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I think this is super interesting, this anti diet movement episode.

Mm hmm. I do, too. I heard a little bit about it every once in a while. Will say something in one of our listeners will write in and be like, hey, you guys shouldn't be saying that. Or you guys shouldn't be talking about, you know, trying to lose weight or something because it shames other people indirectly. Like, you should check out the anti dieting movement. So all of you people who've ever written in with the suggestion for that, this one's for you, because I believe all of you are the ones who who brought that to my awareness.

Yeah.

So the anti diet movement is a response to there's a lot of pieces to it and we're going to we're going to go over all of them. But it's a response to diet culture in the world, especially in the United States, and a response that basically says we don't think diet culture is healthy, literally healthy for your physical health and also not healthy for your mental health and for the well-being of an individual. We don't think diets work. We think we have proof and studies that show diets don't work.

And we think that there's a better way, which is to accept food as something that is to be enjoyed and accept your body. And there's a lot more to it than that.

But that's sort of the broadest stroke in society, goes what I tell you, man. It's when you look at how we are.

You know, I don't want to be brainwashed, is too strong of a word, but how humans and Americans are brainwashed into thinking there is only one way right to live and only one way to live that way. Right. It's pretty interesting and hard to undo.

And there's and for all of us, every single one of us in America, and I would guess in most of the West as well, are subject to kind of this two pronged attack about weight. One is the idea that you just don't look as good when you're overweight and then to the idea that you're not as healthy when you're overweight. And this anti dieting movement rejects both of those. Yeah, they so their whole thing is and it's really it's worth kind of restating here because it's tough to wrap your head around because of the way that we've all been brought up for so long that the anti dieting movement isn't like, no, no, no, all you have to do is cut meat out and you're fine.

You can do everything else. There's nothing like that. It's not only not only don't diet, it's throw away your dieting books, stop following dieting. Blogs, reject that. The standard of beauty like this small, kind of vaguely underweight standard that we have in the West and stop listening to people, including your own inner voice. That's that that makes you feel ashamed when you crave or eat certain foods that all foods are on the table. There's no such thing as bad foods.

And you can just stop thinking about weight and food. Those two things can be decoupled for the rest of your life. You're free, basically is what they're saying. You're free. Go fly a little bird, go live your life. Stop thinking about being overweight.

Yeah. And it all comes down. And this might just some people may just think this is the craziest thing they've ever heard in their life. Right. But what they're saying is, is something called the you should embrace something called intuitive eating. Mm hmm. And this came around in the sometime in the 90s, there was a book written by Evelyn Trimbole and Elise Resh called Intuitive Eating Colen, a revolutionary program that works. And this is a nineteen ninety eight.

And this was basically the idea that we've been looking at. This cycle happened for years of restricting your food, getting on a diet, losing weight, gaining it back, sometimes gaining back even more weight, doing this over and over and over. It's not working. It's not good for people. It's not effective. It doesn't make you healthier to go through this weight loss and weight gain cycle. And you need to stop listening to these external controls, whether it's the media or your parents or your spouse or partner or yourself.

And you need to start listening to your body and eating what your body says to eat. And here's the important part. Stop eating when your body says it's full. Right, and so they kind of put all these things so intuitive, eating is kind of the central focus of anti dieting, but it's not one in the same. Anti dieting is a larger umbrella movement is the best word for it. That includes anti or intuitive eating, but it also includes a kind of a militant opposition to fat shaming of any sort of any kind, and also kind of believes that even kind of overtly believes that any weight loss goal is negative, that it's it comes 100 percent from that being brainwashed culturally.

So we'll talk more about the anti dieting movement in general. But like, we should really explain the principles of intuitive eating that that trouble inrush put together. And we should say one other thing, too. This is not a diet. So so when you're hearing these things, don't think and then you do this and you lose weight. Now that's out the window. That has nothing to do with this. This is about your relationship to food. And then number two, these people are no slouches.

Trible and Russia, both registered dietitians, which are certified regulated professionals who know what they're talking about with with nutrition and intuitive eating, is widely, almost universally embraced by dietitians and nutritionists as well. So it just kind of keep that mindset when you're hearing these ten principles of intuitive eating. Yeah.

And before we actually list the ten, it's worth pointing out that part of intuitive eating is part of the foundation, is the fact that they say, hey, listen, look at your kids when you're born and you're a little baby and you don't know anything, you're just a dumb baby and you grow up to be a dumb little toddler. Your body tells you when you're hungry and you eat and your body tells you when you're full and you stop eating.

And I see that with my five year old. I'm not hungry anymore. All right, stop eating.

It's that easy. And the argument for intuitive eating is that and, you know, partially the anti diet movement is somewhere along the way. We lose that as adults or as, you know, teenagers, even because of this onslaught from the media and from everybody talking about your weight, your weight, your weight and your health. And you've got to be skinny and we lose these we literally lose these biological triggers that say, when you're hungry, stop when you're full, those just go away.

And the idea is to kind of retrain your mind and body to get back to that state you were when you were a dumb baby, right?

Yeah, because I don't even know if it goes away. We're just trained by diet culture to ignore them.

Oh, they say it goes away. Yeah. No, no, I don't know if I agree with that one, but I, I but the, the but the key is, is that it's being one way or another we don't have that intuitively anymore because diet culture has come in and replace that with no pay attention to the calories or ignore the fact that you're hungry because you're limiting portion size. They're saying ignore that that advice. Right.

So here are the principles, the ten principles. The first one is we already kind of covered it to reject the diet mentality. Basically, it's just saying, you know, these these diets don't deliver lasting results and you've got to remind yourself of that. Right.

There's also the next one is honor your hunger. It's so sweet. They have honor in here a couple of times, but they're basically saying that when you are hungry, you should eat and you should pay attention to not only what your body is, the fact that your body is telling you you're hungry. So so go ahead and eat.

But what your body is asking for to now your body, it's important to say, is what they're saying to honor not you're sad. So go eat the ice cream. Right. Which comes later. That comes later. Yeah. What else Chuck. There's make peace with food. Yeah. That is basically unconditional permission to eat. Um, you know we're tempted by the Twinkies and the ice cream and stuff like that, and they're saying give yourself that permission because that's sort of one of the keys, is once you rewire your brain, you're not going to want the Twinkie for lunch because it doesn't have that allure.

And it's probably not going to make you feel great physically. And maybe you need to do that a couple of times to realize, oh, boy, I don't feel so hot after eating ice cream for lunch and only ice cream for lunch.

Exactly. Yeah. So so there's they're saying just like there's there's if you if you are on the couch or you like the story of some good should I should night they're saying get rid of this. Should I, shouldn't I. If you feel hungry in those Oreos sound good. You just get up and you eat Oreos without a second thought. That's the point of making peace with food, giving yourself. Permission to live like that? That's right, the next one.

Number four is challenged the food police, which can be everything from and your friends and family or partners to your own.

And I think many times your own inner voice is probably more than any anything that inner voice. And one of the things with the food police, too, is they can come about in ways that are much less direct then than calling them the food police. Sounds like food police. Sounds like somebody who's going to tell you to put down their Twinkie because, you know, a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. People who say stuff like that, other people, that's definitely food, police kind of stuff.

But that same kind of guilt or shame or reinforcement of feeling guilty or ashamed about food can come from people who are talking about their own dislike for their body or their weight, because it makes you kind of sympathetically trigger and examine your own, especially if that person is it maybe weighs less than you do, because if they're worried about their weight, well, jeez, that means you should really be worried about your weight or they're worried about eating that the grilled chicken on their Caesar salad and you're tucking into a chili dog.

Should you really be eating this? So the food police in this sense can kind of come from a number of different directions, defined the food police. Yeah.

The next one is respect your fullness. And this is a big part of it because they're saying eat when you're hungry, but they're not saying eat till you feel sick. Right. They're saying you need to listen to your body at all times when it's hungry, feed it and then maybe eat a little slower, maybe pause during that snack or during that meal and say, all right, buddy, or am I hungry now? Or I'm bored or stressed out.

And is that why I'm continuing to eat, like check in with yourself in the middle of a meal? Yeah. To see Buddy, do you need fuel right now or you know, it's something going on at work and this Twinkie makes it a whole lot better.

And so that kind of reveals like one of the big principles of intuitive eating, which is mindfulness. Sure. Like you're not supposed to just kind of zone out and watch TV while you're eating ice cream, because then you look down in way more ice cream than you've ever realized, which means that you didn't even enjoy that ice cream. You want to be more mindful when you're eating, in part not just to monitor how much you're eating, but to enjoy it more.

That's part of the whole thing as well.

And then for the next one on the list, in fact, is satisfaction. OK, hold on. I got one more thing about respecting your fulness. So there's this Confucian teaching that the Japanese called Hara Hachi Bu, which means Beliz 80 percent full, and that the kind of rule of thumb among Japanese people is that you eat until you feel about 80 percent full because then your food kind of expands your stomach and by the time you're done eating eventually becomes 100 percent full.

So you don't you don't overeat until you feel sick. And it's actually extremely satisfying. It just takes, again, that level of mindfulness.

That's right. And that number six was satisfaction, which is, you know, enjoy your food, assess that taste and the texture. And how does that feel in your stomach? Is it a gut bomb or does it feel good? Right, and I think also, Chuck, if you if you stop and think about a lot of the ultra processed foods that people have in America, you will find it doesn't make you feel very good. So I think the authors are aware of that.

Part of that mindfulness is going to lead you to a different some different kinds of foods than the ones that that people traditionally think of, that they're just going to eat when food when they don't feel guilty about eating food, you know. Right. Like, they sit back and they're like, no, no, no, go ahead and chow down on that ice cream. And then they sit back and go watch this right there.

I don't know if I'd be happy for a few minutes. And then they're going to be like, oh, I got a stomachache.

I think ice cream is exempted from that. I know I keep talking about ice cream, ice cream to find this thing in the world. It's all of ice cream a lot. But I think, you know, there's there's been plenty of stuff that I've eaten where I realized later that it's not actually good. It doesn't actually taste good. It's not actually satisfying. It actually makes me feel kind of bad. And then the icing on the cake of of you.

I love icing on cake. Disappointment. Yeah, icing and ice cream are exempted, but the icing on the cake of of just feeling kind of duped is that I probably saw an ad for that food within the last couple of days and the ad worked its mojo on my head. And that's why I ate it, not because I like it, but because the ad got me. And then the food itself is designed to hijack your limbic system. So I ate more and more and more.

But when I stopped and really thought about how it made me feel, it didn't feel good about it. I didn't like that food and I've actually given up Popeye's Chicken as a result. Very good. Yeah.

Honoring your feelings is the next one without food. You know, check in with yourself emotionally. How are you anxious. You lonely or stressed out. You mad like what are your food triggers and why are they there and try and resolve some of those issues without using the food? That's a big, big part of it. I think that is the part of it. Dude, I think most people who are overweight are overweight because they eat emotionally. Maybe maybe it's over confirmation by some huge stress eater.

Huge.

And I guess it's possible. I could just be presuming most people are like that. But I suspect that that is the key to all of it is if you can figure out that food is an addiction to you and that you're using it as an emotional crutch, that that will make you identify what you're actually trying to deal with or cover up or run from or make you make yourself feel better against using food. And that is the key to decoupling it.

And when you can do that, you can do all this other stuff, I would guess is just kind of like a cascade of easiness from that point. I think that's probably the hardest part.

Uh, number eight is respecting your body. And this is the idea that, you know, you want to love your body and accept your body and feel good about what what they call your genetic blueprint and the body that you have and maybe you were meant to have and having a realistic expectation about what you can and should look like. That's a big, big part of it.

The ninth one really kind of stands out to me to Chuck is that exercise. They're saying like exercise. But the thing to know about exercise is you don't exercise for weight loss. That's not what exercise is for. It's actually not that great for weight loss. It's good for improving your mood and making you feel better. And it can help with number eight, with you just respecting your body. You can just feel good about your body without even really losing any weight just from from exercising from time to time.

And they don't even say you necessarily need exercise.

They're just saying move more. Yeah. Don't be sedentary, which is a big one. But but that was a big life changing thing for me, too, is learning that exercise is not about weight loss. It's about boosting your mood and sense of well-being. Yeah, it feels good. It does. It feels really good. But if you do it to try to lose weight, it's very frustrating and counterproductive. And you'll eventually give up exercise probably.

And then the last one onto your health with gentle nutrition. And this is the idea that you're making food choices that you like the taste of, but also honored the health aspect. I'm sure you might want to have some cookies and chips from time to time, but focusing on those, you know, non processed foods that also do taste good, that's sort of the route that they suggest you go. Right.

So so that's that's intuitive eating. Although if you if you go back to number three, technically number ten could be canceled out. Like if you're just like now I really hate asparagus. I hate vegetables, I love Oreos. I'm just going to eat Oreos. They're like a. That's fine, as long as you're not feeling guilt about as long as you love your body, as long as you know you're listening to yourself and the cues your body is telling you whatever, that's that's just part of it.

It's it's go to town. Just love food and love yourself is kind of the message, which is a pretty, pretty good message that I think a lot of people want to hear and think. So you want to take a break and then talk about the idea that this is rooted in science.

Yeah, OK, we're going to do that eventually.

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All right. So intuitive eating. This has been, you know, sort of a new way of thinking that's come about over the last probably 10 or 15 years, maybe a little bit more. But it seems like it's really gaining steam in the last 10 or 15 years. And the idea is that there are all these bad buzzwords that we are sort of ingrained in us dieting, losing weight, getting healthy.

They've changed that to or changing from diet to things like getting healthy or it's a lifestyle change. And they're trying to avoid some of those earlier buzz words. But if you're an anti diet proponent, you're saying, you know what, this is all the same stuff. Just because you call it a lifestyle now and you're talking about getting healthy rather than losing weight or going on a diet, it's the same size. It's just in different clothing.

Yeah, it's here's the standard. And everyone needs to reach it no matter what. And that really flies in the face of this idea that that seems to be one of the tenets of intuitive eating and definitely of the anti diet movement, which is that every person has their own different basically genetic weight. Setpoint and that that is what your body is going to stay at no matter what. And if you try to contravene that set point, you might be successful for a little bit, but probably the vast majority of people are going to suffer a relapse, I guess, and they'll gain that way back over time.

Give them enough time. They'll gain that way back. And then the problem is they might even gain even more. And so there are some diets out there that have been demonstrably shown to work, like Weight Watchers now called W-W, like Jenny Craig, now called Jenny Craig. Still Jayce, although I didn't know is Australian. So I guess it should be Jenny Craig. How is that? That's great. I don't think it is great.

I thought all of a sudden I was talking to Russell Crowe.

Right. So those have been shown to work. The problem is this, that you are signing up for a lifetime of paying attention to what you eat. Like that's how it works. Like you don't work, but you have to keep it up for literally the rest of your life if you want to keep that weight off. So and then other diets just don't work at all or they'll work temporarily, but then you just go right back and then you gain some weight.

And they seem to have figured out, at least according to intuitive eating dieticians and anti dieting movement proponents, that there seems to be some biological response by the body to dieting. And it's almost this comedy of errors that just makes everything even worse when you try to diet.

Yeah, I mean, the idea is, you know, with any diet, pretty much you're restricting food in some way, whether it's a kind of food or the amount of food. Right. There is almost always going to be some amount of hunger involved, even though they all say, like with this diet, you'll never be hungry again. They all say that. But that's sort of the idea with any diet is you're restricting yourself. And anti diet proponents say, you know what, when that happens, your body is wired to want to eat and survive.

And when you're consuming less food, energy, that's going to create that energy deficit. And that's when you're going to be burning those fat stores and that is how you lose weight. But your body is also going to trigger a biological starvation response. That is going to mean you're going to fail eventually because your body's saying, I got to eat. I think I'm I think I'm lost in the middle of the woods all of a sudden and go eat.

You're hungry. You're hungry. Yeah. You're more hungry than you would have been. Right.

So this can very, very easily lead to binge eating because you're not just hungry. You're you're hungry at this point. Yeah. And so when you finally do give in and start to eat, you're going to eat more than you would have if you were just plain hungry. Right? Right. That's a huge problem with it. But it seems to be even more more nuanced than that. And that the body seems to to inner basically kind of starvation mode where once it does manage to get you out of that starvation response, where it does get you out of that diet and back into eating, what you've just done is, is scare your brain, it seems like.

So where your brain says, well, I I didn't realise that food scarcity was going to be an issue in our lifetime. So now that I realise it is, I'm going to take that point of adiposity, which is the amount of fat you would generally store on yourself. I'm going to inch it up a little higher so that that my person. Can store more fat because we need to make sure that if this ever happens again, we have plenty of energy stores.

So when you come out of dieting, you can actually gain more weight than you had before because of that, because of their adiposity set point being increased. And then as a result, as a response, you end up dying in your brain says it happened again. So your adiposity set point might be even higher. And so you'll gain even more weight back. And it's a phenomenon that we're just starting to understand that I can't tell if it's just theoretical or an interpretation of evidence, but a term I've seen for it is called diet induced obesity.

And it's just fascinating to think that dieting can actually make you heavier than you would have been if you hadn't decided at all.

Yeah, I mean, here's a thing I don't think we mentioned yet.

When your body goes into that biological response that says, oh, boy, you've got to eat now, it's also saying you've got to eat something that's really high in calories, like don't reach for the Triscuit friend. You need that pimento cheese on white bread, which.

Yeah. Yeah, palmetto trees, you ever have that stuff? I've got some of my friends right now, buddy, and that's the best, it's hard to go back to anything else.

To be honest, I don't even know there was anything else anymore, although it's really, really good.

There is a listener who makes Queen Charlotte pimento cheese out of Charlotte, North Carolina. Is it good if it's Queen Charlotte? It's extremely good, yes. It's like high end pimento cheese. But it's it's not like snooty pimento cheese.

It's like really, really good. Pimento, dear, do you get the palmetto? Do you get the Lapine or bacon or just the plain.

Just the whole opinion. Oh OK. Yeah. No I've not had the bacon. I'm trying not to eat pig. Yeah. Not for any, any health reasons but just because they're supposed to be really smart. Yeah.

I mean I don't get the bacon because Emily doesn't eat it and I don't, I just get the plane.

I don't get the help you know either because I don't look super hot things although and it's not that hot, it's it's becoming really apparent that Emily and I are basically one in the same person.

I have drawn up divorce papers for that reason. I mean, that's from her or me. We can get divorced. Okay.

All right. So we what were we talking about? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So your body wants even like high high calorie foods to pack that weight back on and it's going to pack up more than last time because you've scared it into thinking that it's going to possibly run into food scarcity again. So that's what you're doing, is you're basically forcing your body into starvation mode to lose weight. But your body responds by saying, like, I'm two steps ahead of you, you're not going to win this game, and then you're eventually going to keep gaining more and more weight back and dieting more and more.

And here's the other big part of it, too, Chuck, is that you're going to end up on this disappointing treadmill where you've wasted all this time and energy and emotion into something that's just going to frustrate you. The anti dieting people just say stop.

Well, which could trigger what leads you to eat to begin with, which is stress and anxiety. Right. About your weight. Right. And then there are people like Kirstie Harrison, author. She's a podcast author of Food Psych and author of Anti Diet. Coolen, Reclaim Your Time, Money, Wellbeing and Happiness through Intuitive Eating. Kalanchoe She's also a registered dietitian so she knows what she's talking about too.

Yeah. So she says, you know what this your nutrition, your physical activity, smoking, alcohol, any kind of behavioral health determinate is just about 30 percent of your overall health anyway. And you know, people hang everything on this like that, like an ideal weight. Ideal weight means I'm healthy. And of course, you think people should quit smoking. I'm not saying, hey, go out and smoke anyway, but there are people that say all of this stuff combined is only about 30 percent of your health.

And I'm sure your genetics have a lot to do with it. Somebody may somebodies anxiety and stress level may be so high that they have, you know, a steel cable running through their body at all times. And they may be thin, but they may drop dead from that heart attack in their forties because they're not addressing other factors in their life other than food. Right. And it's kind of rich, too, for the diet culture to be like, well, what about health?

What about health? Because there's some pretty unhealthy diets out there. I ran across a few that have come and gone over the years and then sometimes are revived. Have you heard of the Sleeping Beauty diet? What's that? You take a nap every time you're hungry.

You take sleeping pills at night so you sleep longer so you're not awake to eat.

Oh, don't forget DLO meal, which wasn't necessarily bad, but it was definitely calorie restrictive. Richard Simmons, very colorful, cute little cards or something. Yeah, the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet, which was very 70s, severely in the cabbage soup diet and realize this dates back to the fifties. And after that, the thing is it's calorie restrictive. So you're entering that that's that's that's starvation response. And it'll work if at first it's just you you eat more when you finally get to eat again.

And then there's this one is I just can't believe this. This is a real thing, Chuck. The feeding tube diet. I didn't even want to look that up. I did, and it's exactly what you think. Yeah, I figured the doctor, a doctor, OK, I guess a doctor Nick type fit you with the nasogastric tube that delivers about 800 calories of nutrients directly to your stomach. And under the severe calorie restriction, you will shed the weight.

But again, you're going to gain it all back and then some probably when you start eating again.

So when do you that that's still going on, really? Yes. So the idea that you that not dieting is unhealthy is awfully rich coming from people who undertake some of these extraordinarily dangerous diets, like you can get a kidney infection from that feeding tube diet, like a lot of stuff can go wrong. But there are some things that that do exist in the world that you have to kind of consider. And one of them is the obesity epidemic, which is tough to get around.

But astoundingly, the anti diet movement has been like, we got this.

Yeah. I mean, the anti Diyab diet movement says there is no public health crisis going on unless you're talking about the diet culture burn there like there is no obesity epidemic.

If you look at the average weight of Americans compared to the generation before, it's about six to 11 pounds more. And maybe what this has done, if you look at the BMI scale, which basically says there are three types of people or I guess four underweight, normal, overweight and obese, that might that's six to 11 pounds, which amounts to 10 extra calories a day over time. That might nudge you into a different category from overweight to obese or from normal to overweight.

But BMI and mortality are just and this is this is what they're saying is that that's causation.

Like we've we think we have evidence that shows that being obese and having a higher BMI doesn't mean you're going to die sooner, which is that's astoundingly contrary to the common sense, it seems like, or at least the common perception of the link between being overweight and being dead, basically. And apparently the the the the holy text of anti dieting seems to revolve around this 2006 study by a law professor named Kampo. So I don't know campus's first name, but Campos did a survey of the medical literature and tried to find the correlations between BMI and mortality and and seem to find that there actually is a correlation.

But it's not where you'd think that people who are in the overweight range or the low range of obesity apparently don't seem to have much more of a risk factor than anybody who's in the normal weight range.

As far as mortality goes, you have to get into the the the the far side of obesity and then the far side of underweight to get to where you're actually at risk of dying. So that's super contrary to to what most people think.

And again, there's this is a 2006 study by a law professor who the survey of the literature on nutrition and weight. And so you can take that as you will. But at the same time, if it is correct, it's still to me, I don't think it discounts everything, because if people have gained six to 11 pounds on average compared to just a generation before that, that's not terribly much. I mean, it seems like a lot, depending on how, I guess, inculcated into the diet culture you are.

But it it seems like that's taking a snapshot of something that we're still in the process of and then just saying, don't worry about it, because it's just this much not or how much more is it going to be? And is there danger if we reach that point, if everybody ends up like the humans in that in Walli, you know, and it's kind of akin to saying like, well, it's just the living room that's on fire right now.

There's the whole rest of the house is not on fire. Stop your moral panic about house fires. It's very similar to that. So I'm not saying that it's wrong and I'm not saying that it doesn't help the anti diet movement's ideas. But I think that just to say, like, bam, case closed is is a little glib. You're being glib, Matt, with that, but we say that in our household. That was when Tom Cruise and Matt Lauer interviewed Tom Cruise Scientology.

You're being glib, Matt, that is about as Tom Cruise. The thing you say is anyone's ever said.

And look what happened to Matt Lauer. Yeah, he got cruised, you want to take a break? Oh, my gosh, if we're not taking a second break, you know, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about the big elephant in the room right after this.

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So the elephant in the room is nutrition. I think this is the glaring thing that if you've been listening so far and and disagreed with a lot of the antidote movement, you're probably saying you can eat just Oreos just because it makes you feel good. You got to have nutrition. The body needs nutrition. And here's the thing. The body does need nutrition, but the anti diet movement says just unwire your brain on this moral judgment on food. And if you get too intuitive eating, you're what we're saying is listen to your body.

And if you eat these just Oreos for lunch, you're going to feel like garbage later on. Right. And if you're listening to your body, your body is going to tell you that it wants nutrition and it wants good vegetables and it wants Whole Foods. And if you're really in tune and you're really listening and you're not just saying, oh, well, I'm just going to give myself permission because I'm an antidote or to do whatever I want. And I may be doubled over in pain every afternoon from eating garbage food.

That means you're not doing it right. That means you're not listening to your body because your body will crave nutritional health.

Right. You're just being a smart aleck at that point. That's right. So there's that's kind of like the big the big thing among registered dietitians and nutritionists basically says, like, you know, yeah, we're in favor of anti dieting and we're definitely in favor of people being body positive. There's something called healthy at every size that was founded by Dr. Bacon of all people in a healthy at any weight or is it any size, any size, size, health at every size?

That's right. Linda Bacon back in 2010. And so most most dietitians and nutritionists like, of course, we're all very much in favor of that. But like nutrition is important. And I'm sure there's some people out there like, yeah, you would say that you're a nutritionist, but it is there's just I just think that there's no getting around the idea that you need healthy Whole Foods. I think the problem is the anti diet movement says that sounds awfully close to there's such things as good foods and such things as bad food.

Right. And we reject that outright. Yeah. The nutritionists are saying, no, there really is such things as foods that are better for you and your body and are going to make you feel better when you eat them then other foods. So technically, sure, there is such thing as good and bad foods of that sense, but not shame. It's just this is going to provide more benefits for you than this.

Yeah. And, you know, there is a real danger, too. And the people that are, I guess you would say, against the antidote movement say like, listen, we can't let this thing we're all for body positivity, but we can't let it go so far in the other direction that your diet shaming and you're saying, you know, you shouldn't eat like you were saying, you shouldn't seek out nutritional foods. Like don't let the pendulum swing so far in the other direction that you're brainwashing people into thinking that they can just eat garbage all the time and be healthy.

I don't get the impression that that is super prevalent among anti diet movement. I don't think it is. I think it's more that seems to be targeting any kind of weight loss. And that seems to be a division in the anti diet movement itself. Right.

To where if you if you want to lose weight or even if you don't say you want to lose weight. But it's evident that you did. There's a model named Ashley Graham, who was a full figured Sports Illustrated cover model a couple of years back, and she like lost a few a few pounds, but is still definitely plus size and full figured and proud of it.

But she she she faced a huge backlash as a result of that, where people were like, I'm not a fan of yours anymore because you lost you lost weight and you've betrayed us all. So there's there's this division between well, no, I feel better when I shed a couple of pounds and I have no problem with with wanting to shed a couple of pounds. And the other side is like, you can't even think that way. That's diet, culture, brainwashing you.

We reject that. And we reject you basically, too. And so it's just the Internet's been injected into it, which is the problem is what it seems like.

Right, because people should be able to make their own decisions on their own bodies and how they feel best suits them without being piled on on the Internet and on either side.

And I and I get to also that people are like, well, know that like when you talk about that stuff, it makes me feel shame. It triggers my shame. But the problem is, is like you, you can't control other people. You can only control yourself and your response to other people and forcing other people to behave in a way that makes life. Easier for you is not how things work, like you have to just focus on yourself and your own response and your own positivity so that it is strong enough and robust enough that it can withstand hearing other people talk about how they wish they could lose some weight and be like, you know what, I don't anymore.

I'm truly body positive. I truly love my body. That would be the true body positivity that people are trying to achieve there. And it would solve the problem of fighting infighting among people who agree on almost everything else, you know. Yeah.

And it's you know, it's a it's so hard wired. It's really hard to undo. It takes a lot of work. There was a study in twenty seventeen of intuitive eating among retired female athletes, and they said they felt very liberated. And when they, you know, made that shift to food freedom for lack of a better term. But they said it quote, Nessa's necessitated an effortful process of recalibration during which athletes had to relearn and reinterpret their bodies, physiological signals of hunger and society.

So like I was saying earlier, how that, you know, you you lose these signals from when you were a baby, that you a lot of work has to go into relearning those signals. And these are from these female athletes. And this isn't necessarily the same thing. But there's a big movement now among former NFL players to get their health back into shape.

And there's a long list of these men who have come out saying the NFL like kills you, the weight that you have to keep on the amount of food that you have to eat to be, you know, an offense or defensive lineman. And the before and after pictures of some of these guys that are like six, four or three twenty on the offensive line that are now like six four to twenty five. Wow. It's unbelievable. And they're just like, I've never felt better in my life and I can walk around now and I don't feel like I'm, you know, carrying a sled behind me right now because the NFL is just like numb.

And you got to you got to weigh three hundred twenty five pounds if you want to be on the line.

Yeah. And then I think also the opposite way is for people who are in sports and have to be severely calorie restricted. You're basically taught to have an eating disorder, right. That you have to unlearn when you stop playing sports, too. So it kind of goes both ways. I think the key here is for everybody, for athletes, for everyday people, for people who are overweight, underweight, the the the cross that all of us are bearing.

If you'll allow me to get a little religious of my metaphors here is that we all have to stop being so obsessed with food and how we we look in our weight. And it's just we're all almost all of us are on the same road together. And it's good to remember that we're on it together, traveling together, stop squabbling with one another.

I definitely honor my hunger. You got anything else? I got nothing else.

OK, thank you for listening, everybody. We hope this helped. We hope it didn't set anybody off. If it did, email us, let us know we apologize in advance. That was definitely not our intent.

And since we said that it's time for listening to me, I'm going to call this Axe Murder and Family or axe murdered family. Hey, you guys are the best. I stumbled upon your moccia. That ain't just t podcast a few weeks ago and a been down and stuff you no rabbit hole ever since.

Well, welcome to the show, Jenny. Yeah, welcome. Love hearing about new listeners. Right.

Most recently I've been really into your shows about axe murderers.

They're fascinating. And get this, I've discovered that members of my own family were killed by an axe murderer or two and the eighteen hundreds. Wow.

There's a whole book about it titled Murder Along the Muscarinic Kong. Murder Along the Misconnection.

I thought it was more yeah. They're called the infamous change water massacres of eighteen forty three. The Kassner family, which is my family line, was sleeping one night when two men who were attempting to rob them came in and murdered the mother, uncle and two year old sister with axes.

They had lured the father outside, killed him and threw him in a ditch right before that.

What's amazing is that there were two survivors, little JP and his older brother, Victor, who were asleep on a cot behind the doorway. The murderers had no clue the boys were there and they were left unharmed and slept through the whole thing at six and 10 years old. Wow. What's interesting is that I'm not sure if the two men convicted were killers were the killers.

More than two other men were originally arrested. So it's kind of sketchy. You guys should check it out. Thanks for all you do. You're a comfort, especially during this strange season. That is from Jenny Fernande.

Thanks, Jenny. That's awesome. We're probably just Farnan I guess.

I like Faade. The Destroyer, the mar a drinker.

Thanks. We appreciate you listening. Can you imagine those two boys, six and 10, being like, hey, who's up for pancake when they wake up it too soon? It's an 18 34 murder charge.

And the other one says, no, I'd rather have waffle. Oh, boy.

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