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Overcoming eating disorders with Shirley Billigmeier #22

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Treść dostarczona przez Bill Gasiamis. Cała zawartość podcastów, w tym odcinki, grafika i opisy podcastów, jest przesyłana i udostępniana bezpośrednio przez Bill Gasiamis lub jego partnera na platformie podcastów. Jeśli uważasz, że ktoś wykorzystuje Twoje dzieło chronione prawem autorskim bez Twojej zgody, możesz postępować zgodnie z procedurą opisaną tutaj https://pl.player.fm/legal.

How to overcome eating disorders.

Overcoming eating disorders is not usually a straight forward process. Published in 1991 Inner Eating by Shirley Billigmeier has never been more relevant than it is today. For over 40 years, this author, speaker and body image specialist has been helping women, men, teens and children resolve their issues with food and eating.

Based on her professional and personal experience and her nationally best selling book, Inner Eating, she created Innergetics as a tool for developing and maintaining a healthy relationship between food and your body.

Eating Disorders

Overcoming eating disorders – interview.

Much more than a theory, Shirley Billigmeier addresses head-on the problems and challenges we face each day and gives us an insight into what may be behind eating disorders. Her real-life techniques make it easy to start and produce fast results.

In our chat we discuss many ideas about where eating disorders may stem from and the role that our head, heart and gut brains play in helping to unravel eating disorders.

Shirley is definitely an expert in her field and has had great success assisting people over many years to get better after experiencing. In this interview we go deep in exploring her method and quickly realise that both Shirley an I have similar ideas about supporting people even though we started from completely different backgrounds.

Listen to this interview an learn about

  • The emotional, physical and social reasons you diet.
  • Why diets must fail.
  • How to identify, understand and cope with your eating pattern.
  • How to deal with interference eating.
  • How to enjoy and not want to eat more than your body needs.
  • How to understand the connections between body image, emotions, thoughts, and eating.
  • How to change compulsive eating to ownership eating and win the battle of stomach vs. brain.
  • How to recapture the joy of eating and movement.
  • How to pick up the PACE.Check out other episodes of this podcast at

www.thembrainingshow.com

visit http://www.innergetics.com

Music for intro by bensound.com

Highlights:

01:47 Introduction
03:16 How it all started
11:03 Own it yourself
15:47 Work with the hunger
22:51 Wanting Variety
28.23 Wisdom and body
34:49 Size and weight
43:04 Giving the choice
47:01 Emotional eating
56:43 Fat cells store emotions

Transcription:

Intro 0:06
You’re listening to The mBraining Show, a show about the new field of mBIT, where you’ll get a blend of neuroscience-based research with practical applications for wise living. And now here’s your host Bill Gasiamis.

Bill 0:22
This episode of The mBraining Show is brought to you by revealsolutions.com.au. If you’re a coach and looking for tools to help take your coaching session to the next level, then you may want to consider grabbing a pack of coaching cards.

Bill 0:36
There are several different types of coaching cards at therevealsolutions.com.au website, including The mBraining Coaching cards, the growth, coaching, model cards, and the emotional intelligence coaching cards amongst others.

Bill 0:51
Each pack contains at least 40 cards with different questions and prompts for you to ask your client during session. They made in Australia from high quality plastic coated paper and protected by a plastic box to ensure durability and easy storage.

Bill 1:08
Pack start from around $42 including tax and delivery is free to any address in Australia. Go along to reveal solutions.com.au Click the shop link and check them out. Now it’s on with the show. Today’s guest is Shirley Billigmeier. I hope I pronounced that correctly.

Shirley 1:33
There you go.

Bill 1:34
Oh my Lord. And I thought my name was difficult to pronounce. And I often complain Shirley that other people can’t pronounce my name anyhow. Now I won’t be so hard on them.

Shirley 1:44
Yes, exactly.

Bill 1:47
For 40 years this author, speaker and body image specialist has been helping women men, teens and children resolve their issues with food and eating based on her professional and personal experience.

Bill 1:59
And her nationally best-selling book Inner Eating. She created energetics as a tool for developing and maintaining a healthy relationship between food and your body. Much more than a theory Ms. Billigmeier addresses hit on the problems and challenges we face each day. A real-life techniques make it easy to start and produce fast results. Welcome, Shirley.

Shirley 2:27
Thank you very much.

Bill 2:29
Well, we have had some kind of journey to connect with each other after many, many attempts and tries to communicate. But we’ve done it.

Shirley 2:41
Probably because we’re so far apart across the world.

Bill 2:45
Yeah, I really appreciate your time and connecting with me, I just read your bio there. And I’ve I don’t know a lot about you. But I’ve heard a lot of fantastic words about you. And your bio, and the work that you do right now there doesn’t seem to be a better time for the kind of work that you do. There’s a lot of need for that type of work. Tell me about why it is that you got into that work?

Shirley 3:16
The reason I got into it, my undergraduate and graduate was in health and physical education. And after teaching just a few years, I could see that there was a frustration in people about size and weight and what they were eating and what they were not eating.

Shirley 3:31
And in my own sense of self, I thought that there shouldn’t be any frustration eating was meant to give us energy, it was not meant to drain our energy. And if you think of an infant, when they’re born, they know when to start eating. And they know when to stop. They have a feeling inside their gut that says I need to start it’s hunger.

Shirley 3:52
When that hunger has gone away. They stop. And it isn’t because of their diaper size. It isn’t because they’ve had enough nutrition. It isn’t because there’s an authority figure telling them what to eat or what not to eat is because they know when to stop. And that start and stop is within all of us.

Shirley 4:13
And we have lost those signals, we have buried those signals. And what energetics is, is a guide to give back to those original signals of the body. And when we can connect to the gut. That’s where the signals are. And when we feel that hunger but we’ve cut ourselves off from that hunger feeling. And in reality that hunger feeling is and is the guard of the body.

Shirley 4:37
It tells you how much to eat and the taste which we have avoided and really have not focused so much on. We’re afraid of it. We’re there we’re thinking if it tastes good, it there must be something wrong or that if we eat what we really love to eat, we can’t possibly be in a body that we love being in and to me in order to be in the That you love to be in, you need total choice of eating connected to hunger.

Bill 5:06
Yeah, that’s very beautiful. And it makes me think back to when I was a dad at the beginning of that process. And he went from a great background. So food is really, really important. I’m not sure if food is important, because people have realized it’s about nutrition, or because of the feelings associated with food, that are heart related, you know, the emotional side of eating, eating.

Bill 5:32
And, I remember that we were surrounded by people that knew better than us, our parents, and our friends and everyone who didn’t have a baby, who said, like, your kid has an alien enough, your son, you know, might be hungry, he’s crying because he’s hungry.

Bill 5:48
And then me being the guy who probably ate when he’s ready. And my wife being that, maybe we should listen to those guys. And there was this never ending focus on how much have you eaten? Have you eaten enough? Are you full? Are you hungry? And it was constant, like we were that kind of family growing up when we were kids, and we became those kinds of parents.

Bill 6:12
So I’m interested in your thoughts as to how is it that we’ve gotten to this point where we don’t now understand really what it is that food is meant to do? Because I think it’s a very, very confused process that we go through.

Bill 6:29
And my opinion, is basically I think that it’s just the the environment in which we live and grow the cities and, you know, the towns and the way that food is readily available, but what do you what do you think has happened to this whole thing where we don’t eat when we feel hungry, and we just ate all the time?

Shirley 6:52
Yeah, what you described was if we had all been left alone, and paid attention to hunger, and paid attention to taste and paid attention to when hunger had gone away, and there was no interference, eating would be in its proper order. This the the second that someone started overriding that subtle feeling of I’ve had enough, there was the first disconnect.

Shirley 7:16
And when you disconnect from hunger, you go to the head, and there are no signals in the head to start and stop eating. Now you have to know everything there is to know about calories, everything there is to know about fat grams, and where’s the start and stop, you can’t possibly know all of that information.

Shirley 7:33
So we lose the simplicity of it. And instead of going back to hunger, when it gets complicated, we go then into somebody else’s had to just, you know, for them to tell us what to eat and what not to eat. And we’ve gone the wrong direction.

Shirley 7:48
And so I teach people how to give back to that simplicity of what’s the actual start of eating, its hunger, what’s the actual stuff, but the very feeling of the subtle stuff. And many people when I do seminars will say, where did that stop, go? Because they they have this vision in their mind with this infant that knows exactly when to stop, they don’t care how big that authority figure is.

Shirley 8:12
They will turn their head, they will spit it out, they will push it away, until they’re just absolutely forced to eat. And then pretty soon, that subtle feeling of what I call balanced feeling to 5, because if you put your mind and your stomach in the other scale from 0 to 10, 0 to 5, meaning 0123. That’s all in the hunger feel.

Shirley 8:32
And when hunger is gone away, we’re balanced, it’s been taken care of, that’s the five. That’s the feeling of nothingness, that you’re not crowded with food, and you’re not hungry. Hunger has gone away. That’s when the infant knew that subtle thing that said to the infant, I no longer am hungry, I do not need to eat anymore.

Shirley 8:53
Stay away, I don’t need anything. And then pretty soon the prodding of the got to eat more, because some authority figures said they needed to eat. And that’s when the overridden that’s when we left the gut, we left hunger, and we went to the head where there are no answers.

Shirley 9:10
And it just becomes very confusing to the point where something as simple as eating what you need, has become very complex. And it was never ever meant to be complex. And I raised both my children this way. And I’ll never forget when my son came home is a fourth grader.

Shirley 9:27
And he said, this is interesting. There was a lunchroom lady that told me to finish my food. And I said, Well, what did you say to her? And he said, I said to her how would you know what my stomach feels like? And he stopped eating and I think it kind of stopped her in her tracks because how would anybody else know what you feel like? It is impossible. You’re not living in that other person’s body.

Bill 9:51
So yeah, that sounds like a conversation that I might have had with my son if he used those words. If he said how did you know what my stomach feels like?

Shirley 10:04
Yes, exactly.

Bill 10:06
And I suppose it didn’t use those words. And maybe if he had, maybe I would have said, I would have questioned myself as well, because what I did was what was done to me. And what my wife did was what was done to her. And because there was such a massive concern about how you know, that well being apparently is wrapped around to how much food you eat.

Bill 10:29
And if you’ve eaten enough, you know, I just did the same, I think what I didn’t realize is that I was just behaving like other people, I wasn’t behaving the way I would normally behave. Because, of course, for the majority of my life I’ve been eating until I felt full, and I’ve only eaten when I was hungry.

Bill 10:50
So I’m not sure why we cross the line and go from people who know when they should eat. And when they should stop to people who don’t know when to accept a child saying I’m full.

Shirley 11:03
Right, because if you don’t own it yourself, is very difficult to pass it on to your child and have that confidence that the child knows more than the adult. And that’s why the parent feels and I’ve had many parents feel well, then what am I going to tell them? I said, with food, you let them be, you simply let them be.

Shirley 11:24
And Lambert’s did a study, years ago, on a five year olds, and they were fed a lunch. And after lunch, they were left to go free in a room that was filled with food and so called and I never labeled foods, but they labeled it like junk food or food they weren’t supposed to have.

Shirley 11:45
Now they had just eaten lunch, so they weren’t hungry. And what they discovered was those children that ate when they were in that room, the determining factor was if the parents had rules at home, because there was that feeling in the child, I better get it while I can. I better store it while I can. Because in my kitchen, I don’t get to have these foods.

Shirley 12:08
And so what they discovered was that deprivation of that and that’s why I always call healthy foods, an oxymoron, because someone has already made that decision, somebody has already determined that it was healthy.

Shirley 12:24
And in that study that Lambert’s did, she discovered something even more important, and it was the concept of taste, because in order to taste it, they needed to be the decision maker. If they weren’t the decision maker, they couldn’t taste the food. So they assumed that the only thing that tasted good was the quote unquote, healthy foods.

Shirley 12:47
Because in that their whole identity was wrapped up in I will be the decision maker and the taste buds couldn’t be really felt. And I will explain that in another pleasure sence we always understand it. In another pleasure sense. It’s not console confusing, because we haven’t messed up the other pleasure senses.

Shirley 13:06
Think about music, think about if you put on headphones, and someone says to you, okay, listen to this music, you should like it. It’s good for you. Now tell me what you think. Versus put those headphones on listen to the music. Now you just tell me how you feel? How does it speak to you? How do you like the music? No judgment, no pre-cursor to what that that music should feel like to you.

Shirley 13:33
And in that you’ll understand the concept of why taste unless you have total choice. And that’s what I said people said do you understand nutrition, I said I understand it at a deeper level. We have we have taste buds in our gut, the infant is born with 10,000 taste buds, we need to allow them to pay attention to those taste buds.

Shirley 13:54
Hunger and taste are the guard and guide of the body. In fact, there was a book written in 1901 that said the same thing. And it was called strength from eating. They called it appetite, hunger and appetite are the guard and guide of the body. We have just cut off that information by going to the head.

Bill 14:16
So let’s talk about that. Because this is gonna be very interesting part of the conversation. I think what you say is common sense. And when you talk to me who hasn’t really thought about this topic much. As a parent, I was just frustrated that my kids didn’t eat enough or they didn’t eat as much as I ate or I don’t know what it was.

Bill 14:35
We did get over that after a while and their children do just basically eat when they don’t when they feel like it and we do have a very sort of strict policy on what is in the house with regards to foods that we wouldn’t consider you know, nutritious, so they don’t have it so that so that either snack on something that is relatively good or they don’t snack on stuff that is junky so that that works well.

Bill 15:04
And I do still get frustrated with dinner being ready. So five or six o’clock, and not everyone paying hungry to eat dinner. And there’s, I think the reason for that is because you know that there’s a time limit that we have to how long everything should go for, for example, you know, kids come home from school, there’s a little bit of study that needs to be done.

Bill 15:28
Then, you know, perhaps parents get home, we cook dinner, dinner needs to get data we need to clean up, we need to do the things that we need to do after dinner, pay for the next day and sit down and rest for five minutes and have a bit of a break, right, which we don’t seem to get the opportunity to do these days because of commutes are very long.

Bill 15:47
Because there’s so many things on the to do list. So how do we handle that time? And I know I’ve just gone off what I was originally gonna say, but how do we handle that time where children are not hungry at dinnertime? What do we do?

Shirley 16:02
Okay, that you work with the hunger and instead of against it, and you can say we have a dinner and it would be in an hour, you might be hungry. Now just have a little bit so that we can have our mealtime together, I think mealtime that start and stop the meal. And that family connection is extremely important. I think we were even losing some of that, that start and stop structure.

Shirley 16:26
You can work with the pump and you want hunger to the child, if they’re really, really hungry when they come home to say, okay, we’re gonna have dinner and about an hour, if you want a little something with just make sure you’re hungry when we go to dinner.

Shirley 16:38
So you’re always talking about hunger. So you never lose that connection, of hunger. And you never lost that sense of hunger. I think the structure is extremely important. I think when we lose family meals, we lose that start and stop, I think there’s so much to be said for that.

Bill 16:57
So they’re really key words, that words that you just said about hunger, make sure you’re hungry for dinner, which suggests that that’s the time to eat it kind of from my understanding as well. And from the conversations that I’ve had with grant and from learning what I’ve learned about mBraining and the multiple intelligences is that we can train the gut to eat at a certain time as well. Tell me a little bit about that side of it.

Shirley 17:24
Well, when you think about and I always looked at France, because they whenever they wanted, but they had a country structure. So in and that was kind of built in. And I think they’re starting to lose that. And they’ll probably blame it on the fast food. But it’s more about eating on the run, they hit a country structure, they knew they were going to have breakfast, there was a start and stop.

Shirley 17:46
They knew they were going to have lunch, it was a start and stop. They knew they would have maybe an afternoon something and then they had dinner, there was a start and stop because that’s what this is all about. It’s a start and stop. And because there was no deprivation, they had the fats and the sugars.

Shirley 18:02
They had everything you know, France, it was just it was they always called it the French paradox because they show me what they want and their croissants, how could they eat what they want is because they ate what they want, but the country structure was in place.

Shirley 18:16
And they knew that if they breakfast, they didn’t want to eat too much, because they knew they wanted to be hungry. I don’t know that they thought about that. Because if they had when the fast food came in, you know, they started eating on the run. And that’s what we’re working a lot within us people are eating on the run, there’s no start and stop anymore.

Shirley 18:34
And that’s part of the process that I teach, we’ve got to stop. So that we have a we got to sit down. So all our brains, the interior brain, the gut, brain, the heart, brain, the head, brain, can all be engaged when we start to eat. So that’s probably the first thing that I do when I when I work with people is to have them sit. And then they’ll say why don’t have time to sit and eat.

Shirley 18:57
And I said if you could take all the time and energy that you spent worrying about eating, what you should eat what you should need, eating too much different clothes, size, different things, different changes of weights, if you could take all of that energy, would you have time to sit? And generally it’s absolutely yes.

Shirley 19:16
And the reason you need to sit is because you need to stop so that you have a concrete because hunger is not concrete, you need a concrete action that says I’m going to engage all my brains and I’m going to sit and for this moment, I am going to feed myself I’m going to connect to what my hunger scale is so that I know exactly that I’m connecting to myself.

Shirley 19:37
And I know what I feel like and a lot of times when people do that, they’ll get to that point, and they’ll think that they’re hungry and then they sit down and they check in with their gut and they’re not hungry. And so it is extremely important to have that start stop.

Shirley 19:51
I’m working constantly with the start and starting to stop. So when you talk about the dinner, that’s what France had. They had a start and stop. They had total choice. But they also had a country structure that was built in. And that’s what they’re starting to lose. Now they’re eating on the run mark, you’d never saw people in France eat while they were walking. They’re always sitting up cafe.

Bill 20:11
Yeah, chicken at the scene and the people walking by? Yeah, I suppose. So what you’re saying is that structure at home is a good thing. Because we could say that there’s going to be a meal at lunchtime, which these days might be at school. So that’s okay for the kids. But at home, there’s going to be a meal, and it’s going to be around this sort of hours. be hungry for that, because we are going to sit down and we are going to eat.

Shirley 20:36
Yes, it’s teaching them how to, how to feel their hunger, how to stay connected to it, they know it, it’s, it’s it, we just interfere with it. So if you keep the conversation going, and you validate that hunger, you validate that feel, you work with the hunger and that’s where when people said, well, what if I’m not hungry, when I go to go to lunch, and I and I have a lunch meeting?

Shirley 21:00
I said, if you know you’re going to lunch plan to be hungry, and you start working with your hunger instead of against it. And you need structure, you need to start stop, that’s what’s missing. And when you don’t want to start, you don’t want to stop. And that’s all about OCD, if you don’t want to start and you don’t want to stop.

Shirley 21:19
And it was interesting, because Dr. Jeff Schwartz, who’s the international authority in obsessive compulsive behavior, and that’s why I’m such a proponent of total choice, because he proved with the brain that if you have cognitive choice, you can change a chemically imbalanced brain back to normal without drugs.

Shirley 21:39
And we ended up connecting because I was working with someone who had a real major eating issue. And I opened up total choice. So you can really because that’s your identity choices, identity. And a lot of people talk about choice in every other arena but food.

Bill 21:56
Exercising choice

Shirley 21:57
Yeah, exercising choice. And because total choice is a part of your identity, that and he he could see that you could you if you had total choice, and you knew that you could choose how you were going to move through life, you could and own that start of the movement.

Shirley 22:15
It could change a chemically imbalance brain back to normal without drugs. Now I go deeper, I drop into total choice of eating, because that’s what sustains life, if you don’t have total choice of eating of what sustains life, you can’t really drop in and feel your whole sense of self. So I really am a strong proponent of total choice.

Bill 22:37
Okay, I love that. I love having total choice. There’s only one thing that I want to understand better. What if the person’s total choice of what to eat and when to eat is McDonald’s? What then?

Shirley 22:50
Okay, because the body’s natural state is to want variety. I mean, I literally could eat at McDonald’s every day and not change my weight. Because I’m connected to hunger. Would I want to? Would it feel right to me? No, because I would want variety. Think about this, and this is what’s happened with with healthy eating.

Shirley 23:09
What if I said to you, you can only eat chocolate now for the next three months. At first, it might sound great, but you go yeah you know, after a while you go, I just want a nice salad. I just want but we have totally taken away our right to choose to taste a salad.

Shirley 23:31
And many people I work with will go, Wow, I never ever have eaten a salad that I’m choosing because it tastes good. I’ve been choosing the salad because I should eat and I’ve never enjoyed it. And then they start to open that up. So I go to nutrition at a much deeper level. And I’m going to give you an example of an eight year old that I’ve worked with.

Bill 23:52
I’m just gonna before we get to that story, I just want to ask a question. Regarding choice, do you think some of the processed foods work to take choice away from us via the form of addiction to the different components and chemicals in these processed foods?

Shirley 24:16
Okay, because of the processed food, we need choice even more because the body will not be fooled. If you’re in your head, the body will be fooled. If you’re in total choice you will want that’s why I can change the whole thing of the processing because you’ll want things that really tastes good to you that feel good and we’ve lost that ability to do that.

Shirley 24:38
We could drive the market by having really, really quality food because our body craves that our body craves variety. It craves foods that really tastes like a tomato really taste. But because we’re so much in our head, we can’t even tell the difference between processed and non-processed.

Bill 24:58
Ah, okay, now, I’m starting To get the distinction. So what you’re saying is a lot of your work is now because we’re going to get into that topic. In a moment, you’ll tell me your story as well, though, I want to hear that, but what you’re saying is that the work is done in the gut to get the gut on board to get the gut active to know, what it’s doing rather than to be influenced by all these external factors. And by us being such, you know, head based society, and working at a head level, okay, it’s that time I should probably eat or I should probably eat something or I should probably go to Mecca is or whatever.

Shirley 25:32
Yes, exactly. We want to use the incredible wisdom. And that’s how I connected to mBraining, because I thought, Oh, my word, you guys are talking about gut. But you’ve got to understand total choice. So that you can drop into that gut and use the wisdom of the gut, use the wisdom of the heart, use the wisdom of the body, but we’re not in the body, because we don’t have total choice.

Shirley 25:53
There’s a part of our body that’s missing. And then you get all that judgment from our head. That’s, that’s causing an uncomfortable feeling that says, Oh, I shouldn’t be eating this, I better not eat this. And there’s all this chatter that goes on that now the gut can’t even tell what the gut is feeling anymore, because you have so much chatter about what you should and should not eat.

Bill 26:11
Wow, that’s very cool. That is very cool. So as a health coach myself, so I’m not a nutritionist, or anybody, okay, I’m somebody who advocates a healthy lifestyle. So that can be very different for very many people. But food is one of those important things and getting people to understand their relationship to food is one of those things that I talk to my clients about a lot.

Bill 26:33
And one of the challenges that my clients face, is they say, I don’t have time to eat in the morning, similar to that time issue for lunchtime, and for dinner. And they’ll tell me that they do all these things in the morning.

Bill 26:46
So I’ll wake up, I’ll sit down quickly have a look at my emails, you know, I’ll get dressed, I’ll have to drive, you know, to the next job. If there are tradie, for example, drive to the next job, etc. I’ll stop and get a coffee and a croissant on the way. And my big question to them is, I’m not sure if you realize to, you know, whoever it might be.

Bill 27:09
How far or backward, we’ve come in our society, when you wake up in the morning, and you have the ability to say that I no longer have time to stop and eat something before I head off for my day. And I find that really bizarre because I don’t think that any other society before the type of society that we live in, you know, our ancestors woke up in the morning and said, I don’t have time to eat.

Bill 27:43
When did we become that time poor, that the most basic thing that we need to do in our lives to keep alive? The first and only thing other than drinking water to keep alive is to eat, and to nourish our bodies to make all our organs work? What happened? Like how did we get to that point where we don’t have time to do the most important function to keep us alive?

Bill 28:08
Is it because of this neverending 24-hour a day cycle where we could just turn up to any store at any time and buy anything and just put it in our bodies, because 24-hours a day, seven days a week, it didn’t happen 200 years ago.

Shirley 28:23
That’s why even now more than ever, we need to get back to hunger, because hunger will take care of it. Our wisdom and our body says, don’t move that fast, our wisdom in our body will take care of it. When we disconnect from our body. from hunger, from total choice. There is no wisdom left. And now we’re on a treadmill that just keeps going.

Shirley 28:51
And it goes faster and faster and faster. So that’s where I start with the hunger with total choice with sitting before you eat. When you say you grab, they grab a coffee and grab a croissant they’re driving, they can’t possibly be focusing on taste. They can’t possibly be focusing on what their body feels like.

Shirley 29:09
Or they have a car accident. Either you’re focused outward, or you’re focused inward. And and once you connect to hunger, I had a woman that worked for three M. And they gave her time tons of time management courses, spent 1000s of dollars on her didn’t even make a dent.

Shirley 29:26
I started in with total choice of eating and hunger and her time management cleared out because her own body she would feel the discomfort in her gut. If she was moving too fast. If she was racing, if and she would discover with the hunger scale, if she was over eating okay, then she discovered something is going on.

Shirley 29:47
And so what happens is when you have total choice, you can drop into your gut. The eating becomes your greatest informant it becomes your greatest psychologists of your own wisdom of your own body because there’s wisdom in That we are losing. Because we don’t have total choice, we’re in our heads. And there is the wisdom and the head of balance. It’s in the body, in the gut, in that in the heart. That’s where the wisdom sits.

Bill 30:14
So if somebody’s watching this, who’s new to the words that we’re using, I want to explain a couple of things. I want to explain that we have our brain, everyone knows that there’s many billions of neurons in our brain, okay we have a heart, there’s up to 130,000 neurons in the heart, we have a gut, and in the gut, there’s about half a billion neurons about the same size of a cat’s brain.

Bill 30:43
And we’re talking about these things as being intelligences. And if you didn’t ever know what, if you don’t understand what we’re on about, have you ever been that kind of person who said, I followed my gut, or I make gut decisions, that’s your gut intelligence, sending you up some kind of a signal to allow you to make a decision that you unknowingly are referring to as your gut, making a decision for you.

Bill 31:10
So you’ve also said things like, I followed my heart, because I had to go to the other side of the planet to be with that person, because I loved them so much. So when you refer to your gut and your heart in that way, you’re unwittingly perhaps accessing intelligences within you that are not in your head, but are connected to the way that we do things will say things.

Bill 31:33
And when we’re talking about people disconnecting from those intelligences have, if you’re the type of person who never says, I made a gut decision or followed my gut, then you’re disconnected from it. If you’re the type of person that says hearts been shut down, then you’re the type of person that perhaps has disconnected from their heart.

Bill 31:56
And now you’re missing a key ingredient, at least one third in the decision making process, and you’re relying on intelligences that are making decisions without all of the information and they’re doing the best that they can.

Shirley 32:11
Right because all they know, they don’t know what they don’t know. And, yeah, they don’t know what they don’t know. And there’s so much wisdom that I access, and I and I’ve started working with people that are totally cut off from their heart totally cut off from their gut. And I start with total choice and the hunger scale, because there isn’t a person that I’ve run into they say, okay, on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being starved, 10 being stuffed, five, the feeling of nothingness.

Shirley 32:39
If you put your mind in your gut at this moment in time, what number would you be at? And inevitably, people know. And, and, or they’ll they’ll kind of guess they’ll they’ll go, Wow, okay, I know. So I start there. And they might not even know that there’s gut wisdom, they might not even know that there’s heart wisdom. But I’ve connected them to the absolute core of the essence.

Shirley 33:07
And I remember one person said, she said, Oh, my word, I see what you do. You do like a laser beam, and you put them in the base of their gut, and they don’t even know it’s there. And I said, Yes. And then we start working. And then it’s it’s a process. It’s a process to establish what’s sitting in that gut that you want to let go of what’s sitting, what’s sitting there, what beliefs are sitting there, what deprivation thoughts are sitting there about what I shouldn’t should not eat.

Shirley 33:30
I just started working with a person that had been totally obsessed with eating his entire life is like 40 years old, I opened up total choice and had him track his hunger numbers before he started after he started. And he was amazed at the freedom that started in because he hadn’t access that wisdom.

Shirley 33:48
And what you described is I’m surfacing all that wisdom that that people have, every single person has that wisdom. And there isn’t anybody outside because everybody’s a creative soul. There isn’t buddy outside that has that wisdom. Like you have your wisdom, It’s yours, you own it, It’s yours and yours alone.

Shirley 34:08
That’s why when they have all those nutritional studies, and everything comes out different one day, one day, the week the eggs are good one week, the eggs are bad. One week is half as good. One week is as bad and it goes back and forth. It depends on what group what are they studying, they’re studying human beings.

Shirley 34:23
It depends on what group of human beings they’re studying. Maybe that group likes meat more, maybe that group does better with vegetables, maybe that group does better with so keeps shifting, depending on what group of people what I do is give them a process that they’re allowed to access. The only wisdom that’s true wisdom is their own wisdom.

Bill 34:41
Yeah, that’s gorgeous. I love it. Now, how does that help with body image how does all this help with body image?

Shirley 34:48
I’m so glad you brought that up. Because size and weight to me is the total byproduct of this process, I say put size and weight on the shelf. Because if somebody’s not at the size and weight they want to be, are they going to feel good? Are you going to tell them, okay, just feel good where you are, it’s not going to happen, because we’re not meant to have storage, because there’s no famine coming.

Shirley 35:16
And unless you’ve heard of one, I haven’t heard of one, there isn’t one coming. And we have foods. So we’re not meant to be that anorexic, we’re not meant to be storing storage. So we’re not meant to have storage. So I just say, for now, let’s just put size and weight on the shelf.

Shirley 35:31
And I would say to them on a scale from 0 to 10. If you could eat what you want from 0 to five, would you eat less? And they generally they’ll say yes. And I said, Great. If you eat less, we weigh less. They say yes, it’s a great, let’s just put size and weight on the shelf and leave it there because it’s only going to cause an uncomfortable feeling.

Shirley 35:49
And an uncomfortable feeling that you can’t cannot do something in the moment is what do they call it? In the world of psychology, you have an uncomfortable feeling and you can’t move. There’s nothing to do depression. I thought why would you think size and weight it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s absolutely a dead end street.

Shirley 36:07
And my clients will constantly hear me say just the size and weight on the shelf, leave it there, leave it there. And one little interesting story, a woman didn’t know how much she had it in her psyche until she went home. And her father kind of looked at her. And then he looked away. And she said, Oh my word I could tell just by the look, he didn’t like my size and weight.

Shirley 36:27
I’ve internalized it, I am not valued until I’m a certain size and weight. I said no, from the very moment they start a process with me, we’re in a pleasure base we’re in value based. And size. And weight is totally a byproduct. I don’t even weigh the people, they want to weigh fine. But sometimes that scale messes them up, they they weigh less, they think Oh good I can eat.

Shirley 36:47
If they weigh too much. And they think oh my word, I’m disappointed. And I’ll eat because I’m upset. It’s Dennis street is absolutely a dead end street. So I said, leave it on the shelf. Let’s just really concentrate on working from the zero to the five and see and go with the feelings.

Shirley 37:02
See what feelings and they’ll go through layers of feelings in that gut. Because if you study the gut, you know, there’s all kinds of feelings in that gut. And in this now they finally said in in the fat in the storage is called storage and never call it fat. It stores store or stored energy.

Shirley 37:18
And if there’s storage there, there’s information. It’s not like one study that just came out. It’s not like butter in the refrigerator anymore. There’s all kinds of stuff that comes out. And that’s what my clients will feel.

Shirley 37:28
They’ll feel these feelings start surfacing. I said, Yeah, when you ate for those feelings, I got pushed over into the storage bin. Now the storage bin is being released. And all those feelings are starting to come up. So we need to deal with them.

Bill 37:38
Yeah, lovely. And that’s where you help them. I just want to go back a little bit. And I want to explain to people The reason I got come across multiple brain integration techniques mBraining is because I’d experienced at the time two brain hemorrhages.

Shirley 37:55
Oh, interesting.

Bill 37:57
And my head switched off. So now these intelligences were coming up. And I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. Hang on a second what do I do with this information and the stars aligned, it was beautiful. And I got into this course with somebody explained to me, Grant Soosalu and Marvin Oka, what these things were doing and what I was saying and what was coming up. So I was able to understand then how to use these intelligences.

Bill 38:33
So I suppose you know, my conversation with the people that I work with is that, again, they need to start paying attention to the communication The story is what it means and that all these things don’t need to be. We don’t need to go into our head to work it out. We just need to sit with it and allow it to give us the information and make of it what we need to make of it.

Shirley 38:56
Yes, exactly. No and then you felt the wisdom of the heart, you felt the wisdom of the gut. And that’s when I when I saw their book in Britain, I thought oh my word. They’re speaking my language. This is great. But they need to understand total choice because that chatter that comes from the head when when you thinking you should eat this or shouldn’t eat that or better not eat this or better not eat that that chatter is interfering with the wisdom.

Bill 39:18
Yeah that’s lovely. I just love that you’ve got to the same kind of place where I am. And we’ve come from a completely different path. It’s just amazing. Now, earlier you spoke you were going to an I interrupted you, you were gonna tell a little story about one of your eight year old clients.

Shirley 39:34
Oh, yes. When you talked about, um, I have a friend and she knew not knew my work. And she knows she needed to engage me in helping with their son their eight year old. And because the father was the controller of the peanut butter cups in their house. He decided how much they would have and when they could have them. They could only have them a certain time, whatever.

Shirley 39:54
And she said it’s really getting to be a battle. She said can you help me with this? And I said you He’s eight years old, well, we’ll get this figured out, I knew the couple, I sat down with the Father, I said, I know you’re really into nutrition, you think that if he, if I, we opened up the total choice of peanut butter cup psyllium the rest of his life. And I said, but I said, just give me I said, three days, just give me three days.

Shirley 40:15
And I said, this is what we’re going to do. And I said, I want you to now give him the right to own the peanut butter cups. And and of course, this is like extremely uncomfortable for him to go, Oh, my word. That’s all he’s going to eat. And he said, Okay, I’ll give you three days. I said that. She said, that’s it. I said, Fine. He’s only eight years old.

Shirley 40:35
This will this will take care of itself as a body craves variety. So the first day they sat him down, they said, you know, we we’ve been off on this, and we’re gonna make sure that you are the one that keeps the peanut butter cups. And of course, the lies got really big and gold this is great. This is really fun. I never had peanut butter cups on my own in the house, I can eat as many as I want, oh, this is great.

Shirley 40:56
He held on to the peanut butter cups. He ate them for breakfast, he ate him for lunch. He brought them out in the afternoon, he’s jumping on the trampoline, the father’s going, yep, see that he’s gonna eat them the rest of his life. But at least I can go three days, and then I’ll be done with this.

Shirley 41:09
And then that evening, he took them to bed with him because he was so deprived of these big cups. And the next morning, he was going to a peanut butter cups again, and and he kind of sound to the side and he said, Now I’m gonna have peanut butter cups. I was like, Okay, I’m afraid that if I if I let these go, they’ll build some I’ll go away.

Shirley 41:27
So then he went out to play and he forgot the peanut butter cups. And his mother said, You forgot your peanut butter cups. And he said, Oh, that’s okay. You can just leave them there. And she’s okay. And so when he came back after lunch, because he had peanut butter cups for lunch, now we’re into the second day.

Shirley 41:40
And that evening, she settled down on his plate and just put them on the plate. And he said, Mom, could I have something else? And I and she said, I thought my husband would just die thinking, how could he possibly want something, he can have all the peanut butter cups he wants.

Shirley 41:54
And all of a sudden he could see what had happened. And and then the next morning, she said, you know, here the peanut butter cups again, she eat and and he said no, I want some cereal, I want some cereal. And she said, Okay, I’ll just put them in the shelf. They’re there when you want them.

Shirley 42:09
And that was it, and it took care of all of it. And the father could see what had been happening. And so and after that never an issue, and they totally opened up choice. That’s why so I honestly believe in choice. And I have confidence in the wisdom of the body, as long as it’s valued.

Shirley 42:27
And there may be times like I said, if the trouble is people have been sold, this is what they should eat. And so they think that’s the only thing. And so what do they crave what they should not? Because I always say you can’t want a should you can only want a should not?

Bill 42:43
Yeah. that’s a great story reminds me of the old the way to, for parents to tackle children decided to take up smoking, you know, if you caught your child with a cigarette at age 12, or 13, you buy him a pack of cigarettes, you sit down with them and tell them smoke the whole pack.

Shirley 43:03
And then they get sick right?

Bill 43:04
And they get sick, and then they get put off. And it’s a story that Tony Robbins tells as well. And I’ve heard that story from him and a number of other people. And this seems to be this thing that now you’ve accepted that they can have a choice to smoke or not smoke, or it’s something that they’re not supposed to eat and you allow them, you just flood them with the opportunity to have that all the time.

Bill 43:25
And that somehow gets them to their point of understanding that this is not something that I should or should not be doing. This is just something that doesn’t fit right. It doesn’t go right for me Oh, it’s making me feel unwell.

Bill 43:37
Or, this can’t be the only thing that I can consume, this has got to be something else in it. Because if I have to just consume this thing, well, things are not going to be as exciting as they were when I had the ability to eat all these other foods.

Shirley 43:52
Right. And what I want is to really not to make them sick of that, but have total choice. So they can have things that tasted that have tastes, whether it’s sweet, whether it’s salty, whether it’s vegetables, whether it’s you know, it’s all food, it’s all food, because I want a very good feeling about food, a very pleasant feeling about food.

Shirley 44:12
And that’s what the thing with taste because you have five pleasure senses and tastes has a very specific boundary. It’s hunger to balance. That’s what taste was meant to be. It was meant to be used only from the zero to the five, where you really, really use it as energy and pleasure, strength and pleasure.

Shirley 44:31
Beyond the fai. If you’re looking at like you say, oh, but something tastes really good. I want to keep eating it. And what that is saying, I still want more pleasure. Well, we were given four other pleasure senses for unlimited use. So what my process does it all of a sudden opens up all of the other pleasure senses and the world becomes much brighter because when you use taste beyond the five, now you’re crowded now it doesn’t feel so good.

Shirley 44:54
So mine is so totally pleasure base because all I’m getting rid of is the food that’s crowding you You get it getting rid of the food that doesn’t allow you to feel good. And even I can go even with the healthy ifs if somebody says shrimp is healthy and you eat it and you break out, it’s not healthy for you is so it’s based on how much you’re eating, what your taste buds are, and how your body feels.

Shirley 45:17
And there’s wisdom that we are not accessing. And it’s so crucial. And it’s meant to be totally pleasurable. They said, Well, I don’t want to go to that party, or that restaurant or whatever. I said, Oh, my word, go to all the social events and be hungry. They said, don’t be hungry when you go to a restaurant, don’t be hungry, I’m gonna be hungry.

Shirley 45:36
What’s the point, if I’m going to a party, I’m going to be hungry, she’s going to be serving great food, I want to eat it. So I have to really enjoy taste, and then open up all the other pleasures senses. And it’s interesting because I worked with an executive. And he said to me, he said, You know, there’s two o’clock in the afternoon, I know I’m not hungry.

Shirley 45:54
And he said to me, but I want to eat and I he said, I just can’t get past it. I said, Okay, let’s just say at two o’clock in the afternoon, eating didn’t exist. What are you going to do now? And he looked at me now this is a top executive. And he said, I feel like you’ve got me in the corner with a dunce cap.

Shirley 46:11
I have no idea what it is. I have no idea. I said, Because tastes beyond its use blocks you from your own intelligence from your other pleasure senses. I said, just brainstorm it. Who doesn’t exist right now? What are you going to do? Then all of a sudden, his creative juices started going.

Shirley 46:29
And I said, You’ve got to list all the things that you could possibly do. Because taste has robbed you of your creative soul, when you eat beyond. And what I do is I put taste in order when it’s in order it gives life when it’s out of order, it drains your life.

Bill 46:45
Lovely. That is an interesting question to ask somebody. You can just say how they little heads gonna start to go Oh, I’m looking for an answer. And I can’t find one. And now I’ve got to go somewhere else for whatever it is that I’m going to do. So I like that, that’s excellent.

Bill 47:01
It’s a great way to engage with the other intelligences into the conversation. Yeah, it’s brilliant. Now, let’s have a chat about emotional eaters. Because is that a similar issue in regards to eating from a place of trying to fulfill some unmet emotional, you know, need? Does that also take away choices. That’s what it sounds like, to me now that you’re saying.

Shirley 47:27
Okay, it’s like an uncomfortable feeling in the gut. So it can be a multitude of reasons. Anytime you eat beyond that five, and you have an uncomfortable feel. And you’re what what the nice system was meant to be is like, you get an uncomfortable feeling in your gut, you go to your head and go, Okay, what is that? Okay, what do I need to do to resolve and it goes nice back and forth.

Shirley 47:48
It’s a nice back and forth. way, if you get an uncomfortable feeling in your gut, and you detour over and pick up some food, instead of connecting to that uncomfortable feeling, going to your head, figuring it out. Now, instead of your own mind, using your intelligence and your connection, you use the food becomes the connection and the pathway back to yourself.

Shirley 48:10
So it becomes the solver of the feeling. And then you’ve got to get back to yourself. And now you’re upset with yourself because you overeat and every time you detour you make that stronger than your own mind body connection. Yeah, so I’m always working and that is the process I’m always working at eliminating that detour.

Shirley 48:30
So we have this nice flow of intelligence between the gut and the head that’s what we’re looking for. So that uncomfortable feeling and I in when when I said don’t bury the messenger I want you to feel the whole range of feelings I want you to feel from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high connect to it and we’ll learn how to turn it around and bring it back to balance.

Bill 48:51
So we learn about what the feeling means not let eat food to make the feeling go away.

Shirley 48:57
Right I said don’t you know as I always used it for it don’t you kill the messenger feel that feeling you want to know it’s like we’re in an exploration in your house. It’s like we want to open all that you know, opened the doors you know, and sometimes it’s it’s a little scary to open the door and then you might feel a little bit and go Okay, there’s something big going on.

Shirley 49:13
That’s why I say eating becomes your greatest informant I love working with psychologists because then they go if they’re gonna go to their therapist, they go Okay, we got to work on that. Okay, whatever. So I love the you know, everybody uses because it get you gather so much real information, you get the truth of what’s going on in your gut.

Bill 49:32
Yeah, I love it. Now, another question that I have is all these things are coming into my mind. And this is such a fascinating topic of conversation. And you can go many different ways. But what happens when somebody is an executive and a lot of executives would say, and even if they’re not an executive would say stuff like, I followed my gut.

Bill 49:54
I make gut decisions, but they are clearly overweight, obese, really, really unhappy. So they’re making in one, in one way, they’re making these really gut decisions that are guiding them along this successful path of life, or business or whatever it is. But then they don’t have that next ability that I’m not sure that little ability to tap into those other things, what’s happening there?

Shirley 50:20
They might just not know, he’s like, you don’t know what you don’t know. And it could be that not understanding that zero to 10, it may be that they had that feeling of finish your food, and it feels good to eat to attend. I remember one attorney said after after he was an attorney after a seminar that I gave, he said, Oh, I see, I’ve been thinking that nothing is hunger.

Shirley 50:42
And I’ve been eating from the 5 to the 10. I see I’ve got it. So in that case, he was connected to his gut, but he thought that’s where food was meant to be. So sometimes it’s just not having the information, not having the understanding of what quantity because we’re so used to these big quantities in the world.

Shirley 51:03
And and, you know, France had more of the small quantities, because they were more connected to hunger. I mean, I don’t even know if they were thinking hunger, but it automatically happened because of their country’s structure. So sometimes it’s just not knowing, sometimes it’s not believing you, you have the right to have total choice of eating.

Shirley 51:21
So there’s deprivation going on, there can be a multitude of reasons. If they go with their gut, they want to feel their gut, but then then they have some other messages. So by connecting to hunger, we really do clear out all of it then at that point, because food is what sustains life, without food, you die.

Shirley 51:37
So if you understand food, and you understand the boundaries of food, everything else goes in order. It’s like I’m putting everything in order with a base of food. And if we have food in order, everything else kind of follows in mind.

Bill 51:48
Yeah, I like to use food for healing. So one of the things that I work with people doing is to encourage them to eat foods that encourage healing. So the reason I went down that path is because, you know, I’ve I’ve had, you know, self body image issues myself, just like any other human being on the planet from time to time.

Bill 52:11
And when I first had my experience, the first brain hemorrhage, they put me on some medication and the medication made it so that within about, I think within about three weeks, I put on a kilos, which is maybe five pounds or something like that. And I think I got that, right.

Bill 52:31
And what happened was, I very quickly, now notice that I’ve, my body has completely changed, my clothes don’t fit, I feel really uncomfortable in my skin. And the reason they gave me the medication was to decrease the inflammation in the brain. And this was not a good thing.

Bill 52:50
Because while it was good because it was saving my brain and it was saving my life ultimately, early on. But I figured that if I have to stay on this medication for a prolonged period of time, while this is not going to end well, there’s going to be other complications that come from that.

Bill 53:04
And these medications, made me lose the ability to slip made me lose the ability to you know, be in control of my emotions, all those type of things, there’s a lot of side effects that I had. And I didn’t want to experience that until I was healed or recovered or this was dealt with.

Bill 53:19
So I went for the first time in my life, I became curious about how do I decrease inflammation in the body, and I did a Google search. And what I discovered was that you can actually do that via food.

Bill 53:34
So I used to do all the things and say all the things that we’ve discussed about why I’m eating something or why I shouldn’t have eaten that or I’m not going to eat that when I go to this restaurant etc I did all of those things in the past to try and control my weight. But when I started eating the food that was decreasing inflammation in my brain without realizing the weight fell off.

Bill 53:58
And the amount of weight that fell off was way more than had ever you know come up before when I spent money on exercising on diets on this on that or everything. So what happened was I was just finding that my body was resetting and going back to the the weight that it’s meant to be under normal operating circumstances.

Bill 54:18
And the whole idea in my mind changed about what weight loss weight gain and all that kind of stuff is now now it became about okay forget about the weight loss like you said put it on the shelf that’s got nothing to do with anything.

Bill 54:32
And it was just about instinctively going back to decreasing the inflammation and eating foods that supported that also supported weight loss and it also supported connecting to the gut again and it also supported connected to the heart and paying attention to what was coming up. I found that very very fascinating and it reinforced your what you’re saying reinforces what I kind of discovered accidentally about myself when I was in need.

Shirley 54:59
Yeah, and that’s where a lot of times, for example, there was a woman who was lactose intolerance. And I started working with her and she had a lot of mother issues a lot of pain in her storage cells, there was a lot of pain in there, as she released some of that. And in in the, in releasing the storage.

Shirley 55:19
After a while, what we start realizing is what what you’re realizing, okay, there are certain foods that felt good to you. And I’m always working with that. Okay, if you feel like you’re uncomfortable with that, try little Is it the quantity? Is it a belief in there that’s stuck, that’s causing pain.

Shirley 55:35
And it can be a multitude of reasons and what you discovered, you discover foods that allowed you to feel good, so I’m always working with what feels good to you. Because like I said, if you eat shrimp, and you break out, it’s not healthy for you. But no one person can tell another person, you got to experience that yourself, what feels good to you.

Shirley 55:54
And a lot of times, in this particular individual can really come to eat now, whatever she wants to really shed a lot of pain that she released, there was nothing else other than pain that was causing the inflammation. Because sometimes painting the gut creates the inflammation.

Shirley 56:08
And so whether it’s feelings, or whatever it is, it’s causing that uncomfortable feeling the gut because the gut is meant to feel good. That’s we’re always going we want the gut to feel good. I always talk about having a pleasant face in the gut, we’re always working towards that a pleasant feel in the gut.

Shirley 56:27
And so crowding too much food doesn’t feel pleasant, a food that when you eat it, you break out, doesn’t feel good. So you start determining for yourself, what you need to eat the feels good to you, and the quantities that feel good to you.

Bill 56:43
This has been an amazing conversation, I’ve just come up with another thing that I realized that you’re doing that I do, but you do it to the next level as well. So I talked about fat cells as storing toxins, you’re talking about fat cells are storing emotions and other things as well.

Bill 57:03
Wow. And I can see I understand how you’re saying that. So when I talk about people being overweight or large, and needing to release fat cells and explaining to them that some of the reasons why they’re inflamed is because those fat cells store toxins, you know, chemical based toxins. You’re talking about, they actually also store emotions.

Shirley 57:29
Yes, and I have people when they’re, when they’re going through my process, I said, just get ready for a feeling to surface and and they’ll come and they’ll say, Oh my word. I thought it was done the size and weight. All of a sudden this thought floated through my body.

Shirley 57:42
I said, yeah, you must be dissipating your fat you the storage, because it will come up and just let it go. Let it go. And now all the times I’ve talked about turn it around to get okay. That’s what I used to think that that the size and weight was so important. turn that around go no, I have value simply within myself.

Shirley 57:59
And I need to let that go. So yes, it has feelings and think about when people when you talk about emotional eating, those emotions just don’t go away because you ate. But what happens is those emotions get trapped over in those fat cells.

Bill 58:16
Wow. That’s Oh, that’s so clear to me now. It’s so clear to me, that’s an amazing thing. So we’re releasing all these different things. And for somebody else, it could be storing something, something else as well. And that’s what I love about it, it’s whatever they’re storing for you is what you obviously need to let go of to, you know, help you change your body shape, and therefore, the way you feel and therefore your self image completely changes. Everything gets transformed.

Shirley 58:46
Right, and think about you know, why it’s a choice, because whoever wants to choice. That’s why I really believe in choice to let them feel their own body and do that guideposts because whoever owns the choice owns the power. And when you think of the diet industry who owns the choice and who owns the power. And yet Joe’s meant to the individual feels like they’re a failure. And I said no, your soul went out. This is a good thing.

Bill 59:08
Yeah, this is an amazing thing. Now you’re an author. And we haven’t spoken about any of your books. And I haven’t known you long enough to know that you’ve got a book. But tell me a little bit about the most recent book that you’ve written.

Shirley 59:19
Oh, the one that I had written one way back in 1991. And I didn’t really want to write a book because I love the consulting and the speaking more than the writing but I knew I needed to get that information out the the Mayo Clinic had to leave you started clinic wrote my forward at that point in time.

Shirley 59:37
And it I had the hunger scale in it. But as I go through all these years, I thought, wow, I have so many more tools. And when people first hear it and when they saw it when they first start working with me, they feel it’s so easy. So I said okay, I need to put another book out there called energetics if that’s if that’s what the book is coming decides what to do.

Shirley 59:58
We’ve got to decide that And it’s going to give a multitude of tools because I really wanted the masses to get it. I can work with individuals, one on one, you know, but I want the masses to understand this, because it’s so important. It’s just so important. So I’m trying to do it so that there’s enough tools in that book, so that somebody can open up that book and they can do it on on their own.

Shirley 1:00:19
And maybe if they work with a therapist, or if I can create an online something, so if they have a question, they can just tap in, because everybody can afford to work with me. And I understand that, but I really want the masses to get this because there’s so much important information.

Bill 1:00:34
Where can they get the book from?

Shirley 1:00:36
Well, Inner Eating is still out there. It’s sold out, and it keeps me selling on amazon.com used books, it just keeps reselling and reselling it’s been in Germany it’s been in Canada. This next one I’m hoping to have out within a year. It’s not out yet.

Bill 1:00:52
Okay, great. I’m gonna pop the link to your website on our on the comments from our chat. So people can go there. And can they register somewhere put some sort of an expression of interest in.

Shirley 1:01:06
They can just they can just contact me through my email, which is out there. There’s a contact there. I have a phone number on there. They can contact me at any point in time.

Bill 1:01:16
Yeah, now you’re based in the states were based in Australia. But anyone can buy any of your items from anywhere in the world.

Shirley 1:01:23
Yeah, it’s on amazon.com. Use books Inner Eating. My first book is called Inner Eating.

Bill 1:01:28
What’s the website address?

Shirley 1:01:30
The website is www.innergetics.com it’s energy from within is why I created that name.

Bill 1:01:40
Yeah, it’s beautiful. So that’s this has been an amazing conversation. It’s been really fascinating. I’m so glad that we both persisted to align our calendars to get into a place where we can talk to each other, it was a big job, everybody who’s listening and watching.

Bill 1:01:57
Just so you know, we probably sent about 20 emails in the end, and we finally made it happen. It just goes to show as well worth it. Now, everybody, listening, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, what I would encourage you to do is share it, share it with somebody who you think might benefit from hearing this conversation.

Bill 1:02:15
If you also enjoy this conversation, do us a favor, go to the YouTube channel, and give us a and the link will be in the comments. Give us a thumbs up if you’re watching on YouTube. And if you’re on iTunes, go to the YouTube to the iTunes page of the mBraining show and give us a five star review that will help other people find this episode, it’ll help make the lives of other people more connected with their body, it will give people an awareness perhaps that they didn’t have before.

Bill 1:02:49
And I would really, really appreciate it because that will allow me to do what it is that I love to do. And I’m sure to allow Shirley to do what she loves to do, which is reach more people and not necessarily have to take money from them. Just give them some insights yeah?

Bill 1:03:03
So that’s Um, so we would really appreciate that. Shirley, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for being part of the show. I really appreciate it. We’ve I’ve had so much fun. And I really look forward to learning more about the work that you do and really understanding, you know, the next level of self image and what shapes us and how we can get control back of what it is that we’ve lost control over.

Shirley 1:03:29
Yes, I call it ownership versus control ownership of your own space. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you, you’re talking the same language. That’s why I connected with the mBraining, I thought oh my word we need to connect because there’s so much similar information, so I really appreciate it.

Intro 1:03:44
The presenters and special guests of this podcast intend to provide accurate and helpful information to their listeners. These podcasts can not take into consideration individual circumstances and are not intended to be a substitute for independent medical advice from a qualified health professional.

Intro 1:04:03
You should always seek the advice from a qualified health professional before acting on any of the information provided by any of the transit lounge podcast. This has been a production of themBrainingshow.com check us out on Facebook and start a conversation@facebook.com/mBrainingshow.

Intro 1:04:22
Subscribe to each show on iTunes and check us out on Twitter. The mBraining show we’d like to acknowledge and thank mBIT international for their support with this show. wants to know more about mBraining? Visit www.mbraining.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

For more interviews go to www.thembrainingshow.com

The post Overcoming eating disorders with Shirley Billigmeier #22 appeared first on The mBraining Show.

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How to overcome eating disorders.

Overcoming eating disorders is not usually a straight forward process. Published in 1991 Inner Eating by Shirley Billigmeier has never been more relevant than it is today. For over 40 years, this author, speaker and body image specialist has been helping women, men, teens and children resolve their issues with food and eating.

Based on her professional and personal experience and her nationally best selling book, Inner Eating, she created Innergetics as a tool for developing and maintaining a healthy relationship between food and your body.

Eating Disorders

Overcoming eating disorders – interview.

Much more than a theory, Shirley Billigmeier addresses head-on the problems and challenges we face each day and gives us an insight into what may be behind eating disorders. Her real-life techniques make it easy to start and produce fast results.

In our chat we discuss many ideas about where eating disorders may stem from and the role that our head, heart and gut brains play in helping to unravel eating disorders.

Shirley is definitely an expert in her field and has had great success assisting people over many years to get better after experiencing. In this interview we go deep in exploring her method and quickly realise that both Shirley an I have similar ideas about supporting people even though we started from completely different backgrounds.

Listen to this interview an learn about

  • The emotional, physical and social reasons you diet.
  • Why diets must fail.
  • How to identify, understand and cope with your eating pattern.
  • How to deal with interference eating.
  • How to enjoy and not want to eat more than your body needs.
  • How to understand the connections between body image, emotions, thoughts, and eating.
  • How to change compulsive eating to ownership eating and win the battle of stomach vs. brain.
  • How to recapture the joy of eating and movement.
  • How to pick up the PACE.Check out other episodes of this podcast at

www.thembrainingshow.com

visit http://www.innergetics.com

Music for intro by bensound.com

Highlights:

01:47 Introduction
03:16 How it all started
11:03 Own it yourself
15:47 Work with the hunger
22:51 Wanting Variety
28.23 Wisdom and body
34:49 Size and weight
43:04 Giving the choice
47:01 Emotional eating
56:43 Fat cells store emotions

Transcription:

Intro 0:06
You’re listening to The mBraining Show, a show about the new field of mBIT, where you’ll get a blend of neuroscience-based research with practical applications for wise living. And now here’s your host Bill Gasiamis.

Bill 0:22
This episode of The mBraining Show is brought to you by revealsolutions.com.au. If you’re a coach and looking for tools to help take your coaching session to the next level, then you may want to consider grabbing a pack of coaching cards.

Bill 0:36
There are several different types of coaching cards at therevealsolutions.com.au website, including The mBraining Coaching cards, the growth, coaching, model cards, and the emotional intelligence coaching cards amongst others.

Bill 0:51
Each pack contains at least 40 cards with different questions and prompts for you to ask your client during session. They made in Australia from high quality plastic coated paper and protected by a plastic box to ensure durability and easy storage.

Bill 1:08
Pack start from around $42 including tax and delivery is free to any address in Australia. Go along to reveal solutions.com.au Click the shop link and check them out. Now it’s on with the show. Today’s guest is Shirley Billigmeier. I hope I pronounced that correctly.

Shirley 1:33
There you go.

Bill 1:34
Oh my Lord. And I thought my name was difficult to pronounce. And I often complain Shirley that other people can’t pronounce my name anyhow. Now I won’t be so hard on them.

Shirley 1:44
Yes, exactly.

Bill 1:47
For 40 years this author, speaker and body image specialist has been helping women men, teens and children resolve their issues with food and eating based on her professional and personal experience.

Bill 1:59
And her nationally best-selling book Inner Eating. She created energetics as a tool for developing and maintaining a healthy relationship between food and your body. Much more than a theory Ms. Billigmeier addresses hit on the problems and challenges we face each day. A real-life techniques make it easy to start and produce fast results. Welcome, Shirley.

Shirley 2:27
Thank you very much.

Bill 2:29
Well, we have had some kind of journey to connect with each other after many, many attempts and tries to communicate. But we’ve done it.

Shirley 2:41
Probably because we’re so far apart across the world.

Bill 2:45
Yeah, I really appreciate your time and connecting with me, I just read your bio there. And I’ve I don’t know a lot about you. But I’ve heard a lot of fantastic words about you. And your bio, and the work that you do right now there doesn’t seem to be a better time for the kind of work that you do. There’s a lot of need for that type of work. Tell me about why it is that you got into that work?

Shirley 3:16
The reason I got into it, my undergraduate and graduate was in health and physical education. And after teaching just a few years, I could see that there was a frustration in people about size and weight and what they were eating and what they were not eating.

Shirley 3:31
And in my own sense of self, I thought that there shouldn’t be any frustration eating was meant to give us energy, it was not meant to drain our energy. And if you think of an infant, when they’re born, they know when to start eating. And they know when to stop. They have a feeling inside their gut that says I need to start it’s hunger.

Shirley 3:52
When that hunger has gone away. They stop. And it isn’t because of their diaper size. It isn’t because they’ve had enough nutrition. It isn’t because there’s an authority figure telling them what to eat or what not to eat is because they know when to stop. And that start and stop is within all of us.

Shirley 4:13
And we have lost those signals, we have buried those signals. And what energetics is, is a guide to give back to those original signals of the body. And when we can connect to the gut. That’s where the signals are. And when we feel that hunger but we’ve cut ourselves off from that hunger feeling. And in reality that hunger feeling is and is the guard of the body.

Shirley 4:37
It tells you how much to eat and the taste which we have avoided and really have not focused so much on. We’re afraid of it. We’re there we’re thinking if it tastes good, it there must be something wrong or that if we eat what we really love to eat, we can’t possibly be in a body that we love being in and to me in order to be in the That you love to be in, you need total choice of eating connected to hunger.

Bill 5:06
Yeah, that’s very beautiful. And it makes me think back to when I was a dad at the beginning of that process. And he went from a great background. So food is really, really important. I’m not sure if food is important, because people have realized it’s about nutrition, or because of the feelings associated with food, that are heart related, you know, the emotional side of eating, eating.

Bill 5:32
And, I remember that we were surrounded by people that knew better than us, our parents, and our friends and everyone who didn’t have a baby, who said, like, your kid has an alien enough, your son, you know, might be hungry, he’s crying because he’s hungry.

Bill 5:48
And then me being the guy who probably ate when he’s ready. And my wife being that, maybe we should listen to those guys. And there was this never ending focus on how much have you eaten? Have you eaten enough? Are you full? Are you hungry? And it was constant, like we were that kind of family growing up when we were kids, and we became those kinds of parents.

Bill 6:12
So I’m interested in your thoughts as to how is it that we’ve gotten to this point where we don’t now understand really what it is that food is meant to do? Because I think it’s a very, very confused process that we go through.

Bill 6:29
And my opinion, is basically I think that it’s just the the environment in which we live and grow the cities and, you know, the towns and the way that food is readily available, but what do you what do you think has happened to this whole thing where we don’t eat when we feel hungry, and we just ate all the time?

Shirley 6:52
Yeah, what you described was if we had all been left alone, and paid attention to hunger, and paid attention to taste and paid attention to when hunger had gone away, and there was no interference, eating would be in its proper order. This the the second that someone started overriding that subtle feeling of I’ve had enough, there was the first disconnect.

Shirley 7:16
And when you disconnect from hunger, you go to the head, and there are no signals in the head to start and stop eating. Now you have to know everything there is to know about calories, everything there is to know about fat grams, and where’s the start and stop, you can’t possibly know all of that information.

Shirley 7:33
So we lose the simplicity of it. And instead of going back to hunger, when it gets complicated, we go then into somebody else’s had to just, you know, for them to tell us what to eat and what not to eat. And we’ve gone the wrong direction.

Shirley 7:48
And so I teach people how to give back to that simplicity of what’s the actual start of eating, its hunger, what’s the actual stuff, but the very feeling of the subtle stuff. And many people when I do seminars will say, where did that stop, go? Because they they have this vision in their mind with this infant that knows exactly when to stop, they don’t care how big that authority figure is.

Shirley 8:12
They will turn their head, they will spit it out, they will push it away, until they’re just absolutely forced to eat. And then pretty soon, that subtle feeling of what I call balanced feeling to 5, because if you put your mind and your stomach in the other scale from 0 to 10, 0 to 5, meaning 0123. That’s all in the hunger feel.

Shirley 8:32
And when hunger is gone away, we’re balanced, it’s been taken care of, that’s the five. That’s the feeling of nothingness, that you’re not crowded with food, and you’re not hungry. Hunger has gone away. That’s when the infant knew that subtle thing that said to the infant, I no longer am hungry, I do not need to eat anymore.

Shirley 8:53
Stay away, I don’t need anything. And then pretty soon the prodding of the got to eat more, because some authority figures said they needed to eat. And that’s when the overridden that’s when we left the gut, we left hunger, and we went to the head where there are no answers.

Shirley 9:10
And it just becomes very confusing to the point where something as simple as eating what you need, has become very complex. And it was never ever meant to be complex. And I raised both my children this way. And I’ll never forget when my son came home is a fourth grader.

Shirley 9:27
And he said, this is interesting. There was a lunchroom lady that told me to finish my food. And I said, Well, what did you say to her? And he said, I said to her how would you know what my stomach feels like? And he stopped eating and I think it kind of stopped her in her tracks because how would anybody else know what you feel like? It is impossible. You’re not living in that other person’s body.

Bill 9:51
So yeah, that sounds like a conversation that I might have had with my son if he used those words. If he said how did you know what my stomach feels like?

Shirley 10:04
Yes, exactly.

Bill 10:06
And I suppose it didn’t use those words. And maybe if he had, maybe I would have said, I would have questioned myself as well, because what I did was what was done to me. And what my wife did was what was done to her. And because there was such a massive concern about how you know, that well being apparently is wrapped around to how much food you eat.

Bill 10:29
And if you’ve eaten enough, you know, I just did the same, I think what I didn’t realize is that I was just behaving like other people, I wasn’t behaving the way I would normally behave. Because, of course, for the majority of my life I’ve been eating until I felt full, and I’ve only eaten when I was hungry.

Bill 10:50
So I’m not sure why we cross the line and go from people who know when they should eat. And when they should stop to people who don’t know when to accept a child saying I’m full.

Shirley 11:03
Right, because if you don’t own it yourself, is very difficult to pass it on to your child and have that confidence that the child knows more than the adult. And that’s why the parent feels and I’ve had many parents feel well, then what am I going to tell them? I said, with food, you let them be, you simply let them be.

Shirley 11:24
And Lambert’s did a study, years ago, on a five year olds, and they were fed a lunch. And after lunch, they were left to go free in a room that was filled with food and so called and I never labeled foods, but they labeled it like junk food or food they weren’t supposed to have.

Shirley 11:45
Now they had just eaten lunch, so they weren’t hungry. And what they discovered was those children that ate when they were in that room, the determining factor was if the parents had rules at home, because there was that feeling in the child, I better get it while I can. I better store it while I can. Because in my kitchen, I don’t get to have these foods.

Shirley 12:08
And so what they discovered was that deprivation of that and that’s why I always call healthy foods, an oxymoron, because someone has already made that decision, somebody has already determined that it was healthy.

Shirley 12:24
And in that study that Lambert’s did, she discovered something even more important, and it was the concept of taste, because in order to taste it, they needed to be the decision maker. If they weren’t the decision maker, they couldn’t taste the food. So they assumed that the only thing that tasted good was the quote unquote, healthy foods.

Shirley 12:47
Because in that their whole identity was wrapped up in I will be the decision maker and the taste buds couldn’t be really felt. And I will explain that in another pleasure sence we always understand it. In another pleasure sense. It’s not console confusing, because we haven’t messed up the other pleasure senses.

Shirley 13:06
Think about music, think about if you put on headphones, and someone says to you, okay, listen to this music, you should like it. It’s good for you. Now tell me what you think. Versus put those headphones on listen to the music. Now you just tell me how you feel? How does it speak to you? How do you like the music? No judgment, no pre-cursor to what that that music should feel like to you.

Shirley 13:33
And in that you’ll understand the concept of why taste unless you have total choice. And that’s what I said people said do you understand nutrition, I said I understand it at a deeper level. We have we have taste buds in our gut, the infant is born with 10,000 taste buds, we need to allow them to pay attention to those taste buds.

Shirley 13:54
Hunger and taste are the guard and guide of the body. In fact, there was a book written in 1901 that said the same thing. And it was called strength from eating. They called it appetite, hunger and appetite are the guard and guide of the body. We have just cut off that information by going to the head.

Bill 14:16
So let’s talk about that. Because this is gonna be very interesting part of the conversation. I think what you say is common sense. And when you talk to me who hasn’t really thought about this topic much. As a parent, I was just frustrated that my kids didn’t eat enough or they didn’t eat as much as I ate or I don’t know what it was.

Bill 14:35
We did get over that after a while and their children do just basically eat when they don’t when they feel like it and we do have a very sort of strict policy on what is in the house with regards to foods that we wouldn’t consider you know, nutritious, so they don’t have it so that so that either snack on something that is relatively good or they don’t snack on stuff that is junky so that that works well.

Bill 15:04
And I do still get frustrated with dinner being ready. So five or six o’clock, and not everyone paying hungry to eat dinner. And there’s, I think the reason for that is because you know that there’s a time limit that we have to how long everything should go for, for example, you know, kids come home from school, there’s a little bit of study that needs to be done.

Bill 15:28
Then, you know, perhaps parents get home, we cook dinner, dinner needs to get data we need to clean up, we need to do the things that we need to do after dinner, pay for the next day and sit down and rest for five minutes and have a bit of a break, right, which we don’t seem to get the opportunity to do these days because of commutes are very long.

Bill 15:47
Because there’s so many things on the to do list. So how do we handle that time? And I know I’ve just gone off what I was originally gonna say, but how do we handle that time where children are not hungry at dinnertime? What do we do?

Shirley 16:02
Okay, that you work with the hunger and instead of against it, and you can say we have a dinner and it would be in an hour, you might be hungry. Now just have a little bit so that we can have our mealtime together, I think mealtime that start and stop the meal. And that family connection is extremely important. I think we were even losing some of that, that start and stop structure.

Shirley 16:26
You can work with the pump and you want hunger to the child, if they’re really, really hungry when they come home to say, okay, we’re gonna have dinner and about an hour, if you want a little something with just make sure you’re hungry when we go to dinner.

Shirley 16:38
So you’re always talking about hunger. So you never lose that connection, of hunger. And you never lost that sense of hunger. I think the structure is extremely important. I think when we lose family meals, we lose that start and stop, I think there’s so much to be said for that.

Bill 16:57
So they’re really key words, that words that you just said about hunger, make sure you’re hungry for dinner, which suggests that that’s the time to eat it kind of from my understanding as well. And from the conversations that I’ve had with grant and from learning what I’ve learned about mBraining and the multiple intelligences is that we can train the gut to eat at a certain time as well. Tell me a little bit about that side of it.

Shirley 17:24
Well, when you think about and I always looked at France, because they whenever they wanted, but they had a country structure. So in and that was kind of built in. And I think they’re starting to lose that. And they’ll probably blame it on the fast food. But it’s more about eating on the run, they hit a country structure, they knew they were going to have breakfast, there was a start and stop.

Shirley 17:46
They knew they were going to have lunch, it was a start and stop. They knew they would have maybe an afternoon something and then they had dinner, there was a start and stop because that’s what this is all about. It’s a start and stop. And because there was no deprivation, they had the fats and the sugars.

Shirley 18:02
They had everything you know, France, it was just it was they always called it the French paradox because they show me what they want and their croissants, how could they eat what they want is because they ate what they want, but the country structure was in place.

Shirley 18:16
And they knew that if they breakfast, they didn’t want to eat too much, because they knew they wanted to be hungry. I don’t know that they thought about that. Because if they had when the fast food came in, you know, they started eating on the run. And that’s what we’re working a lot within us people are eating on the run, there’s no start and stop anymore.

Shirley 18:34
And that’s part of the process that I teach, we’ve got to stop. So that we have a we got to sit down. So all our brains, the interior brain, the gut, brain, the heart, brain, the head, brain, can all be engaged when we start to eat. So that’s probably the first thing that I do when I when I work with people is to have them sit. And then they’ll say why don’t have time to sit and eat.

Shirley 18:57
And I said if you could take all the time and energy that you spent worrying about eating, what you should eat what you should need, eating too much different clothes, size, different things, different changes of weights, if you could take all of that energy, would you have time to sit? And generally it’s absolutely yes.

Shirley 19:16
And the reason you need to sit is because you need to stop so that you have a concrete because hunger is not concrete, you need a concrete action that says I’m going to engage all my brains and I’m going to sit and for this moment, I am going to feed myself I’m going to connect to what my hunger scale is so that I know exactly that I’m connecting to myself.

Shirley 19:37
And I know what I feel like and a lot of times when people do that, they’ll get to that point, and they’ll think that they’re hungry and then they sit down and they check in with their gut and they’re not hungry. And so it is extremely important to have that start stop.

Shirley 19:51
I’m working constantly with the start and starting to stop. So when you talk about the dinner, that’s what France had. They had a start and stop. They had total choice. But they also had a country structure that was built in. And that’s what they’re starting to lose. Now they’re eating on the run mark, you’d never saw people in France eat while they were walking. They’re always sitting up cafe.

Bill 20:11
Yeah, chicken at the scene and the people walking by? Yeah, I suppose. So what you’re saying is that structure at home is a good thing. Because we could say that there’s going to be a meal at lunchtime, which these days might be at school. So that’s okay for the kids. But at home, there’s going to be a meal, and it’s going to be around this sort of hours. be hungry for that, because we are going to sit down and we are going to eat.

Shirley 20:36
Yes, it’s teaching them how to, how to feel their hunger, how to stay connected to it, they know it, it’s, it’s it, we just interfere with it. So if you keep the conversation going, and you validate that hunger, you validate that feel, you work with the hunger and that’s where when people said, well, what if I’m not hungry, when I go to go to lunch, and I and I have a lunch meeting?

Shirley 21:00
I said, if you know you’re going to lunch plan to be hungry, and you start working with your hunger instead of against it. And you need structure, you need to start stop, that’s what’s missing. And when you don’t want to start, you don’t want to stop. And that’s all about OCD, if you don’t want to start and you don’t want to stop.

Shirley 21:19
And it was interesting, because Dr. Jeff Schwartz, who’s the international authority in obsessive compulsive behavior, and that’s why I’m such a proponent of total choice, because he proved with the brain that if you have cognitive choice, you can change a chemically imbalanced brain back to normal without drugs.

Shirley 21:39
And we ended up connecting because I was working with someone who had a real major eating issue. And I opened up total choice. So you can really because that’s your identity choices, identity. And a lot of people talk about choice in every other arena but food.

Bill 21:56
Exercising choice

Shirley 21:57
Yeah, exercising choice. And because total choice is a part of your identity, that and he he could see that you could you if you had total choice, and you knew that you could choose how you were going to move through life, you could and own that start of the movement.

Shirley 22:15
It could change a chemically imbalance brain back to normal without drugs. Now I go deeper, I drop into total choice of eating, because that’s what sustains life, if you don’t have total choice of eating of what sustains life, you can’t really drop in and feel your whole sense of self. So I really am a strong proponent of total choice.

Bill 22:37
Okay, I love that. I love having total choice. There’s only one thing that I want to understand better. What if the person’s total choice of what to eat and when to eat is McDonald’s? What then?

Shirley 22:50
Okay, because the body’s natural state is to want variety. I mean, I literally could eat at McDonald’s every day and not change my weight. Because I’m connected to hunger. Would I want to? Would it feel right to me? No, because I would want variety. Think about this, and this is what’s happened with with healthy eating.

Shirley 23:09
What if I said to you, you can only eat chocolate now for the next three months. At first, it might sound great, but you go yeah you know, after a while you go, I just want a nice salad. I just want but we have totally taken away our right to choose to taste a salad.

Shirley 23:31
And many people I work with will go, Wow, I never ever have eaten a salad that I’m choosing because it tastes good. I’ve been choosing the salad because I should eat and I’ve never enjoyed it. And then they start to open that up. So I go to nutrition at a much deeper level. And I’m going to give you an example of an eight year old that I’ve worked with.

Bill 23:52
I’m just gonna before we get to that story, I just want to ask a question. Regarding choice, do you think some of the processed foods work to take choice away from us via the form of addiction to the different components and chemicals in these processed foods?

Shirley 24:16
Okay, because of the processed food, we need choice even more because the body will not be fooled. If you’re in your head, the body will be fooled. If you’re in total choice you will want that’s why I can change the whole thing of the processing because you’ll want things that really tastes good to you that feel good and we’ve lost that ability to do that.

Shirley 24:38
We could drive the market by having really, really quality food because our body craves that our body craves variety. It craves foods that really tastes like a tomato really taste. But because we’re so much in our head, we can’t even tell the difference between processed and non-processed.

Bill 24:58
Ah, okay, now, I’m starting To get the distinction. So what you’re saying is a lot of your work is now because we’re going to get into that topic. In a moment, you’ll tell me your story as well, though, I want to hear that, but what you’re saying is that the work is done in the gut to get the gut on board to get the gut active to know, what it’s doing rather than to be influenced by all these external factors. And by us being such, you know, head based society, and working at a head level, okay, it’s that time I should probably eat or I should probably eat something or I should probably go to Mecca is or whatever.

Shirley 25:32
Yes, exactly. We want to use the incredible wisdom. And that’s how I connected to mBraining, because I thought, Oh, my word, you guys are talking about gut. But you’ve got to understand total choice. So that you can drop into that gut and use the wisdom of the gut, use the wisdom of the heart, use the wisdom of the body, but we’re not in the body, because we don’t have total choice.

Shirley 25:53
There’s a part of our body that’s missing. And then you get all that judgment from our head. That’s, that’s causing an uncomfortable feeling that says, Oh, I shouldn’t be eating this, I better not eat this. And there’s all this chatter that goes on that now the gut can’t even tell what the gut is feeling anymore, because you have so much chatter about what you should and should not eat.

Bill 26:11
Wow, that’s very cool. That is very cool. So as a health coach myself, so I’m not a nutritionist, or anybody, okay, I’m somebody who advocates a healthy lifestyle. So that can be very different for very many people. But food is one of those important things and getting people to understand their relationship to food is one of those things that I talk to my clients about a lot.

Bill 26:33
And one of the challenges that my clients face, is they say, I don’t have time to eat in the morning, similar to that time issue for lunchtime, and for dinner. And they’ll tell me that they do all these things in the morning.

Bill 26:46
So I’ll wake up, I’ll sit down quickly have a look at my emails, you know, I’ll get dressed, I’ll have to drive, you know, to the next job. If there are tradie, for example, drive to the next job, etc. I’ll stop and get a coffee and a croissant on the way. And my big question to them is, I’m not sure if you realize to, you know, whoever it might be.

Bill 27:09
How far or backward, we’ve come in our society, when you wake up in the morning, and you have the ability to say that I no longer have time to stop and eat something before I head off for my day. And I find that really bizarre because I don’t think that any other society before the type of society that we live in, you know, our ancestors woke up in the morning and said, I don’t have time to eat.

Bill 27:43
When did we become that time poor, that the most basic thing that we need to do in our lives to keep alive? The first and only thing other than drinking water to keep alive is to eat, and to nourish our bodies to make all our organs work? What happened? Like how did we get to that point where we don’t have time to do the most important function to keep us alive?

Bill 28:08
Is it because of this neverending 24-hour a day cycle where we could just turn up to any store at any time and buy anything and just put it in our bodies, because 24-hours a day, seven days a week, it didn’t happen 200 years ago.

Shirley 28:23
That’s why even now more than ever, we need to get back to hunger, because hunger will take care of it. Our wisdom and our body says, don’t move that fast, our wisdom in our body will take care of it. When we disconnect from our body. from hunger, from total choice. There is no wisdom left. And now we’re on a treadmill that just keeps going.

Shirley 28:51
And it goes faster and faster and faster. So that’s where I start with the hunger with total choice with sitting before you eat. When you say you grab, they grab a coffee and grab a croissant they’re driving, they can’t possibly be focusing on taste. They can’t possibly be focusing on what their body feels like.

Shirley 29:09
Or they have a car accident. Either you’re focused outward, or you’re focused inward. And and once you connect to hunger, I had a woman that worked for three M. And they gave her time tons of time management courses, spent 1000s of dollars on her didn’t even make a dent.

Shirley 29:26
I started in with total choice of eating and hunger and her time management cleared out because her own body she would feel the discomfort in her gut. If she was moving too fast. If she was racing, if and she would discover with the hunger scale, if she was over eating okay, then she discovered something is going on.

Shirley 29:47
And so what happens is when you have total choice, you can drop into your gut. The eating becomes your greatest informant it becomes your greatest psychologists of your own wisdom of your own body because there’s wisdom in That we are losing. Because we don’t have total choice, we’re in our heads. And there is the wisdom and the head of balance. It’s in the body, in the gut, in that in the heart. That’s where the wisdom sits.

Bill 30:14
So if somebody’s watching this, who’s new to the words that we’re using, I want to explain a couple of things. I want to explain that we have our brain, everyone knows that there’s many billions of neurons in our brain, okay we have a heart, there’s up to 130,000 neurons in the heart, we have a gut, and in the gut, there’s about half a billion neurons about the same size of a cat’s brain.

Bill 30:43
And we’re talking about these things as being intelligences. And if you didn’t ever know what, if you don’t understand what we’re on about, have you ever been that kind of person who said, I followed my gut, or I make gut decisions, that’s your gut intelligence, sending you up some kind of a signal to allow you to make a decision that you unknowingly are referring to as your gut, making a decision for you.

Bill 31:10
So you’ve also said things like, I followed my heart, because I had to go to the other side of the planet to be with that person, because I loved them so much. So when you refer to your gut and your heart in that way, you’re unwittingly perhaps accessing intelligences within you that are not in your head, but are connected to the way that we do things will say things.

Bill 31:33
And when we’re talking about people disconnecting from those intelligences have, if you’re the type of person who never says, I made a gut decision or followed my gut, then you’re disconnected from it. If you’re the type of person that says hearts been shut down, then you’re the type of person that perhaps has disconnected from their heart.

Bill 31:56
And now you’re missing a key ingredient, at least one third in the decision making process, and you’re relying on intelligences that are making decisions without all of the information and they’re doing the best that they can.

Shirley 32:11
Right because all they know, they don’t know what they don’t know. And, yeah, they don’t know what they don’t know. And there’s so much wisdom that I access, and I and I’ve started working with people that are totally cut off from their heart totally cut off from their gut. And I start with total choice and the hunger scale, because there isn’t a person that I’ve run into they say, okay, on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being starved, 10 being stuffed, five, the feeling of nothingness.

Shirley 32:39
If you put your mind in your gut at this moment in time, what number would you be at? And inevitably, people know. And, and, or they’ll they’ll kind of guess they’ll they’ll go, Wow, okay, I know. So I start there. And they might not even know that there’s gut wisdom, they might not even know that there’s heart wisdom. But I’ve connected them to the absolute core of the essence.

Shirley 33:07
And I remember one person said, she said, Oh, my word, I see what you do. You do like a laser beam, and you put them in the base of their gut, and they don’t even know it’s there. And I said, Yes. And then we start working. And then it’s it’s a process. It’s a process to establish what’s sitting in that gut that you want to let go of what’s sitting, what’s sitting there, what beliefs are sitting there, what deprivation thoughts are sitting there about what I shouldn’t should not eat.

Shirley 33:30
I just started working with a person that had been totally obsessed with eating his entire life is like 40 years old, I opened up total choice and had him track his hunger numbers before he started after he started. And he was amazed at the freedom that started in because he hadn’t access that wisdom.

Shirley 33:48
And what you described is I’m surfacing all that wisdom that that people have, every single person has that wisdom. And there isn’t anybody outside because everybody’s a creative soul. There isn’t buddy outside that has that wisdom. Like you have your wisdom, It’s yours, you own it, It’s yours and yours alone.

Shirley 34:08
That’s why when they have all those nutritional studies, and everything comes out different one day, one day, the week the eggs are good one week, the eggs are bad. One week is half as good. One week is as bad and it goes back and forth. It depends on what group what are they studying, they’re studying human beings.

Shirley 34:23
It depends on what group of human beings they’re studying. Maybe that group likes meat more, maybe that group does better with vegetables, maybe that group does better with so keeps shifting, depending on what group of people what I do is give them a process that they’re allowed to access. The only wisdom that’s true wisdom is their own wisdom.

Bill 34:41
Yeah, that’s gorgeous. I love it. Now, how does that help with body image how does all this help with body image?

Shirley 34:48
I’m so glad you brought that up. Because size and weight to me is the total byproduct of this process, I say put size and weight on the shelf. Because if somebody’s not at the size and weight they want to be, are they going to feel good? Are you going to tell them, okay, just feel good where you are, it’s not going to happen, because we’re not meant to have storage, because there’s no famine coming.

Shirley 35:16
And unless you’ve heard of one, I haven’t heard of one, there isn’t one coming. And we have foods. So we’re not meant to be that anorexic, we’re not meant to be storing storage. So we’re not meant to have storage. So I just say, for now, let’s just put size and weight on the shelf.

Shirley 35:31
And I would say to them on a scale from 0 to 10. If you could eat what you want from 0 to five, would you eat less? And they generally they’ll say yes. And I said, Great. If you eat less, we weigh less. They say yes, it’s a great, let’s just put size and weight on the shelf and leave it there because it’s only going to cause an uncomfortable feeling.

Shirley 35:49
And an uncomfortable feeling that you can’t cannot do something in the moment is what do they call it? In the world of psychology, you have an uncomfortable feeling and you can’t move. There’s nothing to do depression. I thought why would you think size and weight it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s absolutely a dead end street.

Shirley 36:07
And my clients will constantly hear me say just the size and weight on the shelf, leave it there, leave it there. And one little interesting story, a woman didn’t know how much she had it in her psyche until she went home. And her father kind of looked at her. And then he looked away. And she said, Oh my word I could tell just by the look, he didn’t like my size and weight.

Shirley 36:27
I’ve internalized it, I am not valued until I’m a certain size and weight. I said no, from the very moment they start a process with me, we’re in a pleasure base we’re in value based. And size. And weight is totally a byproduct. I don’t even weigh the people, they want to weigh fine. But sometimes that scale messes them up, they they weigh less, they think Oh good I can eat.

Shirley 36:47
If they weigh too much. And they think oh my word, I’m disappointed. And I’ll eat because I’m upset. It’s Dennis street is absolutely a dead end street. So I said, leave it on the shelf. Let’s just really concentrate on working from the zero to the five and see and go with the feelings.

Shirley 37:02
See what feelings and they’ll go through layers of feelings in that gut. Because if you study the gut, you know, there’s all kinds of feelings in that gut. And in this now they finally said in in the fat in the storage is called storage and never call it fat. It stores store or stored energy.

Shirley 37:18
And if there’s storage there, there’s information. It’s not like one study that just came out. It’s not like butter in the refrigerator anymore. There’s all kinds of stuff that comes out. And that’s what my clients will feel.

Shirley 37:28
They’ll feel these feelings start surfacing. I said, Yeah, when you ate for those feelings, I got pushed over into the storage bin. Now the storage bin is being released. And all those feelings are starting to come up. So we need to deal with them.

Bill 37:38
Yeah, lovely. And that’s where you help them. I just want to go back a little bit. And I want to explain to people The reason I got come across multiple brain integration techniques mBraining is because I’d experienced at the time two brain hemorrhages.

Shirley 37:55
Oh, interesting.

Bill 37:57
And my head switched off. So now these intelligences were coming up. And I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. Hang on a second what do I do with this information and the stars aligned, it was beautiful. And I got into this course with somebody explained to me, Grant Soosalu and Marvin Oka, what these things were doing and what I was saying and what was coming up. So I was able to understand then how to use these intelligences.

Bill 38:33
So I suppose you know, my conversation with the people that I work with is that, again, they need to start paying attention to the communication The story is what it means and that all these things don’t need to be. We don’t need to go into our head to work it out. We just need to sit with it and allow it to give us the information and make of it what we need to make of it.

Shirley 38:56
Yes, exactly. No and then you felt the wisdom of the heart, you felt the wisdom of the gut. And that’s when I when I saw their book in Britain, I thought oh my word. They’re speaking my language. This is great. But they need to understand total choice because that chatter that comes from the head when when you thinking you should eat this or shouldn’t eat that or better not eat this or better not eat that that chatter is interfering with the wisdom.

Bill 39:18
Yeah that’s lovely. I just love that you’ve got to the same kind of place where I am. And we’ve come from a completely different path. It’s just amazing. Now, earlier you spoke you were going to an I interrupted you, you were gonna tell a little story about one of your eight year old clients.

Shirley 39:34
Oh, yes. When you talked about, um, I have a friend and she knew not knew my work. And she knows she needed to engage me in helping with their son their eight year old. And because the father was the controller of the peanut butter cups in their house. He decided how much they would have and when they could have them. They could only have them a certain time, whatever.

Shirley 39:54
And she said it’s really getting to be a battle. She said can you help me with this? And I said you He’s eight years old, well, we’ll get this figured out, I knew the couple, I sat down with the Father, I said, I know you’re really into nutrition, you think that if he, if I, we opened up the total choice of peanut butter cup psyllium the rest of his life. And I said, but I said, just give me I said, three days, just give me three days.

Shirley 40:15
And I said, this is what we’re going to do. And I said, I want you to now give him the right to own the peanut butter cups. And and of course, this is like extremely uncomfortable for him to go, Oh, my word. That’s all he’s going to eat. And he said, Okay, I’ll give you three days. I said that. She said, that’s it. I said, Fine. He’s only eight years old.

Shirley 40:35
This will this will take care of itself as a body craves variety. So the first day they sat him down, they said, you know, we we’ve been off on this, and we’re gonna make sure that you are the one that keeps the peanut butter cups. And of course, the lies got really big and gold this is great. This is really fun. I never had peanut butter cups on my own in the house, I can eat as many as I want, oh, this is great.

Shirley 40:56
He held on to the peanut butter cups. He ate them for breakfast, he ate him for lunch. He brought them out in the afternoon, he’s jumping on the trampoline, the father’s going, yep, see that he’s gonna eat them the rest of his life. But at least I can go three days, and then I’ll be done with this.

Shirley 41:09
And then that evening, he took them to bed with him because he was so deprived of these big cups. And the next morning, he was going to a peanut butter cups again, and and he kind of sound to the side and he said, Now I’m gonna have peanut butter cups. I was like, Okay, I’m afraid that if I if I let these go, they’ll build some I’ll go away.

Shirley 41:27
So then he went out to play and he forgot the peanut butter cups. And his mother said, You forgot your peanut butter cups. And he said, Oh, that’s okay. You can just leave them there. And she’s okay. And so when he came back after lunch, because he had peanut butter cups for lunch, now we’re into the second day.

Shirley 41:40
And that evening, she settled down on his plate and just put them on the plate. And he said, Mom, could I have something else? And I and she said, I thought my husband would just die thinking, how could he possibly want something, he can have all the peanut butter cups he wants.

Shirley 41:54
And all of a sudden he could see what had happened. And and then the next morning, she said, you know, here the peanut butter cups again, she eat and and he said no, I want some cereal, I want some cereal. And she said, Okay, I’ll just put them in the shelf. They’re there when you want them.

Shirley 42:09
And that was it, and it took care of all of it. And the father could see what had been happening. And so and after that never an issue, and they totally opened up choice. That’s why so I honestly believe in choice. And I have confidence in the wisdom of the body, as long as it’s valued.

Shirley 42:27
And there may be times like I said, if the trouble is people have been sold, this is what they should eat. And so they think that’s the only thing. And so what do they crave what they should not? Because I always say you can’t want a should you can only want a should not?

Bill 42:43
Yeah. that’s a great story reminds me of the old the way to, for parents to tackle children decided to take up smoking, you know, if you caught your child with a cigarette at age 12, or 13, you buy him a pack of cigarettes, you sit down with them and tell them smoke the whole pack.

Shirley 43:03
And then they get sick right?

Bill 43:04
And they get sick, and then they get put off. And it’s a story that Tony Robbins tells as well. And I’ve heard that story from him and a number of other people. And this seems to be this thing that now you’ve accepted that they can have a choice to smoke or not smoke, or it’s something that they’re not supposed to eat and you allow them, you just flood them with the opportunity to have that all the time.

Bill 43:25
And that somehow gets them to their point of understanding that this is not something that I should or should not be doing. This is just something that doesn’t fit right. It doesn’t go right for me Oh, it’s making me feel unwell.

Bill 43:37
Or, this can’t be the only thing that I can consume, this has got to be something else in it. Because if I have to just consume this thing, well, things are not going to be as exciting as they were when I had the ability to eat all these other foods.

Shirley 43:52
Right. And what I want is to really not to make them sick of that, but have total choice. So they can have things that tasted that have tastes, whether it’s sweet, whether it’s salty, whether it’s vegetables, whether it’s you know, it’s all food, it’s all food, because I want a very good feeling about food, a very pleasant feeling about food.

Shirley 44:12
And that’s what the thing with taste because you have five pleasure senses and tastes has a very specific boundary. It’s hunger to balance. That’s what taste was meant to be. It was meant to be used only from the zero to the five, where you really, really use it as energy and pleasure, strength and pleasure.

Shirley 44:31
Beyond the fai. If you’re looking at like you say, oh, but something tastes really good. I want to keep eating it. And what that is saying, I still want more pleasure. Well, we were given four other pleasure senses for unlimited use. So what my process does it all of a sudden opens up all of the other pleasure senses and the world becomes much brighter because when you use taste beyond the five, now you’re crowded now it doesn’t feel so good.

Shirley 44:54
So mine is so totally pleasure base because all I’m getting rid of is the food that’s crowding you You get it getting rid of the food that doesn’t allow you to feel good. And even I can go even with the healthy ifs if somebody says shrimp is healthy and you eat it and you break out, it’s not healthy for you is so it’s based on how much you’re eating, what your taste buds are, and how your body feels.

Shirley 45:17
And there’s wisdom that we are not accessing. And it’s so crucial. And it’s meant to be totally pleasurable. They said, Well, I don’t want to go to that party, or that restaurant or whatever. I said, Oh, my word, go to all the social events and be hungry. They said, don’t be hungry when you go to a restaurant, don’t be hungry, I’m gonna be hungry.

Shirley 45:36
What’s the point, if I’m going to a party, I’m going to be hungry, she’s going to be serving great food, I want to eat it. So I have to really enjoy taste, and then open up all the other pleasures senses. And it’s interesting because I worked with an executive. And he said to me, he said, You know, there’s two o’clock in the afternoon, I know I’m not hungry.

Shirley 45:54
And he said to me, but I want to eat and I he said, I just can’t get past it. I said, Okay, let’s just say at two o’clock in the afternoon, eating didn’t exist. What are you going to do now? And he looked at me now this is a top executive. And he said, I feel like you’ve got me in the corner with a dunce cap.

Shirley 46:11
I have no idea what it is. I have no idea. I said, Because tastes beyond its use blocks you from your own intelligence from your other pleasure senses. I said, just brainstorm it. Who doesn’t exist right now? What are you going to do? Then all of a sudden, his creative juices started going.

Shirley 46:29
And I said, You’ve got to list all the things that you could possibly do. Because taste has robbed you of your creative soul, when you eat beyond. And what I do is I put taste in order when it’s in order it gives life when it’s out of order, it drains your life.

Bill 46:45
Lovely. That is an interesting question to ask somebody. You can just say how they little heads gonna start to go Oh, I’m looking for an answer. And I can’t find one. And now I’ve got to go somewhere else for whatever it is that I’m going to do. So I like that, that’s excellent.

Bill 47:01
It’s a great way to engage with the other intelligences into the conversation. Yeah, it’s brilliant. Now, let’s have a chat about emotional eaters. Because is that a similar issue in regards to eating from a place of trying to fulfill some unmet emotional, you know, need? Does that also take away choices. That’s what it sounds like, to me now that you’re saying.

Shirley 47:27
Okay, it’s like an uncomfortable feeling in the gut. So it can be a multitude of reasons. Anytime you eat beyond that five, and you have an uncomfortable feel. And you’re what what the nice system was meant to be is like, you get an uncomfortable feeling in your gut, you go to your head and go, Okay, what is that? Okay, what do I need to do to resolve and it goes nice back and forth.

Shirley 47:48
It’s a nice back and forth. way, if you get an uncomfortable feeling in your gut, and you detour over and pick up some food, instead of connecting to that uncomfortable feeling, going to your head, figuring it out. Now, instead of your own mind, using your intelligence and your connection, you use the food becomes the connection and the pathway back to yourself.

Shirley 48:10
So it becomes the solver of the feeling. And then you’ve got to get back to yourself. And now you’re upset with yourself because you overeat and every time you detour you make that stronger than your own mind body connection. Yeah, so I’m always working and that is the process I’m always working at eliminating that detour.

Shirley 48:30
So we have this nice flow of intelligence between the gut and the head that’s what we’re looking for. So that uncomfortable feeling and I in when when I said don’t bury the messenger I want you to feel the whole range of feelings I want you to feel from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high connect to it and we’ll learn how to turn it around and bring it back to balance.

Bill 48:51
So we learn about what the feeling means not let eat food to make the feeling go away.

Shirley 48:57
Right I said don’t you know as I always used it for it don’t you kill the messenger feel that feeling you want to know it’s like we’re in an exploration in your house. It’s like we want to open all that you know, opened the doors you know, and sometimes it’s it’s a little scary to open the door and then you might feel a little bit and go Okay, there’s something big going on.

Shirley 49:13
That’s why I say eating becomes your greatest informant I love working with psychologists because then they go if they’re gonna go to their therapist, they go Okay, we got to work on that. Okay, whatever. So I love the you know, everybody uses because it get you gather so much real information, you get the truth of what’s going on in your gut.

Bill 49:32
Yeah, I love it. Now, another question that I have is all these things are coming into my mind. And this is such a fascinating topic of conversation. And you can go many different ways. But what happens when somebody is an executive and a lot of executives would say, and even if they’re not an executive would say stuff like, I followed my gut.

Bill 49:54
I make gut decisions, but they are clearly overweight, obese, really, really unhappy. So they’re making in one, in one way, they’re making these really gut decisions that are guiding them along this successful path of life, or business or whatever it is. But then they don’t have that next ability that I’m not sure that little ability to tap into those other things, what’s happening there?

Shirley 50:20
They might just not know, he’s like, you don’t know what you don’t know. And it could be that not understanding that zero to 10, it may be that they had that feeling of finish your food, and it feels good to eat to attend. I remember one attorney said after after he was an attorney after a seminar that I gave, he said, Oh, I see, I’ve been thinking that nothing is hunger.

Shirley 50:42
And I’ve been eating from the 5 to the 10. I see I’ve got it. So in that case, he was connected to his gut, but he thought that’s where food was meant to be. So sometimes it’s just not having the information, not having the understanding of what quantity because we’re so used to these big quantities in the world.

Shirley 51:03
And and, you know, France had more of the small quantities, because they were more connected to hunger. I mean, I don’t even know if they were thinking hunger, but it automatically happened because of their country’s structure. So sometimes it’s just not knowing, sometimes it’s not believing you, you have the right to have total choice of eating.

Shirley 51:21
So there’s deprivation going on, there can be a multitude of reasons. If they go with their gut, they want to feel their gut, but then then they have some other messages. So by connecting to hunger, we really do clear out all of it then at that point, because food is what sustains life, without food, you die.

Shirley 51:37
So if you understand food, and you understand the boundaries of food, everything else goes in order. It’s like I’m putting everything in order with a base of food. And if we have food in order, everything else kind of follows in mind.

Bill 51:48
Yeah, I like to use food for healing. So one of the things that I work with people doing is to encourage them to eat foods that encourage healing. So the reason I went down that path is because, you know, I’ve I’ve had, you know, self body image issues myself, just like any other human being on the planet from time to time.

Bill 52:11
And when I first had my experience, the first brain hemorrhage, they put me on some medication and the medication made it so that within about, I think within about three weeks, I put on a kilos, which is maybe five pounds or something like that. And I think I got that, right.

Bill 52:31
And what happened was, I very quickly, now notice that I’ve, my body has completely changed, my clothes don’t fit, I feel really uncomfortable in my skin. And the reason they gave me the medication was to decrease the inflammation in the brain. And this was not a good thing.

Bill 52:50
Because while it was good because it was saving my brain and it was saving my life ultimately, early on. But I figured that if I have to stay on this medication for a prolonged period of time, while this is not going to end well, there’s going to be other complications that come from that.

Bill 53:04
And these medications, made me lose the ability to slip made me lose the ability to you know, be in control of my emotions, all those type of things, there’s a lot of side effects that I had. And I didn’t want to experience that until I was healed or recovered or this was dealt with.

Bill 53:19
So I went for the first time in my life, I became curious about how do I decrease inflammation in the body, and I did a Google search. And what I discovered was that you can actually do that via food.

Bill 53:34
So I used to do all the things and say all the things that we’ve discussed about why I’m eating something or why I shouldn’t have eaten that or I’m not going to eat that when I go to this restaurant etc I did all of those things in the past to try and control my weight. But when I started eating the food that was decreasing inflammation in my brain without realizing the weight fell off.

Bill 53:58
And the amount of weight that fell off was way more than had ever you know come up before when I spent money on exercising on diets on this on that or everything. So what happened was I was just finding that my body was resetting and going back to the the weight that it’s meant to be under normal operating circumstances.

Bill 54:18
And the whole idea in my mind changed about what weight loss weight gain and all that kind of stuff is now now it became about okay forget about the weight loss like you said put it on the shelf that’s got nothing to do with anything.

Bill 54:32
And it was just about instinctively going back to decreasing the inflammation and eating foods that supported that also supported weight loss and it also supported connecting to the gut again and it also supported connected to the heart and paying attention to what was coming up. I found that very very fascinating and it reinforced your what you’re saying reinforces what I kind of discovered accidentally about myself when I was in need.

Shirley 54:59
Yeah, and that’s where a lot of times, for example, there was a woman who was lactose intolerance. And I started working with her and she had a lot of mother issues a lot of pain in her storage cells, there was a lot of pain in there, as she released some of that. And in in the, in releasing the storage.

Shirley 55:19
After a while, what we start realizing is what what you’re realizing, okay, there are certain foods that felt good to you. And I’m always working with that. Okay, if you feel like you’re uncomfortable with that, try little Is it the quantity? Is it a belief in there that’s stuck, that’s causing pain.

Shirley 55:35
And it can be a multitude of reasons and what you discovered, you discover foods that allowed you to feel good, so I’m always working with what feels good to you. Because like I said, if you eat shrimp, and you break out, it’s not healthy for you. But no one person can tell another person, you got to experience that yourself, what feels good to you.

Shirley 55:54
And a lot of times, in this particular individual can really come to eat now, whatever she wants to really shed a lot of pain that she released, there was nothing else other than pain that was causing the inflammation. Because sometimes painting the gut creates the inflammation.

Shirley 56:08
And so whether it’s feelings, or whatever it is, it’s causing that uncomfortable feeling the gut because the gut is meant to feel good. That’s we’re always going we want the gut to feel good. I always talk about having a pleasant face in the gut, we’re always working towards that a pleasant feel in the gut.

Shirley 56:27
And so crowding too much food doesn’t feel pleasant, a food that when you eat it, you break out, doesn’t feel good. So you start determining for yourself, what you need to eat the feels good to you, and the quantities that feel good to you.

Bill 56:43
This has been an amazing conversation, I’ve just come up with another thing that I realized that you’re doing that I do, but you do it to the next level as well. So I talked about fat cells as storing toxins, you’re talking about fat cells are storing emotions and other things as well.

Bill 57:03
Wow. And I can see I understand how you’re saying that. So when I talk about people being overweight or large, and needing to release fat cells and explaining to them that some of the reasons why they’re inflamed is because those fat cells store toxins, you know, chemical based toxins. You’re talking about, they actually also store emotions.

Shirley 57:29
Yes, and I have people when they’re, when they’re going through my process, I said, just get ready for a feeling to surface and and they’ll come and they’ll say, Oh my word. I thought it was done the size and weight. All of a sudden this thought floated through my body.

Shirley 57:42
I said, yeah, you must be dissipating your fat you the storage, because it will come up and just let it go. Let it go. And now all the times I’ve talked about turn it around to get okay. That’s what I used to think that that the size and weight was so important. turn that around go no, I have value simply within myself.

Shirley 57:59
And I need to let that go. So yes, it has feelings and think about when people when you talk about emotional eating, those emotions just don’t go away because you ate. But what happens is those emotions get trapped over in those fat cells.

Bill 58:16
Wow. That’s Oh, that’s so clear to me now. It’s so clear to me, that’s an amazing thing. So we’re releasing all these different things. And for somebody else, it could be storing something, something else as well. And that’s what I love about it, it’s whatever they’re storing for you is what you obviously need to let go of to, you know, help you change your body shape, and therefore, the way you feel and therefore your self image completely changes. Everything gets transformed.

Shirley 58:46
Right, and think about you know, why it’s a choice, because whoever wants to choice. That’s why I really believe in choice to let them feel their own body and do that guideposts because whoever owns the choice owns the power. And when you think of the diet industry who owns the choice and who owns the power. And yet Joe’s meant to the individual feels like they’re a failure. And I said no, your soul went out. This is a good thing.

Bill 59:08
Yeah, this is an amazing thing. Now you’re an author. And we haven’t spoken about any of your books. And I haven’t known you long enough to know that you’ve got a book. But tell me a little bit about the most recent book that you’ve written.

Shirley 59:19
Oh, the one that I had written one way back in 1991. And I didn’t really want to write a book because I love the consulting and the speaking more than the writing but I knew I needed to get that information out the the Mayo Clinic had to leave you started clinic wrote my forward at that point in time.

Shirley 59:37
And it I had the hunger scale in it. But as I go through all these years, I thought, wow, I have so many more tools. And when people first hear it and when they saw it when they first start working with me, they feel it’s so easy. So I said okay, I need to put another book out there called energetics if that’s if that’s what the book is coming decides what to do.

Shirley 59:58
We’ve got to decide that And it’s going to give a multitude of tools because I really wanted the masses to get it. I can work with individuals, one on one, you know, but I want the masses to understand this, because it’s so important. It’s just so important. So I’m trying to do it so that there’s enough tools in that book, so that somebody can open up that book and they can do it on on their own.

Shirley 1:00:19
And maybe if they work with a therapist, or if I can create an online something, so if they have a question, they can just tap in, because everybody can afford to work with me. And I understand that, but I really want the masses to get this because there’s so much important information.

Bill 1:00:34
Where can they get the book from?

Shirley 1:00:36
Well, Inner Eating is still out there. It’s sold out, and it keeps me selling on amazon.com used books, it just keeps reselling and reselling it’s been in Germany it’s been in Canada. This next one I’m hoping to have out within a year. It’s not out yet.

Bill 1:00:52
Okay, great. I’m gonna pop the link to your website on our on the comments from our chat. So people can go there. And can they register somewhere put some sort of an expression of interest in.

Shirley 1:01:06
They can just they can just contact me through my email, which is out there. There’s a contact there. I have a phone number on there. They can contact me at any point in time.

Bill 1:01:16
Yeah, now you’re based in the states were based in Australia. But anyone can buy any of your items from anywhere in the world.

Shirley 1:01:23
Yeah, it’s on amazon.com. Use books Inner Eating. My first book is called Inner Eating.

Bill 1:01:28
What’s the website address?

Shirley 1:01:30
The website is www.innergetics.com it’s energy from within is why I created that name.

Bill 1:01:40
Yeah, it’s beautiful. So that’s this has been an amazing conversation. It’s been really fascinating. I’m so glad that we both persisted to align our calendars to get into a place where we can talk to each other, it was a big job, everybody who’s listening and watching.

Bill 1:01:57
Just so you know, we probably sent about 20 emails in the end, and we finally made it happen. It just goes to show as well worth it. Now, everybody, listening, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, what I would encourage you to do is share it, share it with somebody who you think might benefit from hearing this conversation.

Bill 1:02:15
If you also enjoy this conversation, do us a favor, go to the YouTube channel, and give us a and the link will be in the comments. Give us a thumbs up if you’re watching on YouTube. And if you’re on iTunes, go to the YouTube to the iTunes page of the mBraining show and give us a five star review that will help other people find this episode, it’ll help make the lives of other people more connected with their body, it will give people an awareness perhaps that they didn’t have before.

Bill 1:02:49
And I would really, really appreciate it because that will allow me to do what it is that I love to do. And I’m sure to allow Shirley to do what she loves to do, which is reach more people and not necessarily have to take money from them. Just give them some insights yeah?

Bill 1:03:03
So that’s Um, so we would really appreciate that. Shirley, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for being part of the show. I really appreciate it. We’ve I’ve had so much fun. And I really look forward to learning more about the work that you do and really understanding, you know, the next level of self image and what shapes us and how we can get control back of what it is that we’ve lost control over.

Shirley 1:03:29
Yes, I call it ownership versus control ownership of your own space. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you, you’re talking the same language. That’s why I connected with the mBraining, I thought oh my word we need to connect because there’s so much similar information, so I really appreciate it.

Intro 1:03:44
The presenters and special guests of this podcast intend to provide accurate and helpful information to their listeners. These podcasts can not take into consideration individual circumstances and are not intended to be a substitute for independent medical advice from a qualified health professional.

Intro 1:04:03
You should always seek the advice from a qualified health professional before acting on any of the information provided by any of the transit lounge podcast. This has been a production of themBrainingshow.com check us out on Facebook and start a conversation@facebook.com/mBrainingshow.

Intro 1:04:22
Subscribe to each show on iTunes and check us out on Twitter. The mBraining show we’d like to acknowledge and thank mBIT international for their support with this show. wants to know more about mBraining? Visit www.mbraining.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

For more interviews go to www.thembrainingshow.com

The post Overcoming eating disorders with Shirley Billigmeier #22 appeared first on The mBraining Show.

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