Misinformation Isn’t The Problem
A short while back, I was hosted by the lovely Rachelle Heinemann LMHC on her podcast series, Understanding Disordered Eating. The following article is a brief summary of what we discussed. If you’d like to listen to the full episode, you can hear it here.
A few weeks ago, the glorious Bari Weiss aired a podcast episode called “Eating Ourselves to Death,” where she hosted guest-speaker Dr. Casey Means, physician and co-founder of metabolic health company Levels. They discussed how the food we eat is killing us, making us unhealthier, sicker, fatter. Food is the source of all metabolic dysfunction, they claim, which is the source of all disease. And because almost all of us eat ‘bad’ food, 93% of us are metabolically unhealthy. They also pivot their agenda against Health At Every Size (a movement in alignment with the Intuitive Eating framework), and deride its egregious sin in telling people they can eat whatever they want.
Naturally, when the Intuitive Eating (IE) community heard about this podcast, they were up in arms. No, not Bari! We lost another one to the diet-obsessed world! The world that tells us we must restrict to be healthy. The world that tells us that to diet, lose weight, count carbs and fats and calories, will ensure us a seat in the Happy Healthy Elderly kingdom.
The reaction of IE towards, I don’t know, I guess I’ll label it ‘Medicine’ for the sake of flow, and the reaction of Medicine towards IE proved to me that we are under the delusion that we have contradicting views of reality. But I tread in both worlds (I’m a Nurse Practitioner working in Family Medicine, as well as an Intuitive Eating Counselor), and after listening to this podcast I didn’t feel the least bit offended or threatened. I then understood that there is something begging to be clarified. We are labeling them as two different teams, Team Red: food will kill you, vs. Team Blue: it’s okay to eat all foods. Any bridging of the chasm seems impossible.
Well, call me Peacemaker, but here’s how I understand it: We aren’t contradicting each other, we’re discussing two different things altogether. Medicine discusses the what. Intuitive Eating discusses the what now. Medicine tells us which foods are healthy, nutrient-dense. Intuitive Eating discusses how to develop a healthy relationship with all foods.
What do I mean by this? Let’s say a doctor, podcast, tweet, tells you that food is destroying your cellular processes. You decide to go on a diet, cut out the ‘bad’ foods. The diet not only fails, it backfires, because diets statistically have a 80-90% failure rate. You gain more weight, because dieting is one of the biggest predictors of weight gain. You become obsessed with food. You feel guilty, go on another diet, try harder, fall harder. Wash, rinse, repeat. It seems hopeless. Food is bad, but dieting is bad. So how should we eat? What now?
Cue Intuitive Eating, which comes in and tells you there is another way. Your body has an innate wisdom that knows how to eat, when to eat, what’s best for it, and that information is accessible if you learn how to recognize it. And crucial to accessing those internal cues, is learning to shut out the external cues, i.e. anything outside of you telling you that foods are ‘bad’. Because when those external voices tell you to restrict, something inside of you rebels. Restriction backfires.
The reason IE is important is because history has proven that medical knowledge alone, the knowledge of grams, of nutrients, of how one ‘should’ eat, has never been enough to create sustainable change. Misinformation does not seem to be the source of the problem. Ask my patients in larger bodies; they can dissect the nutrition content of a banana better than a registered dietician. Every few years a new Netflix documentary comes out about how the foods we eat are killing us, and yet people are still eating donuts. Because no matter how much we know, no one wants to stop eating donuts.
I think when it comes down to it, the question is this: What happens when you hear nutrition information? What happens when you hear certain foods are bad for you? What happens when you learn that certain foods are good for you? Does that information help you, ease your shopping decisions, make you feel good in your body? If it does, fantastic! Let that information integrate into your life, keep calm and carry on.
But maybe that information makes you feel guilty, wrong. Maybe it makes you feel that you need to change your diet ASAP, and if you don’t all your health problems are your own fault and you therefore need to go on a diet right now, or else. If that’s how you’re responding to podcasts, episodes like these, to doctors like Dr. Means, it’s okay to take that information with a grain of salt. And maybe reach out to an Intuitive Eating counselor.