And by the way, I will be offering a bonus workshop to all of the women who register for free. That workshop is called What to Do When You Mess Up. So instead of going into that sabotage spiral where you say, forget it, I ate all the things. Now, the whole day is ruined. 

You’ll actually find true, authentic motivation and momentum to get back on track within the same day. Isn’t that crazy? Within the same exact day, and this is truly how I have maintained my healthy weight for 12 years, when I mess up, because we will always be human, all we have to do is restart.

I never go a whole day thinking I messed up the day, because it’s absolutely not true. You can restart the day at any time. So here is that interview you’ll hear Rita’s beautiful voice introducing me and the very, very fun conversation that we had. Enjoy.

Rita: Hey ladies, I’m so excited to share a wonderful friend with you today, and we are going to talk about, especially those of you that are struggling in your weight loss journey, about why you feel stuck, why you can’t do what you know you should do and what you can do about it. If you’re new here, I’m Rita Johnson, the owner of Health and Hormones, and here you’ll find fatigue solutions, period help and everything in between. Let’s dive in. 

Today, I’m so excited to maybe introduce to you for the very first time, my dear friend, Denise Jelinek. Denise is a Catholic Convert wife and mother, and the founder of Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit. 

Through her work, she teaches the surrendered method, a faith centered approach that helps women surrender their food and weight struggles to God. So they can experience lasting freedom, peace, and trust in every season of life. Thank you so much for joining me, Denise. 

Denise: Thanks, Rita. It is so fun to be here. 

Rita: You love it. I love it. And just really quick, you guys, I just have to let you know that Denise is somebody, the Lord has brought into my life very quickly and very recently. But he just let us go so deep, so fast, and it has just been such an amazing gift and I cannot wait to share more about what she has to share with you all.

So we’re just gonna dive right in today. Lots of women are they know what they’re supposed to be doing, right? They know they need to do these things to lose weight, but they keep falling off the wagon and it feels so frustrating. So why does this happen?

Denise: First of all, I want to say it is not an intelligence problem and it is not a willpower problem. The woman that’s listening right now, I know that she is so ambitious. She has accomplished so many things in her life, and she is. Such a high capacity. She’s extremely disciplined. She has lots of willpower and lots of self-control. Okay? Our brains wanna tell us that’s the problem. That’s not the problem. 

I also know that she knows a lot about nutrition and health and could write volumes and probably be guests on your podcast and teach what she has learned to people. So it is not an intelligence problem. There are three things that are happening.

And I just kinda wanna say this ahead of time because my degrees are in exercise science. I struggled with this problem of knowing what I should be doing and not being able to do it while I was a personal trainer, while I was writing meal plans and diet plans for people while I was helping other people lose weight, and I couldn’t follow anything longer than four days.

And I know I was smart. So it’s not an intelligence problem. What was happening for me and what was happening for all of the women who find themselves in this situation, and you know it, if you don’t understand what I’m saying, then you don’t have that problem. But there’s some women out there who are like, oh my gosh, she gets what I’m saying.

What happens is we go throughout our day and we encounter something that we get stressed out about and we just haven’t been given a tool other than going to food to comfort and soothe and get through that emotion. I’m just telling you it is in that moment, our brains have become so accustomed to that pattern that it feels like we don’t have any choice.

And what I just told you, there are two things that’s happening. One is your nervous system is fighting for survival. It’s that fight, flight, or freeze. And when you go into survival mode, you only go into default what you’ve always been doing. The human brain is very good at doing one thing. The human brain is very good at doing what it knows how to do.

And so because a lot of us have been practicing these patterns for years, if not decades, the brain will automatically go down that pathway. And I often hear women say, and I just realized my hand was in a bag of chips. I have no idea how I got there. And so it’s that default mode that’s exactly what human brains are supposed to do. So it’s not a problem. 

We have an opportunity to retrain our brain, but just to know we’re in survival mode. So we do what we’ve always been doing and we forget what we said we would do in the morning. And there’s one other thing I think as Catholic women. We have learned how to compartmentalize our food and weight into the secular box. 

And in the secular box, you are running on human strength and the secular box. The food is your God. The scale is your God. Your body is your God. And when we haven’t been able to throw it into like we do everything else in our life as Catholic women, we do everything else with the Lord.

But we just haven’t learned to integrate the Lord into this area of our lives, into our food and weight struggles. And I think. I know I should say that when we aren’t inviting the Lord into that area, it will feel very heavy and confusing. And if we only have a secular tool, it just doesn’t make sense. 

So not inviting the Lord in so that we get the strength of the Holy Spirit is another reason why we’re not able to do what we know he wants us to do.

Rita: Yeah. So powerful. That’s so true. And isn’t that, so apparently all of those voices of the evil one, right? All of those words of confusion and heaviness and weight. So tell me about what led you to create the surrendered method, and was there a moment in your own journey where you realized that something different was needed?

Denise: Yeah. So when I said that we haven’t integrated the Lord into our food and weight struggles, what I mean is we haven’t surrendered our food and weight struggles to the Lord. And my story started my whole life, pretty much, I had only had the tool of opening my mouth to put food in my mouth because I didn’t learn how to open my mouth to share my feelings. It just didn’t feel safe and I know a lot of women can relate to this.

And that got me through. So far my relationship with food and weight through high school and college was not healthy, but pretty typical I think. But it wasn’t until I got married. That not having the ability to speak my own thoughts or feel safe. Not that my husband was a monster. He totally wasn’t. I just was so scared inside and I ran away from conflict that my binge eating really took off. 

So any stress, I would just binge eat. So as a personal trainer, and I was only had a secular business at this point and had only practiced secularly, I tried all the things. I tried therapy, I tried nutritionists. I tried hiring my own trainers. I tried different diets. I tried online programs. Throughout the years, I had tried many things. 

Now, during that time, I also converted to Catholicism, and that’s a whole another story as everyone always says that. And I really was on fire for the Lord. I loved my faith, but all the things I was trying. And then I would pray really hard in the morning and that created sort of a separation between God and the rest of my life. 

So I found myself really stuck in this cycle of having this family that I prayed for and this marriage that I prayed for, but in the evening when everyone was around, I just wanted to dump chocolate chips in a jar of peanut butter and hide in my pantry and eat it. 

And when people would go to bed, I would sneak back downstairs to eat in the dark and then hide the wrappers and hide the dishes. And I felt horrible about myself. And I would wake up in the morning and I would say, Lord, I’m so sorry. I won’t do it again. And I would say, help me. And I would pray novena after novena, and then I would get up from my prayer area and go on with my day. 

And it wasn’t until I realized, oh my gosh, I need to surrender this to the Lord. Not just this, but every area of my life. It was only when I learned how to practice surrender that things began to change. 

So I had this very private journey of surrender, of freedom. My food became ordered. I had peace. I was never really overweight. I was maybe 30 pounds more than I am now. I really was in so much pain. When the concept of surrender found me, and I was in so much pain, not because of my weight, but because food noise was consuming 80 to 90% of my day. 

I was constantly thinking about food, and I remember thinking, there’s got to be more than this to life because I had this beautiful family I had on the outside everything, and once. He taught me surrender and I was in a program that really taught me that. My life just expanded. I love to describe it as going from black and white to technicolor. 

I just didn’t know life could be this good. I felt peace. I felt joy. I felt so much confidence in just a real holy way. Like I wasn’t self-loathing all the time. I felt so much peace and freedom. And that continued privately. And of course my husband knew. My clients didn’t really know. I still had my secular personal training. 

And then in 2021, the Lord used the pandemic and some shifts in my life to say, and now Denise, I want you to go find my hurting daughters and bring them to me. And I thought, What?  Because. If you don’t know Rita, when you are a binge eater, there comes with that. So much shame there comes with that. 

So much hiding, and I wasn’t hiding in this private recovery journey that I was loving, but when he called me to be public about it, and I knew I couldn’t help anybody or bring women to him if they didn’t know that I understood them, and to go public about eating out of garbage cans to go public about. Waking up in the middle of the night to vomit, icing. ’cause I binged on icing from making my kids’ birthday cakes. 

And not because I was trying to purge, but just ’cause my body was rejecting that much sugar to let women know I’ve been there and I hope I’ve been lower than you have so you don’t have to experience it.

And so when he said, Denise, go find my hurting daughters and bring them to me. I knew I didn’t have a choice, and he has slowly, by, slowly given me a platform and a business and a whole  message to take to the world and women start learning the surrendered method in a program that I have called 63 Surrendered.

And that’s it. I don’t, I used to say, I help women do this. I help women do that. I don’t help anybody. I find you. And then he does the rest. The surrender method is just what he wants. Women, he wants women’s souls. 

And when food is standing in your way of being closer to the Lord, when your weight is holding you down and feeling burdensome, it’s keeping you from the Lord. And before we go on, I wanna say one thing. I don’t believe the Lord cares what we weigh. Okay. 

But I do think the Lord cares about everything that feels heavy and burdensome and is weighing us down and that we’re not talking to him about. 

Rita: Yeah, 

Denise: He wants everything. 

Rita: For sure. And the more that we are able to live from a place of empowerment and that this energy and vibrancy to live the mission, he’s called us all as individuals. And that’s what I love when you share your story too, is and I feel very much about that with my own story the way the Lord healed us to heal. In his, have this little, like, planting these seeds to have this hand in watching what he wants for others. It’s the way he’s used our journeys.

And I just wanna say that to them, we’ve listening too. You have to pursue your own journey wherever it feels hard and heavy because that’s exactly what the Lord has for you on the other end of your own healing or in the midst of it too. 

Denise: Yeah, I recently wrote an article and I said, your biggest struggle will be your greatest joy.

Rita: Amen. So true. Alright, let’s dive into a little more about the surrendered method. ’cause I’m sure that just like me, they’re all dying to know. So how is it different from other traditional advice that women are getting? Especially in regards to other ways health coaches and diet programs are helping support them.

Denise: So I think the number one way is it helps you truly get to the root of what is keeping you from being at your healthy weight. So often we want to slap on different behaviors, and I know that sounds a little odd, but no one knows. I like to say, discover what works for you in this season of your life.

And so having the concept of opening our eyes on our own life. So important and so many women are living on autopilot, so it really challenges them to look at themselves and care for them and teach them how to care and support themselves like the Lord would in this season of their life. 

I have three food rules and one is that you eat food that you enjoy, and women have unconditional permission to eat any food. It’s crazy to them. It’s really hard for them to do that. But the real purpose of the surrendered method is this. It is to simply reorder our relationship with food. I like to say, to pull you out of secular dieting and to pull you into just what works for you in this season of your life. What works. 

And it starts with giving yourself unconditional permission to eat any food. And do you know why we do that? Because the Lord gave you taste buds, Rita, that are different than my taste buds. And we have to honor that. 

And I think there are three reasons that the Lord gave us food, number one, to nourish us. And we all know a lot about that, so I don’t even talk about particular nutrients with women. They can do that later after they learn the surrendered method, then they’ll be able to follow any meal plan that they want. 

But first we have to let them honor their taste buds. And secondly, to make sure their belly is full. Okay? And the three food rules that I have are that you eat food that you like, that you can feel peaceful about before, during, and after eating.

So if you feel peaceful with three or four Oreos, we’re gonna put three or four Oreos on your plan. If you don’t feel peaceful with 12, we’re not gonna put 12. And my third rule is that it has to work for the day that you’re living today. Just today, so let’s really let’s just sort of anticipate your needs.

We are so often all up in other people’s business that we’re not even thinking about ourselves and caring for ourselves. And I don’t even use the word ‘loving ourselves ’cause a lot of women can’t go there. I couldn’t go there probably until about 18 months ago. But I like to say we’re just learning how to care, and support you throughout this day. That’s it. 

Rita: Yeah. Oh my gosh, I love that so much. And when you say honoring our taste buds, I think something else that comes up in my mind is that I spend a lot of time helping women learn to listen to their bodies. 

Right? Because a lot of the work that I do is through like a. Letting the symptoms they’re experiencing help us to know the ways their body needs to be supported, whether that’s, you know, hormonally or whatever. But there are a good bit of times women come to me and they say, I just don’t have any self-awareness. I have no ability to hear that. 

And this is exactly that first step of okay, if you can just tell me like, do you like mushrooms? Do you like fish? Do you like tuna? Yes. Do you like, right? Like just starting here is like this super simple way to start listening to that dialogue of what our body is saying. And I believe that can really unlock so much in your journey as well. I love that. I love that piece of your program. 

Denise: And can I just stop you, Rita, because whether you say it or I say it, I want every woman to know this is a skill. You are not born knowing these things. And in fact, you’ve practiced many years of denying, noticing your body.

Rita: Yes. 

Denise: Noticing your taste buds. And so relearning it is a skill, which means that you can be taught it. You are really bad at it at first. 

Rita: Yeah. 

Denise: But it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. It just means you need to practice it more. Right. And it’ll come. It will come. 

Rita: Yeah. That’s so good. Okay. So what would you say to a woman that is doing a protocol that I put together for her, and she is struggling and she keeps falling off the plan. What would you say to that woman? 

Denise: Oh my gosh. I just like every woman wants to be able to follow your plan so bad so badly. Honestly, here’s what I would say. We can deal with one thing at a time, and I would say, let’s just pretend like Rita’s plan is over to the side for now. What parts of Rita’s plan feel doable? What can you do? What feels like it? It’s part of your life already. 

So we would look at the low hanging fruit. Then we could look at what feels scary about the other stuff. Our brains only resist what doesn’t feel safe, and what we may notice is that the plan may feel restrictive to her brain. She would say, but that’s not really true because you didn’t tell me I have to be restrictive, but something may feel restrictive.

And I have to say, I love the surrendered method. Because I often feel like for the woman who’s understanding what I’m saying, it is the first step. So I would say Rita’s plan isn’t bad. It just may be advanced for where your nervous system is right now. And if we can step back and give you a month or two in the surrendered method to really create this foundation.

The safety in your body, reorder your relationship with food, weight, God, all the stuff. Then see that’s the promise of the surrendered method is that you learn how to separate your emotions from your food choices. 

You learn how to emotionally care for yourself and so that way when she comes into whatever Rita says, she doesn’t need the food to do anything for her anymore. She’s got all of these emotional tools and therefore she is free. Did you hear that word? She’s free to be able to follow anything that you want. 

Rita: Yeah. That’s so beautiful. And I have to say, I’ve had some clients that have done that exact, they worked with you in the 63, surrendered. 63 surrendered 60, right?

Denise: 63 surrendered.

Rita: And then they worked with me and it was beautiful because even though they weren’t perfect, they didn’t do everything perfectly right from the beginning, but their ability to say, oh, I’m not doing great, and this is why their ability to hold themselves accountable at the end of that and say I was. I was doing more binging or stress eating around the holidays.

I’m gonna do better now and can you give me some more tools? It raises this deeper level of awareness and it helps give them tools to be able to move forward in the future too, which has been so beautiful to see. 

Denise: Yeah, and I bet what you also notice in those women is it increase their increased awareness, which is fine, but they also didn’t shame themselves about it. They were able to take responsibility and say, okay, and now I’m ready to move on. 

Rita: Yes. 

Denise: But they weren’t like, I’m a failure. They didn’t make it mean everything’s horrible. I’ll never be able to do your protocol. 

Rita: Yes. Which is so important. Oh my gosh. How often were that meanest person in our whole lives? Right. 

Denise: We called the mean girl voice. 

Rita: Yes. You may. So talking about surrender being the key to lasting weight loss, what does surrender actually look like in a woman’s daily life with food?  So, we have four daily disciplines that we do. They are to connect with the Lord in the morning about your food.

You integrate it into your devotional time. Now you make it, you say the surrender novena. That’s why the 63 surrender program is 63 days. It is seven rounds of the surrender novena. Seven times nine. 

Denise: Okay, so you say the surrender novena. You make an easy to stick to meal plan. I already told you the food rules. So an easy to stick to a meal plan simply means it’s easy to stick to.  I just want you to think about you and your day and care for yourself. You can put anything on that plan. 

If you choose to make a change during the day, that’s not a problem either. We have something called surrendering a change, which just means, Jesus, I surrender this change to you. You say that pause, say, Jesus, I surrender this change to you. Write it down, and then eat the thing. It is not a chance for you to judge, should I eat it? Shouldn’t I eat it? Do I need this? Do I not need it? Nobody cares. Just stop. 

All we’re doing is creating a new brain pathway. Do you remember when I said that one of the things working against us is our brains are on autopilot, so I just want to teach your brain that one mini skill.

Am I an I skill of pause, connect with the Lord, go ahead and eat the change. Instead of impulsively eating something and then shaming ourselves for it, or just learning how to make non-judgmental food choices. It’s just, I wanna change. Just change it. And then the fourth thing is that you check in with the Lord back at night.

I wanna talk about what the surrender by surrendering what that does to your brain. So if I continue to surrender a change at lunch, you know what? I want chips instead of carrots, or I want chips with the carrots and the sandwich. 

Pretty soon, we need to recognize that. I just wanna plan chips. It just continues to inform us on what our true desires are. I like to say it teaches us to practice that virtue of honesty.  And when we allow ourselves to eat food that we honestly enjoy, that’s called honesty. That’s all I really do want. The chips. Great. Let’s plan them. 

And people have a hard time planning foods that they think they shouldn’t, which is great. It just brings up our discomfort and it shows us where we’re still like attached to secular dieting. No problem. We work through it all. 

Rita: Yeah. That’s so beautiful. I love that so much. Oh, that’s there’s so much to unpack and digest there and wow. I just know people are gonna listen to this episode on repeat and I’m so thankful that we’re recording. 

Yeah, I think what you said, there’s so much to digest and unpack and what I would just encourage us all to recognize is there’s so much that can unfold in that 63 day journey and the Lord just does the work.

Rita: Yeah. 

All we do is show up, do the four daily disciplines, and he will just keep refining her experience. It’s pretty cool. Yeah. 

Rita: Yeah. That’s so beautiful. And I really wanna go actually all the way back to what you were saying at the beginning, it, seeing, the more that we can see that we have siloed these things of like physical fitness and food relationship in our faith.

And I think that we should see this. Spill over into our churches, we should be able to see this. It’s an unlocking of these areas of our heart that we have, kept separate from the Lord and also not let him into our lives in those ways. And it’s really beautiful to see this deep level of healing that is so impactful in that process.

It’s very concrete. Actionable plan. And that’s what I’m loving so much about all that I’m learning about the surrendered method. That’s just so amazing. 

Denise: Can you just said something so beautiful, you said, unlocking these parts of our hearts and we’re recording this during Lent. Isn’t that what he asks? That we return to him with all of our heart? 

Rita: Yeah.

Denise: That really hit me, Rita, thanks for saying that. 

Rita: So beautiful. So ladies, I am so glad I’ve had the chance to share Denise with you and all that the Lord is doing in and through her because it is just such an incredible gift to get to watch as her friend. And I pray that this is gonna be so beneficial for so many others. 

And for those of you that want to hear more from Denise and I wanna let you know about a workshop that we’re gonna be doing together in the middle of April. We start with. April 13th, we’re going to be doing a weight loss workshop, and Denise is going to deep dive into food noise.

I’m gonna be talking more about. Blood sugar balance and inflammation hunting, which I love to talk about when we have weight loss that won’t budge. We have Liv Harrison who’s gonna be joining us, talking about her own personal testimony with weight loss and really the letter to self that she wishes she could have written to herself way back when.

And we’ll also be pro have a medical provider joined with us as well. This is gonna be an amazing workshop. The information is in the details. For this video, please take a look. Sign up. We’d love to have you in there, Denise, any last parting words that you want to leave our ladies with? 

Denise: Yeah, I really just wanna say that there is nothing wrong with you.

There is no, there was nothing wrong with me. There were just some skills that I just didn’t know no one had ever taught me, and I believe that surrender is one of those skills. I mean, it’s a beautiful concept, but I don’t even know how do you do that. It can be taught and so let’s just learn how to be kind to ourselves to care and support ourselves and just know that we are women who are willing to grow and learn new things.

Rita: Yeah, for sure. I love that. Thank you so much. Thank you for your time today and thank you for the amazing gift you are to the women you’re working with. 

Denise: It’s been so fun. Thanks Rita.