Latest / Giving Pain Purpose with Lyndsay Soprano / Stop Eating Pain Away with Amber Abila
Transcript
- Lyndsay Soprano (00:01.887) So if you guys have been listening to this show for even a little bit of time, you know that I do not like food. Not at all. I have always said I wish I could just be given a pill to take every day that has all the nutrients that my body needs to be amazeballs and call it a day, right? I find cooking and planning and shopping and shopping and all of it totally ridiculous. But I guess eating has been a thing for a while here on this planet. So. We probably need to start feeding our body a little bit better, my darling, and I'm speaking to myself there, to support the healing that needs to happen with the pain that I live in, right? But it's hard to do when you feel like shit every moment of your life. And who wants to eat when you've just puked for a few hours in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evening? I don't. So what do we do about this relationship with food that we all have? And some of us have really great relationships with food, and kudos to you. Others do not, I am one of them. And my guest was one of them and now is a rock star in the food department and she's gonna get into that. like, ew, eating is so challenging for me. And so this conversation is gonna be good because we're talking about rewiring our brain as well. And that is a huge thing for all of us that live in chronic pain and who deal with chronic illness as well. So let's find out what we can do here today and what does our brain actually have to do with all of this. So let's find out. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to my guest today, Amber Abila. Hello, Amber, darling. Amber Abila (01:32.01) I'm so excited to be here chatting with you. Lyndsay Soprano (01:34.447) my God, I'm so glad. And if you guys see her, her eyeballs are like stupid, spectacularly gorgeous. So it's gonna be just, you're distracting me with your beauty here, honey. And I'm already sweating because I get hot and bothered when I do my episodes. My gosh, I'm already charged up here. All right, well, real quick about Amber. Amber helps people stop binge eating and overeating by rewiring their brains so they can feel normal. I don't even know what that even means. Normal me? and in control around any food. Through coaching in psychology, she learned that there was nothing wrong with her and she just needed some simple brain tools to start making dramatic shifts in her eating habits and life. She now walks others step by step through her process in her signature confident eater program, which we're gonna get into, as well as on her podcast, which is like rip roaring amazing in the top 3 % worldwide called Become a Confident Eater. So. All right, I'm rolling out the red carpet for you, babe. I would like to start a little bit about your story, your backstory about binge eating and overeating and the why behind it. And let's take it from there. Amber Abila (02:38.094) Yeah, so as Lindsay mentioned I am a binge eating coach and I am here today after years and years of struggling with food myself My journey started when I began calorie counting. I wanted to lose some weight It felt like such an innocent thing to do. I'm just gonna cut back a little on my food I'm gonna be a little bit better a little healthier But that soon spiraled into this obsession with calorie counting with always needing to know how much calories were in things and what my calorie count was for the day. I could not leave behind my fitness towel on my phone. I was opening it all the time to make sure everything was tracked. And over time, I kept restricting more and more because I wanted to lose more and more weight. And I remember the first time my first binge happened. It was around Christmas time and I thought, my gosh, I've been so good. Let me just go down and have a cookie. So I had a cookie and then I had another and then I had another and another and another until I had seven cookies in a row and I felt just such. immense guilt and shame that that was also the first time I ever purged. And so I told myself, okay, just this one time and that will be it. But then a couple of weeks later, it happened again, and I binged and then I purged and then again and again and again. And so I did struggle with bulimia for a bit too. And I just realized at a point that I cannot keep living my life this way. It was taking over everything. It was ruining my relationship mainly to myself, but also how I was showing up in my work life with my friends. I'm really with everyone around me. So I decided I was gonna go to therapy and get some help. But unfortunately therapy did not do the job for me. And after many months of therapy, I just didn't feel like I was making any progress. It did help me with the bulimia side of things where I was no longer purging, which is good, but I was still really stuck binge eating. And I wasn't sure what was wrong with me. I had stopped restricting at that point. So was eating enough food and everywhere I went, it just seemed to be like, Lyndsay Soprano (04:22.488) wow. Amber Abila (04:30.37) Take a bubble bath, call a friend, chew some gum, eat more protein. I'm like, I'm doing all these things. Like, what the heck? Lyndsay Soprano (04:35.317) Go choose some gum. Yeah, that helps me. When I'm nauseous and I don't want to eat, yeah, go choose some gum. That'll help you. No, it will not. It will not. Amber Abila (04:43.96) So I kept seeing all these band-aid solutions that didn't really address, why was I wanting to binge and overeat so much in the first place? And I came across this book called Brain Over Binge by Katherine Hansen. And this book was the first thing that basically described that binge eating is a habit, that it's not something that's wrong with you, you're not disordered, you're not broken. It's just that your brain at one point, because you restricted, know, sometimes on occasion binge eating can stem from trauma, but I don't work with that. the majority of people who are binge eating is usually from a history of dieting. And so you started dieting, your brain started eating a lot of food to try to help you survive and help you cope with not starving basically. And then from that place, it started to create a habit out of this and start to learn, this human probably needs this much food to survive because she's doing this all the time. And so that really blew up my whole mind and my whole world and it made recovery for me so much simpler. And you know, there was a lot, else in my recovery journey besides just that insight, but that was definitely the moment where everything started to shift for me. And I started to view these urges around food as harmless, around as powerless, as meaningless, as something that didn't really have any significance to my life. And I didn't need to like dive into for 10 years of therapy to figure out. And then once I did that, I really started to show my brain how binge eating was not pleasurable. And it was causing me pain that this myth of that it was helping me Like hope in my life and it was helping me feel better was actually just that a myth because I never felt better after a binge I always and only felt worse and so I started telling myself the whole truth about the story that every time I bend I'm going to feel horrible and not just like in a I'm gonna feel bad way, but really showing my brain like specifically the negative consequences I would get from it and then the flip side also how I can literally rewire my brain to not need to binge anymore because every time we do something, it's like taking a vote in our brain of yes, keep this brain pathway or yes, eliminate this brain pathway. And so when we stop acting on the urges to binge, our brain will literally rewire itself so it stops giving you those urges to binge. And that's how you become this normal natural eater who just doesn't want to binge anymore. Lyndsay Soprano (07:03.349) That's insane. The brain is so incredible to me. It's so powerful, the power that we can make decisions and change things, to change our habits. it is. It's like drugs, it's like alcohol, it's the same kind of a thing. It is a bad fricking habit and it kills us. And as you were saying things, I've gone through some addiction in my life and a bunch of people in my life have been addicts forever. In fact, I just recently lost my sister to it. it's one of those things where... Amber Abila (07:18.638) you Lyndsay Soprano (07:32.499) you automatically go to the fridge to go grab your glass of wine, or you automatically go to your pipe to go smoke your pot, or whatever it is, and you keep doing those things over and over like you're saying, and your brain's like, well, this is what we're supposed to be doing. So what do we do now? So now what happens when you make this decision that you're like, okay, I'm not gonna drink anymore, I'm not gonna eat anymore, or I'm not gonna binge anymore, I'm not gonna do these things. What happens in your brain when you just immediately start talking that way? Because I know I do a lot of intention work and I do a lot of like, today my intention was, remember my why. That just was my intention today. And so they need to be also a little bit like, I will feed my body today healthy. So what happens with your brain when you start making these cognitive choices that are so simple and so small, but make these dramatic results quickly actually? Amber Abila (08:23.598) Yeah, yeah. So what you mentioned is that our brain starts to link habits together very quickly. And this is happening because it's trying to make our life easier, right? If we had to think through every single decision throughout our day, every time we brush our teeth, how to do it, it would make our life so much harder. So our brain is taught. Yeah, exactly. Lyndsay Soprano (08:43.541) Yeah, well we would never brush our teeth. Amber Abila (08:47.712) Our brain automates things for really good reason, but a lot of times it will start to automate things that we don't want it to be automated. We don't want to automatically go to the wine every time we feel sadness or stress. But our brain has now linked, hey, when I get home and I'm feeling this stress, I go to wine, it now becomes this chain of habits that happens. Now, when you decide, okay, I'm gonna give it up and you set this intention for it, what's happening is... Once you actually do that, again, your brain is not getting the reward from that habit. So let's back up a little bit and think about what a habit actually is in the habit loop. A habit loop starts with a trigger. So something triggers your brain to say, hey, this is what we always do. Let's do this now. So it's triggering the habit loop. And once we get that trigger or the cue, then we get an urge. This urge is this craving, this desire. Lyndsay Soprano (09:32.661) Mm-hmm. Amber Abila (09:41.346) this dopamine that gets released of, you should go do this thing. I want you to go do this. And then once we act, we do that thing, then the final step is we get the reward from it. And the reward is what reinforces this brain pathway. So the next time that trigger, that cue happens, you're like, yeah, let's do it. Let's go have that wine. Let's go eat that food. So what's important is two things, the urge and the reward. So if we decide that we no longer are going to act on the urge, Right? And then we don't complete this loop. We get the urge and we sit with that sensation of desire and we remind ourselves this is not something we actually want to do, that this is not who we actually are, that this is not in alignment with our goals. Then we're not taking the action and then we don't get the reward, which is a good thing because if we don't get the reward, the brain pathway is not going to get reinforced. So our brain pays attention to that and says, wait a second, I didn't get the reward when I gave you that urge. Lyndsay Soprano (10:33.269) Mmm. Amber Abila (10:39.084) That must mean she doesn't want to do it anymore, and that's what starts to decondition it. Now, on the flip side, you might be thinking, well, I'm not going get that reward anymore. That's no fun. But there's a new reward that we want to give our brain instead. And this is the reward of celebrating ourselves. Any time we have a strong positive emotion or negative emotion, our brain pays attention. Lyndsay Soprano (10:43.189) I love this. Lyndsay Soprano (10:49.431) Yeah, exactly, that's all the reason we're doing it. Amber Abila (11:06.35) Because emotions are signals to our brain that something is happening. They're like little flags that are going up. And so if you're feeling something really strongly, your brain's saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's pay attention. So this could be something like when you were getting bullied on the playground as a kid, your brain paid attention to that and said, oh my gosh, we better protect ourselves from that in the future. Or it can be you went to Disney World for the first time, and it was a really amazing experience. And you really remember that because it a strong positive emotion. So what we can do is we can help our brain. pay attention to what we want to do instead by using this power of celebration. So let's say you get the strong urge for food, food that you don't want to eat or for alcohol that you don't want to drink. And you sit there and you say, you know what, I'm not going to reinforce this brain pathway. We're changing my brain. We're rewiring it. So it doesn't have these habits anymore. You sit through it and we can talk about how you do that in a second too. You sit through it, you get through it. And then you're like, woohoo, go me. Cause what most people will do is they say, my gosh, thank goodness I got through that craving. Like, God, that's over. I'm moving on. Lyndsay Soprano (12:02.165) I know, I know. It's tough because in speaking in regards to alcohol specifically, because I can speak to that, it is hard. But then as soon as you stop doing it, it really is amazing what your brain starts to do. You're like, God, I don't even like the smell of that right now. It's crazy. Amber Abila (12:17.71) Yeah, but you have to celebrate yourself after you do that. You have to notice the positive benefits of, I woke up this morning and I wasn't hungover. Wow, I woke up this morning and I don't have the food hangover of all the sugar and carbs that I ate last night. And that feels really good. And then when we celebrate ourself, it is like neural superglue in our brain. It's going to tell us, wow, remember that time you sat with that urge? That was so fun. That was so good. That was so exciting. And celebrating ourself doesn't have to be like this Lyndsay Soprano (12:28.372) Right. Amber Abila (12:47.042) big grand gesture of going to get a massage or something, it could be just something like telling ourselves inside, literally like, go me, I'm so proud of you, you're doing amazing, I've got you, like let's keep the good work up. All these little positive celebrations and thoughts in our head are what are going to reinforce that brain pathway. And I know here we're talking about pain specifically, and so noticing in your body like how much less inflamed you feel, how much more energy you have, and really reinforcing that feeling. back to the moment that you made the decision not to have that extra food is what's really important to celebrate yourself and connect it to changing that specific habit. Lyndsay Soprano (13:26.489) It's unbelievable the power of our brain and the power of our ability to self-talk to ourself. To be able to just be like, all right, Lindsay, you got this thing. All right, all right, we got this. And I was really proud of myself when I, I used to drink vodka, it was my last day on earth, right? And one day I was just like, I don't wanna do that anymore. And it was like, boom, I cold turkey the hell out of it and. I even looking at a bottle of vodka, like if I'm going through the supermarket or something, I'm just like, I don't even want to think about what that was. And it was hard, but it was so talk about celebrating. I mean, just that in of itself was a huge win for me. And then over time, after that, I stopped drinking wine and da da da da went down the thing. But it was like, that was a big deal for me because it was a huge part of my life. My ex husband and I's life. was just like what we did. And when I get a worst him and then started to, know, then things started to slow down and then I had to make new habits. I mean, I just had to. And it's hard to do, but it's also, I can't believe how fast it actually starts to kick in, at least for me, from what I experienced. And I love that you brought up inflammation in regards to pain, because as soon as I kicked back on drinking a little bit, my pain levels started to drop down a bit and I wasn't feeling so puffy and my eyes looked better and my skin started to look a little bit better and I was sleeping a little differently, sleeping, because I don't sleep very much because of pain, but my sleep got better. And so those things are huge rewards for me. I wake up and I'm like, my God, I don't feel like crap this morning. That is a celebration of, that's a celebratory moment for sure. Amber Abila (15:07.63) And notice how specific you were with those things. Like, I'm sure we all just got an image of you, waking up in the morning, your eyes are less puffy. Like, all of these very clear feelings are very important for our brain to conceptualize that change, because people just say, I want to drink less so I feel good. Feeling good means nothing to your brain. Your brain has no idea what that is. That is too generic. Lyndsay Soprano (15:27.029) Because drinking makes you feel good too. I mean sometimes. Amber Abila (15:30.434) Yeah. Yeah. Or if I drink, I feel bad. Or if I drink, I feel bad. Or if I overeat, I feel bad. That is just way too generic. So it's really good to be specific of like, I noticed that if I binge eat the pan of brownies, that my joints feel like red. That my joints feel like they're cracking at the seams. If you can get really descriptive with it and then connecting it back to that cue, the moment you see the brownies, that sensation that you feel. Lyndsay Soprano (15:48.062) Mmm. Amber Abila (15:58.732) That is what will help your brain really conceptualize it versus just this abstract concept of, want to be healthy, I want to feel good, I don't want to feel bad. Lyndsay Soprano (16:06.089) Yeah, like everybody when they wake up on January 1st. Everyone's like, I'm gonna get in shape. And then everybody's in their yoga pants out in your neighborhood. And a week later, nobody's out anymore. No habits got formed. And I do my New Year's resolutions in October. Because you gotta start sooner than New Year's. I mean, I'm just saying. So, okay, so now that we've started to work on these, the... Amber Abila (16:08.545) Yeah. Amber Abila (16:17.198) Thank you. Amber Abila (16:23.095) I love it. Amber Abila (16:29.527) Mm-hmm. Lyndsay Soprano (16:34.843) the habit forming and we've learned a little bit about that and the power of rewiring your brain. Now, how do we work with you? How do you do this with people? Amber Abila (16:42.528) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I take people through a six-step process in my program, and I'll go through each of these steps and a little bit about what we do in each of them. So the first thing we work on is your positive food mindset. So your positive food mindset is basically how you think about food. So our thoughts are so, so much more powerful than we could ever imagine, and I'm sure we all know this. Our language is also really important. Even the person I trained with for coaching, she was talking about with how we ask people how much pain they are in, not like how good they are feeling. And that allows your brain then when you're asking yourself how much pain am I in, it goes, it searches for where's the pain, right? And so our language is really important to how it impacts our feelings and our sensations. And so, you know, just all the different thoughts we can have about food around our, whether we believe it's possible for us or not. Like is this... something that I believe I can do. That's really important, because if you don't believe it's possible for you, it's probably not gonna change. So we work a lot on your thoughts and really asking ourselves, are these thoughts true? That's the number one thing you can ask yourself around any thought you're having, because our thoughts are just that, they're just thoughts, and most of them aren't true, and so if these thoughts are harming us and they're making us not feel great, we wanna question that. Lyndsay Soprano (17:58.005) Well, and to piggyback on that, I opened up with exactly what you're talking about. My words and my thoughts around food are all negative, all of them. And so if I start feeling a little bit better, if I start talking more positively about food and what it's doing for my body, that it's nourishing me, that it's helping my nerve damage to rebuild, it's helping my liver to be better supported, it's all of those things. And I don't, I do. don't want to eat dinner tonight. I don't want to do it. And like my sweetie always in the evening is like, what are we doing for dinner? I'm like, you know what I want to do for dinner. I don't want to do anything for dinner, you know? And so changing that mindset is something that I 100 % have to do. Amber Abila (18:41.034) Mm-hmm. Visualization is also a hugely powerful tool for that. In your situation, what's coming up is I'm imagining, I don't know, like your favorite drink if you like milkshakes or I don't know, juice or coffee or something, like almost imagining like the food lighting down that easily like it. Or, you know, picturing the blueberries going through and... Lyndsay Soprano (18:45.908) Okay. Amber Abila (19:03.692) breaking up into all of their little nutrients and healing all of your cells inside. know, like something that we can visually picture for our mind to help encourage us to eat if we are in that place of like something that would feel really good or like you said, to imagine all that healing happening. But on the flip side, we can use visualization to kind of imagine it. I don't always love using visualization to say like harming us, but really looking at, okay, let's imagine Lyndsay Soprano (19:07.955) Yeah. Amber Abila (19:31.99) you know, a gummy bear breaking down in our body, you know, and all those different dyes and things. More or less, but you know, all the different dyes going into our body and seeping into ourselves. Like we can also use that on the flip side to be like, you know, maybe I don't want that gummy bear and I want a blueberry instead, you know, so we can use the power of our visualization basically to show our brain how it wants to be ahead of time. It's like giving our brain a blueprint of how we want to act and how we want to feel. Lyndsay Soprano (19:37.097) Do they break down? Lyndsay Soprano (19:44.167) Ugh. Lyndsay Soprano (19:50.707) Yeah. Amber Abila (20:01.926) But then the second thing I go into with people is really learning how to eat anything in moderation. And we do this through my signature trigger food process. And the basis of the trigger food process is we do some work on changing our thoughts around the food, but I also incorporate a lot of mindful eating. Mindful eating has been shown time and time again to be so effective in helping people stop binge eating and also so effective for so many other body processes, including digestion. So this is another thing that if we're going into this process of eating, really stressed, really worked up, really angry at our bodies for all that pain it's causing us and all that it's done to us today and how many times it's made us throw up. That's gonna cause our body to really tense up because what stress is to our brain is essentially it means something is in danger. Something is about to happen so we better pay attention to what's about to happen and get ready to fight or flight in case there's danger. And what's happening then is our digestive system shuts down. Lyndsay Soprano (20:54.197) Hmm? Amber Abila (21:00.086) because it's trying to save all of our blood, because we have a limited amount of blood in our body at one time, so it can use our blood for our muscles in case we need to do something about the stressor. And that leaves no blood left for our digestive system. So things, if you ever struggle with indigestion, really, really I recommend to sit down, take a few deep breaths, maybe putting your hands on your heart, being like, I'm safe, I'm here, we're gonna begin eating. slowing down eating, like really tasting the food, notice what you enjoy about it, maybe noticing what you don't enjoy about it. Again, depending on where you're falling on this eating spectrum and what your goals are, whether you're trying to eat more or less. But really just getting present for that experience. And that's also so important to connect into your body. Eating is a very body-based experience, yet so many people are going into it with their head. Lyndsay Soprano (21:34.133) Yeah. Amber Abila (21:47.298) where they're thinking about is this food good, is it bad, am I supposed to be eating this, what am I doing tomorrow, what did eat yesterday, should I be mad at myself for what I'm eating yesterday, and that takes us so much out of our body. And so you can really use this as almost like an experiment of like how can I connect with my body in a really loving kind way and listen to what it's telling me right now and using that to build this relationship up instead of a moment of another disconnection. Lyndsay Soprano (22:12.627) Yeah, my sweetie suffers with his relationship with food is he doesn't care what he puts in his body. It doesn't matter. It's like, if it's food, I'll put it in. Doesn't matter. Unless it's super healthy. So he's Mr. TV dinner. He likes the processed food. He likes the bread. He likes the diet coke. He likes the cookies. And he wakes up really, really early for work because he does a morning drive show in Los Angeles. He eats dinner food at nine o'clock in the morning. He's eating chicken tenders this morning at nine. I'm like, I'm barf everywhere if I have to smell shrimp or chicken at nine o'clock in the morning. Come on, bro. There's no mindfulness going on in anything that happens with him with food. And there's very little mindfulness for me because I just don't eat a lot. But when I do, I am mindful about it. I chew slowly. Amber Abila (22:53.294) and Lyndsay Soprano (23:06.439) I enjoy the flavors. look at the colors on the plate. I look at that broccoli and I'm like, okay, broccoli, you are a bad ass bitch right now. You're going to help me. You know, so there are things. And one thing that was really important for me in my journey too is I had to, had gone vegan many, many years ago and it was like when vegan was like the cool thing to do. Right. And it didn't come from the reasons why we should be doing it, you know, right. But I didn't do it well and I didn't do it smart and it totally f'ed up my body. And so then I went back into the vegetarian world and then just recently I started actually implementing like beef into my diet thinking I was like craving it. My body's like you need to put protein in your body or your body is going to kill itself. Like it's eating, it's eating itself because I'm not giving it any fuel. So it's going after my muscles, it's going after my tissues, it's going after my ligaments because it doesn't have anything else to eat. And so I kept telling everybody I'm like, I literally feel like I'm pooping out my muscles. Like, this is terrible. Like, we've got to get this fixed. So, my gosh. It's heavy. Amber Abila (24:09.998) Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure all that mindfulness came in play when you started eating those foods again too and really just like connecting it to your body and telling yourself you're safe and that you're nourishing it. Like all such important things to do. So then the third thing we work on is your urges and your urges are ultimately the root cause of why we are binge eating. The only difference between people who are binge eating and those who aren't are binge eaters have urges and the other people don't. Like the other people just don't have that desire to binge on a lot of food. Lyndsay Soprano (24:16.703) That's right. Amber Abila (24:40.042) So urges are really the root cause. And something that I am giving all the listeners today is my guided audio to stop a binge. And this is where we really learn about your urges. And in that, I give you some reminders of basically what urges are. Are they're coming from this lower part of your brain that is habitual, that is automatic, that is running like a computer system. It is not thinking logically about what you want or who you are. or what you're gonna feel like in 10 minutes from now. That's our higher brain's job. And so it's really important to recognize and separate out these urges from our lower brain and higher brain to say, hey, these urges are not me right now. I am in charge of me. I get to control my motor functions. I get to control whether I decide to eat that food or not. So I give you a lot of awesome reminders in there and I also take you through a visualization to help you visualize what happens if you do eat the food and what happens if you don't and you're really, really proud of yourself. Then fourth, we go into hunger and fullness. So hunger and fullness, as we've kind of mentioned, is really important to tune back into your body. And I know that, especially with people when they're struggling with pain, I can imagine, there's a lot of disconnection from your body that happens almost as like this protective mechanism of you don't want to hit your leg. Lyndsay Soprano (25:52.469) 100 % accurate statement. Amber Abila (25:55.266) Yeah, tell me more about that. I'd love to like hear a little bit more in your experience so I can understand what that's like. Lyndsay Soprano (25:56.799) Ha ha ha! Lyndsay Soprano (26:01.139) Yeah, I totally feel like I'm disconnected from my body. In fact, one of my acupuncturists from many, years ago, when this all first kicked into gear, she told me to humanize my legs and to name my legs. My feet is where this all started. And so my left leg is Thelma and my right leg is Louise. I had to like, so I like talked to him. I'm like, all right, Thelma, you are being a little bit of a bitch today. Like what's going on over here? And making me talk to them as they're part of my body because they don't feel alive. Like they feel dead, even though they hurt so excruciatingly bad. I feel it, my brain knows it's happening, everything's going on, but I feel so completely disassociated because I don't know who this person is in this body. It's not. Amber Abila (26:36.462) Mm-hmm. Lyndsay Soprano (26:53.439) who I was a decade ago. It's not who I was five years ago even, because my pain hadn't gotten as high as it was five years ago. was like, my God, that was amazing. And I thought I was in pain then. I'm like, great, what's it gonna be like in five years from now? So what we can put up with and what we can take on more with our pain as it increases, you just get used to it. But I definitely do not feel like I am in my body half of my day. I kind of feel like I'm floating around it. I'm not. I don't feel as engaged with myself as I used to. It's sad. It's really sad. Amber Abila (27:29.398) Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I love what you mentioned though about personifying it because it's almost like, you know, if you had a child that was in pain, you want to be yelling at it and telling it, you know, all of these things about how horrible it is and why can't you just be better already lovingly hold that child and be like, I'm here for you and I want to help you and tell me what you need. Lyndsay Soprano (27:39.038) Right. Lyndsay Soprano (27:42.633) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Lyndsay Soprano (27:48.167) Yeah, instead of me saying I need to go to Lowe's and get a chainsaw so can cut my legs off. Amber Abila (27:52.77) Yeah. Yeah. So I think with that, one thing that I'm thinking that's come up with clients before is having this hard time like distinguishing between. Lyndsay Soprano (27:55.603) It's tough. Amber Abila (28:05.228) like hunger and pain in our stomach, where sometimes they don't know if they're hungry because they're like, hey, if I have a stomach ache, I'm not really sure am I hungry right now? Because sometimes a stomach ache can feel kind of to hungry, where it's kind of like this tight cramping sensation. And so if there's any sort of pain that's happening in the digestive tract that can make listening to her hunger and fullness a little bit more confusing, especially if someone's dealing with it chronically, that's where I would recommend something along the lines of getting yourself into Lyndsay Soprano (28:07.893) Mmm. Amber Abila (28:33.912) to the best of your ability, just some sort of regulated meal schedule. And that might look like you might need some more of a meal plan or to put it in a calorie counter to make sure you're getting enough nutrients in and enough protein, carbs, fat, fiber, all of that good stuff. And then kind of using that as your guide. But I really recommend at the times that you're not into pain to notice what it feels like in your body when you're like, I know for sure this is what hunger feels like. Seeing if you can distinguish just little sensations in that difference. Or I did this the other week with a client where she gets bloated a lot and she was like, I don't know if I'm bloated or if I'm full and I can't tell the distinction between them. And so we closed her eyes and we really imagined like, what's a time where you know for sure you were just full versus a time where maybe you haven't eaten in a while and you just feel bloated, you know it's not from the food. And she noticed that, you know when I'm bloated, it feels very airy like a balloon in my body. It feels very light. Whereas fullness feels a little bit more dense and compact. and a little bit heavier. so making that distinction was really important for her so she can start to distinguish between some of these other digestive symptoms versus true hunger and fullness. But there's also nothing wrong with using our logical brain at times to sometimes be like, hey, you haven't eaten all day. You're going to need to eat something. Yeah. We can use our logical brain too. We don't have to only do it. Lyndsay Soprano (29:46.793) You're hungry. Lyndsay Soprano (29:51.027) You are hungry women, you have not eaten in three days. This is what we call hunger. Amber Abila (29:58.21) With that too, if someone's struggling with binge eating and then they're restricting in the sense that they feel like they can't eat because of this pain and these digestive symptoms that are happening, that's something where it's important to remember that our brain and body are always trying to protect us against starvation, because that's one of the biggest threats to our survival. So if you are struggling with binge eating, then after that, when your digestion feels a little bit better, I want people to expect that you're going to probably be pretty hungry. at that point in time, that if you can't stomach enough food in the past couple of days, that's totally okay. You never need to force yourself to eat. But then once that hunger returns, it might feel pretty strong and urgent of I need to get in a lot of food right now. And that's totally normal. We just wanna normalize that experience and be like, of course my brain is asking for a lot of food right now. That makes so much sense. And then we can really pause ourselves and take that time to slow ourselves down. really chew our food thoroughly, just make sure everything is happening at a much slower pace because just like if we don't go, if we don't have water for a while and then we start drinking water, we like chug it. We want to get as much of it right away. I'm gonna eventually be like pause and we like start sipping it a little bit, but the same thing can start to happen with food and if you've had experiences with binge eating before, it can start to feel like, no, here we go, we're going into the binge and then the binge happens and then we're ending up overly full. So just really taking the time to be like, hey, it's okay if I feel like. Lyndsay Soprano (31:05.845) Totally. Amber Abila (31:22.702) I need a little more food right now. It starts off fast, but doing whatever you can to start to slow yourself down, chewing more thoroughly, putting your fork down, putting the food down, taking a deep breath and be like, okay, I have food now. I'm my body. Lyndsay Soprano (31:33.857) Take a breath in between bites, you mean? My thing is we bought really nice silverware and really nice steak knives. We bought new plates. We just moved into a new home. And so we've got like new dining room table, new this, new that all this stuff is new around food. In fact, we just got a furniture delivery into our backyard for our summer. And I'm like, we've got the barbecue. We've got great meat. We're buying better food, right? I'm like, honey, I know that you don't give a crap what the cow ate and where it was raised. I do. I don't want to eat, we call it happy cows, right? Happy cows, happy eggs, happy chickens. That's what we do around here. Like if you're going to bring meat into the house, it's going to be good quality meat. I'm not putting crappy meat in my body after all of this time where these animals have been standing in their own poo, locked together and no grazing, no healthy grass eating, know, like give me a break. So there's an element of that that's incredibly important to me and what those animals went through, how they were killed. I mean, there's so many things, the cortisol that goes into their bodies, we eat it from their meat, goes into our body. hello, and cortisol is such a huge problem for women in particular, but dear Lord. yeah, taking those moments and really appreciating the fact that we can afford to buy really high quality meat, that we can. We have these resources around us. We live in an affluent area. We're in Southern California. The weather is perfect. What's our problem? Lyndsay Soprano (33:04.03) man. Amber Abila (33:05.771) Yeah, I love how you're really aligning your food choices with your values too, because I think that's such an important thing to think about. What do I value out of life? And is that aligning with my food choices too? Because so many people will value honesty, but they're not being honest with themselves about what they're eating or what their eating habits are like. Just some of these values that we think, my gosh, this is what I value in a friendship or a relationship. Communication. I value good communication. Am I communicating with my body? I value my animals having open space. so I wanna, you you probably value giving yourself a really nice, lovely environment too. And so that's lining up with your values on all of that, which I think is an important thing to consider. Lyndsay Soprano (33:48.831) That's great. Yeah, that is true. I didn't even think about it that way, actually. I even though that's what I've been doing, it's just straight up, I don't... I immediately envision what these animals have gone through and what they've been put through and what's been given to them and to their bod. And I'm just like, my gosh, like research, research, research, find out where our meat is coming from. my gosh. Okay, so what's the next step? Amber Abila (34:16.13) Yeah, so we have five and six, we're almost through them. The fifth thing is really creating unshakable confidence in your body. And this one is so important to start to disconnect your weight from your worth. Where for so many years as women, this is what we're taught, that like the worst thing you could do is to be overweight or to have a body that's not accepted by society. And that creates so much pressure on our eating habits that whatever eating habits we're taking from that place of this fear and the shame, Lyndsay Soprano (34:18.143) Huh! Amber Abila (34:44.652) around our body is not gonna be sustainable habits. So we wanna get to the place, I'm a big fan of body neutrality, where we don't have to love our body. There's the body positivity movement, which is amazing, but sometimes that can almost go to this obsession on the other side, where it's like, we are obsessed with our bodies, because we love them so much. And I think it's really good to just find the middle ground of it's like, hey, I have a body, it's cool. We don't spend usually that much time thinking about other things about our body, like our hair. We want our hair to like, we like to like it, but we don't want suss over it like, my gosh, is my hair perfect or do I love it today or I'm obsessed with my hair? You know, it's just kind of there, it just kind of exists. And that's how we want to start thinking about our body too is like, we want to love it, we want to respect it, but we don't need to get to the place where we love every single part of our body. We can just say like, this is just something that is, and I mean, do my best to take care of it. Lyndsay Soprano (35:34.899) Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to not be to not be controlled or have our mind have us think about our body image when we've got every filter on the planet to make us look a certain way. And we've got everybody in Hollywood and all of that. you know, we're surrounded by all these beautiful people all of the time in the Hollywood scene. And we're in Los Angeles. So we deal with a little bit of that. But even just being on Insta and you're looking at all these beautiful people and you're like, that's not me and it's never going to be me. Who cares? I can tell you right now, I do not think that Kim Kardashian is pretty because she's an a-hole. Okay? So be a better person and you're more beautiful. You know what I mean? It's like, you are beautiful no matter what you look like because you are this beautiful soul that has been put on the earth for a certain amount of time. I believe in reincarnation because I'm exhausted. I mean, it has to be. I have to be on my like 20,000th life. I swear to God, I'm pooped. But that... part of it is, you know, it's so important. Amber Abila (36:37.248) Mm-hmm, absolutely. Yeah, I think it's so important to just really show our body that love and respect and appreciation that it's showing us every day and giving it back to it. So then the sixth thing is to shift our identity. So this is one that most people do not think about. Shifting our identity sounds like a little like coach speak, like what does that even mean? So how we identify ourselves is like the lens of what we do and how we show up in the world. So if you are believing about yourself, well, I am just someone who struggles with food. I am just someone who won't get this solved. I am just someone who struggles with my weight. I am just someone who has chronic pain. That is part of your core identity, and that makes it pretty much impossible to change. And this is the problem that I have with all of the anonymous programs, the overeaters anonymous, alcoholics anonymous, is because the first thing you do is you go in there and you say, hi, I'm so and so and I'm an alcoholic. Good luck changing that, because now you are never going to believe that you could, and I know Lyndsay Soprano (37:34.165) that you're not. Yep. Amber Abila (37:34.926) called spiel, but that you can never have a drop of alcohol, which, you know, alcohol is a little bit different than food, but you make it part of your core being, and then it becomes something that's like wrong with you, that's part of your identity, and that's gonna be really hard to change. So for this, what I like to do is really start to shifting like who you are into something that you've done or something that you felt. So what this looks like instead of saying, I am a binge eater, saying sometimes I have binge eaten in my past or Instead of I am someone with chronic pain, sometimes I have felt pain in my life. That just removes it. You could probably even feel like I felt like a weight lifted off my shoulders. like, this is just something I felt. This is just something I've done. It's not who I am at my core. And it makes it so much more easier to shift those things then because then they're not who we are. It's just an action. It's like verbing it. It's making it into something we do or feel versus like a noun of who we are, something that... Lyndsay Soprano (38:31.091) Yeah, it's actionable. And I like that you said this because I have it in my profile, which is, cause I have something called CRPS and I say I have CRPS, I am not CRPS. Because it's so important because there's a gal that I know that has CRPS and she 100 % is fucking CRPS. Like she identifies as this disease. And it's really hard to be around her. Amber Abila (38:44.355) Hmm. Lyndsay Soprano (38:59.869) It's hard to have conversations with her. It's hard to be in the room because like everything is about it, everything. And like the wind blows and it's like, ouch. I hurt incredibly bad too right now. I'm just not gonna talk about it 24 hours a day. Like I try so hard. Like even in the morning it's really tough. It takes me a couple hours to be able to actually put my feet on the ground and walk and even though it hurts with every step by about noonish, I'm kind of like, okay, all right, I've got this. But I try really hard to not do like, my feet are killing me. I try, but there are some times where I just, I can't not say something and I'm trying to work on that, but I definitely love the angle of not identifying as whatever it is. I'm a binge eater, I'm an alcoholic, I'm a chronic pain, you know, I'm this, I'm that. I just have these things where I've suffered with them or I've experienced them or I've had a sensation of that. I think that's such a healthier way of looking at it. Amber Abila (40:01.934) Yeah, and it's so freeing to take that weight off of us of, you know, there's nothing wrong with me. Like we all have habits. We all have things that we like about ourselves. We don't like so much about ourselves, but they're not the core of who we are. Lyndsay Soprano (40:06.921) for sure. Lyndsay Soprano (40:14.293) Sure. No, not even remotely. Yeah, cause if the core of who I was was this disease, then I'm just, just sitting dead. You know, I mean, I might as well just jump off a bridge, get it over with. Because I mean, honestly, if I lived that way, I would have. I absolutely would have. CRPS is called the suicide disease. We lose a lot of people to it. It is higher on the McGill's pain scale than natural childbirth. So I guess I'm just having a baby 24 hours a day, every day. This is really fun. I've never had kids. If this is what it's like, it blows. Amber Abila (40:48.192) Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. Lyndsay Soprano (40:50.869) So six steps and it sounds totally doable. Like and not just for binge eating, you're working more on like the whole person as well. You're not just tackling the food side, you're tackling all of the little things that come around that and that bring us to the urges that you're talking about. The things where you're like, my God, I just need a drink or my God, I just need a cookie or whatever. We say those things so flippantly, you know? God, I just ate an entire sleeve of Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies. Did I do that the other day? Yes, I did. Did I feel like crap afterward? Yes, I did. And then I was like, why did I do that? Why did I even do that? I don't even know. I've been craving a lot of sweets lately because I like totally stopped drinking. And so when that started happening, I'm like, my. God, I really need more sugar than I thought that I was because I was drinking Prosecco like it was a celebration every moment of the day. I did celebrate myself every day. Just not in the right way, right? And so those urges that we have right when that happens, what do we do? What do we say to ourselves when we get that? Like what is a good, quick and dirty little mini fix that anybody that's listening right now could get started on today? when they get an urge to do whatever is bad for yourself. What can we do? Amber Abila (42:10.558) Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think going back to something I said earlier of this thought isn't Whatever your brain is telling you in that moment of I need this wine though to feel good. I just need a break It's too hard. I can't deal with this Really question that thought and be like is this true? Is it true that I can't handle the sensation right now? No, I've handled so many other hard sensation sensations in my life Is it true that I won't make it through this? No, I've done so many other things Lyndsay Soprano (42:16.158) Mm-hmm. Lyndsay Soprano (42:23.273) Yes. Amber Abila (42:39.978) Is it true that I absolutely need this food right now? No, I've had three other meals today. I'm properly fed. I'm really not hungry. So the second we start to question those thoughts is the second that everything changes. And it's really important to come from this curiosity lens, which I could tell you were having in that moment is like, huh, I wonder why that happened. I wonder why I might have done that. Because curiosity is the key to understanding why the things are happening. And a lot of us will just beat ourselves up and just be like, my gosh, I can't believe you did that again. You know, you're so horrible for that. Lyndsay Soprano (43:12.053) Right, right. You were doing so good for a couple weeks and now all of sudden you blew it and beat yourself up and go down the road and feel sorry for yourself and all of that just negative, negative self-talk woes me, all of that. I try very hard to not do that about beating myself up, but one thing, I like your, know, putting your hand on your heart and taking a deep breath and all of that stuff, I've suffered with really, really bad anxiety my entire life and something that I do when I feel that anxiety And it's something that I had to practice doing. And now I do it like nobody's business. I'm like, hmm, okay, take a beat. Why am I feeling anxious right now? What the heck is making me feel anxious? And 90 % of the time, it is the dumbest thing you could possibly imagine. It's some little stupid thing, like an email that came in that just kind of ticked me off or some text message. like, I don't even understand what the hell you're talking about. And why did that give me anxiety? So going back to that and saying, Amber Abila (43:58.264) you Lyndsay Soprano (44:09.859) that wasn't that big of a deal. It's almost immediate. The chest opening and that heavy anxiety feeling getting off of me, my shoulders going backwards instead of feeling slumped forward. Like it's amazing the power of just that little, that little moment thing that I do for myself for anxiety. I'm going to try this in other places. Amber Abila (44:28.542) Yeah, I love this sentence starter of I'm feeling blank because I'm thinking blank. Our thoughts are always what are causing our emotional feelings. It's never our circumstances, like the things that are happening are just going on in the world, but it's where we're telling ourselves about those circumstances that are causing our feelings. So even if we don't even change that, even if we just say, I'm feeling stressed because I'm thinking. Lyndsay Soprano (44:35.199) Mm. Lyndsay Soprano (44:44.67) Right. Lyndsay Soprano (44:50.965) Totally. Amber Abila (44:55.662) I don't know, this email is the end of my life. You know, or whatever it is, this email means that my house is gonna get foreclosed on because someone's requesting this bill for a whole bunch of money. I don't know, whatever it is, you're just taking responsibility for your thoughts then, which means you can change them. Because if you're saying, I'm feeling this way because I'm thinking this, it's like, well, my thoughts are optional. So if I don't wanna change this thought, that's okay, but I know it's creating this feeling, so now I have given myself the option of, if I wanna get out of this feeling, let me change my thought to something that would feel differently. Lyndsay Soprano (45:25.983) I love it. It's such a simple thing. mean, it's like, we make everything so hard. And one of the things that I think is so challenging with food is like with alcohol, can stop alcohol. With drugs, you can stop taking drugs. You don't need them. We have to have food. Like I opened up the episode with, kind of have to do this thing here on earth. Damn it, why does, one of the things that pisses me off though about the food industry as a whole is why it had to get so damn complicated. Why did it have to get so complicated? Why couldn't it have just been super simple? Like, do you stand by the pyramid from a hundred years ago? I don't think so. Amber Abila (45:48.408) So. Amber Abila (45:57.186) Mm-hmm. Lyndsay Soprano (46:07.721) Just everything is so complicated. There's all these diets and there's this and there's Ayurvedic and there's, you know, there's anti-inflammatory and there's all, why can't we just have one that works for everybody? I mean, that's where I come from because it's really challenging for me in the food department. But I think that making eating simpler for people like myself is huge. There's a company called Hungry Root. similar to like our blue aprons and you know the meal prep places which really really helps me out specifically for food because it's got all of the talk about values their company aligns 100 % with what my values are in regards to eating and food and where it comes from they have a supermarket with the with the like the meal plan too so like we're like we really like that sauce that was used we can just buy the sauce those those seem to work really well for me because All of the thinking is done and you get to choose how long you want to cook. Like I only want stuff that's gonna take me 10 minutes. I'm not doing anything else than that. That's just not happening. I can't stand in the kitchen for very long. So cooking is challenging. So I've got to like make it snappy, you know, but make it healthy and make, you know, make it snappy to make it, but then sit and relax in it and eat and chew and, you know, do the things that you've mentioned, which is so good. It feels so stupid when you first start doing it though. You're like, I'm chewing so slow. Amber Abila (47:32.554) Yeah, until you realize... Lyndsay Soprano (47:33.043) Like a cow chewing cud, know, like that slow roll. I feel like that's what you're doing. Do I look stupid right now? Who cares? Amber Abila (47:42.062) Yeah, but then you realize how much better you feel too and how much better your digestion improves and it's like, yeah, that's so much better. So one thing I'll say about, this is a common thought that comes up of like, oh, I wish I could just like give up food cold turkey like I did with alcohol or with another. And what I'll offer to that is yes, well, you need to eat forever. You can't give up food forever. What you can go cold turkey on is binge eating because binge eating is something that is so clearly beyond what your body needs. Lyndsay Soprano (47:46.325) Totally. Yeah, for sure. Lyndsay Soprano (47:57.117) Right, right. Amber Abila (48:11.692) And mean, we didn't even fully define binge eating, I probably should have done in the beginning. Which is like... binge eating? Lyndsay Soprano (48:17.269) Binge eating 101 here at the very end. We kept the good stuff for the very end. No, everything's been good. Amber Abila (48:24.888) But binge eating is whenever we eat significantly past our body's fullness signal in an amount that most people would consider abnormal. So that definition in and of itself is pretty vague and it depends on the person. But something like eating one extra cookie more than you need is not necessarily binge eating. It's often accompanied by these feelings of being out of control and eating very fast and feeling like you're almost out of your body during it. And so when that happens, we know that our body does not need to do that. Our body does not need to go that far past fullness. There's no biological reason that our body needs that much food. So what that means is yes, while we can't give up food forever, we can go cold turkey on binge eating. You never ate binge ate again after today, you would be totally fine. You can give that up safely forever and ever. So it gets a little more nuanced when we get into overeating, when it's just like the cookie or not. And technically you don't need the cookies. So you could go cold turkey on, you know, processed sugar if you wanted to, but most people, want to be able to have it, you know, a cookie at Christmas time or some cake at the wedding. And so that gets a little more nuanced, but it is helpful to be like, you know what? I can go cold turkey on this extreme eating habit that I know is not serving me in any way. Lyndsay Soprano (49:41.161) like that you said, not serving you, because that is a huge thing. I'm trying to eliminate things that do not serve me, right? Why are we spending all of this time and money and effort on things that do not serve us? We spend a lot of time doing that. I mean, more than we know that we're doing until we start being cognitively thinking about like, my God, wow. Wow, so much time. my gosh. Okay, well I want to talk to you for like the rest of the day, which I can't do. So before we head out of here, do you have anything that you want to leave the listeners with before we get into like your promos and how to find you and all that stuff? Amber Abila (50:20.878) Mm-hmm one thing I want to mention on our body's wisdom and like how we wish eating could just be simple You know, we didn't always have all this nutrition knowledge. It wasn't until like 1915 or 1917 sometimes the early 1900s that we even knew vitamins existed So it has not been very long that we've had much nutritional knowledge meaning our body has guided us for thousands and thousands of years Lyndsay Soprano (50:40.213) What's funny? Amber Abila (50:47.116) Your body would not be here today if you didn't have ancestors that had a lot of wisdom about how to eat and how to be healthy enough to have offspring and lead to you to here today. So just knowing that no matter how broken your body feels, no matter how out of tune you feel with it, there is that wisdom still inside of you. Sometimes we've just tuned the volume way down because of various factors, ways of diets, what we've learned, maybe past trauma. All of these things can make it so we're disconnected with our body and we don't have access to that wisdom so much. But every time you practice tuning into your body, whether that's with food or even if that's just checking in on your body with your pain or checking in on when you're meditating, checking in on when you're doing yoga and noticing your body during that, that's all reconnecting you back in. Now, of course, there's processed foods that have been introduced in the past hundreds of years since we used to only rely on our bodies. So that is something that You know, it a whole other topic that we could dive into, but we won't do today. But just knowing that if you're eating the majority of healthy foods, you don't have to be perfect. You can, of course, include some processed foods in there. But we want to be eating the majority of healthy foods, meaning whole, unprocessed. And that's what's going to give us access back to our wisdom in the way that it knows best how to serve us. A lot of the processed foods can sometimes confuse our brain and body about what's going on. So again, if we're eating majority of processed foods, it can really mess up our cues with our body. But as long as majority of the time, you know, they have the 80-20 rule guideline. I have other thoughts about that. It's not perfect, but it is a good place to start of getting in mainly nutritious foods and then knowing from there your body has so much more wisdom if we just start to tune in and listen to it. Lyndsay Soprano (52:27.271) I love that. It's a perfect way to end it because it is exactly our bodies are so much more wiser than we could ever ever be. They know far more about how to fix our bonds than we ever will. And trusting trusting our bodies is a hard thing to do when you've either mistreated your body or it's been mistreated or a little bit of both. It's hard to go back and feel safe in it. It's hard to feel it's hard to trust it especially when you've gone through a lot of trauma a lot physical. abuse or sexual abuse. I tend to have two things that have happened to me and you know those things stick with you and that safety, that trust, all of that we have to bring the love back to ourselves again and I think that that's a huge part of it. So thanks for saying that because that's a win. Well everything that you've said has just been wonderful today so I appreciate everything that's coming out of that beautiful mouth of yours. So okay let's find her online. Okay guys so we're gonna put it in show notes and in social but you can find her over the place on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube and she's got her website, theconfidenteater.org. She has her podcast, like I mentioned in beginning, top 3 % in the world, Go Girl, theconfidenteater.org forward slash podcast. Go to her website, check out what she's all about. You've got a little bit of juice here today, but obviously we have more to cover. We probably should do a part two because I feel like we need to cover some other topics. She has a free support group on Facebook as well. Again, all this stuff will be in social and in show notes. You do have that free guided audio to stop a binge before it starts that you can find right now at theconfidenteater.org forward slash urge. We've talked about urges today, guys. Let's have some of these urges go away. No more urges unless they're good for us. Thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it, Amber. It has been lovely to see you again. And I look forward to continuing to see where you go and what happens with everything wonderful in your life. Amber Abila (54:25.486) Thanks so much for having me on, Lindsay. such a joy. Lyndsay Soprano (54:28.039) You got it. Thank you so much. Also, before we jam here, you guys know I've got a new bite size extension of the pain game podcast called pain bites. Super simple. You go to our insta page to our easy link in the bio and it tells you what to do super quick and easy. I want to know what cracked you open this week. What stitched you back together? I want to know your chaos, your aches, your clarity, your quiet winds, your, your boisterous winds. I wanna know the messy, I wanna know the meaningful, and I wanna know the like, how am I still standing kind of moments. I want them all, all right? So it's super easy, go in there. Even if it's just for a bite, right? Your voice is worth being heard. So give it to me, baby. Let me speak it out loud for you and with you, one raw honest bite at a time. You are exclusively invited to share this non-binge eating VIP pain journey together. Let's get to the heart of how to heal with you by my side. Please follow The Pain Game Podcast wherever you digest your podcast content. We will be there. Visit us at thepaingamepodcast.com and follow us on all the socials. Thanks for listening, my little VIPs. Catch you on the other side.