Welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body, it’s Katy here, and I’m so honored that you are listening. 

If you’ve been around for a while, you might have noticed I have new podcast cover art – and I’m obsessed with it! You guys voted and I absolutely love the one you picked – it feels so fresh, and fun yet bold, and it really captures the energy of this show and what it’s like to be in my world right now. 

And I have to say….I’m fired up. This past week I’ve had some really interesting and disturbing encounters with diet culture on social media in my comments section on some of the videos I’ve posted, and as troubling as it is, it only fuels my fire for what we are doing here and this movement we are creating against diet culture. 

ENOUGH ALREADY with all the diet culture BS. 

And I want you to keep remembering that YOU are ENOUGH ALREADY as you are. 

Diet culture wants you to feel inadequate, unworthy, and once you feel that way, you’re right where they want you to be – so that you’ll buy into the diet programs, the books, the supplements, the diet pills, the fat loss meal plans, the get a flat belly coaches…all of it. 

And it’s all SO LOUD right now in this era that we are living in where extreme thinness and heroin chic are being glorified. 

You’ve got to protect yourself, and be aware of what content you’re consuming and what messages you’re buying into, and what articles you’re clicking on. 

Health misinformation is EVERYWHERE. It’s rampant. And it’s a major issue, that can cause you to not only waste so much time, energy and years of your life chasing empty promises about how if you just take this metabolism booster supplement, or mix this magic powder into your water, or follow the right diet or exercise plan you’ll become skinny, healthy and happy – but the health misinformation is even more problematic than that. It can be life-threatening, which is the perfect segue…

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: Vitamin K shots for babies

The internet has convinced people that the vitamin K shot that newborns are given at birth is not only unnecessary but dangerous. And of course parents who are reading and hearing this are going to be skeptical and not want to do something that could harm their child or cause unnecessary suffering.

But here’s the problem – not only are vitamin K shots for babies safe, they can be life saving. 

There’s a great episode of the podcast called This Podcast Will Kill You that’s hosted by a medical doctor and an epidemiologist, and they break down all sorts of interesting medical and health things, and they recently did an excellent episode on vitamin K so go listen to that if you’re interested to learn more. 

At the top of their episode they shared a story from a mom who didn’t have her daughter named Olive get the vitamin K shot, and Olive developed a brain bleed and had to have an incredibly risky surgery at 1 month old. Luckily she survived, but some babies don’t. 

And it’s entirely preventable.

Babies are born without adequate vitamin K stores in their body because it doesn’t get transferred from mom to baby. One of the main ways that our bodies get vitamin K is actually from our gut bacteria – the bacteria make it for us. Well when you’re first born you don’t have well developed gut bacteria yet. And breast milk doesn’t have much vitamin K, and while formula does it’s not enough to count on as a safe alternative.

Vitamin K is essential because it helps your blood clot. Without it, you can bleed out because your blood won’t form the clot or scab that acts like a bandaid and you just keep bleeding. 

The vitamin K shot at birth is a quick poke, and then it’s stored in the liver and the liver can release it slowly as needed.

Some countries use an oral version of vitamin K, but that’s not approved in the US, and it’s not as effective as the injection.

So to sum up the myths around this:

• social media often conflates the shot with vaccines because it is an injection But it’s not a vaccine—it’s a vitamin supplement
• Fear of side effects – decades of research show it’s safe and has almost no side effects
• Cancer myth – it’s been debunked with strong studies showing there is no link
• The breast milk is enough myth – IT’S NOT
• Delayed cord clamping – some people believe that leaving the placenta attached longer will transfer enough vitamin K but it doesn’t, because placenta can only transfer very low levels of vitamin k and it’s not enough

The vitamin K shot is one of the safest most effective medical interventions we have. The risk of brain bleeding, brain damage and death is very real. This is why take such a hard line against Wellness Woo and misinformation because sometimes it’s silly, and sometimes it’s literally dangerous.

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

Ok, that’s enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic…Feeling Discouraged, Scared and Stuck With Intuitive Eating…You Need to Listen to This

• WHY you’re feeling…
  • Discouraged because you are having time figuring out intuitive eating, or you’re inconsistent with it. You do well with it for a while, but then you fall off track. (elaborate…)
    
  • Scared because you’re worried that you’re harming your health, or that you are going to gain tons of weight and be unhappy and miserable the rest of your life.
    • Our brain then catastrophizes this and tells us that you’re going to lose all your mobility, nobody is going to love you, you’re going to have to keep replacing your wardrobe over and over with a bigger size and you’re going to go broke buying new clothes.
      
  • Stuck because you know that dieting doesn’t work as a lasting solution, but this whole IE thing isn’t fully clicking for you either and now you don’t know what to do. You feel like you’re darned if you do, you’re darned if you don’t, and now you don’t know which way to turn.
    • You want to let yourself eat the desserts and chocolate – but you feel like you’re eating too much of it, and you also feel like if you tell yourself no it’s going to feel like you’re restricting or depriving yourself and then you might binge…
    • You know that IE isn’t about weight loss, but you were hoping deep down that you’d lose weight from doing it – and if that’s not happening you question if it’s even worth it.
    • You logically know that dieting doesn’t work, but you also wonder if maybe you need to just eat healthier, avoid processed food or cut out carbs – like you’re not officially dieting, you’re just eating healthier and making better choices, right? (The problem is that this will backfire just like dieting does…)
      
• Feeling this way (discouraged, scared and stuck) makes you want to:
  • Give up on IE and go back to dieting
  • Say screw it and just stop trying at anything because why bother
  • Go ask your doctor for a GLP-1 even though you don’t medically need it
  • All that this is going to do is keep you stuck in this loop that you’ve been in for decades. The way that you break out of it is by doing something different.
• What to do instead of giving up, going back to dieting or saying screw it
  • The first thing is to give yourself compassion. (Tender and then fierce…)
  • So fierce self-compassion, what I want you to do is slow down, step back and get genuinely curious about what’s not working for you and why you feel this way.
    • Ask yourself what you feel worried about, where you feel lost or confused, and what you wish felt easier or different.
    • You can also ask yourself how you imagine things would be different if you were crushing it with IE and you felt great about it. (and you’re not allowed to just say weight loss…)
    • Sometimes I’ll have my clients inside NDC visualize what their life would look like if they felt calm and confident about their body and their eating – what would they eat for breakfast, what would they wear, how would they carry themselves, how would they talk, what would they eat for lunch, how they would approach their health and movement, and how their life would be different than it is right now if everything felt like it was working. This will often pinpoint the areas where things aren’t quite working, AND it often helps them to see that they can start embodying this NOW and they’ll actually start feeling better and doing better w/ IE as a result of that vs waiting to feel this way until they let themselves embody it.
    • If you’re not sure how to figure out what exactly isn’t working for you or what you need to do differently, I actually have Mini IE Audits where I ask you a series of questions to uncover what is keeping you stuck and I give you direct guidance on what you need to do to get unstuck. These audits are only $10 so if you want to grab one just email or DM me the word AUDIT.
  • The most important thing here is that you are getting curious instead of giving up when you feel frustrated and discouraged.
    • The curiosity is what will allow you to uncover what you need to do differently.
  • There will also be an element of “sitting in the suck” and tolerating the discomfort of what it’s like to be in the “messy middle” of this process.
    • If you can’t tolerate the discomfort, you’re almost guaranteed to get sucked back into dieting. You will convince yourself that IE isn’t working or it’s too hard, or it doesn’t work for people like you, and you’ll peace out. You HAVE TO recognize that discomfort is part of DOING THE WORK. It’s kind of like how you wouldn’t expect to climb a mountain or run a marathon and think that it is going to feel easy the whole time. You know that it’s going to be hard, and challenging, and that parts of it are going to suck. But it’s worth it in the end…that’s the same thing with this. It’s going to be HARD – but in the end you’re going to be so glad and proud of yourself. One of my clients inside NDC recently told me that this process has awakened a healthy part of them that they thought was dead, that I thought was long gone and would never come back, and that they are now filled with HOPE and they can see that they are healing their relationship with food and body image one day at a time. A wise therapist, Dr. Michael Barrett once said “Change happens as a result of pain + hope.” If you only have one and not the other you won’t experience change. If you’re listening to this episode you probably resonate with the pain part because of the title, and I really hope that this discussion is giving you hope – because i want it to normalize for you the way that you’re feeling, and show you that it’s part of the process, and you can use these feelings to guide you and help you uncover your areas of opportunity for what you need to work on…. And THAT my friend is how the work is done. 

I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you are feeling like you need more structure, and guidance, and strategy, and direct feedback on your situation, reach out to me. I’m offering those Mini IE Audits right now, and I’m currently doing enrollment in NDC where you get a bonus 1:1 Body Confidence Breakthrough call with me. There’s never been a better time to get inside my world with the level of coaching and support that you can get right now inside NDC and the incredible community that we have inside of motivated people who are doing the work, having deep and powerful conversations and who are constantly having powerful breakthroughs. Feel free to email or DM me about these options or to explore which of my offers is right for you. 

In case nobody has told you today – you are ENOUGH ALREADY. We’ll talk again soon.

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