Episode 208: Liberate Yourself from Weight Loss Conversations with Dr. Jessie Hehmeyer
Part of the Game on Girlfriend mission is to liberate women from the outside forces that tell us what we are capable of, what we should look like, and what we should or shouldn't be doing with our money and businesses. Dealing with our own bodies, our relationship to food, our relationship to health, and how we treat ourselves is the foundation of this work.
I’m thrilled to be talking to Dr. Jessie Hehmeyer, the founder of Well Empowered where she practices data-driven and results-oriented functional medicine. We can look at how we want to deal with our health, how we want to deal with the health of our business, and how we want to deal with how we view the world at large.
Journey to functional medicine
Jessie grew up as a dancer and recalls struggling with weight growing up. She realized in her 20s that struggling with her weight was interfering with her being fully present with the people in her life. Through graduate school, Jessie gathered the tools she needed to help guide people on their journey. She had to be able to understand the body scientifically to help them access the same freedom.
We're born into a world where we very quickly get the message of what a good body looks like and what a bad body looks like. One of the things Jessie does when she starts to work with people is create completion with the past. She asks, when was the first time you remember thinking your body was how it should or shouldn't be?
“It’s the inherited conversations in this area of our life about how our body should be and shouldn't be mixed with wanting to have some control over how we show up and our world as a whole,” says Jessie.
Some of it is psychological, some of it is biochemical, and some of it is social. There are so many different layers to food. A lot of it is the result of an inherited paradigm. There are things that, over and over again, we've heard people say from the time we were little, so much so that they just started occurring as the truth for us.
No morality to food
One of Jessie’s favorite examples of this is the concept that food or beverages are good or bad. I cheated yesterday or I was so good last week. This language is the language of morality. And there is no morality in food or beverages.
Food and beverages produce certain outcomes. We either like those outcomes or we don't. How do we give up the old conversations to avoid shame? Imagine what it would be like to just not have this on your mind anymore, to just have it handled.
“I'm such a firm believer when we are grounded in our intention for our health and our life, what begins to open up is I mean, it's truly magical over time,” says Jessie.
Overcoming all or nothing approach to weight loss
When Jessie works with people on their health, she helps them overcome the all-or-nothing approach. The extreme dieting followed by overindulgence is an expression of all of nothing. And peeling that back one more layer is self-aggression. It doesn't work.
She helps move people towards the middle ground. People have an opportunity to begin to understand what it is to bend and not break. It's created through the living, and people have the chance along the way to gather insights. See what works, see what doesn't work, rather than, “Oh, I made a mistake. Just forget it. I'm a failure, and so I might as well just give up.”
“The whole middle ground mastery journey is really one of self-love,” says Jessie. “So there's just all kinds of kindness, gentleness, grace in that journey.”
Root causes for weight that aren’t talked about
Jessie acknowledges that people will struggle to lose weight if their thyroid isn't working well. But she also highlights three other areas that aren't commonly talked about:
- elevated inflammation
- suboptimal insulin sensitivity
- detox pathways not running smoothly
“I practice data driven natural medicine because it is so grounded in this data,” says Jessie. Functional medicine is designed to identify and address the root causes of people’s symptoms or disease processes as health challenges. It’s not always true that you can completely heal the body, but taking a root-cause approach can support it.
Free gift for listeners
Let Jessie know that you found her from the Game on Girlfriend podcast to receive 10% off a health audit during a complimentary consultation.
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