Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:00]:
Hello, fabulous. Dr. Stephanie Fein here with Weight Loss for Fertility. And today we are discussing the invisible rules that slow weight loss. So invisible rules are the ones that live in our unconscious or subconscious, the ones we make up as kids or inherit from our moms or absorb from diet culture. Sometimes We know what they are and they just sound like truths to us. Oh, you can't have carbs or never eat past 7 or always gain on vacation. Some things like that.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:37]:
I just look at a chip and I gain weight. That, those kinds of sayings that just come to you, they feel like truths. So those can be invisible also because we just never question them. They're just there. We just see them as 100% fact. But most of the time they fly under the radar and we only know they're there when we're trying to do something different, like a new habit or a new behavior, and we find that we can't. So we're trying to establish something, but we keep not being able to do it. And to me, the telltale sign about this is that it's baffling.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:18]:
Like, it's hard to know why. Like, it doesn't seem like it should be a difficult thing, but it just isn't happening. Often there, when that's the case, we have an invisible rule. So I had a client, this is of course how it came up. It's always with my talking with my wonderful clients. We discovered that she was finding it difficult to meal prep. And I asked her about it and she wanted to do it. She definitely wanted to do it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:51]:
So this wasn't one of those things where— and invisible rules aren't that. When you don't want to do it, you don't want to do it. There's no invisible rule there. You just don't want to. In this example, she did want to. She did want to meal prep and she liked the idea. And when she did do it, it worked out beautifully for the week. Yeah.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:12]:
Meal prepping, sometimes people will do that on the weekend. It can be so amazing because you're already planning out your week. You know what dinners or lunches you're gonna have. You buy everything, you make it. So when the busy week comes, all you're doing is grabbing and going or just putting the last few things together. It works out really well. Some people definitely don't want to do it and some people really do. And this was anyway one of the cases.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:41]:
And when she did it, she loved it. It worked so well during the week, but she kept trying to schedule it and it didn't, it just didn't happen. And so I asked her more questions about it and what we got to, and this is, it's so good. What we got to is that she had an invisible rule that everything had to be fresh and chopped by her own hand. So every parsley leaf, every— Onion. onion, every carrot had to be chopped by her. It had to be fresh, organic, recently bought and chopped by her. But then that took hours.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:20]:
That took so much time on Sundays and she was scheduling it for Sundays, but it was often not happening. And this is what we realized, because to do it that way would take hours. And if she didn't have a big chunk of time, it just didn't get done. Or if a friend called and she wanted to go out or If she wasn't feeling well, she wanted a nap. Like if anything came up, it was out the window because she didn't have a chunk of 4 or 5 hours at a time. So then if she originally planned for it, it didn't end up happening, then the whole rest of the week she was left scrambling. Once we saw this invisible rule that everything had to be fresh and chopped by her, it was very easy to start questioning, is that true? Is that, is the freshness and you chopping it as important as having the meals ready during the week? And I did not have an answer for that. That was up to her.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:19]:
'Cause she could have said, yes, that's still the most important thing. And then we would've figured out what would work around that. But in fact, she didn't. It was okay to start using pre-chopped or— Frozen. Canned particular things, or there were shortcuts that were acceptable, but she had to find the invisible rule first. And she didn't really realize that was the thing in the way. It wasn't that she was lazy, that she kept coming up with excuses. It wasn't what we normally think for ourselves.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:54]:
We think if we're not doing it, there's something wrong with us, but that wasn't what was going on. And it's so valuable to see these invisible rules. Some examples of this are, I should only use fresh ingredients. I shouldn't order out. I can't have that. I can only have this. Diet food has to be boring. Or even things like, we have to eat together as a family or as a couple, or— there are so many invisible rules and we want to find them because we want to know that they're there.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:33]:
Often invisible rules that you, as you will have heard, fall under the all-or-nothing thinking. I shouldn't order out ever. That's, that makes it, that's a pretty hard rule, right? That, that doesn't usually work in our world anymore. But the thinking is, if I'm going to lose weight, I can't order out or I can't eat out or some version of that. And when that is a Diet rule in our head, an invisible one in particular, then it makes it completely unsustainable. Weight loss is unsustainable with invisible rules, particularly if they fall under the all-or-nothing thinking. And should or shouldn't rules are often all-or-nothing thinking. I can never have this.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:27]:
I can only have that. When we find these invisible rules, we can start to question that. And that's exactly what we're going to do in the process that we're going to go through. Other times, the invisible rules are more like conventions from growing up. Like, this is how we did it in our family. And if we're bumping up against those, As we're creating our own home or trying to lose weight, it's important to see them for what they are, not truths with a capital T, but something that was true for our family. And it may have made us feel connected, or that's the way we did things. But we now, we want to just question it again.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:14]:
We still can decide to do it, but we want to decide. Consciously. We want to see what they are and then be able to work around them. One of them in this category of the convention from growing up is that we should eat together. We have to have dinner all at the same time. And that's one for me that I always like to question because there's nothing particularly magical about chewing at the same time as each other and swallowing food. Now there might be something wonderful about sitting together, about talking about your day, about sharing, just about being with each other, but it's the being with each other that's important, not the chewing at the same time and swallowing. And just being able to question that is so valuable.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:03]:
Again, when you see it, you could decide, oh no, this is something that's very important to me. And then you're going to make adjustments in your day so that you're hungry for that time. But if you don't even know it's there and you're just getting hangry waiting for dinner, there can be resentment and all these other things built up. And that's what we don't want. We don't want unnecessarily dramatic emotions. Emotions that are very big can lead to emotional eating. We want to understand our emotions and put them in their rightful place, have the right size for them. And when we are feeling outsized emotions for the situation, like getting really angry at someone for being a little late because you're waiting to eat dinner with them, that can tell you something that maybe there's an invisible rule there and we may want to investigate it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:03]:
It may no longer serve us, especially when we're trying to lose weight. This is Again, one of the reasons I love weight loss, because it's showing us all these invisible things that are trying to run the show. And as adults, we get to choose which ones we want to keep. The only real problem with invisible rules is their invisibility. Because once we see them, we get to decide if we want to keep them. It really is up to us. And then we're back in the conscious decision mode, which is what we always want. Conscious decision-making territory is always the place we want to be.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:48]:
We're going to take all of our circumstances into consideration, knowing our goals and knowing what we're living like on a daily basis, and then we can make decisions around it. When we do that, when we get used to doing that, we can Lose weight and keep it off forever. Because we will always be aware of the decisions that we're making and the consequences they have. And we are grownups and we get to make those decisions. So there's a little process I've developed to uncover the invisible rules. So first, there's— I have here 3 ways to know that you have an invisible rule. There could be more, but these are the main ones that I found. One is tension in your body when you think of a topic.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:37]:
So in my client's case, I don't know that this is the case for her, or we didn't talk about this specifically, but if she was thinking about meal prepping and she had a tension in her body, so there was like resistance. I always think of that as there's resistance. It's really your body telling you that something's up. I'm always thankful for the tension because then I know something's not aligning right there. I'm wanting to do something, but my brain is not wanting me— there's something there. Often it will be some sort of invisible rule. Another way to know that you have an invisible rule would be any shoulds in a sentence. Now, the only reason why that's invisible is because Oftentimes it's like I was talking about before that it just feels true to you.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:27]:
But if there's a should in the sentence, even if it feels true, question it as an invisible rule. Okay? So ways to know you have invisible rules, tension in your body, resistance to an idea, any shoulds in a sentence that you say frequently or you notice come through your brain. Or not being able to do something you want to do. Now, not being able to do something you don't want to do, no problem there. But if there's something you want to do, a behavior you want to change, and you're finding it hard to do, keep having excuses or things keep coming up, there's likely an invisible rule there that's preventing you from implementing the new behavior you want. To me, that's always really good to know because what this means is that there's a reason you're feeling tension. There's a reason it's not getting done. And again, it's not because you're lazy, you don't know anything, there's something wrong with you.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:33]:
It's never that. There's actually a reason and it's often an invisible rule. So those are some ways to know if invisible rules are the issue. And then of course we want to discover what those rules are. The first important step is awareness, and you'll be aware because you may see tension, notice a should in a sentence, or you're noticing that you're not able to do something that you want to do. So then we want to find a sentence. We do need a sentence In order to be able to work with this invisible rule. So you wanna find out what the rule is.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:13]:
And the way you do that is asking yourself questions. You could just ask, what's the rule? Your brain may give you the answer. And remember, if there's a should there or a comparison or a right way, that's gonna be really easy. But asking yourself questions will help. What am I thinking? What's holding me back? Any of those things. Asking yourself questions can work. The other one is talking it out with a friend or certainly a coach. The coach is— their whole job is to ask you questions about it because their brain doesn't have the same rules as yours.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:52]:
So they can pick them out a lot easier. Sometimes a friend can too. That's why it might be useful to talk to a friend about it. They may just ask you questions like, why do you think that? Or what makes that hard? Or what makes it easier? In a neutral, friendly way. Coaches are trained to do this. That's why they're really helpful. Friends may or may not be good at it. But if you're not judgmental of yourself, you can ask yourself the same questions and you will get answers.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:20]:
So that's how we discover what they are is we ask and we can do it with ourselves, Journaling works often really well, or talking with a friend or coach. And then what to do about it. So you've noticed that there's tension or a sentence, or you're not able to do something. You're aware of it. And so you look for the sentence, the invisible rule that's actually the culprit, the stumbling block. And then what we do about it is we start to question the sentence itself. Like my client, is it true that I have to chop all of the ingredients myself and that they have to be freshly bought that day? They have to be fresh. They can't be frozen or canned.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:07]:
It may no longer fit. Maybe that was true in an ideal universe, one that had no other Demands on your time, but it no longer works. And then also, if you're trying to lose weight, you can see that something has to change. If we want to change something, we have to change. That's very basic. So maybe there was no cooking because the invisible rule was, and this is not the case with my client, but I'm just taking it further, the illustration. That maybe she was ordering out a lot. And it turned out that it was because she didn't have big chunks of time to cook on the weekend, but she never questioned it because she wasn't interested in losing weight at that time.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:00]:
But once she wanted to lose weight, then she had to change something. And now we get to question, oh, why aren't I cooking on the weekend? Ah, it's because the way I've designed it for myself, I need 6 hours. And when we question it, it may no longer make sense because now my goal is to lose weight. So it doesn't make sense to demand that I meal prep, that it takes 6 hours on the weekend. Now, for some people, they may love taking 6 hours on the weekend and their weekends may be structured such that it works. I'm saying for this person, taking 6 hours on the weekend didn't work. And so now she gets to decide, What do I want to do about that? As we're questioning the invisible rules we've discovered, we may find that it was always wrong. You cannot have carbs ever if you want to lose weight.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:54]:
And that's just not factually true. So we may discover that it no longer fits. We may discover it was always wrong. And you also may hear it as someone else's voice. Often this will happen if it's one of the rules we adopted as a child. It might be a parent's voice, or it could even be a magazine article you read as a 12-year-old. It may be someone else's voice, and that's really helpful to know too, because we could say, oh, I can recognize that as theirs. That's not mine.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:17:32]:
And then we can start to identify the diet culture rules that are unforgiving, don't work, aren't sustainable, and cannot fit in our plan of how we want to lose weight and keep it off forever. Once we question it and we're able to see what works and what doesn't for us, then we're going to choose a truer statement and we're going to repeat and replace that one. So like the example of having to cook fresh things, that may come up again for my client if she's planning to do something. And then she could say, oh, that is ideal, but I don't have time for that. And I value prepping more than that right now. So that's what I'm going to do. Now that could be a faster thing that goes through her head. Oh, I'm just going to spend 2 hours this weekend.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:28]:
And that's okay with her. She's going to recognize it when it gets in the way, replace it with the truer statement that she's happy with now. And then every time that happens in her head, she'll just keep saying that. The repeating and replacing really works. So in the process of questioning the invisible rule, We do want to come up with an idea that works better for us. And then we're just going to repeat and replace that. If we do that, we have consciousness around our decisions and we like our reasons. It makes our behavior change so much easier.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:19:13]:
Invisible rules slow weight loss by stalling new habits. When we seek them out, expose them, Decide what makes sense to keep and what doesn't, we clear the way for behaviors that support our weight loss now and in the future. We stall for a reason, and the reason isn't, there's something wrong with me. Finding that reason in the form of an invisible rule has us healing past dieting trauma and making sustainable weight loss possible and so much easier. If you want help with this, I am just a click away. You can go to my website, stephaniefeinmd.com, click the Lose Weight With Me button. We will be connected, or find me on Instagram @stephaniefeinmd. And come here every week for more from Weight Loss for Fertility.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:20:08]:
I am sending you so much love. Until next week. Mwah.
