This was one of those things that I wasn’t familiar with, so I researched it so that you don’t have to. 

Let’s start with what is Planet Fitness. Most of you in the US are probably familiar with it, but a lot of you listening are from other places all around the world (which is so cool that we can be connected globally BTW), so I’m guessing that some of you aren’t familiar with Planet Fitness as a company.

The are essentially a gym franchise that has been around since the ‘90’s. They’re based out of New Hampshire, and it appears that the very first Planet Fitness was started in Florida and the guy who owned it named Rick Berks named it after his daughter’s school project called “Fitness Planet” which is really cute.

It was these 2 guys in New Hampshire, Michael and Marc Grondhal, bought a Gold’s gym that was failing (which is another popular gym franchise here in the states) and also opened their own gym, and in 2002 they bought the rights for the name Planet Fitness from Rick Berks. 

Planet Fitness has kind of a cool business model. They cater to people who are first-time gym goers, or people who are intimidated by the gym. They market themselves as a “judgment-free zone” which I think is so awesome.

One funny little thing they have is a “lunk alarm” which is this loud siren and light that goes off if somebody grunts too loudly or drops their weights really loudly on the floor like sometimes the gym bros will do. 

They also prohibit certain weight lifting exercises, including dead lifts and clean-and-jerks (which I don’t even know what those are), and this has made some of the more serious weight lifters mad. In fact, Men’s Health magazine named them the worst gym in America in 2010, which I think says a lot about men’s fitness culture. Heaven forbid we create a space that’s meant to feel safer for people who aren’t super serious or experienced at working out and weight lifting. 

So…Planet Fitness as an organization seems fine to me. In fact, I really like a lot of what they stand for and how they make going to the gym more accessible for a lot of people. The other thing they’re known for is their inexpensive memberships. Their basic membership is $10/month.

Now, let’s get into the woo part of the situation. Within the past year or 2, some of the PF locations started getting these machines that they call their “Total Body Enhancement Machine” – which is already giving red flags for wellness woo. What are we enhancing? And why do our bodies need to be enhanced you might wonder? (Me too)

Now you do have to have a Black Card Membership, which is their more expensive membership to access this machine, which looks like one of those booths you’d get in for a spray tan, or if you can picture a tanning bed that’s upright.

What it does is red light therapy – and on the YouTube video I watched where they’re promoting it they claim that if you use it before your workout it can “prime your body for your workout” which is utter nonsense. 

Now, there is some decent evidence for red light therapy in dermatology. I’m by no means a skin expert, but there do appear to be legitimate studies demonstrating that red light therapy can help with skin complexion and collagen production.

One study did specifically say, and I think this is important: 

Commercial success have outpaced empirical approaches on which solid clinical evidence is established. 

The machine also vibrates, which is reminiscent of those machines from back in the 50’s and 60’s where people would stand on the machine with the belt around them and it would vibrate and allegedly break up their belly fat. (Spoiler alert – it didn’t work)

Can the vibration help relax your muscles and feel good? Sure. But is it doing magical wellness things? No.

They also claim it tones your body. It does not. And it claims to be a 12 minute workout. C’mon. This is that diet culture thing where it appeals to our sense of being able to get fitness results without actually working out, and that’s a fantasy. And for people who have a really challenging relationship with exercise, and they might have a lot of resistance to doing it, I can see where this would really appeal to them. But they’re being misled, and that’s not ok.

So…is the PF Total Body Rejuvenation legit or wellness woo? A little of both, but mostly wellness woo because of how much they’re hyping it up. If you’re looking for legitimate red light therapy for your skin, I would recommend asking a dermatologist what they recommend – not signing up for this over hyped machine at PF. From a fitness/toning standpoint it’s complete woo. 

There you have it! I love doing these little deep dives, so keep sending your ideas my way!

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…Why “healthy swaps” aren’t doing you any favors

Understanding Your Intent

During the holiday season we are bombarded by all these messages about how awful all the foods are for us – whether it be the side dishes at your Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, the appetizers at your work holiday party, the cookies, candy and Chex Mix that we tend to make, even the hot cocoa that you might want to drink on a cold snowy day. We’re told that it’s all “unhealthy” and “bad” for us. 

Here comes diet culture with all these ideas about how to “healthify” the holidays. If we step back and look under the hood, most of this messaging ultimately boils down to the fear of weight gain and our cultural fatphobia and anti-fat bias. 

And yes, I get that for some people they are legitimately concerned about their health, and that’s valid. In fact, we’re going to talk more about that here in a minute, because as a dietitian this is my jam and I will give you some strategies on how to tend to your health throughout the holiday season without turning it into this diet-y thing. 

The other day I saw an invite on FB for this weight loss company that was holding an open house in December, and they wanted people to come by for their “healthyish” holiday party where they were going to serve low sugar wine and whatever they deemed to be healthy snacks. Not really the type of party that sounds like fun to me. 

And that’s part of what happens when we try to “healthify” the holidays. It takes a lot of the joy out of it. It makes the focus on how to trick ourselves into thinking something tastes just as good as the regular version, and often we end up feeling deprived.

But again, I get the intent, and I honor your desire to take care of your health. We’re going to get to that. 

What I can tell you with a lot of certainty is this: Often times the things we do in the name of “healthifying” our food end up backfiring, which is ultimately more detrimental to our health than just eating the food you wanted in the first place. 

Why Healthy Swaps Backfire

Someone shared this meme in my FB group the other day (which if you’re not inside the group, you totally should be. It’s called Intuitive Eating Made Easy, and I’ll link to it in the show notes). Anyway, the meme said “when you’re craving a biscuit (a cookie) but you’re trying to be good so you eat an apple, an orange, a celery stick, a handful of raisins and then a whole packet of biscuits.” And it cracked me up, because it’s so relatable, and it’s spot on. That’s exactly what I’m talking about here. By the time you try and eat all of the so-called healthy foods and aren’t satisfied, and you end up eating a boatload of the thing you really wanted, you would have been better off eating the thing you were originally craving in the first place (and you probably would have been satisfied with less of it). That’s what deprivation does to us.

This concept of deprivation trips a lot of people up. They’ll say to me, “But Katy, I’m not depriving myself. In fact, I’m eating way too many of these things!” 

Let’s get into some nuance here. This is one of those things that we deep dive into inside my program Intuitive Eating Exploration, where we look at one of the most misunderstood principles of IE – making peace with food. A lot of people mistake making peace with food to simply mean eating those foods. But there’s more to it than that. Deprivation can show up in a lot of different ways:

• Not letting yourself eat the things you want:
  That would be like the meme above, where you try to eat fruits and vegetables when you really wanted a cookie, and then eating the whole package of cookies.
• Letting yourself eat the things you want – but feeling guilty about it:
  Maybe you let yourself eat the Christmas cookie, but you feel like a criminal, or like you’ve gone overboard, or that it was too much sugar, or too many calories, or you’re thinking about how you’re going to make up for it at the gym tomorrow and “be good” for the rest of the day or the rest of the week.
• Feeling like you are “giving in” when you let yourself eat something:
  That moment when you finally cave and eat something you’ve been resisting – you’re 10x more likely to then eat a whole bunch of it because it’s like you’ve been holding your breath under water and now you’re coming up for air and you’re gasping for it.
• Telling yourself you can only have certain amounts:
  Maybe you are letting yourself eat the peanut brittle you made, or the gingerbread man – but you are also telling yourself you can just have one, or you can only have it on certain days (whether it be cheat days, or the weekend, or days that you ate a salad for lunch, or days that you worked out). Technically, yes you’re letting yourself have it – but you’re putting limitations around when and how much you’re allowed to have.

Deprivation and restriction doesn’t mean that you’re literally not eating it at all. A lot of the reason that we experience the backlash of deprivation is because of the mental side of how we are thinking about food, and feeling guilty for eating it – not whether or not we’re eating some of it in the first place.

So when you are taking your grandmother’s beloved sweet potato casserole recipe and you’re trying to healthify it by swapping out some of the fat or sugar for other things, you’re creating deprivation. You’re sending yourself (and others) the message that you and your body can’t be trusted with this food. And when you’re doing it to traditional family recipes, it’s really sad. You’re missing out on celebrating that part of your heritage, and these recipes that get handed down through the generations.

Now let’s say you have diabetes, and you are worried that eating the sweet potato casserole with all of the brown sugar and marshmallows on top is going to cause your blood sugar to run high. I get that. You can still have sweet potato casserole. You may need a gentle boundary around the quantity of it that you have in one sitting, and you might need to pair it with some protein, and you could take a 10 minute walk afterwards because that helps to lower blood sugar levels. (Now, I want to be careful here to not turn this idea of taking a 10min walk into a form of “earning or burning” your food off. This is literally an evidence-based strategy for post meal blood sugar in people with diabetes and insulin resistance.) My point here is that there are many things you can do to still allow yourself to have the regular version of this dish without having to healthify it.

Part of what you need to understand is that 1) these healthy swaps often create deprivation, and set you up to later overeat at some point (which completely defeats the purpose), and 2) they’re generally not necessary for your actual health. 

Am I suggesting that you should just have a free-for-all with food this holiday season and not pay any attention to your nutrition or health whatsoever? No, of course not. 

What I am suggesting is that the way you’re approaching your nutrition and health may be backfiring on you, and it might be causing you unnecessary stress in your life. You don’t need to rigidly control your food throughout the holiday season.

Let me give you another example. Let’s say you’re making Christmas cookies with your kids, and you are worried about the sugar, so you decide to make the flourless high protein cookie recipe you saw on TikTok (which your kids probably won’t eat). Do you really think those cookies are going to be as enjoyable as a normal sugar cookie or gingerbread cookie? How many of these sad protein cookies do you think you’d need to eat in order to scratch that itch when you want a Christmas cookie?

I’d also like to point out that you can totally have some protein with your cookie. It doesn’t have to be in the cookie. Not every food we eat needs to be fortified with extra protein. You can just pair it with another food that has protein. Like my grandpa used to say when I didn’t like my food touching, “It all goes to the same place.” Meaning, once it’s in your stomach it all gets mixed together and it doesn’t matter if that protein gram came from the cookie or the glass of milk or handful or nuts that you had with it.

If there’s something that is going to decrease your satisfaction, then it’s probably not worth making the swaps. It’s ok to have the real deal.

Have Your Cake and Eat It Too (Honoring Your Health Without Deprivation)

You might be wondering at this point how to honor your health if you aren’t making these “healthy swaps” with food. I’ve got you! 

One of the things I’m known for in my industry is being able to not only help my clients listen to their bodies, make peace with food and eat intuitively – but also how to do this while taking care of their ACTUAL health. And I don’t mean health as in weight. I mean health as in your lab values, your vital signs, your medical conditions. And the reason that I can do this is because of my expertise in medical nutrition as a dietitian, combined with my deep understanding of the psychology of how we relate to food. 

When we only focus on health, or we only focus on psychology – we often miss the mark. 

So how do you take care of your health during the holidays, without being diet-y about it and without having to restrict or healthify your food?

I had a client who took my program Intuitive Eating Exploration earlier this year, and she was one of those people who used to use all of the sugar substitutes in her baking, and she wouldn’t let herself keep holiday goodies in her house. When she would attend a holiday gathering, she’d save up her calories all day – and then of course she’d end up going overboard. So one of the things that we did, given that we use the official IE Workbook inside of the program she was in, was we used the gentle nutrition chapter to talk through how she can honor her health – not just during the holidays, but all year long, and how she can do this by connecting not just with what tastes good, but also what makes her body FEEL good and FUNCTION well. 

She was someone who had blood sugar concerns, and did need to be mindful of how she was distributing her carbohydrates throughout the day, and pairing them with protein, fat and/or fiber. There’s a section in the gentle nutrition chapter where it talks about what Evelyn and Elyse (the authors – who are 2 well-respected dietitians in our field and who wrote the OG book Intuitive Eating) – they talk about what they call “Authentic Health” and how it’s a dynamic integration of inner attunement with your body’s signals and your body’s feedback (which includes your hunger, fullness, digestion, how food makes you feel), alongside external health values which would be the nutrition science about what the human body needs, and medical nutrition guidelines. 

The way that I teach this to my clients is that gentle nutrition has layers to it, kind of like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

• Foundation = eating ENOUGH calories
• Macronutrients
• Micronutrients

Variety is one of the best things you can do for your health and nutrition. Because a variety of foods = a variety of nutrients. (It also means a variety of tastes and textures which tends to make food more satisfying too.) 

With this client that I am using as an example, she had blood sugar concerns, so we talked about spreading her carbs evenly throughout the day, so she wasn’t having no carbs all day long and then all the carbs at night. And we came up with a plan to pair her carbs with protein, fat and fiber whenever possible. So if she wanted to have something like a gingerbread cookie, she might have it with a greek yogurt or a glass of milk. This was what allowed her to enjoy things like cookies, without stressing constantly about how she wanted them but couldn’t have them, and then going way overboard once she finally would give in. 

7 Nutrition Tips for Honoring Your Health During the Holidays 

During the holidays, here are 7 tips for honoring your health (without having to make healthy swaps with food):

1. Eat breakfast every single day. And make sure it has a decent amount of protein in it (which would mean somewhere in the realm of 20-30 grams). 
2. Combine foods that contain carbohydrate, protein, fat and fiber at your meals. 
3. When you’re snacking, aim for carb + protein. 
4. With holiday foods, have them as part of a meal or snack. That way you’ll get satiety from the other foods as well. 
5. If you’re noticing certain foods that have “charm,” go through the decharming exercise with them. DM me if you need more info on how to do this. It’s where you intentionally eat those foods, while mentally neutralizing your judgments about them, to take the power away from the food. It’s kind of like exposure therapy. 
6. Eat your favorite holiday foods mindfully and honor your fullness. When your body says you are satisfied, give yourself permission to stop – and reassure yourself you can have more later when you are hungry again. The decharming is what’s going to allow you to do this with the foods that you feel like you have a hard time stopping with.
7. If you have specific health needs, practice gentle nutrition around this. There aren’t blanket statements I can make here, since health is a very individualized thing. I would give different guidance to someone with high blood pressure than I would someone with IBS, acid reflux or diabetes. Not everyone needs to have limits with carbs or sodium or highly acidic foods, for example, so that’s going to depend on YOU and YOUR body’s unique health needs. But I want you to know that you absolutely can practice gentle nutrition without having to cut out, avoid or healthify your favorite holiday foods. (And that doesn’t mean that you should just stick your head in the sand and have a free-for-all with food, that’s not what I’m saying at all here.)
   
   

Wrapping Up

Let’s recap and then we’ll wrap this up with a bow and put it under the tree. 

The first thing we talked about was validating your desire and your intent to take care of your health. That’s absolutely understandable and a worthwhile goal. Then we talked about how using “healthy swaps” to try and do this usually ends up not being very helpful, it’s generally not necessary (unless we’re talking about food allergies or something like that), and the mindset towards healthy swaps often backfires. No amount of apples or oranges is going to satisfy your craving for a cookie, am I right?

Then, lastly, we talked about what to do to honor your health instead of focusing on avoiding your favorite holiday foods or making healthy swaps. Nutrition doesn’t have to be such an all-or-none thing. Usually there is room for the things we want to eat, alongside a variety of other foods and nutrients. 

Make sure you grab the holiday intuitive eating guide that I mentioned earlier. That’s really going to help you see how intuitive eating might look a little different during the holidays, but it absolutely still applies. In fact, I’d argue that you can really leverage intuitive eating to your advantage this time of year, and that’s really cool. 

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

Resources Mentioned:

• Join my FB Group Intuitive Eating Made Easy
• Grab my FREE holiday intuitive eating guide
• Check out Intuitive Eating Exploration, my group workbook study starting in January!
  
  
  

Wellness Woo Sources:

• https://www.planetfitness.com/franchising/franchising-about-planet-fitness
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33471046/
• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3926176/Welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body, I’m Katy Harvey your host. I hope you’ve been enjoying this holiday season. I’m almost done with my shopping, and I’ve done about half of my wrapping so I’m feeling pretty good about that. 
• One of the holiday traditions at our house is to bake and decorate Christmas cookies together, so I’m excited to do that this upcoming weekend with Trevor and the boys. Honestly, these cookies are more of an art project than a snack when it’s all said and done, but that’s ok. 
• I think it’s fun to have special foods that you associate with the holidays. One of them that stands out for me as a kid was the party mix that my mom and grandma made using my grandma’s recipe that calls for bacon grease instead of butter. Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it, because it’s one of the most delicious Chex mix recipes you will have ever tasted. 
• I want you to think for a moment about foods that make you think of the holidays. What were the foods that were always made in your family when you were a kid? What foods do you tend to make at the holidays now as an adult? Food can be such a beautiful part of holiday traditions, and it connects us with memories of years past, and people that we love, and people we have lost. 
• And that’s why we need to have a conversation in this episode about how trying to make “healthy swaps” in your holiday recipes isn’t doing you any favors – on multiple levels. We’re going to break it down, and I’m going to give you some other ideas for how to apply gentle nutrition without sacrificing the foods and recipes that are beloved to you. 
• Really quick, if you don’t already have it, I want you to make sure that you grab my free holiday intuitive eating guide. It’s filled with 6 strategies that are going to help you use intuitive eating to navigate the holidays – and there are some nuances with how to do this since food tends to look different for us this time of the year. You can grab it at nondietacademy.com/holiday, and I’ve linked to it in the show notes. If you don’t have a copy, push pause and go grab it right now and then come back to the episode. 
• 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: Planet Fitness Total Body Enhancement – s/o to Angela one of my NDA clients who suggested this one during one of our group coaching sessions!

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