Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:00]:
Hello, fabulous! Dr. Stephanie Fein here with Weight Loss for Fertility, and we are talking about becoming a salad person. I actually have that in air quotes— salad person. So the first question, of course, is do you have to become a salad person to lose weight and keep it off? And the answer is no, you do not have to become a salad person. A salad person— I got this This all is inspired from a client, as most of these often are. I love my clients. It's so fun to work with them. They're amazing at what they're doing.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:39]:
And this concept of salad person, it came up in one of our conversations. I'm going to go through more of it, but that idea that you have to be a salad person in order to lose weight and keep it off, that all you can eat is salad. And you better love salad or else you're never going to lose weight and keep it off. And it's just not the case. And it really can't be. If you love salad, amazing. That's fantastic. Eat away.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:09]:
But if you don't, you can still lose weight. And of course, what goes with the idea of salad person is good food, bad food. And that's the thing we want to avoid, that there's Air quote, good and air quote, bad food. And you should never have bad food and only have good food if you want to lose weight and keep it off. Of course, the idea is that you're only eating good food when you're losing weight and you'll get to, you'll get to go back to the bad food when you're done losing the weight. But of course you could see how that is just a setup. There's no way that's ever going to work. You can't only eat good food It's not good.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:49]:
Please see the air quotes whenever I'm saying good and bad food. You can't only eat one way and then eat another way and expect to keep off the weight. This is yo-yo weight gain, 100%. This is the setup. Good food, bad food is the setup for yo-yo weight gain. So when she said salad person, that's all the stuff that's coming up with that is Good food, bad food. I never want to be a salad person. It's bad to be a salad person.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:21]:
It's restrictive and depriving and all the rest of that stuff. So her transformation was amazing. Now, anyway, I'm going to keep going. Spoiler, the goal isn't that everyone should become a salad person. And I'm going to get back to that. You do not have to become someone who only eats salad to lose weight and keep it off. You never have to have salad if you don't want to. It's really true.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:49]:
Never. Now, I always think of my father when I say things like that, because there wasn't a green thing he ever wanted to eat, ever. To the point where he would not want oregano on his pizza, or if he had steak, he would ask that they not put the parsley on there. Really not anything green. And when I think about him, I think, He was a successful guy. He lived well into his 80s. Like, you can live a perfectly fine life without ever having a salad. Now, for the record, vegetables are amazing for you.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:28]:
There are so many nutrients that you can only get that way naturally through different color, like having a colorful plate with all, you know, so vegetables are amazing for you. For the record, it would be amazing to have vegetables for your health, for the fiber. Also, it calibrates your taste buds, like to have the sweetness of a carrot be the sweetness or fruit, that sort of thing, rather than the heightened sweetness of sugar. Anyway, there's a million wonderful things about vegetables. I actually do have episodes about vegetables and the Mediterranean diet, things like that. So I'm happy for I would love for you to listen to those. And if you like vegetables, amazing. And if you want to like vegetables, amazing.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:14]:
You can experiment with vegetables when it's not a mandatory thing that you have to eat them in order to lose weight or be good or whatever. You can always think of my dad. He was— did very well. Same weight his whole life, never ate a vegetable. So it's possible, but I do recommend vegetables if you like them. What I don't want is forcing yourself to have something. That's what we're looking to avoid. Okay.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:48]:
So this is not about convincing you to eat vegetables. I'll tell you that right now. It's about an experience my client had that is a perfect illustration of the kind of change you have when you use the tools I teach here. It is such a good example that I had to make an entire podcast about it. The way we work, we change our thinking and our thoughts and ideas about our hunger. That's what we do here. That's how we lose weight here. And when we do, we change the way we think about and relate to food.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:24]:
And that's what makes the weight come off and stay off. There is no guilt, no punishment, no restriction. That backfires every time. Sometimes I think I sound like a broken record, but I have to keep singing this song that guilt, punishment, or restriction does not work. It's like we have a hammer with the diet industry— punishment, guilt, restriction— and we just keep using it even though we need a screwdriver. And the screwdriver is weight loss for fertility way of losing weight. So restriction just does not work long-term and short-term, it damages the relationship we have with ourselves because we force ourselves to do things we clearly don't want to do. And that sets up an adversarial relationship.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:15]:
It's a power struggle between you and you, your brain and your body. And in war, everybody loses. So we avoid that setup. In order for us to preserve and even better strengthen our relationship with ourselves, we have to find a way to work with our body, not against it. And luckily we can. We start by using the hunger scale. If you are new here, there are many podcasts explaining it in detail, but briefly, it's a scale from -5, which is completely empty, fainting, To positive 5, Thanksgiving stuffed. And where we want to eat is when we're just hungry at negative 2, and we stop at positive 2, which is satisfied, not full.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:04]:
If we eat at just hungry, it's possible and not a problem to stop at satisfied, not full. If we get overhungry, negative 3, negative 4, negative 5, we will overeat to positive 3, positive 4, positive 5. That's a thumbnail version of that. What we find by using the hunger scale is that we can trust our body and her signals. We also get really good at checking in because we have to find out if we're feeling hungry or satisfied. So hearing what's going on internally, that is a great skill that the hunger scale gives us. And then we get so much information about our internal world, not only about our hunger. And that helps us with emotional eating.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:47]:
So there's the hunger scale, but then there's also the food date. And there's 2 parts of that: the evaluation of the week before and the planning of the week ahead. And this trains our brain to find what's worked and also gives us a place to decide what to do differently. This spirit of experimentation is so important. It's Vitally important. So these 2 things have to go together, the hunger scale and the food date. That's the combo is what happens. And there's so much going on there.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:21]:
And I'm highlighting this idea of experimentation because when we try something and it doesn't work as we'd hoped, we learn how to handle it well, not get mad or frustrated, but look at it objectively. And decide how to change it in the future. So we went to this particular restaurant and we ordered something that turned out to— I couldn't stop eating it, or they brought the bread and I got full on that. There's so many things that can go on. And then you're like, oh, got it. Next time I'll pick a different place. Next time I won't have the bread. Next time— there's so many different things we can do.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:00]:
But if we beat ourselves up, we don't give ourselves space. To look for what decision we can do differently. We want to calm the thinking down when it comes to food and weight loss. So it's not so triggering. Diet mentality culture. I talked about this a little bit before, this idea of good food, bad food, of restriction, of not allowed. That is the problem. And because we've had it for so many years, our brain is entrenched in it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:29]:
And so any of these things can be triggering. When this happens, you can see what is really happening. When we calm down the thinking, we can see what's really in front of us, not the knee-jerk reaction, but the truth. Oh, I ate a lot of bread because I was overhungry and I was too hard to wait to eat my meal. Next time I'll eat sooner or I'll have a snack. Like then you have choices. When we can calm our brain down and not say, I can't believe you ate that bread. You did it again.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:10]:
OMG, I can't. When we get like that, there's no space for deciding what to do next, next time. So calming our own thinking around food Makes weight loss so much easier. And it feels so much better too. Being tense, like having tension around food decisions is painful and so uncomfortable. When we can be calm around food decisions, oh my gosh, our world opens up. Ideas come to us. We can make different decisions without beating ourselves up.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:49]:
That's the whole point. Okay. So back to my client. My clients just do such good work. I'm so inspired by their wins and challenges. And if you wanna become a client, go to my website, hit the Lose Weight With Me button. I would love to work with you. We have a good time and we lose weight.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:07]:
So this is a win as defined by her, first of all, and then defined by me because of the calm. That we were just talking about. So she was with her family, which family is always trickier. She was with her mom and her sister and they were having a late lunch because they were doing a bunch of errands and they were, things were taking way longer than they thought. Oh, I almost forgot this part. She spoke up to her family that it was time to eat. And what she noted is that before this work, she wouldn't have, she would've just been stewing and been hungry and been getting in a worse mood. And that was her family's experience of her.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:52]:
But already the first thing is she was like, oh, time to eat. So it was later than she would've wanted, but earlier than it would've been before. So she chose a place, another win. And it was a place like Tender Greens or Sweet Greens. Now that was the place that was closest. So it's not like she's, I must eat salad, but they were there. And if you know that kind of place, they have other things besides salad. So anyway.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:17]:
It's a good lunch place. I have enjoyed lunch there. Anyway, she looked at the menu and she checked in with her body and she decided on the kale Caesar with chicken. Now her family was surprised by this because in the past she was vehemently not a salad person, or the only time she would be a salad person was when she was on a restrictive diet and they wanted to steer clear of her at that point because She didn't want to order the salad. And so she'd be upset about ordering the salad and frustrated and she'd internally struggle. But then also she was short with her family because she was hungry and not happy with her food. And of course then it would lead to ordering other food. If I'm going to have salad, then I'm going to have a triple scoop of ice cream, or I'm going to order the French fries, or dinner is going to be a whole pizza, like that kind of thing, because you're— It's not about hunger at that point.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:14]:
It's about the restriction, the punishing, the rebelling against restriction. It's— that's the issue. It's not the salad. Okay, so her family was surprised and they commented because of all this and they were a little concerned. But what she noticed was that she was fine, totally fine making this choice. She didn't force herself to make the choice. She didn't go in there saying, you better have salad, or salad's the right thing, or the only way you're going to lose weight is by having salad. She knew she was a little overhungry.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:51]:
So at that point, so she was being very careful with her thinking around food. And she looked at the menu and she really wanted a kale Caesar with chicken. That's what she wanted. She knew it was fuel. It was not her last meal, right? This is not the last time she was going to Be eating out. She didn't need to have a vacation meal, a reward meal, anything else. It was just a meal, which is amazing, right? We're bringing the drama down on choosing meals because it doesn't— it's not the end-all be-all. This is fuel.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:26]:
Now you want something you like, of course, and she knew she would like it. She wanted it. She could have chosen anything. And she chose this because she knew it felt good in her body. She's had experience with that before, that if she ate this, she wouldn't feel heavy. She wouldn't feel— guilt could have been part of it. There wasn't any repercussions. She wouldn't have heartburn.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:49]:
She wouldn't feel overstuffed. It would— she would feel well to be able to go do the rest of the day that they had planned. And she was able to make the decision because she was fine with it. There was no rebellion to deal with. She was fine. There was no drama in her head. Her family was worried, but she knew this was different. And it's that internal experience that I'm interested in because to the outside, her family, it looked like, oh, there she goes ordering salad again.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:24]:
But there wasn't bad mood. There wasn't— Ordering extra things to make up for the salad. There wasn't any drama that would happen afterwards because her internal experience was fine. The only drama was that her family was a little caught off guard, but of course they dealt with it just fine. There was no internal drama. It means that she's having a different relationship with food, eating, dieting, weight loss. That's the win, not the salad order, but the lack of drama. Then it was just lunch.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:02]:
She ate until she was satisfied, not full, and she was able to go on with her day. There were no internal negotiations about what she was allowed since she had salad for lunch and what should she— there was no food noise. It was just lunch. And that is the way we lose weight painlessly. And that's how we can keep it off. Because there's no fight. There's just decisions that feel good. Imagine if you had no drama with your food decisions.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:29]:
It's really possible. And the one thing that may not come off with this example is how entrenched her brain was in diet mentality. There really was big rebellion. If she had ordered, like if she forced herself to have a salad in the past and ordering this salad now, it was night and day difference, night and day. The peace is so incredible. And it happens in this way, the way I described at the beginning of this podcast. So it happens all the time around here that we get rid of that drama and then we get to just make decisions about our food. It may look similar to people on the outside, but it's a completely different internal experience.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:17:20]:
And when it is, you feel so much better and decisions are so easy to make. That calm, that decrease in food noise, that drama goes away. And then weight loss happens. Pounds go away too. So if this is something you're looking for, come join us. If weight loss is part of your fertility process, this is the best way to go. It's safe before, during, and after pregnancy and into whatever future brings. Find me on Instagram @StephanieFeinMD, or go to my website, stephaniefeinmd.com.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:01]:
You can hit the Lose Weight With Me button and we will be connected. Until next week, I'm sending you so much love. Mwah.
