• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

Nutrition Experts Podcast

A podcast about nutrition experts and all they do for the world!

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Blog
  • News
  • Podcast
  • How To Podcast
You are here: Home / Archives for Intuitive Eating

Intuitive Eating

Nutrition Experts Podcast Episode 50 What Not To Do When You Want To Lose Weight with Elissa Lueckemeyer, RDN, LD

April 15, 2019 by matheaford Leave a Comment

Elissa Lueckemeyer RDN, LD is a registered dietitian and owner of Food 4 Success, LLC Nutrition Consulting in New Braunfels, Texas. She has a passion for spreading credible nutrition knowledge and helping individuals improve their relationship with food for long-term results. Elissa enjoys being a wife, a mom, and creating educational online courses, blog articles, and recipes. She is also a really messy cook.

Mathea Ford [00:00:29] Hi there! It’s Mathea. Welcome back to the Nutrition Experts Podcast. The podcast featuring nutrition experts who are leading the way using food starts today right now with our next guest. It’s great to have Elissa Lueckemeyer on the show today. Elissa welcome to Nutrition Experts.

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:00:44] Thank you. Thank you so much for having me today.

Mathea Ford [00:00:46] I’m excited to have you on the show and share your expertise with my tribe. So, let’s start with letting you tell my listeners a little more about you and what you do.

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:00:55] So, I am a Registered Dietitian in New Braunfels, Texas and I am the owner of Food for Success LLC Nutrition Consulting and I formed that in 2015 and I seek clients all different kinds a lot of diabetes and weight loss, geriatrics, cancer, digestive issues. And it’s been an adventure it’s been really interesting. I started out in clinical so I’ve used that experience to kind of help me along with providing counseling and I graduated from Texas State University and before that I was in Oklahoma for a little while pursuing a ballet career but due to injury kind of switched over to dietetics because that always interested me. I’ve just found my passion in private practice. It’s been really fun and it’s always interesting and you learn a lot yourself. So, it’s been a been a lot of fun so far.

Mathea Ford [00:01:55] I always loved the outpatient private practice side as a clinical dietitian because you could continue to work with people instead of like in the hospital you see them maybe once maybe twice and help them kind of get started. But the out in the outpatient you get to kind of follow and see the progress that they can make. So, that makes you really think it makes it fun.

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:02:18] Oh definitely! I know when you’re in that hospital setting people aren’t always in the best mood to hear dietary advice at that time. So, outpatient you can really get them when they’re feeling better and more open to new information and it’s just so rewarding to see people have good results with their health in their labs and what’s on the scale. So, I really do like it too.

Mathea Ford [00:02:43] I know you said you see a lot of diabetes, weight loss and I think we all do deal with that in all different kind of realms but you probably have some opinions about you know and feedback about what most people are doing wrong when it comes to things like diets or weight loss. So, when people come in to your office, I don’t necessarily want to say you know they’re bad but the people are not bad. They’re just they’ve gotten bad advice maybe. So what do you see as that sort of things that are tripping people up?

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:03:16] So, yes I think probably one of the most common things that I see is people just focusing on carbs because as everyone probably is aware it’s all over the media. Low carb this note you know carbs make you fat. The Keto diet, Paleo, Whole 30 and even some of my clients come in and their doctors have told them they need to eat. I’ve even heard them say “don’t eat any carbs or you need to get on the keto diet.” And it just sets up a lot of anxiety and fear when it comes to eating carbs how much should I be eating and when I do eat I feel guilt about eating this maybe I really want this slice of pizza but I’m not gonna let myself have it because I can’t eat any carbs. And unfortunately the trend that I see in one of the reasons why they end up in my office is because the guilt just builds up over time and they feel deprived and they end up just kind of going overboard in the end and kind of have that mindset that “I know I’m not supposed to have it but I’m having it so I might as well have a whole pizza” that kind of thing and it’s really an unhealthy way to kind of look at your food and it’s definitely not very enjoyable and they’re not having the results that they want, they’re not losing the weight, they’re not having the improvement in their numbers. I like to have them at my office and we focus more on balance and portion control and that makes a big difference when when we can kind of get to that point where we talk about healthy carbohydrates and how to incorporate them in the diet properly. It just makes a world of difference and they’ll be like “wow! This was much more food than I thought that I could be eating but I’m still having results” and it’s really nice to see that when they they can get to that point.

Mathea Ford [00:05:15] So, how do you think the carbs that we eat in our diet got a bad rap?

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:05:20] Oh! I think it’s just kind of the the trendy thing right now I know like in the 90’s and the 80s it was everything low fat. You know fat was the bad guy. And now it’s kind of switched to carbs and I get that because you know a lot of the processed foods and fast foods are very carb heavy. And we have the diabetes epidemic. Yeah! It’s very understandable how that carb fear kind of came around and unfortunately it seems like now though that it’s kind of gone to the opposite extreme that well they’re bad in excess so we need to just not have them at all. I like to remind my clients that you know whole grains, fruits, vegetables those are all carbohydrates and we definitely need those in our diet for numerous reasons. It’s just finding the right portions of those and how they can fit into a balanced diet.

Mathea Ford [00:06:17] So, you mentioned balanced diet. Do you have a particular diet that you recommend with your patients or how do you work with them to eat healthier?

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:06:26] I wouldn’t say I’m a non diet dietitian because I do believe there are some instances where they may need a certain type of diet but for weight loss I really don’t like diets. I like to think of it more as behavior change lifestyle approaches learning how to improve your relationship with food mindful eating intuitive eating. That’s how I really approach it more and finding balance that no food group is bad that we all need them for different reasons. It’s just finding what’s right for that person as far as the portions of everything.

Mathea Ford [00:07:08] When you talk to somebody kind of where do they start and then where do you lead them to?

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:07:15] Usually what happens and it’s kind of surprising actually you would think that someone coming into it see a dietitian you know they’re eating too much of everything. And actually a lot of my clients when they come in I find out that they’re actually not eating enough and they’re not getting enough calories and that can slow your metabolism down and make it very difficult to achieve the health goals that they want to achieve. So, what I often do is we form like a meal plan. I teach them carbohydrate portioning and including healthy sources of carbs we go over that and we just kind of structure their meals and what the right amount of carbs from them for them. And once we get that kind of established, we can move on to the other macro nutrients, proteins, healthy fats but I find that once they get the idea of the right amount of carbs for for them and it’s actually usually a lot more than they were allowing themselves to have they find that they’re more satisfied, they’re happier, they’re not hangry, hungry and angry all the time and they actually will lose weight because in addition to exercise of course they are not finding these cravings that are so tempting for them to succumb to and they feel overall happier and more energy for our workouts and it really does make a difference.

Mathea Ford [00:08:43] So, you mentioned meal planning, you have any tips or guides for the audience about how you plan your meals?

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:08:50] I will sit down on usually on a Sunday and I won’t say I plan all my meals out because I’ll be realistic, I’m a mom of a four year old and an almost two year old so that doesn’t always happen but I’ll get my dinners going. I’ll plan out the week just with the dinners usually when I’m going to maybe make a bigger batch or something and maybe use leftovers for the next day and then from there I’ll formulate my grocery list from those dinners that I plan and maybe plan out my snacks or my kids lunches. What we’re going to do there. And then I will hit the grocery store or maybe do an online order if you have the luxury of that that’s always really nice and then go from there. I usually maybe cook the biggest meal on Sunday night so I’m kind of ready to go on Monday. Maybe do some prepping that is the most helpful and kind of staying on track during the week and it’s okay that if you have certain weeks things are just not working out and you may need to go out to eat one day if you’re planning ahead you’re still usually making better choices if you can get that kind of all scheduled beforehand.

Mathea Ford [00:10:03] So, you don’t necessarily plan like breakfast and lunch? You always just try to focus on having that dinner meal and then do you have some staples that you keep in the pantry to be able to have breakfast some lunch type foods?

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:10:14] I do. So, I always make sure I got my whole grains on hand, oatmeal and my rices things like that to throw together for maybe some pro teen veggie bowls and green bowls that kind of thing and my kids are definitely creatures of habit. They like either their eggs or yogurt in the morning with some cereal so I always have that on hand. Lunches I will say and this is a challenge for a lot of people and sometimes a challenge for myself too. At my grocery store they’re having some kind of a few pre-prepared meals where they’ll have like shredded chicken ready to go and I can throw that and lots of things in. But you can do that yourself at home too. Definitely just cook a big chicken chop it up and it’s ready to go for lunches and things like that. Yeah! I do like veggie case ideas. Those are really easy to throw together. Spinach, cheese, quesadillas things like that. A lot of minds pretty much kid focused right now.

Mathea Ford [00:11:17] Yeah that makes sense. My kids love the chicken like chopped chicken tacos or chicken salad sandwiches or anything like that. So, I see what you mean with the cooking old chicken. I’ve just started using it in instapot. So, we’ve made a few things in insta pot and then shredded the pork or the chicken and that seems to be good to last couple days. So.

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:11:39] Crockpot has become my dinner time hero for sure.

Mathea Ford [00:11:45] Yeah! It’s just nice and convenient and if you can make it healthy. So, basically you encourage people to kind of move not only to a more balanced diet but also more to home cooking right? So not so much eating out?

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:11:58] Definitely! I’ve had people ask me like if there is one thing that I can do to start eating healthier live a healthier lifestyle it’s family meals. I think it just all boils down to having a family meal. And taking your time, enjoying the meal, enjoying the company and just really savoring that time. And even if your food choices aren’t perfectly images of healthy food that you would see on Instagram or something if you’re still cooking that food from home you are just much more likely to have a more nutritious meal than something you would probably get out. I encourage people to atleast start there.

Mathea Ford [00:12:41] And where do you go to look for recipes you usually have like a bunch of cookbooks or do you go look online?

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:12:47] I do a lot of Pinterest and there’s just some amazing dietitian bloggers out there I’ll get their recipes from. I’m actually a big Better Homes and Gardens cookbook fan. Not all of their recipes are like perfect health images but I do my own little tweaking and stuff like that. They have some really good recipes in there and I actually recommend anyone who’s thinking about starting to cook more. That’s a great start is the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. So, that’s a great place to start. Pinterest, Better Homes and Gardens. I know Google and everything can get really overwhelming but you know if you have a protein in mind that you want to play with you type that in and Pinterest and it’ll it’ll hook you up with all sorts of good stuff.

Mathea Ford [00:13:36] Yeah I like the idea of making boards throughout the week and then you have ones you do and then the next week you still have more for later and Pinterest is a great idea. I love that. What other things should people do to try to eat healthier? I know you mentioned eating at home, cooking at home, having home family meals.

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:13:55] A lot of it I think comes down to portion control if there’s a lot of confusion on that. This is where seeing a dietitian can be extremely investment worthy to really get that down and find out what’s right for you. But other suggestions definitely would be you know besides cooking at home is kind of just take a look at your fruit and vegetable intake. How much of that are you getting a day? I know they like to preach that five a day rule but even if you aren’t at the five servings of fruit and/or vegetables a day and just kind of take a look at that and say “you know I’m hungry for a snack maybe I could squeeze in a piece of fruit there.” That can make a huge difference just doing the lower calorie fruits and vegetables in your diet. And I know that their carbs but they’re good carbs and they’re doing lots of good things for your gut. So, I’m just kind of sliding those in being more active too. I know that we’re talking about diet here but they really go hand-in-hand and you got to eat well and play hard and sleep good. That’s kind of the 3 keys to really good health.

Mathea Ford [00:15:13] So you mentioned portion control. Do you have any guides for people who are listening that might be wondering like how do I know what is a portion?

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:15:24] The American Diabetes Association has a great great resources on carb counting things like that to get you started. You can get information about dietary exchanges there and then also the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has some resources too, the American Heart Association has some resources on diet and a lot of great recipes too by the way. That’s another good source. That’s probably a good start. I just want to encourage people to make sure that when they are looking up this information to make sure that they’re finding it from a reputable source because there’s a lot of misinformation out there as everyone’s probably already aware. Things that end and maybe .org web sites like that maybe more reputable like American Heart Association diabetes.org things like that as opposed to some other websites.

Mathea Ford [00:16:20] Well, definitely you can look at the about page on a website and see if the person who’s writing it is a dietitian or a knowledgeable expert. Are there foods that you encourage people to avoid when they’re trying to lose weight? You know I know I don’t like to do No foods like none of this, none of that. You know absolutes.

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:16:41] Well, kind of like you say I like to think all foods can fit and I like to practice mindful intuitive eating practices and all that is is just really learning how to enjoy your food if you have kind of more of an indulgent item you really sit and enjoy it. You practice enjoying it without guilt because the guilt is just a terrible motivator to do better. I like to say that all foods can fit but of course you know you want to make more often good choices and so I like to just say try to avoid foods out of a like food mix if this out of a box because that tends to be a lot of excess sodium and fan stuff whenever you can make from home from scratch instead. That’s always better. An example of that is like maybe a box of instant potatoes you can make mashed potatoes at home and it’ll be ten times less sodium than what you find in there. So, I tend to say you know avoid a lot of the highly processed foods and try to switch more to recipe investigations and things like that to kind of find out what you can make at home too.

Mathea Ford [00:17:57] So, how do you help people who are like “I don’t cook. I don’t have time to cook.” What do you say to those? Because I’m sure you get it a lot.

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:18:04] I have some resources for them to find some very beginner cooking classes. And also I tell them just experiment. If you have a recipe in front of you and you just play with it. Follow the instructions exactly. You can put together something you would actually be surprised. Aside from those who may not be able to cook there’s a lot of people that don’t have time to cook either. And we just kind of talk about strategies for time saving measures, batch cooking things like that, finding easy recipes and then we also talk about for those who just you know they have to eat out, get food to go, we find healthier options at those restaurants. Sometimes it might be come combining appetizer items, salads and soups and things like that to get a little creative there and asking for dressings on the side so you can control that gravy is on the side.

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:19:05] So, there are ways around it where you can eat a pretty healthy diet depending on your grocery store too. There’s a lot of pre prepared meals there that you can just literally throw it in your oven and you have a healthy meal. It just kind of depends on what area you’re from and what resources you have there. But I definitely encourage everyone if they don’t know how to cook maybe try out just a beginning cooking class and give it a shot because it can just make a world of difference in your health.

Mathea Ford [00:19:37] Yeah I like the idea of time shifting. So, if you’re like you don’t have time after for me for example I come home from work at 5:00. The kids are home everybody’s hungry and then I don’t want to spend another hour cooking food. You know you mentioned batch cooking, you can cook some stuff ahead. You can assemble things ahead when you have more time maybe on the weekends you pre chop your veggies you do that kind of thing and if your kids get a little older teach them how to put something in the oven to cook or whatever and I like that idea because we think I don’t have time in that moment when I get home to cook for another hour because I’m already tired vs. what can you do to you know before that to make it work. And I also love the idea of looking at the menu and doing the appetizers because we always just look straight at. Well, maybe people look at appetizers for before their meal but you don’t necessarily think of appetizer as a meal. But there’s probably a thousand calories in an appetizer. You’ll want to add that on top of the other food. And I know a lot of restaurants now especially if they’re national have the calorie counts. Whether you’re counting calories at least it gives you a check to say “oh! I didn’t realize that when you really had that much calories. Maybe I should get a smaller portion.” So I love those ideas. Those are great.

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:20:58] Oh! And like with crockpot cooking too. If you don’t really know how to cook very well. They have lots of dump recipes on Pinterest where we literally you just get the ingredients and you dump them in the pot and you close the lid and you forget about it for eight hours. So, that’s another solution too.

Mathea Ford [00:21:17] Obviously, you want to put some effort into your health if you’re trying to lose weight you’re doing it for the right reasons. There’s going to have to be some effort. You’re going to have to change. You have to become a different type of person than you are today to change. You have to change some habits. And like you mentioned eat a little slower eat family meals cook a little bit. I love those ideas. I think the thing that I struggle with as a dietitian is the fact that our society is just getting more overweight. We’re having more health problems and I’m chipping away at it over here with a little bit at a time one person or two persons or group classes at a time. But why do you think that’s happening?

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:21:57] Our fast paced society is one of the biggest culprits. Just we have so much on our plate, high stress levels which produces more cortisol which makes us all heavier. You know not having time for family meals, a lot of times eating on the go maybe choosing options that aren’t the best just out of convenience because we don’t have the time to really put into our health. I really think that’s one of the biggest problems. I think if everyone in a perfect world had time to cook meals for themselves, haave the family dinners. We would all be a lot healthier and a lot less stressed out. But unfortunately I know that’s just kind of a dream at this point for everyone. But we all have lives, we all have kids we’re trying to rush around and it gets really hard. But I think it comes to a point or you know you just have to sometimes prioritize you and your family’s health and make time for some of these family meals and make time to kind of read labels and go to the grocery store and do your research and it’s not a very satisfying answer, it’s not a very Instagram kind of sexy answer. You know it’s not a one solution but it’s really what it comes down to is just finding balance in your life, having time to eat with your family or just have at least time to cook something healthy for yourself.

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:23:33] Much easier said than done but I really do think that’s what it comes down to. It kind of always reminds me of that book. It’s an older book that French women don’t get fat and the whole philosophy is you know over in Europe they make a whole ordeal about eating. They take their time, they really enjoy the food, they practice mindful eating even though some of the foods over there are really rich in lots of full fat cream and things like that but because they have a slower paced lifestyle they tend to be a lot healthier. Not to mention they walk a lot more than we probably do but they’re just less stressed out they’re happier and they just seem overall healthier. So, I think that’s what we need to strive for over here.

Mathea Ford [00:24:18] I love those thoughts because I think when people are going for those right now it’s the carbohydrate fear diets, the Keto, the Paleo like you mentioned Whole 30. That’s a quick fix. It might give them results to cut out carbs because carbs are truly sugar. I mean not all carbs are sugar but a lot of the carbs we eat in our diet are from refined sugars or refined and processed foods and changing that you know cutting those out not necessarily completely but getting back to cooking your food and knowing what goes into it is a great thing. When I grew up we had family dinners and so I insist my family has family dinners so we all sit down and have dinner and my father lives with us. He’s like stressed for last like eight or nine years and when he came to live with us I said the “one of the conditions is that you have to always because he had lived. He lived by himself for most of his life. He said You have to come out and eat dinner with us every night. You have to be part of the family because at dinner we talk about ‘what did you do today? What did you..? How was your grades? How was school? Do you have homework? What are we doing this weekend?'” It’s more than a meal. You know it’s community. So, I think if we switch the way we think about it and not necessarily think about it as having to cook a meal and think of it as having family time together time to feed into that is definitely a benefit. So, I love that you encourage family dinners. So, what do you think this carbohydrate fear in cutting out carbohydrates? I know like you mentioned in the 80s and 90s we switched out where we hated all fat. So. Then we added a bunch of refined carbohydrate and made it okay to eat. What does this do into our health? You know when we cut out entire food groups like carbohydrates?

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:26:11] It’s funny because it’s so easy to say or give dietary advice and just tell someone “oh! Just cut this out and you’ll be fine.” That’s a very easy thing to follow. Well, not easy but it’s easy instructions to follow. It’s way way more difficult to tell someone and not definitely not as catchy or salesy to say. Well, just we need to find a balanced diet that’s definitely much much harder to figure out. I think what they kind of the convenience and ease knowing in the back of your mind “Oh! I just need to stay away from anything that has carbohydrates.” I think that’s why it’s become so catchy and and everything it’s just kind of easy to just look for that one thing. But unfortunately what happens is you have to fill that void with something and so that’s usually like what the Keto die and stuff that’s mostly fat. And I know that there’s still ongoing research about keto and its long term effects on health. But I will say personally what I see coming into my office is that people that are trying to accomplish really low carb diets they don’t have the best cholesterol numbers. And I know there are some studies that even suggest keto can be helpful in cholesterol but I personally haven’t seen that myself yet. There’s just not enough known about the long term implications of Keto. And since they’re eating such a high fat diet you know their cholesterol goes up. And they were coming to me for help on “Okay, my cholesterol is high now. I’ve lost some weight but my cholesterol is high what do I need to do now?” And that’s when I say “Okay. It’s time to bring back the fiber to get your cholesterol down and let’s find that healthy balance.” And fortunately when you eliminate a food group there’s going to be a void there and you have to think about well what you’re filling that void with? And like you said in the 80s and 90s we fill that void with refined carbs and now we’re kind of doing the opposite. But what we’re trying to find is a healthy balance of good food, complex carbs and so it’s definitely frustrating for a lot of people. And it’s frustrating as a dietitian too because you just want to help people find a good balance and some of these fad diets just kind of get in the way of that because it’s an easy sounding solution.

Mathea Ford [00:28:37] Like you mentioned it’s not a change. It’s not changing your lifestyle, changing what you’re doing so it’s hard to make it last long term if you’re seeing it as “I’m going to cut up carbs now and then when I lose weight I can eat all the carbs I want” not the game.

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:28:51] Yes. So I always ask you know for people that are wanting to attempt Keto or anything and I ask them you know “do you think this is long term maintainable? Can you go on for the next several months, years without eating a handful of blueberries because that’s going to throw you out of ketosis? So, that is just not really the case and when you do plan on stopping this super low carb diet what are you going to do then? How are you going to be eating then?” We want to prevent yoyo dieting. That’s just so harmful to our metabolism makes it so difficult to lose weight in the future. So, I’m definitely all for finding an improved relationship with food for long term results.

Mathea Ford [00:29:38] So, thinking about our listeners and people who are gathering this information. What advice do you have for them to implement what we’ve talked about in their day to day life? They might be dietitians talking to patients or they might be patients who are interested in nutrition information.

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:29:55] I just like to remind them when they are really looking at going super low carb is just reminding them all the benefits that carbohydrates have and a lot of people when they think carbs you know their mind kind of goes to pizza, donuts you know breads and stuff like that. But carbs are fruits and vegetables and whole grains and thinking about the benefits that those do to our body. I mean there’s more information even coming out about the gut microbiome and all the beneficial fiber and what that’s doing to our gut and they’re finding that’s more and more linked to our brain health. So. I could go on and on and on about the benefits of carbs. So, I think it’s just important for people to understand that they are not as bad as the media makes them out to be it’s just finding high quality ones. And that bread is not the devil. And if you’re eating whole grain bread and the right portions. That is okay. So, I’m here saying that you have permission to have bread. So, you know just eliminating foods like that can just set up a lot of disordered eating patterns and guilt. And that’s not what we want. So, just again reminding people the benefits of carbs and not feeling like they have to go crazy on carbs on the other hand. But following things like them My Plate model for for portion control that’s a good starting guideline. You know half your plates fruits and vegetables, a quarter grains and a quarter protein if you can kind of start thinking of your plate as that kind of balance vs. “No. I can’t have any kind of carbs at all.” I think that’s a really good start.

Mathea Ford [00:31:40] I love that advice. So, I always ask my guests what is your favorite food?

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:31:48] Oh man! I am an expensive date. I like a lobster. That’s my favorite food. I love lobster. All seafood pretty much. I’m from the coast so I love fish and shrimp and all the shellfish that luckily I don’t have that allergy. So and I will tell anyone out there that is not a seafood fan. If you’re not a seafood fan get really really fresh seafood a try because that makes all the difference in the world. I get it straight out of the water and eat it because I have a husband that hated seafood before I met him and I took him to a restaurant down on the coast where we got fresh stuff and I converted him. He really likes it now.

Mathea Ford [00:32:34] Yeah! Here in Oklahoma we don’t get too much fresh seafood. So, it’s harder but always when we go to like Alabama or Florida for vacation, we always eat a lot of seafood just because it’s fresh, it’s right there. Well, Elissa thank you so much for being on the podcast today. It was a pleasure to have you on the show. I know my listeners learned a lot about just rethinking the way that their way of eating is what I want to say I don’t want to say diet. I want to say way of eating. So, if listeners want to connect with you what’s the best way to do that?

Elissa Lueckemeyer [00:33:05] So, first thank you so much for having me on this show. This is an awesome opportunity. You can reach me on my website is food4success.com and you can also e-mail me at elissa@food4success.com. I’m also on Facebook. Same name Food 4 Success LLC, you can find me there I’m always posting stuff fun actually post a lot about carbs on there and I post recipes and things like that as well and on my website you can find my blog you can find our Food 4 Success e-learning platform that where we’re growing. Yeah! I encourage you to reach out I’d be happy to answer any questions.

Mathea Ford [00:33:49] So great! Well guys this has been another great episode of the Nutrition Experts Podcast. The podcast that is all about learning more so you can do more with nutrition in your life.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/renaldiethq/p/app.pippa.io/public/streams/5aba77b58bdf7ba53cccc618/episodes/5cb08cab3b4498fc106c6020.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Email | RSS

Filed Under: Blog, Podcast Tagged With: Balanced Diet, Elissa Lueckemeyer, Family Dinner, Family Meal, Home Cooking, Intuitive Eating, Meal Planning, Mindful Eating, Portion Control, Weight Loss, Yoyo Dieting

Nutrition Experts Podcast Episode 45 Never Binge Again with Dr. Glenn Livingston, Ph.D

March 11, 2019 by matheaford Leave a Comment

Dr. Glenn Livingston, PhD is a long time Bestselling Author and Chief Executive Officer of Never Ever Again, Inc., a company which specializes in helping people with eating problems to stop being eating and overeating, lose weight, and learn how to think like a permanently thin person on the diet of their choice. Previous CEO of two companies, presiding over more than $30,000,000 in consulting services in the marketing and advertising industry.

He is a strong human resources professional with a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Yeshiva University (1991). Also skilled in digital marketing.

Mathea Ford: [00:00:28] Hi there! It’s Mathea. Welcome back to the Nutrition Experts Podcast. The podcast featuring nutrition experts who are leading the way using food starts today right now with our next guest. It’s great to have Dr. Glenn Livingston on the show today. Welcome to Nutrition Experts.

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:00:44] Well thank you for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this Mathea.

Mathea Ford: [00:00:48] Yeah. So, today we’re going to talk about binge eating which is something I haven’t talked a whole lot about on this show. But I want to start with telling my listeners letting you tell my listeners a little more about you and what you do.

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:01:00] Well I guess what you should know about me is that I’m not just a doctor who decided to work with people that were struggling with their eating. I am someone that had a very difficult struggle of my own eating for a good deal of my life. All the way back to I was a weird kid with food. My mother used to give me a whole box of pop tarts for breakfast every morning and a whole box of Sugar Pops for lunch every afternoon. So, that was the way that I was brought up. I don’t think I saw vegetable until I was 16 or 17 years old. But I figured out that if I worked out a lot it didn’t matter at least it didn’t matter to my weight. When I was 17 or 18 I would work out two or three hours a day and I’d have six, seven, eight thousand calories every single day. Boxes of pop tarts, boxes of chocolate bars, boxes of pizza, boxes of muffins, boxes of donuts. I guess you could say like boxes and I was fine with it except for all the time that I was wasting. But I was spending a lot of time eating a one time recovering from food and a lot of time exercising. That lifestyle didn’t work for me when I was a little older and I got married and I had responsibilities and I was commuting two hours each way. I just couldn’t work out like that my metabolism was slowing down a little bit. I couldn’t stop eating the same way that I was. I found that I just got used to it and these foods had a life of their own. And I started gaining weight. And you know my top weight was probably around 280. I’m guessing I was telling you beforehand the number on the scale was 257 the last time I weighed myself because I got fed up with it after that. And worse yet my triglycerides were going through the roof. I know I had a test already a hundred and twenty six. I remember them being over 1100 in the doctor just flipping out saying look you’re going to die if you don’t do something before you’re before you’re 35 so you really just kind of figure this out. But I couldn’t I just kept on I’d be sitting with suicidal patients and I would be thinking when I kind of get my next pizza or a couple who just never recovered from an affair and it was really hard to be a home a hundred percent present to that. That bothered me a lot because I was from a family of psychologists and being a great psychologist was first and foremost what was in my soul. So, I tried to solve it in what you might expect the way a psychologist would try to solve it. I tried to solve it by loving myself. And I said “it’s not what I’m eating I must have a hole in my heart. And if I could fill the hole in my heart then I’ll be okay.” And so I went to workshops and eating disorder specialists and all the best psychologists and psychiatrists around Manhattan. I take medication. I went over just never miss. Everything you could imagine which was a very soulful journey which I don’t regret. But in terms of the results I get a little better and then I get a lot worse, a little better and a lot worse. Finally, there were three things that changed the paradigm.

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:03:57] It made me think that rather than trying to love myself fend, what I really needed to do was act like an alpha wolf in a pack who was being challenged for leadership by one of the pack members. I need to come to think of the urges is coming from a bodily organ and later I learned that it actually comes from the reptilian brain that in a minute but when you think about how an alpha wolf deals with a challenger for leadership it doesn’t say “oh my goodness! Someone needs a hug.” It says you know “get back in line or I’ll kill you.” Snarls and growls and “get back in line or I’ll kill you.” And I thought “well, that’s it’s not all that different than the urges that are generated by my bladder or my testicles” like these are very strong biological urges but I’m not in the middle of a conference where I just decide I’m going to pee. I’ll get up and go to the bathroom and express it in a particular way at a particular time. I don’t just run into attractive women on the street and kiss them. You know you have to approach them in a very particular way or not at all and restrain those urges because of the person you want to be in society right? So, I said “What’s the difference? Why can’t I just define what restraint actually means and take control?”

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:05:11] Two other things happened that made it really clear to me that that was a better paradigm than loving myself in. The first one was I read a book called The Rational Recovery by Jack Trimpey and he works largely with drug and alcohol addicts and he helps them to we called them black and white addictions are the things that you can give up entirely. It’s supposed to food where you have to take the full line out of the cage and walk around the block a couple of times a day. What he basically pointed out was that addiction comes from their reptilian brain and what I knew about neurology was that the reptilian brain doesn’t know love. The reptilian brain whether you want to believe it evolve this way or God put it there it doesn’t really matter. What it knows when it sees something in the environment is “do I eat it? Do I meet with it or do I kill it eat meat or kill. There’s no love there. There’s the sense of love that came later with the higher portions of the brain the mammalian brain that says “hey! Before you eat meat or kill that thing what impact does it have on your tribe or your family or those that you love? Or the neocortex. What we think of is a more human brain which says “we can really delay gratification to think about our long term goals and plans and what does this mean for the kind of person that we want to be for love and spirituality and music and art and who we want to be in the world, how we want to cooperate with society and fit in.” And so I realized that I had to think of my human identity as sitting in my neocortex and above the reptilian brain. And then that’s what I was in control. That the urges might be part of me but they really weren’t me. Just like my bladder is part of me and my testicles a part of me. But they’re not really made to everything that happened. I wouldn’t think a lot of consulting for the food industry.

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:06:58] I never had kids and I never commuted so I had a lot of time to do two careers and I consulted for big food and big pharma. I kind of wish I didn’t but I did and I knew that they were engineering, putting billions of dollars into engineering hyper palatable concentrations of starch and salt and sugar and oil and excitotoxins and basically these food like substances which are designed to hit our bliss points in the reptilian brain and not give us the nutrition we need to feel satisfied. Beyond that, they were putting billions into advertising and most people think advertising doesn’t affect them. But believe me it does. It affects you more when you think it doesn’t affect you because then yourselves resistance is down. And they’re depending on what study you look at between five and seven thousand messages beamed at us over the airwaves about food every day. The airwaves and the Internet every year about food and how many of them do you think are about eating more raw fruits and vegetables? They’re not mostly about eating more of these bags and boxes and containers and mechanisms of industrial profit. And I remember talking to a food bar manufacturer V.P. who explained to me that their biggest insight was to remove the vitamins from the bar and make the packaging look good instead because the vitamins were expensive and they made the bar taste not as good whereas the packaging could make people believe that it was healthier ever vibrance of colors and a diversity of colors and like a bright shiny packaging which in nature a bright shiny salad with green lettuce and red tomatoes and yellow carrots and purple cabbage that would signal a diversity of nutrients. So, I said “you mean you’re most profitable insight was to fake people out?” Can you kind of get a little sheepishly said “Yeah.” I don’t mean to single out the food bar industry because this happens all over the place. So, I said there are these very powerful forces the line against us. Addiction treatment industry is telling us that we can’t resist even if we wanted to. That these urges are irresistible and that you were actually powerless over them and the only hope you had was to admit that you were powerless over them and abstain one day at a time. And there is no evidence for that. There’s no evidence that that’s true. The evidence is more on the side that people can choose to abstain if they want to abstain. That addicts can restrain themselves if they want to. And the only scientific studies that were quasi scientific studies ever conducted about this addiction treatment suggests that it’s either at parity or worse than doing nothing at all. So, I said “Okay. So, there’s these immense forces aligned against us. Everybody’s telling me to love myself then I’ve been trying that for 30 years it didn’t work. If anybody would know how to love himself then it would be a psychologist from a family of 17 psychologists, you’ve seen all these psychologists right?” I said “here’s what I’m going to do. This is the embarrassing part. I decided that I was going to never going to publish this. This was this is just a private journal.” I said “my reptilian brain I’m going to call that my inner pig. I’m going to make a really clear line that delineates what’s healthy food and what’s not healthy food for me. What does eating with restraint really mean to me?” And so “I said something like I will never have chocolate Monday to Friday again I only ever have it on the weekend.” That’s just an example I did all kinds of things. That I said if there’s a voice in my head that suggests that I should have the chocolate because “energy. You worked out hard enough today, Glenn. You can afford. It doesn’t matter. Or you could start tomorrow or chocolate comes from a cocoa being with frozen plants and therefore it’s a vegetable.” All of that was pig squeal. I would say “I pick a squealing for it slop. I don’t want that, my pig does and I don’t listen to farm animals tell me what to do.” I’m so embarrassed that that’s what worked. I wish it was one of the deep psychological insight I thought I had or soulful journeys or meditation. It’s not, it was “I don’t need pig’s laugh, I don’t want the farm animals tell me what to do.” It wasn’t a miracle. I wish I could tell you it got better right away. It didn’t. What it would do is it would give me those extra microseconds at the moment of impulse to remember who I was and why I made them on in the first place. And that way I could make a conscious choice. Sometimes I didn’t make the right choice but I stopped feeling overrun by this mysterious force inside. I stopped feeling helpless and hopeless and powerless and I started to feel hopeful right away. And over time I experimented with different rules. I kept a journal about what the pig would say and why it was wrong, how the pig would lie to me. For example, when it says “you can start again tomorrow it doesn’t matter.” Well, neurologically speaking that’s not true.

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:11:42] If you reinforce the urge today, you’re going to be in a deeper hole tomorrow. Those grooves are going to have been worn even deeper it’s going to be harder to dig yourself out if you’re in a hole, stop digging. That’s the first thing you want to do or you know if the pig would say “go ahead and try this. I can’t get you now if I don’t get you later. You’re going to forget later.” I would say “well, the only time you can eat is now. So, if I was use the present moment to be healthy then you can never get me. And besides you don’t have a time machine anymore than I do you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or any more than I do.” So, I had all these interesting dialogues which would expose the logical fallacies in my pigs attacks. The reasons that it wanted me to take a break and I fully recognized that I couldn’t totally get rid of the pig. There was always going to be this voice in my head that would say those things but I also realized that I could recognize it. I got a lot of those rejection. We also just had to modify things tremendously to make it work. The food I could recognize and ignore it because it didn’t matter if by definition, my pig’s voice was any thought feeling or impulse which suggested that I would either now or in the future have one bite, taste or swallow off of my carefully constructed plan. Then by definition, anything the pig said was wrong. What was malintended and so like Jodie Foster arguing with Hannibal Lecter. There was no purpose arguing even if it seemed that he had a PhD from Harvard and starting analytical and all excited at the top here. But like some like arguing with Hannibal Lecter there’s no real point because it’s malintended. The whole point you start to throw you off balance and get you to try to break your rule. So, slowly but surely I recovered. I lost the weight, I hovered between 200 to 10 these days. I used to be as much as 280 I think I said at the beginning. I used to have high triglycerides those came down. I used to have eczema and psoriasis and rosacea. I don’t think you can see that in me anymore. Maybe a dermatologist can make the diagnosis but it doesn’t bother me and it doesn’t affect my appearance that much. That’s what happened but I wasn’t going to publish it. That’s a whole series of events happened including getting divorced and I decided through a minor publishing company that I was a part of to publish it as a test and it just took off. We’ve got 600,000 readers and almost 2,000 reviews including people who hate us because you were telling me before the interview there’s probably 10 percent of the people that think this is horrible and they call me to call me Dr. Sensitivity. I think sarcastically I’m just not being sensitive to people’s struggles and that’s my story. That’s who I am and what I do and now I focus on that.

Mathea Ford: [00:14:29] You know that’s very interesting because I had a podcast a couple of weeks ago that we talked about this like neuroplasticity and basically how you change and how your brain works with creating new pathways and how hard it is to change that. And so it sounds to me like you kind of used that information and obviously the things that help us to have better brains are things that are like whole grains, whole fruits, whole vegetables that are full of antioxidants to help your brain. So…

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:15:01] It’s not the bags and boxes and containers. I’ll tell you that much.

Mathea Ford: [00:15:06] No it is not. So, going back a little bit to what we were talking about this over eating cycle you mentioned kind of it it started in your childhood. What starts people in that overeating cycle most of the time?

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:15:23] I’m not sure it matters because I think when say they do start that they have a life for their own. I’ll tell you a story. I did this 40,000 person study over the course of about five years when Internet clicks were cheap and I asked people what foods they struggled with like if they started eating them they couldn’t stop and what was troubling them in their life. And I found three interesting things. People who started their binges with chocolate like me they tended to be lonely or broken hearted. I was in a bad marriage for that kind of made sense. People who struggled with salty crunchy things like pretzels and chips tended to be stressed at work and people who struggled with soft chewy things like bread and bagels. They tended to be stressed at home. That this is really interesting I bet there’s something to this. So, let me go investigate my own history. Basically, I have a mother who is a psychotherapist while she passed away a year and a half ago and I called her and I said “Mom, what is it in my history that could have set up? I mean I know I’m got some struggles in my love life and whatever but what does it in my history that would have set up this pattern?” And she gets this horrible look on her face and this horrible standard of where she goes. “I’m so sorry. I am so sorry.” “Mom what is it?” I said “I forgive you. Whatever it is it’s okay I forgive you. You know it’s 40 years later now.” And she said “well, when you were about one in 1965 your father was a captain in the army and they were really talking about sending him to Vietnam. And we were working really hard to have another baby. Hopefully they weren’t going to do that but I was terrified we’re going to send them anyway. And I thought I could wind up as a single mom with two kids. And what am I going to do? And I was really terrified. At the same time my father your grandfather, he just got out of prison and he was guilty. And I had idolized him my whole life. He was the one and only saving grace in my upbringing and he was guilty. And I was just falling apart and half the time I was sitting and staring at the wall and I didn’t have a good therapist and didn’t have anybody to talk to. And I didn’t have the wherewithal to hold you and love you and feed you when you came running to me. So, half the time at least I would say ‘Glenn go get your Bosco and there would be a refrigerator in the floor with a big bottle of chocolate Bosco syrup and you go running over to the refrigerator you take it out you go crawling over the refrigerator you take it out. You’d suck on the bottle and you go into a chocolate sugar coma.” And I thought “Eureka! This is it. This is what this is why I go to chocolate when I’m upset.” And you would think if this were the movies that mom and I would have a big hug and a big cry and I would never struggle with chocolate again right? Would you believe me if I told you my chocolate eating got worse.

Mathea Ford: [00:18:02] Yes.

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:18:03] You want to guess why?

Mathea Ford: [00:18:04] Probably because now you’re upset about that. You felt like you had less control over it.

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:18:10] That’s true. The reason it got worse was there was this crazy voice in my head which I now know was my inner pig and it said something like this. “Hey, Glenn, you know what you’re right. Our mama didn’t love us enough. She left a great big chocolate sized hole in our heart and until we can find the love of her life we’re going have to go riding bingeing and get you let’s go get some right now. So there is this voice of justification that seized on the opportunity to use the emotional conflict and the emotional release to as a cause for bingeing more. And this is right around the time I was having the insights about having to switch my paradigm and I realized that emotions aren’t really a problem. It doesn’t necessarily matter why I have this raging fire inside. A raging fire in a well constructed fireplace in the center of a home can become the center of hearth and home. That’s where people tell stories, that’s where we gather, that’s where they find their peace. The problem is when the fireplace can’t contain it and the pig, this voice of justification is busy poking holes in the fireplace so the fire can escape and burn down the house so you can actually have a pinch. And I realize it was going to be a lot quicker to recognize and disempower that voice of justification than to fix the emotional issues. I mean do you know how long it takes in psychotherapy for someone with this particular problem to solve it? Like how long does it take to find the love of your life? Some people never do. How long does it take to come to terms with the fact that you know your mother was really traumatized and couldn’t love you in the way that you needed to and so therefore she left this hole in your heart. That that could take a very long time five to ten years. I’ve certainly come to a place where I can forgive her and love her for everything she went through. I don’t have a love of my life. I can’t say that I’m you know that I’m solving it. If I had to fix that before I stop bingeing I would be 400 pounds now. So, what causes it? You can investigate the foods that you eat. You can go back and look at your history. It’s a soulful journey to take. There were good things that came out of it. My mom and I forgave each other. I was softer on myself about the mistakes that I did make. It was easier for me to forgive myself after bingeing and get back on track a little quicker. So, it helped a little bit but would help the whole lot more. Was recognizing that crazy voice and disempowering it and most people don’t want to spend five or 10 years in psychotherapy to figure it all out. Most people just want to stop bingeing.

Mathea Ford: [00:20:32] You’re talking about not necessarily positive thinking but maybe more along the lines of changing the way you think about things. So, instead of feeling that victim and powerless and like you know like you said you’re reptilian brain just kind of got you to eat. You start telling yourself a different story which is what you were doing telling yourself this different story about who you were. You’re not that person that binge eat.

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:20:57] Right! Really rather than making a Nazi rule which is how a lot of people look at what I’m trying to do. You’re changing your identity and character trumps willpower. So, what if I say I will never eat chocolate again? For me chocolate just doesn’t belong in my life. For some people it really does but for me it doesn’t. If I say “I’ll never eat chocolate again” people say “that’s crazy! How can you never see chocolate again?” And I’d say “well, what’s the difference between saying ‘I will never be chocolate again’ or saying ‘I’ve decided to become the kind of person who doesn’t eat chocolate.'” The second one is much more palatable and recognizable and easy for people to accomplish because they’re used to developing character traits and all sorts of different ways. We have all sorts of unwritten rules that we follow that we don’t know like if you walk into a diner and there’s a ten dollar bill on the counter because the waitress didn’t see your tip and she says “I’ll be right back. I have to get your menu” and there’s no video camera. The owner is not up front. There are no windows. Nobody would see you take it. Virtually everybody I ask in that situation says “I would never take it.” And I’d say “why? You’d be ten dollars richer. Nobody would know.” They’ll say “well, I’m not a thief!” And I say “What do you mean by that? She said “well, that woman worked hard for her money and I’m not a thief.” And I say “well, so as a matter of character you have an unwritten rule that says ‘I never steal. I will never steal again’ that you’ll follow regardless of temptation which doesn’t require any willpower because it’s not even an option. Willpower is required when you have to make decisions. But when decisions are ruled out because you’ve decided you’re not that kind of person, it’s not even an option and you don’t require willpower anymore. So, what I was doing which actually does result in very positive thinking was I was purging my negative thoughts from my identity. I was saying I’m just not the kind of person who track it’s chocolate. Therefore I’m not the kind of person that gets out of control with chocolate. Therefore, I am the kind of person who can’t control myself. I’m not a slave to my impulses. I am a master of my impulses and I have self esteem and self control. It tends to build up people’s self-esteem rather than tear it down. I know it sounds really weird in theory in the abstract. Another people listening to the call saying “you’ve got this psychologist on your call who’s got a peek inside and what do you thinking?” So, I’m actually at the end of the call I’ll tell you where you can download a bunch of free recorded coaching sessions so you can hear how it actually works in practice because it takes people from feeling despairing and powerless and hopeless to feeling hopeful, enthusiastic and possible. It actually is transforming and thus so far positive thinking. It just does it in a really weird way by purging your negative thinking into this artificial entity that you can call your food monster or your food demon or your pig or whatever you want to call it as long as it’s not a cuddly part.

Mathea Ford: [00:23:41] Is overeating we know that like 60% of the country is overweight and 30% or so I don’t remember the exact statistics are obese. Obviously it’s a common problem but what makes it so common is that related to the way the food manufacturers because not everybody had a bad mother are not necessarily a bad mother but a disconnect when they were young. What makes it so common?

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:24:08] And just as a side point to what you’re saying adversity in childhood can lead to a strong character as opposed to a weak one. So, sometimes you’re looking for all of these faults in your parents but it’s those faults to give you your strength. What makes it such a big problem in my great big not so humble opinion is the evolution of the food substances to push our evolutionary buttons. We didn’t have all these bags and boxes and the containers on the Savannah or in the tropics when we’re growing up and we were evolving. There were no pizzas or pastas or pretzels or chips or chocolate bars you know on on the trees as we were. And it’s only the last few hundred years that these types of things are available. So, we really don’t have a defense for them and they’re getting stronger and stronger and stronger. So that’s part of it. But then the messaging we get that says that we’re powerless and we can’t resist. The messaging that says that you really can’t control yourself. You just have to eat everything in moderation. Well 90% of the time indulge, 10% of the time. That messaging conflicts with what we know about willpower because willpower is a fatigue of all muscle which is fatigued by decision making so if you say I’m going to eat well 90% of the time and eat bad 10%vof the time. Every time you’re in front of temptation you have to make the decision about is this the 10% or this is a 90%? If I say I want every chocolate on the last calendar weekend of the month then 90% of the time my chocolate decisions have all ready been made. I don’t have to constantly wear down my willpower. So, I think people are getting the wrong message. They’re also giving the wrong message about the psychology of winning the game. They’re told to strive for progress and not perfection which is a kindhearted way and the appropriate way to look at the mistakes that you’ve made in hindsight. But when you’re striving for a goal you actually need to commit it with perfection. If an archer is trying to hit the bull’s eye they need to pull back the arrow and see the arrow going into the bull’s eye before they let go of it. They can’t be thinking maybe I’ll make it maybe I won’t. They have to be perfectly committed to that fight of the arrow as if it’s a foregone conclusion that it’s going into the bull’s eye. If they miss the bull’s eye, they’re not supposed to say “Oh my God! I’m a pathetic Archer I’ll just shoot the rest of the hours into the audience or up into the air or whatever.” They’re supposed to get up and figure out what went wrong. Take it seriously. Adjust for wind resistance. Pull a little further back on the arrow whatever they need to do and do it again. If you touch a hot stove you want to feel that pain for a second because if you don’t you’re never gonna know where the hot stove is so you don’t touch it again. But you’re not supposed to say “I’m a pathetic hot stove toucher. Let me just put my whole hand down on it.” You’re supposed to take it seriously. Make an analysis make adjustments if you need to but then let go of the guilt. The pre-severation on guilt and shame, the round and round in your head that doesn’t go away. That turns out to be pig motivated when it’s trying to do is wear you down enough that you feel too weak to resist the next bench. “Oh! You’re pathetic. You might as well just give up and be a happy fat person.” That’s what it’s saying. That makes sense. So, the attitude that I recommend is that you commit with perfection but forgive yourself with dignity. What people are stuck in is pursuing things kind of wishy washy in a wishy washy way like “oh you know gee honey, I know we’re going to get married and I’m pretty sure I can promise to be faithful for the rest of my life but they sure are a lot of attractive people out there and you know progress not perfection.” So, they’re committing to these goals and a wishy washy way which we would never accept in certain situations. And then they’re analyzing themselves with too much self-criticism and flagellation. And so the whole thing is a setup for a loss. So you combine that with the food industry and the advertising industry and the messaging about powerlessness. And it’s a wonder that anybody can eat well today. But the solution is just a little bit of thought to distinguish exactly what healthy eating means for you. Think about the single worst trigger for the behavior for example and make one rule about it and then listen for yourself. Try to break it and either disempower or ignore that irrational voice while you make sure that you are getting adequate nutrition and calories in your day to day life.

Mathea Ford: [00:28:39] When you think about some different kind of the counter movement to what you’re talking about is this Health at Every Size movement where it’s okay whatever weight you are as long as you’re eating healthy and you’re doing healthy things. It’s not necessarily about the weight. It’s about being healthy. So, is what you’re doing kind of or what you’re your suggest book suggests is kind of that fat shaming yourself in your brain instead of being happy with how you are and healthy if you’re eating healthy?

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:29:14] Fat shaming is a problem in our society. People do come in all different sizes and I’m thoroughly against people feeling criticized and shamed for their weight. On the other hand making an objective assessment of what weight is actually healthy. I think the data are pretty clear that it’s thinner than the people at Health at Any Size are necessarily suggesting. And so I don’t want to support people to be unhealthy. I want to support them to feel loved. I want to support them to love themselves. I want them to embrace a slow journey to where they need to be. But I think when you take a really hard look at the empirical evidence about where the incidence of disease and disorder is with regards to our weight and set the target accordingly. I mean our society is way too body obsessed in and of itself. I think women can be very beautiful at all different sizes but healthy is a different story. The same thing with what tends to go along with that is this philosophy of intuitive eating and the idea that you can’t distinguish between healthy and unhealthy foods that we have to be eat anything at any time and just listen to our insights about it. The industry is so strong and they’ve perverted and hijacked our intuition such a high level that we can’t really trust it. If we live in the tropics, we didn’t have all these bags and boxes and containers. Then I think we could trust our intuitions to tell us what to eat but when it’s legal to put flavored cardboard into the food system and it is I could show you instances where it’s happening then I think you have to stand up and say “there are some things I will and I won’t eat. There are some things that are over line and unhealthy or some things that are healthy and I can eat intuitively within those guidelines. But I have to draw some boundaries somewhere somehow.” So, those are my thoughts about the Health at Any Size movement.

Mathea Ford: [00:31:11] So kind of what you’re basically the intuitive eating, feeling good about what you’re eating. Feeling like taking the time to eat slower and enjoy the food that you have as long as you can distinguish that trickster whatever you want to call it in your brain that’s trying to tell you that “yeah! This is really good for you or this is really” or you can like you said “start your diet tomorrow” type thing.

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:31:37] Eating mindfully is really important and you can make rules that support that. I always put my fork on between bites. I never eat in the car. I never eat with the screen in front of me. You can make rules that support that. For me personally as long as they don’t have industrial food being thoroughly present while I’m eating is exceptionally important. Letting my food nourish me. Experiencing every bite you wind up eating a little less of it when you when you do that but I think that we eat mindfully between the lines just like we can drive mindfully between the traffic lights. I think that the discipline actually enhances our freedom. You could not get around Manhattan in a car if it didn’t have traffic lights and stop signs. There were eleven million people in that place and just a few square miles and it wouldn’t be safe to drive around it would be too dangerous. And because we have traffic lights and stop signs people can move without that they’d be stuck. So I actually think that freedom sits on top of discipline. I don’t think that the discipline I’m suggesting restricts our freedom. I think it enhances it.

Mathea Ford: [00:32:41] What kind of guidelines do you encourage people to follow?

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:32:43] It’s important to make up your own rules. I find that a big part of the problem in food disorders, addiction, even just simple overeating is a sense of rebellion. There’s this part of people inside that says “you can’t tell me what to eat” and they go from diet to diet saying “this diet is no good. This diet is no good. I lost weight but I couldn’t stand and I lost weight but I couldn’t stand it. This one’s no good at all.” And it’s just their pig playing the “grass is greener” squeal “oh! That diet is better, this diet is better and it’s really just trying to keep a state of anarchy. So, it’s very important to take a breath and figure out what rules you want to follow. I suggest people start with one rule “What’s your single worst trigger food behavior” and teach yourself that you’re able to follow it. Learn how this game is played. Show yourself that it’s possible to structure your mind in that way and when you hear a craving inside that says “I want to break the rule you say. I don’t want that my pig does or I don’t want that. My reptilian brain does. Its just squealing for its slop and I don’t eat slop.” As crazy as that sounds, it’s a commitment it’s a lingual commitment to forming a more constructive identity that’s in charge around food. Once you get that and I would suggest that people don’t worry about losing weight in those first few weeks. Once you get that, I suggest that people start to add rules which would help them accomplish the health and fitness goals. I’m not a dietitian/nutritionist or medical doctor so I’m not qualified to tell you what to eat. So, I always suggest that people consult with them to figure out what the right goal would be or you know read books or whatever but embrace it yourself and then start to add rules that would help you to lose weight at half a pound, a pound at the most two pounds a week. I really don’t like when people lose more than two pounds a week because I find it virtually always bounces in the other direction. The reason I think that is is because the problem with overeating and binge eating is not just in the overeating-binge eating part of the cycle. It’s an addiction to feast and famine and the most people who are struggling with overeating also are really good dieters. So, they can lose weight but then they gain back more and they get really high during the weight loss period. They get all excited and manic about it. They’re building up this caloric deficit, they’re building up the nutritional deficit and there’s some biological mechanism in the brain I think that would make sense from an evolutionary perspective that if calories in nutrition are unavailable for long periods of time then as soon as they are all we have to hoard them and that’s why people feel like someone’s pointing a gun at their head and saying “you will eat.” That’s why people feel like getting too full is a trigger to overeat even more because it must be a signal to the brain that says “oh! Finally! Finally, calories and nutrition are available I better are take in as much as we can.” So to combat that you went to a regular reliable steady source of calories and nutritions. You need to eat breakfast the day after a binge. You don’t you do not want to make up for a day of bingeing with two or three days of fasting or reduce only. You want to make up with a binge with a couple of weeks of extremely normal reliable eating and that takes you out of this feast and famine cycle. But you went to a more even keeled regular cycle with a slight deficit so that you can lose weight you know pound, two pounds a week at most. That’s what I recommend.

Mathea Ford: [00:36:15] So when you talk about a trigger food how do people identify their trigger food?

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:36:20] What triggers food is the food that you find yourself eating beyond your own best judgment and feel guilty about afterwards. One of the things that I’ll give you when you go to my site at the end is a little workbook with a list of all possible trigger foods or all the ones that we identified. And you can kind of go through one by one and give them a rating and figure out if it’s a trigger for you. If you’re eating. So, people ask me how do you define binge eating? Or how do you define you know overeating? And I’ll say I don’t like to talk about the DSM 5 definition you can look that up if you want to but I don’t like people thinking in black and white terms because if you’re eating beyond your own best judgment then wouldn’t it behoove you to try this mental trick and see if you can take more control. So, I think that the question of “Is it a binge or not?” in and of itself is a bit of a squeal because it’s almost like a pig thing. “Can I get away with it? Can I get away with a little more?” You know what I’m saying? So, if you’re not happy and you’re losing control in any way wouldn’t you like to take more control? I’m not going to tell you I’m not going to take anything away from you. You can eat anything you want to. If you want your food plan to say “eat donuts all day long and that’s it.” I don’t think it’s going to last very long because you’re not going to be nutrified and I wouldn’t recommend it but I’m not going to take that away from you. Nobody is going to tell you what to eat. So, there’s no reason not to make a rule. You can change them if you want to. We will say “I’ll never have chocolate again.” But we say that in the same way we presented to the pig as if it’s set in stone in the same way we talked to a 2 year old. Little Sarah, you can’t never ever cross the street without holding my hand. Never ever ever again. The reason I tell her that even though I know that I’m lying because in five or six years I will teach her to look both ways and cross by herself. I tell her when she’s two years old that she can’t ever do that because it’s too dangerous. I don’t want her even thinking about crossing the street. I don’t want those images in her head. All I want her to do is raise her focus on my hand while we’re crossing the street so she gets her car safely. Our pigs are like that. They are too dangerous in the context of these trigger foods so we present these rules of them as if they are set in stone but if there’s a study that comes out that says you know “if you don’t eat chocolate you’re going to die of penile cancer” (I just made that up.) You’re going to die of some type of horrible cancer. Of course I’m going to consider eating chocolate at that point and I’ll change my rules. And once again, I will tell my pig never again because it has to be set in stone from a pig’s perspective. You don’t want to thinking “maybe? How about now? Is a time yet?” You can’t do that it’s going to be “shut up.”

Mathea Ford: [00:38:57] You talked a little bit about making your own food plan. How do you help people to make their own food plan you said you’re not going to tell me what to eat but how do you assemble a good food plan.

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:39:07] There are four categories of rules I suggest the things you’ll never do again. There are things you’ll do under certain conditions call those conditionals. The things that you’ll always do and the things that you can do in an unrestricted way. Things you’ll never do again are really substances that you want out of your life. “I will never eat castor sugar again. I’ll never be chocolate again.” Things that you’ll do under certain conditions might be “only ever have chocolate added a social event but no more than once per calendar month or only pretzels at a major league baseball park or I don’t eat flour during the week. But if I go out to dinner on the weekend I can have a plate of pasta or two pieces of bread” something like that. Those are conditional rules and always rules something you always want to do. I always make a hypothetical food plan for the next day before I go to bed. “I always drink two pure glasses of spring water when I wake up in the morning. I always eat five servings of fruit and vegetables every day.” Those are always rules and the unrestricted rules are things that I include so that your pig can’t tell you that you’re starving. There are things that you can eat in unlimited quantities. “I can have all the berries that I want to during the day. I can eat unsauced vegetables in unlimited quantities. Can drink all of the coffee and tea that I want.” Whatever it is for you you do that to remind yourself that you won’t be starving. I have a whole set of examples that I’ll give people too so it’s not so confusing but that’s how it works. The main thing is whatever rule you create you want it to be externally verifiable not because you’re going to have people check up on you but because you don’t want there to be any wiggle room for your food monster. A rule that people try to make which isn’t really a rule that meets these criteria is “I will never eat when I’m not hungry and I’ll always stop when I’m full.” That’s a guideline. Guidelines are good to have but they’re not enforceable never been again rules. The reason is that they’re too subjective and internal. Your food master can always say “oh! We’re hungry baby. Believe me we’re hungry or we’re not full yet.” It’s not verifiable. If you really wanted the volume control rule then you need to say something like “I’ll never go back for seconds or I’ll never have more than one plate of food or I will have three meals a day with nothing in between with a meal being 45 minutes in the first calories and last.” Something like that you have some type of externally variable, verifiable external control. Let’s think anybody has to do any of those things. I’m just pointing out for illustration that if 10 people follows you around they should all agree whether you were on the rule or off the rule. That’s how you know that you have a really good rule.

Mathea Ford: [00:41:45] Okay that’s great! So, thinking about the listeners who maybe dietitians, other health professionals or even just everyday people interested in nutrition. How would you want them to use this information we’ve talked about in their day to day life?  

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:42:01] Well you’re talking about with their clients?

Mathea Ford: [00:42:03] Either with their clients or with themselves but probably with their clients. Maybe somebody who doesn’t necessarily struggle with bingeing but they have clients who come in who may have some issues with weight.   

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:42:14] I mean we do have a training and certification program where we teach and supervise people how to work with their own clients. That’s something we really like to do actually because helping the helper really furthers our mission we’re trying to help a million people stop bingeing every year and they have the clients right in front of them so that makes us really happy to do that. But in terms of implementing in their own life, I would make the same recommendation that I make to everybody else which is to start with one rule. Everything that’s really important to do is to be sure that the rules that you create don’t put you in a box where you can’t get enough nutrition and calories. And I would suggest that people check that with a nutritionist or a dietitian or with one of the online systems like cronometer.com or My Fitness Pal just to be sure that they’re not making your rule if it’s inconsistent with your body’s needs. There are some rules you can’t make. I can’t make a rule that says I will never pee again because nobody is going to tell me otherwise. If you make a rule which puts you in too much of a caloric and nutritional deficit, your body is going to want to force you to be less discriminating. You can override that. I mean people can go on hunger strikes until they die but it’s extraordinarily uncomfortable and it takes an extraordinary person to do that. So, why put yourself in that situation? So, go and have your remaining diet checked out by a dietitian or a nutritionist or at least at the very least one of these online calculators to make sure that it’s efficient. When you’re dealing with a craving, there are a couple of important things to recognize when dealing with a craving. First of all, you have to think of the craving as an opportunity. You can’t get rid of a craving without having a craving so a craving is an opportunity to extinguish the craving. If you have a craving and you don’t feed it then the craving will be weaker tomorrow. But underneath the craving is an authentic biological need. Almost all the time. So, it’s not just a craving for a chocolate bar but maybe you genuinely do need some energy. So what I found over time by experimenting with different things was that when I crave chocolate I would teach my brain “no, we’re going to have a kale banana smoothie instead.” And I wouldn’t get high the same way that chocolate makes you high. I think chocolate is a drug but I would feel satisfied and the craving would go away and I would have the energy that I needed. And I think that what I was doing was correcting the biological drive that got hijacked.  

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:44:45] There’s a whole series of animal studies where electrodes were put into the pleasure center thereby short cutting or bypassing the natural evolutionary means by which we’re meant to experience pleasure. And those animals were allowed to self stimulate by pressing a lever so that the electrode was wired to a lever. Those animals pressed the lever thousands of times a day to the exclusion of their survival needs. A starving rat for example would press the lever thousands of times a day and ignore its food. A nursing mother rat pressed the lever thousands of times a day and ignore her pups. So, what’s happening there is hijacking up the survival drive. It’s unnatural stimulation of parts of the brain and chemical neurological stimulation that causes the body to make a biological error. I don’t think anybody’s inserting electrodes in our brain but the chemicals we’re putting into our body it’s not that far away. And can you say we’re not being given these shortcuts to biological pleasure when you could walk out of McDonald’s and see a Burger King across the street at just about every city in the country or the world these days? So, I think you need to recognize that your body is making a biological error. It feels like you need chocolate to survive. It feels like you need chips to survive. At the moment you have the craving it feels like nothing else matters no matter how much work you did to think about what you wanted to do. No matter how committed you were to the diet. No matter how much motivational work you figured out. Why you wanted to commit to this? At the moment of impulse every bone in your body says “just hand over the chocolate and nobody gets hurt.” What you have to do at that moment is say “it’s a feeling and feelings aren’t facts and thank goodness I’m having this feeling now. Thank goodness I’m having this craving now” because I can feed myself what my body really needs. I’m not going to let it go for that chemical electrode in my brain. I’m not going to push the lever thousands of times to be like a stupid rat. Excuse me language I don’t think rats are stupid I think you’re really sweet but you know what I mean. I am going to forcefully and consciously redirect this drive I am feeling towards what I think might be my authentic need. Some other examples are when I struggle with pizza or wanting pasta with tomato sauce and parmesan cheese. What I would do instead was make myself some brown rice with tomato sauce and nutritional yeast. So, I started like shifting for its healthier alternatives and I would find the same thing wasn’t the most delicious thing I ever ate but it killed the craving and I was fine. And before I knew it my nervous system was adjusting and I was getting more pleasure out of the brown rice with tomato sauce and nutritional yeast than I was getting out of what I used to remember going to the pasta. Now, if I went back to the pasta that would revert back to where it was in my body would make the biological error again. So. So, feelings aren’t facts. Thank goodness I’m having this craving. What do I really need? That’s how you do it.  

Mathea Ford: [00:47:50] That’s great. I love that idea of basically trying to restimulate, rewire what your brain wants so to speak by just concentrating on it and doing it for a period of time.  

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:48:03] Yeah.  

Mathea Ford: [00:48:04] So, I always asked my guess what is your favorite food? Obviously it’s not chocolate, not dark chocolate.  

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:48:11] Well, chocolate was my favorite. Chocolate and Cheetos was amazing. When people know what to eat they want to run away screaming. Took me a lot of years to get to this point but my favorite thing to do is to make cucumber noodles with a sauce that has tomatoes and lemons and dates and some dills in it for a little saltiness. Absolute favorite thing and sometimes up with some leafy greens into the sauce and in fact I have to go make that after we talk now because I’m hungry. I make a big friggin bowl of it also.  

Mathea Ford: [00:48:48] So cucumber noodles or just slices really thin slices of cucumbers?

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:48:52] I got a spiralizer. You can get them on Amazon for about 30 bucks and I spiralize in so it’s actually like a noodle so I can actually twirl it gives me the same experience of eating pasta. If you’re stuck on pasta it’s not going to feel like awesome.  

Mathea Ford: [00:49:06] Okay Dr. Glenn thank you so much for being on the podcast today. It was a pleasure to have you on the show. I know my listeners learned a lot about the psychology thoughts behind binge eating and how to make some changes positive changes. If listeners want to connect with you what’s the best way to do that?

Dr. Glenn Livingston: [00:49:23] Well if you could ineverbingeagain.com and you click on the big red button. Sign up for the Reader Bonus List. There are a few things that I can get you. Can get your free copy of the book in digital format either Kindle, Nook or PDF. I can get you a free copy of the Food Plan Starter Templates we talked about. So, regardless of your dietary philosophy. High carb, low carb, ketogenic, vegan, point counting, calorie counting it doesn’t matter. We have a sample set of food rules that you might want to start with and modify for your own benefit. And I recorded a whole bunch of coaching sessions to show you that this isn’t really such a weird or harsh thing in practice as it sounds like in theory so. So, ineverbingeagain.com. Click the big red button.  

Mathea Ford: [00:50:09] Right! So, guys this has been another great episode of the Nutrition Expert Podcast. The podcast is all about learning more so you can do more with nutrition in your life.  

 

https://media.blubrry.com/renaldiethq/p/app.pippa.io/public/streams/5aba77b58bdf7ba53cccc618/episodes/5c8473812b2f6a2e2a1af44a.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Email | RSS

Filed Under: Blog, Podcast Tagged With: Binge Again, Dr. Glenn Livingston, Health At Any Size movement, Intuitive Eating, Never Binge Again, The Reptilian Brain, Trigger Food

Nutrition Experts Podcast Episode 18 Work on Your Day to Day Habits with Esther Avant

September 3, 2018 by matheaford Leave a Comment

Esther is a personal trainer and nutrition coach who works primarily with compassionate women to help them lose weight and become happier, healthier, and more confident. She has a BS in Exercise Science from Boston University and a variety of certifications in nutrition and exercise but her best education has come from working one-on-one with hundreds of women to help them take back control of their health. You can find more about her, including her blog and services, at www.estheravant.com

Mathea Ford: [00:00:27] Hi there! It’s Mathea. Welcome back to the Nutrition Experts Podcast. The podcast featuring nutrition experts who are leading the way by using food starts today right now with our next guest. It’s great to have Esther Avant on the show today. Esther, welcome to Nutrition Experts.

Esther Avant: [00:00:45] Thank you so much. I’m really excited to be here.

Mathea Ford: [00:00:47] Esther I’m excited to talk to you today. Can you tell my listeners a little more about you and what you do?

Esther Avant: [00:00:53] I would love to. My name is Esther event and I am a nutrition coach and also a personal trainer. I specialize in women’s weight loss and my clients are typically what I refer to as kind of do gooders. They work in selfless fields like nursing, social work that kind of thing. Basically caregivers who just put everyone and everything before themselves. And we work a lot on breaking old patterns and habits and taking a multifaceted approach to not just losing weight but also become happier, healthier and more confident.

Mathea Ford: [00:01:26] So that’s a really interesting market because how do you get someone to stop putting everybody else ahead of them even though they know it’s detrimental to their health. Like you said they’re caregivers, they’re nurses, they’re other health care. They know that they need to exercise, lose weight, whatever. But how do you how do you start to get them to think differently?

Esther Avant: [00:01:51] A lot of it is in how you frame it that typically these women are so selfless that they don’t want to you know put themselves first. It feels like there’s so many other people I could be helping that’s not the best use of my time. But when you kind of reframe the thought into think about how much better able you’ll be able to help people or how many more people you’ll be able to help if you’re feeling your best, if you’re not tired, if you’re not missing work for medical appointments, if you’re just you know if you’re not feeling good overall how well can you really help other people? And I think putting it in that light helps women realize “Well, you know what? It’s not selfish to take care of myself. It’s actually doing the people who are relying on me a disservice if I don’t take care of myself because then I can’t help them as well.”

Mathea Ford: [00:02:40] So, what types of things do you usually start with when somebody is determining the best weight loss approach? You know how do you figure out what is the best way to help them with weight loss or if if that’s even not necessarily your first target so to speak?

Esther Avant: [00:03:00] So I think the most important thing in a lot of a lot of things but is is communicating. You know when I do an initial call with a new client I want to know, we know what their goals are and not just the surface value of all “I want to lose weight” but you know really why. What is the emotional root of your goal. Is it because you’re scared that you’re dependent on these prescription medications and you want to get off them to live a long healthy happy life? Is it that year that you feel like your weight is holding you back in your career and that if you took better care of yourself and lost some weight and were healthier you’d be able to advance? Things like that that a lot of times it’s not just about the weight, it’s about something deeper and more emotional. So, uncovering that is really important to start off and then I’m really big on not trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole. And I think that’s an issue with a lot of the weight loss industry is that some coaches and some businesses can be really dogmatic in their philosophy that if you’re not following this type of diet you’re wrong. That kind of thing and it just ends up confusing people and ultimately paralyzing them into doing nothing. And really there isn’t just one way that works. Lots of things work. And it’s about figuring out what works for a certain person and more specifically what works for that person at this time in their lives. And if I were to marry to a certain idea or assumes certain philosophy and I would be doing my client a disservice. So, I think the most important thing at first is being open minded and recognizing that there is no one way that’s going to work best for everybody. And we both need to recognize that. That you know in the short term kind of something more cookie cutter approaches often do work but when you start thinking long term or about how to not gain the weight back that’s when it becomes a different story. And it’s a matter of being able to stick with something long enough that you reap the benefits. So in my coaching calls with clients or in our initial meetings or even just in a lot of blog posts and content that I put out, I encourage women to think about a number of different things but you know one being are you someone who does well with moderation or do you feel like if you give yourself an inch you take a mile? Balance and moderation are like really involved but they’re not necessarily the best idea for everyone. And there was actually a Gretchen Rubin book that talked about these different personality types and how some people just operate better when they give themselves more black and white guidelines. So, just as an example like there’s nothing inherently wrong about eating at night. Calories are still calories it doesn’t matter what time of day. So, there is no like scientific reason necessarily to stop eating at a certain time. But some people actually find it easier to house just a personal rule of “I don’t eat after 8.” And it’s not because those calories will immediately show up on their thighs or anything like that. It’s just because it’s easier than bargaining with themselves night after night about whether they should have dessert or have a snack. So, the same thing goes for weight loss approaches that eliminate or restrict certain foods, certain times of eating. Maybe the whole thing just feels easier if you don’t have to think so much about it and you just follow the “rules.” So that’s one thing to consider is do you like having rules or do they just buy their existence does it make you want to rebel against them. So that’s a factor that can play into what kind of approach you take. Another thing is are you drawn to a more introspective kind of touchy feely approach or are you somebody who likes numbers who likes hard data because intuitive or mindful eating is an approach where you pay close attention to your body? What it’s telling you it needs, how you’re feeling if you’re eating for reasons other than through hunger? How different foods make you feel things like that. And working on becoming a more intuitive eater is a skill that really would benefit all of us. But for some it comes easier than others. So, someone very in tune with her body and her emotions might really thrive in that kind of intuitive based approach. Whereas, if you have somebody who really likes numbers likes having data and target them being really specific then someone with that kind of drive might go absolutely crazy trying to be more intuitive right off the bat. It might feel really intangible and out there and they would do better focusing on something numerical. Whether it’s calories or macronutrients while learning about the energy content of foods and things of that nature. So that’s another consideration is do you prefer to introspect and rely on your intuition to guide your food choices or would you rather take more numbers based approach?

Mathea Ford: [00:08:04] You reframe a little bit and you talk about how it’s going to be better to be healthier and lose weight and they agree. But how do you really get that commitment because I think we all know it’s better and of course if knowing was the way to lose weight we would all be thin. But how do you get to that agreement or commitment to do the things that they need to do whatever they are? Mindful calorie restriction, not eating certain times. How do you get to that?

Esther Avant: [00:08:37] That’s something that in earlier in my coaching career I struggled a lot with the like “I know what these people need why won’t they just listen to me and like do what I say?” And through the course of various certifications and continue education, I was introduced to this a theory or a practice called motivational interviewing which helps someone like me help a client make their own choices and decisions that just by human nature if you go to the doctor and he says “you need to start eating better because you have high blood pressure.” You’re going to smile and nod and you’re probably going to continue doing what you always do. And that’s because you know that’s kind of being dictated to you is like “you have to do this!” Well, “I don’t want to I don’t want you to tell me what to do.” And the same thing goes with working with clients in my field as well that if I were to just tell you you have to do this because it’s good for you you don’t have the buy in. Really. And the buy in comes from I think to two things. One, is uncovering that emotional reason for their goal that you know you’re not just doing this because you want to lose weight. You’re doing this because you want to live a long life to see your grandkids grow up.

Esther Avant: [00:09:58] That kind of gives you some some perspective into an emotional root of “why we’re doing this again? Oh yeah. It’s actually really important to me because of this reason.” And the other thing is to work with the client to have them figure out what they want their next step to be is “I’m not going to tell you this is what you have to do. We’re going to figure out together what do you want to do.” And even if it might not necessarily be what I think is the best first step. I will kind of gently say “here’s my suggestions. What do you think about this or you know where would you like?” I can lead the conversation but ultimately at the end of the day if the client’s decision just say “here’s where I want to start. This is what I want to focus on.” And better to be consistently doing something in the right direction then having all of these starts and stops where you don’t really make any progress. So, even if I think okay this person has you know a major they’re drinking so many liquid calories it would make a huge difference if they just you know quit the capuccinos and put the soda. You know if I present that as a as a possibility and they absolutely shoot it down. Okay, then we’re not going to start there. Where feels comfortable to you? What are you willing to work on right now and let’s just take it from there and that way you’re in charge. You were the catalyst behind the change. I’m just kind of guiding you along the way.

Mathea Ford: [00:11:28] So how do you talk to people who really want this tomorrow? Like they want. So, you know there is on one hand there’s people who are willing to take small steps and understand that it’s them to use often used phrase “it’s a marathon not a sprint.” What about those people that are like “oh, I want to do I’m going to do my start exercising 60 minutes a day and I’m going to get up and meditate for a half an hour and I’m only going to eat 1200 calories. And they’re going to do everything right now. How do you manage that? Or maybe you don’t ever experience that?

Esther Avant: [00:12:04] The vast majority of clients do exactly that and I’m guilty of it myself in other areas where you just like “I want this! I want it now! And now motivated, I’m going to change everything and it’s going to be great. And today my life changes” and you know we all from experience that is rarely how it pans out. So, I think you’ve identified two really important things here. One, is having unrealistic expectations. And two, is trying to do too much at once. So, on the realism front, we have a conversation about you know with regards to weight loss. Specifically with you know what is healthy realistic weight loss. Reality shows like on The Biggest Loser was in its prime. It was really skewing people’s expectations because you’d see somebody losing you know 24 pounds a week and you’d think “Okay, well I’m not on the show. You know I have my life going on maybe I’ll only lose half that. Maybe I will lose twelve pounds a week.” And then when you lose two pounds which is actually you know within a very healthy and safe range, you feel like an absolute failure.

Esther Avant: [00:13:11] You’re like “I lost two pounds out of my 12 pound goal. What am I doing wrong or get this?” So part of it is just education on what even is realistic. And the second part of addressing doing too much at once. One of the most successful approaches that I’ve ever taken and I use it on myself all the time is somebody says you’re like you’re saying “I’m going to wake up at 6 AM and I’m going to meditate, I’m going to exercise everyday and I’m going to eat all these vegetables and I’m going to do everything perfectly” is you know all this I’ll smile and nod and I’ll say “Okay. On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you that you can do that this week? Whatever that goal might be?” And typically when you I don’t know if it’s the sliding scale or what but typically when you ask somebody to assign a number to it they actually take a step back and they’re like “oh. You know what?” I’ve had clients say before like “I think I’m like a 4” like “Okay that’s fine. But what if we scaled the goal back to something that you’re more confident you could do? Do You think it would feel better and might be more motivating if you set a smaller goal that you just knocked out of the park? As opposed to set this like really ambitious goal and then fell short? Because what I see time and time again is you missed a day you said you going to do everyday. You miss a day. You feel like a failure. You skipped the next day and then you end up like in that cycle where you know every Monday you’re starting over again. So, what’s more realistic? What do you 90 percent confidently you could do? What’s a nine out of a 10? And I mean scaling it way back. It might mean I think I can do one day this week. “Okay, great! Then do that one day. Give yourself a pat on the back. That’s your accomplishment. Feel good about it. And then when you feel ready this upcoming week what’s your next goal? Make it a little bit bigger. Do you think you can do a second day? Do you think you know whatever it is” and not just you know setting those more realistic goals but also addressing preemptively what obstacles you might foresee. So, you know say you’re only going to do one morning to work out next week. What happens if you don’t? What if you set that morning and you sleep through your alarm? What’s your plan B? So, it really comes down to having that realistic plan of attack, anticipating the obstacles that might occur and then being prepared to handle them when or if they do happen. And you’re literally what it boils down to is set goals that are action based. Make them so small that they’re almost Fail-Safe, meet or exceed your own expectations and then set the bar a little higher the following week. And it can be challenging at first to wrap your head around like you want me to do less like “This is never going to work. I need to do more.” But typically it only takes a few weeks of that consistent behavior to be like “wow! You know what I’m really experiencing a snowball here! That just the fact that I’m accomplishing my goals is motivating me to be more health conscious when I’m eating to walk more to all sorts of things and just kind of snowball” and it just stems from getting that early win and building some confidence yourself.

Mathea Ford: [00:16:20] When you’re talking to your client, how do you help them to really figure out what is going to work? Because I guess in a way like we all know kind of the things to do exercise, eat right. But how do they figure out what’s working for them and then how do they measure that? Like do you help them to be able to see the difference between like you started with once a week exercising, now, you’re at 5 or how do they figure out what’s going to work to help them to achieve that goal whatever it is?

Esther Avant: [00:16:51] The starting point is having a conversation about what has or hasn’t worked in the past is just as example you know a client will come and say “I’ve lost 40 pounds of weight watchers three times.” And so you have to keep losing the same weight over and over again. Has it really worked? Like you don’t want to be beating your head against the wall during the same thing over and over and wondering why it’s not working. You want to learn from your past and use that as your guide to guide your future decisions. As for how to determine what’s working, I’m a big advocate of data collection and using a variety of Progress Indicators. A lot of times women are very caught up in the scale which is totally normal but you know a lot of us know that we don’t necessarily have the healthiest relationship with the scale. That it can make or break your day. It can make you feel like either a success or a failure but everything is kind of riding on that number. So, with some clients who have a history of disordered behavior with a scale all incurred to not even use it at all. But even when we do use the scale it’s in conjunction with a variety of other indicators so I really like using circumference measurements because those are a really good way to see changes in your body that you might not pick up on otherwise and kind of see that recomposition where maybe the scale isn’t moving much but it’s because you are dropping Fat and putting on muscle and the shape of your body is changing. Even though mass isn’t necessarily.

Esther Avant: [00:18:29] I’m also really a big fan of progress photos which oftentimes clients are reluctant to do either initially or always but I have never had a single person tell me that they regret having the pictures and as hard as they might be to take in the beginning they can be so telling that when you hit you know inevitably you’re not going to be motivated all the time. Never they are going to have these times where you just kind of grinding along and you’re like “Oh! I’m Still doing this and I feel like I’m not seeing any changes.” When you have those pictures to compare, it can be undeniable. Similarly, how clothing fits. They’ve had a lot of clients, not even doing that really intentionally but you know they’ll put on a workout shirt that they wear all the time and they’re like “Huh! This has to be way tighter. This is sitting differently now” or belt loops or things like that. So those are kind of the the number base means of gauging progress. And then I think it’s really important to also focus on other stuff too. Like you mentioned energy levels. Are you hitting that 3:00 PM slump or are you feeling like you can power through the day? Are you sleeping better or longer or falling asleep more easily? The gym is a great way to gauge progress is a lot of my clients start off having pretty minimal recent work out experience and no go from either being unable to do certain things or from using a very light weight and they can just see over time. I used to do five pounds on this and now I’m doing 20 or I used to have to walk after three minutes jogging and now I can jog a whole mile. There are just so many things besides the scale that can help us determine whether we’re on the right track. And I work with clients to figure out what’s important to you. How will you know if you’re being successful? And yes if you want this girl to be a factor at but what else? Even if you know if you’re goal weight, if your dream body was 10 pounds heavier than the number you thought it would be. How would you know that you were successful? What would that look like? What would that feel like? What would your life be like? And then those are the things we look at week after week to say “okay we’re trending in the right direction or you know what? We’re not seeing the results that we want. How can we shift gears to be more successful?”

Mathea Ford: [00:20:52] What are some of the consistent changes that you’ve seen people make? You that you’ve been doing this for 12 years at least and the changes people make that seem to work best in the long term. I know that individuals have different things that happen but just a pattern, have you seen a pattern or anything that consistently works over the long term?

Esther Avant: [00:21:14] One of the things I think is really important in the long term is knowledge about the energy content of food and I’m not an advocate of counting calories or tracking macros indefinitely. But I think as a tool it can be really useful because a lot of people you know if I say if I even say the word calorie or macronutriet, they don’t know what that means. They don’t know what appropriate portions are. They don’t know how their lifestyle, their activity level, their job, their age their sex, their gender. They don’t know how that plays a role in how much food their body needs. So, I think the clients who are willing to be educated on just kind of the nutrition basics do really really well in the long term because those are tools, those are skills that serve them long after they’re tracking where they’re weighing or measuring. I think within that specifically learning about appropriate portion sizes is really important and that can be as numbers based as using a food skill or it can be a little bit more practical in the day to day sense in that you use your hand as a guide. “Okay, I want my protein to be about the size of my palm. I want the serving of fat to be about the size of my thumb” but just gaining that awareness. I guess that’s if I had a pick with an overarching theme it would be awareness. That clients who are willing to pay attention and be mindful and increase their awareness on health related things do best in the long term and the ones who are willing and able to make the connections between “oh I started doing this and as a result I’m feeling this. Therefore, I should keep doing it” using that kind of you know logical deduction makes a big difference. And then I guess I have to be more specific. Clients who prioritize having a lean protein source at most if not every meal do well in the long term. Clients who prioritize eating a lot of vegetables do well in the long term. Clients who make an effort to slow down when they’re eating actually chew their food, actually taste it, allow the digestive process to do its thing and pay attention to “am I stuffed or can I cut the brakes a little bit sooner so that I’m not feeling like I need a nap after a meal.” That’s a really important thing and obviously an exercise habit is something I feel pretty strongly about but even outside of that clients who are successful long term often embrace just kind of the active lifestyle overall. And I don’t mean like you go for century bike rides in your downtime. I just mean you’re inclined to “hey!I have to go from one end of the mall to the other, I’m going to walk instead of repass my car or I’m only going up two floors, I’ll take the stairs its probably faster anyway.” The people who are willing to just kind of embrace you know “Yeah! Give them a little bit of activity whenever I can.” That typically makes them successful in the long term as well.

Mathea Ford: [00:24:35] I think those are great examples. And it’s interesting because it’s truly what we’ve known for a while but once you kind of embrace it and understand that the calorie portion thing can be huge because you don’t pay attention to how much is in something usually.

Esther Avant: [00:24:55] Right! And We have all these processed foods now that you know if you’re talking only about whole foods, your body is able to self regulate pretty well. You know those foods are relatively high volume you start to feel full or satisfied around you know what your body needs for portions. And then we get into these like super processed foods that you’re not going to feel full after a serving of chips. You’re right is not going to be like “Oh I think that’s enough.” It is going to keep eating until you reach the bottom or you run out of time or something happens. So, you know just kind of our internal checks and balances aren’t able to work as well with foods that are made in labs with who knows what.

Mathea Ford: [00:25:36] Many people probably come to you and they’ve been cyclical dieters. So, they’ll diet like you said they lose the fame 40 pounds on Weight Watchers and Weight Watchers is neither good nor bad it’s just how you manage it. But what do you think seems to keep people from continuing that healthy eating and exercise plan once they’ve seen some success like why did they fall off the wagon?

Esther Avant: [00:26:03] I think one part of it is I guess probably subconscious like self sabotage. That if you’ve been wanting to lose weight for a long time and you kind of convinced yourselves that “once I am this weight you know everything is going to be better. I’m going to find love and I’m going to get promoted. I’m going to you know whatever it is” that we kind of in the back her mind somewhere are scared of reaching that goal because what if you reach that goal and it doesn’t change everything? So, sometimes it can be easier to not reach it and not have to be confronted with that possibility than it is to go full force ahead. And then get there and potentially be like oh “I’m thinner but not much else has changed.”

Esther Avant: [00:26:47] That’s one part of it I think. Another is that I used to be very opposed to any kind of short term diet or goal or anything like that and I’ve changed my thinking on it some because I get the appeal of seeing early wins, seeing results kind of proving to yourself that you can do something that you can do this. So, I understand wanting to undertake you know a challenge for 21 days or for a month or something like that or to sign up for you know a diet or a weight loss program that you just kind of do as you’re told. I think the main issue that causes people to fall on and off the wagon and just be in that cycle of “lose it,stop doing anything, gain it back, repeat” is that there’s not really a transition plan from what you’re doing to lose the way to how you’re going to keep it off. I think that’s really the missing piece for a lot of people is you know it’s okay if the way you’ve lost it is in maybe sustainable for the rest of your life but you need to have that plan in place to help you get to something that is sustainable in the long term.

Esther Avant: [00:28:05] So, if you do Weight Watchers and again I’m not necessarily opposed to Weight Watchers either it’s just easy example. But you know if you if you lose the weight with Weight Watchers and then you’re like “Okay, I’m at my goal now I don’t need this anymore.” You need to do something to stop you from just reverting back to what you did before you lost the weight. And that’s I think where the importance of working on your day to day habits in conjunction with whatever else you’re doing is really important that hopefully, however you’ve lost weight has also been teaching you things like we were just talking about portion control and macronutrients and listening to hunger and fullness cues and things like that being more active in your day to day life. So that by the time you are at a healthy and happy weight you are also equipped with all the skills that you need to maintain that weight loss just by kind of continuing to do what has become second nature.

Mathea Ford: [00:29:07] Well I know I know about Weight Watchers, they do have a transition program and you’re able to stay and come to meetings and over a period of time to help you sustain that but it does seem to be that you need to change some on the inside as well. The stress and the anxiety and whatever factors it was that caused you to over eat after change either your reaction to them or you have to change what’s going on. Those are the things that we don’t necessarily associate with why we’re overweight but they’re definitely associated with why we’re overweight.

Esther Avant: [00:29:45] Absolutely! 100 percent. You need to confront the root issue at some point. And I think you know one of the main issues with a short term approach is that it can just be a bandaid that you know you can kind of push yourself through anything for a few weeks. You can tell yourself you know “I committed to this program. I’ve paid a lot of money for it. I’m going to make the most of it.” You can do that temporarily but if then afterwards you revert back to snacking in front of the TV every evening then those results are going to be short lived. So, you’re absolutely right that at some point you need to be confronting “How did I end up here?” What’s really at play? You know I am an emotional eater? And if so how am I going to walk through those emotions in the future in a way that will not leave me putting the pounds back on? And that’s where you know hopefully you’re working with someone qualified to help you do those things kind of concurrently that you know. “Yes! We want you to start seeing the weight come off. We want you to see that what you’re doing is working.” Of course we want you to be motivated to keep putting in the work. But at the same time, we also do need to be turning in a little bit and figuring out you know “Okay, what pattern’s are there? What habits do I need to break? What do I need to work on changing within myself that is going to give me a different result long term?” Because if you look at a lot of research there there’s no shortage of ways to lose weight. The main issue is maintaining that. So, you need to have that longer term outlook. It’s you know it’s not going to be fun, it’s not glamorous to assess why do I eat when I’m sad. And that’s why we don’t want to do it because it’s hard and it can be emotional and there’s no easy answer. Nobody can just tell me “here’s what you do” but if you really want those changes to stick then you do have to get a little bit introspective and figure out “okay, what’s going to be different? How am I going to change literally from the inside out to make it so I am a person who doesn’t have to struggle everyday to keep the weight off?”

Mathea Ford: [00:31:58] When you think about that as far as having like a healthy life and weight loss, how do you help people measure that? Like we talked a little bit before about what are their goals, what do they want to do, motivational interviewing, what are they willing to commit to. But how do you how do you measure that you’re now healthy so to speak?

Esther Avant: [00:32:18] There’s an obesity doctor in Canada almost positive name is Gianni Freedhoff who wrote a book I read years ago about weight loss and obesity. And in it he talks about how the goal for all of his patients is for them to live the healthiest life that they enjoy and that has stuck with me for years and I’ve used it over and over again because I think that’s what it boils down to is you know everybody’s healthy life is going to look a little bit different that you know to a lot of people they would kind of look at my life, my activity level, my diet and be like “Wow! She is like super into that stuff.” And you know there are certain other circles that would be like “Oh! She’s never done a marathon, she’s never done an iron man, she doesn’t eat by a certain way, you know she’s just a recreational healthy person.” So there’s just such a spectrum of you know whatever your norm is. And I think it’s just about taking someone from their current norm which is you know by their own admission, less healthy than they would like it to be. And figuring out how much can we cripple up that spectrum until you reach a point where you like “you know what? If I keep changing more, I’m going to totally hate my life.” And that’s the conversation that I have had often with clients and especially with a relatively thin women who say or you know wanting to lose the last two three or five pounds or get down to a certain body fat percentage is you know that’s possible. “It certainly is doable. I know you’re willing to work hard. You are physiologically capable of doing that. But is it worth it to you? If going from where you are now to that last little bit means sacrificing so much more of your happiness then is it really worth it?” So, sometimes it’s about figuring out “you know what? I’m doing pretty well most of the time and that’s good enough for me that you know I have an occasional drink, I have an occasional dessert. I don’t feel bad about it but overall my habits are pretty healthy then great. Then that is a healthy life and a healthy weight for you. I think the issue is when clients are too far one way or the other. Either they’re obsessively exercising and counting every morsel that goes into their bodies or they just seem like they don’t care at all about their health and it’s just about kind of working towards the middle until you strike your personal balance where you’re like “you know what? I’m doing pretty well. I’m pretty healthy. You know I don’t have any major health concerns and I’m doing the best I can and I’m also enjoying this kind of living and being social with people that I love and care about. And you know and that makes me happy.” And that’s where balance is.

Mathea Ford: [00:35:15] Yeah I was going to ask you kind of how do you help them figure out what is out of balance and what is good balance point?

Esther Avant: [00:35:23] That depends not just on the personal also like where they are in their lives that you know it’s okay to be off balance sometimes. And if you can read a lot of places that there’s no such thing as balance that something is constantly getting more of your attention. So, it’s instead of like a seesaw perfectly balanced it’s like you’re kind of going between one side is higher and the other side is higher. And as long as you’re sort of rotating between priorities then you know there’s no such thing as perfect balance. So there’s that too. Like for example if your daughter is getting married and you’re like I want to look like the hottest mother of the bride that you know this family has ever seen. Then, you know maybe that’s a time that you are going to be a little bit more or even a lot more concerned and you know caring about what you’re eating, how much you’re exercising and maybe it’s not sustainable long term. But you find a dress that you love. You look awesome in it. You look amazing in the pictures, you get tons of compliments and you feel great. Then, you know then that was balance for right then and then as long as you’re able to transition back to something that will help be healthier in the long term. Where you like “Okay, I’m going to ease up now and I sacrificed a lot of time at work or with my family because I was at the gym so much. So, now I’m going to devote more time to my job or to my family and kind of let that take a backseat like I’m not going to not a turn a dial all the way off. I’m going to stop from going, I’m just going to rebalance, we’ll recalibrate a little bit. That’s big. Its just figuring out like “okay, right now what do you feel like you can do?” Something a use often with clients is the idea of bare ass minimums or we call them BAMs and figure out like there are going to be times that you know you are slammed at work. If you’re accountant and you’re an accountant and it’s tax season and you are working 16 hour days. What’s the minimum effort you can put to your health that you can still feel good about at the end of the day? Maybe it’s making sure you eat a vegetable at dinner. Maybe it’s making sure you walk for 30 minutes at lunch. There’s always going to be kind of those ebbs and flows in what gets more of your attention. And I think as long as you’re able to move from you know flow from one to the other without shutting anything completely off then you’re in a pretty good place.

Mathea Ford: [00:37:50] What are some ways you think that our listeners could use the information we’ve talked about today in their day to day life? Whether they’re seeing clients, seeing patients or just for them personally? Do you have any kind of overarching ideas about how they could use it?

Esther Avant: [00:38:06] Yeah I have a few. First one being to learn from your past instead of repeating the same mistakes. If something doesn’t sit right with you, you don’t have to do it even if you know half your neighborhood has success with it. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat. Be open to destroying a bunch of things and see what’s going to work for you. And that goes right into the second one which is to keep an open mind. If you’re curious about something and you’ve done enough research to know that it is safe, give it a shot. Treat it like an experiment. You don’t need to be married to a certain approach and be willing to admit when or if it’s not working for you. Its just kind of there’s nothing to say that you can’t try something and give it your best effort for a month and say “you know what? That wasn’t for me. I did my best and I just don’t see it. I don’t see a penny out. I’m going do something else.” There’s nothing wrong with that. Keep an open mind about you know you might have certain thoughts about how you have to do this or this is the only thing that’ll work. And you know this kind of be open to having your mind changed.

Esther Avant: [00:39:13] And then I think the last thing is something that we’ve talked about but is so important that it bears repeating is that at the end of the day, no matter how you approach your weight loss the most important thing is that you’re simultaneously working on building the habits that will allow you to keep the weight off when you stop dieting. So, that means finding ways to incorporate regular movement and healthy foods into your day to day life in such a way that they don’t feel like a chore or something that you’re being forced to do. They just become what you do.

Mathea Ford: [00:39:44] I think those are great ways and we sometimes as a dietitian personally I get very focused on what does the research say, what is kind of the medical approved way or whatever. But if I pay attention to the other things outside of that, I can learn things from there, I can improve things and that’s also what my clients are listening to so I need to know a little bit more about them. Maybe even you know think about how it would work in real life just so that I can empathize and understand what might be thinking about too so.

Esther Avant: [00:40:28] Yeah, I think those of us with you know the degree, you know the science degree and the background and you know the better kind of scientifically minded and like are interested in the research. It can be hard to kind of shelf that and think about it from like practical points also is that like “Okay, you know just because research indicates something doesn’t mean that there is no validity in you know what this client is saying or what I keep jeering. And you need to kind of figure out where you know where you mesh the anecdotal and the scientific to you know to not forget that you’re working with an actual person not you know a lab rat.

Mathea Ford: [00:41:12] Yeah absolutely. So, Esther I always try to ask my guests what is your favorite food?

Esther Avant: [00:41:20] Well so I’m pregnant right now. And I think that all my favorite foods are just the ones that I can’t have. So I want a rare steak. I want some sushi, I want some Poke which is huge here in Hawaii. So, those are big right now just because you always want we can’t have. In general though I’d say my favorites would be kind of run the gamut here. So, potatoes, eggplant farm, pork nachos and sour gummy candies.

Mathea Ford: [00:41:48] Those are some really good. What’s pork nachos? Just nachos with some pulled pork on them?

Esther Avant: [00:41:54] Yeah.

Mathea Ford: [00:41:54] Okay. And I personally don’t know what Poké is. So, what is it?

Esther Avant: [00:41:59] So, it’s raw fish like cubed raw fish. Typically Ahi but you see salmon sometimes and octopus sometimes. What is that like with sesame oil and like chive or green onion. Sometimes there’s a spicy kind that’s like with some kind of Mayo. It’s kind of it’s similar to like a like sashimi just chopped up with some stuff. Yeah but it’s so good.

Mathea Ford: [00:42:24] That explains why I don’t know what it is because I do not eat fish in general but I don’t eat raw fish for sure.

Esther Avant: [00:42:33] Probably, not for you then.

Mathea Ford: [00:42:35] No, probably not. But I always find it interesting what is kind of trending and people have started doing kind of these smoothie bowls and just everything bowls putting together stuff. So, I think that that’s a great. That’s awesome it used to be wraps you know. It used to be anything so. It’s great! As long as if you want to try new things and you can make it healthy that’s great! So Esther. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mathea Ford: [00:43:10] I know my listeners have learned a lot about just thinking differently when it comes to even just changing habits not necessarily weight loss but changing habits for the long term, thinking about thinking differently about how that works long term. So if listeners want to connect with you what is the best way to do that?

Esther Avant: [00:43:29] The best way would be my Web site which is EstherAvant.com. I’m also on Facebook my business page is Facebook.com/EstherAvantWellnessCoaching. And I’m on Instagram where I do a lot of those infographic content and my handle there is @Esther.Avant.

Mathea Ford: [00:43:53] Great! Thank you so much!

Esther Avant: [00:43:55] Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here.

Mathea Ford: [00:43:57] Well guys this has been another great episode of the Nutrition Experts Podcast. The podcast that is about learning more so you can do more with nutrition in your life.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/renaldiethq/p/app.pippa.io/public/streams/5aba77b58bdf7ba53cccc618/episodes/5b750689b289d880683b5297.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Email | RSS

Filed Under: Blog, Podcast Tagged With: Day to Day Habits, Esther Avant, Intuitive Eating, Mindful Eating, Weight Loss, Weight Watchers

Copyright © 2021 · Wellness Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in