67. Embracing Body Trust and Overcoming Diet Culture with Joanne Edinberg

Imagine feeling at peace with every morsel you eat and loving your body just the way it is. In my heartfelt conversation with Joanne Edinburgh, a certified eating psychology coach, we unravel the intricate ties that bind us to our food and self-image. Joanne's own story moves from battling food sensitivities to discovering the profound link between relaxation and metabolism, lending a personal touch that many of us can relate to. We delve into the harmful cycle of dieting, dissecting how stress influences our eating habits, digestion, and overall health. Together, we question the wisdom of labeling foods and focus on the deeper aspects of eating—making room for mindfulness at the dinner table.

As the dialogue progresses, Joanne and I tackle the sticky web of diet culture, particularly its impact on women in midlife. We confront the uncomfortable truth that traditional dieting methods are not just ineffective, but also damaging. By cultivating a connection with our bodies built on trust and intuition, we explore making food choices free from societal pressures and judgment. This discussion is a clarion call for an individualized approach to nourishment, resonating with women who are navigating the metabolic shifts of aging. It's about replacing guilt with pleasure and finding balance in our eating habits with a spirit of curiosity and compassion.

Toward the end of our episode, the topic shifts to emotional eating and the shame that often comes with it. Joanne guides us through recognizing that the real issue isn't the act itself but our understanding of the emotions behind it. We share strategies for being present during meals, differentiating between hunger and emotional needs, and treating our eating challenges as opportunities for self-reflection and growth. This conversation is a reminder that food can be an act of love, a coping mechanism, and a pathway to self-compassion. By learning to embrace ourselves in the present moment, we step toward a more accepting and peaceful journey with food and body image.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:40

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. Today I wanted to share a really meaningful conversation I had with Joanne Edinburgh, who is a certified eating psychology coach. If you can imagine, joanne believes in looking at making peace with our bodies and finding the joy in eating as a way to lasting change with our weight and what we choose to nourish ourselves with. As you can also probably imagine, Joanne and I are very much in agreement with this anti-diet philosophy and we hope that if you struggle with your weight and being on and off diets, that our conversation can help you make peace with what you eat. So take a listen to my conversation with Joanne Edinburgh. Hi everybody and welcome back to the podcast.

Speaker 1: 1:32

Today I have with me Joanne Edinburgh, who is a certified eating psychology coach with Body Wisdom Nutrition. Joanne received a bachelor's in psychology from Tufts University and a master's in social work from Boston University. She helps health-conscious women transform from feeling stressed to feeling relaxed about food, weight and body image so they can focus their time and energy on what truly nourishes them. She coaches clients to find the inner wisdom to transform challenges with weight and body image into powerful opportunities for personal growth. Joanne is on a mission to help women end the quest for the perfect diet and the perfect body.

Speaker 1: 2:17

Welcome to the podcast, joanne. I'm so excited to have you here today because I know we have a lot in common just with our views and perspectives on how we work with women and their issues around weight and body image and how they feel about themselves. And I know that we were talking off air last week and I know that you have a personal story around your own history with weight and body image and diets and I think that that's what got you sort of into this field of work. Let's start with your story and go from there.

Speaker 2: 2:58

Okay, well, thank you so much for having me. This really is my passion to talk about these issues. And, yeah, I guess for me things really started in terms of affecting my relationship with food when I was in my late 20s. I had a lot of allergies and I just moved to Seattle and I was on various allergy medications and they'd work for a while and then they wouldn't, and then I'd be on another one and I was really feeling in my gut like I need to figure out what's actually going on underneath and not just treating the symptoms. And I worked with a chiropractor and he had me do some testing on my food sensitivities and it turned out there were quite a few that I was very sensitive to all the big ones Eggs, dairy wheat and a bunch of other ones. So I ended up cutting a lot of foods out of my diet and actually had a lot of success in overcoming my allergies. And so I really saw the power of food and how that plays into our health. And yet on the other side of that coin, I think was really when my, like I said, my relationship with food really took a turn for the worse, because I started seeing food as the enemy. You know that there were good foods and bad foods, and if I ate the good foods, everything was fine. But when I ate the quote unquote bad foods or unhealthy foods or foods that weren't good for me, I started being, you know, going into that eat guilt shame cycle and I was very stressed about eating and eating was no longer pleasurable. And then, you know, I had issues with my kids, my son having eczema and seeing a naturopath who told me that, oh, it's about what you're eating, because I was only nursing him at the time and so there was a lot of stress around that. So I had this perspective for quite a while. And then, when I went into perimenopause and, you know, started gaining some weight, which many of us do, you know, solely focused on okay, what am I eating? What's going on? I'm going to figure this out.

Speaker 2: 5:27

And when I did my training at the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, which was about 10 years ago, I think, I had a lot of a haze, because so much of our digestion and our metabolism has to do with whether we're relaxed or whether we're stressed, and we actually can't metabolize or digest our food optimally unless we're in a relaxation state. So I figured out a lot of things for myself and started to really focus on all the other things that affect how we eat. And you know how we eat, when we eat, where we eat, why we eat. You know all the other things in our lives that are stressors and that had a huge impact on my own health and relationship with food and becoming a coach. Now I worked with other women to focus on that as well, because I think those are all the missing pieces. You know, we're so focused on what we're eating and it is important, as I said, but there's so many other things that impact how things work in our bodies, both physically and mentally and emotionally.

Speaker 1: 6:44

So, yeah, yeah, I mean great point that you know, starting to classify foods into healthy foods, unhealthy foods, good foods, bad foods. I can't have that, I can't have this. And then if you, you know, if you waiver a little bit and, god forbid, you have an egg. When they, the chiropractor, said you were sensitive to eggs, I mean, then you know, and right, and you and you mentioned the eat guilt shame cycle. I want to talk a little bit more about that next. But it does. It is stressful, right. Then food becomes incredibly stressful. What are we supposed to eat? I mean that's the number one question I get from everybody. I'm so confused about food. Just tell me what to eat. What am I supposed to eat? Because food is confusing. And then it reverberates, right, it starts in our digestion, we're stressed in our brain and it slows everything down. Right, our cortisol gets raised and then suddenly we like can't really digest food like we want to. Then you have digestive issues and I mean it's just really. It does start with having a healthy relationship with food.

Speaker 2: 7:51

Yes, yes, and you know, I think it's, it's so. It's just so interesting that whole process that happens and stress itself has such an impact on how things are absorbed in the body that you could be eating the quote unquote healthiest food in the world. And if you're eating under stress, if you're eating really fast, if you're not paying attention, if you have all sorts of thoughts about what you're eating, it doesn't really, it's not really going to do you the good that you think it's doing and you could eat foods that supposedly are unhealthy and you know, being a very calm environment, being with people you really enjoy, being very mindful of what you're doing and might not really have that negative effect that you think it might have on your body. So there's both sides of that as well.

Speaker 1: 8:45

Right, exactly.

Speaker 1: 8:46

So you mentioned that. You know you went to see the chiropractor. He's put you on, sounds like maybe you did food sensitivity testing, but it was kind of like a diet, right. Suddenly you have to restrict food, stop eating things that you probably liked and and it sounds like it was helpful. But I think you and I probably both know, I mean, diets are short lived and not you know. So why do you think that it sounds like it sounds like it, it sounds like you went to the chiropractor and it worked for a while until it didn't work, right, because it it, you develop some other like behavioral things or thoughts about food.

Speaker 1: 9:24

So why do you think that a lot of diet programs just fail? I mean, I know, I just it's the one thing I tell my clients. I mean, everyone comes to me on loop with a history of dieting and that's how they sometimes think that that's how you should be eating. You're either on a diet, you're off a diet, your it's just diet is just the thing that's in there, you know, because they're so used to doing that and so and and you're not really supposed to be enjoying food and you're. You know, if you're enjoying food, you're cheating, you know, or Right right, you know. So why do you? Why do you think that? I mean, I think there's this endless conflict around diets, but what do you think about just dieting in general?

Speaker 2: 10:07

Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty much on the anti diet and bandwagon at this point. I've come full circle and you know when, when it comes to calorically restrictive diets, they absolutely don't work in the long term. Because, yes, you can lose weight in the short term by limiting your calories or how much you eat or how much energy you're taking in, but in the end, your body is meant to survive and it is going to fight back tooth and nail, and it is. It does not like to be starved and if you're not eating enough, it will start conserving energy. And you know, the more you do that, the yo-yo dieting just makes it harder and harder to actually lose weight. So it's a very poor strategy for weight loss.

Speaker 2: 10:57

And in terms of other types of diets or restrictive eating which might not be calorically restrictive, I think any time that you are restricting and depriving yourself again, the body is going to fight back, because we don't like that. We don't like to be deprived of anything psychologically, mentally, anything that you I mean, we know this like. We have a huge need for autonomy, right, we want to be able to decide things, and when we're at any level being told we can't do something, we're going to fight back. And so there's a huge amount of power in food in this case, when we can't have it and we, that's all we focus on, that's all we want, and if we can kind of let that go and relax more about what we can and cannot eat, I think that power goes away. And that's what I found I've been. I've become much less restrictive about my diet. I don't deny myself anything, actually and people get really scared of that because they think I'll never be able to stop.

Speaker 2: 12:05

And I think the underlying issue is that we've lost trust in ourselves. We don't trust ourselves to know what we can or we cannot eat or do. And I think that's the really crucial point of working on our relationship with food is getting back to trusting ourselves. Because if we're constantly looking to the outside outside experts or other people that tell us what's best for us, you know we're never going to get to what individually is best for us, because just because it works for some people doesn't mean it works for everyone, and I think we're all unique individuals. That's why so many different ways of eating quote unquote work for so many different people and they're opposite types of diets, you know, from vegetarian or vegan to the carnivore diet. People that eat all of those diets do really well. Some people do.

Speaker 2: 13:07

So we need to figure out for us individually what's best, and I think that's a process of experimentation and being curious, like shifting out of that mindset of being judgmental and like I need to fix my body and there's something wrong with me to. Okay, let's just get curious and try to figure out. I wonder what would happen if I, you know, eat this particular way or eat this type of food or in this environment. And really exploring that in a very compassionate way I think is really the key, like for me, that's what helped me transform my relationship with food, get to the point where I actually enjoy food.

Speaker 2: 13:52

Actually, food is meant to be enjoyed. I mean, it's meant to nourish us. We can't live without food. So coming to a place where we can feel good about it and not feel guilty about everything we eat is really important. And not that it's not that it's easy, because all the messaging that we're getting from the diet industry and the weight loss industry and just in general all the messages we're getting, are telling us the opposite that we can't trust ourselves, that we need to do these things and that health equals weight, which absolutely is not true. All the research shows us that that is not the case, but there are huge industries that are making a lot of money on these ideas, and so it's very hard to be swimming in this diet culture and not feel. Of course we're gonna feel like we can't trust ourselves because we're getting those messages daily, constantly, everywhere.

Speaker 1: 15:01

Yeah. So when diet culture is so amashed in most women's lives that, yeah, you really are swimming against the tide to just say I like food, I enjoy food, it's almost radical. I mean sometimes to hear women especially in midlife, I think talk about how they just like food and I think what diets get us to a point where we don't trust ourselves. Right, you mentioned that before that we lose trust in ourselves because you start to question well, if I'm not following that diet, then how am I eating? It's called using your intuition right and using really it's an inside job.

Speaker 1: 15:54

It's not like this external dieting, but the women in midlife and this has been my experience they're gaining weight. They're gaining some industry weight not everybody, but this is who I usually say and it feels very out of their control because they used to be able to fix things with quick diets or when you're in your 30s, you had to spend a day or two just not eating dessert and you could lose five pounds. Now, all of a sudden, that's just not the case. Their bodies are different and it feels out of control and I wonder if the one thing that they can control that most women can control is to say, like I'm not eating gluten anymore, I'm not gonna eat dairy, because I heard that dairy was really bad for me and as a way to just kind of fix their body. What are your thoughts on that, about women in midlife and struggling with gaining weight and feeling that out of control, feeling?

Speaker 2: 17:16

Yeah, I totally can relate to that. I'm 59, I'm in menopause, now post menopausal, and I guess my philosophy is that everything happens for a good reason, like the body always does what it needs to do, and so there's always a good reason for our body changing. And, first of all, thinking that gaining weight during that period of time is a bad thing and a negative thing is part of the issue. Right, I mean, that's what we're being told, but is that really true? For me personally and many people I know, I weigh more than I weighed in my whole life and I feel better than I've ever felt on every level physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. So I try to focus with my clients on how do you feel and what makes you feel good, and so that assumption that gaining weight is a bad thing is the first thing. Secondly, there could be many, many, many reasons why we put on extra weight, if it is actually a bad thing, which I'm questioning that but weight can represent so many things and stress is a big piece of it. So it may be that we're at this time in our lives where we're not taking care of everyone else anymore, like our kids are older, if we have kids or we're focusing more on ourselves. Maybe we have a little bit more time for ourselves, so things are kind of coming to the surface, right. Anything that causes stress can impact our metabolism. So maybe it's the job that you've been in for a long time that really isn't serving you anymore. Maybe it's our relationship that you're in. Energy can be held in that belly area unexpressed emotions, sexual energy, creative energy. So from my perspective, it's just our body giving us a message that it's something that we can focus on. You know all of those areas, all the things in our lives that may or may not be serving us. And again, you know, for me the point is not like weight loss is not the focus with the work that I do with my clients. Again, it's focusing on what feels good. Do you feel good? And so doing all of the things that bring you joy, that bring you nourishment whether it's food or otherwise that make you happy, that gives you a sense of purpose. That's really what I focus on.

Speaker 2: 20:18

But yeah, I think it's an interesting question. Honestly, I think maybe there's a good reason why we gain weight at this time in our lives. I mean, I think that's definitely a possibility right when we get to the end of our lives, when, if we get sick or you know, most people that are a lot older tend to not, you know, eat as much, so maybe things shift at that point. You know you want to have extra weight on you, though, if you get sick and something goes wrong. You know being really frail when you're ill is not a good thing, right, there's definitely research that shows that having extra weight versus being too thin is better for your health, better for your longevity, better for recovery from surgery. So I mean a lot of it, I think, is just shifting the mindset around this issue rather than being so worried about it. And again, the worry causes stress, which just exacerbates the problem. Yeah, I don't know anything.

Speaker 1: 21:29

No, I totally. I get all that you're saying. I think this is a big conundrum that I don't know. It has like a. It has a clear solution to it because there's the anti-aging industry, you know, that says women are not supposed to age Like, we're just supposed to. You know Botox it out, you know surgery, whatever. And then there's just dozens of diets, you know, for women in midlife and menopause, and supplements and powders and shakes and I mean it's just it all says something's wrong with you and you need fixing.

Speaker 1: 22:14

So it's a hard message, I think, to send to a lot of women to just say like, just feel good about yourself, or it's okay to have extra weight. When you've been, when you have been fed messages your entire life that being overweight is bad, I need to go on my next diet, whatever the messages are, you know that we are broken and need to be fixed. So I think midlife is a particularly hard time because we are also going through so many changes. We might be empty nesting, we have aging parents. You know that we are concerned about maybe your question, your career, your marriage, whatever it may be, but there seems to be like a lot going on right at this time.

Speaker 1: 23:02

I know for what. I am a woman in midlife, so I know this personally. So it's just, it's a lot to contend with, but I think the overall message is to try to make peace with food and peace with your body. No matter where you are at Right, things can change. We don't know what the future holds, you know and but I think having a good, healthy relationship with food first can lower the stress For so many other things. That's just a place to be able to find some joy.

Speaker 2: 23:45

Right, yeah, I mean it's a huge challenge, like you said, the mess of niggas everywhere and like around anti-aging as well as weight loss and it. I think the importance of having people around you who have a similar mindset is critical, because, you know, I don't know about you, but pretty much every day that I interact with people, especially women, I'm hearing people criticize their bodies and worrying about food and weight and if they're exercising enough or, you know, at our age, are they doing enough weight training? And I mean there's just, there's always something right that we're trying to. It's this perfectionist aspect. I know that's me, you know, always trying to be perfect, trying to get it right, trying to improve myself, and there's good things about that.

Speaker 2: 24:39

But being able to relax and let go a bit, I mean this is like this is the second half of our life, like how do we want to spend it? Do we want to be worried about those kinds of things or do we want to be focused on what really makes us happy and brings us joy and nourishes us? And I think the more that we can put our attention on those things, the less we worry about our physical appearance. But it's it's not easy and you know, having support, having a coach or having a group, like I do, a discussion group on ditching diet culture, and those conversations are so nourishing because you know, you realize, okay, there's other people that actually have this same way of thinking, have are trying to shift their mindset. And I think community is key, you know, because you can't do it by yourself. I don't think I think it's really hard because, like you said, we're swimming in this diet culture that's giving us the opposite messages constantly.

Speaker 1: 25:47

So yeah, I mean, like I said before, I think it's like it's almost like radical to just be okay with our bodies and food. It's like if you're not complaining about it, something's wrong.

Speaker 2: 26:02

You know, we're all.

Speaker 1: 26:03

we're all like, programmed to like, not like how we look and want to change. And how can we look younger? And it's yeah, it is kind of an uphill belt, but I think having things like groups and outlets for people to talk about it, to make people feel like they're not alone, is so important.

Speaker 1: 26:28

It's the reason why I do my podcast, I mean it's you know, I want to know, I want people to know that they're just not alone and what they're feeling about certain things that they might be ashamed to even talk about. So I had a question, though, about emotional eating, because I have clients who definitely contend with a lot of emotional eating, secret eating. You know, they're maybe strict on the outside and then they're doing things when no one's watching and you know, and you know late night eating and everything. Why do you think that we emotionally eat?

Speaker 2: 27:11

Yeah, Okay, that's a big question and I have a lot of questions. I know it's a big question.

Speaker 1: 27:15

I have a lot of feelings about it. We could talk all day just about this. I just totally no.

Speaker 2: 27:19

I mean, I don't think there's just like I believe, about our body in general, like there's not. Emotional eating is not a problem. The problem is that the way that we think about it, we feel shame around it, right? If you think about just the term emotional eating, we're eating our emotions. You know, most of us never really learned how to be in touch with our feelings and how to express them normally, you know, and healthily. So we stuff them, and I know in my family growing up, food was love, and so it's a pretty common strategy. When we're stressed and when we're feeling strong emotions that we're not able to express that, we eat, that we go to food, and so I think the way to focus on that is to really be embodied, to really be present when we're eating, whether we're overeating or emotionally eating or whatever you want to call it because that's the only way we're going to get in touch with what's actually going on.

Speaker 2: 28:39

Most of us have strategies to avoid dealing with our strong emotions and with food. It's perfect because we can focus on this every single day. We can't live without food, so it's a great one to help us address this issue of becoming more present with our emotions and really focusing on what we're feeling in any given moment. And so if you have a situation where you just oh, I just was emotionally eating, or I feel bad about that, or I was binging or overeating, whatever it is even if you can't do it in that moment, to afterwards really think about okay, I wonder what was going on there, like what just happened right before that incident. Did I just have a fight with someone? Am I having some problems at work or interaction with my kids, or it could be whatever it is that's going on, but just getting in touch with that.

Speaker 2: 29:45

I think being present to our emotions is the key with that issue and so many other issues. Like, usually, so many of us are not actually present when we're eating, we're multitasking, we're on our phone, we're watching TV or we're actually not eating when we're eating. So I think that being present and just tuning into our bodies and seeing what's going on is the key with that and just seeing all of these challenges with food and body and weight as just being teachers and trying to give us messages about what we actually need to learn, and seeing it in a really positive light, even though it's painful. So I'm not saying it's easy, but that's my short answer. Take on my emotionally eating yeah.

Speaker 1: 30:47

Yeah, I grew up the same my food was. Love was definitely a mantra, but food was also just coping. I'd go through a couple of really hard, traumatic things when I was a child and learning how to gravitate towards food and feeling very comforted by it.

Speaker 1: 31:11

And I also had another side of my family that was just food, was love. I mean. We bonded over food. So there was good emotions as well, but I also had to learn to take the emotion out of food. Food was to learn how to physically identify my hunger, and then that's when to eat, Rather than I mean we eat for so many reasons. We eat to bond over food, we eat to celebrate, we eat all those good things, but to not rely on food to help me soothe my emotions. And then I think and it's not like it never happens and all people do this all the time, but I think you mentioned something just having the awareness or just looking at like if it does happen, then to just look at it almost with neutrality, and I like to think of it as just being curious about it, just taking a look at it, not getting mad at yourself or hating yourself or beating yourself up, it's just something that happened and to forgive yourself and to start. We start again.

Speaker 2: 32:35

I mean all of the coping mechanisms that we have developed. We developed for a really good reason. I mean they protected us, especially when we were little and maybe to some extent still to this day. So having that compassion is really important. And if you want to try to shift some of those strategies, I think the first step is just looking at it and see well, why do I do this? What's the purpose of it? There's always a good reason and maybe you're meeting a need, so are there other ways that you can get that need met? But maybe it's for comfort or just even connecting with yourself. So yeah, there's a lot to be learned from it.

Speaker 1: 33:25

Yeah, I mean we can identify boredom. I mean it doesn't just have to be these like deep, dark emotions, but a lot of the points that I see. They're just bored, they're rewarding themselves at the end of the day. Right, it's been a really hard work day and I'm going to give myself eating as a reward. So, yeah, it can be. It's multifaceted, absolutely. So 80 for emotional reasons and then distinguishing how to then eat for physical reasons, because we definitely want to honor that hunger right and eat when we are physically hungry and not ignore that. That's dieting right. That's something different and we don't want to do that. So I mean, I think, overall what we're talking about, there's a lot. There's challenges, right With food, with our body image and weight, and what do you think that this all teaches us as we're working and trying to make peace with food? And just as a final deep question, what can this all really teach?

Speaker 2: 34:33

us. Yeah, I mean, there's so many things, but I think, for me, I think self-compassion is a big one. We're so judgmental of ourselves, of other people, and I think weight is a perfect one to teach self-compassion, because if we can't love ourselves exactly as we are right now, we're not going to love ourselves later, like if we are in that smaller body or whatever it is that we want to change about ourselves. We have to love ourselves right now, and if gaining a little bit of weight is what's going to help us teach, to help us learn that, it's a great lesson. And so, just seeing it that way, loving ourselves unconditionally is difficult. Most of us did not get that growing up not to the fault of our parents, because they didn't get it either but maybe that's part of what we're here to learn in this lifetime and maybe as we get older, this is the time.

Speaker 1: 35:42

Yeah, I know it's a big question, but I think the overall takeaway, like you had said, is the self-compassion and kindness that we can infuse on ourselves, especially when we have been conditioned and programmed as women from childhood being a teenager to be very hard on ourselves, harden our bodies, be on a diet, not like ourselves, and how we look what we're eating. So I think that is the ultimate takeaway is to really try to cultivate some self-compassion for ourselves. Joanne, thank you so much. This has been a really great conversation. I could talk all day about body image making pieces of food. Like I said, this is what my whole podcast is about, so I really appreciate you coming on and taking your time to talk about this. So how can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about you?

Speaker 2: 36:49

My website is the best place and it's just my name, joanne Eddenberg, j-o-a-n-e-e-d-i-m-b-e-r-gcom, and there's information about my one-on-one coaching program. I have a 12-week program to transform the relationship with food and body, and we do our book club slash discussion group on ditching diet culture, and I'm starting to offer that on Zoom. So, yeah, be happy to set up a call if you're interested in talking more, and thank you so much for having me. It's been really great.

Speaker 1: 37:27

Great. Thank you so much for coming on. I will post all of those links in the show notes so people can access it that way. And again, thank you so much, Joanne. I really appreciate it and keep up the good work.