I Broke My Worst Habit With Kindness! Behavioural Change Expert

0:00We're all a number of steps away from doing something we regret. You are an award-winning psychologist, also best-selling author, How Diets Make Us Fat, and that title spoke to me. I'm just decoupling diet culture from weight loss in order to enable people to lose weight. I never thought about that. So I just thought it was normal to be judging other people's bodies, comparing my body to theirs, and I was gaining weight like wildfire, thinking, what's going wrong? I know a lot now that I wouldn't have known then, but on a diet. You're asking someone to care about an aesthetic in the future when they have a need, physical, like fundamental, existential.

0:33You've got to eat. Oh God, that's so interesting. You've got to eat. It was infused into us. Be thin, be thin, be thin, be thin, don't eat too much. And then body positivity came. But our own learning was too deep. Diet culture left me scared of food. And that's when I had started to treat my weight problem as a food problem, not as a size problem. And I was losing weight at speed. Wow. There are millions of people out there who would be able to manage their weight and their relationship with food had they never tried to lose weight in the first place. Yes. What's really important is that everyone's got something they want to change, something they feel powerless of.

1:06I want to lose weight, I want to stop doing this, I want to not look at my phone in the morning. All day, we're engaging in habits. If you didn't choose them, they chose you. Yes. If you could give people the first steps to making this positive change, what would they be? I have three juicy ones. So first of all... so today I am interviewing the amazing Sheru Izzardi we've had a little exchange this morning on insta already we love each other um she is an absolutely incredible woman an award-winning psychologist also best-selling author and speaker um you've tipped the attitudes towards towards addiction and treating addiction on its head.

1:53You help so many people. And we are here at the 15th of January. A lot of people are already punishing themselves because they may have fallen off the wagon. So I think this is a time when people really need to hear you. And we're going to be talking about your new book. This is so exciting. I loved on your instagram page you had all the different copies of the book from all the different countries of the kind of the kindness method yeah that's amazing and this is going to be the same um how diets make us fat and that title spoke to me in such a massive blow and we're going to talk about that a bit later but first of all i'd like to go back because really this whole method came from personal experience.

2:44So when was the first time that you became aware that other people were aware of your body shape? What was it? I can't tell you that there was a specific moment, but I can tell you that round about eight years old, I became aware that I was comparatively much bigger than the other kids. so they would let you know at school of course every time you went to the gp so we're talking like 1992 1993 every time you go to the gp they would be bringing to my mother's attention like your kid is too large and that's that was commonplace i'm sure it's still commonplace to some degree because no one's recommending obesity you know um and so more and more i was noticing and also you hear people say things like lovely and slim or oh she's got such a pretty face And I think we're more conscious of what kids are listening to now.

3:41But I think it was teachers, you know, people's mums. It wasn't evil people going around to upset me. But the reality of it was that I think the concern was based on real things, which was that the world was harder for a kid that was overweight. I was brought up by my grandmother who couldn't give her kids sugar because it was post-war. and so she gave me all the sugar that she couldn't give her own kids as an act of love, which made me fall in love with sugar. I mean, I had golden syrup and sugar sandwiches for tea. Me too. Did you? For snacks. Did you? For snacks. Yeah, with butter and just like layer after layer until it was like a big doughy ball in my mouth.

4:23I know. I know. I still have that palate. Oh, yeah. I really do. It's bad. So that's actually quite a tough... tough beginning because it sets you up with a taste for something. And what was your mum like when she gave you these treats? Like, was it kind of an act of love for you? My mum was already very weight conscious herself. And much like myself and a number of now thousands of people that I've spoken to and heard from, I'm sure that my mum would tell you that she wishes she was the size she was when she started calling herself fat yes when she started dieting everyone everyone says that to me that i wish i was barely even overweight you know um i looked so great and they are also able on reflection to see how young i looked how vibrant i looked how this you know um my mom didn't come to associate because she didn't grow up in a time where diet culture was so pervasive right it didn't seem strange to say well just need a little less because that happens to do this to you it didn't feel like it was attached to and therefore you will be able to be successful and people will like you and all of that stuff it was more of a health thing and then culturally um i'm iranian and i feel like again it was held lightly don't get me wrong it's damaged a lot of us girls but it was held lightly in the sense what do you mean by that it was seen more broadly as an act of self-care to also care about how much one ate and looked and things like that right they had higher levels of like you should also blow dry your hair every day and i was like that's high maintenance beyond belief but that it was an extension of that yes that said the way it was held lightly meant that living in this society was harder because of course that came really early and so i just thought it was normal to be judging other people's bodies comparing my body to theirs i'd sit on the tube and i looked like okay well my leg is this big and someone else's leg is this big because i heard the grown-ups would be talking about it plus there was like Jane Fonda video all the time and she's cool and she's a legend so I don't feel like the blame game about that is wrong in any sense other than for the diet industry they I have beef with them but when it comes to you know people talk about their mums and diet culture and stuff like we didn't know any better no and we only know what we know now because those people went through what they went through and these are unprecedented times we didn't have ultra processed food stress levels weren't so high you know uh we didn't have all these different interventions that are making us really confused and i think at the time um my mum was much like everyone else's mum yes it was like i just want to do what i need to do so my kid doesn't get bullied and so my kid has a good life and at the time the criteria was be slim or rather don't be fat yes i completely agree and i think having a very slim mum for me was a comparison I could see that I didn't look like that.

7:20And also, I think you just mentioned ultra processed foods. I grew up in literally the dawn of ultra processed foods where they were a luxury. We had no idea how much. I mean, I doubt very much whether when you were little, you had any idea how much sugar was in these or how many bad ingredients were in them. and a tin of, you know, ravioli was a luxury. You know, God, pour it in the pan and just heat it up. Great. Sorry, we're also calling like jacket potatoes, cheese and beans healthy for lunch. Yes. Yes. You know, people will be like, I've had a healthy lunch. Really brilliant lunch. I've been really healthy.

8:02Yeah, yeah. I'm going to have, and I was like, brilliant. And I was gaining weight like wildfire thinking, what's going wrong? How come? Well, because, well, for various reasons. One of them was that restriction from an early age was making me sort of want to get my hands on it the way that one does when you feel like you're not allowed to have something and it's naughty. And I didn't eat. This is unfortunately before I even understood that it was naughty. I think some people forget that someone has to tell you that what you eat happens to increase the size of some people's bodies. And that may or may not impact your quality of life based on the society you live in.

8:38They're so inextricably linked to us. If you don't want to be overweight, why would you eat so much? that's extraordinary it's like one of the only things you absolutely have to do to survive and you're asking someone to care about an aesthetic in the future right now when they have a need emotional physical like fundamental existential you're asking them to care your your need came from you being denied or being told put on a diet yeah okay put on a diet so what What did your diet look like? When and who put you on it? It was just reducing the snacks. It was reducing the desserts. It was reducing the portion sizes.

9:20But I noticed because, of course, I was hungry. And my mom's not cruel, so she would then, I was able to eat as much as I wanted. But I just noted there were subtle changes, you know. And I think a lot of kids do because it is genuine concern. Like, oh, why don't you have your broccoli first or, you know, things like that. And you do kind of pick up, why is no one else getting comments like that? The other thing that I now know, I've now been diagnosed with ADHD. So I know a lot now that I wouldn't have known then. Like? Like I would have been looking for dopamine hits big time, especially if I was restricted.

9:56And then if I was going to consume sugar on an empty stomach or on a boring, you know, the overcorrection. And then the shame that I felt about that was invariably going to make me more vulnerable, addiction vulnerable. to consume more sugar, to numb out, to distract from what I'd just done. Then I would gain weight, which of course would piss everyone else off. And then that in itself was shameful and upsetting to me. And by that point, sugar and food were becoming my drug of choice. And the only other drug of choice that was second, but evidently from my body size, not winning, was the control of restriction.

10:34Yes. So you had both. I had both. I was getting the dopamine hit off the control of restriction. Wow. Of sobriety. Basically, I had a program. But that means eating nothing. Yes. So that's essentially what I was doing. And then more and more when I would do that, my periods of restriction would get shorter. And my periods of relapse or rather my last, you know, final binge, that's it, last hurrah, would be intense because there was more shame. This was really the last time. And I really wanted to eat all these foods for the one last time. I just know that it's not just going to be women. Men and women are going to be watching this and just going, oh, my God, that either is me or it was me.

11:21I mean, what you have just described was me in a nutshell. And the punishment, I mean, I'm feeling uncomfortable you talking about it, was so real. And the funny thing was, in that thing, you know, when you just said, I want to try these foods for the last time because I'm never going to eat them again. That thing. And then you pig out and you are grotesque. And it is ugly. and you're just like, oh my God, I'm absolutely, but it's okay because I'm going to stop tomorrow. Then you wake up tomorrow and you hate yourself. And that's where you want to change from. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt. No, but that's exactly it.

12:03Exactly it. It's the same as using. It's the same as having like one big use up. And in the same that... When you talk about use ups, can we just explain? Absolutely. So my background is largely in substance misuse treatment. And so I was a recovery worker and I was learning how to be a recovery worker. Essentially, I was learning how to help people to stop drinking and taking other drugs. Abstinence-based, because very much it was about prison work. It was about people who needed to get into the room, like Alcoholics Anonymous, like Narcotics Anonymous. There was nothing that we were helping people to moderate with at that point.

12:35I wasn't working in harm reduction. I was working in stop prison social services. This is serious. And so I started noticing who was doing well and why. okay so i started noticing the patterns people who had a program or had a structure and had identified their vulnerabilities and had identified with a humility if i don't do this this is likely to happen um and i also noticed that it was the people who were able to identify the distinction between self-pity and self-compassion it was the people who were able to see their problematic behaviour as a solution and to try to diversify their recovery capital essentially.

13:19What does that mean? Like what it is that you've got to come back to. So one of the ways it comes is from going to having a fellowship, having people who support you, sponsors, recovery specific stuff, right? So it's like recovery in the bank. Recovery in the bank also insulates you so that if you do laps, the bounce back is quick. Oh, okay. As long as you're in recovery and you're reinforcing the importance of your recovery and diversifying it. So now I'm involved in the community. Someone's expecting me tomorrow. Someone's dependent on me. Someone to love, somewhere to live, something to do.

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14:36Everyone who signs up is also going to be in with the chance of winning a£500 wellness package packed with prizes from some of our favourite partners to help you reset in the new year. So all you need to do is click on the link in the description and pop in your email and join the Begin Again newsletter. Join our gang. Let's get ready for the new year together. ever so more and more i just became obsessed with understanding what was it that got people to change after generations of really ingrained habits and self-compassion just kept coming through because i noticed that the opposite actually if you beat yourself up about things if you're spiraling yes it's not kind but it's also it's not common sense it doesn't build a mastery in anything if i wanted to learn something now if i said davina you want to learn to do something you've never managed to do in the past you wouldn't expect yourself to be perfect no but when it's shame driven and you have a legacy of oh i always mess up at this point well that's just a fluke i'll start again on monday you forget that ultimately behavioral change is doing something in a row until it's easy yes it's it's skill building it stops becoming mastery when it becomes personal this is what i noticed the people who were able to just go through the motions have smart feet get get to a meeting do it do what you need to do just let the rest take care of itself so i started going to 12-step meetings myself.

15:59I went to Overeaters Anonymous, I went to Food Addicts Anonymous, I went to Codependents Anonymous, loads of them. Can I just also say to anybody that's watching or listening, I remember when I first went to Narcotics Anonymous and I got the joys and I was like, I cannot believe that this is available for free, like for a donation if you've got it towards the rent at the end of the meeting but if you haven't got it you don't have to it can be literally be for free it's not for everybody lots of people don't like it but for some people it is and can be life-saving so you you went to lots couldn't agree more yeah kind of dig deeper into it and see what it was about but also to get help and support to me now I was fascinated because I understood the quiet of mind that's saying I just don't do any of this anymore no no one no two no at weddings no just on a Friday just no the clarity of mind that that gave people and the focus and their ability to stay on track until those new neural pathways are there and things were normalized and flukes were passed um wasn't available for food you've got to eat no yes of course oh god that's so interesting to eat and slar too to some degree you don't have to have sex you don't have to have love in your life but if you're a lot of us do and codependency and interdependency and you know you want to be dependent on others and you want to know where that line is and things and so my fascination was you know do we have to wait until people have hit a rock bottom so can i just quickly go back to something you just said codependency and sex and love addiction these are both things that possibly people don't know that they're addicted to i mean they are quite subtle sometimes people think well i love sex or i might have sex with lots of different people but that's just free and but it depends how it's making you feel is it attached to shame and guilt are you left with these bad feelings after it or is it something that you're happy is your behavior something you're happy with so that's quite a common common one that people don't really look at and codependency would you mind just because I think codependency is massive could you just quickly say what that is just in case anybody watching might have a problem with that absolutely I think the way it manifests itself for most of us when we talk about codependency is that our external validation is our day-to-day ability to function at the level that we want to and to calm ourselves down it's based on external validation and a relationship with another person and that dependency on each other to be well can be very damaging and can give people the same feeling that they have when they are in a using not using active active addiction so for example I've had to learn that becoming attached to someone and thinking that more is more and thinking that extremes and dopamine hits and feeling anxious and then feeling relieved and then feeling anxious and then feeling relieved is something that will play out in different domains of my life because it's the way that I'm wired.

19:11Now, of course, there are different schools of thought as to whether I was born that way or whether I've come that way, but from the behavioral side of it, that's just the way I'm wired. And so more and more, what I wanted to understand is what's going on on the days where I seem to be able to be moderate in all of these areas where I seem to be able to advocate for myself to take a moment, to make a decision, like take a breath, to not be focused that someone's upset with me because I'm focused on something far more important here. What's going on in those days? And I realized that there was a lot of alignment between that and what I was learning when I was attending meetings.

19:45And these components were not just massively interesting to me, but also they were helping me enormously to give labels and understand for to find my people my people weren't in weight watchers I assure you my people weren't in boot camps and this all or nothing um you know one is too many and hundreds not enough all these sayings I was like hold on hold on hold on this is me this is me but I'm not using alcohol or other drugs um I'm using food and so I started going to OA and still I had my resume always overeaters and I went away and more and more I thought hold on why is this not available to other people because as long as I can remember I was pretty much obese morbidly so I was a hundred and I think 22 23 kilos so I guess that's like 18 19 so and I was fluctuating massively massive massively between restrict I was desperate every day was focused on losing weight and white knuckling it to just eat nothing and punish myself because I was gaining weight at speed and um so by the time I got to work in addiction services I was pretty big and I'd already had a bit of a turning point because prior to that I'd had a gastric band put in so I wanted to be as thin as possible so I thought like tight it save me from myself draw essentially why am I draw shut you know so they did quite an extreme gastric band for you?

21:15You were saying like, make it. The band's always the same. They inject it so that you can decide how big you want it. And very much self-reporting. So self-reporting from someone with an eating disorder who's just gone to these lengths was like, just close it up. You know, food is a thing of the past. Plus, of course, I found it easier to eat nothing than to eat one of most things by this point. Right. Because by this point, also context wise, so much more was ultra processed food. So I was relapsing on stuff that was objectively more fattening. right and so the gastric band was such that it gave me a different type of eating disorder it it it made the binging and the restricting far more extreme the things i was binging on it it diversified the things i was binging on because now i could only pick things that were soft and went through the band so let's say before i was eating i don't know crisps and stuff now i'd be eating ice cream so i was diversifying the bad foods that invariably i would over correct on one day isn't it it was just endless on top of all the diets the grapefruit the this the i don't know literally name them i've done them and then i went through a hard time and obviously i relapsed on my drug of choice and for a moment i dared not care about what it would do to my waistline and it went and i just felt like this click and i couldn't i was trying to be sick and i couldn't yeah it apparently that does happen which now i'm not surprised by because a lot of people who've got to that stage will have invariably had a problem with food right yeah so they took it out i was so relieved i was like that's it i'm not doing this there was a part of me that was like enough enough horrible stuff to your body just enough and i went to therapy and i thought that's it something's got to change i didn't think it was going to be about food addiction or anything like that i just thought maybe i need to work out why i hate myself so much this is ridiculous maybe i should just like myself big and try body positive let's go for it But my issue was that I couldn't because the times when I was really big, it wasn't that I just didn't like looking at a bigger body.

23:08It was that it was the manifestation of neglect and abuse and not drinking a glass of water and not moving. And so I was all up for body positivity. But I was like, wait, wait, wait, everyone. Like, I need to first get rid of what body negativity has done, has left on me. And then I'm all for it. So can you explain that to me again? so basically you thought why don't I just relax and enjoy myself the size that I am but in order to be the size that you were you were doing things that made you feel bad about yourself yeah I wasn't I didn't like food so in that's fascinating I think that body positivity I think that women were given a new thing to do wrong and we were told to turn on a dime so it was like it was infused into us be thin be thin be thin be thin don't eat so much don't eat so much um don't look fat and then body positivity came we're like oh thank goodness but the world hadn't turned on a dime that way our own learning was too deep it wasn't as easy as now just like what you see and be cool with it because you know that the source was rotten and you know about the patriarchy you know about feminism and you know about health and you know about eating disorders And it's like, yeah, but my behaviors are ingrained now.

24:21You have taught me to punish and restrict myself. And now I'm resurfacing in a world where you're saying diet culture was all wrong. But I don't know how to eat. Because as you know, some of us are only ever making things better or worse at any given time. But we're doing constantly. And you have to eat all day. Now you're telling me I have to eat all day. And I have a list of hundreds upon hundreds of foods that I only associate with relapse. because I've only ever had them one last time or I'm eating celery. And you've left me out in the cold here. And I feel there are a lot of women who feel really misunderstood.

24:54They're like, I'm ready to be body positive. If the manifestation of me feeling empowered and I can make choices that I'm happy with, if I make those choices and that's to eat cake all day, then I think those people will be fine with the manifestation on their body. It's the powerlessness that they've been left with. You have left me scared of food. Yes. And eating it like it's being taken away. Yes. which when it overcorrects essentially is what is the it's a perfect storm for obesity which we know right anyway just complete restriction and then abundance and you don't know when it's going to come and then when the abundance comes you're telling me that the foods are going to be designed to be addictive too and then i'm going to crave that i mean process ultra processed food and then i'm going to crave the transformation so i'm going to make sure that i relapse really badly because tomorrow i'm going to be pure and new and everything's going to be amazing my laundry is going to be done and everyone's going to love me this reminds me of when um i didn't actually go to treatment i got clean in narcotics anonymous but it reminded me of friends that went into treatment and whenever they went into treatment for drugs and alcohol this is what i i knew people with drugs and alcohol problem um they would do the mega binge before because they'd be like well i'm never going to do it again so i'll do the mega binge before i get to treatment and then i won't use again and it was funny that thing that you're talking about it's the same with any addiction to anything before you are going to stop you do the mega binge it's your friend yeah it's your friend yeah that's what people don't get and in rehab in residential rehab i know there's a lot of letter writing to like goodbye thank you and goodbye not good riddance but like thank you you're letting go of your friend you're letting go of the the you know the thing that kept you safe, enabled you to deal with your feelings so that perhaps you didn't do more damage, contained you, you are saying goodbye to your friend.

26:46So people need to give themselves a break and say, you wouldn't have done something if it wasn't doing something. You wouldn't have done this if it wasn't doing something for you. And I wish I could say that to people who, the family members and the friends of people who are legitimately fed up with someone who can't stop using it's like you know they'll say things like well you've stopped using now so it's been a couple of weeks so why don't you get job and it's like you've just they've just given up there's a morning going on massive massive morning process going on here where someone has had something that enables them to feel calmer has got them through the hardest times of their lives you're asking them to be without their friends and then go find other friends when they've not known any other way and p.s all their existing friends and habits and everything are still here i mean it's it is the shame you know it's the shame and well i've often thought um about the injections and how they are like a miracle kind of stop stop eating but the feelings you you are still there like the depression that would come with not eating to fix the feelings when you have the jab mean that sometimes people that use the jabs get quite depressed it's a whack-a-mole whack-a-mole yeah oh my god it really is a whack-a-mole cultural reference there i don't want i don't want anyone to now feel ashamed to have to go back to the diet industry to purchase a solution to a problem that they created in the first place so if you are in a situation where you need to quieten the food noise by injecting yourself then you do what you need to do as far as i'm said but what i do know is because you can't be abstinent from food it's very unlikely that if you got to a stage where you felt that you needed to go to this length i say this comparing it with the gastric band it's likely that you to some degree feel powerless or disempowered around food it's likely that you are so unhappy with your weight and have been for so long that you're prepared to forego food as a comfort anymore or you know all of those things and you're just happy not to be hungry and not to have the food noise the difficulty for me is that from everything i've seen everything i know about behavioral change if you've spent decades trying to trying to control yourself if you will around food and the only end is to be thinner, not to actually change how you eat or make anything easier or whatever.

29:25Yes. Just to look thinner. Yes. And that's hard. Behavioral change is hard. Eating differently, shopping differently, or getting used to different tastes, all this stuff. If someone then takes care of the thinness for you, that tends not to be the point that people like me go, right, well then fabulous. I'm going to learn how to drink water. I'm going to really put the effort in now. Because for 20 years I've been putting the effort in And now something's helping me out. And I've not been wired to think that I should care about what's going into my body as much as I care about the size of my body.

29:56And so now what's going to happen is I think there'll be a lot of addiction transference. And I think that... What does that mean? I think that if food was your drug of choice, then when you have a hard time, you may be picking something else up. Right. Shopping. It could be social media, shopping. Yeah. It could be alcohol, whatever. Yeah. But, I mean, you've still got problems if that was solving the problem. the complicated thing becomes that um for a lot of people the problem is that they're not happy with the size of their bodies so you are helping them to some degree by doing that the other thing is their health and their health massive massive and this is the other thing i often speak to people and they betray the fact that they weren't quite as big as i was or quite as extreme as i was and now i've spoken to so many people i can see i was on the sharp end of the most extreme and it's harder to exercise when you're heavier right that's why people strap weights to their ankles to make exercise harder right um it's harder to exercise when you've been eating loads of unhealthy food and you're filled with sugar and you've got acid reflux and stuff so if you're reducing that as well that it becomes a tool that you use for a period of time whilst you're able to activate other behaviors in that sense i think it'll be great or can be great based on what we know so far what i will say though is that you can't be abstinent from food yeah so you need a program after that and you're going to need a program to think that you can just be okay because you're thin and you won't want to eat so much because you don't want to ruin being thin is going back to the problem we had in the first place which is you'll be you will be disillusioned people will stop complimenting you i don't wake up every day after losing eight stone and go oh marvelous this will be another perfect day because I'm thin now right um you've still got to deal with life you've still got to deal with life yeah exactly and also you still legitimately have problems and it's because of diet culture that you've been made to think that all of them will go away if you're slim um and you become disillusioned and you have to eat I mean how did how did the kindness method what were the beginnings of that when did you think do you you know what, we're doing this all wrong.

31:59I feel like there's another way. Yeah. I started working in prison and it was largely with gang members. In a men's prison? Substance misuse, yeah. I was working with probation. And the idea was that I would be able to help people who were in prison on remand because of drug use. It's a terrible, I think it's a terrible time for people that are incarcerated. They're not sure if they're going to be released after their trial or if they're going to be charged and go to prison for a lot longer. So remand is a very insecure and unstable time for someone. And temporary. Yeah, time of great fear. It's very hard to help someone at that point too because also you, whether it's employability or whatever else, like thinking to the future is hard.

32:54And I started learning about how you can help people who don't necessarily want to change. So these people hadn't come in for drug treatment. These were ambivalent people. These weren't rock bottom people who'd come to meetings. Right. So I thought, hold on. These people, this goes against rock bottom. This goes against people saying, you know, when people really want to change, they'll turn up. These people got arrested. Some of them, you know, some of them don't want to stop using. Some of them don't think they're problematic users. Right. Some of them are dealers and I can clearly see that, but they've slipped through the net, you know, things like that.

33:26And so I had to understand how is it that I help a person who I've got for this period of time to generally want to take better care of themselves? Because talking about drugs all day is not going to help this. They have got to have an aspirational model. P.S. They're not going to go to meetings. Right. Because for various reasons, they don't want to share. Right. There's various reasons, confidentiality reasons, all sorts of reasons. So I thought, right, these people need a system. And I started to draw from smart recovery, intuitive recovery. These are all things used in hospitals and bought in as recovery programs.

34:03But I believe all abstinence based. Right. So the idea is that you help people who are in trouble with alcohol and other drugs to stop altogether from the 12 steps, from the training that I was getting at work, needle exchange, all of it. And I put it all together and I started becoming really good at quickly identifying the combination of evidence-based interventions that people needed in a conversational, chilled, non-judgmental way that connected with them. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the sound of our new sponsor. No, it's not a chiropractor business. It's Lindt Excellence Dark Chocolate, expertly crafted by the Lindt Master Chocolatier.

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37:32It's just we all come at it in different ways. So, for example, urge surfing. Urge surfing is when you feel like you want to use and you give it 20 minutes and you imagine there are different exercises used in rehab. Like one of the grounding exercises that they would give you, much like a body scan meditation or something, is to visualize things calming down, to visualize something calm. and one of them that we used to say is imagine that there is a leaf on the water and it's going through the water and a person who's skilled can kind of describe it for you in a way that will calm down your nervous system the way that you do meditation and so there were impulse control exercises that would help people understand that if you wait for 20 minutes you're going to feel differently about this so allow yourself to see that but more and more it was essentially saying all these different there are all these different ways to get people to do something new and scary in a row until it feels familiar and not scary anymore and feels automatic and all of us are just trying to do that so i recognize that and i didn't really care about the jargon if i'm honest because i knew what i wanted to hear i wanted to not be shocked i wanted to know exactly why i was there what you were going to do for me i wanted to be reassured reassured that you weren't going to take my drug away i didn't want you to act like you knew me better than i knew myself yes um and all of those things i brought in i would be speaking to people on a level the way that they already have a discussion and say have you tried doing this so for example impulse control for me I did I can't do body scans and things I can't I will have already picked up 10 times you know like well what do you mean the train has left the station you mean the method just doesn't work on you yeah meditation things like that it just doesn't it's just a bit chilled for me it's a bit calm and when I'm in that state you know what goes up needs to come down but it needs to come out come down quickly and it needs to really engage me um and meditation doesn't it leaves me with too much room for distraction and I just can't see myself interrupting something really compulsive that way but singing did so I broke it down and I was like right why are people meditating they're meditating because they feel present they're meditating because they want to bring their nervous systems back what made me do that singing because when I was a kid I used to stammer I still do to some degree and singing helped and it made me calm so I got a karaoke microphone or at the beginning I used to take myself to karaoke booth by myself and more and more I was like you can redefine this stuff shrew this is common sense stuff you know be still be kind know yourself notice your patterns and all these different evidence bases were saying it in different ways i've like to say there are some some um like maps and stuff in here that are just so helpful like so just in case anybody's wondering thank you this is this is really brilliant with all you've got all of these tips that we're talking about now in here so just reminder you know what it was davina it was acknowledging kind of the higher power thing right let's let's higher power is is a concept that's all that's often contentious when people talk about Alcoholics Anonymous and the other 12-step programs because it suggests that you need to be religious and the word god comes up in some of the literature um I saw higher power originally when I was trying to reframe it for people because I saw the power of it but I saw it was putting people off and so I just thought what you've acknowledged is that there are times when you're not going to want to make the best decision available to you and you're going to need to hand your decisions over to higher power or the version of yourself that is sitting in front of me right now that wants to change someone that cares for you it acts yeah access that self-compassion and so higher power could be accessing a version of yourself yes and the humility that comes with the you know the power that comes with acknowledging powerlessness is extraordinary because then you put things in place and so more and more i was saying to people like how are you going to remind yourself with through with maps or whatever else today you should assume that there are going to be times when early on when you want to use or else you would have already stopped and it all culminated in me going to the school of life and saying can I pilot a workshop on the third week of January they were very clever to put it then because it's now so now wait yeah like yeah yeah always the first week of Jan everyone's like oh you must be so busy yeah tumbleweed because everyone's like well I'm gonna do it myself that's it and obviously they've had a final blowout no one wakes up on new year's day feeling like wonderful never felt better right so they're like well that's it i'm gonna white knuckle it i deserve it this year is different and again they make the mistake unfortunately of thinking that desire and desperation and even shame are going to be enough to drive them and to build new behaviors as if i could say to myself i hate myself so much i'm going to learn french quickly doesn't make any sense right yeah and so the third week the school of life put on this workshop that was called making changes that last I lost eight stone whilst I was piloting out this making changes that last to the school of life and they kept selling out and selling out and selling out I was losing weight at speed because I had started to treat my weight problem as a food problem not as a size problem and the weight was falling off me the same way you know yeah the same way someone who's using just needs to worry about the behavior of not using today what do I need to make it easier not to use today and being in recovery or being clean will take care of itself right yeah and so i was like right and the turning point actually in that moment was when i was in therapy my therapist asked me what if you never lose weight and i spent my whole life and this was i was at my biggest and i was like no no no i want to be body positive but at some point i will still be losing weight like i want to like my body and not hate it and not be horrible to it but i do not think my life's going to be great if i remain at this size no i'm afraid not and then i got really I was really annoyed with her really annoyed I was like this was punchy you know this is a leap and I went walking through London Bridge and I saw these people who were overweight and I realized hold on hold on I don't think they should be like not going out to dinner I don't think they should be like not wearing jewelry or listening to music like they're so they don't deserve any care and so I did an experiment when I thought what if I behave as though I'm never going to lose weight and what I realized was I don't know how to eat like I've been on a diet forever even if I knew I was never gonna lose weight again and I just cared about my health I'd have to sit down and work out a predictable way of eating I'd have to work out what was healthy for me now I'd have so what would that so when you say I don't know how to eat I mean people think that when they're on a diet they are learning how to eat but they're not they're learning how to eat in a finite way because you can't diet forever yeah you have to learn how to have a healthy relationship with food you have to learn how to stop doing the things that cause you to gain weight not white knuckle the things that the efforts that cause you to lose it because what that does this this um activation maintenance thing what it does is reinforce this idea that it will be easier to make choices with your hands if you are thinner so get this done and then learn how to eat differently and then learn how to and it'll just be easier because thin people are better at that and so the shame that is available there everyone's applauding you and then you're so fearful like no listen I'm one French fancy away from this being yeah exactly like train spotting over here sugar version French literally they were my thing I would just like mainline them and I've never I'd never had like one French fancy you know um and again it would have been easier to never have one again but I wanted to learn how to have one and be calm and so I mean to to me even like this quite interesting because you're sitting there saying that I can't do sugar I can't do one sweet like I'm nervous about Christmas day I normally fall off the wagon on Christmas day and then spend like the next January desperately trying to get a handle on my sugar consumption again and I'm one of those all or nothing because I'm an addict and I use the same thing as I did on alcohol, on sugar.

45:32Just don't do it. But that's not realistic. I want to be able to go to dinner at someone's house and have a pudding that someone made and not have to eat sugar the whole of the next day. This is what's made it really complicated with ultra-processed food and sugar because you need, regardless of what anyone believes, my understanding is that you need to believe that you're not in control of your second choice. Correct? Yes. Just your first. That framework, ideology, that way of thinking, I assume you credit with you being able to have a manageable life. Yes. But with that comes an admission or an acceptance of the fact that this is the way I am.