Speaker 1:

When I’m busy at work or on home projects, I frequently skip lunch. It’s no big deal, because I’m never super hungry, but when it’s time for dinner, I find myself cleaning my plate with the thought, “I was so good today. I worked through lunch.” Look, this is what we need to do. When we hear that thought, we need to remind ourself, “Oh wait, I wasn’t so good.” Working through lunch and skipping a meal doesn’t make you good. That doesn’t make you a better person. We just want to cleanse that thought. So when you hear it and your mind says, “Oh wait, no, that’s not what happened. Today, I worked through lunch. It has nothing to do with my self worth. It has nothing to do with being good.” You have to start disconnecting those two ideas.

Speaker 1:

We don’t want to have a different thought. We just want to make sure that particular thought is now getting caught. So I want you to think, I want you to take a second and take a vow to yourself, because you are catching the dialogue now. And now what we want to do is start cleaning up the dialogue. It’s like, “All right, today I worked through lunch. That has nothing to do with me being good or bad. It just means I worked through lunch. And this meal is this meal.” So we want to neutralize everything.

Speaker 1:

The other thing was, “It’s fine to finish these bites. I didn’t have lunch.” This is another neutralizer. When you think that, you want to remind yourself like, “Oh wait, no, I’m supposed to eat until I’m satisfied, or until I’ve had enough. These last few bites are likely to have me eating past enough.” So it’s just, now that you notice that these are the thoughts, you want to remember, all right, now it’s my job to hear them a little sooner, pay a little closer attention. Be on the lookout for them.

Speaker 1:

The other thing that you can do is you can take my advice on how to shift those thoughts just a little bit, and before you eat, especially when you know that you have skipped lunch and you know that that is a trigger. So very often when we are experiencing urges, so when you guys get to module three of No BS, we talk about cues and triggers and urges, cravings. We start really getting into the setup of what all is going on that drives us to overeat, because the other stuff that we’re learning, we’re learning the basics so that it spotlights when we are. If I’m not doing the basics, I’m probably doing some overeating, right?

Speaker 1:

Module two is all about how do we think through things. You’ve got to really understand your thoughts and that they are sentences. You’ve got to understand your feelings. You have to understand the think, feel, do cycle. But that all sets you up to give you the idea of like, all right, here’s what I’m going to do, and anything outside of that is my work to work on. Here’s how I think, and now that I know that I actually can control some of my thinking, that I am in charge of my thinking [inaudible 00:03:02], what module three does is it comes in and it starts showing you how all this starts working together.

Speaker 1:

So for you, what you have discovered is that for an overeating trigger that happens at, let’s say six o’clock at night, it actually starts at noon. So you skip lunch. You think that every time you skip lunch, that by the time you get to dinner, your brain is going to naturally want to say these things, and it’s going to want to eat. Because once it eats, you’re going to feel relaxed. You’re going to feel the dopamine of the food. There’s no downside right after that. You complete the loop. And it’s like, “Oh, here I am. I had my trigger, which is I didn’t eat.” The cue is dinner. And then you get your thoughts and then you reward yourself with the food, which says, “All right, this right here, that’s going on, you should fucking do that more often.” We get us a little extra, extra. We feel rewarded. Your brain is just high on life.

Speaker 1:

But the problem is, is that tomorrow morning, or an hour later, or whenever your conscious brain is like, “Oh my God, we were going to be losing weight this week. I just noticed an overeat. That’s surely going to slow us down, if we keep that behavior,” then that’s when the next think, feel, do cycle starts, where we’re like, “Ooh, not necessarily helpful.”

Speaker 1:

So you have your cue. And what you want to do is you want to start noticing on the days that you skip lunch, you want to take some time to tell yourself after you skip lunch, “This has nothing to do with how much food I’m going to eat tonight. I bet that I can still eat according to the doable hunger method tonight.” You have to start setting it up. You have to start giving your brain directions, just a little bit. This doesn’t mean you’ve got to take a 20 minute siesta, meditate, smoke some dope and stuff and get into your right mindset. It means on the days that you skip lunch, you need to write on a sticky note that, “I skipped lunch. I’m likely to be cued up tonight to want to eat more. And that has nothing to do with this.”

Speaker 1:

Then what happens is that when you go to dinner, if you need to set an alarm on your phone to remind you, before you eat, you want to have a conscious moment where you’re like, “Okay, I’m likely to have these thoughts about eating more. I’m likely to want to finish it up. I’m likely to tell myself I’ve been good. And that’s all the thinking that I’m unwinding. So I’m going to eat and pay extra attention.” And it takes is a few times of doing that to start breaking the connection chain between skipping lunch and overeating at dinner. It’s literally that simple. If you will do those things, you will start seeing that untie and untether.

Speaker 1:

Now, here’s the thing. It doesn’t mean that every single time you do this process, that at dinner every single time, you don’t end up wanting to keep eating. Here’s what I want all of you to know. About half the time, it’s going to work. The other half of the time, it’s not, because you’re still getting used to breaking the pattern. Your brain is probably going to come up with a couple other extra sentences. So we don’t sit around and do this. I get to feel good when it works, and when it doesn’t, I get to go to the narrative of, “This isn’t working. I must be so broken. I don’t understand why I can’t get shit.” That’s called wasting your time with self-loathing.

Speaker 1:

Here’s what’s going to happen. Sometimes your brain is going to give you extra sentences you have to keep saying, and, “We’re not going to eat. It’ll be okay. I’m unlearning this pattern.” If you end up eating, you need to figure out, okay, what sentence then got me to continue to eat, even though I did all this other stuff? Because now that sentence is the one that makes you get super aware of so that you can keep operating at 50%, knowing you’re making progress. And then now you start listening for that sentence, and then you have something to say after that one. And eventually what happens is, when you keep having an answer for your brain that just wants to eat over and over again, guess what ends up happening?

Speaker 1:

Your brain finally will quit asking, because it will notice that all you do is keep coming back with a new thought. And it starts to think, you must want to think those things more often. You must not want to reward yourself with food now. Here’s the last critical part. And I’m going to be teaching this in ending self-sabotage, we do not do enough of this around here, which is you have to make sure that the times that it works, that you don’t say something like, “Well, thank God that worked.” Or, “Good. Hope I can keep this up.” You have got to find excitement, pleasure, and reward in you changing your behavior. And I noticed this happened a lot with you guys, which is, “Well, I’m no longer talking to myself like an asshole, but I’m not exactly talking great to myself. And then I wonder why I want to go back to food.”

Speaker 1:

Because if you can’t create some delight, some pleasure, some reward, or something in your life around you, if you just take the negativity away, you’re not exactly getting what you want, which is a leveled up life. You’re not getting the peace and the comfort and the pride and all the other stuff. That happens through a series of the way that you start talking to yourself. So if you really want your brain to want to make it easy for you to leave food behind after you’ve skipped a meal, you have to make it a big fucking deal when you follow through. Immense pride, a lot of excitement, those kinds of things.

Speaker 1:

I still am not really understanding the purpose of the plan. If we get to write down everything we want to eat, why write it down? Why not just go ahead and eat whenever we’re hungry and stop when full? And what’s the big deal if we eat something different than what’s on the plan? How does our body know we didn’t plan that from the start? What am I missing?

Speaker 1:

Your body won’t know the difference at all, but here’s what does happen. When you don’t write it down ahead of time and you eat whatever you want in the moment, you’re going to be eating according to your feelings in the moment. And unless you’re a feelings master, it’s not going to work that well for you. You’re not going to make choices that you would have made if you’d been thinking about it first thing in the morning and considering, what is my day likely to be like? What is the easiest way for me to lose weight? What are the things I want to try today? What are the things I don’t want to include today? What are the things I do want to include?

Speaker 1:

When you’re consciously planning for the day, you’re taking your immediate wins, insecurities, stressors, anxieties, wants, urges, cravings, and desires, you’re removing all of that noise and you’re planning from what we call the best self, the one that gives a shit about you today and the you tomorrow.

Speaker 1:

So we always want to plan from that mindset, so that throughout the rest of the day, if we don’t want to eat according to that person, then we have something to think about. It’s like, huh, I wonder why, that what sounded good this morning, if it’s not just because of the taste, I wonder why it’s not sounding good now. What feeling is driving this? “I just want it,” is a thought. Why do I just want this now versus what my best self this morning, who loved me, who was thinking about everything that I want, not only to love her food, but love her life, why would I eat against that now? It’s just good to know. That’s why we plan. It’s the measuring stick to make sure that we’re not eating according to a bad day, stress, traffic, it’s free, just want to, need to blow off some steam.

Speaker 1:

I love it when you all are like, “I just need to take a break.” Break from what? That is such a trigger thought. It’s like whenever you hear, “I just need a break,” you owe it to yourself to ask yourself, a break from what? Why am I thinking that food is the break? Why can’t I create the break in my mind? Where is the break in my brain? If I was going to be telling myself something that relaxed me, relieved me, comforted me, gave me a break, what thinking would I stop and what thinking would I insert? That’s why we plan. Because if you’re just eating according to what you want, you’re never given the opportunity to do that. That takes consciousness to do it, and the majority of our life is going to be very unconscious living. It’s going to be very autopilot living, just going through the day and reacting. I’m trying to teach you how to quit reacting throughout your life and start creating the life that you want, with food, in your relationships, and in how you think and live.

Speaker 1:

“I ate that food, and then I felt bad for eating off plan, then went on to eat some cookies, because hell, they weren’t on my plan. I’m wondering if you can give me some advice on how to deal with this issue.” Yes. So here’s the first thing that I will say, is you always have control over what’s for dinner. You may not know the actual food that will be served to you, but you always have control over a few things, your hand and your mouth. Those things are the only two things we need to have control over. The rest of it is what I call nice to have. It’s great when we know what we have available [inaudible 00:14:13] I’m going to decide ahead of time. I’m going to eat these things. I’m going to plan for my best self. I’m going to do all the things. That’s amazing, but guess what? There’s fucking life that happens.

Speaker 1:

And if you’re going to sit there and be like, “Oh my God, I have no control over what’s being served,” versus “I got exactly what I need. If somebody dishes me up mashed potatoes and meatloaf, I still can sit there and be like, Hmm, I bet you, I can eat till enough. Can I just eat till enough?” All of you, please hear the fucking words coming out of my mouth. The reason why we’re overweight is not because of the stuff on your plate. It’s how much you stuff in your mouth of what’s on your plate.

Speaker 1:

If there was a golden rule for all of us, it’s really that one. So you always have control. Stop lying to yourselves. Even if you binge your face off at a buffet for four hours, at some point you stop eating because you take control. So like, “Had enough. Made a decision.” It is the ultimate lie when we sit around and telling ourselves that we do not have control. It makes us feel helpless. And very often, you all [inaudible 00:15:40], like, “No, I really don’t have control.”

Speaker 1:

You’ll go argue with me all the reasons why you don’t have control. And I want you to listen to yourselves. Why would you ever argue with me, be like, “No, let me prove to you all the ways I don’t have control,” so I can feel extra less than, so I get to feel extra helpless. If you want to do something, start arguing for why you do have control. Just like, I actually do have control. It’s just sometimes, I wait a long time before I take control. Sometimes I tell myself I don’t have control, but at the end of the day, I stop putting my hand to my mouth. So I guess I’ve got control somewhere. So you have to open the door to the idea that you are always the one in control.

Speaker 1:

If you do not do that, you will always feel helpless. You will never use words like, “Can I just.” One of the things that I want you guys to hear is just like the only reason why she ate two cookies is because at that moment, when she saw that her partner brought her food that wasn’t on her plan, she immediately went to, “I can’t control this.” And then when her brain thinks I can’t control this, guess what it stops doing? It’s like, well, we might as well just eat. I mean, we’ve already fucked up. That’s a line of thinking. That is not the truth.

Speaker 1:

The truth is, your partner brought you some food. In that moment, you had the option to say, this wasn’t on my plan, but here’s where I still have control. I still can honor myself by eating to enough. I can afterward process this as an off plan eat and shower myself with praise for having an off plan eat that I didn’t put on my plan, and really exercising total control over how much I ate. I also can figure out ways to work with my partner on letting them know, here’s this plan I’m working on. It would be easier for me if I knew what we were going to be eating, but you know what? Sometimes I might not know, and I’m learning how to have my own back through all of it. That’s also a truth. That’s also another line of thinking.

Speaker 1:

All of you, there will never be a need for feeling bad that you went off plan. There’s always the need, from feeling curious about it. What happened? What did I allow myself to think? Why did I break my plan? If you break your plan, like if Chris brought something in tonight, let’s say that I planned a salad and I was relying on Chris to go get it. And when he went to go get the salad, he thought nachos looked better, and he brings home nachos. I would not sit there and be like, “He brought nachos. That wasn’t on my plan. I guess I’m just going to go ahead and eat them, because I don’t get them very often and I’ve already fucked up.” I would not be doing that. I would just be like, “All right, we didn’t plan for this. I’m going to eat to enough. I’m going to talk to Chris. I’m going to say like, hey, it’d be really helpful for me that when I ask for a chicken salad that I get a chicken salad.”

Speaker 1:

I’m not making it a big deal out of between the two of us. I might even just go and ask him, “Hey, I thought I said chicken salad. Was there a reason why you brought home nachos?” I would just be curious. I’d want to probe to figure it out. If he said something like, “Well, I’ve just seen you working so hard and I thought you deserved it,” and blah, blah, I would just look at him and say like, “I so appreciate you noticing how hard I’ve been working. Just in the future, you can just tell me that. That’s so lush. And I’m really working on not rewarding all my hard work with food anymore.”

Speaker 1:

So often what we do is we just get so caught up that we’re failing and that we fucked up and that we’ll never be to lose weight and all this other stuff, that it’s like what ends up happening is we don’t really learn how to talk to ourselves, how to talk to others, how to make the most of the situation. What can I do in this situation? Because this is where I think it happens, is partners bring us food that we didn’t plan, parents bring us food that we didn’t plan, somebody brings us food we didn’t plan. And we immediately go to what we can’t do now. Our brain goes into, “Well, see, I can’t eat what’s on my plan and I’m not going to be able to lose weight.” We go into I can’t mode.

Speaker 1:

The challenge is to learn how to say, “But what can I do?” If you catch yourself in I can’t, switch it real quick to all right, what’s in my control, and what can I do? When you put yourself into that energy, you start feeling more empowered. You start feeling more possibility. You start getting creative about what you can do, and then you do from that action or from that mindset.