What if the way to healing your heart isn’t through your head… but through your gut? In this episode, we welcome Shirley Billigmeier—author, intuitive coach, and gut-brain expert—for a powerful conversation on grief, food, and reclaiming your inner wisdom. Shirley shares how emotional eating, especially after deep loss, is often not about willpower—but about unspoken sadness and a longing for connection. You’ll learn why you were born with built-in hunger cues, what your gut is trying to tell you, and how listening to your body—truly listening—can transform your relationship with food, water, and ultimately, yourself. Whether you’re carrying extra “storage” or simply craving peace after loss, this episode will open your eyes (and heart) to what’s really happening beneath the surface.

Quote:

“The appearance of the body is a visual, an interpretation of our brain. It is not a sensation felt internally, like hunger. Innergetics has proven that honoring the gut’s simple hunger and taste messages will result in a slender body that is balanced overall. In contrast, a narrow focus on the size of the body will only result in continuous struggle and frustration; intellectualizing about food actually blocks information that our body sends about hunger, satisfaction, and other needs and feelings. In essence, work is created where there is meant to be no work. Eating is natural, is pleasurable, gives energy, and was never meant to interfere with our creative minds.”

I am sharing my experience of loving the same man for 32 years, a mother to two adult children, a retired military officer, a breast cancer survivor, and my connections with others.  

Anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should reach out to a suicide hotline or local emergency number in their country: Psychology Today Suicide Hotlines and Prevention Resources Around the World.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Healing Grief Through The Gut: Emotional Eating, Inner Wisdom, And The Power Of Listening To Your Body With Shirley Billigmeier

Our guest, Shirley, is going to talk about something that we really don’t speak about a lot, eating our feelings in this grief journey. I talk to people and sometimes, they’re not eating, sometimes they’re eating too much, they’re eating late, but eating becomes a huge part of this grief journey. Shirley’s going to share with us about our gut brain feeling the ability to know where we are on a level of 1 to 10 in eating and so much more. Let’s get into this conversation now.

Shirley, welcome to the widowhood.

Thank you. I’m looking forward to it.

Thank you. When you hear, “Welcome to the widowhood,” what comes to mind for you?

The Gut Brain And Emotional Eating

What comes to mind is there’s a sadness in it. In that sadness, it’s there because that person meant a great deal and that sadness is very real. What starts to happen is that instead of really feeling that sadness, you start detouring to eating because you feel lonely. That’s where I end up working with people who feel that deep sense of loneliness when they’ve lost their spouse or lost somebody very close to them. It can be a parent, it can be a spouse, it can be a sibling. When I hear widowhood, I think, “Okay, there’s probably some sadness. There’s probably some really deep work that needs to be done.”

You are telling me that eating my feelings is a real thing. It’s not something just made up in my mind. This is a real thing.

No, because I work with the gut brain, and that’s where your eating boundaries are located. We’re born with them. When you think of an infant, they know what hunger feels like. When they’re born, they feel that hunger. They know when to start eating. What’s amazing is they know when that hunger goes away, they truly want to stop eating and it’s very strong.

Those eating boundaries we’re born with. We’re also born with over 10,000 taste buds. Not just on the tongue. They’re all in our gut brain. How do you feel? Imagine how many times you say, “I just had a feeling?” There’s a brain in our gut that has a lot of information. In fact, it is 9 messages to 1 from the gut to the head versus the head to the gut. You really want to listen to the messages.

Those eating boundaries are within us. Yet, like somebody would say, “Shirley, how do you work?” I said, “You listen to hunger, that feeling of hunger, that’s your natural eating boundary.” She said, “Shirley, I’m always hungry.” I said, “Not every feeling below the neck is hunger. There’s where your feelings are housed. You really need to tap into those feelings when you’re hungry, when you’re not hungry, what’s going on. When you’re not hungry and you have the desire to eat thought, something is being told you to pay attention to.”

I often hear people say sometimes they’re hungry or they’re thirsty. How do I tell the difference of all this? If I’m a ripe age of 40, 50, 60, and I’ve never heard this, am I too late to be able to tune into this?

Reconnecting With Hunger Using The Hunger Scale

Never too late because it’s all there. We all own it because we were all an infant at one point in time. I can show you. This is how I start. I have a hunger scale. Imagine now a scale from 0 to 10, 0 meaning starved, 10 stuffed, 5 is the feeling of nothingness. You don’t feel crowded in your stomach from eating a little bit too much. You don’t feel a little bit hungry. I’m going to have you do this also. If you put your mind in your stomach right now, what number would you be at? I’ll say again, 0 starved, 10 is stuffed, 5 is a feeling of nothingness, 4 is a little bit hungry, 6 would be a little crowded. You ate just a little bit too much. You felt some crowdedness. What number would you be at in this moment?

I didn’t know we were going to talk about my food. I’m at a five. I just had some sweet potato, potato chips and some water before we started this conversation.

You knew it like that. You know it. We all know it. We just stopped listening. I always say to people, because we’re a huge percentage of water, so a lot of times I say, “If you’re not sure yet, just drink some water and let’s see how you feel. Take some time, do a pause, really check it out. Are you really hungry?” I start teaching people how to really get back to listening.

What if people say, “I don’t like water?”

That’s probably because it doesn’t have enough intensity to it. It feels more bland. When your gut brain has these intense feelings that have not been dealt with, the water feels too bland. You want something more intense to cover up a little bit of that feeling. People will go for sparkling this or sparkling that or something that’s more intense. The water feels pretty bland. As people start learning the process, you start wanting to have the water. You have the desire to drink the water. That’s the connection to yourself. That water goes from the outside to the inside. It draws you into your gut brain.

How important is water to our physical makeup in our existence?

Extremely important. It really is. The more water, it’s just better. In fact, I play tennis, so if I’m going to go and play a match, I’m going to make sure I’ve been drinking a lot of water before I even step on that court. Water is really crucial to the person. I understand because people say, “I just don’t like that. I just don’t like water. I don’t want to do it.” Eventually, honestly, you will start to desire the water because of the desire to eat thought when you’re not hungry covers over a lot of the desires.

Think about eating. It’s pleasurable, it’s emotion. You’re chewing. From the outside, it brings you right back inside. As you stop using the chewing and the pleasure to feel, as you start eliminating the quantity of food, you will start to want to move. You will start to want to have the natural wisdom of what the body truly needs.

That’s a lot of information. I was thinking about, “I just need to stop eating because I’ve gained 50 pounds since my husband passed,” or, “By the time I put the kids to bed and everything’s done and I’m sitting there looking at old movies and I’m just wolfing down a bag of popcorn or Cheetos or whatever it is, I want to stop that.” Are there other health impacts from me doing all this late night eating and going to bed or 50 pounds just really isn’t that big of a deal?

From Weight Loss To Empowerment And Choice

No. Let me talk first, because when people say, “I want to lose weight,” I work with a lot of deprivation thoughts. I work with a lot of abundance thoughts. When I start working with people, people are amazed because I never tell somebody what to eat. I never tell them the quantities. I never weigh them. I never tell them to move, and I never tell them to drink water. That all starts to surface naturally because whoever owns the choice owns the power. I want to empower the person I’m working with so that they don’t need me.

Eventually, I want to have them move on with their life. I wanted to go with that whole size and weight. They said, “How do you judge yourself if you’re not going to weigh?” I said, “If you want to weigh yourself and you want to see that it’s working, that’s up to you, but it’s not about telling me your weight. You don’t need to tell me your weight.” All I ask is that, is the storage moving in the right direction? If I’m working with people that want to lose weight, I never call it fat. I call it storage because it’s stored information.

If it’s moving in the right direction, that’s all I care. I don’t need to know the numbers, I don’t need to know anything. When I talk about size and weight, if there’s a size and weight thought in your head and you’re thinking, “I need to lose weight,” that’s a deprivation thought. I know that your audience out there, when you feel this yourself, the minute you think, “I need to lose weight,” you want to eat because it’s a deprivation thought. Thinking size and weight will create an uncomfortable feeling because in the moment, you’re not where you want to be.

It doesn’t feel good to have extra storage. That wasn’t where we were meant to be. That was for a famine. I haven’t heard of one coming yet. We’re not meant to have the extra storage. It doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel good to have to carry it around. When a size and weight thought surfaces, I say, “We’ve got to put that on the shelf,” because what we’re working on is really identifying hunger. That’s how you determine because we start eliminating the quantities and the times when you’re not hungry. I would say to you, “When you were at a 2, let’s say the stomach is growling and you only ate to a 5 and that’s all you ever ate, would you eat less food?”

Yes.

You’d eat less food. If you eat less food, will you lose weight?

I’ll make sure I’m moving, too.

Trust Yourself First: Why No Diet, Study, Or Expert Knows Your Body Better Than You

Yeah, that’s up to you. That’s totally up to you because I don’t want to tell you because then it becomes my movement. I’m very careful with how I speak to people because I listen to see if there are beliefs in their gut brain that are driving their bus to eat when they really don’t want to. I always say put a size and weight on the shelf. We’re dealing with it at the core, at the source. We’re going to take care of this permanently because we’re not meant to have storage. We’re not meant to have somebody else be telling us what to eat.

If somebody says, “What about all the nutritional information out there?” My question would be, “Have you ever heard that those studies change?” Do you ever hear, “One day, this is good, one day, this is not good. One day you’re supposed to eat fruits and vegetables. The next day you’re supposed to have all this protein, and then the next day you’re coffee’s good. No, then coffee’s bad.”

When you read the research, it’s not that the research is wrong, they’ve got all the stats, but what are they studying? Who are they studying? They’re studying different groups of people. It’s always going to come out different because we are unique creative souls. There is no one else like us. Those studies, when they get a general group, leans towards that. All of a sudden, the study comes out and it says, “This is what the study says.”

They’re not wrong, but they’re not living in your body. When somebody starts telling me, “What about this or what about that?” I said, “How do you feel? Are they living in your body? Nobody else knows if you’re hungry.” I didn’t know what your number was. I don’t know what the food feels like to you. Take a study like shrimp. With shrimp, they said, “It’s really healthy. It has this and this. You need this to be healthy,” whatever. You eat it and you have a reaction. Is it healthy for you?

No.

Who’s the final authority? Your own wisdom, your own feel of your own body. I start there. It’s very different.

The term gut brain, how did you come about that?

I’ve been doing this a long time. I wrote my book way back in 1991. I was always speaking from my gut brain. I was always the feel. I always had a feel. I always knew I wanted to know what I was feeling. It’s like I could lose weight. I was a cheerleader. I was like, “I just wanted to lose a few more pounds,” and I could lose it, but it was that angst. I thought, “What is this angst? I don’t want to have to think about this the rest of my life. I don’t want to have to change clothes sizes. I don’t want to have to be worried about this. This doesn’t make sense to me.” It was that angst.

What I was working with was the gut brain, but the gut brain was not recognized by the medical community until the late ‘90s when Dr. Michael Gershon, and he’s still at Columbia, coined it the enteric brain, but it’s the gut brain. We’ve all had it. It’s like you just had a feeling or mother’s intuition. It’s your intuition. It’s really important information. It’s like I said, there are 9 messages to 1 from the gut to the head. We better start listening to this gut brain.

Thank you. Have you worked with people before that were struggling with listening to their gut brain and grieve at the same time?

Grief And The Gut Brain Connection

Without a doubt. Grief holes in your body. You feel it. It’s in there. It’s in the cells of your body and you can talk yourself through it and try to create some affirmation. Until you really get in your gut brain and when you’re connected to hunger, you are in your gut brain. We get to deal with those deep feelings of loss and that loneliness. When people have never worked with their gut brain, even without loss, I bring them into that place so that they always feel their own sense of space, their creative soul.

With grief, you need to be there because it’s like you’ve lost somebody that’s really important. The thing is, you’ve always got to give back to yourself. What happens is you have that desire to eat thought and it’s just you’re trying to fill that empty space inside of you. I keep working through that feeling because that’s a deep feeling. We have four other pleasure senses that were given to us to help us when we’re going through something like severe grief.

We have the pleasure of sense of sound to listen to music. We have the pleasure of sense of sight to go on in nature. We have the pleasure of sense of touch with our hands and our feet. Unlimited possibilities. We were never meant to rob taste to handle discomfort. It then becomes what I call out of order. When eating is out of order, it starts robbing you of your life. When it’s in order, it gives you life.

Thank you for explaining that. Grief already takes so much away from us. Grief is, yes, the passing of a loved one. It could be unfulfilled expectations, it could be a divorce, it could be having to relocate or health issues. To think we’re under the guise that we’re medicating ourself with food, but we’re actually taking something away from ourself.

Yes. This process is about abundance. Getting yourself back again. The storage is just robbing you of your connection to you, your deep connection to you with all the messages. It can be grief. You described it beautifully, by the way, Tina. It can be anything. If that connection isn’t there and you start feeling that pain of loss, whatever it is, we need to always come back to ourself. If you don’t do it with your own thoughts and actions, the body will do it for you because you need to get back to yourself. You can’t escape it.

What would it look like working with you? The start processes or a discovery call. Is there a general timeline? What does that look like? Is this developed per person and the timeline is unique for each individual?

Sitting And Eating As A Foundational Awareness Practice

Yeah, I’ve developed this through the years because I know it’s the final answer because we’re dealing with the core boundaries. It’s like a pathway to you. It’s not my program implanted on anybody. I do a recording. I have a whole system set up and a person said, “I just don’t want to do the recording.” The recording’s really simple. It’s like writing down the start of your eating and what you feel when you’ve got to stop. He just didn’t want to do it. I said, “Great, then I don’t do it.” He said, “I’m surprised you said that.” I said, “No, it’s always a choice. I’m curious why you don’t want to do that because that connection to hunger is the deepest connection to yourself.” He said, “I’m always going on and off programs.”

I said, “This is a process to guide you to you.” It was like a light bulb went on and he says, “I’ve looked at it as your program.” I said, “No, it’s a process to guide you to you. I have all the tools to guide you there because I know everybody this space.” Sometimes I would do it just one-on-one and I would always make sure that that person really got it, they really understood it because I know that base inside of you, you need to really develop, like I said, and create that internal pleasant base. We got out all the pain out of the gut brain, but there’s beliefs and all kinds of things in there.

I said, “I would work with people. I continuously developed tools.” I thought, “I can’t really see the people,” so I created what we called a recording card so that you would be accountable to yourself to know what you were feeling like. When somebody first starts working with me, they say, “How do you even start if you’ve never even knew any of this existed? If you never even knew hunger existed?” I said, “We need to create a strong sense of awareness first that you’re starting to eat.”

What is a strong sense of awareness? You’re sitting. You know you are sitting. I always start with the sitting. I have a recording card and they first just say are they sitting? They’re sitting when they start to eat because you’re very aware that you’re sitting. You’ve stopped the motion of the day because we’ve become very fused with the motion of the day. We’re doing all these other things while we’re eating. We’ve lost total awareness. I can hear many of my clients saying, “If you don’t have time to sit, you don’t have time to eat.” First of all, if you took out all the eating when you weren’t sitting, would you be taking out a bunch of food? Also, what I have when you’re sitting, you do nothing else but eat.

I can’t have my phone? You’re saying I’m just eating. What are you saying here?

Yes, just eat.

Why?

I love the why’s. The why is because you need to stay focused on the eating. You’ve been waiting to eat. When you’re eating only when you’re hungry, why distract yourself? How can you pay attention to what you’re feeling? How can you pay attention to the taste? How can you truly absorb the taste? It was sad because everybody is fusing it with this phone. Just imagine yourself going out to a nice restaurant and really respecting yourself and you really had wonderful taste food. Would you want to sit on your phone and not take advantage of that experience?

The satisfaction also comes from the experience. Make it nice when you sit. I hear it all the time. “How can I sit? I don’t have time to just sit and eat.” I say, “If you could take all the time that you have spent worrying about eating, wishing you hadn’t eaten,” and you took all that time and put it on the shelf, would you have more time to just sit and really enjoy your eating?”

That’s why when I started like that, I start just sitting and then people get nervous. You’ve used that tool of eating to move you through the day to handle a feeling through the day, to fill a void, to fill a hole. You don’t know what to do with that space and time. People start getting really edgy. It’s a process because people say, “I can just sit and eat. Okay, I’ll do that. Just sit and eat.” I don’t even pay attention to hunger in the beginning. If I can get people just to sit and just eat, they will discover so much about how much they’re eating has been fused with their movement.

We’re trying to separate it out. You eat and then you live life. That life isn’t in that frustrational. We eliminate all that angst in your head and while you’re living life. I said, “Eating is simple. Life is complex. We need our head space to handle life. We need our feelings to know what’s going on.” That’s why I said the weight comes off as a byproduct. The weight is always a byproduct to really getting to the source and really learning how to handle those deep feelings that you will feel once you’re connected to hunger.

A lot of great information. What makes someone successful on their program working with you?

What they feel as they start going through it. They generally come to me because they want to lose weight or maybe they’re anorexic or whatever. That’s what they come to me for. They start going into the process. Now I have a whole course, but I work pretty much one-on-one with the person along with this whole course that I’ve developed that has over 60 videos and handouts. I’ve used every teaching tool I can possibly use, and people will know this. I really know everybody can get this. I just need to know what angst is this so I can figure it out. It’s always very important to really understand every moment, to really understand why you even had that desire to eat thought.

Going back to the idea of sitting down focusing, can I sit down with someone and talk?

Learning To Be With Yourself — You Are Enough

Sure. I love your questions. It’s interesting because people will say, “When I’m alone, it’s like I want to be doing something else.” I said, “Aren’t you enough? Aren’t you enough just being you?” You really get to focus and you really get to pay attention because then when you go out with friends, you lose track a little bit of how you’re feeling. You get to practice when you’re home alone. I said, “That’s the best time of all. Use that time to really absorb the pleasure of eating. Enjoy it. Respect yourself. Treat yourself the best that you could ever be.” Be your own best friend.

You hear all of this, but what does that mean? It all sounds very esoteric, but you start it with just eating and see what thoughts come up. See if those thoughts come up with, “I just need to do something else. I can’t just sit here.” Why? What’s the feeling? “I feel alone. I feel lonely.” Go deep inside. You are enough. We need to connect to you. You as the person that has value, that person that you lost valued you. You felt a connection. That’s why you were sad. That’s why you felt lonely. Now that person wants you to feel you and be okay.

What makes someone unsuccessful in their program working with you?

The Real Root Of “Failure”

That’s why I’ve always wanted to make sure that when I work with people, they are in this course. They’re in this course, I have thirteen parts to it. By the time they get to about the fourth, fifth part, they realize, “This is about continuous learning.” When they first start, they think, “I ate when I wasn’t hungry. I feel horrible and I’m never going to get this and why am I doing this? I never will get there.”

I just talked to a person right before I got on here and what was happening with her, she was having all this head chatter and I thought, “Where’s all this head chatter coming from?” She was just starting into the process. I said, “You’re sitting in your head when you’re eating. Get back into your body. Let go of everything. Put everything on the shelf. Just get back into your body.”

She knew when she was hungry, I had already gotten her through that, because you know it right away. I did it with you and you knew it, and I just started talking to you, so you knew it. She knew when she was hungry. There are times she could stop. She might stop when she’s a little bit too full. She actually stopped. I said, “You actually stopped. You actually felt hunger. Now we’ve got to let go of all the chatter.” She said, “What if I wanted to lose some weight?” I said, “There’s head chatter. Let’s just sit down. Let’s wait to hunger and really get comfortable with hunger.” Hunger is a good thing. It means that you’re really connected yourself and you didn’t use food before you got to hunger.

I’m continuously building in their confidence. There’s no failure because it’s not about failure. It’s about learning. I always call it learning opportunities when people overeat. I said, “I know you didn’t want to overeat. I know for a fact you didn’t want to overeat, so there’s something big.” As we start going through it, they’re amazed at what’s under that little nibble or that overeating and they just go, “I never would’ve dreamed this was all underneath it.” I said, “Yeah, because a nibble matters. It matters because you matter. There’s something big going on and we’re going to bust through it.” We continuously bust through things over and over and then they develop that confidence, so there really isn’t failure.

This has been very helpful. There are so many people grieving that our focus is on eating our feelings. When we eat our feelings, then we feel bad the next day afterwards because we did that. It sounds as if this program that you would help us work on for ourself would take us out of that cycle. How would someone connect with you if they wanted to work with you?

They can connect with me through my website, Innergetics. It’s Innergetics because it’s energy from within. I did create that name, but then everybody started taking my words. I thought, “I just have to get my name out there.” It’s Innergetics. They can just go into my website. They can go in there because that book that I have, they can download that book. They can sign up for a free consultation if they want to learn more about my process.

Once they sign up, you’ll start getting a few emails just to get some tools, some helpful tools, because everybody can get this because we’re not meant to have storage. As I said, that’s for a famine. We have all the tools internally within us. We have all the tools. We just needed to be able to guide to get there.

Hunger is a good thing. It’s a really good thing. They can connect with me via my email. My email is just Shirley@Innergetics.com. They can connect to me that way or go to my website. I’d love to hear from anyone because there’s no reason to be in that pain or frustration of weight. Life is difficult. Eating is easier. We’ve covered over life with eating.

I generally like to ask my guests if they have any questions for me. I ask a lot of questions. I give opportunity for you to be the host and ask me anything you may want to know.

I’d love that. What resonated with you? When you’re listening to this, what resonated?

The gut brain, that concept and paying attention to the 1 to 10 and understanding a stomach that’s growling is not a bad thing.

Hunger is a good thing. Everything out there is like, you want to bury hunger. They want to drug hunger. I go, “No, you can’t.” That’s a message. That’s a good signal coming from our body. We want to feel that message. That’s always what I want to know. What resonates? What would you see as the most difficult part of whatever you know now about the process?

Being committed and then not beating yourself up when you fall short because the humanness of us, it’s not going to be perfect. The idea is empowering to understand. It doesn’t require all these other tools or obstacles. It’s just paying attention. You asked me this early on, would I lose weight if my eating habits singular changed alone? One thousand percent. Obviously if you do other things, there’s going to be potential for a different or a wider impact but this is enough if that’s the first place and what that looks like.

Redefining Hunger And Removing The Shame Of Falling Short

No, that’s what I always like to see is what would be difficult because the difficulty is feeling the actual feeling the feeling. When you described that people feel like a failure all the time, that’s what I continuously work with people never to feel that way. When I start with them, I say, “You’ll feel like, ‘What else is going on here?’” You won’t feel defeated. If you overeat, you go, “I know I didn’t want to eat in the moment. I know I’m overeating, so what could I possibly learn? What could I possibly learn from this?” We then work through it.

I say, “What was the thought? Give me the thought.” I’m constantly tracking that thought to see what the thought was that created that desire to eat thought when they knew they weren’t hungry. There’s never a failure. That’s why we used to use the word failure. I never use that word because every time that you have a feeling of that desire to eat and you know you’re not hungry or that you want to keep eating when you know you’re at a 5 or at a 6, there’s always a reason. All it means is there’s something more to understand. You’re continuously understanding and putting things in place while you’re developing tools on how to handle those deep feelings.

Did we cover everything that you think we should discuss or did we leave anything out?

When somebody asked me that, I thought, “I could give like a zillion tools.” People always say, “What do you do when it tastes so good and you’re in the middle of that taste?” It’s a range. It’s a gradual process. On that hunger scale, if somebody is starting from like a five, and I remember one of my people when I used to do seminars would say, “I got it. I used to think I needed to eat when I felt that emptiness.” “That’s where you’re supposed to stop.” “No wonder I’m overweight.” I do a range. If somebody starts from a 5 to a 10, then we gradually keep moving down. We gradually keep learning about things.

Every time you go through something, you’re learning something deeper and more understanding. What is so key is to always know there just isn’t a failure. When that taste, you get in the middle of that taste and you really want to keep going, let’s say that your range decided to be from a 3 to a 7. That’s where you are. You know you’re at the seven and you want to keep eating.

I say, “Let’s plan for that the next time.” Let’s say they overate. I say, “Let’s plan for that the next time. Make sure that you’re doing something pleasant once you’re leaving the eating. Once you’re stopping eating and moving into life, make sure there isn’t such a big drop. If you hate what you’re going to do, you don’t want to leave that eating.” To one person, I said, “Imagine that you’re going to go to a massage after. Would you want to keep eating these stuff when you’re going into a wonderful massage?”

If I’m going for that massage, I want to be ten minutes early.

What is really key is to always plan something pleasant, stepping stones, so that you gradually go or maybe you just take a break and you just look forward to a rest or something. I’m always giving a lot of tools so that when you get to that where you decide you were going to stop, whatever number that was, that you have a multitude of tools. There might be beliefs. There might be a belief in there. I haven’t even touched on that. I do want to touch on that a little bit.

There might be a belief that you grew up with that said, “You have to finish your food. You have to finish your food because of the starving kids.” We have different countries that people have used. One client of mine said, “Shirley, this finally makes sense. I have never figured out how my stomach has saved the starving kids in whatever country that was. My stomach didn’t help them at all.”

I grew up with that belief.

Okay, so this is a fun conversation because I had a nine-year-old that I was working with. When we’d work with a range and the feeling of the 5, the feeling of nothingness and she always wanted to go to a 7. She said, “We’ve gotten comfortable with uncomfortableness.” I said, “Yeah, because when that five hit and you were forced to finish your food, you not only ate the rest of the food, but you got a big hug. You’re a great person. You’re good person. How can you stop it at five when there’s food left on the plate? You’ll feel horrible.” We’ve got to turn that belief around. It’s a lot about turning beliefs around. I call them non-value-based beliefs.

Thank you so much for this conversation. I’m going to share something with my readers and then I would like for you to wrap up this conversation with whatever you’d like. I want to say I am sorry for the person that has passed that caused you to find me, but I’m glad you’re here. I know this conversation will be very helpful on your journey of grief and empower you in a way that you probably never thought possible but can see it impacting you. I look forward to seeing you next episode.

I’d like to add to that because what you said was very empowering because that’s what this process is because it reconnects the person to that internal joy of the creative soul of being you.

Thank you.

—

Thank you for supporting Widowhood Real Talk with Tina. Thank you for every episode that you have read. Now I’m asking you to help celebrate my birthday because Widowhood Real Talk with Tina is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit established to support the bereaved. How you can help is by donating $5. Here we are in the month of May for my birthday, 5 and 5. See what I’m doing there? You can do that right now by texting Hope for Widowhood to 53555. You can donate $5 to help support what we’re doing to support the bereaved. You’re helping us help other people. That’s how I want to celebrate my birthday. Right now, if you would text Hope for Widowhood to 53555, you can donate and help what we’re doing. Thank you so much.

Important Links

• Innergetics
• Shirley Billigmeier’s Email
• Shirley Billigmeier’s Linktree
• Free Consultation with Shirley Billigmeier
• Shirley Billigmeier on LinkedIn

About Shirley Billigmeier

For over 50 years, Shirley has been a coach, educator, author, speaker, and body image specialist, dedicated to helping individuals of all ages overcome challenges with food and eating. She earned her Bachelor of Science and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Minnesota in 1971 and 1975, respectively.

Shirley is the author of Inner Eating (Thomas Nelson, 1991), which features a foreword by Dr. Michael D. Jensen of the Mayo Clinic. She is also the creator of Innergetics, a groundbreaking approach she developed in 1994. Over the years, she has refined Innergetics into a comprehensive, holistic framework that extends beyond mindful eating. The process provides structured tools that empower individuals to regain natural control over when they start and stop eating—an innate ability with which we are all born.

Clients who embrace the Innergetics approach not only achieve sustainable weight loss but do so through a sense of abundance and respect for their bodies, rather than deprivation and willpower. This method restores the joy of eating by helping individuals tune into their bodies’ true needs at every meal. Unlike restrictive programs, Innergetics is built on choice and self-trust—Shirley does not dictate what or when to eat, as those decisions remain entirely personal. By waiting until genuine hunger arises, individuals can eat what truly satisfies them.

To expand access to this transformative approach, Shirley has developed an online course, bringing the Innergetics process to a wider audience. To learn more, visit www.innergetics.com.

Your audience can connect with me through my website (www.innergetics.com), email (shirley@innergetics.com and/or follow me on my Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok. I use Linktree, which includes all the links. It is: https://linktr.ee/shirley418

They can also sign up for a free consultation to learn more about the process and if they are interested in the course. The link is: https://calendly.com/shirleygetics/consultation-1