Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:00]:
Hello, fabulous. Dr. Stephanie Fein here with Weight Loss for Fertility. And I just had a client go on a fabulous trip. She was between procedures, so the timing worked out really well. And of course, in our time together, we discussed how she wanted to handle the food on her trip. And she had lots of lists of restaurants and foods to try. It was so fun.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:21]:
It was a big part of the trip and it's an amazing thing. It's so fun to enjoy and try new foods. And the main tool, of course, That makes this absolutely no problem when you're trying to lose weight is the hunger scale, right? So you just eat when you're hungry, stop when you're satisfied. What you're eating doesn't much matter. It will impact, of course, how you feel. But when you're on a trip and you're trying some foods, that's a natural fun time. That's a great thing to plan for and to do. There is no restriction.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:52]:
There's nothing you can't do, especially if you're eating when you're hungry, stopping when you're satisfied, not full. Works great. The second fabulous tool for vacation eating or trip eating, it could be a work trip, it could be anything, holidays, going home for the holidays, anything like that. Hunger scale's always number one, but number two is planning. And so we always talk about how we're going to be eating and planning before the trip. That's just regular life, but sometimes there can be packing and planning. It can be a little stressful. So just planning that out, making things easy on you, then talk Talking about how food is going to go during the trip.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:33]:
What plans do you have? Sometimes you need to make reservations so you already know ahead of time what you're going to be eating. Remember, we've talked about sort of mental rehearsals. It works so nicely. You may do vacations where you're like, I have no idea what we're doing. That's no problem either. But sometimes you do. And when that's the case, it's just nice to have that mental rehearsal. To think about it and to see what's going on.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:59]:
And then we also, and this is an important piece, is we talk about the coming home from the trip. That's a really important piece. And that's what I'm calling reentry. That's when you're coming from vacation back home. Now, when we're talking about planning for before, during, and after trip, one of the big pieces we decide on is what we want to do about weight loss. With the trip. So there's 3 options. It's we want to continue losing, we want to maintain, or we want to gain a little and then have a plan for losing it when we get back.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:34]:
Those are the 3 options. I just like people to pick one. In general, my favorite is maintain. And that's usually pretty easy to do on vacation because you're often walking around a lot more than you do in your normal day. So it's— All balances out really well. Also, depending on where you're going, portions aren't always like they are in the US. If you're going somewhere out of town, she was going to parts of Asia, so there are definitely different cultural ways of having food. Here, there's often very big portions.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:08]:
That's not always the case in other places. So things balance out. So maintenance to me is always a really good way to go. But you absolutely can decide if you want to continue losing weight. That would just require something a little different. And If you want to gain and then have a plan for losing when you get back, no problem. Knowing what you want ahead of time, deciding ahead of time is the key. When we're talking about food and travel, one of the things I really do like to plan is the travel days themselves, because those aren't usually necessarily the fun food or the— you're just trying to get from place A to place B.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:46]:
And the reason why it's important to plan it is because often there's delays or you can't get to food or whatever. So planning usually involves some sort of bringing Of food, bringing of snacks. Then there's, of course, the trip. And again, we touched on that about deciding what you want to do, how you're going to deal with that. If you have the hunger scale, you're basically all set. But the less often talked about is the reentry. And it's really important to recognize that it's actually a vulnerable time for many reasons. I did an episode on this.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:20]:
Episode 83, definitely check it out because it goes into detail about all the reasons why reentry is hard. And what can happen is you can come back, feel amazing, met your goal of, let's say it was maintained, and then the urge to overeat happens after you get back. It's often very surprising. And that's what I talk about in episode 83, which— I love that. Now I'm referring to as reentry 1.0 because that's the practical things. I talk about why it might be a vulnerable time and what to do about it. But here I want to discuss the 2.0 version. And that's the why behind the why.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:05]:
Why is it a difficult time? That's what we're going to talk about here, why it is difficult. And This is what I ended up discussing with my client and what I wanted to bring to you here. It's a more advanced topic because it has to do with the model. Now we've discussed the model before. The model is a way to think about CBT, cognitive behavioral theory, and it's very powerful. CBT is very powerful. It's thinking about our thoughts. And that's something we do around here because it's one of the best ways we can change habits.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:43]:
We need our brain to be on board. We need to be aware then of the things we're thinking. And the reason why that's important is because I'm going to explain the CBT model to you. You may be familiar with this if you've listened to more podcasts, because we definitely refer to it. But if you haven't, if it's new, this is what I'm going to tell you. Thoughts create feelings. which lead to actions, which create our results. And that's the order in which it goes.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:17]:
Thoughts create feelings, lead to actions, which create our results. It's not the other way around. It's not feelings creating thoughts. Thoughts create feelings. Every time we have a thought, there's a feeling associated with it. That is so important to know. And feelings impact our actions and actions create the results that we have in our life. So if we're aware of our thoughts, we can understand why we do things.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:49]:
And we can also start to change our results by choosing or shaping our automatic thoughts. When we're unaware of our thoughts, we're baffled as to why we do certain behaviors. But we can work backwards from the behaviors, find the feeling, and then find the thought. And that once we see that thought, we have so much agency around it. Now I'm not saying it's, we just put a happy pappy thought and everything's fine. There's a process to it, but just the understanding that thoughts create feelings and that once we're aware of them, we have— Power. Power, really. We have understanding, and that goes a very long way if we want to change a behavior.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:38]:
Noticing and potentially changing a thought is one of the best ways to do this. Part of the reason vacations feel so good is that we have a whole different set of thoughts on vacation. Have you noticed? Here's a little smattering of some of them. I've been looking forward to this. It's beautiful here. I can sleep in. This is great. I needed this.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:02]:
Life is good. I love you. If you're with a friend or a partner, those thoughts have wonderful feelings associated with them. Just, it's beautiful here, or this is great. Life is good. These Thoughts have fabulous feelings associated with them. Now you may be saying, oh sure, because you're in a, let's say Hawaii, you're in a beautiful place. It's easy to say this is a beautiful place, but I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where you've been in a beautiful place and our thoughts ruin the mood because we're thinking, he shouldn't have done that.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:43]:
They shouldn't say that. It was supposed to be like this, that, or the other. She always ruins things. We could be in the most gorgeous place on the planet and have these thoughts that change the way we feel. And then it doesn't matter if it's a beautiful place because we're feeling cruddy. That's just an example. I like to see that It's not the— it's not Hawaii that makes life good. It's thinking life is good.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:20]:
Of course, it might be easier to think that if you are in a place that you consider beautiful, but I promise you, you can find beauty in lots of places. Now, this is not to take away from going on vacation, enjoying yourself. In fact, of course, it would always be— I hope you enjoy yourself everywhere you go. And again, this is not about It's not about putting in positive thoughts everywhere. It's about being aware of the thoughts that are happening and understanding where feelings and actions then come from. So reentry, coming back home, can come with a whole different set of thoughts, right? It's over. We're back. Oh, back to work.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:03]:
This sucks. I hate this. It was better there or then or whatever. Those thoughts, just those thoughts, if you said them right now or even hear me saying them, they feel bad. This sucks feels terrible. No matter what I'm referring to, it's not a good feeling thought. And we're likely to have more of them if we're not aware of our thoughts, that we make vacation and home all or nothing. All good, all bad.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:35]:
But remember the model, which is circumstances. So if we put Hawaii circumstances, we have a thought about the circumstance, we have a feeling that derives from the thought, we take action based on the feeling, and we get the results based on those actions. CTFAR: circumstance, thought, feeling, action, result. So thoughts like, it's beautiful here, leads to feelings of gratitude, awe, calm. And then we feel open, loving, flexible. We enjoy the beauty. It's easy to enjoy the beauty in that feeling. And the action was feeling open, being loving, being flexible.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:22]:
Whereas thoughts like, it's over, Creates feelings of sadness or dread, which can lead to sulking, procrastination, low energy, spiraling about work to be done and no vacation to look forward to, which leads to vacation being completely over. It's gone, right? It's now that we're just in the spiral procrastination, low energy thing. There's no remnant of good feeling in sight of the vacation. It really is over. So instead of this dramatic difference, all or nothing, all good, all bad, we want to anticipate the possible tendency that we would do this and think about and plan for our thoughts. So with food, we're going to see about the plan. With food and reentry, we may plan for a grocery delivery before we go on the trip so that When we get back, there's a delivery waiting for us with easy, well-liked meals to make once we get home, making coming home a soft place to land. So there's— we're not scrambling at the end.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:31]:
We're not demanding we make ourselves 4-course dinners. We do something easy. It makes reentry easier. With our thoughts, we want to be aware of our thinking and anticipate that we might fall into the all-or-nothing habit when it comes to vacations, like vacation good, home bad. It's rarely true that vacation is all good and home is all bad. There may be things about being home that are amazing, like your bed, your dog. There, there's, it could be so many things. And so we want to notice what's actually true, not the way our brain tends to do all-or-nothing thinking.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:14]:
The thoughts could be, I enjoyed that vacation and I love my home. Or I look forward to the next vacation and I like my routine. When we don't allow our brain to fall into the all or nothing and we look for real gray zones, real both/ands, our actions follow the feelings and the feelings are so much better. I enjoyed that vacation and I love my home feels so much better than I enjoyed that vacation and I hate my home. Certainly. If we, in fact, if we find that we can't find anything good about being home, that's really good information actually. We can start to think what has to change to make home feel better? That was a little bit of a trick question because a hint is it's your thoughts, right? Your thoughts can help make home feel better. And while that's true, it also could be true that you've outgrown that job.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:16]:
That job just doesn't fit anymore. Or being away has you realize that it's time to move, or there's something that has to change. That's possible also. And it's true that our thoughts can help us feel better. Now they can only do that if we find true thoughts. We can't put something like, I love my home, when we don't love our home, but we might be able to find things about our home that we love. Or even, I have faith in me that I can find a home that I love. That thought is even better than I hate my home.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:54]:
And it gives us more wiggle room to be able to take action from. If we are feeling dread, anxiety, sadness, those are less motivating feelings and the positive actions or productive actions don't really stem from those feelings. That's why we want to find true thoughts that feel better than the thoughts that have us feeling bad to give ourselves a fighting chance to be able to feel a little better and take action that we want to take. Both things can be true, that thoughts can be changed and so can circumstances. Thoughts are powerful and so are decisions. Today we talked about reentry from a trip, and it can be even also from the holidays or family visits or anything. So it's anything that has you out of your regular way of being and transitioning back. We talked about that reentry period and the way I wanted to frame it here today, because remember, check out episode 83 for really practical tips.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:13]:
I wanted to frame this with the idea of reentry as a transition of thoughts, that we have one set of thoughts when we're there and another set of thoughts when we're home. And we want to anticipate that change. Smooth it out and make it less bumpy for reentry. Reentry from a trip is changing from one set of thoughts back to another. Practical planning for a trip includes how we want to think about our food and weight. Let it also include the reentry phase of the trip. That could include things like having a grocery delivery planned, but also awareness of our thoughts about coming home. Choosing our thoughts means we can anticipate better outcomes and we smooth out the roller coaster of emotions of vacation good, home bad, recognizing the 50/50 of all of life.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:17:15]:
When we do that, we protect our brain and our body from unnecessary suffering and the emotional eating that could accompany it. If you have any questions about this or anything, DM me on Instagram. I'm @StephanieFeinMD, or contact me on my website, stephaniefeinmd.com. And you can also start the process of working with me there too. Just hit the Lose Weight with Me button. Until next week, I am sending you so much love. Mwah.
