Revelation Within On the Go!
Tracy Brown's (R.D.) Insights into Diet Culture
Ever found yourself caught in the vicious cycle of diet culture and emotional eating? If so, this episode promises transformative insights from Tracy Brown, a trauma-informed, non-diet nutrition therapist. Tracy takes us on a deep dive into her personal struggles with eating disorders, uncovering the detrimental impact of diet culture and the nuances of emotional eating. Her experiences put a spotlight on the body's inherent protective mechanisms against restriction and illustrate the crucial need for balancing our relationship with food and body.
Carrying feelings of inadequacy into adulthood and the consistent threat of rejection and trauma can lead to direct food and body trauma. As we navigate these complex topics, Tracy provides enlightening insights on how the need to adapt often distorts into a desire for self-transformation. We also tackle the gripping addiction to dieting and its deceptive role in numbing emotions.
Wrapping up our conversation, we focus on trauma's impact on body image and eating, as well as the damaging cycle of dieting and emotional eating. Tracy shares invaluable wisdom on how to grieve for the misconceptions we held about our worth and the steps we can take towards overcoming the influences of diet culture. This episode will challenge your perceptions, offering healing strategies to break generational chains and foster acceptance and love for our bodies. Tune in for an enlightening journey filled with powerful truths about nutrition, body acceptance, and overcoming emotional eating.
Ashley T. Lee Podcast will cover many life issues such as overcoming stress, anxiety...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts
Learn more about our Revelation Within Community: https://www.revelationwithin.org
Ever found yourself caught in the vicious cycle of diet culture and emotional eating? If so, this episode promises transformative insights from Tracy Brown, a trauma-informed, non-diet nutrition therapist. Tracy takes us on a deep dive into her personal struggles with eating disorders, uncovering the detrimental impact of diet culture and the nuances of emotional eating. Her experiences put a spotlight on the body's inherent protective mechanisms against restriction and illustrate the crucial need for balancing our relationship with food and body.
Carrying feelings of inadequacy into adulthood and the consistent threat of rejection and trauma can lead to direct food and body trauma. As we navigate these complex topics, Tracy provides enlightening insights on how the need to adapt often distorts into a desire for self-transformation. We also tackle the gripping addiction to dieting and its deceptive role in numbing emotions.
Wrapping up our conversation, we focus on trauma's impact on body image and eating, as well as the damaging cycle of dieting and emotional eating. Tracy shares invaluable wisdom on how to grieve for the misconceptions we held about our worth and the steps we can take towards overcoming the influences of diet culture. This episode will challenge your perceptions, offering healing strategies to break generational chains and foster acceptance and love for our bodies. Tune in for an enlightening journey filled with powerful truths about nutrition, body acceptance, and overcoming emotional eating.
Ashley T. Lee Podcast will cover many life issues such as overcoming stress, anxiety...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts
Learn more about our Revelation Within Community: https://www.revelationwithin.org
Hi and welcome to Revelation Within on the go. I'm Heidi Bilesma-Epperson, one of your hosts and the owner and lead coach of Revelation Within.
Speaker 2:And I'm Christina Motley, your other host, also a Revelation Within coach and Heidi's partner in all things Revelation Within. We are so happy to invite you to join us for this very special episode of Revelation Within on the go Listener.
Speaker 1:Ever wonder how you can feel safer in your own skin and stop blaming your body and your food for ongoing struggles in your life? Well, today we have Tracy Brown with us. Tracy is a trauma informed, non-diet nutrition therapist. Welcome, tracy, I'm so glad you're here with us.
Speaker 4:Hi everybody. Hi Heidi and I, christina, thanks for having me and I'm glad that, honestly, you all brought in some laughter right before this kind of heavy topic, I think it helps us have our resource to kind of go back to. It's like it's not all bad when things feel so heavy. We can still goof off and laugh and, yes, Basically it's going to be okay. But let's feel what we got to feel.
Speaker 1:Yay, well, thanks for that. Tracy, you are a registered dietitian who helps people of all kinds of variety of people, just from what I know of you but specifically to heal their relationship with food and weight as well as to feel safer and less stressed out in their bodies, and I'm sure you have a testimony of your own recovery from this or that and trauma and the new age and so on, and I know you love to bring glory to God with that testimony. Where do you want to start today?
Speaker 4:Oh, my goodness. Well, I'll just share a little bit. I guess, briefly, about being able to really see the food can just be food and the body's a container for all this stuff. That's like the beginning, middle and end of all this for all of us. But I guess, very practically I struggle with all kinds of sort of eating as well, actually diagnosing disorders and then that subclinical stuff that honestly, most people have as well.
Speaker 4:So anorexia, binge eating, I would say, fitness obsession, a little bit of orthorexia, which is obsession with healthy eating, sprinkled in there too, and all of that was just a whack-a-mole to I would say I'm going to use some other language that maybe people don't know today about changing my state and all that means is like, if you're chronically inside, feeling like these feelings of too much or not enough, believe some feelings and thoughts of my needs are too much, I'm too much, I don't matter, no one cares.
Speaker 4:Plus, like this whole fight, fight, freeze or please, stuff that maybe people recognize as words out there, that if you're inside feel overwhelming as humans and before we really can understand like, well, jesus came to die for all that too. It's not just like the big things and the big sins that we all think about. It's literally like he came to like. I know you were wounded. I know you're wounded by your family, by your peers, by this culture, by the stuff that your generations did, that it was such a rebellion that of course you inherited all that stuff and you didn't know that you were going to be one to be called to be the chain breaker.
Speaker 4:But before we know all that stuff, we're feeling it inside and we're living with it and without someone saying no, no, no, no. You don't try to change your insides by changing your outsides. You're going to probably do what the culture offers and unfortunately that's infected into the church as well that if you change your outsides then you can feel good about yourself, period. That's just how you feel better and that's all it's ever offered. And the way I learned that actually I think all this is a lie is actually through my own recovery experience. I'll just show it real briefly. I won't talk about the supernatural. I know we would love a good supernatural story.
Speaker 1:I had one of those at the beginning.
Speaker 4:Oh, I love that, yeah, but honestly, what's actually more important is the sanctification and the corrections that he showed me around, all the false thinking, real briefly. And I started recovery as I grew up in an area of like 1000 people. The nearest town where I grew up was like 30,000 people and at that time it was going to get started in the 90s where you should have a team If you have an eating problem binge eating, emotional eating, restricting, whatever you see a doctor, maybe a psychologist, or in a dietitian because a team approached them, were finally kind of getting out of the dark ages. If you just stopped your behavior then you would be fine, right. So I got hooked up with this dietitian and she had training in a non diet approach was just that it was just becoming not a common thing, but at least it was a thing that some dietitians like yeah, because I could tell people to lose weight every day, all day long, and they could. They attempt it and then they've gained it all back and the science validates this and you're going to gain it back in six months to two years and most of the time almost everybody gets back to a baseline or and the longer you die, the more likely as you push up your step, point out of just bodily protection because the body proceeds.
Speaker 4:Restriction is death. I don't want to die, so I'm going to do some other feedback mechanisms to protect me from going that low again, because I don't want to do it. That's not my design. You might want it, but the body doesn't. I show she was teaching me these concepts and like, well, yeah, it's kind of lived experience. If I hold my breath, I obsess about breathing. If I have to go to the bathroom and the pressure bills, the pressure bills, the pressure bills in my bladder, all my life in that moment is going to be about is like, oh my gosh, I would not pee my pants. If I pee my pants, why be embarrassed? Do I have a change of clothes? That's normal. So if you restrict food, if you restrict care, what's going to happen? I guess the same thing, because that's what happened. Trying to change my body with food restriction caused more side effects than the things that was trying to protect me from in the first place, which is all the emotional stuff that was underlying everybody's eating problem.
Speaker 4:There is rejection period. That's just, I think, a spiritual truth that I have to step with. Every client I've had is that like it's always about rejection and fear of rejection, whether that came from abuse, whether that came from bullying or that came from just negative gossip and commentary around you. Growing up like oh I see the rules of the land here is like if you want to belong you best be looking a certain kind of way, otherwise people talk about you and maybe nobody ever talked about you. But when you're 10 and you're witnessing these things, you know you sort back in your brain somewhere for later, to your grown up, and you see that like it's not safe just to be okay with myself as an adult can't have that. So you're so much easier to fall for all the potholes that come with adulthood around everybody dining around you, thinking that's the way to be okay, you know, to be healthy, to be loved, all the things.
Speaker 4:So anyway, I was learning all these concepts, actually very gently by her, because I was a pretty angry young woman. Of all the emotional galactic experience and childhood, I was like I'm on my own with this too, I guess. So that was part of the function of all the restricting was like I'm just going to have, not have needs and be above it all, so I don't need that, don't get hurt, I don't get disappointed. She was teaching me these things like well, I know you feel this way about other stuff, but biology, the rules that God put in place around you know how things work.
Speaker 4:On autopilot is, if you restrict your cool, it's going to be a bigger obsession and you don't have a choice. If you don't want this life, you have to eat, you have to work with some acceptance. That, like having a well fed body means you might not. It might not get you fitting into the dominant cultural narrative, but you get to be free, you know, and these are hard choices to make, especially when you're young. So, anyway, I learned this stuff and it was such a great experience and I wouldn't say was spiritual, but it was certainly truth. It's not more of a secular thing, but it aligns with the word. He's probably gonna work out for you, right? So here we are, taking care of the body, taking care of the temple. I use spirit, I'll use biblical language here and I end up thinking like this is the way all dieticians are. So I go to college and no, I had to go there and it's glorified diet culture for the most part.
Speaker 4:You know some of it's very practical in terms of, like you know, medical nutrition therapy and some of the ways in which our behaviors, our movement or our self-care sleep are eating can impact disease either management or keeping yourself off that path. The majority of it is really about like the narrative of like thinner is better. Yes, I mean just coming out of. Like I didn't get into some of those major classes until two years in, of course, like most of us do, and I'm like, oh, oh well, I think this is all hogwash, but I want to get A's and get out of here. So what do I need to memorize to get out of here and then go do my internship and my licensure and practice knowing that, like either I figured out a way to do what I that lady did for me, have a relationship with me and teach me how to be in charge of my own eating and not listen to anybody else.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Or I have to just go back to school or do something else, because this isn't tenable for me. It would be against everything. I just overcame, wow. So, yeah, that's what happened. I'm like, all right, well, what games we got to play to do this and get out of here. And I did, and then took a clinical job that was not weight focused and then started learning how to counsel to do this. And I was. It was like I was 25, well, 26. I'm in my mid 40s now, so it's like 20 something. It's about 20 years ago now. I guess that's the journey.
Speaker 4:I've just always been a non diet dietitian. Always because of my lived experience I've diets don't work. Dietes cause people who have more mental health issues and actually end up being bigger and sicker in the long run. That's just what it is. Yeah, because the body is meant to live and if you don't fuel your body, you, over time, will have just stress related things that happen now simply because of malnutrition, let alone all the other stressors that we started dieting and binging for in the first place. And so my mission me and myself and my team is we try to help people be their own food and body experts again and really simply that's listening to our bodies, listening to the Holy spirit, and everything else that's just not of the Lord.
Speaker 4:Don't play with it, let it go, you know if it's got a name, you know, and all diets have a name. Nothing to do with the sun. Ecclesiastes right, there's nothing to do. There's only three food groups or three macronutrients you can get rid of to try to restrict calories or just simply cut out more calories. So nothing will ever be new. There's lots of new wrangling with the words for temptation to go back on a diet, but it's still something you've probably already done before. If you're above 20 years old listening to this, you've already done some version of the next diet you're feeling tempted by to be truthful.
Speaker 4:All that being said, it's a little bit of my journey, and what shifted for me, professionally as well, is that. You know, I knew that people heal in relationship. Because we got in trouble with our food and body. We did well. We chose something to try to ease our pain restricting, binging out, exercising, whatever addicted to health and all that. Those are just defensive strategies to deal with the stuff we've been through the whole column, the traumas that we've learned about a lot in our culture, so war and abuse and those kinds of things we know. That's like okay, we've been programmed, that's a thing.
Speaker 4:But, honestly, the majority of people that come to see me, and my own lived experience too, is more developmental trauma, which is maybe even at the moment of conception or soon after. There are just ruptures that can happen. Sometimes it's people's fault, Sometimes it's not. It's just attacks of the enemy that create these felt sense of like I'm, it's not okay. Here there's existential angst and we're not going to want to be in that much fight, fight freeze or please, it's not tenable, yeah, or that little you know, like really little on into our early adulthood.
Speaker 4:So we carry that, if we don't have a safe place to put that stuff or we've had some good mentoring or whatever it is, and also depending on how our experience with crying out to Lord with nothing or everything things build up, Our bodies like they are the container and our nervous system is the one that's always scanning for safety or threat.
Speaker 4:And if you're nervous system and an enemy knows how this works, you will continuously bring you circumstances and people and things to get you all wound up again, every hour if needed, be to keep you in this bondage. What happens is we get rejected and then we'll just talk about direct food and body trauma. A second is that you know you're the five year old that was compared to the cousin who was the thinner cousin, and all the to do is made about the thinner cousin and you get like you're not stupid. Oh, they think that's better. And then the enemy will keep reminding you of, like you know, if you were just like your cousin if you were just then and cute like her, then they would love you more.
Speaker 4:And so what's the kid to do? Well, okay, I can't. Maybe it's not going to go to diet, but maybe you'll be the good little girl that, like, never makes a peep, or maybe you're the one that rebels more or whatever to ease some of that rejection. It's a rejection wound, whether on purpose or not, it is what it is and they will just keep on using that. And food is withheld because of what you look like, develop some food trauma. That food is the threat. I love food. I hate food because I need food. Food is pleasure.
Speaker 4:God gave us food to enjoy, yeah, but what am I supposed to do with this body that isn't as good as this person's body? Supposedly it's just programming from the enemy that we're young and we believe what the big people say. Basically, yeah, people care for us, and so you develop this whole thing of like I'm not enough. So we want to feel that lack of care and that too much. Just humans don't want to feel constantly in pain 24-7. So, basically, humans adapt their circumstances.
Speaker 4:What do I got to do to be OK? Because as little up until really our teenage years, early 20s, our brains aren't developed enough to like, dig, picture things, so it's like everything will find when we finally get out of here, I'm not OK, unless something is different. Either I'm different or they're different, and more likely we just hate and blame ourselves and we try to change ourselves. So we eat to not feel, we don't eat to not feel. We need to feel something different, and then that becomes just this loop and this reinforcer and of course we get addicted to dieting. Of course we get addicted to the idea that if I was thinner I'd be happier and that's fed by the fact that people give us accolades as we lose weight, and that's the setup and that's why a diet culture is so satanic.
Speaker 4:It's almost like he knows that people, besides food, water, oxygen, shelter and sleep we don't have these things. We're physically going to expire at some point within weeks and months. God created us to be in a relationship with him. We're wired to connect. He made us this way to connect with him that the enemy knows that wiring too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he does.
Speaker 4:He knows, he totally knows how to play our physiology. People also need love and relational safety and significance. Our kids be when we're like oh I'm just so happy you're here this morning. And they're like ooh mom.
Speaker 4:Yeah, ann, oh, I love this. You're like you're being too much mom, but we thrive. We want to feel like that we matter Somebody we know we do to God, but with physical people we can touch. We would like to have that too, to feel like it's a secure base to go and do bigger things from. Everybody's worth something because we're from God. So period, that's it, end of story. But on this earthly realm, here we see the hierarchies. We're not blind. Satan has set up these systems to wear better than worse, than at all, every area of any category of life. It's set up and, christian or not, we're born into all this and without a lot, a lot of discipleship, we're going to fall into something, and God knows that. So he has a rescue plan for it. But the more we're aware of everything around us if we see this is programmed, it's a very luciferous system. It's like he climbed the ladder.
Speaker 1:Mm Boy, I'm so convicted even hearing you, because in the training I get sometimes to help me build the ministry, it's like you want to hit their pain point. You want to touch on the pain point. But what is that about? It's about saying you're not enough the way you are. You need what I'm offering you.
Speaker 4:Marketing is all about manipulation. If we're ministering and discipling with people, it's like we share the truth and love, but I'm not ultimately in charge of all this. I can say the truth and I'm always really explicit with people. It's like look, I'm not trying to get you to feel guilty, to act. That's between you and God. If this is the truth and this is the truth, and OK, how can I support you? So all that can be done and a lot of love, versus like I'm getting you to buy this program Because if you don't, you'll never get better. That's just. We can't say that.
Speaker 2:That's a lie.
Speaker 4:Right. And so again, it takes a lot of discernment, I think, to help people when you've got to push a lot harder, when you need to just just listen and that's enough conviction Just to be heard and seen and held. People sometimes just get better for that. Yeah, some of the things they're doing technically would be sin.
Speaker 2:I don't need to point it out.
Speaker 4:They're already there and they just seem love. And some of us are a little more stiff-knit and got to learn the hard way. But if somebody can be like, yeah, you were doing the hard thing because of your self-reliance, how come you're so self-reliant? Well, look at your background. That makes sense. Ok, you had to be self-reliant. No way I was going to help you. So can we own that too, without feeling like you're going your parents in the bus? You're just telling the truth. Yeah, you can be truthful without dishonoring them as well.
Speaker 1:So could you elaborate a little bit on the value of being a trauma-informed counselor? How do people think that, ok, I haven't been in a war, I haven't had all these things happen?
Speaker 4:Well, again, I mentioned the needs on purpose, because that's the lead-in. It's going to feel like a major, major heartbreak for the people who are supposed to raise you up in the way. You should go to Mr Martha and reinforce that you're bad and wrong because of the way you look or how you eat. So I've forgiven the fathers that I have I'll just say the grandfather's fathers for not protecting me and ministering to their wives. You'll find the way you are. Stop dieting. That's stupid. I've forgiven them for not protecting me. And then I've forgiven my mothers and grandmothers for talking trash about their bodies in front of me, talking bad about other people's bodies around me. That would teach me that's appropriate and these are supposed to be very moral I wouldn't say.
Speaker 4:I didn't really grow up in a Christian home. My mother was a believer, but that was it, and she didn't have much backup for that. So she did the best she could, but she tried to hide her dieting, which tells me she felt conviction about it. She should have to hide it, but nobody else tried to hide it. It was just like center means that you have more willpower and you're stronger willed and you're just a better person, period. It wasn't wishy-washy. So I'm like, oh, I better watch out for that when I grow up. And so for a child, I would put that in the car. That was pretty traumatic to like. Oh my goodness, all I have to look forward to growing up is to be. If I don't say it, then I'm going to be fat shamed. When we talked about behind my back by people that I love because that's what they do to other people they say they love I would say that's pretty scary for a kid. As an adult, I could be like I'm out of here as a kid. I'm around these people almost every day, if not every weekend, to do these things, and so it's a scary environment and we don't recognize how the reality is. We can't control how, what body we're going to grow up to be in. I'm just talking about a very normal family. By the way, guys, this is diet, culture stuff. I'm talking about like I was food with health. I wasn't. I wasn't even fat shamed. I just felt them fashion themselves and other people and I was like whoa, I don't want to grow up into that. I'm going to control that. So, of course, by the time I'm 16, I have anorexia Not a big shock between all the other stuff that was happening, the perfectionism and the secret sins that were really big time things that were everybody's hiding, that people knew but didn't talk about that kind of stuff, and so of course I hadn't used word.
Speaker 4:That was just inevitable. Something was going to happen. You can't carry down that behavior in family lines and expect disaster not to happen Pride and rebellion and all these things that come with diet culture as well. So I'm saying that because sometimes we don't think our backgrounds were that bad, but the results will look at the fruit of it. Like I had a raging eating disorder. I was prideful and self-reliant and I did believe in God, but I didn't think that he was ever really there for me, because look what happened to me. I have some other stuff I haven't shared here yet, but other abuses and stuff. Like he let that happen. So that's for the really sick people. I'm not that bad. I'm just doing what everybody else does, which is dieting. So I'm sharing that because without enough holding, environment and protection and being raised and like that's not OK. Or look at the fruit that you're going to diet what are you? I'm obsessed with what I look like and what people think about me and what I just ate. That's not holy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 4:So, yeah, I'm sharing the trauma piece of it because, like you can have trauma from being adopted and just not feeling wanted. Even if the people adopted you really loved you, there's still a wound there that has to be worked through just by, yeah, feeling like, oh my, my parents wanted a boy. They got a girl. My family was just going through a lot of hard times and they really just couldn't attune to me. So I would kind of raise myself emotionally. That's. The great reality is like kid can't raise himself emotionally because they're not an adult. You can learn how to feed yourself. Probably you can learn how to like to close on because everybody around you is that close on. You can socially mirror, but that doesn't mean that you feel safe.
Speaker 1:Right. So if a person is beginning to identify with some of the examples you've given and saying, okay, so I've thought that I haven't been traumatized or I didn't experience trauma, but maybe what Tracy is saying does apply to me, how can they begin to come awake to how this is affecting their choices about what they do with their body and their food and eating?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So if you have a basic like the too much or not enough, if you're always feeling gosh, if you just want to feel like there's something wrong with you or pervasive self hate or anxiety or perfectionism over I mean, this is so common, especially, I think, probably for women, especially, I think, prussian women is performance. If you are a performance oriented person, I've got to earn love, I've got to get basically to feel okay. You've got some rejection I know I won't even use the big T for trauma that one's hard to sit with. You've got wounds of rejection, which opens the door to fear. And now you're chronically in this dysregulated place where you can't tell the difference between Prussian non-judge. You just have a lunch with them. You're not present anymore with them and you start to feel like what do I want you to say? Do I look stupid? Who do I need to be to be okay? There's no peace, there's no rest. If you're feeling I don't have much rest, I don't feel like you can hear from God very much because I'm too busy or my brain's too loud Right there. What happens is if this is the program that Satan is trying to get you to stay on. So not everybody goes this direction. With trauma, they do other things that are dysfunctional to ease the pain. But this is ours basically. This is our program that Satan wrote for us because he knows our family lines. He knows what's going on.
Speaker 4:If you're in those environments and you're very probably a little more image conscious than other people and you are performative, you're more likely to fall into diet culture. You might be dieting in the front and then bingeing at night because you're hungry or feeling love, starved or whatever. All this same coin. Just flip it over depending on the moment. You're going to find that when you eat or not eat, you do want to shift in your state. So if you're really hyper-activated fight or flight, let's say, you start counting calories and feel some relief. That's not the same thing as a healing of your wound. That's just like sidestep.
Speaker 4:Okay, right now I have some relief from feeling that it basically is this story If I eat less food, then I'll lose weight and I'll be happy with myself, and then other people might find me more attractive. Or I'm really confident now, or all these lies. I'll be more confident, or I'll be more attractive, or I'll fit into my old clothes. All of these have fixes. Besides losing weight. You can have these things without them.
Speaker 4:Anyway, it becomes a loop where it's like every time, now I'm anxious, I don't want to eat. Every time I'm anxious, I want to eat, so it's just a way to try to. It's like a faux window of safety. It's not real safety Like safety in the lower safety with safe people that you know that you're seeing in your loved and there's resources for any adversity you're going through. You can figure this out versus like, oh, I've got a big deadline tomorrow at work and you start thinking I'm going to die it. You know right now that you're using count and couch that, say, as a call defense strategy because I don't know how to deal with my anxiety.
Speaker 4:And I got wired up a long time ago wait before.
Speaker 4:I went on a diet when you were 10, went to wait watchers with your mom Wait for that ever happened. You already had anxiety, you already had rejection and this was probably one of the first reviews you ever got. Because that's what the enemy does he gives you lots of rejection, have lots of fear, and then, about the time when you're going to start changing, there's the setup. And I was going to have that last straw rejection, whether it's a breakup or something happens or just a transition, and it was like, okay, here's something for you Got to wait watchers, and then it's going to be a setup, right, you know it's like oh, and everybody's you're so great.
Speaker 4:Oh my goodness, you're so disciplined. I wish I was as healthy as you.
Speaker 4:Flattery, right. Yeah, to get you hooked. And then now you're like I got to have that to feel better. Yeah, about any emotion, you know, whether, whatever's with your weight. I want to flip it though a minute for the emotional eating and you can do the same thing there. So if you're in fire flying, you eat.
Speaker 4:What do you tend to feel? Relief, some relief, less bad, you're out of a threat response. The thing is, you're not out of a threat response. It's like here's all the high activation, really high up. Okay, we're going to layer this like layers of dirt here. So, if you imagine it up, here is really high activation, fighter flight, about something you feel overwhelmed or can't cope. But instead of like having like experience and so like when you feel really bad, what do we do? Well, I talked to my mom about it, or I talked to the school counselor about it, or I talked to the pastor about it and really felt those feelings and we got through it and there's solutions for this.
Speaker 4:If you don't learn how to do that, you're going to turn to something else that's just humans. I'm going to do that. I'm going to look for relief, and so I call it the foe window. Instead of real safety. We got this foe window. I ate and I didn't feel so bad and it also kind of replaces some of that nurturance. Maybe start hunger we have around, like and this might have paid attention to my feelings yeah, not the right kind of attention. Okay, you got attention for it by eating and pushing away, but at least it's better than nothing. So you become like your own mother again, like I'm nurturing this bad feeling with some food, but really I just didn't nurture myself, period. Yeah, just take a day off or keep a boundary, whatever it is that we need to be doing that we just never learn how to do.
Speaker 4:Interesting so yeah, one of the things that I've learned of this is like human beings can't stay in this high activation, fight or flight tons of epinephrine and adrenaline, cortisol. We can't stay there biochemically too long. You know you're at really high risk of a heart attack. If you stay there forever, you'll get one probably eventually, or anxiety disorder or something. So what happens? The body tries to fix that. If you can't get relief and you've restricted your guts out and you've been your brains out didn't work. What we do is shut down. We get little numb, we get foggy, we get fuzzy and it's just like bodies like I can't do this anymore, I've got to hibernate. That's where apathy happens.
Speaker 4:Some people think they're really depressed, but really it's like if you just use up some safety, it's like, oh, I just needed to have some fun, oh, I just needed to connect or whatever. But the longer you stay down there, the more likely is, yeah, you get pretty deep into a dark place. But dorsal that's what we're talking about in the nervous system is. It's so energy preservation things. I can't fight and run away anymore. So my body is just too tired and it's got to preserve itself and shut down.
Speaker 4:And so the eating behaviors I see there are just losing track of needs. Oh well, I've got groceries and through meats I'm just eating whatever, or eating to feel something. People binge just to feel something, again, because we are wired to connect. Eventually that need just starts to bubble up so much and we'll eat just to feel not the absence of nothing. We won't feel the absence of care anymore.
Speaker 4:We eat something because it's again a full window. It's not real connections, not real safety, it's not real anything. It's just, over time, what we get programmed to reach for Because we don't know how to identify our feelings or feel our feelings or even what to do with them if we felt them for more than two seconds. So it's not like the willpower, it's just the programming that happens and it usually doesn't start the moment. You know this has been going on well before the restriction which causes the eating that makes you feel out of control and you're going to diet again. It's just a loop, basically, and that's where you see people a lot of times too, and they're really kind of down and they're eating and they start to feel yucky physiologically after a while, like lethargic and like all right.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm going to go on a diet.
Speaker 4:Yeah, they go on a diet, they get themselves out of that low place, and so you continue to cycle over again. So now you're back in sympathetic fight or flight obsessing again. It's not real safety. It's just not this anymore, it's just the absence.
Speaker 1:It's like a control thing, is it yeah?
Speaker 4:Well, I mean, people use the word control honestly. Physiologically, things get over, coupled and, yeah, we are trying to control. At some point we decided like these emotions aren't okay, we start to see the emotions as a threat. So, yes, I want to control the emotions because I don't know what else to do. I haven't been trained up in the way I should go to express things, to have a safe place to talk about things. Everything gets filtered into this external performance oriented relating. Yeah, I can't talk to you about hard things, because when I talk to you about hard things, you tell me that, like I'm being too sensitive, or it's not that bad, or you should suck it up, or other people have harder problems. It's not that bad. It's why I'm talking to this trauma piece, because if you're not allowed to talk about emotions, okay, what are you supposed to do? Because God gave them to you.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 4:So lack of a better word to kind of screw it. If you're not allowed to feel hard things and have a healthy way to deal with it, you're going to develop a defensive strategy. If it's not disordered eating, it'll be something else, because God is obviously his emotional being, because we're made his image. So if we have them, that means he has them. And I don't know where down the line in church history this is all got distorted, that we don't talk about feelings. But here it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I believe in a Christian since 2017. And that was the first thing that blew my mind. I started really openly. Engaging around other Christians is like you all are, just like my clients, you know, do emotions and we talks about anything real.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 4:I had a lot of cognitive dissonance. My idea of Christianity was like, wow, these people love each other. And I had a lot of bad, really had a lot of any negative relationship with Christians. So I didn't play when I really talked to people about like wow, you're on it, why are you doing here? Like, why are you doing this? And they're like, well, I got like I'm too fat and I don't like how I look and like I'm not healthy and like, well, who told you that? And they look at me like I had three heads on, like, well, it's our thoughts or what was spirit? Or is the enemy?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So what did you hear? This, I don't think you heard from God to like that. Your body's disgusting.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So where's this coming from? I just started talking to people like oh, I didn't know to me Christians who didn't do what the world was doing. That's the online, you know. People are raising Christian homes and hold the lives that culture has been in their home their whole life too.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so you know anyway that that's just one of those sad realizations, like, all right, like we got lots of work to do, and so you know, like you know, like you know, we're going to have a church to get this out, and it starts with you. Of course, you can't make other people do it if you haven't done it yet. Of course it's really like, what does the word say about how we deal with hard things, how we deal with having a body, how we deal with food? Nobody can tell me. I've asked that question. I've never had anybody satisfactory like, oh, like actually didn't make a huge to do about foods. Like no, basically don't make it an idol. And so you know, I think that's just like my body's a temple of the Holy Spirit. I'm like, well, okay, and yeah, we should tend it, but that's all you got to do.
Speaker 4:It didn't say change the outside of it. Tending means, like you feed yourself, and what's the easiest way to do that without obsession? When we eat from hunger and fullness, you don't provide your food. Pay attention to that feedback. And so you know you don't have to do that without becoming an idol. Move it. But again, it was everything's about what's your motive Are you moving to change your body so you don't get rejected? You're not called to do that. So when you start saying these things that people like you said, I think there's a lot of whiplash, because people are taught differently in church.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and we've been asked recently isn't it okay for me to have boundaries and to want to get weight off my body? And they're wondering if that's not okay. That's the message to convey.
Speaker 4:Yeah, well, how come you want to do that? I just started asking questions. I don't try to like jammy thing down in my throat Like, well, how can you lose weight? I ask everybody Christian, christian, how can you lose weight? I want to feel better. Okay, tell me more, just keep going. And most of the time it starts to go away from this, like I physically want to feel more vital or strong into this aesthetics and what people think about me. It always goes there because that's the way we were taught. Isn't it okay for me to want that? Well, do you want people to love you more because you lost weight? Because that's really what you're saying.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow, when you really narrow it down, that's kind of what we're doing, isn't it?
Speaker 4:That's what we're doing and of course we want to be loved by our family. We want to belong, but if you read 1, peter, it's like we're not supposed to belong here, to these customs and patterns.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 4:Not saying that it's like evil to want weight loss. It's just like well, you got to be clear about why you want it and the methods you're going to do other consequences to that. Or could you just take care of the body you got and be a disciple and do your life?
Speaker 1:Wow, wow. You've given us lots to think about Before we wrap up. Can you share with us what attuned eating is? Because?
Speaker 4:you share that with?
Speaker 1:your people, that word.
Speaker 4:I mean, I had to find a word. It's not I don't think it's the great word or good word. It's just like when you're hungry, when you're full, you stop and not the whole, like you're almost full. You know there's a lot of like. I see a lot of things out there. It's like stop when you're almost full, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's still controlling. If you need to get good, full and feel some pressure, yeah, you're good and full, cool, you won't be hungry for five or six hours. That's not overeating. Overeating has signals and signs of discomfort with it. Normal eating. You know you're comfortably hungry and you're comfortably full or satisfied. But that takes body internal awareness. So that's why it's like are you paying attention? And again, this can get another place where it's like you get you make an attuned eating.
Speaker 4:Another diet. People do that all the time. Another program I have to warn people about that. No, this is still not your idol. This is just a skill set to learn, because I don't track like, oh, I'm a six or a three and I went to a six. I don't label things like that anymore. I need to do that the first year of all this because I needed some kind of framework, because when you take away dieting bingeing, people usually like lose it.
Speaker 1:Yes, I don't know how to do.
Speaker 4:I don't know how to feed myself, like what's happening, and that's why I think a lot of this work isn't that self-helping. You really need some guard rooms to help you not make this take 10 years, right. So it's like we have some guidance around, like what we're trying to do here is eat regularly. I think that means like eat three meals a day in snacks and eat mostly when you're hungry. Eat mostly when you're comfortably or good and full. Use common sense, like choose a variety of food. You'll be fine because your body will start to give you more cues of like you know, like I could really go for a steak, or like I want something fresh. It can be as simple as that and eat based on that. Same thing with movement is at the beginning. If you've been exercised hesitant, I call it where it's like exercise basically became trauma. It's like I got bullied so much I never got picked in PE. I wasn't that good at athlete. Nobody ever taught me how to move and it'd be fun. People just avoid it. So, as a teach people had to move, I actually have fun. They don't know how to do it. Or sometimes, on the other end, when it's compulsive, like you're going to have to take a break or it's really cut down because your body's not telling you to move that much. Your body's not telling you to never move. They're tying to your sitting in your chair and like your hips are tight or your back hurts. It's you ignore it? Well, you can. Hips are tight, stand up and stretch. That's your movement for today. To get start to like, just honor those signals.
Speaker 4:Same thing with like moving too much. Like I go before I walk. We got to go for your walk. For what? Well, if I don't walk, I'll feel guilty and then I can't eat my food. Today I'm like okay, so this walk is clearly not about health or vitality or connecting in nature. Talking with a friend is obvious. This is about burning calories. Like yeah, I guess you're right. Okay, so go do some experiments to figure out emotion, tolerance, basically with not moving. We've got to work on that because the exercise is just a bow window of tolerance.
Speaker 4:It's not real safety from your anxiety and on your anxieties probably some grief and rage probably. But we've got to learn how to feel that you can't use exercise and it's hard, because again this culture will say oh gosh, you walk every day. I wish I had your willpower. You're giving that up, just like Paul gave up, probably, all the perks of being a Pharisee. We're giving up being congratulated by this world if we're going to actually eat and move and live this way and do health this way. But yeah, so I guess that's a 2D a little bit and a quick little Description.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that. Yeah, what you just said. I remember when I was involved at a tennis club and everybody was on a diet and I wasn't dieting and I was perfectly content in my body but I felt like I was not a part of the club.
Speaker 1:And you're just the same way, if you're not dieting, you do feel a little excluded. And yet I mean, I love that. What you've done is you've brought some wonderful questions to the surface to ask myself or for others to ask themselves what am I doing this for? Who gave me this idea? Was this from God? Is this God's thoughts? We talk about this in Revelation within all the time. What are God's thoughts about that? What are God's thoughts about that? Is that from him or is it the enemy?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So, heidi, I love that example. That is just a real life, day to day in the trenches. Example of like can you feel the feelings you have inside about you know what? I'm not going to go fully on the rabbit hole that I'm not belonging here, but I'm feeling right now like a little sad that I can't connect with them over this issue because that would make me sick. I can't do it.
Speaker 4:So feel your feelings about that, that grief, and, like Lord, I know you're here with me and what we do have is tennis and if that's not enough and you have to get to that and other need for something else somewhere else, but it can't be there and you know grooming, that that is. So a part of the sanctification is that you're going to be grieving what you think you thought you needed to do to be okay, how you learn, how to connect with people. It's not going to be through diet culture anymore. It's not going to be through your body. It's not going to be through who's got the lowest calorie breakfast recipe. We're not doing that.
Speaker 1:Right. And what's so interesting, when you said earlier, if I lose weight and feel like I am loves and it's in any way connected to the weight loss, then what happens? When I start gaining the weight back again, I'm covered in shame and I suddenly feel like I no longer belong to the club. It's so sad.
Speaker 4:Well, I think that again, such a beautiful representation of that's satanic.
Speaker 1:Yes, I see why you say that.
Speaker 4:It's just a shame, set up to get you to hate yourself and to get you knee jerked, because shame is one of the hardest emotions for people to sit with and to not go into self-condemnation, not go into self-hatred, not go into knee jerk to get rid of it, to sit in that and to feel. And shame really is one of those things that stops action. It gets you to whatever you were just doing that made you feel that shame. You want to get away from that. That's the point of it. In a healthy relationship you might feel some shame sometimes, but it's done with love and repair and not loving you. I just don't love that behavior and let's talk it out. The enemy is like well, if you don't want to feel that shame, you best be getting more tennising and you better kind of cut out some food and it's like no, I'm not going to do that. They're going to be cool with me, who I am, they enjoy me. I'm not going to play that where. It's like well, they enjoy thinner me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 4:It's not real. It's not real relationship. It's just like, oh, it's like it would be like Christina, here I already saying like well, I'm purse, I have this new peak purse and that's who I am, and let's have this peak purse, and nobody likes me If you take out the purse and if that's all you are, you're in trouble.
Speaker 3:So for the person out there who is listening, who is maybe to the point where this pattern of overeating and shame and guilt and everything you just described has been going on their whole life and they are totally hopeless and really struggling and have been pushing against the pattern trying to get out Maybe they are so overweight that they're really uncomfortable in their body and not able to really be mobile, those kinds of things what would you say? What would be the first steps for them to get out of those old patterns?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Formal cycle.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so I would. Really, when you're in that much like where do I start? And there's so many issues and all these things that you actually described are pretty complex situations and that's somebody's life, but when we look at it outside of us like it's really complex, so you're not going to start with, everything feels awesome what you're going to be starting with. Like, let's look at the root of the emotional eating, emotional eat. Some people think they're emotional eaters and there's some. There's some element there. But not even back for a sometime when I look at someone's food, I'm looking at, like, are you feeding yourself enough to get to the point in a day? So what happens for most people who are emotional eaters? They tend to not.
Speaker 4:I would say really what I call is deprivation driven eating. People are deprived of, like, not just food but choice around food that doesn't have a bunch of baggage like shame around it. That's a well feeling title to eat. You don't feel entitled to eat because, well, look at my way, I have, you know, one of those cruel things I've ever heard people say to people, especially in larger bodies, like, well, you'll be fine, you got weight to lose. Look at you, know that kind of thing. So people think it's legitimate to not eat because of a body size. That's not true. If you don't eat, you don't get nutrients to those organs inside. You're going to be sick. You can be in a thousand pound body and be malnourished if you're not eating enough food, all right.
Speaker 4:So anyway I would start with, a person is like let's look at someplace we know we can get some traction really quickly. I want to look at your day and are you eating with full permission for first half of the day? Because when people under eat to fix the emotional eating or the binge eating at night or whenever they're doing it, it just recreates a cycle. We can get out of that cycle in like two weeks by eating enough food the first half of the day and they're like well, I'm not restricting, I'll look at their food and it's legit Like they're doing pretty good. There is emotionally. Well, like we put, we still have to clean up your deprivation mindset. All day long you're thinking you wish you could eat less. I want to lose weight. I have to lose weight to be comfortable. I have to lose weight. To people that, like me, is if you got to stop them right there.
Speaker 4:That's triggering self rejection. So you have to eat, regardless of what's going on. Let's start there because the one that cleans up the any kind of emotional eating that could be happening just from negative thinking. We can clean that up quickly. Now, some of the other emotional eating that might be from loneliness or, yeah, what anger, whatever you're trying to suppress, we can work on that too.
Speaker 4:But first thing we can do is if you can look at your feeling. Like you know, I'm starting to eat what I want. I'm eating hunger and fullness. I'm actually taking some time to get my needs. A map that heals a lot. That's a big deal.
Speaker 4:And then we can kind of start with like, what can you be mobile for? Can you sit in your chair and cross your legs a couple of times? And we really just got to start with where people are, versus like we all want to go over here, the down at the beginning. I know you can see my hands, so if you just stretch your arms out, that's what I'm doing, the left arm as far as you can go. We're here and we all want to be on the right side in 12 weeks because we're also programmed to be on a program. That's our culture. Yes, quick fixes, giving all the steps and if I do them perfectly enough, I'll get there, I'll achieve something.
Speaker 4:It's still performance oriented. It's not relationship oriented. We need to have a relationship with what we're doing. We need to have a relationship with ourselves and our emotions.
Speaker 4:So sometimes you're just starting with like being aware of, like Tracy, maybe, like check in with what I was thinking about my body, and it's rough. I don't think I want to come into agreement with that. So we start doing that self-talk work and, before I know it again, some of these before you even get really deep into the deep stuff of the rejection that cost them and this emotional eating. Let's say we've already cleaned up a whole bunch of stuff pretty quickly because you're just doing what the Bible says to do, which is capture your thoughts, and that's your homework at the beginning. So if we're doing God's word, you are going to be successful, because God's word does not come back void. So if you capture your thoughts and you're like, yeah, I don't want to come into agreement with that, I don't have to love my body right now, but I'm going to hate it less, I'm going to stop hating it because that's that hurts God. I don't want to like it. Right now, my first job is to stop hating, so that's why I would start.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Tracy, so much for joining us.
Speaker 4:Thank you both for having me, I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you for being here, tracy, appreciate it so much, and, listener, we hope that there's something here that might encourage you or challenge you, if need be. We are so glad that you've been here and we hope that you will be back next time for our next episode of Revelation Within on the On the Go. We'll see you soon. Bye-bye, thanks, tracy, bye, thank you, thank you, bye-bye.