Katy here, and welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body. Before we get started, I have something EPIC that I need to tell you about. I have been working ferociously behind-the-scenes for these past several weeks on a brand new body image masterclass. And guess what? It’s totally free. It’s called Navigating the Balancing Act, and in it we’re going to talk about how to work through the “messy middle” where you recognize that dieting doesn’t work as a lasting solution, but if you’re being honest, you still want to lose weight. We’re going to dig into how you can balance that desire for weight loss alongside the reality that dieting isn’t going to do that for you. I’m going to give you some tools and strategies for what to do when you’re in that place, and how to continue healing your relationship with food without losing your balance and falling back into dieting, and without falling into the pit of giving up and letting yourself go.

This masterclass is happening next week, the week of September 10th, and I’m offering it LIVE at 3 separate times, so you can choose what works best for your schedule. If none of the times work for you, that’s ok – I’ll send out the replay to everyone registered. You can reserve your seat FOR FREE at nondietacademy.com/masterclass.

As a bonus for everyone who attends the masterclass (live or on replay) you’re going to get a copy my Snack Hack Guide to Intuitive Snacking – where you’ll learn my signature strategy for putting together snacks that honor your cravings AND your health, along with tons of snack ideas for you to play around with.

All you have to do is sign up at nondietacademy.com/masterclass – again, it’s totally free and I cannot wait to dig in and help you navigate the tricky balancing act of body image and intuitive eating.

Ok, onto today’s episode of the podcast…

This episode is about confidence. Specifically, it’s about confidence as it relates to your body. There was a study that showed that 79% of Americans don’t like their bodies, and 91% of women (so almost all women) have dieted at some point in their life to try and change their size. 

And we do this usually for 1 of 2 reasons (often both):

1. To get healthier – because we’ve been told over and over again that dieting and losing weight will make us healthier (despite the data that shows that this clearly doesn’t work, and in fact it harms your health, especially when you do it over and over again)
2. To feel more comfortable and confident in our bodies. Our society tells us that if we lose weight we have achieved something, we’ve accomplished something admirable, and we now “look better,” which leads to more confidence. 

What’s so tricky and deceiving is that when you’ve dieted, and when you’ve lost weight, your health markers might have looked better (i.e. your BP might have been lower, and your A1c might have gone down), and you might have felt physically more comfortable in your body, and your confidence might have gone up because you felt proud of yourself, and you were getting praise and accolades from people around you. 

Therefore, on the surface, it looks like it’s “working” when we lose weight. 

The problem is, it’s a house of cards that will crumble so fast and so hard, it will make your head spin. And then you’re back at square one, feeling like crap about yourself, feeling like a failure, and operating under the assumption that weight loss is the only thing that will make you healthier, happier, more comfortable in your body and more confident. 

The question I want to pose to you today is: What if we challenge some of the underlying assumptions that you’re making? What if we change the way you’re looking at weight, your health and your body, so that you CAN feel more confident – in a way that is long-lasting and sustainable? Are you open to that? Prepare your heart because that’s what we’re going to dig into, and don’t say this lightly: 

This shift that we’re about to make has the potential to change your life. To change the way you see yourself, the way you carry yourself, the way you eat on a daily basis, the way you dress your body, the way you feel when you’re around other people, the way you show up at your doctor’s office, and the way you feel about yourself as a human being. I’m not joking, and I know this sounds a little outlandish and grandiose, but I know it to be true because I see it happening each and every day among my clients and the people who have made this shift in the way they approach their weight and body image. 

Before we dive into our main topic for today, you know what time it is…We’ve got some Wellness Woo to talk about. 

Wellness Woo is the stuff that diet and wellness culture tells us we should do in the name of health, but it’s really based on pseudoscience, exaggerated claims, or just nonsense. 

Today’s Wellness Woo is: Lectins and oxalates – s/o to Laura who suggested this topic

A lot of my information today came from an article published in the journal Nutrients in 2020 called “Is there Such a thing as Anti-Nutrients?” I’ve linked it in the show notes.

There’s a popular wellness guru named Dr. Gundry who makes all these wild claims about how lectins and oxalates, which are considered phytonutrients (which just means nutrients from plants)…He claims these are “anti-nutrients” that are harming us and therefore we should avoid them. 

What’s particularly troubling about this is that Dr. Gundry is an actual medical doctor and cardiothoracic surgeon (he’s not a naturopath or chiropractor who are often the ones touting pseudoscientific crap like this). In fact, he did his undergrad education at Yale, and quite frankly should know better than this. He’s somebody that most people in the general public would look at his credentials and infer that he’s a credible source of health information. 

Yet the scientific community of fellow physicians, surgeons and dietitians have expressed ongoing concerns about the claims he’s making and the things he’s telling people to do with food. He wrote a book called The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in “Healthy” Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain.

Which is where all of this anti-lectin and oxalate nonsense comes from. 

His schtick is that the lectins and oxalates in plants are damaging our health, and that we should all be eating a lectin-free diet. He also sells supplements that he claims protect against or reverse the effects of lectins. 

You’ll notice a theme among these doctors who promote quackery. 

• They leverage their credential to build authority and lead people to believe that what they are saying is true.
• They write books about diet and health and make up their own diets, claiming that they have some secret you’ve never heard and if you just follow their diet you’ll be healthy
• They sell supplements that are unproven, unregulated and usually expensive. 
• Thay make a massive profit off this. 

I’ll take a moment here to remind you that doctors receive very little education on nutrition in their training. They might have a class or a few lectures on it. I saw a thing from a professor at Stanford who teaches nutrition in their medical school, and their med students get 4 lectures on nutrition, that are 20 minutes each. So 80 minutes total in med school on nutrition.  (And in contrast, dietitians spend about 5-6 YEARS studying nutrition.) When you’re following the nutrition advice of a doctor, you’ve got to be careful. It’s kind of like if I started performing surgeries on people. I have some education in human anatomy and physiology, and some training in healthcare – but that doesn’t make me qualified to do SURGERY. (I digress…)

So what’s the scoop with lectins and oxalates? These are a protein compound in plant foods that can bind to carbohydrates. They’re found in nuts, seeds, fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes. They’re most prevalent in whole grains and legumes. Cooking generally destroys the lectins. And the amounts we get from uncooked fruits, veggies, nuts and seeds is really insignificant. 

If someone eats large amounts of lectin-rich foods that aren’t cooked, they can get food poisoning. This is really rare though, because you’re probably not going to sit around eating uncooked beans. 

The human studies on lectins are limited, and the evidence we do have suggests 1) benefits of eating lectin-rich foods, and 2) the way we consume these foods isn’t causing us harm. 

Overall the tried-and-true advice to eat a diet that contains a variety of fruits, veggies, legumes, nuts, seeds and whole grains is still good solid advice. 

Really quick on oxalates and we’ll move on. Oxalates are another compound that get lumped into this discussion and labeled as “anti-nutrients” (which is the most absurd and nonsensical term I’ve heard in a long time. It reminds me of when diet culture used to tell us to eat celery because it’s ‘negative calories.” Good grief.)

Oxalates (aka oxalic acid) is a substance in plants and in mammals that can form insoluble salts with minerals (which would include sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium and iron). In mammals (humans are mammals), our bodies make some oxalates as a byproduct of metabolism, and we ingest oxalates from our food. Most of the oxalate gets excreted in your pee.

That’s why there is one legitimate concern about oxalates if you’re prone to kidney stones. Some people who get kidney stones, when we test their stones, they are high in calcium oxalate. So if that’s happening to you, then yes we would advise you to limit and avoid oxalates as much as possible, but also know that your body makes oxalates so you might still have problems with kidney stones. For the general public this isn’t a concern, and if you’ve never had a kidney stone you don’t’ need to worry about this.

Ok enough about lectins and oxalates and alleged “anti-nutrients.” It’s all wellness woo.

If you have an example of Wellness Woo that you want to share, send it to me at rebuildingtrustwithyourbody@gmail.com. 

Ok, that’s enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic…You don’t need weight loss to feel more confident…This is what you need instead.

I want to preface this discussion by calling out the elephant in the room – I have a ton of thin privilege. It probably seems easy for me to talk about not focusing on weight loss, accepting your body, and stuff like that because I’m in a straight sized body. And 100% that’s true. I don’t have the same lived experience of someone in a larger body. 

Which is why I have invested significant time, money and training into learning from both people who are in larger bodies, who are experts in this area of body image, health, our relationship with food – AND I’ve worked with hundreds of clients over the past 15 years as a dietitian who are in larger bodies and lave learned immensely from their experiences too. 

So even though I don’t exist in a larger body, the things I’m going to teach you today are applicable regardless of your body size. And we’re absolutely going to talk about where society’s fat phobia, weight stigma and anti-fat bias fit into this equation, because it’s essentially why we are even needing to have this discussion. 

The strategies, methodologies, and frameworks that I teach are based on the training and learning that I have received from people with lived experiences in all body sizes, in particular from people in larger and fat bodies. So just because this information is coming from me as a straight-sized individual, I don’t want you to discount the message just because of the vessel that it is coming from. (And if this is messaging that you just can’t hear from me because of my body size, that’s ok. I get it, and I want you to go learn from people who you ARE able to hear and learn from, because you deserve healing and inner peace. If this episode isn’t for you, skip it. I’m not mad at you, we can still be friends.)

If you’re going to stick around, I want you to know that this episode is for you whether you are someone who is in a larger body, or if you are in a straight sized body. This is for you even if you have mobility issues related to your size, and if you have health issues where your doctor is constantly telling you that weight loss is the solution. This episode is for you if you recognize that your body is pretty average, that you’re not objectively fat, but deep inside you still want to be thinner. Because this episode isn’t about your actual weight. It’s about the way you feel about your weight – and about yourself as a human being.

If you’ve made it this far in the episode, I’m guessing you probably on some level feel like you would feel better about yourself if your weight were lower, your clothing size were smaller, you had less flab, fewer rolls and less cellulite. If you could (poof!) make those things go away, you’d feel more confident. I think most of us would. There’s some truth to this.

Here is the first key takeaway that I want you to have from this episode…

The reason most of us would feel better about ourselves if we were smaller, skinnier or more toned is because we have been taught that this is what “looks good.” We are taught this in so many ways, over and over again, to the point that we don’t even question it. We just accept it as Truth (with a capital T). 

Here are a few examples of the way we are taught to feel this way:

• Clothing stores catering to smaller sizes. I remember as a teenager, I couldn’t shop at stores like Hollister where the cool kids (and wealthy people) were shopping because they didn’t carry my size, and the message I internalized from that is my body is bad, my body is wrong, my body isn’t what’s acceptable and desirable. You’d better believe they had plenty of jeans in size 00 though, even though very few girls wear that size. The message is that this is what you should aspire to.
  
  It’s the same thing in adult clothing. If you walk into a store and they don’t carry your size, or if your size is relegated to some back corner of the store for “plus size” women, it sends the message that you’re not good enough. OF COURSE your life would be easier if you could shop in any store without worrying whether or not they’ll carry your size. This is true…and it further compounds our core belief that we are only allowed to feel more confident when we are smaller
  
• Before and after pictures. How many of those before and after pictures have you seen in your lifetime? More than you can count, I’m sure. The person in the before picture is usually heavier, and looks really sad. Then in the after picture they’re smiling and looking more confident. (There’s also a lot of flexing and posing that people do in these pictures to accentuate certain parts of their body and to make themselves look even thinner and more toned.) All of this is further fueling the narrative that weight loss makes you happier and more confident.
  
• Weight loss compliments. It has become a way of saying, “Hello,” in our culture to say, “Oh my gosh, you look so good, have you lost weight?!” We’ll even say it to someone if we don’t think they’ve lost weight, because this comment is meant to be a compliment and a way to greet each other. It’s so messed up.
  
  What message does this send? That you look better at a lower weight. If you are losing weight you’re succeeding, and if you’re gaining weight you’re failing.
  
  It also clues us in that people are noticing what’s happening with our weight, and they’re making judgments about us based on it.
  
  A while back one of my old high school friends posted a before and after picture on FB, and I was floored by the number of comments she got giving her praise, telling her how great she looked, cheering her on, and asking her how she did it. Do you think she would have gotten compliments if she had gained weight? Would people have told her how wonderful she looks then? Probably not. So we get this social reinforcement of our weight loss, and the messaging that we are more worthy of belonging and admiration when we lose weight. 

OF COURSE YOU FEEL LIKE WEIGHT LOSS WOULD MAKE YOU FEEL MORE CONFIDENT.

The Problem(s) With Attaching Your Confidence to Weight Loss

There are 2 problems with this way of thinking:

1. Your confidence becomes very shaky and unstable. It’s contingent upon your weight, something that you don’t actually have very much control over.
   
2. Your confidence hinges upon you doing something nearly impossible – dieting to lose weight, and keeping it off. The research shows that dieting will look like it’s working at first (you’ll probably lose some weight in the beginning), but there’s statistically about a 95% chance that you’re going to regain it, and for ⅔ of people who experience this they’ll regain more weight than they lost in the first place.
   
   In the beginning you’ll feel like you’re succeeding, and you’ll feel that high of losing weight, getting compliments, feeling better in your body, and feeling more confident. You’ll have that excitement about how it’s “working.”
   
   But what happens when the diet stops working? (Which it is almost guaranteed to, and that’s based on tons of research – keep in mind that if we had a diet that worked long-term, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.) You start regaining the weight, you feel like you’re failing, you’re ashamed of people seeing how you “let yourself go,” and your confidence is in the toilet.
   
   This reinforces the notion that weight loss is the only way to improve your confidence.
   

Zooming Out

This is where we need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. The reason that we feel more confident when we lose weight is because we’ve been taught to value this, and thinness has been put on a pedestal.

If we step back and ask ourselves if someone is actually a more worthy person when their body size is smaller, what would your response be? Absolutely not, of course not. That would be a pretty messed up way of thinking.

However, deep down that’s how we often feel about ourselves. We have so much shame about our bodies that we literally feel more worthy of love, belonging and respect at a lower weight.

I want you to hear me loudly and clearly when I say this: YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE AND BELONGING, NO MATTER YOUR WEIGHT, SHAPE OR SIZE. 

I’m going to say that again: YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE AND BELONGING, NO MATTER YOUR WEIGHT, SHAPE OR SIZE. 

Let’s Get Ready to Rumble

Now, normally I am all about compassion, and kindness, and curiosity (and we’ll get there in a few minutes). But first, we need to get angry. 

We need to get angry at the lies we’ve been told. 

We need to get angry at the diet industry that continues to profit almost $100 billion per year off our insecurities, that sells us crap we don’t need, and diet programs that don’t actually work.

We need to get angry at the ways in which fat people are discriminated against. Fat people on social media routinely receive hateful messages and even death threats, just for existing in their bodies. This is not ok.

We need to get angry at the way our doctors are trained to prescribe weight loss as the solution to every ailment under the sun. And the way that insurance companies use the BMI to determine what healthcare procedures they’ll pay for. 

We need to get angry at the fact that kids as young as preschool are already afraid of becoming fat, and that this sets them up for a lifetime of dieting and body shame.

None of this is ok, and it should make us angry. 

When you get angry, it helps you to feel that dissonance when you are aligning with the messages society is giving us about bodies and weight. It helps you make that shift to reject this belief system that alleges that thin people are somehow superior to fat people, and that you are somehow a better person when your weight is lower. 

We don’t have to subscribe to that way of thinking anymore. We get to choose to think differently. 

That’s essentially what this episode boils down to.

Choosing to Think Differently

Now that I’ve got you riled up, and on board with why we aren’t going to buy into that narrative that you’re better when you’re thinner, I’m going to teach you how to approach this instead. How to think differently about your body, about your weight, about your health and about your confidence.

There are 2 key pieces to this, and this is what I teach my clients. We go especially deep on this inside of Non-Diet Academy where we have an entire module devoted to body image healing. 

A lot of people think that the alternative to chasing weight loss is to flip over to body positivity. And a lot of you have told me that this just doesn’t work for you. There’s no way you’re going to feel positive about the body you have. I get it. And honestly, I don’t think body positivity is a very helpful goal here. That’s NOT what I teach my clients.

Instead I teach something called “body neutrality.” 

With body positivity, it’s basically the other side of the coin of body hatred. We’re just flip flopping from one to the other, and the problem is, no matter which way you look at it, we’re still putting a lot of energy into how you feel about your body.

Instead, we want your subjective feelings about your body to have less of an impact on how you live your life and on your confidence in yourself. That’s where body neutrality comes in.

Body neutrality means that you have radical acceptance towards your body. It is what it is. This is the body you have been given, and it’s the only body you’ll ever have for your time here on earth. It’s worth learning how to exist in harmony with your body. 

Your body isn’t your enemy. Your body is your friend. Your body has done everything it can to take care of you, even when you treat it like crap, and when you have deprived it, and when you’ve forced yourself to exercise, and when you’ve berated yourself in the mirror. Your body has always been on your side.

Body neutrality means that instead of chasing your tail trying to feel positive about your body, and trying to feel confident about your body’s size and appearance, you become neutral. You might notice judgmental thoughts, but you don’t attach to them or engage with them. They float by like a cloud in the sky. That’s a psychological technique from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy known as “thought defusion.”

Body neutrality means that you’re not going to let your feelings about your weight run your life. You don’t have to feel positive about your body. You don’t have to feel confident about your appearance. You can still know deep in your soul that you are a wonderful person, worthy of love, kindness, respect and belonging, completely independent of your body size. 

I know this is easier said than done. It’s like learning a foreign language. It doesn’t even make sense at first. 

I’m going to be teaching more on this inside the Navigating the Balancing Act masterclass next week, so if you’re listening to this the week it comes out, make sure you grab your spot for free at nondietacademy.com/masterclass.

The next piece in addition to body neutrality is a skill and a framework called “body acceptance.” 

A lot of people have a big emotional reaction when I introduce this concept. They will say, “Katy there ain’t no way I am EVER going to be able to accept my body this way!”

If you’re having a big reaction, or you’re noticing that resistance bubbling up, I want you to co-regulate with me here and let’s take a deep breath together. 

I want you to listen to this with an open mind, and as if it was a term you’ve never heard before. Pretend that you have no preconceived notions about what it means.

With body acceptance I’m not asking you to like or love your body. I’m not asking you to gaslight yourself or pretend that your life wouldn’t be easier in certain ways if your body was smaller. That very well might be true. 

It’s also true that you might not ever like or love your body’s appearance. That’s ok. You don’t have to.

Body acceptance means that you are choosing to treat your body with kindness and respect, regardless of how you feel about your body that day. It means choosing kindness and respect towards yourself especially on the days that you don’t like your body and you desperately wish it were different.

You will be shocked at how different you start to feel when you aim for body neutrality and body acceptance as your goals, instead of constantly chasing weight loss. 

This shift is an uncomfortable one to make. Because you’re basically having to opt out of everything diet culture has taught you to believe. 

You know what’s cool and life-changing though? Your life gets bigger and better when you’re not obsessed with making your body smaller.

THIS is where the confidence comes from.

Confidence comes from accepting your here-and-now body.

Confidence comes from knowing that your body will change as you go through life. That’s what bodies do.

Confidence comes from no longer being like a puppet on a string to diet culture’s demands.

Confidence comes from knowing deep in your soul that you are a good person, and that you are worthy no matter your size.

Confidence comes from recognizing that diet culture will continue to operate under the assumption that thinness is superior to fatness…and that you don’t have to participate in this belief system anymore.

Confidence comes from learning how to connect with, listen to and take care of YOU and YOUR body. That’s what we’re talking about here. 

If you want to learn how to cultivate this type of confidence that leads to better health, inner peace and breaks you free from being chained to the scale for the rest of your life, I want you to get inside the Navigating the Balancing Act masterclass. Again, it’s at nondietacademy.com/masterclass. 

If you’re listening to this in the future after the class has passed, feel free to reach out to me in the DMs or over email and we can chat about how you can work on this right now and current offers that I have where we dig deeper into body image healing alongside your relationship with food. 

That’s a wrap for now. In case nobody has told you today – you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.

Resources Mentioned:

Grab your spot for FREE in the Navigating the Balancing Act Masterclass

Sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7600777

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