Transformational Leadership Coach Andrea Johnson shares her deeply personal story about a life that begins with bulimia, struggles with obesity, complicated family dynamics, and pauses at a decision to undergo gastric bypass surgery. Andrea and I dive deep into what it was like to make that decision and the emotional resilience it takes to sustain weight loss after the surgery.
Andrea also offers us a new perspective on life through her philosophy of intentional optimism. We talk about the importance of knowing our core values and leveraging them to lead a fulfilling life. As she guides us through the tenets of intentional optimism, we discover how to create an environment of hope, positivity, and courage.
My conversation with Andrea isn't just about overcoming personal battles; it's about growing, evolving, and ultimately transforming your life.
LEARN ABOUT YOUR CORE VALUES
Andrea is sharing a free gift on getting to the heart of your core values, click HERE
Find Andrea on IG, click HERE
Find Andrea on FB, click HERE
Let's Be Friends
Hang out with Heather on IG @greenpalettekitchen or on FB HERE.
Let's Talk!
Whether you are looking for 1-1 nutrition coaching or kitchen coaching let's have a chat. Click HERE to reach out to Heather.
Did You Love This Episode?
"I love Heather and the Real Food Stories Podcast!" If this is you, please do not hesitate to leave a five-star review on Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transformational Leadership Coach Andrea Johnson shares her deeply personal story about a life that begins with bulimia, struggles with obesity, complicated family dynamics, and pauses at a decision to undergo gastric bypass surgery. Andrea and I dive deep into what it was like to make that decision and the emotional resilience it takes to sustain weight loss after the surgery.
Andrea also offers us a new perspective on life through her philosophy of intentional optimism. We talk about the importance of knowing our core values and leveraging them to lead a fulfilling life. As she guides us through the tenets of intentional optimism, we discover how to create an environment of hope, positivity, and courage.
My conversation with Andrea isn't just about overcoming personal battles; it's about growing, evolving, and ultimately transforming your life.
LEARN ABOUT YOUR CORE VALUES
Andrea is sharing a free gift on getting to the heart of your core values, click HERE
Find Andrea on IG, click HERE
Find Andrea on FB, click HERE
Let's Be Friends
Hang out with Heather on IG @greenpalettekitchen or on FB HERE.
Let's Talk!
Whether you are looking for 1-1 nutrition coaching or kitchen coaching let's have a chat. Click HERE to reach out to Heather.
Did You Love This Episode?
"I love Heather and the Real Food Stories Podcast!" If this is you, please do not hesitate to leave a five-star review on Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Hello everybody and welcome back to Real Food Stories. Today I had a really interesting in-depth talk with trainer and coach Andrea Johnson, who not only helps women take control of their lives and change their future by teaching intentional optimism and emotional resilience as key skills to know when navigating through life, but Andrea also has a very heartfelt personal story around bulimia and her decision to eventually have gastric bypass surgery. That's no small decision to make and Andrea could not have done it without the help of a lot of inner work and mindset coaching. Andrea has a really interesting story. I learned from Andrea that life is not linear and there are a lot of wagons we sometimes need to circle to get to a place of peace with our bodies. So I encourage you to listen to my interview with Andrea Johnson. Hi everybody, I'm here today with Andrea Johnson.
Speaker 1:Andrea is a trainer and coach who empowers others to take control of their lives and change their future. As an adoptive parent who grew up internationally navigating mental and physical wellness, she learned that emotional resilience must be earned. Uncovering her own voice became the key to the process that allows her clients to do the same. Andrea was raised on the mission field of Seoul, south Korea, and as a third culture kid, she's familiar with navigating cultural diversity to find her own place of belonging. A family history of obesity showed up early, along with bulimia and depression. Her determination to become healthy led to gastric bypass surgery and his testament to her persevering spirit. She experienced early menopause and became an adoptive mom through private adoption at 42. Her personal journey of deconstructing her own assumptions, beliefs and conditioning produced her signature tool intentional optimism.
Speaker 1:And today Andrea works with ambitious female leaders, founders, community leaders and public officials who feel stifled and have grown unsatisfied with their current level of impact. She facilitates improved communication and corporate culture and women owned or operated teams. Her passion is equipping female leaders to define a new culture by trusting their own ability to think critically, create imaginatively and lead effectively. So welcome Andrea. I'm so glad you're here today. I feel like we have a lot to talk about, personally and professionally. Let's start off by talking about your personal story, the one where you realized your family history of obesity and being overweight and the changes that you made because of that.
Speaker 2:Thank you, heather. I am so excited to be here. We have talked before about whether or not I'm comfortable sharing my story and I just want to make sure that people understand that when we share our stories, others are both encouraged and given the courage that they need to actually take control of their stories. So it is my privilege and pleasure to share. Some people my mother would be included say don't air your dirty laundry. And I'm like this is not dirty laundry. This is the journey that we've made.
Speaker 2:So, going back to my childhood, my entire family we're genetically predisposed, right. We're just those people who tend to carry. We probably, if you go all the way back to I don't know, millions of years ago, we were those people that survived because we tend to carry a little bit more weight on our bodies. But for me, it wasn't so much the genetic predisposition, it was the need to control my environment, and I did that through eating. I did that through taking care of my, creating a safe space for me with the small things that I could control. And my mom's side of the family didn't really have high obesity. My dad's side of the family had more and they had diabetes and that kind of thing. But my mother and you know I'm 57. So we were definitely raised in that period of you must look a certain way in order to be a pretty woman, and not in this age of body positivity or different kinds of diversity and beauty. And we were not raised with that. We were raised that this is what you look like and doggone. If it wasn't Christie Brinkley, you know so, and I'm 51, so it'll never happen. But I was taught at a very young age that if you were overweight at all, it was a sign of the inability to control yourself. So it was a self-control issue, and people talk about that all the time, don't they? We talk about, oh, I'll just white-knuckle it, and it's not that, it just might be. That's how your metabolism starts and then you develop a coping mechanism.
Speaker 2:So for my, I didn't realize when I was starting to hide food at eight or nine years old and we, like I said or you said, we lived in Korea in the 1970s and 80s. We didn't have I mean, if you watch K-dramas now the technology they have and the beauty. I mean they're exporting food here, right, but they didn't have canned goods, they didn't have peanut butter, they didn't have frozen foods. They didn't have all of the stuff that they have today, and so we took canned goods in our homes, in the missionary homes.
Speaker 2:That top half of the, in the second floor, half of the entire second story of the house, was a walk-in attic in which we basically had our own store. We took canned goods, we took tuna, we took peanut butter, jello Anything was non-perishable and I would slip in there and quietly find jello packets or peanut butter or something that I could hide under my bed or under my pillow, that nobody would see and that I could have control over. And I don't know that. I don't even know that I thought that. I mean, I knew I needed to hide it, but I don't know that. I cognitively thought that it was bad or was detriment to me until I, like, went off to college and then things started kind of getting a little more out of control. But looking back at my life, I can see early, early on, that my family's way of handling that genetic predisposition was to buckle down and do the right thing and that didn't work for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can totally relate to so much of what you're saying. I mean just being raised I'm just a year or two younger than you, so we were raised in the same generation and that belief that you must look a certain way. You do not gain weight. I mean, right, it's a lack of self-control, it's a lack of willpower, it's just something against you and we got to buckle down and figure it out. Sometimes you have genetics working against you and it becomes even really difficult, which then it sounds like turned into hiding food, sneaking food, and you had a what sounds like a store up in your attic.
Speaker 1:I mean just the choices and the you know, yeah, tell all my secrets from my childhood.
Speaker 2:We even had a huge deep freeze and we would go on to the military post and we would go to Baskin Robbins and Baskin Robbins had these big round containers of ice cream. I don't know if they still do, I don't even go in these places anymore but instead of buying something off the shelf, they would take this amazing wire cutter and they would take those five gallon or 10 gallon, whatever things, and they would slice off a gallon or two and they would put a lid on the bottom and a lid on the top and that was your ice cream. And so I had, we would, my parents would go and buy like four or five of these things on the army post and come home and we'd put them in the deep freeze. So I was even really good at sneaking in there in the middle of the night, lifting the lid of the actual freezer very quietly, and I would keep a spoon, and then I would find the sherbet or I would find the Rocky Road, and I would very carefully make sure that you, I didn't just dive in with a spoon, right, I had to make it non detectable, right.
Speaker 2:So you see where all of this stuff is going. And it wasn't until I was in the hospital for bulimia and depression, turning 21 in the hospital or 20 in the hospital, that I was willing to admit all of the gosh, the deviousness that went into that and but recognizing that a lot of it came from this fear of being found out, we would make no bake cookies and leave them out on wax paper, you know the kind with the chocolate and the peanut butter and the oats and stuff, and I would walk through and pop one in my mouth and scoot them around as you couldn't tell that I had taken one.
Speaker 1:But it's almost, you know, it's almost asking a kid to be, you know, really disciplined. I mean, that's not even fair in a way. Would you agree with that that you had gallons and gallons of ice cream in your freezer and the Jell-O packets and you're making the cookies, and but you're expected to be in control with it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, and I think there were plenty of times when I would want to blame my environment to a certain extent. That that's, it's a case. I mean there's a case to be made there. But we reach a point where we take on our responsibility for our response to the environment.
Speaker 2:It may not be the year 25, right, I mean it may be. It may be that even at 15 or 16, I still couldn't. I mean, even at school I was a cheerleader and we would. We had hot dog buns in the freezer in order to have game time stuff and I would pull one frozen hot dog bun out and eat it in the bathroom because I just needed some control. So it became much more than that. It became my response to my environment. That included more than just food stores that were there. My sister didn't have that problem Right. So it's totally different people, totally different reactions to what was going on, and none of my other friends had that problem, and I was in a country of people who are still quite small today I mean Koreans. We now know a whole lot more about the Asian diet and what that does for you and how that helps you and how it does different things in your metabolism.
Speaker 2:But, I don't really love the Asian food and I don't digest sesame oil very well, and so I didn't embrace that and so everything was very Americanized.
Speaker 2:But I think it is easy to say it's not fair to a kid, but my parents were working with what they had at the time too. They just they didn't know any better, and I think I shared with you when we spoke earlier that my mother always tried by helping me, like, I think, I. We had our own Weight Watchers group and I think I was a couple of missionary ladies and me, and I think the earliest memories I have of being in Weight Watchers is fifth grade. That's young and, yeah, that's way too young to talk about dieting, and my mom didn't know any better. She just wanted me to be happy and she wanted, and in her mind she thought that you know, being healthy and being thin would make me happy, and the reality is it had something totally different. But she would send me to school with a boiled egg for lunch a boiled egg, half a tuna, fish and mustard sandwich and a tab Diet food.
Speaker 1:Totally diet food and I think that belief that that your mom wanted to make sure that you were happy and being happy means thin, yeah Right, not her fault, or not you know, that's just how she grew up. That's how my mother grew up too. Is that you know, happiness equals thin. Man my whole family was, you know, in that mindset. So that's just passed down beliefs, right, old, outdated beliefs, I think now.
Speaker 2:But that sounds like exactly where your mom was at and you know the more I learned about when you talk about I work with women. One of the reasons I want to work with women is because it's not just this women pass down to each other. We're part of a bigger understanding of the way culture works and the patriarchal system of women are, and I may just step on toes here. But women are performative. Men are men, are like boys, are just good for being boys, right. But girls are always sweet or kind or gentle. I mean, even if just a little poem about puppy dog tails and whatever, I don't even remember what it is.
Speaker 2:But young women, girls are and have always been in Western society, raised to perform to certain duties. You will make a good wife, you will make a good mother. There's nothing wrong with any of those things. But when that's what we're told, it's all outside of ourselves, Whereas boys are taught to be courageous and smart and energetic and the leader you know which is all inside of themselves. And so we have this skewed view and that's a very binary way to look at it. So don't call me out on this as anybody, but seriously, it affects everything. And when we talk about how we're supposed to be happy when we look good, it's all a piece of that because it's outward yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think, when it comes to food and diets and body image, girls, I think from a very young age, are expected to watch their weight, watch their food, not really love food. Always be on a diet, just in case where boys are encouraged to get big, get strong, yeah get strong Book up. Yeah, eat, eat. I have many memories of being a teenager and going out to lunch with my boyfriend, and I better watch what I'm eating where he was able to Get salad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll get a salad.
Speaker 1:You get whatever you want you enjoy. I will have to sit here and be really aware of what I'm putting into my body and chew your food 30 times and put your fork down in between.
Speaker 2:I mean I know all the hacks and habits. I mean it's just exhausting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is exhausting, it really is Well, so then let's fast forward to you said that by your 20s you were diagnosed with bulimia depression, and why don't you just finish that part of the story?
Speaker 2:So when I was in college and my family was still in Korea and I was in Houston, of all places, a huge city, and I didn't do well, I ended up my sophomore year of college sharing an apartment with a friend and I would. I had gained up. I don't know what I weighed at the time, but it felt. I mean, I know that later I gained all the way up to over 300 pounds, and I'm only five one, so that tells you the capacity there, but I don't know, maybe it was at two to 30 or something, and just it felt like the biggest. I didn't have clothes that fit, I couldn't afford anything and I had a big flannel nightgown and I would count the number of days that I could miss class and still pass. Because I'm smart, right. Because the other thing is that I was not the normal girl. I was the courageous girl, I was the smart girl, I was the outspoken girl, I was the critical thinker, and that had to be kind of not beat out of me literally, but kind of like beat out of me right, it's like no, we just hammered in. This is what girls are supposed to be. So by the time I hit 19, almost 20, I was counting the days, closing the curtains, sitting in my apartment eating from Texas right Bluebell ice cream back to the ice cream thing, it's a comfort food and realizing I can't go on like this.
Speaker 2:I didn't know where to get help and I didn't know what to do. And back then the radio. It was like 86, I think I heard, because I'd always heard. I mean, I was a Karen Carpenter fan, so I knew about anorexia and I knew about bulimorexia. I knew, like the binging and purging, but no one had ever said to me that some of the behaviors I had were unhealthy. And when it ever said, this could be a mental issue. This could be something that you've gotten yourself into, that you need help outside of yourself and outside of a diet pill to get out of.
Speaker 2:And I heard a commercial and it was for a group called the Raider Institute. I think they're still in business and it was a 12-week inpatient program. And it was the first place I'd ever heard the term mindful eating. It was the first place I had ever heard the term. Well, because I come from a conservative Christian background, so it was the first time I'd ever been told it's okay to meditate. You need to meditate. Pardon me, it was the first time anybody had ever said what do you think about this, how do you feel about this, or what are your thoughts about food?
Speaker 2:It just never occurred to me, and we did a 12-step program in there, which is very common for anybody who's an addict, and I don't espouse to everything that I learned there, but it was a really good way to set me on the right road, and so what I learned was I was not able to deal with life on lifestorms. I needed different ones. It didn't make me broken. It just meant that I was a little different, and my son has ADHD, and so we talk about being neurodivergent today and how it's a little bit of the same kind of thing. It's like your brain works differently than other people. There's nothing wrong with you and you're not broken, but we need to figure out how to help you thrive, and so that was the first step for me is figuring out how to help me thrive. It was the first time I had been in with a counselor. It was the first time I'd ever really talked to a psychiatrist and we had group therapy, and it didn't go over well. My parents were on furlough, so they were home from Korea.
Speaker 2:This was in Southeast Texas, and I learned that part of this is where I first was told about the outward expression of my self. It was like, andrea, you put on a mask every day, you put on your makeup every day, you curl your hair every day. This is in the 80s, so it was big, and the example that was given was you need to strip all that down. You need to be able to be you without all of that stuff. And I wasn't prepared. I was losing weight because I was being given here's the plate of food that you're eating and we're going to walk two miles a day, but I needed someone to say to me you have to drop that mask. And so she said, all right, for the next week, no makeup period and preferably just wash your hair, say clean, that kind of thing. It was while I was in the hospital I had my first post or preventricular contractions, which is PVCs, which is when your heart skips a beat, and it was because the anxiety of doing that was so intense for me that my heart was telling me your nervous system is freaking out. And so I ended up wearing a heart monitor that week just to see what it was.
Speaker 2:And then, when my parents came for group therapy my mother, because I was terrified for her to see me you don't leave the house without lipstick, right? And she came in and she looked at me and she said you look different. And I said, well, I don't have any makeup on. And she said, no, I can tell you don't have any makeup on, but you look different. And as much as I didn't, I fully understood at that moment that maybe my mom could see and that maybe my mom was teachable.
Speaker 2:She wasn't 100% ready and then, when we started talking about things in group therapy, she ended up storming out and I thought I would never see her again. It was just horrible. It was hard, if anybody's been through that. My mother, however, was the one person in my family who was willing to grow along with me and by the time we lost her in 2017, she, knee to knee with me, said did I tell you how amazing you are? Did I tell you to fly? Did I tell you I was in full circle? But that was 30 years in the making. So this was the process that I had in this inpatient center, and it changed me and it really set me on a path to say I can be me and it's okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that sounds like a really pivotal moment for you when you went into the inpatient therapy.
Speaker 2:It's a 12-week inpatient program.
Speaker 1:Yeah, You've learned the 12-step program meditation, mindfulness, all things that you'd probably never even heard of before, at such a young age, what is?
Speaker 2:your food taste like I don't know. It goes down too fast, Right? I mean just all of those things Noticing your food being aware. And here I am, 37 years later, and I still, even after gastric bypass, I still have found myself thinking well, it doesn't really taste good, but I need to eat all of this nutrition. What I grilled chicken and I didn't like the consistency of it, it's okay to give it to the dog, right, it's just? I'm still having those conversations. They just don't go away.
Speaker 1:Right, you feel like obligated to eat it. Maybe you're ready.
Speaker 2:Play your plate, baby, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Play your plate club and it sounds like your mom who, and you when they said don't wear makeup for a week, and then your mom saw you, that was almost traumatic, I mean it sounds like a really, really big adjustment and it's nice to hear that your mom turned it around so she could really be a big supporter of yours.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it was work that she had to do. And she started, and she even started seeing a counselor. But she figured out that there were cycles in her family and cycles that she wanted to be the one to break. And the reality was I stuck a big old wrench in the works and said this cycle is broken. And so she said, all right, let's figure out how to fix it.
Speaker 2:And she wasn't perfect, and I have lots of stories that I've had to work through with my mother because, well, mothers and daughters, that's just, you know, we could say that's enough to say right there. But of looking back all the way to that moment, she is one of the people that was willing to say I see you. And when people see us, all of a sudden, we have the freedom to be us. And even if we're not prepared, that's the road that we need to be on in order to heal, in order to whatever trauma we had, in order to grow, in order to be who we were created to be. And so, even though that was hard, and there were other times during college and even afterwards that we clashed and she didn't always see me, there was always that peace back there that said but she can and eventually she will and she did.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. I mean you said you mentioned just breaking the cycle or breaking the chain. Sometimes I call it that you were the impetus, sounds like in your family, right, you're the one who, for better or for worse, presented with these challenges, and you were there to recreate new ways of, I think, working in your family.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I saw a counselor who was his main way of working was called Family Systems and he talked about if you're familiar with them. The first thing he did with us was my husband was there too, and he did the full family tree and some of his insights. Just looking at the family tree and having us talk about different people all the way up to my great grandparents was very insightful. But one of the things that we've never forgotten was his example of when you're in a family system. You're on a stage and you each have lines and a script, and if somebody exits stage right when they weren't supposed to, or if someone dies, or if someone decides to change the script because that's what I always say is, I change the script and the rest of my family was like where are we? This doesn't make any sense. But my mother was like hang on, I think I know where we are. Let's find where she is right, because she was willing to change the script and that's just a hard thing to do.
Speaker 1:That's a great way to look at it, that you change the script and then everyone has to either adjust around you jump in or not.
Speaker 2:Right, and Shakespeare is very different from improv. Right, shakespeare is very. Every single line is. His lines are specific. You have to say them the way he designed them, or they're not funny or they're not impactful Whereas improv you get to figure it out on your own with a basic script. Most of us are just programmed to be in a Shakespearean play. We are not programmed or taught how to do improv. So that's what I basically said script's gone, we're going to improv. And my mother was the first one to say, well, this could be fun. My dad's still not really on board, but he's learning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and your responsibility, I guess, ultimately is with you, right, and taking care of you and my family moving forward, with my son and my husband right. So let's talk about the gastric bypass surgery then. How did that come about? It sounds like you were doing a lot of work in your 20s. You really made big progress. And tell me about just the decision to have gastric bypass. I know that's not an easy decision.
Speaker 2:No, it's not, it wasn't at all. And I did do well in my 20s and I learned how to eat healthy food, 1200, 1500 calories a day and, like I said, I'm only five one and walking was good for me. Running I did a lot but I managed to. I was like 125 pounds or so when I got married but, like I shared, I met my husband maybe in grad school. We were both in seminary and he's a pastor and we moved to Baltimore and just being married and in seminary because there were other things I realized I'd not really been trained well for and his family system was very different from mine, and my reaction to stress is eat. And people talk about that as if it's like this normal thing. It's like, well, I think a lot of people have that reaction, but mine was seriously that reaction and I noticed there were times when I was hiding food from my husband. There were things I was doing, I was putting food in my desk at work, all kinds of things like that.
Speaker 2:But when things got really hard in the past, my weight. So I guess 1999 was a hard year and my grandfather committed suicide. My grandmother then died of a stroke, while after having aneurysm surgery. She never came out. Things at church were really hard. Baltimore is a big city. It's a harder city to live in and I just was not doing well at all. I guess I had gotten up to about 300, 310 pounds and my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and she was only 60. And that's not young young to be diagnosed, but it's still young considering general age. And I was working at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center and was able to get her in to see someone. But I knew, having worked at the oncology center, that obesity is one of the largest contributors to any kind of cancer. And when you walked out of the building there were yellow lines beyond which you had to stand in order to smoke a cigarette right, because we want to protect people from secondhand smoke. But you walk in and there were vending machines and train machines and it was really easy to access that kind of thing. But I started realizing and I'd learned a lot about physiology and I started understanding ghrelin and how that works and all the different hormones that affect that your fat cells actually secrete, hormones that tell your body we're supposed to do this. This is how we stay safe. So I found not only my genetics but my physiology working against me.
Speaker 2:And I was still under a lot of stress because not only was it hard at church, but now my mother was diagnosed with cancer and I started looking at options. What do I have? What are my options? And so I initially wanted to do the gastric sleeve, just because that's much less drastic, it's much more, it's reversible. I don't know why we think I would want something that was reversible, but just because we always want to weigh out what are my options. I'm an enneagram six, so I want all of my options covered. All that to say, I tried to do the gastric sleeve because I just wanted to have my options covered and it didn't feel as scary as like cutting your insides and changing your plumbing. And my insurance said no and they said we appreciate that and we understand why. But the success rate with a gastric sleeve is nowhere near.
Speaker 2:At the time this was in 2005,. The Ruin Y, which is the classic gastric bypass, was the catalac of bypass surgeries and weight loss surgeries and it was considered the safest, most effective, the most long-lasting and just with the best success. And so I appealed that and I pulled from journals and, because I was in medical research. I pulled from all this stuff and they still said here's your option you can have gastric bypass or you can just continue the way you're going. And I said, oh darn. So I looked at my husband and I said if we do gastric bypass, there's things that have to change. I can't have sugar, I can't have soda, I can't, you know, small portions, and the way you eat will have to change. And the other piece that I researched was that another thing that obesity affects is fertility. And we had been married 2005. We'd been married 10 years at the time and we weren't getting pregnant. And so here I was, 36, 37, thinking my days are numbered if I want to be a mom. And because of those things that just said, I said I'm going to do it.
Speaker 2:And Hopkins had one of the better bariatric surgery centers there in Baltimore. And so I met with a young surgeon and she said oh my gosh, your mindset is perfect. And she said, I think by the time we were ready to go, she said I think you're going to be my poster child. And I'm like well, that's encouraging to hear. But part of that was that I was talking with a counselor for two years beforehand who helped me make decisions. And then that family dynamics counselor was talking about and all the way through gastric bypass, an entire year after gastric bypass, and he looked at me one day and said I have never watched anyone do anything more courageous than what I watch you go through.
Speaker 2:And it isn't an easy thing. It is a hard surgery. It is the kind of surgery that you have to change beforehand and then you have to be committed. So I quit drinking. If I once I knew I was going to have the surgery, like by Christmas, I knew I was going to have the surgery on March 31st and so I said, all right, so does need to be out, I don't want to have to deal with this. And they said go on the sugar busters diet.
Speaker 2:So I did and I lost a few pounds, but part of it was just changing my taste buds and changing what I knew to be the right things to eat. I did all the preparation work. I did all of the food prep. I got little things that would make it easy for me to digest. I got mashed potatoes in the house, I got lots of really good high quality powdered protein and I did all of those things and I, unfortunately, at the end of the first week, ate a little bit of tuna fish why, I don't know, but I did and it got a little stuck and I got a little scared and I ended up having a second surgery because they went in through the same. It was laparoscopic, which is nice. I knew friends that had been cut from stem to stern and so this was nice. But they just wanted to make sure that I didn't have a true blockage, so they went back in.
Speaker 2:But doing that so changed my understanding of what my relationship needed to be to food that for a minimum of two years there were things I didn't even think about touching and I lost 185 pounds and the lowest I have, like I said, I'm 5'1". The lowest I've ever been, I think, was 116. I'm hovering right around 130, 135 right now and but I'm two years into entrepreneurship and telling myself it's okay and I'm 57, right, so I feel good. But it has been a long 16, 17 years. How long has it been? It's been a long road where my mindset still sees me as a heavy person. I will walk past a mirror and I will go. Who is she? The other thing I'm doing is my hair started turning gray when I was 22.
Speaker 2:And I decided this year in March, I guess it was right around funny, that's now that I mentioned that it was March. It was right around that, I guess 18th anniversary. I was like I'm tired of, I'm not going to not wear makeup because that's just. I don't feel like I wear a mask anymore. But it was the idea that I have beautiful white streaks in my hair and I don't need to continue to color my hair. And so now I now I definitely look at the mirror. I'm like who's that? Oh, we were in Target yesterday. Look at that white haired woman. But our brains take a lot longer to change than our bodies and I think that's the work that we need to understand, we have to do and anytime. I've had three colleagues go through gastric bypass surgery and I'm always very supportive, but I always want to know what is your expectation, because and now they golly they just prescribe it for everybody. I'm like they need to have a good psych eval, they need to have a good counselor, because I've watched people just gain it all back.
Speaker 2:And it just breaks my heart because I know. I know how easy it is for my body to put weight back on, but I also know how hard it is for me to eat that much food. So I mean I know somebody who taught themselves their bodies how to tolerate alcohol, which we cannot do, which was never a thing for me anyway, but all of those things, so that I'm sorry. I feel like that was very long-winded in an answer, but it needs to be comprehensive when we look at something like that. It's not for everyone, absolutely.
Speaker 1:No, thank you for sharing that so openly, and I think what I'm hearing is that you really need to go in very mentally prepared. This is not a diet, it's not. We're just going to tough it out. You need willpower. You really need to know how to eat differently yes, how to eat better and your reasons for the gastric bypass were not for vanity reasons. Sounds like it was really for health reasons. You saw your mom go through a cancer diagnosis at a pretty young age and that sounds like what prompted you to really think seriously about this. But your mindset going into it sounds like it has to be really solid and strong and you had been doing a lot of work up until that point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you do. So it's not you have to. I went into it knowing that I was ready to change my life. I didn't like where I was, and I talk about that.
Speaker 2:If women feel unfulfilled, let's talk about what needs to change in your life. If it's gastric bypass, if it's, my sister is doing a beautiful job, losing over 100 pounds. She has many years to see, and so she needed to eat differently in order to manage a lot of that vertigo, but now she's finally losing weight. She didn't gain it until she had babies. A lot of women don't do that. They don't gain weight until they have babies, and she's doing it without gastric bypass. And yet now she's coming to me saying so how do I eat this and what's you know? Oh, now you want my? Yes, please.
Speaker 2:I'm happy to share my wisdom that I've learned over. This is how many proteins you should eat in a day, and the little food pyramid tells us this thing, but the reality is you don't need them any carbs. You don't need to be no carb, but you need more protein and you need healthy fats, and you need all of these good things for your body to function well. And to say that things like nuts are always off the table means that I'm not getting any of those really good fats. So I have walnuts every day and I've learned how to eat certain things in certain ways and make sure I get my protein in, but I eat popcorn every Friday night. I mean that's I. We have family movie night and I have a big bowl of popcorn and I still maintain my weight, you know, because I want it fresh popped. It's like that's my splurge. And so understanding how your body works, I mean this. I think this goes back to anything we need to know is understanding who we are and how we function, if it's mentally, emotionally, spiritually or physically.
Speaker 2:We need to know we. We are taught to take answers from other people. We are taught to take answers from experts, and I see this in ADHD. We had to become my son's adopted right, so we had to become advocates and understand ADHD without having that diagnosis in our family. Before and when people tell you well, my GP says this, I'm like let me explain to you what a general practitioner is. They know a little bit about everything. The specialist knows everything about that. One thing, right, my sister said my GP thought this about my ear, but when I see the specialist, it's like he knows all of it. I mean, I spent 25 years in the medical field. That's why they specialize. We need to be willing to think critically for ourselves, advocate for ourselves and be willing to take the hard steps in order to actually achieve the things that we know we can and we want to achieve, and to believe that we deserve it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and it sounds like you just, in your process with this gastric bypass, have learned to advocate for yourself and not listen to your intuition. Can we call?
Speaker 2:it.
Speaker 1:Or just your inner knowing.
Speaker 1:I call it my gut yeah your gut, your inner, knowing whatever we want to call it, I call it rather than relying on the outside people telling you how it should be. It sounds like you really have a good grasp on this just inner knowing to make your decisions about your weight, what you're eating, how much, giving yourself permission to eat healthy fats and nuts and not go out into the realm of like fat diets, and just that. You know do's and don'ts and rules. And does that make sense? Is that, am I?
Speaker 2:on the right track with that. I do want to be able to put the caveat in there. I'm not immune to that. Right, this is not a straight road. This is a wandering weebie turn around on circles road and I learned through the mistakes. I learned through trying a fad diet. I learned through. I did well for a little while on 5-2 fasting. I did well for a little while on the super high protein.
Speaker 2:But the reality is I know what my body needs and at 57, it might be different than it was at 37 or 47. And it may be that my expectations of my body weighing 116 pounds at 57, are completely unrealistic. Now I'm not here to tell you that I'm not going to try and get down to about 120, 125 again, but I have tried the fad diets and in between the bulimia and depression diagnosis and the inpatient and the gastric bypass, I did American weight loss, I did nervous system. I did all of those and I had limited success with each one, but I've tried them. So when I say to someone I've tried it all, this is where I landed. It may not be for you. I can honestly say that even with exercise I'm learning what my body can and cannot do. Every good doctor will tell you that you know your body better than anyone else, and if you're not listening to what your body has to say, then nobody else can help you and nobody else can advocate for you, and I think that's just a really important point.
Speaker 1:The important thing is that it seems like time and time again. Maybe you went back to yourself, you were forgiving yourself and then realized that the gastric bypass is probably your best option for you. Yeah, it's not for everybody Right? Certainly not for everybody.
Speaker 2:And some of this is since my gastric bypass. Don't get me wrong. I mean it just is. I mean it's because it's not a magic pill, it's not. You take it and then you don't have to do anything. You still have to live a lifestyle, you still have to care for yourself. I still exercise and I still walk and I still I log my food, because otherwise I hide food. That's my tendency. Some people may not need to do that, but I'm really good at sneaking one or two things still all these years later. That's something that my body says or my brain says oh, we need to, like, fix this stressful thing and I just do so. I have to be aware and start writing my food down and when I'm really honest, I just do better.
Speaker 1:That works well for you and that's great. Yeah, some people hate writing their food down, some people can't live without it, and whatever works for you individually is good, exactly. So let's talk about emotional resilience, because I know gastric bypass being so life changing and it is truly a life changing surgery and you cannot eat like you used to. How does emotional resilience because I know you mentioned this in your bio and the people and the women that you work with cultivating emotional resilience? How did that play a role with you? How is it playing a role with you right now and just in life in general, with the women that you coach?
Speaker 2:So back to my counselor, friend Teri. One of the other things that he taught me was emotions are like wind blowing through a screen door. If you put something up there that blocks the wind from being able to blow through the screen door, it's going to blow the door off the hinges. You've got to allow the wind to blow through Now. You may not want it to, you want it to be latched or something so it doesn't go slap, slap, slap. But that's an analogy that's helped me. But another one that's helped me is I grew up going to the ocean every year, and in Korea we went to a beach and then back and forth to Hawaii, and I have been in Hawaii where I have been. All of a sudden there's a six or eight foot wave and I'm a little person and I'm upside down with my head stuck in the sand, but realizing if I just hang on, it's going to go over and I'm going to be okay. That's what I call emotional resilience is understanding that emotions are just that, they just are wind or a wave that flows through, and that who we are is not dependent upon our emotional state, it is not dependent on even understanding our emotions, but the resilience itself. The definition is basically being able to get up when you fall down, and so there are some people that have that natural ability. My mother seemed to have that natural ability. She was like a bottle of champagne the bubbles would pop, the cork would pop and the bubbles would happen, and then she would need to allow that to resurface, but being willing to go through the hard things and being willing to say, all right, I don't want to do this and I don't feel safe doing this. This goes back to the any grand part. I'm going to do it anyway because I know that building up like a good, strong tree, a good taproot of knowing who I am, and a tree that can bend with the wind as it blows, so that I realize these are just emotions. They may feel really, really strong, but I don't have to run from them, I don't have to fight them, I can just let them blow through and they don't define me. My emotions no longer define me.
Speaker 2:There are times when I will walk into my husband he works from home as well walk in his office and I'll sit down and he knows when I do that he should turn around. And let's just say I'm feeling a lot of anxiety today and I just need to tell you that. So it's just getting it out of my system. Learning that that's how I experience resilience is by acknowledging the emotions that are there, thanking them for the work that they're doing in my life. So I'm experiencing a lot of anxiety.
Speaker 2:I think I'm really scared about giving this talk, or maybe I'm just really excited because they feel the same. So what is it? And then having somebody to talk that through makes all the difference. But I've also learned I can do that to myself in the mirror. So sometimes I will just go to my bathroom and just start talking. I'm telling you all my secrets, like now my throat's closing. I'm talking about all my secrets.
Speaker 2:But it makes a difference being able to look myself in the mirror if I'm really angry, pretending like just doing something out, because that is the emotion that I'm not allowed to express in my history. Anger is not okay, like women are not supposed to be angry, and so for me, being able to express that anger just really like give them a piece of my mind and then I'm oh okay, I may never need to do that, but that sure that got. That allowed the emotion to blow through and the more we experience some of it we plan on experiencing like a most like a gastric bypass. Some of we don't like the death of my mother in 2017. Some of it we do like adopting a child or we don't the being told I can't have a baby. You know, I mean all of those things. As long as we allow ourselves the grace to let those emotions blow through, we will develop the kind of resilience that means we can get through anything.
Speaker 1:You also talk about intentional optimism and I'm just really curious Like I know we'll end with this because I just love the words intentional optimism. So let's talk about what that is. I know you work with your clients on this. You say that it provides a framework for how and what we do, and it's the attitudes and mindsets we employ and embody to live out our own values, goals and dreams with excellence. So I'm intrigued.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, in a nutshell, it is a lifestyle and it consists of six tenants that I boiled down after my mother died. I said what do I believe and why do I believe it and what do I want to stand for? And I just made like a big brain dump and words. This took several weeks to come up with what I call the tenants of intentional optimism. And the first is optimistic, which includes hope, and it includes positivity and moving forward. The second is being present, and that includes wonder, and I call it grown-up wonder. If I know how things work, it's more wonderful to me than not knowing how they work. But it also includes kindness and just being present with other people, because a lot of times we think of presence as being in the moment or with other people. The third is energetic, which includes excitement and joy and being willing to share that with others, even going so far as to saying I get to manufacture my own right. When we know ourselves, we know we can do things that will raise that excitement for us and then we can share it with other people. The fourth is courage, and it is our being courageous, and it includes being undaunted, seeing the mountain and knowing we can climb it, the resiliency I talked about. That's part of all part of courage.
Speaker 2:And the fifth one is wisdom, or being wise, and one of the things I was never comfortable with was being a wise person. I just never thought that was okay. But the reality is we've been around the sun a certain number of times. We have all these experiences. We have our own stories that we can share, and if we respect ourselves and other people enough to share them, then that's a way that we can live in wisdom. And then it's all kind of bookended with intentionality. It includes having a plan and being proactive and being willing to figure out what needs to happen next, so that I can walk with my head up, looking at the horizon and be able to pivot whenever I need to, rather than looking down at whatever cracks I might be trying not to step on or trip over. But intentional optimism is the daily. It's how we do what we do. It's the daily practices of being willing to say I'm going to be courageous today, or I'm just and I love that word undaunted, or I'm willing to share my wisdom with you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it sounds like a really important framework for living life. It is for me, yeah, and you touched on core values too, and that's also equally as important to, I think, just adding into your framework of who you are, your beliefs. Really. You're really deep down strong beliefs that you don't want to waver from.
Speaker 2:Well, it's, the easiest way to have self-awareness is to figure out what your core values are and to understand that the beliefs are what your core values are, what your beliefs are built on. So when you understand that your core values may be respect or, like I said, belonging. So for me, that being weird and being different I'm not that, I don't know, maybe not that weird, but being different meant that I didn't necessarily belong, and so I was always doing something. I believed I didn't belong, I believed that I was broken, I believed that I needed to be different. So I was always trying to do something to fix that, always trying to do something to alleviate that pain of living in tension with not feeling like I belonged. So I think it's just important to understand that foundation.
Speaker 2:But that's how I work with people and I think that even on a weight loss or a healing journey for any kind of food gosh what is the word I'm looking for? Bulimia or anorexia, an addiction or anything like that One of the best things to do is to know who you are and to understand that you're good. There's nothing. I mean your core values. You're not going to find anything in there that's bad. You're not going to find greed. You're not going to. When you look, you're not going to find those things. You're going to find things like I need to belong and I want other people to belong, or I need to be respected and I want others to be respected. So that's when we can start really being honest with ourselves, looking in the mirror and saying it's okay to be me.
Speaker 1:And you mentioned that before we just got on our recording that you have a freebie right. I do To give to the audience. I do.
Speaker 2:That's wonderful. So downloadable exercise that will kind of walk you through how to kind of start the process of your core values, and it's really simple. It's at my website, theintentionaloptimistcom, but it's forward slash foodstories, so it's very easy to find it and I'm sure you'll include it in the show notes. But it'll just kind of, if you're a self-starter, if you're somebody that works well with just reading the instructions and going, it'll give you a really good start. If you're somebody who needs a little more, I have other options there listed on there. But it's to me it is so important that we know it that I'll give it away for free.
Speaker 1:That sounds fantastic. Thank you very much and I will definitely put that in the show notes, for sure, so people can easily find that. And, andrea, thank you so much. This has been an insightful conversation and you've been really a delight to talk to, and I appreciate you being on today. Thank, you.
Speaker 2:So thank you. Thank you. It's my pleasure and it is my desire that my story encourages and helps others.
Speaker 1:Yes, and that is my intention as well is just to get people's stories out into the open so other people can feel less alone and know that other people are going through similar situations. So thank you very much, I appreciate it, thank you.