(enchanted upbeat music)
- Hey, munchies and happy new year.
Welcome to the channel if you're new or if you're not,
I'm Alyssia and I am stoked you're here either way.
Because it is the new year
and a lot of people are setting new health goals,
and a lot has happened for me over the last year,
I wanted to take this first video of the year
to just talk about how I prioritize health.
And it looks very different today
than it did a few years ago because I have changed a lot
and my relationship with food has really changed a lot.
I like to think that a lot of the work I've done
has healed my relationship with food.
Now, that doesn't mean that being healthy is never hard
or that I never have cravings,
or that I never wanna eat cake,
or that I never do eat cake.
I do, but it does mean that
I just don't stress about all of it so much.
I mean, truly so much of why being healthy was hard for me
for the last decade really was because of the stress
I put myself under trying to do everything right,
or to do everything at once, right?
To get down all the routines and check all the boxes.
You know, eat enough vegetables or don't eat sugar,
or no gluten, or grains or legumes, or dairy,
or more fat and less carbs,
or, you know, more water and sleep,
or whatever it was, it felt overwhelming.
And no matter what I did,
I got the message that I was doing it wrong,
or I wasn't doing it enough, or I wasn't enough.
Eventually, I hit a wall that really just made me say,
screw it and that was the best thing
that could've happened to me.
So last year I actually did a mini series in January
about how I healed my relationship with food,
because it has been happening over the last few years.
And now I've had a whole other year
to practice being in that new relationship.
And I have to say,
last year was one of the hardest years of my life,
personally, both mentally and emotionally.
And what's amazing is that even with all this personal stuff
I was going through, I didn't lean on food compulsively.
And I just think, even though these kinds of videos
might be frustrating for some of you
because they don't give a quick fix solution
that most people are on YouTube searching for
this time of year, they do give an honest account.
And I think that's important because the quick fixes
don't actually work.
Healing is the long haul.
I dieted for 10 years
and it only dug me deeper into a hole,
into, you know, yo-yo dieting, and then binge eating,
and then restricting, and these nasty cycles.
And even more importantly,
it was compromising my mental health.
And crawling out of that hole is not possible
by just doing another diet or starting another program,
you know, it was just not,
because what I found for me is
it wasn't really about the food.
You know, there are emotional and mental components
and the mind and body are connected in really complex ways.
When I realized that having a healthy relationship with food
meant looking at how I related to food, right,
everything changed.
I related to food with so much judgment and stress
and guilt.
If I was eating something healthy,
I resisted and resented it.
And if I was eating something unhealthy,
I was judging not just the food,
but myself and I wasn't being present.
And eventually I was binging it.
So rather than continuing to seek out band-aids,
I decided, once and for all,
I needed to get to the root of how I was relating to food.
So that meant noticing my judgment,
my black and white thinking, all of my rules about food
and really questioning them, you know, who made these rules?
Why am I following them?
And what I realized is almost everything I was doing
was externally based.
Someone else said so.
It was an expert, or a doctor, or a nutritionist,
or even science.
But I realized that no one can know my body
and my needs and my direct experience other than me,
even if I gave a nutritionist or a coach
all of my stats and a food log
and everything I could put on paper, and I did,
I did this multiple times for years
and I never achieved the results that I wanted,
even when I tracked everything to a T,
because the truth is I didn't actually know what I wanted.
And my body was really confused.
You know, what I really wanted
wasn't a number on the scale
because no number was ever enough.
What I wanted was to be accepted, you know, by society,
but the truth is item except myself.
So there was no way to win.
You know, society won't ever accept me if I don't.
Now, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you,
I love myself fully
and, you know, today life is rainbows and unicorns.
No, like I said, in many ways last year really sucked.
But what I will say is letting go of trying to heal my body
with other people's experience,
I realized the only one who could heal my body was me.
And that meant I had to actually get to know myself,
both my body and my mind.
I had to get to know my body's needs
and the way that it worked and functioned,
and that's very different than anybody else.
My body is gonna function and work different than yours,
but I also had to learn what it meant to listen to my body.
I didn't know what that meant or how to do it.
I didn't know when I was hungry or full,
and frankly, it didn't matter.
You know, I wanted to eat all the time no matter what.
All I thought about was food.
So this work of healing my relationship with food
was really about healing my relationship with myself
and learning to connect with what I call my inner wisdom,
rather than depending on other people's ideas
or outer wisdom.
And I have a video about inner and outer wisdom
if you wanna learn more about that framework.
But this is scary
because we find it's not really about food,
it's really the work of life
and growing into my most authentic self.
So I'm not here to rain on your new year's health goals,
parade or anything.
Really my goal is to offer a different kind of support
than you're probably getting elsewhere.
You know, I don't wanna sell you a diet,
I wanna remind you that you're already okay
just as you are.
And actually, this healing work begins
with meeting yourself where you're at,
you know, accepting yourself where you are today.
Once I accepted myself where I was,
even though I was in a place that I didn't wanna be,
you know, I didn't weigh what I wanted to weigh,
I didn't eat the way I wanted to eat,
but once I accepted this is how it is without judgment,
but actually with some compassion and understanding,
which means acknowledging why I was turning to the food,
which was out of emotional pain,
you know, just holding that with some care,
it was crazy because it became easier to listen
to what my body was saying and actually respond to it.
And in time, without counting any calories
or measuring anything,
or even restricting myself from having sugar
or gluten or anything,
I naturally saw my weight start to go down
to whatever it was supposed to be,
you know, for this time of my life.
And when that happened, interestingly,
I didn't care anymore about the number
because I realized it wasn't about the weight.
I realized this deeply.
You know, it was about wanting to feel worthy.
And again, I'm not sitting here telling you,
I feel worthy all the time, you know,
but I have a deep recognition
that I'm sure as hell not gonna find my worth in my weight.
This is so clear to me now and it wasn't before,
not just an intellectual understanding.
You know, so now my energy goes into things that matter
to me more deeply, instead of,
as Brene Brown says "Hustling for my worth"
and these other ways,
which really just distract me from the truth.
So I can't explain my whole journey in a video
and it wouldn't be the same journey for you anyway,
because we're very different,
but I can share what I focus on now with health,
because I do prioritize my health
but I don't stress about it anymore.
So my efforts look very different now
than they did a couple of years ago.
So I'm gonna share some specific tips and systems now.
But first, I do wanna remind you to subscribe
and hit the bell so that you can be notified of new videos.
I will be posting twice a week all January long.
So my first approach and recommendation is to focus more
on the good than the bad.
So this is sort of mental,
but remember, it's mind over munch, right?
So focusing on what we can't have.
No sugar, no gluten, no dairy, no carbs,
whatever it might be, that only reinforces
that scarcity mindset and that internal negative self-talk.
And even if you do choose
to remove anything from your diet for a period,
because, you know, I am actually not
an intuitive-eating advocate here
saying dieting is always bad.
I take a very middle way approach
that is founded on a building inner first,
dieting is outer wisdom.
It's not bad, but we need to be connected
to our inner wisdom as a guide for our body.
But my point was,
even if you do choose to eliminate certain foods,
focusing on what you wanna have more of
will help your mindset and mental health,
which I would argue is the most important thing,
because if this had nothing to do with our minds
then we could all stick to a diet and lose weight
and never gain it back because we'd be like robots,
but we're not, we're humans.
So I focus instead on more.
You know, maybe that's enjoying more sweet delicious fruits
that you love, more vegetables
and preparing them in ways that you really enjoy,
you know, both cooking and eating them.
I personally try to get veggies in
at least once per day now, that's literally my goal.
I used to be really trapped in the black and white thinking,
the all or nothing with food, you know,
I must get five servings of vegetables in a day or whatever.
You know, my mantra now, good enough.
Some days I do maybe get three or four servings
of vegetables a day, but most of the time,
I get one serving in and that might happen
for a full week or longer.
Some days I get none, it happens.
You know, I aim for good enough.
In her book, "Daring Greatly,"
which I highly recommend reading, Brene Brown says,
"Scarcity and abundance are two sides of the same coin.
And that abundance is not the opposite of scarcity,
but actually the opposite of scarcity is enough."
Abundance is shooting really high, I think.
You know, I don't need to be enlightened,
I just wanna be good enough.
You know, isn't that really what any of us want anyway
to just stop feeling not good enough?
Okay, so my next system of sorts
for prioritizing health is if I want a snack,
seeing how hungry I am
and determining if I wanting this as fuel or just for joy,
and if I am wanting it for joy as a sensory experience,
I wanna give myself something I really like
and then be present with it.
So if that's pretzels or white cheddar Cheetos,
which are two of my go to's,
you know, I try to put them in a bowl
and sit down and actually notice myself eating them
and enjoy the taste and the texture
rather than being mindless and eating the entire bag.
Now, if my inner wisdom says, no, this is more for fuel,
you know, I'm hungry and I need to get something in,
I try to turn to something more nutritious first,
maybe it's fruit, you know.
And if I really don't wanna eat fruit in that moment,
probably I'm either not that hungry
or I have some emotional need that's not being met, okay.
So I have a video on food as a coping mechanism
that's gonna be coming out later this month.
But in that moment,
I need to find a coping mechanism to meet my need,
which maybe that is food,
we'll talk more about that in a few weeks.
My next approach to making healthy less stressful
is giving myself permission with food,
unconditional permission to keep foods I like in the house.
I did a video on fear foods a few years ago.
I call that foods with emotional attachment or rules.
I used to not any of those foods in the house.
I thought it was easier, right?
Black, white.
It's either here and I eat it all.
So if it's not here, I won't eat it.
Easy, the work is done for me.
The harder choice though,
the harder way of being is getting in touch
with why I feel like I need to compulsively eat it
if it's there and working with that.
So for me, allowing myself to keep the foods in the house
was a game changer.
Yeah, at first I did eat more of them,
but in time, it became disenchanting.
It's like that rebel teenager analogy that I've used before.
So when you're a teenager
and you're told you can't do something,
somehow, it's all you wanna do, right?
So if you tell yourself you cannot eat a certain food,
it becomes all we can think about.
But if we're allowed, not so enticing, right?
Have you ever felt like you want something
and even though there's a bunch of crap in the house,
none of this is what you want, you want something else.
So if you believe, if you actually believe it's allowed,
then it's different.
So in order for me to be around,
for instance, a dozen donuts,
which was a huge trigger food for me,
and to not eat more than I actually need or want,
or to just not eat the full dozen
like I used to do 10 years ago,
I have to actually believe that I could go out
at any minute of any day and get a donut
if I really wanted it and allow myself to have it.
And how do I learn that?
By letting myself actually do it
even if it is January 6th, this is a practice.
But just consider for yourself
how different your stress level would be
if you were able to relate to food
in a way that supported you
physically, and mentally, and emotionally.
So my last tip or system that helps me prioritize health
in a stress-free way is mindfulness.
So mindfulness is a nonjudgmental awareness
of the present moment.
So I mean mindfulness in a few different ways.
One is being mindful with the food, being present with it.
You know, binge eating happens when we are mind less,
we turn off,
we're trying to get away from the present moment,
which is really uncomfortable,
and we're trying to find some comfort in food.
But if I am present with the food,
if I'm paying attention to the taste of it
and to what's happening in my body
and I develop a relationship with myself
where I learned to trust my body and my mind,
then when my body tells me I've had enough,
I can be present and actually listen.
But if we aren't present,
we can't hear the signals from our body.
Just like if I'm sitting there
having a conversation with you and you're wandering away,
you're not paying attention,
you can't be present with me, right?
We have to be present to pay attention.
So I also mean mindfulness as a practice.
For me, that's meditation,
which isn't really about lowering anxiety,
although it might do that,
it's about practicing being present.
I talk more about it in my "Binge Eating" video
and "Mindfulness" video last year.
So I will link those below if you want more information,
but essentially if we wanna be more present more often
to make more responsive choices
rather than compulsive reactions, especially with food,
we have to practice being more present
in our lives in general.
All right, so I hope that this can all be helpful
in some way.
I know it's not a quick fix,
but I don't want you to chase down quick fixes.
I wanna help people actually heal
and find ease with food and with themselves.
I also have a Food Freedom course,
which might be helpful to you.
I've linked it below.
It includes videos, worksheets, guided exercises
to help you approach your own journey to healing.
And as a heads up for this month,
we have videos coming out Mondays and Thursdays
all month long.
This will be a mix of food, meal prep,
relationship with food, recipes, and more.
So I hope that I can inspire you
to connect to a healthy lifestyle
in a way that feels right to you,
and that lowers your stress rather than adding to it.
I appreciate you being here.
I will see you next Monday with a brand new episode,
and remember, it's all a matter of mind over munch.
(enchanted upbeat music)