Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:00]:
Hello, fabulous Dr. Stephanie Fein here with Weight Loss for Fertility. And if you're listening to this, when this comes out, it's July 14th and I want to say happy birthday, Lizzy. It's my friend's birthday and it always reminds me of being right in the middle of summer. Just feels so like the middle of July, middle of summer. We're in the thick of it. And I hope your summer is joyful and fun. I hope there's some water and some sun.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:27]:
And a couple weeks ago I did my Tips for Summer weight Loss podcast. It's number 190 for 2026. Highly recommend. Summertime is such a fabulous time to lose weight. It's actually one of my favorites. That and holiday times, actually. So take a listen. But today I am going to talk to you about a very useful visual.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:51]:
What do I want to say? Visual illustration of resilience. An example, a visual illustration to have you understand resilience in a new way. First, why do we need resilience and weight loss in general? Resilience is awesome, but in weight loss, we need it for the days that the scale goes up, or for the days that we eat past two on the hunger scale, or for the days we get hard news, or for the days even we get a flat tire. On and on all the, all the things that can happen. We want to cultivate resilience so we can keep going. Resilience is the ability to recover. And when we recover, we can keep going. And if we keep going, we will get where we want to go, wherever that is.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:44]:
Keeping going is always the key. Always. We can get knocked down, but if we get back up, we can just keep going. In weight loss, it is such an important concept because weight loss and maintenance of weight loss is lifelong. And not only that, you're going to be getting pregnant, so you're going to have so many changes and then you're going to have littles and then you're going to have. There's so much going on that we're going to need to know that we're resilient when it comes to food and eating. And the good news is that's baked right into Weight Loss for Fertility. Here's the visual picture.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:25]:
A ledge. On the ledge, there are three things. There's an egg, a raw egg, an orange, and a super ball. You know those rubber balls? The egg falls off the ledge and it breaks, right? If it falls from the ledge, it just breaks and the inside oozes out. If the orange falls off the ledge, it looks okay. From the outside, but it's bruised on the inside and that bruise can sort of fester and rot out. If the superball falls off the ledge, it bounces back and sometimes even higher than from where it started. We want to be super balls.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:11]:
This is not about shame or judgment. If we're not super balls in the moment, this is about growth. And in particular, it's about if we're eggs or where we're eggs, how we can move towards super balls. The truth is we might be super balls in other areas of our lives, like lots of areas where I'm sure there's resilience in lots of places, but around weight and food, we might feel like eggs or oranges. And so the good news is becoming super balls is. Is really part of the weight loss for fertility process. You can't do the weight loss for fertility process and not become more resilient. And here's how we do it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:52]:
We practice. We practice resiliency, so we practice handling our eating. It's really our thinking about eating using the hunger scale as a guide. It's such a good template to be mindful of our hunger and eating to satisfied. And then because we're paying attention, we can start to notice our thoughts around food and eating. That's where the gold is. And then as we're doing this, as we're learning things in weight loss and Weight Loss for Fertility in particular, how we treat ourselves as we're learning tells us where we are in terms of egg orange superball. If we go straight into beating ourselves up, if we overeat, then we're eggs.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:48]:
Because one misstep, or what we perceive as a misstep, and then we, that's it, we lose it. But really, a misstep is not a problem. It's part of learning. Our first step, step when we're noticing that this is happening is to really just become aware of the fact that we're doing it, of the fact that we're. We have what we would consider a misstep. And then we beat ourselves up about it. Eggs love all or nothing thinking. It's their breakfast.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:19]:
All or nothing thinking is exactly it, right? Because they're either whole or they're broken. I'm perfect or I'm a failure. That idea in the black and white, all or nothing thinking is what makes us so fragile. Because if you're not perfect, you're terrible. That can't work because there's no such thing as perfect. So it's really important that we grow ourselves out of that Mindset. It's so easy to be in that mindset. Omg.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:53]:
Omg. Our diet culture tells us that because we're either perfect, we're following a perfect plan with no calories and we're restricting everything, or we're eating everything in sight. The diet culture sets us up for that, but that will never work. Now. It works for diet culture because they can sell you another diet or do another thing, but if we're doing all or nothing, we will yo yo all the time. Around here, we are only looking at lifelong weight loss. That's the only thing I care about around here in terms of weight loss is that it's forever. And so we can't be eggs because all or nothing equals yo yo.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:34]:
It equals weight regain. And it's all or nothing is just not how real life works, particularly when it comes to transforming our relationship to food and to eating and to our bodies. It's very normal to have two steps forward and one step back. That is not a problem at all. As long as we keep moving forward. We can take a step back if the circumstances align. It's not a problem if we just keep going. We've had decades of diet culture messages and it's going to take a minute to unwind them.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:10]:
It doesn't have to take years and years, but it's going to take our awareness that it's happening and our willingness to change that up. The good news is we have multiple chances in a day because we get hungry multiple times in a day. So we have multiple chances to notice our thinking about our eating and food. And the more we practice kindness in how we speak to ourselves, the more we change the default habit in place. Right now, I'm going with the fact that it's all or nothing thinking. The more we practice kindness, the more we can be aware of a bigger context of we can be understanding with what's happening. We can be kind. The fact that we're learning that practice the kindness, the benefit of the doubt, that way of thinking is necessary for permanent weight loss.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:06]:
And we learn that we practice that daily when we're losing weight. The weight loss for fertility way Speaking kindly is one way that we become superballs truly. The other way is built in to a fundamental tool we use in weight loss or fertility. It's the food date. You may have heard that before. I have other episodes on this, but the food date, which I recommend to do weekly. We look at the week that just passed and we ask ourselves three questions. What worked? What didn't? What will I Do differently.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:48]:
And it has to be in that order. This structure means we set up our brains to be superballs. This particular structure, what worked, what didn't, what we're going to do differently. What worked means we direct our brain when we start with what worked. And that is always the advice. Start always with what worked. When we do that, we're directing our brain to find the things that went well. There are always things that went well, but our brain doesn't love to look for those things.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:24]:
It loves to look for the things we did wrong. So when we're directing it to look for the things that went well, then we have evidence now that the brain can't say everything went terrible because we've just listed all the things that went well. And if you write this down, it's especially useful because the brain loves to forget. It can forget in one second. It's crazy. We could just make a list in our head of all the things that went well, and then our brain will happily tell us all the things that didn't go well, and it will completely forget the list you just made. So I do highly recommend writing this stuff down because it's like a. It's like a trick on how to support the brain in remembering the things that went well.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:11]:
We can't be eggs, because remember, eggs are perfect or terrible. And so our brain can't say, you've only done terrible because we've just listed all the things that went well. So we're preventing ourselves from being eggs in this exact moment. The what's worked is the gotcha for eggs. It nudges us in the way of superball. So we always start there. What worked. Then if we identify anything that didn't go as planned, that would be what didn't.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:48]:
That's the second question. We want to note it without judgment, just factually, what happened? I ate to positive four, three times this week. It's just a fact. Not. I'm the worst. I'm never gonna get this. I'm. It's just what exactly happened? And then you write that in, and it's so important to remove the judgment.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:16]:
And that's what this is asking. And again, this is how we become superballs. Because we're practicing speaking kindly, finding the things that worked, listing things without judgment. These are really important skills that we need to build in order to become superballs. And we're doing them every week, every day, when we're speaking kindly to ourselves. So we've written down what worked, we've noted without judgment and factually, what didn't. And then we decide what to do differently. Because now we have this information, maybe we can use some of the techniques in our what worked list.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:55]:
When we see clearly what didn't work, maybe it's really easy to find out or to make a hypothesis about what could work for next time. We look at the behavior we want to change, not as a character flaw, but as a circumstance, an event that happened. So instead of beating yourself up, which is a total waste of time and makes us feel worse and then more likely to overeat or emotionally eat, instead of that, we come up with a plan to respond differently. Next time, we may have to examine what happened around the incident, around the event, was I over hungry? Which, by the way, is very often the case. Remember, if you get to minus three, four, or five, you are going to overeat. This is why we eat at minus two, so we can stop easily at two. So being over hungry is very likely a contributing factor to an overeat of some sort. But anyway, the point is that it's important to examine around the whole episode, not just in the one moment that you overate.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:03]:
That will not be nearly as helpful as looking at the surrounding context. So you ask yourself things like, was I over hungry? Was I bored, sad, lonely? Maybe I didn't have anything in the house. And that's a different fix than was I over hungry? If we're over hungry, we do one thing. If we didn't have anything in the house, we decided to do another thing. This is why, if we can take the judgment out and we can just look at things objectively, it's dispassionate, right? We're just. It's very clear what we want to try next. This is how we grow in terms of resilience. But this is also how we lose weight.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:45]:
This will result in weight loss, and not only weight loss, but forever weight loss. Because as you're tweaking each thing, you're building each week by week, what you're doing, and then you end up with a way of behaving, and of course, also a way of evaluating forever. It's so important, and it's the way we get to superball status. Investigating the contributing factors that led to the overeat is so important. We can't just look at the moment of overeating. We need context. And when we do that, it's easier to be kind and understanding. Right? Because if our only point of examination is the moment we put too much food in our mouth for our bodies.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:34]:
That's not going to give us any information that really isn't. That does leave us with just I suck, which is never, that's never ever the answer. The context is so much better. And when we look at the whole context, it's so much easier to be kind and understanding because we're like, oh, I see what happened. Of course, of course this was inevitable. If I skipped lunch and I had a two hour drive and I didn't stop and I ate dinner starving. And remember, that's our first goal, is kindness and understanding for ourselves. So it's so much easier to come up with a plan that will help the next time.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:14]:
If we are looking at the context, if we're seeing things objectively, if we're being kind and then we've recovered, we've bounced back higher because we've learned bouncing back higher is the growth. It means we've learned something that we've actually benefited from. The misstep, the incident, the event. And that's gold. If we learn from every one of those, that's it. That's all we ever have to do in life. We can only really learn in the presence of kindness. We can't yell at someone to learn, learn it now, it doesn't work.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:55]:
Or like I always think about this, you can't yell at a flower to bloom. They have their natural process and when we allow for that process, we provide the best environment for growth. So for us to learn to in the context of food and eating, when there's a calm, curious, non judgmental environment, that's how we can learn. That's how we can then be objective and decide what we're going to do next. It's easy to do that, but not if we're yelling at ourselves. We won't learn, we'll shut down. And so we need the environment to be calm and kind and that will lead us to be able to learn. Which means we will be a superball bouncing higher than the original ledge.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:47]:
If we look at the flower analogy, it's like providing the perfect PH in the soil and the right amount of sun and water and then the blooming happens. We bloom too. In the face of kindness and non judgment, we can do our thing, but if we're being yelled at, we shut down. So we got lots of images in today's podcast. We have flowers and soil and eggs and oranges and superballs. Hopefully that analogy of those three circles really helped me and it occurred to me the other day to talk to you about it. So here's to being superballs. Our goal is superball ness, growth in recovery from setbacks, resilience.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:17:38]:
We get there with kindness for ourselves, understanding and not beating ourselves up. That's the egg identity which we don't want and with our ability through practice to learn from our setbacks with a very specific structure. What worked, what didn't, what am I going to do differently? That's part of the food date and one of the tools we teach in weight loss for fertility. If you want to be a part of it, I'd love to have you lose weight with me. It would literally be my honor. Go to stephaniefeinmd.com Click the lose weight with me button and we will be connected. You can also find me on Instagram always @stephaniefeinmd I am sending you so much love and lots of bounciness for a fabulous summer.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:26]:
I will be here next week and I'd love to see you here too. I'm sending you love. Bye.
