Episode Overview

Why does weight loss feel so hard after breast cancer treatment and menopause, even when you are doing everything right?

In this episode, we start with a simple example.

Think about Survivor.

Everyone loses weight.

Not because their bodies are healthier. Not because their hormones are balanced. But because they are in a true survival state with limited food and constant stress.

So if weight loss were only about calories, this would always work.

But real life is different.

After cancer treatment and menopause, the body often shifts into a protective state. Metabolism slows, stress signals stay elevated, and the systems that regulate energy are not functioning the same way they once did.

From a terrain perspective, this is not a failure. It is a response.

In this conversation, we walk through the deeper factors that influence weight after breast cancer:

How chronic stress impacts metabolism and fat storage
Why detoxification pathways matter more than most people realize
How circadian rhythm and sleep affect insulin sensitivity and energy regulation
What changes after menopause and why the body feels different

A study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology found that chronic stress is associated with elevated cortisol and increased abdominal fat storage.

A study published in Sleep found that circadian disruption impairs glucose metabolism and reduces insulin sensitivity.

And research in Nature Reviews Endocrinology shows that declining estrogen plays a significant role in changes in fat distribution and metabolic function.

This episode will help you stop asking what you are doing wrong and start understanding what your body is responding to.

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Read the full transcript:

0:00
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 and the insights 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, friends, welcome to another episode of Better than before breast cancer. I am your host, Laura Lummer, and we're going to be talking about something today that every woman, almost every woman, at some point, is concerned about, but especially, especially as we get older, we go through cancer treatment, we go through menopause, we are talking about weight management, and today, we're not only going to talk about weight management, but I'm going to break it down for you. I want to talk about calories in versus calories out, but I want to talk to you about other things that impact weight loss so that you can have some hope, that you can feel like you are empowered, and that there are many aspects of your health and your amazing complex body to look at, other than just calories in, calories out. So I want to share a story with you when, and I've shared this story on the podcast before. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011 I went in for my orientation for chemotherapy, and as the nurse walked me through and gave me this huge packet of everything that I could expect going through chemotherapy. She said to me, you can expect to gain anywhere from 25 pounds or more. And my jaw dropped. I was like, What? What are you talking about? Chemotherapy doesn't make people fat. Chemotherapy makes people emaciated, you walk around looking like Gollum. You're telling me I'm going to go through chemo, I'm going to be sick as a dog, I'm going to be bald, and I'm going to gain weight. This is unacceptable, and it's exactly what happened. I had a whole background, whole life, never been overweight, and I worked very hard to make that happen, to stay fit, to stay healthy, to eat well, because one vanity and I liked to be fit and muscular, two health, because I watched people around me gaining Weight, suffering from awful side effects of obesity, including type two diabetes, and that was something I never, ever wanted to go through. And three, I wanted a business in health and fitness, and I believed you should look fit to have a business in health and fitness. That's where my head was. So as I came for each chemotherapy infusion, and I stepped on that scale, I wanted to cry because I couldn't understand what was going on. How am I gaining weight when my throat is full of blisters, my mouth is full of blisters, so sore, my amazing husband at that time was we were not married yet, would make me mashed cheesy cauliflower, because it was about the only thing I could eat. How am I gaining so much weight? And so I resigned myself at one point, and I said, Okay, I am going to go through this just like when I would go through my pregnancies. I gained weight during a pregnancy, and as soon as it was over, I knew that I could count on my body, I could count on my program, I could count on my knowledge of health and fitness, and I could get back to the shape I felt comfortable in, and the weight and the fitness level that I felt comfortable in within weeks after a pregnancy, kind of made up my mind. That's what I'm going to do after chemotherapy, I'm going to do the best I can until it ends. When it ends, it'll be out of my system, just like my oncologist said, right, you're just gonna go back to normal. It's only temporary. They should never be allowed to say that. And so that's what I planned. I planned I'll wait. Chemotherapy will end. I will get back to normal, to my normal weight, my healthy weight, my way of feeling, the way that I look, the way I want to present myself to the world. And it happened about eight years later, and it was eight long years of frustration. And we're going to talk about a lot of reasons why, and when I get to what I think is the most important reason, I'm going to point it out to you. But I spent many years in a toxic relationship with my body because it didn't do what I wanted it to do, wasn't acting the way I wanted it to act. And we are in relationships with our body, and we've got to wrap our head around our role in that relationship, and especially. When it comes to weight management and our perception of ourself and our worth and our appearance, and all the things when it comes to weight management. So let's dig in. I am a very big fan of the show survivor. If you've never watched survivor, I can't believe it. It's on his 50th season right now. But if you've never watched survivor. Every season, a group of people are dropped into a remote place. It's been Fiji for a long time now, and they have either no food or rice, very, very little food. They compete in physical challenges. They build shelters. They have to swim, they have to run, they have to hike, and sometimes they get small portions of rice, or they live on coconuts or fish, and every now and then they get a reward meal. But I'll tell you what I notice at the end of every season, every single person who is still on that show has lost weight. It does not matter who they are. It does not matter if they're men or women. It doesn't matter the color of their skin. It does not matter the stage of their life, their age, the weight they were when they went in by the final episode, every single one of them is visibly leaner. So when people talk about weight loss, they will point to something like that and say, Okay, well, see, it's just calories. If you eat less, you lose weight. And technically, in the most basic sense of thermodynamics, they're not wrong. If someone eats very little for a long period of time, their body weight will go down. It's the basic laws of physics, and it applies to the human body. But here's the part that is very nuanced and needs to be discussed, the human body is not a calculator. It is not simply calories in, calories out. It is a living, breathing, constantly adapting system and your metabolism doesn't just respond to how much you eat. It responds to many signals in the body. It responds to signals like hormones, how much stress your nervous system is carrying, how well you're sleeping, how much inflammation and toxic load is inside of your body. So in an extreme situation, like being dropped off on an island, like Survivor, yeah, you can force weight loss, but that doesn't mean it reflects what is healthy. It doesn't mean that that's a sustainable metabolism. And for us in this community of women who've had a diagnosis of breast cancer after everything we've been through, we want a healthy metabolism, not a starvation metabolism. So let's talk about extreme calorie cutting for a minute. When researchers study extreme calorie cutting, here's what they find, that the body makes dramatic changes to protect itself, and one of the most famous studies on this is called the Minnesota starvation experiment. It happened during World War 236, healthy men volunteered to have their food dramatically reduced so scientists could understand the effects of starvation. Thank God. Clinical studies have changed since then, but the goal then was to help millions of people in Europe who had been starved during the war. And the results were pretty remarkable, because by the end of the restricted eating period, the men who participated their resting metabolic rate, which means how much energy a body burns just to keep it alive, had dropped by almost 40%

8:52
they experienced extreme hunger, extreme fatigue, depression and a preoccupation with food. Some of them even became binge eaters. Once the restriction ended, their bodies essentially hit the brakes on everything that was going on just to survive. And that's the key idea. Our bodies are incredible. Our bodies adapt, and they do whatever they need to do to keep you alive, they will work so hard to keep you alive. So when women tell me they cannot lose weight after cancer treatment and menopause, I'm not going to ask the question, how many calories are you eating? I want to start with a completely different question, a different way of exploring their experience, which begins with, what is your body responding to right now? Because your body is constantly doing something that we, most of the time, don't even think about. It's asking itself on a biological cell. Level, a level below that of conscious thought your body is saying, is this environment safe or threatening? And depending on the answer your body's responding. So when the body senses danger, it shifts into survival mode. And in survival mode, it conserves energy and it will hold on to fat reserves. Its hormones will shift. Metabolism becomes protective, and from the body's perspective, that makes complete sense, because if resources feel scarce or the environment feels threatening, protecting itself is the smart thing to do. So let's think about what a cancer diagnosis brings. The initial diagnosis, the shock of it, the fear of it, the uncertainty of it, the feeling of a complete loss of control over your own body, all of that registers a very real threat signal, and beyond just the emotional weight, the treatments, the chemotherapy, the radiation, the surgery, the medications, they all place a significant, significant physical stress on the body. They can trigger inflammation, and they put the body stress response system into high gear. And here's what research tells us, and I want, I want you to really hear this, because it may reframe, and I hope it does what you think about your body. Inflammatory signals and stress responses do not just automatically switch off when treatment ends. This brings me back to something, that if you listen to this podcast at all, I don't know how many times I've said it, over 450 some episodes, we do not go back to normal. Our bodies have been changed. They have been brought to the brink of death. They have been threatened by a life threatening disease that's not safe, friends, it's scary, and we feel that trauma at a cellular level. Research from Dr Julian Bauer at UCLA was published in many journals, but including the Journal of Clinical Oncology and psychosomatic medicine. And she followed breast cancer survivors for years after treatment and found that elevated inflammatory markers were still present in fatigued survivors an average of five years after their diagnosis, five years, not five weeks, not five months, five years. This is not the flu. This is not I sprained my ankle. This is not the type of illness or injury we're used to our whole lives. Which is it happened. I treated it. It got better. We move on. No, this is so much deeper and in roughly one in four survivors that fatigue that they feel the inflammation behind it can persist to 10 years and even longer, there was a Bauer 2011 Journal of Clinical Oncology study that measured women right at the end of their primary treatment, and found that more than 60% reported clinically significant problems with fatigue and sleep at that moment, with elevated inflammatory markers to match, and particularly in women who had gone through chemotherapy, because not all of us have to go through chemotherapy, but those markers in the chemotherapy treated group were comparable to levels seen in earlier studies of persistently fatigued survivors. So the picture that that paints by this whole body of research is one of inflammation that does not follow a calendar. It doesn't care that your last infusion was three months ago or six months ago. It means your body is still operating in a protective mode, in a survival mode, long, long after your treatment, or the half life of any medication, long after everyone around you expects you to feel normal again, and that experience of not feeling normal, it does have a biological explanation. It can look like fatigue, it can look like a slower metabolism, and it can look like resistance to weight loss, and this means that your body is just continuing to respond to different signals within it, and one of the biggest signals affecting your metabolism is stress. And as if a cancer diagnosis wasn't stressful enough, as if regular life isn't stressful enough, as if chemotherapy, radiation, surgery isn't stressful enough. Take it all, put it together in this big old ball of wax. We've got a lot of stress, and then thinking about, when am I going to get back to work? How much is this going to cost? Who's going to take care of these things that I'm too weak to do? You guys, it's so much stress, and we have to stop undervaluing the impact that. Stress has on our body, because when we experience stress, our body releases cortisol as part of its alarm system, and it's like this smoke detector. It's designed to help you handle short term threats and then settle back down once the threat is passed. But when stress stays turned on for weeks and months or years, which is very common during cancer treatment, that alarm starts to affect how your body manages energy in some pretty significant ways. So cortisol raises blood sugar levels. It plays a role in insulin signaling, and the research consistently shows a strong link between long term elevated cortisol and increased fat storage, particularly around the midsection. And this is also super interesting, abdominal fat tissue has more glucocorticoid receptors than fat stored somewhere else in the body, and that means it is literally more responsive to cortisol signals than the fat anywhere else in your body. Scientists have studied this relationship by measuring cortisol in hair samples, which hold months long records of hormone exposure. It's kind of like how tree rings hold a record of the growing seasons. So there was a study published in the journal obesity that looked at more than 2500 men and women, and it found that people with higher long term cortisol levels in their hair tended to weigh more, had larger waist measurements and were more likely to remain overweight over time. So I want to be really clear about what the science is actually saying here, because it is nuanced, and I don't want to be oversimplifying, this research shows that there's a strong and consistent association between chronic cortisol elevation and abdominal weight, so that means they tend to go together, and the biological reasons for that are very well understood, because cortisol promotes fat development in the abdominal area. It influences blood sugar and drives cravings for high calorie foods, and researchers are still mapping out exactly how much of this is a direct cause and effect relationship versus a cycle, because visceral fat itself can also stimulate a stress response system, which creates a loop. So the bottom line for our purposes here is that chronically elevated cortisol makes weight management significantly harder, and addressing the stress signals in your body is not optional. But here's the hopeful part, calming the nervous system can actually be a metabolic intervention. Time in nature, slow, intentional breathing, gentle movement, meaningful connection with people. You love these things. I know they sound so simple. So like, how is that going to be better than the boot camp where they make me a kale and broccoli and throw giant balls across the gym. But these things send real, measurable signals to your body's hormone system, and another important signal worth understanding is what's happening with the body's ability to clean itself out, which we call detoxification. Most of us think of fat tissue as nothing more than just stored calories, but it actually is very active. Fat tissue acts as a storage space for certain chemicals in the body as well, and it cannot always process and eliminate them right away. So every day, we're exposed to chemicals in our environment, pesticides in our food, chemicals in our plastic, pollutants in air and water. And when the body cannot immediately remove those compounds, it sometimes parks them into fat tissue for safe keeping. So scientists actually have a name for these kind of chemicals, and they're called obesogens. It's essentially a word that means chemicals that promote weight gain, and research has found that in certain environmental chemicals can act as what's called hormone disruptors, so they actually interfere with how fat cells develop, how the body stores energy, and how the signals that normally regulate weight actually work. And so I like to think of the liver as a whole house water filter. It's designed to clean out everything that goes through all the faucets. So as we're going through, say, chemotherapy, after months of chemotherapy, the liver and its detoxification pathways have really been working hard, super hard, and some research suggests that that toxic load can play a role in how the body manages fat tissue. Now it's still an area that of science that's developing, but it's something to pay attention to, because what we do know is that supporting the body's natural cleanse. Detoxification functions is a reasonable and well supported approach to recovery, regardless of whether your body's current fat storage is directly connected to toxic load. So you're not just doing that, you're not just supporting detoxification to lose weight. You're doing it because your body has been through a lot and it needs ongoing support so that it can feel safe. So when we talk about detoxification, and I hear people say it's too much that it can't eat anything, we can't go anywhere, we can't do anything. We have to learn to reframe that for ourselves and understand that doing what we can to reduce our toxic burden, is a nourishing and loving support that helps our body function better. I'm not asking you to be perfect. I'm not perfect. I mean, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see me. I wear makeup. I like shiny nails. I'm not don't live a toxic, free life, but for the things that I can change and I'm willing to change I do so it's important to think about that supporting your body's detoxification system has so many impacts. The cleansing pathways need to stay clean, because if the filter backs up, what happens? Everything else starts to taste gunky, because all the toxins get into it, right? So staying well hydrated helps eating lots of fiber, helps getting movement in and sweating every day helps. Also, you've got to remove the trigger so reducing ongoing exposures where you can choosing cleaner personal care products, washing produce, well, getting the fragrance out of laundry soap, and using those toxic, toxic little balls of things that people put in their laundry, take the things out that are not as important as, let's say, lipstick, maybe even then I'm clearly joking around, there are much less toxic makeups that we can use. We can reduce our toxic burden on so many levels in so many ways, eliminate it in some and reduce it in others. So the third major signal affecting weight after treatment is sleep and specifically your body's natural daily rhythm. Your body runs on a biological clock, your circadian rhythm, the hormones that control hunger, blood sugar, fat, burning, cellular repair, they all follow a daily pattern tied to light and darkness. It is a beautiful, elegant system in the human body we are tied to this earth and the cycles of the moon and the sun. And I don't care if you think that sounds hippie, because it's true, we've got to get back where we can to the simplicity, right, simple facts and universal laws of existing and being connected to this planet that we all evolved on. All right, so let me give you an example of what poor sleep actually does. There was a study published in the journal diabetes that found when healthy adults slept only five hours a night for just one week, their bodies became significantly less sensitive to insulin, and that is the hormone that manages blood sugar. So when insulin sensitivity goes down, the body often produces more insulin to compensate the higher the insulin levels signal the body to store more fat, and particularly around the middle. And I'm going to share another study with you, but I can completely remember, and I deal with women all the time going through this. You're going through chemotherapy. It messes up your sleep. I never had insomnia in my life until chemotherapy. And not only did I spend many, many, many nights awake as I went through six months of chemotherapy, but in addition to that, years after my sleeping pattern has never been the same since I went through chemotherapy. And that says something is significant, and it's important to pay attention to there was another study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and they found something that was really fascinating, and that was that people who were actually trying to lose weight, when they got enough sleep, more than half of what they lost was fat, but when those same people didn't get enough sleep, only about a quarter of what they lost was fat, and they lost more muscle tissue instead, right? Because weight we want to make sure is body fat and not muscle. So sleep doesn't just affect how tired you feel. It doesn't just affect your energy levels. It deeply affects how your body decides how to use and store energies. Bodies are incredibly complex and fascinating, and so for many women as. After treatment, they are put into chemically induced menopause. Many are already in menopause before treatment, but sleep becomes even harder because of hormonal shifts, hot flashes, anxiety and the lingering effects of treatment. So when the body's internal clock gets thrown off, it becomes one more signal to the metabolism that is pulling us in the direction we don't want to go. So supporting your sleep rhythm doesn't have to be complicated. Doesn't have to be perfect. We don't want to be so stressed about sleep that we can't sleep. We want to get natural light in the morning to reset your internal clock. So work on Waking up closer to when the sun comes up, keep a consistent bedtime, even on the weekends. Of course, there's going to be times where we go out and we deviate from that. But consistency doesn't mean perfection. It just means most of the time dim your screens and lights in the evening tells your brains time to wind down. It gives your permission to your brain to just like start to relax and try to finish dinner a little bit earlier that gives your body time to finish the work of digestion before it goes into sleep and starts the process of cleansing. So they're not just good habits to have. They are biological signals that you send, and every one of them that you can do adds up. So when someone tells me that they cannot lose weight after cancer treatment and menopause, I get it. I understand I was there. I lost a total of 75 pounds when I started changing the way that I treated myself and stopped fighting my body and allowed my body to lose weight and feel safe. So when I hear somebody say that, remember, we're going back to the better question, not what's wrong with your body, but what signals is your body responding to right is the nervous system still stuck in stress response months or years after treatment, so many times, I will be working with someone and and they tell me they cannot sleep. They have so much trouble sleeping. And we'll ask questions to see what's going on and what is the sleep hygiene and what is the sleep routine? And say, I do everything. I do all the things. I go to bed at the same time. I have a cool, dark room, right? I have all the things, but what's really going on is they are so scared. There's still a lot of stress in the mind. There's a lot of stress in the nervous system. And in fact, and I went through this as well, we can become afraid and stressed at the idea of going to sleep, because if you go through chemotherapy, or if menopause symptoms are really bad and it's been so disruptive to your sleep, so uncomfortable for you, we start to expect not to sleep. And that in itself, feels stressful, and it becomes this cognitive rewiring of the brain, and we tell ourselves I'm not going to sleep. And I know that may sound like what I believe I'm not going to sleep, but it's true. I've been there. I've worked with people who've been there, and they're actually sleep specialists. There are actually cognitive behavioral specialists that specialize in sleep, and the way that we think that prevents us from sleeping, some pretty powerful stuff. So Is that what's going on is the nervous system still on high alert. Is the body's cleansing system still catching up from everything it's been through? Is it trying to detoxify, clean itself, relax, feel safe, but we're pumping in with all kinds of supplements and all kinds of things, trying to force it to do something it's not ready to do. And we don't even know why we're putting supplements in, except that somebody told us they might be good, right? Remember the liver, that water filtration system, the liver is everything's got to go through it. So if it's still trying to clean up from all of the cancer treatment, and more than likely you're still on drugs for five to 10 years after that, and we're pumping a bunch of unnecessary things, and we live in a toxic environment, we have to stop and think about the relationship we're in with our body, and we have to stop and ask it, what does it need? We have to watch the labs to see his livers that sending us a signal saying, I need you to stop for a sec. I need some gentle support. I need a break. Give me a vacation, right? We have to think about what our body is responding to and does it feel safe enough to be willing to let go of this cushion that is telling it it's safe? Is it willing to let go of the fat so, yeah, extreme calorie cutting can force your body to lose weight, and it can put a tremendous amount of stress on a body that's already going through a lot of stress. It can trigger the same kind of metabolic slowdown as the men in the Minnesota starvation experiment. It can make the nervous system feel less safe, and for women who've been through cancer treatment, that approach often makes things much harder. I know it did for me. I know I did. To myself, and I'll tell you just a quick flashback to survivor. Survivor often had these reunion shows. So after the island people got home, they got cleaned up, they put on their makeup, and they came back for a reunion show to review what happened on the show. And everybody's a little fluffier, right? Their body said, Oh my god, let's put some weight back on here to feel healthy and not starved, and their bodies and their metabolism change. So what we need to do is not make things harder on ourselves. We need to work on making the relationship with our body healthier and better, not more stressful. We want to support the terrain of our body, the environment of all of the cells in our body. We want our to help our body regulate weight in a way that less that can have longevity, that is sustainable, that is healthy and feels good. And I'll tell you, sometimes the first signals of that aren't on a scale. We put way too much emphasis on the number on a scale. And if you stand on a conventional scale and you watch that needle going back and forth, you have no idea if you're losing body fat or you're losing muscle. So it's really important that if you're going to get a scale, you get a smart scale, or you go to a place that can tell you your body fat, so that you know if you're working towards body fat loss, that that's actually what you're losing, and you're not just stressing your body out and losing important, important metabolic tissue, which is muscle. So sometimes the real progress of starting to help that body feel safer might be better sleep before it's changing in the weight it might be more stable energy throughout the day, clearer thinking, less brain fog, better digestion, less heartburn. And when those things start to shift, your body's telling you the terrain is changing, and that's when you will often see the weight start to follow. And I told you that I would point out to you what was the important part. And this was it for me, when I one day realized I've been telling myself, just like we tell ourselves, oh my gosh, I'm gonna have a bad night's sleep, because I've had a bad night's sleep for so long. We can also say, start telling ourselves and start believing I can't lose weight. And I remember going to a doctor one time for some emotional release therapy, and we were talking about weight, because it was something that was really bothering me. And he asked me, Do you believe that you can lose weight? And I realized I did it like I believed that I had tried everything and that was impossible for me. And as he and I talked through that, work through that, I started to realizing, wow, wow. Of course, physiologically, any body can lose excess body fat, but how much was what I believed playing into daily choices I was making, and how much harder it was making my body to feel safe and be able to do what it needed to do, to clean itself up and for me to understand what it needed, to nourish itself, not to force itself. And so the biggest change for me was when I decided to stop fighting my body and to start asking my body, what do I need today? What do I need today to support optimal wellness? What do I need today to support my body's ability to heal?

33:24
So if you've been feeling frustrated with your weight after treatment, after menopause, I just want to offer all of this to you so you can have a different way of seeing what's happening in your body, and that your body may not be resisting you. It maybe thinks it's protecting you, and it may have been doing that for a very long time, for very good reasons. So the most powerful question I believe we can ask our body is not, how do I force it to lose weight, but how can I support my body so it feels safe enough to regulate itself? I think that question changes everything, because it helps you to move from working against your body to working with it. It helps you to move from fighting your body to genuinely caring for it, stop judging it. It isn't emotional, it's biological. And when the body feels safe, when it feels tended to, rather than pushed against, the entire hormonal Environment begins to change. So I want to leave you with three gentle practices, not a diet, not a calorie counting. I mean, there's lots of things we can go into with food, but I want to give you these three general things to do for yourself and see how this starts to change. First, it seems simple, but I promise you, this is important. Spend at least 10 minutes outside in natural morning light. This habit sends a powerful signal to your body clock, and it costs nothing. Completely free the second practice mindful eating. And that means, here are the steps, and maybe you just take them one at a time. Before your meal, you sit down. You do not eat unless you're sitting so no snacks on the run, no just grabbing something out of the bowl. You pass by, you commit to yourself. I will not put food in this body unless I am sitting down. And when you sit to take in food, you pause for a moment. You take a breath, you look at the food that's in front of you. You notice the colors, the smell, the texture, and as you eat, you slow down enough to actually taste it and pay attention to feel how your body responds to it, to notice, are you hungry? Are you satisfied? Are you eating because your body is asking for nourishment or because your nervous system is looking for comfort or satisfaction because you're bored. There's no wrong answer, and there's no judgment here. The practice of mindful eating is awareness, and when we bring that kind of attention to what we're putting in our bodies and how we relate to food, that can create a huge shift. And I know, again, this sounds simple, but I'll tell you, the first time I was told to practice mindful eating. I thought, What a silly What a silly exercise that is, until I paid attention and realized how many things I do when I'm eating. So we work on the relationship with our body by sharing a meal with it. And what I mean is we stop just shoving food at it, and we sit down and we have a meal with it. We start eating with our body, and we enjoy it. And we say, just think about sitting down having a meal with somebody. What do you say to them? How do you like that? Is that good? Are you enjoying that? Right? We're in a relationship with this body, so let's give it some love. Let's share a nice meal with it and pay attention. No phones at the table, right? Isn't that? What we tell the person that's sitting across from us, put your phone down. Put your phone down right. Think about it. When you're sitting with your body nourishing it, put your phone down and love on your body a little bit, all right? And the third, again, that one was free too. That's two free tips. The third one, end your day with a self love, meditation or affirmation, not a pep talk, not toxic positivity, something that's very honest. Place your hands on your heart or your belly or whatever feels right to you, and just say to your body, I see you. I see how hard you work to keep me alive, and I'm not going to fight you anymore. I am here to take care of you, right? You can say it out loud, you can think it in your mind. You can whisper it, but I want you to really mean it, because the science of stress and safety tells us that the body listens and when the nervous system registers that the threat is over and that you've stopped treating your own body as an enemy, it starts to soften and slide out of survival mode. And that is not wishful thinking, and it is not woo woo. It is the biology of how safety works at a cellular level, small signals, free practices that they take intention and they have powerful impact. All right, my friends, I also have a free download that is called How to Eat without fear and guilt after breast cancer. I highly suggest you check it out on my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com, forward slash eat. And if you want to really dig into that relationship with your amazing body, I think of it like doing some intense counseling with the body. We can do some metabolic health coaching. So go to my website, go to coaching and programs, check out my metabolic health coaching offerings, and learn about what your body really needs so you can give it even more love and improve the relationship with this wonderful partner in your life. All right, friends, I will talk to you again next week, and until then, be good to yourself and expect other people to be good to you as well. Take care

39:16
you've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. Else to rest. Your mind is clearer than before. Your heart is full and wanting more. Your Future's at the door. Give it all you got no hesitating. You've been waiting all your life. Waiting all your night.