Elizabeth Vander Leeuw

Listen to this episode here.

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Liz. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight."

Elizabeth Vander Leeuw: Thank you so much for having me, Zibby.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. Let's start by your telling listeners who you are and what you're doing on my podcast. 

Liz: Gosh, what am I doing on your podcast? [laughter] My name is Liz Vander Leeuw. I have a health and wellness business here in Charlotte, North Carolina. I've lived in Charlotte for about four years now. I moved here from DC. I have two daughters, Charlotte and Ellie. They're six and three. They're a handful. I have a husband who's a handful too. I know firsthand the struggle of moms trying to do it all, trying to be it all, and fit health and fit weight loss in as well. I work strictly with moms. I can work with women of all ages. I've worked with a lot of women in their twenties before, but I've found that this is really my niche because I'm in the trenches too. I'm in the thick of it. I know all of the same challenges that my clients are going through. I'm literally going through them too. That's just a little bit of background about me. I got my Integrative Nutrition Certificate, I think six or seven years ago now, from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition.

Zibby: I did that too.

Liz: You did? Awesome. I think that I saw that you used to run Weight Watchers groups and that sort of thing.

Zibby: I did. This was in a past life, but yes, I did all that stuff.

Liz: It was so interesting to me because Weight Watchers now is basically what I learned in school, which is more of a holistic program, your primary foods, your secondary foods. You're taking your entire life into account. It's not just necessarily calories in and calories out. That's basically what I learned in school. I learned every dietary theory out there. I learned that there's really not a one-size-fits-all situation. I don't have a lot of these online programs that some health and wellness professionals will sell where it's like, here's your one program that's going to be six weeks. I'm going to send it to your inbox every week and not check in on you. My programs are very bespoke because every individual is unique. Everybody needs different things, different foods. One man's food is another man's poison. 

Zibby: What has worked for you? Let's go back. How did you become interested in working in this field? What has your own journey with your own body been like? Is that relevant, or was this just a side interest for other reasons?

Liz: Totally relevant. I feel like I had quite the health journey myself. I'll start there which will lead us into why I got into this line of work. My husband and I grew up in New Jersey. We were high school sweethearts. He went to Georgetown University. I went to American University. I wanted to be little miss Elle Woods, politics. That's why I went to DC. That's what I wanted to do. I worked on the Hill for a little while. I worked on a presidential campaign. I worked in PR firms. I did mostly fundraising. Ended up doing a lot of fundraising for nonprofits and education associations. DC was just a rat race. Super fun place to live in your twenties, but stressful rat race. My husband works in finance. There were weeks he worked 120 hours. We weren’t really taking care of ourselves. When I was in college, when I came to American University as an eighteen-year-old, I didn't just gain the freshman fifteen. I gained the freshman fifty. I did not know how to make healthy choices. I was emotionally eating. I'm the only child. I was away from home. I didn't really have the tool set to be on my own yet. I struggled with emotional eating. I struggled with all that weight gain. With that weight gain came lots of really fun things like weight-related issues, thyroid issues, pre-Hashimoto's disease. I was also diagnosed with chronic Epstein-Barr, which is something that I still struggle with today. I decided when my husband put a ring on my finger when I was twenty-two years old right after college, I said, I've got to lose this weight for my wedding. It was not about the health. It was about vanity. I wanted to look perfect in my wedding dress. I lost over sixty pounds in about two years. We got married.

Zibby: Wait, slow down. Hold on. Sorry, I want to hear the end, but I want more details. When you were eating emotionally in college and gaining all that weight and developing associated health issues, what were your habits like? Were you eating fast food? Were you hiding sweets? Was it a combination of a lot of things? What was your eating like prior to that? Had you ever thought about eating? Had it ever been an issue, or you had just always been sort of thin and you didn't have to think about it?

Liz: I never had to think about it. Prior to that, I did ballet from the time I was three until I was eighteen. I was naturally thin. I had a ballerina's body. I didn't really have to think about what I ate. My mom, who always struggled with her weight -- from the time I can remember, she always did. Still does. She would always provide what she thought were healthy options. She wasn't really well-versed in any of that herself. I really just didn't know even what portion control was. When I went to the cafeteria, it was free-for-all. I would just eat whatever I wanted. If I had a particularly stressful day, I'd eat late at night. I remember my roommates and I going to Krispy Kreme in the middle of the night and thinking that that was a good decision. I would never hide food. It never got to that point for me. I was using food as a way to cope with things that I wasn't coping with, if that makes sense.

Zibby: It does make sense. It sounds very familiar. I'm sure a lot of people listening can relate to that. So you gained the weight during college. Then you decide to lose the weight for the wedding, which I'm sure, again, so many people can relate to. That's every bridal magazine. How did you do that? How did you lose all that weight?

Liz: I really did it through mainly exercise. That was something that had been kind of missing from my life in college. I started to exercise every day. It got to the point where orthorexia was setting in. I was so consumed with what I was putting in my body, every calorie, every gram of fat. I went from one end of the spectrum to another end of the spectrum. Neither of those are healthy places to be.

Zibby: For those people who don't know, what's the different between anorexia and orthorexia?

Liz: Anorexia is an eating disorder where you're actually just not eating or you have distorted ways of eating. I was eating. With orthorexia, it's more of, you're focused too much on what you're eating. You're focused too much on the calories in, the calories out. It's not just that you focus on it too much. It can overtake your whole life and your whole brain. That's kind of what was happening for me. It really ended up not being a very healthy situation. I thought I looked great in my wedding dress, but then I just kept taking it further and further. I got down to a double zero. That wasn't healthy either. Sure, I was eating and I was making these great meals for my husband and I, but I certainly wasn't eating enough. I wouldn't say that I had an eating disorder because I have so many friends that have struggled with true eating disorders. This was definitely something that was more emotional and mental going on with me. I had been diagnosed with Epstein-Barr. I'd been diagnosed with all these different issues. Losing the weight certainly helped, but I still had a lot of health-related issues. I also had an immunodeficiency and IGG deficiency. I had a lot going on that I thought, let's just take ahold of this. I have this super stressful life. I don't necessarily like my job. 

I started to look into health and wellness programs. IIN really spoke to me. I decided to go back to school. I was working, did that for a couple of years. I got pregnant. It wasn't really a super planned thing. It kind of just happened. I'm working full time. I'm doing this IIN program, this nutrition program, pretty much full time. Now I'm pregnant. I definitely gained the appropriate amount of weight during pregnancy. It was not super hard for me to lose the weight afterwards. I think that I could attribute that to my orthorexia habits. The process of going through IIN, it was just such a healing process me. I was able to shed all of my issues with food and focus on health. It was no longer about dieting. It became a focus on health. Since then, I've had another daughter. Through both pregnancies, I gained the appropriate amount of weight. My second pregnancy, I probably gained too much. I've gotten to the point now where I'm really healthy and happy and balanced in my body. I've been able to sustain that for the past, I'd say, six years now since my first daughter was born. I think that when you become a mom, it has a way of just clearing out all the BS. You prioritize. You can get your head on straight. I think that the process of IIN and also having my first daughter really helped me to heal all of that. It's something that I really enjoy working on with my clients. If you struggle with emotional eating, if you struggle with orthorexia, not only am I trained in all that, but I lived through it. You can break free from it.

Zibby: When did you put the shingle out and start your consulting wellness business?

Liz: I did that after my first daughter was born when we lived in DC. I did that with a few clients for about two years. Most of my clients just wanted to lose the baby weight and wanted to lose the baby weight. It wasn't really focused so much on health and wellness as much as I always tried to direct the train that way. It just seemed like there was a disconnect there. At the same time, I also started working for a website called Unconventional Kitchen, running their back end, helping them. It was a website for moms to go to for healthy habits, healthy recipes, that kind of thing. I [indiscernible] created recipes for them. That was a really fun thing to do with my degree as well. Through that, through working with Unconventional Kitchen, I started to consult for her and then consult for some other clients in the health and wellness industry who I realized didn't necessarily have business acumen. They had the passion to do this, but they didn't necessarily have the business acumen to run a business. I started to do that and kind of got away from the health coaching for about two years. Once we moved to Charlotte, I realized that while I was making a lot more money doing what I was doing with business consulting, it just wasn't feeding me the way that I needed to be fed. I decided once we were back in Charlotte to start with health coaching again. I did have a baby in between there, so I took a little hiatus. I also noticed that in Charlotte, the health and eating habits are very different than what they were in DC. I find that I'm making a little bit of a bigger difference here for people, if that makes sense.

Zibby: That makes sense. What did it feel like for you to have the whiplash effect of having gained fifty pounds and then all of a sudden being a double zero and being in a dressing room? There must have been a moment where you were like, oh, my gosh, look what is going on. Did that happen?

Liz: I don't even think that it's a look-in-the-mirror moment. I think that it's when you look back on photos. I remember looking through -- my husband and I went to Greece on this amazing trip through the Greek Islands. Take me back. [laughter] 

Zibby: Take me with you.

Liz: We got home from that trip, and I would always put together these Shutterfly books because I had time to do it then. 

Zibby: PS, I have my teenage son make my photo albums for the whole family. Once your kids get old enough, I pay him like twenty bucks an album. FYI. I don't know if that's bad parenting or not, but I get my albums done. Helpful tips for people who have photos stacking up. Okay, go ahead.

Liz: A hundred percent. I have not done one since my first daughter was born. I remember looking back on that book after the trip and thinking, who is that? She's really skinny. Maybe she's too skinny. Is that me?

Zibby: Did anyone say anything to you? Did you family or your friends? Did anyone say, maybe you're getting a little too skinny?

Liz: For sure, my parents. Even my husband was like, "You're beautiful no matter what." He has loved me at every single size that I have been. He would say, "You don't need to focus on this as much." For him, it was less about how I looked and more about what I was putting my energy towards. I do remember his grandmother, who's very outspoken, always liked to talk to me about it. [laughs] For sure, people noticed. People reached out. I think it's something that no matter what other people say to you or what other people think, it has to come from yourself to actually do something and change it.

Zibby: Where are you now personally in terms of how you feel about your body and all of that?

Liz: Now that I have two little girls, six-year-old and a three-year-old -- we're in a pandemic, so let's just throw that in. Let's say pandemic aside, I feel awesome. I have felt awesome for the past, I'd say, three years since my second daughter was born. I gained weight during that process. The weight did not come off as quickly the second time. I probably still have some of that weight on me now. I'm one hundred percent okay with it. I love how I look. I love having some curves. I'm always going to have more of a tiny body, but I feel like I look healthy. I feel healthy now. It's so much less about how I look. How I feel is everything. I want every mom to feel as good as I feel. Once you get that feeling of not feeling so exhausted all the time, of not feeling like you have to constantly be focused on your weight and what you're consuming, I think that the whole world opens up to you in a new way. Does that answer your question? Do you want to know what size I am now?

Zibby: I do not. I do not want to know what size you are. I'm happy to know that you feel good and that is the overarching lesson. I'm really interested in this concept of orthorexia because I talk to a lot of women who confess to feeling overwhelmed and completely consumed by what they eat. Now I'm wondering looking back, all I did was count points for years at a time. Was that orthorexia? How would you know? If there's someone listening who thinks, geez, gosh, I cannot stop thinking about my weight, what can they do? What are your three tips for people who may or may not be orthorexic? 

Liz: I think the first tip is to just, I don't want to say own it, but acknowledge that it's there. Give it a name. Just like when you're in therapy for any other situation, you have parts of you. Orthorexia is a part of you, so name that part and know that it's there. I think that it's really important to talk to that part. If that sounds kind of silly or woo-woo, I think it's really important that if you're struggling with anything between orthorexia, anxiety, any of that, you need to talk to that part and let it know that it's not in control of you. You're in control. You drive the bus. That would be a big sign for you. If you feel like, I'm not driving the bus right now, something else is, something else is taking control, I think that would be the biggest wake-up sign for you to realize that maybe there's something worth exploring here. Maybe there's something that we need to heal here.

Zibby: If people want to work with you directly, do you do it virtually or do you have to be in Charlotte?

Liz: Right now, I work with pretty much only people in Charlotte. I have one client in New Jersey. I like to work with people in person, but everything's virtual right now. I can work with anybody anywhere virtually right now. The one thing that I love to do is my fridge and panty makeovers. That, I always feel like I need to be there with you to do it. I can do those virtually too. It's a sad time. I miss being with actual human beings.

Zibby: Ugh, me too. How can people find you?

Liz: You can find me on Instagram, it's @liz.vandy.health.charlotteCLT, or my website which is lizvandyhealthandwellness.com.

Zibby: That was too fast. Liz Vandy, V-A-N-D-Y. Lizvandyhealthand -- spell out and or ampersand? And, A-N-D?

Liz: Spell it out, yeah.

Zibby: Healthandwellness.com.

Liz: Lizvandyhealthand -- spell it out -- wellness.com. I got to get better at that.

Zibby: In addition to owning orthorexia and everything else, and I know your sweet spot is helping moms, do you have any advice in general for the busy mom who really wants to be healthy and just doesn't have the emotional bandwidth? What you were saying about before you had kids, before you have kids and maybe before you have kids and a job or whatever else you're doing in life, you might have had more mental headspace to focus and make smart choices. I remember before I had kids, I would go through a cookbook and be like, ooh, I could totally make that. I would spend two hours after work. I would make it. It would have three points or something. It would be amazing. I would be so excited. Now I'm like, did I eat? I think I ate today. I don't even have the focus on it sometimes. What are just a few things busy moms who are distracted, or not just moms even, just busy people, even though we're home -- it's not like we're running around as much, necessarily. Even though we're mostly at home, what inspiration and tips can we have for not mindless partaking in some of the habits that maybe we know are not the best but we do them anyway? Then what? 

Liz: Gosh, it's hard. It's so hard right now, especially with the pandemic. I'm trying to normalize pandemic weight gain because it's just a different time. In general for busy people, the first thing I would say is accountability, either working with a coach or just finding someone who's in the same kind of life space as you; if you're a mom, maybe finding another mom who has about the same amount of children and about the same age as your children going through the same struggles. Keep each other accountable. I think that for most of my clients, that's what they want me for. They want me to keep them accountable. I'd say that's numero uno, is just keeping it front of mind but allowing someone else to hold you accountable so that you're not constantly doing it for yourself in your mind. Specifically for moms, I'd say it's the same old kind of adage of put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put it on everybody else. Moms, we don't have time to take care of ourselves. We're taking care of everybody else before ourselves. I really feel like we just have to reverse that. We have to reverse the mom psychology, that martyr psychology, in order to be able to focus on what we need to focus on. The last thing I'd say if you aren't working with a coach who's well-versed in this or you don't know anything about what this is, I would google intuitive eating so that you can begin to understand how to become a mindful eater and how to be in control of that yourself.

Zibby: Amazing. Wow, so many tips. So much to think about. Thank you for sharing your very personal story and your whole journey and how it's led you to helping other people, which is really beautiful. It's amazing that you've decided to do that and got out of the DC rat race and instead are helping women where they're struggling a lot and making real change. I think that's awesome. PS, I love your sweater. For people listening, I'll put this up on YouTube, probably. You're wearing this gorgeous magenta sweater. Where is that from? I have to maybe find a sweater like that.

Liz: It's Halogen, just the regular Nordstrom Halogen cashmere sweater. They make a million colors of them every year. I saw this color and I was like, I must have.

Zibby: I'm obsessed with that color. It's amazing.

Liz: Thank you.

Zibby: Very uplifting. That was off topic. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. I will be thinking of you. I hope I meet you in person.

Liz: It was so nice to meet you. Bye.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Charlotte Laguardia on access to individualized nutrition

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Charlotte. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight."

Charlotte LaGuardia: Thank you so much, Zibby. I'm so happy to be here.

Zibby: It's so nice to see you. Charlotte, first, give listeners a little bit of a bio and your background, how you got into this industry. Then after that, we'll talk about your whole journey to getting here. Give us the rundown of a bio and background for now.

Charlotte: Absolutely, yes. I grew up in Southampton, New York, so out in the Hamptons. I went to college in Worcester, Massachusetts. I went to Holy Cross. I was studying psychology. I wanted to be in marketing. I wanted to do advertising. I was really excited to do that. I started to notice that I wasn't feeling well. By the time I graduated college, I was like, there's no way I can do a nine-to-five job. I don't have the energy. I don't feel well. I dove into a degree in nutrition trying to find some answers. That's what led me into the nutrition field. I got my master's from the Maryland University of Integrative Health. Then I did an internship. I did an exam. I took an exam to qualify for the boards, and so now I'm a certified nutrition specialist. I'm also a yoga instructor. I like to combine the two worlds of nutrition and yoga. Now I'm back in Water Mill in the Hamptons. I have my own private practice that was in person. Now I have moved to completely virtual. I do virtual yoga. I do virtual nutritional consultations as well as workshops. I do a lot of ladies' nights on Zoom. We do some breathing exercises. We talk about things you can eat and all of that good stuff.

Zibby: If people want to find you, where should they look you up?

Charlotte: My website is thriveeast.com. My Instagram is @ThriveEastNutrition.

Zibby: Awesome. Charlotte, you and I met when I had one of my many hit-bottom moments. [laughs] I was like, I need to see someone immediately. I can't do this by myself. I've had kind of a love-hate relationship with getting experts involved in what I know is something I should master myself. You were so kind and came over a few times. Then again, I sabotaged myself. Now I can't even face it again, but not because of you. You were amazing. Tell me about your own -- go back to when you weren’t feeling well. What even led you to nutrition versus med school or something like that?

Charlotte: It is a little bit of a long story. What didn't lead me to med school was a --

Zibby: -- Wait, I want the long story. That's the interesting part.

Charlotte: I know we are on a podcast for why moms don't have time to lose weight. Personally, I don't have a weight loss journey. I had always been on the thin side. I grew up thin. Nothing ever changed. I could never gain weight, actually. I always thought I was really safe. I remember in the seventh grade, learning about diabetes and heart disease. I was like, I'm not going to have that. I have no problems. I'm thin. I had this false sense of safety. I went through life never being affected by the food that I ate, that I knew. I would eat pints of ice cream. I would come from home, and my after-school snack was literally a whole container of whip cream. I was really addicted to those sugary carbohydrate foods. I remember I didn't eat a vegetable for probably years. My mom would try, but I wasn't interested. All I wanted was the white rice and some ice cream after that. I was really hooked on those highly processed, highly refined foods. It never showed physically, so I was like, I'm totally fine. Then by the time I got to college and had to go through stress -- I had all this new stress that I didn't experience in high school, the late nights. I wasn't sleeping. I wasn't exercising. I was eating a hundred percent processed diet out of the dining hall or fast food or whatever I could heat up in my microwave.

That's really when it hit. I honestly remember -- this is crazy. I would walk through halls. It would be one o'clock in the morning. I'd just finished a paper. I'd be walking through the halls of the library. I'd see, there's nothing in front of me, there's no one around me, I'm just going to close my eyes while I walk because I'm so tired and I'm so just shut. That was when I realized that something had to have been up. When I graduated school, I ended up going to a few doctors. Throughout all of that, I always had some GI things. I was never regular. I was always bloated and cramping. If I didn't eat, I'd be doubled over in pain, things that just weren’t normal. In my head, I was like, I'm thin, I'm fine. Everyone experiences this. It's okay. The GI doctors could only say IBS, which is, we all know, this blanket diagnosis. Something's not right. We're not positive, but we're going to put you in this category. Then I started getting neurological symptoms, so things like tingling, buzzing feelings in my body, the extreme fatigue, couldn't remember a thing to save my life. All of these different things started popping up. Neurologists couldn't really figure out what was going on. They were like, "You might be depressed. You might have B12 deficiencies," which wasn't the case. After a full year of not getting a straight answer and not being able to work or do anything, I was like, I have to go back to school. I need to know why this is happening, why this is happening to my body, what I can do to help fix it. Modern medicine is amazing. You get into an accident, they will bring you back. It's the preventative, getting down to the root cause where there's a little bit of lacking. It's a little lacking there.

I decided I had to be my own advocate. I had to figure out, when I eat food, what happens to it? Why do people eat vegetables and not tubs of ice cream? That was really what motivated me to go to school. I knew I could buy a textbook, but I'm the type of learner where I need someone to explain things to me. I found this great program. It was online. It was somewhat self-paced, so I could still do a part-time job while I was learning. It just changed my life. What I started learning about how our food is digested, why we choose certain foods, what all of my symptoms actually meant, and figuring out the whole reason why everything was happening -- a lifetime of antibiotic use, but we'll come to back that. [laughs] When I started learning all these things, I was like, oh, my gosh, I have to tell the world. Why did no one teach me this? Why was it in the seventh grade that I learned diabetes and heart disease existed but not how to prevent them or why they start in the first place? It was really, really eye-opening. I went from that mindset of, I want to work that nine-to-five office job -- I was so excited for pumps and pencil skirts. Now I'm like, oh, my gosh, I just need to be with people every day and share this information, especially kids. I'm finding that I'm heading more towards the adolescent world because that was the time where if I had learned all of this, I think things would have been incredibly different.

Zibby: Now I want you just to talk to my thirteen-year-old daughter. You're such a likeable person. You should have your own YouTube show or something. Do you have that?

Charlotte: You know, people [indiscernible/crosstalk] all the time. I am so camera shy.

Zibby: But you're doing great right now. I know this isn't a camera. It's just Zoom. I feel like my daughter's all into YouTube. To have somebody up there actually giving healthy, health-centered information as opposed to just how to put on her eye shadow would be really awesome.

Charlotte: I could do a little eye shadow too.

Zibby: That would be great. [laughter] So what was the answer? What was wrong with you?

Charlotte: Really, what it was, was a full-blown gut issue. I had chronic ear infections as a kid. From ages one to about three, I was on antibiotics a few times a year. For that age span, what's happening is your microbiome is really setting up. The microbiome is this about four-to-seven-pound collection of bacteria and yeasts and some viruses that should live in harmony. They are there to produce your immune cells, neurotransmitters. They even play a huge role in turning genes on and off. I don't know if you've heard the saying, genetics is the gun and your lifestyle pulls the trigger. That lifestyle influences the microbiome. Really, it's the microbiome pulling the trigger on risk factors. During that age, kids are sticking stuff in their mouths. They're eating dirt and stuff and trying to put things in their mouths. What that is, is they're trying to get bacteria into the microbiome based on their environment. It's a really special time. I was taking antibiotics which meant every time I took a course, I was killing off a big portion of that community.

Fortunately, our microbiome is really resilient. However, we didn't know this at the time. My mom did everything she could. She kept me really healthy. I didn't have chronic ear issues because we took of it then. We didn't know, take a probiotic or eat your fermented foods. As I grew up, I had this really imbalanced microbiome. There were probably strains in there that shouldn't have been. There were strains in numbers that shouldn't have been. I wasn't doing anything to help it. I was only feeding the things that fed the negative bacteria and negative yeasts. What that led to was what we're calling in the industry now, leaky gut. Leaky gut is when the cells that line your intestines start to separate. There's little perforations. Through those perforations, your undigested food particles, any bacteria or viruses that come into the body can seep into the bloodstream which then in turn can set off the immune system. This situation can lead to pretty much all of the symptoms that I had. What I learned was to go back and heal the gut and the heal the system. I can tell you, it's been years, and still always going to be a work in progress. The one thing that I'm learning is that the body is so resilient. The body wants to be healthy. That is where it's trying to get every single day, but we just have to give it the tools to get there. That's what this journey has been.

Zibby: Wow. One thing I heard you say is processed food is not going to help be one of those good tools. Is that right? [laughs]

Charlotte: It is. It's hard. We live in a food industry. Food is a business now. I tell clients every day, companies, they just want to sell you a product. They want to sell you on their brand. They don't necessarily care if it's not the best thing for you. They don't care if you have gut issues or a hormonal imbalance. They just want you to eat their product. That's just the nature of business. I can't really blame them for it. We just need to be more educated about the products that are out there. With processed foods, there's normally sugar added in everything. Ketchup, salad dressings, everything has some sort of sugar even if it says zero grams on the nutrition facts. You're like, there's no sugar in there. I'm totally fine. You look at the ingredients, and see you cane sugar or molasses or date syrup. You're like, okay, there's a little sweet in there, but it's not showing up on the nutrition facts, so it should be fine for me.

The point of that is when you ingest the food, you don't taste sweet, but our digestive system actually has sweet receptors. What those sweet receptors do is they actually talk to the brain. Our gut is connected to the brain through this vagus nerve, this big, huge nerve that goes throughout the body, but its main connection is gut to brain. Those sweet receptors take in the little sugar that you don't taste in your mouth. They recognize it. They release dopamine, which is our reward signal. It makes you want to eat more. It could be a potato chip with a little added sugar. It could be ketchup on a chicken finger, which is just a protein, but it's making you go for more because those sweet receptors keep releasing the dopamine. Your body's like, oh, this feels good. I'm going to keep going. I'm not going to stop. It's a little secret of processed foods. That's why it's really hard to only have one chip or one fry in the ketchup.

Zibby: What about if you're actually eating lots of sugar, sugar that you know you are eating because the second you put the cookie in your mouth you feel like it coursed through your body and you get this hit of amazingness? [laughs]

Charlotte: That's exactly what's happening. It literally is a hit of amazingness. Now you're getting twofold. You're getting dopamine release because the receptors in your mouth are tasting sweet. Then the receptors in your gut are tasting sweet. It's a full-body experience. At the end of the day, it is very neurological. It's not necessarily willpower either. I think that that's something that a lot of us get wrapped up in. I'm weak. If there's a cookie in front of me, I'm going to eat it. It's my fault. I'm weak. I'm not good at this. There's so much more at work here than just willpower. It also depends on the balance of microbes in your digestive system, in your microbiome. If you have higher numbers of certain yeasts like candida, that candida feeds off of sugar. It has this huge nerve, the vague nerve, that talks to the brain and can ask for more sugar. Those cravings, again, aren't that willpower or seeing the cookie. It's actually these old bacteria and yeasts in there using their power to harness the brain and harness our activities.

Zibby: How do you know if you have those in you?

Charlotte: Normally, if you have a very high-sugar diet, I tend to assume that that's where we're headed because whatever we feed will most likely be there. There are stool sample tests you can do. There are also some symptoms like sugar cravings, a lot of dandruff, and yeast infections on the skin or in the body. Thrush is another symptom of candida. It's sneaky. A lot of these bacteria, they're just around for survival. They don't care if the cookie's going to make you crave more. They just want to survive.

Zibby: What is your advice then if somebody, regardless if they have candida or whatever bacteria are feeding the cravings and maybe it's not willpower, but what do you do if now you're in this spin cycle of sugar addiction?

Charlotte: First, I like to recommend different ways to get dopamine. It sounds a little crazy, but if we do something like fifty jumping jacks before we eat the cookie, we're releasing dopamine on our own through physical activity. Then we're less likely to go for the second cookie. Then sometimes, over time, you might not even want the whole thing or even the cookie at all. It also depends on the day. I'm also not about deprivation. We're going to eat cookies. It happens. It's life. There are cookies in our world. We want to do it in the best way possible. If we can do those jumping jacks beforehand, get an initial dopamine surge, then we can have and enjoy that bit of cookie and move on. Other things we can do to release dopamine are talk to a friend or a loved one. Right now too, social isolation is a big thing. Call a friend. Call a family member. Talk to them. Skype with them. Zoom with them. Do whatever feels right or appropriate at the time. That connection releases dopamine. Then the final and favorite one of mine is a hug. A twenty-second, chest-to-chest, equal-partnership hug will help to release those feel-good neurotransmitters as well and, in a lot of cases, start to kick those sugar cravings.

Zibby: If I hug my husband for twenty seconds in front of a plate of cookies, I might not want as many cookies?

Charlotte: Correct.

Zibby: Seriously?

Charlotte: Seriously, yes. For Christmas, we got a basket of gluten-free goods because everyone knows that I don't eat a lot of gluten. You know those stroopwafles that you sit on top of your cup of coffee and they get all gooey? Those were in there. They're really good. I would have one, but then I would do some jumping jacks and I would remove myself from the situation. Yes, a few times I went back for a second one, but not as often as I would've if I didn't do those dopamine-enhancing activities.

Zibby: What's interesting about this to me is that, of course, I've heard the advice. Instead of eating, you should go do something else that's fun. I always interrupted that as a means of distraction. Yes, eating makes you feel good, but other things make you feel good, so just do them instead. I've never heard that the dopamine released from those activities counteracts the cravings for the actual treats because your body is getting the surge that it needs already, so it doesn't look to something external on a plate. Did I get that right?

Charlotte: Yes, you did. Something to remember, too, the fifty jumping jacks will not give you the same awesome explosion response that a cookie in your mouth will. It's not as intense.

Zibby: You didn't need to tell me that. That, I know.

Charlotte: It's very subtle. I don't want you to do the jumping jacks and be like, wait, I don't feel that. That feeling is going to be completely different. If we take the time, it is also a little bit of a distraction, but it's helping because you're getting that reward the body's looking for.

Zibby: Okay, I could try it. I could test this out. I could test it out.

Charlotte: It's always worth a shot to test out. Then remembering too, when we do go to eat that cookie after we do the jumping jacks, eating it slowly and enjoying it fully. I know a lot of times with junk food and cookies and baked goods and things like that, we feel some guilt. We're like, I know I shouldn't be eating this. I'm going to eat it, but I'm going to eat it fast. If I eat it fast, then maybe it doesn't count. This is a train of thought I've had many times. If you sit down and mindfully, slowly eat it, notice the texture, the smell, the mouthfeel, you're going to be so much more satisfied from the one cookie and not need to go for the second. A lot of times, you have a sandwich with two halves. You eat one half. You eat the other. You look down and think that the other's still there. That's what's happening in this guilt-driven cookie eating. We rush it because we hope nobody sees or it just doesn't count if we get it in. By eating it really slowly and enjoying it and honoring it and experiencing it, that awesome feeling lasts a lot longer too.

Zibby: I was eating a cookie the other night. It was gooey and warm and perfect. I was sitting and I ate it in front of my husband. Sometimes I do try to eat things quickly out of sight of everyone for my own guilt reasons. Anyway, I ate it. Literally, he was laughing. He was like, "I don't think I've ever seen anyone enjoy a cookie as much as you are enjoying this right now." I was like, "This is so amazing. It's the best thing ever." [laughs] Not to say it didn't make me want more. I don't think I had more at the time, or I probably would've had more. I see what you're saying. Take the time. Enjoy it. Don't beat yourself up about it. Sometimes I think that's another thing in the cycle that people do. I've already ruined it with the one cookie. I might as well eat six.

Charlotte: Absolutely. I see that all the time. It's important to remember, too, when we're stressed and eating, the stress actually turns our body's ability to digest foods down. We don't extract as much as we could. I know a cookie has sugar. It's definitely something that is somewhat processed depending on where you get it or if you made it. You could have it with dark chocolate and whole wheat flour and get some B vitamins and antioxidants. If we're feeling guilt eating that cookie, those few benefits that are in there, we won't be able to absorb as many. All the more argument to have it, but enjoy and relax and breathe. Look at it. Smell it. Just be in that moment with the cookie. Then go have a fully balanced, healthy meal before or after.

Zibby: Basically, if I or my listeners can eat a mostly balanced diet, I could basically have one amazing chocolate chip cookie every day and still not succumb to what I feel like is addiction, essentially, of the feeling of the cookie in my body. Correct?

Charlotte: Absolutely. Everyone is completely different. It is really understanding yourself. Some people might have a harder time. Some are all or nothing too. I know I have a lot of clients who, even just looking at a cookie will send them into a spiral. The whole mindful eating, have just one slowly, is just not for them. That's okay. We recognize that. We put other things in place. For a lot of people, if you can harness the power of mindful eating and you can slow yourself down, that one cookie is definitely doable, and making sure it's the highest quality cookie. You can make it yourself. You can source great ingredients, organic whole wheat flour. Like I said, dark chocolate's a health food. Add some dark chocolate in there, and nuts and seeds. Make into something that's really healthful.

Zibby: Do you have a go-to healthy chocolate chip cookie option or recipe or something?

Charlotte: You know, I don't, but I can definitely make one if I put a little time into that. After talking about cookies all this time, I'm thinking, definitely.

Zibby: If you want to drop them off here... [laughs]

Charlotte: Want to be my tester?

Zibby: I will test them out.

Charlotte: You can be my recipe tester. We'll get something good going. It would be great.

Zibby: Charlotte, this has been great for so many reasons. One, thank you for sharing your story with me. It's such a good reminder that you can't cheat on your body for too long without it catching up with you. If you're doing things that are not good for you, even if you can't see it, your body sees it. It's just a good reminder that even if you feel good with your weight or your clothing size, that is not the full story at all. That's another good reminder. Two, just the processed food, as we all know, that processed foods are like the devil. Eat in moderation. Look at the ingredients. Be careful. Eat with caution. Then also, remembering the things to counteract the hit you get from sugar and adding things like hugs and jumping jack as a means to fill that dopamine receptor up so it doesn't have as much left to fill with the cookie, which I like. I also like that if you give yourself permission to enjoy something regularly without guilt, then maybe the whole thing ratchets back down in terms of this whole viscous cycle of punishment and willpower and all the things you were talking about. Awesome.

Charlotte: Absolutely. There's so much more to it. I think we like to simplify things and say if you are eating a ton of sugar, you're just weak. You have bad willpower. That's not it. There's so much more. There's so much more we can do also.

Zibby: Awesome. I am going to get back in touch with you just to chitchat to teach my kids. Even though I teach them all the time, I think it helps so much to have someone else come in just give a little tutorial. I'm going to do that. I'm going to go bake some really good cookies.

Charlotte: Eat them slowly. Enjoy. Be in the moment.

Zibby: Yes, perfect. Charlotte, tell everybody again where they can find you if they want to book a session or learn more about you.

Charlotte: My website is thriveeast.com. My Instagram is @ThriveEastNutrition. You can message me on either platform.

Zibby: Perfect. Thank you so much.

Charlotte: Thank you so much. This was wonderful.

Zibby: Great. Bye, Charlotte.

Charlotte: Bye.

Zibby Owens on the weight of it all

THE WEIGHT OF IT ALL

In quarantine, all my old body insecurities came roaring back.

By Zibby Owens

The only reason I bought a scale recently was for my younger childrens’ telemedicine check-ups with their pediatrician. Before I could prop the kids up on my desk and have them “open wide” into my desktop’s camera, I would need to record their height and weight to have on hand for the appointments. It seemed simple enough. I ordered the same type of old-fashioned, floor-model scale that looked exactly like the one I had in high school and that followed me for 20 years afterwards. 

The scale and I have had a fraught relationship since I was nine years old. That was when, according to my mother, I told her I was upset about how much larger my thighs were than all the other girls’ at school with their string bean legs. Sitting at the breakfast table in her bathrobe, smoking a Vantage Ultra and eating half a grapefruit before heading off to Gilda’s exercise class, this 5’ 2”, petite, toned woman sprung into action. She knew just how to fix this problem.

She bestowed upon me her treasured, dog-eared copy of the book Calories and Carbohydrates and taught me how to scan the tiny number lines for each food. I diligently measured half a cup of orange juice over the kitchen sink in my uniform jumper each morning before writing down the calories and then heading off to fourth grade. I remember rushing into my little brother’s room one night when my mom was tucking him in and proudly announcing that I had two pieces of great news: I had swallowed my first pill (something for my allergies) and I had successfully stayed under 1,200 calories for the day.

The real test, of course, was seeing if the scale had gone down. I would stand in my mother’s bathroom once a week, which smelled like Pond’s cold cream and Nivea lotion, and step on her doctor’s scale. I’d nudge the black markers right or left until the pendulum balanced and stopped wavering up and down. I always wanted to push it farther and father left. Nevermind that I was still growing. I wanted to fit in with my waif-like friends. I wanted my body to look like theirs; perhaps then I would be completely accepted. 

For the next 30 years, I tried every diet and exercise fad imaginable while ricocheting up and down 5, 10, 15, or 20 pounds, all within a tight range like a ping-pong ball going back and forth over the net of a faded table. Atkins. Step aerobics. Carbohydrate Addicts. Tae bo. A clinic on 63rd Street that gave me “vitamins.” HIIT. It was never enough. If only I could lose a few pounds, I could remove the shackle of shame I felt was constantly wrapped around my neck like a Parisian woman’s scarf. I was embarrassed by the outward display of my inner mess. I wanted to at least look like I had it all together when inside I was worried, anxious, and trying to find my place in the world. 

After business school in 2003, I became a Weight Watchers addict and adhered so strictly to the program that I lost 30 pounds and even became a Leader, running meetings all over New York City to spread the gospel. I counted points and wrote down every food I ate for almost ten years, through three pregnancies and four kids. I couldn’t get over the joy I felt that there actually was a solution! Something that worked. I couldn’t control the chaos of having twins. I couldn’t absorb the shock of going from being an overachiever to spending my days on the playroom floor, longing for the time when I could just get to sleep again. But losing weight gave me a quantifiable goal. Something for me. Something to aspire to when grades and salary and all other external measures of success suddenly evaporated. 

Yet losing all that weight wasn’t good for me physically; my hair started falling out, I stopped getting my period, and I was always cold. One doctor I consulted even said, “Your body just isn’t made to be this skinny, and that’s okay.” In retrospect, trying to control my intake and keep my body looking its best was the way I tried to cope as my first marriage fell apart and I felt powerless to save it. The inner turmoil was on full display. I ate my feelings. I structured my diet because I could control that more than I could control my life. I ate in secret to cope with the things that went on in my home that I didn’t discuss. 

At some point during the last five years, after my divorce and in my new relationship with Kyle, who became my husband, I made a delicate peace with my body and started focusing on work instead. I stopped weighing myself unless my zippers strained as I yanked them up and I knew I had to regroup. I accepted that to eat the way I wanted without expending an inordinate amount of energy “watching it,” I would be three or four sizes larger than my goal weight.  

And then the pandemic hit. I felt enormously lucky to be healthy and financially secure when so many others were suffering from the start. My first thoughts were more about food scarcity and the nation’s food supply system than my jeans. I was so scared and nervous as we hunkered down that I couldn’t eat that much. I was in survival mode. I threw my energy into helping buoy the literary community when I wasn’t taking care of my four kids and cleaning the house. For exercise, my teen daughter asked me to do a YouTube “summer shred” workout program with her. I’ll do anything for her, even crunches and burpees, so we did it daily.

And then the scale arrived.

I took it out of the box and placed it on my cold bathroom floor. My little guy hopped right on.           

“Mom, get on with me!” he said excitedly. “Come on!”

I hadn’t been on a scale in months, but I had a number in mind (the high end of my ping-pong range) that I fully expected to see.

I got on the scale with my son and quickly did the math. Wait, that couldn’t be right.

“Honey, let me try this alone for a second, okay?”

I gasped.

I stared down at a number that was ten pounds higher than I expected. A number I’d only seen while pregnant. And here I thought I’d lost weight! 

All the old demons came racing out, taunting me. You’re fat! You’re lazy! You’re pathetic! You’re out of control! How could you! The number was far above my “before” weight when I started Weight Watchers almost 20 years ago.

I backed away from the scale and ushered my son out of the suddenly toxic bathroom. 

That night, I began aggressively stuffing my face with food, perversely punishing myself with the same weapon that had gotten me into this mess. I started obsessing about my weight, the foods I was eating, what I “should” and “shouldn’t” consume, scarfing down cookie after cookie at night when everyone else in the house was finally sleeping. 

Naturally, several days later, my clothes felt tight for the first time in months.

I was falling back into my self-punishing habits, like an armchair sliding back into the well-worn depressions in the carpet after being temporarily pushed aside. I almost couldn’t believe it: after all these years, the same feelings were still there, ever-present.

I can see now that I was reaching for my telltale crutch, the one I routinely steadied myself with in times of stress and uncertainty. And what is a pandemic if not a time of extreme stress and uncertainty? I was trying to find that elusive sense of control, that hook to tether myself to, and then punishing myself when I couldn’t pull it off. 

It was a sobering reminder that achieving balance is a lifelong journey with plenty of backslides along the way.

Soon after, the craziness, busyness, and fear of day-to-day Covid life overtook me again. (What about camp?! A new disease affecting children?!? Should we move?) But this time, I handled things a bit differently. 

My food rumination waned: I started to plan. I got caught up in life again, in helping my kids and my community, in looking outward. 

Melissa Liebermann on her family’s Holocaust story and her distorted body image

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Melissa. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight."

Melissa Liebermann: Thanks, Zibby, so much for having me.

Zibby: I'm so glad you reached out as someone who's a part of the Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight community and shared your story with me over email. Now we get to talk face to face over Zoom. This is a real treat. I am thrilled to be your first podcast ever.

Melissa: Thank you so much. As I mentioned, when you said, "Hey, do you want to come on the podcast?" to tell my story, I thought, would people want to listen to it? Then I thought, you know what, why not? As I said to you when I reached out, so much of what you have had to say on this podcast has really resonated with me. I really wanted to share it with you and was glad you thought maybe we could share it with others as well.

Zibby: Thank you. [laughs] Sorry to have taken your message and been like, all right, now we're going to blast this out to the world, but I'm always looking for interesting stories. Honestly, everyone's story is interesting to other people. There's nothing that makes one person's journey more relevant or not. We're each just trying to get through life the best we can. Everyone has their own perspective which someone out there always ends up relating to. That's why I think it's all valuable, personally.

Melissa: I agree. I definitely agree.

Zibby: Speaking of stories, tell me your backstory and your relationship with your weight and body and when it began and where you are now. I'll jump in and maybe interrupt you a hundred times.

Melissa: You probably will need to because, of course, like all of our stories in this regard, it's long. One of the formative elements of this for me is that I'm the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. I think that when you grow up with, in my case, a parent, my mother, who grew up in a home with that kind of trauma -- her parents had lost pretty much all of their family in the Holocaust. My grandmother was in concentration camps. They were starved, basically, for years. There's a lot of dysfunction that comes out of that experience. I think there's not a lot that's been said about the relationship with food that people have when they have not had it. I was very much raised with food as a very prominent element in our lives. A refrigerator that is not filled and stuffed is not okay. You have to have a lot of leftovers after every meal, particularly a holiday. That sort of overabundance was definitely a reaction, I think, to my mother being raised by Holocaust survivors. I think that is an element of it.

Zibby: Wait, I'm already interrupting you. Where was your family from? Which concentration camp? How old were they? Give you a little more detail if you don't mind.

Melissa: Of course. My grandparents are from Poland. They were from Łódź in Poland. My grandmother was in a couple of camps, Auschwitz and I think another one or two along the way. My grandfather was more of a -- he escaped and was in a work camp and has this unbelievable story how he fled and survived through working and hiding. They met after the war. My grandmother and her sister, my great-aunt who just died of COVID in April --

Zibby: -- I'm so sorry.

Melissa: I lost my grandmother a long time ago. She was the only thing I had tied to her. They survived, the two of them. The rest of their siblings, there's these horrible stories of them being taken away by the Nazis, and their mother in front of them. It's just so hard to even think about. That's a lot of the backstory. My grandparents met in a displaced persons camp after the war, as did my great-aunt and uncle. They were married in a joint ceremony. Then they all came to the United States together. It's the American dream in many respects but with a lot of trauma in the history, for sure.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I'm so sorry that that happened to your family. I cannot believe that your great-aunt lived through Auschwitz and died of COVID. Honestly, you should call a newspaper about that. That is the most crazy journey through awfulness. I didn't say that well, but you know what I mean? That this is what felled her after she survived all that. I'm so interested in what happened after the Holocaust, and the Holocaust obviously. I shouldn't say obviously, but I happen to be super interested. I took a whole class in college about the generational effects on what happened after the war and what happened in the displaced persons camps, all of that. Now to see you sitting here, the next generation, it gives me chills, really.

Melissa: It's a lot. It's a lot of deep family history. You worry that the loss of these survivors really impacts the ability to tell these stories. I know you suffered a lot of loss from COVID. It was very sad. It was just not the way her life should've ended.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. I bet in the early days you couldn't even be with her and all that. Melissa, I'm so sorry. Okay, not to drudge up all your painful memories. So they made it through that. Then which part of the States did you end up?

Melissa: They came to Paterson, New Jersey. My mother was born there. My grandfather became an electrician and had a very successful electrical supply company. My great-aunt was a businesswoman before her time. She owned a ladies' clothing store. She and my great-uncle would go to the city and buy clothes for the store. She had a successful business. She was a working mom sixty years ago and really was a trailblazer in that way. It was the American dream. There's no question. They stayed in New Jersey, raised their family in New Jersey. That's where I was born and have lived for all of my life other than the four years of college.

Zibby: All right, so back to eating.

Melissa: It's all about the food, always. [laughs]

Zibby: You had a stuffed fridge. You have this inherited trauma of starvation in the genes somewhere that courses through that you can't escape... Continue.

Melissa: Right. I think that the pivotal time for me was actually when my grandmother died. She was very sick for a lot of her life. From when I was about seven until I was eleven, she was [distorted audio] had a brain tumor that was removed. She was paralyzed. It was terrible. My mother was consumed by her well-being and her struggle. She died the end of sixth grade for me when I was eleven. Went to sleepaway camp late because she passed away right when camp was starting. We were moving to a new house about an hour away, moving to a new town. I came home from camp to a new home, to a new town. My parents had moved over the summer. Here I am, an almost twelve-year-old girl starting what we called junior high back then, seventh grade, had gone through early puberty, was tall, was the same height I am now. I just never grew again.

Zibby: I had that too. I was tall for a hot minute in 1983 or something, maybe a little later. [laughs]

Melissa: There's a picture of me in sixth grade, and I'm the tallest one in the class. The problem is, I was that height for the rest of my life. I used to joke around. I was waiting to stretch out and it never happened, and grow. That was really the pivotal year for me because I started a new school. I didn't know anybody. I was starting to feel really insecure in my body. I turned to food. Food made me feel better. There was no expectations. It just always made me feel better. I really became a binge eater. I really started to come home from school and I would go right to the pantry. I would take out a big bag of potato chips -- it's amazing to think about what I would eat -- and ketchup. That was my binge food of choice at the time.

Then I started sneaking food. That was a huge part of my issue because I knew that I was doing something that was not good for me, but I couldn't stop. To this day, I will tell you -- I'm forty-seven years old. It's been thirty-five years since I started the behavior. I will still go to the pantry and take out something at night that I shouldn't be eating and I'll look around waiting for somebody to say, do you really need that? Do you really need to eat that? It's so deep in there. Nobody says anything except me. [laughs] That was it. I put on a lot of weight in that seventh-grade year and then went on my first diet. I was trying to think about the name of the place I went to. It was a diet center. I can picture it in the strip mall on the highway in the town I lived in. I remember I would eat these freeze-dried little apple pieces in a bag that were on my program. I would make these frozen Carnation Instant Breakfast chocolate something that was okay on the plan.

Zibby: I think I did the same thing, by the way. I haven't even interjected to say that everything is the same until this. My mom dragged me to the diet center. There were these big brown pills, whatever they were, that tasted kind of gross. Did you have the same thing?

Melissa: [laughs] Yes.

Zibby: Oh, my god. What was this place?

Melissa: I don't know.

Zibby: Now a couple people have come out of the woodwork. I only remember going briefly. I haven't heard of it since. I've got to investigate. Anyway, I was there too in New York City.

Melissa: Oh, my gosh. I went on this program. I lost the weight. I have such memories of deprivation from that program. I remember going to the movies and taking those stupid dehydrated apple packets with me so I could have a snack. It's the same. To this day, if I go to the movies or when I went to the movies and if we ever go to the movies again, if I want popcorn, I eat popcorn because I have such a terrible memory of that deprivation. So I went on this program. I lost all my weight. I will never forget. My mother never had a weight problem. She's tall, thin. She smoked at the time. She had a very fast metabolism. Her best friend, who's still like a second mom to me, always struggled with her weight. I remember saying to her when I was twelve, thirteen, "I did it. I lost all the weight. It's over. I never have to worry about this again." I remember her looking at me and saying, "Oh, sweetheart, this is going to be a battle for life." She knew. She knew what I did not know which is that it was not about one diet and losing twenty pounds and then it was over. That was really the start of this lifelong journey.

Zibby: My mother also smoked, also very thin, worked out all the time, never had an issue. Her best friend and her would talk about it. Her name was Sally. Then Sally ended up getting lung cancer. When she was super sick, she came over. She was wearing jeans and a head scarf because she had lost her hair. I will never forget this. She walked in the front door and my mother goes, "Sally, you lost so much weight. You look amazing." Literally, Sally, whose daughters are like my family at this point, puts her hands on her hips and starts turning around 360 so they could admire how much weight she had lost. Then she passed away. It doesn't end ever.

Melissa: It does not. I think that my parents, who are wonderful people and I'm so close to -- but they were always thin. They were very attached to thin being good. When all of a sudden I was not thin, it was hard. They struggled with it. I think they would do a lot of it over again if they had the chance with how they talked to me about it. I don't think they realized that this was a deep-seated problem that I was having. I also have a developmentally disabled brother. I had a sibling who was a few years younger who needed a lot of attention. It's always difficult to have a child with special needs. Forty years ago, we didn't have the resources and the community that we have now. I think that the difficulty that my mother felt in parenting him, getting him what he needed, and dealing with a sick mother and everything else, it was a lot. There wasn't that much left for me and what I was going through as a teen girl going through puberty and struggling in a new school. That was the beginning. It was not over, obviously, after that first weight loss. Then it just went on and on for years. It was a cycle. Something stressful would happen. The binge eating would return. I would lose control over it. I would put on weight. Then I would get control over it.

Then I started Weight Watchers. I'm a huge Weight Watchers fan. I still believe that it is something you can do for life. I was glad I was introduced to it in my teens. I have been on it on and off for thirty-something years. I believe in it because I'm also a big believer in moderation. Weight Watchers is really about that and the lifestyle. It went on and on, back and forth with my weight. Looking back, one of the hardest things is that I've been so cruel to myself. The negative self-talk about my body and the way that I talked to myself and still do is upsetting to me. I'm this confident person in all these other aspects of my life, professionally and otherwise. Yet I cannot shed this deep-seated negative feeling I have about my body. That is something that really is stunning to me, that it has had that impact. I say this sometimes. I have sons. I don't have daughters. People always say, gosh, you should've had a girl. You must've always wished that you didn't have a daughter. I always say to myself -- this is so sad -- I am glad that I don't have a daughter because I feel that I'm not equipped to necessarily raise a daughter with a positive view of her body. I am well past having any children. My kids are not little. I am closer to fifty than to forty at this point. It's something that is that deep in me that I wouldn't even want to have that as a responsibility because I know that I don't have a healthy relationship with my body.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. By the way, I probably should not say this, but I'm looking at you, and you're tiny. I'm serious. People listening -- not that it matters. You could weigh five hundred pounds for all it counts. I don't want to talk about weight, but you happen to be tiny. It somehow makes this even more pronounced because it's clearly not in line with how you actually look, not that it ever is, not that that's the point. It's how you feel.

Melissa: Totally. It's funny you say that because when I told my husband I was doing this, he was like, "She's going to be like, what?" [laughs]

Zibby: No, I'm not like that at all.

Melissa: I know you're not, but that's actually such a good point. I always say I think I've always had funhouse mirrors in my house. I remember distinctly being in college and being at the gym. I always was looking for someone who looked like me, somebody who was 5'2" and pear shaped and hip-y and had the same sort of body type and weighed about what I did because I wanted to see what somebody else looked like.

Zibby: You were looking for me. [laughs]

Melissa: I was looking for you, Zibby. I was.

Zibby: And I was looking for you. I felt like everyone growing up was like a string bean. I was like, what the heck? This [indiscernible/crosstalk] my body.

Melissa: I know. So I'm at this gym, Mike's Gym in Medford, Massachusetts, near where I went to college. I see this woman from afar. I'm like, that's it. That's what I look like. I was like, that's it. She got close to me. I looked at her again. I said, oh, my gosh. The woman was probably sixty to eighty pounds heavier than me. When I really looked at her, I said, that is not what you look like, Melissa. I just cannot see myself the way others do. It's still the case. When I talk to people about the fact that I've had a weight problem, and who have not known me, they are -- it's not like I used to weigh fifty pounds more than I do now. I've never been more than overweight. I'm always on the cusp of the BMI, healthy, a little overweight. When I had my babies, I put on a lot of weight, but I took most of that off. It's not about the number. It's a mindset. I relate to people who have serious weight problems. I get that in a way that -- I think that part of my being raised with this, thin is good, the string bean body is good, is that I really feel that we aren't gracious and kind to people who have real problems, whether it's binge eating or some obsessive compulsive disorder or a family history that they can't get away from. Nobody wants to live in a body that is uncomfortable. I just think we don't treat people with sufficient respect around these issues at all. Even though nobody would think it, maybe, from seeing me, I get that. I want to be an ally for people who are struggling to feel, as you always say, to feel better in their bodies. That's really my goal and my mission today for myself, is to just feel better in my body.

Zibby: And I would argue in your mind. Maybe I should add that. I guess by saying that, I really mean the whole Megillah, if you will. How you feel about it is how you feel in your body too. It's not just that this is tight or this isn't as strong or blah, blah, blah. I don't know the answer. I still feel that same sense that you were talking about with the stealing food. I had a cookie last night. I put it under my book because I didn't want my husband to see that I was going to eat this cookie. Finally, I was like, this is ridiculous. He doesn't care if you eat the cookie. Eat the cookie. Finally I stopped waiting for him to leave the room. This is ridiculous. I just ate the cookie in front of him. He said nothing. He thought nothing. It's all me. It's how many years of this? I feel like this is, in some way, generational. This is not happening to the girls -- by the way, I also wanted to say to you, you would have been a fantastic mother to girls. You would have found the way. There are other women who I know feel the same as you and I know maybe would've gone the other way. I give my kids whatever they want to eat because I had food hidden from me. I'm like, I'm not going to do that. Just even feeling that way, that you feel that you couldn't do it, that you couldn't help someone else when already you're coming on this podcast to help other people, it breaks my heart in a way, but I relate completely.

Melissa: The sneaking food, I have to tell you, you were saying that you -- it's amazing how deep-seated that is. I've been married for almost twenty years. [Distorted audio] said one word to me. We've been together half my life at this point. He's never said a word to me about my weight, what I'm eating, nothing. It's my body. It's my issue. That's how deep it is in me. I'm glad to hear that that's not the case, maybe, for the new generation because I'm sort of detached from raising teenage girls. I have a teenage boy. I'm getting to live through him. I always used to say I wanted to be a skinny teenage boy who could eat anything. I was never going to be that, but I get to feed one now. He made a comment to me a couple months ago where he said, "Mom, food makes me feel better." I thought, yeah, he's got it. He loves food like I do. I love food. He loves food. He's an athletic, tall, very active teenage boy, but he loves food. You have to stay moving to be able to eat all that.

Even with him, I talked to him about the fact that I was doing this because I said, "You need to be quiet. You guys need to be quiet." I talked about binge eating when I was a kid and all that because I think we need to talk about all of this. I'm glad this podcast and other -- this is what we need to do to cure this sort of dysfunction around food. Today, I've talked about all the history. I am much healthier about my -- I still have all these deep-seated problems, but I don't have the same issues anymore in a lot of ways. I'm focused on moving my body. I used to joke around. I hated exercise when I was younger more than I loved food. There were a lot of stretches of my life where I literally would starve myself rather than exercise so that I could lose some weight because I just hated exercise. It was a chore. It was the first thing to go. Now I love it. I need it. I have to move my body.

Zibby: What do you do?

Melissa: When I turned forty, I started running a little. I'm not a big runner. That helped. I started to get more active. Two years ago when I turned forty-five, I said to my husband -- my best friend was in Chicago. She had a Peloton bike. She said, "The Peloton bike is great. It's at home. You can get up early in the morning and do it. You don't have to go to a gym, whatever." I said to my husband, "I'm buying this." I'm not the kind of person who normally would spend a lot of money on a piece of fitness equipment. It's just not my way. I said, "I'm buying this." He was like, "You're not going to use it." I said, "I'm buying it. I'm doing this." It was the best investment I've ever made in my health because it has become a regular part of my life. I used to say that the lack of exercise was my biggest failure as an adult. The biggest failure of my adult life was my inability to make exercise a regular part of my life. I'm a professional. I'm a mom. I'm a wife. I'm a volunteer. This was the biggest failure of my life, and it's not anymore. I love to exercise. It's not just the Peloton. I walk my dog a lot. I do some strength training. I've started to do some yoga during COVID because...

Zibby: Why not? [laughs]

Melissa: Why not? Whatever works to get through the day. Look, people always say you lose weight in the kitchen. Working out is important. If I'm working out and eating everything, I'm going to gain weight. That certainly happens, but my attitude about it is different, for sure. I used to be like -- it would be the start of the week. I'd screw up. It was Monday. You already ate the three slices of pizza, and that was it. I don't do that anymore. Every meal, everything I put in my mouth, it's a new moment. I do not do that anymore. Well, this day's a wash. This meal's over. I just don't do that. Today, I had the salad for lunch. Maybe tonight I won't make a good choice. I don't know, but that doesn't mean tomorrow I'm not going to try to make a good choice again. That's more about the health part of it. That has changed my mindset. I don't weigh myself a lot. I used to. I don't weigh myself a lot because I want to feel like what I'm eating is healthy and I'm making good choices when I can and I'm moving my body. If I make it really about the number, then I get really obsessed.

Zibby: That is amazing advice. It's all so true. It's hard to move it from the realm of the intellectual to the behavior to the habit. It's all fantastic advice and important. It's so important. Working out is just one piece of the puzzle. I try to, in my head, think, this is just for my mental health. This isn't even for my body as much, but it still doesn't get me on the bike some days. I also am on Peloton. I've recently discovered it. I am ThisMomHasTimeTo if you want to be my friend on Peloton.

Melissa: Absolutely. I'm MomWifeBoss.

Zibby: I love that. Wow, that's so cool.

Melissa: All the parts of me.

Zibby: Melissa, first of all, I'm sitting here thinking as you're talking, gosh, I would really love to sit and have coffee with you sometime when we're not having this podcast on. Then I'm thinking to myself, gosh, there are so many people, if you just get out of your own world, your own proximity -- I'm thinking of you and I both growing up among people who even just have different body types and how that feels. There's all this, I was such an outsider because of this or that. Anyway you feel different than is something. If you don't see a model somewhere, not to say that I never did, but certainly not in my -- I just feel like I would encourage other people who haven't broadened out their group from where they live, that now is a great time to do that. Sometimes you have to push the boundaries of not just the moms in your school or the kids in your class or whatever. You might not find someone like you, but that doesn't mean they're not out there in the world. They are. That sounds so obvious, but I just don't think I totally understood that until I started meeting great people like you and so many people around the world on Zoom and all these ways. Thank you for sharing your story. I think your aunt's experience should definitely go in a newspaper or a book or something. I hope we can continue this offline sometime.

Melissa: I hope so too, Zibby. Thank you so much. Thanks for your community. I've told you, your book podcast got me reading again. Then this community has been so great because the message is so important. I'm not the kind of person who normally reaches out to people that she doesn't know. It's been a pleasure to get to know you through this and to talk. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: You too. Thank you so much.

Melissa: Take care.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Melissa: Bye.

Alison Hammer on ending the taboo of talking about weight

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Alison. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight." 

Alison Hammer: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited. I'm not a mom, but I am an aunt.

Zibby: You do not have to be a mom. I'm delighted to have a non-mom. It's just because I'm a mom and this is my brand and whatever. [laughs] Alison, you've been part of the community on Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight. You've been commenting. You have an interesting story. I would love to hear it. Tell me about your journey.

Alison: Absolutely. I've been dealing with needing to lose weight pretty much my whole life. I was talking to my mom this morning trying to remember exactly how old I was when I was in Weight Watchers. It was either eight or ten. I was the youngest member in the meeting. Then we did another program, a medical program. I was the youngest by far. It was all these forty-year-olds and me. At the time, I think I was twelve or thirteen. I went to a weight loss camp when I was a teenager. I've done everything. I've had a few times in my life where I've been successful, but it usually would have a stopping point. I would get back into bad habits. I wasn't necessarily an emotional eater. I wasn't necessarily an overeater. I think that I made a lot of bad food choices. I put a lot of pressure on myself. My family, weight has been an issue on both my mom's side and my dad's side historically. My grandmother was a lifetime member of Weight Watchers. My mom has done Weight Watchers. She still thinks she needs to lose weight even though she doesn't. It's been something that has just been part of my family and part of my life since I can remember. It has been a constant struggle. This past year, it's been a big year for me. I have a full-time job. I also have a second full-time job. I had my first book come out this year on April 7th.

Zibby: Congratulations.

Alison: Thank you. About two or three weeks into the pandemic, so it's been a crazy ride. That was a big moment where I thought I might be out there a little bit more. I'm sorry, I'm a mess. [laughs] 

Zibby: There's no right way. Literally, we're friends talking. I just want to hear the story. You don't have to have any pressure. I'm just curious.

Alison: This is the first time I've publicly talked about it. This might be interesting. When you're struggling with weight, it's something that, it's visible. Anybody who sees you, they know it. It's such a taboo topic that it's not like people really talk about it. I remember one time when I joined Weight Watchers probably my fourth or fifth time, I made a point to tell people because if you tell people, then they’ll help you be accountable. It's not something that I've ever talked publicly about. I'm really excited, but I'm also a little bit nervous.

Zibby: I understand. I totally understand. If it makes you feel any better, I had the same thing. My mother had me, age ten, I was measuring half a cup of orange juice and writing down my calories and looking it all up in a book before I went to fourth grade. I understand the pressure and societal expectations and all the rest. I get it.

Alison: It's fascinating to me because I think that our mothers, they were doing what they were doing out of love. It's because of what their mothers did. I think that this generation, it's different in the way of body positivity and of accepting. The world has changed, I think for the better. The fact that we're having conversations like this and there's communities like yours, I think it's all for the better. I'm very social. I always have a lot of friends. I'm doing a lot of different things, but I feel like I probably kept part of myself hidden. When I look back at photos, I always had to be the one who was in control of the photos because I wanted to be able to protect myself from any unflattering lens. I was always really careful in that situation. I also, looking back at photos, saw that I would always be in the back. I would be kind of hiding and popping my head out. I was just very self-conscious about how I looked in photos. With my book coming out, it was something that was on my mind. If I was doing a reading, back when the world had readings, if I was a bookstore, I couldn't control that anymore. That was something that I was a little bit worried about. As excited as I was about this new career and this new world I was getting into, I had a little bit of anxiety about it. 

About a year before my book came out -- it's such a long process. I sold it in 2018. It didn't come out until 2020. I had another writer friend who had a health scare. That scared me. I was always like, I'm fine. I'm heavy, but I'm healthy. I also have an issue -- I hadn’t been to a doctor for a checkup in a while because it was something, again, with a lot of anxiety. I found a great doctor using the Zocdoc app. Just finding a new doctor can be overwhelming in itself. The app made it really easy to find someone who had availability that week so I didn't lose my nerve. They had Yelp reviews, so I could find somebody with good bedside manner. I went to the doctor. She suggested that I try Whole30. I was like, "No way. There's no way I can do it." I have a ton of friends who do it. I'm very picky. I don't eat red meat or pork. That was the main thing. It felt to me like something that was so protein heavy. I eat chicken, turkey, and seafood. I love cheese. There's no way I can do that. She's like, "Try it." I was like, "Okay, fine." I tried it. It wasn't as hard as I thought. In the first month, I lost twenty-five pounds. It was crazy. I decided to keep going with it. On Whole30, it's super strict. They want you to break habits. If you always have coffee with cream and you're like, there's no way I can do it, break that habit. You might be surprised that you like it. They don't want you to do a lot of replacements because they want you to break that habit. Because I was making it more of a lifestyle, I decided I'm okay with getting a replacement. 

I avoid anything with grains, dairy, or sugar, which sounds like everything. It kind of is, but I've found things that I love. I look forward to lunch every day. It's something that is totally on plan. The other night, I'd had a tough night. Just between work deadlines and book deadlines, I was like, I don't have time to cook. I ordered from a restaurant down the street. It was wings that were not breaded and crispy potatoes. That's on plan. I wasn't cheating. I lost weight the next day. I think that there's such a thing about good foods and bad foods. What I tell people is that it took me forty years to find out what worked for me. Looking back, it's that my body doesn't react well to grains, dairy, and sugar. Even if I just had a little bit or even if I was counting points or even if I was doing all these different things, not every plan is right for every person. I tease, it took me forty years to figure it out. In May, I hit the one-hundred-pound mark. It's crazy. It's funny. When I look in the mirror, I don't always see it. There have been a few times where I've seen pictures of me that other people have posted where I can't find myself in the photo. Then I look and I'm like, oh, that's me. It's been an interesting experience. Then I hit a hundred pounds and went into quarantine. My building has a gym. The gym closed. I, again, have two full-time jobs that got really busy. I sit at this little table for fourteen hours a day, it seems.

Zibby: Where are you in the world, by the way? Are you in New York?

Alison: No, I'm in Chicago.

Zibby: Okay. Sorry, go on.

Alison: I live in Chicago. I have a six-hundred-square-foot apartment. There's not a ton of room. I probably use a lot of excuses. I'm sure I could've done a Zoom workout, but where would I have done it? I'm really good at procrastinating. I'm really good at making excuses. I kept up the eating. I commented on one of the posts in the group about this the other day. I take an eighty/twenty approach. If I was going to be good a hundred percent of the time, I would fail. I'm somebody who believes in setting goals that I will achieve. I want to set myself up for success. I end up doing probably ninety-nine to a hundred. Most days, I'm staying in plan. I have a group of writers. We call ourselves Slice of Fiction. We go out for pizza once every couple months. I had a piece of pizza. It was amazing. I didn't feel guilty about it because it fits into that eighty/twenty. It doesn't get me off of the rails. I found substitutes. I like salty more than sweet, but I like a bite of sweet. I found a few things that don't have grains and don't have sugar but can give me that fix. I don't feel like I'm suffering.

Zibby: Wait, what are those things? [laughs] Back up to the secret weapon there.

Alison: There's two things that I go to. One of them is Catalina Crunch. It's a cereal. They have a chocolate flavor. They have a graham cracker flavor and a cinnamon toast flavor that I've had. I literally just take a little pinch of it. I have just a few of those dry. It feels cookie-like. There's another thing I just tried last night. Some of my friends posted all of their baking photos. They were quarantine baking, and cookies. I wanted something sweet. I decided to try, I have this Birch Benders pumpkin pancake mix. I asked my critique partner, I'm like, "Do you think I could pour them in a muffin tin and turn it into muffins with a batter?" She's like, "Why not?" I made muffins with pancake mix. It turned out great. Another thing, I love pasta. I'm Jewish. I feel like Jews and Italians, they have a lot of similar issues and food we love. I found a chickpea pasta which literally tastes exactly the same to me. I put my sauce on it. I have an almond ricotta cheese that I'll use a little bit of. Really, I don't suffer. When I go out to restaurants, most places it's fine to make accommodations. I think just starting was the hard thing. Then once I got used to it -- one of my best friends is vegan. When she made that decision to go vegan, she realized that everybody has food issues. When you go to a restaurant with five people, someone's going to say, that on the side, I don't want that, I don't want that. 

Rather than be embarrassed about my special needs, I'm proud of, no, I'm doing this for my health. I'm doing this for me. I've been okay with it. I am pretty annoying to go out to dinner with, though. Again, once I went into quarantine, it just stopped. As of today, I'm at 104 pounds lost. I reached a hundred in May. I haven't gotten to 105 yet. I've been between 104 and then 98 for the last six months. I've just been going up and down, and up and down. It's been super frustrating. I've been really frustrated with myself. I have a lot of friends who are like, "Everybody else in the world is gaining weight during quarantine, so maybe maintaining is okay." I'm really hard on myself. I know a lot of women are. When I saw you starting that group, I'm like, maybe that accountability is what I need. I use accountability in my writing life. I run a Facebook group for women called The Every Damn Day Writers. I think that having that support and that accountability, it helps me get my writing done, and so maybe it'll help with this.

Zibby: I hope so. I hope we can help. I think just having the group and knowing anybody out there cares and listens is helpful, for me personally. I'm a member of -- what's that hair club commercial? Do you know what I'm talking about, or am I dating myself here?

Alison: I do. I'm not just a spokesperson, I'm a member too.

Zibby: I'm also a member, right. You can follow a plan, but there's something intangible that I think the Weight Watchers method originally set out to do, which I think has been lost in the corporatization or whatever. It was sitting around talking to other women in someone's living room. There are no living rooms, but I was doing that with books. If I could do that with weight loss -- women, we could sit and talk for eight hours straight about eating stuff.

Alison: A hundred percent. To me, I loved that part of Weight Watchers. I actually used one of the lines, my Weight Watchers, the leader when I was living in Boston used. She said that if somebody offers you something that you can't have, say you're allergic and that you'll break out in hips. [laughter] With Weight Watchers, for me, it would always work. Then I would get so comfortable with it that I would eyeball things. I would be like, I don't have to count because I know. Then just bit by bit, you would get back into bad habits. For me, I realized that, again, it's what I have to do for myself and that I'm better when it's stricter. It's worked. It's crazy. One funny story. My gym has opened again with mixed hours. I got to a point where I had certain Netflix shows. I watched You on Netflix, but I would only let myself watch it when I was on the treadmill. That was a motivator to go do that. I got into it. I got to a point where I was actually looked forward to it. It had been five months since I had been on the treadmill. I've been taking walks, but there's something different about the ground moving underneath you or not when you're on a treadmill. 

I went back last week. I was very proud of myself for going back, but I made a mistake. I started where I had left off. I was doing this interval program at intermediate level. My first time back in five months, I went at intermediate level. Let me tell you, I should've started back at beginner again. I wouldn't have been surprised if I had fallen off the treadmill. It started going so fast. It did show me how far I had come when I was doing it. I do think that it's that habit and routine. Again, everybody that I talk to -- my sister tried Whole30, and it didn't work for her. I think that a lot of it is trying to see what's right for you. I spent a lifetime trying things. I'm glad that I finally figured it out. I'd like to lose about forty more pounds. I don't know if I'll ever be thin, but I don't know if that's my goal. I want to feel good and look good and be healthy and not have to worry too much about hiding from photos and being able to enjoy my life and to not have to worry about not being able to keep up if my friends want to go somewhere. I'm in a walking city, being able to walk everywhere. It's been a big year. I'm excited about it.

Zibby: First of all, I don't want this to sound condescending to say I'm proud of you. Maybe that's the wrong word. I'm really excited for you. I think it's amazing that you found something that worked, and you stuck to it and you had a huge accomplishment. That just shows such commitment and drive and so many other amazing qualities about you and your focus. I know how frustrating it must feel when you're close. You're trying so hard. You didn't give up trying for six months, even though I see why people want to say, oh, you didn't gain. I do feel that way too. It could've been far worse, but that's not what you want to hear when you're trying to go forward.

Alison: It's interesting. I didn't think about this until you just said that, but I had my book launch as my goal. I wanted to lose a hundred pounds by April 7th when my book came out. I didn't make it. I was close. I was at ninety-five or something. I was still happy enough about it.

Zibby: That counts.

Alison: Doing this side by side was great. When I hit a hundred, it was amazing. Then my attitude was like, okay, I hit that goal. I know I want to lose another forty, but I'm not in a rush for it. I was in a rush for it before. I did it healthfully. I lost in a safe amount of time. Maybe I need that goal. Maybe I need to give myself that. My next book's coming out April 13th, so I maybe I need another [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Zibby: There you go. I think that's perfect. What is that? Six months away or so?

Alison: Exactly, from tomorrow.

Zibby: Six months, six times four, it's about twenty-four weeks. Maybe forty's too much, but if you do a pound a week.

Alison: I think that I should pick a number. Forty's the final goal. Maybe I can do it. I, again, like goals that I can reach. I want to make sure I can reach it. Giving myself a goal, I think that I became a little bit more relaxed about it. It's become a part of my life. I do think that I perform better under deadline.

Zibby: There you go. You'll find a number that feels good to you and that's achievable. Sometimes at the beginning when I'm trying to gear up to try to stop overeating so much, I'll be like, oh, my god, but I have to lose twenty pounds or thirty pounds or whatever it is that I'm like, oh, my god. Then I'm like, I actually just really want to lose one pound. If I could just stop the train from being so out of control and just lose one, then the second one's a lot easier. I feel like one after the next after the next as opposed to being overwhelmed by how much is left, that works.

Alison: It's interesting. I find a lot of parallels between my writing life and the weight loss. You're a writer. You know. There's a massive amount of words. I'm trying to finish my second draft of a book by the end of this month. When I looked at the amount of words, it was overwhelming. I'm like, there's no way I can do it. Then I divided it by weeks. I divided it by days. I'm like, okay, I have a plan. I know what I have to do. If I miss I day, I know the exact number I need to make up. When we look at something like twenty-five pounds or forty pounds or anything, it just feels like so much. When you do it a little bit at a time -- the other thing that I think is that it's good to mix things up a little bit for your body because your body gets used to things. Sometimes I feel like if I get in a rut, I'll try something new. Then my body will do well with that. I also tried, about six months ago or maybe a little bit more, I brought intermittent fasting into the mix just because I had stalled. I think it was the ninety-pound mark. Ninety pounds, I was there for over a month. I was so frustrated because I was like, I haven't changed anything. 

My friends were like, "Yeah, you haven't changed anything, so maybe you need to change something up." I tried it. It worked. The first week, I saw movement again. I haven't since, but I'm afraid to stop trying it. I don't eat after eight thirty. Then I don't eat breakfast. I don't eat again until twelve. I'm bad with math. I don't know how many hours that is of fasting, but it's doable. It's easy for me. I feel like I can't stop. I was recently wondering if I should maybe try two weeks on or two weeks off just to get my body out of the rhythm. I wish there was a guidebook. I think that everybody's body is different. Our bodies even change and get used to things. It's just about keeping going. I know a mistake that I used to make was I would make one mistake and I'd be like, then it doesn't matter what I do. I would kind of give up. Again, the accountability. Thank you for starting the group. I'm really excited. I've already picked up some good tips. I've been drinking more water. That was my challenge for this week. I think it's going to be great for women to support each other in this journey that most of us are on, I feel like. [laughs] 

Zibby: Totally. I feel like everybody's on it in one stage or another because this is part of life. This is all we have. This is our car through life. We only get one. We have to sometimes change the oil or take it into the shop. I think you're super aware of what's coming next. I love tying the goal, as long as it doesn't make you crazy, I love the idea of tying it to your next book and taking a smaller, more achievable goal based on the twenty-four weeks or whatever, count them up, that you have left. Maybe half a pound a week. Maybe it's twelve pounds, is your goal.

Alison: I do something that everybody says not to do, but I can't help myself. I get on the scale every day. So much of what I learned from starting Whole30 was about how foods can cause inflammation. I think that part of what I lost in that first month, a lot of it was inflammation because of the different foods not agreeing with my body. Part of it is seeing the daily fluctuation. If I'm up this one day, what did I have that may have caused that? Some days, I'll be bad. Then the next day, there's nothing on the scale and I'm so excited. Then two days later it shows up. It's not an exact science. Again, I think it keeps me accountable. It's fascinating talking about these things because I'm understanding maybe why I do some things that I do. It's a lifelong struggle. I was in Florida visiting some family. They were asking me about my diet. I was like, it's not a diet. I think the word diet has a lot of negative connotation to it. There's nothing wrong with it. For me, it's a lifestyle change. It's not like I can't have something. It's that I choose not to. I think that putting myself in control and determining the narrative and using the words I want to use and making the choices makes it not as hard. It gives me more control. In a world where we don't have control very much at all, it's nice to be able to just claim this one thing.

Zibby: I think once you get out of your apartment and get back to the gym and find some new things, you're working out your body in new ways, I have a feeling, if I were a guessing person, a betting person rather, I would bet that that will help shake up things in your body as well because you're burning more calories than you were before. I know it's not as simple an equation as that. There's more output. You'll be more active. Maybe you'll get into something fun like kickboxing. Who knows? Mix it up. Try some new things. Feel how great your body feels where it is now. Maybe make something not just the scale. Maybe there's an amount of weight you want to lift. Maybe there's some physical, an amount of jumping jacks. I'm just saying maybe the way to get the scale down is not to stare at it, but to do something else just to mix it up. Take up jump roping, spinning. Sometimes I just think, try it. You can write about it. You can put it in your book. Write funny articles. Talk about how it feels. Experiment. Use that new body of yours. Try it out. Take it for a spin.

Alison: If I took up jump roping, I would owe the biggest apology to my downstairs neighbor. [laughs] 

Zibby: Maybe do it at the gym. Okay, fine.

Alison: I'm laughing at the image of that. You're right. The scale is only one way to measure. I know there's a thing, NSV, non-scale victories. I do look for those. Back when I would go to the office, I cut my commute time so much because I'm walking faster. My clothes, there were a few sad moments because some of the clothes that I used to love don't fit anymore in a good way. They just look too baggy on me. The clothing size change, being able to shop in stores that aren't just plus size, it's still crazy. It still surprises me sometimes that I can wear a size that I don't know if I've worn since junior high. I do look for those little moments to appreciate how far I've come. I try not to be too hard on myself, but I think it's a little human nature. At least, it is for me. I'm excited about this goal, April 13th. I'll message in the group. I'll make that official. I'll choose my number. I'll post it in the group.

Zibby: Then we'll be checking in. I'll be looking at the comments all the time. I'll be watching for you and rooting for you. It'll be interesting to see what ends up moving the needle, so to speak. I really want to see you try some new stuff at the gym. I think that's going to be really fun for you.

Alison: Thank you so much. It's been so nice talking to you. Again, thank you for starting this group. I'm really excited about it.

Zibby: Good. I'm really excited you're a part of it. Take care.

Alison: Bye.

Zibby: Bye, Alison.

Ann Garvin on the secret to why losing weight is tough

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Ann. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight."

Ann Garvin: It's so nice to be here. That phrase, I could feel that in my heart.

Zibby: You have a such a unique background. There are so many reasons I wanted to talk to you on this show. Can you start by telling everybody both -- I want to know your personal journey and also your professional one because you're a professor and an expert and all the rest. Lots to discuss.

Ann: There's so much. I know. I'll try to keep it short and not start with my childhood.

Zibby: No, start with your childhood. Tell me when it all started and your own experience with your weight and body. Then we'll go into your professional life, if you don't mind. It's a little intrusive of me.

Ann: No, I don't mind at all. It's great. I was always a stick-thin kid growing up. Puberty took a really long time to hit me. My mother was very, very small and very tiny until she had babies. Then she changed. I experienced how much she disliked that change. When I was young, I got the message. God, I love my mom. She died in the last couple years. She was my best friend. Nobody does it exactly right, so I just have to explain all that.

Zibby: I'm sorry.

Ann: She did have an us-versus-them theory about her body. I got that message that it's not okay to have a soft belly and aging is not the greatest thing. I think I internalized that. It took me many years to come around from that. In college, I lived with a lot of girls who had, for sure, eating disorders that went undiagnosed. I probably had one too just in terms of not really being able to see my body in the way that it was actually and then also thinking that you can manipulate your body in a way that maybe you can't. I think we all go through things like that. Maybe all is a little bit of an umbrella term, but I think people do. For many years, I had a push/pull with this ideal of what the cultural idea of a body is and what a women's actual body is and what it's for and how it's really our best friend and if our bodies are the greatest that it can only be, then that's the only way we live the way we really want to live. Your body is really your best friend, but it took me a long time and a lot of thinking to come around to that idea. 

Probably if someone were to ask me what the key to weight and weight management is, it's really understanding that your body is on your side and that it only wants to do the best for you. I think of my body like I think of my dog. I love my dog so much. I would never push on my dog's soft belly and say, do some sit-ups. It's brutal. I would never do that. I always think, why would I do that to my body which I really love as much as or more than I love my dog? If my body falls out of whack, then I'm not able to do any of the things that I want to do. Anyway, took me a while to get there. After babies, your body changes. You have to understand that after menopause, your body changes. Through menopause, your body changes. Instead of really hating your body for that, I think we have to understand that those things are fantastic and they offer all kinds of benefits. I started working as a nurse right out of college. I didn't work with women. I mostly worked with men because I worked at the VA hospital. I got fascinated with how to get people moving in the hospital to make them feel better. I went and got a master's in exercise physiology and a PhD in exercise psychology. That's where my thinking came in terms of weight. I'm meshing my personal story and my professional story together, but I don't think I can keep that apart.

Zibby: No, this is great. Keep going.

Ann: Once I started studied health psychology, I had a focus primarily in weight and body and how it changes based on both exercise, but also mood and anxiety and depression. That was where all my research was. I started to understand that the way that we feel about our bodies and the understanding of our cultural influence on our bodies is the first step to understanding where we should be in terms of our body weight. Then I started talking to students about it. I found that the current-day students were really no different than I was thirty years ago in terms of my thinking about the body. Certainly, the culture is better about a wider range of body. We're getting there, but we're certainly not there now. Now people are feeling better if they do have a booty. Whereas in my day and age, it was stick thin, flat stomach, fourteen-year-old boy, no hips. We are just pushing women back and forth into this idea that their body is for external consumption and not for loving your kids, doing the things you want to do, reading books, writing books, traveling, experiencing the world. 

If we can tease out those two things, then we can start to think about, what we do that would care for our bodies in the best way? How do we love it? I think loving your body in this day and age is one of the hardest things to do because we've removed ourselves from our bodies. Our bodies are this annoying thing that doesn't pull its weight in terms of thinness. Then we have our bodies over here who are getting us to bring our kids to soccer and do all of the things that we enjoy. We haven't put those two things together. I have really strong ideas about how to do that. I certainly have talked about that in a major way. I do think that that's our first step. People are always saying to me, what do you think about weight loss? What's the first step for weight loss? I would say the first step for weight loss is the hardest step, which is trying to get around your thinking about your body and what it's for and what works the best. For me, here's the other thing. I don't compete with other women and their bodies. I look at other people's bodies, and I admire them. I wonder about their struggles. I think about them all the time. You know who I compete with? My younger self. 

That's the hardest competition of all because with every ticking moment, that self is farther away. That younger self didn't have babies and didn't have a million things to do and could exercise whenever I wanted, etc. That competition is particularly poisonous. However, I look at those pictures and I think, oh, my gosh, I was in such good shape. Then I look at myself now and I kind of bully myself about it. I have a softer belly. I look different. I had to understand a couple of things about bodies. One of the things I had to understand is, as a scientist, we know that everything falls on a normal curve. There are always going to be people with a percentage of body fat that's higher for their health. There's always people that have a percentage of body fat that are very low, and that's perfectly okay. Everybody else falls here. If we think everybody should be up here, very thin, I guess it's down here, very thin, then we are even falling in the face of science that says to us everybody's genetic determines what is the correct body fat percentage. 

That's another thing that we have to fight with, this idea that there's this ideal body shape and it's the shape that we see on the Oscars or it's the shape that we see in all the catalogues with women who have no breasts, no hips, and the clothes hang on them like a hanger. It's so hard for us to see those continuous images and then look at us and reconcile our own bodies. So here I am. I got my PhD in health psychology with a fundamental focus on nutrition. I taught nutrition for thirty years. Yet what I'm talking about is psychology before we even get into food stuff, carbohydrates, fat, whatever. It's also, even knowing all that, I want everyone to hear me say I struggle with the same thing, even with all of the good information, all of the right information. I live in the same poisonous culture that everyone else does about weight. I think what we have to understand, too, is that, how much are we willing to give up for the culture to pursue a certain kind of weight? That, I think, is a really big thing. I want to say a couple more things.

Zibby: Great. This is the best interview I've ever done. I can just relax and listen to you. This is great. Keep going.

Ann: [laughs] I talk too much. Always on my report card.

Zibby: No, it's perfect.

Ann: Now I lost my train of thought because I got embarrassed because I was talking too much. What I was going to say about that is that I think one of the things that we are very afraid of is to walk back on the culture and say, I'm going to be a little softer, and that’s probably okay. We're worried a little bit about how we're going to feel about ourselves and how people are looking at us and what it means. What it means is, when you get a little softer, what people see is a lack of control because a perfectly controlled self is one that can control all of your behaviors and all your passions and not feed them with your mouth. I just think that that's one of the most toxic kinds of things. Here's something else. We're supposed to love food. Food is our sustenance. It's not the enemy. If we don't get enough food, then that's the end of us. What happened all of a sudden in our culture that we became, food is sort of the enemy? which is the worst possible give and take because at that give and take we're saying food is the enemy, stay away from food, but also, food is the thing that keeps you alive and you should only eat good food. Then you have that tongue that tastes everything so acutely and is such a pleasure center, but we’re like, ignore that. You need to ignore that. That's really a tough thing to ask people to do on a regular basis. 

I remember what I was going to say. That is this. This is fascinating. We don't know how to healthfully -- when I say healthfully, I mean psychologically, bone health, heart health, everything. We do not know how to healthfully help women who are very close to their ideal weight lose weight. We don't know how to do it. You know why we don't know how to do it? It's unethical to study it. You are not allowed, as a scientist, to take a person who is at their ideal weight or close to it -- not cultural ideal; physiological ideal -- and study it because to reduce their weight would make them unhealthy. As scientists, we have the Nuremberg trials that show us that we are not allowed to hurt our subjects. Reducing their weight past what would be considered ideal is unethical and not allowed. That means all of the information you're reading about weight loss has been made for people, for men mostly, but also women or people that are extremely overweight, not in a normal range of overweight. When you try to do those things and it doesn't work, you think you're weak. In fact, they weren’t meant for you. We don't know how to help people lose weight who are close to their weight because it's not a healthy thing to do. We don't want you to look good in a swimsuit. We want your bones to be dense. We want you to be psychologically healthy and not thinking about food all the time and searching for food, which is exactly what happens when we reduce your calorie intake to the point where you become a person who's constantly thinking in the back of their head, so when are we going to eat again? 

We do know a little bit about behavioral. We know how to ask people not to eat snacks and that kind of thing. If you are in a calorie deficit and your body knows that you're in a calorie deficit, all your body knows -- it's like your dog -- is, I'm a little hungry. When you should be thinking about this book that you're reading or this podcast that you're doing or this other thing that you're working on, there is this niggling constant tap on your shoulder saying, you know what, you're kind of hungry. You're a little bit hungry. Eventually, when you stop doing whatever it is that's distracting you and you start to get tired, that's when the Doritos come out. You're like, I'm tired. I'm hungry. You don't know why you can't stop eating. That's the psychological drive. There's, in fact, a super great study that was done in the fifties that we couldn't even do anymore, on men, called the Minnesota Keys Study. 

They calorie restricted men. Then they watched their behavior. What they did, they became what we normally consider a woman's behavior or an eating disorder behavior, eating disorder. They searched for food. They ate too much food. They drank too much coffee. They drank too much water. They chewed too much gum. All because they were in a deficit. Then they became eating disordered in a true sense. They were psychologically healthy, very lean men, but they put them on a calorie restriction, which is what we do with women all the time. We're like, you have a tiny little body fat. Stop eating. Exercise more. Now we're in a deficit. Then we have this tap on our shoulder. You put that on top of being fatigued all the time -- what woman is not fatigued? If you go on Twitter or on Facebook, there is eight million coffee jokes about how we all need coffee. We need coffee. I need coffee. I just said to my daughter today, "Oh, my god, my best friend is coffee." 

Zibby: I'm holding a -- I'm trying not to drink as we talk. Yes, I know.

Ann: After saying all that about the psychology of eating, I would say the number-one tip I tell people, the number-one thing you have to do before you ever change any other thing in your life is you have to get enough sleep. Here's why you have to get enough sleep. If you're tired, you're not going to chop vegetables. You're not going to grocery shop. If you're tired, you're not going to sauté something. If you're tired and you're starving, which most of us are if we're in a diet situation and we're living an American life, you are absolutely not going to be searching things and making food prep and doing all these things that we're asking you to do because we're reducing your calories. You're too tired to do that. You're too tired to hold back any kind of normal, healthy, mammal behavior, which is to go look for food. The other thing is, if you're tired -- when I say tired, I kind of mean sleep deprived because most people are a little bit sleep deprived. What happens when you're sleep deprived is you became an abnormal carbohydrate metabolizer, which means you act a little bit like you're diabetic. You know that feeling because two things happen. You get a little lightheaded. That’s what ketosis is. Don't even get me started on ketosis and eating the high-fat diets and keto diets. If you become ketosis and you go into the hospital, they will fix that because it's an abnormal state. It is not a good state. There are so many problems with it. Having said that, you start to feel a little dizzy. That's one thing. 

You start to carve carbohydrates in a way that doesn't make sense to you. All of a sudden, you want sugar, honestly. It's the end of the day and you're like, god, I could really use some sugar. That is sleep deprivation. That also means that as an abnormal carbohydrate metabolizer, you're going to store fat faster. Even when you're sleeping, you're doing that. Because your body needs to be fully rested to metabolize in the way that it needs to metabolize food, sleep is the number-one health behavior. In fact, I'm like a sleep evangelist. I'm a sleepy person anyway. I sleep a lot. I think I was sort of forced into that. There is never a day that I don't get eight to nine hours of sleep, ever. That changed my life in the best of ways. That right there is enough for people to go, I'm not doing that. I can't do that. I'm going to drop my calories. I'm going to do keto. I'm going to do whatever it is I have to do, but I'm not getting enough sleep. I get that. What I would say is, absolutely without fail I became more productive when I got more sleep. Then with a fully slept mind, I can focus and do more work. For god's sake, I get a lot done in a day. The reason that happens is because I get enough sleep. And I nap. That's the other thing. I always nap every day no matter what. I nap every day. I'm not saying everybody needs my amount of sleep. Nine hours is average. Whatever it is, whatever you think it is -- oh, I can even tell you whether you need more or not. Do you want to hear this?

Zibby: Yes.

Ann: Here's how you know, if you do it without caffeine. You have to do it without a stimulant. You can't take your Adderall. You can't take your caffeine for the day that you're going to check this out. Here's what happens. If you sleep a normal week period when you're normally in and out, and then on the day that you're not having caffeine or whatever, you sit and do something boring, usually driving -- if you're in the Midwest, it's driving. It could be something other that's really dull. I'm sorry, but I think church can be very dull. If I'm sitting in church or if I'm driving and the sun is hitting me and I fall asleep, then I'm sleep deprived. Here's why. Whenever the attention in the room goes down, your body that's sleep deprived goes, things are quieting down. This is a good time to take a nap. I don't need my full attention right now. I'm going to fall asleep. If, though, you don't fall asleep and you fidget and you haven't been on caffeine, then your body says, I'm kind of bored. I need a little stimulation. I don't need any sleep. I need stimulation. That's how you can tell. When the activity level goes down and you start to fall asleep, chances are you're sleep deprived.

Zibby: That makes sense.

Ann: It does, right? It does make sense, but I had to read the research on it to really understand it. I just thought that maybe I was oversleeping. I thought a lot of things. I thought, oh, just go have another cup of coffee or whatever.

Zibby: Ann, there was so much in there that I found totally interesting. I could have a hundred conversations with you now. The part I want to go back to is women who don't necessarily have to lose, say, a hundred pounds, but want to lose twenty pounds or ten pounds or five pounds. They still want to do that. It doesn't mean they're going to starve. Sometimes you could say it's weight you don't necessarily need to have on you. You might feel better. Your knees might feel better. There are reasons to get rid of that even though it's not a significant amount. Even though science hasn’t studied it, what do you do then to get rid of those pounds versus without the voice saying you're hungry all the time or having to rely on all those things? What should we do? How should we do it?

Ann: It's a perfect question. You asked the perfect question. How do you do it? There's a couple things that you can do. The first thing is sleep. You have to sleep because your body will hang onto that body weight if you're sleep deprived. It won't give you a hand. It will fight you the whole way because it needs to. That's the first thing. I know that's not a thing that people really like to hear, but that's the first thing. The next thing is, we have to start thinking about our bodies as our best friends and stop thinking about it like it's fighting us. We have to give it the nutrition that it needs without overnutrition. You know what? Putting on weight is just overnutrition. You don't need all of those things. The other thing is, drink enough the water. The reason you need to drink enough water is because often, we interpret hunger as thirst. It's a hard one because you're also having to go to the bathroom all the time, which is really a pain. I'm not going to say anything new to you about, how do you do it? Really, we know what we have to do. We have to sleep. We have to drink water. We have to move every day. We have to move more than we don't move. I'm not saying you have to do Pilates or yoga or run a triathlon. I would say, in fact, you probably don't need to do those things to the extent that you think you need to do those things. The exercise isn't going to save you unless you do so much that there isn't time for anything else, so that doesn't really make sense. Exercise is something that we do for our health but not necessarily for weight loss. Although, it does work because it is a calorie deficit, but it doesn't work like it can. I have stuff on my blog that specifically does the math on that. 

I would say that you have to be very careful about getting the right kind of nutrients. There is so much misinformation out there like keto diets and the coffee with butter and so many, so much misinformation. I know Weight Watchers is something that you talked about before. Weight Watchers is actually the best program. Without a doubt, it is the best program. The only issue that I have with it is that is requires you to be very diligent. Then when you're not so diligent, you put it back on. I think that that's really the only place where it can be a problem. With that diligence comes deprivation. With deprivation, we fall off the wagon all the time. When we're doing it, we have to be less diligent on the program so that it's easier to maintain as we move forward, which also means that ten pounds is going to take longer to lose. That's okay. You have an interesting life. Nobody can see it on you anyway. You just have to allow yourself the time it takes to do it. What you're doing is you're changing the course of the Titanic. You're changing your health behaviors as you move differently. I can tell you, when I've gained weight, I've moved the Titanic in the wrong direction. I've changed all my healthy behaviors. I've stopped doing those things. Now I have to move myself back to the way that I was before. It's so easy to slip moving the Titanic in that direction because we're inundated so much with misinformation about food and there's so much delicious food out there. Does that help?

Zibby: Yes, but -- I get it. I'm loving my body, blah, blah, blah. I'm pretending I'm having a good night's sleep, which of course I'm not, but let's just pretend. Now it comes time to eat. I'm not going to do a crazy -- personally, I don't eat a crazy diet. I'm trying really hard to eat regular whole food, anti-inflammatory, Mediterranean, whatever. I'm trying. Once you get in that and you get rid of the sugar all the time, I've found my cravings to be almost gone, whereas they were constant before. My mood is actually much more stable now that I'm not having huge sugar highs and lows all the time. But how do you just stay eating the right foods? What is overnutrition? Is it just eating too much? Is it too much salmon? Too many grapes? Can I really feel guilty about that? I don't think so.

Ann: No. Here's what you need to do. You need to figure out what your weakness is when you get weak. What is it?

Zibby: Sugar. Anything with sugar.

Ann: Me too. It's those lapses that are stopping you from moving forward. That's not to say you always need to get rid of it. This is what I do. This is my rule. I am not allowed to eat sugar until seven o'clock at night, period. I have adopted that rule for years. I actually don't break that rule because it's been that rule for so many years. I find that after seven o'clock, I don't usually want it. It's really close to my bedtime. [laughs] That may not be the rule that works for you. You have to figure out, when is it that you do the thing that’s hurting your diet the most? whatever that is. If you're mostly doing what you say you're doing, which I totally believe that's really most of us --

Zibby: -- It is now that I'm focusing on it, but I certainly wasn't doing it before. Yes, I am doing it now, but I won't do it forever, I'm sure. Anyway, sorry.

Ann: It's all the same. It doesn't matter whether it was before or after. You still probably had the same weakness before as you do now, right?

Zibby: Yes.

Ann: This is the best news ever. You don't have to problem solve your whole diet. You only have to problem solve that weakness because that's the thing that's putting you over the edge. I know I have to problem solve sugar like nobody's business because I love sugar more than I love anything in the world. It's so satisfying and so wonderful in so many ways that it can come to me. I have to think about it every single time and whether I'm going to do it or not. A lot of times when I'm weak about sugar, it's when I'm tired or it's when something's happening in my life that's hard. I use it for that. I have to see when I'm weak, what I'm eating, if it's worth it. I have to problem solve that and only that. I love that that's the thing because I would say that most of us kind of know what we're supposed to be doing. We are constantly like, should I eat this salmon? Should I have another bite of this salmon? Is the salmon the problem? The salmon is never the problem. The grapes are never the problem. Nobody got fat eating too much salmon and grapes. No one ever did. Our issues are whatever it is that we keep falling down on. If you look back at your behavior before you focused, what were those things? You're going to fall back into those. What you should do is make a list of those and then problem solve those and get super creative about them. 

I can give you some examples. I said that I don't sugar at seven o'clock night because seven o'clock at night is when I want them. What I find is that I fall asleep. Sugar makes me tired. It’s got this inherent reasoning why I do it that way. It's helpful that way. The benefits outweigh the negatives. Other things that I'll do is, if I say to myself, Ann, life is too short, you need to have some sugar sometimes, don't laugh, but I put it in the trunk of my car so that if I'm in bed and I want sugar, I have to go outside to the trunk of my car to get it. I almost never will. I know that sounds silly, but that's really a useful thing for me. Other things that I'll do is I won't go get it at all. If I'm having a really hard time, I will have no sugar in the house except for a bag of sugar, but I'm not really interested in a bag of sugar. I make it really hard on me to get it. If my kids want sugar or something like that, again, it goes out in the car or in the basement. What we've found is it doesn't matter -- this is really good research. If you have sugar on your table or in your cupboards in the kitchen, piece of cake, it's easy to get. If you just move it to the basement or down one floor from you, you can reduce your eating of that sugar by fifty percent. If you put it in a brown bag where you can't see the label, you will reduce it by another ten percent. It's amazing what you can do by not looking at it. All the sugar manufacturers know it. Everything's in a pink box. A chocolate kiss is wrapped in a silver container with a friendly little flag. We have to look at what marketers do to get us to eat, and eat too much of it, and do the opposite. We have to understand that.

Zibby: Ann, this is amazing. I feel like I've gotten so many specific actionable tips that everybody can use in different ways and the insight and science behind it all in a little half-hour package. Thank you. This was perfect. Thank you so much. It makes it feel like the work is not so massive. There's one thing, and you fix one part of it. That's not to say it’s not a challenge to give things up, but also, it's achievable. Thank you.

Ann: You're welcome. Anytime you want to talk about it, just call me up. We don't have to do it on a podcast either. We can do it on the phone. That'd be fine.

Zibby: Cool. All right, I might. [laughs] 

Ann: That'd be fine. So good to talk to you.

Zibby: So good to talk to you too. Thank you so much.

Ann: You're welcome. Buh-bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Heather Cabot on health vs. jean size

Zibby Owens: Hi, Heather. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight."

Heather Cabot: Hi, Zibby. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Thanks for coming on both my podcasts, I should say. This is great.

Heather: I'm very honored. It's so cool that I'm getting a chance to talk to you and interact with you, especially during this time. The fact that we even got to meet in person, that's actually really cool too.

Zibby: You are the only person I think I've met who I've interviewed because you were just in the neighborhood. I was like, come over. It worked out perfectly. I'm so glad for it. That was such a nice day.

Heather: Thank you. I thought so too. It was great.

Zibby: Heather, take me back and tell me about your journey in this world in your body and the biggest struggles and where you are today.

Heather: It's definitely been a lifelong struggle, for sure. I grew up in a very fitness-focused family. My dad was a college football player. My mom has always been very slim, some might say too slim at times. Honestly, it's defined my entire childhood, was really built around -- I don't want to completely blame my parents. I think they were socialized this way as well. They, through the years -- I'm fifty now. I think they’ve evolved a lot too. Although, they are still incredibly focused on health and fitness. They're in their seventies and still running. They actually just got a Peloton. Very much from a young age, being thin, being skinny was a real badge of honor in my family. I remember going to family gatherings and being tortured emotionally inside if someone didn't tell me that I looked thin. I remember having those feelings even at five or six. If grandma didn't say, oh, you look so thin, or you're getting so slim -- as you grow up, your body changes. I went through chubby stages. I went through other stages where maybe I was slimmer at times, like most kids. That's what happens as you grow. Your cheeks get chubby. Then you get slim. Then you grow a little bit. I was hypersensitive to a lot of that. As I said, I think a lot of my self-worth in many ways internally was really defined by that. 

I started going to Weight Watchers when I was in high school. My younger sister and I, we were sort of pushed to go. All of those kinds of things defined my early years and into adulthood as well. The way I talk about it with my own daughter is, I feel like an incredible amount of my mental energy and emotional energy has gone towards being thin and trying to be thin and trying to fit a certain mode. I cannot even imagine what it's like now in this world of social media. I'm just thinking about growing up in the eighties and the nineties and being inundated with fashion magazines. Imagine today. You really can't get away from it. I struggle with that. I worry about that for my daughter and her friends. I feel like there's so many other things that we could all be spending time on besides worrying about what size we are. That bothers me. At the same time, just talking about the present -- I read the stories in The New York Times about -- I saw the one this weekend about people who are slightly overweight being at risk for COVID. It really freaked me out to the point that I actually looked up my BMI. I was like, oh, my gosh, I need to revise my goal. My newest number that I want to get down to is really different than what I had originally thought. Now I'm thinking maybe the overall purpose really isn't fitting into a smaller size pair of jeans. Maybe I should really be focusing on the overall health, which I know intellectually we should be focusing on, but it's hard. Anyway, I don't know if that's too much information about how I grew up. 

It's something as a parent that I've really tried to be careful about. I remember taking my twins to one of their very, very first pediatrician appointments. I remember my pediatrician saying, "Do not ever talk about dieting in front of your kids. Do not talk about fat. Do not talk about weight loss. Talk about being healthy. Talk about being strong." I've really tried that. I have tried that. I really don't talk about -- probably only until recently when I've been trying to have more open conversations with my teens about healthy eating and those kinds of things, trying to open up to them about what I just said, about the amount of wasted mental energy I've spent on these superficial things that I think I've really taken away. I wish I could get that time back, to be honest with you. I'm glad you're doing this podcast. In terms of balance, I think it's important for people to also think about a bigger issue than just the vanity aspect of it. Believe me, I am vain, especially having worked in television. I want to look good too, but I think sometimes we need to step back from -- why are we really doing this? What's the real purpose? For me, I'm really trying to focus a lot on just being healthy, particularly in this environment today.

Zibby: I'm glad you brought up the New York Times article because I read that and I debated, should I post this to my group? Or will that scare them and make them feel desperate? Sometimes I feel like when you're under the gun it's harder. You might want to rebel. They might have the adverse reaction, but I think I might. It is a health issue. Being overweight, whatever that's defined as, is not that many pounds. [laughs] It's pretty easy to be overweight.

Heather: That’s the thing. This piece was talking about forty percent of Americans are overweight. If you go and look at your BMI -- I just did this. I work out. I work out a lot. I have always had a very healthy lifestyle. I haven't always been as thin as I would like to be, but I definitely have focused a lot on being healthy and eating healthy and, like I said, trying to model that for my kids. Even I, I was like, oh, my god, I'm at the top of the healthy. That’s not where I want to be because if I gain five pounds, I'm not going to be in the healthy BMI anymore. I want to be more towards the middle. I want to have the wiggle room. I don't want to be at the very top. Like I said, I kind of feel like, at least for me, what's motivating is the overall -- it maybe has to do with the fact that I just turned fifty and I'm thinking about the second half of my life and how I want my life to be. How I want my life to be is I want to be healthy. I want to be able to do things. I want to be able to be like my parents and still be out running and hiking and going to spin class and traveling the world. My parents just went to Antarctica last year and hiked. I want to be able to do all those things. I recognize that I have to make that investment now. If fixating on a BMI number is better than fixating on that pair of jeans or whatever, the dress I want to get into that I haven't been able to wear for five years, I'm just making that up, but I think maybe, for me, that might help me stay a little bit more disciplined, I hope. It's up and down in terms of my commitment. I know we've posted about that on Instagram.

Zibby: There's no easy answer to it. Whatever motivates you today may not be the thing that motivates you tomorrow. It's just how you get there and what frame of reference you need. We all need something a little bit different at different times. Then the worst part is feeling motivated or scared and not feeling like you necessarily have the tools or control to fix it. I think that's one thing in this whole eating struggle -- I hate all these words like battle and struggle, but it's true.

Heather: It's true.

Zibby: It can feel so out of control. I've had times where I'm like, I feel I'm in control of all of these different things. Why is this the one thing that I can't get under control and that is so visible to everybody else? I mean, not really, nobody cares but me. It's like you're a walking poster. I don't have this particular thing under control. It's embarrassing, I feel.

Heather: It's so funny that you say that because I remember when I -- I am also a mother of twins, like you. I remember right after I had the babies. I gained a lot of weight. We moved right after. We moved to Los Angeles. I was meeting all these new people. I remember saying to my husband that I felt like I had this sign on my -- I wanted to be able to explain to people why I looked the way I did because they didn't know that I just had twins. I'm meeting new people. It was the worst feeling. Let's be honest, I was also pregnant with twins when I was still on network television. How embarrassing is that? I did not think I looked beautiful at all. By the end of my pregnancy, the extra-larges didn't even fit me anymore. I literally had nothing to wear. [laughs] 

Zibby: Extra-large, I couldn't even fit into -- I was wearing, basically, a sheet. I was so giant.

Heather: I mean extra-large maternity. I don't mean regular. I mean extra-large maternity. How amazing, all the amazing things your body can do? You just had twins. I just remember that same feeling. I wish I could tell people, I just had twins. Give me a little time. I'll get back to what I used to look like. I hated that feeling. That's how I feel now too a little bit.

Zibby: Then you realize that nobody really cares but you. They met you. They probably thought you were absolutely beautiful, which you are, and accomplished, which you are. They probably didn't think twice about it. To you, you want to telegraph that. At times, I know I've wanted to be like, it's possible I could be thinner, but is that what's really important? People don't care about that.

Heather: That's a thing I'm struggling with with a teenage daughter. I know exactly what she's going through, and not just my daughter, my son. Teens in general, it's just the phase they're going through. They're hyper-focused on what they look like. I wish I could listen to my own advice I'm trying to give them sometimes. There are so many more important things. It really is about being healthy. Sometimes we just get wrapped up in -- I also have a problem with perfectionism. Back to being out of control, I would say for myself, I have really struggled with, I hit my blue dots, or whatever it is. I've done it for five years, and then the one day I eat the cupcake or whatever it is, I'm like, the whole day's gone to shit. I might as well just eat whatever. It's really bad. That's when I lose control because I'm like, I fell off the wagon. I'm really struggling with, if that happens, what do I do now? I'm trying to track it. I'm trying to, the next day, get up and say, every day's a new day. It's a fresh start. 

I'm trying to be the friend to myself that I wish that my kids were to themselves or their friends were to themselves when they mess up at different things, or just my own friends. I try to be that good friend to myself. I'm really working on that. I agree with you. It's hard. The other thing I was going to say as far as feeling out on control, I think we all have to recognize that, particularly with emotional eating, it really is something that is so deep-seated in our -- it's the way we dealt with emotions in our early years. It is self-soothing behavior. Different people have different vices. I think that it's hard to break. It's easy for people to say, have a cup of tea. When you're in that moment and you feel sad or guilty or angry, it's hard to mitigate those emotions at that exact moment. Then we all end up feeling guilty after, which is the part that I really hate. That's why I was saying try to be kind to yourself.

Zibby: I think that one of the things I've been realizing lately is that if you're already in that moment, it's almost too late. It's like you're on the edge of a cliff. Don't make yourself feel bad that you're now going to fall off. I think the point is not to get to the edge of the cliff. That's the only way to fix it because then you just beat yourself up for the fall, which is inevitable. You end up in the kitchen. You're exhausted. You've had a fight with somebody. Something's gone wrong. You're disappointed or you're angry or you're tired. You're all those things. Then there's something in front of you. You're going to just eat it. The only thing is to backtrack. How can I avoid being all those things, A, and how can I avoid having that thing on the counter?

Heather: For myself, I think the planning is really key to recognize that you are going to have those times. For me, it used to be, when we weren’t in this whole weird pandemic, but it used to be four or five o'clock after I'd gotten the kids home from school. We were sitting in the kitchen doing homework. I was supposed to be making dinner, but I was hungry because I probably didn't eat lunch. That was always a hard time for me, particularly if I was tired, if I didn't sleep well the night before. That's typically when, so planning ahead for those kinds of times when you know that your discipline is not going to be what you would hope it would be at those times, and also not making it worse. That falling off the cliff thing, a lot of times then we self-sabotage and make it even worse because we're like, I already messed up. That's hard. I think the planning is really good. I was never somebody that did the meal prep on Sundays. I have a lot of friends that are so good at that and shop for the week. I'm just not good at that. I'm trying to be better. We're also trying to be more plant based. I have been planning a little bit more and cooking different kinds of things and making sure I have some of those ingredients in the house, but I'm not really great at, Sunday, I'm going to make all these batches of things that we're going to eat all week. Plus, my family doesn't really like to eat like that either.

Zibby: That's okay. That doesn't work for me either. 

Heather: I admire people who have the discipline to do that.

Zibby: Some things I think are easy, like making a big thing of oatmeal and having it last all week. I still haven't motivated to make my oatmeal for the week. Now every morning, I'm like, eh. Now it's almost noon, and I haven't eaten anything because I can't decide what to eat that's healthy. At this point, I'll just wait until lunch. 

Heather: I did that today too, actually. It's funny. I made oatmeal for my husband. Then I left myself a little bit on the counter. Then I was like, why didn't I just make the whole thing for the rest of the week? We could've eaten it every day. Why did I just make enough for the two of us right now? It was kind of silly. I was also going to say, the other thing that I find really challenging -- I'm wondering if the community feels this way. I think we emailed about this a teeny bit. Because I've been focused on all of these things since I was a kid, I am so inundated and I am so often encouraged to try every fad. I've done Whole30. I've done Eat to Live. I'm back to doing Weight Watchers now because I do think that is the one thing that has really only ever truly worked for me. I think it's the accountability part of it. I like the app. I think it works well. I just was wondering if other people -- when we hit that four thirty or five o'clock in the afternoon time when I'm like, I'm starving or I'm tired or whatever, that's when all of these other diet trends start to really make me crazy. Well, I can't eat this because if I eat that, it's too many carbs, or it's this. I'm not supposed to be eating that. I don't know why, I almost feel like I get paralyzed.

Zibby: It's confusing. It's totally confusing. I feel like there should be one of those speed movie things of me throughout my life starting when I was ten looking at the label because every year or two, I'm looking at a different part of the label. A different part is really important. First it was calories. Then it was the fat. Then I'm doing Atkins. It's the alcohol sugar. Then it's the fiber for Weight Watchers. Then it's this. Now it's like, what are the ingredients? Now I'm not looking at it. I'm like, are they whole ingredients? Are they processed? It's just one thing after another. Our minds are just jutting from place to place to place. Where should I look? What is okay? What is not okay?

Heather: What's good? What's bad?

Zibby: What's good and what's bad? That implies there is a good and a bad and that everything is binary, black and white, which is of course not true. To have a well-rounded diet of things, we have to have a little of everything. The thing with Weight Watchers that I like -- this is by no means -- I'm doing my own whatever version of it based on my 2003 thing that was the last time anything worked for a long period of time, so my own points. When I have a list of foods that I'm like, these are the foods I want to eat, I mostly want to eat this anti-inflammatory food from the Mediterranean style because I like those foods. They're healthy. They're filling. I enjoy them. It's not like when I tried to do keto or some of these other things. I don't enjoy eating meat. Atkins isn't going to work. Then to have the points is only, for me at least, to take some of the emotion out. It's not bad. It's just like, okay, whoops, I spent six points on a big cookie. It's over. Moving on.

Heather: Then you can adjust later for what else you're eating later in the day. I think that's the tracking part of it that's -- whether you're writing it in a food journal or you're doing it on some type of app, whether it's Lose It! or Weight Watchers or any of these things. I do think the accountability piece, particularly for somebody like me who recognizes that I am a victim to stress-eating sometimes, that making myself accountable without driving myself crazy but just being mindful of what I'm eating -- even with my kids, it's funny, we talk about portion sizes. We do talk about that now. My kids will now look at the bag of popcorn or whatever, and we'll talk about what a serving size is as opposed to eating out of the bag, which I'm not saying I never do. I really try to pour myself a portion. Hopefully, they do that too so that you just have in the back of your mind what you're actually eating. It's so easy to just inhale whatever’s there when you're hungry, and even if it's the healthiest thing. I think that's problem. You can eat all the whole grains. You eat all the avocado, nuts. 

I think that oftentimes when we think of -- this goes into the binary good or bad. When we think about healthy foods, not all of them are low calorie. It is easy to overeat them and not even realize that you're doing it. For myself too, instead of having one handful of nuts, have three handfuls of nuts and not even be realizing that's what you're eating, that is something that definitely contributes to weight gain. I also think that there's an aging component here. I'm not sure the demographics of the community. I will say for myself, it has become much more difficult to -- as I said, I've always been very active, but I feel like I have to try so much harder now to keep my weight in check. It's so frustrating. We're talking about solutions. My OBGYN last year said to me, I really have to add strength training not only for my metabolism, but also for healthy bones. I really am trying to do that. It's really not my favorite thing. I really like cardio. That's how I manage my stress. I will say that when I have focused on that, and I am really trying hard -- the last three or four weeks, I've been strength training three or four times a week in my garage.

Zibby: Wow, that's a lot.

Heather: My little Peloton, I have the bike, but I also have -- I'm doing all the classes on the app.

Zibby: Wait, so how often are you working out, then?

Heather: I work out pretty much every day. I do. Remember, I was telling you how I grew up. Just to give you a sense, my parents are marathon runners. They would go out on a fifteen-mile run on Saturday mornings. That was their time together. I'm not a good athlete, but I grew up in a very athletic family with a lot of focus on exercise. Frankly, I'm really blessed. The fact that it was part of my lifestyle, as much as as a kid I felt pressure, now I'm very thankful because that's the one thing I don't have to struggle with personally. I don't sleep as well when I don't exercise. I definitely need it. I'm actually an overexerciser. I get injured a lot because I don't know how to modify. I have been using the strength training classes on the Peloton app because I'm not going to the gym right now. It's been great. There are lots of different fitness apps, by the way. It doesn't have to be Peloton. This morning, I did a twenty-minute upper body and a twenty-minute lower body and a five-minute core right before I came on to talk to you. I feel good. I bought a few more dumbbells so I have some heavier weights. Again, that's a focus on health. I worry about falling. I worry about all these things as you get older. I want to make sure that I'm really strong. I'm trying to use that as a focus more than, as I said, the smaller pair of jeans, not that I don't want to wear the smaller of jeans, not that I won't be excited for a shopping trip in a few months. I am trying to focus on things that make me feel good too.

Zibby: You are not alone in the slow down and things getting harder. I hear this over and over and over again. I experience this myself. I'm forty-four. I'm already like, wait, it used to be that if I worked out, it just used to all be much easier. It's almost like a cruel joke. Here we are at a stage in our lives where we're dealing with our kids who are growing up and maybe our parents. There's just so much stress coming at us and caretaking needed on all sides, caretaking 360. We're trying to take care of ourselves. Then all of a sudden, somebody out there made it so that our bodies make it harder at this particular moment. It's like, seriously? [laughs] 

Heather: It is really not fun. It is not. I'm a few years ahead of you. It is not fun.

Zibby: It's not hopeless.

Heather: No, it's not hopeless. I also was going to say, I think the other thing, too, is that I wish I had known earlier that this was going to happen. I never really knew because my mom is very tiny. Honestly, she's a size zero and has always been my entire life. I don't ever remember her being any other size. I could never share clothes with her. I should also say, I have two younger sisters who are also both size zeros. I'm the oldest of four. That was always really hard for me. I always had this impression of myself that I was a lot bigger than I am. I still do sometimes. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I'm not. I always felt like I was towering over everybody all the time, which is not a bad thing, but I just had that feeling. My point is that I never had this conversation with my mom about her suddenly needing to worry about her weight because she was always the opposite. I didn't really know. I wish I started thinking about strength training and some of these other things a little bit earlier. 

The other thing I was going to say about overexercising, which maybe some of your community deal with, is I've gotten injured a lot. One of the things I've been trying to do is listen to my body and try to recognize when I'm getting to that point. What happens is when I get injured, then I can't exercise. I can't do the things I want to do. I tore a rotator cuff a few years ago. I have horrible Achilles tendinitis. I ran through pain. I ran a number of marathons. I did a couple of triathlons a few years ago. I ran through pain in the training, which you're not supposed to do. Now I really can't run anymore. When I was younger, I wish someone had said, hey, take it easy. Focus a little bit more on the healthy eating and portion control and all of that and not putting so much focus on so much intense exercise. That's one of the things I'm trying to deal with right now. How do I still get my exercise fix in in a way that is not creating inflammation or setting myself up for injury? As we age, that's really important. The strength training is, I don't want to get injured again. I really don't. I want to be really mindful of what I'm doing to keep myself healthy.

Zibby: There were so many good takeaways from this conversation, at least for me.

Heather: I hope so. I got to make sure it sinks in for me.

Zibby: I'm going to highlight a few that I noticed. One is to stop being punitive and that sometimes falling off the cliff and that late-night binge or whatever it is you do that you regret, you were set up for failure to begin with. The key is in figuring it out sooner than later. When you're in a full rational, levelheaded, non-emotional state, making a plan, making a plan for four thirty when you don't know what to eat and what label to look at. You know because earlier that day when you've been at your desk and feeling confident and calm, you made a plan for yourself, and so not waiting until the emotional mood strikes to try to figure it out. It's impossible. You're already on the tightrope, so figuring it out ahead of time as best you can, making at least one or two things that can last you all week even if it's something as simple as oatmeal. It will help. It will remind you of what you're doing. Being kind to your body and not overdoing it, and that overexercising at any age won't lead to anything good. 

I think also being aware that you're born a certain way. You were born with a different body type than your sisters. I was born with a different body type even than my mother who's, by the way, also much tinier than I am. I can feel bad about that. I can try to get to a place that I want to be, but my body's not made that way. You know what? Maybe my body has other strengths. I'm really strong. Strength and muscle and all of that is important. People are built different ways, so not to beat yourself up and compare yourself to other people who are born with different body types. Trying to take the advice we give our kids. Trying to be kinder to ourselves. Trying to have more of a sense of peace. Also then to keep health above vanity to the extent that that's possible. Fueling our body. Eating to avoid pain. Eating for the long term. Fueling ourselves, not just feeding our feelings, essentially. Those are some of the things that I feel like I got out of it.

Heather: Good.

Zibby: Did you? Did you get those out of it? [laughs] I don't know.

Heather: Those are all the things that I'm really working on myself. Articulating them and actually saying them out loud versus just it being in my head, I think that's really helpful. Actually, recently -- I don't really do a lot of journaling even though I'm a writer. I don't do a lot of my own personal journaling, but I just bought a notebook yesterday. I do find that in my professional life, writing things down, making lists longhand really helps me. I was thinking yesterday, also because I'm thinking about some creative projects for the future too, but I thought it'd be really great to start writing things down for myself. I feel like that they would stick. Speaking them to other people, talking about them, in a way, I think it makes it real to actually put it out into the world, or you sit down and write it down. The last takeaway I would add to all of that that I know you've discussed in the community is that this is really a journey. It's so important to see it that way and recognize that there will ups and downs. It is very much like a marathon. There will be days when you feel invincible. There will be days when you feel like you can't take another step. You have to remind yourself that that's normal. That's how you do the work. I have to remind myself of that. I know that intellectually. I know that, but I feel that writing it down, talking about it, reminds me that I need to be honest with myself about that. This isn't going to be a quick fix. The extra weight that I want to take off, I put on over several years. It's going to take time to deal with that on many levels.

Zibby: Sometimes I'm like, what else do we have to do the next six months? We might as well have a long-term weight loss goal or fitness goal or whatever. Why not? Or we could not achieve anything.

Heather: I think you're right. Look, I think the mental anguish that so many people are feeling about just having to persevere, this situation that we're in and how we endure it and how we go on, separate from the pain and grief that people like you have felt who've had actual losses which in itself is, it's traumatizing. I think you have to be kind to yourself too with all of this. I was going to say, I feel like having a constructive goal, something to focus on, it at least helps me know that there will be an end to this.

Zibby: Agree.

Heather: It's the light at the end of the tunnel. Having some structure to my day and something positive that I feel like I can do in addition to everything else that I want to do, whether it's contributing to charity or voting, all the different things we can do to make us feel like we have some power in this time where we feel very powerless, I do think focusing on self-improvement, both internal and external, I think it's a good thing. It's a good way to spend this time. I totally agree with you. Hopefully, there'll be some healing that comes out of it.

Zibby: Totally. Let's do it. We got this.

Heather: We got this. What is the plan, that you're going to check in with the people like me over the next few months?

Zibby: Yes, we're just going to keep posting. You can use the community to help you. I was actually thinking of starting, one day a week we can all post a day of food. I could pair people up with accountability partners. I don't know. Just use it. Post in the comments. Hashtag in the stories. We'll share tips. We'll check in every Wednesday for the progress you're making. We're all going to do it together. We'll know we're doing it. The community's going to grow. We're all going to comment and contribute and encourage each other. Why not?

Heather: I think it's great. It's great on so many levels. Congratulations to you. If there's anything that I can help contribute to, let me know. I was thinking you should have at some point -- because I'm sure many people have teenage children or children in general. Something that I struggle with is when I'm trying to be very focused on my own weight loss goals or my own health goals, I don't want to influence my kids in a negative way like I was inadvertently. That's something that I would guess your community probably would want to talk about or know about. I'm sure there are people that specialize in child psychology and weight and all of that stuff, but I'd love some tips for, how do you do that so that you're making space for yourself to do what you need to do without making anybody feel under pressure, but at the same time modeling for them? Anyway, that's something I struggle with.

Zibby: That's a good idea. Maybe I'll do some interviews.

Heather: Later. You probably have enough people in the community that have interesting stories anyway.

Zibby: Yeah, but I can intersperse -- I think this should be for stories. Now I'm just rambling. Maybe in the posts, I can do quick tips from -- like a magazine article, almost.

Heather: Yeah. I don't know how you have time to do all this, but I'm excited for you to do it.

Zibby: I don't either. I don't know.

Heather: It's great. It's something for you to focus on that's positive. I'm so glad that you are doing it. I think it's great. It'll be really helpful to a lot of people. Thank you.

Zibby: Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on the show. We'll keep in touch. Heather, we'll all be rooting for you in the community. Everybody, look for your comments in Instagram and everything. Know that you have a whole team of people rooting for you. You're not doing it alone.

Heather: Thank you. I'll be rooting for everybody else as well. Go team.

Zibby: Go team. [laughs] Bye.

Heather: Take care. Bye.

Shelli Johannes on body image

Zibby Owens: My first guest is Shelli Johannes who is the coauthor of the very popular best-selling children's books Cece Loves Science and Libby Loves Science. She is just a rockstar. I recently had her on my other podcast. She has been posting lots of comments and interesting stuff in the moms' group. I wanted to hear her story. This is my first episode. This podcast will undoubtedly morph over time and potentially include more experts or more whatever. Right now, I just want to hear from other women, other moms, other people who are going through the same stuff and hear about everybody's journeys. Bear with me. I'm going to fine-tune this as we go. I hope you enjoy this conversation I just had with Shelli, who is amazing. Hopefully, it'll make you all feel a little bit less punitive and less hard on yourselves when you hear some of her advice and her story. Enjoy it. Please offer any feedback. I'm at zibby@zibbyowens.com, or you can DM me @MomsDon'tHaveTimeToLoseWeight. I hope to hear your feedback. Enjoy.

Welcome, Shelli. I can't wait to talk to you on "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight."

Shelli Johannes: Nice to see you.

Zibby: Thanks for being, first of all, my first guest on this podcast and second of all, my first guest on both podcasts. It's pretty awesome.

Shelli: I've already made a record. I didn't even know it.

Zibby: You've already made a record. It's not even noon. This is great. [laughs] The point of this podcast is just to hear stories from other people that people can relate to. We all go through very similar struggles with our bodies, but in different ways and different forms. I just wanted to hear about your journey. I know that's a really, really broad question. I just want to have you take me through some of the highs and lows and see what we can learn and share and benefit from.

Shelli: The reason I joined your group is because -- I've never really joined a group before, but when it was moms who don't have time lose weight, I just felt like it would be a larger community of people that had tons of different stories. It wasn't a Weight Watchers group. It wasn't a SlimFast group or a very specific -- the women who get up and do the five AM workouts, I tried that group. Trying to find my people. I've always struggled with weight. I don't even know it's just weight. I think it's more body image. It started very young. My mom was a beauty queen from Florida, very fit, very tall, very thin, and had a very specific body style. I remember when I was younger, I was a gymnast, and so my body style was very different, just muscular and bigger. Weight was a big issue, a big topic in my family. It really started there. I think it just stuck with me. It's always stuck with me. Do you need to eat that? The slight comments, some more derogatory, but a lot of times just those little slight comments that you just don't think kids will hear, maybe. Do you need to eat that? Do you need three cookies instead of two? Haven't you already eaten enough today?

Zibby: Wait, is this the voice in your head, or is this you talking to your actual children?

Shelli: These are not me talking to my children. These are my parents talking to me, so when I was younger. I think that voice, we get those voices in our head which are just people who have made impressions on us, has always stuck with me. Do I need to eat that? Am I thin enough? Am I good enough? Am I fit enough? That's really where it started, was super, super young. I remember being in high school, and I was never the thinnest one. I was always the bigger one of my friends. I remember the first time doing the weigh-in. They do those at school, the nutrition weigh-ins. I remember everyone afterwards talking about their weight. I was embarrassed because my weight was higher because I'm more muscular. I just felt, oh, my gosh, if I weigh X amount and they weigh twenty pounds less than me, I must be fat. I remember that's where it started, really a lot in my teen years, my mom putting me on Weight Watchers when I was fifteen. Then I think we moved to Atkins diet after that. Then I think we moved to South Beach Diet after that. I could never find something that worked for me. It kind of got me on this fad diet roll. That's really where it started. I've always been someone who worked out. That has benefitted me as I've gotten older because I'm a little bit obsessive about working out. I think that was because I was always trying to lose weight and always trying to count my points and always trying to count my calories and making sure that I burned off enough. Then when I got into college, it kind of took a downward spiral where I went on a Jell-O diet.

Zibby: Wait, what was the Jell-O diet?

Shelli: All you ate was Jell-O for a week.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, I missed that one, but I got all the other ones.

Shelli: Unhealthy. This was in the nineties when that whole fad diet things were coming into play. Then I went on the pineapple diet. I don't eat pineapple now. I had sores down my throat. I just went down this really bad path. I don't think it was a path anybody sent me on. I think it was just messages that had somehow gotten on the wrong track. That's really where it started.

Zibby: Then what happened throughout college? What happened after? Did you stop the fad diets, or when you started working, or what?

Shelli: I went on the fad diets. I remember going on the Jell-O diet. This is kind of embarrassing. I'm kind of sticking myself out there. I went on the Jell-O diet, and I lost a lot of weight. I was like, finally, I found a diet that works for me.

Zibby: Starvation. [laughter]

Shelli: And sugar. That's what kept me going throughout the day. I have tons of energy.

Zibby: There's water in Jell-O, right? [laughs]

Shelli: Right, no calories to count. I know, it's horrible. I look back on my teen and college self and feel bad because I wasn't over, over, overly weight. I wasn't having any health problems. When I saw myself in the mirror, I looked big. I did go through a bulimic stage in college. I don't remember what pulled me out of it. I think I remember my mom and dad coming up for a game at UGA and my mom looking at me and saying, "Are you eating? You look way too thin." That was the conversation. You look great. You look thin. You look like you've lost weight. You look like you've been working out. I think that still goes on in my family. You look great. How are you keeping weight off during the pandemic? You look good. I don't even know if they're really aware of it, but I was. That didn't last long because, I'm not making a joke of this, I really don't like to throw up. After my mom's comment and then just the process I had to go through, I couldn't do it. I don't know how I pulled out of it. I think it's always been there. It always sits in the back of my head.

Zibby: Now fast-forward to here. What's been going on since? I feel like having kids is then another huge time where our bodies are like -- you have to focus on them because they're changing so much.

Shelli: And you're weighing all the time. Your weight's going up. I remember when I was pregnant. I was probably about maybe five to ten pounds away from my husband's weight. I remember thinking, oh, my god, I cannot weigh as much as my husband.

Zibby: Oh, my god, I had the same thought, FYI. Same thing.

Shelli: They were like, "We're going to take your baby two weeks early." I remember thinking, yes, that means I don't have to weigh in. I will not make his weight. That was a thought that went through my mind, which is so embarrassing that that is the first -- it wasn't like, is my baby going to be okay? What's a C-section going to be like? It was, yes, I'm not going to gain that extra five pounds in this last two weeks. I'm going to make it. I'm going to skim by under the weight of my husband. That was really hard. I came back after the first one because I do work out. The second one, I didn't come back. I think I mentioned to you that I have a nerve disorder, and so I started taking medicine. It keeps weight on. I couldn't get back. It was very frustrating. I still am kind of there. I still struggle. I was just talking to Kim this morning about coming on your web page. I was like, "What do you hear me talk about from weight as a friend?" She said, "I just think you're always trying. If you go do really well --" I'll go off my medicine and I'll do really well, and then I'll need my medicine, obviously. Then I'll put weight back on. I'll kind of beat myself up about it.

I joined yours to be like, you know what, this is a time for me to just focus on, I need to love myself. I just turned fifty. I had weight goals for when I turned fifty that I didn't meet. I always said, when I turn forty, I'm going to be this. When I turn fifty, I'm going to be this. That was hard because I'm a very goal-oriented person. If I set a goal, I will kill myself to make it. It will almost be to my detriment. Like we were talking about, if I say I'm going to do something, I will do it, and I will do it now. I don't succeed until I meet that. It's a really tough journey to learn how to love yourself and look in the mirror and see yourself for who you are and not have it be a weight number. It's how you feel. Other people will say, "You don't need to lose weight." I'll say, "I carry my weight really well. It's probably these jeans." I will offset it because I'm like, they don't really know what's behind this. They don't see me the way I see myself.

Zibby: I feel like I'm carrying this secret shame of the actual number. If anyone knew, oh, my gosh. I figured out how to dress for it. Maybe I could hide it enough. The thing is, here you are, you're a best-selling author, so accomplished in so many ways. I keep hearing you say about how your body is so athletic. That should be celebrated. You gain weight because of medicine. Even though you have the answers right there of why, perhaps, you're not like the other girls, it's hard to intellectually process that. One of my daughters is super athletic, gymnastics or whatever. I look at her, I'm like, I hope she never has an issue with this beautiful athletic body of hers because it's not stick -- I don't know.

Shelli: I think media and society, that's what's pushed. That's what's celebrated, is those sickly models that are so thin. You're seeing them on the camera. Being a mom -- my daughter is sixteen. She was a soccer player. When she got to be about maybe ten and started being a little more concerned about weight, twelve -- she was a soccer player, and they had to a run a certain amount. They never weighed them, but they definitely had to be in shape. I hid my weight scale. She was always like, "Do you have a scale?" I was like, "I do not have a scale. I don't keep a scale around. It's not about the number. It's about how you feel." I was like, I have to change this message for my daughter because I don't want to repeat the same mistakes. I think sometimes we say things to our kids and we don't realize the message we send is not the message they take in. That's scary to me. That was why we started the books, the same reason. From a weight perspective, I didn't want her to get so focused on a number. Of course now, she's like, "We need a scale." I'm like, "It's not about a number. It's about how you feel. How do you feel today? Do you feel healthy? Do you feel unhealthy?" She's like, "Well, I have been eating a lot of sugar." I'm like, "You probably don't feel healthy, but you're beautiful. Everybody has different body styles." I see her going through the same thing. She'll be like, "But she's a size two. She's small." She's a size six. I'm like, "Honey, you're a size six. Don't look at magazines. You have to go by how you feel. You can't get so caught up in what people are telling you you're supposed to be that you lose sight of who you are." It's scary.

Zibby: It's so true. I feel like sometimes I just need to listen to the things I'm saying to my kids. I was so afraid of saying the wrong things that I've been only body-positive around the kids. I was like, I am not going to do any of this. I've read all these articles. I'm never saying I feel fat or this. I have pain in my body right now, and I would like to eat better for the inflammation, basically, but I can't let them hear me say all that stuff. It's so corrosive. I think our generation, our moms -- my mom had me on diets like you. She took me to some diet center. What I wouldn't do for that body, by the way, back.

Shelli: Oh, yes.

Zibby: There was nothing wrong with my body, seriously. Anyway, whatever. That was the culture.

Shelli: I look at pictures and I'm like, what was I thinking? I look at the pictures. What was I thinking about myself? Why was I so hard on myself?

Zibby: You know, it's funny because that also follows you. I remember a vacation I took maybe five years ago and being in my bathing suit with the kids in the water and being self-conscious. Are people watching me as I wade in here with my kids all climbing all over me? I had this thought at that time, wait a minute, maybe one day this is the body that I'll wish I had. Now I do. [laughs] You always are thinking things could be better. Yet life changes. There are extenuating circumstances like your medicine which is so much more important, getting rid of pain.

Shelli: I will try and get off of it. My husband will be like, "You look beautiful." I'll say, "I'm trying to find that line between looking old and -- I don't want to be old and too thin, but I don't want to be fat." That is what I go through. I'm like, there's a fine line. I need to find that line, so maybe I don't need three a day. Maybe I could do two a day. It's almost like the stages of grief. It's like I'm in negotiation constantly now. Maybe if I do this. Maybe I could do this. Maybe if I could do this. Then there's also that point -- how old are your daughters?

Zibby: I have a thirteen-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old daughter and then two sons.

Shelli: I knew you had four kids, but I wasn't the sure the age. My daughter now is sixteen. I found myself telling her more stories about my journey because I don't want her to feel like it's odd for her to think those things. I've said I've had a tough relationship with food and it really is about health so that if something ever does happen, she can come to me. I did go through the period where I never talked about weight. I never said the word fat. I never said the word weight. I always talked about healthy choices. Let's make healthy choices. These are fun choices for cupcakes. I even remember my very first book -- I know you've written a picture book, right? You've got one coming out?

Zibby: Yes.

Shelli: My very first book was when I was in fourth grade. It was about a fat, smart cookie. I'm in the process now of reworking that to be like, that would be really awesome if I could rewrite that book for myself. It was about a cookie who was constantly eating bad. Everyone was constantly telling her she was fat. That was in fourth grade. I won an award for that essay. I remember in fourth grade saying, oh, my gosh, even my weight won an award. I was rewarded for writing about weight. To me, it was really a sad story about this cookie that was too fat and always ate wrong and tried to do better and just couldn't. It’s funny how those things kind of bleed into even creative aspects that aren't bad.

Zibby: I wrote an essay when I was fourteen about how I felt about my body, I had gained some weight when my parents divorced, and how I felt like people were even treating me differently and how I felt about it. I ended up publishing it in Seventeen magazine. That started me writing freelance essays, essentially. By the way, now that I look back, I'm like, wow, how did I do that at fourteen when I look at what my kids are doing? [laughs] Anyway, it inspires so much artistic production, thought. It's such a waste, actually. Think about what else we could've accomplished. When we think about where we are now, and now here we are joining this group and trying to be there for each other -- again, that's why I did this. When I got all these comments, everyone had such different tips. There's no one-size-fits-all thing. Forget it.

Shelli: It's stories. I loved reading all those stories.

Zibby: Everybody had so many stories. I want to hear all the stories. What are your goals now? How can the group help?

Shelli: One goal is I'm trying not to focus on a number because I think I've been so overly focused on numbers my whole life to my detriment, to an unhealthy -- as you get older, I just turned fifty, and so you start realizing this is the only body am I ever going to have. I better celebrate this vessel and take care of it the best way that I can because I don't get another one. I don't think when you're younger you realize that. You don't realize what the fad diets and what the yo-yo diets, they would call them, or just the mental anguish of what that actually does to my body -- with my nerve thing, I really can't work out very hard. I just have started walking. I think I posted some of these in there. I'll just say, you know what, I don't feel like walking, but I'm just going to walk around the block. Then I'll listen to your podcast. I'll end up walking around thirty minutes for a podcast. Then I'll be like, yeah, I could probably watch one more. I ended up, just started walking and walking and walking. Over the pandemic, I've lost a lot of weight. I think I told you I lost fifteen, but then I started the medicine back up. I've gained five. That was disappointing right before my fiftieth birthday, which was why I posted. Your post came right at that time where I was super vulnerable. I was like, yeah, and then this happened. Then I look back, I'm like, wasn't I just an open book? [laughs]

Zibby: I love it, though.

Shelli: I am trying to find a way to be healthy but still have the things that I love, which I think is why I told you I gravitate towards Weight Watchers. I just feel like when I get in those areas where I'm like, no, you can't do this and you can't eat this and you can't have this and it's past eight, I find I set myself up to fail. I never am successful when I do that. Now I'm trying to be like, okay, I can have the special gluten-free cinnamon bun, but I'm going to have to have a salad for lunch. My daughter ended up coming to me saying, "I don't feel healthy. I would like to figure out how to eat healthy." I showed her the Weight Watchers SmartPoint and was like, "This is not a diet. This is a way to acknowledge what you're putting in your body and make choices and see what the choice gives you. If you come out and you want a granola bar --" She'll say, "It's got too much sugar. It's six points. I think I'm going to have an apple and a string cheese." I've tried to teach her, but that's been hard for me because I don't want to send the message that she needs to lose weight and that she needs to go on a diet.

Now I'm trying to focus on getting ready for her to go off to college and making those healthy choices so that if she doesn't feel healthy and doesn't feel good that she can say, well, I am having Lucky Charms every morning. Maybe I should have an omelet and a piece of cinnamon toast. That's half the points of what Lucky Charms would be. That's a struggle when you have a sixteen-year-old, is to figure out, how do you teach them how to eat healthy without talking about weight and exercise and how you feel? What are the good choices? What are the bad choices? Why are they bad? You can't just say, it's got sugar. The way I can say is, these two granola points are ten points. This caramel rice cake with a string cheese is two points. It's healthier. It's rice. It doesn't have as much sugar. I really struggle with that. When you said moms who try to lose weight, I thought that maybe some moms would also have tips for, how do you get your kids on the right path? How do you teach your sons to work out when they're super thin? His doctor's like, "You need to put on weight." In my mind, I was like, oh, god, don't tell him that.

Zibby: How old is your son?

Shelli: He's thirteen. He's in that space where they're like, you need to put on weight. You need to get some fat in your body. You need to do this. I'm trying to teach him different skills like, what's good fat? What's bad fat? You have to work out. His metabolism's so high. He can't put on weight. It's hard. It is hard being a mom when you're looking from your lens out that isn't a healthy lens and trying to teach a healthy lens.

Zibby: How do you actually eat? What's a go-to meal for you? I know you've referenced some of the points meals and stuff. What's your general eating? Then what's your biggest downfall?

Shelli: My biggest downfall is cheese. That's my biggest downfall. I try to eat eggs in the morning. I love cheese, so I use the cheese as my points. I sometimes eat cheese in the afternoon, but I'll have a salad with some cheese or vegetables with some cheese. If I cut out cheese, I'm just not happy. [laughs] My creamer in my coffee, I will not stop my coffee creamer. It just makes me happy. I like the Delight White Chocolate Raspberry. We stock up on it every Christmas because it only comes out for a couple months. I'm like, two points a tablespoon, I just measure it, and I'll take it. It helps. It's not about the points. I think it helps me be very conscious and aware of what I'm putting in my body because I know that the higher the points, the higher the carbs, the higher the sugar, and the lower the points -- if I have string cheese and a pickle, that's still cheese to me. I can't buy those big logs of cheese. I will eat the whole log. I could probably eat it in a day if I didn't pay attention, just slicing them and your slices get bigger and bigger and bigger. I have to buy the ones that are either sliced or that are individual.

Zibby: That's like me with banana bread. I'm like, I'll just make a slice here in the thing. Then next thing you know, it's like half the thing is gone.

Shelli: Two-inch slice.

Zibby: Yeah, exactly.

Shelli: You're like, one slice of banana bread is only... But I've had three slices in just one.

Zibby: It sounds like some goals and things to look forward to are maybe just getting rid of the scale entirely. Maybe you don't even need it in the family, or just shoving it away for a while. Focusing on the amazingness of your athleticism and that your body was built for more than just being a scrawny model, and that that's a good thing. That's a blessing. Not that saying this for the millionth time will do anything, but just to keep in the back of your head. Counting points. Those are already lots of goals. Keeping walking.

Shelli: That's what I'm trying to do. I'm keeping walking. This last weekend, I went with my daughter, we had a mom-daughter trip. We ended up doing a lot of, I think I mentioned it on one of the posts, we ended up doing horseback riding, which was mountainous and rugged. We ended up doing ziplining and hiking Tallulah Gorge. I have not been able to walk since. I did too much. I remember going to Tallulah Gorge going, "We could go down the suspension bridge." My daughter was like, "Are you sure we could do that?" I was like, "Yes, we can do that." Then I got down. Then I was like, oh, we got to go back up. [laughs] That wasn't smart. I kind of overfatigued my muscles. Then I end up laying down for three days being upset because I'm not walking and beating myself up because I should be walking, but I'm trying to take care of myself and let my body heal from the overexert-ness of a weekend. Then I eat because I'm not walking. I find when I walk, I just get outside and get that energy outside, get out of my small world, which is hard right now in the pandemic because we do live in small worlds. My refrigerator is there all day long. I'm not busy and in the car saying, I'm hungry, but I didn't bring a snack with me, or I only have a banana. Now it's just staring at the refrigerator waiting until, is it snack time? Is it snack time yet?

Zibby: You're like, lunch? Is it lunch yet? When's my feeding time? I'm like a child or something. What would you say to yourself? You're going to have bad days coming up. You're going to have great days coming up. To be more forgiving, what would you want to say? What do you want to remember? Maybe if you replay this or you're having a period of feeling very vulnerable or bad about yourself, what would you want to remember that's really important, like a don't-miss-the-plot kind of message to yourself?

Shelli: I try to talk to myself the way I would talk to my kids. I'll hear myself something. I'll be like, I would never say that to my daughter. Why would I say that to me? I would never say, get off your ass and go work out even though you're in pain. I would be like, you have to listen to your body. Your body is telling you that it can't do that today. Embrace your body. Love your body. Know that you can do that tomorrow. I try to think about now, a little bit more consciously, what would I say to my daughter? If I wouldn't say it to my daughter, then why would I say it to myself?

Zibby: I love that.

Shelli: That helps me because I will get in my head and be like, you only lost a pound. You only did that. Why would you do this? I would never ever say that to my kids. We almost have to retrain that message. We almost have to change those messages that have somehow gotten wired in our heads, that inner voice that is just like, get off your ass. You got to work hard. Work harder. You said you were going to do this. How come you're not doing it? Change it to be a little bit more nurturing and be like, I'm doing the best I can. I did great yesterday. Today's been a bad day. Tomorrow's a new day. It's a hard one, though. I struggle with that question every day.

Zibby: I love your advice. That's advice that could help me, talk to myself like I would talk to my child, talk to myself internally like I would talk to -- we seem to treat ourselves with so much less care than all the people we take care of all the time.

Shelli: Oh, my gosh, I'm so cruel to myself. I feel bad for myself sometimes.

Zibby: Sometimes when I hear my daughter being down on herself, I'll be like, "Hey, that's my daughter you're talking about there." I have to stick up for her being rude to her. "I don't want to hear you being mean to yourself. That's someone I care about there. Stop it."

Shelli: Right, I like that. I like how you're making it the third-person situation, say, hey you, little mister, [indiscernible]. Internal family systems is some kind of therapy that I've read about in the past about how all your different voices in your head -- I have those voices in my head. I have the lady who's just like, your nerve problem, and this and that. She's a hypochondriac and always worried about her nerves. Then I have the person who's like, you're not doing enough. Got to get out and get busy. I'm trying to put those voices -- I think Elizabeth Gilbert talks a lot about that in her Magic book. Put those voices in the backseat. They're the two-year-olds. We don't need to hear from those voices. Bring the other voices that are more positive and nurturing and loving, let them sit in the front.

Zibby: I love it.

Shelli: Those other whack-a-dos in the back, they shouldn't be driving.

Zibby: Right, so just be kinder to ourselves and speak to ourselves the way we'd want anybody else to speak to us. Not to say that's going to help. I know this has been more of just catching up, us talking about our struggles, but I think it's all relatable. So many people wish they had a different body and structurally, they don't. It's kind of a shame now that I'm in my forties when I think about the body types I longed for before. Why? Why is that necessarily any better? I don't know. Anyway, this is also a much bigger conversation. All to say it's a blend of self-acceptance and yet working hard to keep our bodies functioning at their best which sometimes means not having all the extra stuff and staying active and somehow [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Shelli: And maybe realizing what those triggers are. When you posted, it was very intimate. Something triggered that all of a sudden. We have these feelings, and then something will kind of weigh us down. What was that for you?

Zibby: When I posed that I wanted to eat everything in my kitchen?

Shelli: Yeah.

Zibby: I don't think I explained the whole reason. I had just heard some really bad news. I had had such a long day. I was just so sick of being careful and having to focus on this. I was just like, ugh, I don't want to do it anymore. [laughs] Then the group helped so much because I got all these tips. I went out for a walk with the dog. I waited five minutes. I chewed gum. I did all these things. Then next thing you know, the craving passed. I handled it another way, and I lived. I think it's also habit breaking. Anyway, there's a lot. I'm just so happy you shared your story. Thank you for being so open and your advice. I hope the group helps. I hope you continue to keep posting all your stuff because it's so great.

Shelli: Thank you for starting it. Thank you for having me on here. When you said, "Let's kick it off," I was thinking, really? I don't know if I'm the expert to talk or person to talk about...

Zibby: I didn't want to start with an expert. I just wanted to be real. It's just one woman to another. We're in it together.

Shelli: That's why your podcasts are so great. It's amongst moms and women to women. I'm also looking for tips on, how do we raise our kids in a healthy environment with positive messages?

Zibby: Yes, me too, so that I don't mess them up. [laughs] Thanks, Shelli. This was fun. Now I'll be thinking of you as I go about my eating today. It's nice just to have a partner in crime, if you will.

Shelli: I totally get it.

Zibby: Face to a name and all the rest. Thanks for coming on.

Shelli: Good to see you today.

Zibby: Bye, Shelli. Thanks.

Shelli: Bye.