Transcript

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You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach, I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills on the insides and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis if you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started. Hey there, friends, welcome to episode 430 of better than before breast cancer. I'm your host. Laura Lummer, thrilled to be here with you today and thrilled to dig into this topic, because I think it's something that is really, really important. It's kind of like a little bit of prep work, because it's going to come out at the end of September. And if we can get into this mindset, I think it'll give us a little bit of cushion for dealing with October. And when I say dealing with October, we know that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and that lands very differently with different people, depending on where we are in this process and in this journey, and depending on the language that's used around us, and what we make that language mean, and where we feel powerless and where we feel powerful. So I want to start this episode off with a quote that has been one of my favorite quotes for many, many years. This is originally from the I Ching, and the I Ching is The Tibetan Book of change. Is known as The Tibetan Book of change, and the quote says that it is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any self deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events by which the path to success may be recognized. And why I love that quote is because we've got to be honest with ourselves if we want to create change of any kind, we've got to be honest with ourselves, because the first step to change is awareness. And if we're not willing to be aware of where our blocks are, where our opportunities are, where our issues are, if we're not aware of the choices we're making and the power we have over those choices, we'll never have the power to change them. So what brought this up, and what I really want to talk about, is there's a couple of things that I hear from clients and from friends, from family, just from people on a regular basis, but in my work with my clients, there are a couple of things that are just really common phrases, right? That there's never enough, whether it's time or money, I can't get it all in. And when it comes to their health, that it's this idea of it just happens to me, right? This is something that happens as you get older. This is something because I'm in perimenopause, this is just, I'll see what happens, or how I'm feeling. And it's like we step away from the power that we have, and we're almost waiting to see. What does life do to us? What's it going to bring what's it going to drop on us today, and wait and see what happens. So when I started thinking about this a lot early on as a coach, and I had to address it with myself, especially when it came to time, how do I have the time to live the life I want to live? Support my healing, create this business, work with these people, and that's when I created my course that's called, well, that's not when I created it, but over the evolution of my own journey here, I created a course called How to create a life you love in 168 hours a week. Because the work that I do here, that's really what it's all about. The work that I do here is creating a life and a body that you love, a life that you enjoy, a body you feel good in that you have power over that you're partnered with and that you're in love with. It's not about cancer, it is about wellness and joy and fulfillment. That is the work that I do. And so when I started listening to my clients talk about time, which is a huge objection that comes up when we talk about health, no, I would say number one, I don't have the time, or there's no time for that. Or how do I create the time for that? And the only way to do it is with a lot of intention. One of the things that I realized helped people make that connection is if we tied together time and money. So in my course, I give in that course 168 little monopoly dollars so that we can show our brain. This is it. There's 168 hours in a week. And we, I relate a lot to money and financial concepts. Because we relate to money and financial concepts, we tend to give attention to money in our. Lives, because money has a huge impact in our lives, but we look at time as if it just happens when we can switch that and be very intentional about it. It is a life changing step. It's a life changing mindset shift. So I like to think about attaching these non tangible things to tangibles. Now, the difference between time and money is that we can go into debt with money, right? We can save money, we can store it up, we can overspend money, we can end up being in debt, and we can create lots of different feelings for ourselves depending on what choices we make here. But when it comes to time, that's it.

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168 hours is what you get every week. No more, no less. You can't go into debt. You can't save it up. It's right now. That's it. When we start to realize that, and we start to understand the tools in our mind and the thoughts that we can use to use that treasured, wonderful time, and we use it with honor, and we use it with care, because it's so precious, things begin to change. So a lot recently, I would say, recently, over the last many, many months, I see this also, this type of an attitude towards our health, and when I say we and ours, I work mainly with women who have had a diagnosis of breast cancer. They may or may not be in an active cancering state right now, but they've had a diagnosis at some point. And once we've had a diagnosis, as you well know, it doesn't just go away, we don't just stop thinking about it. It's always on our mind. There's obvious times up to 10 years of medication, sometimes even more than that. And if we're living with cancer, as I am, and have been for the last five years, and we're in treatment forever, that is another thing that we have to just constantly be thinking about, right? It's not that it's ever just gone from our mind or gone from our life, but what I started to see, what I started to become really hyper aware of, was the powerless mindset about our health and a lot of fear, because when it comes to managing cancer or treating cancer, and our mindset is all on medicine, then that's a real power, powerless feeling right? Because it's like, if the medicine doesn't work, I'm screwed, right? And so a lot of the work I do, especially in metabolic health and metabolic health coaching, is understanding how our body works, and understanding all the power and opportunities that you have when it comes to creating a body that is healthy and optimized and well. So the other day I saw this video, and I thought, I just have to talk about this. It was a video of a demonstration where women were calling attention to the need for more research funding for metastatic breast cancer. And yes, that is very important research. I'm not talking about the protest, but what I noticed was one of the speakers made a statement, this isn't verbatim, but a statement that said something like this, is the reason we're dying because not enough money is going into research from metastatic breast cancer, and I couldn't help but notice and observe as I watched this video, and the cameras were spanning the crowd, that there are a lot of people in attendance there who appear to be, and I say appeared to be, because this is just a visual observation. I don't know any of these people. I haven't evaluated them, spoke to them, but appear to be very overweight. And this is not about shaming. This is not about judgment. Shame has no place in healing. That's not where I'm going with this conversation, but it is about truth. And as a health coach, as someone who's educated and trained in nutrition and exercise and behavior change sciences, I know fully well that extra weight impacts our body's ability to detoxify. It increases inflammation. It disrupts blood sugar regulation. It puts stress on our hormones, and so even if we have good medications, if we're not also supporting our metabolic health, then we're not doing everything we can to help those medicines work, to support the efficacy of those medications. And so here's the problem with just this discussion. When we try to talk about this, people often go right to shaming, and they think you're saying I'm bad because of my body, and that is not it at all. This is where I think like political correctness around language has gone so far that sometimes it makes it very challenging to. Just discuss the truth without judgment. And the truth is that no human being is worth more or less because of the shape of their body or because of their weight or because of their food preferences or because of their habits. This is not a conversation about human worthiness. It's a conversation about truth when it comes to supporting optimized health, and when we soften the edges so much that we tell half truths just so that we don't have to fear someone judging us, or we hide behind political correctness, we lose sight of the truth, and when we don't acknowledge the truth, we lose the ability to act on the opportunities. So here's the shift that I'm offering here, judgment keeps us stuck. Whatever we're judging we get stuck because then judgment is black and white and right and wrong. We're just in judgment, but curiosity moves us forward. Curiosity helps us to ask better questions. So if I say I don't exercise, maybe that's a fact, right? Maybe you've never exercised a day in your life for the last 15 years. That doesn't mean you're a bad or unworthy person. It is simply a fact. I do not exercise. If I say I like to eat a cookie every day. That does not mean I'm lazy or weak. It is just simply a statement of fact. It's just honest, ate a cookie every day if I like to eat huge portion sizes, because that's the way I was raised with this is an issue in my family that's not a character flaw, it's just a conditioning, something we we learn to do, and we keep doing it. It does not have any impact on your worth or value. Okay, when you tell yourself the truth, then we can get curious. This is where the beauty lies. This is when we can say, well, I take huge portion sizes of food. That's so interesting. I wonder why I do that. I never exercise. That's kind of interesting, huh? Maybe do I think exercise doesn't work for me. I just don't like to sweat. Do I think it's going to be too much effort. What are my questions about why I don't do that? Do I think cookies are the only way to get pleasure in the day? Is that the only thing that brings me joy, if I want to change this behavior, but I'm doing it all the time, I could say, I'm just lazy, or I'm just an addict, you know, I'm just a sugar addict. And we shut ourselves down with our own internal conversation. And if I get curious and say, do I do this just for pleasure? Do I have other what makes me feel as good as I feel when I eat this cookie? Is there some other way to get to get to this point, to get to this feeling? When we start to take that approach, curiosity opens the door to possibility. So I started thinking about this. How can I frame this in a different way? Because I have said a million times, we have a society which is quickly becoming more than just a country. Globally, we have a health crisis, and that is not because people don't know what good and healthy foods are. I mean, there's a multitude of issues around it, right? But one of those issues, I don't believe, is that people don't understand the right food to eat. Okay, that's not that's not the problem. The problem is everything else in our mind about why we make our choices and when we get curious and we start to look at them honestly, then we can open the door to potential, small steps toward change. So just like I like to equate money with time, I started thinking about how in my own life when I started a business and I decided, like, I want to design this life, I have a widespread stage for metastatic cancer diagnosis that opened my eyes to the fact that, holy crap, I could be dead any day. And then I decided, well, if I'm going to be dead any day, my days are going to be good. They're going to be what I want them to be. They're going to be filled with joy and fulfillment and people I love and adventures and knowledge and learning and all the things I love. And so I started looking at my life the way I looked at a business plan when I was in business, right the way that I would look at an annual plan for whatever department or stores I was running and the quarterly plan for that store, like, what? What do I want it to look like? How do I be super intentional about this? So one of the things that's used in business is called a SWOT analysis. And SWOT s, w, o, t stands for strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And I started thinking about, you know, if we apply a SWOT analysis to our health, maybe that helps us to get curious if. Life, we can stop ourselves from judging ourselves. So let's go through these one by one. Let's talk about strengths. So your strengths, these are the things that are working well for you right now. Maybe you are consistent with walking every morning. Maybe you have a supportive circle of friends. Maybe you found a meditation practice that calms your mind, maybe you're really good at hydrating yourself. These are assets, all the things you're already good at. These are your strengths, and you can lean on them and build from them. Weaknesses. This is the part that gets difficult. This is the part that we want to gloss over. But weaknesses don't mean you failed. They're just places where you need more support. Maybe you skip meals and end up reaching for something sweet, lots of sugar because you're too hungry. Maybe your sleep is inconsistent because you call yourself a night owl. Or maybe you're still carrying around beliefs that your body itself is holding you back, like this body is working against you. So when we see these weaknesses, we can name them honestly, without judgment, and then bring them out into the light. Remember the quote when a light comes on, right, when we see things without any self deception, we stop hiding from them, and then we can start shifting them. And we can also ask ourselves, and this is the next step, opportunities. This is where everything gets, I think, really exciting, because opportunities are the place where we can grow. So when we see weaknesses, then we know we have opportunities, and we can say, okay, cool, that's a chance for growth and change, you know, something that comes to my mind when I'm doing analytics on somebody, so let's say we did their lab work, or let's say we did their nutrition genome, or we even did a gut test analysis, and the test results come back and we see different markers that are Out of the optimal range. Recently, I got a gut test back on somebody, and gut diversity is something that's looked at, because that's very important for our microbiome and our gut health, and our gut diversity was 10 out of 100

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we can look at that and go, Oh my God, that's terrible. That's because I've done this and this, and now I only have the little gut diversity. No wonder I feel terrible all the time. We could do that, I don't think it's very helpful. Or we could look at and say, Holy cow, 10% gut diversity is awesome, because that means we've got 90% room for change, improvement, growth that it you're a 10% and you're already functioning, right? You're out there in the world functioning, but, you know, got some gut issues, not feeling great all the time. Imagine if we improve that by 10% more. Imagine if we improve that by 20% more. Holy cow, you could feel so good. What if we see something in the labs? We're like, oh, well, here your body is telling us that there are indications here that it can use some more support with B vitamins, or there's indications here that maybe you've got some leaky gut going on. What great news opportunities. There's opportunities for change, and if we grab those opportunities, then we make them into strengths, and we start to feel better if you don't feel well. And we start to do tests on you, and your labs are perfect, and your gut is perfect, and your snips are like, holy moly, this guy doesn't even have any variance. You're like, Wow, you are like, a superhero. Well, that's a little scary. If everything's perfect and you're not feeling good, I don't know where the opportunities are. I'm giving you a referral to somebody who's much more skilled than me. Okay, opportunities are exciting, so maybe you have never done strength training. Fantastic. Imagine how much you can help yourself and your bone health and your bone density and your energy levels. Imagine there's a support group that you've done this on your own, and you when we do stuff on our own, we're left to only our own ideas and life experiences. But maybe there's a support group out there, and you've heard people get help from it. That's an awesome opportunity to check it out and say, maybe this could help me. Or maybe it's just as simple as just the opportunity to say no to things that drain you to develop healthy boundaries so you can say yes to more rest and self care and joy. Opportunities are fabulous, but we won't have them if we're not honest with ourselves and we don't look at what our weaknesses are, and then we have our threats. These are the risks and the challenges that can undermine your health. What are some threats? Stress, toxic relationships, processed food temptations, right? Environmental exposures, but also our thoughts. Our thoughts can be threats to us because my thought of I can't do it. I've never achieved it. I don't know how that's going to be too hard. Those are threatening belief systems. And again, we're not judging them, we're just acknowledging and we're saying, Well, I tend to think this way, and if I think this way, that's going to be a block for me. Wow. What a great opportunity to work on your mindset. What a great opportunity to adopt different thoughts that shift the way you think, and now your thoughts become opportunities and strengths instead of threats or weaknesses, but we can't do that if we're not willing to be honest with ourselves. So I'll share with you my own personal story. I've shared this before on the podcast, but I was in great shape my whole life. I was never overweight, and I gained a lot of weight during pregnancies, but lost it by the six week checkup. Always exercise. Was very conscientious. I believed about my nutrition, but and I was conscientious within the lens that I saw nutrition through, or that I understood from a traditional health and fitness Western mentality, and this is a healthy way to live. Okay? So always in good shape, never overweight. Go to chemotherapy, immediately, chemically induced menopause, of course, steroids. And I didn't even know this at the time, this was 14 years ago, right? So the steroids, there's sugar that's in these different IVs, which is part of the whole delivery system, but whatever, all this stuff is in there, I'm gaining weight like I am at the National cupcake fest. I mean, it's insane how fast I started gaining weight. And it was shocking to me, because I thought I'm supposed to look like Gollum here, like this is chemotherapy. I'm supposed to be bald and gaunt and thin, and I was bald, but I was not thin, and I was gaining weight so fast I could not understand it. And then my treatment was over, and I struggled. I couldn't get the weight off. And so because now I was in menopause, and now I was on Tamoxifen, and I had been through all of the stress and all of these surgeries, and I, you know, a lot cancer, and cancer treatment is a lot to go through. And so I blamed it on the hormones and the steroids and the treatments and the menopause, and yes, those things played a role. But when I got a diagnosis, a second diagnosis, of widespread stage four cancer, I had to stop, and I had to take the blinders off and be very honest with myself, because it was a dire situation, and I had to decide what is really true here, because if I don't look at what's true here, and I'm listening and I'm trying to research and find out, what do people do to heal, what am I not doing? What opportunities do I have, if I'm not going to be honest with myself, then I'm going to miss those opportunities and I'm going to die. Right? So honesty was very important at the time, and I wanted to understand what I could do to support my healing. So to be honest with myself, and say, Well, you know what? Yeah, I do eat an overall healthy diet, but my husband and I like to go out to really nice restaurants. And at the time, again, this really wasn't part of my scope of awareness that restaurants are typically using seed oils, which are inflammatory, probably not all organic food. Even if it's a nice restaurant, doesn't mean it's all organic food. And so I started looking at all of these places in my life where I was doing things that were working against me. And so I had opportunities for improvement, a cocktail here and there dessert whenever I wanted it, and it wasn't like it was every day and all the time, and I was eating sugar constantly. But in my mind, I said, why the overall healthy lifestyle? And this is the mindset I was in already, and it doesn't matter what I do, because I don't lose weight anyway, so why not have a glass of wine? Why not have this cocktail? And so I had to look at those and say, okay, okay, these are opportunities. The people that I'm reading about who feel they don't do that. They're not drinking alcohol, they're not eating cheesecake or creme brulee, they're not going out to restaurants that cook with seed oils. They're not eating foods that have gluten in them. Okay, right? I have to look at these things and be honest with myself and say someone that I don't like, I don't want to give up some of them, I wish I didn't even have to think about changing. But these are opportunities other people are using, and it's working for them. So I did it. I saw that I could change how I ate. I could move differently. I. Right? Because I loved exercise, and I was exercising, but I was exercising in a way that was literally exhausting me and was very hard on my body. So I had to work on my mindset around the type of exercise and the frequency of intense exercise, so that would help my body reduce inflammation and feel calmer. Prioritizing sleep, you know, the whole FOMO, the binging on Netflix, whatever it was, a consistent sleep routine had to be prioritized. And when I made those shifts, it made a difference. I do believe 100%

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I believe that those changes supported my ability to heal. I do believe that even when my doctor said I wouldn't be here 12 months later, and here I am, five years later, and I know that these things supported the efficacy of the treatments that I underwent. I also did those treatments, which I'm super, very grateful for, but I also reconnected to my physical body in a very truthful way. Faced some painful truths, lost 75 pounds, watched my labs and learned how to optimize my health. I could not do that if I even listened to what was around me, because people around me were saying, Well, you know, so for me, I'm five foot 10, so at 75 pounds overweight, I could still carry it right? People say, Oh my gosh, you I mean, you're not as thin as you were when you're young. But you know, at that time, when I got my second diagnosis, I was what, 57 I think so, 5758 but now you're almost 60. So, you know, that's just what happens. So I had to be really, really believing and trusting in myself and not allowing myself to deceive myself and say, yeah, that right, I could do it sometimes, because it's not that bad, right, to be really honest with myself, because I wanted to live and so that's really, I think, why I wanted to present looking at ourselves through this s, w, o, T, the SWOT analysis, because I see so many people who have so many opportunities to support themselves, and either they don't want to acknowledge them, or they put all their power in something else that really brings up a lot of fear and anger and frustration, because it doesn't give them the result they want. You know, I had a client the other day, a woman who called me for a consult, and she was just so frustrated. She was so tired, she's got aching joints, she doesn't sleep well, and she was just so angry with her oncologist for not changing her meds or giving her something that makes her feel better. And so we always start with the low hanging fruit. And I said, Okay, well, let's, let's look at it. See if there's any opportunities that we have here that could support you, even though your doctor isn't doing what you want him to do. We can come back to that. But tell me about your hydration, right? Are you really good at keeping your body hydrated? Oh, no, absolutely not. Awesome. Fantastic opportunity right there. How easy. What an easy fix. That is, right? Tell me about your diet. Do you eat a lot of vegetables? Do you eat a lot of sugar? Do you have flour in your diet? Tell me about your diet. Oh, I have an insatiable sweet tooth, and I almost never eat vegetables. Fantastic. Holy cow, another huge opportunity. Or we can help you feel so much better, right? These little, tiny things, stress management. Tell me about your stress management. Tell me about how your your relaxation practices, and the space you hold for yourself and how you take care of yourself. Oh, never, I stress over everything. I worry over everything. Awesome. So much opportunity to support you, and it's all within your power, and it's all free. Isn't that exciting? So the whole purpose of this podcast and this show is we have so much power, so much power, so many tools available to us, but we must be honest with ourselves, and we must own those areas and not judge ourselves for them, but love ourselves through it. Be very gentle and say, you know, people say to me, Well, I had someone recently who said to me, I just I don't know what to do. I have this diagnosis, and I know I've abused my body my whole entire life. I'm so upset with myself. You know, I ate sugar my whole life. I drank sodas. My whole life. I drank alcohol. She went on and on. I said, but that's all in the past, and so what that means for us now is that we have so many opportunities to make healthy change, and that's really exciting. Okay, so we gotta leave judgment at the door. We gotta allow ourselves to be honest and then love ourselves and say, You know what you did the best you could, didn't we? I mean, I don't think anybody sets out to say, I'm gonna live this life just beat the heck out of myself and just destroy this body. No, no, no. Never think that, right? So what's happened has happened, and it's in the past, and we absolutely have the right to stand up for the best kind of medical care we think is available to us, and we absolutely can advocate for where we want our funds to go, or where we think more funding is necessary. But while we're doing that, we've got to step into our own power. Because if it's that important for us to say institutions, need to be standing up for us, we also need to be standing up for ourselves, even when it's challenging, all right, and with love, with love, with compassion, with gentleness and with joy. If you would like support in taking that honest look without shame, if you don't know how to do it like, how do I do it? Right? This is the kind of work we do inside the better than before breast cancer membership. We look at the whole picture of life and health, and how do we build a joyful, healthy, fulfilling life beyond these medical milestones, beyond the scans, beyond the blood work, what power do we have? Because we can't change what we don't acknowledge and remember. Truth is not judgment. Truth is freedom. When you see the truth, then you can see everything you have to address, and when you pair that truth with curiosity, whoa, do you see the power you really have to create a life you love and a body you feel at home in and that you trust? All right, my friend, so you can find all the details for the better than before, breast cancer, metabolic health and mindset coaching membership, I have several standalone programs, like creating a life you love in 168 hours a week, all kinds of great stuff on my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com so go check it out. Find something that works for you, and I would love to hear what you discover. So come and find me on Instagram and Facebook. Laura Lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach, and share with me we are inside. Send me a DM I'd love to hear, and I'll talk to you again next week.

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You've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. Your mind is clearer than before, your heart is full and wanting more. Your Future's at the door.

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Give it all you got no hesitating.