00:00:00

Intro

00:02:03

A bit about Alexis

00:04:45

The symptoms she was experiencing

00:05:45

How and why she reached out to me

00:11:18

Her experience of working with me

00:19:43

What her relationship with food looks like now

00:25:47

How her relationship with her body has changed

00:34:23

Alexis’s advice for others with a similar situation

00:00:00

Intro

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 277 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/277.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach, and I help clients to fully recover.

Today on the show, just like last week, I’m chatting with a past client. Last week it was Sam, and this week it is Alexis. Alexis has a long history of dieting and body image struggles; she was using fixing her body as a way of coping. Prior to reaching out, she’d been trying to counteract a period of restriction and dieting by going all-in and taking what she thought was an anti-diet approach, but she found it wasn’t working. She was confused about her health and what she should be doing.

As you’ll hear, Alexis is incredibly open and honest, and this is how she was while we were working together. Really, it’s this honesty and vulnerability that allowed her to make such dramatic changes in a fairly short amount of time.

I always do these episodes to coincide with taking on new clients, which I’m doing right now. If you relate to Alexis and would like to see a transformation in your life, like she’s seen in hers, then I would love to help. You can either head over to www.seven-health.com/help, where you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free recovery strategy call, or you can send an email to info@seven-health.com with the subject line of ‘Coaching’ and I’ll be in contact with more information. So www.seven-health.com/help or email info@seven-health.com, and I’ll put the links to those in the show notes.

With that intro out of the way, let’s get on with today’s show. Here is my conversation with Alexis.

00:02:03

A bit about Alexis

Chris Sandel: Welcome, Alexis. Thank you so much for coming and doing this today.

Alexis: Happy to do this. Happy to be here talking with you again.

Chris Sandel: Tell the listeners, what was your life like before working with me? What problems were you trying to solve? Why did you get in contact?

Alexis: It was definitely a combination of long-term and more short-term things. The real impetus was that I had a very, very hard breakup with a friend some months before I reached out to you. That really launched me down to a really, really low place. And after working with you, I know that when I’m in a low state like that, the first thing I do is try to fix myself.

That incident really put me into a place of wanting to fix myself and try to do it through dieting, or in this instance, not dieting. I actually went reverse in this instance [laughs], and I was very much trying to be this ‘all-in, eat all the food, eat any food all the time, no rules’, and that really wasn’t working for me because I was starting to feel worthless about myself, too. It wasn’t the answer for me.

My history, as you know, I’ve been dieting since I was a teenager. My mother was always on a diet when I was a teenager. I love my mother, absolutely. She’s one of my favourite people. But the perfectionism carried on through to me, and we would have this cycle of being on diets. It was always a diet focus. Every year there was something. So it just became this habit for me that when I was feeling really low emotionally, I could get control of something really easily, and that was my body, which was right there. And it couldn’t escape, right? [laughs]

So I found myself in this really dark place last year. I realised, after having two kids and knowing that I don’t want them to be on this diet cycle that I’d been on for so many years, I knew that dieting wasn’t the answer for me, but I didn’t know – you can have all the knowledge you want, but I couldn’t apply it to myself. I was really struggling, and I was really low, and I just didn’t feel like anybody could really help me because I hadn’t really opened up to many people about this part of myself.

When I was going down this anti-diet rabbit hole, I actually ended up finding you, and here we are. [laughs] So that’s where I was before I found you.

00:04:45

The symptoms she was experiencing

Chris Sandel: From a symptoms perspective, it sounds like a lot of this was mental in terms of what you were going through. Were there other physical symptoms as part of where you were at when we started together?

Alexis: I do feel like my mind does affect how my body feels, and there was definitely a disconnect between myself and my body. I didn’t feel connected to my body very much. It just felt like this heavy thing that was with me. I wasn’t giving it a lot of attention. I was ignoring it. There was a lot of numbing out. So yeah, like you said, it is a lot mental, but I just wasn’t even trying to move my body. It was just something that I felt burdened with and wanted to ignore.

So as far as physical symptoms, I don’t really recall anything digestively or body pain-wise, but really it was just more of the ignoring of the body.

00:05:45

How and why she reached out to me

Chris Sandel: What was it like when you reached out? Was that a big deal? I know you said you went down this anti-diet rabbit hole, you found me. I don’t know how long that was between finding me and then reaching out, so tell me about that experience.

Alexis: Yeah, it was definitely a big deal when I reached out to you. I was still trying to fix myself, just on the opposite end of the spectrum, like “How do I do the anti-diet right?” kind of thing. Just listening to so many people. I think I did understand deep down that I needed personal help, I needed it on a personal level. And I did try Talkspace, and that failed miserably. There was just no connection. I don’t want to fault the people on the other side of it, but it just wasn’t a good fit for me.

I talked about being on both ends of the spectrum. I realised that I needed personal help, so I literally reached out to you and I also reached out to “we’ll personalise getting you ‘healthy’ but we promise it’s not a diet” group. I literally reached out to you at the same time. This is total ‘fix it’, down the ladder, in the hole Alexis at this time.

So yeah, after hearing you and hearing them, it really definitely clicked on what I needed, and it was not another ‘fix it through your body’ type of programme. So it was a huge deal to reach out to you. I had never been in therapy before; I had never talked about any sort of eating issues with anybody, any professional before.

Chris Sandel: Which is actually surprising for me to hear. The reason I say that is because there was, and there is, a real openness to you. It didn’t feel like this slowly took a long time to build trust. You were very, very open and willing from the very start.

Alexis: Well, I think maybe it was a combination. I definitely felt trust from you. You exude compassion and honesty and trust. I listened to your podcast, I listened to previous podcasts you had had with people who you’d worked with, and I just really felt that trust from the get-go with you. So that was important.

But also, I had reached rock bottom for me. It was like ‘diet, diet, diet, diet’, and then it was like, “I’m going to go so anti-diet” and that was also just another way of fixing through what I was eating. So I think I was just in such turmoil internally that it was like, I just realised I had to go totally open with you, and I wasn’t going to get anything back if I didn’t totally take off all of my shields, all of my armour – which I have so much of, because we talked about how I’m a Highly Sensitive Person. Even talking to you, I tear up talking about these things. And it’s with relief. But just taking all that stuff off. When I made that decision, finally, it was like this burden had gotten off my shoulders and I could be very real with you. I looked forward to our talks because of that.

Chris Sandel: Nice. You’ve probably answered some of it already, but what was it about me that made you reach out to me? What was it that I offered or I did that you were like, “I think this could be the person”?

Alexis: Definitely, like I said, you really give off this – it’s totally real. It’s a complete genuineness, and you have a lot of compassion, and that comes through. The way that you talk in your interviews to others and the way that you speak to your audience, it’s very authentic, just for everybody listening. The same Chris that you hear on the podcast is the Chris that you’re going to get talking to you if you work one on one.

But then the other side of it is that my education is in medical science and nutrition, which, like I said before, you can know everything you want to know about how diets don’t work and still you are not able to just suddenly apply it to yourself magically. I always had this conundrum where – and I work in the nutrition space, not as a practising nutritionist, but just in the research space. So I had this abundance of knowledge about nutrition. It wasn’t working. There was this disconnect.

So when I heard you talk on your podcast and you were addressing all of these aspects of health – and we’ve called it now ‘living in the grey’, where nothing is 100% good, nothing is 100% bad – just listening to the way that you would talk about the science of nutrition and address it in a way where you made it very clear that there didn’t have to be any sort of commitment to an ideology, which nutrition can very much become ideology. I just admired the way that you were walking that tightrope between all the views of nutrition. Your approach seemed so balanced and what I aspired to get my logic around. So that was the other side. There was this emotional side and then there was this mental logic side that really appealed to me.

Chris Sandel: Nice. I remember – I don’t think I’ve talked about it for a while, but in my branding, it used to be ‘science and compassion’. So you’ve summed it up nicely there. [laughs]

Alexis: [laughs] Wow, you know yourself, because it was definitely – yeah, both of them.

00:11:18

Her experience of working with me

Chris Sandel: Talk then about what it was like working together and what are some of the bits that stand out for you.

Alexis: Sure. Working together, like I said, I decided to go and just dive in without any sort of pretence or mask on, and you saw all the ugly. [laughs] I don’t think there’s been more than one call where I haven’t cried talking to you, just because I get so sensitive about everything, and that’s okay.

But I don’t think I expected how personal it would be, how personally tailored the structure you would give me. I never felt like I was on some sort of plan or some guide that 10 other people were on. Not to say that I totally expected that, but I think I kind of did because I was surprised by how personalised and tailored the exercises were that you gave to me, and how deep we got on calls. Just working together, I didn’t realise from the start – which is obviously part of why I needed to talk with you – how mental the issues we were going to talk about were going to be, and just the whole mindset and the mind work that we had to do to get me to where I am now, which is in a much better spot.

And the progress, too. I think it was surprising to me how quickly I was able to learn some tools from you and apply them, and get going in my life applying those tools. Not to say everything is 100% perfect, because that is certainly not the case. [laughs] But that was also very surprising: just how quickly we would identify a useful tool for me to use and apply.

Chris Sandel: I’ve got to give you credit with this as well, because it was then you trying things out and figuring out what did work for you and what didn’t, and I do remember in the second or third week, one of the things we set as a goal, you came back and you were like, “Yeah, that actually didn’t work, and I figured out this other way”, and I’m like, “Great. That’s really good that you’ve noticed that about your eating and this thing works better for you.” So yeah, it wasn’t all down to me handing these things over; it was very much a collaborative thing.

Alexis: Yeah, it was. But that’s part of I think why it worked so well with us together. I felt like I could come to you extremely honestly and be like, ‘This tool just did not do it for me, but does this make sense? This actually happened, does this make sense?” Or I’d come back to you and I’d be like, “I’ll be totally honest, this exercise you gave me, I thought it was going to be so lame; I did not want to do it, I did not think I was going to get anything out of this, and then two minutes in I was crying and all of the thoughts and release were happening, and it got me to a beautiful place.” We could have those conversations. So it was good. It was really good.

Chris Sandel: Nice. I want to go through your relationship with food and body and all of that, but what stands out most for you in terms of the best thing that’s happened from us working together? What is that and why is that valuable for you?

Alexis: The best things that have come out of us working together, like I said, are the tools that I have. I’m never going to be completely out of this ‘fix it’ mentality because that’s just where I go when I’m in a state of high stress or high anxiety or overwhelm. But I can see it now. It’s so funny; it’s just so many years of it, so many decades of that pattern, and I had never been able to come away enough from myself and gain enough awareness to see the pattern happening over and over again. So that I think is number one. You brought awareness to that pattern that I have, and I think that is 90% of the way – you identify the pattern and you’re 90% of the way there to not letting it suck you in again.

Then the other 10% are the tools. When we worked together, I fell into a couple of ‘fix it’ traps. I never felt any guilt or shame talking to you about them because we knew they were going to happen, and it was actually great that they happened while we were working together. If I pretended everything was perfect talking to you, then I would’ve never been able to walk through what to do and where I was at and how to maybe be in a way that we had been discussing with the stress ladder or with compassions. Falling into one of those holes when I was in a state of high stress and overwhelm, I immediately identified it and I gave myself a lot of compassion, because we had talked about how I had very low self-compassion when we started. That was a big thing.

So that was one of the tools that you gave me, recognising the lack of self-compassion that I could have, recognising how I act in those stress states and the tools to get me out and into a more safe and social state instead of flight and fight.

Chris Sandel: I agree. I’m really glad that you had those times while we were working together because it gave us something concrete to then look at and explore and say, “Okay, cool, let’s talk about this. What happened during the lead-up here? What were you trying to do in terms of taking care of yourself?”, etc., and we were able to have a good conversation. I think the first time it happened, it took a lot longer before there was the awareness, and then the second time it happened, the turnaround was much quicker.

As you say, that ‘fix it’ mentality is going to keep coming up again and again, and if your brain like, “Hey, we’ve got this way of trying to make you feel safe; why don’t you do this thing?” – that thought is going to arise; it’s just now you are able to recognise it more for what it is and you have other ways of being able to deal in that moment.

Alexis: Exactly. I can lay off my body a little bit and just hit pause instead of trying to take immediate action down some path that’ll put me in a cycle that I’ll end up two steps back afterwards and not feeling great afterwards.

Chris Sandel: Keeping in mind the fact that the work that you do, because you are in the health and nutrition space, it’s not as easy for someone who isn’t in that place and is like “Just unsubscribe from everyone, check who you follow and unfollow these people” – this is your day to day, and it means that you’re going to be at conferences or you’re going to be coming across research that is potentially going to be triggering or potentially going to be making you think “Maybe I should be doing these kinds of things with my diet.”

Alexis: Right.

Chris Sandel: So I think it’s useful to recognise your context with this, and that actually this is going to be coming up a lot more because of your profession.

Alexis: Exactly. I’m definitely in the trenches. When I go to a scientific conference or an industry show, I’m confronted with a lot of messaging all the time that I can’t really avoid. So working with you helped me prepare as well, knowing – we identified how triggering these events were. Then I would go in and I’d say, okay, I’m going to take some time in the morning to really set my mind where I want it to be before even walking into this situation, and afterwards I’m going to take some time to decompress, and I know afterwards I’m not going to take any steps on anything when I’m in that high anxiety, work stress, plus all of the science logic coming at me, health and nutrition, ‘do this, do that’ is coming at me.

I can just hit pause after these. And I don’t tell myself I won’t do anything because you have to live in the grey, right? It’s not black and white, ‘I won’t do anything’ or ‘I’ll do all the things’. I’m going to stay in the grey and hit pause, and then if something really does arise that I think would be actually helpful, I am totally allowed to take action on that – but helpful in all the ways. It’s not just a ‘fix it’ thing. And nothing’s really risen to the top. [laughs] It’s interesting.

00:19:43

What her relationship with food looks like now

Chris Sandel: What about then your relationship with food? What does that look like now?

Alexis: It’s kind of funny. When I was doing that ‘eat anything I want, I’m going to eat all the things anytime, whatever’, I didn’t actually have a lot of food enjoyment. In the past – my father’s a chef, and a Persian chef at that, so that just means abundance of all the foods, all the time. [laughs] I’ve grown up with a really good appreciation of food, and also, with my Persian culture, if we ever got a cold, Dad was boiling turnips. Food can also help you. So there was this enjoyment of food and also this nourishment that food could bring to other aspects besides just appetite.

I definitely, over many years, disconnected from that. I would come back to it a bit, disconnect it. But I would say that now, after working with you – I pretty much ignored food when we started. I didn’t have a lot of investment – maybe that’s the word – in my food. It was just sustenance at the time, feeding the kids, feeding the family. And then I think towards the end, I was sending you pictures, like “Look at my beautiful breakfast I made! I’m proud of this one”, like all of the fruits or all of the different components on this plate, and it looks great.

I think it was the same thing with my body. I was with food at the same place I was with my body, where it was just kind of there and a necessity, and I was not wanting to pay attention to it very much because there was just too much going on in my mind, and I was in too low of a state and too overwhelmed and all of the things.

So my relationship with food now is much more fun. It’s much more driven from my soul than from my mind. I’m not thinking “I must have this grams of fiber, this grams of protein, and oh, that meal was lacking this, this meal was” – it’s so much better when it’s out of my head, just coming from that other place, whatever you want to call it. So that’s where I’m at with food now. There’s just a lot of compassion overall with how I eat and nourish myself and the people around me.

Chris Sandel: Nice. I do remember when we first started together – because I think if you listen to this podcast, there can be this idea that the people I work with are always hyper-focused on every single thing that they’re eating and it’s that kind of thing. And that is a lot of what is going on, but for someone like yourself, there was, as you say, this real disconnect from it. You were meeting everyone else’s needs in terms of what they wanted to be eating, but you weren’t really focusing on yourself.

I can remember – it might’ve been after either the first call or the second call – you going to the markets and just absolutely enjoying that experience and just being inspired to start having this thing for breakfast or this thing throughout the day, and there was this getting to enjoy food for lots of different reasons again. And I could tell you were someone who enjoyed and appreciated food and you had this history, and it was nice seeing that come back – and come back pretty quickly in the whole scheme of things.

Alexis: Yeah, because it was always there; it was just so clouded over with the ‘must dos’, ‘you need to do this to be healthy’, ‘you need to do that to be healthy’, ‘fix it this way’, good/bad, black/white. It was all muddying the waters. I still order groceries, but I was only ordering groceries online – busy full-time working mother with two young kids, dual income family. No shame in ordering the groceries. But I wasn’t ever going to – I don’t think I’d gone in a year when we talked. It had been a long time.

So that was eye-opening to figure out with you. And yes, I realise how much joy I get just going to my local market and seeing – and it’s a health food store. There’s all the health goodies and everything there too. But it’s just beautiful food, beautiful abundance, new things to try, and I’m not going in with any sort of black-and-white mentality. So yeah, that was great.

Also eating breakfast. I wasn’t hungry when I was serving the kids breakfast, but they need to eat before school before their day starts. So I would just have this really sad breakfast. It’d be some toast with butter and jelly. And then you were like, “What would happen…” – because again, it would have to be perfect. Even though it’s not a diet mentality, it was like ‘eat together, eat together’. I’m trying to have this very wholesome, nourishing food culture in my house, but it wasn’t working for me. [laughs] It was like, actually, I really like to eat after I drop my oldest off at the bus stop. I can take a breather, and I make a beautiful breakfast for myself. It’s a great way to start the day.

So even the things that you think can be helpful and perfect, if you’re not living in the grey and seeing how it really does work for you, then you might end up somewhere that’s not enjoyable like that.

Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think it was you having the permission to do that.

Alexis: Yeah. The perfectionism just goes all over the Alexis universe. It’s in all aspects that you can find it. It’s a tricky thing, but I think we worked through a lot of it.

00:25:47

How her relationship with her body has changed

Chris Sandel: What about then your relationship with your body? What’s that like now?

Alexis: A lot different than when we started. Like I said, just years and years and years of dieting, very much focused on fixing my body. Always something to fix, always something to improve. I won’t say I ever felt like this major hate towards my body, but it was always my ‘fix it’ project. It was never good enough.

And then having two kids – I gave myself a lot of space with my body and naturally recovering to a point I wanted to, but it never left. I knew I didn’t want my daughters to have that in their lives. We don’t talk about – I made the culture in my home that I wish I had grown up with. But I was still living with that in my head. [laughs] My daughters, like, “Let’s not talk about their shape or their size, everybody” – we’ve had these very constructive talks with the grandparents. But then in my head I’m like, “Got to fix my body”, and I’m just keeping it so in the shadows.

That was the culmination, being overwhelmed and tired with everything, and I took that anti-diet stance that I’m not going to even think about my body anymore and just ignore it. Again, it was me going black and white again, from one end of the spectrum to the other. When we started, like I said, I was not giving my body any attention or any worth or value because it was so hard to acknowledge its needs without getting caught up in another ‘fix it’ trap.

We started working together – it always starts with compassion, but we did talk about things that made me feel good, and I had done yoga daily for many years. I had stopped. I mentioned that, and it was like, you know what, let’s just do 10 minutes a day, 5 minutes a day, 1 minute a day if it really makes you feel so good.

And I found myself touching my body in a loving way. We talked about when you’re bent over your foot, you see your foot and you’re like, “Oh wow, you, I don’t really ever see you very often. How are you doing down there? You look a little rough. Have I been ignoring you?” [laughs] So I think it was yoga for me that really opened the door while we were talking to seeing my body again and not ignoring it so much.

And from that came a very gentle, compassionate thought of maybe I could take care of my body a little bit, like give it some lotion. Not ‘take care’ like – I know that mentality immediately came to my head. A lot of people say ‘take care’ and they’re immediately like ‘fix it up and change it’. Just to be very clear, that is not what I’m talking about. I’m literally talking about caring for what is, not changing what is. So I started looking at myself again, and it wasn’t triggering or causing negative feelings. It was accepting and having compassion for my body.

And then we talked about, too, those hot spots of my body that would bring really negative feelings. It was so funny, this conversation. We were talking about my stomach, and I was like, “This is a hot spot for me because I can’t stand when it’s uncomfortable” and then we went back a step and we were like, it’s really uncomfortable when my pants are tight. Then we took another step back and it’s like, maybe I just shouldn’t wear tight pants. [laughs] And then we realised, I have no problem with my stomach when I’m wearing pants that actually aren’t literally trying to cut it in half. I’m a short-waisted person, so most pants are extremely uncomfortable on my middle. It was just stuff like that that we worked through.

So the place that I’m at with my body now is that I think definitely that innate appreciation has come back, and caring for it helps me have more compassion for it, because I see it working for me. Yoga has completely reconnected me with my body. Yoga for me is moving my body in a way that brings me really good feelings because it feels so good to stretch.

And when I’m talking yoga, I’m not doing anything crazy; I am not doing any crazy poses. [laughs] I’m literally just starting in my bedroom and saying, “What would feel good right now?” and then I go from there, because I have a couple of poses that I really love. I’m not listening to a guide or anything. I love stretching my hips; that is a total release. I can breathe 20 times through that and I never want to stop.

So that’s what I mean by yoga. It really for me is just that ‘ahh’ feedback and that release and taking time to reconnect with my body and myself. That’s where I am now. It’s a good spot.

Chris Sandel: That yoga piece, from my memory – we talked about this in the first session, and it then became something that was anchored with every step along the way. Before, we talked about that ‘fix it’ mentality and how that would come up; we discovered that actually if you continue to keep up that yoga practice, even if it’s just for 5 minutes or 10 minutes, even when you’re away, that little thing makes so much of a difference for you, and just that recognition.

Again, we talked about this – there are so many things that we’re told that we should do, like ‘this thing is good for our health’, ‘this thing is good for our health’, and you discovered something that is crucial for you, but most people – that’s not what the recommendation would normally be and the best things you can do for your health. It’s not like 5 to 10 minutes of yoga in the morning is going to transform your life. But for you, it kind of does.

Alexis: Right. It is such a key in the foundation of my mind and feelings for the day. It’s so funny; when we would come back and talk and you’d be like, “So, how’s it going with yoga?”, I’d be like, “Not doing it”, and then we’d point out it’s so funny how I was low state, high anxiety, high stress, tired, overwhelmed, and that’s when I want to skip the yoga. But when I’m in that state, if I do the yoga, that is literally what opens the door to getting out of that state for me.

So it’s really, really funny where it’s almost that parental kindness – that’s what I call it – where the non-parental side of you is like, “It just doesn’t feel like I can do this right now. I just don’t want to do it right now”, and then that parental kindness is like, “I promise you will feel better after you do this”, like getting the kids in the bath. “I promise you will enjoy it once you’re doing it.” [laughs] That’s exactly what it is. It’s getting kids into the bath. They fight you the whole way to the bath, and then once they’re in the bath they never want to leave. That is literally me with yoga. I sometimes have to drag myself into the room and shut the door, but once I’m doing it I never want to stop.

But it’s true. We identified that pretty quick when I wasn’t perfectly doing it every day when we were having our sessions, and we recognised the impact that it had when I wasn’t and when I was.

Chris Sandel: What about the stuff that we did together? Was it what you expected? Was it different?

00:34:23

Alexis’s advice for others with a similar situation

Chris Sandel: What advice would you have for someone who has a similar history to you? They’ve got a lot of dieting history, they’ve struggled with food and body in the way that you were; what advice would you have?

Alexis: I would say definitely ask for help. It’s so hard, there are so many reasons that we’ll come up with. And I’m just talking about people like me – people who battle perfectionism, extremely sensitive people, working mothers, spouses, the whole shebang. It’s really hard to (a) accept that we might need help and (b) try to justify that we deserve to get help.

I was at a really low point. I would tell others in my situation, don’t let yourself get to that point if you can. If you do see yourself spiraling, reach out to somebody whose voice seems to connect with you, if you find them on a podcast or see if there’s somebody who a friend recommends if you’re very open with a friend. That would definitely be my first recommendation.

I think to reach out like that, it can help to take a moment and assess how much self-compassion you have, because I can’t even believe that I ended up reaching out to you, to be honest, because I had no self-compassion. I had none. To put it in perspective, talking to other moms out there, if your child was a grown woman and came to you and was telling you that she had the exact same issues that you had, what would you tell her to do? You love this person. What would you tell them to do? You would support them with whatever help they needed, and you would say, “Go talk to somebody. Yes, let’s help. Let’s do this for you.” But then you wouldn’t do that for yourself, and that is the definition of self-compassion and self-love.

So you just need to step outside of yourself and see what you would do for a loved one who is going through the exact same things as you. If you find that you would tell them to talk to somebody, then there’s your answer. And it’s good. It’s scary to start, but it’s really good. Go into it open and honest and you’ll make a lot more progress.

Chris Sandel: You are definitely a good example on that one, for sure.

Alexis: Well, it worked. I think that we had a lot of really, really good moments together in the work that we did together, and I think the world of you and what you’ve helped me identify and what work you’ve helped me do.

Chris Sandel: Nice. I’m glad I got to do it with you. I really enjoyed working with you and getting to see the change that you were able to make.

Alexis: Couldn’t have done it alone. It was definitely not working alone. [laughs] Please never stop what you’re doing, because it definitely helps, and it’s I think what a lot of us need right now.

Chris Sandel: Thanks. Is there anything else I didn’t ask that you wanted me to ask or want to share?

Alexis: No, I feel like we went through a lot. We usually do in our conversations. [laughs] I think we covered just about everything that we’ve worked on and made progress through. This was good.

Chris Sandel: Cool. Thank you for coming on and sharing. I really appreciate it.

Alexis: Thank you, Chris.

Chris Sandel: So that was my conversation with Alexis. She is incredible, and I’m so grateful we got the chance to work together.

As I mentioned at the top of the show, for a limited time I’ve opened my doors to new clients. If you’re interested in working together, either head over to www.seven-health.com/help, or you can email info@seven-health.com.

That’s it for this week’s show. I’ll be back next week with another episode. Catch you then.