Q&A 48 – What does being calm have to do with weight-loss?

In this excerpt from It’s Not About the Food I share a story about the surprising thing I learned at an Equus training and how it impacts the drive to overeat.Learn more about the book here.You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Transcript of this episodeIt is early autumn 2014 and I’m standing in a covered outdoor riding arena. Beyond the open walls I can see the California sunshine warming the desert landscape. Here inside, it’s a bit chilly in the early morning, and I’m wishing I’d worn a light jacket.
The arena is huge, probably nearly the length of a football field and almost as wide. The ground is covered in brown dirt, and where the sun comes past the walls into the building, I can see dust motes floating in the beams. Within the larger arena, there’s a temporary round pen that’s about 40 feet in diameter. I’m inside that pen and I’m not alone. With me is a brown and white horse, whose name I didn’t catch, and we’re going to spend the next few minutes bonding.
I’m here at ‘horsey camp,’ as I call it, in my latest attempt to try to heal the drive to overeat. I’ve flown from Vancouver, British Columbia, to very Southern California and spent money I don’t have in order to spend two days doing what’s called Equus training.
I love horses and grew up around them. My dad started me taking riding lessons when I was about four years old. So this is a comfortable and happy place for me. However, we’re not doing any riding this weekend. I and the other ten or so women in the class will all be doing our work from the ground. Which is why I’m standing in the round pen with a paint horse.
Over the next two days, we all take turns in the round pen with a variety of horses. The premise of the training is that we’re going to learn about ourselves by being in the pen with a horse, both by seeing how we react to different situations and also by seeing how the horses react to us. Horses are highly intuitive and sensitive creatures. Though they are large, they are prey animals, not predators, so they’ve evolved to be keenly sensitive to their environments and to changes in the energy around them. As such, they give immediate feedback about a person’s state of being, often pointing out patterns of behavior that we aren’t aware of.
The objective of the first exercise we do is to get the horse to trot, or canter, around the outside edge of the round pen. Individual trainees like me stand in the very center of the pen and encourage the horse to move without shouting or running at it. You might have a coiled lead rope in one hand that you can gently slap against your leg, but that’s all the guidance you can give to the large animal looking at you with wary eyes. You’re essentially moving the horse with your energy. Letting it know what you want it to do by holding the intention in your mind and being clear and calm. (We’ll get to why calmness matters in a minute.)
I’ve traveled to this foreign land, crossed an international boundary, rented a car, and booked a hotel with the hope that this silent, brown and white animal with pointy ears and a soft muzzle will show me what’s wrong with me. I want to know why I feel so broken inside and why, no matter what I do, I can’t seem to conquer the drive to overeat.
The horse and I look at one another for a few moments while I receive instruction from the workshop trainer. Outside the round pen, my fellow workshop participants are watching, which is really uncomfortable for me. I hate being the center of attention.
The workshop leader,