00:00:00

Intro

00:00:20

Would you like to work with me?

00:06:00

Why Julie originally got in contact with me

00:08:30

Her history with her body and dieting

00:10:15

What attracted her to work with Chris

00:12:45

What the process of working with Chris was like

00:17:25

Improvements she’s noticed since working with Chris

00:23:25

How her mindset has changed

00:24:30

How her life is different now than when they first started working together

00:28:00

How the work she did with Chris affected what she was able to accomplish with her career

00:28:45

Julie’s advice to someone struggling with food or body image

00:00:00

Intro

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 141 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/141.

00:00:20

Would you like to work with me?

A couple of times a year, I take on clients, and client work is the core of my business and how I spend the vast majority of my time. After working with clients for the last decade, I feel confident in saying I’m very good at what I do. Yes, I help clients with various symptoms, but actually it’s much bigger than just removing symptoms. These are struggles that these individuals are obsessed with and are defined by. Their problem has become how they identify and think about themselves.

My clients have often worked with multiple practitioners and are on the verge of giving up. It really isn’t uncommon for me to be the fourth or the fifth or the sixth person they’ve come to. Where I see myself being different to others is by combining science and compassion. I’m evidence-based in what I do and have a strong grounding in physiology and why the body is functioning how it is, but at the same time, I’m compassionate. I listen to the mental and emotional side of the client’s experience, and I know that these aspects are of equal importance of health as the physical side is.

One of the aspects I like most about the work that I do is how positive the process is. People believe that they’re going to have to give up so much, that it will be painful in so many ways, but they’ll convince themselves that it’s better for their long-term health. But what they find is that the changes actually add to the quality of their life. They enjoy the changes in their new life. Their physical, mental, and emotional health improves now, not in some far-off distant time in the future.

After working together, my clients regain what they thought was impossible – having their period again, conceiving, feeling energised, purposeful, alive, and walking by a mirror without the dread of seeing their own reflection.

I put out so much free material – the podcast is free, the blog posts are free. While the free material I put out, I stand behind, it is much more general. You have to discern what is and isn’t relevant for you. But when we are working together, I’m the one who can sort through this and show you what is important, what is the low-hanging fruit, and what are the levers that will make the most difference.

If you want this kind of precision in helping you with your recovery for better health, now is your chance to work with me. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read more about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat.

Welcome to Real Health Radio: health advice that’s more than just about how you look. And here’s your host, Chris Sandel.

Hey, guys. Thanks for joining me for another episode of Real Health Radio. A couple times a year, usually coinciding with me taking on clients, I release episodes of this show where I interview past clients. I’ve done this many times, and the feedback from these shows are always really positive. The overarching theme from the comments I get is it’s nice to hear that change is possible and to get an insight into the lives of these people, that it can be inspiring, it can be a reality check. But mostly, people just appreciate the realness of these kinds of conversations and hearing what it takes and looks like to actually make changes.

So that’s what today’s show is about. As part of it, I’m chatting with a past client called Julie. Julie is actually someone I worked with nearly five years ago, somewhere between four and a half and five years ago. Since finishing our work together, we’ve continued to keep in contact. We’ve met up for a coffee at least once. These days, the tables have been turned, and I’m now getting Julie’s advice. She’s been helping me with my business.

Late last year when we were chatting, we decided that it would be really great to get her to come on the show and to chat about where she’s at now, and as part of that to really demonstrate that this work sticks. Rather a diet that you go on and then it stops working and then you try another diet and then that stops working and you go into that pattern, the work that we did almost five years ago has stuck with Julie, and it continues to impact on her life in positive ways.

As you’ll hear her describe, she suffered with poor body image and insecurity from age five. This led into dieting. When we started working together, she was in her early thirties, so this had been going on for 25 years.

If you hear yourself in Julie’s words and experiences, then I’d love to have a chat and see if we could help you make similar changes. As you will hear, Julie’s life is now completely different compared to when we started together. If you are interested in working together or simply finding out more, you can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat.

With this intro out of the way, let’s get on with today’s show. Here is my conversation with my past client, Julie.

Hey, Julie. Thanks for chatting with me today.

Julie: Sure. Hi, Chris.

00:06:00

Why Julie originally got in contact with me

Chris Sandel: I know it’s been about four and a half years since you first got in contact with me and we then worked together, but can you remember why you originally reached out?

Julie: Yes, I can. A couple months before I contacted you, I had moved to London for work. You can probably tell by my accent I’m not British, of course. I moved from the US. It was the summertime four and a half years ago, and I contacted you because – this is a longer story that we can certainly go into. Certainly I had a 25-year history of body image issues and trying to figure out stuff with food, generally speaking.

But specifically at that point in time, I’d moved to London to build a new business, and I had been there for – gosh, three months at that time, probably, and I just felt like I couldn’t get a hold of my body. By that I mean I just remember my sleep was awful, I felt lethargic all the time, I wasn’t able to go to the restroom the way I wanted to, and I had started to gain a couple of pounds, which wasn’t too abnormal for me, but certainly that was an external physical trigger that I wasn’t happy with.

But really, something I was really, really concerned about was my career is really important to me, and I felt like it was really starting to impact the quality that I was able to show up with, certainly in life, but in work too. That was really the first time I had noticed my body was feeling like it was restricting me and I wasn’t able to perform the way I wanted to perform.

Chris Sandel: Do you remember how you found me? You said you’d moved to the UK probably three or four months prior to that. Was it when you were in the UK that you found me, or had you been following my blog or something before that?

Julie: It was in the UK and it was specifically through the yoga studio Frame in Shoreditch.

00:08:30

Her history with her body and dieting

Chris Sandel: You said this had been a problem that had been ongoing, maybe in different guises and in different levels of struggle, for 25 years. Had you worked with other practitioners before me? And if so, how had that worked out?

Julie: I had never worked with another practitioner, but it’s probably worth giving a little bit of context. When I say I had been struggling with it for 25 years, I was 30 at the time that I contacted you. So from a super young age, really self-conscious about my body and literally yo-yo dieting since I was a kid.

While I had never worked with a dietitian or a practitioner, what I had done many times on and many times off was different versions of dieting. I remember as a super young kid, there was someone in my immediate family who also had some body image issues, so I would go on diets with this person, again, as a kid, as a very young person.

Everything from tracking calories on MyFitnessPal to Weightwatchers for an extended period of time to crazy fad diets. I don’t remember what this one was called exactly, but I remember when I was a kid something about very prescriptive meals including beets. That was the food that I hated the most, but I had to eat all the time on this diet. So yeah, a history of trying stuff, just not working with a practitioner.

00:10:15

What attracted her to work with Chris

Chris Sandel: Considering it had been quite an ongoing thing, was it a big deal to get in contact with me? How did you feel when you reached out and we had that initial chat?

Julie: I wouldn’t say it felt like a big deal because while I felt like I had never really had this area of my life nailed down, I was really big on self-help and soliciting help. So I’d been to therapy and I really believed in hiring help in different areas of my life. I was familiar with that as an idea, so it didn’t feel like a monumental thing at the time.

I would say something that when you and I spoke initially during our chat that really impacted me was I could tell that your approach was ‘it’s all connected’, which is something I really believed in from psychology, from what you eat to how you – blah, blah, blah. I definitely believe all those things are connected. When I spoke to you initially, that really came out in the way that you thought about things. So I was excited about that and attracted to that.

I would say moving from the initial consultation to actually starting to work together, while it didn’t feel like necessarily a monumental big deal at the time, as we started working together, even though I say I believed it’s all connected, I don’t think I realised what it was actually going to feel like to explore and expose all that stuff.

I remember quite a few teary episodes with you and talking about things that seemed to have nothing to do with what I was eating, but starting to really see the big picture of it actually did have to do with what I was eating.

Chris Sandel: As part of that, do you mean that the work we did was just not as you expected it to be?

Julie: I guess so. I don’t know that I had very clear expectations, but yeah, it was probably deeper than I expected it to be.

00:12:45

What the process of working with Chris was like

Chris Sandel: Can you describe a bit about the process of us working together? Again, I know it was four and a half years ago, but from what you can remember.

Julie: There were a couple of angles when you asked me that that I think about. One was pretty deep internal stuff, and then another angle was more topical stuff that, again, had to do with the food and the eating, but I didn’t understand how connected it was at the time.

As a couple of examples – I’m sorry, I wouldn’t be able to name out the process anymore, but I certainly have memories of a lot of the stuff we worked through and that came up. On that deeper level, I remember us talking a lot and doing a lot of work about perfectionism. There was a book you had me read about that that was really interesting on perfectionism and childhood and uncovering some deep-seated stuff there.

I also remember there were a lot of discussions about the relationship I was in at the time in my personal life and the impact that was having on the rest of my life and vice versa.

On more that topical, physical level of things, I remember stuff like I would talk to you about how distracted I was when I looked in the mirror. Probably from your point of view, it was so obvious and so simple. You were like, ‘I want you to put that mirror in the closet and not look at it anymore’. That was a total game-changer, which again, I’m sure was obvious from your point of view, but it never would’ve occurred to me from my point of view.

It was that kind of stuff that I would call on the deeper level. And then of course, there certainly was a layer of looking at the actual food and the science and making different changes and tweaks and testing and learning in my diet to figure out what was going to impact my body and how I was feeling.

Another thing that seriously changed my life – we can talk more about this, but in terms of it’s all connected, I feel like one of the biggest gifts you gave me was understanding how much my sleep affected everything. As I think back on it now, I understand how this is the underlying lynchpin to almost anything performance-related, whether it’s diet, exercise, what work is going to be like that day, how well I’m connecting in my personal relationships. That work that we did on my sleep was one of the underlying changes that we made that has changed everything for the rest of my life.

Chris Sandel: It’s funny you say that, because for me personally, sleep is the most important thing that I can do, hands down, for my health – and not just for my physical health, but for my sanity. If I get good sleep, it’s amazing the kinds of thoughts that come into my mind and how I think about the world and the perspective I take versus when I don’t get good sleep, how much that automatically changes. So it’s good to hear that that (a) resonated with you back then, but (b) is something you kept doing even though we’re four years down the line.

Julie: Definitely. And I would even say at this point, literally this week, last week, I had been thinking about it so much. It has stayed with me to the extent of – I feel like something you would say is getting better sleep will help you make better diet choices, but at this point I understand the effect of good sleep now so much, I’m so intent on getting good sleep that I will now make diet choices in order to get good sleep. Like I’ll turn away a sweet at night or turn away alcohol if I know I have a big day coming up the next day because I understand so clearly how that’s going to impact my sleep. Like I said, to this day, man, that has really stuck.

00:17:25

Improvements she’s noticed since working with Chris

Chris Sandel: What other changes have you noticed or did you notice while we were working together? I know you touched on body image stuff, but also physical symptoms, if you want to deal with both of those.

Julie: Firstly I would say, again, body image and insecurities about that had been on my mind and in my life for 25 years, up until working with you. I want to be clear and certainly respectful to people who have more serious and more medical conditions; I wouldn’t say I had an extreme medical diagnosis or anything like that, but more of an obsession with how I looked and what I ate.

I just can’t even tell you – it distracted me in every area of my life, from the age of five years old, whether it was at school or hanging out with my friends and feeling like I couldn’t play sports, and then as I grew into the adult world, it was the distraction at work. It just took away from every aspect of my life, and I never imagined a scenario where it wouldn’t be a distraction. I just couldn’t even comprehend that that wouldn’t be that nagging, lagging thing in the back of my mind always. I was never able to imagine what it would feel like to feel contented by my body and not distracted by it.

I know that’s kind of a big picture thing, but if I think about the overall takeaway – I think I said to you at the time, I would’ve paid five times what you were asking to pay if I knew what this was going to bring me for the rest of my life. I thought I was going to have to be on diets forever, and I still to this day can’t even really believe I’m content and okay not being on a diet.

I actually feel good about not even the way my body looks, but how it’s performing again. Work is something that’s still very important to me, so having a body that helps my brain perform in the way I need it to has changed everything.

Bringing it more directly back to eating, five years ago, and again, all the time before that, when I was getting in depressive states and unhappy about my body, I would go to these extreme things, like I think a lot of people do. I would go to the classic – especially around the holidays – eat a lot, eat a lot, eat a lot, ‘Okay, I’ll start over tomorrow. I’ll start over Sunday. I’ll start over January 1st’.

Even a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t feeling great about my body, my sleep was crappy, I wasn’t thrilled with how I was performing, and I noticed about myself, ‘Okay, but I feel like I have the tools to reset the way I need to reset. I’ll spend a couple of nights not drinking alcohol. I won’t eat sweets as much. I’ll make sure I’m making all of my food at home this week’. Literally for the past week I’ve been doing that to reset stuff, and I feel great.

Again, I never imagined a life where I would be able to do that in such a thoughtful, non-extreme and sustainable way.

Chris Sandel: It’s really interesting when I hear you talk about this stuff because we’ve remained friends since the time that we worked together; we catch up every now and again, and now I’ve been working with you. It’s almost like I find it hard to remember you as that person because it feels so different.

Julie: Wow, yeah. Going back to some of the heavier stuff, I remember we would do our sessions at 6 a.m. before I was off to work, and I’d be ready for the day and then I would be like bawling my eyes out when we were together and I’d have to re-put myself together before work. Like I said, it’s certainly not just about the food. It was very iterative between the root problem and the symptom problem. And certainly I think in different pieces of life, one is the root and one is the symptom and then vice versa.

So I felt like working with you was a very iterative process, understanding at which point – like at this point food is the root of the problem, at this point food is the symptom of the problem, and addressing that in the right time and in the right place, and then all the stuff surrounding it as well.

I think I even said this to you when we were wrapping up. I had a yoga teacher many years ago who loved that phrase ‘meet you where you are’, and I felt like first of all, you were really great with that, and that played out in that way, like really understanding, ‘What role is food playing in this? And if it’s not food, what role is the other thing playing in it?’ And not being afraid to tackle and work on what the other thing was, because that was going to affect all the other stuff.

00:23:25

How her mindset has changed

Chris Sandel: You mentioned definitely the big piece in terms of your relationship with food and your relationship with your body or how you think about yourself, but are there any other symptoms that you want to mention?

Julie: Again, I don’t want to overstate the issues I was having because I want to be respectful to people who are having more medical issues. Besides the lethargy and just not feeling great energy-wise and also performance-wise, I wasn’t having necessarily a ton of tangible issues. For me it was ‘just’ this little lifelong problem of the constant drag and distraction in my life. Gosh, you gave me a path out of that, which I literally did not think was something that would ever be true or be possible.

00:24:30

How her life is different now than when they first started working together

Chris Sandel: Let’s bring it up to speed now. How is your life different now versus when you first got in contact with me?

Julie: Well, my life is really different, but for a lot of reasons that are probably not too related to that. [laughs] But a couple of things.

Again, I just can’t underscore enough – and I think it’s important to say because I imagine there are other people and women specifically out there who feel this way – the fact that food and my body is no longer a distraction, the fact that I don’t walk by a mirror and am scared to look up at it. I don’t know if anybody else feels this, but if you’re taking pictures with your friends, the first thing you look at is like ‘Do I look fat in this picture?’ The fact that those things are not thoughts and distractions in my life anymore – that was just the underlying current that shaped every single day.

Another thing is, as I gave the example before, I think the fact that I’m making food choices that I want to make. This is not feeling forced or that I’m sticking to a plan or a programme or anything. I’m making food choices I want to make because I have a direct understanding now of how they’re going to impact my body and my brain and my distraction level and make me feel. I’m making these choices of my free will that feel good to make, and I understand how they’re going to make me physically and mentally feel. I think that’s, again, something I never imagined would be true of me either.

I guess lastly, following up on that, I know the levers in diet, physical activity, certainly sleep, coming back to that, that are going to help me dial my performance up or down. The fact that I’m making very intentional choices and I don’t want to have a glass of wine tonight because I need great sleep tonight because I have a big day at work tomorrow – I actually have physical control over those things that are going to give me the outcome in my body and my brain that I want.

Again, to someone like you, this probably sounds so obvious, but I spent 25 years without that, so to have control back over that and have it reap benefit and reward and connection with people is meaningful to say the least. I actually have the power to control how I feel and to feel the way I want to feel in my life now. These are the fundamentals that I need to be able to do that for the rest of my life.

00:28:00

How the work she did with Chris affected what she was able to accomplish with her career

Chris Sandel: I know I asked about how life is different now than it was before. I know you fairly recently, in the last year or 18 months, have now set up your own business, whereas before you were working for other people. Do you think that’s something that you would’ve been able to do previously? Or the level of distraction with all of this stuff would’ve impeded that?

Julie: That’s a great question. Would I have been able to set up the business and do the semantics of that? Yes. Would I have been able to dig in in the intense work I do, keep the focus that I want, forge the relationships that I want that ultimately are going to make this business successful with those distractions? No, I would not be able to do it to the same level and standard. Absolutely not.

00:28:45

Julie’s advice to someone struggling with food or body image

Chris Sandel: The final thing I want to find out – if someone was thinking about getting help with their health, whether that be physical health or mental/emotional health or the different things that we’ve chatted about today, what would your advice be to them?

Julie: Do it. [laughs] My advice is if someone is even thinking about it, it’s present enough, it’s on their mind enough that it’s a distraction in some way. I’m personally a big believer in outsourcing help, so yeah.

First of all, we don’t know what we don’t know, and second of all, I just think the level of accountability, taking things that are bottled up inside of you and putting them outside of you, getting an objective, non-judgmental opinion and help – if you’re someone who has been feeling this way and distracted in this way at all and you’re hearing this today, it’s probably some kind of sign of a trigger, like ‘Okay, there is help out there. Maybe I should take a move on this’. To me, getting the help is a no-brainer.

Chris Sandel: Thank you so much for your time today, Julie. It’s lovely chatting with you again.

Julie: Same. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Sandel: I hope you got something out of that conversation. I hope that maybe it demonstrated the many areas I work on with clients, and also that long-term changes are achievable.

As I mentioned at the top of the show, I’m now taking on clients. If you’re interested in working together or simply finding out more about what that would look like, you can head over to www.seven-health.com/help. That is it for this week’s show. I will be back next week with another new episode. Enjoy your week, and I will catch you then.