A Hot Dog Is a Sandwich - Do New Years Resolution Diets Actually Work? w/ Casey Johnston

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

Today, we are joined by Casey Jonhston, an editor, lifter, and writer of the column 'Ask A Swole Woman' and weekly newsletter 'She's A Beast' to discuss: Do New Years Resolution Diets Really Work? To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This, this, this, this is Mythical. At the start of every new year, about half of Americans say they want to lose weight, despite the overwhelming evidence that dieters regain in the long term. Today we ask the question, do New Year's resolution diets really work? This is A Hot Dog is a Sandwich. Ketchup is a smoothie. Yeah, I put ice in my cereal, so what? That makes no sense.

A hot dog is a sandwich. A hot dog is a sandwich. A hot dog is a sandwich. What? Welcome to our podcast, A Hot Dog is a Sandwich, the show where we break down the world's biggest food debates. I'm your host, Josh Ayer. And I'm your host, Nicole Inaidi. And today we are very excited to be joined by Casey Johnston. Casey's a writer, editor, and a lifter of very heavy weights. Since 2016, she's been writing the column, Ask a Swole Woman, published by The Hairpin, Vice, and Self. And she currently authors an incredibly lovely and insightful sub-stack newsletter called She's a Beast. Welcome, Casey.

Hello, Casey. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here. Yeah, thanks so much. Again, I am a personal fan of Ask a Swole Woman. See, that's why I had to move away from that name. No one, including me, can say it. It's tough. Ask a Swole Woman, Ask a Swole Woman, it. It's tough. Ask a Swole Woman, Ask a Swole Woman, Ask a Swole Woman, Ask a Swole Woman, Ask a Swole Woman. I did it. Wow, Nicole, you're better than all of us. Congratulations. You win. You win. But now

the official name of the Substack newsletter is She's a Beast, a newsletter by a Swole Woman. Yeah, it's a Swole Woman's newsletter. This all went very off the cuff. So I'm like any combination of those words I feel I feel fine about. It makes sense. It makes sense. But as I said, you know, I'm a personal fan. I read the newsletter every week. And what I love about the way that you communicate about diet and exercise is that it brings more people in as opposed to keeping people out. Which, you know, I grew up on the worst place on the Internet, the bodybuilding.com forums.

Wow. Yeah. I was in the trenches. Oh, I was in the trenches. Oh, I was in the trenches. People like, if you eat fruit, you're ruining your diet. You need to take these nine kinds of creatine. Also, here's some radical right politics. And so that was great for a 15-year-old.

But no, you speak about diet and exercise in such an empathetic way that takes into account mental health. And that's something I really appreciate. And I think something that our listeners would really appreciate as we hurdle into the new year, where 48% of people consistently year in and year out say they want to lose weight. Yes. I mean, I think, I mean, how do I follow that up? I really try to think about what brought me into like, I lift weights, but it was a long journey to getting to lift weights.

I think you, Josh, you just said you started lifting weights. I think you played sports in high school, I think I've read. Yeah, high school. Being in a weight room and you were doing lots of stuff, like, basically from when you were a child. Is that correct? Yeah, I mean, since I was, like, 12 years old, it was like, here's a bench press, figure it out. And so I've been lifting consistently for like 17 years, which is weird to think about. And I'm like, I would have been way better at these sports if I had gotten into strength training. But they didn't really do that for girls.

They had us doing lots of, like, intensity intervals. Like, I don't think we did burpees, but, like, push-ups and crunches and stuff like that. And it was just, it was miserable. But also, I don't think helped us very much at our sport, I would say. Yeah, what sport, if I can ask? This was, I played field hockey in the fall and then lacrosse in the spring. And I did a little bit of swimming, too. So all stuff that would have really been helped by some upper body strength, I would say.

Yeah, I'll say. But yeah, I started off being a runner and like really focused on weight loss and really focused on dieting. And just like if I can just be smaller and smaller and smaller, I'll be happier and happier and happier. But it was like sort of going the opposite. But I also didn't know what else to do with my body like or working out like those things that that Venn diagram of working out and dieting and losing weight were like a circle. And then when I finally found the right sort of way into strength training, I was like, oh, these things are like a positive feedback loop and build on each other instead of just various guilt cycles of breaking myself down with exercise and dieting.

So now I try to sort of espouse that worldview to everybody. And I think overall, I think lots of different kinds of exercise can work for everybody. But strength training has a particularly good kind of lifestyle element to it that I really attach to. I think not enough people know about or give a chance, especially women. So that's what I'm about now. Yeah, it's really interesting. The thing you talked about with the guilt cycle and becoming like more miserable.

You had this idea in your head of like, I want to lose weight. And the way to lose weight is to run and starve myself and that will lead to happiness. And I think it's something that a lot of people overthink. They think that the losing of the weight is what leads to happiness. Whereas if you could just skip the losing weight part and go straight to how do I make myself happy, right?

It's like, you think you need to go from A to B to get to C and it's like, there's a way to go from A to C while not hitting that just really crappy guilt cycle at all. So I mean, like, how did you kind of find that sense of happiness and self esteem through the powerlifting? It kind of helped that I went to sort of the very bottom of that hole of like, where the happiness should have ostensibly been. And sure, looked and looked couldn't find an it anyway. Sometimes you have an empty happiness hole.

It happens. The happiness hole is just empty when you reach in sometimes. Sometimes the happiness pit, when you get to the very bottom, turns out to be empty or there's no, you know, whatever treasure is supposed to be at the bottom. It's not there. That was a semi-revelatory experience for me. But then as I continued doing strength training, eventually you get to phases where you can't build any more strength unless you start to deliberately gain weight because you can't

build muscle beyond a certain point unless you also gain some body fat. That was very scary for me. But once I did that, I was like, I feel better and feel better about myself than I ever have in my entire life. Like I feel I feel amazing. And I feel like I look amazing. And that's like, but the previous version of me would not have thought that and that just revealed to me like these things are not the way you look and like how you feel or how you feel about yourself are not as connected as we are made to believe by all of the fitness and diet products out there that are like, if you just lose weight, like the happiness that you seek is just on the other side of that, like 10 pounds or 20 pounds or whatever the case may be. Yeah. But I mean, it's crazy because it

seems like, you know, body positivity, body neutrality, body acceptance, whatever you want to call it, it seems like it's coming more and more to the forefront of what people are talking about these days. However, the number of people that respond, they want to lose weight in the new year. It just stays consistent. I mean, what is the sort of work you think we like actually need to do to eventually get people to drop one, the correlation between health and body weight and to the correlation between happiness and body weight? It's really, really hard because it is so much about not our own behaviors. One, it's not our own behaviors

because it's like the way that we're marketed to is so incredibly aggressive. It's like, we can't really control that. And it's very hard to overcome just like with mental fortitude. And then what was the other point I was gonna make? I'm completely blanking. what was the other point i was gonna make i'm completely blanking what was the question something about uh correlation between health i have this really

awesome habit as a person where i ask nine questions in one question yeah yeah yeah it's super great well i did i did really have i think it was a fairly simple question i just like made up a two-part answer and then immediately forgot second part. But I think it's it's something like I think there is a correlation between like we feel a lot of people feel bad in their bodies. Like even just physically speaking, we like feel in pain. Like I've I've had peers with back pain for several years now. Like when I was in my late 20s, I would have my friends complaining of back pain. And it was just like, this is absolutely mental to borrow a term from British people. It's like there's no realm in which somebody who's only 28 years old should be in pain because they, you know, it's because they're sitting too much, I think, a lot of the time. But we also just feel bad and we want to feel a little bit better. And the weight loss industrial complex has done a very good job of sort of interpolating, like binding those things up together when these things can be completely separate, like the way that we eat and the way that we move.

The fact that we move does not have to be about weight loss. Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, that's something that, you know, I work out every day. It has taken me a while to sort of figure out what I actually want to get from exercise. Because, you know, I did sports in college, I was a hammer thrower, which is, I don't know if a lot of people in the podcast know, it was really sick. And so much of it was, you know, the big three power lifts and Olympic lifting and then occasional plyometric type exercises. But it was all, you know, how fast can you move one weight one time? That was my entire training. And, you know, I was like at a body weight of 270 pounds, deadlifting like 565.

And my body hurt all the time. And then I got out of that sport and I was in the real regular world. And I was like, how do I interact with food and exercise now? And so I'd go to the 24 hour fitness and I'd go, you know, front squat 400 pounds one time and then be like, why? Why am I doing this? And so it took a while for me to get to the point where I realized that it's not the results that I'm actually after. Right. The process is the result, is a kind of mantra that I've been saying in my head. Like I work out for the sake of working out because I know that makes me feel good

and it's not how I look in the mirror afterwards. You know, it's like the working out is the thing that makes you feel good, not the result that you get from it. Yes. And I think there's also a mindset too, like when we are saying these things, when we're like, oh, it's not about the weight.

Like I would have heard this when I was 25 is like, Oh, a, you are already attractive as a person. So it's like not fair of you to tell me it's not about how I look, whatever. Um, but also I think we have a kind of fundamental misunderstanding as well of

like, I think this is going to be really big in the next like 10 years we're starting to get there but the idea of sort of body composition and muscle versus body weight as a metric like we're already on the page of body weight is not super great i think even somebody who wants to quote unquote lose weight might know that that like bmi doesn't tell the whole story and like um people of different body weights can look all different ways in large part because of muscle mass. So I do think while it's obviously my extreme prerogative because I love lifting so much, I do think that a lot of people who are after weight loss are not actually really after losing weight per se. after losing weight per se they're not after making the scale number go down because that's it's not it's not even really what they need in terms of health if you're looking to like lose 10 or 20 pounds you probably don't need to lose that for your health you're just like

i mean we always hear for aesthetic you should lose you know lose 10 of your weight and you'll be more healthy but i think that's also really flawed. But I think we're going to get to a point where we realize if that's like the sort of goal that you've had in mind, while we've been so focused on weight loss, what you actually want is not a change in your body weight, you want to change in your body composition, you probably want more muscle, which we've been taught to fear for a very long time. And then as a product of building muscle, you can lose body fat at the same time. This is like people are talking more and more about this in a way that's, I think, positive because it reinforces the idea of thinking of your body as needing these habits of exercise and like exercise being good and integral to how we live versus it being a torture mechanism for making the number on the scale go down.

Yeah. Nicole, what's your relationship to... I mean, okay. I don't have a relationship. Did I make this up, though? Didn't you, like, Peloton with my brother? Like, maybe once. That's awesome. Yeah, like, my question is, like, again, the prompt is, do New Year's resolution diets really work?

Yes. And, like, that's the question I'm trying to answer. We have to get back on topic here. We'll get back on topic. I don't think... I personally don't think they do. I mean, with my- Have you ever done it? Like, have you ever, do you set new user solutions?

I've never, I mean, like, I write like a mood board, like I make a mood board and I share it, like with a group of my girlfriends. I'm like, this is on my mood board. And then I kind of like explain like what my dreams and like goals are for the year. But I kind of forget them when March comes around. I'm not going to lie. That's a general imperative. Yeah.

And the same goes like every, of course, I've written like be healthier or lose 15 pounds before X day. But that never really happens. And I don't know if it's just a personal thing or if it's just like a universal thing. It's just, I just don't think they're legitimate. Yeah. No, I mean, I think January 1st is a weird marker to set. Like, I'm going to be skinny now.

Yeah, I think anytime you're trying to put something out in the future and saying like, I will be a quote unquote better person on this date. It's just setting you up for failure. Like in my opinion, I think statistics would generally back up the fact that they don't quote unquote work.

But my question for Casey is like is like one what is a diet and two what does it mean for a diet to work true right because the term diet it's become i mean literally um uh yo i'm new to like the internet i don't know if trigger warnings abound i suppose but anytime the term diet is used people assume it in a negative way. They think of the keto diet, the Atkins diet, diets. But when you just say, my diet is eating three mini gingerbread Kit Kats because those freaking roll. Did you have one today? Yeah, I've been eating them for breakfast. They roll.

They're in the office. And that's a part of my diet. It's something I don't track calories. I don't track macros. I try and eat 200 grams of protein a day. Yeah. My diet is mini Kit Kats because they roll and they make me happy. And that gives me energy throughout the day.

But Casey, what is a diet and what does it mean for a diet to quote unquote work? Yeah. I mean, a diet can be a diet is just like I think the etymology of the word diet, which is something along the lines of like what we eat in a day. It's not it's not necessarily about even changing your body weight. Generally, it's just what you eat. So if we were talking more specifically about a weight loss diet, which is what most people are – who have a goal of weight loss are trying to do around New Year's, do they work? I mean, I hate to get too philosophical, but also this is kind of –

Do it, please. This is the point. I always get philosophical here. Casey, do it. That's the point. Which is that like it's like what does work mean you know like if if you're if you have a specific goal of like i want to lose 10 pounds then the diet working would mean you lose 10 pounds but are you going to be happy if you lose the 10 pounds and then gain the 10 pounds back? Because like a diet that just only makes you lose 10 pounds in a set amount of time

is not going to make you like not weigh 10 pounds less forever, if that makes sense. Like, yeah, we I think we have a real not we like the promises of the industry have a real issue in terms of the disconnect between a sort of event versus a lifestyle. And I think we're all on the page of it's like lifestyle habits are very hard to change. But at the same time, we can't really do these like event based, I'm going to lose 10 pounds and then continue to weigh 10 pounds less forever. Often with the same, you can't do that with the same way that you lost the 10 pounds in the first place.

Very rarely, like does that, is that something you want to continue to do for the rest of your life? You might eat like, I don't know, you might eat keto for like two months and be like, okay, I lost my 10 pounds. I want to stop eating keto, but then you're probably going to gain the 10 pounds back, which is totally fine. But there's a disconnect between these two things. And I think that's often when we talk about whether diets are working or not, we're not fully accounting for the difference there. Yeah. I mean, when I heard you say that, to me, a New Year's resolution,

like it's like a checklist and then it's like marking off the checklist. But do you erase your checkmark once you like, yeah, like unaccomplish your goal? That's like one of the questions. Like I lost 10 pounds done off the list. Then whatever happens from there, screw it. And then you're back. Yeah, right. It's like, yeah. And then did that make you happier in the long run? Which again, this is the goal in all of life is just to keep your serotonin, dopamine levels, whatever, above the threshold to where you still want to keep living. It's just happiness is the end goal of anything that we do. We think if we're more successful in our jobs, it will make us happier. A lot of people just work themselves to death and it sucks.

They messed up. A lot of people think losing weight will make you happier. They lose weight. They're miserable. Hell, I have this terrible thing where I try and act like I'm above it all. And then I read one YouTube comment and I changed my entire lifestyle. Like I during during the pandemic. Jesus, it's still the pandemic.

What the hell am I talking about? During the first three months of lockdown, when things were, you know, hairier than ever, we were out of the studio. I just went full like Spartan on my diet where I i was like this is the one thing i can control i know it's not healthy mentally but like i'm just going to eat quote-unquote clean as possible and run every day because i didn't have access to a gym uh and i lost like 10 pounds got super lean and then one youtube comment said josh is down to JV muscle mass. Wow. And I said, I'll show you JV. I'm varsity, bro.

And then I gained 20 pounds and started just an eight-month period of bulking where I just got really strong again. And so I'm so reactive to all this, and none of it ever made me happier or I'd say even less happy. It's almost just neutral and purely reactive to the YouTube commenters so shout out to them out there for just being nice on YouTube Pinocchio-ing me like the freaking geppetto out there you're affecting his life quite a lot YouTube commenters I think you should

reel it in a little bit or just comment aggressively nice things just be like wow Josh you're doing great you deserve happiness today i'll be like yeah you're damn right i deserve happiness um but uh no so i mean i guess people use the phrase like diets don't work because 95 of people will eventually gain them back we've seen all the studies after like the biggest loser right the show yeah where people just go even harder and

there's like a scientific basis to that, too, right? When people diet, your metabolism is physically slowing. Whereas if you're, say, weightlifting, gaining more muscle, you are likely increasing your metabolic rate, right? Yes, it's along those lines where I think if you diet very aggressively, you will lose body fat, but you will also lose muscle, which is what helps keep it supports a lot of our biological processes. But one of the things it does is like keep our metabolism high. So when you diet aggressively, losing fat and muscle, a lot of times you'll rebound, you'll regain a lot of that weight as body fat. You'll diet again, lose body fat and muscle.

So it becomes this way of shaving away your muscle mass that you need in order to if you wanted to maintain a lower body weight you would need that muscle mass but we're often losing weight in this way that is not protective of our muscle um keeping protein high helps uh lifting weights helps even more than that. It'll, it's, you can, and you can, I think I already said, lose body fat and gain muscle at the same time, especially if you're new to lifting weights. But often when we're dieting, we're so focused on making the number on the scale go down that we're trading away a lot of that muscle mass that we really need in order to keep our weight or keep our, keep our bodies healthy, really. Yeah, healthy really yeah 100 i it's funny you know you mentioned um a lot of especially women

will say that they don't want to lift weights because it will make them bulky that is just a god decades old refrain i'd even heard it i'd even heard it from i have one thing to say about that so i did krav maga for about a year hell yeah yeah. I did Krav Maga bag classes. And I would also lift weights. And I would walk into a room shoulders first. I'm not kidding. Like, the way I walked changed. Yeah, you're a badass. Yeah, that sounds amazing.

No. I want to come into the room like a little mouse. Oh, let's break that down. I mean, honestly. Yeah, no, I didn't like it. Like, the way that I was standing and the way, I mean, I have scoliosis, so my posture is already garbage. So I was like kind of like walk, like I was just very like, I don't know. I'm showing you guys.

I can't really verbalize it. But I would come in and I would walk like large. Did that make you like feel bad? Like I was larger than I was yeah of course i did i don't know everybody has different goals i was like i don't want to come into a room looking quote unquote masculine like i felt like my walk was more masculine when i would walk into a room and i didn't like that i wanted to be like i i like tried it and i loved it but i was like i don't like this

and then my mom was like you're walking different and then my sister's like why are you walking like that and i'm like i don't know this is just my stance now wow i can't even picture this different walk this is wild like like oh i wish i could show you i wish i could stand up and show you but literally i would walk in and like like my chest was puffed out my shoulders were down but i would like swing them. No, I know the exact walk. It was weird. I know the exact walk.

Do you know what I'm talking about? No, no. It's called the invisible lats walk. Is it? Okay. Dudes at 24 Hour Fitness who kind of their chest is puffed out. Okay. And they're kind of waddling like a penguin as if their lats are so big that their arms can't physically get to their sides.

That's the walk that you had, dude. You had the invisible lats walk. Yeah. And like I just, I guess I just didn't enjoy that part of it. I mean, I liked everything else about it. I just didn't like that part, how like it almost made me less feminine, in my opinion. I felt less feminine when I was doing it. So I'm like, okay, screw that.

And then I went and did something else. Interesting. Yeah, I didn't like it. I mean, I have to say, I imagine that a lot of the people who I don't hear from, I mainly hear from people who are like, this changed my, you know, how I feel about my body. And I think about my body in a different way that is at least more detached from what it looks like. Like my body suddenly has more value to me beyond what it looks like.

looks like like my body suddenly has more value to me beyond what it looks like and that's mainly like the people who glom onto my newsletter and my columns are tend to be the ones who are sort of on that page i hear far less from the people who um where the overriding feeling is they don't like how they feel like or how they feel yeah that they look um and i think this is totally if anything more normal than the people who are who make that one 180 degree turn fairly easily but that's really it's tough i mean we are kind of operating under pretty stringent expectations totally how we look yeah and it's very difficult to feel like you're to take on the role of the iconoclast and be like i'm gonna be the one who's gonna like change the perception of um bigger women there's lots of people who don't get to make that choice as well and that's like also really um quite difficult i think there's a lot i mean like we

we've spoken about body positivity and like fat positivity. There's so many people who are trying to like own that presentation in a space, but they I mean, they'll tell you it's not it's not easy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, gender, gender obviously plays a huge, huge, huge factor in this. And like, you know, coming from my perspective, where it's like the things that i enjoy doing create a more masculine body type and aesthetic so for me it's a very easy one-to-one but for instance going back to hammer throwing i mean i had teammates who were i mean actual olympians who were you know say like 6'4 215 uh women who were just elite at their sport and literally to the point where they were making a full living off of it and i knew that they they hated their bodies because they considered them

masculine which to me was such a huge bummer because it was like you are a literal olympian what people absolutely dream to get to and you know you have an incredible skill and you still feel bad about it i mean like one do we have some sort of imperative to just break down those gender norms i mean that's kind of how i feel despite doing not like a ton about it. I mean, like, one, do we have some sort of imperative to just break down those gender norms? I mean, that's kind of how I feel, despite doing not like a ton about it. But, you know, or I mean, is there some acquiescence? I think a question I would ask here is, do you feel the same way about even everyone, but like other women where you feel like they like a given woman can look too big? Or is it mainly focused on you? I think it's focused on me. Yeah, for sure. I was just like, nope, I was I was loving it. Like I was kickboxing. I was actively like, I could have hurt

somebody if I really wanted to. It was really fun. That's great. I just don't think I just I just couldn't like, it just it just took a chunk out of my like femininity and i didn't want that anymore i think i enjoyed it yeah i think this is like i don't think that there's an answer in any particular place but i think this is a fruitful line of inquiry if you will that like like thinking about okay i think lots of other people who do this stuff or who look this way look great i don't judge them but i judge myself and like why why is that what caught what like sort of leads to that thought pattern for me like i'm not a therapist but i think this is like this is just like therapy though

you are you are now a therapist you are now my therapist i will i don't care if you're not licensed yeah you're you're doing the work in Casey. Thank you for your emotional labor. I'm building my hour, my like sort of, what do they have? Like not, maybe clinical hours? Clinical hours? I think it's flight hours. You need to fly for 10,000 hours before you can be a therapist. So, I mean, obviously there are so many freaking factors. We talk about discourse maybe moving in the right positive direction,

but the demand for people to lose weight is still there. Or, I mean, I would love to see the term lose weight shift to be healthier or be fitter or be happier in whatever way, shape or form that takes. But what would you say is like the most actionable advice? Just the easiest, simplest advice. If you want to make a positive change for your diet, nutrition, what have you this new year, what do you do? That's a good question. I think, I mean, given all of this talk about how the sort of results-based goals can be a bit problematic in terms of execution, it's just like not that easy, or it's not as easy as it sounds. Like, lose 10 pounds sounds really snappy and like achievable but in the grand scheme it's not really i think a much better goal type of goal to focus on is uh a habit-based

one that's like i'm going to you know you can start as slow as you need although i'm personally a fan of thinking about not trying to wedge exercise into like too small of the cracks in your life and like trying to give it a little bit of a place of privilege, but like something like I'm going to go on a 20 minute walk three times a week, or I'm going to go on a 10 minute walk every day is like one thing that I started doing during the pandemic is just because I was sitting all of the time. So I made it like a point to walk for at least like, just go around a couple of blocks every single day. That's why you're making all the, uh, all the TikTok content on the walks.

I love it. Okay. That makes sense. You can double, you can multitask on those too. Yes, exactly. So I think something like that, something habit-based and then like, I feel like you can trust, you will see differences and how you feel and like, maybe how you think about food or, um, the, your body and like all of these things, just from that, like you don't have, you can sort of trust in exercise to produce a different lifestyle without having to worry about the metrics of it. You can just show up periodically, but consistently.

And that will make changes for you, I think. Yeah. I think a lot of people, they get the analysis paralysis because like you said, there's so much information, so much marketing coming at you all the time, like the bodybuilding forums that told me my diet would be ruined if I ate fruit

because there's too much sugar, which is horse hockey. I remember I had a roommate who was asking me about diet and exercise tips, and he was sitting there, and he was like, hey man, is it true that I shouldn't do cardio after I lift weights because then all my gains are gonna be gone and i'm like no like i mean they're if you're an elite level bodybuilder you may have whose income is literally tied to this then like maybe um but like not for you no not at all he's like bro is it true that like if i eat don't eat carbs directly after a workout if i don't have protein within a 20 minute window

the anabolic blah blah blah and i was like, you are sitting on the couch right now eating Taco Bell. Whatever you do is going to be better for your body than sitting on the couch and eating Taco Bell. Like, do not look at the micro things. Look at the macro things. Go on a freaking walk. If you if you are sweating, if you are breathing hard and if your muscles ache, any of those combination of those three things, you are doing something good for your body. You generally know what foods make you feel good and what foods make you feel bad. We were talking earlier, if I eat a steak before bed, I feel like crap. You know what I'm not going to do? Eat steak before bed, unless I really, really want to, because there's the Pacific Dining Car has the steak that's half price after 11 p.m.

Yeah, I've heard. Oh my God. Never been. But anywho, yeah, I think a lot of people overthink it in a way. And, like you said, it's habit-based things. Go on a walk 20 minutes a day. Yes. Eat more vegetables.

We get focused on the sort of, like, one weird trick things that I think even because probably they sound easy. It's like eat acai, the superfood, and then it'll, you know, do magical things. But that's easier than maybe going on a walk. It'll, you know, do magical things, but that's easier than maybe going on a walk. But it's like, it's really like the boring building blocks, the things that the marketing stuff is not talking about is the stuff that really makes a difference. Like it can be very simple. It does not have to be complicated. It doesn't have to be the latest like Tracy Anderson tip or whatever the case may be.

It can just be very simple and straightforward. You just have to show up. That said, buy Nicole's new seven-minute abs plan, available only at mythical.com. All right, Nicole and Casey, we've heard what you and I have to say. Now it's time to find out what other wacky ideas are rattling out there in the Twitterverse. It's time for a segment we call

Opinions Are Like Casseroles. Wait, can I start off with a hot food take that's about food and diet? Yeah, go for it. When I see like

the real Fitspo people who are doing the chicken, broccoli, and rice diet, right, that's what all the like Marvel actors who get really jacked

for the roles are like, all I ate was chicken, broccoli, rice rice diet. That's what all the Marvel actors who get really jacked for the roles are like, all I ate was chicken, broccoli, rice for nine months, whatever. There are so many delicious flavors that you can add that don't change the nutritional value. Herbs, citrus, fish sauce, garlic, chilies, any hot sauce. I watched a friend who's like a pro athlete just squirt yellow mustard on rice. And I was like, bro, soy sauce. A lot of people do mustard.

What the hell? Why with the mustard? Because it's zero calorie, right? But so is fish sauce. So is soy sauce. So is hot sauce. But it's so stringent. Yeah.

It's like even if you were to introduce a little barbecue sauce in there, that's like, what, 50 calories maybe? That's like really not breaking the bank. But they will be so strict and it's very yeah it's too much someone's got to teach them someone's got to teach them how to make uh nook trump the vietnamese fish sauce condiment yeah uh anyways first up we got at gristle mcthorn body iceberg lettuce is awful and the burps i get from it taste like hot dumpster water casey how are your iceberg burps wow Wow. I've never experienced an

iceberg burp in my life, I don't think. But I also don't eat iceberg lettuce. You know, I'll have a slice on my burger. I think that's my sort of maximum engagement with iceberg lettuce, I would say. But I enjoy that. I'm pro iceberg lettuce, I feel like. But I think I would, you know, my advice to this guy might be don't, I'm pro iceberg lettuce, I feel like, but I think I would, you know, my advice to this guy might be, don't, don't eat quite so much iceberg lettuce. Maybe we won't have the burps. How much iceberg do they eat? How much iceberg do they eat? I'm imagining him just munching on a whole head of the couch. Yeah. I didn't feel like that would be it. No, you know what? Oh, you know, it's so good. A nice, um, that's the salad. Yes. Oh, salad. Incredible.

So good. And I've never had burps from that either. But Wedge salad. Yes. Oh, that salad. Incredible. So good. And I've never had burps from that either. I don't burp when I eat ice cream. But those are delicious. Well, if you eat a wedge salad, you're likely getting the blue cheese burps, which are a Well, then that's a blue cheese burp. They need to specify. It's so funny.

We're talking about my pre-bed steak. The last time I had one would have been on Sunday. It was a late dinner at a steakhouse. It was about 9.30. I finished the last bite of steak. Went to bed at 10.30. Couldn't sleep because of it. That said.

Sorry. Had a lovely iceberg wedge salad. It's the king of lettuces. It is the absolute best. The king of lettuces? Oh, what do you say, Nicole? Little gems? Get the hell out of here. I'm a big arugula fan. Not even a lettuce. Sorry.

Okay, Karma underscore chameleon says, French fries dipped in malt vinegar is better than ketchup. Man, that's tough for me. I disagree, but I have respect for malt vinegar. I think malt vinegar tastes really good, and I would never say no to it. Even if it were the only thing, I would be putting it on my fries 100%. I like it.

Not better than ketchup, but I do like it with some salt. Yeah, this is a very British thing. This is a very like fish. This is a very chippy shop type of thing. The malt vinegar on the fries. For sure. I need some structure. I need, give me a good mayonnaise, a malt vinegar aioli, if you will.

But to me, ketchup's, it's a lovely complex sauce that we should put more respect on ketchup's damn name. A great ketchup fan. Big ketchup guy. At Roscoe and Grace, the only way to eat a grilled cheese is with bread and butter pickles on top. Atop the sandwich, huh? Atop. Atop.

Like on top, not inside in the cheese, with the cheese. Yeah. A nice little pickle topper so it hits the palate first. Are bread and butter pickles the sweet ones? Or they're like sweet and sour? Ooh, I have to disagree. I'm like a pretty strict like sour, salty only pickle.

I don't really like, I like the fancy other vegetables. Pickles can be whatever flavor, but like a classic cucumber based pickle to me, I don't really like when it's sweet. So I'm out on this one. I think they just need to be remarketed. I think they need to be remarketed as candied cucumbers.

You know? I kind of like that. Right? And then you're looking at it as a little sweet treat and not as a pickle. Because if you're comparing like a kosher dill to bread and butter, there's not really a comparison. One gives you the salty savory, one gives you sweet. But if it's like wow, do I reach for that gingerbread Kit Kat

or eat a nice bread and butter candied cucumber? Those are substitute goods in my mind. I do think pickles and grilled cheese, like grilled cheese is an absolute top sandwich to pair with a pickle for sure. Yes, 100%. But to me, it's bite then bite. I need some tuna fish in here, fam. That's where my brain went.

Get those macros, Nicole. I need a tuna fish in here fam that's what my that's where my brain went get those macros nicole i need a tuna melt okay sarah underscore k26268 says borsin garlic and fine herbs cheese an apricot jam in a sandwich slaps so hard read that again for borsin cheese borsin borsin oh okay have you ever had borsin cheese yeah goat. Boursin. Goat cheese? Yeah, I think so. It's like hot fire flames. It's something. Yeah, she's one of those spreadable cheeses that we think is fancy in America, but in France, it's like what they're putting in kids' lunchboxes.

Wow. Yeah. I mean, yeah. A goat cheese and jam is a classic pairing for sure. I'm definitely on that page. 100%. I started fist pumping when I read this. I was rooting for it, because that just sounds, maybe I'm just really hungry right now.

Sounds really good. Which I think is the case, but damn. Yeah, keep doing what you're doing on the boursin and the jam. All right, this speaks to my lifestyle. This is Bitter Oddy Dye. Finger food is best enjoyed laying on the couch. Allowing yourself to be relaxed really elevates the dish. I agree.

I get really frustrated when whatever I'm eating dictates sort of sitting up a little bit. I really want to be just lying back and I often can't do it. So I'm kind of like up on one elbow on the couch with the coffee, like reaching to the coffee table. And I'm like, this is not quite the experience that I wanted. So I think I agree, but I would like more info about how to actually lie back and enjoy it because I can't functionally do it most of the time. This is some Marie Antoinette stuff. Yeah.

Like, I don't get it. You don't get it? I mean, I'm going to choke. I choke drinking water standing up. Wow. You think I can eat, like, a Ritz? All the best monarchs just died of gout. They died doing what they loved.

I mean, that's the goal. But, like, it's so hard to, like, think about eating, like, a, like, my mind went to Ritz. Like, doing what they loved. I mean, that's the goal, but like, it's so hard to like think about eating like a, like, my mind went to Ritz. Like eating a Ritz. Like reclined. Well, I want to be clear, I'm not fully vertical. You're kind of. No, you're like propped up.

I get that. Like in a hospital bed sort of situation. Yeah. We should just get a hospital bed in our living room. That doesn't sound sexy at all. That sounds so sexy. Eating lime jello in a hospital bed, watching Murder, She Wrote. With the socks. The comfy socks they gave you. I think my New Year's resolution diet is going to be

make all of my meals more couch friendly. Because here's the other factor. We just got a white couch and I'm not allowed to eat chocolate on the couch. You guys got a white couch? We got a white couch. With my lifestyle? Why did you get a white of all the colored couches? You go with white? I eat so many saucy foods. All of my

dinners are so saucy. That couch is gonna be a light tan in like two weeks. Julia doesn't let me eat on the couch. I gotta eat on the crappy pink chair. Good, she's smart. Cause that way the spaghetti sauce will blend in if I spill it. Okay. Hey, it's Joseph 00 says a cup of hot coffee with Doritos equals certified bussin.

A cup of hot coffee with Doritos. Hmm. I used to have, when I was in college, there was one class where every time I would get hot tea with milk and cheddar and sour cream chips, which is pretty close to what he's saying. So I think I am actually on this page also. Yeah. I'm trying to think of the flavor combination that most speaks to me. And it was similarly in college, I would eat two pizza bagels and a quart of coffee every morning. That was just it. It was, again, talking about dirty bulking, really putting on some great mass. The pizza bagel for breakfast is quite a move. I love pizza bagels. Oh my God. It was the closest thing to like, it was literally on the way from practice to a class. There was a cart that sold bagels and the most high calorie bagels you could get there was a pizza bagel.

You know, figured the extra fat, you know, was helping me out. And so I would get two 16 ounce coffees and two pizza bagels and just slam them in like an intro to philosophy class. And you know what? It was great. It was a delight. The spiciness of the pepperoni, spiciness of the Doritos kind of like amps up that coffee

flavor. I'm in. Yeah. I like your version more, Casey, with the tea and the sour cream and cheddar chips. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm totally with it. But like the like hot black coffee with the Doritos, I can't. I can't do that. It's almost like masala chai.

Oh, whatever. You know what I mean? No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. All right. At Orton Malena, guava paste and cream cheese is the best dessert ever. Cubans know what's up. Yes.

Yes. Oh, man. A guava and cream cheese pastry is so good. I went to Puerto Rico a few years ago, and that's like a very common flavor combo there. And it's just incredible. Very underrated here in the States, I think. True. Super.

Yeah. I mean, I didn't have that until I went to Miami for like a book festival a couple years ago. Me gusta los pastelitos en espanol. Muy bien. Gracias, Nicole. Gracias. But no, for real. I mean, we don't get a ton of Cuban food.

We don't get a ton of Caribbean. We have some good Cuban, but we don't have enough of like dank ass pastries like that. Gracias. But no, for real, we don't get a ton of Cuban food. We don't get a ton of Caribbean. We have some good Cuban, but we don't have enough of like dank ass pastries like that. Yeah. Porto's. Porto's is good. Porto's makes some dank ass Cuban pastries. Yeah. I love the I just like, my mom used to just buy the membrillo paste and just like put on

a piece of bread. God, I need some guava paste in my mouth sooner than later. More people need to eat guava paste. You're right. Pure Jshot says, refried beans are just Mexican-style hummus. Yes, but there's nothing wrong with that either. That sounds great. A refried beans, like

a hummus-style refried beans implementation, I could see. I think they're saying refried beans equals hummus. I think it equals it. Well, yeah. I mean, it does. 100% it does. It depends on what flavors you're eating. Because hummus, right? One hummus. Well, like, let's... I think it equals it. Well, yeah. I mean, like, anyway, it does. 100% it does. Which is, like, it depends what flavors you're...

Because, like, hummus, right? One, hummus is just Arabic for chickpea. Yes. So anytime someone's saying, like, edamame hummus, it's like, well, you know, if it ain't chickpea, is it hummus? That's a whole nother debate. But, like, the flavors of hummus, tahini, lemon, garlic. Yeah.

Refried beans. What do you got? Onion chili lard. Yeah, that's an easy swap out for me. The lard takes the place of the tahini. That's money. Also, I would eat refried beans over damn near any side in the entire world. I really like refried.

I don't eat enough refried beans. All right, at Fotato Potato So, hell of a name. Frozen bananas over non-frozen bananas. Wow. It's paleo time. I need a moment without one. I don't, I like both. I like both really. I love a frozen banana. It has its implementations, but I like a fresh banana too. I don't know. Frozen bananas can be like a sort of ice cream

substitute if you blend them, which I've been doing more of that and I'm into it. I think it tastes good and the texture is good. I like both. I like both. I love regular banana, regular banana. I like non-frozen bananas, but like for a smoothie, I have like a pack of like frozen bananas that I throw in there. So I like regular bananas more. Yeah. It's once the regular bananas get too ripe, then you put them in the freezer and then you got both. I want to reclaim these food substitutions that people consider substitutions that have had like these bad eras in diet culture stuff. Like frozen bananas being blended in ice cream or avocados being blended in pudding or spaghetti squash instead of spaghetti or mashed cauliflower puree instead of potatoes. They don't need to be substitutes. I love cauliflower puree.

It's a delight. I don't think it's potatoes. I love spaghetti squash. It is neither good as spaghetti nor is it good as squash. If you consider it coleslaw potato, it's a good-ass vegetable. I love blending frozen bananas. It's a nice little treat. I'm reclaiming them outside of the orthorexic diet structure in 2022.

Yes, that's great. I love that. I agree. Up top. I'm giving you a high five. What Lord. That's great. I love that. I agree. Upped up. I'm giving you a high five. What? I can't see. I'm blind with headphones on.

I'm like a horse. All right. And on that note, thank you for listening to A Hot Dog is a Sandwich. If you want to hear more from us here in the Mythical Kitchen, we got new episodes for you every Wednesday. If you want to be featured on Opinions Are Like Casserole, you can hit us up on Twitter at Mythical Chef or and Hendy Zalda with the hashtag Opinion Casserole. And for more Mythical Kitchen, check us out on YouTube

where we launch new videos every week. And of course, if you want to share pictures of your dishes or your New Year's resolution diets, hit us up on Instagram at Mythical Kitchen. I hope we get some weird stuff. They should bring back the Mark Twain diet where you have to chew every bite of food like 90 times. Let's get some old school like red wine and boiled egg diets in the 1700s.

Alright, Casey, thank you so much for joining us. Really insightful conversation. Where can people find you? Anything you want to plug? Now's the time. Sure. My newsletter is called She's a Beast. She'sabeast.co on Substack.

And my Twitter is at Casey Johnston, my name. And my Instagram is at Swole Woman. Hell yeah. And I will also be plugging it just because I think it's a great resource for anybody trying to get started and also just looking for like a refreshing change in the way that people talk about diet and exercise, because I know it's such a weird space to be in. So I'll also post a link on my Instagram and Twitter. So come find that. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. See you all next time. Bye, Casey.