Perfectionism is Sabotaging Your Weight Loss (Why You Can't Keep It Off) with Dr. Nicole LePera

What if the biggest thing standing between you and better health isn't your diet, your workout routine, or your hormones? What if it's the relationship you've built with yourself? In this conversation, I sit down with psychologist and bestselling author Dr. Nicole LePera to explore how our earliest experiences shape the way we move through adulthood. From emotional eating and food noise to perfectionism, people pleasing, burnout, and the struggle to trust ourselves, so many of the habits we think are personality traits are actually learned survival strategies. We also explore why healing isn't about becoming someone new. It's about reconnecting with the parts of yourself that have always been there. If you've ever wondered why you know what to do for your health but still struggle to follow through, this conversation offers a completely different way to understand yourself. In this episode, you'll learn: Why the first five years of life shape the way your nervous system responds to stressWhy food noise and emotional eating often point to deeper unmet needsHow small daily promises help rewire your brain and build confidenceThe difference between guilt and shame, and how each affects your decisionsWhy learning to rest can feel uncomfortable for so many womenPractical ways to reconnect with your body and begin healing old patterns_ More on Dr. Nicole LePera Dr. Nicole LePera is a holistic psychologist, trained at Cornell University, The New School for Social Research and The Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis. She is the founder of the global community healing membership SelfHealers Circle and the author of #1 NY Times Bestseller "How to Do the Work" "How To Meet Your Self" and "How To Be The Love You Seek" Website: theholisticpsychologist.com http://theholisticpsychologist.com Instagram: @the.holistic.psychologist https://www.instagram.com/the.holistic.psychologistTikTok: @theholisticpsychologist https://www.tiktok.com/@theholisticpsychologistReparenting Your Inner Child https://www.amazon.com/Reparenting-Inner-Child-Science-Oldest/dp/1250393132/ref=sr_1_1?crid=BC7KOSLQ9Z55&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9. GXSo5i-H6fQVQrxC1fVOuUl5QM8-zYDC1kWZqQDc8oprum42JGH0EmXkrJprB3IDqhGANFSFT3TPt5pwT7qDP9y_s_98u7cNxnbEyLv6Qvywj9CovS4nU3UwXZ6l6wCIQyglsgmupyKnDlcZvYdBL9NSjSyiHI3C8jgHkjxDLlQkgNXexTbM2_ZJCXULFxCF9zE_IdT_zJ-wxLqetRMCkewWQS5YGmN3osbG6K3jsrE.dgVDlqNOSqyoWHV0sbr5ljk2zV4FaLWEAoREqRqovDA&dib_tag=se&keywords=reparenting+the+inner+child&qid=1782755477&sprefix=repar%2Caps%2C186&sr=8-1SelfHealers Circle https://selfhealerscircle.com/waitlist/For more resources related to today's episode, visit the podcast episode page: drmindypelz.com/ep351 https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep351/ _ Connect with Dr. Mindy: Join Reset Academy https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/reset-academy?utm_source=libsyn&utm_medium=podcast&utm_term=&utm_content=loc-description&utm_campaign=reset-academyWatch the episodes on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DrMindyPelz?sub_confirmation=1Follow Dr. Mindy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dr.mindypelz/Subscribe to Dr. Mindy’s newsletter https://www.drmindypelz.com/ Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, fasting routine, or lifestyle.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mindy Pelz?

  If you are loving the conversations on my podcast and you want to go deeper with me, come join me over on Substack. It's where I share the conversations I'm having behind the scenes, the research that I'm obsessed on and paying close attention to, and really, the thoughts I don't always get to unpack here on the podcast or any of my other social media. We're taking women's health, fasting, hormones, food systems, mindset, aging, and what it really means to live like a girl in today's world to a whole new level. You'll also get early podcast access, deeper essays on my thoughts

• 0:41Mindy Pelz?

  around how we can all stay healthy in this modern world. You get community, you get conversations, and exclusive content that I only share there. I'm not joking when I said this is my new favorite place. It is currently where I am at. So you can head on over to substack.drmindypelz.com, or just search "Live Like a Girl" with Dr. Mindy Pelz directly in the Substack app. I'm super excited to have you over there. Please introduce yourself, and let's dive in to some really good conversations.

• 1:20Mindy Pelz?

  Hey, Dr. Mindy here, and welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast, where I bring you icons, disruptors, educators, scientists, and doctors that show you what can be possible when you love and celebrate the female body you are blessed to live in. Let's dive in.

• 1:44Mindy Pelz?

  By the time a child turns five, 90% of their brain has already grown. 90%.

• 1:53Mindy Pelz?

  And in that same tiny window, before most of us could even speak in full sentences, we were already learning how to handle stress, how to soothe ourselves, how to feel safe or not, in our own bodies. We didn't choose any of it. We just absorbed it. I grew up in a turbulent household, and for years, I thought I had moved past it. I fasted, I studied biochemistry, I built a career teaching women how to heal themselves and their metabolism, but there was one thing I couldn't outrun. The first time I ever did a 24-hour fast, I hit a wall of panic

• 2:38Mindy Pelz?

  that I didn't even expect. My body wasn't just hungry, it was terrified. Some part of me was convinced that if I didn't eat, I was gonna die. And it took me years to understand why. Somewhere in my childhood, food and my mother's love had gotten fused into the same thing. Not eating didn't just mean an empty stomach. It meant losing her. It meant losing love itself. Once I saw that, I could finally unhook from it. I tell you this because I know I'm not the

• 3:17Mindy Pelz?

  only woman walking around with an inner child still running the show. So many of us eat right, fast right, exercise right, and still don't get the results we're chasing. And we blame our macros, we blame our willpower, we blame our hormones, but sometimes, the missing piece isn't in your protocol at all. It's in a pattern that was wired into you before you ever had a choice in the matter. That unresolved piece, it doesn't stay quiet. It shows up as the body that won't release weight no matter what you do, because some part of your nervous system still believes

• 4:01Mindy Pelz?

  it isn't safe to let go. It shows up as food noise that isn't really about food at all. It shows up as the woman who is disciplined to the point of exhaustion, terrified of what happens if she ever loses her grip.

• 4:20Mindy Pelz?

  This is why I have brought you Dr. Nicole LePera. Dr. Nicole is a holistic psychologist, trained at Cornell University, the New School for Social Research, and the Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis. She's the founder of Self Healer Circle, a global healing community, and the author of the number one New York Times bestsellers, How to Do the Work, How to Meet Yourself, and How to Be the Love You Seek. She has most recently released a book called Reparenting the Inner Child, and that's exactly why she was the perfect person to bring in to discuss this topic.

• 5:04Mindy Pelz?

  In this conversation, Nicole and I go straight into the inner child, the nervous system, and why no amount of healthy habits can outrun a body that doesn't yet feel safe.

• 5:18Mindy Pelz?

  We talk about why food noise might be a childhood pattern, wearing a new disguise. We talk about the woman who was never allowed to rest and what it costs her. We talk about how healing isn't about becoming a different person. It's about finally becoming the person you were meant to be. So if you have done everything right and you still feel stuck, this is the one for you. And if you see yourself, or a loved one, or a friend, or a coworker in this episode, please send it out to them. This topic is critically important, not just to our health, but our overall happiness. Ready?

• 6:03Mindy Pelz?

  Let's dive in. Dr. Nicole LePera. Enjoy. Well, let me start off by just saying, welcome, Nicole. I am so excited to have you here, and there's so much I want to dive into in this conversation. So, welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me, Mindy. As I was sharing beforehand, could not wait to get here as well, and super excited to dive into this.

• 6:26Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, thank you. So I want to start with a statistic that I found that has been really, really hit me hard. And here it is. By the time a child turns five, about 90% of their brain has already grown.

• 6:41Mindy Pelz?

  And the wiring for how they handle stress, soothe themselves and regulate emotion is largely laid down before they can even choose it.

• 6:53Mindy Pelz?

  Okay. I grew up in a turbulent household. I read that. I know what happened to me from zero to five. I know you're on a mission to change the way we handle stress and to reparent ourselves. Help me understand this statistic.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm wondering why that number and that stat isn't in my new book because what that is beautifully describing, I'm shocked I missed it, is what I have, and many of practitioners are now calling the inner child. It is that literal hardwiring at a time during our experience where we didn't have language, we didn't have logic. What we had were sensations and survival-driven responses. And then as our brain is growing, learning, taking in information from our environment, we are quite literally developing the roadmap for exactly as that stat was describing for things like how we handle unpredictability, conflict, disconnection, and generally speaking, how we get our needs met.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  And so then for the large majority of us, even though our bodies grow, we age, our circumstances change, some of us find ourselves in completely different geographical locations, yet that inner child, all of those programmed habits come with us. And I think that's probably about a decade ago plus where I found myself feeling very frustrated alongside a lot of clients that I was seeing that it didn't seem like insight, awareness was able to shift those patterns. So that's really where this work and this book in particular has grown out of the insight and understanding that I now have for why that early time is so important, for what is exactly learned and why in that early childhood kind of timeframe.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  And then, of course, what we can do to create the change that we deserve.

• 8:43Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Yeah, and that's what I really want to dive into, what we can do. And when I read that stat, when I read your book, which I love your book, and I I I was highlighting all over it and saw myself in so many places in it. Um, and when I look at my following and my audience, you know, I see so many women that eat right. They fast right, they exercise right, and then they don't get the result they they want to get. And there is like this missing piece that no, it's like the elephant in the room that nobody's talking about. And I think when we look at trauma, a lot of times we think of trauma in our twenties or our thirties or our forties. But what you're offering is that there is a pattern to our thinking that gets developed.

• 9:28Mindy Pelz?

  When we are much younger than that, help me understand how this plays out with our health habits.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  It's it's a pattern that lives not only in our our mind, and this is where I really saw kind of foundational transformation that happens. It's a pattern that also lives in our body. It's a felt sense, it's instinctual reactions, it's those moments where, right, our response is disproportionate. It's for a lot of us, the identities that we play that we don't seem to understand why it is that we keep repeating the same patterns. And again, because that early learning is of course, our mind is always trying to make sense of the world around us, to gain understanding about ourselves and our place of it in particular. Though at the same times, it's also sensing the world around us, right?

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Our body is responding to experiences, caregivers that were present and also everything that was absent. And our nervous system to some degree learns a definition of safety based on those earliest experiences. And to be clear, the language of safety in our nervous system doesn't translate always to what is objectively safe. It simply means what is familiar. And that's why we will carry not just the beliefs in our mind that for some of us, right, we can change. We can hear a conversation like this, my work, your work, understand, right, what's healthy, what's not healthy, what I should or shouldn't do.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Yet in action, one of two things happen, those urges and autop Pilot is too strong that we can't even create the change that we want or to the population. It sounds like you're speaking to as well. Or we do all of the right things. We check the boxes. We create the lifestyle habits that we know will translate right to a different felt experience. Yet if our nervous system can't register safety, if for whatever reason it's interpreting threat in our environment, especially within our relationships, then no amount of healthy habits are going to change the messages that are coming from the bottom up or from our body to our mind.

• 11:37Mindy Pelz?

  How do we know if our nervous system's locked in in a state? Like you have a lot in your book about the different types of parenting that we've been exposed to. But the safety of the nervous system from my lens is one of the most important pieces of getting a result with your health. Because if the nervous system is locked in some kind of unsafe situation, the biggest thing that I see in my world is it won't drop weight. Because why would there's no there's I don't I'm still think I'm running from a tiger. I why would I want to drop weight? I'm still have another priority. How do we identify that?

• 12:18Mindy Pelz?

  Because it would free so many women who think that they just didn't get their macros right? Or they didn't they didn't fast long enough or they haven't found the right exercise. But really, it's the nervous system still feeling unsafe.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  So let me kind of start the answer by maybe describing what a regulated right nervous system could feel like. And then we can kind of travel into probably the experience that the larger majority of us are having. So a healthy nervous system, right? Means that we're embodied as simple as that sounds. It means like we feel like we're in a body, right? We're able to pay attention. We feel our muscles when they tense, when they feel at ease. We can more or less tune into the rhythm of our heart. We feel our breath. And in terms of our muscles, they feel at ease, relaxed enough. Though at the same time, if we needed to, wanted to get up and act, move about our. Environment, we would had the ability to do that.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Right now, this is contrasted by a lot of us who live in a body, maybe even now, if you're tuning into how your muscles feel. A lot of us carry a lot of tension in certain places in our body in general. Or we feel as if we don't have muscles at all, like we're stuck in inaction. Like even if I needed to get off this couch because there was a fire in the next room, it would be hard, right? To inspire action. Those right are signals that our nervous system is in a state of stress. It's either activated to fight or flee with all of that tension. Or we might have gotten to the final step where now we're completely depleted of energy.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  The little energy we have is going to other, other priorities in our body, not necessarily to get us up and move us about the world. So muscles, again, healthy, we can get up, we can move, we can do if we need to. A regulated nervous system, our breath is slow and deep, our heart rate is more or less regular. Now, what I'm not saying though, is that doesn't mean that there's not moments of stress where Yep. I have a reaction, I become tense, I act in the world, my heart rate elevates a little bit. And then I can calm down. So with that, from a more psychological perspective, we can still have upset, we can still have, you know, uncomfortable emotions. But we have the ability to A, stay present, right? Know we're having an upset, not just reacting from it.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  And we can bounce back, right? We can come back down to calm, release the tension in our muscles, our heart rate goes back down to normal, our breathing normalizes. And we're calm and grounded again. So larger majority of us, again, we're living with tense muscles or we don't have the energy that we want or need. We're either holding our breath all day long, or it's so quick and short, it's coming from our chest. Again, signals that our body is in an unsafe experience. And again, our heart rate kind of fluctuates based on that with it elevating as stress rises. So that often then looks like emotionally we become overwhelmed, overreactive, shut down maybe in moments where we do need to act or to assert. Ourself and of course, there's many other versions of living in a state.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  But I think the first kind of pillar of awareness begins with A, can I become connected and present? Can I become aware of how my body is feeling? And can I begin to notice those three major areas? Because those are usually indicators that a state is either being generated, like we're in a state, or for some of us, we're stuck, we're living in a state.

• 15:46Mindy Pelz?

  Right. It's funny, I just brought this question to my membership group about embodiment. How many, and I asked the question of how many of the women on the call felt like they had a relationship with their body? Were living in their body? Or how many felt like they were, you know, in their head? And like 90% of them were like, I'm in my head. I don't, like, they couldn't even fathom what it was like to be in the body. How, if, and I think trauma does that, right? And, and lack of safety. And I mean, we live in a culture where women aren't safe in general. But how do we, what are some techniques to start to get into that nervous system that you described?

• 16:31Mindy Pelz?

  And get back into our body?

• 16:34Speaker 01

  I will always break change, healing, right? Transformation into two really simple, as I often do, steps. And the first step you'll always hear, and applies to this question as well, is awareness, right? Becoming aware, and so the women in your community, very beautiful, like, yeah, I'm aware. I'm not in a body, I'm a head, I'm analyzing, I'm thinking, I'm worrying about everyone else. I'm not here, right, in this vessel. That's a beautiful awareness. We don't have to shame that, that realization. Because that was and developed the habit of not being connected to one's body. Was actually, in my opinion, just like all of these habits that began in childhood. They were very adaptive. They were at one time the safest, the best thing that we can do when what?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  When the emotions or sensations in my body were too overwhelming. When I was physically alone and or when I was emotionally alone. And especially when the person causing the harm was perhaps a caregiver.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Right, so in those moments in childhood where we're not actually independent, we can't leave, we also can't soothe ourself, our nervous system can't regulate on its own. So for a lot of us, the safest thing that we could do, and this began way back then, was begin to check out in different ways, right? Begin to live in our mind. In childhood, for a lot of us, it begins like in a fantasy world, in an imaginative world, where we imagine we're part of a different family, or different things are happening in our life, or it can be translated to doing, producing. The school system, right, I think creates an entire, you know, experience of thinking, of doing, right?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  And some of these things are celebrated, depending on what gendered body you're born into, depending on what society. A lot of things have been normalized, such as not living in our mind. What was coming to mind when you even said that was, who was it? Descartes, who said, "I think, therefore I am." There's even, right, there was, we're still trying to figure out what we really are as a human. And there has been theorists that have thought, thinking is what makes us be. And so what we've now understood is that it's part of the story, the things that we think, but another, right, big part of it is how do we feel? Yet we have this environment, these relationships, where being present or embodied was the most

• 18:56Speaker 01

  unsafe thing that we could be. And so checking out in all these ways that either worked, given our individual circumstances, and/or were validated by our greater kind of belief systems and societal beliefs, and now we do have an epidemic, I believe, of a lot of adults in general, who either spend little time in their bodies and/or are ill-equipped, don't have the tools to be with the stress and the discomfort that they are experiencing in their bodies. So they'll continue to rely on these adaptive mechanisms.

• 19:29Mindy Pelz?

  Is this where addiction, because a lot of the people that come to our community are food addicted, and they're using food as a way of soothing themselves, and then they're gaining weight, and then they want, they don't want to be in their body because they, they can't, they can't even handle their weight. I had a woman in my community the other day say that, she's 84 now, and she said that when she was in her 40s and 50s, she used to look in the mirror and scream at herself, and tell herself horrible things. And I asked her, I said, well, tell me how you got over that. And she said she read a book, the book, Radical Forgiveness. And she had to go through a process, much like what you're offering

• 20:10Mindy Pelz?

  in your book, to start to, to heal what was wounded as a little child. Is, is that the food addiction and the food noise that we keep hearing about?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  I think addiction in general, though I'll say focus on food, I believe it's a, it is a coping habit that is developed, again, at a very early time when we either could not, or did not have the ability to be regulated, or safety, create safety, and/or when we have the experience of deep rooted shame. When we're made, made to believe that for whatever reason, we're not worthy, we're not worthy for the care, right, to have the comfort and the support that we needed. So I believe food addiction, right, kind of goes into that category of some habit that we have learned very early on, that is aimed at making us feel better, regulating upset emotions, and we're gaining a sense of worthiness.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Food also, if we want to kind of unpack all the different layers of it, is often the first point of connection between us and a caregiver.

• 21:13Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Right, our core needs, right, is

• 21:15Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, that's my mom, that's my mom, right there.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  And it's my mom too, right, because my mom, having, not having the emotional resources herself, being raised by much older generation adults who believe that children, quite literally, were seen and not heard, did not have any conversation about emotions, attunement, so simply could not connect with us, her children, and I'm sure the ways that she wanted to, but what she could do was connect with us through Food. And so for me, I have had and still do have a lifelong just a relationship with food and nutrition that I continue to unpack. Though, one of the deepest connections for me was quite literally that food was a moment to connect with mom, right?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  So now, food for a lot of us, in addition to the neurochemistry of certain foods and how they literally change our physiology to start to feel a certain way. I mean, a whole rabbit hole about society and messaging about food and bodies and how it relates and all of the changes and shift that has happened in that, I think, has resulted in a lot of us, you know, having dysfunctional, so to speak, relationships with food and/or, like you were describing earlier, having maybe the right tools or knowledge about food and how we want to use it, understanding that it is a need that all of us have, but not having that safe relationship with food or intaking and/or don't have access to the food that we need to create the health that we desire.

• 22:46Mindy Pelz?

  How many of you felt your brain go offline the minute you hit your 40s? When my brain started to go offline in my early 40s, I was crazy scared. I went from being the woman who could hold everything together to not being able to get through a full workday. The positive thinking that had always been my superpower, it just disappeared. Worst-case scenarios, replaced it. Anxiety I didn't recognize. A version of myself I didn't sign up for. I thought something was deeply wrong with me. And then, I went looking for answers. What I found didn't just help me, it changed the entire way I understand

• 23:26Mindy Pelz?

  what it means to be a woman moving through this season of life. Your brain is not broken, it's remodeling. That's why I wrote Age Like a Girl, to really lay that out for all of you. It's part science, it's part my own story, the messy, humbling, ultimately beautiful story of a woman who had to fall apart a little before she could figure out who she actually was. If you're in that right now, I want you to know you are not alone, and this is not the end. It might just be the beginning of the most powerful chapter of

• 24:04Mindy Pelz?

  your life. So, Age Like a Girl, it's available now at drmindypelz.com/books. And please know, I am always cheering you on. It's so interesting because it was fasting that actually helped me understand what my mom, how she had intermixed mother's love and food. And I literally, when I first started fasting, I was like having a rough moment on my first 24-hour fast. And I was like, "Oh, my God, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die." And then all of a sudden, I realized, "Oh, no, not having food means not having mother's love." And, "Oh, my God, I use food as my emotional support system."

• 24:49Mindy Pelz?

  And it was in that moment that just completely, it's like, once I saw it, I was like, I could unhook myself from it.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  I'm smiling because I had a similar moment in tears, probably in a bathroom somewhere. Similarly, and when I first started to become aware of, A, the fact that our gut and our brain is connected, and that the food I'm eating does translate to how I can think, how I show up emotionally, right? How I embody myself in general. So I started to become more aware of food and start to experiment with different types of eating behaviors. And a lot of them are really hard and put me in a similar position of difficult moment as putting it lightly. But because all of that conditioning was also coming up for me, right? The idea of withholding food for certain periods of time in a fast,

• 25:39Speaker 01

  or, you know, only prioritizing certain food groups and different, you know, kind of eating styles. And, you know, trying to say, and I remember crying over, you know, I experimented a little bit with like a carnivore-type diet. And I was only gonna eat protein. And at one point, I'm like, "Oh, my God, cheese and bacon and burgers, what is so, this is so great." And I would cry over my cheese, bacon, burger because I couldn't have the potatoes that like I desperately needed in that moment. And I'm like, "Why am I crying over potatoes?" And I came to realize it was just like kind of that limiting, like you're saying, loss of connection. What I wanted, how I was feeling good in the moment with the eating that I was doing. All of that just came crashing down and spent a lot of tears unpacking my own relationship with food.

• 26:20Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, and it's so interesting because I love my body, I feel very... In in relationship with it, but it the last piece for me to unhook was, oh, my God, mother's love and food, they're they're together. And wow, that would that was just it totally changed me. And now that we're talking, I've been really contemplating the food noise that everybody claims they have. And I'm wondering, and I'm not saying that they don't have food noise. I I I understand that it's real. But could food noise be when food is constantly talking at you in from the refrigerator? Is there a possibility that there's something underneath that that you either got or didn't

• 27:05Mindy Pelz?

  get in childhood?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, I think anytime, right, we're feeling overwhelmed by a choice. What I mean to say that is, right, the thoughts about the food are overwhelming hijacking, the feelings about the food I want to eat, right? Anytime where we lack flexibility in thought and action and feeling even, right? I think those are great indicators. It's something deeper. Not that we have to judge what's happening, but that there is possibly something deeper, right? So in those moments, right, where we lack flexibility, right, where we can maybe become aware that, yeah, there's food in the fridge, it might be food that I want to eat. Okay, I can now put that thought down and unless I'm inspired to go eat the food in

• 27:50Speaker 01

  that moment, right, I can leave that thought for later when I want to go eat the food. I'm not overwhelmed by the or the thought to act, right? Where the food noise isn't overtaking my kind of internal mental world and or, right, I don't feel so compelled to act that if for some reason something were to get in my way or my own self would be like, oh, wait a minute, I mean, I don't want to eat that food right now. I wouldn't be able to not like stop the action. And I think those are great moments to just become curious, right? Maybe begin to drop in and in those moments where the food noise is increasing in volume, maybe get curious, like what else, you know, might be happening? What's what are the thoughts going on in my mind? What is the meaning I'm making of the food?

• 28:35Speaker 01

  My feeling, did something else happen in my relationships, in my environment, right? Is something else maybe inspiring the action? Yes, it could be that I'm hungry, I need nutrients, and I'm gonna go eat that food to get it. But it also could be a need for comfort, for connection, a simple need of something to do. Because sitting here, right, is in bringing up other thoughts about something else that are too uncomfortable. So I'd rather distract myself with hyper-fixating on food than maybe sitting in the grief or the loss or the anger that I'm experiencing in that moment.

• 29:09Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, you know, you know what I'm thinking as you're talking? I'm like, did anybody have a normal childhood?

• 29:14Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I've not met the person yet. So I'm, you let me know, Mindy, I'm on a tour to find. I mean, jokes aside, though, because I do think, you know, like, for a long time, I would have said I did. You know, and it is taking me this level of understanding and kind of the unpacking that the field itself is doing in terms of expanding what trauma really is as we even gain an understanding of how our body processes emotions. Very natural experiences that we have very little awareness in the scientific community of what they are, what to do with them, right? How to kind of process them. So I have not met too many people that have had fully their needs met for different reasons. Again, information has changed, resources have changed.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  We're parented by humans who are impacted by their environments, by epigenetics, by lifestyle, by everything in between.

• 30:02Mindy Pelz?

  Well, it's interesting, as I read your book, I had sort of two pa- two brains talking to me. I was going back to my childhood and then I was thinking about my own children. And I was like, oh, god damn, I needed this book before that. Like, I think, like, I think everybody should work on their stuff before they have children because it's really, you just bring it all out. It's, you know, you can't help it because you can only parent from your own awareness. It's really incredible. Um, okay, talk to me about discipline because you also have a lot in this book about the, the woman, and I'm gonna say woman because my audience is strongly women.

• 30:43Mindy Pelz?

  I know your book goes to, you know, all, all, both sexes, non-binary, all of it, but. Discipline, the overly disciplined human. What happened to them in childhood?

• 30:56Speaker 01

  So again, discipline, I think it's one of those. Misunderstood, usually because the lived experience of the outcome of discipline, right, has had on us.

• 31:06Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Because I think discipline gets a kind of, sort of a negative to some extent, especially when the experience has been over disciplined, right? An authoritarian where maybe violence and if not abuse was used to define and maintain limits. Because that's essentially what discipline is. Right? The ability to say, here's a line in the sand, right? Proverbial that I won't cross or that you shouldn't cross. And here's what will happen, the outcomes, should that happen, right? And then, discipline in childhood, of course, those of us who have ever been around a toddler knows that the parent's job is to develop the, the boundary, so to speak, and to discipline or give the child awareness of consequences when those boundaries are crossed.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Though, over time, that then translates to the child, and then who becomes an adult, their ability to be disciplined themselves, right? To keep themselves accountable, moving in action, right? And if and when they have consequences, evaluate them and modify their behavior accordingly. So, discipline, again, very general concept of awareness and maintenance, to some extent, of limits or boundaries. And so, when, in childhood, when one of two things happened, right? Our environment was so out of control, so unpredictable, right? And/or no one around us was defining any limits at all for us or themselves or anyone in their world.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Typically, right, what would have happened for a child in that environment, it would have felt probably pretty unsafe, pretty unpredictable. Unpredictability immediately will feel unsafe to our nervous system, especially, right, if what was happening around us was, was chaos, was trauma, right? Then it would feel very highly unsafe. So, a beautiful adaptation in childhood, for some of us, is to try to gain control in any way possible of ourselves, of our environments around us, of other people even, we extend that control outward, in an attempt to gain a sense of predictability, or simply, safety. So for a lot of us that can turn into, right, to some extent, yeah, on the one hand,

• 33:13Speaker 01

  discipline is a healthy thing. It keeps us and others moving toward goals, you know, taking care of ourself, being respectful of other people.

• 33:21Mindy Pelz?

  Well, and our culture loves it. Our culture applauds discipline. So I'm sitting here thinking like, wow, so you create an adaptation so you can have control and then the culture reflects back to you, we love disciplined people.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  We love it. They're celebrated. A lot of times they're the ones who are advancing if they're in a professional setting, right? Because a lot of times that goes hand in hand with, we're rigorous, we're disciplined, and often we're performing, holding ourselves up to those very high, unrelenting standards. More socially, too, it can look like, right, gripping tightly to plans, over preparing, struggling to delegate, to ask for help, and again, lacking flexibility. Because again, to be clear, there is 100% of time and a place for discipline. I think even around certain healthy habits.

• 34:10Mindy Pelz?

  Of course.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I try to hold a looser, disciplined relationship with them, though I do think sometimes there can become too rigorous, too controlled, right? We are, women in particular, are very seasonal, cyclical creatures. So, right, the best day routine on this Monday, right, might not translate to Mondays from now, based on what my hormones are doing, or two years of Mondays from now, because now I've aged two years. So, discipline, again, I think very few of us can define our own limits with limits and boundaries that work well for us, can hold ourselves accountable in action in moments where it's aligned and reasonable that we do that, including, you know, holding others accountable as well.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  But I do think there's this whole world of being too disciplined, again, celebrated by society, sometimes clothed in healthy habits, where we can't miss the gym, even if you're like me, having a cough and you should probably miss the gym today, you know, because you said you were going to, and that's what you do on Mondays.

• 35:11Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  I think sometimes life, going back to this idea of flexibility I mentioned earlier, I think that's often more of a healthier, a gauge of a healthier habit, when some days you can shift, you know, or modify your plan in a way that maps on to what is needed in your body.

• 35:28Mindy Pelz?

  It's so interesting. I always think when we, when you, when we understand concepts like this, it gives us compassion for people. I, I have been thinking a lot recently about the group of humans that are attacking fasting. And they're basically saying, you need to have breakfast. And Dr. Mindy doesn't think you should have breakfast, which is not true. And, and so I had to come up, I got so tired of answering these questions. Everybody was like, but this influencer says I shouldn't skip breakfast, and you say I should skip breakfast. And I kept thinking, what, just think for yourself, think for yourself. What is going on here? And so I had to come up with a term called flex fasting. So I could

• 36:13Mindy Pelz?

  explain, you get to choose your eating window and your fasting window. But you just gave me a level of compassion for those people that are like, I, I need more control than that. I need you to tell me how much protein I should have at each meal. I need you to tell me when my eating window should be and when my fasting window should be. And I'm wondering if the level of compassion I take from this conversation is, oh, there was something out of control in their childhood or in their life. So this control needs to be there for this moment.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  And on the deepest level, right, what I'm hearing in that person is, I don't trust myself to do that. You do it. Right? I don't, I won't know if today's the day I fast or I don't fast. How will I know? What if, you know, so I don't have, because that's what we're really talking about. We're talking about knowing our limits, knowing when we're getting there, reining it in, saying no, pausing, resting, all of the eating, doing, right? All of that is built in self-trust, which is built in self-connection. So until we're in a body that can Determine or kind of can sense a body as it's starting to signal that it's arriving to a limit. And then the trust that you have to have in or create in yourself to identify, oh, those

• 37:32Speaker 01

  signals are happening now, I'm at my limit. And then to be able to honor the limit when, again, a lot of us have all of these different beliefs about what we should be capable of, what a nice person, all the things and reasons why we overstep our limits then takes over. So what I'm hearing in that is is the case for a lot of us because we weren't given the environment. That's how it's developed in childhood self-trust. A child. And so we're talking a lot about kind of a lot of like keeping a child too close to home, right? Not letting a child venture out and discover that there are boundaries and limits with consequence is equally problematic to giving a child no limits, right?

• 38:12Speaker 01

  To letting a child just go and do and never have consequences because neither child will have the ability to develop trust, right? To learn their own signals about when they're approaching limits and then to learn the consequences of what happens, of course, within reason. I'm not suggesting that people go out there and allow their kids to go into unsafe circumstances. Of course, this is, you know, within reason, but that's what we're doing for a child. And so without that, that's what I'm hearing in many of your clients, many people that I have worked with over the years is I want you to do. And I get the same answer to me whenever they want to know the protocol, which I will never give because while I do have many different steps that one could take, my goal is to

• 38:56Speaker 01

  inspire you to become your protocol, right? Your body to determine what choices are most aligned for you. But that's what I hear in those moments when people look at me, when they look at you or when they look at anyone, their friends even, tell me what to do. What I'm hearing is I don't trust myself to know or to follow through on what I know.

• 39:17Mindy Pelz?

  Is there a way we come back into trust with our bodies? Are there techniques? Like, one of the parts of your book that I loved and thought a lot about was a term you you call relational neuroplasticity. And I love neuroplasticity. Get me some good neuroscience.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 39:35Mindy Pelz?

  And I'm super happy. And I was thinking, like, okay, so if somebody is, if I say, eat breakfast, and somebody's like, okay, I'm gonna eat breakfast, and then the next day, I say, you decide. What do you want to do? If they actually start to trust, start to have an experience with themselves of making their own decision, and seeing that they get a positive result, does that, is that how we start? Is it just practice? And then we get new neurons that start to say, you know how to do it. You know how to do it.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  So I came up with a concept, and it's called a small daily promise. And when you join my community, Self Healer Circle, every month, we have a topic in healing, and every month, we talk about it in terms of what's one small daily choice, you know, aimed at the goal of this month. So this month, we're talking about burnout, right? So what's one small choice that you can inspire yourself to act on consistently over time that can maybe help you manage your stress or burnout, you know, replenish your energy sources? So, one small choice, and the reason, a couple of reasons why I have that concept, I speak on it, I teach from it, is because, first of all, again, your nervous system, even if it's a healthy habit, like we've been talking about, will register as new. New is unfamiliar, possibly unsafe.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  There will always be some level of resistance. So this is for all of us out there who want to jump into the deep end, right? We have, we hear the podcast, we read the book, we have four new things we can do, so we're starting tomorrow. Our life is gonna be different, overhauled from top to bottom. Often, what we're doing, while we might be able to white knuckle a complete life overhaul for a couple of days, maybe even a couple of weeks, chances are, we're probably gonna fall back into old habits, because we've kind of, we moved too far into the unfamiliar And by doing that, we've stressed our body out. So while it's frustrating, because naturally, especially if we are suffering, we don't feel good, we don't feel good in our bodies, right? Of course, naturally, we think, our logical mind says, mine does, I know,

• 41:42Speaker 01

  well, five new things quickly will get you to feeling better. However, those five new things might be what takes you right back to the starting gate. So, small daily promise, A, makes the change while it still will be challenging, right? It's approachable, it's accessible, which is the reality. To create change, we have to show up differently in real time, in our daily life. And so, creating too high of an expectation for ourself is only going to challenge our nervous system. And the second reason is because it builds our self-trust. By setting an intention to do something new, which isn't yet our autopilot, it's not instinctively what we do in those moments. Right now, we set ourself up for the beginning of self-trust, because each and every time,

• 42:27Speaker 01

  and we don't just want to set an intention throughout the window, right? We want to show up. We want to take that action sometime in our day. And we want to notice when we either did, or non-judgmentally also notice when we didn't. Understanding that we probably didn't, again, because we either forgot and our autopilot took over, or it was just too difficult, right? That resistance was there, and we'll try again tomorrow. And that builds self-trust, because now a couple of things are happening. We have an intention, right? We're showing up in a moment, we're giving ourself the opportunity. If we do it, incredible, we're already now starting to fire and wire some new neurons together in action. And if we don't, right, we remind ourself that we're human,

• 43:09Speaker 01

  and that tomorrow, a couple of moments from now, will be another opportunity to do that. So that's building self-trust, whether we did the thing or not, because what we're doing is we're building the accountability. We're saying, right, I want to do something new. I'm going to show up for myself, right? I'm going to be accountable in this moment, and I'm going to honor that change. And again, I love neuroscience, it maps on to literally Hebb's law, things changing. We repeat that long enough, and we actually have some new action plans that we can start to rely on.

• 43:39Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I mean, going back to my mother, my mother's love with food, it really was through a fasting lifestyle that I really started to like unwind. I'm like, oh, there it is again. Oh, wait, this is what I got. And the awareness was so powerful for me. What about guilt? A lot of my following the women applying my principles, they set out to do it right, they mess up, and then they're like, oh, I had that piece of food. I was gonna go 24 hours in fasting, I only went 17. And they turn on themselves and they start to feel guilty. I know for me, when I go to that place, it's actually my father's

• 44:21Mindy Pelz?

  voice in my head. That's that was like, see, you're a fuck up. And it's like ties in to the parent who was the one constantly writing me. Is that is that where guilt stems for? Is there a bigger picture here?

• 44:35Speaker 01

  So guilt, and I want to kind of bleed into very similar, though different emotion, but oftentimes can either be experienced together or somewhat similarly, shame.

• 44:46Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I was gonna shame was my next one.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  So

• 44:49Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  We have this conversation somewhat together because they're somewhat related and they originate in childhood and they can very much continue to drive our current habits. So what guilt says, really kind of surfacely, is I feel bad about what I've done. What shame says, so instead of feeling bad about an action, as is the case with guilt in a simple way, shame is where we we don't necessarily feel, we're not feeling bad about what we've done, we're feeling worse, put it this way, about who we are. Perhaps what we how what we have done reflects on who we are. So that says more, I feel bad about me, who I am in this moment. And both

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Those emotions, shame in particular, right, is what is known as a social emotion. And so all of our emotions, believe it or not, whether it's guilt, whether it's sadness and loss and happiness and joy and anger and anxiety and, you know, fear, they have an evolutionary purpose, meaning when they happen in our body, right, they map onto different sensations, like, you know, temperature changes, different sensations that are happening in our body, constriction of our muscles, right, we all kind of understand, that's the thing, but they're telling us a message. And it's evolutionarily driven, when I say that, I mean, it's an important message. Like, anger is a universal indicator that I am being violated, right, either you're

• 46:15Speaker 01

  violating my physical space, my emotional space, and/or I'm violating myself because I'm neglecting or abandoning and none of my needs are being met. Fear, very common reaction, we're all gonna feel fear when something is threatening or unknown in our environment, right, because it tells us to pay attention, and if this threat is too big, to get the heck out of here. So, all emotions, believe it or not, while they don't come with a handbook, they are necessary for us to experience. And shame in particular, because humans, right, we're not the biggest, baddest mammal on the planet, meaning, we could get killed by a lot of the animals that we're sharing space with. So, we learned very early on, humans, that is, our ancestors, that we are much safer in a group of at least another person,

• 47:00Speaker 01

  if not a whole village of people, than we are alone. So, shame is an emotion that grew out of our ability to connect with others, that allows us to not only attune to or sense the very objective rules of the community, the things that we have to do to stay a part of the community or get kicked out, but also the nonverbal things that we have to do to belong. And because belonging is safety and survival, it's so important. So, I went to that very long, kind of, set up. Yeah, no, I hear you. Because we need to feel that, and it starts so early, shame does. Why? Because, again, as an infant that's completely dependent, our first village...

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Right is whoever was in our home, we needed to belong to them enough to inspire them to show up and feed us or keep us safe enough. The next day. So in childhood, if and when, as I think you and I both agreed, the larger majority of have not had all of our needs met in childhood. When we don't have a caregiver that's either present to us physically, or they're neglectful, or abusive, or they're emotionally distant, or whatever it is was the case. Because our mind is always trying to make sense of the world, like I was sharing earlier. In those moments, especially again, I'm not talking about a one off moment. I'm talking about the consistent actions or inactions of caregivers around us.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  In our childlike way of trying to make sense of it, we don't have the ability, the maturity, the understanding to zoom out. Right? Like we gain an adulthood and say, oh, well, this is why mom, dad, or whomever couldn't be present because of their childhood, because of their work, because of their, all the reasons why it has nothing to do with us. The safest explanation that we'll land on, which is also evolutionarily valuable. Because we can't switch out the parents, we can't leave them. Right? Is to land on the determination, the belief. That we are unworthy of their care. And then, of course, we get really attuned and savvy to determine why we're too dramatic, we're too much, we didn't succeed enough, we didn't do it right. All of the messages that we've now gathered that explain.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Why it is, or so we think, why it is that we're unworthy. And then we keep that belief with us and we live from that belief. And then we react, right? When we rehide the shameful parts of ourself, or we become, that's when all this modifying happens. Again, to gain belonging because shame is important, it still will be, but shame rate has taken over. And it's, it's to some extent become the foundation for a lot of us, the new identity. That we continue to embody because there is that still belief that that is the only way that I am worthy of. This connection, this one, this need, this joy, this happiness, whatever it is.

• 49:48Mindy Pelz?

  Wow. So the part of this whole conversation in your book that is interesting for me is I've been doing so much work on my childhood before I even came to your book. I too, I had a psychedelic journey where I was like, I had a great childhood. And then like, the next day, the beautiful people led me through it. They're like, how are you feeling today? And I was like, oh, fuck, my childhood wasn't so pretty. So, but I've been able in to start to watch my behavior and go, oh yeah, that's because mom behaved this way, or that's because the environment was this. And

• 50:30Mindy Pelz?

  it's been very, very freeing. And it has helped me start to break apart some of my behaviors. So if somebody's listening to this, and they're like, oh, my God, I didn't even look at shame as being a coping mechanism I used in childhood. Like, where do we start as we have an awareness that who we are today was created by the environment we grew up in? It's a very, very big daunting task.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I appreciate the question. I also appreciate you sharing kind of the moments that experienced psychedelic, kind of the awarenesses, the recollections even, right? The fact that you could call to mind, or maybe only that psychedelic journey you could, but right, like, the kind of revisit revisiting.

• 51:21Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  For a lot of us, right, is 100% part of the journey of where to start is, right, we gain awareness of the stuff that happened and how it's impacting us now, so we can move forward. There are a lot of us, and I have spoke to this often, kind of earlier on, when I was beginning to share it, honestly, with a little bit of shame and worry about what it meant. Because what you would hear me share is, and I was very aware of this, probably from about high school age, when I started, you know, you start to have relationships, friendships, and, you know, they get a little curious about like, what it was like when you were a kid. You know, you start to have an awareness of other families are different at this age. And so, conversation maybe comes into your peer group and I never could recall what it was like. I had little to no

• 52:02Mindy Pelz?

  I read that in your book.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Recollection of my childhood. I couldn't tell you what a holiday looked like. I couldn't call it to mind.

• 52:10Mindy Pelz?

  Wow.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  And so for a long time, quite honestly, because in we've held a lot of health-related anxiety in my family, another whole story, mapping onto very real health traumas that have happened, not only in my family of origin, but with my mom's family.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  So I was convinced because we were, my whole family has just lived our whole life waiting for the diagnosis. It was going to take us out. I was convinced that this was some version of a cognitive kind of decline that was like structurally wrong in my brain. And so I wouldn't, while it was like a running joke in my friend group for a while, and then it turned into, oh, Nicole was just partying. That's why she doesn't remember. And I landed on that being the reason for a while, too. Anyway, I was scared. And so I finally started to share it because I finally understood that what happens for a lot of us, and again, this goes into neuroscience, which we both love, of the hippocampus and cortisol's impact on it where. And if you notice, I'm very intentionally saying recollect. Because the reality of is myself, all of us who can't recall the story,

• 53:08Speaker 01

  we're living in, right? We're living it in action. We're repeating the habits and patterns, all of the ways that I write, that I gained safety in that environment are still here today. So the answer to the question then, right? Where do I start? I, I think it's important to speak to that because often I get people who are like, well, what do I do? Can I not heal if I don't know, right? I don't have memories. I'm like you, Nicole. I can't recall what happened. Like, am I doomed? And so the answer is we start now. We start with what we have because chances are you're, you're reenacting, right? The lack of safety, how you adapted, who you had to become right now,

• 53:47Speaker 01

  which then also means you might not be exactly sure who you are, what you want, what you need. And that's okay. Cause again, in this shame judgment free zone, you've never practiced. Chances are no one's ever asked you or created the safety for you to explore the answer. So with awareness, right? Start now, not just the hypothetical, not the awareness that you can gain because you're listening to this podcast and now you have a new insight into your own pattern. The awareness I'm talking about is in real time, connecting with your body, right? Kind of tying all these strands together, building moments, building checkpoints in your day, right? Tuning into how I feel, what do I need, getting comfortable with not immediately

• 54:31Speaker 01

  knowing, right? Breaking the habit of outsourcing, asking other people, even professionals like myself, right? And just sit in curiosity. And the more you do that, right? I think the more you find your way to the answers.

• 54:49Mindy Pelz?

  Can you start asking yourself questions like, I feel guilty because I didn't go 24 hours with my fast, I only went 15, I told myself I was going 24 today. Could you take a moment like that and just do some self inquiry and say, okay, why am I not able? I keep hearing flexibility throughout this whole conversation, like, why am I, why can't I give myself permission to have done 15 hour? Where is this need to have to have followed the rules exactly that I had set this intention? Like, is it, is it that, is that an entry point in to just start questioning, where did this thought come from? Where did this, why do I keep thinking this?

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what does it mean? That's a really great thing to explore. Okay, you went 15 hours instead of 24 or whatever it was. What does that mean about you? Right? Often we're not reacting necessarily to the objective reality. Those are numbers, right? 15, 20, 35, wow, number, right? I don't really have an emotional connection to those numbers. But the meaning, right? That's likely where the guilt is coming from. Why is it that? Like, even just reflecting that question back from someone, I should have went 24, 20 hours instead of 15. Well, why?

• 56:04Mindy Pelz?

  Right, right.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Let's see what you're, there is a why there, right? There's a, you've, you've associated, oh, well, because I'm a, you know, an unmotivated, I'm undisciplined, I can't hold myself to anything, and I said I was, and that's why. I'm a loser who can't do anything I say I'm gonna do. Right, not necessarily this case, but right, that's, so now, okay, that's more information now. Right, or because you told me to, and it worked for you, right? Now, there's another piece of information from someone else, who's that would be their answer. So, a lot of times, it's just following the tape. What is it meaning? What is this action? What narrative are you assigning to it? And that will, I think, give us a great starting point, because again, we're not often reacting to what's happening or not hap, just like where shame developed. We're not necessarily reacting, to some extent, we're reacting because mom or dad wasn't meeting

• 56:51Speaker 01

  our need in any way. But what we're more emotionally reacting to is the meaning that we've assigned to us, because we're not worthy, that's gonna hit, and probably be a wound that we then carry with us, inspire all these adaptations where we try to make ourselves worthy and exhaust ourselves doing it. Right? But that's, that's where the wound came. Not the action or inaction, so to speak, of the person, it's the meaning that we made of it, even when it's our own action or inaction.

• 57:19Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it's so, is worthy, there's so many women that are just struggling to feel worthy, and when I wrote Age Like a Girl, I, you probably know, you've heard, have you heard of Carol, Carol Gilligan?

• 57:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:30Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, so, I've stumbled upon her work, and I was like, oh, my gosh, and she studied, my audience knows the story, but she studied teenagers in the 1980s. I'm like, that was me. And I was like, she studied me. And I realized that, at that moment, that at the core of all the, so many of the women, probably all of the women that I work with, is this desire to be worthy, because that's what our culture has taught us. If we behave, if we look a certain way, if we act a certain way, we are lovable and we are worthy. So, is there a piece where we may have gotten a message from childhood?

• 58:09Mindy Pelz?

  And then that message is, continues to be ingrained in us because of what the culture says back to us.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  100% and typically, right, we're worthy, even beautifully said it, right, to be loved, connected with.

• 58:24Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Human need, we never leaves us from childhood, even though we grow and we develop the ability to self-regulate, something we didn't, couldn't do in childhood, can do it as an adult, still feel safer with other people, still feel overwhelmed at time and are comforted, right, by a calm nervous system. So, right, still kind of have that exact same need, hasn't necessarily changed, even though we've grown.

• 58:52Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, I just, it's such, it's one of those things that I battle with, with my community, because when I used to sit down in clinical practice with women who wanted to lose weight, I would say, why do you want to lose weight? They're like, well, you know, I would feel better in bed with my husband, like, I don't feel safe in bed. I don't like the way my body feels, I don't like it touched, um, or I wanna, you know, I wanna feel good when I go to buy clothes. And so then we, I would start to dial it down and I would get to the point where it was like, not only do I want to be worthy, but I want to be loved.

• 59:30Mindy Pelz?

  And what I finally figured out is that really the person they wanted to be loved by was them, by themselves. If we've had, we've all had such crazy upbringings and some of us crazier than others, is there a strategy for loving yourself? Like, like, can you be 100 pounds overweight and still love yourself? Can you have not accomplished all your dreams and still love yourself? There, I, I feel like there is a path there that I would love for women to find.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  So again, I think this is another moment where we can get curious about maybe what our definition and or expectation of love is. Right? Word, we often hear it, we throw it around, but what is it really? And I spent my whole last book on how to be love. You see, talking about love. Because it's really misunderstood and it doesn't, while it, yeah, it's a warm feeling, often it makes us feel good and connected. I believe that it's a much more comprehensive emotion where it, to love can become not just an emotion, but an action. Right? We can show up lovingly, even if we're uncomfortable, right? Or don't like, don't prefer what is happening or someone else is doing, right?

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  We can love someone in a moment that's difficult, so to speak. And so when we apply that more action-based, right? Less it's only warm and fuzzy definition of what love really is. Right now, 100% when we think about what does loving myself mean? I could even make a case that we reflect out our own feelings about ourselves to other people. Or if we don't feel, if we're not loving ourself and showing up in action in ways that we show ourself, that we're worthy of the care that maybe we did not feel worthy of in childhood, right? In the action of caring for ourselves, of showing up, keeping small daily promises, even in moments that are uncomfortable,

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  even in moments where I don't feel good about how I look or what I'm doing. Can I still show up in the practice of love, the embodiment, right? The action of being present to all that is, the positive, the negative, the neutral, right? And still showing up in support and in connection with myself. And that is what I, the definition of love that I'm more aligned with. I can make a whole case that it maps on to neuroscience and heart, you know, heart, you know? Now that we understand the heart is a very powerful organ. And so again, it's not just so an emotion, the way some of us think. So to answer your question, then we can rebuild self-trust through daily actions and reconnect with ourself

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  and cultivate true, authentic love, which also makes room and space for the less than shiny parts, for the parts that we feel bad about, for the moments where we maybe could have showed up differently and we didn't, for whatever reason, and who still accepts ourself and shows up in that connection again and again and again.

• 1:02:35Mindy Pelz?

  I'm thinking that about back to your two questions that you have people ask every day. So or the two things that they do every day. One of the things that I've noticed is that if you end start a new eating plan or you start a new exercise plan, you make a commitment to yourself, just yourself, not not and not an achievement goal like I'm gonna lose thirty pounds, just that I'm gonna go to the gym three times a week. And I'm I'm gonna do this for me. And then you go three times a week. That's actually more important for loving yourself than going to the gym and losing weight

• 1:03:17Mindy Pelz?

  or looking better and hoping to love what you see in the mirror. It's the congruency with you that starts to build the self love.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  I love that the congruency with you in whatever state, whatever emotion, whatever limitation, whatever expansion, whatever joy, whatever it is that you're feeling that goes back to when I was talking about self trust, right? I actually think there's such value in the universal experience of not staying committed to our new habits in those periods, the days, the weeks where we fall back into old habits. And oh, remember, oh, those those things over there that I was doing, they were helpful. Right? Because again, a couple of things, you created discipline and tension, you followed through on action, maybe you give yourself a little bit of time to experience yourself, the difference that you might feel doing this things versus your typical habits. And then you also give yourself another valuable experience, which is you fall back on old habits.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  You remember somewhere down the line without shaming yourself that you want to return to the things that feel better when you do them. And then gradually you do them again. And so again, that is such a trust building experience like the congruence at the gym. Before I'm seeing it on the scale, I'm living it in action. And that again means embracing the days where we don't feel like it, but we're doing it anyway, or we don't feel like it and we don't do it anyway. And then we show up two days ago, two days down the line and we do it then.

• 1:04:40Mindy Pelz?

  So and and what I have found is that a lot of people can actually get to the gym in this in the scenario we're running is there's two, they don't want to go to the gym. Let's say they wake up, they're like, today was a gym day and I don't want to go. And then there's this moment of, oh, if I don't go, then I'm not going to lose weight or I'm not going to look a certain way. And then that ties into all the belief systems that you had from childhood, all the belief systems of what you had, the culture says you should look like. And now it's what I call outside in living. You're living for the the expectations of everybody around you. But what I have found and what has propelled me to the gym on days that I don't want to

• 1:05:23Mindy Pelz?

  go is when I say, I need to feel congruent with me. I need to feel proud of me. Is it going to be better? Am I going to feel more proud of me that I listened to my body needs rest today? Or am I going to feel more proud of me because I went to the gym even though I didn't want to? I, I, when you flip that, I call it inside out living, where you're just in a relationship with you and and you start to just follow that line. That is where I see health habits that people couldn't stick to start to become easier and easier.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  100% I'm shaking my head. Just thinking about all the periods in time where for me, the greatest shift in action was not doing the things that maybe I know are helpful. It was those moments where I tuned in to me and what I needed in that moment. And especially moments where I made a choice based on what I needed, especially in the moments where that could either directly or indirectly impact someone else. Because those are the moments. That have been the hardest for me. And I know those come into play sometimes where we try to trick ourselves. We think, oh, I'm gonna get the trainer, have the workout buddy, right? Make myself accountable. Not to me, because there's a lot of days maybe where I don't want to go to the gym. I go now because you're counting on me, right?

• 1:06:47Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  That.

• 1:06:49Mindy Pelz?

  We, how much money do we spend on that? Let me hire all these people so that they're waiting for me.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Because you're gonna, you know, you're gonna hold me accountable to myself. And so I'm sharing that because as someone, me, who's observed myself enough, those are difficult moments because the part that's activated in me is the appeaser, the pleaser, who doesn't want to disappoint anyone, who struggles to tolerate disappointing myself, let alone disappointing someone else, even if you're someone on the periphery, like a trainer or someone I hired, right? There's still that voice that is like, oh, well, you know, you told them that you were gonna be there. And, you know, especially if now financially, you know, it's gonna, you know, impact them and their bottom line and/or whatever. You have to pay for it. Now you're paying for something you go to, right? I should just go because them. And so I'm thinking back to more recently, actually, within this past year,

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  I had a season of time where there was a couple of months for just things happening in personal life and life in general. I was feeling very overwhelmed. And while I understand, I'm not someone who loves the gym, though I understand that moving a certain amount of times a week is very helpful for me to release, to, you know, exercise the muscles, all the things. And I do happen to have support in doing that. I have a trainer that I see twice a month or twice a week to hold myself accountable. And so for me, the greatest shift, I think, in my own healing was during that period, about six weeks, two months-ish, where I was feeling so overwhelmed, that my body was feeling so depleted, that moving was honestly the last thing that my body felt like it wanted to do. And I also, I was very clear, I didn't want to go to the gym.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  But I had that voice, right? Your trainer, what will she say? She's waiting on you, right? Is she gonna be disappointed?

• 1:08:29Mindy Pelz?

  You're gonna let her down.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  You're gonna let her down. And you know what? I did. I called her up. I have a nice, good enough relationship with her. I, you know, told her exactly, I was like, I am really feeling really pressured by just knowing you're there. For me, what I need is I need to block off the next month, you're not gonna hear from me, see me. I don't even want to know that. I don't even want to wake up next Monday and think, Jim, should I go? Should I not go? I just want to take it away so that I don't have to feel. Struggle with the feeling bad, the feel bad, as I call them, my guilt is the feel bad. I don't have to struggle about feeling bad about you two days a week for the next four weeks, when I probably am going to feel the same. If things change, I'll, I'll text you. But that, to me, was the greatest shift. Because, right, so much aligned, I wasn't doing the things that I know physically do help me

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  live in a more regulated body and nervous system. But I was listening to what my body needed in that moment, even when I knew someone else was going to be impacted to some extent by my choice.

• 1:09:28Mindy Pelz?

  And, and you didn't have guilt about it?

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Well, I, I labored, as I saw myself, like, the first week, I did have a lot of, like, the moment of, like, what am I going to do? And I would inevitably cancel, you know, and not go to that, and not go to that. And that week, I would say, I was really percolating in the guilt, the should do's.

• 1:09:46Mindy Pelz?

  Transition, yeah.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  And, uh, once I decided that I would probably continue to, to feel all of that distress, and that was not anything I wanted to add, um, to what I was dealing with at that time, that once I made the choice to kind of tell her not to expect me, then no, I felt very free to live in the energy, which is what I was wanting, which is to stop action and just replenish.

• 1:10:09Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Why do you think rest is so hard for so many of us, including, including women? And, uh, you know, for me, again, going back to the work I've been doing on myself, um, I finally got a hold, in the last couple of years, that my, my dad used to yell at me when I sat on the couch. And then, uh, and my mom never rested. So I had no, no visual of humans resting in my household. And if I sat on that couch to rest, um, I was yelled at. And one day I got ahold of this in the last couple of years that that's why I don't sit on the damn couch.

• 1:10:51Mindy Pelz?

  So I tried to sit on the couch and it was like, it was like torture. Every little thing in my brain was like, what are you doing? You're being lazy. You got things to do. Oh my God, it's sunny outside. You need to get outside. Like every, I don't know, there was like a whole circus of humans up there. And as I started to tell people more of this story, so many women were like, yeah, I can't rest. I can't sit on the couch anymore. What is it about resting that terrifies us?

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  Thank you for sharing your own journey because I think that's a very common entry point where rest gets associated with a lack of safety because of direct messaging and or

• 1:11:27Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Right? How action and doing versus resting, what the beliefs were, how that was embodied in the home, what we saw modeled. And right, for a lot of us, right, it becomes the doing action, like we were talking about earlier, becomes a protection, right? If I'm moving. So in addition to what have I learned rest meant? Based on that messaging that you have received and others have received, right? What is rest or what has movement allowed me to avoid, right? So for some of us, it's like doing, focusing attention on something else allows us to avoid the overwhelming uncomfortable, you know, emotions underneath. And again, for a large majority of us as well, much like myself,

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  doing, right, was very associated in childhood with attention, with safety, with connection, right? Me doing, performing athletically or academically were the moments where my mom was on the sidelines, paying attention to me, celebrating me. So for a lot of us, again, what we have associated with rest, what we have learned rest or pausing or not doing has meant. For others, right, it's the action of doing has played a protective mechanism. And for all of those reasons, it goes back to again, theme throughout this conversation. To feel the benefits of resting, a body has to be in a parasympathetic

• 1:12:53Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  state.

• 1:12:53Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  And if we're not. Right, that, those are the moments where we're sitting on the couch and we can't sit still. We're shaking, we're getting up, our mind is racing, right? Because what is likely the case is that our body isn't in rest on that couch, meaning our muscles aren't, aren't at ease. I'm not allowing the couch to hold me. My breathing isn't calm and slow and deep and, right? All of these indicators that my body is at rest. What is more likely happening is I'm in a completely sympathetic driven response, right? Where my muscles are tense, my mind is racing, my heart is racing. I'm holding my breath, I'm breathing quickly. And so while I appear I'm at rest, right? My body is not at rest.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  It's indicating that, again, because of what we learned about rest, because of what's coming to the surface, the uncomfortable emotions that we become more present to when we're at rest, all of that then inspires us back into the action that feels safer.

• 1:13:52Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, you nailed it. That's exactly, I'm like, yep, yep, that's me, that's me. And it, it's giving me a thought about emotions because we do live in a culture where we don't like our women to be emotional. And I've been really thinking a lot lately about the anger and the rage that's coming out of women. And I'm like, go, go, like rage it. Because, you know, as women, we, we haven't been given permission to be angry. And, and everything in our culture is set up so that we are rewarded for just being compliant. So a lot of women are waking up and having so many emotions

• 1:14:35Mindy Pelz?

  that they've never had the skill or have been taught what to do with. What do you do with those women right now? How do we help those women?

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  I, like you, want to take a moment to acknowledge and celebrate when we can reconnect with the underlying anger, resentment, rage, whatever degree of that core emotion of anger that it is. Again, acknowledging that anger is so important. It is indicated for some of you listening, perhaps a lifetime of unmet need. You've put Everyone else first, you stayed quiet, you didn't assert yourself when you needed to. And so here's that lifetime of anger. So celebration, right, because again, that emotion, even if you weren't paying attention to it, if it was suppressed, if you were channeling in all these ways, doesn't mean it wasn't there. It was still there beneath the surface, probably driving a lot of the protective habits.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  Anger in general, I think, and it's interesting, I had this thought as you were asking the question. I wonder how much that habit of like teaching, you know, females, women in general, right, to, to be less mad came from. Cause I believe anger in general is an emotion that while it's normal and human and we all have it. I don't think any of us in either gender have had healthy models of anger.

• 1:15:53Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Because what a lot of men have experienced and maybe women have experienced at the hands of men is anger that is explosive, that is dangerous, that is abusive. And so it just got me thinking, I wonder how much of, right, that, and again, to be clear, because I haven't yet said it. I believe, we're talking in a gender, I believe we all have different energies in our body. I believe female identified people, right, have the ability to assert anger, to be calm and nurturing. Kind of, we both have the masculine and feminine energy to different degrees. However, I think very few humans, and I think some of these cultural lessons that absolutely get wrapped around gendered expression, I do think are born out of cultural dysfunction, right?

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  We have a culture who, similar to grief, I don't think we know how to cope with it. I don't think we know how to cope with it in a healthy way. And so celebrating all of us out there as we get more attuned to or connected with our anger, though does still mean that we do have to find healthier outlets, ways to assert ourselves, ways to even just discharge, right, slamming the pillows, going to the, what are those rooms now where you can?

• 1:17:00Mindy Pelz?

  Rage room.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  Rage room.

• 1:17:01Mindy Pelz?

  I know, I've still got that on my bucket list.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  I've not done it yet either, and I'm dying too. But there still has to be an outlet for literally the physical energy of it. In addition to, for a lot of us women in particular, learning to healthily assert. Assert ourselves, define boundaries, hold people and us accountable to those boundaries, right? Show up in self-defense because that's what assertive, healthy, expressed anger is. It allows us to define those limits and to protect ourselves if and when we need to. So for a lot of us, again, that's a journey. I think it comes from a society that is very ill-equipped. Sometimes, right, the good girl, boy, whatever person is developed in protection to having had

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  contact or experience with perhaps an abusive, explosive version of anger. Though, again, the goal still is, because it's important, we need ourselves to inspire action and protect ourselves in certain moments. So finding those outlets, learning those tools, defining those boundaries is all going to be part of the journey.

• 1:18:03Mindy Pelz?

  And what do you say to the woman whose identity was tied into being the agreeable one, or the one that everybody got along with? I mean, this is also, I'm in the thick of understanding my childhood and my mother was like, you're the, like, literally, like, you're the nice one. Everybody loves you, while my sister was tearing up the house. And so then I had to figure out, like, what happens when I start to upset people? It was a part of my identity I had to heal and let go of. And I think a lot of women listening to this conversation as they're having ahs might also have an identity attached to this that they have to let go of. How do you change an identity attachment?

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and again, being agreeable, pleasing, appeasing, right, whatever the language that aligns is, oftentimes, again, they originated in our earliest environments, earliest relationships to preserve connection, right? That's where the identity started to get created. We got attuned, we heard directly, we felt indirectly, all the different people or, you know, parts of ourselves that we had a show that got formed into, for a lot of us, the good personality, the agreeable problem, right? I relate to a lot of that. I became, in my family, the moniker was the quote-unquote "Christ child," never does anything wrong. I was doing a lot of things wrong. I just wasn't showing my family. I got very good at being secretive, but I- Learned, don't bring stress to the home. They're already stressed, right?

• 1:19:30Mindy Pelz?

  Me too. That was mine.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  Just don't say it, you know, and so, but that's how I was seen was Nicole, you just, you know, you and it took until more recently, my sister was like, you just like, yesed mom. And I'm like, yes, I did. I just told mom, whatever it is that, you know, she wanted or needed to hear. I was agreeable to preserve connection because what my mom would do, she wouldn't explosively yell. She would shut down. She would give the silent treatment, sometimes for extended periods of time. So again, being agreeable often has a function in childhood. Some version of it is to preserve connection. A lot of us again, form an identities where that just becomes who we are. I can't be anyone else. And in adulthood, right, it translates to saying yes when we mean no, overextending ourself.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  But all of the while, kind of going back to anger, quietly building resentment. Because resentment, right, is anger that has been around for far too long. It usually indicates that our needs have not been met. We've been overextending ourselves, saying yes, being agreeable to the point of our own neglect and abandonment. So to that person, not only will I say, with awareness, with seeing yourself in action, noticing when you're immediately saying yes and pausing and learning how to break those habits, learning where your limits are. So you don't continue to overextend yourself and then get ready for anger. Cause somewhere down the line, right, you're probably can then connect with all of the anger that decades of agreeableness has begun to accumulate.

• 1:21:00Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Oh, my God. I'm very familiar with that scenario. And when I come to your audience, I, you know, I'll tell part of my story, but I had to remove myself from everybody because the anger of all the years was just coming out of me. And I had to like isolate just to kind of work on, on navigating that. So, yeah. So anyways, I love this conversation. I hope it gives women who have been beating themselves up and trying to figure out why they can't get the result with their health. I hope we just offered them a whole new toolbox. So thank you for going to the places that we went to.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  Of course. This is such an honor. Such a great conversation. I could have went for another hour.

• 1:21:43Mindy Pelz?

  I know. I know. Me too. I'm like, you're like, it's like, you're like a jukebox. I like put a coin in and I'm like, hey, what about play this song for me?

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  I have a lot I want to play back to you too. So we get more stuff to continue.

• 1:21:54Mindy Pelz?

  Yes, I love it. So I named this podcast Live Like a Girl for, for many reasons. But what does living like a girl mean to you? Because it's different for us all.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  I love that. Um, living like a girl means to me,

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  I think it means to me embracing all of me. All parts of me. Um, you know, I think I've chopped off so much of me and I think a girl can be so many things. We can be oppositions. We can be contradictions. We can be what society says we should be. We could be the farthest thing from what society says we should be. We can look how we want. And so I think I'm learning and my journey is in, first and foremost, discovering all of the different parts of me, especially the parts that I felt too shameful of, and then learning how to be that embodiment.

• 1:22:42Mindy Pelz?

  I love that. I, I saw a reel of Viola Davis and she said that her goal in life is to get to know herself as deeply as she can before she exits this planet. And I thought, bingo.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  I have chills.

• 1:22:59Mindy Pelz?

  Yep. That is, that's me. That's exactly me. And that's what I just heard and that's in your statement. So, thank you for the work you're doing in the world. I, um, I don't think most people know how hard it is to put yourself out there to deliver a message over and over and over again, especially in this temperament right now. And, um, what you're bringing forward is, is critical. It's critical. And I just want to thank you for putting it out there boldly and, um, and showing us all a different way to heal ourselves. So I really, that's important that I wanted to pass on to you because, um, you hit a certain level

• 1:23:38Mindy Pelz?

  with your social media, you hit a certain level with your career and, and, uh, people, uh, get pleasure in cutting you down and you continue to appear to, to go move forward. So, um, I know what it's like to receive that. And I just want to thank you for continuing forward with your message.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Thank you. Many of that means I'm feeling myself getting emotional and my habit is I want to deflect and say something else, but I'm just gonna. Receive that in this moment, it really, truly means a lot, especially coming for you. I feel the same wholeheartedly. I've been such a champion of you, your work. I definitely see, as I experience myself, all of the different ways that ideas can get misinterpreted, that we do and still are put in boxes sadly sometimes by women of our own gender in our own profession.

• 1:24:23Mindy Pelz?

  Ah, God.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  And that's a whole other conversation I'm sure you can relate to.

• 1:24:26Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  So, thank you for saying that. I needed to hear that today. I will keep that in my cup as I keep it filled and I hope you feel the same because I'm just such a fan of what you're doing and the way you embody this work and the leader that you are in this field. So, thank you.

• 1:24:42Mindy Pelz?

  Thank you. Well, I'm going to say, everybody needs to go get your book. I devoured it this weekend, highlighted the heck out of it, saw myself all over it. So, I'm assuming the book's everywhere that you can find books, but anything we need to know about your book or how people can connect with you.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  Books should be everywhere, major book retailers, hopefully your favorite local bookstore. If they don't yet have it, call them, ask for it. We'd love them to stock it and we'd love to support that. It's also available Kindle. All of my books are on Kindle audiobook. So, however it is that you like to consume content, though if and when you cannot even support me a dollar in terms of books or memberships, both of which are available, please come follow any of the social media. It is such an important conversation that me and my whole team are so, it's such a priority for us to make sure that this information, this awareness, these tools, these resources. So, whatever social media you're a fan of this day and age, whether it's TikTok or X or Instagram where it all started, YouTube, we're really building out that channel recently. So, come find some

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  version of the handle TheHolisticPsychologist and be a part of this conversation.

• 1:25:48Mindy Pelz?

  Thank you. Thank you, Nicole, for giving me so much time.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 1:25:52Mindy Pelz?

  Even on a day you're not feeling perfect. So, appreciate you and everybody, go follow Nicole. This is an important message. So, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So, please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.

• 1:26:24Mindy Pelz?

  I want to tell you about something that genuinely moves me. And that's watching what happens when women come together around real health science. There's something powerful that shifts when a woman realizes she's not broken. She's just been given the wrong information. And when she is surrounded by other women who are waking up to that same truth. Wow, it's magic. The healing accelerates. The consistency becomes easier. The loneliness of the health journey just literally dissolves. And that's what I have been watching over and over again happen inside my Reset Academy, month after month.

• 1:27:07Mindy Pelz?

  Women who come in frustrated and depleted, they start to find their rhythm, they start to reclaim their energy, and the most beautiful part is they start rebuilding trust with their bodies. Inside my academy, you get monthly trainings, live coaching calls, and an incredible community of women who are all doing this work right alongside you. And I show up every single month with new content, new tools, new ways to explain things because your body is always changing and your health education should grow with it. So come join me over there. All you've got to do is find us on resetacademy.drmindypelz.com.

• 1:27:48Mindy Pelz?

  That's resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. I can't wait to see you there.