Ep. 124 Weight Loss for Caregivers

This transcript was auto-generated, please forgive any weirdness.

 Hi, and welcome to the mindful shape podcast. I'm Paula Parker. If you're new here, welcome. I founded my company mindful shape and this podcast to help women who struggle with their weight and really reach their desired shape and feel in charge around food. I really know what it's like to feel uncomfortable in your body.

And I released let's say around 45 pounds now. Since then, I have also gotten back to my pre pregnancy weight after having two babies. Right now I'm offering private coaching. So if you are interested in learning more about that, you can click the links in the podcast description, or you can go to mindful shape.

com. All right. So today we are talking about weight loss. Or releasing weight if you are a caregiver. So really this is anyone who has a role currently of caregiving. So whether this is your main, you know, occupation, whether you, you know, I work with a lot of nurses and teachers or it's within your family.

Maybe you are taking care of an aging parent. You've got little kids like me, or you have teenagers, which also require different flavor of caretaking.  Really this episode is going to apply to anyone who puts other people before themselves. All right. So there are particular struggles that you deal with.

And I want to talk about those. And then I also want to talk about particular strategies that will help you just in general, in terms of your mindset and in terms of how to release weight and keep it off. Let's just. kick it right off talking about rage eating. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I said. I said rage eating.

So this is eating from anger. You might have heard about it before in terms of storm eating. So this is when we are feeling anger in our body and we're thinking, you know, screw them or screw the situation or something that feels terrible in our body. And so we need a release. We need relief from that.

So we turn to food because why the food is right there. It's available. It's easy. And it temporarily gives us a moment of distraction from that feeling inside our body. It also temporarily changes our neurochemistry in the brain. So I don't want you to think that you're going crazy if you are doing any kind of rage eating, okay?

It's not that uncommon. And to help, I'm going to briefly explain how eating, even when you're mad, changes your neurochemistry. So it changes your brain chemistry every time we eat, but specifically let's talk about how, what's happening, what's going on in your brain. Because I always say there are valid reasons we turn to food and overeating.

You don't need to think that this is just something about you, that there's something wrong with you. All right?  Eating food immediately impacts brain chemistry in numerous ways. I'm going to talk about three right now, mainly through neurotransmitters, hormones, and energy availability. But here's a breakdown of what happens.

Again, I'm just going to talk about three things here. Focus on three things. One is a dopamine surge. So again, dopamine, I've talked about it a lot. It's your drive. hormone. It's involved in reward and motivation eating, especially foods high in sugar, fat, or salt triggers a dopamine release in the brain's reward center.

So this is what makes food very pleasurable and then keeps us coming back for more. It just reinforces that eating behavior. Even if we're feeling like. We're feeling sick or we're not even enjoying it anymore. Your brain is, has that drive to continually get pleasure because it's received pleasure before.

So it will continue to reinforce that behavior. This is when we can feel like we're eating against our own will, or we don't know why we're eating, even when we're not even enjoying it is because of this.  The second is we get a serotonin boost. So serotonin is involved in your mood and also your satiety. 

You know, bread, crackers, cinnamon buns, they stimulate an insulin release, which helps amino acid tryptophan cross the blood brain barrier. And that converts into serotonin, which is you can think of serotonin as a feel good transmitter. Okay. This is why if you eat a meal that's really carb dense, really heavy in carbs, it can temporarily improve your mood.

Like you feel.  Simulation, you like feel a little high off of it. You feel in a good mood generally, your spirits are high, but then it can often lead to a crash later on. And then the third one we'll talk about is cortisol and stress modulation. So eating can lower cortisol, especially if you've been in a fasting state, it can lower your cortisol because when you fast, sometimes cortisol can rise.

This is, as you know, the stress hormone. So it helps you feel more relaxed. immediately. However, as we know, when you are eating excessively over a period of time or, and, or you're choosing ultra processed foods, that of course will trigger a stress response in the longterm, right? It held a negative impact on your cortisol over the longterm. 

Okay. So that was a little breakdown of your neurochemistry. So you're not crazy. There's very valid reasons why you would be doing this. Okay. When you feel anger, especially as it pertains to your caregiving duties,  it could be a boundary issue, meaning you need to set one. So don't think of anger as a problem that causes you to overeat, but as an indication that you can change things and make it better.

So maybe it's a boundary around your personal space or your personal time that you need to set.  Same is true for resentment. Resentment can stem from a perceived unfairness. So I always give the example of if I'm, if I come downstairs, I've been cleaning and I come downstairs and my husband is like on his phone or watching TV and I feel resentment.

Why? It's because I'm perceiving it as like, it's not fair. It's not fair that I'm doing all this cleaning and he's relaxing. That's unfair. That's why I feel the resentment. All right.  I think you were probably expecting this when, you know, you look at an episode about caregiving, we don't prioritize ourselves.

Okay. So meaning that there's nothing left in the tank and then we can eat from exhaustion. So our thought is I just need this food as a reward. You're seeking a break. You're seeking pleasure, something just for you. You're trying to escape the demands on you, the pressure. This makes perfect sense, right?

There's a lot of seeking. And a lot of escaping and we use food to do that. All right. Another thing is that your to do list is probably a miles long and there's hardly anything on there that's nourishing for you. So nourishing is going to be fill you up. It's going to be something that's just for you.

So that might be meditation. It might be your workouts. It might be. A nap. It might just be going shopping. If you were a really busy person, you might not get to do some of these things as regularly as you like. And if you're a caregiving, you're doing so much for others and not doing as much for yourself.

One thing that I heard once and I thought was really helpful and I started doing it was I put me as a priority on the calendar, like that exact phrase. Me as a priority. And I haven't decided exactly what I'm going to do in that time, but that's just 20 minutes as me as a priority, because I'm reminding my brain, I'm changing my self concept into somebody who I take care of me, right?

I'm the asset in my business. I'm the number one asset in my business, right? I need to take care of me. I'm also a very important asset in my family. If you don't protect your assets, if you don't take care of your assets, they are not going to be available. They're not going to be available. The reason that we need to take care of ourselves is so that we can be an amazing caregiver for those people that we care about. 

All of that to say, don't let self care be yet another thing on your to do list that you are not doing right. Okay. This might be a season of life where you are in the role, or maybe this is your career. And then you're not going to make a lot of circumstantial changes, but it's more a case of getting really skilled at handling it with how you're thinking and working with your emotions, working with all the emotions that come up like that, like the anger and resentment that I talked about earlier.

And I'm going to talk about some more specific strategies in a minute on kind of more of the thinking around that. Let's talk about nourishing thoughts.  I was just working. This example came up kind of in a different context, but I think it works here too. So my son just turned four and he's in swimming and there's a little girl in his class who's three.

Her name's Stella. And she, she's one of those kids who, you know, Stella is always going off to the side. Her mom's always wrangling her in, like she dances to the beat of her own drum. She is just doing her own thing. So there's this little exercise that they do in which they get up. on the side of the pool, on the edge of the pool.

And the teacher says, Okay, now you're going to be little seeds that grow into trees. And they say, What kind of tree are you? And my son Tristan he's like, I'm an apple tree. I'm like, okay.  And then the teacher says, Okay, and what does a tree need? And it's like, Oh, they need water, right? Tristan will say, It needs water.

And you sprinkle some water on them. And what else do they need? Oh, they need sunlight, right? You ask little Stella. What does she say? She said dragon's fire. Yeah. So her little Stella's tree, she needs dragon's fire to grow. Okay. So I love this thought because we, we need different things to nourish us.

Nourishing thoughts might be a thought that. Lights up that fire within you. So much of our thinking is on default. It's like a program in our mind. It like dampens that flame. It dampens that fire inside of us, that fire that maybe set the desire, set the goal of how you want to feel in your body, how you want to look, how you want your shape to be, you might have a few.

Classics in terms of a program that you have running in your brain, which I definitely do. Okay. I am not like sitting on a perch telling you that I don't have this and you need to change it. Not at all. Definitely have this too. I'm working on it too. So a program my brain likes to offer is there's so much to do and not enough time.

There's so much to do and not enough time. I'm sure as a caregiver, you can relate to this. No one appreciates what I do. I hear that a lot from clients too, or my caregiving clients is I'm doing so much. It takes so much time. It takes so much effort. I'm doing all of these things and nobody is appreciating it.

I don't feel appreciated.  I'm too tired. It's another one. So we say I'm exhausted. I'm too tired. And another one. It's hard. Whether that's the caregiving that you're doing, whether that it's life in general, whether that's weight loss. Okay. And eating the way you want to be eating. It's hard. So here's what I want to offer about those programs running in your brain.

Those thoughts is it's okay that your brain thinks that. Right? It's okay. It's like totally okay that your brain thinks that we want to bring some humanity to it and the energy of those thoughts, we can actually think of them as real things. Like think of your thoughts as real things like thought forms.

They have a real impact. What is the energy of them? What is the energy of thinking those thoughts? So while we can say, yeah, it's cool that my brain goes there, you can also practice thinking intentionally as a counterbalance. So what thoughts are going to be nourishing you? That's going to fuel that fire that you have inside of you, that dragon's fire, right? 

The nourishing thoughts for what you want. to help you eat on your plan, right? To help you do all the things you want to do, move your body in the ways that you want. So let's talk about the ways of thinking about being a caregiver, having that role that brings you more energy, that fuels that inner flame inside you so that you don't get so depleted.

All right. So let's go through some examples, the examples that I gave earlier, just to give you an idea of how to work with them when they come up, because Who knows? Sometimes you hear something one time and it clicks and it makes all the difference and it changes everything forever.  You're just in the right place in the right time and you're ready to hear it.

First thought, there's so much to do and not enough time. Here's my counter thought to that. Everything will get done in its own time. There's no rush. I can only do one thing at a time. All right. Again, these are the thoughts that we want to remind our brain. We want to practice. We're just planting the seeds right now.

These are thoughts that you can really think about. What is the impact when I'm. I'm always thinking I'm running that program maybe on a daily or even hourly basis of there's so much to do and not enough time. Like how does that feel on your body versus everything will get done in its own time. There's no rush.

I can only do one thing at a time. It's good enough. It's just good enough, right? Next one is no one appreciates what I do,  so I'm going to push back on this a little bit.  Why might you need appreciation?  Is it a validation thing? Why might you need that validation? What if you didn't? Yes, of course, it feels nice when we are validated, but what if it could just be okay to have you validate you?

So without someone else appreciating all the things you do or validating you.  There's almost something really beautiful about that, right? When you don't need that. I work with a parenting coach and we're talking about this recently. Like you can be so dependent on so solid that others will take you for granted. 

Right? Well, how could that be good? Because they depend on you. They rely on you. You're not going anywhere. You're reliable. You create safety and you create stability for someone else. That's who you get to be. Also, you get to appreciate you. We aren't great at doing that for ourselves. Let's be real. So probably why we look for it externally.

We are not acknowledging what we are accomplishing. We are not appreciating us and all the effort that we're putting in. So take this opportunity, just note for yourself, what's one thing that you are doing that you can be proud of that you can just acknowledge yourself for. Okay. If you can get in the habit of doing that or working with a coach or having somebody like up your partner, like my husband's great for doing that for me, have somebody in your life who really acknowledges what you're doing and puts the effort in.

Okay. That, that does help. You know, it's counter to what I just said, which is do it for yourself.  If you could have somebody in your life that helps point that out to get you to do it for yourself, right? It's not, we're not relying on them to do it. They're triggering that thought or helping maybe triggers, not the right word, but helping them, helping us access it.

So, it's reminding us to do that for ourselves. Yeah, you know what? I am doing a lot. I am accomplishing a lot. I am doing the hard work. And just giving yourself a pat on the back for that.  Next one is, I'm too tired. I've been thinking about this a lot.  It often plays into overeating. And I did read a study that tired people eat 30 percent more calories.

Okay, so, I don't know the details of that study. If you're interested in the research, feel free to look it up if you want the stats. I don't know where it came from. You know, you hear these things and it's just kind of sticks in your head. So how true it is, I don't know. But I do know just from my own personal experience that when I'm tired, I do have more thoughts around food.

And it kind of makes sense if you think of the brain knows that food is energy. And so if you're feeling Less energy. It makes sense. So your brain would say, how about more food? Like that could help, right? Totally makes sense. What's your relationship to being tired? Have you ever thought about it? What are your thoughts and feelings about being tired?

What did you learn about being tired growing up? Like, what was modeled to you? I don't have a great model of being tired. My memory of what tired, the experience of being tired is, is my mom coming home from work and being exhausted because she didn't like her job, me wanting to do things. with her and her saying, no, I'm too tired.

Right. And so of course that I interpret that as a very negative experience. So how about you? Like, was it a normal thing? Was it a very common thing? Was it a negative thing or was it more neutral? So my husband's a great example.  His relationship with tired is much more neutral than mine. I feel like his thoughts are a little bit more like humans exert energy and then they need to rest, right?

They know when to rest because then they get tired. Right. It's an indication of, Oh, I just need some rest. When you're a caregiver, you don't often have the luxury of resting when you need to, you are tired. There is no thought work we can do to change that circumstance. Okay. However, we can improve our relationship to feeling the physical sensation of being tired.

So it's how we're thinking about it. We're thinking I'm relaxed. I'm tranquil. Rest is coming. I had a client say this recently. I never even heard that before, but what she tells herself is sleep is coming. Like I'm going to be sleeping tonight. It's going to be okay. I'll fall asleep. Food is not rest. Food is not sleep.

It can be helpful just to remind ourselves of that. Oftentimes when you have thoughts around food, it's not the food that you need. It's the energy. It's the relaxation or it's the rest. It's not the food. It's not the calories. Notice the more you say, even if it's in your own head, I was noticing this weekend for me, I kept on saying in my head, Oh, I'm so tired.

I'm too tired. Notice it makes you more tired. I think I'm a little bit more tired just saying all this, saying that word so often. So it doesn't. Help us. It actually reinforces that. Remember, it's okay to be tired and just try to create some awareness of how often you are saying that to yourself. See if you can start to change your perspective or start to change your relationship with that physical experience.

I'm relaxed. I'm tranquil. Let's talk about the last one. It's hard. And I would say if you are in a heavy caregiving space right now in your life,  or this is your main job, your occupation, whether that's being a mom or that is in as your professional role, it is,  it is hard. It's hard. Because of the emotions you feel in your body that is uncomfortable in your body. 

And I want to offer that expansion feels uncomfortable.  So whatever it is that you are doing, that's hard. It's expanding you. It's expanding your capacity of what you are capable of doing, of what you are capable of handling. It's hard, you're hard. It's tough, you're tough.  You are expanding your capacity to handle that.

I often go and pick up my kids at the end of the day. My husband does the drop off and I do the pick up. And it usually goes well, I have to say. But there has been enough times where it was very difficult, where there was lots of crying and it's emotionally taxing, physically taxing and emotionally taxing on my part.

Enough times that now I really have to mentally prepare myself before I leave the house. I have to literally say inside my head, okay, I can handle whatever they throw at me. I can handle it. Again. I learned this from my parenting coach, who's amazing, by the way, you have to, you have to look her up. She has a podcast called how to become, or what is it called?

It's called Oh, become a calm mama. So if you haven't heard it already, be sure to look that up. If you're a mom.  All right. If I don't have that thought I can handle it, I will feel some dread in my body, even though, of course, I'm excited to see my kids, right? I love them so much and I'm excited to see them.

I will feel some dread about that experience. I will feel some anxiety in my body also.  So the opportunity there is to just get clear and get into the habit or get into the practice of  what do I need to be thinking? To expand my capacity to be able to handle whatever's coming up when I do believe it is hard, there are some difficult or challenging situation because of the emotion that's tied to that for me, based on how I'm thinking about it.

Now, does it alleviate all suffering or anything? No, of course not. But it does alleviate it. That dread and anxious feeling that I have when I get there and I can remind myself I can handle it. Right. It just makes me more calm. It makes me able to show up as the mom that I want to be  as a caregiver that I want to be.

So what is it in your thinking right now, whether it was any of the examples that I gave or maybe some of your own that you want to just take a look at, okay, what is the energy of this thought? Is it, you know, fueling that fire within me and making me feel stronger, more capable? Is it expanding me as a person or is it dimming my light a little bit?

Is it making me feel like I'm less competent, that I don't have the energy, that I am more tired? What is the impact of it? It's not saying that there's anything wrong with your brain going there. Your brain is going there. It's just going there. We have to accept that and we can start when we are aware of it, then we can start to shift it if we want to. 

So I hope this was helpful to all the caregivers out there. A big thank you. We have all had experiences where we had someone caring for us and it made such an impact, whether that was during a hard time, like I'm thinking about, you know, when you're in the hospital and you're going through a delivery, I had amazing caregivers.

I had some not so great ones, but I also had some really amazing ones and it really makes a difference. I've had people like my mom and my parents who We're amazing caregivers in so many ways. And you're just making a difference whether it's caregiving one person and you're making difference for them, or this is part of your role in the world and you're impacting lots of people.

It makes such a difference  and you need to take care of you. Okay. So taking care of you. I know we didn't talk specifically about a lot of weight loss today, but taking care of you is going to take care of your nervous system. And it's going to make it such that you will not need food to cope. You will not be turning to food as often to escape what you're going through and seeking all of that pleasure because again, you'll be self regulating.

All right. I hope that was helpful. I will talk to you again soon.