How Anti-Dieting Works

and read. Even though we haven't physically held in our hands yet, it's like we have Chuck in our dreams so far. I can't wait to actually see and hold this thing and smell it. And so should you, so pre order now. It means a lot to us. The support is a very big deal, So pre order anywhere books are sold. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Chizy,

Chuck Bryant, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Um, yeah, that's all I gotta say. I think this is super interesting, this anti diet movement episode MM hmm, I do too. I'd heard a little bit about it. Every once in a while, we'll say something and one of our listeners will write in and be like, Hey, you guys shouldn't be saying that, or you guys shouldn't be talking about, you know, trying to lose weight or something, because it shames other people indirectly, Like you should check out the

anti dieting movement. So all of you people who have ever written in with the suggestion for that, this one's for you, because I believe all of you are the ones who who brought that to my awareness. Yeah. So the anti diet movement is a response to, Um, there's a lot of pieces to it, and we're gonna we're gonna go over all of them. But it's a response to diet culture in the world old especially in the United States, and a response that basically says, we don't

think diet culture is healthy. Uh, literally healthy for your physical health and also not healthy for your mental health and for the well being of an individual. Uh, we don't think diets work. We think we have proof and studies that show diets don't work, and we think that there's a better way, which is to accept food as something that is to be enjoyed and accept your body.

And there's a lot more to it than that, but that's sort of the broadest stroke in society goes what I tell you, man, it's when you look at how we are, you know, I don't want to maybe brainwashed is too strong of a word, but how humans and Americans are brainwashed into thinking there is only one way right to live um and only one way to of that way right. It's pretty interesting and hard to undo.

And there's and we're all of us, every single one of us in America, and I would guess and most of the West as well, are subjects to kind of this two pronged attack about weight. One is the idea that you just don't look as good when you're overweight, and then to the idea that you're not as healthy when you're overweight. And this anti dieting movement rejects both

of those. They they so their whole thing is. And it's really it's worth kind of restating here because it's tough to wrap your head around because of the way that we've all been brought up for so long that the anti dieting movement isn't like no, no, no. All you have to do is cut meat out and you're fine. You can do everything else. There's nothing like that. It's

not only not only don't diet, it's throw away. You're dieting books, stop following dieting blogs, reject the standard of beauty at like the the small kind of vaguely underweight um standard that we have in the West. Um. And stop listening to people, including your own inner voice. That's that that makes you feel ashamed when you crave or eat certain foods. That all foods are on the table. There's no such thing as bad foods. And you can just stop thinking about weight and food. Those two things

can be decoupled for the rest of your life. You're free, basically is whether say you're free, Go fly, little bird, go live your life, stop thinking about being overweight. Yeah, And it all comes down and this might it's just some people may just think this is the craziest thing they've ever heard in their life. Um. But what they're saying is is something called that you should embrace, something

called intuitive eating. And this came around and the sometime in the nineties there was a book written by Evelyn Tree Bowl and uh At Lease resh called intuitive eating colon a revolutionary program that works. And this is and this was basically the idea that we've been looking at. This cycle happened for years of restricting your food, getting on a diet, losing weight, gaining it back, sometimes gaining back even more weight, doing this over and over and over.

It's not working. It's not good for people, it's not effective. Uh, it doesn't make you healthier to go through this weight loss and weight gain cycle. And you need to stop listening to these external controls, whether it's the media or your parents, or your spouse or partner or yourself. And you need to start listening to your body and eating what your body says to eat. And here's the important part, stop eating when your body says it's full, right, And

so they kind of put all these things. So intuitive eating is kind of the central focus of anti dieting, but it's not one and the same. Anti dieting is a larger umbrella movement is the best word for it. That includes anti or intuitive eating, but it also includes a kind of a militant opposition to um fat shaming of any sort of any kind, and also kind of believes not even kind of overtly believes that any weight loss goal is negative, that it's it comes from that

being brainwashed culturally. So we'll talk more about that anti dieting movement in general, but like we should really explain the intense principles of intuitive eating that UM that triple and Rush put together, and we should say it one other thing too, This is not a diet So so when you're hearing these things, don't think and then you do this and you lose weight. Now that's out the window. That has nothing to do with this. This is about

your relationship to food. And then number two, these people are no slouches. UM Trible and Rush are both registered dietitians, which are UM certified regulated UM professionals who know what they're talking about with with nutrition and intuitive eating is widely almost universally embraced by dietitians and nutritionists as well. So you just kind of keep that mindset when you're

hearing these ten principles of intuitive eating. Yeah, and before we actually listen to ten, it's worth pointing out that part of intuitive eating is UH. Part of the foundation is the fact that they say, hey, listen, look at your kids when you're born and your little baby, and you don't know anything. You're just a dumb baby, and you grow up to be a dumb little toddler. Your body tells you when you're hungry, and you eat, and your body tells you when you're full, and you stop eating.

And I see that with my five year old. I'm not hungry anymore, all right, stop eating. And it's that easy.

And the argument for intuitive eating is that, uh, and you know, partially the anti diet movement is somewhere along the way, we lose that as adults or as you know, teenagers even because of this onslaught from the media and from everybody talking about your weight, your weight, your weight, and your health and you've got to be skinny, and we lose these we literally lose these biological triggers that say when you're hungry, stop when you're full. Those just

go away. And the idea is to kind of retrain your mind and body to get back to that state you were when you were a dumb baby, right, Yeah, because I don't even know if it goes away. We're just trained by diet culture to ignore them. It goes away. Yeah, I know, I don't know if I agree with that. One, but I but the but the key is is that

that it's being one way or another. We don't have that intuitively anymore because diet culture is come in and replace that with no pay attention to the calories or ignore the fact that you're hungry because you're you're limiting portion size and they're saying, ignore that bad advice. Right, So here are the principles, the ten principles. The first one is we already kind of covered it to reject

the diet mentality. Basically, it's just saying that you know, these these diets, um don't deliver lasting results, and you've got to remind yourself of that, right. Um. There's also the next one is honor your hunger. It's so sweet they have honor and here a couple of times, but they're basically saying that when you are hungry, you should eat, and you should pay attention to not only um, what your bodies like the fact that your body is telling you're hungry, so so go ahead and eat, but um,

what your body is asking for too. Now your body, it's important to say, is what they're saying to honor not you're sad, so go eat the ice cream, right, which comes later. That comes later. Yeah, what else, Chuck, there's make peace with food. Yeah, that is basically unconditional permission to eat um. You know, we're tempted by the

twinkies and the ice cream and stuff like that. And they're saying, give yourself that permission, because that's sort of one of the keys is once you rewire your brain, you're not gonna want the twinkie for lunch because it doesn't have that allure and it's probably not gonna make you feel great physically. And maybe you need to do that a couple of times to realize, you, boy, I don't feel so hot after eating ice cream for lunch

and only ice cream for lunch exactly. Yeah. So so there's they're saying, just like there's there's if you if you are on the couch and you're like, uh, those oreo sound good? Should I should not? They're saying, get rid of this. Should I should not? If you feel hungry and those oreo sound good, you just get up and you eat the oreos without a second thought. That's the point of making peace with food, giving yourself permission

to live like that, That's right. The next one, number four is challenged the food police, which can be everything from your friends and family or partners to your own and I think many times your own inner voice probably more than any anything, that inner voice UM. And one of the things that the food police too, is um, they can come about in ways that are much less

direct than than calling them the food police. Sounds like food police, sounds like somebody who's going to tell you to put down that twinkie because you, you know, a moment on the lips of a lifetime on the hips. People who say stuff like that to other people, that's

definitely food police kind of stuff. But that that same kind of guilt or shame or reinforcement of feeling guilty or ashamed about food can come from people who are talking about their own dislike for their body or their weight, because um, it makes you kind of sympathetically trigger and examine your own, especially if that person is maybe um, weighs less than you do, because if they're worried about their weight, well geez, that means you should really be

worried about your weight. Or they're worried about eating that the grilled chicken on their Caesar salad and you're tucking into a chili dog, should you really be eating this? So the food police in this sense can kind of come from a number of different directions. Defund the food police. Ye uh. The next one is respect your fullness. And this is a big part of it because they're saying eat when you're hungry, but they're not saying eat till

you feel sick. They're saying you need to listen to your body at all times when it's hungry, feed it and then maybe eat a little slower, maybe pause during that snack or during that meal and say, all right, body, all am I hungry now? Or my board or stressed out? And is that why I'm continuing to eat? Like check in with yourself in the middle of a meal to see, body, do you need fuel right now? Or you know it's some and going on at work and this twinkie makes

it a whole lot better. And so that kind of um reveals like one of the big principles of intuitive eating, which is mindfulness, Like you're not supposed to just kind of zone out and watch you know, TV while you're eating ice cream, because then you look down and you eating way more ice cream than you've even realized, which means that you didn't even enjoy that ice cream. You want to be more mindful when you're eating, in part, not just to monitor how much you're eating, but to

enjoy it more. That's part of the whole thing as well. And then for the next one on the list, in fact, this satisfaction. Okay, hold on, I've got one more thing about respecting your fullness. So there's this confusion teaching that the Japanese called hara hatchi boo, which means belli is eight percent full. And the kind of rule of thumb among Japanese people is that you eat until you feel about full, because then your food kind of expands in your stomach and by the time um, you're done eating

eventually becomes a hundred percent full. So you don't you don't overeat until you feel sick. And it's actually extremely satisfying. It just takes again that level of mindfulness that uh, and that number six was satisfaction, which is, you know, enjoy your food, Assess that taste in the texture, and how does that feel in your stomach? Is it a

gut bomb or does it feel good? Right? And I think also chuck, if you if you stop and think about a lot of the ultra processed foods that people have in America, you will find it doesn't make you

feel very good. So I think the authors are aware that part of that mindfulness is going to lead you to a different some different kinds of foods than the ones that that people traditionally think of that they're just gonna eat when food when they don't feel guilty about eating food, you know, right, like they sit back and they're like, no, no, no, go ahead and uh down

on the ice cream. And then they sit back and go watch this, right, I don't know about be happy for a few minutes, and then they're going to be like, oh, I gotta stomach cakee. I think ice cream is exempted from that. I keep talking about ice cream ice cream in the world. Let's I'll leave ice cream alone. But I think, you know, there's there's been plenty of stuff that I've eaten where I realized later that it's not actually good, it doesn't actually taste good, it's not actually satisfying.

It actually makes me feel kind of bad. And then the icing on the cake of of I love icing on cake. Disappointment. Yeah, icing and ice cream are exempted, but the icing on this cake of of um. Just feeling kind of duped is that I probably saw an ad for that food within the last couple of days, and the ad worked its mojo on my head. And that's why I ate it, not because I like it, but because the ad got me. And then the food itself is designed to hijack your limbic system, so I

ate more and more and more. But when I stopped and really thought about how it made me feel, it didn't feel good about it. I didn't like that food and I've actually given up Popeye's chicken as a result. Very good. Yeah, honoring your feelings is the next one. Without food. Um, you know, check in with yourself emotionally, how are you? Are you anxious? You lonely? Are you stressed out? You mad? Like? What are your food triggers and why are they there? And try and resolve some

of those those issues without using the food. That's a big, big part of it. I think that is the part of it, dude. I think most people who are overweight are overweight because they eat emotionally. Maybe I'm maybe it's over confirmation by some huge stress eater huge um, And I guess it's possible I could just be presuming most people are like that, But I suspect that that is

the key to all of it. Is if you can figure out that food is in addiction to you, um, and that you're using it as an emotional crutch, that that will make you identify what you're actually trying to deal with or cover up or run from or make your make make yourself feel better against using food, and that is the key to decoupling it. And when you can do that, you can do all this other stuff, I would guess is just kind of like a cascade of easiness from that point on. I think that's probably

the hardest part. UH. Number eight is respecting your body. And this is the idea that you know, you want to love your body and accept your body and feel good about what what they call your genetic blueprint and the body that you have and maybe were meant to have, and having a realistic expectation about what you can and

should look like. That's a big, big part of it. UM. The ninth one really kind of stands out to me to Chuck is that um, exercise There they're saying, like exercise, but the thing to know about exercises, you don't exercise for weight loss. That's not what exercises for. It's actually not that great for weight loss. It's good for improving your mood and making you feel better. And it can help with number eight. With you just respecting your body.

You can just feel good about your body without even really losing any weight, just from from exercising from time to time. And they don't even say you necessarily need to exercise, they're just saying move more. Don't be sentary. Just a big one. But but that was a big life changing thing for me too, is learning that exercise is not about weight loss, it's about boosting your mood

and sense of well being. It feels good, it does, it feels really good, but if you do it to try to lose weight, it's very frustrating and counterproductive and you'll eventually give up exercise probably. Uh. And then the last one honor your health with gentle nutrition. Uh. And this is the idea that you're making food choices um that you you like the taste of, but also honored

the health aspect um. Sure, you might want to have some cookies and chips from time to time, but focusing on those, you know, nonprocessed foods that that also do taste good. That's sort of the route that they suggest you go right. So, so that's and that's intuitive eating. Although if you if you go back to number um uh three, technically number ten could be canceled out. Like if you're just like, no, I really hate asparagus, I hate vegetables, I love oreos. I'm just gonna eat oreos.

They're like, Okay, that's fine, as long as you're not feeling guilt about as long as you love your body, as long as you know you're listening to yourself and and the cues your body is telling you whatever, that's that's just part of it. It's it's go to town. Just love food and love yourself is kind of the message, which is a pretty pretty good message that I think a lot of people want to hear. You want to take a break and then talk about the idea that

this is rooted in science. Yeah, okay, we're gonna do that. Eventually everybody will be right back. Stuck stuck, Stuck. I don't know that you know it's stuck in this Stuck. It's a great name. That's the name of it. It's a great name. Alright, stuck snet with with an X. Alright, so intuitive eating this has been you know, sort of a new way of thinking. Um, that's come about over the last like probably ten or fifteen years, maybe a little bit more, but it seems like it's really gainsteam

in the last ten or fifteen. And the idea is that they're all these budd buzzwords that we are sort of ingrained in its dieting, losing weight, getting healthy. They've changed that to or changing from diet to things like getting healthy or or it's a lifestyle change. Uh, and

they're trying to avoid some of those earlier buzzwords. But if you're an anti diet proponent, you're saying, know what, this is all the same stuff, just because you call it a lifestyle now and you're talking about getting healthy rather than losing weight or going on a diet. It's the same size, it's just in different clothing. Yeah, it's it's here's the standard and everyone needs to reach it

no matter what. And that really flies in the face of this idea that that seems to be one of the tenets of intuitive eating and definitely of the anti diet movement, which is that every person has their own different basically genetic weight set point and that that is what your body is going to stay at uh no

matter what. UM. And if if you try to contravene that set point, you might be successful for a little bit, but probably the vast majority of people are going to suffer relapse, I guess, and they'll gain that weight back over time. Give them enough time, they'll gain that weight back, and then the problem is they might even gain even more.

And so there are some diets out there that have been demonstrably shown to work, like weight Watchers now called WW, like Jenny Craig now called Jenny Craig still, although I didn't know it's Australian, so I guess it should be Genie Craig. How was that that was great? I don't think it was great. I thought all of a sudden I was talking to Russell Crowe, right. So um, those have been shown to work. The problem is this that you are signing up for a lifetime of paying attention

to what you eat, like that's how it works. Like it'll work, but you have to keep it up for literally the rest of your life if you want to keep that weight off. So um, and then other diets just don't work at all, or they will work temporarily, but then you just go right back and then you

gain some weight. And they seem to have figured out, at least according to intuitive eating dietitians and anti dieting movement proponents, that there there seems to be some biological response by the body to diet and it's almost this comedy of errors that just makes everything even worse when you try to diet. Yeah, I mean the idea is, you know, if with any diet pretty much you're restricting food in some way, whether it's a kind of food or the amount of food, there is almost always going

to be some amount of hunger involved. Even though they all say, like, with this diet, you'll never be hungry again. They all say that, but that's sort of the idea with any diet is you're restricting yourself. And anti diet proponents say, you know what, when that happens, your body is wired to want to eat and survive and when you're consuming less food energy, Uh, that's going to create that energy deficit and that's when you're gonna be burning those fat stores and that is how you lose weight.

But your body is also going to trigger a biological starvation response. That is going to mean you're gonna fail eventually, because your body is saying, I got to eat. I think I'm I think I'm lost in the middle of the woods all of a sudden, and go eat. You're hungry.

You're hungry. Yeah, you're more hungry than you would have been. Right, So this can very, very easily lead to binge eating because you're not just hungry, you're you're angry at this point, and so when you finally do give in and start to eat, you're gonna eat more than you would have if you were just plain hungry. Right, that's a huge

problem with it. But it seems to be even more um more nuanced than that, and that the body seems to to enter um basically a kind of starvation mode where once it does manage to get you out of that um or starvation response, where it does get you

out of that diet and back into eating. Um, what what you've just done is scare your brain, it seems like, so where your brain says, well, I didn't realize that food scarcity was going to be an issue in our lifetime, So now that I realize it is, I'm going to take that set point of adipocity, which is the amount

of fat you would generally store on yourself. I'm gonna inch it up a little higher so that that my person can store more fat, because we need to make sure that if this ever happens again, we have plenty of energy stores. So when you come out of dieting, you can actually gain more weight than you had that before because of that, because of that adipocity set point being increased, and then as a result, as a response,

you end up dieting again. Your braid says, that happened again, so your adipocity set point might be set even higher, and so you'll gain even more weight back. And it's a phenomenon that we're just starting to understand that I can't tell if it's just theoretical or an interpretation of evidence, but a term I've seen for it is called diet induced obesity. And it's just fascinating to think that dieting can actually make you heavier then you would have been

if you hadn't diet it at all. Yeah, I mean, here's a thing I don't think we mentioned yet. When your body goes into that iological response that says, oh boy, you gotta eat now. It's also saying you gotta eat something that's really high in calories. It's like, don't reach for the triscuit, friend, you need that pimento cheese on white bread, which yeah, yeah, palmetto cheese. You ever had that stuff? I've got some of my fridge right now. Buddy, man,

that's the best. It's hard to go back to anything else, to be honest, I didn't even know there was anything else anymore, although there was. There's a listener who makes some Queen Charlotte pimento cheese out of Charlotte, North Carolina. It's Queen Charlotte. Um, it's extremely good. Yes, it's like high end pimento cheese, but it's it's not like snooty pimento cheese is like really really good pimento cheese. Do you do you get the palmetto? Do you get the

palepeno or bacon or just the plane just the halap Okay? Yeah, no, I've not had the bacon. I'm trying not to eat pig, not for any any health reasons, but just because they're supposed to be really smart. Yeah, I mean I don't get the bacon because Emily doesn't eat it, and I don't. I just get the plane. I don't get the helpine either, because I don't look super hot things although and it's not that hot. It's um, it's becoming really apparent that Emily and I are basically one and the same person.

I have drawn up divorce papers for that reason. That's it from her me. We can't get divorced. Okay, all right, kay? So um we what were we talking about? Oh? Yeah, yeah, So your body wants, even like high high calorie foods to pack that weight back on, and it's going to pack on more than last time because you've scared it into thinking that it's going to possibly run into food scarcity again. So that's what you're doing, is you're basically forcing your body into a starvation mode to lose weight.

But your body responds by saying, like, I'm two steps ahead of you. You're not going to win this game. And then you're eventually going to keep gaining more and more weight back and dieting more and more. And and here's the other big part of it, too, Chuck, is that you're going to end up on this disappointing treadmill where you've wasted all this time and energy and emotion

into something that's just going to frustrate you. In the anti dieting people just say stop well, which could trigger what leads you to eat to begin with, which is stress and anxiety about your weight. Uh. And then there are people like Christie Harrison author. She's a podcaster of Food Pyke and author of anti diet colon Reclaim Your Time, Money, well Being and Happiness through Intuitive Eating. She's also a

registered dietitian, so she knows what she's talking about too. Yeah, so she says, you know what this um, your nutrition, your physical activity, smoking, alcohol, uh, any kind of behavioral health determine it is just about thirty of your overall health anyway. And you know people hang everything on this like that, like an ideal wheat and ideal weight means I'm healthy. Uh. And and of course we think people should quit smoking. I'm not saying go out and smoke anyway.

But there are people that say, all of this stuff combined is only about of your health. And I'm sure your genetics have a lot to do with it. Um, somebody may uh, somebody's anxiety and stress level maybe so high that they have, you know, a steel cable running through their body at all times. And they may be thin, but they may drop dead from that heart attack in their forties because they're not addressing other factors in their

life other than food. Right. Um, And that's it's kind of rich too for the diet culture to be like, well, what about health? What about health? Because diet there's some pretty unhealthy diets out there. Um. I ran across a few that have come and gone over the years, and then sometimes I revived. Have you heard of the sleeping beauty diet? What's that? You take a nap every time you're hungry, You take sleeping pills at night so you

sleep longer so you're not awake to eat. Don't forget dealer meal, which wasn't necessarily bad, but it was definitely calorie rest Richard Simmons very colorful, cute little cards or something. Yeah, the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet, which severely and the cabbage soup. I didn't realize this dates back to the fifties and it works. The thing is it's calorie restrictive, so you're entering that that's that's that starvation response, and it'll work if at first, Um, it's just you you

eat more when you finally get to eat again. Um. And then there's this one is I just can't believe this. This is a real thing, chuck, the feeding tube diet. I didn't even want to look that up. I did, and it's exactly what you think a doctor, a doctor UM, like I guess, a doctor nick type um fits you with the naso gastric tube that delivers about eight hundred

calories of nutrients directly to your stomach and um. Under the severe calorie restriction, you will shed the weight, but again you're going to gain it all back and then some probably when you start eating again, so that that's still going on. Yes, So the idea that you that that not dieting is unhealthy is awfully rich coming from people who undertake some of these extraordinarily dangerous diets, like you can get a kidney infection from that feeding tube diet.

Like a lot of stuff can go wrong, But there are some things that that do exist in the world that you have to kind of consider, and one of them is the obesity epidemic, which is tough to get around, but astoundingly the anti diet movement has been like we got this. Yeah, I mean the anti diet diet movement says there is no public health crisis going on. Uh, unless you're talking about the diet culture burn. Uh. They're like,

there is no obesity epidemic. If you look at the average weight of Americans compared to the generation before, it's about six to eleven pounds more. And maybe what this has done if you look at the b m I scale, which basically says there are three types of people I guess four underweight, normal, overweight, and obese. Uh, that might that six to eleven pounds, which amounts to ten extra calories a day um over time, that might nudge you into a different category, um, from overweight to obese or

from normal to overweight. But b m I and mortality are just uh. And this is this is what they're saying, is that that's causation. Like we've we think we have evidence that shows that being obese and having a higher b m I doesn't mean you're gonna die sooner, which is that's astounding lee contrary to the common since it seems like or at least the common perception of the

link between being overweight and being dead. Basically and apparently the the the um the holy text of anti diet ing UH, seems to revolve around this two thousand and six study by the law professor named campos So I don't know what campus is first name, but campos um did a survey of the medical literature and tried to find the the correlations between b m I and mortality and and seemed to find that there actually is a correlation,

but it's not where you think that. People who are in the overweight range or the low range of obesity apparently don't seem to have much more of a risk factor than anybody who's in the normal weight range. As far as mortality goes, you have to get into the UM, the the the far side of obesity and then the far side of underweight UM to get to where you're actually at risk of dying. So that's super contrary to

UM to what most people think. UH. And again like there's this is a two thousand and six study by law professor to survey of the new the literature on nutrition and weight and UM. So you can take that as you will, but at the same time, if it is correct, it's still to me, I don't think it discounts everything because if people have gained six to eleven pounds on average compared to just a generation before that,

that's not terribly much. I mean, it seems like a lot depending on how I guess inculcated into the diet culture you are. But it it seems like that's taking a snapshot of something that we're still in the process of, um, and then just saying don't worry about it because it's just this much, not how much more is it going to be? And is there danger or if we reach that point, if everybody ends up like the humans in

that in Wally, you know, um. And it's kind of akin to saying like, well, the it's just the living room that's on fire right now, there's the whole rest of the house is not on fire. Stop your moral panic about house fires. It's very similar to that. So I'm not saying that it's wrong, and I'm not saying that, uh, it doesn't help the anti diet movements, um ideas. But I think that just to say like bam, case closed is is a little glib. You're being glib, Matt. What's

that we say that in our house a lot? That was when Tom Cruise and Matt Lower interviewed Tom Cruise that scientology. You're being glib Matt. That is about is Tom Cruise? The thing to say is anyone's ever since? And look what happened to Matt Lower. Yeah, he got cruised. Do you want to take a break. Oh my gosh, have we not taken a second break yet? No, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about The big elephant is in the room right after this

stuck stuck, stuck. I don't know that you know it stuck and this stuck. It's a great name. That's the name of it. It's a great name. Alright, stucks net within with an X. So the elephant in the room is nutrition. I think this is the glaring thing that if you've been listening so far and and disagreed with a lot of the anti diet movement, you're probably saying, you can't eat just oreos just because it makes you feel good. You gotta have nutrition. The body needs nutrition.

And here's the thing, the body does need nutrition. But the anti diet movement says, just unwire your brain on um this moral judgment on food, and if you get too intuitive eating you're what we're saying is listen to your body. And if you eat these just oreos for lunch, you're gonna feel like garbage later on. And if you're listening to your body, your body is gonna tell you that it wants nutrition, and it wants good vegetables and

it wants whole foods. And if you're really in tune and you're really listening and you're not just uh saying, oh, well, I'm just gonna give myself permission because I'm an anti dieter to do whatever I want. And I may be doubled over in pain every afternoon for eating garbage food. Uh, that means you're not doing it right. That means you're not listening to your body because your body will crave nutritional health. Right, you're just being a smart alec at

that point. That's right. So UM. There there's that's kind of like the big the big thing among registered UM dietitians and nutritionists that basically says like, you know, yeah, we're in favor of anti diet ng and we're definitely in favor of people being body positive. Um. There's some thing called UM Healthy at Every Size UM that was founded by h Dr Bacon of all people any size any size, Yes, size, health at every size, Linda Bacon

back in two thousand ten um. And so most most dieticians and nutritions are like, of course, we're all very much in favor of that, but like, nutrition is important, and I'm sure there's some people out there like, yeah, you would say that you're a nutritionist, but it is. There's just I just think that there's no getting around

the idea that you need healthy, whole foods. I think the problem is the anti diet movement says that sounds awfully close to there's such things as good foods and there's such things as bad foods, and we reject that out right, And the nutritionists are saying, no, there really is such things as foods that are better for you and your body and are going to make you feel better when you eat them then other foods. So technically sure there is such thing as good and bad foods

of that sense, but not shame. It's just this is going to provide more benefits for you than this. Yeah, and you know there is a real danger too. Uh. And the people that are I guess you would say against the anti diet movement say like, listen, we can't

let this thing. We're all for body positivity, but we can't let it go so far in the other direction that your diet shaming and you're saying, you know, you shouldn't eat like you were saying you shouldn't seek out nutritional foods, like, don't let the pendulum swing so far in the other direction that your brainwashing people into thinking that they can just eat garbage all the time and be healthy. I don't get the impression that that is

super prevalent among anti diet movement. I don't think it is. I think it's more that seems to be targeting any kind of weight loss, and that seems to be a division in the anti diet movement itself to where um, if you if you want to lose weight, or even if you don't say you want to lose weight, but

it's evident that you did. There's a model named Ashley Graham who was UM a full figured UH Sports Illustrated cover model UM a couple of years back, and she like lost a few a few pounds but it's still definitely plus size and full figured and proud of it UM. But she she she faced a huge backlash as a result of that, where people were like, I'm not a fan of yours anymore because you lost you lost weight,

and you've betrayed us all. So there's there's this division between well, no, I feel better when I shed a couple of pounds and I have no problem with with wanting to shed a couple of pounds, and the other side is like, you can't even think that way. That's diet culture brainwashing you. We reject that, and we reject

you basically too. And so there's it's just the Internet has been injected into it, which is the problem is what it seems like, right, because people should be able to make their own decisions on their own bodies and how they feel the best suits them without being piled on on the internet and on either side and I and I get to also that people are like, well no, that like when you talk about that stuff, it makes me feel shame. It triggers my shame. But the problem

is is like you, you can't control other people. You can only control yourself and your response to other people and forcing other people to behave in a way that makes life easier for you. It's not how things work, Like you have to just focus on yourself and your own response and your own positivity so that it is strong enough and robust enough that it can withstand hearing other people talk about how they wish they could lose some weight and being like, huh, you know what, I

don't anymore. I'm truly body positive. I truly love my body. Um. That would be the true body positivity that that people are trying to achieve there, and it would solve the problem of fighting in eating among people who agree on almost everything else. You know, yeah, and it's you know, it's a it's so hard wired, it's really hard to undo.

It takes a lot of work. There was a study in two thousand seventeen of intuitive eating among retired female athletes, and they said they felt very liberated and when they you know, made that shift to food freedom for lack of a better term, but they said it quote necessitated an effortful process of recalibration, during which athletes had to

relearn and reinterpret their bodies physiological signals of hunger and satiety. So, like I was saying earlier, how that you know, you you lose these signals from when you were a baby that you A lot of work has to go into relearning those signals, um, and these are from these female athletes of uh. And this isn't necessarily the same thing, but there's a big movement now among former NFL players

to get their health back into shape. And there's a long list of these men who have come out saying the NFL like kills you, uh, the weight that you have to keep on, the amount of food that you have to eat to be you know, an offense or defensive lineman. And the before and after pictures of some of these guys there are like six four three twenty on the offensive line that are now like six four to five is unbelievable, and they're just like, I've never

felt better in my life. And I can walk around now and I don't feel like I'm you know, carrying a sled behind me, uh, Because the NFL is just like, no, man, you gotta you gotta way three pounds if you want to be on the line. Yeah. And then I think also the opposite way is for people who are in sports and have to be severely calorie restricted, you're basically taught to have an eating disorder that you have to unlearned when you stop playing sports too. So it kind

of goes both ways. I think the key here is for everybody, for athletes, for everyday people, for people who are overweight underweight, the the cross that all of us are bearing, if you'll allow me to get a little religious in my metaphors here, um, is that we all have to stop being so obsessed with food and how we we look in our weight. And it's just we're all almost all of us are on the same road together, and it's good to remember that we're on it together,

traveling together. Let's stop squabbling with one another. I definitely honor my hunger. You got anything else, I got nothing else? Okay, Um, thank you for listening everybody. We hope this helped. We hope it didn't set anybody off. If it did, email us let us know. We apologize in advance. That was definitely not our intent. Um. And since we said that, it's time for listener. Now, I'm gonna call this ex murder and Family or X murdered family. Hey, you guys

are the best. I stumbled upon your macha that ain't just tea podcast a few weeks ago, and I've been down to stuff should know rabbit hole ever since. Well, welcome to the show. Of Jenny. Yeah, welcome. Love hearing about new listeners right. Most recently, I've been really into your shows about axe murderers. They're fascinating. And get this, I've discovered that members of my own family were killed by an axe murderer or two in the eighteen hundreds.

There's a whole book about it titled to Murder along the Muskanic Cong Murder along the Muskanic Cong. I thought it was more. They're called the infamous Change Water Massacres of eight forty three. Uh. The casting Her family, which is my family line, was sleeping one night when two men who were attempting to rob them came in and murdered the mother, uncle, and two year old sister with axes. They had lured the father outside, killed him and threw

him in a ditch right before that. What's amazing is that there were two survivors, little JP and his older brother Victor, who were asleep on a cot behind the doorway. The murderers had no clue the boys were there, and they were left unharmed and slept through the whole thing at six and ten years old. What's interesting is that I'm not sure if the two men convicted were killers? Were the Killers? More than two other men were originally arrested,

so it's kind of sketchy. You guys should check it out. Thanks for all you do. You're a comfort, especially during the strange season. That is from Jenny Farnand thanks Jenny. That's awesome. We're probably just farning. I get I like Fard the Destroyer, the Macha Drinker. Um, thanks Jenny. We appreciate you listening. Can you imagine those two boys six and ten being like, hey, who's up for pan kit? When they wake up? Is it too soon? It's an eight murder Chuck and the other one says, no, I'd

rather have waffle oh a little bit. Yeah, we might cut this, but if we don't, you guys can let us know how much we suck. Um. We're right to us via email at stuff podcast Us at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or where ever you listen to your favorite shows. H