Podcasts about lauren you

Ralph and Lauren sit down with Chris Martinez—founder of Bloom Partners and architect behind Agency Freedom Live—to expose what's really wrong with the digital marketing agency space. With over a decade of experience, Chris shares hard-earned lessons on how bloated promises, shallow metrics, and lack of accountability are destroying agency reputations. If you're tired of BS and ready to scale your agency the right way—with real metrics and leadership that delivers—this episode is your roadmap. Discover how to stand out in a sea of scammers, earn client trust, and transform chaos into clarity.Chapters:00:00:00 – Kicking Off with Ralph & Lauren: You're Not Gonna Want to Miss This One00:01:17 – Meet Chris Martinez: The Agency Leader Disrupting the Status Quo00:01:51 – Why Most Agencies Are Broken (And What Needs to Change Now)00:06:12 – The Numbers That Actually Matter If You Want to Scale Profitably00:11:58 – How to Stop Wearing Every Hat and Build a Real Team00:13:46 – Losing Clients? Here's What That Really Says About Your Agency00:17:57 – When Emotions Hijack Business: How to Lead with Data and Discipline00:18:48 – The Brutal Truth About Underperformers on Your Team00:20:24 – Don't Skip This: The Power of Job Clarity and Measurable KPIs00:21:12 – Want Accountability? It Starts at the Top (Yes, That Means You)00:24:02 – Your Clients Aren't Off the Hook: How to Hold Them Accountable Too00:26:39 – How to Audit Your Business and Set Profit-Driven Goals00:30:27 – Limited-Time Offer: How to Get Exclusive Access to Agency Freedom Live00:33:42 – Final Mic Drop: What It Really Takes to Build a Scalable, Respected AgencyLINKS AND RESOURCES:Agency Freedom LiveCALLING ALL 7-Figure MARKETING AGENCY OWNERS...BLOOMGet Your nCAC Calculator Now!Tier 11 JobsPerpetual Traffic on YouTubeTiereleven.comMongoose MediaPerpetual Traffic SurveyPerpetual Traffic WebsiteFollow Perpetual Traffic on TwitterConnect with Lauren on Instagram and Connect with Ralph on LinkedInThanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic? Have some feedback you'd like to share? Connect with us on iTunes and leave us a review!

Are you tired of feeling like you're on autopilot, just going through the motions? It's time to rediscover your spark and awaken to the life you're meant to live. In this episode, you'll learn how to: Shed societal expectations and embrace your individuality. Overcome self-doubt and tap into your inner power. Break free from people-pleasing and prioritize your own needs. Find quiet moments for self-reflection and hear your inner voice. Take daily actions toward fulfilling your true purpose. If you're ready to ditch the worry of what others think and reveal your authentic self, this episode is your guide. Embrace the balanced life of joy and purpose that awaits you! Key Takeaways: "When you aren't your authentic self, you deprive yourself and the world of your true gifts." - Lauren "Authenticity is the key to deeper connections." - Lauren "You'll find answers when you allow yourself moments of stillness." -Lauren Don't miss this opportunity to ignite your authentic self and design the life you've always wanted!   In this episode: (1:00) – The cost of keeping the real you stuck.  (1:06) – Why authenticity matters.  (1:30) – Living a life of duality. (3:01) – It's okay to reveal your secrets and why.  (3:30) – The exhaustion of duality  (4:14) – The people you don't want around you.  (5:15) – Limiting beliefs that prevent authenticity.  (6:03) – The signs you are losing connection with your true self.  (7:00) – Who brings you joy? (7:53) – Stress is a sign of this. (8:44) – Do this when you have a good idea.  (9:17) – The value of mindfulness meditation.  (10:01) – The things to notice as you reconnect with yourself.  (10:27) – Being careful about what you say yes and no to.  (11:23) – Your limiting beliefs and how they impact your life.  (12:02) – Limiting beliefs that are rooted in fear.  (12:39) – Ways to work yourself out of the “can't do” mindset.  (14:00) – Getting rid of your limiting beliefs (getting them out of your body).  (14:27) – Ask this question to get to your authentic self.  (15:49) – Being authentic helps you vibrate at your highest frequency.    Resources and Links  52 Weeks of Hope https://www.52weeksofhope.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-abrams-83b8b421/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyLA7Rb6E0PtKBhPGu1vcjA https://www.facebook.com/52weeksofhope/ https://www.instagram.com/52weeksofhope/ https://twitter.com/52weeksofhope Get your FREE Confidence and Clarity Growth Scorecard

“As we've matured, as our business has matured, so has our mission,” Priscilla notes, one of the many takeaways gleaned from a recent deep-think strategy session at Forward Female. Using the power of the pause, she and Lauren took time out to realign themselves with the business's vision–which is distinct from its mission as they explain on today's episode—remembering the why, as well as establishing new goals and targets. At Forward Female the mission has evolved from wanting to help more women start and grow successful businesses to helping to create more equity for women so that there can be equality for them in business.   Here they share prompts, questions, and advice you can use to refine your own business strategy. It's an ongoing process and requires constant checking in–zooming in on the day-to-day aspects and panning out to see the bigger picture. You must be radically honest about what works and what doesn't work. Get ready to leave your ego at the door.    Entrepreneurship is a journey, not a destination. Grab your pen and paper as they share prompts, questions and advice for refining your own business strategy and plan your next big move!    Quotes “The ‘how' is saying, ‘Okay, what am I providing now? Is that going to be the best solution to help me achieve that?...this is what doesn't work and I know maybe this one thing that I've been doing does really work. And I optimize that and what could be some things that I could add into my ‘how,' to my action in order to achieve that?” (8:59 | Priscilla) “You have to be realistic with yourself…It's being really real with yourself through these strategy sessions, and leaving your ego at the door.” (13:32 | Lauren)  “You can't keep setting these new big goals without sitting down and really thinking through it.” (15:45 | Priscilla) “Understanding that your vision, your mission, the actions and all of that, the reason why it's broken down so much is because it is a journey…It's not this big, ‘aha' moment, ‘I made it!' and it's over. There are all of these moments. And guess what? You can start to have that moment today.” (17:32 | Priscilla) Links Instagram: @forwardfemale @hernextbigmove Website: Forward Female Website Join Community: https://theforwardfemale.mn.co/ Schedule Consultation:  https://calendly.com/the-forward-female/discovery-call HoneyBook: http://share.honeybook.com/forwardfemale Email Us: hello@forwardfemale.com   Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

“Our relationship has to be strong in order for the company to be strong, because we are part of that foundation,” Priscilla explains on this latest episode of Her Next Big Move. In fact, many of the same building blocks that form a strong friendship or romantic relationship–appreciation, making the other person feel seen and heard, and authenticity–build a strong work team and ultimately a strong and positive company culture. Like friends, team members should be encouraging open, two-way communication, encouraging each other's wins and offering help when someone is struggling.   This starts from the top down, by showing people kindness and respect–including for their non-work personal lives– you make your business a place where people want to work. Priscilla and Lauren discuss what it was like building Forward Female from the ground up, starting as strangers and forming a relationship that is not unlike a marriage. In any relationship, no one person should be expected to fulfill every need and they give advice on the best way to delegate so that everyone wins.    In the same way you wouldn't let just anyone into your life, when building a team, you have to be mindful of whom you let into your business from the very first interview question. Lauren and Priscilla discuss their ultimate red and green flags to look out for when hiring someone, as well as the questions you can ask yourself to effectively take stock of your personal and professional progress.    Quotes “Nowadays everyone wants to be seen and heard and get their point across but if you can really hold space and listen, that is such a powerful tool. And that's how you build really solid friendships, because that's what builds up the trust.” (4:45 | Lauren) “There are a lot of similarities between friendships, relationships, and even growing a team and who you bring on to your company. And as you grow, whether that's an initial business partner, or just growing your team in general, there are a lot of those same attributes that carry through.” (6:27 | Lauren)  “You and I have both been really thoughtful and intentional about this, as we've grown our company. We've seen the other side, we've been on the other side of knowing what it's like…So, it's setting those boundaries on both sides and being really clear with expectations and with your communication within the team, too. That's a big one.” (18:53 | Lauren) “Really trust that the team is doing their jobs…and support them every step of the way to where you can say, ‘How can I support you?...That is your job as a business owner, especially as you're growing a team, and should be your number one priority.” (21:10 | Priscilla)  “A great piece of advice: Do the follow up email. The people that follow up are typically the only people I look at…If you do that, I promise, you are 20 steps ahead of most people in life.” (32:01 | Priscilla) Links Instagram: @forwardfemale @hernextbigmove Website: www.forwardfemale.com Join Community: https://theforwardfemale.mn.co/ Schedule Consultation: https://calendly.com/the-forward-female/discovery-call HoneyBook: http://share.honeybook.com/forwardfemale Email Us: hello@forwardfemale.com Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Full Course is a restaurant development and investment firm that incubates and accelerates emerging fast casual restaurant brands, focusing on restaurants less than five years old with 1-10 locations. Full Course has a special focus on businesses run by women, minorities and immigrants. Cleanliness and creating an appealing dining environment is important. Restaurant owners need to make scheduled cleanings – including annual deep cleanings – a priority. Full Course works with designers to help restaurants improve their appearance and atmosphere. They create dining environments that speak to the brand's story, purpose and mission while avoiding some of the unnecessary costs associated with creating custom materials. Full Course realizes that one of the benefits of fast casual dining is that it's fairly recession proof. Consumers may cut corners on higher end dining during a recession, but fast casual dining is usually always within a consumer's budget. Each Full Course client goes through an initial assessment that analyzes the restaurant's finances, staff and leadership, marketing strategies and points of differentiation to find opportunities for Full Course to add value. Quotes “One of my favorite restaurant hacks is when you walk in and you just watch. You watch what the managers do. We all know how to do it by the book, but really great managers are proactive at putting systems in place where there may be a gap.” (Lauren) “The best ideas come from doing, especially in the world of restaurants.” (Lauren) “You can tell how well a place is managed if you just look up at the vents. I don't know how many times I've looked up at the vents and said, ‘Guys, that's so gross.'” (Joseph) “We eat with our eyes first and when you walk into a restaurant and it looks like it's in disrepair, that matters. Those details matter. It shows a letter of care and concern about the environment and a way that you're creating an experience for customers.” (Lauren) “We're very attuned to efficient spending when we're building out these units. We spend a lot of time and energy designing these restaurants so that they communicate the values of the brand but in an efficient and effective manner.” (Lauren) “People will cut spending in a lot of places, but food isn't one of them. We all need that moment of community. We need that moment to go out and get a break from being at home.” (Lauren) “Our staples in the American diet are delicious, but we don't need another burrito. We don't need another hamburger. What we need is something fresh and something that is bringing something different to the market.” (Joseph) Transcript 00:00.00 vigorbranding Everyone today I'm joined by my friend Lauren Fernandez she is the Ceo and founder of full course which we are going to unfurl fully in this episode Lauren wont we start by you saying hello and giving a little bit of backstory. 00:11.92 Lauren Fernandez Yeah hi I'm Lauren ah former attorney turned restaurant owner turned restaurant investor and developer and I started full course a little over two years ago it's been about a 10 year dream of mine to work with. Earlyage restaurant brands and they're really in their emerging years. Um, when they're anywhere between one and five years old and somewhere between 1 and 5 units and that is exactly what full course does so we are a fullservice solution for early stage. Fast casual restaurant concepts you can be anywhere from one to None units. We'd love to talk to you. We have a private equity fund that we use to back our investment in these brands. But we're a little bit different in our approach. We take a minority investment stake. We leave our restaurant partners in charge of operations and in control of the business while we focus on deploying the capital to our growth plan that we develop with you with our development team. So we invest in folks for about 5 years and it's a pretty different and unique appro

MaryBeth Hyland overcame the trauma of child abuse and a clinically diagnosed work addiction to find purpose in her work as a meditation teacher, coach and workplace culture expert. She builds bridges for people to move from out-of-touch to in-the-flow. This episode is for you if: -You love energetic, fast talkers (like MaryBeth and Lauren)-You're a little unsure about the spiritual stuff-You're pretty grounded in your corporate career, but somewhat unfulfilled-You identify with overcoming abuse or perfectionism What's in this episode? MaryBeth hits every note with this episode. She starts at the ground level to introduce spirituality to even the most obstinate observer, using wellbeing as the gateway. She teaches people to listen to their bodies, first, before ever introducing the idea of intuition. She's also very open about her own misgivings about the path until she found herself on it. MaryBeth speaks in detail about her abusive father and her constant work to overcome perfectionism. Both things have informed her work to teach mindfulness and meditation. She gives people permission to be human in the most freeing way. She's constantly going into workplaces to help companies change their culture, so MaryBeth talks at length about the feedback she's getting about what people need right now: authenticity and connection.

Summary: In the third episode of season 8 of The Propcast, Louisa is chatting to Mallorie Brodie CEO & Co-Founder and Lauren Lake COO & Co-Founder of Canadian-based construction technology company, Bridgit about Women in ConTech. They talk about the growth of the ConTech market, how Bridgit have secured investment from some of the leading VC's and won over some major contractors. You'll hear about how a huge part of their software focuses on people and how they have scaled their team during the war on talent which is a problem that many founders are facing. Companies Mentioned:  Bridgit Local Logic Agora  Autodesk BDCs Capital Women  Camber Creek Storm Ventures  McKinsey  Skanska Ryan Companies  Toric Resources:  LMRE Global Recruitment and Search Consultancy LMRE YouTube Interviews Shout Outs: Amy Abascal, VP of Marketing for Bridgit Courtney Cooper, Principal at Alate Partner Julian Brockhurst, Venture Capital at VentureCrowd | Director at Proptech BNE Michael Beckerman, CEO, CREtech and CREtech Climate Ben Lerner, MRI Qube Global Software Jason Fitzpatrick, Senior Vice President Of Sales at Bridgit Thiago Da Costa, Co-Founder & CEO at Toric Key Insights From This Episode:  The war on talent and is a problem most founders are facing, and I'm sure that many entrepreneurs are experiencing the same pain. - Louisa  We found the problem before creating the solution, which we found was different to how a lot of tech companies start. - Lauren  You don't solve the pain point and then stop developing the software and just continue marketing into the industry. We are making improvements and learning from our customers every single week. There is no end to continuing to innovate at Bridgit. - Mallorie ConTech market investment has doubled in the last decade and it's accelerated, far beyond the pace of growth of just the venture capital. - Mallorie The other thing we've seen is just a ton of consolidation in the markets. Not all of that capital is going into seeding new companies. Some of the larger companies out there are seeing all of the innovation within the small and midsize companies and there has been a ton of acquisitions. - Mallorie At the beginning, we certainly found it challenging to raise capital early on in the business... Over time what we were able to do is start to prove our efforts more in the actual metrics and numbers of the business. And that makes the conversation much easier. - Lauren  You have two female founders... I think looking into DEI is extremely important for the growth of a tech business. - Lousia We were females in construction technology really didn't make a selection of two male dominated industries. - Mallorie Companies felt heard. They get to actually give their input into how the product is being developed. And so, through that process, we're also figuring out, which of these companies would actually want to use the product once it's developed. - Lauren  People make the assumption that if they don't have a technical background, they can't work in tech. - Lauren Keywords: Construction, Technology, Women, ConTech About Our Guests: Mallorie Brodie https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallorie-brodie-b3885827/  Mallorie Brodie, CEO and Co-Founder of Canadian-based construction technology company Bridgit. She has almost 10 years of entrepreneurial experience and holds various entrepreneurial awards, including receiving the top prize at Google Demo Day, being named Techvibes Entrepreneur of the Year, being named to the Forbes Manufacturing & Industry 30 Under 30, being named to the Best Of Canada Forbes Under 30 Innovators list, and being named to the Top 40 Under 40 in Canadian Construction list. Since opening Bridgit, herself and Lauren have established Bridgit Bench, our flagship product, as the leading workforce intelligence solution in construction today. Bridgit Bench is now used by over 100 leading general contractors across North America like Rogers-O'Brien, DeAngelis Diamond, Ryan Companies, Alberici, and more. Lauren Lake https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-lake/  Lauren Lake is the COO and co-founder of Canadian-based construction technology company Bridgit. With a degree in Civil Structural Engineering from Western University, With her guidance and expertise in the AEC industry, Lauren has helped establish Bridgit Bench, the company's flagship product, as the leading workforce intelligence solution in construction today. Lauren has been named in the TechWeek 100, Forbes Manufacturing & Industry 30 Under 30, and Best Of Canada Forbes Under 30 Innovators lists. Her true source of pride comes from helping over 100 contractors across North America get the most out of their workforce. About Our Host Louisa Dickins https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisa-dickins-ab065392/?originalSubdomain=uk Louisa started her career in property working at a well-known estate agency in London. Realising her people skills, she moved over to Lloyd May to pursue a career in recruitment. She now is a Director at LMRE, who are a specialist recruitment firm driven by PropTech and recruitment professionals, and Louisa oversees their 5 core areas. Louisa co-founded LMRE and provides a constructive recruitment platform to the new disruptors in real estate. Louisa is also on the board of Directors at UK PropTech Association (UKPA). About LMRE www.lmre.tech LMRE believe there is a better way to recruit. LMRE focus on a more comprehensive, client led focus delivering exceptional talent to the place at the time. They are passionate about the industry and passionate about people's careers. LMRE spend time with each client to become and an extension of the business, and their transparency and core values help them grow with the sector. LMRE simplify recruitment and innovate with our clients and evolve the people driven, PropTech community. Timestamps: [02:30] Talk us through founding Bridgit and the product. You founded it back it in 2014 in the Tech Hub, Waterloo, Canada.  We met through an entrepreneurship program. Lauren was studying civil engineering and Mallorie had been studying business. We also both had family in the industry.  Lauren had some of that first-hand experience from her time on site, how little technology there was, everything was pen and paper back then. We found was people really liked having the opportunity to open up and share their challenges. We found the problem before creating the solution which we found was different to how a lot of tech companies start Through our research and talking with the largest general contractors in the U.S, we learned about the strategic challenges they were having around the labour shortage in general, and just managing their people and really trying to put the best project teams forward. And we set out to create our second product, Bridgit Bench. [08:00] Last year you raised $23 million and you are backed by some big names like Autodesk, BDCs Capital Women and Technology Venture Fund, what are the plans? Is it further growth across the states?  We brought on Camber Creek and Storm Ventures to co-lead the round. Camber brings the deep contraction and property tech expertise and Storm has the B2B enterprise SaaS experience so them joining the board and coming on as investors has been very helpful in the last 6 months.  The key to our overall product development process is that it's very repeatable because we know how to go and do the research, find the pain points and actually launch a product or a module or a feature to solve for those pain points. Selling to mean general contractors right now, our primary user, and really excited to just get more and more contractors onboard the platform over the next year. We're definitely looking at adding new product nodules and also looking at international markets like the UK and Australia.  [10:10] Tell us a bit more about the ConTech market in terms of investment. It's the era that's received the most amount of investment in 2021 and set to be bigger in 2022. What have you seen since founding Bridgit back in 2014?  ConTech market investment has doubled in the last decade and its accelerated, far beyond the pace of growth of just the venture capital.  The other thing we've seen is just a ton of consolidation in the markets. Not all of that capital is going into seeding new companies. Some of the larger companies out there are seeing all of the innovation within the small and midsize companies, and there has been a ton of acquisitions. We've just seen a dramatic shift since when we started the company. The appetite and need for technology now, it feels like we're just at the beginning.  We've started to see solutions where the data is being collected. And now over the next number of years, I think we're going to see some really interesting opportunities around how that data can be put to use.  [13:00] The statistics say it's harder to raise as a female founder. How did you find it? Are there any tips?  At the beginning, we certainly found it challenging to raise capital early on in the business. At that point, you're really just pitching your vision and you're pitching yourselves as founders. And at that point that was much more difficult of a sell.  Over time what we were able to do is start to prove our efforts more in the actual metrics and numbers of the business. And that makes the conversation much easier. And that was just because of the momentum and the product market fit that we were able to show. And just proving that through all of the growth that we have. [15:30] You're fast-growing tech business. How have you gone about recruiting from a diverse talent pool? What would you say are the most attractive parts of working in this space? And why did you both go into it?  We both have family backgrounds in construction. After our studies and hearing all of the different pain points and challenges, we realised we can play a role in helping to solve the problems in the industry. At Bridgit we've been diverse from day one. Mallorie and I did not come from software engineering backgrounds. We were females in construction technology in two male dominated industries. We had little capital to put to work and hired people within our network. If diversity happens early on, it becomes really attractive for a lot of people to come and work at a company that has people with so many different perspectives and so many different backgrounds. We do very specific things in terms of how we're attracting and recruiting talent. We cast a very wide net by how we post our job descriptions and job postings. We eliminate a lot of the criteria that a lot of tech companies would include things like “you need to have X number of years in this type of role at another B2B SaaS company”. For more entry level roles, we've found that you don't need to have that experience to work at Bridgit.  [21:00] You've got some huge clients. How did you go about securing some of your clients? Any tips for people looking to break into this industry you'd like to share? We built our product hand in hand with different customers. The construction industry is a very tight nit group, a very competitive industry. It was a very deliberate choice to start with the enterprise segment, because those companies hold a lot of credibility. To have customers speak to how they've used the product at trade shows doing different podcasts or webinars and having the customers speak to the product, that is what we have found is the most engaging.  We've been very careful to say no when it comes to our strategy and the type of client that we're selling to. So, we could really focus on who we could add the most value to given where the product is at today and deliver a great experience.  We are also very genuine and very honest in how we speak to the product. [26:00] Have you used any sort of external support, associations or groups to help your growth?  There are associations that we are part of. We have integration partners, companies that our product integrates with and we're able to actually show that business use case for how the two products can work together. There're other partners that we work with that are more industry specific. There are marketing partners that we work with to do joint webinars and collaborate together as different teams. Our base of investors who provide a ton of different supports. And we've been quite deliberate in building that group of investors to have those construction backgrounds and people with tech backgrounds. There's been so many people in the industry that have given us so much time. And I think it speaks to everyone's motivation and interest. [30:00] The ‘LMRE' part, Louisa asks the guests to talk about: Lessons learned in your career Importance of corporate values. It's really helped to align everyone and the decisions that we're making and how we're hiring and just the brand that we're putting out to the team and to potential employees.  Deliver results fast. We have win or lose together, which is all about teamwork. We have never stopped learning. Mention a person, product or service Thiago Da Costa, Co-Founder & CEO at Toric. Analytics is such a compelling opportunity in the space right now. Rewarding parts of working in the space:  The industry was open to giving us feedback so that we were able to figure out how to build a product, launch it and build a 90-person diverse team.  The partnership that Lauren and I have together What are you most Excited about for the future of the space?:   Expanding on our product, workforce planning.  The growth and seeing some of the early team members that have been able to just take on challenge after challenge. Sponsors Launch Your Own Podcast Kopus.com is the leading podcast production and strategic content company for brands, organisations, institutions, individuals, and entrepreneurs. Our team sets you up with the right strategy, equipment, training, and guidance and content to ensure you sound amazing while speaking to your niche audience and networking with your perfect clients. Get in touch jason@kopus.com

“Going into any negotiation as a working parent…it's so important to remember that what you're asking for is not just for you in your personal life, but you're asking for essentially everyone,” explains Lauren Smith Brody, author of The Fifth Trimester. In today's episode of Problem Performers, Lauren discusses the role of accessible childcare and paid family leave in our overall economic recovery during the pandemic.  Lauren is passionate about supporting mothers as they return to work after giving birth. Her book and consultation firm are focused on revolutionizing workplace cultures to support new moms, who face enormous challenges in the form of insufficient paid family medical leave and lack of affordable childcare. Lauren explains that women rarely have access to the resources necessary to simultaneously parent and maintain their careers, and these benefits are especially elusive for hourly wage workers and BIPOC parents. She tells listeners that it is crucial for business leaders to talk openly about their own balance between work and family, even the hard parts, to help normalize it for their teams. Tune into this week's episode of Problem Performers for a candid (and hilarious) chat between Lauren Smith Brody and Rebecca Weaver about the challenges of being a postpartum professional, and the importance of making paid family medical leave the national standard. Learn about what you can do to advocate for paid leave and support new moms in the workplace – which ultimately benefits everyone, parents or not.   Quotes • “Some of the people who have made it to the top just do not feel comfortable being transparent about when they are doing things for their families, which is such an easy fix….Especially if they're in leadership, when they are visible about the things that they're doing to support their family life, that's doing their job well. Because they're actually helping retain people. They're helping people see that there's a path forward for them.” (13:41-14:10 | Lauren) • “We should all be in a ‘normal' here, nationally and I would say even globally, that supports the rights of parents and caregivers to earn a paycheck while also caring for their families.” (22:44-22:54 | Lauren) • “Going into any negotiation as a parent who is trying to find a way of working that will let them keep working, it's so important to remember that what you're asking for is not just for you in your personal life, but you're asking for essentially everyone. And so when say to you, ‘Well, I'd have to do it for everyone,' the answer to that is, ‘That's probably what's needed to make progress here and for us to stay competitive.'” (24:28-24:53 | Lauren) • “Eighty-two percent of the existing childcare spots available in our country before the pandemic are available now. Simultaneously 50% of America is in what is classified by the government as a childcare desert. Which means that you'd have to drive a certain number of miles or that childcare is so out of bounds expensive compared to what the average income is that it's inaccessible. And that is particularly true for people of color.” (25:56-26:32 | Lauren) • “It's important for managers and HR to really understand that if the childcare industry's recovery is going to be so much more delayed than every other industry, that those other industries don't just get to keep on recovering.” (27:44-27:58 | Lauren) • “I want HR and business owners and leadership to listen to this message: there will be no economic recovery without childcare support. Period. There just will not.” (29:02-29:16 | Rebecca) • “Until we have (federally mandated paid leave), what we have is a K shaped economic recovery. At the top leg of the K, people who had access are going to keep moving up. At the bottom leg of the K, the people who didn't have access are going to keep moving down. And those two end points of those two legs get further and further and further apart.” (37:19-37:36 | Lauren) • “Thirty-seven percent of people who are ‘voluntarily'…out of work right now, who could go back to work but are not…say that if they had access to paid family leave, they would come back into the workforce.” (39:30-39:50 | Lauren) • “Pay them better. Pay them a livable wage, so that they can pay for childcare or elder care to take care of the people they love. And if you can't pay them, then you don't have a viable business.” (40:43-40:55 | Lauren) • “You shouldn't have to fix the problem that you're in, but if you have one ounce of energy to do it, to speak up, to be a tiny bit more transparent than is comfortable for you, please do. Because there are a lot of people who don't have the ability to do that who are counting on you.” (44:22-44:36 | Lauren)   Links http://www.thefifthtrimester.com/  https://www.chamberofmothers.com/  Instagram: @thefifthtrimesteer  Twitter: @laurensbrody https://paidleaveforall.org/ Email your senator to push for paid leave with just a few clicks at https://paidleave.us/email-your-moc   Connect with a coach at https://www.hruprise.com/   Follow us on social media:  • Twitter: https://twitter.com/hruprise • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hruprise/ • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HRuprise/ • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hruprise/

With the school in lockdown following the death of a student, Leonard comes to Brynn with an unusual request. Meanwhile, Lucas prepares to take matters into his own hands, and Ellie decides to stand up for herself.    This episode contains discussions of death and grief.   This episode was written by Nathan Comstock and sound designed by Austin Cruzen, with music by Thomas Dwyer. The cast, in order of appearance are: Karim Kronfli as Dean Ventrassi Joe Kearney as Bruce McCray Zachary Robb as Dr. Leonard Sumner Leslie Gideon as Brynn Tessek Azul Nova as Jenna Donovan Sena Bryer as Pem Austin Hendricks as Ellie Francis Aubrey Poppleton as Lucas Burns Ivuoma Hall as the Magecorps Investigator Tuesday Orion Ibert as Devon Lancook Eddy Martinez as a student Emma Laslett as Lauren You can find the transcript at www.electromancypod.com/transcripts and check out Where the Stars Fell at https://wherethestarsfell.carrd.co/   

This week Ms. Lauren Stikeleather, published poet joins me for a nice conversation! Her book "A Mixing Pot of Poetry for Thought" is a collection of works she put together at a surprisingly young age! We talk about how she was able to get her works published, the joys of Covid, and what it's like living in New England! I really enjoyed our talk and hope you all go and buy her book!! Some links to help you connect with Lauren: You can find Lauren's website https://www.laurenstikeleather.com/ (HERE) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mixingpotofpoems/ (@mixingpotofpoems) Buy her book on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Mixing-Pot-Poems-Thought/dp/1636766005/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1632667049&sr=8-1 (HERE) Buy her book on Barnes & Nobles https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-mixing-pot-of-poems-for-thought-lauren-stikeleather/1138456191?ean=9781636766003 (HERE)

Today's episode is a little rant on the ridiculousness of it all and how I am staying in integrity in all of the chaos and forcing ways of vaccine passports. I'm speaking my raw truth here, we are all entitled to believe in whatever we want! Always remember who you are- the darkness can have no power over you. Lauren You can follow Lauren on IG @thewomanwhorises

Do you feel like you need to change your body in order to live your best life? Lauren Wills is here to tell you how you can live your most glamorous life in the body you already have! Brittany and Lauren discuss the difficulties of growing up in a world that praises losing weight and focuses on thin bodies as “ideal.” Lauren shares her journey through disordered eating and how she came to be the confident, body-love goddess she is today.   Want more of Lauren? You can follow her here: www.instagam.com/laurenslipglossary   If you loved this episode, please hit SUBSCRIBE to keep up with us, then, go rate and review the podcast, please and thank you.   For more self-love and personal growth tools, head over to Body Talk’s instagram: www.instagram.com/bodytalkwithbee   Or check out the website: www.bodytalkwithbee.com   Want to work with Brittany? Feel free to send her an email at hello@bodytalkwithbee.com

Some people take a gap year after high school, but have you ever considered taking one as an adult? In this episode, we talk with Lauren Vargas, a digital fellow at the University of Leicester and an adjunct instructor at the Harvard Extension School, about her “adult gap year,” how she’s eating her way through London, and just how many books she reads in a week. In this episode we learned: What's awesome about taking a gap year as an adult The upside of chronic insomnia How many books Lauren reads in a week and her favorite genres How to use Legos as a communication tool Where to get good vegan food in London Want to know more about Lauren? You can find her at: Website: https://yourdigitaltattoo.com/  This episode of Punch Out With Katie and Kerry is sponsored by Trust Insights. Are you feeling less than confident in your marketing metrics, looking for some help automating your tasks, or wondering what topics are most important to your audience? Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, Trust Insights will help you light up your dark data. Visit trustinsights.ai/punchingout for more information. Punch Out With Katie and Kerry (#PunchOut) is the show that dives deeper into topics you care about. We don't ask the questions everyone else does. We get to the real insights (and the weird hobbies, the guilty pleasures, the secret side hustles...the good stuff)! We find out what really makes your favorite people tick. Punch out with Katie and Kerry! Have a cool hobby or side interest you want to talk about on the show? Let us know: Web: www.punchoutwithus.comEmail: punchoutwithus@gmail.com Hosts: Kerry O’Shea Gorgone (@KerryGorgone) & Katie Robbert (@katierobbert)

Can you really control your weight? There are two schools of thought on this: one believes that nothing is within our control and the other believes everything is within our control. But what if the truth is somewhere in the middle? Annie and Lauren explore just how much control we have over our weight and provide helpful perspective on an age-old question. What you’ll hear in this episode: What studies say about how much genes influence weight What studies say about how much genes influence height Twin Studies, The Secrets of The Eating Lab and The Minnesota Starvation Experiment How we adjust our eating when we feel we are being observed The two camps: we can control all the things and we can control none of the things How much control do we really have over our weight? How your body responds to decreases in calories Ideal weight vs ideal weight range What happens when you try to “pause” on an escalator Process versus outcome goals How weight range relates to body composition Getting clear on your goals How your pre-disposed body type relates to your weight How to find your weight range     Resources: 53: Secrets From The Eating Lab: Dr. Traci Mann Secrets From the Eating Lab Episode 9: Two Sisters, Two Bodies: Growing Up Together In A Body Obsessed World Episode 4: What A 70-year-old Starvation Experiment Taught Us About Dieting Body Respect 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 Balanced365 together we 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. Welcome back to another episode of Balance365 Life Radio. Before we dive into today's topic, I want to share a super sweet review we got on iTunes last week from Blonde Lauren, which I promise it's not our Blonde Lauren. She says "This podcast is nothing short of life-changing. With all the negative information and images thrown at women in regards to our bodies this podcast is like a ray of sunshine. I listen to this podcast religiously as I walk the neighborhood and it always puts a smile on my face and helps me conquer the day. Jennifer, Annie and Lauren are so relatable and I feel like we were really friends and I just love that." Thank you so much. To everyone who takes the time to drop us a note in our email inboxes or leaves us a review on iTunes, we read them all and they all mean so much to us. Okay. Let's talk about today's episode. We have been talking about this topic in a roundabout way on previous podcasts, but we wanted to dive a little bit deeper into the topic. Can you control your weight? A lot of fitness professionals think you have all the control while some of them think this is a losing battle, why even try? On today's episode, Lauren and I discussed how much control you really have over your weight and I think you might be surprised. Enjoy! Lauren, how are you? Lauren: Good. It's us again. Annie: It's just us again, poor Jen is having some audio difficulties and she wanted to be here, but we are sticklers for sound quality on our podcast and it just wasn't gonna cut it, right? Lauren: Yes. She likes to compare her sound now to my sound when mine wasn't working because she thinks it was terrible. Annie: Well, you know, we've had this, I think we've talked about this on the podcast before, but sound quality. And I thought when we started this podcast, like you would just plug in a microphone and hit record and then you just piece it together. Lauren: I feel like it should not be this hard. It's really fun for us. Annie: It's really hard and especially because you and I have both moved and, maybe Jen's even moved, but when you move, like then you're changing a different recording location and that can affect the acoustics and so, yeah. Lauren: And then the technology on top of all that, sometimes it just does not work out. Annie: Yeah. But we're not complaining Lauren: It might sound that way. Annie: We actually, I really enjoy the podcast. I really, really enjoy doing it. But it's just been a little bit more difficult than we anticipated. So, and especially getting the three of us together in three time zones, like, you know. Lauren: There's always some disaster. Annie: Always. Lauren: The morning of recording. School's canceled or sick, a kid is sick or the heat went out, but we always figure it out. Annie: Yeah. We piece it together. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: We're scrappy in a good way. So we're talking about a really interesting topic and it comes up pretty frequently in our community and that is, can you control your weight? And I think it's really interesting because it seems like there's kind of varying answers to that question and it kind of depends on who you ask. But there's this idea that we can control everything, right? And we can absolutely control our weight. We have total control. On the other side of the spectrum there's this like, "No, you don't." There's people that say you don't have any control at all. You don't need to bother with trying to control your weight or manage your weight. It's just, it is what it is and you're just stuck with it. Whatever it's at and we wanted to dive into like what the real answer is. Do you have any control of your weight? And it's something that we've kind of, I feel like, talked about in a roundabout way with various guests on the podcast, but we haven't specifically addressed like this. Lauren: Right. This one question. Annie: Yeah. And on paper it seems to boil down to simple math, right? Which I think is where we get kind of the, "Yes, you can control everything about your body and your weight." It's "Eat fewer calories than you consume and weight loss will happen," right? And you'll get the desired outcome. And we have- Lauren: And we talk about that too, right? Like we talk about its weight loss does come down to calories in versus calories out, but that's not the whole story. Annie: Right. And we have professionals in our industry that will say that you just need dedication and self control and commitment and then you can have the body of your dreams, right? Like, whatever, whatever body you want, which I think is where we see a lot of the, I don't know if this is still a thing, I don't actually read these sorts of magazines anymore, but at one time, health and fitness magazines used to have like a celebrity on the cover of their magazine. It was like, here's the Jennifer Aniston Diet, or here's the Jennifer Garner diet or whatever. And I used to think like, "Oh, if I just eat what she eats, if I work out, like she works out, then I will then look like Jennifer Aniston. Lauren: Right. And, I can't remember her name. Do you remember the actress's name from that movie? Zack and Miri? Annie: I don't even know that movie. Lauren: Okay. It's a funny movie. I can't say the whole name of it because it's not appropriate. But she was on the Ellen show and, they were showing a picture of her own magazine and talking about like what she eats or whatever. And she was like, you know, it doesn't matter what I eat, this is genetics. Like, this is what I would look like regardless. I would look pretty similar to this. Annie: Right. Lauren: So, you know, people are congratulating her and she's like, "I didn't do anything special. This is just how I'm built." Annie: Yeah, exactly. But you're jumping ahead of the outline. Lauren: Oh, I'm sorry. Annie: Okay. I guess we can sign off now. No, we'll use that as a great segue because it does, it sounds really easy on paper that if you just do what she's doing or, you know, I think, yeah, I get questions, you know, like about my arms. Like what, what arm workouts are you doing? Lauren: Yeah. Annie: It's genetics. Like, maybe years of softball has played into this but it's where I carry my fat. It's how easily I build muscle. And, I think, it's known that our genes control or have an effect on our weight, but it's a little bit, we've been a little bit gray on how much control. Lauren: Right? So we have, like you said, the two camps, the "you have total control" and "you have no control." And surprise surprise, we fall somewhere in the middle. Annie: Yeah. And if you listen to Traci Mann's podcast, which if you haven't listened to it, we'll link it in the show notes. It is a wonderful podcast. She is just a wonderful woman professionally and personally. She's just a good human. She wrote the book The Secrets of the Eating Lab and inside there she compared, she shared a study and it compared the weight of more than 500 adopted children with their biological parents and their adoptive parents. And so this, the idea behind the study was that if learned eating habits, if you could just willpower and self control and you know, do all the things, if learned eating habits have more of an impact on weight then the children should have a weight that mirrors more like their adoptive parents and if genetics had more of an impact, then it should, their weight should be closer correlated to their biological, their birth parents. But what they found was that the children's weight correlated strongly with the weight of their biological parents and not all with the weight of their adoptive parents, which I think is fascinating. Lauren: It is fascinating. Annie: And additionally, a study also she shared in the science, studies, Secrets from the Eating Lab, study from the Secrets of the Eating Lab. They did a study of identical twins that were raised in separate homes, which I think is like interesting enough that there's twins that were raised separately enough to study. Lauren: Can we get the story behind that please? Annie: But there is, there were enough studies, as a way to make sure that they didn't share the same eating environment. Right. So it was a way to tease out that environment was a role in this study. The study looked at 93 pairs of identical twins raised apart and then a 154 pairs of twins raised together. And the results showed that the weights of the twins, whether they were raised together or apart were highly correlated, which again goes to show that our genetics, our biology has a large impact on our weight and those studies and in addition with some other studies what largely contributed, to scientists concluding that our genes account for about 70% of the variation in people's weight. Lauren: Right. Which is huge. Annie: Which is, yeah, which is huge and I don't know, some of you may be listening in and think that that's way more than you anticipated and some people will be like, "Oh maybe I have a little bit more control than I thought." Like it kind of depends on where you fell on that spectrum. If you were like, I can control all the things and, and get whatever body I want if I just have enough self willpower and dedication and self control, this might be shocking news for you. On the flip side, if you were like, I don't have any control, I'm stuck. I come from a long line of people that look like x, y, z. This is just as is what it is. You might have a little bit more wiggle room than you thought. Lauren: Right. So you have about 30% of your body weight is in your control. Annie: Yeah. Lauren: Is what this is basically saying. Annie: And what I think is interesting about this is, Traci Mann also shares, I mean obviously we're not researchers, we're not scientists. So we're pulling this information because we are evidenced based. We don't want to just feed you information because it sounds convenient or because it works for our philosophy or our brand. But for reference she also compare us that genes play about an 80% role in height. And I think that's such an interesting study because you don't see anyone being like, "Oh, I just wish I could, if I just had more self control or willpower, I'd be taller." Lauren: I could get taller. Annie: Yeah. But so often we see people talking about their weights like that. Like, "Ah, I just, I need to quit being lazy or I just need to get my butt to the gym. And then I, you know, I'd get rid of this, you know, fat on my hips or whatever," you know, but you don't hear people talking about their weight or their height, like they do their weight, but it's pretty comparable in how much control we have. Lauren: Right, right. A little less in height. But still really close. Annie: Like you're not over there trying to be taller. Lauren: No- Annie: I mean, maybe heels. Lauren: It's interesting that both of my parents are relatively tall and both of my sisters are, well, they're all like more average size and I am smaller. Don't know where that came from, but it did come from somewhere. Annie: Yeah. Well, and you know, we kind of talked about this, how genetics in the two sisters podcasts where we had Janelle and Jen, cofounder Jen, had her sister on and they have very different body types and they were just, they had a really beautiful story about how Jenelle looked like all the women on one side of the family. And Jen looks more like all the women on the other side of the family. And I just, I think there's a lot of beauty in looking at your family tree and like seeing that. It's not just like body parts, it's like seeing your grandmother, your aunt, your sister, like elements of them. And I think that's just beautiful. Lauren: Not to throw a wrench into this discussion either, but now there is, sort of, more relatively new study called epigenetics, which is like how your environment can turn on or off certain genes, which is also really interesting and I'd love to, I haven't looked into this yet, but I'd love to kind of look into that too that aspect and that might be the 30% that you can control, right. I'm just making that up, but it's something to consider. Annie: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That is, I've never, I don't even think I've heard of that term, to be honest. So I'm curious to learn more about that. Lauren: You know, it's relatively new. I think it's, they're learning more and more about it but there is some studies out there. Annie: Fascinating. Lauren: Yeah. Cause we have, we have a lot of genes and different things determine which genes get turned on and which genes don't. Annie: Yeah. Lauren: Just a little side note. Annie: Interesting. And I feel like I'm now distracted by that. Lauren: I'm sorry. Annie: Refocus. So our genes, just to recap that first point there, our genes have accounted for about 70% of the variation in people's weight. So, again, that's just saying that our biology, our genetics make up a lot of, determine a lot of how we weigh or what we weigh. But that doesn't mean that you're totally out of control. But additionally, our genes can even control how much weight we gain. And this was another study from the Secrets From the Eating Lab that there was even studies where participants were fed the same amount of calories, and the twins gained varying amounts of weight for it. So for example, pairs of twins that were overfed by a thousand calories. Again, if this boiled down to just math, if it worked out on paper, you know, a thousand calories equals this percentage of pounds of body mass gain a week, they should have all gained the same amount of weight. But what happened, pairs of twins that were overfed by a thousand calories a day gain to anywhere from nine to 29 pounds. So in other words, we aren't in conscious control of how our bodies use calories or energy, which I think is fascinating. And you know, if you're listening to this and you feel like I hear this a lot, women comparing like what they eat to their girlfriends or what they eat to the men in their lives and it's like, "Oh, I feel like I look at a Snickers and I gain weight" or you know, "My husband has trouble." I just met with a personal training client yesterday and she actually is having trouble putting on weight and I'm sitting here on the opposite end of the spectrum. Like, I have no problem putting on weight, it seems. Lauren: Right. Annie: And so I just think that that's again to show that our genes can even control how easily we gain weight, lose weight, put on muscle mass, don't gain muscle mass. Lauren: It's super interesting too because we are still learning about how all of this works. Like even now, researchers are still asking questions and they still don't know everything about how all these genes play into weight and metabolism and metabolic rates do differ between people. I think it's, it's not as significant as maybe some people have been led to believe, like if someone has a fast metabolism but it can differ a little bit. Annie: Right. Lauren: Which is what's happening probably with, you know, your client who can't gain weight. Annie: Yeah. And there's so many factors to be considered like environment and like what they do for their, what their, like, habits are, and how their relationship with food and their relationship with exercise. So it's like oftentimes multifactorial. But in the studies of these two are really interesting, especially because we've talked about, we have another podcast, The Minnesota Starvation Experiment, you know, studies like that just aren't even allowed anymore because they're considered unethical. Like, and it can be hard to study people's eating habits. And Traci Mann talks about this in her book because the minute people think that their eating habits are being studied, they change their eating habits. They like get all self conscious and they start doing different things that they wouldn't normally do if they didn't think that they were being watched for eating. I mean, I do that when, like, when I'm out and I feel like, you know, all of a sudden I'm at this nice restaurant or whatever and I think people are looking at me, I'm like, "Oh, I better put my napkin on my lap and not spill and use the right fork and put my fork down between every bite. Breathe. Not just inhale all my food. Annie: Anyways, getting back to our genes. Lauren, this is something you've talked about a lot in our workshops and our podcasts and our program, but that your body has a pretty kick butt weight regulation system and that can often override conscious efforts to change your weight. So for example, you cut calories, your body may in response slow your metabolism, resulting in fewer calories burned or you ramp up exercise and your body secretes hormones to increase hunger, which happens to me all the time. Like I exercise, I actually get hungrier. And so I often eat more and you've talked about that before, that your body's like pretty smart like that. Lauren: Yeah. Well your body, its main goal is to keep you alive, right? And so when you cut calories or you're not eating as much, or cut calories drastically, I should say, because that's what most fad diets do, your body thinks that you're starving. It doesn't know that you are doing that on purpose and that you're going on a diet. And so it does everything in its power to help conserve what energy you have and get you to eat more calorie dense foods. So that's another big reason why you crave high energy foods when you cut calories, you know, because your body wants that energy. Annie: Exactly. And many dieters, I know I've experienced this, I'm sure you have too, have maybe experienced a feeling like your body doesn't want you to lose weight. Like you're fighting against your body and it usually looks like something like this. You cut calories, you experience some excitement and exhilaration of initial weight loss and that's followed by an increased drive to eat and/or not move as intensely as you have been, which leads to weight regain because you go back to eating the food you were eating or not moving as much. And then that's followed by guilt and maybe even this sense of hopelessness. And that's something that Linda Bacon talks about in Body Respect, which is another wonderful book if you haven't read that and she just note that that's because you can only cheat biology so long. Like as you were talking about, your body is trying to, it cares about you a lot. it wants to keep you alive. Lauren: And that's like the unconscious part of ourselves. I think it's the reptilian, it might be the reptilian part of the brain, right, that controls that. And so you literally don't have control over those things. Annie: Right. And Linda Bacon has this, I think it's really kind of refreshing, it feels like it just takes the pressure off of me personally. But she has the quote in her book, again, Body Respect that "Diet failure is no more a sign of gluttony or lack of character than breathing deeply after exertion indicates lung failure or shivering in the cold weather evidences weakness." Like that's, this is the desire to eat, the desire to not move as intensely, the weight regain, that is all what exactly what we would expect from someone that's dieting, that's trying to cut calories. This is what your body is made to do and it's trying to do this because it's what it thinks is best for you. And it's a normal and expected response. So, I guess what we're just kind of boiling this all down to say is that you might not have as much control as you, some people lead you to believe. And what we talked about in the Traci Mann podcasts was that you have a little room, a little wiggle room, and one of the things that she suggests, because I know some of you might be listening and thinking like, "Crap, I wish I had more control over my weight" and we don't want you to feel discouraged from making changes if that's what you decide. But Traci Mann really encourages people to have a weight range versus a specific weight. And, I think that that's a really great idea because so often we hear women that they have this like ideal weight and that ideal weight is pulled out of thin air. It might be their pre-pregnancy weight, the weight when they got married, the weight they graduated high school. It might not even be realistic. And to think that your body can sit at one stable weight throughout the day, the week, the month, the year is just not attainable. That your weight ebbs and flows throughout again, the day, the week, I mean, if I weighed myself in the morning versus night versus Monday versus Friday versus the first of the month versus the end of the month, I would probably get six different body weights. Right. And it could range, you know, and you know, fluctuate five, six, seven pounds. And that this is normal and especially seasons of life, you know, if you're, you've got to, you've just given birth or you know, maybe it's winter and you're not as active, you're not outside as much. Your schedule is really busy because you're an accountant and it's tax season and you're working more and not hitting the gym as much. It's normal. And for this reason, a range seems to be a lot more realistic versus maintaining a single number throughout the year. Lauren: Yeah. So if you just kind of are aware but also going with the flow, like if your weight is up five pounds or down five pounds and just being okay with it instead of again pulling back that pendulum cause that's going to start that extreme pendulum swing over again. If you can just, like Jen says in our workshop that we do, in her Mario Kart example, if you can just move the wheel slightly to the right or to the left instead of extremely turning right or left, you'll be much better off. And also, Traci Mann also talks about this weight range. So there's a certain weight or there seems to be for people a certain weight that is dependent, like we said on many different things that if you go below that, that's when all of those biological changes start happening. Like your appetite increases and your metabolism starts to slow down to conserve some energy. So instead of, she says there's a weight range that your body is comfortable at and you can make changes to get to the lower end of that weight range. And so that's where you have, that's where you can control. So you can't control exactly what rate, but you can control where in that range you say. Annie: And the beautiful thing about that weight range is when you find it, you'll often find that it feels effortless to maintain or that you don't have to work near- Lauren: or close to Annie: -as hard. You have the perfect analogy in our workshop, that we share every now and then about riding an escalator. And when you're dieting hard, when you're trying really hard to maintain a weight that's below that range, it often feels like you're riding, trying to go up a down escalator and like, you're working, working, working, working, working. And the minute you want to take a break or rest or hit pause, it's like you're right back to where you started. And the idea is that when you find that range, you can move it around, give or take a little bit, but it's not like exerting all of your effort, all of your brain power, all of your energy to achieve this weight, either above or below that range. Because she also found in that book, she also found that the opposite was true to that getting people to gain weight out of their range was also equally as difficult as trying to get them to live below the range. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: Yeah. So with that being said, another suggestion we have in addition to the weight range versus a specific weight is to focus on your health behaviors versus weight. And, we've said this for a while, that your weight is not a behavior and for so many reasons we can't always control our weight and trying to do so is really, really difficult. And one of the things Jen talks about too is a lot of this can boil down to are you valuing your weight or are you valuing thinness or are you valuing health? And, you know, and again, no judgment Annie: There's been, I spent a lot of my life valuing thinness. I wanted, I didn't care if I was healthy, I wasn't even thinking if I was healthy or what I was doing, the behaviors I was utilizing, the tools I was utilizing to get to a certain weight was healthy if it was sustainable. I wasn't really even concerned with that. I just was so focused on getting that weight or getting that look, my body to look a certain way that I kind of forgot about health unfortunately. And again, I could just, I have a girl crush on Traci Mann, I could just talk about her all day but at the end of that podcast, she encourages that if you're eating balanced meals most of the time, not getting too full, you're not under eating, you're exercising a little bit throughout the week, you're managing your stress that whatever weight you find yourself at doing those things is good enough. And I think that, like, gives me like a, almost, I can almost breathe like a big deep breath, like a sigh of relief. Like I don't have to do all of these things and then I'm validated by reaching that goal weight that like, "Okay, I did enough." It's like, well, let's focus on what, like, actually our behaviors are and if those encourage health, then we're on the right track regardless of what we weigh. Lauren: Right. When I was at my thinnest, my behaviors were not healthy. Annie: Right. Lauren: And when I was at my heaviest, my behaviors were not healthy. Annie: Right. Lauren: So, you know, focusing on those healthy behaviors, I have settled in the middle. Annie: Yeah. And, you know, one of the ways, we've talked about this before, one of the ways, I think the easiest ways to kind of what we're talking about almost is process versus outcome goals. And a lot of times women have outcome goals. They want to be the size eight. They want to be the size four, they want to be 130 pounds, 150 pounds, whatever it is. And those are all outcome based goals, which are fine. But I think what's really, really a key is to, if that's a goal of yours, to also think about how you're going to get there and write goals around the how. So okay, you want to run a marathon? Like how am I going to get there? You want to drop 10 pounds, how am I going to get there? The how is the behaviors. Lauren: Right? And if you're in our Balance365 program, you'll notice that that's how we set up our program, right? So when you're checking off your habits, that is a process based goal. So you're checking off whether you had that, you know, half plate of vegetables or quarter plate of vegetables or whatever your goal is, you're going to check off if you did whatever your movement goal is. And those are process goals and not outcome goals. Annie: Yeah. And those are things that we can control more often than not. Lauren: Right. Annie: Versus our weight. Like I can do all the right things and for whatever reason, still not hit that goal weight. And I see that happen a lot. We see that happen a lot where women are exercising, they're eating some more fruits and vegetables, they're getting more sleep and they step on the scale and their weight hasn't budged and they feel like deflated. They're like, "Ugh, this was worthless. I didn't do anything. I'm not any further along towards my goal." And it's like, "Wait a minute, you're exercising, you're eating fruits and vegetables, you're sleeping more, you're doing all these really great things for your health and your body. Like, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater just because you didn't lose a pound." Lauren: Right. Annie: The last point I want to make when it comes to, can you control your weight? And I just, this has been absolute ultimate freedom for me is to accept the body type you have and work with it, not against this. And we oftentimes make the comparison between Jen's body and my body because Jen and I are pretty close in age. We've both had three babies. We're both personal trainers. We're about the same height, but there is probably, I don't know what she weighs now, but, there's probably about 50 pounds, 40, 50 pound difference between the two of us and for Jen to look like me or for me to look like Jen is just, like, ridiculous to think that that could happen. That's kind of what, going back to what we were talking about it at the beginning of the podcast about, you know, to think that I could just diet like Jennifer Aniston and therefore look like Jennifer Aniston is just absurd. Right? Lauren: Right. Yes. Annie: But honestly, this has given me, accepting my body type has given me so much peace of mind and like, I can just own my big thighs and my broad shoulders and I don't feel like I have to, like, whittle them down because I'm not, like, I'm not going to, I can, again, like Traci Mann says, I can maybe be a little bit heavier, a little bit lighter within that range. I'm still going to have thick thighs. Like it just, you know, and for a girl that her first diet and exercise book was Thin Thighs. Like, that's all I've ever wanted was the long lean legs. My mom had long, beautiful lean legs and I was like, "Why didn't I? Why did I get my dad's legs?" But now that I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to have thick thighs and that's just the way it is and this is what works for my body and Oh, guess what? They can actually be a really powerful asset in the gym. And these are some aspects that I like about them." I don't love everything about them. That's okay. But again, like I don't love everything about my kids all the time. I still love them. Lauren: Right. Annie: It's like, it doesn't have to, like, you don't have to love every single aspect of your body to love it as a whole, which is something we've also talked about. But, making peace with like, "Okay, I've got a big nose or I've got small hands or big trap," I don't know, whatever it is that you feel like you've been working to fight, like, making peace with that has been really, really impactful in my body acceptance journey. Lauren: Yeah. And one thing I want to circle back to because, I was going to mention this too and you mentioned it and I think it can be really powerful for people, is taking your body type, right? Cause like we have mentioned multiple times in this podcast, you can change a range of your body, your body fat, your weight, but you're not going to change your body type, like that is not going to change. So looking at your body type and think you can think about like, okay, so what is with this body type? Like what am I going to be good at? What does my body type give me an advantage in? And like for Annie, that's like weightlifting and powerlifting and being strong and so you can look at what is that for you. And it might help with this acceptance piece and this body love piece because it's not all about what you look like, but at the same time being, having your body help you be good at something can be really empowering too. Annie: Yeah. That's, we say when you look at your body like an instrument instead of an ornament. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: You know, what? Like, okay, what does, you know and being grateful for what my body does allow me to do or can help me do, can also be really, really special. But, I think that that's, you know, there's a lot of ways you can work on self love and body acceptance, but, that has been really, really powerful for me to just say like, "This is my body and it's, you know, maybe not what I've spent a lot of my years working towards. But like it's, it's still pretty great. It's not better or worse than any other type of, than your body, then Jen's body, than Jennifer Aniston's body, like this is my body and I'm going to take care of it the best way I can, like, thick thighs and all. Lauren: And you know, it's, it's funny because there are a lot of women out there who idolize your body type. Annie: I know. Yeah. That's been, so people, the funny thing is, is this happens to me a lot, which I love, I'm appreciative, but women will comment on the things that like I feel the most self conscious about. You know, like, oh, I, you know, or the funny thing is about my arms. I'll get a lot of comments about my arms. And it's like, well, if you look at the back of my arms, they're covered in stretch marks and it's, which I'm fine with. I again, I've made peace with, it's like I had stretch marks way before pregnancy. I had stretch marks on my arms and my hips when I hit puberty, I just, you know, just genetics and growing and- Lauren: I do too, I have them on my legs. Annie: Yeah. And I think it's just so interesting. And I do this to other women. Women can see beauty in my body or find appreciation in my body or aspects of my body. And then the same elements on their body, they hate on, they berate themselves, they have shame about, and it's like, "Hey, you know what? We all have a lot more in common than we probably think we do stretch marks and cellulite and pimples and gray hairs and wrinkles. And should I keep going?" Lauren: All of it. It's all normal. Annie: It is all normal. If you have a body, you probably have a lot of that or all of it. Some of it. If you have none of it, then that's cool too. Lauren: That's fine too. We love all bodies. Annie: We do. We are pretty inclusive here. So anyways, so I just want to recap. You know, it boils down to what Secrets from the Eating Lab Traci Mann showed, that Linda Bacon and Body Respect has done some extensive research on is that our genes and biology play a pretty big role in our weight. And it's not as simple as you can control it all and you can have the body you want. It's not as simple as you don't have any control at all. It's somewhere in the middle. And what we would encourage you to do is find the weight range that you can live your best life at, your healthiest life at, where you aren't working tirelessly to, you know, maintain a certain weight that's above or below that weight range that allows you to do the things, the activities, the behaviors that you want to do and feel good about yourself. Lauren: Can I add one more little thing? Annie: Absolutely. Lauren: Can we talk for just a second about body composition changes? Because this is a hunch I have because I don't think any studies have been done. I asked Doctor Traci Mann on that podcast, and I don't, I don't know of any studies that have been done, but this weight range seems to be not totally, like it's weight, right? It's not just like a fat percentage range, right? Like we have seen people change their body composition and their weight stays the same. And, so I was talking with someone in our Balance365 program last week, who was worried about working to, she wanted to lose weight for many reasons and different reasons, health reasons, and just not feeling comfortable in her body, right. And, but she was put off by this whole weight range topic. Like "Should I even bother?" Was like the kind of talk we were having. And one thing is acceptance, doing your healthy habits, your behavior-based goals. And then also I think for a lot of people, something really important is building muscle, is keeping your muscle. And I know Annie you have experienced with that, even more than I do if you want to just talk about that. Annie: Yeah. Well, my weight range, has, I guess since since I've quit dieting, which has been six, seven years, it's been a process of over the course of six, seven years, has stayed probably within 10 pounds. But I think, I've also had, you know, some babies in there, my body composition within that 10 pounds has changed pretty dramatically. And, you know, I attribute, so when Dr Traci Mann is talking about a weight range, I feel like that is absolutely me. For me to drop below my, that 10 pound weight range, it takes a lot, a lot of effort and I cannot sustain, I've tried it many times, just more just as an experiment. I've had some performance goals that I've had a hunch that maybe if I were a little bit lighter doing things like Crossfit, gymnastics would come more easily. I just can't do it. Like, and I shouldn't say I can't, I'm not willing to, to make the sacrifices and the changes that would go along with achieving that weight loss, at least not in this point in time. And I say that very objectively, I'm not, I'm not emotionally tied to my weight anymore. But my body composition has changed quite a bit. And I would say, although my weight is in the same range, my body looks different. I have considerably more muscle and less fat. Lauren: And I would echo that too. I'm about almost a year and a half postpartum and I am sort of getting to the lower end of my weight range. Like I can just tell based on my past experiences and you know, and, but my composition is different because I have not been working out as much as before I got pregnant. Right. Because I had a baby and a lot of things have changed and I've been doing the minimum exercise that, you know, I've just been doing what I can and that's good enough for me. But I know that if I want those body composition changes, it's not going to be me losing more weight. It's going to be me adding more muscle, pretty much. Annie: Yeah, absolutely. Which, you know, just in my experience when a lot of women come to me and they say they want to lose weight or they want to look more muscular or they want to look like they lift, that's something I hear common. You know, I just, I want to look like I lift, I want to have more muscle. What they mean is they want more muscle, less fat, not even necessarily weight loss. They and that's, you know, to each their own. But that's me, that's, you know, I really don't care what the scale weight says. I want to be able to do the things that I want to do in the gym and do the activities that allow me to play with my kids and go skiing and, you know, have the stamina and the energy and do fun tricks to with the kettlebell. Lauren: Yes, that's the best part. Annie: One arm push ups maybe eventually. But yeah. So, but I think that's just getting clear on what you really mean, you know, when you're talking about like, if the scale said x amount of weight, would that really change anything if you look the same or, you know? Lauren: No. Annie: Yeah, it wouldn't. Yeah, that's a good point. Lauren: Yeah. So I just wanted to add that little caveat because I've heard people in the interwebs, I've read conversations about this being a negative thing, right? This set weight range and it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be a negative thing. One, It gives you a lot of freedom, right? When you realize, like you had said, it's not all on you, like you can try as hard as you can try, but you're not going to change your body type. But also you can, even though if you may not be able to change your weight any further, you can change your body composition if that's a goal of yours. Annie: Absolutely. And yeah, I really side on the, like, if you feel like you've been dieting and your body is really, like, fighting you because it's, you feel like you're hungry all the time or you don't have a desire to get up and move or exercise because you don't have any energy or your sleep is crap. Like these are things that we would expect and that's normal. And to me that's like, "Oh good. It's not me. It's everyone. It's, like, I'm not just lazy. I'm not just weak. I don't need more self self discipline or willpower." Like, that's, you know, I think that's honestly, I think that that's as a fitness professional, I think that's a lazy excuse to tell a client like, "Oh, this is your fault. You know, you did this, you just need to be more dedicated. You just need more willpower." It's like, if that's the only solution or the only answer I have for someone that's coming to me with some goals, that's like, I'm not a good coach. Lauren: Right. And this is where, you know, education comes in, right? Because for that specific, you know, for that personal trainer, it may be easy for them, right? Because that's their genetics and that's their weight range that they can easily maintain. But that doesn't mean that that's true for everyone else. Annie: Or fitness and food are their profession. And- Lauren: and they work tirelessly. Annie: They work tirelessly to be in the gym and they get a lot of movement because they're, you know, in the gym, from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM working and helping people exercise and their environment is curated to support those goals. You know, that's, I would try to be really cautious about how I talk about my exercise because, you know, I find myself just with my job in the gym multiple times a week. So it's easy for me to show up 30 minutes early and get a quick workout. It's not like that for everyone. You know, I have a little bit of a leg up just because of my profession. Lauren: Right? Annie: Yeah. All right, good talk. This was good. Lauren: Good talk. Annie: Good chat. Lauren: We got a little off track, but- Annie: Well, let's, no, you know, sometimes it goes sideways but I think- Lauren: Hopefully they enjoy the conversation. Annie: Yeah. Well yeah, I mean if they made it this far. Lauren: Congratulations to you! Annie: You win! If you want to continue the discussion, if you want to, you know, revisit the podcast with Traci Mann, we did ask her like, "Okay, how do you find this weight range that's right for you?" And really what she's offered was trial and error. It was like, it's really person specific. There's no, like we can't offer a flow chart, you know, like, is this, you know, is this yes or no? That would be really cool if we could, but if you want help navigating and exploring like "Am I in a weight range that's comfortable for me?" Maybe it's a little bit higher than you thought or you want to move to the lower end of that weight range and you need some help with your habits and your behaviors. Please join us in our free Facebook group Healthy Habits Happy Moms, we'd love to help you. There's a lot of really great women in there, we're in there. Lauren, Jen and I are in there often answering questions and we'd love to see you in there to continue with the discussion. Yeah? Lauren: Yes, please. Annie: Yeah. Alright. Thanks, Lauren. We'll talk to you later. Lauren: Alright, bye.

In this episode, we interview Lauren McPhillips, founder, This Renegade Love. Lauren shares some excellent strategies for creating and marketing an online business. This show starts off with Lauren sharing how she quit the corporate world to start her own blog, This Renegade Love. Was this a particularly difficult decision for Lauren? You will learn how having a strong “Why” will help you make this transition. Lauren also reveals how she comes up with engaging content that resonates with her target audience. However, churning out great content alone with not suffice. You need to build up a strong presence on social mediums to ensure that your content reaches the right people. Lauren reveals some expert tips which will help you do just that. Topics discussed on this show include email marketing, Pinterest marketing, repurposing old content and much, much more. Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur or an established player, his show is loaded with some great insights. Tune in now!  What You Will Discover In This Episode:    How to transition from the corporate world to entrepreneurship    Tips and tricks for creating building a magnetic presence on social media    Pinterest marketing strategies for boosting visibility and widening reach    Benefits of participating in Mastermind group sessions with like-minded individuals Download The Self Love Guide: http://carolelizabeth.com/selflove Join our So Much More family: http://iamsomuchmore.com/group Show notes: http://iamsomuchmore.com/

Pod of the pops: Spice Girls - Meet the hosts   Picture the scene…. The day after they book their (crazy expensive) Spice Girls Reunion tour tickets. Aaron facetimes the girls. Its hard for him to talk because he is squealing with excitement. Aaron: I want to do a podcast all about the Spice Girls. Karen: What? I can’t understand him through the squealing Lauren: I think he wants to do a podcast about the Spice Girls Aaron: Yes BUUUUUT focus on their solo careers. Episode for each: Victoria Beckham (top vocalist), Geri Halliwell, Emma Bunton, Melanie Brown and Melanie Chisholm. Lauren: You mean AFTER we’ve done the big stuff, like, Wannabe and 2 Become 1 and the Spiceworld album and movie. Aaron: Yeah, no, I want to focus solely on their solo careers. I want to be super detailed about Victoria Beckhams lost second album, about Geri Halliwells yoga DVDS and Melanie Browns many many talent show judging roles. Lauren: He’s lost his mind Karen: I can’t understand through the squealing Aaron: Girls, I want you in it. Will you talk about the spice girls for 30+ hours with me? *beat* Girls: Sure.   So heres a chance to remember. So heres a POPcast that does justice for the forgotten pop gems of the last 20 years. So heres the story from A-Z  What do you think about that, now you know how I feel? This is Pod of the Pops.   I am comedian Aaron Twitchen – an English Rose between two Scottish thistles as I am joined, as ever, by my friends Karen and Lauren. In light of the newly announced 2019 Spice Girls tour we are dissecting the solo careers of each individual spice trying to understand how we got to here. I’ll tell you my reason. 2 things happened……. The Geri Halliwell sign “This is like when Geri Halliwell overestimated her viability as a solo artist and left the spice girls”. And I was tagged in it by at least 10 people who, presumably, overestimated their ability to predict opinions and thought I would agree. (one of them was Lauren). I was triggered. Its like they forgot Geri was the first british solo artist to have no. 1 records. That was the front page of newspapers for years. Sold books, merchandise, tv shows and made millions. Millions. Kerry Katona overestimating her viability and freeing Atomic Kitten – Yes. Geri. No. I was triggered. Then, I read an article that rated their earnings since the Spice Girls and managed to summarise their entire 18 year careers – That’s right, 18 years since the Hiatus – in one paragraph. Each. And that made me angry.   So that is why we are here. This Popcast will do justice to the solo careers of the Spice girls. 5 girls who changed the shape of pop culture forever. Proving they are more than just platform shoes and pigtails. Its reminding us of all the things you didn’t know you forgot. Each episode we will be going indepth into their music, personal and business endeavours that led us to this current reunion, and hopefully explaining why we are now a Quad Spice vehicle again. By the end of it you should not only be entertained but thoroughly informed about everything Emma Bunton, Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Victoria Beckham and Geri Halliwell. You can stand at the concert in your catsuit knowing the significance of the Herstory that brought you here.   So….. you’re probably thinking, “Who Do You Think You Are”. In this episode we will introduce ourselves and talk about our first memories of the Spice Girls. Share your first memory of te Spice Girls with us on all our social medias @podofthepops on facebook, Instagram and twitter. Please remember to like and share the show with all your Spice fan friends and remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

  Secrets from the Eating Lab Author Dr. Traci Mann, professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota and an expert on the psychology of eating, dieting and self-control joins Jen, Annie and Lauren in discussing the science behind the hot topics of self-control, temptation, diets and the alternative to dieting.   What you’ll hear in this episode: How much of our weight can we influence? How much of our weight is influenced by genetics? The concept of the Leanest Livable Weight Goal weights and reasonable ranges Weight regain and dieting – how common is it? Why you regain weight after dieting What happens to your body when you go on a diet What you start to notice when you go on a diet Is weight regain guaranteed? Characteristic of people who keep weight off The role of healthy movement  you enjoy in maintaining weight loss Self-control: who struggles with it and can you increase it? The obesogenic environment: what it is Temptation free checkouts and apple bins, reducing the need for willpower at the grocery store The role of small obstacles and inconveniences Making healthy choices convenient to increase compliance Keeping the focus on health instead of weight   Resources: Secrets from the Eating Lab Dr. Mann’s Facebook Page Dr. Mann on Twitter Episode 4: What A 70-year-old Starvation Experiment Taught Us About Dieting 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. Before we get into today’s podcast episode with an amazing guest, I want to share with you a super sweet message that we received from one of our community members on Facebook today. Christy says “I have been a part of Healthy Habits Happy Moms for almost 2 years now and a Balance365er since May of 2018. I am all in to the way this group thinks and believes. I’m at the point now that when I workout I channel Annie Brees, when I mention establishing habits to coworkers I channel Lauren Koski and when I’m trying to give some perspective to friends about diet culture and treating myself well I channel Jennifer Campbell. I can’t thank the three of you enough for how you have changed my outlook and daily life. I’m chipping away at the program but at this point my greatest takeaway is the way I live out each day because of this new perspective. I can go on and on but I just have to give a big thanks to Jennifer, Annie and Lauren. Thank you so much, Christy and I want to share with all of our community members that any email, any message, any direct message on Instagram we read them all and we are so appreciative of any reviews that you share on the podcast. We love them all. We cannot thank you enough.   Alright, let’s jump into this podcast because I’m super excited about it. I’m not sure if we have referenced any other book on this podcast as much as we have her book, Secrets from the Eating Lab by Dr Traci Mann. Dr. Mann is a professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota and an expert on the psychology of eating, dieting and self-control. In addition to all her impressive professional experience, she’s also a mom who loves those ice cream, super relatable, hey? If you’re curious about how much control we really have over our weight, how you can avoid temptation and why diets don’t work and what to do instead then you have to listen to this interview with Dr Mann. Enjoy! Jen and Lauren, we have a special, special guest are you two pumped for the show or what? Lauren: So pumped. Jen: Yes, I’ve been waiting. We arranged this well before Christmas I think so I’ve just been like vibrating waiting for it. Annie: Yes and what our listeners didn’t catch before we started recording was Jen gushing for about 10 minutes about how she loves Dr Traci Mann. Welcome to the show, thank you for joining us. Dr. Mann:  Well, thanks for having me, you guys are so nice. Annie: We, the 3 of us have read your book, The Secrets from the Eating Lab and we reference studies, quotes, information from this book so often in our community and our podcast if they haven’t read it, if listeners haven’t read it we would highly recommend it and it’s heavy on the science because you’re a researcher but I wasn’t overwhelmed by the science when I was reading it. I felt it was very like, I could understand the concepts that you were sharing. So, thank you so much for joining us. Dr. Mann: I would also say I’m sure I shouldn’t say this but it’s free Kindle right now. Jen: OK. Annie: Oh my! How long is it going to be free for? Dr. Mann: You know, I have a vague memory of agreeing to this with my agent like a year ago thinking it was like a month long thing and I think it’s possibly forever, I don’t know. Jen: OK we will Dr. Mann:-never sell another book. So, whatever, it’s fine. Annie: Well I will- Dr. Mann: Better people read it than buy it. Annie: say if you look at the 3 of our copies they are highlighted, like top to bottom, they have been like, right, like, they’ve been used, they’ve been well loved. Lauren: I think the name Traci Mann has been on probably 90 percent of our podcast. Jen: Yeah and this, so I have this page highlighted, what I was gushing about before we hit record was how Traci, Dr. Traci, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to- Dr. Mann: Just call me Traci. Annie: We’re besties now. Jen: So you are very much a messy middle writer in that you really objectively look at the research, you haven’t gone headfirst into any kind of movement or philosophy and just looked at research to support your philosophy, you’ve looked at the research which has allowed you to come up with a very objective, balanced message. Dr. Mann: That was the goal for sure. Jen: And so I just I highlighted this a long time ago because it was perfect. It says, it’s on page 20 and so what we hear a lot and what our audience is very aware of is that we hear two things, we hear that you cannot control your weight, you should not even try to lose weight, it’s pointless, your weight is predetermined, what you have, what you’ve got, that’s what you’re going to have forever and then on the other side of the spectrum, we have this whole industry of transformations that it is totally realistic and sustainable to lose half your body weight forever etc, etc. When what we actually know and what the research provides is is that you, it’s actually like in the middle but what you had written and I feel like I was waiting for this message. When I found your book I felt like “I have arrived. I am home. Like, this is what I have been looking for, somebody who is just sensible.” And you say, “I’m not saying you can’t influence your weight at all, just that the amount of influence you have is limited and you’ll generally end up within your genetically determined set weight range” and I thought that was so perfect in that you’re not willing to say you cannot control your weight, you’re trying to say “Hey, we can influence our weight, it’s just not to the level that you have been led to believe by the fad diet industry.” Dr. Mann: Exactly. That’s right so it’s partly genetic, but not 100 percent genetic.   Jen: Right and isn’t there a percentage? Dr. Mann: I think it was 70%- Jen: Yes I think it was 70% but you have a, there’s about a range of 30 percent in there that you can influence your weight. Dr. Mann: Yeah and I mean, it’s not just that and it’s really interesting that people are staking out these extreme positions, you know, it’s like, “Come on, people, nothing is black and white like that.” Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: But with the weight thing, it’s not just, it’s not the case that you can’t maneuver your weight around to some extent, obviously you can’t, like you just said, you can’t lose half your body weight but you can move it around to some extent but the problem is that it’s really hard, it’s hard to move it around a lot. It’s not hard to move it around a little. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: And that’s mostly what we talk about in the book is ways to move it around a little without it taking over your life. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: But to move it around a lot, it’s not that it can’t be done, it’s just that it’s really, really hard. Jen: And it’s very, it can be hard on us physically and psychologically to be trying to move our weight around to those different extreme ends. Dr. Mann: Yeah, exactly. That’s why I like to talk about this Leanest Liveable Weight idea. By Leanest Livable Weight I mean it’s the lowest weight that you can comfortably have without having to work so hard at it. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: Because the leanest weight you can live at comfortably, now that has been misinterpreted by the lovely people like GOOP.com – the lowest weight you can actually survive at without dying. Jen: Right and that’s not what any of us here are trying to talk about. That’s what a lot of women are trying to be and they might they may not even realize it, that that’s what they’re actually trying to achieve but that’s definitely not healthy, physically or psychologically. Annie: And I just want to add to that we’ve worked with thousands of women across the span of the globe and one of the common themes that keeps coming up for women is goal weights or they have this like ideal body weight and oftentimes if you asked them, like, “Well, where did that weight come from?” it’s, like, so, like, not evidence based, it’s like, “Oh I weighed that when I graduated high school or that’s what I weighed on I wedding day or that’s my pre-pregnancy weight” and it might not be realistic. Dr. Mann: Or it sounds good. Annie: Yeah, or that’s what I read on some chart in, you know, I even remember coming across a scale in the mall bathroom, why there was a scale in the mall bathroom I don’t know but it had a chart of, like, body weights and like this is if you’re large frame, small frame. And it’s really not realistic, usually not realistic for those goal weights. So we love the idea that you have a range because as a woman I know that my weight can fluctuate you know 10-15 pounds versus in a month, in a year, how would you recommend going about determining a reasonable range of weight for someone? Dr. Mann: Yeah, that’s a really good question. That’s the hardest question to answer and the question I’m least likely to be able to satisfy you with an answer to because there isn’t, like, a scientific formula to figure out your sort of set range, so instead you have to just kind of make a guess based on your sort of knowledge of what your weight has done over your life and a lot of people notice that there’s a certain weight area that they keep coming back to. So they lose some weight but then they come back to this weight or they gain some weight but then they plop down in this weight without even trying very hard and so if it’s, you know, the weight that your body seems to keep wanting to come back to that’s probably right there, right there in the set range, right where your body is trying to keep you because you’re good at it. Annie: Yeah, in your book and I know there’s going to be people they’re going to say, they’re going to scoff at this but you didn’t just look at people that have lost weight and then regained it, you also looked at people that were trying, studies that have tried to get people to gain weight and it was hard to even maintain a weight gain as well, which further supports the idea that, like, this is where your body can effortlessly live or with minimal effort. Dr. Mann: Right, it’s true and then the weight gains that are particularly interesting because so many people think, you know, I am so careful with what I eat, if I wasn’t this careful I would for sure gain a whole ton of weight. Lauren: Yes, we hear that all the time. Dr. Mann: Yeah, you do, you know, I think people really worry about that and I think partly why they worry about it is because if they do eat a lot more than normal for a while, they do gain weight, but they only gain a certain amount of weight, you know what I mean? So maybe you’ll gain your 5 pounds or 10 pounds but you’re not going to gain 50 pounds, you know, or if you do you’ll come back down pretty easily. Jen: Right,  we see a pendulum swing happen quite often with women who are coming off dieting, if they have spent a decade of their life dieting. We see this pendulum swing where they go from, you know, one weight and the pendulum swings up to a higher weight that they are comfortable with or that is maybe within their set point range but then it settles down somewhere in the middle and we talk about that and you reference this in your book, The Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Dr. Mann: Right. Jen: So if you are coming from years and years and years of restriction, you look at, we have a whole podcast on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. So if you are coming from a period of very severe restriction, the pendulum swing is almost an expectation, it’s almost, like, we would say it’s a normal and natural response to dieting. Dr. Mann: Oh exactly, it exactly is. I mean, we all need to reframe how we think about dieting. When people think about dieting, they think of that initial weight loss and that’s their image of dieting and then they assume once they have that initial weight loss, they just stay down there. Jen:  Right. Dr. Mann: But actually, if you followed all the research looking longer at dieters, you see it’s completely predictable that the weight comes back on. Jen:  Right. Dr. Mann: There’s a tiny, tiny minority of people who keep it off. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: But for the majority of people, it just comes back on, you know, over the next like 2, 3, 4, 5 years. So we need to realize that that is a normal part of dieting and not a failure by any particular individual dieter. Jen: Right, right. Dr. Mann: And the thing is they always blame themselves for that. Jen: For that pendulum swing. Dr. Mann: That’s just what happens. Your body needs that to happen, your body is making that happen. Jen: Yeah, it’s like, I think you also, I think we’ve used this analogy and I think it came from your book, it’s like gasping for air after holding your breath. Dr. Mann: Right, I didn’t invent that analogy but I did include it, yes. Jen: Yes. Dr. Mann: Yes, it’s true. I feel like anything I say you’ve already talked about but I mean the things that happen when you restrict for a while. Your body, of course, doesn’t know you want to look thinner, your body thinks you’re in the process of starving to death and so it makes these alterations to save you which is so kind of it and yet everyone gets so mad about that because all those changes that save you from starving to death, make, basically make it very, very, very easy to regain the weight. Jen: Right and it probably, well, you can correct me if I’m wrong, it doesn’t really matter what size you are, if you are 120 pounds or if you’re 220 pounds when you do that restriction, your body still, you know, it doesn’t matter how much body fat you have, your body still thinks you are starving. Dr. Mann: Right, if your body detects that much less is coming in than it than expected then it just, all these changes just click on, you know, your metabolism changes, uh oh, now you have to eat less to keep losing weight. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: Hormone levels change, uh oh, you’re going to feel hungry. Jen: Yeah. Dr. Mann: When you eat an amount of food that didn’t used to make you feel hungry, you know and then there’s all these attention changes too, right? So you notice food more if it’s around, you can’t get your mind off it once you start thinking about it, so all those things make regaining the weight way too easy and keeping it off way too hard. It doesn’t make it impossible, though and so this is a key, another key thing that I think people sometimes don’t realize. Any person who knows someone who has lost weight and kept it off, you know, comes and says to me “You can’t say that your body does this stuff, you can’t say your body makes these changes that cause you to regain the weight because I know people who’ve kept it off.” Well I’m not saying that these changes make it impossible to keep off the weight, I’m saying these changes make it really, really hard to keep off the weight. So hard that most people can’t do it. Jen: Right. We were talking before we hit record, again, another thing I had brought up is that because we are, you know, we try to navigate that messy middle and help women figure out what’s right for them, I had said, you know, hearing these two, I remember when I was first getting into this and starting to read about it like 4 to 5 years ago, I would start hearing that extreme messaging “You can’t keep off weight, you just can’t” and actually my husband has lost about 60 pounds, he was, I think, he was about 300 pounds when he graduated high school and now he sits at between kind of 220 and 245, I think. I mean, he’s going to be horrified that I’m talking about this but anyways but that just, that comes very naturally to him to kind of sit around there and so I would, you know, I was the same as those people. I kept hearing that it’s impossible to lose weight and I thought, he has now kept that off for 20 years and he’s not working, like, I don’t see him get up every day and like work at it, he’s not like, he’s not micromanaging his food, he’s not, he has some great habits, he, you know, he eats balanced meals, he tries to get to the gym 3 to 4 times a week but he’s lived a high stress life like the rest of us, he’s had kids, gone to grad school, all of that and so that just didn’t sit well with me and I thought, instead of looking at everybody who is failing, what are these successful people doing? Like why are they able to do it? Which kind of comes why, again, why your book is so refreshing, because you sort of, you’ve got that sort of nailed. Dr. Mann: Well, you know, I mean, I don’t even know and it’s interesting how you describe your husband as not having to work at keeping it off. Because what the research shows of the people who lose weight and keep it off is that those people are, you know, fairly obsessed with every little calorie that goes into their body and with every little bit of exercise they do to burn calories. So that’s what I expect to hear when I hear that people kept it off for a long time but one thing that I’ve been wondering about lately and no one has done the study that I know of and I don’t actually even know how to do this study but I’ve been wondering like, the people who lose a lot of weight and keep it off are those people who had happened to recently gain a bunch of weight but weren’t normally really heavy? You know what I mean, like I’m wondering if those who end up taking, you know, people who have had this unusual weight gain as opposed to people who are just always some high weight and took it off. Lauren: Yeah we see. Jen: I have theories. Go ahead, Lauren. Lauren: Yeah, we kind of see this and this is, I think, kind of in my story too, we see people who start dieting at a young age, right and then they just keep putting on weight as they do the rebound and you know, their weight wasn’t maybe supposed to be quite that high but because of the dieting it keeps going up. Dr. Mann: It got inflated from their- Lauren: Yeah and so for me, when I, after I stopped dieting and I did gain a lot of weight, when I finally went came to this place of balance my weight did go down and I think it’s kind of just like that it came back to its normal range. Jen: My husband also, I haven’t seen any research on this, he has put on a significant amount of muscle over the years so he, you know, at 18 years old, he didn’t go to the gym. He just, you know, his body composition is completely different, he, you can just tell by looking at pictures of him that he had a substantial amount of body fat and then after he left high school he got into boxing and ended up boxing professionally or sorry I should say semi professional, he’s just going to die, when he listens to this, I’ll just give him a little plug, he won the gold medal at the Canadian games in 2007 for boxing. Dr. Mann: Wow. Jen:  I know, amazing, but he just gets so embarrassed when I talk about this. Dr. Mann: You know, just to revise what I was saying, he’s an elite athlete. Jen: Well, he wouldn’t, I wouldn’t say now, I think he’s got more like Dad bod now but he did, he just, he got into, so what we tell our girls in Balance365 is to find movement they like, like if you and you talk about this in your book that if you don’t like what you’re doing you’re never going to stick to it and so when I say my husband doesn’t work at it, it’s not that he doesn’t prioritize exercise and doesn’t prioritize a balanced way to eat, he really enjoys that so it’s not that, so I think what what happens is there are people out there that are just never, they’re never going to enjoy my husband’s lifestyle. I’m not athletic and I am not competitive. I would never have enjoyed training for a boxing match like that or several boxing matches so, but through that- Dr. Mann: I don’t think I would like that either. Jen: Right and so you have to kind of go, you know, and Annie, for example, Annie crossfits like 4-5 times a week which helps her to sustain that 40 pound fat loss that she has done but and so it’s like Annie, personally, doesn’t feel like she wakes up in the morning and micromanages her weight loss, however if I had to get up everyday and go to Crossfit 4-5 times a week, that would feel like I was micromanaging my loss, do you know what I’m saying? Dr. Mann: Yeah, it’s true, so everyone needs to just find a sort of a set of lifestyle habits that aren’t soul crushing for them. Jen: Right, for them and that’s the sort of key that it’s like, what do you like to do and it may not be what somebody else does and so you won’t get the results that person has gotten but hey, that’s OK, like, let’s just be sensible here kind of thing. Dr. Mann: True, I mean, like in the last year or so I’ve had this just chronic hamstring injury, just won’t get better no matter how long it just doesn’t get better and you know, finally my physical therapist was like, you know, it doesn’t hurt when you do spin class, doesn’t hurt when you do yoga, it hurts when you run. It’s like exactly that part of the answer and she’s like “You have to not run” and somehow, her saying that I don’t have to go all winter onto the treadmill, it’s like so freeing to allow myself to do the kinds of exercise that I, I don’t want to say enjoy but that I don’t hate. Annie: Right. Dr. Mann: Even though to me they don’t seem as potent You know, I mean like, my brain is running this but I feel like, you know, all signs are that I’m just as healthy as if I were running as long as I’m doing these other activities and it’s not miserable. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: So thank you, Christina, for freeing me from feeling like I have to use the freaking treadmill. Lauren: Can I, can I go back to, I want to go back to something that Jen said because this. is something that I’ve been wondering about when we hear this about the set weight range is that total weight or is that like fat percentage? Because we do see people who do build muscle, right and they’re the same weight but their body composition is very different, like, how do you know how that plays into this? Dr. Mann: I don’t. I don’t recall ever hearing anyone talking about set weight ranges in any way other than referring to weight. I’ve not heard anyone describe it in terms of muscle mass. Lauren: OK. It’s always something I’ve wondered. Dr. Mann: I don’t think people have, yeah, at least I’ve not encountered it. Jen: Yeah, I’m curious. If you end up putting on this muscle mass and it leads to your total body weight being, you know, a little bit- Lauren: Are the same as what your mass was with less muscle then is that sort of like a “trick” for your body in that it’s like, oh, we’re, you know, we’re the same weight and so you see people that change their body but your body is like “But I still weigh this much and I still need this amount of calories to sustain me.” That might be a future research project for you. Annie: That would reflect my experience, for sure because I have, like, probably a 6 to 7 I would say pound weight range that I have not budged from for maybe a couple years but my body composition has changed within that. A couple of percent, I mean, to me it’s been noticeable but I cannot, like, I have to work really, really hard to get out of that range either above or below it. Dr. Mann: That’s really interesting. So yeah, that might be a good trick, you know, don’t worry about the number, just try to replace some more of that fat with more muscle. Jen: Yeah and I think my husband probably has benefited hugely from his, his body composition is completely different than when he was 18 and I think he’s still a very heavy man, right he’s still like 240 pounds, he’s a heavy man but he’s not, he just has way less fat mass and more muscle mass on him, right? Dr. Mann: That’s great. I never thought about that, very interesting. Jen: Alright. Annie: We will come be your test subjects. Jen: Yes. Lauren: Yes. Annie: Be happy to take a trip to the eating lab up north or kind of down south. Jen: Down south for me. Annie: Yeah, for Jen. Dr. Mann: You’re in Canada. Jen: Yeah, I’m in British Columbia. Yeah. Annie: Yeah, I feel like that’s kind of a good segue talking about, you know, how much your habits or lack thereof kind of consume you because one of the most common comments we get from members or of our community is that they feel like they just need more willpower, more motivation, more self-discipline and if they have those things then they could, like, just stick to their diet, they could stick to their plan, they could reach their goals, right and I know that as a researcher of self-discipline you’ve noted that you’ve heard that echoed as well, that when you share with people that you’re researching that they’re like “Oh yeah, I want more of that” or “How do I get more of that?” In your experience, is more willpower needed? Is that what people are missing? Dr. Mann: No, no, people are missing, so every dieter thinks they are uniquely bad at resisting tempting food, you know, I mean, like, something you sort of alluded to it but constantly people come up to me after talks and or like before talks, “Oh God, self-control, I need more of that, you know, that’s a good thing that I happen to need, me alone, you know,” but everyone is bad at self-control. Everyone struggles with their willpower, thin people, fat people and everyone in between. It’s not the thing that tells us who is going to end up thin and who’s not, you know what I mean, everyone struggles with it, in fact, there’s these, this group of psychologists called positive psychologists that study, like, human strengths, so things like kindness or creativity, or thoughtfulness and what they find is that like the kinds of things that all range really highly kindness, thoughtfulness, people generally believe that they are kind and generally believe they’re thoughtful, the one that comes in dead last every time is self-control. People do not think they have self-control and they’ve repeated that kind of survey in like 53 countries. Jen: Wow. Dr. Mann: It was always at or very, very near the bottom. Nobody thinks they have good self-control, it’s not, it’s not unique to dieters, it’s everyone and it wouldn’t matter if everybody had great self-control because of the environment we all live in and there’s probably no amount that would be enough to survive the onslaught of temptation every minute of the day. Jen: Is this what you would say is the obesogenic environment? Dr. Mann: Yeah, exactly and that is what we’re living in and I mean, I shouldn’t have to try to resist buying a candy bar when I’m in Office Depot, buying paper for my printer. Jen: Right and you don’t. Dr. Mann: That should not be a temptation challenge, you know. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: You know, it’s everywhere, all the time. Jen: Right, there’s candy, I don’t know if you guys have staples down there but we have Staples and it’s like an Office Depot and there is candy at the checkout, it’s everywhere. Dr. Mann: A huge selection, I mean and really kind of awesome candy selection. Jen: Yeah. Dr. Mann: At office supply stores for some reason. Jen: So there’s and there’s, I don’t know if this is same down there, but in Canada there is a push to have, like, basically temptation free aisles, so candy free aisles specifically for parents bringing their children to shop because I just argue with my kids nonstop about not buying candy, so then it becomes this thing that children begin to focus on and then they develop these scarcity issues or because there’s just candy and they see it and you’re saying no but and so the other thing that they’ve started offering in grocery stores here is they have apple bins for children so when you are shopping with your kids you take your kids to the apple bin and they can munch on an apple while you’re shopping and this kind of stuff is brilliant, I think. Dr. Mann: Definitely, you know, it all fits the sort of general basic strategy of rearranging things so that you don’t keep encountering temptation. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: If you don’t encounter it, you’re not going to have it. Annie: And that was kind of like a, I don’t want to say a will power hack, but that was one of the things you mentioned in your book that, like, you don’t have to rely so much on willpower or self-control or self-discipline or say no all the time if you can curate your environment to reduce those temptations, right ? Dr. Mann: Yeah, exactly. Ideally you don’t want to ever have to say no, you know, ideally you just don’t want to come up, you know. Once a food is on your plate, for example, forget it, you’re eating it. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: If you want to keep things from getting to that point where there’s no hope of resisting it. Jen: Right and we, like, even small things, we were talking about this with our Balance365 community the other day. Simple things like dishing up dinner at the island or on the stove and taking it to the table rather than having all your dishes on the table to dish up from is just a really small hack that you could use to not have seconds or to not, you know, over dish up kind of thing. Dr. Mann: Yeah, exactly and that works because, as we talk about a lot in the book, because people are lazy and small obstacles slow us or stop us. That’s a small obstacle. I could get up from the table and walk 4 feet. That is shocking how many people that stops. Lauren: And I’ve heard you talk about it’s not even just getting up but just moving it further than your arm can reach. Dr. Mann: There’s actually a study that shows that one of my colleagues in the Netherlands literally straining your arm is enough to slow people down. Annie: That’s like the, there’s, I have a salt lamp on the opposite side of my room when I turn it on at night and half the time I get into bed and I’m like “Ugh, that lamp is still on” and I swear more often than not I just sleep with it on because I’m too lazy to get out of bed to turn the lamp on, so like I cannot be inconvenienced. Dr. Mann: I am going to one up you on that sometimes I’m in bed on my back but I really prefer to sleep on my side and I just can’t muster the energy to like just friggin roll half my body over, half! Annie: That and you actually, you actually cover small inconveniences or small opticals is also covered in your book because you tell a story about is it toilet paper. Dr. Mann: Yes, I read that online, as, I was so excited when I read that online so it was a budget tip for strapped households was to when you get the roll toilet paper to smush it a little so that it doesn’t turn easily. Jen: Brilliant. Dr. Mann: You know, so when you go to pull it off it tears off right away, so that leads people to use less toilet paper. Jen: That, I need that for my children. Dr. Mann: Actually it’s good for if you have kids. Jen: They plug the toilet. I’m in there with the plunger once a week. Dr. Mann: It would also help with that but you know, just the fact that it stops a regular adult person from using more toilet paper is another example of how small, miniscule obstacles actually really slow us down. Jen: And Lauren, Lauren only buys single servings of ice cream so that was another one. Lauren: Well, they have them at Kroger, like the little ones ,they’re, like, you know, like, this big instead of the pint or the gallon. Annie: They’re like a little cup or like six ounces or something, 8 ounces. Lauren: Yeah or I just go out to like Dairy Queen or something instead of buying the whole gallon in my house. Dr. Mann: Buy the one. Lauren: Or even just for me is like if we make cookies or something, just putting them in the cabinet and sort of leaving them on the counter, right, we used to just leave it on the counter but if I just put it in the cabinet where I don’t see it every time I walk in the kitchen I end up just forgetting about it. Dr. Mann: Yes, keep temptations out of sights. Jen: We have a saying in our community. We also have a free Facebook community that has 40000 women in it, so they just participate in our philosophy, they haven’t bought our program but one thing we talk about in there is there’s this whole veggie tray revolution and so I started it a couple years ago and my aunt gave me a hand me down, an old circular Tupperware veggie tray and I stocked that veggie tray Sundays and Wednesdays because, like, we just eat it all by Wednesdays now, so that has substantially, and having that front and center in my fridge has substantially increased my family’s vegetable intake and I even take it out during meals. If we’re having grilled cheese sandwiches, the veggie tray will go on the table. Dr. Mann: And so it’s all prepared, like, they’re all clean. Jen: Yes, I have washed them, I chopped them I and I just it’s like, if I just need to do the minimum to set us up for success for the week it’s just that veggie tray takes me under 10 minutes and so we open the fridge and it’s just right there and we’ve also moved our treats to the cupboard above the fridge so I need to get a stool out to get out chocolate and chips and you know, people, you know, these things are simple and they work, you know, and but people just, you know, you tell them but they just, if they’re not, they’re still looking there’s like this magic pill thing going on. They don’t think it can be that simple but it is. Dr. Mann: And so the veggie tray is a good example of removing the obstacles to do something healthy. Jen: Exactly, yes, exactly. Dr. Mann: If you look in the fridge and you want a snack, you’re not going to like pull open the veggie bin, you know, get out the beats, break them, clean them, cook them- Jen: No, I’m not. Dr. Mann: But if you do that ahead, and you have a little bowl or tupperware of roasted beets, you will eat them. Jen: Yes, absolutely. Dr. Mann: Vegetables are hard work. Jen: They are hard work and so is protein. So the other thing we’ve tried to bring to people’s attention is that carbs and fat are readily available to us in convenience form everywhere, so if you want to be eating a more balanced diet, focus your energy on getting protein and vegetables and fruit prepared and as convenient to you as the nuts and the seeds and the bread and you know all of that kind of thing, because they take a lot of prep work, right. So the other thing I do is I just throw some chicken breasts in a slow cooker on Sunday night and then I take it out and I shred it and I just have a little container of shredded chicken breast which I can throw in sandwiches or wraps or do you know what I mean? So- Dr. Mann: Yeah. Jen: So yeah, it’s little, little things like that have made the biggest difference in my life and in our Balance365ers as well. Dr. Mann: That’s great, that’s good, that’s just making it easier to do the healthy thing.  Jen: Just environment. Dr. Mann: Harder to do the unhealthy thing. Jen: Yeah, just acknowledging that we’re lazy. Annie: And that’s across the board, like, your research has shown that it’s across the board, like humans in general are lazy, it’s not like these people, like, you know it’s not just me, Jen and Lauren that don’t want to prep our veggies or whatever, it’s like this is human nature and so and I feel like that’s kind of refreshing to hear because it’s not kind of, it’s very refreshing to hear because again, so many people are blaming themselves for why they can’t follow the diet, why they can’t stick with the program, it’s like, look you’re just human, like, you’re asking yourself to change a lot of things at once, to do a lot of stuff that’s really not in your wheelhouse. And it’s normal if you struggle with that. Dr. Mann: And also, can I just add, because sometimes people are like, well, all those strategies you’re saying just sound like, you know, dieting tips. Jen: Yes, they do. Dr. Mann: I don’t really mean them to be dieting tips, I mean them to be, these are just little things that you can just kind of have as habits in your life that will just help you stay in that sort of the lower part of your set point. I’m not saying that by moving the cookies to higher shelf you’re going to lose a ton of weight. Jen: Or that you should never have cookies, right. It’s not about, yeah. Dr. Mann: Right, exactly I’m just saying these are just some things that help you to just kind of stay on an even keel or maybe just aim for that slightly lower part of your set range that you’re already within. Jen: There’s, I wanted to address that too, as well because I feel like there is, as far as environment, there is a lot of tips you can use and they can be used as tools or they can be used as weapons against you, right and so in diet culture these things are often used as weapons and it’s funny because I used to some of the tools I use today to stay healthy, balanced and at a leaner weight, I used to use when I was dieting trying to live a weight below what was healthy for me and I was going hungry all the time, so what would happen to me was I wouldn’t buy the cookies, I wouldn’t buy the ice cream. I didn’t want any of that in my house because my cravings were so strong because I was going hungry all the time, so when that stuff was occasionally brought in my house I would eat it all. I would go nutso on a pint of ice cream in a night or a gallon and so it’s kind of like talking in a nuanced way, right, to go like, “You can use these as tools or you can use them as weapons, it all depends on where you’re at and what’s going on inside your head.” Dr. Mann: That’s really true and that’s a really important point that when you deny yourself something, when you restrict certain categories of foods or certain foods it’s going to eventually backfire. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: It’s amazing how fast you start to want those things you restrict. I mean, we did a study like this, I think I talk about it in the book where we forbade people from eating a food that they didn’t even love, right, it was sort of in the middle for I can’t remember how long- Jen: 3 weeks I think. Dr. Mann: Yeah. Annie: Radishes. Jen: I feel like I just know your book. Annie: Radishes and chocolate for 3 weeks? Dr. Mann: I better know my details well, in any case, the point I was trying to make about that, the main point of that study just was that very quickly they started really wanting those things that they couldn’t have. So not worth it to deny yourself certain things and instead try to just eat those things in reasonable portions. So I cannot live without ice cream and there’s really no reason to do so but my ice cream trick, when you guys mentioned some of yours, I’ll add one more is I make my husband serve me because he will serve a reasonable portion and put it away and our freezer is crazy cold so it’s not even going to be easy to take more because it’s just, you know, he’ll wait and do what you need to do. So let people wait on you, folks. Annie: That’s just good life advice. Jen: Yes, the other one thing for your freezer- Lauren: I can get behind that. Jen: I bake for my kids for their school lunches and I keep it in the freezer so I, if I want banana chocolate chip muffin it’s totally fine but I have to think about that, right, I have to take it out and then I have to unthaw it in order for me to eat it where, you know, just talking about those barriers in environment, just putting a little bit of barrier between you and that thing causes you to pause and go “Do I really want this or is this just an impulse?” Dr. Mann: Exactly, you need that pause. My 14 year old son is obsessed with baking. Well, you know, classic pre-teen boy, you know, scrawny, looks like a paper clip, you know, no body fat at all. But he’s killing me there are constantly baking here and the good news is he’s obnoxious and doesn’t always let me have any because he wants to take it all the school because he brings it to a certain class, you know, there’s 24 kids in that class. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: Every recipe makes 24 so he often doesn’t let me have any, thank God, but a lot of the time he does and it’s like once or twice a week this is going on in my house. Jen: Yeah. Dr. Mann: That’s a lot of like baking. Jen: Extra baking. Dr. Mann: That’s a lot of baking. Jen: Yes. Annie: So, Dr. Mann, I know we’re approaching an hour, I feel like we could do this for the whole time though or a couple hours at least, just to kind of wrap up, all of your research and your experience, personal and professional, inside your book as we’ve shared so much already, you provide a lot of gold little nuggets as to how people can improve their health, reframe their mindsets, even thinking about food in terms of healthy and unhealthy, how to alter their habits to support sustainable weight loss if that’s what they’re after but really, you seem to boil it down to just, as Jen said, sensible no-fuss advice, like exercise regularly and create reasonable eating habits and that you believe that that will help you reach your goals with minimal effort, is that really it? Because if so, that super refreshing. Dr. Mann: That is it. But I will elaborate a little bit because here’s where we have to get our heads and our heads are not there yet but  where we need to get our heads is if we are exercising the recommended amount, which is 150 minutes per week if we are eating, you know, a reasonable number of servings of vegetables per day and if we’re keeping our stress level under control, not smoking, if we’re doing those things, whatever we weigh when we’re doing those things should be where we want to be. We need to define that weight as our perfect weight because that is what you weigh when you’re behaving in a healthy way. So, I don’t know, this comes up all the time with people. Everyone thinks “if I do the exercise I’m supposed to do I’ll get thin,” but that’s not true. Exercise doesn’t necessarily make you a lot thinner but it does make you healthier. What I keep pushing on people is “Behaving in healthy ways makes you healthier, even though it might not make you thinner or as much thinner as you want it to.” So whatever we weigh when we’re behaving in healthy ways we have got to find a way to be OK with that. Jen: Right, except you have a whole section on acceptance, right and let your, do what’s good for you and let your body be what it’s going to be and just accept this, like it’s actually so freeing. Dr. Mann: Yes, just if you keep the focus on health and not weight everything makes so much more sense. Jen: Yeah, I love that. Dr. Mann: You do these healthy behaviors, they make you healthier, but then again, maybe not thinner, maybe not as much thinner as you want. Annie: I wonder how many of our listeners minds are just like blowing right now hearing that. Like, behaving in a healthy way will make you healthier, it might not make you thinner but it will improve your health. Dr. Mann: Isn’t it crazy that that’s mind blowing?  I said that to some radio guy one time and he’s like “I don’t know, that’s kind of a hard sell.” Lauren: You know, well, it’s only a hard sell because you have, you know, diet companies telling you the opposite everywhere all day, every day. Dr. Mann: Seriously, you know, And because people don’t actually value their health the way they all say they do. Jen: Yeah, they value thinness. Dr. Mann: Yeah, if people truly valued health, that wouldn’t be a remarkable thing to say at all. Jen: We had a psychologist post in our group the other day she had read your book preparing for this podcast and she said “I’m a psychologist and I’m reading this book and I feel my resistance towards it, like, I feel it” and she, but you know, she’s acknowledging, like, “This is programming. This is diet culture,” so she was trying to tell everybody, like, “I am a professional and I am resisting this, like, I have a mental block there that I don’t want to hear it. I still want to believe there’s a magic pill out there” and so of course, the general population that isn’t even educated with psychology, you know, of course, there’s a massive block there, massive. Dr. Mann: And I see that and I see that in anonymous comments out there, the people who come up to me are like, “This is freeing, this changes everything, hallelujah” and the people who are like, “I can’t, no, I must believe that I can lose a ton of weight and keep it off.” Yeah, I don’t hear from those people I just hear mean comments. Jen: Right, but they just pursue people who that, whose ideas support their, you know, how they want to see the world right and you know what, honestly, when I embraced these ideals, it was, I went through a pretty big slump of emotion, like, it was like grief. I had to grieve and because it was, yeah, it was, it was an idea that I had based a lot of my life around and spent a lot of time energy and money and the more invested you’re into something, the more you resist that it doesn’t work and trying to convince different gurus or fitness professionals that have built their whole careers and social followings on selling thinness, trying to convince them of that will be even harder because they are so deeply invested in it. Dr. Mann: Oh yeah, they’re the worst. Jen: And so I think a grieving process is like pretty normal when you, like, you have the freedom but then it’s like, you know, you go through these different stages of, like, “Oh, well that sucks” or you feel somebody shame come up and your trigger, that’s kind of your trigger that typically will take you into dieting behaviors to feel like you’re actually in control of that but you’re not and you’re just realizing, “I am not in control” and that can be very depressing, right but but also very freeing on the other side once you fully accept that/ Dr. Mann: Yeah, again, we just have to remember the one thing that truly, truly matters is our health. Jen: Yes. Absolutely. Dr. Mann: You know, have someone close to you die too young and suddenly it becomes very, very real, you know, you have nothing without your health. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: So keep that in mind as the goal. The goal is health. Not some number on the scale and they don’t measure health with that number on the scale. Jen: Right and and including psychological health in that because I have had people around me succumb to eating disorders and that’s a very real thing in our society and it has very, anorexia has very high mortality rates and so- Dr. Mann: The highest of any mental illness. Jen: Yes and so and it’s just a horrible life, right even if you don’t, even if it doesn’t lead to you passing away and dying, it’s a horrible place to be and it is not healthy and it’s, you know, this is very real as far as, you know, a lot of people think of unhealthy as, you know, very large and morbidly obese and eating and eating but there is the other end where there’s a lot of people succumbing to eating disorders as well. Dr. Mann: Yeah, it’s true. Annie: Dr. Mann, I cannot thank you enough. This is so much fun. Is there a place that people can connect with you? Do you hang out on, I already stalked you on Instagram it doesn’t look like you’re- Dr. Mann: I never post, I’m basically on Instagram to spy on my 14 year old. I don’t expect he’ll see this. Annie: Excellent. Are you on Facebook or your website? Where can people catch up with you or stay on top of what you’re working on? Dr. Mann: I guess I’m on Facebook or Twitter more but again, on Facebook I post but mostly political stuff, on Twitter I only lurk, I’m there,  if you want to find me, if you want to talk to me, tweet at me. Annie: OK. Jen: OK. Dr. Mann: Or do the same on Facebook. Annie: Awesome we’ll put that in the show notes so people can connect with you if they want to follow up with you but this was so fun. It was just like talking to a friend that knows a lot about nutrition. Dr. Mann: It sounds like you’re doing awesome stuff so I’m so glad you’re out there doing it. Annie: Yeah, we’re trying. Jen: Thank you. Lauren: Thank you. Annie: OK, we’ll talk soon ladies, thanks for joining us. Jen: Bye. Lauren: Alright, bye!   The post 53: Secrets from the Eating Lab: Dr. Traci Mann 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.

Annie and Lauren interview Registered Dietitian Marci Evans to answer the question once and for all “Is sugar addiction real?” Marci delves into the science, the psychology and the keys to feeling less out of control about sugar and more in control of your life. Strap in for the latest and greatest in peer-reviewed research and what it all really means. What you’ll hear in this episode: Clickbait headlines and sugar research Is sugar addicting? Sugar and Cocaine: How alike are they? Abstinence from sugar and its impact on cravings What rodents taught us about sugar Finding food peace in the messy middle Black and white thinking and sugar The difference between diet rules and noticing what feels good for your body Stopping the cycle of all or nothing with sugar Self-inventory for vulnerability factors Exploring “problematic” foods again Building on quick wins How restriction impacts the brain’s response to sugar The importance of learning to be self-aware with the kindness Your inner dialogue and its impact on your success in reaching your goals The biggest lie of diet culture The truth about your body’s natural tendencies Building self-trust Repeat customers and the diet industry Being responsible consumers of nutrition information Resources: Marci Evans Blog on sugar   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: You feel completely out of control when it comes to candy and cookies, craving sweets even when you’re not hungry. Maybe you found yourself wondering if you’re addicted to sugar. Scour the internet for the term “sugar addiction” and you’re likely to come up with an overwhelming amount of information, much of which seems to contradict each other. Our culture has a pretty extreme view of sugar and unfortunately, the diet and fitness industry is full of pseudoscience and fear-mongering headlines claiming sugar is addictive as cocaine but what’s the truth? Is sugar really addicting? We invited internationally recognized dietitian Marci Evans on today’s podcast to discuss just that. Marci and her team help clinicians and clients alike develop smart, enduring strategies for overcoming eating disorders, disordered eating and the backlash of chronic dieting. Marci, in particular, has done extensive research on the tenants of food addiction after noting that the concept didn’t square with her clinical experience and yet she felt it captured how so many people feel in relationship to food. On today’s episode Marci, Lauren and I discuss what the past 5 years of research and experience have taught Marci about sugar addiction and steps you can take to feel more in control of your sweet tooth. Enjoy! Marci! Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m so happy to have you. Marci: Oh, it is my absolute pleasure to be here, to come to chat with you ladies about a topic that is near and dear to my heart. It is just an absolute pleasure so thank you so much for inviting me to join you. Annie:  Yeah, we’ve been waiting for a while. I think we started emailing months ago and it just schedules just didn’t work out until now. Marci: Yeah, I know. You guys are very, very patient which I appreciate and I had to get through one more big talk before I could put anything else on my plate so I’m glad, I’m really glad to be here and hopefully the wait will be worth it by the time we wrap up this I know what will be a really interesting conversation. Annie:  Yeah, I’m sure it will be. Lauren’s here with us too, Lauren, how are you? Lauren: Hi! I’m good. Excited to be here. Annie: I was just going to say, I bet you’re super stoked- Lauren: Pumped. Annie: Because here we are discussing one of the most talked about topics in our Facebook community, which if you aren’t a member, it’s Healthy Habits Happy Moms on Facebook. We have almost 40,000 women in our private Facebook community and something that comes up a lot is “Is sugar addicting?” And this is a highly debated topic on the Internet and especially in the fitness and nutrition community and as Marci has noted in her blog post, which we will share a link of the show notes to her website, if you just do a google search for “Is sugar addicting?” or “sugar addiction” you’re likely to come up with a wide range of answers from “Yes, absolutely, it totally is addicting” to “No, that’s just a load of crap” it can be really confusing to the mainstream listener, reader, consumer and Marci, this is why we have you on because you’ve done a lot of extensive research on this topic. So how did you get interested in the topic of food addiction or sugar addiction? Marci: Well, I think you nailed it in a couple of different ways. The first is that many people have the experience of feeling really out of control of food and feeling really chaotic, so the term ‘food addiction’, which has gotten written about more and more just in popular media, feels like it’s very resonant for a lot of people and it’s sort of like “Oh gosh, food addiction. There’s something about that feels true for me.” And so it’s something that I have seen a lot of people come to me in my practice with, so it’s something that is definitely coming up in my work in a day to day way, just like you ladies are describing, seeing this in your Facebook group and so I think that that’s a piece of it and then the other piece of it you also alluded to is that there’s been more research on the topic of food addiction and you know, it’s definitely a double-edged sword that this research makes it into the mainstream media. It’s great that the research is being done, the problem is that the way that it often gets written about in the media is not totally accurate to the science and so you see a lot of compelling headlines that you know draw people in and you know get a lot of clicks and get a lot of post likes and are resonant to how people feel that it gets really pulled away from what the actual science says. So I became interested because I learned about it several years ago in a training that I went to but then it was just so relevant in my day-to-day work with my clients that I was like, “I can’t not look more into this. This is just like staring me in my face.” Annie: Yeah and I am, you’re so right because I do think when I’m thinking about all of the headlines and the information that I have read it is very kind of fear mongering, you know, or polarizing or it’s very extreme. We call that click bait, right?  Like, you, they’re just trying to get you to bite, right? Marci: Total clickbait. And then they have these pictures of the brain that look very, you know, very smart and you know, “Wow, look how the brain is lighting up” in these comparisons to, like, drug pathways and so it becomes very tantalizing info that people can get really pulled into for sure. Lauren:  And I think it’s become just “common knowledge” that sugar is addicting, like, if you ask just random people on the street “Have you heard sugar is addicting?” I’m willing to bet, you know, many, many of them will say “Yes.” Annie: Yeah, OK, so are we ready to just dive right in? Like, can we just, can we just go? Are we ready? Marci: We can absolutely go for it. Annie:  Alright, Marci, is sugar addiction a thing? Marci: So the state of the research tells us that sugar is not physiologically addicting. That’s the bottom line so looking at what happens in our bodies when you eat sugar and is there a chemical response that pulls you in to have it more and more and more and that you become sort of this slave to sugar and that the only way to kind of stop yourself is that you have to go cold turkey and that is 100 percent not borne out in the research. Annie: But people have to still keep listening to the rest of the show. Marci: People are going to be like “Who is this chick? Get her off. Yeah, done.” Annie: Like, “Oh I got what, I got the answer I was looking for, it’s not a thing” but you have you have some points of reference that I think are really important to follow this up. Like, to date there is no scientific evidence that sugar is addictive but that’s not exactly, like, there’s more to it than just that and I love that you say, you kind of touched on this earlier, that a person’s sense or feeling of being out of control around sugar or any food in general is not the same thing as having an addiction. Marci: Yes, that distinction to me is everything. That is like where I press pause and spend so much of my time, whether I’m teaching professionals or talking with individuals or nonprofessionals, is that there is the science part, right, that I love, that looks all about the brain wiring and what is happening in a person’s body in, as they’re eating sugar or not eating sugar, right, and we talked about that and kind of gave you the cold, hard truth, sugar is not addicting. However, the other piece of it that is equally important is a person’s experience and what happens inside of them when they eat sugar or when they deprive themselves of sugar, which is really kind of the key part that we’ll be, I think, spending quite a bit of time on, that creates feelings that are really relevant, right? So when people feel chaotic, when people feel out of control, when people feel completely preoccupied and obsessed, those things are very, very real. Those things are important. Those things we have to understand and it’s your guys’ job and it’s my job to help my clients through those experiences and they’re actually very common but those experiences aren’t rooted in an addiction but they are very, very, very important and the feeling can feel like an addiction. Lauren: Yeah, for sure. Annie: So, Marci, are you talking about when we hear in, you know, magazine articles or blog posts, when we hear the response that like this when people eat sugar that their brain lights up like they’re on some, a drug similar to like cocaine, is that what you’re talking about? Marci: Yeah. And I can speak to that if you want me to kind of tease that apart some, those headlines. Annie: Yeah, let’s just jump right into it. Let’s go. Marci: So, unfortunately that is a classic example of total misinterpretation of the scientific research and actually, what we see, when this was published, that sort of initial headline of look at these brain scans and look at this area of the pleasure centers of the brain and this is, you know, more powerful than when a person does cocaine, you know, these really, really, like you said, clickbait, fear mongering type of post was a misreading of the literature from a couple of cardiologists who wrote this post in response to the research, but when you look at the research and what the neurobiologists actually explain is that we have natural reward pathways in the brain. They are there. They are meant to be there. There’s no getting rid of them. They are actually good and helpful things in keeping us alive that we do certain things as humans and we get a reward so that we do them again. So we have natural rewards for things like eating, things like sex, things like holding a baby and feeling really good about it, listening to music, connecting with friends. We get these positive feelings and vibes and actually these neurotransmitters in our brain get produced so that we do those things again because from an evolutionary standpoint, these are the things that have kept us alive. These are the key things that have kept us thriving as a species. And so what we’ve learned is that when a person abuses a non-necessary substance, say, like cocaine, cocaine actually comes and hijacks those completely normal, healthy reward pathways that are supposed to be there. So this idea that “Oh my gosh, you see this lighting up when we eat sugar. This is evidence that you’re an addict. That is not at all what it is saying. You’re seeing normal responses in the brain. We can talk a little bit more about that in terms of what’s normal and what might be problematic in showing these brain images but it’s the drugs that come in and hijack the normal pathways that we get really, really concerned about but those pathways are there. They’re meant to be there. They don’t mean you’re sick. They don’t mean you’re flawed or that you have some big problem. Annie: Interesting. So it was just some misinterpretation of research that caused this whole, like, flood of “sugar is the equivalent to cocaine.” Marci: That’s exactly right. Lauren: And I think it’s, it can be comforting to someone too who feels so out of control around food or sugar to be like, “Oh well, that explains it. I’m addicted, right?” But I think we’ll see that that kind of takes your power away because you aren’t addicted and there are things that you can do to not feel so out of control around those foods. Marci: That’s exactly right and even to add on a layer of complexity is that the notion that I am addicted encourages people to abstain from those foods, right? Well, if I am an addict, the only way to manage this is to totally take these things out of my life and here is where this is probably the most important thing I have to offer to each of you who are listening right now is that that abstaining or we might call it restriction of those foods actually leads to changes in your brain that have a stronger pleasure response that gets lit up and actually encourages you and compels you to have those foods even more. So when the researchers looked at this phenomenon they used rodent models and what they did is they had these rodents and they took the sugar away and restricted them and put them on a diet and it was those rodents that had an amplified response in their brain to sugar and it was those rodents who demonstrated this same chaotic “addictive” behavior, binge-like behavior but when they had the rodents where they didn’t put them on a diet and they didn’t restrict them, they had completely, what we would say, just totally normal responses to sugar and none of the addictive-like behavior and so the problem with the addiction model is not only that yes, totally takes your power away but in addition, it’s going to create the exact scenario that you most fear and it’s going to create the behavior and the changes in your brain chemistry that cause you to feel more out of control and cause you to feel more and more like an addict. So it’s like this double bind, it’s like a double whammy. Annie: And Marci, does research support that for just any food, labeling any foods as bad or addicting or off limits or is this just sugar. Marci: Right now, the research is looking specifically at sugar because the researchers, what they’re trying to do is to get more and more specific and this is where that research on food is much more complicated than the research on say, alcohol or drug abuse because we as humans don’t eat singular substances like table sugar, right? For the most part, we eat things like ice cream and cupcakes or Doritos and so researchers have tried to get as specific as possible to understand is there a specific ingredient that folks are addicted to and this is again where the research right now really points to, you know, the flaws in the research is like, we don’t even have a specific ingredient that we can look at and point to and say that is the addictive substance. Annie: This is something that we talk about frequently in our community and our program Balance365 that this idea of the restriction leads to bingeing or more, it sets you up to be more likely to binge, because so often what we see in our community is that women want to stop the binge by going back to restriction. They’re like, “Oh, I ate too much sugar, got to get rid of all the sugar now!” Marci: Yeah, I have to fix it. Annie: Yeah, instead of stopping at the restriction, sort of resetting or reframing your perspective on sugar. Instead of just saying “I’m all out. I can’t have any.” Try to have it in moderation might reduce your likelihood of binge. Marci: Yes and I feel completely empathetic to anyone who identifies kind of with what you just described because I think that it’s human nature that when you feel like you’ve swung to one side of the pendulum and part of this, you see, I’m a neuro science geek, part of this is just how we’re wired to be as humans. We want to put things into boxes and we tend to be very black and white thinkers so that when we move to one extreme it is very, I think, natural and compelling to hold yourself to the other extreme as a way to find a counterbalance but what happens is that you just sort of envision a pendulum, for most people, they end up swinging between one extreme to the other and it’s not very natural for most people to say “Well, how do I respond to this chaos? I try to find a happy medium somewhere in the middle, right?”   If you just had a day or days or weeks of feeling out of control and you’re bingeing and you’re feeling awful. It is very natural to want to kind of pull over to that other side to detox, to restrict, to put up the food rules because when you’re feeling that way it feels awful and you don’t want to feel that way again and imagining dipping your toe into that middle ground can feel very, very foreign and very scary and for a lot of people, they’re like, “That just doesn’t even seem to make sense. You see, I can’t be trusted. I need to put up all the rules and all the walls and all the barriers.” Lauren: You know, it’s interesting that you say that that’s how humans are wired because we call ourselves, like, we work in the messy middle and it’s so hard to get people to kind of reframe and kind of get it and like, we were talking about before the podcast, it takes people you know a few months sometimes of following us to kind of like indoctrinate themselves in that messy middle. Marci: Totally. I love that you guys call it the messy middle because that’s usually exactly what it is. It doesn’t stay messy forever though. It does not stay messy forever but the process can be a bit messy. However, I do find that when I talk to my clients and I really, I’m sure you guys have seen this too, is that when you talk with them about their experience and their stories and what it’s been like for them over the years, that their lived experience is this sort of swinging from being on a diet to them feeling out of control and then needing another diet and then feeling out of control and so their lived experience really points to and supports what we see in the literature and in the research and why so many of us as clinicians are advocating for that messy middle because their lived experience and the research shows us that restrict-binge cycle is not their fault, it is not a failing, it’s not because they’re screwed up and doing it wrong. It’s because it’s a set up and so those skills for navigating that middle ground can feel really tough at first but that’s where the sweet spot is, like, that’s where you find food peace, like, that where you find sustainable patterns of living. Annie: That is what we share in our community often is that it’s, like, a practice and it’s a skill and it’s just a matter of practicing that new skill over and over and over until that becomes your new normal because it’s not, like, that, like you said that is not natural for me, it’s not natural for a lot of women. We’re so used to, like, being on the wagon or off the wagon, we’re in, we’re out, we’re perfect, we’re failing, we’re right, wrong, black, white, like, so to live in this like gray areas, like, “Oh my gosh, what are the rules? What am I doing? Like, there’s no boundaries, where are the boundaries?” Marci: Like, right, “Just give me the guidebook. Tell me exactly how to do it, I can follow it.” Annie: Yes, which in the in the fitness industry, that is so common, I mean, which I think was which is why our program is such a breath of fresh air, of course, I think that, but it’s, you know, we’re like trying to help you navigate that for yourself versus just telling you what to do so you can hopefully go on to create “boundaries and rules” that work for you and I mean, if that’s what you need, that we don’t have to impose our values or morals or rules on to them. Marci: Yeah, that’s awesome and I think that finding that middle space that is is something, I mean, it sounds like what you’re really describing is something that’s really internally guided rather than something that’s externally imposed and that can feel really, really scary but the amazing thing is is that as you go through the process of really kind of tuning in and really listening and really kind of taking a break from all of that external noise is that you can find patterns and habits and boundaries that are truly sustainable, you know, I wouldn’t say I have a rule of eating every you know 3 to 4 hours, it’s not like I have to follow this rule but I know that when I eat every 3 to 4 hours I feel much, much better and so that’s how I eat most of the time but it’s not a rule that’s been sort of handed down to me that you have to follow it and that’s kind of the difference. Annie: Absolutely. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: OK so to circle back then as it pertains to sugar and this sense of feeling out of control when it comes to sugar consumption, how do you break that cycle of, like, you’re either all in and you’re eating all the sugar or you’re not eating any sugar at all for 30 days or, you know, whatever it is, do you have some guidelines that you use with your clients or that you would recommend in general for how to stop that mindset, or reframe that mindset or stop that cycle? Marci: I do. I do and what I want to say before I dive and sort of offer some tips is to say this process is a process and we’ve already been talking about that, be really patient with yourself and I would also say if you can have in your mind the idea of approaching your experience with a lot of curiosity and just kind of wonder and, “Oh, isn’t that interesting?” in trying to find kind of that neutral detective voice that will help you learn along the way because it’s going to be bumpy, you know ,I love your messy middle, like, it’s going to be bumpy. It’s not as if I’m going to give you a formula and then you’re going to take the formula and you’re like “Boom, got it. No more problems with food, right?” But allow yourself to kind of take some of these ideas, try them on, experiment with them and use them to give you more data and more information but the number one place that I encourage people to start is to do a self-inventory and to take some time with the self inventory, like, do it over several days or a week or so. And ask yourself, what are the things that leave me vulnerable to “overdoing it with food right” so it could be a zillion things, like sky’s the limit, so you could think about “Well, it’s maybe related to my food environment or maybe related to how stressed out I am or my mood or how much my kids are bugging me or how much, you know, my job is completely overwhelming me or the time of day or the amount of food that’s available to me or how well I’ve nourished myself that day, how over-hungry, you know, how much maybe I’ve been following a diet that actually doesn’t meet my nutritional needs. I’m constantly undercutting in an attempt to lose weight but then go over-hungry and that’s when I find myself really having a hard time with food.” So trying to be as extensive as you possibly can in creating this inventory of what I call your vulnerability factors and then you can start to have a little bit more of a nuanced conversation in your own mind around “I have a hard time with sugar when, you know, I’m really, really tired, I’m sleep deprived, I haven’t eaten enough and I’ve got high levels of stress,” right? So you’re starting to really get to know yourself rather than saying “Oh, I just don’t have any will power” or “I’m an addict therefore I have to get rid of this,” you’re really inventorying to get a sense of “Oh these are the things that leave me really, really vulnerable to having a tough time” and the other thing that I would add in is, that’s really important and can take a little bit of time to get to know, is “What are my thoughts and beliefs that I tell myself about my relationship to food in my relationship to sugar, specifically? What is the dialogue in my brain? What thoughts do I tell myself? What do I believe and where did those beliefs come from? Are those beliefs that I learned when I was little from my own mom? Are those beliefs that I was taught from going on a zillion diets? Are those beliefs, you know, that I learned from, you know, my girlfriend down the street?” So really be very, very critical and I would say, like, literally journal this out, try to do it like on a piece of paper or if you have an online journal and really get out of your own head “What do I tell myself and what do I believe about sugar and where did those beliefs come from?” So starting with those two inventories is a really, really important place to begin. Annie: I really, really like both of those suggestions. “What you talked about, that vulnerability Journal is kind of similar, in our program we call it, like, triggers, you know, like, what are you doing, where are you at, what are you feeling, what are you thinking, what did you just do, who are you with?” Because all of those things can really impact our behavior and especially when it comes to food and fitness and I know you know we’re just coming off of Halloween season so I know a lot of people have been having candy in the house, you know, it could just be as. I mean not as simple as. but that could be an element into how much sugar you’re consuming, like, is it just a matter of convenience, like, it’s staring you in the face all day, right? Marci: Totally. Exactly, exactly, you have huge amounts of it surrounding you and I love that you guys use the language of skill building because that is the exact language that I also use with my clients, where I say “Learning to eat in a peaceful balanced way is like building a skill” and the cool thing about viewing it as a skill is that a skill is something that can be developed but if you are someone, and you are very good company if you are, who has spent a lot of your life in a dieting mindset, it’s going to take some time to rebuild that skill of balanced, peaceful, non-chaotic eating and so I am really a proponent of saying “Let’s take just little baby steps here.” Now, I do know that there are some practitioners and other people who said, you know, the best thing I did was just surround myself with tons of sugar and tell myself I have total permission to eat this food and to really listen to my body and that it was rough in the beginning but then I really got to a place where I really believed it wasn’t going to go anywhere and then I stopped bingeing on it, however if that works for you, go for it, don’t let me stand in your way. My experience is that for most people what ends up happening is they end up just feeling really out of control for a stretch of time and it feels like more proof, “See, I can’t be trusted, you see, I was out of control” and so it just feels like more evidence kind of building up and so that tends to not be the approach I go with most of my clients, that with most of my clients we’re like slow and steady, we are, you know, I always use the bike analogy. We’re starting off on a balance bike and we’ve got, you know, a bike that’s maybe a little bit bigger, a little bit, you know, a little bit more like an adult bike and then we move into something that’s more advanced and then we’re really going on the unicycle but we don’t just hop on the unicycle right in the beginning, right? We’re going to start we’re just taking these little baby steps and the point is to begin to have more regular access to the foods that you have trouble with but to do it within the framework of really honoring the things that make you particularly vulnerable. So one of your biggest triggers or one of your biggest vulnerabilities is, maybe, what do you guys see actually? What do you notice? I should ask you, in your Facebook group and you know your audience, what would you say is one of their biggest vulnerabilities? Lauren: I would say skipping meals or not eating enough throughout the day. A lot of people find themselves then bingeing or overeating on sugar and snacks at night or in the evenings after they put their kids to bed. Marci: Totally, so that’s perfect. So I would say if you have a day where maybe you haven’t adequately nourished yourself when you skip some meals and it’s evening time, I would say that’s not going to be the most helpful time for you to practice eating something like Halloween candy in a way that’s going to feel not totally chaotic, right? It’s like, well, that’s not really a fair experiment because we knew that was probably a set up from the beginning and so I kind of take that inventory and say “Let’s try to eliminate as many of those vulnerabilities as possible. And start having little exposures where you’re giving yourself permission to have these foods, low vulnerability, low trigger, challenging those old thoughts and beliefs and developing those coping skills to help you manage the craziness that is life and all the stress that life brings and then it’s repeating those things over and over again. So I had a client, I mean, I’ve done this was so many clients, she had a lot of trouble, one of her hardest foods was Nutella and she’s like “Marci, I’m telling you, every single time I bring Nutella into my house it’s gone in a couple days, like, I just can’t handle this Nutella.” And so the way we ended up going about it was we ended up deciding to integrate it at the very start of her day and so when she would come see me, we did this so slow, like we literally did this over months and I would keep it in my office and I know, some of you might be thinking “Why don’t I have my own dietician” I bet you could be really, really creative. She would come to my office, she would bring a balanced meal and she would do some Nutella with the rest of her meal and then we would note, “What are the thoughts that you are having? What kind of tools and skills can you use to kind of help you through your day because you have a busy day, what’s your food plan, like, making sure you have enough food to get you through your day.” And we sort of charted through all her vulnerabilities and then we did that again and again and then we sort of upped the ante where she took some of the Nutella and she repeated that on her own and so then we just stepped it, stepped it up and as she was developing more skillfulness and more ability, then, I mean, again it wasn’t for a couple months, then she brought the Nutella into her home but we started it with just the tiniest of baby steps. Lauren: I love that. Annie: This is a, yeah, I do too and this just feels like, my background is fitness, but it’s like a lot of times people just need a win, you know, and they kind of just build their confidence slowly and slowly and slowly and over time it’s like, you know, that quote “Little by little you travel far.” It helps to build that self efficacy so that they can believe like “Oh my gosh, maybe I can do this,” but to go from 0 to 100 can be really overwhelming like, “Oh my gosh, no I can’t ever have Nutella in my home and not eat the whole jar” like that’s just, that doesn’t seem even doable but I bet you know now she’s like “Oh yeah, maybe I can.” Marci: Exactly. Annie: or “I am.” Marci: Yeah, “I am.” Yeah it’s really cool because I no longer work with this client because she’s doing so well and she doesn’t need me anymore and that’s always my goal and absolutely, she has all of the things in her house but it took us really breaking it down and it’s exactly like you said, it was her having a little win to be like “Oh, maybe it’s not the sugar, maybe it’s all of the beliefs that I have about sugar and the ways I’ve approached it before and their reaction to all of the deprivation.” Like, I just cannot overstate the implication of having dieted and having that restriction mindset really sets us up to go to the other side of things. Like, it’s really interesting when you look at the brain scan literature when they look at folks who have a history of dieting and restriction and they show them images of what scientists call like, you know, palatable foods or we could say, like, high sugar foods or high fat foods, we might think it was “naughty foods” or “bad foods” is that their brain regions of pleasure light up even higher when you compare to people who don’t sort of hit that profile of long dieting history and so it takes time that gradual permission for that hyper response to get dialled down but it’s the only way for it to dial down. So if you keep going back to dieting and keep going back to restriction it’s going to keep that elevated response, but if you can end this gradual way, practice it and your body and your brain get used to “Oh, this food isn’t going anywhere.I have this food in my life. It’s not as if one time a year I get to eat X, Y and Z. Then that hyper response calms down and we can see kind of like the charge around food sort of settles down and it becomes more neutral. Annie: And that just, I mean, that to me sounds like freedom and such peace to be able to live, you know, or just be wherever you are and know that like you don’t have to hold yourself back or you’re just going to be a maniac on, you know, a pizza buffet or an ice cream sundae, that you can just coexist with the foods you love and enjoy them in moderation. Lauren: Yeah, another thing I really loved about your example is about going through your vulnerabilities, like that client within the Nutella probably had to build some other habits to kind of reduce those vulnerabilities, is that right? Marci: Right, you’re spot on, totally. Yes, she had to kind of identify what other tools that I need in my tool box that help me to manage when I’m feeling really overwhelmed with work and when I’m feeling overtaxed or when I have my inner critic and my inner critic is really, really loud so we had to do a ton of work on helping her to notice how is she speaking to herself and what are the consequences and what’s the likeliest outcome when you continue to speak to yourself in that mean, critical way and I would say that’s a huge, huge cornerstone of the piece, huge cornerstone of the work that I do with my clients is cultivating a couple of skills and so these are some of the broad, brushstrokes skills that I will mention for you and mention for your listeners is developing the ability to be self aware but with kindness. As well as this skill of being able to be compassionate with yourself and you guys probably see this all the time, people have a really hard time being compassionate with themselves because they feel like if I’m compassionate I’m just myself slack, right, and I’m never going to make that forward progress. It is the opposite, the more critical and nasty you are to yourself the less likely you are to achieve your goals and make positive change. If you can talk to yourself like you would to your child or talk to yourself like you would to someone you love and care about, your best friend, those are the same things that help you to remain neutral and curious and that enhances your ability to make sustainable changes and so I spend so much time helping my clients notice and shift the way that they interact and talk with themselves and really working on the inner dialogue. Annie: We have a saying in our community that gets dropped frequently and I absolutely love it, it’s “we take great care of things we love and your body is no exception” but I think you are so right, Marci, that when women think about being kind to themselves and speaking nicely to themselves or coming from a place of love, they’re worried that they’re going to get complacent or that they’re going to just, like, I won’t have a desire to go workout if I’m, like, too nice to myself or I won’t have a desire to eat vegetables if I don’t beat myself up and shame myself into eating this salad with no dressing or whatever it is. And that’s just not been our experience. Marci: Yeah it’s not, it doesn’t surprise me that that’s not been your experience because it’s fundamentally untrue. So one of the things the biggest lies of diet culture is that our nature as human beings is to lay on a couch and do nothing but eat ice cream and that we are constantly having to fight against that nature. That is not true, actually our bodies and systems create vibrancy, they crave balance, they crave things that allow us to feel well and we know that if we are polarized to any extreme we aren’t going to feel well. And so our bodies are constantly trying to move us towards homeostasis so we can flip that narrative, we have to live that narrative from “If left to my own devices, I’m going to be a total just slob on the couch” and say “You know what, actually, left to my own devices, I want to feel really good and I know that if what allows me to feel really good is to be in a pretty balanced space.” If you can imagine eating only gummy bears and bagels for the rest your life, you can imagine that probably wouldn’t feel well, right? If you can imagine eating only spinach and chicken breast for the rest your life, like, that also doesn’t sound so great and so being able to trust that our inner nature and our core souls, actually creates movement, creates balance, creates health, creates vibrancy, all of those things, that you can begin to relax a little bit and be like “I don’t have to ride myself so hard, you know, I trust that my inner core craves healthy themes but all the dieting that we do that stamps out that inner flame and when we move away from diets we find that we have it naturally and intuitively inside of us.” Annie: Absolutely. Lauren shares with our community often, like, people that say that, you know, they say what you just said, like “If I listen to my body, I would just eat ice cream all day, every day” and Lauren is like “Have you tried that? Like, have you actually tried that? Like I think you think you would feel good but I don’t think you would feel good if you just did that all day every day” and people are like “Actually, you’re probably right, like, no, that wouldn’t leave me feeling good” and that this idea that, you know, like you said, if left to my own devices, like, I might actually take good care of myself, especially if I think about it in terms of how I take care of my children, how I take care of my spouse or my partner or what I would say to a girlfriend if she missed a workout or if she overate, you know, some ice cream. I wouldn’t beat her up. I wouldn’t berate her. I wouldn’t say “You’re lazy, like, get your act together.” I would be like “Hey, that’s OK. Like, now we know too much ice cream leaves us feeling yucky, like, let’s not do it again.” Marci: Exactly and if you just can notice that what your body is communicating to you and also trust, and this is where so many people skip a step, because we’re not taught to do this in our culture is that our heads override with a rule, right, too much ice cream and our head says “Tomorrow: rule, no ice cream” but if you can say “OK, I’m going to take a pause from my busy brain and say “If I were to let my body choose what the next step might be,” you will notice that your body has all this wisdom to re-regulate you but that head jumps in way too soon and creates this big rule because you’re in a place where you’re feeling awful and you’re feeling really scared and you’re feeling really anxious, right and so but it’s that practice of noticing, “OK, my head is so loud but if I were to just ask, what would my body say?” and I did actually a hilarious experiment like the ice cream one you guys just gave. I had a client, this is one of my favorite stories, we’re working on moving away from this dieting mindset and she said “Marci, my hardest food is gummy bears.” She’s like, “I’m obsessive with gummy bears, I love gummy bears. So you’re telling me (because we were working on unconditional permission, one of the intuitive eating principles, unconditional permission to eat whatever food she wanted)” she said, “Now you’re telling me that I am allowed to have gummy bears for lunch” and I said “Totally, if what you want is just gummy bears for lunch you can totally have gummy bears but I want you to make sure of 2 things, one: you get yourself enough gummy bear so you’ve gotten enough to eat for lunch and I also am going to ask that you have to pay attention to the taste of the gummy bears and how they feel in your body and how you feel afterwards.” She’s like “OK, I’m totally going to do it.” And I think she was, like, looking to like prove me wrong, to be like “I’m just out of control with gummy bears, I can’t be trusted. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And she came back and I said “Did you do the gummy bears for lunch?” and she’s like “I totally did” and I said “How did it go? What did you notice? What did you learn?” and she said, “Well, I thought that I was just going to be super excited and super happy to eat gummy bears for lunch, like I really felt like I was getting away with something but what I learned is that if I only eat gummy bears at lunch I actually feel sick and I kind of feel shaky” and so I kind of responded, you know, in a very neutral way to say “You know, that’s really interesting.” I said, “So if you were to redo that to where you wanted to have gummy bears at lunch time, you wanted to pair it with other things so that you could feel energized and that you could feel, you know, not distracted at work and  you’re not shaky and your stomach doesn’t feel upset, what would you choose?” and she listed out what she had in mind with gummy bears sort of on the side and it was this, like, completely, you know, nutritious, totally balanced meal and I was like “OK, you know, maybe you want to try that” and it was about her experimentation and learning “Oh, I don’t have to have this hard core rule, you know, like, “Don’t eat gummy bears” it was like, “Oh, it turns out that if I really listen I don’t want to just eat gummy bears for lunch, like, I feel kind of awful when I do that.” Annie: And it was inside of her, like, that she knew that, it was almost innate, like this is, “I did this, I didn’t like how I felt, I’m going to try this” and what an amazing moment. That’s an awesome story. Marci: And it was really cool because, like, you know, we were working on “you have to truly give yourself permission, that has to be there, it can’t be conditional, you have to really say ‘I am allowed to have these foods’ and I’m going to practice and I’m going to notice” and she did that and what she noticed was “I’m allowed to have gummy bears for lunch but do I actually want to” and when you’re not rebelling against something and you have permission, then you have the autonomy to actually make a choice. Annie: Yeah, I’ve shared this analogy so many times but when I was in 8th grade of my parents made this boy off limits for dating and his name was Alex and all I wanted to do, I wasn’t even really interested in Alex I don’t think, but when they said I couldn’t date him I was like, “I need to date Alex.” Marci: You were, like, on an Alex binge. Annie: I was like, “Well, now, watch me, now I’m going to make this happen” but yeah, but it’s kind of the same principle kind of applies to food when you make all foods permissible then a lot of them lose their appeal. Like do I really even want this now that I can have it? Marci: Yeah. Yeah and sometimes our head really wants something, especially when we’ve been really conditioned to say “Ooh, that’s off limits, you can’t have that” So sometimes our head will be like “Ooh, I really want this thing” and then we say “Well, OK, I can have it. I can have gummy bears for lunch but what will that experience actually be like and is that what I want to choose for myself right now?” Lauren: Yeah, I think that dieting, like the biggest flaw even over, you know, reducing your caloric intake in half, basically, which is a big flaw, is just that you can’t trust your body, like it teaches you you cannot, you cannot be trusted. I think that’s like the root of everything, right? Marci: Oh my gosh, I couldn’t agree more. I feel like so much of the cleanup that I’m doing with my clients in terms of the diet culture is beginning to help my clients see this notion that you can’t be trusted, that idea was planted in your brain by the dieting industry and then they put you on a diet that would guarantee an outcome to where you feel out of control, that then looks like evidence that you can’t be trusted and then they give you another diet to follow. It is a complete construct of the dieting industry. It is not rooted in reality and our jobs are helping to move you away from that dieting mindset and towards a place of that inner self trust. Annie: Amen. That’s, and you already said this, Marci, but that’s, we joke that our business model might not be the most sustainable because we want to put the diet industry out of business and give women all the tools they need, give back women all the tools that they already had and so they aren’t forever reliant on us, like you said, like hopefully your clients learn to eat well and that supports their lifestyle and their goals and they don’t forever need you, right? But that’s not the diet industry’s motive. Marci: Oh no and it’s not how it sustains itself, right? I mean, if the average listener was to list out the number of diets that they’ve been on it would be evidence of “Oh yeah, this is based on repeat customers” but  if I do my job really well, right, I’m going to work with people for a period of time and then my hope is that they aren’t going to return and maybe maybe they do, maybe life circumstances hit them up, you know, things happen but my goal is for my clients not have to be repeat customers. That’s the intention, right, is to get my clients to a place where there is so much internal self-trust built that they know how to navigate how to take care of themselves which is very, very different business model. Annie: Absolutely. Lauren: Yeah and I was just going to mention that there was actually an interview done with a Weight Watchers C.E.O. or former C.E.O. that said part of their business model that they would use to get investors is that they had so much repeat business, so many repeat clients and it’s like well, that kind of proves that your diet doesn’t work, you know? Marci: Exactly and it’s not intended to work. Lauren: Right. Marci: Right. Annie:  OK, Marci, I want to thank you so much for your time. This was a wonderful, wonderful interview with you and I think it’s going to provide a lot of valuable and much-needed information to our community about sugar, is it addicting, is it not and as we clearly stated, it’s not, but that feeling of feeling out of control around sugar is something that a lot of women are familiar with and I think you gave some really, really great suggestions on how to begin regaining a sense of safeness or control around those foods. Marci: I sure hope so. It’s been so great to be here and I know you mentioned that you guys are going to link to a blog post that I wrote that really kind of delves into some of the science and some of the trouble with the food addiction model and that might be interesting for some of your readers to see and if it’s, or listeners, I should say, the readers of this blog post and also for folks who might be interested to dive into some of the research, there might be some science-minded folks I can also provide some citations to connect to what the state of the science is and you know, we kind of hit on this in the beginning and I’m sure you guys talk about this, there is so many problems with food and nutrition related research between how it’s conducted, how it’s disseminated and how it is portrayed in the media so the last thing that I would offer up to anyone who is listening is to take food headlines very, very lightly and if they are extreme, if they are black and white, if they are really, you know, kind of imposing a really extreme rule to take that very, very, very lightly, that there’s a lot of problems with reading and interpreting and sharing nutrition-related research in media and that is another way in which you can feel so pulled and sort of feel more out of control and like you don’t know where to go and you don’t know who to trust and you get pulled into another diet and that is why I’m just loving the messaging that you ladies are putting out into the world that is about cultivating greater self-trust because there’s going to be another headline out there and there’s going to be another podcast that I’m going to have to do about that headline. That is going to be my career probably until the end of time. So, do not take every headline so seriously and to really keep doing that work of developing that sense of self trust because it’s in there, it’s inside of you if you believe in it and I hope that this has been not only interesting but also given some concrete steps and tools to help you on your path in your journey in developing healthy relationship to food and body and yourself. Annie: I am certain that it has been and I’m so excited for our listeners to experience it too. Marci: Awesome, thanks. Annie: Thank you, Marci. Lauren: Thank you, Marci. Marci: Bye. Lauren: Bye.   The post Is Sugar Addictive? appeared first on Balance365.

This week we welcome Duane back and play catch up on some juicy topics! From the suicide of Kate Spade & Anthony Bourdain to racist Roseanne, the NBA finals, Drake vs. Pusha T and the G.O.O.D. Music album release marathon, we're in it DEEP this week. We also share lessons on the challenges of love, finding balance and focusing on our mental & physical health.      EPISODE BREAKDOWN: 3:00 - Weekly Recaps *7:23 - Terrence deletes his IG. Find out why! Lessons of the Week: 12:52 - Terrence: "Love is hard. Find ways to love better." 27:03 - Lauren: "You don't have to be on 100% of the time, 100% of the time." 29:35 - Duane: "Take your health more seriously." Topics: 35:00 - Drake vs. Pusha T 52:15 - The Boycott of G.O.O.D. Music 1:09:35 - NBA: The Soap Opera  1:17:58 - G.O.O.D. Music's Album Release Strategy 1:24:18 - R.I.P Kate Spade + Anthony Bourdain