Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome listeners, to the freedom and flourish podcast where we're breaking free from diet culture. It's the podcast for women who have struggled with the ups and downs of dieting, negative body image, emotional eating and disordered eating habits. Join me as we talk with fitness professionals, dietitians, mental health professionals, and real women just like you and me who are sharing with us their experience and secrets to nourishing and loving the body God gave them while supporting our mental and emotional well being to develop and support a strong, healthy body well. Feel confident in get ready for some laughs, cries and aha moments as we talk about weight stigma, disordered eating, body image, nutrition education, intuitive eating and more. But before we dive in, I want to remind you that this is not a substitute for professional or medical advice. This podcast is designed to provide general knowledge and support. Your health and well being is your responsibility, and we recommend you seek the advice from a qualified healthcare professional with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition, concern or treatment.
[00:01:06] Welcome. I'm so glad you found your way here. I don't believe in accidents or coincidence. I believe you found your way here for a reason. And I believe God's hand is guiding and working for our good all the time. I know you may be struggling with unhealthy eating patterns, yo yo dieting, binge eating, emotional eating, overeating food obsession, negative body image, body image, dysmorphia, orthorexia, and the list goes on and on. Your commitment and determination to not give up on yourself and your goals is really worth celebrating. This podcast is designed to empower and support you on your healing journey, healing your relationship with food and exercise and your body. Together, we are ditching the dieting mindset, saying goodbye to all those exhausting, expensive and time consuming diet programs that don't work in the long run, diets that were stealing our peace, our joy, and our mental well being. I want you to know I personally understand these struggles because I lived them. The days can feel like never ending cycles, promising to do better tomorrow, chasing after quick fixes, and hopping from one diet to another. Maybe youve gotten to the point where youre constantly thinking about what to eat and how much. Maybe youre obsessing over what you did wrong or what you did right. This cycle leads to second guessing our own intuition and can lead to feelings of low self esteem, lack of confidence, confusion, food obsession, or food addiction. See, when we quote unquote mess up, we tend to want to restrict or punish ourselves. Even the idea that we messed up creates this mindset that we can't have something, and when we can't have something, we naturally crave that thing. The other problem is that restriction leads to increased cravings, and once you give in to those cravings, you end up overindulging.
[00:03:04] I'm sure you've known that person in your life who can have just one, or they can turn down desserts, sweets and junk food don't seem to have that same hold on them as they do you. This is because they know they can have that food, but they don't want it. On the other hand, when you can't have it, it becomes more tempting. When we give in to that temptation, we often end up overeating. You might tell yourself things like heck with it, I'm really going to indulge now since I can't have this again, or I might as well if I'm not going to have this again.
[00:03:42] Another problem with diets is they don't allow for fluctuations.
[00:03:47] When you're dieting, you are following a set of rules and you're either on a diet or not on a diet. Some would even say they're either doing good or bad based on their diet and food choices.
[00:04:01] But we are not robots and it's really not reasonable to live your life on a restrictive diet plan.
[00:04:08] We should be able to enjoy our food, especially with friends and family, without feeling bad, without the guilt, regret and punishment that often follows. Maintaining a healthy, balanced diet that allows you the freedom to enjoy foods while focusing on nutrition is both sustainable and practical.
[00:04:31] As I mentioned, with the feeling good or bad. We also label foods as good or bad, and we create this love hate relationship with food and even our body. This type of thinking creates a dysfunctional relationship with food, and it makes it difficult to tune into your own internal system. We want to be educated about how food affects us and make the best choices we can while tuning into our body's signaling system.
[00:04:59] This will be the secret to turning your I should eat healthy into a true desire to do so.
[00:05:06] The last issue with dieting that I want to mention is how it wreaks havoc on our metabolism.
[00:05:13] Your body is a beautifully designed system that is keeping you alive and well. When you go through periods of time where you're restricting your food intake, your body gets the message that it doesn't know when you're going to feed it again. So as a protective mechanism, your body's metabolism will slow down and you will start storing more of the calories you're eating as fat.
[00:05:38] Fat is a source of energy that the body can use. And by storing away these calories in your fat cells, your body is protecting you.
[00:05:47] It wants to make sure you have energy for these periods of time when you're not eating enough. Remember, when we are going on and off a diet, one of the things we tend to do is overeat or binge eat on those things we can't have. Well, all that excess calories goes directly to your fat cells to be stored and used later as energy.
[00:06:11] Over the years, as we continue doing this, it continues to slow down our metabolism, and you get to the point where you are no longer able to efficiently burn fat for energy.
[00:06:23] That is the reason why, as we get older, it gets harder and harder to lose the weight. Even though some of you may be hardly eating anything, the good news is, is that this is repairable. Remember, your body is a beautifully designed system. Once it gets that message that you're going to be consistently providing it with the nutrients that it needs, it will start to speed up your metabolism.
[00:06:48] So, how did we get here? Well, this has been years in the making. In fact, the dieting roller coaster often starts at an early age when we see those around us on a diet or people in the media portraying unrealistic, idealistic versions of what our bodies should look like. The truth is, we were all uniquely made. We are born with certain genetic markers that will determine our body type and size. Some people are born with bigger breasts, while some people are born with thicker thighs. Some people have a small frame, while others are in a larger frame. Neither of these things are bad. In fact, curves and fullness in women was, and quite honestly, is still a desirable trait in women. Even the greek term for fat is synonymous with prosperity and fertility. It wasn't until the mid 18 hundreds that being too curvy or heavy was demonized and seen as immoral. This belief in the ideal body and what our body should look like has been created and shaped by society. From the Gibson girl drawing in Life magazine in the 1890s that depicted this drawing of a young white woman with an impossibly narrow waist and thin hourglass shape. The media companies have been using images like these to create a need and desire to do and buy whatever it takes to get that look and status. We've been taught that a thin body was a sign of good health and a larger body was the cause of health issues.
[00:08:30] But fat phobia beliefs predate health arguments, and even up until the 19th century, doctors held that larger bodies were healthier. If you look deeper into this, it's difficult to find any major figure in the field of obesity research who does not have some type of financial tie to a pharmaceutical or weight loss company.
[00:08:55] In fact, in 1980 1998, millions of Americans became overweight and obese overnight due to the change in the bmi thresholds for the overweight and obese category.
[00:09:11] I recently remember going to the doctor and learning that I was on the verge of being obese, which thankfully, I had already done so much healing around my weight and body. But still, the news shook me for a bit. The fear mongering in the media that report on the obesity epidemic and the resulting negative health outcomes of being overweight actually causes health issues and fuels the desire to lose weight, even in someone with a normal bmi.
[00:09:41] There are conflicting studies on this, but there is a study from 2005 showing that being in the overweight category is associated with fewer deaths than being in a normal weight category.
[00:09:55] What we do know is that the weight stigma and this fundamental belief that something is wrong with us constantly criticizing, critiquing, and attempting to change our body, causes a chronic stress response in our body, which is actually more harmful to our health. Again, the stress of trying to shrink our bodies is actually creating more health issues, is more detrimental to our health than being overweight. It also makes it more difficult for you to lose weight, but we'll talk more about that later.
[00:10:33] So some of you are here because you're tired of dieting and years of failed dieting attempts. But some of you might be here because you are worn out by the fears of our culture's new obsession and concern with health and wellness.
[00:10:50] Orthorexia is the newer eating disorder popping up in our society.
[00:10:55] Orthorexia is defined as having an unhealthy obsession with eating foods that one considers healthy or clean.
[00:11:05] These fears of food, and the fears of what certain foods are doing to our body is causing us more harm on so many levels. In recent years, dieting has been replaced with healthy eating. Detoxes, clean eating, healthy protocols and resets are all just another form of dieting.
[00:11:28] This new fear of food and the negative effects it has on our health, combined with a financial and time consuming burden it places on us, is yet another form of stress that causes more health conditions than the food you're eating. But we live in diet culture, and we've been conditioned to want rules around food. And that is exactly what keeps us stuck feeling like we're not enough, like we're missing something, like we're failing. It's overwhelming and it's unsustainable way of obtaining a strong, healthy body you want for years, we've been led to believe that our bodies needed to be changed, and we've been chasing an elusive ideal shape and size. This chase and focus has distracted so many women for years.
[00:12:20] If we're busy trying to shrink and change ourselves, we don't have the energy and mental capacity to fully live to our full potential.
[00:12:31] Diet, culture and other social norms have kept women feeling stuck and not enough, and God created us for so much more.
[00:12:40] Join me as I talk to experts in the field of nutrition, fitness, women's health, mental health, and real women who want to share their experiences and knowledge with you.
[00:12:53] There's also a private Facebook group, the Freedom and Flourish group, where we continue these podcast discussions. If you're able to go over there and ask questions and connect with other like minded women who want to support and encourage you on your journey. So make sure to join that group and subscribe to this podcast so you get notified of newly released episodes. Before you go, I'd like to pray a blessing over you today that you know and feel God's love for you. You are beautifully and wonderfully made in his image. You are enough. You are not broken and nothing is wrong with you. You've just been misled. I pray you find the peace, freedom and joy around food and that you fall in love with who you are while you're on this journey to becoming a stronger, healthier version of yourself that you radiate with confidence and no longer are held captive by those negative beliefs. I pray for your health, happiness and well being. Much love to.
