Ep 169: How Self-Kindness Helps You Come Back to Your Best

Dr. Deb Butler:  Welcome to Thinner Peace in Menopause and Beyond. This is Dr. Deb Butler, master life and weight coach. And as always, your coach. Today is episode number 169. You know what I want to talk to you about today? I want to talk to you about what I’ve been talking to you about for three years and it never gets old. It’s how self kindness and self compassion can help you get anything that you really, really want. Stay tuned.

Hi everybody, how are you today? It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood as always as summer is here, and I’m planning my exciting trip to the Azore Islands, and I’m leaving in about another week or so. So I’m getting really excited about that. My husband’s going, and my son, and my daughter-in-law. She’s my in-law, you know, but I think of her as my daughter. But you know that it can’t be my daughter if it’s my son’s wife, but it feels like it. And then of course, my two grandkids. So we’ll all be staying together. And they’re traveling now. They’ve been traveling for about four weeks. They’ve been to Scotland, they’re in Portugal, and then they’re going to meet us here in the islands. They are a traveling family.

And my son even has a website called Busy Finding Time, where he talks about all his travels with his family, and he speaks from his heart. And I got to tell you, when I see my son, and watch him with his kids, and then watch what he writes about his adventures and his feelings, he never talked to me like that. But this is the thing that I’m telling you, that has nothing to do with what I’m talking about today. But as a parent, as a mom, and I know most of you who are listening are somewhere in the ages of late 40s to 60s, something like that. And for all of us who have children and those of you who still have kids that you’re getting off to wherever they’re going—or maybe younger. But wherever you are in your journey of raising children, I just want to tell you from someone who now has a 35-year-old son, is that you are certainly—no matter what you think now—you’re going to be surprised and probably be delighted. That’s what I’m telling you.

It is so delightful to watch him develop his own life, his own way of seeing things. And you know what? It’s not that far-fetched from the way I am or the way my husband is in many, many ways. And you know, I worried so much about him when he was younger. Oh my god, maybe he’s going to do this, maybe he’s going to do that. And I talked to him a lot of my clients who sort of have all those same fears about their kids. They want to be hyper vigilant. They never want them to be unhappy, always want them to be happy. You know what, guys? You got to let your kids feel their feelings.

And you’re going to be surprised there’s going to come a time where you’re going to see them and go, “Wow!” Because that’s where I’m at right now. I’m in the “Wow!” stage.I’m in the “Wow!” stage of my life. And that is what I want to help all of you get to, or journey to, or if you’re already in it, stay in it. But the best is yet to come and getting older is all about getting into the “Wow!” stage.

Now, what this has to do with this podcast is zero. So I am now gonna get to the topic of my podcasts, which is about one of my clients who I’ve been working with for a couple years. And there’s clients that I work with a lot longer than just the time of one of my programs. Sometimes they decide to work with me longer, and that’s fine too. I have all kinds of ideas and programs, and advanced things to do with clients as they journey through all of this. But with her, she’s really changed in so many different ways. And just like the clients that you’ve heard on my interviews, that it’s so much more than the weight. But in this instance, I do want to talk to you about her, and her weight, and what has transpired.

So over the last couple years, she has started to lose the weight, and gain the weight, and lose the weight, and we really have done a lot of work on her mind. Because as you know, she’s no different than you. And what your little brain wants to do when you start getting down to the weight that you’ve always wanted to get to, it’s got a lot of ideas that may not serve you if you haven’t noticed. And really being able to deal with that on a regular basis long enough to retrain your brain to really believe something else, is the journey that she’s been on. And now she’s just a couple of pounds away from what she wants to weigh. And she has a lifestyle that she really loves and eating is just a part of that.

But what happened, which is what I want to talk to you about today, is that she had to have shoulder surgery around three or four weeks ago, and we talked about this a couple months ago. And she decided that she wanted to have some calls closer together as she went through the surgery because she thought things were gonna come up. And I agreed that things probably were gonna come up, and then it would really give her an opportunity to see what’s still going on in that brain of hers that could use some attention.

And let me tell you what: she has had the opportunity of a lifetime. And this is what I want to tell you and what I have noticed with a lot of my clients, too. It’s that a lot of times they think they’ve got it. You know that, “Oh, this is easy. I could do it for the rest of my life.” And then something happens. A circumstance happens. Somebody passes away. There’s a divorce. Something happens with your kid. Some of the things in life that we just really don’t want to happen, happens.

And this is what I want to tell you is that many of my clients have gone where they started to use food again, and this is what I’m talking about. This client too is that—when she had the shoulder surgery and she had a lot of medication, and it’s gonna be like a three to six month healing process. And in the first—I talked to her after the first week, and she was still pretty medicated. And you know, she was talking about that she really wasn’t really watching what she ate. She was just eating because she—people were bringing her food. And when I talked to her in about the third week, this is what she said to me. She said, “You know what? I’m back to where I started two years ago.” That’s what she thought. She thought she had made no progress, and that she was back to where she started. Because she was just eating all the time and eating all the wrong foods, as if she never, ever had a protocol, or that was living this protocol for years.

And this is what I found as I was talking to her that I want to share with you, because I think it’s really important than I’ve seen with clients who have had circumstantial things happen to them that messes with their brains. This is that—when this happened to her, she expected herself to heal faster, to feel better faster, to get back on her protocol immediately. These were her expectations. And really what happened is that she wasn’t—nothing was going the way she expected. It wasn’t fast enough, and it wasn’t good enough. This is what we found out.

And that when she started seeing this, what she would do is she would just beat herself to smithereens and tell herself what a piece of blank blank she was. And as she was talking to me, what I realized for her, is that the only thing that she was missing, that she totally forgot about—see, she thought it was all about the eating. Listen, she had been on heavy-duty drugs. She was not herself, and she did not give herself any room for healing. And when that happened, food, all of a sudden, became like a joy thing or a fun thing or take-my-mind-off thing. Because she felt so bad about where she was and what she was doing to herself. And once I just reminded her, and really it was a simple reminder is the only thing that you’re really forgetting is that you’re not giving yourself any room to heal the way that your body wants to heal, to give your mind and body what it really needs, which is your own self-compassion and kindness for what you have been through.

You know, when you have shoulder surgery and shoulder is not an easy word for me to say. But when you have that, and somebody goes in and cracks things open or I’m not sure exactly what all was done. But you know in these surgeries, it’s amazing what they can do, but it’s still an insult to the body that has to heal. And when we decide that we are going to do whatever it takes to take excellent care of ourselves, probably the biggest thing that we have to do is that we have to be kind to ourselves. And then it becomes an opportunity to learn how to do that, because this is what she’s now saying once we had that conversation.

Instead of beating herself up—which seriously was just making her eat more—that’s all it was doing. She said she had gone back to point zero, but really where she had gone back to was punishing herself endlessly. That’s what she had gone back to. That’s the only thing. And that once she could see that all she needed was her own compassion—because there’s so many people that were trying to help her and were so compassionate with her—which she really could see and appreciate it. But what she didn’t see is she wasn’t giving it to herself. And as soon as she did that, the next phone call that I had, “Oh, I feel so much better!”

Now, the feeling, the reason that she was feeling so much better was because she said, “The only thing that changed is I just gave myself some room. I just allowed myself to be where I am. And as soon as I could do that, it was so much easier for me to take care of myself, and so much easier for me just to feed myself the food that I needed.” And that when the urges came up, all they were—of course, there’s going to be urges! There’s definitely gonna be more urges after you go through all of that with your body. And if you end up eating more, yes, there are going to be more urges, but you can handle it.

She knows how to come back. That’s what you’re learning to do, too, is to be able to exercise the muscle of coming back to your protocol, to coming back to the way that you know to eat what makes you feel the best. The faster you come back, the faster you’ll come back. But hey, if you leave for a little bit, just remember, you can come back any time. It’s not that we don’t leave. It’s just that how fast do you come back?

You know, in meditation, meditation is all about noticing your thoughts. Now, it’s not about not thinking. It’s just about noticing that when you’re thinking. You come back to your anger, and your anger can be a mantra. It can be your breath, but you come back to it. So meditation isn’t not thinking. Meditation is coming back to your breath or to your mantra. Every time you see yourself thinking, and you come back to your mantra, or your thinking, or your breathing, you are meditating.

Now, this is the same thing in this journey with creating thinner peace in your mind. Whenever you venture off and you find yourself either overeating, or eating non-nutritious foods, or giving into urges, that is when—it’s like how fast can you come back to the present moment? Which will be, what are you eating right now? What’s going on in this present time? Can I eat when I’m hungry and stop when I’m full and feed myself fuel foods? This is coming back to that.

And I can tell you and a lot of my clients would probably tell you if they’re listening to this—it’s the coming back that is making them successful. And that is what my client learned this time. And she’s learned it in different ways over time working with me, but this has probably been her most profound opportunity and most profound lesson. That no matter what happens to her, she can always come back to herself, by being her best friend, being so kind, and so self compassionate. That really is the key. Not so much what she’s putting in her mouth, it’s much more what she’s saying in her head. And that’s what I want to share with you this week. What are you saying to yourself in your head when you don’t like what you see about you? Can you forgive yourself? Can you have compassion for yourself? Not indulge in yourself. Indulging yourself means “Oh, poor baby. I’m not gonna punish you, eat six cupcakes.” Compassion is “Oh my god, sweetheart. I know you want six cupcakes, but you know, it’s not going to get you what you want. Let’s just not do it.”

Self compassion. That’s what I want you to share with yourself this week as you go through it. No matter what’s going on in your life, no matter what, you can always have your own back. And sometimes it’s easier than others, but it’s always available to you. And self kindness, your own self compassion is also available to you. And if and when you lose it for a little bit, you just come back. The more you come back, the more you strengthen that muscle.

You guys, I want you to have such a beautiful week, this week. Whatever it is that you’re doing and whatever it is that’s happening to you, know, that you and your perception, and your mind has more power than what is actually happening to you. So use that this week and use your tool of self kindness in every instance that you can. So, I always end the same way, which is, I want you to be very, very, very kind to yourself no matter what and I’ll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

Dr. Michael Butler: To get a free copy of Dr. Deb’s companion workbook, with all the tools, homeworks, and discussions that she uses in her podcast with our private clients, please go to drdebbutler.com/change. This will make it even easier to follow along with her in future broadcasts.