![176: Interview With Lu Uhrich [New Practitioner] - Seven Health: Eating Disorder Recovery and Anti Diet Nutritionist](https://seven-health.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/lu-uhrich.001.jpeg)
Episode 176: Today's interview is with one of Seven Health's new practitioners: Lu Uhrich! During our chat, Lu shares her personal story, details about the trainings she's done, and goes in-depth about how she works with clients.
Lu is a Certified Eating Psychology Coach, Body Image Mentor and Life Coach. She helps women worldwide to grow in self-awareness, find food freedom and practice body love. Lu graduated with honors from Messiah College and obtained her certification from the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. She is the host of the Untamed Podcast and has written for various publications such as MindBodyGreen and The Beauty Bean.
When Lu’s not changing the world one inspired woman at a time, she enjoys life as [anything but] usual with her husband and three young kids. She’s also an avid reader, tattoo collector, nature lover, Frenchie fanatic, baker and volunteer.
![176: Interview With Lu Uhrich [New Practitioner], Seven Health: Eating Disorder Recovery and Anti Diet Nutritionist](https://seven-health.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Banner-Ad-for-Blog-v2-1.png)
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 176 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/176.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. Yesterday, an episode of the podcast came out telling you about some changes that have happened at Seven Health and Real Health Radio. If you didn’t listen to that episode yet, I’d suggest checking it out. It’s not a prerequisite for listening to this episode or anything, but it will help things make a little bit more sense if you do.
The cliff notes for that episode are that we have taken on two new practitioners to start seeing clients, and today’s guest, Lu Uhrich, is one of them.
Lu is a Certified Eating Psychology Coach, Body Image Mentor, and Life coach. She helps women worldwide to grow in self-awareness, find food freedom, and practice body love. Lu graduated with honors from Messiah College and obtained her certification from the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. She is the host of the Untamed Podcast and has written for various publications, such as MindBodyGreen and The Beauty Bean.
When Lu’s not changing the world, one inspired woman at a time, she enjoys life as anything but usual with her husband and three young kids. She’s also an avid reader, tattoo collector, nature lover, Frenchie fanatic, baker, and volunteer.
I’ve known Lu for a number of years now, so I’m very excited to have her become part of the Seven Health team. I talk in the intro about this and about what we’re going to cover as part of the episode, so I’m not going to do it again here. But what I do want to mention before I start with the conversation is that Seven Health is now open again to new clients. This is for working with myself, working with Lu, who you’ll hear from in a moment, and also working with Amanda Bullat, who is the other practitioner who is also going to be working with Seven Health, and her interview will be coming out next week so you can hear and learn more about her.
There are a number of areas we are skilled at when working with clients. One of the biggest is helping women to get their periods back, so recovery from hypothalamic amenorrhea, or HA. This is often a result of undereating and over-exercising, and is almost always coupled with body dissatisfaction and fear of gaining weight. The work with these kinds of clients – as it is with really all clients – is a mix of understanding physiology and how to support the body, but also being compassionate and understanding psychology and uncovering the whys behind clients’ behavior and figuring out how to change this.
We also work to help clients who are on the disordered eating and eating disorder spectrum. Sometimes clients wouldn’t think to use the term “disordered eating” to describe themselves, but they see that they’re overly restrictive with their eating, fearing certain foods, so bread or carbs or fats or processed foods, they feel compelled to exercise excessively and struggle to stop, and/or find themselves feeling out of control around food and binging.
With these clients, there are symptoms that are commonly occurring – water retention, always cold, poor digestion, peeing all the time, especially at night, no periods or really bad PMS symptoms, low energy, poor sleep, low thyroid. There’s also common mental and emotional symptoms that can go alongside all this – compulsion to exercise, fear of certain foods, anxiety, low mood or depression, poor body image, fear of weight gain, that kind of thing.
With these clients, it’s using the same mix of understanding science and compassion to help them recover. At Seven Health, we believe that full recovery is possible, and I’ve had many clients who’ve had multiple stays at inpatient facilities where nothing worked get to a place where they’re now fully recovered.
The final area is helping clients transition out of dieting and learning to listen to their body. They’ve had years or decades of dieting, and nothing has worked, so they know it’s a failed endeavor, but they’re just struggling to work out what to do instead. What do they do without dieting? How do they listen to their body? What should they eat? They’re just really confused.
With this work, it’s often a combination of intuitive eating, a non-diet approach, nutritional understanding, and being able to guide clients towards listening to their own body. It’s this combination of things that helps them put an end to the dieting habits and to truly know how to nourish and look after their body.
It’s these kinds of clients that make up the bulk of the practice, and we’re very good at helping these clients to get to a place with food and their body and even their life that they thought was impossible.
If any of these scenarios sound like you and you’d like help, then please get in contact. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how we work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help. That address will also be included in the show notes.
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With that out of the way, let’s get on with today’s show. Here is my conversation with Lu Uhrich.
Hey, Lu. Welcome back to Real Health Radio.
Lu Uhrich: Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris Sandel: I am really excited to have you on the show again, but I’m especially excited given the circumstances. You’re going to be joining Seven Health as a new practitioner here, and I really couldn’t be more thrilled.
What I want this episode to be is a way for our listeners to get to know you a bit better – both about you personally and your personality, but also just a sense of how you work and how you help clients with the journey they’re on. You first appeared on the show in Episode 55, back in September 2016, so a bit over 3 years ago. I really do want to suggest that everyone go and check out that episode if you haven’t listened to it before.
For anyone who hasn’t, do you want to give listeners a bit of background on yourself? Who you are, what you do, what training you’ve done, that sort of thing?
Lu Uhrich: Sure. I’m Lu Uhrich. I’m a Certified Eating Psychology Coach, Body Image Mentor, and Life Coach. My training is in eating psychology, and there is a mindful nutrition side of that training as well that I got from the Institute for the Psychology of Eating years ago now, about 5 years ago. That’s where my training is from, but I have a lot of lived experience before that – and of course, after that, the best training has been my practice.
I opened up my own coaching practice under the name Lu Eats, because I am Lu, and I’m proud to eat, which is something I couldn’t always say about myself. Also because my last name is the hardest thing to spell or pronounce, depending on – if you are hearing it pronounced, you’ll never spell it right, and if you see it spelled, you’ll never pronounce it right. So “Eats” was easier.
Anyway, I opened my own practice and have gotten the best and most experience in training – obviously, you can probably agree – on the job, working one-on-one with women and just having a diverse range of clients and circumstances and life situations.
But some of you listening are probably going to want to know, what even got me into this line of work? I’ll just tell you all right now, this was not my plan. I graduated from college with a degree in accounting. I passed my test. I was a Certified Public Accountant. Crunching numbers was my thing. Coaching was never something I even considered back when I was in school.
But life has a way of changing things. As you’ll hear in the previous episode – I think, Chris, you said it was Episode 55.
Chris Sandel: Yep.
Lu Uhrich: I know I shared some of my history then. I really grew up loving life, my body, food – and when I say loving, I don’t mean the dynamic relationship I have with my body and food now, but I didn’t hate it, and there’s something to be said for that in this world and in this time when diet culture and beauty ideals weigh so heavily, especially on women and young girls. I say “especially,” but not exclusively, women and young girls and those who identify as women. But my experience was like, “hey, everything’s fine here.”
I was the biggest of all of my friends. I towered over boys and girls alike most of my life, and that was just what was normal for me. I lived in a family that encouraged us to be active and to be creative and to really get into whatever it was that made us come alive. For some of my siblings, that was sports, and for others it was more artsy endeavors. But my parents really didn’t pass judgments on our bodies or our activity or the way that we ate. My grandmother especially, who has since passed, was just so amazing at instilling a love of food and family tradition and pleasure, but also nutrition and nourishment in the way that she cooked and served all of us. Food was a big part of our family life.
So I really grew up at ease, even going into puberty and high school, and then moving into college and getting engaged and married. So many of those pivotal moments where a lot of women have stress around food and their bodies, I had none. Having children, still none. Going through pregnancy and the time thereafter, postpartum.
It really wasn’t until – and this is something I know I shared in the previous interview – my husband and one of my children were both going through really difficult seasons in their lives in terms of their health – I have a daughter with special needs who has epilepsy and some other medical conditions and developmental delays as a part of a genetic disorder, and then my husband also has a chronic illness.
It was in this time where both of those things were coming to a head that I thought, “huh” – this is something I’ve realized after the fact, of course, which is true for most people. For me, at the time I couldn’t have put to words what was happening, but now in retrospect, given the study I’ve done and the work that I’ve done, I know that I was really looking for something I felt that I could control. And diet culture sells you the lie that you can control what you eat and what then your body looks like, or how much space you take up in the world and what that space is chiseled like.
So I decided, hey, I’m going to do a popular diet and fitness program. It was one diet and fitness program. It lasted 3 months. At the end of it, I did lose weight, but I also lost a lot of life. I lost my period, my libido, my joy, and my sanity around food and around my body. I lost that body image that I once had that was really neutral, that body neutrality. I lost a lot of things, and I developed binge eating disorder and really struggled, then, for a couple years, in something I had never struggled with before.
I made the choice to get a coach. That was amazing and one of the best decisions, if not the best decision, I ever made – for myself, but also for the people I love around me, who thankfully were very encouraging of that choice. It was after working with her and then diving deep into research – I love researching things, I love biology and learning about how the body works, and that was really something that made me just in awe of my body and realize that there was never anything I was going to do to control it or to conform to the beauty ideals that my body wasn’t already equipped to stop me from doing if it meant helping me live and be healthier, and to be safe and sustain my energy.
Learning all the things I learned about physiology and dieting and how those things relate to each other, and learning what I needed to learn to be an advocate for myself when it came to not having a period and wondering what in the world was going on, and not really having any doctors who were able to speak to that because of their own biases – those were the things that really helped me to heal.
And then after that, I thought, hey – I couldn’t even believe – my eyes were opened to how many women struggle and how different their struggles all are, but how there is this thread of commonality between our bodies and what they’re designed to do and what they’re designed not to do, and how they help us to live.
It intrigued me so much, I wanted to study it more. I loved the change and the transformation in my life so much that I wanted to share it with others, so I got the certifications I needed and the training I needed and the experience I needed to go out and open my own practice.
Chris Sandel: Wow. I would recommend that people, as Lu made reference to, check out the first episode because we go through her story in much more detail. What I want to try and do now is just ask questions and go through bits that we maybe didn’t cover in that first episode.
When all of this was going on, how old were your kids at the time?
Lu Uhrich: I didn’t even have all three of them yet. But my family is built, as you know, Chris, through adoption and birth. We had one adopted daughter and our birth daughter at the time, and they were very young. I’m going to say, I don’t know, maybe two or three. And my son was not here yet. He was a hope in our hearts. We had applied to adopt again but were waiting. So yeah, that’s when everything started coming to a head.
Chris Sandel: Part of the reason I’m asking was just do they remember when this was all going on with you and you were exercising more? Or they were just too young to really be able to put any of that into context?
Lu Uhrich: I don’t know that they remember, but I do, as a mother. That’s something I know you may have experienced with your clients, but something that I certainly have experienced my clients sharing with me. The way they related to their family and the people around them was so different.
I remember not liking who I was or my lack of patience because I was hungry and underfed and overworked, and my lack of presence also, because I was distracted by food rules and what I could and couldn’t eat and what I should and shouldn’t be doing when it came to exercise. I remember a distance there that my children thankfully probably don’t. I don’t think that they would recall it at all.
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Chris Sandel: With the training, was it the eating psychology that you did first? Because I know you’ve done that and then you’ve done some life coaching as well. What was the order of those things?
Lu Uhrich: I did eating psychology first. There’s a life coaching aspect to that study as well as a nutrition aspect to that study, but the gist of it was the psychology of eating. Who we are as eaters, so not what we’re eating and how much of it we’re eating or how much we’re working out and when we’re moving our bodies, but more, what are we thinking, feeling, and believing about food and our bodies? Because that is going to dictate all of it. Understanding who we are and how we process and see the world and show up in it is really important to healing food and body relationships.
So that’s where I started. The life coach thing happened through practice, because – as, again, you know – working with women around food and body brings up so many other things. Usually, food and body issues, struggles, complications don’t happen in a vacuum. While there can be some genetic predisposition or often trauma can perpetuate some disordered behaviors around food and body, there’s just a whole lot of other life stressors and simple things that can get in the way, and then we go, “Oh hey, I’ll control this.”
Sort of like my story. It was my husband’s illness and my child’s diagnosis that really sent me going, “What can I control?” Again, that was at a time when I really valued the idea of control, and when someone was selling me this lie that I could control those things, and so I did it. I see that a lot. Life stuff really drives people towards this food and body control and scrutiny, because it’s something to distract or something to numb, or even something to be familiar with.
We know how to be frustrated at ourselves for eating a donut off-plan. That shame feels really familiar, whereas the shame or frustration in our personal relationships or in our job or in our family life or in our living environment might be harder to deal with because it’s new and it’s unfamiliar and it takes creativity and experimentation and time to process through those hardships. So we’ll just channel it all into something we’ve been told we can/should be doing. That was my experience, but it’s also the experience of so many of my clients.
So life coaching really came naturally because I realized that’s what I was doing a lot. It’s like, “Oh, okay, you say you’re feeling this way around food at this time. Interesting. What was going on in your world? Oh okay, so your colleague at work was pawning off a lot of things on you. How did you handle” – and then we get into this whole idea of, “Actually, my job’s not working for me and I’m numbing out with food or I’m numbing out with restriction.” So the life coaching showed up because it’s just a part of the coaching experience for me in my one-on-ones, for sure.
Chris Sandel: Nice. What was the gap between you doing the eating psychology and you doing that life coaching? If there’d been a longer amount of time, do you think you would’ve thought, “Hang on, maybe I don’t need this”?
Lu Uhrich: I think I need it personally, being 100% honest. I knew in my own life that – obviously in retrospect, I discovered that in my own life, it was the life situations, the things happening around me, that led to my disordered relationship with food and body, that led me to diet and over-exercise. And we know that 1 in 4 dieters is going to develop an eating disorder. I know that now; I didn’t know that then. And that’s all it took for me. First-time diet, there I went.
But I still probably would’ve just kept my own experience maybe insulated or thought I was the outlier until I started doing the work with women and realized, wow, there are deeper levels here.
Going to the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, understanding and learning that who we are as eaters informs the way we eat and the way we view our bodies and that really affects our day-to-day life was important. But seeing it in practice, in real-life examples of women coming to me with what was happening with food and what they were feeling about their bodies, but then sharing also the life stuff, the relational, job, environmental things that were going on – that’s when it all clicked for me, like yeah, this is a life thing. There’s so much more to it here. That’s where I spend a lot of my time.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I remember when we were chatting about this during one of our conversations, it’s like the actual food/nutrition piece is such a small component of what you and I work on with clients. It’s everything else that is really then having an impact on that. It’s true; what I work on and do with clients now in no way resembles what I thought I was going to be doing when I first started studying, but it’s actually the thing that really makes the difference.
Lu Uhrich: Absolutely.
Chris Sandel: I think the food piece – I don’t want to undersell it – can have a really big impact. But it’s often a red herring, where people are putting so much focus on that without understanding the context, without understanding the bigger picture and how this fits in or the strings that are being pulled that make you think that this is more important than it really is. So I would agree that that life piece is so important.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah. And listen, when we’re in it, when we’re there in the food and body struggle, no, we’re not going “I know that this is happening because of that.” I’m telling you, it was retrospect, and I’m telling all the listeners, that gave me the wisdom to go, “Oh, I see what happened there. The timing of that is not coincidental.” But in the moment, you’re like, “No, I just wanted to do this diet. What’s the big deal?” It is a big deal.
What happens later, the outcomes that usually lead clients to you and to me, the unwanted symptoms of restriction and micromanaging food and negative body image, those things all are coming from that one decision that we might not, like you said, have the context for – at least, not at first. But in doing work together and really working through our thoughts and feelings and beliefs, we can discover that, and that’s great, knowing that. Once I can discover what triggers these thoughts and behaviors, I can look out for it. They can be my little flashing neon signs to go, “Hey, hold on. Let me think about this here. Let me not just do the thing I’m used to doing or that diet culture tells me I should do.”
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Chris Sandel: I mentioned before about kids. How old are your kids now?
Lu Uhrich: My kids are 12, 11, and 8.
Chris Sandel: Tell me what their eating is like. What are the kind of things they’re bringing home from school or being out in the world in terms of diet culture or comments? How is all that going for you?
Lu Uhrich: I love watching my kids be eaters. My husband and I, we provide food and we usually give a range of options at mealtimes, and then our kids get to pick out of those options what they want. At that point, there’s no judgment. There’s no argument. We’ve laid the foundation and then they get to choose what they’re feeling like in that moment and in that time.
I don’t have a “You can only get a snack from the cupboard at this time” or “Don’t open the refrigerator unless it’s 8 a.m., noon, and 5:00.” No. My kids know that they have free rein around food, and we have a range of foods. We have your processed snacks and we have fruit and we have meats and cheeses and eggs and vegetables and a combination of things.
They do tend to gravitate toward certain things. Each of them have their own interests and desires. But for the most part, they’re really free around food. Just like a month ago, Halloween happened here in the States, and I am not one of those mothers who takes all the candy away the night after my kids go trick-or-treating for it.
It sits in a giant box – because there’s three of them – it sits in a box in our cupboard, and they get tired of it eventually. They pick out the things that they want to eat, and there’s some things that they don’t, and when it’s at its place where I’m like, okay, this is just in the way at this point because no one’s eating from it and no one wants it anymore, we get rid of what our kids have already showed us by their behavior they’re done with. They’re disinterested. It’s as simple as that. There’s just nothing to it. There’s no fights.
It was interesting; last night – it’s the holiday season here, so my son wanted to watch Home Alone 1. If anyone’s familiar with Home Alone, there’s the part where Kevin, the 8-year-old kid, is at home and he’s like, “I made my family disappear. This is great.” He raids the fridge and he’s eating sundaes with Cheetos, and he’s piling tons of sauces and everything all over, like chocolate sauce and sprinkles on his ice cream. My son goes, “Huh, that probably would feel unhealthy.” I’m wondering where he’s getting this conversation, but his mind automatically went to the food and he goes, “I don’t think he could eat all of that because he probably wouldn’t feel well.”
My son looks at me and goes, “I would probably do something like that if you left, but I would probably just make myself a small bowl and eat enough bites until I felt okay, like I felt like it was good.” I’m like, aww, you mean satisfaction? This is great. He’s just having this conversation naturally, watching Home Alone and going, “Oh, I see that, and that wouldn’t make him feel well. But I would really want to enjoy that, so I would probably have this much. That’s my thought.” I’m like, “Oh yeah, maybe you would. No big deal.”
So we’re having conversations like that. My 12-year-old is in middle school, so she definitely sees the dieters and the people who are scrutinizing their food, scrutinizing their bodies. That is not her. Packs a lunch every day, and it’s different all the time. Again, we don’t micromanage it, so I wouldn’t even be able to tell you, except for that I do the grocery shopping, so I know what disappears. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what she even eats, but there’s no judgment around it.
She eats when she’s hungry or when the occasion calls for it – a celebration, a holiday, sometimes when we’re all together and it’s something that we’re doing to connect as a family. She might eat for reasons outside of hunger sometimes, because that’s okay. But she’s generally eating when she’s hungry, stopping when she’s satisfied. She’s really, really smart and in tune with her own body and what she needs.
It’s interesting to step back and watch her. She’s a competitive hip-hop dancer. I’m going to brag a little bit, okay? [laughs] Her team won the World Dance Championships for one of their routines this year in New York City. When I say competitive hip-hop dancer, she’s dancing 12 hours a week at least. She’s extremely active. It’s so interesting to watch when she has time off of dance and when she’s dancing, what she eats. Her appetite changes naturally, and she just goes along with it. She has two dinners, one before and one after practice when she’s practicing for 4 hours in an evening.
But then when she doesn’t practice for a couple weeks – like we just had a holiday break – I watch her appetite just naturally go down. No one says anything about it, and she doesn’t even acknowledge it. She just is so good at being in tune with her body that as an observer you can sit back and watch it.
So it’s really neat to watch my kids have what I would consider a really healthy relationship with food at this point. I can only hope that that continues.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. They’re at an age where a lot of those – pickiness or unhealthy relationships could’ve already started by now. So if you’re saying that that’s still there with your 12-year-old, that’s a really good sign. I would imagine if you’re training that much, you’re going to get some good solid feedback from your body saying, “I’m really hungry. I need to be fed.” If that can just not be interfered with, that’s the perfect way to be hearing what your body’s wanting to say.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah. To me, I think that’s such an asset. Whether she continues dancing competitively or not, she’s already had the experience of knowing, “I can trust my body. It speaks up. It tells me what I need when I listen to it. I have the energy I need, the mental awareness that I need, to pick up choreography or to do my schoolwork.” She’s learning all of that just by lived experience now, which is really wonderful.
And she is hearing me talking to my clients, speaking about my work. It’s something that I love so much, so it’s always coming up. I’m telling my family, “Hey, I read this article,” or talking to my husband about something I’ve discovered or this question somebody asked me and how I’m responding to it. So we’re always having conversations about food and body in our house. This is my work. It’s what I do and it’s what I love, so I’m pretty passionate about it.
So it’s neat to hear how they’re just picking up on that, and then it’s creating beliefs and ideals in their minds that I think are really beautiful. Again, I hope that they continue, because I’m not in control of what my kids think and believe. That’s the truth.
Chris Sandel: With your husband around this topic, is a lot of it just deferring to what you think with feeding the kids or how you’re setting things up at home? Or is he pretty involved in terms of he has thoughts around this, and this is an interest area for him as well?
Lu Uhrich: I think he’s acquired an interest, and it’s multifaceted. He and I are both really critical thinkers. We both like to research and understand things, so if either one of us comes and goes, “Hey, listen to what I just read about” or “Check out this study” or “Did you know…?”, then we’re both excited. We’re totally nerdy like that. That’s the thing that draws us together. We’re both like, “Ooh, let’s think about this together. Let’s have this conversation.”
So I think part of it is just naturally me bringing it up, it enticed him to consider those things as well. But then personally – and I know he wouldn’t mind me sharing – he grew up in an Italian family as a chubby child who was constantly watching the relatives around him diet and criticize their bodies while he himself was in a body that was not considered ideal, based on the beauty ideals, the body ideals, around us. He internalized a lot of that.
Also, the reason I say Italian family is for him, and the way that he explains his Italian family, food is love, and there wasn’t a moment that people were not shoving food down his throat, whether he wanted it or not, whether he liked it or not. If you didn’t eat your Aunt Sally’s pasta dish, that hurt her heart, regardless of whether you even liked it or whether you were even hungry.
So there was some obligation there around eating, but then there was also this shame and guilt felt by seeing other people around him constantly diet and critique their bodies, and projecting that on himself that really put him in a place of not being confident in his body for most of his life. He’s a big 6’3” guy, and he just was not – he never found that peace around his body because he always felt like it should be something else based on things people were saying, but then also, food is love, so what do we do?
He himself had his own experience with dieting and then binging, and he lost a ton of weight. Actually, people started coming up and being like, “Oh my goodness, this chronic illness that he has is really taking it out of him, huh? Look at him, he looks sick.” And he was sick, but it was because he was dieting and was disordered around food. That was really what was happening. He had his own experience, so coming out of that and us being able to talk – he would probably say he has the best relationship with his body he’s ever had, and he’s 37 years old.
Only in the past probably 5-ish years has he really accepted, “I’m going to move my body when and how I want to, and I’m going to eat in a way that makes me feel and function my best based on my priorities and my access, and I’m going to enjoy my life instead of trying to look the part in order to be able to enjoy my life.”
So yeah, he is fully on board, but I’m probably more of the geeky one when it comes to always bringing it up, always having something new to talk about, being like, “Hey, listen to what I’m reading in this book” or things like that. That’s me on this topic, but he’s definitely a healthy participant, for sure.
Chris Sandel: Was he going through his recovery – I don’t know if that’s the right label for it, but going through his journey of getting to that better place at a similar point that you were? Or he saw you get better and that was like “right, this is something that I can deal with, so now I’m going to have my shot”?
Lu Uhrich: I would say he was not nearly where I was in terms of being disordered. He, like many men – not all men, obviously; we know that eating disorders and disordered eating affects men as well – but he, like many men, was like, “I can just do this diet and then just not. I can just do this workout program and then not.” It didn’t wreak havoc on his hormones and his mindset and his feelings about self and his body image the way that it had mine, so it was a very different experience.
He was like “disordered eating lite,” and I was all the way, like “this is a problem.” He was so helpful and instrumental in encouraging me to get a coach and to get the help I needed to recover, for sure. But yeah, it was very different, but he still had that experiential knowledge.
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Chris Sandel: I know as well we’ve talked separately on other occasions around – we’ve been talking about kids, but I know you foster kids and are a foster parent. Talk a little bit about this, because I think this is amazing, what you do.
Lu Uhrich: Yep, just doing all the things. Coaching women around food and body and also being an infant foster mom. My family, we decided together – two of my children came to us through the gift of adoption, and adoption is very complicated. It’s not always a gift for many people involved. We think of the birth families, we think of the children who are separated from their birth families. It is complicated.
It’s something that I didn’t want my children who are adopted to have this unicorns and rainbows view of without also making space for them to see, but also participate in, the level of care and love, seeing the full spectrum of this little infant is coming to us from a birth mother who, in one instance, really cares about them, but doesn’t have the means to provide a home for them. This is the choice they’re making that they feel is best right now.
There’s plenty of other scenarios as well, but allowing my children who were adopted, and also my daughter who isn’t, to see the process of it from multiple sides I think is really important, instead of thinking “a stork just dropped you off, the end.” That’s never been the way we’ve explained it to them. Adoption has always been something we talk about freely and openly because there’s absolutely no shame in it, but we also talk about it with the understanding that it’s not some magical thing that doesn’t have victims and doesn’t have pain associated with it as well.
Knowing that and having those conversations with our children as they’ve grown up, our family was approached and asked if we would be willing to foster newborns from the same agency where we adopted both of our children. This was a family decision, and we’ve been doing it for several years now.
But yeah, we welcome little babies home right from the hospital, and then we love on them, wake up and do the many midnight feedings with them, take them to their appointments and make sure they’re getting the medical care – but most importantly, that touch, that connection, that human love and nurturing that they need in order to function well and develop well over time in their future and in their future families. So we just provide that for a short time, for an interim between when they’re born and when they are matched with and legally able to be placed in the arms of their adoptive families.
Chris Sandel: It’s amazing. I’ve had a call before with Lu where she was holding a – must’ve been couple of days old baby. Yeah, it’s incredible that you’re able to do that and that you obviously have that real nurturing side to you. I’ve got a child of my own, but the thought of doing that – I don’t know how I would be able to cope with doing that.
Lu Uhrich: Honestly, it comes so naturally to us at this point, and it’s just a part of my life. I know I already told you, Chris, but sometimes my client will – I’ll be like, “Hey, got a little baby here sleeping beside me. If you hear a little noise, it might be them.” They’re like, “Oh, cool, cute.” Some of them are like, “Can I see it?” So we have those conversations.
But they’re newborns. They sleep a lot, and then they eat and poop, and that’s what they do. So they just come along with us, whatever we’re doing in life. We also, though, make changes and sacrifices to make sure that they’re getting the care that they need. Some of them have special needs when they come to us that need more advanced levels of care in terms of how they’re fed or when and why they’re seeing a pediatrician. We have a good team here that helps us out with all of that as well.
It’s something I love to do. I actually don’t know – I don’t ever want to stop. I can’t even imagine a place or a time in my life where I’d be like, “Sorry, too full, can’t foster infants,” because it’s just something so wonderful to do, not just for the baby, certainly not just for, or even mainly for, the adoptive family – even though adoptive families are awesome – but also when you think of the birth families and the choices and the sacrifices that they’re making, and knowing that the children have a place to go while they make these really impossible decisions is something that I love being a part of.
Chris Sandel: As I said, I think it’s amazing work that you’re doing.
00:41:25
I want to spend a bit of time just going through some different aspects of the work that we do and get your take on things, or how you bring certain things up with clients or how you work on certain aspects with clients. I know you’ve got a program called Mend that you run, and I was looking at that as part of getting some ideas for things that we could chat about.
One of the things you put in as part of that was: “I discovered that in order for these women to cultivate lasting positive change in their food and body relationship, they needed four things: knowledge, inquiry, experimentation, and support.” I want to just go through each of those and what that entails when you’re working with clients, and how that is facilitated when you’re working with clients.
In terms of the knowledge piece, what are you referring to when you say knowledge?
Lu Uhrich: The way it looks in my 10-week program is a little different than the way it looks and comes across in my one-to-one coaching, but the knowledge piece is really just the understanding of not just the nutrition, like you and I talked about. Maybe not even mainly the nutrition side of things, the calories in and out, the macro and micronutrients and all of that, but also understanding how the body works. How the body works on dieting. I was going to say famine, but I want to be clear – it doesn’t matter if it’s real or perceived; your body will react the same whether you are the one saying “No, I’m not going to eat now because this diet says no” or whether there’s actually food scarcity.
So understanding what happens to the body in times of not having enough energy input, and then excessive energy output, let’s say through over-exercise. Or just understanding what’s happening to their hormones or why their libido might feel like it’s gone off and run away forever, and what is happening in their bodies.
But also then I love talking about what’s happening in their mind and giving them the understanding around that inner critic voice and that naysayer, or the one who’s like “You have to look smaller, eat less, do this.” That voice, and knowing what that is and how to respond to it, and then how also to encourage intuition to take center stage in their minds and in their self-talk, and what that looks like and feels like. So there’s this knowledge component of understanding the way the body works, the way the mind works, the way our feelings and emotions contribute to our behaviors and our ideas around food and body, that I think is really useful.
But also, even getting clear with them like, what brought you here? What brought you to this place with food and body? Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the culture and that environment, but let’s also talk about your family environment or the community around you and the things that contributed to these root ideas you have around food and body that have then made their way to the surface and created fruit that’s unwanted.
Because most of the time, when women come to me to either be in my program or to do one-to-one coaching, it’s because there’s these unwanted symptoms, behaviors, feelings that keep coming up again and again, and they want to fix that. But the education comes, the knowledge comes, when we go, “That thing that you’re tired of, that’s really exasperating you and that I can totally relate to and understand and empathize with you feeling sick of it – I hear you and I see that, but that’s actually just the fruit of all these other things over here.”
Once we can talk about that and I can help my clients to peel back the layers in their own lives and circumstances that are all so unique, that’s where the knowledge component comes in. So there’s the personal knowledge, but then there’s also the general knowledge that I share.
Chris Sandel: In terms of the more educational knowledge, are there certain resources that you really like, where you’re like “I tend to recommend this a lot to people because this feels like it could be so helpful”?
Lu Uhrich: Listen, I’m going to – this is embarrassing. No, it’s not embarrassing at all. I’m not just blowing smoke, but I do often refer women to your podcast if they’re podcast listeners because you have such a wide range of experts on. Even in my program – I don’t even think you know this, but definitely linked up to both of your podcast episodes about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.
And I love talking about that with my clients because it’s really great to hear them start thinking critically and being like, “Oh, okay, so clearly I’m doing this. If they were feeding these guys, whatever it was, 1500-some calories, and I’m advised this on MyFitnessPal – okay, this is making sense.” So I love to see those eye-opening experiences in my clients’ lives when they’re just given information.
Certainly the book Intuitive Eating. Am I allowed to swear on this podcast?
Chris Sandel: You can swear as much as you like.
Lu Uhrich: Yay! The Fuck It Diet, Caroline Dooner, I love her book. Virgie Tovar and You Have the Right to Remain Fat. There’s so many different resources I could list, and I’m going to embarrass myself by not listing all of the ones that I feel that I should and naming all of the people that I think I should.
But yeah, I love – and I say this often – I love being a curator of information and resources for my clients, and then they can go and pick out what works best for them. If someone never listens to a podcast, they’re probably not going to get into some of your episodes. But they might get into an article about the same topic, or a book. I really go with where my clients want and refer them to those resources.
But I’m certainly teaching about intuitive eating as one of the main focuses of the work that I do, but I make it easier to digest, I’ll say. I love the book; the book is so full of information. I recommend it to everyone – and at the same time, I think it can be really hard to digest and put into process for somebody who’s right in the thick of dieting, pathological dieting, disordered eating, and eating disorders. So I try to take it down to the base level and explain it in really common terms and connect that way to the principles, and also try to make room for those red flags of like “Hey, and this could turn into a diet really quickly, so here’s the things not to do, or here’s the things to be cautious of or be aware of,” and sharing that.
So certainly intuitive eating. I am a big proponent of Health at Every Size and practicing movement and eating in ways to help you feel and function well, no matter your body size for the quality of life – but knowing, too, the social justice side of that, where access and opportunity and oppression play into the way we feel in our bodies, the way our bodies function and operate, and what we can do about all of that.
There’s a whole slew of things that I’ll share with my clients, but in my one-to-one, I base it on what’s coming up for them in the moment. If a client, when they come to me, is most concerned about exercise, then that’s where we’re going to go because, one, that’s where they’re ready to do the work, but two, it just makes more sense to follow the path that they are laying out, because I want them to know that they can be and are the experts of their own life and their own healing, not somebody else. Not a guru, not an influencer, but them.
So leaning into that and saying, “Hey, we’re just going to go where you are because that’s the right place to be” can be really powerful and empowering just in that sense of going, “Okay, so here is okay, right where I’m at? Wow, I don’t have to bend over backwards or jump to this point or that point in order to pursue my healing? I can start right here?” So in my one-to-ones I tend to go where the client has the most energy, where they’re feeling like they most want to do the work.
In my program, it’s laid out pretty systemically. I talk about self-compassion and my clients’ foundations and future self. It’s kind of like where they’ve been, where they are, and where they want to go in their relationship with food and body, and then we get into intuitive eating and a typical eating experience. How are you an intuitive eater around the holidays or when you’re going out to eat all the time or at picnics? Or what’s intuitive drinking, and what does that look like? We’ll have those conversations. Then body image, body image practices, talking about intuition and the inner critic.
So in my program I give them knowledge week to week in workbook format, and that’s pretty much – if you’re in the program, you’re getting it in this order. But with my one-to-ones, it really depends on where they’re at.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I would second something you said there just in terms of intuitive eating. I tend to recommend the workbook much more than the official book. I find it a really great resource, and if someone gets onboard with it, then fine. I just find it slightly – for some clients, they just find it a little bit more difficult to get through.
That’s why I think things like Caroline Dooner’s The Fuck It Diet or other books that have come out more recently, which is taking intuitive eating ideas and giving a slightly different spin on it or talking about it in a different way, sometimes can just land better for people.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah, absolutely. That’s what I do. I have a whole workbook in my program devoted to it. If you’re one of my one-to-one clients and we’re talking about it, you get my resources. I’m happy to share where I redefine some of the principles in my own terms and then expand on them in ways that I think make the most sense for the women that I’ve worked with historically, and it seems to be working so far.
00:51:45
Chris Sandel: Then the second one is the inquiry piece. Talk about that.
Lu Uhrich: Inquiry for me really is just about my clients being willing to ask the questions of themselves. It’s not so much – obviously in our one-to-one coaching sessions, I am asking questions, but I’m doing that with the intention of modeling for my client what they can do 24/7 on their own to stop and just think about things in a new way.
I’ve explained it before like when you look at gemologists and they’re holding up little jewels and crystals, and they’re turning them in different ways to see how the tone is cut and where the light hits and if there’s any “imperfections” and all of that. I tend to encourage my clients to take that approach with their own lived experience, where they’re holding it up to the light and exploring it in different ways.
“Okay, what if I turned it this way? What I if thought about it like that? What if I looked at it under this light or that one? What if I approached this differently? How could things change?” So that inquiry piece, I offer a lot of opportunity in my one-to-ones, when I’m coaching women, where I’m bringing up the questions and just thinking through it together with them, allowing them to just brain dump whatever’s coming out in their thoughts and in their mind when I’m asking them the questions.
But I also will provide them with, “Hey, before our next session, think about this” or “Ask yourself these questions” or “Consider the possibility, the what-ifs around this.” I’m offering them some ideas for how they can continue to practice inquiry when we’re not together. In my program, I have questionnaires and lists of questions for them to ask themselves in just about every one of my lessons, so they get that written out too.
But I think being able to ask questions and not just take our first thoughts or someone else’s first initial advice to us or what we see in a newsletter or on Facebook and social media or what we read in an article as just like “yep, this applies to me,” but really being able to inspect it and being able to relax into the idea that we don’t have to be certain and know it all. We can be curious instead. Curiosity there is something that’s so healing for most of my clients.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I know earlier you said you and your partner are really great with critical thinking. I think that’s an amazing skill to have and to teach people. I’m constantly trying to break my beliefs, like, “What happens in this scenario? What happens in that scenario?” and trying to find out, where do things start to break down? Where are there edge cases? Where does this not make sense anymore?
Just because otherwise it’s too easy to make assumptions and get locked into fixed ways of seeing the world. So just constantly trying to challenge things – because more often than not, the first thoughts that come to mind are incorrect, and they’re just habitual thoughts and what we’ve been trained to be thinking.
Especially if the area we’re working with people on is escaping diet culture and escaping thoughts around food and how their body should look and all of those different things, often the first thing that comes to mind isn’t pointing toward the fact that it’s correct and that’s why it’s come up. It’s more of a reflection of what are you most exposed to or what have you thought of the most, historically throughout your life?
Lu Uhrich: Right. Asking those questions and being able to go, oh, there’s lots of different ways to look at this. Maybe culture looks at this one way. Maybe my family tends to think of it this way. Maybe I have historically done it this way.
But what if there was another way to look at it? How might I feel if I just – which is going to lead us into the next one – experimented with living in this other way, or taking this different viewpoint, or perpetuating these other behaviors? If I just experimented with a new way of thinking and looking at something differently, what might that feel like? Because then you have your lived experience to go on instead of just what everyone says you should or should not do and what you’ve been exposed to or not.
Chris Sandel: I really enjoy getting into philosophy and starting to look at all the things that people have wrestled with over time and how we used to think about things. Becoming exposed to that, you can see how much thought has changed. For an individual, they can be like, “Hmm, maybe I can see my thoughts changing like that over time.”
Lu Uhrich: Yeah. I’ll often explain it to my clients like, hey, do you remember when you used to wear bell-bottoms or wide-leg jeans, or whatever the style was years ago? Remember that? That was so cool. We thought it would never end. And then here we are in the tightest jeans that money can buy. That’s the style now, is the “skinny jean.” Why do you think that changed? Did your preferences just change, or did society dictate, did the fashion industry dictate that your preferences changed? How is that happening in other areas of your life?
If you can look at it as something that we all can experience – fashion, even home design and décor, things like that – there’s a lot of really basic, simple things that we all experience that we don’t place as much judgment around, where our preferences and tastes have changed because there’s influences outside of us who are dictating that those preferences and tastes change.
If we can see it in certain areas of our life, then it’s quite simple to be able to apply that to these other areas of our life where maybe there’s more resistance, but at least we can see the possibility there that, huh, maybe everything people are telling me isn’t for my own good. Maybe it’s to line their pockets. Maybe they are an industry that makes billions of dollars for themselves, not me and not my wellbeing. What would that look like if I just started thinking more critically around the choices I made and why I’m making them?
Chris Sandel: It’s interesting you bring up the fashion one, because I now live out in the countryside. I’m trying to think of how long I’ve been out here. I don’t know, 6 years, 7 years, somewhere along those lines. It’s much more conservative in terms of how everyone dresses. They’re not keeping pace with the trends, the way that it was when I was living in East London.
So when I go back in to London to visit friends or whatever, I see such a stark difference. In the last couple of years, there’s just been a real big shift in terms of where fashion has gone, and I’m very conscious of, okay, at this stage, that particular thing, I’m just not really onboard with. It feels so different to see people in chunky trainers from the ’90s that I wouldn’t have even worn in the ’90s. [laughs] But I bet you within a short amount of time, my mind will readjust and I’ll be like, that just looks pretty normal.
What you’re seeing more of becomes the norm, the same way I probably thought about when I was seeing people getting into wearing incredibly tight jeans, which hadn’t been in fashion for a really long time, and then they just became the norm. So yeah, it’s been interesting recently because I’ve seen such a change. I’m almost watching it as a spectator because I haven’t been participating because of where I live, and my taste and interest in fashion is way less than it used to be.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah, and your experience can inform us all that you aren’t participating and the sky did not fall. You are still living your life and happy with your family and engaging in all of the human experiences that are available to you, and it’s fine. You can opt out. If we can take that lesson for what it’s worth in terms of diet culture and our body image, how wonderful.
01:00:15
Chris Sandel: What about then the experimentation piece? You have “experimentation,” and then in brackets you call it “tools and practices.” Talk about how that looks when working with clients.
Lu Uhrich: Right. It really does stem from the inquiry and the asking questions and the thinking critically, and then we go, okay, if I’ve always done it this way because I thought I should or because that’s what I’ve acquired from the culture or the community around me, what if I approach this a different way? What if there was another way to look at my body or another way to engage with food? Okay, let’s just try it.
Experimentation is really just giving ourselves opportunity to live in ways outside of the ways we’ve been trained or the ways that we’ve thought were right or healthy or good. Experimenting is just looking at things a different way, but then actually going out and living the behavior.
I might have a client experiment with, what if you actually didn’t look at the calories burned or the mileage done when you’re on a treadmill? What if you just got on the treadmill if and when your body wanted to get on the treadmill and then, when you felt like your body had had enough – or maybe you were looking at time, because so many of us are so busy and have a lot of time commitments – what if you just stopped, and what if we didn’t ‘look at the calories burned or the distance gone? What if you stopped using quantifiers for exercise? What might that feel like? What might that open up for you?
Maybe you realize you actually don’t want to be on the treadmill and you want to go to a yoga class instead, or you don’t actually want to be inside lifting weights, you want to go for a walk outdoors. But you’ll never know that unless you experiment with letting go of doing things the way that you have been and seeing what else is out there.
The same can be said around food or around the way that we view our bodies. What if experimented with saying something kind to ourselves in the mirror, following up a negative thought or comment? What if we experimented with questioning the judgments we’re having about our body and asking where they came from?
So I really just have a lot of different tools and opportunities for my clients to go into their lived experience in their very unique and personal life – so I base a lot of it on what we’re actually talking about in our sessions and what’s really going on for them, so that we can make it effective in their life. If I just had these tools that weren’t personal, then it’s not going to hit home for everyone.
But in their real life, we’ll experiment with doing things differently, and often it’s the things that there’s been disorder, judgment, fear, frustration around. We’ll say, hey, now we’ve looked at it in a different way, so what if we live it out in a different way? Let’s come back with some feedback. What were those experiences like once you experimented? How did you feel? What were the thoughts that you were having? What can we do from this? What information did that give to us that we can then apply to the next thing we do?
It’s really also learning that we don’t have to get things “right.” I’m definitely a practitioner who doesn’t even believe – I’m a human who doesn’t even believe so much in certainty or rightness as much as our lived experience and evolving and transforming. So I’m just opening up that curiosity and that possibility to my clients too, and saying, what if there wasn’t a right, but there was a good for you right now, or a best choice for you right now, or the next right thing for you to do? But not right overall, right forever, right in perpetuity, like we’re never going to change. That’s impossible. We’re humans. We’re living, breathing organisms.
So it’s really going, what else is there here that I haven’t explored? What else could I do?
Chris Sandel: The thing that I take from that is it’s not even about those individual experiments. It’s more of learning the meta skill of being able to pay attention and notice how you feel when certain changes are made and becoming okay, as you said, with uncertainty – but being just curious, and being like, “hmm, let’s try this thing out or let’s try that thing out,” and it not having to be – the goal isn’t that I get it right this time. It’s that I take something from this that I can learn.
It might be I do this and I discover, actually, that thing just really doesn’t work for me at all, and now I know that information, and that’s really helpful for me. So yeah, for me this component is just part of the bigger picture of having someone better understand who they are as a person and how to explore and navigate the world.
I was listening to a podcast recently, and it was a guy called Mo Gawdat. I think it was on the How to Fail Podcast by Elizabeth Day. It was a really good interview. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. He was telling a story about – I think his son passed away when he was 21, and he was having to deal with that whole experience. He was someone who was a multimillionaire, who was really depressed and had gone on this quest of discovering how to be happy and had really figured things out, and his life was much better. And then his son passed away at age 21. He was like, “This was the point at which I had to really test my theories, not in a vacuum, in the reality of dealing with this situation.”
He talked about his son being a huge video game player and just monumentally better than he was at video games. He was talking to his son, and he was like, “Do you know how to get through here? Do you know how to finish this episode?” His son was like, “The point of playing the game isn’t to finish it. It’s to enjoy playing the game. It’s to find all the little different things in here and how to discover that other thing over there.”
I just think it’s a really good metaphor for this as well. It’s not about how do I pack things and maximize it to the nth degree. It’s how do I open things up and really enjoy a thing to its fullest?
Lu Uhrich: Yeah, I love that. That’s a really good analogy. I may or may not be a closeted gamer myself and just beat the new Zelda for Nintendo, and I was disappointed. A friend of mine asked me why and I’m like, because I didn’t know once you beat it, you couldn’t go back in and – like you were just sharing – explore all the things and do all the little discoveries and get all the points and find all the seashells. This was me being like, “oh, it’s done too soon.” I missed the experience for that final objective.
That is so true and so representative of diet culture and the experience of so many of our clients, isn’t it? They’re going after what they think they’re going to get on the other end of eating “right” or having the “right” body – and again, I’m saying that in quotes – but this idea that their life is on the other side of eating in a certain way, looking a certain way, being a certain way, when really, life is happening right now, and we have the potential to miss out on so much if we’re not here to embrace it.
Chris Sandel: The thing is, for most people, they will never get to the place that they want to get to with the dieting or whatever. But for a lot of clients I’ve worked with, they actually have, and then they’re like, “Huh? This is not how I thought it was going to turn out.” There’s just complete hollowness to the victory. They’re like, “But there was meant to be more than this. This isn’t what I was really after. I was after all these other things that I thought would happen as a result of it.” That can be so crushing, because there’s been so much effort put in to reach a destination that they never thought, or they hoped that they would get to, and then it’s just not fulfilling them in the way that they thought it would.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah. I want to say something before we get too far ahead. You and I as practitioners are sitting here talking about experimentation and doing things a different way and “just try it out,” and it can sound like, to the listener, “Well they’re making it sound really easy, but it’s super hard.”
So just to say, Chris and I – I’m speaking for you because I already know how you feel – but we both know it’s much easier to say “oh, just experiment and go off-course and don’t conform.” It’s easier to say that than it is to do that in lived experience, but it still is so rewarding. And that’s where the support piece comes in that you I’m sure were going to ask me about next in this lineup of knowledge, inquiry, experimentation, and support.
Having a coach, having somebody there to support you through it, is what’s really so helpful. A partner, a friend, but certainly if there’s a practitioner that you trust and hire to walk you through it – because it does feel lonely sometimes, and it is isolating at times to experiment with going against the grain of this diet culture, these beauty ideals, this industry that’s everywhere that is telling you the way you should be and what they can supposedly do to help you get there. It’s difficult, and we have our own family relationships and experiences personally that play into that as well, not just culturally.
So just hear me when I say, lovely Real Health Radio listeners, that it’s not as easy to experiment as we might be making it sound, but it is rewarding and it is so helpful in healing your relationship with food and body. And that’s where support comes in, because having somebody in your corner to listen and understand when things are hard and be able to even give you pointers and ideas for how to be compassionate with yourself and even with others around you when things do get difficult when you’re experimenting with new ways of eating and moving and being in your body is just such an asset.
Chris Sandel: I’m going to 100% agree with you and echo what you said there. If it’s sounding like we’re making this out to be a really easy endeavor, I completely understand that it is not. If it sounds slightly flippant, like “just experiment,” that’s not how I see it and that’s not how it typically pans out for people.
In terms of the support piece, it’s working out, where do we start with this? What can you do? What may feel challenging, but you’re like “you know what, I think I can do this”? And that’s going to be different for different people. They’re going to do it at different paces. We’re going to have to find different ways of being able to approach it, because for one person, what feels like the next logical step, for someone else is a complete no-go and we have to find some other workaround as part of it.
So yeah, I’m in complete agreeance. I know you started to touch on it there – is there anything else on the support side you want to add?
Lu Uhrich: Definitely what I already said, having a coach or a practitioner in your corner is great. Access, opportunity, finances all play into that, so that’s not something that’s accessible to every person all the time. But there are so many online communities that are available.
I run one called Mend that’s not the same as my program. I run a free Facebook community where I do live trainings sometimes. I’ll share podcasts or quotes or ideas and answer questions. There’s so many other free communities out there for Health at Every Size and body neutrality and acceptance, intuitive eating.
There’s a lot of spaces to go on social media and a lot of resources that you can get, like this podcast, where you can feel less alone by hearing the same conversations that you’re having or the same ideas that you’re exploring shared by someone else, shared by professionals and other people just like you who are going through similar experiences.
The coaching, the community, I think both of those things are really important. I do also talk to my clients about – and this, again, like you said, it’s different for everyone and it happens in each person’s own time – but I do also talk to them about getting support where they’re at, whether it’s confiding in a close friend or a partner or a family member, somebody who is there that they can sit across from and look at and touch and see in this tangible way that they can trust with how they’re feeling and what they’re experiencing, and that they could ask to encourage them or just sit with them when they’re going through something difficult as it relates to food or body or beyond.
Having that personal support is also really important. But there’s something out there for everybody, and there’s at least access in one way or another for most people to get some sort of support and some sort of help.
01:14:05
Chris Sandel: Yeah. In terms of the personal support piece you just touched on there, in terms of having someone that you can talk to and touch and feel – I get the impression that your partner was that for you, but did you have other friends or family that really filled that role? How was it for you when you opened up about your own struggles and where you were at?
Lu Uhrich: This is such a good question. If my friends are listening, they’re going to be like, “I remember that.”
I went through this time when – yes, absolutely, Ken my husband is just amazing, and he was my biggest support through my healing process. He was the first and only person that I really opened up with at first and was like, “Hey, this is actually not okay, and I’m super feeling messed up here, and I need help.” He was the first and only person I told for some time.
In the interim there, I had had some food experiences with some friends that I reacted so outrageously to things around food or their questions about why I wasn’t eating or my obsession with counting and restricting and all of this stuff, that I had to go back later and be like, “Thank you for being who you were and calling this out in me. I sucked as a friend right then.” I did open up with them as well about what I’d been going through, and that was so helpful to have people that I could trust around me, to be like, “Hey, I’ve been hiding something from you. I’ve been pretty disordered.”
It’s so interesting because I had some of my close friends be like “What? I had no idea you were distracted. I’m one of those people who, just to give some context, no one probably could tell from the outside. Yes, I lost a handful of pounds, but I stayed within – I hate the BMI scale, but for the sake of reference, I stayed within the “normal” range, up or down. So for my doctors, they were like, “You’re fine. You can’t possibly have hypothalamic amenorrhea. You’re in a normal BMI.” For my friends, they were like, “Maybe your body kind of changed, but not that much.”
No one from the outside could see that I was struggling as much as I was and that it was taking up so much of my life. So that was probably part of what let it fly under the radar for those who weren’t living with me day to day like my husband, and didn’t see me in some really just outrageous situations with food, or with my body.
But my friends, they didn’t see me crying on my bed, being like, “I can’t run 13 miles, but I have to because I ran 12 last week!” Like these weird obsessions I had with doing more and being faster and burning more calories and all this. They didn’t see any of that. But they did see some reactions that I had that were volatile and out of character for me that I then had to go and talk to them about, and their response was “Well, you didn’t seem detached. You seemed here. You seemed with it and available for our friendship” – because I was also apologizing and saying, “Hey, I’ve been so out of touch and here’s why, and I’m trying to get better for myself, but also for you.” They were like, “It was great.”
I’m like, I don’t even remember. I don’t remember anything that they shared with me, anything that happened in their lives. I already told you, I felt like not a great mom, crappy friend. I know this in my own perspective because I was so detached and so obsessed, but they didn’t know until I told them. But once I told them, they were great supports as well.
Chris Sandel: Nice. With the detached piece, was that something you could work out at the time? What I’ve often noticed with clients is that their current experience is like, “Okay, I’m missing out a little bit” or “This is affecting my productivity at work a little bit,” but it’s hard for them to really see how much of an impact it really is having until after the fact, when things have gotten better and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I just don’t understand how I was able to survive before.”
There’s a lot of research around sleep deprivation, and when you’re sleep-deprived, you’re really bad at guessing how much it’s affecting you. You think, “Oh, it’s okay, my driving’s a little worse” or whatever, and then they do the numbers and it’s significantly worse. That’s often the sense I have when working with clients. It’s not always the case, but often in the recovery phase or when they get better, it becomes so glaring to them how much of a deficit they were in – deficit in terms of so many areas of their life.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah, that’s my experience with most of my clients as well, and I will say also for myself. In my own experience, it really was – I mean, I knew there were things that I felt so – I was more easily frustrated. I wanted to control – once you start controlling one thing, it’s kind of like the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. Once I started controlling food and my exercise, I wanted to control a whole bunch of other things as well.
When things felt out of control, I felt afraid. I couldn’t have articulated that at the time, but I noticed this extreme difference, certainly in my connection with my partner, and then in the way that I related to my children and just the capacity I had to be patient and loving and understanding. When you’re not hungry, it’s so much better. [laughs] So that was good.
Even just the way I related to my friends and could be really, truly present in the conversations we were having or in the moments we were sharing instead of being preoccupied with, “Oh my gosh, but can I eat this food that’s on the table?” In front of this really beautiful friend who’s sharing with me what’s really happening in her life and in her heart about something, I was distracted by, “Oh my gosh, am I going to eat that? Why is that person pouring me another glass of wine? I can’t have that” instead of being present with them.
I wouldn’t say that I noticed it because I was going through the motions, and I think that’s the case for so many of our clients. It’s like, “But I’m still going and hanging out with my friends. I’m just not eating the food or drinking the drinks. I’m still going to show up and be a part of that, just after I go to my gym session today because I can’t possibly miss it.” So there’s this idea that “I’m still there, I’m still participating.” But you’re giving everyone and everything around you, including yourself, what’s left, like your reserve, instead of being there and being fully present.
And that’s only something I realized after I had healed. I was like, oh, okay, yeah.
01:21:20
Chris Sandel: I think this touches on something else, which is finding purpose or understanding what is really important in life and how much the dieting or the over-exercising or all of the other components get in the way of all of that.
I’ve had this happen with many clients, and I don’t know what your experience was like, but you get to a place where you’re like, “I don’t even know who I am anymore. I’m really struggling, because if I don’t have this part of my identity or if I don’t have this X number of hours being filled up every day by this, what do I do with that time? How should I be spending that time? I just don’t really know what is interesting anymore.”
Lu Uhrich: Yeah, absolutely. Life gets really small in a way that almost feels normal because everyone else’s life who’s dieting and really bought into diet culture and fitness sensationalism, I’ll say – they’re all there too. So it can feel really small, but yet you might not notice because suddenly you just become the person at your job who’s really into fitness or who eats really healthy. That becomes your identity, so you have identities in this really small sphere of food and body that are hard to let go of, certainly, as you’re healing.
But it also distracts you from like, wait, but I don’t want to be the person who eats supposedly “healthy” at the office lunch table. I want to be the person who’s building my own business or developing this new software or making this difference when it comes to social justice or whatever your passions are. You lose sight of that, but you’re getting something out of the smaller things. You’re getting this positive reinforcement for this really small life that’s been built around dieting and over-exercising and all of those things, and your identity is there.
But sometimes you can forget for a moment, like, “Oh, this isn’t actually what I see my whole life being. I don’t want to get to the end of my life and people remember me as the fit one in the office. I want to have made an impact.” So what is that impact, and how can we start working towards that today?
That’s something I work on with my clients, too. Yes, obviously we’re addressing the food, we’re addressing movement, we’re addressing body image, but at the same time, let’s get into your life. Let’s go after the things you want to go after because there’s nothing more healing than being like, “Oh wait, you mean I don’t have to wait on my weight or fix my food to be just right and perfect and clean or whatever the adjective is of the week? I can just actually go start doing this thing and start making an impact or feeling connected and encouraged and inspired by something right now?” Once somebody breaks that seal and starts doing that, then you realize how small your life had become.
01:24:30
Chris Sandel: Definitely. One of the things I wanted to chat with you about is the body acceptance piece and the befriending your body again, or befriending it for the first time. I imagine some of what you were talking about there helps in terms of if I can find other things going on in my life, if I can see that my body is not holding me back from those things, that can be healing in and of itself. But are there other ideas, are there other things that you’ll often do in the realm of body acceptance?
Lu Uhrich: Yeah, sure. I think the first thing is to begin to look at your body like a partner instead of looking at your body like an adversary. As far as we know – I mean, I don’t know what happens when we die, but as far as we know, to have this current earthly experience, this human experience that we’re having, we’re having it in this body. So what are we going to do about that? We cannot separate ourselves in this life from this body. So why not just work together?
I will often use the analogy with my clients of – I just got a new car, so this doesn’t work anymore, but still – I had a blue, and we’re talking periwinkle blue, minivan for the past several years because I have lots of kids plus foster infants, and I need space, and I have lovely neighbors that we carpool with. So I was the blue minivan mom. And that was not my vehicle of choice. Not at all. I really didn’t love it. But it got me where I needed to go.
So what did I do? I maintained it in a way that showed that I cared about it and I appreciated it, and I didn’t have to love everything about it – or almost anything about it – but I still took care of it in a way that showed that we were in this thing together, and it was taking me through this life and taking my children and doing the things I needed to do. So I appreciated it with regular inspections and getting the oil changed and car washes and filling it up with gas and making sure that it had the energy to get to where it needed to go, and not tearing through really hilly terrain or something in it or beating it up, but taking care of it the best way that I could.
I’ll often use that analogy to just be like, look, your body can be your periwinkle blue minivan. That’s fine. It does not have to be this ideal. You don’t have to be in love with everybody about it. You don’t even have to really like much about it. But can you appreciate it? And if you appreciate it, what are the sort of things that you can do to build that relationship and that connection and keep it moving you through this life in a way that it feels good and it functions well and you’re getting out of your life what you want out of it?
It’s just this idea of like, okay, I don’t have to like it, and yet we’re still in this together, which I think is really powerful.
Something else I think is super powerful when it comes to body acceptance is – and this is going to go back to that inquiry and that curiosity piece that you and I have already talked about – just calling into question some of the things we think about our bodies. If we’re looking in the mirror and we’re like, “Oh my goodness, I can’t stand this flab on my arms” – okay. Heard. You’re human. You’re allowed to have these body judgments. I’ll never tell my clients, “Oh, just work with me and you’ll never have body judgments again,” because I don’t think that’s realistic.
What I will say is, you can take those body judgments and question them, the same way I’m asking you to question so many things. Just be like, “Is there another way to look at my arms? Or is there something neutral I can say about my arms right now?” Over time, that really will help to shift – I mean, it changes the structure of your brain if you’re following up these negative thoughts that used to go unmatched or without argument and you’re starting to say something neutral or something kind or look at it in a new perspective.
So just bringing new ideas to the focus around your body is another way to really move forward in body acceptance. I know Ragen Chastain – have you ever had her on the podcast?
Chris Sandel: I have not, but I know Ragen Chastain. She’s someone who I need to have on the podcast.
Lu Uhrich: Love her. I’ve interviewed her, and we’ve talked a few times. One of the things she said is with her body – and she’s a fat woman who is into fitness and doing all sorts of different really fun and amazing activities in her body. I believe she still currently holds the Guinness World Record for largest woman to complete a marathon.
But there was a time when she really felt disconnected from her body and didn’t like it. She shared that over the course of months, she made this list, and she said it was pages long, of all the things that were good or she appreciated about her body. It didn’t have to be about the way it looked. It could be like, “You breathed today.” I remember her saying, “I forget my keys all the time, so if it was up to me to breathe, I’d probably forget. But my body did that for me.”
She tells this story about how she made this huge extensive list – “My body breathes. It grows fingernails. My hair grows.” All these simple things, some more detailed than others. When she would have a negative thought, she would just go to her list and pick something and say that instead. She said over the course of months, those were the thoughts that came to her mind more often than the negative ones that really changed her perception of her body.
Of course, again, she’s a woman living in a fat body who is oppressed and judged constantly in our society, so she’s still up against fat phobia, weight stigma, and all of the things that are associated with being somebody who exists in a larger body – and yet the way she feels about her body is solid and secure at this point, she would say. Now what she feels is the society needs to change instead of her body needing to change. That was really just a process of changing her thinking and being open to new possibilities of seeing the same thing in a different way.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. What you’re describing is a lot of the stuff that I also do with clients. The way that I think about it is not liking your body is a learned behavior. You didn’t come into the world like that.
It’s something that took practice to get there, and the way you practiced it was saying things over and over and over again. Even with experiences where someone made a comment about you or your uncle said this thing at a party or whatever, yeah, that was difficult, but what made it such an indelible mark was the fact that you then replayed that 5,000-10,000 times over the last 10 years. It’s that repetition piece. If you’re constantly doing something over and over and over again, you learn how to do it really well.
As you’re describing with Ragen Chastain, if you’re starting to feed different things into your mind to constantly say different things, that’s how you start to think differently, and that’s how your beliefs start to change, because your beliefs are mostly made up of the things that you constantly repeat to yourself.
Again, I don’t want this to sound like a really easy process and you can just go off and do it and it’s going to be no trouble at all. Yes, it’s difficult, and this is only one part of it, and there could be other things that this particular kind of exercise doesn’t get you through. But it does help in a lot of ways, and I do think that the power of repetition in whatever direction that’s taking you, for better places or for worse places, it works. Repetition works.
Lu Uhrich: Absolutely.
01:32:45
Chris Sandel: The other part I wanted to talk about was the social justice component because I know that that’s something that’s a big part of the work that you do. Maybe just talk a little bit about that and how you bring it into the work that you do with clients, if that happens with some clients, with all clients?
Lu Uhrich: It’s happening with all clients, and that would really come back to when we’re talking about the what I like to call foundations of why a client is where they are right now in the way they perceive their body, in the way they behave around exercise, around food. Those things come from somewhere. We all have our own personal circumstances that those beliefs and behaviors and ideas come from, but we all also are part of this collective and this culture that feels a certain way about certain bodies.
So it always is coming up because what happens is when a client, let’s say, is afraid to eat bread, it’s not the bread that’s scary. It’s what they think is going to happen when they eat bread – which then, if we follow, tends to be something like “I’m afraid if I eat the bread, I’ll never stop eating bread.” Okay, so why is that scary? “If I never stop eating bread, I’m going to gain weight.” So why is that scary? “Because if I’m going to gain weight, then I might get fat or become fatter.” Is fatter a word? More fat? I’m not sure. But everyone understands what I’m saying.
Anyway, okay, what’s the problem with that? Then we get into this idea of “People are going to find me unattractive. They’re going to think that I’m lazy. They’re going to think that I don’t take care of myself. They’re going to make judgments about my health if that’s important to me.” There’s all of these things that then follow this idea of “I’m afraid to eat bread, but actually I’m afraid to be stigmatized for the weigh that I carry. Either I’m afraid to continue to be oppressed and stigmatized because I am a fat person living in our culture, or I’m afraid to become that.”
That’s the basis of a lot of the behaviors that we have. We as a culture have so closely tied health and weight, and we’ve so closely tied worth and weight, that we can’t not talk about the social justice aspect of it because it’s a part of every person’s desire to scrutinize their food and to manipulate their body, to avoid being oppressed and stigmatized or to stop being oppressed and stigmatized if that’s what’s happening to them.
So, of course, I’m always talking about it. It always comes up in one way or another, because I want my clients to be able to take a second look, to be curious, to be critical thinkers, and go, “Hold on. Why am I the person who needs to change or maintain or prevent or whatever the thing is? Why isn’t culture changing?” There’s this diversity of bodies here.
We can go into the science of body diversity and this idea that obviously we’re not all genetically the same, or we’d all look, talk, act, be the same. Of course, there’s environmental influence as well, but in general, we’re different. We’re all different, and someone’s body shape and size is generally their body shape and size, for the most part, regardless of what they do or don’t do to affect it over time. We can have short-term – what the diet culture would call “successes.” I would just say short-term changes. But over the course of time, not often are people able to maintain something that isn’t natural to their bodies.
So, of course, we’re having this conversation and social justice becomes a part of it because we’re going, “I feel that I need to change in order to prevent being stigmatized, in order to prevent being oppressed” or “I feel that I need to get smaller so that I have more opportunity and access.” I get that, and I so understand where my clients are coming from and why people feel that way. But also, it’s not their duty to change. It’s our culture’s job to change.
So I like having those conversations because I don’t know that you can fully heal without seeing how much the diet industry and patriarchy and even racism plays into our fear of larger bodies. It’s worth a conversation, for sure, and it’s something that comes up in one way or another in my one-to-one coaching and also in my program, because it is important to the foundations of why somebody’s here in the first place, hiring me to coach them through their recovery and their healing process.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I would say the same. It’s an area that we end up getting to or going through at some point because it naturally has to come up as part of that in terms of, what are your fears? Where are those fears coming from? Why do we have these different standards or ideals, or why are certain people more respected than others based on their body? So yeah, it definitely comes up.
In terms of resources, is there any that you really like on that topic or that area? I know it’s covered a lot in Health at Every Size, and I know definitely you mentioned Virgie Tovar before, and she talks about it a lot in her writing and in her book, You Have the Right to Remain Fat. Are there other things that you really like in that area?
Lu Uhrich: For sure. I already brought Ragen Chastain up. I think she is just so articulate and so excellent at sharing really complicated concepts in a very simplified way that connects with a lot of people.
She also is the number one resource I send my clients to when it comes to the conversations they’re having with their medical professionals, because she has a lot of really great ideas for how to approach your doctor and how to respond to your doctor when they’re asking you to lose weight or when they’re trying to weigh you for an asthma medication that is not weight-dependent. Things like that.
So being able to have those conversations – she’s somebody who gives a lot of great ideas for how to facilitate them, and based on different – like, “If you’re here, if you feel comfortable doing this, here you go. But if you don’t feel comfortable, then you can word it like this.” So she gives a lot of great ideas for people in larger bodies.
Ivy Felicia is someone else who talks about wellness for all. She also has her own Instagram account and other social media accounts for fat black women.
What I like to do – because at the end of the day, I am a tall, thin, dyed-blonde-haired white woman. I have one level of lived experience, and it is a lot of privilege. So I’m always sending my clients to other resources and wanting them to hear directly from people in different sized bodies, in different lived experiences, from different places in the world, to be able to get a well-rounded view.
It’s one thing for me to understand and to champion and to convey other women’s and other people’s stories to my clients, but it’s something different for them to hear directly from the source. So I like to send them there.
Virgie is somebody who I just – I love everything she puts out. She’s super witty, down-to-earth. I think it connects in a simplified way, but again, these really complicated concepts. She’s so smart and yet it can feel like you’re just friends in a room, talking, or you’re just reading an email from a buddy when you’re reading one of her articles, because the way she says things is so clear and so direct.
So those are two people who I love hearing from. The book Body Respect is also a good one. There are so many resources out there. If you work with me, you’ll realize I send you a lot of places – because again, not everything lands for every person, but when something really does land and connect with you, it makes all the difference in the world.
So I love, again, being a curator because there’s no shortage of wonderful professionals doing great work when it comes to Health at Every Size and body acceptance and cultivating positive body image and food freedom. Why not get people the resources they really need to help them go further?
Chris Sandel: Nice. One of the things I’m wanting you to help with as part of coming on board is putting together a resources list. This is something I’ve started, and it’s just a half-done thing that I need to finish off, because I want to have somewhere on the site that has, like, “If you’re after this, these are all the books that are really great. If you’re after this, here are all the podcasts that are really great.” I know there are a lot of people who already have that. I often send people to Jes Baker’s site, because she’s done a really great curated list. But yeah, I would love to have a resources place on the site that we can be making reference to and sending people to.
Lu Uhrich: Yeah.
01:42:30
Chris Sandel: I’m conscious of time. The final thing I want to ask is – obviously you applied and you’re now going to be working with Seven Health in terms of seeing clients and as a practitioner and contributing to the content side of things as well. What attracted you to the position, to apply?
Lu Uhrich: You already know some of this, but for your listeners, it’s multifaceted. One, you and I already had a rapport, a friendship long before you were looking to bring somebody on. I trust you. I love your work. I share your work with my clients regularly. I listen to the podcast.
You’re somebody that I respect. I respect all people, but it can’t be said that I’d want to work with all practitioners in this field because I think there’s a lot of people who maybe do the marketing really well, but then their coaching isn’t all that great, or they’re not all that wise to the full spectrum of moving parts and pieces to helping someone heal their relationship to food and body. Not all coaches, not all practitioners, not all nutritionists are alike, and you are somebody that I have always respected. So, you, I would say, and the opportunity to work with you.
The other thing – for people who are listening that already know me, you’ll know I don’t love the idea of building my own empire. I know for some people that’s really exciting as an entrepreneur. They’re like, “yes!” For me, it’s been a means to an end. What I love doing is having really great conversations, like we’re having right now – so podcasting is great, interviewing is wonderful.
But more than anything, I love coaching women one-to-one and helping them to heal their relationship with food and body on their own terms where they’re really getting in touch, they’re being compassionate with themselves, they become more self-aware. I just love watching women evolve in this way that’s so empowering and life-changing. That’s what I love to do. The social media, the building the business, the marketing, for me has always been a means to an end
As you know, Chris, since the beginning of this year, I’ve been exploring possibilities of what it would look like to just be able to do the end part that I love and that I know I do well, without having to do so much of the other stuff. I’ve explored a few of those options, but working with you – I’m one of those people who believes doors open and close for a reason, and for me, I feel like what I went through this year and the decisions that I was making for myself and for my business when it came to coaching, and certainly for my clients, was leading me here.
So it feels like a really good fit, because this is what I was after, and to feel that it’s mutual and to know that you wanted to work with me as well is great. It’s wonderful. I’m so excited for what’s going to come.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I’m incredibly excited. It was awesome when you applied and we got to chat again and go through this. When I first thought of advertising for this position, I didn’t know how it was going to go; I didn’t know who would be applying. To have you come in – I’m just ecstatic. I have a huge amount of respect for you also. I loved your podcast, Untamed. I’ve loved following your work. I love your content. I’m on your mailing list. Your emails are great.
So yeah, I’m just so excited to have you come on board. If I’m going to be getting someone who’s going to be coming to Seven Health to be working with clients, I want to feel confident that when I’m handing clients off or they’re just getting in contact to work with the business, I want to feel confident that the person who is going to be seeing them knows what they’re doing, and I have complete confidence in you and your ability and the way that you’re able to work with clients and get the results that they want.
Again, being able to see this from so many different angles and not get someone to a place where in 6 months’ time, they’re happy, but then things start to fall apart – this is getting someone to a place so that in 5 years, 10 years, 30 years, they’re like, “I’m so glad I did this. This has really been transformative.” That’s the thing I have real confidence that you’re able to deliver to people. So yeah, I’m really excited that you’re coming on board.
Lu Uhrich: Thank you. Yeah, that’s what I always say. I’m always like, I want you to never need to hire me again because you’ve become such an expert of your own body and of your relationship with food and your relationship to the world around you that you don’t need me. I mean, check in, because I love keeping in contact with all my clients and I love hearing their updates.
But yeah, the whole point is, I’m really guiding you to learn how to do these things for yourself. Inquiry, experimentation, that curiosity – yes, I have ideas and I have a ton of professional and personal experience to offer, but at the end of the day, it’s teaching you, like we’ve talked about already, Chris. It’s teaching a skillset so that our clients can take what we’ve taught and apply it to the ups and downs and all the changes that life has to bring, long after we’ve been working together.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, I completely agree. This has been wonderful. It’s great having you back on the podcast. It’s great having you now be part of Seven Health, and the listeners are going to start to hear more from you over the coming months and years.
Lu Uhrich: Yay! I’m excited. Thank you.
Chris Sandel: Awesome. I’ll speak to you soon.
Lu Uhrich: Awesome. Bye.
Chris Sandel: That is it for this week’s show. As I mentioned at the top, Seven Health is again taking on new clients. If you’re interested in working together or finding out more, you can head over to www.seven-health.com/help. That’s it for this week. Next week I’ll be back with a new interview. It’ll be an interview with Amanda Bullat, who is the other practitioner who’s going to be starting with Seven Health. Enjoy your week, and I will catch you then.
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