Bites & Body Love (v)
Welcome to "Bites and Body Love (v)," the podcast where your journey to full body image and food freedom begins! I'm your host, Jamie (she/her), a passionate registered dietitian nutritionist, specialist in body image and disordered eating and body image recovery, owner of an outpatient practice specializing in disordered eating recovery, and creator of the True Food and Body Image (™) Program. I'm here to provide you with a safe and inspiring space, right on your device, where we navigate towards full recovery, food freedom, positive body image, and true well-being. Together we will navigate topics that include all things body image healing, intuitive eating, food freedom, eating disorder recovery, and more! 🌟
As someone who's walked the path of disordered eating and battled through body image struggles, I intimately understand the challenges you might be facing. No matter where you are in your journey, whether you're just starting out or making strides toward recovery, this podcast is designed for you to be your companion and confidante and get to FULL recovery. So if you want to get to that finish line and put disordered eating and negative body image fully behind you to thrive not only in your relationship with food and body but in life.
Connect with me: www.jamiethedietitian.com 💕
Bites & Body Love (v)
Even If We Ate the Same Foods… We’d Still Look Different. Here’s the Science.
Even if every single one of us ate the same foods, in the same amounts, and moved our bodies the same way… we would STILL look different.
And no....this isn’t an opinion. This is what decades of research show about human variability, genetics, metabolism, hormones, and the natural diversity of bodies.
In this pod I break down:
✨ Why body diversity is biologically normal
✨ The “Poodle Science” metaphor and how it explains our cultural bias
✨ Why thin bodies have become the default “standard,” and why that’s scientifically inaccurate
✨ The REAL factors that influence weight and shape (genetics, hormones, metabolism, microbiome, trauma, meds, stress, and more)
✨ Why “calories in/calories out” is incomplete and often misleading
If you’ve ever wondered why your body doesn’t look like someone else’s… or felt like you were “doing everything right” and still not matching the standard...you’re not broken. You’re not failing.
You’re simply not a poodle. And you were never supposed to be.
Your body is meant to have its own natural range, and when you understand that, everything changes.
If this resonates, you can explore more support, courses, and resources on healing your relationship with food and your body on my website.
My website: https://www.jamiethedietitian.com/
My Instagram: @jamieRD_
✅ Apply to work with me: https://www.jamiethedietitian.com/application-page
A big thing that I wish people understood was that we're all supposed to look different. And it's something that you cannot fight. You are born with a body that is going to be uniquely different from someone else's body. And there's a predetermined weight set point and shape that you have. And no matter how hard you restrict or diet or manipulate, it is going to be very hard to shift that. Um even if everyone ate the same foods and exercised in the same ways exactly, people would still all look very, very different. And that's the way it's supposed to be. I mean, that is what the research shows. But we can also use our own experience and understand that like when we look at lineages and families, typically they they look familiar, they have similar body types, um, similar frames, similar weights. And this is natural. We're all just supposed to look different. And that is why this promoting this one thin ideal or whatever kind of build that is idealized, usually, of course, like the thin ideal, um, it's very, very harmful because it's promoting this idea that you could look like that too, but you can't. You can't, no matter how hard you try. And if you do achieve that and you're not supposed to be there, it's gonna wreak havoc on your body. It's gonna be very unsustainable, it's gonna be very bad for your health. And so today I want to talk about what's called poodle science. I'm gonna link a great video for you to go watch about poodle science, but essentially, poodle science is this metaphor and explanation that that shares how deeply flawed and harmful that message of one ideal body and everyone going off this one ideal body, how harmful that is to your health and your well-being and your mental and emotional health. So, for this idea of poodle science, I want you to imagine this group of scientists studying, wanting to study all dogs. But instead of studying all dogs, they just study the poodle. They don't study the Great Danes or the Bulldogs or the labs, they just study the poodle in order to understand all of the dogs. They measure the poodle's weight, their size, their behaviors, and then decide that all dogs should look and behave like the poodle. So then when they meet a Great Dane, they think that the Great Dane is wrong because it doesn't match the standards that they set for the poodle based on the poodle. Even though the Great Dane is perfectly healthy the way it is and looks exactly the way it should for its breed. That's exactly what happens with humans. We have taken this one standard, uh, thin ideal and then have applied it to these standards of health and aesthetics. And what is this ideal? Anyone whose natural body type doesn't look like that ideal, which is most people by the way, they are told that they're unhealthy, undisciplined, need to change their body less than all of that really, really harmful messaging. And I love to share this metaphor with folks because oftentimes when clients come to work with me and um we are working on healing relationship with food and body, but they have this idea in their head that they're supposed to look a certain way, and if they don't, that means something's wrong with them. How harmful is that? How harmful is that? It's very, very obvious when we take away diaculture and thin culture that we are not supposed to all look the same. And if we have to use these measures of severe restriction and just everything, all these behaviors really impacting our life and keeping us from living life and being truly healthy by accepting the weight we're supposed to be at, then we're we're not supposed to be at that weight, you know, where our body decides that, and we need to practice and work on letting go of society's standards and get rid of that harmful messaging and those harmful ideas of what health is, so that we can really come to true health and and body confidence and feeling in control of food and being practicing, you know, respect and intuitive eating around food. And when I said, you know, if we all ate the same and exercised the same, we would still look all very different. I want to talk about the the second thing here, which is that it's not as simple as calories in, calories out that determine your your body shape and size. There are uh according to research, there are many different pieces, and and a big, big piece is that genetic factor that I talked about with poodle science. But also we have hormones, metabolism, lifestyle, metabolic adaption, also gut microbiome is a is a big one, hormones. I think I mentioned that one. All of these things really, really impact um how someone holds weights or gains weight.