Telling a better story about ourselves is the key to shaping our lives in healthy ways, Dr Libby Weaver said in the latest episode of 'Grey Areas with Petra Bagust'.
The beloved Australian biochemist, who lives in Auckland, says we’re wired to avoid pain more than to pursue pleasure – and while historically that may have meant keeping ourselves physically safe, it’s now about avoiding difficult emotions.
In the 'Grey Areas' podcast, released on Thursday, she recounted a story of a 60-year-old woman who came into her private practice wanting to lose weight, as she “couldn’t stop eating cake after dinner”.
“She said ‘if your only solution is to tell me to stop eating the cake, if it was that simple, I would have done it already’,” Dr Libby recounted to Petra.
“I asked her my gazillions of questions… and she shared that her mother died giving birth to her and her father hadn't spoken to her since she was 14.”
The woman explained that she had grown up on a farm in rural Ireland alongside four older brothers, and loved her childhood there. But when she was 14, her father put her on a boat to New Zealand to be raised by a distant aunt, and she never heard from him again.
“She said ‘he loved my brothers enough to keep them, he didn't love me enough to keep me’ and you can imagine why she would think that. But she thinks that's the truth," Libby says.
She can't hear that that's a belief and that's a story she's created to try to understand her own experience, which is what we do. A belief is just a thought that we've thought over and over again without questioning it.
“And I said to her, ‘What if the opposite is true? What if he sent you away because he loved you so much? Think about it from his perspective. He said you were really good at school; he probably wanted you to get a way better education than you were ever going to get living so remotely.’
“‘You're probably just about to start menstruating. Someone had probably told him about that and he thought she needs a female to help support her with that. So he was prepared to break his own heart and never see you again to give you a better life’.”
“And she said ‘I've actually never thought about it like that’.”
The woman ended up contacting her estranged father, and his story was much like the one Dr Libby had told. Dr Libby said it provided the impetus for the woman to deal with her compulsive overeating in the right way, because trying to simply rely on self-control hadn’t worked.
“It's very rarely about food when people over-consume or starve themselves. They're not doing that really because of the food; it’s these belief systems. Our beliefs about ourselves are very slippery,” she explained.
“I didn't sit there and say ‘tut, tut, stop eating the cake after dinner’... Of course, it's not about not having those things, but every night devouring way too much, she was at high risk of developing type two diabetes.
“But that wasn't going to change if I just sat there and made noises at her and said, ‘Come on, it's time to stop doing that’, or tried to give her a motivational talk. She had to really see that that belief was driving her behaviour. And I'll never get over her courage.”
Dr Libby says the key is not to feel like your body is betraying you or that you’re in a constant battle with it, but to become curious about what it’s trying to tell you.
It's your best friend and it whispers to us in the beginning of little things that it would like us to change, and we don't often pay attention unless it makes us stay home from work or disrupts our life and the way we like to live.
“See if you can pause and consider if this is inviting me to change. What's it inviting me to change? Because there's a voice inside you that has your back.”
Listen to the full episode of 'Grey Areas with Petra Bagust' and Dr Libby here.
