This Podcast Is... Uncalled For - Jenna Talleda (Snowed In 2025)

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

Florida-based nutritionist Jenna Talleda joins our Snowed In series to talk about health and mindful eating.

Check the mic will go live. Stories told their eyes and dive. Topics fresh with every spin. You won't guess what's coming in. Every week a new surprise. Minds away never lies. Conversations bold and free. Tune in, I'll just wait and see this podcast is uncarned for.

Catch us here, there's so much more. Laughs and tales you can't ignore. A journey that will leave you floor. In the night or in the day. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I'm another great guest here today. have gone to introduce yourself please hi i'm janet alida i'm a registered dietitian and a certified

intuitive eating counselor all right great and uh welcome and um i guess uh we're going to be talking about health related issues today right sure yeah so what's your uh level of expertise um in this fields yeah so um i've been a dietitian for um um for a while now since 2007, and I started specializing in intuitive eating back in 2017. And so, in addition to just my education and counseling experience and all of that, I also have my own experience with an eating disorder as well. And so I've overcome that and now I work with others to help them overcome their issues with food and body and things like that. All right. Good deal. Good deal. So, yeah, let's talk about eating and health. So a couple of years ago, I had a – I was in the hospital for an evening.

and if I had a stroke, turned I didn't have a stroke. But they did, but they did put me on the meds and I started seeing a doctor regularly. Yeah. This time last year, I was about a little over 250 and had a little more of a gut on me than I do right now and was pre-diabetic. yeah um over the past year uh made some of dietary changes uh try not eating as much and try cutting sugar as much out of my diet as possible yeah in addition to keep it with my meds and uh i find that cinnamon actually helped out a little bit too um and uh i saw my doctor a little less a month ago for annual checkup and I'm now it's 231 so I lost 25 pounds over the last year and I am no

longer a pre-diabetic but my AC1 is still a bit high okay and yeah that's that's a good way to start I think sure sure well you know I'm glad to hear that you know that you're feeling better and that your A1Cs come down and things of that sort, that's definitely some progress. I actually focus on nutrition from a different type of perspective. Because where most health professionals focus on coming from a place of restriction and like saying you can't have this or focusing on changing the scale that you have to lose weight in order to be healthier. I actually work on something that's called intuitive eating, which is about cutting out all of that noise about how you're supposed to eat and what your body's supposed to look like. And instead it's about coming back into your own self and listening to what your own body is trying to say because nobody knows how hungry or full you are.

Nobody knows what your body needs at that given time except for you. So if like somebody were to say, oh, you could only have this much food at any time, you might be more hungry than that. You might be less hungry. And then, but you might be more inclined to try to follow that because maybe the person has credentials or, you know, or things of that sort. But the fact is, is that your body knows how much it needs. And if we sit there and we try to go against that, then our bodies end up coming back and saying, hey, wait a minute, I'm hungry. And then we might find ourselves getting to a place where we feel overhungry or eating quickly or eating to a place of uncomfortable fullness.

And then we get the guilt and the shame because we didn't follow the rules that we were told. And it just, it's like this vicious cycle that keeps going. So intuitive eating is about breaking that cycle and coming back into our own. themselves because we are born with the ability to know how to eat and how to feed ourselves and things like that. It's just that our well-meaning caregivers and our medical community and our society as a whole, they all tell us that we can't trust ourselves, you know? And we have to follow all of these rules about eating in order to be healthy. But like I said, it just takes this in this way of feeling more guilt and out of control about food.

And when you can take that, change that relationship where it's, you know, feeling guilty or out of control, then all of a sudden you have this food and body freedom. And it doesn't feel like you're breaking the rules all the time. Do you know what I mean? Sure. sure so so with me uh one of the big things i did is a yeah i'm doing a little bit of uh that myself just yeah eat when i'm feeling hungry and uh if it's a certain food that i really like yeah probably eat some of that's but uh lately yeah just drank at least one meal at least one

meal a day. I know I know we've been culturally taught to at least three meals day

I think with just the way I am and trying to go bad things one or two

may suffice and I still feel pretty good about it but I totally I totally get eating disorders

are very much a problem and And I want to say it's a unisex problem because I think men can suffer from any disorders, too. We do tend to say women suffer from those because they're trying to, for the most part, fit a certain body type. Yes. It's, you know, and, you know, as we were growing up, I. it was really like pushed into our brain like the the type of person that can experience an eating

disorder tends to be a young white teenage girl in her like like yeah during her teenage years but the fact of the matter is is that eating disorders can affect anybody they can affect any um any person any race any gender any thing like that because we're all in this world that tends to be very diet-focused, very, very fat-phobic, very, we have to stick to this BMI box. And if we step outside that BMI box, then the world is going to collapse or something like that, which is a whole lot of below me. So, and unfortunately, where we get the word. Overweight and obese, which I really don't like, I find them to be very, they're just, they're very

oppressive terms. But where we get those terms from is from the body mass index, which actually tells us nothing about what's happening inside of our body. It's just a measurement of how much space our body uses. And so, but we live in this world. where the diet industry is a huge industry and it grows all the time and it's filled with like I just looked at new numbers and it's close to a $90 billion industry annually and they make money off of our insecurities you know and they just as any other business They like repeat clientele. They want people to keep coming back.

So they develop these ways of eating, whatever it happens to look like, whatever kind of wording or jargon they use, lifestyle change or, you know, being clean or all of this other stuff. It's really just to get us into their system, try out their program that's kind of designed to fail. And then feel bad about it like it's our fault, that we're the ones out of the ordinary, and then come right back into them and keep feeding into their stuff, you know? And the fact of the matter is, is that our bodies are really not meant to be mangled with. They're really not. And the more that we sit there and we try to mingle with them and try to force them into a certain place,

that's when our bodies fight back. And it gives us more issues with different things like, chronic conditions, like diabetes and blood pressure and heart issues and all of that, because our bodies are just constantly going into like feast and famine mode and stuff like that. So, yeah. So the fact of the matter is when it comes to BMI, there's a lot of sketchy history of where that all comes from. It actually started back in like late 1800s-ish time. The man who created it was actually not in the health field at all. He was a mathematician. He just like playing with numbers. And I think he also wanted to help his country stand out.

He was over in Europe and he wanted his country to stand out. he measured a bunch of people and said that they were grouped into these categories. And this was never intended to be an individual marker of health to like pull one person out and say, oh, this is your health because your BMI is this way. It was just a group people. And the thing was is that the only people he measured were other white European males like himself. They were never about women. They were never about people from other countries or other races or anything like that. They were just people from that area and used as the marker of

health for that. Well, even though technically at that time, it wasn't really that way. But then fast forward to about mid-1900s, then the life insurance companies got their own idea that they were going to take their clientele and decide an arbitrary line in the sand of who was at risk of dying sooner. And so they put this, they said, oh, anybody above this weight was going to die sooner. Turned out that the people that they used were just their cherry pick clientele. It wasn't a good assortment of a variety of people. And their numbers were as much as 50 pounds off.

that the people at risk for dying sooner were actually the ones in the smaller bodies, BMI 16 to 21, which is technically underweight to mid of normal weight. And the people who were the lowest risk of dying sooner were actually the ones in the bigger bodies. And yeah, but the diet culture and the industry in our medical community, they all jumped on oh well let's use this as our deciding factor for things and so it causes people to not get care like they need or to be denied what things in life just because of their body size because everybody feels like smaller is healthier but it doesn't mean that at all right you know yeah so yeah how does that feel what do you think about well um

Well, I don't know much about the BMI scale other than my research appointments, they said it was a 30. Yeah. So just borderline obese, which is, which is fine that, which is fine, you know, I'm, I can stand to lose a couple more pounds, but that's not my goal, right? just do what comes naturally. But on the flip side, my mother passed away in December 2010. She was a large, individually obese, which the corner, what killed her was a pulmonary embolism. But her weight, she was over 300 pounds. and that kind of contributed to a lot of the health issues, they say.

And she was, she was big from my birth to when she had passed soon. Yeah. You know what? Women's bodies change all the time, especially after childbirth. And it is in our medical community, our common language. doesn't mean it's correct. But a common language that we have is that doctors will inherently blame weight on so many different things. But a lot of those issues that you're talking about, they can happen in people in smaller bodies too. And but usually it's because we live in a very fatphobic community that weight automatically becomes the scapegoat for everything. And, um, and it doesn't, mean that just because somebody loses weight that they're automatically healthier and just because

somebody is in a bigger body doesn't mean they're automatically healthier or unhealthy for that matter because it I'll give you an example um so I um when I was in my biggest size um my blood pressure my blood sugar, my cholesterol, all of those things, they were all within normal limits and they were actually on the lower end of normal. I ended up losing weight. It was my eating disorder that was happening. And honestly, what I consider an eating disorder today, everybody would think it's just regular weight losses, regular dieting. It's regular like, oh, do this, that, and the other thing, and you'll lose weight. Nobody would have thought that I had an eating disorder because it's so normalized in our community.

But the fact was, it was an eating disorder. And my body ended up changing. Sorry. My body ended up changing. and my blood pressure and my cholesterol actually shot straight through the air in a smaller body. And then when my weight came back as weight typically does, at no fault of our own, it's just how our bodies respond to that kind of thing. Then my numbers actually went back to where they were.

And there's been over the years that I've done, counseling. There's been plenty of folks that I've spoken with, some who are in smaller bodies that are actually not in a very good health state. And then there's other people I've spoken to that are in bigger bodies that actually do have pretty good numbers. And even if those numbers were off, it doesn't necessarily mean it was the weight that was contributing to what those things were. But we just tend to get so like put those blinders on. Oh, the weight is the reason for everything. And actually the case is that weight is not a behavior. Weight is more of a, it's just, it's a number. It's where our body naturally sits. And we can do different things

to help our bodies work and feel well, like, you know, get adequate sleep, get some, you know, a good variety of different foods in that you like and have access to, you know, eat consistently and get that energy and so your body can work well. All of those things, those can be very supportive of our bodies, but it doesn't have to be because we're in a smaller size for that to happen. You know what I mean? Sure. Yeah. How does that sit with you? Sounds like, sounds pretty good. Sounds like a, a different way of looking at things, which is good. That's what we, that's what we need in the world, I think. So is there, and is there any advice you would give to someone who would be interested in learning more about intuitive eating?

and better nutrition. Yeah. So what I would suggest is, first and foremost, I bring some gentle awareness to how people think about their food and their body. If they notice that they are putting things into good or bad categories, or something along those lines and then feeling awful, you know, like morally awful because, you know, they ate a cookie or something like that. That's the place where I bring in some gentle curiosity, gentle curiosity, not the judgment. The judgment comes from that inner

critic that we have in our head that likes to sit there and tell us all the things and punish us and shame us for all of that. Put that voice off to the side and come at this from a place of innocent curiosity of just wanting to learn and understand what's happening. No shoulds, no shames, no nothings, just an interesting curiosity. And then also bringing in that compassion voice because chances are there are reasons why we might have wanted to have something or why why we ate in a certain type of way, it doesn't mean that we're awful people or that we morally failed in some type of way. It's just that society tends to make us feel that way with all of the fearmongering that we have about food and our bodies. And so coming at it from

that perspective can be really helpful to open things up in a safe way rather than trying to fall to listening to that inner critic that likes to be really mean, you know, and tell a lot of lies. So, yeah. So, yeah. So that's one place that I would definitely start. All righty then. All right.

We only have a couple more minutes left, unfortunately, because. Oh, that's okay. Yeah. So if anyone is interested in learning how can they get in touch with you and work. Sure. Yeah. So I have a group that I'm running right now. It's called Permission to Exist.

And it's a membership that teaches people all about the principles of eating and being able to change. that thought pattern with food and body. And you can definitely find me on social media. My handle is Your dot Nutrition.com ally on Instagram and also on Facebook as well. So yeah. And my website is Your dash nutrition dash ally.com. all right well well thank you so much for your time and for your insights and uh yeah thank you so much for having me i really appreciate talking with you mm-hmm This podcast is uncalled for is hosted, produced, and edited by myself, Mike Chernevsky.

The opening music is the, this podcast is uncalled for theme created at suno.com. The outro music for this and every episode in our Snowden, 2025 series, is Snowticket. by PC3. License and creative comments by attribution license. You can find this at free music archive.org. Please support the podcast and purchase our exclusive uncalled for merchandise, t-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, stickers, and so much more. Go to www.cafeepress.com slash uncalled for pod. Thank you so much for listening. We will see you next time.