135 Aliveness

When it comes to releasing excess weight you don't automatically think, the key is cultivating more aliveness, presence and curiosity, but it works! Today I'm talking about two types of awareness: cognitive awareness (I know why I do what I do) and embodied awareness (I know what I’m feeling) and how we can use them to help us reach our desired weight and feel in charge around food.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• A new way to think about dopamine, snacking and doomscrolling
• Why curiosity is the most underrated skill in releasing weight

Links mentioned: Raptitude.com

• Instagram: @mindful_shape
• Free Self Coaching Resources
• Interested in getting coached by me? Go to my website mindfulshape.com

Transcript

 This transcript was auto-generated, please forgive any weirdness.

Hi, and welcome to the Mindful Shape Podcast. My name is Paula Parker. I'm a certified coach, and I'm here to help you release any excess weight that you have and feel more in charge when it comes to food. And today, this podcast is gonna be a little bit all over the map, but I hope you'll bear with me. I wanna talk about aliveness.

Aliveness in terms of equality and a quality that you can cultivate, that you can also dampen your experience of or heighten your experience of, create less of or more of. And for me it's that feeling after a great workout. Or a run. I experience it when I'm laughing with my friends or listening to music is a big one for me.

Oftentimes when I'm with my husband or doing something more physical with the kids like cuddling or wrestling or like playing those more physical games with them. But it's not only the positive feelings I'm talking about here with that sense of aliveness, I also experience a lot of aliveness when I'm in emotional turmoil.

It's also when I'm crying, it's painful, but it's real. It's like a genuine, authentic experience. There's an aliveness there too. So aliveness requires presence, and presence is one of those terms that we use a lot, but we don't necessarily have a definition for it. We say the words kinda like leadership.

You have a sense of it, but what is it really? And in this neuroscience of change course that I'm taking currently, the instructor, Amanda Blake, defines it as simultaneous internal and external awareness. So being present is being able to sense what's around me in my environment, and at the same time be able to be aware of myself, have a sense of my body in space and what I'm feeling inside.

Now, does that land with you? I'm really curious because for me it really does. I know that that's my experience of presence. I think when we don't experience a sense of aliveness often enough or enough in general, we will seek more pleasure with food. And then of course, I. That actually dulls our experience of our lives and our bodies further, and we have even less aliveness.

So this instructor, Amanda Blake, she talks about how our bodies are mostly made up of tubes. Yes tubes, that we are more. Space, then we are density than we are matter. And so just like you can imagine, a wine gloss when it's empty and you ping it with a fork, it vibrates really intensely. When it's filled up, the vibration is dulled.

It doesn't make the same noise, it doesn't vibrate, it doesn't have the same intensity. Our bodies made up of spaciousness and tubes are like that as well, and with food. So you'll notice this when you haven't eaten in a while or maybe you're doing some fasting like longer fast, you feel more, you just do.

For those of us whom that feeling is too intense, we're not used to feeling emotions. We're not used to feeling all that sensation. Our brains have learned we can't handle it. We will dull. That feeling with more food, we will fill that vessel up to numb often to the point of physical discomfort. So if this is you, you know, fear not all you have to do is simply start noticing your own aliveness.

When do you feel it? When are you most present? And then lean toward it, sink into it, really feel I. What that feels like. Maybe as an experiment, you cultivate a sense of aliveness the next time you're in the shower or the next time you finish your movement for the day. Like just take a minute and really soak that up.

Notice what your body is feeling and if you can be intentional about it, then you're teaching your brain that feeling sensation in your body is safe, that it's safe to do so, that it's safe to do that without food. Okay, let's switch gears a little bit. My husband is always saying, you have to read this blog.

It's right up your alley. You would love it. So of course I ignore him, right? But recently I said, okay. I. Send me the link. It was a blog article called How to Stop Eating Candy for Breakfast by this guy called David Kane. So I'll link to it in the show notes. I forget what it's called. Aptitude, I think it's called.

And in it he references a really interesting way of thinking about dopamine. So he talks about the lemon squeezing analogy from a psychiatrist whose name I'll spare you the pain of trying to pronounce and who goes by Dr. K. And if you're interested in learning more about dopamine, I did a full podcast on this.

It's number 40, so just search 40 Dopamine podcast and, or sorry, search dopamine, and then you'll find it. It goes like this. When you sleep, your dopamine system resets. So imagine that when you wake up, you have a full unseed lemon. When the lemon is full, any squeeze of that lemon is going to cause a release of dopamine.

Now the juice is not dopamine. Exactly. It's more like dopamine sensitivity. But I think in terms of using this lemon analogy, it's helpful to think of it as like squeezing a little bit of dopamine. Okay, so dopamine rich activities like. Watching TV or checking your phone. The apps on your phone, like Instagram, snacking, they squeeze the lemon particularly hard, and that creates a massive dopamine release, which reinforces the behavior that triggered it.

And this significantly depletes dopamine reserves. And to be a little technical, the word depletion here is just an analogy. Our bodies don't run out of dopamine. Our dopamine receptors. Become desensitized. Okay, but here's another interesting thing. The more dopamine rich, the activity in this case, the more forcefully that activity like squeezes the lemon, the less dopamine you need to have in reserve in order to keep doing it.

In order to engage with it. That's why it's always easy to pick up your phone or eat a snack as you become more depleted by the end of the day, while less dopamine rich activities like work or movement or thought work on paper, if you're doing your self coaching, usually need to be done earlier while you still can get yourself to do them Activities that require more effort on your part.

Whose, you know, rewards are further away in time versus immediate gratification. They require this full, juicy, plump lemon to generate sufficient motivation to do them. So when dopamine gets bottom out from too much squeezing, it can feel almost impossible to do anything but continue to madly squeeze that lemon because the reserves don't exist to motivate anything harder.

To do anything like that requires more effort. So this is how you can feel almost. He calls it locked in to like doom scrolling or compulsively eating handfuls of trail mix or cookies or searching YouTube and you feel almost unable to stop or break away. It also explains why you might be getting on the scale numerous times in the morning trying to see a lower number.

So you get on, you go to the bathroom, you get on again, you go for a run, you get on again, okay? If this is you, listen up. When you get on the scale, not knowing for sure, but hopeful it will be lower. You're squeezing that lemon of dopamine, okay? That's why your brain is doing it. That's why you're doing this.

So this is how it works. What can we do with this knowledge? Ideally, you'll wanna keep your dopamine reserves as high as possible for as long as possible each day. So you particularly want to avoid making any massive lemon squeezes early in the day, which is exactly what you're doing if you go straight to your smartphone upon waking up like I do.

What would be optimal is to get up and go straight into something effortful and productive, like moving your body or thought work on paper. And if you're looking for thought work exercises like the self-coaching that I'm talking about, you can go to my website, you can go to mindful shape.com to get free resources to start doing that kind of thing.

So this will conserve your dopamine reserves, it'll keep that lemon plump and juicy and keep motivation available for. You know, activity that requires a lot of effort the rest of the day. So the guy that wrote the article, David Kane, he says he's gonna do this experiment. He's gonna refrain from checking his phone first thing in the morning.

I, if you listen to the intro of this, I'm doing a little pre-roll on the podcast right now if you're listening to this in real time. I'm currently doing a month long coaching program called Experiment in which we'll be doing exactly that. It starts this Thursday, May 1st if you're listening to this in real time.

But going back to aliveness. How might you craft an experiment to create more aliveness or open yourself up to that feeling of aliveness, to be able to feel more, to be able to feel harder to develop that skill. And I love this as an outcome because we don't know, right? We don't know for sure. What's gonna move the needle there.

But the very intention that we are open to experiencing and noticing more aliveness will make it more salient to us. You do not have to join experiment to run your own experiments. And whether you join or not, or this is your're listening to this in the future and it's not available, I encourage you to think of something that might be fun for you to test.

But here's the disclaimer, here's where I wanna warn you. It is very hard to resist a goal, turning it into a goal or making it about the result, and we get into that mindset of it's all about the outcome. And see if you can get into a more experimental learning mindset. So if nothing else, you can generate and cultivate some curiosity.

Curiosity, I think, is. Maybe the most underutilized quality in releasing weight and getting to your desired weight. Often, our brains don't wanna go to curiosity right away. They will go to judgment first. So we criticize ourselves with shoulds, like we should know better, or we shouldn't have eaten that, or we should have done that workout, et cetera.

Or we ignore and minimize. So we don't wear ourselves, we don't wanna look at it, we don't wanna track our food, we stick to, you know, those really loose pants that we can, we just know are gonna fit. Even if we gained 10 pounds, it would still fit, or we overeat, but then we tell ourselves it won't make a difference.

Or that we don't really care that much anyways, or it's not that important when we have all of this other stuff in our lives going on. But if you're able to instead, instead of all that, instead you're able to get curious, ask from a more neutral and tender place. You know, why did I do that? How does it make perfect sense that I did that?

Why didn't I do my workout this morning? Why did I decide to eat that? Why did I continue eating even though I noticed that I was full? What is that about? Like from a genuine place of curiosity, here's what you might notice. You're more interested in the process of doing the thing, so you're less attached to the number on the scale and more in how often you're showing up.

It's less about, you know, did the scale go down? And more about did I wait until I was hungry? Did I stop snacking? Did I do my yoga every day? Like I said, I would. That's how you're measuring success. It's your ability to show up for yourself whether or not it produces a result or not. Okay, so, and if not, you know what's going on and how can I set myself up better?

That is a much more productive and conducive question when you're less attached to the outcome and doesn't feel as heavy and draining. Instead, it feels light and playful, and you're more willing to try things you never thought you would, just to see what happens because you're curious, you're willing to make mistakes, which goes against our programming.

Most of us have been conditioned to be on the side of good and right. Avoid making mistakes, then we set ourselves up for disaster because unless we are perfect, every time it feels miserable and we give up. It's that, you know, good old fixed mindset working against us. And lastly, I. When you're curious, you can reflect more neutrally and really pull valuable information from it.

So put new information into your brain. There is learning to be had from every setback, but usually we're so deep in defeat and feeling discouraged and self-judgment and self-loathing that it's not even accessible. It's not on our radar because it's too painful to look at how we behaved, how we ate so much.

We don't look so be curious and courageous enough. To say this is painful. I will not look away. When we look, we can see patterns, we can see our most influential justifications to overindulge. We can see the emotions or states that we most often want to avoid or escape, and the ones we seek the most, like pleasure, relaxation, fun.

This is such good info. So I think it's only when we're really honest with ourselves that we can change. So be curious. Get honest with yourself, knowing there are really valid reasons you're turning to food. Know that you can try new things. You can think new thoughts and learn how to experience all of your feelings.

You can cultivate more aliveness and train your brain that sensation is not bad, that you can totally handle it. And in addition to running experiment right now, I'm currently taking on private clients. So if you're not at your desired weight yet, you have all the info, but you can't seem to get there on your own.

Let's see if coaching can help. As a coach, my job is to help you change, of course, what you are doing in this case, how you're eating and being. So qualities like being curious, resilient, determined, self-compassionate. Rather than what we typically experience, which is frustration being disheartened so that you can achieve whatever desired weight you have.

And to do this, we really need two types of self-awareness. The conceptual awareness is. I understand why I do what I do. This goes back to the dopamine. It's like when you understand how dopamine works in your body, oh, like that makes sense that I'm doom scrolling, right? It's not me, it's not something bad about me is they literally designed it because they also understand how our brain works, right?

They designed it in a way that's going to hook our dopamine system. And the second thing. So that's conceptual awareness. We need that. We also need embodied awareness. This is what I'm talking about with the aliveness. So I know what I'm feeling, I can detect what I'm feeling and I know how to handle it.

So coaching really works because you as the client, are actively increasing this self-awareness, both parts, the conceptual awareness and the embodied awareness, and both of those are required for change. And all of this happens. Within a safe space in which, you know, on our calls together, in which I am actively listening for what it is you wanna be doing, what's getting in your way, and how you need to change to get what you want.

And don't worry, I am capable of working with you no matter where you are in your journey, whether you're hopeless and you have zero belief, but willing to prioritize this. To you are someone who's like, this is done energy and you fully believe in yourself and your ability to reach your desired weight.

So wherever you are on that continuum, set up a next steps, call with me and we'll see if it's a fit for what you're looking for right now. If you like the program, if if we're a match, right, go to mindful shape.com and click on the work with me tab and we can have a conversation. Okay? I will talk to you again soon.

Bye.