The Whole Again Podcast: Mindfulness and Resilience through Kinstugi Wisdom airs every Monday, Wednesday and Friday with Pause Breathe Reflect Microdose Meditations, Growth Mindset and Mindfulness Tips, Transformation our scars into healing and resilience, and a new series from May to August called A Perfectly Imperfect Union.

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What if losing five pounds had nothing to do with dieting—and everything to do with how you eat?

If you’ve ever felt frustrated by confusing nutrition advice, restrictive diets, or the constant pressure to “optimize” your health, you’re not alone. This episode offers a refreshing alternative: a simple, mindful approach to eating that helps you slow down, tune into your body, and build a healthier relationship with food—without extremes.

• Learn how mindful eating can naturally support weight loss without restrictive diets or intense routines
• Discover a simple practice to improve digestion, reduce overeating, and increase satisfaction from your meals
• Gain a new perspective on food that helps you feel more connected, grateful, and in control of your choices

Press play now to discover how slowing down at your next meal could be the simplest—and most powerful—shift for your health and well-being.

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With Whole Again: A Fresh Approach to Mindfulness and Resilience through Kintsugi Wisdom, listeners explore mindfulness and resilience through personal stories of trauma, scars, and injury while learning to overcome PTSD, imposter syndrome, self-doubt, and perfectionism with self-compassion, self-love, and self-worth. Through insightful discussions on building resilience, fitness, and stress management, as well as mindfulness practices and digital wellness, the show offers practical tools such as breathwork, micro-dose meditation, grounding techniques, visualization, and daily affirmations for anxiety relief and stress reduction. Inspired by the art of kintsugi, the podcast embodies healing as a transformative process, encouraging a shift in perspective from worry and overwhelm to gratitude and personal growth. By exploring the mind-body connection, micro-dosing strategies for emotional well-being, and

 Hey there, it's Michael. Welcome to Whole again, the show that is supporting you in creating a meaningful life. And my guess is that the title of this episode about losing five pounds may have caught your attention because who out there, I include myself, hasn't thought about what will it take to lose those pesky last five pounds or just.

They don't even have to be the last five pounds. Just five pounds. And what I'll share with you today won't be about GLP ones. I'm not gonna ask you to do a cold plunge every morning or do some type of high intensity workout. I won't suggest to you that you have to drink nothing but some exotic juice from a country you haven't heard about for 14 days.

And you don't have to take a tub full of creatine. Nope. I'm not gonna talk about any of that. What I'll share with you might be more effective and maybe a bit sexier. Yep, that's right. I'm talking about mindful eating. Now your reaction might be what? What's that? I've heard of mindfulness. I've heard of meditation and yeah, we hear about mindfulness all the time.

We think about someone sitting cross-legged in Lotus position, only focused in on their breath. You might have heard about loving kindness meditation. That's a practice I lead every Friday to end the week. On a good note, you might have even heard of mindful movement, like a walking meditation practice, which I just love or.

In my version, cycling can be a meditative process. All those are wonderful. What I'm offering up today is the power of mindful eating, because let's be honest, you might be eating something right now. Who among us hasn't ate something while listening, watching, reading, scrolling, driving, or at your desk? We love to eat.

We love food. Food nourishes us. Food can be medicine, but often we eat on the go far too often, or eat on the run, or just try to wolf something down real quick because we gotta get onto the next thing. It's almost like we're more like Hoover vacuum cleaners than human when it comes to how we consume our food.

We are smart, my friends. We know how essential food is to our health, but it can get confusing. Should I eat this? Should I eat that? And the food companies seem to confuse us on purpose, so we eat what they want us to eat. But the one thing we do have a lot of say in is how we consume our food as we head further into spring.

Welcome summer. I know many out there will go to the local farmer's market to pick up food right from the farm and bring it to their table. It's not convenient to go to the farmer's market, but the food, the whole food is definitely better for us. But much of our food industrial complex is based on convenience, hence fast food.

But those choices are not the healthiest choices we can make. Taking a slower approach, slower getting real food and preparing it takes some time. But even though we spend all that time preparing something that looks beautiful, we're eating the rainbow, as they say, good. For our gut microbiome, we tend to scarf it down.

It might take 45 minutes to fix something, and then it's gone in about seven minutes and 37 seconds. Which is not good for our overall health. It's not good for our digestion, and we're probably not maximizing the nutrients in the whole foods because we're eating it so quickly. And when we eat quickly, we're not listening to our body.

So often we blow past or we don't even notice the signal. Our body's trying to tell us that, Hey, hey buddy. We're getting close to full. Slow it down. Save some for later. But because we're eating so quickly, that signal isn't communicated in time and we tend to overeat, and we all know the downstream ripple effect, which is not good when we overeat.

Every time I go to a silent retreat, a silent retreat, all the meals are mindfully consumed. There's no talking at the table. We take our time. It's whole food. It's also plant-based because that's the most compassionate diet out there. It may not be the healthiest diet out there, but certainly it's the most compassionate diet we can consume.

So by slowing things down through a silent retreat, our central nervous systems are also more in a rest and digest status. Which just helps with digestion and the absorption of the nutrients from the food. So all this creates some space so I can be much more thoughtful about what I choose to eat and how much I put on my plate.

And every time I go to a silent retreat and what I'm about to say may not work for everyone. After all, when we look at creating a meaningful life, we all have a different recipe. But each time I go to a silent retreat, I usually lose a pound or two, and some of that is driven by food selection. That space to be thoughtful about what I put on my plate.

It's also about my central nervous system being in a better state of being, and I'm also eating more slowly growing up. I would scarf down my meal like it was the last meal I was ever going to have. And if you happen to go out with a group of friends, maybe it's for fun and games, maybe it's a professional dinner, look around, you'll see that so many people are eating so quickly.

Our eating is just another way. Life has sped up, but it doesn't have to be that way. By slowing things down, we can appreciate our meals much more deeply. We can express even more gratitude for what's on our plate and who doesn't love a little bit more Vitamin G. This exercise is something that I've done with a lot of people.

I teach mindfulness to. It's the whole raisin exercise. You might have heard of it. In this exercise, we focus in on one raisin, and if raisins are not your jam, you can. Take a cup of tea or a coffee, or a banana or an apple, whatever it might be. But we take just a little bit of it, a sip one little raisin, a little bite, and we experience it by not just opening our mouth.

And down the hatchet goes. We travel through our senses, we tap into our sight, our hearing, our feeling, our smell, and our taste. And almost all the time that raisin to all the people participating tastes a lot different. It's almost like all these raisins I've had in my life, I've really never fully appreciated what a raisin looks like or how it really tastes.

Because as we're chewing the latest fork full of food in our mouth, we have the next fork full ready to go. It's like we're Stanley the steam engine, just putting more food down the chute, but not really tasting any of it. Not really chewing it fully or properly. So we lose some of the enjoyment, some of the joy that we can get from our food and also some of the nutrients.

And we also missed the opportunity to listen to our body. That signal that our body will tell us to say, Hey, slow it down. We have enough so we don't overeat. So I'm not going to say that, Hey, we're gonna move from how we're eating today to eating everything mindfully. There'll be moments when you're on a road trip and you're eating in the car, or, or you're eating between flights, or you're eating simply at home as you're chilling out with some Netflix.

So we're gonna have times where we're gonna eat and do other things. What I'm offering up to you is try to incorporate certain times throughout the day or throughout the week. Start small. One meal is better than zero meals. Eating mindfully and practice mindful eating, slow things down. Bring your senses into the experience, chew properly, and then listen to your body on what it's sharing with you in terms of how full it feels.

By doing this, I believe we're all going to make wiser decisions as to what we put on our plate. We'll have more gratitude as we do. Since we're incorporating more mindfulness into our lives, our central nervous system can get into more of that rest and digest state, which then also helps us with how we consume our food and how it's processed.

So all of it can lead to a greater appreciation, a greater awareness with how we consume, what nourishes us. My belief is that if you give this a try over the next month or two, you might see yourself losing those five pounds, not because you're doing something extreme. Although slowing down to eat might seem extreme to a lot of people, so you don't have to do a massive workout or do a cold plunge.

You can simply slow things down and have a different relationship with your food. Take it in, cherish it, and that might actually lead to losing some weight. The thing is, you won't know until you try, and even if you don't lose any weight from this, my bet is. You'll appreciate what you put on your plate more deeply, and that will help you create that meaningful life you're aiming to create.

If you have any questions with this, just reach out. I'm happy to help. This is something I'd love to teach about as I share my pauses, breathe, reflect method with others.

As always, thank you for being here. Thanks for listening. If this episode resonated with you, I hope you'll share it with a friend or two. And if your family just inhales dinner, you might wanna listen to this episode together. Slow Down Family Dinners Bond a little bit more deeply. Friday's episode where I share another one of my growth mindset from.

Five years since my last bad day. Let's remember to celebrate our scars as golden symbols of our strength and resilience. And don't forget to have fun. Storm in the castle,

and if you wish to learn more about creating beautiful ripples and how to prevent a bad moment from turning into a bad day. Please visit my website, Michael O'Brien schiff.com and sign up for my newsletter called The Ripple Effect. And join us each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday here at Whole Again, and discover how you can heal, grow, and become more resilient and celebrate our scars as golden symbols of strength and resilience.

Until then, remember, you can always come back to your breath. You've got this and we've got you.