Confident Eaters

CE Scale Talk
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[00:00:00]

Georgie: Welcome to the Confident Eaters Podcast, where you get proven methods to end overeating, emotional eating, and stressing about food. We are heading for harmony between your body, food and Feelings, hosted by me, Georgie Fear and my team at Confident Eaters.

Thanks everybody for joining us today for another Confident Eaters podcast.

I am Georgie Fear, and with me today is my co-coach, Ariel Faulkner. Ariel, I gotta apologize. Last couple episodes I just dove right into the topic 'cause I was so excited and I have this post-it note scribbled on my desk that is like, let people get to know Ariel. So tell them some more about your wonderful self and how you and I ended up doing this together.

Ariel: Georgie, well, I a registered dietician. I've been working with clients for about 20 years now, and I have definitely [00:01:00] shifted in my approach in the way I do my work. And my inspiration, was actually reading your book. And a plug again, give yourself more I can't help myself.

Georgie: Sometimes I feel like these are romance stories. Like, okay, tell us how you met.

Ariel: Well, they kind of are because after reading your book, it was so inspiring for me that I went to your website because I knew something was missing in the way I was working with people, even if they were getting results, I still wasn't feeling like. Fulfilled in what I was providing, and I knew it was because the missing piece was working on the emotional component and the relationship with food.

Not just, you know, the outcome or the process or trying to figure out for my clients what's gonna work for them. I. Because you know, the truth is we can't figure out for people what's gonna work for them. We can be there as their guide and we can support them, but we all have the answers, women and what's gonna work for us.

And so I really work with women and the relationship with food, and I do [00:02:00] work with men as well, not just women, but I would say the majority of my clients are women. And really shifting that relationship with food, which ultimately gets them to the point where, They're living in a body they love without white knuckling it without struggling.

Yeah. And so that's, that's the ultimate goal. So that's, that's who I am.

Georgie: I think our careers have taken a, a lot of a similar trajectory where maybe when we start, we're doing more stuff focused on macros and numbers and, you know, you're hitting a calculator several times an hour. But now we're sort of, Moved away from those sort of themes.

Not to knock anybody that still does that, it's just some people feel drawn in other directions and I think it feels really good to talk more about like why people are struggling with what they're eating and helping them get to that underlying layer. So instead of talking with people about what they want to change, we help clarify why they're doing other stuff, and that does inevitably help them change a lot more successfully.

[00:03:00] But, Thank you for introducing yourself. Where do you live?

Ariel: I live in Sarasota, Florida,

Georgie: enjoying the warmth, so

Ariel: no, I'm not, no, it's too hot right now.

Georgie: And of course I'm up here in Canada and I'm like, oh my God, it's 80 degrees Fahrenheit. I can't take it!

Ariel: That's hilarious. Yeah, I think it was, you know, normal 95 and humid here today, and it's pretty oppressive right now.

It's not, it's not fun. I'm not a hot, hot weather person. Thanks. Don't ask me why I live here. That's another story for another time.

Georgie: So today we wanna talk with everybody about something most of you probably have in your house, and that is the scale.

Maybe it's in your bathroom, maybe it's in your bedroom. But getting on a scale and checking our body weight is a daily routine for a large proportion of the population. I think somewhere around a third of people check it every day. And another third check it about periodically, perhaps once a week or less.

And then there's also a sizable chunk of people who are like, Heck [00:04:00] no, I don't want to get on that thing. And maybe they only find out their weight once a year or twice a year at the doctor. And I've also had a number of people who say that they don't want to know their weight, so they request to not face the number or have it said to them when they go to the doctor.

So much emotion can get involved in the simple act of assessing our gravitational pull. What is your relationship with scale and body weight, Ariel?

Is it where it was five, 10 years ago or is this also is sort of thing that changed over time?

Ariel: This is definitely something that's changed over time, but I will say clients are often shocked when I say I don't own a scale and I don't weigh myself and. I thought that I wanted to go down the route of trying to break the scale anxiety, and this was probably about a year ago, but I never did.

I never did have the courage, which was a blessing in disguise. The only reason I know my weight, I'm, I'm in that third category. You go to the doctor on the scale and then you're like, [00:05:00] oh, okay. That's what I weigh. And that's about it. But the reason I don't own a scale is because when I was in elementary school, I can't believe they did this to us.

But I grew up in a really small town in Pennsylvania and they would line us all up in the, you know, the PE area and they would weigh us in front of everyone and they would announce loudly our, and so everybody heard it. I was heavy, like I was,

Georgie: I can't even imagine a purpose behind that. Like I know. So if somebody has to say it to someone else who's like writing it on their clipboard, fine.

Like, okay, but like, like going outta your way to announce it. What could possibly be the benefit?

It's like a like prize fighters, like you're getting into the ring like, and at 87 pounds we've got second grader.

Ariel: So it was like on top of stuff going on at home on top of, you know, all of these other, there's so much context and and nuance that goes into [00:06:00] that. Maybe other children won't have that effect, but for me it was really painful.

I. And it really created a, a really toxic relationship with the scale. So I have never been a daily weigh-er and I've actually never been aware outside of getting weight at the doctors. Even when I had the most dysfunctional relationship with food and I was the hardest on myself, I never assessed my progress or where I was with my scale weight.

'cause it just created so much anxiety. I only went by kind of looking in the mirror, seeing how my clothes fit. But I was not, I've never been a regular scale person and it's, it's something that I don't desire to do in the future, and I don't see the point of even knowing what I weigh if I'm eating and moving in a way that I'm really loving and my clothes are fitting good, that I don't care what that number says.

Georgie: So you have other life aspirations.

Ariel: Yes, I do.

Georgie: Okay. No.

Ariel: Yeah. I mean, when I introduce myself, I'm like, hi, I'm Ariel. I'm pounds. [00:07:00] No, I don't do that. But you know, you know, I mean, you would think we do with as much emphasis as we put on the scale, you'd think we all walk around with T-shirts going.

This is my weight, just like it happened in, when I was in elementary school, you know? Yeah. And, and I really, I really carried a lot of shame around my weight until I got older and I had a DEXA scan done. And when I had the DEXA scan done, it was really cool because I saw it underneath, right inside the body and you get your muscle and your bone density and all of that.

Georgie: So some people who don't know what a DEXA scan is, A DEXA scan is dual energy x-ray absor optometry, which is a fancy way of saying it uses x-rays to get a peak under your skin and look at how much of your body mass is actually bone versus organs versus fat tissue versus muscle tissue.

So it gives you a lot more information than simply hopping on the bathroom scale.

Ariel: Exactly, exactly. And what I learned from that scan was that I have a very high lean body mass, meaning like naturally just genetically, I have a [00:08:00] higher lean mass. And so I'm going to weigh about 10% more than another woman might fight just because of the amount of natural lean mass I carry

and so understanding that was really empowering. 'cause I'm like, oh, nothing's wrong with me. Like for me to try to achieve. 120 pounds, I would look like a concentration camp victim, you know? Yeah. And yet that's completely, if you looked on a chart that's in the healthy weight range for my height, in fact, I think the low end is one 15 and I.

I'm five, five and a half. Oh, we're in the same height. Okay. Are we? Oh, that's so funny. And so there was a point in my most disordered days in my twenties when I was running seven miles a day and restricting everything that I was weighed at the doctor. And I was one 17 and I was dying inside. Yeah. So if I'm gonna assess my progress on scale, I sure as hell don't want that lifestyle.

Like, I can tell you that.

Georgie: Absolutely. Absolutely. But that's what [00:09:00] happens when we live and die by the scale. You know, maybe we hit mm-hmm. Air quotes PRS in terms of getting our body weight low. But rarely would anyone look back at their life history and be like, those were the happiest days of my life. Like, I never hear that.

Right. You never hear that. Like light does not equal happy. And that's probably one of the. Bullet points that we wanna put on this episode is like lower body weight does not equal higher happiness.

Ariel: And I also think the problem with focusing on the scale as the outcome is if the process you're doing is something that is not sustainable and isn't something coming from a place of kindness and self care.

And a relationship with your body, then whatever number that ends up being is not sustainable. And if you do sustain it, it's from a place of fear and anxiety and struggle. Yeah. Which is not a place we wanna live.

Georgie: So true. A hundred percent. I think it's, it's also fascinating to notice that, so you had a very [00:10:00] disordered relationship with food and exercise, and were striving to get your body to as thin as possible.

Yet you did not have that sort of compulsive get on the scale multiple times a day or everyday sort of pattern. And it's important to remember that, people who have disordered eating are suffering from their relationship with food, don't necessarily have to be in one particular body shape, and they will not all have an obsession with the scale. So we wanna make sure that we don't jump to conclusions there. One of the points that I think is important to make on today's topic is that we never wanna generalize that the scale is good for everyone or bad for everyone, because there is so much personal variation.

And so if you, for example, feel like getting on the scale regularly, It helps you stay aware of the choices that you're making for your body, and it doesn't cause you undue stress. It might be hard to understand how for other people getting on the scale causes severe distress [00:11:00] and anxiety, and for other people it could be serving a harmful role in their life.

So, It's important, I think, as practitioners to notice that some of our clients may be fine with using weight as a measure of their progress. And for a lot of our other clients, it's absolutely not gonna be the best thing for them. And so we wanna choose something else. And so for people listening at home, there's a lot of things that can be taken into consideration.

To help decide whether getting on the scale is actually something that you wanna do on a regular basis, or if it's not, and then there's some other things you can do to measure progress toward your goals.

Ariel: Absolutely Georgie. I couldn't agree with you more, and I think that's what makes us so unique in this entire industry is we aren't about protocols and we're about really listening to our clients and helping them uncover what they resonate with.

And there is no right or wrong. I had an unhealthy relationship with the scale. Because of what I went through as a child that doesn't, you know, [00:12:00] somebody gets on the scale and there's no emotion. It's just a number. It's just a data point. Well, that's a very different relationship 'cause there's no emotional attachment to that outcome.

But when there's been a strong emotional attachment to that outcome, that's when it can turn into a really negative way of measuring your progress.

Georgie: Correct. I agree. And if somebody says, Look at the research. Getting on the scale regularly is a form of self-monitoring that helps people maintain their weight loss after they've lost it.

Or getting on the scale every day as part of a weight loss intervention helps people get better results. It, it makes me cringe a little bit because I'm thinking you may not be looking at the exact right population that you wanna be comparing yourself to. And many times those studies exclude anybody that's had a history of eating disorder. So it may not be the right population to look at for you.

Ariel: And I think to that note as well, when they're looking at those [00:13:00] research studies, to me, success is not when you are white knuckling your process and kicking yourself controlled by a daily weigh-in. A lot of people who have lost a lot of weight and done diet programs and the people they do research on, yeah, they may have achieved their goal, those successful losers, but their way, their only way of maintaining that because it wasn't an internal locus of control, it was external, is to get on the scale.

I personally think it's because they don't trust themselves and they don't trust, they can intuitively manage their weight. They need something outside of themselves in order to stay on track, so to speak.

Georgie: So in that respect, it sounds a lot like the way people use calorie counting software.

Ariel: Exactly.

Georgie: You know, I don't know how to, I don't know if I'm making these decisions correctly. Mm-hmm. I want some confirmation. Mm-hmm.

Ariel: Guilty. Guilty to [00:14:00] promoting that. I'm so sorry. Public service announcement to all former clients that I ever gave calorie amounts to. I am so sorry.

Georgie: But that's what we learned in school, isn't it?

Right. It's, it's, it's both of us, you know, growing up and deciding we wanted to go into nutrition at an early age. You go to your undergrad in nutritional science, and that's the sort of thing they teach you. They teach you a lot of biology, which is super beneficial. But when it comes to your later years and doing your dietetic internship, you're basically instructed that that is how it's done.

Like that is the recipe for helping people change their body weight is to assess the calorie intake, come up with a target, and then help that person match their intake to that target. It sounds great on paper, and again, if it works for somebody, perfect, you know, some people around there we could say, just eat less, and they would go home, eat less, and lose weight.

The problem is those are very, very rare individuals, so I think a [00:15:00] deeper level of understanding of psychology and emotion is absolutely crucial for 99% of people out there to have a substantial change in their behaviors.

Ariel: And Georgie, you told me a statistic one time when we were talking, what is the success rate with calorie counting and macro tracking and apps, just in case people are feeling a little learned helplessness or disappointed they couldn't stay on those programs?

Georgie: It's abysmal. It's abysmal. Most people have heard the 95% of dieters regain weight, and that's pretty substantiated, between a few different data sets. It's above 90%. And then the question is really how long does it take for people to regain their weight? Some studies. Mm-hmm. Virtually everybody regains it by three years in the remainder.

Virtually everybody regains it by five years, but very few people are able to make a significant change and lose at least 5% of their body weight and keep it off for a long period of time. So, [00:16:00] Even if it appears to be successful, to use something like a calorie tracker app or trying to hit a calorie total, too often people say it was successful, but then I screwed up and gained the weight back, and it's like, no, no, no.

It wasn't successful because you shouldn't have to breathe properly to have it, you know, come in, if natural living is. If those results aren't lasting, it simply wasn't a permanent change. Mm-hmm. For many people, weight loss through calorie counting apps is something like a temporary tattoo or a semi-permanent hair color sort of washes out relatively quickly.

Ariel: And I will, I will throw in one caveat there, because one thing I have seen is a few of my clients who have wanted to go that route. I make sure to do the emotional piece, the habit, the behavior piece, the education so that we can transition away from it. But it's [00:17:00] never going to be the tool or even the tool that I would initiate using.

And then, In regards to the success rate, and I saw this over and over again, you know, 95% of people are not going to log consistently. They're not going to count macros, they're not going to micromanage everything they put in their mouth because they have, they have life to live. They have other things to do, hopefully, and it really can.

Hopefully it really can steal the joy away from eating. And if it isn't taking energy and they are not micromanaging, then they're most likely eating the same thing every day. 'cause it's safe and it's portioned and they know what's in it and they're not giving themself the freedom and flexibility to listen to their internal wisdom of what their body really wants and needs.

Georgie: Mm-hmm. So let's talk about using the scale as a tool to measure progress as we both have agreed. For some [00:18:00] people, it's not a problem they can get on the scale. They can use it as data to see if the current behaviors that they're doing are working. So, for example, many of my clients get on the scale about once a week, and I tell people try not to get on it every day.

I'd prefer once a week or less frequently, but it is valuable numbers because we can use it to say, okay, so if Janie's plan has been to include dessert four times a week, and so she's executing that four times a week and she's logging that so we know it's not three or eight, then we can look at her weight.

Changes over a number of weeks and say, okay, so how is her body responding to this behavior of saying yes to dessert four times a week and saying no the rest of the time? For many people, that is a really helpful triangulation for finding out chiefly how many treats we can include, or how much a change in exercise program may impact somebody's body weight.

So [00:19:00] in some senses it can be helpful. However, I find even in clients that we do wanna use the scale with or that we are okay with using the scale with, there's other parameters that we absolutely wanna take into account. Sort of like you wouldn't wanna have a single outcome goal for too many projects in life.

Most of us don't just wanna be lighter, we also wanna be healthier, we wanna have more energy, we wanna feel more proud of our appearance, and none of those things are directly going to be the same as weight loss. So I said earlier that one of the oversimplifications that many people run into is thinking that a lower body weight is going to equal more happiness, and that's simply not the case.

So what other measures of progress have you found helpful, Ariel?

Ariel: Oh yeah. Well, for me, I sleep, you know, quality sleep bowel motility, gut health. When people are highly stressed [00:20:00] and not eating intuitively, they tend to have more I B Ss symptoms and issues with their gi energy levels. Overall improvement in mood,

Georgie: how your clothes fit, right? Yeah. Use quite a lot.

Ariel: Absolutely. Feeling better in their clothes increasing their performance if they go to the gym or they're involved in any kind of activity. There's just so many non-scale victories that we can look at. And when you are working with people and they're really focusing on these other aspects and falling in love with the process, building that self-care, the irony is that's when the scale actually starts to move in the right direction.

Georgie: I see the same. I see for a lot of people it's an ironic sort of trap that the harder they push single-mindedly toward losing pounds no matter what they have to do. Mm-hmm. The more stubborn those pounds seem to be. When we ease up and we start focusing on, let me just [00:21:00] treat myself with a little more gentleness and let me look at what I feel like doing and being more flexible and freehanded in the activities I'm choosing, the meals I'm choosing. Then one day they often turn around and they're like, you know, hands got looser.

Ariel: Exactly. And sometimes experience can be really dramatic. I would love to get, give like a little client story for a few minutes. Sure, yeah. Yeah, so one of my new clients who started with me has struggled with her weight her whole life, and she came to me at a pretty high weight and the first, our first session when we met, and she was a little shocked because I didn't give her calories, I didn't give her macros. I asked her to pay attention to our hunger and keep a journal and note when she felt urges or cravings to eat outside of hunger, to have a large glass of water, see what was going on emotionally.

Practice a pause and then see if she still wanted to eat. And so that was [00:22:00] really, you know, the primary focus of that first week together. And she came back to me.

Georgie: I was gonna say, that's not an easy set of things to do either. Like for her, like I can appreciate the challenge that you're giving her there.

Ariel: Oh yeah. And as you know, Georgie, I followed up with you and said, uhoh, did I do too much? Did I get too much? I was a little concerned. 'cause the last thing you want a client to feel is like they failed. And she came back and she was just glowing. She dropped 10 pounds that week, 10 pounds one week. Never logged a calorie.

And the best part about it was she was like, first of all, she said, I can't believe how good potatoes are. She was cutting starches because she was afraid they were gonna make her gain weight. And I had her incorporate quality starches in each of her meals. She couldn't believe how good she felt and that also helped appease her cravings.

But we just talked about other things. [00:23:00] She's, she's decided she's going to, and, you know, get into some new hobbies and activities she hasn't been doing 'cause she's been distracted with food and struggling with her weight and yeah, that is hard. And that's what I think is so interesting. When you look at, people will go on, you know, 1200 calorie diets and it, in some ways it's actually easier to do that than it is to stop and start to go, okay, am I eating when I'm hungry?

Mm-hmm. Am I stopping when I'm satisfied? I mean, I know that sounds really simple, but it's so powerful.

Georgie: Yeah. I mean, it's tricky to do. We like clear things. We like if there was a gauge on our body that went from like empty to full and it was like, okay, stop eating now. Like a lot of us would buy that gauge or the app that we could look at because then we wouldn't have to do the more difficult job of actually feeling okay, do have I eaten enough or am I [00:24:00] unsatisfied?

Like it requires a whole new level of awareness. So for this client that you're talking about, The measures of progress aren't just the scale, but you're also looking at is she able to do something like stop and pause before eating, or is she making impulsive decisions?

I think that sort of difference in somebody's life, even though it doesn't fit nicely into a box, really does change the quality of our life. If we could quantify, for example, How many times have you felt out of control of the decisions you are making versus how much of the time do you feel like you are making intentional decisions?

Those are the tricky things that programs and generalized weight loss tools often don't ask because it's way easier to be like get on the scale. How much did you weigh?

Ariel: Exactly, and I think of it as like the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy. Mm-hmm. It's like the way we work [00:25:00] with people is a democracy.

We're helping people really like get in tune with their bodies, connect with their bodies, find the way, the path that's gonna work for them with our experience, our expertise, our knowledge. From a clinical and from a relational or emotional eating standpoint. And when you're utilizing these programs or methods that are telling you what to do, well, what happens when they stop telling you what to do?

And I see this all the time with clients. They're, they don't know what to eat. And, and it literally erodes your self-trust with food and creates a dependency on another program or another diet. And then it becomes just a circular pattern where you're running on a treadmill, getting nowhere, and then feeling more and more hopeless.

'cause you keep feeling like you're failing. But it wasn't you, it was the method.

Georgie: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And it's, it's so sad when people are using the scale as the be all, end all [00:26:00] highest judge of the land. Feeling like I'm not getting anywhere when, mm-hmm. Us who are witnessing this person and the changes they've made has seen them become more comfortable in speaking their mind.

And we've seen them adopt new hobbies and spend more time with their kids, and they're telling us that they're not having the same experiences that brought them in, like finding that their clothes were too small every six months. And yet if the scale is holding steady, so many people will feel defeated, like, oh, mm-hmm I just haven't made any progress.

And I wanna say, you are so much happier and more whole and healthy as a person and mm-hmm. Of course the scale is going to go down. That's one of the things that happens when we just form healthy nutrition and activity habits. So many people are just waiting on that scale to move because the very idea that they just feel better almost isn't good enough.

Ariel: I think [00:27:00] that's a lot of, that is what we've been sold by diet culture. You know, this idea that when you do achieve this weight or this body composition or whatever it is that, that you're really gonna be happy and you're not. Yeah. It's just that's not how it works.

Georgie: Right. So maybe a good question for everyone listening to consider is, what have I used my weight as a proxy for in my life?

So speaking personally, I can tell you I have used weight as a proxy for my value as a human being. I have definitely thought that it would be a direct route to more happiness. In fact, I can remember in high school when I was seeing a dietician. She said, why do you want to lose weight so badly? And I said, because I wanna be happier.

I'm just so unhappy. And she said, well, there's a lot of 90 pound women crying in my office. It really struck me for a while, and I just sat there and [00:28:00] thought about it and was like, yeah, I guess I could still be just as unhappy even if I was thinner. But with my 17 year old logic, I thought, well, at least it'll be a step in the right direction.

But it's true, like if you were to graph your happiness in various phases of your life and your weight, there may be some correlations, but they're certainly not gonna be linearly correlated. Sometimes people's happiest times are when they're, I. Eating well, moving often, feeling proud of their accomplishments outside of fitness and having good relationships with other people.

And so usually those times are not when people are hitting their highest weights, but they're often not when people are hitting their lowest weights at all. I think for many women or men who have had decades and decades of trying to reduce their weight kind of all the time, The lowest what you've ever achieved is, in my opinion, probably 10 or 15 [00:29:00] pounds below, where most people feel they can comfortably be happy and maintain for the rest of their life.

What's your thought on that?

Ariel: I completely agree with you, and that's right in alignment with my experience. I mean, like I said earlier, I was 10 to 15 pounds lighter when I was at my lowest weight, but I was also at my most disordered, not only like with my body image, but in all aspects of my health. It was a really awful time when I think back and now it's like I can't believe I did that to myself or I thought that that was going to make me happy. Like, I don't know what we have this obsession with, like thinking that making, getting ourselves smaller and smaller and smaller is going to bring us this joy or this fulfillment, and it's, it's the opposite. It's when we start to actually change our relationship with ourself to one of kindness and self care.

And that doesn't mean. That you sit on the couch eating BombBomb. I'm not talking [00:30:00] about that kind of kindness. I'm talking about stopping with the war with yourself and starting to listen and tune in to your natural hunger, your natural satiety, because our body does have an intuitive wisdom, and I think we all have a unique weight that will never be found on a chart.

Our body is happiest at and functions properly, and this is not a weight that you can define or find in a textbook. It's something you have to experiment with, but you don't experiment by focusing on that weight. You experiment by utilizing the behaviors that habits the lifestyle, changing relationship with food, reconnecting with your body, and then seeing where that weight ends up.

Georgie: I love that approach. Thinking about your goal life and your goal behaviors. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Now, I like to frame my own body weight in the same sense that what do I want my [00:31:00] body to weigh? Well, I want it to weigh what it weighs when I am the best athlete I can be when I'm eating, when I'm hungry, stopping when I'm full, eating delicious food out, having fun with people, not soothing my emotions with food.

My body's gonna fall into some sort of pattern. When we adopt healthy habits, our bodies fall into line and they find a nice place to be. For me, attaining a lower body weight has been, I can very clearly associate it with certain behaviors. I. If I wanted to reduce my weight to like the bare minimum that I could get by on, I would have to make sure I was hungry for a fair amount of time.

Like for me, if I'm hungry for like 30 ish minutes before I eat, you know, I stay around this same body weight, but I know from more restrictive times in my life that getting too a weight that's lower than my body is happy. Maintaining it [00:32:00] requires a lot more discomfort. Something like being hungry for two hours before each time you eat.

And let me tell you, that doesn't just mean being hungry for two hours. It also means being distractible for two hours and it means. Stressing. It means being less focused on my creative work. It means less present to the conversations I'm having with people. It means I'm much, much less capable as an athlete.

I just don't have the gas in the tank to have as much endurance or to do I. As much volume as I do now, like you can't do two workouts a day and feel good for them if you're really, really trying to run on the bare minimum energy intake. So for me, I've sort of felt out my healthy weight comes from these healthy behaviors, and I don't feel the need like you, Ariel.

I don't feel the need to get on a scale super often to know that I'm doing those healthy behaviors.

Ariel: And I think we'll probably touch more, dive more into this in another podcast, but [00:33:00] I would love to ask you, Georgie, when you were in that place, how much of your time was consumed thinking about food?

Georgie: All of it.

Ariel: Yeah, exactly.

Georgie: I was a lousy friend. I was a lousy teammate, I was a lousy partner. We all become self-centered when we're in a certain level of distress. And restricting your food intake is a significant stressor. Mm-hmm. So it's not your fault if that makes you really focus on yourself and your needs and your hunger and how you're gonna bite someone's hand off if they take one of your pretzels, because that's what we all become when we are living in scarcity when it comes to food.

Ariel: Absolutely. The other thing I'd like to say is that if you're a mom out there, because I would say Eva is one of my biggest inspirations and. I never want her to struggle or be in this [00:34:00] prison with her body like I was for most of my life. And it's, it's all about modeling. Like you can say whatever you want as a mother, but you what, what you're modeling is what is going to be ingrained in our children.

And so if you wanna stop this pattern in its tracks and you don't want your daughter or your son. To be caught in that prison of food fear and assessing their value and self-esteem based on their appearance and how much they weigh, then you have to be the example.

Georgie: That's such a great point. Yeah. We remember what we witness and see.

Mm-hmm. And almost all of our clients, I'm sure you'll back me up on this, tell us about their mother's food obsessions and. Shaming themselves over what they've eaten and getting on the scale and mm-hmm. It's,

Ariel: mm-hmm. And even, even other things, Georgie like sitting down to dinner and everybody's eating a full meal, but mom has half a chicken breast and a bite of broccoli.

[00:35:00] It's like, what's going on there? Or maybe she has a whole plate of broccoli and a bite of chicken breast. Right. Both of those are disordered, let's just put it that way. Yes,

Georgie: yes. So we talked about how what we say to our children is not as important as what we're modeling, what we're doing. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

We've also talked about how lower body weight does not equal happier. So what we do want to assess is how happy are we actually, and that's not something your coach or your bathroom scale or your pants can tell you. That's something you have to actually ask yourself. Am I getting happier for this effort?

Is the work that I'm doing on my nutrition and fitness increasing my confidence, making me feel more joyful and energetic? By all means, if it is, then you are right on track. Keep doing stuff that makes you feel more alive. However, there's a point at which you may be trying to push yourself past your happy, healthy body weight, and you start to realize that this effort has now become [00:36:00] exhausting for very little actual life improvement. So while it's tough to quantify, I think it is worthy of reflection to think about.

Whether this project is making your life better or making your life tougher and more stressful. So lastly, before we wrap up, I think it's very important to say, well, if not the scale, what? Like what do we track, what do we monitor? We mentioned sort of those. Soft concepts of how happy am I, how stressed am I?

Mm-hmm. Am I feeling in control of my food? We can also use some more quantifiable things like how are my clothes fitting? Do most of my clothes fit? We can also use, as you mentioned, athletic ability. Maybe you're able to run five K faster than you were the year before, or you're able to bench press dumbbells that were heavier than they were before.

Anything else come to mind? Ariel, when it comes to what can we replace the scale with? If somebody's like, you [00:37:00] know, this thing is really not making me happy.

Ariel: I think we can replace it with our yearly checkup when we see our numbers improve, right? When we get our labs done and we see all our numbers improving due to our healthy habits,

Georgie: right?

Like blood, glucose, cholesterol. All of those things can really be indicators of whether our life is gonna be impacted by chronic disease. Which I think would be much more of a downer than having to buy a larger size pair of pants.

Ariel: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I also think just like the joy of eating and the joy of movement that gets lost in diet culture.

And I do believe that one of the reasons so few people take the steps to get healthier is because they're focusing on the wrong thing, and the act of losing weight and getting fit has been marketed as painful, a struggle. Again, it's more of a dictatorship. It's not working with your body. And what our messages and what [00:38:00] we're teaching is that I. It's actually the complete opposite. When you release the resistance and you step into that relationship with yourself and you eat in a way that's intuitive and the way that your body is communicating to you, and when you're moving in a way that you love and understand that this doesn't mean you have to go to a gym.

There's lots of ways to move our bodies. I mean, I have a client who loves to dance to salsa 'cause she's from Columbia. Mm-hmm. And that's been her experience as her exercise and her movement. And I think that unfortunately, I don't know if this is a word, but fitness culture has done the same damage as diet culture where we have this idea that things have to be so hard.

Mm-hmm. And the truth is, is that the process of not only achieving your ideal health or body composition or weight outcome, whatever that be and exercise and food can be. [00:39:00] A joyful experience.

Georgie: Amen. And when it's joyful, we aren't in such a hurry. Right, exactly. It's the unpleasantness that makes us feel an urgent need to get it over with. Like, I want the fastest weight loss because I don't wanna be doing it for the rest of my life because it's terrible. But if we're able to take out that strain and stress and anguish and just let it be an unfolding of really a pleasant process, then I find we're all able to extend ourselves much more patience in reaching our goal.

Ariel: Yeah, putting that kind of pressure on ourself has definitely come from the industry. And I just like to throw in a little analogy for clients who still struggle with the patients, and this is a financial analogy 'cause I think a lot of people can relate to money. If you were bankrupt and you started saving money, would you be a millionaire in a month?

No,

Georgie: not unless you have like a tremendous income, but no, I wouldn't.

Ariel: Exactly. [00:40:00] We understand that building wealth and changing our habits with spending and saving for things that we want, it, is it, is it hard? Do we have to practice restraint? Do we have to practice controlling, you know, impulse, et cetera for the, for the longer term?

Yeah, but it does accrue over time and solely builds. Imagine if you told yourself, I wanna be a millionaire one day, but I have to do it in six months, or I'm just gonna give up.

Georgie: Mm. Right. I mean, that's so daunting. 'cause I wouldn't have faith that I could do it. So right from the get go I'd be like I don't know what to exactly.

So demotivating.

Ariel: It's so demotivating and that's what this diet culture has done. It's demotivated people because it's put on these constraints and these timelines and these, these, these programs that just further disconnect you. And what I would say to people is that please live to the pressure you have the rest of your life to perfect this process in a way that's [00:41:00] gonna work for you.

You don't need to put a timeline on it. You don't need to put that pressure on yourself and you can change it to where it's a relationship of getting to know yourself instead of trying to control yourself.

Georgie: Well said. What I can see in the analogy that you're using with finances is that so often people become fixated on the markers of progress. And whether that's the scale or you're using other things, you can, you can also become fixated on your pants fitting looser.

It's not limited to the scale. Mm-hmm. But then that can distract us from the actual behaviors that are going to change our lives. So in the financial sense that would be trying to put the credit card back in the wallet when we see something we wanna buy and not buying it instantaneously or choosing to do something that's slightly less expensive.

Save some money there. So the choices that we make day in and day out are what are actually going to [00:42:00] change our lives. But how many of us in the weight loss sense of this metaphor are staring at the bank account every single day going, when is it gonna change? When is it gonna change? When is it gonna change?

And that just leads to impatience as opposed to focusing on actually succeeding at the behaviors.

Ariel: Exactly. Exactly. And that's the whole crux of the issue.

Georgie: So we've covered so much stuff in this. Thank you so much for all of your thoughts, Ariel. I think this is gonna have a lot of benefit for people. For the people listening at home, reconsider what you are doing with the scale. Is it helping you? If so, use it to your benefit. If it's not helping you, reach out. If you need a hand, we can talk about what are some other progress indicators you can use as you move toward the life that you wanna build. By all means, we are not talking about staying put in any sense.

We're just talking about measuring your growth and improvement in ways that feel good to you.

So Ariel, what do you think we should leave people with as their [00:43:00] thought from this episode?

Ariel: That losing weight is the least of what we are capable of and the least important outcome in our health journey.

Georgie: I love that we are capable of so much more. Thank you for spending your time with us. I hope you found useful tips in today's episode that you can apply in real life. Please don't forget to hit five stars or leave us a review.

We would love you forever. Talk to you next week. Bye-bye.