Episode 183: In this week's episode, Chris interviews Elyse Resch about her new book, "The Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens", and they review the ten principles of intuitive eating and how they've evolved over the years.
Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S, Fiaedp, FADA, FAND, is a nutrition therapist in private practice in Beverly Hills, California, with over thirty-seven years of experience, specializing in eating disorders, Intuitive Eating, and Health at Every Size. She is the author of The Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens, the co-author of Intuitive Eating and The Intuitive Eating Workbook, a chapter contributor to The Handbook of Positive Body Image and Embodiment, and has published journal articles, print articles, and blog posts. She also does regular speaking engagements, podcasts, and extensive media interviews.
Her work has been profiled on CNN, KABC, NBC, KTTV, AP Press, KFI Radio, USA Today, and the Huffington Post, among others.
Resch is nationally known for her work in helping patients break free from diet culture through the Intuitive Eating process. Her philosophy embraces the goal of developing body positivity with the belief that all bodies deserve dignity, and reconnecting with one’s internal wisdom about eating.
She supervises and trains health professionals, is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian, a Fellow of the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals, and a Fellow of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 183 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/183.
Real Health Radio is presented by Seven Health. Seven Health works with women who feel obsessed with and defined by their bodies. Using a non-diet, weight-neutral approach that combines science and compassion, we help you transform your physical, mental, and emotional health. We specialize in helping clients overcome disordered eating, regaining their periods balancing their hormones, and recovering from years of dieting by learning how to listen to their bodies.
We’re currently taking on new clients. If you’re ready to get off the diet rollercoaster and heal your relationship with food and body, please get in contact. 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: www.seven-health.com/help. The link will be included also in the show notes.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m recording this intro from my childhood home in Sydney, Australia. I’m out here on holiday and have another couple of weeks before I’m heading home. I don’t have my usual microphone, so I’m doing this on some iPhone headphones, so apologies if the sound isn’t as good as usual.
This week on the podcast, it is a returning guest, and I’m chatting with Elyse Resch. Elyse is a nutrition therapist in private practice in Beverly Hills, California with over 37 years of experience, specializing in eating disorders, intuitive eating, and Health at Every Size. She is the author of The Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens, the co-author of Intuitive Eating and The Intuitive Eating Workbook, a chapter contributor to The Handbook of Positive Body Image and Embodiment, and has published journal articles, print articles, and blog posts.
She also does regular speaking engagements, podcasts, and extensive media interviews. Her work has been profiled on CNN, KABC, NBC, KTTV, AP Press, KFI Radio, USA Today, and the Huffington Post, among others.
Resch is nationally known for her work in helping patients break free from diet culture through the intuitive eating process. Her philosophy embraces the goal of developing body positivity with the belief that all bodies deserve dignity and reconnecting with one’s eternal wisdom about eating. She supervises and trains health professionals, is a certified eating disorder registered dietitian, a fellow of the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals, and a fellow of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Elyse was a guest on the podcast about 18 months ago, and at the time when we were making that original booking, her schedule was really tight and we had limited time. Then when we got on the call, we had some real technical issues. I think in the end, we ended up speaking for only about 35 or 40 minutes, and it just didn’t feel like enough.
As I talk about in the intro to this episode, Elyse has so much going on at the moment that it felt like a good time to have her on for a Round 2. This time we had much more time to be able to chat, and I think the conversation is just shy of 2 hours.
As part of this episode, we talk about how intuitive eating has been hitting the mainstream and some of the upsides of this and also the downsides. We chat about Elyse’s book, Intuitive Eating for Teenagers. The last time we spoke, this was still yet to come out, so it was great to be able to chat with her about this one in more detail.
We then walk through the 10 principles of intuitive eating and actually spend about an hour on this. Personally, this is my favorite part of the conversation, as we both got to speak about our own client experiences with each of these principles and have a really nuanced conversation. There’s lots of practical ideas in here that will be of benefit to you.
Then we chat about the new edition of Intuitive Eating, the 4th edition, that will be coming out in June of this year, and looking at what has changed as part of the book, why things have changed, etc.
That is the intro out of the way. Let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Elyse Resch.
Hey, Elyse. Welcome back to Real Health Radio. Thanks for joining me again today.
Elyse Resch: It’s so great to talk to you again, Chris. It’s been a while.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, it has. You appeared on the show about 18 months ago, and on that day we were really pressed for time. I think we only ended up having about 30 minutes for our conversation. But I’ve had such great feedback from that conversation, despite its length, so I’ve been really keen to get you back on the show.
During that original episode, you were in the process of writing The Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens, which is now out, and I know you’re now doing the 4th edition of Intuitive Eating that’s going to come out in the midpoint of 2020. I know you’re doing Intuitive Eating Journal. So it just feels like a really good time to be having a new, longer conversation with you.
Elyse Resch: Perfect. I’m glad to make the time.
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Chris Sandel: As a starting place, do you want to give listeners a bit of background on yourself, a bio of sorts? Like who you are, what you’ve done, what training, that sort of thing. I know a lot of that was covered in the first episode, but just a brief snapshot.
Elyse Resch: It starts with the fact that I was an elementary school teacher for my first career. I think in a way, that really helps me in the work that I do now, because so much of my focus with my clients is about the inner child, the child within all adults and teenagers. So I had that opportunity to work with little kids for a while, and then I went back to graduate school at 30 and started my career at 37. I now am going into my 38th year of private practice, so I’ve been doing this for a long time.
In the early days, I knew I didn’t want to work with what they call the weight control/weight management, because I just didn’t like that whole idea. But people kept getting sent to me, and I was so uncomfortable. They would be sent to me for medical things like high cholesterol or blood sugar, but the doctors would always say “Help them lose weight.” I was so uncomfortable with it, especially when people would come in and say, “I just can’t follow that plan,” that we had created – even though I don’t believe in meal plans now, it definitely was a meal plan then.
I was very, very open to the first bit of literature I read on the non-diet approach, which it was called then. Now we’ve changed it to the “anti-diet approach.” I read a book by Jane Hirschmann and Carol Munter called something about binge eating or emotional eating. I can’t remember the exact title now. It was suggesting no restrictions in food. Eat whatever you want. Ah, it was called Overcoming Overeating. That’s what it was.
I was just – wow. I was just so interested in that concept, because I’ve always been interested in psychology, but I was also frightened by it. As a registered dietitian nutritionist, the idea of telling people that they could eat whatever they wanted was very foreign. But it was an opening to a whole different world of treating clients and helping them ultimately get into that point of trusting their own internal wisdom.
So that’s that part of it, and then the book writing started in 1994, when Evelyn and I were writing the first edition of Intuitive Eating. It has expanded, as you said. We’re going to be into the 4th edition on June 23rd, 2020. It’s on preorder right now, by the way, if anybody wants to take a look at what it looks like. It’s a cool-looking book.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.
Elyse Resch: Good.
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Chris Sandel: I know as part of the last episode, we went through your history and how you ended up writing Intuitive Eating. I’m going to get people to go and listen to that first episode so they can get more detail on that, but does it feel like we’re at a time where intuitive eating is hitting a tipping point or hitting the masses, where it’s become more widely referred to or talked about by people?
Elyse Resch: Yes, it’s all over the place. So many magazines have written articles, have interviewed one or both of us. There’ll be something coming out in Vogue. There was something in Vogue England – what’s it called?
Chris Sandel: There is a Vogue in England.
Elyse Resch: Yeah, I think there was an article that came out in that. It’s just all over the place. This is the time. Every time you look at Google Alerts for intuitive eating, it’s being written about constantly, all over. This is it, yes.
Chris Sandel: And how are you feeling about the writing that is being done on intuitive eating and how you would like it being represented?
Elyse Resch: When someone is interviewed who is a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, or it’s Evelyn or it’s me, great, because everything comes out just the way we intended it. But there’s so many people that are misinterpreting it, looking at it as the latest greatest diet – which is just an oxymoron – and we have no control over that. It’s very troublesome.
In fact, I think there’s a conference that I just found out about, a tech conference or something, and Weight Watchers is participating in it, and they’ve got an intuitive eating talk. We don’t even know who’s giving the talk, so it can’t possibly be something we know about or would endorse. So it’s troublesome.
But we don’t have control in this universe. We just have to keep putting out the accurate, authentic information about intuitive eating and train people. We have I think, oh gosh, 800 Certified Intuitive Eating Counselors – it may be more; I just haven’t checked lately – all over the world. We are trying to train as many people as we can so that they do work with intuitive eating with their clients in a more accurate way.
But what can we do? Isn’t that the issue of humanity? We really don’t have any control. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Is intuitive eating a trademark name?
Elyse Resch: No, it is not. The book is copyrighted, but the term “intuitive eating” – we tried to do that a long time ago, and they said no, those are just words in the vernacular. So we could not get it trademarked. Which is unfortunate.
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Chris Sandel: Talk then about the training that you do, because I’ve had a number of guests on this podcast talk about the fact that they are Intuitive Eating Counselors and the training that you guys offer. Just talk a little bit about that, because I think it’s wonderful.
Elyse Resch: It’s so interesting; it started in 2007, when Evelyn and I put on an all-day workshop on intuitive eating. A hundred people came, and that was the first certification. It has expanded. That certainly wasn’t enough. It has expanded to many levels of training, including a teleseminar that Evelyn puts on, including supervision hours that people can do, either with Evelyn or with me – all the reading of the books, several exams. So by the time someone is certified – only Evelyn and I do the supervision, so each of us can identify whether a person truly is ready to be an Intuitive Eating Counselor. By the time they have that designation, they’ve been thoroughly vetted, I would say, and have learned very much.
Chris Sandel: I know from the guests and their comments and people I’ve talked to, it is really the supervision piece that people get the most out of. Maybe it’s just the people I’ve spoken to that that’s resonated with the most, but I think it is being able to be in the room and getting feedback and being able to ask questions that is really the thing that people find most beneficial.
Elyse Resch: Yes, because the other parts – reading all the books, the Intuitive Eating Workbook, whatever the latest edition of Intuitive Eating would be at the time, and answering questions – but that’s not personal. The supervision is very important.
Actually, I rarely have somebody in the room, because when I supervise people, they’re not in Los Angeles necessarily. We do a FaceTime session or a Skype session, or occasionally a phone session. But at least we have this contact where we get to know each other.
I have found with a few people that they really weren’t ready because they hadn’t dealt with all of their own issues with eating. It’s so important that anybody who is counseling a client or teaching intuitive eating has worked through their own issues, because it’s inauthentic if they haven’t, and it comes out in ways that they would not even understand. So that’s a big piece of this too.
Chris Sandel: Are you getting more of that now, just with the idea of intuitive eating reaching more people? There’s probably more people who aren’t really ready for that message yet, but are still trying to be implementing it or working with people with it. Is that happening more as part of the training?
Elyse Resch: For a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, you have to be a professional mainly in health science, that type of thing. We’re not just getting people who are reading Intuitive Eating and coming to us and saying, “I want to be certified.” There is a certification called Lay Facilitator, and the scope of practice for someone who is not a professional is very different.
I don’t think there’s more of it. In fact, I would say there’s probably less of it because of having read a number of the books. I think people are starting to realize where they need help. And I have gone on to actually do some counseling sessions with some people who have wanted to be certified but weren’t ready yet, and that’s helpful. But I wouldn’t say it’s more now, no.
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Chris Sandel: Before we started recording this, we were talking about a conference that you were recently speaking at which can show the level that intuitive eating has reached because of the number of people in the room and everything. Do you want to just talk a little about that?
Elyse Resch: This was really exciting. Here in America, we have an organization called the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which registers registered dietitian/nutritionists. That’s our designation. They have a yearly conference. Frankly, I have not been to that conference in a long time because it tended to be very conservative and not open to intuitive eating or Health at Every Size. In fact, this year was the first time that they ever had a talk on intuitive eating. In fact, I think it was the first year they ever had a talk on body image as well.
We sent in a proposal and they accepted it, and there was so much excitement about it. Over 2,000 dietitians came. There may have been other professions there, but this is a conference for dietitians. The enthusiasm was amazing. The standing up and clapping, the reception of what we had to say was so gratifying.
For me, given that I’m older, I’m thrilled that this whole message – the torch is going to be carried on to younger generations. There were some people there that weren’t even born when the first Intuitive Eating book came out, maybe dietetic students or just having gotten out of school, and the first book came out – well, this is the 25th anniversary coming up. So if they were under 25, they had not known about the book.
Chris Sandel: Wow. Given that this was the first time that intuitive eating had appeared at the conference, and you’re saying the conference is normally not so open to these kind of ideas, how was it received from the organized perspective? How did they feel about it?
Elyse Resch: That’s a good question. I think they had some skepticism, because in the last moment, a few days before the conference, our slides had been looked at a second time and sent back to us, and we were told we had to modify some of the slides and put more citations on the slides and move them all around. I think they were very cautious. They wanted to make sure it was evidence-based.
The irony was that we had over 200 citations. We have many, many studies that validate intuitive eating. So they were already in the slides, but they weren’t necessarily upfront. I had to laugh, because they wanted a citation on every slide, and some of my slides came from my brain. So I was going to put, “From Elyse’s brain.” [laughs] They weren’t necessarily based on intuitive eating studies.
So we knew that they were a little cautious about us. I think the year before, there had been a talk on Health at Every Size, which was the first time they had done that, and I think it was a panel, perhaps. I wasn’t there, of course, but –
Chris Sandel: Was that the one with Christy Harrison and someone else having a panel discussion?
Elyse Resch: Correct. I think there was a lot of controversy, plus they didn’t get enough citations for evidence. So they were very cautious with us. But I don’t think they’ve had any problems since, and we got some really great evaluations. It was interesting.
Chris Sandel: Do you think you were under more scrutiny than others? Did you go to any other talks? Do you know if there was a citation on every one of other people’s slides?
Elyse Resch: Yes, we were under more scrutiny. There were citations, but we talked to a number of people who didn’t get this trouble that we got. [laughs] It was stressful. About 5 days before you’re leaving to go back east, and you have to now redo your slides and redo the order of them. It was stressful. But it was worth it.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I remember seeing some posts in Facebook about the fact that you were having to redo some of your slides and dealing with that, and then I saw pictures afterwards of the room, of this ginormous room with people having to sit on the floor as well because they wanted to make it in. It’s such an amazing thing for that to be at that place.
Elyse Resch: It was really thrilling.
Chris Sandel: There’s so many people who are wanting to hear this message.
Elyse Resch: Wanting to hear it, and so many people came up to us afterwards, and I got a number of comments from people that said, “I was ready to give up on dietetics. I was sick of it, I didn’t like it – until I read Intuitive Eating, and it has changed my life and changed my career.” And I’ve gotten many emails that say the same thing. So that’s especially gratifying from the professional standpoint that it’s making a difference in the satisfaction people get in their careers.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I just recorded a podcast with Amanda Bullat, who is working for Seven Health now, and that was part of her story. She finished up dietetics and was in a position where she was worried that the way that they are trained and the way that people come to a dietitian means that you can very easily end up giving someone disordered eating or an eating disorder or real issues around food.
She was in a place where she was like, “I don’t know how to do this in a way that feels ethical and responsible.” It was by reintroducing herself to intuitive eating – she said she’d been exposed to it at some point, but it just hadn’t gone in, given her state with her own struggles around food. But when she re-listened and re-read the book, it made so much more sense to her. And that was the thing that really helped her to start to be able to think, “Okay, cool, now I know how I can be a dietitian and help people.”
Elyse Resch: Yes, and when you are trained in this and take this approach, what happens with clients is remarkable. You can just see the healing happen. You can see them moving on in their lives and moving from a place of constant obsession with food and their bodies to freedom. If we as professionals are able to give that to them, what could be better?
00:22:20
Chris Sandel: I said earlier on about people using intuitive eating and often misrepresenting what it’s about. Are there common areas you see where it’s misrepresented and you’re having to – you can’t fight back against every single post, but where you’re like “I really want people to understand that this is not the case for X, Y, and Z”?
Elyse Resch: It is hard to fight back on it. I contact people from time to time if I can get the name of someone who’s written an article. Mainly, Evelyn and I had an issue with someone who had a website that had intuitive eating in it, and they were doing training, and they were not doing intuitive eating. They were doing something else. We had some legal issues with them until they were finally able to change the name of their website.
So yes, we fight back where we can, and sometimes it’s just out there, and we hope that there’s enough on social media, enough articles and magazines that came out, that people can see the difference.
00:23:35
Chris Sandel: Let’s talk about the Intuitive Eating book for teens. When did you get done writing this?
Elyse Resch: Oh, that’s my baby. That book came out in April of this year, so it was finished I guess at the end of ’18. It takes approximately 2 years to get a book out. From the time you sign the contract, there are many stages that one has to go through to have a book published. Finished writing sometime last year, but the book actually came out in April.
I love that book. [laughs] It was the most fun writing, and some of the comments I get – from adults, by the way – so many adults love the book because they are able to bring themselves back to not only the time when their eating issues began – for many people, they being in adolescence or even before that – but also they’re able to tune into the teen in them. As I said earlier, I’m very interested in the child within, but the teen within is part of the child within. So they resonate with the conversations I have in there, especially about rebellious feelings when we’re told to do something that we don’t particularly want to do. And that’s what diet culture does. It tells you what to do, and eventually there’s rebellion.
I wrote it in a little lighter way, and I also did something interesting; I changed the chapter titles. The titles of each chapter are not the principles of intuitive eating, although I do relate to the principles within them. And I changed the order of them, for reasons that I think would be most appealing to a teen – and now I see it’s appealing to many people.
Chris Sandel: What was your thought process with changing the order?
Elyse Resch: This is a big one, Chris.
Chris Sandel: We’ve got the time.
Elyse Resch: Okay. I think that if I had the ability to change – we did just write this 4th edition, but we didn’t change the order in that edition. We may have changed the order of two of the chapters, I think. I would probably put Satisfaction, if I had the full say in it, as the second chapter. That’s what I did in the teen book.
The reason for that – the first chapter always has to be Reject Diet Mentality, because if the reader is not in a place where they’re going to be open to something other than diets, they’re not going to receive the information in an effective way. So it’s always going through why diets are physically, mentally, emotionally toxic, actually, and why diet culture is toxic.
And then I believe that the driving force of intuitive eating – and I may have said this on our last talk; I’m not sure – is satisfaction, because there has to be a motivation to go from one way of thinking about eating, one type of relationship with food, to this way. I know when people are open to the idea of getting more satisfaction in their eating, they open up this whole world of intuitive eating.
So helping people understand that that is what drives intuitive eating then can help them relate satisfaction to all the other principles, because satisfaction really does inform every one of the other principles. For example, I often say to people, “Would you eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on your way to your favorite restaurant for an elegant gourmet dinner?” Inevitably, people will say, “No, of course not.” I say, “Why?” They say, “Because I wouldn’t enjoy it.”
There’s this intuitive knowing that you have to have some hunger to enjoy a meal. So rather than talking about hunger first, I like talking about satisfaction, because the leap then to eating when you’re hungry – not over-hungry and not not hungry at all – is so much more evident.
The same thing applies to making peace with food. If you have not really given yourself permission to make all foods emotionally equivalent, then how can you be satisfied in a meal, if you’re eating something that you think you shouldn’t be eating? And fullness, the same thing. You don’t get much satisfaction if you’re already full.
That’s why I wanted to put satisfaction up front. And I think fullness really can’t come until you’ve made peace with food, because how can you stop eating when you think you’re not always going to be able to get what you need to eat?
But I do want to say something right here, and I don’t know whether it fits in or not. I want to say something about food security and food insecurity. Not everybody can be an intuitive eater. If you’re living in a world where you do not have access to enough food or the foods that you like, you certainly cannot be as discriminating about “what’s going to give me the most satisfaction?” because the place that a person’s in is survival. So I want to make that very clear. Intuitive eating is a privilege.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I would say even with all of the principles, context matters, getting people to understand the context in which this principle was written and how other things can then fit into that.
As you say, if you’re living in a place where there is food scarcity, where you have times where there isn’t much food available or you have times where you’re in a food desert, so what is available is a lot more restricted – yeah, that’s going to impact on your ability to choose and what you even consider as options, because so many other things are taken off the table.
Elyse Resch: I learned this lesson so many years ago. I would say probably about 20 years ago, I had a client who came from a family – not that there wasn’t enough money for food, but there was a lot of neglect, so she didn’t get enough food in her house. Often they just didn’t provide her the food. She would tell me, “I just can’t stop eating when I do have access to it, because I’m always afraid of the time when I won’t have enough and I’ll be deprived.”
That was one situation where she was very insecure about getting what she wanted, and certainly people who just don’t have the funds to get the food. There’s a lot of prejudice out there and judgment about people in a lower economic group who are feeding their kids fast food. Well, you know what? Maybe that’s all they can afford, and we have to have more empathy for that. At least they’re getting nourishment. At least they’re getting carbohydrates to their brains so their brains will work and protein to their bodies so they can grow.
So we have to have a much bigger perspective and not be so microscopic in our thinking.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. Also, when you say “afford” there as well, it’s not just money; it’s time, it’s ability. There’s so many other factors. I can imagine that there’ll be someone who’ll be like, “If you compare how much it costs to buy something at X fast food joint, and then you can go and find some beans and pulses and vegetables and you can cook a meal for half that price” – but there’s not just the money aspect of it. There is time aspect of it. There are so many things that then also come into that as well.
Elyse Resch: Correct. If somebody’s having to work two, three jobs just to pay the rent, they’re not going to have the time. They barely have enough time to sleep and spend the time they want with their family.
Chris Sandel: I also think looking after your health and making health a priority is also a privilege. When you are under stress, it’s like, “How do I get through this week? How do I get through this month?” You’re not thinking about “What am I going to do to prevent dementia when I’m in my seventies?” It’s just not that important.
Elyse Resch: I think those of us who have privilege – some of us; I shouldn’t say those of us – some people with privilege really don’t have this concept that you’re talking about, really whole judgment. We have to be educating people to be more open-minded and understand social justice. I’m glad we’re talking about this.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, definitely. With the Intuitive Eating book for teens, I’m trying to think of things that will be very specific for the teen market. Are you covering concepts like going through puberty and the additional changes this could then have from an intuitive eating perspective in terms of satisfaction or hunger or that kind of thing?
Elyse Resch: I don’t know if I specifically wrote that. [laughs] I wish I had talked to you beforehand. There’s a lot of psychological aspects of change. It is geared mainly from 13 on, so it’s not for children per se – although there can be some very advanced children who could read this. But it’s a good point if you’re talking about someone in puberty, which tends to be a little bit earlier than 13.
Chris Sandel: With the book, I guess there’s the part where as a teenager, some people may have gone through experiences of dieting, but there’ll be a lot of people who maybe pick up that book who haven’t gone through that experience. Are you almost having to tell people about “these are the things that can happen,” because there hasn’t been that same level of lived experience?
Elyse Resch: Correct. One of the goals of the book is prevention. Prevention of going into diets, which can raise the risk of having an eating disorder. So yes, I try to address, if you haven’t, maybe you know somebody in your life who has been a diet, or a parent has been. But this is to help them understand why diets are going to take them down a road that is not going to make them happy. So it’s both. It’s those who have had the lived experience and those who have not, but can think about it, or know somebody who might.
A lot of kids themselves actually haven’t, but they’re hearing their parents on a regular basis talk about it. I have a client who was in last night who has a pretty severe eating disorder, and she was telling me about how her father, even to this day, is talking about the diet he’s on. He’s taking pictures of himself before so that he can see the difference when he loses weight.
This is someone who already has an eating disorder; however, in some families, there are kids who haven’t yet, but they’re hearing this. The more they get brainwashed about diets, the more they need other tools or other information, other ways of thinking, so that they don’t fall into the trap themselves.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. Are there things in the book that are specific to teens that didn’t go into the other Intuitive Eating Workbook? You obviously mentioned about Satisfaction coming earlier, but are there other things where you were like, “this is really specific for that market”?
Elyse Resch: Yes. I was looking at the developmental stage that teenagers are in. This is the point in life where it’s absolutely appropriate for a teenager to – not only appropriate, but necessary – to individuate, to separate, to have their own beliefs, and to rebel.
So I did talk a lot about other ways that they might be rebelling and how intuitive eating might be the only place in their life where they might have some agency and autonomy, because there are so many aspects of their life that are being controlled –t he homework they have to do, the time they have to be in at night, where they can go with friends. But this is all about them. This is about really tuning in to their inner world. I also talked about how to address parents who have a different opinion and how to learn to speak up and how risky that might be.
But I think the key is the developmental stage of adolescence, which is directly at this place where teens rebel, and they do it in all kinds of different ways. So to help them see how going on a diet is only going to lead them to rebellion in a way that’s going to be dangerous for them, toxic for them emotionally, feeling like failures if they fall off the diet – so they’re rebelling, and then they’re “failing,” and then feeling bad. So really, helping to get to them and speak to that stage so that they feel heard.
Chris Sandel: I’ve gone through the book, and what I like about it is there’s so much of it that’s useful outside of eating and moving their body. Just learning skills like self-compassion and gratitude and sitting with difficult feelings and self-care, and I think there was rehearsing difficult upcoming situations – things that are so important for all humans and for adult life.
So to be exposing a teen to that kind of information – and I’m lucky; I haven’t had any issues around food, but I would’ve definitely loved to have this book as a teenager to then learn about those things as well as about body signals and hunger and fullness and satisfaction and all of those components.
Elyse Resch: Thank you so much for bringing that up and pointing that out. I did spend a lot of time on gratitude, and especially compassion. Self-compassion, compassion for others, looking at how negative it is to compare oneself to others. Here’s a big one: understanding that a person’s size and shape is DNA programmed.
I was really trying to help them have compassion for themselves and not have judgment of others, because there’s so much out there in the world about – this is what diet culture does – “everybody should look a certain way, and if you regulate and control your food, you’ll have this size, this culturally thin ideal.” Just helping them understand this radical acceptance that our bodies are going to be what they’re going to be – size, shape, height, eye color, all of that.
But getting away from trying to change their bodies, appreciating their bodies for all the things their bodies can do – if they can. There’s some illustrations in this book for each chapter. I just wanted to put some little picture in there, and there’s one of a girl sitting in her wheelchair, because there are so many different situations that people have to deal with, and to be aware of that too. They’re not going to be able to move the way somebody who is able can move.
So I wanted to open their minds to things that they may have never thought about and they may not be getting from their families.
00:39:55
Chris Sandel: You mentioned before guiding teens in terms of how to talk with parents or others. I was thinking about that in most situations, teenagers are not going to be the ones that are doing the food shopping or doing the cooking. So how does that factor in, and what’s the advice that’s being given around that?
Elyse Resch: First of all, to help them see that it’s kind of scary to speak up sometimes, especially – there are homes, but they’re rare, where kids their whole lives are encouraged to speak up and talk about their feelings and their needs. But unfortunately, that’s not universal. So to help them perhaps start by speaking up to a safe person about what they’re thinking, and ultimately get to the point of being able to speak up to a parent.
I also address sometimes they’re not going to be heard, and to know that eventually in their lives one day, they will be. They’ll find people in their lives that will listen to them. But not to self-silence. I didn’t write it as “yeah, just do this and it’ll be fine.” I let them know that it could be a very scary and difficult thing to do.
Chris Sandel: Also, you said something earlier about the inner child, even as adults. I think this has been brought hugely to my attention over the last 2 years, having a child and suddenly being a parent and feeling like I don’t think anything’s changed. I’m still a child. I’m still barely able to look after myself, and yet now I have this role put on me as being responsible for a small human in the world and caring for them as they develop. So yeah, the inner child bit does really speak to me.
Elyse Resch: I do want to say that I think the most helpful thing to talk to my clients about is to help them understand that they carry with them, their whole lives, the feelings, the emotions, that they had when they were little, and that that’s normal and healthy and appropriate.
We try to often push them away if they don’t seem like positive feelings and emotions. You’ve heard people say, “Oh no, I’m not jealous, I’m never jealous” or “I’m not an envious person” or “No, I’m not angry.” And that’s not possible. We have all of these feelings. I think the more that people own those feelings and understand that they carry this inner child with them all of their lives, the less chance there is for acting out of those feelings.
It’s such a sad thing that I think about when I read an article about someone who has killed his family and himself. You hear from neighbors, you’ll read in the paper, “Oh my God, he was the nicest guy. We never imagined that he would do something like that.” But to me, that’s someone who was not at all in touch with his rage, and he then put it inward and to his family. I know that’s kind of an awful thing to talk about, but that’s just one example, an extreme example, about how if you’re not in touch with these inner feelings, how they can affect life – in this case, destroy life.
The jealousy thing and the envy thing, especially envy, I think, for adolescents, but for everyone, thinking about what somebody else has that you don’t have and wishing for it and not understanding that envy is a normal human emotion – because there’s always going to be somebody that has something that you don’t have. That’s just part of life. Being able to say, “Okay, I get it. This is how I’m feeling. I’m envious, and I am not going to do something destructive to myself or act out at that person because of this” – these are pretty deep psychological issues.
I think it was important for me to let the adolescents know about that, but also with all of my adult clients. And as you’re saying, you’ve still got that kid right there, so how nice to own it, you know?
Chris Sandel: When I think back to being an adolescent and a teenager – I think I’ve said this before on the podcast – there is no amount of money in the world that would make me want to go back there. It is just such a difficult time, and you are just trying to find your way in the world and work out who you are. As I said before, all of the pieces that you’re talking about in terms of the gratitude and self-compassion and sitting with difficult feelings, etc., is just so helpful to start to learn at that stage.
I don’t know if I – I can’t remember coming across these kinds of concepts. I think these would be the kinds of things I was exposed to much more in my early twenties, when I started reading about this. And maybe this was demonstrated to me through parents and family and other things, but in terms of me really getting these as concepts and reading about them, it was much later in my life.
Elyse Resch: Yes. A lot of young people – or I would say most – are probably not in therapy. I wanted it to be a therapeutic book. And I do mention several times in it, if there is something even deeper going on, see if you can find some more help with a therapist.
But thinking about the fact that – boy, when I was a teenager – I didn’t get into therapy until I was 35. So yes, had I had that book, it really would’ve explained some of the feelings I had. I kind of put myself in there also in that I had a very controlling and unpredictable and sometimes pretty mean father. I could never speak up, so I didn’t do my acting out until I was probably in my late twenties and thirties.
So I think it’s helpful for teens to understand what’s going on inside of them emotionally.
00:46:20
Chris Sandel: You said that adults are also really liking this book. Again, you talked about the satisfaction piece being part of it, but are there other reasons why you think this has resonated so well with adults?
Elyse Resch: I’ll give you an example. One of my clients, we had decided to do the workbook together, where she would read something and do some of the exercises, and then when we talked the next time, she would tell me about them.
She had a breakthrough – and I’d been working with this woman for quite a while – she had such a breakthrough about something that had happened to her as a teenager, that caused her to turn to food for comfort in a pretty big way. Not that we don’t all get to have some comfort from food; that’s part of intuitive eating – but to a point that she was really pushing away her feelings with food. It brought her back to that place, and it was huge. It was a huge breakthrough. She’s doing so much better now in terms of dealing with her feelings and understanding herself.
I think that that can happen when people look back at that age, because we don’t have much self-reflection as teens. I mean, most teens don’t. So for the adults to be able to go in there and look back at what it felt like for them to be teenagers and how that impacted their relationship with food and their bodies and how susceptible and vulnerable they were to diet culture – it’s a big thing.
I’ve had a couple people say, “Oh my God, I love that book. It’s just great because it speaks directly to me.”
Chris Sandel: And the same with eating disorder recovery? Is this something that people have started to use as part of that?
Elyse Resch: Well, my personal opinion is that the ultimate healing of an eating disorder is intuitive eating. There is a great big misconception out in the eating disorder world – I hear it over and over – “You can’t use intuitive eating with an eating disorder because people who are healing from their eating disorder are not in touch with their hunger and fullness.” And I will say, of course they’re not. [laughs] Not accurately, yes.
But there are 10 principles of intuitive eating, so working on making peace with food, working on learning about how satisfying food could be as they are healing, learning about the fact that they’re not going to have to be scared – so many people come to me with eating disorders who are terrified of healing because they don’t think they’re going to know how to eat. Helping them see that there’s going to be this freedom that they will have to trust their bodies and their inner signals as they heal is very motivating for them.
And for teenagers who are in the throes of an eating disorder, using the principles of intuitive eating and helping them see that they will be able to trust their fullness at some point – they can’t right now because they may have slowed stomach emptying if they’ve been doing a lot of restricting in their eating, or if they’ve been binging, they don’t really recognize necessarily normal hunger and fullness signals. But to know that one day they will.
There’s a client I had many, many years ago who said that reading Intuitive Eating – and I think at that point it must’ve been the 2nd edition – she said it gave her the hope. She had been hospitalized 11 times in 4 years, from the ages of 19, I think, to 23. Or maybe it was 17 to 21, something around there. She said, “Reading about intuitive eating gave me this hope that one day, I could be a normal eater.” She healed fully. I kept in touch with her for a long time, and her eating disorder was fully over.
So yes, I’m using it with teenagers who are in – maybe not the very first stage of their eating disorder, but as they start to re-nourish a bit and can really think, then it’s helpful for them.
Chris Sandel: I would say the same with clients that I work with who are recovering from eating disorders. Even the hunger and fullness piece, we can start to look at and we can say, “Look, this might not be a reliable signal for you, but can you start to notice when there are times where it is more reliable, when there are times where it’s not more reliable? What happens in times of stress and how that impacts on it?”
So it’s not that this is the thing that you’re now using as a really reliable measure, but just as a way of starting to get more and more in tune with their body.
Elyse Resch: Yes. One of the things I have said, even with my clients who are pretty severely underweight: if you feel hunger, that is accurate. How great you actually can access hunger from time to time. It doesn’t take very long after they’ve had some re-nourishment to start feeling hunger throughout the day. It’s just the fullness one that’s the complicated one, especially if they’re undernourished and underweight. They’re not going to get accurate fullness signals. You can’t tell someone with anorexia nervosa to eat only when they’re hungry because they’re rarely hungry.
But yes, it’s something we can start talking about, and again, use it as a model for when their bodies are working again. When they’re fully nourished, when their brains are nourished, those signals are going to be accurate – and there are times when they won’t, like if you have a cold and you don’t have much hunger, but you use then the cognitive part of your brain to help you to eat anyway. Or, as you said, Chris, if you’re stressed, yeah, sometimes hunger can go away completely.
So to start talking about those things within the context of the eating disorder is important.
Chris Sandel: I also think you can get a sense of where someone is as part of their recovery. When they feel like “I’m doing better, I’m able to notice that hunger and fullness,” and then they have a period where that starts to go for them and they’re having more difficulty understanding, that can be then a red flag, where they’re like, “Hang on a second. I’m obviously not doing things to properly support my body, because a couple of weeks ago I was able to do this piece, and now I’m not. What’s going on here?” So I find that it can be often an early warning sign.
Elyse Resch: Yeah, I often say it’s a red flag when things are happening that haven’t been happening, as you just said. “Oh, yes, what is going on?”
00:53:20
I don’t know if I talked about this the last time we talked – did I talk about my spiral of healing model?
Chris Sandel: You did not. Not that I remember.
Elyse Resch: So one day I had this thought – and I’m not an artist, but I drew something that looked like a spiral. Just a coil going upwards and having part of it cross over the center. I don’t know if I’m describing it. Just imagine a spiral going upwards.
I tell my clients on a regular basis, this process of healing, whether it’s a full-blown eating disorder or disordered eating, there are going to be times when it’s going smoothly and times when you may have some older behaviors come back. Those are not times to say, “I blew it, I regressed, I’m not doing well.” They’re just times to say, “This is my opportunity for learning.”
I often like to say come from a place of curiosity, not judgment. “Okay, I see that I really ate way more than I needed, and I was over-full. Why did that happen? Okay, maybe I just didn’t eat enough all day.” Neuropeptide Y, that chemical in the brain is released when you’re in a semi-starvation state comes out and you can’t stop eating. “Okay, maybe this is giving me a message that I need to eat more regularly during the day. Or maybe I started having old diet culture thoughts and I started judging myself because I wanted a piece of cake at lunchtime, and then I went on to eating four pieces. Okay, I need to look at that.”
It’s such a wonderful opportunity, as you’re saying, letting you know if things are not going quite the way they have been that something’s coming up for you to deal with.
Chris Sandel: The curiosity piece, which is something I talk about a lot with clients – and maybe intuitive eating was where I learnt about that – but the more people can approach this part of recovery or learning how to eat again from a place of curiosity, I think it just makes the whole process so much easier. It isn’t always easy, but the more that that comes into play, it really does help.
Elyse Resch: I think one of the biggest problems – and I referred to it earlier – in life is that people are very judgmental. They judge others, think that they should be doing things in the ways that the person who’s judging believes in.
I think if we can work on helping the world be less judgmental – and it goes back and forth; it’s synergistic. If you’re less self-judgmental, it helps you become less judgmental toward others, and vice versa. Move it from judgment to just neutral curiosity. “Oh, that’s interesting. Look at the way that that person is doing that. I wonder why,” rather than “What’s wrong with that person? Why are they doing that?”
I think this is one of the healing aspects of life, to come from this curiosity and reduce a level of judgment.
00:56:45
Chris Sandel: Let’s talk about the 4th edition of the Intuitive Eating book. That’s coming out next year at the time we’re recording this. I want to go through some of the things that have changed as part of that, but I think it might be useful for us to go through the 10 principles of intuitive eating.
I know we’ve been chatting about this for a long time, but there might be people who this is the first time they’ve actually been exposed to intuitive eating on a podcast. So just go through what are the 10 principles of intuitive eating, and then we can talk about the updates as part of the 4th edition.
Elyse Resch: I will mention them, and they might not be in the order that they’re in in the book because they were different in my teen book, and in the 4th edition we did move a couple of them around. But in general, the first one is always Reject the Diet Mentality.
Living in this diet culture that we live in – diet culture which is oppressive, which is assuming that everyone should look a certain way and the way to get there is to restrict amount of food or restrict types of food – is just so toxic. The data show that diets simply don’t work. There are different statistics; some say 95%, some say 98% of people who go on diets and lose weight on them gain the weight back, and two-thirds of them gain more weight back.
In that process of weight loss and weight gain, health-wise, it’s not healthy for the body to have those extremes happen. From a standpoint of emotions, people just end up blaming themselves and feeling bad, that there’s something wrong with them. I’ll often say to a client who says to me, “I’m such a failure at dieting,” I’ll say, “No, you’re not a failure at dieting. You are a success at ego identity and ego development.” What we were talking about earlier, that drive for autonomy, starts between 18 months and 3 years old. Your child, Chris, is probably in that mode of wanting to do things on his own. [laughs]
Again, as I referred to earlier, that part of us stays with us all of our lives. So when we’re told what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, eventually there’s a sense of invasion of our autonomy, and we ultimately, with a healthy ego, which is developed at that early age if a child is allowed to have experiences that are independent, that shows up again. Eventually people just say, “I can’t do it anymore.”
If you add that to the deprivation they’re feeling when they’re dieting because they’re not allowed to have what they want or enough of what they want – and there’s always a rebound to that, and there’s many scientific studies that support that – then boom, the diet’s over, as shown by the statistics of how many people fail on diets.
It’s so important as the first principle of intuitive eating to reject all of that and to understand the damage that diets can do physiologically and mentally and emotionally. Then people are ready to look for something else, because if you can’t diet anymore, you’ve got to learn some way of eating that is in tune with yourself. So that’s the first principle, and it’s key to intuitive eating.
I have had clients who have come to me and they’re on the fence on that, and it takes them a while to finally say, “Okay, I’ll never go on another diet.” I’ve even had clients go on diets while they’re seeing me, and my approach is, “Sure. We’ll talk about it. We’ll see what happens.” They trust me enough, and then they’re able to come on their own to realizing that diets are just not working for them.
Chris Sandel: On that point, I think for most people who would start this – and you can correct me if you think it’s different – most people are still going to be ambivalent about that first one, rejecting the dieting. They’re somewhat onboard, but they’re still unsure about it. I don’t think very many people start where there’s 100% belief in that part.
Elyse Resch: Correct. We also have the Intuitive Eating Workbook, which came out in 2017, and then the teen one. If they can work with that first chapter in all of them, in the actual Intuitive Eating book and in the workbooks, and really go back and look at the feelings they had when they were on a diet, off a diet, what started those diets, what they did after the diets, it actually helps them go through their own internal process of coming to the place where they realize it just isn’t going to work and there’s nothing wrong with them. It’s the system of dieting that doesn’t work. So yes, I agree.
So many people come to me whose intention is to lose weight, because they have been so programmed through diet culture that they’re not acceptable at whatever size they are, so they still stay tied into dieting, or they turn intuitive eating into a diet. This is a problem, too, thinking, “If I just follow these principles perfectly, then I will lose all the weight I want to lose.”
So that is something that has to be talked about in so many ways in terms of Health at Every Size, which is that your body deserves dignity and respect, and helping yourself do the things that you’re maybe not allowing yourself to do because you’re uncomfortable at the weight you’re at. I’ve often said putting that weight loss on the back burner, which is kind of an ambiguous statement because I don’t want to be saying that there’s going to be a weight loss at the end.
I don’t judge people, however. I want to say that. People are living in this culture, and their desire to not have to deal with the weight stigma that is around us at all times is understandable. So I want them to understand that focusing on weight loss will only sabotage the process of intuitive eating, because if you’re thinking about “If I want to eat this piece of cake, that’s not going to help me lose weight,” then you’re back to square one.
So helping them put that weight loss on the back burner and saying we don’t know what’s going to happen, but let’s look at ways that you can have a happier, healthier life where you are now, and fighting against weight stigma – Chris, weight stigma actually does way more damage to the body than holding a weight that’s a higher weight. People are afraid to go to the doctor because the doctor might say something about their weight and “you’ve got to lose weight.” Or they’re afraid to go out and take a walk because they’re afraid people might judge them.
They end up really harming their health by not doing some of the things that they would’ve done if they weren’t afraid of being stigmatized for their weight.
Chris Sandel: Just for listeners to know, I’ve done a whole separate podcast on weight stigma that you can check out. I’ve also reached out to try and get Jeffrey Hunger on the podcast, because he’s done a lot of really good research around this. But yeah, I’m in agreeance with you. I also talked about it with Rebecca Scritchfield, because I think there’s a fair bit that she’s done around this as well.
Yes, weight stigma is a really big problem because it then often gets put into the impacts of why people need to lose weight. It gets meshed into all of the bad outcomes that come along with what supposedly is being caused by the weight when actually it’s how they’re being treated because of that weight.
Elyse Resch: That’s right. Going back to when we were talking about self-compassion in the teen book, I think that also speaks to the compassion I want people to have for themselves by how they’ve been affected by diet culture, and have compassion for themselves for that wish that they could lose weight and not have to be affected by the stigma out there.
There’s so much compassion that needs to come from the practitioner and helping the patient be self-compassionate, while at the same time understanding that trying to lose weight is going to be a toxic experience and not something that they’re going to want to focus on.
01:06:05
Chris Sandel: So, Principle 2?
Elyse Resch: That was Principle 1. [laughs] Gosh, as I said earlier, I like to go to Satisfaction right away. It may not be Principle 2 in the book, but I want to help people start to figure out that, number one, they deserve to have satisfaction in their eating.
Life is difficult. I’m almost 75 years old, and I have been through many, many things in life. I am so grateful to enjoy food. It’s one of the things that I can do every day, several times a day, and help people understand that it is a mitigating factor to the difficult things that we have in life. This is something we can give ourselves. So number one, being open to getting satisfaction in eating.
And then figuring out what they like to eat. I have had people say to me, “I have no idea what I like to eat,” because for so long they’ve been directed that certain foods are good foods and certain foods are bad foods, that whole morality issue that’s out there with eating. Just helping them let go of that and look at the different tastes and textures and appearance and aromas in foods to get the most satisfaction they can, if it’s possible in their lives – again, talking about food security and that this is a privilege.
That I see as a motivating factor when people start to think about “I really would like to have more satisfaction.” It’s a new thought for them, and it really helps them then go on to the other principles.
Chris Sandel: On the satisfaction principle, I think with people coming from a dieting mentality, the thought is if I’m having satisfaction, that then instantly means that all I’m going to eat is pizza, ice cream, cookies, etc. And actually, that’s just not the case. I mean, maybe in the beginning that’s where people are going to be drawn towards, but I love eating a whole wide range of foods. You can get satisfaction from eating a cucumber. You can get satisfaction from eating chips. You can get satisfaction from eating a watermelon.
There are so many foods that you can get satisfaction from, and that will change depending on how you’re feeling and what else you’ve been eating and all of these things. But I just want to flag it up, because I think if you’re coming from a dieting place, sometimes it feels like the only foods you’re going to eat are “unhealthy” foods.
Elyse Resch: Let me talk a little more about that. Yes, in the beginning, when you truly give yourself full permission to eat whatever is satisfying to you, more often and more of, you’re going to have these foods that you’ve restricted in the past. That’s just a rebound from deprivation.
But what ends up happening – and this is a key factor for people to be able to understand and calm themselves with – is this concept of habituation, which essentially means the greater the stimulus, the lesser the response. The more you have of something, the less exciting it becomes.
When it’s no longer forbidden, when it can be there anytime, when you’re not going to tell yourself that you can’t have it – if you have it today, you can’t have it tomorrow – what ends up happening is that particular food that had been previously forbidden takes its place within the realm of all foods. As you’re saying, Chris, you can get satisfaction from many different foods. But it has to come from a real trust that you will allow yourself to have that food whenever you want it, and then it takes its place.
There’s also something else that’s called sensory specific satiety. It’s not an easy phrase to say. It comes from the field of hedonics, which is the study of pleasure. What it means is that as you are eating a particular food, bite after bite, the pleasure of it is reduced as time goes on. I think of it as the taste buds get a little bit numbed as you’re eating the same food.
For anybody who has eaten, let’s say pizza, that first piece of pizza is so incredible. By the time you’re at the fourth piece of pizza, if you’re really paying attention, it just doesn’t taste as good. So between sensory specific satiety, being aware – and by the way, sidebar: this means staying present while eating so that you actually can taste the food and notice when it’s not as good. But I think most people would have had the experience that the first bite seems to be the best.
In fact – I know I’m going all over the place, but in fact, there are these restaurants now that have these 50 course meals. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but many, many, many courses. They give you just a bite of each one. Just a small bit. I think whoever invented that understood the sensory specific satiety, because that first bite or so is the best. Then the entire process, they’re having the best bites all the way through, versus a great big steak, and by the time you’re done with the last bite, you’re tired of chewing it.
Yeah, so I think having that understanding of what happens both physiologically in terms of sensory specific satiety and psychologically in terms of habituation – the freer you are to have it, the less forbidden it is; it takes its place.
Just like anything in life, by the way. You meet some new person, you fall in love and you can’t get enough of each other, and after a while, you still love the person, but you have some other things come into your life too. You go back to movement or you go back to reading or you go back to things that you dropped because all you wanted to do was be with that person.
I think when I use that as an example, everybody seems to understand. The newness of something wears off.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. That’s where you want to get to with food. Food still has a role to play and it’s important, and it can be enjoyable, but up unto a point.
Elyse Resch: For me, I like to have a different breakfast every morning, not because it’s any rule – by the way, there are no rules in intuitive eating; there are only guidelines, things to think about. But I just feel like something different every morning. I probably have seven different breakfasts during the week. Or if I particularly liked something, maybe I’ll have it again a few days later. It’s just that sense of change and difference, because if I have the same thing every day, I’m going to become habituated to it. Breakfast is one of my favorite meals, so I really want my enjoyment and satisfaction there.
So, satisfaction. Satisfaction goes along with Making Peace with Food, because in order to fully get satisfaction, you have to be in a place of letting go of all those restrictive thoughts – the good foods, the bad foods, the right foods, the wrong foods – and just be open to tasting and deciding whether you really like something.
So many of my clients who thought they really loved let’s say cheesecake, when they have full permission to eat it, they go, “Oh, you know what? It’s not as good as I thought it was. It’s a little bit rich and I get a bit of a stomachache.” That’s just an example. Some people do love it anyway. But just to be able to know that you’ve got the free will to choose gives you the option to decide whether you really like it or not, or how much of it, or how often you want it. That’s Making Peace with Food, which is another one of the principles.
01:13:55
Then there’s Hunger and Fullness. Again, I’ve got them out of order, but hunger – first of all, there’s many different kinds of hunger. There’s physiological hunger, but there’s also taste hunger.
People say to me, “Am I only allowed to eat when I’m hungry? Is that what the rule of intuitive eating is, of Honor Your Hunger?” No. We’re human. Sometimes there’ll be something – if my client, after the time we’re finished talking, walks in with a plate of just-baked chocolate chip cookies and I’m not hungry yet, I’m still going to eat one of those cookies. [laughs] Because it sounds and smells delicious.
So yes, there is taste hunger. It’s only when it becomes emotional hunger, where one is eating to push away feelings or to numb feelings that it becomes problematic. But we can have emotional hunger that is just for the simple act of comfort and enjoyment at that meal. That’s an emotion. So there is emotional hunger.
There’s other things; some people have energy-seeking hunger, where they’re tired and they think food will give them energy. It really doesn’t. Not the kind of energy they need, because they probably just need more sleep – which you probably don’t get much of, Chris. [laughs]
There’s seeking-experience hunger. I’m not quite sure how I titled that, but where you just want to go out and be with a friend and have something to eat. Maybe you’re not super hungry, but you decide you’ll have something just to have that experience of being with the person.
Again, no judgment about it. But in terms of physiological hunger, it’s important to be present, to notice when you’re starting to get hungry. There are a number of physiological signals that people can have, and not everybody has the same signal of hunger.
I notice hunger – this is interesting. At some point in the writing over the years, I thought to myself, huh, where do I feel hunger? Because people tend to say it’s in the stomach. I actually don’t. I feel my hunger in my throat, in my esophagus. That’s where I first notice that I am getting hungry, and I go, wow, I guess I’m hungry.
Chris Sandel: This is something I comment on with clients as well. I actually have a handout that I send to clients. It’s just a long list of all of the different things that can happen when you’re potentially hungry in terms of all of the various symptoms. I just say, start to pay attention to the orders that these will start to occur for you, and which ones do and which ones don’t.
Feeling hunger in your stomach – for me to feel that typically means I’ve gone about an hour or an hour and a half too long before eating. For me, that is right at the last point. The growling stomach is when I’m at probably a 2 on the hunger scale, where I should’ve been eating a long time ago. So if I was using that as my baseline of “this is when I should eat,” it would not serve me very well.
Elyse Resch: Correct. You can go even further than that, where people start to lose focus. They get a headache. They feel so low energy. They’re way beyond. They may be down to a 0 in hunger.
Chris Sandel: I would say I lose focus before I get the growly stomach.
Elyse Resch: Okay. Everyone is different. I’ll notice that I’ll start to not be able to concentrate, as you’re saying, lose focus, and I know I need some carbs because carbs are what feed the brain.
This is an interesting fact for your listeners: glucose, which is the smallest form of carbohydrate, is the only type of energy the brain can use. It’s the only thing that will cross from the bloodstream into the brain. If we don’t have carbs, our brains cannot function well. So I notice that, and it’s a very specific intuitive signal, “I need some carbs. I didn’t have enough carbs at lunch. I need more carbs.” That’s an interesting thing.
So hunger, yes, you want to eat at a place where, to me, you’re moderately hungry. As I was talking about, not walking into your favorite restaurant having just eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You want some hunger, but you don’t want to be over-hungry, as you mentioned, to the point where you can’t concentrate or your stomach is growling, because then you go into what we call primal hunger, which is the place where – I have so much respect for the survival part of the brain. This is our instinctual part of the brain where instinctually, we need to eat. It’s not a thought process. It’s not an emotion. It’s an instinct.
The brain releases something called Neuropeptide Y. There are probably other chemicals it releases also – probably ghrelin, which is – I’m not sure actually if ghrelin comes from the stomach or the brain. But they’re so connected. That tells you that you’re hungry. But when you’re in this over-hungry state and you release Neuropeptide Y, there’s no control. You’re just out there trying to get calories and carbs for survival.
Waiting until you’re that hungry is not going to give you the best chance of noticing when you’re full because it’s going in so fast, just for survival. And that’s where fullness comes in, too. You can only notice fullness if you’re starting when you have some hunger. If you start eating when you’re not hungry, what do you have to contrast it? You’re just eating.
Eating when you’re comfortably hungry, you’ll notice those beginning signs of fullness so that you can stop and not feel physically uncomfortable after eating.
Chris Sandel: I just wanted to say in terms of fullness, the one thing I would say is there are times with clients where they will start eating when they’re not hungry because they’re not getting accurate feedback. Then when they start eating they’re like, “Oh, no, I am actually really hungry.” It’s then through the process of eating that they discover they’re hungry, and then they do get fairly accurate feedback in terms of their fullness levels. So that would probably be the one exception that I find to that.
Elyse Resch: Correct. People have ignored their hunger and fullness signals because they’ve been on diets, so they’re not really tuned in to their signals, or they have the beginning of or full-blown eating disorders. But it comes back. Once you start nourishing yourself regularly through the day, it does come back.
I do want to say something about fullness. I wrote a paper a long time ago – when I look at the picture on it, I see how long ago it was – called “The Sadness of Saying Enough.” In fact, if any of your readers want that and you want to email me, I will send you that article.
The gist of it actually came from working with a 15-year-old boy who was eating a lot, to the point of being uncomfortable, but he told me he wasn’t eating emotionally. We talked about this for weeks. “Well, what do you do when you’re stressed?” “I go out and throw some basketballs.” “What do you do when you’re sad?” “I go and talk to my mom or I play with my dog.” He said, “I don’t eat emotionally.” However, at his meals, he was eating so much that he was walking away incredibly uncomfortable.
Finally, I said to him, “Okay” – your audience can’t see me, but I’m putting my hands in the air and saying, “If your body needs this much food, but you’re eating” – and then I move my hand over – “to this point, what’s this food for? The part that goes beyond fullness?” He looked at me and he said, “Oh, I don’t want to feel sad that I have to stop.”
This was the point at which he was able to understand that there was emotional eating going on; it just wasn’t the typical running to food for an emotion. It was the sadness piece.
When I wrote this article, I had a lot of responses of people really resonating with it, because anything that we do that’s great, when we have to stop, there’s a level of sadness. If you’re on a great vacation and you have to pack and go home and get back to all of regular life, you have a moment of sadness. By the way, I have that moment of sadness when I’m finishing an incredible book. I’m quite a reader, and if it’s a book I’m just loving and I’m dying to know how it ends and then it’s over, I’m so sad because it’s done.
With eating, what I like to say to people is this is emotion-lite, meaning yes, you have this moment of sadness. You can also tell yourself that when you’re hungry again – which is only going to be in a few hours – you get to eat again. We get to eat so many times during the day and for the rest of our lives every day. If we at that point just put it away and do something else, that emotion doesn’t stay with us for very long.
Chris Sandel: That’s a really interesting story. Yes, I would definitely like to have that piece to include in the show notes.
Elyse Resch: I will send it to you. Going back to fullness, trying to really maintain your awareness, stay present, not have too many distracting things going on while you’re eating.
01:23:50
By the way, I have some opinions about distraction while eating. I don’t think it’s a black-and-white issue. I don’t know if you want me to talk about that.
Chris Sandel: Definitely, because I have some opinions as well where I don’t think it’s black-and-white. You tell me your thoughts.
Elyse Resch: Some people think that you basically should do nothing else but just eat when you’re eating because that’s the only way to be in touch with hunger and fullness. Of course, that would mean to me that you could never go out to eat with anybody because they would be distracting you from your hunger and fullness.
I think it’s got to go somewhere in a gray area. I know for some people, if they eat in front of the television, they pay no attention to their food, and before they know it it’s all gone and then they go and get more. But for some people – I can watch a television show and eat something and be very aware of how the food is tasting and how full I’m getting. I also like to read the paper when I’m eating sometimes, and it doesn’t distract me from my hunger and fullness because I’m aware of both.
But you have to know. The individual is the only person that can know what is truly distracting.
I’ll tell you what would be very distracting for most people: sitting on the internet and just flipping through things, or social media, having their phones, flipping through things, and not paying any attention to their eating. What’s your thought on it, Chris?
Chris Sandel: I sometimes have clients and the thought of just sitting, eating a meal with nothing going on is just too overwhelming. It’s just too much for them. The TV part sometimes can be okay, but often it just disconnects them from the eating process.
Often what I’ll recommend for clients is to listen to a podcast or something that is audio, so that they can still be focusing on their food. They’re able to look at it. They’ve got their hands free, but it’s not just complete silence where they’re doing it and there’s nothing to fill that void.
I’ve had a lot of clients talk about listening to a podcast or listening to some music or something along those lines can actually make the process much easier for them. This is obviously in more of the early stages as part of doing this. But I do think the idea of we can have no distractions is just too high a bar, and actually is more problematic for a lot of people.
Elyse Resch: I think it’s not only problematic, but I think that we do have to learn how to be able to pay attention to our food if something else is going on. Because most people do eat with other people. If you’re only used to eating when there’s absolutely nothing else going on, how do you navigate a meal with someone else?
For some people, it’s very hard for them to stay focused on their food while they’re eating because they’re paying attention to everything else that’s going on. But I think it’s a practice of learning how to be able to have some level of focus outside of the food and still maintain your presence while eating. I hope I didn’t make it more complicated. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: I’m in agreeance with you. I can happily eat food and watch a program or something along those lines and I’m able to keep checking it and seeing where I am with my fullness and being able to stop. But for a lot of people, that’s not the case. So I think what you say is correct. You need to learn about you.
Elyse Resch: Exactly. None of this is absolute. I’ll say this over and over. There are no rules. There’s no right way or wrong way. It’s really tuning in to your own personal needs and your personal experience and what works for you.
01:27:45
Going on with the principles – I haven’t talked about the principles in a long time. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: We’re making our way through, so it’s good.
Elyse Resch: Yes we are. So then there is Respect Your Body. I think that that is such an important piece.
When Evelyn and I first wrote the book back in 1994 and it came out in ’95, we toyed with what to call that chapter. We thought about Accept Your Body, and then we realized that that’s down the road for a lot of people. If they’re not able yet to be in that place of true acceptance, let’s just respect your body. Let’s give your body dignity and kindness and speak nicely to yourself. I can’t tell you how many people say horrible things about their bodies. Be able to do nice things for your body if you can, just to show it respect.
But ultimately, my goal for people ultimately is – I used the term before radical acceptance, which is “This is my body. I am grateful to have this body, and it’s not going to change. This is my body.” Well, let me back up; bodies do change over a lifetime, of course, even beyond full growth. Different eras of life – if it’s a woman during pregnancy, during menopause. Men’s bodies change as well. Muscle mass changes.
So our bodies will change, but it’s about the acceptance that we can’t make them change. We can take care of them. We can do nice things. We can strengthen ourselves. We can strengthen our bones and our muscles. But we can’t really change our bodies.
Chris Sandel: You used the term “radical acceptance.” I know that’s the title of a Tara Brach book. Is there any connection between those two?
Elyse Resch: I actually learned it from my therapist, who is Buddhist. I think it’s a Buddhist principle. I know it’s also used in dialectic behavioral therapy, radical acceptance. I don’t know the author you’re speaking of.
I found it a profound concept. When there is something that is not changeable in life, the ability to accept that inability for it to change actually reduces emotional pain, to come to that place where you accept it in every cell of your body.
I had to do that. My son has schizophrenia. He was diagnosed when he was 18, 19 maybe, and he’s 48 now. I needed to go through over these years of wishing and hoping and trying to make a difference, and when I finally came to a place of radical acceptance, I’m so much more able to appreciate who he is as a person and my time with him. That’s a personal thing, but I think radical acceptance in the realm of what we’re talking about – being able to ultimately radically accept “This is my body and I’m grateful for it.”
Chris Sandel: On that radical acceptance piece, like you commented with your son, I’ve had a past guest on here called Vania and she was talking about the same with her – I can’t remember if it was her son or daughter, who has autism, and them trying to do so many different things for her in terms of changed diet and just how to assist her life.
She said that at some point her husband’s like, “Can’t we just accept that this is the way that she is? Rather than trying to do all these things that are going to change her, can’t it just be like this is who she is and this is how she’s going to be?”
Elyse Resch: Exactly. When I spend time with my son, I appreciate the jokes he makes. I appreciate his sweet, wonderful soul. If I was sitting there thinking, “If only he could be a lawyer…” then I wouldn’t be able to really be there with who he is. This is his path, and there’s no changing it.
[coughs] Sorry, I’ve got allergies. We’ve got lots of allergies in California. Moving on – have we done eight of them?
Chris Sandel: You’ve done eight. There’s Honor Your Feelings without Food and then Exercise and then Honor Your Health.
Elyse Resch: Wait, what about Challenge the Food Police?
Chris Sandel: Sorry, yes, that was the other one.
01:32:30
Elyse Resch: Yes, Challenge the Food Police. That one is about what we were talking about earlier: speaking up. Having your voice to negate – that food police is all those voices out there in diet culture, all the voices of family and friends who have opinions, judgments, and being able to believe in what you believe in, in terms of intuitive eating, and push away those messages. We’re getting them constantly.
By the way, social media can be very problematic, as I said earlier. Learning how to not follow people on social media who are speaking diet culture talk or showing pictures of themselves where they’re altering – especially for women, it’s really troublesome to me when they show pictures of themselves in bikinis and they’re photoshopping them and changing them in such ways. Just let go of those kinds of feeds and look at people who are body positive and intuitive eating, Health at Every Size.
Really challenging all of that negativity that diet culture brings out, and specifically being able to speak up if someone is judging you or is making negative comments to you. Sometimes you can’t speak up. Sometimes there are people who are so rigid in their thinking that you’re just going to get in a fight with them. Just learning to not have it affect you, to walk away and be strong in your own beliefs. That can be in other ways, too, politically as well. [laughs] Okay, we won’t go there.
So that’s Challenge the Food Police. Then the Movement chapter – I’m sorry, was there another one that you said that we didn’t do besides Movement and Nutrition?
01:34:30
Chris Sandel: Honor Your Feelings without Food.
Elyse Resch: Oh my goodness, the big, big, big – okay, we’ve changed the title of that. This is going to be now Cope with Your Feelings with Kindness. It used to be Cope with Your Feelings without Using Food, and we started to realize that that didn’t feel right to us. It was basically saying that emotions are not part of eating.
So it’s more about looking with kindness at what emotional eating one might be doing. As I said earlier, we might just be in a down mood and we just want food that’s really comforting. We want to eat something like macaroni and cheese, that is going to give us that great feeling of comfort. Great. We should be able to get comfort and satisfaction as a feeling, and sometimes we’re going to eat more than our stomachs tell us, and that’s fine too.
It’s just when we get to a place of self-punishment or judgment and anger at ourselves that it becomes a destructive behavior, where people are really eating to the point of physical discomfort and emotional discomfort.
We give a lot of coping mechanisms in there. We look at a couple of things to start with, which is self-nurturance, being able to do things that are nurturing for yourself, and self-care. Self-care, self-nurturance, and also acknowledging – this is one of my big topics that I like to talk about – that each of us has a right to have needs, and to have those needs met.
I find with so many of the people I work with, they were told when they were very young, “You’re too needy” or “Forget your emotions. Stop it. Stop crying.” People learn early on in life if their physical or emotional needs are not met to push them away. It’s just easier to feel that they don’t have needs than to have needs that aren’t being met. And many of these people are taking care of everybody else, but they’re not taking care of themselves.
To accept that we have a right to have needs and to have our needs met, and some of them through our own self-care and some of them through asking for care from others. That’s part of nurturance.
And then coping mechanisms like journal writing or meditating or taking a nice walk and looking at the flowers – things that we can do to help us be with our feelings and learn how to develop something I like to call our “emotional muscle,” that we’re able to tolerate feelings longer without necessarily pushing them away with food – or restriction. Some people use not eating as a way to push away feelings.
The third thing – there was an audiobook that Evelyn and I put out back in maybe 2009, perhaps. I think it was 2009. When we were writing that – this has practices for each of the principles. It’s still available, by the way. It’s called Intuitive Eating. It’s got a chocolate-covered strawberry on the front, and there are guided practices for each of the principles.
When I was working on the emotional chapter, I had this wonderful, wonderful producer who was working with me. I told her the third way of dealing with feelings is sometimes you just have to distract yourself, and she said to me – and this is someone who had never had an issue with eating – “I don’t understand. I thought people should just be feeling their feelings all the time. Why would you want to distract them?” I said, we can’t feel 24/7. There are times when we just aren’t in the place or the feeling is so big that it’s not even appropriate for us to be with it. Maybe we have to wait till we’re in therapy or talking to a trusted friend.
We give some examples of things you can do to distract yourself, which isn’t the use of food for distraction, but other things. Watching a movie or doing a puzzle or something like that. So that’s the chapter on emotions. It’s got lots of suggestions in it.
Chris Sandel: One of the ideas that I constantly come back to with clients on this is around sleep. I know I experience the world differently when I’m getting good sleep versus not getting good sleep, and I think it’s such an important part of being able to have more equilibrium around feelings and emotions.
Elyse Resch: There’s a book I read – I was in Italy a year ago, and I happened to take this book with me, because I remember where I was sitting when I was reading it then. It’s called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, it’s wonderful. I’m reading it at the moment.
Elyse Resch: Isn’t it brilliant? And it’s so interesting. He’s got a great sense of humor. I read it as a novel. It spoke to me. But it changed my whole relationship with sleep. Not that I wasn’t always happy to get sleep, but it made it a really number one priority to get at least 7 – I actually need 8 or 9 hours a night of sleep. So yes, I agree with you. I’m so glad you brought that up. That’s talked about in all of the books and the workbooks.
01:40:15
Now we get to Movement. We’ve changed the title of that chapter, too. It used to be called Exercise: Feel the Difference. Now it’s called Movement: Feel the Difference. It’s been very important to move away from this – we’ve got this exercise obsession in our world, I think, where you must do so many steps a day or you must run or you must whatever, rather than just listen to your body.
It’s actually intuitive movement. What feels good in your body? What do you enjoy? What are the benefits to you by moving? I happen to believe that movement for me – I’m so grateful for the fact that my entire adult life, I have moved my body. I really credit it for a lot of my ability to have the energy I have to do everything I do at the age I’m at.
I think movement is an important part of life, and it has to be approached in a way that is consistent with what feels right to you rather than trying to meet some external standard. It’s so much the same as eating in terms of listening to your body.
Chris Sandel: I know in the teen book – and the reason I’m referencing the teen book is that it’s the one I’ve been looking at more recently – but talking about NEAT, non-exercise activity thermogenesis, and all of the little movements that we do throughout the day and how those are just so important. It’s not the hour gym session that someone does; it’s all of the other bits and pieces that make such a big difference. People don’t even think about those things as being important or as being things that they can put into the category of “I moved my body today.”
Elyse Resch: Yes. I find it really interesting that so many people believe that they’re moving because they’ve gone to the gym four times that week, and the rest of the time they’re sitting, or they’re going on escalators when they can walk stairs. Their focus is on that one hour a few times a week, where people who don’t do that are often much more aware of walking, taking walks, walking up and down stairs if they can.
I really do believe that there’s a great benefit to being aware of the importance of NEAT, the non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And I wanted to tell the teenagers that so they didn’t start feeling bad if they weren’t participating in something that was considered exercise.
01:43:10
End on Nutrition. There was a very thought-out reason to put nutrition at the end, and that one didn’t change the order. That’s always at the end of all the books, because until you’ve made full peace with food, until you’ve gone through this process of really embracing intuitive eating and knowing you’re never going to go back on some externally-informed diet, then ultimately, people – and I find this happening organically with my clients; they will ultimately say to me, “Yeah, I know I can eat anything I want, but I don’t think I’m feeling that good. I don’t know if I’m getting enough ‘nutrition’ in my life. Teach me a little bit about nutrition.”
I do have a Master of Science degree in nutrition, so I can teach them some things about it. But it has to be at a point where someone has fully embraced intuitive eating and is just, as I said, organically, intuitively wanting to feel better, wanting to include things that maybe they haven’t included or help their gastrointestinal tract working or feel that they can do things to give themselves more vitamins and minerals from food, or whatever it is.
But never in the beginning. I think that’s very important. If someone starts to feel, “Uh oh, I shouldn’t be eating that food because it doesn’t have enough nutritional value,” that’s a problem. So you have to be at a point where all foods are – I’ve used this before – emotionally equivalent. They may not be nutritionally equivalent, but emotionally equivalent, where you have the same reaction.
I had a dinner at one of my favorite restaurants on Saturday night, and I had a Caesar salad and I had bread and I had some salmon and baked potato with butter and sour cream and some spinach, and I also had a piece of red velvet cake at the end – which, by the way, I couldn’t finish, so I took the rest of it home because I was comfortably full. But I had the same reaction to all the parts of the meal. Everything was delicious. I didn’t feel good about having fish and vegetables or whatever and guilty – which is something we want to eliminate from relationship with food – about eating cake.
Chris Sandel: I imagine there’s probably some comments that you would make around food, but it’s just not under the umbrella of nutrition. You talked earlier about, “if I’m not getting in enough carbohydrates, I’m going to have more difficulty concentrating, or I might have my energy come down.” So there could be a conversation that you have with a client like, “I’m seeing you’re not having much of this coming in; that could potentially be affecting this system.” Is that okay?
Elyse Resch: Yes, I think it’s really important, especially when I’m working with people with eating disorders who are not nourishing themselves very well at all.
That’s different to me than talking about the value of different foods, the content of different foods. It’s really about an understanding of how the body and brain work and why we need to have all proteins and carbohydrates and fats in our diet for all the different functions that they do in our bodies, and that we’re really depriving ourselves of a full life when we are being restrictive of some particular foods. We live in a carb-phobic world, which I just find fascinating since carbohydrates are so basic to being able to function.
So yes, I’m glad you’re bringing that up to clarify it. That will come up throughout this process, especially if someone – it’s interesting you’re bringing that up. Let’s say someone says to me, “Gosh, I was getting hungry every 2 hours, and I don’t understand why I’m hungry all the time.” We start to look at their meals, and they’re not getting much of any protein or fat, let’s say. That takes longer to digest. They start to understand why they need to have various segments of food or types to be able to feel good.
Or, I was mentioning the GI tract – people will say sometimes, “Oh my goodness, I’m so constipated I can’t ever go to the bathroom,” and they’re not eating anything that has fiber in it. So they learn along the way how food affects them. But it’s not about good food/bad food.
01:47:50
Chris Sandel: What is new in the new edition? We’ve obviously gone through all of the different principles and we’ve touched on a lot through that journey, but what is new in this new edition?
Elyse Resch: First of all I’ll talk specifically, and then I’ll talk generally.
Specifically, for the chapter on raising kids, I wrote a whole section on something called baby-led weaning or baby-led solids. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that.
Chris Sandel: That’s what we did with our son, so yeah.
Elyse Resch: It’s basically intuitive eating for babies. It’s the understanding that in the first year of life, the main nutritional – what a child’s getting nutritionally is from milk.
The whole process of eating solid foods starts to happen around 6 months. They’re not getting a lot of nutrition out of it; what they’re getting is first of all, hand-mouth skills. They’re learning how to put food in their mouths and chew it. They’re learning how to hold the foods. They’re learning social skills, sitting at the table with the family and maybe wanting to eat some of the foods that the family is eating. It’s not about the nutrition. It’s really at a year where babies start to need the nutritional impact of the food.
But it’s such an incredible process to understand the value of giving the child more of the opportunity to say when they’re ready to eat certain foods. Of course, as a parent, if a child is sitting at the table and grabbing at something, you’re not going to give them a big chunk of steak at 6 months old. [laughs] But to give them little pieces of things that are softer and that they can gum or chew.
Chris Sandel: I’m going to actually push back on you on that and say we actually did. We really started with he can eat anything. I mean, there may have been some things like nuts that we’re like, okay, that’s off the menu.
But the point of it is that most of it, he’s not going to be able to swallow, so he would then just chew on it, get the idea of texture and flavor. I think very early on, my son was having meat. It took a long time before any of it got properly swallowed, but we wanted to just expose him to everything. As part of baby-led weaning, at least with the book that we read, it was pretty much like they can start with everything.
Elyse Resch: Yes, I do agree. I was just thinking of giving them a whole steak. [laughs] Well, maybe a whole steak would work. They could gnaw at it, wouldn’t they?
But what I found fascinating about it when I was researching it was that there tends to be less gagging when a child hasn’t been spoon-fed with purees. The purees, often when the spoon goes into their mouths, goes toward the back of their mouths, and they get used to having food in the back, whereas when they’re doing it on their own, they just keep it in the front of their mouths and they’re, as you said, chewing on it, tasting it, licking it, and throwing it out, probably.
Chris Sandel: There is a lot of gagging. I would say it’s probably the first month, there’s a bit of sitting on your hands. They describe the difference between what happens with gagging and what happens when they’re genuinely choking and it’s a problem. But once they get past that initial stage of learning where that gag reflex is, then it’s smooth sailing. But I do think that’s often where parents give up, because they can’t stand the gagging they’re seeing their child inducing on themselves, and they worry that they’re going to cause themselves harm. They’re like, “I can’t do this. Let’s just spoon-feed.”
Elyse Resch: But don’t you think that if they’ve only been fed pureed foods, when they ultimately start eating solid foods, they’re going to have that same gagging thing, just later?
Chris Sandel: Possibly, yeah.
Elyse Resch: So at some point they have to learn how to be able to eat.
Chris Sandel: Totally. I guess it’s just that the parents think they feel more in control if the child is doing that when they’re later on and they can talk to them and they can explain it, maybe, as opposed to seeing a 6-month-old doing that.
Elyse Resch: That’s interesting. I actually think it’s fantastic, so there’s that description of what that’s like in the book.
Evelyn, who is the research part of our team – she’s great with research; she’s got a mind that can just keep all the research in her head. I can’t. So on the research part of it, she added many of the new studies. In fact, that went to the beginning of the book. We decided to have a little explanation of all the science, with all the studies that have been done on intuitive eating. So that’s in the beginning.
That’s the specifics. The general – oh, this is a tough one. When Intuitive Eating was first written way back when, 25 years ago, we were not as awakened to the things we are aware of today. We wanted to make sure – and we’ve done this in the 3rd edition, but even more so in the 4th edition – to be sure to pull anything out of the book that had any kind of focus on weight. Even though we thought we had done it in the 3rd edition, it wasn’t really complete enough.
And that 3rd edition was written almost 10 years ago, so we have put in a lot about weight stigma and social justice and pulled anything out that could be triggering to people. So that’s a general update in this book. We’re aware that times have changed. We’ve learned. We can’t be judgmental of ourselves for not knowing about this 25 years ago.
01:54:10
Chris Sandel: I’m conscious of time, and I’m also conscious of the fact that we didn’t talk about the Intuitive Eating Journal. I’m open to you, if you have the time, to go over and talk about that. But I’m also happy to move on and we can maybe do a third episode at some point. [laughs]
Elyse Resch: Since I’ve just begun writing it – I just sent in my first three chapters – this is going to be a book that is not like the other books where it’s all text. It’s more prompts.
Each chapter will describe one of the principles of intuitive eating in a brief way, and then throughout the chapter, there will be a prompt for setting an intention of something to help one learn about the principle, and then to look at what challenges they may have in carrying that out, talk about the actions they actually took, and ultimately the feelings they had as they were practicing something. So it’s got lots of lines for people to be writing about their feelings and what has gone on up to the feelings.
It’s going to be published by New Harbinger, who published both of the workbooks, and they are going to put some design in it – which was a great relief to me. They’re designing the whole book, and it’s going to be real interesting and fun-looking, and basically just a journal that allows people to go through the process of learning intuitive eating and what it feels like for them, more than just the exercises that have been in the workbooks.
Chris Sandel: Awesome. When is this going to be seeing the light of day?
Elyse Resch: That one’s 2021. That began this year; 2 years later is 2021. So in June of ’20 will be the 4th edition, and I don’t know what month yet – they haven’t told me – in ’21 the journal book will be out.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. Listeners, please remember that for 2021, to look out for the journal.
Elyse Resch: We’ll probably talk again, Chris, before it’s out. I’ll have more information on that.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Elyse, this has been wonderful. We’ve covered so much. It was really great to be able to go through all of the different principles with you and talk about the nuance with all of them. As you say, these aren’t rules; they’re just starting points for people to be thinking about.
Elyse Resch: Yes. Intuitive eating has to offer a sense of delight with eating and a sense of trust in oneself, and basically the freedom to be yourself and be autonomous.
Actually, I will say something – when we talked earlier about how intuitive eating is so there right now, everywhere, in different magazines – I believe that one of the reasons is we are sick and tired of being told what we should eat, how we should look, what we should not eat. We just want to take back our independence around eating and take back the pleasure of eating. I think that’s why it’s so popular.
Chris Sandel: Where can people find out more information about you, if they’re wanting to find out about the certification that you do? Where do you want to point people to online?
Elyse Resch: There are two websites – my own, my personal website, which is www.elyseresch.com. I’ve got all kinds of things on there, lots of resources, my Words of Wisdom.
Chris Sandel: I love that page.
Elyse Resch: Thank you. [laughs] I’ve got to get back to it and add some more things, since I’ve gotten more wisdom, I hope, as the years go by. And I have some things I’ve written, and I think there’s some audio things on there. So it’s a pretty personal website.
Then there’s the www.intuitiveeating.org – it’s .org, not .com. – website, which is the official Intuitive Eating website. That gives the information about certification. Also, if someone is looking to find a qualified, certified counselor, there are resources on there, a directory to find someone.
And there’s a list of all of these many, many studies – I just keep losing track of how many we actually have; over 120, I think, or even more studies, validating intuitive eating as an evidence-based process. So they’re all listed on there too. So that’s where you can get that information.
If anybody really wants to write to me, I do answer all emails. I have to tell you, so much of my time is spent in doing that. [laughs] I’m elyseresch@gmail.com.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I will put all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for this. This has been wonderful.
Elyse Resch: Chris, it’s been wonderful for me too. Thank you so much.
Chris Sandel: That is it for this week’s show. As I mentioned at the top, Seven Health is 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.
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