Now, even though this is going to be over about an 18-month journey, I want you to also know that I’m honing this method as I am experimenting with myself so that I can then lead people through the method a lot faster, a lot faster. And this is how I do everything with the way that we do Catholic weight loss.

I have lived it myself, and then it gets refined and refined and refined and purified so that only the things that truly work, that rise to the surface are what I teach you. I don’t need you to go through and waste your time. Experimenting on yourself is absolutely amazing, and yet when I teach you something, I want to say, “Hey, here’s the most effective way that I have found, so let’s try this first.”

And I’m gonna be going through all of that, how I teach Catholic weight loss, in addition to some new things that I have learned and refined, and I’m teaching that all in my free workshop, Weight Loss: the Catholic Way. It’s July 11th. I’m gonna put the link in the description.

Please just get your spot. That way you are notified of, hey, it’s starting in an hour, and you will also get the replay. You will also get the Zoom link sent directly to you so you don’t have to hunt and peck for it. You can just find it. You may be wondering, why in the world would I be doing a free weight loss workshop?

And if you don’t know my story, it’s very short. This is the number one reason I’m doing a free weight loss workshop. Because God said, “Denise, go find my hurting daughters and bring them to me.”

Because 12 years ago, he freed me from binge eating. 12 years ago, he freed me from this cycle that I was in where I was spending most of my evenings hiding in my pantry, dumping chocolate chips in a jar of peanut butter and eating it with a spoon, probably going through four to five jars of peanut butter a week.

Because I just didn’t know how to handle my emotions. I just didn’t know how to handle my life any other way, and my brain had gotten into that pattern, and it felt very normal and familiar, and I couldn’t stop myself. I would be waking up in the morning with so much regret, so much remorse, promising I would never do it again, and I would do it again. I would wait for my family to go to bed at night so I could scurry back downstairs and eat more food.

And the thing is that 12 years ago, God freed me from that. I had a very private journey. For several years, it was just me having this freedom, living privately with God, and of course my husband knew, but I wasn’t telling really anyone else about it.

Until the pandemic hit and everything was turned upside down, and God used that as an opportunity to change my career path, change the message that I was sending. I was working as a personal trainer, and I was teaching people about their physical health. I was teaching them about their nutrition, wellness.

And he said, “Denise, I want you to go find my hurting daughters and bring them to me.” And I knew what he meant. I knew that he meant go find the women who are in that dark place like I would be on my couch in the morning feeling just horrible about myself.

Go find the women who are sitting in their living rooms wondering what the heck is wrong with them, scrolling through Instagram or different websites to find a solution, which I did many times, and absolutely nothing worked. And thank God nothing worked. Thank God nothing worked. If something would have worked other than God, I wouldn’t be here today.

And so I do believe it is my mission to share his message with as many people as possible, to let them know that Catholic weight loss is the way. And I’ll be doing a short podcast, I’ll release it in a few days, just telling you what I’m gonna cover in the workshop. But essentially, you need to see how secular dieting isn’t addressing your real problem, in fact, it’s making your problem worse, and how Catholic weight loss is truly the way.

And I believe those two terms can go together. Catholic and weight loss can go together because it is that weight loss, and it is not unhealthy weight loss. It’s called weight rebalancing, if you will, and I like to just use the term getting to your healthy weight. But we’re going to do it the way we do everything in life, the Catholic way. So go to the description and make sure that you get your spot.

And let’s dive into the saga, the journey of how Denise has finally found a solution to being able to go to a restaurant, eat normally. And when I say normally, I can tell now when my body has had enough, and I am learning, still learning, to feel at ease stopping eating. So let’s begin where every great story begins, which is in the beginning.

So when I first started doing health and weight loss coaching, I was introduced to this concept of a protocol, and a protocol is something that you just decide ahead of time, here’s a vulnerable situation. Here’s something that kinda keeps tripping me up. Here’s something that’s always been a problem, and I don’t want it to be a problem anymore.

And so we just think ahead of time and we create protocols, and I have many podcasts about protocols. A couple years into teaching this concept, I thought it was a lot more fun to call it a game plan. It sounds more fun and playful.

So just know that a protocol and a game plan, they’re the same darn thing. It’s just you thinking ahead, “I’ve got this situation that bothers me, that trips me up, that feels vulnerable, that feels shaky, and I want to plan ahead for it.”

So I was introduced to this concept, and so I started to make restaurant protocols. And I would make one, I would try it. It may work, it may not work, but I would continue to make these protocols.

And I wanna share a couple with you. I literally have dug through old podcasts. I have dug through old videos. I have dug through old writings to bring you this podcast today. So it is truly a documentary, if you will, and if there’s a word to have an audio-mentery that is what this is.

So I would try a variety of protocols, and yet it still felt like I was white knuckling. I would still feel this angst before going to eat at a restaurant, and I still felt very hypervigilant when I would be at a restaurant. So just know that I created these protocols, I tried a few things, and it just didn’t really feel like it stuck.

Well then, in 2023, oh my gosh, I guess I am going back many, many more years than this. In 2023 I had a huge flare-up in my SIBO, which is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. It is sort of in the IBS family, and when that happens, which has happened maybe three times in my life, I know that what I absolutely have to do is to decrease the variety of my food.

When I’ve had flare-ups before, I have limited my food to homemade yogurt with some sort of almond milk, steamed carrots, chicken, only boiled chicken, eggs, and this bread that I’d made that was a protein bread, and I could eat that. Well, this SIBO had flared up so badly, and it flared up because I was doing keto, which I do believe God called me to do keto for a few years. That’s a totally different story.

But I had drifted into what’s called dirty keto, which essentially means you’re just eating a lot of sugar-free stuff. And so it wasn’t as whole food, and I’d gotten to a point where I was probably drinking a bottle of sugar-free syrup, like putting it in coffee. I wasn’t drinking it from the bottle.

I was putting it in coffee or maybe adding it to yogurt or making some sort of concoction. I really don’t recall anymore. I was going through a bottle a week. That’s a lot of artificial sugar, and I think it was sucralose, which is horrible on a person’s gut who has small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.

All you have to know is I trashed my gut. I trashed my gut, and this is all the while, and I want this is kind of a confession time, too. All the while, while I’m teaching women to eat food that they love, and I truly did love it, but I can see looking back, oh, it was an attachment. I can see I was using it for emotional reasons. I didn’t have that freedom. Which is fine. I mean, this is just part of the human experience.

So I absolutely had to find something that would heal my gut. It’s kind of funny, like most people might go to a doctor. I guess I knew it was so bad, and I just kept praying and praying and praying, and I talked so much with the Lord, and he kept bringing different things into my life, and he brought in the carnivore diet.‌

When you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, what ferments in your gut, because your food is supposed to digest, and the bacteria is supposed to be in your large intestine, and when you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, the GPS on your bacteria is broken, and that happened to me because I had a bout of salmonella years and years ago in the early 2000s, like 2001.

Anyway, what happens is the bacteria move to the small intestine, and so that’s not where it’s supposed to actually be digested, and it ferments it and it creates a lot of gas. And the only kind of food that will create that are vegetables. Isn’t that crazy? Fruits, vegetables, and certain starches.

But what is 100% safe for someone to eat who has SIBO that will not ferment in your gut is any oils, fats, and meat. And the carnivore diet is 100% animal-based, so I didn’t have to worry about the vegetables. And so it was a beautiful almost elimination diet that still felt very satisfying, and I could get on board with that. And I just felt like God put it in my lap.

The way that I started to do carnivore, I started to follow some people, and I started to join a group because I truly believe that if you need to make a change in your life, being supported by a community is just one of the kindest, most loving things you can do for yourself. I really believe that.

And I wanted to give myself that gift, and I joined a community to help me with the carnivore diet. And what they promoted was eating to feeling full, and that you would. they had this protocol where they. It was essentially called priming. They called it priming, where if you felt like you were half full, then you should eat to become full.

I thought the rationale was interesting. They believed that the people who have not been doing the carnivore diet were undernourished and underfed, and therefore, they needed to make sure that they were getting enough nutrients. I have to be honest with you, that when I decide to do something that I don’t know how to do, I just challenge myself to be 100% obedient, and that’s worked for me in a lot of places.

When I first came into stopping binge eating and surrendering my life to the Lord, I said, “I don’t know how to do this. I’ve never done it, and you people do, and I’m gonna do exactly what you say.” I just really just blindly say, “I’m committed, and I’m gonna do it,” and I don’t even question it, which I do believe, honestly, is a huge asset, a huge asset where you say, “I obviously don’t know how to do this, so I’m going to get help, and I’m just gonna do what they say.”

And so I did that. And I want you to know that if you’re considering Catholic weight loss, and if you have never done it, I really want you to be that willing to try it, to say, “Hey, you know what? What I’ve been doing on my own hasn’t worked. And what do I have to lose? Nothing.”

So I started doing this protocol on the carnivore diet and eating that way, and I’ve never been in tune really with my hunger cues anyway, and so I was feeling uncomfortably full at times, but I also was trying to just be obedient, if you Will, and just be willing to do the process.

Well, slowly by slowly, from September to December, I had gained nearly 25 pounds. It was very uncomfortable in my body, and I was very uncomfortable in my clothes. I had bought some new clothes, and what’s interesting, though, is that although I was obedient to that- I also said I’m going to do this the surrendered way.

And so as I saw my weight creep up, as I saw my body change, I would sit with the Lord every single morning and I would say, “Lord, is this what you want for me?” And each time I just felt 100%, “Yes, Denise, this is what I want for you.”

Now, I felt like He was saying, not only is this healing your gut, but it was healing so many other places in me. I could see that one of the reasons I was into the sugar-free syrups was because I was trying to maintain and hold onto my thin body.

I had made my thin body a god. And I think that anything that we’re holding onto that we’re making a god that isn’t God is Hel will remove it from us so it’s no longer distracting us from Him. And I really feel that. I also during that time was able to work on my own body image and accepting my own body, which was so hard.

But I had to learn how to be kind and gentle and tender with this body that felt different, with this body that didn’t look like I wanted it to look. And it was only actually after I was able to go through that and having a different body, and it was, you know, pretty significantly different in a short amount of time, that I was actually able to create that course, Letting Yourself Love Your Body, recognizing that it is only a mindset thing It’s only a mindset thing.

And so I continued to gain weight until I got to December, and I sat there and I said, “Lord, I am so uncomfortable. What if I could heal my gut?” And I’d healed my gut by that point. At that point, my gut was great, and I sat with him and I said, “Lord, what if I could maintain this gut healing and go back to what I know works for me?”

It was the shift from I tried what they did, my gut healed amazing, and can I trust myself to return to what I know works for me? What if I do that? What if I trust myself? And so that was really fun. And so I started this experiment and what I now call Denise’s Lab that I’ve honed over and over and over, and I thought, “What if I just do what I know works for me?”

Let’s get back to eating in the way that I know works for me, ’cause I’d gotten into a variety of behaviors that weren’t the way that I’d always eaten. Things like eating butter. Like just uninhibited amounts of butter. One of the things they recommend on the carnivore diet, as crazy as this sounds, is you could just have pats of butter, and it was just. It felt out of balance, let’s just say. It just felt out of balance.

So I said, starting the first of the year, January 2024, I said, “What if I just return to trusting myself? What if I could get.” And it wasn’t necessarily back to my healthy weight. It was just something felt out of balance. And so I started intentionally losing weight, which I believe you can listen in my carnivore diet story.

But where this is relevant is during this time, what I’d started to do was observe how I was eating, and then I said, “What feels out of balance?” And then I would pick an experiment to run each week, maybe one or three experiments, and just started to see, does this change anything? does this create a change? Does this feel more in balance? Is this leading me down to my healthy weight?

Well, during this time, I started observing and doing small experiments for two months. And then I got a new community that I thought, “I’m going to try intentional weight loss with this carnivore/just different way of eating that I knew would stay good with my gut.” And part of that, I recognized that I did not want to eat out at a restaurant more than once a week. That’s where I’m going with all of this.

And so I told my husband, and we would do other things, but I pretty much, during this intentional weight loss period, decided that I would not eat out more than once a week. And that went really well for my weight loss, but I’ll tell you guys, when I would go out to eat, it felt like I still had that mindset like, “Oh, I never get to do this. I never have this.”

I could tell my brain was, “Get in what you can, ’cause you’re not gonna have another chance until next week.” I was creating this restriction, which was leading me to then overeat when I would get to a restaurant. And I don’t think I felt restricted during the week. It was just. when I’d go to a restaurant, it felt different. It felt like, now’s your chance.

And I could just tell that I still didn’t feel that peace. And yeah, looking back, I could still see the restaurants I was using as permission to overeat. My mind was totally not managed. What I was trying to do is to just, I wouldn’t say white-knuckle, but I was really only looking at the behavior and not the mindset behind the behavior.

Okay? So I got down to my healthy weight. Restaurants still tended to kind of be a problem. We might go out once a week, we might go out twice a week, but they still weren’t really peaceful. So that’s in 2024. Now, 2025, and I’m giving you guys the dates so that you see, holy cow, sometimes we just have to keep working at something. We have to stay in the work.

In 2025, I was running a group of 63 surrendered women, and I chose to do a video diary. I thought, you know what? I’m gonna do 63 Surrendered with them, and I’m going to also have my video diary because I had a vacation planned in there, and I wanted them to see just how you can do 63 Surrendered.

And if you don’t know what 63 Surrendered is, it’s essentially a fancy name for the way that you do lose weight as a Catholic woman. There’s four daily disciplines that you do, and I wanted to show these women how I did it when I was on vacation. So it was fun to share that experience with people.

But here’s the thing that you need to know, is that the vacation that I had planned was actually at an all-inclusive, and I haven’t been at an all-inclusive resort for 15 years maybe. And all inclusive, then I knew that we would be eating every meal, we were there seven days, over 30 meals would be at a restaurant, at a buffet.

And so I created a protocol. Here’s what I thought. So the game plan or protocol that I wanted to create you say, “How do you want to feel during this event?” And I said, “I wanna feel connected. I wanna feel loved and engaged.” What can I think to create this feeling? This is a perfect time to connect and make memories. This vacation can change the course of our family. Ooh, that’s a good one.

And this is a great time to let God’s love flow. So I really wanted to feel that when I was on vacation with my family. We were at, like I said, an all-inclusive, and it was in Mexico. How do I want to feel about myself on this vacation? I wanna feel seen and heard, loved, supported, important, special, light. And what can I think to create this? Denise, I see you. I love you. This is special. This is just for you. I’m committed to protecting your interior, and I’ll never forget you.

And I want you guys to remember one of the things that I really need to heal from, and that I’ve healed greatly, praise God that He’s healed me, is this belief that I’m forgotten, that I’m unimportant. And so I see that come up a lot in my writing.

Okay. So other part of this protocol is foods that I will eat and why, and foods that I won’t eat and why. Foods that I will eat: dips, flavorful and savory foods. I love dipping food. Why? To get a lot out of my food without feeling uncomfortable. When I eat very flavorful food, I don’t have to eat a lot. It just feels very satisfying.

Foods that I won’t eat and why. And I said, foods I try but I don’t actually want seconds of because they’re on my plate, so I’m not gonna eat foods like that. And I won’t clean my plate just because food is there.

This was the first time that I started to recognize, oh my gosh, I’m eating food just because it’s on my plate, and really looking at that behavior and giving myself permission to not do that. I had some other intentional thoughts around food that I wanted to share with you that may be helpful for you.

Is finishing this actually the best way to enjoy what is mine? I have this belief like, “This is all mine. This is all mine.” And that just goes back to that younger part of me that feels wounded and deprived and forgotten. So when you do get something special, she wants to take it all as hers. Is eating past fullness part of the privilege or a prison?

And that’s the, one of the key thoughts that kept driving me on that vacation was, eating past full is a prison and stopping is a privilege. Isn’t that cool? I loved that. That was really helpful for me. And what if the real luxury is stopping when I’m satisfied? Oh, here, yeah, stopping is a privilege, overeating is a prison.

And then you go through all the obstacles that you expect. So one of the obstacles were the buffet or menu overwhelm, and feeling pressure to just try all the things. And so my old response would be to pressure, eat all the foods, and try everything new. I never get a chance to do this.

And I decided ahead of time that my new game plan would be to say, “It’s okay to take what you like, and it’s fine to take familiar foods. It’s fine to take what you know you like, Denise. We don’t have to try everything different just because we’re in a place that has different foods.” Then – another obstacle, this is all mine. I put it on my plate, and I have to finish it.

So my old response would be to clean my plate, and that’s when I came up with that new game plan that stopping is a privilege, and Denise, you are special no matter what you put in your mouth. Another obstacle is a thought, I never get this. So my old response would be to overeat it or go back for more, and my new game plan was to decide if it’s actually special to me. If it’s special to me, then I wanna eat it first.

And I started to use this concept of I wanna put the foods that are most special to me in my stomach first so that they get priority, if you will, on my stomach space, and I don’t get overfull. And finally, the other obstacle is feeling preoccupied with food, thinking about seconds while still eating, not present. You guys ever do that, where you’re eating something and you’re thinking about eating more?

You’re thinking about eating food while you’re eating food. You’re thinking about eating other food while you’re eating food. And my old response would be impulse or fast eating, get enough in, and I could definitely tell that that was a stress response. And I wanted to be aware of that.

Ooh, that’s a stress response. When I’m thinking about food when I’m eating food now, or like I’m thinking about eating future food while I’m eating, or I’m eating fast, and that’s just a stress response. And my new game plan was to recognize that preoccupation with anything, with it food, someone else’s behavior, or my to-do list, means that my brain is sensing danger.

Did you guys hear me? That if I’m not present and I’m preoccupied by something else, my brain believes that I need to focus on that other thing. It’s sensing danger, and my only move is to actually calm down first. And I recognize that I cannot make food decisions in that stress state. I just can’t.

So that vacation went very well. So that was the protocol that I used, and what was so fun, part of the experiments that I run for myself, is I create a tracker for myself, and then I check in with myself, and I was giving myself hearts for every meal that I used my game plan or that I didn’t overeat or that I ate slowly and stayed present.

That’s another fun thing that I like to do with my experiments is, I like to create a tracker for me. Okay. So then the next time that I gave a focused effort to this was I was still using this protocol, but my husband and I went to Vegas, and I just kept feeling like, gosh, there’s something underneath of this. It just felt like the work that I was doing was very surface-y, but something kept coming up. And this is the time that I was introduced to more healing work.

And so when I sat and I wrote and I wrote, it became very apparent to me that there was something that I needed to do, and so I decided that I’m gonna observe myself and do some writing on it. I just wanna observe my brain. So this is kind of how I run every experiment. First, I wanna observe it, and then I actually might make a game plan, and the game plan then, using it would be the experiment.

But first, I have to observe what is the behavior that I wanna work on. And what I noticed was my brain having these thoughts, and I wish I could find my writing from this ’cause I’m just doing this from memory, but it was something related to feeling special. This is special. I never get to do this.

It’s just this whole concept of being very special. It’s unique. I never get to do this. And what’s so fascinating is that’s not even true. The older I get and the more freedom we have with traveling because our kids are getting older, and my husband loves traveling, the more I am doing this.

But I can tell that’s a younger part of me. That’s a younger part of me that needs that healing. So I thought that was very interesting. So I remember that Vegas trip really working on just observing myself because this Vegas trip was truly part of three weeks. Within three weeks, you guys, this is crazy.

Within three weeks, I was traveling 15 days. So the next trip after that, so that was with my husband, the next trip after that I had with a friend, a dear friend who’s also in this program. And so it was very fun, very fun to share our food thoughts and what my brain is saying. We would say it out loud. We’re both coaches.

And we both were really using this as an opportunity not only to spend time together and work on beautiful things for Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit, but we were also using it as time to grow closer to ourselves and to heal our relationship with food.

And one of the things we started to implement with regard to restaurants is, it was fun ’cause we had a buddy, we were buddies together, is we would not open the menu. We would sit there, and for 60 seconds we would just calmly decide, what do I wanna do? What do I have a sense about eating? And I love that. I love that. It was so fun. It made ordering… sometimes we would just say, “Hey, this is what we want,” to the waitress. So that was super cool.

And the other thing is because we had each other, we also started practicing this concept of when we’d had enough we would just say it out loud. ” You know what? I’ve had enough.” And we were staying in a place where we could easily take leftovers home, and so that was also kind of fun to configure, “Oh, I’m gonna have this for lunch tomorrow.”

So that was not a written protocol, it was in the moment, but it was really beautiful, really beautiful just to be able to stay really connected with myself. And you’re gonna hear at the end of this story that is just the truth of where I wanna go. I just wanna eat in harmony with my body.

Okay. So that’s in October, and then my husband decides he wants to go back to this all-inclusive Mexico place. And we do it again. And I used the same protocol that I’d used six months earlier in June when we went on the family trip, and that was the protocol that I just went through.

But this May, May of 2026, my husband took me back to the same darn place. Okay, so you can tell we’re getting older. We wanna keep going to the same places.

And I don’t mean that in any sort of derogatory way, but we were sitting at breakfast one day at this resort and my husband goes, “I see why people just go back to the same place that they like going to.” He goes, “As I get older, I just wanna go back to familiar places. You know, the variety isn’t as much of the spice of life.” I thought that was really cute.

And so here I am back in May. My husband took me for my birthday, which was amazing, and it became very apparent to me, oh my gosh, we are doing over 30 meals at this resort, 30 meals at buffets, at restaurants, and traveling.

And I see that traveling is a huge part of our life, our future life. I see restaurants are a huge part of our future life. And God had exposed me to some new tools. There is this exercise that I did called unwanted behaviors, and I pulled that out, and this is where one of the biggest shifts have happened for me. I should do a whole podcast on this.

But essentially you say what your goal is, and I said, “I want to stop eating when I’m full.” And what behavior is standing in the way? I said, “The behavior of keep eating. I keep eating.” And you go through, “Well, why is that even a problem?” And I said, “I just feel horrible about myself, and I want to conquer this. I want to look forward to travel and not dreading it. I want to be a good example.”

And I started to think about a recent time, and prior to that was just Mother’s Day, when I’d been at a restaurant and I had eaten more than I had expected. And how was that benefiting me? And I said, actually, because I felt special. When I was on Mother’s Day and we went to this burger place, and I had my boys with me and my husband, we were all having so much fun. We were playing games at the restaurant, and I just felt so special.

And I just felt this is all for me. And it just felt like this really fun experience. And how overeating at this point to keep eating felt beneficial was because I felt special, I felt treated. I felt like part of the fun. I felt normal. Isn’t that interesting? I felt normal. Like, ooh, I can eat whatever I want.

And I was trying to feel special, but also, you guys, I was trying to avoid the feeling of feeling deprived, left out. Isn’t that so interesting? I was trying to not feel unimportant or forgotten. So I went through this whole exercise recognizing the truth is that when I’m overeating, I’m trying to avoid feeling left out or deprived.

And I love the question in this exercise that says, “Okay, is overeating the best and only way to not feel left out or deprived or forgotten?” And the answer is no. Absolutely not. And then what I get to do is to connect with God, and He said, “Denise, I want to heal you. Let Me.” Isn’t that beautiful? He said, “You, sweet girl, are so precious to me, and you are never forgotten.”

And so my new belief, and this is part of this exercise, is to just expect that to surface. My brain has been thinking for several decades, “You’re forgotten. Nobody cares. You’re left out.” And so that’s the truth. That’s the real truth. And so my new belief would be expect it to surface. It just wants to be heard, and I can allow it without fear or believing it.

I can allow that feeling of, “I never get to do this,” or, “I’m deprived or left out.” I can allow that to come up. My new belief also is the thought I am safe to experience the emotion of forgotten. It will pass. I can hold onto younger version of Denise, little Denise who believes she’s forgotten, and just love her. I can hold her through that.

The other part of this exercise is to notice that what I was trying to feel was to feel special. And the question you ask yourself again, is eating more the only and best way to feel special? And the answer is no. And what are some other ways that I can create that feeling of special? Because all of you know that a feeling does not come from the food we put in our mouth.

A feeling comes from the thought we’re having about the food. So I can create the feeling of special without putting food in my mouth. I can simply have a thought that will create the feeling of special. And so I played around and tried on a couple thoughts, like you try on a shirt, and the one that landed for me was, He cares. Someone really cares about me.

I’m really loved. Someone truly cares. That’s the one I really started practicing and cultivating, even when I wasn’t eating, so that my special bucket, if you will, was full my entire trip, so I could access the feeling of special, cultivate the feeling of special at any time, regardless of if I’m eating or not eating.

And I asked the Lord to reveal more to me. And He said, “These are the times you get to feel my love.” Like when I cultivate that feeling of special. He said, “Sweet girl, help me let yourself receive my love.

God was saying, “Denise, when you feel special because you’re cultivating that in your brain, you are allowing yourself to receive my love.” Like, God always wants to give me that love, but I’ve been blocking Him.

And then I went on to say, to respond to the Lord. I said, “I see that my overeating is truly a lack of letting myself experience your love, Lord, at all times. I must intentionally retrain my brain to be tuned in to receive your love at any moment so that I can access the feeling of special at any moment.

So during that vacation, I just kept saying, “Someone truly cares about me.” And I would put those glasses on, and I would notice it everywhere, whether it was in the way that our towels were folded in our room, whether it was in the way that the waiter filled our water or, just maybe even somebody who picked up my towel if I dropped it.

I could just see all over the place that someone truly cares about me. So I created a new protocol, but through this exercise, not the way that I’d done the game plan before, and my new behavior would be to pause when I feel forgotten, allow forgotten to well up in me, like to notice the urge to eat more, and to allow myself to feel forgotten.

Like, just to notice, there it is again. Not a problem And I would intentionally do a 60-second pause in the middle of my meal and just be. Just be. And one of the things as I’m rereading this that I actually did not do because I forgot about it was to visualize during that pause the younger version of me and just let her sit on my lap and just stroke her back and say, “I love you. I see you. You’re so special to me. You’re so precious to me.”

And say, “Someone truly does care about us, sweet girl. It’s that exercise that has been most pivotal to me that I think you can just see the layers of the onion being peeled back and peeled back and peeled back and peeled back. And this has most recently been the thing that has helped me so much.

Now, I continue to hone this because my work as a human who knows how to do this stuff is to make my life peaceful. And when I experiment on myself, then I can bring it to you and you can hear my journey.

So now we’re a month from that vacation that I’d gone on, and I continue to have this new thought about being special, loved, and cared for, and I really have noticed I hate that feeling of being overfull. I do not like it.
And so recognizing that not being full and noticing when I’m getting full, so this is still a work in progress because I’m still learning what feels full, what feels comfortable, and when to stop. But I’m learning it, and that’s when I’m observing it.

So most recently, I’m recognizing that I need to create safety in my body to eat or not eat. Like it just doesn’t matter what food I put in my mouth or not, I’m safe. If I feel forgotten, it’s not because of the food that I’m eating or not eating, it’s because my thoughts about the food and my brain is really used to thinking forgotten, left out.

So I should just expect it. But that doesn’t mean it’s true. I don’t have to believe it. I don’t have to follow it. And I don’t have to shame it either. I just know that’s a wounded younger part of me who wants to be heard. I’ve also started to notice when I don’t want to not have food. Like, I can sense this feeling of being attached to certain foods, which is very interesting.

And so I’m practicing actually letting our groceries run pretty lean at times to I don’t have my favorite foods, if you will, in the house, to practice not having my favorites and being fine. Just practice, like, detachment. I know that’s a little bit of a side note there, and it also is just really pleasant to, like, not go to the grocery store more than once a week.

And who am I kidding? I get grocery delivery. I hate going to the grocery store. Okay, so now I want to take you to the most recent mindset work that I have done, and it is on this new thought, I’m learning to sense when my body feels just right, when it feels in harmony, and I want to feel freedom more than I want to feel full.

Now, this came because I wanted a thought that I could think, and my brain kept thinking, I wanna know when I’ve had enough. And I don’t like that, when I’ve had enough. It feels like you’ve had enough.

And again, maybe that doesn’t feel like that to you, but for me, it felt depriving, it felt shameful, it felt. It didn’t feel sweet and kind and loving and special. So I was looking for a different word for enough, and I used an app, it’s a free app called WordHippo, if I’m just trying to play around with words and change words out.

And I love the word harmony. I love the word peace. And so some of the other ones that I had played around with, and I’m reading my journal. Eat until, instead of saying I’ve had enough, eat until I’ve had an adequate amount of food, which sounded, like, stupid. That did not feel yummy at all.

A proper fit, agreeable, harmony, in sync with. And that’s when I thought, I want to be in harmony with my body to where it feels just right. Just right. And I thought, that’s fun. I wanna play around with that for a little bit. Let’s just see how that feels. And I’m learning to sense when my body feels just right when I feel in harmony.

And I really love that thought. I love freedom more than I love feeling full. I love the feeling of freedom. It is one of my favorite feelings. Truly, freedom, I can’t get enough. So on Father’s Day, which I’m recording this in June, my husband had this impromptu idea. He wanted to go to Indian food.

And typically when I go to Indian food, I get this one dish that’s this cheese dip. Paneer bhurji, I think is what it’s called. So I’m probably saying it totally wrong. To make a long story short, it is so good. I don’t know what is in it, but I always overeat it. I’ve never not overeaten it.

And so here we are going to Indian food, and I can choose any food that I love, but I sit there and I just sit quietly with myself, and he’s like, “Well, do you want this or do you want that?” And normally I would say, “I want both.”

And this time, I got a sense of what I wanted my plate to look like, and so I knew what to order, and I said, “You know what? I don’t want the paneer. I always overeat it. I just don’t wanna deal with that today.”

And it was from a place of protecting myself in a sweet, loving, kind way, in a way that you have this whole day that you will get to live, and now we don’t have to do the mind drama of eating the food or not eating the food.

And it wasn’t from a place of fear as much as it was from a place of, you know, I’m really trying to get this restaurant thing down and be present and enjoy my time with him, and I don’t want that to be distracting. I don’t wanna have to coach myself through that. It was a protection of my energy and my focus, and I didn’t.

And I loved my new thoughts that I was practicing, which were I’m learning to sense when my body feels just right, when I feel in harmony with my body. And it was so cool. I watched my husband eat lots of food, and the truth is that what I put on my plate, ’cause it’s shared, it’s sort of family style, I put some of it back.

And I could tell my brain was like, “Oh, I could just have a little more.” And I said, “Yeah, you can, but I hate feeling full.” And that gentle reminder was amazing. It has been so incredible to know and to keep working.

So here’s what I want to give you the takeaways. If you want to do something in Denise’s lab, this is how I do things. You choose one thing. Choose one thing that you want to work on, and if you’re not sure what you want to work on, then just observe yourself for a few days.

But you choose one thing, like the restaurant eating. I observed what I was doing or maybe you make a game plan and then you observed yourself using the game plan to see what works. And you just keep tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking so that you can get to the core of the issue.

And you’re going to keep making progress, and you will make progress, and I want you to see where you’re making progress. So repeat the things that are working, and then keep tweaking the things.

But most important is not your behavior, it is the mindset you’re going in with. So you can see I didn’t say, “I’m going to sit at a restaurant, and when I get to a fullness level of two, I’m gonna stop.” No, I went with a different. I went with a mindset. I’m learning to sense when my body feels just right, feels in harmony. And that just keeps me so open. I just love it.

So really getting to a mindset to drive the behavior that you want is very key to Denise’s Lab. But overall, my friends, you have got to stay in the work. You’ve seen that this has been a journey for me over three years that I’ve been working on it, I guess more slowly by slowly by slowly, and then more focused in the last month, which that focus is what is bringing such beautiful results and such peace.

And it’s not from Denise, it’s because God is gracing me with that, and I’m saying, “Yes, I’m staying in the work. I’m not giving up.” And I wanna say one other thing, is that through these three years, I have overeaten as I’ve been doing these experiments, between these experiments and while doing them.

But I haven’t shamed myself, I haven’t criticized myself or felt guilty. Maybe a little guilt here and there. But when I see myself overeat, what that means, it’s an indication that more support and care is needed, more healing is needed.

And so it recommits me to the work, recognizing that I still need more care and support, and to seek how to do that. There’s still more to learn. I learn when I see myself overeat. I don’t shame myself.

And if I see myself overeat between these experiments or while I’m doing them, I use that to fuel my desire that I want to overcome this. So if you feel stuck in a behavior, maybe it is restaurant eating, maybe it is lonely, procrastination, stress, boredom eating.

Maybe it’s nighttime eating. Maybe it’s eating in the middle of the night. Maybe it’s binging on your favorite food. I don’t know. Whatever it is that you say, “Gosh, it’s this one thing that I can’t overcome. I’ve been trying for decades,”

I want you to come to my workshop, Weight Loss: The Catholic Way. In that free workshop, I’m going to be laying out how I do my lab, how I help you stay in the work. Staying in the work is noticing when our brain wants to give up and redirecting it to stay in the work.

I will also be releasing a six-month group that I’m going to be starting in the middle of July that’s going to be for women who want to overcome whatever their behavior is, to use this formula that I laid out, that I’ve done on myself, but I promise you it won’t take three months. I promise you that, because I’ve distilled it down so that it will be way faster.

I expect the women who go through this six-month group, which I’m calling Stay. It’s called Stay. Why? Because the only reason why you don’t have what you want is because you haven’t stayed in the work. I had to keep staying in the work to overcome overeating so I didn’t feel deprived. Overeating so I could feel special.

I had to stay in the work so I could learn that I can cultivate those feelings other places. I had to stay in the work so I could keep practicing, keep refining. I know how to do this. My lab has helped me overcome caffeine. My lab has helped me stop eating because I’m tired.

My lab has helped me lose that nearly 25 pounds. My lab has helped other clients that I’ve worked with lose fat weight. Yeah, fat weight, not muscle weight. You know, that’s what’s happening when we try other extreme methods, we lose muscle. My lab has helped women who used to wake up in the middle of the night and eat their faces off not do that anymore.

Create safety in their body so they can actually stay in bed and go back to sleep. My lab has helped women at 9:30 at night who would binge learn new ways to do different things to where they can actually spend that time doing things they enjoy instead of eating their faces off. My lab has been distilled and refined so that it works. It is so fun. I love doing experiments, and it makes weight loss and overcoming this stuff exciting and fun.

So come to my workshop. That’s the bottom line. Come to the workshop. Get your spot. Be thinking, hey, is there something I want to overcome? Are there maybe two to three somethings that you’d like to overcome, so that by the time we get to the end of the year, you’re greatly diminishing your time of overeating at a restaurant, or waking up in the middle of the night and eating, or whatever it is that you know is really holding up your weight loss.

Or maybe you just need to work on consistency. Whatever it is, just know the first place is coming to the workshop, so get there. The link is in the description of this podcast. It’s nowhere else. It’s in the description. You will also be getting emails, I’m sure, about it, but make sure you come to the free workshop.

And share this. Please share this with all of your Catholic friends. You know, we’ve got a beautiful community that we’ve grown up, and what’s really amazing is the women who God is calling them to nurture and love the other hurting daughters.

And so if you feel called to bring this message to other women that you know who struggle with food and weight and who love the Lord, we’ve got to build an army of women who are helping each other spread God’s message.

So please share this link with them, the link for the free workshop. They will find out how to do Catholic weight loss and their very first place to start. I will tell them exactly what to start with, and I promise you I’m not gonna mess up their food and tell them what to eat.

Okay, everybody, this has been so fun for me to show you what God has done in my life and how he uses me to create cool things for you. Yeah, I really feel blessed to be able to do that. So here we are, Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit, where we keep God our God, not the scale, not our pant size, not the magic diet. Catholic weight loss, where we return God as our God.

Have a blessed day, everybody.