- How did I heal my relationship with food?
Let me tell ya.
(upbeat hip-hop music)
Welcome to the series, I'm Alyssia,
and I'm so glad you're here.
Before we get started, I've gotta remind you
to subscribe and hit the bell.
This series is going out every weekday this month.
Remember that the course is actually hosted in email,
so even though the videos are on YouTube,
if you want the additional downloads and materials,
sign up at mindovermunch.com/foodfreedom, it is free.
Yesterday we talked about the importance
of emotional intelligence,
which is the ability to perceive, facilitate,
understand, and manage your emotions,
and how that actually leads to health.
The research that I found in grad school
is that healthier choices were made
with emotional intelligence over nutrition knowledge.
So the question becomes how, then,
do we increase our emotional intelligence,
our ability to perceive, facilitate,
and understand and manage emotions?
The answer that I have found...
(rapid scribbling)
is mindfulness.
(gasps)
So, what is mindfulness?
It's like this buzzword now,
and nobody really knows what it is.
But I think now I can officially say
I'm a mindfulness expert,
because this is what I studied in grad school.
Right? That's allowed.
Okay, so mindfulness is
Nonjudgmental Awareness of the Present moment, NAP.
- [Computer Voice] Nap.
- So let's break this down.
We've got the present moment.
The present moment is all we have right now.
We ruminate about the past, we're anxious about the future,
we spend most of our time wandering,
but the truth is, all we have is right now,
the past is gone and the future is yet to come.
I mean, an asteroid could come and hit us now.
(planet explodes)
And then the future would be gone.
So we need to become more present.
The awareness part is about seeing clearly.
So I wanna see something
without anything else getting in the way,
without telling a story about it.
Whatever is here in my experience right now
is what's really going to help me
manage whatever's happening.
If I'm lost in a thought about the past or the future,
then I can't really think or see clearly.
And the last piece of mindfulness is non-judgment.
We judge ourselves, we judge others,
and then we can't see clearly.
Judgment is actually a block.
Judgment is a form of resistance.
And what resists will persist,
so we gotta get rid of the judgment,
we gotta get rid of the resistance.
And really, mindfulness, because of these three components,
becomes an opportunity to begin again in each moment.
Our mind is gonna wander away from the present moment,
and through our nonjudgmental awareness
of what's happening now,
we can just stop, breathe, and say,
"Let's start over, let's begin again."
So a good way to know if I'm being mindful,
or if I'm bringing mindfulness to a moment,
is to ask the question, "What's happening now?"
And that's one definition
that some people use of mindfulness.
It's really hard to define,
but in some ways it's a mind state.
In some ways, it's a way of being.
You may have heard of mindfulness meditation.
Meditation is a tool to practice mindfulness.
It's a way to practice
being nonjudgmental, aware, and present.
The meditation is not the goal,
the goal isn't to just sit there with our eyes closed,
but it's a way to practice
the qualities that we want to foster.
Meditation, it's really important to me,
and it was really important to healing myself,
but also healing my relationship with food,
and that's why I'm talking about it in this series.
But mindfulness is not solely meditation,
and there's more ways to practice than just meditating.
I went to grad school for mindfulness,
unclear of how mindfulness healed my relationship with food.
I knew it wasn't mindful eating,
I actually didn't like mindful eating,
I was really averse to it,
and I have a video coming later on in the series
where I talk about mindful eating.
But what I realized was that, what mindfulness does
is it shifts our relationships to things around us.
So it doesn't change the external circumstances,
but it changes my experience,
because I learned to relate differently to what's happening.
So typically, our minds are wandering.
We're mindless more often than we're not.
We're usually reacting.
- [Computer Voice] Reacting.
- To whatever is happening around us,
we don't even realize it.
With mindfulness, I can slow down,
I can be present, aware, nonjudgmental,
and I have the ability to...
(rapid scribbling)
respond.
- [Computer Voice] Respond.
- Rather than react.
When I can respond, my experience changes.
This might all be a little ambiguous, let's give an example.
So let's say someone says something that makes me mad.
Now, if I'm not mindful, I might get angry and react.
Maybe I yell.
- No!
No!
- Maybe I shut down, but I react.
I close up, and I'm not even aware that it's happening.
With mindfulness, that same experience happens,
the person says something, they make me mad,
I'm aware of what's happening now in the present moment,
in my body and mind, and I'm nonjudgmental.
And then I have the space to decide how I wanna respond.
How does it make me feel to get angry and be mad?
Does it make me feel good? No, not really.
I mean, it's a conditioned, reactionary response.
Mindfulness is really a way
to rewrite those conditioned reactions, and learn to choose.
Okay, so Viktor Frankl,
he is a psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor,
he wrote "Man's Search for Meaning," great book,
but he has a quote that I love, and it is,
"Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
And in that response lies our growth and our freedom."
And this is mindfulness, this space.
We learn how to exist here, rather than a stimulus happening
and a response, a reaction that we're not even aware of.
So it's almost like a stove.
If it's on and you touch it on accident,
you're gonna pull your hand away really, really fast.
Physiologically, your nervous system
is gonna take over to protect you,
and you react by pulling it away.
Of course, you want your body to do that,
but we essentially are doing that all the time.
Someone says something and makes us mad,
I don't need to react like that.
But we have conditioned ourselves to react to discomfort.
Now, when I respond differently to someone who's mad,
my experience changes.
Probably their experience will change a little bit too,
but what's important is my experience,
and then my relationship shifts.
So if mindfulness can shift my relationships
to people and things around me,
why not food, right?
Okay, so here's a food example.
I go to a restaurant, and I'm wanting to eat healthy.
This is the me before.
I wouldn't even really read the menu,
I would go to the areas that I've already
predetermined on the menu are allowed,
so maybe it's salad,
or something with protein and vegetables,
something that fit whatever diet I was eating at the time.
This is not mindful. I was not present.
I wasn't aware of how I felt in the moment
because I was making a decision
based on a past thought and a future goal.
And I was definitely judgmental,
because to order something unhealthy
meant I was making the wrong choice.
Now, if I go to a restaurant
and I bring mindfulness to the experience,
I am present right now in this moment,
I'm aware of how I feel right now and how I've felt all day,
I'm aware of what I might need or what serves me.
Maybe that's something healthy, and maybe it's not.
But most importantly, I'm nonjudgmental.
If I choose something unhealthy,
it doesn't mean I'm bad, or that I've made the wrong choice.
And if I choose something healthy,
it doesn't mean I'm good or bad,
and it doesn't mean I've made the right or wrong choice.
I let my inner wisdom guide me as my foundation,
and then the outer wisdom can support on top of that,
the frosting on the cake.
(rapid snapping)
The same thing happened
in my experience with exercise addiction,
which I've talked about a little bit on the channel,
more in my emails.
When I was doing it, because it was predetermined
and because I wanted to lose weight, I was forcing it.
I was exercising for a certain amount of time,
or to burn a certain amount of calories,
or get a certain amount of steps.
I was fighting my way through it
and convincing myself I loved it.
Versus tuning in and listening to what I need today and now.
How long do I need to exercise?
How long do I want to exercise?
What kind of exercise? What feels good, what feels bad?
I actually want to work out more with this kind of mindset,
and I dread it less.
And with food, I've found I actually eat healthier.
I literally eat more salads now than I ever did.
In all the years I've run this YouTube channel,
how many times have I said I hate salad?
Here's another graph.
There's an inverse relationship
between whatever it is you wanna do and forcing it.
The more I force it, the less I wanna do it.
The more I tell myself I have to exercise,
the less I wanna do it.
The more I tell myself I have to eat salad,
the less I wanna do it.
This is human nature.
We're rebels, we resist that.
Okay, so mindfulness, it might sound
kinda like a frustrating concept
because it's not black and white.
It's not a clear cut definition, it's not a linear process,
or a checklist that you can print out and take with you.
It's really a way of thinking,
and it has to be practiced and embraced over time.
But it has really made space for me
to feel so at peace with food and exercise and health.
And I'm gonna weave it in throughout the series,
and I'm gonna provide
tons of mindfulness tools along the way
so that you can start to get curious about it.
In today's email I included a guided audio meditation,
and again, like I said,
meditation is one of the main tools I've used
to increase my own emotional ability,
my ability to perceive, facilitate,
understand, and manage emotions
and to connect with my inner wisdom.
It's not the only tool, and I'm gonna include more tools
throughout the series, especially in the emails,
there is more coming, I promise.
Okay, so be patient, go through this month
being curious about what your relationship with food is,
rather than just trying to change it all at once.
Just notice it, start there.
And as a reminder, my Mind Over Meal Prep course
is still open this week for enrollment,
and it's a great way to support this free series as well.
It will also give you a deeper dive into mindfulness
and how to apply it to your life, your health,
your diet, and your weight loss goals.
I really designed that course actually
around healing relationships with food
because meal prep almost made my relationship to food worse,
and that's why I wanted to redo my old meal prep course,
to kind of redefine what meal prep could be
with a more sustainable approach.
Anyway, share in the comments,
what about mindfulness, what resonates with you,
or what do you feel you don't understand,
so that I can talk about it a little bit more?
If there is someone that you think this content,
the series, this video would resonate with,
I ask that you share it,
and it would really mean a lot to me
because I feel like this is my baby,
and I wanna get this series out there,
and it means the world to me
that you're here tuning in watching every day.
So thank you so much, and remember,
it really is all a matter of mind over munch.
(upbeat hip-hop music)