This week, we are continuing our series on spring cleaning and are talking about the power of pivot and how we can take the message of the season to explore our heart's calling. As always, I'll be sharing how our relationship with food is a window into our relationship with ourselves. And overweight or not, you can use this message to lean into your unmet needs and desires and avoid our very human tendency to soothe and distract with external comforts. Welcome back to Health Byte, my friends, the podcast where we explore the intersection of science, nutrition, health, and wellbeing.
I'm your host, Dr. Adrienne Youdim I'm a triple board certified internist, obesity medicine, and physician nutrition specialist. And I just love sharing the science of living well. So thank you for being here and for being on this journey with me. And our neighbor, and our numbers are growing daily. So thank you for being a listener. Please continue to be a part of this growth, and if you can, head over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening, and leave us a review. It would be a huge help to amplify my message and create the genuine impact I'm hoping for. And back to our podcast. And I just love spring. It is the season of rebirth, growth and awakening. Truly an opportunity to realign with our values and our deepest intentions for how we wish to live. And this is what I really want to focus on on today's episode. And here's the first lesson. In order to grow and evolve through the infinite potential that you all carry, you must be able to open up to life with a beginner's mind, which is the ability to see every season of your life every moment with fresh eyes, open to the opportunity, open to the possibility of the growth and potential that it can bring. I'm often asked when I decided to become a doctor. And I can't really answer that question because I wanted to be a doctor from my earliest memories. It didn't feel like a decision, but a mandate I was born with. Growing up, I had so many ideas of what being a doctor looked like, but over time it evolved like all things should. My earliest professional goals were to be in the ivory tower, to be in academics, to work at a respected institution, to teach while I cared for the sickest of the sick, And as a resident, honestly, I look down on outpatient medicine, feeling that being in the hospital and in the acute setting was where I really saved lives. But after I worked in the hospital setting, not only as a resident, but rounding on wards as an attending, Grey's Anatomy style, caring for the sick alongside my own dedicated residents, carrying pagers and running to code blues, it dawned on me that preventing death and illness did not begin in the hospital, but in the office when people were still well. My switch to preventive medicine required a redefining of what I thought it meant to be a, quote, real doctor. It took lots of soul-searching and shape-shifting of the image I had of myself since childhood. And here's the next lesson. We need to give ourselves permission to shift and to evolve. How is it even reasonable to think that we make one decision as a child, or as a college student, or as a young adult, or at any point in our lives, and expect that that decision guide and define us for the rest of our lives? So I pivoted, I pivoted to the outpatient setting. And as the medical director of the Weight Loss Center at Cedars-Sinai that I helped create, I was not only involved in caring for people who were not ill, but also for creating the programs that supported that vision of keeping people well, of keeping people out of the hospital setting and educating students and residents and colleagues along the way. It was exciting work. It was important work. And yet, nearly a decade later, I began to experience another tug at my heart, one that beckoned me away from academia. While I loved my work and the people I worked with, I felt confined. unable to practice medicine the way I thought it was meant to be practiced. Quick visits defined by organizational needs were not a way to truly care for patients, to truly heal. And I knew this through my patients' eyes, but also from being a patient myself. And I felt personally confined as well. I wanted greater autonomy, not only professionally but personally, to create, to write, but also to create more space for my personal needs and the needs of my family. And this pivot was probably the most challenging. I spent almost three years contemplating. all the while the nagging inside my soul would not quit i was faced with two opposing tugs the desire to please others to be seen by others and myself by the way as a leader a director as an academic as someone who felt special by virtue of a fancy title and the tug to explore living and working without the confines of those titles and the sense, the false sense of security that they brought. I would have to address my own judgments and preoccupations head on if I were to follow my heart. And here's the other lesson, that is what a pivot requires. The ability to put aside your ego, your fear, and your judgments to answer the call. And I want to tell you that no pivot comes without fear. Fear of failure, fear of making the wrong decision, fear of losing our financial freedom and security, fear of being viewed as selfish and foolish and not enough. there were many fears to contend with. Pivot also requires questioning your self-perception. Who am I if I'm not this persona that I spent years creating and perfecting? And that, my friends, is really difficult armor to contend with. These are questions that I wrestled with personally long after I made the leap. And so many times, I lulled myself into comfort, telling myself, Oh, you're just fine how you are, so that I wouldn't have to contend with these scary and difficult self reckonings. But that nagging, that nagging would not quit. I kept suppressing the voice beckoning me to pivot and to grow, but it just kept getting louder and louder, urging me to take the leap. And I wonder how many of you are contending with that very voice and the false sense of security that you are wishing upon yourself. So when I announced, when I finally announced my resignation, my colleagues were shocked. I would never survive as a solo practitioner in the newly created Obamacare world, some would tell me, and many would just whisper behind my back. My friends and family, they questioned my rejection of a prestigious position and a prestigious title. Maybe I'd just gotten fired, they would say. And to be fair, I relished in those titles as well. It gave me a sense of importance and relevance. But here's another lesson. True confidence in one's worth and worthiness comes only from within. And so after much contemplation, I left and began doing the work. Many years later, I felt another tug and nagging that I should take this message that I shared with my patients beyond the four walls of my office. I knew that the struggles that they shared with me were universal. I knew it because I felt those same longings myself. Hunger, I would come to realize, was not something meant to be suppressed, but rather something to be examined, to be leaned into, an opportunity to understand what they represented, a longing to meet the demands of our unmet emotional and spiritual needs. But in order to share this message, I had to face my self-limiting beliefs. The fear of talking about such fluffy things as a physician. What would my colleagues think? What would my patients think? And who am I anyway to write this book? No one would read it. I'm not a writer and a litany of other negative thoughts and beliefs that were trying to hold me and my dreams at bay. And here's the next lesson. We all have self-limiting beliefs. It's the voice that tries to keep us safe and protected and fear from other people's judgment, not to mention our own. But here's the thing. We will never grow if we don't dive into that tendency, human and normal as they may be, to reckon with them and to acknowledge that they are not meant to be the final word. To fast forward with you and share that I did write that book, the one I call Hungry for More, is to gloss over many, many days of agonizing and reframing. Addressing our self-limiting condition and conditioning, my friends, is not a one-and-done proposition. Rather, it is a work in progress if we're ultimately to follow our true calling, whatever that may be. And now I find myself here once again. in the midst of this new weight loss revolution that has been brought about the advent of highly effective drugs like Ozempic and Wagovi and Majaro, ZepBound, and the many, many more that are in the pipelines. While everyone is jumping on the weight loss bandwagon, plastic surgeons and dermatologists, and even a neurologist on TikTok, while gyms and Costco and Walmart are scrambling to get into a space that I have dedicated myself to for the past 20 years, long before anyone was talking about it and when shame was the prevailing sentiment. After educating and justifying a field in medicine that people conflated with Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, now that I should be basking in the spotlight of this cool new world of weight loss popularized by TikTok and influencers, I'm hearing the nag again. because this message of self-worth and self-compassion is not just about weight loss. It's a deeper message. It's about how we choose to act as a collective, how we wish to parent, to engage with our partners and in our relationships, how we choose to lead in our organizations and our companies all depends on how we choose to engage in our own well-being. How do we speak to ourselves? Do we allow ourselves rest and play? Do we take the time to commune in nature? Do we engage in movement and contemplative practices? These questions, my friends, will determine all the rest. Now more than ever, as the world is raging with angry rhetoric and division after a pandemic and social and political injustice have siloed us, we are at the risk of negativity and fear further alienating us rather than bringing us together as one. So in this moment in time, I'm feeling the pull. I'm hearing the voice that tells me perhaps there's more good to be done. By sharing the skills and practices that I share with my patients every day, perhaps I can urge others to do the same, to engage in their own well-being, recognizing that this first step of being more compassionate to others Begins first with being more compassionate to themselves and I tell you my friends it does not come without the all too familiar doubts and fears negative self-talk and self-limiting beliefs but I also know by now that pivot requires a reckoning with these very natural tendencies and It's the universe's way of asking, are you up for the challenge and ready for the work that will test and prime you for the next step? I know by talking to many of you one-on-one, by talking to my many patients who are struggling with the same questions and are faced with the same naggings, And if it's happening in the four walls of my office, I am certain that it is happening to you too. So I want to encourage you to lean into the nagging of your own heart. Be brave enough to listen to the voice within you and let it lead you to the next step despite the fear. the ego and the self-limiting beliefs that are keeping you safe despite it all. Lean in with an open heart and an open mind and with a beginner's mind and know that I am right there alongside you. So here's to spring cleaning your life and leaning into the calling of your heart. I'm curious to know what this stirs up within you. Wishing you a great week and I'll see you here next week again on Health Byte.