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How to Eat between the Lines
57 Plays2 years ago
What is eating between the lines?
Today I am breaking down what it means to eat between the lines and WHY this is what you need to take with you going into 2024.
Time to take a deeper look into your WIRING to better understand your behavior within the extreme realms of food intake, and figure out why you cycle and don’t shift.
Take a listen if you ALSO figure all this anti diet/wellness culture is just an excuse for folks to be complacently unhealthy. There is just… so much more to it, ya’ll.
theresemartinezrd.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Eating Between the Lines
00:00:01
Speaker
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
00:00:25
Speaker
without 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.
Goals for 2024: Nutrition and Health Focus
00:00:40
Speaker
Here is how to eat Between the Lines. Hello, hello, welcome back to Eating Between the Lines.
00:00:53
Speaker
Happy 2024 y'all. I am pretty excited for this gear. I'm not really someone that does a whole lot of like New Year's resolutions and a lot of goal setting, but I definitely have some things on my radar.
00:01:09
Speaker
And I'm just kind of looking forward to getting into it this year. I wanted to start the podcast season off this year with talking about really what eating between the lines is all about.
00:01:28
Speaker
I recognize I haven't totally dove into this concept and since starting this podcast. And I think that this is a really great way to honestly kick off 2024 because it is a framework.
Understanding Health Nuances
00:01:44
Speaker
My other intentions for this podcast this year is.
00:01:47
Speaker
diving into a lot of nutrition education. I spent a lot of last year doing a lot more interviews and, you know, personal podcasts with
00:02:00
Speaker
more conceptual considerations around nutrition and health. And while that is absolutely a major part of this podcast, I am kind of excited to get a little bit more into some of the nutrition recommendations and application and tangible action items to give y'all. Cause I mean, we can think our way through only so much, right? But those action items are really what we'll,
00:02:30
Speaker
create a bigger difference in addition to actually understanding the conceptual side of things too.
00:02:36
Speaker
So with that said, this is another conceptual episode, but it does dig into some big considerations that I have not touched on yet. And so to back it up a little bit, I created this podcast to help people understand the nuance to health, right? The many layers beyond just nutrition.
Critique of Diet Culture and Societal Pressures
00:03:00
Speaker
And today I want to break down really the importance of doing that and going into 2024. So we're going to talk a lot about influences to behavior today regarding dietary intake. And I want to just shed light on why this is important. So we get a lot of pressure from society, media.
00:03:25
Speaker
to not only look a certain way, but to be in a certain state of health too. Think diet and wellness culture. Think fear mongering, shaming, and guilting people into behavioral changes.
00:03:39
Speaker
The cycle that these influences put people through is so frustrating to watch and what I experienced for over a decade of my life. And my hope is that calling them out and providing a new vision will help create clarity and action for a healthier body and mind for y'all.
Addressing Body Positivity Myths
00:03:59
Speaker
This is layered and, you know, not necessarily something a person can just tackle in one podcast, but I hope that it kind of gives you some things to think about and reflect on for your own self because this is, this is big. This is big for every single person out there. Okay. I think it's common also to see a backlash.
00:04:26
Speaker
against diet and wellness culture. And, you know, like, I think I see this all the time, but I'm also in this world. So maybe it's just me, but I see this, this back and forth, right? So folks that kind of bash diet and wellness culture, then folks that kind of think that people that are anti, you know, diet, anti wellness are people that are just.
00:04:50
Speaker
complacent with people living in unhealthy bodies or having unhealthy behavior, right? It's almost like
00:05:00
Speaker
giving up on health for the sake of body positivity or something. And this is just missing so much of the point. I could talk on a lot of podcasts about this, but this is missing so much of the point and not what folks like myself are trying to do and preach and talk about any dietician
Restoring a Healthy Relationship with Food
00:05:24
Speaker
out there. Well, I can't say any, but
00:05:27
Speaker
When you see you dieticians online that are like saying it's okay to eat a bag of chips or something. It's, it's so frustrating to see people so against eating a bag of chips, but we are seriously just in the front lines all the time because we see what diet and wellness culture does to people all the time. It is not pretty.
00:05:52
Speaker
It is wildly disordered. It has taken people out of their bodies, out of their own knowing.
00:05:59
Speaker
And it just, it's not the fact that we are promoting consuming unhealthy foods or chips all day every day, right? It is really understanding the nuance to health and the nuance to honestly nutrition as well. I just want to be clear that the purpose of this is not to say eat whatever whenever and to
00:06:28
Speaker
develop complacency with whatever stage of health you're at. Although honestly, it's not really on me to should on anyone to improve their health, right? I think the purpose so much more comes down to just appropriate education and giving people the right tools to develop the appropriate motives for behavioral change versus fear mongering and guilting and shaming people that does not work.
00:06:55
Speaker
Eating between the lines sheds light on the nuance of health and helps people develop skills that best compliment adding nutrition into their diet with appropriate motives, not fear mongering, guilting, or shaming. It is focused on restoring one's relationship with food through untangling and rewiring the physiological and psychological responses that have been so ingrained through the bullshit that we have seen throughout our whole lives.
00:07:24
Speaker
It is helping people get back to their own knowing it is putting you back in the driver's seat of what you want to do with your health, education on different angles and considerations of what to prioritize and why, and give you tools for application and grace in the potentially quite messy process. So that's what this podcast is about. Now let's talk about what the application of eating between the lines looks like.
Why Diet Plans Fail
00:07:50
Speaker
Breaking down a couple considerations with the complexity of health and behavior. So we can see why this approach is so important and helpful. Let's first talk about the physiological response that we have to food. So food is habitual, cultural, emotional, psychological, and physiological. Like why we do what we do regarding food intake is complex. This is why it is
00:08:16
Speaker
So frustrating and challenging to just like get a meal plan thrown at you or something and be like, go, this is how you are healthy. And that's that we have layers to all of our behavior. So in terms of physiological responses to food.
00:08:33
Speaker
If you think about, you know, your whole life, I kind of have patients first talk to me about their history with food intake, right? So like if you were part of, um, you know, the clean your plate club when you were growing up, but you also had only access to hyper palatable foods. Maybe there were things with resources and situations even with like family where you were forced or encouraged or only really could consume.
00:09:04
Speaker
foods that were a little bit lower in the nutrition realm, and then you ended up consuming a lot of hyperpalatable options. Now, this isn't just, you know, childhood dependent, but we tend to shape our palate over the course of our lives, right? And there can be something so enjoyable about hyperpalatable foods.
00:09:29
Speaker
And if we get really used to consuming hyper palatable foods, that's high fat, high salt, high sugar foods, we can kind of get used to that response, right? This is a like massive hit in that pleasure response. And it is so enjoyable, right? There's a reason people like hyper palatable foods. And so we are training our body to only have that stimuli on a regular basis and that especially
00:09:58
Speaker
can contrast to maybe more quote unquote healthful foods, especially when we are not taught how to make healthful foods be that tasty. It is increasingly unappealing. And so we have this physiological response to food. Maybe we've also used food as a coping mechanism and it has a physiological response
00:10:23
Speaker
in that way too, in addition to a psychological response that we'll get to
Psychological Influences on Eating Behaviors
00:10:27
Speaker
in a second. But you know, if there are certain things that you eat that are comforting and that, or maybe remind you of someone or home or have a very like physiological response created that is positive or negative, honestly,
00:10:45
Speaker
that can be a driver and a reiterating motive to consume those foods. So with combining the physiological response and then looking at the psychological response, we can see that these actually overlap a bit too. So with the psychological response to food, this goes into those seeds planted when we're younger, right? Seeds planted and watered through childhood, whether that is,
00:11:11
Speaker
you know, parents and peers dieting, whether it's things that were told shown in the media with magazines, uh, with what we should and shouldn't eat comments about other people's bodies, trying to navigate our way to manipulate our body through intake. Maybe it is parents telling us we need to go on a diet and maybe it's no one really telling us anything about our food, honestly, too. Like that could be in a different realm.
00:11:40
Speaker
So there can be this relationship developed with food in all sorts of ways. You know, sometimes people have relationships with food that's really neutral. And some people have a lot of depth and complexity to their relationship with food that kind of goes into a lot of those narratives growing up. For example, we are told we shouldn't have the hyper palatable foods because they will lead to overeating, they're calorically dense, they're not nutritious, et cetera.
00:12:09
Speaker
This could lead us to put them on a pedestal, right? I remember this happening, getting diagnosed with type one diabetes, where I just felt like I could not have sugar ever. And it really ended up feeding a lot of my eating disorder because it didn't give me any room to enjoy and experience these foods because I was just told I shouldn't and can't have them.
00:12:33
Speaker
And I mean, for anyone that goes through times where they are told that they shouldn't and can't have these foods. And then in contrast, when the foods are so pleasurable, it just leads to a lot of confusion, right? And frustration with your own self and inability to have this willpower and then going through cycles of binging and restricting and yo-yo dieting. It is super frustrating. And.
00:13:02
Speaker
Other psychological responses can look like diets that you've tried and things that you've learned through having, quote unquote, success or not having success, right?
Personal Diet Experiences and Individualized Nutrition
00:13:13
Speaker
So if a person does a ketogenic diet and loses weight, has found it successful, okay, well, what does that teach them about carbohydrates? You know, if someone goes on a carnivore diet and has better digestion, what does that tell them about plants?
00:13:30
Speaker
Now I'm not here to say keto and carnivore are like inappropriate for absolutely everyone in the world. And I would pose curiosity, you know, when it comes to individuals trying these diets, is it really the carbohydrates that are the demise to one's health in a ketogenic diet? Is there something else to gauge around health, right? Beyond weight.
00:13:59
Speaker
Is it the carbs or is it the decreased calories that a person is consuming? Is it, you know, the meat being so beneficial in a carnivore diet and the plant foods being so detrimental to digestion? Or is it the fact that you just don't have a healthy gut microbiome to handle some of these plant foods to begin with?
00:14:24
Speaker
And so you're just taking out the aggravators and not actually restoring the health of your gut. Potentially, right? Again, this is all very general and I am the first to admit that, you know, nutrition is extremely individualized. I just see this a lot. So we're not addressing the bigger picture of the variables when it comes to diets and why diets sometimes like, I don't know, like quote, quote, work.
00:14:51
Speaker
So we're developing these narratives around diets and what diets have done for us. We are learning these lessons.
00:15:00
Speaker
And so that's a psychological response to food. So now you go in and you try to improve your intake, maybe say with a dietician or say another approach, other program. And then those are all going to be like those programs might teach you other things, but if they aren't considering your psychological response to food and you're not addressing this and you're not learning other angles of appropriate nutrition.
00:15:28
Speaker
You're just going to carry these with you like always and forever. And so our physiological and psychological responses to food are huge when it comes to behavior and behavioral change. Just these two variables is like wildly layered for folks. Just identifying patterns, thought patterns, and trends around this, you know, backing the track up. I've talked about that a lot before.
00:15:54
Speaker
is so important for us to just start creating awareness. And once we can start creating awareness around our psychological and physiological responses, we can start to create appropriate interventions. But a lot of that comes with
00:16:08
Speaker
you know, having the appropriate professional help as well and, or, you know, getting the, the right resources for you to do the work on your own, which can be done. It's just harder sometimes just not being able to ask yourself the right questions.
Awareness and Interventions for Food Responses
00:16:25
Speaker
So it is helpful to then kind of develop the skillset to add nutrition in while restoring and combating these narratives.
00:16:35
Speaker
I like to think about this analogy that I've talked about before around the plant that starts to get watered early on in your life.
00:16:46
Speaker
And this might be about, you know, food. It might be about body. It might be about both. And certain, certain influences can start to water this plant over the course of your life. Right. So say like, okay, you get some, someone says something about someone's body and it's positive and you know, your body doesn't look like that when you're younger.
00:17:08
Speaker
And then you see in the media that you're supposed to eat this way to have a body that looks like that. Okay. That's now watering that plant. And now you get exposed over and over and over throughout the course of your life by different things that water that plant. So now this plant is thriving. And as you create awareness on how this is impacting your own relationship with food, you can start to intervene with
00:17:38
Speaker
how that plant is watered. And so that goes into planting other seeds and watering the other seeds that kind of combat those narratives. So it's really important to help water those other plants to kind of combat the wiring, right? And that's how a lot of work is done when we're trying to shift these things that are so ingrained.
00:18:04
Speaker
And this is just, I mean, a part of what it looks like to eat between the lines, but this is why it's so important is because we have this so much wiring. And if we just are always getting bombarded by the shoulds, shoulds, cans, cans, and these extreme measures of like thinking we either have to be totally complacent with not being healthy or we have to be this like pristine picture of health and like anything in between is, I don't know, lazy or something.
00:18:34
Speaker
We just, it's, it's not going to serve us and we can't figure out how to move forward in an appropriately paced fashion when we are combating these rooted issues. And so, uh, it is, it is so important to, to understand this, you guys. Plus, okay. We have other variables like gut health and.
00:19:03
Speaker
certain influences with hormonal health that can also influence eating patterns.
00:19:09
Speaker
And I think that it's helpful to recognize this too, because resolving symptoms here is big. It's big in re-regulating your body. It's big and feeling better in your body. And I don't know what that looks like for everyone. I know that many people are not following foundational applications of health in regards to nutrition and movement and stress management and sleep management, because you know, like,
00:19:39
Speaker
lots of things to consider with life and the challenges
Balanced Health: Mental Well-being and Nutrition
00:19:41
Speaker
there. But I also know that people alternatively go to highly restrictive options and that is also not serving them very well. And I know that I've seen a lot of GI patients that have benefited from a little restriction and the healing process, but I'm just thinking of all the supplements and programs thrown at people all the time when the foundations have not been checked off or
00:20:04
Speaker
period of time. I kind of reference it as the appropriate time under one's belt. So I just like to mention I do know and recognize there are other considerations with the state of one's body and that it's not always doable to just dive into helpful eating patterns and that kind of thing based off of my recommendations here. But I do think that it's still helpful to
00:20:33
Speaker
Give credit where credit's due essentially, you know, and really reflect and see if you are checking off those foundations and have for a consistent period of time while looking out the other pillars of health, right? So other foundations like just being intentional with your intake and applying principles of mindful eating or getting back into your body through gentle movement, touching base can also really help kickstart the journey back to yourself.
00:21:03
Speaker
A lot of this is just trying to get back to yourself, right? Trying to...
00:21:08
Speaker
get through the weeds of people throwing stuff at you. And that's just really hard. It's, it's really hard because we have been so dang wired. So eating between the lines is, it's about not letting food rules, shame and guilt dictate and preoccupy your food and lifestyle choices, right? It's finding a way to live that balances nourishment that is appropriate for you.
00:21:36
Speaker
It's not about complacency and being unhealthy and accepting all of that because you have a better relationship with food. Although, I mean, you can kind of gauge your own prioritization of your own mental health in that regard too. Cause I know that sometimes that is the more prioritized component of health is just having that better relationship with
Balancing Nourishment and Food Relationship
00:21:58
Speaker
food. And maybe it's okay to be a little bit more complacent around other parameters of your health, but either way,
00:22:06
Speaker
It's building a better relationship with food that nourishes yourself and letting your body land where it lands. That's kind of the bigger scheme of eating between the lines.
00:22:15
Speaker
So it's important to be able to develop the database of food and meal options that help support your patterns of intake that can then serve more time under your belt in regards to your own habits. And then, you know, kind of working on application thereafter. It's also understanding the pillars of health and the influence that they all have on one's overall wellbeing.
00:22:40
Speaker
and taking action with nutrition in a way that compliments those other pillars while helping a person feel better in their body. These claims around body positivity and health at every size, supporting unhealthy behavior and pushing people into weights that are correlated with some conditions is just missing the point. And I've kind of talked about that already, but it just, the bigger picture means we know that shaming, scaring and guilting people into different ways of eating to be a different size or state of health does not work.
00:23:11
Speaker
We also know that not all sizes of bodies directly correlate to being healthy or unhealthy. So how do we take action to support people with these psychological and physiological influences of behavior to improve health overall if they want, right? We are not here to should on people, you know? I think that's another big issue. I also feel like a lot of people don't know how good they can feel and maybe sometimes helping folks
00:23:40
Speaker
get a little taste of that can build traction. And that's a whole other conversation and, you know, layered discussion with figuring out how to motivate folks in that regard without getting too like pushy. It's a whole battle, man. I struggle with this a lot as a dietician and personal trainer. It's like, I just, I want to meet people where they're at all the time. And I also want people to feel as good as they can. And I know that so many people want that too.
00:24:08
Speaker
It just can be sometimes a little misguided and again, utilizing motives that are just not the most effective, I would say. So eating between the lines, it's a way to eat that understands the nuance of health and aims to add nutrition into one's diet with appropriate motives. Not fear mongering or guilting or shaming,
00:24:38
Speaker
while restoring one's relationship with food through addressing the layered variables around physiological and psychological wiring. That is eating between the lines.
Conclusion and Call to Connect
00:24:49
Speaker
Let me know if y'all have any questions and or recommendations for podcast topics this year. Guess I am looking forward to a year of fun podcasting. So.
00:25:03
Speaker
Reach out happy 2024 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.
00:25:32
Speaker
or apply for the next round of my signature program, Restoring Nutrition Intuition. Otherwise, Instagram at teresmartinasrd or my Facebook group Fed Fit and Fad Free Nutrition with Teres are always places for more content and support. Until next time.