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Could you be supervising your kids too much? Safety is important, but that doesn’t have to translate watching your child’s every move. Annie, Lauren and Jen are joined by parenting expert Allana Robinson to discuss outdoor unsupervised play, fostering independence and life skills and finding more balance as a parent.   What you’ll hear in this episode: Societal pressures around supervision and engagement of parents with their kids The amount of time working moms spend with their kids vs stay at home moms in the 50s What science says about enrichment and play Motor skill development and play How motor skill development affects reading ability Facilitating outdoor unsupervised play through relationship building in your neighborhood The value of small risks in learning to prevent injuries How children's’ injuries have changed with the introduction of “safer” equipment How to introduce unsupervised outdoor play in an age-appropriate way Boundaries and consequences - how to use them Helping kids learn to entertain themselves Judgement and the mom on the phone in the park What happens when you interrupt or correct play Isolation and the need for community of parents and of kids Zooming out from our kids’ behavior and learning to see it in context   Resources: Uncommon Sense Parenting Facebook Page Allana’s Facebook Group Ping GPS The Gift of Imperfect Parenting Your Kids Need to Play Outside Without You podcast episode (Allana Robinson) Marian Diamond Rat Enrichment Study No Child Left Alone study Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome to Balance 365 life radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balance365. Together we coach thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy, and confident in their bodies on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing with amazing guests. Enjoy. We live in a culture where parents are expected to be with or entertain their kids all the time, but we also have other responsibilities inside the house that need taking care of too, and as a result, our kiddos' outdoor playtime often gets cut short, but today's guest has solutions. She understands the importance of outdoor play for kids and wait for it, she encourages unsupervised outdoor time. Yeah, you heard me right. Alanna Robinson is an early childhood educator and parenting coach for parents of toddlers and preschoolers. She helps parents understand why their children are misbehaving and what to do about it without yelling, shaming, or using timeouts. On today's episode, Alanna, Jen, Lauren and I discuss why your kids need to play outside without you and how to begin implementing that today so your kids can play outside and you can tackle your to do list inside or you can always just relax too. But before we dive in, it's important to note that we have a diverse audience, and even though we don't have immediate solutions for everyone, we want to acknowledge that inequalities do exist and people with different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds may have a different experience with outdoor play. But as always, we don't want anyone to feel left out of this conversation. And if you want to discuss any of these topics further, we invite you to join our free private Facebook group. Healthy Habits Happy Moms. Enjoy. Lauren and Jen, welcome to the show. We have a special guest. Lauren, are you so excited? Lauren: I am so pumped. I'm so excited to learn all the things. Annie: I know. Jen, I know you're excited cause this was a guest you found and you brought and you were like, "She needs to be on the show." Jen: Yeah, I'm part of Allana's, I'm in her parenting posse Facebook group. Actually, Allana, I found out about your Facebook group in our Facebook group. Allana: Oh yeah? Jen: You were, or did someone just recommend your Facebook group to me in our Facebook group to me in our Facebook group. So group to group. So I joined yours and you have said some things that have been so profound and have changed the way I parent and discipline, which is amazing. Allana: That makes me so happy. Jen: And even though you specialize in one to six year olds, I have, well, I've been in your group for quite a while, but my boys are transitioning out of those ages. So I have a five, seven and nine year old. I find your advice still works for my seven and nine year old. And so you just scale it to their level and yeah, it works. It's amazing. And it's taken so much stress out of parenting, right? Especially with discipline because you're always like, "Is this enough? Did he learn his lesson?" Annie: So in other words, welcome to the show, Allana. How are you? Allana: Thank you so much for having me. I'm great. Annie: Good. Allana: Making me so extremely happy because you never know if what you're putting out into the world is actually landing with people and it's just, it makes me so happy to hear when it does. Jen: I don't, I just read along. So I would say I'm a lurker in your group. I've posted once, but I read. And so it's actually a good reminder for me that in even our Facebook group, I'm sure there's tons of lurkers, so nothing you say is ever really wasted. And so I read whatever you write. So whatever you're doing in that group, I'm a step behind. Annie: And then she comes to me and she's like, "Hey, you need to check her out." And then I went to your website and listen to one of your podcasts. And it was about why your kids need to play outside without you. And I was like, "Freedom!" It was amazing. Jen: That was a huge moment for me and you're so open about your own parenting practices and you're not just telling people, "Hey, here's what to do." You're like, "Here's what what you should do. And I'm doing it. And this is what happens in our day to day life." And can I say the comment that blew my mind? It was just from a couple of weeks ago. Can I say that? Am I allowed? You told everybody, someone asked when they can let their toddler play in their backyard unattended. And then all these women were giving advice, right. And it was this huge thing and all of a sudden you swooped in and you said your youngest or you start them out one and a half years old playing independently outside by themselves at one and a half. And your son has been walking down the street to the park from four years old. Allana: Yup. Jen: On his own. And I was like, "Wow." And you said the world is safer today than it's ever been. There's this perception that it's more dangerous and we actually have more things in place to keep our kids safe even though it's safer. But that's killing us as parents. And actually what it's leading to is a lot more indoor time and screen time for kids because it's actually not realistic or sustainable to expect parents to be playing or even supervising their kids 24 seven and so kids aren't even getting the minimum amount of movement that they should be just because it's actually become impossible for families to provide that. Allana: It's an impossible standard. There's also a study that was done not that long ago about the difference in the amount of time working mothers today spend with their children versus stay at home mothers that spent with their children in the 1950s. Working mothers today spend more time on average with their children than stay at home mothers did in the 1950s so this concept that we have to constantly be in their face, we have to constantly be engaged with them. We have to constantly be enriching them. Jen: Right. Allana: Putting this impossible, impossible load on us. And you know where that came from? It came from another study. There was a woman named Marian Diamond who was in the 1960s, she was doing research on rats and how big their brains got when they played versus rats who weren't given the opportunity to play. Allana: And she was a woman scientist in the 1960s and she was playing with rats. So she got ridiculed socially by her male colleagues for being the girl who plays with rats. And in order to try and make her study, her papers more serious, have a bit more aplomb, she removed the word play and she changed it to enrichment. And nobody knows this woman. Nobody has ever heard of these studies before, but they have just trickled through our societal psyche to the point where we believe that we always have to be engaged with our kids or they're going to be stupid. And what that study should have said is the more time the children play, the smarter they get, the bigger their brains get. And that tiny little change in the way that we communicated that idea has had such a prolific impact on North American society. And now we're at the point where it's breaking us to meet those expectations. And we're so terrified that if we don't, that our kids are going to be stupid. And it's, yeah. So this fear that everybody has, and it's a deep seated subconscious fear that we have to be with them all the time or they're going to be taken or stupid. And it's just, it's not sustainable. You can't do it. Jen: Can I just, I'll just add another fear. That they're going to get hurt and someone's going to call child and family services on me and my kids are gonna get taken away because I wasn't there when they fell off their bike, broke an arm. Like, you know, it's just, I'm afraid of what my neighbours are gonna think of me. Not so much anymore because my kids are a bit older. But when my kids were younger, it was, we lived near a park, I wouldn't dare have sent, you know, in my head I'm like, "I'm sure they'll be fine." My Dad used to do some very questionable, like, I mean over the line questionable things. So you know I'd always have my dad be like telling me "It's fine!" Just, but you know, you, you actually worry about your neighbors. And actually I've been on social media for several years now and shared a lot of our family during that time. I think I started after my third was born and I have had many people message me and threatened they're going to call family services on me, like awful telling me I'm an awful mother. Like, if I'm trying to share like our mom life moments, you know, like, there's accidents- Allana: That hasn't happened to me yet quite frankly, because as you said, I'm very open about what I allow my kids to do. And there's more studies. There was this study that was done in 2016 about, it's actually called No Child Left Alone. And it was a study that was done by a small group of researchers and they basically asked a large, large group of people, they gave them scenarios in which a child was left alone and every single scenario was exactly the same except for the reason why the child was left alone. So they varied the reason, like, you know, mom went to go see her lover versus, you know, mom had an emergency at work and couldn't find a babysitter. And what they found was that people assessed a higher risk to the child based on what they morally felt the reason was for leaving the child, even though all the factors were exactly the same. And so what that means is that people don't just think things are dangerous and therefore, and moral, they think things are immoral and therefore dangerous. So, and when I say to people like "I let my five year old walk to the park," they're like, "Aren't you afraid CPS is going to get called on you? Aren't you afraid that somebody?" And I'm not because I know my neighbors. And that is how we combat that, because it's a lot easier to judge somebody on their morality when you don't know them, when you can't put a face to them, when you've never spoken to them. So, and it's awkward, super awkward. But when we moved here when my son was a year and a half old. And so he was just starting outdoor play and he was, he's tiny for his age, like he looks much younger than he is. And so I actually took his hand and we went around and we walked up and down our street and we knocked on everybody's door and we introduced ourselves. And I said, you know, "My name's Allana. This is my son Logan. You might see Logan around, he likes to play outside by himself. I'm okay with that." And people were kind of like, "Okay." And it was, it was awkward as hell. And you know, we have a bit more in depth conversations with our immediate neighbours who can actually see into our yard. But so no, nobody ever, I gave my phone number to everybody and said, "Hey, if you ever see him doing something questionable that you're not sure it's safe or appropriate, please send me a text message. Like I am always, I will deal with it." And what that people call CAS because they see a child doing something that they're not sure is totally on the up and up and they don't have a touch point. They don't have anybody to go to other than the police. So if you go to your neighbors and you say, "Hey, this is who I am, this is my child, this is my phone number, please call me if you know you ever need anything," it removes that ability to have such a quick moral judgment on you because they seen your face. They've spoken to you, they've had a conversation with you and that I think because we don't know our neighbors, in this day and age we move around a lot more. We live in much larger communities. Houses are much closer together. We don't, we don't know our neighbors the way that our parents did or grandparents did. So it takes a conscious effort on our part if we're going to be sending our kids out into the world by themselves that we know we've scoped out the world for them, right? Jen: Yeah. Go ahead, Allana. Allana: Oh, I was just going to say it like, he has, he's walked to the park before and I've had neighbors text me and be like, "Hey, so your kids at the park by himself?" And I'm like, "Yup." And they're like, "Oh, you're okay with that?" "Yup. Thanks for letting me know though." And they're like, "Okay, great." And that was the end of it. And they know him, he knows his boundaries, like, and there's a certain amount of teaching to this. You don't just send your kid out the door and be like, "Off you go." There's a lot of very conscious teaching that has to happen in, right. Annie: Allana, I would love to get into, like, how do you actually implement it in a little bit? Because I know like you can't just take a kid that, like, hasn't had any unsupervised play and be like, "Okay, see ya. Have fun." But I want to back up because you have quite a bit of information about, like, the benefits. Like why does this matter to the kids and why does this matter to parents? Allana: Well, because the outdoors is basically, like, nature's occupational therapy, right? Like the rate of children in occupational therapy has soared since the 1990s and it's because the kids aren't getting outside. When you go outside, first of all, the environment is perfectly sensorially balanced. It's made for us. It's not too loud. It's not too quiet. Depending on where you live is not too hot or too cold. But you can adjust it, you know, generally it's not too bright. There's, you know, very subtle sounds that help you orient yourself in space. Like just the sounds of birds tweeting and leaves rustling helps your brain figure out where you are in space. It has, there's so many sensory experiences, mud, grass, air, everything is a sensory. The heat from the sun even is a sensory experience that helps your brain integrate the input that it gets both indoors and out. It's not controlled and there's things that you have to adapt for which you wouldn't have to adapt for inside because everything is so controlled inside. So our kids aren't getting that stimulus that hopefully we got that our parents definitely got outdoors and the result is that there's a lot of kids in schools right now who have vestibular problems and it's affecting their ability to read. It's affecting their ability to sit down and concentrate. Spinning, spinning has been shown, if you spin for five minutes, it's been shown to increase your attention span for two hours. They've removed every single merry go round. Every single spinning toy. Kids aren't allowed to spin on swings anymore because it's "dangerous." They've shortened the height of swing sets. If you look at pictures of swing sets from like the 1960s, the set itself is super, super tall and the chains are super, super long, which means they got a lot larger range of motion. When everything got scaled down and we got super safety conscious. We literally scaled down the swing sets. The chains are much shorter. They're not getting as large a range of motion. They're not getting as much stimulation. So it's vital not just to, you know, their ability to entertain themselves. It's vital to their long term learning. If you don't have a body that can integrate all the information that you're getting, then it's going to crop up down the road in lots of different ways. Jen: Wow. You know what? We moved from Vancouver, a huge city in Canada to a very small city, in the interior British Columbia, 90,000 people. And then within that community we live in like this tiny little suburb that backs on to, like a provincial park. So just hiking trails and stuff. My children's life has changed. Being so close to nature and having other children on the block, like our doorbell is ringing constantly. These kids are outside all the time, way more than when we lived in Vancouver. When we were in Vancouver I felt like I had to facilitate everything because you're in this big city you like, it's just, yeah, it was, there was just, it was very, and it was very stressful and I don't even think I realized how stressed I was until I wasn't living there anymore. And I have so much more freedom. I, you know, we even live close enough to the school that, like, boys can walk to school and walk home. And then just my free time has gone way up. Like as far as, and the load of parenting has gone way down for me living in this neighborhood and in this smaller city and I just can't believe how the quality of our life has improved. It's crazy. Allana: Totally. And like I have a lot of parents were like, "Listen, I don't have an outdoor space for my kids. Like we live in an apartment building and I can't let them go downstairs and play in even in the public green space by themselves because there's, you know, 60 back balconies that face onto it and somebody is going to take issue with it" and I always say "Some is better than none." Jen: Yes. Allana: Taking your kids to a park and take them to a park where there's no equipment. Right. Don't take them to a park where there's all these plastic climbers and stuff. Take them to a park where there's no equipment, provincial park, national park somewhere that it's more of a natural space and let them play there rather than let them climb the trees, let them walk on the logs, let them go, you know, dig in the ravines and the ditches. That's much more high quality play than the kind of contrived play that happens on swing sets and stuff like that. Jen: Yeah, they, when my kids were young, we lived in New Zealand and they are extremely progressive as far as play there. And this is kind of when all this started coming to me, because I had never heard this kind of talk in Canada and they talked a lot about the benefits of decreasing supervision and increasing risk on playgrounds because for example, our school, our playground no longer meets safety codes anymore. And so our school is paying $100,000 this spring that we all had to fundraise for to put in a new, new safe playground. And I'm kind of sitting back while everyone's very excited, great, but I'm sitting back going like, this is a hundred grand on a new safe structure that- Allana: Is going to do them a disservice. Jen: Right? And so - Allana: Yeah, I know the feeling. My son's play, my son's school, he's in junior kindergarten here in Ontario and they don't even have a playground. They don't have any, like they have a fenced in yard and there's a play structure for the kids who are in grade four and up. But anybody under that isn't allowed to use it. And we're moving schools next year. And his first question was, is there going to be something that I can climb on Jen: Right. Allana: Yeah, dude, that's like one of my top priorities. Jen: Yeah. I see just as many kids in the field next to the school. It's all fenced and stuff than I do on the playgrounds. Right. So it's and then tell me this, I don't know if this evidence based or not, but I often wonder what happens on playgrounds when the kids are bored and there's no risk anymore. Like do they turn? Like is that why they're turning on each other at recess? Allana: When there's nothing to do, you're going to create something to do. And so the nice thing like, and people will often say to me like, "How do your kids play outside for hours on end? There's nothing in your backyard." And there isn't. We literally have a yard and a shed and, but there are things in my backyard. We have lots of loose parts. We have, when my husband built that shed, he took all the off cuts and just kind of sanded down the edges generally so that he wasn't getting any splinters. And so there's, there's a ton of lumber back there. There is sticks, there's mud, there's a sand pit, we have a water table that kind of turns into a pond during the summer because nobody cleans it out. It gets very disgusting but so they have all that stuff out there and they'll take like, you know, an action figure or a car or something, one little thing and they'll build this whole playscape off of it just because toys are built with a very specific purpose in mind and kids know that they're supposed to use them that way, right? You're supposed to use a tool the way the tool is supposed to be used. We're very, very clear about that with young children. So when you give them a toy and it's only able to be used one way, they're going to get bored with it really, really quickly. And then when there's nothing to do, they're going to start disturbing. Jen: Bleeping the child psychologist. Allana: I always have an explicit warning on my own podcast because when I get passionate I run my mouth. But yeah. So, but if you don't give them those things that are closed ended to begin with, if you give them open ended stuff and you expect them to create their own world, they'll do it and it will be so immersive for them that they won't have time to make, you know, trouble. They're going to be so engaged in it.   And that's the other thing is toys generally can only be used by one or two people versus open ended materials. "Okay, you want to come play with me? Great. Go grab a stick. Right?" So that's, it's a lot easier for children to join play when there isn't set materials for them to use, when everything's very open ended because they can modify what they're doing to include more people very easily.   And to come back to kind of what you were saying about the play structure, that's another problem, right? There's usually limits on how many kids can be on the play structure, especially in school environments where they're like, you know, there can only be five kids on the play structure at a time that just hamstrings them. It cuts them off at the knees and when there's children, you know, want to come in, they can't. So keeping things and it's just really, the science across the board just says "Back off! Back off and they'll figure it out. That's what their brains are designed to do." Jen: Right. And that's really what builds a resilient person. Right? They can figure it out in a moment. Right. The other thing that had been talked about in New Zealand I remember is as playgrounds were becoming more safe, they were not just less risky as in, "Ooh, am I going to fall? Or it was also, they were less physically risky in that it didn't require as much strength to go over these different spots in the park. So the upper body strength in children is coming down big time because they are taking out monkey bars. They're taking, you know, they're taking out all these upper body things." Allana: Exactly. Because you've got children in occupational therapy to build that up because they're not naturally getting it, they're not weight bearing. I have so many clients who their child is in kindergarten and first of all they're asking these kindergarten kids to read and write when that's not developmentally appropriate, but they also can't physically do it because they don't have the strength in their muscles to do it. Like fine motor skills starting in your shoulder and they work their way down. Jen: Right. Right. Allana: If you don't use your gross motor skills. You can't use your fine motor skills when you need to. So yeah. And the other thing about reducing risk is that they're reducing small injuries, but the injuries that do happen are much larger. Children are breaking bones more frequently. They're, you know, having huge concussions when they do, because their vestibular system is so underdeveloped, they don't know the limits of their body. And so when they go to try and do something new, they can't tell if they can actually do it or not. Jen: Right. Because they've had no lower level risk that warns them Allana: They weren't able to build up to it. Jen: Amen. Yeah. Allana: We've reduced, you know, cuts, scrapes, minor stitches and we've turned that into breaks and concussions and it's, ask any occupational therapist and they'll tell you that a lot of these things are very easily solved just by sending them outside to play. Jen: Right. That's so interesting to just reframing it, right? These things are good. Like this is good for your kids to make these mistakes, have these small falls. None of them are life threatening, but they're teaching them about their environment and saving them from future. An analogy to that, actually, I posted a insta story a year ago with my oldest son on a little mini quad at his grandparents' farm and he was doing donuts and it was all dusty and I got so many from women that were like, "I would never let my child do that." And he had an accident that summer. He bumped into the side of his uncle's truck and he flew and hit his chest on the handlebars and it really hurt him and it really scared him. I mean, he's wearing a helmet and we've got that safety stuff. And I was like, "Good." I could see the donuts were getting a little out of control. I could see that kid needed some kind of little bump to remind him that he is on a machine and it happened and it was good. And he is much more safe now. And I guess, I guess what, and also my dad's a farmer, so I grew up in, you know, "dangerous" environment of, like, just roaming around a farm and yeah. And it's like, I see now how good that is, but you know, and I moved to the city and I think of all these city kids getting licenses at 16 and like, you know, we're a little, when you grew up on a farm, you're just driving, you drive, right? Like you drive when your dad's lap or you, you're helping, you know, you're way too young. You're 12 years old and you're helping move trucks from one field to another. And then I think of all these city kids getting their licenses and it's like that's crazy that they have no driving experience. And you know what I mean? So it's like- Allana: I was reading something the other day about how it's taking longer. Like when I turned 16 almost all my friends got their license on the first try. And apparently there's some statistics now coming out that it's taking teenagers longer to learn to drive because they're having to develop vestibular and proprioceptive skills that they didn't as a child. And so they're not able to judge where their car is in space. Jen: Oh gosh, that's so interesting. Allana: So yeah, it's, this isn't just about mom getting some breathing time of being able to clean the kitchen without anybody crawling up their back and about the kids being able to entertain themselves. These skills that they develop, that looks like they're doing absolutely nothing are so important. And they will follow them for the rest of their lives. And it's just, it frustrates me so much. Jen: Lauren had a question, I think. Allana: Oh yeah, Lauren, did you have something? Lauren: Yes. Can I, can I? Hello? Annie: Hi. Welcome to the show. Lauren: Hi, I'm over here. I'm trying to get a word in next to Jen. Annie: Good luck. Jen: Classic little little sister moment. Lauren: So I love all of this. Can I ask some practical questions selfishly that hopefully will benefit all of our listeners? I have a five year old and a one year old and I'm wondering like, okay, my one and a half year old obviously is probably going to have different boundaries than a five year old, but the five year old, I mean, I let her play outside sometimes, but I'm usually watching her through like the window and whatever. Like so what are, how do I introduce this concept to both of them in age appropriate ways? Allana: So the five year old, as you said, it's going to have a much longer leash than the one and a half year old. If you have fenced space, it's, that's easiest because it's easiest for us to back off. But generally what I do with little kids is I start by being outside with them but not being engaged with them. So like blowing snow in the driveway. They can't participate in that, but they can be outside while we're doing it, weeding the garden, they might join in but they're going to get bored and they're going to go do something else. Doing things that need to be done anyways, but, and that we're around, but we're not focused on them. We're focused on something else. So that's like step one is generally just getting them used to the idea that you're not going to be watching them all the time. And then step two of that is starting that way and then being like, okay, I'm going to go in and go to the bathroom. I'm going to go in and make dinner. And just gradually lengthening the amount of time that you go in at the end of your play time so that they're not going from "I'm inside and supervised, to I'm outside and not supervised." There's a buildup to that and it's amazing how, like, children are very intuitive. So if we have concerns, if we're scared of them doing something, they're going to pick up on that very quickly. Their limbic system is very connected to ours and our inter brain is going to go, "You're not safe!" And so they're not going to feel safe. So it's a workup for us too, right? We need to feel confident and comfortable leaving our kids alone. So those are steps one and two generally for me is just being outside, not engaged with them but being outside with them. And then at the end of that starting to introduce, I can go inside and you don't have to come with me. And once you kind of work up to a good chunk of time, then you can start sending them out by themselves and lengthening that amount of time so that you're like, "Okay, well, you go out and I'll meet you there. Like I'm just going to go and put this in the oven and then I'll be outside." And starting to get them used to going outside without you following behind them. And then you can go out again, do something else, not be engaged with them, but be around and then go back inside. So you're kind of working it from either end rather than just sending them out on their own. And that's generally a nice good workup for kids. They don't feel scared because they know you're coming, you know that you're not having to like peek through the window to keep an eye on them either because they can sense that too. Windows don't block limbic resonance. Lauren: Do you have tips if your yard is not fenced in, like, do you give them ahead of time, like, boundaries? Allana: Absolutely. So my favorite tool for this is go to Home Depot or Lowe's and grab some of that neon paint that they mark gas lines with when you call and be like, "Hey, I'm going to dig in my yard." And then somebody comes by and like Mark's all your gas lines so you don't hit a gas line when you dig. Go and get that and spray your property line. And I do that every spring with my two, because I have a two and a half year old. And so last year he was a year and a half and he wants to play in the front yard with his big brother, but there's no barrier in the front. So he was getting really angry because my big can let himself in and out of the backyard and the little one can't and he'd be so mad when my big one would leave him in the backyard. So I did. I went and I got the orange paint and I sprayed, just a line right down our ditch and down either side of our front yard. It doesn't look great, but when you mow the grass goes away and he, and I was like, "Listen, you cannot cross the orange line without mummy or daddy." And we walked the orange line and I showed him, "Yes, no, you cannot go on this other side." And it did. We had to work up to it Again, starting with me being outside with them and keeping an eye on them, but not engaged with them, reminding him that he can't cross that line and just very gradually backing away from him and letting him have more ownership over that. Now we can go just about anywhere. Like we have a cottage with a waterfront that we go to in the summer and now I can like walk up and like spray that line along the waterfront and I'm like, you can't cross the dark line- Jen: Take it to your hotel. Annie: The restaurant. Jen: The restaurant play here, don't worry, you can mow it out. Allana: I've done it with orange electric. Try and pick a color and stick to it because kids tend to get that, like, color association. But I've done it with orange electrical tape, like, we were at, actually just this last week, my big one was hospitalized and we were in this waiting room, like, it was like an examination room with the door didn't close. It was kind of like just a triage kind of space. And my little one was kept trying to escape and I busted out my roll of orange electrical tape and put on a hard line on the doorway and I was like, you can't cross the orange line. And he was like, "Okay." Jen: That's so awesome. Annie: it is. Allana: At this point that he's like, "No, we don't cross orange lines," causes problems when they're like, "Here you can go!" Like where were we? We were at Wonderland or something like that last summer and there was, like, a line on the ground to mark where you can't cross to go before you go on a ride. And they were like "Come!" and he was like, "Uh uh, we don't cross orange lines." Annie: So I have a feisty two and a half year old and I'm picturing this like it, like I'm, this is not that I don't believe you, but I mean- Allana: It's not an overnight thing. Annie: Yeah. I'm picturing me, like, getting out, like, rope or a spray can and like her just laughing in my face like, "Yeah, okay, mom. Right." Allana: Right. Well and they do. But that's the thing where you have to very consistently redirect them back to the other side. And- Annie: What have you used as appropriate consequences? Like do you say, like, "Sorry, we can't play outside then if you-" Allana: Yeah, well if you can't, so I often say like "If I can't trust you to stay on this side of the orange line, then we're going to have to go inside. Or if I can't trust you to go stay on this side of the orange line, we're going to have to go in the backyard that's fenced" and, or "if I can't trust you to be playing up" like often when I was starting to do this with him, I would be washing my car because my husband's a car nut and so it makes him very happy when I wash my car frequently. So I was like, all right, this makes him happy. This makes me happy. We're going to wash the car while the kids play in the front yard. And like, I mean it's nice when you have an older child who gets to be the tattle tale, but it was like, "Mom, Owie's going into the road" and I would bring him back. "If you can't stay on this side of the orange line, then you're going to have to come and sit in the car." And he was like, "Uh un." And I was like, "Yeah." And it doesn't take very many times of, like, "Hey," as long as you tell them what is going to happen before it happens. Like you can't spring it on them and be like, "Nope, if can't stay on this side of the orange line I'm going to strap you into your car seat." And then they're like, "Well, I didn't know that was what was on the line." Jen: That's actually, this is another huge takeaway I've gotten from your group is the whole concept of natural consequences, like, life changing. We could do a whole other podcast on it and I'm sure people can find more about it on your podcast. But I, it's just like brought my chill level into a normal range around my kids. And, you know, even, it was in your group, it was something about, it was just like this, right? So it's like you lay out the boundary, you tell them what the consequence is and it's a natural consequence. So it's so it's not like disciplining anymore, right? Allana: Exactly. Annie: It's about getting them to connect to the consequences of their actions. Allana: and kids can tell when we're pulling a power trip, right? Timeouts all that stuff. They know when we're like, "No, I'm just doing this because I can." And so, like, things with, "Okay, if you can't stay on this side of the orange line," the best logical consequence for that would be, "Okay, well then you need to go into the gated area." Like that's, he doesn't want that because he knows his big brother's not in the gated area. He knows that, you know, he wants to be in the front with us. And so that creates a consciousness in him that he's like, "Okay, I need to think critically about this. I'm not going to," and they will test. Kids are scientists. They use the scientific method with much more accuracy than any adult. And they will have a theory and they will test every variable possible, which is why I say, like, try and keep the color consistent because like my son, we were at my mom's once and she didn't have any orange paint, so I busted out some pink. Pink apparently doesn't have the same staying power. It is not an orange line. Jen: Oh my kids would do that. Allana: Because right. Anytime you introduce a variable, they have to test it. They have to, they're so inquisitive. They are scientific little minds. So, and that's where you have extinction bursts where they're like, "Okay, this was the limit before and now it's, there's a new limit. How hard do I have to push until we go back to the old limit?" So staying consistent really is the key to the whole but yeah, keeping, I've lost my train of thought now. Jen: You're amazing. Like you, it's like you're in a child's brain and the way you explain things is so fantastic. I can't wait to send everybody to your podcast and you just, and then suddenly my anxiety in parenting is just gone when I listen to you because I know I'm doing the right thing and it will work out. Right. You sometimes feel like you're just trying whatever, just try it, see what works. But I just have this, like, reassurance from you that it's just consistency. Allana: it's so much easier to let go when you know what's going on under the hood and you know how their brains work. And that's, like, my whole philosophy is if you can understand how your child's brain works, then you can work with it instead of against it. And so many of the conventional parenting wisdom is working against their brain. Annie: Right? Right. Jen: Yeah. Allana: Dominant. It's trying to exert dominance. Jen: Then you get struggles and they feel, yeah, it's- Allana: They feel controlled and nobody likes to feel controlled. You push back and they feel like they're being manipulated and treated like subhuman. So when we just treat our kids like we would not how we would treat an adult, but when we are give them that kind of respect, it's amazing how quickly they come onside. It really is. Annie: And I think from like a parenting perspective, hearing you as an expert in this field, pun intended, it's almost permission giving to say like, "It's fine. Go inside, go to the bathroom, put a frozen pizza in the oven. I mean that's what I would do. Like make a phone call, whatever. There'll be okay. And they need it. It's not just for you." It's, like, it just helps me like do this guilt-free. Allana: Totally. And like I've had clients with 11 year olds who will still make their 11 year old come in from the backyard when they need to go pee. Like when you go to the bathroom. Jen: Like that thread in the group before you came in and laid it down with everybody. I was like, "Who are these people?" Like how long are you gonna be like basically- Allana: And the funny thing. It's like my babysitter, my main babysitter is 11 years old. And when I tell people that they're like, "What?" They're like, "But you don't her alone with them." And I'm like, "Oh yes I do. She can." My 11 year old babysitter can feed my children dinner, bath them and get them in bed and an hour and a half flat. I can't do that. Jen: That's the other thing is that eventually we're working up or my son turns 10 this summer and we've kind of given him the, when you are 10 we will start leaving you a home alone. Like if I'm popping out for groceries or whatever. And it's this thing he's looking forward to and that's kind of the law here. Just so everybody knows. I know the law's different in different areas. But that is, we are law abiding citizens anyways. And so if you can't leave your child, like it has to start happening at some point, right? On a gradual basis. You can't be micromanaging your kid. And then he turns 10 or 11 or 12 and then you go, "Okay, we're leaving you alone." Allana: We don't give children any ability to experience minor risk and then they turn 18 and we're like, "Go out and innovate." Jen: Yeah. Go live alone. Annie: This sounds like- Allana: And they're like, "I've never done this in my entire life. You can't start with, like, throwing them out the door. Jen: And then they struggle. Right. And mental health issues in freshmen university students are just skyrocketing. Allana: Of course, living with their parents for longer and longer because they just don't have- Jen: They're not self sufficient. Allana: Yeah, you don't know how to cope without somebody micromanaging you and telling you what to do all the time. And then when people are like, "Make good decisions," you're like, "I don't know what that means." Because you have no. Jen: Yeah. Allana: Litmus test for it. So it's, it really is, you know, when people say early childhood is so important, it is the foundation for your child's entire life. And if you can't start trusting them when they're four with little tiny responsibilities, how are you going to trust them when they're 16, 17- Jen: Right. Yeah. The other thing I learned from you Allana that I wanted to say was about this bored thing. Cause I think that's the next thing, right? So, okay, your kids are playing alone, but they come back and they're like, "I am bored." I learned this from you in your group. You said it is not your job to entertain your child. And I, so that's just what I say to them. Now they come to me and say they're bored. I'm saying "That's not my job to find something for you to do. Like you, go find something to do." Allana: You are not a clown. You are not the family cruise director. Jen: Right. Sometimes I'll say, "Here's your options. You know, you can get out the coloring stuff. You can go out and jump on the trampoline" or I'll give some options to "Go get your bikes, go down to your friend's house, see if he wants to play." But I tell them all the time that "I am not here to entertain you. That is not my job." And that's been such a revolutionary thing for me too, because I, you know, you feel the pressure around that. Allana: Well, exactly. And that comes again to that pressure of they need to be enriched 24 seven if we want them to be smart. And that the only person that's available to enrich them is me so I have to be constantly engaged with my child and it's just not true. In fact, it's damaging. Jen: Right, right. Lauren: So I have my one and a half year old, like, he'll go play by himself, like, no big deal. But my five year old has always been, she wants to play with somebody. Do you have any tips for like training that'd be like you can, like, she'll go play for a little bit but it's, it's just she's completely different than my one and a half year old and she seems to only want to play with me. Jen: Or what about an only child? Like people that have one child? Allana: Only children I find are actually the best at entertaining themselves because they have no expectation. Like, even my older son is super good. He's really good at playing by himself because he had to, he had nobody to play with. My younger one is not so good at playing by himself because he's always had big brother being his cruise director. I actually find only children are usually very good at playing by themselves. It's not usually such an issue with them. There are children who are just, they're extroverted. They take energy from being around other people. Whereas introverts, that's expending energy, right? So it's a difference in what we find stressful. And so for kids then that's typically how I find kids who are extroverts is when they're like, they always want to be with someone. I'm like, "That's because that refills their tank. That's actually calming. Jen: Interesting. Allana: Versus children who are spending energy. So for them it's actually more calming to have people around and to be engaged with people. And these are the people who when they're in their 20s want to live in those houses with like 40 other people and they're like, "This is fun." And you're like, "No, that's stress. Stress." Jen: Annie, sorry. Annie's been waiting. She's got a question. Annie: No, no, no, no. Jen: She'll try to shut us down, I know it. Annie: I'm giggling because I am an only child and like- Jen: Oh right. Annie: But also, but I'm also an extrovert, so I grew up in a house where, and this might've just been a reflection of my mother and father who both worked full time. And I know that they were just tired when they came home from work, but I always got to have friends over. But I grew up, this supports kind of what you're saying. I grew up in a neighborhood where my, you know, I had three or four best friends within a block of, and we would just skip through the yard to get to, cut through yard backyards to go to the other person's house. And it was like, you just come home when the street lights turned on. That was like our guide and I was, you know, that was probably fifth or sixth grade, but that was there, you know, get on your bikes and you just go, you, you, and, and as long as you're home, by the time the street lights come on, like, we're good. Jen: I'm at the point where I'm like, when my kids are hungry, they'll come home. Like I trust. I've come to trust it. And because you're building this relationship, right, you give them more boundaries and more boundaries and then you as a parent, you trust. You know, it's always a little, once you give them a little more, then it's another trust thing. But then, you know, I've built, like, in our neighborhood with my three kids, we just, there's a lot of trust there with my kids now. And maybe I do, maybe I have my kids have more free reign than some of my neighbors, but I have trust there and I know my kids will get hungry eventually and they will come home and we just, it just works. Allana: Totally. And even like people will say to me like, how can you let your five year old go down the street? Aren't you scared he's gonna get hurt and not be able to tell you or you know that somebody's going to snatch him? First of all, my child is usually low jacked with a GPS. So we do live in 2018, these devices exist. Jen: Oh, you actually have a gps on your son? Annie: I actually have a gps on my son. It's the size of about a quarter or a looney. Jen: What do you wear? Can you tell us about that? Where you put it, how you? Allana: Yeah, so it's just I have, you know, those, tags that they put on merchandise in stores so that when you walk out, if you don't pay for it, it'll beep and flash and all that stuff. So those have a pin that need to be removed with a magnet. Right. So I have just a little fabric pouch. GPS goes in the pouch and it gets pinned to his, he's usually wearing cargo shorts. So we put it inside the cargo pocket and we pin it in there so he can't lose it. Nobody can take it off of him unless they removed his pants. And- Jen: And that's connected to your phone? Allana: It's connected to my phone. It doesn't track him. It just tells me where he is, where the gps is in that moment when I go to look at it. So I can tell if he's, and it's accurate to about 20 meters, so I can tell if he's in the general area that I expect him to be in. It also has the ability to send an SOS. So he just pushes on it and it'll alert my phone that he needs help so then I can go find him. Jen: What brand is this? Could you share that with our- Allana: Yeah, it's called a Ping gps. Jen: Wow. I am getting three. Allana: It is awesome. I love it. There are about 80 bucks and then they cost about five bucks a month US to run. But you can't get a cell phone plan- Jen: Look at Lauren writing. Taking notes. Lauren: Ping GPS. Jen: Lauren lives on a beautiful acreage with a huge, that's why she was asking about the fencing and stuff for kids. She always posts on Instagram these beautiful pictures of her back- Lauren: Snow covered. Jen: Yeah, it's November, but it's gorgeous. So, these would be very handy for you, hey, for your- Allana: Yeah. Jen: Country kids. Allana: It also takes off a little bit of that, you know, CAS call pressure- Jen: What if? Allana: Everybody's so scared that somebody is going to go, "You don't know where your kid is" and you're going to go, "You're right. I don't." Whereas if somebody comes to me and says, "You don't know where your kid is," I can go "Actually, he's within 20 meters of-" Jen: Right, right. Allana: The whole like, and even, I was talking about this on my personal Facebook page where I was sharing that No Child Left Alone Study with just with my friends cause somebody had asked about it and my aunt was actually like, well, like she was the perfect example of where you're not judging something based on the actual risk factors. She was "Never be too careful and the world is a dangerous place." And I was like, but it's not based on the statistics, based on the information we have, it's not. Jen: Right. Allana: We were talking about it because as you said, you know, we always give them those incrementally larger responsibilities. My five year old has wanted to walk to the bus by himself in the morning for school, for months now. And the other day he said to me, "Mommy, please, can I have the responsibility to walk to the bus all by myself?" Well, I can see his bus stop from my front window. It's literally two doors down. Our neighbors all know him. My neighbor who lives beside me is on maternity leave so she's watching him out the front door. She's always texting in the morning like "Good morning," I'm being watched. So I know she's watching him too and she's one house closer to him and I was like, I really had no reason to say no to him other than people who don't know you might think you're too stupid because you're too young. That's not a good enough reason for me. So I let them walk to the bus by himself and one of my neighbors took offence and called the bus company and was like, "I don't think this is okay." And they called me and I was like, "That's their problem." Jen: Right? Totally. Good for you girl. Look at you go. Allana: He's, you say, and it's again, we're, I'm pretty sure the directives we get next year are going to be rewritten because their directive saying that children need to be supervised at the bus stop. I'm like, that literally means they need to be watched. And I was watching him. It doesn't say they need chaperones. So we need to start kind of advocating on the competence of our children too because so many people are so quick to say, "Well, they're five, they're stupid" and no, like you know what your child is capable of and even what they're incapable of and nobody knows your kid like you do. So if you genuinely don't feel like your child can handle walking to the park by themselves because they don't have the awareness of people around them. They're not able to walk on the side of the road. Like I didn't just send my five year old to the park, we walked to the park together for many, many times, almost the entire summer. You know, I would send him to the park and I would stand at the end of the driveway and watch him walk to the park and then I would follow him with his brother. And we would do the same in reverse and like, again, you work up to it so you have to know your child's competency level before you, you try and give them a responsibility, right? Annie: I find it really inspiring and encouraging to listen to you Allana. Like just own your choices even with some pushback from spectators or neighbors or family because I would have, I think that that's something that I get a little nervous about too is, like, my kids, my two oldest run the neighborhood and I really don't, like, I trust them. They've haven't violated my trust. Knock on wood, I have no reason to second guess them that they're going to come home and they're going to be where they are and, but I am always like, what do other people think? Do other people, like, know that like they're okay and that we've had these talks and like there's just this fear of judgment or fear of like getting criticized and then they- Jen: They think you're a bad mom. Allana: Or that I'm just lazy. Jen: It comes down to that in so many situations of decisions we're making and Annie and Lauren and I talk about this around nutrition all the time, right? So it's like you're scared. Do they think I'm a bad mom? Like it's just this constant thing. Allana: And it's that moral judgment again, right? Like do they think that I'm being, that they're doing this because I'm lazy? Does that make them think that they're at a greater risk than they actually are? Annie: I just want to sit on my couch sometimes, and like, don't move. Jen: I do.The thing is, and this, I mean you see it too, like, if you want to take your kids to a park and sit on your phone, I'm like, do it. And I see these posts on Facebook. They're like the mom who just sat on her phone or her kids had to play by themselves and the child was shouting, "Mom, watch me." And the mom didn't look up. I'm like, the child will live, like- Allana: Our parents didn't do that for us. Jen: No. And sometimes it's all the mom has in her day to just be chilled out. Like I had three kids in four years and we lived overseas. So no family and in New Zealand, a lovely thing about New Zealand too is that all their playgrounds are gated. So, and you can't get out. So I could literally go in and just sit and just Facebook or read or whatever, just ignore them. And that was the only time I had and I'm all the power to ya, girl if that's what I'm on. If I see a mom with- Allana: On her phone and I got in it last summer with the mom, cause I do the exact same thing. I bring my laptop generally and I will tether to my phone and like work at the park so that my oldest, my youngest kid run around and ours has a fence but it's not a closed off fence. So I mean if they want to, they can escape. I've walked the perimeter with the many times we've talked about what the boundaries are. If my little one, I've showed him there is a gate, it's open, but that means it's a doorway and you need to stay inside the park or we're going to have to go home and he wants to play. And every once in a while I'll just shout out like "Cubs, where are you?" because we call them the bears and they'll go, "Here, here!" And I'll go, "Great!" And I don't even look up as long as I can hear them I know that they're close. And this woman was like, "Excuse me, do you know what your son is doing?" And I looked up and he was climbing and I was like "On the play structure?" And she was like, "Yes." And I was like, "We're at a park." That's what he's supposed to be doing. And she's like, "But you didn't know that you had to look." And I was like, "That's generally how sighted people determine information. Yes." She was so angry because I didn't have my eyes glued to his butt the whole time. Jen: Oh this busy bodyness is just killing us. Annie: Yeah. Allana: Kids don't need us to be in their face 24 seven. They need the space to play. And in fact, if you're playing with your kid and you're not into it, it removes all benefit of play for them. Both, all the people who are playing something need to be in a place state in order for the play to be beneficial. One person or group that isn't enjoying the play removes all the benefits of play for every single person in that group. So if your kid is forcing you to play trucks with them and you're like, "Oh my God, when is it nap time, I don't want to be here." They're not actually getting the benefit of you playing with them. Jen: Yeah, that's so interesting. Allana: So it's better to find something that you actually enjoy doing with your child and do that so that you're both in a play state, it's a frame of mind. It's not an action. Jen: Brene Brown has in her parenting book The Gift of Imperfect Parenting. They sat down as a family and made a list of things that fill everybody's cups and found the common ones and then that's what they focus their family time around now. And I thought, I thought it was such a good idea, right? Like it's mind. So Brenay Brown said it's mind numbing to play board games for herself and so she's just done. She's not doing it anymore. I was like, "Wow, it's so nice to hear someone like you give me permission to not do these things that I don't like doing with my kids. And I don't, I don't do things I don't like with my kids anymore either." Allana: Like I swim with my kids. That's what I enjoy doing. So we go swimming once or twice a week and we get in our mommy and kid time and that's great. Other than that, I'm like, "Please go do something else." And they're like- Jen: Raise yourselves. Allana: "How are you running a business at home? Mostly by yourself. Two little boys at home." And I mean, my oldest is in JK but he only goes three days a week. And I'm like, because they play by themselves. They go, I feed them breakfast, then I'm like, "Okay, play time." And they go and play in the basement and I'd go work and then they come up when they get hungry and I feed them and the little one goes down for a nap and the big one goes downstairs and play some more and it just gives you so much more freedom. It's actually better for their brain. Jen: And you're happier as a parent, right, having some time. And I guess before we wrap this up, I want to, you know, I just, I guess it's to, it's nice to let parents know that there is detrimental effects to your child by over supervising them, right? So just saying like there's measurable detrimental effects to these kids. Allana: Children who are closely supervised during their play will hamstring their own play. They won't allow themselves to go into a full play state because they're anticipating being interrupted or corrected. Jen: Oh interesting. Allana: So if you are constantly supervising your child's play, they probably aren't getting the benefit of their own play either. Even if you're not playing with them because they're anticipating having you go, "You can't do that. Don't use that that way. That's a firetruck, not a helicopter." And they're not allowing themselves to go into that fully immersed play state where all those benefits of play, all the problem solving and executive functioning skills and all that really get used in that play state. They keep their play very, very surface level when they're being supervised closely. Lauren: That's interesting because I find myself, I can't not correct when they're in view. So I put them out of view. I'm like, "Go in the playroom and play because when you are doing this, I cannot help myself but say stop it." Jen: It's like when I bake with my kids. I, like, can't handle cooking or baking with my kids because I, I just am like, "Don't do that. That's wrong. You're going to break it!" Allana: My mom's a pastry chef and God bless her, she can and I'm like, "Okay, that is your thing, Nana." She is totally into the whole cooking thing. And you know he got all these little, like, real knives and stuff, but they're small so that he can handle them. And the other day we were making, just chopping up potatoes for like roasted potatoes for dinner and he was like making these, like, really, like, random sized chunks. And I was like, "Okay, you're too," Jen: You're like twitchy about it. Allana: One inch cubes, not two, you're holding a knife and you're doing well. You're not killing yourself. Annie: Oh, that's awesome. So a lot of this is, I mean, it's not just about retraining kids to do this. It could be about retraining yourself too, or both or both depending on what you're kind of used to and what your goals are. And, but either way, I mean, just to summarize, this is good for both sides. Both parties, both parents, caregivers and kids when they have unsupervised specifically outside, but unsupervised play. So- Allana: Absolutely. And so many parents, so many moms express that guilt to me cause they're like, "I feel bad making the play by themselves. I feel bad that I'm not engaged with them. I feel super guilty." And it's like, "This isn't about you. This is about them." And it's, yes, it benefits you as well and that's nice, but this really is about them. This is for them. And it takes that guilt away. You don't have to feel bad for making your kids play by themselves. It's good for them. Jen: I want to just kind of leave us with this vision. I'm going to tell you something that really struck me when my kids were younger and was an eye opener moment for me actually. And I was watching, I was in a hard place with motherhood, right? Like these three kids under five, oh my gosh, under four actually. And I was watching The Good Shepherd and it's an old movie that takes place in the fifties. It has Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie and there's this scene where Matt Damon, he's coming home at the end of the day and all, and he's walking up to the house. It was a well researched scene and this is not even what the scene was about. It's just something that I noticed. The moms were all grouped together chatting in one person's front yard and they were all smoking as they would be in the 50s and kids were running everywhere. And I like had this pain in my chest when I saw it because it reminded me of how lonely I was and how parenting must've been so differently back then. Different back then. And not just that, I think moms are more lonely now. It's that kids are more lonely now in a way too, right. Because we are very isolated inside the homes and yeah, I just quite, I really quite crave are return to that and I feel like we've kind of found it in our new neighborhood and like it's just easier and simpler and yeah. Allana: I think, I think once we realize that what children do naturally is, there's generally a reason behind it. We don't tend to trust kids in what they're doing. We want to, we think we know better, but children know what they need and they'll do what they need. And once you can start to trust your kids that way and realize that what they're doing, whether it's a behavior, even if it's a maladaptive behavior, even if it's like what they're playing, if it makes no sense to you, children are doing things for a reason. There is never a child that is doing something just because they feel like it. Like there's never not a reason behind something that a child does. And so when you can trust that and trust that your child is doing what they need, it's so freeing for us. And it does allow us to go back to that, you know, children are allowed to be rambunctious. They're allowed to get hurt, they're allowed to be unsupervised. And you know, people keep thinking, "Oh well, you know, lots of, you know, the good old days didn't exist." Well, no, but we can bring them back in a modern way that is safe and comfortable for everybody. It doesn't have to be the way it was in the fifties for it to be beneficial. Jen: Right. We have tape and our GPSes. Allana: Exactly. That was a hard thing for me because I was like, I have a Bluetooth tracker on every, on my keys and my wallet. Even on my car. I have ev

    In this member spotlight episode, Annie and Jen are joined by Balance365 member Bethann for a light and fun conversation about her Balance365 journey, living in the messy middle, loving the community and laughing together about equally messy minivans. Tune in for a great chat!   What you’ll hear in this episode: Cleaning your environment of negative media messaging The value of supportive community Scarcity and consumerism Where we learn about what it means to be a woman Making the shift between focusing on weight loss to postpartum recovery and wellness Media messaging around how women relate to each other Social constructs of women in competition with each other How our sense of self worth impacts how we treat other women How increased self worth drives the ability to participate in your own life The role of sleep and mindfulness in determining appetite and true hunger Trial and error in establishing habits Giving yourself permission to figure it out Calorie counting and how it relates to hunger and satiety cues Getting to a place where food doesn’t hold so much power over you and what that looks like Discussing moderation with your kids   Resources: Tracking Weight, Steps, Food: When It Hurts, When It Helps Arms Like Annie Everyday Strong Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie:  Welcome to Balance 365 life radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balance365. Together we coach thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy, and confident in their bodies on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing with amazing guests. Enjoy. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Balance365 Life radio. We are back today with our mini series called Member Spotlights. This allows us to introduce you to Balance365 community members who are just killing it inside the program so that you can take their wisdom and stories and learn from them. They're busy women and moms just like you who are changing their habits, their mindsets, and reaching their goals. Today you're going to hear from one Balance365 member who was determined to make changes to her habits in hopes of making a positive impact on her children's lives. Bethann is a seasoned member of our community who came to us looking for help in healing her postpartum body and has since stopped obsessing about food and exercise, lost 30 pounds, connected with true hunger and fullness cues and become more comfortable with taking up space in the world. I can't wait for you to hear more about this mom of three's experience inside Balance365. enjoy! Jen. We have a special guest with us today. Are you so excited to have her on? Jen:  I am. She's like an old friend. Annie:  I know. Well, she actually is an old friend of mine because I got to meet her back when I took a trip to Arizona. Jen:  Oh right! When John went to Phoenix. Annie:  About eight months ago? Jen:  You had a little meet up with all the Phoenix- Annie:  And there's was a lot of them too, which was great- Jen:  girls. Annie:  Yeah. So Bethann, welcome to Balance365 Life radio. How are you? Bethann:  Good, thank you. Thanks for having me. Annie:  Oh, thanks for joining us. I'm so excited to have you because we did get to meet in Arizona. And I think you messaged me, I posted an insta story that was like, "I'm in Arizona" and you were like, "Can we have coffee?"And then the next thing I know there was like eight of you and it was great. It was so fun to meet in real life, not just on the Internet. Bethann:  I know. I was so excited and I remember getting ready to come meet you and my husband was like, are you going on a date? I was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm fangirling!" I was just so excited because you guys have literally you, the three of you have changed my life in the best way. So I was so excited just to be able to thank you in person. Annie:  Oh, I remember you picking me up in your minivan. It's just like quintessential- Jen:  Mom date. Bethann:  Yes, that's a mom date. That's exactly it. The first thing you said was, "Is your van always this clean? Do you have children?" It's like, I do, but my husband's very tidy so they are not allowed to eat in our car. Annie:  Yeah, I remember, I was like, "Is this new? Like did you just get this yesterday?" Jen:  When my husband gets in my vehicle, he's like, "It smells like a barn in here." Like yeah, Kinda. Annie:  There's probably a lot of snacks in the back too If you're hungry- Jen:  Open a window. There's some French fries on the ground at your feet there. Annie:  And if you look in the crevices, I bet you can find some goldfish. Jen:  That's exactly what my vehicle is like. Annie:  Oh, Bethann's husband is probably just having an attack right now listening to us. Bethann:  Well, he's at work. Annie:  Oh good. So you have been a longtime member. Do you remember when you joined Balance365. Bethann:  I want to say it was 2015, so that was the year my twins were born and I actually found you because I had a really bad muscle separation from carrying my twins. And I found that out because I had a hernia after they were born and I had a CT scan done to see how bad that was. And my doctor says, "Oh, and you have diastasis recti." And I was like, "Well, what is that?" And he talked about it a little bit and I realized I probably had that after my first son was born and nobody mentioned it. I just had that six week follow up and they said, you can exercise like you normally do, which I did and probably should not have been doing some of the things I was doing and then I started searching because he basically said, don't do planks or situps- Jen:  Right, there's not a lot of instruction from the medical community on what is, like, rehab appropriate and how to scale that back into a regular exercise routine postpartum. Bethann:  Right. And that kind of scared me because I'm like, "Well, I like to exercise." So then I started searching and then I found the Mama Lion Strong website. Jen:  Oh, crazy. That doesn't even exist anymore, that website. Bethann:  And I found a little bit, Brianna Battle's website. And then that of course left led me to the Healthy Habits, Happy Moms' Facebook group. So, which gave me a lot of really great information. And then actually I had just done a couple of cycles of a 21 day program. Jen:  We know what you're talking about. Annie:  We know about that. Bethann:  And then as I kind of dove further into the Healthy Habits group, I was like, "What am I doing?" I had done, like when I was younger, I'd done Weight Watchers, you know, in college and the more I read, I was just like, "I'm newly postpartum. Why am I dieting? Why am I worrying about this stuff right now?" And so the more I read, you know, and the more I got into the healthy habits group, I just kind of just stopped doing all it, stopped doing all that stuff at night. The first thing I did was unfollowing, I think I remember it was a post that Jen did that said stop following these kinds of toxic people and these toxic groups on Facebook and Instagram. Jen:  Yeah, because they become part of your environment, right? Because social media is part of our environment now. Like, let's get real. The amount of time, I think I read a study that says the average woman is on her phone five hours a day, which is crazy. But I don't really want to look at what my phone usage is anyways. But it is part of our environment. And when your social media environment is all about weight loss or different unkind, unempowering messages towards women, that becomes your reality. Right? Annie:  I would offer even a not meaning to have a negative impact on your life. There's some posts that can be really positive in nature, but for whatever reason they just don't make you feel good. Bethann:  Right. Annie:  And those should be unfollowed too. Maybe for now, forever, for temporary. Bethann:  And I was just thinking, I was like, you know, when you're already in that postpartum space with all the hormones and you know, you're dealing with all those body changes. And I'm like, "This is a really good idea. I need to just kind of back off from this stuff and get to a better head space." And the messages in the Healthy Habits group are really positive. And all the women were really positive for the most part. And I was like, "This is really the space I need to be in right now to get to a better place." And- Jen:  I think it's quite, it's just, it's like world shifting for a lot of people. Bethann:  It is. Jen:  It's a perspective that you have never been exposed to for some women. Right? Bethann:  Right. Jen:  It sounds like you shifted from thinking you can fix yourself with weight loss to realizing your body needed healing after having twins. And also what women really need to fix themselves isn't weight loss. It's a better relationship with themselves and food. Bethann:  Yeah, I think a lot of women don't. And for me, just as an aside, I lost my mom at 10 to cancer. So I didn't have a woman in my life that really taught me about what most of what I learned about being a woman is from magazines or, what other women or girls around me were learning from magazines. So like all of those, like, you know, the Cosmo and Young Miss and all of those kind of horrible headlines on magazines were like the things that we're picking up. And, and I was like, it's not about makeup and swimsuits and diets and hair removal and any of those products or any of that stuff they push at you. But it took me to 2015 to get that because I didn't have anybody in my life that was able to be like, "No, no, no, no, no. This is all marketing. This isn't how you person"- Jen:  Totally. Bethann:  "This isn't how you become fully realized or happy with yourself." So to find a group of women who, like, "This is a bunch of BS, there are other things that fulfill you, you know, or even that I've always struggled with that concept that, you know, it's women against women. Like I always, whenever I had girlfriends who were like, "I don't like that girl because of this." And I was always like, "I'm not getting involved." Jen:  Right. Bethann:  Like, why is it like that? Why is it, why, why is it like that? I never quite understood that. And when I found Healthy Habits I was like "All of these women are uplifting each other and cheering each other on." It was like, these are my people. Like I was still happy. I always have trouble really making connections with girlfriends because there would be people, like I'd always meet women like that and I'm like, "I'm not doing this thing." So I'm moving on. Jen:  Yeah. Which is another culturally prescribed behavior, right? That we're sort of pitted against each other. You see it in movies, you see it, you know, in different media that we have to compete for men. And there's just a big scary, you know, we have to be the thinnest. We have to, you know, there's just this big scarcity thing around beauty and - Bethann:  Around everything. I feel like scarcity is a big theme. Jen:  Well, scarcity drives consumerism, right. So- Bethann:  And we don't need any of that stuff, really. We don't. Jen:  Yeah. So were, you know, and we need to, you know, I think what we're trying to achieve is getting women to expand their definition of health and happiness. Bethann:  Yeah. Jen:  Past all the superficial stuff we've been sold that bring us happiness. Right? Bethann:  Right, right. And I'm just, I'm so glad I, I'm just so happy to be here and I just feel like so much more of a, like a fuller more well rounded, happy, fulfilled person. Jen:  Awesome. We love that. Bethann:  Than I did before. I mean, so many wonderful things have come into my life since. Annie:  Before we started recording I was just asking you some questions about this episode because having known you for a while I've seen some behavior changes or some non scale victories and even some scale victories that you've celebrated inside the group. And I just kind of blanketly said, "How has your life changed?" And you shared about the diastasis recti healing and you've shared that you have lost some weight, which was maybe a goal of yours at one time. But what I really loved about what you said to me, you said, "I've stopped obsessing about food and exercise and about what my kids eat, but maybe most importantly, I found my clan that helped me find my voice to speak up for myself and to allow myself to take up space in this world." And I think that's like, that's just beautiful. That's really great. Bethann:  I really feel like I can, I used to not really say what I thought about things. Like I definitely had an opinion, but I didn't think my voice mattered all that much on issues. And now I'm not afraid to just say like, "Listen, I don't care if you agree with me or not. I think this is important. Annie:  And I think when you start acting and believing out of this place of self worth and value just innately because you're human and that you should be treated with respect regardless of your body shape or size or how much you weigh or what food you eat and you're a good person because you're living, breathing person, it spills out to everything in your life and it started affecting how you see people and how you treat people and then in turn what you expect in response and sometimes, like, the stuff that was cutting it years ago isn't okay. Like I identify with the, you know, cutting down of other women when I was really insecure and self conscious, I did that to other women a lot because that's kind of how I talked about myself. And then once I increased my self worth and my value and became more at peace with my body as is, that stuff just melted away. Jen:  So such a shift from focusing on the negative of what you saw on other women to focusing on the positive. And as Annie mentioned, that often comes as we build up our own self love, we suddenly feel more loving towards and less judgemental to people around us, which is just such a wonderful headspace to be in. Bethann:  Yeah, it's just really nice to just be able to put that positive energy out into the world. Especially, you know, with so much negative things going on. Jen:  Right. And you can't put that out there if you are existing in a universe where you feel very negative about yourself. But second to that is that you are, you are depleted, you are empty cup, you have nothing to put out in the world when you have an empty cup. So it's just that cycle of loving yourself, caring for yourself, and if everybody in our society did it, you know what that could do. Annie:  Yeah. Good people bring out the good in people. Right? So, Bethann, let's dive into, let's shift gears a little bit and dive into the habits that were game changers for you in the program because I know you had a couple, do you want to share those? Bethann:  For me it was a true hunger and goldilocks, really. I had, because I'd been in the Healthy Habits group for so long, I had, like, daily movement and neat down really well, hydration was down really well for me and balanced meals cause I'd done the powerball challenges several times before I did Balance365, but the things are really struggled with was I felt like I didn't know when I was hungry or when I was full ever. And I think part of that was doing, I've done several cycles of Weight Watchers and they were big on having, like, always have a snack with you always know when your next meal is a the five to six small meals, you know, make sure you have your points. And I made like doing the points you could eat, literally eat garbage, you know, within your points range. And I really had no idea when I was hungry or when I was full. I mean, I had no idea. So I really stopped doing that. And I did, you know, I was pretty good at meal prep already and so I would just wait until I felt hungry for breakfast and then once I did that and I was actually getting enough protein, that was really huge. The true hunger thing was really huge because then I was like, I am not hungry at noon, at lunch. Right. I'm not, I'm not hungry when my kids are hungry for lunch. I'm hungry at one 30. I'm not, I don't have to eat when they eat. And then that actually stopped the, you know, when they wanted snacks. I don't actually like Goldfish. I would always eat snack with them. I didn't like them. They don't taste that great. Jen:  Wait a moment. Bethann:  Or like, or some of the like, I don't really like animal crackers, you know, some of the things that would snack on with them, "I'm like, I don't really enjoy that." I realized I'm not hungry and that doesn't even taste good. So, and then after I got that down, I would actually, I kind of stopped eating breakfast and lunch with the kids and I started doing those two meals separate from them. So when they would like, either go down for a nap or were playing quietly, I would take my time and eat really, really slow. And then I realized, like, I actually can't eat all of this food, like the power bowls, like as you know, the rest of it, the portion sizes are a little bit too big for me and I would actually sometimes eat the, some of the lunch power bowls for the second half for dinner. I didn't realize, you know, I was like, "Oh that is way too much food for me." I didn't realize before, but then getting to that point and then sometimes I would notice, um, like throughout the month, kind of along with my cycle, like just before my cycle I would be super hungry, I could eat a whole powerball. So it was really, those two were really taking it very slow and listening to my body and listening to the different times throughout the month too cause my need would change. Sometimes they'd be really hungry and sometimes I wouldn't. Sometimes I'd need more, sometimes it would be less. So it really depended on, it also would depend on how much sleep I got. Jen:  Totally. Bethann:  If I got enough sleep then I wouldn't eat as much. If I wasn't getting enough sleep, my body would need more energy to keep me going. Especially with, you know, when I had like three toddlers running around, there was a lot more to do. So it was really, but it was, that was really, now it's easy, but at first it was really hard work because I really had to like slow down and sit with it for awhile and listen. Jen:  And probably be imperfect. I think a lot of people struggle with this like, "What if I get this wrong?" And it's like "You are going to get it wrong. Guess what? You're going to get it wrong a lot of times before you get it right." Bethann:  I would like, stop. I'd be like, "Okay, I definitely feel full. But then 45 minutes later I'd be like, I'm definitely hungry." So I would go back and eat until I felt full again and then so it was definitely kind of messy. Jen:  Yeah, it always is. Annie:  That's part of balance that's exploring what's too much and what's too little. Like that's how you find balance. And then like you said, Bethann, sometimes it ebbs and it flows. Like you do need a little bit more food for whatever reason or a little bit less food. Bethann:  I felt like, it was just like I didn't stress about it. That was one of the things, like I would always go back to the material and one of the things, so I was like "Don't stress about it" or I would write down, I would take notes and be like, okay, well, you know, I kind of felt, like, I would think about how I felt about it and be like, I just felt more hungry. Like I was trying to be kind of like, "Whatever." I was more hungry. It's just food, right? It's not, I have to pay attention to what I needed. Not, it wasn't a want, it wasn't a, I wasn't having an emotional response to it. I actually physically felt hungry. So I really tried to go "Am I physically hungry or am I emotionally having a problem here that I need to work through?" And it was, you know, and sometimes it wasn't emotional thing. And I was like, "I really need a nap," or I really need to just, I want to eat this because I really am just stressed out. Jen:  And sometimes that is what you need and that's fine. It's all about frequency, right? Like how often some people don't have any other tools in their toolbox for coping with stress then to eat. And that can become a big problem if, especially if you have a very stressful life., right? Bethann:  And I did use those, the two questions, like what did I do well today? What did I learn? I actually had a reminder on my calendar, on my phone. And so at the end of each day, I would journal that. And then I would say like, "So today I learned I was feeling stressed about this. And my response to that was I either, like, coped pretty well with it by doing, you know, I meditated or I stretched or I went for, I took the kids for a walk because I was feeling anxious and upset about this. Or I talked to my therapist or I did this, or I didn't handle it as well as I would've liked and I ate a sleeve of Oreos but then I would write after it, "That's okay." Like at the time I did something, like, I would prefer I didn't do, I always reminded myself that it was okay. Because it was just one response in the whole of the journey. It was that day's response. It wasn't like I did it for a year. I did it that one situation. That's what I love about the Balance365 thing. Right. it's you doing it right. It's, you working through it. It's not prescribed. There's not meals, there's not points. There's not rules. Jen:  It's not a pass or fail program. Bethann:  Right. . Jen:  It's a journey of self exploration and you can't fail at learning what works for you. Bethann:  Exactly. So there's no, you're not going to get slapped on the wrist. Right. So I would write that saying "It's okay" was me saying you have permission to figure it out. So that was a big thing for me. Like you have permission to do what you need to do to figure it out. And so now I'm at the point where I can have a package of Oreos and I remember posting, like "I've had this package of Oreos in my pantry with like an Arrow to where it was and I forgot about it for three months." Jen:  Yeah. Like, how does that happen? Bethann:  Unopened for three months. And they're my, like, I am not a big store bought cookie person, but those were my favorite store bought cookies and I forgot I put them in my pantry. I bought them for me and I forgot about them. And I was like, "How did I get to that point?" Because they were kind of like my stress cookie. Jen:  Well, you're not preoccupied with them any more and food preoccupations come from restricting and dieting. And when people approach changing their nutrition, they immediately go to, "Okay, what are all the bad foods I'm eating? What do I have to cut out? What do I not have control around?" But I guess what we have to understand is that it's actually the restricting that is causing those preoccupations and in order to fix this issue, you can't fix it at stopping and restricting. You have to address, you have to stop restricting that is the answer, which is very scary for some people. Bethann:  Yeah. I mean, now I can keep all sorts of things in the house where I'm just like, "Yep, we've got that in the pantry and I don't really care." Jen:  And it's just food. It's always going to be there. It's not, it doesn't have any power over you Yeah, totally. It's a great place to be. I wanted to circle back a bit to calories because you talked about being a point counter and all of that and we have a podcast on calorie counting in which Lauren does a good deep dive into the science behind calorie counting. I think we talk about when it hurts, when it helps, but one of the main issues is if anyone listening has an extensive history of counting calories or points or you know, whatever it is, one of the drawbacks of that is that it can disconnect you from your hunger and satiety cues. And our hunger and satiety cues are, honestly, our best calorie counters. And if you want to punch into a machine and get a rough estimate of what your daily energy expenditure is, that's fine. That can, but it is just an estimate because as you mentioned, our caloric needs change on a daily basis. If I go for a long run, one day, my caloric needs are different than the days when I'm sitting at my desk working most of the days, most of the day, if I am pmsing my body actually needs 90 to 300 calories extra those days than it does when I'm not premenstrual. And so when you're disconnected from your hunger and satiety, and when you aren't honoring your hunger and satiety, then you're going to be fighting with it. And it's always going to be this wrestle with your body of "Wow, you know, I feel hungry or I'm having these cravings, but I couldn't possibly, I'm at my point level for the day. " And as we know and have discussed in this podcast that wrestling with your body being at war with your body, you just never win it. I don't know really anyone who's winning that. Right, it inevitably leads to a binge and bad feelings and that cycle that almost every woman is stuck in. Bethann:  I think I remember getting my points range for Weight Watchers and then like anytime I would go over I just felt bad about myself. Annie:  So Bethann, I think, your experience with hunger and Goldilocks is, or I know, I don't think, I know is something that is been life changing for a lot of women in the program, myself included. It was such a game changer habit. And, what would you say are, in addition to the hunger and Goldilocks habits and all the other habits that you mentioned, what would you say, what's been the outcome so far of your effort into the program? Bethann:  So, I've definitely, like, my body composition has changed, and I have lost weight but that, like I said, it wasn't my main focus because I feel like I gained a lot more self confidence and self love and value. But also just for my family, for my boys, I don't really worry about what they eat. I notice too, even like when we go to the donut shop and they'll pick out donuts, they don't eat the whole donut, they eat what they want and then they push it away, which to me really says something like they, that's a sweet treat. And that's not something, we don't get donuts every single day. But even then, you know, I know a lot of adults would be like "Donuts!" And they eat the whole thing. Jen:  And some kids, once they get to a certain age, right? Like this is a skill we all kind of innately have. These are cues. Like when we have to go to the bathroom, we go to the bathroom. When we're tired, we go to sleep, our hunger and satiety are cues that we have and the thing is adults take that away from kids, right? By trying to control and restrict and tell them "This is good and this is bad" and if we didn't take that away from them then we'd probably all be okay today, but we're not. Bethann:  Yeah. And that was another thing that he said, he came back and he said, "Sugar is bad," and I said, "Sugar is not bad. Sugar is in everything." He said, "Well, what do you mean?" I said, "Well, this apple you're eating has sugar, that orange has sugar, the potatoes have sugar, the bread has sugar." I said, "Sugar is not bad. It's in everything." I said, "It's not the only thing you want to eat. We want to eat some of everything." I said, "It's just part of, it's just food. Everything is just food." So you can't, no, you can't just survive on donuts, but you also can't just survive on carrots. We can't survive on ham. So- Annie:  There's that balance and moderation coming back again. Bethann:  So, you know, I, so I just have to, I kind of feel like, I'm like, okay, "Yep, that's what they said in school. But remember, you know, it's about what your body needs. If you ate just donuts all day you wouldn't feel very good, but if you ate just carrots, you wouldn't feel very good either. It's like, yeah, I know that. So, you know, I just kind of go back to it and it's the same with exercise I said, you know, "You can't run all day. You need to go to bed too or you need to sit and rest or you need to stretch. I mean, you can't just do that." And I exercise in front of the kids. My parents never ever exercised at all. So I was not an athletic kid in the least. An I did not, I did not do team sports in school, anything like that. It took me a really long time to find movement I liked. Arms Like Annie really helped me. I really. Jen:  I'm on week 20 myself, actually, on Arms Like Annie program. Bethann:  I'm doing Everyday Strong right now because I finished Arms like Annie, so I'm doing Everyday Strong then I'm going to go back to Arms Like Annie, but I really like weight lifting and I really like feeling strong. So I do it with the boys. They really love the inchworms and mountain climbers. The four year olds, the twins are like, "Is it an inch worm and Mountain Climber Day?" And they're down on the floor and it's really, really cute. But I love that they go, "Mom, is it time to exercise? Where's your workbook?" Because I printed it out. So then, "Where's the workbook? Let's do the timer for the 30 seconds. Are we dancing? Are we doing jumping jacks?" Like they know the workout and they're asking which day we're doing, "Do we need the resistance band or do you need your dumbbell?" And they know all of the workouts. And then even sometimes we do the videos on Youtube, we'll put it on the TV and, and they go, "Oh, is that Annie or is that Jen?" They know everybody and it's really great because they will come out and they'll come, they'll, you know, do everything with everyone. Annie:  And, well, I even remember when I was in Arizona, I think I ended up like sending you like a FaceTime. Did we facetime? Bethann:  He's like, "Will, Annie say hi to me? Annie:  Like we're real humans. Jen:  That's adorable. Bethann:  I know, like, you guys are celebrities to my kids so, they're in the living room. They were like, "Are you talking to Annie and Jen?" "Yes. Right now." Oh my gosh, they're so excited. Annie:  Maybe we need to branch out and do a kids exercise programs. Jen:  Yeah, we can get ourselves a Sunday morning special. Bethann:  But they could keep up with the adult stuff you do. I mean, they're like, "Are we doing the Sweaty Betty today?" Annie:  Oh, I love it. Jen:  Oh that's so cute! Bethann:  You know, all of it. What I like is that I can do it in the living room with the kids. Annie:  Yes. Well, Bethann, thank you so much for your time. Jen:  Yes, thank you. Annie:  I appreciate it. This is so good chatting with you, and I know you're going to inspire a lot of our community members to make changes for their kids and for themselves along the way, because yes, let's end those predatory companies. Bethann:  Yes. Thanks so much for having me. You guys have really just, you make the world a better place. Thank you so much. Annie:  Thank you for being a part of it. Jen:  Thank you. Annie:  Okay. We'll chat soon. Bethann:  Okay. Annie:  Okay, thank you Bethann:  Bye. Jen:  Bye. Annie:  This episode is brought to you by the Balance365 program. If you're ready to say goodbye to quick fixes and false promises and yes to building healthy habits and a life you're 100% in love with then check out Balanced365.co to learn more.  

  Parenting can be exhausting, especially if your kids aren’t sleeping well. How do you help your kids get the sleep they need? How do you get the sleep you need? Jen, Annie and Lauren discuss these important questions with Dr. Craig Canapari to get listeners and their kids on their way to better sleep. What you’ll hear in this episode: Misconceptions about sleep training The role of mom shame in the decision to sleep train or not Harnessing habits for better sleep in your kids Sleep as a buffer for toxic stress Sleep debt - what is it? All or something - the value of incremental gains in your sleep habit At what age should you sleep train? Social jetlag: what is it and what does it have to do with sleep? How to shift your sleep schedule Dividing sleep responsibilities Sleep routine in blended families or single parent households Screens in the bedroom - why you should unplug How limiting screen time can improve your sleep How to help your kid stay asleep or in bed longer How sleep impacts weight Resources: Atomic Habits by James Clear It's Never Too Late to Sleep Train: The Low Stress Way To High Quality Seep for Babies, Kids and Parents - Link when available Dr. Craig Canapari’s Blog Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight, and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balanced 365. Together we coach thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy, and confident in their bodies on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental, and emotional well-being with amazing guests. Enjoy. Annie: Welcome back to another episode of Balance365 Life radio. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to share with you a really sweet review left for us on iTunes. SPagan84 says, "I beg of you. This is what female need to hear. Annie, Jen and Lauren cover a lot of freaking rad topics. Women empowering one another, women evolving to be the best version of themselves and women learning to love themselves. This podcast is so much more than fitness and nutrition though they have a no bs approach to diet and fitness that applies to real life. I love, love, love the Balance365 life." Thank you so much to all of you who have taken the time to leave us a review on iTunes, we read every single one of them and they all mean so much to us. Alright, let me tell you about today's guest. Annie: Dr. Canapari is the director of the Yale Pediatric Sleep Center, father and author of his first book, It's Never Too Late to Sleep train. Shortly after becoming a father, Dr. Canapari realized that all of his years of 36 hour hospital shifts didn't come close to preparing him for the sleep deprivation that comes with parenthood. Inside his book, Dr. Canapari helps parents harness the power of habit to chart a clear path to high quality sleep for them and their children. Sound familiar? On today's episode, Lauren, Jen, Dr. Canapari and myself discussed the importance of quality sleep for not just your children, but why it's so important for parents and caregivers as well. Plus he shares a ton of great insight on to how to improve sleep for your whole family regardless of age. Enjoy! Annie: Welcome to the show. We have a special guest today. Jen, do you want to tell us how you met our special guest? Jen: Sure. So this is Dr. Craig Canapari. Hello. I found his blog, it would be over four years ago now because I had, my third son was a nightmare between the hours of 7:00 PM and 7:00 AM and I had never experienced this before. My first two were natural sleepers and I was going out of my mind by the time he was one. And so one night it was late and I was googling anything and I came across his blog and I got some answers to my questions and I've followed him ever since. Annie: Doctor, welcome to the show. Dr. Canapari: Thank you for having me. And that's very kind. I wish I could actually see what time of night people are reading my site relative to time zone because I suspect it's probably mostly in the middle of the night. Jen: It was probably 1130 for me and I was like crying and I just, yeah, so now I refer people to your site all the time as, like, an evidence based resource for um, parents whose children have sleep issues, which it's hard, you know, there's just so much. One thing that I will tell you that I appreciate and that I think a lot of our listeners might be able to listen to is that there's a lot of, I don't know if you want to call it pseudoscience or opinion based sleep recommendations online. And when I had my third, um, we lived in New Zealand and I, you know, they just, what I'll say is I was very wrapped up in the natural birthing community by the time I had my third and sleep training is just like "N-O" in that community. Like, your kid's going to get brain damage, they'll have neurological issues, attachment issues for life. Jen: And so I really thought if I tried to intervene in my child sleep that I was going to give my child brain damage. And what happened is I pretty much got brain damage from that year of trying to deal with him. And I mean I literally felt crazy where I, when he was one, I pretty much had a nervous breakdown and was in therapy and I was a mess. And it was, like, my marriage was falling apart, everything. And it was all because of, I wouldn't say all, you know, nothing happens in a vacuum, but in hindsight now we're four or five years later, I'm like, that year of sleep was like, it made me crazy, like crazy and this stuff is serious and people don't take sleep seriously enough. But like there are some women and men out there that are really, really suffering and they don't know where to turn. Dr. Canapari: Well, I think there's a, there's a lot of good points in what you're saying and the first thing is that I think that like sleep and bedtime are really personal things for people and, it's a totally separate issue, but you know, in our town, and you know, I've been involved locally, regionally, nationally with sleep issues for teenagers and trying to get more humane start times for teenagers. And there's something personal about bedtime and what happens in your house at night. So people aren't always open to advice. And I think there's also the thread of, it generates a lot of strong feelings for people and people have very strong opinions that aren't always grounded in facts. And I always laugh about the the idea that crying can damage your child's brain. I mean, my kids used to cry all the time over like the dumbest stuff. Dr. Canapari: Like in the book I talk about my kid was four and found an ant on his donut and he was crying. And I'm like, I don't think it damaged his brain, you know? But I think we're also a little bit more vulnerable when we're sleep deprived that things that are, you know, if you stop for a moment, you're like, you know, I think it's reasonable for me to expect that I get a decent night of sleep my child does. But you're more vulnerable to kind of this judgment that can kind of come in and, and you guys know all this as moms too, I think that the whole sort of mommy shaming thing is real. Jen: Yes. Yes. Dr. Canapari: You know, my boys were both born via c sections and the first one was cause he, you know, he couldn't be born any other way. And I remember my wife talking about, you know, some people would say things that almost made her feel like she hadn't, you know, delivered my son. Jen: Right. Like, are you mom enough? Dr. Canapari: Yeah, totally. Totally, totally. So I think that it's not that everyone has to sleep train their child. It's not that you have to use cry it out sleep training and it's also that sleep training has such a negative valence in our society. People are like, "Oh, it's just cry it out. And it's just this thing that a lot of people view very negatively." There are lots of things you can do that don't necessarily mean that your child is going to cry more. Jen: They are not talking about it publicly, but we're all googling it. It's one of those, like, it's become one of those secret underground things that we all want to do but we are afraid to admit it. I experienced this big time. I formula fed my first baby and um, that was horrific. I had a woman come up to me in the grocery store and ask me why he was drinking from a bottle. And it's just, yeah, like you, I've had three children and my youngest is now five and in hindsight I wish I could take all that pain away for new moms. Like I wish I could say, "Hey, it doesn't matter. Like, it really doesn't matter. Once they get up and going, you know, it's just, I can't tell the difference between my three kids who I sleep trained, who I didn't, who had formula, who had breast milk, who was born by epidural, who was born naturally. They're just, just choices that we make." Dr. Canapari: And especially with the first child, it's so fraught. I remember one of the biggest fights that my wife and I ever had was about what stroller we were going to get. Right. You know, and, and, and you know, I wanted of course this really stupid technological thing that she didn't want. And with the second kid, you're like, "I want the cheapest stroller that I can fit in my car really easily." It's just, you get a little bit more perspective, but I think you're totally right. Like as a parent, you kind of need to give yourself permission to be like, you know what, I'm going to do something a little bit different from some of my peers and it's okay. Jen: Yeah. In the end, you, you need to be okay. And I guess that was my greatest lesson from having postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, and like, basically a nervous breakdown as I just talked about. I was not okay. In my pursuit of trying to find what was "the best" way to raise a child, I personally was not okay. And now I just believe so wholeheartedly that children need their parents to be okay and we'll and to be okay we'll all kind of make different choices in that pursuit. Dr. Canapari: I think that things have kind of pendulumed away from self care for parents, especially moms. And, you know, when the term attachment parenting was coined, it was in the 60s, and back then people were like, "Oh, if your child's crying, you should ignore them because otherwise you're going to spoil them." And clearly that's not true, right? It's natural to comfort your child. And, you know, there was a, uh, a lot of pioneering work done by a woman named Mary Ainsworth that sort of showed that, well, that's not correct and it's okay to comfort your child and be emotionally available for your child. But when we think of attachment parenting now, we often think of, you know, Sears and everything that's kind of come out of Sears' work. And I agree with a lot of what Sears said is that like, you know, you should be close to your child and it's valuable to make time if you would like to breastfeed to make that a priority. But, you know, there's little room there for the needs of parents, especially moms in that conversation these days. And you know, I tell parents all the time, like, you know, it's okay to fix this for the reason that you're falling apart. Like, you're a better parent if you're not super sleep deprived and your child will benefit. You know, it's totally, you know, and that's kind of my job. They know it's the case, but they almost need someone to give them permission to make some changes. Jen: And there's not, and you know there's like zero to 60 and then there's like level one, level two. Do you know what I mean? Like not, and I think it's scary to go from zero to 60 but you don't have to necessarily go to 60. There's interventions that can start here where you're comfortable and then you can assess from there. Dr. Canapari: Totally. It's not a binary thing that like you're doing everything or nothing or they're perfect or it's terrible. It's usually somewhere in between. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: And we all know as parents, you figure some things out, you get your kids sleep the way they're going, and then all of a sudden another kids waking up at night or they get a cold or it's never going to be perfect. Jen: Right. I feel like managing my kids sleep is like this ongoing thing that, you know, there's always something. So anyways, yeah, as long as we're all sleeping good enough, I'm okay. Dr. Canapari: That's my goal. Have you heard the whole a good enough mother? Donald Winnicott was this psychiatrist and pediatrician in England in the 60s and he coined the term "being the good enough mother." And it's just the idea is like if you love your child and you do your best to take care of them, they're going to turn out fine. You just need to be good enough. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: And I, and I just love that idea. It's like, "Hey, look, it's not going to be perfect." And like so much of parenting now is, like, full contact and be like, I've got to get my two year old studying Mandarin or you know, they're not going to law school or something like that. And really it's just, you know, do your best. It's okay. Jen: Right. Annie: Doctor, before we get into some of the questions we have for you, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your book? I feel very special. Your team sent me, an unofficial an uncorrected proof that's not yet for sale. So I feel like VIP having this book here- Dr. Canapari: It's full of typos. Annie: You know what, that's great because I'm the world's worst proofreader. Lauren and Jen- Jen: It makes us feel good enough. Dr. Canapari: I just went through, I think the final proof and I still found a bunch of stuff and I'm like, "Oh," I'm like, I can barely read it anymore. I've read it like a thousand times. Oh, I'm sorry. Go. Annie: I thought it was great. It's called, It's Never Too Late to Sleep Train: The Low Stress Way To High Quality Seep for Babies, Kids and Parents. And what I loved about it is that you have this little dedication right in the front of the book there to your wife and kids and it says "You're the reason I get out of bed in the morning, in the case of Teddy, often, literally." It's like you've lived this, like, it's not like you're just some doctor- Dr. Canapari: I've been in the trenches. Annie: Yeah. Which I appreciate. So can you tell us a little bit about the book? Like, when will it be for sale? Where can they find it? What's in it? Just give a little overview. Dr. Canapari: So the book is coming out in May 9th and you know, just to backtrack a little bit, I started writing stuff for parents online, in 2012, back when I was over at Mass General in Boston with the idea of that, my background was in pulmonology. I trained in sleep medicine as well, but I used to do sleep apnea research and the behavior stuff was kinda new to me and I was like, you know, I'm going to start writing these articles for parents and it's going to be my way to master this material as well and to have resources if someone's in the office and I don't have time to go through everything and be like your go to my website, this is exactly what I think is important. And, you know, as going through this over time and kind of learning how to do this as a parent and as a doctor, I realized there's a lot of great sleep books out there, but I generally felt like a lot of them are pretty long. Dr. Canapari: You know, I think Ferber's book, which is great, it's about 600 pages long and it covers things like narcolepsy in teenagers. And you know, if your one year old can't sleep, you probably don't care that much about that. And I also think that there's been a lot of new research since Weiss, Bluth and Ferber wrote their books that kind of, perhaps demystified this a little bit. And specifically looking at the psychology of habits, which is, you know, habits are such a hot phrase nowadays, right? There was the Charles Duhigg book, James Clear just came up with Atomic Habits. But just the idea of there is an underlying psychology that underlines all these automatic behaviors we have all the time. Right? Those fights we have with our kids, every day, that's a habitual behavior, right? Dr. Canapari: So if you understand how that works, you can maybe tweak those behaviors to, for lack of a better word, to kind of use the power of these automatic behaviors to help rather than hinder you. So in the book we talk about if you want to change your own habit, and I bet you guys, in terms of what you do, talk a lot about habits with your client. Jen: It's all we talk about. Lauren: I have James Clear's book, like, literally right next to me. Annie: Same. Dr. Canapari: Yeah, no, I heard it's great. I haven't read it yet, but I've followed his stuff for a long time. Jen: Yeah, he's good. Annie: He's great. Dr. Canapari: The difference is if you want to change a habit, you're going to change the behavior. You know, if we talk about the habit loop, you have a cue that triggers a behavior and you have a downstream consequence. And it loops around and around. Your child is not going to raise their hand and say, "Hey, you know, mom, you're super tired and I'm just going to stop getting up at 4:30 in the morning." Right? That's the behavior you want to change. So you have to think about what are the upstream things you can change and how can you change your own behavior in the way that you respond to what your child's doing to help to shape their behavior to what you want. So anyway, this book is my summary of the things that I've learned in my journey as a sleep doctor and as a parent. And, my specific focus is in a population that I think people don't focus on as much. Like there's a lot written about infancy and I think infant sleep training is actually really simple. Dr. Canapari: It's not easy, but it's simple. And I cover that in the book. But also what do you do if your child's a little bit older? What do you do in a toddler or an early school age child where the, when we think about sleep training, we may think about cry it out. That's not going to work in a three or four year old. You know, it might work, but it would be horrible for parent and child. So what are other ways that you can change a child's behavior that really just aren't so unpleasant or scary for parents and kids? Jen: The reason I found your blog was because my youngest son, no, this wasn't why I found your blog. I found your blog because of sleep aids, my son had a sleep aid and it was me. And, the second time I revisited your blog in detail that was helpful to me was that my youngest son has night terrors. And your, one of your sons had night terrors. Dr. Canapari: Oh yeah. And now he sleepwalks too. We were just on a vacation with his cousins in the middle of the night, we found him just sitting on the toilet with his pants down, but not awake. And I'm like, his cousins found this pretty amusing as did we, yeah, he's 11. He found it less funny but- Jen: Right. So yeah, I mean you really have been in the trenches and there isn't a lot of information once you move past the infant years. And so yeah, that was the second time your blog was very helpful to me, was seeing you had, you're not just talking about this, you had experienced night terrors with one of your sons and just the science around it and what, how you guys ended up dealing with it, which is now how I deal with it. And yeah, I mean that stuff is scary and very stressful for parents. Dr. Canapari: Yeah. And I think that, in some of the things you guys have, with the topics today, just sort of talking about, sleep and sleep debt and I think of sleep as a, it's kind of a capstone skill for parents and families, right. If sleep is good, other things get easier. If sleep is bad, everything gets, everything gets worse. Jen: So would you call it a skill? Cause I noticed, you know, you're not calling it a habit, you're are calling it a skill. So would you say learning to sleep as a skill? Dr. Canapari: Well, I think yes. I think especially for, look, you said your two older children were good sleepers. Right? Jen: Fantastic. Dr. Canapari: And, it just kind of came naturally to them and we all have experienced this as parents. Like, you know, my older son is a great sleeper, but when he was little, he was a picky eater and every child is good at some things and bad at other things. So, like, I think some kids sleeping comes naturally to them. Like self soothing, sleeping through the night is very easy. Other children need to need to be taught. And the way we call, sleep training is the process, the term we use to describe teaching our children to sleep independently with our help, either falling asleep or staying asleep. And it's funny, some of the research, one of my colleagues is doing at Yale now, Monica Ordway is, we're looking at sleep as a buffer for toxic stress. Like, you know, stress is, we all know what stresses, right? A little bit of stress as good. You want to study for an exam, you need to be a little bit stressed to do it. But being chronically stressed is, it can really cause harm to health. Like when your son wasn't sleeping for a year- Jen: I ended up with a registered Dietitian who was amazing, but I had gone down the woo hole, which Lauren, my partner here pointed me out, with diet, but I mean I was breaking out so badly and I was like so inflamed and I thought it must be nutrition related. And there were a couple of people out there willing to tell me it was nutrition related. So it's cutting out all that stuff and it wasn't working. And I had, I did go see two GPs where one prescribed this cream that basically burned my face off. And the second one wanted to put me on the pill, which is fine, but I didn't think that I was like, "No, there's something, like this is not, this is very abnormal for me. I've never struggled with this." It's finally Lauren had said, you need to get to a registered dietitian. Jen: And she sat down with me, went through what's happening in my life and was like, you need to get some sleep. Like you are so inflamed because your body is so stressed. And that ended up being what it was. It ended up being that when I buckled down and we kind of dealt with these issues with my son and actually what happened was my husband took him away to his parents for five nights cause he just needed to be away from me I think. And within three weeks my, everything was calm. My face was calmed down, starting to heal. Like, I would just wake up and look puffy, like when I was so sleep deprived, I wake up and look puffy and almost feel hungover and that all just, once I fixed our sleep issues, that all went away. Dr. Canapari: I find that totally believable. And first of all, as a sidebar, how great to find a provider who looked at your whole set of issues and really like, there's no upside for a nutritionist to say "It's actually your sleep," right, financially. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: But I think I know, Annie, you work as a trainer, right? Annie: Yep. Dr. Canapari: So I bet if your clients aren't getting results, you're probably like, how much sleep are you getting at night, right? Like you can't, you're not gonna you're, you're going to struggle with your weight if you're sleep deprived. You are, I mean, I know you guys wanted to talk about sleep debt. Sleep debt certainly is a real phenomenon. It's hard to measure biologically. It's not like you can do a blood test and say, "Oh, you have, you know, your level of this neurotransmitter is high, that means you're in this amount of sleep debt." Dr. Canapari: But we know that it's a cumulative phenomenon and you can't really catch up on the weekends. Right. There was a study of teenagers, again, I know we're talking about moms and little kids here, but I think it's very interesting. This researcher named Dean Bebe had this fake summer school for kids that they were enrolled in as a research trial. And they'd have these classes that were kind of boring and they'd sleep deprive the kids for like six hours of sleep a night for two weeks. And they let them sleeping on the weekends. And what they found was every day their performance was getting worse. And if they did, in terms of how they were retaining material, in terms of their vigilance, et cetera, and if they got catch up sleep on the weekends, they got a little bit better, but they didn't get back to their baseline. Dr. Canapari: So the next week they started off worse than they had in the beginning. So it just is going to keep snowballing. And the classic example is of a parent. I mean I think that there was a research trial published a couple years ago that said single moms are the most sleep deprived people in the United States, hands down, which I find totally believable, right? Jen: Absolutely. Dr. Canapari: If you're working outside of the home, you're a single parent, you know, you are getting your kids to bed and then you have all the work of the household to do. It's just, it's nuts. And it's not like with airline pilots or bus drivers or something like that where we actually have rules saying, well, you have to sleep x amount to do your job. Nobody's, you know, nobody's looking over your shoulder as a parent and saying, "Hey, you know what, it's 10 o'clock, you know, I'll take it from here." Right. Annie: Wouldn't that be nice? Dr. Canapari: Yeah, it would be pretty cool. Annie: That's actually, quite in line. You and I have talked over the phone before this podcast that we address sleep in Balance365 as one of, kind of the habit foundations or habit accelerators because we know, as people in the health and wellness industry that when you're tired, everything just seems harder. Annie: So in terms of sleep debt, if you have a sleep deprived kid or adult, how can you get out of it? Like how- Jen: I don't think we defined sleep debt either before we started talking about, so sleep debt Is what accumulates right? Once you go without sleep, you accumulate, you owe sleep debt. Dr. Canapari: Yes. Essentially. Essentially if you are consistently sleeping less than the amount of sleep you need, and we know for adults it's anywhere between seven and nine hours of sleep at night. Your sleep requirements might be a little bit different than mine. If you think back to before you had kids and you imagined f you went to bed at a certain time and you could wake up spontaneously without an alarm, that's about how much sleep you need. If you do that consistently over a couple of weeks, of course, none of us with children ever experience that. But it's if you are constantly getting less sleep than you need or your sleep is interrupted frequently as it is if we have a child that's sleeping poorly at home, you're developing sleep debt, which is just the biological imbalance. Dr. Canapari: When you think about sleep it's sort of like breathing, eating healthy food, breathing clean air, drinking enough water. We know if we eat poorly, we feel worse. If we we're having too many calories, the wrong kinds of calories, but it's the same. It's the same deal with sleep and sleep is, it's very easy to shortchange sleep, right? You can't manufacture extra hours in the day. It's easy to stay up a little bit later and you know, either catch up on work, do your email, fold laundry or even just get caught in that cycle of say, binge watching or something like that. Because we're surrounded by these addictive technologies that want to, you know, have our eyeballs instead of having us go to sleep. Jen: And, and just to that point, I mean we do, we're human beings are amazingly resilient. So anyone can tolerate a couple nights of bad sleep or a couple of nights of not great eating habits. It's really what we're doing day in and day out, week to month to yearly, right? Dr. Canapari: Right you can catch up to a degree on weekends, but again, most parents don't have that luxury. I think that the real key is, look, some people have weeks, months, years of sleep debt, the key is just going forward. How are you going to change your life to allow you to start getting caught up on that? And I think even if it's just allowing yourself to get an amount of sleep so you feel rested in the morning. In my clinic, we look at an incremental gains, right? Like if someone's going to sleep at midnight every night, again, I deal with a lot of teenagers who are sleep deprived. I don't want immediately go and be like, well, you should go to bed at eight o'clock night. We sort of start seeing, well, what, what can we do to get you to sleep at 1130 or 11? Like getting those small incremental gains are going to make someone feel better and be more successful even if it's not perfect. And it's likewise if you're working on your child's sleep issues, again, like little kids usually aren't that sleep deprived, right? Because they're going to make it up during the day. They're going to make it up in the car. They may have naps at preschool. They may nap great a preschool even if they refuse to now for you, which is a really frustrating phenomenon, right. Lauren: That's happening to us right now. Dr. Canapari: Yeah. And they're going to catch up but as parents we don't have that luxury, right? We can't take a nap. We need to be attentive when we're driving in the car, giving presentations at work or anything like that. When you get into older children, think later elementary school, middle school, high school, that's when those kids are going to have more difficulty catching up. The biggest reason to fix the problems in young children is to me, it's the benefit for the parents. Jen: Right, right. Annie: That's actually something you also addressed in your book, which I so appreciate as you have a section about what sleep training will do for you. You know, it's like it allows, it's like the snowball effect. As I said, everything's just seems harder when you're tired and all of a sudden when you're getting more rest, maybe you have more energy to get in a workout or have some extra time to go do Xyz or you're more productive at work or you're more efficient in the home or what, you know, whatever. It just seems to carry over and spill over into so many areas outside of the bed. Jen: What happened with my youngest son, and if you think this is way off, Dr. Canapari, you can tell me to shut up. I had three kids in four years and then my last one was this terrible sleeper and then I ended up, you know with the doctor or with that dietitian telling me you need to get some sleep. Even though my acne started clearing up after three weeks of consistent sleep, I noticed that I didn't wake up feeling refreshed for about a year. Like it took like a year for me to feel like I was recovered from those years with the kids. Dr. Canapari: So I think there's probably a lot of factors there, right. You know, working off a sleep debt is not something that happens easily, right. If perhaps your husband had said, I'm actually going to take all three of the kids for a month. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: You could've gotten caught up. But also, and excuse me for presuming you mentioned you were also struggling, struggling with some postpartum depression and that probably also could be factored into this as well. Jen: And starting this business and you know, there is stress definitely in my life. And also let's go over that year, the kids would get sick and you know, it's not like I had a year of perfect sleep before I felt recovered, but I just remember at that one year mark going like suddenly realizing, "Oh my gosh, I'm waking up in the morning and I'm feeling, like, refreshed." Like, yeah. So it was just, I was just very tired for quite a while after even getting the sleep training and not that, you know, not that things didn't improve for me, right, just by getting better, right? We talk in Balance365, we have this saying called all or something and it's like, when will it ever be perfect? But you can always, you know, there's usually a better choice available to you. It doesn't have to be all or nothing and- Dr. Canapari: Totally right. Jen: So and we have a lot of women who talk about, you know, they're just so fried from work and parenting that the evenings feel like the only time they have for themselves, like get the kids in bed at, you know, say 7:30, 8 o'clock and then they stay up til midnight because it's the only time they have for themselves in their week. And they just, they're just like selfish with it. They just crave that alone time so badly. But, and I, we all deserve that. Like, I get it and we all deserve that. But just even saying, okay, well instead of four hours for yourself, can you take three, go to bed at 11 instead of midnight. That gives you something. Right. Dr. Canapari: Well also, I mean, I think that if you can convince someone to get an extra hour of sleep at night, they're going to be like, "Oh, that is for me. Right?" Like getting that extra sleep is actually a really powerful tool I have to make my life better. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: And, you know, I certainly, you know, Annie and I were talking like, you know, to have finally developed an early morning exercise practice and now I just go to bed earlier cause I feel tired at like 10 o'clock at night and wow. You know, I used to stay up til like 1130 or 12 and I'm like, "Wow, I actually feel *inaudible*" and I'm like a sleep doctor, I should know this, right? It was very easy to stay up and like, you know, watch another show on TV or just kinda, you know, the time gets away from you when you're tired, right? You can just sort of be scrolling through Instagram or watching Netflix and all of a sudden you're like, "Holy crap, it's like 1145." Right. And I see parents where their young child is going to sleep at 11 or 12. It's more common than you'd think. Annie: Wow. Dr. Canapari: And I'm always saying to people, I'm like, "Look, I love my kids, but I am so done with them by like 8:30 at night. You know, like, they need to go to their place and be on their own so I can, you know, my wife and I can unwind." Jen: Right, right. Is there any truth to this fact that getting every hour of sleep you get before midnight is like two hours of sleep that you're getting after midnight? Is there any truth to that? Dr. Canapari: I think that's probably, I haven't heard that. I would say that when it comes down to is, the fit of when you're sleeping versus when your body wants you to sleep. Jen: Oh, okay. Dr. Canapari: I don't know if you guys have ever heard the phrase social jetlag. It's something we think about a lot in teenagers, but it can happen a lot in I think mostly not parents cause we get up early on the weekends. But if you think back, I can think back to before I had kids, I had a weekday bedtime and wake time and a weekend wake time and bedtime and wake time, right. Jen: So your weekends are maybe 2:00 AM to 10:00 AM. Dr. Canapari: Exactly. Jen: Yeah. Okay. Dr. Canapari: So I'm sort of like, on the weekends I was living on California time and the weekdays, I was living in Boston time. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: And we know it's not just the duration of sleep, it's the quality of fit to what your natural body clock schedule is that has a lot to do with it. Like, we know that shift workers, even if they get adequate sleep, are more vulnerable to certain types of cancer, certain types of chronic disease because they're not sleeping at a time where their body really wants them to do it and, we know, you know, you probably know, we all know, are we more of a night owl or a morning lark? A lot of us as parents, we become morning larks because we have to, and there's actually, if you look up online, you can look up a morning-ness, this evening-ness questionnaire that will actually tell you where you fall on this continuum. Dr. Canapari: You know, teenagers are, you know, kids are naturally kind of morning larks. Like most kids before puberty, they tend to want to go to sleep earlier. They want to get up earlier on average though there are exceptions. When they hit puberty, their sleep schedules shifts two or three hours later. So that is our, you know, in the, and that's when all of a sudden your kid that was going to sleep at eight o'clock, can't fall asleep till 11 o'clock at night and it's not just cause they're on snapchat or their smartphones and doing homework on the Chromebook. It's also just their natural biology. So I think that thing you're referring to is probably, you know, get to the idea of are people just not sleeping at a time when their body wants them to do it? That being said, most people are naturally, you know, I'd say if they go to bed between 10 or 11, get up between six or seven. Again, this sounds like a pipe dream for a lot of parents, right? But around there we'll probably feel pretty good. Jen: Can you shift that too, so if you found yourself to be, I mean it may mean some of us are forced to because of our morning lark children, but I recently, I would have considered myself a night person but starting in November I started getting up at 5:30 in the morning just because it feels like the only I can exercise or on days I'm not working out. I can get some work done before my kids are up. I'm less distracted in the mornings that I am in the evenings for whatever reason. And I feel myself shifting where I'm like- Dr. Canapari: It absolutely is something that you can shift. So generally, the levers you have to pull are, the most powerful one is light exposure. So light exposure in the evenings will tend to shift your body clock later and these are slow changes although it is always easier to stay up later, than go to bed earlier. Right. Jen: Right, right. Dr. Canapari: If you want to shift your sleep period earlier, you could probably go 10 or 15 minutes a night. If you wanted to shift your sleep later. Again, it's not usually what I'm trying to do in the clinic or what most parents are like, "Boy, I'd like to stay up three hours later and get up three hours later." Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: But it's easier to go in that direction. So light exposure in the evenings is going to push your clock later and think about, well what's the light emitting device that we hold about 12 inches from our face? Jen: Smartphone. Right. Dr. Canapari: So smartphones will tend to push people's sleep schedules later. Evening exercise will also push it later. Jen: Oh, okay. Dr. Canapari: Conversely, exercising in the morning light exposures, the best is natural light exposure will move things earlier. So someone wants to get in the, you know, like you said, getting up earlier, exercise in the morning. If you can't exercise outside, that's great. Probably in Canada or Connecticut, we're not exercising with natural light in the morning at 5:30 in the morning cause it's still dark out and it's below freezing but those are really helpful things. In our clinic too, we use a lot of Melatonin. Melatonin in the early evenings will help shift people shift their schedules earlier as well. Certainly that's something someone wants to talk about with the doctor. Jen: Right. If melatonin is right for them. Dr. Canapari: Right. Jen: Okay. So back to sleep training kids. I know we don't want to talk too much about infants cause that's not even, we just don't want to spend too much time there because actually our audience has a wide range of age of children. But when I think one of the most controversial things is when to start sleep training a baby. Dr. Canapari: Sure. And I think that, you know, it's funny, there was a couple of years ago, there was an article in New York Times about a group in Tribeca, which is a very trendy neighborhood in Manhattan, was recommending the people sleep, train their kids at two months of age. And you know, they didn't publish anything on this, but they said they were getting good results. But I think that's a little bit too early. If you look at your average baby between four to six months of age, that's when they're going to start going for longer stretches of sleep at night. They're going to start to be able to fall asleep without being soothed by their parents at bedtime. So that implies to me that naturally speaking, they're evolving the capacity for longer periods of sleeping night. Jen: Okay. Dr. Canapari: I would say for most parents, between four to six months is probably the sweet spot. Jen: Okay. Dr. Canapari: But before then, you really, you know, the best thing to do is to soothe your baby to sleep, rock them, nurse them, give them a bottle, lay them down in a bed when they're asleep. Then around four to five months, that's when you can start trying to put your baby down drowsy but awake. And, if they fuss a little bit, that's okay. If they're screaming and yelling, maybe they're not quite ready from a biological standpoint. Right. It's, you know, the funny thing about when I had my second son is I'm like, "Oh, he's not exactly like the first one," which if you asked me intellectually I would've said, "Oh, of course they'll be different," but you expect your child to be this kind of the same. And, you know, and I say, parents just try putting them down drowsy but awake and see how it goes. If your child's hysterical, then wait a week or two and try again. Jen: Right. Okay. Dr. Canapari: If your child's sleeping through the night and you know, no matter what you do, you don't have to sleep train. Right. You know, it's not something you have to do. The reason you do it is so your child can fall asleep independently and stay asleep for the night so that we can get a good night of sleep. Annie: So two and a half is maybe a little too old to be coddling to bed. Is that what you're saying? Dr. Canapari: I mean, I think that it's fine if your child sleeps well at night, right? Like, you know, I always say like, if what you're doing is working, great, you don't have to change a thing. There's nothing, you know, sometimes I lay down with my kids at night at bedtime. My younger ones, like, will kick you out in five minutes. It was like, "That's great dad. You can go." As his words are, "I want to go to sleep in my own time." He doesn't even want me to see him setup his blankets and the older one wants me to stay a little bit longer. And I'm like, "Well, this is precious. He's 11. Pretty soon he's going to want nothing to do with me." So I'm happy to lie there. And I don't think there's anything wrong with it if your child is sleeping great and you're happy with how your child's sleeping, however, if you're not happy with how your child's sleeping, if you have to spend three of those precious hours in the evening laying with them to get them to fall asleep, if they need you multiple times during the night, then you may want to make a change. Dr. Canapari: Right? But you don't have to change anything if you're happy with the arrangement. The same thing with bed sharing. If you have a family bed and it's going great, provided that you're observing safe sleep practices with an infant, more power to you, that's wonderful. But if you're not happy and if someone's not sleeping well, then you may need to make a change. Annie: I want to keep the cuddles at bedtime and let her fall asleep on me. I don't want her waking up at night. Jen: Yeah, that's what I like. Annie: I want the best of both worlds. Jen: But I think that's quite common. It's, so there's getting the child to sleep, you know, baby, toddler, child, what, how do you keep a child sleeping? Dr. Canapari: Now that's the trick, right? So you know, I think it was actually, it was Richard Ferber, which came up with this idea of sleep onset associations. The idea that your child falls asleep under a certain set of circumstances, and then naturally, as he or she goes through the night, she wakes up at night. We've all experienced that. We may wake up at two or three in the morning, adjust our pillow rollover and go back to sleep. You may not even remember it if you're up for five minutes, but you know, as Ferber talks about in his book, if you woke up in another bedroom, you might be like, "What the Hell is going on?" And you might go investigate. So, it's hard to know what babies are thinking. But if your child falls asleep with you present and then goes through a natural awakening at night, she might need you to go back to sleep. Dr. Canapari: That's why working on independent sleep at bedtime tends to make those nighttime awakenings go away. Because once your child is able to put herself to sleep, she can go back to sleep with a natural awakening. And this dovetails nicely with a phenomenon we've all seen. Your child will have three hours of the deepest sleep of the night, stage three sleep, slow wave sleep at the beginning of the night. So that's like if you're driving back from somewhere, your kid falls asleep. You can pick your kid up, change the diaper, put them in a bed, they don't wake up and that's about two or three hours of sleep. But then, say you put your child to sleep at eight o'clock, you're getting to bed 11, all of a sudden you hear your kid calling for you, right. Because that's when they come out of that stage of sleep and they go through a period of REM sleep, REM sleep, or dream sleep clusters in the second half of the night. And it happens every two to three hours after 11 o'clock, that's when your child is going to wake up and request your presence. Jen: That's exactly what's going on in my house. It starts around 11. Dr. Canapari: Yeah, exactly. Just when you're getting the bad and you're lying- Jen: Yes. Dr. Canapari: Maybe tonight's going to be different, right? Lauren: Right. I remember that sense of dread. 11 o'clock. Jen: And that's actually when my sons, my boys go to bed at about 7:30, between 7:30 and 8 and they go to bed really well independently. But when my son was having really intense night terrors, I could almost set my watch to it. It was around 10 30 or 11 when he would start screaming. But now he's not having his night terrors s just getting up and coming to find me. And you know, parents are too tired, you're too tired to take them back to the bed. So he crawls in bed with us and I'm not happy with that, but it just seems like our best option right now. And I think what I found, cause I had mentioned earlier, I found on your website to talk about sleep aids and I think I'm my son's sleep aid. Like it's me. It's actually, and when he goes to his grandparents' house, he does not wake up through the night. He sleeps all night. It doesn't go looking for anybody. Dr. Canapari: Is it frustrating? Jen: It's so frustrating. Dr. Canapari: I guess you're doing it wrong. You know, I always like my parents applying like the finest seventies parenting techniques. No, when my kids are over there and I'm like, you know, I just, you know, give them like Coca Cola, like all the stuff that I'm like, I would never permit in my household and, you know, it's fine. But that is one of those things. And that's why I think one of the things in your outline, is I think is, I just want to get to is, is dividing sleep responsibilities in the household. If there's a two parent household, it's very important that both parents participate at bedtime. And, I can't tell you often I hear the story of you know, someone and it's, let's be real here, if it's a mom and a dad in the household, it's usually the mom coming in and saying, "Well, he'll only go asleep for me." Dr. Canapari: And the dad may say, you know how dads are, "I can't do this. You know, you have to do it." And, you know, I think that best practice is at an early age, get both parents involved at bedtime. But if, you know, sometimes, as you said, sometimes mom needs to go out of town. Right? Like if you can't, if you leave town for a couple of days, guess what? The dad's gonna figure it out and your kid will figure out it as well. It's not like if you, you know, if you had to go away on a work trip, your child would not sleep for five days. Right? Like, that's just not how it works. And I think it's really important that any one of the household who is a caregiver helps. Dr. Canapari: And, you know, I even give parents a script. I mean, I to say, you know, "I know we're both concerned about our son's sleep. I really need your help. You know, like, the doctor says you need to help at bedtime and I'm going to go out." You know, it's likewise in blended households, if parents are separated, like single parents, et cetera, it's very important that kids have the same set of rules and have consistency at both homes if there are sleep difficulties. This is the struggle for a lot of families. I mean, you know, many, you know, every parent wants the child to sleep well, but say they're at mom's house on the weekdays and on the weekends the Dad may let the kids stay up later, and just lie with them to go to sleep and that you know, that it's fine if things are going great but if things aren't going well it's really important that everyone who cares for the child get on the same page. Jen: Right. And with the same routines. Dr. Canapari: I mean it's not going to be the same in both households but as close to possible in terms of the timing, in terms of what you do and specifically in terms of is a parent there when the child falls asleep or not? Annie: Right, right. Okay. Do you have any, I know you have a whole chapter in your book dedicated to sleep environment and location and I think there's probably a lot information in that chapter that could apply to adults in addition to kids. Do you have any, are there any like non negotiables are things that you would really encourage people to consider in their sleep environment? Dr. Canapari: Oh man. I'd say getting the screens out of the bedroom and, I think there is, when I started working as a sleep doctor, when I finished my training in 2007, the big argument was does your kid have a TV in the bedroom or not? Right. That was what, you know, that was often the conversation. That's often the conversation I was having with families would be like, "You need to remove the television from your child's room because they're sleeping poorly." Nowadays it's not a conversation about television in the bedroom, it's about tablets, smartphones, et cetera. And we know these devices are corrosive to sleep, you know, as we were talking about earlier, the bright light can actually shift your biological clock later. We also know that these devices are profoundly addictive, right? Like Instagram doesn't make money if you're not looking at Instagram. Jen: There's a lot of research put in to how to keep people there. Dr. Canapari: The smartest psychologists in the world are in Silicon Valley trying to addict you to these services. Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: Yeah. And, I encourage people to keep them out of their bedroom and really to be pretty strict. I love now on, what's the feature called on the iPhone? It's screen time. Lauren: Screen time. Yeah. Dr. Canapari: It's generally been a positive with my kids, except when I'm at work on a snow day, say, and they keep sending me messages to give them more screen time, but I think they kind of get it. And I also liked in my phone says at 10 o'clock being like, you know, it basically kind of shuts it down and I can bypass it. But taking that step being like, "Do I really need to keep scrolling through this right now?" You just need that little check and really ideally keeping the devices out of the home because, you know, I'm very careful about shutting off alarms on my phone. My wife has all these alerts on her phone. So if like something on the Guardian website, the UK goes off a news alert goes in the middle of the night, she gets an alarm and I'd be like, do we must we know what, what the queen said in the middle of the night? Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and I turn off her phone. Jen: So just getting all those alerts off notifications, like just- Dr. Canapari: Yeah, if you can keep out of the room and if your kids are little, setting this example now will pay dividends when they get older. Right. Jen: Yeah. My son, I did this as an incentive for them to get their butts going and get ready for school in the mornings. They are allowed to watch TV or play video games once they are ready for, ready to go for school. So that just got them go hustling. Right. So they could watch some TV before school and when it started they would, that meant 10 of TV before we had to leave for school. But I have found over the last year that it has increased because they're getting up earlier and I am not sure. I'm wondering if that's because there's some kind of habit or something built in where they're there, maybe start rousing a bit in the morning, but then all of a sudden it's like "TV, I can watch TV." And so it's, I didn't mean to, so there's, it's like they're sleeping less and I don't know if there's any science behind that, but I swear if I cut out TV in the morning, they'd sleep longer in the mornings. Dr. Canapari: Well, I mean, how badly do you want to do that, right? Jen: I don't know, I don't know if it's negotiable or not. Dr. Canapari: In general, I like incentives for behaviors that are desirable and really getting kids ready in the morning are one of those situations where you have so little leverage, right? Jen: Right. Dr. Canapari: Like if your child, if your child is difficult in the morning, what is the outcome for them? You have to drive them to school. Like they know that they have you over a barrel. I think that maybe putting a limit on being like, well you know, here's the maximum amount of screen time you could get. But it is one of those things like as you go through the night, your sleep gets lighter and lighter. Right? That's why it's so much harder to get kids to stay asleep. Especially to do early morning awakenings than it is to get them to fall asleep. Both in terms of behavioral techniques and even, cause I see kids with sleep problems bad enough I write for prescriptions. Dr. Canapari: Any medicine that can last long enough to keep a kid asleep in the morning is going to last too long. You just can't calibrate it that way. So I think that if your children are functioning well in the morning and going to sleep at a reasonable hour, they're getting enough sleep. I wouldn't worry too much about it unless it's disruptive. But if you feel like they're really struggling during the day, like if the teachers are giving you feedback or they're falling asleep on short car trips during the day, then maybe you want to think about a different incentive to get them going. Annie: Right. Right. Jen: Right. Lauren: I'll say, Jen, something that we did with Elliot this year is she would wake up at like 4:00 AM and come in my room and wake me up. "Is it morning time yet?" Cause it's dark, you know, when she would wake up I'd be like, "No, go back to sleep." She'd come in at five. "Is it morning time yet?" So we got this little alarm clock thing that lights up green when it's morning. Dr. Canapari: The "Is It Ok To Wake?" clock? Lauren: Yes. Dr. Canapari: Yeah. No, I think, I think that works really well. And, you know, it's, I think Andy alluded at the beginning, my younger son was, for a while, was a real early riser. I mean, I remember going to Disney World when he was like seven and taking him for walks so my older kid and wife could sleep until 6:30 in the morning, you know, like, I like the okay to wake clock and an older child to who can get it, you can be like, look, "You can get up and play in your room and read books." Lauren: Yeah. She's five, so she's old enough to understand, you know. Dr. Canapari: Yeah. I mean a two or three old is just going to roam, right. You know, but and that's the important thing too, you know, in terms of the sleep training conversation, it is very clear that sleep training, even cry it out sleep training is effective and it's safe. But the best study, looking at the safety of it, they were looking at things like that always gets trumpeted as side effects of sleep training, elevated cortisol levels at all, et cetera. It all was fine at the time where kids were age five and it really seemed like most kids were sleeping pretty well by age five, no matter what you do. There are exceptions to this, right. You know, I've explained this in my home, in my clinic certainly, but I think the message to parents is positive. Like address the problems you need to address for your sanity. If you're doing things that you know aren't quite best practices like lying with your two and a half year old until they fall asleep and they sometimes crawl in your bed at night but you can live with that, that's okay. Your child is going to be fine. If you are okay, if you can live with it, right? It's like parenting is an exercise in compromises. You can't potty train your kid and sleep train your kid and like you can't fix everything at once. So it's okay, pick a problem you want to work on and work on that. Let the other stuff slide you're going to be okay. Annie: I think that's a wonderful message to wrap up on because it's like, it's very much in line with our program as well. Like, find what works for you and it's good enough. That's all the is really important. Even if it's not best practice, you know, the ideal or whatever it is. Dr. Canapari: Well. Yeah, and I think that if, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe one of the focuses that you guys talk about with, is clients the right term? Annie: Members, yeah. Dr. Canapari: Your members is weight control, right? And I just want to leave with you with, I think that's something that's so important is we know that sleep curtailment is associated with increased appetite and increased weight gain. And, I just saw a great research talk showing that the hormonal reasons for this were different for in men and women. But the outcome is kind of the same, that if we sleep poorly, we accumulate more adipose tissue, more fat. We have more hedonic eating, craving for salty, sugary foods. So I think, and of course I'm biased, but for people that are struggling with their weight, improving their sleep is such a important thing to do. And if the way you do that as improving your child's sleep, think about that as another goal why this is worth your effort, right? If, we'd all like to, most of us, you know, want to maintain a healthy weight, and working on sleep is going to help people do that. So I think that's an important message even if your members don't have kids, working on their own sleep is going to be a really high yield thing for them to do in terms of their health. Jen: Right, right. So like regular sleep will lead to more regulated eating, which leads to a stable regulated weight. Dr. Canapari: Absolutely. Annie: There's not much that more sleep wouldn't do good for people. I can't think of any, too many negative outcomes for more sleep. Dr. Canapari: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that most of us professionals, grownups, we're working on sleep debt, we need to chip away at it because it's going to help us be healthier, feel better, and you know, to kind of be the people we want to be. Annie: Yeah. Thank you so much doctor. There's so much good information here. I can't, I think our listeners are just going to really, really appreciate this. And we will send links to go find your book because I'm sure by the time we release it will be out. So congrats on the book and thank you for joining us. We appreciate your time. Dr. Canapari: Thanks guys. It was fun. And yeah, I'm sorry we didn't answer all the questions you sent me in advance, but I'd be happy to come talk to you guys again some time. Annie: Yes. We'll have to have you back for sure. Okay. Dr. Canapari: Take care. Jen: Thank you. Lauren: Bye. Dr. Canapari: Bye guys. Annie: This episode is brought to you by the Balance365 program. If you're ready to say goodbye to quick fixes and false promises and yes to building healthy habits and a life you're 100% in love with, then checkout Balance365.co to learn more.  

  Secrets from the Eating Lab Author Dr. Traci Mann, professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota and an expert on the psychology of eating, dieting and self-control joins Jen, Annie and Lauren in discussing the science behind the hot topics of self-control, temptation, diets and the alternative to dieting.   What you’ll hear in this episode: How much of our weight can we influence? How much of our weight is influenced by genetics? The concept of the Leanest Livable Weight Goal weights and reasonable ranges Weight regain and dieting – how common is it? Why you regain weight after dieting What happens to your body when you go on a diet What you start to notice when you go on a diet Is weight regain guaranteed? Characteristic of people who keep weight off The role of healthy movement  you enjoy in maintaining weight loss Self-control: who struggles with it and can you increase it? The obesogenic environment: what it is Temptation free checkouts and apple bins, reducing the need for willpower at the grocery store The role of small obstacles and inconveniences Making healthy choices convenient to increase compliance Keeping the focus on health instead of weight   Resources: Secrets from the Eating Lab Dr. Mann’s Facebook Page Dr. Mann on Twitter Episode 4: What A 70-year-old Starvation Experiment Taught Us About Dieting Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome back to another episode of Balance365 Life radio. Before we get into today’s podcast episode with an amazing guest, I want to share with you a super sweet message that we received from one of our community members on Facebook today. Christy says “I have been a part of Healthy Habits Happy Moms for almost 2 years now and a Balance365er since May of 2018. I am all in to the way this group thinks and believes. I’m at the point now that when I workout I channel Annie Brees, when I mention establishing habits to coworkers I channel Lauren Koski and when I’m trying to give some perspective to friends about diet culture and treating myself well I channel Jennifer Campbell. I can’t thank the three of you enough for how you have changed my outlook and daily life. I’m chipping away at the program but at this point my greatest takeaway is the way I live out each day because of this new perspective. I can go on and on but I just have to give a big thanks to Jennifer, Annie and Lauren. Thank you so much, Christy and I want to share with all of our community members that any email, any message, any direct message on Instagram we read them all and we are so appreciative of any reviews that you share on the podcast. We love them all. We cannot thank you enough.   Alright, let’s jump into this podcast because I’m super excited about it. I’m not sure if we have referenced any other book on this podcast as much as we have her book, Secrets from the Eating Lab by Dr Traci Mann. Dr. Mann is a professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota and an expert on the psychology of eating, dieting and self-control. In addition to all her impressive professional experience, she’s also a mom who loves those ice cream, super relatable, hey? If you’re curious about how much control we really have over our weight, how you can avoid temptation and why diets don’t work and what to do instead then you have to listen to this interview with Dr Mann. Enjoy! Jen and Lauren, we have a special, special guest are you two pumped for the show or what? Lauren: So pumped. Jen: Yes, I’ve been waiting. We arranged this well before Christmas I think so I’ve just been like vibrating waiting for it. Annie: Yes and what our listeners didn’t catch before we started recording was Jen gushing for about 10 minutes about how she loves Dr Traci Mann. Welcome to the show, thank you for joining us. Dr. Mann:  Well, thanks for having me, you guys are so nice. Annie: We, the 3 of us have read your book, The Secrets from the Eating Lab and we reference studies, quotes, information from this book so often in our community and our podcast if they haven’t read it, if listeners haven’t read it we would highly recommend it and it’s heavy on the science because you’re a researcher but I wasn’t overwhelmed by the science when I was reading it. I felt it was very like, I could understand the concepts that you were sharing. So, thank you so much for joining us. Dr. Mann: I would also say I’m sure I shouldn’t say this but it’s free Kindle right now. Jen: OK. Annie: Oh my! How long is it going to be free for? Dr. Mann: You know, I have a vague memory of agreeing to this with my agent like a year ago thinking it was like a month long thing and I think it’s possibly forever, I don’t know. Jen: OK we will Dr. Mann:-never sell another book. So, whatever, it’s fine. Annie: Well I will- Dr. Mann: Better people read it than buy it. Annie: say if you look at the 3 of our copies they are highlighted, like top to bottom, they have been like, right, like, they’ve been used, they’ve been well loved. Lauren: I think the name Traci Mann has been on probably 90 percent of our podcast. Jen: Yeah and this, so I have this page highlighted, what I was gushing about before we hit record was how Traci, Dr. Traci, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to- Dr. Mann: Just call me Traci. Annie: We’re besties now. Jen: So you are very much a messy middle writer in that you really objectively look at the research, you haven’t gone headfirst into any kind of movement or philosophy and just looked at research to support your philosophy, you’ve looked at the research which has allowed you to come up with a very objective, balanced message. Dr. Mann: That was the goal for sure. Jen: And so I just I highlighted this a long time ago because it was perfect. It says, it’s on page 20 and so what we hear a lot and what our audience is very aware of is that we hear two things, we hear that you cannot control your weight, you should not even try to lose weight, it’s pointless, your weight is predetermined, what you have, what you’ve got, that’s what you’re going to have forever and then on the other side of the spectrum, we have this whole industry of transformations that it is totally realistic and sustainable to lose half your body weight forever etc, etc. When what we actually know and what the research provides is is that you, it’s actually like in the middle but what you had written and I feel like I was waiting for this message. When I found your book I felt like “I have arrived. I am home. Like, this is what I have been looking for, somebody who is just sensible.” And you say, “I’m not saying you can’t influence your weight at all, just that the amount of influence you have is limited and you’ll generally end up within your genetically determined set weight range” and I thought that was so perfect in that you’re not willing to say you cannot control your weight, you’re trying to say “Hey, we can influence our weight, it’s just not to the level that you have been led to believe by the fad diet industry.” Dr. Mann: Exactly. That’s right so it’s partly genetic, but not 100 percent genetic.   Jen: Right and isn’t there a percentage? Dr. Mann: I think it was 70%- Jen: Yes I think it was 70% but you have a, there’s about a range of 30 percent in there that you can influence your weight. Dr. Mann: Yeah and I mean, it’s not just that and it’s really interesting that people are staking out these extreme positions, you know, it’s like, “Come on, people, nothing is black and white like that.” Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: But with the weight thing, it’s not just, it’s not the case that you can’t maneuver your weight around to some extent, obviously you can’t, like you just said, you can’t lose half your body weight but you can move it around to some extent but the problem is that it’s really hard, it’s hard to move it around a lot. It’s not hard to move it around a little. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: And that’s mostly what we talk about in the book is ways to move it around a little without it taking over your life. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: But to move it around a lot, it’s not that it can’t be done, it’s just that it’s really, really hard. Jen: And it’s very, it can be hard on us physically and psychologically to be trying to move our weight around to those different extreme ends. Dr. Mann: Yeah, exactly. That’s why I like to talk about this Leanest Liveable Weight idea. By Leanest Livable Weight I mean it’s the lowest weight that you can comfortably have without having to work so hard at it. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: Because the leanest weight you can live at comfortably, now that has been misinterpreted by the lovely people like GOOP.com – the lowest weight you can actually survive at without dying. Jen: Right and that’s not what any of us here are trying to talk about. That’s what a lot of women are trying to be and they might they may not even realize it, that that’s what they’re actually trying to achieve but that’s definitely not healthy, physically or psychologically. Annie: And I just want to add to that we’ve worked with thousands of women across the span of the globe and one of the common themes that keeps coming up for women is goal weights or they have this like ideal body weight and oftentimes if you asked them, like, “Well, where did that weight come from?” it’s, like, so, like, not evidence based, it’s like, “Oh I weighed that when I graduated high school or that’s what I weighed on I wedding day or that’s my pre-pregnancy weight” and it might not be realistic. Dr. Mann: Or it sounds good. Annie: Yeah, or that’s what I read on some chart in, you know, I even remember coming across a scale in the mall bathroom, why there was a scale in the mall bathroom I don’t know but it had a chart of, like, body weights and like this is if you’re large frame, small frame. And it’s really not realistic, usually not realistic for those goal weights. So we love the idea that you have a range because as a woman I know that my weight can fluctuate you know 10-15 pounds versus in a month, in a year, how would you recommend going about determining a reasonable range of weight for someone? Dr. Mann: Yeah, that’s a really good question. That’s the hardest question to answer and the question I’m least likely to be able to satisfy you with an answer to because there isn’t, like, a scientific formula to figure out your sort of set range, so instead you have to just kind of make a guess based on your sort of knowledge of what your weight has done over your life and a lot of people notice that there’s a certain weight area that they keep coming back to. So they lose some weight but then they come back to this weight or they gain some weight but then they plop down in this weight without even trying very hard and so if it’s, you know, the weight that your body seems to keep wanting to come back to that’s probably right there, right there in the set range, right where your body is trying to keep you because you’re good at it. Annie: Yeah, in your book and I know there’s going to be people they’re going to say, they’re going to scoff at this but you didn’t just look at people that have lost weight and then regained it, you also looked at people that were trying, studies that have tried to get people to gain weight and it was hard to even maintain a weight gain as well, which further supports the idea that, like, this is where your body can effortlessly live or with minimal effort. Dr. Mann: Right, it’s true and then the weight gains that are particularly interesting because so many people think, you know, I am so careful with what I eat, if I wasn’t this careful I would for sure gain a whole ton of weight. Lauren: Yes, we hear that all the time. Dr. Mann: Yeah, you do, you know, I think people really worry about that and I think partly why they worry about it is because if they do eat a lot more than normal for a while, they do gain weight, but they only gain a certain amount of weight, you know what I mean? So maybe you’ll gain your 5 pounds or 10 pounds but you’re not going to gain 50 pounds, you know, or if you do you’ll come back down pretty easily. Jen: Right,  we see a pendulum swing happen quite often with women who are coming off dieting, if they have spent a decade of their life dieting. We see this pendulum swing where they go from, you know, one weight and the pendulum swings up to a higher weight that they are comfortable with or that is maybe within their set point range but then it settles down somewhere in the middle and we talk about that and you reference this in your book, The Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Dr. Mann: Right. Jen: So if you are coming from years and years and years of restriction, you look at, we have a whole podcast on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. So if you are coming from a period of very severe restriction, the pendulum swing is almost an expectation, it’s almost, like, we would say it’s a normal and natural response to dieting. Dr. Mann: Oh exactly, it exactly is. I mean, we all need to reframe how we think about dieting. When people think about dieting, they think of that initial weight loss and that’s their image of dieting and then they assume once they have that initial weight loss, they just stay down there. Jen:  Right. Dr. Mann: But actually, if you followed all the research looking longer at dieters, you see it’s completely predictable that the weight comes back on. Jen:  Right. Dr. Mann: There’s a tiny, tiny minority of people who keep it off. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: But for the majority of people, it just comes back on, you know, over the next like 2, 3, 4, 5 years. So we need to realize that that is a normal part of dieting and not a failure by any particular individual dieter. Jen: Right, right. Dr. Mann: And the thing is they always blame themselves for that. Jen: For that pendulum swing. Dr. Mann: That’s just what happens. Your body needs that to happen, your body is making that happen. Jen: Yeah, it’s like, I think you also, I think we’ve used this analogy and I think it came from your book, it’s like gasping for air after holding your breath. Dr. Mann: Right, I didn’t invent that analogy but I did include it, yes. Jen: Yes. Dr. Mann: Yes, it’s true. I feel like anything I say you’ve already talked about but I mean the things that happen when you restrict for a while. Your body, of course, doesn’t know you want to look thinner, your body thinks you’re in the process of starving to death and so it makes these alterations to save you which is so kind of it and yet everyone gets so mad about that because all those changes that save you from starving to death, make, basically make it very, very, very easy to regain the weight. Jen: Right and it probably, well, you can correct me if I’m wrong, it doesn’t really matter what size you are, if you are 120 pounds or if you’re 220 pounds when you do that restriction, your body still, you know, it doesn’t matter how much body fat you have, your body still thinks you are starving. Dr. Mann: Right, if your body detects that much less is coming in than it than expected then it just, all these changes just click on, you know, your metabolism changes, uh oh, now you have to eat less to keep losing weight. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: Hormone levels change, uh oh, you’re going to feel hungry. Jen: Yeah. Dr. Mann: When you eat an amount of food that didn’t used to make you feel hungry, you know and then there’s all these attention changes too, right? So you notice food more if it’s around, you can’t get your mind off it once you start thinking about it, so all those things make regaining the weight way too easy and keeping it off way too hard. It doesn’t make it impossible, though and so this is a key, another key thing that I think people sometimes don’t realize. Any person who knows someone who has lost weight and kept it off, you know, comes and says to me “You can’t say that your body does this stuff, you can’t say your body makes these changes that cause you to regain the weight because I know people who’ve kept it off.” Well I’m not saying that these changes make it impossible to keep off the weight, I’m saying these changes make it really, really hard to keep off the weight. So hard that most people can’t do it. Jen: Right. We were talking before we hit record, again, another thing I had brought up is that because we are, you know, we try to navigate that messy middle and help women figure out what’s right for them, I had said, you know, hearing these two, I remember when I was first getting into this and starting to read about it like 4 to 5 years ago, I would start hearing that extreme messaging “You can’t keep off weight, you just can’t” and actually my husband has lost about 60 pounds, he was, I think, he was about 300 pounds when he graduated high school and now he sits at between kind of 220 and 245, I think. I mean, he’s going to be horrified that I’m talking about this but anyways but that just, that comes very naturally to him to kind of sit around there and so I would, you know, I was the same as those people. I kept hearing that it’s impossible to lose weight and I thought, he has now kept that off for 20 years and he’s not working, like, I don’t see him get up every day and like work at it, he’s not like, he’s not micromanaging his food, he’s not, he has some great habits, he, you know, he eats balanced meals, he tries to get to the gym 3 to 4 times a week but he’s lived a high stress life like the rest of us, he’s had kids, gone to grad school, all of that and so that just didn’t sit well with me and I thought, instead of looking at everybody who is failing, what are these successful people doing? Like why are they able to do it? Which kind of comes why, again, why your book is so refreshing, because you sort of, you’ve got that sort of nailed. Dr. Mann: Well, you know, I mean, I don’t even know and it’s interesting how you describe your husband as not having to work at keeping it off. Because what the research shows of the people who lose weight and keep it off is that those people are, you know, fairly obsessed with every little calorie that goes into their body and with every little bit of exercise they do to burn calories. So that’s what I expect to hear when I hear that people kept it off for a long time but one thing that I’ve been wondering about lately and no one has done the study that I know of and I don’t actually even know how to do this study but I’ve been wondering like, the people who lose a lot of weight and keep it off are those people who had happened to recently gain a bunch of weight but weren’t normally really heavy? You know what I mean, like I’m wondering if those who end up taking, you know, people who have had this unusual weight gain as opposed to people who are just always some high weight and took it off. Lauren: Yeah we see. Jen: I have theories. Go ahead, Lauren. Lauren: Yeah, we kind of see this and this is, I think, kind of in my story too, we see people who start dieting at a young age, right and then they just keep putting on weight as they do the rebound and you know, their weight wasn’t maybe supposed to be quite that high but because of the dieting it keeps going up. Dr. Mann: It got inflated from their- Lauren: Yeah and so for me, when I, after I stopped dieting and I did gain a lot of weight, when I finally went came to this place of balance my weight did go down and I think it’s kind of just like that it came back to its normal range. Jen: My husband also, I haven’t seen any research on this, he has put on a significant amount of muscle over the years so he, you know, at 18 years old, he didn’t go to the gym. He just, you know, his body composition is completely different, he, you can just tell by looking at pictures of him that he had a substantial amount of body fat and then after he left high school he got into boxing and ended up boxing professionally or sorry I should say semi professional, he’s just going to die, when he listens to this, I’ll just give him a little plug, he won the gold medal at the Canadian games in 2007 for boxing. Dr. Mann: Wow. Jen:  I know, amazing, but he just gets so embarrassed when I talk about this. Dr. Mann: You know, just to revise what I was saying, he’s an elite athlete. Jen: Well, he wouldn’t, I wouldn’t say now, I think he’s got more like Dad bod now but he did, he just, he got into, so what we tell our girls in Balance365 is to find movement they like, like if you and you talk about this in your book that if you don’t like what you’re doing you’re never going to stick to it and so when I say my husband doesn’t work at it, it’s not that he doesn’t prioritize exercise and doesn’t prioritize a balanced way to eat, he really enjoys that so it’s not that, so I think what what happens is there are people out there that are just never, they’re never going to enjoy my husband’s lifestyle. I’m not athletic and I am not competitive. I would never have enjoyed training for a boxing match like that or several boxing matches so, but through that- Dr. Mann: I don’t think I would like that either. Jen: Right and so you have to kind of go, you know, and Annie, for example, Annie crossfits like 4-5 times a week which helps her to sustain that 40 pound fat loss that she has done but and so it’s like Annie, personally, doesn’t feel like she wakes up in the morning and micromanages her weight loss, however if I had to get up everyday and go to Crossfit 4-5 times a week, that would feel like I was micromanaging my loss, do you know what I’m saying? Dr. Mann: Yeah, it’s true, so everyone needs to just find a sort of a set of lifestyle habits that aren’t soul crushing for them. Jen: Right, for them and that’s the sort of key that it’s like, what do you like to do and it may not be what somebody else does and so you won’t get the results that person has gotten but hey, that’s OK, like, let’s just be sensible here kind of thing. Dr. Mann: True, I mean, like in the last year or so I’ve had this just chronic hamstring injury, just won’t get better no matter how long it just doesn’t get better and you know, finally my physical therapist was like, you know, it doesn’t hurt when you do spin class, doesn’t hurt when you do yoga, it hurts when you run. It’s like exactly that part of the answer and she’s like “You have to not run” and somehow, her saying that I don’t have to go all winter onto the treadmill, it’s like so freeing to allow myself to do the kinds of exercise that I, I don’t want to say enjoy but that I don’t hate. Annie: Right. Dr. Mann: Even though to me they don’t seem as potent You know, I mean like, my brain is running this but I feel like, you know, all signs are that I’m just as healthy as if I were running as long as I’m doing these other activities and it’s not miserable. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: So thank you, Christina, for freeing me from feeling like I have to use the freaking treadmill. Lauren: Can I, can I go back to, I want to go back to something that Jen said because this. is something that I’ve been wondering about when we hear this about the set weight range is that total weight or is that like fat percentage? Because we do see people who do build muscle, right and they’re the same weight but their body composition is very different, like, how do you know how that plays into this? Dr. Mann: I don’t. I don’t recall ever hearing anyone talking about set weight ranges in any way other than referring to weight. I’ve not heard anyone describe it in terms of muscle mass. Lauren: OK. It’s always something I’ve wondered. Dr. Mann: I don’t think people have, yeah, at least I’ve not encountered it. Jen: Yeah, I’m curious. If you end up putting on this muscle mass and it leads to your total body weight being, you know, a little bit- Lauren: Are the same as what your mass was with less muscle then is that sort of like a “trick” for your body in that it’s like, oh, we’re, you know, we’re the same weight and so you see people that change their body but your body is like “But I still weigh this much and I still need this amount of calories to sustain me.” That might be a future research project for you. Annie: That would reflect my experience, for sure because I have, like, probably a 6 to 7 I would say pound weight range that I have not budged from for maybe a couple years but my body composition has changed within that. A couple of percent, I mean, to me it’s been noticeable but I cannot, like, I have to work really, really hard to get out of that range either above or below it. Dr. Mann: That’s really interesting. So yeah, that might be a good trick, you know, don’t worry about the number, just try to replace some more of that fat with more muscle. Jen: Yeah and I think my husband probably has benefited hugely from his, his body composition is completely different than when he was 18 and I think he’s still a very heavy man, right he’s still like 240 pounds, he’s a heavy man but he’s not, he just has way less fat mass and more muscle mass on him, right? Dr. Mann: That’s great. I never thought about that, very interesting. Jen: Alright. Annie: We will come be your test subjects. Jen: Yes. Lauren: Yes. Annie: Be happy to take a trip to the eating lab up north or kind of down south. Jen: Down south for me. Annie: Yeah, for Jen. Dr. Mann: You’re in Canada. Jen: Yeah, I’m in British Columbia. Yeah. Annie: Yeah, I feel like that’s kind of a good segue talking about, you know, how much your habits or lack thereof kind of consume you because one of the most common comments we get from members or of our community is that they feel like they just need more willpower, more motivation, more self-discipline and if they have those things then they could, like, just stick to their diet, they could stick to their plan, they could reach their goals, right and I know that as a researcher of self-discipline you’ve noted that you’ve heard that echoed as well, that when you share with people that you’re researching that they’re like “Oh yeah, I want more of that” or “How do I get more of that?” In your experience, is more willpower needed? Is that what people are missing? Dr. Mann: No, no, people are missing, so every dieter thinks they are uniquely bad at resisting tempting food, you know, I mean, like, something you sort of alluded to it but constantly people come up to me after talks and or like before talks, “Oh God, self-control, I need more of that, you know, that’s a good thing that I happen to need, me alone, you know,” but everyone is bad at self-control. Everyone struggles with their willpower, thin people, fat people and everyone in between. It’s not the thing that tells us who is going to end up thin and who’s not, you know what I mean, everyone struggles with it, in fact, there’s these, this group of psychologists called positive psychologists that study, like, human strengths, so things like kindness or creativity, or thoughtfulness and what they find is that like the kinds of things that all range really highly kindness, thoughtfulness, people generally believe that they are kind and generally believe they’re thoughtful, the one that comes in dead last every time is self-control. People do not think they have self-control and they’ve repeated that kind of survey in like 53 countries. Jen: Wow. Dr. Mann: It was always at or very, very near the bottom. Nobody thinks they have good self-control, it’s not, it’s not unique to dieters, it’s everyone and it wouldn’t matter if everybody had great self-control because of the environment we all live in and there’s probably no amount that would be enough to survive the onslaught of temptation every minute of the day. Jen: Is this what you would say is the obesogenic environment? Dr. Mann: Yeah, exactly and that is what we’re living in and I mean, I shouldn’t have to try to resist buying a candy bar when I’m in Office Depot, buying paper for my printer. Jen: Right and you don’t. Dr. Mann: That should not be a temptation challenge, you know. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: You know, it’s everywhere, all the time. Jen: Right, there’s candy, I don’t know if you guys have staples down there but we have Staples and it’s like an Office Depot and there is candy at the checkout, it’s everywhere. Dr. Mann: A huge selection, I mean and really kind of awesome candy selection. Jen: Yeah. Dr. Mann: At office supply stores for some reason. Jen: So there’s and there’s, I don’t know if this is same down there, but in Canada there is a push to have, like, basically temptation free aisles, so candy free aisles specifically for parents bringing their children to shop because I just argue with my kids nonstop about not buying candy, so then it becomes this thing that children begin to focus on and then they develop these scarcity issues or because there’s just candy and they see it and you’re saying no but and so the other thing that they’ve started offering in grocery stores here is they have apple bins for children so when you are shopping with your kids you take your kids to the apple bin and they can munch on an apple while you’re shopping and this kind of stuff is brilliant, I think. Dr. Mann: Definitely, you know, it all fits the sort of general basic strategy of rearranging things so that you don’t keep encountering temptation. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: If you don’t encounter it, you’re not going to have it. Annie: And that was kind of like a, I don’t want to say a will power hack, but that was one of the things you mentioned in your book that, like, you don’t have to rely so much on willpower or self-control or self-discipline or say no all the time if you can curate your environment to reduce those temptations, right ? Dr. Mann: Yeah, exactly. Ideally you don’t want to ever have to say no, you know, ideally you just don’t want to come up, you know. Once a food is on your plate, for example, forget it, you’re eating it. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: If you want to keep things from getting to that point where there’s no hope of resisting it. Jen: Right and we, like, even small things, we were talking about this with our Balance365 community the other day. Simple things like dishing up dinner at the island or on the stove and taking it to the table rather than having all your dishes on the table to dish up from is just a really small hack that you could use to not have seconds or to not, you know, over dish up kind of thing. Dr. Mann: Yeah, exactly and that works because, as we talk about a lot in the book, because people are lazy and small obstacles slow us or stop us. That’s a small obstacle. I could get up from the table and walk 4 feet. That is shocking how many people that stops. Lauren: And I’ve heard you talk about it’s not even just getting up but just moving it further than your arm can reach. Dr. Mann: There’s actually a study that shows that one of my colleagues in the Netherlands literally straining your arm is enough to slow people down. Annie: That’s like the, there’s, I have a salt lamp on the opposite side of my room when I turn it on at night and half the time I get into bed and I’m like “Ugh, that lamp is still on” and I swear more often than not I just sleep with it on because I’m too lazy to get out of bed to turn the lamp on, so like I cannot be inconvenienced. Dr. Mann: I am going to one up you on that sometimes I’m in bed on my back but I really prefer to sleep on my side and I just can’t muster the energy to like just friggin roll half my body over, half! Annie: That and you actually, you actually cover small inconveniences or small opticals is also covered in your book because you tell a story about is it toilet paper. Dr. Mann: Yes, I read that online, as, I was so excited when I read that online so it was a budget tip for strapped households was to when you get the roll toilet paper to smush it a little so that it doesn’t turn easily. Jen: Brilliant. Dr. Mann: You know, so when you go to pull it off it tears off right away, so that leads people to use less toilet paper. Jen: That, I need that for my children. Dr. Mann: Actually it’s good for if you have kids. Jen: They plug the toilet. I’m in there with the plunger once a week. Dr. Mann: It would also help with that but you know, just the fact that it stops a regular adult person from using more toilet paper is another example of how small, miniscule obstacles actually really slow us down. Jen: And Lauren, Lauren only buys single servings of ice cream so that was another one. Lauren: Well, they have them at Kroger, like the little ones ,they’re, like, you know, like, this big instead of the pint or the gallon. Annie: They’re like a little cup or like six ounces or something, 8 ounces. Lauren: Yeah or I just go out to like Dairy Queen or something instead of buying the whole gallon in my house. Dr. Mann: Buy the one. Lauren: Or even just for me is like if we make cookies or something, just putting them in the cabinet and sort of leaving them on the counter, right, we used to just leave it on the counter but if I just put it in the cabinet where I don’t see it every time I walk in the kitchen I end up just forgetting about it. Dr. Mann: Yes, keep temptations out of sights. Jen: We have a saying in our community. We also have a free Facebook community that has 40000 women in it, so they just participate in our philosophy, they haven’t bought our program but one thing we talk about in there is there’s this whole veggie tray revolution and so I started it a couple years ago and my aunt gave me a hand me down, an old circular Tupperware veggie tray and I stocked that veggie tray Sundays and Wednesdays because, like, we just eat it all by Wednesdays now, so that has substantially, and having that front and center in my fridge has substantially increased my family’s vegetable intake and I even take it out during meals. If we’re having grilled cheese sandwiches, the veggie tray will go on the table. Dr. Mann: And so it’s all prepared, like, they’re all clean. Jen: Yes, I have washed them, I chopped them I and I just it’s like, if I just need to do the minimum to set us up for success for the week it’s just that veggie tray takes me under 10 minutes and so we open the fridge and it’s just right there and we’ve also moved our treats to the cupboard above the fridge so I need to get a stool out to get out chocolate and chips and you know, people, you know, these things are simple and they work, you know, and but people just, you know, you tell them but they just, if they’re not, they’re still looking there’s like this magic pill thing going on. They don’t think it can be that simple but it is. Dr. Mann: And so the veggie tray is a good example of removing the obstacles to do something healthy. Jen: Exactly, yes, exactly. Dr. Mann: If you look in the fridge and you want a snack, you’re not going to like pull open the veggie bin, you know, get out the beats, break them, clean them, cook them- Jen: No, I’m not. Dr. Mann: But if you do that ahead, and you have a little bowl or tupperware of roasted beets, you will eat them. Jen: Yes, absolutely. Dr. Mann: Vegetables are hard work. Jen: They are hard work and so is protein. So the other thing we’ve tried to bring to people’s attention is that carbs and fat are readily available to us in convenience form everywhere, so if you want to be eating a more balanced diet, focus your energy on getting protein and vegetables and fruit prepared and as convenient to you as the nuts and the seeds and the bread and you know all of that kind of thing, because they take a lot of prep work, right. So the other thing I do is I just throw some chicken breasts in a slow cooker on Sunday night and then I take it out and I shred it and I just have a little container of shredded chicken breast which I can throw in sandwiches or wraps or do you know what I mean? So- Dr. Mann: Yeah. Jen: So yeah, it’s little, little things like that have made the biggest difference in my life and in our Balance365ers as well. Dr. Mann: That’s great, that’s good, that’s just making it easier to do the healthy thing.  Jen: Just environment. Dr. Mann: Harder to do the unhealthy thing. Jen: Yeah, just acknowledging that we’re lazy. Annie: And that’s across the board, like, your research has shown that it’s across the board, like humans in general are lazy, it’s not like these people, like, you know it’s not just me, Jen and Lauren that don’t want to prep our veggies or whatever, it’s like this is human nature and so and I feel like that’s kind of refreshing to hear because it’s not kind of, it’s very refreshing to hear because again, so many people are blaming themselves for why they can’t follow the diet, why they can’t stick with the program, it’s like, look you’re just human, like, you’re asking yourself to change a lot of things at once, to do a lot of stuff that’s really not in your wheelhouse. And it’s normal if you struggle with that. Dr. Mann: And also, can I just add, because sometimes people are like, well, all those strategies you’re saying just sound like, you know, dieting tips. Jen: Yes, they do. Dr. Mann: I don’t really mean them to be dieting tips, I mean them to be, these are just little things that you can just kind of have as habits in your life that will just help you stay in that sort of the lower part of your set point. I’m not saying that by moving the cookies to higher shelf you’re going to lose a ton of weight. Jen: Or that you should never have cookies, right. It’s not about, yeah. Dr. Mann: Right, exactly I’m just saying these are just some things that help you to just kind of stay on an even keel or maybe just aim for that slightly lower part of your set range that you’re already within. Jen: There’s, I wanted to address that too, as well because I feel like there is, as far as environment, there is a lot of tips you can use and they can be used as tools or they can be used as weapons against you, right and so in diet culture these things are often used as weapons and it’s funny because I used to some of the tools I use today to stay healthy, balanced and at a leaner weight, I used to use when I was dieting trying to live a weight below what was healthy for me and I was going hungry all the time, so what would happen to me was I wouldn’t buy the cookies, I wouldn’t buy the ice cream. I didn’t want any of that in my house because my cravings were so strong because I was going hungry all the time, so when that stuff was occasionally brought in my house I would eat it all. I would go nutso on a pint of ice cream in a night or a gallon and so it’s kind of like talking in a nuanced way, right, to go like, “You can use these as tools or you can use them as weapons, it all depends on where you’re at and what’s going on inside your head.” Dr. Mann: That’s really true and that’s a really important point that when you deny yourself something, when you restrict certain categories of foods or certain foods it’s going to eventually backfire. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: It’s amazing how fast you start to want those things you restrict. I mean, we did a study like this, I think I talk about it in the book where we forbade people from eating a food that they didn’t even love, right, it was sort of in the middle for I can’t remember how long- Jen: 3 weeks I think. Dr. Mann: Yeah. Annie: Radishes. Jen: I feel like I just know your book. Annie: Radishes and chocolate for 3 weeks? Dr. Mann: I better know my details well, in any case, the point I was trying to make about that, the main point of that study just was that very quickly they started really wanting those things that they couldn’t have. So not worth it to deny yourself certain things and instead try to just eat those things in reasonable portions. So I cannot live without ice cream and there’s really no reason to do so but my ice cream trick, when you guys mentioned some of yours, I’ll add one more is I make my husband serve me because he will serve a reasonable portion and put it away and our freezer is crazy cold so it’s not even going to be easy to take more because it’s just, you know, he’ll wait and do what you need to do. So let people wait on you, folks. Annie: That’s just good life advice. Jen: Yes, the other one thing for your freezer- Lauren: I can get behind that. Jen: I bake for my kids for their school lunches and I keep it in the freezer so I, if I want banana chocolate chip muffin it’s totally fine but I have to think about that, right, I have to take it out and then I have to unthaw it in order for me to eat it where, you know, just talking about those barriers in environment, just putting a little bit of barrier between you and that thing causes you to pause and go “Do I really want this or is this just an impulse?” Dr. Mann: Exactly, you need that pause. My 14 year old son is obsessed with baking. Well, you know, classic pre-teen boy, you know, scrawny, looks like a paper clip, you know, no body fat at all. But he’s killing me there are constantly baking here and the good news is he’s obnoxious and doesn’t always let me have any because he wants to take it all the school because he brings it to a certain class, you know, there’s 24 kids in that class. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: Every recipe makes 24 so he often doesn’t let me have any, thank God, but a lot of the time he does and it’s like once or twice a week this is going on in my house. Jen: Yeah. Dr. Mann: That’s a lot of like baking. Jen: Extra baking. Dr. Mann: That’s a lot of baking. Jen: Yes. Annie: So, Dr. Mann, I know we’re approaching an hour, I feel like we could do this for the whole time though or a couple hours at least, just to kind of wrap up, all of your research and your experience, personal and professional, inside your book as we’ve shared so much already, you provide a lot of gold little nuggets as to how people can improve their health, reframe their mindsets, even thinking about food in terms of healthy and unhealthy, how to alter their habits to support sustainable weight loss if that’s what they’re after but really, you seem to boil it down to just, as Jen said, sensible no-fuss advice, like exercise regularly and create reasonable eating habits and that you believe that that will help you reach your goals with minimal effort, is that really it? Because if so, that super refreshing. Dr. Mann: That is it. But I will elaborate a little bit because here’s where we have to get our heads and our heads are not there yet but  where we need to get our heads is if we are exercising the recommended amount, which is 150 minutes per week if we are eating, you know, a reasonable number of servings of vegetables per day and if we’re keeping our stress level under control, not smoking, if we’re doing those things, whatever we weigh when we’re doing those things should be where we want to be. We need to define that weight as our perfect weight because that is what you weigh when you’re behaving in a healthy way. So, I don’t know, this comes up all the time with people. Everyone thinks “if I do the exercise I’m supposed to do I’ll get thin,” but that’s not true. Exercise doesn’t necessarily make you a lot thinner but it does make you healthier. What I keep pushing on people is “Behaving in healthy ways makes you healthier, even though it might not make you thinner or as much thinner as you want it to.” So whatever we weigh when we’re behaving in healthy ways we have got to find a way to be OK with that. Jen: Right, except you have a whole section on acceptance, right and let your, do what’s good for you and let your body be what it’s going to be and just accept this, like it’s actually so freeing. Dr. Mann: Yes, just if you keep the focus on health and not weight everything makes so much more sense. Jen: Yeah, I love that. Dr. Mann: You do these healthy behaviors, they make you healthier, but then again, maybe not thinner, maybe not as much thinner as you want. Annie: I wonder how many of our listeners minds are just like blowing right now hearing that. Like, behaving in a healthy way will make you healthier, it might not make you thinner but it will improve your health. Dr. Mann: Isn’t it crazy that that’s mind blowing?  I said that to some radio guy one time and he’s like “I don’t know, that’s kind of a hard sell.” Lauren: You know, well, it’s only a hard sell because you have, you know, diet companies telling you the opposite everywhere all day, every day. Dr. Mann: Seriously, you know, And because people don’t actually value their health the way they all say they do. Jen: Yeah, they value thinness. Dr. Mann: Yeah, if people truly valued health, that wouldn’t be a remarkable thing to say at all. Jen: We had a psychologist post in our group the other day she had read your book preparing for this podcast and she said “I’m a psychologist and I’m reading this book and I feel my resistance towards it, like, I feel it” and she, but you know, she’s acknowledging, like, “This is programming. This is diet culture,” so she was trying to tell everybody, like, “I am a professional and I am resisting this, like, I have a mental block there that I don’t want to hear it. I still want to believe there’s a magic pill out there” and so of course, the general population that isn’t even educated with psychology, you know, of course, there’s a massive block there, massive. Dr. Mann: And I see that and I see that in anonymous comments out there, the people who come up to me are like, “This is freeing, this changes everything, hallelujah” and the people who are like, “I can’t, no, I must believe that I can lose a ton of weight and keep it off.” Yeah, I don’t hear from those people I just hear mean comments. Jen: Right, but they just pursue people who that, whose ideas support their, you know, how they want to see the world right and you know what, honestly, when I embraced these ideals, it was, I went through a pretty big slump of emotion, like, it was like grief. I had to grieve and because it was, yeah, it was, it was an idea that I had based a lot of my life around and spent a lot of time energy and money and the more invested you’re into something, the more you resist that it doesn’t work and trying to convince different gurus or fitness professionals that have built their whole careers and social followings on selling thinness, trying to convince them of that will be even harder because they are so deeply invested in it. Dr. Mann: Oh yeah, they’re the worst. Jen: And so I think a grieving process is like pretty normal when you, like, you have the freedom but then it’s like, you know, you go through these different stages of, like, “Oh, well that sucks” or you feel somebody shame come up and your trigger, that’s kind of your trigger that typically will take you into dieting behaviors to feel like you’re actually in control of that but you’re not and you’re just realizing, “I am not in control” and that can be very depressing, right but but also very freeing on the other side once you fully accept that/ Dr. Mann: Yeah, again, we just have to remember the one thing that truly, truly matters is our health. Jen: Yes. Absolutely. Dr. Mann: You know, have someone close to you die too young and suddenly it becomes very, very real, you know, you have nothing without your health. Jen: Right. Dr. Mann: So keep that in mind as the goal. The goal is health. Not some number on the scale and they don’t measure health with that number on the scale. Jen: Right and and including psychological health in that because I have had people around me succumb to eating disorders and that’s a very real thing in our society and it has very, anorexia has very high mortality rates and so- Dr. Mann: The highest of any mental illness. Jen: Yes and so and it’s just a horrible life, right even if you don’t, even if it doesn’t lead to you passing away and dying, it’s a horrible place to be and it is not healthy and it’s, you know, this is very real as far as, you know, a lot of people think of unhealthy as, you know, very large and morbidly obese and eating and eating but there is the other end where there’s a lot of people succumbing to eating disorders as well. Dr. Mann: Yeah, it’s true. Annie: Dr. Mann, I cannot thank you enough. This is so much fun. Is there a place that people can connect with you? Do you hang out on, I already stalked you on Instagram it doesn’t look like you’re- Dr. Mann: I never post, I’m basically on Instagram to spy on my 14 year old. I don’t expect he’ll see this. Annie: Excellent. Are you on Facebook or your website? Where can people catch up with you or stay on top of what you’re working on? Dr. Mann: I guess I’m on Facebook or Twitter more but again, on Facebook I post but mostly political stuff, on Twitter I only lurk, I’m there,  if you want to find me, if you want to talk to me, tweet at me. Annie: OK. Jen: OK. Dr. Mann: Or do the same on Facebook. Annie: Awesome we’ll put that in the show notes so people can connect with you if they want to follow up with you but this was so fun. It was just like talking to a friend that knows a lot about nutrition. Dr. Mann: It sounds like you’re doing awesome stuff so I’m so glad you’re out there doing it. Annie: Yeah, we’re trying. Jen: Thank you. Lauren: Thank you. Annie: OK, we’ll talk soon ladies, thanks for joining us. Jen: Bye. Lauren: Alright, bye!   The post 53: Secrets from the Eating Lab: Dr. Traci Mann appeared first on Balance365.

Can you love your body and still want to change it? The answer to this question depends greatly on who you ask. Some people in the body-positive camp think that weight loss and self-love can’t co-exist, while the diet and fitness industry encourages self-hatred. Does the truth lie somewhere in the messy middle? Tune in for Jen, Annie and Lauren’s discussion on the topic.   What you’ll hear in this episode: Has the body positivity pendulum swung too far? Change as a natural consequence of habits and behaviors Mindset blocks and change What research says about how much control you have over your body Altering appearance for self-expression Examining motivations for changes Being realistic about timing of changes Is there way too much overthinking going on? Mothering yourself Identifying when you need self-compassion and when you need tough love The answer to the question of the day!   Resources: Secrets From The Eating Lab Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Can self-love and a desire to change your physical being co-exist or are they a contradiction of one another? The answer to that question is debatable depending on who you’re asking. On one hand of the body positive camp say body love and weight loss can not co-mingle while it seems as if the rest of the diet industry requires a certain amount of body dissatisfaction as a prerequisite to change. There is no doubt in our minds that the push for body acceptance of all shapes and sizes is a much needed message but what about those individuals who want self-acceptance and still desire to change their bodies?This is a quite complex and messy topic and on today’s episode Jen, Lauren and I share Balance365’s stance on how you can strive for change that’s rooted in self-love and acceptance and joy. Ladies, welcome back to another episode how are you? Lauren: Good. Annie: Why? Why can’t you just answer the question? Jen: I feel like you need to address us individually because what happens is, what people can’t see behind the scenes is we are actually on a video conference call looking at each other so then you are like “Ladies, how are you?” and then Lauren and I stare at each other waiting for the other ones to answer first. Lauren: Who’s going to go first? Annie: Quit being so polite and just answer the question. Lauren, how are you doing? Lauren: I am so wonderful, how are you? Annie: I am golden, thank you. Jen, how are you? Jen: Also wonderful. Annie: I feel like that was just so surface-level answers but we’ll go with it. Jen: Well, if you want to do a deep dive in my problems lately. Annie: Would you like to schedule a coaching call with one of the Balance365 coaches. Jen: Well, I need a new podcast called the Jen show. And I’ll just get all weeps and vent. Annie: I do feel like you’ve used some of our podcast episodes to kind of sort through some of your own issues about exercise. Jen: Yeah, but you know what? It’s helpful for people because my problems are their problems. That’s the narcissist in me. I struggle with things a lot of women struggle with. It can be helpful to go through it with a coach. I actually have a really good idea for a podcast series and that’s to bring on Balance365ers on to the podcast and coach them through whatever block they’re struggling with and sending that out to all of our listeners. Don’t you think that’s a good idea? Annie: I do, yeah and all jokes aside, you’re right, you do have a problems. Jen: I am your average busy working mom that struggles to make time for self care and yeah, that’s why I think our podcast resonates with so many women because we all have surpassed 200,000 downloads I’ll just add that in too. We are not standing on our high horses telling everybody what to do, we struggle with all the same things, have struggled in the past currently or we may in the future so yeah, we’re all in this together. I hope everybody feels that way when they listen and talk to us. Annie: I feel like that just got really serious, like we started out all jokey. Lauren: It started out all good and quickly. Annie: You can always count on Jen- Lauren: To make it an intense counselling session. Annie: To turn it into a serious, sentimental intense conversation. Jen: I’m an INFJ. I like intense conversations. Lauren: I don’t remember what my letters are but they’re the opposite of Jen. Jen: Yeah, we could have called that without you going through the test. Annie: OK. All jokes aside, we do have a kind of a heavy topic today, it’s something, it’s a question that comes up so frequently in our community, so frequently in the diet and fitness world and something that we’ve addressed inside our community but not on the podcast yet and that is “Can you love your body and still want to change it?” and by changing it we mean address your body composition, gain weight, lose weight, change your appearance of some sort and that’s a pretty big snowball to tackle, right? And depending on who you ask you’re likely to get a variety of answers. Extreme body positive activists will tell you that body love and weight loss cannot co-exist, do not co-exist and on the flip-side many professionals in our industry or the diet industry in general as a whole that support weight loss believe that self loathing and body dissatisfaction is a prerequisite to changing a body and here we are as the 3 co-founders of Balance365 yet again in the messy middle, right? Lauren: Yup. Jen: Yup: Annie: And so we’re, you know, again, the answer to that question is going to depend on what camp you’re asking, right? So we’re going to answer this question or discuss some of the talking points that we consider when helping our community members evaluate “Can you love your body and still want to change it? Can they co-exist?” and I think we can all agree that this body acceptance movement or accepting yourself at every shape and size is a much needed message for our culture. But what we’re experiencing is that those who still want to make changes are kind of like, “Well, what about me? What do I do? What, like, how, where do I fall into?” and sadly, it feels like in some ways the pendulum has swung a bit too far in one direction, especially when members of our community are feeling shamed for wanting to change their body still or they’re keeping it a secret or they’re afraid to tell anyone. And that, to us, isn’t neutral or an expression of body autonomy which we are super supportive and this is tricky because on some levels what we do in Balance365 is give women the tools and support they need to reach their goals, which can include weight loss, while simultaneously encouraging them to love and accept themselves and there are people out there who believe that these two concepts contradict one another, which is kind of the debate of the moment, right? Now in our industry “Can you love yourself and want to change it?” Does that mean that you don’t ultimately love yourself if you still want to change yourself? Do you have any thoughts, Jen? Jen: Well, newsflash, almost any change, lifestyle change you make in your life and do consistently is going to change your body because our bodies are always in flux and although they are a representation of our genetics and our environment, they are also a representation of our habits. So I recently changed my mode of exercise. I have gone a couple years of just doing like shorter more intense workouts and now I’m back into a phase where I have the time and opportunity and support to do some heavy lifting. I’m actually going through the Arms Like Annie program that a lot of women in our community are which is a strength training program, full body strength training program, heavy weights and guess what? My body is going to change because that’s what bodies do, they adapt to the stresses you put them under. So this I really see as a big mindset block for a lot of people, whether it’s trying to hate their body to change or resisting change because they’ve learned to love their bodies. I got some really good advice this last spring. I was struggling with a certain mindset around business and money. I was at a conference and I was talking to a man who has built multiple companies and sold them and is a multi multi millionaire. He told me he lives on a street in San Francisco and sometimes he walks out and looks down the street and can’t believe that he could buy every house on the block if he wanted to. But he grew up extremely poor and so why we connected is because I grew up without a lot of financial privilege and I find that affects me today but the advice he gave me that I now see is so universal, he said “You are so busy fighting battles in your head that you are never going to be able to get out there and fight the war” and I honestly see this as one of those mindset blocks, one of those blocks that women run into like and makes them freeze and then they expend this time and energy on it. Do I want to change my body? Don’t I want to change my body? Why do I want to change my body? And then they’re just missing the whole thing that change needs to come from a place of self care and if you are taking action on something that feels like you are caring for yourself, nurturing yourself, mothering yourself, then who cares what the outcome is? Maybe your body will get smaller, maybe it will get bigger, I don’t know. Annie: You just ran through my 3 bullet points in like five minutes. Jen: I’m sorry. I did not read the outline. Annie: So Jen summarized that so well and so concisely we can just end the podcast now. I’m just kidding but you’re spot on. You’re, it’s such a good point that you’re so busy, what did you say? You’re so busy fighting battles- Jen: You’re so busy fighting battles in your head you’re never going to get out there and fight the war and this is what we deal with in an ongoing basis in Balance365, any of our Balance365ers listening will say, “Yeah, she’s right. I mean there are so many women posting daily working through these mindset blocks” and it’s really those different programmings that we have that keep us from actually taking action and doing the things that we want to do or need to do in our lives to feel our best, like our best selves. Lauren: Yeah I was writing something earlier about this kind of exact thing, like the mindset piece that we put first is so important because when you get through that the nutrition habits and exercise habits are so simple, like they’re simple. What trips us up is like these mindset blocks like you’re talking about. Annie: And you know, I just want to back up too and I hope this is inferred and I hope that you can just sense this about us by the way we carry ourselves and the way our program is written and laid out but we absolutely believe in body autonomy and we believe that the individual has control over who and what they use their body for and for what and how long and that means that we respect to variety of goals women may have for their bodies and women come to our program with goals of building self-love and healthy habits and some come with a clear goal of weight loss and we don’t place moral value on either goal over the other. We believe that they’re all worthy and we’re here to help women achieve their goals, whatever they are. Jen: We have women share with us in Balance365 that once they really get that self acceptance piece and love their bodies they’re so afraid of losing it because nobody wants to go back there once you’re not there anymore you don’t ever want to go back in that space. So then they start the habit building process and they start losing weight and that puts them into a negative space almost of self sabotage because weight loss then becomes triggering to them as in “Wait a sec. I worked so hard to love that body and now it’s changing again” and the other thing like, newsflash, our bodies are always going to change every single day we are getting older so our hormones are changing, we’re  getting wrinkles, we’re, you know, our hair color is changing. I mean, our bodies are always changing and I think that is the biggest acceptance piece that needs to happen is your body is always changing so stop this hypervigilance on trying to control it. Annie: Right and I think that getting clear on the why behind your desire to change your body can help answer some of those questions and so often we see women wanting to change their bodies and it’s rooted in self hate or this misconception that if you fix your body you’ll love your life and your life will be perfect and you’ll have the perfect body or ultimately that you want to feel worthy and you want to feel free of shame and you want to have this loving and belonging and it’s our experience that you can’t hate your body into loving yourself and nor can you hate your body into being healthy and if that had worked I think we would have a heck of a lot more “success stories” in our lives than we really do, right? Jen: The greatest act of self love is loving yourself when you think nobody else will, so when you aren’t fitting into society’s mold of what is lovable, right, so it’s, you know, so if you do have a larger body there is a lot of good and value there of learning to love and accept yourself at a larger size before, you know, before the weight loss journey comes, if it ever comes, you know, whatever your choice but you know, it’s like only loving your kids when they’re well behaved, right, like, when, you can just love your body when it’s doing what you want it to be doing and you can’t just love yourself when your behaviors are on point, right, your nutrition’s on point, your exercise is on point, your rockin’ life, you love yourself but then as soon as your behaviors are off track you’re filled with these self loathing thoughts. That’s not love, that’s just like surface level approval. Annie: That’s conditioned. That’s conditioned love. That’s not and ultimately I think what a lot of us would really like and are striving for is to love ourselves unconditionally. Meaning our body can look a variety of ways, our behaviors can look a variety of ways and we still can treat ourselves with compassion that we would so many other people in our lives. Jen: Yeah, another good analogy I use sometimes with women is I moved into a house, a new house about a year and a half ago and it’s an older house and there was people that lived here before us that decorated, painted, designed to this house in a way that suited them but is not to my tastes at all. So, for example, my bathroom is lime green and I hate it, I hate it but I still love my home. I am still grateful to live in this home. This is the nicest home I’ve ever lived in. Growing up as a little girl my mother couldn’t have dreamed of providing this kind of house for me as a kid so every day I wake up I feel like I’m living in my dream home but my bathroom is lime green. Yes, I do want to change that color eventually. I haven’t yet, it just, I haven’t had time, it has been the right time but eventually I will paint the bathroom, I will do some renovations around this house to change it but that doesn’t, that doesn’t take away from the unconditional love and gratitude I have for this home and I wish that people could feel that way about their bodies. Sometimes there are changes that you want to make and as long as those are realistic and within your realm of control the problem is there is just such polarizing views. There’s this whole view that you mentioned at the start, Annie ,there’s this whole idea that you have complete control over what your body looks like and then there’s the other end of the spectrum people saying “You actually have no control over what your body looks like so don’t even bother thinking about it” but I think it was Dr Tracy Mann, we’re interviewing her on our podcast pretty soon here which is really exciting but she has in her books that studies in her book Secrets From The Eating Lab, studies show that it’s in the middle, you know, as usual, we actually do- Lauren: That messy middle.   Jen: Yes, like you can’t change your genetics, of course, but there are certain behaviors we have in our life that will affect the way our bodies look and feel and I think her stats are we have about a 30 percent, 30 percent of the way we look is we’re able to manipulate, which is probably a lot less than some people think and a lot more than other people think and so it’s OK. It’s OK. You can have total love for your body. You can have gratitude for the body that you were given. You can have acceptance of the genes that you have and you can still say, “You know what, I would love to reduce my abdominal body fat and I am going to step forward making change in a way that will reduce the fat I have on my body and that is coming from a place of self-love and self care and also being realistic.” Annie: And I think the important distinction there, Jen, that you’re, in terms of your bathroom, is striving for change doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just different. It’s not good or bad- Jen: Yeah. Annie: I mean I mean to you the lime green might be bad but- Jen: Yeah, I mean, but how some people behave about their bodies is that, taking it back to the house, they would just throw gas around this house and light it on fire like that because they don’t like the way the bathroom looks and here’s the thing, it’s also knowing that there’s a time to address that and not right, like, I have recognized over the last 18 months that trying to make any changes to the interior of my home were just not realistic. I just haven’t had the time or the resources or the money to pay somebody so we haven’t done it and there’s a time to change and then there’s a time to hold the line and just, but you can still wake up every morning and be grateful, right, like it doesn’t have to be something urgent in, like, you know, you can’t love yourself or respect yourself until you have this but I mean, we talk about it in terms of bodies but I mean there’s a lot of people that get hysteria over their house as well because it’s where they live in. Annie:  Yeah or you love your job, you enjoy your job but you want to improve in a particular skill set or – Jen: Yes. Annie: You enjoy your marriage, you love your spouse, your partner, your significant other but you wish you could spend more time on date nights or as you noted you love your children but you wish they would listen better at bedtime but you can, we believe wholeheartedly, that you can want to change an aspect or an element of yourself, your appearance, your being, whatever it is and that come from self love, that come from a place of love and care and admiration for yourself, versus- Jen: It’s not that you are more or less worthy with these changes, which is really that key component, right, like I go in and color my hair, I get blonde highlights every 3 or 4 months or so or 10 months. And it’s like, I just like it and I don’t see myself as the less worth, if I, you know, for whatever reason, if I had to go back to my, you know, grow it all out and have it just have my natural hair color, I wouldn’t be like, you know, feeling awful about myself, it would just be “Oh, like, I love coloring my hair. I wear makeup, you know.” There’s all these things, right but like- Lauren: Our outward appearance can be an expression right we are and people have different preferences, people like different hair colors and different hair styles and different makeup styles, that’s OK. It doesn’t mean like we don’t love ourselves if we’re not wearing makeup and that’s how we can use that analogy when we’re talking about our bodies. Like, you don’t have to, we say this all the time, you don’t have to love every little tiny part to love the whole, right? Annie: That’s exactly how I feel about muscles, to me they’re like an accessory, like they’re like my favorite accessory. It is honestly, it’s an act of self-expression for me to have visible muscles. Now if for whatever reason I didn’t have the visible muscles, you know, it might be an adjustment but I ultimately know that I am a human of value, of worth, just innately, not because I look a certain way, not because I can do certain things in the gym with my muscles that look a certain way. I just have value because I’m a human, as do all all women, and I mean and it’s so easy for us to see as mothers and all, we could say the same thing about our kids, like, why do our kids have value? Just because they are, just because they’re beings, they’re living, breathing humans but to give ourselves that same sense of value and worth seems so difficult. Jen: Yeah I think what happens is people, they just, they overthink this and it gets people in a tizzy on both ends whether it’s from believing you can’t love yourself until you look a certain way or believing that if you’re making changes you don’t love yourself, you know, there’s just way too much overthinking going on. Annie: So what with the approach that we’ve already kind of touched on that we take in our program is we encourage our members to adopt a self-love approach to change and if weight loss is the way in which you want to change your body, it can be a by-product of your habits and a way that you care for yourself. Jen: Yeah and it’s always a byproduct of your habits, always, right? So when you are, like, we’ve covered this in previous podcasts, but you can’t just say, snap your fingers and lose 10 pounds. Annie didn’t snap her fingers and grow muscles. All changes are a byproduct of our habits and so once you start looking at changes as a byproduct of your habits then you can look at the habits required and or the skills you need to develop in order to see that change and you can decide if that is self love and self care for you, right? Annie: And you posed a really great question, a thread came up in Balance365 last week and the question you posed in response to her is “Is this goal about health and love and self-care or is this about achievement and ideal?” Jen: Right. Annie: And that can maybe help you distinguish the why behind this. Is this coming from a place of love or is this coming from some other place that really isn’t worth perpetuating. Jen: Right, like I could be leaner than I am right now, I am quite comfortable in my body with my body weight but I have been 20 to 25 pounds leaner than I am now. I can go back to that life but there is a point where the extreme that I would have to take goes from a place of self-love and self care into self harm, right, so I, you know, I eat really balanced meals, I pay attention to my nutrition, eat when I’m hungry, stop when I’m satisfied, exercise regularly, take care of my mental health. If I wanted to lose 20 pounds at this point I would have to pay very, very close attention to my nutrition and to me that takes me into a place of self harm and it doesn’t feel well and that’s sort of my guiding compass as far as is this coming from a place of self care or is this coming from a place of self harm? Lauren: I really like that, like, how does it feel? Jen: How does this feel for you? Yeah. Annie: Yes And unfortunately there are people in our industry that would encourage you to power through that feeling. Jen: They do all the time in the fitness industry. All the freaking time. Annie: They would say “This is a prerequisite. This is a requirement that you regulate this negative self talk or pushing yourself past this comfort zone is something that’s required to achieve these goals that are ultimately of high value, right?” Jen: They describe it as a plateau, right, that you have to push through, which sometimes it, like, I mean, that’s the thing about, you’ve really got to know yourself, right, because sometimes there’s value in pushing through, right, like sometimes you don’t, every time it gets hard you don’t want to give up and walk away. Sometimes there’s hard things that you have to work through but the self harm piece is like “Is this sustainable for you? Are you willing? Are you going to do this forever?” And there’s been different times in my life, like for example, right now I get up at 5:30 in the morning to work out and start my workout at 6 and yeah, there are some days that I don’t want to do that but I push through and I’m always happy afterwards. Right now that behavior comes from a place of self care. When I had a newborn, if I would have insisted on that behavior with a newborn baby when I wasn’t sleeping all night and I was pushing myself to get up at 5:30 to work out at 6, that becomes self harm, right, because it means I am going with less and less and less sleep. I’m not even getting enough sleep to recover from my workouts. So those are really self assessment questions that you need to ask yourself and that nobody can answer except for you. Annie: And that’s exactly why we don’t prescribe weight loss or have weight loss goals or goals in general for our community members because no one knows your body better than you do, not even us who work with thousands of women on a daily basis, like, we don’t know you as well as you do and so we really just want to encourage you to pull that reflection inward and say like, “What is this about? Like, can I love my body and want to change it at the same time?” and maybe for you the answer is like “No, I can’t right now. First I have to work on loving myself, you know. Jen: So we recently had a community member share that she thought she had fat loss goals and she was ready to dig in on those fat loss goals but after some self assessment she’s realized that that actually is not a healthy space for her to be in right now and she loves the idea of just focusing on habits and letting her body be what it’s going to be and that is the ultimate form of acceptance for her and that’s where she’s at right now and we are like “A round of applause, girlfriend” because really, all we want for people is to own their life Annie: Yeah, and, you know, just some of these concepts we talk about are kind of heavy and they’re philosophical but, you know, so often what we hear, what this change looks like, this shift which can be so subtle and so small and sometimes you don’t even realize that it’s happening to people around you is that all of a sudden, you know, we’re exercising because, as Jen said, “It leaves me feeling better. I feel more confident. I have more energy throughout the day” versus “I’m getting up at 530 to punish myself because I want to change my body because I hate my body so much and I just can’t stand another day living in my own skin.” I mean, the behavior looks the same on the outside but on the inside, Jen knows this is coming from a place of self-love and self care. Jen: Yeah we often say and I think we’ve said in the podcast before, “it’s not about the what the people are doing it’s about the why and how they go about it.” That’s where the dysfunction and disorder, that’s where it can be found. Annie: Yeah, and I mean, the same can be true for how you feed your body, how you speak to your body and you know, are you feeding yourself balanced meals because your body deserves to be nourished and again, you feel better when you have balanced meals or are you starving or removing whole food groups or eating foods you don’t like because, again, you loathe your body and you want to change it and if you change your body, you change your life and if you change your life then you have less problems.” Jen: Right, the thing I love and I’ll let Lauren elaborate on this but somebody posted in our group in the last, I don’t know, year sometime, she asked about protein bars and she said “But aren’t protein bars diety?” and then you replied, Lauren, do you want to share that? Lauren:  Yes, I don’t remember exactly what I replied but I’ll say what I think about it now. So there’s no, like, diet food or not diet food, right? Like you walk into a restaurant and like two women are eating the exact same thing, they’re both eating a salad and one person restricted themselves and they’re punishing themselves for what they ate yesterday or they’re punishing themselves because they hate their body and the other person is eating to nourish their body and it makes them feel good so that’s why they’re eating their salad, right, like just like Jen said, it’s not always about the what, it’s about the why. Jen: Does it come from a place of deprivation or does it come from a place of abundance and self care? Annie: Exactly and again, they can look the same on the outside. Jen: Exactly. Annie:  On the surface. You might not be able to tell, you might not be able to distinguish and that’s why it’s so important that you get really in tune with yourself and what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and that can help you discern, is this self-love or is this self-hate are these behaviors rooted in? And you know, I just, we say this all the time and it can’t be said enough, we have a saying that “We take great care of things we love and your body is no exception” and I think about all the things that I take care of in my life, between relationships with girlfriends, my children, even my house plants, for heaven’s sakes and I want them to feel comfortable and safe and confident and thrive and grow and expand and live this vibrant life, I’m not degrading them, I’m not starving them, I’m not depriving them. I’m actually treating them really sweetly and kindly and with love and encouragement and sometimes that looks like- Jen: Sometimes there’s tough love built into that. Annie: Yes, like, “Jen, do you want to stay in bed because your bed is warm and cozy and it’s cold outside and it’s dark but I know ultimately this is the goal I committed to and I’m going to feel good” Like, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. Jen: Absolutely. Actually, my mantra, you know, these days I’ve been struggling a bit. And my mantra is “Mother. I’m mothering myself right now.” Like I have just needed, I have needed some tough love lately and it’s not that I’m, like, being a drill sergeant to myself it’s that “Would my mother let would let me stay up and watch Netflix to 1:30 AM when I have to be up at 6 you know 5 nights in a row?” Like, no, and so that’s sometimes where the tough love has to come in but a mother, well, a mother knows. A mother knows when to push and a mother knows when to pull back, right, we do it for our kids every single day but yet for ourselves it’s like we want to put ourselves into like one box and just like stay there either because we see pendulum swing with self-compassion to, right, we see all the time women are like “Oh I’ve watched Netflix for 3 days but self care, right? and it’s like, “I don’t know. I’m not you so I don’t know if that was self care for you or not but I know for a lot of people you have moved from self care to like numbing and avoiding.” And like you know, like, my mother, if I was sick I might watch T.V. for 3 days but if I wasn’t sick my mother, you know, there’s not a lot of mothers out there who would be letting their kids just sit and watch T.V. for 3 days. Annie: After a day she would be like, “OK get off the couch.” Jen: Get outside, right? My parents used to do that all the time, like, “Get your butts outside now,” right, and so you bring it back to that and go like mother yourself. Have you gotten some fresh air today? Have you gotten some movement in? Are you eating balanced meals? You know, eating, you know, high sugar treats all day long, no that’s not self care day after day after day and that’s certainly not balance. Annie: So, you know, I think, this is just my own personal experience but I’ve heard it echoed in the stories of women we’ve worked with in the past is that they kind of are like, “Yeah, OK, I get that some women love themselves and they’re treating themselves well because they love themselves that much. That’s great for them, however for me I’m used to fueling my workouts and my food and fitness choices from self-hate and I’m worried that if I love myself that I’m just going to become lazy and I’m going to eat all the foods and I’m just going to lose all my motivation and I’m going to get complacent, right?” Jen: That’s how it feels when you’ve been in a place of control for so long, I mean what happens to the teenagers who move out of their family home at 18 that have been living under very rigid controlling rules. They go to college and they go nuts, right? Like we will always rebel against these rules. Annie: Lauren and I are like “Yep.” Jen: Yes, so it’s sort of like, you know, it’s just, it’s human nature, right it’s just human nature and so a lot of people might see their pending swing but eventually you need to like sit up and go and you just need to mother yourself, that’s what you have to do and I find that quite effective in knowing when I need a little tough love and when I need some compassion, right. So if my kids were really emotional, you know, school ends, they’re super emotional, they’re fighting, they’re just not doing well, I can look at them and have some self compassion and go like “These kids are tired, like, we’re going to turn the T.V. on a little early today because they they need some downtime, they need to skip their chores today, they’ve got no energy, you know, or emotional regulation skills like this.” Because you you look at your kids and you just assess, right, you’re always assessing what they need and that changes day to day and I think we can do that for ourselves too. We can do a much better job of it than women traditionally have been doing. We’ve just, we live under so many rules, right, like I just think women actually live under so, not just for ourselves but in our society there are so many rules and a societal construct that women always are living around that I think when we do find ourselves in that space of having free time, we may find ourselves in a rebellious space a lot because we actually have no idea how much unconscious time and energy we spend on, like, subscribing to these rules. Lauren: Preach. Annie: Word. So the anti-climatic answer to our question that I posed at the beginning of this podcast is “Can you love your body and want to change it?” is, I mean, Yes/It really depends and that’s something that you have to answer on an individual level. I personally can sit here and say with great confidence that I have changed my body as a complete act of self-love. Or self-love has resulted in a body change is maybe a better way to put it. But not everyone that changes their body is acting out of self love and vice versa and again our bodies are meant to change they’re fluid. They’re ever changing, they’re always changing, especially as women of childbearing age, I mean, my body looks so different than it did a year ago and I’m 2 plus years postpartum, like, it’s till changing from pregnancy I feel like, I mean, my hair for heaven sakes is still changing. But I think, you know, we’re, as usual, we feel like the truth to that question is somewhere in the middle. We are not on either side of one extreme camp or the other and we really want to help put women in the driver seat to answer that question on their own terms, in a way that serves them and feels good to them and anything we can help women, any way that we can help women come across that answer is good for us. Jen: Yes. Annie: All right, good one. Jen: Lauren will go zip in in the background go ” Preach.” We should get you a t-shirt that says “What she said.” Annie: OK, well, yet another great topic with yet another awkward ending in the bag but this is good. This is a good conversation that I think needed to we needed to address on our podcast because again, we’ve discussed it so many times in our community, which again, if you’re aren’t in there and you want to join it’s Healthy Habits Happy Moms on Facebook. The three of us are in there, we’ve got some awesome moderators and a great community system if you want to continue the discussion on loving your body and still changing it or how you can begin making changes from a place of self-love. It will be a great place to learn so I hope to see you inside and ladies we will chat soon, OK. Lauren: Bye. Jen: Bye.   The post 50: Can You Love Your Body And Still Want To Change It? appeared first on Balance365.

  Diet culture is often so subtle that it can be hard to even identify. On today’s episode Jen, Lauren and Annie tackle the big topic of diet culture: what it is, what it looks like, how it’s harmful and some practical advice on how we can begin to dismantle this hurtful, oppressive system. While this topic is broad and deep, this conversation is the tip of the iceberg and a thought-starter for future conversations. What you’ll hear in this episode: What is diet culture, what does it look like, what does it sound like? Before and after photos – why are they problematic? The impacts of diet culture on the individual, family, and community Making informed choices as consumers to support or not support diet culture How socio-economic factors impact health Thin privilege and how it impacts lives Health, race, and representation in images of health How kids are impacted by diet culture How different healthy weight is for women individually Diet culture and how it creates weight gain How to turn diet culture around Nourishment as a concept that goes beyond food Curating your environment to fight diet culture Resources: Episode 24: Before And After Photos – Comparison, The Thief Of Joy Getting Older: Hillary Mcbride On Women And Aging Linda Bacon’s book Body Respect Setting Body Talk Boundaries Over The Holidays Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: Welcome back to another episode of Balance365 Life Radio, we have more than enough research to show that diets don’t work. We know this yet people still continue to diet over and over and over again. Why? Well, it’s likely large in part because dieting is a big part of our culture: diet talk, weight talk, negative body talk. It’s everywhere from office conversations to gabbing with your girlfriends over drinks to the marketing on our food, books, and commercials. Diet culture is often so subtle that it can be hard to even identify. When everyone around you is seemingly celebrating weight loss at all costs and bonding overeating “good” foods and say no to “bad” ones it can be difficult to take a stand against a culture. On today’s episode Jen, Lauren and I tackle the big topic of diet culture: what it is, what it looks like, how it’s harmful and how we can begin to dismantle this hurtful, oppressive system. We know that this is just the tip of the iceberg of a very important topic and discussion and we invite you to continue this discussion on the inside of our private Facebook group Healthy Habits Happy Moms. See you on the inside! Lauren and Jen! We’re back with a big, big topic today, are you ready for this? Jen: Ready. Lauren: Ready. Annie: You’ve got your game faces on, you guys. We’re discussing the term diet culture. What is diet culture? Which, the reason why we want to address this is because diet culture is a term and a phrase that we use frequently in our community and in our content and we really haven’t stopped to kind of unpack what this is, right? And we’re just going to dive right into it because I think we could spend a lot of time talking about this and we want to make sure that we do it justice and who knows, we might have to come revisit this. We’ll see how far we can get on our outline, right, but we know that diets don’t work and this is not a new topic. If you’re new to our podcast that might be a new concept to you but if you have been around our community and our podcast for a while, you know that diets don’t work and the research is there to support it and in fact, the research shows that most people are able to lose weight in the year but the vast majority gain it back with the majority of people gaining back more than they lost within 5 years and to echo the research that’s already out there that supports diets don’t work, we’ve surveyed our community and an overwhelmingly amount of our community have tried dieting and they’ve “failed” yet many women keep dieting, right? We see this all the time, like, people try diets, they don’t have success but they keep dieting and why is that? We would offer that it’s, unfortunately, part of our culture, right? Jen: It’s deeply ingrained in our culture to diet. Lauren: Yes. Annie: Yes. And so what we want to discuss today is what is diet culture, what it looks like, what it feels like, what are the consequences of living in a culture obsessed with dieting and spoiler alert: it’s everywhere. Jen: And yeah, a really good analogy I have is we also live, well I do, personally, where I live, I live in a car culture, a commuting culture, so public transport is not good where I live. You essentially have to have a car to participate in our society and imagine not having a car, how difficult that would make things for you and people would be surprised, like, “You don’t have a car? How do you get around?” So if you compare that to living in a diet culture, it’s the same thing. It’s actually very difficult to not to diet in our culture and it can make your life actually feel harder, initially than participating in the culture. Annie: Because you feel like you’re going against the grain. Jen: You are going against the grain and our society isn’t set up to support people who are not making, who are choosing to not do that. Annie: And because diet culture is so subtle, it can be really hard to identify what it is and what it isn’t and you might not be familiar with the term yet, diet culture, if you’re new to our community but I promise you, you have experienced it and I just want to share just, I pulled these out of a hat off the top of my head when I was reviewing for this podcast some of the ways in which you might have experienced a culture that I think are pretty common. Phrases like “I’m going to be bad and order fries” or how we compliment pregnant women for being “all belly” or tell them how great they are looking after giving birth. Jen: Yes. Or  “You don’t even look pregnant” etc. Annie: Yes.  People who lose weight are consistently applauded for and praised without question or you might hear phrases like “I’m on a new diet”, “How is your diet going? Have you tried this diet? I lost weight with this diet.” Jen: Yeah or “I’m off my diet.” Annie: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I’m sure many of you listening are probably nodding in your head in agreement that you’ve heard those types of conversations, you’ve seen those behaviors and they’re so common in our daily lives and these are the examples of what diet culture is, could be or what it sounds like are endless but- Jen: Yeah, before and after photos are a really problematic thing in our society and some of our listeners might be in the fitness industry and they might use before and after photos and I just want to say that it’s not, I know the intent isn’t there, I mean you might be coming from a really good place trying to showcase your client’s results and the intent might not be there but you certainly are profiting off of the fear that’s already there and that’s just something I would like our colleagues to sit with. Annie: Which is difficult because that’s something we as a company have struggled with which we have a whole podcast on before and afters and what the consequences of using them can be. We have gone back and forth, should we use them, should we not use them. Because they are effective, I mean, you see them, not even in a professional setting, you know, a girlfriend post that she lost 20 pounds or whatever in a post before and after on just her personal Facebook page and people break their necks looking at it, right? Jen: Right. Lauren: Right. Annie: And, you know, again, that’s diet culture, where we applaud these people for weight loss or think if they’re a better person or more disciplined or of higher moral virtue because they lost weight and we don’t even stop to question “Are they actually healthier? Do they do they feel better? How did they go about achieving that?” like, “Could this person just be sick?” I mean, like, there are so many options other than “this was intentional and they automatically feel better” but let’s just define it, right, this is, the definitions vary from source to source but in general diet culture is a society that focuses on and values weight shape and size over health and wellbeing. It worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue. It promotes weight loss as a means of attaining a higher status. It demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others and it oppresses people who don’t match up with the supposed picture of health which disproportionately harms trans, bigger bodies, people with disabilities, people of color and it can be damaging to both mental and physical health. Lauren: Right. Jen: Right because they just, they aren’t represented in a diet culture. Annie: Yeah, and- Lauren: This is not something we’re even conscious or aware of, right? The fact that it’s so embedded in our culture, is it’s just what we’ve grown up with, it’s what we’re taught to do and you know, we’re not consciously aware of these thoughts or behaviors sometimes, it’s just there. Jen: My social media feed used to be filled with before and after photos because those are the types of pages I followed. Just diet pages, weight loss pages, fitness professionals that were constantly posting before and afters of themselves and their clients and so essentially, anytime I was on social media, which for a lot of women is quite a bit, I was looking at before and after photos and that absolutely affects the way you think and see the world. Lauren:  And how you feel about yourself. Jen: Yeah. Annie: And it’s in the marketing of our foods, too. I had a FaceTime conversation with Jen about this topic last week and I got off the phone after talking about diet culture, opened up my fridge and here my yogurt says “light and fit”, you know, to me that’s ingrained diet culture or you know, we’re calling foods “guilt free” or there’s guilt, you know, I think- Jen: It is, it is honestly everywhere and back to the car analogy, it’s like, it’s like roads are everywhere, if you came across a spot in a city that had no roads to drive down, you would go, “What on earth is going on here?” You just take for granted that roads are going to be everywhere and in our society diet culture is everywhere, everywhere. Annie: And again, it also, you know, we’ll talk about this how it oppresses certain populations in a little bit as well but we’re really just seeing one type of body, which we were talking about this before we even started recording, it’s thin white women, you know, in the diet industry. Jen: Of a certain age. Annie:  Of a certain age, yes and that can be really harmful and if you don’t stop to question these things, you’ll probably just go with the flow, you know, you’ll just kind of keep swimming with everyone else. Jen: I used to model, which I’ve shared in the podcast before, and I was told at 19 that I was getting old for modeling and that if I hadn’t made it internationally by the time I was 21 that I did not have a future in modeling so that is an indicator of the types of models that we’re seeing. They are very, very young. Annie: Babies. Jen: Yeah. Like most girls go big when they’re like 14 and I was told at 14 by a model agent that I had the perfect body, like, I was perfect at that point to be a model, to have a career as a model in women’s fashion magazines when I was 14 years old. Annie: At 14. Yeah, yeah, you’re selling to adult women as a 14-year old that’s a crazy concept to wrap your head around. Jen: Yes. Annie: But, you know, in addition to talking about what it is and what it looks like and what it feels like, I really want to spend a fair amount of time to on why it matters because, you know, before I was familiar with the concept of diet culture, I thought it was just kind of like on a really individual level, you know, like, I thought like, “Oh, this is just what how this person is choosing to spend their time” and I wasn’t really aware of how it impacted our community or our society and Jen, you know, you said on a previous podcast, like, we talk about how we want society to change or how we want our culture to change, well, that starts with us. Jen: Yeah, we are society, we’re part of it. Annie: We’re part of it. Jen: Yeah. Annie: Yes, so let’s talk about why it’s harmful because it’s harmful to individuals, it’s harmful to families and it’s harmful to communities and the first one, which we kind of touched on is it oppresses a large majority of the population on an individual level, you know, just on ourselves, it encourages people to believe that they are less than until they achieve some level of weight loss or fitness goals, right. It makes you engage in self-doubt, you doubt yourself, you feel like you can’t trust your own instincts. It lures you into thinking that you failed because you couldn’t stick to your diet plan and oftentimes people that are engaged in that kind of thinking are thinking things like “I can’t do this because I look like this. I can’t do this because my body is this” and I have personally experienced that. I remember my husband wanting me to go rock climbing and I couldn’t, like, I was too worried about could I, am I going to fit into the harness? Is the harness going to hold me? Is this something that my body is allowed to do, like, and it turns out I could have, I just was too wrapped up in thinking- Jen: You were too big to do this. Annie:  Yeah, the self-doubt that that was my limiting factor, right. And then on a community level, it contributes to a culture that makes it acceptable to treat people as less than because of their bodies, right and in fact, when I was researching this there was one study that I came across that it noted that 15 percent of hiring managers, only 15 percent of hiring managers, would hire an overweight woman for a job. So essentially it’s allowing employers to see overweight people as sloppy or lazy and just not hire them. Jen: Yeah and so you don’t see the person or their skills or their education, you see the body. Annie: And we’ve talked about that, or talked around about that, you know, about how what it looks like when you go to McDonald’s and sit and have you know a cheeseburger and French fries versus what it looks like when a larger body goes to McDonald’s. Jen: Yes, thin women can post photos on social media of eating like a whole pizza and be proud of it and people will high 5 them and I think there’s even, I read a blog post a couple years ago, I can’t remember the author now but basically it showed comments under this photo of a like a thin, gorgeous girl eating a huge pizza and there were males saying “Oh,  that’s so sexy” and then next to a photo of a really large woman eating a whole pizza and the comments were “That is so disgusting.” Annie: That’s just heartbreaking and eye-opening. Jen: It’s awful. As far as going, “Hey”, like trying to address the diet culture we live in and your everyday behaviors and the way you talk and think around it, like, that’s really what we’re trying to address here, right, like there are people that are seriously hurt because of some of your unconscious everyday behaviors that contribute to upholding a society that oppresses A lot of people in our culture. Annie: And you know, I have no doubt that there are people with hearts of gold and good intentions that are engaging in diet culture like Jen: Absolutely, I mean, there’s probably still areas of my life if I really dug in, I mean, that’s all part of our work, right, is unraveling that. Annie: Yeah, it’s oftentimes not intentional. It’s just, you know, what you’ve learned, what people of before you have done, what you’ve seen other people do, what you’ve heard other people say, you know, I remember, like, early as a trainer talking about concepts that I, that would make me cringe now in terms of diet culture and it’s like, when you know better you can do better and that’s part of what we want this podcast to do today is just start creating some discussion and awareness about what diet culture is and how it impacts our lives. Jen: Yeah, I even recently have been thinking about something. So I love LuluLemon leggings, they are my favorite. They fit me so well and they’re really good quality, I love them and recently a bigger woman called me on shopping there. She said “You are supporting a company that will not carry my size and has openly had the founder talk about that they don’t cater to women my size” and I felt really uncomfortable and that’s something so I’m just, full disclosure, being open about my own journey but I’m really kind of sitting with that and going like “Am I going to be OK with that that they don’t carry over a certain size and I’m going to keep shopping there or can I keep shopping there but bring it up to management, write letters, like, you know, what can I do?” Like, because I don’t feel good about that and then the other one was Victoria’s Secret which I have vocally and openly called out that company for years and years now of their objectification of women. And they recently went public on record to say that they don’t make larger sizes because that’s not their market and they don’t want to sell to women in that market and I have not supported Victoria’s Secret for years and years but that is just something for us all to think about, right, like would you would you keep supporting a company that said they don’t want to sell to black women? Annie: Right. Jen: Like that’s not their market? Or disabled people? Sorry, our store is not wheelchair accessible because we don’t want, we don’t want people who are in wheelchairs in this store. Annie: Yeah. When you take it out of the terms of bodies and when you put it in that context, it’s a no brainer, right? Jen: Yeah and I mean that is part of living in a diet culture that we all so, we don’t even think about that oppression of larger people, right, so, you know, and as soon as you take it into that context of color or ability then it’s like “Oh, wow, no, that’s awful” but then you bring it back to bodies and you’re like “Is that awful? I don’t know. I have to think about that.” Because it’s just so ingrained that you really have to think about it. So those are some thoughts I’ve been sitting with lately just being honest with our audience that it is a journey and you will continually realize that there are ways that you contribute to supporting diet culture. Annie: Well, I mean, yeah and just again, all the ways that it shows up in your life. I mean my drink of choice used to be a skinny latte from Starbucks or like eating skinnypop popcorn, two things that I really enjoy I hate the name. Lauren:  Yeah. Annie: Why did they have to be named that? And you know, so can we just call it nonfat lattes? Jen: Yes. Annie: Like yes, yes i can. I don’t have to engage in that or I can stop buying that product as you noted or I can call it something else or you know, my light and fit Greek yogurt, sorry, Yoplait. I don’t like the name, I like your yogurt, I don’t like the name. In addition though to, going back to how it’s harmful, oppressing individuals and on a community level, it also hurts, as Jen noted ,people of color, those with disabilities, people live in poverty because they’re just less likely to be able to access the tools that some people believe can “cure” or address some of these health-related issues or size-related issues such as health care, gym memberships, nutrient-dense food and in fact, I went back and reference Linda Bacon’s book Body Respect, which is a great book if you haven’t read it. And she notes that social and societal differences account for the largest part of the population’s health, even more so than behaviors, biology or genes so really, like the culture, the socioeconomic status that you are brought up in, you’re raised in that you’re living in, plays a bigger, way bigger role than what you’re choosing to eat or- Jen: Yeah, I often say, like, if you are going to be talking about the health of our society and losing your mind over obesity rates, you better be bringing socio-economic conditions into that conversation and letting me know what you are doing to bridge that divide in socio-economic situations across your culture because you cannot stand on your platform and talk about how everybody just needs to eat healthier, you know, what I mean? Once you start understanding the big picture you start to understand actually how useless- Lauren:  Like all you need to do is buy all organic produce, lean meats that are grass-fed, get the special bulletproof coffee drink and you’ll be good to go, right? Jen: Right, it’s elitist, it really only helps- Annie: Privileged people. Jen: People in privileged people, right, helps or harms, that’s a whole other question because if you already have those privileges, you know, somebody is just making you anxious about not being privileged enough or perfect enough then, you know, it’s, anyways so yeah, I mean, part of our work, if we really do care about the health and wellbeing of our society is about how to raise children up out of poverty so that we can see them with better outcomes in life, right? Annie: And just, again, going back to the definition of diet culture, you know, that it promotes thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, like, you know,  I’m not any better or worse than someone that’s going to the gym or that has a gym membership or that eats organic bananas than is, you know, than someone that eats conventional bananas, like, but so often we do, we praise people that have those behaviors, that have access to those services or memberships that’s like, they’re doing something right, right?  They’re just better. Jen: Yeah but people love to hear that, like, people love to hear, people love rags to riches stories and so you, like, even I look back on myself, you know, I am a thin, white woman, like I have so many privileges in our society because just because of those things. I was born Caucasian and thin. But I even look back on, you know, the way I used to pat myself on the back, like, as if I was just this, like, awesome hard worker and it’s not that I didn’t work hard for certain things, you know, for my education, for everything that I have today for, you know, that I do work out and consistent with exercise but you know, there was a time in my life where it was an elitist thing almost, like, I thought I was, you know, just extra special for whatever reason but it turns out I actually was born with a headstart in life that a lot of people didn’t have and for somebody to start a health and wellness company and grow it to what we’ve grown ours to in the last 4 years as a fat woman of color, now that is hard work. Do you know what I mean? Like, there’s just certain privileges that the 3 of us have that allowed us to, that people will take advice from us online because we’re all thin. Annie: Yeah it’s that this is a heavy topic. Jen: It’s uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable for us to acknowledge our own privileges, like it really is but it’s so important in order to, if you want to see more equality in our society, like, women, we talk about it all the time, wanting equality with men and that seems to be an easier conversation to flow. But then, you like, let’s talk about all equality, right, and then that means it’s easy to sit back and be a victim of inequality but like what if you are a perpetuator of inequality, like that is uncomfortable. Annie: Yeah. Jen: But that is so important. We expect men to do it, right, we want men to do it. Annie: To be able to objectively look at our behaviors and say, like, “I could be potentially contributing to the problem” It’s like- Jen: Yeah like here are small ways- Annie: It’s hard to face. Jen: Here are small ways. Yeah, exactly. Annie: Absolutely. OK, so backing up, how it’s harmful. It oppresses a large majority of the population, I mean, when we say large, like, that’s pretty much everyone except for thin white people, I mean, which is, like, that leaves a lot of people out, that’s really exclusive. Jen: Yes. So just if, people who are struggling understand this, if you go do a google image search of and just type in like “health and fitness” you will be met with images, 99 percent of the images that come up are, like, thin white people. Annie: Yeah. Jen: I feel like I need to do that real quick. Lauren: I’m doing it right now. Jen: OK just to make sure I’m right. Annie: I just, as you know, as a personal trainer I know that I’ve searched personal trainer images it’s all white men. Jen: Or if you type in healthy women, so I just typed in healthy women on a google image search and I’m scrolling to the scrolling, scrolling, I saw one black woman, one, rest, oh here’s a woman laying in a bed of fruit with a tape measure wrapped around her waist. So yeah, it’s just thin white women, that’s all it is. Annie: Yeah and that’s not, that’s not true representational, truly representational of health. Jen:  Absolutely not. You feel, then, the idea of diet culture is that you have to be a thin white woman to be healthy. Annie: Yeah. Lauren: Right. Annie: And that so far from the truth that it’s ridiculous. OK. Moving on. Another reason it’s harmful, one of the many reasons diet culture is harmful is that our kids are catching on quickly to this culture, the the new normal of these behaviors and conversations. We’ve shared these statistics so many times. I’m going to share them again because, like, it needs to be heard again and again and again. Over 80 percent of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat. 80 percent of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat. 53 percent of 13 year old American girls are unhappy with their bodies. The number grows to 78 percent by the time they reach 17, by middle school 40 to 70 percent of girls are dissatisfied with 2 or more of their body parts and I mean, that’s just 3 of the many alarming statistics. And inside of Balance365, Jennifer, you share an observation from author Jan Jacobs Brownsburg, do your remember this, when you wrote about this? How she had been studying girls diaries. Jen: Yeah, yeah it’s in the 1st chapter of Balance365. Annie: And you read her book and you noted that she was writing about how girls, she was studying girls diaries and how these girls were writing about a desire to better themselves and she notes that the difference was pre-war, they were talking about being the self development was focused on helping others and putting more effort into school or reading and by the 1990s bodies had become a preoccupation, that they were writing about. Jen: And appearance and makeup and fashion and yes so this is also such a hard conversation because what if you really like fashion, you know? Where Hilary McBride pointed out in our of the last podcast we did with her. You know, are our interests and beliefs and you know, all of that, is that who we are or is that shaped by our culture? And so- Lauren: It’s messy. Jen: It’s very messy, right and but yes, so basically that book looked at what girls valued and how they wanted to better themselves 100 years ago versus today and that there are there’s just been a dramatic shift in values over the last 100 years where I think most women would say “Gosh, like, you know, I wish, I wish my daughter was more focused on school than boys and makeup and all of that but that’s the culture we live in” Like, you can say one thing as a parent, “Hey, this is where you should invest your time and energy as a girl to be successful in life, to be happy, to be fulfilled” but when you have a whole culture and society telling them differently, they’ll stop listening to you. My Mom, my mother was so amazing at that, my mom was so ahead of the game in the nineties raising me in the 2000s. But, you know, I was surrounded and I was in a culture that clearly valued bodies. I remember when Britney Spears’ first single dropped in she had the, I remember just crowding around the CD in the CD insert, like the first friend who went and got the CD, they would pull the insert out and we would all just- Annie: Read the lyrics and look at the photos. Jen: Yeah we were just surrounded, like, looking at these photos of Britney Spears and she was wearing a little skirt and it was just, like, everything right and yeah, and we even see it in Healthy Habits Happy Moms, our own Facebook group, where we want to so badly want to see this shift, we see, once in a while women might come in and post a before and after photo, they may be new to our group or whatever, they don’t understand the culture in there yet and even when that happens it will get so much attention. Well, I noticed the other day that a woman posted in the last year she has added in a couple habits and her triglyceride levels are back down into a normal healthy range and it did not barely get any engagement and I look at that stuff and I think, even in our group, it’s so depressing because it’s like that is what health is, like, those are the things we should be celebrating. We don’t know what that picture means. We don’t know if her blood pressure is through the roof. We, it’s just, yes so, it’s just, it’s so depressing to me. I’m like Society doesn’t care if people are healthy, they care that they’re thin. Lauren: Right, like stop framing it as health and wellness, right? It’s thinness that you are  celebrating but back to the the diaries of the girls thing too, we talk about all the time how women say in our in our Balance365 group, like, I have all this time and mental space that has opened up since I stopped focusing on my body and dieting and like, I kind of see that in this this study from this author, like, where would we be if we weren’t so focused on ourselves and our bodies, like, where would we be if we were all still trying to better ourselves in other ways? Jen: Right, would fighting for equality with men still be a conversation? Like imagine if women took all the time and energy they put into their bodies and their appearance and put that on equality- Lauren: Or any issue. Jen: Any issue, getting politically active or you know, yeah. Annie: Which is a great segue into the 3rd way I wrote down why it’s harmful is it keeps us from living our lives and as we’ve talked about, our conversations are consumed with diet talk, weight talk, body shaming. On a really small scale, we hesitate to eat kids cake at birthday parties or we hesitate at going out to eat with a girlfriend because we are fearing putting on weight or deviating from our meal plan but I know the 3 of us have talked about that we could not have started this business if we were still eating, breathing, living diet culture. Like we wouldn’t have the capacity for it. Jen: I did a talk for a women’s studies class last year via video through, I was just asked to do it remotely basically so I filmed it in my home and it was for the University of the Saskatchewan, a women’s studies course and I did my 1st year of university at the University of Saskatchewan and at that time I wanted to be a doctor. When I started university I wanted to be a doctor and I had to basically drop out by my 2nd semester. I had to move down to part time studies because I was struggling with an eating disorder by then. It just, it was my whole life, it became my whole life. I was starving, my B.M.I. was 17, I was running on a treadmill for like one to two hours a day every morning, not eating, it just it consumed me and that might be a more extreme result of living in a diet culture is actually developing an eating disorder but there was a study done in the States, I think the University of Southern California and they surveyed 10000 women and 65 percent of women report having disordered eating behaviors. That’s huge. Lauren: I had the same experience and I think it’s, I think maybe getting a diagnosable eating disorder is rare but struggling with disordered eating and having it take up your life is not rare. Jen: No it’s very common. Lauren: Yeah I remember coming home, in my senior year it it took up my entire life. I wouldn’t go out because I had to come home and I had to do my workout and I had to eat my broccoli, like I could go out and eat. I had to come home and yeah, just the same way that you’re describing. It took over my entire life. Annie: I am just scrolling on Instagram, I swear it was Erin Brown wrote, had a quote or shared a quote at one point about how all the possibilities and opportunities that have been missed because women were worrying if their thighs were too big. Jen: Yeah. Lauren: Yeah Annie:  And that hit home for me. I mean, everything from rock climbing to saying no to opportunities to speak or present or share or work with a client or you know and I think about some, just in the health and wellness world, some of the women in our community that have even expressed, like, I have a really an interest in helping other people, becoming a personal trainer, becoming a nutritionist, getting the certification but will people want to take advice from me because I look like this? Which is anything outside of the norm and that’s really sad, that’s unfortunate, really unfortunate so I want to do our part to break that, right? Jen: Yeah and the messy part of this conversation is trying, talking about weight loss in the context of it not being about diet culture. So that is a really hard conversation to have because we are all about body autonomy and letting women decide what’s right for them and for some women, fat loss is part of their wellness vision. And so, you know, but in within Balance365 constructs you would understand that it’s behavior change that leads to sustainable fat loss etc, etc, etc, we have many podcasts about this. And so that is just really and that’s why chapter one of Balance365 is diet deprogramming because you really have to untangle what it is, what is driving these thoughts, right? That is something really tricky to untangle so where we talk, you know, Annie has lost. Annie used to be a size 22 and now she’s a size 12, is that right, Annie? Annie: Ish. Yeah. Depending on the brand. Jen: Yes and so for, Annie getting healthy, ditching diet mindset, ditching disordered eating, cultivating healthy habits that she can stick to resulted in losing 10 dress sizes which is amazing and I will celebrate that with Annie. I do not think of Annie as a better person than when she was a size 22. I think she was just as worthy. Annie may not have felt that but, and that is the whole problem in our society that we actually believe we are more worthy when we’re smaller. However, on the flip side, me doing all those same things, ditching dieting, ditching disordered eating, ditching and actually cultivating healthy habits that work for me in my life have resulted in me being about 20 to 25 pounds heavier than my leanest weight. And so that is a really important thing for women to understand when we talk about Balance365 and we address weight, we are there to help women become a healthy weight and that is going to look different for everybody. I am not interested in any way in supporting a woman in figuring out how to live life at a weight that is not healthy or sustainable for her. I am not interested in giving her a bunch of diet tricks that make sure, you know, that allow her to be super lean certain times of the year, that’s just not where our focus is and so Balance365 really, you know, the conversation is more about, is not about what losing weight, it’s like what is a healthy weight for you and the thing is in Balance365 so many women have dieted for so many years they don’t even know what that is. Like they haven’t been able to maintain their weight for 3 months, let alone figuring out what maintaining their weight for years and years even looks like for them and I know I didn’t know. I was just constantly going, you know, because I was constant dieting, disordered eating, rebounding. I was basically slingshotting to below what a healthy weight is for me and then right back to above and below and above and I was just slingshotting back and forth where once I found my, you know, what’s healthy for me was basically smack dab in the middle of that and that is what I have been able, that I maintain my weight for the last 4 years through, you know, even some very stressful seasons of life, like because this is actually what’s healthy for me, but that can be a tough pill to swallow for women because for some women that weight is actually heavier than what they are now and that’s terrifying for some women. Lauren: And I think it’s hard for us to communicate that in a diet culture, right, like it’s hard for us to communicate we’re going to help you get the size of body that’s right for you. It’s not always weight loss, sometimes it’s weight gain, sometimes it’s, you know, you’re pretty much the same weight but you have more freedom, you know, to eat the way you want. Annie: Because in diet culture weight loss is equal to a higher status. Jen: Yes, always. Yes. So in a diet culture weight loss is always the goal, right. Annie: Right. Jen: Yes but we do, you know, we’ve got women who have lost significant amounts of fat inside our program but for them, being in those larger bodies was a prison for them because that was not the right weight for them, it was well above what was healthy and sustainable for them and a person gets to that space because of diet culture, because of the constant yoyoing of diets and every time they diet they lose 10 pounds and they put on 35. They go on another diet, they lose 10 and they put on another 35 and at some point those women, fat loss becomes it isn’t about diet culture anymore, isn’t about worthiness, it’s about reclaiming the body that they were always meant to have had they never gone on a diet at all. Lauren: Right and going back to diet culture, our culture is to blame people with larger bodies, right, that it’s their fault that they are in a larger body when it’s diet culture that put them there. Annie: Exactly. Lauren: Many, many times, right? It’s because of the dieting that they’re in a body that’s larger for them and obviously, that’s not universally true but in a lot of cases. Jen: Yes. Annie: Yeah, I feel like we could spend hours talking about how this harmful on so many levels. But I also want to leave some time and some space to talk about how we can kind of start to change it and the first one, I feel like this is our answer to everything on changing everything is just creating awareness, like, you know, like, we’ve talked about this in so many pockets on various topics but just opening your eyes and paying attention to what is diet culture, where you see it, where you experience it and where you hear it and just like start listening, start paying attention. Because as Jen said earlier, once you start seeing it, you’ll realize it’s everywhere. The second thing is break up with dieting. And I want to be clear that you don’t have to be on a diet to participate in diet culture, like that’s key. Like this isn’t just something that people who are dieting are participating in. But also that giving up on diet culture doesn’t mean that you’re giving up on your health. Like there are other options. And one of the ways you can start breaking up with dieting is to question the rules that you’ve been taught, the “rules”, right? The foods that you’ve labeled as good and as bad, your relationship with exercise, like what does that look like, are we exercising to punish ourselves, because we hate ourselves, because we think when we’re thin our life is going to be perfect and we’re going to have the perfect body and people who weigh less have less problems. And this can take years, like this is, I mean, as Jen mentioned earlier when she’s talking about some of how her decisions she still is kind of wrangling with, like, we’ve been in this and we’ve been doing this sort of work for almost 4 years and we’re still, or if not longer but specifically with our company for for almost 4 years and we’re still, like, kind of wading through the mud, like it’s cloudy and it’s messy and it’s muddy and it’s like, is this health? Is this diet culture? Is this supporting where I want to go or is this, like, disguised, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, so to speak? And then also vote with your dollars and your energy. Just a simple refusal to feed the diet industry, buying products that support it, whether it’s food, systems, magazines etc. You know your yogurts, your places you’re shopping, where you’re buying your clothes. Jen: And this stuff works. It can feel hopeless but, like, we are seeing a shift, like we are seeing a shift and people are getting really loud about it and companies are paying attention. Because we are seeing, we have never had so much, we don’t have a lot of diversity but we have never seen so much diversity in the media as we do today and that is from the work of all of us individually just throwing those pebbles into a pond which eventually make a wave. Annie: One of the places I really like to shop is Aerie, even, I don’t know if there’s an age limit on Aerie. Lauren: I really like Aerie too. Annie: I really like it and every time I go in there there are, you know, they’ve openly declared that they have stopped photoshopping their models, there’s often disabilities, women with disabilities in their marketing. There is, you know, not maybe as large of a variety of body types and skin colors as I would like to see but it’s more so than it was, you know, 3, 4, 5 years ago and just to circle back to LuLuLemon, obviously anyone that follows me knows that I love my Lululemon and I’m an ambassador for them and I would say the same thing for them too, following them on social media, they are carrying additional size ranges, like, they’re, I think they’re moving, what I see from them is- Jen: They’re moving Annie: They’re moving in that direction. Jen: And the thing is so, it’s understanding too, I remember, Annie, we had this talk right so the political party that I have traditionally voted for in Canada frustrates me to no end and so much so that actually our last federal election I did not vote for them and that’s sometimes is a stand that you have to take as a person but there’s another choice is to get involved in that industry or those companies or that political party and try to make change from within and so as far as Lululemon I don’t know if I’m going to stop shopping there but I am thankful for the awareness that my friend brought to me to say, “You know you’re supporting a store that doesn’t even want women my size in there” and that just stopped me in my tracks and what I am definitely going to be doing is going in and saying “This is how you make people feel, people I love and what do you have to say about that?” and that will be escalated. I recently took a stand at my local pool, so this is just another small example but I shared this on social media, I haven’t shared it on our podcast yet but there’s a swim club at my local swimming pool and I witnessed this male coach probably in his late teens, early twenties talking to a group of probably 11, 12, 13 year old kids making fun of people who are over 200 pounds and just the way he was, it was awful and I was sitting in the hot tub while he was doing this with the team and I’m sitting with my kids and after they left I really had a very, I addressed it with my children, like “That was not OK,” etc  but then I’m not going to stop going to the pool, like that is a place that we enjoy and frequent. What I did do was I went to management and told them that this had happened and they were so thankful and now they will work, because the swim club is an external club that comes in, so now they will work with the club to make sure the club understands that this is a body-inclusive environment and that is not OK. So there are ways of, you know, there are certain brands you might love, you know, etcetera but until they are like that Victoria Secret, I mean Victoria’s Secret stepped up and said: “No, we are not changing.” They basically said, “We do not want big women in our stores.” I will not shop there anymore, that is my choice but I haven’t shopped there for years. If you have followed me long enough on social media you’ll know why. Annie: You’ve had some runins with Victoria Secret. Jen: They know me but so that’s just a choice you can make. You don’t have to walk away, it doesn’t have to be this break up, it can be like “Hey, I support you and I love you guys, I love your brand but here’s what I need from you to keep supporting you.” Annie: Which is actually a conversation that I have had many times with my local Lululemon store and they’re all about it. They are they are game to do whatever they can to help support that as well, I mean, they acknowledge that like “Yeah, we would love to be able to dress all women and like how can we make our voices heard and what actions can we take and how can we be more inclusive and more welcoming to men and women of all varieties even while in this very moment we only serve pant sizes up to a 12 or a 14? What else can we do, how can, you know, how can we start to create change?” and you know, these are the tough and sometimes uncomfortable conversations we need to have. Lauren: Well and I think too it’s sometimes even more impactful than boycotting, right, to have Annie in they’re saying, like, “Look, this is how what you’re doing impacts me, impacts these people, right? Annie: Right. Yeah and in addition to refusing to feed the diet industry, kind of along the same lines as to build your life online and in real life with people, books, music that support how you want to feel and hopefully that’s not a part of the diet culture and my friend Meghan talks about nourishing her body and when she first told me that nourishment was one of her core values, I kind of rolled my eyes because I thought she was going to give me this like elitist version of how she eats paleo. Jen: Green smoothies. Annie: Yes and what she was talking about, how she defines nourishment is what she puts in her ears, what she puts in her body, how  she moves her body, what she reads, what she consumes on social media, like those are all the ways in which she nourishes her body and I love that definition and you know, just like Jen said earlier, you know, her feed used to be filled with before and afters and I’m guessing you’ve unfollowed. Jen: No, I don’t see any of that anymore. It’s jarring to me when I see before and after photos now, I’m like “Oh, where did that come from?” Annie: Yeah and it’s like, it’s OK, sometimes, you know, unfortunately like the saying “fences make good neighbors”, you know some of your friends might be really heavily engaged in diet culture still and you might have to unfollow or set some boundaries. Jen: Yeah, I say “It’s not personal, It’s about me, not you” right, like, “You go ahead and post your before and after photos, it doesn’t serve me and if I saw the odd one now I’d be fine but I I recognize it’s a slippery slope, right, if you have, you get on Facebook for 15 minutes and you have 16 before and after photos come through your feed, like eventually, eventually, that becomes our reality, like, it just does so yeah, curating your environment is so important. Annie: Yeah what else do you want to add before we pop off? I mean, I know this is such a heavy topic and there’s so many aspects and components to diet culture but I just really wanted to kind of throw something out there sooner rather than later for our community who might be new and might be struggling with the concept of diet culture and because even it’s so subtle sometimes I miss it, you know, sometimes I don’t even realize that what I just participated in was diet culture, what I just bought was supporting diet culture. Jen:  I would say it’s OK to like get to the awareness stage and start noticing and making small changes in your life, one thing that I feel very passionate about is not overwhelming women and feeling like they have to be the only crusader for this cause, like, we really have only so much time and energy and number one needs to be taking care of you because you will never be able to take care of others until you can take care of you and us three going from the awakening to the taking care of us to making sure our cups are filled to starting this company to becoming crusaders that was a years in the making process, right, like, I didn’t realize one day diets don’t work and I have been part of this machine that exploits women’s vulnerabilities for my whole life to the next day starting a podcast and talking about all these issues, like, I mean, we’re talking years so don’t feel like you have to do all the things in one day but you’ve got to make sure you’re taken care of  first. Lauren: Yup. Annie:  The awakening, that sounds- Lauren: I like that too. Annie:  I was like “Whoa, yes! Sign me up for that” Jen: Stay woke, friends. Annie: Stay woke to diet culture. That should be our new hashtag. Lauren: Hashtag. Annie: Hashtag stay woke to diet culture. Lauren: Tag us if you use it. Annie: All right this was and can be a really heavy topic but, and it is serious, like this is detrimental to our individual and cultural health and especially our children who are just unknowingly, you know, being exposed to it. We had a really great podcast on boundaries where we talked where Jen made the analogy that compared it to secondhand smoke and diet culture is the same way, you know, like that’s, you know- Jen: Just blowing smoke in your kids’ faces all day long. Annie: Yeah and we don’t doubt the intentions or love that a parent would have for their children, so creating awareness to how harmful this can be is, you know, the first step to really making some steps in the right direction but if you want to continue the discussion, if you want to discuss what is diet culture, what it isn’t, is what you’re experiencing or what you’re participating in part of the problem or part of the solution please join us inside our private Facebook group Healthy Habits Happy moms 40000 women that would be happy to continue this discussion inside there and the 3 of us are in there too participating as well so if you have more questions or if you’re still confused or if there is something that you want to talk about that we didn’t talk about in this hour, let us know we’re here, like this is just, I have a feeling this is just going to be an ongoing topic. Jen: Yeah this was the tip of the iceberg. Annie: Yes, the tip of the iceberg, exactly All right, well thank you ladies, it was a good chat. Jen: Yes. Annie: Alrighty, bye bye. Jen: Bye. Lauren: Bye.     The post 49: Diet Culture Explained appeared first on Balance365.

When the New Year rolls around, people start making resolutions to change their lives. More often than not these ventures end in failure, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not a lack of willpower, motivation or hard work. It’s just the way we make resolutions isn’t always consistent with the science of behavior change. Jen, Annie and Lauren explore the three ways you can make better resolutions this year, or even decide whether you need to make resolutions at all. Resolve to join us and learn more! What you’ll hear in this episode: The best time of year to buy used exercise equipment New Year’s resolutions and FOMO The Power of Suggestion, product placement and targeted ads Jumping on the bandwagon and following the leader The perfect storm of post-holiday shame Shame-based marketing as motivation for change Ending the binge-restrict cycle Learning to let the pendulum settle Zooming out to give context to holiday eating What happens when you try to change too many things at once Outcome-based goals vs habit-based goals How to turn an outcome-based goal into a habit-based goal Resources: Five Stages Of Behavior Change Episode 15: Habits 101 – Hack Your Habits, Change Your Life Episode 22: The Oreo Cookie Approach To Breaking A Bad Habit Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Transcript Annie: The New Year is upon us and with that comes optimistic feelings of a fresh start, a clean slate and a chance to reach our goals. Love them or hate them, it’s estimated that almost half of Americans make resolutions every year. Step into any gym the 1st week of January and it’s clear that fitness and weight loss goals are topics for most resolution makers. Resolutions are a dime a dozen. It’s sticking to them that can be difficult. Sadly, the reality is that most of us who vow to make changes in 2019 will drop them before January is even over. On this episode of Balance365 Life Radio Jen, Lauren and I dive into common reasons why New Year’s resolutions fall flat and changes you can make to help ensure you stick with your goals long after the New Year’s excitement fades. Enjoy! Lauren and Jen, welcome back! We are discussing New Year’s resolutions already, can you believe it? Lauren: No. Jen: I can’t believe how quickly this year has gone. Annie: No, I feel like I blinked and it was like the end of the year. Jen: I feel like I just saw you guys in San Francisco in February. Annie: I know, it was like a year ago. Jen: I know. Annie: That’s what happens when you see each other every day and talk to each other every day, all day. Besties. So we are talking about New Year’s resolutions because, I mean, it’s obviously a timely subject, we’re coming up on the end of the year and people are thinking about what they want to accomplish in the New Year, right? Which is ironic because we used to have a challenge, we did a challenge a couple years ago called the Screw Your Resolutions challenge and it was our alternative, our Balance 365 alternative to resolutions because so many of us have made resolutions and failed, right? Have you done that? Jen: Most people. Lauren: Yeah. Jen: In fact. Lauren: No, I’ve never done it. Jen: In fact, I keep my eye out for workout equipment around March and April because it all goes back for sale, you can get really good deals on treadmills around that time. Annie: Yes and workout clothes as well too, like they’ll go on, I mean, they’re not on sale right now necessarily but because it’s a popular time to be buying them. Jen: Yeah. Oh I mean second hand- Annie: Oh, OK. Jen: March, April, yeah people, they buy, they get the deals in December-January, they spend $2000.00 on a treadmill and then by March-April it’s back up for sale for like $400.00 So keep your eye out- Annie: Because that treadmill trend- Jen: on buy and sell websites. Yeah because you just hang laundry on it, really. This is what you do. I mean, I’ve been there as well. But I sold my treadmill when we moved last time and I really regret it because now I’m looking at getting another one. And but I’m going to wait I’m going to wait for the New Year’s resolution dropouts to put theirs up for sale- Annie: Yeah, she’s going to take advantage of you guys, listen. Jen: March-April. Annie: She’s going to prey on you. Lauren, what about you? Have you made a resolution and failed to keep it? Lauren: Yes, pretty much every year besides the last five. Yeah, it was always obviously diet exercise related too. But then I would add, like, other things so I would want to do all the things. Annie: Yep. Which we’ll talk about. Please don’t jump ahead of my outline. Lauren: I’m sorry. Annie: We’ve talked about this. Jen: I made a New Year’s resolution-ish. It was a couple years ago it was really big to choose a word, like choose a word for 2016 or 2017 whenever it was and I jumped on board that train and it was a success but we will talk about that later. I won’t skip us ahead. Annie: What was your word? Jen: It was respond. Annie: Oh, OK. Jen: Rather than react because I found myself, I was, like, you know, I could be quite reactive. Annie: No. Jen: So I really worked on that secondary, that response, when your inner B. F. F. comes in and it’s like “Whoa, chill out, girl.” Annie: Yeah, I dig that. Jen: What about this? Annie: Yeah. Jen: So then I would find, you know, I think it was 2016, I worked really hard on it and I’m much better at keeping my reactions under control and responding. Annie: Well, I’ll be interested, maybe a little bit later you can tell us about why that was so successful versus other attempts. But before we get any further, really, today we just want to discuss, I have 3 main reasons that we see resolutions kind of fall flat and I want to be clear that we are not anti resolutions, we’re not anti goals, we’re not anti action plans or whatever you want to tackle, resets, restarts, refreshes in the New Year because I’m totally one of those people that gets super excited about the idea of like a clean slate, like, that’s really, like, I love, like, a fresh start, going to start over. I get to do this. I’m going to do it right. It’s super exciting and super motivating but just the way in which people approach them and their expectations around resolutions are usually why they aren’t successful with them. Jen: Yeah we are pro, we want you to be successful. Annie: Yeah so we’re going to discuss 3 ways you can make your resolutions a little bit more successful because again, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with resolutions inherently, It’s more how we approach them and our expectations surrounding them. So let’s just dive right into it. The 1st one is that remember that you can set goals, create new habits, set intentions any time of the year, right? Like this is not something specific just to New Year’s Day or New Year’s Eve, you can do this February 1st, just the same as you can March 1st or May 15th, like whatever time you want to set new goals, you can make new goals and as I noted, I totally understand the excitement that comes when everyone else around you is doing the thing, right, and it’s contagious and I have severe FOMO, you know, fear of missing out so I feel this pressure like “Oh I want to do that, like, that’s really exciting, right?” Jen: Well, it can be like when you go shopping with your girlfriend and you only need one thing, like you need a pair of jeans and then you get in the store and your friends are like “I’m getting jeans. Oh, I also need earrings and look at this top, it’s so cute, and this coat” and then all of a sudden you’re like “Yeah, those things are so great. I should look at them too and I should get them too” and then all of a sudden you’re leaving the store with like 6 bags and you only want one pair of jeans, right? So during New Years, it’s just that you’re just surrounded by people changing all the things and you’re like “Well that is such a good idea, I need to address that in my life too. Oh and that would be great too and that too” and then all of a sudden you’ve got 10 New Year’s resolutions. Annie: And the power of suggestion, sorry, Lauren, go ahead. Lauren: I was going to say, well, even more than that for me is I would feel like I had to make a New Year’s resolution period, like even if I was not in a particular space in my life where I could handle a new goal or setting a New Year’s resolution, like, I had my daughter 5 years ago on December 1st and so it was like “Oh, I should make a New Year’s resolution” while I had an infant, you know, right, probably not the best time. Annie: Yes and I was just going to add to the power of suggestion is really, really strong around this year because Jen you’ve shared advertising budget numbers from the diet and the fitness industry, they spend a large percentage of their marketing budget this time of year. They are pushing, pushing, pushing- Jen: Yeah, the first few months of the year, the 1st quarter. I can’t remember what the numbers are, I’ve shared them on a past podcast but it’s like 65 percent of their marketing budget is spent in the 1st couple months of the year. Because yeah, so it’s everywhere. Annie: So you’re really, really, you’re likely seeing it in magazines and commercials and newspapers, in bookstores and anywhere you’re going, essentially, to buy this product, buy this program, purchase this service, purchase this membership- Jen: Yeah, people have no idea, like, how much thought goes into marketing and so even, you’ll see, I noticed in my local bookstore that throughout the year when you walk in there’s different tables set up featuring, you know, new books or this all these books on this topic. Well, in December or January the diet table comes to the very front of the store so when you walk in it’s right there. Because they know, they know that that’s the time to be selling these books, to put them right in front of you, get you thinking about it, it makes you buy them. We like to think we’re so in control of our choices but we really are not. Annie: I was just going to say that because I know, Annie 10 years ago would have walked into Barnes and Noble or whatever this bookstore, saw the diet book and “it’s like they knew what I wanted,” like, yeah, how did I, like, you know, how did they know but really? Jen: If you don’t even think about the change, it’s like, this must have always been here. Annie: Right, it’s like, like, you know, it’s like, it’s, now we have Amazon ads popping up on our feed, you know, like Lauren, you just talked about how you were, posted about your standing desk. Lauren: Oh my gosh, yes, I got this standing desk which is amazing, I got it from Costco, I don’t know if it’ll still be here when this airs but I got it from Costco and I posted about it on my story and I had never seen an ad for a standing desk before and after I posted it on my story I was started seeing Instagram ads for this other standing desk and it freaked me out. Jen: Oh. There’s so many conspiracy theories around what Facebook and Instagram listen to and of course they deny, deny, deny but that happens to me all the time. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to a friend about something, like, in person- Lauren: Yes. Jen: Then I’ll start seeing those ads on my feed. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: There’s a meme that it’s like, of course, if I had a dollar for every time I started a sentence with “There’s a meme” on Instagram that says “Oh, oh, that’s weird how this showed up on my feed when I didn’t talk to anyone about it, I didn’t type it, I didn’t search it, like, it’s, like, there in your brains, you know- Jen: You thought it. Annie: Yes, but anyways, it is, you know, it’s kind of like when you go to Target and your kids don’t want goldfish until they see the goldfish and then you know and it’s like “Now I can’t live without the goldfish.” Jen: And you have to and there’s also food, food companies have to pay more to get their products on the shelf at eye level. Lauren: Yes. Jen: Do you know I mean because they know it leads to you choosing it more so they make a deal with, you know, whatever supermarket chain and they pay a fee to have their product at eye level, like, you really, if you know what I mean, like, it’s just there’s so much of this that goes on that consumers aren’t aware of. Annie: Right, which we kind of went off on a tangent there and I think that would make a really great podcast about how the the science and psychology behind marketing and how it works the way it does, especially when it comes to health and wellness but the point here is that you can set these goals any time of year, so even though the bookstores are pushing it or you might feel like you’re seeing these messages to get these really brand new fresh goals around your health and your wellness. It seems like it’s everywhere. Remember that you can set these 6 months from now, 3 months from now, any time a year. You don’t have to feel pressure to do it on New Year’s Day. Jen: Yes and now that we have told everybody about it, you will start noticing it and you can be more critical about it and this is called media literacy and media literacy has been found to be one of the greatest tools in preventing disordered eating and body image issues. So pass it on. Annie: Pass it on. Stay woke, right? Jen: Stay woke. Annie: OK. Number two, remember your why. Ask yourself “Does this really matter to you?” when you’re setting your New Year’s resolutions because along the same lines of getting caught up, this can tend to be following the leader, kind of like Jen said when you’re shopping with your girlfriend and in my experience, what’s personally happened to me before is one girlfriend dinner is like “Oh yeah, I’m going to join this gym, I’m going to start this program, I’m going to start this diet” and the rest of us are like “Oh yeah, like, I guess that sounds good,” like, “That sounds good to me, I’ll do that too” or like “Guess I hadn’t really given it that much thought but she’s done the research. And she seems to think it’s a good idea so I’ll do it too” and if you listen to our Stages of Change podcast with our Balance365 Coach Melissa Parker, you’ll know that skipping stages like contemplation, where you’re thinking about doing a thing and preparation, where you’re making plans to do the thing, are actually really vital to your success and this is one of the reasons people- Jen: Not skipping stages. Annie: Sorry, yes, not skipping stages. It’s really vital to your success and this is one of the reasons that people can fall flat on New Year’s resolution time is because they join the gym, they buy the meal plan, they sign up for the challenge or whatever it is they’re doing without really considering “Does this even matter to me? Is this a good time in my life to do this? Is this reasonable to think that I can do whatever is required to make this goal happen?” Just like Lauren said, like, she just felt this pressure to make a resolution and it’s like “Hey, I just had a baby. Maybe now isn’t the time to be all in on whatever it is I’m wanting to do” and if you give it some reflection and you come up with like “No, this isn’t OK. This isn’t the time, this isn’t the thing I want. That’s OK. It doesn’t mean that you’re stuck wherever, you’re out forever. It just means that maybe you need to re-evaluate and get some clarity on what your goal is and how you’re going to get there. Jen: Yeah, it often is related to, I think, feelings of guilt around holiday eating as well so, I mean, that’s why the advertising is so successful, right, because they know you’re feeling bad about all the eating and sitting around you’re doing over the holidays and that becomes your motivation, right, which is shame-based motivation, which we also know through research that shame-based motivation is not lasting. Lauren: Yeah, and I’ll add too on this that this is why we actually added a section in Balance365 it’s called The Story of You and it helps you to uncover what your values are and what your core values are and so not only does that help you when you are making changes because when you make a change if it connects with one of your core values you’re more likely to stick to it but it also can weed out this extra stuff so you can think back “Well does this really support any of my core values?” and if it doesn’t you can feel a lot better of saying like “Oh, this isn’t for me, like, it’s good for them, it’s not good for me.” Jen: Right. Annie: And circling back to what Jen said about shame-based marketing, you know, I think in the past when I have started a new diet or a new exercise routine on New Year’s Day it has usually been to combat those feelings of shame and guilt about eating too much, missing the gym because I’ve been busier than normal, the weather’s been crummy, not enough daylight, you know, whatever fill in the blank and they know this. Lauren: Yeah, that was always me, like it comes right after the holidays, right, where everyone’s crazy busy, there’s treats everywhere. And it’s just like, it’s kind of like a perfect storm, right, everyone’s doing it, you feel crappy, the advertising is being pushed to you, so it comes together on January 1st. Jen: Yeah and it’s just it’s all part of that roller coaster, though, you could start if you zoom out a bit and start identifying trends so most people wouldn’t binge over Christmas if they weren’t dieting before Christmas. Lauren: Right, yeah. Jen: And most people wouldn’t diet before Christmas if they were bingeing at Thanksgiving. Lauren: And then you wouldn’t feel crappy, right? And wouldn’t be like “I need to do something.” Jen: Right, so the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is also a very, very popular time to go on a diet so, you know, people go into the holiday, basically, diet to counteract their Thanksgiving bingeing and to prep themselves for Christmas. Someone just said the other day, told me a friend of theirs was working on losing 5 pounds in preparation for the holidays and I’m, you know, it’s funny kind of, but you’re also like, I just cringe and think, “Oh my gosh, like, you’re basically just announcing that you have an eating disorder and that you are starving yourself in preparation for being able to binge.” Lauren: Right and that just feeds right into the cycle. Jen: Yeah and then so you binge over Christmas and then you get back on that diet rollercoaster for January and then, you know, then you restrict, then you binge and then you’re restricting for your bikini season and then it’s just, it’s just wild. Annie: And most people are trying to stop that cycle in the binge, when they’re in the binge they want to pull all the way back to restriction which I totally get, like, that seems to be, like, “Well, duh, like, I, you know, I’m either all in or I’m all out, I’m on the wagon, I’m off the wagon,” like there’s just two extremes and our approach would be to just let that pendulum settle down in the middle like, don’t pull it so far back. Jen: Yeah, so Chastity, she’s in Balance365, she said the other day is that people want to stop bingeing but unfortunately they don’t want to stop restricting. However the solution to stop bingeing is to stop restricting as well. Lauren: Right. Jen: And people just really have a hard time wrapping their heads around that. Annie: Absolutely, I mean, it can be scary because it feels like you’re letting go of some of that control, especially if you’ve been dieting for years and that’s what you know, that a lot of women feel comfortable and in control when they’re dieting, even if they’re miserable, even if they’re white knuckling it. Lauren: I remember someone when we first started doing this had been dieting for years and years and she was terrified when we told her like stop counting your points, stop counting, like, just give yourself permission to eat and she was like “I will literally start eating and never stop.” Jen: I remember that too. Lauren: And like, spoiler, that didn’t happen and now she lives a free life and she doesn’t count and she’s happy with her progress but she was terrified, like there was a real fear for her. Jen: Right. Annie: So once again we went on a little tangent. Jen: As we do. Annie: I’m just looking at our outline, like “Remember your why” and now we’re talking about restriction and it’s all connected though, isn’t it? Jen: So remember your why. So remember that you don’t want to be on the diet roller coaster and that is your why for not jumping on board a new diet in January. Annie: Well and why am I doing this again, if I am being honest and years past it would have been to try to avoid or to remove some of those feelings of guilt and shame, so it’s like “OK, I’m just going to try to regain all of my control by doing all the things and doing them perfectly” and you know, again, it just, what that does is eventually perpetuates the cycle of this diet cycle. Jen: Yeah, an alternative to feeling guilty is to say “Wait a sec, I’m human and just like everybody else at Christmas, I indulge in the holiday foods and move along.” Annie: Yeah. Because the holiday foods are yummy. Jen: They are. Annie: They are yummy. And yeah and just cut yourself some slack, right? Lauren: Yeah. Annie: OK, so we covered the first two. A, you don’t have to make these New Year’s resolutions just this time of year, you can set goals or new intentions or create new habits any time of year, then you evaluate like “Does this really matter to me? Why am I doing this? What’s my purpose? What’s my mission behind this? What am I hoping to get out of this?” and then if you come to the conclusion that “I still want to move forward. I still want to make change” and your resolutions are around things like eating healthier, exercising more, drinking less, quitting smoking then we’re talking about changing habits which, shockingly, is something we’re pretty good at helping people do. Surprise! And Lauren you have some really good information about creating and changing habits, but essentially it boils down to you don’t have to overhaul your entire life overnight because so often people go to bed on New Year’s Eve and they’re like, they set these plans and they’re going to wake up like a person with completely new habits on January 1st, like 12 hours later, new year, new me, right? Lauren: Right. That would be really nice. Annie: It would be great if it were just that simple, if all the change could happen. Jen: If worked, we would encourage it. Lauren: Yeah, right. Annie: Yeah, it’d be a heck of a lot quicker but will you share the statistics about why changing too many things at once isn’t likely to bode well for you? Lauren: Yes, so we share this all the time, actually but I find that it’s so eye-opening for people is that studies show that if you want to change a habit and you change one small thing and only that thing you have about an 80 percent chance of sticking with that change long term, which is actually really good for percentages. If you try and change too things at the same time your success rate of sticking with both of those things drops down to about 30 percent and then 3 or more changes at the same time your success rate drops to almost 0 sticking with all those changes and then the more things you add on, the less and less your success rate will be. Annie: That’s not very promising to change a lot of things at once is it. Lauren: No, so not only do you not have to, you shouldn’t if you care about sticking with it, right? Annie: Yes, so when you think about someone that wakes up New Year’s Day and is like I’m going to change all 3 of my meals, plus my snacks, plus my sleep habits, plus my water and alcohol consumption, now I’m also going to add going into the gym 5-6 times a week, that is so many behaviors that it takes to change, I mean we’re talking about, like, let’s take a look at a meal, like, what does it take to change a meal, like, it could change what you put on your plate, how you prepare your food, what kind of foods you’re buying at the grocery store, it might require, do you even go to the grocery store in the first place versus eating out, I mean, and those are the little steps that take to build a really great solid habit that so many people overlook. They just think “I’m just going to start eating a balanced breakfast, lunch and dinner tomorrow, all the time, forever and ever amen.” Lauren: And our brains just don’t work like that. It’s just the way we’re wired and you know, we, like our brains, like consistency and constants and so it’s not going to bode well for you if you try and change everything all at the same time. Jen: I don’t even like going somewhere new in the grocery store, like a new aisle. Like when I when I’m looking at recipes and there’s just some whacko ingredient, you know, that either you can’t find in a regular supermarket or I’ve just never seen that before I’m like, “Next!” Like, I just really resist. Yeah. Annie: I think, yeah, I mean, obviously when it comes to cooking I’m the same way. I see it is a recipe with more than like four ingredients and I’m like “No, I’m out.” Lauren: Thank you, next. Jen: Yeah, I know as far as our plans on expanding our our recipe collection on our website and just looking at, like, when we had a woman making recipes for us this fall and the first couple she sent me I was like, “Listen, like chickpea flour is just not going to fly.” Lauren: I feel like we should have a test where like if Annie, Lauren and Jen can’t make it it doesn’t get put out there and we would be like, “Pizza. Quesadillas. Chicken.” Jen: Yeah yeah and so it’s like, I remember I would go all in like back in my dieting days on making things like cauliflower pizza crust. Lauren: Yes I would take so long to make meals and they would always taste like crap. Jen: Yeah and so but then it’s like, you know, five years later, we’re just having pizza, like just regular crust and it’s way better. Lauren: Like, it’s fine. Jen: It’s like all those steps, right, like all those steps to make, to just get in the habit of making these healthy pizza crusts and yeah just really makes no difference. Annie: And now, yeah, I feel good just throwing some veggies and some fruit and some extra protein on my Jack’s frozen pizza. Jen: Yeah, like, I’ll just have a side of cauliflower with my regular pizza. Instead of trying to work it into the crust. Annie: I really like how you say cauliflower. Lauren: Cauliflower. Annie: Anyways, yeah, but truly I think people really underestimate how much energy is required to change just one habit and it’s definitely a slower process but what we hear from women in our community that are working through our program is that it feels effortless, they’re not white knuckling through all these changes and just like, “Oh my gosh, I hope I can do this. I just need to do this for a little bit longer before it comes automatic.” They’re like, actually, they’re kind of like looking around like “Is this really all I’m doing? Like, this is all you want me to focus on?” and we’re like “Yeah, actually.” Jen: Just this one thing. Annie: That is. Jen: Yeah. Annie: And if you’re talking about changing existing habits, which that comes up a lot around New Years resolutions too is the best way to change an existing habit is to replace it with a new one and Lauren and I have a pretty good podcast, actually two podcasts on how habits are built, like Habits 101, and then how to change or break bad habits, so if you want more information on the science and the process behind habit building and breaking bad habits, I would highly encourage you to listen to those because, I mean, I think we give some pretty good tidbits. Lauren: It’s pretty good. Annie: I mean, it’s alright. And the other thing I want to add onto that too in terms of habit changing and going a little bit slower is to discuss the difference between outcome-based goals and behavior-based goals because so often, again, resolutions seem to be outcome-based goals. I want to lose 10 pounds. I want to run a 5K. I want to compete in this challenge or whatever and it doesn’t really address the behaviors, like, OK, how are you actually going to do that? What actions are you going to take to lose 10 pounds? Like I’m not poo-pooing weight loss as a resolution goal, your body, your choice. But how are you going to lose that 10 pounds? It might be I’m going to start exercising on Monday, Wednesday, Friday for 30 minutes or I’m going to replace, you know, X, Y, Z with vegetables on my plate or I’m going to increase protein or you know, whatever that looks like, we would encourage you to write your goals based off of your behaviors, not the outcome you want, because so often if you take care of the behaviors, which we have more control over, the outcome will just naturally be a byproduct of it and so often I see women doing all the right things and they don’t get the outcome they want and then they feel like a failure, you know, they’re making all these great changes. Especially when it comes to weight loss. We’ve seen women work their butts off to try to lose weight, you know, they’re maybe exercising more, they are addressing their self talk, they’re getting more sleep, they are cutting back on sugary drinks or alcoholic drinks or whatever that is they’re working on and they step on the scale and they’re down 3 pounds instead of the desired 10 pounds and all of a sudden they feel like they’ve failed. Lauren: Right. Jen: When they’ve actually succeeded in all these areas of life that a lot of people struggle to succeed in and it’s huge, it’s a huge big deal. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: Yeah, when really if you just zoom out and it’s like “Oh my gosh, look at all this great change I’ve made, I’m feeling better I’m taking better care of my body or you know, whatever it is, fill in the blank, that we just tend to lose sight of that when our goals are outcome based. Lauren: Also when they step on the scale and they see that, that they haven’t lost as much as they had hoped, they also a lot of times will be like “Well, what’s the point, right ?” and then they don’t continue doing those behaviors and it’s the continuation and consistency of those behaviors that’s going to lead to possibly them reaching their goal, right? Annie: Yeah, so the easiest way to turn your outcome based goal, if that’s what you were thinking about before listening to podcast, into a behavior based goal is to just ask yourself “How am I going to achieve that? How am I going to run a 5K? How am I going to run a marathon? How am I going to lose 10 pounds? How am I gonna?” Jen: Yeah. Annie: You know, like and then usually that how, that’s the behavior. Jen: Yeah and then realize that that outcome goal you have actually could be made up of a series of behavior changes that need to happen one at a time, therefore it may not happen as quickly as you like, which is OK. Life is long. Annie: Yeah, it’s the tortoise and the hare, right? Jen: It’s a journey. Annie: Yeah, as cheesy as that sounds, people are probably like, “Oh, come on.” Jen: It’s a journey. Lauren: Zen Jen over there. Jen: I know. Annie: Enjoy the process. Jen: Gandhi. Annie: We need one of those successory memes. You know, popular in the nineties. OK, well those are the three main points I wanted to discuss when it comes to New Year’s resolutions. Is there anything you two would like to add? Lauren: I don’t think so. Annie: OK, let’s do a quick review. First of all, before you set your New Year’s resolutions remember that you can set these new goals, create new habits, set new intentions, you can have a clean slate any time of the year. I totally understand that it’s super enticing to have like new year, new me but you can do this on May 1st just as easily as you can January 1st. The second one is to remember your, why does this really matter to you? Are you just doing this because your girlfriends are doing this or because marketing is telling you to do this or is this something that you really desire and then on top of that are you willing to do what it takes to make that happen and sometimes the answer is no, like Lauren said, you know, she really maybe wanted some of the things she wanted after having Elliott but it just wasn’t, the timing wasn’t good and honoring that, and being like, “Hey, I can just put that on the back burner and wait a little bit to start that until I’m ready to make those changes and I’m able to make those changes and stick with them” is absolutely, that’s an OK answer. Jen: I know you always say, Annie, there is more than two options, it’s not always “yes” and “no”, there’s a third option which is “later.” Annie: I would love to take credit for that but that’s actually Lauren. Jen: Oh, I’m sorry, Lauren. Lauren: Yes. Annie: Yes. I was like, as soon as you said that I was like “Oh, I really wanted credit for it because it’s good, it’s good advice, but I’m going to be honest, that’s Lauren’s advice.” Yes, later is always an option which I think is, that’s goes back to your maturity about responding, Jen, versus reacting, you know, so many people can get reactive during New Year’s resolutions like they feel compelled to do something just because everyone else is doing them and it’s like, if you just have pause, like think like “Do I want this? Was I considering this before I heard Susan over here talking about her weight loss? Like. Jen: I always think of my inner BFF like she’s, she just like, she comes to me in that first second I react and then give it 20 seconds and my inner B.F.F. is sitting beside me like “Hey, girlfriend. Calm down.” Annie: That first voice in me though, she can be really kind of grumpy sometimes. Jen: She’s my naughty friend. She’s naughty. Annie: Let’s do it! Yeah! Is this is code for Annie and Lauren? Jen: There’s Annie and then there’s Lauren. Annie: Annie is like shoving you into the mosh pit at a concert, like “You can do it!” and Lauren’s like, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Jen: Let’s stay safe back here. Annie: Both are needed sometimes, OK? And the last point we just discussed today was that you don’t have to overhaul your life in one night, that to think that you’re going to go to bed on December 31st and wake up 8 hours later a completely different person doesn’t usually happen for people and that’s not, that’s not because you lack willpower or motivation or determination or discipline, that’s just the way behavior change works and it takes time and slowing down the process to focus one thing until that becomes automatic and then layering on brick by brick is usually the best place to start and we have a saying too that we stole from James Clear that “Rome wasn’t built in a day but they were laying bricks often” Lauren: We changed it to make it our own. What’s our new one? Beyonce wasn’t built in a day. Jen: Beyonce wasn’t built in a day. Annie: Beyonce also wasn’t built in a day. So if you could just lay a brick, you know, if you have these big goals 2019, 2020, 2021, start with a brick, really and lay your strong foundations, good solid habits, one by one and you’ll get there eventually and hopefully you’ll wake up one day and you’ll have this big beautiful Coliseum and you’ll be like “Oh, that was easy.” Jen: Exactly. Exactly. That really is how it happens. Annie: Yeah and I know that’s probably sounds a little bit ridiculous or a little bit too good to be true but you need to be able to play the long game for behavior change, you have to have big picture and patience which, I’m saying that to myself right now. I’m talking in a mirror. And yeah, hopefully this helps people build some better resolutions. I would love to hear what people are working on. So if you are working on something for the new year and you want to talk about it, please join our Facebook group, it’s, we’re Healthy Habits Happy Moms on Facebook. We have 40,000 women in our private Facebook group and if you need a place for safe support, reasonable advice and moderation, this is your place to go. Jen: I got a huge compliment yesterday. I was at a cookie exchange with 10 women and not many people know about my our company locally where I live and actually a couple women from my community just joined and the one woman said to me yesterday “Your group is the first place I’ve ever found that actually promotes you giving yourself grace.” Lauren: Aww. Annie: Can we like get a testimonial from her? Jen: I’ll ask her. She’s in Balance365 now. Annie: Oh that’s wonderful. Jen: She would be happy to. Anne: Yeah, I think it’s a pretty sweet place. We have amazing women, it’s really, it’s not it’s not us, it’s our community that’s made it such an amazing place to be, they provide support, applause and encouragement and tough love sometimes when it’s needed. It’s a great place to be, so find us on Facebook at Healthy Habits Happy moms You can also tag us on social media on Instagram and show us what you’re working on, show us your more reasonable New Year’s resolutions. Jen: Yes. Lauren: Yeah, I like that. Annie: Yeah, me too. OK, anything to add? Jen: No. Lauren: No. Annie: We’re good to go? Alright, well, we’ll talk soon, OK? Lauren: Bye. Jen: Bye. The post Episode 46: 3 Ways To Improve Your New Year’s Resolutions appeared first on Balance365.