Brief: An Honest Discussion About Food (w/Dr Sarah Ballantyne)
Dr Sarah Ballantyne forged a career in science communication and health education advocating for autoimmune solutions in food and the paleo diet. In 2014, she began questioning her approach. Shortly after, she realized she was spreading nutrition misinformation and has dedicated her career to correcting those errors.
Derek talks to Sarah about the dangers of diet and nutrition misinformation, dealing with obesity and eating disorders, and the challenges of talking about food in public. Her new book is Nutrivore: The Radical New Science for Getting the Nutrients You Need From the Food You Eat.
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So much of the brain power that's used in producing this podcast in some sense revolves around food and nutrition and all of the grifting and health spaces and healthism and the various anecdotes that are traded in the wellness industry presenting themselves as universal truths when, perhaps better put, it could just mean it's true for me.
Talking about diets, talking about nutrition, especially if you're not trained in these fields, is something we see very often.
And grappling with something that we both need to sustain ourselves, literally, physically, but also something that could be An act of pleasure, an act of community, an act of sharing among your community.
It's so primary to the human experience and yet it creates so much anxiety in so many of us, myself included, as you'll hear in this episode.
I'm Derek Barris, and this is a Conspirituality Brief, and it's on a topic that has always been very difficult for me to talk about, which is food.
During this episode, I'll talk a little bit about my challenges with obesity and eating disorders, mostly from when I was younger, but something that has persisted throughout my career.
You can say it drove me into a career in fitness, which it very much did.
And you'll also hear from Dr. Sarah Ballantyne, who is my guest today.
And like me, she has changed her mind.
She's changed her career focus to hopefully, she believes, bring better information around food and nutrition than she used to.
Her new book is called Nutrivore, the radical new science for getting the nutrients you need from the food you eat.
And yes, that is a marketing title, but this isn't a diet book.
It is a book that she hopes will bring a better understanding about nutrients and what we need to get healthy, stay healthy, but it doesn't advocate for any particular diet.
And that's partly because she made her career originally as Paleo Mom and talking about an autoimmune protocol diet work that she doesn't necessarily regret but understands that she was spreading misinformation around food.
And we're going to discuss that.
In fact, most of our conversation really isn't about her book, although she will bring up points and I will ask her about it.
It's about to me coming to terms with just how complex health is.
And when you live somewhere like in America, for most people, having access to such a wide variety of foods is amazing.
And the fact that we can share them with each other compared to places in this country and elsewhere where people don't have that kind of access.
And on the flip side, you have so much of what I've covered in four years now in this podcast and over a decade in health and science journalism, which are people demonizing foods and saying that this is the right diet or that's the right diet.
And again, it's very hard to distinguish between an anecdote, meaning this works for me, and the idea that this must work for everyone.
That's a few of the topics we're going to get into.
I really enjoyed talking to Sarah.
I've liked her social media presence over the last almost a year since I found her.
She talks about topics which are very close to my heart, like the social determinants of health and advocating for not having a diet, but also trying to live a healthy lifestyle.
She has received a lot of pushback over the years.
I received pushback from people who listen to this podcast and who know my work for even having her on.
And we're going to bring all that up because I think that these sorts of discussions are really important.
Because one thing I am pretty confident in saying from all of the public health professionals and doctors and nutritionists and dieticians and all the wonderful people I talk to on a regular basis, Is that so little of what we know is settled?
But we do know some things, and our knowledge base is growing all of the time.
So, I hope you enjoy this conversation.
Drop some comments in if there's things to push back on.
As Sarah says, she's continually evolving her understanding, as am I.
And I hope you have a good meal tonight, because at the end of the day,
that is really one of the best things we could ask for.
Dr. Sarah Ballantyne.
Thank you for joining today.
I'm so honored. Thank you so much for having me.
Of course. We're going to talk about one of the most difficult yet important topics in existence,
which is food.
I've openly discussed my previous eating disorder on this podcast.
I think it's really important for men to talk about these things.
Not enough do.
But I also do not give nutrition advice.
I was a yoga instructor for a long time.
I saw a lot of my colleagues doing that and I resisted because of my experiences.
And yoga instructors are not qualified to talk about food purity, for example,
because I know what it's like to cycle through fad diets and I don't wish that on anyone.
So as I mentioned to you a few weeks ago, I overcame my battle with orthorexia through the paleo diet.
I don't advocate for it now, but it was also a step on my own path.
And with your new book, you've received some criticism online because you were formerly known as Paleo Mom.
I didn't know your work then, I found you more recently, and I really truly appreciate your videos about various types of food without preaching the dogma of a diet.
Now, you also told me that you spent the last four years really trying to understand nutrition on a more holistic level, and I'm of the mind that people are allowed to grow and change.
So, can you just start with a 101 on how you went from paleomom to nutrivore?
I would love to.
So I think my experience in the paleo community was maybe a little bit different than yours because I think I learned orthorexia through the paleo diet and the autoimmune protocol rather than it being a place for me to recover, a better relationship with food. But that being
said, I also experienced pretty transformative difference to my physical health through the
paleo diet and the autoimmune protocol. And that is why I became so enthusiastic for that
diet. That's why I made that my whole personality for many years. That's how I started my career
talking about nutrition online.
And so I learned these two things, right?
And they don't necessarily, they shouldn't go together, but I learned both just how big of an impact higher quality nutrition can be.
And I also learned a lot of disordered eating patterns and a lot of fear of food.
So my journey to Nutrivor which is a non-dogmatic approach to diet where we literally just talk about what foods supply what nutrients and try to improve diet quality in a way that is sustainable and doesn't involve any restriction other than right for allergies or other similar type medical reasons.
That was a very slow gradual realization for me.
It started in I think it was 2014, although I have to admit that keeping track of years is not my strongest skill set.
I was pitched a gut health book from my old publisher and as I started to work on this gut health book, I really became sort of like hyper fixated on the gut microbiome and I spent over six years researching the gut microbiome and kind of like how a science communicator does, right?
We go into the nitty gritty of the science, we learn as much of it as we can, and then we try to wrap that up into an easy to understand package for the average person.
And I kept hitting Nutrients and foods that are extremely beneficial for our gut microbial community.
They feed diversity, they feed keystone species, probiotic species that I was not eating.
That I was afraid of, that the paleo diet had told me were bad.
And when you understand how profound the impact of our gut bacteria are on our overall health, I could not square that.
So I kept hitting, wait, why are we not eating lentils?
Look at how amazing lentils are.
Why are we not eating corn?
Why are we not eating oats?
And that it was sort of like one by one almost like one food at a time having to like dig into the science and then wrap my head around that the the fear that I had about that food was not actually well supported by the scientific literature.
And as I came to each one of those realizations I gradually started to realize That I had gotten a lot of things wrong and that it wasn't just me, it was the entire paleo community thinking about foods in the wrong way, right?
So thinking about foods in terms of this one compound this food has being detrimental for this one system in the body that doesn't necessarily reflect how the whole food affects the whole us and I needed to take a step back and relearn How to think about food.
It was almost like returning to my roots as a medical researcher, right?
And really sort of finding my way, having bought into the logical sciences and sort of like pseudoscience way of thinking about things that are really prevalent in the wellness community and having like learned that from other scientists, but really like that made sense to me when I first I started talking about the paleo diet online and then having to realize, oh no, that it actually doesn't make sense.
That's not how to read the scientific literature and I need to go back to my training as a medical researcher and apply that lens to this area of research and reteach myself all of this.
The, you know, the earliest beginnings of what has become NutriVore I can probably trace back to about 2014 but it was late 2019 when I started talking about it online where I had sort of amassed enough realization to understand it is time for me to build something new and start talking openly online about the things that I was wrong about and I am starting to understand Just how wrong I was about so much and that I, I had unknowingly spread misinformation and now I need to, I have a moral imperative now, uh, because I still care deeply.
Like the whole, my whole, everything was always about helping people.
I still care deeply about helping people.
Well, in that case, I need to undo the wrong in order to help people.
And, um, and in that process, Understanding food, I then realized how many of my eating patterns were disordered.
So I had to address that.
And that actually influences a lot of the NutriWorks philosophy.
That's why it's not a diet.
It kind of lives in that weird amorphous gray world between diet and anti-diet.
And that also actually is why the quality and scientific rigor behind all of the content I put out now is so high.
It's because I never ever want to be wrong again.
It could happen, right?
Humans are fallible.
If it is, I will, again, say sorry and correct the record, but I am trying to institute such a high level of scientific rigor, really looking at scientific consensus, rather than me interpreting the data, letting scientists do that, and then just communicating that in order to more accurately represent where nutritional sciences are
and what the take-home messages are.
And then also, hopefully never be in the situation where I am unknowingly spreading
this information again. First off, I'm from New Jersey, so the idea of never eating corn
just would never actually fit into my brain as a general life principle.
You bring up something there that is common that we see and I've identified as something with influencers in the conspirituality space is they never admit they're wrong.
Whereas all of the cardiologists, epidemiologists, public health officials that I've talked to over the years, they have a certain humility about them that is like, I was wrong.
I don't know is also a big one, which I love, because it's like, there are many things that I don't know about, so I either don't talk about them, or if I'm asked, I'm like, I don't know, I haven't formed an opinion yet.
And it's very hard to present that sort of humility and that just, you know, ignorance in the sense of I don't know yet in spaces like social media, for example.
It's very uncomfortable.
It feels crummy.
We don't like to admit to our spouse that we're wrong about something, let alone a million people online.
And I think that the reason why I was able to was Two things.
I think one is there's something really deeply ingrained in my soul where I want to help people and I'm also a scientist through and through so I want to use science to help people.
But I think also it was my training as a medical researcher that taught me how to understand the boundaries of my own knowledge and how to continue to follow the science and it was sort of a Remembering that training that I had to rely on in order to say, yes, I was wrong about this.
And here is now the incredible deep dive, including 300 scientific references to explain how and why my opinion on this has changed.
And so, again, it was sort of that combination of Feeling the deep need to because I don't think misinformation serves people well and to realize that I had been spreading it was awful.
And so needing to help people get the correct information.
I think it was so there was so much of a desire there that it kind of overwhelmed any like fear or anxiety about Actually doing it.
My wife knows that I'm usually wrong, although I don't at the time, but she's usually correct in that.
So, it is an important life lessons too.
But the first video that I remember seeing by you, you were discussing the social determinants of health.
I don't know if you use that term, but when I saw it, I was like, follow right away.
And that's how I started following you.
Because you stated that low cost food options are really important.
And in our world, we have an upcoming Dave Asprey episode, for example, and he calls oatmeal peasant food.
And that's just really dangerous because moralizing about food demoralizes someone.
So, do you think it's possible to get the necessary nutrients from your diet on any budget?
So I think there's two, there's like the implied question and the question in that.
The implied question is like absolutely I think moralization of food is what's driving healthism, right?
Because then you see yourself as a good person if you have good health you attribute your good health to the good foods you're eating and then you judge somebody with poor health as being a bad person because they must be eating bad foods and that also then It drives more and more restriction and more and more food fear.
So when we start labeling foods as good or bad, it becomes, it just like opens up this Pandora's box that allows for a space for fear-based marketing, predatory marketing.
And it's something that I really care very deeply about in building Nutrivor, that we use Nutrivor principles to get away from moralization of food rather than a new way to moralize food.
So that is something that I really am working very hard on the communication around.
But do I think that we can actually eat a nutritious diet on any budget?
I think no.
I think the way that our food system is now, I think it can definitely be a much lower budget than a lot of people think.
I think that the wellness community is very good at, oh, yeah, you're doing all of these things and buying all of these expensive foods.
Well, let's raise that bar.
And now those foods are toxic.
Now you need to buy these even more expensive foods.
Oh, no, wait.
Now you're doing all those things, well now let's, oh we're gonna raise the bar, now you need the $300 a month supplement on top of all of these things, right?
I think that is very prevalent in the wellness community and I think a lot of people are spending a lot more money on food than they need to, to be able to eat a nutritious diet.
But is a nutritious diet accessible for all food budgets?
I don't think so.
I think if you have $20 a week to spend on food, I don't know how you get enough calories and also get enough vitamins and minerals.
I think there is a big systemic challenge that we need to address at the policy level to make fresh, whole foods more accessible and more affordable.
Well, just flag for listeners that I'll be leading episodes on the Environmental Working Group and their problems and we're going to do a regenerative farming episode coming up here.
So, we're going to be talking about some of those subjects.
And I also want to do a social determinants of health only episode.
Yeah, so important.
Not enough people understand that, yeah.
But let's talk about nutrients because that's why we're here and that's why you're here with this book.
Early in the book, you write that For at least 10 essential nutrients, more than half the US population is falling short of dietary requirements.
And for at least 4 essential nutrients, more than 90% of us aren't getting enough from the foods we eat.
That info, I looked at your footnotes, which are extensive, as you said.
It's from a 2011 study of over 18,000 participants.
There was a limitation in that it was self-reported, but the reports were filed 3-10 days after consumption, which is pretty good.
So I find this study interesting on a few levels, but let's start big picture with some speculation.
Why do you think many Americans aren't getting enough of the nutrients that they need?
I think there's multiple ways of measuring this.
There's multiple studies that measure this in different ways.
I liked that study and I quoted it because it actually did an analysis based on food versus fortification versus supplementation and a lot of studies lump that together.
Um, I think that those numbers, whether we take the numbers from that study or other studies that show, I mean, studies show a range, right?
So some studies show even worse numbers.
Some showed studies show like slightly better.
Uh, they all show we're on average falling pretty short of the mark of actually hitting the recommended dietary intake of a range of essential nutrients.
And I think it's a confluence of, uh, at least three factors.
So first is the Accessibility and affordability and palatability and time and convenience of ultra-processed foods.
Right now, different estimates, but something like 60% of calories in the United States come from ultra-processed foods.
Not that all ultra-processed foods are nutritionally void or they're not all harmful for our health.
But they are typically displacing more nutritious options, right?
So options that have more vitamins and minerals.
So I think one thing is just, again, those like big systemic challenges that we have with the food supply, where the most easy to find and most affordable foods are the ones that offer us the least amount of nutrition as a broad overgeneralization, but we'll still roll with it. So
I think that's one of the challenges we have. I think the other big challenge we have is
confusion over what a healthy diet really looks like. And this is, we can put some of the blame on the part
of how much dietary guidelines have changed in the last 50, 60 years. I
I think the bigger part of the blame falls on the diet and weight loss industries really focusing on things like calories, carb grams, I mean, from the 70s, 80s, fat grams, and really oversimplifying nutrition to whatever you need to do to lose weight and oversimplifying health As just what the number on the scale is.
And I think that so many different diets have very different messages.
They're typically explained based on what you don't eat and not based on what you do eat.
And right now we're at a point where every food is demonized by some diet or another.
So if you were to actually subscribe to every single diet out there, you might not even be able to drink water anymore.
It is that sort of I mean, it's really wild to think that every food has somebody saying that food is toxic, that food is terrible.
And I think that depending on what diets you've followed, because I think also there's a lot, especially the diet and weight loss industry, really prey on our insecurities to try to get us to buy into whatever it is they're selling.
Depending on your specific path Waiting through that industry, I think we are learning things that actually work against our ability to eat a nutritious diet intuitively.
So, we now are talking about second, third generation who have been so heavily influenced by various weight loss centered diets.
That, like, I, you know, my, my mom also was subject to these types of messages.
I've got teenage daughters.
They're also receiving these types of messages from media still.
And as much as I try to protect them, there's certain things I can't, I can't stop.
And, and I think that that, that confusion, that melee of conflicting information means we're in a situation where The most nutritious foods, right?
The foods that offer the most actual nutrition are the ones that you're privileged to be able to find and afford and like live close to a store that sells them.
And even if you have that privilege, you may not be able to recognize them in the store.
And so I think that all of those things together are creating an environment where It's just really hard.
It's really hard to choose healthy foods, to afford healthy foods, and to identify them in the first place.
You mentioned supplementation and fortification, which was also brought up in that study.
And of course, supplements, as you mentioned, are huge in wellness land.
And I'm not really talking about the clinical application of, for example, iron deficiency, which happened to my wife last year, which is a very real thing.
But influencers love monetizing all sorts of supplements, apply a lot of magical thinking to them, even when there's no evidence.
But fortification is often demonized in conspiritualist and wellness spaces because they're like, if you're adding things to the food, it's not natural.
So what are your thoughts on the value of fortified foods?
Do they fill in essential gaps for people?
Yeah, I mean we have statistics that show at least the three biggest success stories of fortified foods is iodized table salt reducing risk of goiter.
It is folic acid supplementation in grains reducing risk of neural tube defects.
And it is iron fortification, reducing risk of iron deficiency anemia.
Those are our three biggest success stories.
They have really impressive statistics in terms of how they have, you know, reduced risk of those health outcomes.
And I mean, I don't think you can argue with the statistics if you're willing to actually look at them.
I think in the context of things like Cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes where it's not as much a direct link with a single nutrient.
It's a collection of nutrients where if you're short of them that increases risk and it's not a direct cause and effect.
It's interacting with things like genetics and epigenetics and social determinants of health and other health-related behaviors like Activity and whether or not you smoke or drink and it's kind of this confluence of complex factors that are altogether increasing risk.
I think that's where fortification as it currently is kind of runs into its limit, right?
That it just really isn't sufficient enough to make up for an overall a insufficient diet, so a diet that's not so low in
essential nutrients that it's causing a disease of malnutrition, but is still falling quite short
of the mark of actually meeting our nutritional needs.
And I don't think that we are fortifying with enough nutrients, enough foods to actually
be able to make that difference.
I think there's a really interesting conversation to have around increasing fortification programs,
especially for ultra-processed foods, rather than demonizing them while promoting a multivitamin
that has the exact same nutrient forms in it and has a lot less scientific evidence
Well, a minute ago you said for those willing to look at statistics and in our space, no, that doesn't happen.
Data is irrelevant.
Data are irrelevant in our spaces.
Now, with Nutrivore, you have a sort of scoring system for nutrients, which is very informative in terms of understanding what you're getting in the foods that you eat.
But for someone like me, it is also a bit triggering because I was brought into Orthorexia from the Zone Diet, which is counting macronutrients on every single food.
It paralyzed me.
It often meant that I didn't eat.
I skipped meals all the time, which led to panic attacks.
Two of them hospitalized me.
So, I had this thing where I was counting in my head all the time.
Now, so can you sort of broadly tell me what the system entails and what you would tell someone like me who gets triggered by seeing numbers related to food?
Yeah, I would love to.
So, it's called the Nutri-For-Score, which is great because it rhymes, and if you can't have a pun, you gotta have a rhyme, and if you can't have a rhyme, then you have to have alliteration.
So, those are the three highest forms of awesome.
It is just a measurement of nutrient density, which is scientifically defined as nutrients per calorie, and it's algorithmically based on the Nutrient-Rich Food Index, but instead, the Nutrient-Rich Food Index, as it currently stands, uses typically either 9 or 15 nutrients in the calculation.
And I think that's a limitation of the way that calculation is currently being used.
So, in the Nutri-For-Score, I used 33 nutrients into the calculation with the goal of just understanding the food rather than trying to retrofit a score to the Healthy Eating Index, which is a measurement of how well somebody's diet aligns with USDA dietary guidelines.
So, um, so it is a measurement of nutrients per calorie.
Uh, it's fascinating.
My favorite thing about it is the redemption arcs, right?
The foods like iceberg lettuce, which people call crunchy water, actually has a lot of nutrition per calorie, more than celery or cucumber, which I think is, is fascinating.
Um, less than other types of lettuce, but iceberg lettuce is also the cheapest lettuce, the most easy to find lettuce, and the one that's going to last the longest in your fridge.
And if that's your favorite lettuce, you don't need to feel guilty eating it.
So that to me is my favorite way to use the NutriVerse score is in helping people overcome value judgments of food and food fear.
But I do understand that a number can also trigger moralization of food.
I've created a lot of content around the NutriVerse score trying to address that and trying to say like there's no cusp above which a food is good and below which a food Is bad.
And if you actually look, I've got, um, not quite 8,000 YouTuber scores calculated to date.
And I actually have my Patreon.
You can download the full 227-page table and just, like, look at all of those scores.
Or you can search them for free on my website.
And you can't, like, scroll through these scores and go, aha!
That's it.
All of the, you know, fast food is below this level and all of the whole foods are above this level.
You really see this, like, overlap where there's foods that would be considered ultra processed that actually have pretty impressive NutriVore scores and then you've got whole foods that actually have Not that impressive NutriVerse scores.
Cheese is my go-to example.
as the most concentrated food source of calcium, average gingiver score is 140, right, compared to 4,000 for
kale, right? So like, you just, you just can't, you can't draw this line in the sand and
say above good, below bad.
There's lots of lower NutriVerse score foods that can fill important nutritional niches.
So for a person who's not triggered by the number, I always say we're not using this number to call foods good or bad.
We're using this as one piece of information in our food decision making.
We are combining this with other things That we need to know about the food.
So the NutriFourSquare does not tell us what nutrients are in that food or how much nutrients per serving.
It's really basically telling us what the quality of the calories are.
So we want to know what food group does this belong to?
What types of nutrients does it contain?
Is it a high nutrients per serving food or a low nutrients per serving food?
And that's why there's so much in-depth nutrition information on my website.
But for the person who finds that number just really hard to let go of, wants to gamify, wants to swap out for something that has two more points of NutriVore score, I say, no, no, no, no, no.
This is not the tool for you.
Please ignore it.
Please don't use it.
Not every tool works for every person.
I think it's a fascinating lens through which to view food, but it is also an oversimplification of food.
We don't want to only use this number.
And if it is triggering disordered eating patterns, I've created lots of other resources to help apply the Nutriper philosophy to however you eat now that don't use the Nutriper score, so you can just ignore that number.
I'm not going to lie, I was a little bummed when I read about cheese.
Because cheese is such a part of my life.
But it brings up an important point, which is that sometimes in all of these conversations, pleasure is overlooked.
And so when I eat food, when I eat cheese specifically, and I have my little plate with hummus and olives and cheese, it is purely for pleasure and I'm okay with that.
And for the calcium and the conjugated linoleic acid, right?
There are still valuable nutrients in cheese and I think that because diet culture has again sort of like, I don't want to say brainwashed, it has trained us into thinking about food as this is a good food or I'm cheating, right?
Or it's a guilty pleasure or it's something I shouldn't be eating, right?
We kind of have this dichotomous approach.
I think with Nutrivore I'm really trying to help Get us beyond thinking about food so simplistically and instead think about the quality of the whole diet and whether or not our nutritional needs are met.
It's actually really hard to get enough dietary calcium without including some dairy products.
It's possible, but it's actually way more straightforward by including dairy products.
So like, yes, in terms of if it's your protein food at a meal, you're going to get more nutrients per calorie from a piece of chicken and you're going to get even more if you have a piece of fish.
But that doesn't mean that cheese doesn't have a really important role to play contributing to the overall nutrient equation.
Okay, here's something that always gets me in trouble with some people, but you wrote it this time and I think it's really important to unpack because I know very well the fat-shaming crowd.
I grew up overweight.
I know what it's like to be on the receiving end.
And I worked in fitness, so I saw it from the other end with some of my colleagues and people who were a little manic about their diets and their bodies.
But this is really important.
You're right.
Overwheat and obesity are in fact poor proxies for measuring health and disease risk.
And we know that for some people, again, some, I'm qualifying it, obesity is a problem.
We can't not talk about that.
The lands that I come from, it's blown entirely out of proportion.
It usually has to do with aesthetics and the way people feel about themselves and putting it on other people, and it creates a lot of stress in body images and that can lead to eating disorders.
So, again, that's a really big topic, but given your work, how do you navigate that space with people?
Yeah, it's tricky, especially because I wrote the book NutriVore to be weight inclusive, but I also wanted to include Evidence-based strategies for people if they wanted to apply the Nutriper philosophy to a caloric deficit in order to lose weight.
So trying to navigate.
The way I navigated that in the book is I actually took the strategies for sustainable weight loss out of the narrative and threw it in the appendices.
So it is not something that you have to read about and everything else in the book is about health and not Weight.
So I actually just kind of separated it out completely from the main narrative because I think as much as I understand, because I also grew up obese and losing a little bit more than a whole knee is part of my own health journey.
Health journey?
Oh gosh.
The way I default into the language!
It's hard to escape.
It really is.
I've been in this industry for almost 30 years.
I understand it.
And I don't have an alternate term to use.
If you have one, I would love to hear it.
It's part of my own past experience.
And so I really resonate with, I've had the experience of being bullied for being in a larger body.
Um, and I've had that experience of desperately, desperate, so desperately wanting to lose weight that it drives, um, maladaptive coping strategies.
Um, and people that followed me for a long time actually have seen my weight fluctuate over the last 12 years as well.
Like that is something that has, unfortunately, it's very visible, right?
So people have, have seen, uh, the challenges that I, that I've gone through with weight fluctuations.
One of the things that I think is really important to bring in from a personal experience side into this conversation, because I have been twice as heavy as I am now, is that I have experienced personally really, really good health at a variety of sizes.
And I have personally experienced really, really poor health at that same variety of sizes.
And I can say that my personal experience, my health has not correlated very well with my size.
And the science would show that that is actually true for a large number of people, and that better things to look at when we're looking at things like risk of cardiovascular disease would be how active somebody is, not their BMI.
It would be to look at things like diet quality, and it would be to look at their experience of weight discrimination, medical discrimination, the psychosocial stress of weight stigma, And I think that if we can take a step backwards and first of all acknowledge that you can be healthy at any size, that health-related behaviors matter more than your size, and accept people for
Wherever, whatever their size is, right?
That all bodies are good bodies.
I think that's a really important concept.
But I also think that if we can get rid of that part of the conversation, it frees up more room in our brains to focus on the health related behaviors.
And for some people, focusing on higher diet quality, focusing on more activity, on getting enough sleep, on incorporating resilience activities into their day.
For some people, that will lead to weight loss.
And that's, that's great if that's compatible with their goals.
And for some people, it won't and they'll still get healthier.
And I think that is the thing that really matters is supporting people's long term health.
So I think it's a tricky conversation.
There are people who Um, I think haven't had the life experience to be able to really, um, sympathize or, um, or even grasp what it's like to walk around in a bigger body.
And I think there are some people who actually, I think some of the most judgmental people are people who have lost weight in one go.
And it wasn't that hard for them.
They did one thing, they got there and they go, why doesn't everybody do this?
That's actually, there are lots of people out there who are able to successfully lose weight and keep it off, but it really is the minority experience.
And I think for those people, it's the hardest to grasp why you would, you know, your weight might fluctuate back up again.
And there's a lot of assumptions that are made of people in those judgments that are not fair.
And so I think for me, I can bring in my personal experience.
I think that's always the best way to start that conversation.
And then I can bring in the science.
But I think I also have to recognize that not everybody has the life experience to ground them in that conversation to be open to that information.
Yeah, it is one of the hardest conversations, period.
We had Aubrey Gordon on about a year and a half ago to talk about that and we are such big fans of Maintenance Phase because she does such incredible work with Michael on these topics as well.
And again, being on both sides of this, it's been tough watching on my end because when I did lose the weight when I was a teenager and grew up and then all of a sudden people were treating me differently, it definitely gives you a sense of righteousness.
That I had to overcome over years myself.
So thank you for sharing that.
And I've asked a lot of hard questions and I appreciate it, but I want to end on a fun one because why not?
Because food is important.
We look at all these aspects of demonization and all these problems, but food, as I said, is pleasure.
So what are some of your favorite nutritious foods and or meals?
I love this question because I love food.
I think one of the most important features of my diet is that I mix it up a lot.
But I can tell you that my current kick, one of the foods that I really had to address my own fears around in my transition was legumes.
And I now try to incorporate a lot of legumes into my diet because they have so many long-term health benefits.
My favorite way to do that is with legume-based pasta.
So, Barilla, which I am not sponsored by Barilla, I would totally be open to sponsorship.
I would say all the same amazing things as I already do, I promise.
Um, but they have a red lentil pasta that is 30 or 40 cents more per box than the regular, so I realize that that does make it not affordable for everyone, but I can find it at my local Walmart, my local Kroger, and for that 30 or 40 more cents per box, You're getting so much fiber and so much protein.
It's actually quite filling.
Like we are a family of four.
My girls are teenagers, so we're four people who eat an adult amount of food.
And one box is plenty for dinner for the four of us.
And it also means that I don't need to pack as much nutrition into the sauce.
So I actually can offset that 30 or 40 cents with sauce ingredients.
I don't have to put as much meat into the sauce for my protein or whatever.
And...
Pasta, very specifically using red lentil pasta, has become part of our go-to rotation.
My 17-year-old just told me the other day, she was like, I think this is my favorite meal.
And I was like, I think it might be mine.
It's basically using the same sauce recipe that my mom used to make these giant batches of when I was a kid.
So it has all of those nostalgic buttons.
I think pasta's a comfort food for a lot of people.
But what I love, and the reason why I was sort of put this under my, like, A, it's like a kick that I'm currently on, but also B, that that ability to have options for the actual noodles that are also contributing a lot of nutrition, because I think traditionally the noodles are more the filler rather than the nutrition.
And with lentil or chickpea, there's lots of different options.
Edamame pasta with that whole collection of options that's out there.
I love it because it It adds in a food into my diet that I don't love a lot of cuisines that use lentils.
Like I don't love a lot of lentil dishes otherwise, but I can have it feel like spaghetti and I'm still eating lentils.
And so that is my current kick.
As much as I try to mix up what we eat very frequently, that is one that I keep coming back to.
