Abby Langer (00:02):
Physical hunger comes with certain signs, so obviously like a rumbling stomach or if you can't focus, sometimes people get tired, they get cranky, hangry, they might get a headache. Emotional hunger comes with, it's very specific.
Michelle MacDonald (00:30):
Today my guest is nutrition expert Abby Langer. So Abby is a registered dietician. She's the owner of Abby Langer Nutrition. Her career has spanned over 20 years, I don't know, maybe that's 25 now from hospitals to private practice. She's made it her mission, and I love this to debunk fad diets and nutrition myths and promote how to live your best life without dieting. She's written for self, men's health, women's health. She's been featured as an expert in the New York Times, the cut CBC radio, I mean the list goes on and on. She lives in Toronto. She has two daughters. She lives with her husband in Toronto. And you can also visit her website, abby langer nutrition.com, and you can connect with her on Twitter and Instagram at Langer Nutrition. And I highly recommend you guys follow Abby full of great information. Abby, welcome to the show.
Abby Langer (01:19):
Thank you. It's so good to be here
Michelle MacDonald (01:21):
So I'm going to dive right in because we're going to cover a lot of stuff today. Okay. First of all, you like so many gals that I interview, you get a lot of pushback from people complaining about how you go about exposing diet fads or false and misleading information. I mean, I don't know how you can drop the bad news in a nice way, but it's a fad, it's misinformation, and many people are so emotionally attached to their influencers or their anecdotal evidence. And I mentioned earlier when we were offline that I read about a gal complaining that your statement that it's a fallacy that sugar causes high insulin. And she's saying, but what about me? I have an addiction to sugar sheets, a little bit of sugar, and then she can't stop herself. And meanwhile, in Nature Magazine, it says clearly that there's no scientific data on sucrose, which allows linking sucrose to diabetes, which allows the conclusion to be drawn out that it has a detrimental effect on glycemic control or type two diabetes when we're talking about ioic exchanges, sucrose for any other starch. So for you, we can go on and on about the science, which I know you love to do. But for this kind of example, what would your suggestions be for her situation that doesn't involve demonizing
Abby Langer (02:46):
Sugar? Yeah, I think so many people, many people take an extreme view of nutrition, so it's either all of the sugar or none of the sugar. And I think it's in part because so many influencers and personalities out there, especially on social media, use fear and anxiety as tactics to sell a narrative. And sugar is a great example of this. When some person who a lot of people follow say says, if you eat sugar, you're poisoning yourself. It's toxic. It causes all of these diseases. It makes people anxious, and then they naturally want to go the complete opposite direction. So they go to the other end of the spectrum and they become anti-sugar basically for everything. They cannot accept the fact that there's a gray area that most of us do best in, and that's how I operate my practices in the gray area, and I teach people how to exist in that nutrition gray area where you don't eliminate any foods and you don't only eat certain foods, but you find joy in eating.
(04:15):
And so to someone like that influencer, I would just after communicating the research, which sometimes doesn't work because people either don't understand research or they create an identity that is focused on their diet. So you're basically insulting them in their eyes if you tell them that what they're doing is wrong. I would explain to them that they don't have to cut anything out of their diet and that they'll, the negatives of cutting out all of the foods, for example, with sugar from their life will supersede any kind of potential positives. Think of it this way, why would you ever want to go through life with no birthday cake or no ice cream in the summer or in the winter? I like ice cream anytime these foods. Food isn't just about fuel. It's not just about eating healthy. Food is about love and about community and about joy, and you should have peace with that. So I try to steer people in that direction. But that being said, Michelle, there's always people you're never going to reach, and I don't die on those hills because that's just not my job.
Michelle MacDonald (05:46):
I love that. I don't die on those hills.
Abby Langer (05:48):
No.
Michelle MacDonald (05:50):
So digging a little deeper then, because this is a hot topic, whether it's sugar or whether it's anything else in diet that is the current flavor for bad. When people are tugged by a certain food item that they're struggling with and that's kind of a trigger for them or that they feel is a trigger for them, how do you guide them to be confident in that gray space?
Abby Langer (06:17):
So a lot of people have food triggers such as pasta or bread or candy or those types of foods because they've been told again and again and again that they shouldn't be eating them. I mean, for example, I have a client right now, I do one-to-one counseling, and I have a client now who was told for probably decades that she shouldn't be eating pasta because Weight Watchers said that she shouldn't eat it. And so it's become this mythical thing in her life where if she ever ate pasta, she would overeat it because she'd be like, I got to get it all in now because I'm eating. It's wrong for me to eat it. So what I do is I get people to slowly expose themselves to the trigger food so it becomes just another food. So I mean, certainly there are foods that we find more attractive. I love Easter cream eggs. If I have them in the house, I do eat them, but after keeping them in the house for an extended period of time, I don't give a crap about them anymore. And I feel like for the majority of people, this is the case. Once you expose yourself to these foods on a regular basis and you tell yourself it's okay to eat them, they just become another food and the attractiveness just vanishes.
Michelle MacDonald (07:49):
So we're actually segueing into this idea about emotional eating already, so I'll reserve that for the next question after this because it's very close to home. For our own coaching services, I mean, we really focus on cultivated the athlete mindset, but we do have people coming in that are struggling around what they call trigger foods, and we use a macro based approach, which I don't know if that's going to be okay under your radar, but I coach when you understand the mathematical language of food,
(08:20):
Then it opens up the whole wide palate for you, and then you have to be your own scientist. You have to kind of try foods and does it work? Does it not work? Do you get the results you want? Does it make you feel good? Not only when you're eating it like an hour after you're eating it the next day and all of that, but for some gals, they really fall hard and they keep trying and experimenting. We actually roll out about week three. We roll out what we call social eating. So you're actually going to go out and eat and you're not going to make the food, you're not going to cook it, you're not going to plug it in, and you're just going to sit with it while you have a coach walking you through how did you feel and what happened and all of that.
(09:01):
And we get pushback from clients, I don't want to do it. I'm doing great. I'm afraid to do that. A lot of people just have a blast, and it becomes a very successful way for them to have that balance that they're looking for and to experiment with not following any kind of a plan and developing that kind of intuitive eating. But sometimes people fall down and we'll try again. All right, let's eat the hamburger again. And sometimes it spirals. I remember this one great gal, she had a hamburger and then she ate her boyfriend's fries, and then she went home and she had a chocolate bar, and it was that I can't stop myself. Then by the third time, like you said, by the third time, she was fine. She was like, oh, it's easy now because it was a trigger food where this is the only time she could have it. Oh my God, get it all in. Or whatever emotions that it triggered. Yeah,
Abby Langer (09:50):
It's an all or nothing mentality. But I also find that when people are restricted, I mean they just feel so guilty or when they're following a very tight plan, you are, it's a very niche population that you're counseling, and so you're looking for a certain outcome, but for the majority of people, if they deviate from what they feel is the right thing, it creates this situation where it's like, oh, I felt guilty. I feel shame. I'm a bad person for doing X or eating X, and then now I'm just going to go crazy. And it's hard. And another thing that happens is that when people are following a very regimented nutrition plan, it does happen that after a while, they feel very, what's the right word? Stuck by it. They don't trust themselves to eat outside of that plan, and it becomes a thing where they need to keep that plan for the long-term, whatever it is, because they're afraid that without it, they can't decide for themselves what to eat. They can't trust their body to tell them how much to eat and when to eat. And so there's so many things around food. It's so complex, which is another part of my whole social media presence is people who oversimplify nutrition. And I'm like, you can't just oversimplify this stuff. There's so many facets that, and if you don't know what you're talking about, you shouldn't be putting your crap on social media and trying to advise people because you can really do damage.
Michelle MacDonald (11:58):
Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's so incredibly nuanced, and I mean, we could spend a whole hour just talking about a small portion of the nuances. My husband and I were listening to probably listen to 15 or 20 of your reels last night in which you involved eating Doritos and m and ms.
Abby Langer (12:20):
So
Michelle MacDonald (12:20):
We want to go, did you actually eat those Doritos at m and ms? I'm like,
Abby Langer (12:23):
Yeah, I love Doritos. I love Bal. In Canada, we have a flavor of Doritos called zesty cheese, and it's like the bomb, the best thing ever, but I don't, again, I used to have the same problem. Let me tell you, in the distant past, I used to restrict food and I would binge on this kind of stuff. I wouldn't be able and to have it in the house and I would just binge it. And then I really slowly, it's a process, right? I've taught myself, this is food. I can't live like this.
Michelle MacDonald (12:56):
It's
Abby Langer (12:56):
So fucking, can I swear on this podcast?
Michelle MacDonald (12:59):
Absolutely, go ahead.
Abby Langer (13:01):
It's so fucking unhealthy. Not only physically, but emotionally. I was constantly thinking about food, constantly just obsessed. And so I very slowly just tried to integrate these foods into my life. This is a long time ago, but it really has helped me. So yeah, I eat Doritos, I eat ice cream. I eat m and m's, absolutely, but I also eat a ton of solid and fruit and whatever. And I like the example I'm setting for my kids
(13:35):
Because I have two daughters, one's almost 14 and one's 16, 16, not 17, and I'm showing them as well as myself that all foods can fit in. It's fine. I went to Chipotle yesterday and had the biggest fucking burrito ever, and I ate it in less than 10 minutes. Maybe not ideal, and that's fine, but previously I would've been like, oh God, I ate a burrito. I feel so awful about myself. How many calories is this? And blah, blah, blah. And I would've obsessed about it, but then I was like, you know what? I wanted the burrito. I ate it. I'm going to move the hell on and whatever. And it's fine.
Michelle MacDonald (14:15):
Do you tend to work with more people that are trying to heal the relationship with food, or is it kind of all over the map
Abby Langer (14:22):
As opposed to,
Michelle MacDonald (14:23):
As opposed to, Hey, I want to lose some weight. Do people go to you to lose weight or do they go to you more towards healing their relationship with food?
Abby Langer (14:31):
It's both. I do have a program for women called Eating After 40, and is
Michelle MacDonald (14:37):
I was going to ask you about that.
Abby Langer (14:38):
Yeah, yeah. So it's generally heal your relationship with food and then relearn how to nourish yourself physically and emotionally using food. But I do get they're inextricably linked. I find that probably 99% of people who I see for weight loss have some sort of dieting history or issues around food that we really need to take care of. I often will refer people to a therapist because I am not a therapist, so there's really conscious about staying within my scope of practice, but I do a lot of counseling around negative core beliefs and how did you grow up and how was food perceived in your home when you were a child, all of that stuff. And people don't realize that it makes such a difference. So yeah, we get all into that, and so it's sort of both
Michelle MacDonald (15:41):
So great. So then knowing that you have to stay in your lame, but there's emotional eating exists on a spectrum, so we have, you just need to learn some strategies and self-awareness two, okay, this is actually a disordered behavior,
(15:59):
And you don't know right off the bat necessarily, right? So how do you go about, again, helping people will find strength in the gray area and the nuances and going from that initial exploratory journey with them as your dietician. Like, Hey, okay, let's work on expanding your toolbox as you like to say for your coping mechanisms to, okay, hey, I think now we need to bring in a therapist and what does that conversation look like? Because you also don't want to label people and they identify with a behavior, right? Well, you're just having this behavior, it's not who you are.
Abby Langer (16:39):
I mean, I think it becomes apparent for me, because I've been a dietician for so long, I can really sniff out an eating disorder or even disordered eating in the first probably 15 minutes of talking with someone.
Michelle MacDonald (16:54):
Oh, wow.
Abby Langer (16:54):
Yeah. I mean, it's pretty apparent the way someone will talk about food. And I ask a lot of questions. People are sometimes, why are you asking me these questions? But it really helps. I'm the type of person I want all the information, all of it before I even start making recommendations. And then I just say, I think for me, it's a controlled act here in Canada to make a diagnosis. So I'm not allowed to make a diagnosis and surely wouldn't say, I think you have an eating disorder. But I would say I think there's a lot of stuff that's deeper here that is outside of my scope of practice. I think you would really benefit from seeing a therapist. I have names that I give people and they can see a therapist concurrently with me, or they can leave my practice, see the therapist, and then return. It's up to them, but a lot of people will really benefit from it. I think we all need therapy anyways. Where else can you talk about yourself for hours and hours? And the person just has to listen
Michelle MacDonald (18:07):
On your Instagram story, I think.
(18:09):
Yeah. Okay. So then on the spectrum of learning, so let's dive into emotional eating because you have a beautiful article there in your blog. And guys, I highly recommend following Abby Langer on Instagram, of course, but really go into her blog where she goes into more detail, but a lot of really important subjects around nutrition. So this idea about emotional eating, it's a really sensitive topic when people apply to work with us. And we really try to very candidly say, and as to your point, we're a very niche coaching platform. Our program's not for everybody. That in fact, it could be the worst thing, the worst thing if you are really struggling with emotional eating as a coping mechanism because we're we're about data and performance and meal planning and all of that, which could create so much stress that you would actually be triggered.
(19:09):
So we really try to be without, again, as you say, without saying you have an issue, we have an actual application process where it's like, okay, if you answer this question this way, then we give you a mindset book and give you some references to some alternatives to pursue before working with somebody like us. I don't know if it's ever a good fit. Now, I also was a bulimic for 16 years in my miss spent youth track and field athlete. And when I was a teenager, one of our girls in our circle of friends was a champion figure skater. It starts like that, oh, I've got this trick that I do. And then it's like, oh, that's a great trick. That's the reality of
Abby Langer (19:53):
The
Michelle MacDonald (19:53):
School situation. Who's in your tribe? Scary. But then me, now here I am, my husband eats completely different than me. We've got two jars of Nutella. He loves Nutella. He'll go through a jar. He is big, big boy goat, he'll go through a jar in two weeks, peanut butter, nuts, all the things that before would've been whispering wine. And now sometimes I'm like, even I'm hungry. And I'm like, oh, I should have that. I want to have that. And then I'll be like, oh, shoot, I haven't had enough protein today. And then I'll think about how delicious. I mean, I just don't, I might have it. I had some Nutella yesterday as a snack, but oftentimes I don't because it's just this conversation of, well, what do I really want? And what I really want is to be satiated or whatever, right? Yeah. How is this for, there's just no triggers for how you want. That's what I talk e for how you want to. Okay, so let's talk about that a little bit more. This is a big one and I think people really struggle with that. And if we can just talk about expanding the tools in your toolkit and not identifying with the behavior as well, and just dive into that a little bit.
Abby Langer (21:03):
Well, in terms of emotional eating, I think it's important to understand that we all do it, and emotional eating has been painted as this horrible thing that you should never do, but that's impossible. I eat emotionally, not all the time, but occasionally for sure. And it's not only when we think of emotional eating, we think of the quintessential woman who's been dumped and she's sitting on the couch eating ice cream, but it's also, we eat emotionally when we're happy, when we're excited for all different emotions. And in some situations it's just normal. Someone brings you a birthday cake for your birthday and you're not really hungry, but you're excited, so you have a piece of whatever, get over it. But if it's your only coping tool in your coping toolbox, that becomes an issue, obviously physically and emotionally. And so I think the first part of what I tell people about their emotional eating is to understand that it is normal human behavior because I think there's so much shame behind it. Oh, I ate this. I'm such a bad person, but you're not a bad person. You aren't your diet, first of all. And this is, we all do it. You are in good company here. And then to try to figure out what is causing this behavior. So are you vulnerable because you're tired? Are you vulnerable because you're sad because you need something? What is it that you need at that time?
Michelle MacDonald (22:52):
So it's starting to look at the emotions. What is the actual emotion that I'm having versus
Abby Langer (22:57):
Just emotion? Take a step back from whatever you were going to eat and just think, what do I need right now? What am I feeling right now? How is this food going to make me feel? And sometimes you're going to fucking eat the kit cap bar and whatever, who cares? But I teach my clients something really effective called the pause where you love it already. It's like game changing because you pause before you eat something, you think, how is this going to make me feel? How hungry am I? Am I even hungry at all? What do I need right now? And it's especially effective for emotional eating, but I get them to do it actually all the time at the beginning when they're eating at meals or whatever. But it forces you to identify with emotional eating that emotion behind what you're feeling and sit in that emotion. So often when someone eats emotionally, and I want to stress that I've done this too, of course we've all done this, so I don't want to shame anybody. We just grab things to stuff, emotions down, we want to stuff them down. That's why we eat emotionally. A lot of the time we use food to cover the emotion, but when you take the pause, you sit in that discomfort.
(24:31):
And that is so important because we want to know where this discomfort is coming from. If we can figure that out, we can maybe head it off before it happens again, or we can figure out more effective ways of dealing with it. So I get people to talk to me about that emotion, figure out where it's coming from, and then list some ways, and I help them if they need help that they can deal with this emotion more effectively. All the while understanding that sometimes again, they're going to choose that food, that they want to deal with the emotion. And that's okay. It's just that I don't want it to happen every time.
Michelle MacDonald (25:15):
Yeah, we talk about using breath, so just take a deep breath because it has such an immediate effect on your sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system, like full inhalation, open the rib cage, full exhalation, and in that pause, what's going on?
(25:35):
And so the habit of having a conversation with yourself versus just blindly being in your limbic brain, like react, react, react, and just driving that wedge. And it's funny, I joke with my husband now, actually, I'll grab a piece of chocolate or something and I'll say, I'm emotionally eating this chocolate. And I think I have fun with it because I was so sick for so long with eating disorders, which is the full extreme of emotional eating, they say. And I remember being horrified about reading this. I think it was in my late teens or early twenties, and I was still very, very much in the trenches. And I was reading something like, once you have an eating disorder diagnosis, you're always going to have it because you always have to eat. And I was, I was reading about a 40-year-old who was still bulimic, and she had kids I thought, and she was losing her teeth, right? That's terrible. That's going to be me. And it wasn't until I was 30 many years later that finally I had my own cathartic moment where it was, I'm done. This is such a waste of energy. I'm out, I'm done. And of course, there were still some relapses now and again, but over those years, really I changed completely to be here where I am now. And people ask me, well, how'd you do it?
(26:51):
I did yoga twice a day for nine weeks with 200 other women, and I was just a witness to the massive conditioning experiment that we were all part of and the massive waste of energy that we were all participating in. And I was just like, I want to achieve great things with my life. I got to be done with this. Yeah, hard to explain. What about you? What was your path? Did you go through therapy? Was it a slow process? It
Abby Langer (27:18):
Was so slow. I just, the moment, and I talk about this in my book, good Food, bad Diet, but I had these behaviors and then I worked in the intensive care unit when I was just starting to be a dietician and I saw people you were dying, and they were like my age or a little bit older, and I thought to myself, these people didn't know that they were going to be in this position a couple days earlier. They were just living their lives. In many cases. They weren't diagnosed with a disease that was long-term. They had a car accident or they broke their neck while they were riding a horse or awful stuff. And I thought to myself, why am I doing this? To, why am I obsessing about going out for margaritas with my friends or really living my life and doing things?
(28:17):
If I am in the ICU, God forbid tomorrow, I'm not going to think to myself, oh, I'm so glad I kept those last five pounds off. I'm going to think to myself, I wish I would've lived my life without regard so much regard for how I fucking look and what my pants size was. And because I had the privilege of living in a smaller body anyhow, and my weight has never affected my health, but I still was always like, oh, I need to fit into a 27. I need extra small. And it was really fucking me up, and it was really fucking up so many facets of my life, physically, emotionally, socially, financially, even with the food I was buying. And I thought, it's not worth it. This isn't worth it. At the end of the day, I want to really be around the people who I love and I want to have a good time, and this is what matters. Not like if I gain five pounds from that, I don't give a shit anymore because this isn't like, I can't do this anymore for the rest of my, plus, I knew I was going to have kids at some point. I don't want them to take on these behaviors. It was awful. That's
Michelle MacDonald (29:41):
Huge. It was huge. Your actions leave a legacy. Yes, they do. They do. Yeah. Very important. So going back to this idea of emotional eating, Deb, what are the key differences between physical hunger and emotional hunger?
Abby Langer (29:56):
So physical hunger comes with certain signs. So obviously like a rumbling stomach or if you can't focus, sometimes people get tired, they get cranky, hangry, they might get a headache. Emotional hunger. It comes with, it's very specific. It's like a very specific craving for a specific food comes on really quickly, and that's basically it. I mean, if you don't have that physical hunger feeling, but you really are, think about when the last time you had a craving for something and you weren't really hungry. It was just like you wanted that one thing and it was on a loop in your mind. So that's more emotional hunger and emotional hunger, obviously. It often comes in response to emotions, whether you realize it or not. So a lot of times people will be like, I have a craving, but they don't have the insight to understand that that craving originated with some emotion that they don't want to feel, right? So they're like, oh, it's a craving, but actually it's not just a craving. Take a pause. What actually are you feeling right now? Sadness. Are you hiding that sadness under the craving? Let's feel the sadness
Michelle MacDonald (31:22):
Or the boredom or the feeling lost with your purpose and life and of
Abby Langer (31:26):
Course
Michelle MacDonald (31:27):
All of these
Abby Langer (31:28):
Things. All of the things,
Michelle MacDonald (31:29):
Yeah. So I'm thinking of, don't hate me. I'm thinking of you're eating these m and ms and there's a guy in the background talking about eating, I don't know, a cajillion cups of blueberries or something, and you're rolling your eyes and you're like, when has anyone ever satisfied a chocolate creamy with fruit? So in the moment of having this sudden onset of I have to have this thing, I have to have this Oreo cookie, and you pause, how do you decipher between having the pause wanting the Oreo cookie? Everything's happening so fast, especially when people are starting to learn to navigate their self-awareness and then their coping mechanisms better. How do we navigate between that urge to have that thing and also being okay that it's okay to have the thing?
Abby Langer (32:20):
I think that you need to think again how that thing is going to make you feel and understanding. You have to understand why you're eating it, and you have to also understand that all food is just food and that nothing bad is going to happen to you if you have those Oreos and that you can have an Oreo anytime you want. This is a key thing. I think a lot of people are like, I can't have an Oreo because X told me that they're whatever off limits or whatnot, so obviously that makes us crave more, but when you take the mindset of listen, you can have an Oreo anytime you want. You don't have to push that aside and eat 10 frigging cups of blueberries, which we all know is it often doesn't work. I mean, shades of the nineties where we all did that and then we actually just went and ate what we craved in the first place. I think when you have that conversation with yourself and you have that understanding that no fruits are off limits, it can be extremely scary, but I think it really helps to figure out the emotional eating part,
Michelle MacDonald (33:37):
Right? Yeah. That's key. If there's something underlying that you need to address first, and it doesn't have to be something that requires therapy, it's just understanding that your complex being with complex emotions and everything comes to the surface, and we're so busy these days, there's so much going on. Just, yeah, we're so respected,
Abby Langer (33:57):
But I think it's important to really understand and mention or acknowledge that this whole process can be extremely scary for people, extremely scary, especially people who have gone decades of their lives not trusting themselves around food or certain foods, and now we're telling them, you can have any food you want. You can keep it in the house, whatever. People are frightened and is a process that can take years. Honestly. People are so afraid of gaining weight. They're so afraid of losing control, but it's worth it in the end to go through this process. It's just can be really frightening.
Michelle MacDonald (34:51):
Yeah. It brings me back to that first I opened, I talked about that gal on Reddit who said, if I had 20 grams of sugar in my diet in the morning, it accelerates the cravings throughout the day, so I just can't do it. Yeah,
Abby Langer (35:05):
Why? Do you know why? Probably because she's telling herself she can't have sugar, and then once she has sugar in the morning, she probably thinks, well, I've blown it so I'm going to eat sugar all day long. She probably has this underlying all or nothing thinking, and it's not a sugar addiction, it's that you're telling yourself you can't have sugar ever, and then when you start your day with sugar, it's like the damn breaks, and then you just have it all, and then you're like, I'm addicted to sugar. When really it's not really an addiction. It's all emotional. You're telling yourself you can't have something. Of course, you're going to want it more, and it's not all or nothing.
Michelle MacDonald (35:52):
Abby's right. Our perspectives on nutrition are fueled by social media influencers, and that can create anxiety around foods like sugar sometimes that leads people to adopt restrictive diets. Remember Abby's advice about finding a balanced gray area approach to eating where no food is off limits and food is appreciated for both nourishment and joy that will help satisfy your relationship with food. In the next episode, Abby's going to discuss misleading menopause targeted diets, the science or the lack of it behind fasting trends like the Galveston diet and the impact of weight loss medications such as ozempic, including their ethical considerations and long-term effects on health. See you next episode.