I had a blast giving this speech to an audience of about 20-30 people.

All these youtube videos I'm making are giving me tons of public speaking practice, so this was a lot of fun.

I even got a lot of compliments afterwards on my storytelling ability, which I had never heard before.

Me, a good storyteller?! No way!

One of things that made this public speech fun though was me sharing my story from the lens of the hero's journey.

This myth, and just really appreciating Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, has played a integral role about how I think about myself.

To be honest, I only had an hour to prepare for this speech.

So before preparation I just thought to myself, "Ok, I only have 1 hour to prepare so what are some true stories that I can share with people?"

And here's what was the result, for my 'icebreaker' speech at Toastmasters.

The Icebreaker speech is for people giving their first speech at a toastmasters club.

The rule of thumb is that you're going to make a lot of mistakes because this is your first speech.

But this wasn't my first speech and I'm pretty sure I shocked some people!

I recently got a comment from someone asking "how do you work with people?"

That was all. Not a lot of context so I am interpreting this question in a unique way.

I'm going to share an email response I recently gave to client who emailed me in response to binge attack.

I'll edit out a few details to keep anonymous, but hope this helps you too.

My response:

"Thank you

Have you ever lost control while you were eating?

Or felt incredibly chaotic and confused and like you absolutely urgently had to have food and a lot of it? But then afterwards you felt guilty bloated?

Today I'll be giving two reasons which contribute to this chaotic uncontrollable feeling so that you can understand why you lose control. These two reasons are:

1. Biology - not eating enough
2. Rigid rules - success or fail and then uncontrollable eating when you fail

Basically rigid rules like you can ONLY have 1200 calories per day or you 'fail' for that day ...

Combined with not eating enough ...

Make it so that you have these breaks, when you let your guard down.

And the avalanche of foods cascades in chaos.

The solution? Don't have as many rigid rules that make you into a failure if you don't live up to them perfectly.

The enemy is rigid, black-and-white, all-or-nothing, success-or-failure mindset. In Eating Enlightenment, we practice the middle way of thinking, or flexible thinking.

Someone asked me recently, a friend of mine, "what time should I go to bed and what time should I wake up?"

I understood where my friend was coming from, he had expressed to me previously that his weight was high and that his energy was low.

He knew he had to eat better and sleep more if he wanted to lose weight and increase energy. This question really resonated with me - I have struggled with sleep habits for years, and while I'm not the perfect sleeper I have learned a few things about sleep that I'd like to share with you today.

1) I want to talk about the mindset of self care so that we can overcome the obstacle of time.

2) I'll give a few practical pointers to go to bed on time which I have found useful from my perspective. These things include a dark room, ear plugs, a bedtime routine that relaxes you, getting up out of bed if you can't fall asleep.

3) I'll talk about naps. I'm a huge fan of naps.

Today I wanted to talk about habit stacking.

Habit stacking is where you link together habits like a keychain. For example, I have a personal passion to study my dreams.

So every morning I try to remember my dreams and then I write down my dreams. I then practice habit stacking by jotting down my intentions for the day in the journal and sketching out my schedule.

After a few minutes of dream journaling and planning, I'm more awake, and so I'll just put the journal to the side and meditate or be quiet for a few minutes. So today I'm going to be talking about habit stacking and some of the basic principles.

First, we have to understand the basics of habits which means understanding a habit loop.

Second, we have to understand the mentality of habit stacking which is based around momentum.

And third, we have to start small and get going.

Let's dive in.

Today we're going to talk about a powerful exercise you can do to shift out of fixed mindset and into growth mindset.

A growth mindset is a characteristic that every successful person has in life.

It's the mindset that you can improve and learn from failure, and that failure is not about you personally.

The typical example is the quote by Michael Jordan who said when asked "what makes you great?" answered by saying his greatness was due to the numerous times he's failed.

Growth mindset realizes that failure is part of the journey and embraces the lessons you can learn from failure.

A fixed mindset on the other hand takes failure personally.

People with a fix mindset think to themselves I am stupid, I will never improve or I always fail at everything I try - so what's the point?

People will fix mindset give up on themselves. And so on this evening journey we want to be growth mindset and we're going to do a powerful exercise to shift any of our tendencies of being fixed towards growth.

This exercise is a letter writing exercise with 2 parts.

1. Release the past
2. Practice the future

Are you on a weight loss or eating transformation journey?

If so, have you realized the importance of managing your emotions?

I just had a conversation with a wonderful woman the other day and she asked a powerful question - "how do I explore my emotions?"

So in this post I'm going to cover three steps free to follow, so that you can explore your emotions and ultimately stop binge eating, emotional eating and mindless eating.

These three steps are:

1) feel the emotion
2) expect to feel fear but realize the fear does not mean that something bad is going to happen
3) imagine someone is feeling what you're feeling and ask yourself - what advice would I give this person?

Have you ever felt confused after you ate a meal but very quickly afterwards you were hungry again?

I have a simple solution for you.

You are thinking in terms of a 24-hour time period, and not reflecting about your food intake over the last few days.

By this I mean you haven't eaten enough over the past few days.

Or, maybe you exercised intensely during one day like you went on a 10 mi hike, but you didn't replenish your body with enough food afterwards.

Or, as what often happens, you are under a deadline. You have a project due at work or some other event coming up and it's very stressful on you. And while you are stressing about this project or deadline, your stomach is shutting down.

When you're stressed, the blood in your stomach goes to your extremities, or your limbs, and this makes hunger harder to feel. Stress makes your appetite go down.

So in any of these cases, whether you're not eating enough, not replenishing your body after a lot of exercise, or your under a deadline, these are all things that build up over a few days.

And then one day, you eat lunch, and it's a big lunch. It should fill you up.

But the problem is you are only thinking in terms of that day.

You aren't incorporating your eating habits into your mindset from the past few days.

So you feel very confused because on a regular day this type of lunch would fill you up.

But when you haven't been eating properly over the past few days, this lunch is not the same.

Your body is playing catch-up.

Let's talk about what's most important in terms of nutrition.

Talking about what's important is important because lack of knowledge is not the problem.

Our problem today is that we have too much nutrition knowledge, and we don't know what nutrition knowledge to focus on.

So this video today I'm going to go over three guidelines which I feel are the most important.

1. We have eating unprocessed or foods that are 1,000 years old.
2. Eating meals that have a variety of macronutrients.
3. Dropping the moral judgment, and not expecting perfectionism.

This video is all about deepening the connection to your body and really understanding your bodily sensations.

This video, in addition to making sense of your bodily sensations, explores how to really start building trust with your body. And trusting your body is the essence of eating enlightenment.

The essence of eating enlightenment is you have it within you, that your body can return to a natural way of eating that stops been eating and leads to you returning to your natural body weight.

To put it in more simple metaphorical terms terms, in eating enlightenment we Believe that you have an inner light.

So the first part of the video is all about listening to the messages of your inner light, which get expressed through your bodily sensations.

The second half of the video is about protecting the inner light.

You might imagine a flame, a candle in the midst of a windy day. If you do not shield and protect and care for the candle, the flame will be blown out.

And so the second part of the video is all about how we can protect our inner light using self-care activities. Let's dive into today.