MODULE 1

EATING PSYCHOLOGY & MIND BODY NUTRITION

Welcome to the first module of The Mind Body Eating Coach Certification Training!

Module 1 sets the table for the entire training. It’s all about learning the DNA of this unique body of work. As you’ll soon discover, we create a powerful foundation that will help us become proficient in working with and navigating the most common and compelling food and body challenges of our times.

You’ll learn the core concepts that create the language and infrastructure for effectively understanding the root causes of your clients’ unwanted eating concerns. To this end, you’ll learn key distinctions in Dynamic Eating Psychology and Mind Body Nutrition; discover important counseling and listening skills; and explore the architecture of healing, masculine and feminine psychology, and the psychobiology of soul lessons.

We’re off to an exciting start with Module 1 … so let’s begin!

Remember to start by watching your Module 1 Overview Videos, and be sure to check off each of the required elements (training videos, journaling exercises, quiz, and more) on your Module 1 Checklist below.

Overview Videos

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Greetings, my friends. I'm Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Here I am in a conversation with you from my office in Boulder, Colorado. I am so happy you've enrolled in this training. Congratulations, you've made it. You're here. Thanks a lot. I know it took a lot for you to get here, and to me, you've made a powerful decision. You've made a beautiful choice, and we are so going to make this worth your while. Now, once again, I know it's probably taken you a lot to get here. Honestly, it's taken time, energy, money, maybe a lot of decision making. Maybe it was easy for you, maybe it wasn't so easy for you. But either way, it's a powerful commitment. It's a beautiful one, and it's a timely one for you to choose to study the kind of work that's going to help propel you personally and professionally into a whole new realm of the nutrition universe and of the eating psychology universe. So again, I am happy for you, for me, for us. What a great experience we're gonna have together. My promise to you is I'm going to do my absolute best to make this training worth far more than the money you are paying. So by the time the training is finished in eight months or so, you're going to be a different person. You're gonna see food, body, and health in a whole new way. You're gonna have an amazing toolkit to serve others in a very meaningful and effective way. And you're gonna find yourself truly at the leading edge of eating, psychology and nutrition. So let us start with a bit of story. You know so much about what we do with clients is we learn about their personal story. Who are you? How did you get here? Mr. And Mrs. Client, because story is beautiful. Story on so many levels is really all that we have and all that we are and all that. Our friends and loved ones, the people we know when we're gone, they're gonna remember us based on our stories. Not all the little trinkets you left for them or the money, they're gonna tell stories about us. So I wanna say a few more words about me, my story, just so you can get a sense of my perspective, my orientation, how I got into this work. Just so you can have some context here. My story briefly, my earliest memory in life is being taken to the hospital when I was less than a couple of weeks old, believe it or not. I remember that I checked this out with my mom and dad and, and it blew their mind. I remember my mother holding me in the front seat of the car. My dad is driving, my mom is crying. And what was happening was I was dying and I couldn't breathe. So I was having an asthma attack. Now, for some strange reason, here I am an infant, two weeks old, I knew the English language completely. I understood every single thing that both my parents were saying, go figure. By the way, psychologists will tell us that we actually learn language in the womb. Okay? So I'm having an asthma attack, and indeed I have been born asthmatic. The very first day I popped out of the womb. In addition, the doctor had said, this kid is highly allergic. I was in the hospital for just about a couple weeks. So they let me out. They gave my parents some medication, sent me home, and here I am in the car. My parents are rushing. I'm dying because I can't breathe. That's my earliest memory. So I came into this world struggling physically, and throughout my childhood until about the age of five, I was going from doctor to doctor, dealing with the asthma, with allergies, with some undiagnosed childhood autoimmune condition. I was sensitive to everything and nothing helped. So finally, at about the age of five, I don't know quite how this happened, but I'd heard a rumor that fruits and vegetables were good for you. I was the kind of kid that was raised in the generation, the late fifties, early sixties. It was TV dinners and all that strange artificial food and nothing natural. Everything came out of a can or a bottle or was frozen. And this was high tech nutrition. This was supposed to make us all healthy. So anyway, five years old, I asked my mother to buy me some apples and peas and carrots in a can because somehow that was my concept of fruits and vegetables. Coincidence or not, my health started to improved. Was it connected? Who knows? But from a very young age, I made the powerful magic connection. 'cause this is magic to a kid's mind that what went into my body had a profound effect on my health. So to my child's mind, this, this was amazing. And it set me off to the races in terms of a fascination with diet, fascination with nutrition. Like, wow, this works. It's unbelievable. I can empower myself. I could do something. 'cause the adult world wasn't making it work. So I experimented with my diet from then on, and you know, my dad was a chiropractor, and this was back in the early days again in the fifties when he graduated, when chiropractors were not so popular and were kind of looked down upon. So from early on, I was given a, a holistic bent, um, or thrust and, and an interest in just being surrounded by natural healing, alternative healing, different philosophies. As I came into my teens and early twenties, I started seeing clients. It was a very natural flow. It was easy for me. In fact, people were seeking me out because they saw me eating these strange foods. They saw me eating natural foods and talking about weird supplements. So friends would come to me for their weight issues, their overeating issues, their health concerns. Now I started to notice that I was having a lot of success and then a lot of unsuccess. And I noticed over the years, and this is after schooling and so on, I noticed over the years that you can tell people, Hey, here's what you should do. Here's what you're supposed to eat. And it registers in the brain. Yep, this is what I'm supposed to do. This is what I'm supposed to eat. And then people come back a week or two later and say, I just couldn't do it. I had a Wall Street clientele for a long time, and they were highly educated, highly motivated, and I was blown away that they just couldn't do it. Now, how many of us say that I know what I'm supposed to do, I know what I'm supposed to eat. I know how I'm supposed to take care of myself, I just don't do it. So it was from there. At that point, right around my mid twenties, I had done so much work studying the science of nutrition. I felt that I exhausted my knowledge base at that point. I had read every single book out there, and you could do it back then, every textbook, every popular book written in the 1950s, sixties, seventies, eighties, and before on nutrition. So I had a ravenous appetite. So the statement, what should we eat? For me started to become who are we as eaters. I wanted to understand the mind of the eater because I realized if I didn't know the mind, the heart, the psyche, the soul of the eater, then I really couldn't get anywhere really in helping people around their food challenges and nutrition and health. So I decided to embark on a study of eating psychology. And back in the 1980s, there wasn't any. I looked all around in the United States, you know, where is there a program in eating psychology? Back in 19 82, 19 83, I could find one program in Florida that was an internship for eating disorders, mostly for anorexia. And I thought to myself, what about the rest of us? Yeah, I'm interested in anorexia, but what about the other? 99% of the population who isn't anorexic is not extremely obese or extremely bulimic classic eating disorders. But we have a relationship with food that's challenged. We wanna lose five pounds, 10 pounds, 30 pounds, 150 pounds. We have body image concerns, we overeat, we bingey, we emotionally eat. What about everyone else who seems to have these interesting minor, moderate, or often pretty big challenges around eating? But other things in my life might seemingly be okay. So check this out. I found a graduate program, Sonoma State University in California that basically allowed me to do an independent study in eating psychology. So I just made up my own program. I put an ad in the newspaper that is, that essentially said, eating psychology support group free. Come on in. It's at Sonoma State University, led by a graduate student, me, Mark David. So I didn't even know how many people were gonna show up for this. And a few months later, I come to the room and there's about 18 people there and and I was, I was happily surprised. Now, who showed up of those 18 people were some of the skinniest people on earth anorexic, some of the largest, most obese people that I had ever seen. There was only one man, and he had a history of bulimia. There was a model, professional model with classic Hollywood good looks. I had age groups in there from 18 years old to about 66 years old. Once a week for about seven months. We all just sat in the room and I basically learned on the job. And I want to say we learned a lot about each other. We discovered the humanity that we all shared. The girls who were the skinniest and the girls who were the biggest. At some point, they found each other. They started loving on each other. At some point they saw each other and they found common ground. Now, this propelled me into a state of awe because there's such a depth, there's such a connection between all of us, no matter who we are, no matter what we look like, no matter what we're eating, no matter what the eating challenge is. So it moved me how as we all began to understand ourselves more in the mind and the heart and the soul of the eater, all of a sudden people began to have noticeable changes and noticeable shifts without forcing or pushing or shoving. Some people lost weight, some people gained weight, some people dropped so much of their struggle, others simply deepened into themselves. Some became more aware, but we all became more compassionate and a lot more alive and a lot more clear and a lot more conscious. And we moved further along on the journey. I learned that our core, as human beings at our core, we share the same humanity no matter what we eat, no matter what kind of body we have. So this led me further into studying the mind body science of things. Because I noticed at some point that no matter how much psychology I knew, there was another dimension that seemed to be missing. And I found it when I began a personal and in-depth study of yoga and meditation. Something odd happened for me personally. When I started doing yoga and started meditating, I began to relax. I was breathing, I think I was breathing for the first time, truly. I started doing some simple yogic techniques going within calm my system, different types of breathing practices. And what's fascinating is that my digestion started changing. I didn't even know my digestion wasn't so good all of a sudden. It was powerful. Um, didn't even know it needed to change. My metabolism shifted. My percent body fat changed symptoms that I had that I thought were normal fatigue, moodiness. All this stuff began to change. And all of a sudden I realized, wow, I could be eating the healthiest food in the universe, which I was, and or I thought I was. But if I wasn't in the optimal state of digestion and assimilation and metabolism, didn't even matter what I was eating. I saw that there's a connection between nutrition and mind-body science. So my friends that led me further into those studies. And I eventually originated the field that I call MINDBODY Nutrition to bring this awareness, this important dimension of health and life into the world. And of course, this eventually led me even further into exploring the connection between health, nutrition, emotional challenges with food, and even the connection between food and spirituality. It's all connected. My whole professional career, quite frankly, has been driven by some very powerful questions. How do we keep pushing the envelope? How do we keep going deeper and deeper into who we are? Why are we here? Why do I have these symptoms? Why do I have these challenges around food and body? Why is there pain and suffering? And how do I truly address it? How do I truly transform it? What is it for? Because as we know, my friends, obesity is on the rise. Nutrition linked health issues are on the rise. Diseases of all kinds across the board, whatever you can imagine are increasing body image issues are going through the roof. We are in so much suffering around food and body because something's not working. So I've been asking these questions, my friends, how do we do work that really serves others? How do we stop all the nonsense strategies that just don't work? And how do we do something truly meaningful and real and sustainable? That's what's been motivating me, inspiring me personally for a lot of years. That's what we're going to get down to business with in this training. So I have a few biases that you should know about that I just wanna lay out right up front. I was raised in the sciences. I spent a year in medical school before leaving. I so wanted to become a doctor and then teach nutrition. Well, that dream didn't last long. I, I chose to leave school and learn as much as I could about nutrition because I wasn't learning anything back then. Medical schools had no information about holistic nutrition or even normal and therapeutic nutrition. It just wasn't a topic. So I ended up traveling around the country for a number of years. I apprenticed with whomever I could find who was doing something different and interesting in the field of clinical nutrition. I went to fasting clinics. I found a raw food clinic back in the early eighties. I was just so hungry for knowledge. And at the same time, that eventually led me to working as a consultant in the health food industry and in the supplement industry. So in the course of my career, just so you know, I've worked for some pretty big companies, Johnson and Johnson, the Disney Corporation. I've done media consulting in the health field, in the nutrition field. I present to just about every kind of audience you can imagine. I cast for myself a pretty wide net in large part. So I could learn as much as I possibly could about what's going on in the fields of eating, psychology and nutrition. And how can I learn to communicate with just about anyone because we all eat. So that's a little bit about my background. I'm passionate about this work. I'm glad you are passionate about this work. And you shall see. You're going to get to take everything you learn in this training and you're gonna make it your own. You're going to put your unique spin on this work. That's what this is about. So I wanna suggest to you, my friends, that you are learning a cutting edge field, a leading edge, fresh new body of work. So I've got some really high hopes for every one of us in this training. That means you. My hope is that you change the world. I mean that my hope is that you are so transformed and moved by this body of work that you're about to learn, that you take that transformation and you help spark the same in others. That's what it's all about. The power of one person to make an impact is really bigger than most of us could even know or imagined. I've learned that personally. I've proved it in my own life. So my friends, this is our first conversation together in this training. I want to lay a foundation for you of the concepts and the information on camera here right now. So we can connect a little bit and talk briefly about the training and some of the pieces that are gonna help you really ease into this in a way that works for you. So this training is about going into new territory together. And new territory, you know, is where discoveries are made. That's where innovation happens. Now check this out. The word innovation. You know, years ago, starting in the 1970s, big companies began doing marketing research, the big fortune 500 companies. And they did research around products, around selling to people. And they wanted to know, how do we market better? How do we understand ourselves? There was some fascinating information that essentially demonstrated for all the big corporations for the Fortune 500 companies when they looked at innovation, 'cause innovation they thought was key. They learned that innovation tended to come from outside the company. Meaning when there was innovation in electronics innovation, in business, innovation in how you create a new product, it mostly came from an outside consultant, from somewhere else, from somebody else, from another country. The reason I bring that up is you will find the same thing tends to happen, believe it or not, in the field of medicine, in the field of nutrition, and in the field of psychology, that so many of the juicy new ideas, the challenging ideas that move everything forward, tends to come from some of the radicals on the fringe, the hippies, the characters, the renegade practitioners or scientists, the people who dare to go out to the edge. So if you study the field of nutrition and you really think about it, where Inno, where does innovation come from? You know, you might hear names like Mic Khi or Francis Mo Lappe, or Dr. Atkins or Dean Ornish or whoever. Now, these experts essentially were coming from the outside. They didn't necessarily come from the hallowed halls of mainstream academia. So many of the bestselling books in nutrition that have had an impact comes from outsiders. You know, I'm talking about all the great information about a vegan diet, about a vegetarian diet, about a raw food diet, about a paleo or an ancestral diet. They've all come from quote unquote the French. Now, in a sense, you and I, we are those outliers. We are the people who are at the edge, but we're also on the inside. We're changing things from the outside in and the inside out at the same time. So we're gonna learn a new language in this training. We're going to learn a new set of maps, tools, skills about how to look at people, how to look at your clients, your students, your friends, your loved ones, yourself, how to look at people and begin to understand their nutritional issues, their food issues from a whole different place. So once again, my friends, my promise is that you're gonna come out of this training with a toolkit. You're gonna come out with skills that will give you more confidence. Very important. And again, I want to assert that this training you're in is really an evolutionary step forward in nutrition and mind body nutrition and eating psychology in healing. And it's at the leading edge in many ways of culture change. 'cause that's what we're here to do. We're here to change the conversation around food. And that's a big assertion and it's a necessary statement I think to make. Because as a field nutrition and eating psychology, let's own that. We've stagnated a little bit. In fact, maybe we've stagnated a lot. There's a place where science hasn't given us what we need, where psychology hasn't given us what we need in terms of our challenges with weight, with body image, with loving your body, with having a happy, nourishing relationship with food, with eating, how to deal with overeating, binge eating, emotional eating, and a host of medical and nutrition linked conditions that so many of us deal with. So here, all these challenges are on the rise, and we gotta get creative. We gotta be a little more bold. We've gotta be courageous. We gotta be courageous enough to step outside the box we've been given and just generate a whole new vision. That's what we're doing together. So let me make some promises to you that I feel pretty confident about. These are promises about what you're going to come away with from this training. You will have a relaxed confidence around coaching, around working with a client. It doesn't mean when you finish this training, you're gonna be a world class coach or counselor. I'm gonna tell you straight up, my friends, I'm gonna be honest with you. Um, I don't care what kind of promises other trainings make. Even if you're in medical school and you become a doctor, you don't really learn how to be a great practitioner until you start to see your patients and clients. You don't become a great counselor, coach, healer, psychologist, social worker, dietician, whatever it is, until you're actually seeing clients and you are practicing, you're getting some practice and getting some time out there in the real world. And we're laying a foundation. And when you have a foundation of knowledge, of insight, of information, tools, skills, maps, overlays, things to listen for, that's what you're gonna get in this training. This will give you the confidence to get out there and be in the unknown and be in the uncertainty that has us say, okay, here I am, I'm in the wilderness, but I have some navigation skills. I've got my compass, I've got my GPS, I got my telescope, my binoculars, and all my gear. Whatever we need to navigate, whatever we need to move the right equipment, the right clothes, you're gonna have that when it comes to working with the most commonly seen eating challenges. So here's another promise I want to make. You are going to come away with a unique foundation of knowledge and information you're going to experience, most likely some personal acceleration. Chances are you're not going to be able to come away from this training without you yourself being impacted in a positive way. And my friends, that is a big part of the beauty of the helping and healing professions. So many of us go into this work because we have a personal interest in it because it moves us, because we have gone into or gone through or are going through our own health issues, our own challenges. And that's beautiful. It's a wonderful thing and it's something that actually qualifies you and me, believe it or not, to do this work. If this work is important to you personally, if it's in, if it's in your bones, if it's in your organs, if it's in your heart, if it's in your soul, it qualifies you to help and serve others again, because you've either gone down this road or you're going down this road and you're looking to improve yourself as we speak, to elevate yourself, to transform yourself to better yourself. So good for you. If you are an unfinished product, good for you. If you have challenges with food, good for you. Really. If you have body image challenges, a weight challenge and eating issue, if you've wanted to be more perfect, you're wanting the perfect diet, the perfect body you want to heal whatever medical or health condition or symptom that you have, what I'm saying is great, you have the most important qualification to do this work because you're on the journey yourself. And by the way, you don't need to be perfect. You only need to be one step ahead of another person to truly serve them, to truly help them. So we've gotta get over the perfection thing, and we're gonna talk about that more, my friends. We're all in this together. We're all learning. None of us are perfect. You're gonna come away with what I believe is a lot more wisdom. By the way, here's the challenge when it comes to the nutrition field. Here's what I mean when I say more wisdom. We the collective, we are exposed to a ton of nutrition information. Get on your computer right now, search the internet you can spend from now until forever looking at reading about and debating about nutrition information there. It's, it's, there's so much pound for pound, line for line, sentence for sentence. It's, it's, it's infinite. So we're not lacking in nutrition knowledge at this stage of our evolution. What we tend to lack in is wisdom, IE, how to use that knowledge, which knowledge to use, how to apply it, how to apply it in an effective way and for whom at what time. So yes, there is a subset of people who need more nutrition information and need more facts. There is a certain subset of people who need nutrition knowledge, meaning, oh yes, eat your greens, eat your vegetables, eat your healthy va, eat your healthy protein and your quality food. Here's the right supplements, here's what you should do, here's what you shouldn't do. And there it is. So yeah, there's a lot of people who need that. And there's a large number of people who need something additional and very different from that. And this is the subset of people and is big that I'm talking about here. Not the people who exclusively need straight up nutrition knowledge. If you wanna serve that population, good for you. It's beautiful. But I wanna say this, so many counselors, nutritionists, healers, dieticians that I've mentored over the years, they've seen that nutrition information, nutrition knowledge and facts only go so far because we have to once again understand the mind and the heart and the soul of the eater in order to communicate to others and truly serve them and help them. So of course I'm saying for my scientific bias, facts and scientific information, it's important, but it's how you deliver those facts and information. It's how you place them in a context. What is your client ready for? What are they ready to heal? What would they find useful right now? Do they need something else when it comes to their eating challenge, their binge eating, their emotional eating and so forth? You know, for so many of my clients, I need to help them defect themselves to get rid of all the nonsense in their heads and relax a little more into their relationship with food to let go of some of their rules. Now, some clients, I need to get on a more structured diet to give them more facts, help them tighten up their nutritional game. Everybody is different. The more you and I can see the uniqueness of each person, each student, everyone that you know every client, the better you can serve them is kind of simple, but we don't always practice it. So more wisdom in the nutrition realm and the eating psychology realm, that's what we're going for. And it's a valuable skill. So what I'm saying is you're going to find a heck of a lot of wisdom in this training and you're going to find it growing in you. 'cause that's what helps so many people move forward.
Now, my friends, I'd love to share with you some intentions that I have for us, for you in this training. First and foremost, numeral uno intention. Everybody learns, we're all going to learn. I'm committed to you learning and coming out of this training with a lot of information, you're gonna get a lot of facts. You're gonna see as this training starts from this moment forward, uh, you're not gonna be lacking for information and insights and distinctions. So even though I'm just saying that we have too much information, yeah, you're gonna get more. Uh, it's going to be timed, I believe very well. In fact, we're going to overdeliver for you in that department and you'll be able to pick and choose what works best for you, what lands for you. Yet another intention that I have, uh, and if it's your intention that's great, is that we all grow professionally. That we all grow in our skillset as a helper, a coach, a teacher, a practitioner, whatever it is that you're doing out there, a consultant that we all grow professionally and part of growing professionally is expanding upon the gifts that you have to offer, that are inborn in you. You know, there are so many marketing programs out there on the internet telling you, okay, here's how you're gonna be rich, here's how you're gonna be famous. And it's all about marketing this way, marketing that way. And that's okay. Um, yes, it's important to know how to market and marketing is gonna help you grow professionally. And indeed you're gonna learn some of our best tricks when it comes to that realm. But unless you and I have something of substance to offer, unless you have something real, a real gift, the best marketing in the universe isn't really gonna get you anywhere. Or it'll work for a small number of people who are marketing, marketing, marketing, but they really don't have something to offer of true value that's commensurate with the price that's being charged or the great amount of marketing that they did to convince you to buy their products and to buy their services. So all I'm saying is that growing professionally happens from a deeper place. It happens from the place where you get in contact with, oh, I have something to share, I've got something to give. I've got something of value, I've got something new for people. I've learned about weight loss on a deeper level. I've learned how to work with body image in a powerful way. I've learned about overeating and binge eating and emotional eating and all the nutritional and psychological factors that tie in. I've learned about digestion and immunity and fatigue. I've got healing strategies and insights and distinctions to bring to the table that I feel have true value so that my friends is marketing from the inside out. That's how you create true success. Now, yet another intention I have is that everybody in this training gets their money's worth and more. So I know you're paying good money and our intention is to overdeliver to give you far more than your money's worth. I firmly believe one of the secrets to the universe, um, is that we gotta be willing to give. We've got to be willing to let energy flow, let money flow you. You know, this money's energy, money goes into circulation. So I want to give you the best value that I have to offer. So my hope is that you'll receive it. You'll take everything that you're, that you're learning, you'll feel the value from it, and create value for yourself. Let it move through your own system so everybody gets their money's worth, your clients get their money's worth, you get your money's worth. Yet another intention that I have, and it's going to be a little challenging because I would love to sit down with each and every one of you personally. My intention is that everybody grows, heals and transforms and shows up. If you're doing this training in the comfort of your home or your office, wherever you are, your living room or you're sitting watching on some little gizmo, um, it can be easy to stay in your own little cocoon and in a way not show up as best you can. That's very possible. So when I say showing up, showing up means whatever that means for you. It means bringing your best. Showing up means that you bring yourself to the table, you bring your openness, you bring all the possibilities of who you can be. You bring your discomfort around whatever's happening in your life, around whatever material is inspiring you or invokes you or what it provokes in you. So I'm asking you to show up in the best way you can as a student and as a learner and as a fellow professional. Now, as much as I'm in this role right now as your mentor, your guide, your teacher, there's a way in which we're all equals. We're all equals as souls on planet earth. So once in a while, you get to be in the power seat, or I get to be in the power seat. You get to be the teacher, you get to be the counselor, you get to be the parent or the adult, whatever it is. Sometimes we get to be the kids, the students. So we're always changing roles. So no matter what role you are in, I'm saying just show up, show up with your best. Because when you show up with your best effort, and, and you know this, I'm just reminding you, when you give your best effort, that's once again your inner marketing, that's your inner gold, your inner brilliance. You're setting an intention right now for how your work, how your career is going to unfold. That's gonna be the magnet that helps you attract the kind of clients and students and business that you want. If indeed you want to use this in a good professional way. So I have some requests of you in this training. My first request is I would love for you to trust the flow that's going to unfold here. One of the things I learned really early on as a student, and it might have been even in grade school, quite frankly, and I don't know who taught me this, maybe it was ingrained from my parents or my family. I respected my teachers, but, but even more so, I respected the learning journey, the learning process, uh, you know, because sometimes teachers aren't always perfect. I always trusted in the learning journey because it was so magical for me, and in part because I had to, I was learning, I was growing. So the process worked. I learned how to read, I learned how to do math like all of us. I learned how to do so many things because I was trusting the flow, trusting the process. It's so much bigger than any one person. So there's a lot of material in this training, and we're going to go in some different directions. We're going to come at things from different angles, and all I'm asking is that you trust a little, and it's not just trusting the flow that's presented to you in this training. Really what I'm saying is trust the flow of your own, your own life. You've chosen this, you've put down your money, you've staked your claim. Let's just have some faith and trust that it's going to work. I've certainly got a lot of trust in it. I've been doing this training for a long time and it delivers. So there's likely going to be times in this training that it won't be so easy for you. Where it gets a little challenging, there's going to be questions that will come up for you. Please, my friends, relax into those questions. Oh my god, what do I do? How do I deal with this client? How do I deal with that client? Wait a second, I need to know how to do this. I need to fix this. I need to know everything. Just relax. This is, you know, a journey. It's an eight month journey. Trust that we're going to learn what we need to learn at the right time, because there's a lot to learn here. Now, another way of saying that, another request I have of you is to please my friends, hang in there with uncertainty. I want to invoke one of my professors, the late Gordon Tappen, when I was at Sonoma State University in California, he taught me about uncertainty. Basically, he said, we don't have to know everything all at once. He would say, what about uncertainty? Every time you thought you knew something, if you're like me, you probably get a little antsy. When you don't know something, you know, how much money am I gonna make? Where am I gonna live? What's my life gonna be like? Will I find love? Am I gonna have the right clients? Am I gonna learn how to work with people? When am I gonna lose the weight? When am I gonna get better? There's a lot of uncertainties in life. When am I gonna die? That's a big uncertainty. Am I gonna get sick? That's a big uncertainty. Uh, what am I supposed to eat? For a lot of people, that's a big uncertainty. All your clients come in with that uncertainty. Let's relax into the uncertainty together because answers eventually come, or maybe not, but even if they don't, it's powerful to hold the big juicy questions. So this is what I've learned in over three decades as a helping professional and as well in my own personal life. When the answers are not there, just make the questions more powerful when the answers are not there right away. When we don't know, just take a deep breath and relax into the uncertainty and just know and remember, this is how life works. And the answers come eventually. Now, here's another request that I have of you. I would love for you to consider being in the chrysalis or being in the cocoon. Two words that mean the same thing, cocoon, meaning this, one of my great memories in life, my uncle Ronnie, when I was about seven years old, he comes over to my house, he's holding a jar, and inside the jar was a bunch of leaves and there's a cocoon, a chrysalis. Now, there was also a couple of caterpillars in the bottom of this big jar, and my uncle says to me, you've seen a caterpillar before, right? He says, now a caterpillar just like these ones at the bottom of the jar, a caterpillar spun this cocoon that's hanging right there that you could see in this jar as well. Now, inside that cocoon, you can't see it right now, there's a caterpillar, but soon that cocoon is going to open up and a butterfly is going to come out. No more caterpillar. Now, as my uncle's explaining this to me, that a caterpillar is gonna turn into a butterfly, honestly, I'm thinking to myself, this guy is nuts. Caterpillar's a slimy worm, and a butterfly is his beautiful creature that flies around. Is this ain't gonna happen? But on the other hand, I know my uncle is a really smart guy and he's a scientist, and I'm just a little kid. So there's a darn good chance he's right. So anyway, my uncle leaves and I've got this jar and I put it in my basement. And like any smart kin, I'm a little curious. I wanna see what's inside that cocoon. So I take a knife and I cut the cocoon open, and I'm looking for this beautiful butterfly right now, much to my dismay inside the cocoon, it was just a bunch of mush. And I mean mush. So I get on the phone, I'm really upset. I call my uncle and I say, uncle Ronnie, you know, I'm really upset. There's no butterfly in here. There's not even a caterpillar in there. It's just a bunch of mush. And I was kind of crying because it seemed like he lied to me. But he explained to me, well, listen, first of all, you killed the thing I thought, really? And then he said, next, when a caterpillar is turning into a butterfly, there's a stage where it looks a little mushy. So my friends, let's fast forward a little bit. When you and I are in that cocoon, we can get a little mushy when we are in our caterpillar stage and it's time to learn something, and we spin our cocoon and we're ready to transform when we're inside that cocoon, we're not quite a caterpillar, but we're not quite a butterfly. There's an amorphous, mushy stage, and sometimes you and I, that's what it looks like, we're mush. But out of that chaos, out of that crazy change, we become a whole new beautiful creature. And that's why I'm asking you to be in this cocoon of your own life, because there's times with your client that that's where they are going to be. There's just gonna be mush happening. And the mush stage is okay, because if you and I could see into the distance our clients, our friends, our family, our students, our loved ones, they're in their cocoon and things are rearranging. Don't be fooled that this means the end of things when your client is in chaos or upset. Because what's really happening is nature and life and the wisdom of genetics and the wisdom of the universe, the wisdom of evolution is creating a beautiful dynamic creature. We are constantly transforming. We are learning how to be stewards, caretakers of our own cocoon, and the cocoon that our clients are in. And, and that's what life does to us and infuses us. It mushes us, and then we transform, and then we pop out and we're a butterfly. That's what you do. That's what I do. That's what our client does. So my friends, can you hang with that? I'm really asking you to stay with that process as it comes up for you in this training in your own life, because that's what prepares us to help others. Now here's another request I have of you, my friends. There will be opportunities in the online forums for you to connect with other students. Do that as best you can. See if you can create a learning community, see if you can be an inspiring part of that learning community. Um, some of us are good at that, some of us aren't. You know, sometimes we can feel a little bit isolated. We can get isolated in, in our profession and our lives. So I'm asking you to really take the time to build connection with some of your fellow students. You know, many students in this training form lifelong connections and friendships, personal and professional ones. It's a very rewarding part of this educational experience. At the same time, I have another request, and that is to honor all of the voices that you tend to hear. What does that mean when I say honor the voices? First and foremost is that there's gonna be a lot of voices, even in your own head. Those voices might say, I love this. Wow, I, I I, I don't like this part of the training, but wow, I like that part of the training. Or, wow, I really wanna learn more about this, or My goodness, I totally disagree with that, or I agree with this. So we always got a lot of people in our head and they're constantly talking and they're useful. We got a crowd up there, and they're real. And they all need space, and they all need a voice, and they all need to be honored. By the way, this is how we work with clients as well. We notice all the voices in their head and we listen. Now, just because you disagree with one thing that you hear in this training doesn't mean you have to disagree with everything. Sometimes I'm gonna say things that you simply don't jive with. Throw it out. If that happens, disregard it. Don't get caught up with it. Don't waste your time. Sometimes I'm gonna say things that really work well for you, keep it, hang onto it, hold on, use it. Uh, there'll be things that you're not so sure about. So keep it, test it, experiment with it, try it out. I'm just telling you about life. You know, these things I'm just reminding us. So when I say honor all the voices, I also mean as well that you're gonna hear so many different viewpoints, whether it's from another teacher or another expert from a book you read from another professional that you talk to who has just a different experience or a different approach. My friends, there's always a nugget of wisdom to pull from what anyone has to say, quite frankly, from any dissenting voice. I believe part of what being a successful professional in this field is about is us learning to honor all the different voices and seeing that there's, there's really no competition because chances are, even if someone has a radically different idea than you, there's an important piece that they might be contributing to your understanding. It might be tiny, but a little piece that has some truth, has some wisdom, has some usefulness. If not for you, then maybe for your client or for someone in your life. So there are diets that I personally might not follow, but I'll offer them to my clients. If I think, okay, this would be good for you to eat a vegan diet, or might be good for you to go on a fast or good for you to go on a raw food diet or this diet, it doesn't matter to me.
It could be good for you to just cut loose and eat whatever you want. It could be good for you to have a very strict and well controlled diet. So I'm looking at each client as an individual person. It's learning to work with people where they are at. Now, my friends, another request for you is to make the material yours, meaning as you hear the material that you're learning, I have no interest in you taking this and being me and doing it exactly how I do it and saying it how I say it. You know, I counsel and coach and teach in a way that I do, and I'm happy for you to model after me and take what you need. But I want you to counsel and coach and teach the way you do. That might mean that you're taking little pieces from here and there, and at the end of the day you might be using the material and just putting your unique spin on it. You can take something and add a different angle to it. You can combine what you are learning here in this training with, with cooking, with moving therapy, with massage, with, uh, knowledge of a specific religious or spiritual tradition. You can combine it with your enthusiasm for a certain kind of diet, for working with a certain age group. All of it, it's fine. And to me, that's great. If you see connections with things that you've learned that I don't know about good for you, be open to your own unique expression in this work, your own unique fusion of it, okay? Empower yourself. Trust yourself in in that way. Notice what wants to come out of you. Notice what wants to emerge. It's really a lot of fun when you do that because you are finding your unique voice. Now, here is a last request that I want to mention, and that is to see all of your clients as a reflection of you. You're going to be dealing with all different kinds of interesting characters. Now, you personally might have the perfect weight or the perfect health, and your client might come in and they're not healthy and they have tons of weight to lose. Maybe they say, I have no willpower. Maybe they have this issue or that problem. And we can often tend to separate ourselves. I'm gonna fix you. I'm the person that knows everything. And that's what a lot of coaches and practitioners do. And I would love for you to consider dropping that. I want you to drop that and see everybody as containing a part of you as expressing some part of you. Meaning I'm gonna operate on the assumption that every client that shows up in your practice, in your office, every, every person that you encounter is reflecting something important back to you. When we can see ourselves in another, when we can see another in ourselves, it joins us together. It helps us serve others better. It actually makes you a more effective practitioner because there will be some clients that push your buttons. And if your client pushes your buttons, believe it or not, that's about you. It's not about them. When a client pushes my buttons, I've got work to do on self. So my job is to see myself in the client that's pushing my buttons. They irritate me or they anger me and I feel a little bit turned off by them. That's something I need to look at in me. So if you judge somebody because of their weight, if you judge somebody because of their eating habits, their diet, if you judge somebody because of their level of consciousness, because you're thinking, you know, oh my God, you haven't taken care of yourself, look what you've done to yourself. We always have to look in the mirror and step out of our small world. We need to grow. We need to take a higher road. You and I, all of us, we have a different journey. We all have a different path. So our job is to respect that in our clients. Chances are my friends, when we judge someone else, we probably have that same quality somewhere inside us to some small degree. So as I begin to have compassion and unconditional acceptance for the person across from me, my work with them becomes far more effective and I grow as a person. Next, I wanna share with you some of my personal assumptions that I have about you, and you tell me if I'm right or wrong about these because it's good to get clear and honest from the teacher standpoint about assumptions that I might have about my students. But they're good assumptions. Some of the assumptions I have about you are that you come in with a special gift, whatever that might be. You personally might know what your gifts are, or you might not know what your gifts are. But I believe that we all come to earth into this life with gifts to give whether those gifts are professional, personal, both a swirl of all of them. And there's a chance that you don't even know what all of those gifts are. But my assumption is that you've got a gift to give that is unique to you and that the world needs. There are certain clients that are built just for me. There are certain clients that are built just for you, and I personally could not help those clients that are built for you because of who I am and because of how I express myself and because of who you are and how you uniquely express you. So there's a chemistry between you and your client. You have a unique style, you have a way where you can relax certain people, speak to them, communicate with them. You have a way that you relate with certain people, how you deliver information, how you connect, what your background is, how you look, that will help certain people just relax and grow and transform. So what I'm saying, my friend is each one of us has a special gift. I am making that assumption about you and I mean it. You got a special something. And part of this training is all about you owning it. Now, another assumption that I make is that each one of us, each one of you, has a very specific and unique journey. Meaning a unique journey in life. In the big picture, we have a journey personally, we have a journey professionally, we each have a specific journey in terms of our relationship with food, with body, with health. To me, why that's important is that collectively, we tend to get caught up in the belief that, wow, I wish I didn't have this body. I wish I wouldn't have this medical condition, or gosh, I was born with the wrong body. I'm in the wrong life. I'm born into the wrong family. Who are these people? Uh, this body, this is not the real me. You know, what's going on here? How did I end up like this? I should have been richer, thinner, taller, shorter, whatever. And what ends up happening is we don't bless our own journey. And so much of this work with your client is learning how to help them embrace their own journey, how to bless their own life story, how to look at everything they've gone through, not as something bad, not as something unfortunate. And yes, yes, yes, yes, you've had your challenges. Our clients have our, have their challenges. Of course, we have pain, of course, we have suffering. We've each had our own share of that, and very few escape, pain and challenge and hurt and betrayal and wounding in this world. So chances are, if you're a human being alive on planet earth, you're going through that or have gone through that, or will go through that. So how do we make it right? How do we create compassion around it? How do we make it okay? How do we really get and know and believe that your journey, each person's journey is the right one for you, for them. My journey's, right? For me, your client's journey is right for them. And that's what I want for you. That's what I want for you to do in terms of helping your client to help them own and acknowledge that their journey is a good one. Because when they do, you have helped them step onto a path where they can finally heal, unfold, and transform in a good way. You know, I wanna give you a hint here in terms of the client realm, in terms of your effectiveness as a counselor, as a coach, as a practitioner. So many people are in so much pain and suffering because they're simply looking at their circumstance, their life story, their health condition, their challenge with food. And they're saying, wrong, bad, no good, shouldn't be like this. Yuck. I hate this. And they're cursing it. And that's the opposite of a blessing. That's the opposite of love. It's the opposite is self-acceptance. You know, think back for a moment to the fairytales that you've learned, all the witches and warlocks and the supernatural stories, especially the tales of old. And there's always people, there's always characters, the sorcerers, and they're always placing curses on people and turning them into creatures or frogs. And then there's the good guys and the good gals who come in and they do their magic and their magic wand and their blessing. And these are all powers that live inside of us to bless or to curse, to diminish or to uplift. And in a lot of ways, you can boil down what we do in eating psychology down to blessings and cursings down to, am I diminishing myself or am I uplifting myself? Am I punishing myself or am I nourishing myself? Can I look at my life? Can I look at my client's life and honor that journey? So my assumption for you is that you have a specific, special, beautiful journey that's a hundred percent right for you, despite the difficulties, despite the challenges, despite the hurts, despite the pain, despite the suffering. Same with your client.
Okay, my friends, my next assumption about you and about us is that we each teach what we need to learn. So if you're in this field, you're teaching it, you're counseling coaching because on some level you need to learn it for you personally. That works for me. That's why I'm in this. And again, I'm saying, beautiful. This qualifies you. It qualifies me. It qualifies us because a powerful teacher is teaching something that they know inside their guts that is speaking to them personally. This is pretty important to me. I, I love this work and it teaches me all the time. And as I learn it for me, I can share it with others. And again, I think this is simply how life works. So yet another assumption I'm going to make about you is that you're comfortable for the most part, being at the edge, being at the leading edge. Now, as much as I know that you want basic information, and we all need that, as much as you want to know how to operate in the usual professional world, in the scientific realm, the healing realm, the psychological world, the nutrition space, you're also a bit comfortable stepping out to the leading edge where things might get a little bit unknown and uncomfortable. My assumption is you're comfortable peeking behind the curtain and seeing what else is there to know. Because again, innovation, the new insights, the new paradigms, are only revealed to us when we're willing to step out to the edge of the cliff and take a little risk and look and see what's over the edge, what's in the wilderness that we haven't discovered. It takes a whole different approach. It takes a whole different mindset. There are so many of us who know that there's a better way to go about the business of nutrition and eating psychology and helping people. We know that on a deeper level, we see it, we feel it. And I'm assuming that you are comfortable with this way of being and that you're going to get more and more comfortable with it. I'm also assuming that you believe in a holistic approach, that you believe in something more. Now, the reality of it is that so many of us have been brought up in the scientific realm where if you don't prove something scientifically, then it's not true. Um, you know, it was a beautiful line from the philosopher Jose Ortega iga, and he said, life cannot wait for the sciences to catch up and prove itself. Life is fired at us. Point blank meaning life is urgent. It's now, it's here, it's right in this moment. And we have to respond to what we know. We respond to what we're given. There are certain things that science is going to validate and prove for you and me. And there are certain things that science is not going to validate and prove. There are certain things that there's scientific disagreement about. So you don't wait 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years for science to catch up and prove everything that, or some things that you might know inside yourself or that you have seen or you have observed, or you feel or your intuition tells you is true. The way science tends to work is that it wants to take a huge population of people, do an experiment where you can try to flatten out all the variables, make everybody one person, and then we can all say that all human beings need this amount of vitamin D or we all need to eat this specific kind of diet or this perfect diet. Yes, we have similarities, my friends, and we're different. Both are true. There's a paradox there. We have similarities and we're different. And what that means is every person is unique, every soul is unique. You know, it took about until 30, 35 years ago for popular science to agree that mind body science is actually true. It works. And that what happens in the realm of mind indeed influences our physiology. So science finally got on board with that in the 1980s. And it was a revelation when they started seeing that, you know, relaxation techniques, uh, meditation, yoga, could actually impact your immune system, your digestion, your healing process, your chance of surviving longer with a heart disease or cancer. This, this was a mind blowing experience for scientists. It was headline news. Yet, by the way, ancient traditions, other cultures have known about this simple concept for literally thousands of years. So all I'm saying is, again, don't wait for science to prove everything to you. This is not an anti-scientific statement. It's actually pro science because science comes from the mind of humans. And it's growing, it's changing, it's evolving. It takes interesting twists and turns, sometimes not so good ones. If you need science to prove everything to you, then be careful because half the scientific research says that alcohol is bad for you. And half the scientific research says alcohol is good for you. And it's all true. Same with meat, same with a vegetarian diet, a vegan diet. There's conflicting science about everything. So you could speak about so many of the situations where, okay, alcohol is not so good. It kills your brain cells. It wreaks havoc on society. It harms adolescence and impacts your unborn child. It's true. And then there are situations where it does work for people, it does work for the body. It can impact health in a very positive way. It can positively impact heart disease. Now the point is that it's not black and white. My friends and science tends to wanna make things black and white. So yeah, this is good, this is bad. Well, is meat good or is meat bad? Well, it really depends on how you use it. There's nuances to everything. So you and I have to be able to live with scientific uncertainty because that's what science is about.
So again, my friends, my assumption is that you're a little comfortable with uncertainty. You're comfortable with a holistic approach. You're comfortable knowing that there's something more. And we don't have to wait for proof all the time. We can start to prove it to ourselves, to prove things in our own body, prove it in the people that you know, prove it in your own observation with your own eyes. Indeed, that's how science works. You start with a hypothesis and you go out there and you prove it or you disprove it. So that's what we're doing together. Next, my friends, I'd love to discuss with you some agreements that I think are useful for you and for us in this training. An agreement that I'm going to ask you to make with me is to maintain the confidentiality of the training material. So you, my friends are on the honor system here. You've paid for the training and all the materials that you have. That's the value of the training. So I'm gonna ask you to keep that to yourself. So if you have a friend who's interested in it, yes, talk about it, share your enthusiasm, talk about what you're learning. But if they want the actual material, have them reach out to us and we'll talk to them about it and look to enroll them in the training if indeed it is actually the right thing for them. So what I'm saying is the material is the value of the training. So please help us maintain the integrity of our business, uh, and how we do this exchange with the world. To me, I'm doing the best service that I can of trying to do good work in the world, important work in the world. And I think we live in a time when too many financial institutions have kind of failed us. When banks don't work for us anymore, governments aren't exactly doing their job. So each one of us needs to step up in terms of our Own integrity around money, around truth, around business arrangements, around how we do life together, particularly in the realm of finances and in the realm of commerce. So I'm hoping you'll make that agreement with me and honor the confidentiality agreement that you have already indeed signed. Next my friends, another agreement that I ask you to make is to take responsibility for your experience in this training. Meaning make this training work for you. Don't complain, don't whine. If you have a concern, if something isn't working for you, contact us and we will address it. Now, please don't reach out to us in the online forums because those are for educational purposes. If you need to talk about you, your experience in this training, what's happening, what's not working, email us directly first, and we'll handle it that way. No training of any kind in this universe is gonna be perfect. Um, there may be some things about it that you don't like. Once again, take responsibility, breathe it in, move through it, reach out to us. What I've learned as a professional and as a student, is that when I'm going to sit in a classroom, I'm going to be in a learning environment. And I don't think I've ever been in a learning environment where everything just work like magic. So I'm asking you to extract the best value that you can and do that with this training. There's so much value to take out. Yes, I want feedback from you. Yes, I want to hear how to make this a better experience for you. So once again, if you have insights, if you have improvements to offer, if you have feedback, a concern, email us and we'll figure out a solution. So once again, my friends, welcome, welcome, welcome. Thanks for being on this journey with me. Let's make the best of it. Let's do something good that let's do something great. Let's transform our own lives, and in the process we're gonna learn how to make the world a better place. Now this is the end of our first opening video. I've got two more coming for you with me on camera where we get to lay a foundation for the core concepts of this training. I'll see you real soon. On the other side.

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Greetings. Once again, my friends, Mark David here, and here we are in our second introductory video. So I would like to share with you some of my assumptions that I make in the back of my mind about food, nutrition, body, and health. And really in doing that, I wanna lay a foundation for what seems to be going on out there in the world, in our culture, perhaps in different countries when it comes to the collective conversation about food and nutrition and body and health. And to me, this larger conversation, as you've heard me mention, has become a little bit confused, has become a little bit distorted. It can get a little chaotic or toxic. The conversation around food, body, health, weight, it needs to be updated, it needs some wisdom, it needs some light. So that's what we're doing in this training. You know, we have insurance companies battling about health. We have government agencies doing battle. We have different food industries and companies creating some really bizarre kinds of foods that don't quite work for the human body. And we have a lot of different experts saying all kinds of different things about what we should and shouldn't be eating. And this is the way to do nutrition. This is the way to deal with your health. This is how you address all these different issues. And it's endless. And it's a battleground, and it's the wild west. It's a little crazy out there. So I'm just saying that to acknowledge that for a moment, we're acknowledging that it's a little wild. So many people, by the way, are wondering, well then, what's the right answer? What's true? So let's you and I just relax into the chaos like we mentioned, because it is indeed chaotic. What's happening is the field of health and nutrition is oftentimes a battleground for your beliefs. For our beliefs. There are a lot of experts battling for our minds. They want us to believe this, buy this book, buy this system, buy this supplement, eat this food. And there's oftentimes some financial interest behind the scenes as well. What happens is we get accustomed to believing that all the good information about health and nutrition that's out there is indeed out there in a book in an expert in this organization. And what we have to remember is that there's also information in our own body and our own experience. And that's a lot about what you're gonna learn in this training. So much of what goes on in the health and nutrition universe is that we become a bit disembodied. People don't trust their own inner experience, their own body experience, their own physiology. And we don't trust because we've lost a little bit of contact with the body. We haven't been taught to access body wisdom. And again, that's what so much of this training is about. It's how to invite your client back into body wisdom, how to cheer lead them there, how to coach them back Into what they know or what they can learn for their own self, from their own self. Because that's what heals us in so many ways. So the collective conversation around food, body and nutrition has become a bit of a place of dysfunction that's calling for healing.
Remember, whenever there's chaos, whenever there's dysfunction, the good news is that healing is wanting to happen and healing is possible. The good news is, we're ready for something more. We're ready for transformation. So once again, let's just own that. This is simply what's going on out there with nutrition. It's a little confused. And in a way, the fields of nutrition and health, it's kind of like an outta control teenager, you know what I'm saying? Has a lot of energy, a lot of activity, a lot of possibilities, but there's a lot of hormones flying and things are all over the place. And at the same time, we're trying to land and to ground and to be more adult and clear as a nutrition profession. So it's a young profession. So my intention in this training is to help ground us more in nutrition, in health, in the body, in eating psychology principles, in universal principles. And good science, smart science, good psychology, smart psychology. Smart psychology. It actually works. That feels intuitively correct, that's compassionate. And then when you hear it, you go, oh yes, that resonates for me. Because chances are you've thought it before or thought it, but you haven't quite put it into the words that I am going to be putting it in. You know, you and I sometimes, we are just, we're voices over mouthpieces for each other, for a higher power, for the universe, for a greater intelligence. There's some of what I say that's not going to be new for you, it's just going to be my own words and I'm putting it out there and it's resonating for you. We each become in a certain way, a voice or a mouthpiece for the universe on behalf of our clients, the people that we serve. So what you have to share really, is that you're sharing a message that so many people might be thinking, meaning your clients, your students, your friends, your loved ones. You become a voice for them. And that's a powerful way to be in the world, my friends, and to be in your profession. So nutrition and health have also become a battleground, quite a bit of financial and corporate greed. Let's just own that. I know you know this, but we're just raising our hands. There's a bunch of food companies out there that know the products they're producing aren't so good and they're low quality. There are many, what we call in the industry, commodity food items. Food items that are produced in massively large quantities that are grown in unfortunate conditions. And they're of the poorest quality variety. So I don't need to tell you that the haves of this World are often taking advantage of the have-nots. We the collective, we the corporate, we, we take over the resources of other countries, we create unfair economic practices, and we often change shortchange, the people who grow those products that are mass produced. You know, we're talking third world countries and burdening them with pesticides. In fact, there are pesticides and chemicals in the United States of America that are banned. You can't use them in this country, but we actually create them, we produce them, we export them to other nations, they spray it on their crops, and then they sell the food back to us. That's an interesting world. So what I'm saying is that there's a, there's a shadow side, there's a dark side to the nutrition and food universe. It's just good to acknowledge and own that there's a greed that happens in food technology, in the food industry, and unfortunately in the medical industry. So we have to have a good metabolism for that. It's the world we live in. I spent many years as the editor for a prestigious alternative health peer reviewed medical journal. And we, I was a submissions editor and we received submissions from all over the world, different scientists, institutions. And the bottom line was, I always had a look at who was funding the research, because that tells us, that tells you how the research is or isn't skewed. So this is just what happens in the world. And it's a bit unfortunate, but it's the world we've been born into. And as we understand that there's a dark side to the nutrition conversation, that there's a dark side to the nutrition conversation in the food industry in the scientific world, then we can bring more light. Then we can begin to see how can I take my little candle and just create some more insights, some more wisdom, some more love and compassion and truth. That's what we're here to do. I also wanna say that our collective conversation around food and around body and health and weight is a reflection of our relationship with the earth, with nature. Because when we're removed from the sky and the wind and the earth, and the trees and the water and the animals and the sun and the rainbows, when we get disconnected from all that, when we don't really see our place in the natural world, we lose something very dear and important for our wellbeing. So we humans have evolved out of the earth, out of the world, out of the jungle. We've learned as a civilization how to create, how to farm, how to grow, how to do culture, how to make buildings and create language and science and cars and computers and all kinds of fun little gizmos. Um, we're not embedded in nature anymore. And oftentimes what happens is we get a little too far from it. We forget how we're connected to the natural world. So much of what I see with my clients in terms of what they go through with food and body, uh, and people who suffer with eating challenges, so much of it is connected to this loss of naturalness, this loss of a sense of what's good for me, what works for me, how does my body work? What does my body teaching me? Nature, your own body has a lot to teach you. It's easy to look at a microscope and look down into the cell. It's easy to get into the DNA, it's easy to get into the physics and the atoms and the electrons and the molecules and the biochemistry. And when we do that, it's often easy for us to miss the big picture when we dive down so deep. A lot of what we're doing, my friends, we're going to be seeing the big picture of food and nutrition and health. So yes, we want to understand the molecular dynamics, but we can't truly understand the small, tiny, isolated picture until we see the big picture of things. So I'd like to share with you some statistics just so we're on the same page. Let's talk about some numbers. By the way, I love numbers. I love statistics, especially when they prove what I believe is true, and especially when those statistics are compelling and a little bit trustable. So here's a fascinating statistic that you have to dig for, and I don't know why this is not front page headline news of every newspaper and magazine and nutrition book in the world, but 99 to 98% of all humans who lose weight on a weight loss diet, they gain that weight back within approximately one year and then some. And indeed, when you sum total up all the research on weight gain, all the research on obesity, 99%, and it's been changing over the years, by the way, it used to be 96% and it was hit 99%. 99% of all those people losing weight are gaining it back. So that's what a meta analysis of all the research shows. And my friends, that's a dramatic statistic. You don't hear that because so many of the companies, the organizations who put out the food product, the supplements, the exercise gizmos, the programs, the diets, the weight watchers, they're saying, Hey, we put 30 people on a program and they lost 15 pounds and 27 days, or whatever it is. But they didn't follow up with those people. What happened to them six months later or a year later or two years later, every time you have a follow up study, years down the line, people are gaining it back and commonly people will gain back even more weight than when they lost. So simply put, this is a way of saying simply put what we're doing when it comes to weight loss anyway, ain't working, just doesn't work. Here's another interesting statistic. Over 95% of women who've been polled and this in North America are dissatisfied with their body and dissatisfied with their weight. That's a huge number. So when we're saying over nine out of 10 women are in a relationship with their body that's based on hate, um, that's a silent epidemic. That's a silent holocaust because it tears at the deepest level of our fabric, of our being, our soul. It affects our health. It affects who we are in the world. You can't walk through this world successfully if you don't love your own package. So when we have a world of disempowered people, the world can't progress in the way that it ought to. The world can't transform as it should. The world can't heal if at least half of us are being held back. The women in a significant, dramatic and powerful way in our, in our own internal world. That's big, that's deep, that's important, that's headline news, and it's something that we have to grapple with. So what I'm hinting at is that women have a particularly interesting and different and special relationship with food. We gotta own that and acknowledge that. Now, do men have their own unique relationship with food and body? You bet. Absolutely. And we're going to dive into those distinctions throughout the training because it's a little different and it's powerful for both. Yet, another interesting statistic is that in any given week when you're polling women, over 80% of them will say, I'm on a diet. Here's another crazy statistic. Four out of 10, five to 7-year-old girls will say, I'm on a diet. Now, where did they get that from? How is it that four out of 10 girls who are between five to seven years old say I'm on a diet? I think they get it from the 80% of the women who said that they're on a diet. They get it from the media, they pick it up from the atmosphere, they get it from the world. Our young children are, are having this distorted, dysfunctional relationship with food and body from a young age. And ouch, that hurts. And we're here to change that. Here's another fascinating statistic to me. And it's more nutritional. It keeps changing over the years, depending on where you're going and where you're listening. It said between 75 to 90% of all diseases, and this is a United States government statistics, 75 to 90% of all diseases, um, it could be prevented or dramatically helped or significantly improved with good nutrition. That's huge. Why don't we do anything about that? What, what, what's happening? What's going on? So the good news in all this is that this is a wide open field for you, for me, for all of us. There's a lot of people who need a lot of help. There are so many people in need of the messages that you are going to be learning that you can bring to them. The education that you offer, the counseling, the coaching, the cheerleading that you're gonna be able to share with others in a professional way is so, so, so, so valuable. The messages that you will be learning in this training are profoundly needed. That's what I'm saying. So you're gonna be armed with some great information and some great wisdom. You're gonna be locked and loaded with this. You're gonna start to remember them. It's gonna just be ingrained in your system. There's gonna be certain messages in this training that indeed you'll hear me repeat a number of times. You'll get enough information and tools and insights that you will be able to share with your clients in a very abundant way. Now, the course correction for all this, for all of the challenges and all of the chaos that's out there in the field of nutrition, the course correction is simple. The course correction is love, it's consciousness, it's smart science. It's dropping into the sacred, it's body wisdom. It's beginning to understand the masculine and feminine aspects of our psychology. It's taking a new approach to eating psychology. It's taking a new approach to nutrition. It's about us being more courageous and bold. It's about respecting our inner knowing. Sometimes it's gonna be hard work and sometimes it's gonna be smooth sailing. Now again, a big part of what I'm asking you to do as a counselor, as a coach, as a practitioner, as a teacher and leader in this field, is to see and embrace the simple fact. Yes, yes, yes. There's chaos out there. Yes, there's chaos in terms of nutritional belief systems. There's confusion, there's so many different voices in terms of what's out there in terms of what the experts say. But again, they're all saying something different and there's scientific proof that so many of them offer. And what I'm saying to you is this is simply what's so, and it's your job to have a good, strong immune system and digestive system to tolerate the wild west. So can you relax into that? And I'm asking you, I'm requesting of you to really relax into your own body because a nutritional counselor, the coach, the practitioner in eating psychology of the future, which is you right now, which is what you're learning how to be, is not going to simply be pushing more facts at people and pushing information. You're gonna be helping people manage all of the information that's coming in. You're gonna kind of be like a high level traffic cop. You're gonna help your client learn what's the best diet for them. You're gonna deliver, what's the best insights for them? What's might be the best healing strategies around their weight, their body image, their overeating, their binge eating, their emotional eating. How do they stop the fight with food? How do you help them stop the constant fight against their own body? You help somebody do that and you've done something tremendous, my friends. So this is all about how you help people liberate themselves from the chains that are holding them back so we can expand and start to do the work that we're really meant to do here, each one of us. So we're here to help people reach their true creative full self-expression. So many people, so many of your clients are living with a constant low level or even high level anxiety, fear, self torture around food, around body, around body image. And we're here to change that. When you can help a person transform and heal a little bit and find some space and find some self love, and find some self-compassion and find some symptomatic relief. When you can help them recontact their relationship with food, to see their body differently in a more positive way, to see the whole show their entire relationship with food in a positive light. You have done a powerful service that has an amazing value. Now for me, I hold certain goals for all eaters and my clients, all of them eat. I hold certain goals for eaters in general. Some people, you know, some practitioner, their goal is I want all people who eat to be vegetarian. I want all people to who eat to be paleo or to go organic or to not eat junk food or whatever it is. Now, you can probably ask me, and I do have all my personal specific nutritional goals that I wish the world would do, but that's not that important right now because really it's bigger than that. A bigger goal for all the people that you're serving, all the eaters that you serve, all the clients that you serve. A bigger goal is self-love. A bigger goal is your clients stepping into the fullest possible expression of who they are meant to be in this world. To have a relationship with food that's natural, that's flowing, that's easy. My biggest goal for anyone is the fulfillment of their soul's purpose. Their soul's destiny. Why they came here to be in this life. So in a way, my biggest goal for my clients on one level has nothing to do with food. I really wanna say that again. I really want to emphasize that my biggest goal for my client as an eater is that they are fulfilled in terms of being the highest expression of who they came to be in this world. That's what I want. So on one level, I don't care what they eat. Yeah, of course I want them to be healthy. Of course I want 'em to eat, you know, organic food that supports the earth, that's grown in a conscientious way. Of course, I don't want 'em to eat a lot of junk, but everybody's different. And you probably know people, I bet you know people who eat all the worst food in the world, and yet they're happy, they're healthy, and maybe they live to be a ripe old age. I, I don't know if I've mentioned this to you, my grandfather, I call him Grandpa Jack, he lived to be 99 years old. Ah, almost made it to a hundred, lived to be 99 years old. He was never in the hospital for a day in his life. He never had an operation. He was hardly ever sick. 99 years old. What did the guy eat? Chicken soup, bread, sucking candies, vodka every day, boiled carrots and Brooklyn tap water. That's what Uncle Jack did. To live to 99 years old. I, I should write a book, call it the Uncle Jack Diet. You know, now that's the perfect diet for him. Now, is that the perfect diet that's gonna help you and me be happy and healthy and live long? I, I don't think so. So everybody is different, you know, and in so many ways, food is meant to sustain us here on planet Earth. And when food sustains us, then you can go about the business of the rest of your life. You don't have to be worried about what you ate, what you shouldn't ate, what you didn't eat. You don't have to worry about, did I overeat? Did I do this? Did I do that? Should I lose weight? Should I gain it? You can just have a nourishing relationship with food. Get pleasure from it. It can be fun. It can give you health. And you move on and you go about the business of your day. Now again, you've known people who eat the wrong food and the worst foods, and they're probably healthy and happy and upbeat. And likewise, you probably know people who eat the best foods on the planet and they might have the healthiest diets and they're constantly miserable and sickly. Have you met anyone like that? So all I'm saying, all I'm saying is that there's no guarantee in terms of what you eat, my friends, the perfect diet, whatever that is, and it doesn't exist, guarantees us nothing. There is no one perfect diet. You're gonna hear me speak about this more, and I'm gonna go into detail about how to work with clients in that realm. 'cause believe it or not, a lot of people are stuck there looking for perfection. So my greater goal for eaters is that they use their relationship with food as a vehicle to grow. Chances are whatever's happening with my client's body image or whether they need to lose five pounds, 50 pounds, 50 pounds, 150 pounds, whether it's, I hate my body, I wanna lose weight, I want to gain weight, uh, I want to change my shape, I want to heal my digestion, I wanna stop whatever it is. My biggest goal for eaters is that they begin to see how everything about health and their relationship with food is an opportunity to grow. It's an opportunity to heal. It's an opportunity to transform, to learn life lessons, period. When you and I, when our clients can see it like that, when you can help your clients have that big picture, my friends, the world opens up, it changes, and then you and your clients, you can do what you're supposed to do here on planet earth, which is that we're here to learn, to grow to better ourselves and to come out with the fullest self-expression of who we are. So that's the assumption that I'm making about life. That's the assumption that I'm making about the spiritual universe in this training. It doesn't matter what religion you are or what your spiritual beliefs are, or if you have them or you don't have them, I'm simply suggesting I'm postulating. I'm asserting that we're all here to learn and grow. And if that's true, and I'm convinced it is, then everything about our relationship with food, about your client's relationship with food, every challenge they have, every eating issue they face, it's not something that's just here to torture them. It's not something that's here to make us miserable and ruin our lives. It's not something that's here to make us feel like a victim. Those challenges are here to spark us, to challenge us, to build character, to get us to look deeper, to help us grow and transform. So again, when you can see that for yourself, when you can see that for your client, life changes. People open up, people heal. And magic happens. I've seen this thousands of times. When you make somebody's food issue just about food, chances are they can get stuck locked up and they're gonna go into the same spin cycle. They're gonna go around, around for years and years. They're gonna do the same limiting diets, same punishing exercises, the same fasting, the same fighting, the same extreme exercise, the same extreme diet. And I'm not gonna get where they want to go. The strategies we've learned in large part have not been sustainable. They're not long-term effective because they don't go deeper, because they don't get to the truth of who we really are. When we change, when we transform, when we heal, there's a darn good chance that you've changed because something deeper happened, something more powerful happened that we didn't quite know about, we didn't expect indeed, because we're learning and growing. That's the whole point. I think that's how the universe tends to do its thing, and that's what I'm suggesting. So my friends, yet, another great goal that I have for my clients is that they have a body and a metabolism that supports who they're supposed to be in this world. In other words, eating and health isn't just about having the perfect diet and the perfect health. If your goal is perfect health. So what? Like really? So what? You have perfect health, you have a perfect body. So what if your goal is perfection? Perfection, perfection. Okay, that's interesting. But that can get a little shallow sometimes. I've watched people just spend majority of life force just exercising and dieting and doing healthy stuff, and then they're extremely healthy and extremely fit, and there's nothing else to talk about. So if we want health just for health's sake and perfect weight, just for perfect weight's sake, then what's our life really for? What are you here to do? How are you here to learn? How are you gonna use that perfect health? And how are you gonna use that perfect body? What are you gonna give? What are you gonna do with it? What are you gonna create? Like put that to work. To me, that's a bigger conversation that's more interesting than, Hey, I've got perfect health. Wow. Hey, I've got a perfect body. Look at that. Here's my nice selfie, here's my picture. You know, can you think of people you know who do indeed have the perfect body of the perfect weight, but they're still miserable or unhappy or secretly dissatisfied? I meet so many people like that perfect weight, perfect body, perfect health guarantees us nothing. Yes, nice to have it, sure, but if you don't, then what do you do?
So my biggest goal for clients is that they have a body and a metabolism that supports who they are in this world and who they can be and how they can express themselves, and how they can share something good and do something good with their life, that they do the work they're supposed to do, that they become the person they're supposed to be, learn the lessons that they're here to learn. That takes things to a more interesting cosmic level. I think it's a bigger approach. Maybe you can call it a more spiritual approach. Maybe you can just call it a fuller approach. So yes, yes, yes. Here's the paradox. Check it out. I want to help my client with their specific health concerns. I want them to be out of their pain. I don't want them to have fatigue. I don't want them to have extra weight. I don't want them to suffer around, you know, how they look or what they eat or how much they eat. But at the same time, before I try to take away someone's pain and take away their poor digestion or fatigue, before I take away a bunch of pounds of body fat
before I take out my stick and just try to beat their weight or beat their symptom into submission, I wanna make more space for them. I wanna listen. What are these challenges here to tell us? What are they teaching us? Because oftentimes the things we're trying to get rid of, we can't get rid of them because they're talking to us and we aren't hearing. Okay, let's take a bit of a turn here. I wanna talk to you about what I'm gonna call two important muses for our work. Now, let's take a turn here. We're gonna go into a different neighborhood. I wanna talk to you about what I'm going to call the two important muses for our work. The muses were to the ancient Greeks, the beings, the mysterious, mystical beings who creatively inspire us. It's been said that when a great artist is able to create, it's the muses that are inspiring that artist. When a musician, which by the way, that's where the word muse is, is inserted into when a musician starts creating great music, the muses are inspiring that musician, they're whispering. Somebody came into their ear and just spoke. So this is all a way of saying that creativity comes through us. And oftentimes the muses are the voices that are speaking things that we're not always hearing or feeling. On a conscious level, the muses come and go and a muses that which inspires us. So why do I mention this? I wanna mention two important muses that inspire me around this work. They're not the kind you'd normally think about. I'm going to name them and then I'm gonna describe them and tell you why I indeed think they're important. The first muse, the first important creative guide is, you've heard me say this before, uncertainty. The second is called paradox. Now I'm sharing these with you because to me they're super useful. When you understand what they are and how they actually are impacting you, your clients, it can help you become not only a better person, but also a better practitioner, teacher, counselor, coach. So let's dive into uncertainty first. The crazy thing about life is that we, we, all of us, we don't like to be uncertain. We want to know, we wanna be in control. So the opposite of uncertainty is control. We want to know what's gonna happen. I want to know how much money I'm gonna make. I know I want know when I'm gonna get married. How many kids are they gonna be healthy? Uncertainty kind of sucks sometimes, but the truth is that uncertainty, again, it's kind of the way the universe works. The truth is that you don't know when you are going to get sick. The truth is that we don't know when we're going to die. The truth is, I don't know who my child is gonna grow up into. The truth is, I don't know what the economy's gonna do, what the world is gonna do, how much money I'm gonna make. I don't know when love is gonna come and when it's gonna go. We just don't know. We don't know when health is coming and going. You know, you might say, your client might say, I need to lose 25 pounds, I need to lose 50 pounds. We don't really know that. We don't know how it's gonna happen, if it's gonna happen, when it's gonna happen, and if it does, if it's gonna come back. So there's a lot of uncertainty in life. So here's the trick, it's a given. The world is uncertain, and it always has been. We're even uncertain about what happened 10 days ago. You can't even remember what you ate for lunch four days ago. You might be uncertain about what happened, you know, five minutes ago, we forget. Well, we're uncertain so many times that'll be in a social situation, a conversation, who I want be when I grow up. You could be in your sixties, seventies, and eighties and still feel uncertain about your future. Uncertainty is okay. So that's the muse of uncertainty. It's not so bad. Uncertainty is not so bad as we've made it out to be. So my question for you is, are you willing to relax into not knowing uncertainty? Can you embrace the journey which is uncertain? Can you embrace the unknown instead of resisting it, fighting it, trying to control it, and trying to bend it to your will, which never works? Anyway. So what I'm saying is so many of our clients, their health issues, their food issues, their eating challenges, their weight concerns is directly connected to the strategies they do to brace themselves against uncertainty, to brace against fear about life, love, marriage, money, career. My fears about health, my fears about my body. A lot of us have not been taught how to do uncertainty, how to live with it and how to embrace it. And again, I'm saying it's the nature of life that when we resist uncertainty, we create stress. And as you're gonna be learning in this training, again and again, stress, chemistry, sympathetic nervous system dominance can create at the end of the day, decreased digestive function, decrease assimilation, decrease calorie burning capacity, appetite, dysregulation, and the eventual chemical. Physiologic and cellular wearing down are the weakest links in our body. Chronic low level, day in, day out, stress depletes the human system and will lead to unwanted symptoms and unwanted behaviors, particularly around food. So when we resist the uncertainty of life, eating challenges, overeating, binge eating are predictable, making poor food choices becomes predictable. When we resist the uncertainty of life and go into stress around that, health issues and symptoms are predictable. And when we relax into uncertainty, wisdom is born. When we relax into uncertainty, the magic of the universe starts to do his thing. Now, if you take this to a more metaphysical level, when you look at the creation stories of so many of the world's greatest spiritual or religious traditions, if you look at the creation story, even that science is saying, you have this big bang in the beginning. There's nothing in the beginning. There's the void. In the beginning, there's an explosion. In the beginning, there was chaos, there was darkness, and it's just a cloud of possibility, of uncertainty, of unformedness. And then boom, creation happens. So you're gonna hear that piece of information from physics, from astronomy and from different religions. And that bit of wisdom is saying that uncertainty, IE chaos always precedes creation. Remember the caterpillar inside the cocoon, chaos precedes creation. Now, how is this important to your client? Well, there are so many times when I'm sitting with a client and my client has all these issues and all these problems, so she or he is coming to see me, perhaps to lose extra weight that they might be carrying. But that same client might have mood issues and digestive issues, and they're overeating or binge eating or emotional eating, and they hate their body. And I might be sitting there going, oh my goodness, what do I do? Where do I start? And I've had a lot of clients like this, and you will likely have a lot of clients like that who have a multitude of symptoms. And we don't know where to start. What do I do? Where do I begin? And I'm thinking to myself, I don't know. And from that place, I relax into not knowing. And then we do all the questions and the intakes, and eventually things come together. So when you relax into not knowing, you are in a relaxation response, parasympathetic nervous system dominance. And when you're in relaxation response, relaxation, physiology, and chemistry. And what science knows and understands is that the relaxation response, parasympathetic dominance, is where we do our optimum state of digestion, assimilation, calorie burning and natural appetite regulation. It's also where wisdom is born. Your greatest insights happen in the prefrontal cortex and the brain needs to be relaxed. Now, if I'm in stress, I'm in the lower or more reptilian brain that's built for instinct. It's built for survival, it's built for fight or flight, for fear, for worry, and to act quickly about instinctual things. When your life is on the line, that reptilian brain is activated by the stress response. It ain't about your creativity, it ain't about higher wisdom, it's not about love, it's not about connection. It's not about writing the next great novel or creating the next great work of art. It's not about the sacred. It's not about seeing the holistic big picture. The primitive survival brain is about fighting off the lion, fighting off a hostile attacker or running the heck away. It's about saving your life. So all of what I'm saying here is that if you're stressed and stress can mean, oh my God, what am I gonna do with this client? You're gonna lose access to that part of your intelligence and your wisdom that actually does your best work. And this is not just with a client, my friends, this is in everything in life. So relaxing into the uncertainty of your own life, of your profession, relaxing into the uncertainty of the moment with your client is key. Again, when you and I can do that, magic happens.
Now, another way of saying relaxing into uncertainty, by the way, is trust. Another way of saying trust is faith. When we have more trust and more faith, we have more space, there's more opening, and again, there's more wisdom, there's more conversation. The heart becomes active. The higher mind becomes active. Body wisdom is then available to us.
So the fields of nutrition, eating psychology are uncertain fields. Science has uncertainty and chaos. Medicine has uncertainty and chaos. Life has uncertainty and chaos. If we knew everything, everybody would be happy and healthy and live forever, and we wouldn't even be in this conversation. But as you know, that's not the case. So can you, can we relax into uncertainty? Your job, I'm suggesting from now until the time that you die is to bring your relaxed self as much as you can, as best you can. It's not gonna be perfect into the chaos, into the fray, into your life. Because when you do that, out of that chaos, creation is born new, insight, healing, wisdom, compassion, love is born.
Now I wanna make a distinction as we're talking about uncertainty. Um, given that it's our creative muse, I want to talk about the distinction between uncertainty and confusion. Here's what I'm saying about confusion. Confusion is when we go, oh my God, I don't know what to do. I'm so confused, I can't do this, I can't do that. I don't know what to do. It's kind of like running around like you're a hot mess, you're shaking, you're in a stress response, and you're sort of knocked off your horse. Confusion takes us out of our center, out of our body, gets us all uptight, and literally puts us in a physiologic stress response. So the very thing that I'm confused about, oh my God, what should I eat? Oh my God, what am I supposed to do? Oh my God, what's my next step with this client? The very thing that throws us into this stressed, anxious, confusion place can be a place where we drop into our center and get relaxed. The very thing that stresses you out, that you're confused about, you can go into relaxed uncertainty. Note the distinction again. Uncertainty is where you can relax. If you choose, Hey, I don't know where I'm gonna live. I don't know what's gonna happen, but I'm gonna trust, I'm gonna have some faith, I'm gonna be wise. I'm gonna take the next logical step. When you can do that for yourself, you can begin to do that for your client. That's the name of the game. When your client can relax into their life, relax into their relationship with food and their uncertainty about what they should eat and how they're gonna heal and how they're gonna get where they want to go, when your client relaxes, that's when healing starts to become possible. That's when breakthrough is possible. If your client is stressing into all the uncertainties, I promise you my friend, I guarantee you that's why they're coming to see you in the first place because they haven't had success because they've been stressing into their challenges, understandably so. And they haven't been given higher critical thinking. They haven't been given good advice. They've been taught survival based thinking, and they've likely been seeing practitioners that say, okay, you have to follow this crazy diet or follow this crazy exercise program or take a hundred different supplements. So they've been getting strategies to heal themselves that are inherently stressful. My point is, my friends, we're here to help our clients relax and have trust and have faith because all good things happen from here. Now, here's a second muse that I would like to share. The second creative inspiration that I believe is very helpful when you start to hear that muse, when you start to hear that whispering in your ear, and as I mentioned it's paradox. Lemme give you the classic definition of paradox, which is kind of paradoxical. Paradox means beyond belief. Paradox means the non contradictory nature of contradictions. Paradox means the hidden architecture of the universe where opposites flow into one another. Let me say that again and then I'm going to explain it to you because I think it's important. Once again, paradox means beyond belief. Paradox means there are contradictions in life that are actually not really contradictions, and that there's a hidden architecture to things where when you peek behind the curtain how the universe is really working, there are all these opposites that flow into each other. So what do I mean? Think of your loved ones for a second. Your husband, your wife, your girlfriend, your boyfriend. Think of your kids. Think of your parents. Think of somebody that you love and you love them so much. And you could even say, I love you so much, but there's also times when you might be thinking about that same person and thinking, I hate you. So times when you're the greatest thing in my life. And times when you might be thinking, this is the worst person in my life. Those are complete opposites, but they're both true. It's a paradox. They seem to be contradictory. I love you, I hate you, but it's a paradox. So lemme ask you this. Have you ever had this happen? You want something, you want it so badly, you're hanging on, you're doing everything you can do to get that thing, and it doesn't come. It is kind of finally you forget about it. You let it go, you give up, and boom, it happens. There it is. It shows up in your life paradox. By letting go of something you draw to you, it comes to you. Again, I'm suggesting this is a hidden architecture of the universe. It doesn't make sense. It's contradictory, but it's a paradox. Here's another one, good and bad. Good and bad exists. They tend to flow into one another. There are parts of you and me that are really good. There are parts of you and me that are not so good. And we tend to think, oh my goodness, I have these parts that aren't so good. I better push them away because I can't believe that they can exist side by side. You know, part of me is very loving, part of me, not so loving. Part of you might be very compassionate, and part of you might be very mean. There's a part of you that knows what to eat, that knows what to do. And there's another part of you that's self-destructive and just wants to take yourself down. These seem once again, to be contradictory. But again, when you understand the beautiful nature of paradox, we begin to start to allow these voices, these opposites to exist side by side in such a way that they're not battling each other. Because when the opposites battle each other, we tend to fall into pain and suffering.
Yet another paradox, just to give you an example, giving and receiving. In the physical world, you give away 50 bucks, you have 50 bucks less. But supposedly in the metaphysical world, we're told in the spiritual world that giving is receiving. That if you give something away, it somehow comes back to you. That's a paradox. Let me give you one more aspect of this about paradox. Universe comes to us in opposites, and this is taught to us once again in so many of the world's greatest traditions, spiritual, religious, philosophical. We have yin and yang, we have masculine feminine, we have left brain and right brain. We have night and day, we have rest and work. You really can't know what love is unless you know hate. You really can't have a front if you don't have a back, you can't have a high without having a low. You can't really appreciate and know health until on some level, you know, dis-ease. And what happens is, as humans, this is how we experience the world. And we tend to get attached to certain kinds of opposites. Meaning, well, I like pleasure, but I don't like pain. I like certainty. I don't like uncertainty. I like good, but I don't like bad. I want health, but I don't want unhealth. Of course, all that makes sense. Now, the challenge is when we get super attached to one of the opposites, that's when pain and suffering really starts to get worse. That's when we just wanna have comfort all the time and we get resistant to having discomfort. And when we're resistant to discomfort, we look to distract ourselves. We look to medicate ourselves.
Actually, what I wanna say to you is from a general perspective, so much of this training on one level is about teaching you how to help your clients, how to navigate discomfort. That's what we're learning. How to navigate discomfort. Humans are not so good at navigating discomfort. As soon as we feel discomfort, we want to distract it. We want to fix it, we wanna change it, we wanna medicate it. How do you distract yourself when you feel discomfort, when you feel emotional? Discomfort, professional discomfort, sexual discomfort, discomfort around your body, around your life, around the unknown, around what just happened with my mother or my partner. Uh, discomfort around my weight, around my shape. Well, I don't know, maybe you watch tv. Maybe you go do some useless searching on the internet. Maybe you eat, maybe you eat a lot, maybe you binge, maybe you turn to food, maybe you turn to junk, maybe you turn to sugar. And it makes sense. We do whatever we need to do to distract ourselves from the discomfort because we don't like it. And it's discomforting, it's painful. So once again, the paradox is learning to embrace the opposites, to literally embrace our discomfort as much as we embrace our comfort. That's what I'm asking you to help yourself with so you can learn to help your clients with. That's a powerful strategy. It's a powerful technique. Okay, my friends. Now I wanna play with another concept that also comes from the ancient Greeks. Uh, and in Greek mythology, we learn about two interesting sisters. The sisters are named Hygeia and panacea. Now these are actually archetypes. They're mythological women, their personifications, and you can look them up in Greek mythology, you can Google them online and learn about these two sisters. But I want to tell you why they're important voices in this work. Hygeia sister number one, which by the way is where we get the term hygiene from. Um, she was the preferred daughter of her father. Asclepius Asclepius, uh, was the Greek God who ruled over medicine. Now, his daughter Hygeia, he preferred her just a little more because she was all about daily rhythm. She lived in a flow. She nourished herself, she cooked, she had all these interesting daily practices around nourishment, around beauty, around self-care, around health. So hygiene, hygiene, personal hygiene. She was always present with her body, with herself, day in and day out, nourishment care, feeding herself, cooking, giving to others. It was a constant flow. It was a moment to moment practice. Now, her sister, who was also very well loved, was panacea. And by the way, we use that word panacea these days to mean a cure all. And the reason why we use that to mean cure all, because this sister in Greek mythology, she actually had an interesting power. She'd hang out in the woods most of the time. She wasn't always around. It was hard to find her. But people sought her out because she was very well known, because she had a special healing herbal mixture that could heal anything. So panacea had the good, she had a healing mixture that can heal anything. So when somebody in the village had a disease, when they had something wrong that couldn't be helped, they would seek out panacea because you knew that her herbal remedy, should you find her, would somehow cure you. Now again, she spent a lot of time alone. And even when you sought her out for your disease, she wasn't always there. There's not always a cure all. There's not always that one thing that's gonna save us. So here's the thing, Hy was the preferred daughter. Even though both were loved, we love hy more because in a strange way, day in and day out, she serves us better. In the world of health and healing and nutrition, it's daily practice. How we nourish ourselves on a daily level, that's most important. That's what's gonna help your clients get where they want to go. Panacea is all about the cure all. And you know, okay, my goodness, I'm, I'm sick. I need the right drug, I need the right herb, I need my panacea. I have to get the operation to cut this thing out. That's a panacea. Um, we, we look for the one pill, the one vitamin, the one thing that's gonna do it. And you know, sometimes for some people that happens and we need that. And it's important, but it's not for all of us. In fact, it's a small amount. And why I'm mentioning this is that far too many of our clients are looking for the cure. All. They're looking for the one thing. They're searching for the sister who's hard to find. Our scientific world, our scientific community is endlessly focused on the panacea, the constant. Well, someday science is gonna figure this out, and we're gonna just take a pill and you're gonna lose weight forever, and you're gonna keep it off forever. And then you're gonna be happy and you're gonna be healthy, and you're gonna live forever. And all I wanna say to you, my friends, is do me a favor. I just need you to give it up. I just need you to let go of that one. Right now, science, I'm guessing, I'm betting, I'm asserting, is never going to find the one true weight loss pill. It's not gonna happen. It's not gonna find the one vaccine to fix everything. It's, it's a promise that we hear over and over again that seduces us. It's wishful thinking. We need to use our smarts, we need to use our wisdom. We need to understand that for so many of us, healing comes from a different place. So in this training, you are learning how to work with your clients' hygiene, so to speak. Yep. There are little cure all tricks that we're gonna use for sure, healing strategies that we employ that can make a difference. But it's the sustainable day in day out practices that will take your client into a long-term, nourishing relationship with food, with natural weight, natural health that are all about daily practices that are doable in that work. Next, my friends, one of the useful and not quite always practiced activities when we're learning about health healing, nutrition, psychology and transformation is to take some time and look at some of the common terms that we use and distinguish out those terms so we can have agreement about what we're talking about. So we're going to look at terms like health, healing, nutrition, nourishment, disease. When you hear these words and we're gonna break them down, what are we really saying? What do we really mean when we say health, healing disease? I think again, it's a useful practice to distinguish out so we can all get on the same page together. Here's an example. Uh, I might say the word to somebody dog. Now if you have the belief that dogs are bad or dogs are gonna bite me, when you hear the term dog, it's gonna not feel so good for you. You're gonna have certain thoughts, certain emotions. If you love dogs, if you think they're great, if you've had great dogs in your life, then when you hear the word dog, you're gonna think, oh great, I love dogs. And you're gonna relax and it's gonna feel good. If you love the ocean and you think it's the greatest thing in the world, when you hear someone say ocean, you are gonna feel good. You're gonna have certain associations that automatically without saying anything, take you to a good place. But if you almost drown once and you hate the water and you're afraid of the ocean, it's kind of scary that when somebody says ocean, a different experience happens. My point here is this happens quite a bit in the fields of nutrition, in the fields of health. So let's break down the term health for a moment. What is health? What do you think when you hear the word health, what do you believe health is? Now this is a interesting practice I've been doing for many years. I've had the opportunity to teach in so many different settings. Professional, public, universities, colleges, medical schools, prisons, high schools, you name it. One of my favorite questions to ask a group of people is, okay, everybody, what's health? Call out a term. Call out a word that describes for you health. Now, it doesn't have to be an exact definition, but just call out a term that you hear in your head that comes to your mind when you hear the word health. So what I wanna do right now with you, my friends, is feed back to you. Some of the most common answers that I've heard literally from thousands of students, thousands of people over the years when I've asked the question, what is health? So I will hear answers such as absence of symptoms, balance, vibrancy, honesty, love, peace, no disease. Fully functional. Health is beauty. Health is self-awareness. Health is self-acceptance, health is resilience, health is immunity power. It's when my body and mind work together. Health is wealth. Health is integration. Health is where I'm uninhibited. It's me having lots of energy. It's me being joyful. It's feeling connection, it's feeling strength. Those are the common ones. Now my friends, here's what I find really interesting. I want you to note that the most common answers out of everything I just mentioned, the most common answer I hear from people when I say what is health is people will say, absence of disease. Absence of symptom. I am feeling totally vital and totally have lots of energy. That's an interesting definition. What I would like to do though is to see if we could expand that definition. I wanna offer you another definition of health that I think is going to be useful on this journey we're on together. Try this out. Health is an energetic state of congruency that originates beyond biology, but can express itself through the body. However it may, I'm gonna say that again. Health is a state, it's an energetic state of congruency. It originates from beyond our biology, but it can radiate and express through the body. However, it may meaning this meaning you can be healthy but not necessarily have the most healthy body. You can be healthy, but not necessarily have the most healthy energy. In fact, you can have all kinds of symptoms. In fact, you can conceivably be healthy and have a disease, meaning there's a deeper energy radiating through you. And you could be healthy because you are loving, because you have care, because you have wisdom, because you have a sense of wholeness, because you have a sense of peace. Some of the healthiest people I've ever met where people who were dying, you know? And yes, I've met people who are young and vibrant and powerful, but you know, they could also be jerks. So as the young or or the vibrant and powerful people who's an absolute jerk and and is not a good member of society, is that healthy. So it's a matter of definition. Health can be measured in so many different ways, and we tend to limit the conversation of health to the absence of symptom and absence of disease. And what I'm suggesting to you, my friends, is that there's a bigger definition. I'm talking about a healthy personality, a healthy soul, a healthy attitude, a healthy approach to life. And when you have that, you have an amazing package of health. Even though your body might not be healthy and your relationship with food, still might need some work. Now, you've probably said some of these terms. You likely know people who have a healthy relationship with life, who have a healthy relationship with food, money, love, sexuality, whatever it is. So that's healthy. Symptoms are what symptoms are. Disease is what it is so much of the time. It depends on what we do with our symptoms, what we do with our disease. Notice again that so many people when we talk to them and ask them about health, that they say that health is love. They will say health is feeling connected to something greater. They'll say health is a greater spiritual power. They'll say health is joy because for those people it is. And for those people it's true. And if that's not part of your definition, then it won't be true for you. But we can expand our definition and that's what I look to do with my clients. And so often our clients are indeed coming to us and we're trying to change their behavior. Don't eat so much food. Put down the fork. Chew 50 times. Don't drink that diet Coke. Don't eat that sugar, don't eat that junk. Of course, my friends, I love these strategies. They're great. Um, but we tend to think that that's what grants US health.
You know, if my client has a life with no joy, if they have a life with no intimacy, no personal connection, no higher guidance, no sense of purpose, and they're surrounded by disharmony, um, those are the places where I want to help them create health. Because oftentimes check this out. When you look to other places with your client to create health, their food challenges and their actual physical symptoms start to unwind and begin to take care of themselves like never before. So this is a good, useful, powerful distinction because you can take a hundred different people who have an overeating challenge and they're each overeating for a hundred different reasons. One person might be overeating because I hate my job, and then they come home and eat and they overeat. And it makes perfect sense because they're using food to regulate their emotions. Somebody else might be overeating because I'm lonely and food fills me up and it makes me feel good. It makes perfect sense. Somebody else might be overeating because they're unhappy about how much money they're making makes perfect sense. Somebody might be overeating because they're worried about their, their, their sick relative in the hospital. Somebody else might be overeating because they're undereating in their first three meals of the day, and then they're overeating at night. Somebody else might be overeating because they're still embarrassed about their body that they've embarrassed, that they've been embarrassed about forever. And food makes 'em feel better. So again, we tend to attack the overeating. Well, stop overeating. You have to control your overeating. More willpower don't overeat. It's not a willpower issue. And overeating is not an overeating issue. So sometimes where the action is, is how can I help you, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, in relating differently to your work, your job? Because that's what's causing you the stress of overeating. How can I help you unwind that? How can I help you understand that better? And then we start to talk about the things that are truly important to them, and we trace it back and we figure out, and we're working with that person to help them gain insights into how to make their work life better for them. And all of a sudden, we're not even talking about overeating anymore, but their overeating challenges helped. So this is a long-winded way of saying that you're going to learn how to be a detective in this training. You're gonna learn how to be a sleuth. You're going to learn how to listen for the connections that you might not otherwise have noticed, because food and eating are oftentimes doorways into something more interesting and something more deep. Yes, health is everything in your client's life. So what I want my client to have a more healthy body. Yes. Do I want them to eat healthy foods? Of course. Do I want them to have a healthy relationship with food? Yes. But let's have a nice big wide definition of what health can mean so that our toolkit grows bigger. So health doesn't just mean stop eating so much. Health doesn't just mean your 50 pounds of weight disappears, because guess what? You can diet people, you can exercise them a hundred times and 98 to 99% of them are gonna lose the weight and then they're gonna gain it back because we never got to the root cause. By the way, one of my favorite ads that I saw many years ago was a picture of a woman. It's really had an impact on me. Picture of a woman in the caption reads, I've lost over 2000 pounds. Hmm. Now when you read under the caption, further in the small print it basically, she goes on To explain, she's been dieting for over 30 years and she's lost weight, gained it, lost it, gain it, lost it, gained it. And when she told it all up, she'd lost over 2000 pounds. Now, there's a line that's been attributed to Mark Twain and he said, quitting smoking is the easiest thing to do in the world. I should know. I've done it over 500 times. In other words, just 'cause you lost the weight doesn't mean you did it in a healthy and sustainable way. Just 'cause you stopped smoking doesn't mean you did it in a healthy and sustainable way. So again, we're looking to create a bigger definition. And again, that bigger definition of health is love. It's connection is balance. It's wholeness, spirituality, sensuality, self-acceptance, speaking the truth, being authentic, being real, being your creative self that's healthy, giving your gift that's healthy. Sometimes people just need to be a bit more silent and relaxed. That's healthy. These things can then be the medicines, the healing agents, and the nutritional substances that contribute to the actual, literal metabolic, physical health of the body. Remember, we are a continuum of mind and body. It's all connected. When you help heal, mind, heart, and soul, definitionally, you help heal the body. And so many times when you help heal the body, you can help liberate mind, heart, and soul. So it works both ways. Okay, my friends, thanks for hanging in there. There's still more to come. I have one more introductory video coming up next with me on camera where we're going to dive into a few more great concepts. We're so lucky to be able to do this together. Thanks for your time and energy. I'll see you get on the other side.

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Screenings. Once again, my friends, I'm Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Here we are in our introductory, getting to know each other. Let's lay a little bit of foundation conversations. So we have been, let's just dive right in. We've been distinguishing out some different concepts. Closely related. We were talking about what is health closely related to the concept of what is health. Let's ask the question, what actually heals us? What truly heals us? What does the healing, so if I'm sick, if my body's ailing, if my soul is ailing, if this physical being is hurting, what's going on? What does the healing, I think it's good to distinguish these terms out. Now, I've asked this question for many years, different audiences, what heals to thousands of people, and I wanna share with you some of the more common answers, uh, that come up to the question from all different kinds of audiences. What heals you? And again, I'm talking about average audiences, professionals, public, young, old, what heals. So here is some of what I hear. Self-love, honesty, listening, time, nature, understanding, compassion, forgiveness, perspective, laughter, curiosity, creativity, surrender, fate, dancing, being real present. Uh, sleep heals me. Children heals me. Communication heals me. Travel heals me. Vacations heal. Me. Being in a relationship heals me. Not being in a relationship heals me. Uh, someone once said, skinny dipping heals me. Uh, having a good vision about life heals me. Um, hope acupuncture healed me. Massage healed me. Um, change community music, pets, herbs, sex, fun, support. A lot of people say, when I'm self expressing, that heals me or when I have a good rest. Okay, so, so many different things heal us. But seldom, of all the things I just mentioned, seldom will I hear somebody raising their hand and going, A prescription medication healed me. I just haven't heard it. Seldom will I hear that surgery healed me, even though for some people it does. Never have I heard, you know, vaccination healed me. It's fascinating when I ask what heals because time and time again, maybe about 20% of the answers at most are herbs, acupuncture, diet, food, et cetera. So much of what heals us that comes to mind for people is in the personal realm. Again, love, faith, commitment, children travel, different aspects of lifestyle, getting support. You know, what happens is as soon as we get into the healing professions for a lot of people, soon as you become a nutrition practitioner, a a coach, we think that these little specific techniques or supplements or diet is what's gonna heal people. So, I wanna say this, I wanna remind us all, and this is coming from a nutrition fanatic here because I'm fanatic about food and supplements and diet. I want to say that probably at least half of what heals, and I'm just taking a guess here, about 50% of what heals my clients, um, comes from the nutritional realm. You can experience powerful change in transformation there for sure. You know, there's there, there's situation where somebody's clearly dealing with a food allergy. You take that food away, there's a shift, there's a change. Great, that happens. But we're conditioned to believe that specific foods and specific diet, supplements, herbs, combination of all those will somehow magically heal any condition. And that's what we're looking for. And those are what I would suggest, generally speaking at best, are adjunctive therapies, meaning they're supporting what we're doing. Yes, they're powerful, and sometimes that's what's needed to hit the target. But it might be less frequent than we think when it comes to overall healing about what your client's dealing with. So again, even if you take a person who clearly we discover might have celiac's disease, and you do the dietary shift and you take the gluten away, and all of a sudden their depression has gone, their fatigue goes away, their digestion improves by leaps and bounds, their irritable bowel syndrome is gone. It still works for us to do healing on other levels because for that person, there might be, you know, healing in terms of, wow, how, how do they deal with life now? How do they deal with their social system? How do they deal with foods that they can't eat anymore? How do they let go of being a victim? It just doesn't stop with nutrition. That's what I'm saying. So healing doesn't just mean my symptom goes away, because chances are, if you're alive on planet earth, we're here to heal more than just the body. My friends, we're here to heal more than just our symptoms. We're here to heal our relationship with people, with parents, with family, with friends, with loved ones. We're here to heal our relationship with self. So much of the time we're here to heal our relationship with a higher power. Perhaps we're here to heal our relationship with nature, with the earth, with our community, with the world. So there are lots of things we can do here to help ourselves heal. And by healing, I mean to change, to grow, to transform, to get the shift we want. We're trying to figure out how to be with ourselves, how to be with each other. 'cause it's not always easy. Humans have a hard time being in marriages and business relationship with our brothers and sisters. It's challenging, but we're here to heal those, to elevate those, to transform those to grow. So again, oftentimes the healing of, let's say a digestive issue or fatigue or immune challenge, a chronic pain, an inability to lose weight, those healings cannot always happen until a deeper healing takes place. So that's what I'm just asking us to keep our eyes on. We're gonna be listening for that in the back of our mind. That's what we're going to be learning in this training, to have a bigger, more beautiful, expansive, wider net to throw out in terms of our definition of what heals. Because the more medicines you and I have in our toolkit, the more tools we have in our toolkit, the better a practitioner we can be. So when I'm working with a client, of course I want to help them have a better diet, and I do. But I'm always listening for what are the other medicines that they might need? You know, many moons ago I was studying Native American traditions and I was very kind of taken and moved and surprised and inspired by how when some Native American languaging, they'll constantly say, you know, when seeing a particular animal, let's say, oh, that's good medicine, that's, that's bear medicine, that's hawk medicine, that's eagle medicine. Uh, or in relation to a person, they might say, oh, she's got good medicine. Or to a particular spot. Oh, that's a power spot, that's good medicine for you. So that, that mindset, that Native American mindset was aware that anything, my friends could be good medicine, seeing a rainbow, seeing an animal, anything in nature, different people bring different kinds of medicine via their personality, their energy, um, and all these things are what we have in our toolkit and what's at your client's disposal. So part of what we're gonna be learning here is to see your client as a set of possibilities where yes, you're going to tweak their diet. My friends, don't worry. Yes, you're gonna look to make changes in their eating, all different kinds. We're gonna dive into that. Yes, you're gonna look for tried and true nutritional tweaks, supplement tweaks that have the best chance of helping your client. But at the same time, we wanna have a bigger take, a bigger view on what else heals. So often what your client needs in life is more love, more consciousness, more awareness, more truth, more communication, more forgiveness, more self forgiveness, more insight, more personal power. There's so many ways for you and I to cheerlead our client into healing so many ways that are non-physical, non nutritional. And yet they affect the nutritional and the metabolic realm in a very real and potent way. So my friends, now let's ask this question. When Does healing happen? When does healing happen? If you've ever experienced healing, growth, transformation, change a shift. When did it occur? You know, to me, this is another question that I think is really fascinating because people do heal. But when, when? When. Now if we could find out when that's a big piece of information. So when I've asked this question over the years to audiences, 'cause this is how we learn. We learn from each other, we poll our experience. Here are some of the most common answers that I've heard. Healing happens when I slow down. Healing happens when we're ready. Healing happens when we let go. By the way, these are from professional audiences, public audiences of all ages. Healing happens when I learn something, when I felt something. Healing happens when we finally take responsibility. Healing happens when we've been witnessed or seen. Healing happens when I make the choice to heal. Healing happens when we don't even know why because it's so often a mystery. Now, yes, I've heard the answer. Healing happens when I'm in the hospital. Um, actually maybe I've heard that once or twice. Um, seldom do I hear healing happens when I sat down with my doctor or healing happens when I eat this food. Yeah, okay, I hear that sometimes or healing happens when I do this exercise. Hmm, not that common. Now, my favorite that I want to emphasize with you is that healing is a mystery. With a capital M, we're so often taught that healing means you surgically remove something, you eat this kind of diet, you take these supplements, you do these protocols, and then the healing process happens. Change growth, transformation happens. We try to make it an A, B, C, D stepwise process. And if you follow this very specific map and these specific protocols, that's when healing will happen. And my friends, sometimes we get lucky and it works that way. But you know, oftentimes it just doesn't. Life has a different timing than you and I want. So again, the point is that healing is a mystery. You take out a tumor, but it can grow back. You lose the weight, but it can come back. You heal your heart disease, but you can come up with another heart attack. You fill the cavity and yet another one shows up. You get outta one challenging relationship and then you end up in another. Your heart gets broken once and you might heal and then it might get broken again. So healing is often a mystery. What we need is a way to approach the mystery with more respect. Now, I think, and you tell me if this is true, there's a little bit too much assumption in the healing professions that we know what we're doing and we're experts. We know what we're doing and sometimes we do, and my friends, sometimes we don't. Now for me, yes, I will be certain about things that I share with you. I'm going to be certain about the nutritional changes that I think are important, the nutritional tweaks that are useful. I will be certain about MINDBODY strategies, eating psychology strategies. So yes, I will be certain and confident. And at the same time, paradox, healing is a mystery. So to hold both of those, to have great confidence and to respect the mystery, I don't know. Sometimes you could do everything good and everything, right? And I have done so with clients and they might just lose a pound or two of the 50 that they wanted to lose. Now, particularly with weight loss clients, you could do every single thing, right? And see little to no results. So life is, is a mystery. We don't know how long somebody needs to be where they're at. We don't know how long they have to live in this world and how they're supposed to live. So sometimes dying is the healing, sometimes the actual disease process and everything that person goes through, including the difficult part of the disease process, sometimes, strangely enough, that's the healing itself. We don't always think in that ways. Sometimes we need our eating challenge, we need our extra weight for a little while longer. We don't know the timing. So can we respect that there's a grander wisdom that does the healing? Because I think there is, there's a deeper wisdom, there's a truth that's bigger than us. And the truth is that the way we're designed, the way the human body is designed, uh uh, you can get a cut on your finger and you don't do the healing. So there are literally thousands of chemical reactions that will happen in the course of milliseconds. In the tiny little domain of the cut on your finger. There are so many biochemical steps that are required to heal that wound. Yet you and I do nothing and we know nothing about it. If we were responsible for the thousands of little reactions, the chemical reactions and directing those, your head would explode. At best, what you and I do is we help create the conditions for healing. Yeah. Meaning, oh, I cut my finger. Oh, better not bang it better not hit it against the wall. Uh, put a bandage on it. So you help create the conditions for the healing that change the transformation. We protect it, whatever it is, we create conditions. But the actual change, transformation, healing itself comes from a deeper intelligence, comes from the intelligence of life, of the universe, of the body. And it's amazing and it's a big wow. And that's why we call it a mystery with a capital M. And that's why it's good to respect it. So we don't really know how healing should happen or when it's supposed to happen. You know, perhaps the best, best we can do is to partner with the universe, partner with a higher wisdom. And I'll say, okay, Mr. Mrs. Client, um, you need help. You've come to see me. I've been there. Here's an idea. Here's a diet. Here's a set of protocols. Here's some questions I'm gonna ask. I think I might know how to help you. I'm confident I can help you. You might wanna follow this diet, you might want to eat this way. You might want to explore these possibilities. So I'm gonna be saying that paradox in the back of my mind, I'm affirming the mystery of healing and affirming that sometimes it's teaching us in a different way. Oftentimes the mystery of healing is really teaching us humility. It's teaching us patience. It's teaching us that we don't know. It's teaching us that maybe we have to keep exploring to keep moving, to keep growing no matter what. Sometimes it's teaching us that we just have to persevere and keep pushing through our inertia and our setbacks. Yeah, oftentimes our diseases, our symptoms, our unwanted challenges with food, our excess weight that we can't lose is teaching us that we're not in control. For a lot of us, that's the lesson to learn. It's teaching us that we need to reach out for help. It's teaching us that we need to look deeper, that we need to continue to explore outside of ourselves or inside of ourselves. Because sometimes, for example, a person's extra weight is more than just extra weight. It's not just 50 pounds. What it really is oftentimes is a placeholder. What do I mean by that? It's a placeholder. Perhaps the person with extra weight has been abandoning themselves, abandoning their body. Maybe somebody hurt them, wounded them, sexually abused them. Maybe past experiences haven't been digested, absorbed, integrated. Maybe they need to communicate differently, better with others. Maybe the weight is a placeholder because that person needs more empowered expression. Maybe there needs to be some truth telling forgiveness of self for others. Maybe that person needs to claim their power, their purpose in the world, their sexuality. It could be so many things. Perhaps there needs to be a deeper spiritual understanding. Or maybe it's a food allergy. Maybe it's an issue with macronutrient balance. Maybe it's, uh, a metabolic issue such as a thyroid concern or pre-diabetes. Maybe it's meal timing, maybe it's a combination. So we don't know what extra weight is always teaching us, but as long as it's there, it's asking us to look. It's asking us to listen. So that's what this work is about, my friends. It's in part respecting the mystery as best we can. As we proceed with strategies that are in alignment with who we truly are and how the body works. As we're in alignment with who we are as personal, emotional, spiritual, metabolic beings, trying to get all our bodies and beings into alignment so we can create the conditions for transformation to happen. Remember, you don't heal the cut, but you and I help create the conditions so that a greater wisdom can truly come in and add support. That's what I think we're doing with our clients. We're helping create with them conditions so that their deeper wisdom, their higher power, their inner knowing about the body, about life comes through them, comes through us, comes through the space that we create together in a coaching session. Okay? Now, along the lines of what is health and what heals and when does healing happen? Let's ask another question. What is disease? What is disease? When I ask this question, a room full of people, I wanna share with you some of the most common answers that I've heard. So I say, what is disease? Raise your hand. Call out a term and people will say, most commonly, disease is pain. It's suffering. It's the body breaking down. It's hurt, it's bad choices, it's the result of aging, it's genetics, it's punishment, it's imbalance. It's um, means approaching death. I'll also hear sometimes that disease is a mystery. So those are the most common ones. And let me say a couple of those again, let me emphasize them. The most common ones, pain, suffering, the body, breaking down, hurt, bad choices. Disease is the result of aging. Genetics, punishment, imbalance, the person approaching death. And it's a mystery. So I'm calling those the common ones. Notice that for some people, disease has a tinge of punishment. I wanna underline that for a second. My friends, because far too many of my clients, far too many of us, far too many of my friends, students, people that I talk to over the years, families, friends, loved ones. When disease comes, when symptoms come, when extra weight comes, when unwanted eating habits come, we can go into a little bit of feeling the victim, I'm being punished, I've done something wrong. I don't know what I did wrong. Or maybe I did this wrong, that wrong, the other thing wrong. Why is this happening to me? This shouldn't be, I don't deserve this. You ever gone there? You ever know someone who's gone there? Now, when we go into that place, we tend to kind of contract, we tend to shut down. We tend to make ourselves physically, emotionally, and energetically smaller. And when we do that, we get into a stress response, sympathetic nervous system dominance, which my friends means stress physiology, stress chemistry. Which quite literally, and we're gonna learn a lot more about this, it decreases our digestion, assimilation, day in day out, calorie burning capacity, and our ability to naturally regulate our appetite. And in addition, we will increase the kind of chemistry that will eventually attack the weaker links in our body no matter what those weaker links are. So can you notice with your client how their issue, their concern, their challenge, whatever problem they've come to you with is often tinged with that moralism. I'm being punished when I notice that with my client. You bet I'm gonna try to help them. You bet. I'm gonna raise my hand. I'm gonna invite them out of the paradigm of victim of punishment. I'm broken. I'm no good. And invite them into a bigger perspective that this, this experience is an opportunity to grow. It's not punishment. I know it hurts. I know you're in pain. I know this sucks. You can take that to the grave, I'm being punished. Or we can learn more to relax and to uncertainty. The uncertainty that is my symptom. My dis-ease. That is my unwanted eating habit, my my unwanted weight. And in that relaxation process, wisdom starts to come through. A higher power starts to come through. Insights can occur, higher power starts to come through. And insights can not only happen for you as a coach, but they start to come through your client as well. So my friends, let me suggest a different, different definition of disease. Um, you've probably heard variations of this before maybe, but it's nice to remind each other. Disease is so often the body's attempt to achieve wholeness. Plain and simple. Disease is the body's attempt to achieve wholeness. Disease is not a punishment disease. Isn't that there's something wrong with me as a person. It doesn't say anything about my character. It's actually a process whereby the body is trying to do something to achieve wholeness. It doesn't look like that to the mind, but it's trying to find its way back home. Now, another way of saying that is disease. And when I say disease, I mean any unwanted habits, symptom behavior, extra weight, eating challenge. It's a higher wisdom speaking through the body. It's talking through the body. It's asking something of us. It's not saying you're bad, we're punishing you. You did something wrong. It's the universe. It's the wisdom of life and body speaking through the body. It's as simple and beautiful and elegant as that, my friends. Now I wanna suggest another interesting concept to consider. We know that disease or symptom, or unwanted habit indeed is very personal. That is, this is my digestive issue. This is my extra weight, this is my binge eating, this is my emotional eating, and it is, it's mine. I'm dealing with it. But check this out. Sometimes our symptom, our unwanted eating challenge is shared. It's collective, meaning it doesn't just belong to me. Meaning maybe I'm overeating because I'm in a relationship where there's no real communication and we're in silent breakdown, me and my partner. So because of that, I'm gonna use food as a way to suppress my feelings and not communicate. So yes, that's my choice and it's personal, but it's occurring in the container, in the dance of the relationship, maybe my partner's closing down on me and all of a sudden I find myself eating and maybe I, or maybe I'm overeating because oh goodness, I'm 16 years old and I'm living in an environment where my parents are fighting. My mother judging me. My father's telling me that I'm too fat. I have to be skinny. I'm in all this emotional craziness and I don't know how to help fix my parents. So I just sit there and I eat. Because we often turn to food for substitute comfort, symbolic substitute. So that's not that a 16-year-old has this terrible eating issue. It's a shared challenge. It's occurring within the family circle. Within the family context. Another example, you might have asthma. Uh, now you might have asthma because you're born in a neighborhood where there's a lot of pollution. There's a nearby factory, let's say pumping out toxic chemistry. This happens quite a bit because they're not being responsible. So you are breathing in the dysfunction of a business, of a society, of a world that hasn't learned a healthier and more responsible way to act. And you breathe in that air and you have this asthma. So is that a personal problem? You bet I can't breathe. It's personal. It's personal. It's personal. It's landing in your body, but it's shared. It comes from the collective. It's not about fault. We're not even blaming the collective. It's just shared. We're expanding our definition. So you and I have to start to learn, my friends, to see disease symptoms, unwanted eating behaviors and challenge for what they really are. So yes, it's personal, it is. But here's the paradox. Sometimes, oftentimes in some way, shape or form, it's shared. So we ask the question, who is it shared with? What is the wider circle around this? Because that gives us information. Here's another example of a collective issue that personalizes within us. If 60% of the adult population in most western nations, particularly United States, is dealing with, you know, weight issues, that's actually not personal, that's a collective issue. If diabetes or blood sugar dysregulation is also starting to approach about 67% of the population within less than 10 years, that's personal for the person that has it. But that's actually a collective challenge. So many young people are bulimic. That's not personal. It's collective. It personalizes in people That says something about the world, about culture, about society, about how we as a community of humans are doing life. So that's why we're looking at our clients' bigger picture, the bigger picture of their life. So once again, yes, there are personal conditions and connections. You can always find any individual's life that's going on. But we need to be able to embrace all the different levels and see the bigger perspectives, my friends. And when we realize that our issue is in some way a shared one, it actually can empower us. Really. Does it fix everything? No, but it's certainly a piece of the puzzle. Does it help us in our journey along the way? You bet it does. Again, we're expanding our definition so we can be more effective. So we can see that it's not about individual fault. We can stop the self attack, stop the self blame, stop blaming others and just embrace the beauty and the complexity of our eating challenges that we might not have imagined. Lemme give you another example. I have a client who's dealing with her fatigue and as far as we can tell, and she could tell her fatigue is there because she's working so hard. So it's pretty clear she's working 70 hours a week. But why is she working 70 hours a week? Well, it turns out her partner isn't pulling his weight. Well, why isn't he pulling his weight? It turns out he's not making enough money because he lost his job and now he's depressed and he can't find a job and he's kind of home and he, he just can't motivate himself. He can't inspire himself. So now she's working even harder. She's pushing herself and eventually she hits the burnout point. And now she's going around thinking, I am chronically fatigued. What's wrong with me? Poor me. How did I screw up? Why am I being punished? So she's taken that on and really all the healing strategies and all the medicines and all the herbs that she's done are useful. But she's been going from practitioner to practitioner and nobody's really seeing the big picture. She hasn't been helped because until the core issue is looked at, which is I've gotta sit down and really work this out with my partner. You know, what's the real challenge here? How do we support each other? How do we help each other more? How are we working against each other? How do we help heal this system, this relationship? How do we have a good action plan? So they need more communication Now, okay, now when I ask people the question, what diseases us, what diseases us, you know, first we ask the question, what is disease? Now I'm tweaking that question. What actually diseases us? Here are some of the common answers I get, and I think this is another fascinating question. So what diseases us? Here's the common answers, bad food, toxins, genetic diseases, pollution, drugs, those are the most common ones. I will also hear that what diseases us is resisting? What is, um, judgment, ignorant poverty diseases, us, the medical system, diseases, us, blame, hate, bad relationship, viruses, bacteria, bad choices. Also hear stress. Stress is a common one. Now, I think if you listen to that list again, bad food, toxins, genetics, pollution, drugs, resisting what is, et cetera, yes, there's a lot of harmful things from the outside. A thousand percent, it's true, a hundred percent true. There are substances such as toxic food, toxins in the environment, bacteria, viruses that clearly disease us. But once again, we can be compromised not just from that, which comes from outside of us, but also that which we generate from within. Sometimes the most toxic chemistry in the body is that which we self produce judgment, indeed can disease, us blame, can disease, us making bad choices. These things affect us in a powerful way. So you can bet with my client, I'm looking and listening for what are the toxins in their diet and in their world, uber important. Maybe they've caught some kind of disease agent when they travel and that's what's leading up to their fatigue. But I also wanna check in, not just with the physical toxins. So we're learning how to be smart practitioners, but what are the emotional toxins that might be impacting my client? Again, bigger perspective. Let's look at another question my friends closely related to what diseases us. Let's jump to the opposite. What nourishes us? What nourishes us? Now, nourishment is important here. And let me define nourishment for you. I'm gonna give you a loose definition. I'm gonna say nourishment is that which makes us feel kind of warm, makes us connected, makes us feel more in love with self, happy to be here. That which reproduces us, sustains us on a physical, personal, emotional level. If something nourishes you and I, it's generally a whole body experience. We feel it. You know, oftentimes when I ask people the question, what nourishes you? I'll hear, um, food. That's usually the first one I hear food or people will say love. I might hear supplements. I might hear herbs or nature or clothing or beauty or being social or pleasure or intimacy or eating desserts. Some people say people nourish me or the movies nourish me, my relatives, this specific person, memories nourish me. Uh, the truth nourishes me. Art, extra time being out in nature. Okay, so why is this important? I wanna suggest that if something truly nourishes us, then by definition it has a nutritional value. Another way of saying that is that nourishment supersedes nutrition. It comes on top. And oftentimes we say, oh, this is the best nutrition for you. Now, now, but what if somebody hates greens? And no matter how many greens you give them, if greens are noxious to them for whatever reason, I don't know that it's gonna be that nutritional. If it's not nourishing them, if they're fighting it, if they're in a literal stress response when they're eating it, it's not going to metabolize as efficiently. On the other hand, if something is truly nourishing, then technically it's eliciting a relaxation response. And when we elicit a relaxation response, parasympathetic nervous system dominance, we drop into the optimum state of digestion, assimilation, day in, day out, calorie burning and natural appetite regulation. It's just how the body and life works. It's how we're designed. Pleasure catalyzes a relaxation response. You're gonna hear more about that during the training. So nourishment leads to pleasure, pleasure, catalyzes, parasympathetic nervous system dominance, the relaxation response, which is where we do our optimum digestion assimilation, day in, day out, calorie burning and natural appetite regulation, my friends, in other words, the relaxation responds. Turbocharges, nutrition, all the nutritive functions of the body. Again, this is how we're designed. It's basic textbook physiology. And it should be headline news in every nutrition book. But it isn't. And why isn't it? Because we can't bottle it and we can't sell it. You can't make a profit off of it. You can't make a profit off of telling people to relax. But it's probably one of the most important nutritional and metabolic principles on earth. What's happening with so many people is that we're doing things that don't nourish us, not just with food. People are following diets. They that are un nourishing, they're following diets that are punishing, they're following a life that's punishing. You know, you can have the high protein, no carb diet and it might work for you and it's great if it does, but all of a sudden it might end up hurting you if it's uh, if it's making you uptight, if it's making you stress, if you start to have cravings and you're judging yourself for having cravings, because I can't stick to the high protein diet and I wanted to eat carbs, it just might be that you might not be built to be mostly carbohydrate free. And the stress of that diet is causing a physiologic stress response, which can cause us to excrete nutrients, which can decrease calorie burning capacity, which can decrease our appetite regulation. So my friends with my clients, yes, I'm looking to tweak their diet as always, and we're gonna learn tons of dietary tweaks when it needs to be tweaked with my client. I'm also looking to ask the question, what nourishes them in the bigger picture? The challenges, we often get stuck looking for nourishment exclusively from food. And that makes sense because food is very nourishing, makes me feel good, makes me feel warm, gives me pleasure, reproduces me, gives me that feeling that I'm in love with my body. When I eat food that I love, I drop into heart and soul Food is truly a great drug. It really is. We gotta embrace that, accept it, and love on the fact that food is wonderful. But again, so many people collapse the experience of nourishment into just food. So food becomes extra important. So a lot of the work you're doing with clients is to discover what else nourishes you, Mr. And Mrs. Client, are you getting touch? Are you getting intimacy? Uh, are you pushing intimacy away? Are you getting nourished in your social circle? Who are you hanging out with? Oh, you're with friends who are also unhappy about their food, their body, and you're hanging around people who are constantly in self-judgment. Well, that's not necessarily nourishment. So are you giving yourself creative time? Oh, you love to do art, you love music, but you're not doing it. Why are you taking time off? Are you the boss? But you're still working too many hours? So you do have control over your schedule, but you're getting sucked into overworking anyways. So there's so many great places for you to work. So many great things you could do with your client to help them drop into a bigger definition of nourishment. Sometimes people simply need to be reminded of that. I might be saying things that are obvious to you, but your client needs to hear it. So instead of getting rid of a bad habit, you are in part inspiring your client to adopt good habits. And those good habits tend to starve out the ones that you wanna get rid of. So it's not always about attacking a bad habit, attacking my overeating. It's about adopting good ways in our life, nourishing ways that as we do them, we become less dependent on food. And this, by the way, is a brilliant little tool to use with your client. Not just attacking a bad habit, but introducing ones. Okay? And you're gonna learn more about that. So now we've said the word nutrition quite a bit. We haven't distinguished that term out. You've probably said it or heard it thousands of times in your life. You've thought about it. Let's look at a definition of nutrition. Let's see if we can agree on what it means. First and foremost. Here's the classic textbook definition of nutrition. I wonder if you know this classic textbook definition of nutrition. You ready for this? Nutrition is the science of the human need for food number one, and the science of how we metabolize food in the body. That's it. That's the classic simple textbook definition of nutrition. Number one, the science of our need for food. Number two, the science of how we metabolize that food in the body. That's it. And that's interesting. And actually it does the trick, but my friends, that was the definition of nutrition for about 170 years. And you know, something, time for an update. And I'm going to suggest that indeed this is old and it is outdated. And why is it old and outdated? Because we, the scientific we have now, without a shadow of a doubt proven that mind impacts body. We know this. So really when we're saying that the mind affects the body, we're also talking about how feelings affect the body. We're talking about how relationships are impacting the body, your pets, art, creativity, journaling, a spiritual connection, love, purpose, all of that. All of life is impacting your body. We know that science has caught up to that. So the new definition of nutrition is that it's the MINDBODY science, not the science, but the Mindbody science of the human need for food. It's the mind body science of how we metabolize food in the body. So we just changed a simple word from science to mind, body science. So in other words, what I'm saying is that you have to bring mind, heart, and soul to the table of science when it comes to understanding nutrition. Otherwise, we're only operating with half of the amount of information at best, from a true nutritional standpoint, we're standing on one scientific leg. So yes, you can tell someone the nutritional value of their meal. And yes, I wanna know what my client is eating. I wanna know what they're not eating. That tells me a huge amount. But again, I'm saying that's half the story of good nutrition. The other half of the story of good nutrition is mind, body, heart and soul. It's who we are as eaters. It's what you think, it's what you feel, it's what you believe. It's your level of stress or relaxation, how much pleasure you're getting, how much nourishment, the thoughts you're thinking, all of that. My friends, once again, powerfully impacts how we digest, assimilate, calorie, burn, and metabolize and appetite regulate a meal. This is what you're gonna learn how to work with and make magic with your client. Now by the way, it boggles my mind that so many clients over the years who just in one session, we identify, okay, wow, you've had this digestive issue for 20 years. You've had this heartburn for 30 years and it doesn't go away. You've had all these tests, you've been taking heartburn, medication. That really doesn't help. And you don't want to be on medication for the rest of your life. And then we might notice, my goodness, you're a stressed eater. Wow. You eat in a conscious, anxious state. Wow, you don't like your body. Wow, you think food is the enemy that creates a stress response. And look at that. You're a fast eater, which also puts the body into sympathetic nervous system dominance. A stress response. You're gonna learn all about this in our conversations on digestion. So we'll do a simple MINDBODY nutrition tweak, or two or three, we'll slow down, we'll do breathing. We'll take more time with meals. We'll put the body into a relaxation response just as an experiment. Whenever the person eats and all of a sudden after 20 or 30 years of lack of improvement, they dramatically improve in days. Now it blows my mind how science has been missing this piece for way too long. My friends, the field of dietetics has been missing it, the naturopaths have been missing it just about everybody. No blame. So now we are going to have some powerful tools to work with clients that can really help move the needle, help them get results, help them make headway, help them have some progress because your client wants to see progress. And we're gonna learn what are the tools to help your clients see some progress perhaps in the first session or two. You know, sometimes when I'm helping a client, let's say with their digestive issue, it doesn't heal a hundred percent, it might only heal 70%. And I'm mentioning this for a good reason. Because even if somebody only gets to 70% of where they want to go, 50%, 90%, whatever it is, that might not be a bad thing. Because in the mystery of life, in the scheme of things, sometimes our clients need a little bit of discomfort, need some symptoms, because it keeps us honest. Because it keeps life and the body giving us feedback. The body's telling us, Hey, here's what you need to do. You need to listen for feedback. I'm talking to you. Maybe you need to eat slower, you have digestive discomfort today. Uh, maybe you need to eat different foods. Maybe you need to de-stress yourself. Maybe you're allergic to something. Um, you just can't go and eat whatever you want. You have to pay attention. You gotta be more clear. You gotta take responsibility. So that's what our symptoms are teaching us on an ongoing basis. They're keeping us in line. We're learning all these wonderful lessons, my friends from food,
'cause the body can be saying that you have to take care of yourself on a personal level, on a nutritional level, an emotional level. We have to take care of our spiritual business. The body will point us to where we need to go. So my friends, we're developing a powerful set of distinctions already as we're talking now, I wanna remind you again that we're starting nice and wide here. I'm being very general. We're starting with the big picture. So trust, please trust that as we move forward in this training, we're going to get more narrow, more specific, and we're gonna dive into the details. So in future conversations, again, we'll be talking about the specificity of how to deal with your client's, weight loss issues, their body image concerns, immunity, fatigue, digestion, overeating, binge eating, endless dieting, all of it. We will get into the specifics. Please don't worry, be patient. Because for the first segment of this training, once again, we're laying a foundation. So it's all good. Patience is a great virtue. So my friends, once again, I want to congratulate you on what I know is a fabulous choice. The choice that you've made to participate in this training. I really mean that. And again, I want to acknowledge that we're on a powerful, beautiful journey together. We are stepping out to the leading edge of eating psychology, of mind, body nutrition, good for you. We're stepping out into new territory and health and healing with this material. So I'm inviting you to be willing to indeed go to your edge. I'm inviting you to be willing, as always, to take what works for you and use it. And if something doesn't work for you, let it go. Don't give it a lot of energy. There's so much information you're going to be exposed to and it's all gonna come together. You know, questions are gonna come up for you, insights are gonna come up for you. And I want to remind you as best as possible, do what you can to relax into the journey. You know, please don't expect that you're gonna become an expert in all of this overnight. Once again, as questions come up, if you feel stuck, if you're getting lost, you could reach out to us, reach out to fellow students. We're all here to help. We're creating a great community. My friends, I'm so pleased to be on this journey with you. Thank you for your time. Thanks for your attention. So much more to come and I'll see you on the other side.

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