#80 Healing Eating Disorders with Mindy Gorman-Plutzer

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions. Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself. And in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie, who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hi, everyone, it's Dr. Donna here and I am going to introduce you to Mindy Gorman Flutzer today. She specializes in helping people with eating disorders, but really, I would say changing your relationship with food and eating and liberating you really from your relationship and prior relationship with food and eating. She is a certified functional nutrition and lifestyle practitioner and an eating psychology coach. Thank you so much for joining me today, Mindy.

Thank you, Dani. I'm thrilled to be here.

I really think that this is much more common of an issue than people often realize is our relationship with food, our way of thinking about eating. It can be really a stress starting from a young age and there's not some of the solutions out there are not really solutions for people. And that's why I'm so glad that you do what you do and offering people a different way to shift this, shift this whole weight relationship with food. Tell us more about, you know, the way you talk about it and think about it and what, what first of all, even what led you to focus in this area?

Well, I'll start off with what brought me here, you know, my interest and really what became a subsequent passion for a functional eating disorder recovery model was born out of my own experience with recovery. I can say that for more than 20 years of my adult life, literally, pun intended, I carried the weight of an obsessive fear of what food would do to me.

There was one point in my experience where I restricted my food intake so drastically that I was two pounds away from being hospitalized. Periods where I binged, I consistently purged. And because of this, my life took turns, ups and downs, in and out of my control. But my recovery experience.

Was like every other conventional protocol. I was seeing the doctor for weekly weigh ins and vitals. I was seeing a therapist two times a week, and I was having meetings with the dietitian. So essentially, I was being told what I needed to weigh, what I needed to do to think and what I needed to eat. Nobody was exploring the systems of my body that were contributing to all that I had become.

You know, it was, there was no Deep dive into how my physiology was perhaps impacting my psychology. And of course, then there was no thought about how my psychology was impacting my physiology. And there was series of life events. I found myself on a new trajectory, believe it or not, in my early 50s, and having had a background in nutrition, I found myself drawn to the idea of health coaching. And that led me to eating psychology coaching certification, and then functional medicine nutrition. When I was able to put all this training together, and as I was embarking on creating this coaching practice, I learned through the principles of functional medicine that all systems of the body are connected, everybody is unique, and everything matters. It was such an aha moment for me, and I realized at that time that there had to be an alternative approach to eating disorder recovery. You know, recovery. We talk about recovery. Let's talk about the definition of recovery.

Right.

Recovery, if you look it up on Wikipedia, is that it's to regain what was lost or taken. Now, when we lose ourselves to compulsive behaviors, addictive behaviors, or even chronic illness, we lose a part of ourselves. And very often the part of ourselves that remained is bound, bound by a set of rules, by a set of protocols. I prefer to think of recovery as liberation, particularly freedom recovery from disordered eating behaviors or an eating disorder. I do want to address the differences.

As we continue our conversation, but what's important to understand and why it's about liberation or freedom as opposed to recovery? Because recovery is never linear. It's full of paradox, it's full of nuance. It's bio, individual. It is different, looks different for everybody. Because, because of our bio individuality, we know as integrative, naturopathic, functional practitioners that the environment within us is as unique to us as our fingerprint is. Therefore, how can there be a one size fits all protocol for something as insidious as a relationship to food?

No, it makes sense. It makes sense. And I think, too, that so much of the time when people are experiencing.

This struggle with food, it can feel like you're trapped. You know, it feels like you're stuck in this and you can't find a way out. You keep turning this way, turning that way, and trying this and trying that. And no matter what, you find yourself still trapped in this repeating pattern. And so to me, when I hear you talk about freedom, it's freedom from that experience. Just the concept that you could have a whole different relationship with food and you don't have to feel trapped.

But what's so important, Donnie, for people who are facing these eating challenges to realize is that there really can be no transformation. And I choose that word over change.

Change is something we do. Transformation allows us to become.

And there's a big change. I talk a lot about how there's a difference between doing recovery and being recovered. And of course we can talk more about that. But what I wanted to say is that in order.

To get to that point of transformation, it's really important to really back it all up and look at story, the power of story.

So we can understand the context within which these behaviors evolved. A very important thing for everyone to realize who's listening to us now. If they're feeling challenged by their relationship to food, if they know someone who is, it's important to recognize that these behaviors with food started out as a solution. It was the best you could do at the time.

They're not the problem.

If we think about our very first experience with being fed, where you survived the birth process, right? Our first experience with being nurtured, with being seen, which was being heard, has to do with feeding.

It's true.

At that point in our brand new lives, we have no autonomy, we have no ego. We are solely dependent on the care and feeding, on the one person who's responsible for our care and feeding.

If somewhere along the line, as we start to develop and we start to sense our autonomy in the world, and our sense in the world, if we no longer feel safe for whatever reason, it could be abandonment, could be rejection or perceptions of, in fact, you know, any kind of trauma, whether it's big trauma or little trauma.

We know somewhere deep within us that we always have food to turn to. It's consistent, it's always there, it made us feel better. And those memories are buried deep within our brains, in the limbic system of our brains.

So that is why for so many people, food represents love, it represents safety. And then of course, you pile on that all the cultural messages that we're getting, right? And then you look at this diet culture that we are thrown into today, where we're really in a culture of comparison rather than connection, where we're part of a culture that is truly profiting off the fact that we are disconnected from the wisdom of our bodies. So you add all this up, it's no wonder that eating disorders and disordered eating is at an epidemic level.

Yeah, I agree with you.

And so much of the time we're so busy with our lives, we sometimes we don't even realize it's a challenge. Sometimes we don't even realize it's a challenge until it starts to affect our health. And then we start to go, what is this? And what do I do about it? So tell. Let's talk about the distinction between an eating disorder and a disordered eating. So people just have a sense of what is it that's happening for them and what is the language around it.

Well, I've defined two levels of disorder.

The one level which is perhaps very common, maybe more common, is.

Misinformation that is driven by misguided beliefs, typically influenced by the diet culture, the $70 billion industry that again is profiting off the fact that we're disconnected from the wisdom of our bodies. The culture that's telling us to eat this, don't eat that. The spin instructor who's telling her followers on social media or in class that she's eating a certain way, therefore you should too.

Right? And then you have a whole generation of people that are living income, prepare and despair. And then you have another level of disordered eating, which is basically very similar symptomatically to an eating disorder, but it's on a lesser level. So it's severe. Restricting chronic dieting, compulsive behaviors with food over, exercising, binging, consuming a lot of food in a short period of time beyond the point of. Of being full, using food in an effort to numb, avoid and distract from feelings or situations that you deem intolerable.

So.

The disordered eating would be all of that. To a lesser degree, the physical consequences, the psychological consequences, have not manifested tenfold. They're not as dire, they're not life threatening yet, but they certainly could escalate to that.

Which is more. When it's an eating disorder, it gets to that level.

Yes, exactly.

I also want to bring to bear the fact that an eating disorder is not solely a psychological issue. There are biological components. 90 to 98% of the people who are struggling with eating disorders today have also experienced severe digestive distress. But there's another important fact that has emerged lately. Children who have digestive distress, dysfunctional digestion.

Have a higher predisposition to developing an eating disorder later in life. That certainly speaks to the gut brain connection.

Well, I see that because what can happen for children and adults is when you're having digestive symptoms, let's say pain or bloating, then you start to become afraid of food because you're associated with this discomfort. Then you start to.

Sometimes this is where even just diets to avoid certain foods can go to an extreme, where a person is avoiding so many foods in an effort to avoid digestive symptoms that it Becomes a disordered eating.

Right, yes, absolutely. But then there's also the other scenario where there are imbalances that are creating a distortion in psychology. You know, certain neurotransmitters might not be present or adequate for whatever reason. Hunger hormones are dysfunctional. So there are a lot of reasons that could be contributing to the eating disorder instead of a result of.

No, I think it. And I think you're making such an important point. This, you know, really bringing it back to the gut brain axis and the communication that happens back and forth, that it's. Sometimes people will say, well, where did it begin? And sometimes I say it's one of these chicken and the egg things because they're so interconnected that we can't. As soon as we say it's one, then we realize it's the other, and we go back and forth again. And we know that in the digestion is where we not only digest our food, but we absorb our nutrients. And those nutrients are so important for making neurotransmitters and making all of these processes work in our nervous system. Plus, it's where our neurotransmitters are made, like serotonin and gaba. It's where our gut bacteria live. And we know that the gut bacteria are communicating with the nervous system. So it's so interconnected, just like the ones you mentioned, that to really help a person heal, we need to be addressing both sides of it. All of those different interconnections.

Yeah. And my objection to the conventional treatment protocols, particularly ones that require a patient to eat all foods, otherwise known as the all food spit diet, could very well be feeding the patient's anxiety.

And another part of that that needs to be addressed is that there are definitely going to be foods that basically just don't sit right in the gut. The digestive system of somebody who's been engaging in these destructive behaviors.

So that needs to be honored. The example I give very often is a patient being told that she's got to eat this bagel and cream cheese for breakfast. She eats the bagel and cream cheese for fear of.

Having to drink a can of insure, and then she's complaining of digestive distress. Ordinarily, what happens is she's taken for meal support, she's taken for counseling.

Rather than having.

Somebody look at what's going on in there.

There's so much that could be. I just hurt. I just feel it in my heart as you're describing it. And I know because I have helped many patients over the years, too, and when they describe these situations where you realize, like, you know, when we have such. Yes, you know, these conventional programs are trying to help people, which we want, but it's. We can see where it's, you know, it could be tweaked and it could be refined and it could be made. Made to even help them more if we could integrate all of the knowledge that's really in the research in this. Nothing you and I are talking about doesn't have studies to demonstrate it. Right. It's like, so how do. If someone's struggling on their, you know, right now, it might seem like their only option is a conventional program. What do you. What do you say? What can they do in addition or instead, or how do they navigate that?

Well, I think the first thing that has to be looked at is support to basically regulate one's nervous system.

Vagal tone is very important. Supporting activating the vagus nerve is very important.

Vagus nerve is the largest nerve in our body. It innervates, I think, every organ, particularly digestion. That's a big piece of it. But regulating calm so that the body is able to receive the gifts of liberation, otherwise known as recovery. That's where I would recommend starting. The other part is eliminating inflammatory and toxic thoughts.

Right. We have to be careful who we're working with. We're not going to offer what's known in the functional medicine world as an elimination diet to somebody who is a chronic restrictor.

So that's very important.

Introducing context is very important. As I said, context, connection, and choice. People need to know that they have choices.

I see too many clients who have come out of residential treatment, conventional Iops, intensive outpatient programs, and they find that the tools that they were given just aren't sustainable.

I think we're doing a wonderful service today by letting people know that they don't have to rely on the conventional protocols.

So that really would be my answer, Donnie.

You know, I love it.

I would like to see everybody take a more holistic, integrative, functional, naturopathic approach to healing. Healing from. From whatever challenges they're facing with their health. You know, we are the experts of our experience.

We are. We can become the masters of our own healing. And to pay homage to the title of your podcast, how Humans Heal. Humans heal when they feel empowered, when they are involved in a therapeutic partnership with a practitioner who gets it, who knows how to listen. That's how humans heal. Humans do not heal when they're feeling disempowered. As so often, conventional protocols for anything in the Healthcare realm that we are in today is very disempowering. You have a generation of people that still don't question the doctor.

I had a client just the other day distraught because she went to.

For her GYN visit and his older gentleman doctor and he's told her get on the scale. She said well I prefer not to be weighed so just get on the scale. How disempowering is that? But equally as disempowering is when the doctors are doing what they're calling blind weights where they weigh a patient backwards and don't tell them about their weight. How can you become master of your healing if you're not a partner in the therapeutic process? And if the weight is up or down and that's a problem, then that needs to be addressed. Yeah.

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No.

I think you, I love your points and your words. I mean I really, I really think that listeners will feel that too that just this, the concept of being empowered means then it allows you to accept yourself where you are and accept your process and to accept support and help for the healing process. And it's, and to you know, to start to be in that curious learning kind of a state versus the fear and anxiety and overwhelm state. And, and I think you know, I completely agree with you that that totally shifts things and I like how you said earlier about you know, getting to the place where you're able to receive because you know when we're, we know our bodies are already stressed. Like the way I look at it is with both, with disordered eating and an eating disorder the, it's like the stress becomes internalized and it becomes this internal creation of stress. So beyond this stress on your external world, there's this internal stress that just keeps spinning chaos. And when it gets to that point, it's hard to receive anything. Sometimes even something that would be considered good is hard to receive because there's just so much stress that you, you can feel like you're just your body's reacting and afraid to everything.

Like you talked about, even starting with the vagal nerve, which is, I think so awesome because of course the vagal nerve is one of the main connections between our brain and our gut. And we can use support for the vagal nerve to help reset not only our digestion, but our response to stress, to help us get into this parasympathetic anti stress and start to shift out of that this vicious cycle of stress. We can go, hey, we can actually on purpose, with simple activities, start to give our body and mind the experience of being out of stress. Then you start to see, oh, something else is possible. And then we start to be able to receive different information and different patterns and create different pathways. And then to have someone like you talked about to help guide you, you've created, I mean, I know that you not I think you work with people one on one, but you also have some ways that people can access your help online too. Tell us more what you do, Mindy.

Yeah, so I do have an online course. It's an eight module course that chronicles my own recovery. Every module starts out with an anecdotal story of what it was like for me, my insanity, if you will. And then I go into the solution.

My course is modeled after the book I wrote, Seven steps to stop fearing what food will do to you and start embracing what it can do for you. Because as I shared before, for most of my adult life, I feared what food would do to me. Translate, make me fat. I had no connection at all to what food could do for me. Intellectually, I knew food was fuel, but it didn't matter. It was what it was going to do to me. In fact, I often laugh that when I couldn't calculate and balance my checkbook, I could mentally calculate every calorie of every morsel I put into my mouth. Anyway, I digress. So it's eight modules, seven steps to food freedom and it's an acronym for freedom. So find your enough rest and digest. Eat when you're hungry. Stop when you've had enough. Eat mindfully. Do something every day to make your body feel alive. Only eat whole foods as often as you can and make sure you surround yourself with what truly nourishes. And there are workbooks and handouts and affirmations and it's really a wonderful, wonderful course. And I just slice the price in half. So that is available on my website for after you watch my free master class. So it would be the freedompromise.com forward/masterclass.

And there are lots of free resources on my website as well. There's a mini free mini course. There is my guide to food freedom which really details the seven steps. So I invite everybody to go there and download what they can and what appeals to them. And yes, of course, I work with people one on one, which I love doing, I truly love to do that. But, well, and you're meeting.

Thing is, you're not only have your professional training, but you went through this yourself. So I think, you know, I love how you created the course based on your path of healing. So it really helps people kind of see, hey, this is possible. Here's what you're going to probably experience at this point in the journey and here's what you did to help yourself through it. So it really feels like you're in it with them, it seems to me.

And what's important for people to know is that liberation recovery is a mindset. It's not a weight. It's not a group of a food group or exchanges or an amount of calories. It's a mindset. It's about compassion, acceptance, forgiveness. And as I said before, it's extremely nuanced. There's a lot of paradox and there's a lot of innuendo. And what is recovery for one.

Is not necessarily recovery for someone else, especially when we are functioning in this holistic and functional space. Because as I shared and as I share with anybody who cares to listen, my relationship to food was such that I created a huge storm in my own gut. Not only did I restrict, but I was laxative dependent for probably 30 years. Way past my foray into recovery.

You can imagine what that did to me. So I'm still dealing with repercussions of that. So I know how important it is to not only address the mind and the brain, but the gut where all healing begins. And I think that is a missing component for a lot of the recovery.

Protocols that are out there today. We have. We have to stop waiting on the weight. It's not about weight. You can have an eating disordered mind.

And present as a healthy, normal weight.

Yeah, I love this point because, I mean, sometimes, yeah, someone who maybe is kind of really. I almost want to say, almost good at, you know, good at having an eating disorder. Then you.

You.

It doesn't show necessarily on the outside. You know, it's sometimes you. It has this part of it that's hiding. I don't know if you. If you can speak to that a little bit. Where it's. It's isolating. But in some ways, the isolation becomes almost a protected place. And how to kind of.

When you get to that point of feeling like, hey, I don't want to be isolated anymore. I want to speak about this. And in the speaking about it, there's so much healing.

Yeah. But you bring up an important point, and it popped into my mind a little while ago. Very often, because these behaviors serve a purpose, there's a reward in these behaviors. They really serve a purpose. I don't talk to people about why they're resisting giving them up. I talk to people about where the reward is, how the behaviors are serving them. That's really important to the context. But what happens so often, Donnie, is that these behaviors become so ingrained in the person who's suffering and surviving. Remember, they're surviving, and it becomes a part of their identity.

And then fast forward. Who will I be without this? Who will I be without these behaviors? Who will I be when I need to feel these feelings that scare the life out of me? Literally.

It'S scary to think. Right. And it feels like a big void sometimes. What am I diving into?

So the behaviors. Yes. While they're very isolating, some people are revered for them.

They're revered for their lean bodies. They're revered for their cut muscles. They're revered because they eat so cleanly or appear to be so disciplined when they're with a group of friends, when the truth is, what's feeding that fear is anxiety about what food will do to them.

Now, I'm not talking about the person who's got chronic digestive issues, who's literally afraid of what food will do to them. I'm talking about the disordered thinker who has the misguided beliefs that is driving their misguided behavior.

Yeah, it was interesting. I was speaking to someone today who was even talking about how.

Sometimes it can even be that the thinking. And as you mentioned, a lot of this starts from our childhood and how we start to think about food from early age.

You know, she was talking about how.

Food was almost like thought of. She was. She. She didn't have very much money when she was young, so having food was something that meant she had Wealth. So then now, as an adult, when she's eating, it's saying, hey, I, I can, I have wealth. I have. I can finally choose to eat if I want to. But then she finds herself, you know, eating more than she, you know, than she wants or needs. And so it's, it's interesting, right? Sometimes these, you know, these beliefs from childhood show up for us in ways that we may not even be very conscious of now unless we start to just pay a little more attention and ask some questions and really be willing to listen to ourselves to say, hey, what is really going on here? Why am I eating or not eating.

In these certain situations?

Who's making these choices? Is it the petulant child? Is it the rebellious teen? Are these choices serving my highest intentions for myself? In the case of person, you were just talking about the fear of not having enough, needing to make sure there's enough. You know, restricting is a repudiation of needs. It's saying, I don't need people, I don't need food. Overeating, binge eating. Is that fear of never having enough. And perhaps a dysfunctional relationship with deprivation.

Interesting.

And, you know, you don't have to have had a traumatic relationship with friends, food or to food. Growing up, food could be all about grandma's favorite recipes and holiday meals.

And then as you grow older and life gets in the way and you might suffer some disappointment. Food is love, food is safety, food is security.

You know, that, that brings to mind a client that I work with, and I actually, I talk about her in my master class. I talk about three clients in there in the masterclass. But, you know, just reminds me that food for her came from one of seven siblings, came from a big family, and every Sunday was family dinner, and the table was beautifully set and the food was beautifully served. And later on in life, she suffered some tremendous losses. You know, she lost her home in Hurricane Sandy. Her marriage was falling apart. Truly, truly feeling deprived and restricted in her life and in her growth. And, and now, you know, add Covid to. To this and how she feels restricted. So for her, food is safety, food is love.

And she loses herself to it and is now suffering the consequences of it as well, physically and psychologically. So you don't always need to have had a dysfunctional relationship with food.

It's more of a dysfunctional relationship with yourself. Truth is that our relationship to self is reflected in our relationship to everything else.

Wow, that's so powerful. Really is, you know, that the food is just the thing we're looking at. Or experiencing, but it's really how. How do we get more connected with ourselves and our needs and our feelings and. And then the other things start to solve themselves.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's. Again, it's understanding the context within which the behaviors evolve. So it starts with awareness, and then we need to invite in curiosity without judgment, no shame. That's how we become empowered to make the choices that we can make for ourselves. Because the truth is recovery, liberation is a choice. The eating disorder, the disordered eating is not necessarily a choice. It becomes the solution to navigating a world that we find difficult to navigate for whatever reason.

Sometimes carrying extra weight is the protection that we feel we need.

Sometimes being very small helps us to feel invisible if we're afraid of being seen.

So understanding the context that can only happen after we become aware is so necessary to be truly free.

And I wonder if, like, even. Sometimes I think even on a more subtle level, like.

Like I see sometimes I joke. I wish we had almost like a. I wish our bodies almost had like a readout or some way to tell us when we've. When we've eaten enough or when we're. Now, I know we have our hunger hormones, we have our fullness hormones, but those are sometimes disrupted and they can be on a delay. You could be eating and your brain's not even going to know you ate for probably at least 20 minutes. We can't really rely. We wish we had something that would more quickly say to us, hey, I just ate enough for this time period, for the next few hours. But because our bodies don't tell us that, we really have to learn that for ourselves. Like, how much food? And then when do I need to eat again? It's not something that we really learn in school. And of course, in most of our home environments, we were told to eat all the food on your plate, however much food that was usually more than you probably need, need at that time period. So just to recognize that we. And that we're all human in that way, that we. It's part of being human, I think, is learning how to feed ourselves. How much food do I need? And it could be different than another person.

And it changes. I'm sorry for interrupting changes day to day. That's why I get so crazy when I hear about these protocols, these diets, telling people, well, you have to eat four and a half ounces of chicken and four and a half ounces of vegetables every day for lunch and dinner, or 6 ounces of this and 6 ounces of that. Well, what if that day you needed four or what if that day you needed eight.

And everybody's a little different.

You're not learning to listen to the wisdom of your body. On any given day. You have different needs. And just like those messages of eat, everything on your plate.

Subliminally teaches you that you can't be trusted to know the wisdom of your body. So to that person that isn't sure, I would say the first thing you need to do is to slow down, slow down, tune in, really listen. Track symptoms. How are you feeling after eating this meal? Are you bloated? Are you having any digestive distress? That's how we learn what's going on in there. Track, track, assess, and then we can make the recommendations.

No, so true. I described that too. Because the more you start to pay attention to your body, then we can make little tweaks. It's almost like you go, okay, let me try this a little differently. And okay, based on these variables, let me try this a little bit differently. And just knowing that it's a process, it's not something that anyone has the perfect answer to. There is no one answer. You just have to, just have to go with it and know that we're all in that together. Figuring out how to feed my body in a way that works best for, I guess, for, for me and my body is what I was going to say. But you know, just how to find that. And it's, it's not something we're taught, so we have to figure it out. Right?

And how am I going to honor my body?

Right? How is feeding my body honoring my body? That's a very important point too, because for so many, that's not a part of the equation.

And that seems like it would relate to like even self love and self worth.

Yes. Oh, definitely self worth. You know, a big part of this, this whole discussion needs to be how we source our self worth. You know, if we are feeling better about ourselves because of what we're giving to other people and putting ourselves last, as many women do, then chances are we're not going to eat enough during the day. At nighttime, when all the work is done and we're just alone with our thoughts and ourselves, chances are we're going to turn to food and overeat, even if it's out of exhaustion.

If our self worth is sourced by how we look or the image that we think we need to put out there, then we're going to be attached to dieting again, to that more attached to comparison than connection.

If we are sourcing our self worth by how successful we are.

How powerful we are, then we're going to constantly be looking for things outside of ourselves to take care of us.

So how we source our self worth is very important. And what's forgotten in that scenario is that we are all inherently worthy. Somehow that gets lost on so many.

It's true.

It's years to discover and evolve and learn that I am enough. And on every any given day, as long as I do the best I can, it's enough. And my best is going to look different from day to day.

I love that. I know. And I. So I think that's a perfect way for us to, you know, to kind of finish this conversation is to just remind everyone listening that you know, you're enough just because you are and doesn't have to be anything else. On to sometimes starting there is where you open up to realizing, okay then, now what do I want to choose? What do I want to look at? You know, what help might. I want to seek and to know.

That the size of our lives may not be reflected in the size of our bodies.

Oh, wow, I haven't heard that before.

I know. Of which I speak.

I'm a small body too.

Exactly. You know, and I like to think that I have an enormous presence on this earth. And it's not because of what I weigh or what I don't weigh. It's not about the size of my clothes or the size of my thighs. It's about the depth of my soul and what I can give and what I'm willing to receive. And I wish I had the decades of my life back where I gave it all up to the scale and the image that I thought I needed to project.

In order to feel that way. Because I didn't feel that way about myself. I was waiting for the world to project that on me.

Well, and to think that it's this depth inside of us that we can't see, you know, it's not. Sometimes we think things are. We're so used to what's visible, but it's sometimes it's what's not visible that we have to be willing to kind of look at and find inside ourselves.

Right. The place we can always return home to. It's there. It's a deeper sense of self. That sacred space of solitude, I like to call it. Where there's no fear, there's only love. And not in the romantic sense, but the opposite of fear.

Oh, and I'm so glad that you, you found words to articulate. This and to create, you know, to write your book and create your program and everything to really offer this resource to people. So I want to acknowledge you for that and thank you so much for coming today to talk about it with me and, and definitely anyone listening who would like to connect more with Mindy. You can, you can find her on her website, the Freedom promise dot com.

Yes.

Or on social media, the same. Right? The Freedom Promise.

Freedom Promise, Yes. And we have a Facebook group which is called called Stop Fearing Food the Freedom Promise Way. And I go live there every Thursday morning and.

I just, it's my mission, it's my passion to partner with anyone who feels challenged by food and their bodies and would like to be free.

I love it. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Dani, great to see you.

Great to see you too.

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