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Transcription
The speaker discusses their experience with weight loss supplements and the limitations they found in relying on them. They explain that restricting certain foods can lead to cravings and overeating, and that feeding emotions rather than the body's needs can also contribute to unhealthy eating habits. They emphasize the importance of listening to hunger cues, making healthier choices, and stopping when full. The speaker then introduces CBD as a natural appetite suppressant that can help with cravings and regulating appetite. They highlight the benefits of CBD in managing food intake and suggest it as a potential tool in developing healthier eating habits. Hi, my name is Bess and you are listening to the Canna Fitness and Nutrition Podcast where we are hanging out at the intersection of fitness, nutrition, and cannabis. So today I'd like to share something with you about willpower and motivation and supplements. So have you ever tried a weight loss supplement? That is my question. In the old days, I would say before there were weight loss drugs, there were weight loss supplements. So there were, if you've ever been to GNC or Vitamin Shoppe or one of those, there used to be shelves and shelves of fat burners, which were just like a pill that claimed it would burn your fat. And this is going back to the 90s, man, so this is going back quite a ways. But there were, there was the FEDRA, right, which was eventually banned because it was terrible for you. Then there were some, they found different products that could do the same thing they claimed and those were popular in the 90s and the early 2000s. And then most recently now is we have drugs that are pharmaceutically made and need prescriptions, but that promise to help with your appetite and your willpower essentially, right? So yeah, I tried, I tried supplements. I tried it. I can't remember the brand name off the top of my head, but I used to go into GNC and I would buy a bottle of fat burner because who doesn't want that, right? I mean, why? If I can buy a bottle of $29.99 fat burner pills, like, of course I'm going to try that. That because, but here's the thing is, I mean, I know, we all know that if we could just find the strength to stop eating, right, that we could be a smaller size. We could lose weight. We could be smaller. We would, it would solve all of our problems. But I just didn't have, or I didn't feel like I was strong enough to stop eating. I didn't think I was strong enough to make better decisions. I didn't think I was strong enough to stop once I was full. I didn't think I was strong enough to be able to control my appetite, and honestly, I didn't know how to do that. I really didn't think I was strong enough to control myself around certain foods. Man, there were times that, you know, if you put me, if you put out a cake, man, that was, I just could not trust myself around a cake. I mean, come on, frosting, especially if it was chocolate, forget about it. I really did not think I had the strength, willpower, call it what you want, to resist things like cake. I was weak. I thought I was weak. Let's put it that way. Now, there's a couple of reasons for that. There is, if you've ever restricted food, then your brain has to overcompensate. So if you've ever restricted food and told yourself you couldn't have cake, then what happens is when you are confronted with it, you automatically want to go overboard with it because you've restricted it and you've told yourself you couldn't have it. So that makes it more illicit. It makes it more dangerous. It makes it more craveable, right? We always want what we can't have. We've heard that, right? Isn't that true? So we want what we can't have. So if you tell yourself you're not allowed to have certain foods, then you're going to have a hard time resisting it, which is why one of my main principles is that you can have any food you want because as soon as we restrict it and take it away, you're just going to want it and you're going to have a hard time controlling yourself around it. So all foods are permissible. Now, some foods are better than others for us, right? Healthier choices. But again, I didn't feel strong enough to make healthier choices. I just did not trust myself. So I took supplements and I took them for a long time and I got to tell you, nothing changed. Nothing. I did not gain magical strength to be able to resist the foods that I was craving or restrict. If I restricted a food and wanted that cake, I still wasn't strong enough to resist it. I still didn't trust myself. The pill didn't magically make those things happen or go away. I still didn't just magically trust myself around cake, even though I was taking a supplement that was supposed to burn fat. I can tell you for sure that because I was overeating cake, whenever it would appear, that I wasn't losing weight. In fact, I was gaining weight because I was overeating cake because as soon as I told myself I couldn't have, I'm a sweets person, so as soon as I told myself I couldn't have that, eventually that mental fatigue would hit and I would go overboard. My body and my brain would want to overcompensate and I would, you know, emotionally or stress eat my way through whatever delicious sweet item I could get my hands on. The pill did not magically make that go away because it wasn't, that's not what that was meant to do. It did not accelerate my fat burning at all, it did not help that burn because I was overeating. So it doesn't matter if you're going to overeat anyway, then a pill's not going to increase your metabolism. That's not exactly how that works. That is misguided labeling, I will say, and you actually, you want to know what's in those pills, actually, and this is the, again, I'm going back a little old school, right? This is the 90s, early 2000s, old school pills, at first it was the ephedra, right, which was banned, then it was just caffeine. They would put a lot of caffeine in those pills with some B vitamins, right, which is not bad, it's not bad for you at all, but nobody needs that much caffeine and you know what you feel when you take a lot of caffeine like that in a pill form? You feel jittery as all get out, and so that is not necessarily the most pleasant feeling. So here's the thing, I did that for a while and it did not do anything other than make me jittery, and a lot of times it made me feel real, if I didn't have any food in me it made me feel real, not great, but eventually I stopped because what happened was eventually I learned what was causing this extreme appetite and these cravings, and it was two-fold, one, it was restriction, it was telling myself I wasn't allowed to have certain foods, so then eventually I would get fatigued of that strict restriction and I would go overboard and I would crave the things I wasn't quote unquote allowed to have, and two, I was feeding my emotions, and I was feeding my stress, I wasn't feeding my body, I was feeding my mind, and there's a big difference there because feeding your body means listening to when your body gets hungry, recognizing that it's going to need fuel, and then seeking out the appropriate fuel to make you feel best and optimize your health and performance. For example, if you get hungry during the middle of the day, the lunch time let's say, you want to eat something that is going to keep you, if you're working, you're going to want something that's going to keep you alert, keep you energized, because if it's lunch time and you work like a traditional daytime job, you're going to need energy until the end of the day still, so you don't necessarily want to sit down to a big heavy pasta meal that's going to put you to sleep because you've still got a half a day left, right? So you want to find foods that are going to optimize your health and performance for the day. So I was eating to satisfy my emotions, and I had to do some digging to figure out what those were, you know, sadness, loneliness, stress, anxiety, all of those things that were creating more cravings, because cravings can be caused by a lot of things. It can be the food we eat can cause cravings, or the food we're not eating, right? Sugar makes us crave more sugar, salt makes us crave more salt, not eating enough protein can cause more cravings, not eating enough good fats can cause cravings, so there's a lot of practical ways to handle cravings, and there's a lot of practical ways to handle appetite, where we're listening to our hunger, feeding our body, fueling our body appropriately with the protein and fiber and water, and also stopping when we're full, so that we're, again, we're optimizing our health, we're stopping when we're full, we're fueling our body according to what it needs, and not listening to what our brain is trying to tell us, because there gets to be a lot of mixed signals in that whole connection, there's a lot of mixed signals, and there's a lot of confusion, because a lot of times we want to eat something, right? We want it in our brain, we want it because we know that it's delicious, but it's not necessarily the best thing for us. I mean, trust me, I like pizza, ice cream, and not as great food for us, just as much as the next person, but the reason I make healthier choices most of the time is because I like the way I feel when I make healthy choices, and I don't care for the way I feel when I stick my face in a cake and eat it, right? So that's what happened, is I learned that I had to pay attention to my physical body, my actual stomach, and my actual hunger and fullness, and not just my brain. Once I started doing that, my weight just naturally regulated. It did, it totally did, and I've been living with that method for a long time. Now, fast forward to when I learned about CBD and cannabis in general. CBD is the non-intoxicating form of cannabis, so THC is the psychoactive component, so we typically split those two into separate categories because they do separate things, even though they come from the same plant. It's so fascinating, right? They come from the same plant, but they do two very different things and have very different effects, but yet similar. CBD actually suppresses appetite. It's a natural appetite suppressant. The way it works in your body suppresses the hormones that make us hungry. It can help with cravings. If you struggle with cravings and you're still learning how to pay attention to that, because it is a skill and it takes practice, it's not something that you can't just flip a switch. It takes time and practice, so CBD can be a great bridge for that because it'll naturally reduce your appetite and help you find control over those cravings, find control over your appetite. Now, THC, as we know, can cause some problems with the munchies because it actually activates the part of our brain that increases hunger, but here's the thing, not to be scared of it. I don't want you to be scared of THC because of the munchies because it is controllable. Just because it's triggering it, it only happens with certain types, certain strains are known to be more triggering. When you break the cannabis plant down, not to get too nerdy here, but when you break it down, it breaks down into components and some of those components are called terpenes. Each type of plant, and if you've dabbled a little bit, you know that there's a lot of different names of the cannabis strains. All of those different names are just different types of the plant. Think about flowers and how many different flowers there are out there. They're all just a little different, but beautiful in their own way. There's terpenes in the cannabis and the different terpenes do different things and have different effects on our brain chemistry. It's really our endocannabinoid system, but just for simplicity, I'm going to say brain. Certain terpenes you do want to look out for because they might trigger the munchies or that hunger signal, but also certain terpenes have the opposite effect. If you're worried about the munchies, then I can tell you that you want to look for strains that have humaline in it. You want to be careful of certain other strains that can cause the munchies. You want to make sure you're just getting the right thing or getting a blend of CBD and THC. Again, the blend, that CBD, as I've mentioned before, it can work with the THC to make things stronger and better, but it can also soften the THC. It brings it down a notch. It's not as psychoactive. If you take CBD, the non-psychoactive, and THC together, it's not as intoxicating. It is less of a high. It's less psychoactive when you take it together. It also will decrease your munchies. If you're worried about the munchies, a great trick is to add some CBD to your THC to bring down. If you like a strain and it does give you the munchies, add some CBD. It'll bring down the munchies because it'll have that appetite suppression part of it. That is a great, great underutilized benefit of cannabis is the natural appetite suppressant. I would say there's a lot of talk right now about the pharmaceuticals that are out there. I'm not a great, huge fan of that because I think it is unnecessary. I think for some people it might be necessary, but for the volume of people that are using it right now, it's not necessary for that volume of people. The first thing I would try, and again, because I've tried supplements, I know that they don't always do anything. If that's not the problem, it's not going to be the solution. If your problem isn't a true hormone imbalance in that way, then the drug's not going to help you. If it's a psychological, or emotional, or stress, or just simply a habit, no drug's going to help that. You're going to have to learn to pay attention to the hunger, pay attention to the fullness, because here's the thing. You are strong enough to stop when you're full. I figured out I was, I am now, and you are too. You are strong enough to stop when you're full. You are strong enough to make healthy choices. You are perfectly capable of making healthy choices. It might feel uncomfortable, and it might be different than what you're used to, but you're perfectly capable of doing that. I didn't think I was, and now I am. I thought I couldn't make myself stop once I started eating, and you may feel like that too, where you just can't stop until it's gone. Sometimes even when it is gone, you just get up and get more. You can. You absolutely can. You can tune into your stomach, listen to your stomach, listen to your body. It does take some practice and some training, but I promise you, you are strong enough to do that. You can also trust yourself around certain foods. You can. You can, and I know it may seem like you can't, but you can. It is entirely possible. It's going to take some practice. It's going to take some faith in yourself, and it's going to take learning how to tune in and stopping the restriction cycle of restricting food and then overeating, but you are strong enough. You are strong enough to make these habit changes. You are strong enough. CBD is a great, absolutely 100% natural way to get a little leg up on appetite suppression and on reducing cravings. So if you're interested in any of that, I'd love to talk to you more. You can check out my website, and I can be reached through it at canafitnessnutrition.com. I am on Instagram, and always in my DMs at bestfitpersonaltrainer, and I am reachable on email at skinnerel.com. There it is, and I would love to hear from you. So I hope this was helpful today, and as always, have a great day. Let me know if I can do anything for you, and I'll see you next time on the Cana Fitness and Nutrition Podcast.
