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It's free! On this episode of The Daily Dollar, we're chatting about weight management news. When the majority of the nutrition information on the internet is all about weight loss, it's really difficult to know what's the truth and what's just marketing to make you buy into a product or program. Let's unpack this today.
It's dollop time. Hey, hey, my name's Kate. I'm a registered nutritionist, and after 20 years in the field of nutrition, I'm tired of seeing people stressed about eating and confused about where to start. And so, I'm changing the conversation.
You deserve to feel confident in your food choices and empower to maximize your health. Every weekday will dollop an episode into your feed, covering everything from busting nutrition myths, practical food ideas, my thoughts on trending topics, and habits for a healthy life. My promise to you, it will always be sustainable, realistic, restriction-free, and strictly no-woo. Only good science translated into easy, everyday advice.
Let's do this. Welcome back to The Daily Dollar Podcast, everyone. Happy Friday. And we are finishing off the week with the last in my series on weight management myths.
And I've talked about four myths this week, and I've really rambled, and I've really got on my soapbox. And the reason I wanted to share these things is because I just feel like they really wrap people up in chains and keep you stuck when we start to think about our health and our self-worth, and everything is just about what we can do with our weight. But nutrition is so much more than weight loss. Our health is so much more than what we weigh.
Our worth and our value is so much more than the size of our bodies. And I know our culture tells us differently, but I hope to be. I guess just a different message, just a different way of thinking about food. And so, to finish off the weight management myths, I really wanted to talk about something that's pretty close to my heart these days.
And that is, yeah, thinking about weight differently. So when it comes to, I guess, talking about weight management, I think that I now cannot mention the fact that the pursuit of weight loss and the perfect body is fraught with frustration, restriction, disappointment, poor body image, food guilt, and shame. And I want to make it really clear that I'm not against weight loss. I'm not against people who want to lose weight, and that if you want to lose weight, there is absolutely no shame or judgment in that.
But what I am against is losing weight at all costs, losing weight at the expense of your health, losing weight because you think it's going to make you a better and more lovable person. It's those kinds of things that I'm against. And so, one of the things that I'm really passionate about is now teaching nutrition from a health perspective. And it's silly that we even have to say, I have to say health first, because that should just be a given.
I'm teaching you how to eat well so that you can maximize your long-term health. I'm using scientific evidence based to inform myself, and then my training as a nutritionist gives me the ability to critically analyze this evidence to help you translate that into practical ways to eat that work for you. So, I'm not against weight loss, but I guess I just want to be really clear that the pursuit of it and this idea that we must lose weight or that healthy eating is a weight loss diet, is really a really dangerous thinking and is really a difficult way to think about food and a challenging way to think about food, and there's a better and easier way to think about it. So, if you've been on a diet to lose weight your whole life, like on and off diets, right, you might feel like a complete failure because you've tried to lose weight and you can't, or you lose weight and the weight just comes back on again and it just feels like this horrid vicious cycle.
Maybe you find yourself trying to be healthy and make healthy choices, but you can notice yourself still putting on weight. Or maybe you're just really confused about all the information out there about what to do and how to eat, to lose weight that you just feel really stuck in poor eating habits and you just can't break free. And this is what the pursuit of weight loss and our weight loss industry has done to us. It has led to multiple generations of people who have low self-esteem, poor body image, who have masses of food confusion, despite the fact that we live in the information age and information is more accessible than ever before, and now with AI we have now the ability to put in a few little prompts and it control the entire internet and give us a summary, even then we're more confused about nutrition than ever before, and we still find it difficult to change our eating habits long term for the better.
So I want to talk about this idea of the pursuit of weight loss, so when we put weight loss as the primary goal and we pursue it at all costs, this is what I'm talking about. And again, I want to remind you that if you want to lose weight or you want to be in a small body, I'm not against that desire at all and you have no reason to feel any shame or judgement around that from me, I fully get it. But these are the problems associated with pursuing weight loss at all costs. Firstly, this is associated with disordered eating, which is the biggest risk factor for an eating disorder.
So disordered eating is eating in a way that we wouldn't really diagnose you with a full blown eating disorder, but it's along the spectrum and heading in that direction. Secondly, the pursuit of weight loss reinforces the belief that the body needs to be changed to be worthy and it stops us from enjoying the body and the life that we have now. And one of the things that I've seen over the years, and one of the things I've done myself when I've been trying to make my body change or look different, is that I've put off life. I'm not going to go to the beach, I'm not going to go swimming, I'm not going to wear those clothes, I'm not going to do that activity, I'm not going to go for that promotion until I've lost weight and I've got my life together, aka controlled my food to the point where I've made my body smaller.
And this just robs us, we only have this one body and we only have this one life and we don't want to waste it and not enjoy it and be present in the moment purely because we feel like our body is the wrong size. And I get that bodies that certain sizes have different complications and increased health risks and so your desire to make it smaller, to maybe make it easier on your knees or make it easier on your back pain or to make different activities easier is absolutely fine. But that doesn't mean that you deserve to miss out or not enjoy things, right, or not engage in activities that make you happy. And so I guess I would encourage you to not use this as a way to punish yourself and that you are allowed to, even if you're not the size that you want to be, enjoy your life.
Thirdly, the pursuit of weight loss rarely addresses any underlying issues leaving the individual feeling blamed for their failure. And so I guess the problem is if they're trying to lose weight but they can't, most dietary programs don't address things like emotional eating, the psychological element of eating, using food as a coping mechanism for stress, a lot of things that sort of impact our food choices day to day. And we just never address those things, all we're given is a meal plan or don't eat this and do that, and then we can't stick to it because we haven't actually addressed all these underlying belief systems, but we don't realize that that and are kind to ourselves and be like, actually, this is really hard for you because you have these things that you relate to about food in this way with. We blame ourselves and be like, well, you're just disgusting or lazy and you just can't stick to it.
Fourthly, the pursuit of weight loss all costs clashes with our biology, leaving most people in a cycle of losing and gaining weight, which has both physical and mental effects. And it's fighting ourselves. It's not eating when we're hungry, which then might result in binging, which is then not stopping when we're full, we're in complete disregard of our internal cues and only using external cues to decide whether we're going to eat or not. So we're constantly fighting our body rather than working with it.
The other thing that's really important to understand is that weight loss has been unfairly credited with health outcomes in science. So let's do a quick little lesson on how weight loss science works. So you'll start with a group of people. They'll do specific things in order to lose weight and let's call those things health behaviors.
And that's the different protocol that the scientists might be testing to see if it works. The science measure the health outcomes of this group of people, maybe heart disease, diabetes, different risk factors, et cetera. And then they'll make a conclusion that weight loss leads to all of these health outcomes. However, was it the weight loss that led to the health outcomes or was it the healthy behaviors that they did that led to the health outcomes?
And this is really important. And this is why I like to say we focus on health. So I help you build good diet quality, nourish and satisfy your body, learn to listen to your body's cues, teach you different skills to help you put what you learn into practice, feel confident in your food choices, cooking, shopping, planning, storing food, and building that repertoire of being able to eat well long term and do that consistently. And weight loss is the side effect of that because it's the health behaviors that promote long term health.
Not the weight loss. Weight loss just happens sometimes as a result of those health behaviors. And this is where we've got a little bit lost and we've just made the assumption that see these people with small bodies, they have these health outcomes. And see these people in large bodies, they have these worst health outcomes.
So what if we just made the people in the big bodies small? What if we actually made all bodies regardless of their size, do the healthy things that we know promote long term health? And if some of the bigger bodies become smaller, that's okay. If some of the smaller bodies become bigger, that's okay.
Weight loss is a side effect of consistent healthy behavior rather than the end goal. And that is something I think is a really important thing that is missing from the nutrition industry. And it's still a really ingrained fact that if you live in a larger body that you have different health outcomes, which is true for a certain number of the population, but it's not at the individual level just because someone is in a larger body doesn't automatically mean they're at risk of poor health. So it's, I guess I want to leave you with today's episode in that independent of weight, healthy behaviors have been found to be healthy.
So, you know, we gain fitness from exercising regularly, which is protective for a health, lower mortality risk, and that happens regardless of your body size and regardless of whether any kind of exercise you do helps you lose weight or not. Same goes from a nutrition perspective, eating more fruit and veg or drinking less alcohol, lower mortality risk regardless of your body weight and whether you lose weight or not. The problem is is that these things are just harder to measure than weight change and we just like using weight as a proxy for health because it's easy to measure. It's easy to do science with, but the reality is health behaviors are so much more important.
And it just means that we take that pressure off ourselves to make the number on the scales go down and we focus our mental energy on what we can actually control, which is the regular healthy little things that we do each and every day. Well, that's it for today's episode and the week on weight management myths. Hope you enjoyed it. We'll catch you next time.
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Until next time.