224: Adjusting to a New Body, Meal Planning; Breaking Thought Patterns - Listener Q&A

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hey, you're on air with Ella, and today it's a Q and A. I'm answering listener questions that came in via email, social media, you name it. Let's go.

Welcome, you're on air with Ella, where we share simple strategies and tips from people who are doing something better than we are.

Whether it's wellness or relationships to just living better and with more energy, or changing your mindset to accomplish more in your own life and succeeding. However you define it, this is where we share the best of what we're learning from the experts, and we're learning more every day. Live better.

Start now. I wish you could see me right now. I am. Sometimes I record in different rooms in the house.

Today I'm recording in my basement office, which is lovely, but it's also my workout room. So it's got, like, a hard floor. Not a lot of texture in here. Absorbing sound. So.

Because the last time I did a solo episode, I was p popping and breathing heavily into my microphone, and I promised you that I would do better. I've got a towel over my head, I'm holding a mic, I'm holding a foam cushion, and I have a beach towel over my head.

The glamour, the absolute glamour of podcasting, it's beyond. Today's a fun episode. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you for joining me. I really, really like being in your ears. It's so nice to be here.

You guys send me questions from time to time, and every once in a while on Instagram, I'll just put out, you know, what do you want to know? What questions do you have? Any topic. I don't care if it's money, body relations, relationships, career.

Not because I am a guru in any of those things, but because I love to have these conversations with you. And of course, I'm excited to share resources with you where I have them. So I'm taking your questions, and I won't read your name.

If you ever want me to read your name aloud, then you have to tell me that I'm going to assume anonymity is the name of the game. Okay. The first question that I got, I'm just jumping right in. All right, here we go. Resting. Well, how do I get good rest?

Even when I sleep long, I don't feel energized. Okay, this is something to be curious about. There are obviously any number of factors in play here.

It could, of course, be your sleep quality, stress, environment, etc. But a lack of energy is often not related to sleep. So listen carefully. To the question, she says, even if I sleep long, I don't feel energized.

Now, those two things, of course, could be tied together, but they might not be. It could be that your hormones are out of whack.

You could have a sluggish thyroid, for example, or autoimmune conditions that you might not be aware of.

Lyme disease, for example, creates fatigue, brain fog, et cetera, a profound lack of energy, as do many, many, many other types of autoimmune conditions. Now, this is not at all meant to be a litany of threats and health disasters, right? No.

What I'm trying to say is this is encouragement to get curious. So, of course, one of the most natural and logical places that I would start would be with a sleep audit. Do I have good sleep hygiene?

Am I able to relax my mind before I attempt to sleep? I did an episode ages ago.

It's actually episode number four with Sean Stevenson on how to get a good night's sleep and how quality of sleep is so much more important even than quantity of sleep. Not that quantity is not important, but if the quality isn't there, the quantity becomes almost moot.

All right, you're trying to captain a boat while poking holes in it. So I highly recommend episode 4 with Shawn Stevenson and a good sleep hygiene audit.

But secondly, I think it's really worth a health audit, if you will.

So, writing this down, writing how you feel, writing what you're doing down, whether it's on the notes app, in your phone or on your calendar app, if you can, start getting curious and start tracking your inputs and how you feel. And I'm not suggesting that you do this every day. Tim Ferriss, by the way, author, podcaster Tim Ferriss, he said he writes down.

I don't know if he still does this. He probably does.

He writes down every single workout, his weight, how he feels every day, what he eats every single day, so that he has basically an index of his physical health. And if something's not working for him, he can go back and look for patterns, et cetera, et cetera. Okay.

If I'd done that, I feel like I would know what was working and what was not. And it would be, like, this enormously helpful resource. But I haven't done that.

However, when I go through periods of strife or health mysteries or trying to figure out what is going on, I find this calendaring or this journaling, however you want to look at it, I find it extremely helpful. So you might jot a note down on how hard you slept how many hours or how well you slept, I suppose is the thing to say.

And for how many hours, you might jot down what you ate that day.

You might jot down a comment on your stress level, you might jot down a comment on whether you exercised or what you did or not, and a comment about your energy and start tracking. You can do this in a Google Doc. We have an infinite number of ways. I'm sure there are many apps in the world that do this. Okay, I just.

I'm very analog with this stuff. I like to be super, super, super simple. But we have to be our own detectives.

And life is too short, my friend, to wake up every day and feel like you can't wake up. So I highly recommend Curious.

And I find that when you start looking and opening yourself up for answers and opening yourself up to the learning, the learning comes. So of course, I have episodes back in the archives here on different things. You can tweak to dial in, dial up your energy.

But the very first thing that I would do is I would get curious. I hope that's a helpful starting point for you.

Okay, the next question that I received was, how do you adjust to accepting a new body after quitting dieting? Oh, girl, I feel you. I really, really, really felt this.

So she is trying to get off the dieting roller coaster, but her body is changing and fluctuating, and that is 100% natural. But just because it's natural doesn't mean we always love it. Can we be real?

There's something that I'm having a whole new appreciation for, and that is that we somehow give ourselves a hall pass. Well, maybe we don't, but we certainly should.

Acknowledging that we used to be a child and then we went through a phase called pubert, and then we became an adult and we had an adult body.

But we act like our body goes through that one transformation, that one time, and any other fluctuation is something that we should worry about or try to control or despise or manage, etc. Etc. Etc. What if we thought about it like this?

I'm essentially going through transformation at all times, and very often that shows up in my physical body. I've said this before. I don't really want to go down this rabbit hole right now. I think I've been four sizes. Anyone out there? Can you relate?

That's in my adult life. I also can feel amazing on Tuesday and by Friday, I'm using all the tools. Okay. I'm like, don't strive for self love. Strive for body neutrality.

And I'm having this dialogue every week of my life. I don't take up nearly as much time and energy managing this dialogue as I used to, but I am not pretending for one second that it's not still there.

Now, maybe for some of you, you can't relate, but to those of you who have to manage your mind and its thoughts about your own body on the regular, I hear you, I see you. I am you. I don't have pat trite advice for body acceptance, especially after quitting dieting. Here's all I will say about it.

You are here for so much more than how you feel in your genes today. And you have so many other things to do with your energy that today I don't feel like telling you to reframe.

I don't feel like telling you to strive for neutrality today. I just feel like telling you go do other things. Don't replace displace. So today's thought, ask me tomorrow, I'll have a different thought.

You've heard me talk about replacing those thoughts. You've heard me talking about body neutrality instead of body acceptance. But today, do you want to know what I feel like?

Really, truly, what's on my heart to tell you today? What's on my heart today? Instead of replacement of those thoughts, it's displacement of those thoughts.

What if you were just too busy pursuing more important things today, tomorrow and the next day? What if you decided to take that energy and just bump those thoughts out of your mind because you don't have time for them and put them elsewhere?

Put them into the things that fuel you, put them into the things that light you up. Put them into a relationship that you want to reconnect, a project that you want to start, a project that you want to finish.

Something you want to do in your home, something you want to do in your career. What if you just chose for the next three days to take every single one of those thoughts and displace them? I love that idea. I'll be honest with you.

I got an Easter dress and I loved it when I bought it. I liked it so much I bought it online because that's how we buy things right now.

And it's a knit dress, so it's not the most forgiving garment that I've ever worn and I loved it when I bought it. When I tried it on on Sunday to wear for Easter, I did not love it. And my first thought was I am way too badunkab dunk for this dress.

Okay, got a little too Much going on. A little too much action back here. A little too much action up here. My first thought was, I am too big for this dress.

My next thought, I replaced that thought. I was like, this dress is too small for this body. Okay, how about that? How about them apples?

Somebody obviously came into my closet before I'd worn the dress and did some kind of weird shrinking thing to it. I don't know, I wasn't there. But I replaced that thought with, no, this dress is too small for me. That's the dress's problem, not my problem.

That's great. Okay. But do you know the best thing that I did, the best thing that I did with all of that was first of all, I put on something that felt great.

And then I got busy. I forgot every word about it. And I don't mean busy like go run around like a busy rabbit. I mean, I got busy with other things.

I got busy with my family. I got busy being present. I got bus focusing on many other things that mattered so much more that day. This is not a lecture.

This is me sharing my trial and error with you. So, yes, it's always wonderful to train the brain to replace, but I'm just going to put it out there for the next three days. Let's displace.

What can you displace those thoughts with? What can you fill up that space that is created when we set aside a focus on our physical? What can we fill it up with instead?

Okay, I got a question about meal planning tips and tricks. My tip and trick for meal planning is I don't. There are many, many people who believe in the power of meal planning who will sell you a meal plan.

None of that is bad. All of it works for some. None of it works for me. I'm just not a meal planner.

What I do instead is I commit to a list and I make sure that my house is filled with the foods that I can readily access and make something very quickly. But I am no cook. I don't cook. I assemble. So I just make sure I have the pieces and parts in the house that I can assemble.

So I'm currently completely obsessed with frozen vegetables of all sorts because I will just put them all in a skillet and make a fry up with some kind of delicious sauce. So. And by the way, I'm not making the sauce. It's 100% store bought. That's just the phase that I'm in right now.

My husband does the real cooking and so that's kind of up to him. So when I just need to assemble a quick meal so that I'm eating whole foods that make me feel good, then that's what I'm doing.

I'm going to my pantry and my refrigerator and my freezer because the only meal planning I'm doing is planned grocery shopping with a list. Like, it's that basic. By the way, a moment of gratitude.

I honestly think that we should every once in a while, when we open our pantry and it is completely full and we open our refrigerator and it is full, full of the things that we want and need. Like, can we just have a moment of gratitude about that? I don't know.

To me, that's just like one of the most obvious ways to acknowledge how abundant our life is. So I'm super, super grateful for that. And I don't mean to take us down some woo woo rabbit hole, but I just feel a lot of gratitude about that.

But I am not meal planning. I am grocery list planning. That is the extent of it. Okay, Sorry.

But when you do a live Q and A, and I don't like script anything out, I tend to take some left and right turns. So thanks for humoring me. Somebody said, what is your background? I've heard you say that you have a job, but what is it? I. This is. This is cute.

I rarely talk about what I do outside of podcasting just because I don't know that it's that interesting to you. But my background and my education are in business, so I got my mba, my master's in business administration a million years ago.

I started my own business in: 2003

But I started the podcast in: 2015

And then I became an athlete in my late 20s, all right, could not run a mile when I was 21 years old. Became a triathlete when I was. Was maybe 28.

And I was having so many offline conversations with just friends and acquaintances about staying healthy and how complicated everything feels and how we don't have time and yada, yada, yada.

origination of the podcast in: 2015

I've had so many iterations since then, and now I simply open up this platform to a more robust, well rounded definition of wellness and living our best life. As trite as that sounds, in many areas of our life, if it's about more of what we want and less of what we don't, I'm talking about it.

the company that I started in: 2003

I've bought and sold several businesses, including a brick and mortar, and I've done many, many different things.

But what I really love to do is facilitate each of us as individuals, as a team, or as a corporation, as it were, in my business world to maximize our potential. So in the business world, that's about revenue and profit and people, right? But in this world, it's about helping facilitate, not not, not be a guru.

Think of it this way. If I've climbed a mountain because I've tried so many different things, right?

And we all have, and I know a shortcut how to get there, or maybe I have tools that work for me that might make your journey up this particular mountain easier. I want to share that.

So I'm not sitting on top of the mountain looking down and being like, oh, perhaps one day you can climb up here and sit with me. I am the Sherpa next to you that says, hey, I did this. I tried this. This didn't work so well. Here are three tools. Try any of these three.

Maybe one will work for you. By the way, can I hang out with you and, like, do this with you and be in your ears and walk this journey with you?

Like, that's kind of how I think about this platform now. So thanks for letting me Sherpa with you. And by the way, you guys Sherpa me on so many things. So that is what I love about this community.

And when I do speaking and when I do events and that sort of thing, the journey is not only more interesting and we learn about resources at our disposal, but it is so much more fun. So that is what this world means to me. Okay. Somebody else asked, where did you go? So they were acknowledging the job and they said, where did you go?

Is everything okay? The show was very, very consistent for years and years and years. And then I took a hiatus for lots of reasons.

We talk about them in some earlier episodes, but then I took an hiatus that was unplanned. Okay. And I couldn't really come on the air and be like, hi, I'M taking a break. Here are the reasons. None of, none of that was really working.

So I'm back now. I am back full time. You have me full time. You have me consistently.

If I can't do this show anymore, okay, if I don't get all the listeners back, if the numbers aren't good, if I can't get financial support to make this happen, and consistently, then I will stop forever. The end. Full stop. Period. Done. Okay, but I'm assuming that it's all going to work out. I'm assuming that you guys are going to share the show.

I'm assuming that a couple of you would be willing to leave a review so that more people see the show. I'm making these assumptions because I believe in us. I am assuming that I get to go back to doing events and meetups and retreats.

So that is what I am manifesting over here with the beach towel over my head as I talk to you. And that is the direction I'm heading. But where did I go? And is everything okay? Here's the story. I'll try to tell it quickly.

I think it might be boring for you. It's just not that exciting. I just took a full time position. This was about two years ago now.

you, I started my company in: 2003

I haven't actually been an employee in 23 years.

So I became a full time employee again just a couple of years ago and that was a huge change for me and obviously a great deal of responsibility as you might imagine. And I felt very lucky to have it. I was very pleased.

I tried to make it all work, but it didn't come together and I had a false start trying to relaunch the podcast in March last year when we were all working from home because I thought it would become manageable again. And I was wrong. So you got a few fun episodes and then I disappeared.

So I have now reverted back to my firm, still supporting the same clients, but now able to manage other business interests as well. I know that's kind of boring, but everything is fine.

I just went through like five seasons of life in the past 18 to 24 months, including moving, relocating my small family during my son's senior year of high school. Yeah, that happened. Pandemic Shutdown, right? Impacted everybody.

College application season, new corporate job for me, a full renovation that actually required us to move three times. That's another story. My son started university and then, of course, corporately helping lead, you know, a 2,000 person organization through Covid.

Okay. And then many, many, many other challenges of opportunity, as I like to call them. I'm not whinging, okay, I'm not complaining.

But I do think that I owe you a little bit of an explanation as to where I went and a promise to you, a commitment to you that I am here, I am back, and I am consistent, you know, until there's no demand for it. So thanks for bearing with me. That's what happened. No drama. No drama. No drama. Just life. Okay. I really like this question.

How do you break thought patterns that go way back? Like guilt, for example, you know, they're not good for you. But what to do? I really, really appreciate this question.

Let me start by acknowledging that it is so easy to get the wrong message on podcasts or the interwebs where people say, you know, just be it so you can see it. That was my podcast voice. But it's easy to take the trauma that you have from being an adult in this world and say, you know what you should try?

You should try a bubble bath. Or, you know, you understand, like, really trying to synopsize the evolution of our entire development in these trite sayings and tips and tricks.

That is not what we are here to do. When I say positivity is a choice, I don't mean that in some trite way.

I mean, I had to do a lot of work to get to a place where I could even understand that sentence, much less try to practice that muscle. You know, episode 139 with Jim Fortin, that is probably, I think, top three episodes of all time. I really encourage you to go listen to it.

It is an absolute must. Listen. And we talk about how the brain must change, how our identity must change for us to live differently. But it's not the whole story.

It is not enough to say, be it so you can see it, and then expect us to heal past traumas or thought patterns. To believe that that is so is what I would consider to be toxic positivity. Oh, just change your thoughts, change your mind, change your life. Life.

Now, I do believe if you change your thoughts, you can change your mind and you can change your life. I do believe that, but I think it's a mistake to say that's all there is. So instead, or I suppose I should say, in addition to.

This is similar to me, to the energy question that we started with. I would start getting curious about therapeutic modalities. I would start getting curious about ways to heal my past trauma.

I'm going to share some of mine with you. But I believe that when you start getting curious and you open your mind to learning, you draw those that will help you to you.

You draw them into your. I don't know, have you ever started looking at a certain type of car and then that's the only car you see on the road? Of course.

And I think by now you've all even heard that analogy. But that happens when you open your mind to learning or to seeking different modalities that might help you.

All of a sudden this information starts sort of pinging up everywhere. For me, modalities can include anything from meditation to prayer to journaling to emotional freedom. Technique tapping.

We've done a show on that, to reiki, to acupuncture. Did you know that people have massive emotional breakthroughs because of acupuncture? There's an infinite number of modalities.

We've talked about so many of them on this show. But there are also so many routes to therapy that may serve you. And I don't think I've talked enough about that on this show.

So that's everything from neuro linguistic programming, NLP to rtt. Rapid transformational therapy. I did that. I'll tell you about that in a minute. There's shaking therapy.

There are so many different therapies that help you heal from subconscious thought patterns that you don't even know that you have. So I had this experience with rtt. I told you I'd come back to that. This was maybe three years ago now. Wow. I can't believe it.

But I reached out to an RTT certified trained therapist. You gotta be careful with this stuff. That is Rapid transformational therapy. Wow. That say rapid transformational therapy.

I did one session with this gifted woman. I can't tell you that I finished this therapy session with her. And all of a sudden I saw the light and everything was different.

But wow, did I notice a shift and a lightning, like a lightning of my load, if you will. And she helped me uncover and identify so many, not so many. It wasn't that there were so many, it was that they were so deep.

Three major themes that I was clinging to subconsciously and was not aware of. And honestly, I think that probably had a huge amount to do with why I was able to heal from my disordered relationship with food at the time.

I think that had a huge amount to do with it, actually. I can't believe I've never strung that thought together. But anyway, this is 100 motivating me to reach out to her. Her name's Shilpa. Up.

I'm going to reach out to Shilpa and see if she will come on the show. We won't be talking about my baggage, but we can talk about the RTT therapy and what it was like. So anyway, see, rabbit hole.

I promised you rabbit holes today and I am delivering. But that is my best tip for you is to start getting curious about different ways to uncover what these beliefs are and where they came from.

I think investing in yourself is absolutely the most important thing you can do to truly, truly live the life that was meant for you. Okay. Somebody asked me to talk more about passive income ideas.

This is interesting because this, it really isn't a business podcast, which is hilarious because that's what my training is actually in and you know, about 25 years of experience now. However, that's not what this is and people do it, do it really, really well and they do it better than I do.

So what I'm going to share with you is just one resource that I've really liked over the years and that's smart. Passiveincome.com Pat Flynn.

Sorry, I couldn't remember his name, but smartpassiveincome.com is a great place to start if you're interested in passive income ideas. Obviously I am no expert in that because I barely do this, but hey, P.S.

you guys would help me out so much if you're in the uk, the US or Canada by shopping with my Amazon link. Whenever you shop on Amazon, conveniently linked in the show notes. The reason why is I get like a few cents. Not even a few cents.

I get a few like tenths of a cent every time you shop.

But it's just like this tiny little pot of money that helps me pay for things like hosting the website and hosting the podcast, which is a different thing, and eventually editing and producing because I do all of that myself anyway. Okay, okay. That's my passive income and I suck at it. So go to patmartpassiveincome.com and start with him. Okay, let's do maybe two more questions.

In what ways have I grown in the past year? And in what ways have I numbed over? Ooh, good one. Good, good, good, good.

I'm going to answer slightly differently, but I think I'll still maintain the Intent of the question. Okay, so a couple of things that have changed for me in the past year and I'm talking to you now in the spring of.

I walk almost every single day of my life now, and you've heard me talk about that already, so I won't belabor the point. But this is not my workout.

It is my oxygen, it is my timeout, it's my self care, it's my meditation, or it's my phone call time, or my podcast time, or my book on tape time. Okay? This habit has changed so much for me that I cannot possibly do it justice. But let me tell you what you really care about. It's changed.

My stomach will save my brain and my soul and all those things. And I'm just gonna tell you because I get stress belly. All right? I've talked about that before.

Walking every day helps manage stress, helps manage cortisol layers, quite lit layers levels quite literally. And it has just chilled my tummy out.

So I am so much more comfortable day to day because it just has helped me manage stress belly, whatever you wanna call it. That has been a really singularly habit for me.

The other thing is I eat what I think my body wants and I don't really care about the rules that I used to have. But for me, what that results in.

And I hesitate to say this because I feel like you'll take it as advice, some of you, and it is so not, because the whole point here is to do what works for you. What works for me is multiple small meals. You can call them snacks throughout the day.

So I eat when I wake up because I'm hungry and don't talk to me about fasting in the morning. Like a girl's got to do stuff. Like I'm not fasting.

So I drink, you know, 18 pots of coffee and then I eat something and then I'm invariably hungry a couple of hours later. Well, instead of apologizing for that, I do this really weird thing. I eat. So instead of shaming myself for being hungry, I just eat food.

It works out much better for me.

And then I love, love, love, love, love, love, love to have like a big humongous salad or a big vegetable meal between 3:30 and 5:30pm and it typically ruins my dinner. So I drive my husband crazy. But if I can be done eating every day by 5:30pm, I am the happiest, happiest person in the world.

It makes me feel better, it makes me go to sleep better. And I just, everything works better. So you can Call that intermittent fasting.

I just call it doing what feels good, and that's what feels good for me. So. So because I've been working from home and I haven't been traveling, you know, I used to travel constantly.

And because I haven't been traveling, I've been able to kind of really indulge in my own wants and needs, schedule wise. So that's what has been working for me. It will be super interesting to see what happens when the world opens back up again.

And, you know, I gotta live outside this bubble, so that'll be interesting. The other thing that I've done is I have increased my alcohol intake. And that sounds so funny to say, but I'm just being honest with you.

Like, I used. Used to go months without drinking. I mean, months. And I didn't even think about it. And now I'm really enjoying it. I feel fine about it.

But I don't want to send you the wrong message. Like, I don't want to lead you astray. But bear in mind, I've never had any kind of disordered relationship with alcohol. So because food's my thing.

So for me, two glasses is like my max on a Saturday night. Okay? Like, if I have three glasses, call a medicine.

So when I'm talking about increasing my intake, I'm talking maybe one to one and a half glasses of wine, and that's like, that's the max. However, so many more nights. Tuesday night, no problem. Wednesday night, no problem. And I'll be honest with you, I'm enjoying it.

My husband and I are trying more types of wines. Like, we joined a wine club. Like, we're really savoring it and we're enjoying it together.

And this is where, you know, I have to stay curious about this. I have to pay attention. But I enjoy the transition between my day and evening.

This is almost a ritual now, and I have to pay attention to that because rituals become patterns, become problems if you aren't paying attention. And so we'll see if that changes.

And probably as I start gearing up for triathlon training season, it probably will change because you, you know, you can't do it all. Not all at once anyway. So. Yeah, so those are really the things that have been shifting and changing for me during the past past, you know, 12 months.

Okay, last question. How to get comfortable seeing yourself on camera every day. Now, this is a work from home question, not a YouTube video question.

So this is a professional woman, and she is talking about how she has to be on Zoom every day of her life now and she is becoming a bit distracted by it or finds it frustrating because she wants to sort of pick herself apart. And here's my honest to God answer. The bad news is nobody cares. And the good news is nobody cares. Here's what I mean.

Everyone is looking at themselves. Everyone. Or they're so bored their eyes have glazed over. Girl, stop worrying about it. First of all, you are fabulous. Second of all, you are fabulous.

And thirdly, no one is looking. We are all either in a zoom coma or we are looking at ourselves and picking our own appearance apart. Am I right or am I right?

Okay, there are two questions that came up and I'm going to tell you what they are because I think I'm going to do a show on them. So one of them was co parenting in a divorce.

Somebody asked that question and I was like, you know what, I'm not going to answer that in 30 to 60 seconds. I think I might do an entire show on that. Do you want to show on that? Co parenting and divorce?

I have a lot to say but also I'm almost certain I could get someone on to talk about that. That. So let me hear from you if you like that idea. The other thing is I love this question. Dressing for success in a corporate environment.

I think that is actually kind of a fun topic. So I think I'm going to take that question, thank you very much and do an actual show on that. Last but not least, I have a question for you.

Who do you want me to interview or what topic do you want to hear? You can email me at ella@onairela.com or you can DM me, whatever like you get the idea.

But I want to keep the queue filled with the people and the topic topics that you are asking for. So let me know. I like to keep that queue really, really full. Right now I've got about six shows I haven't even released yet.

So we are tracking my loves. But let me know, hit me up, tell me who you want to hear next and I'll make it happen. Thanks for sharing this time with me.

Thanks for the questions and the feedback. Love ya. Okay, that's a wrap.

I hope you enjoyed today's show and got something out of it that you can use if you did and you want to let find me on Instagram at on airwithella or open the show notes for this episode and get all the links@onairella.com there's no whiff. It's just on air. Ella.com thanks for listening thank you for sharing the show, and thanks for inspiring me. You are, quite simply awesome.