Done with Dieting Episode #106: Imprinting

On today’s episode of the Done With Dieting Podcast, I am talking about something called imprinting. Which just means that we are taking it all in and we’re becoming more present.

Let’s go

You are listening to the done with dieting podcast. The podcast for women in midlife, who are done with dieting, but still want to lose weight and feel good in your clothes.

You know that diets don’t work long term. But you feel like there’s this secret that everyone else knows that you just haven’t figured it out yet.

I am your host, Elizabeth Sherman. And I’ve helped hundreds of women get off the diet roller coaster, change their relationship with food, exercise, and their bodies.

Through this podcast, my goal is to help you too.

Welcome. Let’s get started.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Done With Dieting podcast episode number 1 0 6. Now, where I’d like to start our episode today is I’d like you to go on a journey with me. If it’s available to you, close your eyes. And I’d like you to imagine that you are in a rooftop restaurant.

The weather is a perfect temperature, whatever that is for you. 75 degrees, 80, whatever. The wind is blowing just ever so breezily and it’s night and the rooftop bar is lit up from all sides, the moon is shining brightly. There are clouds in the sky, and they are just perfect round, cloudy clouds, just like cotton balls.

As you look around the table, you see your friends and they are smiling. They are talking and they’re animated. Their faces are lit up by candlelight. And as you look around the table, your heart is just filled with love, and joy, and satisfaction with your life.

That’s where I wanted to start today’s episode. Because this is actually a memory that I have of myself. And it was the first time that I actually did this technique that I’m going to talk about today called imprinting. And what imprinting has done for me in my life is it has slowed down the busyness of life. The busyness that we all find ourselves in, and it has brought me back to the present moment.

Now, this function of imprinting is something that I’ve developed over a period of time. And it started with an exercise called ‘notice and name.’ I used to do some work for a company called Precision Nutrition. If you’ve heard of them or perhaps, we’ve met through them, I was doing some work for them and one of their very first habits because they have a habit based program.

One of their very first habits is to spend five minutes just paying attention. And they have this exercise called notice and name. And when you notice and name, what you do is you just start noticing and naming things around you. So, you could just notice, the carpet is gray, or the walls are white, or I see a flower, or I see my dog, I hear the sound of a truck coming. I hear the sound of a phone ringing. I can hear the sound of a bird. I feel wind on my skin. I feel hot. I feel sweaty.

And so, what you just start to do with notice and name is it’s a way of bringing us back to the present moment. And what you do is you notice and name your five senses. So, things that you see, things that you smell, things that you taste. Notice what’s happening in your mouth. Are you tasting leftover coffee taste, or taste from lunch, or maybe your toothpaste, or whatever it is.

So, what does your mouth taste like? What do you see? What do you smell? What do you taste? What do you touch? What do you hear? Okay. And so, just really being present with what is happening right now. I’ve adopted using the notice and name technique in my own practice with my clients. And the reason that I’ve adopted it within my own practice is because I find that for so many of us and for so many of us that live in Western culture, we are constantly going, going, going, going, going.

And what happens, what we’ve learned is that our brains were constantly thinking about what happened yesterday or what happened just a minute ago. Or we’re hyper fixated on what’s happening in the future. What that does is it takes us away from the present moment.

Now, why this is a problem is that so many of us walk around feeling like our heads are disconnected from our bodies. And what we want to do is with the work that I do with my clients, we want to integrate our heads back into our bodies because our heads are actually part of our bodies. But so many of us go around believing that our bodies are a nuisance.

We start to get irritated when we’re sitting and we’re working and all of a sudden we realize, oh, you know what? I need to go to the bathroom. It’s like, ugh, why do I need to go to the bathroom? This is irritating. Why does my body need to go to the bathroom? Right? How many of us do that? And so, many of us also walk around like, ugh, I’m hungry again. Why am I hungry again? Or we get irritated with all of the things that our body needs. Gosh, I gave you a glass of water the other day. How dare you need more water?

What this process does through noticing and naming and paying attention to our bodies. What we start to do is we start to pay more attention to what’s happening in our bodies.

So, I tell a story that I just think is so funny because years ago I was at a party with some friends and I was talking to another woman and we were talking about how we love sweets and how we overeat brownies, and cookies, and stuff like that. And there was another woman there and she just looked at us and she was like, yeah, well I just kind of pay attention to my body. I just listen to my body.

And she walked out of the room, and I just remember thinking, b*tch. Like whom does that? And the truth is that no one teaches us how to listen to our body. And so, through this practice of noticing and naming, we’re starting to do that.

Now, what I’ve done within my own practice is I’ve incorporated some additional touchpoints. What I’ve done is I’ve added in what I call doing a body scan. And what a body scan is you start at the top of your head, and you slowly move your way down and you just start to notice, what am I feeling? Am I stressed in my shoulders? Are my shoulders tensed up? Is my jaw tense? Is my face flushed?

And again, going back to the notice and name, what do I taste in my mouth? What am I hearing? But not so much about the hearing, and the taste, and the sight. What we’re really trying to do is something that’s called interoception. Now, interoception is one of our senses. We’re not taught about interoception.

So, in addition to the five senses that we all know about sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. We also have two additional senses. One which is called proprioception and the other which is called interoception.

Proprioception is the idea that we know where we exist in space. An example of proprioception is that you can read a piece of paper, a book, or whatever it is the newspaper. And you can grab your coffee cup and bring it to your mouth without looking at the coffee cup or without looking at your mouth. Right? You can know where your limbs are in space. You can reach over and grab something without having to look at it. That’s proprioception. Understanding where your body and your limbs are in space and in relation to your body.

And then, the other one is called interoception. Now, interoception is the idea that we understand what’s happening inside of our body. You’ve probably talked to people who have said that they knew something was off and they went to their doctor, but they couldn’t really describe it. That is the power of interoception. And when their doctor came back, he said, yes, you have cancer or some other disease. Like understanding that your body is just not right, but you don’t have any words to put around what’s happening.

Now, here’s what’s really interesting. A few episodes ago, I had Paula Engebretson on the show, and she is an A D H D coach. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that folks who have A D H D or neurotypical brains may not be very strong in interoception. So, what that means is some of us are actually just more in touch with our bodies than others. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we can’t learn it, and that’s part of what I teach my clients.

Now, what we do is we start with this body scan, and we’re using the body scan for a couple different reasons. The first reason that we’re using the body scan is just like I mentioned before. We’re bringing our head back into our body. We are reconnecting our brain into our body. Because again, our brain is part of our body and there’s a lot of give and take there. We just don’t pay attention to it. And so, that’s really the big takeaway here is when we’re doing a body scan, we are paying attention to what’s happening in our bodies.

Now, in coaching with my clients whether we’re working one-on-one or in a small group. What we do is we start to use that information for one of two different reasons. One is starting to understand what our hunger signals are. Because so many times we, women have been told that we should not pay attention to our hunger signals. That we shouldn’t pay attention to our body. That we should follow the rules of whatever diet we are on and pay attention to that instead of our own self-trust, right? Paying attention to our body.

For many of us who have started dieting at very young ages, you are told, don’t pay attention to your hunger. Cover up your hunger with drinking water, instead. Like you’re not hungry, you’re just thirsty.

And so, what we do is we stop paying attention to those signals and we stop learning. We learn to disassociate our body from our brains. We see our bodies as annoyances. We see our bodies as something that isn’t part of us. And so, through starting to uncover what are our hunger signals, like no one tells us that, right? No one teaches us how to read your hunger signals. Right?

And the thing is that everyone’s hunger signals are completely different. Some of us have experience what’s called being hangry, right? Others of us get really lightheaded. Some of us feel weak. Some of us get rumbling in our stomachs. And so, there are a lot of different signals that your body sends you when you are starting to get hungry. And so, through doing this body scan on a regular basis, what we’re doing is we’re learning what is my body trying to tell me. When is my body telling me that I am hungry, so that I can then take care of it.

The other thing that the body scan does is it allows us to get in touch with our emotions. So, what are the physical sensations that we experience when we experience an emotion? And for many of us, we don’t pay attention to our bodies when we are experiencing a very high intensity emotion. Like excitement, like sadness, like grief, like anxiety. Because we’re like, it feels bad.

But here’s the thing about doing a body scan, which is brilliant. When you can take a feeling and really sit with it and understand what are the physical sensations that I experience when I feel this emotion. And you really just focus on the physical sensations instead of the emotion itself or how terrible it feels. What it does is it actually takes the power away from the emotion. And this is something that we do when we learn how to process emotions. We really just feel the emotion. We’re like, okay, body, bring it on.

And what you’ll notice if this is something that you do or if you learn how to do this is that even though negative emotions don’t feel great, they really can’t hurt us. So, those are the three reasons why we’re doing body scans so that we can integrate our heads back into our bodies, so that we can get in touch with our hunger signals. And then, also so that we can start to feel emotion and really be able to process it.

So, that’s the body scan and notice and name.

Recently, I’ve started getting into this other modality of coaching called Positive Intelligence. And it’s really fascinating. I’ve talked a little bit about it on this podcast before specifically an episode called Mental Fitness that I’ll put in the show notes. But what that coaching teaches us is how to do what he calls positive intelligence, PQ reps.

And what PQ reps are is it’s just taking 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes and really bringing yourself back to the present moment. Now, there are a couple different ways that you can do these PQ reps. One way is to just again, go to notice and name. So, notice even something that you’ve had on your desk for years. So, like, picking up the mug that you use every single day for your morning coffee and really looking at it.

Notice how the light plays off of the curve of the coffee cup. Noticing how your coffee smells and noticing the steam as it comes up from the coffee cup. So, really spending some time just being immersed in this visual sensation, even though it’s something that you’ve seen time, and time, and time again. What you’re doing is you’re looking at it for the first time.

You can do this with your partner or those people that you love who are close to you. Like really pay attention to their face. What they’re looking like, what their expression is on their face, like really pay attention.

Another method of doing a PQ rep is really paying attention to what it is that you’re hearing. So, starting to focus on what is the closest sound to me? How does that sound? And then, focusing on the furthest away sound, what does that sound like? And so, through this process of really paying attention to what is happening? Right now, in your space, what it does is it brings you into the present moment.

And no one has to know that you’re doing any of these things. No one has to know that you’re doing a body scan. You can do it in the elevator. You can do it in your car. And the same thing is true with PQ reps.

Now, through these processes that I’ve learned doing the PQ reps and then also doing the body scan, what it’s done for me is it’s allowed me then to start imprinting present moments.

There’s a quote that I love by a man named Viktor Frankl. And the quote says, between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.

Through doing the body scan, through doing PQ preps. What that does is it actually creates that space. Most of my clients come to me because they don’t like that they’re eating, and they don’t understand why they’re eating. They realize that they’ve eaten, but they don’t realize that they’re doing it.

And so, for most of us, we don’t want to give up sugar. We don’t want to give up tasty treats. But what we want to do is we want to become more present with those experiences. We want to be able to make choices.

In this Viktor Frankl quote, why I love that is because for so many of us, something happens, and we react. Someone says something mean to us and we snap right back. We feel a negative emotion. We dive into the chips. We feel sadness. We go for the chocolate. And we don’t have that little bit of space in our thinking process that allows us to question. Should I be doing this? Is this the best thing for me? Is this what I really want?

And why that’s important is because what we want to do is we want to increase that little space. There are some there, but so many of us resist meditation. Doing PQ reps, doing body scans is just a different way of doing meditation. So that we can create that space between stimulus and response between something happening to us and us reacting. It’s the difference between reacting and responding.

And so, through these processes, through doing the body scan, through doing the PQ reps, through noticing and naming. What I’ve been able to do is I’ve been able to become way more present in my life. And in fact, what I do now is I find myself, when I am experiencing joy, or satisfaction, or contentment, or anything that just really hits me as, this is beautiful.

What I do is I take a breath. I stop for just a minute, and I imprint that moment on my memories. And what this has done for me is it has made my life so much richer because I can then recall those memories so much more effectively because I can now take in all of the sensations. I can take in the visual sensation. I can remember hearing my friends laughing. I can remember the music that was on. I can remember the breeze across my skin. I can remember feeling love and joy and compassion for all of these people.

Because who doesn’t want to feel that at any drop of a hat? So, what’s your takeaway from today?

The thing that I want to share with you is that the more we pay attention, the more we can just stop, notice, and really pay attention to what’s happening. The more we will be able to do that when we want to do that. The more we are able to create a space where we feel our body and integrate our brains, back into our bodies. What will happen is we will be able to live a more intentional life.

A life where we’re not automatically running to food in order to self-soothe. A life where we are able to do the things that we said that we were going to do because we can be compassionate with ourselves. We can live a life where we can just be happier.

And if this is something that you’re like, I don’t know if I can do this, but I want it. I am going to invite you to work with me one-on-one or with my small group. The Feel Good Sisterhood is a small group coaching program that the women are just amazing, and they are on this quest just like you are. To be free from diet culture. To integrate their bodies back into their lives and to really feel everything that they’re feeling.

If this is something that you want, I would love for you to join me. Go to elizabethsherman.com/consult to schedule an appointment where we can figure out where the best place for you is. Either one-on-one or in group coaching.

And if you’re looking for more information on how to work with me and what that entails, you can go to my website at elizabethsherman.com. And up at the top there’s a menu that says, work with me. Just click on that and you can see my different offers.

All right, everyone, have an amazing week. I will see you next time. Thanks for sticking with me. Bye-bye.

Hey, Thanks for listening.

If you’re done with dieting and would like to work with me as your coach, I’d like to invite you to reach out to myself and my team to ask about programs and pricing.

Go to elizabethsherman.com/contact to get started today. I can’t wait to hear from you. See you next week.