Food, Pleasure, & Health with Marc David

Welcome to Mama Goddess. I'm your host, Alexandra J. Johnson. This podcast is all about rocking your goddess life, creating vibrant health and celebrating motherhood and family life. It's about living an authentically awesome life. Let's have some fun. Hello and welcome. I'm Alexandra J. Johnson and today we have a fabulous guest, of course, Mark. Mark is the founder, the director and the primary instructor for the Institute for Psychology of Eating and he also is a best selling author. He has the slow down diet and nourishing wisdom and he's so awesome and radical and he just brings such a new, fresh, much needed perspective to nutrition. I've been in nutrition for studying it and teaching it and being part of it for 15 years. And when I found him, I was just psych. Yes, he is the missing link to all of these nutrition theories. So welcome Mark.

Thank you, Alexandra. Happy to be here. Thank you for doing this.

Yes, well, thank you for being here. And I'd love to just start off with what got you into the psychology of eating and what is psychology of eating?

You know, it's interesting because we start out with that question and even though this is a pleasure conference, in a weird way it was kind of the opposite of pleasure that got me into all this because I was kind of born into the world with a lot of pain. I almost died a couple of times in infancy. I had very intense asthma, allergy, immune issues that really lasted throughout into my early teens and I was sickly miserable. My parents took me from doctor to doctor. Nothing helped, just with the asthma, with the allergies, with my weak immune system. I didn't have much pleasure and I was in a heck of a lot of pain. And I think sometimes destiny kind of calls us. So I was compelled on my own and really from a young age to start questioning why am I sick? What's happening to my body? How come no one can help me? And somewhere in all the sort of suffering and exploration, I had heard a rumor that fruits and vegetables were good for you. When I was about five years old and at the time I asked my mom to buy me apples and peas and carrots in a can because somehow that was my child's conception of fruits and vegetables. Coincident or not, she buys them, I eat it, and I started getting healthier. So from an early age I made really what to me was a very magical connection that, wow, I take all this stuff that I'm eating and I change it a little bit and my health starts getting better. Like that was mind blowing for me and gave Me, a whole new purpose, not only for myself, which was what I focused on, but then as soon as I hit my early 20s, I was pretty much recovered, my body completely transformed. And that sort of led me on a professional journey to study nutrition, study health, study the body. And I was in medical school for a year. I thought I wanted to be a doctor and teach nutrition. We didn't have any nutrition in medical school. And I eventually left and started just putting together my own education, which eventually led me into eating psychology. So for me, it's a calling to be doing this kind of work. And as you probably know, like, the work we do often is born out of our own need and our own challenge. So I feel like I've been able to make a career out of really the early suffering that I had. So that's the short answer to your question.

That is amazing.

Wow, what a journey it has been. Yeah.

So great. So the. And you talk about the nutrition and we'll get into maybe some nuts and bolts of nutrition. But what. So I know you talk a lot about the mind and the psychology. What does that mean? And why is that important for us to have, like, the right psychology around our nutrition?

Well, we, the collective, we tend to think or want to believe that nutrition is this exact science, or even that biology is this exact science. Yeah, maybe math is an exact science. Maybe physics approximates close to an exact science. But as it turns out, once you really start to look at the literature, when you look at the research, when you look at what we know about the body, essentially what you eat, the very food itself, I'm going to say, uber important, obviously, for health and metabolism. But the food, I'm going to say, is half the story of good nutrition. The other half is who we are as eaters. Because what science has been figuring out over the last 30, 40 years is that the mind is dramatically impacting the body. When it comes to how we metabolize, when it comes to health, when it comes to digestion, assimilation, calorie burning. So who we are, what you're thinking at any given moment is being translated into physiology, is being chemically translated into your system. If you're having a happy day, you woke up on the right side of the bed, the baby's not crying, everything's going great. Happy chemistry. My life is good. And then all of a sudden, baby starts crying or dishes break, life is bad. And then I get stressed, and then I get tight. So we know sort of on our own personal kind of anecdotal level, like, yeah, What I think affects me somewhat, but it's quite a literal process. It's quite a literal process how our thoughts are being transduced into the kind of chemistry that impacts how the body heals, you know, diseased body tissue. My thoughts, my feelings, my beliefs, particularly levels of stress and relaxation are impacting us profoundly. So at some point, I was seeing clients over the years for nutrition, and people come and they want to lose weight or they want to heal their digestion. And what I would find on the one hand was I can tell someone what to eat and all the great things to do, and it could be a highly motivated person, and they might come back and say, I know what I'm supposed to do. You told me. I agree with you. I couldn't do it. So not only is what's going on in here and in my heart and in my being, not only is it influencing, literally my biology and my chemistry, it's also influencing my ability to do the things I say I want to do. So. So it seems like the mind can be at war with itself and cause us to go against our own wishes. So I just realized, my goodness, if I'm going to be in the nutrition field and the health field, I better understand the mind and the heart and the soul of the eater, because we bring that to the table. We love certain foods. We're repelled by others. We have memories maybe of what it was like growing up eating at the table. If your family dinner table was wonderful and relaxed, you're going to have a different relationship with food than your friend who they sat down at the dinner table and dad was strapping everybody and you have to finish everything on your plate. But you can't eat too much because it's going to make you fat, and that's going to mean no one's going to love you. And then all of a sudden, we grow up with all this anxiety, fear and stress around food, around the body that actually lives in our system. So there's a lot of people walking around with very intense thoughts and beliefs about food. Oh, that's bad for you. Or thoughts and beliefs and feelings about my body. It's horrible. It's ugly, it's too fat, it's no good. That creates a physiology, it creates a chemistry which literally impacts how we burn calories. It literally impacts how we digest and assimilate. So again, we have to put ourselves in the optimum state to receive the wonderful foods and medicines and herbs that we're taking.

Wow, that was incredible. That was so awesome.

Yeah.

And so how does, and I love this, that you bring pleasure into it as you're talking about it. Like if we don't enjoy our bodies and we have all these negative thoughts, like we're not open and receptive for pleasure, and why is pleasure, can you just talk about that? Why is pleasure important? What is pleasure?

You know, that really is a great question. What is pleasure? My guess is if you asked 500 experts from 500 disciplines, you'd probably get a very different answer. What I want to say though is pleasure in essence is irreducible. Meaning, no matter what you and I think it is or how we define it, what the collective we can agree on is that the body does experience pleasure, the mind, the psyche, experiences pleasure. More to the point where evolutionary, physiologically, biologically built for pleasure. So at the most primitive level of our physiology, we are programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Maybe you can transport yourself back to junior high school biology. You probably learned that. In fact, you probably learned that every organism on the planet, you could be a single celled little amoeba swimming in a pond. You could be a lizard, you could be a bug, you could be a lion, you could be a human. On some level, we're programmed to seek pleasure, avoid pain. So that little tiny cell that's swimming around in the pond, its physiology is way more simple. But pleasure, for it means survival. Pleasure, for it means I found food, I eat food, and somehow that food feels right. And the pain for that little single celled organism is. Huh? I think there's a bigger single cell creature chasing me. I better get the heck out of here. Because if I get eaten. Painful, right? So we're wired in that way, and there's a beauty to it, because essentially that which is pleasurable, according to our physiology, according to our genetic memory, helps keep us alive. It sustains us. Ah, this water tastes so good. We need water for life. So it just so happens that evolution, or the wisdom of the universe builds in the fact that, hey, that which sustains life, let's make it pleasurable. Otherwise these silly humans aren't going to do it. If we don't make eating pleasurable, they're going to forget to eat and starve. If we don't make sex pleasurable, they're not going to want to procreate and then the species will die. So there's this imperative to reproduce. You and I are not going to want to reproduce in our life. If life is horrible and terrible and painful and miserable and suffering, there's got to be a reason to want to keep doing this. So evolution builds in that all these things are going to feel pleasurable to you. So it kind of becomes, at a primitive level, it becomes a biological compass. We're oriented towards pleasure. Meaning, huh, I'm hungry, I need to seek pleasure. I eat food, and then I'm satisfied a by the food. But I've also avoided the pain of hunger and starvation. If I don't eat, I get real mean. I kill for food, and so will we all eventually. So eating the food alleviates the pain and gives us the pleasure. And it's kind of like a universal principle, the universe. And this is. The Taoists talk about this. So many religious traditions. Yin and yang, God and goddess, masculine and feminine, up and down. The universe occurs as opposites, and we need both. You need light and dark. You need wakefulness and sleeping. We need pleasure and pain because each informs the other. You can't know what happiness is unless you know what sadness is. We can't know what joy is unless we know what terrible suffering. So the opposites kind of inform each other. And so we have this beautiful kind of system that we've been inaugurated into. And just let me say this also, just from a biological standpoint. You know, transport yourself for a moment back in time to when, you know, you were a little infant and you pop out of mama's womb. Now, the father of Western psychology, Sigmund Freud, he had this great term about babies, infants, he called them, and it's kind of weird, he called them polymorphously perverse. And when you look up, what does polymorphously perverse means? What it means is that an infant doesn't distinguish between different kinds of sensations. Its nervous system hasn't developed. So an infant's not sitting there going, ah, yes, this is my mother touching me. This is her voice soothing me. This is how good it feels to feel the warmth of her skin. And, oh, this is the milk. I like that. The infant experiences all of it as one. So mother is touch. Touch is love. Love is food. Food is love. Pain is absence of mother, and pain is bad. Food and pain is in my belly. It's all registered as one event. So we have a cellular memory that food is pleasurable because you could take a. And you know this because I know you're a new mama. You can take a screaming, crying little infant, and they're going nuts. And all you do is hold them, give them the breath, and they get the milk. And within, what, five seconds, brain chemistry completely changes, brain state changes. You go from screaming little creature to happy baby. And you and I remember that in our cells, we remember, oh, feel pain, feel bad, get food, get touch, get warmth, get nourishment, love, feel better. So it's all connected. So bonding, bonding to the mother, bonding to her body, bonding to the breast, to the food, bonding to father. That's a pleasurable act. So in bonding with your partner, your lover, your friends, we bond with our friends, you know, that is pleasurable. So we do it because the pleasure is the compass. Ah, this feels good. Now, of course, opposite from that, like any compass, you look at your compass, it might go a little haywire. And, you know, we're human beings alive on planet Earth. We're here to do a little bit of learning. And it's easy for the pleasure compass to get a little distorted and throw us off. You know, we tend to call that addiction, or we call it intense attraction to cravings for different substances that hook us, you know, so we can get attached to pleasures that don't necessarily support us. Epicurus the Greek, he was actually a Greek monk, you know, so where we get the term epicurean delight or epicurean feast, everybody thinks Epicurus was some big gourmand kind of a guy who just was a glutton. He was actually a monk, and he essentially created this philosophy where he said, you can't live wisely and justly and rightly and compassionately without having pleasure in your life, which is very profound. And he also said that the two go hand in hand. But pleasure has to teach us. And we also, at the same time, we need wisdom to inform how we do pleasure. Because if you left your little kid on their own, yeah. They might start grabbing for all the Coke and the Pepsi and the junk food. So there's a place where, as you and I mature into adulthood, we learn more the nuances of pleasure. What are the pleasures at work? What are the pleasures that don't? So it's a fascinating biological exploration and then a personal, emotional, spiritual one as well. Yeah. So that's the short answer to your question.

Wow, that's so great. So on the pleasure, I love that. The pain, the pleasure and the mother and just the whole process of we are wired for pleasure. That's amazing. One is, what is your thought on the pleasure? Because for so many people, they're unhappy with their bodies, they're unhappy with their nutrition, they're unhappy just in general. And I feel like a lot of us have lost the pleasure of eating and of being alive. So what's your thought on that? Why do we do that? What's going on with that? I feel like we're in a pleasure deficit.

Yeah. Yeah. That's such a great way to put it. We're in a pleasure deficit. I think it's pretty collective. It might even be planetary, particularly in industrialized nations. You know, I personally believe if we go back into history, we could see that in so many of the philosophies that the world has been brought into, in so many of the religious traditions, pleasure is often seen as bad, evil, the devil. You know, right off the bat, if we just look at Judeo Christian heritage, Western civilization, the Old Testament, and the New Testament, which kind of come as a package deal. The story of Adam and Eve, which is arguably one of the first stories you learn if you're in the Judeo Christian heritage story of Adam and Eve, is essentially where the big dude upstairs lays down down a rule and says, yo, people, don't eat this apple. Don't do it. Stay away from it. Bad. Now, that's kind of interesting. That's kind of interesting way to start out our creation story. We're given shoulds and shouldn'ts. And you know something? Turns out human nature is such that if you tell a kid or an adult for that matter, don't do this. The first place the brain goes is why. The second place the brain goes is curiosity. And the third place we go is, how do I get some? How much is it gonna cost me? Where's the black market for that stuff? And part of that's evolutionary, because the truth is, in order for us to have the best chance to survive, you need to know as much about your environment as possible. Humans, every organism, the better you know your environment, the better you know the jungle, you better than. The better you know all the creatures, all the foods, all the possibilities, the more chance you have to find what you need. So we need to explore everything for survival now. So story Adam and Eve. So of course they eat the apple, woman eats it first, which is kind of interesting, of course. So the feminine gets blamed, and then as soon as the big guy upstairs says, hey, what's going on? Adam and Eve, I hear you ate the apple. And they're hanging out in the garden, and all of a sudden they're feeling shame about the body. They're covering up their nakedness, and then they get punished and they get thrown out of the garden. So here they are, Their nakedness, their innocence is kind of made bad, and they're feeling shame about the body. So Essentially, what I'm saying is it feels like. It seems like in certain civilizations on the planet, we've inherited a shame about the body. It's not okay to be naked. It's not okay to feel your turn on or your sexuality. It's not okay to eat your food at go, oh, yummy. This is so good. It's not okay if you're married to go, say, I like that person over there. There's a lot of rules and we don't know quite what to do with it, though, with all of it sometimes. So pleasure has become problematic. We also get signals, messages from the culture. You know, walk into a supermarket and go to the checkout counter where they have all the magazines, and I guarantee you, you could see at least five magazines that are like Family Circle or Women's Home Journal, like some kind of women's magazine. And they all have a beautiful picture of a dessert on the COVID some big chocolate dessert. And then you know how they list all the articles and at least three of the articles will be lose seven pounds in seven days. You know, the 500 calorie die. So it's tempting you on the one hand with these beautiful, like, eat this devil's food cake. Bad for you to eat, but really sinfully rich and sinfully good. So we're given confused messages about pleasure. And consequently there's a little bit of suffering around that somehow we've gotten from religion, from culture, that pleasure ain't so good and you have to hide it. And then if somebody shows it, she's a slut, or she's a glutton, or he's a, you can't trust him. We come up with all these concepts around it. So it's a confusing, I think, soup to swim in. But here's what I think is the bottom line when you say so, you know, here we have these people who like food is not pleasurable. They don't like their bodies. Here's the thing. Pleasure is extreme experience in the body. That's kind of where it happens. Pleasure is in the body. Pleasure is a felt experience. It's a physiochemical experience. Once I use my mind, my mind, your mind. Our mind is powerful enough to say, bad pleasure, no good, I'm not going to feel that. So, you know, your husband can give you a shoulder rub and if you go, I hate shoulder rubs, I don't want this, you're not going to feel pleasure. We can play your favorite music, but if you're really pissed off, no, I don't want to listen to my favorite music. No pleasure. So we can use the mind, unfortunately, to stop the experience of pleasure. And then what happens? Because we are programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain, It's a biological imperative. If we're not getting pleasure, we get miserable, we get cranky, we get hungry for the very thing we secretly want. So if you're not experiencing intimacy, and all humans crave intimacy, we get weird, we get mean, we get cranky, we might get sick, we might get fatigued. If you're not feeling the love, the connection that affects pleasure, if you're not getting pleasure from food because you're on a lifeless diet, because you're trying to lose weight and you're eating all kind of yucko stuff, then we're suppressing pleasure, but the body's going to hunger for it more. So part of it is we need to feel pleasure in the body no matter what. No matter what you look like, no matter how old you are, how young you are, no matter what your beliefs are. Pleasure needs to bypass the mind in order to be felt. There are people, literally, especially. Especially with food and sex. With food and sex. Oh, God, Alexandria, I really shouldn't eat. This is bad for me. It's really no good. I like ice cream, but this is really bad for me. I don't have sugar, so I eat the ice cream, and I'm thinking, alexandra is really bad for me. I shouldn't do this. So my mind is focused on how bad it is for me. And in order for me to actually experience pleasure sensations, I need to be proud, present to the pleasure. If you're busy reading a book and talking on the phone and somebody's massaging you, you actually can't get the full sensation of pleasure, because pleasure needs awareness, attention, and presence. So when we don't have that, even if you. So I'm eating the food, and I love that ice cream, but I'm not experiencing the pleasure. So the brain doesn't recognize pleasure, pleasure. It's just eating a bunch of stuff, and the brain's going, huh, I ate the ice cream. I wanted to feel good. I didn't feel good. I was sure I was going to experience pleasure because I always experience pleasure when I eat chocolate. But none happened because he wasn't paying attention. But the brain's not smart enough to say, you weren't paying attention. All it says is, hungry, give me pleasure. So then we're constantly hankering after the food or more sensation, or more television or more whatever it is that's stimulating us, because they want more and more to feel the pleasure that we're not feeling because the mind can't relax into it. Right, Makes sense.

Yeah, totally. So on the pleasure. So we need to fully enjoy it and be present for it. And is this one of the reasons that we kind of overeat and binge eat and hide from it? We want the pleasure, but we're not aware of that we're actually having it. So we want more of it. And so we eat 50 cookies.

Yes, that's a big factor that's happening in part on the biological level. If we're overeating, if we're binge eating, there's always an absolutely perfect good biological and psychological reason for the unwanted habits that we have. So if somebody says to me, God, Mark, I am overeating so much. God, I am binge eating so much. The first place I go is, oh, let's find out why that makes 100% perfect sense, why that is the right strategy as far as your being is concerned, that you should be doing to get what you need. So as an example, I might overeat because I had a really rough day at work. I don't really like my job, and I come home and I just broke up with my girlfriend. I'm really lonely. I have no love in my life. I'm never going to find love again. That sucks. But I want to have a happy life. I want some pleasure food, because I instantly remember that food equals love, food equals pleasure, food equals touch, Food equals intimacy, Food equals love. Love equals food. And it's what psychologists call a symbolic substitute. So you and I will reach for the closest approximations to what we want that we can't get. So if I can't instantly get connection, love, intimacy, touch, meaning, purpose, because that's all going to make me feel good and pleasurable. What else can give me pleasure that I can have right now? Okay, food, television, video games, whatever it is for us, it makes sense that that person overeats. That person says to me, I'm overeating. I'm not going to say, stop overeating. I'm going to say, you have a perfectly good reason to overeat. If I was in your situation, I'd probably overeat there too. And the food is giving you pleasure, so then it feels right. But here I am, I feel guilty, I feel bloated, I ate too fast and I'm gaining weight, and this really doesn't give me what I I want anyway. So then that becomes an exploration process to see great so there's a good reason for you to do this. Now, let's look at that unwanted behavior, the overeating, the binge eating, as pointing somewhere. It's pointing us to consciousness. It's pointing us to the place where the alarm clock is trying to wake us up. So my overeating and binge eating is trying to wake me up to the fact that really what's happening is I need to examine how I do relationship. I need to examine what it is that I want in life. If my job isn't satisfactory, what do I do really? Do I start to explore? Do I start to get another education? So let's go into the deeper questions. So in a sense, I was guided there in a weird way by this distorted relationship with pleasure because I was grabbing onto the food. But food becomes. And pleasurable activities can often become a symbolic place where we enact deeper soul longings. So pleasure is like a trail that you follow. Where's this leading me? You know, chances are you are close to the people you're close to because there's a pleasure in there somewhere. You know, you marry the person you marry because there's a bonding, there's a connection, there's a pleasure in how we relate, how we connect, how we talk, how we see each other. Oh, you love me. That's pleasurable. I love you. That's pleasurable. So pleasure becomes a compass. And maybe at first you think this is a pleasurable person for you. So then you kind of check it out and you go on a date and you sip some tea, and then you do coffee, and then you do tequila, and then whatever it is. So I don't know if I answered your question even.

I don't even know my question. You're just like, so mesmerizing. You just go. I'm like, what was my question? Oh, I think on overeating. Yeah, totally. And I think it's great. I love that you start from the place that nothing's wrong. Because I know, you know, a lot of times, and I had some overeating issues in college, you know, and I was stressed out, and I was a college athlete, and I was always feeling like there's something wrong with me, you know, like, what's wrong with me? I just need to restrict, restrict, restrict. And I know so many people that I work with and talk to, they don't know why they're binging, they don't know why they're overeating. They don't know why they can't say no to the Ice cream, you know, and this is so great to see. There's a reason.

Yeah. And, Alexandra, I'm so glad you brought up that example of your own experience and the word restriction. If we go back to just the dance of the universe of yin and yang, light and dark, work and play, it's back in front, up and down. So everything occurs as an opposite. My heart contracts and expands. You can't just have contraction of the heart or just expansion of the heart. We'd have a heart attack and die. We're constantly pulsating between the opposites. So you know something? It's actually fine to restrict when one needs to restrict. Sometimes I need to restrict. Sometimes I need to contract. No, I can't eat that. I'm on a diet or that food makes me feel yucky. I'm not going to do this. So sometimes you and I need to restrict. But then there needs to then be an expansion. So there needs to be that balance. So we need to then expand into place pleasure, expand into food, expand into touch, expand into whatever the expansion is. But if I stay in contraction and restriction, then distorted behavior is predictable. If I stay in contraction, unhappiness and suffering are predictable. If I stay in contraction, health challenges and symptoms are predictable. So restriction is fine, but let's make sure it's followed up by expansion. And then, yeah, I'm going to contract again, and then I'm going to expand again.

That's cool. I love that, too. Just the expansion. Because there are. For my life, nutrition has been a passion for me. And then also just my personal journey with associating love and comfort and whatever, all the stuff that we have with food. It's so great that there is a time, and I think it's really inspiring for us. There is a time that it's great. And there's also a time where you're like, you know what? I'm not going to restrict. I'm going to open up to it more. I just love that.

Yeah. And also on that note, playing with that, and this also comes from Taoism, from Chinese philosophy, which I find very helpful. They'll say that one extreme, when you play it out, ends up becoming the other extreme. They'll say, extreme yin becomes yang, extreme Yang becomes yin. What that means is, in essence, let's say you do something that's extremely pleasurable. Like, you know, if, like, you like to be tickled so your friend tickles you and you go, oh, that feels so good. That's so pleasurable. But if your friend pins you down on the floor and tickles you for 30 minutes. That can become the worst torture ever. So extreme pleasure all of a sudden becomes painful for some people. When you're in very intense pain, like if you're in a war and your arm gets blown off, that's intensely painful. What the body does as an evolutionary mechanism is it floods you with pleasure chemistry and actually to help you survive, because that's such a painful experience and it's so freaky to see your limb get blown off that you need a flood of pleasure chemistry to help you survive and get through. So extreme pain becomes pleasure. We can get. Oftentimes, like, if I restrict, like, you know, I'm going to go on a fast, Alexandra. I just want to, like, cleanse my body. And I go on a fast and like, man, I feel really good. Well, I lost a couple pounds. I'm going to restrict all the time. Because restriction felt good. Yep. So we developed this concept, restriction equals good. So we keep restricting and restricting and restricting, and in a weird way, we get attached to. Even though the restriction becomes painful, we get addicted to that state. It's a brain state, It's a chemistry. I'm addicted to my restriction. I'm hardly eating any fat. I'm hardly eating any protein. I'm doing all this exercise and it gives us a weird kind of a high. It gives us a weird kind of pleasure, but it's distorted. It's not truly in alignment with who we are. It's not truly natural. And that restriction isn't sustainable. It's not really serving body and soul. Right.

And the restriction also comes from. Because I know when I've done the restriction, you know, there's the balance of restricting. And then, like you said, it has to pop up at some point. So you can restrict, restrict for three months, six months, a year. And then all of a sudden you're like, yeah.

And then we're wondering, why am I binge eating? Why can't I control myself? Well, actually, you can't control yourself because you are in such tight control, eventually the psyche and the body have to expand. So tight control, tight control, tight control. All of a sudden, uncontrollable, ravenous appetite. I've got to spend all my money, I've got to gamble all my money. I got to shop. I've got to go out and screw 25 people. I got to go binge on all this ice cream. Because we've been so consumed, contracted, that when it's time to expand, we have no wisdom in that expansion. We're just reacting from this place of like just. Just biologically driven need, that it's not guided by intelligence and wakefulness because the restriction wasn't guided by intelligence and wakefulness. And the expansion is going to reflect that same thing.

Yeah, that's so great. Because so many times when we do restrictions, it is out of fear or out of hating our bodies. It is not like, oh, I love myself, I'm going to go on a cleanse, or whatever. You know, it's usually, I hate myself. I hate that I'm 20 pounds overweight. And then, yeah, you're coming from that body wisdom.

And here's the thing, because we understand, whether we know this or not, consciously we understand that pleasure is a reward. Many of us use pleasure as reward, meaning, okay, good girl, here's your lollipop. So chances are you learned that as a child. You do something good, Mommy and daddy give you something good to make you feel pleasurable. Here's a candy, here's a sugar. Here's the new toy. Wow. I've been a good girl. I've been working really hard. I've been doing all these interviews. Great. Now I'm going to give myself a week off. Reward you get. Pleasures are rewards. So we know that and that's okay. Now here's the challenge. If I'm walking around like so many people are going, I hate my body. I'm not lovable. I don't deserve because I'm too fat or my shape isn't right, then I don't deserve pleasure. I've made up in my mind I don't deserve pleasure because pleasure is a reward. And what happens is many people, particularly I see this with women, think I will have the perfect guy, the perfect life, the happiness. I'm going to be the real me when I have the body that I want. Because then it's all kind of like it's all going to happen. And at that point in the future, which is, you know, a little bit out there, but it's in the future. But I'm going to get there because I'm exercising and I'm dieting, then I'm. Then I will be worthy of the pleasure I want and only then. But what that says is, I'm not worthy of it now. So I can't receive pleasure now because I don't deserve it because of this body. And then that creates this vicious cycle. So then I restrict and I become unhappy and I live in a stress state because there's no nourishment. Really. There's no pleasure. And pleasure actually is a metabolic enhancer. It is a healing energy. It is a healing chemistry in the body, and it is, believe it or not, a metabolically hot experience. So pleasure will catalyze the best healthy functions of your body, including normal, healthy day in, day out, calorie burning. But when we're restricting, we're actually stopping the very thing we want. So all I'm saying here is essentially that when we have the core belief that I'm not good enough, I don't deserve, we put pleasure off into the future, and pleasure is the very thing we're wanting. So it's learning how to embody pleasure. Now, pleasure, there's no such thing as pleasure in the future. If we can give up future pleasure, we would be a thousand times happier because there's always. With people, there's always a little carrot that we dangle. Yeah, I'm gonna feel pleasure when I get this done. Well, it might be really pleasurable just to sit here and do this. And then it might be pleasurable to go to the next thing and make a snack for yourself. And then it might be pleasurable, you know, to give your co worker a hug and talk about the next thing on the agenda. So always putting it off into the future. And then we. We're not so happy.

Right? So what. How do we. You know, because I know that this is part of my current dance, like, really trusting yourself, you know, just like trusting your body wisdom and listening to your body. I mean, I know this is a huge question, but could you just talk about that? Because I know it seems like most people in our. In our culture, a lot of people are either on a diet. They're in the restrictive, or they're in the expansion. And there isn't, like, a center grounded. What does my body truly need? And how the heck do I listen to it? And how do I nourish it and be happy and enjoy it?

I love that question, Alexandra, and thank you for answering it too, for me, which is how do we trust pleasure? You used the word trust, and you really emphasized it. And to me, that's it. We have to trust it. And it's almost like saying, like, if I was single and I came to you and I said, alexandra, I need some sisterly advice here. I want to be in a relationship, and I haven't been in a relationship for so long, and you might talk to me, and you might start to find out, this guy doesn't trust women. So then you might say, you know, Mark, I don't Think you're trusting women or trusting relationship? I don't think you're trusting love. And then I go to you. Well, I think you're right. Well, how do I trust that? Well, there's probably a million answers to that. But at the bottom line is trust is irreducible. Trust is something we offer. Trust is something we grant. Yes, you have people in your life that maybe they're in your life because they earned your trust. So trust is definitely. I want to say something that we earn. You know, I'm in relationships, partnerships, friendships, and we earn each other's trust. Like, oh, you showed up for me. Wow, that kind of goes in the trust bank account. So we do that kind of dance. But also, you might meet someone on the street and you know, they might ask you, hey, can you give me directions? And you start talking to them. You're trusting in that moment that you know they're not going to like kidnap you and grab you in their car. So you're granting trust every day to people. Just grant it. So what I'm saying is we collectively need to wed these two concepts called trust in the body, or trust and pleasure. Because the problem is we're not trusting the body. We don't trust pleasure. We don't trust the activities of the body. We don't trust the naturalness of the body. We've been taught to untrust it. Well, ask your doctor. Go to your doctor. You don't know the answers to these questions. You don't know about health. Go to the expert. Read a book. Oh, my God. Pleasure. You can't eat that. You can't do that. We're taught not to trust our sexuality. We're taught not to trust our hungers. We're taught not to trust our desires. We generally get those messages that these things are not quite trustable. So everybody's walking around in a body that can't be trusted. And the only antidote for that is to begin to play with, experiment with trust. So trust. And here's what I love to tell clients, students, anyone. It's like, okay, so you don't trust your relationship with food. You don't trust that if you eat something, you're going to be able to control yourself. Okay, great. How about, though, if you trust that if I eat this cake and I end up eating the whole cake, can you trust that you can return to forgiveness and love? Can you trust that you won't abandon yourself and smack yourself down and drop into negative self talk? See, that's where the real trust is. Trust that I'm going to stand by my own side and not abandon myself. Because we self abandon when we self attack. We self abandon when we go and say to ourselves, I hate you. You did this bad behavior. You're a willpower weakling, you have no control. Essentially I'm giving myself the message, you are beyond untrust. And really what it is is actually I'm human, I'm fallible, I make mistakes, I'm imperfect. That's part of the soul's journey on planet Earth. Can we learn to trust ourselves that we will return to self acceptance and self love and return from disembodying and checking out? Because we tend to check out when we get pain, suffering, discomfort. We just like check out. So can I trust myself? Can I make an agreement with myself that I'm going to check back in, I'm going to get back into my body, get back into my emotions. So that is a dangerous and scary process because you might eat all the sugar. But what I'm saying saying is you can trust that you'll still love yourself, that your friends will still love you, your loved ones will still love you. The love is still there. Yeah, I made a mistake or yeah, that was a tough lesson. Let me keep practicing. So we will never reach our pleasure potential, our nourishment potential, our feel good potential, our turn on potential, our organization, orgasmic potential. Unless we throw ourselves into the fray, unless we throw ourselves into the danger zone called pleasure. Because truth be told, Pleasure isn't 100% safe. It's not safe. Like you might be attracted to someone and all your girlfriends tell you stay away from that guy, but you're attracted, but everybody says stay away. And it's this weird mix. I mean, how many times does that happen? You know, these fatal attractions that we have for the wrong people or for the wrong foods. But there's also this place where we're drawn to that attraction. We're attracted for a reason.

Yep.

You might need to explore that attraction to that food. You might need to go down the road of addiction. You might need to be in a bad fatal attraction relationship in order to learn and become a better person. So we have to I think, let pleasure teach us. Wow. You know, I follow. You know, maybe another word we can use, which is often a potentially a bigger word for pleasure or that helps navigate us is desire. So we have desires. You might desire to have three children, you might desire to have this amazing business. You might have a desire to just live near your family in a small house and have an uncomplicated life. You might desire to have a certain kind of body. So what I'm saying is we tend to label our desires as bad. We keep them to ourselves and we kind of fester with them. And the truth is our desires feed us and animate us. Our desires give us energy. If we owned our desires. Owning your desire doesn't mean you're going to necessarily get the actual desire. But if you said to me, mark, I have such this intense desire to, like, marry Brad Pitt, why, you know, I might be sitting there thinking, I think he's taken, and this might be a slim chance. But, you know, instead of saying, gee, that's such a stupid desire. That's so dumb, then you walk away going, oh, I feel so ashamed. And your energy contracts and you feel small and you feel no good, and, God, why am I so stupid for having that desire? Desires don't make sense. Desires are beyond us. Desires are defined, and yet they come through us. So if you really own that desire and feel it, wow, it feels so good to have that desire. I can feel that level of attraction. Wow. I can feel that level of heat. Desire is felt in your own body when you let it circulate. And this is what the ancient yogis would say. When you let desire circulate in your body, a, you actually have a better chance of fulfilling it in the real world. And B, even if you don't, it is fulfilled because it's circulated without judgment and conversation. You just let the desire be, you bless it, you own it, you feel it in your own skin. And that empowers us, because then you don't make your desire bad or wrong. You don't make the pleasure that you want bad or wrong. All pleasures are good, particularly when you experience them in your own body, at the very least. And as long as it's not harming another, as long as that pleasure is consensual. Yeah. Then I want to say it's good. So I think we, as a planet, we as a species, we are a. Pleasure is a. It's a spiritual teacher, you know, it's calling us into greater awareness. And it's not always safe, you know, to your point. So we have to learn to trust pleasure and trust the process and trust that we could learn from the pleasures that end up bringing us pain, that we could learn and grow from it and become better people and become more wise people, so then we could experience pleasure even better.

So many things. That's so.

So.

I love the. Oh, my gosh. I just Totally lost my train of thought. This happens in my interviews. Lack of sleep for a new mom. I'm like, what was I gonna say? Oh, I got it. So I love what you're saying. You need to be willing to put your pleasure out there to be willing to. As you're just saying it, I can feel in my own body a level of being vulnerable and, like, being willing to put yourself out and almost be out of control. Like, not knowing what's gonna happen. And we love to know, and I love to know what's gonna happen, how it's going to all go. And if I just kind of open up to pleasure, it's like, what the hell is going to happen? Which I think we need to be comfortable with, right? To fully experience the full realm of pleasure and desire.

Yeah, I love how you said that. It's something we let go into and surrender into. We cannot, in the purest form, control pleasure. We want to control because control makes us feel safe. If I could control everything that happens in my day, I feel good and I feel safe. I want to make sure everybody does what I want them to do. And it's the perfect temperature outside, and we have the perfect conversation. So I want to control stuff. It makes me feel good. There's a usefulness to that. But pleasure defies control. The deeper the pleasure, the more we are surrender to it. Because control is another way of saying especially. Extreme control means my vigilance center is turned on. My fight or flight response is turned. When I'm vigilant, I got to make sure there's no lions attacking me. I got to make sure I'm safe. I got to make sure that this pleasurable experience is going to be exactly what I wanted. Honey, I want you to sit here. Actually, you're wearing the wrong clothes. I want you to change those clothes. And now I want the lighting like this. And no, I don't want you talking. We try to control every little nuance, and before you know it, we've lost the pleasure. We've lost the flow. At some point, it's something we need to relax into and surrender into. Because pleasure on a physiologic level. Here's the kicker. On a physiologic level, pleasure is most fully experienced. In a physiologic relaxation response, the most heightened sense of pleasure happens the deeper we are in the relaxation response opposite from that. The more you are in stress response, fight or flight chemistry, the less you can experience pleasure. So here you are, and you're really pissed, and you Had a rough day and your husband just wants to hang out and love you up, and you're like, I'm upset. Then you can't experience the pleasure because you're vigilant center is still fighting what happened today. So if you eat in that moment, you actually cannot experience the full complement of pleasure in your body from that food because the main stress hormone cortisol desensitizes us to pleasure because you're stressed out, you're anxious, so we're flooding the system with cortisol. It literally desensitizes pleasure receptors in the digestive system, throughout the body, in the skin. So if you ate at that point, you actually have to eat more to experience the pleasure in that food. As if had you been super relaxed. We need to let go of our vigilance center. Our control has to be my way or the highway in order to experience the pleasure that's possible. And let go and surrender. Surrender isn't always easy because it's not safe. So to experience our deepest pleasures, we have to feel safe. Whether it's a sexual pleasure, whether it's an intimate pleasure, whether it's a food pleasure, there has to be a sense of, I'm safe here, I'm okay, I trust this person, I trust myself, I trust the universe that I'm going to be okay. Whatever my fear is here, I trust that I'm going to be okay. And if you don't trust it, you can make a decision. No, I don't trust here. Great. Sometimes our vigilance center is pretty accurate and it says, this is not a trustful situation. Get out. That's fine also. But it's really listening and learning and discerning when our vigilance center needs to be on and when our vigilance center needs to be relaxed a little bit. Because. Because pleasure heals us. Pleasure deeply relaxes you even more. So I need pleasure to be in a relaxation response. But then the more I get pleasure, the more my body goes into parasympathetic dominance. Relaxation response. And pleasure, like stress, is a graded response. You could have mild stress, extreme stress, post traumatic stress. You could have mild pleasure. You could have extreme pleasure. We sometimes call that bliss or ecstasy, which people will tell you, it, like, changes my brain chemistry. It changes your life. When you meditate and you feel bliss, like yogis will say that, or people in the Tantra universe will say, yes, they had a, you know, a tantric blissful sexual experience for the first time. And it just, it changes you forever. So there's a Mystery to pleasure. I think that's quite enticing.

I think so. I'm sold.

Yeah.

So I'm curious on the pleasure. Like what? I know I have two questions. The first one is how would we go about a pleasure? Like, let's say we're going to sit down to eat. How would you recommend that we prepare ourselves, our mom, our body, to actually sit down and allow the pleasure to be filled up in our body? Do you have recommendations for that?

Yes. And as always, your questions have some great answers to them. So how do we prepare? Pleasure oftentimes loves staging, loves to be created. It loves for us to manage the experience. So if you're going to go to bed, you might have made sure that my sheets are washed, the pillows are fluffed, there's a candle in the room, my favorite music is on. You created a container for pleasure to help you have pleasurable sleep. If you are going to going on a vacation, you might sit down with your friends and your family and go, okay, let's arrive on such and such a date. Let's go to this hotel I love. And oh, they have massages there. And oh, they have the right kind of. So you're setting up the conditions for you to experience maximum pleasure based on what you know about how you experience pleasure. So pleasure loves thoughtfulness, Pleasure loves a little bit of planning. Pleasure also loves specifics. It loves specifics. So you specifically don't want to go to certain places on a vacation. There are certain places you love to go that's very specific. You can't get pleasure unless you know some of the specifics. So with food, what does create a pleasurable eating experience for you, for me, for anyone? You know, for some of us, we love company. Some of us, wow. It feels so great when I go to my favorite restaurants. Feels so great when I eat outside. It feels so great when I set a beautiful table. It feels so great when I play my music. It feels so great when I eat with these particular friends. So it's really doing your own personal inventory and seeing what are the elements that would make my eating experience pleasurable. Oftentimes pleasure like space and it likes slow. It's hard to experience pleasure on the fly. And many people will tell you, I love food, I love food so much. And then I'll ask them, are you a fast eater, moderate eater, slow eater? And say, oh, I'm the fastest eater in the world? I think, huh? Well, that's like saying you love sex and you love it so much. Like, yeah, let's do it and get it over in 30 seconds. If you love something, for goodness sakes, make it last. So pleasure tends to like spaciousness. We forget that because we're so busy.

Totally.

And we wonder why we're not getting pleasure. Well, if you're sitting there eating your food and you have your favorite meal there, and you've got your candle and you got your music and you've got your loved ones sitting there, but you're worried because you know something, you got a work deadline and you're sitting there thinking about, oh, my God, I really didn't complete that task. I didn't have enough time today, and now I might not meet my deadline. And you're sitting there eating, but you're not present to the meal. Because I brought my work to the table, I'm not present. I can slow down. My mind is anxious, My mind is spinning. I won't be able to receive pleasure because I'm not fully present. So creating the conditions for pleasure often means what's going to help me let go into this moment? What's going to help me get present? Let go of the past, today, yesterday, let go of the future. Oh, I'm going to be much happier when I get this task done and just be here and allow ourselves the pleasure of the moment without. Without any other conditions. Because we often have all these conditions. Well, this can only be pleasurable. You know, I really can't have a pleasurable meal because I'm not making enough money in my life yet. Like, ouch.

Or I don't have the right partner or the right job.

So wouldn't it be fascinating to tick off all the conditions or as many as we can and accept, experiment with. Can you experience pleasure being just who you are right now? Okay, you don't necessarily have the salary you want, or you don't have the relationship you want yet, or you don't have the house you want yet, or you don't have. Fill in the blank. Fine, let's put that to the side and say, and I can experience pleasure. I don't have to wait. Indeed, I think the more we incorporate pleasure into our lives, the more powerful we tend to feel, the more filled up we get. Because pleasure is a food. Vitamin P is an essential nutrient. It nourishes us. It does something special, you know, and for any viewer listening to this, think of the people in your life that you would say, yeah, he. She loves to experience pleasure with food, with vacation, with all these like, yes, she really is connected to pleasure. He's connected to pleasure. Chances are they're happy people. They've got a good life, no matter what their salary, jobs, whatever is. They have a good life because they're letting an event happen in their system that is powerfully generative and regenerative and healing and transformational. So that's the other piece. Pleasure is a mystery. It does transform us, it does elevate us. I believe it can create a whole different physiologic experience in the body that we. Science hasn't even begin to understand yet. But we can sense it. When you have a peak pleasurable experience in nature or in a sexual connection, or in yoga, or in ecstatic dance or in some kind of ritual or listening to music. People have intense pleasurable experiences that are life changing for them. We could be doing that probably on a daily basis.

Yeah, totally. And I love it too, because you're inspiring us to do that. Because I think a lot of. Of us will have, you know, just there's work to get done and there's things to get done, you know, but there's no reason that we can't have a pleasurable experience when we sit down to eat for lunch like every day. That can be a source of pleasure. We don't need to rush through it, you know, and it's a. It's a choice that we, that we make.

Yes, such a good point. It's a choice and we have to remember to make that choice. And I think we often find, feel that pleasure is not a choice, that it's somehow this lottery that you win and you get lucky somehow. Or those people have it. The movie stars, the things people, they have pleasure. No, anyone can have it. Our dogs and our cats experience it consistently on a daily basis. They know how to do it. There's less clutter in the way for them. They're just like, ah, pleasure.

Oh my gosh, Totally. Our dog. She's hilarious. Jess, you were saying that yesterday. I just said she is so pleasurable. She'll just be like running around and she's just in pleasure and then she gets in the relaxation response when you're petting her. She is just like the demonstration of chill. We need to be doing more of that.

Yeah, animals can. Pets can really model for us that pleasure is a natural state. It's a natural state. It's not artificial, it's not synthetic, it's not something you discover. It's something we uncover, it's something we recover. It's something we expose and let out and release as opposed to. You have to Learn how to do this. We have to unlearn all the things that get in the way of it.

Yes, totally. I love that it's such a great natural state. It's not something that we need to learn. It's just who we are. And I love your science, too. Like biological. Like in our biology, we're wired for pleasure. And then it also. I love what you're saying, too, that not only are we wired for it, but it actually makes us healthier on a chemical level. That's, like, revolutionary.

Yeah. And it's absolutely dumbfounding when you really begin to look at body physiology and you see that there are body parts. There's parts of our sexual anatomy that are simply designed for pleasure and nothing else. Your skin sensors are designed to receive pleasure, plain and simple. Your taste buds are designed to receive pleasure. Orgasm is designed to keep doing itself, and there's no other purpose other than pleasure. And, yeah, we want to make it biological, sure. That's okay. We want to make it evolutionary. But we're more than just, you know, biological monkeys that come out of the earth. There's. There's a huge range of possibilities. Possibilities. I believe we're spiritual beings, so pleasure keeps evolving to the next level in us, and it teaches us so as we go into our sacred anatomy, the sacredness of pleasure in the body, the sacredness of nourishment, the sacredness of our desire. Different powers, different revelations unfold in us. And we do change brain chemistry, changes digestion can change, health, can change. Our outlook on life can change. There's all kinds of research showing that when infants are deprived pleasure, when they're deprived sensation, color, touch, their brains shrink, for God's sakes. Any organism. We've done that a million times with monkeys and chimps. Their brains shrink when they're young and you deny them pleasure. It literally shrinks their ability to think and lessens their iq, for goodness sake. Oh, my gosh, that's wild. So pleasure is actually doing. It's evolving us in ways that we don't even notice.

Yes. Vitamin P, baby.

That's right. All we got to do is put it in a little bottle and sell it and wow, we'll be rich.

That's awesome. We have it right in our bodies. You said it's right here and it's free. Any other thoughts on pleasure before we wrap up? Yeah.

Wow. Thoughts on pleasure. So many of them. Part of it is, I want to remind us that pleasure definitely loves slow. It loves when we create an atmosphere of slow for it because pleasure is very nuanced. Pleasure needs us to slow down, to feel it. One of the reasons we overeat and we binge eat. One of the reasons we are not satisfied in intimacy, in touch, in sexuality, because we're moving too fast. If you and I hadn't seen each other in a long time and we were best friends, and while we get together and we have a quick 30 second conversation, and while we're having a 30 second conversation, I'm thinking of something else, you're thinking of something else. And then we both walk away going, that wasn't pleasurable. I didn't get what I wanted. Now there's tons of pleasure potential between us because we're all good friends, but we didn't create the right conditions because for us to feel, feel the pleasure of our company, we need to create a container of time and slow and possibility. How are you doing what's happening in your life? Wow. You're doing this, I'm doing that. Wow. I'm so happy for you. So we need to breathe a little bit and slow down to feel those nuances of the taste of the moment. I need to, to hear your. Oh, I remember your voice. It's so soothing. Wow. I remember your smile. That feels so good to me. Visually, when we slow down, pleasure starts to sink in. So practice slowing down with food, with sexuality, with intimacy, with anything that you claim gives you pleasure. Make it a little slower. Notice what happens. I also want to recommend for viewers out there, take some time and do, I guess what we can call a pleasure inventory. So sit down with pen and paper, write down everything you could think of, Persons, places, things, thoughts, feelings, foods, substances, herbs, anything pets, flowers that gives you pleasure. A complete pleasure inventory again, everything persons, places, feelings, thoughts, things, foods. And just write down that list. Get a full inventory. I don't care if it's 50 pages so you can see everything on paper that gives you pleasure and then begin to notice anything on the list that you forgot about. Anything on this list that's easy to do. Some of the pleasures that we love are easy and we forget they're daily pleasures. Some of the pleasures granted, may, might be once or twice a year. You know, I love going to Bali or Hawaii. Okay, so that might be the vacation. Maybe I'll plan that. But notice on your inventory, what am I keeping up with here? What's doable, what do I want to invite back into the table? So that can sort of be our guide.

That's fantastic. I love that I have. I don't have my journal here, but I have a feel good sheet with, like colors and it's exactly that. I look at it and it's like being in the sunshine, drinking some green juice, you know, playing with my dog, cuddling like they're simple things, but we don't take the time to slow down to enjoy them.

Yeah.

And as you were just saying, then we'll wrap up. I know. It's interesting because I think our mind goes so fast and our body and senses is slow. Right. So we need to go slow in order to fully feel the senses. If we're rushing, we miss the sensations.

Yeah. Slow is sexy. Slow is sexy. We have been conditioned to believe that fast is sexy. Fast cars, fast women, fast food, you know, fast Internet, speed connection. Let's get stuff done. Let's do really fast. That's so sexy. Like, come on. Okay. Yeah, maybe here and there. A really fast hot sports car is sexy, but okay, done. Slow is sexy. Slow dancing can be sexy. Slow communication can be sexy. Any love scene from your favorite movie, chances are, has some slow in it. Any romantic scene, chances are, has some slow in it. When we slow down time. Oh, wow. We were together and time slowed down. That's sexy, right? Yeah.

Amen. Let's end with that. Slow is sexy.

Yeah. I love it.

Well, thank you so much. Can you please share where we learn more about how we can be slow and sexy?

All right.

And much more.

And much more. For those of you who are not familiar with my work, I have founded the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, which is a wonderful teaching organization. Our website is psychologyofeating.com that's all one word. And if you go to psychologyofeating.com you can really learn all about us, what we're up to, what we do. Our main activity is we have a professional training. We train people to be eating psychology coaches. And so much of that is how to nourish oneself, how to create a style of eating and of living that is indeed about pleasure. That is about trust. That is about empowerment and authenticity. So anyway, we train people to be eating psychology coaches. It's an amazing program. If you go to our website, you'll see right on the homepage or any of the pages, you can sign up for our free video guide. It's called the dynamic eating side Psychology breakthrough. So I go into a lot of the principles you've heard me talk about and principles that we actually use in the training where we train our professionals to help others around weight and binge eating and overeating. And body image and even health issues commonly associated with nutrition. You could always email us@infoychologyofeating.com that's how you can learn about us. I've got books out there. You can figure it out. We have all kinds of free information too on the website. We got a great blog so that's how you stay in touch with me, with us. Psychologyofeating.com get the free video guide. What else? Ms. Alexandra, I think that's awesome.

Yes. Check it out and his books are awesome. Just two, I love both of your books. So highly recommend those as well. So thank you so much for all of your wisdom and passion on pleasure and all of your research and really, really appreciate it. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Mama Goddess. Sending you lots of love and blessings. If you'd like to connect more, go to mamagoddess.com until next time. Keep rocking it and have an awesome day.