SAMIA: Awesome, awesome! I know that one time when we were talking you were telling me something about intuitive eating being built upon ten principles. Can you maybe tell us about one or two of the principles that are involved?

SAMIA: My gosh, you brought up so many, so many, excellent points. One of the thoughts that I was having as you were talking is, you know, when it comes to the dominant culture especially in the context of the media and how the media frames the conversation, you know in the last 10 years since I started my own business as a Happiness Expert, coach trainer, healer, I've had to learn a lot about marketing. And one of the things that, you know, you're constantly taught in the marketing world is that, you know, you have to figure out a quick, simple, easy way to get your message across… Means it can't be layered, it can't be complex, it has to be very simple because often you just have a few seconds to capture someone's attention. And so, you know, you take something like before and after pictures of "Oh my gosh! I used to be this fat and now I'm like this thin", like, that's a very quick and easy way to communicate a specific idea, you know. And so from a marketing perspective, it's an awesome thing to focus on because it catches people's interests, it catches people's imagination, it's visual, that's, you know, just very like... there's a very concrete result that it helps you to imagine for yourself. So it sure is a wonderful thing from a marketing perspective to focus on. But it's just, even if it's the truth, it's just such a tiny, tiny, sliver of the truth. And what you're saying is look at the bigger picture, make the whole conversation more layered, more complex, so you can see the fortress.

LISA: And you hit on a really touchy subject. And prior to me becoming an Intuitive Eating Health Coach, I was just, I was a traditional health coach. I have a very long diet history. I've been dieting since I'm 12. I had been dieting since I'm 12 years old. When I shifted into my... this career, I thought, you know, I'm already a dieting expert. I'm going to help other women lose weight because it is just so important. And then I realized that, through further education, not only is how we visually look not... our... like, our self-worth gets mixed in with how we visually look. And I discovered I had my own disordered eating challenges. And with good conscience and ethics I could no longer do what I was doing because I needed to heal myself and I didn't want to be supporting other women with their disordered eating and possibly moving into eating disorders. When we look at those visuals, we don't know what we are saying when we say, "Oh, you look so wonderful!"

SAMIA: Yeah.

LISA: We say it with encouragement and enthusiasm because we are told to believe the thin ideal is best. And the reality is that all of our bodies are best. Whatever body we land in that's just where we are. Our bodies, they have to be our friend for as long as we are here. And nobody wants to be at war with themselves 24 hours a day. How do we shift that message, so that... when we're looking at these images, first of all we're saying, "Oh, you looked horrible before and now you look wonderful!"… And the reality is, based on scientific studies, is that the before picture is also going to be the second after picture. And when we are talking to these people or you see somebody on the street and you say, "Oh you look so wonderful! You must have lost weight”, are we encouraging their disordered eating? Are they challenged with an illness? Are they experiencing grief? We have no idea. How do we shift that conversation to, "I am so happy to see you", "Oh, your eyes are sparkling! Tell me what's happening". Or "You look really tired and sad. Tell me, tell me what's happening", "How can I help you?", "How can I support you?" Shift away from that commentary of the vessel in which we landed in. You know everybody's DNA is different. Where is, you know... your ancestors are different, we are all going to look different. How do we remove that judgment and create acceptance?

SAMIA: Yes.

LISA: And weight discrimination is no different than all the ethnic discrimination that goes on in our world. And it's just a small part on how do we start to stop marginalizing our communities based on our body size, our color, our shape... all of it, all goes together.

SAMIA: You're so... oh my gosh, that's so true! I mean, you know, the person of color living in a culture like in America where I'm part of the minority... what you just mentioned about, you know, that we are all coming from, like, different cultures, and I think, backgrounds... we have different DNAs, different ancestors, and so forth, and that makes our body different... It makes me think about how, you know, we have different standards in different cultures. I remember when I lived in India... that's where my life started... for the first 8 years of my life we were living in India. And you know India actually is also an extremely ethnically diverse country. And there has... I mean, India has a history of at least 5,000 years that we know of that's recorded, a very very old culture... And in those 5,000 years there have been lots of people from different parts of the world who have come to India and settled in. My own family is a great example. Like, I mean our family has been based in India for the last 3/400 years. But before that we have ancestors who traveled from Persia, from East Asia, from the Middle East. And I'm like the mix of all of these different ethnicities and backgrounds. And so like a lot of times when people look at me even in India they're like, "Where are you from?" And I was living in a part of the country where I was more fair than a lot of the other people around me. And like if you/if I lived more, more, in Northern India, my complexion would not be considered particularly fair. But where I was, I was considered particularly fair. And I was also bigger. Like I was bigger than all my classmates in terms of my height, my weight, and all that. And I always stood out. And/but the thing was that people saw my bigger size and the assumption that they made in Indian culture was, "Oh, Samia must come from a well-off family. She must come from a very rich family, because she must... because if she's bigger in size that must mean she has access to good food and, you know, healthy nutrition and all that kind of stuff"... Because so many... unfortunately like in especially where I lived, so many of the kids who were very small in size and thin.... it wasn't by choice. It was because of malnutrition and poverty and things like that. So, you know, like, I always felt extra loved in some ways because of my bigger size even though I didn't do anything to earn that, you know, praise. But it just goes to show that cultural standards can be so different.

LISA: And you know you shared some really... a beautiful story in how our perceptions create the lens in which we, you know, and how we feel. And you know over 100 years ago, you know, you put... you said it... in that a bigger body was shown that you were well nourished and you were to be revered. And then comes all these other different factors and then you know marketing comes in, and profits come in, and all of a sudden the BMI comes in, and all of these things are hijacked to create profits for so many people. And depending on where we are in the world, how we visually look creates status or privilege or marginalization.

SAMIA: Right. <

LISA: And food insecurity is huge. And if you have food insecurity at some point in your life that has a lasting effect for years and years. It doesn't go away unless you really do the work and become aware of how it has impacted you. Because food insecurity... and I don't want to confuse the issue... but when you're dieting and you have restriction and deprivation which is choice versus food insecurity which is not choice, it still sets up the famine response in your body. So those of you, you know, those that have food insecurity when there is food available, you're always in fear that it's going to be gone. And your natural inclination is, for survival, is that there's food in front of me, I need to eat. When we're talking about diet world and diet culture with restriction and deprivation, our bodies don't know that it is a choice. And it can only last for so long. And when the dam breaks, that's when we go into the refeed and it affects the imbalance of, you know, the diet roller coaster being up and down. And then all of a sudden comes the guilt and the shame and it just continues to go on and on and on and you cycle and continue to cycle. So the famine response is similar in our bodies with food insecurity even though the experience is very different on how you got there.

SAMIA: Yeah, that's a very, very, important aspect. Can you share another principle? Like, I feel like if you share another principle that will help us to go even deeper.

LISA: Absolutely. So the second principle is, honor your hunger. Those of us that have been dieting have lost touch with our signals, our hunger signals within our body. Often, we are told when to eat. So when you're, you know, when you go back to school, you know your parents said, well, you need to eat before you go to school at 7 am. You're eating lunch at 11, 12... at some odd time. You come home from school, you may or may not have a snack. And at somewhere between five and seven o'clock dinner is ready. Not once did anybody ask you, "Are you hungry?" And you weren't taught to ask yourself, "Am I hungry?" And to have the freedom to say yes or no. So it's really important to take back your power. And this is where I get my three words of listen, trust and respect. It's free learning how to listen to your body. When we're born as babies we're all born intuitive eaters. So whether you nursed or bottle-fed, your baby would cry. And as a caregiver you would either naturally feed the baby with a bottle or bring the baby, if you're the mom, bring the baby to your breast and you would nurse. Baby would quite, settle… when they're done they shut their mouth and they turn away. Then as the mom or the caregiver we know best and we start to take the bottle or we take our nipple and we try to put it back into the baby's mouth to make sure that they're topped off, have they had enough, you don't want them hungry… And that is the beginning steps of teaching our babies and our children not to trust their bodies.

SAMIA: Yeah.

LISA: As we get older, we will tell our kids if they're playing, "Hey honey, it's time to come eat!" How do we rephrase that to, "Lunch is ready. When you're hungry come to the table and you can eat." And that, and typically the kids will play for another 30, you know, a few minutes and they'll check in. Or if they're really engaged in something and loving something they might put it off because that's more, you know, more important. So it's learning to understand when we're talking about hunger, is it a thought? Is it a body cue? Or is it an act of self-care?

SAMIA: Yeah.

LISA: So an example could be... if you're traveling, and you know that you're on a five-hour flight, maybe your flight is at nine o'clock and you ate breakfast at seven o'clock, but now you're not gonna land until two o'clock. What do you need to do to be able to make sure that you take care of yourself, that at two o'clock when you land you're not starving and out of control and looking for whatever is closest to eat. And you know sometimes it happens. You know, we're not talking about you have to be regimented and you always have to do this. It's three things to think about in terms of your hunger... Are you feeling it within your body? Is your tummy grumbling? Are you getting brain fog? Are you getting short tempered? Are your, are you able to focus? What is your patience? What is your sense of humor? Where, what's happening with your body as you notice the difference between before, during, and after meals? And the second one is, you know, what's happening? You know, is it a thought? Are you bored? Are you distracted? Are you hungry? Do you need, you know, some sort of dopamine hit which will just kind of keep you going through whatever you're doing? Or do you need to say "Here's what my day looks like. I know I have to eat. Like my time is crazy. I'm gonna just make sure that I have pockets of time to nourish my body at certain times during the day so that I don't crash and burn, and I can be doing all the things that I need to do".

SAMIA: Right, right. So it could be a feeling in your body, it could be a thought, or it could be like a conscious act of self-care.

LISA: Yes!

SAMIA: Those are the three things you want to think about in terms of when you're eating and how you're relating to what you're eating and when you're eating. And does this... so how does this relate to what you were talking about a little bit earlier in terms of, you know, the famine response that gets triggered in our bodies when we're either food insecure or when we're, you know, too much into the dieting culture? How do we relate these three ways of thinking about eating to, like, when we get stuck in the famine response?

LISA: So what often happens is when you restrict and deprive... that you lose touch with those signals within your body, because you're very much in your head. You're following the diet rules and you don't tune into your body cues. So when we had talked over the last few weeks I had shared with something called interoceptive awareness. And the best way to explain that is if your bladder is full you have that sensation that you have to pee. Chances are, I would bet money that you're going to find a place, a toilet, to be able to relieve yourself as soon as possible. You are going to honor that cue. As dieters, we often just kind of say, "I'm going to ignore it. I don't hear it. I, you know, I can't eat before one o'clock because if I eat at eight o'clock I'm gonna eat all day and then I'm gonna be bad"... And you go into this whole litany in your mind on why you are not supposed to be eating. What happens is that when we restrict and deprive we automatically... At some point it's kind of like a pendulum. You can restrict, restrict, restrict. And then all of a sudden the dam breaks and then you go all the way to the other side and you eat. Your body no longer trusts you. And if there's in front of you, you just keep going. Just like, you know, with the fat with, you know, food insecurity. If there's food in front of somebody, they are not going to leave a morsel on that plate because their body is saying "Okay, here's a way for me to thrive, I need to eat." And it's the same thing. So when you honor your hunger, it starts to help with the dysregulation with the other systems and other thoughts that are going on in your body.

SAMIA: Okay. So if someone's stuck in the famine response in that context, they're probably having a lot of thoughts about eating that are not the best. And that's just because of them being stuck in the famine response. And so the thing is to understand where you're at? Why you're there? And then sort of over time you can sort of come back to the healthy normal. And then you can really begin to trust even the thoughts that you have about when to eat and what to eat and so forth. And you can trust better and more the signals that your body is giving... and so on and so forth.

LISA: And that brings us into the next principle of making peace with food. So, when you restrict food and you say I can't eat this, because if I eat this I'm never going to stop eating. So what happens is that we then turn into the binge component. Let's just say that, you know, you've been on a strict diet and, you know, all of a sudden you're off your diet. Now you see a piece of cake. You're going to eat as much cake as you possibly can... followed by guilt and shame, because you, quote unquote, “have no self-control”. If you gave yourself unconditional permission to have cake every day, that it's never going to disappear, that you can have it any time that you want it, then you will naturally stop binging on it. And it's called through the practice of habituation. So an example... just as a very simplistic example, and I'm really simplifying the process here... Let's say that you have a one pound bag of M&Ms and I told you that you can have a pound of M&Ms every day for the rest of your life. That first day you're going to sit there and you're going to eat your M&Ms and they're going to be so good. And the second day and the third day you might go through that pound of M&Ms. When we're talking about habituation, we're not talking about eating them in the middle of a binge. We're talking about eating them when you are not starving, not necessarily stuffed... you are sitting, you are present, you are aware, you're grounded, you're connected. We start to say, how do you feel when you're eating these M&Ms? Does the first M&M taste as good as the 10th M&M or the 30th M&M or the very last M&M? And through this practice, as you continue to give yourself unconditional permission, you will notice that when it is readily available and you are eating it being present, all of a sudden you don't want a pound of M&Ms. You're gonna notice that, you know, typical things of a pound of M&Ms is going to give you a sugar rush and you're going to crash and all of a sudden you're going to get that horribly overly sweet feeling in your mouth, then you need something to balance it out. You notice that your tummy may start to hurt or, you know, so many different... everybody's different in their response... Those are just kind of generalizations... And you're gonna say, like, "Oh, I can have five or ten M&Ms", or whatever that number is that works for you every day, and it doesn't matter. All of a sudden I don't need to eat a pound, I don't have to binge, I don't have to sneak, I don't have to stand in my pantry and pick at it. I'm going to sit and I'm going to enjoy it. And I'm going to love every one of those M&Ms. And I'm going to stop when the enjoyment stops.

SAMIA: Yeah! Oh, I love that. And you made me think about, again when I was a little kid you know. And so one thing that happened with us was... I mean in my family... as I mentioned I started out life in India. That's where my dad's from. But my mom's from Pakistan. And every summer pretty much, during the summer holidays, she would take us to Pakistan to visit her side of the family. And it so happened that my Pakistani side of the family is more well-off financially than my Indian side. And so when I went to Pakistan, I had access to a lot more what we would, what we considered, luxury foods. Like, for example in India, my family, we couldn't afford to eat meat every day. We just couldn't. It was too expensive... so we had, maybe, meat twice a week or something like that. And even then it was like small portions because we got a little bit and then it had to be shared with everyone in the family. We didn't have access to things like ice cream or frozen food or cookies and chocolates and things like that. But in Pakistan, my Pakistani side of the family, because they are well-off, actually owned their own poultry farm. There was like chicken to eat every day. And there was like a bakery that... one of my grandparents favorite things to do because they know we enjoyed it so much... they would take us over to the bakery and we could choose anything we wanted. And there were like these little cookies that we really, really, loved. And we'd get bags full of them. And like, me.. like, I think because of exactly what you were talking about is, I didn't always have access to these things. And so I'd be like "Nom-nom-nom-nom-nom, give me more, give me more!". Especially in the first few weeks of me being there. But then over time you're like, "Okay, you can slow down"... you know. And I was always amazed by how my cousins who were visiting from London, never had the same reaction.Like they would take maybe one cookie or two cookies and then stop. But me, I was like "Nom-nom-nom-nom-nom". Because they had access to those kinds of things in London where they lived. And I was like "How can you hold yourself back?” I couldn't understand.

LISA: And now, and now it makes sense. And it's just, you know, when you're raising children and you have all of these food rules and then, you know, they sneak eat... and that's where, you know, some of those challenging... and those eating habits start to form... when you start to have all these restrictions and the rules. And when you give your kids some autonomy to be able to make some decisions, it changes their relationship with food. Because when you grow up with the restrictions and the deprivations or the lack of just... because of food insecurity or financial reasons... you shared an example beautifully on... you didn't even know it, but it was just such a luxury that your body didn't, you know, like your mind and your body were like, "Well I'm never going to see these again, I need to make sure that I have every one of them that I can stand". And then all of a sudden it started to relax and you got, you know, sick of it. And it became the new normal and you're like, "Okay, one or two is really okay". And then the cycle started again. And that happens even, you know, in our society with people who are just, you know, food secure. And the holidays come and there's a special food that you make and you only make it once a year.

SAMIA: Yeah.

LISA: And it's easy to overeat that. When we practice intuitive eating, there's no guilt or shame that goes with it... you're clear on, "Oh! This is just so good, I'm going to eat until I just can't eat anymore". And that is okay, because you know you're not going to see it. Or if there's something that's delicious and that's amazing and you don't want to overeat it, think about maybe you can make it a second time during the year so that it doesn't become such an anomaly and a challenge. And if it is for that day, so what? It doesn't define anything.

SAMIA: Yeah.

LISA: It's just as that you enjoyed a special food and it was made with love or you made it with somebody. What else is going on about that food that makes it so amazing? You know, it's like I make food that my grandmother taught me to make and I only typically make it around the holidays. And part of that food is, you know, making her recipes and bringing her into the space. She's been gone for 20 years... but that's part of the food, it's what it's saying, and we all gather around and we say, "Oh! You know it's nanny's matzo balls". I mean, that's what makes it so special. And you know if you eat and you just learn to eat and enjoy without thinking, "How many calories are in that?", "Oh! I shouldn't do that! I'm going to be so bad today"... No, you're not good or bad. You're going to enjoy food and you're going to have a different relationship and that's just it.

SAMIA: Yeah. Oh, I love that, love that. You know, just because of time I'm going to have a stop over here. But you're coming back and we're going to keep talking because this is just so awesome and important. Do you have any last words to share with us for right now?

LISA: I think the best...you know what I always share with my clients is to really learn how to have self-compassion for yourself. And the practice of intuitive eating takes time, patience, practice, and self-compassion. And there's no good days or bad days. It is just learning to make your choices and the best choices for you at that moment in time, and to get rid of the guilt and the shame.

SAMIA: Awesome. Thank you, thank you so much, Lisa. We're going to add Lisa's links to all the show notes people. So please get in touch with her if this is something that you're struggling with. And as I mentioned, we will be back with Lisa very, very, soon. So until then, I wish you lots of peace and joy :)

LISA: Thank you :)