Why You Can Eat Fat

all the way from New York. Hello everybody. Yeah, and Lisa was actually running a little late to the zoom because I know you were running to get like chocolate covered almonds, which is um one of your favorite batty snacks and it's perfect for today's episode because we're going to get into a conversation about fat. But before we do, do you want to explain to everybody the fun residency

that we have coming up? For sure? Also, I don't want to give shout out to chocolate covered almonds for getting me through this postpartum experience in the most delicious way possible. So we're coming up on almost two years of outway when we kicked it off, and I want to say how much I enjoy doing this with Amy every single week. But I am going to be taking a little break for a little bit of time and give some other new voices in this space a chance

to educate and empower you with some new tools. As I know some amazing people that I think could really shine if brought to this space. So we're going to be doing what's called a residency. So for the next four weeks, we're going to have on registered dietitian Michelle Pillapesh. You may remember her from a previous episode actually too, She's been on Outwag and I absolutely love Michelle. She's a registered dietitian. She's somebody who I think is fresh

to the space. She brings a unique lens. She has experience with both disorders and disordered eating, and interestingly enough, she hasn't personally suffered from an eating disorder or disordered eating, So I think she brings this uniquely professional lens where she's able to be incredibly compassionate but not so close to it that allows her to really just shine in

the space. Awesome. Well, I'm excited about sitting alongside her for the four weeks that we're going to be recording, and um, yeah, I know it's just gonna be full of a lot of helpful information, which is why this podcast exists. Hopefully it's a weekly resource for you where every Saturday you can use it to check in and either not feel alone or learn something or grab ANUE tool to keep in your toolbox to help you manage life. You know, that's what we're all trying to do one

day at a time now. The inspiration behind this conversation came from an Instagram post at Lisa put up that we both think is an important topic, and the first sentence in that post was fat, Why It's important? And in food Obsessed of living. So I'm gonna throw the reins to you, Lisa for this conversation. But I think that growing up when I did in the nineties, I was in my early early years, was basically told to fear fat, so on learning that has been a very

difficult process, even all these years later. I think that most of us listening, no matter what generation you're in, has either a fear of fat or a lot of confusion around fat. What is the truth behind it? Is it unhealthy? Does it lead to wake in what is the role in it in our life? I mean, I I too grew up in the I guess the snack Wells generation. I don't know what feels so archaic because I don't even think they sell it anymore. I haven't

do they, Honestly, I don't know. But it's funny you call it that because I remember getting snack Wealls all the time, the Devil's Food cakes and the Vanilla way for I'm sure they're at the store. I just don't pay attention to that anymore. I don't know. I mean, I think that the emphasis on other things has changed so much it At the time that was certainly the height of like what you should be doing and not doing.

Fat free was huge. Fat free still is huge in some diet um in some diets it's the opposite, like keto is a high fat diet. So I think again, there's a lot of confusion cross between all generations. Here are listeners who are twenty or younger to fifty plus. We're all kind of like, wait, what is the role of fat here? I'm super confused and I don't know

which way to go. So, you know, as a registered dietitian, I feel like I could go on and on about the benefits of fat for your vitamin absorption, for creating hormones, for the nerves in your in your brain, all that stuff. But when you're in the height of disordered eating, you don't give a crop about any of that stuff. You only care about what it's going to do to your physical,

aesthetic body. Do you agree with that, I'm guess nodding my head in agreement, okay, And I think that that you know is certainly when you're young, you're easier to kind of put second. Okay, I don't really care what fat does for my health because I want to look a certain way and I can figure that out. But as you get older, perhaps you begin to care about your health in a different way and you are kind

of curious about it. So I do want to stay away from the nutritional nuance of this conversation, but I want to acknowledge it as well, because what I'm here to do today is talk about why you need to add fat to your diet to have a peaceful relationship

to food and the rest of your life. But I don't want to dismiss that this is a really complicated topic and therefore, don't engage with your grandma or your mom about this conversation, because even as a registered dietitian, there's so much nuance to the different types of fat and even the breakdowns within that. Right, we've got saturated, unsaturated, got poly unsaturated, mono unsaturated, we hear about omega three's. There's so much that even as a registered dietitian, it's

really hard to distill into a conversation. Does that make sense? Okay? Cool? So for me, you know, I grew up through many different generations of dieting and for a long time the fitness world where I really wanted to be like shredded for a while. Like I was never like a competitor, but I was very focused on body fat and and looking lean and having defined abs during my college years, and the information was simply like go protein. Like protein ended up being like the only safe food that I

could eat. And I think a lot of people feel that way, no matter what diet they've gone through. Is like, most people are afraid of carbs in some way, most people are afraid of fat in some way. That leaves one macro nutrient left protein, and that leaves a very bland diet, not much to be desired, not much to be enjoyed, and it's super super limiting. But I feel like for me, I don't know. I never cut out

carbs completely. I always have really enjoyed the way they made me feel, and I could never give up fruit or anything like that. So I never I ever had too complex of a relationship with carbohydrates. Mindful of them, for sure. But fat is this one that I think crept up on me and stayed with me for a

very long time. And I think that understanding it and learning what it feels like in my body and learning how to work with it from both an outer wisdom point of view, outer wisdom being what is this going to provide to my meal? And an inner wisdom point of view, how is this going to feel good for me? Is kind of where the two come together for me and a lot of the students that I that I

work with during disordered eating. I know this might sound weird to you, possibly to you Amy, because you have more of a restrictive past, But I considered myself a foodie in the height of my disordered eating, like I was obsessed with food. I loved going out to meals, even though it caused me anxiety to do so. I was always thinking about food, scanning, end use, trying different things,

although within the confines of what I could eat. But I considered myself somebody who quote unquote loves to eat. Let me ask you this, When you did eat at a meal, did you really enjoy it? Did you extend the meal time or did you try and make it as like compact and short as possible so that you could go back to restriction? And somewhere, I did not enjoy it. You did not enjoy Okay, Yeah, So for me, I I had these allotted times where I could eat and I wanted to extend them for as long as

I could. But I was afraid of calories. So how to make a meal extend and be long and you know, get that release away from the restriction was to fill myself up. And I put that in quotes because I was very careful as to what I was filling myself up with, knowing that certain foods would make me feel full but not actually make me be full or you know, tack on the calories. Again, I put that in quotes because I didn't, you know, I was just afraid of

many foods. So you know, like volume eating is a diet tactic of eating high volume foods, but it fails to really address the necessary component of why we end meals, which is not just feeling full, it's being full. And that's an important distinction that we combed through in forth the noise hunger fullness, because you can feel full but not actually have enough energy to get you through the

next three hours. Right, if you ate one apple right now for lunch, right, there might be a fullness to you because it's a crunge, it takes you a while to eat, it's high fiber, it's got water. Maybe not one apple but two apples, right, you would feel full, but in an hour you'd be like, wait, I'm hungry, right, and you'd be thinking about food again. Yeah, I mean I like that you went apple, and that's actually something that But in my mind I'm having the vision of

how I used to treat rice as perfect thank you, okay? Perfect? That that works? That works even better and perhaps is more relatable to to a lot of people. Rice cakes are a food that you could eat three or four of, right, and you wouldn't feel guilty. They made you feel full, but they might not actually be filling because they're low in calorie, they're low in fat. Yeah, they're low in really any type of nutrients, right right, they're low in nutrients.

But I mean, I guess it's rice, so it has some carbohydrates in it, but it will be pretty pretty low, low calorie, So it'll make you feel full for an hour. It'll it'll get you through, but then you'll be hungry again and be thinking about food. So for me, I was thinking about food all of the damn time, and yet I was eating a lot. And again, eating a lot is in quotes here because I wasn't actually eating

a lot. I was eating a lot of volume, but I wasn't actually eating enough calories per meal or using fat to balance my blood sugar. So I just want to clarify before we even go further here, is that feeling full and being full are not the same exact things. Satiation, your hormones changing your blood sugar having going up and down is different than your stomach distending because you put a rice cake in it and your body saying okay, food has arrived. So we have different levels of fullness

as food makes its way down the digestive process. And if we stop with just the physical fullness. I had a rice cake, My stomach feels a little bit distended. There's that immediate feeling of fullness. We don't get to satiation where food makes its way to the gut, and the gut then send signals back to the brain. Hey, food's coming. We can start to decrease your appetite hormones and your blood sugar is leveling out and all this

good stuff is happening. That makes sense. Yeah, I'm sitting here as you're talking, thinking about how it's some one my time, and I as when we're recording this, and I have not satiated my body today or my brain my mind, Like I just haven't. Like I'm sitting here thinking like I should have planned further ahead, but I'm stuck at the office. So anyway, this is me having this moment and this self awareness to know that I want to give my body that this isn't something I

did in a disordered way. Totally. I think how it can happen to us too, And now I'm very self aware of it because you're talking about it. Well, the cool thing about that is that's probably gonna happen again. Right. So things that you could do, also if you have a busy day at work, is to prepare the first meal of the day, if it's your breakfast, to make it a little bit more well rounded, to carry you out a little bit further. So going back to fat, fat is going to make you feel fuller for longer.

But here's the key here with fat is it takes longer to feel full. So when you eat that rice cake, right, or if you eat four rice cakes, let's say you might feel full in the moment, but you're hungry in an hour or two. Whereas let's say you had half of an avocado, you might not feel that physical fullness immediately because of the volume of the food compared to

a car bohydrate, right, compared to the rice cake. But you're going to feel a more level feeling of full for longer because it takes longer to digest, and because whatever you're pairing it with, let's say you have the rice cake and the avocado, it's slowing down that digestive process as a whole, which is helping you to absorb nutrients as it makes its way down your body. I'm trying to illustrate that because it's it's one of those

things that's kind of hard to to picture here. Well, even as you're saying that, I just had a flashback to some disordered days where I wouldn't have paired certain things. Honestly, I don't even know right now if I would have done, you know, a fat with the carbohydrate. All I know is I had this little chart that I printed out and I would carry it around and so thankful to be free of that. Yeah, So exactly there we've had.

There's so many rules and noises that we've picked up along the way, whether you can't eat this food with that food, or this food at that time, or don't eat at that time in general, only eat at this time.

So there's so much to unpack here. What is really much more simple when we come back down to the science of how food works in the body, and that is what I want to equip and empower people to have, because free of that that bs you have an inner wisdom that says we I don't want just this plain rice cake, I want to pair it with avocado, right, and and we're not tuning into that because we have

these rules happening here. So when you're not actually trying to trick your body, and when you're not following these outside rules arbitrarily that seemingly make no sense, your body actually works perfectly to let you know when you've had enough food. And I want to say that again, when you're not trying to trick your body, your body signals will work perfectly to let you know when you've had enough.

And that might be really unbelievable to somebody now who finds themselves getting constantly painfully full after every meal, even though they're working so hard to trust their body. I've found, in the height of my eating disorder two things I would never know when I was full, But I also never knew when I was actually really hungry. And I feel like what is characteristic of all eating disorders is

that noise. So very few people, regardless of disordered eating or not, are very attuned to what gentle hunger and gentle fullness should feel like. They might know what being starving feels like, and they know what being painfully full or stuffed is. But where's that gentle place of needing food, where you're you're not, you know, thinking about chewing off

your arm. Where's that place of ending a meal that feels comfortable for the next few hours but doesn't feel like you need to unbutton your pants, and fine tuning that getting to know your own body signals. I'm going a little off track here to the fat thing, but I think it's important conversation. Nonetheless, fine tuning those signals. Going into a meal a little bit hungry and ending it a little bit full is going to drastically change

how much your mentally thinking about food. And that's what really changes the game for me and for a lot of people. So adding fats to your meal. If you're somebody, if you're listening right now and you're like, well, I'm still terrified of fat, I don't even know where to begin. I don't even know where to to to start with this whole thing. I want to give you a couple of tips and tricks to start integrating it into your diet.

And the reason I wrote this post was because right now I am craving a lot more fats than general. I am really in the mood for salmon and avocado and snacking on nuts and seeds and nut butters and all that stuff right now, and finding myself craving a lot more high fat foods, and I realized recently that old me wouldn't have been able to honor this out of fear. And me now is actually noticing what's happening because I'm adding them on so consistently and eating them

throughout the day. And however many quantities or servings I want, how level I feel, And that's a freedom that I think everybody deserves to have. It will drastically change how much you're thinking about food, because it's going to change how you feel inside your body. Now. I know in the post you said to try to add at least one fat source in each meal. Would you encourage people that are just like dipping their toe in this water

because of the fears there too? Maybe just maybe it's not every meal, but you just start at least trying once a day or um. I think that if you're just dipping your toe in the in the water, a better strategy here, because that should really be in your diet consistently throughout the day. A better strategy might be to introduce smaller amounts but still bring them in at every meal. So maybe if you're having oatmeal for breakfast,

you're sprinkling um. Maybe not two tablespoons of nut butter, but maybe one tablespoon or whatever you're comfortable with at lunch, maybe on your salad, let's say, if the salads of food that you're comfortable with. I always love pairing something super safe with something that feels scary, throwing something like um while uts or dressing on. I'm a huge fan of dressing after years of you know, thinking that dressing

was the enemy for for so many reasons. But dressing is usually a great source of fat, and it also provides what's called satisfaction. It can help you actually enjoy what you're eating and end the salad if it is feeling content rather than reaching for more. For dinner, can you cook with different oils or think about adding fatty fish. I'm a huge fan of fatty fish, like salmon. Salmon's my personal favorite. I don't really love a lot of the other fattier ones, like mackerel or sardines. But if

that's your thing, go for it. If that's your thing, go for it. I don't think gave you like sardines either. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not a fan, but people love sardines. You can buy them in the tin. They're very affordable, you know, all all that kind of stuff. So again, adding one fat source to each meal and or snack is a great way to kind of begin this journey.

Nut butter is one that everybody kind of is excited to add back into their life after years of doing powdered peanut butter, you know, all those sorts of things. Can I say something about that. I used to be a powdered peanut butter junkie. Um. I thought it was like the greatest invention known to man. And this was years ago, and then I stopped using it. I don't even remember for whatever reason. And then I guess after a few years of not having it, I decided to

give it a go again. Yeah, I should retry it too. Oh No, we should, Well you should if you want to. For me personally, I know this might not happen to everybody, but my stomach was so upset. It caused so much discomfort honestly that I don't know if it truly was from that. I mean, my hypothesis is that it is from that, because it's the only thing I did different. But maybe it was a fluke and it was something else. But it was so uncomfortable that I won't even dare

even try it again just for the sake of testing it. Well, I'll say this, which is interesting. You know, I'm a big fan of real foods and whole foods, and what you're doing in a powdered peanut butter is you're taking peanuts the whole food or a powdered and butter. You're taking that whole food which contains the fatty acids, the nutrients, all that good stuff, and you're they remove the fat, so all your left is with the protein. So that's a high level form of food processing. And yet we're

glorifying that as the healthy alternative. So just to kind of play with the mind game here and then putting it in plastic to sell for five dollars, you know, just to kind of play with the mind game here. So what we call healthy when it's so far from the source, right, the same thing with snack wells, something that can sit on the shelf for probably five years without end. We've removed the fat, we've removed everything. But this is a health food because it's fat free. So

just to kind of play with that for for a minute. Yeah, No, I mean, it's just it's something to think about in two and maybe what my body. What I didn't notice about my body when I was using it, Like who knows where I was with all different kinds of foods that I ate because I found that to be true

with other processed things. And I'm not anti processed foods by any means, but these were other things I was specifically eyeing because quote unquote I thought they were going to be healthier for me, and I consumed them regularly. So either a my body was just used to it, or be I lived in discomfort and didn't really know it,

And so the problem is now. And the powder peanutter is just one example I could give others where I sometimes see things at the grocery store, I'm like, oh, yeah, I used to buy those, and then I'm like, I don't know that I want to buy it because I don't want to risk the discomfort for sure. And now you're listening to your body rather than just saying this is healthy, so I'm going to eat it. I was

in the same exact vote of constant discomfort. I just want to also just ask Tori Scure that a lot of people who are struggling with let's not even call it disordered eating, but disordered behaviors around food are also

subject to a lot of gastro discomfort. Like you and I are discussing, and we see that a lot on Instagram and on TikTok, this obsession with bloating and guess and how to get rid of it and all these solutions, when I think for a lot of people, the solution is also moving away from the things that are causing the discus emfort rather than adding these food these foods in that are quote unquote healthy. Okay, So the other thing I want you to know is to use your

outer wisdom. Knowing that fats take longer to digest is going to help you go into a meal knowing that a you need to eat a little bit slower, and you need to know that this The feeling of fullness might kick in a little bit later because of that. So when adding fats to your diet, they don't work as immediately as carbohydrates, which are broken down immediately and provide us with energy. They still provide us with energy and a good amount of it, but it takes a

little longer to know that. So work with that info, go slower. Take notes as fifteen minutes go by, thirty minutes go by, sixty minutes go by, so that you can really study how your body is working off of that food. Take note of what you feel like immediately after eating meal that now contains fat. Really think about what it feels like in your body. Is there a physical discomfort with that fullness? Or is there I'm full,

but I feel comfortable. Think about that to distinction. And then I want you to notice what happens mentally as your body is digesting the meal a little bit more slowly now that fat is involved. Is your brain free to think about other things because you're not immediately going back to thinking about your next meal from the hunger coming on shortly thereafter. And just a little pro tip here and getting started with this, is to shorten your

meal or snack windows. So like Amy and I mentioned earlier, or the biggest mistake I see people make is going into a meal or a snack on empty or waiting until as long as they possibly can to eat. Your blood sugar is not meant to be a roller coaster shooting up and down, up to the sky and into the ground. It is supposed to be like a seesaw leveling, um, staying level, just dipping a little and then um coming

back up, dipping a little, coming back up. And the best way to do that is to eat consistently and eat balanced meals. And I love that you ended your post with fat is satisfying, filling great for blood sugar and amplifies the flavor for overall satisfaction, and then you ask people to share their favorite fat sources. So I just want to encourage people to go check out at Lisa Hame, which is your Instagram where this post is

and Haime is h a y I am. And it's got beautiful flowers on there because I think your husband Evan orders some edible You ordered edible flowers and I was l O l ng when you put that in your Instagram stories. But you know, people are commenting with their favorite fats like wild salmon, all nut, butters, avocado, some that we obviously mentioned, but you can read through and see if anybody posts something that you maybe need

try out. Tahani is another interesting one that has great flavor and can add something interesting to dishes and so good. It's full of fatty acids that come from sesame sea.

It's a fantastic one. I also just want to lastly say before we head out for the week that in my Instagram stories, I asked people what their relationship to fat was and so on my Instagram post, which is public where you might see everybody throwing out their favorite sources and how much they love fat, it got real all my stories when I asked people what their favorite um, what their relationship to fat was, and you had a lot of people that are doing a lot of unlearning,

a lot of people that are still really afraid of fat. So if that's you right now, just know that you're not alone. And there's millions women and also men working through this as we bring fat back to our plate so we can live healthier, happier, more fulfilled and satisfied lives. Boom drop the mic. Alright, well, we hope you'll have a great rest of your day. Bye bye, everybody. I'll see you real soon,