Stuff You Should Know - How Anti-Dieting Works

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

There’s a movement afoot that says we should all stop thinking about our weight and just enjoy food. No, it doesn’t help you lose weight…No, it’s not a diet…No, - just listen to the episode, okay? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

this season on Running the Break with CJ and Alex. Rapper Meek Mill, so obviously huge ties to Philly was at a Sixers game recently and in what seemed like a real-life curb your enthusiasm as an episode, he accidentally tripped a ref sitting courtside as the ref was running back up court. You know what CJ? I gotta say, I feel like that should be a technical foul, one free throw for the opposing team. Yes, if you rep your town and your team as much as you do Meek Mill, that he's a Sixer, right? So the opposing team's got to take free throws or unless, you know, if we're going off of the curb episode, does Meek have the discography of that compares to like

Seinfeld tapes that he could bring to the ref's, you know, hospital bed? Shout out to curb, that was one of the greatest episodes ever. Listen to Running the Break with CJ and Alex on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by FanDuel. Make every moment more with FanDuel Sportsbook, an official partner of the NBA. You know, when you're staying at an AirBnB, chances are you've wondered, could my place be an AirBnB? And if it could, what could it earn? You might not realize it, but you could be sitting in an AirBnB right now. Like some people AirBnB their whole house when they're away visiting family or really on any sort of trip. Just think, you can make enough

money to cover plane tickets or some of that trip. Find out how much your home could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, everybody. I don't know if you've heard, but we have a book coming out. Finally, finally, after all these years, it's great. It's fun. You're going to love it. It's called Stuff You Should Know, colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. Yep. And it's 26 jam packed chapters that we wrote with another guy named Nils Parker, who's amazing and is illustrated amazingly by our illustrator, Carly Monardo. And it's just an all around joy to pick up and read. Even though we haven't physically held in our hands yet, it's like we have Chuck in our dreams so far. I can't wait to actually see and hold this thing

and smell it. And so should you. So pre-order now. It means a lot to us. The support is a very big deal. So pre-order anywhere books are sold. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Chizzy, Chuck Bryant. And this is Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, that's all I gotta say. I think this is super interesting, this anti-diet movement episode. I do too. I'd heard a little bit about it every once in a while. We'll say something and one of our listeners will write in and be like, Hey, you guys shouldn't be saying that or you guys shouldn't be talking about, you know, trying to lose weight or something because it shames other

people indirectly. And like you should check out the anti-dieting movement. So all of you people who've ever written in with the suggestion for that, this one's for you because I believe all of you are the ones who brought that to my awareness. Yeah, so the anti-diet movement is a response to, there's a lot of pieces to it and we're gonna go over all of them, but it's a response to diet culture in the world, especially in the United States. And a response that basically says we don't think diet culture is healthy, literally healthy for your physical health and also not healthy for your mental health and for the well-being of an individual. We don't think diets work. We think we have proof and studies that show diets don't work.

And we think that there's a better way, which is to accept food as something that is to be enjoyed and accept your body. And there's a lot more to it than that, but that's sort of the broadest stroke. And society goes, what? I tell you, man, it's when you look at how we are, you know, maybe brainwashed is too strong of a word, but how humans and Americans are brainwashed into thinking there is only one way to live and only one way to live that way. Right. It's pretty interesting and hard to undo. And we're all of us, every single one of us in America, and I would guess in most of the West as well, are subject to kind of this two-pronged attack about weight. One is the idea that you just don't look as good when you're overweight.

And then two, the idea that you're not as healthy when you're overweight. And this anti-dieting movement rejects both of those. So their whole thing is, and it's really, it's worth kind of restating here because it's tough to wrap your head around because of the way that we've all been brought up for so long, that the anti-dieting movement isn't like, no, no, no. All you have to do is cut meat out and you're fine. You can do everything else. There's nothing like that. It's not only don't diet, it's throw away your dieting books, stop following dieting blogs, reject the standard of beauty at like the small kind of vaguely underweight standard that we have in the West, and stop listening to people,

including your own inner voice that makes you feel ashamed when you crave or eat certain foods, that all foods are on the table. There's no such thing as bad foods. And you can just stop thinking about weight and food. Those two things can be decoupled for the rest of your life. You're free basically is what they're saying. You're free. Go fly a little bird. Go live your life. Stop thinking about being overweight. Yeah. And it all comes down, and this might just, some people may just think this is the craziest thing they've ever heard in their life. Right. But what they're saying is, is something called, you should embrace something called intuitive eating. And this came around in the, sometime in the 90s, there was a book written by

Evelyn Trebowl and Elise Resch called Intuitive Eating Colon, a revolutionary program that works, and this was in 1998. And this was basically the idea that we've been looking at this cycle happened for years of restricting your food, getting on a diet, losing weight, gaining it back, sometimes gaining back even more weight, doing this over and over and over. It's not working. It's not good for people. It's not effective. It doesn't make you healthier to go through this weight loss and weight gain cycle. And you need to stop listening to these external controls, whether it's the media or your parents or your spouse or partner or yourself. And you need to start listening to your body and eating what your body says to eat. And here's the important part,

stop eating when your body says it's full. Right. And so they kind of put all these things. So intuitive eating is kind of the central focus of anti-dieting, but it's not one in the same. Anti-dieting is a larger umbrella movement, is the best word for it, that includes anti or intuitive eating, but it also includes a kind of a militant opposition to fat shaming of any sort, of any kind, and also kind of believes, not even kind of overtly believes, that any weight loss goal is negative, that it comes 100% from that being brainwashed culturally. So we'll talk more about the anti-dieting movement in general, but we should really explain the 10 principles of intuitive eating that Tribal and Rush put together. And we should say one other thing too.

This is not a diet. So when you're hearing these things, don't think, and then you do this and you lose weight. No, that's out the window that has nothing to do with this. This is about your relationship to food. And then number two, these people are no slouches. Tribal and Rush are both registered dietitians, which are certified regulated professionals who know what they're talking about with nutrition. And intuitive eating is widely almost universally embraced by dietitians and nutritionists as well. So just kind of keep that mindset when you're hearing these 10 principles of intuitive eating. Yeah. And before we actually list the 10, it's worth pointing out that part of intuitive eating is part of the foundation is the fact

that they say, Hey, listen, look at your kids. When you're born and you're a little baby and you don't know anything, you're just a dumb baby and you grow up to be a dumb little toddler. Your body tells you when you're hungry and you eat and your body tells you when you're full and you stop eating. And I see that with my five year old. I'm not hungry anymore. All right. Stop eating. And it's that easy. And the argument for intuitive eating is that and partially the anti-diet movement is somewhere along the way, we lose that as adults or as teenagers even because of this onslaught from the media and from everybody talking about your weight, your weight, your weight and your health and you got to be skinny.

And we lose these, we literally lose these biological triggers that say eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full. Those just go away. And the idea is to kind of retrain your mind and body to get back to that state you were when you were a dumb baby. Right. Yeah. Cause I don't even know if it goes away. We're just trained by diet culture to ignore them. Oh, they say it goes away. Yeah. No, I know. I don't know if I agree with that one. But the key is that it's being one way or another. We don't have that intuitively anymore because diet culture has come in and replaced that with, no, pay attention to the calories or ignore the fact that you're hungry because you're limiting portion size.

They're saying ignore that advice. Right. So here are the principles, the 10 principles. The first one is we already kind of covered it to reject the diet mentality. Basically, it's just saying, you know, these, these diets don't deliver lasting results and you got to remind yourself of that. Right. There's also the next one is honor your hunger. It's so sweet. They have honor in here a couple of times, but they're basically saying that when you are hungry, you should eat and you should pay attention to not only what your body's, the fact that your body's telling you're hungry. So go ahead and eat, but what your body's asking for too. Now, your body that's important to say is what they're saying to honor. Not you're sad. So go eat the

ice cream. Right. Which comes later. That's a different thing that comes later. Yeah. What else Chuck? There's make peace with food. Yeah. That is basically unconditional permission to eat. You know, we're tempted by the Twinkies and the ice cream and stuff like that. And they're saying give yourself that permission because that's sort of one of the keys is once you rewire your brain, you're not going to want the Twinkie for lunch because it doesn't have that allure. And it's probably not going to make you feel great physically. And maybe you need to do that a couple of times to realize, oh boy, I don't feel so hot after eating ice cream for lunch and only ice cream for lunch. Exactly. Yeah. So they're saying just like there's, if you are on the couch

and you're like, oh, those Oreos sound good. Should I, should I? They're saying get rid of this, should I, should I? If you feel hungry and those Oreos sound good, you just get up and you eat the Oreos without a second thought. That's the point of making peace with food, giving yourself permission to live like that. That's right. The next one, number four is challenge the food police, which can be everything from your friends and family or partners to your own, and I think many times your own inner voice. Probably more than anything that inner voice. And one of the things with the food police too is they can come about in ways that are much less direct than calling them the food police sounds. The food police sounds like somebody who's going to tell you to put down

that Twinkie because you, you know, a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips, people who say stuff like that to other people. That's definitely food police kind of stuff. But that same kind of guilt or shame or reinforcement of feeling guilty or ashamed about food can come from people who are talking about their own dislike for their body or their weight because it makes you kind of sympathetically trigger and examine your own, especially if that person is maybe ways less than you do. Because if they're worried about their weight, well, geez, that means you should really be worried about your weight or they're worried about eating that the grilled chicken on their Caesar salad and you're talking into a chili dog. Should you really be eating this?

So the food police in this sense can kind of come from a number of different directions. Defund the food police? Yeah. The next one is respect your fullness. And this is a big part of it because they're saying eat when you're hungry, but they're not saying eat till you feel sick. They're saying you need to listen to your body at all times when it's hungry, feed it, and then maybe eat a little slower, maybe pause during that snack or during that meal and say, all right, body, am I hungry now or am I bored or stressed out and is that why I'm continuing to eat? Like check in with yourself in the middle of a meal to see, body, do you need fuel right now or it's something going on at work and this Twinkie makes it a whole lot better.

And so that kind of reveals like one of the big principles of intuitive eating, which is mindfulness. Like you're not supposed to just kind of zone out and watch TV while you're eating ice cream because then you look down and you've eaten way more ice cream than you've even realized, which means that you didn't even enjoy that ice cream. You want to be more mindful when you're eating in part, not just to monitor how much you're eating, but to enjoy it more. That's part of the whole thing as well. And then the next one on the list, in fact, is satisfaction. Hold on. I've got one more thing about respecting your fullness. So there's this Confucian teaching that the Japanese call Harahachi Buu, which means belly is 80% full. And the kind of rule of thumb

among Japanese people is that you eat until you feel about 80% full because then your food kind of expands in your stomach and by the time you're done eating, it eventually becomes 100% full. So you don't overeat until you feel sick and it's actually extremely satisfying. It just takes again that level of mindfulness. That's right. And that number six was satisfaction, which is enjoy your food, assess that taste and the texture and how does that feel in your stomach? Is it a gut bomb or does it feel good? Right. And I think also, Chuck, if you stop and think about a lot of the ultra-processed foods that people have in America, you will find it doesn't make you feel very good. So I think the authors are aware that part of that mindfulness

is going to lead you to some different kinds of foods than the ones that people traditionally think of that they're just going to eat when they don't feel guilty about eating food, you know? Right. Like they sit back and they're like, no, no, no, go ahead and chow down on the ice cream and then they sit back and go, watch this. They're going to be happy for a few minutes and then they're going to be like, oh, I got a stomach ache. I think ice cream is exempted from that. I keep talking about ice cream. Ice cream's fine. It's the best thing in the world. Let's all leave ice cream alone. But I think there's been plenty of stuff that I've eaten where I realized later that it's not actually good. It doesn't actually taste good. It's not

actually satisfying. It actually makes me feel kind of bad. And then the icing on the cake of... Oh, I love icing on cake. Disappointment. Yeah. Icing and ice cream are exempted. But the icing on this cake of just feeling kind of duped is that I probably saw an ad for that food within the last couple of days and that ad worked its mojo on my head. And that's why I ate it. Not because I like it, but because the ad got me and then the food itself is designed to hijack your limbic system. So I ate more and more and more. But when I stopped and really thought about how it made me feel, it didn't feel good about it. I didn't like that food. And I've actually given up Popeye's chicken as a result. Very good. Yeah. Honoring your feelings is the next one

without food. Check in with yourself emotionally. How are you? Are you anxious? Are you lonely? Are you stressed out? Are you mad? What are your food triggers and why are they there? And try and resolve some of those issues without using the food. That's a big, big part of it. I think that is the part of it, dude. I think most people who are overweight are overweight because they eat emotionally. Maybe it's overconfirmation by some huge stress eater. Huge. And I guess it's possible I could just be presuming most people are like that. But I suspect that that is the key to all of it, is if you can figure out that food is in addiction to you and that you're using it as an emotional crutch, that that will make you identify what you're actually trying to

deal with or cover up or run from or make yourself feel better against using food. And that is the key to decoupling it. And when you can do that, you can do all this other stuff, I would guess, is just kind of like a cascade of easiness from that point on. I think that's probably the hardest part. Number eight is respecting your body. And this is the idea that you want to love your body and accept your body and feel good about what they call your genetic blueprint and the body that you have. And maybe we're meant to have and having a realistic expectation about what you can and should look like. That's a big, big part of it. The ninth one really kind of stands out to me too, Chuck, is that exercise. They're saying like exercise. But the thing to know about

exercise is you don't exercise for weight loss. That's not what exercise is for. It's actually not that great for weight loss. It's good for improving your mood and making you feel better. And it can help with number eight, with you just respecting your body. You can just feel good about your body without even really losing any weight just from exercising from time to time. And they don't even say you necessarily need to exercise. They're just saying move more. Yeah, don't be sedentary. Which is a big one. But that was a big life-changing thing for me too, is learning that exercise is not about weight loss. It's about boosting your mood and sense of well-being. Yeah, it feels good. It does. It feels really good. But if you do it to try to lose weight,

it's very frustrating and counterproductive and you'll eventually give up exercise probably. And then the last one, honor your health with gentle nutrition. And this is the idea that you're making food choices that you like the taste of, but also honor the health aspect. Sure, you might want to have some cookies and chips from time to time, but focusing on those non-processed foods that also do taste good, that's sort of the route that they suggest you go. Right. So that's intuitive eating. Although if you go back to number three, technically, number 10 could be canceled out. Like if you're just like, no, I really hate asparagus. I hate vegetables. I love Oreos. I'm just going to eat Oreos. They're like, okay, that's fine. As long as

you're not feeling guilt about it, as long as you love your body, as long as you're listening to yourself and the cues your body is telling you, whatever, that's just part of it. It's go to town. Just love food and love yourself is kind of the message, which is a pretty good message that I think a lot of people want to hear. I think so. You want to take a break and then talk about the idea that this is rooted in science? Yeah. Okay, we're going to do that eventually. Everybody will be right back. Hey, friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me, wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guesthouse

of her childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember

Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends paper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stuxnet. Who Stuxnet? Stuxnet. I don't know. You know it's Stuxnet. Is it in this? Stuxnet. Stuxnet. It's a great name. It's a great name. All right. Stuxnet with an X. All right. So intuitive eating. This has been, you know,

sort of a new way of thinking that's come about over the last like probably 10 or 15 years, maybe a little bit more. But it seems like it's really gained steam in the last 10 or 15. And the idea is that there are all these buzzwords that we are sort of ingrained in us, dieting, losing weight, getting healthy. They've changed that to or changing from diet to things like getting healthy or it's a lifestyle change. And they're trying to avoid some of those earlier buzzwords. But if you're an anti-diet proponent, you're saying, you know what, this is all the same stuff just because you call it a lifestyle now. And you're talking about getting healthy rather than losing weight or going on a diet. It's the same size. It's just in different clothing.

Yeah. It's here's the standard and everyone needs to reach it no matter what. And that really flies in the face of this idea that what that seems to be one of the tenets of intuitive eating and definitely of the anti-diet movement, which is that every person has their own different basically genetic weight set point and that that is what your body's going to stay at no matter what. And if you try to contravene that set point, you might be successful for a little bit, but probably the vast majority of people are going to suffer relapse, I guess, and they'll gain that weight back over time, give them enough time, they'll gain that weight back. And then the problem is they might even gain even more. And so there are some diets out there that have been demonstrably

shown to work like Weight Watchers, now called WW, like Jenny Craig, now called Jenny Craig still. JC. Although I didn't know it was Australian, so I guess it should be Genie Craig. How was that? That was great. I don't think it was great. I thought all of a sudden I was talking to Russell Crowe. So those have been shown to work. The problem is this, that you are signing up for a lifetime of paying attention to what you eat. That's how it works. It'll work, but you have to keep it up for literally the rest of your life if you want to keep that weight off. And then other diets just don't work at all or they'll work temporarily, but then you just go right back and then you gain some weight. And they seem to have figured out, at least according to intuitive eating dietitians

and anti-dieting movement proponents, that there seems to be some biological response by the body to dieting. And it's almost this comedy of errors that just makes everything even worse when you try to diet. Yeah. I mean, the idea is if with any diet, pretty much, you're restricting food in some way, whether it's a kind of food or the amount of food, there is almost always going to be some amount of hunger involved even though they all say like, with this diet, you'll never be hungry again. They all say that, but that's sort of the idea with any diet is you're restricting yourself. And anti-diet proponents say, you know what, when that happens, your body is wired to want to eat and survive. And when you're consuming less food energy, that's going to create that

energy deficit and that's when you're going to be burning those fat stores and that is how you lose weight. But your body is also going to trigger a biological starvation response that is going to mean you're going to fail eventually because your body is saying, I got to eat. I think I'm lost in the middle of the woods all of a sudden and go eat. You're hungry. You're hungry. Yeah. You're more hungry than you would have been. Right. So this can very, very easily lead to binge eating because you're not just hungry. You're hungry at this point. And so when you finally do give in and start to eat, you're going to eat more than you would have if you were just plain hungry. Right. Right. That's a huge problem with it, but it seems to be even more nuanced than that

and that the body seems to enter basically a kind of starvation mode where once it does manage to get you out of that or starvation response where it does get you out of that diet and back into eating, what you've just done is scare your brain, it seems like. So where your brain says, well, I didn't realize that food scarcity was going to be an issue in our lifetime. So now that I realize it is, I'm going to take that set point of adiposity, which is the amount of fat you would generally store on yourself. I'm going to inch it up a little higher so that my person can store more fat because we need to make sure that if this ever happens again, we have plenty of energy stores. So when you come out of dieting, you can actually gain more weight

than you had before because of that, because of that adiposity set point being increased. And then as a result, as a response, you end up dieting again. Your brain says, it happened again. So your adiposity set point might be set even higher. And so you'll gain even more weight back. And it's a phenomenon that we're just starting to understand that I can't tell if it's just theoretical or an interpretation of evidence, but a term I've seen for it is called diet induced obesity. And it's just fascinating to think that dieting can actually make you heavier than you would have been if you hadn't dieted at all. Yeah. I mean, here's a thing I don't think we mentioned yet. When your body goes into that

biological response that says, oh boy, you got to eat now. It's also saying you got to eat something that's really high in calories. It's like, don't reach for the trisket, friend. You need that pimento cheese on white bread. Which, yeah. Palmetto cheese. You ever have that stuff? I've got some in my fridge right now, buddy. Man, that's the best. It's hard to go back to anything else, to be honest. I didn't even know there was anything else anymore. Although there's a listener who makes queen charlotte pimento cheese out of Charlotte, North Carolina. Is it good?

It's queen charlotte. It's extremely good, yes. It's like high end pimento cheese, but it's not like snooty pimento cheese. It's like really, really good pimento cheese. Do you get the palmetto? Do you get the jalapeno or bacon or just the plain? Just the jalapeno. Oh, okay. Yeah. I've not had the bacon. I'm trying not to eat pig. Not for any health reasons, but just because they're supposed to be really smart. Yeah. I mean, I don't get the bacon because Emily doesn't eat it. I just get the plain. I don't get the jalapeno either because I don't love super hot things. Although,

and it's not that hot. It's becoming really apparent that Emily and I are basically one and the same person. I have drawn up divorce papers for that reason. That's it. From her or me? We can't get divorced? Okay. All right. Good. So we, what were we talking about? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So your body wants even like high, high calorie foods to pack that weight back on. And it's going to pack on more than last time because you've scared it into thinking that it's going to possibly run into food scarcity again. So that's what you're doing is you're

basically forcing your body into a starvation mode to lose weight, but your body responds by saying like, I'm two steps ahead of you. You're not going to win this game. And then you're eventually going to keep gaining more and more weight back and dieting more and more. And here's the other big part of it too, Chuck, is that you're going to end up on this disappointing treadmill where you've wasted all this time and energy and emotion into something that's just going to frustrate you. And the anti-dieting people just say, stop. Well, which could trigger what leads you to eat to begin with, which is stress and anxiety about your weight. And then there are people like Christy Harrison, author, she's a podcaster of

Food Psych and author of anti-diet colon, reclaim your time, money, well-being and happiness through intuitive eating. Colon. She's also a registered dietitian. So she knows what she's talking about too. Yeah. So she says, you know what? Your nutrition, your physical activity, smoking, alcohol, any kind of behavioral health determinant is just about 30% of your overall health anyway. And you know, people hang everything on this like that, like an ideal weight means I'm healthy. And of course, we think people should quit smoking. I'm not saying, yeah, go out and smoke anyway. But there are people that say all of this stuff combined is only about 30% of your health. And I'm sure your genetics have a lot to do with it. Somebody's anxiety

and stress level may be so high that they have, you know, a steel cable running through their body at all times. And they may be thin, but they may drop dead from that heart attack in their 40s because they're not addressing other factors in their life other than food. Right. And that's, it's kind of rich too for the diet culture to be like, well, what about health? What about health? Because diet, there's some pretty unhealthy diets out there. I ran across a few that have come and gone over the years and then sometimes I revived. Have you heard of the sleeping beauty diet? What's that? You take a nap every time you're hungry? You take sleeping pills at night. So you sleep longer. So you're not awake to eat. Don't forget, deal a meal, which wasn't

necessarily bad, but it was definitely calorie restrictive. Richard Simmons, very colorful, cute little cards or something. Yeah. The grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet, which was very 70s. Severely. And the cabbage soup diet, I didn't realize this dates back to the 50s. And it works. The thing is it's calorie restrictive. So you're entering that starvation response and it'll work if at first it's just you eat more when you finally get to eat again. And then there's, this one is, I just can't believe this. This is a real thing, Chuck, the feeding tube diet. I didn't even want to look that up. I did and it's exactly what you think. Yeah, I figured. A doctor, a doctor, like I guess a doctor nick type, fits you with a

nasogastric tube that delivers about 800 calories of nutrients directly to your stomach. And under the severe calorie restriction, you will shed the weight. But again, you're going to gain it all back and then some probably when you start eating again. When did they do that? That's still going on. Really? Yes. So the idea that not dieting is unhealthy, is awfully rich, coming from people who undertake some of these extraordinarily dangerous diets. You can get a kidney infection from that feeding tube diet. Like a lot of stuff can go wrong. But there are some things that do exist in the world that you have to kind of consider. And one of them is the obesity epidemic,

which is tough to get around. But astoundingly, the anti diet movement has been like, we got this. Yeah. I mean, the anti diet movement says there is no public health crisis going on. Unless you're talking about the diet culture, burn. There like, there is no obesity epidemic. If you look at the average weight of Americans compared to the generation before, it's about six to 11 pounds more. And maybe what this has done, if you look at the BMI scale, which basically says there are three types of people, or I guess four, underweight, normal, overweight, and obese, that might that six to 11 pounds, which amounts to 10 extra calories a day over time, that might nudge you into a different category from overweight to obese or

from normal to overweight. But BMI and mortality are just, and this is what they're saying, is that that's causation. Like we think we have evidence that shows that being obese and having a higher BMI doesn't mean you're going to die sooner. Which is that's astoundingly contrary to common sense, it seems like, or at least the common perception of the link between being overweight and being dead, basically. And apparently the holy text of anti-dieting seems to revolve around this 2006 study by a law professor named Campos. I don't know what Campos's first name, but Campos did a survey of the medical literature and tried to find the correlations between BMI and mortality, and seemed to find that there actually is a correlation,

but it's not where you'd think that people who are in the overweight range or the low range of obesity apparently don't seem to have much more of a risk factor than anybody who's in the normal weight range as far as mortality goes. You have to get into the far side of obesity, and then the far side of underweight to get to where you're actually at risk of dying. So that's super contrary to what most people think. Again, this is a 2006 study by a law professor who did a survey of the literature on nutrition and weight. So you can take that as you will, but at the same time, if it is correct, it's still to me, I don't think it discounts everything, because if people have gained six to 11 pounds on average compared to just a generation

before, that's not terribly much. I mean, it seems like a lot, depending on how, I guess, inculcated into the diet culture you are, but it seems like that's taking a snapshot of something that we're still in the process of, and then just saying, don't worry about it, because it's just this much. Not, well, how much more is it going to be, and is there danger if we reach that point, if everybody ends up like the humans in that, in Wally, you know? And it's kind of akin to saying, like, well, it's just the living room that's on fire right now. There's the whole rest of the house is not on fire. Stop your moral panic about house fires. It's very similar to that. So I'm not saying that it's wrong, and I'm not saying that it doesn't help the anti-diet movements

and ideas, but I think that just to say, like, bam, case closed is a little glib. You're being glib, Matt. What's that from? We say that in our house a lot. That was when Tom Cruise and Matt Lauer interviewed Tom Cruise about Scientology. You're being glib, Matt. That is about as Tom Cruise the thing to say as anyone's ever said. And look what happened to Matt Lauer. Yeah, he got cruised. You want to take a break? Oh my gosh, have we not taken a second break yet? No, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about the big elephant in the room right after this.

Hey, everybody. When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Stuxnet. Who Stuxnet? Stay on with us. Stuxnet. I don't know what they're called. You know it's Stuxnet. Is it in this? Stuxnet. Stuxnet. It's a great name. You gotta quit saying Stuxnet. That's the name of it. I know. It's a great name. All right. Stuxnet with an X. So the elephant in the room is nutrition. I think this is the glaring thing that if you've been listening so far and disagreed with a lot of the anti-diet movement, you're probably saying you can't eat just Oreos just because it makes you feel good. You gotta have nutrition. The body needs nutrition. And here's the thing. The body does need nutrition, but the anti-diet

movement says just unwire your brain on this moral judgment on food. And if you get too intuitive eating, what we're saying is listen to your body. And if you eat these just Oreos for lunch, you're gonna feel like garbage later on. Right. And if you're listening to your body, your body is gonna tell you that it wants nutrition and it wants good vegetables and it wants whole foods. And if you're really in tune and you're really listening and you're not just saying, oh, well, I'm just gonna give myself permission because I'm an anti-dieter to do whatever I want and I may be doubled over in pain every afternoon from eating garbage food. That means you're not doing it right. That means you're not listening to your body

because your body will crave nutritional health. Right. You're just being a smart aleck at that point. That's right. So that's kind of like the big thing among registered dietitians and nutritionists that basically says like, yeah, we're in favor of anti-dieting and we're definitely in favor of people being body positive. There's something called healthy at every size that was founded by Dr. Bacon of all people. Isn't it healthy at any weight or is it any size? Any size. Okay. Yeah, size. Health at every size. Right. Linda Bacon back in 2010. And so most dietitians and nutritionists are like, of course, we're all very much in favor of that. But nutrition is important. And I'm sure there's some people out there like, yeah,

you would say that you're a nutritionist. But there's just, I just think that there's no getting around the idea that you'd need healthy whole foods. I think the problem is the anti-diet movement says that sounds awfully close to there's such things as good foods and there's such things as bad foods and we reject that outright. Yeah. And the nutritionists are saying, you know, there really is such things as foods that are better for you and your body and are going to make you feel better when you eat them than other foods. So technically, sure, there is such thing as good and bad foods of that sense, but not shame. It's just, this is going to provide more benefits for you than this. Yeah. And, you know, there is a real

danger to, and the people that are, I guess you would say against the anti-diet movement say like, listen, we can't let this thing, we're all for body positivity, but we can't let it go so far in the other direction that your diet shaming and you're saying, you know, you shouldn't eat like you were saying, you shouldn't seek out nutritional foods like, don't let the pendulum swing so far in the other direction that your brainwashing people into thinking that they can just eat garbage all the time and be healthy. I don't get the impression that that is super prevalent among anti-diet movement. I don't think it is. I think it's more that it seems to be targeting any kind of weight loss. And that seems to be a division

in the anti-diet movement itself. Right. To where if you, if you want to lose weight, or even if you don't say you want to lose weight, but it's evident that you did, there's a model named Ashley Graham who was a full-figured sports illustrated cover model a couple of years back. And she like lost a few pounds, but it's still definitely plus size and full-figured and proud of it. But she, she, she faced a huge backlash as a result of that where people were like, I'm not a fan of yours anymore because you lost, you lost weight and you've betrayed us all. So there's, there's this division between, well, no, I feel better when I shed a couple of pounds and I have no problem with, with wanting to shed a couple of

pounds. And the other side is like, you can't even think that way. That's diet, culture, brainwashing you. We reject that and we reject you basically too. And so there's, it's just, the internet's been injected into it, which is the problem is what it seems like. Right. Because people should be able to make their own decisions on their own bodies and how they feel it best suits them without being piled on, on the internet and on either side. And I, and I get too, also that people are like, well, no, that like, when you talk about that stuff, it makes me feel shame, but triggers my shame. But the problem is, is like, you, you can't control other people. You can only control yourself and your response to other people

and forcing other people to behave in a way that makes life easier for you. It's not how things work. Like you have to just focus on yourself and your own response and your own positivity so that it is strong enough and robust enough that it can withstand hearing other people talk about how they wish they could lose some weight and being like, huh, you know what, I don't anymore. I'm truly body positive. I truly love my body. That would be the true body positivity that, that people are trying to achieve there. And it would solve the problem of fighting in fighting among people who agree on almost everything else, you know? Yeah. And it's, you know, it's a, it's so hard wired. It's really hard to undo. It takes a lot of work. There was a study in 2017

of intuitive eating among retired female athletes. And they said they felt very liberated. And when they, you know, made that shift to food freedom, for lack of a better term, but they said it, quote, necessitated an effortful process of recalibration during which athletes had to relearn and reinterpret their body's physiological signals of hunger and satiety. So like I was saying earlier, how that, you know, you've, you lose these signals from when you were a baby that you, a lot of work has to go into relearning those signals. And these are from these female athletes of, and this isn't necessarily the same thing, but there's a big movement now among former NFL players to get their health back into shape. And there's a long list

of these men who have come out saying the NFL, like kills you, the weight that you have to keep on, the amount of food that you have to eat to be, you know, an offensive or defensive lineman. And the before and after pictures of some of these guys that were like six, four, three, 20 on the offensive line that are now like six, four to 25 is unbelievable. And they're just like, I've never felt better in my life and I can walk around now and I don't feel like I'm, you know, carrying a sled behind me because the NFL is just like, no man, you got to, you got to weigh 325 pounds if you want to be on the line. Yeah. And then I think also the opposite way is for people who are in sports and have to be

severely calorie restricted, you're basically taught to have an eating disorder that you have to unlearn when you stop playing sports too. So it kind of goes both ways. I think the key here is for everybody, for athletes, for everyday people, for people who are overweight, underweight, the cross that all of us are bearing, if you'll allow me to get a little religious in my metaphors here, is that we all have to stop being so obsessed with food and how we look in our weight. And it's just, we're all, almost all of us are on the same road together and it's good to remember that we're on it together, traveling together and let's stop squabbling with one another. I definitely honor my hunger.

You got anything else? I got nothing else. Okay. Thank you for listening, everybody. We hope this helped. We hope it didn't set anybody off. If it did, email us, let us know. We apologize in advance. That was definitely not our intent. And since we said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this axe murder and family or axe murdered family. Hey, you guys are the best. Stumbled upon your matcha. That ain't just T podcast a few weeks ago and have been down to stuff you should know rabbit hole ever since. Well, welcome to the show, Jenny.

Yeah. Welcome. Love hearing about new listeners, right? Most recently, I've been really into your shows about axe murderers. They're fascinating. And get this, I've discovered that members of my own family were killed by an axe murderer or two in the 1800s. Wow. There's a whole book about it titled Murder Along the Musconic Kong, I thought it was more. They're called The Infamous Changewater Massacres of 1843.

The Castner family, which is my family line, was sleeping one night when two men who were attempting to rob them came in and murdered the mother, uncle and two year old sister with axes. They had lured the father outside, killed him and threw him in a ditch right before that. What's amazing is that there were two survivors, little JP and his older brother Victor, who were asleep on a cot behind the doorway. The murderers had no clue the boys were there and they were left unharmed and slept through the whole thing at six and 10 years old. What's interesting is that I'm not sure if the two men convicted were killers. Were the killers? More than two other men were originally arrested, so it's kind of sketchy.

You guys should check it out. Thanks for all you do. You're a comfort, especially during the strange season. That is from Jenny Farnan. Thanks, Jenny. That's awesome. We're probably just farning. I like Farnan, the destroyer, the matcha drinker. Thanks, Jenny. We appreciate you listening. Can you imagine those two boys, six and 10, being like, hey, who's up for pancake when they wake up? Is it too soon? It's an 1834 murder, Chuck. And the other one says, no, I'd rather have waffle. Oh boy, we'll probably edit this part out a little bit. Yeah, we might cut this,

but if we don't, you guys can let us know how much we suck. Write to us via email at stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack

and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio

app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.