Powerful Perspectives on Hunger + an Exciting Announcement!

Check out the EASY Weight Loss Club

In this podcast episode, John introduces his new program called the "Easy Weight Loss Club," launching on September 25th. He explains that it will be a paid community hosted on a platform called Skool, offering course content, live coaching calls, and a supportive community. John emphasizes the importance of reworking our relationship with hunger as an emotion and discusses mindset shifts needed to manage emotional eating. John invites listeners to join the Easy Weight Loss Club and the Weight Loss Freedom Academy for support and guidance in overcoming emotional eating and achieving weight loss goals.

Timestamps:

The Easy Weight Loss Club [00:00:00]
John introduces his new program, the Easy Weight Loss Club, and explains why he created it as a paid community separate from the Facebook group.

Challenges with Social Media Algorithms [00:01:04]
John discusses the frustration with social media algorithms, specifically mentioning the changes in TikTok's algorithm and the impact it had on his reach.

Benefits of Joining the Easy Weight Loss Club [00:02:12]
John outlines the benefits of joining the Easy Weight Loss Club, including access to course content, live coaching calls, and a supportive community. He also mentions the Hunger Management Masterclass as part of the program.

Understanding Hunger Signals [00:11:38]
Explains the purpose and context of hunger signals, and how our resistance to hunger causes suffering.

Investigating the Sensations of Hunger [00:13:57]
Encourages listeners to explore and identify the physical sensations of hunger in their bodies, and differentiate between emotional and physical discomfort.

Hunger as an Emotional Pathway [00:20:48]
Discusses how emotions that are not fully processed can manifest as hunger, and the importance of befriending and understanding hunger to uncover underlying emotions.

How other emotions use hunger and why they do it [00:22:48]
Explains how other emotions can be rerouted through hunger and suggests finding alternative solutions to deal with this.

Closing emotional loops and reworking our relationship with emotions [00:23:54]
Discusses the benefits of establishing more freedom to feel hunger and taking value-based action instead of reactive eating.

Benefits of joining the Easy Weight Loss Club [00:26:04]
Highlights the advantages of joining the program, including never having to fear hunger, increasing comfort zones, and experiencing improvements in various areas of life.

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Transcript

John (00:00:00) - Hello again. Welcome back to The Easy Way Out. I'm not exactly sure the topic of this podcast. I just hit record and we're going to see what comes out. Before we get started, I want to talk to you about something that I'm excited about is this new program that I've created. It's called The Easy Weight Loss Club, Easy as an acronym, but it's also just that's my whole ethos, right? I think things should be easy. I think if you're really, really struggling, then the way out has to be easy. So the Easy weight loss club will be different from the Facebook group Lose Weight with John in that it will be a paid community. It will not be hosted on Facebook. It will be hosted on a much better community site called School Skool. And the idea here is that it's not really like a business move. I want to be able to interact and teach with more people, and Facebook makes this very difficult in the Facebook group. Social media is frustrating right now because there's this glut of AI generated content and it's a bit hard to compete.

John (00:01:04) - The platform that I used to have the most luck on was TikTok, but then they changed their algorithm about nine months ago and it completely altered the amount of traffic, reduced it by about 80% that I was getting. So I'm still basically trying to figure out what's the best way to get my message out. I think in the long term this podcast will be essential to that. So you'll probably still see me on the socials posting content, but for the most part, I want this podcast to speak for me and I want this to be the main vehicle for teaching anybody for free. The things that I've learned on my journey and as a coach, helping people with severe weight issues and mindset issues, healing from trauma, all these things. So the idea is to have this easy weight loss club where it's going to start off at like 29 bucks a month and this is insanely cheap. This is like it's so low. They're telling me I'm crazy kind of thing, but it's very, very inexpensive. My hourly rate is quite high, so at $29 you it would probably get you usually about, I don't know, like three minutes of my time.

John (00:02:12) - So I'm going to be launching this new program. I've built it. It's all set up. I just haven't pulled the trigger on it. But I think it's a no brainer. I think it accomplishes something for me and it's definitely going to accomplish things for you and anybody who needs help in the Department of Weight loss mindset specifically focused on, okay, how can we help people go about weight loss in a different way that sets them up to win rather than fail? And how can we equip the most people possible with the perspectives that will help break down the disadvantageous aspects of their mentality and help them build up their abilities, their sense of permission and their connection with their innate desires, their motivation. And so by making it so inexpensive, $29 a month, it's probably going to go up in the future. So this is an opportunity to get in for way cheaper. People told me to charge at least $99 for this, but I was like, Yeah, I don't want to I don't want to go over 50 bucks.

John (00:03:14) - And then I was like, Let's just do 29. Like, let's make this an absolute no brainer. So there's about 12 hours, of course, content available in this group. I will be doing live coaching calls where we will get to interact in person and I can help you troubleshoot any issues you're running into or any questions you have. And we'll be doing that to start off with twice a month. And if we get enough people in the program, we can expand that however much we want to. I feel like the more people who join, the better the community will get because I've seen how my Weight loss Freedom Academy has gone and the teaching in that group setting has some really nice advantages. So this is different course content from the Weight loss Freedom Academy. Inside, you'll get my Hunger Management Masterclass, which alone costs $27. And that is a absolute game changer. Like, I'm not joking when when I say master class, it really is. I'm proud of it. It's going to massively reshape how you think about hunger and actually all of your emotions, and it's going to massively improve your ability to stick to your diets and your eating plans without having to constantly quit, start over, quit, start over.

John (00:04:29) - I know I can't wave a magic wand and like heal the masses just like that, but I'm out here to help the people who can't be helped. I wouldn't be here unless that was the mission because I never wanted to just be another voice, another talking head, another person giving their advice on the internet. I am only here because I made it through a harrowing situation life. And when it looked like, okay, I'm probably going to make it out of this, you look back and how can you not want to help? Other people who are suffering the way you were suffering still were. And through coaching, I've just been astonished at how much I have to give people. It's really boggled my mind. It's astonishing to me how how many different kinds of people my ideas have worked with. Weight Loss Freedom Academy is still it's more expensive, but it's also still a no brainer in my mind. And that's where we're going to get a lot more personal one on one support. Whereas the easy way Loss Club is for the masses, right? I hope to have the most helpful group you could ever want to belong to, and I know that that's possible because I see the quality of the people who come into my general ecosystem and how rare it is for any of them to be butt heads and how easy it is to see who that's going to be in.

John (00:05:52) - Just press delete. Yeah, just lovely people who follow me, especially people who are listening to this podcast. You're the hardcore, you're the founding members of this. And someday if this podcast has a really big footprint and you can look back and be like, Yeah, I helped do that. And now there's an opportunity in the Easy Weight Loss Club to do the same, become a founding member, get access to coaching, get access to 12 hours, of course, content. It's not like, great, now there's 12 hours of work I have to do. No, this is just a library of resources. You have to help you dismantle the disadvantageous ways of going about weight loss, dismantle the reasons you've been failing, and how to reassemble the good and necessary parts into a system that will actually work, that is doable, and it's going to give you the best shot you could possibly have of finding success because you really deserve that. And we all do. So I believe I'm going to launch that officially on September 25th.

John (00:06:54) - I'm going to open the doors to that. If you are excited about joining up, you can message me and make sure you're on my list of people who I will notify as soon as it's ready. I will put a link into the show notes so you can go check out the group. Look it over. Also, by joining the group, you're supporting my work, the podcast, all the free content that I create. Think of this as a sort of Patreon type thing where you can support a creator that you like and get some really cool perks in return. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about the Hunger Management Masterclass content, specifically, what is the most belief shifting aspect of it? And give you a couple insights here that might immediately shift the way you view hunger. So first off, the key to hunger management is understanding that hunger is an emotion. Psychologists thought for 100 and some years that there was a hierarchy of emotions and the the most potent ones were like drives. And then there were less important ones, the more superficial things like jealousy.

John (00:08:05) - But evolutionary psychology has gotten more of a footing in the last 20 years especially, and its view of emotions is more egalitarian, that every emotion is equal in importance and equal in what they're trying to do. So, yes, anger and love, those two emotions are actually seeking the same end, and that is your survival and your ability to reproduce viable offspring. So if you think about it, every emotion is there to keep you safe and to help you find a mate. And well, so when you understand that hunger is an emotion, you realize that, oh, wow, this is actually a great place to practice. A lot of the emotional skills that I teach to my clients and I sometimes teach here. So for people who aren't very good at feeling their feelings, starting with Hunger gives us this like, perfect entry point because not every emotion are you going to feel it every day, right? So you don't get to practice with your raging jealousy necessarily every day, but with hunger, you do get to practice every single day.

John (00:09:16) - You are going to be hungry at some point, especially if you are trying to lose weight. Right. And so the cool thing is that by getting into a calorie deficit, which if you're watching this, most of you probably have that on your agenda so that you can lose weight. Now you create more opportunity to interact with the emotion of hunger. Pretty cool, right? And that may sound strange because people don't usually talk about hunger like it's a good thing. Most people feel like it's a huge liability or that it's a giant annoyance or that it's something that's an impediment to them reaching their goals. And actually it's none of those things. Hunger is an emotion, and like any emotion, it's goal is to help you survive and be able to. Reduce. And if those two things come into conflict, it's going to pick survival. So, yeah, hunger is a survival instinct. Make sense, right? You got to eat to live. So how could something so integral to our survival seem like such an impediment to our self improvement? And how can reworking our relationship to hunger actually set us up to find other forms of emotional processing and emotional acceptance? Feeling your feelings to find that much, much, much easier.

John (00:10:29) - So hunger in the time of plenty. Isn't it strange that the people who are least likely in human history to suffer malnutrition are the most afraid of this emotion? Hunger. It's quite odd. And it has to do with exposure. We haven't gotten to experience it and realize that, Oh, I'm not going to die. It's it's just an emotion because dangerous hunger has been banished from our world. For the most part, it's easy for us to misinterpret the hunger signals as alarm bells rather than indicator lights. And so we have this survival instinct to eat going off like a fire alarm in your head every time you're considering having a snack. Obviously, this is a recipe for disaster. So to start off with, you want to start seeing hunger as the low fuel light on your dashboard rather than your car shutting down at the side of the road. Right. You can go days and weeks without eating and without it hugely diminishing your health. We evolved to do this. We evolved to survive periods without food.

John (00:11:38) - No one's recommending you do that. But but for us to create wiggle room with our hunger, we have to establish some boundaries in our minds. And the first one is this is not that big of a deal. It's an emotion. It's a sensation in your body and most of your suffering of hunger is your resistance to it, thinking you have to fight it, thinking that it's it's an incitement to worry and decision making. Oh, what should I eat? Should I eat this or should I brought my lunch, but I don't really want to eat it. Should I go get Wendy's? That is a lot of the suffering that you're experiencing around hunger. The second thing to realize about biological hunger signals is to think of the context in which they evolved. Hunger signals didn't evolve in a time of refrigeration. They evolved in a time where we were hunting gathering. It was very difficult to store food for a long, long periods of time. Therefore, there were rarely large surpluses which allowed you to work really hard for one day and then be able to not worry about food acquisition for the rest of the week.

John (00:12:45) - You were pretty much having to do it every single day to some extent. So when hunger signals evolved, they evolved in a context when in practicality it was most likely going to take a few hours for you to acquire food. So when you get a hunger signal, your body isn't even asking for calories right now. The second it's saying like today would be good any time in the next couple of hours, that would be fast. So it is a polite request. It is a if you wouldn't mind. Yeah. Chuck some calories my way. Give me some nutrition. These are incredibly powerful mindset shifts on their own, but they really just open the door to what's possible when we investigate our relationship with this emotion of hunger. Because not only is there a lot more we can learn about ourselves and this emotion going through this process will give us practice dealing with emotions that we find uncomfortable and finding the immense power that's available to us when we accept and listen to our emotions. So what does that look like? Well, think of the last time you were hungry.

John (00:13:57) - Where do you feel it? Most people are going to say their stomach, but let's think generally your whole body. Where do you feel hunger? If I say the word hunger, where do you feel sensations in your body? More than likely, when I talk about the idea of hunger. You felt resistance in your body. You felt some kind of clenching, you felt a tightening, or you felt energy somewhere in your body. So even the idea of hunger elicits a reaction from you. So eating is not the only reaction that has been programmed into you. Regarding hunger. There are a number of other reactions as well, and by noticing these reactions and disassembling them, it makes it much, much easier to disassemble other actions like actually shoving your face with food. So you start off by sitting with the idea of hunger, really thinking about, yeah, what's its purpose? John says it's just an indicator light and it's not an alarm bell. What could that mean? And the next time you have the opportunity to feel hunger, which is usually every few hours for the first time in your life, you'll say to yourself, Oh, great, I'm hungry.

John (00:15:08) - I can learn something from this. I'm going to practice. I'm going to explore this and you can feel your hunger and go, Yeah, okay, where am I feeling it? Am I feeling it? And my shoulders and my feet and my quads? Or is it just in my stomach? Like, where is this? And notice where it is everywhere. And then allow it to minimize. We can usually when we're resistant to an emotion, we feel a bigger how should I say we feel a we feel energies in a bigger swath of our body. But as we focus in on where it's all really emanating from, we can usually tighten the focus down to a what do they call that when it's like the very center of an earthquake, an origination point or a couple or 2 or 3 of them. And you can begin to notice, okay, the pain I'm feeling, is it emotional or is it physical or is it both? Once you identify the difference between emotional discomfort and physical discomfort, you can learn from that.

John (00:16:09) - And obviously with physical discomfort, you have an opportunity to to sit with a physical manifestation of your emotions just like a clenching fist. If you're really mad, grinding teeth, if you're super, super stressed out about something and you can see that that hunger signal often as a need for, okay, there's we need to create balance here. It's possible that you need food, always a possibility. But in so many ways, the ways that I get into in detail in the Hunger Management Masterclass, which you will have access to if you join the Easy Way Loss Club, you can learn not only how tolerant you really are of them, how small they are compared to what you thought they were, what they feel like in reality when you're not resisting them, when you accept them and noticing how much acceptance of the emotion changes your experience of the emotion. One of the very interesting aspect of focusing on hunger is that it is an emotion that gets a lot of hop ons, it gets a lot of stowaways. You could say your emotions are dispatched by your amygdala based on the information it's receiving from other areas of the brain.

John (00:17:21) - The amygdala is not just the fear center of the brain. It is the part of your brain that flips the alarm bell and causes you to go into fight or flight and then controls things during fight or flight, or has a huge role in controlling things once we're in fight or flight. But it's also the dispatcher of all emotions. Why would our emotions come from the part of our brain that's linked to panic? Because the purpose of emotions most likely is a survival adaptation that allows the amygdala to say, okay, I think the right response to this is anger. So it pushes the anger button, the anger. It's not a choice when you're becoming angry for there to be psychological and physiological adaptations that prepare you to to deal with certain situations. So if something is really pissing you off and say somebody's taking more than their fair share of something and you start to get bigger and more imposing and your voice raises and your hands start to clench, the emotion of anger is fundamentally your experience of these adaptations that your brain is making to prepare you to meet some kind of threat or to put some imbalance back into balance.

John (00:18:36) - And it doesn't mean that a mild annoyance was going to impede your survival. But if we deal with the mild annoyances when they're still at the level of a mild annoyance, we don't get those problems big enough that they could actually threaten our survival. The mind is seeking to stay as far away from the cliff edge as possible. But let's say for whatever reason, you were very uncomfortable with the emotion of anger and you repressed it when you felt it coming up. You were really good at squashing it back down. The emotion isn't going to stop. It doesn't go away. When you push it down. It remains an open loop in your mind and body and it will seek other pathways to get you the message that it's trying to deliver. Because emotions aren't just physical and mental adaptations. They also carry packets of information on what On the thing in your periphery, the thing that your conscious or subconscious mind is picking up on the pattern. It's noticed when you're processing emotions fully, you will get those little packets of information and go, Oh, I'm really angry right now.

John (00:19:44) - Well, that's because Bill's doing that thing he always does and this is super unfair. Now the emotion doesn't need you to go punch Bill, even though you're physiologically getting ready for a confrontation. All the emotion really needs is for you to take. Assertive action. The amygdala just wants to know that you understand that there's an issue and that you're going to take care of it. And once you do it, if you don't punch the guy, it's fine. They make those perfectly happy. Loop is closed. We're done. But if you're routinely not honoring your anger, if you're getting angry at Bill and not saying anything and then just walking off with your friend and talking about him behind his back and doing nothing to actually change Bill's behavior, then that loop remains open and you will remain angry even if you are really good at pushing it below the surface of your awareness. I think emotions, because they're driven by the need for survival, not accuracy. They can reroute through other emotional pathways that you keep open, One that you respond to better than any other is hunger.

John (00:20:48) - And this is why emotional eating is such an issue, because all the emotions that you're not able to process fully are coming through the hunger pathway. One benefit of of really becoming friends with hunger, getting to know it, sit with it, you're in the car, you notice that you're hungry and be like, Oh, this is good. This is an opportunity. I'm just going to sit with this hunger. I'm going to increase my tolerance, the duration at which I can, without stress, be a home to this emotion. Let it be there, let it rise up. And then sometimes you watch it fall away. Other times you watch it slowly mount until you go, Yeah, I really should eat something right now. This would be a really good time to give my body some nutrition. So as you're delaying your reactivity to the emotion, you also get to investigate hunger. You get this time to sit with it and go, Hey, I think you're anger wearing a hunger mask. Oh, this is this is sadness wearing the hunger mask.

John (00:21:48) - And what this will start to do is by learning to make friends with hunger, it actually helps you see the emotions that you're not processing. You actually get to meet them and you take off the hunger mask and you're like, okay, hi, anger. And now that you've had practice doing this with hunger, now you go to the next level and you actually start feeling some of the emotions that have been using your hunger pathway as a detour to try to get to you. And ultimately, what is this emotion want? It wants to be honored and it wants you to take assertive action. And you can't do that until your first willing to accept it. You're not going to be able to understand what that emotion is after until you're willing to sit with it. People often have a hard time with the idea of feeling their feelings because their only context for feeling their feelings as being overwhelmed by their feelings. So if you realize anger is wearing a mask of hunger and that by being with hunger, you're like, whoa, now I'm I'm with my anger.

John (00:22:48) - Okay? Now you know that it has something to tell you and it's going to suggest a way to deal with anger. Now, if it's being rerouted through hunger, it's trying to get you to deal with your anger through eating. So first off, you can say what would be a different solution. Food isn't going to change. Bill doing this right. The point of this anger is that my mind wants me to reestablish balance in my relationships, and Bill is taking too much. You can listen to the anger, listen to what it has to teach you. Listen to what it has to tell you and listen to what it's suggesting. What's the angry response that would close this loop once you've identified what you're angry about and the reaction that the emotion is suggesting and you clear away the false reaction which is eating and get to the real reaction, Well, I like to punch somebody. I don't feel like I can punch them, though. So that's why I'm going to eat cheese instead. Now you have an opportunity to think, is there any assertive action I could take that would recreate balance where there currently is imbalance? So you decide to talk to Bill and say, Hey, Bill, you're doing this.

John (00:23:54) - It's not really fair and everything will work better if you stop doing that. So now that you've taken assertive action about the thing that you're actually mad about, you're not going to be as hungry because anger isn't taking the hunger bus anymore to get to you and you reduce the number of things in your environment that are making you feel angry. And when anger does arise, you'll be more likely to greet it and go, Oh, hello. What are you trying to tell me? How are you trying to help? It's like Lassie barking at Timmy. What is it, girl? What are you trying to tell me? That's what you want to do with your emotions, even if you don't understand them, to at least have that receptivity to them. So, yes, on a practical level, we need to establish more freedom to feel hunger and to take value based action rather than eating out of reactivity. And we can close emotional loops and it actually presents this perfect doorway into reworking our relationship with the very emotions that use hunger, because historically we haven't felt equipped to.

John (00:24:59) - Communicate with these emotions or let them communicate to us. And once you can do this with petty annoyances, it opens the door to, Hey, how can we use this newfound ability to start to process larger and larger chunks of emotion that are stuck in our bodies and minds so that we could let go of emotional eating, regain RNA motivation, and majorly get out of our own way when it comes to weight loss or our finances relationships. And that's the cool thing, is that when you lose weight the easy way, you don't just lose weight, you end up getting better with money and better with people. You can't heal from things that are this big inside of you that are running the show and not see benefits elsewhere in life. Oftentimes with coaching clients, I see improvements in their work life before we see weight start to come off. And every improvement that you make like that, it's weight off of their heart and mind, but it's also less stress, better boundaries and improving sense of self and an ability to self direct.

John (00:26:04) - So yeah, what would it be like to never have to fear hunger again? To never have to worry about hunger or hunger, derailing your diet, never having to worry about being hungry all the time. What would it be like to increase your comfort zone where you just feel more comfortable in a wider swath of places and you feel more comfortable in more areas of your own mind and body? So I guess I'll end it there. Hopefully you will join the Easy Weight Loss Club as we kick it off. I'm probably going to have to put a cap on that, probably somewhere between 10 or 20 people. When I open the door to this, I'm going to be sending out an email to 2000 people on my email list. So I assume these are going to get snapped up. So if you want one of those spots, message me and I'll set one aside for you. And this will help keep the group manageable for me as we're just starting. And then once we get our feet under us, we can expand from there, because ultimately I think this kind of thing has a really no ceiling on how many people we can help with it and what we can do with it.

John (00:27:08) - And obviously, if you're interested in the Weight Loss Freedom Academy, it's a bit more of an investment, but you get a lot more and you get that 1 to 1 support where I can help you hand in hand work through emotional eating, your motivation issues, lack of self trust, all these things. Please share the podcast with someone, Share it on social media. Leave me a review. I haven't gotten any new reviews recently. I don't think especially at iTunes Review would be super helpful. I think on Spotify you can just hit five stars and walk away. If you have any questions you like me to answer on the podcast, you can email me at John at Oakes Weight Loss. That's oakes with an e. j o h n at oakes weight loss.com. Thanks for your support. I think this is the third one that I've done in a row, so hopefully we can just keep cranking with a weekly upload schedule. Have a great week and I'll talk to you soon.