Episode 245: Today on Real Health Radio, I'm speaking with Alissa Rumsey. We talk about her book Unapologetic Eating: Make Peace With Food and Transform Your Life. We go through the four sections the book contains - fixing, allowing, feeling and growing – and cover some of the ideas and practical suggestions that are offered.
Alissa Rumsey, MS, RD, CDN, CSCS (pronouns she/her/hers) is a registered dietitian, nutrition therapist, certified intuitive eating counselor, and the author of Unapologetic Eating: Make Peace With Food and Transform Your Life. Alissa is passionate about helping people reclaim the space to eat and live, unapologetically.
She is the founder of Alissa Rumsey Nutrition and Wellness, a weight-inclusive practice that offers virtual counseling, group programs, and online trainings to support people in breaking free – both individually and collectively – from body-based oppression. Through their work, Alissa and her team help people liberate themselves from dieting, cultivate a peaceful relationship to food and their bodies, and live a more authentic, connected life.
Her expertise has been featured in hundreds of media outlets and she speaks regularly at events, online trainings, and conferences around the country. She calls New York City home and spends her free time exploring the city’s food scene and searching for patches of green space to sunbathe in. To learn more about Alissa’s work, please visit www.alissarumsey.com.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 245 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/245.
Before we get started, I just want to mention that I’m currently taking on new clients. I specialise in helping clients to overcome eating disorders, disordered eating, chronic dieting, body dissatisfaction and poor body image, exercise compulsion and overexercising, and also helping clients to regain their periods. If you want help with any of these things or you simply want to improve your relationship with food and body and exercise, then please get in contact. You can head to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help, and I’ll also include that in the show notes.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist that specialises in recovery from disordered eating and eating disorders, or really just helping anyone who has a messy relationship with food and body and exercise.
Today on the show, it is a guest interview. My guest today is Alissa Rumsey. Alissa is a registered dietitian, a nutrition therapist, a Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor, and the author of Unapologetic Eating: Make Peace with Food and Transform Your Life. She’s passionate about helping people reclaim the space to eat and live unapologetically. She is the founder of Alissa Rumsey Nutrition & Wellness, a weight-inclusive practice that offers virtual counselling, group programmes, and online trainings to support people in breaking free, both individually and collectively, from body-based oppression. Through her work, Alissa and her team help people liberate themselves from dieting, cultivate a peaceful relationship to food and their bodies, and live a more authentic, connected life.
Her expertise has been featured in hundreds of media outlets, and she speaks regularly at events, online trainings, and conferences around the country. She calls New York City home and spends her free time exploring the city’s food scene and searching for patches of green space to sunbathe in. You can learn more about Alissa’s work at www.alissarumsey.com.
A number of months ago, I read Alissa’s book, Unapologetic Eating, and I found it a fantastic resource. It touches on so many areas that are crucial to helping someone move away from a place of dieting or disordered eating to a much more pleasant and authentic life. Despite the title being Unapologetic Eating, the book is about much more than just eating.
As part of the conversation, we talk about Alissa’s background and how she got into being a dietitian. We go through her own history with food and dieting and how this impacted her life, and then the massive ‘aha’ moment that she had when she found intuitive eating. We then spend the rest of the conversation talking about her book. The book is broken down into four sections, which is Fixing, Allowing, Feeling, and Growing. We go through some of the ideas contained in each of these sections.
Some of the topics that we touch on are the power of eating a sandwich, the recent nature of many beauty ideals, using mindfulness to notice thoughts and emotions, creating a coping plan, dealing with body grief, the importance of values, and self-connection and embodiment. This was a great conversation, and one with many practical ideas and suggestions.
At the end of the episode, I have a suggestion of something to check out, but for now, here is my conversation with Alissa Rumsey.
Hey, Alissa. Welcome to Real Health Radio. Thanks for chatting with me today.
Alissa Rumsey: Hey, Chris. Thank you so much for having me.
Chris Sandel: This is great. I am a really big fan of your book, Unapologetic Eating. I think that for a lot of the conversation today, I want to talk about that book and a lot of the topics that you cover in that, because there are so many different areas you go through. I know the book’s called Unapologetic Eating, but it covers so many different components of life outside of eating. There’s a lot that we can touch on, and we’ll in no way cover everything that is in the book, so if listeners enjoy this conversation, then please, I suggest getting the book because I really enjoyed it.
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But to start with, do you want to give listeners a bit of a bio on you – who you are, what you do, what training you’ve done, that kind of thing?
Alissa Rumsey: Sure. I am a registered dietitian nutritionist by training; however, I always tell people I don’t exactly do what people often think registered dietitians do. I used to, but I discovered first intuitive eating and then Health at Every Size and now what I consider weight-inclusive care about five or six years ago, and it completely shifted the way that I practice.
I have my own business. I started that business about seven years ago, and the business also shifted five or six years ago when I discovered the weight-inclusive practices. Currently where I’m at is I have a virtual private practice, so my team and I work with folks one-on-one. We also run different group coaching programmes during the year. We have some different online course options for people, really all around this idea of divesting from diet culture and healing from chronic dieting and coming back into your body and reconnecting with your body and yourself and working through whether it’s intuitive eating, we do a lot with mindfulness and self-compassion and some somatic work.
Really helping people connect to their bodies and eat in a way that feels internally driven and feels more like self-care instead of self-control or restriction. Just really helping people have more peace around food and eating and their body, so it’s not taking up so much brain space and time. That’s the main thing that I do.
I also do some trainings with professionals, with other dietitians, other healthcare professionals as well, all around this idea of weight-inclusive work and how we can provide the least stigmatising health care. I know you’ve talked to some of your guests before about weight stigma, and when we’re providing intentional weight loss and doing these different things, it can be very stigmatising. So I do trainings with other professionals as well.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I’m glad you had that ‘aha’ moment six years ago and started to shift.
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But if we go back earlier than that, giving a bit of information on you and your personal journey with this stuff, what was your relationship with food like growing up?
Alissa Rumsey: When I was growing up, I honestly didn’t really think about food that much, and I realise now how privileged that is, because I grew up in a naturally thin body and didn’t have any negative comments about my body from anybody growing up. So I honestly did not think about food or what I ate or was not eating for years. I was a very picky eater, which is funny to my friends now because now I eat pretty much everything and I love food. [laughs] But when I was a kid, it was very much like no soup, no sandwiches, these big categories of “I don’t like these things.”
So I feel very lucky that as a kid, I wasn’t getting those messages. That started to shift a little bit in high school. I went through puberty, and like a lot of folks that go through puberty and having body changes, that comes with what I now know is natural and very normal weight gain. But for me, that was very scary. It also happened to coincide with – I was very active, and I stopped playing basketball in those high school years. So this weight gain happened, and I started to panic because my body was changing and I felt really uncomfortable.
I ended up going to Weightwatchers with my mom. That started it for me. It started as a ‘diet’, but then did definitely turn more disordered where I look back now and I’m like, I was not even eating close to enough of what I needed. I was definitely overexercising. And that continued the end of high school through college. And actually, like many dietitians and nutritionists, that informed me deciding to go to school to become a dietitian. It did come from this disordered place at the time.
So yeah, I did struggle with my own body image and disordered eating throughout high school and college and into my twenties. And again, I say this with a lot of privilege, where even when I gained weight, I was still in a straight size, socially acceptable body. So I always say in terms of me healing my own relationship with food and my body, it was ‘easy’ in the sense that it was all internal work. I wasn’t getting messages from other people about my body changing. I was able to go to the doctor and not be weight shamed, or I don’t experience weight stigma.
And I again feel very privileged and lucky that my healing sort of happened – I did not think that anything was disordered about what I was doing. [laughs] Because diet culture so normalises these things. But I moved to New York City after my dietetic internship to work at a large teaching hospital here, and I fell into a group of friends, all the other dietitians – again, it’s so funny because I know so many dietitians that have their own history with disordered eating and/or eating disorders, and again felt so lucky. It was New York City, we were all in our twenties and thirties, everyone was really into food, and the food culture here is amazing. Everyone just ate and loved food.
So naturally, through being around people who didn’t really talk about calories or weren’t really worrying about what they were eating that much, and being really excited to be in New York – just being in my twenties in New York City was amazing, and I think naturally, those experiences helped me start to loosen my grip on food and on trying to restrict. Again, a lot of privilege, because my body didn’t really change. It did a little bit in the short term, but again, my set point is a straight size body, so I had that privilege as well.
But that was my twenties, and honestly it wasn’t until I discovered intuitive eating that I was like, oh wow, I was really disordered before, and realised that I’d come to intuitive eating without even knowing that that’s what I was doing or where I had gotten to.
Chris Sandel: You talked about your relationship with food being part of the reason that you ended up doing dietetics, and I think that is a really common story for a lot of people. And then also just being in dietitian school or nutrition school – that in and of itself can start to have an impact on your eating habits and your belief around food and your thinking about what other people are eating and all that.
I’m someone who, similar to you, I’ve had a really lucky upbringing in terms of always lived in a straight size body. I’ve never had any issues around food, so I bypassed that whole phase. But I do also remember when I was studying nutrition that there were lots of different changes I would go through and phases I would go through where I was playing around with this thing being in and this thing being out, etc. I think that was born of the fact that you’re studying all of these different things and there’s such an emphasis on food and health, etc., that I think it’s hard to not get into that place. So if someone’s already in a difficult place with food to start with, it can very easily spiral.
Alissa Rumsey: Oh yeah, for sure. And I think, too, the nutrition training really – I had a dietetic intern who’s now a fantastic dietitian, and she said to me – it really brought to my attention and made me think about how our nutrition training and dietetics programmes, at least for sure here in the United States – a lot of us come in already with perfectionist tendencies because that’s something that our culture also emphasises. She said to me, “I feel like my dietetics programme really honed this and made me even more trying to be perfect and like you have to do the ‘right’ thing.” Very binary. So again, we have these cultural characteristics of perfectionism and binary thinking, and then honed even more in the majority of the dietetics and nutrition programmes that take that and be like “Let’s drill that in even more.”
And yeah, the training – and it’s starting to slowly, slowly change; I’m actually speaking to a group of dietetic interns on Thursday – but it’s still very weight-centric, and it’s still very much centred on “This is wrong with you; you need to lose weight.” That’s just day in and day out, that’s what we’re learning. It’s very much a lot of morality around food. It’s very Eurocentric. I’m white, and I think, as I learn from my colleagues of colour and friends, for people who are not white, what’s presented as healthy eating is so Eurocentric, and cultural foods are always the ones that are being demonised as bad and not good.
So yeah, I think there’s so much wrong with the nutrition training as a whole. Certainly if someone does not come in with disordered eating, I feel like it’s a high chance that they’re going to struggle during their programme.
Chris Sandel: I definitely agree with that.
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When you started studying as a dietitian, what did you think you would be doing with clients? What was the pull for you? Was it somewhat personal in terms of “this is how I’m going to figure out how I feed myself and how I can make those changes I want to make or learn more about X, Y and Z that can help this thing for me”? Or was it much more about something you thought you were going to be doing with other people?
Alissa Rumsey: That’s a good question. When I was in high school, it was the early 2000s. At that point – and again, I feel very lucky with this – no one I knew was dieting. This wasn’t a topic of conversation around my peers, at least not on the surface, like I know it is so much for adolescents these days. So when I started ‘eating healthy’, I got a lot of attention for that. It started to become part of my identity, like “Alissa is being the healthy one” or “She’s eating these healthy foods.” And I liked that. I liked that I was getting attention for that, and I liked that people came to me with questions about nutrition.
I also started at the time working out at a gym and was really proud that I was learning to lift weights. Again, that wasn’t something that a lot of women were doing at that time. So I really internalised this as part of my identity. That’s when I was trying to decide what I wanted to go to school for and learned, “Oh, I can make this a career. I love answering these questions. I can make this a career.”
I think certainly there was also my own part of at that time, food and diet and exercise were so important to me. I spent so much time thinking about those things that it also made sense to go into that field. But there was a part of me that was like “I want to help people with these things.”
And initially what I wanted to do was sports nutrition. That was my initial passion. I worked at the campus gym all through college and did personal training and really wanted to work with professional sports teams. That was my original thought. And then I actually, during my dietetic internship, fell in love with critical care and working in the intensive care units. I’m very science and math brained, and I really liked that piece of it.
After my internship ended, I decided I wanted to work for a couple of years at a teaching hospital, so that’s where I moved to New York City and got a job at a large medical centre, a large teaching hospital here in New York City. Ended up being there for almost seven years because I really loved it, and I learned so much.
When you’re at a really large teaching hospital, yes, there’s the patient care, which I love, but there’s so many other opportunities. I got my start in doing media work there. I got my start doing speaking. I got my start doing social media work, working with the social media team there. So there were lots of opportunities for growth there, which is really nice, which is not the case, I know, for all dietitians and hospitals. But I was very lucky to get a job somewhere where there were those opportunities and where I felt like I was learning, and I loved all the people that I worked with.
I also think that helped in healing my own relationship with food, because I wasn’t working right out of school in weight loss. That’s not what I was doing. I was working in the intensive care unit, where we are more concerned with getting enough food in people. The main problem my patients were struggling with was either being able to eat at all – a lot of people were not eating by mouth; we were feeding them via tube – or if they were eating by mouth, like, “How can we get enough food in you?” So I think it also helped a lot that I wasn’t working in an outpatient setting doing weight loss counselling, because that was just so not on my radar in terms of my work for many years.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I guess it shows you a different side of health and human experience and all of that that was probably quite eye-opening for you at that age. As you said, that in comparison to working with athletes or with people where it’s about weight loss, it would’ve very much played into your identity, whereas this other aspect of work probably wouldn’t have matched up with or knocked against your sense of identity.
Alissa Rumsey: Yeah, exactly. So much less. There’s still certainly the dietitian stereotypes and the comments. To this day, when I’m meeting someone out and they’re like, “What do you do?” – I hate that question. [laughs] And I still have yet to come up with something.
My partner always jokes because he also hates that question, and we both look at each other when someone asks that and everyone’s like, “Wait, what? What’s the matter?” Neither one of us wants to say, because there’s so much loaded with saying “I’m a dietitian” because immediately you get comments about “Oh, can you tell me what to do to lose weight?” or “I need to get rid of this gut.” I’m like, no, I’m not the food police. I’m not judging you. So certainly being a dietitian, no matter where you are, there’s that piece.
But yes, to your point, I think for sure my day-to-day wasn’t wrapped up in doing that for other people, and then my colleagues in the nutrition department, shockingly, all of us did have a pretty healthy relationship with food. So that was also super helpful.
Chris Sandel: When I get asked that question, my response is always, “I’m a nutritionist”, which I then fairly quickly follow up with, “And I mostly work with eating disorders.” That tends to stop the questions about “What should I be eating to be healthy?” or “What should I be eating to lose weight?” or whatever. So adding that little bit of additional information stops a lot of the types of questions that you may be fielding.
Alissa Rumsey: Yes, that’s great.
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Chris Sandel: What was your experience like when you did find intuitive eating? You said you kind of found that in a roundabout way.
Alissa Rumsey: Yeah. I left the hospital about seven years ago, I think – what is time at this point? Especially over the last two years. [laughs] But seven-ish years ago, let’s say. I decided to start my own business. I was doing weight loss coaching stuff as well as a bunch of other things, and the first couple of years of my business, I had no business training, so it was such a steep learning curve. I was doing all these different business trainings and learning all this stuff about business.
And then I felt like I got to a really solid place and I was like, okay, business is stable; I want to now start doing more training around my counselling skills. At the time, I was really interested in and into mindfulness and mindful eating, so I started searching for trainings around mindful eating and sitting on Google and Googling, and came upon the intuitive eating training that Evelyn Tribole ran at the time, and still does, a six-week training for health professionals. I was like, “Oh, intuitive eating. I think that’s like mindful eating” and signed up. I had never read the book.
Interestingly enough, I had taken the book out of the library when I first moved to New York City, so almost a decade prior at this time, and never got around to reading it before it was due back at the library. [laughs] I actually don’t even remember what prompted me to take that out. And I didn’t know anything about intuitive eating. I was like, “I think this is similar to mindful eating. This looks like a good training. Let me sign up.”
Then in the first series in the webinar, Evelyn is sharing about weight science – and I know you just had Dr Jeffrey Hunger on, who’s an amazing research scientist in the weight science area. So she’s sharing all this data about weight science and introducing Health at Every Size, which I had never heard of, and it was really interesting. On one hand, my mind was blown. I was like, “I’ve been a dietitian at this point for almost 10 years; I have never heard about any of this stuff. How have I never been taught this?”
Then on the other hand, it just made so much sense, because both with my own experience with food, but also in thinking about the clients I had worked with in those past couple years in my business where they came to me for weight loss, they would lose some weight, they’d go off, they’d come back 3, 6, 12 months later being like, “Ugh, I gained it back, I need your help again.” I was like, “This makes so much sense. No wonder that’s happening.” I started putting those pieces together.
So my mind was blown, but it also really clicked for me pretty immediately. There was certainly – oh my gosh, over the next couple of years – and I’m continuing to unlearn – there was so much unlearning I had to do and so much uncomfortable work I had to do personally in thinking about a lot of these things. But it did make so much sense immediately that even when it felt really hard, even when – I mean, I certainly had moments, especially that first year, when I was like, “It would be so much easier to just go back to doing what I was doing before!” Because I’m working up against 10 years as a dietitian, 5 years of training to be a dietitian, so 15 years of being told one thing and then being like, “No, actually, that can be really harmful.”
So it was definitely a challenging thing, but it was one of those things for me personally – and I know a lot of folks say this too – where it’s like, once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think you’re so right there, because it makes sense, as you said, and once you have that knowledge you just can’t go back to what you were doing. From a moral standpoint, but also just that it no longer makes any sense to be doing that.
Alissa Rumsey: Right. For sure. It was certainly a transition point for the clients that I had at that time, who had come to me for weight loss and all of a sudden I was like, “How can I work in some of this stuff?” I actually did pause taking on new clients for several months as I dove more into the training around this area.
But I think, too, as someone in a straight size body, I had already done my own work on healing my relationship with food, and it wasn’t something – I think it can be so much more challenging for people who have larger bodies, especially in the health field. I know a lot of health professionals and dietitians specifically who talk about the awful weight stigma and discrimination they face having a larger body in this field. So I do think that also – certainly my privileges made this transition easier in that sense. I wasn’t having to worry about what people were thinking of me as a dietitian.
As a function of the privileges that I was born with – being white, being thin, I’m still relatively young, conventionally attractive in society’s eyes – people listen to me. They’re like, “You’re a dietitian. I can trust you.” And my colleagues who are fat will say the same exact things I’m saying and they get awful comments or people trolling them and bullying them and worse. Again, I think that made my transition to this work a lot easier because of these body privileges I have.
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Chris Sandel: You start the book out talking a little about this as well. You talked about posting a picture of yourself eating a sandwich, and the response that you got versus the response with someone – I think it was Brianna Campos that you compared it to. Do you want to explain that for the listeners, for anyone who hasn’t read the book?
Alissa Rumsey: Sure, that’s right in the introduction of the book. Yeah, that was a really big turning point for me. At that point, I had been practicing from a weight-inclusive approach and using intuitive eating with clients for a couple of years, and I was in Florida visiting some family and my partner went to school in Florida and his family lives down there, and he was like, “You have to have a Pub Sub.” Anyone who’s in the South of the United States knows what a Pub Sub is.
So we get these Pub Subs, which are these massive sub sandwiches, delicious, and I’m eating one, and unbeknownst to me he’s taking a photo of me as I’m eating it. He showed me the photos afterwards and he’s like, “Do you mind if I post this on Instagram?” I was like, “No, go for it. I actually want to post that photo, too”, because in the photo I’m in a bikini and hunched over. I’m blissfully unaware that my photo is being taken and I’m just going in on this sandwich. I have food on my face, my hair’s all over the place. I’m really enjoying this sandwich.
Looking at that photo made me think of a recent conversation I’d had with a client of mine who had watched Salt Fat Acid Heat on Netflix, the documentary with Samin Nosrat, the chef. My client said to me after watching this, “I have never seen a woman on TV, especially a woman like Samin, who is non-white, she doesn’t fit the conventionally attractive, socially acceptable body or appearance that we see on TV usually, just eating and enjoying food, and not trying to be like ‘This is bad, I shouldn’t be doing this’. Just eating and enjoying it, no excuses or anything.”
So seeing this photo of myself made me think of this conversation, so I put the photo up on Instagram and I put a caption like what I just described to you about this conversation with the client, like, why don’t we see more photos of women just eating and enjoying food and not apologising for it and not feeling self-conscious and not feeling judged? Just eating. The response was pretty immediate and pretty amazing.
We started a hashtag that was #womeneatingfood, which at the time – this was in 2019, I think – there were only three photos on Instagram that had that hashtag. And now there’s thousands and thousands, which is really cool. But as that was starting up and people were posting photos of themselves eating, which was so awesome to see, some of my fat friends and colleagues were posting photos. And seeing the difference in what their comments were versus the comments I was getting – I got praised, this got covered in the media, people were like, “This is amazing.” I literally did not get one negative comment. Not one.
I use the example of Bri Campos, who had shared this with me and allowed me permission to use this in my book. As a fat person, she posts a photo of herself eating and she gets like “Oh, you’re promoting obesity, this is so unhealthy, how could you do this? You’re a bad role model” and much worse. There’s so much awful, awful stuff that’s said to people online.
It made me super, super aware of my thin or straight size privilege and just how I can say the same exact thing as someone else, and because of how I look – which is nothing that I’ve done; this is just how I was born – through nothing that I’ve done, people will take me more seriously. So it really did start another wave of the unlearning and getting much more clear on these privileges and this positionality in terms of how I move about in the world.
Certainly in writing the book I was also very aware of this and wanting to use that positionality in a way that was very purposeful. I talk in the book, in the introduction, about how I hired two different equity consultants, people that have different identities than I do, to really make sure that any bias that I have – because we all have bias in it; we all have implicit bias – wasn’t coming through, and they were catching that. I really purposefully tried to quote people like Bri and fat and Black and Brown women of color and queer folks, all those who really started the body positive and fat liberation movement. Really thinking about that.
But that sandwich story that I start the book out with was a big turning point for me in this realisation not only of my own privileges but also just in terms of the different systems of oppression and like, yeah, why don’t we see photos of women eating food? At the time, too – people can go do this now – if you Google ‘women eating food’, the majority of photos that came up and honestly still do usually come up were thin, white women, young white women, pretty white women, eating salads.
Chris Sandel: And laughing while eating salads. [laughs]
Alissa Rumsey: And laughing. Yes, oh my gosh, exactly. Now if you Google that, you’ll see some of the media coverage that we got, but it’s still mostly that, versus you Google ‘men eating food’, it’s still mostly white, conventionally attractive men, but they’re eating burgers and pizza and all different things. It really got me thinking about, why is it that so many more women feel the need to apologise for what they eat or feel guilty about what they eat or feel self-conscious or worry what others are thinking? I started to put all these pieces together.
Chris Sandel: It is, when I think about this, a very sad state of affairs that you eating a sandwich makes news headlines and that people care.
Alissa Rumsey: Right?
Chris Sandel: In 2019 or whenever this happened, there are so many things going on in this world, there are so many things that women and everyone are doing – how is this big news?
Alissa Rumsey: Yes. I’m so glad you brought that up. You would not think that me just posting a photo of myself eating something would be a big deal, but thousands and thousands of likes and comments and media interviews later, it is, because women, when they start to think about it, they’re like, “Yeah.” I had so many people reach out to me thanking me for sharing that because they were like, “I feel like I can’t do that.” We’re just so taught that we have to look a certain way and we have to look perfect, and if we don’t, then there’s something wrong with us.
There’s so much pressure, I think on humans in general, but women bear the brunt of it, for sure. So yeah, it was really, really fascinating to see. I did not think those were the things I was going to get people telling me I was brave and they could never in a million years post a photo of themselves about that. Which is so sad, because eating is something we all have to do. We all do it multiple times a day. It just speaks to these different societal pressures that are there.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. It sounds like a headline from The Onion, like ‘Woman Eats Sandwich’ and then there’s a mock piece about how much of a big deal it is. But yet you’re right, it is a really big deal for so many people. My comments here, I don’t want to belittle it, but I’m also like, it really demonstrates where we’re at.
Alissa Rumsey: Exactly.
00:35:18
Chris Sandel: Keeping on focusing on the book, the book is broken down into four parts. There’s Fixing, Allowing, Feeling, and Growing. Do you want to talk a little about each of these parts?
Alissa Rumsey: Yeah, sure. Like you said at the beginning, the book is called Unapologetic Eating, but really it’s so much more than that. My goal with the book was really to walk people through the process of going from trying to always ‘fix’ themselves or change themselves to feeling embodied and able to unapologetically eat and from there being able to put that into the rest of their life and unapologetically live. So yes, I broke the process down into those four segments you mentioned.
00:36:04
The first part of the book is called Fixing, and this is where I go into more detail about the history of diet culture and our culture’s beauty ideals – the racism, the colonialism, the sexism that’s at the root of the diet culture that we know today. I also talk more about the reasons why dieting and weight loss measures never seem to work. I talk about the health and weight science and how health and weight are not as inextricably linked as we’ve been told for so long.
Then there’s also a whole chapter in the first section that really helps the reader explore more about their own history with food and their body. It is a book, but there are a lot of breakout prompts and reflection questions, really helping folks start to question and dig deeper into their own history and do some reflection on that.
Chris Sandel: I’m going to add a couple of things from this section that I really liked. You mentioned about beauty ideals. So many of the things that you touched on there was just how recent they have become and how connected some of these are to consumerism and basically companies coming up with products and wanting a bigger market share for that product. Like talking about armpit hair and cellulite and teeth and wrinkles. Maybe just talk a little about those things, because I thought that was quite fascinating for how recent they were. Obviously there are deep roots that go way back for a lot of beliefs around bodies, but these things were so recent, and yet they feel like fact and ubiquitous.
Alissa Rumsey: Yes, yes, yes. That is such a huge theme in my book. It’s what I hope to encourage people, is to question these things that we’ve taken as fact. So I have a section in Chapter 1 called “Are They Really ‘Flaws’?” This was mind-boggling to me. Some of this stuff I had known, some of it I learned while doing research for the book. But yes, many of these things we think of as flaws, whether it’s grey hair that we need to dye or cellulite or yelling teeth that we need to whiten or armpit hair or leg hair that we need to shave – these things, like you said, in the not-so-recent past were not considered flaws. Consumerism, and really capitalism, is what made them into flaws.
A couple examples of that that I share in the book. If we think about cellulite. Cellulite is something that occurs naturally for almost all women, like 80% to 90% of women. Basically all of us have it, and it does not matter on body size. All bodies have it. Up until the ’60s or ’70s, which is not that long ago, that was just considered normal skin. It wasn’t thought of as this thing that you needed to fix or be embarrassed of. That was just what skin looked like.
And then in I think the late 1960s, Vogue Magazine used the term ‘cellulite’ and introduced people to this word, and in doing so created a new beauty standard that women needed to try to achieve. Once cellulite was cemented as “This is a problem, I need to fix it”, all these skincare companies began making cellulite eliminate products to try to make money off of this beauty ideal.
Another example is with grey hair. I’m in my late thirties, and I’ve been getting grey hairs, and up until a few years ago I was actually plucking them out. I stopped; this is one of my more recent beauty ideals that I’ve been playing with, letting my greys grow in and seeing what that brings up in me. So this was a really interesting one for me personally to learn. It wasn’t until the 1940s or ’50s that women actually started dyeing their hair. At that point, if you wanted to dye your hair, you had to go into a salon, and it was something that was – I think the word they used was ‘loose’ women, this was something ‘loose’ women did. So women were not dyeing their greys because they didn’t want to be ‘loose’ – which is a whole other issue. [laughs]
But in the 1940s, ’50s, Clairol, a company that’s still around today, was trying to revamp the image of hair colouring to appeal to women’s anxieties about aging. So Clairol actually ran ads; the ads themselves said that grey hair was causing women to be old and ‘not fun’, and that if you had grey hair, you were confined to wearing clothing in subdued colours and you could only be friends with older people. They basically ran this set of ads that was like ‘grey hair = old and not fun’. [laughs] How does this benefit Clairol? Clairol is selling at-home hair dye. So they’re now profiting off of this beauty ideal that they’re creating.
Yeah, so many examples of that, from body hair, wrinkles. Oh my God, the wrinkles and the explosion of Botox and all of this, and the fact that almost all Botox users are women. That tells you something right there. So again – and I say in the book too, this is not to shame anybody who is dyeing their greys or using cellulite cream. It makes sense, because there is so much associated with that in our culture.
But if we can start to think about questioning, okay, who is profiting off of this? Who’s profiting off of me feeling badly about myself or me feeling like I have to fix myself? I think that ends up being the inherent problem: when we think that we are this problem that needs to be fixed, and we keep searching for the thing. But there’s nothing wrong with us. There’s nothing that’s going to ‘fix’ us, and we just keep searching and searching and spending all this time and money and energy. So really taking a step back and being like, who am I doing this for?
Chris Sandel: What is worrying as well is how much this is affecting people who are younger and younger in terms of people getting Botox who are still in their twenties, and where that is becoming more and more normalised. It is somewhat scary just trying to think about how dystopian this is going to get and where we’re going to be in 10 or 15 years’ time with all this.
Alissa Rumsey: Yeah. With social media and the research that Facebook released, and now we’re seeing with TikTok and Instagram, just how social media and seeing these images – which either people might’ve had Botox or had something done on their face, injectables, but also just with apps and filters and all this stuff that makes us look ‘perfect’, whatever that means. It’s affecting women’s body image, and it’s causing eating disorders. Especially, like you said, in people who are younger.
I cannot even – there was no social media when I was growing up. I didn’t even have Facebook until my twenties. And yeah, I cannot imagine if I was at that age feeling already so insecure in my changing body and so much peer pressure to then also be seeing these millions of images as well. It’s just so, so sad.
Chris Sandel: I think I’ve commented on the podcast many times, there is no amount of money in the world that would make me want to be a teenager, and that was me being a teenager in the ’90s. To even think about that now, I want none of it.
Alissa Rumsey: Agreed.
00:44:17
Chris Sandel: One of the other bits from this section that I really liked was there was an assessment of how diet culture and diet mentality has affected you, and then there were all these phrases, and you could just tick them. Some of them were like “I don’t feel my hunger cues”, “I’m not able to tell when I’m full until I’m stuffed”, “My relationships have suffered”, “I have mood swings.” Just this really long list that you can go through, and I thought it was a really nice way for someone to start to get some perspective on how much this is having an impact.
I think sometimes it can feel like this isn’t that big a deal. Like, “Yes, I may be a little bit picky with my eating, or maybe I’m exercising a little much” or something along those lines in terms of starting to notice there’s maybe a little bit of a problem, but I think this lays it out where you start to notice that this really does have tentacles in a lot more things than you may have first realised.
Alissa Rumsey: Yeah, exactly. I was trying here to help people see how it’s so much more than just food. It’s not just this problem with food; this affects our entire life. When we’re focused on trying to fix ourselves or control ourselves, it really undermines our ability to listen to ourselves and understand ourselves and our body and trust ourselves. So it ends up impacting all other areas of our life.
I talk in the book too about how so many of my clients will say not only do they not trust themselves around food, but they don’t trust themselves in other areas of their lives. They identify as people-pleasers and always put other people first. So yeah, really just showing people how if you’re not able to trust those body cues, what a big impact it does have outside of just food and our body.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, it’s not just about hunger. It’s basically intuition for so many aspects of life.
Alissa Rumsey: Yes.
Chris Sandel: We’re not going to have time to touch on this, but there was a lot about using dieting as a coping mechanism, which I really liked. You talk also about socialisation with girls and boys, which I thought was really fascinating. So I really liked that first section on Fixing. Talk now more generally about the Allowing part and then I’ll come in with my extra bits to add in.
00:46:47
Alissa Rumsey: Sure. I have to give credit to one of my mentors, Fiona Sutherland. She was the one who I first heard this description of like, how can we move from fixing to allowing? In fixing, we’re trying to change ourselves and fix ourselves. Part 2 of the book is called Allowing, and this is really where you can start to take steps to move away or start to notice how fixing has been detrimental to you and start to move away from that. Start to allow yourself to sit with the thoughts and feelings it brings up. Start to rediscover your inner wisdom and start to take steps to trust that inner wisdom.
In this section, I have a whole chapter on cultivating awareness and mindfulness. That’s actually the first chapter in the section. I feel like I say this every day to my clients: until we’re aware of what is going on, until we’re able to sit with that and explore that more, if we just try to fix or change things, that’s not long-term sustainable change. So there’s a whole chapter on mindfulness here and cultivating that.
I also introduce intuitive eating, talk about the intuitive eating framework and talk about how to honour your inner wisdom and start to reconnect to that, and also talk about moving from this place of scarcity and restriction to one of more abundance.
Chris Sandel: Let’s talk a little about the mindfulness piece, because I really like this section, and you break down the sequence with mindfulness in terms of steps of how this can be helpful with clients or really anyone – the steps being experience, then notice, then pause, then get curious, and then respond. Do you want to talk the listeners through that?
Alissa Rumsey: Sure. First I’ll say, typically the chain of events is we have an experience – the example I use in the book is a client whose pants felt tight. We have this experience, and then we immediately react to that experience. It’s like, “My pants are tight. Oh my gosh, I’ve gained weight. What am I doing wrong? What is wrong with me? I need to go on a diet.” We immediately react to that uncomfortable experience, or painful experience.
With mindfulness, what we’re trying to do is put some space between the experience and our reaction. So yes, I walk through, we have this experience. The pants feel tight. Can we notice that? Can we separate ourselves a bit from that experience? “Okay, I’m noticing that my pants are tight and that this is causing me to feel really uncomfortable right now.” And then starting to get curious about that and starting to think about that a little bit more. This allows you to then respond to whatever experience you’re having rather than just the immediate reaction.
I think I talk in the book about how this client – and it’s funny, because this was a client from several years ago, but I literally talked this through with a client yesterday, too, so this is a very common one. In the past, my client would try on a pair of pants, they’d be tight, and she’d immediately be like “I need to fix this. I need to diet. Pants are getting tight, I need to take care of this.”
This time, pair of pants felt tight and she noticed, “I’m feeling really sad, I’m feeling upset that my body might be changing, I’m feeling scared. What am I feeling scared of? This is bringing up fears of being judged about my weight or gaining weight and people not accepting me or loving me.” So getting down to like, what is really underneath this fear, in this case of weight gain?
And then taking some time to pause. This client in particular thought about it and she was like, “Okay, you know what? Yes, these pants are tight, but also, I have a lot of other stuff going on in my life right now.” I think her in-laws had been living with them for a little bit, which was very stressful, and she was already on edge for that. She was feeling really out of control in other areas of her life, and she was like, “You know what, this is making me feel even worse. I’m projecting some of this onto my body.”
Then her response, instead of the reaction of going back to dieting, she was like, “I have other pants that fit me, that I like, that I look good in, that are more comfortable. I’m going to put these ones in the donation pile and I’m going to put on a pair of pants that fit.” And she went back to reflecting on, “I’ve made a lot of progress at this point on trusting my body and trusting my intuition. I want to keep moving in that direction.”
And this can be used – obviously, in the book I talk a lot about examples around food and uncomfortable body experiences, but this can be used with anything. Anything in our lives where we have this experience and then we react, the more and more we’re able to take a breath and think about things and separate ourselves from that experience a bit – I mean, this is a skill I just keep learning more and more about, and it can affect so many other areas of our life in a positive way.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. You are correct, it is so universal, and it’s something that I notice and use a lot with myself. I like acceptance and commitment therapy, and there’s a lot of that in here in terms of the way you’ve explained that.
I also think if you’re someone who has a history of dieting, if you’re someone who has a history of body image issues, if you’re someone where this is a big part of your identity and where you put focus, any time you feel uncomfortable, it normally goes through that lens. So it doesn’t matter whether there’s been a tightness of the pants which then does feel like it’s fairly well-connected to stuff to your body, but it could be a fight with your partner, an email you’ve got, a parking ticket, or whatever it is – normally then gets put through the lens, whether consciously or unconsciously, of “This would be easier if I lost weight” or “This would be easier if I started to restrict” or whatever it may be.
Often when I’m having these conversations with clients and these kinds of reactions are coming up, my questions are always like, “What else was going on at the time? Let’s have a look at some of the other things.” It’s normally something else that has kicked off this chain of events.
Alissa Rumsey: Yes, exactly. You mentioned before about dieting as a coping tool, and I think so many people, a lot under the level of consciousness, will turn to trying to control their bodies and themselves when stuff feels out of control in their lives. I love that question about “What else is going on right now outside of this experience?”, because yes, I agree. Whenever I ask that question too, there’s generally always something else going on, and if we’re just used to turning that onto our body and blaming our body and being like, “Here’s how I’m trying to find control,” we have to notice that pattern first before we can start to shift.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. And as we said earlier, this is universal. For some people, it’s not got to do with food. Some people, their instant reaction is “I go to anger in these situations.” It’s like, “Cool, now I’m going to step back and notice and do all these things.” And once you get over the food thing, there’ll be something else and then something else and then something else. This is just a skillset that, for however long you’re on this earth, you will be coming back to.
Alissa Rumsey: Yes.
00:54:57
Chris Sandel: There was another section in here where you were talking about self-care and coping tools and self-compassion as part of this process, and you talk about creating a coping plan. I think that would be useful to have a bit of a chat about, like some of the different things that can be connected with this.
Alissa Rumsey: Yeah, the third section is called Feeling and talking about how when we stop trying to fix ourselves and begin to allow our body to just be, lots of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings can come up. For a lot of people, these are things that they’ve spent years if not longer trying to suppress. If you have used dieting as a coping tool, consciously or subconsciously, it’s important to develop more coping skills to use in those moments where things feel uncomfortable or painful or you need more support.
So I talk about developing ac oping plan, and this was something – to give a shout-out to Rachael Hartley, who’s another dietitian and author of the book Gentle Nutrition, which is also amazing – this is something I first heard her synthesize in this way, like a coping toolbox. So depending on what the uncomfortable situation or experience or thought or feeling is, I might need different tools for whatever’s going on. Rachael calls this creating a coping toolbox because a single coping strategy is not going to work for every emotion.
And usually when I ask people in our first session, I always ask folks, “How do you cope with emotions? How do you cope with stress?” or whatever, and either I get an answer of like “I exercise or I use food” or I just get a blank stare. They’re like, “I don’t have any coping tools.” Exercise and food totally can be coping tools, but they’re not always going to work, and sometimes we can use them in ways that might be more harmful than helpful.
So I walk you through in the book creating a coping plan, and I give examples of some different buckets that coping strategies could fall into. They could be something that is relaxing or calming; they could be something that helps with connection; they could be something that is energising or movement-related. It could be a coping tool that’s more pleasure-related or something that’s release-related. In each of those buckets, there’s many different things we could cultivate.
Just to give you some examples, connection for example, maybe you make plans to see a friend or you call up a loved one to have a conversation with. If you have a pet, playing or cuddling with your pet. Maybe going out into the world, going out into a coffee shop or restaurant, being around other people. Anything that’s going to cultivate that connection.
Some examples of maybe pleasure – I know for me, from a pleasure standpoint, putting on some really cozy, comfortable clothes. Also eating a favourite food that tastes really good. For me, pleasure is also – I’m actually sitting here with one right now – drinking a really well-made latte is so pleasurable for me and 100% one of my coping tools. [laughs] Sitting outside in the sunshine. For some people pleasure might be watching their favourite TV show.
So again, just trying to come up with things ahead of time – because in the moment, we tend to go right back to our default coping tool, which for some people is dieting or food restriction or body shame. For me, my default at this point is what my partner calls ‘doom scrolling’, so I just open up my phone and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll, which is mindless, but then it never makes me feel better afterwards. So if we can create this coping plan ahead of time, then in the moment when we’re like, “Ooh, I feel anxious, I feel stressed, something happened”, we can go to this coping plan and pull out something and see if that can help us sit with these uncomfortable feelings.
Chris Sandel: For me, when I’m working with clients with this stuff, there’s creating it ahead of time, which I think is important, but also having these things occur outside of just when the shit hits the fan and when you feel terrible. Because I think if the only point at which you’re reaching out for connection is when you’re feeling terrible, or the only point where you’re saying “I now should get some pleasure” is when things are terrible, it means that you’re constantly fighting an uphill battle to make that choice at that point. But it also means that you’re missing out on the buffering or the benefits you could have if these things are constantly occurring in your life. If these are a regular facet, more often than not it takes a lot more to bring you down.
So a lot of the time when I’m working on this stuff with clients, it’s like, how do we raise the quality of your life so that you’re always in a better starting place?
Alissa Rumsey: Yeah, 100%. You’re right, the coping tools – yes, having ones we can use when stuff has gone really bad, but regular – I call them regular self-care practices. Regular practices that are helping to keep you grounded, helping to keep your nervous system regulated. Exactly like you said, if we’re more regulated, it does not mean that we’re never going to not feel comfortable, but it means that we widen our window of tolerance so that things that maybe in the past made us feel really uncomfortable or distressed don’t make us feel as uncomfortable or distressed.
So yeah, I think those regular self-care practices are also super, super helpful in addition to having specific things that when stuff is going really badly or you’re feeling really shitty, you have stuff to also use at that point.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, and one of the regular ones for me, especially for the clients I work with, is making sure they’re eating enough. I think that’s typically where things start to spiral, when that hasn’t been occurring. That has to be the foundation on which everything is built, because if that’s not happening, then you are fighting a really uphill battle.
And that does have such an impact on where you sit nervous-system-wise and the kinds of thoughts and feelings that naturally start to occur when you’re in that place. So a lot of the work is like, how do we do these foundational things that are getting you 60-70% of the way there just as a baseline so it’s not just fighting fires?
Alissa Rumsey: Yes, exactly. I feel like that is something a lot of people don’t realise. Eating enough and eating consistently affects our brain. That affects our nervous system. And if we’re not doing that, then our capacity to sit with uncomfortable things is way less.
01:02:16
Chris Sandel: You talk as well – I really like the section on body grief and that process of dealing with that and exploring that and sitting with that. If you want to just mention that briefly?
Alissa Rumsey: Yeah, this is something I think everybody goes through in their journey: sitting with the grief that comes from no longer pursuing dieting or pursuing weight loss. For some people, this is grieving the body that they thought they would have or the body that they used to have. For some, it can be grieving the aging process and what that means. And for people who have larger bodies, there is a real grief around sitting with the fact that, yeah, they are going to be treated differently by some people, and there are things they might not be able to do.
This is something I’ve learned a lot from Bri Campos, to give her another shout-out, about ‘sitting in the suck’, as Bri calls it. Yeah, it’d be amazing if we just healed our relationship with food and feel great in our bodies, but no, we have to go through this period – another client of mine says ‘going through the mud’ of grieving. Grieving this loss.
I share – this was based on a paper that was put out in 2008 by a psychotherapist, and then it’s something that I first saw referenced by Meredith Noble, who is a fat acceptance and body image coach. Really looking at the five stages of grief and using that to think about moving through those stages when it comes to our own bodies as well. The denial, the anger, the bargaining, the depression, the acceptance.
In the process of getting to a place of body liberation, is what I like to think of, it is going through these phases. And it’s not just a one and done thing. We might get to this point of acceptance and then we get injured, or then we start to get wrinkles, and we have to go through it again for different things. But really this idea that yeah, we have to sit with these feelings and grieve whatever that potential loss is for the person. What does it mean to give up dieting, to give up the attempt to try to shrink yourself, and what do you then have to grieve?
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I think it’s useful to talk about this as well because I think sometimes there can be this misunderstanding of “I found intuitive eating, I’m now embarking on this, and everything is going to get better from here.” The reality is, there is that sucky period where you’re unlearning and relearning new things. There is this sucky period where your body is changing.
So I think it’s useful to, in a sense, normalise that process, like, no, this is what happens. If I had a magic wand and I could take it away from you, I would love to do that, but that’s just not the reality of it. And there is something better waiting on the other side, but you have to go through this process.
Alissa Rumsey: Yeah, exactly. It’s not something we can skip, unfortunately, as difficult as it is. And yeah, for sure it’s also – I do want to make sure I say that when we’re talking about this, we’re talking about right now the internal body grief work, but body image and body acceptance does not exist in a vacuum. We can do all this internal work, but for people who live in bodies that are marginalised by society, there are still these systems in place that are going to try to oppress their bodies.
That can be a big grief piece, because for marginalised folks, dieting and shrinking themselves into a smaller body often has less to do with fitting this beauty ideal than it does with feeling safe in the society that we live in and getting health care and getting access to these things that they might not be able to get in a different size body.
So yeah, I think this is a really complex process, for sure, but is something – and I talk about, too, how I think this is why so many folks end up getting involved in the activism piece of this, because for so many people, there’s only so far that internal work is going to take us if we still have these systems of oppression in place.
Chris Sandel: I completely agree. There was another section that you talked about laziness and the concept of laziness and why it’s a lie, which I absolutely loved, because it’s a conversation I have a lot with clients. You talk about body image and different body image tools as part of this.
01:07:29
But I want to move on to the final part of the book, which is the Growing part of the book. So give the cliff notes of that, and then I can dig into some specifics.
Alissa Rumsey: Surprisingly, I wasn’t expecting this, but this was the part of the book that was the most fun for me to write. In this last section, called Growing, in this process of questioning and unlearning and reconnecting to your body, we all get to explore and learn and define new truths for ourselves.
This is the place where often people will say – I’ve had clients who are like, “Now that I’m not dieting and doing these things, I have so much extra time. What do I do with this time? And who am I now that I’m not pursuing these things that I’ve been pursuing for so many years?” So this section on growing is really a chance for people to do some more self-exploration and self-discovery. There’s some values-based work in there. There’s some embodiment and some somatic practices to start to help people think about being connected more to their body outside of just the food and eating piece. And then I end it talking about how to embrace your power more fully.
Chris Sandel: There was another great checklist that people can go through where it looks at – it’s called Self-Connection Questions. I like this because it moves someone so far away from looking at things through the lens of food or exercise or how their body looks and being more about genuine connection within myself and what that means. Things like, when was the last time you laughed really hard? How would your best friend describe you? What is something you’re passionate about? What memory would you want to relive again? And it just keeps going on.
I thought each of these could be a great journalling prompt if someone wanted to take it in that direction. It also starts to dovetail into stuff around values, which I think is really important. This is something I forgot to mention when we were talking about the mindfulness piece; I think when you’re having that moment of pause, if you’ve done some values work in advance, like “What are my real values? If I say that these five things are my real values, what would be the appropriate response in this moment if I’m using my values and my North Star as opposed to being pushed around by these feelings and thoughts that I’m having in this moment? If I take a pause and a bigger picture approach here, how could my values be helping to guide me?”
I just thought that was great that that was coming up. As I said, the self-connection questions I thought were fantastic.
Alissa Rumsey: Thank you. A friend of mine, Hana Jung, those were used with permission from her. I share, too, in the book, that was for me personally something that I realised honestly only in the last couple of years, even though I’ve been healing the food and body image piece for well over a decade. I had this realisation that so much of what I do or say was going through this subconscious filter before I would do or say it, and the filter was “What are other people going to think of what I’m doing or saying?”
So my own journey in the last handful of years has been this self-connection piece of how I get reconnected to myself and to who I really am and just getting to know myself better and feeling more grounded in that. I think a lot of the folks that I work with identify with this in the sense of they identify with the people-pleaser piece and always thinking outside, of what others are thinking about them. So the self-connection questions and certainly the values work as well has been super helpful for me, and for folks as they start to explore, “Who am I outside of just my appearance? And who am I outside of what other people think about me?”
Chris Sandel: I think that filter of wondering “How is this looking to an outside person? What is this person going to think about when I utter this sentence?” or whatever it may be – it reminds me, I had Lindsay Kite on the podcast from Beauty Redefined, and we talked a lot about self-objectification and how self-objectification is kind of the opposite of what you’re talking about here, which is that reconnection with one’s body and really being in one’s body.
01:12:32
I know you talk about how reconnecting to your authentic, unapologetic self involves getting out of your head and into your body, and I think that is really true. Do you want to talk a little bit more about what it means to be in your body or to be embodied, and maybe some of the embodiment practices that you reference in the book?
Alissa Rumsey: Sure. I think for a lot of people, we spend most of our time in our heads. I have clients who will say from the neck down, they don’t feel anything or pay attention to anything. It’s literally in their heads all the time. This is really common in our culture because we live in a culture that is encouraging us to do that, encouraging us to disconnect from our bodies in so many ways.
So I wrote a whole chapter on becoming embodied and introducing this idea of, what does it mean to get out of your head and back into your body? I will acknowledge here that the first time I heard ‘get out of your head and into your body’, I was like, “What the hell do they mean? I am in my body.” So if you’re thinking that right now as you’re listening, I hear you, and you’re not alone. [laughs]
But yeah, I’ve come through this process of like, oh yeah – for me, it was that realisation of me filtering everything and not paying attention to these signs that my body was sending me and trying to numb them or push them down. Because it’s really challenging to stay present in our bodies. There’s so many things every day that encourage us to numb and dissociate and tune out and disconnect, and certainly for folks with any history of trauma, that plays into this too.
But when I’m talking about embodiment, as you and I are talking, I’ve been mostly in my head, but now that we’re talking about embodiment, I’m like, okay, I can feel my feet on the floor. I can feel that my stomach’s starting to get a little hungry for lunch. I’m noticing sensations in my body. I can notice my breath right now. So being embodied is really about being present in your body and feeling your body sensations.
This is even when you’re engaged in the world in some way. So you and I are talking right now. It is very common that I’m going up into my head because I’m thinking, I’m listening to your questions. But embodiment is like, can I pause, notice that I’m in my head, and also start to not just think with my head but also notice my body? So just being more aware as you’re walking about the world and your day of feeling connected to your body and noticing and sensing and listening to what your body is saying rather than just your head.
Another personal example of this – and again, this is something that I just realised two years ago, with the help of Fiona Sutherland, actually, in a supervision session. I had been struggling with some low appetite and really having a hard time eating during the day, and was starting to notice more of these body sensations but honestly was just so busy and didn’t really know what they were. I was just ignoring them, basically. In conversation with Fiona, she was like, “What is your knowledge about your nervous system?” [laughs]
It really made me realise that the feelings I was feeling in my body was my nervous system freaking the eff out and being like, “What are you doing? You’ve been working way too much. You need to get up, you need to take a break.” And that is why I wasn’t able to eat, because my nervous system was so on edge all the time. Again, this is just a couple of years ago. And it’s hard, because I did notice the sensations, but I was like “I have so much to do, I have to do this thing, let me just do one more thing.”
So embodiment is like, can I notice these things? I still do feel those things – way less. It was literally happening every day. And now when I feel them, it is immediately a trigger for me, assuming I can do this, to get up from my desk and be like, “Nope, I just need to” – and I have some coping tools that I know work at this point, that I’ve practiced. One of them is I go lie on the couch and I put a heavy blanket on top of me. I have a couple of specific albums that immediately at this point, they start and my nervous system settles.
Embodiment is this ability to be connected to your body, to know what it’s communicating to you, and then to respond to that, this two-way street between our bodies and ourselves and listening to that.
Chris Sandel: Nice. The nervous system piece is huge. I had Deb Dana on – I can’t remember what podcast episode it is.
Alissa Rumsey: I’m reading her book right now.
Chris Sandel: Polyvagal theory is something I talk about a lot with clients and use as a way of them starting to understand these different parts. But I had a similar experience to you, but much more recently. My wife, at the end of last year, was in an accident and I had to take quite a bit of time off work and look after my four-year-old son.
It was the first time in a really long time that I’d had extended time away from work, and despite how much of a challenging time this was, I noticed that when the only thing I had to do all day was just play with my son, my nervous system calmed right down, and I noticed that this work that I do where I was always in the mentality of “I’m great at compartmentalizing. I can get on with things. This does not affect me” – I’ve noticed that that is bullshit. [laughs] It was having much more of an impact on me than I was noticing.
By having that time to have space and a break, now when I’ve come back, I’m much more aware of these things. And I intellectually understood polyvagal theory; I’d read the book, I’d chatted with Deb Dana. But it took that experience for me to really see a difference, I think because I’d become so acclimatized to it.
This is something I always talk about with clients who are in recovery from an eating disorder. You are just unaware of how affected you are by this. You are so used to these sensations that you don’t even realise they are occurring, and you could be living at a 1 out of 10 or a 2 out of 10, but you don’t really notice that because that’s been your way of life for the last 5, 10, 20 years, whatever it may be. It’s only when you come out the other side that you then are able to see it for what it is, in the same way I was able to see how much it was having an impact on my nervous system.
Alissa Rumsey: Yeah, exactly. It is such a hard thing to explain to folks until you do get in there and do have that experience of dropping into your body. I felt very lucky that for me, what started me exploring this and realising that I was up in my head was I was on vacation. I think for a lot of people, when we’re out of our normal routine, that tends to be a time where we are able to let go and let our nervous system settle. I had this experience sitting on a beach. And again, similar to what you said, I had intellectually been thinking about this and learning about this, and I had this experience, and I can still feel it in my body right now as I’m talking about it. Just sitting on this beach and being like, “This is what it means to be in my body. This is what it is.”
And yes, our day to day, we’re not always going to be – yeah, if we could all just play all day and not have to work, amazing. But unfortunately, that is not the reality for a majority of us. So yeah, for me, it’s been this like, okay, how can I try to cultivate these moments during the day where I do have to work, but how can I cultivate these moments? Ideally taking longer breaks on weekends and taking time off and vacations to cultivate – and there are embodiment practices.
I love that you said playing with your son, because for me, it’s been this journey of, how do I get back to that childlike self? Play is such a huge thing. My friend Hana, the self-connection questions, something she said is “Why do adults stop playing? How can we continue playing as adults?”
But there’s also practices like yoga, meditation, deep breathing. Just being outside in nature. There are things we can do to feel more embodied that, again, once we’ve been practicing them, don’t have to be days off on end or anything like that. But yeah, it is something that just having that experience and taking some time – and like you said, you just don’t realise it when you’ve been living this way for so long.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. For you, in terms of what you said about “I noticed my appetite was down”, I think too often the thought with intuitive eating, at least for beginners, is that it is the ‘hunger and fullness’ diet, and if I’m not hungry, then I shouldn’t be eating. As you experienced, even though your appetite was down, your body still needed the energy to be able to function properly; it just wasn’t giving you that feedback adequately because it was prioritising other things, even though it clearly needed the energy.
Alissa Rumsey: Exactly. And that was making my nervous system even more go offline because I wasn’t able to adequately nourish myself. So yeah, now I’ve had to have practices of eat my breakfast before I sit at my desk. I’ve cut way back on those lattes that I love so much. I’ve cut way back on them because I started to realise, oh yeah, I love them, and in some ways they are coping tools for me, and I get so much pleasure from them – but also, it affects my nervous system and it affects my appetite. The mornings I have coffee, if I do have it – which I do still have it a couple days a week – I will try to make sure I eat before I drink the coffee.
So it’s just noticing these little things, and what shifts I can make, because I know that when my day gets busy, it’s going to be hard for me to fully be in my body. And also in terms of my schedule, I’ve been like, can I make sure to be really intentional about leaving gaps in between things? Whereas before I was like, “Well, I can fit this in.” And I still do that sometimes, but trying to be more intentional.
Actually, my partner and I just got kittens last month, so that has been a really helpful midday ‘go out and pet the kittens’ nervous system settler for a few minutes at a time. Just finding these moments during the day.
Chris Sandel: I thought you were going to say that ruined your nervous system because you were up at night dealing with kittens.
Alissa Rumsey: Oh, no, they are sleeping in the bathroom. [laughs] And I think they’re sleeping. We don’t hear them. And luckily – we live in an apartment building in the city, and our neighbours don’t hear them. So we think that they’re sleeping during the night. But yeah, they do not have the run of our house yet. Yet. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Nice. [laughs] Alissa, this has been awesome. As I said at the top, I really thoroughly enjoyed your book. We have barely touched anything that is in it. I’ve got so many notes that we didn’t even get to, so I highly recommend that people check out the book. Where can people be going if they want to find out more about you?
Alissa Rumsey: They can visit my website, which is www.alissarumsey.com. You can also follow me on Instagram @alissarumseyrd, and then my book Unapologetic Eating is available anywhere books are sold. I link to all of those on my website at www.alissarumsey.com/book.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on the show and for chatting with me today.
Alissa Rumsey: Thank you so much for having me, Chris. This was a great conversation.
Chris Sandel: That was my conversation with Alissa Rumsey. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and also her book. It’s one I have started recommending to clients since I read it, so if you enjoyed what we covered today, we barely scratched the surface of what’s covered in the book, so please check it out. You won’t be disappointed.
01:25:35
Now, my recommendation for this week for something to check out is Brené Brown’s most recent book, Atlas of the Heart. I’m a huge Brené Brown fan. I think I’ve read or listened to all her books or at least most of her books. This is a new book all about emotions, and looking at the fact that as humans, we are often not great at being able to name a wide array of emotions, and we don’t have the language for it.
She makes reference to some research that she and her team have done where they ask people about emotions and she said that most people are able to label three emotions. Most people can name happy, sad, angry. She points to the fact that the better we are able to accurately name and label an emotion, the better we’re able to understand it and better able to cope. This is actually something that ties into a recent podcast conversation that I had with Adele Lafrance, which is Episode 240 of the podcast, talking about the important function of emotion coaching.
Most of the book is then looking at this long list of different emotions and focusing on each one and how they arise and what you can notice and what are their traits, etc. It’s actually a book that was rather serendipitous in terms of turning up for me at the right time. I’d been wanting a book like this, one, for myself, because I personally think I could benefit from having a better ability to more accurately label my own emotions. It’s something that Ali and I have also been wanting to help our son, Ramsay, with. I’ve actually got another book that is specific for helping kids with emotions called Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child by John Gottman, but I haven’t read much of that yet, so it may feature at a later date as part of a recommendation.
I also wanted a book that I could recommend to clients about emotions because it is so crucial to the work that I do. I’ve really been impressed with it. It’s one of those books that I know I’m going to come back to and will probably go through multiple times because there is a lot of information, and there are so many emotions that she touches on.
She makes reference to this quote from Liz Gilbert that has stuck with me and feels very apt with both the work that I do, but even when I reflect upon struggles in my own life. The quote is: “You are afraid of surrender because you don’t want to lose control, but you never had control; all you had was anxiety.”
I listened to the book on Audible, and I think Brené Brown has done a great job narrating it. She even adds in extra bits that weren’t in the book-book. Or she will say, “Let me read that again because I know if you were looking at the book, you would probably read that sentence a second time.” So it feels like there’s been a lot of thought that’s gone into the audio experience, and it’s a very easy way to consume the book. So the book is Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown, and I highly recommend checking it out.
That is it for this week’s episode. As I mentioned at the top, I’m taking on clients at the moment. If you want help with an eating disorder or disordered eating, with chronic dieting, with poor body image, exercise compulsion, getting your period back, any of the topics that I cover as part of this show, then please reach out. You can head to www.seven-health.com/help for more information.
I will be back next week with another episode. Take care, and I’ll catch you then.
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