Podcast appearances and mentions of marci evans

This episode is NOT only for men!    Gals - you'll also learn what's causing your binge eating and how to stop getting the urge to binge, and have more understanding for any men in your life who might be struggling.   Here's a preview:   Main differences in how men might experience binge eating vs women: Generally, men place more self-worth on wealth and status than weight and shape, and so the pressures of “beauty standards” are less of a driver for their issues with food Men *generally* require a higher caloric intake than women and, since diet-culture targets women more than men, they may not be aware of how severe their calorie deficit is when dieting (for ex: thinking 1800 per day is a “moderate” deficit when it is actually severe for most men)   Similarities between the two sexes: Rigid food rules and under eating are main drivers  Mood dysregulation (an inability to tolerate difficult mood states) History of dieting leading to metabolic adaptation and the need for a period of calorie surplus to come back to a healthy homeostasis   I talk more about these differences and how to target each of the 3 main root causes of binge eating in this episode!   Give it a listen and I'd love to hear your feedback or additional questions - feel free to send me an email.  

Do you feel like all of your struggles with food lead you to believing that you must have a food addiction?    I get it. For years I felt the same! I felt like I must be addicted to food because who else would eat copious amounts of food to the point of feeling physically horrible (and sometimes with foods that I wasn't even enjoying!!)   And with all the fear mongering media about how sugar is addictive, it's easy for binge eaters to believe they are food addicts.    But… are you??   In today's episode we dive into the concept of food addiction and dispelling myths around this topic.    Registered Dietitian, Marci Evans, an expert in the field of eating disorders and body image healing, who has extensively reviewed the research on food addiction, walks us through that research and what is the real underlying factor that makes so many feel out of control with food – and what you can do to stop feeling this way and heal your relationship with food, effectively!   In this episode we cover:    Why so many people who binge eat so easily believe that they are addicted to food The difference between feeling addicted and being addicted  The neuroscience of addiction (and does food fit that criteria) How to stop feeling addicted to food if you binge eat   As always, once you give it a listen, I'd love to hear your takeaways and feedback! And if you found this episode helpful, I'd so appreciate your support of this podcast by leaving a review.    Rachel's Resources: Follow Rachel on Instagram (please hyperlink it to    Stop feeling out of control with food using the FREE eguide: 3 Steps to Stop Feeling Out of Control with Food   Are you a Food Freedom Professional seeking to boost her counseling skills & coach clients with confidence using the Intuitive Eating approach? Get immediate access to the FREE video training, 3 Steps to Boost Your Coaching Confidence.   Want to share your thoughts or feedback on this episode? Contact Rachel at  rachel@rachelgoodnutrition.com     Marci's Resources:    You can find Marci at: Marci RD Nutrition

Do you compare yourself with others? (Raises hand.) Today we're re-airing one of our favorite conversations with Marci Evans on social comparison theory. If you have ever compared your success, body image, relationship status, friendships or even living situation to anyone else (especially on social media), you HAVE to listen to this episode.   Social comparison theory states that individuals determine their own social and personal worth based on how they stack up against others. In some cases, comparison can be helpful, but more often than not, it's bad for our wellbeing.   In This Episode We'll Cover: Which personality types tend to be more prone to comparing (hint: people who are empaths) What happens to our brains when we make these cross-comparisons Concrete things you can do to compare less…starting NOW & MORE   Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.   Produced by Dear Media

If you're interested in gut health, you likely have seen on social media the crazy amount of information you “should” do to heal your health. Eating the right foods, avoiding inflammatory foods, taking a million supplements and more, it seems like the list of things you should do is never ending! I asked gut health and eating disorder expert, Marci Evans, to come on the show to help you understand how malnourishment plays a role in your gut health, and why recovery is the answer most of the time.   Marci identifies as a Food and Body Imager Healer® practicing from a weight inclusive and anti-oppression lens. She has dedicated her career to counseling, supervising, and teaching in the field of eating disorders. She is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian and Supervisor and certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. In addition to her group private practice, Marci launched an online eating disorders training platform for clinicians in 2015 and co-directs a specialized eating disorder internship at Simmons University. In 2018 she received the Professional Integrity Award from The Behavioral Health Dietetics Practice Group of The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. She has spoken locally and nationally at numerous conferences and media outlets. She regularly communicates on social media so be sure to connect with her @marciRD.   In this episode we discuss: What ignited Marci's passion for eating disorders. The four main reasons digestive issues are so common in the eating disorder population. How the gut brain axis influences how people feel in their bodies, and how they experience their digestive symptoms. How the gut microbiome is impacted by eating disorders and malnourishment. Why it's so important to only give recommendations based off the actual gut health research we have available (aka why you shouldn't follow the advice you hear on TikTok). How Marci lives wellness without obsession.   Learn more about Marci: Marci's Group Private Practice Marci's Online Training for Clinicians Remember, if you need help making peace with food and your body, my team and I are always here to help you. We have two ways we can support you: through private coaching and our group coaching program, Food & Body Peace Playbook. We are offering a month-long Black Friday discount for the month of November to both private and group coaching, learn more when you schedule your discovery call!   Click here to grab your FREE Holiday Survival Guide, offer available for a limited time only!

There are so many different types of chronic illnesses, from IBS to Crohn's Disease, that make healing your relationship with food infinitely more complicated.    It's not as simple as “read the intuitive eating book, eat when you're hungry!” (let's be real – that's a boiled-down version of intuitive eating, anyway). When someone's body responds differently to different foods due to a chronic illness, how do they navigate recovery from disordered eating and heal their relationship with food?    Anita Dharwadkar talks with me today about just that. If you struggle with a chronic illness and want to heal your relationship with food, then this episode is for you… but even if you don't, this is a really interesting conversation that will allow you to pick out pieces that do apply to you – and help you understand that recovery and intuitive eating is not a one-size-fits-all process.     Anita is a Registered Dietitian who practices in the Boston area. She's an anti-diet dietitian who practices Health at Every Size. She's been trained to work with eating disorders and has worked with all levels of care.    Right now, she's working as an outpatient nutrition therapist in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Marci Evans (who was actually on the podcast a few weeks ago!). Anita has a passion for working with the intersection of eating disorders and chronic illness, specifically in adolescents.    Listen now to our discussion about the complexities of navigating recovery from an eating disorder with a chronic illness. Tweetable Quotes   “Be gentle with yourself. Know that this isn't going to happen overnight. You didn't develop disordered eating… overnight, it's going to take time and that's frustrating.” – Anita Dharwadkar, RD, LDN   “Every time that you are choosing to eat, you're making a good, nourishing choice and getting yourself one step closer.” – Anita Dharwadkar, RD, LDN   Resources:  Anita's Instagram, @Dietitian_Anita    Anita's Email, Anita@marcird.com    Anita's practice website    LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who may need this podcast by sharing this episode.  Sign up for my weekly newsletter here!   You can connect with me, Rachelle Heinemann, on Instagram at @rachelleheinemann, through my website www.rachelleheinemann.com, or email me directly at rachelle@rachelleheinemann.com 

Marci Evans, RD has dedicated her career to counseling, supervising, and teaching in the field of eating disorders. She is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian and Supervisor and certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. In addition to her group private practice and adjunct teaching positions, Marci launched an online eating disorders training for dietitians and co-directs a specialized eating disorder internship at Simmons College.  She volunteers for a number of national eating disorder organizations including the IAEDP certification committee and is serving as an eating disorder resource professional for The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. She has spoken locally and nationally at numerous conferences and media outlets.  Sweets, spice, and everything nice! Sugar really does have an amazing effect on our food journeys. It creates a distinct taste that makes everything feel so irresistible.  If you feel like you're struggling with sugar addiction and would like to be enlightened about this matter, this episode will surely do wonders for you! Tune in as Marci Evans shares her knowledge with us in this sweet episode.    [0:01-05:54] Introductions Introducing our guest speaker   [05:55-29:34] What is Sugar Addiction and How Does It Differ From Other Food Addiction? Marci elaborates on her role as a registered dietitian and how she uses her scientific knowledge Redefining addiction and how it affects every aspect of the human anatomy How science cannot necessarily pinpoint what a sugar addiction is  What are the proponents of the food addiction model?  The neuro-responses of mice who have undergone restrictive or intermittent access to sugar in comparison to mice who have unlimited access to it The psychological impact of labeling food as “bad” or “good.”   [29:35-38:45] Fake Sugar and Artificial Sweeteners Digestive concerns that arise from misuse of artificial sweeteners Sugar recommendations – what could this mean?   [38:46- 53:00] Marci's Advice for Those Who Feel that They're Suffering From Food Addiction The importance of validating one's emotions, feelings, and experiences to navigate through the concern. How a person's medical history can help Marci's personalized approach.  The value of curiosity in understanding food behaviors and other factors that encourage particular actions. Marci elaborates on what it's like working with her and an example of her approach to a hypothetical concern   [53:01-54:39] Outro Where to find Marci?   Resources:  Marci Evans' Website Marci Evans' Facebook Page Marci Evans' Instagram   Tweetable Quotes:  "The process is not necessarily linear. It can get quite messy. It can go on all sorts of direction.” – Marci Evans, RD   “Know what your vulnerabilities are.” – Marci Evans, RD   “The answer is different everyone.” – Rachelle Heinemann, LMHC     LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who may need this podcast by sharing this episode.   Be sure to sign up for my weekly newsletter here!    You can connect with me, Rachelle Heinemann on Instagram, through my website www.rachelleheinemann.com, or email me directly at rachelle@rachelleheinemann.com

Around one in every twenty Australians has an eating disorder. These are serious mental illnesses characterised by obsessive thoughts about food and body weight and frequently co-occur with a wide range of psychiatric or physical symptoms.Gastrointestinal (GI) problems are one of the most common consequences of an eating disorder. In fact, according to our guest, Marci Evans, the vast majority of people with an eating disorder experience difficult digestive symptoms or gut disorders.Marci goes on to examine the features of eating disorders that lead to gastrointestinal disturbances. She describes the difficult and unique challenges health practitioners face when managing functional gut disorders in patients with eating disorders and explores the ways these can be best managed.Marci identifies as a Food and Body Imager Healer® practising from a Health At Every Size and anti-oppression lens. She has dedicated her career to counselling, supervising, and teaching in the field of eating disorders. She is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian and Supervisor and certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor. In addition to her group private practice, Marci launched an online eating disorders training platform for clinicians in 2015 and co-directs a specialised eating disorder internship at Simmons University. In 2018 she received the Professional Integrity Award from The Behavioural Health Dietetics Practice Group of The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. She has spoken locally and nationally at numerous conferences and media outlets. She loves social media so be sure to connect on Instagram or Facebook or tweet her @marciRD and check out her blog at www.marciRD.com/blog.

Eating disorders are serious mental health conditions that involve an unhealthy relationship with food, eating, exercise and body shape.For those affected, the physical and emotional repercussions can be overwhelming, impacting many aspects of health as well as family and social wellbeing.In this episode of Patient Journeys, we hear from Natalie Douglas, who suffered from multiple eating disorders from the ages of 13 to 22. As Natalie describes her many challenges, frustrations and lessons, you'll also hear commentary from guest experts, including Dr Jeffrey DeSarbo, Gabe Covino and Marci Evans, to provide important and valuable insights.

Fellow anti-diet dietitian Marci Evans is back! We discuss the intersection of digestive disorders and eating disorders, the risks associated with elimination diets, the role of the gut microbiome in digestion and health, the importance of consistency in self-care and well-being, and so much more! Plus, Christy answers a listener question about why she as a dietitian doesn't advise people to shift their food choices to less-processed foods. (This episode originally aired on November 26, 2018.) Marci is a Food and Body Image Healer™. She has dedicated her career to counseling, supervising, and teaching in the field of eating disorders. She is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian and Supervisor, Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor and Certified ACSM personal trainer. In addition to her group private practice, Marci launched an online eating disorders training platform for dietitians in 2015 and co-directs a specialized eating disorders dietetic internship at Simmons College. She volunteers for a number of national eating disorder organizations and has spoken locally and internationally at numerous conferences and media outlets. She loves social media and you can find her on all outlets @MarciRD. Find her online at MarciRD.com. Subscribe to our newsletter, Food Psych Weekly, to keep getting new weekly Q&As and other new content while the podcast is on hiatus! If you're ready to break free from diet culture once and for all, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course. You'll get all your questions answered in an exclusive monthly podcast, plus ongoing support in our private community forum and dozens of hours of other great content. Christy's first book, Anti-Diet, is available wherever you get your books. Order online at christyharrison.com/book, or at local bookstores across North America, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Grab Christy's free guide, 7 simple strategies for finding peace and freedom with food, for help getting started on the anti-diet path. For full show notes and a transcript of this episode, go to christyharrison.com/foodpsych. Ask your own question about intuitive eating, Health at Every Size, or eating disorder recovery at christyharrison.com/questions.

In this episode, I talk with Rise Up Nutrition teammate and fellow dietitian Mackenzie Bowman. We discuss how she got her start working with eating disorders and sports nutrition after staring off as an engineering major. Both with experience working in the collegiate setting, we talk about the importance of sports dietetics and nutritional resources for student-athletes. Mackenzie shares her passion for building personal relationships with clients, focusing on the psychology behind nutrition and coaching clients to their own unique goals. Mackenzie and I discuss her role working with clients enrolled in our Group Coaching program, and the nutrition transformations she has witnessed during the first 3-month course. Overcoming disordered eating and REDs takes time, but having the support of our dietitians and other female clients sharing in the process can help speed up the journey. Mackenzie's food philosophy centers around fun, fuelling adequately for health and performance, and fitting all foods in. She is passionate about cooking and community, using food to bring people together, alongside intuitive eating and gut health. Her Instagram @followyourgutrd feed is full of recipe inspirations together with gentle nutrition tips. Mackenzie gives us all advice on using social media for good rather than triggering negative mindsets: the instant unfollow button is our friend! For a lot of our clients, the pandemic and the birth of TikTok were the catalysts for disordered eating and overtraining, but for Mackenzie this time sparked her own path to intuitive eating. Mackenzie shares her naive history with nutrition despite growing up as a competitive high school athlete. Food was always fun and intuitive, providing her with the energy needed to fuel her activities. However, studying dietetics in college led to Mackenzie developing an unhealthy relationship with food and body image, hindering her performance as a collegiate volleyball player and affecting her social life. Coming out the other side, Mackenzie uses her personal experience to connect with and guide her clients. Working at Rise Up Nutrition, Mackenzie loves the impact she has on the lives of our clients, and seeing them meet their own goals brings her a lot of joy! Mackenzie Bowman's Official Bio: Mackenzie Bowman is a Registered Dietitian and sports nutritionist and intuitive eater! In addition to Rise Up, Mackenzie currently works at Prosperity Eating Disorder and Wellness, and the last few years was the Assistant Director of Sports Nutrition at Wake Forest University for their collegiate athletes. Prior to Wake Forest she was a Clinical Dietitian which, as we know, is a great foundation of nutrition expertise before going into specialization. Mackenzie is a Certified Nutrition Support Clinician, she has her Master's degree in Applied Nutrition and Physical Activity from Virginia Tech, she has completed Marci Evans eating disorder training and is a Body Project Facilitator helping people improve their body image. In this episode you're just going to learn more about Mackenzie, get to know her and her passion for nutrition – and you'll understand why she is such a great coach for some of the ladies in our programming! Follow Mackenzie on Instagram @followyourgutrd Learn more about Lindsey's Services and the Team at Rise Up Nutrition: www.RiseUpNutritionRUN.com Worried that you have RED-S? Curious to know how we could help or how you can recover fast?! Download the RED-S Recovery Race & see how you place for more support: www.RiseUpNutritionRUN.com/REDS

Have you ever struggled with your body image?   If the answer is yes, you'll want to stick around for today's episode.   Meet Corinne Dobbas, MS, RD, a registered dietitian, nutrition therapist, and intuitive eating counselor. She helps teens, young adults, adults recover from the effects of chronic dieting and eating disorders. She specializes in eating disorder recovery, disordered eating, and body image, taking a non-weight-focused and non-diet approach in helping her clients build a compassionate relationship with their bodies and food.   In today's episode, Corinne shares what led her to become a nutrition therapist. She also breaks down how normalized disordered eating behaviors are in society, even in the health field, and how they can harm your mental, emotional, and physical health.   Plus, she gives us some tips on how to work through challenging body image moments, such as dealing with discomfort, unease, and triggers.   Connect with Corinne: Website | https://corinnedobbas.com/   Connect with Katie: Book a free strategy call | www.katiehake.com/schedule Discover your eating style with this free quiz | www.katiehake.com/quiz   Other links mentioned: Elizabeth Scott's Big-Hearted Embodiment Training → https://elizabethscottresources.com/events/  The Body Positive Trainings for Treatment Providers → https://courses.thebodypositive.org/p/training-for-treatment-providers  Body Image Online Training for Clinicians with Marci Evans and Fiona Sutherland → https://marcird.teachable.com/p/body-image

Marci Evans, MS, CEDRD-S, LDN, joins The Body Image Podcast to talk about the intersection of digestive issues, eating disorder recovery, and body image. More specifically, Marci talks about: What makes folks in eating disorder recovery susceptible to digestive issues? What's a functional gut disorder? The prognosis for digestive issues in recovery Self-compassion and GI concerns Dealing with pain Unhelpful comments around digestive issues Some helpful things for GI issues What is problematic for recovery and digestive issues Gut directed hypnotherapy in recovery And so much much more. Learn more about Marci and her practice here. Find Marci's online courses here.

Marci Evans, MS, CEDRD-S, LDN, shares her passion for creating accessible and engaging training for eating disorder clinicians. If you're looking to gain confidence in the field, this episode is for you. Marci's trainings are varied – covering everything from counseling to body image to digestive issues in ED. Her trainings keep clinicians coming back … Continue reading Take Your Eating Disorder Expertise to the Next Level! Marci Evans, MS, CEDRD-S, LDN, Shows You How →

Marci Evans, RD is our guest today and we're digging deep into the intersection of gut symptoms, mental health, chronic stress on the body and our relationship with food. You don't have to have a diagnosable eating disorder, or severe disordered eating to experience gut issues that stem from a complicated relationship with food.   Marci...Read More »

The post Rebroadcast: Interview With Marci Evans appeared first on Seven Health: Intuitive Eating and Anti Diet Nutritionist.

Marci Evans, MS, CEDRD-S, LDN, shares some her work in body image, digestive disorders and nutrition counseling.  And the number one most important thing? If you're going to be working in the field of eating disorders, to be in clinical supervision (it's more important than who you follow on Instagram!!) She reminds us that regardless of your role in healthcare, you are interacting with people with eating disorders. And although many of us get "zero training in eating disorders",  we need good healthcare professionals to dive in and do this work! Supervision is to help us become stronger and more confident, and it's ok to be a beginner.  Even the most seasoned practitioners feel like beginners sometimes, which is why we keep learning! BIO: Marci identifies as a Food and Body Imager Healer® practicing from a Health At Every Size and anti-oppression lens. She has dedicated her career to counseling, supervising, and teaching in the field of eating disorders. She is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian and Supervisor and certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. In addition to her group private practice, Marci launched an online eating disorders training platform for clinicians in 2015 and co-directs a specialized eating disorder internship at Simmons University. In 2018 she received the Professional Integrity Award from The Behavioral Health Dietetics Practice Group of The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. She has spoken locally and nationally at numerous conferences and media outlets. She loves social media so be sure to connect on Instagram or Facebook  or tweet her @marciRD, and check out her blog at www.marciRD.com/blog. With your host Beth Harrell Follow Beth on Instagram

Do you ever feel bloated, constipated and just can't figure out your body? Well, today's guest spills the beans on digestive disorders, how living with an eating disorder we tend to feel things very deeply and how we can support gut health through recovery. Marci identifies as a Food and Body Imager Healer® practicing from a Health At Every Size and anti-oppression lens. She has dedicated her career to counseling, supervising, and teaching in the field of eating disorders. She is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian and Supervisor and certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. In addition to her group private practice, Marci launched an online eating disorders training platform for clinicians in 2015 and co-directs a specialized eating disorder internship at Simmons University. In 2018 she received the Professional Integrity Award from The Behavioral Health Dietetics Practice Group of The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. She has spoken locally and nationally at numerous conferences and media outlets. She loves social media so be sure to connect online @marciRD.  In today's episode we cover functional digestive disorders commonly experienced in recovery, practical steps we can take to support our gut, the role of probiotics, digestive enzymes and how to know the difference between a food intolerance and eating disorder symptoms.   Find more from Marci at marcird.com and Instagram.com/marcird Follow us on Instagram.com/embodyhealthlondon_ Follow us on tiktok.com/embodyhealthldn Follow us on twitter.com/embodyhealthldn Follow us on facebook.com/embodyhealthldn

Did you know that…food is not always the cause of your GI symptoms? In fact, sometimes it has nothing to do with food and everything to do with your thoughts around the food. Today we are going to explore why this may be through a conversation on the gut brain axis.   I want to thank Marci Evans for her recent workshop that inspired this episode and is the reference for most of what I'll share in this episode.   The brain is involved in so much aspects of your health. From how the digestive response is impacted by the gut brain axis, to how body image work is brain work, to even how the hypothalamus, the control center of your brain, is the reason your period can shut down if you are undereating and overexercising...it is TRULY fascinating to think about how our brain is involved in so much of what we think and feel and believe on a daily basis and how this may impact our health.   In this episode we dig in to the link of disordered eating and the digestive system and GI symptoms you may be experiencing through understanding the connection of your gut brain axis.   The Summer Reset is a free mini-course created for you to help you realize this fact: you're already summer body ready. And what this means to you is, instead of constantly trying to change your body every year summer rolls around, you can choose to reset how you view your body. So you can feel comfortable and gain confidence in the body you have right here, right now. The Summer Reset will help you reset your mindset towards food, fitness and body this summer so you can stop waiting and start LIVING NOW.    Click here to join the waitlist for Digestive Freedom Foundations.   This episode is brought to you by one of my favorite skincare companies, Primally Pure. My favorite products right now are the facial dry brush, the plumping mask and the citrus and mint body butter. You can use the code NOURISH for 10% off your first order.   Resources for you: Learn more about our services at Nourishing Minds Nutrition. Read testimonials from our amazing clients here.  Join our FREE support group for like-minded women, the Nourishing Women Community for more community & support. Take a look at our online shop, the Wellness Without Obsession Shop.   Let's hang out! Connect with Victoria and the staff at NMN: Victoria's Instagram Victoria's Website Nourishing Minds Nutrition Instagram Nourishing Minds Nutrition website

The purpose of today's episode is to share the digestive response our bodies have to an eating disorder and how this impacts our gut microbiome.   For the context of this episode, I'm going to refer to eating disorders to include the entire spectrum: chronic dieting, disordered eating, orthorexia, anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating. Since I specialize in orthorexia, I'll really be touching on this quite a bit in this episode, yet all eating disorders (ED) have an effect so this really is an episode to say all forms of ED impact digestion.   According to Marci Evans, 98% of those affected by ED have digestive issues. Specifically functional gut disorders (meaning no structural damage), although structural disorders can absolutely impact those with ED, too. In today's episode we share why this may be that so many with ED struggle with digestive issues, as well as why those with digestive issues are more prone to develop ED.   There are so many mechanisms at play for how the digestive process is affected when we have an eating disorder, in this episode we will review how an eating disorder impacts digestion via: The gut brain axis The stress response of the body Inflammation Decreased variety of the microbiome Decreased intake of prebiotics (food for bacteria) As well as next steps to take as a patient and health care provider   Resources and References*: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30704642 https://healthspaceclinics.com.au/blog/the-role-of-gut-microbiome-in-eating-disorders https://kelseykinney.com/got-anxiety-heres-how-your-gut-microbiome-plays-a-part/ https://kelseykinney.com/polyphenols-foods/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6047317/ https://marcird.com/improving-digestion-without-obsession/ https://marcird.com/digestive-disorders-eating-disorders-a-complicated-mix/ https://www.thereallife-rd.com/2017/07/eating-disorder-gastrointestinal-issues/ https://www.victoriamyers.net/blog/10-steps-fix-digestive-distress   *Please note that there may be triggering information in the research studies linked.   Mantra for the week: https://www.instagram.com/p/B9DRs8HpTXJ   Resources for you: Learn more about our services at Nourishing Minds Nutrition. Read testimonials from our amazing clients here.  Join our FREE support group for like-minded women, the Nourishing Women Community for more community & support. Take a look at our online shop, the Wellness Without Obsession Shop.   Let's hang out! Connect with Victoria and the staff at NMN: Victoria's Instagram Victoria's Website Nourishing Minds Nutrition Instagram Nourishing Minds Nutrition website

Today on the podcast, we have one of our amazing dietitians at Nourishing Minds Nutrition, Kelsey Pukala, back on the show to explain how disordered eating can be a root cause to digestive issues.   In today's episode we detail through: An explanation to what is disordered eating What kind of digestive issues you can experience with disordered eating Why and how disordered eating can lead to digestive issues Why we don't use elimination diets and food sensitivity testing in our practice General tips to get started with improving your digestion   Information discussed in today's episode: Victoria Myers Blog Meg's Etsy Shop Episode 83: Digestion Basics, IBS/SIBO and merging Intuitive Eating with Digestive Healing Episode 66: SIBO, IBS and Digestive Healing with dietitian Kelsey Kinney Episode 64: Probiotics: the what, how and why Marci Evans website Is Clean Eating Causing Your Digestive Issues? Improve Your Digestion Naturally (and Start Today!) Resources for you: Learn more about our services at Nourishing Minds Nutrition. Read testimonials from our amazing clients here.  Join our FREE support group for like-minded women, the Nourishing Women Community for more community & support. Take a look at our online shop, the Wellness Without Obsession Shop.   Let's hang out! Connect with Victoria and the staff at NMN: Victoria's Instagram Victoria's Website Nourishing Minds Nutrition Instagram Nourishing Minds Nutrition website For every guest that comes on the show, we donate money to Loveland Foundation. The Loveland Foundation, a foundation that provides therapy and  healing to Black women and girls. We are honored to donate monthly to the Loveland Foundation, and you can learn more and donate yourself here.

As more and more begins to open up as a result of the vaccinations, many people are beginning to talk about, "the COVID 15" (or 20, 25, 50, etc.). Most of this talk of weight gain is done from a negative perspective ... a negative thing that needs to be fixed ASAP. How do people usually attempt to "fix" it? Yep, another diet.In this episode, we discuss a recent article written by Marci Evans, a certified eating disorder registered dietician titled, "COVID Weight Gain & What It Really Means." In one of the quotes from the article that sets the foundation for our discussion, Evans writes, "Because our culture almost always frames weight gain as a bad thing, it’s important to appreciate all of the amazing and vital ways our bodies fight to protect us. And yes, that includes weight gain during times of intense stress."Rebecca Heald, Transformational NutritionLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-heald-b9229b159/Web: https://transformationalnutrition.co.uk/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TransNutrition1/IG: @transformationalnutrition1Jeff Ash, Hope Drives Me Training & NutritionLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-ash-7b004318a/Web: https://hopedrivesme.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/hopedrivesmenutritionIG: @jeffashfitness

ABOUT LARA REAVES :When Lara Reaves arrived at a place of meaningful recovery with an urge to help people like herself. When asked by mentor Rebecca Copper “what do you want to do deep down inside in your gut,” Lara knew the answer was to help others with eating disorders and Lara’s training began her training shortly thereafter. The clinical expertise and decades of recovery from her mentor offered Lara a unique education that “I would have never experienced during a psychology master's program.” During this time, Lara assisted in building a virtual Disorder Eating program, seminars on Eating Disorder Treatment, workshops, and writing projects. The experience was inspiring, and watching people make peace with food and their bodies felt like witnessing miracles. Lara realized that the Recovery coaching aspect of the work was what she loved and felt the most passionate about, leading to Lara receiving her certification as an Eating Disorder Recovery Coach from The Rebecca's Foundation Institute.Lara was supervised and trained directly under Rebecca Cooper, world-renowned eating disorder therapist, author, and founder of Rebecca's House residential treatment center. Lara also volunteered as a Recovery Mentor, an experience that planted the seed to pursuing work as a recovery coach. She found it deeply rewarding to be a part of someone else's transformative journey towards a deeper, more peaceful relationship with food, addiction, and themselves. Through looking at the causes, effects, and social pressures, she grew her awareness of how much needed to be done to help people with Eating Disorders and mental health. As a recovered anorexic, bulimic, and alcoholic, Lara realized her new mission was increasing awareness of multiple aspects of the problem, guiding people in steps on the journey to recovery, and educating the public about the seriousness of eating disorders.Since recovery, Lara has worked in residential clinical settings, adolescent mental health facilities, and is well-versed in communicating with a treatment team. She is the Chief Operations Officer of The Rebecca's Eating Disorder Foundation, where they fund men and women who want to get treatment. Lara is a Certified Eating Disorder Recovery Coach from The Rebecca’s Foundation Institute, Chief Operations Officer and Coach for Rebecca’s Eating Disorder Foundation, Body Image Training for Clinicians: The Missing Piece of Whole-Body Healing with Marci Evans, CEDRD-S & Fiona Sutherland, and Certified Holistic Nutrition Practitioner from Southwest Institute of Healing Arts, Tempe AZ.Lara continues to value and love doing the things that helped her to reach full recovery by continuing to deepen her sense of spirituality and connection with the world including attending 12 step support groups, prayer and meditation, journaling, walking in nature, and reading a mix of spiritual and self-help books. Lara resides in Southern California, where she lives with her beloved husband Amir and their two dogs Ariel and Ernest. In her free time, Lara enjoys doing what she genuinely loves. Lately, this has been a lot of writing, playing with her dogs, service work (collecting and donating food and clothes for charities), gardening, and watching “I Love Lucy.”CONNECT WITH LARA REAVES:• Visit Lara online to learn more about her services and story• Learn about Lara’s Coaching and Recovery Philosophies• Contact Lara to see if working together would be a good fit• Subscribe to Lara’s personal blog and her blog written for Rebecca’s Eating Disorder Foundation• Follow Lara on Facebook and Instagram• Read more about Lara's journey from recovering to recovered • Listen to “Lara Reaves for Eating Disorder Awareness Week” on the Oversharing podcast• You can also find Lara on Rebecca’s Eating Disorder Foundation and at Karin Lewis Eating Disorder Center＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿ABOUT KARIN LEWIS:Karin Lewis, MA, LMFT, CEDS has been recovered from Anorexia Nervosa for over 20 years and has been specializing in the prevention and treatment of eating disorders since 2005. To learn more about Karin and her center’s services, please visit Karin Lewis Eating Disorder Center. You can connect with Karin on social media by following her on Facebook and Instagram.If you enjoyed the podcast, we would be so grateful if you would please consider leaving a review here. Thank you!Are you interested in becoming a guest on the Recovery Bites podcast? If so, please fill out our brief application form to start the process.

Today on the podcast we have the honor of having Racheal Hartley, author of the new book Gentle Nutrition, on the show.   Rachael’s book Gentle Nutrition explores what healthy eating looks like from a non-diet perspective. It teaches you how to improve your relationship with food and how take care of your body with real life tips and tools that have helped my clients. By taking food off it’s pedestal as the end all, be all of health, Gentle Nutrition creates space for engaging with nutrition in a more relaxed, and sustainable manner. When we leave diet culture and the assumption that weight equals health behind, we can focus on truly honoring our health and well-being.   Rachael Hartley, RD, LD, is a Columbia, SC-based nutrition therapist, certified intuitive eating counselor and nationally-recognized food and nutrition expert. In 2014, Rachael  opened her private practice, where she specializes in intuitive eating, disordered eating and eating disorders, women's health, and digestive disorders. She also runs the popular food and wellness blog The Joy of Eating. As a trusted voice in the dietetics field, she collaborates with like-minded brands for recipe development and nutrition communications.In 2018, she was named one of Self Magazine’s trustworthy dietitians for nutrition advice. Rachael has trained under dietitians Evelyn Tribole (co-author of Intuitive Eating), Marci Evans and Anna Sweeney.    In this episode we discuss: Rachael’s journey to choosing to become a RD, and then evolving into a non-diet RD.  Rachael’s new book, Gentle Nutrition, that I am SO excited to share and recommend to my community, because there are SO few books out there discussing nutrition from a non-diet lens.  Why Gentle Nutrition explores what healthy eating looks like from a non-diet perspective. Why approaching nutrition from a relaxed, sustainable, non-diet manner essential to true health and well-being. Tangible examples of what gentle nutrition can look like an application. What it looks like to stock your kitchen for intuitive eating. Where the 2,000 calorie recommendations on food labels came from. How Rachael practices wellness without obsession.   Links to learn more about Racheal: https://www.rachaelhartleynutrition.com/my-book-gentle-nutrition https://www.rachaelhartleynutrition.com/blog/how-to-stock-your-kitchen-for-intuitive-eating https://www.rachaelhartleynutrition.com/blog/where-2000-calories-on-food-labels-comes-from  Racheal’s Instagram account   Resources for you: Learn more about our services at Nourishing Minds Nutrition. Read testimonials from our amazing clients here.  Join our FREE support group for like-minded women, the Nourishing Women Community for more community & support. Take a look at our online shop, the Wellness Without Obsession Shop. Join the waitlist for our new program coming in May, Get Your Period Back Playbook.   Let’s hang out! Connect with Victoria and the staff at NMN: Victoria’s Instagram Victoria’s Website Nourishing Minds Nutrition Instagram Nourishing Minds Nutrition website For every guest that comes on the show, we donate money to Loveland Foundation. The Loveland Foundation, a foundation that provides therapy and  healing to Black women and girls. We are honored to donate monthly to the Loveland Foundation, and you can learn more and donate yourself here.

Marci Evans came on today's Spot On! episode to discuss an alternative approach to dietary behavior change that emphasizes healthful behaviors instead of weight loss called "Health At Every Size". As a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian and Supervisor and certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, Marci has dedicated her career to counseling, supervising, and teaching in the field of eating disorders for over a decade. Listen now to learn about the philosophy behind this approach. --- Thank you for listening! Find us on Social: www.facebook.com/SpotOnDrJSB/ www.instagram.com/spot_on_podcast/ twitter.com/joansalgeblake

How can parents encourage their children to have a healthy and curious relationship with food? Can providing an explorative relationship with food, give them a better standing to trust their own bodies? What does the research say about pressuring or praising your child to eat a certain food?In this podcast episode, I speak with Marci Evans about raising kids to have a healthy relationship with food and their own body.In this episode we discuss:How to not pass on your issues with food to your childPraise being a double-edged swordSign up for the FREE e-course to understanding your eating disorder and embarking on the road to recovery. SHOW NOTES: Click hereFollow me on Instagram @behind_the_bite_podcastVisit the website: www.behindthebitepodcast.com

How can parents encourage their children to have a healthy and curious relationship with food? Can providing an explorative relationship with food, give them a better standing to trust their own bodies? What does the research say about pressuring or praising your child to eat a certain food? In this podcast episode, I speak with Marci Evans about raising kids to have a healthy relationship with food and their own body. In this episode we discuss: How to not pass on your issues with food to your child Praise being a double-edged sword Sign up for the FREE e-course to understanding your eating disorder and embarking on the road to recovery.  SHOW NOTES: Click here Follow me on Instagram @behind_the_bite_podcast Visit the website: www.behindthebitepodcast.com

How can parents encourage their children to have a healthy and curious relationship with food? Can providing an explorative relationship with food, give them a better standing to trust their own bodies? What does the research say about pressuring or praising your child to eat a certain food?In this podcast episode, I speak with Marci Evans about raising kids to have a healthy relationship with food and their own body.In this episode we discuss:How to not pass on your issues with food to your childPraise being a double-edged swordSign up for the FREE e-course to understanding your eating disorder and embarking on the road to recovery. SHOW NOTES: Click hereFollow me on Instagram @behind_the_bite_podcastVisit the website: www.behindthebitepodcast.com

How can parents encourage their children to have a healthy and curious relationship with food? Can providing an explorative relationship with food, give them a better standing to trust their own bodies? What does the research say about pressuring or praising your child to eat a certain food? In this podcast episode, I speak with Marci Evans about raising kids to have a healthy relationship with food and their own body. In this episode we discuss: How to not pass on your issues with food to your child Praise being a double-edged sword Sign up for the FREE e-course to understanding your eating disorder and embarking on the road to recovery.  SHOW NOTES: Click here Follow me on Instagram @behind_the_bite_podcast Visit the website: www.behindthebitepodcast.com

Fellow anti-diet dietitian Marci Evans is back! We discuss the intersection of digestive disorders and eating disorders, the risks associated with elimination diets, the role of the gut microbiome in digestion and health, the importance of consistency in self-care and well-being, and so much more! Plus, Christy answers a listener question about why she as a dietitian doesn’t advise people to shift their food choices to less-processed foods. This episode was originally published on November 26, 2018. Marci is a Food and Body Image Healer™. She has dedicated her career to counseling, supervising, and teaching in the field of eating disorders. She is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian and Supervisor, Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor and Certified ACSM personal trainer. In addition to her group private practice, Marci launched an online eating disorders training platform for dietitians in 2015 and co-directs a specialized eating disorders dietetic internship at Simmons College. She volunteers for a number of national eating disorder organizations and has spoken locally and internationally at numerous conferences and media outlets. She loves social media and you can find her on all outlets @MarciRD. Find her online at MarciRD.com. Christy's book, Anti-Diet, is available wherever you get your books. Order online at christyharrison.com/book, or at local bookstores across North America, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Grab Christy's free guide, 7 simple strategies for finding peace and freedom with food, for some ideas of how to get started on the anti-diet path. If you're ready to break free from diet culture once and for all, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course. Ask your own question about intuitive eating, Health at Every Size, or eating disorder recovery at christyharrison.com/questions. For full show notes and a transcript of this episode, go to christyharrison.com/foodpsych.

Marci and I discuss her work as a weight inclusive and non-diet body image healer and Registered Dietitian. We talk about food as a red herring and gastrointestinal issues in those with eating disorders. We discuss eating disorder recovery in general, and the dangerous dogma that is diet culture. We also touch a little on the topic of eating disorder memoirs and whether these are helpful or harmful; the new film on Netflix, "To The Bone" specifically.

In a diet-obsessed, thin-idealizing world, how do we heal our body image? As an eating disorder therapist, I get this question nearly every day in session. Cue Marci Evans, registered dietitian and body image healer.… Continue ReadingBody Image Healing with Marci Evans, RD The post Body Image Healing with Marci Evans, RD appeared first on .

Carolina (Carol) Guizar joins the show to talk about why diet culture sucks, and what it looks like in the Latinx community. She gets real about her lived experience as a Mexican-American, and a woman in this country, struggling with beauty "ideals", thin-privilege within her family culture, and efforts to fit in and avoid otherness. Recently, Carol has taken her work, and anti-diet message to the Instagram account, @la_eathority. Here, she shares "Intuitive eating+body peace for Latinxs".  Follow Carol @la_eathority, or reach out to work with her through LatinxHealthCollective.com.  Covid-19-related resources mentioned:  @Covid19eatingsupport (collaborative account led by HAES®-aligned providers) Marci Evans and Fiona Sutherland addressing challenges for practitioners, on The Mindful Dietitian podcast FREE WIND hangouts for RDs and RDs2Be (join us in the Facebook group for information) And hey, it's OK if you're not getting ALL the things done right now. There's a pandemic happening. We're living through it. This is unprecedented for most, if not all, of us.  Your host, Heather Caplan RD: HeatherCaplan.com,  @RDRealTalk. Have you left a review for the show yet? If not, please do! Click here and tap the stars. Questions or requests for the show? Reach out: RDRealTalk @ Gmail.com Show notes live here: weightinclusivenutrition.com/podcast Last but not least, get more RD Real Talk from the newsletter, landing in your inbox monthly!

At this unprecedented time of chaos and uncertainty, we seek connection and care in ways that may feel really difficult. As health practitioners, we too can be caught up in what these events mean for us, our families, communities and the world. Here, Marci and I have an important conversation about what “self care” really means - perhaps in even unconventional ways - and how we can become more attuned, receptive, grounded and creative when tough moments, days and times arise. About Marci: Marci is a Food and Body Image Healer®. She has dedicated her career to counseling, supervising, and teaching in the field of eating disorders. She is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian and Supervisor, certified Intuitive Eating Counselor and Certified ACSM personal trainer. In addition to her group private practice and three adjunct teaching positions, Marci launched an online eating disorders training for dietitians in 2015 and co-directs a specialized eating disorder internship at Simmons College. She volunteers for a number of national eating disorder organizations including the iaedp certification committee and is serving as an eating disorder resource professional for The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.  She has spoken locally and nationally at numerous conferences and media outlets. She loves social media so tweet her @marciRD, follow her on Facebook and Instagram, and check out her blog at www.marciRD.com/blog. Marci's Online Courses        

The purpose of today’s episode is to share the digestive response our bodies have to an eating disorder and how this impacts our gut microbiome.   For the context of this episode, I’m going to refer to eating disorders to include the entire spectrum: chronic dieting, disordered eating, orthorexia, anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating. Since I specialize in orthorexia, I’ll really be touching on this quite a bit in this episode, yet all eating disorders (ED) have an effect so this really is an episode to say all forms of ED impact digestion.   According to Marci Evans, 98% of those affected by ED have digestive issues. Specifically functional gut disorders (meaning no structural damage), although structural disorders can absolutely impact those with ED, too. In today’s episode we share why this may be that so many with ED struggle with digestive issues, as well as why those with digestive issues are more prone to develop ED.   There are so many mechanisms at play for how the digestive process is affected when we have an eating disorder, in this episode we will review how an eating disorder impacts digestion via: The gut brain axis The stress response of the body Inflammation Decreased variety of the microbiome Decreased intake of prebiotics (food for bacteria) As well as next steps to take as a patient and health care provider   Resources and References*:   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30704642   https://healthspaceclinics.com.au/blog/the-role-of-gut-microbiome-in-eating-disorders   https://kelseykinney.com/got-anxiety-heres-how-your-gut-microbiome-plays-a-part/   https://kelseykinney.com/polyphenols-foods/   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6047317/   https://marcird.com/improving-digestion-without-obsession/   https://marcird.com/digestive-disorders-eating-disorders-a-complicated-mix/   https://www.thereallife-rd.com/2017/07/eating-disorder-gastrointestinal-issues/   https://www.victoriamyers.net/blog/10-steps-fix-digestive-distress   *Please note that there may be triggering information in the research studies linked.   Mantra for the week: https://www.instagram.com/p/B9DRs8HpTXJ/   Resources for you: Learn more about our services at Nourishing Minds Nutrition. Read testimonials from our amazing clients here. Join our FREE support group for like-minded women, the Nourishing Women Community. Live Q&As are hosted every Tuesday evening.   Let’s hang out! Connect with Victoria and the staff at NMN: Victoria’s Instagram Victoria’s Website Nourishing Minds Nutrition Instagram Nourishing Minds Nutrition website

This episode of the Pursuing Private Practice podcast is not to be missed, as Jennifer sits down with Marci Evans for an incredible conversation that will inspire dietitians at all stages of their career. As a leader in the field of eating disorders, Marci helps bust the myth of doing it all alone, and why working with teams and community is necessary to build a thriving business and to support her accomplishments in the dietetics industry. Fortunate to discover Intuitive Eating early in her internship, Marci reflects back on how it shaped her career and her own relationship with food, and influenced her niching down to eating disorders and HAES. Working at a weight-loss centric gym while attending graduate school, she cultivated her entrepreneurial skills and developed her voice and message of weight-inclusive dietetics. You’ll hear the process of how Marci transitioned from a solo practice to a thriving group practice, and the necessary risks involved. She also shares how after teaching a University program for clinicians working with eating disorders, she bridged the course curriculum to create her online training program, Nutrition Counseling for Eating Disorders, and how she later updated it with a 2.0 version. From there, she developed even more online training programs for dietitians, to meet the demand for specialized training.   Along the way of building a thriving group practice and online training programs, Marci explains the absolute necessity of having a team of people to help get it all done. “If you’re unable to surrender tasks to another person, you cannot build beyond your own individual practice.” – Marci Evans Some of the topics discussed include: How her Master’s degree integrated nutrition and entrepreneurship with eating disorders counselling, and provided the foundation. Her process of growing a group practice and the steps of developing her online course. How her community feedback helped her build version 2.0 of the program. The lack of training opportunities in eating disorder counseling, why dietitians need to learn more about it, and her passion for continuing to expand the role of dietitians. The challenges of her unexpected maternity leave and transitioning back to work, and how she now navigates the middle ground without over-extending herself. Her advice for dietitians going into entrepreneurial ventures. Looking ahead to 2020 and what’s next. “I feel really strong about continuing to elevate and expand the role of dietitians.” – Marci Evans For more information, visit https://www.pursuingprivatepractice.com/25   SPONSOR INFO: This episode is sponsored by a free on-demand training for professionals, the 5 Secrets To Make Money and Make An Impact In Your Private Practice. On this training, you will discover 5 “Easy to Implement” tactics to GROW your Private Practice with a Specialty in Intuitive Eating.

Marci Evans, MS CEDRD-S LD, comes back to RD Real Talk to chat with us about body image. This conversation pairs with episode 130, featuring Bri Campos LPC, to continue our understanding of, and scope of practice (as dietitians) with, body image healing. Marci also shares some business and life updates, including how she prepared, and set boundaries for, her maternity leave last year.  Marci puts out a call to action for all practitioners: We must do our own work, first. She provides some foundation for how to do that, along with ample resources for professionals who want to learn more about this topic.  Continue to learn about Body Image through our Weight Inclusive Nutrition and Dietetics (WIND) workshops and webinars. More information here: weightinclusivenutrition.com/events Resources mentioned:  WIND NYC Workshop (and virtual option): Register here! “The Body Appreciation Scale” by Laura Avalos, Tracy Tylka and Nichole Wood-Barcalow Dr. Daphne Lordly and her body image, and body perception, research Food Psych episode with Kimmie Singh MS RD (214) Marci's online trainings for professionals Be Nourished Body Trust Provider Training Book: Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach Book: Self-Compassion by Kristen Neff Book: Embody: Learning to Love Your Unique Body...by Connie Sobczak Book: The Handbook of Positive Body Image and Embodiment by Niva Piran and Tracy Tylka  Book: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk Additional resources we mention (books) are listed here: weightinclusivenutrition.com/books Your host, Heather Caplan: HeatherCaplan.com, @heatherDCRD, @RDRealTalk. Have you left a review on iTunes yet? If not, please do! Click here and tap the stars. Questions or requests for the show? Reach out: RDRealTalk @ Gmail.com Last but not least, get more RD Real Talk from the newsletter, landing in your inbox monthly!

Do you compare yourself with others? (Raises hand.) Our podcast guest this week, Marci Evans, spoke about social comparison theory at our annual nutrition conference, and it was hands down the most powerful presentation I have ever been to. Social comparison theory states that individuals determine their own social and personal worth based on how they stack up against others. In some cases, comparison can be helpful, but more often than not, it’s bad for our wellbeing. If you have ever compared your success, body image, relationship status, friendships or even living situation to anyone else (especially on social media), you HAVE to listen to this episode. Tune in to learn: Which personality types tend to be more prone to comparing (hint: people who are empaths), what happens to our brains when we make these cross-comparisons, and concrete things you can do to compare less…starting NOW (and for free).   For our resources and shownotes, visit foodheavenmadeeasy.com/podcast.   HOOKUP CODES: Skinsei: Personalize your skincare routine⁠ with a 1-month free trial for $45 subscription at skinsei.com   Produced by Dear Media

The post 172: Interview With Marci Evans appeared first on Seven Health.

Feel out of control around sugar? If so, know that you're not alone. SO many of not only my clients but also my friends and family members have expressed dissatisfaction when it comes to their relationships with sugar. Listen in as I break down what the science actually says about sugar addiction. If you're ready to dive deeper be sure to join my 5-day sugar challenge here - www.katiehake.com/sugar. Things Mentioned in Today's Show: -FFHH Episode 50 -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17617461 -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27372453 -THE BODYLOVE PROJECT WITH JESSI HAGGERTY Ep. 038: Marci Evans on Food Addiction -www.katiehake.com/sugar    

Registered dietitian Marci Evans draws on her expertise in both digestive health and eating disorders to talk us through helping kids struggling with tummy aches and food sensitivities. We discuss the mind-body connection, the risks of elimination diets, and her recommendations for supporting your child and working with their medical providers from a body-positive perspective. Get our ABC Guide to Body-Positive Parenting. Read the full show notes here.

| About this Episode | WELCOME TO SEASON TWO OF SPOT ON! In our season premiere, we are joined by Marci Evans, a registered dietitian who specializes in the treatment of eating disorders and body image concerns with a passion for neuroscience. Marci explains the science behind how Instagram affects your brain and how it can change your emotions on a chemical level beyond your control. Enjoy this episode of Spot On! and don't forget to subscribe and like our Facebook page! Thank you for listening! www.facebook.com/SpotOnDrJSB/ www.instagram.com/joansalgeblake/ twitter.com/joansalgeblake

Is food addiction real? Many women who struggle with their relationship with food believe it is. Registered Dietitian, Marci Evans, walks us through the research on food addiction and what is the real underlying factor that makes so many feel out of control with food - and what you can do to stop feeling this way and heal your relationship with food.  Marci is a Food and Body Imager Healer®. She has dedicated her career to counseling, supervising, and teaching in the field of eating disorders and body image and has spoken nationally and internationally on these topics. In 2015 she launched an online training platform for dietitians and therapists and currently offers 3 self-study courses on the topics of body image, nutrition counseling for eating disorders, and the intersection of disordered eating and digestive health. In 2016 Simmons College recruited Marci and Lisa Pearl to develop a specialized eating disorders dietetic internship track and graduate level coursework. Additionally, she maintains a group clinical practice in Cambridge, MA and loves social media so connect with her online @marciRD on all social media platforms. You can also learn more about Marci’s work at marcird.com Want to heal your relationship with food and stop feeling addicted to food? Go to rachelgoodnutrition.com/program to join Rachel’s 6 week online program Break Free From Binge Eating

[Replay!] Jessica Jones, dietitian and co-host of Food Heaven podcast, joins me to chat about her career, and then, Whole30. January seems like the most popular time for people to "try" the Whole30, so we're here to try and help you avoid that path. I put out a call to social media, asking people why they've done the Whole30, and what they liked about it, to try and integrate various perspectives.  Tune into our conversation to learn why Whole30 isn't the best way to adopt new habits like meal planning, trying new recipes, and eating to feel better. There are many other ways to do all of the above, without extreme food restrictions or rigid food rules.  We address: meal planning, recipes, digestive issues, sugar addiction (or lack thereof), PCOS, and the hidden threat of deprivation.  Most of the things we talked about: Food heaven show on YouTube, and the Food Heaven podcast “I guess the Whole30 is very much still a thing”, on my blog Marci Evans on Food Addiction: Food Pscyh & RD Real Talk (#26) “Why Fear of Sugar Addiction May Be More Toxic Than Sugar Is” by Rebecca Scritchfield RD PCOS Nutrition resources: Julie Duffy Dillon & Rachael Hartley   Other stuff: Your host, Heather Caplan: HeatherCaplan.com, @heatherDCRD, @RDRealTalk Have you left a review on iTunes yet? If not, please do! Click here and tap the stars. Questions or requests for the show? Reach out: RDRealTalk @ Gmail.com

Today on the podcast, we have one of our amazing dietitians at Nourishing Minds Nutrition, Kelsey Pukala, back on the show to explain how disordered eating can be a root cause to digestive issues. In today’s episode we detail through: An explanation to what is disordered eating What kind of digestive issues you can experience with disordered eating Why and how disordered eating can lead to digestive issues Why we don’t use elimination diets and food sensitivity testing in our practice General tips to get started with improving your digestion   Information discussed in today's episode: Victoria Myers Blog Meg’s Etsy Shop Episode 83: Digestion Basics, IBS/SIBO and merging Intuitive Eating with Digestive Healing Episode 66: SIBO, IBS and Digestive Healing with dietitian Kelsey Kinney Episode 64: Probiotics: the what, how and why Marci Evans website Is Clean Eating Causing Your Digestive Issues? Improve Your Digestion Naturally (and Start Today!)   Resources for you: Learn more about our services at Nourishing Minds Nutrition. Read testimonials from our amazing clients here. Join our FREE tribe for like-minded women, the Nourishing Minds Tribe.   Let’s hang out! Connect with us: Meg’s Instagram Meg’s Website Victoria’s Instagram Victoria’s Website Nourishing Minds Nutrition Instagram

Cheat meals have been a part of popular diet culture for a long time and there are even experts who promote them as being healthy. But what is the truth? Join us as Annie and Lauren unpack the assumptions that are made about cheat meals and explore what balance and moderation mean in the context of healthy, happy living. What you’ll hear in this episode: Do cheat meals boost your metabolism? Could cheat meals be negating your progress? What the experts say about cheat meals Do cheat meals provide a psychological break The Pink Polar Bear effect and cheat meals What “sugar addicted rats” really tell us about restriction Do cheat meals help you stay on track? Cycles of binge restrict - seasonal, time of day, days of the weak How to enjoy treats without cheat days The Goldilocks approach to balance What to do when your pendulum swings back How to find balance in the middle Resources: Is Sugar Addictive? 49: Diet Culture Explained 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 philosophy of a cheat meal is based on the idea that for one meal or one day a week you can eat whatever you like and it seems to have become the standard in many mainstream diet plans. Fans of cheat meals boast that they boost your metabolism, provide a psychological break and help you stay on track with your goals but do they really? On today's episode of Balance 365 life radio Lauren and I dive into our thoughts and experiences on if cheat meals help or hurt your relationship with food and how you can actually enjoy the foods you love without relying on cheat meals. Enjoy! Lauren, it's me and you again. How are you? Lauren: Hi. I feel like we should have so Mariah Carey in the background. Annie: Oh yeah, we should have, maybe Vanessa can, our podcast editor can put some in the background since Jen's not here. Jen is not a Mariah Carey fan and Lauren and I are diehard Mariah Carey fans. Lauren: Like old school Mariah. Annie: Yeah, in fact on Saturday night there's a bar in my town that is an over 30 bar, which- Lauren: Oh my god. Annie: But the it's great because they play a lot of Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul. Lauren: Do you have to show your ID to prove that you're over 30? Annie: You don't but yeah, I just don't think many people under 30 it's really their thing. Lauren: Want to go. Annie: It's definitely an older crowd but the music is so good so it's fun just to go dancing there because it's like you're in middle school. It's like you're at those middle school, like school parties again. Lauren: And like the skating party. Annie: Yes, like Jay for roll away. Lauren: It reminds me of that meme that says there needs to be a bar, like, for people who like to have 2 drinks then go to bed before 9 o'clock. Annie: Yup, that's me. I had a couple glasses of wine at dinner then we went out dancing with my girlfriends and it was great. Lauren: Like that sounds fun. Annie: It was fun. It was, I mean, that's essentially what happens in my bathroom every morning, you know, a little dance party with Mariah Carey- Lauren: But maybe without the wine with. Annie: Yes or or maybe with a lot of coffee. Just replace the wine with coffee. Anyways,  I'm happy you're here with me today because we're talking about cheat meals and I used to be a big cheat meal fan. Did you ever do a cheat meal? Did you ever do that like? Lauren: Yes, I did lots of cheat meals. They were always like, Saturday it was like my cheat meal day. Annie: Mine was Friday night and then it kind of wiggled its way into Saturday and kind of eventually came around Sunday which we will actually talk about later today but the cheat meal was kind of a standard in a lot of diets. Lauren: Yep. Annie: I don't know if you see this too in your area but it's kind of touted as like the go to philosophy for a lot of, especially in the gym setting, I feel, like a lot of people are doing, you know, that if it fits your macros or whatever and then they have their one designated cheat meal or cheat day. But the idea is that you can eat whatever you want in that timeframe, right? Lauren: Yeah. Annie: And there's actually even some "experts" that make claims as to why a cheat meal can be a good thing for you and they can say everything from it boosts your metabolism, that it can give you a psychological break from dieting and they can also say that it helps you keep you on track with your plan, which we're just going to blow those right out of the water in the next few minutes. So are you ready? Do you want to just get right into it or do you have any cheat meal thoughts before we jump into it? Lauren: Do you have any cheat meal thoughts? No, no, we can jump right in. Annie: Okay, let's go. So claim number one: cheat meals boost your metabolism. Lauren, you're kind of the nutrition guru, you are, not kind of, you are the nutrition guru. Is that true? Do cheat meals boost your metabolism? Lauren: No, I mean food boosts your metabolism in general and if you need a cheat meal to boost your metabolism, you are not eating enough right or being way too restrictive. Yeah and you know, to add to that whole eating breakfast, jumpstarts your metabolism, like, that's not true either so no, not and also one cheat meal can undo your results for the entire week and I think, I know you've probably experienced this too, right,where you you put in all this hard work throughout the entire week and so your cheat meal you all the things and I think we underestimate how much, how many calories we can eat during a cheat meal or a cheat day and it really, it kind of "undoes" everything you just worked to do, right and if you instead just kind of make smaller, more manageable changes throughout the entire week you don't need a cheat meal and you probably or could get better results anyway. Annie: Yeah, the first time I was, that concept of essentially a cheat meal having the, could be an opportunity to essentially negate all the work you did throughout the week I was in a doctor's office and I was talking to my primary care doctor, this was before I was a personal trainer. I was in the fitness industry, this is was long before this but I was expressing to her that I was trying to make some changes to my diet but that I wasn't losing weight and she asked, like, well, you know, what are you doing and I said well you know Monday through Friday I do really well, I, you know, pack my lunches, eat breakfast, I eat dinner, my snacks are this and that, like all the gold standard, sort of balanced diet stuff, right, it was heavy on the restriction side, of course. Because that's, you know, what I knew then but I said, you know, then on the weekends, then we'll eat out and she was like "Well, tell me about your eating out" and I was like, "Well, we'll go to the, you know, the restaurant down the corner or this or that" and she was like, "I hear that you're trying to make some changes and you have some really good intentions," she's like, "I want you to know that one of those meals can negate any caloric deficit you've tried to acquire during the week" and I was mad. I was mad when I heard that because I was like "No, I work so hard during the week to get this result and then I essentially just blow it all in one Chinese buffet, like, is that what you're telling me?" She was like,  "Well, look, it's not personal but yes, it's possible." Lauren: Yeah, that's really like, exactly what I used to do. I know a friend of mine, do you guys have On The Border? Annie: Yeah  we ate at On The Border when you were here. Lauren: Oh, well we would go to On The Border, there's one like by my house and we would eat the chips and salsa first, right, then I would get these tacos, these amazing tacos with the rice and then we would get this like cake dessert thing which had like the cake with the gooey chocolate center and ice cream and it was like, I probably, yeah, I would definitely overdo it because I was so hungry and so excited to actually eat good food, you know, because when you're restricting yourself so heavily throughout the week you want food that tastes good, like, you want taste. Annie: And I know we've said this a million and one times on this podcast before but I'm going to say it again, restriction sets you up to binge. Lauren: Yes. Annie: And so it's no surprise that if you're restricting, restricting, restricting, you know, like, white knuckling it through the week and then you get to that cheat meal on Friday or Saturday or Sunday or whatever it is or cheat day, it's no wonder you're like "Game on! Let's go, I'm going to get all the things! You know, I'm going to start at breakfast and I'm going to go all the way to dinner, you know or I'm going to have this, like, 3 course meal if you're just doing one meal, like, I'm going to I'm going to expand that meal into an appetizer and then a main course and then a dessert and then a side dish and some heavy caloric drinks or some alcohol or whatever." That's normal, that's exactly what we would expect from someone that is white knuckling it through the week, like. Lauren: Right and when you only have one day or one meal to get in all your favorite foods, like, I'm going to fit as much as I possibly can fit in my stomach right now, like, and I still go out to eat, like, I still eat chips and salsa and tacos and sometimes order dessert but I just eat less, like, I don't eat as many chips and salsa because I'm not starving, like, I'll eat, you know, I'll take half of my meal home because I don't need it all and if we do order a dessert, like, the whole family shares that, I have a few bites and like that's it, so not saying you can't go out to eat but it's just a different kind of experience. Annie: Absolutely. I think that's what we call moderation here at Balance365. Lauren: Oh, OK. Is that the term? Annie: Is that a new concept to you, Lauren? Jokes, jokes. OK, claim number 2: cheat meals provide a psychological break. Is that true? Lauren: No, I don't, not in the long run. So it can feel like a break when you're in it, right, but then you have to go back to restricting. I remember I always used to like, plan, like you said, I would play my whole day. Annie: Yes, right. Lauren: Plan what I'm going to eat for each meal, the whole cheat day but then you have to go back to it and we had Marci Evans on the podcast a few weeks ago and we talked all about sugar addiction, right or whether sugar addiction is a real thing, so if you haven't listened to that, definitely go listen that was a really good and if you remember, she talked about the sugar addicted rats that "prove" that sugar addiction is a real thing, right, when you read the click baity articles and whatever. But what we, what the study actually showed was the rats that had that addiction-like behavior were the ones that were, they had to fast before hand, right, they restricted their food before hand and then they gave them that access to the sugar and they gave them sometimes a lot of sugar, sometimes they would take it away and give it back and the rats that did not have that restrictive behavior before hand they just ate it like regular food, right, they didn't exhibit that same addicted like behavior. Annie: Yeah  so what she was suggesting and what other research has backed is that it's not necessarily the food, it's the way in which the food is presented or the context around the food. Lauren: Right. Annie: So yeah, when you're saying, no, I can't have this until Friday, like, yeah, come Friday you are salivating for it? Lauren:  Like, yeah and I think we talk about this in probably almost every single podcast but like the Pink Polar Bear effect, when you tell yourself you can't have something, you want it more and actually something that was really interesting, I think it was another Tracy Mann study who we're going to have on the podcast soon too shows that when you restrict your food you are more likely to notice food around you and that's by design, right. So when we were at real risk for starving we were more likely to notice when food was around us and that was helpful to us back then, but now with food everywhere it's not so helpful but when you restrict your food or tell yourself you can't have that food, you notice food more around you I mean, which is super interesting. Annie: I think if you are trying to get pregnant, have been pregnant, the thing that comes to mind is like, when we started trying to conceive with my children, you know, it was like all I saw was pregnant- Lauren: Everyone- Annie: Everyone was pregnant right, like, the farmer's market was just full of pregnant women. Lauren: Or you ever get a new car and then you've never seen that car before and now you see it everywhere and like everyone has your car. Annie: Yes, the power of suggestion, right? Lauren: Yeah. Annie:  OK claim number 3, this is kind of what I was hinting at earlier is that meals make it easier to stay on track, which- Lauren: Yeah. Annie: Tell me about that, Lauren. Lauren: Well, so your cheat meal on Friday night leads you to your cheat day on Saturday which leads you to your cheat day on Sunday. Normally I could cut it back off for Monday morning but trying to just do one cheat meal over the weekend and then stop is really difficult and I think most of our listeners who have been through this can completely understand where we're coming with this. Annie: And I think it's really common, you know, if you first start implementing the philosophy of cheat meals to be like "OK, cheat meal one and done" and then, you know, a few months later it's like a cheat meal Friday night goes into breakfast Saturday and then after a year of cheat mealing it you're like "Oh, look, my whole weekend is now a cheat meal, which is essentially my experience." Lauren: Right and then it's like what are you working so hard Monday through Thursday for, right? You're just torturing yourself for no reason. Annie: Right and the other thing that's kind of actually thinking about it in those terms, we've talked a lot about Weight Watchers, I've been a member multiple, multiple times but that's essentially what I was doing around weigh ins was I would kind of white knuckle it, restrict, restrict, restrict pre-weigh in and I would go weigh in so I could weigh in light and reach my goal for the week and then after the weigh in it was game on, like, finally, just give me the foods that I was saying I couldn't have before I weighed in and which leads us right into why or how rather cheat days can create the perfect storm for yo yo dieting, weight loss, weight gain, weight loss, weight gain, weight loss, weight gain is essentially what we're saying, Lauren and I are saying is that you spend, you know, 3, 4, 5 days dieting, dieting, dieting, dieting, restricting, restricting, restricting and then the other 2, 3, 4 days game on, all in,  I'm just going to eat whatever I want, you get a case of the screw its and that's like, "Let's go, right?" Lauren: Yeah for sure and then, we're kind of talking about this as week and weekend but there's also like the seasonal thing, right, like we just got over, we just got done the holidays, right that's a big thing too, like, you diet, diet, diet up to the holidays and then you go crazy until, you know, sometimes the beginning of January, sometimes it's until the spring, right and then you just repeat that again. So this can be like shorter, like weekly or it can be even shorter than that, like, sometimes you'll see people trying to eat as little as possible throughout the day and then they go crazy at night, right? They can't stop eating at night, like, after their kids go to bed or when they get home for work or whatever, so it could be a short of a time frame as that, it could be a week, it could be months. But yeah, it's kind of all the same, even though it's different. Annie:Yeah and I just want to say, I want to reiterate that the restrictive diet that's paired with the cheat days or cheat meals is what makes it necessary, "feel necessary" to eat all those foods because your hunger, you're hungry, you're thinking about all the foods you said you couldn't eat and your quantities have likely been repressed before that and so you want to eat a high volume of foods and then you combine that with what we're talking about with the lab rats earlier, like, you know, you get this addiction-like response because you've been restricting these foods, it's not because the foods themselves are addictive. it's the manner in which you present the foods to yourself. Lauren: Right, it's like we always talk about it's the diets, like, it feeds itself, right, like you go on a diet and going on the diet causes you to overeat which causes you, you know, shame and guilt and all these feelings which make you want to diet again, it just goes in a circle it over and over and over. Annie: Yes, so how do you enjoy treats without cheat days? Lauren: Well, you want to start not at the cheat day part ,you want to start at the diet part. Annie: Yes, so many people are- Lauren: So make your diet not so restrictive and you, like, you just said you don't have that strong desire and strong need to overeat all the things. Annie: Right. It's not, the answer isn't eat everything in sight all the time and it's not, also on the flip side, to eat only healthy or "good" foods and never eat treats again, the answer is daily consistent moderation. Lauren: Well, there is that word again, moderation. Annie: It just keeps coming up. It's so weird. And that's finding a balance between the food you love and a way of eating that helps you live your life and show up in your life as your best self. So instead of cutting out sweets and treats or pizza or tacos or whatever it is or waiting until the weekend, you plan to enjoy a reasonable amount of treats or pizza or tacos throughout the week and you know and you might have some variations of that, so obviously you are not going to probably choose to eat a cheat meal for the whole, or what you would traditionally eat at a cheap meal, you know, I'm thinking of someone who is currently listening and they're like imposing the cheat meal philosophy. You might have a little bit of a pendulum swing where while you're, as Lauren said, trying to stop this process in the restriction, you might feel that your cheat meal carries on for a week or a couple weeks and you eat all the foods but eventually, in our experience, as Lauren said and we've shared this on the podcast before, you're probably going to find that if you continue to cheat meal type foods, whatever that looks like to you, over the long haul you're probably not going to feel very good. Like you just aren't and again, we just shared this on our last podcast that we recorded that the diet industry wants you to believe that if you are left to your own devices you will sit on the couch, eat all the foods all the time and do nothing, right, that's what they want us to believe but we would offer that if left to your own devices, our bodies naturally crave a variety of foods, balance, moderation, movement, variety and so one way to implement moderation is to allow yourselves to eat those cheat meal foods throughout the week, not just on the weekends or not just when you have those designated, like, "I'm allowed to eat this" moment. Lauren: Right and it's not, you don't need to confine yourself to just "diet foods" right, like, eat foods that you enjoy and eat enough of them to sustain you and you won't feel that crazy desire to eat all the things that taste good and are super hyper palatable and it's just, it's exactly that going from one side of the pendulum to the other to in the middle. Annie: Yeah, because part of finding balance whether it's with food or exercise or anything, anything in life when you're trying to find balance, part of finding balance is experimenting what feels like too much and what feels like too little. I mean, even, you know, like, thinking about, like, you're learning to drive a car, which is another analogy we've used before. You know, when I watch my kids drive a car when they turn, you know, a car, they're not driving my car, just to be clear, you know, whether to drive like a go cart or a video game, when they turn, they crank the wheel hard and when they stop they push the brake hard and when they press the gas pedal, they push the gas hard and they have to just learn that, like, that was too much, this is too little. I got to find that balance in between what's just enough for me. It's like Goldilocks, right? Lauren: Yeah and we see this all the time in our Balance365 community and the Healthy Habits Happy Moms community. Someone will be like, well I tried this for a day and I ate all the things that didn't work and now I don't feel good, right, like, you are not, you have to realize you are not going to get this right on the 1st try, like, it takes trial and error. But going through that process is worth it in the end, like it's not going to take forever, it will take some time to figure out but then you have it and you know and you know what's too much and you know what works for you. Annie: Yeah, so if you're someone that's listening, I'm thinking of myself when I was 20, you know, 2 or 23 and I was doing cheat meals on a Friday night. I guarantee if I let go of that restriction during the week, cheat meals on the weekend sort of thing I would have had a period where my pendulum swung in the opposite direction and I would have been pizza, tacos, chips like a steady diet of just those three foods, like no vegetables, no fruit, very little, you know, protein. And I would have I would have eventually have come out of it and in fact, I did, that's essentially what I did is, like, let go of that process was I had to move through some of this, like, "OK, I'm going to experiment what feels like too much food and then I'm going to let my pendulum kind of settle somewhere in the middle which is now I'm able to enjoy pizza and tacos and chips, you know, as little or as much as I see fit and I'm completely neutral about it." Lauren: Yeah and we're not saying, you know, you're never going to eat another vegetable again, like, once I kind of find, once you, say, sort of start settling back in the middle, that's when it's really helpful to kind of adopt these other healthy habits that we teach in Balance365 like adding your vegetables and making sure you're going enough protein but doing it from the mindset, from a balanced mindset instead of a diet mindset, it makes all the difference. Annie: Yeah and I think too, you know, just to wrap up, remembering that this is a process, right, like we were just saying that it's going to be a practice, it's going to be an evolution. And you might have some missteps but we encourage our Balance365 members to look at this as like an experiment and it's just kind of information that you're gathering about yourself so you can, you know, that saying when you know better, you can do better and you can make different choices based off of your needs the more information you have about yourself. But, all in all, we would we would largely encourage moderation over cheat meals, for all the reasons we just listed previously but we think that really promotes a healthy relationship with food and that way you get to eat your pizza and your Cheetos, next to your kale. Lauren: That was a different podcast. Annie: I know but it still applies, it still applies, you can have it all and kale. Lauren: Yes. Annie: OK, good, we crushed that, Lauren. Lauren: Yeah we did. Annie: Yeah and if you need, if we say so ourselves, if you need help, if you're currently like cheat mealing it up and you're like, "OK, yeah, I hear what they're saying, this isn't working for me anymore, I don't want to continue this" and you want support and you're not already in our Facebook group please join us. It is a free private Facebook group. We are Healthy Habits Happy Moms on Facebook we have 40,000 plus, and growing daily, women in our group that would encourage you, love to encourage you and cheer and clap for you and support you as you find out what balance and moderation looks like in your diet. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: Alright, thanks, Lauren. Lauren: Alright. Bye. Annie: Bye  

Does food have power over you? Do you find you can't stop eating certain foods? Do you connect with shame every time you soothe with food? Listen to the latest Love Food podcast where we dive deep into what's going. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. This episode is brought to you by my courses: PCOS and Food Peace and Dietitians PCOS and Food Peace. You CAN make peace with food even with PCOS and I want to show you how. I've just discovered the Body Love Box and it looks like a fantastic resource for people who live in large bodies or anyone who wants to improve their body image. It's a monthly subscription box that gets mailed to your home and it includes things like body-positive stickers and pins as well as deeper resources on body acceptance, health at every size and intuitive eating. Each box includes items from fat and marginalized creators, and pays them a living wage for their work.    The monthly subscription can be found at www.thebodylovebox.com, and use the code LOVEFOOD for 15% off your first month. This episode's Dear Food letter: Dear Chocolate Covered Peppermint Oreos, Why do you have so much power over me? Why can't I just eat one or two of you? Why do I wake up in the middle of my sleep and eat you? I know an entire box isn't good for me, but yet I keep going. The same goes for chips or any snack. Why can't I eat an acceptable amount? When I'm tired, stressed, lonely you are always there to comfort me. But after I'm done, I hate myself.  Our relationship has reached a scary place. I'm ready to break up but scared I'm not strong enough. Sincerely, Powerless and Unacceptable Show Notes: The Should Eat Fantasy Compliance blog post When relying on hunger is too scary blog post Marci Evans discusses Food Addiction on the Love Food Podcast Marci Evans research behind Food Addiction blog post Julie Dillon RD blog Link to subscribe to the Love Food’s Food Peace Syllabus. Eating Disorder Dietitians Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue!

Jessica Jones, dietitian and host of Food Heaven podcast, joins me to chat about her career, and then, Whole30. January seems like the most popular time for people to "try" the Whole30, so we're here to try and help you avoid that path. I put out a call to social media, asking people why they've done the Whole30, and what they liked about it, to try and integrate various perspectives.  Tune into our conversation to learn why Whole30 isn't the best way to adopt new habits like meal planning, trying new recipes, and eating to feel better. There are many other ways to do all of the above, without extreme food restrictions or rigid food rules.  We address: meal planning, recipes, digestive issues, sugar addiction (or lack thereof), PCOS, and the hidden threat of deprivation.  Most of the things we talked about: Food heaven show on YouTube, and the Food Heaven podcast “I guess the Whole30 is very much still a thing”, on my blog Marci Evans on Food Addiction: Food Pscyh & RD Real Talk (#26) “Why Fear of Sugar Addiction May Be More Toxic Than Sugar Is” by Rebecca Scritchfield RD PCOS Nutrition resources: Julie Duffy Dillon & Rachael Hartley   Other stuff: Join the extended podcast conversations and meet fellow real-talkers by joining our community, Patreon.com/RdRealTalk Your host, Heather Caplan: HeatherCaplan.com, @heatherDCRD, @RDRealTalk Have you left a review on iTunes yet? If not, please do! Click here and tap the stars. Questions or requests for the show? Reach out: RDRealTalk @ Gmail.com

Annie and Lauren interview Registered Dietitian Marci Evans to answer the question once and for all “Is sugar addiction real?” Marci delves into the science, the psychology and the keys to feeling less out of control about sugar and more in control of your life. Strap in for the latest and greatest in peer-reviewed research and what it all really means. What you’ll hear in this episode: Clickbait headlines and sugar research Is sugar addicting? Sugar and Cocaine: How alike are they? Abstinence from sugar and its impact on cravings What rodents taught us about sugar Finding food peace in the messy middle Black and white thinking and sugar The difference between diet rules and noticing what feels good for your body Stopping the cycle of all or nothing with sugar Self-inventory for vulnerability factors Exploring “problematic” foods again Building on quick wins How restriction impacts the brain’s response to sugar The importance of learning to be self-aware with the kindness Your inner dialogue and its impact on your success in reaching your goals The biggest lie of diet culture The truth about your body’s natural tendencies Building self-trust Repeat customers and the diet industry Being responsible consumers of nutrition information Resources: Marci Evans Blog on sugar   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: You feel completely out of control when it comes to candy and cookies, craving sweets even when you’re not hungry. Maybe you found yourself wondering if you’re addicted to sugar. Scour the internet for the term “sugar addiction” and you’re likely to come up with an overwhelming amount of information, much of which seems to contradict each other. Our culture has a pretty extreme view of sugar and unfortunately, the diet and fitness industry is full of pseudoscience and fear-mongering headlines claiming sugar is addictive as cocaine but what’s the truth? Is sugar really addicting? We invited internationally recognized dietitian Marci Evans on today’s podcast to discuss just that. Marci and her team help clinicians and clients alike develop smart, enduring strategies for overcoming eating disorders, disordered eating and the backlash of chronic dieting. Marci, in particular, has done extensive research on the tenants of food addiction after noting that the concept didn’t square with her clinical experience and yet she felt it captured how so many people feel in relationship to food. On today’s episode Marci, Lauren and I discuss what the past 5 years of research and experience have taught Marci about sugar addiction and steps you can take to feel more in control of your sweet tooth. Enjoy! Marci! Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m so happy to have you. Marci: Oh, it is my absolute pleasure to be here, to come to chat with you ladies about a topic that is near and dear to my heart. It is just an absolute pleasure so thank you so much for inviting me to join you. Annie:  Yeah, we’ve been waiting for a while. I think we started emailing months ago and it just schedules just didn’t work out until now. Marci: Yeah, I know. You guys are very, very patient which I appreciate and I had to get through one more big talk before I could put anything else on my plate so I’m glad, I’m really glad to be here and hopefully the wait will be worth it by the time we wrap up this I know what will be a really interesting conversation. Annie:  Yeah, I’m sure it will be. Lauren’s here with us too, Lauren, how are you? Lauren: Hi! I’m good. Excited to be here. Annie: I was just going to say, I bet you’re super stoked- Lauren: Pumped. Annie: Because here we are discussing one of the most talked about topics in our Facebook community, which if you aren’t a member, it’s Healthy Habits Happy Moms on Facebook. We have almost 40,000 women in our private Facebook community and something that comes up a lot is “Is sugar addicting?” And this is a highly debated topic on the Internet and especially in the fitness and nutrition community and as Marci has noted in her blog post, which we will share a link of the show notes to her website, if you just do a google search for “Is sugar addicting?” or “sugar addiction” you’re likely to come up with a wide range of answers from “Yes, absolutely, it totally is addicting” to “No, that’s just a load of crap” it can be really confusing to the mainstream listener, reader, consumer and Marci, this is why we have you on because you’ve done a lot of extensive research on this topic. So how did you get interested in the topic of food addiction or sugar addiction? Marci: Well, I think you nailed it in a couple of different ways. The first is that many people have the experience of feeling really out of control of food and feeling really chaotic, so the term ‘food addiction’, which has gotten written about more and more just in popular media, feels like it’s very resonant for a lot of people and it’s sort of like “Oh gosh, food addiction. There’s something about that feels true for me.” And so it’s something that I have seen a lot of people come to me in my practice with, so it’s something that is definitely coming up in my work in a day to day way, just like you ladies are describing, seeing this in your Facebook group and so I think that that’s a piece of it and then the other piece of it you also alluded to is that there’s been more research on the topic of food addiction and you know, it’s definitely a double-edged sword that this research makes it into the mainstream media. It’s great that the research is being done, the problem is that the way that it often gets written about in the media is not totally accurate to the science and so you see a lot of compelling headlines that you know draw people in and you know get a lot of clicks and get a lot of post likes and are resonant to how people feel that it gets really pulled away from what the actual science says. So I became interested because I learned about it several years ago in a training that I went to but then it was just so relevant in my day-to-day work with my clients that I was like, “I can’t not look more into this. This is just like staring me in my face.” Annie: Yeah and I am, you’re so right because I do think when I’m thinking about all of the headlines and the information that I have read it is very kind of fear mongering, you know, or polarizing or it’s very extreme. We call that click bait, right?  Like, you, they’re just trying to get you to bite, right? Marci: Total clickbait. And then they have these pictures of the brain that look very, you know, very smart and you know, “Wow, look how the brain is lighting up” in these comparisons to, like, drug pathways and so it becomes very tantalizing info that people can get really pulled into for sure. Lauren:  And I think it’s become just “common knowledge” that sugar is addicting, like, if you ask just random people on the street “Have you heard sugar is addicting?” I’m willing to bet, you know, many, many of them will say “Yes.” Annie: Yeah, OK, so are we ready to just dive right in? Like, can we just, can we just go? Are we ready? Marci: We can absolutely go for it. Annie:  Alright, Marci, is sugar addiction a thing? Marci: So the state of the research tells us that sugar is not physiologically addicting. That’s the bottom line so looking at what happens in our bodies when you eat sugar and is there a chemical response that pulls you in to have it more and more and more and that you become sort of this slave to sugar and that the only way to kind of stop yourself is that you have to go cold turkey and that is 100 percent not borne out in the research. Annie: But people have to still keep listening to the rest of the show. Marci: People are going to be like “Who is this chick? Get her off. Yeah, done.” Annie: Like, “Oh I got what, I got the answer I was looking for, it’s not a thing” but you have you have some points of reference that I think are really important to follow this up. Like, to date there is no scientific evidence that sugar is addictive but that’s not exactly, like, there’s more to it than just that and I love that you say, you kind of touched on this earlier, that a person’s sense or feeling of being out of control around sugar or any food in general is not the same thing as having an addiction. Marci: Yes, that distinction to me is everything. That is like where I press pause and spend so much of my time, whether I’m teaching professionals or talking with individuals or nonprofessionals, is that there is the science part, right, that I love, that looks all about the brain wiring and what is happening in a person’s body in, as they’re eating sugar or not eating sugar, right, and we talked about that and kind of gave you the cold, hard truth, sugar is not addicting. However, the other piece of it that is equally important is a person’s experience and what happens inside of them when they eat sugar or when they deprive themselves of sugar, which is really kind of the key part that we’ll be, I think, spending quite a bit of time on, that creates feelings that are really relevant, right? So when people feel chaotic, when people feel out of control, when people feel completely preoccupied and obsessed, those things are very, very real. Those things are important. Those things we have to understand and it’s your guys’ job and it’s my job to help my clients through those experiences and they’re actually very common but those experiences aren’t rooted in an addiction but they are very, very, very important and the feeling can feel like an addiction. Lauren: Yeah, for sure. Annie: So, Marci, are you talking about when we hear in, you know, magazine articles or blog posts, when we hear the response that like this when people eat sugar that their brain lights up like they’re on some, a drug similar to like cocaine, is that what you’re talking about? Marci: Yeah. And I can speak to that if you want me to kind of tease that apart some, those headlines. Annie: Yeah, let’s just jump right into it. Let’s go. Marci: So, unfortunately that is a classic example of total misinterpretation of the scientific research and actually, what we see, when this was published, that sort of initial headline of look at these brain scans and look at this area of the pleasure centers of the brain and this is, you know, more powerful than when a person does cocaine, you know, these really, really, like you said, clickbait, fear mongering type of post was a misreading of the literature from a couple of cardiologists who wrote this post in response to the research, but when you look at the research and what the neurobiologists actually explain is that we have natural reward pathways in the brain. They are there. They are meant to be there. There’s no getting rid of them. They are actually good and helpful things in keeping us alive that we do certain things as humans and we get a reward so that we do them again. So we have natural rewards for things like eating, things like sex, things like holding a baby and feeling really good about it, listening to music, connecting with friends. We get these positive feelings and vibes and actually these neurotransmitters in our brain get produced so that we do those things again because from an evolutionary standpoint, these are the things that have kept us alive. These are the key things that have kept us thriving as a species. And so what we’ve learned is that when a person abuses a non-necessary substance, say, like cocaine, cocaine actually comes and hijacks those completely normal, healthy reward pathways that are supposed to be there. So this idea that “Oh my gosh, you see this lighting up when we eat sugar. This is evidence that you’re an addict. That is not at all what it is saying. You’re seeing normal responses in the brain. We can talk a little bit more about that in terms of what’s normal and what might be problematic in showing these brain images but it’s the drugs that come in and hijack the normal pathways that we get really, really concerned about but those pathways are there. They’re meant to be there. They don’t mean you’re sick. They don’t mean you’re flawed or that you have some big problem. Annie: Interesting. So it was just some misinterpretation of research that caused this whole, like, flood of “sugar is the equivalent to cocaine.” Marci: That’s exactly right. Lauren: And I think it’s, it can be comforting to someone too who feels so out of control around food or sugar to be like, “Oh well, that explains it. I’m addicted, right?” But I think we’ll see that that kind of takes your power away because you aren’t addicted and there are things that you can do to not feel so out of control around those foods. Marci: That’s exactly right and even to add on a layer of complexity is that the notion that I am addicted encourages people to abstain from those foods, right? Well, if I am an addict, the only way to manage this is to totally take these things out of my life and here is where this is probably the most important thing I have to offer to each of you who are listening right now is that that abstaining or we might call it restriction of those foods actually leads to changes in your brain that have a stronger pleasure response that gets lit up and actually encourages you and compels you to have those foods even more. So when the researchers looked at this phenomenon they used rodent models and what they did is they had these rodents and they took the sugar away and restricted them and put them on a diet and it was those rodents that had an amplified response in their brain to sugar and it was those rodents who demonstrated this same chaotic “addictive” behavior, binge-like behavior but when they had the rodents where they didn’t put them on a diet and they didn’t restrict them, they had completely, what we would say, just totally normal responses to sugar and none of the addictive-like behavior and so the problem with the addiction model is not only that yes, totally takes your power away but in addition, it’s going to create the exact scenario that you most fear and it’s going to create the behavior and the changes in your brain chemistry that cause you to feel more out of control and cause you to feel more and more like an addict. So it’s like this double bind, it’s like a double whammy. Annie: And Marci, does research support that for just any food, labeling any foods as bad or addicting or off limits or is this just sugar. Marci: Right now, the research is looking specifically at sugar because the researchers, what they’re trying to do is to get more and more specific and this is where that research on food is much more complicated than the research on say, alcohol or drug abuse because we as humans don’t eat singular substances like table sugar, right? For the most part, we eat things like ice cream and cupcakes or Doritos and so researchers have tried to get as specific as possible to understand is there a specific ingredient that folks are addicted to and this is again where the research right now really points to, you know, the flaws in the research is like, we don’t even have a specific ingredient that we can look at and point to and say that is the addictive substance. Annie: This is something that we talk about frequently in our community and our program Balance365 that this idea of the restriction leads to bingeing or more, it sets you up to be more likely to binge, because so often what we see in our community is that women want to stop the binge by going back to restriction. They’re like, “Oh, I ate too much sugar, got to get rid of all the sugar now!” Marci: Yeah, I have to fix it. Annie: Yeah, instead of stopping at the restriction, sort of resetting or reframing your perspective on sugar. Instead of just saying “I’m all out. I can’t have any.” Try to have it in moderation might reduce your likelihood of binge. Marci: Yes and I feel completely empathetic to anyone who identifies kind of with what you just described because I think that it’s human nature that when you feel like you’ve swung to one side of the pendulum and part of this, you see, I’m a neuro science geek, part of this is just how we’re wired to be as humans. We want to put things into boxes and we tend to be very black and white thinkers so that when we move to one extreme it is very, I think, natural and compelling to hold yourself to the other extreme as a way to find a counterbalance but what happens is that you just sort of envision a pendulum, for most people, they end up swinging between one extreme to the other and it’s not very natural for most people to say “Well, how do I respond to this chaos? I try to find a happy medium somewhere in the middle, right?”   If you just had a day or days or weeks of feeling out of control and you’re bingeing and you’re feeling awful. It is very natural to want to kind of pull over to that other side to detox, to restrict, to put up the food rules because when you’re feeling that way it feels awful and you don’t want to feel that way again and imagining dipping your toe into that middle ground can feel very, very foreign and very scary and for a lot of people, they’re like, “That just doesn’t even seem to make sense. You see, I can’t be trusted. I need to put up all the rules and all the walls and all the barriers.” Lauren: You know, it’s interesting that you say that that’s how humans are wired because we call ourselves, like, we work in the messy middle and it’s so hard to get people to kind of reframe and kind of get it and like, we were talking about before the podcast, it takes people you know a few months sometimes of following us to kind of like indoctrinate themselves in that messy middle. Marci: Totally. I love that you guys call it the messy middle because that’s usually exactly what it is. It doesn’t stay messy forever though. It does not stay messy forever but the process can be a bit messy. However, I do find that when I talk to my clients and I really, I’m sure you guys have seen this too, is that when you talk with them about their experience and their stories and what it’s been like for them over the years, that their lived experience is this sort of swinging from being on a diet to them feeling out of control and then needing another diet and then feeling out of control and so their lived experience really points to and supports what we see in the literature and in the research and why so many of us as clinicians are advocating for that messy middle because their lived experience and the research shows us that restrict-binge cycle is not their fault, it is not a failing, it’s not because they’re screwed up and doing it wrong. It’s because it’s a set up and so those skills for navigating that middle ground can feel really tough at first but that’s where the sweet spot is, like, that’s where you find food peace, like, that where you find sustainable patterns of living. Annie: That is what we share in our community often is that it’s, like, a practice and it’s a skill and it’s just a matter of practicing that new skill over and over and over until that becomes your new normal because it’s not, like, that, like you said that is not natural for me, it’s not natural for a lot of women. We’re so used to, like, being on the wagon or off the wagon, we’re in, we’re out, we’re perfect, we’re failing, we’re right, wrong, black, white, like, so to live in this like gray areas, like, “Oh my gosh, what are the rules? What am I doing? Like, there’s no boundaries, where are the boundaries?” Marci: Like, right, “Just give me the guidebook. Tell me exactly how to do it, I can follow it.” Annie: Yes, which in the in the fitness industry, that is so common, I mean, which I think was which is why our program is such a breath of fresh air, of course, I think that, but it’s, you know, we’re like trying to help you navigate that for yourself versus just telling you what to do so you can hopefully go on to create “boundaries and rules” that work for you and I mean, if that’s what you need, that we don’t have to impose our values or morals or rules on to them. Marci: Yeah, that’s awesome and I think that finding that middle space that is is something, I mean, it sounds like what you’re really describing is something that’s really internally guided rather than something that’s externally imposed and that can feel really, really scary but the amazing thing is is that as you go through the process of really kind of tuning in and really listening and really kind of taking a break from all of that external noise is that you can find patterns and habits and boundaries that are truly sustainable, you know, I wouldn’t say I have a rule of eating every you know 3 to 4 hours, it’s not like I have to follow this rule but I know that when I eat every 3 to 4 hours I feel much, much better and so that’s how I eat most of the time but it’s not a rule that’s been sort of handed down to me that you have to follow it and that’s kind of the difference. Annie: Absolutely. Lauren: Yeah. Annie: OK so to circle back then as it pertains to sugar and this sense of feeling out of control when it comes to sugar consumption, how do you break that cycle of, like, you’re either all in and you’re eating all the sugar or you’re not eating any sugar at all for 30 days or, you know, whatever it is, do you have some guidelines that you use with your clients or that you would recommend in general for how to stop that mindset, or reframe that mindset or stop that cycle? Marci: I do. I do and what I want to say before I dive and sort of offer some tips is to say this process is a process and we’ve already been talking about that, be really patient with yourself and I would also say if you can have in your mind the idea of approaching your experience with a lot of curiosity and just kind of wonder and, “Oh, isn’t that interesting?” in trying to find kind of that neutral detective voice that will help you learn along the way because it’s going to be bumpy, you know ,I love your messy middle, like, it’s going to be bumpy. It’s not as if I’m going to give you a formula and then you’re going to take the formula and you’re like “Boom, got it. No more problems with food, right?” But allow yourself to kind of take some of these ideas, try them on, experiment with them and use them to give you more data and more information but the number one place that I encourage people to start is to do a self-inventory and to take some time with the self inventory, like, do it over several days or a week or so. And ask yourself, what are the things that leave me vulnerable to “overdoing it with food right” so it could be a zillion things, like sky’s the limit, so you could think about “Well, it’s maybe related to my food environment or maybe related to how stressed out I am or my mood or how much my kids are bugging me or how much, you know, my job is completely overwhelming me or the time of day or the amount of food that’s available to me or how well I’ve nourished myself that day, how over-hungry, you know, how much maybe I’ve been following a diet that actually doesn’t meet my nutritional needs. I’m constantly undercutting in an attempt to lose weight but then go over-hungry and that’s when I find myself really having a hard time with food.” So trying to be as extensive as you possibly can in creating this inventory of what I call your vulnerability factors and then you can start to have a little bit more of a nuanced conversation in your own mind around “I have a hard time with sugar when, you know, I’m really, really tired, I’m sleep deprived, I haven’t eaten enough and I’ve got high levels of stress,” right? So you’re starting to really get to know yourself rather than saying “Oh, I just don’t have any will power” or “I’m an addict therefore I have to get rid of this,” you’re really inventorying to get a sense of “Oh these are the things that leave me really, really vulnerable to having a tough time” and the other thing that I would add in is, that’s really important and can take a little bit of time to get to know, is “What are my thoughts and beliefs that I tell myself about my relationship to food in my relationship to sugar, specifically? What is the dialogue in my brain? What thoughts do I tell myself? What do I believe and where did those beliefs come from? Are those beliefs that I learned when I was little from my own mom? Are those beliefs that I was taught from going on a zillion diets? Are those beliefs, you know, that I learned from, you know, my girlfriend down the street?” So really be very, very critical and I would say, like, literally journal this out, try to do it like on a piece of paper or if you have an online journal and really get out of your own head “What do I tell myself and what do I believe about sugar and where did those beliefs come from?” So starting with those two inventories is a really, really important place to begin. Annie: I really, really like both of those suggestions. “What you talked about, that vulnerability Journal is kind of similar, in our program we call it, like, triggers, you know, like, what are you doing, where are you at, what are you feeling, what are you thinking, what did you just do, who are you with?” Because all of those things can really impact our behavior and especially when it comes to food and fitness and I know you know we’re just coming off of Halloween season so I know a lot of people have been having candy in the house, you know, it could just be as. I mean not as simple as. but that could be an element into how much sugar you’re consuming, like, is it just a matter of convenience, like, it’s staring you in the face all day, right? Marci: Totally. Exactly, exactly, you have huge amounts of it surrounding you and I love that you guys use the language of skill building because that is the exact language that I also use with my clients, where I say “Learning to eat in a peaceful balanced way is like building a skill” and the cool thing about viewing it as a skill is that a skill is something that can be developed but if you are someone, and you are very good company if you are, who has spent a lot of your life in a dieting mindset, it’s going to take some time to rebuild that skill of balanced, peaceful, non-chaotic eating and so I am really a proponent of saying “Let’s take just little baby steps here.” Now, I do know that there are some practitioners and other people who said, you know, the best thing I did was just surround myself with tons of sugar and tell myself I have total permission to eat this food and to really listen to my body and that it was rough in the beginning but then I really got to a place where I really believed it wasn’t going to go anywhere and then I stopped bingeing on it, however if that works for you, go for it, don’t let me stand in your way. My experience is that for most people what ends up happening is they end up just feeling really out of control for a stretch of time and it feels like more proof, “See, I can’t be trusted, you see, I was out of control” and so it just feels like more evidence kind of building up and so that tends to not be the approach I go with most of my clients, that with most of my clients we’re like slow and steady, we are, you know, I always use the bike analogy. We’re starting off on a balance bike and we’ve got, you know, a bike that’s maybe a little bit bigger, a little bit, you know, a little bit more like an adult bike and then we move into something that’s more advanced and then we’re really going on the unicycle but we don’t just hop on the unicycle right in the beginning, right? We’re going to start we’re just taking these little baby steps and the point is to begin to have more regular access to the foods that you have trouble with but to do it within the framework of really honoring the things that make you particularly vulnerable. So one of your biggest triggers or one of your biggest vulnerabilities is, maybe, what do you guys see actually? What do you notice? I should ask you, in your Facebook group and you know your audience, what would you say is one of their biggest vulnerabilities? Lauren: I would say skipping meals or not eating enough throughout the day. A lot of people find themselves then bingeing or overeating on sugar and snacks at night or in the evenings after they put their kids to bed. Marci: Totally, so that’s perfect. So I would say if you have a day where maybe you haven’t adequately nourished yourself when you skip some meals and it’s evening time, I would say that’s not going to be the most helpful time for you to practice eating something like Halloween candy in a way that’s going to feel not totally chaotic, right? It’s like, well, that’s not really a fair experiment because we knew that was probably a set up from the beginning and so I kind of take that inventory and say “Let’s try to eliminate as many of those vulnerabilities as possible. And start having little exposures where you’re giving yourself permission to have these foods, low vulnerability, low trigger, challenging those old thoughts and beliefs and developing those coping skills to help you manage the craziness that is life and all the stress that life brings and then it’s repeating those things over and over again. So I had a client, I mean, I’ve done this was so many clients, she had a lot of trouble, one of her hardest foods was Nutella and she’s like “Marci, I’m telling you, every single time I bring Nutella into my house it’s gone in a couple days, like, I just can’t handle this Nutella.” And so the way we ended up going about it was we ended up deciding to integrate it at the very start of her day and so when she would come see me, we did this so slow, like we literally did this over months and I would keep it in my office and I know, some of you might be thinking “Why don’t I have my own dietician” I bet you could be really, really creative. She would come to my office, she would bring a balanced meal and she would do some Nutella with the rest of her meal and then we would note, “What are the thoughts that you are having? What kind of tools and skills can you use to kind of help you through your day because you have a busy day, what’s your food plan, like, making sure you have enough food to get you through your day.” And we sort of charted through all her vulnerabilities and then we did that again and again and then we sort of upped the ante where she took some of the Nutella and she repeated that on her own and so then we just stepped it, stepped it up and as she was developing more skillfulness and more ability, then, I mean, again it wasn’t for a couple months, then she brought the Nutella into her home but we started it with just the tiniest of baby steps. Lauren: I love that. Annie: This is a, yeah, I do too and this just feels like, my background is fitness, but it’s like a lot of times people just need a win, you know, and they kind of just build their confidence slowly and slowly and slowly and over time it’s like, you know, that quote “Little by little you travel far.” It helps to build that self efficacy so that they can believe like “Oh my gosh, maybe I can do this,” but to go from 0 to 100 can be really overwhelming like, “Oh my gosh, no I can’t ever have Nutella in my home and not eat the whole jar” like that’s just, that doesn’t seem even doable but I bet you know now she’s like “Oh yeah, maybe I can.” Marci: Exactly. Annie: or “I am.” Marci: Yeah, “I am.” Yeah it’s really cool because I no longer work with this client because she’s doing so well and she doesn’t need me anymore and that’s always my goal and absolutely, she has all of the things in her house but it took us really breaking it down and it’s exactly like you said, it was her having a little win to be like “Oh, maybe it’s not the sugar, maybe it’s all of the beliefs that I have about sugar and the ways I’ve approached it before and their reaction to all of the deprivation.” Like, I just cannot overstate the implication of having dieted and having that restriction mindset really sets us up to go to the other side of things. Like, it’s really interesting when you look at the brain scan literature when they look at folks who have a history of dieting and restriction and they show them images of what scientists call like, you know, palatable foods or we could say, like, high sugar foods or high fat foods, we might think it was “naughty foods” or “bad foods” is that their brain regions of pleasure light up even higher when you compare to people who don’t sort of hit that profile of long dieting history and so it takes time that gradual permission for that hyper response to get dialled down but it’s the only way for it to dial down. So if you keep going back to dieting and keep going back to restriction it’s going to keep that elevated response, but if you can end this gradual way, practice it and your body and your brain get used to “Oh, this food isn’t going anywhere.I have this food in my life. It’s not as if one time a year I get to eat X, Y and Z. Then that hyper response calms down and we can see kind of like the charge around food sort of settles down and it becomes more neutral. Annie: And that just, I mean, that to me sounds like freedom and such peace to be able to live, you know, or just be wherever you are and know that like you don’t have to hold yourself back or you’re just going to be a maniac on, you know, a pizza buffet or an ice cream sundae, that you can just coexist with the foods you love and enjoy them in moderation. Lauren: Yeah, another thing I really loved about your example is about going through your vulnerabilities, like that client within the Nutella probably had to build some other habits to kind of reduce those vulnerabilities, is that right? Marci: Right, you’re spot on, totally. Yes, she had to kind of identify what other tools that I need in my tool box that help me to manage when I’m feeling really overwhelmed with work and when I’m feeling overtaxed or when I have my inner critic and my inner critic is really, really loud so we had to do a ton of work on helping her to notice how is she speaking to herself and what are the consequences and what’s the likeliest outcome when you continue to speak to yourself in that mean, critical way and I would say that’s a huge, huge cornerstone of the piece, huge cornerstone of the work that I do with my clients is cultivating a couple of skills and so these are some of the broad, brushstrokes skills that I will mention for you and mention for your listeners is developing the ability to be self aware but with kindness. As well as this skill of being able to be compassionate with yourself and you guys probably see this all the time, people have a really hard time being compassionate with themselves because they feel like if I’m compassionate I’m just myself slack, right, and I’m never going to make that forward progress. It is the opposite, the more critical and nasty you are to yourself the less likely you are to achieve your goals and make positive change. If you can talk to yourself like you would to your child or talk to yourself like you would to someone you love and care about, your best friend, those are the same things that help you to remain neutral and curious and that enhances your ability to make sustainable changes and so I spend so much time helping my clients notice and shift the way that they interact and talk with themselves and really working on the inner dialogue. Annie: We have a saying in our community that gets dropped frequently and I absolutely love it, it’s “we take great care of things we love and your body is no exception” but I think you are so right, Marci, that when women think about being kind to themselves and speaking nicely to themselves or coming from a place of love, they’re worried that they’re going to get complacent or that they’re going to just, like, I won’t have a desire to go workout if I’m, like, too nice to myself or I won’t have a desire to eat vegetables if I don’t beat myself up and shame myself into eating this salad with no dressing or whatever it is. And that’s just not been our experience. Marci: Yeah it’s not, it doesn’t surprise me that that’s not been your experience because it’s fundamentally untrue. So one of the things the biggest lies of diet culture is that our nature as human beings is to lay on a couch and do nothing but eat ice cream and that we are constantly having to fight against that nature. That is not true, actually our bodies and systems create vibrancy, they crave balance, they crave things that allow us to feel well and we know that if we are polarized to any extreme we aren’t going to feel well. And so our bodies are constantly trying to move us towards homeostasis so we can flip that narrative, we have to live that narrative from “If left to my own devices, I’m going to be a total just slob on the couch” and say “You know what, actually, left to my own devices, I want to feel really good and I know that if what allows me to feel really good is to be in a pretty balanced space.” If you can imagine eating only gummy bears and bagels for the rest your life, you can imagine that probably wouldn’t feel well, right? If you can imagine eating only spinach and chicken breast for the rest your life, like, that also doesn’t sound so great and so being able to trust that our inner nature and our core souls, actually creates movement, creates balance, creates health, creates vibrancy, all of those things, that you can begin to relax a little bit and be like “I don’t have to ride myself so hard, you know, I trust that my inner core craves healthy themes but all the dieting that we do that stamps out that inner flame and when we move away from diets we find that we have it naturally and intuitively inside of us.” Annie: Absolutely. Lauren shares with our community often, like, people that say that, you know, they say what you just said, like “If I listen to my body, I would just eat ice cream all day, every day” and Lauren is like “Have you tried that? Like, have you actually tried that? Like I think you think you would feel good but I don’t think you would feel good if you just did that all day every day” and people are like “Actually, you’re probably right, like, no, that wouldn’t leave me feeling good” and that this idea that, you know, like you said, if left to my own devices, like, I might actually take good care of myself, especially if I think about it in terms of how I take care of my children, how I take care of my spouse or my partner or what I would say to a girlfriend if she missed a workout or if she overate, you know, some ice cream. I wouldn’t beat her up. I wouldn’t berate her. I wouldn’t say “You’re lazy, like, get your act together.” I would be like “Hey, that’s OK. Like, now we know too much ice cream leaves us feeling yucky, like, let’s not do it again.” Marci: Exactly and if you just can notice that what your body is communicating to you and also trust, and this is where so many people skip a step, because we’re not taught to do this in our culture is that our heads override with a rule, right, too much ice cream and our head says “Tomorrow: rule, no ice cream” but if you can say “OK, I’m going to take a pause from my busy brain and say “If I were to let my body choose what the next step might be,” you will notice that your body has all this wisdom to re-regulate you but that head jumps in way too soon and creates this big rule because you’re in a place where you’re feeling awful and you’re feeling really scared and you’re feeling really anxious, right and so but it’s that practice of noticing, “OK, my head is so loud but if I were to just ask, what would my body say?” and I did actually a hilarious experiment like the ice cream one you guys just gave. I had a client, this is one of my favorite stories, we’re working on moving away from this dieting mindset and she said “Marci, my hardest food is gummy bears.” She’s like, “I’m obsessive with gummy bears, I love gummy bears. So you’re telling me (because we were working on unconditional permission, one of the intuitive eating principles, unconditional permission to eat whatever food she wanted)” she said, “Now you’re telling me that I am allowed to have gummy bears for lunch” and I said “Totally, if what you want is just gummy bears for lunch you can totally have gummy bears but I want you to make sure of 2 things, one: you get yourself enough gummy bear so you’ve gotten enough to eat for lunch and I also am going to ask that you have to pay attention to the taste of the gummy bears and how they feel in your body and how you feel afterwards.” She’s like “OK, I’m totally going to do it.” And I think she was, like, looking to like prove me wrong, to be like “I’m just out of control with gummy bears, I can’t be trusted. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And she came back and I said “Did you do the gummy bears for lunch?” and she’s like “I totally did” and I said “How did it go? What did you notice? What did you learn?” and she said, “Well, I thought that I was just going to be super excited and super happy to eat gummy bears for lunch, like I really felt like I was getting away with something but what I learned is that if I only eat gummy bears at lunch I actually feel sick and I kind of feel shaky” and so I kind of responded, you know, in a very neutral way to say “You know, that’s really interesting.” I said, “So if you were to redo that to where you wanted to have gummy bears at lunch time, you wanted to pair it with other things so that you could feel energized and that you could feel, you know, not distracted at work and  you’re not shaky and your stomach doesn’t feel upset, what would you choose?” and she listed out what she had in mind with gummy bears sort of on the side and it was this, like, completely, you know, nutritious, totally balanced meal and I was like “OK, you know, maybe you want to try that” and it was about her experimentation and learning “Oh, I don’t have to have this hard core rule, you know, like, “Don’t eat gummy bears” it was like, “Oh, it turns out that if I really listen I don’t want to just eat gummy bears for lunch, like, I feel kind of awful when I do that.” Annie: And it was inside of her, like, that she knew that, it was almost innate, like this is, “I did this, I didn’t like how I felt, I’m going to try this” and what an amazing moment. That’s an awesome story. Marci: And it was really cool because, like, you know, we were working on “you have to truly give yourself permission, that has to be there, it can’t be conditional, you have to really say ‘I am allowed to have these foods’ and I’m going to practice and I’m going to notice” and she did that and what she noticed was “I’m allowed to have gummy bears for lunch but do I actually want to” and when you’re not rebelling against something and you have permission, then you have the autonomy to actually make a choice. Annie: Yeah, I’ve shared this analogy so many times but when I was in 8th grade of my parents made this boy off limits for dating and his name was Alex and all I wanted to do, I wasn’t even really interested in Alex I don’t think, but when they said I couldn’t date him I was like, “I need to date Alex.” Marci: You were, like, on an Alex binge. Annie: I was like, “Well, now, watch me, now I’m going to make this happen” but yeah, but it’s kind of the same principle kind of applies to food when you make all foods permissible then a lot of them lose their appeal. Like do I really even want this now that I can have it? Marci: Yeah. Yeah and sometimes our head really wants something, especially when we’ve been really conditioned to say “Ooh, that’s off limits, you can’t have that” So sometimes our head will be like “Ooh, I really want this thing” and then we say “Well, OK, I can have it. I can have gummy bears for lunch but what will that experience actually be like and is that what I want to choose for myself right now?” Lauren: Yeah, I think that dieting, like the biggest flaw even over, you know, reducing your caloric intake in half, basically, which is a big flaw, is just that you can’t trust your body, like it teaches you you cannot, you cannot be trusted. I think that’s like the root of everything, right? Marci: Oh my gosh, I couldn’t agree more. I feel like so much of the cleanup that I’m doing with my clients in terms of the diet culture is beginning to help my clients see this notion that you can’t be trusted, that idea was planted in your brain by the dieting industry and then they put you on a diet that would guarantee an outcome to where you feel out of control, that then looks like evidence that you can’t be trusted and then they give you another diet to follow. It is a complete construct of the dieting industry. It is not rooted in reality and our jobs are helping to move you away from that dieting mindset and towards a place of that inner self trust. Annie: Amen. That’s, and you already said this, Marci, but that’s, we joke that our business model might not be the most sustainable because we want to put the diet industry out of business and give women all the tools they need, give back women all the tools that they already had and so they aren’t forever reliant on us, like you said, like hopefully your clients learn to eat well and that supports their lifestyle and their goals and they don’t forever need you, right? But that’s not the diet industry’s motive. Marci: Oh no and it’s not how it sustains itself, right? I mean, if the average listener was to list out the number of diets that they’ve been on it would be evidence of “Oh yeah, this is based on repeat customers” but  if I do my job really well, right, I’m going to work with people for a period of time and then my hope is that they aren’t going to return and maybe maybe they do, maybe life circumstances hit them up, you know, things happen but my goal is for my clients not have to be repeat customers. That’s the intention, right, is to get my clients to a place where there is so much internal self-trust built that they know how to navigate how to take care of themselves which is very, very different business model. Annie: Absolutely. Lauren: Yeah and I was just going to mention that there was actually an interview done with a Weight Watchers C.E.O. or former C.E.O. that said part of their business model that they would use to get investors is that they had so much repeat business, so many repeat clients and it’s like well, that kind of proves that your diet doesn’t work, you know? Marci: Exactly and it’s not intended to work. Lauren: Right. Marci: Right. Annie:  OK, Marci, I want to thank you so much for your time. This was a wonderful, wonderful interview with you and I think it’s going to provide a lot of valuable and much-needed information to our community about sugar, is it addicting, is it not and as we clearly stated, it’s not, but that feeling of feeling out of control around sugar is something that a lot of women are familiar with and I think you gave some really, really great suggestions on how to begin regaining a sense of safeness or control around those foods. Marci: I sure hope so. It’s been so great to be here and I know you mentioned that you guys are going to link to a blog post that I wrote that really kind of delves into some of the science and some of the trouble with the food addiction model and that might be interesting for some of your readers to see and if it’s, or listeners, I should say, the readers of this blog post and also for folks who might be interested to dive into some of the research, there might be some science-minded folks I can also provide some citations to connect to what the state of the science is and you know, we kind of hit on this in the beginning and I’m sure you guys talk about this, there is so many problems with food and nutrition related research between how it’s conducted, how it’s disseminated and how it is portrayed in the media so the last thing that I would offer up to anyone who is listening is to take food headlines very, very lightly and if they are extreme, if they are black and white, if they are really, you know, kind of imposing a really extreme rule to take that very, very, very lightly, that there’s a lot of problems with reading and interpreting and sharing nutrition-related research in media and that is another way in which you can feel so pulled and sort of feel more out of control and like you don’t know where to go and you don’t know who to trust and you get pulled into another diet and that is why I’m just loving the messaging that you ladies are putting out into the world that is about cultivating greater self-trust because there’s going to be another headline out there and there’s going to be another podcast that I’m going to have to do about that headline. That is going to be my career probably until the end of time. So, do not take every headline so seriously and to really keep doing that work of developing that sense of self trust because it’s in there, it’s inside of you if you believe in it and I hope that this has been not only interesting but also given some concrete steps and tools to help you on your path in your journey in developing healthy relationship to food and body and yourself. Annie: I am certain that it has been and I’m so excited for our listeners to experience it too. Marci: Awesome, thanks. Annie: Thank you, Marci. Lauren: Thank you, Marci. Marci: Bye. Lauren: Bye.   The post Is Sugar Addictive? appeared first on Balance365.

Fellow anti-diet dietitian Marci Evans is back! We discuss the intersection of digestive disorders and eating disorders, the risks associated with elimination diets, the role of the gut microbiome in digestion and health, the importance of consistency in self-care and well-being, and so much more! Plus, Christy answers a listener question about why she as a dietitian doesn’t advise people to shift their food choices to less-processed foods. Marci is a Food and Body Image Healer™. She has dedicated her career to counseling, supervising, and teaching in the field of eating disorders. She is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian and Supervisor, Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor and Certified ACSM personal trainer. In addition to her group private practice, Marci launched an online eating disorders training platform for dietitians in 2015 and co-directs a specialized eating disorders dietetic internship at Simmons College. She volunteers for a number of national eating disorder organizations and has spoken locally and internationally at numerous conferences and media outlets. She loves social media and you can find her on all outlets @MarciRD. Find her online at MarciRD.com. This episode of Food Psych is brought to you by Poshmark, the easiest way to buy and sell fashion items. Sign up for a Poshmark account and get $5 off your first purchase with the code FOODPSYCH! This episode is also brought to you by Zero, the better way to quit smoking. Go to QuitWithZero.com/foodpsych to get more than 50% off your first month. This episode is also brought to you by TomboyX. Go to TomboyX.com/foodpsych and check out their special bundles and pack pricing. Food Psych listeners will also get an extra 15% off with the code FOODPSYCH! This episode is also brought to you by Audible. Go to audible.com/foodpsych or text FOODPSYCH to 500 500. Grab Christy's free guide, 7 simple strategies for finding peace and freedom with food, to start your intuitive eating journey. If you're ready to give up dieting once and for all, join Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course! Ask your own question about intuitive eating, Health at Every Size, or eating disorder recovery at christyharrison.com/questions. To learn more about Food Psych and get full show notes and a transcript of this episode, go to christyharrison.com/foodpsych.

On Episode 10 of the "You Can Eat With Us" Podcast, we are joined by two special guests. Marci Evans is a Food and Body Imager Healer®, Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian (CEDRD) and Supervisor, certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, and Certified ACSM personal trainer. She supports both clients and clinicians using a Health At Every Size approach. She is a nationally recognized speaker and eating disorders resource, and one of her clients, Kelly Mora, joins us to talk about their work together.  We talk about how important it is to advocate for competent, kind, compassionate healthcare. We also talk about the language and messages we use in describing our bodies and personal preferences in how we describe our own bodies. If you've ever wondered what it might be like to work with a non-diet dietitian, this episode is for you! For more inspiration to help you feel confident advocating for your own healthcare, please visit this page to download a PDF resource written and shared by our guest, Kelly M.: http://www.libreconnections.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/I-am-Not-Sorry.pdf Show Notes: - Marci RD Nutrition: https://marcird.com/ - @marcird on Instagram: https://instagram.com/marcird - @marcird on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marcird - Marci RD on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marcird/ - Paper: The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence for Prioritizing Well-Being Over Weight Loss (https://bit.ly/2yI1uGK) - @LibreConnections on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/libre.connections/

For Episode 14, I got to chat with Marci Evans (@marcird on Instagram) who is a Registered Dietitian specializing in food and body image healing. This episode is all about food addiction which is a topic that Marci is well versed in discussing. Her knowledge on this topic is impressive, but her compassion for those who have struggled with feeling addicted to food is really what makes this episode amazing. Find more information about Marci and her amazing services on her website marcird.com.

Fellow anti-diet dietitian Marci Evans shares why some people feel "addicted" to food, what the science actually says about so-called food addiction, how intuitive eating and Health at Every Size can help you recover from disordered eating behaviors, why it's so important that eating-disorder specialists NOT also try to sell weight loss, and lots more. This episode originally aired Nov 28, 2016. Marci Anderson Evans MS, CEDRD, cPT is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian, ACSM Certified Personal Trainer, certified Intuitive Eating Coach, and owner of Marci RD Nutrition Consulting. By combining her passion for food, nutrition, and fitness her goal is to take help each of her clients find a healthy and happy relationship with food and exercise. She works exclusively with clients with eating disorders, disordered eating, or those interested in intuitive eating counseling. Marci has two professional passions. The first is empowering individuals to find a healthy relationship with food, exercise, and their bodies. The second is teaching and supervising dietitians on how to effectively counsel people with eating disorders. Marci finds great satisfaction in utilizing a psychologically informed approach to counseling and feels grateful for a career that helps her to learn and grow every day.  Find Marci online at MarciRD.com, and learn more about her online training for dietitians.  Grab Christy's free guide, 7 simple strategies for finding peace and freedom with food, to start your intuitive eating journey. If you're ready to give up dieting once and for all, join Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course! To learn more about Food Psych and get full show notes and a transcript of this episode, go to christyharrison.com/foodpsych. Ask your own question about intuitive eating, Health at Every Size, or eating disorder recovery at christyharrison.com/questions.

Should dietitians talk about body image with their clients? Aaron and Glenys discuss how this can be a difficult topic to broach with clients, but how it is essential to the work of making peace with food. Both share their experiences in talking about body image and weight stigma with clients and how it helps to move the work of finding peace with food forward. Aaron and Glenys also do a quick review of how they ended up at a place of Health at Every Size in their personal lives and in their work and the new perspectives they’ve gained through creating this podcast. Shout-outs in this episode: Marci Evans, RD and Fiona Sutherland, APD for their amazing Body Image Workshop More About Aaron: www.bvmrd.com More About Glenys: www.daretonotdiet.com

Season 2 Episode 4: Food Addiction with Marci Evans, RD Food Addiction, specifically sugar addiction, has become a hot button topic in recent years. People feel out of control around highly palatable foods and struggle to avoid over eating them. Sugar also lights up the pleasure centers of our brains, similar to drugs like cocaine and heroin. Does that mean that it, and other highly palatable foods are actually addicting? Listen to this great discussion I share with Marci Evans, RD to find out.   In this episode: The research around food addiction and pleasure Feeling out of control with food is definitely an issue The Restrict/Binge Cycle How HAES and Intuitive Eating can help reduce feelings of addiction around food Yale Food Addiction Scale – is it harmful? Cocaine vs Sugar and the Pleasure Centers   Marci Evans, RD Marci is a Food and Body Imager Healer®. She has dedicated her career to counseling, supervising, and teaching in the field of eating disorders. She is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian and Supervisor, certified Intuitive Eating Counselor and Certified ACSM personal trainer. In addition to her group private practice and three adjunct teaching positions, Marci launched an online eating disorders training for dietitians in 2015 and co-directs a specialized eating disorder internship at Simmons College. She volunteers for a number of national eating disorder organizations including the iaedp certification committee and is serving as an eating disorder resource professional for The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.  She has spoken locally and nationally at numerous conferences and media outlets. She loves social media so tweet her @marciRD, follow her on Facebook and Instagram, and check out her blog at www.marciRD.com/blog.   “If we are promoting a paradigm of abstinence or restraint or restriction, we are neurobiologically setting ourselves up, potentially, to act in a way that feels compulsive and out of control.” Marci Evans, RD   Resources: Sugar Addiction: The State of the Science  Sugar Addiction: A Summary of the Science Additional articles written by Marci on the topic    

This week we’re All Fired Up on sugar! My incredible guest is Marci Evans, anti-diet dietitian, speaker, and eating disorders specialist. She’s had an absolute GUTFUL of the sugar hysteria gripping our planet, and is here to set the record straight! Is sugar addictive? Do we need to constantly police our intake? Why is Sarah Wilson’s hair so shiny? Has the world gone completely round the twist? Don’t miss this fabulous dose of sensible sugar talk!   Show Notes

This week we’re All Fired Up on sugar! My incredible guest is Marci Evans, anti-diet dietitian, speaker, and eating disorders specialist. She’s had an absolute GUTFUL of the sugar hysteria gripping our planet, and is here to set the record straight! Is sugar addictive? Do we need to constantly police our intake? Why is Sarah Wilson’s hair so shiny? Has the world gone completely round the twist? Don’t miss this fabulous dose of sensible sugar talk!   Show Notes

Happy New year team! Today I'm talking to the incredible Marci Evans about body image, self-acceptance, and food 'addiction'. Marci is a certified EDRD, a body image healer, and intuitive eating counsellor. Our conversation is a great antidote to all the diet culture BS you're seeing everywhere right now. We talk about why it's so challenging to develop positive body image, what real body positivity actually means and thin privilege. We also look more closely at self-acceptance and self-compassion and why developing practices around these concepts can help you heal your body image. Finally we go deep on the science around the idea of food 'addiction' and discuss what the evidence really means; plus some ideas on how to help build a healthier relationship with foods you feel you might be addicted to.

Have you ever wondered if your struggles with food should or could be characterized by the food addiction label?  Marci Evans, MS, CEDRD, cPT is a renowned eating disorder expert and nutrition therapist. She not only runs a very successful nutrition consulting business but also teaches at two universities and supervises dietitians in their clinical practice. She sat down to discuss food addiction theory and provides practical tips about working through struggles with food. We discuss in depth the science and theory behind food addiction and talk about why this is a controversial issue within the scientific and healthcare community. Links mentioned in this episode: Marci’s website: www.marcird.com One of the studies mentioned about food addiction Marci’s blog post about food addiction Paige's online course Leave a review for the podcast here More info about the upcoming Mindful Eating Workshop

"A stressed out person often has a stressed out gut."   In this episode, I invited my good friend Marci Evans, MS, CEDRD-S. LDN, cPT to join me on Nutrition Matters Podcast to talk about gut health and the dangers of elimination diets.    Bloating, constipation, gas, and many other GI symptoms are often met with recommendations of elimination diets as the standard protocol and intervention for gut health. Many people in our society right now are removing entire food groups and/or common allergens in order to try to understand what is causing the digestive problems.   Many people with a long-standing chaotic relationship with food and many with eating disorders find that these protocols are causing more harm than good. There's so much to learn about gut health and it's a topic that science is only beginning to scratch the surface in understanding. Tune in to hear an in-depth conversation about how to have a healthy gut without letting that pursuit lead to you to yet another diet trap.   Links mentioned: Squatty potty Clinical Guide to Probiotics App Iberogast

Marci is a Food and Body Imager Healer™. She has dedicated her career to counseling, supervising, and teaching in the field of eating disorders. She is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian and Supervisor, certified Intuitive Eating Counselor and Certified ACSM personal trainer. In addition to her group private practice and three adjunct teaching positions, Marci launched an online eating disorders training for dietitians in 2015 and co-directs a specialized eating disorder internship at Simmons College. She volunteers for a number of national eating disorder organizations including the iaedp certification committee and is serving as an eating disorder resource professional for The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. This is the second episode in a three part series about the intersection of eating disorders and substance use disorders, and after the previous episode, I wanted to really dig into the topic of food addiction, what is is, and what it is not, with the one and only, Marci Evans. In this episode Marci and I talk about the research around food addiction, and also how you can move forward and improve your relationship to food, and your experience around food, if you are currently suffering from feelings of food addiction. What did you think of this conversation? Let me know in the comments below! Resources Jessi's Free Intuitive Eating Audio Download BodyLove Project Premium Podcast Intuitive Eating Support Group Marci's Website Marci's blog post on food addiction

Marci Evans joined me for a chat about all things eating disorder (ED) and intuitive eating! She is a Certified Eating Disorder dietitian (CEDRD) and certified Intuitive Eating counselor, and she has created numerous resources for dietitians interested in ED nutrition therapy. Fun fact: Marci matched with her last choice internship. It happens! I have followed her career for years, and have learned so much from her work. She’s an innovator, educator, mentor, and real talker. Our real talk moments: Burger grilling and Bone marrow testing Career chat: Not all dietetic jobs are represented in the internship! How to become a CEDRD How to become a certified Intuitive Eating counselor Marci’s resources for dietitians and dietetic interns: Quiz: Is Eating Disorders Work a fit for me? The Dietitian’s Guide to Where to Go for Eating Disorder Training Listener questions: What are some guidelines that I (and others in my position, i.e. not a credentialed healthcare provider) should follow for sharing experiences {in ED or amenorrhea recovery} while not crossing an ethical boundary? Can you talk about the intersection of GI issues and ED recovery?   Marci Evans, RDN CEDRD CPT | MarciRD.com @MarciRD (Twitter and Instagram)

Are you trying to make peace with food, but still trying to lose weight? Do you want to know if there is a way to pursue weight loss AND heal your relationship with food? Are you struggling with what you see as an addiction to food? Listen now to hear my insights on this complicated food peace issue. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. This episode is brought to you by my PCOS summer series: Empowering Your PCOS Journey. You CAN make peace with food even with PCOS and I want to show you how. This series and our Facebook group will be with you every step of the way. Episode's Key Points: The pursuit of weight loss CANNOT be combined with making peace with food... so now what?? Thinking about food addiction leads to issues with food preoccupation. We NEED food to survive and thrive! We shouldn't pathologize the desire for food. There isn't ONE diet that, for most people, can help maintain weight loss for more than two years. In fact, most dieters regain all their lost weight, plus more, within five years. Dieting predicts weight gain!! Ancel Keys' Minnesota Starvation Experiment: strong and fit men were fed half of the amount of nutrition they needed. Eventually these men became depressed and food preoccupied, and experienced a decrease in libido and in interest in extracurricular activities. Weight loss pursuits promote restriction, and restriction leads to food preoccupation... so we can't pursue weight loss without it resulting in food preoccupation. Remember, even if you decide to leave dieting and intentional weight loss behind, it will still take TIME to end your struggles with food preoccupation. Make sure you have a team behind you to support your healing! We live in such a fatphobic world! It's important that we break down our own internal biases related to fatness, and face our own fat discrimination. What is really behind the fear of fat? Explore that to figure out what's really behind the obsession with weight loss, and to discover what's keeping you stuck in disordered eating patterns. Show Notes: Link to subscribe to the weekly FREE Food Peace Newsletter. It is sent out every Tuesday morning and no spam EVER. By signing up, I will also send you Love Food's Season 1's Food Peace Syllabus. Marci Evans' Love, Food Podcast episode Ancel Keys' Minnesota Starvation Experiment Eating Disorder Dietitian Julie Dillon RD blog Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue! Thank you for listening to the Love, Food series.

Would you consider yourself a food addict? Do you find yourself trying to abstain from certain foods so you don't "lose control?" Are you unsure if food addiction is the right way to describe what you're experiencing? Listen now for some expertise on the latest research and find out more about the truth behind the food addiction model. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. This episode is brought to you by Pursuing Private Practice Masterclass.  Ready to start doing things your way and kiss the corporate world goodbye?  Details here and remember the super secret discount code BOSS for 10% off. Episode's Key Points: Holidays like Easter and Passover can bring foods out of the woodwork that we don't usually eat! (Think: chocolate bunnies, Peeps, jelly beans.) When these foods resurface, because we haven't learned to make them "neutral" yet, it can feel like we're addicted to them when they're finally around. Our bodies don't need to rely on dieting to find health. In fact, dieting HURTS us, and it can lead to bingeing and an OCD experience with food. Eating is just like peeing!!! When you gotta go, you gotta go, and how much or how little you pee doesn't matter. But with hunger, there is so much JUDGMENT attached to it. So what if we took that judgment away? What if we treated eating just like peeing? They're both bodily functions that do just fine on their own without outward policing. So stop judging when you're hungry, or how much or how little you need to eat to feel satisfied! Eating is like peeing. Marci Evans joins to talk about her expert knowledge on food addiction research! Food doesn't need to have so much power!! You are NOT alone... your pain is individual, but your experiences with food are so common. What are the first steps to making peace with food when dealing with these problems?? Compassion! Challenging food addiction in and of itself The food addiction model is problematic and has many limitations! The term "food addiction" is very poorly defined in the research community. Most 0f the research has been done on animals, not humans, and the research that has been done on humans has had a LOT of mixed results. It fails to consider alternatives to the biological response to food that mimics drug use, such as pavlovian conditioning, the fact that food is meant to be rewarding, or the impact of restraint, restriction, or previous dieting on our pleasure reactions. Food is meant to be rewarding!! The pattern of restriction and restraint that then swings to bingeing can lead someone to think they're addicted to food... but that might not be the case! Bingeing is often a reaction to deprivation!! Current food addiction research does NOT account for restraint, restriction, or dieting history. Our natural biology REBELS against restraint!! So how do we move beyond the food addiction model? Remember you are not alone! Consider what "healthy" means to you, and make sure it's BALANCED and SATISFYING. Use resources to support your journey. Notice what's happening in your body instead of what's happening in your brain. Once we take the judgment away, we can really listen to what our body actually needs. Our body craves balance!! Remember, healthy eating includes satiety and pleasure! If you deny these parts of eating, you won't find a peaceful relationship with food. Show Notes: Link to subscribe to the weekly FREE Food Peace Newsletter. It is sent out every Tuesday morning and no spam EVER. By signing up, I will also send you Love Food's Season 1's Food Peace Syllabus. Love, Food Podcast Episode 53 Love, Food Podcast Episode 6 with Marci Evans Start your private practice! Click here and use code BOSS to get 10% off Jennifer McGurk's Pursuing Private Practice Masterclass!! Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch ---> This week's Food Peace Syllabus addition #1 Eat What You Love and Love What You Eat by Michelle May ---> This week's Food Peace Syllabus addition #2 Starting Monday by Karen Koenig ---> This week's Food Peace Syllabus addition #3 Find Marci on Twitter! Eating Disorder Dietitian Julie Dillon RD blog Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue! Thank you for listening to the Love, Food series.

Marci Evans on orthorexia, mindfulness and the importance of being curious. Please join me to hear inspiring fellow Eating Disorder Dietitian Marci Evans share some incredible pieces of wisdom, reflecting on her own experience and expanding out to the work she does with clients, and fellow Dietitians. Here she shares: The books that once you read it and know it, you can't "unknow it" How Marci moved from "mindfulness feels a bit....blah?" to "ahhhh....this is why it's important..." and how it directly translates to client outcomes Specifically how OUR mindfulness practice directly influences our neurobiology & be an observer of our own experience How we can find mindfulness in small ways, that it does take intention and and it's OK if it feels effortful. Staying curious to notice your whole experience, even those "eeek" moments where you might not be at your best Bringing self compassion into your life! What exactly is orthorexia? Why our culture is so unhelpful when it comes to orthorexia How orthrexia can become a socially sanctioned surrogate for the ED How to look out for getting distracted by what seems to be "the problem" at the expense of more meaningful conversations Our Body Image Workshop - please join us!!   Notes from Marci: Orthorexia: Dunn & Bratman www.orthorexia.com The Mindful Therapist (Dan Siegel)   Connect with Marci! Web - www. marcird.com Twitter @MarciRD Instagram @MarciRD  

Fellow body-positive dietitian Marci Evans shares how she developed a healthy relationship with food in childhood, when it started to go awry, why it's so important that eating-disorder specialists NOT also try to sell weight loss, why some people feel "addicted" to food, what the science actually says about so-called food addiction, and lots more.  Marci Anderson Evans MS, CEDRD, cPT is a Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian, ACSM Certified Personal Trainer, certified Intuitive Eating Coach, and owner of Marci RD Nutrition Consulting. By combining her passion for food, nutrition, and fitness her goal is to take help each of her clients find a healthy and happy relationship with food and exercise. She works exclusively with clients with eating disorders, disordered eating, or those interested in intuitive eating counseling. Marci has two professional passions. The first is empowering individuals to find a healthy relationship with food, exercise, and their bodies. The second is teaching and supervising dietitians on how to effectively counsel people with eating disorders. Marci finds great satisfaction in utilizing a psychologically informed approach to counseling and feels grateful for a career that helps her to learn and grow every day.  Find Marci online at MarciRD.com, and learn more about her online training for dietitians.  To learn more about Food Psych and our guest, visit christyharrison.com/foodpsych Join Christy's intuitive eating online course at christyharrison.com/course How healthy is your relationship with food? Take the quiz and get free resources at christyharrison.com/quiz!

Today, I'm speaking with Marci Evans, Certified Eating Disorder Registered Dietitian and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor running a private practice right here in Cambridge, MA. In addition to her private practice and three adjunct teaching positions, Marci runs an online eating disorders training for dietitians and is currently co-developing a specialized eating disorder internship at Simmons College. You can follow her @MarciRD on twitter and Facebook, and visit MarciRD.com to check out some nuggets of wisdom on her blog. In this episode Marci offers some really concrete tips on how to get started with the practice of Intuitive Eating (outlined below). As she defines it, Intuitive Eating is about knowing yourself first. Then, it's learning how to integrate the knowledge of the mind, with the wisdom of the body. Contrary to what most people believe, this practice is not simply just about “eating whatever you want.” It's about getting to know your body on both an intellectual and intuitive level, so you are able to fuel properly, while also enjoying your food. In this episode Marci highlights three key factors (plus so much more wisdom) to help you get started: Focus First on Meal Timing While the word “Intuitive” might imply to simply just eat when you feel hungry and stop when you feel full, Marci explains that eating at regular intervals (every 4ish hours), you'll naturally heighten those sensations of hunger and fullness, and become more in touch with what those sensations feel like, and how to respond to them. Use Calorie Counting as an Experiment Calories are everywhere! They are hard to avoid. So if you're someone who relies solely on external factors, think about using that information as a detective might use a clue. If you have a meal that is X number of calories, ask yourself: Did that satisfy me? Did that hold me over until my next meal? Did that help fuel my workout? Constantly Create a Positive Food Environment A lot of what I hear when I approach clients and readers with the idea of Intuitive Eating is, “I don't trust myself.” Marci suggests to start simple practices to build trust, such as building a positive food environment. She offers an example of one of her clients, who after seeing her mother-in-law, felt stressed and exhausted, and ate a half pan of brownies. Taking care of yourself, physically and emotionally, and approaching food in a positive, or at least neutral mindset, helps develop intrinsic trust around food. Subscribe: bit.ly/bodylovestudiopodcast  Resources Intuitive Eating and The Intuitive Eating Workbook (available for pre-order) by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD and Elyse Resch, MS, RD, CEDRD The Art of Money by Bari Tessler Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin

Have you had a dysfunctional relationship with food since you were a kid?? Was food a protector from horrible life events yet you are still feel shameful years later? Listen now for insight. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. Key Points: Thank you for the feedback on how you are experiencing the show. So glad you are experiencing more peace with food and at home in your own skin! Julie says thank you for sharing the kind words after she expressed her own body image struggles during times of infertility (Not episode 21 as I state in this podcast rather Episode 18) Have you read Dietland yet? Amazing and sure to help you heal your relationship with food and your body. Would love to hear your thoughts about the book. #JenniferExists. Shall we have a Dietland book club?? It is important to honor the functional relationship we have with food. Tell Food thank you and compassionately time to move on and grieve it when it changes. Unless it is not time. Trauma work can help you heal and be able find another way of relating with food. Unhealthy coping is still coping. Stop beating yourself up for how you've gotten this far. Should we blame weight for health problems? Weight probably has a relationship with health yet not causation. Just a relationship. Health behavior change associated with weight gain shouldn't be considered the cause rather a symptom. Not everyone in larger bodies has health problems. Not everyone who has lost weight is healthy. Cause for health problems multifactorial probably from oppressions, traumas, behaviors, and stress. Food addiction: when one takes away the deprivation, they no longer using the word addiction to describe her relationship with food. Many people can relate to the trauma of sexual abuse and/or bullying. Next time you find yourself in a binge or bad body thoughts, take a deep breath, in this exact moment, someone else is sitting with the same shame and anger. Use that common bond to help you energize your healing. Show Notes: Episode 18 Julie shares her body image struggles Raindrop Memories Edward McKays Used Book Store Dietland by Sarai Walker and the trailer for the paperback Episode 20 with Kari Anderson where we discuss honoring the functional relationship with food. EMDR for Trauma work Advanced Integrative Therapy for Trauma work Episode 6 with Marci Evans on Food Addiction Sexual abuse is more common than you probably think. Check out info here. Eating Disorder Dietitians Julie Dillon RD blog Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue! Thank you for listening to the Love, Food series. Give me feedback via Twitter @EatingPermitRD.