Welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body, it’s Katy here. Imagine waking up in 4 months and finally being able to eat a bagel for breakfast, and meanwhile the nurse from your doctor’s office calls and says your blood sugar and cholesterol have improved from last time.

That’s right, we’re going to talk about how it truly is possible for you to improve your health while eating things like bagels, pasta, pizza, cake, cookies, ice cream, and all the things that diet culture tells us are bad and unhealthy. 

Now am I suggesting that these foods are all you should eat all day, everyday? Of course not. One thing that I’m seeing a LOT online lately is that the social media version of IE is sometimes distorted and inadvertently leads people to believe that you should just throw all the diet rules out the window, and then eat whatever you want, whenever you want, without any regard for nutrition, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

If you came to me as a client and wanted to improve your health while doing IE, we absolutely can do that, and I’m going to walk you through the first 5 things we’d do right away to make that happen.

And the cool thing is that when you do all of these consistently, enjoying bagels and pasta, while watching your health improve doesn’t just become possible for you…it becomes your reality.

I want to give a quick shout out to those of you who have responded to me about my email newsletter and the new format that I’m doing. I am having so much fun with it because there are different sections where I’m sharing IE tips, products I’m enjoying, stories about things either in my personal life or hot topics in the industry right now, and of course you’ll still get the scoop on the weekly podcast episode. It’s just something different, that has a little bit of something for everyone. And the feedback I’m getting is that people are loving it. Now if you hate it, that’s ok, and I want to hear that too. Just say it nicely, please, but do respond or DM me and let me know if you like the old format better. 

The point of my weekly email newsletter is that it’s helpful to you, and that it’s something you look forward to opening and reading each week, and that it delivers you valuable tips, insights, and resources for your IE journey. 

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: Poppi (submitted by a listener – you know who you are!)

Poppi is the soda that you’ve probably seen all over social media and in grocery stores that is marketed as a healthy alternative to regular soda.

It was created by a woman in Texas named Allison Ellsworth because she was wanting to quit drinking soda, and she took her creation to Shark Tank and the brand exploded. 

So what’s in it?

It’s a fizzy drink that tastes sweet like soda, and it’s made with fiber (in the form of inulin and cassava root) which they refer to as “prebiotics” which is technically true, but I want you to notice how it SOUNDS healthier to refer to it as prebiotics than to say inulin and cassava root. This is about perception here. 

It also contains ACV (woo). 

And sugar, but their promise is 5gm or less. Which is fine. It’s great to have options that are lower in sugar, especially for people with blood sugar concerns. 

The rest of the ingredients are: Cane Sugar, Apple Juice Concentrate, Stevia, Tartaric Acid

So nutritionally, it’s fine. It’s not going to hurt you. 

But the hype around it is based on a lot of woo in marketing it to you in a way that positions it as a health food product, and they charge you $29 for a 12 pack of cans. 

The person who submitted this said that someone told them that it’s healthier than diet soda, so let’s talk about that…(it’s pretty comparable, it does contain calories from sugar aka CHO (20-35) and diet soda doesn’t)

Let’s also talk for a sec about the class action lawsuit against Poppi in June 2024 for false advertising over the claims that Poppi was making about being “gut healthy” when the amount of fiber in the product isn’t enough to make a meaningful impact on gut health. 

Poppi settled for $8.9 million.

PepsiCo is currently working out an agreement to buy Poppi for 1.95 billion – another example of how the wellness woo industry is quite lucrative.

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…5 things we’d do immediately if you came to me and wanted to improve your health, while eating things like bagels and pasta, and other foods that diet culture deems as bad.

1. Delete the food tracking app from your phone. It’s messing with your head and keeping you disconnected from your body.
   
2. Eat breakfast within about an hour of waking up. Get your metabolism and digestive system “fired up” for the day with some fuel. (This is one of the first things that I teach inside NDA)
   
3. Don’t go longer than 3-4 hours without eating something (either a meal or snack) during the day. This will prevent you from getting ravenously hungry, and then the pendulum swinging to feeling stuffed because you inhaled your food so quickly. Eating at regular intervals, on purpose (and not grazing) will make your hunger/fullness signals more reliable for you.
   
4. Combine carb, protein, fat and fiber at your meals. This will help balance your blood sugar, support healthy cholesterol, and allows you to eat the foods you love while also being intentional about nutrition.
   
5. Train your brain to think of food as carb, protein, and fat. So when you’re eating a bagel with cream cheese, instead of labeling it as “bad” and “too many carbs” in your mind (which leads to feeling guilty)…Instead think of it is bagel = carb, cream cheese = fat. Pair it with some protein and fiber, and you’ve got a balanced breakfast! (Example: Pair it with greek yogurt for protein, and berries for fiber. Easy peasy!) 

When you do these things consistently, seeing your A1c or your cholesterol, or your BP, or your IBS improve isn’t just a fantasy – it can become your reality. This past week I had not 1 but 2 clients tell me that they had their labs checked and their A1c was down (which is a reflection of your blood sugar). One person had gone from the pre-DM range to normal. And this is a result of them getting off the dieting rollercoaster, and using the strategies we covered today. 

If you want to experience better health – whatever that means for you – it absolutely can happen while including the foods that bring you joy, like bread, and lattes, and Taco Bell. All it takes is being able to listen to your body (which includes your body’s medical feedback such as your lab results guiding you towards what your body need), along with the right strategies for your eating that will allow IE to work for you, and the mindset shifts in how you are thinking about food so that it doesn’t hold power over your and you’re not obsessing about it. It’s when you start putting all these pieces in place that you will begin to see that you don’t have to restrict and control your food in order to be healthy. 

If you want to explore coaching options for how we can work together and you can improve your health, without diets and restrictions, so that you can have peace with food – and this upcoming Halloween you won’t be wigged out about the the Snickers bars in your house, or those Reeces pumpkins that have so much charm and call to you one after another – then reach out to me either via email or in the DMs and we can chat about what coaching options I have available that would be a good fit for you. You could experience some massive shifts in both your health and your relationship with food by the end of the year if you start now, so don’t wait. Don’t put it off if you’re thinking about it. Things aren’t going to get less chaotic as we get closer to the holiday season. NOW is the time to take action. So reach out, and we’ll have a no pressure chat. 

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

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