If you eat junk food every day and never work out, you're going to become obese, and you'll likely contract diseases like diabetes or heart disease.
What if the same were true about our emotional health? What if there were emotional exercises and healthy emotional foods we should be consuming... and without them we would become emotionally obese?
In this episode of the podcast, I sat down with Laura Coe to talk about emotional obesity, and the analogy translates surprisingly perfectly!
If you want to learn what emotional junk foods you indulge in that are eating away at your relationships and overall emotional health, what healthy emotional foods and exercises look like, and how to create an authentic life you're truly excited about, this is the episode for you!
Show Notes
Laura Coe co-founded Litholink Corporation, a healthcare company serving over 350,000 patients per month nationally. When Litholink sold to a Fortune 500 company, she left corporate America to pursue lifelong passions.
Even while working in corporate healthcare, Laura always specialized in breaking down complex concepts for to make them easy to digest, understand, and apply. Now she channels that unique skill into “translating” philosophy and ancient wisdom – breaking down monumental, life-changing wisdom in a way that everyone can apply to their own lives.
Laura currently devotes her energy toward writing, coaching, helping others implement spiritual teachings in their everyday lives. Her first book, Emotional Obesity, is available for purchase. And now she is the host of the popular podcast, The Art of Authenticity.
4:00 - What is Emotional Obesity?
5:40 - Laura's story of gaining and losing her emotional weight. Wanting to be a philosophy professor, and instead running a tech company... which didn't feel right.
9:30 - How to shed your layers of emotional obesity. What does it mean to live a good life, or be emotionally fulfilled?
10:40 - Many people go on emotional crash diets when they leave their job, divorce their husband/wife dramatically, or make other rash decisions. These do not work.
12:00 - Kids know what they love... and they live it. As adults we start to do things we don't love, and make decisions, and take actions that are inauthentic. Then we wake up and we're in a life we never wanted.
13:10 - Imposter Thoughts: The rules we and others make for ourselves in order for us to be happy.
14:20 - Emotional Junk Food = unhealthy personal narratives... most of them start with, "I should."
19:00 - How to stop your crazy, negative, destructive thoughts
22:45 - Right and wrong thinking and the rules we set for ourselves and others.
24:00 - How to react when you don't have control, and learning what you can and can't control.
29:30 - Emotional diet and exercise: The cure to emotional obesity. (This is not "positive thinking.")
30:30 - Nutritional thoughts and this scene from The Breakup:
32:50 - Learn to appreciate the action over the motivation.
34:00 - The importance of taking action
35:20 - You can experience fear when trying to live an authentic life, especially around things and people that are important to you.
37:00 - Where to start taking action if you want to change your life. Start by identifying your most unhealthy go-to emotional junk food.
38:00 - Try going assumption-free for a week
39:00 - The importance of community and enlisting the help of your friends
40:20 - There's cultural shame in experiencing an emotional challenge
46:10 - When it comes to getting into physical shape, we'd all love to look like a model or celebrity, but those people work out several hours a day. If we want to be healthy emotionally, it's going to require some significant work as well!