The scene opens with a five-year-old girl sitting on the floor of a house with no running water or plumbing. A house ridden with alcohol and drug abuse. A house that welcomed a sexual abuser to bare hands on her. Cut two years later. Scene opens with that now-grown woman sitting on her living room floor. The doctor peppered in one hand and hand full of pills in the other. Yeah, it had come to that. She was broke, lived with chronic fatigue, cystic acne breakouts and memory loss with no found solutions. So, when she found a lump in each breast, well, she hit rock bottom. But this is not a tragic Hollywood movie and it's not where the end credits begin. It's an accurate telling of where today's woman of impact found herself, and her story definitely didn't end there. In that moment she realized something. It was happening for a reason, and that gave her life meaning. So she picked herself back up off the floor, took herself off autopilot, and finally for the first time took the steering wheel of her own life, and nutrition seemed the first logical gear. Now, 15 years later, she is founder and CEO of the Institute of Transformation Nutrition, where she combines science, psychology and spiritual practices to help thousands of clients, ranging from stay at home moms, to celebrities, to Fortune 500 CEOs, to transform not just their bodies and health, but their relationships and business. Refer to as the transformation nutritionist she is often called to share her expertise. On the doctors, Dr. Phil, the today's show Revenge Body with Clory Kardashian, Harper's Bazaar and Shaped Magazine all just to name a few. Now the voice and example of what is truly possible, she is igniting bigger conversations around transformation and what it actually takes to live a more meaningful life. So guys, please help me in welcoming the best-selling author of the smash hits, the Hungry Khody Cookbook and the Pink Method, the woman whose transformation and evolution knows no bounds, the woman I am proud to call my good friend, my sunshine on a cloudy day, Cynthia Pascuela-Gossia. I don't even know how to respond to that. I had no idea that's where you were going to start. That really, yeah, my palms are sweaty. Yeah, I'm nervous. See why? That's a great question. I think, you know, when someone else, it's one thing to live your story and you just take it as it comes. But when someone else, you hear someone else verbalizing those things about you. It's just, it sometimes takes me back, I guess. Does it bring everything back up? Does it remind you the realness of it versus it's just the story you keep? For sure. You know, the interesting is over the years, I've done so much work, right? And it never goes away. It just never goes away. There's always more work to be done, more opportunities to see, more understandings to be had, and more progress to make. Truly, life is transformation. If you allow that, right? And so, but that's okay. I don't think Lisa, I ever want to be numb to that or to, I don't want to ever get to a place where I hear that and it doesn't affect me in some way because that will have meant that I've lost touch with who I really am and where I really came from and why I do the work that I do every day. Then how do you keep it? How do you stay in touch with it without let'sing the emotion of what you felt in that moment to show you now? Well, that goes back to the work I've done, right? I didn't have those tools when I was that woman and that child. Now I do. And so it's through these tools and these techniques. It's not like I just evolved or transformed into a brand new person overnight and those things just want to win. And I'm like, you know, I got this. I deal with it every day, but now I have tools. And so let's talk about those tools because I know like me, you're a massive fan of actually giving takeaways that people can take and implement in their rule of two actually make change. So the first thing is we've known each other for a while now and I knew your story but I didn't know the extreme of your story. You didn't portray it to be as severe as I understood it to be after going down your path of researching. Going through your story, the one thing that struck me so hard is how do you not become the victim? Because girl, I think like, oh yes, I got bullied when I was younger, and then I hear your story. And I'm like, if there was anybody on this planet that could say, yeah, I'm a victim and why me and my life is shit, it was what you went through. How do you not stay there? How do you, what are the tools in fact that you've taught yourself to not stay the victim? Yeah. I firmly believe that being a victim is a choice. I know when I say that it might trigger people, and I might be like, I didn't choose to have these things happen to me. I didn't choose, you know, the abuse. I didn't choose these circumstances and situations, and I hear that, and I fully respect that, and I acknowledge that. What I chose, Lisa, was to not stay in this victimhood mode. I chose to use that and to recognize that these things are happening for me. If they weren't, they wouldn't be happening. And then find the opportunities in each of those things so I didn't have to stay a victim. So you can stay in that place or you can actively choose to allow those things that pain to become your greatest superpower as you like to say. And you can leverage that with the understanding of what is this, why is this coming into my life? What is this here to teach me? How can I learn from this? How can I leverage this into something bigger, right? And then you set off on that path to find that. For me, it was also about survival. And when I did hit rock bottom and I was so angry and it was my last moments I thought here. And I started saying why me? And I was angry at the people who I went to for help who couldn't help me. that was angry at myself for getting to that place and I was angry at you know the people who I went to for help who couldn't help me

I was angry at myself for getting to that place. I was angry at God like what kind of God allows this to happen to people

Once I got there I realized that that was me being a victim

Right and when I heard that voice that night that said this hasn't happened to you

It happened for you. I Said then what what's it all for? What is it all for? We're all here for a reason, right? Otherwise, you wouldn't be here. And we're meant to learn things in this earth school. Like, take the curriculum. You're here. You might want to try to take the curriculum, right? And that's what I chose to do. And everyone has that choice. Now, I'm not going to here and just be flippin' and be like, oh, just choose something different because it's not that easy. And there are days when I just want to wallow and being a victim, but that takes away my power. And I still, from time to time, will kick and scream. And that's okay. It's human. We can all feel that. But at the end of the day, you have to make the choice or not to transform that pain into power and leverage that opportunity. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. So why do you think we try to eliminate pain or avoid pain when you're saying it can be so powerful, which I completely agree, but most people run away from that? Yeah, it's because it's painful. No one wants to just wallow and transfer patients. You don't know one wants to just sit and feel. There's a reason we numb. There's a reason we're on our phones and social media and we drink and we do drugs and we have sex with random people. There's a reason because it's painful because a lot of these emotions are tied to severe traumas and triggers in our lives, right? But the pain is the way through and underneath these feelings and these emotions that we have, there are lessons and there are learnings and there are opportunities and and it's about taking that away. It's about uncovering and sifting through and sitting still long enough to feel. But here's the other thing I want to say about emotions and why don't we feel because sometimes we don't know how to feel. Now here's what I mean by that. An emotion lasts for 90 seconds, just 90 seconds. Now you might be like, girl, I have been on the floor for hours, wallowing, kicking, screaming, crying, and I have to. I've had to lean on loop for hours. That's your go to. No, but the emotion itself is 90 seconds. The thing that makes it last for hours and days and years are the stories that we tell ourselves, that we continue to tell ourselves. And we were to truly just feel an emotion and sit with them. And it'll pass in 90 seconds, but we don't do that, right? We start thinking and feeding into it and start replaying the scene over and over in our minds. We start thinking, I should have done this. I should have said this. What if I would have done this years ago, right? And that keeps it alive and it keeps it going. When if we can let that go, it will pass and the greater knowledge of that pain will come through. And that's when we can take a step back and logically look at it and say, okay, now what do I do with this? I love that so much because it really is, stories are so powerful, but we're not aware of the stories we tell ourselves. That's right. And so that's why I love, explain to me your three E's which are freaking amazing. Yeah. So one of the reasons we tell ourselves stories is to back up the beliefs that we already have about ourselves. So humans do this really crazy thing called looping, right? And we have something called a negativity bias, which is we want to believe just the worst, the worst possible situation, outcome, all of those things. So survival mechanism, right? We need to be aware that there might be a tiger in that cave if we go in, right? But it's not like that anymore. For most of us, we don't hang out around caves where tigers hide in, but we don't know that, right? We haven't evolved to that point. So it's okay. It's human nature. We do it and here's the key. You just got to be aware of it. So that's that's the first thing is understanding that we have these beliefs, we want to always believe the worst and we loop, which means if we have an opportunity to believe the best or the worst about something, we'll choose the worst every time. So here's how beliefs are formed. It's made up of three E's. There is an event that happens. There are the emotions that are felt and then there's the explanation that you give it. So let me give you an example. An example I like to use because most of us experience trauma that sets the course for the rest of our lives before the age of eight. We established these beliefs. Right? Before the age of eight, most of these things are already rooted in the core essence of who we think that we are. We've chosen to be right. So let's say Lisa you bring home your report card and you sit down and it's not looking so good. So your parents sit down and they say Lisa this is unacceptable. The grades have to come up. If you want to do something with your life, make money, contribute to the world, this is not okay. We won't allow this to happen. So here's what we're gonna do, and maybe they set some boundaries for you. And that's it. Great's about to come up and acceptable. That's the event. It's just an event that happened. But how do you feel? What are those emotions?

It probably doesn't feel so good.

Parents are disappointed and you don't.

You always want to make them.

You feel like you failed, right?

So that's your emotion.

The explanation you give it, I'm a failure.

So for the rest of your life, that's a belief, right?

The event that happened, the emotions you felt, the explanation that you gave it. I'm a failure. So now that you've formed that belief, you'll spend the rest of your life looking for evidence to prove that that's true, right? You start a new business, something goes sideways, I'm a failure. You get stood up for that hot date that you had on Friday night. It's me, I'm a failure. Right? It was something I said or something I did.

I knew I shouldn't have sent that last text message. I'm a failure. We infricing that belief in myself, looping, yeah, looping because we have this negativity bias, right? So that's how beliefs get formed. And that's what we turn to every time, we, every time something in our life happens And we feel these heavy emotions, this pain,

we go back to those beliefs.

We start reliving them over and over, we start feeding into them again, and that's why we're on the floor wall of wing and pain three and a half days later. But here's the good news. So now that you know this, remember awareness is the first step to change, the first step to transformation. Now everything in your life where you have these beliefs that are rooted, you can go back and revisit that event. You can say, okay, so I remember feeling like I was a failure when my parents set me down over the report card. That's the event. What other explanation could you give it as opposed to to being like, well, I'm a failure. What else could have been happening? Well, maybe Lisa, your parents just wanted something better for you than what they had. Maybe it was the only way they knew to communicate and tell you the importance of showing up in the world and doing your best because they love you and they want you to have a great future. Well, if that's the explanation, what's the emotion? You see, you work backwards. You with me? So now what do you feel? Probably happy, probably relieved, probably loved. So, one cares about you enough to pursue. And the event was just your parents loving you. It's just something that happened, right? You don't have to feel those deep seated painful emotions when you give it a different explanation. Yeah. Yeah, when I heard that, it hit me like a ton of bricks because it really is about the unwiring, right? Like don't get so traumatized over where you are right now and who you are. Like know it's possible that you can unwind, that you can unlearn it. But people, this goes back to the belief in, we don't believe that they can do it. What is that first step for people to start that? Like, break them open in essence. I don't know that it's that they believe they can't do it. I don't know that that's what's going on. I think what's going on is they don't feel they're worth doing it. So many of us feel worthless and hopeless, and like we don't deserve good things in our lives. We feel unworthy mostly because of those beliefs that were developed when we're young. So why would I work to overcome beliefs? I'm right where I'm supposed to be. Why? I don't deserve that. Why would I do the work? So, how do you get people to see that there was it? Let me tell you a quick story. When I was going through my own transformation, I'd hit rock bottom, I decided to come out of it. I started with nutrition, quickly realized it It was tied to my thoughts and my trauma, and then my connection, my spiritual connection to something bigger.

How do I get back on the right track? How do I find my value? I went to this coach and I sat down with her and I told her I'm gonna... came out. Right? It was just like here it is. And I was crying and sobbing the ugly grunt and at the end she said it's okay I know exactly what you need and I thought hallelujah praise Jesus girl of a ride tell me everything and she said you just have to love yourself. It took every bit of self control that I have ever even thought about having not to just lots myself on this late night Samba. Thopper! Because that had never occurred to me that if I just loved my life would be so much better.

And even to this day, your people talking about where you got to love yourself. You just got to love yourself. Yeah, yeah. That's crazy. Like we can just turn a switch and make it happen. So how do you love yourself? Where you can start by not hating yourself, right? That's a good place to start. But you can't just-love. Here's what I've been really interested in lately.

I've been really peeking around behind the self-love and this idea of ourselves that we've created. And what if we didn't have to love ourselves? What if we didn't have that kind of pressure? Because here's what happens when people say you just gotta love yourself, just have self-love. It's the most important thing. It will change everything. Well now you just set me up for another failure in my life that I don't need.

Ah, because if you don't love yourself you failed. How can you love yourself? You're trying to love yourself when you really just don't. You've ever been in that place where instead of loving you, love yourself. Every second you show up in the world is just a disaster. To tell someone like that to just love themselves or just you're not helping them. I like to peek behind this cell that we're supposed to love and I just like to get to know her. And I wonder if through that process I can just let her be who she needs to be and not who I want her to be. Okay. What if I could just see her and accept her? What if I just said, wow, she's been through some stuff and she deals with it and this and this and this and this way? Cool. You cannot love yourself if you have no idea who you are and most of us don't. We're trying to love an idea of who we wish we were, not who we are currently, and that's why we fail so much. When it comes to this idea, just loving yourself. When it comes to self-love, that's why we fail. Most of us have no idea who we are. How can you love someone when you don't know anything about them? We have been so busy trying to become who they say we should be that we have no idea who we are. So instead of just loving this idealized version of yourself that you haven't even made happen yet, what if you just kind of accepted yourself the way you were? What if you said, sometimes I just, I feel broken, I kind of am broken, but

that's okay, because that's how the light gets in. And that's what I was going to ask, because a lot of people, and this is a fascinating conversation I love having, because a lot of people say, love yourself, you know, love yourself the way you are. And usually there are people that pride themselves on growth. Yeah. And that's where it comes to like, How do you love yourself just the way you are?

And at the same time say, you're not good enough yet

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