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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Good morning everybody, back with another podcast. Remember the concept of this podcast is one day at a time. You focus on today. If you can do it today, can do it for another day. If you do it for another day, can do it for three days, four days, get the gist.
Speaker 1:But only if we bring our attention and awareness to today. Now, two studies I want to talk about today. The first one is titled Does Fear of Rejection Cause Food Issues? Now you want to stop and maybe think about yourself. Does rejection for you cause food issues or other issues?
Speaker 1:Food issues are never just about food. Food is very complicated, it's an emotional thing, it's your conditioning, it's things that happened to you, it's a coping mechanism, right? So when we look at understanding why we eat, how we eat, and our behaviors in social scenarios when we're sad and upset on our own. All of these aren't just because we like food. Okay?
Speaker 1:It's it's not just the simple answer to it. Food a lot of delicious foods but food is used as a coping mechanism, it's used to reduce stress, it's used to hide a lot of people. There's a book called The Body Keeps a Score About Trauma and it talks about a lot of people who were obese. In that book they spoke about, I lost a lot of weight. They regained the weight and they had a shocking conclusion where they were like, Why did you regain all the weight?
Speaker 1:They were like, I to hide. I don't want people to notice me. When I'm this big, I'm invisible to society. We don't think about the deeper meaning of some of these things like wow, that's crazy, that really shook me. Anyway, let's get back to the study.
Speaker 1:So obviously you start at the school yard, someone calls you fat or whatever sticks in your head. A lot of people have said this type of stuff before. A lot of us remember a time when they felt rejected for how they looked. Some people are like whatever, things hang on to it. Other people think about that fear and next time they go into a social environment.
Speaker 1:There's a personality trait in this research study called rejection sensitivity. Here's why this matters when it comes to nutrition and health: high rejection sensitivity is linked with disordered eating behaviours. In the new study by McGill University, they looked at this relationship. The scientists hypothesized that people who fear rejection are more likely to experience interpersonal stress. So for instance, social conflicts such as physical and emotional bullying, and as a result, they binge on or restrict food corp.
Speaker 1:So they restrict food as a way to control something in their life or they binge. Those are the two ways. So look at the links between fear of rejection, exclusion, bullying and problems around food by using questionnaires over several points in time. In particular, looked at binge eating and being overly concerned with weight and shape. They asked two groups of females a series of questions to find out how they felt about rejection, their experience with bullying, their attitudes about eating, weight and their shape, and their height and weight.
Speaker 1:Here's what the study found: The researchers' data didn't show that interpersonal stress was the link between rejection sensitivity and disordered eating, however, they did find that rejection sensitivity was directly associated with concerns over body weight and shape, as well as binge eating. So the association between rejection sensitivity and disordered eating is not dependent on actual experiences of interpersonal stress. So in other words, just worrying about being rejected or feeling like you've been rejected may be enough to contribute to disordered eating. So the researchers said that people with high rejection sensitivity may develop eating issues in an effort to help themselves avoid interpersonal issues rather than as a way to cope with them. So obviously this is quite a small study.
Speaker 1:The point about this one really is, when it comes to fat loss and how we look and stuff, if you're overly concerned about how you look all the time, how many pounds of fat you've got to lose, your attitude about your weight and your shape, and if you're eating good or bad foods. If you're always judging good, bad, good, bad, good, bad, you're always judging this is bad, this is bad, this is bad, Your fear of rejection in a social scenario is obviously gonna get higher. You're gonna think, well, my weight is bad, my shape is bad, my eating is bad. Why would I even go out into the world? Why would I bother?
Speaker 1:Why would I bother putting myself there? Right? And then you start eating eating to cope, eating at home, staying in, you know, maybe the secret eaters types of stuff happens. And this is really important to understand, like, are you on this kind of spectrum of how you deal with stuff? I've spoken a lot on this podcast and if you look the Stoics would say nothing is good or bad, it's how you do something, right?
Speaker 1:So weighing yourself every day isn't bad, inherently bad. People are like weighing yourself every day is bad. You hear a lot of people throwing this around. It's ridiculous. Daily weighing is a measurement of your weight.
Speaker 1:It is simply numbers. The numbers aren't judging you. The numbers are the numbers. A scientist would not be like, Oh, shit, that's a bad number a good number. They just take the numbers and at the end they come to a conclusion.
Speaker 1:And then that conclusion they could put their little spin on it and say Well this is a good result for humanity, a bad result. They could say something along those lines. Tracking your nutrition, people say tracking is bad. My Fitness Pal is bad. This and that.
Speaker 1:One of the problems with My Fitness Pal have done is they've put people on really aggressive low calorie diets and they've offered absolutely zero support for people. It's just a tool. They've put their hands away and gone well we've created the tool, it's up for you to figure it out. And then now there's loads of forums in Reddit saying don't eat your calories back, eat your calories back, this and that. They've got absolutely no coaching built into the app, which is the problem.
Speaker 1:And also the low calories. Tracking is an issue, it's the methodology that my friend doing, it's low calories. If you're just tracking your eating behaviour without trying to lower it or increase it just for the awareness, If you're just tracking your weight daily just for the awareness, you're not trying to put a good or bad label on it, if you look at yourself in the mirror and you can just look at yourself, stop looking through the lens of good and bad, disgusting, ugly, brilliant, whatever, just look at yourself, this is me, this is the accumulation of what my life has been until this moment. Some people have had more stressful stipes, some people have had upbringings that are harder, some people have had lower education on nutrition, all this type of stuff. A lot of people have got different ways to struggle.
Speaker 1:And the way you look at these things is more important than the thing itself. So eating broccoli isn't, you know, who cares? Your view on it is problematic. Your view is, well, if I eat broccoli, it's a really good food. It'll save me.
Speaker 1:No. Broccoli has simply got a lot of nutrition, micronutrients, stuff like that. Right? So oh, but if if I eat this cookie, it's gonna be bad for me. No.
Speaker 1:The cookie is the cookie. Nothing wrong with it. If you eat it, you've eaten a high the dense highly dense, highly caloric dense food. If I even said that right, good god. So our relationship between our views on things and when it comes to food is where the real work needs to be done.
Speaker 1:Tracking is an absolutely phenomenal tool for you to use to bring awareness. One, how much energy you're consuming, how much food you're consuming. Two, are you eating enough protein? That's an important one. You track your steps, where are your steps at?
Speaker 1:Don't judge it but where are at? Where's your weight at? Your average weight for the week, where's all that? And you start pulling this picture together and as a scientist would, the first thing is, Okay, here's the weight, here's the calorie intake, here's average step count, the facts become obvious. The next action is obvious.
Speaker 1:If you remove yourself always scanning and judging, the facts become crystal clear. You trying to judge and scan is like you're putting a mist between everything. And that mist causes huge problems, causes you to have a terrible relationship because you can't even see. It's kind of like you're blinded and you cause problems. So I want you today to really look at these things.
Speaker 1:In the research it offered some suggestions on how to lower rejection sensitivity because obviously if you can increase your self esteem and stuff like that, it's shown to help combat rejection sensitivity which in turn will help combat food related binge eating or coping mechanisms. The three things they looked at was cognitive behavioural therapy. As we know stoicism is kind of the precursor to this, You read a lot of philosophy, you'll understand the methodology of how they think, art therapy, mindfulness and meditation, all the stuff you already know about basically. And you think, well I can't do mindfulness sculpting meditation and yoga and this and that. It's not about doing them for an hour and then going home.
Speaker 1:This kind of like awareness day to day, like I said at the start of the podcast, this one day at a time approach isn't something you just do for five minutes. Meditation isn't something you sit in the corner and go, That's not true meditation. True meditation is simply being able to look at the inner workings of your brain, how it's reacting to the outer world, your relationships, and this observation cannot be a judgment. It's got to be an observation without choice essentially. What we mean by that is an observation without saying it's good or bad.
Speaker 1:Can you look without the judger? And we can do this. Can you look at something without the judger? We do this in other things. You might look you might go to a lake and you might see like fishes fish fishes you might see fish jumping up and down.
Speaker 1:There's no judging going on, you're looking at it, wow fish jumping up and down. That's very nice. Nice to go, that's very nice. And then you notice how quickly the mind comes in and goes, that's nice, that's bad, it's cool. But for a brief moment you are simply observing and you see that the fish jumping out of the water, bam, done.
Speaker 1:Whatever is in nature, we've all had those moments and then the thought comes in and goes, 'Woah, that was a lush.' And then the judgement comes in, which is the thought. Essentially the reverse is happening when it comes to eating and observing how we're eating and the numbers. As soon as we see a certain weight in the scale, thought comes in and goes bad. Can you stop that? Maybe not, conditioning is very strong.
Speaker 1:But can you look at the movement of that without trying to change it or push it away or stop it or manipulate it or wish it away or erase it? Can you just look at the movement of that? That's meditation day to day. So anytime you get ten minutes and you feel anxiety come in, you feel restlessness come in, or you start feeling agitated, instead of going like, am I feeling agitated? Why anxious?
Speaker 1:Why am am feeling anxious? Sit with it and just look. You will see where it comes from. You'll see that the mind is going, I'm not getting the work done, I'm feeling a lot of stress, I've got to deliver this by tomorrow, I haven't done any exercise today, I'm eating, I'm starving, oh my god, I need to do this, need do that, you see all of this, like I need to do this, need to do that, all this mind, all this all thought is doing all the time, I need to do this, I need to do that, I need to go towards pleasure, need to go away from pain, towards pleasure from pain. That's all it's doing all the time.
Speaker 1:Bam, bam, bam, bam. It cannot be stopped. But you can look at it. And that's what really this is all about. It's never just the food, it's how we look at everything that combines with this our relation with food, and you can only learn about this in the moment today.
Speaker 1:You can't think back about yesterday and learn about it. It's already gone. It's the past. You can only see now. I don't know if that's making any sense to you, but I feel like if we can see how these things flower moment to moment, we can get a grip on our actions.
Speaker 1:We can actually act from a different place. Instead of action from a place of discontent, a place of anxiety, place of hate, a place of negativity, we act from a place of we let all of that flower and reveal itself. We don't react with it, we don't push it, we don't accept it, we just look at it, we give it its time to flower and die, and this new type of, this new type of adventure takes place. This new type of observation takes place, and this new type of action takes place, where you're not acting from the fear, you're not acting from that feeling of rejection. You're not acting from that bad place.
Speaker 1:You're reacting from, I see it. I see it. I understand it. This is my next move. You know?
Speaker 1:And that's how maybe to view today, to give this a chance. Because it's linked in research. Like, we've linked this in research. The Eastern philosophies, Eastern religions have been saying this for years. It's kind of nonduality type of stuff.
Speaker 1:All of this stuff has been spoken about for thousands of years. Researchers coming out and saying, it's not the food itself. It's our relationship with the food. It's our relationship with ourselves. This is what's happening.
Speaker 1:That's causing more stress. This is the thing. Mindfulness and meditation and CBT and stoicism and philosophy, these help. And we're going, okay, cool. And we're still not taking action on this.
Speaker 1:So put the work into that and use a food tracking app that is easy to use, like Passpal for example, the test method, whatever. And that's a good tool for observation and awareness. So have a good day guys, think about these things one day at a time, don't do it too much. So now think about your one big thing today is to be in a meditative state as long as you can. It's very hard, but not meditating instead of like, oh, all this is like nonsense, but can you just be aware of the things inside the mind and how the things outside and inside and how they're all interacting without trying to intervene just like watch.
Speaker 1:Do that for today and see what you think, see what you find out and let me know. Have a good day, speak to you soon.