Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:00]:
Hello, fabulous Dr. Stephanie Fein here with Weight Loss for Fertility. And today I am so excited to talk to you about a book. I have been waiting for this book. It is called Love Untangling the Knot between Mothers, Daughters and Food. Doesn't that sound amazing? This is by Janine Roth. She, you may know her, she wrote Women, Food and God in 2010. I cannot believe it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:32]:
16 years ago and that. And then she's done workshops ever since. She lost a lot of weight. Her main way of doing that was intuitive eating. And she had some rules and she did some processes in that. And her rules included eat when you're hungry and stop when you're satisfied. That may sound familiar. She recommends eating distraction free what you want in full view of others.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:59]:
It doesn't have to be actually in front of others, but with the intention and to enjoy your food. The part I always had issues with was in terms of intuitive eating, was allowing the body to decide without healing the relationship with the body. So to me it's always asking a toddler what it wants to eat. It's not like we don't want our little toddler self dictating what we eat. We want our healed adult self to decide what we eat. And that to me is always the biggest issue depending on how someone's presenting intuitive eating. But in her latest book, Janine Roth's latest book, Love, finally she resolves that issue, which is so amazing. She's a fabulous writer.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:49]:
I highly recommend the book. I actually have two forms of the book. I listened to it, she reads it and because it has a step by step process in there, I wanted to have the book itself too. So then I bought the book. Highly recommend either so whichever way you like to consume content, I would recommend either way. The foreword is by Anne Lamott, who I also adore. So I was just, it was just basically heaven. I had pre ordered it and I got it right away and then I listened non stop.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:23]:
It was, it's really wonderful. The thing I love about Janine Roth and besides the fact that she's a great writer, is that she struggles and she is good at being able to articulate the struggle. And so she's a nice person to have as a teacher because she really gets it and she's been through so much sort of self help and ways and she still hadn't undone the knot of her mother until recently. This book has the process of how she was able to do it and it's beautiful and I will say it's nothing brand spanking new. There are many processes that point to this healing of the relationship really with yourself. That's the way I usually talk about it, healing the relationship with yourself. It could also be thought of as healing the relationship with your body, healing the relationship with food. And it's such a vital piece of permanent weight loss.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:36]:
It often doesn't feel like, seems like I should just close my trap and not eat more food than I need. But clearly it doesn't work that way. And we know that. That's why we have a process around here. The way that we talk about it in weight loss for fertility is hunger scale, food date, and then the mind work. This is similar to the mind work that we do. And so I'm going to talk to you about the six steps and give you a brief little review of them in lieu of reading the book. The book is amazing and rich and has so many great examples in it that I'm certainly not going to go through here.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:22]:
But even with this, maybe this will just wet your whistle or give you a reminder or something like that about the book. Highly recommend getting yourself a copy. Okay, so as mentioned before, the part of intuitive eating, the part of the book that she did 15, 16 years ago, was allowing the body to decide without healing the relationship with our body. And if we think the body wants cake for every meal, I contend that is not actually the body speaking. That's the conditioned savior speaking. Continue to listen. You'll understand what I mean. It's an offshoot.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:03]:
It's a child's interpretation of what's happened. And then we take on that Persona because it worked in the moment and we continue with it for years. That piece may be demanding cake for every meal, but that is not your body. Your rebellious piece, your tough peace, your indulgent peace may be asking for cake for every meal, but your actual body will not do that because the body's true voice is soft and clear. It wants to be loved. And it wants to love. Your body does. It wants to serve and feel energized, useful and helpful.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:44]:
It wants to feel well, it wants to be able to do what it's here to do. And ice cream sundaes for every meal won't do that. It won't feel its best. And this is not denying ice cream sundaes. You know perfectly well if you want an ice cream sundae, amazing. But if the body's asking for. If you think that the body, this voice that you're saying is your body wants an ice cream sundae for every meal, that's not the actual body speaking. That is a cloudy version.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:17]:
And so healing clears that up and makes it much easier to access the body's true voice. And the body's true voice is a relationship you have with yourself. We can think of it as the body and whichever way works for you, but that is. We're all talking about the same thing. So this newest book, Love, finally shares a process for healing that I can get on board with. It's more advanced thinking for weight loss and changing or healing your relationship with your body and food. And that's what's required for permanent weight loss. Okay, let's dive in.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:59]:
So in this process that she learned from her teacher, Coco, and then she's been using it for now, years, so it's her own at this point. Step one is recognize that you're triggered. So what she's talking about is, and this is how we end up healing the relationship that we have with ourselves. This idea that when we get very upset or when we have a strong emotional response to a situation, we want to acknowledge that, examine it, tag it as an issue that we're having. Because if we have an outsized emotional response to a particular situation, that indicates that there's some work to be done there. It's the. I always think of this Shakespeare saying, methinks he does protest too much. When someone is making a really big deal out of something that other people could think is small, there's a trigger there.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:04]:
We're protesting too much. There's too much there. It's a sign that there's some work to be done there. It's really useful now. I love using the hunger scale for this. If we're using the hunger scale and we find that we're having a hard time with it, it's hard to eat when we're hungry. It's hard to stop when we're satisfied. We have feelings around that.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:26]:
When it's time to make that decision, that means there is an issue there, an unresolved issue there. So the hunger scale, we can use it to find these triggers. Often we're just triggered in the day, so we don't need to go looking for it. But the hunger scale will help bring them up, show them to us. So step one is to recognize that you're triggered, acknowledge the upset, recognize that something has happened in your body. So again, if there's a rush of emotion or. And the way she describes it and talks about it, and I've done this too, is a sensation in the body. Feelings.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:08]:
Emotions are actually sensations in the body. You might have a tingling in your sternum or a fluttering in your belly or a tightening of your shoulders or a burning in your hands. There will be an actual sensation. And if we get quiet, we've noticed that we're triggered. We get quiet, we can locate it actually having a squeezing in my center right now. Interesting. I wonder what that's about. I'm explaining this to you.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:43]:
There could be something there, maybe a judgment. There's something going on. If I wanted to, I could investigate that. I'm going to continue talking to you about it, but maybe as we go through, it will become even more clear. So the first step is recognizing that you're triggered and acknowledging the upset. We're recognizing that something is happening inside our body. There's a sensation. We can especially notice this if others don't respond the same way.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:15]:
So an example would be like, someone doesn't respond to your text right away. Some people would not care about that. And some people would get really bent out of shape. If. If other people may have a different response and yours is big, that is a clue that it might be a triggering event. The way we talk about around here, when we talk about the model, it's circumstances lead to thoughts, lead to feelings, lead to actions, lead to results. This is the idea that circumstances are neutral. It's our thoughts and feelings that are not.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:54]:
So the circumstance in that example was she hasn't yet returned my text, and it's been one hour since I sent it. That is just the factual. I sent a text, it's been an hour, no response. And I could be triggered by that, or I could think that's not a big deal. It was a neutral circumstance. And we want to recognize that, that we are not letting it be neutral. We are having a reaction to it. Okay, step one, recognize that you're triggered.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:24]:
Step two, it's about me. I love that. Really? You have to get the book. Because she talks about hating this part. And what she means by step two, it's not about me, is it's not about what they did, but what you made it mean that they did it. So in this text example, she hasn't returned my text. It's not. That's not the issue.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:52]:
The issue is what I am making it mean about me, that they haven't returned it. So if someone hasn't returned my text in an hour and I'm very upset about it, I might be thinking, they don't love me. I'm not important to them. They are mad at me. I could be Making up a million things that are upsetting, and I'm getting worked up and upset when I don't have evidence of that at all. And it certainly does not have to mean that, period. The person can be driving. The person could have left their phone somewhere.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:27]:
There's so many other innocent reasons. But if I'm triggered, that means there's something. I am making it mean something, and that is the issue. So I'm making it about me. The reaction am I having is about the meaning. I give the circumstance now, to me, this is all good news because this is where our power comes from. If it's about me, then I can do something about it. If it's about them, there's nothing I can do about it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:59]:
Step three is name the feeling. So you've recognized, acknowledged that you're triggered. You're reminding yourself that it's about you, meaning it's. There's nothing to fix. With them, we're triggered, so that means there's something going on inside us. There's a meaning we made about. That's a. That's about us.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:21]:
And now we're going to name the feeling. And when we do, we're able to witness it when we decide to name it. So we've identified it in our body, and we're going to name it shame, embarrassment, disappointment, frustration, guilt. When we're able to see it and witness it. And that's what happens when we want to name it, we have to step outside it and look at it from the outside. When we do that, we've now separated ourselves from it. We aren't frustrated. We are feeling frustrated.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:57]:
It's a big difference, because then we don't have to be carried away by the emotion. We can examine it. We. We can be curious about it. We can look at it from this angle and that angle. If we're separate from it, we're not in it. We're watching it. It's a very big difference.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:12]:
And this skill is really important. We develop this skill here because of the hunger scale we're observing. We're noticing our hunger level. And when we do that, we're checking in. Generally, we're checking in to see if we're hungry. But also we may start to notice, oh, I'm feeling nervous. I'm having a fluttering in my. I don't know, left arm whenever I think of Sally.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:44]:
And then I can identify what that feeling is. I can name it. So you're putting some distance between you and the feeling. There's less merging and more curiosity and Understanding it's a really big deal. We practice that here. And it's an important piece in this six step process that Janine Roth explains. Okay, step four, so we've gotten step one, recognize that you're triggered. Step two, it's about me.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:14]:
Step three, name the feeling. Step four, remember the first time you felt this. This is different than the model that we talk about because in the model we're talking about the thought and the feeling. We're identifying that it's a really piece, this piece. Remembering the first time you felt this to me brings in Byron Katie's work, her inquiry work. And specifically it's question three, how do you react? What happens when you believe the thought and in that inquiry, because in the work there's a thought that you're thinking that's just like the model and then you're questioning it. That's what Byron Katie talks about. That's what we're doing here too.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:01]:
We're questioning like, oh, I am making it mean that she hates me. She hasn't returned my text, that she hates me. When was the first time I felt that abandoned or discarded or ignored? We will have named the feeling. And now we're looking for the first time, an early time. It doesn't have to be the very first time. If you can access the very first time, amazing. But if you can just even access an earlier time, that will be very instructive. With Byron Katie's the work, the question is, how do you react? What happens when you believe the thought and she asks you to think about the memory? What memories come to mind? And that's the same thing.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:43]:
When did you feel it? So we're looking in history, we're following the thread of the feeling and that will give you so much good information. When we go back in time, we see the sweet innocent that had to deal with something she was not prepared for. So if I'm feeling ignored by my friend, not responding to the text and I'm just making something up, but it could be, this is very common. I'm thinking about a time that I wanted my mom's attention but she was washing the dishes and I'm feeling ignored. And that was extremely painful. So we can see that it was an innocent child feeling ignored. And my example is my mother's back is turned, she's doing dishes. The ignoring doesn't even have to be intentional.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:17:42]:
It may never have been able to be a different way. Now if I said my mother locked me in a closet, we could say, oh, but she did that on purpose. She's terrible. But even that, if I make that mean that I'm being ignored, I'm wrong as a child, because no child deserves to be put in a closet. It's clearly about the mother or the. Whatever, the person. It's not about the child, but the child having no other control at all. Because, of course, as children, we have very little control and limited knowledge of how life works.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:20]:
The only thing we could do was make a conclusion about ourselves. I must be truly awful if someone puts me in a closet or turns their back on me when I need them. I must be terrible. And you could see that's an innocent conclusion to make for a child, but it's not accurate. And then we take that with us over and over and over again, and it becomes well entrenched. And then we start to see the world that way. It's so innocent. But this is how it can happen.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:56]:
So that's step four. Remember the first time you felt this. Step five is what you concluded about yourself then. And I alluded to that, right? So you are remembering the first time you felt this and the situation. And then step five is what you concluded about yourself then. So when mom criticized you, when dad left, when brother called you names, what did you believe that meant about you as a child? That's the only version, the only direction our brain could go is that we blame ourselves because we didn't know more about the world. We only had a limited. It's like a computer not being connected to the Internet.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:19:37]:
It just has what's on the computer. Instead of having vast knowledge of the world, children have a very small set of information for them to draw on. So we created these beliefs, what it meant about us, when really it's about the brother feeling insecure or jealous, the dad. Lots of things could happen for someone leaving or a mom criticizing you. Clearly, things were going on for her. Now, a child can't know all this. And so we make a conclusion about ourself and the conclusions. And that's the word that Coco and Janine Roth use, is the conclusions we made about ourselves.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:20:22]:
And I liked that wording because it's like a shorthand. You understand what that means? I concluded that it meant this. And those can be the core wounds. Like, I'm unlovable, I do things wrong, I'm ugly, fat, unpopular. You fill it in and then we carry that forever. Now, one thing I like to add here is because as an offshoot of that's the. Usually the core wounds are the very deep, and they Usually all mean there's something terribly wrong with us. But the part I also like to work with, and this is a little bit internal family systems is what clever.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:21:02]:
And it was very clever for young children to do this fix. Did they come up with so I could be comforted by food? I'll never be deprived again. I better hurry up or I won't get any. I have to hide my desires. Like, these are the conclusions. It's not that they're. So these are the fixes for the conclusions. Like in order to not feel unlovable, I'm going to turn to food.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:21:28]:
Like the core wounds. The conclusions that Janine Roth is talking about are very. It's very important to heal those. Those are like the Holy Grail. But we can also get there by noticing the fixes we came up with. And often they were very smart. I will never be weak again. I will never deny myself again.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:21:55]:
And those things can lead us to eat when we don't actually want to. The conclusions. This sentence is really a big deal. I think the conclusions were unavoidable, but not true. She wrote that as something that Coco was saying to her in one of these sessions. The idea that the conclusions that we came to as children were unavoidable given the circumstance and given a child's brain, it was clear that we were going to come to a conclusion like that. But just because it was clear that we were going to come to that conclusion, it still does not make that conclusion true. And that is life changing.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:22:40]:
It's not true that I'm unlovable. Even if my mother puts me in a closet. That's a really big idea. And we can see that as an adult that has so much more to do with the mother than the child. As adults, we can see that we were innocent and that the adults weren't perfect. They could have had a bad day or no sleep or lots of people that needed their attention. Or maybe they're just immature or they were brought up by immature parents themselves. There are so many reasons that our child brains could not know, didn't have access to.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:23:22]:
So that's step five, what you concluded about yourself then and step six, forgiveness now. Again, one of the things I love about Janine Roth is that she's. I hate that this was a tough one for her. But really this is why we have the book, because she was able to come here. And this is a really important point. It's not forgiving the abusive parent. So Jeannie Roth talks about some abuse that her in particular her Mother doled out to her. So it isn't about forgiving the abuse.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:23:59]:
It's about forgiving yourself for believing that what she did meant you were reprehensible. I'm going to say that again. We're forgiving ourselves for believing that what the adult did meant that we were terrible in some way. That's what we're forgiving. We're forgiving the conclusion that we made, not the beating or the ignoring or the any of that. We are forgiving ourselves for the conclusions that we came to and the understanding. Forgiving and healing that this and other processes like it bring clears the way for the eight Cs from internal family systems, which is calm, compassion, curiosity, creativity, confidence, courage, connection and clarity. We can feel all those C's calm and compassionate if we clear the way.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:25:08]:
If we understand, forgive ourselves and heal those core beliefs, then that's healing. And our reward for healing is feeling calm, compassion, curious, creative, confident, courageous, connection and clarity. And that is some good reward. And you can imagine when we're feeling like that, we don't need to eat. We don't need to eat a whole bag of potato chips. We certainly can enjoy potato chips if we like them, but we don't need to stuff down. We have clarity and compassion and courage. We are creative.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:25:52]:
We can handle things that come our way. When we live here, we don't need to use food to cope. We see more clearly, we aren't triggered. And if we know what to do, we no longer have drama at work, at home, and then there's so much less to stress over, to eat over. Life will always give us difficult situations, but they can just be difficult, not woe is me, not the end, not dramatic. So we can have a flat tire and it not necessarily be triggering. Like we could just get a flat tire and be like, I have to take care of the flat tire. That is a bummer.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:26:36]:
I'm going to call and tell them I'm going to be late. I'm going to call aaa. I'm going to pull over to the side. You just do what you you need to do. Not triggering. I have the worst luck in the world. Everyone's against me. Life is terrible.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:26:47]:
And then that spiral that comes there, there's a big difference between the two. So we're not taking away life's difficulties, but we're able to handle them so much easier. And then we also don't need food to help us cope with it. This is the stuff that I love about weight loss or fertility. Permanent weight loss that we get these skills, we get healing and then the rest of life. Not only do we get to live in the body that feels good, but we also get to move through life healed and our reactions and our connections are so much clearer and easier. And let me tell you something that's very helpful when we're parenting littles and that's always where I'm going with this. I want to make parenting easier and we can do that in the weight Loss for Fertility weight loss process and this is part of it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:27:50]:
Highly recommend the book and if you want help with this in general, I'm here for you. Please go to my website, hit the lose weight with me button. We will be connected. I am happy to help you with this. It is my life's work and joy to help people heal and lose weight and have kids in the process. I am sending you so much love. Until next week.
