EP231: Welcome to 2024!

[00:00:00] Speaker A: You are listening to episode number 231 of the reversing diabetes with Delane MD podcast. [00:00:07] Speaker B: Welcome to reversing diabetes with Delane MD, where women who are confused and worried about their type two diabetes come to learn strategies to fix it. I'm your host, Dr. Delane Vaughn. Ladies, if you know you are capable of doing badass things at work and for your family, but you're frustrated with why you can't seem to stop eating the chocolate cake, this podcast is for you. Let's talk. [00:00:30] Speaker A: Hey there. Welcome to the podcast, and welcome to 2024. Thank you for joining me today, and thank you for committing to your health. Today we are going to talk about gratitude. We're going to talk about all the thank yous. We're going to talk about what we're ready to leave behind in 2023. Also, those two things are what we are going to really focus on. This is one of my favorite things to think about as the new year approaches. Like, what am I ready to leave in the year that I'm walking away from? What? Have I done enough in my life that I'm like, I can walk away from this and not need to do it anymore? I love that mindset. I love that mentality. I love that question. So we're going to talk about all of those things today, but before we get started, a couple of reminders and some housekeeping items. So, medications. If you are medicated for your type two diabetes, you have been medicated because of the way that you have eaten in the past. If you change the way you eat, your medications are going to need to be changed as well. And if they aren't changed, you can get quite sick. And so I need you, if you intend to make the changes that I talk about in the podcast in these episodes, I need you to call your provider who gave you your diabetes medications and let them know that you're going to be making some dietary changes and that you need to know how they want you to give them your blood sugar logs so that, you know, do you need to fax them? Do you need to email them? What do you need to do? Do you need to call their nurse? How do they want to hear about your blood sugars and how you can expect to hear information about how they want you to change your medications. If you do not do this, you can end up quite sick, the kind of sick that results in death. And nobody wants that. So make sure that you make that phone call to your primary carer, whoever's giving you the medications for your type two diabetes. And let them know what you plan to do and get that line of communication open with them so you can know how to send them your logs and how to expect to receive information about changing your medications back from them. So I also want I have help for you. I have worked on this and I've talked about it. I don't know that I've talked about it too much in the podcast, but I'm going to be talking about it a lot more in the podcast. There is a 14 days to better blood sugar guide that I have developed and you can download it for free. So this is help for your type two diabetes. If you have maybe had the thought like nothing I do seems to make my blood sugars better. If you don't know what to do to make your blood sugars better, if you feel like you've made some improvement but can't get all the way there, whatever it is, this guide is meant to be incredibly helpful for you. It's meant to show you that in 14 days you can see better blood sugars. That guide can be found at this is the website. Httpsite site delanemd.com betterbloodsugars that's the website. I'm going to say it again httpsite delanemd.com betterbloodsugars that will get you to that guide. You'll put in your email address. That's going to get you put onto my email list so you can get all the updates about things that are going on, offers that I'm making, webinars. If I do the five day free challenge, all of those things are going to be posted. They're going to be relayed to you in that email. But then once you put your email address in, it just pops up the link for that 14 day guide. Super powerful guide. Again, if you are on medications, before you implement this guide, I need you to call your primary care or your doctor that's monitoring your blood sugars. Because this is a powerful guide, you will see improvement in your blood sugars. And for those rare folks that don't, I really need you to reach out to me and let me know. You can email me at [email protected] you can email me all the time, anytime. Not just about that blood sugar guide and that log and your blood sugars and what they're doing, but also any other questions that might even come up here. Send me an email. I'm happy to answer them. In addition to being on my email list, you can also find me at delanemd on Instagram and Facebook, and the information about upcoming offers, upcoming things that I'll be doing, helpful webinars, those sorts of things. All of that will be also shared on the social media accounts so you can find them there. Lastly, I have a favor to ask. I'm drinking tea. I don't know if I'm not affiliated with the Republic of tea, but they make some really tasty teas. And so I've gotten some new teas to get me through the cold winter months, and I'm digging on some of that right now. So if you hear me drinking, I'm so sorry. I'll try not to do too much of that. Lastly, I do have an ask a favor to ask of you if you could like and rate this podcast on your podcast player. So usually there's a place you can put a thumbs up, a star, whatever it might be. You can put a review on there if you are getting help from this podcast, please, if you could like and rate this podcast. The more ratings and the more reviews that this podcast gets, the more the podcast player algorithms. Put this podcast in front to other people. Put it out there for other people. Okay? Also share it on your social media accounts. Share it with your friends. Tell your friends about it. Remember, insulin resistance affects 93% of americans. And the strategies that I teach in this podcast, in these episodes, improves insulin resistance. It fixes insulin resistance. Nine out of ten americans are in this boat are affected by insulin resistance. So they need to hear, like, help me, help them be part of the movement of getting the word out there that we do not need to be sick, that we do not need to live our lives tied to the american health care system, that we can live naturally healthy lives. People need to hear this, be part of that. Help me get that word out and some of the ways that you can help. Share it with people. Tell people about it. Rate and review the podcast. If you've already done that, I want to say thanks. All right, so today we're going to talk about gratitude. We're going to talk about what we're ready to leave behind for 20 as we start 2024. What we're ready to leave in 2023. We're going to talk about gratitude for 2023. We're going to talk about the opportunity for gratitude in 2024 and gratitude practices. So there is, of course, tons of amazing evidence in the medical literature about gratitude and its positive impact. Martin Seligberg is one of the big researchers on gratitude and positive psychology, but not know, giving ourselves affirmations and feel good affirmations. But positive psychology is actually a little different than that. And then there's a number of other really amazing researchers that are doing work on gratitude. And what we're realizing is that it has an incredible gratitude practice has an incredible impact on your health, not just on life being a little nicer, but it actually has an incredible impact on your health. There was a study done where they took two participant groups. So two groups of participants, one focused on gratitude throughout the day, and one kind of focused on the irritation. And they did that in a number of different ways. They asked questions about what you're thankful for, what happened work, what happened that you liked, what worked for you, and then what was really getting in your way, what was really annoying, what was irritating you today. Right? Like, there are two groups that were focusing on two different parts of their life, and what, of course, the research shows, and somehow it doesn't seem like this should be rocket science, this should even need research. But people are so resistant to gratitude practices that we actually do have to do research on this. What these studies showed is that the gratitude group had a generally happier outlook on life, but they also had less doctors visits, which is huge. That's the impact. You can actually just feel better, be healthier, need to see the doctor, lust just by being grateful for what you have in your life. Other studies have shown that when people actively are expressing gratitude towards others in their life, of course they have increased scores. And this, again, this is like writing letters of gratitude to people in their life when they do that. This increased scores on happiness measures and happiness surveys. So these aren't causative studies, though, right? They're not like, do a journal practice for gratitude and you will be happier. Do a journal practice of gratitude and you will see your doctor less. They're not positive studies, but there's clearly a correlation between actively focusing on gratitude and the reporting of happiness and well being. Okay, so what gratitude practices do is they change a focus in your brain. This change of focus that's developed when you're using these gratitude practices, when you're doing a gratitude practice, they help to rewire neural pathways in your brain. Gratitude practice. Having a well defined gratitude practice is important for rewiring those pathways. So a neural pathway is basically a connection of neurons in our brain that has led to a thought, a feeling, or an action. In fact, neural pathways do all of the things that your brain do, like all of the things that your brain directs into your body, like take a deep breath, neural pathway, heartbeat, neural pathway, make urine. Neural pathway. All of those things that our brain directs in our body is done by a neural pathway. Period, end of sentence. But this includes the way we think, the way we feel, the things we do, the actions we take, all of those come from a neural pathway. So when we have these repeated thoughts, feelings, actions, these repeated running of neural pathways, the neural pathways actually connect stronger to one another. Kind of like practice makes perfect, right? Repeatedly thinking something, feeling something, or acting in a certain way becomes easier the more we do it. This is where they become a habit. They become habitual. The more we do an action or a behavior, the more we think about the action or imagine the action or plan the action or behavior. The more we review the behavior in our brain, the easier, and the more habitual that behavior becomes. The things that we focus our thoughts on are the things that we are going to, of course, think about. And the more that we do it, the easier it is for our brain to choose and to turn those thoughts on. They become habitual. The more frequently we have feelings. Happy, sad, motivated, angry, whatever the feeling is, the more we have that feeling, the easier it is for our brain to choose those feelings out of all of the other feelings in the world. Right? Like, a kid could laugh out loud on an airplane, and you could laugh because it's kind of funny. And laughter can be contagious, or you could be irritated. Sometimes that is very dependent on what you have been practicing feeling what you have been feeling. Okay, so today I want to talk about the rewiring of your brain intentionally to something that actually leads to health. But I want to show or talk about how the neural pathway and this habit development plays out in our health. Okay? So if you believe that eating healthy is hard, it's usually because you practice thinking that eating healthy is hard, and you practiced it for a long time. This is actually what makes the experience of getting healthy feel very challenging and what makes most of us very resistant to doing it. Learning to intentionally rewire those neural pathways is a powerful tool to learning to be healthy long term. But the more we've thought it's hard, the more we're going to have to practice intentionally thinking something else. Yes, it is absolutely important and possible to stop desiring chocolate, right? To stop having the whirlwind take over. The whirlwind of desire take over that leads us to chocolate. It's totally possible to stop that. And coaching entirely will help you rewire that part of your brain. The thoughts that lead to the feeling of desire. That's absolutely possible. But learning to focus on gratitude, it has benefits that go well beyond not desiring chocolate. So I talk with my clients a lot about how to, what do we do? What are some strategies that we can implement a gratitude practice with? So at the beginning of each day or at the end of each day, the gratitude practice that I recommend at the beginning of each day or the end of each day, that you list out three things that you're grateful for. You can even do this both at the beginning of the end, and I almost think that that's even more powerful. And that makes sense, right? Like, we're getting a double dose of it, so it makes a lot of sense. But sometimes I think it's powerful to see what you are grateful for in the beginning of the day and then at the end of the day. After. We've had all the experiences of the day, we've had all the feelings of the day, we've had all the challenges of the day, we've had all the rewards of the day, like, whatever. We've had little wins at during the day, at the end of the day, I almost think it's almost more powerful or just more intense gratitude that you can experience at the end of the day. Doing it both beginning of the day and the end of the day, I think, of course, exponentially intensifies that. But I always recommend doing three things. Only looking at three things that you're grateful for. These could be three things that happened during the day that had a positive impact on your life, or it could be three things that exist in your day from day to day basis. Right? Like steady, stable, static things that have a positive influence in your life. I do feel that it's important to limit to three things. This keeps you anchored. It keeps the thing that you're grateful for resonating. You feel it. It becomes embodied. It's in you. It's anchored to you. I mean, we can all be grateful that we have a roof over our heads. I always say we can be grateful that we have a roof over our heads and that we have heat. But on a morning that I wake up and it's ten degrees outside, I am far more grateful for that heat than I am on a day that it's just 45 degrees outside and I'm a little chilly. Okay, so finding something that creates an embodied feeling of gratitude in you is really important. Having three things. So it's not a list of ten things that become like, that can lean towards the superficial, but instead having three things that really, really, there's a depth of gratitude associated with it. We don't want to fall into the habit of just listing things that have positive impacts on your life, but you want to list things that have positive impacts on your life that have a true feeling of gratitude associated with it. In the moment when you're listing them, when you're going through and writing them, really try to anchor and resonate into them to have the feeling of gratitude with them. I think that's really important. This is the gratitude practice that I recommend, and this is the one that I usually do my gratitude practice. I usually do it in the morning. I will do it sometimes in the evening as I'm going to bed as well. So doing that gratitude practice is going to help you to rewire those neural pathways in your brain and what you focus on. It's also the practice of even at the end of the day, I'm feeling this right now. I'm feeling very overwhelmed today. I have no idea why. I really don't have anything that I have to do, but I feel like I have a lot of people that are expecting things from me, and it's not like I'm doing something just because it's expected of me. I want to do them, but I'm feeling really short on time, and I'm just feeling very overwhelmed and very irritated and all the feelings, right? But then I had the thought that my babies are safe. I knew I was irritated, and I knew I was doing this podcast on gratitude, and I'm like, well, what am I really grateful for? I am grateful that right now, as far as I know, all of the people that I love are safe. They are safe and they are happy. And it's interesting when I redirect my thoughts, and that's an active experience, right? Versus having the thoughts that just serendipitously blow up in our brain, which feels like overwhelm to me today, right? When we redirect our thoughts to something that creates gratitude, that we feel gratitude with, when we redirect our thoughts to something that feels grateful, that we can feel grateful about, it is impossible to have those negative thoughts with it. I can't feel irritated and overwhelmed while I'm feeling grateful. Got to pick one or the other, and that's kind of nice. No wonder people are generally happier when they have these gratitude practices. But this is the power of rewiring those neural pathways. One, you get used to feeling grateful, but two, you learn the skill of rewiring, of refocusing, where you're directing your brain, where you're directing your energy. So this is the practice I use. I highly recommend it. I think it's incredibly powerful, and I also think it leads to better health. So I want to shift a little bit and talk to what we are ready to leave behind in 2023. What am I ready to enter 2024 with? And I've done it enough in my life. What am I willing to leave behind in 2023? And that's kind of the thing. What is the thing that I have been doing enough of in my life that if I never did any more of that in my life, I would be totally okay. I could leave it behind me and be totally okay. I've shared this story before, and I shared it a number of years ago when it was happening in real time, but it was such a powerful experience that I still find that I share it pretty frequently. When I realized, and of course, I realized probably five years ago, that I maybe six years ago, that I was emotionally eating. I don't know that I ever thought about emotionally eating. I don't know that I ever thought that emotionally eating was something that I could stop doing. I was just like, this is just how sometimes we live, right? But when I realized that I was emotionally eating and I realized that I was very absent mindedly, emotionally eating, and I was doing it to a point that I would actually feel physically uncomfortable. I would feel so physically full that I was uncomfortable. And I knew it was a problem, and I knew I did not want to live that way. And I knew it was leading to health issues, and I knew I didn't love it, and I was really wanting to let go of it. And I had probably spent a year, maybe even 18 months, very plainly looking at this emotional overeating, this absent minded, emotional overeating, and knowing, like, I really want to stop doing this and really being stuck in a habit and a behavior that I wasn't able to do, and I had looked at why I had done this, but that shifting from walking away from absent mindedly, emotionally overeating did really require for me to look at it with an element of gratitude. And it was a very deep, heart wrenching, carnally and visceral response for me when I finally saw what it was. So when I realized that what I was doing was this is just the tool that I had learned over my lifetime for how to manage my emotions, was to eat. Even though I knew, like, intellectually, I knew it did not make sadness go away. It did not make overwhelm go away. It didn't actually make me happy. There were all sorts of things that it didn't do. And I had learned, like, okay, that's not true, but I still was driven to eat this way. And when I realized that it was the thing that probably kept me from developing a smoking habit, it was the thing that probably kept me from developing a significant drinking habit, like a drinking habit that looked like alcoholism, that I had never used drugs in the way that I used food, and the way that I really avoided some horrible outcomes as far as that, as drug use can lead to that. I avoided that because I was able to use food to emotionally eat. I never used gambling. I never used a lot of different things that really lead a life to ruin, whether it be financial ruin, whether it be relationship ruin, whether it be professional ruin. There are a lot of different ways that people manage their emotions that can lead to a lot of ruin. And I didn't choose those because I had emotional eating to fall back on. And when I realized that I was so overcome by an element of gratitude for that absent minded, emotional eating that I had done that I decided I was, in fact, done with it. Absolutely. I was done with it. I didn't need to do that another day in my life. I had done plenty of days of that, and I didn't need to do it. But I was so grateful for it that I actually envisioned packaging it up in a beautiful package, beautiful wrapping paper, beautiful bow, and leaving it on the side of my journey for somebody else that they might find it someday and use it and use that instead of falling to one of those other things that could be incredibly ruining to a life. So that amount of gratitude, and it still brings me to tears. It was such a deep amount of gratitude that it really did allow me to walk away from absent minded, emotional eating. Do I emotionally eat? Yes. There are times where I know that I'm like, I'm not hungry. I'm just emotionally eating. I don't do it a lot more than I don't do it a lot. I don't do it anymore in a way that blocks me from my health. Right. All eating is emotional eating, whether you're doing it from a feeling, an emotion of empowerment, or whether you're doing it from an emotion of feeling out of control, it's all emotional eating. We all eat emotionally because emotions are what cause our actions, and eating is an action. Okay, so we're all emotionally eating. I will say that I definitely don't absent mindedly, emotionally eat to a point where I feel physically ill anymore. And I will say that I cannot remember the last time that I absent mindedly, emotionally ate? If I emotionally eat, I am very clear. I am emotionally eating right now, and I know I'm doing that, and that alone keeps me from overstuffing myself. I'm like, oh, I just am looking for something to fix my emotions. Hey, Delane, chocolate doesn't ever fix your emotion. We don't need to do this. And that alone has allowed me to do that. But I had to work on that gratitude piece for what it had been for me. I had to stop hating my emotional eating, this thing that I had fought against for so long, and I had to realize that it had served an incredibly important role in my life and that I had to have gratitude for that. So this is the power of gratitude and learning to feel that way, right? For me, what I was willing to leave behind, and I can't even remember what year it was, although I did a podcast episode on it, so I could probably find it. But I had to find some gratitude for that thing that I was willing to leave behind, understanding that I was doing the best I could in the moment and that really, that emotional, absent minded, emotional overeating saved me from a lot of really bad decisions in my life. So this is the power of gratitude. I think gratitude is all that in a bag of chips, and I think everybody should have a gratitude practice. So I do want to move to the question of what am I ready to leave behind in 2023? You get to decide what you're ready to leave behind in 2023, but I'm going to walk through a little bit of kind of how I made that decision for 2024. What was I ready to leave behind? So I thought about leaving behind a number of things over the year 2022 and 2023. Both I've really worked on following my schedule, and I will not say that I've mastered that. There are still times that I know I've got something else on my calendar, and I choose to do something that is not that task that I had in my calendar. I continue to work on that scheduling component and following my calendar, not because I think everything needs to be pre planned or I want to live some super strict life, nothing like that. It's just more that I get more done. I am more productive when I follow my calendar. That is why that is such an important piece to me. So I thought about that for 2020. 04:00 a.m.. I done not following my calendar. Have I done that enough in a lifetime that I don't need to do that? Anymore. It doesn't feel compelling to me. I'll be real honest, I don't feel compelled to leave that behind in 2023. And maybe, I don't know why, but that is not what I'm deciding to do. The other thing. And this came up after my son and I, he was looking for his air pods that he had for Christmas and that he, by December 30, was struggling to find the case and he was very upset with himself. And I went into his room after he'd went to a buddy's house, I went into his room and I found them. And then I went to find the air pods because he said he'd left them in his room to put in his case so they could charge and all be together. And his room was chaos, like finding those two little air pods, it was chaos. I was like, oh my gosh, it's no wonder he lost his AirPods case. And then I looked at my own working space and I was like, I live in chaos like that too. And I said to, I texted him, hey, buddy, I found your Airpod case. I've got it on the charger. Don't worry about it, we've got it. I said, your room's kind of chaotic. I said, you and I probably together, we both need to work on some organization skills. And as I thought about what I was ready to leave behind in 2023, that is really what's kind of come to mind. It's like, I think I'm ready to not live from disorganization that I've done for most of my life. Even when I'm thinking about why I'm so agitated and annoyed and frustrated and overwhelmed today, I would say 70% of those feelings right now are coming because of his poor organization. And so as I thought about this today and thought about the podcast, I was like, oh, that is really something that I am totally ready to leave behind. I'm ready to leave that behind in 2023 and start 2024. And it's one of those things that I can make sure to do it every single day. Like when I am done with my day, is my workspace clean and organized? That's just another seven minutes of time, maybe at a long. I mean, really, it's probably going to be like three minutes, but just a few minutes of my day to get that organized so that I can live from that organized space. So I think that's what I'm going to do. I clearly just thought about this in the last 24 hours, so I'm going to sleep on this tonight, and then in January, on January 1 of 2024, that is. I think it's going to be a great thing to commit to. I don't see it changing, but I'll make my final commitment on January 1, and I recommend everybody do that. If you are making a goal, please sleep on it. Please do not write it in Sharpie. It's the joke. Write it in pencil first, and then write it in Sharpie after you've slept on it. Make a goal. Think about what it's going to take to do it. Think about what you're going to have to be willing to do. Think about the hard things, not just the amazing clothes that you're going to wear or whatever. Like, don't think about the easy part or the fun part. I want you to really consider the things that are going to be challenging and then sleep on it. And wake up in the morning and reevaluate that thing that you want to do. If in the morning you still have hell yes attitude or energy about it, then hell yes, let's do it. But if you have any hang ups, I think that's one of the saddest things that we do, is we set these flippant goals for ourselves, and then we say that we're going to do it, and then we wake up two days later and we're like, I don't even want to do that. And then we're like, oh, I never keep my goals. I never actually reach the things I commit to. So to avoid doing that, write it in pencil first, sleep on it, and then write it in Sharpie. So I hope everyone is grateful for 2024. The universe has saw fit to give you air in your lungs for another day. And when the dawn of January 1 comes, you wake up and there are air in your lungs. There's air in your lungs, you have something more to do on this earth. And that is just one of the most amazing things that we can all remember every single day of our life. If I'm here on the earth for another day, I am grateful because there's something more I need to do. And I hope that 2024 brings you everything that you wish for, everything that you hope for. But I hope for them more than anything that you are grateful in your core for the opportunity that 2024 is. I will be back next week, next year. Lots of stuff planned with Delaney, MD, for next year. In fact, I have podcasts planned for throughout the year. If there is anything specific that you have questions about, if there is anything specific that you want a podcast about if there is anything information wise that you're like, I've heard this, I've heard this. Help me out. Send me a message. I'm happy to get that information into podcasts so that you can hear the answer to that. I want to make this a little more interactive. I want to make sure you're getting all the information that you need to live that naturally healthy life, to let go of type two diabetes and put it behind you and really leave that in your past. So if you need anything or if there's anything specific that you're thinking that would be helpful for you, please send me a message. [email protected] I'll answer any email that you send me and I will get any information that you need into the podcast. Until then, keep listening to the podcast, keep avoiding the foods that make you sick, and keep making the choice for your vitality, your longevity and your health. I'll talk to you next week. Bye.