MODULE 1

EATING PSYCHOLOGY & MIND BODY NUTRITION

Section 6

This unique approach will help create a new understanding of nutrition issues and eating concerns, and provides a powerful new roadmap for working with clients.

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Greetings once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Today's conversation is about masculine and feminine psychology. What a great topic. So in this particular presentation, I'm going to lay a foundation for understanding what is the masculine, what is the feminine? Who cares? Why is this important? Why do we wanna know about this? We're gonna look at masculine and feminine archetypes. What exactly really isn't archetype anyway? Um, how is it practical? And you're gonna see throughout this training, you'll hear me referring to how we work with men, how we work with women, because we're often different. It's just the way it is equal in the eyes of the universe and different in our expression. Oftentimes, you're going to hear me talking about how you, the coach, counselor, how you can put on your masculine hat, your feminine hat, see the world through the masculine archetype, through the feminine archetype, which could also mean left brain, right brain. We're gonna go into those distinctions shortly. We're going to look at how the field of nutrition and really all the different disciplines in psychology often get tangled in this interesting web of conflating, confusing, not really understanding masculine and feminine principles, left brain and right brain principles, and hence, the fields of nutrition and psychology are often at war within themselves, and often creating strategies that don't help the people that they're meant to serve. Because we miss out on these important distinctions. So we're gonna tease them out. And ultimately, my goal for you is to be able to turbocharge your ability to really be effective in this work, uh, to be effective as a coach, counselor, teacher, healer, practitioner, to be a more effective human when it comes to understanding your own feminine and masculine energies when it comes to understanding the feminine and masculine energies around you. So let's say it another way. A deeper understanding of masculine and feminine archetypes within us can be powerfully transformative.
It can be a very potent and strategic coaching and counseling tool. When we're expressing our masculine and feminine energies and archetypes, I'm using those terms interchangeably in a way that's truly natural for us. When each human being is expressing their unique balance of masculine and feminine archetypes in a way that's truly natural for them, that creates the conditions for the healthiest possible relationship with food, body, and self. I mean, that, that's a big statement. In general, what I also wanna suggest is that when we have the ability to think in terms of archetypes, to play with them, to explore them, to experiment with them, we give ourselves once again, the best chance to be highly effective practitioners and highly effective humans. Let's first define the term archetypes. Now, archetypes are fascinating. You know, there's a whole field called archetypal psychology. Let's call these timeless energies, timeless forms or metaphors that have been around for eons of time. Let's call them invisible psychospiritual, DNA, let's call them eternal blueprints. Let's call archetypes, concepts that are vastly underrated, deeply important, and containers of the story of our journey. Now, you probably heard when you were growing up, hey, once upon a time, and that once upon a time story was followed by, there might have been an animal in the story, or a king, or a queen, or a princess, or a prince, or a deer, or a mouse, or a boogeyman, or a witch, or a warlock, whatever it was. These are all timeless energies or metaphors or archetypes. The king is an archetype. The queen is an archetype. The child is an archetype. So across the globe, when you say the word child to someone, they kind of know what you're talking about. Child is an archetype. So when we hear the word child, the mind, the brain, our inner world, immediately goes to an understanding of what a child is. And, and therefore, there's the child within you. So you are not an actual child right now, but you still have the archetype of the child within you. So we call that the inner child. We contain an infinite, potentially number of archetypes in each one of us. Animals are an archetype. So yes, a bear is a bear is a bear. But, uh, interesting. You have sports teams named after bears, Chicago Bears, Chicago cubs, you know, on Wall Street. It's either a bull market or a bear market. These are archetypes, meaning they have a meaning beyond the actual thing itself. It symbolize something. The bear represents an energy. The bear has a certain kind of medicine according to Native American tradition. It's an archetype. You know, when you say the word king, immediately people go somewhere with that. We think of a king as the male who's the ruler, who sits on his throne, who has authority, who has dignity. So yes, the king could be the king of the kingdom or the land, but somebody could be the king of the household or the king of the classroom, or the lion could be the king of the jungle. So basically, I'm giving you examples to begin to think in terms of archetypes. So the queen, you think of a queen, she's royal, she's regal. She owns herself. She sits on her throne. She's empowered, she bestows her gifts to her queendom. The queen is self-assured. She know who, she knows who she is. And the queen, the good queen, serves the good. She's on the side of the good. So these are all archetypes. And indeed archetypes are passed down to us via story, via tradition, history through religion, religious stories, parables, the Bible archetypes are passed down to us through culture, through art, through music, through poetry, through our family, through our ethnicity, through books, through the media. So we have learned through so many different ways about the archetypes, and they change a little bit. You know, the archetypes morph, you know, so the archetypal woman, woman with a capital w um, in the Renaissance might have been, you know, a woman that we would consider zoic or plump, or a bigger woman that, that, that was beautiful. Um, you know, these days, the archetypal woman might look a little bit different. She's empowered in a whole different way. She's more of a heroine. She might be more of a superhero. She might be of a Jill of all trades. Um, so, so the archetype shifts somewhat, and at the same time, they maintain a certain sameness throughout the ages. So an archetype could be king, queen, the warrior is an archetype. As soon as I say the word warrior, you have an idea what I'm talking about, warrior or warriors. He, she is strong, they have courage, they're willing to go to battle. The lover is an archetype. The artist is an archetype. And within the artist archetype, there's different kinds of artists. There's the, there's the starving artist archetype. You know, uh, in this culture, when you say the word starving artist, people know exactly what you mean. There's an image of that. You know, there's also the artist who's, you know, it could be the Renaissance artist has a certain archetype. Uh, the successful artist has a certain archetype. Dancer is an archetype. We talked about the child. Victim is an archetype athlete. When you say the word athlete, people know what you mean. Someone who's embodied, someone who does a physical skill, a sport with excellence, that's an archetype. Magician, the killer. When you say the term killer or assassin, that's an archetype. Meaning we all kind of know what it means. It points somewhere. The betrayer, the savior, our savior, that's an archetype. Mother, father, sister, brother, aunt. When you say aunt, uncle, that's an archetype. Healer. Teacher leader, princess Prince Casanova, who? Virgin Witch, Sage, Saint Sinner. When I say any one of these, you know what I'm pointing to, even though we might have slightly different images in our brains between you and me of what these are. When you say teenager, when you say beggar, an image comes to mind. B***h is an archetype. Genius is an archetype, a guru. We use the term guru. We all have an image. We all know what that means. The shaman is a classic archetype. It gets even more specific. Caretaker. That's an archetype. Guardian, gangster, scientist, hunter is an archetype. One of the old oldest archetypes is the wise woman or the old man archetype. Any of the astrological signs, those are archetypes. The cards in the tarot deck, those are archetypes. Like the fool. Angel is an archetype. Demon is the archetype, my friends, the list goes on and on and on. When we can think in terms of archetypes, we become very clever. We become very smart. You've already heard me saying that within a session, I want you to be able to switch hats, switch personas. That's another way of saying switch archetypes. So in one moment, in a session, I might be taking on the archetype of a cheerleader. I'm cheering my client on. In another moment, I might take on because I'm a male, the archetype of a father, and all of a sudden I'm coming from a fatherly place and giving them fatherly advice. Because, you know, sometimes certain people could use that in a session. You might become a mother for a moment in a session. You might become, you know, the teacher and start delivering information to your client. In a session, you might become a scientist. And, and especially if you're interested in science, and you have a lot of science information at your fingertips, and you notice that your client really feeds off of you, giving them scientific information about what you wanna tell them or what you wanna suggest to them. So in that moment, you invoke that archetype and you embrace it. So it's so that archetype is speaking through you.
This gives us a powerful tool. So I'm just not one guy in a coaching or counseling session. I am many different people. Might all of a sudden be a best friend. I might be a brother. You've heard me say in different moments, I might identify my archetype to my client. I might say to my client, you know something, if you were my son, if you were my daughter, if you were my sister, if you were my brother, here's what I would tell you. If the person's much older than me, you know, Mr. Client, if you were my father, here's what I would tell you.
All of a sudden, people are listening through different ears that it literally changes the person's listening when you announce to them who's speaking. And even if you don't announce it, they still get it. They still pick up on it energetically.
It is probably, you know, other than Carl Young, it's really Joseph Campbell who popularized in this century, the term archetype, and, and really brought it into pop culture. Pop psychology brought it into the streets. I actually heard him in a public lecture, uh, many, many moons ago. And somebody in the audience asked a really interesting question. You know, they basically said, okay, Mr. Campbell, you're always talking about these archetypes, archetypes this, archetypes that. Um, and, and the, and the person asked the question, where are these archetypes? Where are they? And you know, on one level, it's a silly question, because they're timeless forms. They exist in the sphere of ideas. They exist in the invisible. And he paused for a moment, and he made a fascinating comment. He said, you know, they live in the DNA. And I thought that was very fascinating. You know, we think of the DNA as a bunch of genes and a bunch of little chemical switches that turn on and off my alcoholism gene, or it gives me my blue eyes, or my brown eyes, or my gene for diabetes, or my gene for genius, whatever it is. Well, DNA also most likely contains energies that which passes on from generation to generation. We pass on, your lineage has passed on personality traits. This happens. We know this. Um, and these personality traits are often passed down in the form of archetypes. And, and that's what I believe Joseph Campbell was postulating. And getting at, just because you can't measure it, doesn't mean it's not there. So to me, what he's implying is that somehow we're born with these energies. We're born along with them. They live inside us. They're often time released inside of us. When you're a child, you're in the child archetype. When you're an infant, you're in the infant archetype. When you're a teenager, all of a sudden, teenage consciousness is released in you and you act like a teenager. It's an archetype. That's time released in you. When you become a young man, a young prince, that archetype is time released in you when you become a young woman, a princess. And by the way, when I use the term princess, it, it's been given a negative connotation in a lot of cultures. I I don't use it as an insult, just so you know. Um, so when you become a young woman, the, the, the princess archetype is time released in us. What a beautiful thing. When you step into adulthood, the adult archetype is released in you. When you step into your elderhood, you know, 60 years old, plus you step into your wise man, your wise woman phase. If you start to go into the wrong direction and you become a thief, you step into your criminal archetype. If you become a science oriented person or an actual scientist, you start to adopt the science archetype.
So these energies are around us, and these energies are within us, and these energies move us. They make us the multi-dimensional beings that we are, because you're not just one person who said this, the old spiritual teacher, Osho Rajani, she said, you're not a person, you're a crowd. And it's true. Yes, you are. You, there's a you that is timeless. That's the witness consciousness. You, that is there from the moment you're born till the moment you die observing your life. But at the same time, there's all these people that live inside of us. There's all these personalities. Once again, if you're a woman, you might have the mother in you, the daughter in you, for sure. You're a sister, you are a friend, you've been a witch, you've been a b***h, you've been a lover. You might be a scientist. You might have been an athlete. You might have the dancer archetype in you, the artist archetype in you. You might have a little bit of thief in you. It, it, it's, we have so, so, so, so, so many. And you could be moving in and outta those archetypes at different times and different days, depending on where you are and who you're talking to and what you're doing. So, so think of feminine and masculine archetypes, okay? We're gonna, we're gonna detail these pretty soon, but what I want you to hear, my friends, and this is important, is that these are symbols, these are metaphors. So when you hear feminine and masculine, it's not just woman and man, though. A woman is the feminine archetype, and a man is the masculine archetype. But according to Carl Young, the father of this kind of psychology, uh, in the western world in the last a hundred plus years, um, we all have masculine and feminine energies within us. He called it anima, the feminine, animas, the masculine. So we all have those energies within us. In ancient China, this was described as yin and yang. Those are energies. Those are symbolic energies. Yin has been evolved to be the feminine. Yang is the masculine energies in science, we often refer to this as right brain and left brain. And, and even though it doesn't exactly fall out that way from a scientific standpoint, it's just a great metaphor as processes in the brain that are more creative, feminine right brain processes in our central nervous system that is more masculine, logical, linear, IE left brain. So they're great descriptives, woman and man, uh, uh, let's face it, you and I are aspects of creation. Creation occurs as polarity, night and day, up and down, back and front, right and left. Light and dark. Good and evil. Woman and man, we there, there's polarity within the world. You can't know what love is unless you've experienced hate. And vice versa. You cannot truly know what pleasure is unless you've experienced pain. So the universe, the created world that you and I live in, exists as just a endless collection of dualities, of opposites. Opposites attract, opposites, go along with each other, rest and activity, waking and sleeping.
It's all duality. So masculine and feminine archetypes. Traditionally, there is a ton of symbology across so many different cultures about sun and moon. And moon is always taken to symbolize the feminine sun, the masculine, emotional and mental that's often used as feminine, masculine goddess and God. That's feminine and masculine, native American tradition, earth and sky, the earth mother, the father, sky, mother, father. So it's okay.
A lot of people wanna flatten this all out and say, no, it's all equal. It's, it's, yes, it's all equal in the eyes of the universe and in the created world, there's duality, there's polarity, there are opposites. And the opposites are complementary. They exist side by side with ano with one another. Creation would not exist without masculine and feminine. You would not be in existence. You can philosophize all you want, but unless feminine and masculine comes together, you and I don't exist. IE mother and father, masculine and feminine. Interesting. When the two come together, they become a powerful creative force.
Now, some of the thinkers, writers, teachers that talk about this sort of thing will often postulate that on average, on average, on average, the average guy, the average male, the average man is about 80% masculine and 20% feminine. And it's said that the average woman is about 80% feminine and 20% masculine. And from there, there's everything in between. So our masculine and feminine polarities within you, you might be 50 50, you might be 95, 5, you might be a woman and have a much stronger masculine polarity. You might be a man and have a much stronger and greater feminine polarity. So we're talking about averages, but it's often interesting to play with that concept. What am I, what's my client? What are the people around me?
Oftentimes there's a bit of resistance to this concept, this topic, because people say, well, what do you mean we're all equal and we wanna flatten it out? And I think unfortunately, in, in my estimation, and, and others who, who talk about these things, I'm not the first person to say this. You know, I think at some point collectively, we all looked around and we realized, huh, the feminine, the women of the world have not been always treated so well on earth. Um, it's oftentimes been a man's game, and the feminine has not been fully respected, cared for, and elevated. So as a way to, hmm, correct that, I think what's happened is people literally, instead of saying, Hey, wait a second, we're equal in the eyes of the law and the eyes of the universe, we should be equal in opportunity. We should be equal as souls. We should be equal in all the ways that the world should treat people. And at the same time as creatures, we're quite different. We're physiologically different. Our innards are different, our expression is different. So in many ways, as we've created equality and as we move towards creating equality between men and women, it would be easy to throw out the baby with the bath water and say yes. And equality means we're the same, that men and women operate the same, they have the same psychology, they have the same inner world. I don't know that that's true. In fact, my assertion is it's different. And our job is to look at each client, each individual, and see what the masculine and feminine means for them in their own unique expression. So again, this can be a challenging concept for some people. I want you to hang on my friends, if it is for you. I would love to request that you let go of political correctness here. So again, my assumption, all humans are equal. We are equal, equal, equal in the eyes of the universe. And male and female of the species are different. Once again, the assumption is men and women each have men and women have both masculine and feminine archetypes or energies within them. Once again, the assumption that I'm operating from, and you try this on, if it doesn't work for you, throw it out. Men will on average tend to emphasize more the masculine archetype. Women on average will tend to emphasize more the feminine archetype. And any given client will be their own unique mix. And it could be, it could fall out in any different way. So there's every possible range of masculine and feminine energies within any given person. And quite frankly, this could even change throughout our lives. There might be certain times in your life where you're expressing more of the, your masculine polarity. There may be certain times in life when you are expressing more of your feminine polarity. So we're entertaining this concept. We're playing with this, by the way, here's why I am asserting to you that this is super important, because men and women, I have observed and noticed have a very different psychology oftentimes when it comes to our relationship with food, body, and health. And I think if we don't notice that, and if we aren't willing to see that when it's operating, then we're not effective. So let go of your political beliefs and look at the person before you look at the man, before you look at the woman before you. What is their unique relationship with food and body as a man? What is their unique relationship with food and body as a woman? What energies, unique energies are men subject to in this world that would impact either positively or negatively, their relationship with food and body? There's a lot of those. What are the energies that are hurled at women that will positively or negatively impact their relationship with food and body? It's different for men, by the way. You don't have to believe me about this, but the best psychologist on the planet, by far and away the greatest psychologists on the planet since about the late 1920s, have all gone into the marketing universe, have all gone into advertising. The successor to Sigmund Freud. You know, his son-in-law went into advertising. Um, because the advertisers understand how to talk to the feminine mind particularly, and they understand how to talk to the masculine mind. And you can see in advertising what they do to get you what they do to hook you, because they understand the archetypes and how masculine thinking works, how feminine thinking works. They know how to get you, they know how to hook you. They know how to motivate you. They know how to scare you. They know how to make you buy stuff.
So there are no shoulds and shouldn'ts here, my friends, meaning there's no right or wrong in terms of how much masculine or feminine archetype any person should or shouldn't be expressing. And many people, here's one punchline. Many people get caught in unconsciously over-emphasizing one of these polarities to their disadvantage. So in other words, there might be certain men who are overemphasizing the masculine polarity too much to their own detriment. In other words, they're not in contact enough with the feminine, which would help them navigate the world better, which would help them navigate relationship better, which would help them navigate their body and their sense of nourishment and their relationship with food better. Some men might be over emphasizing their feminine, which means they're under emphasizing their masculine, and that could impact their relationship with food, body and health and their behaviors and their choices, and perhaps even their metabolism. Same thing for women. There are many women who are overemphasizing the masculine archetype, masculine energies to the detriment of their feminine. And that can impact their relationship with food, body, and health and their behaviors. When you start to course correct that something interesting happens, healing transformation begins to happen. Certain women are emphasizing too much of their feminine. They need a little bit of more of their masculine. I'm gonna define feminine and masculine more in just a moment.
So this is what we're listening for because our relationship with food and body and health, our behaviors around food and body are fueled by or driven by, in part
how we do masculine and feminine energies within us. So stated in another way, when we overemphasize a polarity, or if we're deficient in a polarity, unwanted symptom and unwanted behavior can be the natural result.
So my assumption is that we are here to express, you and I are here to express our truest nature and our own natural mix of masculine and feminine energies, masculine and feminine archetypes, whatever that may be for you, whatever that may be for me at any given time in life.
Make sense? So when you hear me talking about this, you need to do a little bit of gymnastics in your own mind because you're going to be thinking about your own polarities and how they express themselves in you. And what I wanna suggest is that the polarity that you have, the the rough percentage of masculine feminine archetype in you, it's inborn, it's kind of genetic, it's kind of karmic, it's inborn, and it's conditioned into us by the world. So the world will condition us in certain ways given what you were exposed to, what you learned, how you were raised, what you absorbed from your environment. And once again, our polarities can naturally change throughout life.
Let me say this all in a different way, my friends. And I've seen this time and time and time again, you can be a far more empowered person when you start to grapple with and understand your own masculine and feminine essence and what's most natural for you and the direction that you wanna go in, in your own life. You can be a more healthy and empowered person in every way, shape, or form. I'm not just talking about with food, body and health. I mean in life, I mean in relationship, whether you're, doesn't matter what your sexual orientation is, doesn't matter what your age is. As you start to get clear, if you're a woman, who am I as a woman? What does that mean for me? Because oftentimes we are just operating on assumptions of who I'm supposed to be as a woman. But have we questioned it? Have we looked at it? Have we detailed it out? Have you actually written out what your beliefs are about what a woman is, how a woman should be, how she should act? And and have you seen that? Have you gone down that list and go, huh? Like, what is actually correct for me? What is true? What, what do I like about my beliefs? What doesn't maybe quite work? Who am, am I as a man? What does it mean to be a man? What are the attributes for me of a man in this world? What are my masculine traits? How do I wanna express myself as a man in this world?
So yes, I'm very biased here. I am assuming that you are either identifying as a man or a woman. So that's my bias for the small percentage of people who identify differently, that is not my expertise. So I'm talking about the majority of clients that you're going to see, the majority of clients that you're going to see will either be identifying as a man or a woman. That's my experience. So that's what I'm best at talking about. So that's what I'm gonna be focusing on. Okay? So the masculine archetype, I would like to name some aspects of this archetype. So when you think of the masculine archetype, think of what's oftentimes classically called left brain, which is that aspect of us of men and women, and especially men that is more logical, that is more mental, that is more linear. The masculine archetype. Remember my friends, you're thinking energies inside you. And you may think man and woman. So in the masculine archetype, which both men and women have, logical, mental, linear, one pointed masculine, straight to the point, very goal oriented. Masculine is about intellect, masculine is about the mind. Masculine energy is hard. It's about heroics, it's about purpose. The masculine is about presence. That's an important one. The masculine is about presence. Think of for a second, if we talk about men and women, what is important quality of a man? Oftentimes it's just being present. If a man is absent, when he's standing there talking to you, if he's going off in a hundred different directions and he can't focus his mind and he is not looking at you, it's a little disturbing. Presence is masculine. It doesn't mean a woman can't be present. It doesn't mean a woman can't be intellectual, mind, heart, heroic purpose. I'm not saying that. Okay, I really want you to get this. You have to think archetypally. The mask and archetype is about clarity. It's about systems, it's about hierarchy. People don't like the term hierarchy. There's all kinds of hierarchies in life, in nature, in culture, in the mind you have hierarchies of values. So hierarchy is a masculine energy. The masculine energy in us, the archetype is about protection. Therefore, the immune system is considered masculine. Um, the masculine archetype is about creating boundaries. The masculine archetype is about creating order. The masculine archetype is about commitment. It's about willfulness. It is strength, it is information. The masculine archetype is science. It is numbers. It's calculating. It's about measuring. This is how much. This is the length it's penetrating. It is, I mean, think of the actual masculine body. That's how it is created in terms of the sex act. It's about problem solving. It is directional, it's singular, it's combat, it's fight, um, symbolically in different systems of health healing, um, the masculine is considered muscle. It's considered me metal. It's about survival. It's king, it's prince, it's father, it's brother, it's warrior, it's patriarch, it's conqueror. The masculine could be the bad guy, archetype. So the list goes on and on. I've just given you for the most part, what, what would be considered sort of the boilerplate. Many of the boilerplate positives of the masculine archetype. Now, for everything I've just listed here, there's a range of that. Meaning if I said the mask and archetype is one pointed and goal oriented, being one pointed and goal oriented can be a great attribute of a human being, a man or a woman, but also being one pointed or goal oriented. If we're overly goal oriented and we're so after a particular goal that we can't see the forest for the trees and we don't notice ourselves and we don't notice the big picture because we're obsessively going towards a goal that actually isn't helping us, then that's the unhealthy expression of that masculine archetype. The masculine archetype, we're calling logical. Being logical is very important. You probably make several hundred logical decisions every day. Red light stop, don't go. Let's say logical decision you make. That's the masculine archetype. So we make hundreds of logical decisions every day. That's a good thing. And oftentimes, if a human is overly logical and just keeps referring and relying on logic, logic all the time, that person will often miss the feeling realm and the emotional realm. Because emotions are oftentimes not logical. They don't follow logical thinking. They're not linear. Um, so the overly logical person can be emotionally immature and detached and create a lot of chaos around himself or herself.
It is very important in the masculine archetype. Numbers. Numbers are important. Numbers make the world go round. Numbers determine how much money you have, how it's, it determines so much. We rely on numbers for everything. And there are places where we over rely on numbers of as if numbers is proof of who we are and what our worth is.
Well, if I weigh 150, that's bad. But 130 is good. Hmm, 150 is bad, 130 pounds is good. That's where we start to get into trouble when we're over emphasizing numbers or the masculine archetype in our relationship with food.
So what I'm gonna suggest is you study this list a little bit, and once again, I want you to understand that these are traits that are found in both men and women. And the masculine is emphasized in a majority of men. The feminine is emphasized. In a majority of women, I believe quite naturally feminine archetype would classically be considered right brain.
The yin to the yang and the feminine archetype is non-linear.
That's not bad. By the way. Feminine archetype doesn't always need to go in a straight line. A straight line isn't always the best way to get somewhere, by the way. Um, so the feminine archetype is non-linear. It's very creative. It is receptive. The feminine archetype is that part of ourselves that is emotional in contact with emotion. Lets emotions flow. Lets emotions live in us. The feminine archetype is nourishing. Think of, think of the mother who's just given birth. Think of the grandma archetype that's cooking. So the feminine archetype is nourishing. The feminine archetype is embodied. Mother earth embodied. It's the feminine archetype that we think of as embodied. The feminine archetype is art. It's artistic, it's color, it feminine archetype is circular to the masculine archetype, which is linear. The feminine archetype is musical. The feminine archetype is unpredictable. Mother earth, it could be a storm, it could be clouds, it could be calm, it could be smooth, it could be lightning. So therefore the feminine archetype can be chaos. But the feminine archetype can be flowing. The feminine archetype, sun and moon, it's the moon. It could be very watery. I said colorful. The feminine archetype draws connections where connections aren't previously seen. The feminine archetype is associative. It's relational. By the way, I haven't shared this yet, but in a stress response, there's actually a slight difference in the physiologic stress response between a male and a female. For those of you that need a little bit more scientific proof, how we're different. So much of the stress response that I have, um, mentioned is really the masculine stress response fight or flight or freeze. So that's also feminine. But there's a, for women, there's a slightly different stress response. And in a mild to medium stress response with women, not a full blown stress response and a mild to medium stress response for women, um, they will often release oxytocin slash prolactin, which are associative hormones that connect us to other people that make us want to talk, that make us want to connect, communicate love. Because the feminine knows that when I'm in connection and there's conversation and there's talk, then that ensures survival. Whereas the masculine brain is gonna go out in a very logical, linear, courageous, heroic way to fight.
Part of the feminine stress response is to connect. Very interesting. Um, so the feminine archetype is also soft.
Does that mean a woman can't be strong, hard and muscular? No. But archetypally speaking, let's think in terms of yin and yang. Yin would be soft. Yin would be feminine. Feminine archetype is loving. It's caring. The feminine archetype is food. It is body. And where muscle would be energetically masculine fat, believe it or not, is energetically feminine. Women will have an extra layer, literally, of fat on the body. The feminine is earth as opposed to masculine sky. The feminine is the soil. The feminine is procreative. It's communicating, it's inclusive. The feminine is the part of us that's intuitive, open, spacious, check it out. Curvy, sensual, touch, pleasure. Feminine images are more feminine. Feminine is considered yielding. Feminine is dance. The feminine is birth earth. Mother, queen, princess, the feminine is mother. It could be the loving mother, it could be the devouring mother. The feminine is sister. It's goddess. The feminine is also considered the unknown. It's considered the mystery.
You know, it's so funny, I've mentioned that fat is energetically the feminine, and we have been conditioned by culture to hate fat, to fear it. We have this toxic nutritional belief that fat is the enemy. If you have a female body and you are creating a child for goodness sake, you actually need more fat. You need more fat for that infant. You need more fat for breastfeeding and for all the hormone production that one must do. As a pregnant expecting and breastfeeding mother, we've made this substance so evil and so bad, whether you're men or a woman. But it's, it's, it's just fascinating because to the feminine mind, advertising and culture has aimed at the feminine mind that fat equals bad. Fat equals the enemy. Uh, and that's gonna make you a far better consumer of products that hopefully alleviate that in some way, shape or form, or make you feel better about yourself.
You know, I talked about the masculine being the masculine archetype being about numbers. You know, I just, just notice this in the culture, males, oftentimes, the masculine in us, males in particular love to be ranked. They love to know where they stand in the order. What's my batting average? What's my golf score? How do I do on that test? You know, they, that masculine loves to be ranked by numbers. It loves that kind of feedback. It wants to know order. What's my Google ranking? You know, that, that's the masculine in us. And it's oftentimes particularly emphasized in men. Um, women generally don't wanna be ranked. The feminine in us doesn't like to be ranked. You know, the worst, worst, worst insult you can hurl at a young woman is to rank her beauty. You know, I used to see this in junior high school, high school I've seen in college where, you know, a a girl would be crossing the street and a bunch of guys would yell out a number, you know, uh, one outta 10, oh, she's a four, she's a five, or she's a nine. That's a deep insult to the feminine within us. It's horrible because it doesn't, it doesn't embrace the feminine mind. It actually goes against it. So my friends, here's an assertion. Try this on the field of nutrition and the field of eating psychology, here's my assertion. Field of nutrition and field of eating psychology are both suffering from a lopsided, imbalanced masculine approach and perspective.
And in fact, what's interesting with all due respect is, and this is not an anti-male statement, but the fields of nutrition and eating psychology have been developed by men. With all due respect, if you study the history of nutrition, if you study the history of psychology, it's, it's men. Are there women in there? Sure, but proportionately speaking, not a lot. Who is the father of psychology in the western western world? It's Sigmund Freud, who's the mother? Hmm? Psychology doesn't have a mother, just has a daddy. So that's gonna tell you about our lopsided approach is the masculine mind. That's invented psychology. It's the masculine mind that's invented nutrition. And it is the masculine mind in both men and women that have now continued those. So men and women, and especially women, have adopted a masculine approach to nutrition and a masculine approach to eating psychology. I'm gonna detail this out in a second. Meaning, what does it means is our collective emphasis in these disciplines is more heavily, remember what I talked about masculine. It's more heavily left brain. It's mental, it's numbers driven. It tends to be highly intellectual, tends to be highly disembodied. It tends to be non-emotional. It tends to be very black and white. Eat this, don't eat that. Um, it lacks pleasure.
It lacks a sense of nourishment. The fields of nutrition and psychology are driven by one pointed, logical, linear measurements. If you wanna understand somebody's nutrition or you wanna understand their health, we're gonna do all these medical tests. We're gonna look at the numbers. And I know you, I know you say you have these terrible digestive issues, or I know you say you have all these terrible, you know, fatigue challenges, but we've just done all the tests and there's nothing wrong with you. That would be what I would considered a foolish, misguided, masculine approach. I'm not blaming men there. It is a masculine approach. It is an archetypal, energetically masculine approach that we've all bought into, and we all believe. So does that mean numbers are not important? No. Does that mean that the entire fields of nutrition and psychology are wrong? No, it's just that they're a little imbalanced. So yet another way of saying this as that nutrition and eating psychology have been quite, in my opinion, deficient in the feminine polarity of things in the feminine archetype of things. And I believe it is our job to course correct that. Because when we do nutrition and eating, psychology will not just be standing on one leg. They will now be standing on two legs and they will be more steady, and we will be able to have more complete and whole conversations about healing our relationship with food and body and health. Because we will be embracing a fuller, more holistic, more truthful, more real, more practical approach to these disciplines, and in particular how they show up in our lives. So think of it in this way, nutrition, the field of nutrition itself, vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, carbohydrates. I'm calling that the masculine archetype, not for men. I'm calling it the masculine archetype. It's the science of things. It's the chemical structure of things. It's the amount of nutrients in your body. It's the amount of nutrients that you need. It's the identification and isolation of even more nutrients or ancillary nutrients or nutritive substances that we haven't fully recognized yet. Nourishment on the other hand, is the feminine.
Is this food giving you pleasure? Are you present to it? Is it making you warm? Is it serving you? Is it recreating you? Does it make you smile? Are you celebrating the meal? Or are you over-emphasizing the masculine on, oh, I'm just supposed to eat this. I am eating all my antioxidants and I am going to chew this 50 times. Choo, choo, choo choo, chew, chew, chew. See, I just consumed all the right nutrients, you know, what is it? Back in the days of, uh, you know, when we first learning how to go up in space, and they were supposedly creating food for the astronauts to take up in their little capsules, because as it turns out, you, you can't, you know, bring a whole kitchen up into those little space capsules and cook a nice steak meal for the astronauts. So what do we do? So nutritional scientists all got together and said, Hey, listen, let's just look at all the food that we can, and we're gonna just break down what are the key components. This is back in the 1960s. You wanna break down all the key components of what nfi the human body. So that identified all the vitamins, all the minerals, and little bit of protein, little bit of carbohydrate, and a little bit of fat. And it's like, okay, we're gonna make a mixture of powdered mixture of all these nutrients that astronauts can take up into space, and they're gonna just add water to this powdered nutrient mixture and everything's gonna be okay. So that's the masculine mind at work when it comes to nutrition. Now, here's what's fascinating to me, my friends logically and fortunately somebody decided to test that on the ground first before we send these guys up there, let's test it on the ground. And sure enough, they ate this nutrient mixture and everybody got sick. They had digestive issues, it tasted terrible, they didn't like it. They had diarrhea. Some of the test subjects got headaches. Um, some of them got constipated and it was an awful experience. Diarrhea, constipation, digestive upset. Why? In large part, because even though that sounds all scientific, it is a limited view of science. It's lacking a feminine view of science.
And consequently, there was no nourishment in there because the body is just not looking for a bunch of breakdown products of nutrition. In fact, much of the power of a meal, the nutritional value of a meal is not just given in the food itself. It's actually given in the process that your body goes through to digest, assimilated, and pulverize it. Your digestive system needs to exercise. It's like a muscle. Literally, if you keep giving somebody food through a tube, you will eventually negatively impact their health. The medical profession knows this. Hospitals know this. You don't want to be giving somebody, uh, intravenous nutrition for the rest of your life or, or food through a feeding tube through the rest of their life because it's gonna impact their immunity. It's gonna impact their digestion, it's gonna impact their assimilation, it's gonna impact their health. It's not gonna be good because the body needs to go through the process of taking food, digesting, assimilated, calorie burning it. That in and of itself is nutrition. It's scientific.
So nutrition is very much the masculine archetype. Nourishment is more the feminine archetype. Let's get a little bit more down and dirty here, my friends. So you can see more of what I mean. So the masculinization of the field of nutrition and by extension, the field of eating psychology. So here's some of the ways that I believe the fields of nutrition slash eating psychology, mostly nutrition here right now are over masculinized. There's an over-reliance on numbers. I'm not saying numbers are not important, my friends,
but okay, you should eat this much protein, this much fat, this much carbohydrate you should be eating, you know, and, and this should be the proportion of macronutrients, and you need this much body. If you actually had a sit down and measure the numbers of macronutrients that you were eating every day and the numbers of vitamins and minerals you were eating every day, your, your head would explode. You wouldn't know what to do and know there's not a single human there. There are are ranges of what a person might need, but nobody knows truly exactly what's right for this body, that body or the other body. But we have this over-reliance on numbers. Now, of course, there's the all important number in the field of nutrition and eating psychology, which is weight, the number on the scale. We rely so heavily on the scale. You look at the scale, I'm looking at the scale in, whoa, I gained a pound. I hate myself. I lost a pound. I like myself. You actually give the number on a tiny machine in your bathroom, the power to tell you if you should like yourself or hate yourself. God forbid you gain two pounds or three pounds, you will hate yourself. And maybe it was necessary to have an extra pound of water in your body that day. And you know, something scales are inaccurate. They're machines. I promise you, you move your scale to five different rooms in your house. You're gonna get four different numbers of how much you weigh right now. It's not an accurate creature, it's not exact, uh, but we give emotional energy and power to the number on the scale, to the number of pounds that we weigh. We have given so much importance to nutrient amounts, and we don't even know what the heck we're talking about for the most part. So yes, this information is important. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm talking about over-reliance on it for many years. It's a little bit less now, but still we have this over-reliance on this thing called calories because we think that weight is a function of calories and calories out that is such old nonsense, outdated, simplistic, sophomoric, embarrassing science. And I can't believe with all the evidence out there that people still believe that when you can just Google stress induced weight gain, when you can just Google looking at high fat, high protein diets versus a high sugar, high carbohydrate diet, you could be eating the same amount of calories and on a high sugar diet, you're gonna put more weight on in the body than a high healthy, fat, healthy protein diet. Ton of research out there. There's a ton of research for the last 60 years about meal timing, eating food late at night versus the majority of food, you know, during the daytime hours. So calorie burning will be a function of time of day. Calorie burning will be a function of macronutrient balance, but we over rely on the calorie and the number, it's simplistic. Um, the masculinization of the field of nutrition, um, has ended up with heroic exercise. What do I mean? You must do this hard push force beat up on your body exercise if you wanna get those pounds of fat off ladies and men. So what happens is you have, uh, several generations of people who are punishing themselves with exercise that they can't stand moving their bodies in ways that they don't like because they think that this is gonna be their royal road to weight loss, which will make them happy, which will make them happy to be in their body. How could you possibly be happy to be in your body if you're doing the kind of exercise that makes you miserable? It makes no sense. We rely on this thing called scientific proof. Unless you're a scientist and you've been behind the scenes, you know, as a scientist that scientific proof is a moving target and that science is a numbers game. Science is a money game. Science for hire is a game. And who is ever is doing the science. Whoever is doing the study, they have an agenda. They're getting paid by somebody, they have a bias. And this is why you have scientific proof why smoking was good for you back in the day. And now we have scientific proof why smoking is bad. We had scientific proof why Wonder Bread was good for you? And now we have scientific proof why it's bad for you.
The masculinization of the field of nutrition is all about a system. You, you need to follow this system of nutrition if you wanna be healthy. And this system means you eat this, this time of day, this and that, and then you have to eat that. But you can't eat this, but you have to do that. But if you don't do this, and you better not do that, but woo, it's confusing. Do animals have systems, you know, closely related to a nutritional system? And it doesn't mean nutritional systems are bad. I love them. They're fun. Stop worshiping them as if that's the only way that there is, it's a way, it's an interesting way. I have followed the nutritional system called being a vegetarian for many years, being a vegan for a number of years, being in raw food system for a year. I have been macrobiotic. I followed that system.
It's, it's a system play with it. But to believe that I can only be healthy and righteous in my body and with my nutrition if I fall, only follow a system or this system, ouch. So the masculinization of nutrition is that there's a right way, because remember, the masculine is logical and linear. The magic, the, the masculine is more black and white. The feminine is more colorful. The feminine has all different shades of gray and black and white and purple and green and blue. The masculine is black and white. So there's obviously then a right way to eat and there's a wrong way to eat. Oh, really? Well, guess what? The right way for me to eat actually might be the wrong way for you to eat. Every human is different. We are all biochemically bio nutritionally unique. The masculinization of nutrition and psychology looks for perfection. So the masculine archetype is, includes perfection. The feminine archetype is imperfection.
The masculine archetype wants to be logical, linear numbers oriented, science oriented here is the perfect way. So that's an extreme expression of the masculine archetype is perfection.
The feminine archetype is, is more imperfect. It's, it's, it's got room, it's got plenty of wiggle room because perfection doesn't exist in nature. It doesn't exist in any creature. It doesn't exist in any human. But when we grab onto that aspect of the masculine archetype, it's very attractive. Perfection. The mask and archetype has geared us to remember muscle is masculine, feminine is fat. So in the mask and archetype, we value muscle more. And in fact, we attack fat. So I'm saying energetically, when you attack fat, you're attacking the feminine archetype energetically. When you feel muscle is far more important to you than fat, and your muscle positive and fat negative,
you're pushing away the feminine archetype. And you're not just pushing it away in terms of your body, you're probably pushing it away on many other levels. So once again, the mask and archetype is not bad. But when we over rely on it and overemphasize it and push it to its negative extreme, then what happens is the field of nutrition gets stuck on the right way to eat the perfect way to eat. And the only thing that can guarantee what's something, what's good or what's bad is if it's, if it's got a way to be measured. You know, for eons of time, the field of nutrition and popular culture made fun of organic food. And I remember thinking, how could you possibly make fun of organic food when the stuff you buy in a supermarket in terms of fruits and vegetables, let's say fresh fruits and vegetables. I, I remember, okay, the first time I went to Europe, first time I traveled to Italy and I went to a farmer's market and I had fresh fruits and vegetables, my mind was blown. Previously I hated tomatoes. I hated most fruits. Why? Because I'd actually never tasted a real tomato at that point. Uh, the tomatoes you get in a supermarket, especially back in the 1960 seventies, they're tough. They're tasteless, they're not sweet. Um, and for the first time, I'm eating fruits and vegetables that are heirloom that have not been genetically engineered so they can grow fast and pour quality soil with extreme amounts of pesticides and on largely nutrient depleted soil, such that when you end up with your fruit and vegetable inor organically grown, grown to be mass produced in the fastest, quickest way possible to get it to market. Anybody in my mind can start to see, gosh, this stuff tastes nasty compared to the other stuff. So as soon as I started tasting real fruits and vegetables, I'm like, oh my God, this is so much healthier for you. It feels he in the body. Is there scientific proof? Can I prove to you that it feels healthier? Eh, no. There's no way to prove that because, but scientific proof isn't the only realm of proof. That's the challenge. There's different kinds of proof and there's body wisdom. We don't ex we don't respect body wisdom. Body wisdom is feminine. Scientific proof is masculine. Scientific proof says body wisdom is no form of proof. Well, it's body wisdom from all the hippies and all the organic farmers that eventually got us to then take organic food. And you start to break it down and you send it to a laboratory. And lo and behold, organic food is more nutrient dense. You can actually measure it out and say, oh, okay, it pound for pound. It has more vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients than they're inorganic counterparts.
I could have told you that, I could have guessed that, but can't you feel it in your body?
That's the feminine to be embodied to feel it. But we thrown out the baby with the bath water. We threw out the feminine from nutrition. So if somebody's saying, Hey, taste this food, it's fresh, it's real. It's grown on a farm, it's grown on, grown in accordance with nature. Hey, taste this food. My mother just cooked it and she's been in the house all day chopping the vegetables, making it with love. It tastes so much different than the nonsense you get out of a can that the marketers then call. I don't know, they give it a name, they give it some old Aunt Jemima or something like that. They put a grandma on the label for goodness sake to give you that association because they know that, you know, deep down inside that chances are if an old school grandma cooked, it is going to be tasting better and fresh and real, and it's gonna be healthy for you, even though it's mass produced nonsense that's sold with the cheapest possible ingredients and given all kinds of taste and flavor chemistry to fool your brain to thinking that it's real. You know what I'm saying? And this overemphasis on the masculine aspect of nutrition, the masculine archetype of nutrition, it, it, it makes people so anti body fat and weight obsessed. Weight watchers, were constantly watching our weight. And you know, and I've met so many people over the years, I mean this, um, even people literally in Hollywood who, who have the body and have the weight and have exactly what they want, and they're still obsessed and they're still unhealthy and they still walk around like they're gonna lose it. They're walking around in fear and they're so focused on it, and a little bit amount, a little bit of amount of fat here, here, here. And it's a form of strange brainwashing itch, say hypnosis that is not healthy for the human mind. Women are get women, and many men are getting destroyed by the scale, absolutely destroyed by it. Their soul is being destroyed by the relationship that they have with the scale, the number on the scale we're getting destroyed by this concept of fall calories and fat grams. And the perfect diet and hard exercise. It takes away our humanity. It takes away embodiment, the feminine. It takes away nourishment, the feminine. It takes away our flow, the feminine. It takes away our body wisdom, the feminine.
And my friends. I spend many, many moons working behind the scenes in the food industry. I've hobnobbed with scientists, with food scientists, with nutritionists, with doctors. And, and honestly, consistently, consistently, there's this message that you hear from the medical, medical community, from the scientific community. People are so fat, fat is bad. Just stop eating so much and exercise more and shut up and get over it and control yourself. This is killing us. This is imbalanced. And this is what our greatest scientific minds are telling us. And we're getting punished because the world is archetypally imbalanced when it comes to our masculine and feminine approach. So then what do we do? We punish ourselves nutritionally, we take on masculine strategies to change the body. Intense exercise, intense dieting, counting calories. These are masculine approaches. Are they bad? No. But when we overemphasize them or using them when it's not the right strategy, then it can be damaging, dangerous, harmful, toxic.
You know, one of the most you challenged professions out there in the nutrition universe are the dieticians. Because the dieticians, pretty much every dietician that I've ever met has a beautiful, sincere, wonderful passion slash interest in nutrition in the body, in health, in good relationship with food. And then you study dietetics. And it's all about numbers and it's all about facts. And you actually don't learn anything about a human being's relationship with food. And indeed, as a, as a dietician, you are taught that you don't even go there. You're just talking about the numbers. You're just talking about dietary details of essentially eat this and don't eat that. And then dieticians graduate pretty much with their hands tied behind their back because they've learned about the numbers, and they're told to look at people like a bunch of numbers.
And they know and they learn very quickly, especially if they're seeing clients. And especially if those clients are women. And especially if the client has an eating disorder, they don't even know how to handle that or what to do. You just can't sit down with an anorexic and say, oh, you're not eating enough food. Eat more. But that's the education that they're getting. Um, because the field of dietetics is largely funded by the American Dietetic Association. Where do they get all their money? They're getting it from the big food companies. And the big food companies hire dieticians, especially out of out of school. And they work for a lot of the big companies, and they're advocating for all the products out there that are poor quality products. But hey, here's the nutrient breakdown of this product and here's why it's so good for you.
That's an imbalanced masculine archetypal approach to nutrition. You know, if you've ever so inclined, go interview people, professionals, whether it's a dietician, a doctor, a health coach, interview people, a fitness person who work with weight loss, and who just work with exercise and diet and ask them what their success rate is. See if you get an honest answer. Ask them what their long-term success rate is. Yeah, plenty of people lose 15 pounds, 20 pounds. But what happens four months later, six months later, a year later, 98 to 99% of all people who lose weight on a weight loss diet, gain it back within a year. And then some, most of the studies that you read, oh, this was successful and that was successful. It's a short term study. They're not following up a year or two later. They don't want to, you know, for a while there was a show on tv, I don't even know if it's still on. I don't pay attention to it. The biggest loser. And what do they do? They push you. They force you, they shove you. They rely on numbers, they rely on heroic exercise, push for shove. And when the truth came out, all these guys are gaining back weight right and left. And if they're not gaining back the weight, they're freaked out about gaining it back. Why? Because they weren't doing anything sustainable. Why? Because they're relying on an imbalanced, archetypal masculine approach of heroic exercise, reliance on numbers, calories in calories out. Okay, well, why was extra body fat there in the first place? What's the brilliant reason for it? Is it connected to their emotional universe? Is it like, like, what is it?
Unless we go there, we don't truly see the human being that we're working with. So you and I, my friends, we're here to make a course correction in a big way.
When we overemphasize a masculine or left brain approach to nutrition, we will overemphasize numbers, nutrient amounts, calories measurements, cholesterol levels, the unquestionable nature of lab tests. We will overemphasize willpower, willpower, willpower that's masculine to control your appetite. We're gonna overemphasize perfectionism about the body. We're gonna overemphasize surgery, fat removal, and an attitude that science will save you by discovering the tiny little cellular mechanisms that hold the key to all of life's mystery, especially weight loss. You know, and we go on a quest for perfect health, absence of disease, get rid of this weight. I'm never gonna feel suffering again. And that whole journey itself is fraught with suffering.
Goodness knows how many clients I've seen who have been living in this universe, and they are feeling abused and beat up, and they don't even know why. And they have been powerless, and they don't even know why. And they're not getting where they wanna go. They're not getting sustainable weight loss, they're not getting sustainable appetite regulation, they're not getting sustainable health. And they don't even know why. Because they're doing what they were told they were supposed to do, which is eat less and exercise more. They're counting calories, they're limiting their food intake, and their appetite is screaming at them, and they're eating low calorie fat, they're eating low fat, and they don't understand why they're binge eating.
It's because we've left out so much of the feminine.
When we're waiting for science to save us, when we're waiting to find the right piece of nutrition information, masculine science, the masculine, if we are putting all of our energy and religious energy and belief system into this, is this is what's gonna save me. Um, we stop the questioning process. You know, it's, it's like, I don't know if your kid is acting up, if your kid is having a hard time, if your kid is yelling and screaming and you look at your kid and you look at your partner and you say, you know, someday we're gonna discover the gene, the switch, the nutrient to just have happy, nice, wonderful children. We're, we're, we're gonna get there someday. So let's put research money into that. And, and well, maybe it's about your parenting. Maybe it's about understanding what's going on in your kids' life. Maybe it's about seeing the big picture, what's happening with them. Yeah. What are they eating? Yeah, what's going on at school? Yeah, what's going on in their personal life? We've stopped the questioning process when we keep thinking that everything is just about chemistry and the science of things. Now, I'm not anti-science. I want you to get that. I am overemphasizing in this conversation how much we've overemphasized the masculine approach. I am a nutrition science junkie, so I feel very qualified to critique it night and day because I love it. And it needs to help itself. It needs to grow up. We need to include a whole different approach. So we've been emphasizing the masculine approach to nutrition in this world, and in this training, we're simply emphasizing a feminine approach just to rebalance the conversation. Again, that doesn't mean the masculine approach is bad. You've heard it, you've read it, you've seen it. You can get it online. You could consume a thousand books and a thousand trainings, which will continue to tell you all about it. All the clinical stuff, all the nutrition science. And if you keep praying at that alter thinking that it's gonna change your relationship with food, body, and health, and you have been, and it hasn't changed it, then use your wisdom, my friend, and understand, ah, we're gonna look in a different place. We're gonna go down a different road. We're going to expand the field, open it up, we're gonna heal it, we're gonna make it more complete so we can help get where we wanna go. What does that mean? Let's look at what a more feminine, archetypally feminine approach to nutrition would look like if you don't like the word feminine substitute a yin approach, but iss good. So it, it, it emphasizes nourishment over nutrition. So, and that's a feeling in your body. If something is truly nourishing for you, persons, places, things, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, foods, then my assertion is it is actually nutrition for your body. It changes how you metabolize that food if something is truly nourishing for you. So does this food nourish you? Does this meal nourish you? Are you tuning into your body? Are you tapping into it? The feminine archetype emphasizes pleasure, nourishment, connection with food over feeding. Feeding yourself means here's the food, here's my body. Food is a collection of chemicals. My body is a collection of digestive organs. I'm gonna take this collection of chemicals, food and put it in my body, collection of organs, digestive organs, and then a scientific process will happen. I will digest that food and I will just go about my business. Okay, well, it just so happens that there's a human dimension to that. And if you don't eat slow, if you don't eat in a relaxed way, if you're eating well, multitasking. If you're eating and you're not paying attention, um, if you're eating and you're not present, if you're eating and you're speaking negatively to yourself, all of that will impact your metabolism. So all of a sudden, the experience of a meal, the pleasure of it, the nourishment of it is literally creating our nutritional metabolism is, is literally scientific, but we don't see it. So the feminine distinction in nutrition is that the feminine is willing to enter into the mystery of food, the mystery of nutrition, as opposed to standing in scientific certainty all the time. And unless we have scientific certainty and unequivocal scientific proof of this food, that food this chemical, that, that herb, that vitamin, then it doesn't mean anything. You know, I remember when I was a college student, I was a, I was a junior in college. How, how old was I? 18, 19, 20? I don't remember. But I was a young kid and I, I was at a, my roommate had a, I don't know, his family had a Christmas party. I was invited over and one of his relatives is a doctor. And this doctor had heard that I was into nutrition and herbs. So my, so this is back in the 1970s where nutrition was almost a dirty word back then, honestly. And herbs, you might as well have said witchcraft. Now, at that time, even with herbs, there was still, there was a huge amount of research on herbs, but it, it was an arcane field and you had to dive deep into the research and you had to go, you know, into a medical library. And not only that, so much of the research on herbs was done in Europe and done in India and done in China. So you had to find the translations of those, or you had to know how to read German, or you had to know how to read Italian, um, or read Chinese for that matter. So anyway, so, and I was taking herbs and experimenting with herbs, and it was really helping my health. And anyway, I'm in a conversation with this doctor and he says, listen to me. He said, this herbs stuff is a bunch of nonsense. He said, and the only way I'm gonna believe any of it is if I see, you know, double-blind research on herbs. And that's it. And I remember thinking, wow, like, really? Wow. So you are unwilling to try this and see how it feels in your body. Fascinating. You are unwilling to try this herbal digestive formula and notice, wow, this helps me digest better. You are unwilling to take this immune enhancing herb and notice in your body, Hey, I see a difference.
If you look at the history of herbs, if you look at Chinese medicine, if you look at Ayurveda, there was no, you know, double-blind placebo controlled studies. How did they figure this out? These ancient systems, Ayurveda, Chinese five element theory, that's the herbs and the herbal formulas to this day, they're so brilliant and we still have no idea in so many ways why they work.
Somebody back then was tuned in on a whole different level. So the feminine distinction in nutrition will emphasize flow over meal plans. Okay, this is what you're supposed to eat, uh, six o'clock in the morning, I want you to eat this at breakfast, these five things. And then at 9:45 AM you have a snack that consists of 0% fat yogurt. And, and, and, okay, so you could say, eat this at that time of day. That's fine. That's masculine approach. And there's also a feminine approach, which is, okay, yeah, we can know loosely what we want to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But you know something, the body changes every day. And wow, I'm actually not hungry at breakfast today. Um, so I'm not gonna eat as much. And oh, you know something, instead of having this for lunch today, I'm really drawn to that. I'm really attracted to that tuning in. There's a flow. We have a nutritional flow. If you were truly able to follow your nutritional flow as a human being, you would be eating in a very interesting way that would surprise even you. And it would be correct for your body, because the body is constantly changing. You know that different days you have different energy, your digestion's different, your elimination iss different, you're attracted to different foods. Notice what happens for you over the course of a week, over the course of a year. Um, you know, I, I will get attracted to a food. You know, summertime comes around. I don't think of watermelon ever except when they're in season. And, and I just notice 'em. I'm like, oh my God, I love watermelon. And for two or three weeks, I'm eating a ton of watermelon and I never think of it again. And when I'm eating watermelon, it's the greatest food on the planet. I can't believe how good it is. I can't believe how great it feels in my body. And then I'm done. I don't need to see it again. I don't think about it again. You know, we are creatures of our environment. Doesn't it make sense that when something is growing in your environment and it's the food that's growing in your environment, for goodness sake, eat it. 'cause it's only gonna be here for a limited amount of time. That's your nutrition. And because we are creatures of the natural world, we grow, we heal, we reproduce, we nourish and nutrify ourselves in accordance with what the environment is doing. IE what it's producing to a great degree. So the feminine approach to nutrition, to body, to weight to health emphasizes movement over exercise. I'm calling exercising masculine distinction. Once again, these are not good or bad. We are so conditioned to exercise. You need to do this exercise. And exercise is a tends can, can be, can be robotic. It could be judgmental and punishing. And you are doing it not because you love to do it, you like to do it, you are doing it because you want a specific effect. It might not even feel good to you. It might not even feel right for your body, but you are doing it because it will make something happen. Now, there's nothing bad about that except when it's not serving us. So the feminist emphasizing movement, movement just for the sake of moving. What if you just moved? What if you danced? What if you only exercise in a doing things that felt good? So movement means how does your body wanna move? And once you start to move like that, ah, there's a flow, there's a connection. This is natural for me. I love this. This is such a good expression. I love to walk, I love to hike. I love to be outdoors. I love to do dance. I love to do yoga. You might love to do weightlifting. You might love to do a certain sport. A lot of people are doing exercise that they don't like. How many times my friends have, I worked with clients who I switch their exercise to movement, got rid of all exercise that they were doing that they didn't like, and switch them to movement. How would you like to move? Assuming everything burned equal amount of calories. And that's what ended up moving the needle for them. In terms of weight loss. The feminine emphasizes cooking preparation over prefabricated meals. So the masculine is prefabricated meals, pre-prepared meals. Here it is just, just add water. So that's a masculine approach, extreme masculine approach. The extreme feminine approach is cook it from scratch.
Body wisdom over book knowledge. Okay? You could read a book about nutrition and tells you, don't eat this, don't eat that. Here's why it's bad to be a vegetarian. Here's why it's bad for this, bad for that. And you eat a vegetarian diet and you go, wow, this is the best thing.
You can find a ton of information about really the evils on health of a vegetarian diet or a vegan diet. It's out there. And true, it is that a vegetarian and vegan diet doesn't work for everybody. But man, there are people that it's a revelation for, it's a revelation in terms of health. It's a revelation in terms of energy. It's just a revelation on so many levels. So who cares about the book Knowledge if something is truly working for your body?
Feminine emphasizes eating food, eating food over controlling your appetite, because it's about learning to eat. It's learning to be in a dance with your environment. You're in a dance with the sun. You're in a dance with the time of day. You're in a dance with waking and sleeping. You're in a dance with movement, with breathing, with food. When should I eat? What should I eat? Eat, enjoy it, digest it, assimilate it, celebrate it. As opposed to, oh, I should eat this for breakfast, this for lunch. Whoops, I can only eat this amount. So I have to use my willpower because I'm still hungry. But it looks like if I eat more than I'm gonna gain weight. And if I gain weight, nobody's gonna love me. And you, you're eating from your head. You're not eating from your body, your being, your soul, your true metabolism. You get what I'm saying? My friends? Are you getting the feminine archetypal approach to nutrition? The feminine is garden grown over laboratory grown. Yes, there's some fascinating laboratory created. Foods is a huge movement in the field of food technology to create synthetic meats that are laboratory grown. They're not from animals. There's no animal parts in it. There's no animals whatsoever. But how do you create a, a, a substance, a barger that tastes just like a burger, but there's no meat in it? And, and, and that's fun. That's great. That's interesting. Um, the feminine approach is, Hey, let's just make a veggie burger. Let's make a bean burger. Um, let's eat an animal burger. I'm not saying one is better than the other, it's just that when we overemphasize one at the expense of the other, we can end up going down the wrong road.
So once again, my assertion, when we o when we're over emphasizing one polarity, the masculine or the feminine, this imbalance will inevitably show up as symptoms or unwanted eating behaviors or out of control thoughts. So example, when I think, you know, I need to control my appetite with more willpower. That's a masculine approach. I need to control my appetite. I need to control my appetite. I need to control my appetite. By the way, that's a false concept. No one needs to control their appetite. I mean, that, that is a false imbalanced masculine concept, masculine archetypal concept, not man concept. Why? Because you don't need to control your appetite. You need to learn how to eat. You need to learn how to be in a dance with food such as, oh, I'm eating this. Ah, I was experiencing it. I was sensing it. I was feeling it. My body has had enough time to scan the meal and my body will naturally let me know when I am full, when I am complete. But instead, if I'm trying to control my appetite and I'm artificially thinking I can't eat this amount of fat, I can't eat this amount of food, that by itself will lead to some version or versions of binge eating, emotional eating, overeating, and eventually self attacking thoughts. When you can't control your appetite with willpower, because you're gonna be trying to diet, you're gonna be trying to, uh, calorie restrict food, restrict fat, restrict protein restrict, and your brain is going to scream hungry because it's sensing a nutrient lack. And then you think you have a willpower problem. And the problem is, you've never learned how to be in a natural relationship with your body.
You don't need to control your appetite. You need to learn how to be in the beautiful dance with the exchange of food in your environment. You need to learn how to be in the beautiful dance of eating, digesting, feeling full, experiencing your meal, feeling if it's right for you, thinking a little bit about it afterwards. Hey, did that nourish me? Was it good for me? Was it right for me? As opposed to I need to control my appetite with willpower. Another example, overemphasizing the masculine polarity. I must hit my target weight, really? So, so, uh, and, and my friends, literally hundreds and hundreds of clients that I have had over the years who woo, their life force was driven, hitting their target weight, honestly occupied more of their brain than their job, than their wife, than their husband, than their children. With all due respect and must hit my target weight. And we give our weight. We, we give our power away to this artificially created number. And we can live in massive amounts of self-rejection, and misery. If we don't get to that precise amount, and we think that this number that, that, that we've made into a god, we worship it. Where where does it even come from that number? It's, it's, it's a nonsense number that, that we make up in the masculine mind, because that's gonna help us hit perfection. And I've gotta hit that target weight. And we overemphasize that and we overemphasize that. And meanwhile, we've disembodied, we've abandoned ourselves. We are crushing the intimacy in our relationship with others in our world. When, when you become obsessed with food and body, you become intimate with your obsession. You become intimate with your perfectionism. You become intimate with your false belief and all the energy you put into your false belief that I must weigh this. I must look like that. I must eat like this. I mustn't eat like that. So all day long inside our heads, we're thinking about food, we're worrying about food, we're thinking about weight, worrying about weight, thinking about body fat, worried about body fat. Thinking about who we're gonna be once we hit that target weight, thinking about, or the misery we're gonna suffer if we don't hit it thinking about, oh my God, I shouldn't have eaten that. I should have eaten that. I gotta do this different. I can't believe I did that. And you know what? That whole conversation
is like spraying intimacy, repellent all over you.
It's spreading wisdom, repellent all over you.
It will stop intimacy with your partner. It will stop intimacy with the people closest to you, your friends, your loved ones, your children, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. And in essence, you are sleeping with your obsession. You are sleeping with your target weight. That's who you get in bed with. That's who you caress, that's who your hugging and that's who you're writing love letters to. Pretty much pulls us away from life.
When we overemphasize a masculine approach to nutrition and eating psychology, we will think, okay, I I just need to find the right nutritional system. I need to find the right supplement. I need to find the right doctor. And then I will finally get healthy. And we understandably and wisely go from nutritional system to nutritional system, from doctor to doctor, and we don't get where we want to go. And then we never look outside of the realm of nutrition information, of rearranging the food on our plate or rearranging the supplements that were taken. We never looked past that. And we might not notice that. The reason why we haven't been able to get where we wanna go is because of the stress that we carry from a relationship, from a past undigested, undigested experience, from a suppressed deep desire that we have from our own fear of our own body, of our own sexuality, of our own personal power that keeps us small, that keeps us in a stress response, that then changes us biochemically. So yeah, sometimes the answers are found in the nutritional realm. Sometimes the answers are found in the medical realm, absolutely, 100%. And when they are, hallelujah, I love it. And that's not the only realm. So when we're imbalanced, the scientific nutritional macronutrient, nutrient supplement, food and diet realm is the only realm we look to.
And in that realm, because we're imbalanced, it's actually half science, because science needs both the masculine and feminine polarity to be true science. Otherwise, it is imbalanced. Because as we've seen a distinction as simple as how stress and relaxation physiology impacts digestion, impacts mood, impacts energy level and of course impacts weight, impacts calorie burning, capacity impacts, appetite, regulation. That is all scientific information that is buried in the textbooks and buried in the research. Meaning we don't bring it out to the forefront because then what it implies, what that science implies is that science is not just about chemicals, science and the chemistry of the body is influenced by thoughts, feelings, beliefs, science is influenced by your connection or disconnection to a higher power. The science of the body is impacted by how much you do or don't love yourself, how much you self attack my friends, that's stunning information. It's scientific, but we don't hear it as scientific because it sounds airy fairy because it comes from the feminine polarity. And we won't even notice it despite the fact that so much of it is in the research in terms of stress, relaxation, physiology. So then it takes a feminine mind and a scientific mind to go, oh, well, yes, stress and relaxation. But what is stress? And what is relaxation? Relaxation physiology also means self-acceptance. It means positive self-talk, it means self-love. It means nourishment, it means pleasure. All of those put you into a relaxation response, which changes your digestion, your assimilation, your calorie burning power, your physiologic appetite regulation. That's stunning. And we've cast it out because it sounds to the overly masculine scientific mind. It sounds unscientific.
So until we embrace and integrate the feminine when it comes to food, nutrition in the body, women and men will continue to suffer with disordered eating, body hate, self-judgment and obsession over food just the way it is. My friends, you gotta consider this, you gotta think about it.
I just remembered another example that I wanted to share with you. Remember we said muscle is energetically or archetypally. Masculine fat is, um, energetically or archetypally feminine. When we cast out the feminine, we make fat, evil, you know, so a common client that I've seen over the years are young women in their late teens, twenties and thirties who are eating extremely low fat. Why? Because they have the old, outdated, toxic, nutritional belief. Fat and food equals fat on my body. And if I have fat on my body, I will be unlovable and I will not find true love, and I could not be the real me and life will be miserable. So they're going extremely low fat. What happens when a young woman goes extremely low fat? Well, one of the things that will eventually happen, if you go low enough fat, and this is an extremely common symptom of fat deficiency in the diet, or a female body that is too low, in percent body fat is, you'll lose menstruation. Literally, you'll lose your ability to menstruate. So I've had women clients over the years who are in a relationship where they're married and they're wanting to get pregnant and they can't, and they've done everything under the sun and they've had every test and look at their diet. I'm like, oh my God, this is, thank you for coming to see me. This is the easiest thing in the world. On paper, you are, you, you have a fat free diet. No wonder you've lost menstruation. Nature evolution will not let you have a child because that child will be born deformed. So nature is beating you to the punch and is saying, sorry baby, you are not going to give birth. You are not going to have a baby. Why? Because you're in starvation mode. Why? Because you must be living in an environment where there's not enough food. And the way nature works is it wants to give you the best chance to survive and continue the species. So right now, Mrs. Client, you need to survive. You need to get into a different environment where there's more nutrition, better nutrition. So once you have more nutrition, better nutrition, IE essential fat, which that infant is going to need. If you suck all the fat outta your body right now, my friends, you, you, you would collapse and die in a, in a, in a lifeless heap. You know, it's, it's a key constituent of every cell wall in your body, for goodness sake. Um, it's a key constituent of your brain. You would, you, you would, you, you would have no intelligence, no consciousness. We sucked all the fat outta your brain. Um, and of course it takes a little bit of convincing for the women who have gone fat free to eat more fat, who want to have a child because they think it's gonna now make them fat. And on average for a woman who's lost her menstruation because of fat deficiency, doesn't take more than a couple of weeks, sometimes even less, to replete her body and to see menstruation return, IE the brain realizes, oh, thank goodness, we're not starving anymore. So this training, again, will by necessity strongly state the case for including a more feminine approach to food, nutrition, weight in the body. And it doesn't negate the need for the masculine or left brain aspect of these. I really want you to hear that. I really want you to get that. I wanna make another assumption here. Masculine, left brain approaches to life, to politics, to the economy, health, food, science and culture. Um, you know, these have predominated in the western world for a long time. So we're not just talking about food and body and science where talking about in other aspects of life as well, where we have seemingly cast out the feminine and it's time to invite it in. My assumption is that collective evolution happens and personal healing is accelerated when we have more of an integration, more of a balance and a harmony between the polarities. It's simple when there's more of a dance between the masculine and feminine. Notice what we say in our culture. We often have this term, the battle between the sexes. What a horrible concept, by the way, the battle between the sexes, the war between the sexes. How did that begin? Who started that? I think culture. I think media actually instigates that.
Honestly, I think men and women, there's, there's a very natural relationship there that, um,
has been beat out of us in a lot of ways. And we are, I think as a world looking to get back into balance with these energies. How do humans get along? For sure, humans need to learn how to get along. Male and female need to learn how to get along together. We need to learn how to understand each other better.
And we need to understand the masculine and feminine energies within us that uniquely express differently in each one of us.
By the way, interesting scientific fact, I just like to share this. Um, so your brain, left brain, right brain, uh, as it turns out when you're looking at left brain and right brain, um, the two hemispheres, if you track hemispheric dominance, so one hemisphere of the of, of the brain will be dominant in any given moment. Interesting hemispheric dominance in the human brain naturally alternates in cycles that are approximately two and a half hours in length. So for approximately two and a half hours, um, your right brain is more active and then your left brain is slightly more active. So hemispheric dominance, when we measure it just electrically will switch. Now what's interesting, there's two times during each day that hemispheric dominance is naturally balanced between left and right. So left and right brain are equal in electric activity. And those two times of day just so happened to be exact moment of sunrise and exact moment of sunset. And it just so happens that at these two times during the day, learning appears to be maximized. Your ability to learn as maximized mood is most balanced. Wisdom and creativity are most emphasized, and a sense of, uh, wellbeing is most naturally pronounced. A lot of this, this particular research was, um, driven by the science of Ayurveda. Um, and, and literally the yogi's described this phenomenon in a different way, you know, eons ago. So a lot of this research was done in India, interestingly enough. Um, but there's western research as well. So there's something about when there's moments when masculine and feminine left and right, they come into a balance and something good happens, which is interesting to note. So a great practice, a great practice, my friends begin to notice and solve clients, friends, and loved ones where they emphasize masculine approaches in thinking to food, body, and health, and where they're emphasizing feminine approaches to food, body, and health. Just notice, notice, notice. See what you see, what do you see? How does it look like their approach impacts them? How might this be limiting them? How might it be helping them?
Do you have a more masculine approach, a more feminine approach to food, body and health? What does that look like for you? The people closest to you observe the people closest to you. That's how you play with this material to see if it is actually useful for you to see if it actually works for you. What might things look like if you, your friend, your loved one, your client, embraced more of a feminine approach to food and body. So I really hope you're starting to see, get and feel and have a good sense of what the feminine approach to nutrition is, what the masculine approach to nutrition is. The feminine approach is not going to emphasize weighing yourself every day, every minute, five times a day, whatever it is. Quite the opposite. The feminine approach to nutrition will ask, how do you feel when you eat this? The feminine approach to nutrition and eating psychology doesn't care what it says on the scale. How do you feel in your body? It doesn't care what a soulless, emotionless piece of metal machinery on the floor tells you when it feeds you back. A number feminine approach doesn't care, is it's not gonna let that control its heart and its soul. Look in the mirror, my friends. I think you know what I'm talking about. You know, you could be losing weight, you could be gaining weight, gaining muscle, losing muscle. Things change, things switch. The body is in flux. We need to learn how to trust a little more.
You know, a masculine emphasis in counseling and coaching emphasizes fixing broken people. Hey, something broken, fix it. It's very black and white. And you know, sometimes in counseling and psychology, we do need a masculine approach. We do need a one point in approach. I'm not saying that's bad, but this is tends to be the majority approach. You gotta fix this masculine. Approaching counseling emphasizes, just give them information. Just tell them what to do. Hey, eat this and don't eat that. Oh, you're overeating, don't stop it. You're emotional eating. Well, don't do it. Not good for you. How many times have I heard people say that? Um, by the way, usually those are men. Occasionally there are certain women who would say that. And those women professionals have an extremely masculine approach. The masculine approach has, you set goals and you meet them. Nothing wrong with that. The masculine approach is a just say no approach. Just say no to overeating. Just say no to binge eating. Just say no to eating that sugar. The masculine approach looks to change or modify behavior. This is your behavior. How do we modify it? So the behavior is the problem, and you attack the behavior itself. Put the fork down, take two deep breaths, then you won't overeat. The ma and approach says, well, don't let your feelings get in the way. 'cause they're getting in the way. Why would you let your feelings get in the way? Just, just don't feel those feelings or just push them outta the way. Tell that to a person. Tell that to a woman. Tell that to a man who's a feeling person when their feelings are there doesn't work. Masculine approaching counseling is give a meal plans, tell 'em what to eat, and find the right diet for that person. Now again, all of these have their place. Everything I've just mentioned has its place, but when you overemphasize it, people's souls can end up being crushed.
You know, we we're talking about archetypes. You know, it's, it's when you, when you go back to one of the primal creation myths of, of Judeo-Christian heritage, Western civilization, the story about Adam and Eve, that's, that's one of the first stories that so many people learn. So many children learn. And when you actually think of that story, and, and I'm, and I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not attacking the story, but think about it for a second. The guy upstairs makes the first food rule, don't eat the apple.
Lo and behold, the woman breaks the food rule first, just saying, the woman breaks the food rule first she was tempted, she was the weaker one, and then she tempts the man. The man eats the apple, and the guy upstairs says, what? I told you not to do that now you're gonna be punished. The implication is, excuse me, but it's kind of the lady's fault. It's the woman's fault. Now what I wanna say is, you know, I, I'm not saying that this causes our belief system, but certainly what it does is it at least points to what I've noticed collectively is in my experience, women are tending to bear the brunt of a disordered, dysfunctional, challenging relationship with food.
A challenging, dysfunctional, painful suffering relationship with food tends to be overemphasized in women. I am not saying this isn't a challenge with men. More and more and more men are having challenging relationships with food, are having intense eating disorders. But when you break down the numbers of who has eating disorders, binge eating bulimia, the majority are going to be women. When you break down the eating issues that people on average tend to face, the majority at this point in time tends to be women. I think we have to own that. I think we have to acknowledge it. And I think it is a byproduct of an overemphasized masculine approach to nutrition, to food, to body, to life. And that women bear the brunt of it. And a lot of women are suffering in silence because they're doing what they were told to do. They're doing the exercise, they're working hard, they're doing the diet, they're working hard, they're doing what they're told, and they're often doing it for years and years and years. And then they end up suffering and misery because they're not actually being listened to. They're not actually being tuned into, and they're not getting a complete science. They're not getting a complete nutrition. They're not getting a complete eating psychology. So we're changing all that. We're shifting all that. A feminine emphasis in counseling or coaching. You help and assist people on their journey.
You provide wisdom and insight and experiential learning. You have a direction, but you're willing to be flexible and change it. We're embracing feelings. We're listening to them. We're embracing symptoms, we're listening to symptoms. We're letting symptoms speak.
If you went to the emergency room, if you went to a hospital and then you say, Hey doc, you know, I really wanna listen to this symptom and get a deeper understanding of what it means, they're gonna look at you like you're crazy. Um, feminine approach to counseling is looking to create change and transformation from a deeper place. A feminine approach to coaching and counseling is helping our clients discover the changing need of their own body, the flow of their own body, which means we're helping someone embody. Embodiment is not a scientific fact, even though I believe someday we might be able to have certain measurements that point to it. Um, but what I'm saying is, if you are an observer of life and you are, if you are an observer of people, and if you've been doing this work like I have at the front lines, working with people around their food body and health issues, you start to notice who's in their body, who's embodied and who's not. And you have a person who's not embodied and they're very disembodied and they're checked out of their body, and the body is a hateful, harmful, unfortunate place, and they just don't wanna be there, then what is going to happen is they're likely not going to get where they wanna go. And why aren't they get, why won't they get where they wanna go? Because the car is not gonna go anywhere unless you're in it. And embodiment is, it's a non-negotiable need for who we are to get where we need to go. So let's break it down even more.
Masculine approach to weight loss. What would that look like? This is important to detail it out, just so you can get a sense of what the overemphasis of a masculine approach to weight loss is. I'm suggesting that the overemphasized masculine approach to weight loss, the archetypal masculine, remember not just men, it doesn't mean men and women specifically necessarily get rid of that excess weight. Do intensive exercise, restrict your food, counting and limiting fat grams, no pain, no gain, willpower, resist food, measure of success, number on scale. You have to be motivated. Come on, you could do it. Push harder, push harder, exercise harder, go more, go faster, go slower, eat less. It's the goal. What's important? You gotta get to your goal. It's not about the journey, it's the goal. Just get to the goal. So that is the overemphasized masculine approach. And when the softer masculine approach doesn't work, hey, you diet, you exercise, you get motivated, no pain, no gain, you know, all that stuff makes sense. But when we overexercise it, overemphasize it, we over exercise, we over calorie restrict. We forget about the journey because we're so focused on the goal and we're unhappy in our journey, which means we will likely be unhappy when we get to our goal and our goal would not be sustainable. So this is what we bought into and it's an imbalance masculine approach. It, it doesn't express the healthiest aspect of the masculine. I'm calling this imbalanced, which is what we tend to do as a culture when it comes to weight loss. We have a very narrow limited spectrum of the masculine approach to some people need to eat less. Sure do some people need to exercise more? Sure. Believe it or not, when it comes to weight loss, that is not the majority of people, it is a smaller percentage of people. For the vast majority of people, it's a complex of different strategies that need to happen. It's about food quality, it's about food type, it's about timing of meals. It is about being in the optimum state of digestion, assimilation, calorie burning, and natural appetite regulation. It's about the kind of movement. It's about working with our emotional metabolism. It's about working with some of the key stressors in our life that might be impacting our weight. We're gonna learn more about that
feminine approach to weight loss. Let's listen to this symptom. It's divine. It has a wisdom in it. What's this excess weight telling me? It might be telling me to, to exercise more. It might be telling me to eat less, but it also might be telling me to slow down. It might be teaching me about self-love. It might be asking me to look at my upbringing, my relationship with my parents, with my partner. A feminine approach to weight loss will emphasize movement rather than exercise. It'll emphasize finding our natural appetite and being in a relationship, in a flow and a celebration of appetite. A feminine approach to weight loss is not looking to eliminate pleasure from food. In fact, it's emphasizing receiving pleasure of food. So you can actually get the pleasure that any human brain is seeking when it's eating. So when you get the pleasure you seek, you don't need to keep hankering after more food and more food because you didn't pay attention or because you were eating pleasure less food. A feminine approach to weight loss, believe it or not, emphasizes letting go of the scale or it emphasizes de-emphasizing the scale and start to notice how you feel in your body rather than using the scale every day to measure success. The feminine approach is embracing the fullness of the journey and understanding that the journey that you're on to weight loss informs the destination. So if you're hating yourself, self rejecting yourself, self attacking yourself in the journey to weight loss, you cannot possibly end up in a destination of happiness and self-love. So it's self-love rather than motivation from self-loathing, it's being inspired about the journey. A feminine approach to weight loss doesn't say, when I lose the weight, then I'm gonna be the real me. Then I'm gonna be, you know, more confident, then I'm gonna be moving, then I'm gonna go out dancing, then I'm gonna be in my body. No, a feminine approach to weight loss emphasizes stepping into the body right now.
The feminine approach to weight loss doesn't need to rely on numbers to measure itself. Because the feminine is embodied. The feminine is natural. The feminine feels itself. The feminine knows how it's feeling because it moves, because it senses, because it's celebrates, because it's connected, because it cares, because it wants to smile, because it wants to experience embodiment.
Consequently, the feminine is not going to rely on the scale. It will kill the scale. It will destroy it, and then it'll celebrate it. It'll let go of the scale because a scale, a little machine can't tell us. It can't tell you how you feel. It has no right to do that. A feminine approach to food, body health. Weight loss is also tends to be a more soulful one. And the soul is ever changing. The soul is ever growing. The soul needs warmth. The soul needs connection. The soul needs depth. The soul needs to feel itself. The soul needs to be reflected back to itself.
A reminder, my friends, this conversation about masculine and feminine is not about which is better. Both are necessary energies in all life. Ideally, we have an elegant blend of masculine and feminine energies in our relationship with food and body. The kind of blend that works for who you are, who I am, who your client is, that blends gonna be a little different. Sometimes we need more one polarity than the other. And in general, the fields of nutrition, medicine and psychology need a dramatic course correction here when it comes to including the feminine. So that's what we're emphasizing. A more feminine approach to nutrition, to eating psychology. It's been deficient for far too long, and it is one of the main reasons why so many people continue to feel lost and confused and burdened by unwanted eating challenges and thoughts about food and body. It's why people continue to use strategies that sound good on paper that technically should work, but they don't. And then we end up doing the same strategies over and over again year after year. Calorie restrict exercise. How many people have I met when it comes to weight loss that they've been doing some version of that for decades? It breaks my heart and it's clearly not working. But because we've been taught to believe in the religion of the extreme masculine approach to food, body and weight, we keep going to that altar. We keep worshiping their thinking that someday the gods will bestow on us the gift that we've been wanting. Instead of noticing that there's a whole different way. So in the feminine approach, we're learning to welcome food to the table. We're learning to love the body into change. We're learning to celebrate food, celebrate appetite to inhabit the body, to live in the body, to honor the body, to respect it, to feel it, to notice all its nuances.
We're here to learn how to relax into the eating experience. We're here to learn how to relax and trust the body.
We need to trust the body more because if you don't trust the body, you will constantly be living in distrust. You have to trust that when you go to sleep, you're gonna wake up. You have to trust that when you eat, you're gonna digest. You have to trust that when you eat, you'll be okay. You're not going to gain oh, so much weight that you will be oh, so unlovable. We have to trust the natural appetite of the body. We have to trust that we can learn to regulate our challenging emotions.
You know, when we begin to think of this in terms of men and women and these archetypes, um, it's interesting when you look into the heterosexual universe, because that's the one I understand the best. Um, what, what's, what is masculine power? What is the true healthy masculine? Um, what what would a woman say is a good man? What's attractive in a man? He's present, he's aware, he's there, he's committed, he's straight, he's one pointed. He goes for his goals. He doesn't get distracted. He gets them. He's measuring his progress. He sees when he deviates off course, he gets back on course. A good man doesn't get stuck in his feelings and emotions, and he is wallowing in them all day. And he needs you to be his mommy and take care of his feelings. Yeah, he has feelings, but he feels his feelings and he's not getting lost in them and stuck in them such that he's moody all over the place and he needs you to take him out of his mood all the time. So that sense of presence, that sense of personal power, that sense of going for his goals, of being one pointed of making things happen, of taking care of business. Okay, I'm describing that as masculine, as masculine features. Um, what's the powerful feminine? When you, when you go to the men and say, okay, when you go to the heterosexual universe, what's the powerful feminine? Um, what's a powerful woman or, or what do men truly find attractive? Um, what you're gonna find is men are attracted to a woman who's embodied, a woman who celebrates her own sensuality. What does a man get attracted to? A woman who is okay with her body. A woman who's experiencing her body, who's in her body, who is receiving pleasure from being a woman and having a body. You're not gonna say, oh, I really love a woman who hates her body. Men aren't sitting there saying, I want a woman who weighs five pounds less over here, or 15 pounds less over there. And if they are, that's not the guy you want. Feminine power is a woman who knows who she is, who gets herself, honors herself, loves herself, loves to be in her creative self, accepts her emotions, is willing to to ride out with her moods, is willing to be in her complexities, her changes. She can celebrate it, she could laugh at it. She can understand that it's not her. Yes, she has her masculine side, but it's not all of who she is.
So, and yes, and there's deviations. There's different ways that different men, women are attracted to different kinds of men and women and whatever sexual orientation there is. But simply put, what I am trying to say is I am looking at my client. My job as a counselor, as a teacher, as a coach, as a practitioner, is to see my client and just notice their masculine and feminine polarities. Notice their masculine and feminine archetype. If it's a man, how does he express his masculine archetype? How does he express his feminine archetype? Does my client need more of the masculine in his or her life? Does my client need more of the feminine in his or her life? Do they need a squirrel of both? Is my client's approach to their overeating or their binge eating, their emotional eating, their unwanted eating behavior, their dieting, their weight concern? Is it overly masculine? Is it overly feminine? And what direction might I want to experiment with course correcting so we might see a different result?
These are all very fascinating questions. These are all very fascinating places to explore my friends. I hope this conversation was useful for you. If you have benefited from it, I want you to notice what you benefited from. I want you to notice what impacts you. I want you to be honest with yourself. Um, if something didn't work for you, throw it out. If something is agitating you, examine it, explore it. You know, sometimes we need to play with certain concepts. We need to embrace our discomfort. See if there's anything there for us. Uh, this, again, I wanna remind you for, for some people can be a challenging activating topic because we live in a time of gender confusion. Meaning we live in a time of changing definitions of masculine and feminine. We live in a time of changing definitions of sexuality. So these are places, places worthy of exploration who argue as a woman who argue as a man, what does it mean for you to be a woman? How do you truly want to express yourself as a woman? What would make you fulfill fulfilled as a woman? Who are you as a man? How do you wish to express yourself as a man? What does it mean to you to be a man? How do you wanna show up in relationship to your woman or to your man if you're a man, if you're a woman, how do you wanna show up in relationship to your man or your woman? Whatever. It's, these are good questions because oftentimes, oftentimes, oftentimes, oftentimes, our relationship to our own masculinity, our own femininity, or both are drivers,
are factors and sometimes even a root cause of our unwanted food, body, and health concerns. And we will see this play out as we start having conversations about body image. Start having conversations about how actually to work with that. How we work with weight and binge eating, overeating, emotional eating, endless dieting. You're gonna see how this plays out, this, this dance of masculine and feminine. So my friends, please begin to observe yourself. Begin to observe others. Just watch. Just notice, I'm telling you, this is such juicy stuff. I'm telling you, there's a lot of gold here. I promise you. I promise you, I promise you, not only is there gold, but there's tremendous effectiveness here. When you start to notice in your own life where you need to emphasize feminine or masculine more, and in your client's life where they need to emphasize feminine and masculine more, it can be profound. Okay? Thank you so much for being on this part of the journey with me, my friends. I so appreciate it. This is the end of masculine and feminine psychology. We're Gonna be talking next about the psychobiology of Soul lessons, yet another great conversation. Um, I really appreciate you. I really appreciate your time and attention, and can't wait to have the next conversation. Thanks so much.

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