The Food Medic - S2 E5 - Ditching Diet culture with Laura Thomas

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

In this episode we hear from Laura Thomas who is a registered nutritionist, specialising in intuitive eating. Hazel and Laura chat all about how to ditch diets for good, what intuitive eating actually means, weight stigma and the concept of body neutrality. Laura also hosts a podcast “Don’t Salt My Game” calling out diet trends and myths, and has just released her debut book - JUST EAT IT. You can find more from Laura @laurathomasphd on Instagram. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Dr. Hazel Wallace. I'm a medical doctor and founder of The Food Medic. So I hope you guys are well and not feeling the january blues too much last time we heard from dr rang and chattergy who chatted all about stress and how to deal with it in everyday life so hopefully some of those tools have been useful now this week we're going to hear from laura thomas who is a registered nutritionist specializing in intuitive eating. Laura helps her clients to build a healthy relationship with food by helping them tune into their own innate hunger and satiety cues and to also disconnect from diet tools like meal plans and calorie trackers. Laura also hosts a podcast Don't Stop My Game calling out diet trends and myths and has just released her debut book Just Eat It. Now before I met Laura I thought

I had my head wrapped around all of this but listening to her and learning from her I realised that intuitive eating is so much more than I'd previously understood. I think the phrase has been misrepresented in the media so I've asked Laura to come in and straighten it all out for us. I think the timing of this podcast could not be more perfect as we're right in the middle of January and diet fads and books are literally everywhere. And quite frankly, they're quite suffocating. P.S. Don't forget to keep listening to the end of the podcast

to find out what we will be discussing on the next episode and to also hear what this week's challenge will be, which I think is perfect for January. So, Laura, welcome to the show. Hi. You and I have gotten to know each other over the past couple of months and if for those of you at home who don't know Laura is equally as mental as I am and has decided to go back to university to also do a master's. I feel like we kind of commiserate with each other and sort of give each other a reality check like what are we doing here?

Absolutely especially because you've just brought out your book it's just out. I know it's wild I don't know what I was thinking I kind of thought that things would be quite calm until January hit but all the way up to Christmas was just a complete ride. So what's the book called? So my book is called Just Eat It and the subtitle is how intuitive eating can help you get your shit together around food. Hope I'm allowed to swear on this podcast. Too late if not. So the whole book is well it's largely focused around intuitive eating and that's what you specialize in. But I feel like that phrase, the whole concept of intuitive eating is very misunderstood and almost like misrepresented in the media. So can you just tell us what is intuitive eating?

Yeah, I totally agree. There's so much of a misconception about what it is. And you'll see bros on Instagram being like intuitive eat whatever you want whatever you want and technically that's true but there's a lot more nuance to it because we know that if you just eat whatever you want whenever you want with any regard to how that actually makes you feel and perform and you know the sense of well-being that you have in your body if you don't pay attention to any of that then it's probably not going to end very well so intuitive eating the way that I like to describe it to clients is you know that voice in your head it's telling you what when and how much to eat and kind of bargaining and negotiating and telling you that if you've had these carbs today you can't

have these other carbs in the same day and it just gets stuck on a loop in our heads when you go through the process of intuitive eating hopefully that voice will start to dissipate and quieten down and you'll learn how to make food choices that aren't guided by that niggling voice in your head but that are actually guided by your body and the signals that it's sending you for things like hunger and satiety and also the pleasure and the satisfaction that we get from food, as well as those things that I mentioned earlier, like stamina, energy, and just a sense of overall well-being rather than guided by these external rules that kind of make us feel weird about food

and can almost bring like a sense of shame or guilt or judgment if we eat perceived wrong or bad foods. Yeah. Okay. And I want to come back to that in a little bit. But before we jump in, I'm interested to know how you as an individual got into this in the first place? Yeah, so I have two degrees in nutrition. And I think as part of my training in nutrition, like I kind of joke that I had all these values and macros and calorie numbers like hammered into me and I turned into like a walking my fitness pal, right? Like, as part of your training for nutrition, you have to be able to regurgitate that stuff off the top of your head. So rules and restrictions around food became really ingrained and entrenched in me. And I found myself in a really disordered relationship with food.

And then it wasn't until I came across, well, I kind of came across the concept of health at every size and sort of as part of that intuitive eating as kind of falls underneath that concept and so that was really just like kind of mind-blowing for me and really helped me doing some learning around that and then fast forward to when I started my own practice I was kind of just doing more stuff along the vein of like typical nutrition and here I'm going to tell you all the right foods to eat and and you're going to be just fine and I realized that the people that were coming to me even though they'd kind of been caught up in like wellness and clean eating and listening to

Instagram pseudo nutritionists and buying all the books and following everything like perfectly but they weren't getting the like boundless energy that they were promised or the glow that they were promised and all this kind of stuff. And they had a lot of guilt and anxiety and stress related to eating. And so I realized that the problem wasn't actually the food, it was the relationship with food. And so that's when I went back and I kind of thought about, OK, what had been helpful for me? And then retrained, became an intuitive eating counselor, did a lot of CPD, read a lot of the literature. And then I started talking about it on my own podcast and on social media. And it seemed to really resonate and click with people.

I think it was the right sort of time when people were just fed up of being told we have to eat perfectly in order to be healthy and they found that the messages of intuitive eating and learning to tune into what your body is telling you is really empowering and liberating yeah and when I knew you were coming on here I did a little shout out on Instagram and just see if people had any questions and what kind of topics would come up when I mentioned intuitive eating and words like binge and out of control and guilt like you've just mentioned just kept coming up every single message and to be honest majority of the people who I thought would respond would just be women but actually there was a lot of men saying the same things and it made me realize well this is a huge problem but if we just look

at women for a second it seems that majority of us have been on some form of diet in our lives and we all have this or we have had at some point a kind of funk around food we're not really sure like what we should be eating if we're doing the right thing again like how we get that glow how we have the perfect skin the perfect diet why is our relationship with food so messed up this is my question to you yeah so I just want to really quickly just touch on what you said about men there because I think that they often get left out of the conversation and just anecdotally in our clinic um so my clinic's called the London Centre for center for intuitive eating we've seen

a lot more men recently so i think that they are starting to reach out and get support for this and so it's just to say for any dudes listening like my book is predominantly aimed at women and and a lot of the stuff geared to intuitive eating is but that's not to say that it's not for dudes and that they can't go and seek out support for this because I think it's equally as important for everyone not just women yeah so why is our relationship with food so messed up it's such a great question and I think that there are sort of interpersonal reasons um like I said I'm studying eating disorders at the moment and so so we understand that sometimes there's a genetic basis for this. And there are people who are slightly more susceptible than others.

But then we have to also kind of take a step back and look at the sociocultural context of our eating. And we basically we live in the media, on social media, on TV and magazines everywhere is kind of reinforcing this idealized version of what women in particular, but all genders are influenced by this now. But we're told that we need to fit this really narrow ideal, this aesthetic ideal that is biogenetically difficult if not impossible for most people and so that ends up in us trying to instead of accepting who we are trying to chase someone who we're not and that I think disconnect between who we are and that ideal that we're trying to chase that gap is where anxiety and depression and various other that weird funk that you talked about around food that's where that stuff grows and just that's kind of a breeding ground for that

yeah and I think like you said it permeates everything and sometimes we're not even aware that it's happening you just have to open a magazine or go into a clothing store or especially around January it's either you know beat the bulge before Christmas or like shred for summer everything's body focused and the words that are used it's so suffocating but one of the questions that I keep getting asked is how do I just ditch diets for good how do I still eat healthy without being so concerned about what I'm putting on my plate? And it is really tough. And so the first thing that I would say is to have some self-compassion. And I've done a whole chapter on self-compassion in my book just because I think it's such a underscoring foundational principle that without that, you can't really build the

skills of intuitive eating and get back in touch with the cues that your body's sending you so just go easy and go gently on yourself because we are living in a culture that reinforces this really narrow ideal and so we're constantly kind of having to develop resilience against that. And that takes some work and takes some practice. So if you do have those thoughts of like, oh, I should just go on another diet. I just, I'll go on one last diet and then I'll learn intuitive eating. Just understand that that's pretty normal and that's part and parcel of living in diet culture. But you can start to unpick that, I suppose. I think in of low-hanging fruit sorting out your social media

feed I know that people this is advice that people are given quite frequently but I really think it's worth hammering home because sometimes I'll tell my or I'll ask my clients to sort out their social media feed and then we'll go back in and have another look a little bit further down the line and people haven't been ruthless so I'm saying being really really ruthless with what you're following diversify your feed so that you're seeing a wider variety of different bodies and not just ones that conform to a certain ideal so like even look around you when you're out and about the variety of different shapes and sizes and abilities and genders and the whole variety of life and try and make sure that some of that's reflected in your

social media feed as well and then you can start to follow accounts that encourage self-compassion and there's some really really cool research from the University of the West of England at the Center for Appearance Research that shows that images of self-compassion can buffer the detrimental psychological effects of viewing fitspo imagery. So it can actually buffer that and help improve what's called state body confidence or state positive body image. So that sense of feeling good in your body in that moment. And there's some other really fascinating research that is coming out around body image. We've known for a long time what contributes to negative body image and us feeling like crap about our bodies.

But some really interesting research is now beginning to show that being outside in nature and doing things like yoga and going to life drawing classes can actually improve what's called embodiment so that sense of like being in and grounding into your body and that almost like a mind-body connection and that can help improve body confidence. And then when it comes to food, you mentioned at the beginning that intuitive eating is not just throwing everything at the window and just being like, I'm going to eat whatever I want, because I think that brings up a lot of anxiety for people. And they're like, well, I'm just going to eat donuts for the rest of my life, and I'm not going to be able to hold back. So you discuss this concept of gentle nutrition in your book. And I think that

comes towards the end of when you're working with a client so can you explain that concept? Yeah so just to kind of give a little bit of preface to the intuitive eating intervention because like you mentioned Hazel gentle nutrition comes at the end and that's very deliberate and very intentional because while you're going through the process of learning to eat more intuitively, part of that process is learning to deconstruct and unpack and unpick food rules and restrictions and rigid black and white all or nothing thinking about nutrition. So we have to strip all of that back and then learn how to eat basically from the ground up and learn to be guided by our body in terms of like what tastes good and what feels good in our bodies.

And there's a part of that process where you learn to make peace with food. And that's called unconditional permission to eat, which is where people get this idea that just screw it, eat whatever you want, whenever you want. And so in that process, there might be a period of time where you're kind of making up for the fact that you've been quite deprived, you've been quite restrictive, and the heavier and the harder you've been restricting, the bigger that sort of rebound might be potentially. So if that does happen, that's okay. In the short term, that's all right, right? That's part of the process.

And that's part of almost that healing of making peace with food. In my book, I've really tried to make that a process that is very deliberate and intentional. And there's a step-by-step guide to doing that. So it doesn't feel overwhelming and it doesn't feel like you've gone into freefall right but there's almost that piece of really making peace with food and learning that you can eat the things that you want and nothing catastrophic is going to happen that needs to take place before we move to the place where we can come at nutrition information from a place of self-care rather than control and restriction and so that's why that gentle nutrition piece is left until the end.

But what we're seeing in gentle nutrition is that it's not black or white. It's not like if you have a donut, like you mentioned, that it cancels out all of the other nutrition and the fiber and the micronutrients and phytochemicals from the rest of the food that you've been eating all day. So basically what I'm trying to say is there's a process of deconstructing everything and then building back up. And so it's a very deliberate move. But something else that I wanted to say, just to maybe help reassure people that they aren't going to just go like, into this frenzy. Yeah, exactly. If you're listening, if you can, if you're not like walking down the

street, you're sat somewhere where you can close your eyes just for a second, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and then think about how it would feel in your body if first thing in the morning you woke up and you ate a donut and then you have another one for a mid-morning snack and then for lunch and then for your afternoon snack. Do you think you're going to want to ate a donut. And then you have another one for a mid-morning snack. And then for lunch. And then for your afternoon snack. Do you think you're going to want to have a donut for dinner that night? Right? No.

It's such a good point. But also, how does it feel? Like, how would you feel, Hazel, if you'd eaten donuts, like six donuts for the day and hadn't had a proper meal? You just, you wouldn't be very productive. You'd feel so lethargic you'd feel nauseous you you know the first donut not gonna lie the first donut would feel good maybe the first and a half but after that you'd just be sick of it it's like with anything it's like when people put you on a diet of veggies and chicken and you're just like why

am i eating this all the time and yeah another reason why diets don't really work it's like you need variety in the diet and your body will tell you hey i need some greens right now and like i need some healthy fats and i need some carbs they're the things that your body's telling you but i think we don't trust ourselves anymore because we're like well i've read that i should have x amount of calories and X amount of carbs and fats and protein, but everybody is so different. Your weight and your height and your gender, there's so many other things here. So many variables. Yeah. And ultimately, we want to feel good in our bodies. We don't want to feel lethargic and nauseous. But on the other hand, we also don't want to feel restricted and deprived. And so when we're guided by our bodies that gives us the freedom to sort of say this feels good but too much of this doesn't

feel good and too little of that doesn't feel good but instead of that being dictated by somebody else who doesn't know your life you get to decide you get to call the shots you get to make the rules about you and your body yeah and I'm sure like I am that you are bombarded by journalists and people saying what advice would you give to someone in January who is under pressure to go on all these diets they've had three weeks of lots of Christmas parties lots of boozing not very many greens not much sleep is it okay I guess, change your lifestyle in a way that makes you feel good again without going full hog restrictive? Like how does one go about doing that, easing yourself into the year? Yeah. So I think when we're talking about this kind of thing, it's helpful to just

take a step back and look at the bigger picture, right? Because ultimately, it was maybe only three or four weeks in the whole year where things were maybe off kilter for you. So put that into perspective, first of all. And secondly, I would add to that, that even intuitive eaters will at Christmas time, maybe eat a few more mince pies than, well, because they're not around the rest of the time. But you know what I mean? like we would maybe eat more than than normal and there's nothing inherently wrong with that there's a lot of fear mongering around that and so it's just to say that like when delicious food is around it's normal and okay to to eat that but just notice what your body's kind of craving after that point like you said before it'll start telling you when it wants to do a bit more movement and when it wants to eat some vegetables. So for instance, if we're talking

about movement, think about Christmas time as like your baseline when you haven't done much movement at all. And instead of getting into that mentality of, oh, I need to like start, I don't know, sculpting my butt like a peach or, you know, getting all these gains. Think about how do I feel now? How would I like to feel? Do I want to help improve my sleep? If I start doing some gentle movement, does it help improve my sleep? Does it help my mental health? Does it help that niggling backache that I have? And start to think about what movement feels like in your body rather than you should and you have to and you need to move and punish yourself with exercise. And I think

it's just thinking about what feels good to you rather than following all of these external pressures that are placed on people in January that they have to completely transform themselves. You don't have to transform, you're great as you are. But yeah, think about do you need to add in some more vegetables? Would that feel good? Without necessarily having to restrict and deprive yourself. Yeah, there's so many people telling us what to do in January. And we like what I'm trying to hopefully empower people to do through the book is to just take that decision making process back into their own hands and ultimately it's about being accepting of who we are rather than always constantly trying to change ourselves and be someone who we're not there's nothing wrong with self-development and evolving yourself but when it's coming from a place of hating yourself I

think that's where we can kind of run into trouble. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's so nice for people to sometimes have that tool to them to just be given permission, which is sad in itself, but sometimes we need to hear it. And that's exactly what your book does. So moving away from food, let's chat a little bit about body neutrality. And can you explain what this means and ways that we can learn to accept our bodies which is definitely easier said than done regardless if you're male or female or whatever size you are yeah so I think probably most of your listeners will probably be familiar with the body positivity movement there's a lot of talk about that and it's great and we're starting to see more diversity in terms of advertising

campaigns and things like that body diversity but for a lot of the people that I work with maybe people who have had children I've worked with women who've had mastectomies and various other surgeries injuries and their bodies they don't feel like totally in love with every single part of their body that just feels a little too out of reach for them so this idea of body neutrality is a much easier place for them to get to and it feels more realistic it feels more comfortable for them and it's just this idea that okay maybe we don't feel like we're like beautylicious and flawless 24 7 and we don't like love that patch of cellulite or that belly roll but actually we're not going to treat ourselves like crap we're not going to beat ourselves up about that and go towards restrictive punishing dieting or exercise we're actually just going to be kind to our bodies

treat them with respect move them in a way that feels good feed them the foods that feel good and sound appealing and appetizing and having a bit of self-compassion for when you're having those bad days. So that's really what body neutrality is about. Sounds wonderful in theory, but like kind of getting out of that dieting mentality, it's a process and it requires self-compassion. And actually one of the things that I would probably recommend as a tool to help with the whole intuitive eating process well there are two things there's learning self-compassion and there's learning mindfulness and having a mindful practice because what that can help us do

is when we're having those body bashing thoughts they tend to kind of like get stuck in a loop and then we cling on to them and we go to like the worst case scenario yeah so what a mindfulness practice can help us do is learn how to break that loop and intercept instead with some self-compassion and kindness even if we're not feeling great about our bodies but understanding that that's a universal experience a lot of women don't feel great and don't feel comfortable in their bodies so understanding that that's like a universal part of being a person is that we don't always feel great in our bodies and then offering ourselves some self-compassion and kindness yeah I love that I'm like literally in awe of you just and i just want to say like

i'm realizing that a lot of this stuff sounds really woo yeah like i hear myself but i just want to say that there is a lot of evidence and science coming out of the psychology literature that backs up these concepts as being helpful i think we often see you know in terms of like learning to love our bodies we're told sometimes to focus more on our bodies yeah like love your thighs and love your arms and love this bit and ultimately what I want to help people do with this book is to actually be thinking a lot less about food and their bodies and to be able to really get in touch with the things that they love and that fill them up and drive with the things that they love and that fill them up and drive them yeah so that they're not you know because how much time and energy and

money and other resources do we spend on trying to like eat a perfect way or look a perfect way it's exhausting and we've got so much more to offer the world yeah absolutely how much time do we talk about it and the whole podcast is about it. So in October, a test holiday, a plus size woman featured on the cover of Cosmo. And she was in a swimsuit. And while there was a huge amount of support online for this, and I thought it was incredible. There was also like a certain people, Piers Morgan, who suggested that it promoted obesity. I'm really keen to hear did you respond to this no so I think this was at a point where there was a lot of like I had a deadline for the book but just want to give a shout out to my colleague Helen West who's a registered dietitian who wrote a really great thread in response to this so I'm going to kind of because my sentiments completely align with Helen's and she to all intents and purposes said like first and foremost it's absolutely nobody else's business what Tess Holliday does with her body her lifestyle

that is her business she was just doing her job, ultimately. You know, she's a model, so she was just doing her job. And then I think, secondly, it's just really underscoring this idea that we can't tell anything about a person's behavior or their health by looking at their body. There are so many assumptions that, for instance, people who are higher weight don't exercise or eat in a particular way and don't eat in another way. And care what I had to say about it but you know I would try and really hammer home that idea to him that we don't know anything about her health behaviours and

also the size of someone's body does not determine their health outcomes. And that's a really good segue into my next question which is about weight bias and fat phobia because we talked about how prevalent it is in society and obviously that was reflected in the response to the magazine cover but let's talk a

little bit about how prevalent it is in health care and what we can do as health care professionals to address health concerns without promoting weight stigma, so just in case anyone is confused by what that means, weight stigma is the sort of negative labels and judgments and assumptions that we make about people in bigger bodies based on their body size and no other information. So in a healthcare setting, it's really prevalent. I did a blog about this not long ago. But it's something like 70% of women in larger bodies feel as though they've been discriminated against by their healthcare providers. So that could be like a GP or a dietician or a nurse. And 70%, that's a lot of people. And that's not like a blatant in-your-face, you fat pig kind of people. And that's not like a blatant in your face, you fat pig kind of comment,

but it plays out in really subtle ways. For instance, in healthcare settings, a person doesn't have all the necessary follow up testing or treatment options presented to them that a thinner person might. A more blatant example, I had a client who went to her physiotherapist with a shoulder issue and she got manipulation and she got given exercises and told how to strengthen the shoulder back up. And then the physiotherapist handed my client a leaflet about weight loss and so my client she's kind of sassy sort of clapped back at this um physiotherapist and was like well is my shoulder problem caused by my weight and he said no it has nothing to do with your weight and so she's like will losing weight help my shoulder and he was like no it has nothing

to do with with your weight but she was still you know well I can imagine she felt sort of belittled and her health concern trivialized and reduced down to her weight and that's what we see oftentimes in health care settings that people get misdiagnosed, underdiagnosed, dismissed, and just their health concern reduced down to their weight because of weight stigma amongst healthcare professionals. And there's actually, there's some really heartbreaking examples of people who have died because their doctors just looked at their weight and didn't take their health concerns seriously. So for instance, some people having their cancers being just dismissed and

not diagnosed. Yeah. And one of the things that we've, you know, discussed quite a lot within lectures is especially people with a higher BMI. And if they happen to develop cancer and lose weight and oftentimes they may be applauded for losing weight when actually that is a sign that they're very unwell this could be when no one's aware that they have cancer so it's just one example of how we often use weight and weight loss as this indicator for health when it's really not it it's a measurable parameter that can sometimes be useful particularly when we're tracking progress in certain things but as a medical doctor myself I see it all the time and I would lie to you if I said that I didn't think in that way in my practice previously. And it's taken me quite a while to change my thinking

and to not put that stigma on patients. So my question to you is, do you feel resistance from other healthcare professionals when you talk about this? Yeah, and I think, first of all, thank you for saying that. Like, I think it's great to sort of hear your experiences and hear your journey with that, because it's really hard to get our heads around this stuff. Like we're all taught in the same weight centric paradigm.

We're all taught that being of a higher weight is bad for us. It's going to kill us. We hear about the obesity epidemic and all of these kinds of things. And so finding out about these concepts of health at every size and the fact that BMI is not the sole determinant of health and actually that there's a J-shaped relationship between BMI and mortality. So meaning that actually the people that have the lowest risk of mortality are in what we would consider to be that overweight group. And it's not until either extreme that we have the sort of increased risk of mortality. And we're also not taught that to attenuate that risk, we can encourage health promoting behaviors rather than putting everything solely on weight as the indicator of health. So we're all kind of swimming through this same soup and I do get pushback from other

healthcare professionals but at the same time I can understand that and I think we just have to kind of keep being critical, keep being open-minded and really change in the face of evidence which it sounds like is exactly what you've done hazel yeah yeah absolutely and it's a conversation and i think we need to support one another and it's like with anything in science we're constantly learning and i don't think you make a good clinician if you're not open to to learning and having your mind changed about things yeah I totally agree whoa I feel like I got really emotional there oh it is it's like a huge thing to get your head around yeah um and it definitely took me a while to get there and I also just have loads of compassion for people who are just learning this information for the first time I'm sure probably like

some people listening their minds are being blown right now as well and it does take a while to make that shift and it's okay if you have to kind of go on your journey I think what's really frustrating and difficult for me is when people are presented with those facts and then don't go off and do their own learning and reflecting I think that's where it can be dangerous is when you when you stop evolving as a practitioner yeah absolutely and so this episode goes out in the perfect time in January and before you go what would be your biggest message to anyone listening at home and they are feeling very overwhelmed by all the health messages and what do you do you switch off well actually i'm doing this kind of fun instagram campaign at the moment so this might be something

that people can get involved in so they feel like kind of empowered so at this time of year like you say tons of like adverts and magazine covers that are telling you that you need to like it's the whole new year new you kind of thing. And they're all really, really rooted in diet culture. And in order to be successful and be happy, you have to change your body. And that's crap, right? That's total crap. So what I'm encouraging people to do is to snap a picture of the advert or the campaign or whatever it is.

And then within Instagram stories, we've developed these little stickers that are really cute. And they say things like your weight is not your worth and skills are for fish and riots, not diets. Yeah. So they're kind of fun. And it's just a little bit of an avenue to diet culture in January. So you can search my name, Laura Thomas, or Just Eat It, which is the title of my book and then if you tag me in the post write a little bit as well about why this is damaging and why this is hurtful to people's relationships with food and then I'm going to share as many of them as I can but it just kind of sends this message to your friends and family or your other followers that I'm not

buying into this crap anymore you don't have to and it's intended to be just like a fun empowering campaign where we can all push back against the diet culture stuff at this time of year that's so cool such a good idea well you've I was just going to ask you to tell people where to find you you've just said on Instagram but do you have a website you also have your podcast yeah so my podcast is called Don't stop my game and we're doing a fun little mini series just eat it takeover of the podcast for january for the book coming out so the the other place is my book which is called just eat it where you can find in all the book shops my website is laurathomasphd.co.uk and my clinic is the london center for intrusive

eating.co.uk so if you feel though you need a little bit of extra support, we have resources and clinicians that are helping people work through this intrusive eating process. Wonderful. Well, that's everything that we've got time for. But that was such a good episode. Thank you so much. Thanks, Hazel.

Thanks so much for having me on. So, ladies and gentlemen, that was Laura Thomasomas and i hope you found it useful i think she is just such a wealth of information and a very very intelligent woman so it was just great to have her in the studio and to learn more from her but before you go as always i have a challenge for you and after speaking all about compassion with Laura, I'm challenging you guys to take the focus away from food and take the focus away from your body and instead focus on gratitude. So this week, before you go to bed or when you get up in the morning, I'm asking you to write down three things that you're grateful for. Now, this doesn't have to be anything massive.

It could be something as simple as someone made you a cup of tea or you got to lie in today. But I promise you this will make the world of good. And actually, it's a really nice note to go to sleep on. And if you do decide to get involved, please do let me know on social media and use the hashtag the food medic challenge. I love seeing your posts and it really inspires me to take part in the challenges also. Make sure to hit subscribe if you want to be the first to hear all about any new episodes and leave us a review and a five star rating. On the next episode, we will be chatting all about pre and postnatal nutrition and training with personal trainer Charlie Launder and registered nutritionist Charlotte Sterling-Reed. I think you guys are really going to love this one, even if you're not a mummy or thinking about babies just yet.

Thanks for listening, guys, and we'll see you again next time.