Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 401: How to Embrace the Anti-Diet | Christy Harrison

Episode Date: December 1, 2021

This episode is the second in our two-part Anti-Diet Series, and features guest Christy Harrison. Christy is an anti-diet registered dietitian and nutritionist, a certified intuitive eating counselor, and a certified eating disorders specialist who has struggled with disordered eating herself. She has come out the other side and written a book called Anti-Diet, and in this episode, she discusses how to transform your relationship with food and your body.This conversation explores Christy’s personal experience with disordered eating, the problems with and deep historical roots of diet culture, the scientific evidence against dieting, and the principles of intuitive eating.Content warning: This conversation touches on sensitive topics such as eating disorders and body image, some of which might carry an emotional charge for some listeners.   Christy is also the instructor in our brand-new Anti-Diet Challenge over in the Ten Percent Happier app. This seven-day challenge helps you build a better relationship with food and your body and is backed by science and supercharged with meditation.The Anti-Diet Challenge kicks off on Monday, December 6 in the Ten Percent Happier app. If you’re not already a Ten Percent Happier subscriber, you can join us by starting a free trial that’ll give you access to the challenge, along with our entire app. Click here to get started.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/christy-harrison-401See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, one of the things that happens to a lot of people when they start meditating and it definitely happened to me is that you might become more aware of your thoughts. And as you become more aware of your thoughts, you may notice that many of them are venomously self-critical. You might notice this background swirl of judgments and worries and regrets that can make your life a lot more miserable than it has to be. Again, I'm speaking from genuine personal experience here.

Oftentimes, some of the most pernicious and most harmful thoughts revolve around our relationship to food and our bodies. Long time listeners may have heard me say this before and I think this is something more men should say out loud. But I often find myself in spirals of self-laceration when I walk past a reflective surface, especially if I'm wearing a bathing suit, for example. The visible abs I prided my cell phone back in my 30s are not here anymore, and the thoughts that follow this observation can be pretty nasty. And my inner weather can have outer consequences.

Maybe I start fanatically counting my calories or maybe I'm so caught up in obsessing over food that I'm barely president, meal time, or maybe I get so into the habit of beating myself up that I extend that aggression to other people in my orbit. So all that is the bad news. The good news is that there's a way out of this, at least in my experience, hence the two-part series we're doing on the show this week, which we're calling the anti-diet series.

This is episode two, by the way, if you haven't heard the first episode with the actress, Jamila Jamil, I highly recommend you check it out because she's amazing. Today's guest argues that the dysregulation I just described inside my own head isn't just common, it lives in just about all of us, but also that it has a common source, which she calls diet culture.

What's more, she says there's another better way to interact with our food. It's called intuitive eating. I should say this is something I've been practicing personally for a couple of years now, and to use an overused phrase, it has genuinely changed my life. My guest today is Christy Harrison. She's an anti-diet registered dietitian and nutritionist, a certified intuitive eating counselor, and a certified eating disorder specialist who has struggled with disordered eating herself.

She's come out the other side of it, and she's written a book called Anti-Diet and today she's here to talk about how to transform your relationship with food and your body. In this interview we talk about Christie's personal experience with eating disorders, the problem with diet culture, the deep historical roots of diet culture, the scientific evidence against dieting, and then the principles of intuitive eating. Just a few notes before we go for it. This conversation, as you might imagine, touches on some sensitive topics such as eating disorders, body image. Some of these issues may carry an emotional charge for some listeners, so just a heads up

on that. On an audio tip, you may also hear a tiny bit of airplane noise in the distant background at certain moments. That's what happens when you record remotely during a pandemic. Also, you may notice that Christie's voice at times is a tiny bit breathy. That's not because she's nervous. It's because she was very pregnant when we recorded this. By the way, if you like what you hear today, I've got another bit of good news.

We've tapped Christie to be the instructor in our brand new anti-diet challenge over on the 10% happier app. In this seven-day challenge, we're going to help you build a better relationship with food and your body. The approach is backed by science and supercharged with meditation. In this challenge, Christie and I are going to talk through the principles of intuitive eating in a series of short videos, and then after the video is complete, Kristi will lead you in a guided audio meditation to actually kind of pound the lessons of intuitive eating into your neurons. The Anti-Diet Challenge kicks off on Monday, December 6th, to join.

Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps by visiting 10%.com that's all one word spelled out. If you already have the app, just open it up and follow the instructions. If you're not already a 10% happier subscriber, you can join us by starting a free trial that will give you access to the challenge along with our entire app. If I'm honest, if you had pitched me this idea of transforming my relationship to food 10 years ago, I wouldn't have just discounted it. I probably would have told you that I didn't need any kind of reset at all. But I also, as is often the case, would have been entirely wrong. So I really do hope you'll consider joining us for this one, the stuff that

Christi teaches has had a huge impact on me. We will get started with Christy Harrison right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do. What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits

without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonical, and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos, to access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. All one word spelled out.

Okay, on experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Christy Harrison, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Dan. It's great to be here. It's great to see you again. We had a lot of fun to the show. Thanks so much, Dan. It's great to be here. It's great to see you again. We had a lot of fun recording the challenge. It's nice to get together once again.

You know, we didn't get to talk that much about it while we were recording the challenge. So I'd love to hear a little bit more, if you're comfortable, about how you went through a period of time where your relationship to food and body image was, I think the term of art here is disordered. Are you comfortable talking about that?

Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, my background is that I actually was intuitive eater growing up. I had a really peaceful relationship with food. I was fortunate and privileged really to have enough food growing up. So we never had that food insecurity piece interfering in my relationship with food. And I was always in a smaller body, so I never had anyone telling me I needed to lose weight, putting me on a diet.

So I was able to sort of have that intuitive relationship with food that we're all born with that lasted until I was about 20 years old, actually. And so I was able to eat when I was hungry, stop when I was full, eat what satisfied me, figure out what that was, just sort of discover foods that I liked and make my own snacks when I got old enough. So it was a really lucky sort of upbringing, I think, because a lot of people don't get that. But when I was 20, I went and studied abroad in Paris and gained a little bit of weight was there. I had switched birth control pills,

so I think that was part of it and also just all the baguettes and the cheese, you know, delicious. So I gained some weight and then suddenly, like everything that I had been hearing about diets and the need to lose weight and how you lose weight and calories. All that just sort of came rushing to the fore because I had grown up around it.

I had grown up around people who were dieting and talking about that stuff. Even though it was never imposed on me, it was sort of like filed away in the archives ready for me when I did gain some weight. Pretty quickly I started restricting what I was eating, started exercising to try to lose weight and got into some pretty disordered stuff fairly quickly because it was the early days of the internet.

This was like 2001, 2002, not the earliest days, but the early days of being able to Google something and find a message board about it. And so I got into calorie counting, I got into atkins, which was sort of becoming a big trend in the US at the time. And when I got home from my study abroad, it was really like in it with diaculture. And pretty quickly tumbled into what I now know was a diagnosable eating disorder. I never actually got diagnosed at the time, but I was in this pretty toxic relationship

with food in my body of restricting under eating during the day, often binging at night. And the binges would sort of get more and more intense, the more I restricted, and then over exercising to try to compensate and then wash rinse repeat basically the next day and the next day and the next. And through months of that sort of pattern, I developed a lot of other symptoms, a lot of health problems as well.

I lost my period for about a year. I was going from doctor to doctor, trying to figure out what was going on. It's having a lot of digestive issues, fatigue, brain fog. And when you have nebulous issues like that, I think especially with hormonal stuff going on too, even back then, even, I guess this was probably now 2002. There was a lot of wellness stuff out there, alternative medicine suggestions of like,

oh, cut out gluten, cut out this, try this herb, go to a natural path, all these different things. And so it was definitely sort of in that mode of just trying different alternative modalities, trying different diets, but also still going to a lot of Western doctors and trying to figure out what was going on, different specialists, and nobody could tell me,

this is I think in retrospect what weight stigma really does to people who are struggling with food and body issues, because as I mentioned, I've always been in a relatively thin body, but I was never quote unquote thin enough by eyes, I guess. I was never emaciated. So people didn't suspect me of having a needing disorder and didn't really ask, like, well, could this issue with your period or these other symptoms be due to food and what's going on with your relationship with food? Like, are you eating enough? How is your relationship with exercise? What are you doing?

Are you taking enough days off? Are you pushing yourself beyond your limits? I think if people had started asking me those questions, I might have still been in denial that I had a problem, but at least perhaps it could have planted a seed. But as it was, I just didn't really get that sort of support. And I knew something was wrong, but I sort of just was struggling on my own to figure it out.

And so that was all at the beginning of my career as a journalist. And so at the time, I was so obsessed with food and nutrition and health that those were the beats I gravitated towards. And that's what I sort of built my career around. And so I started working in a different magazines and food media, environmental magazines as well. And was really just kind of obsessed with sustainability and the Michael Pollan sort of style of eating, like eat food not too much mostly plants, that kind of thing. But that was actually before that book even came out, it was like the omnivores dilemma,

which was kind of all about eating local, as low on the food chain as possible, sort of the problems with the food system, all of that stuff I was really obsessed with. And so I think that sort of drove me further actually into one part of my eating disorder, which was orthorexia, like the obsession with healthy eating, the obsession with eating in a sort of clean and pure way. But I also had some really positive influences, I think, too, from an old boyfriend who was kind of a foodie, like to go on food adventures and expose me to a lot of different kinds of foods and made me feel like I had to be more adventurous and not as restrictive.

So that was one thing I think that helped pull me out of the most restrictive and problematic behaviors of my eating disorder. And then continuing to work in food media and eventually ending up at Gourmet magazine, I think was helpful in starting to come out of that. But the real turning point, I think, for me was discovering the book into a dev eating by Evelyn, Tribbling and Elise Ration. I know you had Evelyn on the podcast before, and she's a friend of both of ours and just wonderful person. And I discovered the book because I was starting to research my own book that I never ended up writing about emotional eating, because at the time I identified as an emotional eater, it felt like, you know, I'm just out of control with food. Whenever I get access to certain foods, I just eat them in this emotional way where I can't stop and what's the deal with that? What are the origins of that? And

so through that research, I discovered intuitive eating. I brought that into my own therapy with a therapist who was really more specialized in anxiety, somatic experiencing, sensory motors likeotherapy and a lot of mindfulness. And so that's where I really first discovered meditation and self-compassion. And I think intuitive eating just sort of plugged right in with those practices and made a lot of sense to me, both as someone who had been an intuitive eater growing up and sort of practiced that for 20 years in my life and as someone who is newly discovering self-compassion and meditation and mindfulness like it just really resonated with where I was. Note to the listener, we're going to take a deep dive into what exactly intuitive eating is

and how to do it. But we're on the line here with somebody who's really interesting and I want to stay with some sort of background issues before we dive into the practicality. Christie, in your book the quality. Christie in your book, Anti-Diet, you talk about the diet culture and its pernicious impacts. You listed a bunch of aspects of the diet culture that some listeners may feel like, well, doesn't seem that bad, but that ends or not having too much gluten or eating healthy food. What's the problem there? So what is the problem there? What's your beef with the diet culture? Yeah, I think my beef with diet culture

is that it really interferes in people's relationships with food. It makes them so overwrought and also makes people feel like they need to sort of follow an outside guru or plan or program or something other than trusting their own inner wisdom. Intuitive eating has gentle nutrition as one of its 10 principles, and we'll talk about that, I'm sure. A bit, so it's not like nutrition is not at all a part of intuitive eating,

but intuitive eating is really this peaceful, easy relationship with food, where you're not overthinking things, where you are able to trust your instincts, your bodily cues, your desires, following your sense of pleasure and satisfaction, through this process of sort of getting obsessed with health and nutrition, I realize just how much discourse around those things is really problematic, is really harmful to people actually. It takes them so out of this ability to trust themselves, makes them feel so guilty and ashamed and wrong and bad for eating what feels pleasurable, what feels satisfying,

for eating when they're hungry, right? Because when you're following a diet, and really, when I say diet, it's sort of like even just loosely quote- unquote, watching it. You don't have to be on a specific plan or program or protocol or whatever. You can just be trying to eat healthy by diet culture standards. I think what often happens is people do get restricted. They get deprived of enough energy, of enough calories overall.

And they also get deprived of the variety and the sort of fun foods that they love, and the culturally relevant foods oftentimes too. And so with that deprivation, what happens is we get into this sort of cycle where the deprivation builds up to such a high degree that we then sort of give in. We have to eat all the food or we have to eat the food that was once forbidden and off limits. So we see this sort of deprivation, driving people to then consume to the point, often of discomfort. I don't like to use the term overeat, but I say more like rebound eating or makeup eating because it's really eating to make up for the deprivation you've been experiencing. And so when that happens, we then paradoxically end up eating more of those forbidden foods, end up eating more food overall,

then we might have if we had just been free and easy with food and allowing ourselves to have as much as we want, whatever we want, you know, with some consideration, perhaps, of nutrition and health, but having that kind of take its natural perspective, having that be not the be-all and end-all of our relationships with food. Is it correct to say that there's conclusive evidence that diets do not work? Yeah, there definitely is really strong evidence that diets don not work. Yeah, there definitely is really strong evidence that diets don't work.

And when I say don't work, what I really mean is in the long term, right? Because I think most people would agree if they're doing some sort of intervention that's supposed to be helpful for their health, they don't want it to work, quote unquote, just for a year or two, or maybe three or four,

or they don't want it to be something where they're six months on, six months off, cycling back and forth. They want it to be sustainable. They want it to be something that's actually going to help them long-term. And unfortunately, with diets, we just don't see that that's the case. We just don't see them being sustainable or helpful or health promoting in the long-term. In fact, most diets fail within a year to five years. Actually, the sort of lowest point of anyone's weight loss with a diet is usually between six months in a year. And then they end up putting the weight back on slowly

over the next four years or so. If not, some people don't even lose weight to begin with on a diet, right? Some people, their bodies are really good. It's sort of defending their natural set weight range and they just won't budge. Research actually shows that up to two thirds of people regain more weight than they lost on a diet.

And again, when I say diet, it's like, could be a quote unquote lifestyle change. It doesn't have to be like specifically, you know, atkins or keto or weight watchers or doom or one of the newer ones, you know. And I will say too that this weight cycling that people do when they go on diets is actually really harmful to health in and of itself. So regardless of what weight you started out, the more you weight cycle, the more you lose and regain, lose and regain, lose and regain, wherever you started out, wherever you end cycle, the more you lose and regain, lose and regain, lose and regain,

wherever you start it out, wherever you end up, it's actually riskier for your health to cycle like that than it is to stay the same weight, even if that weight is a higher weight. So, there's a lot of evidence that weight cycling actually puts people at higher risk of a lot of the things that get blamed on weight itself, like heart disease, diabetes, certain forms of cancer, early mortality, that actually a lot of that could be explained by just weight cycling. And weight stigma is a separate thing. It's discrimination against higher weight people. And experiencing weight stigma also puts people at higher risk of those things that tend to get blamed on weight itself. And so when we

think about that, the fact that weight science doesn't control for weight stigma and weight cycling, I've really almost never seen a study that controls for those things unless it's a study that's specifically looking at weight stigma and weight cycling and the effects of those. And what if we lived in a society where higher weight people did not feel compelled to go on diets, did not feel compelled to shrink their bodies, did not feel discriminated against, and bullied and shamed for the size and shape of their bodies. Like, how much healthier could people actually be? That's where my approach comes in now with intuitive eating, which is really an approach grounded and health at every size,

which looks at how can we help people of all sizes improve their well-being, engage in health-promoting behaviors without having to try to lose weight and going on these futile weight cycles. Like I said, we're going to talk a lot about the blocking and tackling of intuitive eating, coming up. But I do want to stay at the level of context setting for a minute, because another thing you talk about in your book is the roots of diet culture. Where did this all come from? Where are hunter gatherer or forebears on the savanna, striving to achieve ketosis and

judging each other based on whether they had visible abs? Where did this come from? Yeah, it's really interesting. I think it has a very modern context, actually. We do not see weight loss as a goal or even thinness as a beauty ideal, really, in most societies around the world, until the 19th century, really, like, when it really started to set in, you know, in ancient Greece, the word diet actually comes from the ancient Greek diet, which is like the ancient Greek word for, really, it translates more as regime. A lot of people translate it as lifestyle or way of life,

but actually it's more like regime or regimen. It's like the eating and exercise practices you're supposed to follow for well-being, and they also include bathing and sexual practices and stuff. But when focusing specifically on food and diet, it was really interesting to see the rhetoric around people who followed the correct diet prescribed by ancient Greek doctors were considered to be good-upstanding Greeks and the people who did not follow that diet were described using terms like they're like

animals or they're like barbarians because they're not following the correct regimen. And so that's where we first started to see a little bit of judgment being placed on what people ate. And body size was sort of wrapped up in that too, but it wasn't to the extent that it is today. It was sort of like, balance was the ideal that was being aimed for. And if someone was, quote, unquote, too heavy or too small, that was seen as sort of a health defect,

or an aesthetic defect, and the goal was seen as sort of a health defect or an aesthetic defect and the goal was to be sort of in the middle, but actually like the body ideal was certainly larger than it is today. But there was this sort of, you know, middle of the road kind of body image ideal. But we really started to see weight loss be something that people strived for or weight loss be something that people strive for or a thinner body be the ideal in the 19th century, like the mid-1800s. And that's when there's a sort of confluence of factors like the industrial revolution and people starting to work in cities and have more sedentary jobs. And there is mass production of clothing where people had to start fitting into standard sizes

as opposed to having clothes tailored made for them. So suddenly, there was all this sort of angst around, like, what is all this modern life doing to people? What is the transition from farming to office or factory work doing to people, really, is more factory work, I think, back then, with that, there was also, like, separately, sort of the rise of evolutionary biology as a discipline. And there's a lot of pre-existing racist beliefs, of course, at that point, that there

was supposed hierarchy of races that white, northern European men were the closest thing to God, you know, the closest sort of beings to the divine, and that white, northern European women were kind of a step down, and that southern European folks, men, and then women were step down, and that people of color from various parts of the world were lower and lower on this, suppose, at hierarchy. And when evolution came on the scene, there was sort of this adoption of that pre-existing hierarchical notion of races, but now it was being used to say white northern European men are the most evolved, right? They're the furthest along in the evolutionary chain. Obviously, this is all very political and sort of motivated by the

people in power wanting to retain their power. And believing that people from sub-Saharan Africa were like among the lowest on the evolutionary ladder, conveniently justifying slavery, right? So, you know, with that, the sort of evolutionary idea about the different races, there was also this emphasis on cataloging different parts of the body and body sizes and shapes for people around the world.

And they started imposing this idea that sub-Saharan Africans or people of color in general were larger-bodied, and that women also were also in general larger-bodied. And so therefore, larger-bodiedness was not ideal, was something that took you away from the sort of evolutionary ideal of white, northern European man who was deemed to be thin and closest to God and closest to sort of the evolutionary perfectedness of the human being. So we started to see these racist ideals come into play really heavily in the 1900s as well. There's a really good book about this called Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings, which I definitely recommend for anyone who wants to really geek out about this subject, but it really started to

become clear that there was very explicit recommendations for white women to become thinner or to lose weight or to not allow themselves to gain too much weight in order to not appear like African women or Irish women, interestingly, who were sort of demonized at the time as well. And so it was like, don't be like those African and Irish women. Be thin, be a proper Protestant American lady. And so all of that discourse was very above board. And it's interesting because of that discourse was very above board. And it's interesting because it all sort of fed into the creation of the diet industry, you know, products and programs that were designed to make people lose weight or supposedly make people lose weight because they really didn't work long-term or oftentimes work at all. And so the diet industry really started to take off in the early 1900s and 1920s.

It was booming and it's just sort of continued a pace since then. It's continued to grow by leaps and bounds every decade. But the sort of racist roots of it and the explicitness of that, I think, has been obscured in the subsequent decades. Now it's seen as being about health. And that really wasn't the case at the beginning. Doctors really had no interest in helping people lose weight at the beginning and actually thought that it was mere vanity taking away the doctor's attention for more important things that they could be focusing on.

That's a whole other story too of how the healthcare industry started to get interested in weight loss. But I'll just pause there, because this could be a whole other story too of how the healthcare industry started to get interested in weight loss, but I'll just pause there because this could be a whole separate book. Well, I know you're working on a separate book about the wellness industrial complex, and you write a little bit in anti-diet about how the diet industry is kind of sneaking into areas that we don't think of as being the diet industry. We think of it more as wellness.

Right. Totally. Yeah, it's so fascinating to see like how the diet industry has shape shifted and now cloaks itself in this disguise of wellness. And the wellness culture as I'm kind of exploring in this book, the second book, goes beyond just food and diet. There's all these other practices and sort of alternative medicine spaces and supplements that are part of wellness culture as well.

But I think food and exercise are really central to it. The ideal of wellness that's sort of pervasive in our culture really is a very thin ideal. And it's also typically white and wealthy and young and all of these things. It's a very oppressive sort of ideal. But in terms of how the diet and industry has sort of shapeshifted into wellness, I think that's a really fascinating story too

because really around the 1980s and 90s, we started to see this radical shift like away from the low fat craze, which had dominated over to the low-carb craze, and subsequent disillusionment, I think, on the part of many people in the public, with diets in general, because I think there was this moment of realization of, wow, everything we've been told about food and nutrition and diets and how to lose weight, maybe it was wrong. Maybe these decades of low-fat dominance, you know, at the time I remember thinking too and having conversations with people about this.

Like, we've been totally led astray. Like, the low-fat, sort of high carbohydrate stuff that we've been eating has actually probably made us gain more weight. And oh my god, what have we been doing? And I think that was maybe the start of sort of planting seeds for a lot of people that nutrition science isn't necessarily infallible or always trustworthy or that diets don't necessarily work, right?

That the low fat diet didn't actually produce lasting weight loss for the vast majority of people. Now we know 20 years into the low fat diet didn't actually produce lasting weight loss for the vast majority of people. Now we know 20 years into the low carb, sort of phenomenon that low carb diets also don't produce lasting weight loss for the vast majority of people. Again, this is something that has maybe short-term effects, but is not the long-term sustainable solution that people are looking for to help their well-being. And so the diet industry, which by that point was a multi-billion dollar industry, I think started looking for ways to differentiate itself. Diet companies started looking for ways to differentiate themselves from the stuff that was seen not to work,

or the stuff that was sort of being questioned. And so the rhetoric started to become, you know, this is not any other diet you've tried, this is different. Here's why this is different. And one of the big reasons for that they said was like, this is about your health. Helping you be the healthiest version of yourself. You need to lose weight for your health. There was also sort of like a rise in anti-obesity rhetoric, and I use the word obesity with big air quotes around it, because it's a really stigmatizing term. But around the 1990s to the early 2000s,

there was this sort of trumping up of beliefs about so-called obesity that it was a disease, that it was an epidemic. You know, in the term obesity epidemic started to be used. First in scientific journals and CDC reports, and they had these maps that they started using. I'm sure you've probably, everybody's seen those maps by now of like obesity rates in the United States, you know, showing the map filling in and getting redder and redder over the years to indicate the growing percentage of people in each state that was in the so-called obese BMI category.

With that, suddenly journalists started covering that. News media jumped all over it. There were these surge in news stories using the rhetoric of the so-called obesity epidemic, where it went from almost zero to hundreds of stories within a matter of a couple years. And so I think that's when this idea of weight and health really became linked in the public imagination

in a way that they never were before, where it became this sense of a public health emergency. Like, oh my God, we have to do something about America's growing wasteland. And with that, the pressure on people to lose weight, who were higher weight, who were maybe in that so-called obese category, but also on people who weren't, on people who were worried that maybe they would get there, or have been told by their doctors that they were in danger of being so-called overweight. I think all of that sort of created this mass panic for a lot of people in a sense of,

okay, we really need to take our health seriously, we really need to do something to get healthier. And what is that? Oh, it's lose weight. But now it was not just about looks, it wasn't just this aesthetic concern. It felt like a matter of life and death. Much more of my conversation with Christy Harrison, right after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle. And we're the host of Wunderies New Podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build-up, why it happened, and the repercussions.

What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lins lack of public support. It angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed

to fight for Britney. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Really appreciate all that context, super fascinating. Now that we've laid that groundwork, let's talk about intuitive eating. What is intuitive eating? Let's talk about intuitive eating. What is intuitive eating? So intuitive eating is, I always say, the default mode. It's that really easy, peaceful relationship with food that we're all born with, where we honor our hunger, we feel our fullness, we trust our sense of satisfaction and pleasure.

We're able to enjoy our food and really not second guess our choices with food and not feel guilty or ashamed or stigmatized for our food choices. That's the mode that I would love to see everyone be able to get back into in relating to food in their bodies, to just have that peaceful, self-compassionate, easy, free relationship with food where it doesn't take up so much headspace, where it's maybe a thought in your day, maybe you have to think about what to make and what to eat, but that it's not an obsession, it's not something that's requiring a ton of planning or self-abnigation or deprivation that you're able to actually enjoy food and be flexible with food and be present with people and connect over food, have food as a part of celebrations and pleasure, as well as being used for energy and fuel. There's so much to talk about here. I think one way to get us deeper into the wise and

whereforage and how's is to play a little clip from our conversation from the anti-diet challenge that we're going to be running on the 10% happier app. And this first clip is about ending the war with food. So let's listen to that and then we'll talk a little bit on the other side of it. We're going to talk about ending the war with food. Christy, what does that mean? Yeah, so ending the war with food really means giving yourself unconditional full permission to eat, whatever you want, not just as much as you want, but whatever types of foods

you want. Knowing that there's no such thing as good or bad foods, food doesn't have any morality, attached to it, and that you're self-worth, you're worth as a person, is not tied to what you eat. Isn't there evidence, though, that there are foods that are healthier than other foods? So a salad is objectively healthier than a cupcake, no? Nutrition is important certainly, and there are nutritional differences in types of foods.

So, you know, we'll get there with intuitive eating. Gentle nutrition is the last principle of intuitive eating for a reason, really, because if you rush nutrition, if you rush into thinking about those kinds of things, you end up kind of back in the diet culture mindset and the diet mentality that we're trying to get away from. When you deprive people of something, it really does become the forbidden fruit that tastes the sweetest.

There's actually evidence that people who've been deprived of chocolatey foods for a week have greater cravings for chocolate at the end of that week, and that response is actually higher in the people who are diners prior to the study, so, you know, dieting in and of itself also increases cravings. So you're not saying throw out all nutrition, throw out all science, just that we should have gentle nutrition because if we get too rigid around it, that's where we can get a little dysregulated. Exactly.

It's the rigidity that's the problem because the rigidity really keeps us, you know, striving to get it right. This perfectionism with eating that, you know, ultimately keeps us from finding balance. So we're back now on the podcast conversation. Christie, as I understand it, you're calling for a paradigm shift here from self-control to self-care. That's right. That's right.

I always say, you know, a peaceful relationship with food is based on self-care, not self-control. And really, I think that taking care of yourself with food means, yes, of course, paying attention, some attention to nutrition, and especially if you have medical issues that warrant it, but also paying attention to pleasure, having the ability to be flexible with food, honoring your hunger, not depriving yourself, allowing yourself to eat to fullness and satisfaction, and not getting so caught up in the minutia of nutrition. You know, really, gentle nutrition is so much less detailed and so much less full of minutia than the nutrition people have learned in diaculture. Counting calories or macros or thinking about carbohydrates

or points or, you know, all the different things, all the different numbers that different diets have thrown at us over the years. Or thinking about good and bad foods, you know, that sort of wellness culture style of eating that demonizes certain foods and elevates others. That's very much a hallmark of diet culture, too. And within intuitive eating, we're saying to just let all that go, right? Stop approaching food as numbers or as points or as, you know, macros or things to be broken down and calculated. We have to have the flexibility and the autonomy really to choose what we want to eat and to be able to eat according to our desires and our sense of pleasure and satisfaction.

In addition to thinking about what's going to make my body feel good. I know you hear this all the time and this was my beef. When I first met Evelyn Tribalai who you discussed before, she's one of the progenitors of this notion of this approach called intuitive eating. If you go back and listen to that podcast, I think it was January of 2020, I believe. You can hear me. I go in super skeptical by the end. I'm utterly converted and actually have been working

personally one-on-one with Evelyn since I was completely changed my approach to eating and my approach to, you know, how I talk about food with my son too. But what one of the skeptical notes I was hitting in that interview, which I know you hear all the time is, wait a minute, if you tell me there are no good foods and no bad foods, I can eat whatever I want,

whenever I want them, well, I'm just gonna have my face in an Oreo box forever. Right. Yeah. And that is a phase that people sometimes go through. I sometimes call that the honeymoon phase with particular types of foods, right? That you're so excited to have access to those foods again,

that that's all you want, that it's, you know, you want to be with those foods 24, seven, like the honeymoon phase of a relationship or something. And that also it's part of what I call the restriction pendulum, where when you've been restricted, when you're sort of pulled over to the side of restriction, there's this other side of the pendulum that you swing to that's sort of make up eating or rebound eating. You can't just sort of expect to settle in the middle at a place of peace when you've been really pulled over

to the side of restriction, because physics doesn't work like that with a pendulum, and our bodies don't work like that either. So I think it's definitely really scary, and I want to empathize with the fear that that can bring up of, oh my God, I'm going to never eat anything but Oreos again or whatever your food of choice is that was maybe previously forbidden.

And I'm living proof that you can get to the other side of that, that that's not forever, that you can actually have those foods in your house for months sometimes and not feel like you have to dive to the bottom of the box, like foods that I thought I could never keep in the house when I was in my disorder eating days are now regular parts of my everyday menu and in my pantry for as long as they want to be sometimes for months. And not that that's a badge of honor, right, to not eat the food either, because that's just turning into a deviating into a diet as well to say, oh yeah, into a deviating, I'm

going to into a deviator and I just never want this stuff. Like, sometimes you genuinely won't want it, but in a lot of cases, you do still want the foods that were previously forbidden and then you sort of had the honeymoon phase with. You still eat them, but you're just not eating them in this sort of frenzied or compulsive or like someone who's just crawled through the desert and sees water sort of way. It's a much more balanced, low-key kind of take it or leave it sort of way that you relate to those foods. So, the trickiest food for me has always been sugar. My parents were quite restrictive when it came to sugar.

I had awesome parents, so I don't want to vilify them in any way. They were and are phenomenal, but they were physicians themselves. They were following the evidence, which is that too much sugar for kids is probably not a great idea, or at least the conventional wisdom, let's say. And so I fetishized it as I grew older. And even as a grown-up, I would just kind of eat so much that I would feel awful. I'd be unable to sleep and then I feel terrible the next day. And because I felt terrible and was run down, it would actually kind of put me in the mood

to eat more because it made me feel better. And so I would get in these stupid cycles. And it was just boring to think about all the time. And to a large extent, I have broken out of it, but I can still find myself. You know, often I won't eat it because, you know, like right now, somebody came in here with a jar of Skittles,

I would actually wouldn't be a problem right now. But like, just say it 8.30 at night, somebody came in with with a jar of skittles, I would actually wouldn't be a problem right now, but like just say at 8.30 at night somebody came in with a bunch of candy or some cookies. I would want it and if I ate it, I would actually be unable to sleep. So now I am doing a little bit of restriction in that at 8.30 at night. I'm not going to have a bunch of candy even if I want it because I know how bad it's going to make me feel. And sometimes in those moments, I feel like I'm not going to have a bunch of candy even if I want it because I know how bad it's going to make me feel. And sometimes in those moments, I feel like I'm not really doing intuitive eating correctly. Yeah, it's so tricky, right? Like I think the intention is really what it comes down to. And intention can be so complicated sometimes.

So I think, you know, the intention of self-care, right? I'm hearing you say that there's a real intention of self-care there. And I think that's definitely in line with intuitive eating. Like I said, self-care, not self-control, right? But is there also a flavor of self-control? Is there also some sense of like, this is bad? Not just, I'll feel bad if I eat this, and so I genuinely don't want it. But like, I'll be bad if I eat this, and so I genuinely don't want it, but I'll be bad if I eat this, and so I shouldn't have it. Because I think if that's there, not that there's a right or wrong with intuitive eating,

because intuitive eating is about sort of experimentation and figuring out what works for you, not following these black and white right or wrong sort of rules, but to the extent that that maybe sense of self-control is still there, would it feel more intuitive, would it feel more sort of expansive and self-compassionate and just in line with your other values maybe if you sort of were able to let go of that last little vestige of self-control and just sort of really approach it

from self-care. Because when I think about sort of equivalence to that in my life, like right now I'm pregnant, seven months pregnant, and I've actually had acid reflux or gird since my disordered eating days, I think that's when it first appeared, when I was first diagnosed, and it's really kind of come and gone since then even after after recovering from disorder eating with stress

or with wearing too tight clothes or having pressure on my stomach, as I do now with a baby. So it's gotten really bad. The heartburn in the last couple months has just been pretty gnarly. And so there's lots of foods that I typically love that I now look at.

And I'm kind of like, oh, I don't want that. Like that doesn't sound good to me because I know what it's going to do. I know the feeling it's going to create. And that sort of come about through trial and error, through like being like, I can eat whatever I want. I can eat, I'll eat this. I don't want to trigger anyone by saying particular foods.

But I'll eat X food and it'll be fine. And then it's like two pepsids later and I'm like, oh my god, what have I done? Or what happened? I can't I eat this food that I typically was able to eat with no problem right before. And so now it's sort of an embodied experience actually. It's the sense of like, that really doesn't sound good.

And it's a visceral kind of full body thing. It doesn't feel like it's coming from my head. It doesn't feel like it's a war between what I want and what I feel like I should have. It's just, yeah, okay, I'm going to not have that. And that does not say that that happens every single time, right? Like when I was at my baby shower and they had this delicious cake for me, I was like, well, cake probably isn't gonna sit very well, but it's my baby shower.

My husband's aunt went to great trouble to get this delicious cake, and so I'm gonna have it. And I had a little harbor in afterwards, but it was fine. So it's not to say that you have to kind of follow your body's cues at all costs, or that you can't choose something different sometimes too. Just thinking about that sense of like an embodied no versus a no to a particular food that's coming from your head or from a place of like I shouldn't do this.

And is there a corresponding, warring part of you that's like, but I want it. Because I think that's where maybe it's a little less intuitive and still coming more from that place of self-control, if that makes sense. It does. I don't want to dwell too much on my own personal story here, but just to close the loop on it. I actually don't have the story anymore that sugar is bad. I don't stop myself from eating it because I think it's, I don't like the whatever ramifications it might have on my waistline or that it's going to violate some rules of some diet somewhere.

So I don't actually, I used to, but I don't anymore. Evelyn has liberated me from that. But it does take some self control, 8.30 at 9 o'clock and I'm tired. We have plenty of candy around the house. My wife had the very wise intuition that Keeping it around and not making it forbidden for my son would have Positive impacts as she was right. My son does not fetishize candy in any way So I see some candy as I'm watching TV or reading a book and I want it I'm not thinking that it's evil, but there is some self-control

required to remember this is going to have ramifications that will be unpleasant for you and compound for you into the next day. So intellectually, I kind of talk myself out of it. So anyways, I say that just to close the loop on it, but to get away from me for a second and to really address people who are listening who are new to intuitive eating. Can you talk on the most basic sort of blocking and tackling level? What is different in the mind of an intuitive eater in a meal? How are you approaching the meal differently than the rest of us?

Such a good question. I think the first word that comes to mind is just ease. Like there's just so much more ease with it. There's so much more of a sense of like not a big deal. This is food, maybe I'm excited about it, maybe it smells good or maybe I'm curious, but wary, you know, it's a new food that I've never tried before and someone else made it

or, you know, there might be other sort of feelings going on, right, about the food and about the meal, but there's not this sense of guilt or the self-control that goes into when you're a dieter sitting down to a meal. It's like, oh, I'm going to eat this, but I'm not going to eat that. I'm only going to have half of this. I'm going to set this portion aside to take home with me, whatever little rules that you've picked of picked up along the way in diaculture. There's just not that sort of sense of calculation of intellectualizing with it. It's much more of a, I guess, again, embodied experience, right, where it's like, this smells

good. What are the flavors? You know, how hungry am I? How much do I want based on my hunger, sensing your satisfaction with the meal, sensing when you're starting to get full, not having any sort of self-judgments about that, too, right? Or I think sometimes with intuitive eating in the early stages, people who start to sense fullness will start getting sad

and sort of have this feeling like, no, being full means I have to stop means I have to give this up, or I'm not allowed to have any more or something like that. But within two and a half eating, there's not that sense of guilt. There's, once you've gone through maybe this morning process of allowing your fullness to drive how much more you're going to eat, there's not a sense of sadness necessarily when the meal's over.

Although if it tastes really delicious, of course there's probably gonna be some sense of, like, oh, I wish I could keep eating this, it's so good. But yeah, it's really just a much more relaxed approach to food and it doesn't require as much intellectualizing, planning, self-shaming guilt. There are not as many voices that maybe come from a scolding parent or from a diet

that you were on a million years ago, or with diet culture, I think there's often this accumulation of different diet rules. So even if someone's not on a particular diet now, they have all these rules in their head from diets they were previously on, or even if they are on a particular diet now It's like I'm doing atkins, but I'm also still counting calories

But I'm also still trying to eat low fat or whatever it is right. There's just much less noise in your head You described intuitive eating is more relaxed more easeful, but There is some work, especially at the beginning of learning how to pay attention to the food and to your body as you're eating it, sort of your satiety cues. How full are you? There's a emphasis, as I understand it, on mindfulness to the extent that you are tasting and smelling the food as opposed to reflexively shoveling or hunting around your plate with your fork as you're chewing, so that you're kind of doing two things at once.

So there is some, maybe you don't like the word work, but it is a practice to a certain extent. Would you agree with that? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I guess I was sort of giving like the ultimate vision of intuitive eating, like kind of what it can be when you're really clicked into it or when you've been practicing it for a long time. But yeah, the truth is, when you're first starting out with intuitive eating, it is work. It is a lot of effort there, just like with meditation, with sort of the early days of meditation, I think the instructions and the paying attention to your breath is so much

more effortful than it becomes when you've been practicing for years. The practice of intuitive eating that Evelyn teaches that I teach is a little more structured. There's 10 principles to it. You don't have to necessarily practice them in order, although I really like to have that structure, that order, because I think they kind of build on one another. And I really like having gentle nutrition as the last principle, the 10th and last principle, because I think if people approach nutrition too early on in their process, they can definitely just turn it into another diet rule.

It's really not gentle nutrition at that point. It's rigid nutrition. So I think having it at the end is helpful. But the 10 principles, if it's helpful to hear just for anyone who hasn't heard that, it's reject the diet mentality is the first, really the foundational principle, I think, because it's about kind of becoming mindful of all those diet rules that you have in your head and being aware of the harms of diet culture and how dieting has led you astray in the past, sort of building your desire for a different way, a different approach.

The second is honoring your hunger, which is super important and foundational as well, because a lot of people are very disconnected from their hunger at first, especially if they've been dieting for a long time. But when you can start to notice your hunger and maybe more subtle signs of hunger that come up before you feel your stomach growling,

before you feel that sort of classical sign of hunger. And so learning to honor those really helps you not be on that restriction pendulum so that you can then start to feel more at peace and less driven to that rebound eating. Make peace with food is the next principle. And that's really about not having foods be off limits, challenging these ideas of good and bad foods

and allowing yourself to have all foods so that you're not in that deprivation mindset with them. Challenge the food police is the next principle, and that's really about talking back to those voices in your head that are enforcing diet culture's rules, right? Telling you you're bad for eating certain foods or that you're not allowed to have more of something

or that you have to do X, Y, and Z to a tone for what you've eaten. And so it's about kind of that mental self-talk, right? And challenging that inner critic and have a much more self-compassionate way of talking to yourself. The next principle is feeling your fullness, which is a tricky one, I think, for people just coming into intuitive eating, and I think it's really nice. It's not one of the early principles to focus on. It's actually a little further along, because one pitfall I see with people who are

just starting with intuitive eating is turning it into what my colleague Isabel Fox and Duke calls the hunger and fullness diet, where it's like, it's a diet whose rules are, I must only eat when I make exactly this amount of hungry. I have to stop as soon as I'm this amount of full. I'm not allowed to eat for any other reason, right? And so it can get very restrictive. And so really feeling your fullness is about tuning

into this sensations, the sort of getting in touch with that interoceptive awareness of like, how does your body tell you it's full? How does your body signal to you that it's had enough? And not that you necessarily have to stop eating at exactly that moment when you first feel signs of fullness, but it's a sign that, OK, I'm on the right track,

I'm kind of getting towards full, and that's the good thing, right? Getting to fullness is a positive thing because it means you're nourishing your body. The satisfaction factor is the next principle. I think actually they flipped those two in the last edition of the book, so satisfaction comes first, but the satisfaction factor is really about allowing yourself to have foods you enjoy, and really taking pleasure in food for its own sake, but also having pleasure for the sake of well-being, because it actually helps you feel better. It helps your overall well-being to be satisfied, and then respecting your body, which is a really important principle. Respecting your body's limitations, its needs, and that's where things like consideration

of medical conditions can come into play. That's where, like, when I think about my heartburn or acid reflex, or maybe when you think about how something is gonna make you feel, and you sort of are making food choices around that piece of self-care, but it's also respecting your body without this sort of imposition of how my body should look, how it's supposed to function, respecting what is,

what is with your body. So it's natural size, it's shape, it's abilities, it's disabilities, chronic illnesses, respecting all that, and not necessarily loving your body, right? Because I think it's hard sometimes to jump from self-loathing to self-love, but I think body respect is a helpful sort of stop on that train where you're sort of declaring a truth with your body, right?

You're not at war with it or trying to wrestle it into submission. And then exercise, feel the difference, right? Feeling the difference with it or trying to wrestle it into submission. And then exercise, feel the difference, right, feeling the difference with movement, I should say. So moving your body in ways that feel good, in ways that feel joyful and not designed to shrink or again, wrestle your body into submission, right, not in ways that are designed to make you look a certain way or having to hit certain goals. So learning to engage with movement from a place of self-care, rather than self-control, again.

And then finally, gentle nutrition. The gentle nutrition piece, again, it sort of fits in with that body respect, right? But it also builds on all the other principles. So you're not doing nutrition from a place of diet culture. You're not doing nutrition and ignoring your hunger. You're not doing nutrition and ignoring your satisfaction and pleasure. You're incorporating all these other principles with your nutrition choices and making gentle

nutrition choices that are about helping you have energy, helping you feel sustained and satisfied at the end of a meal. So it might be adding more of something, right? It's like, let's add a carb here because I know that that helps keep me full and satisfied or let's add a vegetable because I know that's going to help with digestion or help me get the vitamins I need.

But not making it this sort of minute intellectualized fixation that it is in diet culture. Much more of my conversation with Christy Harrison right after this. I want to do one last clip from the anti-diet challenge that, as I mentioned earlier, is going to be running on the 10% happier app. In the clip that we're about to listen to,

we talk about emotional eating, which is a phrase you used early, early on in this conversation that I think sometimes, I think you would argue gets a bad rap. So let's just listen to that clip and we'll talk a little bit on the other side. We're gonna talk about emotional eating, which Christy gets a pretty bad wrap. It really does, yeah, and you know, think intuitive eating is all about not demonizing

emotional eating. So sometimes eating for comfort or eating for distraction are part of a peaceful relationship with food. And sometimes chronic hunger can also spark emotions that make us feel like we're eating emotionally when we're actually just hungry. You say that sometimes people who are emotionally eating are actually just deprived? Yeah, absolutely. So deprivation can drive the sense of, you know, hangar is kind of a common emotion that

we associate with being too hungry, but, you know well, like having a low mood, feeling depressed or anxious. There's lots of emotions that can come up when we're chronically deprived and not eating enough. And the common response to emotional eating and diet culture, I think, is to say, well, do something instead of eating to distract yourself or take yourself away from, you know, don't eat food, do this instead.

But actually, the intuitive eating response is, what can we do in addition to eating? Because oftentimes, deprivation really is at the root of it. So how can we address the deprivation, take care of our need for food, and take care of whatever else might be coming up for us? So this reminds me of a conversation I had with Evelyn Tribalai a while ago. I came to her somewhat cheapishly and said, I think I'm kind of cheating on some of the intuitive eating because I don't really eat breakfast much, not because of a deprivation thing, but because I like to have a clear mind in the morning for meditation and exercise.

So I'm pretty present for lunch and for dinner, but often I'll find 8.39 o'clock at night. I'm hungry even though I know I'm not really hungry, but it's just that sort of lull in the day, I'm watching TV or reading a book, and it's when I described earlier that I might reach for candy, but I usually don't have the candy

because I know it'll mess up my sleep, but I might have like a bunch of pretzel sticks or something like that, even though I'm not hungry, just because I don't know, I'm a little bored and it's somewhat comforting to have a little salty snack. And I remember describing all of this to her and she was like, what's the problem? And often I'll be eating in front of the TV, which by the way is not something that's encouraged in intuitive eating. It's really about like eating a meal with another person or eating a meal

with no other distraction so you can be, you know, right there for the sensations of the eating. And again, she was just like, what's the problem with that? So what's your take on that overly long description? I just delivered. I mean, I really agree with her. I would say like, what's the problem? I think within two, it's a meeting like in sort of that early stage, right? When it's like the learning to drive the car, hands at 10 and 2, like, yes, not having distractions and not

eating in front of the TV or whatever is helpful for learning to tune into your body and being more mindful and stuff. But once you've practiced that a bit and you sort of understand how to do that, I think eating in front of the TV or eating with other distractions isn't really a problem. And I think even in the early stages, honestly, it isn't really a problem. And sometimes it's necessary if you're gonna get eating done. Like a lot of us have to eat at our desks at work

while working. And you know, that's just part of part of the reality of a lot of workplaces or deadlines and things like that. And so if it's a choice between not eating until you're extremely hungry or eating at your desk while working, there's really no problem to me with eating at your desk while working or eating in front of the TV or whatever it is.

And I think you can definitely tune in to your desire for food, your sense of satisfaction and pleasure, your sense of flavors and textures of the food, even while distracted, right? Even while in front of the TV, you can sort of dip in and out of that awareness. But yeah, I think thinking of it as like, this is bad, I shouldn't be doing this, or I'm not really hungry, so why am I eating with intuitive eating? We're trying to get rid of all the guilt, right? We're trying to not feel guilty or shamed about any way that we're relating to food. And in, you know, the case you're describing, it sounds like I wonder if there maybe

is a little bit of hunger, a little bit of physical need there at the end of a long day, like people that do tend to need snacks throughout the day, especially if you've skipped breakfast, maybe you're going to be sort of hungrier later in the day, and maybe it's a really subtle level of hunger where it's not stomach growling again, but it's thinking about food, thinking, oh, this sounds really good right now. That is a form actually sometimes of, that your brain is telling you, maybe it's not a sort of obvious physical sensation, but your body and your brain really do work together to give hunger signals. And so sometimes hunger signals come from the brain in the form of thinking about food, right? But, you know, it could also be just a need for pleasure and comfort

and unwinding at the end of a long day, and there's nothing wrong with that either. So yeah, I would say it really isn't a problem when you're eating in those ways, and that I think all of us, even pretty seasoned intuitive eaters, even people who've been lucky enough to be intuitive eaters their whole lives, sometimes eat for those reasons, sometimes eat for comfort and pure pleasure, and just a little bit of a distraction or escape at the end of a day or something like that. And there's really nothing wrong with that.

You know, when emotional eating maybe becomes an issue for people is when it feels like it's the only coping mechanism they have for difficult emotions. And also when there's deprivation driving it that needs to be addressed, like what can I do in addition to eating to take care of these emotions? Beyond that, I think there's lots of ways that we all eat that maybe feel quote unquote emotional in some sense that actually aren't a really big deal.

This has been so interesting. And even though intuitive eating isn't new to me, I just, it's so valuable to hear all of this stuff again and to see many of the old ways of thinking that were pounded into me by the culture are still there for me. And just hearing you talk has really kind of re-vividified my dedication to this practice. So I really appreciate you coming on. In closing, can you just quickly plug everything you do so that if people want to learn more about you and from you, they can?

Yeah, absolutely. So the best place to find me online is my website, which is chrisdherosand.com. I wrote a book called Anti-Diet, the book we've been talking about. I did a course with you on the 10% happier app that you can find there. I have other courses on my website. I do a 13 modules, but really it's sort of a lifetime access course on intuitive eating. If you want to kind of have a longer course in this, I do private coaching as well, though not as much at the moment because I'm working on my next book. And I have a podcast on my own as well called Food Psych, which you can find on my website or wherever you're listening to this podcast.

Oh, and I have a card deck actually that just came out called the Making Peace with Food Card Deck that is 59 anti-diet strategies, just kind of like bite-sized little strategies to help you make peace with food in your body that I co-authored with a therapist named Judith Maths. So info about all of that is on my website, christiehererson.com, and then the 10% happier app as well. You've done lots of stuff, and I know you've got another big project coming in the form

of a book, and you've got an even bigger project coming in the form of a baby. So thank you for doing this interview well, very, very pregnant, not the easiest thing to do, but appreciated. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. This is really fun. Thanks again to Christy. Remember, join us for the anti-diet challenge. Over on the 10% happier app, that challenge starts Monday, December 6th, right in time for the Christmas Hanukkah, Kwanzaa New Year's parties.

Download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps and start a free trial to join the challenge. This show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davy, Kim Baikama, Maria Wertel, and Jen Poehont with audio engineering from our good friends over at UltravioletAudio. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.

Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.