Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 615: Nutrition Advice for People Who Don't Want to Go on a Diet | Rachael Hartley

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

If you want to opt out of diet culture, then what should you actually eat? Today’s guest is endeavoring to answer this question. Rachel Hartley is a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor and the author of a book called Gentle Nutrition: A Non-Diet Approach to Healthy Eating. In this episode we talk about:The basics of intuitive eatingHer thoughts on whether or not we should weigh ourselvesWhether or not adopting intuitive eating means living with your face in a cookie jar foreverHow her work has influenced her own body imageThe eight guidelines of gentle nutritionHer provocative contention that “the healthiest choice isn’t always the most nutritious choice”Her take on some of the critiques of intuitive eatingHer thoughts on trendy new weight loss drugs like OzempicFor tickets to TPH's live event in Boston on September 7:https://thewilbur.com/armory/artist/dan-harris/Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/rachael-hartley-615See 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, Dan Harris. Heads up people in the Boston area. We're doing a live taping of this show on September 7th at the Armory Theater. That's a Thursday. Can't tell you who the guest is, but I suspect you will very much enjoy the conversation. We'll put a link to purchase tickets in the show notes. Okay. Now to today's episode, I am a dedicated, non-combatant in the diet wars.

I have learned to keep my mouth shut on these issues the hard way. Over the years, I have adopted plenty of food religions, veganism, low-carb, but to name just two. I've tracked my calories obsessively the whole nine. A few years ago, as many of you know, I made a decision right here on this show, actually in the middle of an interview, to ditch all of that and adopt what has sometimes been called the anti-diet. I did this while interviewing a very persuasive person named Evelyn Tribbley. We'll put a link to that episode in the show notes if you want to hear it. Evelyn is one of the co-founders of intuitive eating.

The theory of intuitive eating is basically that you should eat what you want when you want it with two key guidelines. First, you should listen to your body for cues as to when you're hungry or full. And second, you should definitely have a basic grasp of what is healthy and what is not healthy. Intuitive eating folks call this gentle nutrition. As I said, though, I am a non-combatant. I'm not here to tell you what or how to eat.

You can do intuitive eating. If you want, you can skip bread and cookies and strive for ketosis if you want, whatever, God bless. But for me, this whole intuitive eating thing just makes intuitive sense. The data suggests that most of the time and for most of us diets don't work, going out of diet can actually be a predictor of future weight gain. Worse, following what other people tell you you should do about your food, and how you should look, etc., can warp your relationship to food and to your own body. But one of the tricky things about adopting this whole intuitive eating philosophy

is that the gentle nutrition part can seem a little vague. If you want to opt out of what many people call diet culture, then exactly what should you eat? My guest today is endeavoring to answer this question to be a little cute about it to put some meat on the bone. Rachel Hartley is a certified intuitive eating counselor and the author of a book called Gentle Nutrition, a non-diet approach to healthy eating.

In this conversation, we talked about the basics of intuitive eating. Her thoughts on whether or not we should weigh ourselves, whether adopting intuitive eating means living with your face in a cookie jar forever. How her work has influenced her own body image, the eight guidelines of gentle nutrition, her provocative contention that the healthiest choice isn't always the most nutritious choice, her take on some of

the critiques of intuitive eating, and her take on the trendy new weight loss drugs like ozempic. This, I should say, is the sixth and final episode of our series, which we have called Get Fit Sainly. If you missed the earlier installments, go check them out. We covered longevity, exercise, and the impact of food on your mental health. Hit me up if you've got a moment on Twitter or on 10% dot com with some feedback. This is really, I think, probably the most ambitious series we've ever done and by and we would love to know how it landed. 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, Kelli 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 did 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. Rachel Hartley, welcome to the show. Hi, how are you? Doing great. Thanks for coming on. I would thank you so much for having me. I am just thrilled to be chatting with you today. Likewise, I'd love to to be chatting with you today. Likewise.

I'd love to just get some background on you. How did you get interested in this non-diad or anti-diad approach? Right. Yes, because it certainly is different than the traditional diatetic model that is all about calories and portion and more rigid control. I think a lot of it actually has to do with my upbringing around food. I consider myself someone who was really privileged with food growing up and being surrounded by lots of different cuisines.

I had parents who were kind of foodies before, you know, foodies was an actual term that people were using. So I always had this kind of groundwork of understanding that food was a lot more than fuel. Of course, when I became a dietitian, you are taught a very, very different model of relating to food. It is so much more about control. And I think that created a lot of confusion for me as a dietician trying to square, you know, my upbringing with food and how I had seen different people relate to food, as well as just like my schooling background in psychology, things really didn't fit for me.

And so I wish I could say that there was some single aha moment where I was like, aha, like, you know, intuitive eating, this is the thing. But really it was this very slow, messy process. I was working as an outpatient dietician in a large medical center and counseling clients on whether it was diabetes management or the consults that I would get for weight loss. And I knew that I had these interpersonal skills with clients.

Like I felt really good about the work that I was doing with them. I always remember we had this patient satisfaction survey. And I was ranked like, you know, 90% of people ranked your scores as excellent. And I was so excited at first. I was like, wow, what a great, you know, feeling to have. And then maybe a day later, I was like, wow, what a great feeling to have. And then maybe a day later, I was thinking to myself, well, why do I feel so ineffective at my work? Why do I feel like I'm not really actually helping people by teaching them things like clean eating and portion control.

So over time, I think first I learned a little bit about mindful eating and became interested in that. Of course, they're read, Eveline Trivoli and Alize Rush, their vacantuitive eating, and that was like a huge moment for me in learning and growing. I still didn't necessarily know how to put that information into action with my clients, but it was definitely the slow process of learning and gradually integrating it with the clients I was working with. So you felt off because you've been raised to love food and now you're helping other people manage food as opposed to enjoying it. Yeah, absolutely. People would come in and they would just feel so much more stressed about the way they were feeding themselves.

And I would see the sense of shame that people were experiencing if they were struggling with eating behaviors. Or maybe they weren't changing the way they were eating, but not losing weight. Or they ate something they deemed as bad. Just part of this traditional di dietetics paradigm that is really shame inducing. Many people listening to this may be familiar with intuitive eating, but there are probably a lot of people who are hearing about it for the first time. You mentioned Evelyn Tribbley. I probably will have said this in the introduction, but I work with her personally. She's been a huge influence for me. Can you just give a basic description of what intuitive eating

or what is sometimes referred to as the non-diad or anti-diad is all about? Right. Yes, absolutely. It is a paradigm for learning how to feed yourself where the focus is on well-being rather than weight loss. And when we say well-being, we're talking about not just physical health, but your mental health as well. You know, it's something that is a tool for just building a healthier relationship with food and learning to relate with food in a way that feels good.

I sometimes describe it as instead of getting super personicity about what you're eating and when just sort of eating what you want, when you want it with the caveats that you should learn how to listen to your body about when you're hungry and when you're full, and that you should have a background ambient understanding of what healthy nutrition looks like without getting obsessed with every little detail of the healthy nutrition. I think that's a great definition. Yep. And I wish it was as simple and practice as eat what you want when you want. Yes, intuitive eating is about eating what you want when you want

with this connection to your body, with this sense of embodiment and awareness of how food makes you feel. And I really want to name that that is so much harder to do in practice when you are in a space of really feeling negative in your body. If you are someone who is in a bigger body and getting a lot of these external societal pressures about how you should be eating, but yeah, it really is you having autonomy over your own food decisions and you having autonomy over what is your definition of health? What does health mean to you? It's not pushing a right or wrong way of eating. It's creating this space that allows for you to figure out a way of feeding yourself that you feel

good about. I completely agree that it's you could put it in a way as I did that sounds reasonably simple, but there are a lot of devils in the many, many details and I've been working with Evelyn triply for several years and it is still quite difficult. I mean, for me at least trying to undo decades of conditioning, maybe lifetimes of conditioning, whatever's handed down to me through my jeans, about my attitude, about my body, other people's bodies, how much I should eat, what I should eat when. So it's not easy. And yet it is liberating because I've spent so much of my life subscribed, dogmatically, to some sort of food religion that took me out of the moment and also set me up

for feelings of failure all the time. Right, absolutely. And I love what you say about how the way that you were brought up around food, how it took you out of the moment, you know, oftentimes when we think about health, we're really focused on the physical. And what you're describing there of that lack of presence that happened when you were subscribed to Diet Culture. That's something that has a huge impact on your well-being and the well-being of your family and your friends and the people who are around you. Our ability to be present in our life and to be connected to the people around us and to be connected with our environment and our community, that's part of health too. And it's part of nutrition.

It's part of how we feed ourselves. We connect with other people over food. That's how humans evolved. So I just, I really appreciate you adding that point there. Yeah, I think there was a key moment for me when I was interviewing Evelyn Tribbley for the first time on this podcast. And she just got me thinking about how just that morning,

I had been eating some avocado toast and feeling guilty about the fact that white bread is allegedly sinful and realizing, oh, yeah, but I was in that moment not tasting my food and not connecting with my wife and child who were in the room with me. What a waste of good avocado. Yes. And precious time. So yeah, I mean, I think to me, you can look at this just as like super tactically through the lens of what you eat, or you can look at it through the much broader lens of how you're living and the quality of your life. Right. Looking at it from a sense of well-being and how, how is food? How is my relationship with food, either supporting my well-being or chipping away

at my well-being? So let's talk about what, at some point, we're not run through some of the critiques of intuitive eating, but let's learn more about what it actually entails. Your book is called Gentle Nutrition. What do you mean by that? Yeah, Gentle Nutrition.

So I wrote my book on the last principle of intuitive eating, which is honoring your health with gentle nutrition. So I wrote my book on the last principle of intuitive eating, which is honoring your health with gentle nutrition. It's nutrition. It's all evidence-based nutrition, but it's focused on using that nutrition knowledge to support your well-being rather than manipulate or control your body size. So I think of it as having a few different points or maybe a few different places where it converges from diet culture and diet mentality. One is that it is about your self-care rather than self-control. So we are approaching gentle nutrition from a place of not controlling food or controlling our body, but caring for our body and supporting its functions and its health and our well-being. It's flexible rather than rigid. So, diets oftentimes come with these really rigid rules about what to eat, what not to eat.

Gentle nutrition is something that accounts for the fact that life is going to happen. I have huge renovations going on in my house right now, and I don't have access to a kitchen. So, gentle nutrition for me is going to look much different than when I actually have a kitchen with a stove and like not a house that's covered in dust and plastic and all of that. Gentle nutrition is individual.

We all have our own unique individual nutrition needs and our own relationship with food, which has an impact on our ability to engage with nutrition. So, you know, someone who is older versus someone who is younger, someone who is an athlete versus someone who is, you know, maybe just kind of moving more lightly, someone who has a health condition versus someone who doesn't have a diagnosed health

condition. Gentle nutrition, it can adapt to all those really individualized needs that people have. Other points with gentle nutrition, it is something that looks at the big picture. with gentle nutrition, it is something that looks at the big picture. So instead of hyper-focusing on each individual meal, each individual snack, or on specific foods, gentle nutrition is something that zooms out and looks at our patterns of eating over time and helps us kind of get away from this hyper-focus on every single bite of food that we put in our mouth. I know Evelyn often says, you know, one meal is not going to make or break your health and that is so true. And yet the way that diets and food and nutrition is traditionally taught is with this emphasis on every single meal has to be perfectly balanced

and I have to eat the right foods and I have to always have healthy foods or I can only have 20% unhealthy foods and 80% healthy foods, all these silly rules that take us away from evaluating the big picture of how we're feeding ourselves. And lastly, I often say that gentle nutrition is about positive nutrition rather than subtracting. So we're focusing in on adding foods in rather than taking foods out of our eating pattern. Let me ask some of the questions that a lot of people ask when they're confronted with this pretty radical idea.

One question is you talked about how much you weigh. Are you saying we should never weigh ourselves? I don't recommend people weigh themselves. I'm not here to say that you should never, each person out there is individual, but the number on the scale, you know, what kind of information is it giving you? Is it actually giving you information that's helpful for you, figuring out how to feed yourself in a way that feels good. The clients that I work with in my practice, oftentimes what happens is they hop on the scale and they see the number is either up or it's down and it has an impact on how they choose to feed themselves for the day. If the number is up, they might say, oh my gosh, we'll screw it. My weight's up. I feel crappy about it. So,

if it all start all over Monday, or if it's down, that might reinforce restrictive eating behaviors, or conversely, if it's down, they might feel like, gosh, I've earned this specific food instead of getting connected to their body. When we wear ourselves, it's something that takes us away from our own embodiment and our own connection with our body and it's wisdom. I always veer away from giving these very specific, no, you should never do this. But I would have a lot of concerns about someone weighing themself. But is there no connection between the number on the scale and your health? There's much less of a connection between the scale and our health than we've been taught. Traditional healthcare teaches us that food and fitness and our weight are sort of the end all be all of health.

And yeah, our weight can have an impact on health, but I think in a very different way than most people recognize. You know, when we look at research on weight science, on the relationship between weight and health, we actually see things like weight stigma and weight cycling that have much greater impact than ones, you know, just their static number on the scale. So for example, I said weight cycling, most people are familiar with yo-yo dieting and the up and down that happens in our body when we're going on a diet, going off a diet, losing weight, regaining weight. Well, that's a lot for your body to have to go through, to go from oxygenating and nourishing

and moving a body that's bigger, to smaller, to bigger, to smaller, and back again, we know that that puts a lot of metabolic stress on the body. So, yeah, weight cycling is something that accounts, actually there's some research that suggests that that might even be the vast majority of the difference in correlations we see in health among people in, or quitting normal BMI, and higher BMI's. The other thing I mentioned was weight stigma. If someone is existing in a larger body, they're getting constant messages

from society that their body is not okay. It's a stressful thing to navigate the world in a bigger body. And what is the impact on one's health? That's again, it's not to say that even if we eliminate weight stigma, even if we eliminate weight cycling, that there is zero relationship between weight and health. You know, if I had a magic wand and could just magically wave someone into a smaller body, it is certainly within that realm of possibility that it could have a positive impact on their health, but we don't have a magic wand. Someone losing weight, it involves some dieting,

it involves some taking medications, it involves some having a surgery, all these things that are not health neutral behaviors. So is it your view that diets flat out do not work? Yeah, that's really what the research shows us that other than a very, very small percentage of people and studies vary, but it looks like somewhere between, you know, three and tenish percent. And then we could have a whole other conversation about that three to tenish percent who

lose weight and keep it off for a long time of like how many of them are struggling with disorder eating or an eating disorder. But yeah, the research shows again and again that there really isn't one single way of someone losing a significant amount of weight and keeping it off permanently. And then the final question I just wanna get out there because I've talked about this with everybody

who's come on who's a proponent of intuitive eating. But again, for the newbies here, I suspect people have been thinking all along and waiting for me to ask, if you tell me I can eat whatever I want, whenever I want, I will live with my face in a cookie jar forever. Yes, that is how people often feel. And I have heard that fear again and again and again. And I have seen that fear, disfellown again and again and again, and I have seen that fear

disfellown again and again and again in my practice. So that might happen for a short period of time. There is a thing called the honeymoon phase that many people go through when they're loosening up restrictions. You think about it if you haven't had a lot of experiences with, I don't know, like Oreos or something. You know, of course, you I don't know, like, Oreos or something, you know, of course, you're relearning how to engage with Oreos in a way that feels good. And that's probably going to involve some face plant into Oreos situations.

So, yeah, that is a real thing that happens. And it can feel so scary when someone is new to intuitive eating. If possible, I always encourage like working with somebody, of course, that's a really privileged thing to be able to have someone who you can work with one-on-one or at the very least, having a Facebook group or somebody else where you can chat through these things and normalize that experience of the honeymoon period. But what we see again and again is that

it really is the restriction that's fueling the face plant into the Oreo's behaviors. So it's not the Oreos itself, it's the fact that we've been deprived of them. And for me personally, cheese is like my absolute favorite food. Like I love like fancy cheese plate. There's always that joke about like, you know,

or use a bread person or the cheese person. I am the cheese person. That is my favorite. And if for some reason, I don't know, like there was a plague that infected cow and we're not gonna have any cheese anymore, I would be running to my nearest grocery store just like loading up on all the wheels of Bree

and just, you know, going to town on it. It's that restriction. It's that fear of not having it in the future that leads to behaviors that feel very out of control with food. So yes, that fear is valid and you probably will have some instances where you feel kind of out of control around food at first and it subsides over time. As you're getting more practice eating those previously off-limits foods and as you're chipping away at that emotional restriction, that fear of, you know, this food is bad or

this food is going to cause some sort of catastrophic health effect as that food is becoming a bit more normalized, your behaviors with that food are going to feel much more comfortable too. Just speaking for myself, I can't remember if it's been three or four years that I've been working with Evelyn on intuitive eating, but I definitely went through that honeymoon phase, which is like, I think not probably the right way to describe it because it doesn't feel like a honeymoon, it feels like a disaster. And so I was completely, I had to like completely gorge and then go crying to Evelyn about how I'm totally out of control. And she was like, no, no, no, you're just working through giving yourself permission

to do this. And once you feel genuinely in your bones that you can have sugar anytime you want it, you won't feel crazy about it. But you're like still the kid whose parents didn't let him eat dessert more than once a week and you're rebelling. And that makes a lot of sense. I would say many years later, I have a very different relationship to sugar now. And I can still have days where if I'm tired or I am not mindful, just the other day there was a bunch of ice cream Sundays

on the table and I was just mindlessly eating it and eating it and eating it and I fell like shit. But I would say that happens way less frequently than it used to and now I am much more likely to view a day like that as a data point rather than an abject failure and a trip down into the toilet vortex. It's like, oh, yeah, okay.

I figured out that if I'm not paying attention, you'd if I'm well slept and not super stressed, if I'm not paying attention, sugar is super addictive and I can, you know, get dysregulated. Anyway, I said a lot there. Does that mean of that land for you? Yes. No, I appreciate you sharing that example because I think people think of intuitive eating. They bring a lot of diet mentality into intuitive eating. It's almost like I'm doing it or I'm not doing it. Like tomorrow, I'm going to be an intuitive eater. And I think

what you share it is a wonderful example of how intuitive eating it's a practice. And we're gonna have days, even myself is being an intuitive eating counselor. I have days, I have meals where I'm not very connected, I'm not eating very intuitively. And that's okay, we can get curious about, why did that happen? Like what was going on that we were eating all these ice cream

sandwiches to the point of stomach ache. But you don't have to look at it from a point of shame. I like to talk to my clients a lot about the difference between shame and guilt and how shame is this idea that when we make a mistake or when we do something that doesn't align with our values, it's because there's some fault within us is because we're broken. We have some character flaw rather than guilt, which I know might feel a little bit weird to this almost sounds like I'm telling you, you should feel guilty about that. But guilt, you know, sometimes we make a mistake with food. Sometimes we eat in a way that doesn't really correlate with how we want to take care of ourselves and

our values around food and taking care of our body. And okay, maybe we feel a little bit icky about it. Maybe that doesn't feel good, but can we just get curious about what were the factors leading up to it? And maybe there's something to learn from. Maybe there's information that's helpful for you another day, or maybe just sometimes we just eat too many ice cream sandwiches and that's part of life and it doesn't have to be a big deal. Yeah, it's not that deep. Yes. The way it's often talked about in meditation

circles is the difference between shame and wise remorse. Shame, I sometimes think of shame as like a kind of a psychic constipation. It keeps you with your head up your ass because shame is all about you telling yourself a story about how bad you are. So you get real stuck in that place, whereas wise remorse is whatever fuck up you've just made,

it's not about you holistically as a person. It's about you made a mistake and maybe you hurt somebody else or you hurt yourself, but can you not get stuck in telling yourself a whole shame story? And so I find that really useful and that helps me when I get, you know, just like I did this past Sunday where I was my spoon just kept finding its way back into this huge Sunday over and over and over and over again. And I felt physically and psychologically kind of shitty afterwards. I was able to pull myself out of that spiral much more quickly than I would have in the

past. I love that. I have one last big picture question for you about intuitive eating. And then you have these eight guidelines to what you call gentle nutrition that I do want to run through as well. But let me just ask the one last question because I think for me a big piece of Intuitive eating has been to and I'm not in any way all the way on the other side of this but is to have different expectations about how my body looks in the mirror and I'm just curious about how you work with that. Because we live in a culture where for guys,

it's on Instagram, your buddies are posting post workout pictures with well-defined abs and blah, blah, blah. And I find that I'm just constantly taking the voice of the culture into the moment where I look at myself in the mirror after I've gotten out of the shower. And I've gotten better at that, but it's still, like I've still wrestling with that. And I'm curious for you, are you like just down with however your body looks at

at any given moment, or do you still obsess about that on some level? Yeah, about my personal body or? Yeah. I appreciate you asking that. Actually, I think that's an important question because we bring our bodies into this work. You know, I have been doing this work for a long time and I am someone who deeply values that all bodies deserve respect. And I'm someone who sometimes struggles with body image.

I found that I know my specific triggers, like I know for me when my stomach is bothering me, like that was always an area for me body image wise that I was really sensitive and self conscious about. And so I know when I have an upset stomach, when I have like reflex or something that oftentimes that physical discomfort will turn into this thought of like, oh, my body is a problem that, you know, where I feel unhappy with my appearance. I also noticed that there are certainly times where I'm around kind of like you're talking about looking on Instagram or, you know, just when you're with friends that sometimes when I'm in a social situation where I feel a little maybe at a place or

I feel like, I know, a little bit of that, oh my gosh, those are the popular kids in high school kind of feeling that sometimes I feel a bit uncomfortable or icky in my body. And I feel so grateful that I've gotten to a place where I know that those feelings are gonna pass and that I'm not someone who's acting on it. But yeah, I think that's such an important question because people often feel like they

can't practice intuitive eating unless they feel like 100% accepting of their body. And that's rarely the case. You know, if someone is 100% accepting of their body, they probably are just naturally pretty intuitive eater. So really normal to feel uncomfortable in your skin at times or maybe all the time. And I still think that intuitive eating is a paradigm that we can integrate and utilize as a tool for helping you build a healthier relationship with food, as something that can help you notice that discomfort and sit with that discomfort and not necessarily have to act in a way that is harmful. Yeah, I've been very influenced by one of the other interviews we've done in this series

and the series we're running about getting fit without losing your mind. Carl Lai, who's a friend of mine and an amazing meditation teacher. I interviewed her recently. We've already posted that and she talked about instead of body positivity, just like body respect. You know, again, you can, you just be grateful for the fact that this whole system, this network of networks in your body is functioning largely outside of your conscious control. And so, you know, you don't have to try to exercise all of the culturally ingrained thoughts about how your body should look. It's going to be hard to do that. But

can you have an easier, cooler, more supple relationship to the self criticism around that and wake up in those moments and revert back to, yeah, maybe I'm having a moment of judgment about how distended my belly is, maybe I'm having a moment of judgment about how distended my belly is, but I'm glad that all of the parts in there are working well and that I'm generally healthy, et cetera, et cetera. So body respect. Yes, yes, I love that. I oftentimes talk to my clients about the difference between body respect and body kindness. And I think of body respect is this very elemental, like your body needs enough food.

Like that is part of respecting your body. Your body has its like basic needs, you know, no matter how you feel about your body, no matter how you feel about your appearance, your body still deserves adequate food. It still deserves to eat enough to be able to function and to be able to function well. And if we wanna take it one step further

and treat your body with some kindness, here's how we can integrate some nutrition or some pleasurable movement, just pleasure and general with food. Hey, man. Coming up, Rachel Hartley talks about the eight guidelines of gentle nutrition and her provocative contention that the healthiest choice is not always the most nutritious choice.

Life is short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time, pure on earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions,

like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs, and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times.

But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. By my count, there are eight guidelines for gentle nutrition. Let's zip through these if you're down. The first one is eat fruits and vegetables, non-controversial. Yeah, pretty non-controversial there. Fruits and vegetables get certainly put up on a pedestal, and I don't want to add to that.

But yeah, they've got a lot of vitamins, minerals, nutrients, fiber. There's a lot of great reasons to be feeding our body fruits and vegetables. And I think we can do that without crowding out other sources of energy. Guideline number two is eat whole grains and other fiber rich carb sources. Okay, this is slightly more controversial because we've vilified carbs in some corners of our culture these days. So say more. Yes, yes, yes, it's so funny to see how carbs have become this controversial food and grains. It's sort of silly to me when you look around the world

and see all the different cultural ways of eating carbs are always the basis of different cultural diets. It's such a huge part of how we nourish ourselves for eternity, so it's really wild to see carbs get vilified. But I want to kind of point out with this one that refined grains get a lot of bad press. People talk about white bread or white rice or white pasta as if it's this really damaging thing to eat as if it will cause harm to your body. But instead what I'd like to do is think about how can we just add in some fiber rich grains? We know from larger studies that people who eat carbs and people who eat whole grains, that this is associated with good health.

So how can we integrate it in a way where we're not diminishing pleasure with food? So for me, when I work with clients that oftentimes looks like finding what are whole grains or other fiber rich carbohydrates that you really enjoy. So maybe they enjoy potatoes, which are a fiber rich carbohydrate source.

Maybe they enjoy whole grain bread, but they really hate brown rice and they really hate whole grain pasta. So how can we just kind of work with what you like and integrate some whole grains rather than doing 100% whole grains? Because that kind of oftentimes lead to digestive issues for all that you hear about fiber and whole grains and digestion. Like there is such thing as too much fiber. And so having that nice mix of somrifying grains and some whole grains is beneficial. But just to be clear, we can feel okay about refined grains, so like white bread and fresh made pasta and all that stuff. Yeah, they are not poison.

It's interesting when, so we hear a lot from clients about how these foods might impact their blood sugar. And certainly if you look at, and if for example, someone eating white bread and then a clone of that person eating a whole grain bread or brown rice and white rice, you do see a slight difference in the glycemic effect, meaning how that food affects their blood sugar. There it's not a huge difference,

but there is a slight difference. But when you're eating these foods as part of a meal, so when you're having a sandwich that has a whole grain bread or when you're having white rice with chicken or fish or beef or whatever protein source and having some vegetables with it. When you're getting that mix of fat and protein and carbohydrates, there's not a huge difference in how it impacts your blood sugar levels. What about french fries? French fries are delicious.

Actually, I use french fries as an example of how we vilify certain foods in these ways that don't really make a lot of sense when you kind of dive into the details. So you think about a french fry. It's potatoes, it's oil, but this is a bad food. We shouldn't be eating french fries, but then you think about roasted potatoes. That's this healthy food and virtuous food. But at the end of the day, it's also potatoes and oil. So when our body, when we eat french fries,

or if we have roasted potatoes, like the chemical compounds is that your body breaks that down and digest it and absorbs the nutrients, it's really not all that difference. Like, is there a slight difference in that content, sure? But it's really not that different because fried foods, the process of frying it actually creates kind of a seal on the outside that you're not getting it as much oil as you might think. That's kind of a fun example I love to share. Third guideline is don't fear fats. Speaking of french fries, yes, fats are satisfying their satiating.

There is a purpose for fats. So when I went to school, we were just kind of coming out of that low fat craze and getting into the whole, you know, adkins kind of diet, but there's still such a hangover about fats. I think some of it actually has to do with the name itself. We associate dietary fat with adipose tissue, but fat, it's just one of our three macronutrients

and we need it. It plays important functions in our body. It gets integrated into our brain. Our brain is actually, oh my goodness, I'm gonna butcher the number, but I wanna say it's like 75% fat or something like that, but it's a lot of fat in our head, basically. And it also plays roles in creating hormones.

It's helpful for digestion. So we really, it's a food group that's essential, but gets vilified. I find from an intuitive eating standpoint too, when people overlook fat as part of their meals, they end up leaving a meal meal feeling not very satiated, not very satisfied. They end up feeling hungry soon after eating and either binging later or eating in a way that feels chaotic and out of control.

So I encourage people to cook with that, to add fat to their meals, to think of it as not just a sort of thing to prevent food from sticking to your pan, but something that's like a flavoring ingredient too. Where are you on butter? Oh, I love it. Yes, I'm team batter for sure. It has a flavor that you just can't replicate from other foods. Butter gets a bad rep because of saturated fats and it's effect on our cholesterol levels, but it's a great example of how there's a kernel

of nutrition truth that gets blown up and exaggerated to the point where it's no longer helpful for us. So with butter, for example, there's some people out there who can eat larger quantities of saturated fat and doesn't really have a big impact on their cholesterol levels. You know, yes, there is this small number of people who are more sensitive to dietary cholesterol, but it's not something we have to fear and get overly anxious about. Songs where using lots of other types of fats too, you know, people who cook with butter, usually cook with things like olive oil or maybe peanut oil. Maybe they're using avocado oil. We can get some variety in rather than demonizing a specific

food. But you don't want to be eating sticks of butter every day. There has to be some moderation here I would imagine. Sure, and that's where consciousness comes in rather than restriction. I would imagine if someone is actually eating sticks of butter, there might be some other things going on there. So I don't know that it's necessarily a behavior that people would engage in without, I don't know, some degree of restriction going on.

That's influencing those behaviors. So yeah, we can be conscious about things. For example, high cholesterol runs in my family. I have high cholesterol. I've always had high cholesterol even when I was a more rigid eater. And so because of that, I do try to be a little bit more conscious about butter or saturated fats. But we can do that in a way where we're not restricting ourselves. I often ask people to think about, does that change make you feel deprived or doesn't make you feel restricted? And if so, then maybe that's not necessarily the healthiest choice for you. Maybe that's not something that's actually improving your well-being. But, you know, if you feel like, hey, I can try to cut back a little bit on butter,

maybe cook with more olive oil. And it feels like a very chill, easy change to make. Great. You have a pretty radical quote here. The healthiest choice is not always the most nutritious choice. Yes, I like to distinguish between health and nutrition. So we label foods as healthy or not healthy, but to me, health is something that's very different than nutrition. Health is something that incorporates our psychological well-being, our social connection with people, our sort of financial situation and socioeconomic. So health has to, is much more nuanced than how much vitamin C and fiber is in a certain food. So yes, nutrition is a piece of

whether a food might be a healthier choice for you, but it's not necessarily the end-all-be-all. So for example, I signed up, I'm not exactly sure why I did this, but with some friends they talked me into running a half marathon and we're gonna see how that one goes. But I think about when I work with runners and what do they do before our race? They take that gel pack, what is that gel that energy gel pack? It's sugar. It's not something that provides their body with a lot of nutrition. It's not necessarily a nutritious food, but it's probably one of the healthiest choices

they can make in the moment because it provides their body with that simple source of energy. So again, we can think about nutrition intuitive eating doesn't mean that all foods are equal, that, you know, brownie is just as nutritious as a salad. That's not the case, but that brownie is just as nutritious as a salad. That's not the case. But that brownie in certain situations might be the healthier choice for you, and that

salad might actually be a less healthy choice. And I think it goes beyond just like, you know, it is a healthy choice to have sugar before you go on a long run, even though it's not classically nutritious. I think there's a psychological component that I'm hearing to what you're saying, which is if cooking with oil instead of butter feels restrictive is going to set you up for benches down the road, degrade your quality of life, increase your stress, that's likely to have holistically speaking some negative health impacts on your whole body. And so, yeah, maybe you ought to think about a different way to approach it rather than

straight up restriction. Yes, yes. Even if a food was certifiably unhealthy, is labeling it as such or eliminating it from your diet, does that actually help you engage with it in a healthy way? And I think the research and my professional experience is no. So the idea of like how nutritious the food is, like we can think about that and that can be something we integrate information we take in and we use and figuring out how to feed ourselves. But at the end of the day, doesn't matter the nutrition content of a food,

if eliminating it is something that causes stress, then I don't know that that is the healthiest choice for you. Guideline number four is eat more plants and fewer animals. Yeah, so kind of a broad one. And again, I want to be very clear. I'm noticing myself thinking about the listeners out here who may be hearing these guidelines and feeling a bit, maybe tense or feeling a sense of restriction

coming up within them or a sense of fear or guilt about their own eating behaviors. So one thing I want to emphasize is that these are guidelines and very, very loose guidelines, just like the principles of intuitive eating are guidelines and not rules. But yes, when we zoom out and look at the big picture of people's eating habits, we know that eating in a more plant-centered way, not necessarily vegan, although there's nothing wrong with that of someone else's eating vegan, and not necessarily vegetarian, again, even though there's nothing wrong with that. But integrating more plants less animals, that it's beneficial for our overall health

for most people. And I would argue to the environment, which is part of health too, the health outside of ourselves. Yeah, just to interject here with some personal reflections, I was vegan for about four or five years, and then I was vegetarian for a minute. And then I it all fell down. And now I'm back in Omnivore land, although I'm pretty heavy on plants and often don't have any meat or fish until dinner and some days I don't have any at all. And yet prior guests in this series we've been running have argued that like we really do need more protein, especially as we age and that animal protein, I hope I'm not mangling

the advice, but that animal protein is really the easiest way to get it. So what's your take on that advice? Yes. I think there's benefits to including animal-based protein in our eating, and that doesn't mean that someone shouldn't be a vegan or a vegetarian if that's what they're ethically called for. This is all very individual. There are some people out there who are maybe eating a totally plant-centered diet is what feels good for them and that's wonderful. Other people might find that they really feel best eating more animal proteins and eating a more protein-heavy eating pattern. And again, that's great

for them too. But overall, there's benefits to including animal-based protein because like you said, it is probably the easiest way to get protein in. And we do have a little bit higher protein needs as we get older, of course, with the caveat that most people are really getting more than enough protein in their diet. But this is a great example of how we can take information about nutrition and how do we want to apply it to ourselves. If someone is ethically called to be a vegan, that doesn't mean even if we knew for certain that their body would get some benefits

out of including animal proteins, that doesn't mean that that's the choice that they have to make. There's a lot more that goes into our decisions about food. So yeah, I hope that kind of gives a little bit of the nuance there. Yes, this is a friendly place for nuance. Guideline number five is have dairy if you enjoy it. Again, another food group that has been really demonized. I often say there's these

kernels of truth and nutrition that gets so blown out of proportion. And there is the kernel of truth that many cultures just don't eat dairy. It's not part of their traditional eating patterns. It's not necessarily a thing that like, you have to have to have. And I'll add to that, like I definitely think there, you know, milk, you know, when I was growing up in the 80s, was certainly pushed on you quite a bit from, you know, all the gut milk campaigns.

But there are actual benefits to dairy, you know, a wonderful source of protein, calcium, and other bone-building minerals. So you think of potassium and magnesium. It's something that's delicious and tasty and convenient and a simple thing to pack as a snack. So I really love dairy and I also encourage people to go for a 2% or full fat version of it. It tastes much, much better in my opinion. And it's going to help keep you satiated longer.

Next one is be mindful about sweets. Yes, going back to that sort of like consciousness without being obsessive about it. Again, I'm putting myself in the position of the listener, and I think under this principle and this is something I talk about quite a bit in the book, is that most of the time when people are eating large quantities of sweets, oftentimes it's under the condition of deprivation. We've all kind of heard those rat studies about like the rats who were addicted to sugar. And what I love to share with my clients is that they actually didn't show those addictive behaviors around sugar unless they were being deprived of food. So it's this kind of classic study that

gets shared about why we should be careful about sugar. You're going to get addicted to it and once you start eating it, you're never going to be able to stop. And when we actually look at the studies that were supporting that, the only mice that showed addictive behaviors towards sweets were hungry food deprived mice. When mice were given free access to food, they didn't actually show those behaviors towards sweets. So I always tell, share with my clients, like if you want to have a healthier relationship with sweets, try baking some cookies, actually allow yourself to eat some sweets. And at the same time, we can have some degree of consciousness. How does it make you feel when you're eating sweets without pairing it with fats and protein? You know, how does

it feel when you're going a period of time where, you know, maybe you're eating a larger quantity of sweets? Like, is that what makes you feel good? Maybe it doesn't make a difference in how you feel, or maybe you're noticing like, yeah, I gotta get some produce in here. We're gonna get to this with the last of the guidelines, which for my money is the most important.

But yeah, I do think it's like, for me, it's been about how do I feel? I had a day, this past Saturday, before Sunday, I screamed Sunday, extravaganza that I had the following day, where I was with my son all day, went to a baseball game and we're at a birthday party. I don't think I had anything to eat that day other than dessert. And I felt like garbage, like total garbage. It was the worst. And so I think just tuning into that is useful.

And yet, and here's my question, I think there are a lot of people myself among them who many nights per week, if not every night, after having had a balanced dinner, I like to have a little dessert. Should I be feeling any guilt about that, that you've said be mindful of sweets? When I say mindful, that does not mean eliminating sweets. We have plenty of room to be able to eat sweets every day.

It's interesting the studies that look at sugar consumption and health, but the caveat that correlational studies are not that great. But we certainly do see a correlation between health outcomes and sugar intake, but even at that lowest level of sugar intake, where we see the best health, people are still eating sweets every single day. Those are still people who eat sweets. So diet culture has taught us that sweets are to be eaten like once a week or every once in a while, but we can include sugar regularly and that doesn't mean we're harming our health. Our body knows what to do with it.

Our body knows like when we digest our desserts, when we digest a snack that has added sugar in it, you know, it goes into our stomach, it gets broken down into, you know, glucose and all the other parts of the food. But once that food enters our gut, once it enters our bloodstream, that glucose from that sweet is the same as glucose from quinoa or oatmeal or, you know, potatoes or whatever other food.

So again, it's not something that we have to get obsessive about. Penultimate guideline here, emphasize fresh food. Yeah, there is, again, kernel of truth, that fresh foods have lots of nutrients. And at the same time, I love convenience foods. I think they're a wonderful tool for feeding ourselves when we're busy, when we don't have a lot of time, when, like, me right now, when you don't have access to a kitchen, there is a purpose for convenience foods. And can we incorporate some more fresh foods in? Can we emphasize more fresh foods in our overall eating pattern? So, yeah, I always want to be care. I know clean

eating has sort of put unprocessed foods or whole foods, whatever that means, a bonapetistol. And I think it's important to really look at it as something that has its benefits, something that we can incorporate more of in our overall eating pattern without eliminating processed foods, without demonizing foods that come from a box or come from a can. Because it's a really privileged way to think about food. You think about the time and energy that goes into cooking a meal that's made from all fresh, whole ingredients. And a lot of people don't have time for that. They also might not

have the money for that. So again, we can highlight the nutrition benefits of a food or food group without demonizing other foods. You have word allowed on social media that there's been some fear mongering around chemicals in food. You have this post, this joky post, that says warning these chemicals are hidden in your food, such as dihydrogen, oxide, AKA water, sodium bicarbonate, AKA baking soda, and you go on and on. But should we have no concern

about some of these unpronounceable ingredients? Yeah, no, I love that post because chemicals, it's a scary sounding thing and oftentimes there are certain additives or ingredients and foods that have a long or unpronounceable name or looks kind of like, like I wouldn't have that in my kitchen, but they're just regular ingredients. Maybe they're vitamins or minerals that have been added. So yeah, is that to say that we should have zero concern? You know, on someone who certainly

looks at the food industry with some degree of skepticism, I don't, I'm not someone who puts all of my trust in large companies. And I do think we need to chill out a bit on ingredients without getting too detailed because I think it's where we get into a little bit more individualized stuff. Like, yes, there are certain ingredients or additives that might not be the greatest for certain people. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be eating processed foods or that if we see something that has an ingredient we can't pronounce, that that's automatically bad for us.

Coming up, Rachel talks about the final guideline out of the eight guidelines of gentle nutrition for my money, for whatever it's worth. This final guideline is the most important. We'll also talk about her take on some of the critiques of intuitive eating, and we'll get her to weigh in on those trending new weight loss drugs, including ozampic. Final guideline, as I said before, I think this is, you may agree or disagree. I don't know. To me, this just seems like truly the bottom line and it may be exactly why you put it on the bottom line. Pay attention to how food makes you feel. And we've referenced this, you know, like with sugar.

I'm like, I like eating sugar. But if I eat too much of it or if I eat it the wrong time of day or if I eat the wrong, you know, a certain type of sugar, certain products, I might feel like shit. And so just listen to that. Yes, yes. Human beings were designed to be flexible with food. There's no one right way of eating. And so I know a sort of general pattern of eating that feels good for me. And it sounds like you've worked on discovering a general kind of pattern or flow to your eating that feels good

for you. But that doesn't mean it's going to feel good for another person. And this is where I get to feel good for another person. And this is where I get bitmenedly a bit angry and fired up when I see people online saying, hey, it's like my way or the highway, this is the right way to eat. If you're eating different than this way, then you're hurting yourself, you're harming yourself, you're killing yourself, like the fear mongering around that. Because the reality is, if you look around the world and you look at all the different patterns of eating that we have evolved to thrive off of, there's huge differences. Like we can have big differences in our macronutrient composition of our eating. We can eat a large variety of foods or there's some cultures where humans have grown up where they have less of a variety. So to say that there's one right way, I think that's selling false promises.

I think it's using fear to sell a program or a product. It's something that makes me angry. How we feel that can be a incredible source of wisdom in feeding ourselves. We can tune in and check in with our body and notice what feels good in a non-judgmental way. Intuitive eating isn't always eating meals that you feel awesome after life happens. Like you're example from the Sunday gate. Sometimes we eat in ways that don't necessarily feel good and it

doesn't mean we've done catastrophic damage to our body. Our bodies are not these delicate little flowers that we have to care for. Our bodies are designed to take some rough and tumble and admittedly some people their bodies can tolerate a bit more than other people's bodies, but we still don't need to approach intuitive eating as if every meal we're going to leave the dinner table feeling like, oh, like my digestion is great. And I feel incredible and energized and awake because it's just not realistic. Yeah, every time I worry about beating up my body, I look at Keith Richards.

That dude survived the high grade cocaine and crappy heroin for decades. He's still kicking. Yes, yes. If you don't mind, I'd love to share an analogy that I often use. There's the idea, Diet Culture promotes this idea of treating your body like a temple. And I kind of like to say, okay, let's treat our body like a house.

We want to keep up with our general maintenance of our home. You don't want to spring a leak and let it go. And you know, like a year later, have like all sorts of damage going on, some mold forming. We wanna take care of our house. We want to make sure we're engaging with some amount of upkeep. But also like we don't have to have this pristine, perfectly clean architectural digest type home.

And so our house, just like our house can survive that weather or, you know, sometimes like things do go wrong with our house. And like we can fix that. You know, we don't have to be so pristine with how we're caring for our body. Okay. So let me ask about some of the critiques we've heard of intuitive eating in the course of this series. We had on Dr. Mark Heimann and he was generally pro into it, but he did say, and this just picks up on your point about listening to your body. He was just saying that like,

if your brain has been totally hijacked for years by diet culture and or just terrible nutrition, you know, you've been just living off of fast food because that's the way you were raised, that it's gonna be very hard to learn to listen to your body and intuitive eating may not work in those cases. What's your rebuttal if any? Yeah, I'd be curious about what his definition of work means.

If work means achieving some sort of way of eating that alliance with his view of what healthy eating should look like, then maybe not. It is true that how we grow up around food influences, our taste buds, our taste preferences, and intuitive eating is about figuring out a way of eating that feels good for the individual. So, you know, if he's kind of looking at someone

who's grown up on fast food and that's all they've eaten for every single meal, well, intuitive eating can help support them and figuring out a way of improving their both physical health and mental health without disregarding their taste preferences. So yeah, I find that one a little bit hard to square. I'm also just thinking about the people who I've worked with who have felt like they were addicted to sweets or they struggled with binge eating disorder that perhaps if you looked at their eating pattern objectively, they were not getting a lot of nutrition in. And still, there was deprivation in there that was fueling those behaviors,

which you wouldn't think because if someone is eating at a fast food all the time or whatever, they're eating it. So they're not being deprived, but that emotional restriction around food has a huge impact. You know, it's one thing to allow yourself to eat a food, but if you're telling yourself, okay, I'm bad for doing this. There's something wrong with me. There's a lot of shame there. yourself to eat a food, but if you're telling yourself, okay, I'm bad for doing this.

There's something wrong with me. There's a lot of shame there. It's going to keep them trapped in the same behaviors. So I would also add to that that what role is deprivation playing in these supposedly or quote, hijacked eating behaviors? Yeah, I guess I also just kind of wonder what is the alternative. You know, is that someone who, I don't know, are we throwing just like a rigid way of eating at that person and kind of expecting like if it intuitive eating is off limits for them, then what

is like within their means within their capabilities? Well, I mean, I don't know. In reading The New York Times article, The New York Times did a big takeout recently on Evelyn Tribalet and her partner, Elise Rache, who came up with intuitive eating low these many decades. And it was largely quite complimentary, but there were a few critics in there and you might be able to recapitulate their criticisms better than I can. But if memory serves, the criticism ran along the lines of like sometimes actually we'd really it's a life a matter of life or death. We really need to put somebody on a restrictive diet because they are morbidly obese.

Anyways, does that job with your memory of what was said in the article? Yeah, I think that was yeah, essentially that intuitive eating is fine up until a certain point, but if someone's weight has gotten to a point where it's deemed too high, then we have to do a diet, then we have to focus on weight loss. And I disagree with that. As always, intuitive eating is an option. So for someone out there who is in a higher weight body,

who wants to pursue weight loss, that's fine. I'm all about bodily autonomy, but I have some questions about how is that pursued? How is that focus on weight over one psychological health and well-being? Is that actually helping someone improve their overall health and well-being? So I do not see intuitive eating as having a weight limit. I don't see it as something that is only for people who are in smaller bodies. I work with many people who's BMI is in that,

I say the air quote, like morbidly obese range because it's a really stigmatizing term. And actually, as a sidebar, the phrase morbidly obese was developed by a bariatric surgeon, because you're going to sell a lot more bariatric surgery if it sounds like you might drop dead at any minute. But yeah, I think where some of that comes in is people assume intuitive eating is just eating donuts all the time or eating sweets or just eating in a this kind of stereotypically unhealthy way and it's hard for them to square how do we use this tool for someone who's

struggling with their health and it's all about like meeting the person where they're at and figuring out like what is supportive for you and taking care of your health and can we do that without looking at a specific number on the scale as the outcome? So if someone has legitimate health concerns, whether they're at a high weight or not, we can do that while also utilizing that intuitive eating

paradigm. Right, so what has to happen in your view is a rethinking around the relationship to food in your body. And if you're not doing that, if you're just going with gritted teeth, white knuckling restriction, it is unlikely to work in an abiding way. Exactly. Because dieting, it doesn't change one's relationship with food. And I'll say there are plenty of people who have very high BMI's who eat just in an overall healthy way who take care, who care about their health and are active.

And if you, you know, they go to the doctor, their labs are looking great. So there are plenty of people who are in objectively fat bodies. And I use the phrase fat, not in a pejorative way, but just as a descriptor, they are healthy. They are just objectively healthy. And if someone is struggling with health concerns, what happens when we focus on weight as the way of improving their health? You know, we know that diets don't work long-term. There is actually a study that looked at tens of thousands of people,

work long term. There was actually a study that looked at tens of thousands of people and the probability of someone in an air-quote OB spotty attaining quote unquote normal weight. I feel like I'm doing a lot of air quotes over here. It was something like one in 8,000 or one in 9,000. I'm probably butchering the numbers a little bit, but it's extremely, extremely low probability. So how can we just support that person's health without depriving them of food and nutrients? Because the most important part of healthy nutrition is whether someone's getting enough food. It's interesting because there has been some mockery around this notion of healthy at any size because you hear critics say, well, you're just justifying, you know, patently unhealthy weight, even though it is true, as you said, that looking at somebody even if they're stereotypically, quote unquote, fat, that they actually may be super healthy.

But there are critics who say healthy, and I mean, size is basically just political correctness brought into nutrition. Yeah. And I think that arises from a really fundamental misunderstanding because health at every size, it's not about assigning one's health, it's not about looking at someone on the street and saying like, oh, you're healthy, you're not, you're sick, it's about giving people the opportunity to pursue health no matter what health means to them. So health can mean different things for different people.

And really frankly, if you kind of look at the world and take into account like mental health conditions, physical health conditions, no one out there is very few people who aren't struggling, who don't have something that they're struggling with. But yeah, like health at every size, it is creating a world where someone can, you focus on things besides changing their body size to improve their well-being. So whether that's engaging with pleasurable movement

instead of militant exercise, whether it's helping people get access to healthcare because unfortunately and infuriatingly, people are denied healthcare because of their weight. People are denied surgeries. They're delayed healthcare. They're told that, hey, why don't you lose weight in six months, come back and then we'll treat your condition?

People are denied access to fertility treatments. So, health at every size is about creating a world where we are really supporting people in their own individual decisions around their body without forcing weight loss as the solution. Just a quick question as we wind down here and maybe there's no quick answer so you can pass if you want but just be curious. Everybody's talking about ozemic as a weight loss drug. And it's a part of a family of drugs that people are taking. And I guess it's reducing their appetite and helping them lose weight.

What's your take on that? Yeah, it's wild to see this medication. I mean, it really is everywhere. And I get so many questions from my clients because they have friends and family members who are using it. And I don't want to demonize anyone who chooses to use Osembic.

Again, it's your body, not my body. You do what you want with it, not my personal decision because I'm not living in your body. And I also think there's something really scary about the way that this drug is becoming normalized. I'm thinking of those. At Jimmy Kimmeljoke at the beginning of the Oscars and the Evality of Everyone Being On O'sembek and just how quickly this has become part of our cultural conversation. It's interesting when you look at the research around O'sembek, it's being touted

sort of similar actually to how weight loss surgeries were first marketed when they came out. But it's being touted as this like the miracle drug and like permanent weight loss and look how much weight people can lose. But when you, well, first of all, when you look at how people like tolerate it, there's a lot of people with some pretty severe side effects from the medication. But too, we see that similar to dieting, there is weight regain over time.

There's research that shown people start to regain the weight they've lost on OZM-BIG. I wanna say, please don't quote me 100%, because I wanna say it was after two years, or within two years, not 100% on that one, but regardless, people do start to regain weight while they're still on it. And of course, when someone stops taking the medication, they regain the weight that they've lost. So I have a lot of concerns with how it's being used. And actually, and specifically with doctors,

I found a lot of my clients, their doctors have treated them in some pretty icky ways about taking this medication. Almost like, well, there's no excuse now for your way. We have ozemic. When they have some very, very real concerns about why they wouldn't want to take the medication. So yeah, it's definitely something that I guess to summarize is something I feel kind of icky about. icky is the clinical term.

Yes. Rachel Hartley, author of gentle nutrition and non-diet approach to healthy eating. We'll put a link to that. We'll put links to lots of her stuff in the show notes. If you want to learn more, Rachel, thank you very much. Well, thank you so much for having me. This is a lovely conversation. Thanks again to Rachel.

Thank you as well to you for listening. If you've got a moment, go give us some feedback on this Getfit Sainly series. Also, rate and review us. That really helps us grow this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin, David Lawrence, and Tara Anderson. DJ Kashmir is our senior producer.

Thanks again to DJ for all of his incredible work on this series. Marissa Schneiderman as our senior editor and Kimmy Regler as our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet audio, and we get our theme song from Nick Thorburn of the great Indy Rock Band Islands. We'll see you right back here on Friday for a bonus from Alexis Santos.

It's a guided meditation that will help you deal with self-destructive urges that sometimes come up when we're trying to boot up healthy habits. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ 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.

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