301: The Emotional Side of Recovery From Dieting, Addictions, and Breast Implant Illness

Episode 301: The Emotional Side of Recovery From Dieting, Addictions, and Breast Implant Illness

Emotional side of breast implants – world changer. dieting, addictions. the magic is in the details. changed thinking. changed life. huge solution.

Holistic Health Practitioner, Sarah Anne Stewart is joining the show today to share her personal journey with breast implant illness and eating disorders and how, in return, she has become an advocate for body positivity, healing relationships with food, and redefining self-love.

More about Sarah Anne Stewart:

As a Certified Holistic Health Practitioner (AADP), Sarah runs a leading mindfulness based private coaching practice in Los Angeles. Sarah's unique heart-centered approach has helped hundreds of women across the globe make sustainable lifestyle changes and heal their relationship with food and their bodies. Sarah is the founder of the Awesome Inside Out Movement, an advisor to international wellness brands, and soon to be Hay House author.

Show notes:
1. Heal your relationship with food with Sarah's 21 day program.

2. Order Dr. Pompa's Beyond Fasting book! Released December 2019.

3. CytoDetox: Total detoxification support where it matters most – at the cellular level.

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
I've done a few shows this year on Cell TV about breast implants. I didn't really cover the emotional side of breast implants; the why, the why you may have gotten breast implants or why you're on the fence of removing them.

This next guest, Sara Stewart, being from the modeling world, she tackles this hard and she is a world changer now. She goes beyond breast implants in this interview into dieting, into the addictions that go from one thing like breast implants to the next to the next. I think the magic in this interview was the details that she gives about how she changed her thinking and ultimately, her life. Huge solution, because I know so many of you are battling this out there watching this; we get the emails. We have some great solutions to offer on this show. Stay tuned.

Ashley:
Hi, welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I'm Ashley Smith. Holistic health practitioner Sara Ann Stewart is joining the show today to share her personal journey with breast implant illness and eating disorders; how in return she has become an advocate for body positivity, healing relationships with food, and redefining self-love. Sara leads a mindfulness based private coaching practice in Los Angeles and her unique heart-centered approach has helped hundreds of women across the globe make sustainable lifestyle changes and heal their relationship with food and their bodies. Let's get started and welcome Sara Ann Stewart and of course, Dr. Pompa. Welcome both of you.

Sara Ann:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we're excited to have you. I said right before we started the show, Sara, that this has been a passion of mine this year, this breast implants. The reason why is because I've run into it now so many times with women not getting well, wondering what's going on, their hormone dysregulation, I mean, all the typical symptoms, and it ends up being breast implants. However, we haven't done enough, borderline any, on dealing with really the problem here, dealing with self-image. So many women have watched our show, we've gotten the emails and it's well, maybe this will help me get well. Really, even if they believe that it is, it's this body image and the stigma and all of that that they're really dealing with. You bring a very unique answer here and I think some solutions that we haven’t brought on other shows that are really important. This goes beyond breast implants; this goes into chronic dieting. I believe you have some really unique answers here that we're going to hit on this whole show. So big show, can't wait.

Sara Ann:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here and I am so grateful and privileged to be able to talk about these topics.

Dr. Pompa:
You're not afraid. You're a beautiful woman. You have obviously battled this in your arena and everything that you've done and I said hey, if you're not the role model yet for women, you need to be. Let's help you get there. I'm being really serious because most of the women watching this really aren't making the move. They're not going, “Okay, that's it; I'm getting these breast implants out,” and it's because there is a bigger issue here. Let’s start with your story. Let's go right after it. Tell me a little bit.

Sara Ann:
I grew up in a really holistic environment. My father was a public speaker. He traveled the country, talking about my body connection, and psychology, and why we should be meditating and doing yoga, and all of these things that were really good. Back in the day, we would go from town to town and there was no internet. We would knock on doors and hold these different classes in halls and schools and so forth. I grew up in a world that was really, really holistic.

When my father was diagnosed with the devastating news of terminal cancer, he looked at the doctor in the face and said, “Have you ever seen a miracle?” The doctor said, “No, in the 20 years of doing this work, I've never seen one.” My father said, “You're going to see one.” He went home and went against all medical advice and started going on a very clean vegan diet, studying the Gerson Program in Hippocrates Institute, doing these different protocols [04:42] and really diving into what had happened throughout his life where his body was able to be able to get sick. He dove into all of these different—on the nutrition side, the healing protocols that would heal his body. He was also doing the emotional, mental, spiritual work as well. I witnessed my father completely cure cancer after seven years—sorry, seven months and he's been cancer-free for 20-plus years. I had this profound knowledge of holistic health growing up but I was scouted to model when I was 15. Within a week of signing my contract, I developed a series of eating disorders that lasted for a decade.

Dr. Pompa:
Go figure.

Sara Ann:
Go figure. I went into this thinking, oh my gosh, I should have such a good head on my shoulders. Look at this family that I come from. Look at my father; I'm going to be okay. I just want to see the world. This scout promised me that I would become a star and make all this money and get to have this experience. I'm like, what could go wrong? Flash-forward ten years, I was told by a doctor, “If you do not leave this industry, you are going to lose your life to anorexia.” I'm in a series of other eating disorders and I thought to myself, how has this happened? The amount of shame and guilt and just pain inside of me looking back on my life and thinking, I can't call my parents. I'm addicted to Adderall; I am now addicted to laxatives. I'm anorexic, bulimic, all of these things which you would never expect coming from how I was raised.

On one hand, I had this beautiful knowledge of how food is healing and then on the other hand, I saw it basically destroy my life. I thought the answer was give up my career as a model, pick up my bags, go back-packing. What I didn't know is that your mind goes with you everywhere that you go.

Dr. Pompa:
Damn.

Sara Ann:
I'm trying to run from this problem by the shutting off social media and leaving my career behind, and the anxiety got worse. I went back to school for nutrition and the anxiety got even worse because I was studying all these different protocols but yet I didn't know how to actually listen to my own body. I hadn't made the connection that I actually had this intuition inside of me that could lead me to the direction of what was best for me.

It was a long journey. I ended up turning to meditation, mindfulness, reprogramming the subconscious beliefs and stories and all of these things that I had picked up for ten years. After working with a meditation teacher for a couple years, I finally was free of these addictive patterns. From when I was modeling, I had gotten breast implants to keep my career going. Then, I started to get really, really sick. I realized that I didn't know what was going on for several months.

I went from doctor to doctor to doctor and come across some posts about breasts implants illness. I ignored it, I ignored it, I ignored it some more until so many women who were coming out and thank God for social media because all of these other courageous women were standing up and speaking out. I was like, I think my doctors are missing something. I went back to my doctors and my doctor said, “Not your implants.” I went to some other doctor and then finally found a doctor who was finally like, “Yeah, you should really get those out; it's really important.” Then, I finally listened and then all my symptoms went away. A year later, I'm symptom-free and have my life back.

Dr. Pompa:
Your whole story hits on what I say all the time: it's physical, chemical or emotional. Obviously, you had emotional things. You pointed out you had to change your thinking; you had to change your mind which then changed your patterns, etc. If you didn't do that first, I don't know if you had the guts being a model—at least, that was your career at one point—to do that. Again, there's a lot of women watching this who aren't models. It's not their image or their identity and yet they're still struggling because they think that's what makes them beautiful or attractive to a man or their husband or boyfriend, whatever it is. You had to go through the mind change and then okay, the physical interference [08:57] you got your life back. Always, it's typically both. It's the mind and the physical that play into this.

All right. Let's focus on this mind change because as I've pointed out, a lot of people, a lot of women watching this won't even be able to take the job because they're thinking about their body. Their image is too much for them to bear, this identity and so help them. I mean, I don't even know where to start but I don't want to leave them in the dust here either because ultimately, it's a mind shift of the way we think—is our paradigm. How we view our world is how our world becomes around us. Whatever illness you're dealing with or whatever struggle, what you learned is what everybody watching and listening to needs to learn. Let's start there.

Sara Ann:
I want to start with wherever you are, I hold so much compassion and love for that space because I talk about self-love, self-worth, self-esteem all day long with my clients, and the moment that I made the decision to get my implants out, I went into tons of self-doubt, worry, concern, fears, all the emotions that you can expect from changing your physical body and having something that you had inside of you for nine plus years. Then, all of a sudden, you’re going to wake up from a surgery and look very, very different. I want to just first address that all of those emotions are very real, and they’re okay to have. I think a lot of times what I see is that we will feel them, and then we’ll use fear or other addictions to suppress the emotion that we’re feeling. For instance, just dealing with the emotion and confronting it and being okay with it and moving through it. I think that’s the first part that’s really important is just to identify that it is okay and perfectly normal to have these feelings.

I think it’s also really important to look at, for me specifically, my environment. Who was around, and who was influencing my decision to take my implants out? I can say this with so much love. Again, you are the only person that should be determining what you’re doing with your body. That’s it. That’s my number one thing I tell all the girls. I have hundreds of girls reach out to me now all day long. It’s mind-blowing to me what’s happening with the explants and what’s happening culturally with this whole movement. I’m always like your husband, your partner, or your—whatever relationship you’re in should not be impacting your decision, and only you know in your heart what the best decision is for you.

What broke my heart is when I started to share my story about getting my implants out. They were like, well, what is your husband going to think? I was like I haven’t thought about that yet. What is he going to think? I went into all of this almost depression and sadness. I was like what if he’s not happy? What if it changes our sex life? What if it changes our intimacy? What if it changes our relationship? What if he isn’t happy, instead of connecting to myself?

I had to pull out all of my resources, the forgiveness letters, the affirmations, the meditation, the mindfulness component to sit in front of the mirror naked and say I love my body regardless of what even my husband thinks, right? This is my body. I’m in this body. I’m the only person that has control over my health, and this is the stuff that is needed 100% to get my health back in line. I’m going to stop negating all of these other women or all of these stories and telling myself that it might not be my implants and doing tens of thousands of dollars in detoxing to, again, try to prove that it’s not the implants. I think that that’s what so many women are doing. I get messages from women who are like, well, what kind of implants do you have? Oh, thank God. I don’t have those implants.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s it, yeah.

Sarah Anne:
It’s all implants.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s all implants.

Sarah Anne:
It’s all implants, and I’m like it doesn’t matter if it’s saline, or gel, or whatever. I’m like just because I had a certain implant doesn’t mean that I’m the only person to get them with this type of implant. I think a lot of times we’re trying to solve—we’re trying to pinpoint is it related to implants? I can just speak from the women I’ve spoken to, and again, everyone’s different. If something is suppressing your immune system where you can’t get better, whether it’s your thyroid, your adrenals, why not take them out, right? Why not?

Dr. Pompa:
The why not is where we’re going here, right? It’s the image that they have. Okay, so I mean, back up. You said that you had to sit in front of a mirror, look at your body, and say, okay, I love my body. Okay, that was maybe the beginning. I mean, take us through more.

I mean, you nailed it. I mean, I can’t tell you how many women are watching this right now that are exactly in the battle where you sit, right? How is this going to affect my relationship with my husband, how people view me, how this thing—I mean, it’s all of that self-talk. I mean, if you don’t have that—I don’t even know how you wouldn’t. Of course you have those thoughts. Everyone does.

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, of course you have it because there was a reason why you got them in. If you loved your—and that was the part for me.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, good point.

Sarah Anne:
That was the part for me. It was, wow, I have to have so much compassion and love and understanding and forgiveness for myself. Nine years prior I sold my car. I called my father in a moment of shame and said I need the money. He was like what’s happening? I never called him for money before. I went in, and I signed the docs. Two weeks later I had implants. I didn’t even think. I didn’t think about the repercussions of this action until nine years later. It was just like in, out, done.

Dr. Pompa:
Everybody’s doing it, right?

Sarah Anne:
Totally. I was told that you have to have certain proportions to be a model and to sell lingerie. Then those stories and those beliefs even if you’re not a model are transpired to the mass media because of marketing. What blows my mind is that—I just did this piece. I looked at a magazine from 1954, and it’s the same marketing tactics as they’re using today. To think that we’ve been immune to these marketing tactics and how they’re selling things, we haven’t been, and so we have to identify that these stories that we’re holding aren’t our stories. They’re stories our grandmother told our mothers, our mothers told us, kids on the playground told us, what we’re seeing on social media. There’s CGI and AI bots now that try to manipulate the way women feel about themselves. It’s like this is a massive problem, but only we have the power to change culture.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re right. We have the power to change culture and how we perceive culture, right? We can’t affect the boy on the playground who was giving attention to the girl with the bigger boobs, and that’s still in your head. I mean, come on. I mean, those realities happen, right? Boys going through puberty, it’s like, hey, that’s different. I mean, that’s the reality. Girls are like, oh, he’s attracted to that girl. She’s not even as pretty as me, but look what she has. The psychology gets started there, right?

How do we unwind it, Sarah? I mean, yes, it has been reinforced by advertisements and culture. It’s reinforced from the playground all the way to now. I mean, that’s a lot of changing my thinking, I mean, if I’m woman thinking about this.

Sarah Anne:
A hundred percent. The number one thing for me was radical self-responsibility. It was the responsibility that I—these thoughts in my mind are not my thoughts. They’re part of what I was conditioned to believe growing up, but I will no longer allow the thoughts to dictate my reality and my life and, most importantly, my health. I think when I was able to separate that this is just a thought and it’s moving through my mind—and it doesn’t define me. It doesn’t define my worth. It doesn’t define my self-esteem, my self-confidence. I can literally disassociate myself from the thoughts that are coming in of fear, worry, concern. Who will I be without these implants? Get back to my truth, which is I’m worthy of everything I desire with or without implants, with or without blonde hair, with or—whatever it is, whether I was looking a certain way or being a certain way. I just had to keep separating what was my truth and what was not my truth.

At the core of who you are, you know what your truth is, and I just believe everyone is worthy of a beautiful, healthy life. I understand deeply that these beliefs are so engrained in us. I did a lot of forgiveness work around the girl who wanted her modeling career to continue and the reason I got them, and I think that that’s almost the place to start for a lot of women. It’s like why when you were 19 did you make the decision? Why did you make a decision for this guy that you were dating at the time? I know, for myself and I’m speaking candidly, there were so many times I wanted to change my body type for the person I was dating. That’s just, again, part of our culture. I had to keep going back to, wow, I’m in a relationship now where that’s not needed, and I would never expect that from my husband to ask of anything like that from me.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s funny. We were just at dinner this week with a friend of mine and four of us sitting around the table. I don’t even remember how the subject came up, but him or I, big boobs, yeah, it doesn’t do it for us. I’m stating that to show you that it’s not a reality that every guy. It’s probably split the same as some guys like long hair/short hair, dark hair/light hair. I mean, that’s the point is that you are what you are, and I promise you, there’s guys out there that like you exactly the way you are, perfect. They would look at you and say, oh, my gosh, perfection. When you try to be for who is really what the question is. Are you trying to gain—if 25% of the men like bigger boobs, you’re trying to be in that 25%? Why?

Okay, now, you’re very big into, obviously, meditation, even to the point where it’s like, hey, believe it or not, you can meditate and stay lean, lose fat. We’ll get there in a minute. Your meditation must’ve been a big part of how you changed your thinking into the new thinking of, hey, this is me, and it’s great.

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, I think it’s just—I think what meditation does is it quiets the external. It gets you back to yourself. It gets you back to your truth. It gets you back to the place where you can connect with your heart and say I’ve been suffering for two years trying to figure this out and no longer will I allow myself—this is my truth, and no longer will I allow myself to continue to suffer and risk my health for years to come for vanity, for ego, for how I look. It took a long time of sitting quiet in my mind and shutting out the noise and all the voices and all the people and all the opinions and even all the doctors’ opinions. I had so many different doctors telling me it is your implants. It’s not your implants. It was like, at a certain point, I got to the point where I was like ten doctors have told me it’s not, and then this one doctor is saying it is. I’m weighing yes or no. Finally, I just was like I have to listen to the voice inside of me that knows it’s my implants, that has the courage to get them out, that forgives my 20-year-old self that did this back in the day, and I’m moving forward with my life in a healthy place.

The thing is, if we don’t do the inner work now, it’s going—the consequence is lifelong. Your body’s always going to be changing through pregnancy, through aging, through hormones, through all of these things that we see, and I think we’re at a place holistically and with food where we definitely have antiaging hacks. We can definitely take care of ourselves, but your body is going to change. Why not fall in love with your body right now as it is so that as your body changes you can continue to love it and appreciate it and have gratitude for the body that gets you through life and allows you to have all these experiences?

Dr. Pompa:
Look, I mean, I’m hoping this is the—we’re being forced to as a society to understand that this mindset that’s being forced upon us with food as well as body image, I mean, all of it is—we’ve got to break it. You were in the industry. You also live in a place where it’s just abundant boob jobs, right? You see how many getting sick or at least they have a lot of symptoms that they’re probably not associating with their breasts. What do you think? This is going to come to a head with autoimmune and everything that we know it causes.

Sarah Anne:
I’m hearing a lot of women come out and even a lot of women in my community, my friends, that are, oh, I didn’t realize it wasn’t normal to wake up with brain fog. Oh, my memory is going, and I didn’t even think about the fact that it could be my—there’s these subtle symptoms that are creeping up on them. Oh, I realize I’m having joint pain. I’m having pain in my arms. Oh, I realize I’m having acne at 30. I can’t get rid of it. I don’t know what’s happening. Oh, I realize I’ve had a rash for a year. I’m like those are not normal symptoms. Something is happening.

I think that, as we all have the courage to communicate and talk about this problem, more and more and more women are noticing that these symptoms that they are deeming just getting older, or they’re saying that, oh, well, I just thought it was my IUD, or these other things that potentially could be causing problems as well, but they’re starting to wake up that the implants could be causing these symptoms. It’s not normal to have migraines. It’s not normal to…

Dr. Pompa:
No, not at all.

Sarah Anne:
To be chronically exhausted where you have to sleep every day, I mean, I’ve been hearing these things from women. It’s just mind-blowing to me.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I wanted you to say exactly what you said. Those little symptoms are the oil light going on in the car going something’s wrong. Something’s wrong. You can cut the wire, put tape over it, but something’s wrong. If you have breast implants, pay attention.

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, that’s what happened to me. I was numbing the problem. It’s interesting. As we use food or other things to suppress our emotions, we can also use glutathione injections, ozone treatments, supplements, all these different protocols to suppress the actual thing that our body’s trying to speak to us through, which is our symptoms. I was suppressing my symptoms and saying I’m okay because I can get out of bed. I was only okay with three cups of coffee and getting the ozone and getting the glutathione and getting my IVs every week. Finally, my doctor was like you can keep covering up the problem, or you can walk across the street, and go get your implants out. I’m like, yeah, exactly.

I know this stuff. I’m in holistic health, but yet, we think we can mitigate and get through life. Why do you want to get through life? I don’t want to get through life. I want to thrive.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, I’m a guy who talks cause all day long, whether it’s if you still have silver fillings in your mouth that contain 50% mercury. Yeah, you’re not immune to mercury. It’s going in your brain. I feel fine now. Maybe you do. Maybe that morning brain fog or the fact you need three cups of coffee to survive, maybe you’re not so fine. If you’d of asked me the week before I got sick if I was healthy, oh, healthiest guy I know. A week later, voom, my bucket overflowed. You’d of said the same thing before your stuff started, right?

How many kids today are on Adderall? You mentioned Adderall. My kids tell me, dad, this is a big problem. They’re using Adderall to take tests, to function. They buy it cheaply at school from probably kids who have prescriptions. Who knows? Then they’re using marijuana to bring it down on the other side. I mean, is this is a trend that my kids are just making up, or is it real?

Sarah Anne:
I mean, I know, from my experience, I became very addicted to it during—while I was modeling for the weight loss component of it, which is so sad for me to even look back, and the consequence, again, the consequence of even just Adderall withdrawal. I look at what I put my body through, and I think that’s something else that, if you were to take yourself and just look down on your life and just see what behavior and how you’re treating your body on a daily basis, would you be proud of that person and how they’re taking care of your body? When I look back on my life, I had—for a long time, I had so much shame around how I took care of my—I was multiple laxatives every single day, multiple Adderall pills, barely eat. I’m like, how was I so destructive to my body, and what kind of mindset created that? I’m like, a person who really didn’t love themselves.

I cannot blame the modeling industry. I cannot blame my agent. I can’t even blame media or social conditioning. I’m like, at the end of the day, I made these choices to my body, and I chose not to do the inner work for many, many years to get to a place where I love myself where I can look at social conditioning. I can look at media, and I cannot get triggered by it anymore. I can say, oh, that’s nice that this advertisement wants to advertise in that way. I feel sad that they’re exploiting girls like that.

Dr. Pompa:
What you’ve done is you’ve changed your thinking, woken up to the fact that, that advertisement, I know exactly what they were doing. I control my identity. I control who I am. Everybody watching this, you have to go through that mind change, right? I see that. I see that people—when I coach people for their health, there’s a certain mindset that I can tell right away that they’re going to get well and one—and I try not to take these people. No, there’s a mindset that they’re stuck in a bad way of thinking; the same thinking that got them there.

I train doctors. I just did a mastermind where I was talking about functioning from your true identity, so getting breast implants immediately warps your true identity. The point was is you’re never fully happy until you’re functioning from your true identity. You’re never fully successful. In other words, there’s just a non-authenticity that comes about when you’re not functioning fully in your identity. The mind shift that I see you made, it was being completely identifying with your true identity. What I told them to do is make a timeline. Go back into your life, whether it’s kids on the playground, whether it’s teachers, family members, brothers, sisters, events, and look at times that may have warped your identity. Go back and revisit those times, and change the way you think about those times. Then it’s easier to often times—we all have to do this, by the way, at every level, right?

Sarah Anne:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Did you do anything like that? Did you go back? I guess you said, I mean, you went back at 19 and said, hey, I forgive myself for doing this. You had to go back in those times and reevaluate them.

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, I think a powerful thing for me with the timeline was just seeing that my insecurities and my addictions got transferred from one thing to the next until I was able to really dive deep into the inner work. When I met my coach, [Andres], who teaches meditation, he said you are going to have to unlearn all the ways that you were taught to suffer, and you’re going to have to unlearn this with an immense amount of courage because it’s going to shake your identity. It’s going to shake everything you know to be true about yourself, and that takes courage. It’s hard. It’s challenging. What I realized a lot with women that say, oh, what are your thoughts on breast implants, I’m like I’m not going to discourage you from getting them, but I do recommend for six months to a year to get a life coach. Get someone to help you with self-love, self-worth, self-confidence, loving yourself. So many women have reached out to me, and they’re like, oh, wow! I didn’t need them because I healed the pain that existed in me that I thought the breast implants would give me.

What I see so often is people get the breast implants, and they want the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. They keep thinking these external things are going to fuel the insecurity that lives within them. When they heal the wound from their childhood, from their father, from the mother, from whatever happened—I had to do this with my mother. I realized that the only reason I was in the modeling industry was because of my relationship with my mother, and I wanted external validation and love from someone outside of myself. When I healed that wound, everything started to shift, and I was no longer looking for all these things to heal that place in myself because it was already healed.

Dr. Pompa:
Is this a safe question to ask then if we say to women, okay, why do you want the breast implants, or why did you get the breast implants? Should they evaluate that first? The answer I think it would—I want to look better. Then you would say, well, why do you think you look not good? Then you would back up to say—I mean, is that a good thing to back into that?

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, I think inquiry and question is always such a profound way to bring forward your truth. Again, I’m just speaking for myself. I cannot speak for any other woman and their desires and what place those are coming from. I just know when I’ve done the inquiry work where I write a question of why did I want my implants and then you just free-flow write. What are they providing me? Was it safety? Is it comfort? Is it love? What are the reasons behind these? You allow yourself to free-flow on these type of questions.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what I want to hear. That’s the free-flow, the free flowing on those questions. Love comes to mind, right? That’s why, okay, security. Whatever it is, write it down. That’s what you’re saying.

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, I want to find my partner. I want to find my soulmate. These things are very normal, and they’re okay. I don’t want to shame anyone for wanting them for those things, but I just want to address that the healing is always going to be internal. Before or after the implant, we have to heal the part of ourselves that feels less than. Otherwise, in ten years, it will be something else. In 20 years, it will be—we’ll always be searching outside of ourselves.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s the point is that it’s going to be that next thing, next thing, next thing because you’re not really satisfied with your true identity. I mean, you may get the guy, but it could be the wrong guy, maybe not. It could be. I mean, a lot of bad things can happen because you’re not identifying the true identity, so it’s never too late. That’s the whole point here is evaluate why. Evaluate what it makes you feel like with or without. I think you have to dig into these hard thoughts and topics. Then when you do, then you have to start telling yourself a different story, correct?

Sarah Anne:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, that’s what you did. That’s what I’m hearing.

Sarah Anne:
I think we also need to empower other women to make choices based on their health. One thing I recognized when I got my implants out, I would say 90% of the questions were how do they look? Are they saggy? Do you have scars? Do you like your doctor? Did she do a good job? Maybe 10%, maybe 5% of the questions was how are you feeling? Are you feeling better? Are your symptoms gone?

I’m just realizing based on how we empower one another from woman to woman. It’s like I’m very careful now. I’m very cautious that when I talk to women it’s like, oh, are you feeling better? Are you more alive? Do you have your energy back? These are the things that matter, not if I have a scar. What matters is my health. Our minds are just completely reverse, and that’s no one’s fault. It’s just how we’re taught.

If we empowered each other to say, wow, I support you 100% to get your health back. I support you to feel alive with your kids. I want you to live a long time because we’re close, and I want to be friends with you to the—‘til we’re old. It’s like those sort of things I think we can start to empower each other and change culture.

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s the problem. Teenagers, I mean, maybe 20s as well, the value is being attractive. The value is looking a certain way, having friends, right. I watched my teenager. It’s like, oh, my God, the greatest value or I should say the greatest fear is not being accepted, right? They don’t think about health as a value until it’s not there, right? I mean, when I was sick, if you’d of told me to take my ears off, I would’ve taken my ears off to feel good again. I mean, it’s like I’d of walked around without ears and been like, yeah, I took those off, and now I feel good again. I mean, the point is is my values change, right? Your values change very rapidly.

I interviewed a gentleman born without legs and amazing guy. His name’s [Shawn]. I tell you what, he talked about a scenario where he was in a room with women who were struggling with weight loss and diet and failures, and for a moment, they forgot who they were in front of. They were making all these excuses, reasons why they would—not following a diet, da-da-da-da-da. The one woman heard herself at one point, and she stopped. He said, visibly, she looked down, just realized who she was in front of, and she said I should just probably stop talking now.

My point of even telling that story is his point was it’s all mindset. It’s all mindset, right? I mean, he had no excuses. It’s like his identity—I asked him the question did you go through one day ever of feeling sorry for yourself because you didn’t have legs? He’s like, oh, my God, now way. It’s like this has made me who I am. This gives me the platform. It’s his mindset, or the opposite could’ve been true. It’s like, yeah, I went through 20 years of misery feeling sorry for myself. He never went through that.

I mean, the point is is that you have legs, right? He didn’t. He’s a world changer, oh, my gosh, this guy, amazing marriage, amazing relationships, changing the world, mindset. Legs, boobs, hair, really, it’s a choice. It still is a choice, isn’t it?

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to—at the end of our life, I don’t think we’re going to be like I wish I cared more about that 20 extra calories I ate today, or that extra thing I binge on, or the margarita. We’re going to be like did we live? Did we enjoy our life? Did we have fun? Did we play? Were we excited? It’s like we’re not going to sit there and think about, oh, I wish I would’ve had smaller thighs. It’s not going to be the thing that we wish we would’ve worried about more.

I just think, when you look back on your life, where are you investing your energy? It’s a conscious choice. It’s like I’m not going to drive my energy towards trendy diets, newest fads, all these things that just keep me in a cycle, the habitual cycle. I’m going to focus on sustainability, prevention, health, well-being, the things that are going to actually bring me joy, happiness, the things that impact my cognitive health.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s painful. It’s painful to get rejected, right? We’ve all been there. I mean, I have dyslexia. I mean, we have a story, but it’s painful nonetheless. I think that because it’s so painful we do a lot of things to avoid it, right? We do a lot of destructive things trying to avoid it because we were hurt at one point. I mean, I so always try to get my children and those God puts before me to understand that it’s choice, life and happiness. Saying you know what? I’m done with that thinking. It’s a choice.

Am I oversimplifying it? It’s like I know when I look back at my life and I interview successful people like you that you said you made a choice. There was a decision made. I’m just done thinking that way. It’s getting me nowhere. It’s leading to this, that, and the other thing. I mean, could it be just that easy as saying, okay, I know I don’t want to be hurt anymore? You know what? I’m choosing to protect myself, which is ultimately hurting me.

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, I think it can be. I think there is quite a bit of—I want to say willpower or discipline. We have to become conscious in every moment we have the choice. We can say we have the choice, and then every moment we have the choice, again, because our subconscious is dictating 95% of our choices to some extent. I believe that the better we feel in our bodies the better our choices become. I always see that people heal their addictions with food, and they create this food freedom when they heal their relationship with their body. When you heal your relationship with your body, you’re not going to want to put that stuff in your body. I love my body so much that I—yes, I’ll have a glass of wine and a piece of cake once in a while, but the most part, I want to nourish and care and take care of my body as well as I possibly can.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I agree. Okay, let’s complicate this even just a little. I’m serious. I always think of my viewers, right? I think how the viewer is going, okay, look at you two. You two are thin. You don’t have my problem. I’m 200 pounds. I’m 250 pounds, whatever it is, right?

What do you say to this person, meaning that, look, I sit in front of the mirror, and I don’t care what you say. I don’t like what I see, right? What do you say to this?

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, I think we have to be very careful, especially now that your size for how you look on the outside does not dictate what’s happening inside your mind, and we have to be compassionate and loving towards everyone because we have no idea what they’re experiencing in their mind. Even though I might look a certain way, it doesn’t mean that I don’t go home and doubt myself or have fears and have my own anxiety and so forth.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a great answer. I sat as a boy, and I was stupid. I couldn’t read. I had dyslexia, right? That’s a great answer. In other words, okay, yours is that. You don’t know mine, not this. You know what I’m saying?

I don’t care what it is. We still have to change the way we’re thinking about ourselves, and then the symptom may be weight loss resistance. The symptom may be whatever I was dealing with, the insecurity and acting blah, blah, blah. It’s like, no matter what, we have to be comfortable here.

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, I can say, when I was a size O, when I was a size 14, I was miserable on both sides of the spectrum. I was close to 200 pounds, and I was still absolutely miserable, and I was 108 pounds and miserable. Your size and your physical appearance doesn’t dictate your happiness. I think so often we look at social media and make the assumption that these people look a certain way, so they’re happy. Some of the most miserable people I know are Instagram models and people who are celebrities and people who look and appear like they have a perfect life, but behind the scene, you have no idea what’s happening.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I guess, if you could be whatever way you would say is perfect, unfortunately, you have to have the same brain, and that was your point earlier, right? It’s your life, but it’s like, unfortunately, my brain had to come with me.

Sarah Anne:
A hundred percent.

Dr. Pompa:
Whether you’re 250, or 125, or whatever it is, it’s like, unfortunately, you have the same brain. You’re going to be just as miserable and uncomfortable here as you are here. That’s a fact, unfortunately, right?

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, I mean, I remember when I hit my dream weight. I looked at the scale, and I’m like, wait, I’m supposed to feel elated and excited and so happy right now. I was like nothing has changed. Now I have to maintain this. There was no peace. There was no joy. There was no happiness. There was no fulfillment that you get from actually recognizing and disconnecting from your body and connecting to your truth in the place within you. Your soul, the part of you that has a purpose, has your why, has your mission, has all of the reasons why you are on this planet is so much greater than your physical body. When you connect to those places in yourself and recognizing that you have this reason to live, then it’s so much less about your body and fitting into your jeans, and if the jeans don’t fit, you stretch them out. You do some lunges, and you buy a new pair.

Dr. Pompa:
To make the argument, hey, he didn’t have legs. You’re 250 pounds. What’s worse? I mean, I would say not having legs. He chose to be absolutely happy and changing the world, and he’s absolutely amazing. He has amazing relationships. It’s a mindset. It really is.

Then now let’s make the argument, though. Once you get the mindset, now that was what transformed your life. All of a sudden now, the weight problem is being the symptom can actually—let’s face it. I would argue that, being 200 pounds, you have a bigger problem, and that’s some of the health issues that are coming. The mindset shift then could actually help you with the health issue, and obviously, you start losing normal amount of weight. You talk about that.

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, I think we have to be conscious too of—when I was gaining weight, I—again, as I shared, I left, and I was like, oh, I love myself now. I’m out of the modeling industry. I can do whatever I want with my body, so I can drink. I can party. I can eat fast food. Again, I was like, oh, I love myself, and loving myself looked like doing whatever I wanted. Then, like you said, from a chronic sickness side of things, had no energy, was exhausted. Felt like shit every day, brain fog. It was the same sort of symptoms that I was just experiencing with the breast implant illness because I was eating fast food and not caring for myself. It was almost more sabotage than self-love.

I think right now culturally we’re in an interesting time where a lot of talk and conversation is, well, I love myself, so just do whatever you want. I always argue that that’s not real self-love. Self-love is caring for your body exactly as is it right now, loving yourself exactly as it is, and holding the vision that you want to have a healthier mindset. You want to have a healthier body. You want to continue on this sustainable life path to remaining healthy. I think that’s a very different mindset than I’m going to do whatever I want, and that’s the trap that I got stuck in. That’s the trap that I see so often other woman get stuck into.

They come to me. They’re like, well, I heard online I can just do whatever I want, so I’m drinking diet soda and eating pizza all night. I’m like is that going to help you sustain your why, the reason why you’re on this planet, why you want to be here, why you want to live, and the impact you want to create? The answer’s always no, and that doesn’t mean don’t go enjoy a beer or have a piece of pizza. I love pizza as well, but it’s like it’s recognizing am I choosing and making decisions because I deeply love myself and my body, or am I choosing them because I am using self-love as a way to, again, suppress the work that really needs to be done?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, really, when you do that, again, you’re functioning outside your true identity, right? Self-destruction is now part of your true identity. I believe in all of our true identity is gifts that God gives us and ability to make a difference and have a purpose and a promise with that. When you’re living that life that you described, you’re outside of your identity again. There’s no way that’s going to lead you to that promise, so one final thought in the sense that, meditation, you connected even to being able to be a healthy weight, weight loss, healthy instead of being addicted to food, your diets, bounding back and forth. Make that connection for our viewers.

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, so when I decided to study more nutrition and I went back to school, and I thought, okay, well, I’m going to switch careers. The answer to my health problems is to know more information, and I think so often we think this way. We go online, and we’re researching, researching, researching, researching. We’re trying to get all the information, which is absolutely great. It’s great that there’s all this access to information. I know right before this call we were joking. We were like there’s so much information out there now. There’s no excuse to not find it, right?

For me specifically, it gave me more anxiety to the point where I was like, well, now I don’t know what to do because I have all these different expert opinions, and I’m more confused and so going back to meditation, which we’re now seeing is one of the most profound things for weight loss. People think, well, okay, how can sitting doing nothing help me lose weight? It indirectly helps you lose weight because it changes the neuropathways in your brain, which then allow you to indirectly make different decisions. When you’re meditating, you’re actually reprogramming the part of your brain that doesn’t love yourself. You’re impacting the part of yourself that maybe feels lonely at night when you come home, and the first thing your reach for is food. You’re reprogramming the part of yourself that can have more compassion for yourself. It’s helping improve your sleep, which then gives you more energy through the day, so you’re not reaching for the soda in the afternoon. It helps you become present, so you can become mindful while you’re eating.

It does so many things that indirectly impact our health and wellness choices that it almost is—for me and my clients, it’s like a nonnegotiable. I always am like this is the one thing I always recommend. Of course, if they don’t want to start with it, I completely understand because it does take a lot of courage to sit with yourself and confront your own thoughts. It’s not about clearing your thoughts. It’s just about recognizing, oh, that’s not my thought. I’m going to allow it to move through me and not allow it to impact my decisions and my actions.

Dr. Pompa:
How much of this do you do in a day? When do you do it in a day? Give us very specifics on how to do it.

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, so I work with a coach and a meditation teacher from India that I’ve been traveling with and doing a lot of work with for several years. My specific practice is 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night, nonnegotiable, sometimes more. I do mantra meditation in which he gives me a mantra. Then based on where I am in my life, I’m using that mantra to repeat over and over again. To start, it can be as simple as two minute—literally, two minutes. Just sitting quiet in your mind, holding your heart, and just breathing. I think we forget to breathe. We don’t even know how to breathe anymore. We’re breathing from a state of fight or flight instead of rest and digest.

I’m always like if you can even just connect to your breath for a few minutes so that you can make a conscious decision. In the moment of an experience where you’re like, oh, I shouldn’t be walking to the fridge at 12 o’clock at night, why am I doing that? Take a moment to sit, breathe. Connect to your heart. What am I trying to suppress in this moment? I think, if you can consciously become aware of the emotions you’re trying to suppress, you can heal the emotion, and recognize that you can do something else to shift that emotion.

Another type of meditation I really love is a walking meditation where you just—when people are triggered to go eat food, I’m like, well, why don’t we do something else like walk, and just say let go as you walk? Let go. Let go with every foot. You could do walking meditation. You can get a visualization meditation. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong.

One of my best friends, Dina Kaplan, she runs The Path. She says every type of meditation rewires a different part of your brain, and you really have to figure out what works best for you. I just say have the courage to just start, and don’t be scared of your thoughts. Your thoughts, again, aren’t yours. Just because you have a thought doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you human, and once you allow yourself to be able to let go of the thought, you no longer will be acting from a place of the thought that surfaces that then creates the emotion and then the behavior.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so if you just sat there for 20 minutes and have the choice to throw out the bad thoughts, yeah, I’ll keep that one, bad thought. Keep that one. Keep that. A point, it’s going to work. It really is. Then like you said, breathe deeply. I heard basically a five second inhale, five second outhale puts us in that parasympathetic state.

Science is all over this. I mean, you can change your gut. You can change your cortisol. All of those things affect your hormones. As I always say, folks, the big problem with weight loss resistance and why people get—it’s hormones. Ultimately, what are we doing about it? Your thoughts, man, we have control over them. That’s great.

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, I’ve seen people do nothing different and just meditate, and they lose weight. It’s mind-blowing to me.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s been studies done on that. I mean, literally, do nothing different. Change our thoughts. I always bring up The Biology of Belief [00:51:02] science. I’ve interviewed Bruce Lipton a couple times, and our thoughts change our cells, change the proteins we make, which is ultimately changing you. You become a new you when you change your thoughts. It’s scientifically proven. Twenty minutes a day, I challenge you all to do it. Start there for today.

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, that would be the best. If you can, start with 20 minutes.

Dr. Pompa:
Just think positively about yourself. What is your true identity? Throw away bad thoughts, right?

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, visualize what it would like for you to have—one of my favorite exercises is start in the morning and just visualizing your day, making healthy choices throughout the day. Your body can’t recognize what is true, what it is in your mind and you’re visualizing and what’s actually happening.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Sarah Anne:
If you can start setting yourself up to have these incredible days from start to finish where you’re [00:51:54]….

Dr. Pompa:
You’ll create it.

Sarah Anne:
…making the healthiest choices, how amazing? It becomes easy.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you’ll create that day. I mean, your subconscious literally is that strong and that powerful. I mean, it’s been said, for healing, if you just visualize yourself healed, healing, the energy coming from your brain, which has the ability to heal, folks, down in your body to that spot. Just regenerating that spot. Visualize yourself bouncing on the knee that you hurt, whatever it is, without migraine headaches, sleeping through the night. I mean, visualize what maybe right now your brain thinks is impossible because it’s tied somehow to your false identity. If you change the way your subconscious—you start visualizing that. You said it. Your brain doesn’t know any different. It becomes that reality. Isn’t that cool?

Sarah Anne:
Mm-hmm. It’s so great. So exciting the time—the research we have and what we know is—it’s so amazing to be alive now.

Dr. Pompa:
It is. It’s a good time for many, many reasons, and I choose to think it’s the best time to live ever.

Sarah Anne:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Pompa:
Sarah, thank you so much for sharing your story, and it’s an amazing story. You know what? I know this, you empowered a lot of people today, including women that were on the fence about getting breast implants. I know you trained a lot of people how to think better, so thank you for being on CellTV.

Sarah Anne:
Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Pompa:
Promote your gift that you said.

Sarah Anne:
Yeah, so I have a free—just a free giveaway. It’s called the Awesome Inside Out packet. You can just go to sarahannestewart.com/free and grab it there. It’s 21 days to help shift your mindset around dieting and let go of dieting, and included in that is a meditation. If you want to get started on the meditation journey, it’s an easy way to get started.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, take advantage of that gift because that’s awesome. You’re the poster child for it. You’ve done it, so if you did it, I want to know more about it. Thanks, Sarah.

Sarah Anne:
Thank you so much.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv, and please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.