join me! STOP OVER EATING overview

Transcription

1 join me! STOP OVER EATING overview

2 2 What You Will Learn Welcome to the Stop Overeating Masterclass book on How to Stop Overeating. If you read this book, you are going to learn why you overeat. You re going to learn about weight pain. Weight pain is the reason why we overeat and we re going to talk a lot about that. We re going to talk about how your hormones help or hurt you. We re going to talk about committing, deciding and rehearsing. We re going to talk about losing fat by fat adaptation. We re going to talk about your lifetime protocol. I m going to introduce you to the idea of creating your own lifetime protocol and how much freedom that will give you in your life. WHY SHOULD YOU LISTEN TO ME? I know that a lot of you already know me. But I know that some of you don t know me. Some of you might have come to me straight from Facebook or you ve just been listening to my podcasts. We ve never had any interaction. So I want to give you a little bit of background about me and why you should listen to me specifically on this topic. First of all, I was an emotional eating sufferer myself. I went through years and years of emotional eating. I know the hell that is and I know the pain that is. I think, first and foremost, that is really important. I just want you to know that, while I was going through it, in that moment, I had this revelation, If I ever figure this out, I m going to teach it to people. If I ever figure out a way out of this, I m going to teach other people how to do it. So here I am, teaching you how to do it. I ve been a Master Weight Coach for 10 years now. I can t believe it. My work has evolved so much over those 10 years. Some of you may know me from my book If I m So Smart, Why Can t I Lose Weight? Which I still stand by and is still a great book. All of the stuff I m going to teach you in this book is the next layer, all the added knowledge that I have about hormones. The reason why I have all this added knowledge now is because, hopefully I ve learned something in those 10 years. Also my son was diagnosed with insulin resistance. I m one of those people who whenever something happens, in terms of if someone gets sick, or some problem happens, I m on the internet researching it, figuring it out. I know more about insulin than most people. I know more about hormones than most people. I know more about diabetes than most people, because insulin resistance is the precursor to diabetes. I was really worried that my son would get it and I wanted to know everything I could know about it, so I could help him reverse it. Which he has now reversed and is no longer insulin resistant, and he is actually very lean and very tall. Which is a whole other story. I m going to introduce you to the idea of creating your own lifetime protocol and how much freedom that will give you in your life. I ve studied the latest science on weight loss. I really have one thing that I did when I really started deciding that I was going to do small group coaching.

3 3 As a Master Coach, I wanted to find out what is the most successful long-term weight loss solution on the planet? What I found is first of all, there are very few. Most processes for losing weight have a less than one percent long-term success rate. Less than one percent. It s so sad to me. The ones that do work have some pretty common things in relation to each other. Those have been the things that I ve incorporated into this program and then I m also going to teach you. My results are permanent. I haven t struggled with my weight. Actually, since I ve implemented this additional information into what I ve done, I ve lost an additional 10 to 15 pounds and gone down a couple more sizes. Now my main goal with most of my clients has been to help them stop overeating emotionally because that is the hell of that. When you stop overeating emotionally, you typically lose weight, because overeating is what causes overweight. Now as we get older, over our 40 s, it becomes much more difficult to lose that weight just by stopping overeating. That s what got me more and more interested in the hormones. Not only do we have to stop overeating so we stop gaining weight, but we then have to figure out how to lose weight on top of that. I m going to share the keys to doing both of those with you in this book. I used these exact same tools to completely stop over drinking. I don t feel like I was over drinking. The reason why I say over drinking is because I was drinking when I didn t want to drink. I was drinking alcohol and I wanted to not want to drink it, if that makes sense. One of the things that was interesting when I first started this last Stop Overeating Masterclass with a group of six, one of the things I kept referring to as a metaphor was my desire to drink wine versus their desire to overeat food. As I applied all these materials and used myself as an example, I completely lost the desire to drink alcohol, which is exactly what I wanted to do. I have a whole new sense of freedom because of that. It just really reassured me that what I m teaching and what we re applying is really awesome.

4 4 Desire Let s start with desire. I think this is one of the biggest pieces that is missing from all diets and all attempts to lose weight. Most of them figure out how to adjust to our desire to overeat, instead of talking about adjusting our desire to overeat. Desire is unconscious but can be programmed. A lot of times people will ask me, How do you love something you don t love? Love is just something that happens. It feels like desire is something that just happens, but really it s an unconscious programming. Our desire isn t a given. Our desire is something that we ve programmed, maybe unconsciously and that we can use our conscious programming to reprogram. Stay with me on this. I want you guys to think about this question. It s really important: Think about how liberating it would be not to want any extra food. Would you be willing to remove all food as entertainment from your life? Now, when I say entertainment, I mean any kind of mouth entertainment. Any kind of eating for pleasure. Any kind of eating for enjoyment. Anything like that. Would you be willing to only eat for fuel? One of the best examples that I have for this is one I taught in one of my in-person classes. What I asked them was Would you be willing to eat a bar that just tastes like sawdust if it gave you all of your nutrients that you needed? If it gave you everything you need to be the way you want to be, highly functioning, but it tastes like sawdust? That was it. Would you be willing to just eat that and not eat for entertainment at all? Why or why not? That is such an important question. If you say No, I wouldn t be willing to do that. I wouldn t be able to give up food as entertainment. I wouldn t be able to give up food as pleasure... I m not saying there s a right or wrong answer. But you need to know the reason why. When I was thinking about me with the drinking. Was I willing to give up drinking forever? My answer was No. I wanted to want to do that, but I didn t do it. Ask yourself that question right now and answer it. The answer is so important. Think about how liberating it would be not to want any extra food. Blind acceptance of overeating as a pleasurable and a harmless activity contaminates your life. I want you guys to think about that for a minute. We have a blind acceptance of overeating. Everybody is overeating all around us. So many people are overweight around us. We talk about it as if it s a pleasurable and harmless activity. One of the examples I use in my masterclass is if somebody is not eating a cupcake. If I m handing out cupcakes and somebody is not eating a cupcake, they have to explain to me why they re not. Why don t you want one? The same with alcohol, Why aren t you drinking tonight? We have to justify, we have to explain, why we re not overeating. Why we re not eating cupcakes, when the opposite should be true. We should be able to ask

5 5 people, Why are you eating that cupcake? Why are you drinking that chardonnay? You should have a better explanation than that. Because we have this blind acceptance that when people don t overeat, when people aren t eating just for pleasure, they have to justify that. Do you see how backwards that is? That s something I want you to start thinking about. Hmm, why do I have to explain when I m not overeating? Not wanting to overeat is much more important than losing weight. Most of us are focused on losing weight, but that s just treating the symptom. We have to start by focusing on the real cause. The cause is overeating first of all. But that is also a symptom of the desire to overeat. We have to start with the desire. My goal for you is I want you to not want to overeat. I m going to talk more about that. Desire is the reason you overeat. You overeat because you want to. You learned to desire it. Think about that. You learned to desire overeating. It s screwed up, but it s true. You want to have cupcakes and cookies and have seconds and snacks because you were taught that s normal. You were taught that s part of being an American. You want to eat extra food against your own will. Unconscious desire often trumps conscious will. How many times have you said, I m not going to overeat. I m not going to eat this. I m not going to eat this food. I m not going to eat gluten, I m not going to eat whatever it is. You tell yourself, I m not going to do it. Then you get in that situation and you do it. It s like you re doing it against your own will. Not only do you have one cupcake, but you have ten. You have to understand the difference between that conscious will and that unconscious desire. That unconscious desire is going to trump that conscious will every time. It s a learned pattern and your brain likes to be efficient. How do you know you want it? Because you have it. When you don t have it you feel like you re missing out, sacrificing or giving something up. One of the things I want you to think about is when you don t have a cupcake, do you feel like you re being deprived? Do you feel like you re missing out on something? Can you think about something that you don t have, that you don t feel that way about? If you don t have a cigarette do you feel like you re sacrificing or missing out? If you don t have a shot of heroin, do you feel that same way? If you don t feel that same way, that s what I want to teach you. You can feel the same way about cupcakes and extra food as you do about cigarettes (if that s not something that you want). The desire is what makes it hard not to do it. If you didn t desire it, it wouldn t be a problem. How do we remove the desire? It is the long-term solution. You can unlearn desire. The desire is what makes it hard not to do it. If you didn t desire it, it wouldn t be a problem. When I talk about drinking, it s very different to not drink alcohol but to really want it. Oh, I wish I could have a drink, but I m not going to. Can you just feel the tension in that? I genuinely don t want it now. It might as well be gasoline. It might as well be grape juice. I just prefer not to have it. That s where I want to get you with food. That s where my students have gotten with Stop Overeating. Desire resides in your mind based on conditioning. I m going to cover all of these: conditioning, dopamine, and emotion escape patterns. If you didn t want to overeat, you wouldn t have to use willpower or feel deprivation when you don t. For most of us, cigarettes aren t a problem. If cigarettes are a problem for you, pick something else. You could

6 6 put a carton of cigarettes in front of me and I wouldn t have to use willpower and I wouldn t feel deprived. I just wouldn t have them. That s how I want food to be for you. I don t want you to adjust. Oh gosh, don t bring food in the house. I want you to be able to have all the food there and genuinely not want it. We re going to remove that desire. The way that we remove that desire is by: Understanding the conditioning. Understanding how the neurotransmitter dopamine works. Understanding how we use food and weight pain as a way to not feel our emotions because we don t know how to sustain presence during an uncomfortable emotion. A lot of people say, I want to be normal and eat what I want. You ll say, I just want to be able to eat a little bit of everything. It sounds like such an innocent thing to say. This is the wrong thing to strive for. Wanting to eat like a normal person, wanting to eat in moderation is kind of like saying, I want to have a little bit of heroin every once in a while. Thinking about it that way is not serving you. How do we know? You ve probably thought about it that way and you haven t been able to be at the weight you want. Most importantly, you still have that mental chatter around food. You need to focus on not eating less, but on desiring less. That s a huge difference, right? Most of us focus on eating less, but our desire is still sky high. Eating less becomes painful. If I really want something but I don t eat it, then I m going to feel pain. If I don t want to eat it and I don t eat it, then I don t. You need to focus on desiring less, not just eating less. Instead of saying I want to be able to have one cupcake and then be done with it, it s better to say I want cupcakes to be irrelevant. Most people come to me and they say I want to be able to go to a party and have a piece of cake and just be done with it, or have a couple bites of cake and be done with it. I think that s a misplaced desire to want to do something. Wouldn t it be better if you didn t care about cupcakes? If cake wasn t even relevant? It s just like somebody having a cigarette. Wouldn t that be easier than trying to decide Should I have one bite, should I have 2 bites, should I have 3 bites, should I have some cake, should I not have some cake? I m not sure. This is what used to happen to me with wine. I m only going to have a glass of wine, maybe I ll have two glasses, oh it s fine I ll just have two and a half glasses of wine. It was constant chatter in my mind about whether I was going to drink or not drink. It s the same with food. It s much more effective to be free from the desire than it is to try and manage your desire with willpower, extra decisions, and chatter. Deprivation is painful, but deprivation isn t caused by diets or not eating. It s caused by the desire to overeat. Please hear that. People think diets cause deprivation. Diets don t cause deprivation. Deprivation is caused by the desire to overeat. We condemn diets because they don t accommodate our desire to overeat. When we go on a diet, we have this huge desire to overeat and we ve limited our food, so we constantly feel terrible, and then we end up overeating on the backend. Who do we blame? The diet. Think about going on a diet if you didn t have any desire to overeat. Easy peasy. People that don t have food issues like we do can go on a diet and they re fine. Depends on what kind of food is on that diet though, we ll talk about that in a later section.

7 7 Conditioning Let s talk about conditioning, how we are conditioned to want food, to desire food. Media and TV. Think about when you watch TV, how many commercials there are for beer and for food. It s always a really skinny hot girl eating a huge hamburger and French fries. It s always really sexy volleyball players drinking beer. Holidays. Think about holidays. Can you imagine a holiday without food? How do you celebrate a holiday without food? We re totally conditioned that all holidays, all celebrations include food. Restaurants. At restaurants, it s not just let me bring you a small plate that you can enjoy. It s let me bring you an appetizer, let me bring you a meal, let me bring you a dessert, let me bring you huge portions. We re totally setup for overeating. Snacks. Look at the amount of snacks available and the industries that are built on providing snacks to us. One of the biggest differences between 1950 and 2013 when they did a study, was that our weight has completely ballooned, which makes no sense if you think about how much more knowledgeable we are about weight, how much more knowledgeable we are about food. You would think that we would be thinner, we re twice as fat. The other huge difference is the amount of snacks. It used to be don t spoil your dinner. Don t eat in between meals. Now it s, do you need a snack? You need a snack, here s a snack, take a snack, put a snack in your backpack, keep the snack, always have a snack and the snack is usually processed food. We re trained to want that.

8 8 Dopamine The next thing that causes desire, which is literally a physical desire in our brain, is dopamine. It s a neurotransmitter in our brain that increases when we eat certain foods. For example, when we eat sugar or when we eat flour, that neurotransmitter goes up tremendously. If you were to eat an apple that just had a little bit of sugar in it, your dopamine level will go up a little bit and you d find pleasure in it, which would be great. We concentrate all of that sugar down and we have it and it completely floods our brain and dopamine goes through the roof. Now that desire is pleasurable. Most of the time we don t think about desire being pleasurable but it is. When we look at something that we desire, we feel pleasure. We don t feel satisfied but we feel pleasure. We feel like we want more of that. That s why dopamine creates addiction with heroin, and with cocaine, and with food, with sugar and flour. Actually, researchers learned that sugar is, in many ways, more addictive than cocaine because all it does is create desire. I eat some sugar, dopamine goes up, and it makes me want more. Dopamine goes up, it makes me want more, dopamine goes up, it makes me want more. The other problem is that the more dopamine that is in my system, the more it floods those receptors in my brain. It s constantly flooding it so the receptors in my brain get overloaded and the receptors downgrade themselves. They re like Whoa, this is too much. What happens where I used to eat an apple and get a rush a dopamine, now when I eat an apple I get nothing. I ve overflowed myself with sugar, so now an apple doesn t give me that same rush. I have to eat twice as much food just to have that same experience of natural dopamine. That s really powerful to understand. Our bodies have not adapted to our refining process, our concentrated food process. Our brains are completely trying to adapt by diminishing our receptors.

9 9 Emotions & Weight Pain The last reason why we re conditioned is emotions. We use pleasure to avoid emotional pain. The pleasure of eating. Food is supposed to be pleasurable. We have now made it so it s overly pleasurable and we use that to avoid feeling. It dulls the vibration in our body. The more food we have in our body the less we feel. That s another reason why we overeat. We use it as a distraction, as a coping mechanism. Instead of being present and really feeling our emotions, we eat and we distract ourselves. We focus on the food, and we focus on eating, and then we focus on weight pain, and beating ourselves up for eating so we don t have to feel whatever emotion it is that s going on in that moment. Ask yourself this, are you willing to not want it? That s not an easy question, because I was just talking to somebody the other day and they said I want to make love to the cupcake. If I said to them Are you willing not to want it, are you willing to not want the cupcake? What would you say? Most people are like No, I want to want the cupcake, except that I don t really want the cupcakes, I don t like the result of the cupcake, but I enjoy the cupcakes. Really think about that. Are you willing to not want it? That s desire, and that s huge, and you must understand the components of that. Now we re going to move onto hormones.

10 10 Hormones The reasons why we overeat are first because of our brain and our desire to overeat. The second reason is physical and it s because of hormones and hunger. What is overeating? Eating more external food than your body requires for fuel. How much you require for external fuel should depend on how much fuel you have onboard already. This is one of the ways that I like to talk about this is people say How do you lose weight? What do you eat in order to lose weight? I say You eat your own fat. That s the best way to lose weight, you dine on yourself. The reason I ve used the words external food is because a lot of times, people think if they re going without food in between meals, or if they re fasting, or if they re not eating, that they re somehow going without, that they re starving. They re not starving. They re utilizing the fuel that s already on their body. How much you re overeating is going to depend on how much food you have onboard, how much fuel you already have available to you. That will determine how much you need from the outside world. People that are starving are people that don t have fat on their bodies. They re literally consuming their own muscle and their own organs, that s what starving is. Skipping a meal is not starving. Skipping is a meal is you utilizing the fat that s on your body. One of the important ways to know if you re overeating is to ask yourself Are you hungry when you re eating? My initial work that I used to do with clients was If you re not hungry, that s emotional eating and we need to solve for that. That is true. But what I noticed with a lot of my clients is they were hungry all the time and that didn t make sense. They were overeating but they felt hungry all the time. That s because of hormones. When you look at this hunger scale and you think about negative 10 being starving and positive 10 being completely stuffed and 0 being not hungry and not full, it s really helpful to be able to categorize your own hunger. Where are you on that hunger scale? Right now, think about that. Where are you right now on the hunger scale? Notice where you go to answer that question. Did you go to your brain and say When s the last time you ate? What did you eat? Or did you go to your body and check in? You need to go to your body and check in. Your hunger doesn t depend on the last time you ate. Your hunger depends on your body and what does it feel like, does it feel hungry? If it does, where on that scale does it feel? Does it feel like you re at a negative 8 or does it feel like you re a positive 8? Where are you on that hunger scale? Be careful not to go to your brain. In order to have your hunger dictate when you should eat, your hormones need to be balanced. Let me teach you a little bit about hormones. How much you re overeating is going to depend on how much food you have onboard You don t need to know all about hormones, hormone study is very complicated, for me anyway. I know that some of you reading this are science buffs and it s not a problem, but for me I don t understand that stuff very well.

11 11 But I studied it pretty deeply, so I ve tried to simplify it for you here. There are three hormones I m going to talk about. I m going to talk about ghrelin, I m going to talk about leptin, and I m going to talk about insulin. Ghrelin. Ghrelin is important because it increases hunger, it s a hormone that s found in the stomach and it tells you when you re hungry. The more ghrelin you have, the more hungry you re going to feel, the more often you re going to eat. What s interesting about ghrelin is if you normally eat 6 times a day, at those times that you The more concentrated the food, and the more sugar, the more ghrelin you re going to have, the hungrier you re going to feel normally eat, you will have a release of ghrelin telling you It s time to eat. Is that based on what your fuel needs are or is it based on your conditioning? Unfortunately it s based on your conditioning. Ideally I only want ghrelin coming out when I really need some fuel, but that s not how it works. It s conditioned and the other problem is that the more concentrated the food you eat, the more ghrelin you re going to experience. For example, if I drink a Coke that could have 300 calories in it, because the stomach lining doesn t experience that as food, as calories, it won t indicate to my brain that I ve had 300 calories and, in fact, it will tell me that I m hungry. It won t tell me that I ve had enough calories to add enough fat to my body, so I will be constantly hungry. The more concentrated the food, and the more sugar, the more ghrelin you re going to have, the hungrier you re going to feel. This hormone must be managed if we want to eat to our body s wisdom. We can t throw off our hunger signals and then eat to our body s wisdom because we re constantly creating a false sense of hunger with more ghrelin than we need. Leptin. Leptin is the other side of it. The way that I remember ghrelin being the hunger hormone is like your stomach s growling, like grrr with a capital G. Leptin lets you know when you re full. It s released from your fat cells. It s like Dude, we re good. We don t need to eat anymore. We re not hungry anymore. It lets you now when you re full. It s fantastic! Just pump some more leptin into me because it takes away my appetite. I want more and more leptin. The truth is the more fat you have the more leptin you have. They used to think they could just give more leptin to people, they would be less hungry and they would lose weight rapidly. That didn t happen. In fact they did this test on mice, they gave them tons of leptin and they were hoping they would lose weight but they didn t. They were trying to figure out why, since obese people have the most leptin (because it s created in the fat cells), why are they more hungry? Shouldn t they be full all the time? Here s the reason why: too much insulin blocks leptin at the brain. That leptin is saying Hey, we ve had enough. We ve got plenty of fat on board. We don t need any more food. If you have too high of insulin that hormone will block that message from going to the brain. You won t be able to feel full because it s completely blocked. In fact you re going to feel hungry a lot more of the time. Now, you can change and manage your leptin sensitivity, which is so fantastic. I ve gotten myself to the point where I rarely feel hungry because I have so much leptin onboard. Think about those times in your life when you are just genuinely not hungry. It s so much freedom and it s so much pleasure. The way that you re able to do

12 12 that is by managing your insulin level, which manages your leptin, which lets you know that you re full and decreases your appetite. Then it s not hard because you don t have that physical desire to overeat. If you don t have the mental desire to overeat then what are you going to do? You re going to access your fat reserves, which is what exactly we want to do. I call it sending the body for takeout. Take it out of my own body. I don t need to go to the store. Eating more fat can help with leptin management and decreased appetite. We ll talk some more about that in a later section. Insulin. We talked about ghrelin, which lets you know that you re hungry. We talked about leptin, which lets you know when you re full really important hormones when you re trying to eat according to your hunger scale. Let s talk about insulin. I know a lot of insulin because of my son s insulin resistance, and because insulin is the main hormone that will determine if you gain, maintain, or lose your weight. The more you can learn about insulin, the better. Insulin controls your blood sugar. It drives glucose out of the blood and into fat, muscles, and liver. When you eat something, it s all broken down into glucose and that glucose needs to be managed. It s a beautiful thing. Insulin takes it out of the blood and puts it into the fat or into the muscles for use. Type 1 Diabetics don t make insulin. They can literally starve to death or they get toxic blood sugar levels because insulin doesn t take the sugar out of the blood and put it into the fat or put it into the muscles. It s really fascinating. There are people that have Type 1 diabetes that actually they have an eating disorder where they take less insulin in order to weigh less. The less insulin you have, the less opportunity you have to store fat. Type 2 diabetics have way too much insulin. I know that s confusing for some people because sometimes Type 2 diabetics need to take insulin, which is crazy and let me explain why. When you have too much insulin because you re eating too much sugar, is one reason why your blood sugar s not controlled because you re eating way too much food that turns into glucose, so you have too much insulin that s being produced. What happens is everything down regulates and you become insulin resistant. The pancreas literally pumps out more, and more, and more, and more insulin trying to accommodate it and eventually stops. You have plenty of insulin in your blood, it s just that you re insulin resistant. They have to actually put more insulin into your blood in order to manage your blood sugar. Why is this a problem? Insulin blocks fat burning, it s the fat storage hormone. It takes sugar and turns it into fat and it blocks any of the fat coming out and becoming sugar. What is really important is when you have high insulin in your blood, it s really impossible to lose weight and, in fact, you re probably going to gain weight. Most Type 2 diabetics that are given insulin because they have to maintain their blood sugar end up gaining weight. Most of them are obese and that s one of the reasons why they re struggling with Type 2 diabetes is because they have too much insulin. We give them more insulin. It just perpetuated, that s why so many of the doctors say there is no cure for diabetes because the way that they re treating it is by giving more insulin and there s no way to cure diabetes if you re going to be constantly giving more insulin. There are a lot of cutting-edge doctors that are curing diabetics by managing insulin by bringing it down instead of adding more. And that s exactly what you want to think about when you re trying to lose weight. The lower your insulin, the better. Then it s not hard because you don t have that physical desire to overeat

13 13 Insulin is increased by concentrated food. When I say concentrated food throughout this book, what I want you to think about is any food that s taken out of its natural form and concentrated. For example, sugar. You take sugarcane or beets that have a little bit of sugar in them and a lot of fiber that would be released slowly, and you take it and you concentrate it into this fine grain. It s kind of like what they do with cocaine. They take the coca plant, which would totally fine if you just dealt with it by itself, but when you refine it and concentrate it, then it becomes a lethal drug. It s the same with sugar. It s the same with flour. The more concentrated that food is, the more it spikes your blood sugar, which means insulin has to flood in to bring it back down. That s why we have such a huge uptick in diabetes now, because of all the concentrated food that we have that our bodies aren t used to. Too much insulin creates insulin resistance and, eventually, Type 2 diabetes. Our bodies have not adapted enough to concentrated processed food in order to handle the increase in insulin and the weight gain it causes. When there s insulin in your blood you cannot release fat. When there s insulin in your blood, you are in storage mode. Really important to remember, concentrated food, sugar and flour increase your insulin tremendously. How do you manage your insulin? The most important question. Every single time you eat your insulin goes up. It makes sense, right? Every time you eat, you get nourishment in your body, you re going to get glucose in your blood, the insulin will come in and it s important. It s coming in to take care of you. It s coming in to take the nutrients that you have in the blood and utilize them. Put them into your muscles, put them into your fat, put them into your liver. Sugar and flour affects your insulin more than anything. They are found concentrated in processed food. The more concentrated your food, the more insulin goes up, and then the more hunger and cravings that you have. Remember, when you have a lot of insulin in your blood, it blocks leptin. The more concentrated your food, the less pressure you re going to have on the inside of your stomach wall, the more ghrelin you re going to have. The more insulin you have in your blood, the less weight you re able to lose and the more weight you can easily gain. When my son had insulin resistance, he had really high insulin in his blood so we would go out to a restaurant, eat, and he would be hungry right after. We d be leaving the restaurant and he d say, I m hungry. We d say, What? What are you talking about? It was like constant insulin that wasn t being processed properly. The goal is less insulin. Always remember that that is the goal. 1. If you re trying to lose weight, I cannot emphasize enough that eliminating sugar and flour most of the time will be really powerful. Sugar and flour keep insulin elevated. 2. Give your body a chance to lower insulin levels by not snacking in between meals, too. Remember, every time you eat, your insulin goes up. If you re snacking in between meals, your insulin s going to keep going up in between those meals. 3. Eat more fat and protein and less carbohydrates to lower your insulin. When they measure insulin levels, it s dependent on how much glucose is in your blood. That s the glycemic index, which is a good general idea to look at, although there are some discrepancies. In general, fat doesn t make your insulin go up. Protein makes it go up a little bit. Carbohydrates make it go up more. The more fiber you have in those carbohydrates, the less it ll go up. Simple carbohydrates, sugar and flour and grains make it go way up and keep it elevated, depending on how much you eat. You can reverse insulin resistance rapidly and begin losing weight quickly, even when it s been impossible before, by making these adjustments. It s exactly what happened to my son. We took him off of sugar and we took him off of flour and we lowered his simple carbohydrate intake and he lost weight like that. It was amazing to watch.

14 14 Less insulin allows more leptin into the brain and you re therefore less hungry. It was amazing to watch how, all of a sudden, he wasn t hungry all the time. It was such a relief to us. We ve talked about desire and we ve talked about hormones. Those are the two main reasons why we overeat. We have that emotional desire, that neuro-pathway desire and we also have the physical desire to overeat. We have to solve that first. The next step is losing fat. Don t even try to lose fat until you figure out how to stop overeating, because they will just cancel each other out. You ll be constantly trying to lose fat and maybe you will be losing fat, but you ll keep pouring it in anyway. You ll always be at that struggle. Do that desire and that hormonal work first. Then we ll talk about losing fat. The thing you need to consume to lose weight is your own fat. Do not forget that.

15 15 Discomfort & Change Comfort is the enemy of change. Discomfort is harmless. I m always telling this to my students. You have to be willing to be uncomfortable. The thing is, what you re doing now is effortless. It s easy to overeat because it s a pattern. To change that pattern you have to be willing to change something that you re doing, which will make you uncomfortable. The brain doesn t like to be uncomfortable. The prefrontal cortex is actually quite lazy. It doesn t want to make changes. You have to be willing to move into the discomfort to make the change that you need to make. The brain resists it. You have to stop gaining before you start losing. You have to stop overeating to reduce the insulin. There will be some discomfort with that. If you work on your desire to overeat it ll be much less than if you have to deal with deprivation and willpower. Unconscious desire is effortless. We need to make the unconscious desire be to not overeat. In order to make that change, we have to bring it up to our awareness, change it and then make it effortless. That is uncomfortable. The gap between where you are now and where you want to go is paved with temporary discomfort. Sometimes we call that the river of misery. The space in between two models. Unconscious desire must be replaced with freedom from desire. One of the ways I like to describe this is like, I used to have this crazy crush on a bad boy, that I knew wasn t any good for me. I just wanted to drive by his house and see what he was doing and wait for him to call and try and call him. It was this overwhelming desire. Then one day I realized desire for that person was gone. I could see that person. That person could come over. That person could call me and there was nothing there. Nothing, the freedom from that desire. That s where we want to go with food. In order to do that, we have to take our effortless desire now. Bring it to consciousness. Change it and then make the new desire effortless. The desire to only eat when we re hungry. Physical cravings have to be eliminated. How do we do this? We do this by reconditioning the brain to believe new thoughts about food and overeating. We find out what you currently believe about overeating by closely paying attention to why you overeat and then deciding to believe something differently on purpose. Now this may sound like basic knowledge. For most of us, all of our overeating is so unconscious, is so programmed that we re not even aware of why we do it. That s why I say closely paying attention. Closely paying attention to why you overeat is not enjoyable. Your brain resists it. It s like, Why should we pay attention to that, that s so effortless. If I had to describe to you how exactly I brush my teeth, that s a tedious process. Why? I m just going to brush my teeth. I don t have to explain the steps to you. That s what this process is. It s dissecting all of those little pieces. I was just dealing with one of my clients who had had an issue with some overeating. I wanted to break it down step, by step, by step, by step, by step, which The gap between where you are now and where you want to go is paved with temporary discomfort

16 16 is really tedious because the brain wants to keep that unconscious. We have to pay attention to what is driving your current behavior. Now if you don t overeat, if you don t have the cupcake, how will you feel? Why will you feel that way? Do you know? I always say if you re overeating, stop overeating. It will become really clear, really fast what you re feeling instead. For example, with my drinking, having a glass of wine. I noticed when I didn t have a glass of wine, I felt restless. I was like, Oh, that s so interesting. Think about what a hard sell that is. Hey, you could have a glass of chardonnay or you can feel restless. I think I m going to have the glass of chardonnay. What I m suggesting is that you have to choose restless over the chardonnay in the short term, until the chardonnay becomes completely irrelevant to you. At first, it s going to be a hard sell. But as long as you choose to feel the truth of what you re feeling instead of escaping it, then that will become your effortless pattern.

17 17 Fat Adaptation Let s talk a little bit about fat adaptation. That s when your body prefers your own fat as fuel. Often when we try and eat less, the body goes into withdrawal from the processed food and the concentrated food that we ve been eating. That makes it unsustainable. We feel that withdrawal. We feel icky. We feel hungry. We feel like we need more food. We get that icky feeling. My husband will say, I need to eat. It s not please, can we eat? It s I need to eat right now, let s go. It s like he s hangry (hungry and angry). That s what happens when we try to stop eating flour and sugar and all of that processed food at once: we feel hangry because our body isn t tapping into our fat source. We literally need to train our body to rely on itself for fuel, which it does automatically, by the way. It s not like we eat a bunch of food and that food is utilized. What happens is, we eat a bunch of food and it s stored for the next couple of hours. A lot of us, if we eat again, we just use that glucose that we re eating instead of utilizing our own body for fuel. Your body would prefer that you just keep eating. You can just use the glucose that you re eating, that s the easiest way. It s harder to break down the food typically. You have to get your body so it actually prefers to be fat-adapted. That s when your insulin is low. That s when you feel better. That s when you re not hungry and your leptin is high. That s when everything is beautiful. You have to train your body into that. The other thing you need to know is what are your patterns of action that have become effortless and lead to overeating? What s going on because habits don t require decisions? They re just something that you do habitually. When you re in the habit mode, you re not living deliberately. You re not making conscious decisions. You are living by default, so what does that mean? That s why when you see people that are the exact same weight they have always been. We just keep repeating those same patterns because they re effortless. We re not making conscious decisions. When we start paying attention, then we can make decisions that are different. It takes increased awareness and meticulous journaling and attention to not only what we re eating, but why we re eating it. We go through the discomfort of changing them so the new habits become effortless.

18 18 Committing, Deciding & Rehearsing Let s talk about a commitment. People will say, I m totally committed to losing weight. I m all in to losing weight. I ll do whatever it takes. I ll ask, Will you give me 50,000 dollars if you don t lose weight? They re like, Whoa. Whoa. I don t know about that. Ask yourself, how committed are you to something? Would you give not just me $50,000 would you give the worst nightmare presidential hopeful, would you give them $50,000? Would you give a charity you don t believe in $50,000, if you didn t? That s how you know if you re really committed. What s the difference between your idea of committed and how much skin you are willing to put in the game? What are you afraid of? Why don t you commit to never overeating right now? Really ask yourself that question. Are you willing to never overeat again, right now? Listen to your reasons, you must solve for those reasons. Why do you believe you re sacrificing by not overeating? This is how I used to feel about chardonnay. I thought, I m not going to commit to never drinking again. That s a horrible idea. Especially because I wasn t an alcoholic. I wasn t abusing alcohol. I just felt the way I used to feel about food. That I was drinking it against my own will sometimes. I wasn t feeling good at all the next morning. I used to think life without chardonnay would be such a bummer. What I found out is life without chardonnay is so much better than life with it. I had this association. I think many of you do, too. You think giving up extra food would be a huge sacrifice. Who s going to give up cupcakes forever? Now I m not suggesting that you do. I m suggesting that you look inside your mind and see what your thought patterns are because you may not even be aware of them. It s really important that you pay attention. Moderating overeating is accommodating our desire to overeat. Your commitment can be to eliminating the desire. Think about it. Nobody says, I want to moderate my smoking. I want to moderate my heroin. I know that those are extreme examples. I want you to think about why do you want to moderate your eating? Trying to moderate your eating and your overeating hasn t served you. It hasn t brought you to the place and the results that you want. I want to take your brain to the point where you don t have to moderate your desire. What I found out is life without chardonnay is so much better than life with it Most solutions to weight loss try to help us moderate our reaction to our desire. One of the examples I like to use is shoplifting. Can you imagine if people had the desire to shoplift? We would say, Okay, for all you people who have the desire to shoplift, we re going to create pretend stores. You can go in there and shoplift. It will be kind of like shoplifting, but not really. I feel like that s what some of our foods are, like Pop Chips. You desire to eat too many potato chips. I don t know if Pop Chips are pretend potato chips. Let me create really low fat food with lots of chemicals in it that

19 19 make you think that you re eating something. We haven t addressed the desire. We re just trying to accommodate it. We would never do that with shoplifting. We d never be like, You want to shoplift? Let me finagle some scenario so you can be able to shoplift. You like to overeat, let me make some Snack Well cookies so you can overeat and not gain as much weight. I think we need to take it deeper. Instead of accommodating this desire, we need to say, Where is this desire coming from? What if we change that? Then the food won t matter. People don t try and cut back on shoplifting because it would never work. I don t want you to think about eating less in that same way. I want you to think about, I don t want to desire food that my body doesn t need. Here s what your commitment looks like. You make the decision, no matter what. Maybe and I ll try is a huge problem. Do not spend your time in maybe, I don t know or I ll try energy. Either say, I m going to go all in and do it or I m not going to do it. Don t keep yourself in that energy because what that does is it perpetuates the idea that you can t be successful. You keep believing that you can t be successful. You keep believing you can t be successful when you haven t really gone all in. The only way to uncondition this programming is to go all in with it, because your brain wants to stay the same way. It takes so much effort to change it. Once it s changed, it s changed permanently. You have to have a great why. Why do you want to stop overeating? You have to be willing to stick to it no matter what. You have to commit to believing that it s possible. That s really hard for people to believe they can lose weight because they ve believed for so long that they can t. I would say that s my biggest challenge with clients, is letting them know You can lose this weight permanently and not make a big effort to sustain it. We can make it until it s just effortless. Massive action means you take action until you get the result you want. You do not stop until you get the result you want. Cognitive dissonance is disagreeing with yourself. That s where a lot of you are. You have a desire to overeat and you have a desire to be thin. I remember when I was a kid I used to think, I can t wait to get to the place in Heaven where I can eat fettuccine Alfredo and be skinny. Those were my competing desires. Cognitive dissonance is very uncomfortable because we have this huge challenge between who we want to be, in terms of being thin, and what we want to be able to eat. You have to give up one or the other. Otherwise you re going to have constant cognitive dissonance. What determines how you feel is your level of belief when you start attaining the results. When you think about your results. When you think about losing weight. You think about getting to your goal weight and staying there effortlessly, how do you feel? If you currently feel conflicted. If you currently feel struggle and pain, you have a lot of cognitive dissonance. Which means your desire to overeat is still too strong. That s what we need to work on. That s what we need to work on. That s what you need to spend time on. Ask yourself this, how much time do you focus on the solution? Which is being at your goal weight and eating the way that will sustain it. How much time do you focus on the problem? Which is, I want that food, I want that food, I want that food. You need to spend more time thinking about your future and where you want to go versus where you currently are in the struggle that you re in and the past struggle that you ve always had. Whenever I talk to my clients they re always like, I ve never been able to do it before. I tell you what, that is completely irrelevant.

20 20 I have students that are in my Stop Overeating Masterclass that are at the thinnest weight they ve ever been in their lives, except when they were maybe toddlers, really young kids. Really think about that. Really think about, your future does not depend on your past. You can have a future where you don t desire overeating. I promise you that. Let s talk about mental rehearsal. You think about who you want to be. Then you study for the part like a character in a play. You practice believing being someone that can be at their goal weight effortlessly by practicing the thoughts that person would have. Practicing their patterns of action. That person, by the way, isn t good at resisting food. That person is not interested in it. They don t go into a party and think, I m not going to have that cupcake. I m not going to have it. I m not going to have it. I m not going to have it. They just don t even notice the cupcake. They re much too interested in the people. That s what you have to rehearse in your mind and practice. By spending more time thinking about where you want to be versus where you are right now, is what will create that personality. Which will create the memory that gravitates you ahead of time and will get you there so much faster. Focus on your commitment to the result and adjusting action as needed to get the result. How would you behave in that situation if you didn t desire? One of the things I used to do when I was thinking about alcohol was, I told myself: I would go into a bar and I would sit down. It would be a beautiful bar and I would order a beautiful non-alcoholic drink. I would still enjoy everything and I would be very sophisticated. I would still have a great time. I used to associate that with having a glass of chardonnay. I started visualizing it and practicing it before it even happened. Now that s my reality. Never doubt your decision to stop overeating. Overeating causes the problem, it doesn t solve it. So many of us believe overeating is a solution to pain. Overeating is the cause of the pain. There s a concept I teach called Decisions Ahead of Time. Those of you who listen to my podcasts know about this. Reacting and resisting in the moment are what lead to overeating. The skill of deciding what you want ahead of time, planning, and then honoring that plan, can get you to any dream you want. You re always going to make better decisions before than you do in the moment. Decisions eliminate chatter. How many times have you guys been at Starbucks and you ve been like, Should I have a cookie? Should I not have a cookie? Should I have a pasty? The scones are so little. Maybe I ll just have a Frappuccino. I won t have it with whipped cream, if I don t leave on the whipped cream then that s okay. Maybe I ll get a non-fat latte because that doesn t really count. All of that chatter. If you ve decided ahead of time you re just going to have a coffee with a little bit of cream and it s going to be a grande and you ve decided the day before, there s no chatter. You just go in and you purchase it. You practice believing being someone that can be at their goal weight effortlessly by practicing the thoughts that person would have You re always going to make that decision more thoughtfully and better the day before than you do in that moment. You re able to stay present in your decision making pre-frontal decisions versus when you re in that moment and you may be feeling stressed or tired, you may have depleted all your willpower. It doesn t matter if you ve decided ahead of time. It s one thing we do a lot of when we re trying to lose weight, when we go through this process. The other thing I want you to decide ahead of time is, what if the scale doesn t go down the way you want it to? What if it doesn t go down as fast as you want it to? What are you going to do?

21 21 I want you to decide right now. In that moment you re going to freak out. You know what most people do? I want you guys to stay with me on this. What do most people do when the scale doesn t go down and they ve been eating really clean, what do they do when the scale doesn t go down? What s their answer to the scale not going down? They go and they eat and they overeat. This makes no sense. It s like Oh my gosh, this scale s not going down, I think I ll go eat a bunch of food. All of this has been uncomfortable and I haven t lost weight so forget it, I m just going to go eat. You have to decide ahead of time, you don t know how fast that scale s going to go down or not and you can t be dependent on it. Decide ahead of time that you re going to be committed and you re not going to let that scale dictate.

22 22 Your Lifetime Protocol The last piece I want to talk about is the protocol. This is something that I have created. You create a protocol for yourself that serves your needs. Only you can decide what that is. I m not going to tell you what you can eat, I m going to give you all the research, I m going to tell you what I know, I m going to tell you what I ve seen work with some people, what I ve seen work with other people. Then you create the protocol of how you re going to eat. The question isn t Is my protocol sustainable? The question is Is my life sustainable without overeating? I had a student say to me I don t think this is a sustainable way to eat. This was a really healthy way that she was eating and she was eating plenty of food. She said, I don t think this is sustainable. I said, Why? She said, Because I want all this other food and I desire all this other food and I feel like I m whiteknuckling it, I m using willpower. I said to her, What would have to happen in your life to make your protocol sustainable? Instead of changing your protocol to make your protocol more sustainable to your life, change your life. Make it so you don t need to overeat. Make it so that your relationship with yourself is so good that you don t need to overeat. The answer isn t finding the right diet, the answer is finding a life and a way of being with yourself so that overeating isn t necessary. How do you find the fuel that works for you? Everyone needs to discover what their body can eat for fuel. Diets can t tell you exactly because they aren t aligned with your body and most of us have a lot of fuel onboard already. We don t need to be adding a lot of fuel and making it complicated. You find your fuel by experimenting and seeing if it fits your requirements. Does it feel good in your body? Does it give you the energy you want and need? Does it help you lose weight? Those are the three most important questions. Now, I say this with the caveat that you may have to go through a period of withdrawal taking yourself off some foods, and being tired, and going through withdrawal, and feeling icky for a while until you re really able to answer those questions. Remember, the lower the insulin response, the better. Insulin prevents weight loss. Remember flour and sugar raise insulin in your blood. You need to get yourself off of those things so you can really determine Am I hungry? Is my ghrelin working, is my leptin working, is everything aligned? The next question you have to ask, not just what to eat, but also when, When should I be eating? You need to decide that ahead of time. Don t be responsive in the moment, especially in the beginning. I highly recommend you reconsider everything you ve been taught and you eat in a way that keeps your insulin the lowest. We used to be taught (and I used to teach eat all the time), six meals a day, constantly be eating. That will work for you if your hormones are completely aligned. Most of us, especially if we re over 40, our hormones are not perfectly aligned. The less often you eat, the less insulin you will have. Snacking all the time will prevent your insulin from Make it so that your relationship with yourself is so good that you don t need to overeat

23 23 ever coming down. For most people, six meals a day is atrocious, it s not going to work in order to get your insulin down. My first recommendation is don t ever snack in between meals. And it s okay to skip a meal now and then. I want to talk a little bit about fasting and intermittent fasting and how that really helps with your insulin. My son Christian, who was insulin resistant, could not fast. He s a child, he can t fast and he completely reduced his insulin resistance. It s not completely necessary, it s just another tool we can use. Decide when you will give your body a break from insulin and see if it helps you lose weight at the rate you want. Experiment and see what works for you. Now, I ve freaked you out, right? I m telling you that you don t want to desire food. You don t want to desire overeating. I do not believe that you should go without food for entertainment forever. I do think you should explore the reasons why you need it. The most effective programs that are in the world today completely eliminate joy eating. They are programs that are like Food Addicts Anonymous is one of the most effective programs. They have a 20 percent compared to a 1 percent success rate long term. They completely remove all food as entertainment forever. There s never an option where you can have a piece of cake ever. I think there s a way to do both. I think you can implement joy eating. Here are my rules for joy eating: I recommend eating a food that has nothing good to do for you once a week and is planned 24 hours in advance. It has to be planned. You have to choose it and you have to plan it ahead. Then you pick an amount to eat and you stop eating when that amount is up or when you stop enjoying it. You savor, you pay attention to each bite. You be really clear with yourself. Now here s where 90 percent of the people that are in my Stop Overeating program right now have lost their desire to joy eat. They do not find the joy in it. The problem is that eating cake and eating chips and eating all of that stuff doesn t give you the same effect when you re not using it as a way of escaping or distracting. When you really sit down and sit to enjoy it. It s not as enjoyable as it was distracting. I have worksheet that we call the tedious power worksheet where you taste each bite and really enjoy it. It really teaches you about which foods you really do enjoy. I recommend that you add that in, any food you want cake, pizza, whatever. Make sure you plan it ahead and it s deliberate. You re not eating against your will. Planning is something that really goes along with those decisions ahead of time. Being deliberate in what you want and why you want it. I suggest planning for your life. I also suggest planning your food. When you learn to honor your plan you learn how to trust yourself and how to establish a great relationship with yourself. Which is a huge issue when it comes to eating. Most of us don t trust ourselves because we ve been eating against our own will. We don t understand that our unconscious programming is not some moral ineptitude, it s just the way that our brain is designed. We can trust ourselves if we know how to program our brains. Write down what you re going to eat tomorrow and then don t change it, no matter what. No matter, I don t feel like it or I don t want it. I m bored. I always say, So what? Food isn t there to entertainment you. It s not supposed to be exciting, it s there to fuel you. If you re bored with it, it s fine. Sometimes I m bored with my husband. I stay with him. It s all fine. I don t expect him to be constantly entertaining. We expect that from our food. We expect our food to constantly entertain us because that s what we ve been programmed to believe. Journaling (and this is something that I ve never wavered on): you have to write down everything you

24 24 eat every day. You can t lose weight without paying attention to what you re eating and how it s affecting your weight, period. You need to have a way of seeing what you re doing. These people that have been in my program for six months have been able to see every single thing they ve eaten for six months and how it s affected their weight. There is no more important information. You stopped losing weight. You can see what changed. What s working. What isn t working. Really powerful. This is not optional. If you are doing this on your own, or if you are doing it with me, it s not optional. Consciousness is what solves the weight problem. You have to become conscious of what you re eating and why you re eating it. Remember, don t seek relief in the thing that s causing the misery. We seek relief in food, but food is the thing that s causing the misery that we re in. Here s the summary: You have to commit to losing weight. You have to understand how the body loses weight. How does it lose weight? It consumes itself, literally. Understand how the mind changes. Then change your mind and your body by choosing a protocol and doing the mental work to honor the protocol that you have chosen. Repeat it until the new patterns are effortless and you have no desire to overeat. That is the process and it works beautifully. Is it easy? No. I will tell you this. It s simple to do if you are willing to be uncomfortable. If you re willing to experience discomfort. If you re willing to go straight in. Then you will get to the point where you re new comfort will be the solution to your problem. It s the temporary discomfort in exchange for the longterm misery that you ve been experiencing. Here are the side effects of stopping overeating: emotional freedom from fighting your desires, weight loss, your ability to be around all types of foods and situations, living in the truth of your emotions, and your ability to manage short-term discomfort and release long-term misery. This kind of freedom is totally worth it, I promise you. But if you need some additional support, let me tell you about my Stop Overeating Masterclass.

25 25 Self Coaching Scholars Once you stop overeating, you are left with what remains. What remains is your relationship with yourself. There is a reason you are overeating, and once you stop overeating, that reason becomes very apparent. The way you deal with not overeating is through self coaching. You will need to learn how to feel without eating or buffering. You will need to learn how to manage your emotions without eating. You will need to find pleasure in other areas of your life that don t include overeating. As part of the Self Coaching Scholars program, you get complete access to the Stop Overeating Workshop. In this workshop I go through all the detailed steps of how to lose weight and keep it off permanently. You also get full access to me for coaching and questions about your process and anything you are struggling with. You also get access to a certified weight loss coach who has been through the Stop Overeating Masterclass program as a client and lost all of her weight. She will be available to help you with any protocol questions or goal weight questions you might have. In addition, you will get all the coaching tools you need to keep your mind focused on the foundation you need to not gain the weight back. You will get a package of bonus materials that give you a basic overview of how to coach yourself, stop buffering, and manage your emotions. Each month you will get a new set of lessons to keep you focused on all the underlying causes of overeating and self-sabotage. This program has worked for hundreds of clients to lose weight and keep it off permanently. You can t just imagine what you will look like when you have lost the weight. You have to imagine what you will be doing with your mind and your emotions to make it enjoyable and easy. If you are feeling deprived and miserable, there is no way you will keep the weight off. Self Coaching Scholars teaches you how to lose it and then keeps you involved enough to keep it off. The membership includes the following: Getting Started Package Self Coaching 101 How to Feel Better Why You Aren t Taking Action and How to Get it Done Stop Buffering Stop Overeating Workshop and Book Stop Overdrinking Program Monthly Lesson Book and Video Monthly Podcast Workbook Four Group Coaching Calls with Brooke For more details and to sign up now, please go to thelifecoachschool.com/join.

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