Ep 4 Some Real Life Physical and Emotional Scenarios and Using Mindfulness

Thinner Peace in Menopause, Weight Loss and Beyond, Episode 4

Dr. Michael Butler: Welcome to Thinner Peace in Menopause, the mindful management of your mind and body. This is episode four. Today, Dr. Deb, who’s a master-certified weight coach, is going to talk to you about how paying attention to your emotions can change how you reach for food. It’s a game changer. And I should know: she’s been the love of my life and my wife for 37 years and my friend for over four decades. Today, we’re going to share some of her wisdom. Dr. Deb.

Dr. Deb Butler: Hi there! It’s Dr. Deb. I want to give a big shout-out to my husband. He’s been introducing me in all these segments so far, and he’s got the best voice I know of and I’ve been with him for so long. So, I think it’s so cool that he’s introducing me. And so, thank you, honey, I appreciate it. Anyway, I digress.

Today we’re going to talk about what you’ve been observing in yourself and how to turn that observation, what you’ve been seeing, into something that’s going to be very, very positive going forward. But you got to know what’s going on inside of you first before you can do anything positive. And that’s really the work that we’ve been doing.

So, I think now that you are starting to be able to watch yourself when you sit down to eat and applying numbers to how hungry you are-when you start and how full you are when you’re done-and what we’re going for is to eat at a negative two, which we’re calling a whisper, and to stop with a plus two, which is also a whisper of fullness. But you are satisfied. But you feel light; you feel airy. You know that you could go for a walk after eating and you have energy. And that’s really what I want for you. Have you been noticing that? Have you been able to do it is even a better question.

And the other thing that we talked about was the whole idea of your emotions and what we’re calling emotional hunger, especially when you go into the negative numbers and there’s negative emotions or vibrations in your body. Are you able to apply a number to that and to notice the difference between your physical hunger and your emotional hunger?

Well, what I want to do today is to give you a couple different scenarios with the emotional hunger scale and the physical hunger scale that I’ve seen in my clients, and to see if it’ll help you as you go forward dealing with the different incidents that will happen when you sit down to eat. But I want to say right now that I really applaud you for taking the time to do this for yourself because sometimes we don’t even save enough time, ever, to just take a moment with ourselves to know what’s going on. So, I think if you’re starting to do this, I think that you’re starting to make yourself a priority. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about. Just think if you started living your life, with you being your number one priority, because that’s really what I’m asking you to do right now is to pay attention to you. Really, I want you to be paying attention to yourself all the time. But for now, we’re using the sitting down to eating as the moment in time to pay attention to yourself. Right now, you’re training your mind to pay attention when you sit down to eat. And my guess is, is that over the years, you’ve actually trained your mind to check out whenever you sit down to eat. So this is very, very new, and I applaud you for trying.

So what I’d like to go over today are a couple different patterns with emotional hunger and physical hunger that I think is pretty common with most people when they’re first starting out. And I’ve certainly seen that with plenty of my private clients and even myself. I think this will be very, very helpful for you going forward. And then after this episode, when I go to the next episode, I’m going to add something new for you to start observing in yourself. And I think it’s going to be a game-changer for you. But first, I want to make sure that you understand completely, how to see yourself, observe yourself when you’re either emotionally eating or when you’re noticing your physical hunger is either too high or too low. So the two patterns that I’m going to talk about today are either, one, waiting too long to eat or, two, eating when you’re not hungry. And I know you can all relate to that.

But I still want to say that I’m so happy that you are putting your attention into you every single time you sit down to eat. It’s the most important thing that you’re ever going to do and it’s probably the one thing that you actually gave up a long time ago. I know I did.

So let’s go over the first pattern where you wait too long to eat and what that might look like in for you or what it looks like in real life. So, let’s say, for instance, that you’re going out to lunch. That happens a lot. And you’re checking in with your body, and I applaud you for doing that, but what you’re noticing when you check in is that you’re very, very hungry. Let’s say you’re a negative five. That’s pretty darn hungry. If negative 10 is starving, negative five means that, at least for me, it would mean my stomach is really growling, and I’m a little lightheaded. And I’m not real clear-headed, so that might be like it is for you. And I start getting a little grouchy. So anyway, I’m out to lunch, and let’s say I’m with some friends, and I look at the menu. And what attracts me the most are the least nutritious meals. And I think that’s interesting because when you get too hungry-it seems like the most simple process-carbohydrates always appear to be the best. I don’t care if it’s doughnuts or croissants or, whatever, potato chips. It seems like that’s what you seem to want. You want dessert first, almost. So, what you do is you order a big hamburger and French fries because you feel so hungry and you can’t wait to eat. And then you get your food. And when you eat it, you eat way beyond a plus two. You get up to say like a plus five. And you notice this, but you don’t feel like you can stop yourself.

Now, this is an interesting scenario because we talk a lot about thinking that you are in control or not in control. But when it comes to your physical hunger, when your hunger gets really low, I think the body becomes physiologically compulsive, which means it’s in survival mode-it needs to eat. And it doesn’t care where it gets the food; it just has to eat, which is why you feel like you could eat the whole menu when you’re ordering because you’re so hungry. But it’s also because the body is just beyond in control; you need to give yourself a break.

When you see this type of pattern, number one, you need to show yourself compassion when you see it. And it’s the hardest thing for any of us to do because we have trained ourselves to be really hard on ourselves. We’ve trained ourselves to try to whip ourselves into shape. In the old days, we may say to ourselves, “Why did I wait so long? Why didn’t I stop and eat? What’s the matter with me? I’m supposed to be doing this, right?” You know the drill. But what I’m showing you to do now is instead of beating yourself up, you take a nice diaphragmatic breath, like we did in the beginning-a nice big belly breath-and you show yourself some compassion. Because really, you’ve been doing this for so long that it’s just what you’ve naturally been doing. And now you’re trying to do something different. But you’ve got to give yourself a break because it’s not gonna happen overnight.

So I think the best thing to do, when you’re showing yourself this self-compassion, is that you give yourself a pat on the back for seeing it. And then you say to yourself, “Next time I’m going to try to be better to myself, and I’m not going to wait so long to eat because it’s not right. It’s not fair.” And that’s it-that’s compassion. That’s helping yourself and not hurting yourself. You would never ever do that if it were your child. You wouldn’t scream and yell at them because they did something wrong. You would just look at them and go, “Honey.” You would try to figure out how you could help them do better. And that’s what you would do. And that’s what I want you to do for yourself. Show yourself some compassion, no matter what you see, and I guarantee you, next time, you can help yourself by checking in a little bit sooner.

We’re not used to checking in with ourselves at all and I’m asking you to check in at each meal. So now, if you find that you’re waiting too long to eat, you need to check in with yourself more often, like maybe every hour or two during the day just to see where you are inside your body. Is it hungry? Does it need something? And then you’ll start seeing a pattern when you need to eat, and then you’ll be able to be more prepared. But for now, you’re showing yourself some compassion, when you observe a pattern such as this, you do not beat yourself up. And that’ll be a big difference because we wouldn’t do it for our kids because they’re not going to change if we beat themselves up and or spank them or put them in the corner or whatever, anything like that. They change when they feel like they’ve been understood. And that’s what I want you to do for yourself, to understand yourself.

You know, just by noticing this and noticing that you’re waiting too long to eat or eating too much, and you would bring this to our coaching session, it’s such a great start. Because now we can look at this and what I would tell you, and what you might tell yourself is, of course, you ate a lot. Of course, you didn’t feel in control; you waited too long to eat. That’s what happens in the body: it becomes compulsive. And that’s a much more compassionate way to talk to yourself in trying to beat yourself up.

And the definition of compassion, according to some emotion researchers-I know, I didn’t know there was such thing as emotion researchers, but there are-and compassion literally means to suffer together. And it’s defined as the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another suffering and you feel motivated to relieve that suffering. I love that. What if you could do that for yourself? You know, you could think to yourself, “You’ve been doing this for a long time. But you can begin to do something differently. I know you can. You could stop. Maybe now is the time to put your needs first. It might mean making time for you every time your body whispers, in this case, when it whispers that it’s hungry.”

So in the upcoming weeks, I want you to consider this, and the reason why you want to start at a negative two is because the body is not compulsive. And you can make really good choices for yourself if that’s what you really want. You want to eat nutritiously. That’ll be your best chance to be able to eat nutritiously if you’re not real starving when you have to make that decision.

Now, let’s take a second example of how your week might have looked in a separate scenario. It’s nighttime, and you finished dinner. And you’re at a plus two, and you know you’re not hungry, but you want to eat anyway. And so, you go and you eat a bag of potato chips. This is what happens: your physical hunger scale, you know, is it a plus two, but because you’re paying attention now, you noticed that your emotional hunger scale was at a negative six. And since you wanted to investigate, what you found out is that you were feeling anxious because you were thinking about an upcoming project that was coming up tomorrow, and you were nervous about it. And you were thinking that you’re not going to do a good job, so the anxiety was really strong. And the potato chips at that moment seemed like the answer. Does this sound familiar to you? This happens a lot to a lot of people, and especially without paying attention. Because of this vibration that’s going on in the body and because it’s in the exact location where physical hunger can be, it almost feels like the most natural response is to eat something. But really when the emotional hunger scale is strong like that, you just don’t want to feel that uncomfortable feeling.

And the interesting thing about eating is that, as I’ve said before, it numbs that anxious vibration. So, in the short run, it feels like it could help, help you not feel it, and it certainly takes your mind off of it. But now that you’re looking at it, you can see that there are other ways to calm that anxiety. And that what you would think to yourself is that potato chips aren’t the answer; potato chips are not going to make tomorrow go any better. In fact, if you look at it, what might happen is once you eat the potato chips, then you go into a punishment session. You beat yourself up for eating the potato chips and how out of control you are. And pretty soon, you’re feeling worse than you when you were thinking about how anxious you were about your project.

So, what I want to show you here is that the anxiety doesn’t come from a project that’s due the next day. Your anxiety comes from your thinking about what you make it mean. And when you think that you don’t think you’re going to do a good job, that’s just a sentence in your head. And that thought, “I’m not going to do a good job,” creates the anxiety that you feel in your body. The beauty of this is starting to note that your feelings or emotions are coming from your own mind. They’re not coming from the project. Does that make sense to you? And what you also might notice now is that potato chip are also not going to make the project go better, right? Starting to see that. So, you get in that moment of time when you actually become aware of that negative emotion, that there’s something different that you could think that actually could make that anxiety go away. And potato chips absolutely will not make that anxiety go away. But your mind could make you think something different, which could change everything. Right? And for sure, what we know is you could think potato chips are not going to make me feel better. That’s absolutely a true thought too. And potato chips will not make my project go better either.

Because you have been checking in and now you know what you were thinking and you know what the feeling that was being created by that and you can change what you do in the moment. And that’s what I want you to see here. Maybe, you even decide to think that going to sleep might be better than eating potato chips. And that maybe you are better than you think you are for this project. That’s possible, too. You might be making up all kinds of stories. Maybe sleep is the answer. So, you come up with alternatives to what you could be thinking. But remember, you create your emotions by what you think.

Let me repeat: you create your emotions by your thinking. So when you think, “I’m not ready for tomorrow,” or “I don’t think it’s going to go good,” or any of that type of negative thinking, you and your mind create the anxiety that you feel in your body. And the potato chips? They can numb that vibration a little bit, but it doesn’t help with your project one iota. So, you could decide, at least next time, not to eat the potato chips. And you could decide to think that all the chips in the world won’t make your project or tomorrow go better. In fact, if anything, it’ll make it go worse because then the whole scenario beating yourself up comes up. And that’s really the truth.

So what if we just learned to manage the emotion by managing our thinking? If we’re thinking something that’s making us feel anxious, then it’s possible that we could think something different. And that is the answer. Can you imagine that it’s possible that you could live in your world where you are the center of it, where you are the priority of it? That you check in with you on a regular basis and pay attention to what’s going on in your mind that’s creating the vibrations in your body? What you think is paramount, and you have to pay attention. But most important is that you continue to use food to learn more about why you do what you do and how you can begin to control how you eat by watching how you think.

Now, let me repeat that. The most important thing that you can do at this point is every single time you sit down to eat, you can learn more about why you do what you do by seeing what goes on in your mind that’s creating the feelings that are inside of you. And if you’re feeling physical hunger, there’s only one thing that can make you feel better, and that’s food. But if you’re feeling strong, negative emotions, all the food in the world won’t take care of that.

So until next week, I want you to practice, practice, practice. And then next week, I’m going to give you some more tools that will even help this and make it a little bit easier. So until next week, I’ll see you later.

Dr. Michael Butler: If you would like to leave an honest review of my wife, Dr. Deborah, I told her that as a husband, I would give her an honest review and I’d give her wonderful marks, but she didn’t want me to do that. She wants you to do that. So, go to iTunes; go to drdebbutler.com/itunes, and this will help the show and its rankings in iTunes a lot. Thanks!