Break Free from Self-Doubt with Leanne Ellington

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is April 1st.

It is Action April, and today is Mind Change Monday.

I'm so grateful to be with you here, your favorite internet and hopefully real-life

brain surgeon. We're going to do a little self-brain surgery today.

A few months ago, I had a conversation with Maddie Jackson-Smith,

who you probably heard, I hope you heard on the podcast.

If you didn't, go back, and I had an opportunity to be on her podcast as well.

And Maddie Jackson-Smith, of course, Alan Jackson, the country singer's daughter,

and she has an incredible book that she's written called Lemons on Friday about

her story of losing her husband just before their first wedding anniversary

and just an incredible story.

And a few weeks after I talked to Maddie, she sent me an email and said,

hey, Lee, I want you to meet Leanne Ellington.

Leanne Ellington and you would really hit it off. You have mutual stories that

would benefit each other's audience. It turns out Leanne Ellington is a podcaster

on the iHeartRadio network. She has two podcasts.

One is called What God Got to Do With It. The other one is called Outweigh, O-U-T-W-E-I-G-H.

And she is an incredible person who has sort of gone through a tremendous challenge.

She lost 100 pounds. She had a tremendous issue with food and body image and

all kinds of problems. And she basically transformed herself by pursuing an

understanding of neuroscience and how your brain works and how you think about things.

And she kind of worked herself through all that, lost 100 pounds,

became a fitness professional, was on television all the time.

But there was something big missing in her life.

Her story you'll hear as we unpack it in this episode. But basically,

neuroscience led her to God, and God led her to a new career,

this redesigned look at how you can change your mind and change your life.

And her platform lines up with mine very well. We come at two different problems

all through the lens of neuroscience and faith.

And I think you're going to love Leigh Ann Ellington. I know you're going to

love Leigh Ann Ellington's story.

She's a self-image scientist, speaker, educator, dreamer, newlywed,

and lover of warm chocolate chip cookies. I can't wait for you to meet my friend, Leanne Ellington.

But before we get started here on Action April, I have one question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything

starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.

This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

Friend, we're back and I'm so excited. This is actually, you don't know this,

but this is the fourth time we've tried to record this intro.

We're having all kinds of internet problems and fun things today.

And that means that the conversation you're about to hear is really important.

And I'm excited to introduce a new friend who's going to become a well-known

person to you in the coming weeks and months. I've got Leanne Ellington from Nashville, Tennessee.

Welcome to the show, Leanne. Hello. So glad to be here.

And I am grateful for you and your patience. And today's been a little challenge,

but the last two weeks we've tried to record this and I've had neurosurgery

jump up and get in the way.

So thank you so much for pushing through all that.

Absolutely. I cannot complain about neurosurgery. So you're excused. That's awesome.

I want to shout out our mutual friend, Maddie Jackson Smith,

for introducing us and hooking us up.

I love Maddie and she's so great. and our listeners today are familiar with

her and just so kind of her to hook us up. So thank you so much,

Maddie, for that. Shout out to you.

And Leanne, give us a, I've told the folks a little bit about you already,

but give us a 30,000 foot view of your life and your story and then we're gonna go deep in it.

Sure. Yeah. 30,000 foot view, just to kind of give some context.

You know, my childhood, I was a sedentary, overweight, out of shape cow potato

and didn't know anything different and didn't have God in my life at the time.

And through when, when I hit my early twenties, I hit my first enough is enough point.

And through a lot of wrong ways and maybe some of the right ways,

I went on to lose close to a hundred pounds.

Thinking that that would make me feel happy and beautiful and all the things

that I thought that it would fill the gap up.

Um, unbeknownst to me though, I give myself disordered eating and a toxic self

image and body image to get myself there, but didn't know that was even a thing.

Um, so, you know, through a series of core life crises, but also,

um, really opening myself up to basically becoming my own advocate and,

and studying things like biomechanics and psychology and behavior science.

And then a spine surgery, ironically, is what led me to start studying neuroscience.

Not even knowing what that was at the time.

But that's what I needed to heal myself from complications after a spine surgery.

But through a clonation of all those things, I realized that the problems that

I was trying to solve with diet and weight loss and food and my weight was really

in my brain, through my thoughts and my beliefs and my behavior.

And it wasn't until I started taking that approach because the other side of

it too is after I lost all this weight, I was left with a self-image,

what I would call a residue, where I was still seeing myself through these goggles where I thought,

you know, I call them my fat goggles because that's what my brain was telling me and calling myself.

And I believe that we all have our own goggles, but, you know,

unworthy, unlovable, broken, you know, a lost cause, all these things.

And of course, weight loss to heal that.

So long story, a little less long. In the midst of that, I found God and started

my faith journey, which is its own journey on itself.

But really, neuroscience is what led me to feel like it resonated with me and landed with me.

Um, but fast forwarding to present day, um, you know, now I have women that,

you know, the millions of women that struggle with disordered eating and self-image and body image,

I help them reheal that by taking a brain first approach to healing their struggles

by really reconciling the identity that's causing them to think and act and

feel and behave the way that they are so that they can be set up for success,

um, on their health journey.

And I define health as this three-dimensional mental, physical,

emotional, spiritual, social spiritual kind of, you know, journey,

but really help them set themselves up for life.

So they're no longer dabbling with band-aids and short-term gratification traps.

So that's kind of the cliff notes of everything.

That's amazing. Now you kind of went past it pretty quickly,

but when you talk about how you found God, I mean, your story of finding God

is really intricate and interesting.

So unpack that a little bit for us, because you came out of sort of secular Judaism, right?

And just help us understand that, how you found him and how science was kind

of part of that. that. And that's a fascinating story. Absolutely.

Well, I am a bacon-loving Hebrew-speaking Jew who found Jesus about five years ago.

And how that happened was, you know, the way I kind of describe it in secular

Judaism, you know, it was a heritage. It was a culture.

It was, you know, the history. I mean, my grandparents were in the Holocaust.

So it was very important.

Judaism was very important to me, but it was never God. It was never faith.

It was more like a culture.

And so I and in a way, I think I was raised to believe that Jesus was in the

category of like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

It was just kind of this thing that I just thought was not something to even explore.

So honestly, it wasn't until I had my probably third or fourth like core life crises.

Right. Where I ended up down on my knees in surrender in a pile of tears with

this awareness that I can only describe now as a gift from God.

God of like, I can't do this on my own anymore. And I don't want to do it on my own anymore.

So I started seeking out the word surrender.

That's the word that kept coming up to me, surrender, surrender.

And I never explored that word. So I literally asked my friend,

Hey, what are some good churches?

What has good music? I'm in Nashville. Who's got good worship music.

And they told me about this place called cross point. And my first question

was like, are Jews just allowed to walk into a church?

Because I didn't know, you know, and they're They're like, yeah,

everyone's welcome is their tagline. So I went and I was like, okay, yous are welcome.

I went there and I immediately felt goosebumps from the music and the message.

The concept of Jesus was very far away from me at first. It felt a little bit

weird at the time, to be honest.

But I just met myself where I was and I substituted the word God or universe at the time.

But in the meantime, I was deep in the throes of neuroscience and understanding

why I do what I do and why I create the beliefs that I have and talking about

self-image and identity for a decade at this point,

you know, without understanding what identity is truly rooted in. Right.

And so the other side of it was I had an awareness, which again,

only a gift from God of this idea of self-image and self-love and self-acceptance.

It was so like hyper dependent on me.

Right. And so that was another awareness of like, this is all being done through

me. And so for about a year, I just what I call dipped my toes into Christianity

and started going to church and joining small groups and getting the word.

And about a year into it, I had my moment where I, I, I believed it just like

hit me like a ton of bricks. And that's enough story for another day.

But it for like at that time, I was like, OK, like, God, I'm going to give you

everything. everything, my, um, my physical life, my love life.

Um, cause at the time I was, you know, still kind of recovering from the mindset

of like, God, am I going to be alone the rest of my life? Fast forward.

I just got married a few months ago, but, um, you know, I gave my, thank you.

Um, I gave my finances to God. I gave my coping mechanisms to God because,

um, I mean, I had used every, everything as a coping mechanism.

Um, you know, anxiety that I was trying to like meditate and journal and psychoanalyze

my way through every single morning, all of a sudden I didn't have to work so hard to have.

There was that peace beyond understanding that I had heard about, but for even new.

All of this kind of intersected. And that's what woke me up to this idea of

like, wait a minute, I'm teaching self-imaging and I'm teaching about brain,

but it also intersects with the idea of, you know, for me in a way,

it was just, first of all, like trying on this idea of unconditional love,

like the eyes, like borrowing goggles,

you know, of unconditional love, unconditional acceptance that even when I don't

think I deserve it kind of acceptance.

Um, and I just started kind of interspersing that in my stressless eating curriculum

and it just started opening doors. And then women that were just like me,

that maybe they had been, they had fallen away from God or they felt disconnected

from God because they had so much shame.

And they're like, I know I'm not supposed to have all the shame,

but I still carry it. So then they had shame about their shame.

Or maybe they grew up in a religious, like a law-driven, you know,

punishment-driven or whatever kind of view of God.

And they felt they disconnected from it or they didn't agree with how their

parents upbrought them, whatever the case was. was.

But then all of a sudden, my stressless eating curriculum, where I was helping

women heal from the food and body prison, was now not just self-imaging and

identity work around that, it became the gateway to God.

And so there's a lot I could say that happened in tween and around that.

But again, that's just the kind of 30,000 foot view of that.

And now, I mean, God is this central focus of my life and my priority.

You know, the first thing that I turn to when things are good and when they're good.

Wow. It's kind of appropriate. We're recording this on Good Friday,

the Holy Weekend for Christians.

And your story really, it started with, hey, you need to die to some of the

ideologies and ideas that you've been carrying, some of the work that you've

felt like you had to do, and you need to let somebody else help you.

That's kind of a good metaphor for today, isn't it?

A thousand percent. You know, at first it was my weight. Like I was like,

oh, when I lose the weight, then I'll feel lovable, worthy.

But then I started hiding behind like, oh, I'll show the world how smart I can

be or how successful I can be or how accomplished I can be.

And my worthiness was found in everything outside of me. bank balance,

scale size, relationship status.

And yeah, I mean, I had to die to myself a thousand times.

I still die to myself every day in ways, you know, because I catch myself going

chasing those worldly pursuits as well as, as we all do.

But yeah, I mean, that was, that was probably one of the big things of like

the idea of dying to myself and give my life over to Jesus.

Like that was, that was the big hurdle, like kind of, I was trying to academic

my way through that or trying trying to logic and reason my way through that.

And you can't logic and reason a spiritual pursuit like that.

You know what I mean? Like for a while, I was too smart for God,

you know, and now I'm like, oh my gosh, like I've been, God's been in me the

whole time, you know? That's right.

I think that's a good kind of example of this whole left brain,

right brain conundrum that we all are in.

We spend so much time trying to sort of hyper-focus and pursue and turn something

into to a thing that we can grab and understand and hold on to tightly.

That's all this left brain stuff.

And to really find peace and joy and meaning, you've got to learn how to turn

all that off and let your whole experience, the whole right side of your brain,

come in and be part of the conversation too.

And that's where God is, is in that place where we can listen and hear and the

still small voice happens.

And that surrender process you described is exactly right.

So it's amazing to me how God drew you from a secular Jewish background to a

kid who was interested in science and you found him through the things that

he created, which is what Paul told us was gonna happen in Romans 1, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I, I, I think God is smiling at all the dots that I'm

now connecting where I now see he was, Oh, he was in that, or he was talking

to me through that where I wouldn't have called it God at the time. Right.

Um, and I didn't know that he was talking to me, but now I look back and I see it all.

And it really was that's that whole dying to process and allowing my logic and

reason brain to just, just let her be there.

Like I wasn't missing her, like letting her be there and have her skepticism

and fear and, and, you know, logic and reason, but like quiet her long enough

to just say, Hey, that, that quiet place where this is not something to figure out, right.

This is a receiving, this is allowing, this is the surrender.

And I think for, you know, when you're, when you're wearing strong,

a strong suit, like you're, you know, like I'm going to, you know,

I'm smart or I'm accomplished or whatever.

And it's just like, you're, you're hustling for your worthiness.

It's almost like those two places can exist. And like, the dying to and the

surrender, that's where the magic happens. You know, that's the beauty of it.

That's right. I figured out a long time ago, my second book,

the subtitle was Faith, Doubt, and the Things We Think We Know.

And what I figured out was that if you tie your happiness or your joy or your

purpose or any part of your life to things that can be taken from you or things

that you might be wrong about,

that you thought you knew this and it's not actually true, then you're really in trouble.

You're walking on a bridge that might collapse.

And so what has to happen at some point is you have to tie yourself to something

that can't be taken from you.

And I think that's when we realized how important God and faith is.

So when did you hit that place where you said, okay, I'm ready to step out from

knowledge and control to something that's a little bit squishier than that in faith?

And just unpack that a little bit more deeply for me, that movement from control to faith. Yeah.

Yeah, it's, you know, the first time I can actually like visually picture is

I was on a paddleboard in the middle of a lake before I made the move to Tennessee.

And I ended up, this was not planned and I'd never done this before,

but I literally fell to my knees crying.

I was listening to Sarah, Sarah Bareilles, Hercules. And it was that moment

when I, what I just described, like, I can't do this anymore.

Right. And, and part of it is before I got into the work that I do now,

where I really help women heal the root of their food and body struggles.

I actually had gotten into the fitness industry originally because I was like,

oh, fitness changed my life.

Weight loss changed my life because, again, I hadn't seen what I hadn't seen yet.

I had no idea that my identity was so rooted in how I looked or how many times I was on TV or whatever.

Right. And so that summer on

my knees on the paddleboard was when I that's the first time that I felt.

And again, I didn't call it God at the time, but that's when I first started

like listening to what probably the time I called the universe, right.

Um, where, you know, from the outside looking in, I was, I was at the peak of

my career. I had, you know, this very successful fitness business.

I had, um, a staff working for me. I had hundreds of clients.

Um, it was very like scaled and I didn't have to do a lot of like work inside the business.

I was on TV every single week. I was there, you know, they, the,

the media of the whole fat girl to fit girl angle, and they They kind of,

you know, put me all over TV.

And so I was at the outside world. And so what do you think happened to myself?

It was measured by my weight, how many clients I had, how successful I was,

how many times I was on TV, all these things.

And so that moment on the paddleboard, I heard, I heard God say, just, just walk away.

Just shut it down. I was like, Whoa, like I'm supposed to just shut this down.

And that was the first time I remember like having a conversation with the universe,

right? Which I now know was odd.

And I remember people saying to me, what are you going to do?

And I'm like, I don't know, I'm going to figure it out.

And they're like, how are you gonna make money? I'm like, I don't know,

I'm going to figure it out. Like, I know I can't keep going down this dead end

road anymore. It was this unspoken knowingness.

And that summer is when I discovered because if I'm, if I'm not a fitness,

expert anymore, who am I?

If I'm not bringing in all this income, who am I? If I'm not on TV anymore, who am I?

And that's when I realized that everything that I had chasing was empty and

meaningless. And that was when I started.

I read the book Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz many years before that.

And I remember this idea of him. He was a famous plastic surgeon who did a lot

of operations on people and realized that their appearance changes didn't reflect their self-image.

And so he started, um, his science of the self-image. And I remember thinking

that I'm like, okay, the weight loss feels emptiness and meaningless.

The money is empty and meaningless. The recognition on TV, empty and meaningless.

And that's when I first started just breaking it down. And that's when I,

I basically, I lied to myself in so many ways that summer and started building myself back up.

And that's when I also hit the head where I was was like, okay,

this food body struggle that you're hiding behind, because I was still like

exercising my eating habits and trying to out diet, poor mindset,

you know, that's when I really was like, okay, it's time to take all of this,

this stuff that you've been learning and really heal.

And in order to do that, you probably need to stop trying to be a leader for

other people in that way and lead yourself.

Um, but that's when also the surrender conversation happened.

So that's really what paved the way.

And then a couple years later, I moved to Nashville and I mean,

there's churches on every corner and worship music.

And so a couple of years later is when I first walked into a church.

So that's, it took a couple of years for me to really get the memo.

Think that like maybe the universe was God, but I, I think I needed to go through

almost like destruction of like, I needed to destroy what was an excellent because

it was just just holding me down,

bugging me down and keeping me attached and chasing after idols that would never

fill the voids I was seeking to fill. Never. Wow.

You know, so. There's so much, there's so much depth to, this is like five or

six episodes we could talk about what you just, what you just unpacked in three minutes.

But I think that's part of why, I think the metaphor, when God says he's a consuming

fire, I think that's what he's talking about.

He, you got to let him burn stuff out of you that's not the essential stuff

that he wants to build you up from.

And I think that the next layer of that, maybe you talked about all this sort

of superficial or external stuff, you know, my performance, my income,

my identity, my ability to get on television, my fame or whatever.

But the next layer of it, probably that people are listening out there,

a lot of our listeners today, Leanne, are going to be folks who have lost a

child or they've become widowed like Maddie or something like that.

Some kind of big, massive, you know, relational thing has happened.

And it's just as true. Like if I'm not a parent anymore, who am I?

If I'm not a spouse anymore, who am I?

If I don't have this or that or that other thing that I thought my life was about, what am I?

And so maybe speak to somebody right now

from your perspective who is just going through the thing they lost the job

that they're not gonna be that thing anymore or they just got the diagnosis

or they're just got home from the funeral like somebody's right in the thick

of it what do you say to them from your perspective about what happens now that

would be helpful to them or hopeful to them.

Yeah, absolutely. So, and this is so common, what comes up in the work that

I do, because the majority of the women I work with are in their 50s, 60s, some in their 70s.

And, you know, they're on that cusp where they're like, my life right now doesn't

look how it looked a few years ago, or even a decade ago.

And where I was needed, I no longer needed it anymore.

And where is my purpose? Like, who am I? It's this identity crisis that is such

an opportunity, but at the time, it doesn't feel like it. it feels like it,

you know, you feel the suck of it, right.

Which is like, it sucks you into sadness, grief, depression, and part.

And what I will say to that first is like, it's important over that,

you know, cause I think a lot of our culture teaches us to be like,

Oh, just put on a happy face, be strong or positive. Think your way through that.

And I, that can be so toxic because it can, um, really, uh, cause us to just,

you know, suffocate on our own emotions and not feel heard and seen and really

repress those emotions.

So it's really important, I believe, to acknowledge them and experience them.

But the big thing is to not let them swallow you up and not sit in them too long. That's right.

You know, and to really, and it's not about like putting a positive spin on

it or fake it till you make it or positive think your way through it.

But I think there's a really powerful reframe that can happen once we have expressed

it and immersed it and felt the suck. You know like this this and give yourself

permission to be human right where you know you can be It's not logical.

It's not rational where you have those moments where why is this happening to

me right like this isn't fair It's not okay like in giving yourself permission

to not okay but then to not sit in and that's where I think the reframe is powerful where I.

We cannot control what happens to us, but we can, the one thing we can influence

is who we show as in the face of it.

And this is where it becomes a call, right?

Like it's a call, it's a call to action of like, who do we want to become?

And that's where we click the slate and that's where we get to rebuild our identity.

Right. And sometimes it's from the ground up because some people never have

their identity rooted in something bigger than them. Right.

And sometimes it's just like a recreation and a re reminder,

you know, we get that amnesia, of like, who am I?

And they need to come back or maybe they need to like give themselves permission

to be a freshman and not know anything and have that clean slate,

even if they did think they knew they were.

So, you know, the biggest thing I talk about when I, um, there's this concept

I teach with my clients called their inner comps.

And in order to do that, what I invite to do is give themselves permission to

not be a mother, a sister,

a wife, any of those roles, and

just come back to who they are as the dog

god or a soul a spirit

a woman right just for themselves first and

foremost which for so many people that are going through

this big loss whether they lost um you know a family member or they're grieving

you know being uh um an empty nester like because grief can show up in so many

different ways right yeah um and so but it's the hardest thing is to like they

think they're being selfish right but like i can't not be that for everybody else The truth is,

is that when you rush to go be a certain way of being for everyone else,

you miss out on showing up as that for yourself.

And then what happens, you have that cognitive dissonance of like,

wait, this is who I know I am, but I'm witnessing myself not show up as her. Shame.

And an embarrassment and you know disappointment live in

that gap right versus if you carve out who

you want to be as a as the heart of you the soul

the essence spirit the daughter of the most high king and you carve that first

you can't not go be her as a daughter a wife a sister a mother boss a caretaker

whatever it is right so that would be the thing i would say is like this is

an opportunity for a reframe give yourself permission to feel the suck right

there is no There's no roadmap for grief.

There isn't, right? And nobody should, if anybody's telling you how you air

quotes should be grieving, they're probably not the person you want to be around

right now, right? There's no, there's no roadmap, right?

But that being said, when you are ready, and I feel like there is that little

like, you know, tickle in our throat or ring in our ear, we're just like,

okay, I'm ready to hit the reset button or I'm ready to at least get ready to

get ready to get ready, right?

The first thing I invite people to do is come back to their identity and recreate

it, like Pretend like they don't know anything about themselves.

Start with an empty cup and start at the essence, the soul of they are,

independent of the roles that they play so that they can then go decide who

they want to be in the face of this terrible circumstance.

Wow, that's powerful advice, Leigh-Anne. That's exactly right.

And I think the idea of finding the essence and then playing roles within that

essence is the mind shift that we need to have because it's the role you can lose.

That's what I came to as a, you know, my job is neurosurgeon,

but for most of my career, I thought that was my calling.

I thought my calling was surgeon in the operating room.

And then what I figured out when I started writing books was my calling is to

help people figure out what's hurting them and what to do about it.

And I don't have to be in the operating room to do that, right?

So I don't have to worry about someday when I need to retire from being a surgeon,

am I not going to be me anymore? more because I'm still going to help people

figure out what's hurting them and how to help them.

And so that shift between sort of what I do and who I am is,

I think, the most important part of what you just said. Love it.

When did you come to the idea? And it's so easy to get caught up in it. What's that?

I was just saying it's so easy to get caught up in those roles too.

And that's why creating that awareness is so massive. Absolutely.

Along the journey somewhere, you made a step that's hard for a lot of people to make.

And that is that you took something, that you did had gone through and you decided

to try to teach other people about it.

Like what, talk about that shift in your journey from being the person who's

experienced this to the person who can teach it and why that's important and how you did it.

Yeah, no, that's a great question. You know, one of the things is that what

I discovered was that what I was searching for wasn't necessarily there.

And I'm somebody coming from the camp of like, I mean, I was in therapy since I was a little girl.

I did Overeaters Anonymous. I mean, I did every diet and fitness program.

I read all books, did all the programs, got the t-shirt, you know, all the things.

And it wasn't any one thing. And I think I, just like a lot of people are looking

for that one thing that's going to make the massive difference.

That's a change everything.

Um, and what I discovered is it wasn't any one thing.

It was this three, because my problem was three-dimensional,

right? It wasn't just physical. It wasn't just mental and psychological.

It wasn't just emotional and socially all of it. Right.

And so, um, you know, I, what I discovered was that, um, I needed to,

and that was a distinction too. I needed to first and foremost,

you know, metaphorically put on my own oxygen mask first.

So when I talk to you about that summer of surrender, that's what I had been

doing a lot of this self imaging.

And, you know, I guess I called it mindset the time before I was really into the brain set side of it.

I had been doing that for a long time. But the food and body stuff when I discovered,

you know, after my life crisis on the paddleboard was that I couldn't talk about

the food and body stuff with women until I figured it out. out.

So that summer is when I really like when I burnt my first like big fat experiment

where I took everything that I had learned about behavior science and psychology and all of that.

But then specifically, I was obsessed with the anterior cingulate cortex,

because that would help me understand kind of like my addiction brain and also

my physiological pain brain, because I was having a lot of physiological pain,

but I was no longer injured.

So I had no more injury. My spine surgery had been like five years before that,

but I still had a physiological pain. pain. So I was like, that's interesting.

And so all that to say, I started assessing over, over the social brain and

realized a lot of my emotional pain was just manifesting physiologically.

Um, and that's what led me to really look at like, well, wait a minute,

what if this is what's going on with my sugar addiction?

What if it's just, uh, and I say sugar addiction in air quotes,

because now I realized like I wasn't actually addicted to sugar.

I just practiced a recipe of thoughts and beliefs and behaviors that were causing

me to feel addicted and compulsive, like have this compulsive relationship to sugar.

And when I practice a new recipe of different thoughts, beliefs,

and behaviors, I still use sugar non-addictively.

Right. But that being said, all of these things started coming together for me personally.

And so I was doing the self-imaging work with my one-on-one clients after I

retired from the fitness industry.

Because at the time, I was like, I'm never talking about food and fitness again.

I was very mad at the fitness industry. I was like, this is a very toxic industry.

They're harming people.

I've come back full circle around now and just realized that,

hi, I'm the problem. It's me. I was the one creating the toxicity.

But it's all good. I didn't know what I didn't know. But that did cause a lot

of shame for a while. I've reconciled all that.

But that being said, I was doing a lot of this imaging identity work with women.

And I kept seeing that they were hitting the food and body struggle as well.

Meanwhile, I had been free, I was had set myself free on the food and body side of things.

But I was like, I'm just gonna be air quote, selfish, keep this for myself,

because I downloaded a belief that I never wanted to talk about food and body

stuff again, because I was done, I was retired, right? Right.

So then my women kept hitting these walls. So finally, I was like,

like, okay, I just, I created kind of like a new language or a new system of thinking around food.

I'm just going to put together a little PowerPoint for you and just see how it feels.

And that's how it started. I was just like teaching my one-on-one clients and

they were like, Leanne, this is crazy. Why isn't anybody teaching this?

And that's what morphed into me taking what was then the self image solution,

which still part of my stressless eating curriculum and turn it into a stressless eating curriculum.

So part of it was, I need to get over my own beliefs that I was harming people,

like the do no harm thing, I had to make sure I wasn't harming people by talking

about food and body again, because I was on TV for years as like Leanne Ellington,

the fitness expert, teaching less, move more, harder, faster, more.

And I felt I still was reconciling shame about that.

But then it like smacked me, you know, clear in the face that the systems of

thinking that I had kind of piecemeal together.

And I was a mutt. I was a mutt of psychology and neurology and biomechanics

and all things, nutrition, all the things.

And I was like, it became a a conversation of like, who am I to not teach this anymore?

So I had to reconcile my belief, but I also needed evidence that this stuff

was, was like, it was revolutionizing their mindset and brain set.

Um, and that side of it was 11 years ago now, and it's just only gotten more

robust, but I needed, um, I needed God, you, even though I didn't call him God at the time.

Um, but I also needed that like empirical evidence to know like this stuff works

and I need people to go through it and to give myself permission to be that

mutt of different modalities and not just teach any one thing. It was everything.

I love that. And you call yourself a scientist, and I think you said it exactly the right way.

Like, friend, you don't have to be a PhD biochemist or molecular biologist to be a scientist.

The art of science is being willing to ask questions and make a hypothesis and

test it and having enough character to change your hypothesis or your belief

system based on the evidence that you discover.

And so you built yourself up a worldview and a lifestyle out of following the scientific method.

And then I think God called you in to say, hey, let me show you where this stuff really comes from.

And you've done a remarkable thing that's helping people. Well,

how do people, who's the ideal person listening to you today that would say, hey, I need to call her.

I need to send her an email and start talking to Leanne professionally.

Maybe who out there listening would benefit from working with you more closely?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, first and foremost, if you have done all the

diets and you've tried all things and, you know, things work until they stop

working and you might have this inkling in your brain, there is something bigger

and deeper that has nothing to do with food and and nothing to do with exercise,

I would invite you into the possibility that you are absolutely,

absolutely, absolutely right.

But also maybe you have, or you've done all the things, but your view of yourself

doesn't transform, right?

You still feel unworthy, unbeautiful, unlovable, all those things that I would

say is definitely a brain and self-image struggle as well.

But also if you feel like handcuffed or you feel like you are a slave to dieting,

slave to exercising, and the way of sustaining this is absolutely unsustainable.

And you know, know, in the back of your mind, you can't sustain it and there's gotta be a better way.

Um, you know, I, I believe that there's, there's something for going on and

that you can teach your brain to do the heavy lifting.

Um, but also if, if the version of who you are does not reflect who you want

to be, um, and it's manifesting in a physical body that doesn't reflect who

you really are. Again, I believe there's a deeper problem at play.

So, you know, if you're done with, you know, the dieting and the weight loss

run around and you're done trying to, you know, positive, think your way through

it or paint fake positivity on a poor self-image,

I believe that there's an opportunity for a bigger, better, more healing,

like long-term, handle it forever kind of conversation.

And that's the kind of women I love to talk to.

Wow. We'll put your website in the show notes if anybody out there is feeling

this tug to check your website out, get to know you a little bit more,

maybe even contact you for coaching.

I think there's a lot of work that you're doing that would be helpful to the

kind of people that listen to this show.

And let's talk Talk about your podcast for a minute. Leanne has two incredible

podcasts, the What's God Got to Do With It show, which I love,

and then Outweigh. So talk about those for just a second if people wanna check

you out and listen to you. What are those two shows about?

Absolutely. Outweigh is actually the continuation of my Stressless Eating podcast

where Amy Brown from the Amy Brown Show had Outweigh, which is really geared

towards women that struggle with disordered eating.

Anybody who's not familiar with disordered eating, if you're anything like me

and you maybe fell through the cracks where you're not diagnosed with an eating

disorder, but you feel like the binge, the binge restrict cycle,

but also just feeling like you have you feel out of control of food,

like maybe it controls you more than you control it.

There might be a disorder or a dis-ease in your brain that is very fixable. You're not broken.

You are not, you know, destined to stay this way forever.

It is a thing. And you're so not alone. But that's what Outweigh is all about over on iHeart.

And then What's God Got to Do With It started as a one episode on the Stressless Eating podcast.

Yeah. It was kind of my coming out where I shared with my friends,

my family, like, hey, I found God and this is what has opened up for me.

And I heart was so gracious to give me the microphone, my own solo podcast over there.

So outweigh is a continuation of stressless eating.

And what's got to do with it is, you know, still where faith meets science meets

that food and body conversation, but really what God has to do with everything and anything.

So they are both over on my heart or wherever you get your podcasts.

And then anybody who wants to find out about the rewiring their brain and see

how I operate on that front, you can find my free webinar.

It's all over the podcast. And I've tried to make it as widely available as possible.

Wow. And it's helpful. It's very useful. I've been listening.

And I think it's interesting to me, Leanne, like Maddie Jackson saw...

A sort of, I think, a parallelogram with our work and how we kind of sort of

coincided with some of the things that we were both talking about.

And Leanna and I had maybe an hour-long Zoom conversation a month or so ago

when we first discussed the idea of being on each other's podcast.

And it dawned on both of us, it really became obvious that we have a lot of,

the ways that we see things are fairly lined up.

And it's amazing to me that you just talked about disordered disordered thinking in your eating.

Because just this morning, I wrote what's going to be the first chapter of my

new book, Self-Brain Surgery.

And I talk about how it dawned on me that a lot of the problems I see in my

neurosurgery practice really come down to disordered thinking.

And when you parse that out a second ago, we're not saying, when we say disorder,

we're not saying a psychiatric disorder.

I'm not saying that you think your wife is a hat, like the Oliver Sacks' patient.

I'm saying that there's something out of order in the way that you think.

If you come to me with back trouble and you think that that surgery is going

to be the end-all, be-all to your whole life and everything in your life is

going to be fixed magically with my knife, that's not going to happen.

Like, you've got to change the way you think about it, right?

And so I think that one of the issues, and what I wrote this morning was.

People have, they think wrong about their thinking, they feel wrong about their

feelings, and they believe wrong about their beliefs sometimes.

And we all do that. And so I think what you just said is exactly right.

Like we have to take a look at our belief systems, the way we're operating,

the operating instructions that we view the world through, and we have to reorder them.

And I think for you, you found that through faith. And I love your story.

And I'm so grateful that you spent some time with us today. What's one word

of encouragement you could give somebody today on Good Friday, Leon?

Yeah, you know, my word of encouragement, it's multiple words.

It's just, you know, give yourself permission to not know anything and give

yourself permission to say, I don't know what I don't know and be an open slate and be an open book.

And that leads to that childlike wonder and that childlike faith,

because when we think we know, it kind of cuts off possibility.

And so that would just be my words, multiple, would just be,

you know, give yourself permission not to know anything. thing. Wow. Beautiful advice.

Leanne Ellington is going to be back on the show soon. We're going to have another

one of these deep conversations, and she's going to host an episode of the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast.

So coming soon to that side of the show, we're going to have Leanne's testimony

and where this whole what's God got to do with it thing came from.

It's a powerful story that'll help you change your mind and change your life.

Leanne, thank you so much for your time, my friend. God bless you.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been amazing. Appreciate you.

I told you that was an incredible conversation.

So grateful for Leanne Ellington. Please check her work out at leanneellington.com.

That's L-E-A-N-N-E, Ellington.com, leanneellington.com.

I'll put the link in the show notes. I'll put links to her podcasts.

They're both tremendous.

What's God Got to Do With It has become one of my favorite podcasts,

and I'm going to be on the show pretty soon.

So I'll send you a link when that happens too. Leanne is going to come back

and host an episode of Spiritual Brain Surgery. you're going to get to know

her and her work a little bit more deeply.

And I can't recommend highly enough some of the things that she's doing to help

people change their minds and change their lives over on what's God got to do with it.

Hope that this was helpful to you, friend. We're getting started with Action April.

Leanne's story is a good example of what happens when you smash faith and science together.

And I'm interested in your story too. What's happening in your life as you do

this, as you use the things that God has created to explore and understand the

universe and the way your mind works?

And apply those to what scripture has said all along, that's when you really come alive.

You really come to understand exactly how fearfully and wonderfully made you are.

God bless you, my friend. Looking forward to what you have happened in your

own life through Action April.

And I can't wait to hear your stories. Send me an email, lee at drleewarren.com.

Leave a voicemail at drleewarren.speakpipe.com, or leave a comment on one of

the posts on Substack or somewhere else on the internet, YouTube,

or wherever you listen to this podcast.

We are grateful for you. God bless you. We're praying for you.

Don't forget the prayer wall, wleewarrenmd.com.

And always remember, you can start today.

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Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

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And I narrated the audio books. Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up

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