Are you the type of person who can eat off plan maybe a little bit or a lot a bit, and you just wanna throw in the towel for the rest of the day or maybe for the next few days and start again on Monday?

If that’s you, and I’ve been there myself, that is called multiplying the mess up, which means you have a mess up and then you just give up, so you multiply it over and over and over, and it’s one of the reasons that is keeping you at an unhealthy weight. So this podcast is for you if you find yourself falling into that. 

This podcast is all about how can you make a mess up and let it be one. Because you will mess up. It’s called being human. But multiplying the mess up is just because your brain was never taught what else to do. So listen up. I give lots of practical tips in this podcast of how to not multiply the mess up and what to do when you do mess up. All right. Enjoy.

We’re going to get into what mess-ups are, what to do when you’ve already messed up, and how you can even start preventing mess-ups. So my friends, let me just tell you about what my mess up pattern used to be.

My mess up pattern really was. If you’ve heard my story before, what really brought me into food recovery was not because I had a lot of weight to lose, it was because I was exhausted by the food noise. I was living in food noise 85 to 90% of my day, which just means that 85 to 90% of my thoughts were about food. And when 80 to 90% of your thoughts are about food then you kind of end up eating food a lot.

So I was eating food a lot, so there weren’t a lot of times I could really stay on a plan like Monday through Thursday night. But that’s really, my real mess up pattern though was Friday nights.

So I might overeat other days, but the next day I could restart. But once Friday hit, all bets were off until the next Monday. And so what I’m going to show you today is something that has helped me never mess up. And what I mean by that is there may be times I’ve overeaten.

There may be times I look back and I say, “Oh gosh, I wish I wouldn’t have done that.” But what I’m going to teach you today has always prevented me from making a mess up to a give up. Messing up is totally human. You will never be saved from messing up because you will always be human. It will happen less and less and less.

But giving up, multiplying the mess up into hours or days of beating yourself up or overeating, waiting either till the next day, or maybe until Monday, or the next month, or until vacation is over, or until, the wedding is over, or until. And you know the or until, and you have had varying degrees of or until.

You’ve only done that because your brain hasn’t known anything else to do and so that’s what this workshop is. This workshop is to teach your brain, the something else to do other than give up because messing up is human.

I think it’s really fun to also look at messing up not only in regard to food, but also into, you know how sometimes you say the wrong thing and you mess up, and you beat yourself up for it afterwards? Or maybe you yell at the kids and you didn’t mean to, and then you beat yourself up. So it’s just any time your brain messes up. So it’s a very, very general, but today we’re going to talk about it specifically with food.

So this workshop is for you if you find that you struggle with stress or emotional eating, if you give up on Thursday and Friday and wait until Monday. Okay, that was me. If you do find that food thoughts are taking up a lot of your day and leading you into making that mess-up mean a lot. If you can find that you can follow a plan for days and then you mess up.

If you eat something off your plan that you shouldn’t, something, whatever, you think it’s a mess-up, and then you eat more. That’s really what we’re going to focus on is how to not beat yourself up and then eat more. And you are definitely in the right place if you are stinking done tired from starting over and over and over. Okay? So welcome.

As I told you, I used to suffer from food noise 85 to 90% of my thoughts, and I don’t anymore. I used to be able to follow a plan for three to four days, and then I would fall. Then I couldn’t, and I don’t have that pattern anymore. I’m able to follow a plan. Thursday and Friday would hit, and all bets were off, and I would restart on Monday. That doesn’t happen anymore. I don’t give up anymore.

I want you to know that I’ve had 12 years of peace with food the majority of the time, and I want that for you, too. And so that’s why we’re looking at this one piece to create more peace in your life so that when you do see a mess-up, you can have more peace

I just love to say I just don’t give up on me anymore, and I don’t. And I say that because it’s just. I think that’s just so crazy. I just feel like that’s such a miracle of the Lord, and I want you guys to know that He’s always working miracles for you.

So you’ll see this picture on the left. That’s when I was 40 pounds heavier, but I don’t even think that’s the miracle. The miracle is just that I can be at a healthy weight without dieting, without food drama And it’s possible for you.

Okay, so let’s get into this. Okay, first let’s talk about something. I want you to grab a piece of paper. You might wanna take some notes. I should have told you this ahead of time, but I want you to think of the last time that you messed up. The last time your brain thought, “That was a mess up.”

And for some of you listening, your brain is like, “I don’t know the last time,” which is fine. I want you to think of one time that you messed up. Put it in the chat If you want, or just write it on your paper. What are you calling a mess up?

As we go through this workshop, I’d like for you guys to put anything in the chat with each other or when I ask a question like this. As we go through, if you have a specific question that you do not want me to miss, I want you to put it in the Q&A.

In the Q&A is where I will see questions, but they only come to me. I will check the Q&A when we get done, but not before. And if you want me to not use your name and ask you a follow-up question, then just put it anonymously.

So the last time that you messed up, what happened right before that? We’ll call that like what created the mess up? What was like the trigger? What led you to eat the thing. Your brain may or may not know this answer. What made you do that? Don’t coach yourself out of it.

Your brain might want to, especially if you’ve been around for a while, you wanna coach yourself out of it. But in general, if you’re just looking at a higher order, what was it that triggered you to eat that? What was happening?

So Jen said I overate candy because I was overtired and needed to keep going. Great. I want you to think of the few hours prior to that. What led up to that? I was sick with a cold. I had a lot of stress. And then after you had the mess up, what happened? What did you do? How did you respond?

Outside my comfort zone, introvert having to be on for several hours. Yeah, my body was drained when I got home and wanted to reward myself. Only I was at home, which always plays into my mind of providing opportunity to what I consider treating myself. Yes. Too much thinking and didn’t wanna think. Great.

So then what happened afterwards? Now, I want you to just kind of jot that down because that’s the. Hopefully, you’ll never have to live that again. This is what we are here for, to minimize, because your brain was just doing what it knew how to do. So here’s what the giving up tornado really looks like when you really give up.

And remember, your brain is only doing what it knows best to do or what it knows how to do. And unless you’ve trained it to do something different, it will always do what it knows. So you start with a trigger, and you mess up. And then you have this tornado thinking of, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

And when. Anytime you think, “I shouldn’t have done that,” you’re going to feel guilt and shame. Then it goes into a mental storm because the next piece is, “I shouldn’t have done that,” but then you make it mean something about you, or you make it mean something about your future.

Okay. So for example, you might say, ” I shouldn’t have done that,” guilt and shame. “I’m a failure.” So you’re making it mean you’re a failure, which leads to despair. Or, “I shouldn’t have done that,” guilt and shame. ” I’ll never lose weight,” which is you’re making it mean something about your future. That’s catastrophizing. I call that the mental storm.

And when you’re living with guilt and shame, despair and hopelessness. How in the world could you expect to do anything else than give up? That feels so heavy, doesn’t it? Those emotions are very hiding. Those emotions are very heavy. I just want you to see this isn’t about what you ate.

And it, because it could also be about something else that you do in your life that you don’t like. Saying the wrong thing or being embarrassed or yelling at your kids. It’s all the same pattern. You mess up, you think, “I shouldn’t have done that,” guilt and shame, and then give up.

But here’s the crazy thing is that we’re talking about messing up with food, but if even if the mess up were, “I shouldn’t have done that, I said the wrong thing, or I yelled at someone,” we typically, because of our inclination to use food, guilt and shame, despair, and hopelessness will lead us all back to the pantry, ’cause that’s our way that our brains know to feel better.

But I want you to know the truth. The mess up doesn’t really start with the food. It starts before that. Something else was happening. What happened was that your brain was simply using food to help you through the situation.

And here’s what I find usually triggers a mess up. Okay, the first thing is something unexpected happens. So let’s stay on this number one thing. When something unexpected happens, your brain needs time to reorder, but that doesn’t feel really great. It’s like driving with the parking brake on.

And often that reordering is uncomfortable. And because our nervous systems love predictability, our nervous system says, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know what’s going on,” and we’ll go into a stress response.In that stress response, typically that’s the trigger that moves you into the food.

Something unexpected happens, your brain feels very uncomfortable because it’s unpredictable. It’s an unpredictable situation right now. And I say right now because I know that there’s a 90-second pause, that if you give that, your brain 90 seconds, it can reorder itself and create more stability.

But until you know that, your brain automatically then goes into the pantry just to be comfortable, to have some predictability, to have some stability. Okay? The second reason that we mess up is because there’s a predictable situation. You saw it coming. It’s happened before. It’s just you didn’t know how to navigate it. You didn’t know how to care and support yourself through it. I call these vulnerable situations.

And when you haven’t navigated or created a game plan or known how to care and support yourself through it without food, your brain will do what it knows what to do, which is to go to the food, to seek comfort, to seek stability, to seek predictability so that you don’t feel that discomfort of going through this vulnerable, uncomfortable, unfamiliar. That’s not true. It is a very familiar process. It’s just uncomfortable.

Either way, it doesn’t matter if something unexpected happened or you just have a vulnerable situation that you haven’t learned to care and support yourself through. Either way, your brain automatically goes into survival mode and just does what it has always known what to do.

I’ll say it again: Your brain is in survival mode. That is why you are triggered into the food. So when you’re stressed, it just does what it always knows, and if food is the way that your brain knows how to cope, that is what it’s going to do. In a kind way, your brain is almost saying, “I know what’ll help you. I know what’ll make you feel better.” Okay?

So let me tell you a little bit about my mess up, a mess up that happened recently to me. So nearly, it doesn’t matter, a year and a half ago, I’d been having peace with food, and I had this situation where we were having family dinner.

And family dinner at this point had become quite a challenging time for us. I had one boy in junior high, and I had one boy in high school. My older son had behavioral special needs, so family dinners were very uncomfortable.

To get him down to the table, he would find that it was very challenging, and then when he got there, he would pick on the little guy, and then husband would be having a reaction, and I just kept pressuring myself to have family dinners. I just thought it was so important for my family we should have family dinners.

I was starting to do things like if we have family dinners at predictable times on certain days of the week, I will schedule them. I will let everyone know that five o’clock on Wednesday night, we’re going to be sitting down as a family, and it’s at five o’clock. And I would schedule these a week ahead.

I would also schedule fun things, schedule maybe games during it, extra candy during meals or after, even treats or different toys that would be on the table. I just trying to make it like this party atmosphere where the whole family could get together, where they would start looking forward to it.

I used to buy little bottles of carbonated, like juice, so that everybody had their own little bottle. Maybe we’d drink them out of wine glasses. Everything. Try special dishes. And this one particular evening, I had prepared it, put the table down, and as always, older son came, but not at the right time. So husband’s sitting there, younger son is sitting there.

Older son didn’t come down. We’re all sitting there. We’re all waiting. Should we pray? Should we not pray? Okay, we went ahead and prayed. Then he came down, and then he started picking on the little guy who was just, like hiding and just “I cannot wait for this to be over.” But he’s just trying to like, go with the team.

And then I’m watching husband look at teenager, and then husband’s just like scooping his food up as fast as he can, and the teenager’s kind of meh. And I could just tell, like I’m watching those two husband and teenager, and then my heart goes out to little guy who I just wanna create this environment for him. Truly, he’s the only one who cares.

And I’m trying to have some pleasant conversation with him, and this one’s so, trying to get attention, but in a really negative way. And so as I finish my food, I try to eat slowly. I can just see I’m just starting to pick off the serving dishes, which is something I’d never done.

And then once everyone left, I’m cleaning up, and I am just eating while I’m cleaning up, just putting it in my mouth. And I saw what I was doing, ’cause once you start this work, you can’t unsee it. But I couldn’t stop in the moment. I could have, but I wasn’t willing to. I just wanted to clean up and get out of there and go somewhere else, and I was eating to get through that.

Okay, so there’s my story. Now, my questions for you are, Can you relate to trying to control something that was really never yours to control? Have you ever s- found yourself eating and not quite knowing why? While I was cleaning up, I couldn’t have said, “I just wanna get out of here.” I just couldn’t stop.

And I tell you that story. Because I want to ask you a different question. When you heard that, and you heard me say that, did I mess up? Or was I just trying to survive and get through it? Mess up or survive?

Yeah, I was just trying to survive. I was just trying to get through it. You can see that my brain just said, “Let’s just get through this. We can do this. Come on. I’ll help you through this.” And so I did, of course, fall into some guilt and shame afterward, but I want you to start to see yourself as you heard me, and that’s how the Lord sees. He sees, my goodness, you tried so hard You’re trying so hard.

So let’s move into the actual tools that will help you. Three tools that will help you from giving up. Now, I told you that after that I did have some negative feelings. I could tell I felt guilt and shame. I did lots of journaling, and I used these three tools. And I’m gonna tell you, you don’t have to do lots of journaling to do tool number one.

This becomes a standard. What do they call that? A standard operating process. I want this to just become standard for you. Number one is that you just decide, “I will not multiply the mess up,” which means you let one mess up be one, and you can start now. I’ll tell you more about how you can do that.

The second thing is that you get to use it for information. You get to say, “What do I now know that I couldn’t have known any other way?” And the third one is you get to truly prevent future mess-ups by asking how can I care and support myself through that in the future?

Okay, so let’s just dive into this first one. How not to multiply that darn mess up. The first one is I want you to just expect that you’re going to have that shame spiral. You know, anytime we do something that we’re like, “Oh, shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have done that.” We don’t have to say, “I wanna do that again,” but just expect it to sting a little.

I think when we expect it, then we say, “Of course, you’re there. It’s gonna come.” And remember, you’re not responsible for your first thought. You’re not responsible for your first thought. So expect it. You’re only responsible for what you do after that. Then you get to choose what’s next. And what I want your next move to be is at the very next meal, you eat normally.

Doesn’t that sound simple? It just means that the next meal is normal. No restriction, no punishment, just a normal meal. So if you have a mess up, let’s say, in the middle of the day, then I want you to just pause and sit with the Lord and commit to eating normally the rest of the day. And your brain will want to restrict. Remember, that’s just what your brain thinks it should be doing.

But instead, we’re going to eat normally. You’re gonna eat normally, so you can just write a sketch of what you plan to eat the rest of the day. Do that and commit that to the Lord. What you want to show your brain is we’re safe. We don’t wanna do that mess up thing again but we’re safe. We can restart right now. Nothing has gone wrong. I can restart right now.

I love doing this, especially if I’ve had an argument with someone and just, especially with my kids, I’ll say, “You know what? Let’s just restart the day. Let’s start over.” It could be 8:00 PM. It could be 9:00 PM. You can restart your day at any point ‘Cause the Lord is always with you.

He’s always saying, “Return to me.” And that’s all we have to do. This way one mess up, it’s just one mess up. Or is it even a mess up? It’s just you trying to get through what you were trying to get through

The second thing is I like to call this mining for gold. You want to ask yourself, what do I now know that I couldn’t have known any other way? So what I told you is that I learned I was trying to control other people. And I’m gonna tell you, when you try to control other humans it will always lead into tornado thinking.

And you know I was trying to control them because look how much effort I was putting into having the ideal interactions, that they had to play their parts a certain way for me to feel okay, for this to be a good environment for younger son and a good environment for me.

Look how much the word manipulation is the truth of what I was trying to do, but it really came from a place of love. I really thought I was doing the right mom thing. You can see I put enormous pressure on myself to create these memories, to be a good mom. I learned that.

And if that took one night of overeating after dinner, I will tell you the peace that’s come from learning that now is so good. I also learned, you guys, that my family is just not broken, that my expectations were just not the truth for my family.

My family is exactly as it should be. Do you know how I know that? Because nothing in God’s world happens by mistake. And if there’s something in your life that you think should be different, you’ve got to take it up with the Lord.

Because I promise you, no part of your life is an accident. He knew you would have the family you have, the kids you have, the spouse or the no spouse. He knew you would have the job or the no job. He knew you would be in this season of your life enduring this stuff. And if it requires you to overeat to start trusting him on that, he’s gonna reveal it somehow.

When we walk right next to the Lord, he can say, “Op, there’s a little pothole there,” and he’ll push you out of the way gently and then pull you back, and you miss the pothole. And then there might be a crack in the sidewalk, and he’s like, “Oh, there’s a crack in the sidewalk. Be careful. Oh, there’s dog poop. Watch out for that.”

And you guys are walking arm in arm. But so often we’re, like, walking ahead of him, and he’s back here, and we’re walking ahead of him, and he’s back here, and pretty soon we get so far ahead of him that he can’t even scream at us, and he has to throw a rock to get our attention to say, “Oh my gosh, you’re about to fall off the cliff.”

Or, “Oh my gosh, there’s a bike coming,” to where we get hit in the head and now we look back and we say, “What?” But typically we fell in the hole And that’s the point. The point is the Lord will allow us to fall, if that’s what we want to call it, as much as we need to so that He can get our attention and truly reveal what we need to know.

So when we mine for gold, I want you to just think of it as the biggest privilege ever. It showed me that I need Jesus. You know what it also showed me? A lot of humility. That I can still rely on food. That Denise Jelinek can sit here and I can say all the things and teach all the things, and I can still in my private life be so weak on my own.

And that food is the fastest thing that I can turn to for comfort. It reminds me that I still need to make that daily commitment. I still need this work. I needed more support. I want you to mine for gold so much. You can hear it in my voice, where that situation has become so precious to me. I’ve talked about it so many times now and taught about this dinner situation.

And it taught me so many things, and it’s brought me so much freedom because now I know these things. And I want you to make that list, and I want you to just keep going. I know this now, I know this now, I know this now, and I couldn’t have known it any other way. And keep going till you’d be willing to relive to relive that mess up? Just promise you he never allows anything that he cannot make for your good.

And the third thing is to be able to look back at that situation and say, “Where did I need care and support?” I love this one simple question: How can I care and support myself going forward in that situation? Whatever your situation was that you were thinking of in the beginning, we’ll talk about that.

I’ll tell you what I learned from my situation and where do I need care and support. Number one, make family dinners optional. “Hey, I’m sitting down with food. There will be dinner on the table Wednesday nights at 5:30. I would love for you to join me.” Whoever’s there is there I just have to manage my expectations.

And whoever’s there, if they’re there, that’s great, and if they don’t have a pleasant interaction, I can make a boundary that says dinner’s over or go sit somewhere else, or I’m leaving, right? I can do that. My job is to care for myself first. That’s my job. My job is to care for me first.

My job is to have realistic expectations. I’m gonna tell you what I decided to do. I decided to stop having family dinners. I decided to stop thinking that my family was broken because we didn’t have family dinners. I decided to start believing there are other ways to interact and to have quality time with my family.

And so I started creating those activities, sort of saying, “Well, what I really want is just for us to all be together.” And you know. I started experimenting with different things, maybe different outings and I’ve also found that it’s okay for us to have. I’m the one that wants quality time, so it’s okay for me to do that one-on-one.

It’s okay for me to think, too, like my sons can get together, and they do really well in these certain activities, so maybe we’ll all go get smoothies together. That’s fifteen minutes in the car there and fifteen minutes back. I got my thirty minutes of mom time watching them chitter chatter, and they’re in a good mood.

I can take them shopping. That’s usually fun for them. The craziest thing, though, you guys, is I have learned that all of us- all four of us. Have a really wonderful, beautiful time when we go out to eat at a restaurant. The first time we had a family dinner out at a restaurant to celebrate something that was wonderful, I could just see the dynamics were different.

Everyone was in a different mode. So now I plan once-a-month family dinners of us all together at a restaurant. And I just let that be. So I want you to think about your situation, the situation that you said you recently messed up. Can you now see where you needed care?

And that’s what you’ll do. When you look back, you can screenshot this. Your homework will be to say, “Well, was this an expected thing or an unexpected thing? Was it just a vulnerable situation or was my brain just trying to reorder?” But either way, you can say, “Where did I need care?” How do I want to care and support myself through this next time?

And you get to experiment with these different ways. Like just choose one thing you’d like to do differently. I want to say that tool number two and three, which are the mining for gold for the lessons and then this one, you’re not going to do it in the moment.

The only one I want you to do in the moment is just decide, ” I’m going to eat normally at the next meal.” Okay? These other ones, you’ll need some time. You’ll be calm. You need to be calm to do them, and there is no rush to do it. But I would say within the next 24 to 72 hours afterward.

Here’s what I want you guys to also hear. Did you know that when people have a heart attack, like someone’s driving, and let’s say they have a heart attack, they can pass out behind the wheel. Why? Because their brain says, “We don’t have a lot of oxygen going through the brain right now and through our body to survive right now, so we’re just gonna shut down all systems.

Okay? So if someone’s driving and they have a heart attack and they pass out, their brain was going into survival mode. None of us would look at them and say, “Wow, your brain really messed up there.”

You’re so weak. You’re such a failure. I just want you to see that it’s the same mechanism that’s saving your life in a heart attack that shuts down all systems. It’s the same brain that is just in survival mode and using food to help you get through that situation. So once you’ve messed up, let’s look at that and let’s unpack that to prevent future mess-ups.

And I see some questions in the chat. Can you guys make sure that you put those in the Q&A so I can answer them when we’re totally done? Okay, so here are the three tools at a glance. Number one, don’t multiply the mess up. You can take a screenshot of this. Use it for information.

What do I now know that I couldn’t have known any other way? I want you to keep going until you would do it again, just because it was such good learning. And find where you need care and support. So just how can I care and support myself through this next time? This is all information.

But you need to know that life will happen, that humans will be human, and it doesn’t mean that it has to lead to mess-ups. So the hardest part of really losing weight. So one of the biggest ways that we are stuck not being at a healthy weight is once we mess up, we multiply it into days or weeks, and now you don’t have to do that.

And I also will say that the hardest part of losing weight is usually not the food. It’s what happens in your brain when you get triggered and you get, go into tornado thinking. So let me explain something else here.

Here’s the situation that has happened right now. Right now, you get triggered, you have a stress response, which we all understand now is a stress response, and our brains are going to food. Okay? But I want you to imagine what if you had a way that would help you with your stress response, that you now know how to care and support yourself through this.

Because right now you’re getting, these are today’s tools. Those three, and those three really do work. They really do prevent you from giving up, okay? So there is no give up. It just ends here and then we use tools.

But my question is what if you have a way that once you’re in a stress response, you know how to care and support yourself through it . Because what would happen then is that instead of going to the food, it would totally erase this part. There would be no food.

See? Am I selling you on the importance of being able to care and support yourself through a stress response? How to care and support yourself without food? Yeah. But what if when you are triggered? What if when you’re triggered, you’re able to return to calm?

Now, if when you’re triggered, and that trigger, remember it’s two things: something unexpected happens or it’s a vulnerable situation and you didn’t know what to do. When you’re triggered, if you can learn how to return to calm and you teach your brain how to do that, it actually will prevent you from going even into a stress response. Isn’t that pretty cool?

Now imagine if you actually could anticipate your triggers. So over here, you can actually detect when your body is about to be triggered or you have your eyes so aware on your life that you know you’re going into a situation that could trigger you. If you can anticipate a trigger and you have tools to stay calm, then you never get triggered. Is that incredible?

So instead of just using these tools that you learned today after the mess up, we can actually go to the very, very, very beginning of this cycle and prevent it, prevent that tornado thinking. And I’ve been teaching this in a program that we call Untroubled, and I wanna share with you a message that a woman just gave me about that

She said, and here’s her whole message. She essentially said, Let me start here. She said, “Something happened today that led me to start going into tornado thinking, but I took some deep breaths.” Okay, she noticed she was triggered. She took some deep breaths, “And I asked myself, what was the fact and what was the situation? What were my thoughts?”

So that’s one of the tools that I teach in Untroubled. She says, “My thoughts led me to frustration, and so I remembered, what am I making that fact mean, and what else could I make the fact mean?” So all of what I just told you are some tools that she has learned and trained her brain to do.

But here’s what I want you to see. The very last sentence is, “I do feel much better about it, and there was no thought of food at all while this was going on,” which is what would have happened in the past. And this woman has only been using the tools in the Untroubled program for two weeks.

Two weeks, and she’s noticing how this doesn’t even have to end up with food, how she doesn’t even have to go into a stress response. She’s training her brain with that. And what the Untroubled program does is it helps you identify your own personal triggers. Because listen, your triggers are different than mine.

You’ve got to look at your own life. It helps you calm the storm, even in the middle of it. It helps you return to calm. Remember, a trigger can happen, but you know how to return to calm. It helps you anticipate those triggers before they even take over, where you start to feel it in your body. Your body’s sending you sensations that you aren’t even aware of.

But I will teach you how to do that, how you can start reading your own body and care and support yourself before you’re even triggered. And slowly by slowly, you’ll be able to prevent these triggers even though your life doesn’t change. Isn’t that incredible?

This is a six-week program  that you guys can start right away. There’s two ways to do Untroubled. The first one is self-paced. It’s six weeks that will take you through how to detect in your body when you’re being triggered, how to develop your own personal trigger map, how to see the things in your life that are triggering you right now. You’re not gonna change your life.

Nobody’s changing their life. God gave you this life. He wants you to have this life. It isn’t an accident. Our work is to care and support ourselves through this life, and you just haven’t had any other tools. Your brain is simply doing what it knows, and that’s to go to food.

So if you want to do this self-paced on your own, it’s six weeks. The second option is you can do it with me, and that is with coaching every single week. Every single week. So you get instant access, of course, but every week we get together and we get to talk about your triggers.

Every week you get answers to your questions. Every week you get to problem solve, and you get to do this with other Catholic women  you say, “Denise, I wanna learn a different way. I don’t like giving up.”

And a woman who doesn’t like giving up probably really doesn’t like being triggered. You wanna get through the ups and downs of life without stress eating. I mean, here’s the biggest thing: life will not change, but our goal is to get through it without eating. And if we can get through it without using food. You can be at your healthy weight.

I find so often women plan these elaborate diet plans or some sort of meal plan and they start it, and then something triggers them, and that’s what throws them off. Because none of  us are confused about the foods that will lead to a healthy weight.
You probably have a plan that you absolutely love, and you wish you could stick to it, and perhaps the majority of time you can. But this is the missing piece that’s throwing you off. I find it’s important to focus on one aspect at a time.

And when you can put concerted, concentrated, focused effort on retraining your brain on what to do when you’re triggered, it will make following a plan, any plan, doesn’t matter what plan it is, you get to pick whatever plan you think will work for you, it makes that possible This is the skill to learn so that you can follow any plan.

You know the food that will lead to a healthy weight. It’s just time to not be thrown off from it. We spend so much time trying to manipulate and rearrange the other things in our lives so that we don’t get triggered. How about we put our control and energy into what we can control, to what will improve our lives?

Because what I find is that when we keep putting our energy and trying to control the things that really aren’t ours to control, trying to control things that aren’t yours to control 100% leads you into tornado thinking, triggers stress response and eating. Trying to create a perfect family always led me to want to eat, and it pushed me so far that it did. That was a lot. I hadn’t done that for a long time.

Now I know. Now, I know. And there’s so many things in your life right now that I promise you that just learning a few skills will transcend all of those. And like the woman that I shared with you today, she’s only been doing this work for two weeks, and she is not eating over things. She said she didn’t even have a thought about food.

That’s how powerful doing this work can be. It retrains your brain. It shows your brain what to focus on so that your brain isn’t doing what it’s always known to do. So come with me. Come with me. Teach your brain these things. It’s been the missing piece. You know the food part. Now do  this.

After six weeks, you will be a woman who knows when her body’s being triggered. You’ll be able to calm yourself down, and when you find yourself in those vulnerable situations, you have a plan for it. That’s part of the program. We create plans for things.

And then part of the coaching is we support ourselves. How did that work? Do we need to tweak something? I want you to look at that. Look at those three things one more time. A woman who knows when her body is triggered, she knows how to calm herself down, and she knows how to care and support herself through rough times without food.

Do you think that woman struggles with food? I mean, do you think that woman struggles with her weight? Do you think the woman? Who knows when her body’s being triggered, how to calm herself down, and how to care and support herself with- through rough times without food. Do you think she struggles with her weight?

Do you think learning these three things would help make your weight loss much easier? I just think it’s so cool that we get an opportunity to truly look at what is the problem. And this work allows us to really put eyes on what is the problem. And it’s you guys, over and over, it’s not the food. But it’s even clearer now that it’s just not the food.  And I promise you, you don’t ever have to give up.

And I promise you that you’ve never truly messed up. Your brain was just doing what it’s always known what to do. It was trying to protect you. But it is time that you can retrain your brain so that it learns new ways to support you.

And those new ways can become automatic. Just as automatic messing up can be, as automatic can be the pauses, calming yourself down. And it just takes retraining your brain. So everyone, let’s start doing weight loss like we do everything else in our life, with the Lord, the Catholic way.  

And if untroubled feels like the next step, the next thing that God is calling you to, just go in the description. You will see the link, and you can get started on learning how to make your pauses automatic, how to make calming yourself as automatic as giving up and throwing in the towel used to be.

All right, everybody, have a blessed day.