How To Read Your Cravings with Alex Jamieson

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show where I talk nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle with some of the coolest people in the world. Plus I give you tips that you can put into fast action to uplevel your health so that you can go out there and live that big life you're meant to live. Now, today's show is all about something I get asked about all the time and that's cravings. In fact, I'm going to answer a listener's question at the end of the show that's all about cravings. So be sure to tune in for that. Stay tuned for that. But I have the Cravings Whisperer with me today. You are going to absolutely love the information that she's going to share because she has a completely different approach on cravings. We're taught to fight our cravings, to use willpower. You know, willpower is just a complete myth. Her book, her courses, her podcast and blog guide readers to embrace their cravings as their allies to make peace with food and reclaim their body. In fact, her book Women, Food and Desire. Honor your cravings, embrace your desire, Reclaim your body was number one on Amazon on several lists. Hit was one of 12 books to help you through a tough divorce on bustle.com and chosen by goop.com as the top nonfiction winter book. Plus she has a podcast called the Crave Cast how cute is that? Which debuted number one on iTunes and Alternative Health. She's been all over the media, Oprah, The Today Show, Dr. Oz, Martha Stewart Living, CNN, Fox News, USA Today and People. And she travels around the globe teaching, doing keynote speeches and also continues to write. That's one of her books. She has multiple books but she was best known for over a decade ago and where she really got her start in all this was she was the co star and co creator of Super Size Me with Morgan Spurlock, that Oscar nominated documentary that shook up everybody. I still remember watching that with my kids way back when. And the next thing I remember about all that is I got a Chance to meet Alex a couple years later, and it was when she was in her staunch vegan days. And part of you remember that movie, she was a vegan. And after Morgan got supersized up, she helped him get back down through her vegan lifestyle. But when I met her, just about a year after I met her, she decided to come out and start eating animal protein again. And, boy, that took some courage on her part because she really wrestled with it and her community, the vegans were angry. It took a lot of courage for her to come out and talk about food and desire and what she was really hungry for and what she wanted to do. And she has shared that through her blog and through her podcast. And it's such an important message. So I am super excited to have Alex with us today. So let's do it. Alex Jamison, welcome to the show. I am so happy to have you here with me today.

Hey, jj. So good to be here.

All right, let's dive in. And you know, when we talked about doing this, you called it the positive psychology of dieting. And I'm like, all right, what? What's that mean, Alex?

Well, listen, psychology, just as nutrition has gone under, a huge transformation in the last few years. Like, people are kind of always coming to both of us and saying, oh, nutrition science keeps changing. I can't keep up. Right. Well, luckily that's happened because we have learned so much about what nutrition really means. Hopefully we're not counting calories anymore. We're focusing on nutrients. Well, the same thing has happened psychology and I have been diving deep into a new framework, positive psychology, which is the focus on what's right with you, what are your strengths, rather than the old framework of what's wrong with you. Let's fix you. And this is such a powerful way for all of us to help reframe our relationship with our bodies, our relationship with food, so we can take away the judgment and just get clear about what we need.

I love that because we are so judgy, judgy on ourselves. Oh, my gosh. Like the world's not hard enough, and then we have to, like, just beat the crap out of ourselves because we ate the extra cookie, right? So in using this now, are you, like, focusing on a specific diet or is this just stored eating, or is this just kind of an umbrella over everything?

The beautiful thing about positive psychology is that it works no matter what diet, exercise, routine you are doing. You can be a plant based yogi or a paleo crossfit dud, and positive psychology will Help you to maintain your motivation, to get deeper into the mental part of your practice. And like so many of us have tried different diets or we've tried to get remotivated or reconnected or back on the bandwagon and something about our thought processes gets in the way. Right. We beat ourselves up, like you said, or we have negative habits of thought that make it really hard for us to feel inspired and hopeful again. And this framework of positive psychology is the best scientific backed way to reset your mindset.

Ooh, I love that. Now, how did you, like, how did you figure this out? How'd you land on it?

So, you know, a few years ago, well, I went through my own journey, as you know, in the last five years.

Very courageous woman you are.

So I was vegan for over a decade. It worked really well for me in my mid-20s and then come to my mid-30s when I'm single, parenting a little boy, restarting my business. My body started to fall apart. And as many of you know, it's really hard to change how we eat when we define ourselves by how we eat. Right. We're worried about the judgment that comes with the food on our plate.

I mean, you'd built an entire community, community around this.

So, yeah, my whole world was vegan food and vegan living. Vegan living for dummies. That was me.

Yeah, I know. This is why this was so courageous. I still remember the text from you. Oh, my gosh.

Oh, my gosh. When I, when I had my first burger, I texted JJ and she was the most excited person about it. But as I went through this struggle to heal my body again in my mid-30s, to heal my crashing hormones, to bump up my numbers, I was severely, severely anemic. I realized that the mindset of food was as important as the nutrition, the biochemistry of food, because there was so much judgment from my vegan community about what was going on with my body and what I needed now with food. I needed to include meat back in my diet, but it was the mental process, it was the psychology of eating. It was the psychology of diet that was so, so hard to overcome. Right. When I had my first burger, I felt so good physically, but emotionally I was a wreck. And as I explored this more for myself and my clients, okay, how can I, how can I help us take the shame and the blame away? How can I help us get motivated and feel inspired and be easier on ourselves? I also have a little boy who come age 6, he was diagnosed with severe dyslexia and ADD and he was coming home from school crying, thinking that he was stupid because he didn't understand and couldn't finish his writing work in class and all. And I thought, I know he's not stupid. I know we're going to figure that out. But it's the mindset of how can you believe in yourself and get back to work, get back up on the horse, be resilient, right? So I was doing it for me and myself. So I went back to school in all my spare time and went back to become a positive psychology practitioner. And that has been infusing the work I do in health ever since.

I know. And you can totally see it in everything you do. Great. Just even the way that you look at cravings, which is 180 degrees from how people look at them. And I know you've really taken this on. We call you the cravings Whisperer and you have your crave cast. But you know, talk about that. Because it is so different than what we've been taught to think, oh my gosh, you're craving something and use your willpower and put it down and you're bad. And you know, what's your take on cravings?

Yeah, so I believe. And believe me, it took me a while to figure this out. I just thought my cravings for meat were bad. Like, oh, I'm a bad person for needing it. I'm weak willed. Why can't I figure out the answer? Just like I thought my cravings for sugar just mean I'm a sorry sack of poop. Why can't I just be good? Why can't I be better and stronger than this? And when I got into positive psychology again for myself and for my son, I began to look at cravings in a different way. That these are messages that any craving you have for anything, it could be a craving, a desire, a whim, but especially for food. It's a request from your body for balance in some way, right? Your body needs something, and that may be a result of nutritional imbalance, bacterial imbalance, or two of the other root causes. So your body is telling you you need something, something has triggered you. We don't yet understand the language of those cravings. So that's what I've been doing for the last three years, decoding what these cravings mean so that we can get our bodies what we really need and not just rely on the sugar, the alcohol, the gluten, the dairy, the caffeine that are so yummy. But those aren't the only an. And they don't really fulfill all the needs.

So actually cravings are like an email to your body. You should listen to them. They're trying to tell you something.

Yes, I call cravings your soul's to do. List this. It's a request for some kind of balance. And once you start looking at it again non judgmentally, like positive psychology so beautifully teaches us, if you can do it without beating the crap out of yourself, then you start to see, oh, there's truth, there's wisdom here, there's a way forward.

Okay, so let's dive into weight loss. And so much of my audience is interested in that topic and so much of the country and world is. What are some tools here? Do you have three top positive psychology tools you can use here?

Absolutely. My first one is strengths. Discovering what your strengths are. Again, this is the major difference between positive psychology and old school psychology. When you discover your strengths. And there's many different platforms online where you can go discover this by answering a bunch of questions. When you discover your strengths, you realize, oh, like I'm pretty cool. Like I have resources. Did you know that love of learning is a strength? Gratitude is a strength. Bravery, creativity, humor, these are all strengths that are documented, analyzed, proven to be tools that we have that help us not just survive, but thrive in our lives. And when you get really clear about those, it is, it's like life changing. When I realized that love of learning, which is one of always one of my top three strengths, that it was a valuable thing, I always was beating myself up mentally, that I was just easily distracted. So like, oh my gosh, I just want to go read or I want to go do this thing. I'm like, why can't I just like be into this one thing? Why can't I just have one thing? Jj, you are so into this too. But love of learning, it's a strength. It keeps us curious, it keeps us hungry for knowledge and looking for solutions. So when you discover your strengths, it gives you hope, it helps you feel confident in yourself. So that's one of my top positive psychology tools. Now another one is resilience and grit. And I have to roll those two into one. So this is the last one. I'll talk about resilience and grit. This is like one of the biggest hot topics in American education, especially that we are failing our kids in school, not teaching them how to be able to stick to a project or believe that they can endure through challenges. And one of my favorite quotes about grit, to help you understand what it is like resilience is being able to pick yourself back up, lift your head. Okay, get ready. Get back in the game. Grit is this idea believing that you're going to be okay, and if you're not okay yet, it's not over yet. Like, that is powerful. And that is so true for anyone who has dieted over and over again, anyone who has tried weight loss programs that failed them. Right. And I truly believe most diet plans and weight loss programs fail us because they don't address this emotional and psychological aspect of food and eating. Right.

I know. It's just crazy, isn't it?

Yeah. So being able to draw in these positive psychology tools into whatever weight loss program you're currently in is going to help you be so much more successful.

Okay, so how does someone get started doing that then? Like this. This sounds great. Of course, now I want to go find out my strengths, and I want to know your strengths. It's like when we do the color code personality test in the Colby. We always want to know in the love languages. But. But someone listening right now goes, all right, okay, this is the missing. Because what I hear, Alex, is like, this is the missing piece. Right. So we have the missing piece. So someone hears this. Now what do they do? Like, how do they put this into practice? How do they use these tools on their own? How do they get more help?

Okay, great. Well, there's. I mean, there are so many books and programs out there now. You could go back to school, like, okay, no, no.

Okay, so, Alex, Alex, Alex, how do we simply tell someone, like, direct them in one place? What's the shortcut to this one?

The shortcut really, is to hang out with me and JJ online. Honestly, I talk about these topics all the time on my podcast and on my blog and my programs. I have been building positive psychology into this idea. How do you lose weight? How do you get comfortable with food? How do you love your body? Again, not just using food and nutrition, because that. That needs to be part of the program, but changing your mindset. Now, there's one tool that you can look at that's really, really useful, and that's learning the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. Okay, so fixed mindset thinks, I can never change. If I don't know how to do it now, I'm never going to know how to do it. Growth mindset says, I can figure anything out. So you'll start to notice your thoughts if you have a fixed mindset about something. So fixed mindset says, I don't know how to do long division. Growth mindset says, I don't know how to do long division yet. Right. Fixed mindset says, ugh, plan A didn't work. Plan B didn't work. Growth mindset says, good thing there's more than 20 more letters in the Alphabet. Who can I ask that can help me with this? So start listening to paying attention to your thoughts. Are you in a fixed mindset or a growth mindset? And just knowing the difference between the two is enough to help you get onto the growth path.

And you know what I think about the people we hang out with because we have our community and we are growth minded people. And that's the other piece I'd say to that is you become the people you hang out with. So hang out with growth minded people because you can't help but start to think that way, which is so key. Now I know you have I love this one. I love your cravings quiz. I love, I love, I love your cravings quiz. And I think that'd be a great place for people to start. Obviously, dial into the crave cast. It's an amazing, amazing podcast on itunes, but I think everybody should jump in and tell and take the cravings quiz. So what will they find out, Alex, when they do that?

Great. So the cravings quiz and you can go to cravingsquiz.com, it takes about five minutes. You're going to answer some questions and it's going to help you begin to reframe your perspective on your cravings. You're going to discover that actually what your body is asking for is a request for balance. And it will give you one of three cravings types. You're either a featherweight, an earth mama, or a firebrand. Now, these are based on traditional Ayurvedic medicine, 5000-year-old medicine from India. So I did not create this. This is 5,000 years old. But this way of choosing your food can help you go from lightheaded and airy and unfocused to grounded, calm and warm in your life. So this cravings quiz really gives you great new perspective and information right away.

Awesome. Everyone go take the quiz. So, Alex, I knew this would be awesome information for the audience. I just love having you here and I want to remind you. Everyone again, cravingsquiz.com and tune into the Crave cast. Now, after the break, I'm going to be answering a listener's question, so stay with me.

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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question. And today's question is so perfect. Okay. It comes from Leah, and Leah says, my question is, how do you deal with cravings with little time to make a healthy snack? Okay. So I just couldn't resist answering this question with everything we've just gone through with Alex. But I'm going to take it a little different approach. And the first thing that I say there is, is it a craving or are you really hungry? I teach people to go four to six hours between meals. And when you eat by the plate, which is clean, lean protein, things like grass fed beef and wild fish and pastured chicken and healthy fats. And don't be afraid of fat. Fat is so satiating. It helps keep you fuller, longer. So those would be things like coconut oil and avocados and raw cacao and then some slow, low carbs and that's things like lentils or wild rice or squash or berries and then loads of non starchy vegetables. When you eat that way, that balance of the protein, fat and fiber, it acts like a trifecta to keep you fuller longer. And so you shouldn't be hungry between meals. Now, if you have a craving, go back to what Alex was just teaching about. Craving is not hunger. But if you're hungry, I teach people to always carry something with them because there are those times that you eat breakfast and maybe, maybe lunch is getting pushed a little late or you have an early lunch, you're gonna have a later dinner and you need something. So I always keep around, I'll be honest, I keep my bars around my JJ virgin bars. And I'm particularly hooked to the chocolate mint all in one protein bar. So I keep that around with me most of the time. Actually, all of the time, I have them stashed everywhere in my car, in my suitcase, in my purse. Because usually when people find out I have them, they want them too. But you know, it could also be a baggie of nuts. That's another easy one. It could be some grass fed beef jerky. I love Paleo Valley Paleo sticks. Those are awesome. From my buddy Autumn Smith. So those are some different ideas for you, but I think the real takeaway is number one, Are you really hungry? Maybe you're just thirsty. Try a glass of water because so often that's the case. And if it's a craving, not hunger, let's go back and do some work on those cravings and dive deep into Alex's work because she is just the master of that. All right now if you'd like to submit a question, just go to jjvirgin.com and you can leave a voicemail for me. I love hearing from you. And one more way, I'd love to hear from you. I'd hugely appreciate it if you could jump on Stitcher or itunes and leave a review for me. It helps a bunch and be sure to subscribe and share the show with your friends. This is JJ Virgin signing off and reminding you that you are worthy Dare to Live a life that matters.

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