Molly Claire 00:03

Hello, coaches. Welcome to this episode. I'm so excited to have here Dr. Priyanka Venugopal, who is the master of burn stress, lose weight, former OB-GYN physician turned life coach. Her story is awesome, and you're going to get some great nuggets of wisdom on the podcast today. So welcome to the podcast, Priyanka. 

Dr. Priyanka Venugopal 01:10

Molly, thank you for having me. I just want to take a minute just to say thank you so much for having me on. I love talking about this conversation. How does someone go from being a physician to becoming a coach? I think it's such a good conversation to have. So I'm so glad to share it here. 

Molly Claire 01:24

Yes, yes. You know, some of the things, of course, that I love about the work you do is you're passionate about helping women and supporting moms, right? And the stress of all the things. And also, you know, this piece of the puzzle where even when we can have all the best information, we can have the knowledge, right? As human beings, our clients can anyone listening here as a coach, your clients can go Google a million things and get a lot of solutions. But are we able to actually implement what we know we need to do to make it happen? So that's a lot about what the conversation is about. So tell my audience a little bit about why you're here. What do you do? What brought you to this space? 

Dr. Priyanka Venugopal 02:08

Yes, so my name is Priyanka. I am an OB-GYN physician turned stress and weight loss coach, specifically for professional working moms. And I never had a dream of being a coach or an entrepreneur. It was not even on my radar that this was a thing, that this was a field. I was just someone that at a very young age without realizing it got put onto a treadmill or onto a track of you just go to school and then you just go to graduate school and then you graduate that school and then you get a job. And I think that that's probably true of many women where you either get programming by the big person in your life through their most, you know, well-meaning intentions maybe and society that this is the way that life works. And I think it was probably in 2018. Yes, 2018, I had my daughter. I had a three-year-old son at the time and I was in my practice as an OB-GYN. I actually very much loved my practice. I had very supportive senior partners. I loved my staff, my patients. So I was not one of the physicians that you might hear from that are very burned out because that's a real thing in the physician community. There's a huge rate of burnout. But for me, I just, I was feeling very discontent. I had that good on paper life with, you know, these two kids and a practice that I really did enjoy, but there was something that just did not feel satisfying. And over the course of many years, I had gained a lot of weight. So I was a little over 200 pounds as an OB-GYN physician who knew what to do, but somehow wasn't able to do it. So I think a lot of the frustration that I had at that time, there's a lot of self-criticism. I didn't even realize that I had a lot of self-criticism because I'm a glass half full kind of person, but I had a lot of, yeah. 

Molly Claire 03:55

That's the thing. I think a lot of our clients, they don't even know the stuff is underneath. We help them with it. But what you knew, right? Is something was off. You weren't feeling good. 

Dr. Priyanka Venugopal 04:03

And I had this thought around, I know what to do. I'm literally an expert in women's health in hormone health. And yet here I am not able to put into practice what I am telling my patients to do.And that was when I stumbled on it literally stumbled onto a podcast that was about coaching and mindset. And I feel like it's almost like somebody turned on a light switch in a very dark room. So I had been in the room the whole time. I think that it was always in me, but I just didn't know because I hadn't seen it. And that was just the beginning of the best journey of my whole life. It started to really transform not only how I felt as a physician and as a mom and as a wife. It helped me with my in-laws. It helped me with my three year old who was really challenging. And I lost a little over 60 pounds without fads, gimmicks and counting calories simply by getting coached. And that was the beginning of my entire journey. 

Molly Claire 05:06

Mm. Amazing. Amazing. We hear stories like this, right? But it always seems like it's, oh, someone else or something's different about that. But as you now are working with your clients, I'm curious to know, what do you see as maybe the common threads as to what they bring to you or the common threads in how they're able to actually make this transition in their life? 

Dr. Priyanka Venugopal 05:34

I think, you know, actually one of the interesting things at the very beginning, when I first got coached, the idea that thoughts create my feelings, it's such a simple concept. And it's been, it's been, you know, around for thousands of years, it's not like it's a novel concept, but it was never in my awareness. And I think that just that realization for me that my life, the feelings of stress that I'm experiencing around my three and a half year old son at the time, or the feeling of overwhelm that I'm having around my task list and my responsibilities, the feeling of inadequacy that I'm feeling with my body and my weight journey. Wait, that's not because of my circumstances. It's because of the thoughts I'm having. It was deeply transformative for me. And I think sometimes the mistake I have made as I've now been coaching for many years is I forget about the power of that very simple transformation for my clients. I think, you know, when my clients come in, it's you want to coach them on so many things because you have experienced so many things, but sometimes just showing them that their thoughts are where their stresses are coming from, their overwhelm is coming from has been for me the most, I think that that's where my clients really get the most transformation. 

Molly Claire 06:48

Yeah, yeah, and I think you know as you're talking because you know, of course the philosophy I bring to the coaching space is taking this holistic view right where we're looking at thoughts, but also where our emotions are rising in the body that need to be addressed from that standpoint. How does the nervous system play into this, right, and having this whole picture view? So that's a lot more of my angle in particular. And yet the thing that is for certain in all of this is helping our clients right to separate their internal experience from what is happening on the outside, right? Here's the circumstance. Here's the situation. Here are all the things that we can list. And when we can help them see that that circumstance does not have power over them. And instead we can attend to, you know, what's inside like for you, helping them attend to what's going on in their mind. You know, as I help my clients attend to, you know, the imprints on their nervous system or emotions or whatever, it's really powerful. That separation right there. I think we could talk about it every single week with our clients and with ourselves. And it is a light bulb moment every time. 

Dr. Priyanka Venugopal 08:04

Yeah. And, and I, at least in my experience with my clients, because I work with, I work with overachievers. So these are women that just kind of self-identify as perfectionists or they're, they're the women that just never want to make a mistake ever, ever. Right. And again, I'm my own first client. This was me. Like I never, I would say I actually never even self-identified as a perfectionist, but I was someone that hated making mistakes. I wanted to get it just right. And I think what I've noticed in that client population particularly is we're very practical or what we tell us is we're very practically minded and it can sometimes be hard to wrap our arms around this idea of emotions and feelings in our body and allowing an emotion and processing an emotion. It can feel hard to wrap your mind around. But I think that if a coach can really hold that space from a place of assurance and confidence in their coaching relationship, I think that the clients get to benefit because the only way for them to wrap their arms around it is to experience it. So that has been what I've noticed that clients might come in wanting, of course, a strategy, like a practical, like the A-line, the practical strategy on how to feel better in their mind and lose the weight without fads and gimmicks. So of course we want to have the structure, but this is this hidden piece that they don't even know that they need. Then they get to experience a coaching relationship, which I think is just amazing. 

Molly Claire 09:28

Yes. Yeah, that's right. Because it's like, I mean, I know in my experience that many of the overachievers, the perfectionists, these, you know, people that identify that and fit in that box, if you will, that they're much more comfortable staying in their head and having a tangible plan of action. And they don't even know that they need to pay attention to the feelings in the body, right? It's like sometimes I'll say it's like they're cut off from the neck down. They're like, let's stay in the mind and let's solve this here. And so that's why I think it's such a brilliant entry point, you know, with the achievers that I very much relate to as well. I've gotten much better at going into my body and understanding that, but such a great entry point to look at the thinking and to allow that to start to unlock so much for them. 

Dr. Priyanka Venugopal 10:19

Yeah, a lot of my clients, and this was me as well, I still revert to these because again, sometimes our habits are very old. But a lot of my clients are over-thinkers, they ruminate with the second guess. And even if you're a smart and confident person, which I was as an OB-GYN, I still did a lot of overthinking and rumination on either a decision that I've already made or a problem coming up in the future. And it perpetuated a lot of worry for me. And I realized kind of in my own work and what I've now been coaching clients on is we will continue to do that. We'll continue to ruminate and overthink and stay in our head. Because we don't know a better alternative. It's just a habit to ruminate and stay in our head. It's just a habit. It's a pattern. It's just a pattern because we don't have a better alternative. I was telling my client this yesterday, we were talking about, you know, when you have an urge to snack or nibble or eat food when your gut is not hungry. And we were talking about how it's uncomfortable to say no when you feel stressed and you're used to using food as a break, for example. And I was saying the reason that that urge is so compelling is because we haven't practiced the alternative. We didn't know that there was an alternative. The urge felt so powerful that we didn't know what else we could do. So I think this is where we can really empower our clients with what if there was an alternative strategy here, giving your brain like the other road it can take when it's having a really big feeling or a really big emotional experience if we don't do our status quo. 

Molly Claire 11:47

Yeah. Yeah. You know, this reminded me of something I noticed in myself. I don't know if you have insights on this or not, or if this is just a random thing I'm throwing in, but I noticed this. So for me, you know, there's this idea of paying attention to, right? Am I actually physically hungry? Or is this maybe emotional hunger? Or is this like a habit, right? And we can, I don't know how much of that you dive into with your clients, but sometimes we're not actually physically hungry, right? We might think that we are, but we're not. So I remember a time where I was more attuned to this and I would be working on my business and I would be, I was working on a project that I felt especially anxious about. And I would go to work on it and I would feel hungry. And it really did. Even now to this day, it felt the same as physical hunger to me. But because I could see the pattern and I noticed, wait a minute, how is it that every time I go to work on this, I feel physically hungry, right? And so I was able to see and identify, okay, this is a pattern for me, right? This is an avoidance technique. And even though it feels like physical hunger, am I really hungry? So I don't know if you come up against that with your clients at all, but that was something for me that just noticing the pattern was enough to remind myself of what my body really needed and what it didn't need. 

Dr. Priyanka Venugopal 13:08

Yeah, I think that this is huge. And it actually touches on what you were just saying, where we are so used to being in our heads, especially like the practically minded person, that a lot of women that come to work with me actually don't even know when they're actually hungry. And maybe because they have been peddled, you know, diet industry standards, they're afraid of experiencing hunger. So there's a lot of, you know, I really approach this with a lot of tenderness, because, you know, there is a lot of fear when you think about weight loss and hunger and what it means to lose weight. So the first thing is most women don't even know when they're actually hungry, because they're used to eating either because an app told them that they're supposed to eat or because it's 12 o'clock or because the calorie counter is, you know, telling you that you're under or over a certain allotment. So we've become very disconnected with our gut. The good news is that we can actually retrain our brain to reconnect with our body. It's the best news ever, because it means you don't need to be married to an app or a calculator to number one, feel good in your body, but to lose the weight you want. So that's the very first thing, which I hope creates relief for people that are used to typing in every single calorie that they ever eat. But the second thing that is important, and this is I think of this like two peas in a pod, they're two skills that go alongside each other. The first one is, you know, attuning to your gut. But the other one is thinking about urges and cravings. I think of them as little siren songs. What is my brain offering? You know, I think of it urge truly as the most loving act. I know that sometimes we hate urges, like, can we just not have this urge to go off plan? That would be nice, right? That'd be so nice. But I actually think about urges and cravings as a gentle nudge by our brain simply trying to get our attention that maybe we just want to break. Maybe we are just bulldozing over something in our life. Maybe we're feeling uncomfortable about something. So even with your project, you're doing a project or preparing for a presentation, you're stretching your brain. And if you're a perfectionist, look, I need to get it just right. It has to be perfect. So that discomfort, because it's uncomfortable, your brain is just like, hey, girl, don't worry, I have your back, you want to feel better. This is an amazing, very reliable way of having a moment's break. So whenever I talk to my clients about urges and cravings, I think of them as little siren songs to actually look at a different part of your life, look at your marriage, how you feel with your kids, your time, your responsibilities, your work, what's coming up there? Where are you experiencing a little bit of stress or overwhelm or inadequacy, or fear that your brain's like, don't worry, I've got your back. It's just using food to solve that problem. And if you're giving food a job, it was just never meant to have. 

Molly Claire 15:51

Yeah, I mean, I love this. And I want to just pause and highlight this because one thing that came to my mind that's slightly different, but in the same realm, and then I want to circle back to this, you know, the urges piece, but what came to mind is I think about when I'm working with my coaches and training them, that we can be worried about resistance, right, or us like we have resistance, and we think it's a problem when our client has resistance, and then we want to change it, and we want to fix it, and we want to push against it. When I think resistance, similarly, right, it's like if my client's feeling resistance, this is a chance for us to know, hey, there's something that needs to be attended to here. There's something that needs to be looked at. And it reminded me of that. And then circling back to these urges, I love the way you frame this for your clients. I love it almost like when I have an urge, what if it's a gift? What if it's a gift with a message for what I'm needing or how I can care for myself? Like what a different framing, right?

Dr. Priyanka Venugopal 16:55

It really is. It really is telling you it is the most empowering experience to realize that urges are just a little signal. They're a little love letter from your brain. And the only reason that we will resist it, and I was actually just coaching a client on resistance, she was having this thought, I have to, I'm supposed to, I'm not allowed to, for example, eat certain food. She made a plan. And the plan was very lovely. It honors her hunger. It's full of foods that she actually loves. It 100%, if she follows it, it'll get her to her body goal. But she had a thought, I'm not allowed to eat off plan. That was her thought. And so she had a lot of resistance. And what most people try to do is they tried to muscle over that resistance, they tried to double down muscle down Monday morning, I'm going to try again. And as we all know, because we're coaches, that may work for a day or two, but it won't last because willpower depletes. And I think the most power that we can have is to show a client that resistance, in my experience, is simply a fight flight response by your brain. So the reason that she was telling herself I'm not allowed to, I have to, is because her brain is so steeped in diet brain. She doesn't realize that she will get rest and play and a break from life. She just doesn't need food to do it. She just hasn't done it before. So this is where I was asking my client, where in your strategy, did you build in guilt free rest and play? And she was like, well, I got too busy. And I'm like, this is why your brain is stealing it. So I think of urges, they show us gaps. They show us gaps. When I lost a lot of weight, this was before I got married 15, 17 years ago, I did the 100 calorie oatmeal packets, I was hitting the gym six days a week. And I was counting every calorie and point–it was terrible. So of course, the day after the wedding, I started eating the food again, it was such a deprived… it was full of deprivation. So yeah, I think that we assume that making very clear decisions, decisive decisions around how we're going to eat is deprivation. But the reality is we just haven't made enough decisions. I talk about guilt free rest and play being an integral part of any strategy. So if you don't have it, your brain is going to steal it. It's usually with food. 

Molly Claire 19:14

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love that and these again going back to these urges thinking about how yypically when we've had an urge we see it as a problem, a bad thing to erase, right? So this shift is really a big deal and you know as you were talking it's like oh, I'm having these memories of being in college and, you know, it's so funny to think back about what the recommendations used to be right? It's like oh, these are fat-free pop tarts or these are right like the just foods that were snack wells, right? Loaded with sugar all these fillers, but they're fat-free. And I just think about, I mean, I could just say for me personally over the years the worry the obsession about what I'm eating about what it's doing to my body and I think that it's so pervasive in so many people's lives and as you're talking I'm thinking I mean, yes there's the weight loss right which is going to lead to better physical health and what about this piece of healing our? Relationship with food and healing sometimes this inner battle that we've had with ourselves for so long.

Dr. Priyanka Venugopal 20:26

Absolutely. And the conversation that I really like to have with my audience, with my clients, with really anyone that will listen is that your hormone health matters. Hormone health, you know, especially when you end when you're a teenager in your 20s, maybe you're not thinking about this, so it may not be landing for you. But as you enter your mid to late 30s, and you start to feel the effects of getting older, it's not just in your head. There's a reality that estrogen levels are declining as you enter perimenopause, and you start to enter a different phase of your life, you might start to notice that it's catching up to you. I remember in my office as an OB-GYN, the top three complaints I would get would be weight gain, fatigue, and low libido. And it's not a surprise that these patients were 35 enough, they had one or two kids. It's not just magical that this is happening. It's true hormone health, but it's also that a decade of stress, high levels of cortisol leading up to perimenopause is having an effect on us. So yeah, this is why coaching is so important, because there's actual studies that coaching impacts hormones, it impacts your brain physiology, your amygdala, which is a part of your brain, has decreased distress signals. Yeah, it impacts cortisol. So this is something that I think is incredibly important that we can actually take control of our hormone health, of course, with tangible physical strategies. And, you know, of course, that can be very helpful, but coaching can have a huge impact on our hormone health, which impacts wellness and weight loss. 

Molly Claire 22:03

Absolutely. I mean, I think when I first found coaching I was going through a lot of things in my life at the time, one of them being continuing to recover from this completely out of the blue chronic fatigue syndrome that had hit me just, I mean, truly I've always been a high energy person up early in the morning and here I was, I could hardly function as a mom to my kids and it was very real physical things going on within me and my journey to healing it was holistic and comprehensive and many things, right? And looking at what was going on in my gut and all of this and the mental and emotional piece within coaching created so much more of a healing environment for my body, right? Because when we can lower those cortisol levels, we can put our body in a state of healing. It's a really big deal. So I'm glad that you highlighted that because it has the coaching around the mind and the emotions has a real physical impact on the body. 

Dr. Priyanka Venugopal 23:05

It's actually physiologic, elevated levels of cortisol. And by the way, for anyone listening, you don't need a blood test or a phlebotomist to measure hormone levels to feel the impact. We know when we're stressed. We actually know. We can feel when our body is experiencing stress. We don't need a phlebotomist to tell us, but there is actual data and physiology. When you have elevated levels of stress and cortisol in your life, it plays a role with gut, with how your body stores fat, with how your body stores fat. There's actual physiology. So if you've ever noticed, wait, I'm noticing I have more belly fat, or I'm noticing that I'm having more, I'm having this impact in my life, it's not in your head. I think that that's always so important to say. And there's actually real tools that coaching can be so impactful for. Yeah, yeah. 

Molly Claire 23:55

Well, this is awesome. Okay, as we finish up, I would love for you to share any last thoughts, final words of wisdom, whatever you'd like to share. And then of course, please tell everyone where they can find you. 

Dr. Priyanka Venugopal 24:07

Absolutely. So I think that my favorite thing to share is never to make assumptions about ourself like the feet like for example, I used to think I'm a glass half full optimistic kind of person. There's no way that I have self critical self judgey self blame thoughts. But really reminding ourselves to not have those assumptions to put things in on paper and really take a look at what is creating my stress, what is creating my overwhelm. There's usually a really sneaky, quiet whisper of a thought, even if you're a glass half full kind of person. And I think the same is true for our clients. So our clients might say, No, I'm not criticizing myself, but you're really not believing them when they're experiencing feelings like stress and overwhelm. And in terms of where you can find me I am burn stress lose weight everywhere on the internet. I think that my favorite ways of communicating with the people is on my podcast, the burn stress lose weight podcast. And again, my mission is really to share science informed information. I talk about hormone health, I talk about strategies, so you can feel better head to toe with actually like science informed information and not fads and gimmicks. And of course, burnstressloseweight.com where I have awesome free resources if you're interested. 

Molly Claire 25:23

So awesome. I love it. And of course, all of this information is in the show notes. People can definitely connect with you easily there. Thank you so much for the conversation and all these insights. It's been amazing.

Dr. Priyanka Venugopal 25:36

Thank you so much for having me. Bye everyone. 

Molly Claire 25:38

All right, coaches, I'll talk with you next week.