Hello, everyone. This is your host, Susan Rosin. My guest today is Dr. David. I'm going to get this wrong. Wis? You got it. Thank you. I got nervous for a minute. So many people get my last name wrong. It's Wis. Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure. Good. I know my name is the same thing. I'll tell you about that after we finish.
So welcome, David. And as I always say, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and introduce yourself so I'm not boring people with reading it off a piece of paper. Yes, I am reporting from West Los Angeles. So exciting to learn that we are from the same neck of the woods. Liberally. Literally. We went to the same middle school and high school. That's Palms Middle School, Hamilton High School. That's West Los Angeles. I'm a product of the public school system and Los Angeles culture
in the '80s and '90s. Oh, my God. Yeah, very fortunate to do my undergrad at USC. Sort of a party animal at the time. Didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life, but I definitely wasn't in a rush to build a career, that's for sure. Or choose one, right? Yeah, I was postponing that as much as possible. I did find myself having some health challenges, mental health challenges and physical health challenges.
I got into wellness when I was 24 after being in college for many years and not finishing, switching majors, struggling, trying to figure out how I was going to approach this journey called life. Nutrition, really, and exercise really changed me. I had one of those stories where I was desperate. I found wellness. It did the thing that most people wish it did, which is rapidly transformed my life within a few months. I had a career trajectory change.
I was a personal trainer for a little while while I went back to school to learn more about Nutrition, I had to do a lot of biochemistry and core science classes to get a master's in Nutrition and become a registered dietitian. I've always been off the beaten path. Just interested in topics related to mental health, nutrition for addictions, disordered eating. I like the marginalized groups. I like the forgotten groups, the people that most educational campaigns miss.
So I got interested in Nutrition for mental health. And then I built a practice called Nutrition in Recovery, which focuses on people that have challenges to where you wouldn't just go into any old nutritionist. You need to talk to someone who knows what it's like to eat in the middle of the night. You want to talk to someone who knows what it's like to have weight cycled for 30 years. You want to talk to someone who knows what it's like to have body image issues.
All of those particular issues really became my specialty. I've had the privilege of working with people for 11 plus years with a wide range of challenges I've since moved into the functional medicine space. I got my PhD in public health with a minor in health psychology. I've really tried to bring together a lot of different fields, social sciences, psychological sciences, nutritional sciences. I'm really blessed because I get to do counseling with people, and I also get to do research.
I write papers and collect data. I have a pretty amazing career set up here in LA. I have two children. I have a two-year-old and a three-week-old. Oh, my God. I'm just coming out of a newborn baby. That's scary. Life is good. Thank you for having me. Yeah. No, thank you for coming on, for sure. I do have to say that you are the first person that I have ever met, not having nothing to do with this even thing, who Yeah, that we have the exact same educational background. Yes. It's bizarre. Okay.
So welcome. And let's talk... Boy, I don't know. There's so many interesting avenues that we could go down. I think I may leave it to you to take us in a direction of where you're seeing the most issues, as well as where you're seeing, if you are at all, where things are getting better in certain areas, and particularly as it applies to people 50 and older, which you're getting close. Absolutely. It's funny. I actually started collecting data in my private practice during the pandemic.
I Everything switched online, obviously. We got accelerated into change in a way that was difficult, but in many ways helpful. I used to have forms that I would email people, and they have them fill it out and send it back to me. It was like, Okay, we can stop doing this now. In setting up online onboarding, I was still finishing my doctorate at the time. I did submit a IRB, which is an institutional review board, to use the data that I was collecting in my private practice for research.
It's all fresh in my mind because I wrapped it up this year and I had over 300 participants. I just submitted a bunch of different manuscripts with the data about childhood adversity and how trauma affects eating, Disordered eating, addiction-like eating. But the point is, I got a chance to look at my sample and see, who do I treat? I already knew, but- To a degree, yeah. To a degree. But more than half of the 300 were white women in their 50 and above.
Oh, interesting. Okay. While Well, that's not a shocker to me. It seems to be the person that seeks help the most, right? They have an interest in help seeking more so than perhaps the 25-year-old male, right? But in terms of getting research published, journals like to see diverse samples. You know what I mean? So it's a bummer that I don't have as diverse of a sample as I'd like.
But more than half of the people in my sample have a history of substance use disorder, which is unique given that I have a particular practice focused on people in recovery. So I have a pretty high percentage of people that have some an addiction history. And somewhere in the 60s %, people screen positive for some disordered eating. So you could see that I have a particular niche for the person that's got a legacy of trauma, addictions, and disordered eating.
And when that's the case, usually people have struggled with food weight, body image as an ongoing issue, right? And that there's going to be periods in their lives when the noise gets less, right? When job satisfaction was high, maybe before the kids were there. There was a period when you were doing yoga three times a week. There's these periods of wellness. And then, of course, life shows up. There's adversity. I've had my fair share in the last five or so years.
And health is more challenging. Eating behaviors are more erratic, unpredictable, et cetera. So in functional medicine, one of the things that we try to do is create what we call a timeline, where you can really look at... Obviously, there's a medical timeline, which is a value. When did certain things change? Where there are medications, there are injuries, where there are possible infections or viruses. You try to really piece together the health journey.
But doing it from a standpoint of behavioral health and mental health is also really valuable. I think your listeners could probably do this as an activity of just map out a little timeline of when were periods, maybe when you got messages that you ended up really internalizing and remembering. When did you have periods when you lost or gained a significant amount of weight? When were there periods where you engaged in extremes, dietary extremes, things Thinking extremes, et cetera. Yeah.
Exercizing. Over-exercising, right? You look at your timeline. Oh, in these two years, I exercised twice a day. And then four years later, I couldn't get it together to get to the gym at all. Start seeing these patterns of connectedness and then also putting them into the context of our lives, right? Like, what was going on? Where were you living? Who were you living with? And it starts to really elucidate a powerful story.
And as a practitioner, as a provider, my job is to help someone understand their story and tell it back to them in a way that feels meaningful. And just to give you an example, it wouldn't be uncommon for me to learn that one of my clients or patients was on a stimulant medication for ADHD in their late teens. Now they're in their 30s and they're binge eating a little bit. And they don't understand why.
And I'm not saying that one caused the other because There's so many factors, behavioral health. But if someone is weight-suppressed for a few years and not listening to their appetite because there's some external medication, it would make sense that that would return later, that there would be a side effect or a consequence. And oftentimes when it comes to eating and health, nutrition, I should say, people don't look at it as a life course or a lifespan issue.
People tend to really look at it as this 24-hour day. What happened in the last week? That's it. Count your calories, and it's calories in, calories out. You look at your day. But nutrition affects us over our life lifespan. Someone, for example, that had a drug and alcohol problem in their 20s and became addicted to illicit substances, that's going to leave an imprint on the brain that has implications for eating behavior.
Traumas in those first 18 years of life, crime the nervous system for for binge eating or even for purging. There's such an awesome story in each of us. Doing a timeline to conceptualize it is a worthwhile endeavor. Medication changes, life changes, all of that. You can start to see, Okay, this is where I've been. This is where I'm at. And you can start to get a more realistic picture of where you might be
headed, right? Yeah. It's always interesting when someone tells me that they're 62 years old and their goal is to weigh less than they did when they were 25. And it's just like, good luck. You know what I mean? It's like, why? And they don't realize it. They don't realize they're saying... They just have like, Oh, I really want to be one 40. But maybe when they were... The lowest they've ever been was 145 back 30 years ago.
It's not realistic that your body would be able to reach this lowest weight and sustain maintain it. Timelines help people get realistic about what you're up to. You can really look at your life history to get a sense of what might be some realistic intentions to set. Yeah, absolutely. I think the other thing that I think you touched on is that, particularly for people who are older, they They are looking back at what some doctor or somebody else told them when they were 30. That's right.
That not only is not realistic, it's not good for them. The other thing I think What I think that a lot of people don't understand is that if they would exercise, your muscle is way more. That's right. So you're actually healthier, even though you're 10 pounds heavier. That's right. Than you were. And there's all these little things that people just don't... That you can tell them that they're not getting from their little lose weight fast book that they bought on the- Their little app.
Yeah. At the market. There's a lot of binary thinking in nutrition and health. This is a good exercise or a bad exercise, and it's very quantitative, numbers-focused, and it can feel a little bit shallow. I love what you said about this person, and maybe not even just a person, but as a whole in society, this idea of chasing something of yesteryear, like a body or a workout plan of the past, this idea of... It's almost like a euphoric recall of a body that one lived in that felt like home.
Or didn't feel like home. Or didn't feel like home. Which is why they're not there anymore. Right. So, yeah, I have a couple of theories. One is that if people live in a body that doesn't feel like home, it can be traumatic. And then they're having a trauma response where their life is set up. That makes sense. Yeah, their life is set up to make sure to never recreate that experience. One of the major symptoms of trauma or PTSD is avoidance.
So if you were to use that framework, someone had some changes in their body that were very aversive and difficult, and it left an imprint of, let's never let that happen again, which is why some people could become lifetime dieters or people that tend to go to extremes or even prioritize that over everything else in life. There's also the opposite when people have a recall of a time when things were well.
I remember once chatting with someone in my practice who was convinced that they needed to be gluten-free. I'm not against that. I believe that a lot of the reasons why people feel better on gluten-free diet isn't because of the gluten, but it's also because of the wheat, right? Like the glyphosate and some of the other hazardous compounds that- For sure. Wheat in the United States. But anyways, the person was reminiscing about when they felt the best, and they were on this gluten-free diet.
And then we were trying to figure out if it was the best thing for them. And it was a challenge because the person had some binge eating behavior. So by trying so hard not to do it, they ended up doing it with guilt, right? And so we were trying to figure out if this was, in fact, a good rule for them to have in their life.
And what I discovered with this person was that they were on a gluten free diet for a year and a half, many years ago, while they were in a relationship with someone that they really loved. It was a really good relationship. Oh, no. Yeah. And so they remember feeling really well in that period of their life, and they connected it to the gluten-free.
And what we were able to see is that you're reminiscing on a positive period in your life of wellness, but there was really a lot of connection and love that created that. They might have subconsciously attributed it to the gluten free rather than the thing. And so, yeah, the mind is fascinating when you get to talk to people about these things day in and day out, you just learn all the intricacies of the human mind. And, yeah, The health psychology, we call it.
Yeah. I think people, they come up with all kinds of reasons/excuses for why this happened, why this didn't happen? Why? And I'm not saying this negatively. It's just a fact of life. That's right. But people don't seem to understand that. And it's like once they understand that, it's like, Oh, okay. It doesn't mean they won't do it again. But they can say, Oh, okay. Now that makes sense. Why I did da da da da da da da. That's right.
Why I left my husband at that point and then later on got back with him or whatever. The mind has to build a narrative to make sense out of the lived experience, right? If there's unexplained phenomenon, it's difficult for the mind. And so it almost needs to ascribe meaning, right? Like you said, some reason, explanation, justification. It needs to do that. And I say it meaning the mind needs to do that in order to resolve any cognitive dissonance.
So if there's anything that's conflicting or feels difficult to resolve, it's going to leave the mind unsettled. So it naturally will develop some a narrative to be able to move on to make peace with it. And oftentimes there's accuracy in narratives, but oftentimes, as I think you pointed to, people have just created a story about something in order to make sense of it, and it isn't grounded in facts as much as it is in the pursuit of making making sense or reducing conflict.
Another assignment I like to give people, and perhaps some of your listeners might be interested in this, is making a list of all your old ideas that you have about food and that you have about body. It can really be a meaningful assignment to starting to think about what might be some of my underlying beliefs that have stuck with me for decades.
It's It's not uncommon that a mom or an uncle made a comment about a food or about what you should do or how you should look or how you fit in a certain outfit, and it stuck. It wouldn't be uncommon for me to have a client who was 66 that was still subscribed to something that a doctor said when they were 14. It It just became sticky because it happened during development.
When things happen during development, meaning when the brain is growing, it can get cemented into those pathways and really become embedded into the psyche. If someone has a lot of old ideas around food and body, it's going to prevent them from having new experiences, right? Oh, no, exactly. And the other thing I'll throw out there, having been through this myself a number of times, is that you have to be careful of what your family says to you. Yes. Right?
Either when you've lost weight or when you've put it back on again or before you lost the weight or whatever. I have a brother who had said to me, 40 years after I lost the weight, Gee, you really kept the weight off well. It's like, Excuse me? Right. I know. Body talk. I think it was normative behavior in the '90s and early 2000s, and that it was a socially acceptable thing to make comments about people's appearance.
And I think in the last 10 years, more and more people are realizing that there's just a lot of room for bruising and sensitivity there. And I think more and more people are waking up to this idea that even in some cases, it's just as inappropriate to make a comment about weight that someone has lost as it is to make a comment about weight that someone has gained. Yeah. Oh, no, exactly. I mean, it's great if someone just says, Gee, you're looking really good. Yeah.
I feel you're gone. Stop there. Yeah. You don't have to say because you lost weight or because you this. Just, you're looking really great. I tell people the energy that you're giving off is landing differently. I feel your wellness. I feel your vibrancy. No, I like that. I like that. That's good.
Tell me a little bit, tell me, tell us, a little bit about some Some of the things that, maybe that's not the right way to say it, some of the ways that you work with people and the ones, not to make stereotypes or anything of that way, but that there are people who are doing da, da, da, da, da Yeah. I approach my work... I am a dietitian by training. I'm also a mental health scientist, and so I do counseling, and I also practice functional medicine.
So bring together a couple of different things to try to really be helpful. And I do operate a lot like a therapist in the sense that there's a natural discovery and progression process. And I do still get people that reach out to me looking for some quick fix. Can you give me my diet? Basically. Yeah, right. I'm not against helping people move quickly. I I don't want to see people move quickly, but I tend to operate under the assumption that this is more depth work, right?
That necessitates the same way no one would go to see a therapist for one session. You probably wouldn't come to try to transform four decades of chronic dieting in one session. I tend to work with people that I know that they're going do some weekly sessions for at least a month. You know what I mean? Yeah, to start. Just to start. Just to start, right? It takes a lot of the pressure off of me to need to perform and provide what some people think they need.
So I've learned there's a difference between what people want and what people need. And as a practitioner, it's like, I want to give people what they want, but I have to give them what they need. So I'm finding the sweet spot, right? So there's times when someone's like, Can you just give me a meal plan? And I'm like, No, I want you to... Let's start logging your meals in the app, checking in with your hunger fullness.
Let's start journaling, taking a look at what went well, what you could do better. And then we'll slowly start to make gradual changes in your approach to eating. Maybe we'll start with meal timing. Maybe we'll start thinking about food groups. Maybe we'll start thinking about the rate at which you consume food. Grocery shopping, cooking, joy, celebration, bringing together a framework that can be transformative rather than just another diet. I've been doing it for a while.
I used to use other people's apps to have people track their food. These are recovery apps, by the way, so not calorie apps. There's fitness apps, and there's more apps that are designed to promote more of a qualitative approach to eating. I used other people's apps for quite a while, and I finally built my own. All right. It's been my big project in the last few years. I built an app called Wise Mind Nutrition. It's three different words.
Wise Mind, coming from dialectical behavioral therapy, which is about finding this middle ground. Between logic and emotions, your wise mind. So the app is a middle ground between recovery and also different mental health needs. There's a balance between being intentional and deliberate and then also being a little bit more relaxed and fluid. There's a good blend of energies in there so that people could find what resonates with them.
So there's a food log and there's a video program, and it's personalized based on mental health. So there's a process by which someone could figure out if they have depressive symptoms or anxiety, et cetera. And if they They have, for example, trauma symptoms, you're going to get maybe a couple of different recommendations. Maybe you'll get pings to pay more attention here.
But there's a program in there that's helpful to people who are looking for a little bit more of a deeper experience with nutrition and lifestyle. A little more support. A little more support, but it's different than a lot of the other apps because apps are designed to make life easy and solve problems. When you're doing treatment and recovery work, it's not always easy. It's like, No, I want you to do this assignment. I want you to know what I mean?
For people that are really ready and looking for that level of engagement, the app is perfect. For people that are not really prepared to do all that, you can use it in a much lighter and gentler way. Maybe just doing a journal entry at the end of the day and just setting some intentions. You could use the app and say, I want to eat all the colors of the rainbow. I want to drink two liters of water. It gives you a little reminder at the end of the day, and you could check in like, Did I do it?
What can I do differently tomorrow? And you can use it just for that. You could use it as a food log. You could use it to connect with other people. If you have a coach or a provider, that person can follow you, can follow your friends. I'm in the process of creating a little bit more of a community so people can find other people to connect with on the app. There's a lot of privacy issues to where you can't see other people. You have to know their username.
Creating a little bit of a place for people to opt in and share that is my next step. But yeah, the app has basically transformed my practice into being this difficult, expensive thing to something that all people can access. All my in-outs and recipes, they're all in the app. All right. It's a cool resource. Why is My Nutrition? It's Apple, Google. I love seeing people get through the program.
We've had people that have a decade legacies with disordered eating find some peace here and feel grounded and feel more neutral with food. The whole point of it is nutrition for mental health. It's cool to be a pioneer in that space. Yeah, absolutely. Excuse me. I can see where it would be so helpful for people to have something that they can go to and not try and get on the phone with you or text you or whatever people do these days.
I built it so that people that are in the app can send me messages and stuff. Oh, exactly. That's cool. No, I think that's great. I think Very nice. I'm proud of it. It's relatively new, and we're adding more and more features as we go. So feedback from users is always welcomed. And that's how you grow things. That's right. Especially on the internet or on LinkedIn. Line, I guess. Not even just the internet anymore. Excuse me, showing my age there.
Okay, well, I think that brings us full circle here. I don't know if there's anything else you want to just wrap up with, any last advice or where people can- The app is Why is My Nutrition, which you could find at wisemanutrition. Com or in the app store. But I also have my- Okay, so spell WISE. W-i-s-e-m-i-n-d. I know it's confusing because my last name is Wizz. I created that mess, but it is truly That's really the best name for the app. Oh, yeah. No, no, no.
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. But yeah, I had to make it so that if someone did search for my last name, W-I-S-S, mind, then it'll come up. I'm findable on the internet. My clinical practice is called Nutrition in Recovery, and that's nutritionandrecovery. Com. I guess if I could leave our listeners with anything, I would say that it's never too late to adopt a new framework for eating. The dominant frameworks have been the calorie system and the macronutrient system.
Then there's other frameworks that are focused on micronutrients and things like that. But we have some emerging frameworks in the dimensions of nutritional psychology and nutritional psychiatry that are more focused on gut health and inflammation and thinking about food more qualitatively, the degree of processing, ultra-processed foods versus minimally processed foods.
There's a paradigm shift happening right now that's making nutrition feel a little bit more evolved rather than this free for all space where people just focus on fitness and appearance. I want to encourage anyone, if you've done the vanity thing for so long, it's tricky because the mind is focused in that direction. But what we're doing at Wise Mind Nutrition is the sanity thing. So we put sanity before vanity.
And if you lead with the mind, if you lead with the mind, if you lead with the recovery, the body stuff tends to follow. If you lead with the vanity and you lead with the calories and you lead with the body, the other stuff doesn't always follow. And oftentimes it recreats the issue. So lead Lead with recovery, lead with the healing, do the internal work. We say it's an inside job and watch the rest of your health follow. Yeah, I agree. I totally agree. So thank you very much.
Yeah, no, thank you for coming on. It's been... And lightning is not exactly the right word. But seeing all of these things that are being developed, not just by you, but to support people. Paradigm shifts. Yeah, for sure, which is great. So I am going to say what I usually say, and sometimes it's applicable, sometimes it isn't, but I always have to say it, which is that neither of us are doctors, and this is not to be seen as medical advice.
So if you do want some advice that's for you, you know where to go, especially if you're having trouble, amongst other things. And with that, I will say what I always say, which is that I will see everybody else next week.