Real Food Stories
The question of "what to eat" can feel endlessly confusing, especially when we contend with our own deeply ingrained beliefs and stories around food. Blame social media, the headline news, and let's not get started on family influences. Passed down from generations of women and men to their daughters, it's no wonder women are so baffled about how to stay healthy the older we get.
As a nutritionist and healthy eating chef, combined with her own personal and professional experience, Heather Carey has been connected to years of stories related to diets, weight loss, food fads, staying healthy, cooking well, and eating well. Beliefs around food start the day we try our first vegetables as babies and get solidified through our families, cultures, and messages we receive throughout our lifetime.
We have the power to call out our food beliefs so we can finally make peace with what we eat and get on with enjoying the real food and lives we deserve. Listen in to find out how to have your own happy ending to your real food story. Connect with Heather at heather@heathercarey.com or visit her website at www.heathercarey.com or www.greenpalettekitchen.com
Real Food Stories
92. Healing Your Inner Eater with Jessica Setnick
Join me as I dive into an enlightening conversation with Jessica Setnick, a renowned registered dietitian specializing in eating disorders. In this episode, we unravel the complexities of eating issues among midlife women, exploring the societal pressures and fear marketing that contribute to these struggles, starting from childhood and often intensifying during midlife.
As Jessica writes "My strength is looking at the backstory of your eating - not just what or how much you eat, but also why you eat, how you feel about what you eat, and how the habits you hate may have served you at one time. Let's take eating issues out of the shadows and use treatment strategies to help everyone who eats.
Jessica takes us on a journey through how food can act as a mood-altering substance and the unrealistic expectations women face, even those as well-known and resourceful as Oprah Winfrey. But Jessica doesn't just identify the problems; she challenges societal beauty norms head-on. We discuss the motivations behind popular weight loss drugs like Ozempic and debunk the myths that weight loss equates to happiness. By advocating for self-acceptance and curiosity about our bodies' natural processes, Jessica inspires us to rethink what true health and beauty mean.
We also explore the empowering impact of public figures who embrace their natural aging process, offering a refreshing perspective on defying conventional beauty standards. Jessica shares her wisdom on reconnecting with natural hunger cues and breaking free from childhood food messages, providing practical insights from her book "Food Fairy Tales." Listeners will find valuable exercises to rediscover their intuitive eating habits.
From exploring orthorexia to personalized self-care during midlife transitions, this episode is a treasure trove of information for anyone looking to improve their relationship with food and body image. Don't miss this thought-provoking discussion that promises to inspire change and self-compassion.
Buy Jessica's Book Food Fairy Tales HERE
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Hi everybody and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. Today I am with Jessica Setnick, who is a registered dietitian and is known by eating disorder professionals worldwide for bringing a new vision of eating disorder care to the field. Through her training workshops, eating disorder boot camp and hundreds of conference and community presentations, jessica has spread her message to thousands of healthcare professionals, educators, college students and other individuals. Combining authenticity, two decades of expertise and her unique ability to translate complicated topics into practical tools, jessica connects with audiences on a deep level, whether from a podium or across cyberspace. So happy to welcome Jessica to the podcast today. Hi Jessica, how are you?
Speaker 2:So I'm sort of cringing at that dry bio. I wish I had given you something more interesting about myself, but we'll prove that I'm well beyond the bio as we talk about myself, but will prove that I'm well beyond the bio as we talk.
Speaker 1:I'm sure that you can speak to many, many people about eating disorder issues, because I know that it's so incredibly prevalent, and I know that we talked off air about the people who I see and who my audience is here, and that's mostly women in midlife.
Speaker 1:So I would love to talk to you today about what you see in this age group as far as eating issues and how we can help women finally make peace with their bodies, because it is such a challenge at this age. You know, you see on the internet the fear marketing around getting older, gaining weight, not being able to lose weight, needing to balance hormones or take weird supplements to boost metabolism, and I think all these messages just foster a lot of paranoia in women and just send out a message that they are not good enough, that they need to be skinnier, that they need to be just for their age, you know, for the just better looking as we get older, and it's just a battle. So I think we are just in a, in a almost in a losing battle with with getting you know, with aging and and then having this pressure to lose weight, which I think can stir up some old eating issues and and disordered eating. So what do you think?
Speaker 2:Well, I have so many thoughts about what you're saying. I absolutely agree that all eating issues well, I won't say all, because there's exceptions to everything but most eating issues are pediatric. They started a long time ago, even before we were born, right. And so as soon as you're born, you don't get your needs met immediately. You have to cry for food, and so there's someone or you at least have to have someone who's responsive to you, and so any's someone or you at least have to have someone who's responsive to you and so any of that person's hangups about food get instantly and automatically translated down to us. On top of that, the feeding process is part of how we develop self-esteem, so if it's disrupted in any way, there's just so many things that can go wrong, and one thing that most people never even think about is that food is a mood-altering substance, and we think about drugs or alcohol as mood-altering, but food is mood-altering. Anyone who's ever gotten hangry and then ate something and suddenly doesn't hate their husband anymore, whatever the case may be, knows that food is mood-altering, but we don't think of it that way, and so there's so many ways that we use food that are a problem, but I think that you can't place everything on an individual. I am in your target audience. I am 51 years old. I think that aging is the new weight loss.
Speaker 2:I agree with everything you said about all those products that are always being marketed to us, and if you think about the fact that if we all just accepted ourselves right now, as is like snap of the fingers, everyone now accepts themselves, think about how many industries would crumble. We kind of saw it during COVID right that there were people who weren't shaving their legs anymore. You know, there's so many things that rely on us feeling like there's something wrong with our bodies. It's part of our culture, our capitalism aspect of our culture, and you know that's what advertising is meant to do is evoke an emotion in us that we already have. Advertising doesn't teach us new things. Advertising evokes an emotion that we already have, and so that feeling of us not being good enough is already there, and then it's really preyed upon, and I feel like the best example of how it works or I don't want to say works, how it manipulates us is.
Speaker 2:I read somewhere yesterday that Oprah Winfrey has decided to take weight loss drugs and the fact that she, with all her accomplishments and all the barriers that she's overcome, you know, still feels that her weight is her biggest accomplishment. I mean, she's been dealing with this, you know, as long as we've seen her in the public eye, and I don't think that anyone else really cares what size Oprah is. We all either admire her for the things we admire her for, dislike her for the things we dislike her for, but I really don't think anyone cares about her weight. It's more of a news topic because it's important to her. And so if you think about someone with every resource in the world, that person is not able to change her body type from its natural state long term sustainably. That's what I think we should recognize.
Speaker 2:Now, the problem with midlife is our bodies start to change and so we feel like, oh no, this isn't my normal body type. I need to get it back to that other body type because that's my normal body type. But it's really like a second puberty. Think about your kids. If you have kids or kids in your life, if you have watched anyone go through that big growth spurt and body changes, we wouldn't tell them no, you have to go back to the size that you were when you were eight.
Speaker 2:But that's what we're trying to do to ourselves and it's an imagined sort of manipulated phenomenon that I think is sold to us for the purpose of selling us things. And it's really sad that we're not allowed to just age gracefully. But I remember that commercial being a kid. I don't intend to age gracefully, I intend to fight it every step of the way. I mean, that is what we're dealing with now. We're in that situation where we feel like we have to fight to maintain the status quo that we've had during maybe our 30s, 40s, and I think it's really hard to accept that bodies change throughout life and will continue to. It's really tough and I know that because I'm experiencing it myself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I am too. I'm in my mid fifties right now and definitely my body is shifting and changing and I'm recognizing it and just trying to sort of blow with it and not get alarmed by it. But it can cause a lot of fear in a lot of women. I wanted to talk to you about Ozempic. That was one of my questions.
Speaker 1:I was going to address, but you just brought it up and the fact that Oprah has come out and said that she has lost a lot of weight because she's been taking weight loss drugs. And the curious thing for me with Ozempic and I understand the need if you are very, very overweight and, you know, for health reasons, right, there is a health component, right, that we want to address, I think, in relationship to weight, but not when it's just like 20 pounds, right it's you know what I'm talking about like when you have a lot of weight to lose.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, the research shows that people who are and I don't really care for the word overweight, because it's like over what weight? It's over some random standard weight, but that first group of individuals who are over that random standard weight are actually healthier than people who are underweight. So it's one of those things where we have been sold this myth that weight is the defining factor in health and affects all these other things, and it does affect some things. It affects mobility in some cases. Right, there's things that weight does affect, but we've been sold a bill of goods about how weight is the most important factor in health. So I just want to point that out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I totally agree with you on that. I know I'll retract my statement, but I think my point is that I have yet to hear anyone say I'm taking Ozempic because I'm concerned about my weight in relationship to my health. It's I've. The only thing I have heard is I am taking a Zempik because skinny just feels better to me.
Speaker 2:You know it's, and I and I and it's the other.
Speaker 1:like I've never heard that from Oprah, you know, I've never heard that also, like that she was concerned about that, but it just was concerned about that, but it just but that she wanted to lose weight to stop the result of of this drug, and I don't want to speculate, I don't want to speculate.
Speaker 2:And I also don't want to judge any individual for doing what they are doing in their life, because they're making choices and I believe in autonomy. But I can tell you what I feel about what has led to someone who feels that they have 20 pounds to lose. So there's already a myth that they have 20 pounds to lose, and then the myth that if they lose weight they'll feel better. Right, there's so many myths that lead up to someone who is a normal weight wanting to take a weight loss drug, and that's, I think, what we as a society need to change. But it's on an individual basis, and so to me it sounds really, really hard to just say I accept my body, as is right, much less I love my body. I mean, I don't know anyone who stands in front of the mirror every morning and says I love my body, like no, that's sort of an impossible goal, I think, to achieve. But I think that curiosity is a great stepping stone toward hopefully someday acceptance. I think appreciation is a good stepping stone too. So if, instead of my body is wrong, my body makes me feel bad. If instead we just had curiosity, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:I'm tempted to take a weight loss drug. I wonder what that's about or appreciation I'm so appreciative of all the changes my body's going through that I don't even need to know about. It's so weird to think about that. You have your lungs breathing all the time without you having to think about it and your heart beating all the time without having to think about that. You have your lungs breathing all the time without you having to think about it and your heart beating all the time without having to think about it, and your hair grows all the time without you having to think about it. And isn't it possible that our body shape is changing, not for some nefarious reason, but simply because that's the process that we're going through? And can we appreciate that as much as we appreciate? Thank goodness, my hair grows without me having to think about it, every minute of every day, you know.
Speaker 2:So, I think, curiosity and appreciation. If we had been raised with that instead of dislike, disdain and control, we wouldn't be in a place where someone who you know and I have heard many more people because I work, I guess, in this field say that they want to lose weight for health reasons. But they're in the same boat as the friends that you're talking about, who really are not experiencing health-related complications of their weight, but it's still that storyline in their mind that we've been raised with and again, I don't blame any individual. We're all swimming in the same pool of you know, basically diet culture and untruths. But whether it's for the pseudo health or whether it's simply for losing weight, I actually think that I admire someone who just says, yes, I'm doing it to lose weight and doesn't have the sort of cloud of you know, faux healthism, because at least it's it's honest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with that. I think that you can. I hear that. You know you can hear people say like I'm losing weight for my health or but it's there might be right underlying other. They want to lose weight because losing weight is more accepted. Yeah, could be yeah and acceptance really starts with yourself.
Speaker 2:But, like I said, you can't, it's really hard to say. For example, you know I would really be more comfortable just wearing my bathrobe to the grocery store, right? If? If we accepted ourselves, there's, like you said, there's social pressure out there that says wait, this is not the right way to go to the grocery store. But then sometimes we'll see really normal talk about you know his experiences with alcoholism and put in his medical knowledge la la la, and then at the end he played the harmonica.
Speaker 2:Ok, that's weird, right, you don't expect that in a professional lecture, but I remember it 20 years later and to tell you about it because it's, I just thought, wow, that's, that's bold, right. And so we sometimes admire people who step outside the norm. You know someone like, let's say, a Judi Dench who's aging naturally or something like that. But we we don't have the confidence to emulate that because we feel the social pressure. And so that's how I know it's fictitious is because there are people who are exceptions, and I can hear the thoughts of the people listening to us saying but I'm not Judi Dench, so she can get away with that, helen Mirren can get away with gray hair, but I can't pull off gray hair and again, that's just a storyline that we tell ourselves.
Speaker 2:And here I am with highlights in my hair because I'm trying to gently transition myself from weird no, I shouldn't say weird To me. It's weird because I've always had brown hair so now suddenly I have these gray Dr Seuss hairs popping out, and so you know, highlighting them is sort of my transition to gray, but it's I totally get it. Like well, helen Mirren, yeah, she looks great with silver hair, but I wouldn't type of thing. It's so easy to do that stuff to ourselves when really we need to remember it's not true, it's social pressure. And that's where the curiosity piece comes in. I wonder where I got this idea that gray hair isn't okay. I may still color my hair, but to just be curious, instead of thinking gray hair is bad, thinking I wonder where I got this idea that gray hair is bad. In other words, thinking of it as an idea instead of a fact is already a step in the right direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. I mean, to do something out of the norm is is very brave and it's also really risky, because you are then going against the majority of of women and the and the pressure is real. I mean I don't know. Can we thank social media for that? The internet no this has been going on a long time oh yeah, oh no, this has been going on for years and years.
Speaker 1:But I think now, especially with with the 24, seven social media cycle, you know you, all you do is go on Instagram and because I'm of my age, I mean they, they know me really well, right, and suddenly you know all the menopause diets. Right, and suddenly you know all the menopause diets, supplements, hormone balancing, anti-aging makeup, you know, cosmetics just to get myself to look younger. But I agree with you that I think that this absolutely starts in childhood. Right, we are fed messages. We have to clean our place. Fed messages, we have to clean our place. I mean, we lose our, what it feels like to be hungry and and full enough and to stop, right, and. And we get all sorts of messages from our parents and and and family, right, and so then that just rolls into we're not good enough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I want to insert another thought about social media, because I do think there is a plus to social media, and maybe I'm the only person on earth who you know, who is in this profession, that thinks there's a benefit to social media. But it helps us see people who are different from our peer group and different from the people that we see all the time. So I will say that I have seen people on social media, for example, who are luxuriating in their gray hair, right, People who take pride in their beautiful gray hair, and I don't know anyone in my life personally that does that. So there's a different point of view for me to see that I don't see in my daily life. I have seen people on social media who and this is the term that they prefer to use for themselves are super fat and they're exercising. They're doing exercises in a chair, even if they can't jog. They are putting on beautiful clothes and beautiful makeup and enjoying their day.
Speaker 2:I have seen people that the world would consider obese, tumbling right, Doing gymnastics, dancing with style and grace, and I don't know people in my life that I would see on a daily basis doing those things, and so to me there is a plus to social media, which is that we can and it's hard because you have to kind of fight the algorithms right, you have to sometimes seek these things out, but every once in a while there's someone who you know has a viral video, and then I'll follow them. I'll choose to follow someone who breaks the mold because it's a reminder that if there's one person on social media doing that, there's thousands of people out there doing that. The world is not the little cookie cutter place of my, let's say, neighborhood or friend group.
Speaker 1:Yeah no, I agree with you on that. But that also feels a little like well, like Helen Mirren is doing, she can go gray, but I'm not doing that. It feels risky. Right, yeah, absolutely. But again, it's putting right. So you see those people, absolutely. But again.
Speaker 2:It's putting those ideas into our mind. It's countering the messages. So I'm not saying that one large person doing gymnastics is gonna make us think, oh, I don't need to lose weight, like it's not that, like one-to-one ratio, like that, but it is anything that pops a little hole in the bubble that we live in is a step in the right direction. It's reminding us that these myths that we've heard are not true.
Speaker 2:Gray hair you can't be pretty with gray hair. I mean, remember the old, so old. But you know, men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses, and we're both wearing glasses right now, right. So somehow we have managed to sway the trend toward it's cool to wear glasses, right? I don't know, maybe in 10 years it'll be it's cool to have gray hair. Actually, there was a trend, maybe like four or five years ago, where it was like light, purple, light blue hair, but it was almost silvery, gray, right. So it is possible to change these things, right. So there is a it is possible to change these things right, but it's not a fast process at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I think it is very possible and I think that's the women that I work with. I mean that's my goal is to help women make peace with food and eating and cooking, getting into your kitchen, being comfortable with food. I love all that, but it's a process. A lot of the women that I see in cooking classes. They have a lot of fear around food, around cooking, about being even good enough to cook a good meal for their family. The layers go deep and I think the layers start in childhood.
Speaker 2:Well, let me tell you about a study that some savvy dietitians did, probably 20 years ago. They took three year olds and five year olds and they gave them all, on three different days, three different size plates of macaroni and cheese. So one day it was a small plate with a small amount. One day it was a medium plate with a medium amount. One day it was a medium plate with a medium amount. One day it was a bigger plate with a bigger amount. And they mixed it up. It wasn't like a progression like that of a small, medium, large, they just mixed it up. What they found was that, no matter what size plate you gave a three-year-old, they ate what they wanted, left over the rest and went to play. The five-year-olds paid a different amount depending on the size of the portion you gave them, and so what we learn from that is somewhere between three and five.
Speaker 2:We stop listening to our internal cues that guide us and we start looking at external cues, even if that external cue is as simple as the size of the plate. So we want to try to get back to that. We're not trying to convert into a new person, we're trying to get back in time to that three-year-old that says I'm hungry even if it's half an hour before dinner and doesn't care if you say dinner's in 30 minutes, they're hungry now. And how would our lives be different if, when we were kids, and we said 30 minutes before dinner, I'm hungry and, by the way, at some point we stop even asking because we know what the answer is going to be. But if we felt totally confident, saying hey, I'm hungry now, and the person who was caring for us said, ok, well, dinner's in 30 minutes.
Speaker 2:What do you think you could eat that would tide you until then? Do you think maybe half a turkey sandwich would be a good choice? Or crackers and cheese, right? And if you ate it and then you weren't hungry for dinner, they would say that's OK, you had a big snack before dinner. And the next time you said I'm hungry and it's 30 minutes before dinner, they would say, ok, well, let's think about this.
Speaker 2:Last time you were hungry before dinner, you ate cheese and crackers and you weren't hungry when it came to be dinner time. So what if we just do crackers and then see how that goes? And if they had taught us to experience and experiment with our own hunger cues rather than saying dinner's in 30 minutes, so you just need to wait. What if you had to go to the bathroom, right? Oh well, toilet time is in 30 minutes, you just have to wait. I mean, probably some people were raised like that, but we can easily see that there is a point where your natural body functions are going to overcome any of those restrictions and that's where you know you find out as a kid like oh, nobody's home, I can sneak some more crackers or something like that, if you don't know that you're going to get fed when you need it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, that's a great study and I think that would be the dream right that children have parents who grew up as healthy eaters and then they are passing down these really good behaviors to them, but it's the parents that intervene and then throw in all the messages about food is good, food is bad, you're hungry and remember, no one who is listening is immune, in the sense that all of us, every single one of us, has either a parent or grandparent maybe it goes far back as a great-grandparent who was a refugee, who was an immigrant to a new country, who was impoverished, who had food insecurity, who lived through a war situation, right.
Speaker 2:So the people who cared for us came about it honestly, right, they're not trying to screw us up. Right, they had a different situation, but they failed to see that we are no longer in that situation. And just as a tiny example, I remember that my uncle Stanley he was in World War II and he was in maybe was it North Africa, and they didn't have enough water. And every night he had to go to sleep with a glass of water by his bed. He usually didn't even drink it, he just needed to know it was there, right. And so those things are lifelong and lasting. When we have traumatic events with food in his case it was with water, but same thing those things are life lasting. And so if we were raised by someone who has that kind of experience in their past, if we were raised by someone who has that kind of experience in their past, it's not surprising that they pass it on to us because it's part of them.
Speaker 2:So I just want to let parents off the hook and just make sure we're not, you know, saying everyone's parents screwed them up and that's the problem. It's that people do things out of love, right, because they want us to have a good life and they want us to fit into society and they don't want us to wear bathrobes to the grocery store and be looked at as weird. And so it's in love that we have some of those ideas Now advertising and capitalism. I'm not going to say they love us, they just want to exploit us and take our money. But parents I think I hope most parents are doing things out of love and out of the way that they were raised. And what's hard is you can grow up thinking I'm never going to do this to my kids. But if you don't know what the other options are, you end up replaying the same story.
Speaker 1:That's really true, and I agree with you that I think that parents do come with their own histories that they've gotten from their parents, and on and on histories that they've gotten from their parents, and on and on, and it's. There's all sorts of messages about clean your plate, they're starving kids in Africa, you know whatever.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, you cannot leave any food on your plate, or you're not allowed to have dessert unless you do this. I mean, there's a million of those messages, but then how do you not pass this on? I mean, how, how do you then learn to become a mindful eater? You know where, where you are listening to your hunger and your and your fullness and and your satiety, and you're allowing your kids to do that without fear of them being hungry or getting too full, or they're going to gain weight, or they're going to mess up their dinner or all of that.
Speaker 2:Well, let me say the first step is accepting that all of those things are going to happen to your kids and that's part of the experience is sometimes overeating, sometimes under eating, sometimes eating things you don't love, sometimes having the same thing two nights in a row because you love it so much. Right, all of those things are going to happen and we need to be much more accepting of those experiences. And it's really hard because of that feeling that you know something's going to go wrong and you never turn off that worry switch once it turns on for a parent. I can give a couple of suggestions. One is that if you think about kids, eating is not a matter of one meal or even one day. It's over time. So if you took, you know, if you went to see a dietitian and said, do you think my kids eating is okay? They're not going to say what did they eat yesterday? Right, it's going to be more of a long-term. What are the kind of things that they like? What do they tend to do? Because health is so much more about trends than it is about any one thing. Now I'll make an exception if they're like eating marbles. Yeah, no, that's bad, but as far as food goes, it all goes down the pike and your body sees it as nutrients and not as even individual food. So we put a lot to a lot of preoccupation on what our kids eat. That maybe isn't necessary, but the part that's really hard is us identifying the stuff that isn't real from the stuff that is real, because in our minds it's all truth right.
Speaker 2:And so I put together a workbook called Food Fairy Tales, because I want us to talk about these things as myths or fairy tales or stories or whatever you want to call it, but something that helps you realize that you have heard these stories but you don't have to believe them anymore, and so, instead of sort of shaming yourself for having these thoughts, recognize where they came from and then decide which of these do I want to keep. So, just as an example, maybe your parents said, oh no, you can't wear white shoes until after Labor Day, and you heard that and you get to decide if you want to do it or not. And there may be pangs in your head when you wear white shoes before Labor Day and you're like, oh, should I be doing this? But then you go to a party and you realize everyone's wearing white shoes, or someone else, someone you admire, is wearing white shoes and you realize it's okay. So that's what I want us to do with these food fairy tales is think of it as.
Speaker 2:Ooh, it's really hard for me to let my kids leave food over on the plate that I know is going in the compost pile. But you know what? That was just a story I was told. Yes, there were children starving in Africa, but you know what? If this was really about starving children, there's probably hungry kids across the street. You don't have to go further than your own neighborhood to find food. Insecure people, right? So that's where I feel like we are really trying to go is to recognize. These are thoughts, these are stories we were told, and so if you can do that on your own, that's fine. The workbook walks you through it.
Speaker 2:And then the other option is to actually talk with a dietitian, and I'm personally in favor of eating disorder dietitians, even if you don't feel like you have an eating disorder, because eating disorder dietitians are the ones who are trained to investigate and help you figure out what it is that you are, what are the roots of your behavior. And then there's one more thing If someone's interested in a book. There are quite a lot of books about this. Intuitive Eating comes to mind, Nourish comes to mind. Those are the ones that I think are probably most targeted toward adults, but, interestingly, books like Born to Eat, which are about child feeding, are actually very interesting for an adult to read, not necessarily towards their kids your kids might be teens and you're not, you know, in charge of their food anymore. But to think about how you were raised with food and how different it may be from what is considered to be a healthy way of raising kids with food, and that's when you start to be able to separate. Oh, these are the stories I was told from. This is real.
Speaker 1:Those are great resources, and so there's, you know. So we're talking about a lot of focus on how to get parents to help their children, not, you know, pass on eating issues.
Speaker 2:But also we were all children. So that's why the same resources for parents helping children are also helpful for adult women, helping ourselves to sort of reparent re-raise ourselves with a healthy relationship with food.
Speaker 1:Totally true. I absolutely agree with that. But you know a lot of women. The focus is on helping my kids right. It's them first. Now, all of a sudden in midlife, they're you know, they're empty nesters. I know my kids don't live at home with me anymore. I'm not responsible for cooking for them and like making sure that they're nourished and everything. And now it's you know, now the focus is on themselves. And what do you feel about eating disorder or disordered eating, now in midlife, with, like this empty nesting? Because I've that's been my experience with some of my clients is that things, you know, maybe they're so focused on their kids and now they've got to focus. And then there's the aging and I don't. I want to look good and on and on. And, yeah, things can bubble up to the surface.
Speaker 2:So you have a confluence of several things. One is transitions are hard period. Whether they are good, positive transitions, whether they are things you wanted, even if they're things you initiated, transitions are hard period menopause is a transition. Empty nesting is a transition. Aging is a transition, right? So we've got this perfect storm of different transitions. And then, oh and, by the way, if you are in a significant relationship, the transition of your relationship centering around kids and logistics and things like that is in transition too. When you're empty nesting Also, self-care is hard.
Speaker 2:Putting ourselves first is hard. There was a study done once that showed that if doctors told women they needed to walk for their health, nobody did it. But if they said, you know, grandpa Joe needs to take a walk every day, they would go. They would take a walk because Grandpa Joe needed them to take a walk with him, right, and so self-care is hard. So you have the transitions are hard, plus, self-care is hard.
Speaker 2:And think about how nourishing yourself for yourself is hard when you've been told all your life that whatever it is you want to eat is somehow wrong. And so, instead of saying like yeah, it really sounds good to order in Thai three nights in a row, we think I can't have the same food three nights in a row. I would never feed my kids the same food three nights in a row, right? So everything goes through that screening process and we end up really out of touch with what our needs are. So how can I take self-care, self-care, self-care? Take a bubble bath, like candles. You know what? Taking a bubble bath with candles makes me stress out about the candles falling in the tub, like that is not a relaxing thing for me. Right? We have to figure out what self-care is for each of us. For some people, self-care is getting together with a friend. For some people, self-care is being alone with a book and PS. Sometimes self-care is different things for the same person at different times. So all this is really different for women in this stage of life, and so it makes sense that we would be mixed up and confused. Now I will tell you I think that therapy with the right counselor is a great source of support, and I know that there are people listening who think, oh, therapy that's for crazy people or whatever. But I read this in Oprah's magazine once Therapy is not for certain people, it's for certain situations, and transitions are one of those situations. So having another person's perspective can really help you get out of your head and, in lieu of having someone to talk to, people sometimes turn to our favorite club, which is weight loss.
Speaker 2:And my perfect example is that my mom, who knows what I do and you know, has fluctuated probably within the same 10 pounds her whole life. After my stepdad died, she started going to Weight Watchers and I told her you know, you do you Like I'm not a judger, but you cannot sit here in my house about to eat dinner and be counting points on your phone when there are children around. Okay, we're just not doing so. We came to our peace with that. Well, one day I don't know what the situation was, why she didn't have her car, but I was the one that picked her up from Weight Watchers and situation was why she didn't have her car, but I was the one that picked her up from Weight Watchers and as we were driving home, I said I'm just curious, what do you talk about there? What did you do?
Speaker 2:She said, well, today was about the holidays coming up. Today was about how are you, you know, going to manage your eating over the holidays? And I said well, you know, the Jewish holidays are coming up and I used to celebrate them with my husband, but he passed away this year, and so I called my daughter and she said she would take care of it and I could come over to her house every night of Hanukkah. And so she's going to fix dinner and I realized, as she's telling me this this is just an old lady support group. Right, she went and she shared her feelings in a way that maybe she doesn't share with her friends because she thinks she'll be a burden, or she doesn't share with me because she's worried she'll be a burden. Right, this is her old lady widow support group. This has nothing to do with it, right, and so that's our.
Speaker 2:It's interesting that she felt safe doing that. But had I said why don't you join a support group for bereaved widows? She would have had no interest in that. If I had said why don't you consider seeing a grief counselor? No way she would have done that. Right, but she'd go to Weight Watchers and talk about her feelings all day, so sort of an acceptable sort of way of being among you know, women and and I'm sure there are men in Weight Watchers too, but we're talking specifically about women, and so I just it's. It's one of those common languages that we have and it's unfortunate that weight loss is a common language. Anti-aging is a common language, but it is period. That's the place that we are in this culture.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't see it going away anytime soon, even though I know we can talk about self-care and yes to all of it, but it's unfortunately still.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we can at least work on it in our own, in our own sphere of influence.
Speaker 1:Yes, exactly. But what if someone so your mom is a good example. I mean, she decided to go to Weight Watchers. And what if there are women who because I see women who have been on and off diets their entire lives they don't know how to eat without being on a diet. Either you're on a diet or you're off a diet. Is there a diet? That's good, okay.
Speaker 2:That's good, Okay. So the dilemma here is that we all wanna pay for an app that will just tell us what to eat, when to eat, right, how much to eat. But the truth is we have that app inside us and that's again what we're trying to go back to. But it's not appropriate to say, oh, you've been on a diet your whole life, You've been completely detached from your own internal app. Well, just turn it on and go for it. That's not going to work. So the best bridge for that actually is a plan that's made specifically for you by a dietitian, because that's where and again, I would recommend an eating disorder dietitian. Even if you don't identify as having an eating disorder, you can say that I don't identify as having an eating disorder, but I've been on a diet all my life and I need someone to help me get from here to there, because it can be a years long process to get from listening to what other people tell you to eat to listening to your own internal cues. So in the meantime, it would be wise to listen to someone who has your best interests at heart, who has heard your story, who takes into account the things you like. Right, the cabbage soup diet doesn't care if you don't like cabbage, right. But a dietitian cares if you don't like cabbage. And I'm sure in the work that you do as well, you take people's preferences into account, and so, whether it's a dietitian I'm using the term dietitian, but it could be you it could be someone who has their best interests at heart. It could be a nutritionist, you know, not someone who's going to try to sell you a bunch of supplements, but someone who's going to listen to your life situation and not tell you you have to home cook meals if you like to eat out, right. Someone who's really going to hear what you say and then to think of that as an experiment.
Speaker 2:Because the thing is, every diet you've been on has taught you something, right. It may have taught you that you hate cabbage, right, but it's taught you something. It's you know. Maybe it's taught you that you don't really need a Snickers bar at three o'clock every afternoon, right? Whatever it is, you've learned something that the hard part is sifting through the positives from the negatives.
Speaker 2:The hard part is sifting through the positives from the negatives, and that's why I think, almost very close to 100% of situations, you have to talk it through with someone else because you have to get out of your own mind. The other alternative is to write things down as you read a book or as you do a workbook or something that can help. But ultimately I think the shortcut, if there is such a thing, is to talk it through with another person who can really help you sift through what is solvable with different ways of eating and what may be feelings or transitions or something else that may need a different kind of solution. I mean, how many diets can you go on to not go through menopause Like it doesn't work like that, right? How many diets can you do? How much weight can you lose till you overcome a crappy childhood? It doesn't work like that, and so a lot of times we're using food or dieting or weight loss or weight change or anti-aging as a way to sort of solve things that are not really solvable with food or dieting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, very true. I wanna just ask you just to please define what an eating disorder is, because we've been talking about eating disorders and disordered eating and I just, for my audience, if you could just give a brief definition of that, just so people are familiar with that.
Speaker 2:The briefest of definitions is do problems happen when you eat or don't eat?
Speaker 2:Like that's the one liner.
Speaker 2:The way I think about eating disorders is I actually, in my work, I choose to use a different terminology and I use disruptive or dysfunctional eating behaviors, because the problem I found with the term eating disorders is, like many things, we have this picture in our mind of who has an eating disorder, like we might see that emaciated person at a luncheon, you know, and, or something like that.
Speaker 2:We have this picture in our mind of who has an eating disorder, like we might see that emaciated person at a luncheon, you know, or something like that. We have that image of who has an eating disorder. And the truth is, anyone who eats can have disruptive eating behaviors, and so that's what we're looking at. And so disruptive eating behaviors can go on a wide spectrum, from, you know, very mildly annoying to life threat, and so perhaps when they're life threatening, that's when we would traditionally think of eating behaviors as an eating disorder. But to me, anyone who's struggling deserves to get help. We don't have to label it, we don't have to put people in boxes. So I go back to that definition, that one liner, which is do problems happen when you eat or don't eat?
Speaker 1:What about orthorexia? You know where, where I see women? You know they're eliminating dairy, they're not eating gluten, they're, you know, whole food groups. Get take it off the table, right, right. And so to me this is an eating disorder.
Speaker 2:Well, it only qualifies as orthorexia if it's impairing someone's quality of life. So, in other words, having food preferences is not an eating disorder. If someone is not eating dairy and not eating gluten and having a great life and their health parameters are good and they have energy and they feel good about themselves and they're content and they have a nice social life, great, that's not orthorexia. And they feel good about themselves and they're content and they have a nice social life great, that's not orthorexia. But at the point where someone is, let's say, not going to social functions with friends because they have to spend all weekend going to 10 different farmers markets to find all the specific foods that they want, right.
Speaker 2:Or at the point where someone is spending money they don't have on cold pressed juices right, or those kinds of things that is an impairment of functioning, even if their health may be fine, if their anxiety is so high that they can't go to a friend's birthday party because there might be gluten there, right? Those are the kind of things that I would say fall into that category of do problems happen when you eat or don't eat? And so I have heard, you know, competitive stuff like well, my cold pressed juice is in a glass bottle. I would never have cold pressed juice out of a plastic cup, right? Or I've heard of someone who dropped someone as a friend because they made a cake with an egg in it, right, I can't be around someone who would do such a thing, right. At that point I feel like the individual may think, oh, this is working great for me, but if it's affecting their ability to be with others, et cetera, then to me that is an impairment of functioning. That would be problems happening around 30.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that sounds like so there's a lot of gray area, like in this world. Well, it's very personal.
Speaker 2:It's very personal. You can't just make a criteria and then ask people to either be in or out, right. Oh, like Heidi Klum, you're in or you're out, right. It's not like that it's. It can flex. So, for example, someone might be really interested in eating nutritiously, going to a farmer's market, blah, blah, blah. But then under a time of stress, like, let's say, a relationship breakup or empty nest syndrome, it can kind of get a little bit out of control or obsessive because it's filling a need, that's sort of a void in a different area of their life. So it's not that healthy eating is inappropriate, it's the obsession with it that's inappropriate.
Speaker 1:And that then puts you in the category of a certain disordered eating. Yes, I mean there's so many mixed messages out. I mean, every time I see a new diet I'm like there cannot possibly be any more diets out there to have. And then there's another.
Speaker 2:They're going to keep coming, or they recycle Old ones Absolutely yes. And then there's another they're going to keep coming, or they recycle old ones Absolutely yes, one thousand percent. Yeah, they're going to keep coming because they don't work. That's the dilemma is that they don't work, and so there's always more people to sell a new diet, and what we do that is so, I think, counterintuitive. I don't understand why we do it. Instead of saying, yeah, that diet didn't work, we say, oh, yeah, I couldn't stay on it, or something like that, right? Or we say, oh, it worked, it totally worked, and then I gained all the weight back. Well, no, then it didn't work, but we were looking at it in like this very short term kind of way, as it worked. I'm the problem and that's that comes from that whole line of BS that we've been sold of not being good enough, like you said.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that you couldn't follow the rules. You couldn't, you couldn't keep up with it. It becomes your fault. Yes, Well, there's so much to talk about in the world of eating and food and and making peace with your body, and I know you know we talked about that. This really does start in childhood, with the messages you get but it's never too late.
Speaker 2:It's never too late to start being curious yes, about your own behaviors.
Speaker 1:It's never too late yeah and that and then. That means getting more intuitive with your eating right, Kind of trying to tune out the messages and just feeling okay about what you are doing, practicing self-care, knowing that you are going through changes in your life, that your body is shifting.
Speaker 2:And take away the shame. No more shame, no more shame. Instead of being ashamed of what you've eaten or not eaten, think about it as regret. You know, I regret that I ate that whole apple pie. What can I do differently so that that doesn't happen again? You know what I need to consciously eat during the day so that I don't unconsciously eat during the night. Right, it's just being curious, and it's okay to regret something and say you know, I enjoyed it at the time, but I feel kind of sick now, you know, or whatever it is. But to not be judgmental about it, to be curious, I wonder why that happened. Right now, the idea of eating a whole apple pie sounds terrible. I wonder why I really wanted that earlier. You know what was missing in my day, or what was missing in my life or in my mood that made me think eating a whole apple pie would fix it? I want to change the underlying thing, not the pie. Saying I'm never going to eat apple pie again is not the solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that sounds like cultivating some self-compassion and kindness for yourself, right? Just as you would talk to a friend, right you want?
Speaker 2:to do that with yourself. Yes, and now I want apple pie.
Speaker 1:I'm hungry, right? Yeah Well, jessica, thank you so much. I mean, this has been a wealth of information and I know you are just an expert at what you do. I have one last question If someone does want to find a dietitian who specializes in eating disorders, how would they go about doing that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's actually an organization for eating disorder dieticians. It's called IFED I-F-E-D-D, and so if someone were to email admin like administrator admin at I-F-E-D-Dcom, they will get Bianca. She is the administrator for that dietitian organization and they can email Bianca and just say I live in wherever and I wonder if there's an eating disorder dietitian you could recommend near me. Or that does telehealth, if that's what you prefer.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. I will put that in our show notes so people can have that link, and I will also link your book oh yeah, food Fairy Tales.
Speaker 2:I'll give you a coupon code after we get off that you can put in the show notes, so that'll bring it down to $15 for anyone. It's an e-book and you can download it and see if there's, you know, some of those exercises that you want to try to guide you into figuring out how to unravel and get back to that intuitive eater that you were when you were three.
Speaker 1:Perfect, okay. Thank you so much, jessica. I really appreciate it and my pleasure. Have a great day, thank you.