The Retirement Success in Maine Podcast Ep 086:  How Overeating was Cured by Climbing the Pleasure Ladder

 

 

Transcript:

Ben Smith:

Hello, welcome everybody to The Retirement Success in Maine Podcast. My name is Ben Smith. Allow me to introduce my two co-hosts, the Presque Isle and Caribou to my St. Agatha, Curtis Worcester and Austin Minor. How are you both doing today?

Curtis Worcester:

Doing well, Ben. How are you?

Ben Smith:

I'm doing well. We had to do a little shout-out to the North county of the State of Maine.

Curtis Worcester:

I was going to say-

Ben Smith:

Aroostook County.

Curtis Worcester:

We're traveling now that we're into almost July here. I see we're going north.

Ben Smith:

Exactly. Exactly. That's where I think people try to go into Maine in the summer and enjoy lots of different areas and I think there's a lot of in Maine and people want to come back and experience camp and kind of reconnect with family and friends and do a little rediscovery. And one of the things that I think we talk about a lot in our show is retirement's actually a time for rediscovery and new patterns. Right?

Curtis Worcester:

Absolutely.

Ben Smith:

But as we age, there's some times that we may lead ourselves astray, which I think that's why, as we said, coming back to Maine sometimes helps us find those patterns. But in retirement, perhaps we're more sedentary or maybe we find ourselves searching for purpose and meaning in our next chapter, and we turn to food for comfort. So this might especially be true as we have more time to boredom eat, thus on various levels, we can begin to have an unhealthy relationship with food in retirement.

So when we become uncomfortable with our weight, then we may go to extremes to find solutions. So if you find yourself a loved one or a friend in this situation that brings you concern, we wanted to have a conversation about relationship with food and defining what's healthy as we age. We thought a guest that is of retirement age themselves and have worked through an eating disorder would be the perfect person to have this conversation with. So how do they go through that valley and then find a healthy relationship with their body and food on the other side? So that's exactly what this show's going to be about, how overeating was cured by climbing the pleasure ladder.

Curtis Worcester:

That's right Ben. And as you just kind of teed up for me here, we do have a perfect guest for today's conversation. So our guest is a Harvard educated author of over 40 Jewish children's books and is also the author of a candid memoir for adults about how she became an observant Jew and overcame food addictions joyfully and spiritually. The goal of her books is to help souls shine. Her background is in public health and her books deal with topics like disabilities, healthy eating and abuse as education on these subjects definitely helps souls to shine more brightly. She also coordinated a Jewish Big Brothers Big Sisters mentoring program in Baltimore, Maryland before retiring. So with that, please join me in welcoming Bracha Goetz to the Retirement Success in Maine podcast. Bracha, thank you so much for coming on our show today.

Bracha Goetz:

Oh, I'm really happy to be here. Thank you.

Ben Smith:

So Bracha with our show, of course, we want to get to know you a little bit. So we want to spend a little bit of time hearing about your upbringing and especially your time at Harvard. So what brought you to a relationship with eating that flip-flopped between intense dieting and binge eating?

Bracha Goetz:

Going to Harvard was a real experience. I'm going to name drop because people get a kick out of this.

Ben Smith:

Sure.

Bracha Goetz:

The people that I knew, okay, I was in the dance studio and we had one computer room back in those days. Guess who was in it? It was Bill Gates with his cohort. Now I just forgot his name. Oh my gosh. But anyway, the two of them were hanging out. The second guy in Microsoft, I just forgot. But anyway, the two of them were always in this little computer room hanging out and everybody just considered them such nerds. That's what we thought. They were kind of looked down upon. Anyway.

Ben Smith:

That's pretty awesome.

Bracha Goetz:

Yeah. And the other people, I'm telling you, look, Caroline Kennedy, she was with me. She was two years behind me in the dorm. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Daniel Moynihan's son. Oh, Abby Rockefeller. She was there in Cambridge. It was like I got there, I felt like I'd made it. This is success. I didn't come from that kind of a background. I would say lower middle class, but I was searching for wisdom in life. So I worked really hard and I got into Harvard and I'm with all these people and I felt like this is it. Now you've made it to the top. And I was even invited to this exclusive garden party with a lot of these children of the most famous people. And I felt like, okay, this is it. But I saw that those people too seemed a little bored, looking for something else, looking beyond each other.

I realized they were just people just like you and me, nothing special about them. And also on this perfect garden party day, it started pouring rain. These thunderstorm clouds came and it was pouring. And I said, "Oh my goodness, all these powerful people can't even stop the rain from coming down on their party." So there's something more, but I don't know what it is. And I feel so grateful that I made it to what I thought was the top, but it's an illusion because that's not it, just like fame, wealth, power, fortune. Okay. But that's not happiness. That's what I was able to learn at that point in life. And I'm really grateful for it because sometimes people go after illusions their whole lives. So in my early adulthood I learned this and then I could search for something more. What really brings lasting happiness?

So during those years is when I had the food addictions and it's kind of common, eating disordered behavior when you're that age. And what I translated it into later on in life is that my soul was starving so I could never get enough. And eating is a way to exercise control. When you're like dieting, like restrictive dieting, you're trying to bring control into your life when life feels out of control. And then when you have these uncontrolled binge eating things, it's like you feel so lost and desperate and your soul is starving and you can never get enough because that emptiness inside. You try to fill it with externalities, that's an addiction, but it's not a physical hole. That hunger is real, but it's not a physical hunger.

Ben Smith:

So Bracha, real quick too. It sounds, I can imagine just being in those social circles and feeling like, hey, do I even belong here? And here's obviously one of the finest institutions in the world and the pressure from the classes and the social circles and the friend groups and all that. I can just... And I know we all have pressure in all daily parts of our lives, but I could see where that pressure might even make you have a more intense reaction to getting control is when you're feeling out of control in all these different areas of your life. And there you even feel like maybe you're not succeeding, that you try to find ways to bring control. And I could see where maybe that's one way that maybe an overeating is a way that kind of inserting that back in your life.

Bracha Goetz:

Yes, confusion. And especially also when a person hits... It's a transition time. And when a person hits retirement, that's another transition time when a person might feel lost and try to fill the emptiness or try to fill boredom with eating, but it actually makes the hole bigger. It makes the emptiness bigger. It doesn't feel it up.

Austin Minor:

So connect a couple dots for me here, if you don't mind. So you were at Harvard and then you were to continue to medical school, I believe so.

Bracha Goetz:

Yes.

Austin Minor:

How did your path change there so that you've been writing children's books for a career and living a more worldly existence?

Bracha Goetz:

And I want to say writing the children's books is not exactly my career. It's something I love to do to just be helpful to the world. I worked for years in different capacities as an activity director, as a mentoring coordinator. What I was studying to be in medical school was a psychiatrist. And later on, so my books also, they very much deal with public health. As an undergraduate, I was taking courses at the Graduate School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School because this fascinates me.

The path I went on when I finished my first year of medical school, I took a six-week trip to Israel and I came back 10 years later. So something really changed. I really immersed myself in finding my roots and my heritage. So I went in a very different direction, more like a soul doctor, the healing of the soul rather than just the body. But now my books, they deal with both. In order to have your soul shine fully, you also need a healthy body. That's what I realize. So my books deal with how to have the most healthy body and have the most healthy soul. So I write the books that I wish I had as a child to answer these basic questions, how to develop happiness skills early on in life so you don't have to play catch up much later in life.

Austin Minor:

I love that.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah, I like that a lot. So now kind of sitting here today, so you've been retired for a few years, so you know exactly what our kind of core audience is going through right now. And so for some, right, we've talked about there's an emptiness that can happen from leaving a career. So I just want to ask you, how has retirement been for you? And then a little aside, are you also retired from writing right now?

Bracha Goetz:

So I'm still writing.

Curtis Worcester:

Okay.

Bracha Goetz:

In fact, yeah. What happened is I was always published by traditional publishers and now my children, my youngest children, they decided, no, stop sending your books out. We want to become the publishers. Really, as an author, you don't make a ton of money as an author. It's just like an extra thing I do. And so now they can make most of the money selling the books and publishing them, and I'm happy to be able to help them and they love getting my messages further out into the world. So it's really been awesome.

The past two years I've been working with my children, so we're still writing and they encourage my writing and I give a lot of presentations and I do consulting work and editing and I love it. So that's been continuing and I really enjoy retirement because now my time is totally freed up to be as creative as I want to be and follow all the dreams that I love to do. I love to dance. As I explained, even back at Harvard, I was dancing and now wow, I could dance as much as I want. I love that. And just it's much easier to live a healthy lifestyle, to travel, and just enjoy life more fully.

Curtis Worcester:

Love that.

Bracha Goetz:

Yeah.

Ben Smith:

So Bracha, that was a really great answer and love hearing you have your happiness, you have your purpose. And I know what we're going to talk about today is how overeating was cured by climbing the pleasure ladder. So we're going to talk about pleasure ladder later, but let's define things first. Let's go through and just use the same terminology for everybody, and I'd love to just hear from your perspective, how would you go about defining an eating disorder?

Bracha Goetz:

Yeah. Oh, an eating disorder, disordered eating. Well, I consider it, you're not eating in response to your physical hunger. You're eating in response to all kinds of other factors. And there's many different types of disordered eating. The most common is really binge eating, overeating to the point of just eating completely out of control. Enormous amounts of food in a short period of time is binge eating. And addictions, I don't know if you were going to ask me about that, but an addiction, it's the compulsive use of something or a behavior despite the harmful consequences. You realize you're harming yourself, but you can't stop. You continue to overuse whatever substance or behavior you're doing despite the harm it's causing you.

Ben Smith:

Gotcha. So those are really key and I thank you for doing that. But let's go back to a little bit of the bio piece. So you're at Harvard studying, right? Let's dig in specifically into that time where you were kind of out of balance here, but your eating disorder really wasn't eating at restaurants too much and then looking to maintain weight by cutting calories gradually. How did that happen to you and how out of balance did you get?

Bracha Goetz:

Well, yeah, it kind of was like that. I mean, we'd eat in the cafeteria, we'd go out to eat. And then after that I would do restrictive dieting. It was just horrible. It's like you're in a prison. It takes over your life. The walls become narrower and narrower. All my thoughts were about that. Oh, how much should I eat here and I eat too much here. It's like it uses up your emotional energy, your thoughts. Everything closes in on you and what you realize, what I realized later is that the prison walls that you create, it's made up of your thoughts and you can get out at any time, but you don't realize you have the key. You have no idea that you can get out of this prison that you've created. That's what it's like to be in an addiction, in an active addiction.

Austin Minor:

Oh yeah, that's probably something that you do a good job describing it, but until you're really in that situation, it's probably hard to grasp how severe that is. So you mentioned to us that you climbed the pleasure ladder. So tell us a bit about where you were in your eating disorder when you learned about the ladder, how you learned about it and what it is.

Bracha Goetz:

Yeah, could you believe I look like a success on the outside and yet I was ready to give up on life. I was that miserable in the addiction that I didn't feel like living. My life was so valueless to me. That's how I felt. So when I got there that summer between my first and second year of medical school, I actually, I was still always asking, what's the purpose of life? I can't believe we get up every day to go to work, to make money, to buy food, to go to work, to make money. What's the purpose of all of this? So I know that with this rabbi who's no longer alive, Rabbi Weinberg, he said, "The purpose of life is to experience the greatest pleasure possible." Why is this old rabbi saying that? That doesn't make any sense. That sounds hedonistic. But he explained the greatest pleasure possible in life are the spiritual pleasures.

Those are the pleasures that last. So to put it in concrete terms, it's like this. There's a pleasure ladder with five rungs on it. And I think that relates to our five fingers. We have the ability to bring pleasure into our lives at any moment. Why does a person overeat? Why do they keep stuffing their faces? Because they're experiencing pleasure and they're afraid that they don't have enough pleasure in their life. So they just keep stuffing it in to experience that one moment of pleasure. The pleasure lasts this long while it's in your mouth. Once it starts going down, you're not even feeling the pleasure anymore. So just to experience those few seconds of pleasure, a person will keep stuffing their face because they don't believe, they don't trust that this world is really filled with pleasure, that there's an abundance of pleasure that we have the power to bring in.

So a person develops an addiction because they feel out of control and they feel the world is out of control and they're trying to bring some sense of control in. When you can develop trust that this world is really filled with an abundance of pleasure, it changes everything. So these five levels, they correspond to the five levels of the human soul. The lowest level of the soul is the part that's connected to the body. So all the natural physical pleasures, the natural foods, exercise, swimming, dancing, yoga, being in nature, music, all these natural physical pleasures, they're designed to uplift our bodies and uplift our souls if we experience them with gratitude. The gratitude changes everything. So let's say an orange. An orange, it's a simple thing, but it's like if we experience it with gratitude, with focusing on it, we can notice that the fruit are all green.

They're camouflaged in with the leaves until they're ready for us. And then they become bright and beautiful and they call to us, "I'm ready," when they become so beautiful and then they smell beautiful, they look beautiful and they're filled with a sweet juiciness like an orange. It's individually packaged and the peel keeps the juiciness in for months. And then once you finish eating it, you find these seeds of infinity, the seeds of eternity, they become infinite amount of trees, infinite amount of oranges. It's like this amazing mindfulness experience it could be to eat an orange with gratitude so that opportunity is available to us. Or we could eat an orange flavored tangy taffy. And there even the wrapper pollutes the environment and we eat it. We feel one second of pleasure and then it just starts to harm our bodies. And afterwards, what do we feel? Guilt or just a slowing down as the sugar goes out of us.

So the junk, it's designed to be delicious and addictive and the natural stuff, it's designed to be delicious and nutritious. It's like a whole different kind of thing. So in fact they say now that junk has more in common with cigarettes and cocaine in its effect on the body than it has more in common with an orange, with a natural food for us. So all these things are designed to uplift us physically and spiritually by filling us with gratitude. And the next step up is love. And it doesn't sound like love is empowering. It's dependent on someone else. But we can bring love into our lives at any moment just by focusing on the virtues of another. They don't even have to be there. A person in prison could think about a grandmother that once did a kindness for them and be uplifted with a warm emotional feeling of love that inspires them to become better.

So we can bring love into our lives at any moment, focusing on the virtues of another. And up higher than that is meaning how can we bring meaning into our lives at any moment? Doing something good and positive in the world. I was on another show and the guy said he was feeling lonely eating pizza all by himself. He ate two slices of pizza and he was about to plow through the rest of the box. Someone knocks on his door. His neighbor needs his help for two minutes. He comes back. He doesn't want the pizza anymore. It's not calling his name anymore. He could put the rest in the fridge. Why? He filled up with meaning. He did something good and meaningful and he doesn't need that anymore. We overeat to try to fill that hole, but that doesn't fill it. It's filled by gratitude. Being able to give back and gratitude fills us up.

What's even higher than that is creativity. When we are in the creative zone, we don't feel like eating or sleeping. We're in such a creative place. When you're heavily involved in your work and you're absorbed in something, then you're on such a high that you don't need to be eating or sleeping even. It's like an amazing pleasure. The highest of all is transcendence. That's when we transcend our own limitations. We make that first crack in a bad habit. We do something new we've never tried before. Something good, amazing. And it's also like under a starry sky at night. We remember that forever, that it's a part of us that we know we're part of a greater whole. We're all connected to the same source energy and we're all connected to each other.

So each level up brings more connection. Why does a person overeat or why do they get involved in another addiction? They feel disconnected. They feel alone, anxious, depressed. All of these things make us disconnected. So bringing connection into our lives, this all brings more and more connection. This is how we fill ourselves up with lasting spiritual pleasure and there's only one price to pay to climb each level. And that's gratitude. Gratitude is what fills us up and brings us connection, brings us out of ourselves into the world.

Curtis Worcester:

Thank you so much for going through that ladder kind of rung by rung for us for us and our listeners. I think that was extremely helpful, just kind of a reaction I have. So hearing about the five levels of that ladder, five rungs, there seems to be a purpose of life agenda there. I know we're kind of talking about your journey, but there seems to be that kind of purpose of life agenda hidden in there and it obviously translates well as many retirees are left to their own devices to rediscover, reinvent, ask themselves what is my purpose now? Right? That's kind of the transition here and I think you just kind of said this, but pleasure seeking seems to be a component of finding purpose. And I guess the question I have for you is that where you think these addictions start for so many people?

Bracha Goetz:

Yes, exactly. We feel lost. What is the purpose of all this? This explains the purpose of why we're here. We are not just bodies. In fact, the older we get as our bodies deteriorate, we become more spiritual. We relate to our souls even more. That's what naturally happens. Our bodies degenerate for that purpose, to recognize our real self is a soul that goes on forever. And you know what? When a person becomes much older, they still are as vibrant a soul as they ever were. The soul never loses its vibrancy. In fact, that's why there's a disconnection when you look in the mirror and you go, "That's me with the wrinkles? But I feel so vibrant inside," because you're a soul and a body and this is just our clothing.

And we recognize that more and more the older we get because our soul maintains its vibrancy. It's something that lasts forever. And that's really what we have to nourish here in life through gratitude, through having a grateful life. That is what nourishes our hungry souls so that they can shine as fully as possible. And part of it, the lowest level is nourishing our bodies so that they can stay healthy and vibrant and enable our souls to shine.

Ben Smith:

So Bracha, I really like where you're going here in terms of this kind of finding this purpose and finding all this. I'm just thinking about triggers that happen for us as we age. And I'm just thinking about also why someone that perhaps hasn't displayed the level of the physical level, the eating side, might suddenly start and we hear about it as financial advisors is, hey, someone's comes to us. And I'm just thinking about that rung of the ladder where maybe creativity and you're saying, "Hey, I get a lot of self purpose from displaying creativity."Well all of a sudden if I'm retiring from the job that allows me to express creativity and now I am not able to do that and maybe I feel like that part of my life is missing. I'm not expressing myself as I used to and not feeling, as you said, you have this high of I don't need to eat, I don't need to sleep.

I feel like I'm more of myself as I'm expressing that creativity. So I could see where all of a sudden now I'm lost. I'm missing my purpose. I maybe start exercising less often and less strenuously maybe because I have general aging issues or increasing physical limitations. Maybe I have money now. It was, hey, I have access to a pool of money and I have greater access to rich food and eating in restaurants so I can eat even better. I can eat with more kind of pleasure in that, as you said, between the jaw and your throat here about that space, I can get richer foods that tastes even better than I've ever had before. So I can see where all of a sudden there's some connections here. So I want to ask you about a question of, hey, so I'm just giving you some of those examples, but what are some indications that you think that retirees may be overeating, not response to physical hunger, but maybe for other reasons?

Bracha Goetz:

Exactly. It's a major transition time. There's a loss of what you used to be doing. And from that loss you can easily feel disconnection. That comes naturally. It's a process of creating new connections to do things you enjoy. We hear all the time, it's important to eat healthy, it's important to exercise, it's important to volunteer and all this stuff, but we don't connect it to the soul, nourishing our soul. That's why I found this so helpful because this is ancient mystical wisdom. This isn't coming off the top of my head. No. Why did these things work? Why does exercise the endorphins created, they make us happier? Why? We were actually created this way. We're designed this way. We are designed to actually benefit in this way and we're here for that purpose. Our whole purpose for being here is to experience gratitude.

Two, when we do that, it transforms everything we're experiencing into a joyful experience. And that's like, it puts a framework around why do all these things work? Why does exercise make us more joyful? Why does eating healthy? It explains all of that in one framework. So now we understand why all these things work and because we were designed that way when every moment that we are grateful is a moment that we're not being miserable. So we can celebrate every moment of gratitude that we experience. And if you are not used to being a grateful person, it's kind of traveling over a road that hasn't been formed yet. It's really hard the first time. It feels silly. It feels ridiculous going on this road that hasn't been paved.

Once you've paved it and you've practiced gratitude, the more you practice it, the easier it becomes because you've created those neural roadways, the neural pathways, and it goes much more easily to experience gratitude in life the more you practice it. So even if it feels silly at first, try it with an orange, try it with a little raisin and experience it mindfully. Eat it mindfully or exercise. And notice. That's an amazing thing about yoga because you do it slowly and you have the time to recognize how amazing your body feels. A massage, whatever it is that gets everything flowing in your body so that you can let the joy flow too. Yeah.

Austin Minor:

Yeah, that's super helpful and I like that, especially not even to just try to determine what you're doing that might be detrimental to you, but really focusing on the good stuff in your life. Like you said, when it's exercise or when you're eating something like an orange and you're enjoying it, is really tying that into those five rungs of the ladder. I love that.

Bracha Goetz:

Exactly. Oh, I just want to say this. Let's say just what you were saying. Let's say a person has an overeating problem. So let's say they ate 10 candy bars. They can celebrate that they didn't eat 50 candy bars. There's always something to celebrate because that's how it gets you. You feel, oh, I ate all this garbage. Now I'm garbage. Now I'll just keep eating garbage. If this is how it goes, and you just go lower and lower. Instead say, "Okay, I ate 10 candy bars, I didn't eat 50, I didn't eat 250." Just celebrate wherever you're at and then you'll have more. That's how you bring the gratitude in. I'm sorry, but please, yeah, go on.

Austin Minor:

No, that ties in perfectly and that's such a good point. So no, what I was going to say is that your transition to finding spiritual nourishment is what cured your food addiction from what you're saying. So it seems like the traditional root for addressing food addiction would be therapy and counseling. Do you think those two coexist?

Bracha Goetz:

Yes. And here's why, I told you I have two books about abuse. Abuse puts a covering, trauma, neglect, any type of trauma a person's been through. It's not so easy to recover from an addiction if you've been through a trauma and you're using the addiction to cope in life to cover up that pain. But here's the thing, this is how it is. This is our soul. It's always shining. But when we go through a trauma, it puts a covering over it. So we don't even recognize that we're shining anymore. We don't even see it or feel it. So sometimes we need therapeutic intervention to help us, to provide support, to remove the coverings because it's scary to do it by oneself. It's an important coping mechanism that a person has to not experience so much pain is an addiction.

So they may need help. They may need therapeutic intervention through a coach, through a therapist in order to overcome sometimes. Other people may not. They may be able to do it on their own. A person will know, are they able to see their soul shining or not? If they don't feel worthy, if they really feel like the garbage can that they're putting in, then they probably need therapeutic intervention to help them so that they could get to their resilient soul reconnect to their resilient soul again and recognize the shining part of them. Yeah.

Curtis Worcester:

I love that. And for those of you listening who may be watching, you'll appreciate that demonstration with the light as much as I did. I think that was really helpful. I want to go back a second to gratitude. So gratitude is something that we've covered on this show throughout a bunch of episodes, but specifically we had a guest named Matt Moran on a little bit back in our archives. And more recently we had a guest, Chris Gathers. Both of those conversations just really dove into gratitude and living your life with gratitude. I want to ask you why is gratitude the secret weapon of the pleasure ladder?

Bracha Goetz:

Exactly. Let's say a person wins a lottery or let's say, God forbid, a person becomes paralyzed. Studies have found that six months after a person wins the lottery, millions of dollars in a lottery or becomes paralyzed, severe things happen to them, six months later, they're back at the same level of happiness they were before these major things happened in their life. But what changes a happiness point? This is what they found through scientific research. What actually changes a person's level of happiness in a lifestyle way that goes on and on is gratitude. Developing the habit of gratitude changes your life forevermore. Not winning the lottery, not God forbid, becoming paralyzed. These things actually, you go back to the same happiness set point you were at beforehand.

It's learning to practice gratitude that significantly changes the level of joy in your life. And really what is a good day? A good day is not when things happen to you that are great. It's when you make good things happen. You have a hundred percent control of that outflow pipe. You don't have that much control of the inflow pipe. So that's what you can work on developing your happiness. This is what gratitude does for you. Being grateful is basically focusing on the positive, removing those blockages, removing them, and focusing on all the positive in your life that you can so easily take for granted.

Ben Smith:

So Bracha, I want to add to that too because I'm going to ask you two questions. I'm going to throw in a bonus question that we haven't talked about before, but so the five rungs of the ladder and go all the way to the transcendence. And I know you mentioned it, but I want to dive into that a bit more because I think when we talked at a previous session, we talked about hey, being able to transcend outside of ourselves and to see a little bit of the impact that we have on others, but also the impact that we're having on the world and to see how everything kind of connects and kind of grows and flows between places. And I just kind of see that from the population that either listening to our show or that we're helping is that for some people they're able to get to that point and in some of it they go through, even within their family lines, they go through ancestry.com or they see right that, hey, I'm in a line of people before me.

And then the line of people that are coming afterwards. And I think Curtis Trelidibner mentioned that about, he talked about, "Hey, you almost visualize a line of our family members and my parents are in front of me and maybe my children are behind me in line and we're kind of on this conveyor belt and we kind of see ourselves as we have a journey, as we have all this." So having these enlightened transcendent connections and having gratitude for it, I'd love to hear about your connection and the transcendence part, right, because I see that that's being able to just have a more enlightened viewpoint. Why is that the top of the rung of the ladder, I guess where I want to go with you and where are you getting that gratitude out of transcendence today?

Bracha Goetz:

Yeah, what changed for me is that I trusted life. I began to trust that there's an ultimate good purpose for everything that happens to us. That changes my whole perspective. Then every challenge that comes my way doesn't throw me so off balance. I realize it's all part of a much bigger picture that I may not understand right now, but now I've developed enough trust that I believe there's a good purpose to it all. What happens to us this minute may not feel good, but I trust that eventually I'll see why it was good and that there's an ultimate good purpose to everything.

When I was feeling lost, the world turned gray and now the colors are back and vibrant. That's the change that takes place when you bring this whole different picture into your life and understanding that what does a child want for their children? They want their children to experience the greatest pleasure possible in life. That's why we were created. That's what we are here for. And it may not feel like it sometimes and it may not feel like it to the child when they're getting the vaccination or they fall down, but it's all for a good eventual purpose of ultimate growth.

Ben Smith:

Love that Bracha. So again, thank you for kind of spending a moment on that because I think that's a really key point here is kind of going up that ladder. The ultimate goal is to maybe get to the top of the ladder to experience all of those pleasures with gratitude and kind of having that. I want to go back to our theme on food here a little bit and I'll kind of raise my hand. I'm guilty of watching this show called My 600 Pound Life. It's a very popular show. There's people on the show that they've struggled with obesity all their lives and they say that food is the only thing that brings them pleasure. And perhaps even worse when they feel bad, the only thing that comforts them is food. So I think they've become so dependent and so solely focused on the only thing that can kind of bring a pleasure as food.

So it just creates a terrible cycle as maybe then after as you said, we eat that food, then we feel bad about ourselves again. Maybe we're not making right food choices as well. So I guess the question here is obviously when you are on that cycle, there's folks on that show, there's a trigger for us that leads us to ask for help. And I think that trigger maybe was delayed for the folks that are being highlighted on that show. But it seems like if we're getting in the show's case to a morbidly obese level that we're not listening to a trigger. So what do you see for triggers that are saying, "Geez, I'm not happy. I am out of balance and I'm doing something that's harming myself." How do I kind of internally or externally get a trigger to say, "I need to solve something here?"

Bracha Goetz:

Yeah, exactly. The people on that show have kind of given up but not totally. Their souls are still there. They just feel that that's the only thing that could give them pleasure. They need to learn about the pleasure ladder. That's it. They need to understand the simple ways that they could begin to bring pleasure back into their life little by little. That's it. Just experience the orange with mindful gratitude. Experience, if they're not used to exercising, just move their neck around a little, feel how good that feels, move their wrist. Do little things that you start to experience that pleasure. Send a text message. Some of them can't even get out of bed. Send a text message to someone expressing what you appreciate about them. All of a sudden you fill up with a feeling of love. It's amazing. It doesn't take a lot. It's little things. Planting little seeds like that grow trees, grow fruit infinitely. That's all they really have to do in order to begin to make a change in very, very small ways.

Austin Minor:

That's great. And that's very true. I think even for all of us that aren't even on My 600 Pound Life, really just making those small changes first.

Bracha Goetz:

And enjoying them, enjoying those changes. That's it. I learned that it takes 400 repetitions to change a habit. Who wants that? It takes only 10 to 20 repetitions if you do it joyfully. So add in the joy. That's how you create new habits quickly. Yeah.

Austin Minor:

Oh, I'm writing that down. That is a very interesting thing to know. So Bracha, we've talked a lot about food, but we know there's another side to you and your writing of children's books. So how has your life experience with an eating disorder influenced your messaging to children in your books?

Bracha Goetz:

Yeah, exactly. I'm trying to prevent that for children. You don't have to get stuck in an addiction. You don't have to think there's a limited amount of pleasure in your life. Here are the skills for how to be happy early on in life. And guess who's reading these books? Youngest children. Parents are reading it, grandparents are reading it. Teachers and even teenagers when no one's looking, they pick up the books and they get the messages. Little children's books are the only books that the message gets to every single age level. And the books are enjoyed by every age level because they're written on a level where they could be absorbed on all different levels.

So Let's Stay Healthy. This was written during the pandemic when parents were reaching out to me, help my children. They just eating junk. They're not exercising. They're not going to sleep. Explain why. I love to explain why. Why is it important? Why does our body need healthy foods? The bad food actually takes stuff out of our bodies. It drains us. Exercise, our bodies were designed to move sleep. Test, see how you feel when you get enough sleep and when you don't get enough sleep, see how much happier you are. And hygiene, I teach you about all these things.

And then my newest book is called Don't Read This Book. This book is about the little voice inside all of our heads. So this voice is saying, "Don't read this book. Don't figure out how to out trick me because you're going to learn all my tricks in this book." So these are the tricks. This voice is in all our heads all day long trying to get us to be miserable. "You just need that. You're lacking that. You're missing this." So if we learn that right away, we go, "Oh my gosh, it's you. You're that voice trying to get me to be miserable. I get it. I'm going to focus on what I have. I'm going to focus on all the blessings in my life already." And what happens, it's a fly in the book. It goes, woo. It goes flying away. It has no power over you the minute you recognize it.

Well, this book took me 30 years to write. Why? I wrote it 30 years to go. I came up with the title, but I didn't have the ending. I knew something was missing until I got to last year. I figured this out and I didn't realize it the whole time. Even that voice, that voice was put inside of all of us for a positive reason. That voice really doesn't want us to listen to it. It wants us to push it off. It wants us to grow our gratitude muscles. That voice is put inside of us. It's a personal trainer designed for resistance training. We grow our gratitude muscles pushing it off and saying, "I appreciate what I have in my life right now." That's how we become a happier person. So I'm teaching this to children. My books are in hundreds of thousands of homes and I hear how the books are saving lives every day, teaching children gratitude skills and teaching the adults as well. Yeah.

Curtis Worcester:

I love that. I love that. And just for everyone listening, I know we'll cover this when we do kind of our normal wrap up, but we will have links to all of your books in our show notes so everyone can go check them out. So Bracha, we've kind of reached the end of our conversation. I do have one final question for you. We like to ask all of our guests this. So we're here on the Retirement Success in Maine podcast. So we got to throw in a retirement question or two. So I know you're currently in retirement, but we'd like to ask, how are you going to find your personal retirement success?

Bracha Goetz:

Yeah, I think it's Wayne Dyer. Wayne Dyer said, "Success is an inside job." That's real success. The more I do every day, I feel my soul shining brighter and brighter. I'm so grateful for this. I hope that everybody out there also finds these ways to nourish their hungry soul. It's genuinely hungry and it just needs this kind of nourishment in order to shine fully. Recognize you are a soul. Recognize you're not just a body. You are also a soul, and all these ways will help your soul to shine. I also want to say on my website, you can download a free chart, much more complex, about the pleasure ladder explaining what all these steps are about. You can put it on your fridge or your cabinet. If you feel like overeating, you just look at it and you remind yourself there's no scarcity of pleasure. There's an abundance that you could bring into your life at any moment.

Curtis Worcester:

Love that.

Ben Smith:

Bracha, and I know we'll point people to your website, which is goetzbookshop.com. So we'll have that link in our show notes as Curtis was saying, but we really can't thank you enough because again, the show today kind of had a little maybe food as the theme, but really a lot of spirituality and purpose and meaning and gratitude and a lot of really great themes today. So thank you so much for sharing your story with us, sharing your philosophy, having a really great conversation about, I think maybe we'll all have a little bit of pieces that we're lost or we're not all the way up that ladder where we want it to be and showing us a path to get there. So thank you so much for coming on our show.

Bracha Goetz:

Thank you. What a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

Ben Smith:

All right, be well. Take care. It's really great to have Bracha Goetz on as a guest today. We're pretty excited to have a guest of her caliber too and kind of really great life experience and world experience on top of that. So again, for an 86th episode, not a bad one there today. And again, eating, retirement, lots of different themes here today. And we thought maybe we'll just kind of go around the three of us and do a little quick here's kind of some of our reactions to today and a takeaway that we all had for the show. Austin, would you like to maybe kick us off with something that you liked as a highlight for the show today?

Austin Minor:

Yeah, I'd love to. Well, first of all, I am craving an orange now, so that's going to be my next stop after this. Well, no, I think she was fantastic. And when it comes to people that are giving you kind of overall life advice, I think there's like the proof is in the pudding kind of thing where she comes across with such a great energy and you can really tell that she truly believes and lives all of the things that she was teaching us about. So I like that just on a very high level, but definitely all five rungs of that ladder are something that are things that I know I can definitely focus on more in my own life. So I thought that she had a lot of really valuable stuff there.

Ben Smith:

Nice. Yeah, I agree. Curtis, what was anything you took away from today's show?

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah, I think so the short answer is gratitude, but I know that's something we've covered a lot. One specific thing that stuck out to me that she said, she even kind of just said it in passing, I don't think it was a key point to a... Well, when she initially brought it up again on the theme of gratitude, she was talking about someone who maybe just sat down and ate 10 candy bars and the easy reaction is to go, oh, I'm gross. I just ate 10 candy bars. But just this simple, flip that around. You didn't eat 15, you didn't eat 20. Just that, I say simple, it's easy to talk about it in retrospect here. If you're going through it, I understand it's not that simple, but just the change of the mindset of it could have been worse.

I did it better than it could have been. Just to start your thinking that way. And then clearly her whole kind of conversation was about going through this process with gratitude and it just snowballs from there I think. So just the key piece of the candy bars really stuck out to me, and I wanted to bring that up because I thought, well, that's something that's small and simple, but it really would start making a big difference.

Ben Smith:

Well and add to it too, and I hadn't heard this until she said that today was the point about 40 or however many reps, 400 reps to do make a habit. But when you do it with joy is... So to the same thing of how many times do we hear about it is somebody said, "Well, I want to get back to exercising more and be more active." And they used to walk two miles and they can only walk a half a mile. So they look at that and say, "Hey, I'm a failure and geez, I can't do what I used to do and isn't this terrible?" And all of a sudden you start beating yourself up. We have a client that had hip surgery and was a pretty good golfer, and then after hip surgery felt the limitation of their body and not as good.

And you could feel them beat themselves up, right? "I'm never going to get back to where I was and I'm not going to be as good." And versus the thought of, geez, I'm really excited to be out here. I'm grateful I'm experiencing courses again. I'm able to hit the ball still. Right? There's kind of this 180 that can kind of happen there. And also I guess for me, looking at the pleasure ladder like the five rungs there that she's describing, going through appreciating natural and physical gifts, love, appreciating others, meaning, creativity and transcendence, kind of those things kind of combined, but we kind of made the point it's like, well, when you retire and you miss your creativity or you miss your appreciating other people, I don't see other people anymore.

I think there's a lot of things on that ladder that was described that we hear either our listeners or the people we help as clients echo to us, right as, "Geez, there's pieces that I'm missing and I'm feeling that hollowness from that and I'm feeling like I'm not who I was or I'm not kind of as happy as I used to be." And I think when you put it in that ladder perspective, I think, it shows you where the gap is. And I thought that was really great from a kind of application of what she was describing to of some of the situations we see. So yeah, really great to again, sometimes see things through new lens is really important. And I think Bracha was really great bringing that today.

So again, we'll have the links to Bracha's books. One thing that we didn't bring up, she actually wrote a memoir called Nourish the Soul, so more of her life story. That is on Amazon. I think it's coming out here in July of this year on Amazon. So we'll have that link as well in addition to the children's books. So I know we have a lot of parents or grandparents that might want to share some of these messages with kids. So we'll have those links. You can go to blog.guidancepointllc.com/86 for episode 86, to find more about Bracha and her message here. And again, you could also read the transcript, but we really appreciate you tuning in today, listening to our conversation. We have a bunch more ready to go, so we will catch you next time.