0:00:00
 Hey guys, and welcome back to No Wellness Wankery podcast, which I'm really glad that we're doing this podcast because we're calling out all of the BS in the wellness world and we're helping giving you some tips along the way so you can be healthy without the struggle. My name is Lyndi Cohen. I'm a dietitian. I'm a nutritionist You can find me on Instagram at the nude nutritionist and honestly, I grew up hating my body. I grew up dieting I grew up being very stuck in diet culture and it made it impossible to like myself and so here I am helping people be healthy and Wondering to myself how can we change the entire culture that keeps us from feeling relaxed around food and keeping us obsessed with our weight. That's what I'm curious about.

0:01:19
 It's a very big question.

0:01:20
 I feel like I can do it. Hey, my name is Jenna D’Apice. I work with Lyndi and I've also been on a diet most of my life, but I may not, I don't like to use the word healed because I don't think that's what it is, but I feel like I'm a lot further down the garden path of getting to food freedom and relaxing around food. So I feel like I've got some more questions than maybe you might have the same questions that you would be thinking you'd want to ask, Wendy. So that's my piece in this puzzle, to be your voice and ask the questions that you're thinking.

0:01:49
 Yeah, if you're not quite as far on the garden path. Is that the phrase? I think so.

0:01:53
 I think so.

0:01:54
 We'll roll with it.

0:01:55
 We're all on the same path, I'm just a little bit further back. And we were chatting just before about, I've read some books and I think it's a big topic that I know on your socials a lot of people say this all the time, I just have to lose five kilos, I just need to lose a few kilos, I just need that little bit extra weight is what I need to lose and it's a big

0:02:17
 topic. Yeah, and there are diets specifically made for this problem that we feel and there are plenty of books that have been published trying to help people lose the last few pounds or last few kilos.

0:02:28
 Yeah, and I was saying, so I've read a book just specifically about losing the last little bit of weight. That's the whole topic, and they say things like, obviously, small portion sizes, changing the way you're exercising, like maybe trying a different exercise, maybe you have to increase your intensity, or maybe you have to, a lot of the things is like filling up on vegetables

0:02:48
 before you eat and it's just like, is that what we should be doing? And it sounds a whole lot like dieting advice to me and stuff that's pretty unsustainable, most of it. Well, firstly, if we're telling someone to control their portion sizes, I feel like your hunger stays the same, right? But your portion sizes go down, so now you're just hungrier. Is that the advice? And I feel like we've got to reach a point where we think, I don't want to sacrifice 95% of my life just to weigh 5% less. Because when you're already at your certain weight and your body is very comfortable at that weight, which is why you're struggling to lose the last few pounds, what you need to do to try and undermine your body weight is quite large. It's a huge lifestyle compromise very often and it requires you cutting out foods that you love, really reducing how much you're eating, increasing your intensity of exercise and if you really want to do that because it feels good, go ahead and do that. But if you're doing it simply to lose weight, I think that's disordered and I think it's very unsustainable. So it's not even like, you know, if you did it I think you'd be able

0:03:57
 to maintain it because I genuinely don't. Yeah, I remember even when lockdown first started back in whenever that was, I would have thoughts of, oh, this is so good, I'll be able to lose so much weight because I won't be going out, I won't be eating meals at restaurants and bars, and I can just really control everything in here and it'll be really good for me.

0:04:19
 That is what the disordered eating tells us to do, isn't it? We kind of look for these little opportunities in our life and we always bring it back to how is this going to influence our weight.

0:04:27
 Where do you think it comes from like people think I need to lose five kilos or I need to lose a few pounds like that very small amount of weight where have they gotten that number from or why do you think that I'll feel happier if I'm

0:04:40
 just that little bit smaller? Well I feel like our entire lives we are told that if we need to weigh less if we weigh less we'll be a whole lot happier and I don't know about you but anytime I have lost weight it doesn't matter how much weight I lose, I always feel like I could lose a little bit more. The goalposts continue to shift. And so maybe you have this idea of what you should be weighing, and it could be something like this is what I weighed in high school or on my wedding day or when I was this weight after the intense diet that I did, I felt really good in my body. I got all these positive compliments, and I'd like to go back to being that person. Here's an idea. What if your goal weight isn't the same as your healthy weight? What if all the people who you're aspiring to be like, who have the so-called perfect body, what if they're not being fully transparent of all the sacrifices they need to make all the time in order to look that way, whether they're under eating, over exercising, dehydrating themselves, doing all kinds of crazy things, missing out on their social life. And the question you have to ask yourself is, are those last five kilograms really worth sacrificing your life over?

0:05:45
 No.

0:05:46
 No, they're not.

0:05:47
 But you actually, I don't know about you, but I had a diet for 10 years before I was like, firstly, I'm not getting there. It doesn't matter what I try. I tried all the things. I'm not successfully able to get to that point and stay there because the fundamental truth of it is I don't want to have to eat vegetables before every single meal or I don't want to have to go on social occasions and miss out on certain foods. And so I just couldn't maintain that in the long term, which meant that every time I lost weight on one of those diets, I'd regain the weight, plus I'd regain more weight than I ever lost so that each time I dieted, it was simply me gaining weight. That's all diets did for me. Yeah. I remember one diet that I was on, and it's something, obviously it's like a point counting, one of those ones. And I remember I was going out in the nighttime and I was like, including in my points for this whole day, like having like one beer, like one, and I'd already picked the type of beer that I was going to have because it allotted in to my points allowance for the day. And it's like, it should be about how lucky we are to be able to go out and have a nice time with our friends, and I'm already like pre-planning what beverage I'm going to drink and then I'm having one of them and I've eaten less throughout the day to factor that in. I mean this is this is crazy and by the way this is a very common thing that happens when you've been a dieter but how much of your headspace gets occupied by thinking about how much beer you're allowed, how much portion size you're allowed, it is really life controlling and I always think to myself how many other things could you be spending your precious energy and headspace thinking about? Imagine if women never dieted, and I say women because women, I think, have been major victims of diet culture. Imagine how much more we would be able to get done or how much more life we could end up living because we could be more present in the moment instead of thinking about, I can't believe I ate too much at the buffet, now my holiday is ruined. I've ruined way too many holidays because I feel that.

0:07:42
 100% and even in terms of like when a big event is coming up, all you're thinking about is I just want to lose this last little bit of weight before the event and it'll be really good whereas other people who maybe have got a more balanced relationship with all that are just excited that it's coming.

0:07:56
 Yeah, exactly.

0:07:57
 And I'm dreading you don't have enough time.

0:07:58
 How nice that would be. And if it's a question of I can't actually have something that I wear that's going to fit me, I've been hiring some dresses recently when I've got a big event. That's always a nice thing to do to help yourself feel more comfortable. But back to the whole body image thing, I have a question for you. Have you ever looked back at an old photo of yourself and you're like, I looked so good. Look at me. I was hot. And if you flash back to that moment, you're like, you remember hating how you looked. You remember loathing yourself and obsessing over food and all those awful things, but now that you're kind of out of it, you're like, I wish I'm nostalgic for that body. Now, this is proof that a certain weight isn't going to make you suddenly accept your body the way it is, that it doesn't matter almost how much you weigh, you're still always going to want to weigh less.

0:08:52
 Yes, I've definitely felt that before. I remember looking back when I'd lost a lot of weight, and I remember looking at the time, that's when I thought, well, I just need to get a personal trainer to just do that little bit extra. But looking back in the photos now, I was very thin.

0:09:08
 Yes. And do you wish you looked like that now? I had a long time of that weight that I was, was the weight that I thought that I had to get back to.

0:09:16
 And then as I've gotten a bit older, I've realized that that weight is unachievable

0:09:21
 now.

0:09:22
 But then I still have another weight in my head of a number of, I remember I was dating a guy and he… and it's such a strange thing that this is what sticks. He said I had a really good body at a weight that I was. Now, anyone dating anybody is going to say you look great because that's just how people

0:09:43
 – They like you.

0:09:44
 Exactly. They like what I look like regardless of what the weight was. But something in my brain has clicked of, like, he said I looked good at this specific

0:09:53
 weight and now still that has the weight that I always seemed to be good if I weighed that. And so we get these goal weights in our brain from a variety of factors and then they stick in our brain. And unless we are that size, we get really flustered around healthy eating and dieting and we double down harder. And we talk about this often, it can lead to feeling restricted, lead to that binge or overeating cycle, which leads to ultimately gaining weight.

0:10:20
 So if you have this goal weight that you think is the weight you should be in your head, how do you know what is the weight your body should really be at?

0:10:28
 Yeah, okay, so firstly we've got set point theory. So I don't know if you've ever heard of that. That's kind of like this idea that you've got this natural place where your weight likes to sit. And you might have noticed this if you're ever doing a diet and you've kind of hit a weight loss plateau where you kind of got stuck at a certain number and you're like, didn't matter, you still did all the things you were doing before, but your body was like, no, we're not budging. So you have these set point weights where your body is just really comfortable and trying to undercut that weight can be quite damaging. Maybe this weight that you're currently at is exactly the weight that you're meant to be at. Maybe you're struggling to lose weight because you're not meant to lose more weight. Maybe this is the weight where you have the energy to do the things you love, your hormones are balanced, you fall asleep at night easily because your brain's free to think of things other than calories or reps at the gym. Maybe you don't need to shift any more weight. Maybe the headspace that you gain by staying at this weight, the energy and all that good stuff is very much worth it, just weighing a little bit less than what your brain is trying to lie and tell you that you should be weighing.

0:11:38
 When you say your hormones are balanced, you mean like your skin's good, or how do you know if that is true?

0:11:43
 Yeah, so I mean, hormones regulate a whole bunch of things, so from your skin to your mood. So for me, like looking at my mood and noticing how it feels by waking up and I'm like excited for the day, or am I feeling really stressed and like I can't cope, falling asleep, because our hormones regulate things like how melatonin and how sleepy we feel at the end of the day. So when you feel like doing those things feels quite in sync, then that's how you know that your hormones are feeling good. Right, okay. So there's a lot of... your happy weight could be different to the

0:12:16
 weight you have in your head.

0:12:17
 That's exactly it. And you might say, well, I don't feel happy at the weight that I'm at right now. And so that's a challenging thing. So firstly, you know, like we talked about with having those old photos of yourself that you're like, oh, I love that. Losing weight isn't going to suddenly take that feeling away. You can't lose weight to like your body in the same way that you can't hate yourself into a version of yourself that you like. So I think that we think, when I lose the weight, then I'll like myself. And I think that is kind of the wrong way to go about it. It's hard to say, or it's hard to do, but the idea is that we're actually practicing the things that help us like ourselves. And that, when we're doing stuff because we like ourselves, because we're doing things because they feel good in our bodies, we're so much more sustainable, we have so much more consistency than if we're doing it out of a place of, I hate myself, I have to lose weight, I have to shrink, I have to get to a certain destination. What many people do is they have this certain goal weight, and they have to do it within a certain time frame. They lose the weight, and then they regain it again, plus more, which is, we know this is the yo-yo cycle, which, according to research, yo-yoing your weight is far worse for you than actually just existing within an overweight or an obese kind of category.

0:13:30
 Really?

0:13:31
 Yeah, so it's like the weight cycling, the up, the down, the up, the down, that us yo-yo dieters would be all too familiar with. That puts a lot of strain on the body. And yet we have this like total fat phobia that's ingrained in everything that we do, but actually this determination to try and fit into what we're told we're meant to be so we could be so-called healthy is making us deeply unhealthy.

0:13:51
 It is full on.

0:13:52
 When you say, accept my body the way it is, that's a very easy thing to say. How do I actually do that?

0:13:58
 Oh, I mean, that's a huge one. I feel like it's an entire podcast coming soon, ways to help you accept your body. I think the first thing is just noting all the times that you pull yourself apart. That's a really important one. And having these little moments where you can kind of remind yourself of the basics, like we've talked about in the last episode, is you don't have to look perfect from every angle. I'm allowed to, I don't have to eat perfectly in order to be healthy. All these little reminders that help us stay on track I think are very useful.

0:14:30
 So to the person, aka me, who thinks that they just need to lose that little bit extra weight but they can't do it, what are our main tips? Okay, cool.

0:14:41
 So if you want to add in more of those healthy habits that make you feel good, do it. But don't do it because you're trying to lose weight. So it might be like, all right, well, I'm going to go for a walk to go get my coffee instead of driving. It might be something small like that. And you think, well, do I actually enjoy this process? Maybe you do. Okay, great, cool. Now, when we enjoy a process like that, we can actually stick to it. It's so much more doable. So just asking yourself before you add in a healthy habit, can I do this for the rest of my life? You might be like, well, like, I don't know if I can do anything for the rest of my life. You're going to get a gut feeling of like, is this actually sustainable? Because most of us were able to stick to a diet for a few days, a few weeks, a few months. But if you're not willing to do it for the rest of your life, and I genuinely mean that, then it doesn't matter because you will drop that habit. You will end up regaining weight if you end up losing weight from doing this habit. And so it's kind of like you're getting stuck in that weight cycling pattern again. So some ideas. So you might go, right, well, a healthy habit might be going to bed half an hour earlier so that you can kind of start that wind down, hopefully get half an hour extra sleep, and that helps to regulate your hormones as well, prevent you from getting overly hungry because when we don't sleep enough, we get really ravenous. So you think about these little habits that might not seem like they have a direct impact, but cumulatively, they all have a really huge, they all make a really huge difference.

0:16:06
 I feel like there were so many times where I thought I had to do the most high-intensity exercise possible, and I'd hear people like, you see those fitness point trackers on the wall and everyone's comparing how many calories they burnt in this exercise class, and then it was so high-intensity and I hated it, so then I just stopped and wouldn't do anything.

0:16:26
 Yeah, it burns you out, doesn't it? Exercise starts to feel like punishment, especially when you do those high-intensity exercises that you're like, this is grueling, it feels torturous, I want to throw up. At some point you're like, this isn't good for me. And honestly, the body doesn't love that level of stress. It's a mental thing, it's also a physical thing. So that's a really great example of the times where we push ourselves way too hard. When you do those high-intensity exercises as well, you end up getting so hungry. I don't know if you've noticed that, especially if you do it early in the morning, you push your body to the extreme, you're ravenous for the entire day. So you get yourself into this really hard cycle, this hard place to be in, where you're exercising so hard, and then you're hungry, you're fighting your hunger, and then you end up eating the wrong thing and then you're guilty so you have to work out even harder at the gym and try to eat even less and it's a bit of a dangerous cycle. Yes, because I suppose in the terms of like athletes who are pushing themselves to these extremes, they're not doing it to lose weight. So therefore, they're pushing themselves to extreme levels and then they're fueling their

0:17:31
 body in accordance to how much they're expending.

0:17:34
 Yeah, and athletes eat a lot. And so there's a lot of research about how exercise doesn't actually contribute to weight loss. It does increase hunger and I think it does make us more tired. It does a whole bunch of stuff that the reason to exercise can't be for weight loss. It has to be because it makes you feel good. Since quitting dieting, I went through a similar thing as you. I used to punish myself with exercise, do these grueling exercises that I absolutely hated. So when I quit dieting I had to go cold turkey. Like every form of movement was associated with calorie burning for me. So I think there was a few years there where I was just like anti-exercise. I went on the other side until I started to realize that you can exercise without even thinking about how this is going to impact my weight. I am a big fan of doing gentle exercise. So the daily walking thing is a really big one for me. And if you've got like a fitness tracker, I would recommend that you turn off the calories because that can be really triggering and it helps to reinforce the idea that you're only walking so you can earn food, which is absolute nonsense. And recently, once I had my baby, I was like, okay, well, how am I going to fit back into my old clothes? I started running. And then like a month in, I'm like, I don't like running. I don't know why I'm doing this. And even after doing all the work I'd done, I still realized there was a part of me that really wanted to lose weight. And I was doing something that was completely not sustainable for me, unenjoyable, and I quit, and I'm proud of it. And now I do my lovely little walks.

0:19:11
 When I first started doing things like Pilates and very more gentle things, I can sustain that because I enjoy it, I don't dread going, but when it's different things

0:19:20
 then I can't go. Yeah. Now that I've stopped dieting for so many years, high-intensity exercise doesn't feel like it's about weight loss anymore and that's kind of something that's kind of interesting for me, that I'm like I really needed this big gap for it from it before I could feel like, okay, this feels enjoyable again.

0:19:38
 Something that I've noticed very recently in myself is that, and mainly because my partner is kind of putting this into my head, like we'll go to, for a walk or the gym or a swim or something active and great and good for ourselves. And then I would come home and we'd have dinner and he would say something like, do we want this for dinner or do you want a glass of wine or something. When normally I would have the thought of, well, I've just exercised, and if I have that, I'm going to counteract everything I've just done. Today's a good day. Yes, I've exercised, so why would I do that and wipe out all the good work I've just done? Wherein, realistically, I wasn't doing the movement in the first place to lose weight, so now I can enjoy my dinner and do things. It's not going to wipe it out, because there's nothing to wipe out.

0:20:21
 There's way more balance. So this is such a good thing to talk about. This is a pattern that people, particularly ones who, you know, there's people who are like either odd, like they're either really good or they're being bad, quote unquote, and they're going through this kind of like huge shift, the yo-yoing. They're either exercising rigorously and eating like perfectly, whatever that means, or they're like getting takeaway all the time and zero exercising, but they have no in-between. I think it comes from this very mindset. The mindset is, well, if I'm exercising and I'm doing all these things, then my diet has to be perfect to reflect this. One of my friends started exercising recently, kind of got into like the F45 thing, really enjoys it, loves the high intensity. She goes at like 5 a.m., which I think is crazy. I'm not a morning person. Some people love it. Some people love it. She loves it. She's doing it for the right reasons, then like, you know, eat a burger for dinner. And whereas I feel like someone who's stuck in diet land is going to go, well, why are you going to do that? But actually, she's been doing this F45 thing now for months. And I don't feel like she's suddenly going to stop or fall off any bandwagon because she's got enough balance. It's not like there is a good version of her and a bad version of her or good days or bad days. It's just doing stuff that feels good. She's more hungry, she's going to eat a little bit more, and she's going to move on with her life.

0:21:42
 Yeah, it is definitely a hard thing to get to because I feel like you go to the gym, and then even I go to the gym and sometimes you can see the people, not the people that have it all together, but after the Saturday morning gym and they've gotten up, moved their body, they're feeling good, so yeah, they're going to get a croissant and a coffee because that's what they feel like eating, whereas I probably still couldn't really do that. I feel like I'm not quite there as yet, but you can see why there's no reason why someone can't have a croissant if they want to.

0:22:11
 Yeah, in fact, it's a lovely, liberating thing to think about, this idea of being healthy doesn't have to mean being perfect, right? So it's a bit of movement and you can eat things like croissants and you can have a mix of everything, but when we get into the idea of well, I'm being healthy. I have to be perfect I think that's that's that's completely unsustainable and undoable if you can't lose a lot of feelings, maybe you're not meant to Or maybe maybe you're going to decide there are things that you're willing to do and that you can maintain for the rest of your Life or you're gonna ask yourself. Is that going to be too much of a life sacrifice? I've seen these videos of people when they're like, you know, think about all the workouts that mean you've missed social occasions or the snacks that you've needed to count and all the willpower that's been required of you. I personally feel like there is just too much of a life sacrifice that needs to be made, too many memories that you end up missing out on because you're too busy counting calories instead of counting happy occasions. And I think you just need to work out whether or not you are genuinely willing to make those changes for the long term, because as I said, not worth sacrificing 95% of your life to weigh 5% less.

0:23:24
 Yeah, I saw a personal trainer had written something on Facebook the other day of like, you're not getting results not because of your program in the gym, but more because of the drinks you're having on the weekend and going out on the weekend. That's not why you're getting results.

0:23:38
 And when they wrote that, I kind of thought, but what's results? Yeah, and why suck the joy out of everything in life so I can look leaner and what, impress other people? Is that really worth it?

0:23:51
 Yeah, and I feel like a lot of the time this mindset comes from that athlete mindset, which is not an everyday person. Like, yeah, maybe you're not getting the scores you need in the swim or training enough if you're drinking alcohol on the weekends, but you're not an athlete.

0:24:10
 And athletes aren't one all the time. They come up to a competition and they go hard and they commit because there is an end goal. And once they get to that end goal, they know they can chill out a lot more. But when it comes to our health, this is an ongoing thing we're working on. There is no end goal. There's no after photo, really, there is like no destination that we're trying to get to, it's an ongoing thing. So we're completely different from that. And I think for me that there is a huge difference between the fitness world and the health world, and so often the advice we get in fitness land is very detrimental to our health. Not always, but often. But a lot of the time.

0:24:46
 Too often.

0:24:47
 Anyway, that's a bit of a talk about why you might be struggling to lose the last few kilos. As always, we like to finish up our chats with someone or a group or a company who are doing great things. If you're one of those people, by the way, and you feel like we should give you a shout out, reach out to us and find me on Instagram at nude underscore nutritionist. The person we want to talk about today is probably someone you know, and it's Turia

0:25:13
 Pitt. We love her a lot. Obviously, you probably all know about Turia. She entered an ultra marathon, I think, back in 2011 and was unfortunately run through a grass fire.

0:25:25
 Yeah, got caught in a grass fire. And she got burns to 60% of her body. She was told she'd never run again, never be able to have proper mobility, and she's kind of defied it all and she's run, you know, she's done like ultra marathons and...

0:25:39
 She wrote an amazing book about happiness, which I think is just... It's seriously definitely one to check out. And the one thing I took up from it, it was like, you don't need big moments to be happy. And literally until Taria pointed that out, I hadn't ever thought about that. And especially back to weight loss, I always thought, this will make happiness. These big monumental occasions in my life, that's where happiness comes from. And it actually just comes from, my partner made me a really nice cup of coffee this morning, or I made a joke and my niece laughed. Like little things like that, you can get happiness in little things like that. So, Torea Pitt has an amazing book of that.

0:26:12
 Yeah, we can't keep waiting to lose weight to live our lives. We can't keep waiting for big moments to actually be happy.

0:26:19
 No, and she also has just made this really cool new program about running, because obviously running is her bread and butter, that's her stick, and about how sometimes a lot of people feel like they can't run and they've just written themselves off like, I can't be a runner, I hate running. And she talks about how she had to reteach herself to run. And I think that she has such an interesting perspective because she's been an elite runner, she has been told she'll never walk again, and then she's also gotten back to being a good runner and then had children and had to keep starting that process over and over again.

0:26:52
 And should this program specifically made if you are a mom or someone who's really busy who's time poor, because it's like finding the time to go for a run is really, really tough. Between sleep schedules and not getting enough sleep at night, it makes it all very tricky. Maybe there's a program I need to do so I can actually learn how to enjoy running. I'm sure it's possible.

0:27:10
 It's always possible, but trick it.

0:27:11
 Awesome.

0:27:12
 Go check her out. Anyways, guys, thanks for listening to another episode today. I'm Lindy. I'm Jenna.

0:27:21
 Thanks for coming.

0:27:22
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