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S1 E1 The Spectrum
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Breaking down the nuanced spectrum of health and why it is SO important to get this down FIRST and FOREMOST in your health journey.
https://theresemartinezrd.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Eating Between the Lines'
00:00:01
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Hello and welcome to Eating Between the Lines. I am your host, Therese Martinez, and I am so happy to have you here. If you want to untangle yourself from diet culture conditioning and get appropriate, actionable options to nourish your unique life and body, I'm going to dive deep into the nuanced spectrum of health to help you figure out what to prioritize in your journey without
00:00:26
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getting trapped in the extreme ideology of health optimization or total complacency. I am here to help you apply the science effectively, not rigidly, and get you feeling better in your body and mind. Here is how to eat between the lines.
00:00:49
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Hello,
Passion for Individualized Health
00:00:50
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hello, and welcome to Eating Between the Lines. I am so excited to have you guys here. I have been
00:01:02
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planning on making a podcast for so long and this is a huge passion of mine to get the word out with what true health can look like for the individual while exploring the different parameters and identifying all the nuance so that you guys can actually have
00:01:29
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actionable items and tools to decide for yourself and not what everybody else is telling you to do for what is appropriate for you. There are so many things to consider when we are thinking about health and as a dietician and personal trainer,
00:01:53
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I definitely err on the side of understanding nutrition and fitness to a certain degree. However, throughout my work professionally and personally, I definitely have come to understand the importance of the other pillars of health.
Exploring Health Pillars
00:02:16
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When talking with clients, I really like to explore the spectrum.
00:02:24
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And this means looking at the different pillars like movement, nutrition, stress, exercise, and my personal addition called the juice pillar. I think that this kind of can go under the stress pillar, but
00:02:47
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It really is about what gives you juice in life, you know, your creative outlets, your community, and how that contributes to your overall health. So there's a lot of emphasis out there on nutrition and exercise being like the best ways to optimize your health. And I definitely believe that they are massively powerful in
00:03:17
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improving your health. And I just think it's really important to explore the other pillars and understand how everything can work together. Okay, so there is so much emphasis on that nutrition and exercise portion. And so
00:03:41
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What I have found is that diving into this leads to daunting overwhelm and unreachable or unattainable expectations of oneself that really actually doesn't help their health overall.
Personal Struggles & Health Balance
00:03:57
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So a little bit of background for you with my own journey.
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I have been through the gamut of diet culture trials as a dietician and trainer, knowing the unsustainable nature of it all, but trying to believe I could still do it all and quote, quote, optimize my health. I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when I was 14 years old.
00:04:28
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And for my whole life, from what I can remember, I have been trying to please and be what others want me to be. It was very unhealthy growing up and it honestly really harmed a lot of my relationships, you know.
00:04:48
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thinking I needed to look a certain way, get certain grades, be a star athlete, do all of the things, get attention from boys, party my way to popularity, whatever it was, I wanted to do it because that was ultimately how I felt like I would be accepted in this society. It's really what made me think I'd be safe.
00:05:15
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And so I overcompensated with all the things. And it's not a huge surprise that I developed an eating disorder that really plagued my life in high school and college and a little bit thereafter as well.
00:05:33
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I
Bulimia & Professional Conflict
00:05:34
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became bulimic and utilized that first as a tool to, you know, control my body. And then it really evolved into a lot, a lot more. So I studied kinesiology up at Western Washington University and then
00:05:57
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Went to grad school to study dietetics and exercise physiology. Got my master's at Washington State University in Spokane, Washington. And ultimately, I really wanted to be a diabetes educator. And going through school, I actually managed to create more food rules. Thinking I was setting an example of what optimal living was when in reality, I was sinking deeper.
00:06:27
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into a whole of rigidity, obsession, and unattainable goals. But I was a dietician and a personal trainer. I had to look a certain way. I had to eat a certain way. I had to show up a certain way. This is what I thought. Unfortunately, it only continued to feed my eating disorder and other coping mechanisms that led me to escape and distract.
00:06:53
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It was an outlet to escape my diabetes and the demand of what living with type 1 diabetes is. It was an escape of my life, of my not enough-ness, my financial stressors, and it was a way to constantly distract and seek quick fixes of happiness. I cannot believe how deep I was.
00:07:20
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Honestly, still am in many ways, constantly, constantly learning how diet culture and, you know, societal influences have truly wired me. You know,
Societal Pressures & Diet Culture
00:07:36
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diet culture affects us all. There is deep, deep programming, wiring we have to untangle. And even after my decades
00:07:50
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of therapy and self-reflection. I am still uncovering how engulfed this societal gas has truly made us all. I like that term gas. Glennon Doyle actually was the one that planted that seed for me and she had termed it in reference to
00:08:16
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societal pressures to look a certain way and in terms of fitness and beauty and how folks can kind of grow up being exposed to this gas in different degrees. And different people have different tolerances to what this gas does to them.
00:08:46
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Right? So not everybody develops an eating disorder. Not everybody has a really poor relationship with food. Not everybody has a great healthy relationship with food and wonderful hunger signaling and, you know, eats when they're hungry stuff and they're full, whatever, and is motivated by different, different things. So.
00:09:16
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You can reflect on this and see what your own gas stamina has been throughout your life, what your personal relationship is with food and body. And for me, you know, the gas hit me pretty hard.
00:09:39
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um, did not have a huge stamina. And then with certain choices professionally, you know, with an attempt to learn more about nutrition and exercise thinking that was the route to helping my clients better and myself better, there were continued self-regulations and structures that ultimately were not healthy. And basically.
00:10:09
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know, more and more gas, more and more toxicity for myself. So with that said, I must say I still truly love learning about the human body and how to improve my mental and physical health. I just now know the flags to look for. So
00:10:35
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rabbit holes that one can go down and the balance needed to support knowledge and application. I also know and love how much nutrition can truly be transformative to one's health and that it isn't everything. Which brings me to this fundamental concept in understanding health, which I term the health spectrum.
00:11:07
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Eating Between the Lines paints this picture of, you know, on one end having this optimized health, right? Improving all of these pillars to the best extent possible and, you know, riding high on everything and life just feels blissful and amazing because your health is apparently, you know, picture perfect.
00:11:37
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And the other end that is close to, you know, total complacency and being unhealthy. People might correlate this with eating a lot of processed foods, being extremely stressed out, inactive, right? Kind of taking a look at all of those pillars and thinking what the worst situation would be for all of them.
00:12:07
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And while I definitely think there are degrees of inspiration and, you know, motivation to head in the direction of more optimal health, I think that there are just nuances that need to be addressed. And it's
Balance vs. Optimization in Health
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important to recognize
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how much of a spectrum this is and where you can land on the spectrum and still be very happy and healthy without putting the pressure on yourself to optimize absolutely everything in your life. So if you picture that line, the optimized quote unquote, you know, optimized variation,
00:13:00
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and the very unhealthy other end. Now it's up to you to figure out where you land. And so it's kind of helpful to sort of look at all of these pillars and see where you might land for each individual one. So for example, if a person feels like they have their nutrition relatively dialed in,
00:13:28
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maybe that puts them a little bit closer to this optimized health end with nutrition.
00:13:35
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Maybe their stress is affecting them much more and they do not have great stress management techniques and modalities. And so that is a different, a whole different mark on this line. It's got its own category, right? So then you put that down for where you're at in between the lines there. You do the same for activity and stress and your juice category.
00:14:06
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And so now you've got these different dots on the spectrum and
00:14:11
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Basically what you want to do here is kind of take a look and see where and what might need a little bit more attention. That's one step. It doesn't mean that you need to do anything about it though, because if maybe your movement is very far towards that, you know, less optimal end,
00:14:37
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But your stress is high enough and your sleep is also low enough that you are not feeling able to
00:14:50
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Workout, this means that maybe your priority lies somewhere else. You see what I mean? It's not that we're trying to get everything up to that optimal end. We are trying to understand what the next best thing for ourself is.
00:15:08
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And it's important to be able to assess these individually and put some self-reflection into it to actually see what is feasible for you. Otherwise, we're just shooting on ourselves to bring all the things up into this optimal range and end, which I also, again, don't really believe is a thing that exists.
00:15:35
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The whole idea with this is that you can be really healthy and live a great life without optimizing all of these pillars all the time, or even some of the time optimizing all of them, right? You can find balance and you can have certain areas that aren't doing great. And it doesn't mean you have to focus on them all the time to bring them up depending on the person.
00:16:05
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Again, there's just a lot to take a look at and consider. Even if we dive into, say, exercise, everybody's definition of what optimal and appropriate and healthy is for activity is going to vary. And so this is when getting some help and assistance can be great.
00:16:33
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to kind of analyze and assess all of these things for yourself. But is going to CrossFit going to be the best thing for your next step for exercise is, you know, setting goals of going five times a week to the gym. When you haven't really gone to the gym before, you don't have a plan and it's really intimidating to you.
00:16:54
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Maybe that's not the best thing and it's unrealistic and you're setting yourself up for burnout. These are things we don't want to do, but so often do because we have these pressures externally, sometimes a little internally, without the map, without the direction of really how to go about creating something in a fashion that is appropriate for you, that is sustainable.
00:17:24
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And that makes sense for your life. This is really where so many companies and individuals and people in the health industry, they just get it wrong. And it is not helping the consumer, you know, to have realistic expectations. I talked a bit about the 80-20 recently.
00:17:53
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on social media. And the
Critique of the 80-20 Health Rule
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80-20 is an idea that 80% of the time you are eating, moving really good, really well, which again is relative to who is judging. But with that said, then 20% of the time you have more leniency with your intake and movement, right? The idea is to
00:18:22
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to do exactly what I am saying and give people permission to not feel like they have to be perfect all the time. However, what this is missing is that 80% is not actually doable for a lot of people in their current life. And also defining what healthy is varies from person to person when it comes to nutrition and movement and the
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things. So there's that part. And then there's also the 80% being potentially far reaching. If you are someone that is not cooking whole foods much at all at this point, if you are going on a walk a couple times a week, but pretty sedentary,
00:19:16
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saying that the best thing for you to do is to be healthy 80% of the time and that healthy is defined as cooking whole food meals and going to the gym five days a week.
00:19:30
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What's that gonna do for you and your psychology around how you approach health and how hard you are on yourself? What's the guilt shame cycle that then follows if you are not able to actually pursue the 80-20? This is why it's so important to actually figure out where you are at. And honestly, just look at those pillars of health and kind of just
00:20:00
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see your own spectrum and see where you are at. And without, again, this goal of moving everything towards the more optimal end, this is more giving yourself grace to understand that sometimes things aren't going to be over there and that's okay. It's important to see what is actually providing you the most happiness
00:20:28
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along with your health and what is the best next thing for you to focus on. What's the most appropriate thing for you to focus on versus just trying to move everything to a more optimal state, which debatably is more stressful. And then the stress component, the stress category.
00:20:50
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now is towards the other end. You see how that works? Now, everybody's different. Everybody's got different gauges of where they want to be, how they want to feel, their habits they need to and want to shift. But essentially, I really think the health spectrum can be very powerful.
00:21:14
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when it comes to you actually visualizing and seeing where those categories lie for you so that you can sort of see what might need a little bit more attention or not.
Future Podcast Guidance
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This podcast is really designed to work on addressing those different categories in a host of ways so that you can actually assess better
00:21:44
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and have more tangible guidance with what to do without needing to put that pressure on yourself. Okay, I hope this helped. Stay tuned for the next episodes in this intro series, you guys.
00:22:05
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Again, so happy to have you here and I'll catch you next time. Thank you so much for listening today. If you found this information valuable, please share this episode and give it a review. They truly help a ton. If you want additional support and information, you can head over to my website, teresmartinezrd.com where you can snag my free guide on how to improve your hunger signals. Get on my email list for regular juicy content.
00:22:32
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or apply for the next round of my signature program, restoring nutrition intuition. Otherwise, Instagram at Teresa Martinez RD or my Facebook group Fed Fit and Fad Free Nutrition with Teresa are always places for more content and support. Until next time.