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Speaker 1
Hi. Welcome back to another episode of Tina Arena where I talk about life as I see it, a journey of growth, especially through my lens, which is nutrition, fitness, health, well-being, a little bit of spicy childhood experiences, and oh, ADHD. I'm an entrepreneur. This is life through my lens and my point of view. And what I wanted to talk about today was my vacation that I just went on.

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Speaker 1
I spent a week with my family in the Dominican Republic.

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Speaker 1
ever since my siblings have started to have kids, we've been taking family vacations together because my mom is really trying to encourage our family, spending time together as the unit and having the my nieces and nephews really bond and become good friends.

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Speaker 1
so I'm bringing up this whole vacation experience because this year was actually an entirely different vacation experience for me.

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Speaker 1
in the past I had bulimia. So going to all inclusive resorts was actually very stressful for me.

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Speaker 1
It didn't make the situation any better. Like, I still had my eating disorder even on vacation.

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Speaker 1
And I remember. So my younger brother, he's very innocent and he's very naive sometimes. So I mean, it's not his fault, it is what it is. But

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Speaker 1
after getting dinner at the all inclusive buffet, I joke around with him and I'd be like, hey, do you want to go get more food with me?

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Speaker 1
go get dessert. Like extra dessert, extra food, extra pasta, whatever it was. And he loves food too. So obviously he would always say, yeah, sure. and then he more often than not get a little bit and be watching me eat like, way too much food.

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Speaker 1
so that was the pattern that I used to have, that all inclusive resorts.

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Speaker 1
I would frame it as a cute little bonding experience for me and my brother, but it was actually me, bingeing and purging afterwards.

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Speaker 1
last year's all inclusive resort experience was.

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Speaker 1
I wasn't sick anymore. I didn't have my eating disorder, but I think I was still stressing about food a lot this year. It was a really different experience for me. It wasn't stressful anymore. Definitely. I mean, I just have the habit of over eating and I love to eat and I love to munch and I still feel like I am working on listening to my stomach's fullness signals.

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Speaker 1
so I'm still often able to overeat quite easily. So the first couple of days on vacation, I was totally overeating because of the novelty. Right? You went, you're on this new resort. There's a whole bunch of food. We're trying everything, seeing if it's good.

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Speaker 1
we I remember we went to the Olive cart restaurant and it was bad. It was terrible. So we ate a little bit there, and then we went to the buffet, and then we eat more, and we actually did it as a family at this time, which is kind of cute.

00:03:08:01 - 00:03:26:16
Speaker 1
And I mean, it, it gives you an idea of the kind of family that I grew up with. Like, we are so into food and so into eating that we would eat at the ala carte restaurants this year and probably be full, but then go to the buffet and get more food.

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Speaker 1
And that happened probably five out of the seven nights that we were there. We would go to the buffet after dinner again,

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Speaker 1
and I know that was my pattern previously to binge. But this year I was not bingeing.

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Speaker 1
I was super full a couple of times, but it wasn't. You know, I didn't get into that negative mind space as easily as I would have in the past. And I'm very, very proud of that and, proud of the work that I've done thus far to get to here.

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Speaker 1
So the point of this episode is to talk about how I got here and how I ate when I was on vacation.

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Speaker 1
It's an all inclusive resort.

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Speaker 1
number one, as I spoke about in an episode a couple of weeks ago, I'm not drinking alcohol anymore.

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Speaker 1
Not that I'm a sober person. I just don't like it. So I actually had zero alcohol when I was down there,

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Speaker 1
And that just helps keep the urges in check, right? Like I'm more in control of myself when I'm not drinking alcohol. If I had been drunk, then maybe I would have been having more snacks and then that could have escalated and might have led to me feeling poorly about myself.

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Speaker 1
But that never happened because I didn't drink any alcohol, so I was never in an altered state of mind.

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Speaker 1
Which is really helpful when you easily slip into negative thought patterns. So for me, staying sober,

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Speaker 1
although I don't consider myself a sober person, but I basically am, I just like that I am in control of my thoughts.

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Speaker 1
it gives me more joy that I am in control of myself and my thoughts and my body. And like when I feel awkward, I don't have the urge to suppress my awkwardness by drinking alcohol. I, I definitely don't enjoy wallowing in the awkwardness, but I can just be like, okay, well, like I can. This is weird.

00:05:18:09 - 00:05:44:10
Speaker 1
I can handle it and whatever. Moving on. Okay, what else did I do? So like I said, the first couple of days it was novelty. Maybe the first two days, I just ate whatever I wanted, and I tried everything. And I had a couple of desserts, and it was cool. It was fun. I had no bad feelings and no negative thought patterns.

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Speaker 1
When I did that, I was eating slowly. Oh yeah,

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Speaker 1
I was eating slowly, which really helped. But another thing that I started doing when it comes to food is

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Speaker 1
I only get one plate of food, I don't. I try not to go back for a second. Any time that I went back for seconds, it was for a little bit of dessert, but mostly fruit just to fill up, and eat more fruit

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Speaker 1
Because they had fresh papaya there and passion fruit.

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Speaker 1
And those are tropical fruits that are very expensive right now in Canada. So I ate a ton of that. So when I went back for a second, it was usually for fruit, which to me is fine.

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Speaker 1
I don't demonize fruit in any way. I allow myself to eat as much fruit as I want.

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Speaker 1
So when I went back for dessert, I would maybe try like a tiny bit of dessert. Cheesecake. Tiramisu. You know, those fancy resort cakes? I would try a little bit of that, and then the rest of the plate would be fruit. But back to my main point. I only grabbed one plate of food when I went to the buffet,

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Speaker 1
the reason why I just get one plate of food is because I can see visually everything that I want to eat all at once, because.

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Speaker 1
wet, I just put a little bit of food on my plate and I'm just telling myself like, oh, this is all I'm going to eat today. And it's just like half the plate

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Speaker 1
Mentally, I am not happy. I can visually see that the amount of food in front of me is minuscule, and my mind is telling my body that this amount of food is not going to satisfy me physically or mentally, no matter how good it is. Especially if it tastes good. Because if it tastes really, really good, then I'm not going to want to eat this much amount of food.

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Speaker 1
I'm going to want to eat this much, right? That makes total sense. So my strategy for when I eat at the buffet is I get one plate, the big plate of food, and I load it with food. I'm not shy about creating a mountain of food. Because when I look at one plate and I see visually that there is a huge mountain of food on it, I'm like, oh yeah, this food is going to fill me up and it's going to be so exciting, and it's going to be great, and it's going to be delicious

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Speaker 1
and visually, because visually, I see that there's a huge amount of food on my plate that for some

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Speaker 1
reason, my mind tells my stomach that this is going to be satisfying.

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Speaker 1
I'm going to be satisfied.

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Speaker 1
I'm not wasteful. I try not to be wasteful at buffets, but when you walk around and you just got even like a tiny scoop of everything that you want to try, usually that creates a mountain on your plate.

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Speaker 1
So I walk back to my table and I have this mountain of food, and I just start trying everything. And if I don't like something, then I'm not obligated to finish it,

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Speaker 1
So most of the time I'm probably not eating the entire mountain of food. But even if I don't eat the whole plate, I feel pretty satisfied because I've eaten maybe most of the food on there,

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Speaker 1
And I don't need to go back for seconds. Your stomach is not that big. If I have a huge mountain plate of food and I won't eat half your stomach is probably going to be full.

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Speaker 1
do you see the nuance there when you have a plate and you put tiny portions on it and you eat all of that, it feels like you didn't eat enough?

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Speaker 1
when I have a plate and I put small portions on it and I eat everything on that plate, mentally it kind of feels like, oh, I ate everything and I'm still not satisfied. I'm probably hungry. I'm going to go back for a second, but if I put everything that I could possibly eat on the one plate and maybe a little bit more,

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Speaker 1
I know that what is on this plate is going to fill me, and I am not in a scarcity mindset like everything that I need is right there.

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Speaker 1
And so when I'm eating, I feel calm enough to eat slowly and I feel present so that I can try all of the different varieties of food on my plate. If I don't like something, I'll just leave it

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Speaker 1
that is empowering now because I don't like that. So I'm not going to eat it and that's fine.

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Speaker 1
And I'm I promise you, I'm not wasteful. So if I notice that I don't like something, I'm not going to get it again. And maybe if something that's questionable, I'll just grab one tiny piece. And actually, at the end of the trip, I started cutting the desserts in half and only putting half of them on my plate. I know it sounds like this might be wasteful for you to just grab a mountain of food, but I promise you, I ate most of it most of the time.

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Speaker 1
Unless it was absolutely disgusting. But now I'm like, I'm not. I'm not forcing myself to eat. Like, why would I do that?

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Speaker 1
I don't know if this is something that people think about, but this is definitely something that I've been playing with and struggling with for a very long time.

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Speaker 1
This is just one of the ways that I've learned how to manage my eating, because sometimes it's very hard.

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Speaker 1
I know that I'm an intuitive eating coach, I am a nutrition coach, and I like, live and breathe this kind of stuff. And that's probably why I'm a nutrition coach and an intuitive eating coach, because I personally struggle with it so much. So I'm sharing my experience and I hope that this is helpful.

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Speaker 1
I never ate while looking up. That's not true. I was going to say I never ate while looking at my phone, but when I had breakfast by myself, I was definitely on my phone eating breakfast. But if there was other people with me around me, I was not on my phone too much. but breakfast was a pretty simple meal.

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Speaker 1
by the end of the vacation, I was just eating eggs and fruit, so it wasn't like I could over eat with anything, because on my plate was literally just like three eggs and a whole bunch of fruit. So being distracted was not the worst thing, because I already knew that I wasn't really going to over eat.

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Speaker 1
I'm not perfect. It happens.

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Speaker 1
I'm human. I will eat while I'm on my phone sometimes, like people do, that I wish that I did it, but I do, and I just do the best I can. Okay, we all know that there's best practices and then there's your life, so I can tell you all of the best practices.

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Speaker 1
and you can practice them. But there's also real life, and we try to do the best that we can as much as possible. And that is the 80% of it that matters. Even if you aim for 51% consistency, just keep showing up for yourself and keep figuring it out. Like, how did I come up with this idea to pile all my food onto one plate?

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Speaker 1
It was just curiosity. I'm like, what would happen if I just got everything on one plate? And I just sat down and I didn't let myself get seconds. Lo and behold, I was still satisfied. I didn't need the second,

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Speaker 1
I only wanted the seconds when I was dieting, and I was telling myself that I needed to restrict the amount of food that I was eating.

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Speaker 1
That backfired in me completely, and I ended up binge eating all of the time. So this was the opposite of that, right? I put a whole bunch of food on one plate, and I told myself that I'm allowed to eat everything on this plate if I want to, but I'm not going to go back for seconds unless it was fruit and that worked like I didn't.

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Speaker 1
I didn't binge eat at all on this vacation. It's been a very, very long journey of growth. But that was the thing that helped me.

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Speaker 1
I didn't even talk about, like, the food that I was eating when I was at, the resort. I always centered my meals around protein. I always made sure that I was getting enough protein. I didn't count the grams of protein I was eating. I didn't weigh it. I didn't visually guess the calories that I was eating. I just made sure that there was protein on my plate.

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Speaker 1
I didn't always eat vegetables. Actually, salad is very unappetizing for me right now. Raw salad. So I haven't really eaten raw salad in a long time,

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Speaker 1
But I did eat boiled broccoli like green beans. they had lentils. I definitely had pasta sometimes. I always made sure that there was protein on my plate. There wasn't always a vegetable because their vegetable preparation wasn't always the greatest, but there was always protein.

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Speaker 1
I'm just saying that like I didn't focus on eating vegetables. I was always eating fruit. I had lots and lots of fruit multiple times a day, but the vegetables at on resort, they're just not great. So I kind of skipped them. But sometimes, like I know that you need micronutrients. I understand that micronutrients are an important part of health, and so sometimes I made myself eat the boiled broccoli.

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Speaker 1
That was gross. And sometimes I did eat soggy, mushy green beans that were also gross.

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Speaker 1
You win some and you lose some.

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Speaker 1
Anyway, that was my experience on vacation last week. What did I do? I also started running every day on vacation, which is really nice. Since I was not drinking, I was not socializing. The kids went to bed by 10 p.m. and so I went to bed by 10 p.m.

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Speaker 1
so I'm up super early. I'm reserving the beach chairs. I have coffee and breakfast by myself.

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Speaker 1
And actually in Punta Cana, I started running, which is not something that I've been doing in Canada recently, but in Punta Cana I brought my running shoes and I had so much time in the morning I just started exploring.

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Speaker 1
So I took up running while I was there, and I basically explored all of the resorts. We stayed at Iberostar Punta Cana, which is one of the cheaper sister hotels, and because I was running, I was able to explore the other ones that were more expensive. So there we were, star Gran Bavaro and I think the selection, I don't know what they're called, but I was running around and I got to see all of the really cool levels of their Iberostar resort.

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Speaker 1
The point is that I had fun.

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Speaker 1
I'm very proud of myself for the work that I've done and how I was able to handle myself around food. I know that my brother in law still thinks that our family eats way too much, which he's probably correct.

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Speaker 1
I didn't Benji and then fall back into old patterns.

00:16:31:09 - 00:17:07:16
Speaker 1
And that's a win. And we're going to take that away for today. So that was it. That was my experience on vacation. I don't know if this is helpful for you guys. This is it's kind of like a niche, niche topic. But, let me know if you did find it helpful. Remember to please rate, share, subscribe and follow me on Instagram and TikTok, and on my website at tinas arena.com I am launching a new group coaching cohort mid April.

00:17:07:16 - 00:17:23:00
Speaker 1
So if you are struggling on your journey of food and you need some help, I looking for people that want to feel better in their bodies and they don't know where to start. That's the kind of person that I jive with.

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Speaker 1
So if that sounds like you,

00:17:24:12 - 00:17:25:13
Speaker 1
send me an email.

00:17:25:13 - 00:17:28:10
Speaker 1
You can find it at Tina arena.com and.

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Speaker 1
I hope you have a lovely day. See you next week.