Organ Playing and Weight Loss [ep. 80]

This isEat Well, Think Well, Live Well podcast, I'm Lisa Salsbury, and this is episode 80 organ playing and weight loss. Welcome to Eat Well, Think Well, Live Well; the podcast for women who want to lose weight, but are tired of counting and calculating all the food. I'm your host, Lisa Salsbury. I'm a certified health and weight loss coach and life coach, and most importantly a recovered chronic dieter. I'll teach you to figure out why you are eating when you aren't hungry, instead of worrying so much about what you are eating. So I have been thinking in the last couple of days, how similar my organ plane journey has been to my dieting and eating habits. I know that sounds kind of wacky. I don't even know where this thought came from. But I'm going to tell you a little story. About learning to play the organ. And what I'm talking about here is like the church organ. So if you're not familiar with that instrument, it's a similar to a piano in that it has keyboards. Um, the one I play has two keyboards, a lower one and an upper one. And then the full pedal board, which you play with your feet. Okay. So around 2006, I decided to take my piano playing skills to the next level. And learn to play the organ. I had played the piano since I was about third grade and I actually took lessons all the way through my freshman year of college. I was very confident on pretty much any him in the hymn book that I played out of. And let me give you a little background on my church involvement here with music. At my church, everyone is volunteers. So no paid clergy or teachers or anything of that sort. So we basically trade around jobs. Sometimes you're a teacher. Sometimes you play the organ. Um, but of course not very many people can do that. So it was my job at the time to play for the congregation to sing in the main meeting. Normally this would be done on the organ, but I didn't know how so I played the piano. The problem is it's just not quite loud enough for the entire congregation to sing and still be able to hear that accompaniment. So I really did. Need to learn to play the organ. So I found a organ workshop being taught at Brigham young university. That said it would take you from being a piano player to an organ player. I was like, great. I'm in, this is what I need. I packed up my three kids at the time and I drove us to Utah. At this time I was living in Reno. So it was about, uh, I don't know, about a nine hour drive eight, maybe. Anyway, I farmed them out to different cousins and friends each day of the workshop during the week. And why I didn't find babysitting locally for them. I have no idea. I. My memory does not serve me there. I think it's cause my little one was still really little Abby was really little at the time. So. Anyway, I brought them along and figured that all out. I went to this workshop. We took all kinds of different classes, had practice sessions. We were given different workbooks and music books. But overall the three principles they gave us to live in play by at the organ. Was to do these three things. And in this particular order, number one, first and foremost, you've got to play up to tempo. No one likes to be singing. What should be a very lively song at the pace of a funeral March? More people will seeing if it's up to tempo. Number two, after you playing up to tempo, get the registration, right. This is the technique of choosing and combining the stops of the pipes in the organ in order to produce a particular sound digital organs. Like most smaller church organ's mimic the sound of pipes. I've always played on a digital organ and it just mimics that with the registration, but it just does that digitally. You don't want to use like a soft flute, like stop when the congregation is trained to sing a March like song. And likewise, you don't want to use the main, like eight foot pipe or the trumpet, like one on a softer, more reverence song. So you've got to know what all the stops do and create the right sound. Number three. Get the notes, right? So getting the notes right. Is the least important thing in the hierarchy. If you are playing up to speed and the sound is right, some missed notes, won't be nearly as noticeable or bothersome to the congregation. Better to play at tempo with some mistakes, then very slowly with all the notes. Correct. So after the workshop I went home, I had to practice for hours each week to play just three songs for that Sunday. And then repeat with three new songs. The next week I could have just played the songs on the piano. Pretty much perfectly. But I wanted to play the puddles. And again, you may not be familiar with this part of the organ, but the pedal board is set up the same way as the keyboard. It's three octaves. You play the bottom note of the hymn, the base part with either foot using either your heel or your toe. And this is at the same time. That you are playing the top three notes at the him with your hands. Obviously, this was the main new skill that took a lot of practice. I really wanted to play it correctly. Right with the pedals. And that is what took the most practice is incorporating this new thing. Of having to pay attention to the feet while my hands were playing, like they normally did on the keyboard part. All right. Fast forward, 18 years to present day. I cannot believe I've been playing for that long. Currently I can play the most common probably I would roughly guess a hundred hymns in our handbook with maybe 10 minutes of practice. Some, I don't need any practice at all. As long as my hands are warmed up. I can even play when someone comes up and starts chatting or asking me questions while I'm warming up, we're playing the prelude music. Meaning I can play the familiar hymns without much thought at all, including those pedal parts. And I still play by those original three principles. Here's the kicker. I still mess up. Every single week. I get the notes, right? Probably about 90% of the time. But I maintain my speed and I choose my registration the best I can for each M some hymns I make it through and I think, wow, I didn't mess up at all. Or maybe just such that only I would notice because I admitted some notes and no one else would know that I sort of messed that up. It's pleasant and easy. And often on those really familiar ones, I sing along. I'm sure I look like a total dork singing and playing, but if I know the words by heart, I often sing, which is not something I ever thought would be possible when I first started to be playing the keyboard. With both hands and the puddles with both feet and singing. Other songs, my daughter comments while that was a hot mess. And that's true. Sometimes it is. Sometimes I don't play the notes. Correct, but I never stop. And apologize to the congregation. I mean, sometimes I make a face, so if they were watching me they'd know, but I just move right along and I keep playing. Continuing to play when I've made a mistake is one of the hardest things I had to get good at. It's a pretty key skill when you're playing the accompaniment for our congregation to sing, though. If I stopped and started this song over every time I made a mistake. No one would know what to sing. So I keep going. I'm curious if any of my listeners play the organ, it's a pretty unusual skill to have. So I picked this story on purpose because I'm pretty sure I'm the only one. But what I do know is that probably every one of you has tried to lose weight. I'm going to take you through the story again. But with weight loss. So instead of going to a crash course, organ workshop, you can learn the techniques and skills to lose weight in a crash course with me. I mean 12 weeks. Is not exactly the same as a three-day workshop, but when you are talking about training your brain to see food and hunger in a new way, Different than you may have your whole life. It's actually pretty quick, 12 weeks out of your life is not a big commitment. Rather than piano player to organ player, I'm going to take you from a chronic diameter to a natural hunger driven eater. I'll give you a few main principles to live by. We've talked about several of them on the podcast. So honestly they won't come as a big surprise, but they are the principles like implementing the hunger scale. That's number one. Before we're worrying about what to eat. If you think about the hunger scale, being the tempo. And then getting the notes, right. Is the actual food that you're eating. The hunger scale is the more important skill. It's a far more important to be eating according to your hunger than to worry if you're eating the right vegetables or the exact right amount of protein, or if you maybe should eat less fat. None of that actually matters nearly as much as if. You are eating the volume that is right for your body. So we're going to have some principles like this. You know, Paying attention to your hunger scale, drinking, water, getting sleep. Those are going to be your registration. All of the, the way your life sounds. That's the, the lifestyle, stuff like that. Drinking the water, getting the sleep, keeping your stress under control. All of the stuff that makes your life amazing. So that your food doesn't have the job of comforter, compensator, and entertainer. Getting the notes, right. Won't make a bit of difference. If you're using the wrong registration, it will not sound correctly. So it does not matter if you are eating all of the right foods, if you're over eating them. And I put right by the way in air quotes. If you're overeating them. Or if you're too stressed about them, or if you're not doing the lifestyle stuff, like the sleep and the water and the movement. It's just going to be way more difficult then it needs to be to lose the weight. All right. The second way, this is similar is you'll need to practice each week. Just like I spent time learning this new skill. It is going to take a little more time at first than it will. Later on, you will master these skills, but at first it will take more focused thought and effort. You could easily just eat and cook an order the way you always have, just like I could have stayed playing the piano. But you have a desire to change things up and learn a new way. And it will take some intentional thought. It's okay. That it will take practice in the beginning. This can be the tricky part though, because you want to lose weight without being obsessed with what you're eating. I get that. Totally. You're probably going to feel like you were thinking about it even more thinking about your hunger and keeping a food journal. And so it feels like, wait, I thought I was going to learn how to do this without obsessing over it. I promise this will go down in time. It feels like you're thinking about it more than you use to put word, going to just be thinking about it in a different way and learning a new skill. But as you practice it, the obsession about food and the thoughts about food and the worry. We'll absolutely go down. You will be able to go to a dinner party without a plan and easily not overeat. You'll be able to purchase your kids' favorite treats. And have them in the house without needing to finish them off in the evening. You'll find that you will start preferring the feeling of enough to the feeling of full overly full. You will stop wanting to overeat. And the third thing I noticed about the, the, uh, similarities here is after all this practice and after all this skill development, You will actually still quote unquote, mess up. You will still overshoot. Occasionally you will still choose to emotionally eat sometimes, which looks like things like eating birthday cake at your best friend's 50th party, even though, you know, you are already comfortably at enough It looks like eating something at the end of a long day, knowing full well, it's not going to solve for your stress, but choosing it anyway in the moment. You know, I did this just the other night. I chose to eat something in the car to keep me awake for a two hour drive in the evening. And I was like, I am not hungry for this. And I chose to eat it on purpose. It was absolutely an overeat. And I chose to, because I felt like it was keeping me awake. We do these things sometimes. But you just go right on. You don't stop moving forward. You don't start over at the beginning of the song. I mentioned this last week, but this is the very next bite strategy you play. The next note as it's written, without stopping or yelling out on apology to everyone. You just keep going. Your very next bite is right on plan. What have you learned in your life? That has been hard. Does it give you evidence that you could learn new skills that will lead to weight loss for you? I think we need evidences in our life that we have learned hard things. That we have learned new things. There's too much out there that says you can't teach an old dog new tricks. And that we're just too old to change our minds about food or our bodies. But that is just not true. We definitely can learn new things. And partly that's due to neuroplasticity. Wikipedia says that's when the brain is rewired to function in some way that differs from how it previously functioned. And there is no age limit on this learning to use my feet and hands, all playing different notes required a lot of rewiring, but it was possible. And it's possible for you to learn new ways to think about your food or your hunger level or your movement routine or whatever you know is stopping you from reaching your weight loss goals. As much as I love these analogies stories. I want you to also think about something else with this story. You might play another instrument and think, oh yeah, that was the way it was for me. When I learned the violin or the guitar. Or maybe you learn to cook with a lot of failed meals and you were following principles that you found in a cookbook. And you just kept trying to cook, even if you burn stuff or forgot to add an ingredient or it just plain didn't taste good. Did you think of some situation like this that was similar to mine? As I told this story, or maybe you're thinking of something now. That's how group coaching works when you watch other women in the group get coached. They may be talking about something as foreign to you as learning to play the organ, but you'll see yourself in there challenging situation. You'll notice how the problems or cravings or situations the other woman is going through. Is not the exact same as you, but similar in concept. The model I use in coaching is designed to solve any problem. It's based on cognitive behavioral theory. And it works in any situation. When you see someone else's issue get run through the model, it will be just like listening to my organ story and realizing it's just like your learning to run story or you're learning to knit story, or you're learning to fill in the blank. Story. Group coaching is incredibly powerful and I invite you to come try it out. We start on February 7th. It's definitely not too late for you to get registered. There's a few links in the bio for you this week. One is if you're ready and you're like, sign me up. I've been fence sitting here for too long. I've listened to all your podcast. I'm ready. I'm ready to just get registered. That one will say register here. It'll just be a payment link. There's another for you. If you're thinking you need a bit more information, drop your email in that forum, and I'll send you all the details by email about the group. Then there's one more. If you're like, I just need to talk to you. And make sure it's a perfect fit. That's fine. Go ahead and schedule a free coaching call with me and we'll make sure all your questions are answered and you feel good about your choice either way. Okay. That's it for today as always. Thanks for listening to the eat. Well think, well live well podcast.