Emma: As I went to leave the flat, I just went, this is an act of self-harm, take your shoes off. And I went and sat down with a cup of tea and just thought, right, this is, this is how tenacious and nefarious this illness is, because you have one sign of weakness and it's in.
Rupy: Welcome to the Doctor's Kitchen podcast. The show about food, lifestyle, medicine and how to improve your health today. I'm Dr Rupy, your host. I'm a medical doctor, I study nutrition and I'm a firm believer in the power of food and lifestyle as medicine. Join me and my expert guests where we discuss the multiple determinants of what allows you to lead your best life. Today I have a very honest conversation about eating disorders, negativity bias and the brain with Emma Guns and Katie Warriner. Katie is one of the UK's leading performance psychologists, working behind the scenes and on the big stage with some of the world's best athletes, leaders and organisations. From the sports field to the boardroom, the helicopter pad to the operating theatre, Katie helps people train the mindset skills and practices essential to thriving under pressure. She's been embedded in Olympic sports for the last decade, supporting many of our most successful athletes at both the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympic games. But she was also a professional athlete herself who had to overcome the issues surrounding food being used solely as a tool for performance and how that was ingrained into her as an impressionable teenager chasing Olympic ambitions. Emma Gunavardhana is better known by her media name, Emma Guns, and is an award-winning journalist and podcaster who I describe as the UK's answer to Joe Rogan. The Emma Gun Show covers topics including beauty, wellness, mental health, eating disorders, business, entrepreneurship and finance, and she prides herself on covering a variety of topics in a way that will be relevant and meaningful to her global audience. And today, I wanted her to share her relationship with food and her personal experience of self-confidence and diet. Both of my guests are pragmatic thinkers as well as passionate advocates for supporting people to develop the mindset that they need to thrive. But I do want to exercise caution with today's show for anyone uncomfortable listening to stories around binge eating disorders, guilt, body dysmorphia and depression. Today, you're going to hear about self-compassion and how our brains work. Katie's experience of negative self-image and body dysmorphia, how food can be naively perceived as a means to achieve something or equally to fill a void. Connections as the antidote to shame and why guilt is a natural and healthy emotion. Yes, you heard that correctly. Why guilt is something that we need to embrace in an appropriate way and how we can use negativity as a foundation for change. In addition, Katie runs online courses for athletes who want to train their mental game, as well as for some who want to invest in their mental wellbeing. And listeners can get a discount to either of those courses by checking out the details at thedoctorskitchen.com. For now, enjoy the podcast. So thank you both so much for making the time this Friday morning to chat with me on the podcast. I love you both. Emma, you're a prolific podcaster, I described you as the female version of Joe Rogan in the UK, which I think is brilliant. And Katie, we were on a webinar a couple of months ago all to do with mental health and specifically for healthcare practitioners. I'd love to start with your journey and your story, Katie, and what you do and introduce you to the listeners.
Katie: Yeah, thank you and thanks for having me. It's really looking forward to the conversation and the lack of structure to see where we go. I think all three of us like to go with the flow. So I mean, I guess the story kind of starts, I was when I was younger, I was an artistic gymnast. I was really, really passionate about the sport. I just there was nothing more I wanted to do with my life than do backflips and somersaults and train and that sort of pursuit of perfection. You know, a tumble well landed under pressure was for one reason or another was was just absolutely what I was passionate about. However, I I I mean, I trained like by the age of about 12, I was training about 30 hours a week. I wasn't going to school. I was sort of exempted from school for various training sessions and so on. And over the years, my sort of love of the sport got got sort of distorted because I had a really, really difficult relationship with a gymnastics coach that I worked with. I developed some, yeah, some really difficult sort of thoughts and feelings about myself, about about my body image and all sorts of things. And ultimately, my love of the sport just just sort of, yeah, it changed a lot. And I ended up at 15 or 16, I actually finished having represented the country, traveled the world and and you know, had had what in many ways was an amazing career, but not not what I dreamt of. And I decided, I don't remember saying this, but my mom always tells me that at 16, I turned around and said, I want to be there for others in the way that no one was for me. I want to help other athletes connect better with their coach, have a better chance of being understood and following their dreams. And and back then, I guess I didn't really know that was a role, you know, sort of that brilliant naivety of when we're younger. So I went on to study psychology. Initially, I suppose because I was interested in how much our brains can be developed, how much our our ways of thinking and feeling about ourselves, you know, is that fixed? Am I just born tough or can I work on my toughness? Can I work on my confidence? And the the field of psychology just I'm so grateful for it because I've just absolutely loved learning about that. And now I'm sort of 15 years into a really, really fortunate career working primarily within Olympic sports, so within Team GB and helping athletes and coaches to make the most of their sporting passions and talents. And I also work alongside a couple of really good colleagues in a few different sort of passion ventures in schools, so helping schools change the way they develop self-esteem within young people and resilience. So, so yeah, really, really varied, but primarily any anyone with a dream, I'm well up for helping.
Rupy: That's amazing. There's so many elements of your story I really want to unpick that. I don't know where to start. I mean, I guess it never fails to amaze me how many times I have someone on the podcast who is doing some incredible feats, whether it be in something clinical, whether it be something outside, who's had a powerful personal story that has fueled their desire and fueled their passion. And I wonder, you know, when you were 16, you felt unsupported. What what things are you doing now? How has your personal experience helped you create a structure or framework or a cushion for people who are in the same sort of high performance pursuit as you were?
Katie: Good question. And it's I I'm still on a journey with it myself. So if you were to interview some of the athletes I've worked with over the years, a lot of them wouldn't actually know anything about my story or wouldn't even know that I used to be an artistic gymnast myself. Over the last few years, I think as you get more and more comfortable in your skin, I've I've noticed that I'm more comfortable talking about it and even like talking with you guys today is like it's quite a privilege actually. I used to think that I really wanted to go to the Olympic games, win an Olympic gold medal and then use the story and use what I'd learned to help other people achieve their dreams. I used to think that was the way to do it. Over the course of my career and with some, you know, fantastic mentors, Pippa Grange, Steve Peters, various people that have supported me, I've come to actually learn that the suffering I had is probably at the heart of of why I'm able to to hopefully make a difference to athletes, coaches and, you know, leaders, teachers today because I I understand what it's like to lose a dream. I understand what it's like to feel that kind of pain and that sort of sense of loss and that that sort of misunderstanding. And I am so, so motivated now to help other people not not have that, but to grow through their experiences, to, you know, to feel supported. So I think initially just intuitively because I'm genuinely, you know, like we all are, we're following our passions and being true to to ourselves and and sort of trying to not not build a life based on a CV, but based on, you know, the eulogy metaphor of who do you really want to be and and what do you want to do with this one precious life. And so I think that that just organically, I hope comes through and I'm kind of, I guess I'm in it for the right reasons for for me personally. But I have over the last few years been able to share a little bit more and I think I think that that just adds authenticity to it. But I'm still figuring it out. It was a good question. I'm still figuring it out.
Rupy: Yeah. I mean, it's a privilege for you to even want to share your story. I think on a podcast that demonstrates, you know, that maybe not the comfortability of being vulnerable, but certainly your authentic self. And I know this is probably really hard for Emma to not jump in with questions because you are a podcaster and I'm sure you're thinking like, oh, I'd love to ask about this. So I'm going to ask you to talk about you for once actually, because I know after listening to so so many of your pods, you're an amazing hostess, you're an amazing person who who has, you know, some really poignant questions, but I want to turn the lens on on you and and allow you to tell your story.
Emma: Thank you. So, it's so interesting listening to Katie's story actually, because I've made notes instead of butting in. So things that you mentioned, mentors, failure, confidence, self-esteem, suffering. And I I wrote those down because they are things that I think I can relate to and I think a lot of people can probably relate to. And I think I started out as a journalist in beauty or a writer in beauty and wanted to work on magazines because I thought it was incredibly glamorous. And so that was my dream in the way that I guess going to the Olympics was your dream. And I somehow managed to get there. I mean, there was a lot of luck involved, but there was also an awful lot of graft. But it wasn't necessarily the dream that I thought it was going to be. And I really struggled with that. I really struggled with the fact that I thought that this was going to be this glamorous life. But in addition, I think I realized that I didn't have any self-esteem, I didn't have any self-confidence. So I wanted to become the beauty editor of a magazine because I thought, well, if that's my identity, then people will like me. I will be valid. That will give me the thing that will mean that I will be able to walk into a room and not feel anxious and not feel that I'm the worst person in the room. And so I aspired and tried really, really hard just to get that label, just to have that identity. And then when I got there, it was like, and now what? It was so that was really a bit of a struggle. And that's I guess the thing that has really informed the podcast in so far as I can't be alone in having all these self-destructive, self-sabotaging thoughts and feelings. And it's so easy to project onto other people around you that they're absolutely winning at life and they've got everything sorted and they know how everything runs and they walk into a room and they feel great. Everybody has gone through something, everybody has had their failure, everybody has had their issues with self-esteem. And I think that's it's really helpful to share those stories. And so that I guess is the basis of why the podcast was born because the really good stuff, the really good stories and the real growth comes from your own failure, but also understanding other people's. And there's a great RuPaul quote, which is the part of the the place on the bone that was broken becomes the strongest part in the bone. And I love that because I just I like the idea of thinking that actually your failures do make you stronger and I do believe that they do.
Rupy: I need to write that down as well.
Emma: I'll send you a meme.
Rupy: Yeah, of course. And you know, obviously the the Doctor's Kitchen podcast focuses on nutrition and and diet as well as all the other aspects of of lifestyle medicine. And obviously we want to go into the other wider determinants of what makes people ultimately happy as well as successful, whatever their definition of success is. And and for you, Katie, you know, one of the things in in terms of how you described it as the pursuit of perfection would have been diet and and the restriction that is almost necessary when it comes to pushing out performance as an athlete. How how was that for you? If we could just zoom in on that perspective.
Katie: Tough. And I've got a little baby girl now, Isla, who's coming up to two and I I often look at her and she's jumping everywhere. She wants to climb on everything. And I'm thinking, gosh, I really want to take her to like a little baby gym. And then there's this other voice that comes in saying, no, I do not want that for her. And but I think gymnastics is working hard to change, but when I was training, I mean, from the age of 10 onwards, I was weighed constantly at training, a couple of times in a training session even, which just scientifically now, and there's no merit to that kind of behavior. My coach spoke to my parents about about my diet and, you know, how rice cakes would be a good idea for dinner because it's very low calories and food is just food became just purely about how to be as lean as possible because gymnastics has the two benefits. There's obviously the aesthetic for some reason, you know, slimmer is is what was considered better. And also then you can somersault more, it's easier to rotate in the air and and all the rest of it. So food became very difficult and it and with that, then it just became a source of control of like, I can't guarantee if I'm going to win a medal, but I can guarantee how many calories I had, you know, I had one of those little books, you know, at the age of 12, like counting calories and you can't unlearn that. You can't unlearn how many calories are in a piece of bread and so on. And so learning how to work with that. And there was a really, really transformational moment for me when I was sort of in my later teens, around about 18, where I realized that I was constantly avoiding going out for dinner with with friends, with school friends and then university friends because I I wasn't able to then know what would be on the menu and how to control that side of things. And there was just this moment where I thought, you know, I would swear, but I'll try not to. Like, this is not okay. I want to live my life more fully. I want food is such a beautiful part of connecting with people and sharing moments and food is food is like so full of pleasure. It's not just something to be controlled and counted. And so it's, yeah, it's been a real journey and I don't I don't, I mean, not every gymnast walks out with an eating disorder, but I think on the disordered spectrum, I know more that do than don't. And I think it's so difficult for it not to become so connected in with your self-esteem and how you're valued and whether or not you're going to get selected.
Rupy: Yeah. I I I know this is a very sensitive topic, so I want to tread carefully with with all the different questions that I ask. But but Emma, you you've have your own sort of story and your own journey with regard to an an obsession or an a disordered relationship with with eating.
Emma: Yeah, 100%. So the bit of the puzzle that I missed out about the girl who got the job as a beauty editor on a magazine, the thing that I stopped myself from saying was, I didn't want to be the fattest beauty editor in the room. And I was. And and from a very young age, I was very doll-like. And I was talking to someone recently and I said, it was almost as if I could divide my childhood into before and after fat. So I was quite doll-like until about the age of eight and then suddenly I changed and it and it was a very stark lesson from the age of eight that you can't really compute at the time, but you understand that the world treats you very differently based on how you look. When you're a cute little kid, the world's your oyster. When you're not a cute little kid, the world is not. And obviously, I'm sort of simplifying it for whatever reason. But I had a very early onset PCOS, so that's polycystic ovarian syndrome. And my symptoms were quite severe and they went undiagnosed until I was 17. So in the interim, around eight, nine years old, my mother took me to the doctor, Emma's putting on a lot of weight. And I was told I was obviously eating too much and here's a list of diet foods. And a little bit like you, Katie, just very different settings, just Emma probably shouldn't eat chocolate, Emma needs to move more. And I really understood the focus of foods now a bad thing, foods wrong. And that really, I guess, started the first knot into what became a huge, huge tangle in terms of body image. And it was only two years ago, so in 2019, I actually had a breast reduction. And it was perfectly, I was a very good candidate for a breast reduction anyway, but I didn't understand this at the time. It wasn't until afterwards I realized that a lot of the reason why I'd undergone surgery, you know, general anesthetic, invasive surgery was because I thought that if I didn't have big boobs that I would look slimmer. So you can imagine the shock when when I didn't have the result that I was expecting. And actually, but it was a very useful thing because I did that thing where I looked in the mirror and just thought, you can't do this, you can't keep doing this. You're 41. Are you really going to be, is this going to be the one thing in your life you can't get a handle on? Is this going to be your legacy? Emma spent her whole life being unhappy with her weight and never, never got on top of it. So I just had to give myself an extremely tough pep talk and also look at it from a completely different perspective. I had over the years been extremely good at dieting and I had been over the years extremely good at working out with discipline and with consistency. And at 6 o'clock in the morning, I would be in the gym and I would be doing my workouts and even the trainers would come over and be like, God, look at what you've done, this is amazing. But I could not sustain it. And so the thing that I really understood and which is its own journey in itself is it's not actually about the food, it's not about the exercise, it's about what's going on in here and I had to interrogate that. And that was the hardest piece of the puzzle, but the best work that I've been able to do in terms in terms of just feeling connected to my body and feeling as though I have some sense of confidence and self-esteem that I realized I never had before.
Katie: For me, like not to kind of put you on the spot too much, but that's why what you do is so beautiful that you might not realize it, but what you do for me is you encourage me to be passionate about food, to to learn about what's possible and the creativity and the and how to kind of like nutrify your body with it and like there's so much connectedness between what we're all doing without it being sort of on the surface necessarily obvious.
Rupy: Oh, no, thank you. No, no, that's very sweet of you. I was I was literally just going to bring you in and just say, Katie, this is not only from your personal experience, but this is sort of your bread and butter, I imagine, because you're you're exposed to a lot of people who are having these sorts of thoughts and these thoughts of feelings around food, albeit in a different in a different sort of industry in terms of of athletes.
Katie: Yeah, I mean, I think you you touched on it at the end there, Emma, you're spot on. It's it's never really about the food, it's what the food represents for someone, whether it represents a way to feel a little bit more in control of a world that we're not in control of, or whether it represents a way to feel a sense of achievement because this is something that I can do and I can see a result from it. Often, I I've I've met a number of athletes that are eating to fill a void because essentially they're trying their very much trying to achieve something in sport in order to feel good enough. The amount of Olympic champions, Premiership footballers, CEOs that I've worked with over the years that on paper seem like they've got it all, like, you know, really, really impressive, they're achieving dreams, they're standing on podiums, they've got shiny things around their neck, and they feel empty from it. And they feel like they kind of almost like, what was the cost of this journey? Was it worth that price? And actually, I thought when I stood here on top of this podium that I would feel so full of of joy, but actually I don't. And there's a really, not a very scientific source, one of my favorite sources of sports psychology is, you know, the Cool Runnings film and there's a quote in that, which is, if you're not enough without a medal, you'll never be enough with a medal. And that's sort of like, when I heard that, I was like, I could never express that as well. That's at the heart of my work. Actually, I don't do an awful lot about sport specific psychology. I do a little bit around, you know, penalty shootouts or decision making or managing nerves, that kind of stuff. But really, the most powerful work I've come to to have the privilege of being involved in is helping athletes and coaches realize that they are enough as they are. You are a human being, not a human doing. Who do you want to be in the world? Now let's go and pursue something that you want to do for fun, not for fear, not for fear that you're not good enough, that you need to get this medal in order to be good enough, to be loved or valued. And just that kind of like stripping it back to what it is to be a human being has been completely transformational actually for me, for for those I've worked with. And that's not what you get taught at at psychology school. You know, it's not on the curriculum. It really, really should be and I want to be a part of changing that in schools. But yeah, it's just that that sort of recognizing why you're doing what you're doing and having that be healthy through a sort of a sort of a route of love.
Emma: It's absolutely, it's absolutely that. And I think someone might listen to me talk and say, well, what did you do? Did you just go on a diet? But it it was about that different approach. So previously, the way that I ate, it was self-sabotaging and there was no connection between what I'm eating and nurturing or looking after myself. And the same with exercise. It was almost a punishment. I mean, I enjoyed it, but I my motive for doing it was almost like, you're going to, I'm going to punish you until you lose weight. And it was changing the mindset to, I'm going to feed myself in a way that the person that somebody who really loved me would feed me. And I'm going to exercise in a way that somebody who really wanted me to remain fit and strong and healthy would want to, because there's that great James Altucher quote, nobody, nobody wakes up in the morning and wants your success more than you do. Like it has to be you that wants it. So I listen to all these inspirational podcasts and I tap into all this inspirational stuff from James Altucher and RuPaul. But just when it came to how I viewed my body and whether that's because I succumbed to diet culture or not, I wasn't actually at any point, nothing I was doing was about an act of self-care or self-love or liking myself. It was all about you've got to change if you and and flipping that vocabulary and sort of, you know, doing a a chart on a piece of paper and going, this is what I'm currently saying, what would be the positive opposite? It was just flipping into that head space, which obviously doesn't just happen overnight, but that would be my thing. It is switching the gears.
Rupy: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, considering the environment that you were working in for a large part of your career in the beauty industry, it just reminds me, I feel like this podcast is turning into quote central here, but you know, the the Baz Luhrmann song, don't read beauty magazines, they only make you feel ugly. That was your constant environment and probably across your desk, you were seeing the latest diets, the latest fads, the the look that everyone should be trying to achieve. And and to to pull on Katie's point, you really have to try and establish the why of everything that we do. Why are we trying to look a certain way? What is meaning to us? What is success for us? and bringing that out. I mean, what what was that process like for you, Emma, in terms of really changing that mindset? Because I imagine, particularly as you're working in the industry at such a a young and impressionable age, it would have become part of your personality, part of your your fabric.
Emma: Oh, absolutely. And I was already very much, I already knew that the images of women that I was seeing on television, they were things that I aspired to, but I knew I knew I didn't look like that. So I was already punishing myself for that, even if I even if I necessarily knew. But yes, I remember a few years ago going around to a friend's house and she said, oh, I'm going to, I don't know, should we get a takeaway tonight? And I said, oh, I'm doing this thing. And she and she just put her head in her hands and she said, every time you visit, you're doing a new thing and based on something that you're trying for the magazine or that you've heard about or that one of your beauty editor friends, she's like, can we just have a takeaway? And can you just eat it? And can we not take out a food group? And I hadn't really realized until then how indoctrinated I was into all of these things. Like one minute you're cutting out carbs, one minute you're trying something else. I mean, I can't even list off the amount of things I've tried. So I was very susceptible to it and I did completely fall for it. But I think the the difference in I read a book called Brain Over Binge. And it's by an author Catherine Hansen. And that really, I read it at a point the day after I'd looked in the mirror and I had said, we're not doing this at 50, Emma. And this is the same woman who had looked in the mirror at 16 in the summer holidays between the fifth form and the sixth form, fifth form being uniform, sixth form being own clothes, and had said, you're not going to be a fat sixth former and was. And so I just didn't want to keep having that conversation with myself. Like, really, I didn't. So I read the book Brain Over Binge. A friend had recommended it to me, someone, a really good friend who's recovered from anorexia. And she said, I know that you don't have my issues, but I think this might help. And I was quite cross at the idea that I might have binge eating because even the idea of binging or admitting to a binge was just so shameful. I was just, how could you possibly say that I would do that? And I read it in one sitting, so technically I binged it. And it and I did speak to the psychotherapist Mandy Saligari about that and she went, let me get this straight, you binge read a book about binge eating. And we had a laugh. But it it's not like it's particularly scientific, it's not even particularly well structured or well written, but it's incredibly repetitive. And about two chapters in, I thought, this is almost like hypnosis. And it definitely, and I thought, I'm going to go with this. And it was, I genuinely mean this, I read it in what, five, six hours with and I highlighted sections and I went to bed and it was as if overnight I had had a software update. And when I woke up the next morning, the way that my fundamentally my behavior around food was changed forever, not permanently, because we can talk about relapses and setbacks, but it just fundamentally helped me understand that what I was doing was self-sabotaging. And there was this constant conflict where I I spent my life talking to my friends saying, does my bum look big? Do I look big in that? Do you think I'm fat? All of these things. I was a real Debbie Downer to be around. And I was constantly looking for reassurance from other people. And that made me realize that this is just something that I had to completely break that way I was thinking was something that had to be broken because it's unbelievably unhelpful.
Rupy: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Katie: I mean, it's it's linked to how we relate to our emotions and how we I absolutely love you know Liz and Molly, I don't know if anyone's seen on on oh, they're amazing. They've got a book called no hard feelings. Oh, like they put out these really great sketches of our emotions at work. And how actually we need to really embrace our emotions more and be able to talk about it and move on from the narrative that it's weak to talk about your emotions. You know, I've worked in men's team sports for over a decade now and big, big, massive, burly rugby players. I might ask them like, how are you feeling? And they'll say, I'm thinking about what I'm going to do in training. I'm like, that's nice, that's a thought. How are you feeling? I'm I'm feeling ready to go. That's trying to get to feelings is so critical. And then talking about feelings like let's take guilt for example, what we talked about before was guilt can be and and should be viewed as a really healthy emotion. It's a really healthy emotion that sends off a bit of an alarm to say, do you know what, I've done something wrong. I've done something against my values. Maybe I want to be healthy and I want to love and nurture myself and I've just gone and eaten a ton of chocolate without any mindfulness. I didn't even enjoy it. I got to the end of the packet and I I thought I had another bit left but I didn't because I wasn't even paying attention in the first place. So actually I feel a bit guilty about that. And now we've got the risk of like, oh, it's eating disordered, but it's not. Guilt is a healthy emotion that says, I did I did something against my values and that guilt motivates us to do something about it. I'm going to treat myself a bit better. I'm going to call that friend that I forgot whose birthday it is, whatever it might be. I'm going to pick up the phone to my mom because I've not spoken to her in a while. So guilt can drive us to back to our values, can drive us to do healthy, positive things. And it's it's an emotion to be listened to and respected. But what happens more often is that guilt, as you said, spirals into shame. And the difference is guilt is I did something wrong. Shame is I am wrong. There is something wrong with me. And from there, it's like, where do we go? Where do you go from there now? Like you then now spiral down, whereas guilt can project us forward towards positive action. Shame keeps us trapped within ourselves. Now, if there's something wrong with me, I now need to retreat. I I don't want to be seen. I and then actually I'm going to do more of that kind of behavior. So then when whether it's food, exercise, whatever it is, whenever it becomes linked to shame, then it's so difficult to talk about and work with because it's so it feels so deeply personal when the reality is it's it's often helpful not to see it like that. And that links back to
Rupy: Exactly. Yeah, this this really links back to how you want people to understand how our brains work in terms of the neurochemical changes that occur when we perform actions and how we respond to those. And one of the things, and obviously this isn't going to happen overnight for people, you know, suddenly guilt is a healthy emotion and then this is going to spur me on to do great and and amazing things. It takes time, it takes practice. But if we can reframe guilt as a as an opportunity to improve ourselves, I think that's what we should be striving for rather than restricting ourselves from even thinking about guilt. You know, it's and and there's a bit of a conundrum there.
Katie: Yeah, I love the way you frame that. I'm going to need to take that. Guilt is an opportunity.
Rupy: We created a new quote. Yeah.
Katie: Yeah.
Rupy: Emma, did you have any thoughts on that? Sorry.
Emma: Yeah, I was really curious about how you how do you can you diagnose shame? Can you like, can you see it? Can you know that you have it? Can you see it in other people? That's what I think confuses me. I I totally think you're 100% right. But then if shame is the bad thing, how do we expose it so that we can move it towards guilt?
Katie: It's amazing what you just said there and it's not I guess like shame not necessarily the bad thing, but just unhelpful. Unhelpful. Like just, you know, is it helping you be the person you want to be and live the life you want to live? No, because shame makes us there's an amazing, amazing psychologist who I have a massive girl crush on called Brene Brown, who maybe many of your listeners might know, you guys will know. And she obviously she's a has deep expertise in the psychology of shame and she talks about that for shame to exist, it needs silence. So it breeds like in the petri dish of silence of like because I'm not going to talk about it because I'm ashamed of it. So now I can't tell you that I picked whatever was, you know, the example of like I picked something off out from the bin or whatever it might have been because I'm ashamed of it because I think there's something wrong with me for doing that. Whereas actually, if you see that as a behavior, let's think of it in the context, let's think of it as to what that behavior, what purpose is it serving for you? Because at some point in life, that behavior may have been what got you through a really tough time, seeking comfort in food or whatever it might be or whoever it is we're talking to. So when we can just try and depersonalize it somehow and just think, what what is this behavior doing for me? So if I, you know, if I don't feel good about myself and I shrink back and I, you know, I don't I don't want to go out for dinner with my friends, that's serving a purpose. It's trying to make me feel safe. It's coming at a cost because I'm now losing the opportunity to connect. And that's the thing we then need to talk about. So I yeah, I mean it's just fascinating.
Rupy: Yeah, yeah. And I I you know, I love talking about this because to to your point, Emma, it's it's very hard to objectively define, I think for a lot of people whether they are experiencing shame or another word to describe their feelings. And it's the same way I try and explain to people the various levels or the spectrum of low mood and depression. On one hand, you have what I describe as subclinical depression where you can still perform your daily activities, but you generally feel low, but not low enough where you fall into the clinical spectrum where you can't get out of bed, you're having ruminations, you're not eating, your sleep is disturbed, etc, etc, etc. So I think to a degree, we all experience some shame and we all experience the wide uh uh vernacular of or the the wide spectrum of different emotions, but to varying degrees. And um it's, you know, and this is to your point, uh Katie, this is why it's hard to have a discussion about this on social media where most of your message is being miscommunicated.
Katie: And yet it's so important to and there's so like there's so much amazing stuff out there on social media, both as a platform, like, you know, what Marcus Rashford's doing around child poverty or, you know, there's so much beauty and brilliance in social media. We wouldn't be here connected now if it wasn't for social media. So I think it's just let's keep let's keep talking about it. And then and then being able to stop and think actually like this, you know, this sort of mantra that I'm not my thoughts because you you have thoughts. In the same way as I have I have toes, but I'm not my toes. As though suddenly when it comes to our thoughts, we like we fuse with them so much. And so if I'm having thoughts that feel shaming of there's something wrong with me, I shouldn't, no, I don't want anyone to know that about me, then being able to step back and think, I notice that I'm having these thoughts. And in that space between me and the thought is space for me to think differently of actually, what would I want my friend to feel like that? What would I say to my best mate if they were in that situation and find a bit of a wiser, more compassionate voice. And then we're starting to learn and work with with our thoughts and feelings rather than being driven by them because, you know, you talk there about your depression and subclinical and like that that sort of belief that we should be happy every day is just so, so unhelpful that our brains are built to make that actually they're built to be negative. You know, I love that kind of story. I think it's Russ Harris who talks about that if you imagine back in caveman era, you've got um, I hope this isn't too much of a tangent, but if you've got two like, you've got two two cavemen, Bob and Bill. Bob is really positive, he's really happy. He's like, yeah, this is great. And Bill is just really anxious and worried about everything and thinks the worst case scenario all the time. If there's a rustling in the bush over there, Bob is going to be like, oh, whoo, friend, let's go. And Bill's going to be like, oh, could be a dangerous predator. I'm going to seek cover and hide. If it is a predator, Bob's dead. Bill survives. So negativity and worry and doubt and insecurity is an evolutionary useful trait. And that's how our brains have evolved to actually it's helpful to think the worst, to worry, to be anxious, to, you know, and all the rest of it. So once we we've got that primitive thinking machine in all of us have, we didn't get any choice about that. You had that at birth. It's not even anything to do with you. And that part is the one that then runs so many people's lives. And that's the part that then thinks like I need to look a certain way in order to be accepted because, you know, back in the tribe, if I didn't fit in, I'm probably not going to survive because I can't hunt with people. I'm not going to get protection if we do get attacked. You know, so being in a tribe was really such a such a survival requirement. But now, like our tribe is like millions and millions of people that we're now comparing ourselves to and it just creates so many problems until we start talking about it like this and seeing it for what it is.
Rupy: Absolutely. It's a I had a no, that's a great tangent because it reminds me of a conversation I had recently with Mo Gawdat, who is a person who's had depression most of his life. He had to endure the loss of his young son to a freak accident during a a routine surgery. And um, he describes our brain as running on old software. And we are currently operating old software in with new hardware. And there's a disconnect between that and we have to learn how to navigate our new hardware using old software. And I think those tools about discussing how our brains work, for example, understanding the negativity bias are super important for for everyone to understand, not just children, but also adults. And and Emma, you know, you've bravely shared about, you know, how you still have relapses and stuff. I wonder how how, I mean, it's really authentic and really encouraging that you're able to have to to be able to talk about that even even now, even today. I mean, what what sort of coping mechanisms do you rely on to to get you through?
Emma: Oh, that's a really great question. I think I just have more trust in myself. So what you were saying, Katie, about the negative negativity being quite good for us because it's a survival mechanism. I think it's really intoxicating to feel as though you've got the answers so that you don't need to learn anymore. I think that's a really intoxicating feeling. I think that also speaks to what we were talking about about social media. If a meme sounds great, it's really it can be quite seductive to think, well, I'm just going to live by that or somebody says I should live this way, I'm just going to do that. And actually, I think one of the things that I rely on is seeing the part on the bone that was broken becomes the strongest. So even though I was very quickly able to catch what happened at the weekend, I it was a really good signpost essentially for because I was able to go sit down and you know what it's like when you read a book or you learn something for the first time, you you retain it for a while and then you might forget bits and you need to go back and revisit. So I just saw it as a really good opportunity to pick up that book, go to the highlighted sections, remind myself of the things that I know to be true, also just slow down and also just honestly, without sounding like an egomaniac, just thank myself for what I've done to this point so far. I just go, actually, do you know what, in the grand scheme of things, you've done really well. So today was a bad day, you caught it, it doesn't need to be a bad day anymore. It was just it doesn't even need to have the bad assigned to it. It was just an opportunity to to look back and go, right, you've done this. If and I I think about, okay, what if I hadn't read that book and had gone into lockdown? That is something I think about like because of my toxic relationship with food, would I have relied on it really heavily? Could there have could lockdown have actually been really quite dangerous for me? So I'm so I just was thankful for the fact that, oh, thank goodness you read that book before, you know, six months before lockdown because you've got your head together before you were then presented with something that would have been really challenging given your previous head space. So I think that's is a long-winded way of just saying there aren't any specific coping mechanisms in that I don't go to a particular website or what what have you. But I think it's just revisiting your progress and acknowledging the progress that you've made. And then then you don't want to then go out and sabotage it because you think you sort of tot it up and it's like counting out your money and putting it all in one place and seeing it and you go, actually, there's a lot there. I'm going to I'm going to not spend that. I'm going to invest it. I'm going to a high yield interest account and I'm going to I'm going to um I'm going to capitalize on it and I'm going to make more of it. So I think that was what that's why I'm not too upset about what happened at the weekend and why I'm happy to talk about it. Because what I also don't want to do is be one of those voices on social media who says, I read a book and look, because for before I read the book, all you saw of me on social media was from the neck up. And then gradually I started to, you know, the camera started to zoom out and people started asking me, have you had bariatric surgery? What diet are you on? You know, there was a lot of interest and I was ignoring people. And then I decided to address it and so I was honest with what had happened, but I think it would be really disingenuous of me to present that I read the book and now look, I've dropped 30 pounds and clearly I'm more confident, not because of my weight loss, but because of the other issues, the mental issues and the fact that I've sort of sorted my head out. So I would feel very disingenuous if I didn't say, ah, but it's not linear and there have been setbacks. I still beat my myself up some days, but I am able to catch it because of the work that I did a couple of years ago.
Katie: I think that's such a beautiful answer and like you I almost feel like people like rewind that and listen to that again. Because like within that you talk like you talk just to pull out a couple of things that I heard that I thought were brilliant is like they're simple but those are the best things is like you you said slow down because the primitive part of your brain that was trying to hijack you in that moment is really fast. It's sort of five times faster than your logical who you your real self. You know, when you try and think about prefrontal cortex and all the rest of it, which is where you're thinking, hang on a minute, let's look at how far I've come. So in slowing down, sometimes that is the that is all we need to do to then allow the kinder voice to kick in. And then you talked about like thankfulness. So like when when we're feeling a bit anxious, the antidote to anxiety is often gratitude. So if we can switch to a point of gratitude of like, actually, I'm really proud of myself. I'm really proud and I'm really thankful that I read that book and I've made this like there was so much wisdom in what you talked about. Have you heard of, you know that Japanese phrase Kintsugi? It's similar to what you're talking about there, you know, that when you in in Japanese culture, if you break a a bowl or whatever, they then put it back together with gold and that's that's so it's through our imperfections that we become valuable and beautiful and and all of that sort of stuff. So, yeah, I loved that.
Rupy: That's brilliant. Yeah. I mean, that that for me, I I I know that um that that Japanese concept and and for me it's just so beautiful because it again, it's like finding opportunity in what might be a situation that is frustrating, um embarrassing as well. And I think, you know, what what's really powerful about these conversations is that we've all had personal experience with ill health, whether that be body dysmorphia, mental health problems, physical health problems. And it just reminds me and I I feel like we're going to end on this quote now of um this Rumi quote, which is the wound is the place where the light enters you. And and again, it's it's all about finding opportunity in places where you feel very down. And again, like I'm I'm not trying to suggest that it's easy, it's a process. In the same way, my meditation practice that I've been doing for years still feels very frustrating and I don't feel like I'm anywhere near Nirvana at all or, you know, becoming a very well-rounded, rational person, but you know, it's the process that you have to fall in love with. And um, yeah, no, I I uh I I've really, really enjoyed all these different concepts. It's it's incredible.
Emma: There's another thing, another quote I do want to bring in.
Katie: I know I've got you've made me think of the other Rumi quote, which is one of my favorites, which is like something along the lines of uh there is out beyond right doing or wrong doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. Which is I feel like this conversation's been about is like, no one really no one's got the answer, have they? We're all figuring it out. Let's not label things right or wrong. Let's just chat. Let's connect and let's see what emerges from that because human beings are such such amazing creatures that so much good stuff can come when we do that. So yeah, I think we need to now ask all the listeners like for their favorite quotes and we're going to like double our quote.
Rupy: Yeah, I know, I love it. That's brilliant.
