- Do you feel like you know about food, nutrition, and diets
but you still can't lose weight.
Hint, hint.
You already have what you need.
(upbeat music)
Welcome to the series I'm Alysia.
And I'm so glad you're here.
Before we get started,
I wanna remind you to subscribe and hit the bell.
Remember that this course is actually hosted via email
even though the videos are on YouTube,
the rest of the materials
you'll need to sign up for the email
to get those downloads at mindmovermunch.com/foodfreedom.
And it is a completely free course.
Okay, so I spent years trying to help others
with their health while I was struggling with my own.
I wanted to lose weight and it didn't make sense.
I mean, I had so much nutrition education and knowledge.
I was a certified nutrition coach and personal trainer.
I knew about the science of food and diets.
I educated people about it on YouTube.
Why couldn't I do it?
Why couldn't, you know, not just I lose weight
but why couldn't I feel good about myself or my health?
So as I started to heal myself, as I talked about last week
I inadvertently started to heal my relationship with food.
And in 2019 I found a master's program
in mindfulness studies
and I decided this is the master's program I wanna do
because I want to figure out
how I healed my relationship with food.
I knew it was related to my mindfulness journey
and practice, but I wasn't clear how.
So I got into the program.
And as I researched,
I realized that mindfulness was like the framework
and it held many of the tools
but what was really missing for me
and for a lot of people
was a way to deal with my emotions and stress.
You know, we don't learn this in school.
Most of us don't learn it at home growing up.
So we all experience stress and emotion,
stress, and emotions.
Many of us turn to food,
food and eating to cope.
Now we may, you know, gain weight or develop health issues
because of this.
And you know, we go to lose the weight or get healthy
but what do we do?
We focus on the food.
This is outer wisdom,
see Monday's video if you don't know what I'm talking about.
When I say inner and outer wisdom, you got to understand it
for the rest of the series,
but essentially the stress or emotions happen
we turn to food to cope, but the food isn't the problem,
it's the stress, the emotions, it's the inner wisdom
that we're missing.
We need to get...
We need to get to the root.
So when we turn to food emotionally,
we are feeding an emotional hunger, not a physical one
but it's really hard to know when that's happening
and what to do about it.
So I told you guys, I went to a retreat called
the Hoffman process. And that was really the first time
that I confronted my emotions.
Like I think I said I didn't even know
what a feeling was before then.
- I'm in glass case of emotion.
- And that was really the catalyst for my personal work.
I had to heal from the inside out.
And I really think we all do.
By heal, I mean, learn to process emotions in a healthy way.
So what was happening with that healing?
The personal work, the journaling, the therapy,
the turning inward.
I was essentially trying to figure out how to be do have
it's not on here
but I didn't realize it at the time.
But what was happening
is I was developing emotional intelligence.
So in grad school
I became fascinated with emotional intelligence.
What is it?
No, it's not like IQ, which is intellectual intelligence
which many people believe is fixed.
So you get what you get.
Emotional intelligence
which is also known as emotional ability
or emotional competency is defined not by me
but in the literature
as the ability to perceive, facilitate, understand
and manage emotions and feelings.
What I started to see in myself
and in the research
was that being able to manage our emotions
and our stress is actually key to our health.
In fact, it is a foundation.
We need the inner wisdom first.
We cannot benefit from the outer wisdom
until we have that inner wisdom down.
And I did not have it down.
I was stressed, anxious,
often depressed at points in time clinically
and I didn't know how to manage it.
I never learned it.
And the research supported this,
I came across some interesting studies
that were about nutrition knowledge
and showing that it has really little less
than we think to do with our health decisions.
So there was for one
a nutrition certification program that did a poll
showing health coaches and nutrition experts who,
you know considered their nutrition knowledge excellent.
They self-reported it as excellent.
They were actually more likely to be daily drinkers
than those who reported their nutrition knowledge
as average or low.
Now, you know, I know
if this doesn't necessarily mean anything
but typically we acknowledge
that drinking every day wouldn't be a healthier choice.
So the people who had nutrition knowledge
still chose to drink every day,
also about two thirds of the experts in the poll
had a BMI of over 40.
Now of course we have to be really careful
when we look at BMI too closely,
especially at an individual level.
But at an aggregate level
it correlates with health issues, nonetheless.
So if it's not knowledge that makes a difference
in our health choices, then what is it?
I found a study that discovered
that people made healthier food choices
when they received emotional ability training
even compared to a group of people
who received nutrition knowledge training.
In fact, one study analyzed BMI
which please interpret with care,
but they looked at the BMI of students
and their emotional intelligence.
So their ability to perceive, facilitate, understand
and manage emotions
and their nutrition knowledge.
And what they found.
So knowledge down here.
What they found is with low emotional intelligence.
So red will be low because it's less ideal, right?
We wanna have emotional intelligence.
The ability to perceive, facilitate, understand,
manage our emotions.
So people with low emotional intelligence,
people who could not manage their emotions well,
when their nutrition knowledge increased,
so did their BMI.
But those with high emotional intelligence, okay, green
'cause it's more ideal.
We wanna hire, we wanna be able to manage our emotions.
People who could manage their emotions
who could manage, facilitate, understand
perceive their emotions,
those people as their nutrition knowledge rose,
their BMI's decreased.
So essentially what this points to is inner
and outer wisdom.
Before the nutrition knowledge can really serve us,
we have to have inner wisdom down.
If we don't have inner wisdom down,
all that knowledge is just gonna confuse us.
And this is why I suspect people's BMI's went up
as they didn't know what to do with the information
because they're so caught up in the outer wisdom.
Essentially to heal our relationship with food
and to reach a healthy weight while having a healthy mind
we have to learn to increase our emotional ability
and our ways of coping and managing stress.
So this is one way that the mind and body are connected.
I have more on this coming
throughout the entire series about the interconnectedness
and how it affects us physiologically.
The question that we leave with now
is how do we build up that emotional ability
and learn to better perceive, facilitate, understand
and manage our emotions and our feelings or our stress.
A huge part of my answer came from mindfulness
which is what I'm gonna talk about tomorrow.
And I have got tons of tools
to share with you all month long.
So don't forget to subscribe,
please if you found this useful
and you're excited to go through this series,
I hope that you'll share it with someone else.
This series has been kind of what I've been waiting to share
on this channel for so long.
And I just didn't even know it.
And it would mean the world to me,
if you would help get out the word
that we can heal our relationships with food
and it's not actually as complicated as we thought.
So please share in the comments.
Do you ever turn to food to cope emotionally?
You know, do you struggle
with binge eating or restrictive eating?
I did both.
And I'm gonna share more on that soon.
Okay.
And remember more than ever.
It really is a matter of mind over munch.
(upbeat music)