Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:00]:
Hello, fabulous Dr. Stephanie Fein here with weight loss for fertility. And I have a client story for you. This is often how these podcasts start. They just spark inspiration and so sweet. Fabulous client is doing so well with onger scale. And when we talk, we'll sometimes talk about meals that didn't go well. If most meals are going well, then the ones that don't are the.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:27]:
That's where we get the juice. We can squeeze some juice out of the lemon. So we go to those. And this meal stuck out to my client. And when we went over it, which we do again to learn from, not judge. And as you're getting used to doing the food date, you will feel that way too, because we use the evaluation process of what worked, what didn't, what am I going to do differently? We start with what worked to start training our brain to see the positives. And so in general, my clients will be seeing things that are working much more often. And then if things go off the rails or not the way they wanted, there's no judgment there.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:18]:
There's just curiosity. So that's what we were doing. And we always learn something. And what we learned, we're going to be talking about today. So she had the experience of all of a sudden having an impulse to have cake. It just. It was a voice that came through her head. Now, the rest of the week, that wasn't an issue.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:42]:
It just in the middle of the morning, she had this thought, I want cake. And that impulse is what I want to talk about in general. Particularly if we want to lose weight and keep it off. We want to avoid impulse eating. And that's what this was. This was not planned. This was not anything. She was just going about her business, and all of a sudden her brain offered, ooh, cake sounds good.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:10]:
Impulses come from a more primitive part of the brain, and they're triggered by hunger or an emotion. They're triggered by, like, a disequilibrium in the brain. And the impulse is the answer to that disequilibrium. It's an attempt to right the ship. The voice that suggests cake when it's not even on your radar is most likely hunger. And that's what we found out for the client. In fact, she was hungry. And often it's really good to notice this because that could be the first sign of hunger, and it actually might even be the first sign of over hunger.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:51]:
So remember, minus two is just hungry, not the first whiff of hunger. The first whiff of hunger is minus one, but minus two is just Hungry. That's where we want to eat. Because partly this reason, we are avoiding impulses. Because if we get to negative 3, negative 4, negative 5, we may have our brain screaming at us. And it's going to happily offer any old snicker bar, pizza, fat, whatever's fastest, quickest, most delicious, what it knows you would eat. So it's a clever way the brain has to get us to eat. And when our normal hunger signals didn't work, it will throw its bag of tricks at us.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:36]:
And one of those might be an impulse thought, an impulse desire for food. And I always like to point it out. That's what it is. It's the brain's attempt to get you to act. And sometimes we think that voice that suggests cake when it wasn't even on our radar. We're just walking around and we all of a sudden get that it's not a deep need or a quest that you must go on, not a deeper meaning inside your body. Oh, my body wants cake. That's not it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:15]:
And that's an important thing to say because often where we'll get tripped up is, I have a deep need for cake. And so if I don't have it, I'm denying my soul or something. I know this sounds really dramatic, but honestly, our brains will do this. Our brains will convince us, I really need it, I really want it. And if I don't have it now, I will be denying a part of me that's not real. And what I mean by that is it's not an actual need of your body. Your brain is making you think it's very important, but it's in reality it's not important. And I just say that so that you can use that as part of the understanding if and when this happens, not as a judgment or certainly not for guilt or shame, but to recognize how the brain works.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:13]:
It is so tricky, and it knows you very well, so it will do whatever it needs to do to motivate you to action. If you weren't listening to the more subtle hunger cues, it will get nasty, is how I can think about it. The brain is very tricky sometimes. There are many parts of the brain, but the two areas we're going to talk about here are the primitive part and the logical prefrontal cortex. The primitive part is like a toddler. It wants what it wants, when it wants it. And we don't negotiate with toddlers. It just does not end well, you may notice.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:56]:
They always get what they want. It's just like the title of the Podcast. We don't negotiate with terrorists. They can't be trusted. Same goes for the brain. The brain fights dirty. It will use whatever it can to get you to do what it wants. And just like a terrorist or a toddler.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:13]:
So we don't want to negotiate with it. We want to understand and then we want to prevent. Ideally, we're preventing. If we try to reason with the impulse, we will be convinced it's a great idea. The brain is super duper clever that way. So ideally, we try to avoid the prospect altogether by planning our food ahead of time with our prefrontal cortex. When it comes to food, particularly with weight loss, we want to use our prefrontal cortex as much as possible. That's the part of the brain, that's logic, patience.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:48]:
It can see the big picture, it understands what we're going for, and it has a good plan. If we pair that with eating when we're hungry, just hungry, then we can head off a whole lot of these impulses because they're tricky to deal with and it's better to not have to. This is always the first place we look when we have unexpected impulses. Did you get past negative two on the hunger scale into the over hunger zone? That's your tip off. And then we look elsewhere. The impulse always means something. Your body never needs pizza or ice cream, stat. Your brain will think that if it's vulnerable, like if it's hungry or tired or overwhelmed or full of an emotion.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:37]:
And this isn't to say that we're not going to have pizza or ice cream. We are. We can make decisions to have pizza or ice cream. And ice cream, whatever, anything you want, especially you can decide when you want it, who you're going to have it with. You're going to make sure to get your favorite, not just eating any old pizza. You're going to have the good stuff. But if it's an impulse, that's the giveaway. Making decisions, planning ahead of time to have your favorite foods, amazing.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:08]:
Planning something else and then having the impulse to have those foods. That's the tell that's showing us something else is going on. We can keep the impulses at bay if we follow the hunger scale and plan our meals. That's what we do with the food date. And if we do this, we will more easily recognize the desire as an impulse masking something else that's going on. It doesn't mean we won't follow through on the impulse. Sometimes impulses can be very hard to slow down, to separate the trigger from the response. But if we are aware of it, because now you're hearing this and you might be more in tune to it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:51]:
If we're aware of it, that alone, the noticing makes a big difference. It slows down the trigger response and then recognizing for what it is, which is a call for help. It got a little desperate, it got over hungry, it's a little overwhelmed, it's tired. And in that way, if we recognize it and we can slow it down, we can change the behavior in some way. Sometimes we can stop it altogether. Sometimes we'll just have less. Sometimes we'll have it all. But we will learn for the next time and remember how important that is.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:25]:
That is not a failure, that is not a problem. That's amazing. I'm going to remind you of the timeline of behavior change here. Behavior change comes from awareness. First of all. That's always. We have to start there. And usually the awareness when we're just starting to change a behavior will come after the behavior.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:47]:
But that's valuable because then we're looking and seeing what we would do differently. And if we continue to be aware, it will be much sooner after. So it may have been a day after, and then it'll be half a day after, and then it'll be an hour after, then it'll be immediately after. And then our awareness starts happening in the moment. That's when we can affect change. And then it will happen even before it happens. That's when it will be very easy to say, oh yeah, I don't want to get over hungry. I have so many impulses when that happens.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:21]:
Awareness is the key, which is why we're talking about it here. I want this to be something you're aware of, not to feel guilty about, not for it to feel like a failure, but for you to notice it as a normal part of how the brain functions, Particularly when it's hungry or overwhelmed, tired, any of those sorts of things. So we always want to set ourselves up for success by getting enough sleep, managing our stress, all that sort of stuff. And when things are off, this is what can lead to weight gain. It's a whole set of things. It's not just liking Chipotle. That is never the issue. It is so much more complicated than that.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:04]:
And that's what we talk about here. And this is one aspect of it as the recap. Impulses for highly palatable foods are often a sign of something going on in your mind or body, not a true body need. It can be a sign of hunger or over hunger. That's often what it is, or a sign that you're tired, thirsty, or experiencing an uncomfortable emotion. That's where emotional eating can come in. We trace it back to learn about yourself, and then you can use the data next time. So we always want to be aware of these so that we can find out what set it up, and then maybe there's something we can do the next time to prevent it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:52]:
In general, we don't want to eat our food on impulse. It's better not to encourage the toddler or terrorist part of our brain. We want to choose our food with our prefrontal cortex ahead of time. That's what the food date is for. This is not a secret way to have you eat dried chicken breast. That's not what we're planning for ourselves. We may have cake. We may absolutely, when we're planning our food ahead of time, decide to have cake.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:20]:
But the experience of eating a planned piece of cake is much different than an impulsive one. The prefrontal cortex is a friend to weight loss. And the primitive parts, not so much. I'm always here to help with this stuff. You can find me effaniefinemd on Instagram and LinkedIn, or you can go to my website, stephaniefyemd.com you can click the lose weight with me button and we will be connected. And I am happy to help you with this sort of stuff. This is the stuff that has you losing weight without restriction or deprivation and has it permanently off. And that's always what I'm going for.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:01]:
Sustained weight loss. So there's no yo yo weight gain. I am sending you so much love. If you ever have any questions, please reach out to me. I'm so happy to answer them here or anywhere. Sending love until next week.
