Year after year, one of the most common New Year's resolutions is losing weight. Many of us start the new year hating what we see in the mirror. And so we resolve to fix it, not by eating just a tad healthier, but by completely overhauling our entire food intake. January can feel like a time when everyone is on some eating regime. Our social media feeds fill up with diet ads and articles about paleo and Kaito and master cleanses and cabbage soup.

Our friends download calorie counting apps and pledge to cut out carbs and sugar.

It's hard not to get swept up in all the fresh start diet culture frenzy, especially if you're not feeling all that positive about how you look after the holidays.

I know all this very well because I, too, have had my fair share of Jan Di overhaul's, I have started many, many a new year hating what I saw in the mirror and obsessing over my own eating habits and what was the result of all district dieting weeks later? More often than not, I wound up beating myself up for not living up to that perfect picture of health I'd envisioned on New Year's Eve. A resolution I thought would make me happier ended up making me feel more disappointed and more depressed than ever.

It's been hard for me to break this annual cycle, but last year, around this time, Andrea Wachter came to my rescue. Andrea is a psychotherapist who specializes in disordered eating and the problem of diet culture. She's been studying effective ways to eat for over 30 years. I decided to take her meditation course, getting over overeating on the insight time around. And it was like a light bulb went off. Hello and welcome to lesson one. I'm so glad you decided to join me on this journey.

If you've been struggling with overeating or binge eating, the most important thing to know is that it's not your fault.

Like all the other experts in this New Year mini season of The Happiness Lab, Andrea has discovered that a more self compassionate approach is the key to becoming happier with our bodies and healthier in what we feed ourselves. So if you're ready to learn more about how you can be healthier and kick that destructive diet habit through kindness, then join me, Dr. Laurie Santos, for another special New Year mini season edition of The Happiness Lab. The topic of what I'm supposed to be eating has taken up way, way more of my thinking than I care to admit, I have spent an embarrassing chunk of my adult life plotting and planning new diet regimes.

I've spent hours fantasizing that this time I really will perfectly adhere to that unnecessarily uber strict new eating plan. And I inevitably become sad and disappointed when surprise, surprise, I fail again to live up to the superhuman diet goals I've set for myself. And because I then feel like a loser, I wind up comforting myself with whatever off limits food I was trying to limit in the first place. And that's why I was so taken by Andrea and her work.

She knows exactly what all this feels like because she went through these very same behaviors and worse for years. I think it's really important to be open about the troubling relationship that many of us have with food and eating, but knowing Andrea's personal history, I was a bit nervous about asking her to share all the details. What was once the biggest shameful secret of my life is now my career. So there is kind of nothing I don't talk about anymore because there's no shame anymore, because I know it wasn't my fault and I know it was all passed down innocently.

And having found a way to climb out, I'm happy to share what I've been through.

So with that permission, I asked Andrea to explain her journey towards eating with greater self compassion, beginning with her very earliest memory of when body image and disordered eating took over her life. Basically, I started dieting when I was about 12 years old, and it was the first time I remember having someone comment or say something shameful towards my body, up until that point, I don't really remember thinking all that much about my body, even though my mom was a and still is a chronic.

But when I was about 12, I got teased about the size of my thighs and I call it a dart in the heart moment where something happens and you feel terrible about it, usually terrible about yourself, usually make decisions as a result that are not generally healthy or helpful. And so I felt terrible about my body, decided that I needed to lose weight, and I started my first diet. And like I said, my mom was already dieting at the time.

My older sister was already dieting and I just hopped on what I now call the diet Riet roller coaster. So talk about what it was like to be on that diet roller coaster inside. Well, once I started obsessing, it was this constant soundtrack and it colored my life now so people can diet. I call them lightweight dieters, pun intended. Some people can diet and it doesn't take over their lives. And some people it's a real huge obsession and leads to problems.

And then many people it leads to full blown eating disorders. And that's what happened with me. I just became obsessed, which is the natural response to dieting. I started Sneek eating all the food that I wasn't supposed to have on the diet and had huge weight fluctuations. I did have a life like I went to school and I eventually went to college and I had lots of friends and summer jobs. But on the inside, no matter what I was doing, there was this constant soundtrack of what I was eating, what I wasn't eating, what someone else was eating and not eating, what my thighs looked like.

Compared to that, I just was constantly obsessed and that really colored my my life. So this sounds like a horrible soundtrack to turn on in your own head. But here we are at the start of the New Year and so many people are willingly jumping on this diet roller coaster. Tell me kind of how that makes you feel as somebody who's studied this for so long.

Well, it's sad because it's kind of the the solution that people are given. And even though the diet industry is hugely successful and multibillion dollar industry that continues to grow, it's got pretty much a 95 percent failure rate. People think that they themselves are failing, but they're just failing the diets. But really, the solution that we're given to body image issues and to bingeing or overeating is to diet. And the solution that we're given, the diet is part of the problem.

So I feel sad about it. And I know what it's like to spend your life obsessed on food and going to parties and not being able to eat what others are eating or what you really want, or eating out of control once you, quote, slip or break or go off the diet. So I know that only too well. And I also know. What the effects of dieting are and and there's the it is a roller coaster. So what were some of the negative behaviors you noticed in yourself?

You talked about your obsessive thinking, but did you also have behaviors that made you worry that something wasn't right, that you were on this kind of strange roller coaster? Oh, absolutely.

I snuck out constantly. I tried to eat what I had deemed good foods in front of people and then naturally ate what I deemed bad foods or what I was taught were bad foods. I would throw food away in an attempt to get rid of it and then get it out of the garbage and eat it again. I mean, just they call it in Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12 step arena, they call it incomprehensible demoralization, things that I never dreamed I would do.

There were even times I would steal people's food that I was out of control with food.

What's amazing about your story is that you really realized the bad part of this diet riot roller coaster firsthand, right?

Yes. But after decades of dieting and writing and severe eating disorder and going on one diet after the next and yo weight fluctuations, and then I finally found help that actually helped and I started working on the deeper issues. And so how are you able to get off this diet roller coaster? Well, I began getting sufficient support that took me deeper than just my body size support, that helped me learn what I was eating over, not just what I was eating, support that helped me stop restricting and start having a new relationship with food and learning how to approach food.

According to how it would make me feel rather than how it would make me look. And one of my biggest do overs was deciding that I was going to let go of my obsession to change my body and instead learn how to treat my body respectfully and then make peace with whatever that body was going to be as a result. And so in some ways, ironically, it was this attempt to get over this diet mentality that allowed you to kind of come to terms and love your body, which is what people who are starting out on diets want in some sense in the first place.

Exactly.

People think that if they change their body, then they love their body. But the way I love your body is to love your body. Like you cut out the middle guy and you're you work on that and it's work on its roll up your sleeves, work on it because of the culture we live in.

Talk a little bit about what happens and what the diet mentality does to our brains in our minds.

Oh, let me count the ways, what it does to our brains, in our minds. Well, mentally, first of all, when we deprive ourselves, we become obsessed. If someone is cold and they don't put on a sweater, they're going to be thinking about how cold they are and when they put on that sweater, they probably don't continue thinking they're cold or someone's tired and they continually deprive themselves of sleep. They they can't stop thinking about how tired they are and feeling tired.

But as soon as we sleep and get rest, we're not likely to obsess on being tired the next day because the need was met. So when we diet and chronically restrict ourselves of delicious food and enough food, then our minds obsess on food because they're not getting what they're needing. So it's it's a natural response. So that's the first huge effect of diets. Secondly, there are hormonal changes that happen in our body as a result of dieting and attempting to lose weight on naturally.

We have hormones that are responsible for hunger and fullness. And when we die it and we lose weight on, naturally, our hormones will adjust to try to get us back to natural. So our hunger hormone will increase because it wants us to eat more and our satiety hormone will decrease because it wants us to get more food, to get more calories, because we need it so hormonally. Our bodies are very unhappy when we diet and when we are eating in a loving, respectful way, which means we don't starve and we don't stuff ourselves, then our hormones regulate.

And similarly, metabolically, that's a third area that changes and that gets affected by diets. Our metabolism will adjust if we deprive ourselves and if we try to go lower than our natural weight range, we all have a natural weight range, just like we have a natural foot size and a natural height, our natural weight range that isn't one number as opposed to what we're taught. People try to get to be one. No, our natural range is a range.

It fluctuates. And when we die, our range tends to fluctuate enormously and unnaturally and our metabolism will try to adjust to try to get us back to our natural range because it's natural. So that's another effect to be metabolically happy. We want to stop stuffing and starving ourselves. And when we stop starving ourselves, we stop stuffing ourselves. And you use this wonderful metaphor of all these changes as this kind of diet rollercoaster, so talk to me about what you mean about this roller coaster.

Yeah, I call it the diet Riet roller coaster, so. There are certainly many people that just riot, they just binge and painfully overeat and they don't diet, but I've never met anyone that doesn't diet in mentality. So I like to say, whether you're dieting in reality or mentality, it's still going to have that rebound effect of rebellion. So if somebody deprived themselves of food on a diet, whether it's an official diet in a book or a doctor or it's your own deprivation and rules of food groups and foods that you're just not allowed to have because they're bad or they're fattening or whatever.

So when someone does that, it sets up this natural response to just want to eat everything. The diet mentality tells us not to eat. And again, there's people that just binge and overeat and they say they don't diet. But I have never met someone who didn't have diet mentality that thinking that they should be dieting and that still sets us up.

And so I grew up in diet culture, obviously. I mean, I took your course on Incyte Taimur, which I adored. Everyone who's listening to this should take her course if you're struggling with this stuff. But but even though I know this stuff, it's sometimes hard for me to believe that it's possible to kind of take care of your body and lovingly feed it in a way that doesn't feel so obsessed. But you've argued that we can all do this if we kind of listen to that voice deep down inside of us, if we put some work in to kind of listen to it, we do have this voice, but it's a deep voice.

It's kind of in our hearts. It's a natural knowing of how to treat your body just like, you know, if you're cold, you grab a blanket, you know, if you're tired, hopefully if you're caring for your body, you go to sleep or rest. And we've been so robbed of this innate knowledge of how to feed our bodies because of the diet industry. So this process is about getting it back.

So I think people at the start of the new year really want to do something positive for themselves. Right. Like they want to in some sense be healthier or be fitter. But they unwittingly end up jumping on this diet, right, roller-coaster? That leaves them in some ways like mentally and maybe even physically worse off than before.

Absolutely. And it's like looking at one piece of a puzzle and missing that. There are so many components. I like to talk about a four legged table and that in order to be healthy and in order to heal from if somebody doesn't feel comfortable in their body or their treatment of their body in order to feel more healthy and more balanced, we have to deal with all four legs of this table in order for the table to be stable. I love a good run.

So the four legs or areas to work on. If someone wants to start the new year and work on being healthier, the four areas are physical, which is letting go of that extreme diet. Right. And learning how to feed yourself lovingly and respectfully. And then it's emotional, which is learning how to cope with and tend to your emotions rather than think certain ones are good and certain ones are bad. And then there is mental, which is looking at your thinking.

And I think disordered eating is really disordered thinking. So looking at the quality of your thoughts, how you're speaking to yourself all day long, and then the fourth is spiritual and how how you're feeding yourself spiritually, how you're connecting with yourself or deeper areas of life. And so when we deal with all four of those areas, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual, not dealing with them perfectly or overnight, but we really work on all those parts of ourselves in our lives.

That's how we get healthier in the new year or any time of the year. We're going to take a short break now, but when we return, I'll have Andrea explain exactly how we can make sure all four legs of that table are sturdy and how kindness and self compassion yet again. Archey, the happiness lab. We'll be right back. America is about to not be great again. The speech the fake media didn't want you to know about it is now available for download.

I'm President Donald Trump, and this is not just the most important speech I've ever given, it's probably the most important one by any president in history.

Hasta la vista, America is Trump's farewell address. Well, it's Trump's farewell address imagined by Kurt Anderson and performed by Alec Baldwin. Hasta La Vista. America is available exclusively at a Trump farewell, Dukkha. It's just 99 cents. Shouldn't we be charging more for the greatest speech of all time? Hasta la vista, America for now.

Available now at a Trump farewell, dotcom. Psychotherapist Andrea Wachter describes her experience of disordered eating as like being on a diet riot roller coaster. It's an analogy I can relate to because it's not just that the ups and downs of strict denial and drastic overindulgence are like a fairground ride. There's also a disorienting and deafening inner monologue that comes with this mental ride that can even sound like a creaky old roller coaster.

When you're dieting and rioting, you often can't hear that quiet, kind, calming voice inside you, the one that knows what a body really needs to feel healthy and happy. After years of riding the roller coaster, Andrea had to make a special effort to hear her own calm in her voice over all that diet noise.

I would ask myself over and over. If I was feeding someone else who I love, how would I feed them right now and I always had to add the someone who doesn't diet or riot part, if I'm feeding someone else I love, who doesn't diet or diet, how would I feed them? Because if you love someone, some people put loved ones on diets and some people stuff their loved ones and say, here, take more. I love you so much more.

So if you're feeding someone who doesn't in a right and you love them, how would you feed them? Because I didn't have that intuition for a long time. That intuitive eating in the early years didn't work for me. I was like, oh, I don't know how to eat intuitively. I know how to restrict and I know how to binge. But when I started asking myself that question and asking what feels loving, what feels respectful, then I would get little inklings until it became the new normal.

And so, I mean, I've tried to be on this path myself, of sort of hearing that inner voice. And it's hard in part because of all these kind of cultural norms. But it's also hard because I think if you have it, listen to the voice in a while, it becomes hard to genuinely hear it. You know, sometimes when I hear, you know, how would you feed yourself lovingly? I think it's got to be the healthy stuff, you know, avoid the cookies.

Right. Like the that kind of idea of good and bad sort of gets in there. And so in your course, you talk about three things to pay attention to when you're picking food that should feel loving, nutritious, delicious and moderate. So talk about why that's kind of a good cue for those of us in the baby steps towards mindful eating.

Yeah, I use nutritious, delicious and moderate as a little checklist because we need to nourish our bodies. And a lot of times when people say I'm not dieting anymore, no more diets for me than they're perhaps not getting enough nourishing foods. So we do need to nourish our bodies. Whatever that looks like or feels like for anybody is might be different. Right. But there are there are food groups and there is a way to nourish our bodies. And again, if we begin to tune into that inner knowing or ask ourselves how we feed someone we love who doesn't diet Ariete, we can get a sense.

So how do you nourish someone? You're not likely to give a child a banana for breakfast and send them off to school for the day? When we think of how would you feed your child, you're more likely to give them a nourishing meal. So nutritious, delicious. When we diet, we often eat kind of tasteless food and so we need to make sure that it's delicious food. Now, if I'm just focusing on the deliciousness, then we might not be getting nutritious.

So when I first started trying this all on many, many years ago. And I was OK, I'm not dieting anymore, I'm just going to eat what's delicious. Well, it's not loving to just eat cookies. And it's not loving to just eat donuts and it's not loving to just eat salad. So we've got some nutritious and delicious and they can overlap. Too many nutritious foods are delicious to us and hopefully we do just eat what we like and love.

And then moderate is what's a loving amount, a respectful amount for your body. Our bodies know when they're satisfied. So it's learning how to listen to that. And this is all easier said than done, especially if we haven't worked on the other leg. So I can't stress that enough. This is a four pronged process here.

And so let's talk about one of the other legs, I think kind of the mental part. Right. So talk about how you would sort of work on that leg of the table, as you put it.

Well, we need to look at what's the nature of our thoughts. I talk about three different mind moods. We have an unkind mind, a kind mind and a quiet mind. And oftentimes when someone is living on the diet Riet roller coaster, they're really hanging out on the unkind mind channel. So we need to have an upgrade in our thinking, the quality of our thoughts. And again, just like, how would you feed someone you love? How would you speak to someone you love?

And looking at the way we're speaking to ourselves and we need to be speaking to ourselves kindly. And then there's also which internal voice are you listening to? Are you listening to the diet or voice that's telling you that's bad, you should eat that. You should look like that. Are we listening to the right or voice that says, give me everything that I never I'm allowed to have or be tuning into love what is respectful, loving, compassionate treatment and self talk?

I think the unkind mind is so important to talk about right now at the New Year, because I think so many of us, in an attempt to better ourselves on January one, end up talking to ourselves in a really unkind way. Yes, so it's bringing consciousness to the way we're talking to ourselves so often, we just have this monologue going and we don't even stop to question it because it just feels so real, sound so real. But that's often where safe support can come in.

Getting help from someone who can say, wait a minute, that's really not a kind way to speak to yourself or would you ever speak to someone else like that and really beginning to take a look at how am I speaking to myself and would I speak to someone else who I love in this manner?

And so another part of the table is to really pay attention to the physical cues that we have around eating and kind of what's causing us to eat. We often assume we just eat because we're hungry. But then when we really pay attention to what's causing us to pick up that sandwich or that cookie, sometimes it's not hunger at all, right? Yes. And if you've got a history of dieting and writing, you're likely to be pretty cut off from your natural hunger and fullness signals.

When I first started that piece of the process, I couldn't really distinguish so much between was that a feeling? Was that a hunger pang? Was that anxiety? Was that thirst? I don't know what's going on in there because so much happens in our guts. So for me, in the beginning, I just kept going with what feels the most loving. What would I how would I feed someone I love who doesn't diet? All right. Well, I probably would give them some food upon awakening within a reasonable time, an hour, a half an hour or something.

And it probably wouldn't be a box of donuts and it wouldn't be a yogurt. It would be what's a loving meal? And I just kept asking myself that it was, I call it, the biggest do over of my life. When I decided, as I approach the kitchen or open a menu, I am going to ask myself what feels loving, what feels respectful to this body. And I'm going to move aside, step aside that voice that thinks I need to change my body in order to be lovable and acceptable.

And I just kept doing that over and over. And it was hard at first because just like meeting someone new, you don't know them. It takes time. It takes time to get to know that voice inside of us. You know, one of the things I observed when I started to do this is that when I was craving food and the beginning of this journey, oftentimes it had nothing to do with my hunger cues whatsoever. The food was trying to fill something else.

And this gets to, I think, your spiritual leg of the table. We need to kind of figure out what else is missing, because it seems like sometimes we kind of go to food when there's some other thing we're looking for.

Absolutely. We were somebody I read once that binging or dieting our attempts to find spirituality about going to the wrong address, you know, it's like a good, valid try to get filled up or to get some more sweetness in your life or to get some comfort. I say good try. We're just doing the best we can trying to fill ourselves up. But when we really fill our spirits, we feel better afterwards. We feel fulfilled afterwards. We don't feel regretful or stuffed or like we hurt ourselves and deprived ourselves.

I always encourage people to make a spirit, fill our list and to gather ideas as you go and to find ways to fill your spirits in a way that you feel better afterwards.

And so what are some examples on your spirit? Fill our list. I think this will be really important for our listeners to hear some good examples. Oh my spirit, fill our list, rest and getting in nature and yoga and taking a bath and meditating and connecting with loved ones, watching a comedy or reading. I paint rocks. I decided a few years ago I needed something off the screens, so I started just doodling and painting on rocks. So there's lots of ways that people fill their spirits, mostly to me going into nature, going to the beach or the woods or swimming.

And everybody has to find what fills them and ways that even if it's just resting in a way that's guilt free and you're filling back up, that's what we're looking for, getting comfort. I'm glad you mentioned the resting thing, because one of the early experiences I had after taking your course on Insight Time, when I was trying to pay attention to why I was eating things, was I was actually working on podcast episodes, in fact, of writing, writing, writing.

And I had this craving to, like, head downstairs and get like a cookie or get some chips or eat something. But I knew I wasn't really hungry. And as I was kind of walking down, I realized actually what I really needed was just to, like, stand up. I was sitting in that chair writing for hours and I think my body just wanted to get up, move around, get a change of scenery. But the only thing that I would allow myself to do if I was like taking a break was to go eat something.

And that was a really important moment because it made me realize, like, oh, my body doesn't want food right now. It just wants a break. And sometimes the only way you think you can give yourself a break is with, like, eating something hackley especially if that's a habit.

It's kind of like if a baby starts. Crying You want to rule out all the reasons, right, so maybe it's hungry, maybe it's tired, maybe it needs a diaper change, maybe it's something's poking at we have to rule things out. So if we want food, we have to rule out. Am I hungry or unsatisfied from my last eating experience? And if you've eaten and it was a delicious, nutritious, yummy meal or snack, OK, I'm probably not hungry.

So now am I having feelings? Do I need to tend to some emotions that I'm having or what am I thinking or my thoughts kind of sending myself in an unkind direction and unhelpful direction? Or am I needing something or is there a deeper need here and needing something more spiritual or to connect with or even just to rest or to stand up or sit down or whatever? And all of the strategies you're giving us fits with something we talk a lot about on the happiness lab, which is the simple act of mindfully paying attention.

You know, for me to notice what was going on with my craving, I had to kind of be there and pay attention to my emotions. But I think also to notice that you're eating nutritious, delicious stuff, you also have to be there when you eat. And this is something I struggle with this like simply being present and not checking my email or ignoring it during the simple act of eating. So talk to me about some strategies people can use if they want to kind of pay more attention during eating and be more mindful.

Well, I think this process is about paying more attention in general. Right? It's really about waking up and being more conscious. And that's the only way that I have found to make sustained change is to be more aware and kind of parent ourselves. And loving parent doesn't just send a kid off and just let them roam the house all day without care. And so it's really caring for our body, caring for our mind, caring for our needs and tending to ourselves and being awake at the wheel, so to speak.

So being awake and aware when you're eating, being more awake and aware when you're not eating, what you're needing, what you're feeling. And so often people with whether it's a full-blown eating disorder like I had or just disordered eating people have had kind of a hypnotic spell cast upon us. And it leads us to be pretty checked out with these screens is constant screen use and with just obligations. And now all the anxiety in the world, it can leave us pretty numb.

So what's being asked here is is a lot, but you get a lot as a result. You get a lot back. So it's it's a worthy cause, but it is about being more aware of how you're treating yourself and how you're speaking to yourself.

So as we put all these legs of the table back, I think a final thing we need to pay attention to is kind of trying to avoid these cultural forces that led us onto this diet. Right. Roller coaster in the first place. And I feel like there's nothing harder than to do that during the new year, where it feels like there are forces screaming at us to restrict our foods or to Iquito or eat healthy. Any hints for how to fight these forces, especially at this time of the year?

Well, the first hint is you have to believe in what I'm saying here, what we're talking about. You have to buy in to the idea that the diet is not the solution to a body image issue or feeling unhealthy in your body. The diet is part of the problem. So you'd have to believe that. And once you believe it, it's about really standing by that belief and acting according to that belief. And so once I believed that dieting is not of interest to me anymore and that it only sets up obsession and bingeing, then no matter what other people were doing, it didn't matter.

It maybe wasn't as enjoyable. I remember in the early years when I was first trying to make the shift and I would go be with people that were still dieting. And I remember there would be times where let's say I was visiting family and we were going to go out to dinner and it was lunchtime. It was mid-afternoon. And I'd say, oh, I'm going to eat lunch. And they'd say, well, we're going to have a big dinner and early dinner.

I'm going to skip lunch. And I'd say, OK, well, I'm going to go have a lunch. And I would just it took it was brave to go against the culture or I wanted maybe dessert with my breakfast and nobody. And they thought it was weird or I don't want dessert with my dinner because I'm full of sort of going against the cultural norms is brave. But once, you know, this is what I need to do to get my own relationship with my body back and to get off that diet.

Right. Roller, and you're committed to it. And once you know wholeheartedly that dieting is part of the problem, not the solution, then it's about being brave and taking a stand and doing it differently. Sometimes I'll say to my clients, if someone in your family has to go to the bathroom, do you think you should automatically go to you know, it's like we get to have different bodily needs and it's and it's brave on this. And so how has this approach changed your life?

I mean, you've talked about this being a moment that has changed everything, so talk about how it's changed your relationship with your body, but also your happiness.

Only completely. Only every day. Just I used to be completely obsessed with food and my body. And I was either restricting and obsessing or over eating and bingeing and obsessing and white knuckling or out of control. And again, you don't have to be as extreme as I was to still deserve and warrant help, and now I eat food where my body tells me it needs food and I choose just exactly what I like and what I want. And there's no longer in the beginning when I was learning this, there was a lot of inner committee dialogue of that loving to have that as a restricting if I don't have that, as it felt like every meal was big committee meeting and now I just know exactly what I want and I just go get it.

Fortunately, I'm fortunate enough to be able to have resources and have what I want in my home. So now that frees me up. That frees me up so much time. I think about all the time I spent thinking about food and my body size and just missed out on life. And I don't think anybody gets to their deathbed and wishes they were a different size. I've had so many clients in their eighties and late eighties who have said that they don't even have a memory of eating naturally and feeling comfortable and peaceful in their bodies.

So we so many people just lose years out of their lives thinking about food and body obsession. So for me, I've gotten that back. I have a lot more free time and that frees me up and I get to read if I want to read and go walk in nature or sit down or do a podcast with a lovely person. So it just frees me up to be able to see what else there is in life. It doesn't mean I'm happy all the time.

That's not natural either. It just means that I'm not obsessed with food all the time or all.

Since learning of Andrea's work, I tried really hard to reduce the amount of mental time and emotional energy I spend thinking about food and eating, I'm still more influence than I'd like to be by all the cultural pressures to look a certain way or eat a particular thing or to think of food as good or bad. But this year, I'm trying to find that kinder, more compassionate voice in my head. And so my eating resolution for 20 21, unlike the diet riot urges of years past, is to ask myself the question Andrea suggested.

If I was feeding someone else who I loved, how would I feed them? Right now it sounds like a tiny step, but for me it's been a game changer. In our next and final episode of this New Year mini season, we'll tackle another super common resolution that also causes us to be unkind to ourselves and to our happiness exercise. So if you want to learn more about how you can engage with fitness more self compassionately, I hope you'll come back for the next episode of The Happiness Lab.

With me, Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab was co-written and produced by Ryan Dilli, the show was mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and our original music was by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to the entire Pushkin team, including McLibel, Maggie Taylor, Carly Migliore, Heather Fain, Sophie Green McKibbon, Eric Sandler, Jacob Weisberg and my agent Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by Dr. Laurie Santos.