As the harms – and ineffectiveness – of dieting become more well known, Melissa has noticed an interesting phenomena.
A lot of “weight loss experts” are starting to give you messages like “of course you’re not losing weight, you’re not eating enough!” – in stark contract to older messages like “learn to eat less”.
In this episode, Melissa explains why this messaging is just more diet culture keeping you stuck in the “calorie model” and how “eating more calories” isn’t the magic bullet to weight loss they say it is.
In this 2 part series, Melissa walks you through a recent research paper to give you background so you can feel more confident in your choice to become an Intuitive Eater (and maybe, get better at explaining to other people!). We talk about the two main theories of why some people may be at a higher weight than others, and why rat and genetic studies aren’t really telling us much to prove them. Follow this podcast so you catch part 2!
Episode Resources:
- In this episode Melissa discusses a review paper by Dr. Kevin Hall and colleagues, you can read it here: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/115/5/1243/6522166
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This episode was sponsored by No More Guilt with Melissa Landry. Reminder that though we are dietitians, we’re not *YOUR* dietitian. Podcasts don’t constitute treatment. If you have concerns about your dieting behaviors, seek out guidance from a medical or mental health professional. And if you’re looking for the process, support, and focus you need to live life without food guilt apply for a coaching program from today’s sponsor. No More Guilt with Melissa Landry is currently enrolling clients into 1:1 programs, group programs, and, recently added a do-it-yourself learning format: the Ex-Dieter’s Guide to No More Guilt.
does eating more help you lose weight? [part one] transcript
Melissa Landry 0:02 Hi there, I'm Melissa, a registered dietitian specialize in intuitive eating for on again off again, chronic dieters, and I'm here to help you take the guilt and stress out of eating so you can be the first in your family to break the diet cycle. I'm interested in helping you unlearn generational diet trauma, so you can be who you are without food guilt. Be sure to follow on Instagram at no more guilt for more support between these episodes. Are you ready? Let's jump in. Okay, I have to know if this drives you bonkers, the way it drives me bonkers. Have you ever heard someone, maybe a trainer or a dietician or nutritionist, maybe out in the world? If you've ever heard someone say, Oh, if you want to lose weight, you do need to cut calories, but not too many. What a confusing thing to say. It drives me mad because for so long, the messaging was eat less. And many of us who have been around diet culture, many of you who have been dieting for a long time, that is the message that you internalized it is part of your food rules. It's something you carry with you every day when you look at food, and then all of a sudden the message changed. And I think the message is changing. Because as consumers get a little bit smarter, as the internet allows us to share our stories of like, Yeah, I've been on this diet for 20 years, and it hasn't been working. In fact, I'm gaining weight opposite to what it was promised. People are getting smarter, and giving you an alternative message that sounds appealing. That kind of feels like Oh, of course, that's what I was doing wrong. I cannot imagine what that feels like, as someone who has been trusting diets or people who are teaching you diets. Okay, I'll eat less. I've done that. And then all of a sudden, the program changes for no reason. We don't just see it with like, how many calories to eat, we also see it with the trends and styles of eating. There was a time when low fat diet was all the rage. Hello little baby snack wells, hello 100 Calorie packs. Hello, the rise of like, various low like the old Lester chips, okay, there was a lot of response around the low fat diet come to find out couple years later, we love that's increased them. No problem. Carbs are actually the enemy. Now, I want to just first take a step back and say there is a pattern, and you're not doing anything wrong, and you're not losing your mind and you're not dumb or thick or resistant or whatever you want to call yourself. I've heard clients call themselves these things, you are not those things. Because diet culture keeps shape shifting. What I want to talk about today is actually bigger than the question, Does eating more make you lose weight, I think you all would be better served to be able to think about how to evaluate changes in messages going forward. I think the best we can do as nutrition professionals, is help you to interpret the messages that come out because science will evolve. And some of it may be useful, right? We're not going to say all research is bad. We're going to say research is evolving. Research is imperfect. Research is biased, and how do I if I want to stay aware of up and coming information, but evaluate that in a way that does not trigger my restriction. That does not harm me mentally, physically or emotionally because we're done with that. That's over. Okay, we do not want more of the harms that diet cause and we can want to understand the research and we can want to use that research to make choices for our bodies based on the information that's available. So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna break this topic into two episodes. This is part one, I was gonna try to cram it into one episode and I was like, Melissa, this is allowed. We're gonna have a little series we're gonna break it down. No reason to rush. Interesting information. If you're with me, if you're thinking you know what, yeah, I would love to understand the philosophy of why diets don't work. If that is something that you're interested in, particularly to build your confidence as you choose this way, please stick around. We're going to cover it all. Let's start with what we know about energy balance. When I was a new dietitian, in my early 20s young whippersnapper, I joined a research group. So as a research dietitian, and what that meant is that PhD level researchers would come up with hypotheses, they would receive grant funding. And we would do a project we would implement that project, sometimes for six months, sometimes a year, sometimes 18 months. These were big trials, you guys to get funding for those long term projects, is highly competitive, it's very difficult. And we do our best when we're in research to be rigorous and true to what we promised we would do with the funds we were given often from the government. Many times projects are funded when they look at obesity. And you guys know, I don't love that word. But it is the term used in research to describe those in a larger body higher than a certain BMI classification. One thing I didn't know, back then that I do know now is that the body mass index is bullshit. It is not based on a population that represents all bodies. It is not something that has been validated as representative of one's health, meaning someone could have a larger BMI and still have a healthy body. And so we don't know if and how we don't actually have a causality around how weight or BMI, which isn't even weight would link to health. So it's not valid, in my opinion. And in the late 90s, there was an effort against the advisory committee within the AMA, to reduce the BMI eyes cut offs. And when that happened, the number of folks who were categorized as overweight and obese increased overnight. And what I didn't know as a young researcher is that when we were quote, fighting the war on obesity, we weren't really at a place to know for sure that BMI was a problem in and of itself. I'm gonna walk you through a research paper today that I have a lot this this comes from a weight loss guy, by the way, the scientists name is Hall, I became aware of him in my early 20s. He is a pretty balanced reporter of the weight loss science. And that's why I like him, because he includes the truth from my perspective, but one of the criticisms I have is that he starts his review of the research, which we're about to talk about, by stating that, you know, we need to come up with a way to describe why there's differences in people's body size. He's like, you know, what, we are here to take the research to prove the theories we have about why certain people are bigger than others. That's my job. And not here, I'm gonna lay that out in this paper. And the reason why we need to do this is because we need to know why people want bigger bodies, so that we can help them reduce the size of their bodies so that they can be healthier. So this is where Dr. Hall and I might disagree. Because the weight loss, people are going to say that being in a bigger body is pathological in and of itself. And that goes against the American Medical Association's advisory committees words that say actually, obesity doesn't really classify as a disease. It might not be a disease, they're saying don't don't call it that don't, don't make this criteria based on BMI don't make it super strict because like, I don't know that it classifies like a disease the same way the flu does. It might not be a pathological or wrong state to be in a bigger body. And that's where weight loss researchers are going to differ from Health at Every Size or intuitive eating type of researchers, they're going to come at the observation of the bigger body with a totally different perspective. And as a result, their research are going to include different metrics, different conclusions. In my experience, I find that when a researcher learns the unfortunate truth that they were unsuccessful taking a person or a group of persons in a larger bodies down to smaller bodies. They do not say, Well, maybe it's because that's not a problem. They don't interpret the the failure of the design of the study. As a problem with the design, they see it as a problem of the individual sticking with the diet or not. They see it as Oh, well. Maybe we're missing some factor. And if you want to play devil's advocate, we can't know we don't know. But we are at a point in the research where we have, oh my gosh, I've been in the field almost 12 years. Some of this work that I got involved with started about 10 years before that in the mid 90s. We have 2030 years of research Trying to examine what's causing people to have bigger bodies? And how do we make them smaller? And I don't know that we have an answer after all that, I don't think we're any closer to it. All we can say is that there, there are some definite factors that are probably not related. And what I think's happening is that it's taking a long time for that messaging to get out into the practitioner space. This is another phenomena of research, right? Things are happening in the research world. Sometimes it takes a while to translate it, or sometimes it's not even translatable. It's just like, oh, cool, interesting finding. But every Joe Schmo that can read a research study decides to take those interesting findings and call it fact, another story for another time. When you are scrolling Instagram, right, and someone you like maybe even something you really liked their personality, their content, their media, they may they say something in a way that's really authoritative. When they're saying something with that confidence.The reason you are in a bigger body is x, and I'm going to teach you how to do Y so that you can be in a smaller body, right then in there, my flags going up, because we don't know for sure that being in a bigger body in and of itself, is pathological. As I go through this information today, I want you to keep that in the back of your mind that research studies define obesity based on the BMI. The BMI, as far as I'm concerned, is invalid because it is based on men's bodies from the 1800s. The criteria are the references of like who's obese versus overweight versus normal, quote, normal weight, all quotes, guys, you guys know by now, those criteria changed arbitrarily, against the recommendation, that obesity may not meet the criteria to be pathology or disease the same way maybe diabetes or heart disease would, both of which in those examples, by the way, exist in smaller bodies. And so as I go through this, I want you to keep that in the back of your mind. But we are actually going to go put our weight loss researcher hats on for a second, we're gonna think like a weight loss researcher, in today's podcast, we're gonna, we're gonna give them the benefit of the doubt that their paradigm is right, even though I don't believe it's right, you know that. But we're gonna, we're gonna try to say, Okay, let's put ourselves in their shoes, right? They believe that a bigger body is pathological. It's not, quote healthy. And that the only way to make that body healthy is to shrink it. So that's where they're coming from. And that's going to be a really helpful exercise, because we are going to look at what their research is saying about their model. And we're gonna use that to try to objectively walk away with the confidence that following all this recommendations of like, eat more calories, eat less calories, eat less carbs, eat more fats, it's a wild goose chase. So let me see if I can walk you through that and help you to understand. So here's we're going to do today, we are going to first talk about two theories that are out there for why people in bigger bodies are in bigger bodies. Then I'm going to talk you through two types of research that we have read studies and genetic studies. And then we're gonna take a pause, I'm gonna let you digest that. So next week, we can talk about people studies. This will include population studies, and my favorite where I came from as a former researcher, dietary intervention trials. First up, we're talking theories. Let's start with the energy balance model. How many of you have heard of calories in calories out? This idea came from physics. If you put, let's say, we'll use gasoline. If you combust gasoline, if you burn it off, there is a certain amount of energy bound within the molecules have that gasoline, and we can actually measure joules is one form of measurement. But we can actually measure it in calories. Calories is a unit of measure that just says how much energy is contained within something. And so there is this device, it's called a bomb calorimeter. And I don't ask me how it works, I just know that it does. Essentially, you can put food inside of a bomb calorimeter imagine it like a microwave. And it can tell you how much energy is within that food. And by and large, that is how estimates for food. You know, when you look at your label, and you can read calories, that's by and large, how that might occur. We can make a guess how many calories are within that food based on balm colorimetry. And the whole theory goes, it's like okay, well, if you eat 2000 calories, say, we could measure the calories within your food and we could also measure measure how many calories you burn. We could do that by measuring your energy at rest. We could do that by watching your physical activity. We can make some assumption about your age and your height, and we can make an assumption of how much you're burning. Basically, if you're eating what you're burning, your weight should stay the same. That's the theory. Right? Sidebar. This is the entire premise, the eating disorder voice, or that part of you that says, just one more, try the food, police, whatever you call it, this is the entire premise it hold on to for dear life, to make you be on the side of continuing to harm yourself with diets. This is such an oversimplified model. Because we have a brain we have hormones, we have fat cells, we have a gut, we have all these beautiful things that are working in harmony, that when we eat a food, it causes internal experiences within us, that might shift how we consume food in the future, it might shift our burn. Our activity levels might change day to day, we know things like in women, when you're on your period, your energy burn might be different through that cycle. If you're active, maybe you took a long walk one day versus another. So this calorie in calorie out model was largely thought as it for a very long time. And that's the model that Weight Watchers really hinged itself in the very beginning. But ultimately, it was found that like, there's probably a little bit more going on here. And so obesity researchers weight loss, researchers started saying well, okay, what if we take a look at what's causing all that minutia? And that factors inside the body? Is it possibly the quality of the food? That would mean how much carb protein fat? Is it possibly lean body mass? How much muscle mass people have? Is it their insulin usage? Is it genetics? So all these questions start coming out. And from my memory, Dr. Kevin Hall was the first researcher who really talked about this in the major publications or research articles and scientists love. It was kind of buzzworthy because it was exciting for people who had seen that diets were failing, they were like, oh, okay, that's why because it's not calories in calories out. And I'm watching at that time, researchers get super excited because now they have this whole new body of work that they can explore. And this is the rise of the Atkins diet studies. And in my group, it was low glycemic studies, there were some people who are holding on to low fat studies, dietary composition became the new it trial, the new research thing, because people were trying to figure out what the perfect balance of food was to do what what's the big theory, make bigger people smaller? Or help small people stay small. That's another another thing that medicine seems to be interested in. And yet, we're going to find out that the studies aren't proving one way or the other, that dietary composition makes all that much of a difference when you take a 10,000 foot view of the research. Sure, you can find individual studies that will tell you, Oh, this diet worked in this population for this time. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about how science advances itself, which is repeatability. If something cannot be repeated over and over and over by research trials by different research in different populations, guess what we can't call it truth. This energy balance model is a theory that intuitive eating uses. It is one that makes sense and might describe how bodies self regulate themselves. But what it does not tell us is how we can manipulate those systems in order to have a body that we believe culturally, is the right one or the healthy one. And we do not have evidence that being in a bigger body in and of itself is something that needs to be intervened on. So that's me taking my weight loss research at all, for just one second, because I've got it's kind of uncomfortable on my head right now I left that world. The other model that comes up a lot is the carbohydrate insulin model. And this is one that I am a little to aware of this is the model that my research group was working with. And the researcher I was working with at the time was pretty cutting edge pretty respected in the space. And what he said was that if you eat high glycemic carbohydrates, this has since been refuted. To some extent we'll get there. So don't start taking notes. But his idea was if you eat high glycemic carbohydrates, you will feel hungrier sooner and that will cause you to desire food that will cause you to consume food often high glycemic again and then you will want more food and this is what's driving weight gain in in populations and if we can help people to eat low glycemic foods Well, then maybe they wouldn't be so hungry. And if they're not hungry all the time, then maybe they wouldn't eat so much and, and they would spontaneously lose weight. What a thing. So naturally, people are very excited by that like that could be, that's going to be it, that's going to be so simple, right? Because everyone in a bigger body isn't meant to be in one. So there must be something wrong here. And if we can hijack the diet composition, if we can change the head, cool, great soft it by my tone, you can probably guess that's not what wound up happening. In fact, this was some of the early experiences I had, as a research dietitian, going, Wait a minute, this is supposed to make the diet easier to follow. This is supposed to make people lose weight faster. And as far as I could tell, both anecdotally and from our results, when we did this research trial, with folks living out in the world, you know, they'd come in, they do individual sessions, or group sessions and education, stuff that you're used to stuff that I do. Now, as an intuitive eating coach, we would do the things to help people learn this and be motivated and stick with it. As far as I could tell, it wasn't actually making a difference on weight loss, and worse, it was causing people the same binge restrict feelings that I saw in other diets, it was causing sometimes lower self esteem and lower body image and, and you know, what would often be said, which made me so uncomfortable then, and still makes me so uncomfortable was like, Oh, well, people just can't stick to diets. And if they could, then we would see our results, which is kind of bullshit, you guys. I mean, I'm working with these people, week to week, sometimes building relationships with them. These are often people who had their shit together. Like they were professionals. They had beautiful families, they, they were kind, they were part of their communities. They were fun. They were interesting. They had hobbies. Imagine this, they were signing up for a research study, because they wanted to lose weight in a way that also helped other people. Can you imagine the motivation of a research subject, they're not, you know, there's a slight stipend you get. But it's not. It's not comparable to what's happening, like they're coming in for all these visits, and they're donating their time. And their data. It just never made sense to me that this was a problem of the subjects. I started linking that to my mom's experience, where it's like, if my mom Nancy could have lost weight, she would have like, she knew how to do it. She's on time and time again, she would burn out, and sometimes, quote, quit her diets. But now looking back, I'm like good on your Nance because they were not making her happy. They were sucking her energy, they were lowering your self esteem, they were distracting her from her life. And so it never made me comfortable that whenever the this carbohydrate insulin model failed, my colleagues are saying, well, maybe it's just a matter of getting people motivated, right? If only we could make it easier. And because of that, where research turned was saying, Well, what if we do it over telehealth, right, then they don't delete their house, they'll be more motivated. And then when that didn't work for everyone, it was like, Oh, well, some people live in poverty. Some people, you know, culturally, they're different. And let's just, let's come up with something different from them, you know, it's they're probably not going to interact with these types of trials. Or worse, they try to get folks who are in poverty or are culturally non white to eat in a way that is opposite to their economic ability, or their cultural preferences in history. Lee, Kira, the black nutritionist, and Delena, your Latina nutritionist, both on Instagram, talk about this a lot. And they can speak from their perspective, how it's hurt them, their communities, as well as where the research is lacking on that front. And then it turned into, well, let's get people into the lab, right, like, let's let them not leave, and we will control everything they eat. So even if they can't stick with it, at least we could prove it's the dietary quality causing the problem. Do you see the issues with this guy's like the whack a mole? Watch out for Whack a Mole responses? When you're like it? This doesn't seem to be working. But all you get is Yeah, but we keep whacking the moles without being like, where are these moles coming from? My take? What I have learned is like, if you're saying, Yeah, but so many times. I mean, you can keep pulling that thread. But what if we just flip the paradigm? If the assumption of the research trials is that being in a bigger body is the problem and we can't seem to figure it out after 30 years of the best, smartest, most rigorous scientists, millions and millions of dollars? At what point do we say is this actually a problem? Can we go back to the basics? Some might disagree. That's where I'm at. Let's recap. The second theory of why people in bigger bodies exist, why weight gain might be happening at a population level, completely ignoring all that BMI stuff, because I just won't let it go has been largely refuted. And I'm telling that to you, because I do think that this is where carbs become the enemy. The research that comes from that idea, created an enemy and carbs, it created enemy out of, quote, high glycemic foods. And I'm not so sure that we have that evidence on a population level to say that's what's causing the bigger body. That doesn't mean that there aren't individuals who might benefit from lower carb or lower glycemic diets, there are certain disease states independent of weight, that you might want to consider that they include PCOS diabetes. But by and large carbohydrates are not making people that they're not making, causing, quote, The obesity epidemic. So we've just covered two theories. The energy balance model, which says that calories in calories out is a very simplistic version of how our bodies maintain our weight. And that ultimately, there are a lot of different factors involved in creating a regulated weight for you. We know that it's possible dietary compositions involved with that. But for the most part, it is regulated by your brain, your fat cells in your gut, and your genetics. And it does not like drastic swings. Energy Balance model in the intuitive eating lens says that your body likes to be at a specific weight range. And if you try to pull it out of that range, you will experience symptoms like extreme hunger, obsession with food binges, sometimes depressed metabolism. And I think that's where the flexible dieting, people are trying to play with the numbers a little here to say, Well, if that theory is true, what you need to do is get yourself to the lowest part of your setpoint range, right? What you need to do is eat less, but not to less that it makes your body feel like it's starving, and then you're stuck. This is the same rhetoric of restraint, you're still restricted. If you tell yourself externally, I can only have this much food, it doesn't matter if it's 1800 calories or 1200 calories, the body needs different amounts of foods on different days. And mentally, the idea that you can only have up to a certain amount of food for many causes, scarcity, causes rebound eating, it causes all sorts of trouble that we've talked about in previous episodes. So the energy balance model, in my opinion, it's neutral, it's a way of describing how our bodies might regulate itself. And for the general public for you and me, we don't have enough evidence to understand how to manipulate it. And we find that manipulating it behaves in practice, just like following a diet, you are manipulating something your body regulates for you. You can't manipulate how many breaths you take an hour. You can't sit there and go, Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna only breathe 10 times in the next hour. What? No, you don't get to decide that. Maybe you can condition yourself down to that. But like, what's that going to take? And why? Why do we need to breathe 10 breaths in our same thing? Sure, maybe. Maybe, theoretically, if you alter your diet, you could cause your body to be at the bottom of your setpoint weight. But what's that going to take and why it's the same attitude that drives diets. It's just a little bit more flexible, but it doesn't feel any better not in practice. So the energy balance model is when we can use, I would say the carbohydrate insulin model of weight regulation is kind of not as strong based on my experience, as well as the research we're going to look at. What this paper that we're about to discuss by Dr. Kevin Hall says is that theoretical models of obesity must explain between person variability in adiposity, or fatness as well as the reason recent global shift and its distribution. That is the last line of the introduction of this paper we're about to talk about. Most importantly, our model of obesity must explain why different people have different degrees of fatness and why there has been a recent global shift toward a higher BMI. He just dives in after that does not explain the urgency. You know, I'm looking at this I'm like, There's differences because there's differences and the recent global shift is because you lowered the criteria of the BMI like anyone who has been around that information was like, oh, yeah, no, I found it. We don't need to You know, this is what's happening. But we're going to put our weight loss researcher hat on. We're going to start by what Dr. Kevin Hall who would say maybe represents more current thought of the weight loss researchers who are looking at this from the 10,000 view. So he starts with rat studies. So he does a review of rat studies. And he acknowledges, like, rat studies are great. He's like rat studies control a ton of factors that we would not be able to do in humans, right? We could effectively I mean, maybe it's not super ethical, but you could effectively like, quote, starve a rat, you could overfeed a rat, you could do things to a rat that you would not get IRB or Institutional Review Board approval for in a research trial. So we can learn things, right. We can also, because of the way rats are, do things over the course of like days and weeks that might take weeks and months inside of a human. So it's nice because we control a lot. So that what we see in the rat is more likely to be scientific in nature, right? It's not likely to be impacted by other variables that we cannot see. I'd be remiss if I did not interject on myself here. I watched ratatouille for the first time ever last night, no reason why it just came up on the Hulu. And we were like, Let's do this. Rats get a bad rap. Okay, some of them can cook magical, delicious meals. And so I don't say this next part lightly. Right cities aren't great, because they're freaking rats. It is not always translatable. And researchers are always writing this when they when they report like, look, we found this but we really need to do a lot of work to see if this is translatable. But let's say we take it with a grain of salt. Let's say we go, you know what rat cities are what they are. I understand that. What are rats studies telling us? Rat studies are telling us that when they put a rat on a high carbohydrate diet, or a high glycemic diet versus a low glycemic diet, the rats gain weight on the low carb diet unexpectedly. They think that might have to do with fat composition, it could have to do with the rats metabolism being different than ours. At any rate, we cannot effectively say at this point in time that a high glycemic carbohydrate diet is causing weigh gain. So that's a very interesting thing coming from the weight loss world in the rat studies, which they acknowledged are not perfect, but they can be foundational for future studies. He's going look, at least in the rat models, we cannot create create repeatably. This situation where high carb or high glycemic diets are causing weight gain in rats. Important to note, the next thing that Dr. Hall looks at in his review is genetics. And I think this is so interesting, I was reading this with like, a fine tooth comb, because many people in the intuitive eating world will say like, look, what about genetics? What about genetics? So I'm reading this like, yeah, I understand, in theory, this idea of genetics, but like Ross got exciting, I've never really seen it laid out what's happening with the genetic research. So what this is saying is, is that we don't have a specific gene, or a variant of genes that we can definitively say causes obesity isn't that interesting. What we do see is that there is a gene that associates with fat mass and an obesity. So it doesn't cause it, but it is associated with it. And carriers of this gene, consistently report to have increased appetite, and or objectively measured food intake. That's all he said about it. He said that some people who have a variant with a gene that associates with higher fat mass, and higher quote, obesity, again, defined by that silly BMI. Those people have increased appetite or objectively measured food intake. And if you're taking it back to the perspective of what an intuitive eating, person might think of that information, I immediately went yeah, if you assume that some folks are bigger than others, right, so let's say this person has a genetic code for a bigger build, they have a height, their their height is bigger, maybe ancestry wise, they come from people who have withstood a lot of famine, for whatever reason, their body was destined to be bigger. Would it not make sense that they would hunger for more food and then eat more food? To keep that body they're meant to be in thriving and alive like the same way we would expect? If a mouse to be genetically coded to eat less food than, say a horse, we wouldn't question like, wow, horses are very hungry and eat a lot, because that's what they're meant to do. And this is the fundamental flaw sometimes in these weight loss studies, it's they're saying that the bigger body is wrong. And what we got to do is make people smaller. But what if they're not meant to be? So that's as much as we know from genetics, the review, per this paper found that very interesting. I don't take anything away from this other than we cannot prove that there's a quote, fat gene, we cannot prove that we can't really prove anything from the genetic code. At this point in time, there's only an association that folks who have more fat mass and have the obesity associated gene, they tend to be hungrier and eat more. What does that even mean? Like? I don't know, that would make sense to me. It's not causal. Okay. So when we think about where we are at in this work, we have talked about the reason why things keep shape shifting, in my opinion, we've talked about the energy balance model, we've talked about the carbohydrate insulin model, we've talked about rat studies, and we've talked about human genes. In our next episode, we're going to pick up with the studies that have more to do with people. Those are population studies. And those are dietary intervention studies. And when I walk you through this, I think it's going to blow your mind and surprise you how little we know about nutrition research, given how authoritative we can be in sending those messages out, and I'm hoping this gives you the confidence to see that you did not mess up, you did not fail. Because your 15-20 years of dieting did not lead to a smaller body. We are finding more and more even with our weight loss research assumptions and our weight loss research hats. We don't know why people are in bigger bodies compared to others. And we also don't know how to make them smaller. More on that on the next episode. I'm going to put the link to the paper I've been reviewing in the show notes if you yourself, want to lay eyes on it. And please know if you are having a hard time wrapping your head around this. It feels like Oh, bring it exploding, you are not alone. A lot of this information gets lost in the sauce because of diet culture. Your experience was legitimate before I throw a bunch of research studies that you we don't need research to validate what people are going through out there when it comes to their experience with food and body image. And if you are feeling like you're ready to take it seriously, how long you have struggled to have a quote normal relationship with food. I want to invite you to check out my three month one to one coaching program. You can find out about it at Instagram at no more guilt or on my website Melissa Landry nutrition.com I work to help you unlearn the misinformation from diet culture, and instead, use your body cues and what you care about health so that you can pursue it and make choices sustainably, effortlessly for life. that's of interest. come chat with me. I want to work with you. Otherwise, we'll see you next week when we hit part two of this topic. Until next time, be good to your good body. Transcribed by https://otter.ai
