The Air We Breathe: Finding Well-Being That Works for You
E33. The Dark Side of Extreme Dieting & Brightline Eating with Clinical Psychologist Louise Adams
Today on the podcast, I am joined by Louise Adams, a clinical psychologist out of Sydney, Australia, founder of the UNTRAPPED Academy, and host of the podcast All Fired Up.
I discovered Louise and her work through her podcast, where she did a series debunking Brightline Eating. Louise hopes to help people wake up to diet culture B.S. and understand the cycle that diet culture creates.
In this episode, we will discuss:
- Brightline Eating and the harms that this program creates and promotes.
- How to be a B.S. detector and understand that if someone says they have “cracked the weight loss code,” they are most likely selling you a false narrative.
- How to find pleasure in food again.
- Deciding what you value and how you want to live your life.
Louise also shared a few shifts to lessen the impact of diet culture.
Mindset shifts:
- How to rediscover pleasure with food and create relaxation around food.
- Ask yourself what you value in your life. Louise says it is about “understanding that values are what you stand for as a human being and what you really want to get out of life.”
- Turning to a professional, especially if you are experiencing disordered eating or an eating disorder.
Resources:
Today on the podcast, I am joined by Louise Adams, a clinical psychologist out of Sydney, Australia, founder of the UNTRAPPED Academy, and host of the podcast All Fired Up.
I discovered Louise and her work through her podcast, where she did a series debunking Brightline Eating. Louise hopes to help people wake up to diet culture B.S. and understand the cycle that diet culture creates.
In this episode, we will discuss:
- Brightline Eating and the harms that this program creates and promotes.
- How to be a B.S. detector and understand that if someone says they have “cracked the weight loss code,” they are most likely selling you a false narrative.
- How to find pleasure in food again.
- Deciding what you value and how you want to live your life.
Louise also shared a few shifts to lessen the impact of diet culture.
Mindset shifts:
- How to rediscover pleasure with food and create relaxation around food.
- Ask yourself what you value in your life. Louise says it is about “understanding that values are what you stand for as a human being and what you really want to get out of life.”
- Turning to a professional, especially if you are experiencing disordered eating or an eating disorder.
Resources:
Well, today I have Louise Adams with me and I'm very excited for this conversation. I had listened to a series she did on her podcast, talking about Brightline Eating, which she'll get into the details, and I just wanted to know more, because I see so much application from the Lord's work that she did reading the books and watching the videos. So none of us have to. So, louise, why don't you just go ahead and jump in and tell us about yourself and your work?
Speaker 2:Sure. Thank you so much for having me on to rant about Brightline Eating and other cults. So I'm a clinical psychologist and I'm based in Sydney in Australia and I've been working in private practice since like the early 2000s. And when I started work, you know, I noticed that pretty much everyone I was seeing had an eating disorder or disordered eating or they wanted to lose weight and I was one of them, because I had this kind of weird period before I opened my first private practice where I felt like I had to lose weight before I opened it. How weird is that?
Speaker 2:So I was stuck in diet culture All my clients are stuck in diet culture and I wanted to make sure that if I was going to help people lose weight I needed to be scientifically accurate. You know, I couldn't just sort of say what I'd done because I think I'd done. My latest diet was like Jenny Craig or something and of course I was putting the weight back on, because that's what happens when you go on a diet. So I did a really deep dive into the research literature on, I guess, what works when it comes to weight loss in the long term that doesn't also cause an eating disorder, and I came up for air realizing that the science was just 100%, in that nothing works Basically. Everything works in the short term. People can lose a little bit of weight in the short term and then literally everyone puts the weight back on. One to two thirds of people gain more than what they started with and this whole kind of diet cycle starts again. So I realized really early on that it was a massive scam, and so since then my fire has been lit and so I'm a clinical psychologist.
Speaker 2:I help people with disordered eating and eating disorders. But I guess my mission in life is to help people wake up to diet cultures bullshit and to really fire up and protect their glorious, diverse bodies from the onslaught of industry funded, you know, wellness BS and weight loss BS. So I've got a podcast called All Fired Up, where I kind of literally rent about the state of the world with diet culture and talk to people from all over the world who have been impacted by it or who have fired up themselves. I've got an online academy called Untrapped, which is, I gather, anti diet experts and speakers from all over the world and they come and chat to us about how there really is a wonderful alternative to kind of always trying to shrink your body and look after it in diet culture without trying to shrink it. So that's me. I'm also a mum of two girls and a great day called Dolly Porton, and two cats.
Speaker 1:Very nice. Did you say Dolly, porton or Python? I said Porton P-A-W. I get it, I get it, I get it.
Speaker 2:She's very cool. She's on Instagram.
Speaker 1:Oh, very nice. Well, I always like it when a dog gets in the room, especially like when you hear like their little nails on the floor. I mean there's always better energy when there's a dog around.
Speaker 2:Agree, agree. She's used to living to me rent.
Speaker 1:Oh well, I mean, what a great job that you just get to. I mean you call it ranting, but really it's educating, because I came up through a standard university education I mean exercise science Never heard anything about weight loss not being efficient, long lasting, you know, not a pee, but it was much later to the game than you were. I think that it is. I mean, it's always great to have more voices and more people, especially in a different way, saying like maybe this isn't the right approach. And I did do my thesis in graduate school on eating disorders because of my own behaviors I had in undergraduate. And then, as I started to work more and watching the world the worlds of here's what I know about eating disorders, here's what I know about intentional weight loss and it was like this is one circle of a Venn diagram.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's join the dots here, like let's really do something different rather than trying to keep everything going, because I think even our eating disorder as well is pretty woeful at connecting those dots.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm. Yeah, it really just depends, I think, a lot of times on who you are, what you look like, what your weight is, because then we might encourage some disordered eating behaviors If you're still not the right size, and it's very alarming. I always find it very alarming.
Speaker 2:I think it's dreadful. I think we cannot keep the weight loss industry going and effectively treat eating disorders. But one of them has to go and I've got some opinions on which one should go.
Speaker 1:Well, tell me about Brightline Eating, because I had heard sort of whispers about it before. But again, I just try to keep my blinders on because there's only so much my brain can take as far as diets. And so then when I saw your series, I was like ooh, okay, so I want to hear this. And it was so much more awful than I actually would have noticed because I thought, well, this is a pretty restrictive, what some people might call very clean eating, a lot of things not allowed. But then when you got into more of the, especially the woman who started at her personal dynamics with food, I was shocked yeah, which takes a lot. So tell us about Brightline and what the scoop is.
Speaker 2:What the scoop is on Brightline. So I've heard about it from doing the podcast. All fired up, so someone contacted talking about her experience. She's an Australian and Brightline Eating is American. But she was sucked into this and had such a terrible experience and had such a severe eating disorder as a direct result of doing the program and I was shocked hearing her story. And I guess, my brain being what it is, once I get fired up about something I do go down the rabbit hole. So it's not enough for me to just read the diet book. I kind of went full, full wall into a deep diet.
Speaker 2:So the person's name is Susan, here's Thompson, and she is a neuroscientist based in the US and in her book, brightline Eating, she gives like a bit of an autobiography of herself and I'm reading this and it's clear that she had a restrictive eating disorder from really early on and grew up in a very fat, so big household, a very, I guess what we'd call an orthorexic household, where there was, you know, good food and bad food. Susan was exposed to all of these messages that being in a bigger body was the worst thing that possibly happened and that she always needed to try and watch her weight. So she was very naturally very early on binge eating. She was hiding food and she was eating a lot of it in secret and you know this only happens when kids are being restricted in some way. But in Susan Pierce Thompson's autobiography she repeatedly forgets that restrictive side and just focuses on her, what she thinks of as addictive eating path. So she's always perceived herself as someone who has a problem with being unable to stop eating so-called bad food periodically and that her, what she needs to be doing, is constantly restricting. So I'm reading this and I'm really reading someone with an eating disorder and she had been sort of admits in the book that she had an eating disorder but didn't ever really get treatment. What she did do is overeat, is anonymous and food addicts anonymous, which is like a free 12 step program, very popular, and this is really different to you know, my wheelhouse with treating eating disorders because they're very much based on this thing Ideas of like similar to alcoholism, and Susan Pierce Thompson has a history of substance abuse. So I guess it's a natural progression for her to kind of go into one of those 12 step programs. I've got nothing against 12 step programs when it comes to alcohol and substances.
Speaker 2:I think abstinence is a model that can work for a lot of people. It is pretty demanding but you know, whatever works when it comes to food, food is not an addiction anymore than I'm addicted to oxygen. You know we need food to survive. It's one of the most fundamental psychological principle. If we restrict ourselves from certain foods, we will get unnaturally preoccupied with it and we'll want to binge and we want to do a lot of that and we'll feel terribly guilty and then the whole cycle will start again. So it can look and feel like addiction. But the problem is restriction and over and over again in her autobiography I'm seeing that being missed.
Speaker 2:She fell into the OASA world. She was one of these people. Her really, really enjoyed restriction, which can happen when you are restricting this order and orthorexia. It can feel very powerful to kind of white knuckle being thin and also deprive yourself in a kind of slightly sadistic way. And she was really good at it. And, long story short, she has kind of lifted the FAA program into a full profit business that she has and she's kind of luring people in, women from all over the world, using her kind of moniker as a neuroscientist to push the idea that food is an addiction and that the only path to be what is it that thin and free or something like that is to really have an active eating disorder.
Speaker 2:I don't want to go into the details of what she tells people to do because it is so disturbing.
Speaker 2:It is like reading a pro-anna website in a book.
Speaker 2:I, sadly, have read all the books and I felt like I was literally in a pro-anna website. I was so disturbed by it fundamentally and some of the practices that she is telling people to do literally putting sticky tape on your face when you're cooking dinner so you don't eat before you sit down Like really whacked, not okay, stuff is perceived as a virtue in her program. So I could talk for hours about how profoundly disturbed a book of wands by this, but it's also the amount of money she is making from selling this program. I'm talking multi-millions of dollars that she is making from April when people have contacted her, like my client not my client, but like my listener who contacted me after developing a severe eating disorder that required years of treatment to recover from. She contacted Susan Pierce Thompson. She told her about what was happening to her and there's just been no response. So she's creating these terrible situations and not taking any responsibility. I just really get fired up when people are profiting, and profiting from developing eating disorders in people is not okay.
Speaker 1:What I really noticed when you were talking about it, I mean, I think like when you've learned about it or when you've experienced it.
Speaker 1:You know you have a bit of a ting, ting radar where it kind of like is is hitting like your tooth in the back and you're oh no, because you did talk about when she was cooking, that she did put tape on her mouth to keep herself from nibbling while she was cooking, which you know, I've certainly had clients who had trouble because they ate so much while they were cooking and then they weren't hungry. So for me my thought has always been like well, what about a later afternoon snack before you start cooking, so then you're not hungry when you're cooking and then you can, you know, enjoy your snack and enjoy your meal. And that her brain was like you know, is there a leather mask I can put on my face so I don't eat? And you're like, oh, I mean, it's just such a sign of a problematic way of thinking. And that's what I really wanted to get your insight on as well, because I feel like the description of her program and you'll never eat these things, you know.
Speaker 1:I don't know if she said that they won't even sound good, you won't even be tempted, because I think people think that that is freedom.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, no, this is like calling a maximum security prison freedom, because it's like in a way it is because you don't have to think about anything, because all the rules are there. You're only allowed out of your cell a couple of hours a day.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that is not freedom everybody. That is like becoming a complete prisoner of this cult-like way of thinking about food. Your level of restriction is next level. We are calling certain classes of food addictive. So I think flour and sugar are considered addictive and you're allowed to eat anything with any of that in it. There is bit truly no evidence that either of these food groups are addictive in any way, shape or form, and I'm saying 100%. I've scoured her website, all of her publications and both books and I have not found a single reference that bucks up her claim that flour in foods is addictive. She has like a couple of very sad studies that back up her idea that sugar is addictive.
Speaker 2:But if we look at again this idea of restriction, this starts to paint out the picture of why addiction can look like it does, or why why can look like addiction when it's not really addiction. So studies that have been done to kind of prove food addiction have been done in rodent populations and what we see in rodent brains sometimes is an elevated response to eating high sugar foods and that is used time and time again in food addiction literature to prove that therefore sugar is addictive and there's so much sugary now. So these days, that why are all addicted to food? What they are leaving out? And let's say again, these are, these are studies in rats. These are not humans, but In the rat studies it's firstly, what they do to the rats is deprive them of sugary food, and then there's the an exaggerated response in the brain. Rats that are not first deprived have no elevated response to sugary foods.
Speaker 2:So again, the restriction aspect of this whole model is ignored time and time again by food addiction people, including Susan Pierce Thompson. By the time she wrote her second book, she was addressing some of the criticisms that have been made against her first book, but she doesn't address this one. It's just, let's just ignore it, let's not address it so we can just keep selling our products. It's really, really horrible. So if you think that food addiction is a thing or that sugar addiction is a thing, please know that the actual siren disagrees vehemently with this, that the real problem here is restriction. Once we remove restriction, legalize all food, we can really normalize our responses to food.
Speaker 1:And what is it that I think, especially from a psychological perspective, is the yearning or the desire to have rules and order? Is it just that people then don't have to spend emotional energy making choices? Or like what is the allure of? Because I've certainly had people sit down in front of me just like, oh, just tell me what to eat. Well, that's definitely not the way it works, but why do you think people like that perspective of having it all laid out for them and they don't have to think about it?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that I mean, there's something really appealing isn't there about like I'm just going to hand it to you, like literally on a flight, and you don't have to expend any energy in having a relationship with food. But I think we need to contextualize it, because we all grow up in diet culture, right, and our relationship with food is always colored by the fear of being fat or gaining weight, and we're all in it. So if you're in a larger body in this culture, you are taught that you should always be trying to dutifully work on becoming a smaller person. And if you're a smaller person in diet culture, you are kind of living and breathing the terror that you might one day become larger. So our relationship with food is always colored by that impact on our sides. So people want to be told what to eat, because what they're really looking for is how can I not be bigger, Like I've not either lose weight or how can I make sure I don't become fat? That's what it is.
Speaker 1:It feels like that we're the guarantee, because she's figured it out, she's got a system, so then it's much easier to trust that's in terrible air quotes to trust her.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. All of these gurus have the answer, you know, with their wackadoodle theories, and hers sounds very scientific because it has neuroscience in it very bad neuroscience in it and very loose kind of and massive generalizations from neuroscience.
Speaker 2:But if you are a neuroscientist and you know, and if you look at Susan Pierce Thompson, she's a thin person. She's very, very charismatic. She's got these kind of hypnotic too much time. Looking at her blogs and her video blogs, she's very convincing, you know, and people in the weight loss industry or the wellness industry these days, they are very convincing. They're excellent salesmen, they have the answer, they have some kind of theory. It sounds sciencey and we are driven by fear because diet culture is selling us this fear all the time. They're being larger is a terrible thing. Not only is it terrible socially, but it's terrible from a health perspective. So these, these charlatans, these snake oil salesmen, these neuroscientists, these members of the weight loss industry have the certainty. All you need to do is follow my role and you can be happy, thin and free, as Susan Pierce Thompson says and this ignores the fact that it doesn't happen for the majority of us, but it's that you know, dangling that carrot all the time is very tempting in diet culture. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they people cut it up in some way, feeling like there's a system or there's a method that they just haven't found the right one, or they didn't do it right anyway. But there is, you know, a structure that would do it and I think you know it's certainly. Oh my gosh, it's so proselytized, especially like a few are in a larger body and going through health care.
Speaker 2:Or even if you just have health care problems.
Speaker 1:It's like oh what, here's the system and the structure that you need, then we're all good, then you don't have any problems, and then if it didn't work, then that's your fault issue.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, it's your fault and all of that again, that kind of skates over the idea Like that. The assumption there is that the normal human body is like is BMI between 1825, which that's actually bullshit. People come in diverse sizes just like we come in different heights. If we all followed the same program, we would still be vastly different in terms of our size. So this idea that if you just follow a program, your body will effortlessly shrink down to become a thin body that is just not true and that is, I think, a hard scientific fact for people to understand, only because we've been sold this idea that there is only one body that you can have in order to be healthy and happy and part of society. So that's why I'm so fired up, because we've always been diverse. Our bodies are unique and individual and heavily influenced by things like genetic makeup, and it's just awful to think that we're all trying to reach this pinnacle of a BMI range that was sort of standardized in the insurance industry based on white men.
Speaker 1:I think we've got to let it go. Well, what do you think Because obviously people listening, and at different times they've either picked up a book or found a website or found an influencer Like, what do you feel? Like are the best things that, as they, you know, if then a friend was like, ooh, bright line eating, like what questions can they ask themselves? That kind of make the most sense to see like, oh, this is not a thing, this is nothing you would want to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think of it as our job in diet culture is to become very good at being bullshit detectives. So we've got to kind of get our critical thinking caps on. And I want to run to remember that 70 years of weight science research has shown over and over again the same thing. We have level A evidence that shows that on a weight loss diet through lifestyle means that means dieting and exercise Most people will lose somewhere in the range of five to 10% of their initial starting weight over the first six months, maybe 12 months. After that period of time, our bodies release this cascade of hormonal changes that resists weight loss and encourages our body and our minds to restore that weight loss. So level A evidence that in the long term, people will regain the weight after losing a little bit at the beginning and that one to two thirds of people after a weight loss diet will become heavier than they were in the first place. The evidence for that is as strong as the evidence that we have in a scientific literature and smoking leads to lung cancer. We just don't have stronger evidence than that.
Speaker 2:So if your guru or your Instagram person is saying, hey, lose weight and keep it off, I want to know. Ok, so you've cracked the code, have you? You've cracked the holy grail of 70 years of weight loss science? Show me the evidence, show me your outcomes, show me your studies. First of all, almost none of them have any scientific research to back them up. Almost all of them that do have any scientific research to back them up will be short term one to two years.
Speaker 2:The weight loss industry loves stopping an intervention at two years and pretending that that's forever. It's not forever. So one understanding that it is really unlikely that this guru has cracked the code. So it's kind of like saying my body has just accepted starvation and it's just going to forget that it's been starved and just get on with it at this new effortless low weight. That just doesn't happen in human bodies. So it's remembering that. And I think the other part of that is understanding who is this benefiting? Because Susan Pierce Thompson has made, I think, in the range of $40 million American dollars through selling this. This is a lucrative industry. The person that is selling you this product is doing it because they are profiting from your fear and your misery, and I can think of so many awesome things to spend your money on that are not weight loss product. Awesome inventions, buying great dates so many things that we can be doing with our time in our short time on earth than worrying about trying to tinker with our weight.
Speaker 1:So keeping a focus and I think critical thinking is always the perfect term of how is it that this person is doing something that nobody else is?
Speaker 2:doing.
Speaker 1:And obviously they're always highlighting their own personal success and then elevating some people who have quote unquote, done well. That's the N equals one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's the well. If I've done it, you can do it. And if we know that weight loss doesn't last in 99% of cases, that does mean that one person is white knuckling it, that doesn't mean that that can be you. That also doesn't mean that that should be you. I think the people who are and Susan does this herself actually same it because she's done it. It's possible for everyone.
Speaker 2:I think it's the cruelest misrepresentation of how science works. It doesn't matter what your experience has been. What matters is the scientific evidence of whether or not an intervention is effective and safe. One of the things we need to stress as well is that, on top of being really ineffective, deliberately trying to lose weight is the biggest risk factor for developing an eating disorder, and I work with people with eating disorders. They are really really difficult to treat. It requires a lot of intervention to get well from an eating disorder. It's not something that I would wish on anyone. So the intervention of deliberate weight loss, intentional weight loss, is not only ineffective, it's psychologically extremely harmful, so we've really gotta remember that as well.
Speaker 1:I think that piece isn't very well understood, because I still think, certainly here in the States, the image of an eating disorder is a thin, white teenage girl who's completely emaciated, not representing that 94% of people who have an eating disorder are not underweight. And I think that people don't understand and that's how a lot of the behaviors like hers of completely cutting out ingredients in food groups, people are like oh man, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:And you're like, oh, that will cost you at some point, but I think that piece is just lost on so many people because, again, that is what's glorified. I had an intern last year and she came in to help me start the podcast and I never had any luck in helping her understand eating disorder and disordered eating because I was like she's Gen Z, like let's have some Gen Z guests, and then she would bring forth these Gen Z fitness influencers who only ate clean, who all of it and I was like okay, so let me back up again because, like, we're clearly orthorexic, at least, and but it was just really interesting because it could never get any of it to really sink in.
Speaker 1:That know, this is problematic, because she was like, oh man, that's so cool. They got a big following and like, they eat all the cool foods.
Speaker 2:And so.
Speaker 1:I think that's kind of the interesting piece, that, and that's why recovery is so hard too, because you're budding up against a culture that is like you don't eat sugar, like, oh man, that's amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no, the comparison in social media, especially like social media based health and wellness, it like it's next level, it's making people so unhappy and we are really obscuring Like. I honestly think, in a way, like I was a young person in the 1990s, like with all of the heroin, sheik and the Cape Moss and like all of that, it was really easy to detect diet culture there, pro and a websites were a big thing. But nowadays, the health and wellness industry and the instant, this kind of clean eating thing, as if that just makes no sense to me. But this is really hard because people are like oh, that is health, that is looking after health. So I'm not trying to be thin, I'm just trying to be healthy. But that actually like the pursuit of health, so called health, which always kind of involves restriction of food and becoming thinner. It's the same thing, it's just repackaged eating this sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:I think the litmus test is asking yourself am I okay? You know, am I okay? How is my relationship with food Is and things to look for? Am I relapsed? Do I have a relaxed relationship with food or does it preoccupy me and like, is it the first thing I think about when I wake up. If it's the latter, that's something to be aware of. It's a risk that could look like risky, disordered eating. So food relationship needs to be relaxed and Pleasurable.
Speaker 2:Pleasure with food is something we do not hear about. I've lost count of the amount of menus around, even in my area I live near the beach and there's lots of these like clean eating cafes and whole food cafes. The description on the menu of the food that's being served has nothing to do with taste. Sometimes I don't even know what it is, because we're just being told what the ingredients are and how much it's going to boost my probiotics or gut health or whatever I'm like. What is it? Is it cheesy? Does it taste good? No one knows. So pleasure, having pleasure in food, is okay and it's a sign of being in a relaxed relationship with food. If you've lost your pleasure and if you've lost your relaxation, you might be in trouble with all of your start culture, stuff that's floating around about wellness.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that the relaxation piece is so accurate because it's a lot of work to only eat certain things, only eat at certain times and having to play that like mental chess game all the time. And I think relaxed doesn't even pop up on some people's radars that, yeah, if I just said like hey, louise, do you want to go to happy hour with me? That you could be. Like, what time is it? Am I free? Yes, I can go, but that for many people it's like well, where are we going?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, what do they have there, oh?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:And I think the flexibility as part of that relaxed that. Sure, maybe we're going somewhere and it's not your favorite stuff, but you can be like okay, I'll find something, it'll be fun. I get to see Louise, get to hang out and focus on those pieces where I see the tightness and the restrictive grip takes such priority over, because I think it doesn't dawn on people that you could just be like oh yeah, that's fine.
Speaker 2:The Paul Brightline. Eating People are literally told by Susan Pierce Thompson that if they're going to a restaurant, they need to take their food scales with them to weigh the food before they eat, and it's really not okay.
Speaker 1:That would just yeah. Can you just imagine like, oh, I bring a larger purse because I've got my food scale, and then, of course, I'm sure you're verbally abusing the wait staff to make sure there's no salt, sugar, oils, anything, which is just like I brought a bag of raw broccoli with me, pretty much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just a look at your own life If you're doing stuff like that. But have a look at that. You've lost your pleasure, your white knuckling something.
Speaker 2:Health we think about health. What is health? A lot of people don't really think about this question a lot, but this pursuit of health is sort of like a pursuit of health for fiction. And you know eating exactly the right thing at exactly the right time and you know gaming your longevity and all kinds of stuff like this. For me, health is really multi-dimensional and it's not just individual, it's social and cultural. I think our culture has a massive eating disorder. I think our culture is in poor health when it comes to our relationship with food. At the individual level, health is not just about narrow ranges of metabolic measures like your blood sugar levels or you know how much sleep you're up for, what she's telling you that you get. It's social health, it's psychological health, it's emotional health and this is what gets sacrificed at the altar of getting the perfect markings or the perfect numbers. You know health isn't measured in numbers. When we're thinking about it from a lifelong perspective, does that make sense? Mm-hmm, absolutely.
Speaker 2:But it's about micromanaging our health and start thinking about it in a much more relaxed way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I think, for especially like you have said, that the Brightline audience is mostly white, female, kind of middle-aged.
Speaker 2:Middle-aged ladies, you know, with cash to spare, high-income ladies who have audience securities, that's her prey.
Speaker 1:And I think that's also I was just doing an episode on acceptance and you know sort of this culture that I think that women certainly you know, are brought up in about control and keeping things, because you know you need to be working on your achievement, you need to be working on your body, you need to make sure you're taking care of everybody else around you, and so that demographic, like when you said that I was like, well, that definitely tracks because that's part of you know, the upbringing or indoctrination that that's what a good woman does yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:To care of all of these.
Speaker 2:The weight loss industry is unbelievably sexist when it comes to like. I don't even believe in you know, the whole kind of obesity epidemic statistic and stuff like that. But when you look at it, in all of the developed countries it's the men who are heavier, they have higher rates of what they call obesity than women, and yet almost all of the research is done on women. Hello, that's a little bit of this sexism there. It's everywhere. The weight loss surgery literature is skewed towards women. The weight loss drug industry literature is skewed towards women and, like literally almost all of Susan Pierce Thompson's victims are women.
Speaker 1:When you have a client and they're trying to, because to me it feels like you've got. You know, in one hand you know I'm restricting, but you know, maybe I've got the body that I want, or I'm on my way to the body I want, and then in the other hand is here's my freedom, here's my social joy, here's my relationships. And then I'm sort of assuming you're trying to get people to prioritize these relationships and fun, and like, how do you really get people because again, like yes, if then you end up gaining weight because you're not restricting yourself so much, like, what do you find really helpful to help people see that freedom and relaxation, flexibility are more valuable?
Speaker 2:Well, I don't say that as my job actually, because I can't tell people what they think is more valuable, but it is highlighting, like the kind of the bargain that you're striking with white knuckling, your natural body, but it is. I talk to people a lot about value, like what is your value? How? How do you want to live your life? What's important to you as a human? You know, at the end of your life Do you want to have on your tombstone always maintained her weight or do you want to have, you know, had beautiful times with friends and family? It's understanding that values are what you stand for as a human being and what you really want to get out of life. And then there's rules that we get taught by the culture, which is there's a certain body we need to pursue all the time in order to get that. So it's sort of helping people to understand that fundamentally, values are like, implicitly, what's going to make you wiser, happy, but the rules, stuff that we can really interrogate, unpack and dissect and start to question in a more critical way.
Speaker 2:One of the most useful things that I can do with people is to help them do like a timeline of like it's going to come out of start life hating our body. We pick this up. We get taught how to hate our bodies and what we need to do to control them. So helping people to write out a timeline of like how I got disconnected from my natural body, how I learned that controlling my size was like one of my jobs on planet Earth and often people understanding that this has been something they've been taught is really illuminating because it helps them to understand that that stuff that we've been taught is very different to what we actually value as humans on the planet. You know people that I love in my life. I don't care how big or small they are. It really doesn't matter what they look like. It's about human connection and beings on a planet. So everyone is going to land differently when they do this work and, like you said before, we all live in diet culture and there are actual pressures on people.
Speaker 2:So I don't judge people if they were or if they let, but I kind of say it is my job to help people wake up and make more consensual deal on like okay, well, I understand the deal and it's my body, my choice. Does that make sense? So, but it's also a huge part of it is the weight science, because people come in and they really blame themselves for not having the right body. What I can't, I adjust, you know. I can do everything else in life. I'm really, you know, nailing life, but I cannot get the body that I want. I keep weight cycling, and so for me, helping people to understand that is not their fault is really empowering, and it needs to be, because there's so much messaging given to people that if they can't do it, then they're doing something wrong and they need to get another product in order to kind of be able to do it, which it's just the biggest scam you could imagine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think to what like sort of weighing things out. That was just me, you know, when I was trying to decide, and to your point, the values, because I do remember. You know, when my son wanted to go to this restaurant that you know, at that time I was like there's, you know I didn't say it to him, but you know panicking and reading the menus, looking up like oh yeah, there's fashion in there.
Speaker 2:I can't go. Is there a place?
Speaker 1:next door that I could get something and maybe bring it in there. Looking at the restaurant on Yelp, like well, what kind like would it be obvious if I brought something like this whole thing? And then we went there several years later I was doing much better, and then the biggest thing that struck me was like I missed the whole thing the first time. I missed time with him.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I was being present because I was worried about flour or you know whatever it was, and I think those like things. When I can ever make them contrast for myself, then I'm like oh, versus the second time. You know we were there, for he's a film major, you know he had a movie and so it was a competition too. My family was there and he was there, and you know we're talking about the film, whereas, like I couldn't tell you what we talked about.
Speaker 1:The first time that was helpful for me. To be like this again is so expensive for me in ways that I never even thought that it was because it's hurting my presence, my ability to show up Because you're completely preoccupied with fearful thoughts about, you know, not being able to stick to the plan and that is horrific and such.
Speaker 2:Christy Harrison calls it a life-thief. You know the bullshit of diet culture and it is that that is. For me, that is a crime and a travesty that so much of our lives is dominated by these thoughts which are not important, and we need to actually have that contrast in the same restaurant and it's like, oh, how lovely. This is what life is without an eating disorder. Because that's what it is. It's not a diet. It's an eating disorder when it preoccupies your mind, when you can't think about doing anything because of how it might affect what you're trying not to eat. That is disordered eating and eating this sort of land, and you know time to kind of raise the red flag and get some help.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a great, really image, like the uncle waving the white flag by saying like, okay, this isn't working, and I think you also don't have to have any idea how to fix it too.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Just knowing like this isn't good. I don't know what good looks like, but it's not this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but go see an eating disorder person. Don't go to one of the. Don't go and get more weight loss. Help For God's sake. Don't go to an atropath. Go to an eating disorder person and say this has been happening, how can you help me? And also, it's okay if you're terrified of weight gain because, like literally everyone who comes to see me is, I am terrified that you're going to tell me that I'm going to gain weight. You know that that it's okay. Everyone's terrified of weight gain. Go anyway. Remember that the eating disorder person that you're seeing, who are trying them on, you're not signing up for anything, but just to have a conversation with someone who understands how this can, how this can trap you.
Speaker 2:Eating disorders are so easy to develop and so difficult to get out of. It's like a Chinese finger trap. You know those things where the more you kind of struggle them, deeper you get into it. So you can't do it on your own most of the time. And that's not a judgment, it's just it's really really scary how how much they can have you in their clutches, and that's that's what I can say. In Susan Pierce Thompson. She has monetized her eating disorder and it's hiding in plate sites and it's normalized and and held up as something to be proud of and I think, I think it's just horrifying that, essentially, a walking pro and a website is still operating in 2023.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think, understanding that there's no governing body of diets or books or anything like. You can say whatever you want, you can have whatever issues and pass those along Like there there is nothing out there protecting you, no.
Speaker 2:Back in the 1990s, you know, the National Institute of Health in the United States did an inquiry into the weight loss industry and clipped down on it. That's why we see the results not typical on the commercials, but that's the extent of regulation of the industry. You're right, and that's the low consumer protection. And in any other area of medicine this would have been stopped long ago. But because diet culture sort of survives on fat phobia and really hatred and fear of getting larger, this really damaging industry is allowed to kind of continue unfettered, unpoliced, unregulated and like that. That's what kind of really keeps me going. I really want to say globally the industry just shut down and for us to kind of like imagine all of the billions of weight loss industry profits actually went into caring for human health. What could we do with all that money?
Speaker 1:I think some people think that there are institutions that are there to protect them, kind of sort of like the supplement industry. That people are like, well, obviously, and I was like obviously nothing like you think this is natural, like maybe I made it my kitchen sink yeah, supplements are completely unregulated because the FDA don't get involved.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is the wild west in terms of um we do have. That's why, you know, from an individual perspective, becoming better at detecting bullshit is our biggest weapon, because there aren't any regulatory bodies there to shut this stuff down.
Speaker 1:So it's really just getting t-shirts that say bullshit detector is really kind of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a really wonderful t-shirt that says are we allowed to swear on this forecast? I'm not really.
Speaker 1:Yes you already have and you're good. Oh, I did. Okay, it gets a pee every time.
Speaker 2:It says I don't give a fuck about your diet, Susan, on the t-shirt, and I think that's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Very oh, but it's, yeah, I just see it often and I think there have been times when I coached more individually and then times, years, where I'll pull back and be like I've got to do corporate wellness because I cannot listen to it. It just sometimes after a while you're just like you know it's because it's the same of like hey, I found this book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know I am now diet culture intolerant, like it's a full thing. It's really something that we need to protect ourselves from. You know, I'm going much less on social media, and so I find a thing that we have to look after ourselves in a culture that really, really, really is like just waiting at the door to sell us another product.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm so happy that you are here and I think this is it's such an important conversation because, you know, she isn't certainly not the only one with this. You know, incredibly, you know we've got the whole 30. I mean there are so many other programs that are very similar that people really aspire to, and I just really want to flip that script of like, oh no, that is not aspirational.
Speaker 2:That's asshole, that's dangerous.
Speaker 1:I'm from aspirational to assholes Re-framed, yeah, yeah. So where can people find you and find more about you?
Speaker 2:On probably insta-untrapped-underscore-au and untrappedcomau. You can find me there. That's mostly where I'm hanging out at the moment, but they all find out podcast. We've got, like, I think, 70 something episodes of various rants against various aspects of diet culture. So if you want to get to, your all should detect a nice and finely tuned. That's a good place to start.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like it. I enjoy some anger with the entire situation. I don't feel like there isn't anything that, again, we need to be like nice and polite about, and so I enjoy your tone on your podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Yes, I have been accused of being an angry feminist and I feel like I need to get that t everything when I get that t-shed. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, that's sort of. That's not a slur in my world. I'm like, yes, me too.
Speaker 2:Yeah angry women change the world and you know we are in such a formidable fight, especially with the weight loss pills of the moment against diet culture and the onslaught of bullshit. So we need to maintain a healthy sense of anger, but not direct that anger towards our bodies anymore, not for another moment. Direct it towards the Charlotte Tins and Stagall Salesman who are making us feel like we can't be okay unless we buy new products.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time. I'm happy to be able to chat live with you. It's been very nice, it's been wonderful, thank you Hither. All right, take care.
Speaker 2:Thanks, bye.