Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much (24 page)

• Consider using a whole-body vibration machine as a gentle way to start to get exercise and build body awareness, too.

• Get yourself moving in ways you find enjoyable. You may do better with low-stimulation exercises, such as walking, yoga, swimming, and yoga, rather than high-stimulation exercises such as taking aerobic exercise classes. Assert yourself in creating opportunities for movement that make you feel comfortable. Change instructors or classes if you have to.

• Be compassionate with yourself as you begin to get movement. Don't feel you have to push yourself. You really only have to do the equivalent of brisk walking for an hour twice a week and doing movement that works all the muscle groups twice a week, but if you really want to do a marathon, that's fine too.

• Movement can be more fun if you do it with a friend, work out to music, or get “green exercise” in nature. Research shows there are extra mood-boosting benefits to exercising outdoors. Think about biking or walking (a pedometer can help you keep track of your steps).

• Lifting hand weights builds bone and muscle mass, as well as strength, while giving you exercise. Boosting your muscle mass also boosts your metabolism.

• Whatever movement you do, focus on strength, stamina, health, and movement; check in with your body to be sure you are doing what's right for you. Forget about “no pain, no gain”—it's not true.

• Know the symptoms of adrenal fatigue and address them, getting any needed tests to check your hormone levels and reducing your stress.

• Reconnect with your feelings. Experience them, use the IN-Vizion Process if they're intense, and don't turn up the volume on them by thinking negative and distorted thoughts.

• Reconnect with your thought processes. Become aware of negative self-talk whenever it occurs and immediately replace it with positive self-talk that supports happiness and confidence.

• Reconnect with the larger world and stay informed about what's going on, but limit your exposure to bad news. Balance it by going out of your way to find good news sources.

• Avoid watching disturbing news on video or listening to the audio. Read your news instead to limit your empathetic response so you're not overwhelmed.

• As you reconnect to other people, use the techniques in this book, such as The Slick Blue Shield exercise (Chapter 4), to set boundaries, but also set healthy boundaries in practical ways, too. You don't always have to take someone's phone call or continue a relationship with him or her.

• Break your addictions to communication technology whether it's your smartphone or social media that's making you enmeshed with others and overstimulating you. Use software programs to keep you off of social media when you're using your computer.

• Don't bond with others by dumping your garbage on them or letting them dump on you. Bond by encouraging each other.

• Beware of the detour of caretaking—the dysfunctional dynamic of co-dependency. Don't deplete yourself while giving to others and don't take responsibility for their emotions and choices.

PART FOUR

It's Simple, But It's Not Easy

8

Now
Let's Talk Food!

As I said before, I'm a full-on, flag-flying foodie. I love food and I love to eat, and I don't just enjoy a good meal, I savor it. I had to learn to appreciate the taste, texture, and temperature of food again after years of bulimia in my teens and early 20s, which had me using food as a mood modifier. If it was going to spike my serotonin level, fast, and quiet my anxiety, I was going to eat it. Later, when I began to be more mindful of what I was eating because I had my porous boundaries under better control, I realized that some of my trigger foods tasted awful. Now, if I'm going to have a small portion of cake, I'm going to take my time and enjoy it, without the accompanying cacophony of thoughts around how “bad- bad-bad” I am for eating it. Deprivation has never worked for me, nor for any of my students; and one of the most important pieces I have learned is that if I say I can't have it, I will want it—for the wrong reasons.

As I began to make peace with myself, my body, and my life, I found I could choose to have a small piece of cake once in a while without its sending me off to the store to eat a whole cake, devouring it on the way home!
Restoring the ability to make choices is crucial.
If it's a crappy, rock-hard, processed “treat” out of a package, blechh! And, if it's a food that is generally noisy for me, I avoid it altogether. I don't want to even contemplate a box of cookies, as they are likely going to be singing, “Eat me, eat me!” once I have the first one. I have no desire to do that to myself anymore. I know what works and I know what doesn't; I'm very clear that tempting myself with a trigger food is an incredibly bad idea. As an ex-addict and recovered alcoholic, I know that a glass of wine isn't okay for me, either. Certain foods just don't work for me. And so what? There are plenty of other delicious choices that will make me feel good and healthy, rather than compulsive and crazy!
When you no longer feel compelled to manage your empathy overload by grounding yourself with food, making good decisions about what to eat is infinitely easier. When you stop beating up on yourself, you'll notice your triggers and learn how to avoid them.

What should you eat? When I decided to write this book, it was because I had discovered a link between empathy overload and weight issues. That's what I'd experienced, as had a large portion of my clients. So, this was never meant to be a typical diet book, which is why we don't talk about food until now. Everyone is different. For example, people have different blood types and unique genetics, so different bodies can respond differently to the same food.

As I always advise my students in my online classes, visit a nutritionist or health coach, see a doctor, get blood work done, find out your hormone levels if you're middle aged, and learn whether you have any vitamin or mineral deficiencies. These are things I can't address.

EATING WHAT FEELS RIGHT

Food plans are personal, so I'll share what works for me and give you my general advice on eating for people who feel too much. In short, what I recommend is pretty basic: try to consume a predominantly locally grown, plant-based diet, as free as possible from chemicals and environmental toxins. Limit consumption of stimulants, especially if they are noisy foods for you. Stay away from processed foods, and avoid all genetically modified foods; no one really knows their long-term effects, and why should you gamble? Beyond that, listen to your body's response to what are seemingly listed as healthy foods, whether they are whole-grain bread or soy products. I have a friend who wanted to add soy to her diet, but she realized that after eating a meal with a large serving of tempeh or tofu, she would get an odd headache and her stomach wouldn't feel quite right. Her body was telling her to limit soy and find another protein source.

Some of you may do just fine with small amounts of gluten in your diet, mostly in the form of whole grains, and even be able to eat white-flour pasta on occasion without gaining weight or having digestive problems, blood sugar fluctuations, or food cravings afterward. The problem is that people who feel too much also tend to be oblivious to just how much sugar, gluten, refined flour, processed foods, and chemically altered fats they are eating, the emotional distraction they provide, and these foods' effects on the body. Take gluten, for example. Did you know that gluten is added to a full range of foods, from salad dressings to ketchup to teriyaki sauce? If you cut out all gluten, you might discover you feel much better—plenty of people just don't digest gluten well. In fact, you might find you have celiac disease, which is the inability to digest gluten; you can take a blood test to determine if this is the case. So, why overload your system with something it has trouble working with, taking valuable energy away from your body's other systems? It's interesting that gluten intolerance and celiac disease have become more common since food producers started adding gluten to more foods and since growers began using genetically modified grains. Is that a coincidence?

You may find that your body doesn't handle certain foods well, which shouldn't be a problem because you have plenty of options. That said, there is just one more important factor I want you to consider when choosing foods: whether they are cruelty free.

CRUELTY-FREE FOODS

People who feel too much are often able to pick up on the emotions of animals because those emotions have been infused in the animals' milk, eggs, and flesh. If an animal has lived a stressful, unnatural life, its very cells are affected as a result. When you take those cells into your body by eating cheese, eggs, or meat, you are actually eating their fear, anxiety, anger, and sadness, energetically speaking. Every fearful experience and mistreatment they have in their unnatural lives is an energy that is experienced and floods their systems with chemicals that are present in what we eat. Animals feel their feelings and no one who has ever cared for one can deny that. Animals can experience emotions, not necessarily in response to actual thoughts, as we do—a cow isn't having an existential crisis about the meaning of life. But the animal
is
terribly stressed and afraid by being packed into an unnaturally crowded pen, unable to wander freely under rainy and sunny skies, unable to eat a variety of grasses, and unable to interact with other species.

In North America, we have huge stockyards of cattle that never place their hooves upon the grass or drink from streams, and that eat a combination of corn and ground-up animal parts, which they would never do in nature. They are also given antibiotics to prevent and treat infections that they have developed as a result of this unhealthy and unnatural experience, and also from application of hormones such as bovine growth hormone (BGH) to enhance a cow's milk production. You, of course, eat those antibiotics when you drink the cow's milk or eat the flesh of an animal that has been treated with them.

And it's not just cattle that are treated inhumanely; chickens and pigs, too, see such treatment. In fact, chickens' beaks, which are meant to peck the ground and help fertilize the soil, are cut off so that they won't harm each other when the crowded conditions under which they live cause them to attack their coop mates. It hurts to even think about the suffering of these poor creatures.

While animals may not seem to have the same range and complexity of emotional experience that we do, they certainly feel sadness, anger, and contentment. An animal that has no quality of life, that isn't living in harmony with the land and with other creatures, is not a happy animal. Consider what neuropeptides get into a human body when a person eats the egg of a chicken that's been caged every moment of its life, or the flesh of a fish that can barely swim in the filthy pond water of a fish farm.

If you do eat meat, poultry, fish, eggs, or milk products, think about how the animals have lived and died—peacefully, or violently? Were they treated with respect or disrespect? Was that animal's life on the farm similar to the life it would have led in nature?

I can't cite any specific scientific research on the emotional effects of eating cruelty-free foods vs. factory-farmed foods; it's something I know from years of working with highly intuitive, sensitive, and empathic people. As I grew more in tune with my body, after years of abusing it and ignoring its messages, I started to recognize that eating meat or dairy products just didn't feel right. I typically buy certain brands of organic goat and sheep cheese because I know the animals are treated well on the farms that supply the milk for these dairy products; but one day, I was in a pinch and bought an unfamiliar brand of Cheddar cheese to go with my lunch. I was chatting away as I was eating, and everything seemed fine, until I started to clear my plate. Suddenly I had an overwhelming sense of sadness and panic that lasted a few moments. I knew deep down that it was because I had been eating something from a factory farm. I believe the body knows what it needs, and although I had been pretty strict “veggies only” for years, I have found that sometimes I feel much better adding some grass-fed free-range beef to my diet. One thing is for certain: I feel the difference between a naturally raised cow and one from a factory farm.

Even if you think it's not going to affect you when you have a burger made from a stockyard animal that has been mistreated, hear me out. Modern farming methods that treat animals as commodities instead of sentient beings are cruel and unnatural. Yet research shows that people would rather deny that an animal they eat has suffered than change their eating habits. Please don't underestimate how beneficial it is to yourself, to the animals, and to the planet to eat a mostly plant-based diet and to consume only cruelty-free dairy, poultry, fish, and meats—if you consume animal products at all.

Educate yourself on how the animals bred for food are treated, and then choose what to do. There is no excuse for any of us to not know where our food comes from, in what manner it is delivered, and how the animals we eat are treated. We are all responsible for this planet, as well as every living thing on it. You don't have to be as extreme as I am in my commitment to eat humanely. After I read the books and watched the DVDs that are listed at the end of this book, which forced me to look at the cruelty and truth of slaughterhouses, factory farms, and dairy farms, as well as read the studies about the emotional lives of farm animals, I made up my mind. You may feel differently after learning about the origins of your food.

Also, there have been several excellent books and documentaries explaining why corporate farming is so detrimental, not just to the animals but also to the planet and to us. What producers are doing to the food we put in our bodies is horrifying. You may have heard of additives like “pink slime” (the unappetizing, informal name for the ammonia-treated beef by-products that's added to beef as a filler) or “meat glue” (the equally unappetizing name for a powder mixed with meat scraps and used to “glue together” larger pieces of meat, making it more likely for bacteria to grow in an undercooked steak or chop). You owe it to yourself to know what you are eating. I encourage you to look at the Resources section of this book to learn more about what you are putting in your body and the ways you can eat more cleanly and healthfully.

WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT PROTEIN

If you are worried about getting enough protein, don't be. Humans aren't designed to live on large quantities of meat, eggs, milk, and cheese. When it comes to how our ancestors ate, you probably have an image of cavemen hunting the woolly mammoth and a tribe of hunters feasting on the flesh, with a few berries served on the side. In reality, most of the calories those hunter-and-gatherer tribes consumed came from plants, and successful hunts were relatively rare. It was the women, picking berries and digging up roots, who kept the tribe from starving. (Funny how history doesn't give them credit for keeping early humans alive, isn't it?)

Somehow, along the way, we got the impression that we wouldn't be strong and healthy unless we eat plenty of meat and dairy foods. This myth of our large protein need was picked up by producers and advertisers, who make money by promoting certain products. You might be surprised to know that most North Americans eat more protein than they need. That's not my opinion; that's straight from the Centers for Disease Control. Two cups of cooked dried beans and 8 ounces of milk or yogurt will about do it for meeting an adult's daily intake of protein. That said, we do need protein in our diets so you will have to find it somehow and your particular food plan may include more of it than someone else's. When I am particularly active, I consume more protein and feel good with 100 grams per day; when I am less active, I may consume 60 grams per day. It's an individual choice.

What we aren't getting enough of is fiber and vegetables (for the record, no, ketchup doesn't count as a vegetable, regardless of what bureaucrats or lobbyists for the fast food industry have claimed). Cruelty-free dairy products or meats may cost more, but since we don't need to eat large amounts of protein, it makes sense to spend our grocery dollars on quality protein that comes to our plate without wreaking destruction and creating fear, anger, and sorrow along the way.

Again, I'm not saying you have to be a vegan or need to boycott all meat. You may find that your body and spirit can tolerate some animal products and even feel better when you eat small amounts of them. I'd been mostly a vegetarian for years, but after a time my body was clearly craving a different protein source, so I added fish and eggs; then once I began more strenuous exercise, and due to hormonal changes, my body steered me to add small amounts of red meat back into my diet. I was very conscious about these choices and checked in with my own health care team. I believe as long as they aren't farmed in a way that abuses the animals, I can choose to eat them according to my body's needs. Moderation is the key as there is no one-size-fits-all food plan for everyone.