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Losing weight should't be expensive or complicated. The ideal process would reduce our stress while driving results. Dr. Z weaves together his perspective on physical and mental health and the powerful way that fasting can connect these two spheres of our lives. Let's move toward total wellness and a holistic vision of health and healing. Learn more at SimpleFasting.com
All right, everybody. Welcome. So nice to have you here. Welcome to fasting Space. I've got the herbal tea and going to chill out with you this morning. Encourage you. Grab a coffee. Gravity. I'm Doctor Zimmerman if we haven't met. Really nice to have you here. Are you struggling to lose weight? If you are, I want to give you an especially big welcome.
I just want you to feel welcome here. I want you to know you are not alone. You're not alone in a struggle for weight loss. Something that is so common. And you're also not alone just in your personal journey coming here. I want you to feel welcome that you find a community here that recognizes that losing weight through any path is difficult, no matter how you go about it.
There's obstacles and challenges. It's okay to struggle. So many times when we're walking on a path we feel like it should be a straight path can feel like, oh, is there something is wrong with me? This is difficult. Why is it such a struggle? The struggle is real. Struggle is normal. Nothing wrong with you. I want you to know.
Is nothing wrong with you? It's okay. And come to this space. We share the struggle together. Now I'll tell you my whole goal. Pretty much my goal in life, honestly, is to help people make the struggle as small as possible. I do not want people to struggle, but I recognize that it is a struggle. Right. And so this is the paradox.
This is the balance that we're going to lean into. We want to develop a rhythm, develop a practice, develop an experience, create an experience for ourselves in which we flow through seasons of struggle like water, through a stone water carving out through a stone. It's flowing. Say water doesn't struggle. Water flows through a space. We encounter obstacles in our life.
We encounter struggle. Struggle is real. But are we overwhelmed by it? Or are we embracing it as a mindset? Are we flowing through it? Are we seeing our obstacles as stepping stones that we climb over? Are we recognizing the opportunities we have not to avoid struggle, but to embrace it and flow through it and use it to springboard us on in an experience of health and strength and vitality.
This is what I want for people. That's what this space is about, turning our obstacles and our struggles into history and experience and sources of strength and inspiration and becoming strong, resilient, shaping our experience from one where we feel struggle to one where we experience peace and contentment. Where we've built a healthy, strong and resilient relationship with food.
Where we've set boundaries and created spaces. We're okay with food when it's the appropriate time or okay without it. When flourishing is promoted in its absence, that's the fasting space. Fasting to me like a lens that can focus all of our health experience something that initially can seem intimidating, can seem difficult, that we can practice it and learn how to do it and embrace it.
Where maybe not easy, but we are heading in that direction, finding a place of ease with it. If you would like to work on that sort of thing, then I say hang out here fasting space and we work on it. It's a practice. Perfection is not required. And certainly, I'm nowhere near that space. We just we we have an aim on the distant horizon.
This is our journey. This is our life. We have an aspirational vision of a healthier, stronger version of ourselves. And we're walking on that path. And that path is not always a straight line. We encounter obstacle, struggle, come together in this space, will overcome it together, will walk along the path day by day, week by week into, the future together.
So many times we're struggling with a health issue. We're struggling to get healthier, make some sort of decision. Maybe it's, you know, in any good area of health, getting more active and moving, making healthier food choices, opening up some fasting space, trying to get over us, a food craving a situation with some sort of unhealthy thing that really has a hold on us.
It's like the first part of a fasting space is just to be able to stop a snack, like just a little bit of space get through. It can be such a struggle because food so intimately connected in to both our physical bodies and our emotional state very, very powerful space. Now, this is why I love fasting, because it's a powerful practice that is centered right at the center of this space.
Physical, emotional space really help to get at the heart of the matter. Our relationship with food at an easy space, sometimes the easy space to say, I'm just gonna I'm not even going to think about it. But is that the space that is really serving us in this season? Are you in a season now where you say, you know what, I'm ready to do some deep work.
I'm ready to dive in. I'm ready to really understand myself. And, you know, why do I think and feel the way I do and why is life the way it is? And how do I change in a very thoughtful and gentle way so that it's not overwhelming, but is a process that feels loving and thoughtful and kind and helps make life better.
Far from being overwhelming actually comes to bring peace and contentment here on a weight loss path, you're struggling to lose weight. You can feel alone. I don't want you to feel that way. I want you to recognize, hey, love, is there. Love is something I didn't alive last year. Is love the answer? Very broad question is love the answer?
People say like, oh, of course love is the answer. You know, in the big abstract sense. Of course, it's easy to say, love the answer to everything. Is it tangibly the answer to discrete problems that we have in our life, especially as we're trying to struggle down our weight loss path? What would it mean to say, well, love is the answer to something like that.
This was the reflection that I was having today. I was thinking about my own personal self. Do we have love for ourselves? Is a bigger, more important question to start? Then you know, where are we at on some health path? What is a number on a scale? Say, you know, things like that are easier to focus on. We were talking on the live earlier in the week.
Like a lot of times when we're trying to get to a really deep emotional issue, answer a complex, complicated question. One of the things that our brain does to simplify the process just keeps us answering an easier question than the really difficult question. Sometimes we don't even realize that we made the shift. We're trying to think about something difficult or exposed to something.
We just answer an easier question and we go on without really diving in. So we're in some sort of struggle in our life and is actually our weight question, like, say, I'm trying to lose weight when I get healthier means when I lose weight, then I'll be happy. Are we in a space like that and is that actually one of these processes that has hijacked the situation where it's like the deeper question is really, do I have love and compassion for myself and way deeper, but maybe that is the core thing, that that's what I want more.
I want a lot of things more. I very much want to help anybody lose weight that wants to lose it, I really do. But even even if someone never lost the weight that they want, it never could do a fasting, never could do anything if they found love, joy, peace and acceptance for themselves and said, hey, you know what?
My life is so much better. You know, I'm treating myself more kindly and, it's such a huge win, I want that. Yeah, that was my reflection. You know, today, personally, I say, oh, it's hard to even talk about it. Like, I mean, I've got work to do. Like everybody else. I say it's it's almost hard to even talk about it.
You start saying, oh, do I have love for myself? This isn't the type of thing that people normally talk about. People say we worry about every other thing. And, so to move toward that, in the midst of struggle, how do you get through a struggle? How do you actually become strong and resilient and kinder to ourselves? Let's work on it.
Let's do some deep work on it. I have this book, Dear Artist A Love Letter by Jia Zhang. I have been referring, for quite a while, really, on the channel and in our work. In weight loss is like an artistic expression. It is an artistic expression. And what I mean by that is we are creating our experience, the experience that we're having with food, with the decisions we make, how we spend our time.
We make all these decisions and it creates the experience. So many of times we think, oh, like life is just happening to me. Life is passive. Certain things do just happen. We don't control everything, but we have a huge amount of ability to change the experience that we're having to make different decisions, to have a different way of being in the world.
And, by making these different decisions, these are like different brush strokes. We're painting a different picture with our life. We're creating a health expression. This is, to me, such a beautiful and really a more loving way to do it. Then, you know, think of weight loss in our current system and really almost everything in our medical system.
It's completely analytical. It's numbers, it's data. Here's here's a much more right brain way to do it. It's an expression. It's emotional. It's an experience totally different way than just like, what are the calories? What are the macros? What is a number? Say, you know, like what is my human experience here? Know to me this is how we get down into this deeper level.
That isn't just some sort of robotic process. A robotic process be very frustrating for people because we if we reduce everything just to numbers. I haven't experienced that actually work as well with so many people, a lot of people crunching a lot of numbers and having a lot of struggle, feeling really frustrated with it. So we're trying to get down in there.
So this book is written from the perspective the author of the book is taking the perspective of love. Okay. Love is writing to you. Love is writing to me. We're receiving a message. Can that help us experience love? To recognize love is a real, tangible force. Do you believe it? Do you believe love is real? Do you believe that love exists and can it give you encouragement?
Can it bring health and healing? Dear and precious soul, this is how it starts. This is the message from love to you dear and precious. So do you refer to yourself that way already, just in your own mind. Nobody to feel self-conscious to? Would you treat yourself even so kindly? I remember when you were a young child and free.
I am writing to you now because I love you for any of my words in this letter. To sink into you and flower, you must believe that love itself is speaking to you. If you feel these words as love, they will enter and inhabit you according to my prayer, which is that you be free and true as you can be in your life and in your soul expression.
So many things have touched you along your journey. Can you tell the difference between your true nature and how you have been shaped by this world? I hope so, I want more than anything that you remember yourself and be free. You have something no one else has. You are you. You have something that everyone else has you are you?
I pray that you let your singular calm and soul have its joy and its say, I am love, I am life. And with this letter I am loving you. Will you have some tea with me? You've been on such a journey. You can use some rest and solace. You may not know this, but I have cradled your heart all along your way.
From conception I feel your life of ache. You've gained so much and lost so much. You keep making meaning. I pray that you see how much you mean. Our future has always gestated in you. What you do with this life makes you a mother. You keep birthing things. I'm not here to encourage your art. I'm here to love you.
If you open to my offering, love will encourage you. I've seen the way you look at things. I see the way things look at you. This looking, feeling, tasting, smelling, hearing, sensing it's love. Remember when your best childhood friend hurt you? When your parent scared you? Or that night you ran away from home? The days you went hungry, the pain of abandoning yourself, your countless tears and skies filled with clouds of doubt.
Those brushstrokes are now texture in your testimony, their notes in your sacred song. When you're lost and hurting, dear soul, turn back to love. Each time you step out of the pool of your fear. Love is the one who towels you dry. Love converts your every moment into medicine. Love is your miracle. Remember this when you pray. You're praying for one thing only.
Live as a prayer and this one thing will flood your life. Our tea is steeped and steaming now. It's fragrance soothing. Are you ready? Let's sip this hot ceremony, relax the body and celebrate life. I hope you find those words inspiring. I'm inspired by them reading through it. It inspires me to act in a more kind, loving, compassionate manner with myself, finding the joy and the flow within the struggle.
I think love is a part of that. We build, that love for ourself. You know, love to me is not a timid, or shy. It is a powerful force in the midst of a culture that is completely focused and consumption that is flowing in a direction away from health. It is difficult to say no to that, to chart a different course.
To me, it's the loving thing to do. When we have love for ourselves, it doesn't mean it isn't difficult. We love helps us embrace the difficult choice. Give us strength on a journey despite a struggle. I'd be thinking on these thoughts today. Encourage you to think on these thoughts. Share your reflection. With me. I'll be happy to hear Janna note in the comments.
And, I will be back tomorrow, and, we will continue to have our reflection and moving forward in health. I wish you the very best.