How to Stop Fighting Food

and Duke. I've known Isabel for almost a decade. We're neighbors now, and on a nice San Francisco day, you can find us walking around in the park discussing Pemma Showdred. We both talk with our hands and are known to fling a crumb or two while eating treats and talking loudly about how much we hate diet culture. Beyond being my friend, Isabella is kind of a big deal. She's a health coach who helps her clients break out of cycles of binging and restricting so they can finally make

peace with food. I am so thrilled to talk with her today. Now let's get back to the nutella. I went to the I walked down to like the little coop down the street, and they have like that they had just gotten the bread delivery. So I got this like sweet, warm baby loaf of it's called like Duca. It's like a Duca bread and it's got seeds all over it, and it was like so dense and delicious. So I got that. I cut it up into I really love cutting my own bread into like really fat slices.

Oh that's amazing. Yeah, and the war is like the spongy, warm fluffy bread. Yeah yeah, yeah, it's like spongy and dense and I love that. And then it's got like a nice crunch, which we're gonna I'm gonna crunch it in a minute. But also yeah, I just slathered nutella on it and then cut up some banana put that on top, and it was just oh so good. Should we share a bite together? Normally? I come down, Okay, let's do it. Okay, Okay, here we go, okay three

two one, no, no, okay, here we go. Oh glo, okay, where'd you get the full? Mmm? I like that right, very good. So tell us about why we're eating nutella. I always just thought that nutella was like the ultimate symbol of like bad foods that people like avoid in diet culture. You know, it was like the holy grail of that. It was the ultimate creamy, fatty sugar. Are you know everything that was villainized in diet culture like felt to be embodied by nutella. So yeah, so it's

the best obviously, yes. Yeah. So the first time you encounter nutella, I want to go back to that moment or the first time you remember. I remember really discovering I went to France one summer I did like a teen tour in France when I was thirteen. I remember going to France and it being everywhere and thinking like

this is the best food that ever existed. I was definitely attached to this really happy memory of just being like a free kid running around like being almost spoiled, right, I mean really, I'm like in France, I'm thirteen years old and I'm eating nutella creeps. I mean, you know, it's like really the ultimate decadent experience. That food represents that whole trip, that whole experience of my life. And I had loves in France. I had my thirteen year

old love in France. I think I had my first kids in France that summer, maybe my first like real like makeout, you know, French frenched, and so there's just a lot and so there was just a lot of really positive, you know, feelings about that trip. I do remember coming back though, and freaking out that I had gained weight, and I remember thinking like, well, it's because

of all the nutella that I ate. The villainization of nutella was like very quickly attached to the joy of nutella, right, I don't I don't really remember ever thinking the nutella was really okay because by that age, by the age where I really discovered nutella, I was already pretty entrenched in diet culture. I was probably already I think I had like a full blown eating disorder at that point already, but I I yeah, so there was no time where

I really felt nutella was a safe food. But I remember always thinking it was the fucking best food, you know. My first encounter with nutella was also abroad. I was sixteen years old. I was visiting extended family. It was like kind of you know, my grandmother had been waiting until I was sixteen to sort of take me on an identity pilgrimage to Mexico. So that I could meet

our extended family. So I was in the town where my grandfather grew up, which is called San Luis Potosi in Mexico, and my we like, I don't know if he was my uncle or what he was like some kind of relation, and he brought home a jar of nutella as sort of just a hospitality gesture, and I remember, you know, I was like, what is this right? And then I put a spoon in it and it was

like fireworks are going off. It's like the scene in a movie where you're like you see your first love and you're like, oh my god, it's happening in my mouth. And I ate the whole jar that day. Like they were like you know that. I think the next one. They were like where the new tela go? And I'm like, whoops, um, So it was yeah, and then I have one, so

I hadn't. I mean, I think that also what's interesting when you're talking about going to France, like my next my next chapter of nutella history, you know, novel or whatever is. I'm studying abroad in Italy and I have decided to turn this short term study abroad into a diet, right, Like I think that I was so drawn in by the idea that you could go overseas and then after like a few weeks or a few months, come back and be completely transformed, you know, like to the to

the point that no one can even recognize. You're like your friends and your family are like, who's that, and You're like, it's me, um and um and Italy every summer, like every summer break, every it was. It was always that fantasy, every single time you were going to be like a way and then you'd come back a new person. Yeah, right, and it never happened, as we know, as diet cultures always always be disappointing us, right totally. But I'm like

in Italy literally basically starving myself. Some friends are like, I don't know if this is a good idea, and I'm like, you're just jealous. I'm in capable. I'm like completely completely in like I don't know, I'm in like the sunken place with my fat phobia, right, and I cannot understand these people's gestures of care as anything but jealousy.

But then, you know, we're in Italy. People like the other people in the house I'm sharing with, you know, eighteen years old, We're sharing a house like eight people or something, and someone always had new Tela in the you know, in like the kitchen, And of course in my moments where I would like, you know, could not just starve myself endlessly, I would just find the jar of new I would like sniff it out like a

trouble pig, and like I would just eat. I would just eat as much and sometimes a whole jar and um yeah, and then like being called and then somebody being like, did someone eat my new Tela? And everyone knowing that it was me because I was like doing all this wild insane food restrictions, and then pretending that it wasn't me, and then finally caving out of shame and being like, I did eat it. I'm sorry, I'll replace your new Tela, and it all started over again.

It's about like it was like a horrible it was like that horrible cycle. And I think, right like, and this kind of is starting to pivot into what you do, right Like, of course we have this sense that we're monsters that were terrible, but then you know, we realize that this kind of behavior is actually completely in line with what dieting and food restriction does to a person. Yeah. Completely, I want to get into that more in a second. Um, we we've known each other for a long time, but

you've never told me. We've never had that moment where you tell me what your relationship to diet culture was, like, how you ended up the have to becoming a health coach who works with people who are recovering from chronic restriction or disordered eating. So, I, you know, had been a sort of classic diet in cycler. I was put on my first diet by my pediatrician when I was three, and I remember my mom lovingly refers to this diet as the broccoli and skim milk diet. I was like

high on the BABYBMI scale. I was like, you know whatever, and the pediatrician said, oh, you gotta watch your weight, you gotta be careful. And so I don't have a memory of not being on a diet as far back

as I have consciousness. I always just had this experience of myself as somebody who wanted more than I was supposed to have, and I loved food too much, and my desires around food were not good, and I had to actively sit on my hands and try not to eat because you know, if I ate what I really wanted, I would be fat. We all got this message. You didn't have to have a p fat phobic pediatrician to

get the message that this was bad. It wasn't just about health, come on, I mean, it was lovability issue. It was a social issue. I remember I did have this feeling of like, if I was thinner, I'd be more popular and more people would love me. I'd get the boys to like me. And I had crushes going back to like the age of five, and I thought that thinness was the thing that was missing in my life as sort of like this like white, upper middle class girl that seemed like the only thing that maybe

was the problem. Like it's like, well, yeah, if I'm thin, I'm just gonna have everything. Life would be perfect when I was thin, right, I would get everything, I'd have all the attention, I'd have everything that I wanted. And that, fundamentally, my body and my appetite, right was my biggest problem. And so I spent my entire childhood into my adolescence trying to control my appetite but not being able to, then hating myself for not being able to, then trying harder.

The next day, and then not being falling again even more intensely. The more I would restrict, the more I would binge, the more I would hate myself, the more I would try to restrict, until eventually you do get into like real clinical eating disorder behaviors. I mean, I remember being so desperate, right, I mean I was. I think I was throwing up my food by age ten or eleven, and so this went on throughout my whole

childhood and adolescence, through high school and college. And then I remember so even at some point I discovered stimulants, right, appetite suppressants, cocaine, adderall, and that really was the only time I was ever able to actually lose a significant amount of weight and quote unquote stick to my diet was when I was using drugs, and that very quickly

landed me into rehab. So I was nineteen when I went to rehab for an eating disorder, and eating disorder slash cocaine whatever, it was really just basically needing disorder, and I was like, this is so great. I'm going to go to treatment and they're going to teach me how to not binge without drugs. I remember being in the intake and I said, if you can teach me how to control my weight without coke, I'll quit tomorrow.

I will have I will give up drugs tomorrow if you can teach me how to control my weight without it. And they said, yep, we can do that. And when I was in treatment, and this was like a fancy, rich girl rehab, right, I mean, this was like the highest level luxury healthcare you could be getting. I think my parents, my mother spent one hundred thousand dollars on

treatments for me that year. And and what I got was I mean, I got clean, right, I mean I was in an environment where I couldn't do drugs, so I did get clean. But you know, functionally, what they were doing with food is they just put me on a meal plan that was less food than my body actually needed. Because the meal plan was designed to keep me in the BMI range right, right, not to heal you, but to keep you in the range, to keep me in the BMI range, right. There was no real rehab.

There was no like you know, we had group therapy where we would talk about our feelings, but then we'd have to go eat our meal plan calorie allotment. And that was the treatment. And I remember, you know, kind of coming out of rehab and I was like, what's you know, what's the aftercare plan? And they would say, go to OA, go to Overreaters Anonymous, and stick to your meal plan and you know, work with a nutritionist or whatever, you know, like have a nutritionist watch over

your meal plan essentially right. Like, So I came back and I was working with the nutritionist. And when I worked with the nutritionist is the same thing. It was all about. She would weigh me every week and like adjust. We'd talk about what I was eating and we would adjust the food to keep me in the weight range. It was all about keeping me in the weight range. So I, again very quickly after getting out of rehab, could not stick to any kind of meal plan. I

had the same problem. Nothing changed. I wasn't doing drugs, which was good, but I could not stick to my meal plan. And I realized, I think, like I remember being in an Overreader's Anonymous meeting and I met someone who is, like to this day, one of my best friends in the entire world. And she somehow came across a Janine Roth book. I don't know if you are you familiar with Genine Roth. Yes, yes, yeah, So she came across a Janine Roth book, and this was my

first introduction to the concept of intuitive eating. This was my first introduction to the concept that you have hunger signals, that you have a body that gives you information about what it needs. I didn't know that. I thought that what your body needs is whatever it needs to stay in the weight range. The idea that I was supposed to listen to my hunger on food, that that was

like important, was pretty new. The idea was, if you're listening to your hunger signals correctly, right, if you're really waiting until you're hungry and really stopping when you're full, you will be thin. That was the message. So this is what I call the intuitive eating diet, or the hunger and fullness diet. And I became totally, like, you know, pretty obsessed with the hunger and fullness diet. But I would fall off of it. I couldn't stick to the

hunger and fullness diet either. Sure, No, I would eat way past the point of full in quotes, and I would eat when I quote unquote wasn't hungry whatever that means all the time, right, So I couldn't stick to the Hunger and Fullness diet. And then I mean I went through many different iterations of the hunger and Fullness diet.

At one point I was involved with the Way Down Diet, really super very intense Christian group, this church that basically it's a lot of like pray to God to not eat when you're not hungry, because when you want to you when you're not hungry, it's like a spiritual malady, right, And so I was even like a weight lost church. It's a wait losch church. Yeah it's church. Yeah, Yeah, it's it's there's a documentary about this. It's actually quite disturbing.

It's a pretty much it's a cult. I didn't realize how culty it was when I was doing it because I wasn't actively in the church. I was just you know, buying all the programs and reading all the books, you know. And I remember you're supposed to wait until you have a growl in your stomach to eat, and if you eat before you have a growl in your stomach, that's a sin. Wow wow wow, very intense. I mean I was starving myself. It's a starvation program. And I remember

having a huge binge eating episode. I was like, couldn't hang on any longer, binged my face off. It was like four days in the fetal position, could barely, very physically uncomfortable, like low bottom binge eating, where I like call had to call in sick from work because I was so full and stuffed that I just could not really breathe or move. I felt like I was in

the depths of hell. I'm sitting there, like sweating, so full, so uncomfortable, calling and sick from work, and I'm just like I call it like my final, my final binge. I'm just not in control of my food. I can't do it. I can't get up and try again tomorrow. I can't. It was like a surrender moment of like perhaps I'm just a person who's going to have a jar of nutella and I can't do anything about it because every time I try, I end up here and

I can't be here anymore. I cannot be like face down in my bed hating myself because I fell off the wagon. I don't have the energy to keep trying to control my food, and so I just gave up. I gave up. I was like, screw it. If I gain weight. I gain weight if I eat whatever I eat. What. I can't think about this anymore. I can't have my life revolve around this anymore. I'm just gonna let myself just eat and whatever my weight will be will be.

And the magical thing that happened was I ate. I gained weight, But I never had a four day bender where I just wanted to die ever again after that, you know, like it was like the really intense binge eating episodes that the hardcore diet inch cyclers have experienced. And if you've been there, you know what I'm talking about. That never happened to me again. Did I have days where I had a jar of nutella? Absolutely? I could

still have that day. You know, Stabilized, normalized food doesn't look like what diet culture tells you it's gonna look like right right right. And I feel like you and I have talked about this. I don't know if you've quite called it radical hopeless, yes, but I think there is a rocket of hopelessness, the gift of he does Yeah, giving up was the best thing that ever happened to me.

That was the healing, giving up the hope of dieting will ever work for me, I kind of want to talk a little bit about some of the points on the journey, like one of them being I mean, right, you can be eating in a way that where you do not feel controlled by food, and that could look a lot of different ways. Some days it can look like the drive to tell us. Some days it looks like whatever. Some days, you know, I mean, it can

look a lot of different ways. The other thing is at the end of you know, creating a relationship with food that is peaceful and not adversarial, or that like it is as joyful and peaceful as possible, like in the context of such an anxiety written food phobic culture. At the end of that, there is no guarantee of what kind of body you're going to have. At the end of that, that can be complete. You can have this beautiful, wonderful I would use the word healthy relationship

to food. And you could be a thin person, you could be a fat person. It's like all over that there's no guarantees on this, And I think that that's really scary for a lot of people, and I think for a lot of people it can be really liberating and normal. I think for me it felt really liberated like, oh,

this is the body I'm supposed to have. Yeah, And I think going back to sort of radical hopelessness can look like that moment, you know, where you're in the fetal position and you have to call out of work.

It can also be the moment where you sort of have to come to terms with the fact that you ultimately can't control the size of your body pretty much unless you want to, unless you want this to run your entire life, right, And I'm curious about you, know, as a coach, I know you have brought people to the gift of hopelessness or help them usshered them to their And I'm curious, like, what is that like for people? Is that something I mean talk about the gift of hopelessness.

I mean, the gift of hopelessness is the most it is the core of my teaching. I really think that. Like, if you're like number one goal is I just don't want to have an eating disorder anymore, Like I don't want to have this like crazy relationship with food anymore. Once you really get to the point where you're like, I just can't diet. I am hopeless on dieting. I am hopeless on trying to control my food, trying to

control my body. That's when the real healing comes with food, right, Like, that's when you're like, Okay, food's just gonna be food. It's gonna be what it's going to be. This is what we call acceptance body acceptance. I can still struggle with my body image. I can still struggle with fat phobia on any number of levels. But fundamentally, if you are hopeless on dieting saving you from that pain, that's your food is just going to be your food. Right now.

Here's the problem I think with hopelessness is that hope grows back. If I'm really struggling with my body image, if I'm having pain around my body related trauma in some way, all of the sudden dieting seems like maybe it's a good idea. Maybe it wasn't that bad. Maybe if I just do this, well, I'm not going to go back to that crazy dieting. I'm just gonna be like a little dieting or I'm just gonna be like you know, like yeah, right, dieting is the real coping mechanism. Right.

People talk a big game about emotional bleating or whatever, like you want to know what's really hard giving up dieting when you're in pain about your body, when you're having emotional pain about your body related trauma. This is the thing, and this is what I've been trying to you know, more and more tell people as I'm like, you know, Isabel, like you're using the word hope, I might use the word you're triggered. Right. We think of dieting as like healthful behavior. We think of that moment

when we want to get thin as optimization. I'm like, no, it's all just you being triggered when you restrict. It's it's a reaction. It's what you've been taught to do to cope when you are triggered. To your point around the pain that you have been taught that something's wrong with your body, something's wrong with how you eat. So, I mean, I think you know, and there's a reason

for that. There's a biological reason for that. Actually, So when we are in fight or flight, when we are anxious, when we are in trauma's response, we literally our brains start to look for how do I get out of this pain? Right? What can I get control over? Biologically, part of what that is is you start to develop something called threat bias, which means you're looking for problems to solve. What can I control, What can I, you know,

do to make myself safer? And so dieting is like, in the absence of an obvious solution to my problem, dieting is just this like always there in this corner of like, oh, this is something you can control, right, well, there's a little weight, you know, why you're bodying your body is always something you can try to control, right It's just kind of like I'm having difficult feelings and I'm just in them, and there's really nothing to be done about it other than just be with my feelings.

If I'm trying to escape those difficult feelings, but I don't really have a real solution to that problem. All of a sudden, like any control mechanism out there will start to look feel like a good idea. And sometimes this could this could be you know, the pain might come from like actual fatphobia in the world. But you know, even if you're just an anxious person, right, it's this projection of all of my anxiety onto my body as the thing to control to take me out of this

pain that I'm in. Does that kind of make sass of course. Yeah. Absolutely, It's like, you know, it feels unsafe to be in my body. What can I do to escape from this, get a sense of control over

this feeling which feels very overwhelming. I mean absolutely, And I think again, there's this idea that you talk about this a lot, the idea of a lot of people think of an eating disorder as something that is sort of self contained, like there is something wrong with me, there is something wrong with my relationship to food or my relationship to my body, without understanding this is happening in an ecosystem where all of these things end up

becoming inevitable for a certain percentage of the population. Yeah, I mean, I would say that every diet of dieters by definition, are dealing with this up and down. This is most people's experience in some way or another, right. I think some people have more severe ups and downs, and they usually just match the degree to which we're restricting or making ourselves wrong or being perfectionistic with food

or whatever. I call it. Diep In cycling physics, the farther I pull the bow back on the bow and arrow the farther it's going to fly in the other direction. In the second I let it go, and then it's like, oh shit, it flew in the other direction. Let mela blah blah blah, myself back right, and then it just keeps happening. And this is this is diep in cycling

classically defined, and most people are experiencing this. The small group of people who are not experiencing this, who are successfully sitting on their hands and really you know, holding it down for years on end, that's when you start to really see symptoms of clinically restrict of eating disorders like anorexia. So you know, I always am like, I do not feel jealous anymore. I did I used to do. I used to feel jealous of people that could restrict,

that had the capacity restrict. I'd be like, I would what's wrong with me? I never I never thought I had an eating disorder because I wasn't capable of maintaining restriction, and I would be jealous similar soime too, Now I realize, actually the folks who are really capable of long term restriction are often in more pain than anyone else because that, I mean, there's no relief. It's constant self denial and self harm with zero relief. Binges are fundamentally relieving, they

are medicis and all. They're actually a healthy response to deprivation. Yes, thank God for my binges because they kept me alive, they kept me out of the hospital, And I mean I can feel that in my whole body. What you're talking about is binging is healthy responses, normal responses, self

care in some way. You know. I think it's so it's so difficult in this moment to understand things like something like quote unquote binging, which is so deeply shamed and mythologized in our culture, to actually sort of see it as like, you know, as an act of self care. Is your body sort of coming in and taking over and helping you survive. And I don't think we have the space right now to even think of how amazing that is. It's a I mean, yeah, I have an

enormous amount of gratitude now for that. And you know, really it's a massive shift of consciousness to think that my desires for food are good, that my desires for food are healthy and keep alive, that my desires food are fundamentally safety mechanisms. Yes, yes, yes, yes, I mean I've just been thinking. I mean, for me, I you know, I'm I'm always like, I don't like the quote unquote

healthy quote unquote unhealthy eating binary. I'm like, anything fundamentally right when we're talking about the bare minimum, anything that is there to help you survive, that's going to keep you alive, I would say, is in the healthy camp, right, Like, yeah, you're absolutely not eating right. I'm like, and so I think, um, yeah, I mean I always have trouble with those kinds of binaries. But you know, let's let's talk a little bit about um sort of fat phobia and what that looks like.

You know, when you're working with a client who maybe is a thin bodied person versus a larger bodied person. You know, like a thin person can have an extremely high level of body dysmorphia, which is very unpleasant, but may not be dealing with you know, likely is not dealing with structural cultural fat phobia. I'm just thinking about, like, when you're working with a thin client versus a fat client who might be facing fat phobia. I mean, what, like,

what's the difference in those two trajectories. I mean, obviously, the challenges that a fat person is facing in terms of externalized or institutional or interpersonal fat phobia are just going to be structurally and fundamentally different. They're just dealing with you know. So if you think about like fat phobia can be broken down into institutional, interpersonal, and intra personal. Right, if a thin person is not dealing with institutional fat phobia,

they just do not. They're completely they have the privilege which is never having to deal with that particular set of challenges. The interpersonal fat phobia that they're dealing with is also probably quite reduced. That being said, I think what's complicated for thin people is that even thin people are not necessarily immune from having had fat phobic experiences in childhood and also witness fat phobia and seeing how people get treated differently on the basis of body size.

It's like thin people still like see that and they like kind of internalize the fear of fat, even if they're not experiencing the fat phobia. So it is undoubtedly clear that larger people are dealing with way more shit than thin people in terms of the challenges that they need to overcome, because they're also potentially also dealing with

the anxiety. That's the other thing about you know, living in a fat body, you're dealing with all of the institutional fatphobia, all the introversonal faphobia, all the stuff, and you may also have trauma and anxiety and things that predispose you to disordered eating even if you weren't in a fat body, right, so it's like a triple action threat potentially happening. But yeah, it just gets like really murky, like where the line is I guess between am I

totally projecting something irrational onto my body? Is this like, oh, you have an eating disorder because it's really about something else. It's not really about fat phobia. It's just you know, you're projecting you know, your anxiety and your trauma onto your body. Or does having had experience of fat phobia and childhood or having a mother who was a diet or who was constantly you know, put putting yourself down, or having a mother who constantly put you down even

if you were in a you know, thin body. I mean, it's just the line starts to get really weird in terms of what's caused by quote unquote active external fat phobia and what's an anxious or trauma response projection, And like making a distinction between those two is really hard to do because no matter what body you live and you still live in a fatphobia culture, some kind of makes sense absolutely. I mean that's the thing where I

use the I use them. I often use the metaphor of like breaking up and diet culture as your ex and I'm like, I think what's hard about diet culture, unlike a lot of other types of trauma, is that you know, some trauma is safely in your rear view mirror. You can deal with it, and you can kind of tell yourself, I'm never going to be like if it happened as a kid, I'm never gonna be five years old that you know, I'm never gonna be dependent on

my parents that exact same way. But with that phobia and working through food issues and body anxiety, it's like running into your X every damn day, Like everywhere you go, your X is like there, and so you're trying to heal while also actively running into them when you're grocery shopping, when you're going to get coffee, when you're going to get your new tela, when you're trying to go on

a date with someone else. Right, like right, I think exactly of the that's what's that's one of the biggest challenges I think right about the recovery is that the trauma. It's like my friend, my friend once told me, you can forgive someone who has slapped you in the past, but you cannot forgive someone who is still slapping you. Yes, this what's so hard. It's like we're still getting slapped.

It's really hard to forgive, right solves, let alone anything right when we're still actively in this place where we're getting lambasted all the time, you know. Right. So this is where I mean a good portion of my work, and this is you know, with people of all body sizes, right, A good portion of my work is when it comes to just dealing with the culture. Right, is where can

I realistically protect myself? Are there boundaries that I can realistically input to keep to protect myself from the culture, Right, Like maybe I don't talk to my faphobic mother, maybe I don't you know, follow the Kardashians on Instagram, Right, Like, there are what can I actively do? What is a realistic thing that I can do to divorce myself and

take myself out of that kind of violent environment. But then realistically you're going to come up short there, right, So then what's the game plan then, And I mean I would argue probably, you know, a big part of it is like repair, right, like being able to like self soothe and like, you know, how can I self care after I'm harmed when harm is not avoidable. I have a lot of clients whose spouses are really fat phobic spouses who are you know, basically threatening them with

you know, I need you to be losing weight. I mean that's a really different way of children you have a family. I mean that is a heartbreaking situation. It's

like you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Right, So, you know, working with people around you know, what are the boundaries that you personally feel comfortable setting, Like what are your lines in the sand where you can remove yourself from toxicity and where you know, for whatever reason, you may be deciding to stay in an environment that may be fat phobic because of these other things. Right, it just gets really it's a lot. But yeah, what

can I do to change my environment? Where can I set boundaries and my environment? And where do I need to like how can I take care of myself when I am exposed to fat phobia in a way that harms me? Yeah, Okay, So actually I've just have one last question for you, Isabel. Are you ready, Yes, let's do it. Okay. I want you to pretend that you're traveling.

You're in the future. If you're I don't know how long in the future, but it's a time when you can look back at what we're all living through around diet culture and food and bodies. It's you're safely that's safely in the past. We're no longer doing that. What is your future self saying about this very moment, like twenty twenty two that we're living in now when it comes to like how we deal with food and body and diet culture, you know, I think that honestly, I

just have so much compassion. Like when I think about that, when I think about like looking back on history and thinking about that must have been so hard and so painful, and it makes me so sad, and I just it's like my heart breaks, and but there's like a real

it's just compassion. Like I just feel so much compassion, and that's like one of the most important tools you could have, I think in this process on this journey is just really looking at your diet recovery journey through the lens of compassion, you know, looking at your body image challenges through the lens of compassion, of like, none of this is your fault. How can you just really like love yourself and be compassionate towards yourself through this

like violence that we're experiencing as a collective. M Yes, I mean I absolutely love that. I absolutely agree, Isabel. Thank you for being on Rebel Eaters Club. Thank you for having me. This is so special. I'm like, I feel like such a special kinship with you, and it's like it's just a treat. It's really a treat. Ah. Same same, And thank you for sharing some new tele banana business with me anytime you want to share a new telebanana. Wow. Okay, let's take a moment to contemplate

radical hopelessness. Yes, that moment when you understand that dieting just doesn't work, that it will never work, that it's not your fault, and your body will just be the way that it wants to be. That is a moment of power. As Isabel just taught us, dieting is the real coping mechanism. Most of us need help coping. How can we trade out dieting for something that doesn't eat our souls, though, I personally recommend thrifting watercolors and perfecting

your heckling skills. If you have thoughts on the conversation you just heard, or even if you just want to say hi, reach out via social media. DM me at Virgie Tovar, DM the show's producers at Transmitter Pods, or shoot us a message at Rebel Eaters Club at gmail dot com. Rebel Eaters Club is brought to you by Transmitter Media. This episode was produced by showshe shol Events. Sarah Knicks is Transmitters executive editor. Wilson Sarah is our

managing producer, and Greta Cohen is our executive producer. And I'm your host Virgie Tobar. Rick Kwan is our mixed engineer. And thanks to Taka Yazawa who wrote some of the music we use in the show. If you love Rubbel Eaters Club, tell your friends and share the love by writing a review on your favorite podcast app. See you next week