Food Addictions and How To Break the Cycle with my Hubby Jon [Episode #675]

Today’s solocast topic is: Food Addictions and How To Break the Cycle with my Hubby Jon

I am so excited to have my hubby Jon back on the show today as we discuss food addictions and how to incorporate the Four Cornerstones to break the cycle and start living a life of purpose.

Topics Covered In Food Addictions and How To Break the Cycle with my Hubby Jon

• Touching your skin, moving your body and connecting to your digestion
• Stress management on a daily basis with a morning routine, meditations, journaling, routine and rhythm
• Healthy community and connections
• Emotional freedom and wellbeing
• Self-connection and awareness

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Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

• Practical Ways to Heal Your Relationship with Food by Feeling Into Your Intuition
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• Living Joyfully Beyond Addictions with Dr. Rebecca Williams
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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly: 00:00 Here we are, babe. It’s been a little while since you’ve been on the pod, but I’m so happy. You’re back here today.

Jon: 00:07 Um, back

Kimberly: 00:08 <laugh> And we are actually shooting on our porch here in Hawaii. So all those beautiful bird sounds, maybe some rain.

Jon: 00:19 I love it. You know, a, uh, I was the park the other day, uh, with one of our children and somebody said Aloha to me when I was leaving is like Aloha, like Shalom. Like I can just, you know, use it as necessary.

Kimberly: 00:35  I think Aloha is greetings and it is also goodbye.

Jon:  00:38 I like, it’s a nice goodbye.

Kimberly: 00:40 Yeah. It’s like respect. Goodbye

Jon:00:42 Is a word it’s like kind of like, oh, you’re leaving <laugh>

Kimberly: 00:46 Is

Jon: 00:46 A

Kimberly: 00:47  Hello? Yes. It’s

Jon: 00:48  Like an optimistic thing.

Kimberly:  00:50 Yes. So we’ve been, we’ve been back and forth of course. And it’s just, it feels so nourishing. We’re here in the greenery. We’ve been camping, we’ve been farming and it’s been a great place for us to, um, really get healthy together. We’ve been eating a lot of greens back to our topic today, which is about overcoming food addiction. So this is something that obviously, babe, I’ve been talking about food for so many years. I feel like I’ve been through my own sorts of food addictions with having eating disorders, you know, long time ago now, but back in high school and then just relying on food as a comfort source. I think in, in college I did gain some weight. I was partying a lot and then it just, you know, it’s, there’s been this interesting shifting around my relationship with, with food. And I think that most everyone as a food journey, and I know you have a food journey, babe. Um, because we tend to put our emotions into all these different things where emotions don’t really need to be including food. I mean, easier said than done. It’s a really, um, complex topic, but I’m so excited to talk about it because you and I have been talking about this with your spec, you know, your personal food journey. And, um, I think that there’s a lot we can share about tips to help overcome mm-hmm

Jon:                              02:12                <affirmative>

Kimberly:                      02:13                This addiction.

Jon:  02:15 Yeah. Um, it’s a powerful conversation because on the other side of this conversation is really either what you numb yourself with to avoid doing the things that, um, are, you know, painful or part of your purpose that are, are difficult. Um, and so it’s just, uh, it’s not like it’s not a light conversation about, you know, food. It’s about life’s purpose.

Kimberly:                      02:52                Um, it’s about energy life’s purpose, where we direct our energy. And,

Food and your life’s purpose

Jon:                              02:56                And maybe it’s not clear when I, when I say that. Um, but what, what I, what I realize is that, I mean, I say the word drug as numbing agent, anything can be a drug. Anything can, drugs are numbing agents for, for me. And I mean, food is a drug we have to eat to, to nourish ourselves. But a lot of of eating comes with a lifestyle, you know, like, like I look at a lot of the joy that I get from a lot of things. And I mean, like literally joy in the moment, the fleeting, you know, joy, like I think about what I’m going to eat. I get excited about it. I, then I go to the grocery store, I, then I prepare it. Then I overeat and have to take a lot of time digesting the foods yeah. That I eat. And so when, when you think about it, say you’re sleeping a third of your life. I’m probably spending 40% of the time that I have on this planet. Thinking about, uh, and preparing and recovering from eating.

Kimberly: 04:07 Mm-hmm,

Jon:  04:08 <affirmative> a huge percentage of, of life and of waking hours. A predominant amount of, of waking hours is concerned and involves with food, which is, is, uh, too much.

Kimberly: 04:25 Yeah. So <laugh> a lot to say there, baby. It, it is interesting when we look at the percentage of time that is wrapped up in this whole food, uh, category where in reality food can actually be really simple. It can taste good. It can be fresh, it can be, um, deeply nourishing, but it is meant to be simple in a sense. And when you go back to the, to the scriptures and the teachings, and of course, right now I’m rereading the Bava Gita for the 20th time, and there’s this, um, section that really makes me reflect on my food journey, where it went from unhealthy tendencies and overeating and purging into really focused on being healthy, but it was still a lot of energy around food.

How self-discipline plays into what we eat

Kimberly: 05:22 And then there is another, a level beyond that where it gets really simple. And like you said, all that energy 40%, we redirect into our purpose, into our goals, into our, um, meditations into our self connection. So there’s this, uh, part, this latter part of the Gita, which talks about the 26 soul qualities that humans must develop up in order to reach our fullest potential. And one of them is self discipline or tapas. And I’m just gonna read a sentence here from yoga Nada’s commentary on the Gita. He says the profound purpose of tapas is to change. And man, his quote, bad taste in preferring transient self pleasures to the everlasting bliss of the soul. So one of the, when the Gita’s talking about sense pleasures, it’s talking about, of course, food, eating a lot of food over indulging in sex, all these things outside of ourselves, which it isn’t that we don’t enjoy them. But again, like you were saying, babe, 40% is going out. It’s just sort of an energy drain versus, okay, I know what to eat, I enjoy it. And I move on with my day. And then all of that other energy is like we said, purpose goals and bigger things in life.

Jon:                              06:35                Isn’t that interesting that it’s called tap as when I know of tap’s a small, delicious plates of food that allowed me to try a variety of different things in the same meal. Um, but anyhow, uh, yeah, I mean, I’m at a phase where I’m aware of this. Yeah. But like, and for the last couple weeks, and I really kind of have gotten clarity on this cuz for two plus weeks I just ate fruit and vegetables.

Kimberly:                      07:04                Yes.

Jon:                              07:05                And what I realized eating fruits and vegetables is one and I love fruits and vegetables, but like it’s not super enjoyable. I wasn’t looking forward to meals. Uh, I wasn’t getting the same, you know, itch that I scratch when I like eat a meal and fill myself up. Uh, it was more just for sustenance that I will say that I felt strong. It just, food became not enjoyable to me. And so I was like, well, I’m doing this because I like to try new things, but like it’s difficult. And then once you kind of start processing that, and you’re not spending time thinking about meals because you can’t and this and that, even though I definitely had the odd dream about, uh, a delicious meal uh

Kimberly:                      07:59                <laugh>

Jon:                              08:00                You know, like you’re not getting that itch scratched. Like you have all this time to actually focus on other stuff. Like you say, it’s not a little thing. It is a huge,

Kimberly:                      08:10                Don’t you feel like you’ve had so much more time and energy though, past few weeks?

Jon:                              08:14                I don’t think I’ve had more energy. Uh, maybe I have actually

Kimberly:                      08:17                You seem a lot more energized to me, baby.

Jon:                              08:20                I definitely didn’t have a low energy, which I was surprised by because you know, I’m a big protein guy and my protein, uh, you know, I was eating a lot of, uh, I was eating like nutritional yeast and stuff like that, but, uh, not the same levels of protein. And certainly, you know, it’s interesting also is I track my glucose, uh, where like it can continuous glucose monitor and I track my, my metabolic score through levels. And, uh, even though I was eating way more sugar than, uh, I normally eat my glucose was more stable than it’s ever been.

Kimberly:                      08:57                Mm-hmm <affirmative> mm-hmm

Jon:                              08:58                <affirmative> my score was in the mid nineties, which it never is. It’s never crazy out of whack, but it was like very high. And I was eating sugar with every, you know, throughout the day at, at every meal.

Kimberly:                      09:11                That’s, what’s so funny. I think about all these like quantitative formulas and ratios and all the biohacking stuff. It it’s very reductionist. It goes down to numbers and all the people that are scared of bananas or fruit because they have sugar. But the truth is, is I’ve been preaching for so long. And people like Dan Buettner from the blue zones, these foods are from nature. We’re part of nature. We’re meant to eat these foods. They’re in a complete nutritional pack with fiber and all these things. So anyways, yes. But I wanna go back to what you were saying about, it’s a, it’s a difficult thing to break the emotional time. Yeah.

Jon:                              09:44                So it’s less enjoyable. That’s the whole thing is in the moment it’s less enjoyable. What I really wanted to was a cheeseburger.

We discuss how to phase out of attachment with food

Kimberly:                      09:50                Right. But what, so what I’m saying is there is a transition from there to like what I was saying in the Gita where it’s like, oh, we’re not, indul, we’re not overindulging. We’re not putting all our happiness and joy and all these things, which may feel really good. The cheeseburger may feel really good in the moment, but it’s not sustainable. It’s fleeting. So I was talking to a friend of mine, who’s who’s an AA. And he was saying to me that he had to wrap his mind around the idea, like he was part of the discussions, part of what they’re taught, I think is, or what he said is that it’s going to be a different life. So we don’t compare. Right. So it, when we’re moving past food addictions, like we’re moving past heroin or any other sort of addiction, it’s gonna feel really different. So in the beginning, like you said, maybe it may not feel so. Um, but I do think there’s this gradual phasing out for me. I can say that it’s taken me, you know, over a decade to get to this point where I’m just not as attached to food. You see that vapor. So simply, whereas even five years ago, I’m still making lots of recipes and doing all this stuff and experimenting and that’s that’s can still always be the, are for people that are passionate about making things. But I wasn’t passionate.

Jon:                              11:02                I look at that and I see your simple food and your brown rice and your lentils and everything. And I’m like, yeah, but you also don’t get, you eat for nourishment. Yes. You don’t get the same joy from a delicious thing that I do,

Kimberly:                      11:14                But I’m, but I’m saying if you saw the way I ate or you, if you, you could peek back 10 years ago, or, you know, even five years ago or eight years ago, four years ago already long, it was, it’s been this transition where I would really look forward to, you know, plant-based restaurants. I loved coconut ice cream and vegan cheese and all these different things and I would eat for sense, pleasure. So I’m just saying over time shifted for me is, and it doesn’t have to be this, you know, this pushing thing. It’s not hurrying to get there. There’s just been this increase in inner connection. There’s been this increase in meditation. And so along with that, it, you start to, um, gradually transcend without the pushing. So what I’m saying is, while we focus on cleansing the body, it doesn’t have to be the full focus, you know, back to the SA Luna philosophy of the four cornerstones, food body, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth. The way I healed my food addiction was the spiritual growth. Because you realize what you’re looking for in food, you can find in yourself mm-hmm, <affirmative> in increasingly sustainable ways.

Jon:                              12:19                Yeah. And if I look at you, I’m like, well, what she’s eating, cause I’m still attached to

Kimberly:                      12:24                <laugh>

Jon:                              12:25                That sensory pleasure. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And like, I like being attached to it’s something that I like on some level, like I enjoy looking for like, it’s difficult for me not to. Yeah. So I look at you and I’m like, well, you’re the healthiest person. I know. Um, and so I like the, the, the end kind of result of that, which is why I’m like, you know, pursuing different parts of this. But when I see you and your relationship with food and you get, you’re just less excited about it. Like it’s just for you. I’m like, yeah. But like, it’s one of the things that I get so much joy from that I will not get that joy from. And I know where I’m at on this path because I it’s, it’s an addictive yes. Place. And, um, I’ve been here with cigarettes when I smoked cigarettes.

Kimberly:                      13:10                Yes, twenties,

Jon:                              13:11                Uh, and from my early teens to my twenties and, uh, uh, what that path was like is very similar in the sense that like, it got to a point where I was like, man, I don’t feel great. Uh, this is gross. I’m gonna stop. Even though I still wanted to smoke, I still, but I’m like, I’m gonna stop. Cause it’s unhealthy. So I would stop. And then <affirmative>, I would have a couple drinks at a bar. So trying to do it just because it was like health, like unhealthy have a couple drinks at a bar, always want one, have a couple drinks at a bar, start smoking again. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the next day I’d buy a pack and you know, the cycle would repeat itself. And then as soon as I change my mindset from, Hey, you’re hurting yourself. Why are you hurting yourself? Don’t you want to be the best version of yourself. As soon as I understood that I never wanted another cigarette again, you couldn’t pay me to smoke another cigarette again. And I think you have to have that, uh, that clarity and that mindset in, you know, in this, I can see this, like this same cycle kind of repeating itself.

Renunciation and finding peace in your relationship with food

Kimberly:14:17 So yes, it’s, it’s, it’s so interesting. Like you said, whether it’s cigarettes or food, it’s the through line is something outside of ourselves. Right. And when you were saying, oh, <laugh> you don’t necessarily wanna be me where you just see me having a much more pragmatic relationship with food. It’s not that the joy goes it’s that the joy gets transmuted into something else. That’s for me, it feels like this inner fire that builds it’d be, and then you feel much more powerful. And then the word enlightenment comes to mind, which means more freedom. You’re not so tied to the food. You’re not dying to go to this restaurant or to eat this dessert. It’s all this stuff outside of ourselves. So one of the, so another soul quality that I wanted to mention is Tiga in Sanskrit, which I think I’m saying, right, which is renunciation I’ll, IITA say from Yonda.

Kimberly: 15:11 It is the wise path trod by the Devee who willingly gives up the lesser for the greater, he relinquish his passing sense pleasures for the sake of eternal joys. So when I look back on, when I was really into food, even when I was into like really healthy food and I was going to all the restaurants, it was still, like you said, a huge part of my life. You know, I’d go with my yoga friends and we’d make food together and we’d eat in. I would always be thinking about new recipes and all these things. And now I don’t think about food that much. It’s true. It’s taken me a long time to get here, but I think about how much more, um, peaceful I feel inside my, myself. I just, I don’t feel like, just feel a lot more free. I was so tied to food. I was so tied to thinking about it. Did I eat too much? Am I gonna get fat? Can I eat this? Can I eat that? And there really is this, um, gradual transition, which we’ll talk about next, some really practical tips for getting past food addiction. But, um, but yeah, it just transmutes.

Jon:                              16:15                So yeah, I mean, I, I can’t really stress how important this realization is. Yeah. And the real enough. And, and, but I can explain it. I can explain why, because

Kimberly:                      16:30                Oh, here comes the rain think about, yeah. And this

Jon:                              16:32                Is a very real stat that people can relate to. Let’s say a third of your life is sleeping. Okay. Yeah. Let’s say a third of your life for arguments sake is focused on food and eating and preparing and digesting and all of those, all of the, those things, it’s, it’s like basically saying we’re living in a form of a, of a matrix

Kimberly:                      16:59                Yes. Or

Jon:                              17:01                Dependent on food, not for nourishment, but because we’re used to it because we’re numbing it. And so what it’s really saying is your life is pretty much the majority of your life

Kimberly:                      17:11                Sleeping and eating,

Jon:                              17:12                Sleeping, and eating

Kimberly:                      17:14                Everything

Jon:                              17:15                Else into the rest. And do you want to be that person or not? And like, as much as I love food, as much as I’m addicted to food, I definitely do not want my life to be about that.

Kimberly: 17:28 Yeah. <laugh>, it’s true. I’m so glad you laid it out in such a clear way. We’re here in Hawaii. And we went to check out this water slide for, um, Bobby, the other day that I was at this big hotel, which is very different than where we are. We’re in this rural place with our farm, but we were just looking around and we were talking about it. We’re like, you know, a lot of people come on vacation to Hawaii, let’s say, um, and then they’re focusing on which restaurant they’re waiting at the restaurant, they’re getting their food.

Jon: 17:57 You’d be hard pressed to find a person that hasn’t been on a vacation like that in their

Kimberly: 18:00 Life. Oh yeah. I have been on them. Yeah. But then it’s three times a day. And then I, you know, it’s like, then you don’t have as much time to walk in nature in I to do all these beautiful hikes and you know, whatever kayaking do all these things, because so much of it is around food again. And I’m not, I’m not, I’m just saying that, you know, wherever we are in the journey, um, because I know what it’s like to be really deeply entrenched in that as well. It’s a good idea. First of all, just to step back and take a little assessment and say, huh, how addicted am I to food in this moment? So the pathway out, babe, you know, back to the cornerstones food body, emotional wellbeing and spiritual growth. And I’ve always found this in working with clients that if there is food addictions and believe me, I worked with people with very intense food addictions.

How are we processing foods from the Four Cornerstone perspective

Kimberly: 18:47 The pathway is not to try from my perspective. Yes. There’s a part of like teaching about healthy foods, of course. And you know, what’s good for your body micronutrients, all these different things, but a lot of people that are addicted already know that information, right. But of course, if you need to know more about how to eat healthy, truly healthy, please read my first book. The beauty detox solution got lots of info for you there. But then for me, what I’ve seen is that we move attention into the other three cornerstones to heal food. So that means spiritual growth, which we’ll talk about each of these in more detail self, which for me is self connection to the true self who you really are. The formless part of you, not the outer of shell, the physical part, that’s eating the food, but who you are, your infinite potential and then emotional wellbeing.

Kimberly: 19:34  This is so intricately tied to food. How do we process our emotions? How do we process stress? Right? Because otherwise that will get projected onto food. And finally body body is where we start to create more connection to our bodily temple through our skin, through exercise, through all these different practices. We’ll talk about details in a moment where we start to realize, oh, if I eat too much food, if I’m addicted to food, I’m actually over time. Really? Um, squashing my vitality, my life force, I’m aging, my body so quickly. And that doesn’t, we get to, you said that realization that comes the more we start to create more connection to our body, not just the food. Do you see what I mean? So it’s the three cornerstones, the other cornerstones that we start to nourish and put more energy in, and then that starts to heal the food. Cornerstone does that resonate at all with you, baby? It

Jon: 20:26 Does resonate with me, uh, completely. It also kind of starts scratching on the edge of, of once you start going down this rabbit hole, it’s like, but why do I get so much pleasure from, from, from food? Why do I get so much of the joy in my life from these sensory things? Yeah. And is that all there is, or am I looking for a way to actually numb myself to avoid, you know,

Kimberly: 20:54  The unprocessed emotions or the other things? Exactly. Because

Jon:  20:57 Your ego will play tricks on you.

Kimberly:  20:59  Exactly. And

Jon: 21:00 Ego will PRI and not, you know, for any reason other than it’s trying to protect, protect you from, you know, difficult things. There’s not a person alive, who’s become an adult without significant trauma.

Kimberly: 21:14 When I had bulimia, I was 16 years old, you know, and I, I can still remember feeling so alone. So lonely, so terrified, so disconnected. And so I would eat all this full food, cuz it would make me temporarily feel what you feel from food. Like the little ups, like I’m eating this cupcake, I’m eating all this stuff. And then I would feel so bad and guilty. Then I would, then I would purge it out. But looking back, I had no connection to processing my emotions and I had no connection to myself. I had no sort of, you know, real spit virtual practice or awareness.

Jon: 21:49 Well, it’s hard to actually even think about that when you’re so busy thinking about, um, you know, your social life. Yeah. And you know, your goals that are not your spiritual goals, but actually whatever the, you know, the external validations that you’re getting and what you’re supposed to be doing. And so much time thinking about food.

Kimberly: 22:11 Yeah. Well now I look at what like people in the wellness space or the wellness space in general and a lot of people are trading unhealthy for healthy, but they’re still in that obsessive mode where I can also relate to being in that orthorexia where they’re still thinking about food a great amount of time. Oh, let me check my stats. Did I eat too many carbs? Oh, I, I have to stay on this keto, whatever it is, like these rigid food plans, whatever people are doing, it’s still a lot of attention on food. So true healing of food. True renunciation, true. Moving towards enlightenment and freedom means yes, food can still taste good, but we become free from using it as, um, just putting too much energy into it. And again, just like a, when you think about this river, this flow of life, it’s like this big Ette that’s gone off, which is draining a lot of energy.

Kimberly: 23:00 We’ve dammed it up. And then your life force and your energy and your focus and your concentration, your creativity increase so much when you, you get a hold of that food addiction aspect of life.

Practices that connect your body towards self-love and self-respect

Kimberly: 23:47 So let’s go through, um, the cornerstones baby. The first one I wanna talk about is body. Because similarly to food, it’s tangible. You can see your body in the mirror. It’s more dense, gross form. Even though everything is constantly in movement. We know that from quantum physics, but it’s denser. So that means the electron are moving. Everything is, is, is at a level where we can see it. So you can see food and pick it up and eat it and same thing with your body, right? So practices that involve really starting to connect to your body in a deeper way and creating more self love and self respect for your body. I think also heals the food because, um, I don’t think a lot of people realize that digestion is the most energy intensive process of the body. Everything from mast, all the way down to assimilation and elimination, it really takes so much from your body. That’s trying to repair on a cellular level and you know, people think I do this workout. It’s so hard and intense, no digestion takes a lot more energy. So I think, um, for me, when I started to have more self respect for my body it’s, um, some of the practices were, um, working with my skin, which sounds like a really funny place to start, but our skin is our biggest organ. So when I was healing myself, I started to do things like dry brushing and Abiana, which is the AIC practice of self massage. And I started to touch my skin, which sounds really funny, but I actually started to feel more embodied in my body.

Tip #1. Touching your skin, moving your body and connecting to your digestion 

Kimberly: 24:43 And there’s this amazing, uh, trauma expert and author called Peter Levine. And he talks about one, one of his, uh, trauma healing mechanisms is you actually take your hands and you grab the opposite upper arm. And he teaches that about containing a space. So you feel like, oh, I’m safe in me. And there’s this between, you know, you and what’s out here. So he talks about touching your skin as a way to heal as well. We know our, our skin is very VAs related. Um, there’s a million nerves there’s so it sounds funny, but I’ll just share that when I started touching my skin more, it was the beginning of, oh, I’m not just looking at myself in the mirror, criticizing myself all the time. Oh, you’re so fat, da da, da, da. I started to realize like, oh, this is, this is me and this is part of me to love

Jon:  25:36  Mm-hmm <affirmative>

Jon: 25:39 Yeah. I mean, so I, you know, I definitely, and maybe it’s a man thing, uh, be it deeper than that. Uh, but I am pretty rough on my skin. Like I scrub yeah. Me brush my teeth.

Kimberly: 25:54 Yeah. You’re you’re a bit rough. I don’t know if this one resonates with you as much baby, but, but it’s true. Like over time you may, you may connect more to your skin, all these tools like different ones will resonate more with different people.

Jon: 26:06 No, I think that as you grow to love yourself more, you start touching yourself in a more conscious way.

Kimberly:26:12 Yes, absolutely. Um, and the other part of body is exercise. So when I was, you know, back in the eating disorders, deep in the food addictions, the exercise that I made myself do was running, which I absolutely hated, but I was doing it because I was like, you have to be skinny. So I was doing these ways. I was moving my body in ways that felt for me, horrible <laugh>. And then as my self connection with my body grew, I was like, oh, my body naturally wants to move, but it feels really good to do yoga. It feels really good to walk. I don’t have to pound my knees. I had bad knees, um, since high school cross country from running too much. So I started to realize that part of self love is choosing exercise. That isn’t torture. Now I know you love baby. Like we have this amazing gym. You build, you have this, you know, your friend comes over, you got, you do jujitsu. Let’s talk about jujitsu. It was a form of movement that feels really good to you. It lights you up and now you’re spending more time doing things like that, that you enjoy.

Jon:                              27:14                Well, I do both, but I do like, uh,

Kimberly:                      27:16                But you enjoy both.

Jon:                              27:17                I do enjoy both. I like, but like functional fitness, for example, call it CrossFit. Um, those are exercises that are, they’re not like, you know, bulk exercises. Yeah. There’s a lot of flexibility.

Kimberly:                      27:31                Yeah. And,

Jon:                              27:32                And, uh, and balance and a lot of, uh, that associated with that it’s those are not things like running that might be, you know, unnatural to do over long distances.

Kimberly:                      27:43                Yeah. Yeah, no, I’m saying like where you, you seem to really enjoy your exercise. So I think that’s important, but across the board, when you do move your body and you enjoy it, you start to feel connected. And then I think you don’t want to pollute it as much with food. Right? You start to feel like, oh, you know, again, healthy exercise, not what I was doing, which is over pushing.

Jon:                              28:07                You understand that you come at this and most people you’re already on the other side of

Kimberly:                      28:10                This. Yeah. So I’m going back to how, where I was feeling, most people,

Jon:                              28:13                Most people are coming at this from the perspective being like, oh, that makes sense completely. But like, I like eating food.

Kimberly:                      28:21                Exactly. So,

Jon:                              28:22                So this is what happens. So this is the, this is the path. But yeah, but this I’ve been through this with like cigarettes, for example, like, well, I will only, you know, eat, you know, a really delicious meal, say once a month and I’ll look forward to that meal. And so the rest of the time I’ll eat really healthy and I’ll have this like feast once a month, but you know exactly where that goes. Because once you start eating really healthy and feeling really healthy and realizing consciously holy shit, my life is not being obsessed with food. I’m actually allowed to like live a life instead of like grazing essentially like that’s how, that’s the bigness of the topic that we’re talking about. Like living a life with purpose versus spit ending your years grazing. Yeah. What do you want? But then at some point what will happen is that you won’t want that meal it’ll happen that

Kimberly:                      29:15                Yeah, exactly. Will

Jon:                              29:17                Not want that meal, but the drug addict thinks, Hey, but I like having that meal. And eventually that’s just going to go away if you follow

Kimberly:                      29:24                The exactly. So what we’re saying, there’s no pushing, there’s no hurrying together. There it’s this gradual unfolding. When I was deeping my food addictions, babe, I couldn’t even imagine a life without dairy cheese and French fries. Those were two delicious. Those were two of the things I would binge on the most. But now I can sit here and say, you know, sometimes BU gets French fries. He gets French fries and I’ll eat a few, but I don’t, I’m not tied to them. No. Right. And definitely I’m not eating Terry. So we’re saying that this is a gradual process. So if you’re sitting here, like you were saying, babe, and you’re like, oh my gosh, I love to eat. I can’t imagine not eating. I’m not saying that you won’t enjoy food, but I’m just saying, you’ll feel you can feel more freedom. And when you do eat, you could enjoy it, but it doesn’t have to control your life.

Kimberly:                      30:10                Totally. So things like moving your body, connecting with your skin, um, are two ways and also connecting to your digestion. So that’s why I’ve always talked about digestion. That’s why our Solona supplements focus on digestion because when you realize, oh, this is a lot of energy and you start to pay attention to, Hey, I am bloated all the time or it doesn’t feel good to be constipated and constantly have diarrhea. Like this doesn’t feel good. This is your life force are Veta talks about digestion so much. The Vatas talk about digestion because so much of it is tied to your vitality. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So just being aware of, you know, when you eat a big meal or you don’t, or what foods start to make you feel, um, you know, certain ways it’s important to just start connecting to your gut, to your belly, I think in just digestion in general as a really important process in your life.

Jon:                              31:04                Yeah. I also think that the beauty of this and I suspected, you know, these things and I’ve kind of toyed with various diets and, and things of that. And I definitely didn’t expect to be as strong as I was. Uh, that was the real,

Kimberly:                      31:19                Oh, when you were just doing fruit and veg. Oh yes.

Jon:                              31:22                I incur cuz this is, this is something that will, I have a feeling if somebody takes two weeks or a month, but I sit for, you know, a little more than two weeks and I’m still kind of on it. You know, I’ve really just deviated slightly from it. Um, but uh, you’re going to notice these things coming up naturally and you’re going to realize, holy, I spent so much time. I typically spent so much time of my life, occupying myself in some way or another with food related things. And you can’t help, but notice the grossness of the, of that percentage of time that you’re not actually like focus on other things that maybe you think are more valuable to you than just like living a life dedicated to immediate sensory pleasures and not actually like exploring maybe a deeper purpose.

Kimberly:                      32:19                Yes. And I, I wanna say this word again from the top us part, transitory transient mm-hmm <affirmative> so yes, you eat that cookie or 12 cookies. Delicious. And it’s delicious, but it leaves right. So freedom is anchoring in something steady mm-hmm <affirmative> inside of you. Right? The true self is spirit inside of us. Like our potential, our self sustain, our personal power is I’m here. And I don’t, I need, I’m not tied to all this external stuff to feel better. Right. The

Jon:                              32:55                Ultimate fleeting, because if you eat 12 cookies <laugh> yeah. Might be D but as soon as you’re done that last bite, you feel like crap.

Tip #2. Stress management on a daily basis with a morning routine, meditations, journaling, routine and rhythm

Kimberly:                      33:03                Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It is literally a moment on the lips. So, um, yeah. So first of all, connecting more with your body digestion movement skin. The next cornerstone is emotional well being slash mental health. So this means day by day <laugh> and this is a big one I found in clients. This is the one that has a lot of stuff in there, right? To unpack, to see where over many, many years we’ve projected onto food and not, maybe not have been fully aware of it. So a couple things I wanna mention here, number one is stress management on a daily basis. So it doesn’t accrue and build up to this place where we’re like, you know, red alert. I just need to go to that restaurant and eat this enormous meal and drink three glasses of wine to feel better. What we wanna do is start to, oh, manage, like I said, day by day, what are our practices?

Kimberly:  34:04 So that the stress doesn’t get to that, um, critical level. And so for me, it’s about morning routine, how you go into your day, which includes DGS hot water with lemon meditation. And I, you see me babe, by journal every morning. And what it does is it helps to center me. I journal about things I still need to let go of from the day before or, um, you know, just things that are in my mind. And I, for me, writing things down helps to process it. So that’s a big part of my stress management is going into the day, feeling centered from my morning, practice us.

Jon: 34:42 Yeah. I think that, um, you have a wonderfully consistent and established morning routine because you’re just at a different place. Like I have a morning routine that comes naturally to me, but I don’t push myself beyond that. You don’t really push, like you have to journal. I have to make myself journal, which makes, which makes journaling less valuable to me.

Kimberly:  35:09 But in the beginning, like I said, it used to feel really challenging for me to sit in meditation. It was like the last thing I wanted to do felt boring. It felt like I was wasting my time. I wanted to get into the day and I was scrunching my eyes. So I’m just saying you, you keep doing the small daily steps and what happens is your energy shifts to where I am now. I’ve been meditating now for over 13 years, you know, me, babe, I can’t wait to meditate. Like I love being in there. It was not like that in the beginning. So routine and rhythm, the Sanskrit word is Dina char. And the Vatas teach us that when we put ourselves in a daily rhythm, we start to regulate the mind. We start to regulate every part of our life. We start to come into our power from our daily rhythms and routines.

Tip #3. Healthy community and connections

Kimberly: 35:50  Um, when it comes to emotional wellbeing, another important aspect is community. So we are men to be having this collective shared experience. We’re not meant to be isolated or feeling, you know, like we’re off on our own or we’re separate, we’re part of this whole. So I think healthy community is really important, healthy connections. That’s one of the reasons I created the Solluna Circle for like-minded souls, where we come to together, we support each other. We talk, we are zoom every month. We talk about, um, a theme this month, it’s rituals and habits for creating inner security in an uncertain world. So I think it’s just important to find community that feels good to you. Um, as another aspect of mental health, emotional wellbeing, of course there’s many. And I know you and I babe, talk about community a lot. We’ve built so much community in LA. We have this amazing thriving community we’re already building in Hawaii. Isn’t it amazing how amazing our neighbors are. Incredible.

Jon: 36:49 I’m amazed in Hawaii, how organic, um, the, the community building it has been. Yeah. You know, it’s literally just going through life, uh, and bumping into people. And then, uh, people just, I think it’s a benefit of also being on an island in a, in a small community where neighbors like just are more, uh, used to helping each other. Yeah. Don’t you feel like this is the most and you and I have both traveled all over the world. Um, this is the most like helping community that I’ve ever

Kimberly:  37:31 Oh, yeah. Been

Jon: 37:31 A part of and just

Kimberly: 37:32  Beautiful. The

Jon: 37:33 Point of like just the new Yorker and me sometimes is almost a little skeptical when somebody you meet on the street, like instantly is like, oh, I’ll come to your house and like, look at your transmission for, you know, after my gosh after work.

Kimberly: 37:49 Uh, yeah.

Jon: 37:50 And uh, I mean the amount of things like that, that have happened, people coming to our home and, you know, dropping off

Kimberly: 37:57 Bags of vegetables. Yeah, exactly. I mean, everybody is open and every, and you just know everybody has your back. So again, not everybody lives in a place where their neighbors are like that. But like I said, seeking community in all the ways you can check out our Solluna Circle, if you’re interested or any sort of place that really feels nourishing and grounding and port of is important. We need to find that.

Jon: 38:24 Did you grow up, uh, being close with your neighbors?

Kimberly: 38:27 No, mm-hmm

Jon: 38:29  It was like, we grew up with like a very antagonistic, oh,

Kimberly: 38:31 Really

Jon: 38:32 <laugh> relationship with all our, like, not, I’d say borderline antagonistic with almost all of them. Oh. And these were like rowhouses and I grew up

Kimberly: 38:41 In the city. Yeah. They were all close by. So we were

Jon: 38:43 Very close together and we would see them on a almost daily basis, but not talk to them at all. There was no,

Kimberly: 38:50 Yeah.

Jon: 38:50 Borrowing a couple of Really like having relationships with your immediate neighbors.

Tip #4. Emotional freedom and wellbeing

Kimberly:38:57 Wow. Well, I grew up on four acres, so the houses in Connecticut where I grew up were really spaced out. So I remember when I was 12, 13, 14, I was the babysitter for the whole neighborhood. So I knew all the neighbors at that point, but then people would like come in and out and you just gotta get busy with life. And at a certain point, I felt like I didn’t really know any of our neighbors, just like a few stragglers <laugh> so this is such a di we’ve created this, babe. I think we’ve really like run towards community when we’ve chosen, where to live and all of that. Um, so that’s, you know, we moved out of Venice beach, which definitely didn’t feel that felt very transient to me also. Um, so community is an important aspect and then another part of emotional freedom, emotional wellbeing is understanding the difference between thoughts and emotions, um, which I talk about in the new book.

Kimberly: 39:53  You are more than you think you are because the, my is tricky. The chatter is part of the ego. So you can keep yourself in an emotional, chaotic state by your thoughts, just running, you know, what the Zen Buddhist called the monkey mind, like over and over, and it continues to make you angry and ER, or whatever the emotion is versus getting out of the mind, training yourself to get outta the mind. Again, that was thing that has built for me over time. And just going down into your body. Yeah. And really feeling the emotions, which will digest and metabolize similarly to food. If we put the energy on the emotion itself, instead of the thoughts. So then as I started to process more of like, oh, let me let this resentment or this anger or this, this run through me again, this is over time. I didn’t have to project it as much onto food. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, again, the loneliness that comes from community, um, is important as we have to project that into food, we don’t eat when we’re lonely and sad. Right? All, all of these different athlete, all just starts to add together for emotional wellbeing.

Jon: 40:56 A hundred percent think that is often, um, how people that diet, I feel like I’m speaking from like the perspective of

Kimberly: 41:05 No, no. It’s

Jon: 41:06 To people that are not, cuz you’re there. You’re on the other side when it comes to that food stuff, but uh, people will be doing pretty good and then something will happen in their life. The same way I would go to the bar and have a couple

Kimberly:  41:17 Smoke

Jon:41:18 Cigarettes. Yeah. Be like the first kind of refuge mm-hmm <affirmative> when you’re in that, you know, uh, stressed out, uh, or angry or whatever, you know, that negative head space is to go to something that is comforting in the moment. And oftentimes that is food for people.

Kimberly: 41:35 Right. And easy. Right. Cause you could just pick it up. So that’s why I started by saying routines evening, routine morning routine. No

Jon:  41:43 Temporary, like as soon as you’re done now, you’re actually, well now I just picked out and I still feel crappy and guilty for, you know, eating

Kimberly: 41:52 All that. Exactly. It’s not an effective method, but it is, you know, it’s a, it’s something that we’ve, you know, lot of us have relied upon. Like we said, it’s easy access. So it’s just this, you know, again, looking at it and seeing, oh, how do I retrain that? Um, I remember I used to have all this like stress pent up. So by the end of the day, I’d be like, I deserve a tree. Yeah. So it’s like, how do we not build it up so much? So then we don’t need the treat. Like I said, it’s the rhythms processing every day, worry

Jon:42:22 That we tell ourselves too,

Kimberly: 42:23 Right?

Jon: 42:24 Because like you did something, you, you deserve it, but you can easily channel that into something else that is actually healthy.

Kimberly:  42:31 How about I say you deserve to reach highest potential. You deserve to have your dreams come true. You deserve to feel amazing. And food is not gonna give you that.

Jon:  42:42 Yeah.

Tip #5. Self-connection and awareness

Kimberly: 42:43 So there’s many aspects of emotional wellbeing, mental health. And then the fourth cornerstone is spiritual growth. And again, I’ll say it for the millionth times, spiritual in our isn’t about religion. It’s about self connection. It’s about awareness. It’s about moving towards more freedom and it, it is inside of us. So in the larger sense, the more we connect to this profound power, creativity, vitality inside of us, truly without pushing, without even trying naturally you need less from the outside. And that does include the temporary satisfaction of food. So like I said, babe, over the past 13 years, I’ve been meditating increasingly deeper and deeper. Not with the goal of this is gonna heal my food journey. I didn’t and think about the relationship between food and meditation for a really, really long time until actually quite recently. But then it just became, oh, I have, I, I have this inner joy and peace building inside of me. I’m just less interested in this outer stuff. So I’m talking from a place of being really like, it was everything like I would need the ice cream, like I said on the pretzels and the French fries and all this stuff, little

Jon: 44:05 Ice cream and pretzels together. Cause that’s a delicious, sweet

Kimberly: 44:09 And salty together and separate everything. All of it. It was just like so much of my mind. And then I realized like, you know, it is difficult to sit with yourself. This, you know, we’re tra we’re trading back to renunciation, we’re trading the, the form less for the form, the, the sitting in meditation for like something like a big juicy Sunday or something. Right. So it takes time. But underneath everything is energy. So food is energy. Meditation is changing your energy, everything is energy. So it’s just seeing how you play with your own personal energy. And so I am a huge proponent and believer in meditation as a daily practice, we have free guided meditations also on the app. If you’re looking somewhere to get started, um, I can’t say enough about how much it’s transformed my life and healed my relationships, including my relationship with food. You just start to pull the power back in, you know, and I know where, where you are, babe. You’re starting to get deeper and deeper into your own us as well. And I think that’ll be part of this massive healing of the food addiction that’s going on with you. Well,

Jon: 45:18  We know all of this, that’s the amazing thing. It’s the interesting part about this. Like we don’t grow up with like teachers and people around us that are really saying in any culture, whatever they are saying. Yeah. Per Sue, like the instant gratification and all the sensory pleasures you can, and you’ll live, you know, a great life. You know, that’s not what anything is teaching us. Um, yet still we create our own stories of why we need something right now that somehow makes those decisions more palatable that actually, you know, blinds up us from the real truth.

Kimberly:  45:54 Yes.

Jon: 45:54 If you give into these things on a consistent basis, like most of us do most of your life, you are spent grazing, um, with, you know, occasional, you know, valuable relationships and uh, you know, times spending things is on, on work that is meaningful to you and time, you know, finding God either, you know, will say internally. Um, but that’s a small percentage of that time if you’re spending the rest of your time, the bulk of your time, actually just pursuing yeah. These, these fleeting things, which we know is not our purpose.

Kimberly: 46:34 We know it’s not our purpose, but I feel like the message in the west let’s, you know, keep it to food for a minute is use your willpower. And it’s almost like giving up, you know, giving up the treats like you’re missing out. Yes. And you’re losing out, but you have to use your willpower because you want that skinny fit by or whatever it is. But the message here in the, in the Gita, in the Vatas in this, you know, in the larger spiritual sense is that you’re not giving up anything. You’re, you’re giving up the lesser for the greater, yeah. By giving up these food addictions, you’re actually pulling in your power and you’re gonna grow in your vitality, your joy and your peace. Um, it is it’s incomparable to the transients of food. So that’s why we don’t.

Jon: 00:07 Anything that focuses on a series of fleeting sensory pleasures yeah. Will not lead to happiness or a state of wellbeing that is not fleeting by it’s definition. Exactly. You know, that these don’t, that, that it begins and ends with that moment. Um, versus actually like finding truth or God or love or whatever you want, whatever word you wanna put, you know, the difference between something that is, uh, fleeting and something that you know is not

Kimberly: 00:43 Yeah. I mean, think about relationships. People can have all these transient sensory experiences they can have all the one night stands. They can go to prostitutes, watch all the porn, go to strip clubs. And they’ll, they’ll feel that sort of judge in that moment, but then it goes away and then you just kind of want more and more and more versus the, the depth that comes from a, like a beautifully fulfilling relationship,

Jon: 01:10 You know? Well, that’s a whole, that’s a whole other conversation along

Kimberly: 01:12 Conversation. I know, but <laugh>, I’ll talk about that next time, but you could see in, in any, in any way, um, I just, I, what I would want for everyone is to have more freedom and in the freedom means we start to create the lives that we really want. And we can’t really reach our fullest potential if we are caught up in addictions.

Jon: 01:35 I think the first step is actually just being conscious, not even stopping, just being like, you’re gonna eat this ice cream right now, or you’re just being conscious of the amount of time that is spent being associated with food and food preparation. And in my case, overeating and digesting and, and having to recover from, from eating enormous meals and things like that. I mean, it’s just, just a huge thing. And all you have to do is keep doing it and witness it.

Kimberly: 02:02 Yes. So for me, I, a hundred percent agree, babe. I think it’s witness be aware and then maybe just pick one simple step and to nurture more in the other cornerstones. So for body, you may say, oh, I really wanna try this workout or do this differently. I’m gonna try a different form of movement to connect more to my body emotionally. Yeah. I think I’m gonna join that community or I’m gonna journal or whatever. Some of the things we talked about and his spiritual growth, even if I start meditating five minutes a day, you know, may feel completely unrelated, may feel completely restless, but I promise you that all these build over time and the energies and the different cornerstones will nurture the wholeness and our wholeness is our power mm-hmm <affirmative>. So it all adds up. Thank you so much, baby, for this conversation, for, for your wisdom, for being here for being my amazing husband. I love you so much.

Jon: 02:53 Thank you, mama. I love you.