Welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body, I’m Katy Harvey your host. Today’s episode is going to be something a little different than anything I’ve done before here on this podcast. It is going to be an exclusive breakdown of how one of my clients FINALLY found peace with her body after over a decade of dieting. I’m going to pull back the curtain on what exactly we worked on, how she implemented it, and the struggles she worked through along the way (because you and I both know that it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows – this work is HARD). So get ready to be a fly on the wall to get a sense for what that process looks like, so that you can apply some of the same strategies to your own journey. 

Really quick, before we do Wellness Woo, if you are listening to this around the time that this episode came out in September 2024, I can’t NOT tell you that my signature course and group coaching program, Non-Diet Academy, is open for enrollment. This is a very big deal, because I only open up enrollment twice per year, once in the spring and once in the fall, and therefore this is the last time this year that you’ll be able to get inside, and you do not want to miss this opportunity!

Non-Diet Academy is perfect for you if:

• You’re fed up with dieting. You’ve been there done that, and you have figured out that it doesn’t work for you as a lasting solution – and you’re ready to do something different.
  
• You want to be able to push your cart down the chips aisle at the grocery store, and grab the bag of spicy Doritos that you love, without worrying that you’re going to immediately inhale the whole bag as soon as you get home.
  
• Your closet is full of clothes in so many sizes you could open a thrift store, because your weight has fluctuated so much with various diets and healthy eating kicks that you’ve been on, and it’s painful to get dressed because you’re not sure what’s going to fit.
  
• Getting on the scale feels like you’re being graded on whether or not you’re winning in life. If the number is up you’re failing, and if it’s down you’re succeeding.
  
• You would love to be able to walk past the scale and let it collect dust, because it doesn’t hold that power over you anymore, and you’d love to be able to eat your grandma’s famous lasagna recipe without calculating how many minutes you have to walk on the treadmill to burn it off.
  
• You don’t just care about having freedom with food, but you also care about your health, and you want to make sure that intuitive eating isn’t damaging your health in some way. You want to feel confident telling your doctor what you’re doing, because you know it’s working for you, and that’s reflected in your energy, your balance with food, your relationship with exercise and your actual health. 

If ANY of what I just said speaks to you, then you’re the perfect candidate for Non-Diet Academy. (And if you’re sitting here wondering if you’re the right fit, you probably are.) We can totally have that conversation though if you want to touch base with me and chat without any pressure to join. And trust me, if it’s not right for you, I’m going to tell you that. I’m not interested in accepting money from people who aren’t right for this program. 

For all of the details about what exactly the program entails, and enrollment information, just head on over to nondietacademy.com/enroll to check it out, and DM or email me if you have questions or want to talk through it before making your decision. 

We begin on September 23. If you’re listening to this in the future and want to get your name on the list for the next round (or you want to see what programs I am currently offering), just reach out to me directly. 

Again it’s nondietacademy.com/enroll

If you are listening to this and you’re already signed up, I am sending you a virtual high-five and I cannot wait to dig in and get started with you! If you haven’t done so yet, make sure you check your email because I loaded all of your bonuses (including a couple surprise bonuses) inside your course portal that are available for you now while you’re waiting for NDA to begin. 

And if you’re listening and you’re thinking about joining, you can get your hands on the bonuses right away when you sign up. I love rolling out the red carpet for my NDA clients and spoiling you all with lots of goodies. 

Ok, moving on…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: V Shred – s/o katelyn

V-Shred is this company that runs a website for exercise and weight loss. On their about page they say that they started the company because of all the “misinformation” out there around weight loss…which is ironic given the level of misinformation they are spreading. 

The founder and CEO of this company is a guy named Vince Sant, who is a certified personal trainer and a fitness model. His bio says “Vince has to keep his body looking perfect 365 days a year” and it goes on to cite his % body fat…and of course the promise is that they’re going to help you do the same thing.

From what I could tell on their website they employ “highly trained certified coaches” to facilitate their programs. They don’t say what the certification is though, which is really sketch to me. 

The company promotes these workout programs you can do from home, which is great. I have no problem with that. But where it gets gross to me is the way the programs are promoted. Here are the names of some of them:

• Fat Loss Extreme
• Ripped in 90 Days – promoted to men
• Toned in 90 Days  – promoted to women

It’s clearly designed to be extreme. Which is code for 1) not sustainable, 2) possibly dangerous, 3) likely not very doable for most people.

Their website is full of before and after photos.

They are happy to also sell you meal plans that claim to tell you about “fat burning foods” to eat (which isn’t real – there is no food that burns fat). And of course they’ll sell you a crapload of supplements you don’t need. 

The whole thing is a good old fashioned fad diet and exercise plan, preying on people’s insecurities about their bodies and their desire to look like the pictures of the people on the website who are “shredded” and “toned.” 

There are plenty of ways to work out at home, and this is not the route I would recommend that you go. It’s packed full of Wellness Woo and is one of those diets that claims to not be a diet, but is totally a diet. Hard pass.

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…How my client finally found peace with her body after decades of dieting.

I first want to be clear that I do have permission to share this, and I’ve made sure not to include any details that would reveal personal information or jeopardize privacy. 

Let’s get into this client case study. I want you to hear her story, because there are going to be elements of it that ring true for you, or that apply to you, no matter who you are and where you’re at on your journey. 

I want you to listen and think about how the things that she did, the mindset shifts she made, and the strategies she implemented can apply to you. Having these real life behind-the-scenes examples can be so powerful, because it’s one thing to talk about strategies and concepts as a concept, but it’s a different ballgame to see what it looks like in action. I love hearing examples and case studies of things I’m learning about because it helps my brain to connect the dots – that’s when the lightbulbs go off for me. In fact, I just attended a virtual conference a couple weeks ago, and the case studies were hands down my favorite part.  

Ok, here we go…

Where We Started

Here’s where this client began. When she came to me she was struggling with:

• A long history of not liking her body ever since she can remember. She talked about being bigger than her friends in elementary and middle school and how self-conscious she was and how badly she wanted to lose weight. 

• Thinking about food all the time. She would constantly be thinking about what she ate, how many calories were in it, what she was going to eat later, and whether or not she had worked out and burned enough calories that day. She was treating her body like it was a math equation of calories in, calories out.

• She had grown up being pretty athletic and enjoying sports, but once she became an adult she no longer had that structure of team sports for exercise, and going to the gym felt like something she “had” to do even though she didn’t really enjoy it. She knew she wanted to be active, but the way she was forcing herself to do it wasn’t enjoyable at all. 

• She was exhausted, depressed, and wanted to be able to eat and exercise normally, and to enjoy her life, while also taking care of her health. 

• She had done that thing that so many people do thanks to the way our culture talks about health….She had blurred together the idea that restricting and controlling her food, trying to lose weight and exercising constantly with “health,” when it wasn’t making her healthier at all. 

It was really clear to me right away that in order to get healthier she needed to work on her relationship with food and her body.

When we looked at where she was at, and what she wanted, her goals and desires were:

• To “feel normal” with food
• To eat well and still be healthy
• To still exercise, but without it being a chore or stressful. For it to feel good and be fun.
• If she was being honest, she still wanted to lose weight. 

There’s a lot of untangling to do in the early stages of this process. She had restriction and weight loss tangled together with health. And she also had weight loss tangled together with her self-worth. 

What we did:

There are 8 essential things that helped her to find peace with her body after all of that time she spent dieting. I know that might sound like a lot, and it is, but I want you to get a good 360 picture of what it takes to make peace with food and your body.

1. Untangled diet mentality vs true health, and getting clear on what even is “normal eating?”

Initially, this client had lumped together weight loss and restrictive eating as being what constitutes better health. However when we took a closer look, she could see that she wasn’t actually getting healthier by staying stuck in the dieting and restrict-binge cycle she was in. 

Deep down she already knew that, but it was something that we needed to talk through and specifically call out to help her get crystal clear on why she was taking this different path. 

We also broke down what it is that her true self values in life and with her health, vs what diet culture values. 

Her true self valued being well-nourished, being able to go out to eat with her family without just getting the lowest calorie thing on the menu, and fully participating in life by doing things like getting in the pool rather than hiding her body on the sidelines.

She could see that this was actually in contrast to diet culture, and that diet culture values thinness regardless of how a person gets there (even if it involves super unhealthy behaviors like fasting, purging, taking diet pills, extreme exercise and highly restrictive eating), being rigid and controlled with food (even if it means missing out on social events or enjoyment of food), and that diet culture values things like extreme extreme exercise and avoiding fatness at all costs. 

One of the first things she said to me when I first met this client was, “I don’t even know what normal eating looks like anymore.” 

She knew a lot about calories, and carbs, and points, and fat grams, but when it came to eating intuitively like a normal person who has no hangups with food, she was so confused she didn’t know where to begin. 

We talked about what normal eating actually is, and how it includes listening to her body, as well as using nutrition science and her wisdom to nourish herself well, but without rules and rigidity. We talked about what a normal meal looks like, a normal snack, an overall normal eating pattern, the ways that normal eaters think and feel about food. Casting this vision helped her to see what she was moving towards (and it helped her to see how far from that dieting had led her). 

2. Got clear on why dieting doesn’t work, and the vicious cycle that people get stuck in . It was relieving to her to realize that she wasn’t alone, and that the reason she was having so much struggle sticking to the diets she tried and why she was having a hard time losing weight, and why she always regained it. When she realized that it wasn’t her fault and the science behind why dieting doesn’t work I could see the lightbulbs going off in her mind. 

It clicked for her once she understood how dieting works against our biology, and that no amount of willpower or dedication was going to help her override her body’s primal instincts to protect her against dieting and deprivation. 

So not only did she see how dieting doesn’t actually align with her values, but it also doesn’t align with her biology. She finally accepted that it wasn’t that she wasn’t trying hard enough or that she was doing something wrong – but rather that dieting isn’t a winning strategy to begin with, and it never is going to be. 

She needed to understand this in order to let go, and to really trust this different non-diet approach.

3. We started from scratch with her eating. We wiped the slate clean. And we built her new eating strategy from the ground up, working WITH her body, rather than against it. 

We did this via a framework I teach inside Non-Diet Academy that I call “SCA.”

• Schedule – Having an intentional eating schedule that is strategically designed to allow for a gentle ebb and flow between hunger and fullness, and to keep energy levels and blood sugar stable. 
• Composition – Combining carb, protein and fat strategically together to show her how all foods truly can fit while also honoring health, and while promoting satiety with food. This allowed her to discover what food pairings that tasted good AND made her feel good.
• Amount – Learning how to trust her body to tell her how much food she needed in any given moment, rather than relying on portion sizes, diet rules, an app like MyFitnessPal, or calories/macros/points the way she used to.

4. Then we leaned into reconnecting with her body’s signals for hunger and fullness, as well as satisfaction with food. This was an ESSENTIAL part of learning to trust her body and to trust herself with food again. She needed the structure we started with to help her appetite hormones and her digestive system get into a rhythm that was reliable and predictable, and after a couple of weeks she started really noticing her hunger and fullness more clearly. 

This was really healing for her to realize that she actually can trust her body to tell her how much food she needs, and that she doesn’t have to monitor and plan out every morsel of food she’s going to put in her mouth. 

This body trust was how she knew that she truly never needed to go back to dieting again. She understood not only that dieting doesn’t work and why, the fact that dieting actually doesn’t align with what she values in life, and that her body will tell her what it needs if she listens and trusts it.

5. Neutralizing judgments about food and decharming the foods she was afraid to keep in the house. It’s one thing to eat consistently, and to honor your hunger and fullness, and to allow yourself to eat your forbidden foods again – but it’s another thing to actually do the mindset work to change the way you are thinking about food and relating to food. If you don’t do this mindset work, you won’t fully make peace with food, and you will continue to have a hard time mastering the other aspects of intuitive eating. The food judgments themselves are what we call “attunement disruptors.”

6. Body image and weight fears related to health. We unpacked the stories that she was telling herself about what her body looked like, and about the number on the scale. Her self-worth and her confidence was completely enmeshed with her weight and the size of her body. This took time to untangle it, to flush out the stories that were fueling her hatred towards her body, and to begin cultivating compassion towards herself and her body.

She was really scared about what was going to happen to her weight. And her weight did fluctuate some throughout this process. Initially, she tried staying away from the scale, but then when her pants weren’t fitting she weighed herself and it was up, and this made her feel like she needed to monitor her weight gain, so she started weighing herself and trying to view it as data. Eventually she came back around to not monitoring her weight which was where she found the most peace with her body. 

She had to come to terms with where her body wanted to be when she was no longer dieting. She also had to grieve the reality that her set point weight was probably now higher than it would have been if she had never dieted. 

Body acceptance was a key piece of our work. And by “acceptance” I don’t mean letting yourself go; I mean accepting your body as it is meant to be when you’re not on the dieting rollercoaster anymore. It’s only when you can come to terms with this that you will truly be free from the diet mentality. There’s a good chance that you’ll have to accept a weight that’s higher than you’d like it to be. Our culture has messed us up so badly in terms of our expectations and our desires around weight, as well as what we believe is healthy. 

What’s “healthy” is having kindness and acceptance towards your body, and finding ways to care for yourself that are actually effective. Dieting and chasing a lower number on the scale is not an effective way to manage health long-term. It creates the short-term illusion that it’s “working” – almost always followed by weight regain, and worsening health with the weight cycling that occurs. 

Accepting this – even though it’s a sucky truth – is ultimately what is going to allow you to have the inner peace that you have yearned for for so long. The peace within yourself that you’ve been told will only come from being a lower weight. 

And I get that a lot of you listening might have some very real health concerns as well, and your doctor may have told you that you need to lose weight for your health. Again, I am going to keep reminding you that if dieting was going to make you permanently thinner and healthier, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The research is clear that dieting and chasing weight loss damages your health, puts you at higher risk for cardiovascular disease and increases your risk of early death. Our healthcare system and our doctors have this so backwards, because they’ve been trained in this weight-centric model where BMI is seen as the beacon of health, which it’s not. 

Your doctor can help you get healthier – if you take the focus off weight loss in the discussions. When we take our blinders off we start to see that there are things like medications, physical therapy, gentle nutrition, or other treatments that will improve your health when we drill down on what the actual health concern is. 

This client had some mildly elevated cholesterol. She was initially so worried that it was because her weight was too high, and convinced that if she lost weight it would fix her cholesterol. When we took a look at her weight history though, what I pointed out to her was that her cholesterol was about the same no matter where her weight was. Her weight had gone down and up multiple times, and yet her cholesterol was pretty much unchanged. 

What we also saw with that was that no matter how much she restricted her food, avoided high fat foods, or cut out sugar, this also didn’t fix her cholesterol. She finally came around to accepting that she was probably genetically predisposed to high cholesterol, and that it wasn’t a weight or food problem. 

That didn’t mean we ignored it. In fact we did apply some gentle nutrition to see if it would help keep those numbers from going up, and we talked about how at some point as she gets older she may need a statin and that doesn’t represent failure. It’s about taking care of her health, which sometimes includes medications. 

7. Getting her needs met in life outside of food.

This is one of the most overlooked parts of making peace with food and body image. We tend to focus a lot on the food and body image itself, without zooming out to also look at why our body image sucks so bad in the first place, and what function dieting and obsessing about food and weight is serving in our lives. 

Often dieting becomes a coping mechanism for emotions and unmet needs outside of food, and our bodies become the scapegoat for other things in our lives. 

At the core of most body image struggles is shame. You’re not going to hate or diet yourself out of shame. 

We need to understand the shame story and your shame triggers, beyond just not liking your weight or feeling guilty for something you ate. 

We need to go deeper than that. 

For this client, she was able to recognize that she felt like she never fit in, no matter where she went. She had friends, but not BEST friends, and she liked her coworkers, but her coworkers hung out together outside of work and she wasn’t usually invited. She felt like she was on the outer circle no matter where she went. This shame and loneliness was something she had never directly addressed. She developed the story that if she could just lose weight and feel better about her body, that she’d be more confident and people would like her more, and she’d no longer feel disconnected and left out. 

She also realized that she didn’t like her job. It was hard for her to admit this, because she was in a career that required her a degree that took her a long time (and a lot of student loan debt) to get, and she felt like it would mean burning everything down and starting over to admit she felt like she had chosen the wrong career. 

You can see where these things that seemed unrelated to her eating or her body image were actually playing a big role in how she was approaching these things, and when she started looking at the real issues in her life, she didn’t have such a strong need to use food or dieting as a crutch or coping mechanism.

8. Healing her relationship with exercise and redefining it as “movement.” 

Given that she was treating exercise and going to the gym as something she “had” to do, we set up an experiment where she took a break from the gym. I had anticipated a lot of resistance from her about doing this, and it was so fascinating because she was actually relieved to stop going to the gym. In fact, after taking a break from the gym, she realized she didn’t miss it and she canceled her gym membership.

She realized though that she genuinely liked being active, and she wanted to find ways to move her body that were more enjoyable. She tried several different things: yoga, pilates, spin classes, walking, running, and dancing videos on YouTube in her living room. 

The other thing she found really helpful was that she stopped thinking of it as “exercise” and she started calling it “movement.” This language shift helped her expand her mind to see that there are tons of way so to move her body, and it doesn’t always have to be exercise in the traditional sense. She could walk to her neighborhood coffee shop, or she could embrace yard work as movement, she could stretch or do a few yoga poses in between meetings at work which felt good to her body and grounding emotionally. Playing catch or basketball with her kids didn’t need to “count” towards her daily exercise quota. It could just be a fun thing they did, and it reminded her how much she loved playing outside as a kid. 

Bringing this playful element back into it was something that really helped her to let go of the rigidity she used to have with exercise, and instead of using the hotel gym on vacation she was able to chill out and enjoy downtime more too.

How You Can Find Peace With Your Body Too

This healing and this transformation that this client experienced happened because she took the leap and decided to join Non-Diet Academy. I obviously can’t (and won’t) guarantee results, but what I will guarantee is that you will receive the exact same tools, strategies and frameworks that allowed her to find peace with food and her body. The peace that dieting can’t offer, because it keeps you at war with your body. 

You CAN learn how to feel at home in your body, to eat the foods you enjoy without feeling guilty (and without going overboard), to move your body and exercise because it makes you feel good and it’s good for you, and to take care of your health without making it about weight. 

We are getting ready to come up on the holidays. Just imagine if by Halloween you could buy the Reeces pumpkins and have them in your house for you to enjoy, unapologetically, and come Valentine’s day next February you still have some of the Reeces pumpkins left that you forgot about. 

And just imagine if at Thanksgiving this year you ate the mashed potatoes and gravy and a slice of pumpkin pie, without ending up stuffed and miserable because you listened to your body. And at Christmas you baked and decorated sugar cookies with your kids or grandkids, and didn’t secretly eat them after everyone else goes to bed. 

Then picture this – January 2025 rolls around, and you don’t even feel one bit tempted to start a “weight loss journey” or a new diet, because you feel great. You feel comfortable with food, empowered with how you are approaching your health, and you don’t feel guilty for how you ate during the holiday season because you enjoyed food but didn’t overdo it. And it had nothing to do with willpower, control or dieting. It was because you made peace with food and ditched dieting for good. 

This is where you can be in just a few months, with the focused work that we are going to do inside Non-Diet Academy. I want you to have the peace and freedom with food that you desire, your health, acceptance and comfort with your body, an exercise routine that works for you, and for you to LIVE LIFE FULLY because you’re no longer held back by dieting or obsessing about food and your weight 24/7. You deserve this, and I would be honored to help you. 

Check out the details at nondietacademy.com/enroll or reach out to me directly. The best place to connect with me is via email or in the DMs on FB or IG.

In case nobody has told you today – you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.

Rate, Review, & Follow us! 

“I love Katy and Rebuilding Trust With Your Body .” <– If that sounds like you, please consider rating and reviewing my show! This helps me support more people — just like you — who are ready to finally discover peace with their bodies. Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Then be sure to let me know what you loved most about the episode!

Also, make sure to follow the podcast if you haven’t already done so. Follow now!