podcast242redo ===

Rita Black: [00:00:00] Have you ever felt like you should know how to eat healthy and take care of yourself, but somehow just couldn’t make it happen? My guest today, Michelle Wolfson knows that feeling all too well as a chef and a nutritional manager. She is an absolute authority in helping people manage their diets for all kinds of medical conditions.

Rita Black: But behind the scenes, she was struggling with her own weight and feeling like an imposter in her own profession. Michelle has now released 48 pounds and has been maintaining that success for over seven months with the shift process. And what’s so inspiring about her story is that it wasn’t more discipline or knowledge that helped her finally break free from binging.

Rita Black: It was learning how to work with her mind, and most importantly, how to bring self-compassion to herself in the moments she used to turn to food. [00:01:00] In our conversation, Michelle opens up about using mindset tools. Not only that helped her with emotional eating, but also supported her in managing her bipolar condition and creating a calmer, more peaceful relationship with herself.

Rita Black: Her journey is powerful and it’s a reminder that sometimes the biggest transformation doesn’t come from what we know, but from how we think and how we treat ourselves along the way. So let’s dive in.

Rita Black: Did you know that our struggle with weight doesn’t start with the food on your plate or get fixed in the gym? 80% of our weight struggle is mental. That’s right. The key to unlocking long-term weight release and management begins in your mind. Hi there, [00:02:00] I’m Rita Black. I’m a clinical hypnotherapist, weight loss expert, bestselling author, and the creator of the Shift Weight Mastery Process.

Rita Black: And not only have I helped thousands of people over the past 20 years achieve long-term weight mastery. I am also a former weight struggler, carb addict and binge eater, and after two decades of failed diets and fad weight loss programs, I lost 40 pounds. With the help of hypnosis, not only did I release all that weight, I have kept it off for 25 years.

Rita Black: Enter the Thin Thinking Podcast where you too will learn how to remove the mental roadblocks that keep you struggling. I’ll give you the thin thinking tools, skills, and insights to help you develop the mindset you need, not only to achieve your ideal weight, but to stay there long term and live your best life.

Rita Black: Sound good? Let’s get started. [00:03:00] Hello, friends. Come in. Welcome. I hope you are having a fabulous week so far. This October I have been exploring conversations with our wonderful members of our community who are maintaining their ideal weight. And I cannot wait for you to meet Michelle Wolfson, who is not only a chef extraordinaire, but knows so much about food and nutrition and we just love having her in our community.

Rita Black: Oh my gosh, she is just a value add on steroids. She’s that person that if a member is struggling with some sort of health issue, like thyroid, kidneys. She’s oh yes, I know what you should do. Because for years she helped others people. She was making food and advising people because she is a nutritional manager.

Rita Black: And I wanted to tell you, if you are listening between today and [00:04:00] October 21st, 2025 you can get her online latest cooking class that she did during our shift Weight mastery process that is available as its own. Little mini course as a bonus along with 2024, not 2025, but 2024 pricing of the hypnosis based shift weight mastery process.

Rita Black: Our flagship program, the self-study version you can get this, we are having our autumn flash sale. So it’s a discount plus the cooking class, plus an additional bonus of our shift weight express, which is our five top hypnosis downloads. And this is just a great time to enroll and get your mind ready, like break free from the weight struggle before the holidays.

Rita Black: People joke, they’re like I’m gonna wait till January. But so many of our members started [00:05:00] their journey before the holidays being very nervous, but actually releasing weight through the holidays just because they got their minds in the right place. So by the time January was rolling around, they were already 20 pounds down.

Rita Black: So you don’t have to gain weight over the holidays. You can have a fabulous, connected healthy light holiday 2025 or Whereev whenever you’re listening to this. It’s never too late. But this, we wanted you to have this combination pack of all these great all this great value including the course.

Rita Black: So if you wanna check it out, this course has helped over 12,000 students shift from weight struggler to weight master without dieting. Please come and check it out at www. shiftweightmastery. com/slash. That kind of rhymed. So let me do that again. So it’s [00:06:00] www. shiftweightmastery. com/so as in flash sale, so slash flash.

Rita Black: Okay, let’s dive in. Hello Michelle and welcome. I have been waiting for this interview for so long and it is so great to have you here. Welcome to the then Thinking Podcast.

Michelle Wolfson: I am absolutely thrilled to be here. And ever since I joined the shift and started listening to the podcast, it was like a little bit of a secret dream.

Michelle Wolfson: Baby, I’ll be one of those people. She’s the kind of success that, Rita wants to interview me. So it’s like dream come true. It’s pretty amazing to be here. I’m really happy.

Rita Black: Oh, that’s so cool. I know you posted these pictures. So Michelle has this very interesting and very cool life.

Rita Black: She’s had an amazing life with food, so I can’t wait for her to start unfolding that. But yeah so where should we start? I was [00:07:00] gonna say, I was, Michelle posted, she’s in our membership and she posted these pictures of a rattlesnake, beautiful woods. And I was like, where the heck are you, Michelle? And she says, oh that’s like my backyard.

Rita Black: Tell us where you live and tell us all about Michelle. Just like start from the center and move out.

Michelle Wolfson: So Michelle is now, retirement. And so I live in Muskoka on Go Home Lake, and I live a little bit remote. We, it’s all, we all have two acre properties up here and we’re all directly on the lake.

Michelle Wolfson: And actually most of the cottages in my area, you can only access them by boat. But I have one that, that is on a road and we’ve been coming up to this lake me for about 30 years, my husband for 50. So we have a really close connection with the land. And I’m a super outdoorsy person. I love to spend my time outside.

Michelle Wolfson: I’m a beekeeper. I try to be a [00:08:00] gardener, all that kind of stuff. So I just love to be outside, but I actually grew up. In the city. I was born in downtown Toronto, Mount Sinai Hospital, which is a big downtown hospital. And I actually spent my whole, life growing up, living in a big city.

Michelle Wolfson: So I, I’ve had the best of both worlds. When it comes to like culture, but nature at the same time. I’ve been really lucky.

Rita Black: That is super cool. So what, so where did you maybe tell our listeners where you’re at right now? You’re maintaining how much of a weight release?

Michelle Wolfson: I am currently maintaining 48 pounds loss released.

Michelle Wolfson: And I am, I’ve been maintaining it for about seven months. Fantastic. I think I’m at my goal weight, but I don’t need to make that commitment. I don’t know exactly. I may lose another three or four pounds, but when I do, it will be because it’s like a natural release from my [00:09:00] body.

Rita Black: Cool. How did the story all begin?

Rita Black: Michelle, you, so you were born in Toronto, in Mount Sinai Hospital?

Michelle Wolfson: Born in Toronto, Mount Sinai Hospital, and I grew up in Toronto. From a food perspective, I was a latchkey seventies kid. So I would come home from school and I would watch all of those. What I think right now is a really corny, television programs and wait for my parents to come home from work.

Michelle Wolfson: And they usually wouldn’t get home till six or six 30. I have two younger sisters that I would’ve been taking care of and I started making dinner for them. I started just to on my own, pull out cookbooks and look in the fridge and see what was there. And I remember my very first dish. Okay, let’s just say this has no bearing on what I cook now, but I took out.

Michelle Wolfson: There was a brand in Toronto, in, in the freezer called a Captain Highliner. And they were bricks of fish. They were like the [00:10:00] shape of a gold bar. They were a little brick of fish. They were like a pound. And you would defrost the fish and that’s how you bought your fish, was in these little bricks.

Michelle Wolfson: And I remember a finding a recipe for a tin of cream of celery soup and some diced onion and some marram. I don’t even, I don’t even cook with marram now. But anyways, and I stirred it through the soup and I put the piece of fish on a Pyrex dish and probably Corning wear in those days, the white with the blue on it.

Michelle Wolfson: And then I poured the tin of soup over top and put that in the oven and, whatever, half hour later out came dinner. So I, I just. That’s just how I just started by necessity. But my mother grew up in Southern Ontario, but she lived, she grew up living like a hobby farm style.

Michelle Wolfson: So my mother was really big on vegetables. We had. I had eaten every vegetable by the time I was 10 years old and certain things that my friends had never heard of. I remember in the fall, my mother, we would go to the farmer’s markets and when we’d bring home things like [00:11:00] pumpkins and squashes, and if there was no room in the cold cellar for them, they, we would put them under our bed store there.

Michelle Wolfson: Oh, fun. So I did grow up eating a lot of food like that on my father. It was the main cook though of our house, and he was a great cook. He really was. He made very traditional ashkenaz Jewish kind of sied stew kind of recipe stuff. But he adored food. And he would take me to the grocery store and we would spend like half an hour walking through the grocery store and he would talk about things and point things out and it was just a really wonderful food.

Michelle Wolfson: Positive experience, but I also grew up with no ice cream, no potato chips, and no we call it here, we call it pop and you call it soda. And unless there was a babysitter coming, if there [00:12:00] was a babysitter coming out, came the chips out, came the soda out, came the ice cream, stuff like that. So I grew up eating a really clean lifestyle and I didn’t really have any weight issues as a young person until I had my own money.

Rita Black: And I started work pretty young or I had an allowance and I had money. And I was also an athlete, so I was usually on the swim team and I would have workouts, like I’m talking about like from age, about 13 through to 18 workouts after school. You’d, I’d go into school at, early at seven, I’d swim for an hour, school would start.

Michelle Wolfson: Then after school I’d do another. So on my way home from school I would be famished, like I’m talking like absolutely starving. And I took the public transit to and from school and I would get off at the convenience store and I would eat junk because it [00:13:00] wasn’t allowed in our house. And because it was a quick fix and I still managed to not be very overweight because I was an athlete.

Michelle Wolfson: But I remember when I went to the pediatrician’s office and I was 13 years old and he. Accidentally left to open my chart because back in those days you didn’t see what the pediatrician wrote about you. And I remember him writing that I was 13 years old, that I was 132 pounds. I am five foot two. And I remember him writing the word obese because clinically that Yeah.

Michelle Wolfson: Is it wasn’t meant to. Yeah. He

Rita Black: wasn’t cutting you down. Yeah. Insult. It was just like that was the clinical term you would use for that was clinical term, somebody of your height at that weight.

Michelle Wolfson: And I remember being absolutely shocked that I was clinically obese. But what I wanna tell everybody who’s [00:14:00] listening today, especially the women who are menopausal, especially the women who have been overweight since before they were 13, is that I am currently.

Michelle Wolfson: 124 pounds, and I am eight pounds lighter than where I was at age 13. And I didn’t do anything Herculean to get there. I just ate healthily, followed, did everything, I just, it just happened. I just let it happen. I remember when I first joined the shift, a lot of people who knew I was trying to lose weight were, they were critical.

Michelle Wolfson: They were trying to be supportive, but they were critical and saying, you’re never gonna get to where you wanna be. You’re menopausal. That can’t happen. You’re too old. That can’t happen. And I just wanna tell you it, it’s just not true. I have never been this size. [00:15:00] People are like, oh, do you fit into your high school jeans?

Michelle Wolfson: I’m like, are you kidding me? I fit into my grade six. Like I, I’m smaller than I was in grade six. What are you talking about? My high school jeans were much bigger than what I wear right now. So just as a, can I actually lose the weight that will take me to a place where from a, a body health and composition perspective that I am healthy or you can, and it only took seven months.

Michelle Wolfson: And one of the things that I used to do when I was in my teens and in my early twenties and my thirties and actually my forties and maybe even my fifties, is I used to cry myself to sleep at night because I was always overweight and I wasn’t just 10 pounds overweight like I was at age 13. It crept on and on, and.

Michelle Wolfson: Every night that I went to bed, I said to myself, I will [00:16:00] do anything to lose the weight. And so I had this absolute pit of the stomach and pit of my heartache at nighttime before I went to bed saying, I just know that there’s a thin person inside me that I don’t know how to get there and I’ll do anything to get there.

Michelle Wolfson: And then to find out, it actually wasn’t that difficult at all. It just took, till I was 60 years old and came across the right program that really spoke to me. So what happened after I was 13? I, 15, 17, 18, went to university, still stayed super active. Was, always a swimmer, always a cyclist, always, always playing sports, but no eye hand coordination.

Michelle Wolfson: I’m not that, I’m not that girl. Okay, don’t throw it. They’ll throw, don’t throw something at me, I can’t catch it. But other things, I’m really enthusiastic about it and I’ve always felt that I was a pretty strong person. And then as I got older, and I, I went to school and I [00:17:00] used to work for something called a newspaper.

Michelle Wolfson: I know you young people don’t know what that is. But for a very long time, for a huge segment of my career, I worked for the Toronto Star, which was Canada’s largest newspaper. And during those days it meant something and I was in advertising sales. And but what happened is I had a very stressful job and I was selling advertising during the day and it was like I said it really took a lot of out of me to do it.

Michelle Wolfson: And when I came home at night, I would cook.

Rita Black: I would cook

Michelle Wolfson: away the stress, cook away the stress, cook away the stress, and I would make bread and I would do pastries. And then I, thought, oh, I’ll try get into chocolates. I did all that kind of stuff. Wow. And as time went on, I’m getting into my thirties now.

Michelle Wolfson: I got married and I said to myself, maybe I should be cooking for a living ’cause I’m coming home from work and that’s all I’m doing. So with my husband’s support and rah right behind me, he said, yeah, go and do what is gonna make you fulfilled. Because already at that point [00:18:00] I had a really big repertoire of food.

Michelle Wolfson: I could already make great meals. I wasn’t necessarily the fastest cook, but it was really coming along and I knew it gave me a lot of joy. So I went back to culinary school and I did a culinary management program. I forget how old I was. I was maybe 20. Maybe thir my early thirties, some, something like that in my early thirties.

Michelle Wolfson: And everybody else was of course 18. So I had a really good, but I was obviously really focused and I was like, always had like top grades and everything, awards the whole thing because for me, this was really serious irony, knew I was making a career decision. So I went back and I trained under traditional.

Michelle Wolfson: British French, Belgian, German Austrian chefs. Okay. Wow. The kind that like, throw pans at you. Except for that they, you, Michelle,

Rita Black: me. Was this in Toronto that you were studying underneath all these people at [00:19:00] Toronto, at George Brown College in that time? When was this? Was this the eighties or nineties?

Rita Black: It would’ve been, it would’ve been the nineties. Okay. So food was really coming in, like good chefs, restaurants, that was like, ’cause I remember, I think it was exploding at that time. Yeah. Restaurants were not known for their food. They were known for their chef.

Rita Black: It was

Michelle Wolfson: all about the individual chefs.

Rita Black: So you would go in and apprentice underneath these people or work with them? Yeah,

Michelle Wolfson: absolutely. Yeah. No, I worked with, and I worked with awesome chefs. People who gave their life and soul and. Everything in those movies, where they show you the chef, unfortunately, usually being a cocaine or heroin addict because they’re like crazy involved, which did not happen to me.

Michelle Wolfson: I’ll have, but they absolutely, I, it was an amazing time to be in the food industry because everything was revolving around food. And so when I finished the program, I would have [00:20:00] been in my early thirties and I knew that I didn’t wanna work in a restaurant late at night.

Michelle Wolfson: So what I did was I devised a way to do my cooking during the day with private clients. So I did some restaurant work, but I realized it wasn’t gonna work. I must have been. 36, because that’s what my son was born. I was 36. And so what happened was I developed a personal chef business. This is in the days when nobody had heard of a personal chef.

Michelle Wolfson: Nobody. I was like, like the third personal chef in Canada. I started Wow. With the United States Personal Chef Association. And even though I had done all this cooking experience, I needed business training. My, my girlfriend Mia m [00:21:00] Andrews, she was the president of the Canadian Personal Chef Association, and she scooped me up.

Michelle Wolfson: She saw I was ripe. I was, I was older, I was business-minded. I was looking for the right hours. And I became a personal chef for a very long time, more than 25 years. And during that time when I was a personal chef will be as successful, not as their cooking is good. As they are a business and a marketer, because really there are a lot of good chefs out there.

Michelle Wolfson: So I really focused on my business and my marketing to create a job for myself that would not only let me cook amazing food all the time, but that would let me work Monday to Friday, nine to five, no weekends, whatever. So I decided that I would hone in on people who wanted to have amazing scratch homemade food.

Michelle Wolfson: And just cook for them in their kitchen. And what happened over the course of the next 10 years is a lot of my [00:22:00] clients became people with special dietary concerns. They were people who were gluten-free, they were people who had allergies. I have cooked for. Every major illness, heart and stroke is like that is the, the nothing restrictions compared to the swank diet for ms.

Michelle Wolfson: I cook for people on end stage renal failure. I currently still cook for people who are living with end stage liver disease. So I cook for people to whom their restrictions are multi-variate. It, it might not just be sodium it might be a whole range of things. In fact, at one point the Humber Valley Regional Dialysis Center, no, Humber Valley Hospital, which is the dialysis kind of hub in Toronto, they had a patient who had a brain injury and needed to have a diet that had less than 500 milligrams of sodium per day and their kitchen.

Michelle Wolfson: Could not achieve that. Like they’re they just were not set up for those kind of specialties. They’re set up more or [00:23:00] less to cook healthy, but to cook for the masses of people in the hospital. So I actually created menu plans and programs for hospitals and that’s what really led me into the nutrition management program.

Michelle Wolfson: So I’d been working as a personal chef probably for oh, 10 or 15 years. And my business had gotten to the point where I wasn’t cooking in my clients’ homes anymore because I had too many clients. And so now I, and I also got a business partner who. My best wonderful friend Cheryl. Cheryl had a son exactly the same age as mine.

Michelle Wolfson: Imagine that two chefs and we both have nicks and they’re both the same age. So it was like Karma was talking to us. The universe answered our prayers when we met on a United States Personal Chef Association training where I was now running the training to onboard the chefs, and she was the students.

Michelle Wolfson: So anyways, so we got together and she is just an amazing business manager, rock [00:24:00] solid at that end of things. So what we did was in exchange for managing the food service of private curling clubs. For all your Canadians out there. You know what that is? All non Canadians and southern people, it’s where you take a great big hunk around of granite and you forcefully, but not lifting gently or whatever make it go down the ice and you send it towards the house at the other end.

Michelle Wolfson: So I ran the food service and curling clubs in exchange for full-time use of their kitchens for my business.

Rita Black: Wow. Can I ask you, when you were cooking, it’s so fascinating, when you were cooking it, when you were molding yourself, like when you were developing all these different strategies for people who had various illnesses, was that really creative for you?

Rita Black: Did you love that? Because it’s such a challenge, right? No sodium, like how do you make that tasty for somebody you know, did, or was [00:25:00] that, did you find that restrictive or did you find that. Like exciting, absolutely

Michelle Wolfson: exciting. I wanted to carve a unique niche for myself, and I wanted to be able to prove that you could have awesome tasting food and it would allow you to live the life and respect the nutrition needs that you come across.

Michelle Wolfson: And it was, it involved all of my creativity, all of it. It involved me diving into cuisines that are really heavy on herbs and spices like Indian cuisine. And I, when I say Indian, I mean there are like. 10 different regions of India that I like to work with. I like going food, I like, like I really Yeah. Subgroups. Yeah. So it really gave me the opportunity to [00:26:00] use food as a palette, like an artist. And it didn’t matter that someone was on a sodium restricted diet because we were going to still make sure that your taste buds were jumping off, were jumping around in your mouth because we used horseradish, we used vinegars, we used, all kinds of things that really are pecan in on the taste bud that really bring the food alive in your mouth.

Michelle Wolfson: And so the more I did it, the better I got at it. I was always very creative, but there was just something that was really drawing me to it, rather than making you another obsolete. To die for French recipe with a quarter pound of butter and beam cream and reductions, which are absolutely like my favorite food.

Michelle Wolfson: You cannot, there, there’s just nothing that compares for me to that classic, very [00:27:00] simple but strong flavors that come across in French cuisine. But it’s been done and,

Rita Black: also, I think because when I have cl, I have clients who are foodies. I mentioned this too before we turned on record, and I think they fear that it is going to be restrictive to eat healthfully or that it’s taking away part of their personality and you’re just.

Rita Black: I’m a foodie. Whereas I really think the challenge to be healthier to, make the, that you can Absolutely. And people who cook. It’s that’s such a great challenge that it is actually more creative. I think people get fearful that it’s like limiting and puts you in a box and it, yeah it handcuffs you versus what you’re talking about, which is it opens up this whole other part of your brain to engage and get creative and [00:28:00] dig deeper, which is so cool.

Rita Black: You probably maybe wouldn’t have explored all eight regions of India and cooking had you not had to make it satisfying for some, when some of your clients Like, that really seems so cool to me.

Michelle Wolfson: As a chef who loves cooking, it’s a com it’s wonderful. It’s a it’s a challenge that.

Michelle Wolfson: Just keeps on opening up for me. But as if I put myself in my shoe in the shoes of an eater who did not grow up with parents who cooked, who don’t have a lot of exposure to food, who may be in food deserts, who don’t have experience shopping, who depend on grocery stores and who depend on the grocery store to give them dinner, not ingredients, then absolutely it requires a change of perspective.

Michelle Wolfson: The more you embrace the wrong ingredients that put together your [00:29:00] dinners, the more flexibility you will have and the more far reaching you’re going to be able to take your meals. But if you defen depend on finding it in a bag, in a box with a, a label on it with a QR code. That’s really where it becomes a, you can’t instantly without effort find meals that are going to fit the plan.

Michelle Wolfson: And are we not that single serving take away instant gratification generation?

Rita Black: Yeah. Did your parents, did they love that you were making dinner when they came home and dinner was served like that must have been so cool for them.

Michelle Wolfson: No. Yeah. I didn’t know if I wanna admit this or not, but I’m going to, and I’m gonna ask, I’m gonna ask for forgiveness from my mom [00:30:00] who has who, who left us in 2005, but my father.

Michelle Wolfson: Was thrilled that I was cooking. And after my mother passed away, I continued to cook for my father, always giving him dishes. And in fact, at the, at the age where your parents says, not one more gift. I started this. Food. I’m gonna call it like a dinner. It’s, it wasn’t a service or a style, but it was a theme called the Yiddish Mama.

Michelle Wolfson: And what I did was I went back through all of my old recipes and his old recipes and historical recipes to find old traditional Eastern European Jewish food that I could make for him as a present because he didn’t want, so I made all kinds of things that I currently are not in my repertoire, like Pcha, which is it’s like like the Eastern European, it’s the Jewish equivalent of head cheese.

Michelle Wolfson: It’s not made anything porky. It’s made with like chicken feet, but it’s basically like chicken [00:31:00] foot jello with raw garlic in it. And if right? Like for the people who are like, getting up and they’re ripping off their hunk of, rye bread and they’re having their cha then they’re, whatever, it’s, it didn’t do it for me, but my mother and I love her to death.

Michelle Wolfson: My mother was mortified that I was cooking for a living.

Rita Black: Oh, really?

Michelle Wolfson: Because educated people don’t cook for a living. Oh, interesting. My mother was, she never said anything overtly negative about the fact that I was cooking and I provided my mother’s end of life care and I remember the last couple of months and the kind of food that I cooked for her, and I remember every single day.

Michelle Wolfson: So she died in my house. I did her palliative care in my house. Oh my gosh. Every day I would come into her room and I would bring her. Something like she was [00:32:00] stopping to eat protein, so I would make my favorite rice pudding with risotto and have a get silk and tofu mixed in with a lot of cinnamon.

Michelle Wolfson: And not that she didn’t notice, but so that it would taste good. And I remember for the whole time I did her palliative care after every meal, whether it was tea and toast, or whether it was minced and pureed beef. She thanked me and she didn’t just say thank you. She thanked me genuinely. Wow.

Michelle Wolfson: Taking care of her. So I look, look at that as my, okay mom, I know you weren’t proud. I became a chef because, Jewish mothers always want a doctor, lawyer or an accountant. But that was never going to be me. And she was super appreciative. And as if anybody has ever done palliative care, when you do palliative care for a parent who appreciates it you will never regret one minute of it.

Michelle Wolfson: It’s you often [00:33:00] are never given the opportunity to take care of your parents the way they took care of you. Yeah. So that’s how I looked at palliative care. But no, mom wasn’t really thrilled that I was setting out to be a chef, but,

Rita Black: yeah.

Michelle Wolfson: I did it anyways.

Rita Black: Through these years that you were chefing away, what was your weight doing?

Rita Black: Would you be heavy and then diet or were you dieting or were you just, what was going on weight wise? I hear you were making food for people, but what was going on internally inside of you

Michelle Wolfson: when you buy chef? I have always had chef jackets.

Rita Black: And

Michelle Wolfson: I have them in size miniature that I wear now.

Michelle Wolfson: To size chef Paul cus Paul I have them from miniature me to Paul PDO size chef jackets and, do you know in your mind how big Paul PDO was?

Rita Black: No, I don’t, no. It was

Michelle Wolfson: very portly.

Rita Black: [00:34:00] Okay.

Michelle Wolfson: Hard time getting through the doors. So I have been every size and because I’ve always been really athletic, I have had the good fortune of being able to not experience a lot of health decline.

Michelle Wolfson: Because I’ve always been, have a really good muscle mass because I’ve always, done cycling or done swimming or doing something. But there have been several times during my life where I would go to the doctor and the doctor would say, these are your outcomes for your blood pressure and for your cholesterol, and these are not good outcomes for you.

Michelle Wolfson: And so then I would get serious and I would eat foods that were the latest craze for health. I didn’t do some of the diets that I hear other ladies on your program do, but I didn’t do the Cornish or that kind of stuff. But I did the oat fiber diet where you [00:35:00] use your digestive system to build concrete, I believe would be the other way of looking at that.

Michelle Wolfson: I did I, I did Weight Watchers. I did the, the worst diet ever the Bernstein diet where you’re actually eating 500 calories a day and getting injections. And I did a lot of low carbing. Originally, I started off with the Atkins, and then I morphed to other programs that were centered around low carbing.

Michelle Wolfson: And every time I would approach it, I would achieve a measure of success. But I’m a binge eater.

Rita Black: And

Michelle Wolfson: being a binge eater is like a it’s part of my personality. And I say it in a really flat emotion way. It’s not bad. I’m not a bad person because I’m a binge eater, but for whatever many months I could stay on these [00:36:00] restrictive programs, I would always fall back.

Michelle Wolfson: To my closet eating, and I know we’re all laughing, but you have to understand, I actually have a pantry, a closet. I have those snacks. And so I, and so even if I was, I absolutely fell into that, good, bad. Every time I would lose weight I would celebrate and regain it all and, and plus some.

Michelle Wolfson: And I probably have, I’ve already, I’ve way more than gained and lost the 250 pounds that the average diet or loses in the course of their life. That’s I know many times that I have gone up and down the scales and every time I, would corrode a bit of me

Rita Black: by

Michelle Wolfson: being. Unsuccessful and I’m not really used to being unsuccessful.

Michelle Wolfson: I was a very successful business person with my personal chef [00:37:00] business, but I also had a really big problem of imposter syndrome. Yeah. In my nutrition management system. So after going to chef school for many years and having all these clients, I decided that even though I knew exactly how to make an amazing, end stage.

Michelle Wolfson: Renal failure, meal plan. I didn’t have credentials that said I did. People just had to trust. I did. And I thought, enough of this, I’m going back to school. So I went back, I did a postgraduate nutrition management program at George Brown College. So I I have the designation that allows me to run a schedule one hospital, kitchen, any federally regulated institution.

Michelle Wolfson: So I can do any kind, I can manage the diet of any kind of person unless they have enteral or parenteral feedings, which is the ones where, they put the tubes in you. That I don’t train for that, but I can do I have the credentials to do anything. That’s, [00:38:00] and it really was freeing to have the designation because as soon as I had the designation and it said, ND Nutrition or NM Nutrition Manager at that point the confidence built up in.

Michelle Wolfson: I could go in and present and people they believed me and they were successful. But when I looked in the mirror, what looked back at me was not someone who was at their ideal weight. It was someone who, despite all of their education, their knowledge and their training could not maintain a weight that was considered healthy.

Michelle Wolfson: That’s

Rita Black: tough.

Michelle Wolfson: How could I be this amazing nutrition manager if I couldn’t even follow my own advice? The problem wasn’t food. The problem wasn’t skill or knowledge. Problem was psychological. It was in me. [00:39:00] It was how I felt. It was the way that food made me feel if I ra ate the wrong food. So the Atkins diet and the low carb diets really taught me a lot about being able to hibernate that carb zombie part of you that loses control around food.

Michelle Wolfson: So I knew that being able to eat a controlled carbohydrate diet was going to be an important part. But what I did, but I already knew that and I already did Atkins and I already lost all this weight on it, but it came back. And so I had already been on all the diets. I had already read all the books.

Michelle Wolfson: I’d already done all the plans. And my girlfriend said to me, I stopped smoking with Rita Black, she’s got a weight loss program. And I’m like, are you serious, Leslie? And she’s yep. It was just like 1, 2, 3, couple hours later I was a [00:40:00] non-smoker. And she’s and I’ve never gone back.

Michelle Wolfson: It’s been three years. I’ve never had another cigarette. I’m like. Seriously. She’s yeah, I don’t smoke. I don’t do the pat, I’ll do anything. I’m non-smoker now. And I’m like, oh, good God, sign me up. What the heck? I’ve tried everything else. Yeah. And then something happened that I didn’t expect.

Michelle Wolfson: So I’ll share with you that I’m bipolar and I manage my bipolar disorder through guided meditation, through cognitive behavior therapy, through biofeedback therapy, through exercise therapy, music therapy, and a lot of different therapies. And I’ve had this diagnosis of bipolar disorder now for 25 years.

Michelle Wolfson: And while it is always part of my personality, it doesn’t define who I am and it doesn’t limit what I can do, but it did teach me. That you can learn to think [00:41:00] differently about triggers in your brain that bring on your spiraling thoughts. And I realized the similarity between my binges and the way I felt inside my body, that absolute sense of horror and shame and self-loathing and sadness that would just come over me in my binges and I couldn’t stop.

Michelle Wolfson: It went well past the full feeling. Yeah, just couldn’t stop eating, and I didn’t know why. And then when I hit the shift, all of a sudden I got explanations, I got answers, I got support. But the thing that was most impactful for me. Was I had to be kind to myself. I had never been kind to [00:42:00] myself around food and bingeing.

Michelle Wolfson: I had been the meanest person ever to myself, right? Because I was so disappointed in the way I behaved in my lack of self-control in my compulsion. I was so disappointed in myself and I couldn’t understand it, and then all of a sudden I learned that it was also in my power. The same way that managing my bipolar disorder is, it’s also in your power to do, and it’s very similar.

Michelle Wolfson: You just have to look within. You have to build that inner coach that can give you the resources so that when you come up against challenges from your rebel and your critic and that you can say, Hey, I know that this food is tempting, but I’m gonna tell you how this gonna make you feel. If you [00:43:00] eat this, you’re gonna be crying yourself to sleep at night, but you have an option.

Michelle Wolfson: You don’t have to eat it. Instead, put your headphones on, go for a walk, leave the room, do jumping jacks, call a friend, read a book. Pick up your knitting. Get outside. And when you do those things 10 or 15 night minutes later, that binge it dissipates, it doesn’t go away. It just dissipates out of your body.

Michelle Wolfson: And it’s like you, you get flooded with self-control. And it didn’t happen instantly. Took a

Rita Black: lot of practice. Yeah. You’re training some deep grooves out yourself outta deep grooves. Tell them about your therapist’s the toboggan thing. ’cause I think that’s such a great metaphor.

Michelle Wolfson: When I was first diagnosed with my bipolar disorder, I went to see a [00:44:00] psychiatrist and I had a full psychiatric evaluation.

Michelle Wolfson: And the first thing they said to me was you need this and you need this lithium and so this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna put you on this lithium. And at the same time, I also had a therapist of a a psycho, a psychotherapist who I had been using. And so I went back to the psychotherapist and I.

Michelle Wolfson: Said, I’ve had a real collapse. I’ve had a real breakdown. I ended up at a psychiatrist’s office. I had to have a psychiatric evaluation, and they told me that I’m gonna be on lithium. And she looked at me and she said, lithium is always gonna be there for you. It is always going to be available for you to use.

Michelle Wolfson: But the downsides of lithium is, first of all, it takes two years to get your dose and second of all, part of your bipolar disorder that is woven into you is your creativity. How do you think you are creative of a chef? Where are [00:45:00] those wonderful, crazy ideas coming from? They’re coming from your mania, from your manic episodes.

Michelle Wolfson: Now sure, you’ve got depression and you have days that are really tough, but if you take lithium, you’ll be flat. So it’s always an option for you, but why don’t you invest in yourself? See what you can do without lithium knowing you can always fall onto it. So she explained to me that when I had my spiraling thoughts, I was standing on the top of a mountain and the snow was very deep.

Michelle Wolfson: And when I needed to get down to the mountain, I was going to take my luge, or for non French people, that is your toboggan. And I take my toboggan and I go down the hill on it, and as it goes down the hill, it carves into the snow. And when I get back up to the top of the hill and I take my toboggan, the path of least resistance is the path that I took the first [00:46:00] time.

Michelle Wolfson: And over time, you go down that path over and over again. And for me, that was the root of my spiraling thoughts. That was the root, that my negative thoughts that took me to a dark place. That’s what they were doing. They were going over and over in this same path. And one thing about smiling thoughts is they’re comforting.

Michelle Wolfson: They may not be good for you, but they’re familiar. ’cause you always know where your debas going to end up. It’s going to end up at the bottom of the hill in that spot. But if you want to change the way you react to the trigger that sent you down that path, you need to pick your toboggan up and you need to lift it up above the snow, turn it and put it down in a new spot.

Michelle Wolfson: And then when you get down to the bottom of the hill, you’re gonna arrive at a new place. And when you go back up to the top of the hill, you pick your toboggan up and you put it in a new spot again. And that new spot [00:47:00] is going to give you a neural pathway that’s gonna land you in a new ending. And it’s not going to be the same one, it’s gonna be one of your own choosing.

Michelle Wolfson: ’cause you move the lose yourself. And so she just explained to me that’s neuroplasticity. It’s the ability to make those new neuro pathways. But you choose them. Yeah. You do them. You and so what happens in the shift when we listen to the hypnosis, it gives us. New ways of solving our age old problems.

Michelle Wolfson: It gives us new ways of thinking about the things that have been plaguing us. Not for a week or a month, but for 20 years or 30 years or 40 years of thinking this way. And it gives us that new idea. And then our brain, when we listen to it over and over again, it [00:48:00] creates the new neural pathway.

Michelle Wolfson: So you get to build your own path from the top of the hill down to the bottom of the hill, and it lands in a new spot and you chose it. And then when you like it, that becomes the way that you do things right and you manage things.

Rita Black: Love that metaphor. It’s so good. I might have to steal it

Rita Black: I. Yeah. ’cause it is, it’s, and the, I know you were saying that trigger and the spiral are painful and frustrating, yet familiar. So comfy and the same with the weight struggle. Painful, frustrating, but familiar. We know where it ends up. It’s safe in our brain. Our brain will go for safe.

Rita Black: So strange. But thank you for that illustration. So you had, you came into the shift with a good knowledge of mind work, doing, [00:49:00] like you said, mindfulness meditation managing. I think it’s interesting. Did you have compassion for your bipolar disorder? Did when you one discovered that you had bi bipolar disorder, was there.

Rita Black: Compassion for yourself as you worked through all of this? Because obviously it took a lot of work.

Michelle Wolfson: I think there was a lot of sadness. I felt like I had something that was beyond my control. It’s an illness. And I’ll always have bipolar disorder just the same as I’ll always be a ooida.

Michelle Wolfson: And I am just the luckiest person on earth and not, some of my girlfriends are therapists and so I would often be able to talk to them. And they were very open-minded and they had they attached no stigma to bipolar disorder. These are people who’d lo known me for 30 or 40 [00:50:00] years.

Michelle Wolfson: Their opinion of me wasn’t about to change simply because I got a diagnosis.

Rita Black: And

Michelle Wolfson: I think that I learned compassion. I remember my husband is very supportive, but he is not always the most modern husband. I always say that he’s the very last fifties husband around. He doesn’t cook, doesn’t clean.

Michelle Wolfson: Our dog doesn’t bring him his slippers, his our dog takes his slipper. But if you can think of the, the guy in the Lindsey boy with the dog and the slippers, I think that’s him. But he’s wonderfully loving and he’s an amazing partner and a provider and everything, and a musician and all that stuff.

Michelle Wolfson: But he didn’t really get what mental illness was or what bipolar disorder was, and he didn’t understand that it lived inside of me and he didn’t have it, so he would never feel like me. He didn’t get that. But I do remember sometimes when I would be really [00:51:00] frustrated and screaming and yelling. And in looking to him for comfort or reassurance, and he like totally blind to what was going on, and he’d say to me, listen to yourself, you.

Michelle Wolfson: When he said that, then it was like, oh my God, I’m bipolar. Of course I’m yelling and screaming about something really ridiculous. And so for me it was like a release. Yeah. It was like, oh, okay. I’m just having this little, total meltdown because of my bipolar disorder. I need to put my, I need to, I, I need to pull my, my tra my, all of my therapies into place.

Michelle Wolfson: I need to get into room, I need to get into

Rita Black: your operating

Michelle Wolfson: system. I had it’s but he was not a good sounding board. Like my girlfriends totally got it. My cousin INE has a, is a therapy. My girlfriend Laurie and my girlfriend they have all been [00:52:00] really special in being able to help.

Michelle Wolfson: It’s, it, they’ve, I have one girlfriend, Jillian, and she is a she manages, she’s a therapist and she manages behaviors of people that are really difficult really difficult. And I always make her my last resort ’cause I think she has a really stressful life. But when she talks to me, she talks to me like I’m normal.

Michelle Wolfson: Like my bipolar disorder is normal. So like she, and so when other people treat me like my bipolar disorder is normal, then I am more compassionate because now I realize a lot of people out there have mental illness. A lot of people have bipolar disorder and it doesn’t make you a good or bad person. It just makes you a person who has challenges.

Michelle Wolfson: Other people have, other things going on in them. And this is just my Bailey, Rick.

Rita Black: Yeah.

Michelle Wolfson: Yeah. And I think it’s

Rita Black: I don’t know if absolutely. You’ll always be a binge eater in [00:53:00] that. That’s I think most of us, I’ll always be trigger with weight.

Michelle Wolfson: Yeah. Yeah. I’ll be triggered to binge eat.

Michelle Wolfson: I don’t always have to act on it, but

Rita Black: yeah, and I think it’s a, I think, our illusion of that, it’s all, when you get to your ideal weight, it’s it that this is a chronic thing that you are, managing yourself in this area of your life for the rest of your life. It,

Michelle Wolfson: this is the part that IN never knew because I’d never been at my ideal weight.

Michelle Wolfson: And so anytime I’d ever gotten close. I just assumed Bing magic. Yeah. I’m at my ideal weight now I can just go back and eat everything I want and then wonder why I was right back where I started and when I went through the shift program, so many habits had changed that’s never gonna happen.

Michelle Wolfson: Yeah. Because so many of my daily, [00:54:00] weekly, monthly, and minute to minute habits are different that I don’t feel that way. I don’t feel like I’m at my goal weight and there’s magic in it, with the exception of being able to go online and order any order clothes in any style and it always fits.

Michelle Wolfson: That’s that is like magic. But there’s no magic. I agree with you

Rita Black: there.

Michelle Wolfson: There’s no magic in the way I’m going to eat. The way I’m going to eat has been the way I have curated for myself and I often. When I hear people in our program and I meet them online and, sometimes I try and help coach them and they’ll say something to me like, I fell off track and I’m really disappointed that I couldn’t get myself back on eating.

Michelle Wolfson: Exactly what I wanted to eat and whatever. And I’m thinking to myself, oh my goodness, I went for 40 years with binge eating. I do not expect to [00:55:00] cure that in a month or a week or whatever. It’s going to be a continual development and growth part of me in the way that I approach these binge triggers in the way that, much like you, I have foods that can never enter my house.

Michelle Wolfson: Yeah. They just, or if they enter, I. Can’t have any access to them. Yeah. My, my husband was eating the last of the apple crumble last night, and I said, is that the last of the apple crumble? And he said, yes. Did you want me to save you some? No. Actually, I have eaten a life’s worth of apple crumble already.

Michelle Wolfson: I think I make the best apple crumble in the world, and I’m sure my partner Cheryl, will agree because we served it at to literally thousands of people at all of the [00:56:00] bond spiels that we ever did, because we made it by hand and it’s absolutely wonderful. Sounds wonderful. It’s like an oatmeal cookie on, on, on apples.

Michelle Wolfson: It’s just fabulous, but it’s a huge trigger for me. Yeah. Like it’s a colossal trigger. I cannot eat a serving of apple crumble. A serving for me is it’s a Pam.

Rita Black: Yeah. And

Michelle Wolfson: if you’re a restaurant, it’s a hotel pan with 30 servings. You might not eat it in one night, but there’s nothing left over at that.

Michelle Wolfson: So I recognize that there are certain things that I will never eat again, except for if I go to somebody’s house and they give me one serving, and I know I can’t go in their kitchen and steal the rest of it and put it in my bag and take it home, then I can have a little bit. But I I have made peace with the things that I will never eat again because of what, how they make me feel.

Rita Black: Yeah.

Michelle Wolfson: And there’s so many

Rita Black: other foods that you can eat. Oh my gosh.

Michelle Wolfson: Oh my gosh. There’s just millions of things out [00:57:00] there all the time that I eat. My, my fridge is full all the time. I’m constantly cooking, making new recipes, doing new things. Yeah. Running by smoker. I’m just constantly developing new things and trying new recipes and doing things all the time.

Michelle Wolfson: No shortage there. No shortage there. And most of the foods, you, you made a comment during the training that talking about binge eating, saying that most people gain weight by eating the same foods at the same time with the, the same foods, same time, same place. It’s a hundred percent true.

Michelle Wolfson: A hundred percent true. And so if you can remove yourself either from the foods or the place, or the time, you can keep that under control. So those, there are very few foods, there are a few that don’t come into my house, but most can surprisingly I’m good with some, with most things now. That’s awesome.

Michelle Wolfson: Yeah.

Rita Black: That’s great. Yeah, I think it’s a, it is an evolution. You figured it out and and for somebody like yourself, you’re, because you’re, I [00:58:00] for. Of you who are listening. Michelle posts the most amazing food pictures. She should work for a magazine because she does post her, oh, this is what I made for dinner tonight.

Rita Black: And we’re all like, can we come and eat at your house? ’cause it’s just so beautiful. I had some questions. Michelle. What are I’m interested, like as a nutritional manager, what, and maybe this didn’t come across, but I have a feeling it did. It’s what are some myths that people buy into around food, that in your career, that when people are trying to be healthy, maybe not necessarily losing weight, but what are some, are there any sort of myths.

Michelle Wolfson: So there are myths that have been propagated by our governments over time, and they’re, they weren’t propagated by the governments in a malicious way. But if you take a look at our food pyramid and you look at it between the ones that were produced by the government, and of course my examples are always gonna be the Canadian government but they’re pretty similar with American sources and what they [00:59:00] told us to eat in the seventies and the eighties and the nineties and the aughts and now, and what they used to tell us was that we should eat whole grains.

Michelle Wolfson: And when you say eat whole grains, my mind immediately goes to, okay. Maybe we’ll be putting some cascia or some millet or some, some kind of like barley. Yeah, bar, but I think of like a grain that is an entirety rule. You eat the whole thing. You eat the endosperm that, you eat the chaff on top.

Michelle Wolfson: You know the thing that makes it whole. And that’s not what people take from it. People take from it that somehow how whole grain bread is better than white bread, but there’s like nothing about whole grain bread that is virtuous. If you look at the composition of a slice of toast, whether it’s whole grain, rye, sourdough, Ezekiel, whatever kind of bread, [01:00:00] it’s a carb.

Michelle Wolfson: And it has very little fiber. Oh. But it has twice as much fiber as white bread, right? Because white bread has one gram of fiber, and whole grain has two grams of fiber. And how is that helping you achieve, a daily total of 10 to 15 or 20 grams of fiber? Like you can’t eat 23 pieces of it. So I think part of the myth is that we should be eating foods that governments and associations have told us are healthy for us without using our critical thinking powers.

Michelle Wolfson: General Mills does not care that you are fat. General Mills wants you to buy their product and this isn’t an antigen Mills thing? No, it’s a food labeling issue. It’s a quantity of food issue. When someone puts granola on their yogurt, if I were to do that I don’t, ’cause it has sugar, but I, my husband for example, [01:01:00] I put about 10 grams of granola on, I make it at home.

Michelle Wolfson: But when someone goes to the grocery store and they buy a name band, granola, and they look at the serving size, it says sometimes half a cup. And then you look at the calories on it and the calories are like three 50 calories. And then they’re gonna be adding milk and fruit and all kinds of other stuff.

Michelle Wolfson: And they’ve not got one ounce of quality protein in their body, even though they thought. They were eating something healthy because the symbol on the box said green healthy. Yeah. Cow, whatever the symbols are on there, you’ve been marketed to for a very long time by manufacturers and it has led people to think that somehow brown rice is good and white rice is bad, but the truth is no rice comes without a huge glycemic spike.

Michelle Wolfson: So I ended up [01:02:00] at the end of my weight loss journey thinking that I was gonna have a great A1C, which is the measure of the my blood glucose, my glycol hemoglobin. And I thought I lost this weight. I eat healthy, I’m gonna have a grade A1C. Guess what? I did not have a grade A1C. In fact, over the course of the last four years, it had gone up by six points.

Michelle Wolfson: And even though I had lost the weight, so I was really confused. I was really. Perplexed.

Rita Black: Yeah,

Michelle Wolfson: possibly it would’ve gone down over time, but I said, you know what? I am going to use my scientists. And more than my inner scientist, I’m gonna use the little patch on your arm with the little probes.

Michelle Wolfson: And I’m gonna get a continuous glucose monitor, and I am going to measure my blood glucose 24 hours a day. And I did it for almost three months. And I learned so much about how my body processes different foods and what made me [01:03:00] spike, even though it might not make the person beside me spike, I learned, and one of the things I learned is that I always need to eat the protein in my plate first.

Michelle Wolfson: I eat meat, even if I’m just eating three or four bites. I eat it before the vegetables and that, that, that didn’t come, like I, I usually eat the vegetables first. That’s the big, bulky part that. Gonna make me fall, but that’s not what’s gonna keep my glucose under control. So I had to learn things about myself and about my blood sugar so that I could create a meal plan that, it wasn’t dramatically different.

Michelle Wolfson: But I don’t eat three or four cups of vegetables at my meals now. I eat two cups or two and a half cups and maybe, and bigger protein, and I still eat the same number of calories in the day, but I have morphed the food so that my body doesn’t do insulin spikes, and that really helps with cravings. I personally [01:04:00] try to keep my carbohydrates to no more than 60 to 80 grams per day with the exception of exercise.

Michelle Wolfson: Understand, I am a a long distance cyclist, often cycling for three and four hours, do you know, going like 50 or 60 miles or, 17 to 90 kilometers and I will burn between 1,015 hundred calories and those bicycle rides. Can be fueled by pure carbohydrates, by fruit, by dates, by all that kind of stuff.

Michelle Wolfson: But out so it’s not that I don’t understand why and how our body needs carbohydrate for fuel and for exercise, but without big exercise, I keep my carbohydrates very low and I choose them to be the best ones. The ones full of the most nutrients, vitamins, fiber, those are my carbs. And it has given me a feeling of calm, an ability to keep that carb, zombie, well under control so that I [01:05:00] don’t have those big swings and cravings and binges because I am more in charge.

Michelle Wolfson: And one of the things that I have to keep in a sticky note, if I’m feeling like a lot of cravings and binges. It’s because I’ve eaten too many carbs. My brain is so altered, my thoughts are so altered by the carbohydrate consumption that I don’t remember that I don’t have to feel this way. I actually forget.

Rita Black: I think it’s so interesting and I agree with you a hundred percent. I think we go into an alter older state when we’re getting too many carbohydrates. Our inner critic goes up very loud. A lot of stuff happens and and so it’s almost like you have to I’d be interested to hear what you do, it’s almost like you have to go, part of you has to go.

Rita Black: You are in an altered state. You need to get outta this altered state, and you get yourself back to, you [01:06:00] hibernate that carb zombie. But

Michelle Wolfson: I do like you do. I do exactly what you do. I protein up. I eat egg boiled eggs, I eat yogurt. I finish my day with a lot of protein. Even if it goes over my calories, I protein up because by protein up it is, first of all it’s like a reminder.

Rita Black: I eat a lot of carbs and I need to change what I’m eating. It changes my palate. I’m not as sensitive because now I’m eating, this protein dense food. Yeah. Chemically, it

Rita Black: changes everything.

Michelle Wolfson: It, it does. I also found, and I don’t know if you, you find this too, is I have two different kinds of hunger.

Michelle Wolfson: I have a hunger that says, you’re hungry and I don’t know if you know what’s coming up in the next hour or so, but you need to be making sure that some food gets into you in the next hour. That’s my normal hunger. But if I’m busy, like I’m beekeeping and I’m holding bee frames in my hands, and I have bees running all [01:07:00] over me, I know I can put a snooze alarm on that hunger and say, okay, got it.

Michelle Wolfson: Heard the, I just need to finish, close up this hive, put everything away, and then I can go address my hunger. That’s like my normal hunger. It comes, but it’s like a snooze alarm hunger. Then there’s the other hunger. There’s the hunger. That’s like a screaming Mimi. There’s the hunger that you feel, and when you feel it, it’s a five alarm emergency.

Michelle Wolfson: It says, I don’t care what you’re doing in the beehive, throw those frames on the ground, get to your kitchen and eat food that. Is my sign that I am having too many carbohydrates. It’s because the hunger is different. The hunger is demanding. Yeah, the hunger is fierce. And so if I feel that, again, it’s awareness, it’s another awareness.

Michelle Wolfson: Ooh. If [01:08:00] I feel that kind of hunger, I need to get some things under control. And it’s only over time, it’s only after months of practice and practice that this self-awareness kind of starts to come out. And that’s why I believe in my heart that I will always be able to maintain my weight and I will never go back.

Michelle Wolfson: To the way to the old relationship I had with food is because all I am doing now in maintenance is curating that awareness of, food and how I feel and what that hunger means. I’m curating that now and I am creating appropriate responses to it.

Rita Black: Yeah. It takes time and it takes patience and and ability to get it wrong sometimes.

Rita Black: Forgiveness, that inner coach. Yeah.

Michelle Wolfson: Yeah. Forgiveness [01:09:00] and kindness. Yeah, for sure.

Rita Black: Michelle, this is so amazing and I could keep talking with you for a long time, but this, our podcast will then become a major motion picture movie or something.

Michelle Wolfson: Wonderful to be here.

Rita Black: We’ll have to have you back because I, we have a whole other conversation just about.

Rita Black: Healthy eating and food and your ideas on it. ’cause the, I know you’re heading in that direction of helping people. So we’ll have you back. But I wanna ask you, just to to put a bow on our conversation today, what do you feel like is the one thing that your experience of, releasing weight for the last time and really evolving yourself what is the biggest gift of weight mastery for you, other than weight?

Rita Black: I

Michelle Wolfson: think that the ability to take charge of yourself. It’s the mastery that allows [01:10:00] you to develop further. It’s the mastery that allows you to achieve goals that maybe you didn’t believe you could achieve before, because. I am able to lose weight after 60 years of being overweight. Oh my gosh.

Michelle Wolfson: What else might I be able to do?

Rita Black: Yeah,

Michelle Wolfson: amazing. Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.

Rita Black: I wanna just thank you from the bottom of my heart. This has been amazing. It’s been lovely to learn way more about you. And it, and exciting and we have to have you back for a beekeeping segment too.

Michelle Wolfson: And I really don’t eat honey anymore, but that’s, yeah.

Michelle Wolfson: That’s okay. You love the bees though, huh? I do. I love working with bees. They are certainly the most challenging hobby. And when I did quit work as a chef a while ago. My arthritis, we didn’t even talk about that, how I was crippled and didn’t walk for two years and all that kind of stuff.

Michelle Wolfson: And but when I gave up my career because [01:11:00] of my crippling arthritis and I couldn’t walk as soon as I started to get better, I, I took up the most difficult hobby I think I could find, because being a chef was the most difficult career. So what the heck? I might as well become a beekeeper.

Rita Black: You certainly take on the challenges. I have a friend who keeps fees and it is like I said, it’s a podcast episode in and of itself. ’cause they’re fascinating creatures for sure. My gosh. Yeah. You don’t respect them until you. Hear about keeping them. That’s it is just unbelievable. Michelle, you’re it was just a joy to, to speak with you and you are such amazing contributor to our community, so thank you.

Rita Black: Thank you.

Michelle Wolfson: It’s a real pleasure. Thank you very much for the opportunity.

Rita Black: Oh, thank you, Michelle. I, and again, I value you so much and thank you so much for bringing all your brilliance to our community. You are amazing. And you, listeners, thank you so much for all the value you bring to the Thin Thinking community.

Rita Black: I appreciate so [01:12:00] much all the conversations that we have here in our world. And hopefully Michelle’s story touched you. I know it touched me. And don’t forget, our Autumn Flash sale is happening right now. Through October 21st, 2025, you’ll get 2024 pricing on the Shift Weight Mastery Process Health Study program Michelle’s new online cooking class, and our five top hypnosis downloads from the Shift Weight express.

Rita Black: It’s the perfect time to get ready for the holidays and set yourself up for lasting weight mastery. So just visit www. shiftweightmastery. com/slash that’s slash fl a h to join in. Or you can check out the link in the show notes and have a great week. And remember that the key and [01:13:00] probably the only key to unlocking the door of the weight struggle is inside you.

Rita Black: Yes, you So keep listening and find it. We will be back here again next week. Thanks for listening to the Thin Thinking Podcast. Did that episode go by way too fast for you? If so, and do you wanna dive deeper into the mindset of long-term weight release? Head on over to www shift weight mastery. com.

Rita Black: That’s www shift weight mastery. com, where you’ll find numerous tools and resources to help you unlock your mind for permanent weight release tips, strategies, and more. And be sure to check the show notes to learn more about my book from Fact to thin thinking. Unlock your mind for permanent weight loss and to learn how to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an [01:14:00] episode.