This episode is about health issues and where those fit in as part of the IE journey. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that they can’t or shouldn’t do IE if they have certain health issues like diabetes or high blood pressure. But that couldn’t be further from the truth…

Now, if you’re doing IE incorrectly and it’s damaging your health, then we of course need to take a look at that. And that’s what we’re going to cover in today’s 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: Viome.

Homepage of website = $400 test kits you can buy (very confusing about what this company even is)

“About” = “Imagine a world where illness is optional.” OMFG

In our vision, the future of healthcare is not in hospitals but in the comfort of your home. Tomorrow’s medicines won’t be found on pharmacy shelves but on a farm.

We call our method ‘a signal in the noise’ because we can discern meaningful patterns amidst the vast array of health data within you. With our insights and tools, you can confidently navigate your health, eliminating the confusion surrounding nutrition.

Founder: Naveen Jain

Founder & CEO

Naveen Jain is a serial entrepreneur and philanthropist driven to solve the world’s biggest challenges through innovation. From local boy to lunar visionary, Naveen sees beyond the current business and technological landscape, creating companies that make a true impact. As the founder of Moon Express, World Innovation Institute, TalentWise, Intelius, and Infospace, Naveen is an intensely curious entrepreneur who is focused on audacious ideas that push humanity forward.

Moonshots – space travel, and thinking bigger….other recommended books = how to become a millionaire

Course: The Power of Boldness for $400

Stephen Barrie, ND

A naturopath is their VP and Head of Clinical Nutrition

clinical reference laboratory for physicians, which he started in 1986 to advance natural medicine and the scientific research of integrative medicine around the world

Book = “7 Day Detox Miracle”

We offer up to 70+ Health Score biomarkers included with our Full Body Intelligence Test.

Your biochemistry is unique! We measure over 10 million data points from expressed genes per sample from microbial (oral and gut) and human cells, allowing us to quantify, influence, and monitor your cellular and microbial pathways. This lets us know the nutrients or ingredients you need in order to stimulate or suppress certain functions and bring you back into balance.

They’re mostly looking at your gut microbiome

Talks about leaky gut

Personalized Food Recommendations

We provide customized food recommendations, which are sorted into four categories. Each food is accompanied by helpful information on why we recommend it, or why we don’t.

Ultimately, if you read through what they’re doing, it’s an AI platform…

I want you guys to develop a stance of skepticism on this stuff always. 

If you have an example of Wellness Woo that you want to share, DM it to me.

Ok, that’s enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic…What to do if Your Health Issues Feel Overwhelming and it’s Making You Doubt Your Intuitive Eating Journey

A lot of people who come into my world have health issues that really impact their life, and that they worry about:

• Diabetes
• Liver disease (used to be called fatty liver – or as one of my clients calls her “plus sized liver” – and recently that condition has been renamed to MASLD (Metabolic Dysfunction-Associated Steatotic Liver Disease)
• IBS
• Celiac disease
• HTN
• High cholesterol
• Cardiac issues 
• Autoimmune issues
• Ehler’s Danlose
• POTS
• Cancer survivors
• Transplant recipients
• Kidney disease

This list could go on and on…

IT’S VALID TO WORRY ABOUT YOUR HEALTH. I DO TOO!!

And I want to remind you: Dieting is NOT a health-promoting behavior.

I know it FEELS like it is one. Especially if you feel like you went too far in the wrong direction w/ IE.

And when your amygdala and the fear center of your brain gets activated, it makes you do things like:

• Googling things like “how to lose weight without dieting” and “what’s the healthiest diet” at 11pm when you’re laying in bed
• Re-downloading the MFP or WW app on your phone so that you can feel in control of your food again
• Cutting out sugar or processed food because you haven’t done the mindset work that you need to do to let go of those inaccurate fears and judgments, and you still believe it’s unhealthy
• You go into fix it or panic mode and bail on IE entirely

And in the moment, your panic feels like you’re being smart and taking care of your health…when really, you’re just operating out of fear and reactivity. Which is part of why you are in this place to begin with. You are letting fear and external things like diets and wellness culture tell you what to do, instead of being connected with and trusting of your true self.

Let’s also be so for real and honest right now…

A lot of the things you’ve done when you were dieting aren’t actually healthy, right?

• Cutting out entire food groups
• Detoxes and cleanses where you’re starving yourself and giving yourself diarrhea
• Drinking crazy amounts of coffee, water, diet soda, or other calorie-free beverages as a way to suppress your appetite and make you feel full.
• Skipping meals.
• Choking down huge amounts of vegetables or protein.
• Eating high volume, low calorie foods that don’t actually satisfy you

Geneen Roth is famous for saying “For every diet there’s an equal and opposite binge.” 

And not only is the dieting not good for you, but neither is the binging that happens on the back end of it. 

Think of it this way: Would it be healthier to try and never let yourself eat Cheez Its, only to end up eating the whole box when you finally give in…or would it be better to eat a handful of Cheez Its with your lunch as a source of carbs and move on with your life? 

The all-or-none thinking that’s inherent with dieting doesn’t work. It sets you up for failure. It’s a big part of what makes dieting unsustainable. (The other part is biology…)

What to Do If Your Health Is Getting Worse

So let’s say you started doing IE and your health condition(s) are getting worse. Your bloodwork is worse. Your energy sucks. Your body hurts. 

The first thing we need to do is zoom OUT before we zoom in on the solution and the strategies to address it.

EXAMPLES:

• Blood sugar
  • My friend Kristie Messerli, a diabetes dietitian, is always pointing out that if dieting worked we wouldn’t have an epidemic of women who have been on and off diets since they were 8yo.
  • Instead of using dieting, or keto, or low carb, to manage blood sugar – you need to understand how your body and your blood sugar actually works….Those might look like they’re working as bandaid solutions…
  • Zoom out: Dieting is making your insulin resistance and blood sugar worse
  • Zoom in: 
• Joint pain
  • Client who lost 50# and still has knee pain
  • Another client who lost >100# with bariatric sx and still has arthritis
  • Tell my story of going up the stairs – and how b/c I don’t have internalized fatphobia (and I have thin privilege) I was able to respond productively
  • Zoom out: Knee pain is caused by a LOT of things. Dieting doesn’t fix it.
    • Dr. Gaudiani points out that for people in larger bodies, one of their greatest risks of medical complications during surgery such as knee surgery is malnutrition…which they very well would have if they lost the drastic amount of weight surgeons often want them to lose for the knee replacement  
  • Zoom in: WHAT ELSE can you do to help your joints?
    • Strengthening
    • Motion is lotion
    • Antiinflammatory meds
    • Fish oil (not always safe!)
    • Ice/heat
    • Shoes, braces, etc.
    • Self-compassion

So whatever health issue or concern you have, I want you to pull out a piece of paper or note on your phone and do this with me:

1. Write down the specific health concern you have  – we need to give language to it (explain why vague concerns are unhelpful)
2. Zoom out  – Have you been able to stick with dieting and restricting permanently? What happened where you decided to try IE? WHY IE?
3. Zoom in – this is what I am an expert in helping my clients with all day everyday. 

Because I care so much about your health, that’s why I start my clients off with structure and we don’t do “just listen to your body” or “eat whatever/whenever.”

STRUCTURE protects, honors and supports your health in conjunction w/ IE.

Part of listening to your body is listening to its health needs and medical feedback. (and you don’t need something like the viome thing we talked about in Wellness Woo – good old fashioned primary care is what’s evidence based “longevity” care)

I also want to remind you that health isn’t one lab value, or food that you do/don’t eat, diagnosis.

It’s also not a number on the scale or a BMI. 

We have to keep zooming out to look at the bigger picture. Diet and wellness culture want us to focus on these tiny specific things like a certain test, or supplement, or superfood to eat, or toxic food to avoid.

What will actually support your health is:

• A healthy relationship with food and exercise
• Nourishing yourself well, without rigidity
• Balancing your blood sugar
• Keeping an eye on your BP and your labs
• Moving your body consistently
• Sleeping enough
• Social connections
• Seeing your doctor on a regular basis
• Taking the meds your Rx’d
• Avoiding smoking and too much ETOH

It’s the really unsexy things. 

Too many of you are seeing the number on the scale go up when you start doing IE, and you freak out and jump to the conclusion that you’re automatically becoming unhealthy. 

Can we pay attention to changes in your weight and get curious about them? YES, one million percent… (and this is another thing that makes me different from most IE coaches out there)

The last thing I want you to think about here today is how becoming an intuitive eater is actually your superpower when it comes to managing your health:

• noticing how foods make you feel after you eat them (not just how they taste)
• honoring hunger while honoring gentle nutrition
• body awareness of what your body is telling you
• sustainable nutrition changes
• flexibility
• self-trust
• working with your body instead of against it
• Leveraging gentle nutrition as self-care, rather than trying to micromanage and control your eating by throwing out all of your “junk” food and telling yourself you can’t have sugar anymore.

Wrapping Up

Next time you find yourself thinking, “I need to go on a diet for my health.” or “IE is making me unhealthy.” or “What diet fixes this?” – instead I want you to get curious with yourself:

• What is my body telling me?
• What does the evidence actually say?
• Which changes feel realistic?
• What can I do consistently for the next five years?
• What support do I need?

And from there we can experiment with some changes, see how your body responds, and continue to adjust accordingly. 

This will require you to tolerate uncertainty, fear and discomfort – which is an ESSENTIAL skillset for IE to work. Otherwise you’re going to stay stuck in that pattern where you feel fear and discomfort and you either numb it w/ food or you run back to dieting.

The women I coach aren’t looking for someone to hand them another meal plan. They’re looking for someone who can help them separate legitimate health concerns from diet culture fear.

I help my clients:

• interpret health information without catastrophizing
• make realistic nutrition changes
• protect their food freedom, so they can still eat ice cream when they want it, and Friday night pizza with their family
• improve health markers and honor their health needs
• stay out of the restrict-binge cycle
• Ultimately rebuild trust in themselves and their ability to take care of their bodies in ways that are 1) effective and 2) sustainable.

You don’t have to choose between your health vs IE….you can have both.

Enough already with assuming that going on a diet and losing weight will fix all your health problems. 

Enough already with jumping to the conclusion that IE isn’t healthy for you, when you might just need to make some gentle nutrition adjustments (or you might be making mistakes with IE that are causing it to not work like it’s supposed to).

Enough already with thinking of it as choosing your health vs choosing IE when they can coexist together. 

You can get healthier without punishing or hating yourself.

And in case nobody has told you today – you already are ENOUGH ALREADY as a person and in your body. We’ll talk again soon.

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