Why diets don't work with Lyndi Cohen

0:02 A listener production. This is Crapphita Happy and I am your host Castunn. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Today, I am joined by Lyndy Cohen, who you might know as the Nude Nutritionist. Lindy is an anti diet dietitian, a best selling author and host of the popular podcast No Wellness Wankery. Her latest book is called Your Weight Is Not the Problem.

0:48 And that's really the topic of our conversation today. In a world that we know places so much emphasis on particularly women's physical body, and on being thin and beautiful and youthful, how can we move away from a diet and weight obsessed culture and into a place where we are happy with our body and improving our relationship with food. In today's conversation, Lindy and I will talk about what is a diet and the rules that we inherit and carry as souvenirs from a lifetime of dieting and diet culture. How do you know if you're on a diet or you really are making a lifestyle change, and some ways that you can start changing your relationship with your body.

1:29 I know this is such a relevant topic for so many of us. I know you're going to love this conversation with Lindy. Lindy Cohen, welcome to the Crappy to Happy Podcast. CAAs, thanks for having me. It's I'm delighted. Thank you. I'm a huge fan of your work. I love what you do, so when I saw that you had written a new book, I knew that I immediately had to book you. And thank goodness, we got you in just before you're about to go off and have a baby. So I appreciate you making the time. We have one week until dday. But I just want to not glamorize that, by the way, that it actually would have been really nice to, like, you know, if I planned my book a little bit better and my baby.

2:10 With these things you cannot plan. But anyway, a bit of rest is always nice as well for everyone. Hopefully you might get a little bit of rest after the well, no, there'll be no rest after the baby because what am I talking about? But hopefully you'll get a little bit of. Space anyway to be able to focus on the baby and the other baby, because I know it's not your first one. Anyway, Lindy, let's. Talk about you are a nutritionist and a dietitian and really really doing a great job educating people about healthy eating. And the time of your book is your weight is not the problem, which I love. I think we all know. I've talked about it on this show many times. Everybody's talking about it. We know that diets don't work, and yet we are still obsessed with dieting.

2:57 So I would love to just start with just straight up why don't diets work? You know, you're right, we do know that diets don't work. Goodness knows. We've tried enough of them to realize that what ends up happening is they make us feel crazy around food, around the very foods we're trying to avoid we suddenly can't stop thinking about. Then, you know, we try and be good, we end up in this pattern where we're next thing we know, are crouching in the pantry at three pm, or we've picked up the kids, or you know, back from a busy day and we're eating as much as we possibly can. We're eating more than we went on the weekends. We lie in bed at night being like, oh, I wish I could do things differently. We wake up the next day resolved to do it differently. And yet the same pattern keeps on repeating itself. And it's not just that diets don't work, it's that they actually lead to weight gain, not weight loss, the very thing they are promising to us. But the reason I wrote this book is because I feel like I meet smart people every single day who know that diets don't work, and yet I would have a chat to them and it would become clear to me really quickly that these people were all on a diet. And so in the book, I talk about this idea of diet rules. So diet rules are these crappy souvenirs from a diet's past. You know, it's anything you've collected along the way, all these rules about how you should or shouldn't be eating, and so often they end up contradicting each other. So it could be that carbohydrates are good, No, carbohydrates are bad, carbohydrates are fine, but you have to have this much. No, you can only have carbohydrates after

4:28 a certain amount of time. There are hundreds of these percolating in our very lovely headspace, and as a result, it makes it incredibly hard to make healthy choices. We think these diet rules help us eat healthily. We think, well, if I didn't have these diet rules, I would face plants into the pantry. If I didn't have these rules, I wouldn't eat healthily at all. But the thing is these diet rules are dieting, and dieting is contributing to us, as I said, feeling crazy around food, contributing to weight gain, making us obsessed with the very things would not allow to eat. And if it worked, wouldn't we have all reached our goal weight by now and be happy in all those and and be the healthy people we want to be. It's not working, so we've got to ditch these diet rules.

5:13 You have raised some really good points there that I want to pick up on, and I think probably maybe a better first question would have been like what is a diet? Because I think there is so much confusion now because we are now being sold and now what we think we're doing is we're being healthy. We want to eat well, we want to be healthy. So when does the healthy eating and wanting to be you know, the have energy and be invigorated, and all of those things that we think come with eating certain things or eating in a certain way, Like, when does that actually become a diet? It's such a good question. So back in the day, everyone was dieting, and everyone was talking about dieting, and it was still quite trendy. Would have the accins diet, the cabbage soup diet, the lemon detox diet. He did them all and then at some point, thank goodness, dieting became quite uncool. And so even the diet companies have picked up into this fact. They go, oh, people don't want to do a diet, So we're going to tell everyone that we're not a diet, we're a healthy evening plan.

6:15 We're a lifestyle approach, they promise while giving you a meal plan. And so it's become trickier than ever to avoid diets, and this is what's sabotaging so many of us. And so in the book I talk about what exactly is a diet, but one of the things that is a sure giveaway is a list of forbidden foods, so eat these, but don't eat these. Control is another form of dieting, following a meal plan, so someone telling you what to eat every single meal of the day. Listen. I'm sure you can stick to that for a few weeks, maybe a few months. But if you don't want to be living like that for the rest of your life, then what's the point of doing it temporarily Because any health benefits that you get are going to be just short lived. And so one of the things I offer in the book is three questions we can ask ourselves to work out. Is it a diet or is it a healthy habit? Because yes, I am a dietitian. I want us to be healthy. I want you to have energy.

7:08 I think energy is the most important thing we can have. I want you to sleep well. I want you to like yourself. So we need to be adding in lots of things that make us feel good in order to do this. So the three questions are one, does this help me become closer to the person I'd like to be? That's just a really nice qualifying question, so that it's promoting good health. Number two, can I do this for the rest of my life. That is a very very important one. As I just said, if we can't do it for the long term, then any benefits are going to be very short lived. And question number three is really important. If this didn't contribute to weight loss, but I still choose to do this, now you might think, oh, well, I do want to lose weight, so why should I not put that as a priority. And what I say to that is weight loss is actually a very terrible motivator of health. So there's a few options what happens.

7:58 One option is we try to lose weight, we get to our goal weight, and once we've reached our goal, we stopped doing all the things that helped us get us to that point. But more commonly, what ends up happening is, let's say I start running and the only intention of my running is that I'm going to lose weight, and I am dedicated, and I'm eating in a certain way, and after a few weeks I help on the scale and I realize I haven't lost weight, or I haven't lost enough weight, or whatever parameters I've set for myself. Do you think I'm going to keep running? I'm absolutely not. It doesn't matter that I'm sleeping better, that I have more energy, that I have all these other benefits. I'm simply going to look at my weight loss in the prescribed time that I've been told. This is how much weight you should lose if you follow all these rules and disregard all these healthy habits. So a little bit about me. I used to be a chronic diet I started my first, all right, it's very relatable. At the age of eleven, I was put on my first diet for no reason other than the fact that I wasn't slim.

9:00 I then was prescribed a meal plan. I came in for regular way, and I became obsessed with trying to weigh less. Fast forward ten years. At this point, I was now categorically morbidly obese. I hated my body. I was obsessed with food. No one knew more about food than me. I had tried countless diets by this point. I guess at twenty one, I stopped and I thought, I've been following all the rules. I have tried all these things, and here I am heavier than I've ever been. Hating myself. There's got to be another way. So I decided this is how I was going to stop dieting. I was going to stop subscribing to these things that were making me feel crazy around food. Over the next four years, I lost twenty kilograms simply by not simply, but by not focusing on my weight, by focusing on things that made my body feel good. Over time, I lost the weight, which equates to one hundred grams per week over that time period. Now I've been pursuing weight loss and only last one hundred grams a week. There is no way I would have thought that was enough.

10:07 I would have given up. I would have disregarded the fact that I was fundamentally changing my brain and my body and my lifestyle, that I was morphing into the person I always wanted to be. That one day I would look back on my life and be like, can you believe I do these things naturally easily, without willpower because I want to? And weight loss turned out to be just a happy side effect as a result of doing all these things. So I think our obsession, our hyperfixation on trying to lose weight, is really sabotaging us and anyone who feels like they have a weight problem their entire life. You go to the doctor, what do they tell you, we can't work on anything else because you need to lose weight. You need to try harder, just use more willpower. We get told and you want to yell. I have tried. I have tried so many countless ways to control this body. And the more we keep focusing on trying to lose weight, I think it's a day injurious strategy. We know we've tried it, and it's it's not working for us.

11:04 And it doesn't work. And the thing that breaks my heart too is I've had Glenn Macintosh on the shoe as well, and he talks about you know, if anything failed to ninety five percent of the time, like you, you just it would be stupid to expect that it's going to work for you. And that's that's what we do with diets. But what happens I see all the time is people say I was following the plan, I was doing the things, I was getting the results. I was feeling good and to a point, and then life happened. My mum got sick, we moved house, my partner lost his job. You know, all of this stuff happens, and I just fell off the wagon, like I just, I just didn't sustain those behaviors and now I've gained back all the way and more, which is statistically what happens. But they don't say, well, there's the evidence that dieting doesn't work. They say there's the evidence that I am a failure because it was working, you know, I was getting the results and the fact that I'm now not means there is something wrong with me.

12:04 And that's the thing that I really think we need to flip. There are so much self blame and self judgment and self criticism involved when the thing happens that statistically is going to happen exactly. You haven't failed a diets diets and don't failed you countless times again and again. And I think this faulty thinking is the thing that keeps us stuck thinking, well, if I just tried harder, or if I did things slightly different, if I had more time, I had more money, if I mel prepped, whatever it is, we keep thinking this time is going to be different. But statistically, each diet attempt is probably getting less effective. And I talk about this is diet burnout. So perhaps you once did you know an approach, you counted points, calories, macros, whatever your poison was and it worked and you lost weight and you regained it again. And now you keep going back to that same approach, hoping this time you'll be able to replicate the same results. And yet you're finding you can't stick to the diet nearly as long as you once did. You're not losing weight like you once did either, and you're just feeling like this is more reason as to why you're the failure. This is how diets work, is that your body gets a lot smarter, and it does something called the survival switch. So when your body fears that there isn't a plentiful supply of food, it caesars control. Its job is to keep you happy and healthy, which means nourished and fed. So as soon as it gets a whiff of dieting, of restriction of oh, the famine starts tomorrow, which is that I'll start a

13:37 diet on Monday. Mindset. As soon as it notices this, it flicks into this primal state where you might find you can't stop eating. Your every thought comes back to food, and this is a byproduct of starvation. This is a byproduct not even of even physically restricting, but simply having the thought I shouldn't have eaten, that I'm feeling guilty about it, noticing maybe I should only have one slice instead of two, all of these thinking this is emotional hunger at play, and we need to rectify this because this is what's driving us to feel like we feel out of control around food, or that we're addicted to sugar. Neither of these things are true. We just need to work with your body and start listening to it, because your body's constantly giving you feedback about how to look after it, and from a very young age, you've been taught to ignore it. Things like you have to eat everything on your plate, of diet, advice about how to control how much you weighed and what you looked like, and all of these things are making it really hard for you to simply tune into your appetite, which is your body's innate weight management system. To be honest, it's pure job is to tell you how much food you need to thrive. Some days you're going to burn lots of energy and some days you're going to burn less.

14:51 Your appetite will naturally flux with the changes in your energy levels, and so we need to get a whole lot better at not listening to to the diet noise or these diet rules that are telling us when to eat, how much, and how confusing that all is. And we need to get good at listening to our body, which means listening to our appetite, asking ourselves, am I actually hungry? And making sure we're eating satisfying food. Oh my goodness, the number of dietis I meet who do not eat enough during the day, who do not eat enough satisfying food during the day, blows my mind. Although it's completely understandable when you've been told to cut up carbohydrates and fat, especially if you know you've been dieting for years in the eighties.

15:35 Yeah, it's people to go for the low fat option everything. But no, we've moved past that, please. But people are building because we're collecting these diet rules like souvenirs, and so we need to get rid of them otherwise it's going to continue to be really hard for us to not eat emotionally, for us to stop eating when you feel full. And I think this is a crazy idea what I talk about. Those ideas. We have to give ourselves permission eat the very foods that we feel out of control around and then someone will say, but when I just lose control around these foods, if I let myself just eat as much chocolate as I want, I won't be able to stop eating. And the interesting thing is the exact opposite thing tends to happen. When we say to ourselves, you're not allowed to have chocolate.

16:18 That creates that sense that there is a restriction on how much chocolate you are allowed to eat. So when we do get access to it, we have to roundpage and eat as much as we possibly can because we don't quite know when we're going to get access to it next. And makes us feel crazy around food. When we do the opposite, we say, hmm, I'm going to eat this chocolate, and I'm allowed to eat this chocolate, and anytime I want more, I can have more. It flips something. Suddenly we have choice, Suddenly we know it's not going anywhere. They did this really interesting study with macaroni and cheese, and they gave participants as much macaroni and cheese as they could possibly eat, a delicious comfort food I think we would all agree, And what they found is after a few days of this experiment, well, the macaroni and cheese was very interesting to the participants in the beginning. A few days in the macaroni and cheese just wasn't as interesting that had macaroni and cheese, and as you can imagine, they didn't eat nearly as much macaroni and cheese. This is what we need to do with these foods that we feel crazy around. Giving yourself permission to eat them makes them less interesting, reduces your cravings around them, so you feel normal around them again.

17:28 The opposite restricting them, telling yourself you can only have one more slice, one more piece, one more bite. This is what's making us feel crazy around food. I know it's counterintuitive. I know I'm asking you to trust me and do something different, but we need to try something different here because this old approach is not working. It's not working. So much good information there, Lindy. So first of all, going way back, you said we might have done this, then counted the points, did the thing, got the result, and then you know, three years later, four years later, whatever I've been in this situation myself in my twenties, you go back to that thing that worked and lo and behold, it doesn't work. Why not? Okay, So there are physiological changes that happen in your body.

18:11 Very interesting research from the Biggest Loser study actually, where you know the famous TV show where participants would lose a hectic amount of weight in a very short period of time, and some very smart scientists started tracking these participants to see what happened to their bodies afterward. Now this is purely physiological. What happened to them is that their Grellin levels went up. Grellin is your hunger hormone, so they were hungrier afterwards. Not only that their leptin levels went down, which is the hormone that tells you I've had enough to eat, So they're hungrier and they need more food before they feel satisfied. But not only that the metabolism slowed. Normally, when you lose weight, we would expect to see metabolism slowing by a certain degree. But what was interesting is their metablism slowed far more than we would have ever predicted elsewhere, and five years, six years after follow up, it didn't come back to baseline level, even though all except one participant to regain the weight. So each diet attempt is impacting our ability to find a weight that feels comfortable for us. Not only do. We have these physiological changes that I've talked about, but we also have those psychological impacts, the obsession with food, the constant thoughts, the accumulated diet rules that making us feel crazy around food. It is very socially acceptable as well in our culture to make comments about food, to comment on other people's bodies too. For you know, you've been in the staff room and someone's going to say, Oh, my goodness, can you really get away with eating all those carbohydrates? Yeah, exactly, I have to go to the

19:45 gym tomorrow. All these kinds of comments are very socially acceptable, and I really want that to change as well. I do too pick. I pick people up on that sometimes people I'm close enough to do to pick because I have a teenage daughter too, and she picks people up on things like that all the like, Oh, I have to go to the gym tomorrow to work this off, you know, all this naughty food today, I'm going to have to work extra hard tomorrow. Like no, no, we're not going to be We're not even going to say that out loud, Like that is not a thing anymore. I love that. Lindy also said that what we really need to do to break out of these old patterns that don't work is to give ourself permission to eat all the food. And you quite rightly also said most people will say I talk to people too and say the same thing, and they will say absolutely not, like I can't be trusted, like I would just eat.

20:33 All the food. So should people expect when they start, you know, doing something different, letting go of old food rules, expect that there will be a bit of a compensated it, like they might overdo it initially, but to understand that that will be temporary, that they will come back to a more of a healthy balance. Yeah, I think that is almost the biggest challenge is to say to you when you read introduce these foods, they are going to be highly interesting. You haven't allowed yourself full permission to eat them in a very long time. So what we're going to have to go through is a phase of refamiliarizing yourself with these foods and helping your body learn and trust that these foods truly are allowed.

21:15 So there might be some murky waters in between, where we know progress is definitely not linear, and that's certainly the case in this situation and for anyone who's scared going yet? But I really don't want to lose I really don't want to gain weight. That's the thing I'm most scared of. I really just I'm terrified of this idea. I want you to imagine. Imagine where will you be in one year from now? Where will you be in five years from now? I wish this was a quick fix. I wish, but quick fixes don't work. What I'm talking about is a slow rewiring of the pathways in your brain to change your very relationship with food, the thing that you have been taught from as a young kid about how you should be eating. We need to remaster all of this stuff, so there will be times where you eat more than you planned. I would say, though I don't think it's going to be necessarily more than what is currently happening in your life. You're probably already feeling a little bit out of control around food. You're probably overeating on a regular basis anyway. So really, what are the options we have is one where we're going to get progress and move in the right direction, and the other one we're probably going to progressively gain weight with each failed attempt it slow. Our metabolisms have all these impacts on us psychologically, and I think at some point we need to take the long term view and do the scary thing. And I know this is scary what I'm asking you to do to give yourself permission to eat foods, But it's worth trying.

22:41 Yeah, it's I think that's a psychological hurdle that people really struggle to overcome when we perceive that the worst thing in the world is gaining weight. I mean, that's a whole other issue, right, like the fact that a woman's whole sense of liking herself happiness is all contingent on achieving au And wait, I mean, how do we move past that? Yeah? So I dedicate an entire chapter in this book to talking about how to raise kids who like their bodies, who have a healthier relationship of food than what you were probably given, what we were all probably given by our moms or our grandmothers. And I think for years we've been passing down disordered eating from generation to generation, pulling your tummy, should you really be having seconds? All these comments that we often are handing down between mothers and daughters. So, if you grew up with a questionable relationship of food and you now have kids going, I don't want them to have to struggle the way I did this. This is why I wrote that book. I really want you to be able to read this and take it on board. But I think when people have this idea, this misconception that body image is a trivial thing, that people stressing out about weight is just about vanity.

23:49 It's not about vanity when we fail a diet. Well, when a diet fails us, now not only do we have ourselves to hate, but our very sense of who we are is it comes into question. We think we're incapable and a failure, and so it is so much greater than just what we look like. It is our very essence of who we are and how the world perceives us. And I can't lie to you and say looks don't matter. I want to be able to. But I think we live in a world that tells us that the most impressive thing a woman can be is thin and pretty and look perfect. And I think we need to decide that. And there are so many things I tell myself, and I will teach you how to talk to yourself differently, because when you wake up in the morning and looking in the mirror triggers you into a bad body image day. It spirals your health, your physical and your emotional wellbeing in a really negative way.

24:44 So we need to have some coping strategies where you can say to yourself, you see a really bad photo of yourself. Everyone's going to have a bad photo or a bad angle. You say, it's not. It's not my purpose in life to look perfect from every single angle. It's really not. You're going to take great photos and you're going to take terrible photos. The question is, are you going to let those bad body image days derail you and send you on the yo yo dieting bandwagon yet again, or are we going to do something a little bit different. Body image is really important because I think we think, well, I'll lose weight and then I'll like my body, you know, And I think that's the wrong way to do it. I think liking your body is the pathway to health. I think when you like something, Let's say you have a car that you love. You take such good care of it. You're going to get it serviced, you're going to keep it clean, You're proud of it. You want it to be a nice place.

25:36 When you don't like something, you disregard it, You get sloppy with that kind of thing. You just it doesn't really matter, it's not important, you don't prioritize it. So I think it's really important that we should like ourselves first. I think we take much better care of our bodies. We do things because we enjoy them, because we like ourselves. I feel like it's a much better place for us to be coming at it going. I want to add in healthy habits because I like myself, not because I hate myself. I often say to people, like, appreciate your body for what it can do, you know. I appreciate your body for what it allows you to. Do in life. You know, even if you can't right now love how it looks like. What are some of your kind of tips around that helping people to get more accepting of their physical body.

26:20 I think this idea of you know, I spent many years hating my body, and the idea of moving from hating my body to loving my body was too large, too large a swoop to take, And I don't think we should aim for loving our bodies. I think what we should aim for is simply accepting them, choosing to respect it and that might go, Listen, I don't look amazing today, but I'm still going to choose to respect my body and take care of it, and I think that's important. So I'm not talking about you know, people go, well, this is just you're just going away, I don't care about how I look. This isn't the case. This isn't not caring about how you look. This is just not letting how you look to determine how you take care of yourself. And it does take a lot of work because literally everything around us is reminding us that we would be happier if we were thinner, and we actually live in a world that prefers someone to have an eating disorder over existing in a larger body. It's incredibly disordered, and that is perhaps why we have seventy five percent of women who have disordered eating. And so you have to kind of recognize that this is the normal. This is the culture, unfortunately, and we have to start to change it for ourselves and for our kids, because it's everywhere.

27:35 I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you apps drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us. A rating and review. The other thing, Lindy, that I think we're coming up against now is that this idea that certain ways of eating. I'm thinking particularly of things like Keto, things like intermittent fasting that have really been sold as health solutions. I was even reading the other day that you know, Keto has following a Keto dart has been shown to potentially reduce the risk of, say, Alzheimer's, and you know, there's lots of talk about reversing diabetes and all that sort of stuff. So I can see how people will really latch onto those particular ways of eating with the assumption we're being told that this is like a healthy lifestyle, and.

28:39 It is, and there is heaps of research to say if you follow Keto you'll get these benefits, and if you fast intermittently, there are stackloads of benefits for you. I can't refute that, and I won't. However, my question to you is can you do it for the rest of your life? Because all of those benefits are contingent on you sticking to it, and that's the fundamental. A few a handful of people will happily fast every so often in their life and do that forever. I'm not one of those people. For me, I feel like I need paster in my life. I need to be able to eat when I am hungry. And so I think what we're talking about here is we're tuning out of these nutrition gurus who are constantly telling us which super foods to buy and the new trends and all the things that we should be doing. And it's about tuning into our body that's constantly giving us this feedback loop that's saying, hey, this food doesn't make me feel amazing, or this one does make me feel great, instead of getting caught up and what is the current fad. And by doing this over a period of time, we're going to fine tune how you should be eating. And when your body has more energy and youruslee being better and your bowels are working well and your mental health isn't a good place, that's when we're going to know this is the diet. Because there isn't just one diet that works for you. But we got to work out what's your thing what's gonna what is sustainable and enjoyable for you?

29:59 I think that is an amazing, amazing point. Yes, number one, do it if you can sustain it. But people that I know typically don't, myself included, you know, I even get hooked into that. Oh I probably should do that because I don't want to get else someone's maybe I should try keito. I can't do kito, like, I could never stick to something like that. It's just beyond me. So I don't even know why I try. So try. Yeah, I don't try. And maybe you have to drive yourself to realize that that is not sustainable or if it is great. But what you have just started to talk to talk about, Lindy, sorry, is this idea of tuning into your body. And I think this is such an important point. We're so disconnected from our own bodies in many ways, not just to do with food, but just do with everything. Like we stuffed down our emotions. We live in our heads. We think we can think our way through all the problems, whereas I'm all about, you know, feeling, connecting with your body, connecting with sensations, and this idea of just getting a little bit more in tune with ourselves and our body and learning what feels good for us, as opposed to looking outside of ourselves all of the time for the answers or the rules or the results or the solution.

31:15 Then that's kind. Of the way forward, and I think that's what you're encouraging. Right exactly. Let's look at kids. For example, I think, you know, I'm a mum. When I'm feeding kids, I'm like, there is temptation to say things like, oh, listen, you can have dessert when you finish this meal, or no more chocolate. I hear parents saying that's got too much sugar. We shouldn't be eating that. There's a temptation to want to try and control what they eat. Well, what I really want for us to teach them from the get go how to listen to their innate body, their bodies innate wisdom. So, for example, you know, maybe not even maybe, I think what we should be doing is letting our kids find the boundaries of their health. So let's say they do eat way more chocolate than is healthy and then they feel sick. They go, oh, it doesn't feel so good. I actually want my kids to experience that.

32:08 I want them to have that internal feedback loop that's helping them to make healthier choices. Because I'm not going to be around forever, and we can't parent our children all the time saying eat this, don't do that. We need them to be able to trust that their body is guiding them to make healthy choices. And the only way we're going to do that is by letting go of all these rules that we think we have to tell them. I think the default we need to recognize is that our body does want us to be healthy, that it has a whole built bunch of inbuilt mechanisms to help us try and be healthy. It likes us to go to sleep, It tells us when we need to go to the bathroom. It has all these little clues that it's constantly trying to tell us I'm thirsty. I need more of this. And what we need to do is get better at listening to these little cues that are happening, these little clues that are happening, so that we're hearing them before it ends up being shouting.

32:59 We get out of our brain and get into our body. And I think it's a really nice thing to teach our kids. And if you didn't learn that as a kid yourself. It's not too late for you to start to learn how to listen to your body as well. Yeah, that's such great advice. The other thing you mentioned earlier that I just remembered I wanted to pick up on was the difference between emotional hunger. And physical hunger. I get asked this all the time. In fact, just talk to the girls on the kickpod about this very topic, about. This idea of emotional eating. As a psychologist, you know, part of my approach is, well, how about we focus less on the eating and more on the stress or the emotion or what's going on, you know, tuning in and dealing with that, instead of being the biggest concern being that, oh my god, if I'm emotional eating, I might gain weight and that could be the worst thing in the entire world that might happen, because the fact of the matter.

33:45 Is that food. And I've made this point myself too, like food is not just fuel. Food is connection, food is social, food is you know, we don't just eat to survive. Emotional eating is my expertise. What I focus on, this is what I help people. I help people who've tried all the things and have failed it all the things. Okay, So firstly, some degree of emotional eating very normal, normal, very healthy, well well within the healthy range. We all have different coping strategies, and eating can be one way that we can soothe, one way amongst many ways that we can help to soothe ourselves, whether it's you know, going for a walk, or speaking to someone or having arrest so many ways. What happens is we end up when we create these lists of forbidden foods. When we apply all these food rules, we make emotional. We make eating so much more interesting and attractive, and it gives us such a big dopamine hit when we do do it.

34:43 So it does a really good job of helping to soothe us, and so we use it more often as a coping strategy. So this idea of giving ourselves permission to actually eat these foods helps us to rely less on eating as a way of soothing ourselves, because these foods don't create this same kind of dance party in our brain as they previously did. An important part of this is understanding the difference between physical and emotional hunger. So, physical hunger is the gnawing in your stomach. It's a gut feeling to say, hmm, I feel like I should eat something stronger. Symptoms of it might be feeling fatigued, lightheaded, angry, definitely something I struggle with, and using the hunger scale something I talk about in my book Your weight is not the problem will help you work out Am I hungry?

35:29 If you've been dieting for countless years, it's really hard to know. Am I physically hungry? Or am I just thinking about food? Because you've been taught to ignore hunger or eat by the clock. It's lunchtime, it's breakfast time, this is what I should eat, and so we learn how to ignore physical hunger. A few things to know about physical hunger. It is pretty predictable, so it rises slowly as we run out of energy in our body says hey, I'd like a little bit more energy. Can you top me up? And that's what hunger is. So when you are hungrier, you're burning more energy. And there's been some really interesting research to show that your hunger, your appetite can help you eat within fifty calories of your energy requirements, which is far more accurate than any meal plan could possibly be. Because some days you burn a lot and some days you do not. So what we need to do is get off that meal plan bandwagon and start tuning into your lovely body using something like the hunger scale. Now, emotional eating is different. Of course, we use food to emotionally calm ourselves and to feel good.

36:29 When we are doing this thing where we are taking foods off limits, we are aggravating our emotional hunger. We're saying to ourselves, you can eat this, but only have this much. And what it does is it creates the sense of you know, when you finish a meal and you I just really need something sweet, or you know you've finished your dinner time and you're just going, oh, I just really feel like something. I'm full, I've eaten, I'm not hungry, but I really feel like something is going to hit the spot. Firstly, there's conditioning that is happening here. So you know, typically you always eat some dessert while watching your favorite TV show, it's going to condition you that the next time you're watching your favorite TV show, you're probably going to want those foods as well.

37:10 But the more food rules we're applying, the more we can boost up our emotional hunger. And also the big problem is we're often not having satisfying foods. So let's say we try to be good during the day, we're having a light, fluffy salad or whatever we think is the right choice, and we're actually not having the very foods that are truly satisfying to us, both physically and emotionally, and that's leaving us with this gap where we go, well, I am physically full, but there is an emotional desire there that has not been met. There is also a third type of hunger which I talk about, which is hormonal hunger. So of course when you have your period, there is a week before your period comes where you are going to be ravenously hungry. You are burning more energy, and you are just going to want to eat so much more. A meal plan telling us to eat the exact same thing every single day is just not going to cut it. When you hit menopause, of course, we know you get so much more hungry than you previously were before, and there's a whole bunch of impacts there as well, with your slowed metabolism that we need to talk about that I do talk about in the book.

38:10 And then the thing that can apply to everyone, regardless of gender, is sleep. So fundamentally, if you're not getting enough quality sleep, your body is going to seek out energy in some form, and the easiest form for it to get energy is through food. And sixty percent of Australians aren't getting enough quality sleep or enough sleep, And so we keep looking for this new fan dangled solution to our health and what superfood is it going to be? What diet am I going to try? We need to prioritize on the basics first, and the basics I talk about this idea of the hierarchy of healthy habits in the book, which is about prioritizing the stuff that has the biggest impact in your health and then building real health above that. Sleep is a cornerstone of health. It regulates all your hunger hormones, It regulates your metabolism, it controls your mood, and it is not something we are prioritizing enough. Instead, we're asking questions like with yogurt should I be having instead of trying to work out how do I get better quality sleep, something that would have a far greater impact on our health.

39:12 I'm glad you mentioned that because that was one of my favorite things in your book. I love that pyramid I thought that is perfect. That just makes so much sense. I recommend anybody grab the book and have a look at that, because you're right. Deal with the basics first, get that foundational stuff right, and then start moving up, because I think it can feel really overwhelming to try to change your whole way of thinking, eating, behaving. You know, like it's quite overwhelming. So I really love that healthy habits pyramid that you suggest. Even when we get off the dieting kind of bandwagon, even when we learn better, we know better and we're attempting, for example, to we might swear no more diets. I'm just going to eat, listen to my body. We can often find ourselves and you talk about this getting triggered by into dieting. So I'm not doing any more diets.

40:04 I know that doesn't work. I've done qto, I've tried that. It doesn't work for me. I just that's just not a thing. But then, you know, you go to work and Brenda from accounting is you know, everybody's oh, you look amazing, you've lost so much weight. Again, we comment on other people's bodies and weight as if that's the most important thing about them, the most significant achievement of their life was to lose weight, and everybody wants a piece of that. What did you do? What did you how did you get that result? Or all sorts of things can trigger us back into thinking to believing that, oh, actually maybe this will be the answer, maybe this will be the solution. How do you suggest that people kind of protect themselves, insulate themselves, I guess, from those kinds of triggers, or respond to those kinds of triggers and not be pulled back down that path again.

40:55 Yeah, it's incredibly hard because die culture is absolutely everywhere. It's normalize these things that we say to our colleagues and our friends that are just this is just normal for us, sadly, and so there are so many ways that we can opt out. Whereas you know, we know it's unsubscribing from people we follow on social media, but of course Brenda from accounting, we can't avoid her in the in the in the lunch room forever. In those situations where you see a friend or a colleague and they're losing weight and you go, oh, well, I could I could just I could go keep that, I should just do that, and and you know they you notice that they just want to keep talking about, Oh, I tried this, and then I ate this, and and they're really proud of it. I actually I flip that in my mind. I see that rather as a symptom of their diet obsession, that when we are not eating enough, when we are trying to control everything we eat, our brain has to hyper fixate on food. It's if you've ever lie lay in in bed at night running over all the things you've eaten and how you're going to do better tomorrow, and then you wake up in the morning and you have you have to con be thinking about food. This is a symptom of someone who is on a diet. And so I always see someone like that and I think, okay, can I firstly, can I notice that kind of behavior? And then where they do?

42:09 They often want to talk about their weight and what they're doing, because I see it as a signed disorder and I don't see it as inspirational, and I think that's a nice way to think about it. I also think if someone had lost weight and five years later they going I'm still where I am now, I'd say great. But eighty percent of people will regain the weight that they lose on a diet. I wish Brenda all the best, but I think reminding ourselves that if it worked, it would have worked by now we have tried countless times. And what the sad thing for me is in my work is I sometimes find that I've had to people have had to diet for a decade at least before they get to the point where they go, I've tried enough to realize this isn't going to work. And maybe you'll have these temporary lapses where you go, oh, maybe I'll just try thinking like this. But once you know about what is actually driving you to eat and feel out of control around food, you can go, oh, I told myself I should try and eat a bit more clean this week, and I guess that explains why I feel a little bit crazy around food right now. And then you remind yourself of the basics and you come back to a non diet approach that is perfectly fine to do, and it's normal to do when you're you're learning how to stop dieting after decades and potentially decades of dietes and decades.

43:26 I know, I really love that too. I think that that's a really probably a nice way to wrap it up too. Ultimately, life is too short to be miserable and focused on how we look and what we should eat. Life is to be enjoyed. That's where I've got to and after my decades of attempting to diet. But I think that what you said, Linda about normalizing the fact that yeah, you might have those setbacks and relapses and that's okay, that's a result of years of conditioning. That's a man. At your funeral, no one is going to talk about how flat your stomach was, whether or not you had cellulate or scrawny arms, and if they do, your friends are shit. And honestly, the truth is, you can't live a full life on an empty stomach, or you can't reach your potential when every thought keeps coming back to food and how much you're allowed to eat and how many calories you've consumed that day. It's time to stop waiting to lose weight, to live your life like go swimming, be in photos, turn up, start existing for this whole madness that we're only going to be happy when we finally lose weight. We need to stop that dialogue because life is happening and you're missing out.

44:39 Amen to that Lindy, thank you so much for the work that you do. Thank you for your time today. This has been amazing. I really appreciate everything that you're doing. Oh it's my big pleasure. Thank you. To find out more about Lindy, you'll find her on Instagram where she is Nude Underscore nutritionist site is Lindycohen dot com and her book, of Course is Your Weight Is Not the Problem, and it is out now in all bookstores. Of course, you can always find me on Instagram or on TikTok cast Done Underscore XO. Find out more about my books my online programs at casdone dot com. Don't forget my brand new. Audible original, The Imposter Solution, Five Steps to Ditch Self doubt and Stop feeling like a Fraud, is available worldwide on Audible and is included in the Audible Plus catalog, which means it's free to download if you're an Audible subscriber.

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