor as a behavior to track, but it works really well. Jen: So ultimately you're tracking, the behavior change that you have people track is not necessarily emotional eating episodes, but how they dealt with those, whether they dealt with it in a manner that is more healthy than bingeing. Josh: Yeah. Jen: Right. Okay. Josh: Yeah. And so that could look really differently for a lot of different people, but it's like how often did you use this metaphor? How often would you use a diffusion technique? How often did you use your menu of things you can do? Jen: Right, right, right. Annie: Great. So, so you're putting behaviors with it. That's great. Josh: That's what grounds it in the real world. Annie: Yeah. Josh: Otherwise it goes way. Jen: Josh had a thread on his page, several months ago where you said, "sometimes I think" as far as your weight loss clients, you said "If we changed nothing at all except working on stress reduction methods, people would lose weight without changing anything at all." And then I had mentioned or just sleep, like, just a sleep habit, which is, you know, kind of goes hand in hand with stress- Josh: So good. Jen: Isn't it? So it just sort of like, yeah. So imagine if people just, so what we find is people hyperfocus on food, like they just are hyper focused on it and if you zoom out and you get back, if you just laid your foundations for say stress reduction, better sleep hygiene, anything you identify that helps your wellness wheel go, the food just doesn't matter. People will kind of eat until they're satisfied. Do you know what I mean? Like it's often these, the overeating tendencies we have are often a result of these high stress, sleep deprived, poor coping mechanism, lifestyles that we're living, the rest of the overeating issue. You don't have to be so hyper focused on the food or crank the wheel to the right and jump on the Keto wagon or cause you're really never getting to the underlying issues of why you're overeating in the first place. Right? Josh: Yeah. With my most successful clients, all these things we're doing show up as self care. Jen: Right. Totally. Josh: And it's like, and then the people that struggle are the ones that keep trying to do it as punishment. Jen: The food, the food. Yeah, totally. Josh: And the thing about sleep is no one makes phenomenally great food decisions when they're exhausted. Jen: Nobody. That's right. Yeah. Josh: I will throw out there in case there's any people that work like swing shifts or anything like that out there. For a while I had a ton of clients that were nurses that worked overnight and so for them, a lot of it was just acceptance of every time their schedule shifted they were going to be like unusually hungry. And so that is workable. But for everyone else, if we can just turn off screens like an hour earlier, like, man, this all gets easier. Jen: Totally. We just interviewed a sleep doctor before we interviewed you. Josh: Oh really? Annie: Yeah. He said the same thing. Jen: Same thing. Our podcast is the best. Josh: Your podcast is the best. This was so much fun. Annie: Are you always this energetic? I mean, every time, I've talked to you twice in five years, like you always have such great energy about you- Jen: And smiling. You're always smiling. Josh: You're super great. It's fun hanging out with you guys. Annie: You are welcome back here anytime. Josh: Also, this is, like, my favorite stuff to talk about. Annie: So yeah, you are, you're welcome back here. Anytime. Anything, any projects you're working on that you want to tell us about or where can we, where can our listeners find you or keep up with your work? Jen: You're working on a million books. Josh: I am working on a million books, so, losestomachfat.com is still my blog. I still do celebrity workout stuff and emotionally eating research, which is now a weird combination. I've got two books coming out. Lean Is Strong is coming out at the end of this year. And then the untitled emotional eating book is coming out next year. And that's my big stuff right now. It's top secret. Annie: Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Alright, well thank you so much, Josh. Josh: Thank you. Annie: We will talk soon, hopefully. Josh: Okay, cool. Thanks guys. Annie: Thanks. This episode is brought to you by the Balance365 program. If you're ready to say goodbye to quick fixes and false promises and yes to building healthy habits and a life you're 100% in love with, then checkout Balance365.co to learn more.

Can you love your body and still want to change it? The answer to this question depends greatly on who you ask. Some people in the body-positive camp think that weight loss and self-love can’t co-exist, while the diet and fitness industry encourages self-hatred. Does the truth lie somewhere in the messy middle? Tune in for Jen, Annie and Lauren’s discussion on the topic.   What you’ll hear in this episode: Has the body positivity pendulum swung too far? Change as a natural consequence of habits and behaviors Mindset blocks and change What research says about how much control you have over your body Altering appearance for self-expression Examining motivations for changes Being realistic about timing of changes Is there way too much overthinking going on? Mothering yourself Identifying when you need self-compassion and when you need tough love The answer to the question of the day!   Resources: Secrets From The Eating Lab Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Can self-love and a desire to change your physical being co-exist or are they a contradiction of one another? The answer to that question is debatable depending on who you’re asking. On one hand of the body positive camp say body love and weight loss can not co-mingle while it seems as if the rest of the diet industry requires a certain amount of body dissatisfaction as a prerequisite to change. There is no doubt in our minds that the push for body acceptance of all shapes and sizes is a much needed message but what about those individuals who want self-acceptance and still desire to change their bodies?This is a quite complex and messy topic and on today’s episode Jen, Lauren and I share Balance365’s stance on how you can strive for change that’s rooted in self-love and acceptance and joy. Ladies, welcome back to another episode how are you? Lauren: Good. Annie: Why? Why can’t you just answer the question? Jen: I feel like you need to address us individually because what happens is, what people can’t see behind the scenes is we are actually on a video conference call looking at each other so then you are like “Ladies, how are you?” and then Lauren and I stare at each other waiting for the other ones to answer first. Lauren: Who’s going to go first? Annie: Quit being so polite and just answer the question. Lauren, how are you doing? Lauren: I am so wonderful, how are you? Annie: I am golden, thank you. Jen, how are you? Jen: Also wonderful. Annie: I feel like that was just so surface-level answers but we’ll go with it. Jen: Well, if you want to do a deep dive in my problems lately. Annie: Would you like to schedule a coaching call with one of the Balance365 coaches. Jen: Well, I need a new podcast called the Jen show. And I’ll just get all weeps and vent. Annie: I do feel like you’ve used some of our podcast episodes to kind of sort through some of your own issues about exercise. Jen: Yeah, but you know what? It’s helpful for people because my problems are their problems. That’s the narcissist in me. I struggle with things a lot of women struggle with. It can be helpful to go through it with a coach. I actually have a really good idea for a podcast series and that’s to bring on Balance365ers on to the podcast and coach them through whatever block they’re struggling with and sending that out to all of our listeners. Don’t you think that’s a good idea? Annie: I do, yeah and all jokes aside, you’re right, you do have a problems. Jen: I am your average busy working mom that struggles to make time for self care and yeah, that’s why I think our podcast resonates with so many women because we all have surpassed 200,000 downloads I’ll just add that in too. We are not standing on our high horses telling everybody what to do, we struggle with all the same things, have struggled in the past currently or we may in the future so yeah, we’re all in this together. I hope everybody feels that way when they listen and talk to us. Annie: I feel like that just got really serious, like we started out all jokey. Lauren: It started out all good and quickly. Annie: You can always count on Jen- Lauren: To make it an intense counselling session. Annie: To turn it into a serious, sentimental intense conversation. Jen: I’m an INFJ. I like intense conversations. Lauren: I don’t remember what my letters are but they’re the opposite of Jen. Jen: Yeah, we could have called that without you going through the test. Annie: OK. All jokes aside, we do have a kind of a heavy topic today, it’s something, it’s a question that comes up so frequently in our community, so frequently in the diet and fitness world and something that we’ve addressed inside our community but not on the podcast yet and that is “Can you love your body and still want to change it?” and by changing it we mean address your body composition, gain weight, lose weight, change your appearance of some sort and that’s a pretty big snowball to tackle, right? And depending on who you ask you’re likely to get a variety of answers. Extreme body positive activists will tell you that body love and weight loss cannot co-exist, do not co-exist and on the flip-side many professionals in our industry or the diet industry in general as a whole that support weight loss believe that self loathing and body dissatisfaction is a prerequisite to changing a body and here we are as the 3 co-founders of Balance365 yet again in the messy middle, right? Lauren: Yup. Jen: Yup: Annie: And so we’re, you know, again, the answer to that question is going to depend on what camp you’re asking, right? So we’re going to answer this question or discuss some of the talking points that we consider when helping our community members evaluate “Can you love your body and still want to change it? Can they co-exist?” and I think we can all agree that this body acceptance movement or accepting yourself at every shape and size is a much needed message for our culture. But what we’re experiencing is that those who still want to make changes are kind of like, “Well, what about me? What do I do? What, like, how, where do I fall into?” and sadly, it feels like in some ways the pendulum has swung a bit too far in one direction, especially when members of our community are feeling shamed for wanting to change their body still or they’re keeping it a secret or they’re afraid to tell anyone. And that, to us, isn’t neutral or an expression of body autonomy which we are super supportive and this is tricky because on some levels what we do in Balance365 is give women the tools and support they need to reach their goals, which can include weight loss, while simultaneously encouraging them to love and accept themselves and there are people out there who believe that these two concepts contradict one another, which is kind of the debate of the moment, right? Now in our industry “Can you love yourself and want to change it?” Does that mean that you don’t ultimately love yourself if you still want to change yourself? Do you have any thoughts, Jen? Jen: Well, newsflash, almost any change, lifestyle change you make in your life and do consistently is going to change your body because our bodies are always in flux and although they are a representation of our genetics and our environment, they are also a representation of our habits. So I recently changed my mode of exercise. I have gone a couple years of just doing like shorter more intense workouts and now I’m back into a phase where I have the time and opportunity and support to do some heavy lifting. I’m actually going through the Arms Like Annie program that a lot of women in our community are which is a strength training program, full body strength training program, heavy weights and guess what? My body is going to change because that’s what bodies do, they adapt to the stresses you put them under. So this I really see as a big mindset block for a lot of people, whether it’s trying to hate their body to change or resisting change because they’ve learned to love their bodies. I got some really good advice this last spring. I was struggling with a certain mindset around business and money. I was at a conference and I was talking to a man who has built multiple companies and sold them and is a multi multi millionaire. He told me he lives on a street in San Francisco and sometimes he walks out and looks down the street and can’t believe that he could buy every house on the block if he wanted to. But he grew up extremely poor and so why we connected is because I grew up without a lot of financial privilege and I find that affects me today but the advice he gave me that I now see is so universal, he said “You are so busy fighting battles in your head that you are never going to be able to get out there and fight the war” and I honestly see this as one of those mindset blocks, one of those blocks that women run into like and makes them freeze and then they expend this time and energy on it. Do I want to change my body? Don’t I want to change my body? Why do I want to change my body? And then they’re just missing the whole thing that change needs to come from a place of self care and if you are taking action on something that feels like you are caring for yourself, nurturing yourself, mothering yourself, then who cares what the outcome is? Maybe your body will get smaller, maybe it will get bigger, I don’t know. Annie: You just ran through my 3 bullet points in like five minutes. Jen: I’m sorry. I did not read the outline. Annie: So Jen summarized that so well and so concisely we can just end the podcast now. I’m just kidding but you’re spot on. You’re, it’s such a good point that you’re so busy, what did you say? You’re so busy fighting battles- Jen: You’re so busy fighting battles in your head you’re never going to get out there and fight the war and this is what we deal with in an ongoing basis in Balance365, any of our Balance365ers listening will say, “Yeah, she’s right. I mean there are so many women posting daily working through these mindset blocks” and it’s really those different programmings that we have that keep us from actually taking action and doing the things that we want to do or need to do in our lives to feel our best, like our best selves. Lauren: Yeah I was writing something earlier about this kind of exact thing, like the mindset piece that we put first is so important because when you get through that the nutrition habits and exercise habits are so simple, like they’re simple. What trips us up is like these mindset blocks like you’re talking about. Annie: And you know, I just want to back up too and I hope this is inferred and I hope that you can just sense this about us by the way we carry ourselves and the way our program is written and laid out but we absolutely believe in body autonomy and we believe that the individual has control over who and what they use their body for and for what and how long and that means that we respect to variety of goals women may have for their bodies and women come to our program with goals of building self-love and healthy habits and some come with a clear goal of weight loss and we don’t place moral value on either goal over the other. We believe that they’re all worthy and we’re here to help women achieve their goals, whatever they are. Jen: We have women share with us in Balance365 that once they really get that self acceptance piece and love their bodies they’re so afraid of losing it because nobody wants to go back there once you’re not there anymore you don’t ever want to go back in that space. So then they start the habit building process and they start losing weight and that puts them into a negative space almost of self sabotage because weight loss then becomes triggering to them as in “Wait a sec. I worked so hard to love that body and now it’s changing again” and the other thing like, newsflash, our bodies are always going to change every single day we are getting older so our hormones are changing, we’re  getting wrinkles, we’re, you know, our hair color is changing. I mean, our bodies are always changing and I think that is the biggest acceptance piece that needs to happen is your body is always changing so stop this hypervigilance on trying to control it. Annie: Right and I think that getting clear on the why behind your desire to change your body can help answer some of those questions and so often we see women wanting to change their bodies and it’s rooted in self hate or this misconception that if you fix your body you’ll love your life and your life will be perfect and you’ll have the perfect body or ultimately that you want to feel worthy and you want to feel free of shame and you want to have this loving and belonging and it’s our experience that you can’t hate your body into loving yourself and nor can you hate your body into being healthy and if that had worked I think we would have a heck of a lot more “success stories” in our lives than we really do, right? Jen: The greatest act of self love is loving yourself when you think nobody else will, so when you aren’t fitting into society’s mold of what is lovable, right, so it’s, you know, so if you do have a larger body there is a lot of good and value there of learning to love and accept yourself at a larger size before, you know, before the weight loss journey comes, if it ever comes, you know, whatever your choice but you know, it’s like only loving your kids when they’re well behaved, right, like, when, you can just love your body when it’s doing what you want it to be doing and you can’t just love yourself when your behaviors are on point, right, your nutrition’s on point, your exercise is on point, your rockin’ life, you love yourself but then as soon as your behaviors are off track you’re filled with these self loathing thoughts. That’s not love, that’s just like surface level approval. Annie: That’s conditioned. That’s conditioned love. That’s not and ultimately I think what a lot of us would really like and are striving for is to love ourselves unconditionally. Meaning our body can look a variety of ways, our behaviors can look a variety of ways and we still can treat ourselves with compassion that we would so many other people in our lives. Jen: Yeah, another good analogy I use sometimes with women is I moved into a house, a new house about a year and a half ago and it’s an older house and there was people that lived here before us that decorated, painted, designed to this house in a way that suited them but is not to my tastes at all. So, for example, my bathroom is lime green and I hate it, I hate it but I still love my home. I am still grateful to live in this home. This is the nicest home I’ve ever lived in. Growing up as a little girl my mother couldn’t have dreamed of providing this kind of house for me as a kid so every day I wake up I feel like I’m living in my dream home but my bathroom is lime green. Yes, I do want to change that color eventually. I haven’t yet, it just, I haven’t had time, it has been the right time but eventually I will paint the bathroom, I will do some renovations around this house to change it but that doesn’t, that doesn’t take away from the unconditional love and gratitude I have for this home and I wish that people could feel that way about their bodies. Sometimes there are changes that you want to make and as long as those are realistic and within your realm of control the problem is there is just such polarizing views. There’s this whole view that you mentioned at the start, Annie ,there’s this whole idea that you have complete control over what your body looks like and then there’s the other end of the spectrum people saying “You actually have no control over what your body looks like so don’t even bother thinking about it” but I think it was Dr Tracy Mann, we’re interviewing her on our podcast pretty soon here which is really exciting but she has in her books that studies in her book Secrets From The Eating Lab, studies show that it’s in the middle, you know, as usual, we actually do- Lauren: That messy middle.   Jen: Yes, like you can’t change your genetics, of course, but there are certain behaviors we have in our life that will affect the way our bodies look and feel and I think her stats are we have about a 30 percent, 30 percent of the way we look is we’re able to manipulate, which is probably a lot less than some people think and a lot more than other people think and so it’s OK. It’s OK. You can have total love for your body. You can have gratitude for the body that you were given. You can have acceptance of the genes that you have and you can still say, “You know what, I would love to reduce my abdominal body fat and I am going to step forward making change in a way that will reduce the fat I have on my body and that is coming from a place of self-love and self care and also being realistic.” Annie: And I think the important distinction there, Jen, that you’re, in terms of your bathroom, is striving for change doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just different. It’s not good or bad- Jen: Yeah. Annie: I mean I mean to you the lime green might be bad but- Jen: Yeah, I mean, but how some people behave about their bodies is that, taking it back to the house, they would just throw gas around this house and light it on fire like that because they don’t like the way the bathroom looks and here’s the thing, it’s also knowing that there’s a time to address that and not right, like, I have recognized over the last 18 months that trying to make any changes to the interior of my home were just not realistic. I just haven’t had the time or the resources or the money to pay somebody so we haven’t done it and there’s a time to change and then there’s a time to hold the line and just, but you can still wake up every morning and be grateful, right, like it doesn’t have to be something urgent in, like, you know, you can’t love yourself or respect yourself until you have this but I mean, we talk about it in terms of bodies but I mean there’s a lot of people that get hysteria over their house as well because it’s where they live in. Annie:  Yeah or you love your job, you enjoy your job but you want to improve in a particular skill set or – Jen: Yes. Annie: You enjoy your marriage, you love your spouse, your partner, your significant other but you wish you could spend more time on date nights or as you noted you love your children but you wish they would listen better at bedtime but you can, we believe wholeheartedly, that you can want to change an aspect or an element of yourself, your appearance, your being, whatever it is and that come from self love, that come from a place of love and care and admiration for yourself, versus- Jen: It’s not that you are more or less worthy with these changes, which is really that key component, right, like I go in and color my hair, I get blonde highlights every 3 or 4 months or so or 10 months. And it’s like, I just like it and I don’t see myself as the less worth, if I, you know, for whatever reason, if I had to go back to my, you know, grow it all out and have it just have my natural hair color, I wouldn’t be like, you know, feeling awful about myself, it would just be “Oh, like, I love coloring my hair. I wear makeup, you know.” There’s all these things, right but like- Lauren: Our outward appearance can be an expression right we are and people have different preferences, people like different hair colors and different hair styles and different makeup styles, that’s OK. It doesn’t mean like we don’t love ourselves if we’re not wearing makeup and that’s how we can use that analogy when we’re talking about our bodies. Like, you don’t have to, we say this all the time, you don’t have to love every little tiny part to love the whole, right? Annie: That’s exactly how I feel about muscles, to me they’re like an accessory, like they’re like my favorite accessory. It is honestly, it’s an act of self-expression for me to have visible muscles. Now if for whatever reason I didn’t have the visible muscles, you know, it might be an adjustment but I ultimately know that I am a human of value, of worth, just innately, not because I look a certain way, not because I can do certain things in the gym with my muscles that look a certain way. I just have value because I’m a human, as do all all women, and I mean and it’s so easy for us to see as mothers and all, we could say the same thing about our kids, like, why do our kids have value? Just because they are, just because they’re beings, they’re living, breathing humans but to give ourselves that same sense of value and worth seems so difficult. Jen: Yeah I think what happens is people, they just, they overthink this and it gets people in a tizzy on both ends whether it’s from believing you can’t love yourself until you look a certain way or believing that if you’re making changes you don’t love yourself, you know, there’s just way too much overthinking going on. Annie: So what with the approach that we’ve already kind of touched on that we take in our program is we encourage our members to adopt a self-love approach to change and if weight loss is the way in which you want to change your body, it can be a by-product of your habits and a way that you care for yourself. Jen: Yeah and it’s always a byproduct of your habits, always, right? So when you are, like, we’ve covered this in previous podcasts, but you can’t just say, snap your fingers and lose 10 pounds. Annie didn’t snap her fingers and grow muscles. All changes are a byproduct of our habits and so once you start looking at changes as a byproduct of your habits then you can look at the habits required and or the skills you need to develop in order to see that change and you can decide if that is self love and self care for you, right? Annie: And you posed a really great question, a thread came up in Balance365 last week and the question you posed in response to her is “Is this goal about health and love and self-care or is this about achievement and ideal?” Jen: Right. Annie: And that can maybe help you distinguish the why behind this. Is this coming from a place of love or is this coming from some other place that really isn’t worth perpetuating. Jen: Right, like I could be leaner than I am right now, I am quite comfortable in my body with my body weight but I have been 20 to 25 pounds leaner than I am now. I can go back to that life but there is a point where the extreme that I would have to take goes from a place of self-love and self care into self harm, right, so I, you know, I eat really balanced meals, I pay attention to my nutrition, eat when I’m hungry, stop when I’m satisfied, exercise regularly, take care of my mental health. If I wanted to lose 20 pounds at this point I would have to pay very, very close attention to my nutrition and to me that takes me into a place of self harm and it doesn’t feel well and that’s sort of my guiding compass as far as is this coming from a place of self care or is this coming from a place of self harm? Lauren: I really like that, like, how does it feel? Jen: How does this feel for you? Yeah. Annie: Yes And unfortunately there are people in our industry that would encourage you to power through that feeling. Jen: They do all the time in the fitness industry. All the freaking time. Annie: They would say “This is a prerequisite. This is a requirement that you regulate this negative self talk or pushing yourself past this comfort zone is something that’s required to achieve these goals that are ultimately of high value, right?” Jen: They describe it as a plateau, right, that you have to push through, which sometimes it, like, I mean, that’s the thing about, you’ve really got to know yourself, right, because sometimes there’s value in pushing through, right, like sometimes you don’t, every time it gets hard you don’t want to give up and walk away. Sometimes there’s hard things that you have to work through but the self harm piece is like “Is this sustainable for you? Are you willing? Are you going to do this forever?” And there’s been different times in my life, like for example, right now I get up at 5:30 in the morning to work out and start my workout at 6 and yeah, there are some days that I don’t want to do that but I push through and I’m always happy afterwards. Right now that behavior comes from a place of self care. When I had a newborn, if I would have insisted on that behavior with a newborn baby when I wasn’t sleeping all night and I was pushing myself to get up at 5:30 to work out at 6, that becomes self harm, right, because it means I am going with less and less and less sleep. I’m not even getting enough sleep to recover from my workouts. So those are really self assessment questions that you need to ask yourself and that nobody can answer except for you. Annie: And that’s exactly why we don’t prescribe weight loss or have weight loss goals or goals in general for our community members because no one knows your body better than you do, not even us who work with thousands of women on a daily basis, like, we don’t know you as well as you do and so we really just want to encourage you to pull that reflection inward and say like, “What is this about? Like, can I love my body and want to change it at the same time?” and maybe for you the answer is like “No, I can’t right now. First I have to work on loving myself, you know. Jen: So we recently had a community member share that she thought she had fat loss goals and she was ready to dig in on those fat loss goals but after some self assessment she’s realized that that actually is not a healthy space for her to be in right now and she loves the idea of just focusing on habits and letting her body be what it’s going to be and that is the ultimate form of acceptance for her and that’s where she’s at right now and we are like “A round of applause, girlfriend” because really, all we want for people is to own their life Annie: Yeah, and, you know, just some of these concepts we talk about are kind of heavy and they’re philosophical but, you know, so often what we hear, what this change looks like, this shift which can be so subtle and so small and sometimes you don’t even realize that it’s happening to people around you is that all of a sudden, you know, we’re exercising because, as Jen said, “It leaves me feeling better. I feel more confident. I have more energy throughout the day” versus “I’m getting up at 530 to punish myself because I want to change my body because I hate my body so much and I just can’t stand another day living in my own skin.” I mean, the behavior looks the same on the outside but on the inside, Jen knows this is coming from a place of self-love and self care. Jen: Yeah we often say and I think we’ve said in the podcast before, “it’s not about the what the people are doing it’s about the why and how they go about it.” That’s where the dysfunction and disorder, that’s where it can be found. Annie: Yeah, and I mean, the same can be true for how you feed your body, how you speak to your body and you know, are you feeding yourself balanced meals because your body deserves to be nourished and again, you feel better when you have balanced meals or are you starving or removing whole food groups or eating foods you don’t like because, again, you loathe your body and you want to change it and if you change your body, you change your life and if you change your life then you have less problems.” Jen: Right, the thing I love and I’ll let Lauren elaborate on this but somebody posted in our group in the last, I don’t know, year sometime, she asked about protein bars and she said “But aren’t protein bars diety?” and then you replied, Lauren, do you want to share that? Lauren:  Yes, I don’t remember exactly what I replied but I’ll say what I think about it now. So there’s no, like, diet food or not diet food, right? Like you walk into a restaurant and like two women are eating the exact same thing, they’re both eating a salad and one person restricted themselves and they’re punishing themselves for what they ate yesterday or they’re punishing themselves because they hate their body and the other person is eating to nourish their body and it makes them feel good so that’s why they’re eating their salad, right, like just like Jen said, it’s not always about the what, it’s about the why. Jen: Does it come from a place of deprivation or does it come from a place of abundance and self care? Annie: Exactly and again, they can look the same on the outside. Jen: Exactly. Annie:  On the surface. You might not be able to tell, you might not be able to distinguish and that’s why it’s so important that you get really in tune with yourself and what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and that can help you discern, is this self-love or is this self-hate are these behaviors rooted in? And you know, I just, we say this all the time and it can’t be said enough, we have a saying that “We take great care of things we love and your body is no exception” and I think about all the things that I take care of in my life, between relationships with girlfriends, my children, even my house plants, for heaven’s sakes and I want them to feel comfortable and safe and confident and thrive and grow and expand and live this vibrant life, I’m not degrading them, I’m not starving them, I’m not depriving them. I’m actually treating them really sweetly and kindly and with love and encouragement and sometimes that looks like- Jen: Sometimes there’s tough love built into that. Annie: Yes, like, “Jen, do you want to stay in bed because your bed is warm and cozy and it’s cold outside and it’s dark but I know ultimately this is the goal I committed to and I’m going to feel good” Like, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. Jen: Absolutely. Actually, my mantra, you know, these days I’ve been struggling a bit. And my mantra is “Mother. I’m mothering myself right now.” Like I have just needed, I have needed some tough love lately and it’s not that I’m, like, being a drill sergeant to myself it’s that “Would my mother let would let me stay up and watch Netflix to 1:30 AM when I have to be up at 6 you know 5 nights in a row?” Like, no, and so that’s sometimes where the tough love has to come in but a mother, well, a mother knows. A mother knows when to push and a mother knows when to pull back, right, we do it for our kids every single day but yet for ourselves it’s like we want to put ourselves into like one box and just like stay there either because we see pendulum swing with self-compassion to, right, we see all the time women are like “Oh I’ve watched Netflix for 3 days but self care, right? and it’s like, “I don’t know. I’m not you so I don’t know if that was self care for you or not but I know for a lot of people you have moved from self care to like numbing and avoiding.” And like you know, like, my mother, if I was sick I might watch T.V. for 3 days but if I wasn’t sick my mother, you know, there’s not a lot of mothers out there who would be letting their kids just sit and watch T.V. for 3 days. Annie: After a day she would be like, “OK get off the couch.” Jen: Get outside, right? My parents used to do that all the time, like, “Get your butts outside now,” right, and so you bring it back to that and go like mother yourself. Have you gotten some fresh air today? Have you gotten some movement in? Are you eating balanced meals? You know, eating, you know, high sugar treats all day long, no that’s not self care day after day after day and that’s certainly not balance. Annie: So, you know, I think, this is just my own personal experience but I’ve heard it echoed in the stories of women we’ve worked with in the past is that they kind of are like, “Yeah, OK, I get that some women love themselves and they’re treating themselves well because they love themselves that much. That’s great for them, however for me I’m used to fueling my workouts and my food and fitness choices from self-hate and I’m worried that if I love myself that I’m just going to become lazy and I’m going to eat all the foods and I’m just going to lose all my motivation and I’m going to get complacent, right?” Jen: That’s how it feels when you’ve been in a place of control for so long, I mean what happens to the teenagers who move out of their family home at 18 that have been living under very rigid controlling rules. They go to college and they go nuts, right? Like we will always rebel against these rules. Annie: Lauren and I are like “Yep.” Jen: Yes, so it’s sort of like, you know, it’s just, it’s human nature, right it’s just human nature and so a lot of people might see their pending swing but eventually you need to like sit up and go and you just need to mother yourself, that’s what you have to do and I find that quite effective in knowing when I need a little tough love and when I need some compassion, right. So if my kids were really emotional, you know, school ends, they’re super emotional, they’re fighting, they’re just not doing well, I can look at them and have some self compassion and go like “These kids are tired, like, we’re going to turn the T.V. on a little early today because they they need some downtime, they need to skip their chores today, they’ve got no energy, you know, or emotional regulation skills like this.” Because you you look at your kids and you just assess, right, you’re always assessing what they need and that changes day to day and I think we can do that for ourselves too. We can do a much better job of it than women traditionally have been doing. We’ve just, we live under so many rules, right, like I just think women actually live under so, not just for ourselves but in our society there are so many rules and a societal construct that women always are living around that I think when we do find ourselves in that space of having free time, we may find ourselves in a rebellious space a lot because we actually have no idea how much unconscious time and energy we spend on, like, subscribing to these rules. Lauren: Preach. Annie: Word. So the anti-climatic answer to our question that I posed at the beginning of this podcast is “Can you love your body and want to change it?” is, I mean, Yes/It really depends and that’s something that you have to answer on an individual level. I personally can sit here and say with great confidence that I have changed my body as a complete act of self-love. Or self-love has resulted in a body change is maybe a better way to put it. But not everyone that changes their body is acting out of self love and vice versa and again our bodies are meant to change they’re fluid. They’re ever changing, they’re always changing, especially as women of childbearing age, I mean, my body looks so different than it did a year ago and I’m 2 plus years postpartum, like, it’s till changing from pregnancy I feel like, I mean, my hair for heaven sakes is still changing. But I think, you know, we’re, as usual, we feel like the truth to that question is somewhere in the middle. We are not on either side of one extreme camp or the other and we really want to help put women in the driver seat to answer that question on their own terms, in a way that serves them and feels good to them and anything we can help women, any way that we can help women come across that answer is good for us. Jen: Yes. Annie: All right, good one. Jen: Lauren will go zip in in the background go ” Preach.” We should get you a t-shirt that says “What she said.” Annie: OK, well, yet another great topic with yet another awkward ending in the bag but this is good. This is a good conversation that I think needed to we needed to address on our podcast because again, we’ve discussed it so many times in our community, which again, if you’re aren’t in there and you want to join it’s Healthy Habits Happy Moms on Facebook. The three of us are in there, we’ve got some awesome moderators and a great community system if you want to continue the discussion on loving your body and still changing it or how you can begin making changes from a place of self-love. It will be a great place to learn so I hope to see you inside and ladies we will chat soon, OK. Lauren: Bye. Jen: Bye.   The post 50: Can You Love Your Body And Still Want To Change It? appeared first on Balance365.

  Diet culture is often so subtle that it can be hard to even identify. On today’s episode Jen, Lauren and Annie tackle the big topic of diet culture: what it is, what it looks like, how it’s harmful and some practical advice on how we can begin to dismantle this hurtful, oppressive system. While this topic is broad and deep, this conversation is the tip of the iceberg and a thought-starter for future conversations. What you’ll hear in this episode: What is diet culture, what does it look like, what does it sound like? Before and after photos – why are they problematic? The impacts of diet culture on the individual, family, and community Making informed choices as consumers to support or not support diet culture How socio-economic factors impact health Thin privilege and how it impacts lives Health, race, and representation in images of health How kids are impacted by diet culture How different healthy weight is for women individually Diet culture and how it creates weight gain How to turn diet culture around Nourishment as a concept that goes beyond food Curating your environment to fight diet culture Resources: Episode 24: Before And After Photos – Comparison, The Thief Of Joy Getting Older: Hillary Mcbride On Women And Aging Linda Bacon’s book Body Respect Setting Body Talk Boundaries Over The Holidays Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome back to another episode of Balance365 Life Radio, we have more than enough research to show that diets don’t work. We know this yet people still continue to diet over and over and over again. Why? Well, it’s likely large in part because dieting is a big part of our culture: diet talk, weight talk, negative body talk. It’s everywhere from office conversations to gabbing with your girlfriends over drinks to the marketing on our food, books, and commercials. Diet culture is often so subtle that it can be hard to even identify. When everyone around you is seemingly celebrating weight loss at all costs and bonding overeating “good” foods and say no to “bad” ones it can be difficult to take a stand against a culture. On today’s episode Jen, Lauren and I tackle the big topic of diet culture: what it is, what it looks like, how it’s harmful and how we can begin to dismantle this hurtful, oppressive system. We know that this is just the tip of the iceberg of a very important topic and discussion and we invite you to continue this discussion on the inside of our private Facebook group Healthy Habits Happy Moms. See you on the inside! Lauren and Jen! We’re back with a big, big topic today, are you ready for this? Jen: Ready. Lauren: Ready. Annie: You’ve got your game faces on, you guys. We’re discussing the term diet culture. What is diet culture? Which, the reason why we want to address this is because diet culture is a term and a phrase that we use frequently in our community and in our content and we really haven’t stopped to kind of unpack what this is, right? And we’re just going to dive right into it because I think we could spend a lot of time talking about this and we want to make sure that we do it justice and who knows, we might have to come revisit this. We’ll see how far we can get on our outline, right, but we know that diets don’t work and this is not a new topic. If you’re new to our podcast that might be a new concept to you but if you have been around our community and our podcast for a while, you know that diets don’t work and the research is there to support it and in fact, the research shows that most people are able to lose weight in the year but the vast majority gain it back with the majority of people gaining back more than they lost within 5 years and to echo the research that’s already out there that supports diets don’t work, we’ve surveyed our community and an overwhelmingly amount of our community have tried dieting and they’ve “failed” yet many women keep dieting, right? We see this all the time, like, people try diets, they don’t have success but they keep dieting and why is that? We would offer that it’s, unfortunately, part of our culture, right? Jen: It’s deeply ingrained in our culture to diet. Lauren: Yes. Annie: Yes. And so what we want to discuss today is what is diet culture, what it looks like, what it feels like, what are the consequences of living in a culture obsessed with dieting and spoiler alert: it’s everywhere. Jen: And yeah, a really good analogy I have is we also live, well I do, personally, where I live, I live in a car culture, a commuting culture, so public transport is not good where I live. You essentially have to have a car to participate in our society and imagine not having a car, how difficult that would make things for you and people would be surprised, like, “You don’t have a car? How do you get around?” So if you compare that to living in a diet culture, it’s the same thing. It’s actually very difficult to not to diet in our culture and it can make your life actually feel harder, initially than participating in the culture. Annie: Because you feel like you’re going against the grain. Jen: You are going against the grain and our society isn’t set up to support people who are not making, who are choosing to not do that. Annie: And because diet culture is so subtle, it can be really hard to identify what it is and what it isn’t and you might not be familiar with the term yet, diet culture, if you’re new to our community but I promise you, you have experienced it and I just want to share just, I pulled these out of a hat off the top of my head when I was reviewing for this podcast some of the ways in which you might have experienced a culture that I think are pretty common. Phrases like “I’m going to be bad and order fries” or how we compliment pregnant women for being “all belly” or tell them how great they are looking after giving birth. Jen: Yes. Or  “You don’t even look pregnant” etc. Annie: Yes.  People who lose weight are consistently applauded for and praised without question or you might hear phrases like “I’m on a new diet”, “How is your diet going? Have you tried this diet? I lost weight with this diet.” Jen: Yeah or “I’m off my diet.” Annie: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I’m sure many of you listening are probably nodding in your head in agreement that you’ve heard those types of conversations, you’ve seen those behaviors and they’re so common in our daily lives and these are the examples of what diet culture is, could be or what it sounds like are endless but- Jen: Yeah, before and after photos are a really problematic thing in our society and some of our listeners might be in the fitness industry and they might use before and after photos and I just want to say that it’s not, I know the intent isn’t there, I mean you might be coming from a really good place trying to showcase your client’s results and the intent might not be there but you certainly are profiting off of the fear that’s already there and that’s just something I would like our colleagues to sit with. Annie: Which is difficult because that’s something we as a company have struggled with which we have a whole podcast on before and afters and what the consequences of using them can be. We have gone back and forth, should we use them, should we not use them. Because they are effective, I mean, you see them, not even in a professional setting, you know, a girlfriend post that she lost 20 pounds or whatever in a post before and after on just her personal Facebook page and people break their necks looking at it, right? Jen: Right. Lauren: Right. Annie: And, you know, again, that’s diet culture, where we applaud these people for weight loss or think if they’re a better person or more disciplined or of higher moral virtue because they lost weight and we don’t even stop to question “Are they actually healthier? Do they do they feel better? How did they go about achieving that?” like, “Could this person just be sick?” I mean, like, there are so many options other than “this was intentional and they automatically feel better” but let’s just define it, right, this is, the definitions vary from source to source but in general diet culture is a society that focuses on and values weight shape and size over health and wellbeing. It worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue. It promotes weight loss as a means of attaining a higher status. It demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others and it oppresses people who don’t match up with the supposed picture of health which disproportionately harms trans, bigger bodies, people with disabilities, people of color and it can be damaging to both mental and physical health. Lauren: Right. Jen: Right because they just, they aren’t represented in a diet culture. Annie: Yeah, and- Lauren: This is not something we’re even conscious or aware of, right? The fact that it’s so embedded in our culture, is it’s just what we’ve grown up with, it’s what we’re taught to do and you know, we’re not consciously aware of these thoughts or behaviors sometimes, it’s just there. Jen: My social media feed used to be filled with before and after photos because those are the types of pages I followed. Just diet pages, weight loss pages, fitness professionals that were constantly posting before and afters of themselves and their clients and so essentially, anytime I was on social media, which for a lot of women is quite a bit, I was looking at before and after photos and that absolutely affects the way you think and see the world. Lauren:  And how you feel about yourself. Jen: Yeah. Annie: And it’s in the marketing of our foods, too. I had a FaceTime conversation with Jen about this topic last week and I got off the phone after talking about diet culture, opened up my fridge and here my yogurt says “light and fit”, you know, to me that’s ingrained diet culture or you know, we’re calling foods “guilt free” or there’s guilt, you know, I think- Jen: It is, it is honestly everywhere and back to the car analogy, it’s like, it’s like roads are everywhere, if you came across a spot in a city that had no roads to drive down, you would go, “What on earth is going on here?” You just take for granted that roads are going to be everywhere and in our society diet culture is everywhere, everywhere. Annie: And again, it also, you know, we’ll talk about this how it oppresses certain populations in a little bit as well but we’re really just seeing one type of body, which we were talking about this before we even started recording, it’s thin white women, you know, in the diet industry. Jen: Of a certain age. Annie:  Of a certain age, yes and that can be really harmful and if you don’t stop to question these things, you’ll probably just go with the flow, you know, you’ll just kind of keep swimming with everyone else. Jen: I used to model, which I’ve shared in the podcast before, and I was told at 19 that I was getting old for modeling and that if I hadn’t made it internationally by the time I was 21 that I did not have a future in modeling so that is an indicator of the types of models that we’re seeing. They are very, very young. Annie: Babies. Jen: Yeah. Like most girls go big when they’re like 14 and I was told at 14 by a model agent that I had the perfect body, like, I was perfect at that point to be a model, to have a career as a model in women’s fashion magazines when I was 14 years old. Annie: At 14. Yeah, yeah, you’re selling to adult women as a 14-year old that’s a crazy concept to wrap your head around. Jen: Yes. Annie: But, you know, in addition to talking about what it is and what it looks like and what it feels like, I really want to spend a fair amount of time to on why it matters because, you know, before I was familiar with the concept of diet culture, I thought it was just kind of like on a really individual level, you know, like, I thought like, “Oh, this is just what how this person is choosing to spend their time” and I wasn’t really aware of how it impacted our community or our society and Jen, you know, you said on a previous podcast, like, we talk about how we want society to change or how we want our culture to change, well, that starts with us. Jen: Yeah, we are society, we’re part of it. Annie: We’re part of it. Jen: Yeah. Annie: Yes, so let’s talk about why it’s harmful because it’s harmful to individuals, it’s harmful to families and it’s harmful to communities and the first one, which we kind of touched on is it oppresses a large majority of the population on an individual level, you know, just on ourselves, it encourages people to believe that they are less than until they achieve some level of weight loss or fitness goals, right. It makes you engage in self-doubt, you doubt yourself, you feel like you can’t trust your own instincts. It lures you into thinking that you failed because you couldn’t stick to your diet plan and oftentimes people that are engaged in that kind of thinking are thinking things like “I can’t do this because I look like this. I can’t do this because my body is this” and I have personally experienced that. I remember my husband wanting me to go rock climbing and I couldn’t, like, I was too worried about could I, am I going to fit into the harness? Is the harness going to hold me? Is this something that my body is allowed to do, like, and it turns out I could have, I just was too wrapped up in thinking- Jen: You were too big to do this. Annie:  Yeah, the self-doubt that that was my limiting factor, right. And then on a community level, it contributes to a culture that makes it acceptable to treat people as less than because of their bodies, right and in fact, when I was researching this there was one study that I came across that it noted that 15 percent of hiring managers, only 15 percent of hiring managers, would hire an overweight woman for a job. So essentially it’s allowing employers to see overweight people as sloppy or lazy and just not hire them. Jen: Yeah and so you don’t see the person or their skills or their education, you see the body. Annie: And we’ve talked about that, or talked around about that, you know, about how what it looks like when you go to McDonald’s and sit and have you know a cheeseburger and French fries versus what it looks like when a larger body goes to McDonald’s. Jen: Yes, thin women can post photos on social media of eating like a whole pizza and be proud of it and people will high 5 them and I think there’s even, I read a blog post a couple years ago, I can’t remember the author now but basically it showed comments under this photo of a like a thin, gorgeous girl eating a huge pizza and there were males saying “Oh,  that’s so sexy” and then next to a photo of a really large woman eating a whole pizza and the comments were “That is so disgusting.” Annie: That’s just heartbreaking and eye-opening. Jen: It’s awful. As far as going, “Hey”, like trying to address the diet culture we live in and your everyday behaviors and the way you talk and think around it, like, that’s really what we’re trying to address here, right, like there are people that are seriously hurt because of some of your unconscious everyday behaviors that contribute to upholding a society that oppresses A lot of people in our culture. Annie: And you know, I have no doubt that there are people with hearts of gold and good intentions that are engaging in diet culture like Jen: Absolutely, I mean, there’s probably still areas of my life if I really dug in, I mean, that’s all part of our work, right, is unraveling that. Annie: Yeah, it’s oftentimes not intentional. It’s just, you know, what you’ve learned, what people of before you have done, what you’ve seen other people do, what you’ve heard other people say, you know, I remember, like, early as a trainer talking about concepts that I, that would make me cringe now in terms of diet culture and it’s like, when you know better you can do better and that’s part of what we want this podcast to do today is just start creating some discussion and awareness about what diet culture is and how it impacts our lives. Jen: Yeah, I even recently have been thinking about something. So I love LuluLemon leggings, they are my favorite. They fit me so well and they’re really good quality, I love them and recently a bigger woman called me on shopping there. She said “You are supporting a company that will not carry my size and has openly had the founder talk about that they don’t cater to women my size” and I felt really uncomfortable and that’s something so I’m just, full disclosure, being open about my own journey but I’m really kind of sitting with that and going like “Am I going to be OK with that that they don’t carry over a certain size and I’m going to keep shopping there or can I keep shopping there but bring it up to management, write letters, like, you know, what can I do?” Like, because I don’t feel good about that and then the other one was Victoria’s Secret which I have vocally and openly called out that company for years and years now of their objectification of women. And they recently went public on record to say that they don’t make larger sizes because that’s not their market and they don’t want to sell to women in that market and I have not supported Victoria’s Secret for years and years but that is just something for us all to think about, right, like would you would you keep supporting a company that said they don’t want to sell to black women? Annie: Right. Jen: Like that’s not their market? Or disabled people? Sorry, our store is not wheelchair accessible because we don’t want, we don’t want people who are in wheelchairs in this store. Annie: Yeah. When you take it out of the terms of bodies and when you put it in that context, it’s a no brainer, right? Jen: Yeah and I mean that is part of living in a diet culture that we all so, we don’t even think about that oppression of larger people, right, so, you know, and as soon as you take it into that context of color or ability then it’s like “Oh, wow, no, that’s awful” but then you bring it back to bodies and you’re like “Is that awful? I don’t know. I have to think about that.” Because it’s just so ingrained that you really have to think about it. So those are some thoughts I’ve been sitting with lately just being honest with our audience that it is a journey and you will continually realize that there are ways that you contribute to supporting diet culture. Annie: Well, I mean, yeah and just again, all the ways that it shows up in your life. I mean my drink of choice used to be a skinny latte from Starbucks or like eating skinnypop popcorn, two things that I really enjoy I hate the name. Lauren:  Yeah. Annie: Why did they have to be named that? And you know, so can we just call it nonfat lattes? Jen: Yes. Annie: Like yes, yes i can. I don’t have to engage in that or I can stop buying that product as you noted or I can call it something else or you know, my light and fit Greek yogurt, sorry, Yoplait. I don’t like the name, I like your yogurt, I don’t like the name. In addition though to, going back to how it’s harmful, oppressing individuals and on a community level, it also hurts, as Jen noted ,people of color, those with disabilities, people live in poverty because they’re just less likely to be able to access the tools that some people believe can “cure” or address some of these health-related issues or size-related issues such as health care, gym memberships, nutrient-dense food and in fact, I went back and reference Linda Bacon’s book Body Respect, which is a great book if you haven’t read it. And she notes that social and societal differences account for the largest part of the population’s health, even more so than behaviors, biology or genes so really, like the culture, the socioeconomic status that you are brought up in, you’re raised in that you’re living in, plays a bigger, way bigger role than what you’re choosing to eat or- Jen: Yeah, I often say, like, if you are going to be talking about the health of our society and losing your mind over obesity rates, you better be bringing socio-economic conditions into that conversation and letting me know what you are doing to bridge that divide in socio-economic situations across your culture because you cannot stand on your platform and talk about how everybody just needs to eat healthier, you know, what I mean? Once you start understanding the big picture you start to understand actually how useless- Lauren:  Like all you need to do is buy all organic produce, lean meats that are grass-fed, get the special bulletproof coffee drink and you’ll be good to go, right? Jen: Right, it’s elitist, it really only helps- Annie: Privileged people. Jen: People in privileged people, right, helps or harms, that’s a whole other question because if you already have those privileges, you know, somebody is just making you anxious about not being privileged enough or perfect enough then, you know, it’s, anyways so yeah, I mean, part of our work, if we really do care about the health and wellbeing of our society is about how to raise children up out of poverty so that we can see them with better outcomes in life, right? Annie: And just, again, going back to the definition of diet culture, you know, that it promotes thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, like, you know,  I’m not any better or worse than someone that’s going to the gym or that has a gym membership or that eats organic bananas than is, you know, than someone that eats conventional bananas, like, but so often we do, we praise people that have those behaviors, that have access to those services or memberships that’s like, they’re doing something right, right?  They’re just better. Jen: Yeah but people love to hear that, like, people love to hear, people love rags to riches stories and so you, like, even I look back on myself, you know, I am a thin, white woman, like I have so many privileges in our society because just because of those things. I was born Caucasian and thin. But I even look back on, you know, the way I used to pat myself on the back, like, as if I was just this, like, awesome hard worker and it’s not that I didn’t work hard for certain things, you know, for my education, for everything that I have today for, you know, that I do work out and consistent with exercise but you know, there was a time in my life where it was an elitist thing almost, like, I thought I was, you know, just extra special for whatever reason but it turns out I actually was born with a headstart in life that a lot of people didn’t have and for somebody to start a health and wellness company and grow it to what we’ve grown ours to in the last 4 years as a fat woman of color, now that is hard work. Do you know what I mean? Like, there’s just certain privileges that the 3 of us have that allowed us to, that people will take advice from us online because we’re all thin. Annie: Yeah it’s that this is a heavy topic. Jen: It’s uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable for us to acknowledge our own privileges, like it really is but it’s so important in order to, if you want to see more equality in our society, like, women, we talk about it all the time, wanting equality with men and that seems to be an easier conversation to flow. But then, you like, let’s talk about all equality, right, and then that means it’s easy to sit back and be a victim of inequality but like what if you are a perpetuator of inequality, like that is uncomfortable. Annie: Yeah. Jen: But that is so important. We expect men to do it, right, we want men to do it. Annie: To be able to objectively look at our behaviors and say, like, “I could be potentially contributing to the problem” It’s like- Jen: Yeah like here are small ways- Annie: It’s hard to face. Jen: Here are small ways. Yeah, exactly. Annie: Absolutely. OK, so backing up, how it’s harmful. It oppresses a large majority of the population, I mean, when we say large, like, that’s pretty much everyone except for thin white people, I mean, which is, like, that leaves a lot of people out, that’s really exclusive. Jen: Yes. So just if, people who are struggling understand this, if you go do a google image search of and just type in like “health and fitness” you will be met with images, 99 percent of the images that come up are, like, thin white people. Annie: Yeah. Jen: I feel like I need to do that real quick. Lauren: I’m doing it right now. Jen: OK just to make sure I’m right. Annie: I just, as you know, as a personal trainer I know that I’ve searched personal trainer images it’s all white men. Jen: Or if you type in healthy women, so I just typed in healthy women on a google image search and I’m scrolling to the scrolling, scrolling, I saw one black woman, one, rest, oh here’s a woman laying in a bed of fruit with a tape measure wrapped around her waist. So yeah, it’s just thin white women, that’s all it is. Annie: Yeah and that’s not, that’s not true representational, truly representational of health. Jen:  Absolutely not. You feel, then, the idea of diet culture is that you have to be a thin white woman to be healthy. Annie: Yeah. Lauren: Right. Annie: And that so far from the truth that it’s ridiculous. OK. Moving on. Another reason it’s harmful, one of the many reasons diet culture is harmful is that our kids are catching on quickly to this culture, the the new normal of these behaviors and conversations. We’ve shared these statistics so many times. I’m going to share them again because, like, it needs to be heard again and again and again. Over 80 percent of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat. 80 percent of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat. 53 percent of 13 year old American girls are unhappy with their bodies. The number grows to 78 percent by the time they reach 17, by middle school 40 to 70 percent of girls are dissatisfied with 2 or more of their body parts and I mean, that’s just 3 of the many alarming statistics. And inside of Balance365, Jennifer, you share an observation from author Jan Jacobs Brownsburg, do your remember this, when you wrote about this? How she had been studying girls diaries. Jen: Yeah, yeah it’s in the 1st chapter of Balance365. Annie: And you read her book and you noted that she was writing about how girls, she was studying girls diaries and how these girls were writing about a desire to better themselves and she notes that the difference was pre-war, they were talking about being the self development was focused on helping others and putting more effort into school or reading and by the 1990s bodies had become a preoccupation, that they were writing about. Jen: And appearance and makeup and fashion and yes so this is also such a hard conversation because what if you really like fashion, you know? Where Hilary McBride pointed out in our of the last podcast we did with her. You know, are our interests and beliefs and you know, all of that, is that who we are or is that shaped by our culture? And so- Lauren: It’s messy. Jen: It’s very messy, right and but yes, so basically that book looked at what girls valued and how they wanted to better themselves 100 years ago versus today and that there are there’s just been a dramatic shift in values over the last 100 years where I think most women would say “Gosh, like, you know, I wish, I wish my daughter was more focused on school than boys and makeup and all of that but that’s the culture we live in” Like, you can say one thing as a parent, “Hey, this is where you should invest your time and energy as a girl to be successful in life, to be happy, to be fulfilled” but when you have a whole culture and society telling them differently, they’ll stop listening to you. My Mom, my mother was so amazing at that, my mom was so ahead of the game in the nineties raising me in the 2000s. But, you know, I was surrounded and I was in a culture that clearly valued bodies. I remember when Britney Spears’ first single dropped in she had the, I remember just crowding around the CD in the CD insert, like the first friend who went and got the CD, they would pull the insert out and we would all just- Annie: Read the lyrics and look at the photos. Jen: Yeah we were just surrounded, like, looking at these photos of Britney Spears and she was wearing a little skirt and it was just, like, everything right and yeah, and we even see it in Healthy Habits Happy Moms, our own Facebook group, where we want to so badly want to see this shift, we see, once in a while women might come in and post a before and after photo, they may be new to our group or whatever, they don’t understand the culture in there yet and even when that happens it will get so much attention. Well, I noticed the other day that a woman posted in the last year she has added in a couple habits and her triglyceride levels are back down into a normal healthy range and it did not barely get any engagement and I look at that stuff and I think, even in our group, it’s so depressing because it’s like that is what health is, like, those are the things we should be celebrating. We don’t know what that picture means. We don’t know if her blood pressure is through the roof. We, it’s just, yes so, it’s just, it’s so depressing to me. I’m like Society doesn’t care if people are healthy, they care that they’re thin. Lauren: Right, like stop framing it as health and wellness, right? It’s thinness that you are  celebrating but back to the the diaries of the girls thing too, we talk about all the time how women say in our in our Balance365 group, like, I have all this time and mental space that has opened up since I stopped focusing on my body and dieting and like, I kind of see that in this this study from this author, like, where would we be if we weren’t so focused on ourselves and our bodies, like, where would we be if we were all still trying to better ourselves in other ways? Jen: Right, would fighting for equality with men still be a conversation? Like imagine if women took all the time and energy they put into their bodies and their appearance and put that on equality- Lauren: Or any issue. Jen: Any issue, getting politically active or you know, yeah. Annie: Which is a great segue into the 3rd way I wrote down why it’s harmful is it keeps us from living our lives and as we’ve talked about, our conversations are consumed with diet talk, weight talk, body shaming. On a really small scale, we hesitate to eat kids cake at birthday parties or we hesitate at going out to eat with a girlfriend because we are fearing putting on weight or deviating from our meal plan but I know the 3 of us have talked about that we could not have started this business if we were still eating, breathing, living diet culture. Like we wouldn’t have the capacity for it. Jen: I did a talk for a women’s studies class last year via video through, I was just asked to do it remotely basically so I filmed it in my home and it was for the University of the Saskatchewan, a women’s studies course and I did my 1st year of university at the University of Saskatchewan and at that time I wanted to be a doctor. When I started university I wanted to be a doctor and I had to basically drop out by my 2nd semester. I had to move down to part time studies because I was struggling with an eating disorder by then. It just, it was my whole life, it became my whole life. I was starving, my B.M.I. was 17, I was running on a treadmill for like one to two hours a day every morning, not eating, it just it consumed me and that might be a more extreme result of living in a diet culture is actually developing an eating disorder but there was a study done in the States, I think the University of Southern California and they surveyed 10000 women and 65 percent of women report having disordered eating behaviors. That’s huge. Lauren: I had the same experience and I think it’s, I think maybe getting a diagnosable eating disorder is rare but struggling with disordered eating and having it take up your life is not rare. Jen: No it’s very common. Lauren: Yeah I remember coming home, in my senior year it it took up my entire life. I wouldn’t go out because I had to come home and I had to do my workout and I had to eat my broccoli, like I could go out and eat. I had to come home and yeah, just the same way that you’re describing. It took over my entire life. Annie: I am just scrolling on Instagram, I swear it was Erin Brown wrote, had a quote or shared a quote at one point about how all the possibilities and opportunities that have been missed because women were worrying if their thighs were too big. Jen: Yeah. Lauren: Yeah Annie:  And that hit home for me. I mean, everything from rock climbing to saying no to opportunities to speak or present or share or work with a client or you know and I think about some, just in the health and wellness world, some of the women in our community that have even expressed, like, I have a really an interest in helping other people, becoming a personal trainer, becoming a nutritionist, getting the certification but will people want to take advice from me because I look like this? Which is anything outside of the norm and that’s really sad, that’s unfortunate, really unfortunate so I want to do our part to break that, right? Jen: Yeah and the messy part of this conversation is trying, talking about weight loss in the context of it not being about diet culture. So that is a really hard conversation to have because we are all about body autonomy and letting women decide what’s right for them and for some women, fat loss is part of their wellness vision. And so, you know, but in within Balance365 constructs you would understand that it’s behavior change that leads to sustainable fat loss etc, etc, etc, we have many podcasts about this. And so that is just really and that’s why chapter one of Balance365 is diet deprogramming because you really have to untangle what it is, what is driving these thoughts, right? That is something really tricky to untangle so where we talk, you know, Annie has lost. Annie used to be a size 22 and now she’s a size 12, is that right, Annie? Annie: Ish. Yeah. Depending on the brand. Jen: Yes and so for, Annie getting healthy, ditching diet mindset, ditching disordered eating, cultivating healthy habits that she can stick to resulted in losing 10 dress sizes which is amazing and I will celebrate that with Annie. I do not think of Annie as a better person than when she was a size 22. I think she was just as worthy. Annie may not have felt that but, and that is the whole problem in our society that we actually believe we are more worthy when we’re smaller. However, on the flip side, me doing all those same things, ditching dieting, ditching disordered eating, ditching and actually cultivating healthy habits that work for me in my life have resulted in me being about 20 to 25 pounds heavier than my leanest weight. And so that is a really important thing for women to understand when we talk about Balance365 and we address weight, we are there to help women become a healthy weight and that is going to look different for everybody. I am not interested in any way in supporting a woman in figuring out how to live life at a weight that is not healthy or sustainable for her. I am not interested in giving her a bunch of diet tricks that make sure, you know, that allow her to be super lean certain times of the year, that’s just not where our focus is and so Balance365 really, you know, the conversation is more about, is not about what losing weight, it’s like what is a healthy weight for you and the thing is in Balance365 so many women have dieted for so many years they don’t even know what that is. Like they haven’t been able to maintain their weight for 3 months, let alone figuring out what maintaining their weight for years and years even looks like for them and I know I didn’t know. I was just constantly going, you know, because I was constant dieting, disordered eating, rebounding. I was basically slingshotting to below what a healthy weight is for me and then right back to above and below and above and I was just slingshotting back and forth where once I found my, you know, what’s healthy for me was basically smack dab in the middle of that and that is what I have been able, that I maintain my weight for the last 4 years through, you know, even some very stressful seasons of life, like because this is actually what’s healthy for me, but that can be a tough pill to swallow for women because for some women that weight is actually heavier than what they are now and that’s terrifying for some women. Lauren: And I think it’s hard for us to communicate that in a diet culture, right, like it’s hard for us to communicate we’re going to help you get the size of body that’s right for you. It’s not always weight loss, sometimes it’s weight gain, sometimes it’s, you know, you’re pretty much the same weight but you have more freedom, you know, to eat the way you want. Annie: Because in diet culture weight loss is equal to a higher status. Jen: Yes, always. Yes. So in a diet culture weight loss is always the goal, right. Annie: Right. Jen: Yes but we do, you know, we’ve got women who have lost significant amounts of fat inside our program but for them, being in those larger bodies was a prison for them because that was not the right weight for them, it was well above what was healthy and sustainable for them and a person gets to that space because of diet culture, because of the constant yoyoing of diets and every time they diet they lose 10 pounds and they put on 35. They go on another diet, they lose 10 and they put on another 35 and at some point those women, fat loss becomes it isn’t about diet culture anymore, isn’t about worthiness, it’s about reclaiming the body that they were always meant to have had they never gone on a diet at all. Lauren: Right and going back to diet culture, our culture is to blame people with larger bodies, right, that it’s their fault that they are in a larger body when it’s diet culture that put them there. Annie: Exactly. Lauren: Many, many times, right? It’s because of the dieting that they’re in a body that’s larger for them and obviously, that’s not universally true but in a lot of cases. Jen: Yes. Annie: Yeah, I feel like we could spend hours talking about how this harmful on so many levels. But I also want to leave some time and some space to talk about how we can kind of start to change it and the first one, I feel like this is our answer to everything on changing everything is just creating awareness, like, you know, like, we’ve talked about this in so many pockets on various topics but just opening your eyes and paying attention to what is diet culture, where you see it, where you experience it and where you hear it and just like start listening, start paying attention. Because as Jen said earlier, once you start seeing it, you’ll realize it’s everywhere. The second thing is break up with dieting. And I want to be clear that you don’t have to be on a diet to participate in diet culture, like that’s key. Like this isn’t just something that people who are dieting are participating in. But also that giving up on diet culture doesn’t mean that you’re giving up on your health. Like there are other options. And one of the ways you can start breaking up with dieting is to question the rules that you’ve been taught, the “rules”, right? The foods that you’ve labeled as good and as bad, your relationship with exercise, like what does that look like, are we exercising to punish ourselves, because we hate ourselves, because we think when we’re thin our life is going to be perfect and we’re going to have the perfect body and people who weigh less have less problems. And this can take years, like this is, I mean, as Jen mentioned earlier when she’s talking about some of how her decisions she still is kind of wrangling with, like, we’ve been in this and we’ve been doing this sort of work for almost 4 years and we’re still, or if not longer but specifically with our company for for almost 4 years and we’re still, like, kind of wading through the mud, like it’s cloudy and it’s messy and it’s muddy and it’s like, is this health? Is this diet culture? Is this supporting where I want to go or is this, like, disguised, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, so to speak? And then also vote with your dollars and your energy. Just a simple refusal to feed the diet industry, buying products that support it, whether it’s food, systems, magazines etc. You know your yogurts, your places you’re shopping, where you’re buying your clothes. Jen: And this stuff works. It can feel hopeless but, like, we are seeing a shift, like we are seeing a shift and people are getting really loud about it and companies are paying attention. Because we are seeing, we have never had so much, we don’t have a lot of diversity but we have never seen so much diversity in the media as we do today and that is from the work of all of us individually just throwing those pebbles into a pond which eventually make a wave. Annie: One of the places I really like to shop is Aerie, even, I don’t know if there’s an age limit on Aerie. Lauren: I really like Aerie too. Annie: I really like it and every time I go in there there are, you know, they’ve openly declared that they have stopped photoshopping their models, there’s often disabilities, women with disabilities in their marketing. There is, you know, not maybe as large of a variety of body types and skin colors as I would like to see but it’s more so than it was, you know, 3, 4, 5 years ago and just to circle back to LuLuLemon, obviously anyone that follows me knows that I love my Lululemon and I’m an ambassador for them and I would say the same thing for them too, following them on social media, they are carrying additional size ranges, like, they’re, I think they’re moving, what I see from them is- Jen: They’re moving Annie: They’re moving in that direction. Jen: And the thing is so, it’s understanding too, I remember, Annie, we had this talk right so the political party that I have traditionally voted for in Canada frustrates me to no end and so much so that actually our last federal election I did not vote for them and that’s sometimes is a stand that you have to take as a person but there’s another choice is to get involved in that industry or those companies or that political party and try to make change from within and so as far as Lululemon I don’t know if I’m going to stop shopping there but I am thankful for the awareness that my friend brought to me to say, “You know you’re supporting a store that doesn’t even want women my size in there” and that just stopped me in my tracks and what I am definitely going to be doing is going in and saying “This is how you make people feel, people I love and what do you have to say about that?” and that will be escalated. I recently took a stand at my local pool, so this is just another small example but I shared this on social media, I haven’t shared it on our podcast yet but there’s a swim club at my local swimming pool and I witnessed this male coach probably in his late teens, early twenties talking to a group of probably 11, 12, 13 year old kids making fun of people who are over 200 pounds and just the way he was, it was awful and I was sitting in the hot tub while he was doing this with the team and I’m sitting with my kids and after they left I really had a very, I addressed it with my children, like “That was not OK,” etc  but then I’m not going to stop going to the pool, like that is a place that we enjoy and frequent. What I did do was I went to management and told them that this had happened and they were so thankful and now they will work, because the swim club is an external club that comes in, so now they will work with the club to make sure the club understands that this is a body-inclusive environment and that is not OK. So there are ways of, you know, there are certain brands you might love, you know, etcetera but until they are like that Victoria Secret, I mean Victoria’s Secret stepped up and said: “No, we are not changing.” They basically said, “We do not want big women in our stores.” I will not shop there anymore, that is my choice but I haven’t shopped there for years. If you have followed me long enough on social media you’ll know why. Annie: You’ve had some runins with Victoria Secret. Jen: They know me but so that’s just a choice you can make. You don’t have to walk away, it doesn’t have to be this break up, it can be like “Hey, I support you and I love you guys, I love your brand but here’s what I need from you to keep supporting you.” Annie: Which is actually a conversation that I have had many times with my local Lululemon store and they’re all about it. They are they are game to do whatever they can to help support that as well, I mean, they acknowledge that like “Yeah, we would love to be able to dress all women and like how can we make our voices heard and what actions can we take and how can we be more inclusive and more welcoming to men and women of all varieties even while in this very moment we only serve pant sizes up to a 12 or a 14? What else can we do, how can, you know, how can we start to create change?” and you know, these are the tough and sometimes uncomfortable conversations we need to have. Lauren: Well and I think too it’s sometimes even more impactful than boycotting, right, to have Annie in they’re saying, like, “Look, this is how what you’re doing impacts me, impacts these people, right? Annie: Right. Yeah and in addition to refusing to feed the diet industry, kind of along the same lines as to build your life online and in real life with people, books, music that support how you want to feel and hopefully that’s not a part of the diet culture and my friend Meghan talks about nourishing her body and when she first told me that nourishment was one of her core values, I kind of rolled my eyes because I thought she was going to give me this like elitist version of how she eats paleo. Jen: Green smoothies. Annie: Yes and what she was talking about, how she defines nourishment is what she puts in her ears, what she puts in her body, how  she moves her body, what she reads, what she consumes on social media, like those are all the ways in which she nourishes her body and I love that definition and you know, just like Jen said earlier, you know, her feed used to be filled with before and afters and I’m guessing you’ve unfollowed. Jen: No, I don’t see any of that anymore. It’s jarring to me when I see before and after photos now, I’m like “Oh, where did that come from?” Annie: Yeah and it’s like, it’s OK, sometimes, you know, unfortunately like the saying “fences make good neighbors”, you know some of your friends might be really heavily engaged in diet culture still and you might have to unfollow or set some boundaries. Jen: Yeah, I say “It’s not personal, It’s about me, not you” right, like, “You go ahead and post your before and after photos, it doesn’t serve me and if I saw the odd one now I’d be fine but I I recognize it’s a slippery slope, right, if you have, you get on Facebook for 15 minutes and you have 16 before and after photos come through your feed, like eventually, eventually, that becomes our reality, like, it just does so yeah, curating your environment is so important. Annie: Yeah what else do you want to add before we pop off? I mean, I know this is such a heavy topic and there’s so many aspects and components to diet culture but I just really wanted to kind of throw something out there sooner rather than later for our community who might be new and might be struggling with the concept of diet culture and because even it’s so subtle sometimes I miss it, you know, sometimes I don’t even realize that what I just participated in was diet culture, what I just bought was supporting diet culture. Jen:  I would say it’s OK to like get to the awareness stage and start noticing and making small changes in your life, one thing that I feel very passionate about is not overwhelming women and feeling like they have to be the only crusader for this cause, like, we really have only so much time and energy and number one needs to be taking care of you because you will never be able to take care of others until you can take care of you and us three going from the awakening to the taking care of us to making sure our cups are filled to starting this company to becoming crusaders that was a years in the making process, right, like, I didn’t realize one day diets don’t work and I have been part of this machine that exploits women’s vulnerabilities for my whole life to the next day starting a podcast and talking about all these issues, like, I mean, we’re talking years so don’t feel like you have to do all the things in one day but you’ve got to make sure you’re taken care of  first. Lauren: Yup. Annie:  The awakening, that sounds- Lauren: I like that too. Annie:  I was like “Whoa, yes! Sign me up for that” Jen: Stay woke, friends. Annie: Stay woke to diet culture. That should be our new hashtag. Lauren: Hashtag. Annie: Hashtag stay woke to diet culture. Lauren: Tag us if you use it. Annie: All right this was and can be a really heavy topic but, and it is serious, like this is detrimental to our individual and cultural health and especially our children who are just unknowingly, you know, being exposed to it. We had a really great podcast on boundaries where we talked where Jen made the analogy that compared it to secondhand smoke and diet culture is the same way, you know, like that’s, you know- Jen: Just blowing smoke in your kids’ faces all day long. Annie: Yeah and we don’t doubt the intentions or love that a parent would have for their children, so creating awareness to how harmful this can be is, you know, the first step to really making some steps in the right direction but if you want to continue the discussion, if you want to discuss what is diet culture, what it isn’t, is what you’re experiencing or what you’re participating in part of the problem or part of the solution please join us inside our private Facebook group Healthy Habits Happy moms 40000 women that would be happy to continue this discussion inside there and the 3 of us are in there too participating as well so if you have more questions or if you’re still confused or if there is something that you want to talk about that we didn’t talk about in this hour, let us know we’re here, like this is just, I have a feeling this is just going to be an ongoing topic. Jen: Yeah this was the tip of the iceberg. Annie: Yes, the tip of the iceberg, exactly All right, well thank you ladies, it was a good chat. Jen: Yes. Annie: Alrighty, bye bye. Jen: Bye. Lauren: Bye.     The post 49: Diet Culture Explained appeared first on Balance365.

Free Morning Routine Habit Tracker! Mornings can be tough but they don’t have to be. Annie and Lauren chat with Makenzie Chilton of Love Your Mondays about the morning routine she recommends for her clients. In just 23 minutes, you can effect positive change on the trajectory of your day. Find out more about simple steps you can take starting tomorrow to make all of your tomorrows better. What you’ll hear in this episode: The scientific benefits of routine What is positive psychology? If you can only do one thing, this is it The power of gratitude Why you shouldn’t reach for your phone first in the morning Strengthening neural pathways for positivity The practice of daily journaling The mind-body connection Movement in the morning – why it matters Multitasking vs monotasking Acts of kindness Tim Ferriss’ approach to a morning routine All or nothing mindset and morning routines What implementing the morning routine for 60 days felt like Seinfeld’s Chain Theory How your brain responds to checking things off  your to-do list The Ta-Da List – what it is and how it works Managing your screen time and the anxiety of disconnection Removing obligations to respond to things before you are ready Resources: Sean Achor TED Talk Tim Ferriss Morning Routine Seinfeld’s Chain Theory The Ta-Da List – Makenzie’s Instagram Post Love Your Mondays Website Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: If you’re like Lauren, Jen or I mornings can leave you feeling a little frazzled. Whether you wake up to an alarm clock or like mine, your alarm clock has two legs, stinky morning breath, needs a diaper change and is demanding breakfast, mornings can often feel chaotic and adding one more thing to your am to do list might not sound so doable but on today’s episode career coach and productivity specialist Makenzie Chilton shares a short and sweet morning routine that is scientifically backed to amplify positivity in the brain and optimize productivity throughout the rest of your day because let’s be honest, the first hour of your day can really affect the tone for what follows. Plus this only takes 20 minutes and you can include your whole family if you wish. After chatting with Mackenzie on today’s episode Lauren and I have already started to change the way we start our mornings and I think after listening you might be excited to explore it as well. I’m excited to share that we’ve got a super sweet freebie for you. You can download and print this routine and habit tracker off at www.Balance365Life.com/episode48. Mackenzie, welcome to Balance365 Life Radio, thanks for joining us. How are you? Makenzie: Good, thanks for having me. Annie: I am so excited to have you because we’re going to talk about morning routines. Lauren, you’re with us today, do you have a morning routine, Lauren Lauren: No, well, I tried to implement one and my son just doesn’t cooperate so I’m excited. Makenzie: To be honest, like, I know that I’m like “Everybody do this routine” but I’m super not perfect at it and my morning routine is coffee, nonnegotiable. Annie: I can get on board with that. Lauren: Oh, I have that. Makenzie: Yeah, yeah. Anything beyond that I’m just like “These are enhancing things” you know. Annie: Yeah, I could totally get on board with that, you’re not like “Do this or die, comply or die” it’s like, “I said these are going to make your day better” but before we get into that can you tell us how you got into morning routines? Makenzie: Yes. So, I’m a career coach now at Love Your Mondays and my background is in psychology so I feel like my story is not super unique in the way about a lot of people have experienced kind of like my path but my education is kind of unique. So I, typical, like went from high school right to university. And I didn’t know what I wanted to do, which, I feel like it’s a common theme for however old you are, 18, when you go to university. It’s still mind-boggling to me that we’re supposed to like have that figured out. Annie: I know, we’re babies, right? Mackenzie: Yeah and then I had taken psychology all the way through and I’ve always been super fascinated in people’s behavior and you know, why people do things, what’s the motive behind it and then I took this really awesome class in 4th year and it was forensic psych and I thought forensic meant death. Annie: Same. Lauren: Same, right? Makenzie: Yeah. It means, like, the study of Law. So it’s anything to do with law and psychology. At first, I was like,  “How am I going to analyze dead people?” But it’s anything, essentially, with crime and psychology so that’s like the psychology of policing or jury selection or serial killers or mass homicide and those are the things that I focused on because I really found it fascinating how people could behave so differently than the norm, essentially. Then I worked in the prison system here in Canada for 3 years and I absolutely loved that job, like dream job, so I felt very lucky, I still feel very lucky to have experienced a dream job in a way because I felt like I was helping people that nobody wanted to help and I was getting like real progress with these like very violent criminals. But then I got laid off. Yeah, budget cuts, they cut our funding. And I got laid off and I was like “What I do with my life? So I started using the psychology I had and I went into, I worked in management for a while and combined those two things and started Love Your Mondays and so with that became, like, learning about all these, like, productivity things and how to be your best self and a lot of, I call them like, behavioral enhancements or motivators, right and so that’s where the morning routine kind of slid in because I’m not, I don’t thrive on routine, I have like a balance of like, like, chaos a little bit because it’s creative for me and but I also like cycle back to like really needing a morning routine sometimes. Annie: Fascinating. I, all of my, like, side note: murder mystery podcasts like memories are coming back to mind, like, I wonder what she thinks of that which we’ll have to chat about later. Lauren: Yes I was thinking of a lot and I was thinking of the murder podcast and like crime shows, Orange Is The New Black, I’m like- Makenzie: Yeah. Lauren: Let’s just talk about that stuff. Makenzie: Honestly, like, have you seen MindHunter? Lauren: No. Mackenzie: It’s on our Netflix, I think our Netflix is different than yours in the States but, he like goes into prisons in the seventies and he’s the guy that came up with the term serial killer. But that was like, essentially, my job for a while. Annie: Oh, fascinating. Makenzie: Talk to these. Yeah, it’s great. Annie: And now you’re on a podcast helping women with their routines in the morning. Makenzie: Right. Annie: But it’s all connected. Makenzie: It’s a cycle. It’s all behavioral. Annie: Yeah. So you have a routine because this is what you do now, you help people with productivity and starting their day on a little bit more positive note, as you said, like enhancing their day, enhancing their morning. You have your own routine that you shared with other people which is actually how you got connected to us because I think Jen found your morning routine and was like “Let’s talk about this” because so many women I think listening, myself included, are, in the mornings especially, trying to get themselves ready, get kids ready, manage schedules and it can feel like chaos and you’re just like clawing your way through it and it’s just like survival mode but there are some benefits to creating some routine regardless, I know you were going to get into some elements of the routine that you would recommend but there is some science about benefits of routine, right? Makenzie: Yeah, I mean, it’s structure, right, so it’s like a repeatable behavior that we can kind of eventually do without necessarily thinking about it that gives us structure and flow, especially in the morning for setting the tone for the rest of your day. Annie: Gosh, that sounds familiar, Lauren, huh? Lauren: Yes. Annie: We talk about habits all the time and how especially as busy women our motivation and energy and time are just like commodities that are so precious to us and if you can get into the habit of doing things or routine of doing things you can hopefully find yourself in a position where you don’t have to exert large amounts of willpower and motivation and determination and effort to get the results you want to get throughout your day or throughout your lifestyle or your fitness or your food or whatever it is we’re talking about. Hopefully, the idea is that with some of your tips listeners can implement some of those elements to their morning and have a better day overall, right? Makenzie: I want to, like, I’m not a mom, I’m an auntie, a loving auntie. But I do want to acknowledge that I understand that this isn’t maybe something that can be implemented all at once or all together or consistently every day and so I actually met Jennifer in person. And then she was watching my stories where I was talking about this routine on Instagram and she was like “Listen, when I get up in the morning like a truck ran over the cereal bowl and I spill coffee everywhere and I have 3 kids and it’s not happening” and I was like, “OK, fair.” Lauren: It’s kind of like, “Well, what kind of routine can you have when you wake up to a child screaming at you every day?” and I do really like morning routines and I try my best but I just have to remind myself like a lot of times it doesn’t happen or doesn’t happen consistently like I would like it to and I have to remind myself that like this is a season of my life and it’s not going to be this way forever and so I just have to do my best and let that be OK and realize that I’m not going to probably get my morning routine every day until my kids are older and like there’s just, maybe you have some tips for me but it may just be, like, that’s how it has to be for now. Makenzie: Yeah and I honestly, I really like that aspect of looking at it through a non-judgemental lens, right? Because some people will be like, “Well, I should, I should, I should and-” Annie: Or if I can’t do this routine start to finish, perfectly, all day, every day, then I’m not going to do any of it and I’m guessing you would say, like, “Pick what you can do.” Makenzie: Pick what you can do. Pick what you can do and find space even if it’s throughout the day, even if you complete these, it’s 23 minutes total. So when I was talking to Jennifer I was like, “Involve your kids in the morning if you can for certain things, depending on the age, obviously.” Annie: Yeah, well, now, you know, like 23 minutes it’s like, “OK, let’s get going now, my interest is piqued even though I already, I already know what’s in your routine, I’ve looked it over but I’m sure our listeners are like “OK just tell us the routine.” Lauren: Just tell us what it is. Annie: Yes, so tell us the secret. OK. So what do you do? You wake up and what? Do what? Makenzie: Well, I wake up, I used to be, I’m not going to use the words good or bad but I use to just check my phone right away. And I’ve tried to not do that because in my world it just means I immediately have, like, a list of 10 things that I have to do and it takes away from doing this so I like to, what I say, set myself up for success so I know that first thing in the morning, the only thing I have to do is the morning routine and then I kind of continue on with my day. So this routine, I didn’t come up with but I love it, it’s science-based which I’m a super fan of if you can tell, I’m kind of a nerd in that way, so it’s based on the work of Shawn Achor and he’s a positive psychologist, he has like a really, really funny TED talk. Annie: I watched it this morning. We’ll have to link that in the show notes. He’s super entertaining. Lauren: Oh I want to watch it. I really like positive psychology. I took a class on it once. Makenzie: Yeah, it’s amazing and so for people that maybe haven’t heard of positive psychology before it’s, the focus is more on like future, it’s future-focused behavior as opposed to a lot of other types of psychology that can be very diagnostic and past focused. And it looks at kind of, instead of, and he talks about this in the TED talk, instead of looking at the average, he wants to look at those outliers, so those people are operating at like a higher level of either happiness or ability to learn or whatever, whatever the marker is, they actually look at the outliers- Annie: In hopes of moving everyone up with them. Makenzie: Exactly. Annie: Yeah, so it’s, like, you’re, what are you doing well that everyone else can do well also so we can all do well together? Makenzie: Yeah, exactly, so we could all do well, instead of what happens a lot in, like, data science is that they try and figure out what the average is doing within a margin of error so they can prove it or disprove it. Annie: Yeah and sharing is caring, right? So- Makenzie: Exactly. Yeah.  So what he found was that these 5 things and I’ll highlight the one specific thing, if you can only do this one thing then that’s the thing you should do but he found through his research that over 21 days it’ll change the wiring in your brain to make you happier, which is awesome, right? Annie: I’m in for that. Makenzie: Into that but what else he really, really drives home is that when we’re happy our brain operates at an up-level, so as opposed to negative neutral or stressed. So right now you might just be, you know, neutral which is better than being stressed but you aren’t able to think of creative solutions and your brain isn’t operating at a higher capacity like it does when it’s happy. OK, so the morning routine. So the first one is the thing if you can only, only do this one I suggest to people: write down, we’ve all heard this kind of before, but write down 3 things that you’re grateful for and get really specific with these things so thing, like I’m really grateful for my friends, is good but I’m really grateful for my friendship with Naomi because she always makes me laugh and so we see how much how much more specific that is, correct? Lauren: Right. Annie: Yeah. Makenzie: And so the benefit of doing this is that your brain, instead of noticing the negative things in the world first, it’ll train itself to focus on the positive. Annie: Which I really like that, because kind of circling back to the contrast of opening your phone the first thing that, I mean, that’s exactly what I do, I put on my glasses and I grab my phone from my nightstand, I unplug it and I’m opening up email, I’m checking Instagram and almost instantly I’m like, like, it’s just like this wave of, like, this cloud comes over me that’s like, “Oh my gosh, look at all this I have to do, look at all this I have to respond to and then here’s this chick, she looks like she’s just crushing it in the gym and her kids already ate this healthy breakfast and this girl already went for a run and I’m feeling like I’m just I’m already in catch up mode, before my feet even hit the ground I’m already like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to get going” and your suggestion is like don’t touch the phone, wake up and write down three things you’re grateful, three specific things you’re grateful for, so you start already, start focusing on the positive. Makenzie: On the positive. Lauren: I really like that part too because I think we know, I think we’ve talked about before, like, the more you can, you’ve got to create that neural pathway in your brain, right, where like when you think a certain way thoughts that are like that come easier to you, so like I always talk about it in in like, like, body image, right? Like you already have this, a lot of people have this negative thought process going and going and going and thinking like one time one nicer thought about your body, it’s going to feel really hard but the more that you do that the more you strengthen those thoughts. So yeah, I think that’s great and I just see a lot of parallels with a lot of different elements to that. Makenzie: And like this, if anything, if this is the only thing that you can do it still will improve your brain to be- Lauren: Yeah. Annie:  And that takes, what? I mean 3-5 minutes at the most, if that. I mean, some days might be a little bit easier, might be able to come a little bit easier than others, but I mean, that’s not a huge time investment. Makenzie: And I think it’s really interesting when you do it, especially for about 10 days, around the 10-day mark you’re like, well, I’ve already said all the things because at first, it’s like, “Yeah!” Lauren: Oh, right. Makenzie: You know what I mean? And then after you’re like, I’ll just plant. Lauren: Can I repeat? Makenzie: But so then it becomes, like, a really kind of, like, fun exercise to try and find things, you know? Lauren: Yeah. Annie: Yeah. And I just, on a really simple, like, way of, like, looking at it, it’s like, the more you pay attention to the stuff the more you tend to see it, it’s just like the power of suggestion or whatever, you know? Like someone or when you’re pregnant, like suddenly everyone’s pregnant it’s like, like when you start looking for good stuff, the more good stuff it just seems to naturally appear. Makenzie: And that’s what we want to focus on, especially right as you’re starting your day. Annie: I love it. K, cool what’s next? Makenzie: Next step is journaling about one positive experience that you’ve had in the last 24 hours. And so the science behind this is kind of that your brain is reliving that positive experience and your conscious brain can’t tell the difference between a memory and between reality and so we see this a lot in people that have post-traumatic stress disorder because they’re reliving a terrible event right and their brain doesn’t know if it’s real, if they’re in a threat or not and so we kind of want to capture that and flip it into reliving a positive experience interest. Annie: So how much do you have to journal or is that up to the individual, like, set a timer or just? Makenzie: Yeah, so I think it’s like the first one, so the gratitude write down 3 things is about 3 minutes, this one I do just about 2 minutes, so even if it’s like a cute older couple I saw when I was on my way to the ice cream store, you know, I’ll try and remember if it was raining outside, if there are any smells and you go through kind of all the senses. And it can be as small as you witnessing like a loving glance between a really cute older couple or something like that, so it doesn’t have to be a big thing that necessarily happens to you even, it could be your witnessing of an event but just reliving like a one of those warm and fuzzies, you know. Annie: OK, because I’m over here thinking about like this like Dear Diary journal entry. Like 4 pages in your best handwriting where your hand starts to cramp. Makenzie: I mean, you can. Annie: But like, don’t overthink it, like, it could be something that you witnessed. Makenzie: Don’t overthink it. Annie: Okay. Makenzie: And you want to be like an easy yes, right? So like an easy behavioral habit that you can create for yourself. Annie: Got it. I love it. Makenzie: The next piece is, so Shawn Achor says exercise for 15 minutes, I say move for 15 minutes, any type of movement because I feel like that feels less daunting. For me, like, when I’m going to work out it’s like for 45 minutes to an hour and it’s like a thing and I’ve put the clothes on and you know I’ve to go out and do it and that’s what feels like a lot in the morning for me to do. Annie: Are you a Tim Ferris fan at all? So have you seen him share his morning routine? I guess, I don’t know if he has, like, a cooler name for it but he’s, that’s what it is, he probably has of like cool marketing term for it. Makenzie: Probably, it’s probably like super optimized and super, yeah.   Annie: Like, be 10 times cooler in the morning with these 5 things. But he has something similar in there, he just says do 5 to 10 reps of something and he notes that getting into his body even if it’s just for 30 seconds affects his mood and I think he noted in this particular article that he just does like push-ups right now, like he does 10 push-ups and so, you know, maybe somewhere in between, you know, 10 pushups and 15 minutes or whatever you can give but just this idea that you’re like just getting into your body, you’re priming your body, so to speak, you’re embodying your body can get some endorphins going. Makenzie: Get the endorphins going and improves your, like, mind-body connection, which is such a real thing, like it affects your intuition, it allows you to listen to your body when you’re making decisions. And it’s teaching your brain that your actions matter. Annie: Yes. Makenzie: That’s kind of the link and that’s what we’re trying to get in the morning so it doesn’t have to be this daunting, you know, I’m training for a marathon or whatever it is, not that there’s anything wrong with that but I feel like for people that maybe have kids, this is a way that you can incorporate, depending on the age of your kids, like have a dance party for 15 minutes, like how great would that be, you know? For your little guys in the morning. Lauren: I think that would elevate everyone’s mood, right? Makenzie: Mhmm. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: For sure and it’s not, again, goes back to not a huge time investment. I think we meet a lot of women that are in a spot in their lives where they’re just saying no to exercise period because they can’t commit what they feel is worthy of an exercise routine, you know, like 45 minutes to a half hour, so it’s like, “I can’t do the whole thing so it’s just not good enough. I’m not going to do it at all. Kind of what we were talking about at the beginning with routines, like, I can’t do the whole routine so I’m not going to do any of it but this is, like, just 5 to 10 minutes, like, you know 15 minutes if you’ve got the time or whatever, but if you don’t have 15 minutes, like 5 minutes is better than nothing. Makenzie: Yeah, exactly and that’s, like, one song, like that’s how I kind of do my thing for the morning, I’m like, “OK, these are my 3 pumping up jams and that’s about 9 minutes or whatever it is, right? Annie: Yeah. Oh, I love that. Makenzie: I think it’s good too to just, like, notice where your things are that you want to work on so when you are talking about that it seems daunting to go work out 45 minutes, that’s me, like, I still have issues with consistent exercise because it seems like such a big deal by the time I, like, get sweaty and then I have to shower and so that’s why I do like this in the morning. Because it is easy. Annie: Yeah and you’re still getting benefits of moving your body. Makenzie: Yeah. Annie: Absolutely. Lauren: Can we go back to what you said before, you said, “It trains your brain that your actions matter” is that what you said? Makenzie: Yes. Lauren: Can you expand on what that means? Makenzie: So it goes back to that mind-body connection, right, so if you are noticing differences slowly over time and say your energy or in your ability to focus, your brain will be like, “OK this matters, it matters that I do this” and so an alternative examples of that is kind of and I still do this sometimes but someone said this to me and I don’t know where I read it or saw it that when you hit the snooze button, you’re essentially like lying to yourself first thing in the morning, like you’re teaching, right? And I love the snooze but you’re teaching your brain that you can change what matters in the morning right away and that’s how you’re starting your day and so someone said that and I was like “Oh my goodness. Wow.” So I was like, “OK, I don’t want to lie to myself first thing in the morning. But so this is kind of the reverse of that, that even if it’s, so it’s a dance party or it’s a quick 15 minute walk with your dogs or the push up thing, those small things even will teach your brain that what you’re doing is important because you’ll feel the energy, you’ll feel the increased endorphins, you’ll see the ability to focus and your brain will connect that to your body. Lauren: Gotcha so like you’ll want to do it. OK. Annie: Those become the part of the positive reward that follows the movement, in habit speak, yes. Awesome. OK, So, so far we’ve got, just to recap real quick, we have gratitude: writing down 3 things that you’re grateful for, then a little journaling reliving a positive experience and then exercise, 10 to 15 minutes, move your body whether it’s like dance party, a yoga, some squats, some pushups, a walk with the dogs, a run, whatever it is. Makenzie: Whatever it is. Annie: And then what’s next? Makenzie: So this one is both a buzzword right now or maybe for a little while but it’s meditation and I first found this like really daunting and I expected to be sitting in like, you know, typical yoga pose and like become enlightened real quick and the best description I found for meditation is, because I thought you were supposed to clear your mind, right, I thought that was the purpose and you are, but it’s focusing on your breath which is the key point number one and then letting your thoughts pass through without judgment and so I think that’s something that isn’t necessarily always taught in meditation classes that I’ve taken or certain apps that you can just download without any kind of background but my meditation teacher was, she said that and she was like “We’re just noticing that you’re really wanting coffee” and then you let it pass and then you go back to focusing on your breath. And so we’re only going to do this for 2 minutes in the morning. So 2 minutes breathing in, breathing out. Some people are really visual, so what I found super helpful is to breathe in and imagine you’re breathing in the color blue through your nose and then you’re breathing out the color red. And that like allows me to actually focus and do it. My thoughts will still come in but then I always, you just always kind of come back to the breath. Annie: I wonder how many people are breathing in blue and flowing out red right now because I’m pretty sure I was and I really, like, I really, I can picture that like- Makenzie: Yeah. Annie: And there’s I don’t know if this was intentional but the color association with, like, blue is, like, invigorating and light and airy and like, positive and red feels a little bit heavier and I don’t want to say bad but like negative. Makenzie: No. Right. Annie: So to breathe in the good stuff and exhale. Makenzie: Exhale yeah. I see that red stuff as like “I’m a dragon, like, power!” Annie: Oh I kind of like that too. But and I love that you say, like, 2 minutes, start there. Lauren: I was going to say is there a reason behind, like, the order and the time frames because I have recently gotten into meditation and I’m trying to be consistent and I’m not super consistent right now but I’m working on it and I know that I always try to do at least 10 minutes and I don’t know why, I just think I should do at least 10 minutes for some reason. Makenzie: I think that I’m sure there’s probably, like, research out there that shows like optimal whatever but I think there’s, like, certain people like Sting, I think he meditates for like 8 hours a day or something. Just like I don’t know what else he does. But I think, for me, there’s no way I could do 10 minutes. Which maybe says something about the where my brain is at focus-wise. So I don’t, I don’t really know how to answer that, I’m sure there is something out there, maybe I can do a little poking around. Lauren: I’ll look into it. Makenzie: But the idea is, you know, we come from such a society or culture where multitasking was like champions for so long. And I feel like it was, like, I always say that it was such a nineties thing that you’d write on your resume or likely early 2000 you know the “ability to multitask” whereas now you would write like “can stay focused on one thing.” Annie:  Well and I think just in mommy culture that high productivity and multitasking is still very much, like, you know, I can cook dinner, I can have a baby on my hip, I can be listening to a podcast and texting with a girlfriend and change a diaper all at one time, you know, like, and that is just the reality of our lives but being able to really turn inward and focus on what your thoughts are, what your breath is and just having that moment where you’re just doing like just one thing. Makenzie: Just one thing, yeah. Annie: Just one thing can be really good too. Awesome. OK. So is there just one thing left on the morning routine? I feel like all this is like way more doable than I imagined. Makenzie: Right? It’s less scary. Annie: Yeah. Makenzie: So the last thing is acts of kindness. And there are acts of kindness like everyone sort of random acts of kindness where you buy coffee for the guy behind you in Starbucks but I like to keep it super simple. And so this idea is you can either write a positive text message or just someone a quick email thanking them or saying how proud you are of them for XYZ which I really like and this is what they kind of talk about in that TED talk. But what I found is if you do this for longer than 21 days and I have a pretty good circle, I have a pretty decent network, but when you run out of people that you feel comfortable being like “Hey, I really appreciate you and whatever”, just that quick little message. So I like to flip that into conscious acts of kindness, not random acts of kindness, it can be but it’s also just being aware that you’re doing something kind so if you’re holding the door open for someone you could think about it as “Yeah, whatever, like I know I learned my manners” or you could consciously think of that as an act of kindness. Annie: I love this. Of course, when you said buying people coffee in Starbucks I swear I’m always the person that gets their coffee paid for and then feels obligated to pay for the coffee behind and they’ve always had like a $20.00 tab. But I do think, like, just a simple text message, it could be a really great place to start, again, low on the time investment piece so if you’re cramped for time in the morning and it already feels chaotic, it doesn’t take a lot of time but what’s the reason behind that? Is there, does that, I mean, selfishly what does it do for me to send a note to someone, I mean, I can imagine, it makes the other person feel warm and fuzzy but- Makenzie: Right, well, it’s kind of putting the acts of gratitude and the movement and or exercise we do into an exercise, so it’s combining the two things and doing something that someone would be grateful for, so it’s again, creating action out of some of the other things that we tackled in the first four steps of the routine. Annie: And so I think, Lauren, maybe you started to ask about this. Is there a reason behind the order of this or can you mix and match? Makenzie: You know what? I’m fully for mix and matching. Annie: OK. Makenzie: I think that the first one, the three things that you’re grateful for, that has had the most research behind it to show an improved mood so if that’s what you’re going for, then, which I think everybody, if you asked them, like, “Would you want to be happier?” They would say, “Yeah. Of course.” Who would turn that down? So I don’t think the order necessarily matters and some people really notice that the movement for 15 minutes makes their day better so they end up just doing that. Some people know that the meditation is what they need and so they just focus on that, so like best case scenario, we can do all five of these things. I don’t do all five of these things. I try to. I try to get as many in as I can. Annie: When I was, back to Tim Ferriss, when I was reading his little article about it, he, I think he had a really great perspective, he had, I think, five or six elements to his morning routine as well and he said “I’m shooting for 2, 3, maybe 4 and if I can do some of this most of the days, I know that I am starting the day off on a good note and if I don’t get all five it’s not failure, it’s just, like, I didn’t, you know, like it’s kind of just like a point, like I’m just trying to check off a couple, you know? Makenzie: Yeah, I love that. Annie: Yeah, which takes the pressure off, like, again, going back to that all or nothing mindset like I can’t do the whole checklist then I’m not going to do any of it, like what do you have time for? Makenzie: Right, what do you have time for and what did you find to work for you? So say you could do all five for a week but then you’re like, “You know what? I really like the acts of kindness and the exercise.” Annie: Yes, so when you started this, Makenzie, did you do it all all at once or did you start with just one thing? Makenzie: I went gangbusters and I did all five for 60 days. Annie: What was your experience after 60 days? Makenzie: That I realized how many barriers came up for me, so thinking of 3 things to be grateful for 60 days, I was like “Ugh. Am I ungrateful because I can’t think of something new?” you know and then you can spiral into this mindset that I could easily make excuses so it wouldn’t always be first thing in the morning. But I would still be proud of myself that I got it done and so what I did was I had just a square that had 60 boxes and Seinfeld did this, so he called it the chain or the link something like that and he would X off on a calendar, I think it’s the chain, how he would write every day and his goal was to never break that chain, right? And so I feel like for building a habit that you really want to create having something visual like that where it almost feels like you’re getting a gold star is, it’s helpful but since then, I don’t do all of them every day. Annie: Yeah, it was just kind of you were running a test on yourself. Yeah, we have something similar in our  Balance365 program, we have habit trackers because that visual representation, like just marking it off- Lauren: Just checking it off- Annie: Can be really, really rewarding, like “I did the thing!” Makenzie: I did the thing. Annie: I did the thing that I said I was going to do and I’m going to check it off and that checking it off feels so dang good. Makenzie: It does and like, lists, like, to do lists are real. You get endorphins. It’s the same. Your brain spikes when you’re able to check things off. Annie: Yes, here’s mine, and I like to make little boxes, Makenzie, you’re on here and I love to check off the, like, gosh, that, there’s nothing feels better than checking off those boxes or crossing that list off, like sometimes I put things on there that I’ve already done just so I can cross them off. Makenzie: Totally, I posted about this on Instagram the other day. Annie: Did you? Makenzie: I called it the Ta-da List. Annie: Yes I saw that. Oh my gosh. I love that we need to reshare that because I remember reading that, now that you said that, and it was you said “Write all the things that you have done and now it’s called the ta-da list” and I was like “Ta da! I did this!” Makenzie: And you feel so accomplished. Annie: Oh yes and that feels good and really, speaking about, in the context of routines, doing something just really small and starting your day off, like, “Look, I said I was going to do this thing and I already did this thing” and it can just snowball, like “OK, look, I already did this one thing, I can do this other thing” and I think, like, for me that’s making my bed, that’s just part of my morning routine, like it, I cannot go in and out of my room without that like distraction, like, it’s just like a visual distraction to me so if I just make my bed and it’s like, “OK, see, look like everything just”- Makenzie: Can’t crawl in now. Annie: Yeah, I mean I can lay on top of it. Pull the covers over it. Yeah but I think again, just to echo, you have some really great elements in your morning routine, just to recap really quickly one more time. You start off with gratitude, making a list of things that you’re thankful for, being as specific as possible. Spend a few minutes journaling, reliving a positive experience throughout your day. Exercise 10 to 15 minutes, just move your body in a way that feels good to you, then start, do some meditation, focusing on your breath, your thoughts without judgment, even as little as two minutes is good enough and then acts of kindness, was there a number? Did you prescribe a number or was it just? Makenzie: For acts of kindness? Annie: Yeah. Makenzie: I mean, I think that can be like a two-minute thing. Yeah. Annie: Cool. Makenzie: So it’s basically the 15 minutes of movement is the bigger one and the rest are like two to five minutes.   Annie: And so you said, in total, this takes you about 23 minutes. Makenzie: 23 minutes. Annie: To be exact. Start to finish. Makenzie: Yes. Annie: And again, if you’re a woman in a position where you already feel like your routine or your mornings are just chaotic, don’t feel like you have to add all this in at once, you can, like Makenzie did, or you can incorporate your family in on it, maybe your family discusses acts of kindness or maybe you do the, you know, I’m just spitballing here, maybe you do the journaling, you’re reliving the positive experience as a family or as, you know, like- Makenzie: I mean, get ideas from each other, like make it a group thing. Annie: Yeah. Yeah. And so you, but you know, the other elements, really, as you said they’re small time investments but research has shown that they can have the power to rewire your brain to a more positive state of mind and as you said at the beginning, when you’re in a more positive state of mind, you can fire on all cylinders a lot more efficiently, like you can, you’re just, you’re more better at problem solving, you’re, I can’t even remember all the things that you listed and then that Professor listed as well in that TED talk, which again, we’ll link but- Makenzie: It’s wild and that’s why I do really recommend, like, that I get my clients all do this routine. And they, you know, it’s like part of their first piece of homework is to implement this routine because I do believe it works because one, I’ve tried it but also because the research shows that it works so there’s a lot of information out there right and so that’s kind of how I operate in just because of my background, I think, in psych but how I seek to put the best information in front of my clients or out there is just to see what has been proven to work. Annie:  Yeah and you know what else comes to mind, Lauren, is when we were in San Francisco a mentor of ours gave us the 5-minute Journal. Do you remember that? And I think it kind of combined the gratitude, I started off. Yes, there it is, you have it and that combines a couple of the elements in there for you and it just kind of lays it out and it has AM and PM, right. Lauren: Yep. Annie: It’s clearly been a while since I did, I did start it but- Lauren: Same. Annie: You know, what I’m really honestly really excited about is I’ve already decided I’ve already I’m committed to not picking up my phone, not turning on my phone until the kids or I get my kids dropped off at school because I know, I can feel it overwhelming me in the morning. Lauren: Oh, that’s good. I might join you in that, so I’ve been wanting to put my phone on airplane mode when I sleep and then leave it like that and then I’m always worried like, what if something happens and people can’t reach me so I have to like deal with that- Makenzie: That anxiety, yeah. And that anxiety’s real. Like, I before I lived here I lived on the Island, Vancouver Island, and where I lived I got American cell reception so I didn’t get cell reception unless my roaming was on and my power went out so I had no Internet and I had no cell reception and I was just like “Huh.” You know, it was like such a weird experience to be like fully unplugged and like, kind of forced into it. I was like a 30 minute drive to the nearest town. And so it was a really cool, like almost forced experiment to like sit with how that made me feel and then realize, “I’m very anxious and do I want to feel like I’m attached to my phone?” and that was the catalyst for me. Lauren: I think the new iPhone update that I just got has like a, why are you shaking your head? Annie: Because I know what you’re going to say and I don’t like it. Lauren: You don’t like it? Annie: No, but go ahead. It’s why I haven’t updated my- Lauren: it has like a screen time thing but what it does is you can set screen-free hours so like you can set the hours where like all your apps won’t work and the only thing that works is like text messaging and phone calls and I think I might try that. Annie: I just really like- Lauren: You can override it, though. Annie: OK, that’s what I would do all the time. Lauren: Yeah, I know. I’ve done that. Annie: All the time. I really do like the idea, though, of just, I think that’s a super simple change that I could make tomorrow. Is starting my day off in a more like proactive positive mindset, instead of being so reactive and I don’t remember where I was reading this but they were just speaking about how, you know, a lot of times we have this like urgency or anxiety about responding to emails right away or whatever and oftentimes it’s like a reaction to other people’s procrastination, it’s like, you know, they decided not to email until this time and now you feel obligated and it just sets off this whole like a domino effect where you feel like you’re just, like, “I’ve got to do all this right now” versus “OK, I’m just, like, I’m cool, I know I’ve got my stuff together and I’m just going to open my phone up when I’m ready to process all of it” versus process it and then like “Oh now, I’m going to start my day with you know” Lauren: Just make sure you respond to my Slack messages, OK? I’m kidding. Annie: You’ll probably just text me or call me if I don’t respond. That’s me, I joke that I’m Team No Chill so if I don’t get a response right away, you can rest assured that I will be trying to connect with you via Instagram D.M., Facebook Messenger, text message, phone call, FaceTime. Anyways, OK, Makenzie, this was so wonderful. I, you know, I think when we think of morning routines, we do think of things like “OK, we’re going to get dressed, we’re going to brush our teeth, we’re going to make our bed, we’re going to pack our lunch,” you know, that sort of stuff and this was on a much deeper level than that. Makenzie: I’m all about that. Let’s go deep! Lauren: I really appreciate that it was quick too, like, I think of morning routines, I think of, like, you need to journal 10 pages and that just like a hard pass for me but this seems doable, for sure. Annie: Yeah. Lauren: Even if I can’t do it all all the time because I do have a 4-year-old and a one-year-old and- Makenzie: Right. Lauren: They don’t always sleep until even six. Makenzie: And I’m fully aware that like, Moms, you need your sleep, so I’m not in any way suggesting that but if you can incorporate the kids or you know, when they’re dropped off at the school then you dive into this stuff, I think it’ll, you know, I got shivers when you were talking about like maybe incorporating the kids to do that because just imagine how they’re going to walk through the world now, being grateful for things in the morning and if you start them doing that at like age 7, just imagine what they’ll grow up to be like, you know? Annie: Yeah, Lauren: Yeah. Annie: I love it and so, you know, the big takeaway is make it work for you, like these were all really good ideas and suggestions and again, make it work for you and if you want to continue the discussion on morning routines and you aren’t already a part of our free Facebook group of Healthy Habits Happy Moms please do that because I think our community is, I know our community is going to have some really great additional ideas on elements to include or how they’ve made this their own or how they made it work for them so thank you so much. This was so much fun. I enjoyed it, we will have to have you back again soon but maybe we can discuss like murder mysteries. I feel like that would really go well with Balance365 Life Radio slash Murder Mysteries. Lauren: Yes. It’s an obvious pairing. Annie: Clearly. No brainer. OK, thank you, Makenzie, we’ll talk to you later.   The post Episode 48: Getting In The Habit Of A Morning Routine appeared first on Balance365.