The Eating Habits We Didn’t Choose: Healing Relationships with Food

Foster and Cesar bravely share their radically different relationships with disordered eating, trauma, and healing. Foster opens up about living with an undiagnosed eating disorder for 22 years—marked by constant food obsession and internalized body shame—before receiving a diagnosis that finally brought relief and a path forward. Cesar shares his story of childhood hunger and neglect, and how that scarcity shaped his adult relationship with food. Together, they explore how trauma lives in the body and how healing requires listening within. 

If you’re sitting with a complex relationship to food or your body, whether it’s anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphia, orthorexia, binge-eating, or a more nuanced disordered eating fed to you by diet culture, this episode is designed to be the first step in your healing process. You are not alone. 

In this episode: 

• Foster reveals her 22-year struggle with food and eating—and the diagnosis that set her free
• The shocking truth of what her inner voice sounds like
• Foster takes us inside the mind of someone with an eating disorder
• Cesar shares the lasting imprint of childhood hunger including scarcity and shame
• The foods Cesar gives himself full permission to indulge in
• The household phrase that still haunts Foster—and how she’s learning to reject diet culture
• What intuitive eating looks like in real life—and why Foster calls herself a toddler in recovery
• Cesar’s powerful reminder that eating—and healing—isn’t about rules

Also mentioned: 

Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch

Our episode on How to Spot a Gatekeeper! 

You can also watch the episodes on YouTube.

If you enjoyed this episode, take a moment to follow Beauty in the Break on your favorite podcast app and leave a review—it really helps!

Reach out to the show—send an email or voice memo to beautyinthebreakpod@gmail.com and be sure to follow on Instagram. 

Cesar Cardona:

• Attend his upcoming speaking engagements
• Listen to music from Cesar + The Clew on Apple Music and Spotify
• Receive his monthly newsletter Insights That Matter

Foster Wilson:

• Buy her poetry book Afternoon Abundance
• Learn about her postpartum services
• Receive her monthly newsletter Foster’s Village

Created & Hosted by: Cesar Cardona and Foster Wilson

Executive Producer: Glenn Milley

Editor: Bessie Fong

This episode is brought to you by Arlene Thornton & Associates

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Beauty in the Break.

I'm Foster.

And I'm Cesar.

This is the podcast where we explore the moments that break us open and how we find beauty on the other side.

So whatever you're carrying today, you don't have to carry it alone.

We are here with you.

Thanks for being here and enjoy the show.

Welcome back, everyone, to Beauty in the Break.

Hello, hello.

Thank you for coming back to this show.

And welcome back to you.

You just got back from Jacksonville, where you are giving a talk in your hometown, which must have been really cool, huh?

It was probably the best time of me visiting my hometown, Jacksonville, Florida.

It felt full circle, for one.

The last time I was there, I was not a speaker.

I had one talk, my very first talk, like the following month, and I was already excited.

I come back now and I've done 12 talks.

I want to say this here because I think this information should be shared as many places as possible.

The talk I gave was called Information Era or Error? The Power Lies with the People.

There's so many good things happening in this world, and it's just not being shared. 85% of nuclear warheads have been destroyed.

There was a little under 70,000 in the 80s. Today, there's a little over 9,000.

Still needs to be worked on, but that is a lot of progress.

Reforestation, for example, which cleans up 40% of human emissions, which is a large percentage.

These companies have got together and done what's called the Bonne Challenge, where they wanted to reforest the planet by 2030, and they're on mark to hit that.

They're on mark to hit it?

On mark to hit it.

That's not what we hear.

That's not what we hear at all.

We hear all of the doom and gloom, which isn't incorrect.

It's just incomplete.

But we have so much of this access now that we can share with each other.

We don't have to rely on the, to reference a previous episode, the gatekeepers with information.

We can do this ourselves.

So my talk was about how we can empower ourselves in that capital D of democracy.

I think that's really interesting too, to think about personally, how we share information, because it's very easy for us to go to our friend and say, oh my God, did you hear this terrible thing happen?

Oh my God, did you hear he did this, he did that?

Oh, the world is ending.

The world's on fire.

Okay.

Yes.

And also there's all of these other things that are really positive.

Look at the beautiful community and commitment to supporting each other that has come out of the fires in LA.

Devastating experience.

And there's a really beautiful symbiotic relationship coming out of the families on the East side and the families on the West side.

Let's talk about that too, because it starts to filter how we see things in, in this world.

So I think it was really, really effective from my zoom perspective.

Thanks.

I said this to one of my clients today.

Foster is the person whose opinion I admire the most.

And she's really the only person I'm ever trying to impress.

So you messaged me and said, that talk was phenomenal.

And I was in the car.

I was like, yes, that's what I'm talking about.

I felt really good.

So thank you for saying that.

I appreciate that.

I'm super excited to talk today about our respective relationships with food because everyone has to eat.

And trust me, I've tried to go down the road of, could we just eliminate food completely?

Cause I don't really get it.

If there was a pill, we both would take it.

Right.

Just take a pill, keep moving.

Go on.

Yeah.

But I'm trying to encourage myself to have more embodiment in my life.

And this has been part of my journey with food and its connection to body and its connection to mind, all of it altogether.

You have told me a lot about what it was like as a child, both being left alone and also being really hungry and how that has affected you today.

Can you tell me like a little bit more about your childhood with food?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Growing up, one parent wasn't there and the other parent was there, but they would leave me alone for a long period of time.

And sometimes there was minimal food in the pantry, just a bag of rice or wheat bread with peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or sometimes not.

Let me stop you.

How old were you?

I was five, six, seven, eight.

And you were left alone overnight?

Sometimes overnight.

But often, yeah, sometimes overnight.

Yes.

But often throughout the entire day.

I will say also, I may be very independent, but obviously, of course, a little isolated.

Can you imagine leaving our youngest at home?

No.

All day and overnight?

No.

With no food in the pantry?

You know what?

It's not a no, actually, because I have an instinct of like, oh, yeah, that'll be fine.

Wait, wait, wait.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

That's not how it goes.

That's not, you don't do that.

Because my instincts are like, yeah, if I was good, they're good.

Which, who hasn't seen that happen in society?

It was like, oh, I was raised this way.

Look at me.

It's a very common parenting phrase.

Well, I turned out fine.

Yeah.

So let me...

Make that person suffer too, that you didn't turn out fine.

FYI.

Or even if you did, you're lucky.

You're so lucky.

And don't you want to question how you were raised and improve the situation for your child?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would lean into it more and say, If you're okay with letting a kid suffer, then maybe you didn't turn out as fine as you think.

Because you're willing to say, this kid is okay and they'll figure it out.

I think about either of my children being left alone at five or six years old and fending for themselves.

It pulls my gut out just to think about how guilty I would feel if that were the situation I was putting my children in.

And I could just imagine that was very lonely for you and very isolating to have no parental figure in the house at such a young age.

While I was that age, living by myself, doing that stuff by myself, a lot of my questions were, how come nobody wants me?

How come nobody loves me?

How come nobody wants to take care of me?

And there were plenty of times where my parents were there.

So it's not like they were just like, screw the kid.

But the time that I was left should have not have happened.

That's for sure.

The times that I was around people was mainly school.

It kind of reinforced the isolation because I'd be with the classmates and they would talk about their parents and the times, what they did for the weekend or what they're doing tonight.

And at some point I gathered a great amount of friends and I was relatively popular in elementary school.

At the same time, I remember keeping tabs on the unmentionables, knowing I shouldn't tell them I was by myself.

When I was seven, I was in this apartment complex and a maintenance man had to come in.

And I had been there by myself for the day.

And I remember saying to him, could you not let management know that I'm by myself here?

Which is a very interesting thing now that I think of it from this perspective.

Let this child take on this accountability.

And he didn't.

But I had to continuously do those sort of, keep it vague.

Keep it away.

Like Peter Tosh says, you can fool some people sometimes, but you can't fool all the people all the times.

And one of my classmates, his name was Ryan Redshaw.

He was a very sweet guy and his family was really cool.

I stayed over at their place once and I remember thinking, this is so great because they had dinner together and all that stuff.

He noticed some days during lunch, I wouldn't bring lunch or I didn't have any money for it.

And he went and told his mother.

And she started giving him money to give to me to eat.

There was something that felt so nice from her, but something that was highly embarrassing as well.

And to be that age and to feel hunger pains very often, it's something that I consistently try to avoid.

Hunger pains.

You avoid being hungry?

I avoid hunger pains.

If I feel hungry, it's my signal of like, it's time.

And everybody's body tells them that.

But for me, it's really like, okay, where are we going?

As soon as possible.

Because I felt hunger pain so many times in my life.

I don't ever want to feel that pain again.

Well, shout out to all of the Ryans of the world.

Just anonymously brought money for their friend.

I think that's such a beautiful caretaking gesture.

And his mother too, to see and recognize you.

She was a beautiful woman.

He's a wonderful man.

He's a great dad now because we're still friends on social media.

That's so great.

And you know, what reminds me of is in the pandemic, LAUSD, the Unified School District in Los Angeles, which is massive.

It's got so many schools.

They started offering free meals to people who normally got their free or reduced lunch program at school.

And they were out of school for so long.

So all these kids across the district could go to the school physically and pick up breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a whole big bag of food for the weekend during COVID times.

And when everybody came back to public school, now all lunch across the school district is free for everybody.

What a concept.

It's incredible.

It's incredible.

And it's such an equalizer too for all of the different socioeconomic levels that there are in the school.

Doing away with the things that we need in the world as a business, as profit, and just serving people what they need in this country.

The reason they have breakfast in the classroom is because they were finding that the kids who had less access to food and whose parents didn't have enough money for food, they would come to school hungry and they would do poorer on the test.

And so they started offering breakfast in the classroom to everyone every morning to make sure that everyone had the best chance at learning that day.

Oh, my goodness.

And it's so interesting that you say you had hunger pains and that your hunger pains were, you know, you didn't have a choice about that.

My brain still thinks when I'm hungry, good.

Good, you're hungry.

You are going to lose weight.

You are going to be thinner now that you're hungry.

It is a positive thing in my brain.

I'm still learning to catch that thought and go, wait, wait a minute.

No, actually, hungry means you have to need to eat something.

I'm wondering if the initial thought will ever go away.

I don't know.

I want to give a little content disclosure because I do want to talk about my eating disorder.

And for some people that may or may not be the right time to listen.

So if that might be hard to hear, you know, hit a pause on this and go listen to one of our other episodes.

But I do think it's really important to share today my journey with an eating disorder and realizing so late in my life at 38 that I had actually had an eating disorder for 22 years.

I really didn't understand that that's what I was dealing with until two years ago.

Well, how often do we forget about our shadow, but it's constantly there with you and you lived with that sort of conscious about it, but really not conscious about it.

Yeah, I think the story I told was that I had an unhealthy relationship with food, but I didn't know beyond that how to define it.

Story told to you from someone or your thoughts to yourself?

My thoughts to myself was that I had an unhealthy relationship with food, but that was sort of contradicted because I also ate really healthy.

I ate really well.

I didn't eat a lot of processed foods.

I avoided sugar quite often.

So on paper, I was doing healthy things.

But what I think a lot of people don't realize is that an eating disorder is not a disorder of the body.

It's a disorder of your mind.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Of course.

Of course.

Why would you eat that?

My whole life, I hear the I think of it the other way that you say that to me.

I'm like, oh, of course.

There is a body image component as well.

I knew that my entire life, I did not like the way I looked and I did not like my body.

I was running from my body for sure.

For the listener who has never had an eating disorder, which is hopefully many of you, I want to take you inside the mind of someone with an eating disorder.

Because once I became aware that the way my brain thinks about food is not normal, I was quite relieved, actually.

Because it meant that there was hope for me to think differently.

Inside my mind as a teenager in my 20s and my 30s, all day long, I think about food.

I think about when am I going to eat?

What am I going to eat?

As I'm eating, I'm thinking, is now the time to stop?

Is now the time to stop?

When I've just eaten, I feel guilty for what I've just eaten.

And then I think about tomorrow, how can I do it better?

All day long, every day, for 22 years.

Wow.

Okay.

Okay.

That's terrible to feel.

And my next question is, I get investigative.

How did you pick that up and apply that to your life?

It's everywhere, actually.

It's all of society.

It's all of diet culture.

It's all of social media.

It's everything related to health.

We are receiving this messaging all the time.

And if I may say, the same confliction that you were feeling inside is the confliction that's out here.

Because we have everything that you just said and consistent commercials of all processed foods.

Of bag of chips and fast food, quick food comes in.

So you get these two sides that are living in a society of capitalism that we're the best person wins.

But everybody can win now.

So you're just getting both ends of be really healthy or junk food is here.

And that was living within you.

I think there was a point when I was 15 and I looked back at a picture of myself when I was 10.

And my memory of that moment in that picture, in the swimming pool, playing with my family, my memory of it was sheer joy.

And I looked at the picture and I didn't like the way I looked in my body.

And in that moment, it isolated.

Oh, you felt joy in that moment.

But now looking back, it was wrong.

You looked terrible.

So I could never feel comfortable in my body knowing that years later I might loathe myself.

So I was constantly running from the body of now.

And when I was 38 and I finally was in a quiet enough, clear enough, self-aware space, I realized that I had been on a treadmill thinking like this every single day.

And I never once got it right.

I never got my body right.

I never got my body image right.

I never felt good about the food that I had eaten that day.

Not one day did I feel like I got it right.

And I went to my therapist and I basically begged her for a diagnosis.

I was like, I really need to know everything I've told you over the last seven years.

Do you believe that I have an eating disorder?

And she said, yes.

And I fell back so relieved because to me, a diagnosis was freeing.

There was actually a pathway for me to go forward and learn a new way of thinking.

So that moment for me was total freedom.

So not once did you ever feel like you succeeded in that daily checklist.

I used to wonder, could someone out there just tell me exactly what to eat?

I will do it.

I can do anything.

Tell me what to eat for my body to look the way I want it to look.

And I'll promise I'll do it.

I used to almost pray for that.

I believed that the power lied outside of me.

Sure.

That is clearly what it sounds like because you're being shown all these, this is the way on magazines and television and songs and so on and so forth.

Two questions.

One, what was the image you thought you were supposed to look?

And if you'd have got there, would you have been satisfied?

I have no idea.

I have no idea.

You have no idea because you didn't even know what image you were supposed to be.

I think I did.

Okay.

I certainly had mood boards.

I would cut out of fitness magazines of how I wanted my body to look, but it was certainly societal messaging from TV and movies and magazines and social media, all of that subconsciously.

And also I will say I came from a family that all the women were on diets in the 90s.

It was the 90s.

Everybody was on a diet.

And no one said it's not good for a teenager to be on a diet.

I remember a phrase that was said quite often.

Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.

What?

Hold the fries.

That?

Oh.

I feel so emotional saying that out loud because it sounds really terrible to say.

I can't imagine my children saying that in a household with my children.

And yet it was funny and accepted to my family to say that.

And no one had that reaction.

So no wonder I didn't love myself and care about myself and feel good in my body.

No wonder.

That was the messaging that I received.

And I think the family messaging just reinforces societal messaging.

If there is an ultimate mendacity of this current culture, it's the fact that nutrition is not as good as being thin.

Yeah.

What on earth?

Oh, yeah.

There's multiple times that we've been together that I can see you doing a sort of barometer of where am I right now mentally.

And you also would say some stuff to me.

You would say, Caesar, I just want to express this.

I'm feeling this way about my body, about what I've eaten, so on and so forth.

Those are the buds from the plant, from the seed of hearing stuff like nothing tastes as good as being thin.

Yeah.

Come on.

Come on, society.

That is the darker side of information, I suppose.

I feel like we gain more information in this society before we can learn how to be satisfied in who we were internally.

Yeah, it all comes from without.

It all comes from outside of us.

Oh, my gosh.

Rather than internally.

I'm not a violent person.

I'm a nonviolent person, but I could strangle that sort of intellect in the people who didn't think that through when they say it.

I'm sorry that happened.

And it's sad for them.

And it's very sad for them also.

Yeah.

Hard on the problem, soft on the person.

Yeah.

I want to strangle the information itself.

And then look at the other person and say to them, you don't have to be scared of that word anymore.

That's right.

Before we learn how to share information based upon the other side of thought.

That out there is where we need everything.

And now we have magazines full of what someone is supposed to look like.

And you and I will go through a store and we'll see a model who's not thin these days.

And we're like, that's so cool.

Yeah, that should have been the default.

So you have that thought running through your mind.

And then you get to a point in your life where you recognize you're not hitting those checkpoints.

That hits you.

What do you do with that?

What's the next thing?

Once I realized I was on this never ending treadmill, I was exhausted.

It separated me from people that I was close to because no one else had any idea what was going on in my mind.

And I thought maybe everybody feels this way and I'm just getting it wrong constantly.

I went to my therapist and she said, I believe you have disordered eating, generalized disordered eating, specifically orthorexia, which is a focus on healthy foods, like an obsession with being healthy.

I am not holding on to that too tightly.

I just needed to know that the way my brain worked was not right.

Once I get my hand on like, I can improve myself now, I was like, check me in, put me out of commission for six weeks, let someone else teach me what to eat, how to eat.

That wasn't truly necessary for my health at the time.

Okay.

Okay.

I understand the impulse to have that thought though, especially you and I are similar in that way.

If we can find the, and I mean this pun intended, the diagnosis of whatever it is, then we can get our hands around it and then we can say, okay, let us pull it out.

Let us retwist the wires around.

And I get that, but it didn't apply to your situation at the moment.

It wasn't that drastic.

And there were a lot of other tools that I could use and teach myself that didn't take me out of commission with my family for that many weeks.

I really had to have a grieving process about that though.

I remember I went and met a friend for coffee and I got to the coffee place and I burst into tears telling him the story of what I just realized.

And the fear I had in that moment was I cannot trust my mind.

I have been living with a drill sergeant in my brain.

Oh boy.

For 22 years telling me, eat this, don't eat that.

And guess what?

He's wrong.

So who do I listen to?

What voice is actually mine?

I think this drill sergeant dominated my thoughts for so long.

I didn't know where myself was actually.

My voice underneath it all.

And that was terrifying.

It was terrifying.

I don't know what to listen to anymore.

So it would say, my brain would say, we'll have that muffin.

And then another side of my brain would say, do you know how many calories that has in it?

And then I would just get stuck.

It was hard.

And I grieved that diagnosis as well.

Very trickster, very shape-shifting of this drill sergeant who was legitimately lying to you.

Very, very much just, oh, no, now here.

No, now it's there.

Oh, sorry.

I meant this.

I meant third option.

Yeah.

You recognize that.

You have to go and meet this friend.

Make these connections for me in the parallel.

Before you had this realization, what did it feel like before you ate, if you were ignoring those feelings of hunger?

And then what did it feel like when you would satisfy that?

But then once you had that realization, same question.

What did it feel like when those impulses came up?

And what did it feel like if you ignored them or if you listened to them?

Well, before this realization, I would get hungry.

My brain would say, good, you're hungry.

See how long you can go.

My drill sergeant used intermittent fasting as the latest fad to be like, see, it's okay to starve yourself for 16 hours a day.

This is not, you're not, this is not, this is not, this is not David Blaine's or Houdini's like, let's see how long.

That's not how.

Please continue.

Yes.

That is how my drill sergeant voice would speak to me.

See how long you can go.

I was making myself very sick in that regard.

I would go 16 or 18 hours without eating.

I would get headaches.

I was in starvation mode.

So I was constantly thinking about food.

And then I'd be like, don't eat it, don't eat it, don't eat it yet.

And then once I ate, I would essentially low-key binge on healthy food and then feel immediately guilty.

After starting to work on this with my therapist and also with my own studies, I was deeply interested in it.

The only tool I really had was the idea of intuitive eating.

And there is a book, Intuitive Eating, that has been around for decades and has done many revisions.

Feel great.

And we'll link it in the show notes.

It's by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.

And one of the main principles is to reject diet culture.

So you have to reject anything that remotely looks like diet culture, which intermittent fasting would be one of those things.

I'm not saying intermittent fasting is positive or negative, but for someone with a disordered brain, it's going to catch you.

The brain is going to hold on to something and be like, here's your new rule.

And I needed to have no rules.

I needed to learn how to listen to my body.

There's a very simple scale in intuitive eating, which is the hunger and fullness scale.

And I actually had to assign myself a number.

I'm feeling like a hunger level of four or hunger level of three to begin to teach myself.

If you're at a three, let's feed your body now.

And let's not eat to a 10.

Let's eat to a six or a seven.

One of the things I found very interesting when learning about intuitive eating was there's a moment of pause before you eat.

Before you sit down to a meal and you take three full breaths of pause before eating.

And I almost wondered if that was almost like a prayer, like some cultures pray before they eat.

It is a moment to have gratitude and to have awareness and intention about eating food.

I never had intention when I ate food before.

I could see that being the reason for it.

That sort of awareness and intention, thanking each other for the food, bowing to the chef.

It's interesting because I found myself on the other side, especially when I was younger.

When I would eat, I would really pray before my meal.

I was religious one to begin with, but two, I don't know when I'm going to have more food again.

There's a part of me that's just being really thankful.

Of course, I masked it under my belief of like, thank you God for this food, so on and so forth.

I forget what the prayer was.

I was 10, 12 and a teenager.

But we are in the exact opposite of this thing.

We kind of, we were inverted on how we perceived food.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a lot of information that you had to live with constantly.

But then you got this sort of roadmap for once that somebody could, your therapist said, go to this place for a roadmap.

And then you found the roadmap.

It's instinctual eating?

Intuitive eating.

It's intuitive eating.

And then you can find this roadmap, but you still got to walk it.

The roadmap is not the terrain.

You have to go and do it yourself.

What is it like now?

I just realized that every single step in that book was, it does not come from without.

It comes from within.

So my answer is always check into my body.

How do I feel right now?

Okay.

And my body has to hold all the answers.

And that has been a theme of mine for the last couple of years as well.

Oh, just deadline is great.

Say that again.

My body has to have all the answers.

My body holds all the answers.

There you go.

Okay.

I couldn't trust my mind, right?

I couldn't trust that drill sergeant voice in my mind because he was barking orders from the without.

This is what other people are going to be able to tell you how to eat.

And whether you look good enough and whether you're doing it right or wrong.

And that's not trustworthy.

I have to come back to my body for the answers all the time.

And what that looks like every single day is checking in.

I know I haven't eaten yet today, but am I hungry?

And sometimes I'll now eat at 11 and sometimes I'll eat at nine and sometimes I'll eat at noon, but I never go past noon because I know I personally don't like eating in the morning, but I have to listen to my body.

And guess what?

That time when I get hungry, it changes every day.

Totally.

But that's a concept to me that I didn't understand before.

I just was adhering to the rules of, well, don't eat until one or two or three o'clock in the afternoon.

So listening to my body, checking in, constantly assessing where am I on the hunger and fullness scale.

I'm still new.

I'm two years into this journey.

So I'm a toddler still and I've relearned how to eat.

It's full circle as we can get at the moment because you're in that young toddler child stage.

So then that photo of that child in that picture, if you see it now, what do you think?

I used to hate that little girl.

And now I feel so much compassion for her because she really was living her joy.

I was without joy because of my relationship with food and my mind.

I was really without the joy of food and without joy in my body for so long that I am now trying to find her again.

That freedom, that carefree quality of, I don't give a crap what anyone thinks of me and my bathing suit.

I am living my best life and diving into this pool.

You've shared multiple times with me when you have some of those feelings that show up for you and watching you deal and work through them is ultimately inspiring.

It is beyond motivating.

Thank you.

It makes me feel luckier every day to be your partner because I get to watch you show strength in a space, your mind that is, that is with you every single day.

Yeah.

And if you're doing this work now, you vocalize those things to me.

Yeah.

But there's something to be said about you consistently having the endurance to show up for it when it shows itself.

Yeah.

I try to unmask that voice when I hear it in my head and the drill sergeant gets louder and louder.

And I'll say it to you because I want to recognize that that is the drill sergeant voice and not my own.

And we can laugh together about, well, that's a ridiculous thing for him to say.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What about you today?

Tell me, like, getting from that hunger pain of childhood to where you are now, like, catch us up a little bit.

A lot of my teenage years into my 20s were eating when you can, if you can, because otherwise you'll die.

Whoa.

Wow.

Yeah.

And there were moments, especially in my middle teens, that I was living with my mom.

My mother loves to cook.

She loves it.

Right.

That's that's one of her favorite things to do.

It's her love language.

That is her love language.

When I got here to L.A., one, just being a musician and not having much money, and then two, spending my money that I did have on unhealthier things.

Food got put to the side unless I really, really had to.

And some of my thought was, well, you've survived already with minimal food.

I think you can be okay here.

Without realizing the nutrients aren't just for my body.

It's for my mind.

It's also for me caring for myself.

Yeah.

So the moment that I got sober and the moment I became a Buddhist and I started watching my thoughts, I could spot the moments in my life that I was telling myself, I'll eat later.

No big deal.

And then this little seed started to grow out and say, how about you just eat what you want right now?

Go for it.

And when I met you, you were eating whatever you wanted.

Yeah.

So that realization, me being more successful in my career and having money, both of those, I was doing inner work.

And three, actually, appealing to the inner child.

I bought some action figures around that time.

And I started playing with them because the kid in me wanted to play with action figures.

Sometimes when he was younger, if he got a B plus, his toys would be thrown away.

So I got the three action figures.

I lucked out and found the ones that I used to have.

And I played with them for like two, three weeks.

And then the next thing came up was, you want food?

What do you want?

And as a personal trainer, it's weird to say this, but for like two years, I just wanted to have Taco Bell, pizza, cookies, cheesecake.

And not one time, not a single time, did I say no to that inner child.

And I was appealing and appeasing the hurt version of me.

And somewhere in there, I had served not just the hungry child, but the forgotten child.

This is where our stories intertwine because you and I met one year after my diagnosis and sort of freedom from this voice.

And I was still working on it.

And you and I met and you were eating like that.

You were eating pizza and so much sugar.

You had cookies around all the time.

And this is how I know I've grown because I was not judgmental of you because I heard that whole story of your childhood.

And I understood why you were gifting your inner child the food and the sweets that he wanted as a child.

So to me, it was such a beautiful act of process that I just, I knew that I don't eat like that and that it wasn't quote unquote healthy, you know, but that was healthy for your mind and your spirit.

Right.

Absolutely.

And I never once judged it.

And I never once told you to do anything differently or even suggested because I was thoroughly impressed that you were doing that for your spirit.

It was bigger than what the actual food I was eating for myself.

I found this deeper thing of tending to the inner version of who I was that was harmed.

You know, as Buddhists, the Zen Buddhists, we say to have a fulfilled life is the supreme meal.

Right.

So like, so we, yeah, yeah, I love that phrase.

So we have that version of me that was like, I'm recognizing the bit of sacrifice now from the actual unhealthy eating of a lot of sugar and processed stuff for the deeper wound that's there.

And because I recognized it was why I was able to work through it and get to the other side of it.

If I didn't recognize it, I would just, the cycle would keep continuing.

I knew that you are aware of all of that because you told me that story and you told me this is exactly why I eat like this for now.

I didn't need you to be any different.

And I also trusted that this was your process.

And then about a month ago, something changed in you and you said, I'm going to start eating a little differently.

Okay.

What triggered that change?

Do you think?

Did it just get all out of your system?

There's a mystery that I participate in constantly in me and in the world.

And not one time do I ever try to answer the mystery.

I just have an intuitive understanding of this is the right thing.

Going back to leap of faith.

Right.

And I want to say to you listening, if I may, patient endurance is stronger than any sort of white knuckling.

Stronger than any sort of muscle pushing.

We're doing this now.

I'm going to drive, you know, this month for sober October or dry January or no sugar September or whatever it is.

Patient endurance gets you much further.

It doesn't seem like it, but it gets you further.

Because you're enduring what's going on there.

You come out on the other side sharpened.

So for me, I gave myself that space to say, have this, have this, knowing that if I give myself that over time, it's going to transition over.

Because what happens instead, you stifle the inner child.

You stifle the inner child.

You don't let that part heal.

And you cover it up with all these other rules.

No, no, we have to be healthy.

This is what we do now.

It's going to come out in other ways.

Right.

You know, who knows why you had an alcohol addiction and a drug addiction at different points in your life.

Who knows why?

But letting the whole inner child have its moment and then taking the time to heal it, riding that wave.

And now you're coming to a place of whatever is aligned for you, whatever that means.

And that, again, will come to listening to your body.

What feels good in my body.

Absolutely.

And the cool part about all of that is because I listened to it so much and I had spent the time with it.

I know when it's done, it's done.

Because I participated with it.

It's not a what if.

It's not the grass is greener.

Just go to the other grass.

Go to the other side and see that it's not greener.

Go and find out that wherever you are, the grass is going to be quite green.

You have to make that decision.

So when it changed in me and I realized, okay, this is that.

I also wasn't working out either.

I'm a personal trainer.

I didn't have the desire to work out.

And I didn't give myself guff for one time for not working out.

And then because I listened to it, and this is not the physical thing.

I'm not telling everyone to dive into some substances and whatnot.

I'm talking about diving into your own personal crap.

Enduring patiently with that.

And all at the same time, I look over to the child.

What do you want to eat now?

And to follow the metaphor, the child was an adult like me.

I was like, oh, now it's time.

Now you've arrived.

He grew up.

And he grew up.

And so I was like, okay, cool.

We're done here.

Let's make some adjustments.

And for a person who's eating at least one whole pizza a week, I haven't had pizza in like four weeks, five weeks now.

And those things will ebb and flow too.

And they'll ebb and flow as well.

And that's the joy.

That's the joy.

The joy of food.

Yeah.

Thank you for sharing all of that.

Thank you.

And I hope that both of us in our inner child and our grown-up adult versions of ourselves continue to find the joy.

And for the person listening who saw any part of themselves in this episode, I hope you find your true voice underneath whatever those drill sergeant-y voices or not good enough voices are in your head because it only comes within.

It only comes from within.

And your key into finding that out, if I may say to you listening, the moment that voice is comparing anything or taking information from somewhere externally about the validation of yourself is the moment you know that's not the one to listen to.

Because we have a massive society of all of these constructs of where we're supposed to be.

There are so many entry points into any kind of disorder within our culture.

There are trends and fads and breeding ground for a very unhealthy relationship with food of any variety.

There's just so many entry points.

Absolutely.

We all have a piece of this, I think, in some form.

Yes. Yes!

Yep.

Which is some of the reason why we got this show, right?

We're trying to link that up with each other.

And what's more is that every new thing always feels like it's the thing.

Every new trend or fad or diet or fast food is being told to us like, we have found it.

This is it.

Which is never it.

That's not how we work.

It's always changing in this society.

You know, we, I said my mother loves to cook.

She loves it.

It appeals to her in a space of I love to nourish and give.

That is a very motherly thing.

And also she was raised like the woman has to learn how to cook for the male.

The woman has to stay in the kitchen and do those certain things.

Now, one, at some symbolic level, it's mother womb.

It's life giving.

It's nutrient giving because mother gives life.

And so does mother earth.

Totally recognize that.

But let's also not forget that that concept is only about 200, 300 years old.

It was only the industrial era that we decided that because we put men in working time, in working warehouses and told the woman to stay home.

And then we put the kids in a school that aligned with the same working time for the factories.

Awesome.

Exactly.

But before that, and here's more information that no one talks about, the entire history before that, women were able to be traders, like trading goods.

They went to war as well.

They were able to own businesses from 10,000 years ago all the way up to the agricultural era.

It was, for the most part, a lot of kind of trading off.

Like, you do this, I do this.

You do this, I do that.

But we don't get told that.

So we think that this is supposed to be the way.

But that's not it.

That's not it at all.

Let's talk about equity in another episode because I want to dive into that about gender equity.

Yeah, I would absolutely love to because these gender roles are slowly dying away.

And I'm thrilled about it.

And also, you can see the pushback from people who don't agree, who think that I should stay here.

Thank you for sharing.

And thank you for listening to this.

This was really important for me to get out of my body and into the world.

And I really want to hear from you.

What is your relationship to food?

And do any of these voices pop up for you?

And what are they telling you?

Because I'd really, I really am curious what goes on in other people's minds.

So you can send us an email.

Please send us a voice note because we are such a, we're suckers for voice notes.

And you can email it to beautyinthebreakpod@gmail.com

And please share your resources on the topic.

We are all learning from each other.

And it's a beautiful way to get more information that is positive.

Have a great week, everyone.

Thank you for joining.

And please, as always, be kind to yourself.

If this episode spoke to you, take a moment and send it to someone else who might need it.

That's the best way to spread these conversations to the people who need them the most.

And if you want to keep exploring with us, make sure to follow Beauty in the Break wherever you get your podcasts.

We'll see you next time.

Beauty in the Break is created and hosted by Foster Wilson and Cesar Cardona.

Our executive producer is Glenn Milley.

Original music by Cesar & the Clew.