Christina is the special guest chef and recipe provider in our Nourish Yourself coaching program that runs only once a year. We recently put out an AMA on Instagram asking what questions and anxieties are particularly present for you in this precarious post holiday moment when the New Year, arrives along with RESOLUTIONS SELF CARE and of course DIETS.
We got so many wonderful questions, from what is ‘balanced eating’ and how do I get there, to how to handle other peoples' body/diet talk. Today, we discuss your questions and provide (hopefully) some answers.
We will be doing a part 2 early next month (when maybe a few dry-January/Whole 30 plans haven’t shaken out as hoped). Feel free to comment with more questions to be answered in that episode!
These are also the questions that are addressed in Nourish Yourself, our seven-week anti-diet coaching program that aims to equip you with the information you need to empower yourself around food and gain the confidence to make choices that work for YOUR life and YOUR body.
Our winter 2025 course starts in March and enrollment opens in February—you can sign up for the waitlist here to be notified.
During Nourish Yourself you get 7 Weeks of gentle focus, redefining the patterns and thought processes holding us back from ease and joy around food, cooking and even grocery shopping! The course also features Live Virtual one-to-one sessions with Cadence and a LIVE VIRTUAL GROUP COOKING CLASS with Christina Chaey to ground us in our own personal skills and goals.
Let go of anxiety and overwhelm around food and 'diet'. Get the information and tools you need to find what works for you, your life and your body. FULL INFO HERE.
I’ve also written about food and nourishment in these posts:
Literally Everyone Else Lives on Carbs
Guacamole Fulfillment
and 7 Decades of Self Denial
Curious about working with me? Please check out my other offerings…
Virtual Run Club enrollment is currently open and closes Jan 10th. Each series we start with a group coach call. 9 out of 10 participants begin by saying how much they hate running or are terrified to start. It’s a truly beginner friendly program. Many VRC alums have gone on to create non-obsessive, joyful running practices, and even inspired our next level up Virtual Marathon Training Club.
I also teach beginner strength and stability via Kettlebells and Pilates as well as several restorative classes and workshops including Anti-Anxiety Cardio and Fascia Release™ .
All my programs are designed to gently shift our bodies into balance without the shame or ‘sweat is fat crying’ mentality that infects so much of mainstream fitness. I hope you can find something here that supports you.
You can also find plenty of free support on my IG HERE
Transcript
Cadence: Hello, I’m Cadence Dubus. This is Busy Body podcast and today I'm here with Christina Chaey. I'm super excited to kind of co-host this conversation today with Christina because we are collaborating on the Nourish Yourself program which is rolling out this winter/spring to support everyone. Christina, introduce yourself and why you're here today.
Christina: Oh, sure. Hi, I'm Christina Chaey. I use she/her pronouns, and I am a recipe developer, a writer, soon-to-be first-time cookbook author. I have my first cookbook coming out in early 2026. I write a newsletter on Substack called Gentle Foods where I write essays and contribute recipes really around a very aligned topic of you know kind of nourishing yourself and just meditations on I think finding peace with cooking and just finding ritual and practice in that process.
Cadence: That's exactly one of the reasons why I reached out to you to do this program together, because your focus is very much in this space of accessible eating that's still delicious, exciting, interesting, not rote, you know. And also makes space for mistakes or jazzing up something from your pantry, like there's a lot of options. It feels very scalable. I really like cooking and I like eating, but looking at your recipes, I'm like, oh, I could literally take it to this next level. Or I can imagine someone who really is like, I've never really cooked something more complicated than like stir-fry. You also have options and you're very like clear about that in your Substack, like try this breakfast thing it's like three ingredients and I've been eating it all week and I feel like somebody who's like kind of looking at you aspirationally would be like okay, maybe I can try that, you know, and then you know see your photos from like the big holiday meals and stuff that you make that are really like, okay, I can see why she worked at Bon Appétit. And understand that there's a scale to go to, but it doesn't feel at all like, oh my god, I could never and I just follow her to be wowed all the time.
So I wanted to bring that in because I really felt and feel like food appreciation and kind of food awareness, food knowledge is such an important aspect of developing peace around food. And knowledge in general, that's such a part of my brand, like how your body works, understanding why things happen, understanding what pain is, understanding what cellulite is, like understanding these things so that they aren't haunting us or kind of like hanging over us in some way. So that's a really important aspect of the program is that you really bring this like, you can do it, here's just ways to make hummus not be the most boring thing for you.
Or, like, we literally do a live cooking class with you, which, you know, I think everyone experiences, like, oh, I'm doing it. It's happening. Like, I just made a meal that's going to last me several days, and it wasn't the scariest thing I ever did.
Christina: Right, totally.
Cadence: So we did an AMA that you beautifully articulated on your [Instagram] stories. We wanted to answer some questions today that are very much in line with what we talk about in the course. And the people that ask those questions, those are our peeps. These are who we hope are going to join.
Christina: Yeah.
Cadence: Talk us through what you put out there.
Christina: Yeah. And thank you for that lovely introduction. You know, Nourish is something where I feel like I never took that course with you when you were running it, I think maybe a year before we started working on it together, but I wanted to. I was very intrigued by it. And even as someone who works in this industry, who has worked in food and worked in food media and restaurants and whatever for the last decade-plus of my life, it's just funny because I'll read a description of the Nourish course on your website and I’ll be like, I need that! And all to say the things that we're talking about today, the questions that we're examining and hopefully trying to shed some light on, one: I feel like I want to emphasize to people like these are not the right answers. We're not coming with right answers. We're not coming with like definitive science or whatever. Like that's not what I do. I feel like what I try to do is examine sort of like the emotional and the stuff that we kind of hold on to that's like behind the questions. Like, okay, what are the things that we're really feeling that are driving some of these anxieties and fears and guilt? And how do we look at these things with a bit more compassion? And I feel like that's something that you share as well.
Cadence: Another way to say we're not giving the right answers is that really the way that I teach and coach people is what is called in the industry “client-led,” meaning my role is to be like a shepherd, a guide. I really believe people have the answers in them. I think we are all beautiful, sentient beings and really we kind of know. We're like plants growing towards the light. We kind of know where we want to be.
Often we don't have the resources which could literally be knowledge, straight knowledge. So that's literally what's in our course. Like the three workshops that people get, one is just like, what are carbohydrates, protein, fat? What are they doing? How do we digest them? Did you ever sit down and really look those up and learn about how they break down your body? Or have you just been reading like pop diet information from various magazines and being like carbs fat protein good. If you don't really understand how these work, you're always going to be just at the mercy of the next kind of fad or headline or whatever. And also it could just be someone creating space, which I think is a big part of we're doing, like a container to help you have insight. Even like a yoga class is basically a space for people to breathe, be self-reflective, go internal, be restful. They might not be able to provide that for themselves regularly.
Christina: Totally.
Cadence: But they're like, oh, I love this class that I take every Saturday morning. Who cares what the moves are? What it is is this calm space where the lights are dimmed and there's nice music. And maybe that's really the value of that. So I also really always, and I think this is also a place that our values align, I am always steering people away from anyone who's like, “This is the right way and that is the wrong way.” That is a huge red flag immediately because there isn’t a way that works for every single human, and you know there are like general rules of non-self-harm and things like that don't poison you know but one person's like ideal way of eating can be completely not workable for another person based on all kinds of things. So that is literally why the diet industry exists because it's complicated. If it was simple, that whole world wouldn't work.
Christina: Yeah. You know the other thing I was going to say is that we are only human. We too are people and consumers of media and just like, crap in the world. Yesterday as I was doing some prep for this episode, I totally got got by one of those sponsored ads that are popping up all over my Instagram that are like, “This is the way that you're going to eat right and everything's going to change and your skin's going to clear up and you're going to lose 20 pounds and you're going to blah, blah, blah and then, and then it'll be over for all of you,” you know? But I totally got got. It was an ad from some kind of low FODMAP-specific food delivery service. But the ad was like, it was aesthetically attractive, it was showing all these yummy foods, it was talking about, you know, how the service makes it easy to go through all the steps of what it means to follow a low FODMAP diet, which for anyone who doesn't know is just, It's a certain kind of diet that's often prescribed by doctors that involves specific phases of eliminating like a ton of foods and then reintroducing them slowly. And I was just like, wow, this sounds great! I love this! I need this. And then I was like…but I don't! I was like, before the second I was watching this ad where it was talking about these specific phases and how this service was going to help me achieve all of them, this thought has never crossed my mind before as something I might want or need in my life. But the temptation to just have like an easy answer, or I think the right answer, all these things we just talked about is super real and it continues to be something I navigate in my own life, which is why I appreciated that so many of the questions that we got from people really followed a few major themes.
Number one, thank you to everyone for sending these amazing questions. We got dozens. And I think some of the major themes that I noticed in these questions were, you know, a real concern around this “right way” to eat. A lot of stuff around restriction and moderation and finding balance, which I have a lot of thoughts about, and I'm sure you do, too. Ingredient-specific fear mongering, so I would say that's anything related to fears around sugar or carbs or seed oils or whatever it is, this messaging around “evil foods.” And then I think another huge one was just handling when other people around you are engaging in this sort of harmful talk around dieting and other toxic mentalities around food and bodies.
Cadence: A bunch of the questions also were with like domestic partners which is super challenging.
Christina: Okay so I have a question for you, which is like, do you have a question that you feel like immediately struck you as like, oh my god, great question?
Cadence: I have a few. They were all so good, they were great, so I think there's kind of a theme, there's like sort of a few questions that get mixed into one, which is all this kind of like how to frame healthy eating without that turning into restriction, how to eat well and balanced without giving up things that you like. How do I be healthy without overanalyzing everything that I'm eating? These are all in this same kind of Venn diagram of eating without freaking out, which I think is very much what we try to address in the Nourish program. Cause I think that there's a billion people out there, mainly women and femme-socialized people, who probably had much more extreme, disordered eating when they were younger, have kind of healed that to a point. They're not doing the more extreme behaviors that they did, you know, in their teens or their twenties. But now they're kind of in this nowhere zone, this ether where they're like, okay, I know what I shouldn't do anymore. I'm not micromanaging my meals like crazy or I'm not starving or binging or doing these more intense things. But I still have enormous anxiety, you know, and now it's just kind of floating around constantly and it's almost like I'm doing an impression of somebody who eats well and balanced, but I don't really know what that is. I don't know if that's resonating in my body. And it makes one really vulnerable to those kinds of Instagram ads because of course you want someone to go, “this is the way” or “stop eating this” or “all seed oils are killing you,” you know, “your coffee is rotten.” Like all these things. Have you heard that one, how the coffee beans are all rancid.
Christina: I don't want to hear it. I have, I have, I just willfully tune it out.
Cadence: Yeah, exactly. So I think that person, like that is this person who's educated and food aware enough that they're not living on completely super high processed food, but they are literally worrying, should I not be eating seed oils? Or, you know, is every time I eat a pastry or, you know, some salami, pepperoni, something that's processed in that way, is that horrible? And then I think with that comes a lot of restriction in ways that are maybe more subtle, but that's just the anxiety piece. Like a lot of just like, “I never have sugar” or “I never have dessert” or like, “I don't keep X, Y, Z in my house.” It's not a really joyful, free place. Even if from the outside, that person looks like, oh, they're eating a sandwich. They had avocado toast for breakfast. Like, what are you talking about? They seem fine.
Christina: Yeah. As I was listening to you talk, I was reminded of something I've been working on a lot this year, which is just this idea of positive visions. I think what you were saying was basically like, if you're coming from this place of what not to do, if that's one column, this other column of what to do is not self-directed. It's not self-informed. It's not something that you're actively pursuing. All you're doing is pursuing something that you don't want to do. And so it totally makes sense that it then leaves this morass of just like, well, what do I do? And then it is this perfect funnel for all kinds of information and misinformation to come through, and at that point, it's just like no wonder everyone is confused about everything all the time. I actively feel like someone who counts myself as part of that demographic often, and this is my profession, which sometimes I forget that means I know more than the average person about a lot of this stuff. And yet here I am still feeling confused about plenty of things.
But yeah, I mean, I think I'm curious to know what conversations look like with clients of yours and people that you work with around this idea of like, well, how do I do it? How do I do it right? And how do you go about shifting that to, well, maybe it's not objective, how do I do it right in an objective, singular way, but how do I make it right for me?
Cadence: Yeah, exactly. So that's part of what we address in the program and when I work with people one-to-one, one thing that I ask is that they keep a food diary, which is different than calorie counting. I'm not asking for portion sizes or like how many grams of XYZ. Really, I just want to see a picture of their day because literally a picture of what you're eating says a lot. Like if you're getting up at four in the morning because you have a long commute and your first meal of the day is at like, 5:30 in the morning, that's going to be a very different picture throughout a day. That's a super long day if you get home at like 7:00 at night and you're going to bed at nine or whatever you know, versus someone who gets up at 10:30 in the morning and their first meal of the day is at 11, 11:30. I literally look at everyone's journals and then we just start talking about like, what is your lifestyle? Like what makes the most sense for you? Do you cook? Do you have time to cook? Where do you get your food? Do you like to do that? You know, this is how we start to remove the barriers.
Like if you really find it hard to find time to shop, can we prepare your pantry and your shopping lists for when you do shop to really set you up so that you don't have to shop very much. And you still have a lot of options that are nourishing and balanced for you at home. And just literally start to create those creatively together. Like what are snacks that you can have on hand? Like what does a solid day look like for you? And hopefully with the self-awareness that we build in the program, people can also notice like, oh, I actually felt really good when we made XYZ plans, or that didn't work for me, I got really tired or my digestion was off, blah, blah, blah. Great, let's keep, you know, tweaking that to make it work for people.
That's why, you know, dieting and various prescribed programs just don't work because it's literally just like putting something on top of someone. And like if you've got kids or you're up really late or whatever, suddenly your little meal plan just doesn't work anymore because it doesn't allow for variation and and that's why everyone quits eventually, I mean one of the many reasons.
Christina: Yea. And this is where I feel like it can be so helpful to really challenge certain binaries and certain assumptions that we hold about food specifically. Like I noticed there were a couple of questions that people asked or comments that people made about snacking.
Cadence: Right.
Christina: And there's such a demonic kind of reputation that snacking has where it's the enemy. Snacking is my weakness. Like it's garbage, whatever. But to me and I think something that we emphasize a lot in this course and in our own philosophies is like the context of it really matters, where if a snack at a certain time of day is going to be the difference between you feeling like you're going to crash and you know binge at night and end up feeling horrible like right before you go to bed or whatever the scenario may be, then that is something that I would you know, I would advocate for you to eat that snack. And then I think from there it becomes a question of just like I think it's about a willingness to engage with what you're actually sort of feeling and how you mentally and physically are actually processing and digesting in the purest sense of the word, like the input.
I feel like we have talked about this before, where…sorry I have to gather this thought. Oh yeah, with binaries, I think another one that comes to mind is this idea of “processed food is bad” or “fast food is bad” or whatever. And I'm thinking about someone who was in one of our courses a while back who, oh my God, I'm sorry. Can you hear the cat like screaming? I fed him specifically right before this so that he would not scream. But here he is being nourished again.
But anyway, yes, this idea that processed foods are bad, fast food is bad. And I was thinking about this person who was in our course like a little while back, who I think she spent a lot of her day in her car for work, right, like that was just the reality of her life and her lifestyle. And that is a case where it's like, okay, you know that your lifestyle that requires you to get up in the morning and be in a car for an hour or two hours or something first thing in in the morning, that is not the person who is going to wake up tomorrow and be like, I'm gonna make a two-hour trad wife-style home breakfast for myself every morning before I get into my car, you know? Like that's not that's not going to be the right thing for that person. However, something that might be right for that person is, as you said, some education around what kinds of options might make them feel better during that car ride. Maybe it's about just grabbing the egg wrap at, you know, your drive-thru in the morning that you can eat in the car and getting that combo of protein and carbs and et cetera will end up making you sort of feel better throughout the day than a different choice. And those are the kinds of things that I feel like it can be really hard to know how to ask those questions if you don't know that those are the questions.
Cadence: Yeah, exactly. That's a great point. And I think there's also an assumption that to change, it has to be somewhat like really drastic. I think that's very much what marketing and doing this around the new year, we're doing this intentionally because this is the time that there's just so much of like basically make a drastic change. The one that you fell down, it was like, “all your problems are solved like forever!” Like there are these really big promises. And it could be these baby steps of, what if you make a better choice at the drive through, start to notice how that feels. Maybe that turns into, oh my god, I can pre-make little egg McMuffin things at home actually and now I've just reduced like the salt and the grease and the this and the that, but like, let me get there slowly in my own time instead of taking that person and expecting them to make homemade granola every morning and like you know source a zillion beautiful nuts and grains and all this stuff. Like that's just that's not gonna happen.
Christina: Yeah, and I think too, just being careful to unsubscribe from the…I'm not sure how to call it, maybe the “hierarchy of health” where it's like, you know, homemade granola is great. Homemade egg muffins are great. I am not really interested in telling someone, like, that that is a better choice for their life. Because it might not be, you know, and that's where I think it's so interesting to talk about other ways that we define health for ourselves, other ways that we define balance, where so often these things can look so explicitly like it's only about you know how many grams of carbohydrates you're eating in a day or only about how much unprocessed food you're eating or whatever it may be and it can feel super rigid. And in fact there are other determinants that I prioritize in my life or other things that I value. Maybe I'm someone who like the time I choose to spend not making homemade whatever is time that I would rather spend taking a 20-minute walk, do you know what I mean?
Cadence?: It always makes me think of when I talk about this kind of like, what is “healthy,” you know, how much attention do we want or need to put into these aspects of our lives, specifically food and movement and those kinds of like health and wellness categories. I think of a couple of clients that I have and have had in the past who are doctors, like surgeons, emergency room doctors, and a client I had a long time ago who was in some kind of like creative I don't even know what he did. He worked for a big media company and would put out these really huge products of some kind. Big creative projects, videos, things happening in spaces. I think it's the kind of company that Google would hire to do a big event for them or something.
Christina: Got it.
Cadence: And all these people loved their jobs. Love, love, love their jobs. Huge amount of satisfaction, creativity, meaning. The surgeon in particular I'm thinking about, she would tell me she would do eight-hour surgeries on a moment's notice. That's being an emergency room surgeon, someone comes in with multiple gunshots, you go from chatting in the hallway with your colleague to eight hours straight on your feet, full focus. You're not being like, guys, I have to stop every three hours for a snack. Like, they don't get a pee break. I don't know how, I don't know how they do it. But she, and I mean, I would ask her, I was like, how do you like, what does that feel like? And she was like, you're just so like, this is how there's different people in the world for her and the way her brain works. She's like, you're so focused. Like, I don't have any thoughts about like, I have to pee or that I'm hungry. She's like, once I finish, I'm like, Oh my God, I'm so hungry. Like all this stuff, you know, but yeah, doesn't cross her mind. She's just completely immersed. And similarly, this person who did the creative media stuff, he had crazy long hours. He just worked insane hours. It was 100% taking a toll on his body. He knew it. He was always straining and spraining things. He was eating all over crazy food, no consistency of any kind. But he was really honest that he was like, I love my job. I love my life. Like I'm not willing to change what I'm doing right now. Maybe later he would, you know, but he was just like, this is what I worked my whole life for and I'm not going to like get like, you would get up at six to like immediately start working at home, take a shower, grab a quick snack, get on the subway, be at work. Like, he's not fitting in a 20-minute stretch session there, you know?
Christina: Totally.
Cadence: And I'm like, I respect that dude. Is that the body that I want to live in? No. But, like, he is super fulfilled in a different way, and I value that. Like, I'm not seeing a sad person who's feeling lost and confused and uncomfortable. He's like, this is the life I've always wanted. And similarly, with people in the medical field, a lot of times the environment dictates how they can take care of themselves, and that's just like a cost-benefit analysis. And to expect that person to drink a green juice in the middle of their 24-hour shift is just illogical, basically.
Christina: Yeah. And that really brings up a lot of thoughts for me around how my conception of balance as it pertains to food just continues to evolve as I get older. I think where I am today I would say feels much more like balance doesn't mean that you're perfectly balanced in the middle of the seesaw and, neither here nor there is teeter-tottering to one side at all times. I think it's much more like I've come to believe in this idea of balance as rooted in resilience, which I think is also something that you and I both value a lot philosophically. The reality is that life brings different things to either side of the seesaw constantly. And balance is really about knowing where your center is and how to get there, no matter where you are on that seesaw, if that makes sense.
Cadence: Yeah, absolutely. It's something that I write about a lot in my Substack, that we can't aim for sameness. Like sameness doesn't exist.
Christina: Yeah.
Cadence: Sameness is the perfectionist idea that I'm always going to approach every day, every meal, every problem, every setback with this perfect solution or this relaxed, optimistic, knowing way. But consistency, resilience is kind of the “two steps forward, one step back” thing. When I was in my twenties, I used to run myself ragged, not eat enough, not because I was having disordered eating, but because I was just a dumdum 20-year-old who was just not bringing snacks and being like, whatever. And I would get crazy hungry, eat too much in that I felt ill or like, it's just not nourishing, you know, regularly felt like it was too much for you. And it, and regularly kind of felt like I was going to faint or like shaky, you know, like not, it did not feel good.
Christina: Right.
Cadence: I have developed enough knowledge, skill, self-reliance, connection, confidence with my body, other resources, just like better planning ahead, joining the [food] co-op, things that give me resources for literally having better snacks around, that even when I still run myself ragged, I don't drop all the way back to that way of handling things. I might still get to a point where I'm like, oh my god I'm so hungry, but I'm not so hungry that I'm like eating an entire pizza on my own or just like cleaning out my whole fridge I'm so hungry like oh my god I'm so hungry I'm gonna eat my meal now you know?
Christina: Right.
Cadence: And I think like that's a place, that's a promise, you know, that I want to give people. It's like, I can give you the skills that you can lift out of kind of where you're feeling now. So you just have like a little more resilience to fall back on because you will get sick, interrupted, overstressed, overworked, go on vacation, have in-laws in your house for too long. All the things that do make it almost impossible to be like, I'm having my yogurt and chia seeds.
Christina: Like you could choose to not do those things, I suppose, but really the consequence is that your world just becomes smaller and smaller. Like, that's not the life I'm trying to live, personally. And I continue to be on this journey, but it's taken me quite a long time to get to the place where I am now, where, you know, I was just thinking about growing up with women's magazines in the 2000s when I was a teenager and how balance with food, for me, my conception of balance with food is really rooted in some of that crap I was consuming during those years where balance was like, an always variety-packed 1200-calorie daily input that ends with a square of dark chocolate, you know? And it's like, well, I don't want a square of dark chocolate all the time. Does that mean I'm doing it wrong? Like it's just so funny to think about how much that defined these long-term ideas I have held around what it looks like to be balanced. And it's something that I find was really echoed in a lot of these questions that we got from people that were around, you know, like staying “healthy” but with “balance.”
Cadence: Yeah, exactly. That is something that I address in the workshop. Literally one of the first questions I ask is like, what is healthy? What does that mean? What do we mean when we say that? And I just want to add, when you were like, we could avoid all those things, the social situations, the going out, the traveling, and then our life gets really small. And I would say what I think happens for people, is instead of avoiding those things, they just live in fear of them. They're excited for their trip to Cancún, and they're terrified that they're going to be drinking and eating too much and all this stuff. They're super excited to go to Christmas and New Year's or whatever holiday they're celebrating. At the same time, they're like, oh, there's going to be all these cookies and stuff. And there's this sense which I have addressed in several kind of social media posts that I've done, this idea that like one thing, one event, one meal, one handful of cookies is setting you down this dark path or undoing everything. And that's such a reductive way of thinking. And it's fed so much by like women's magazines. Like, that your guilty pleasure, your naughty treat, all this kind of stuff. Really what we're trying to build is a resilient engagement with our nourishment, with food, via appreciation, via just resourcing, with our knowledge, with our understanding and intuition with our bodies. Because like a cookie or a holiday meal or a two-week vacation, it doesn't, literally how our bodies work, how our metabolism works, it really doesn't affect you the way that we think it does. Sure, you get bloated, maybe. I mean I went to Italy for like 10 days and I definitely came back and I was like wow, two plates of pasta and a bottle of wine every day does make a difference. But also since I don't live in Italy sadly, I didn't worry about it because I knew I was just going to come home and go back to my usual way of eating, which is a much, much sadder version in comparison to eating in Italy, basically.
Christina: Right, right.
Cadence: But I want to give people that kind of confidence, wisdom, that like you can go to a party and go bananas if you want. And then you just go back to the way that you normally take care of yourself and it just doesn't matter. And I want to really relieve people of that anxiety and guilt and you know. A bigger question which we like can't even address here is like, if this holiday period is turning into some kind of spiral for you where you are really feeling that you're doing a lot of imbibing in a way that doesn't feel good, but is kind of this release and now you kind of can't stop and that's like a whole other thing to address you know and that is probably more about like restricted behavior at other times and shame and messaging that you're having. But just the general person who's like freaked out because their friend brought cookies over for them and left them at their house and they're like well, now I'm gonna eat that whole plate of cookies. Yeah, you are, and then they'll be gone and then there won't be another plate of cookies and you'll just go back to your normal life and it's just like, it's really okay.
Christina: Right, right. I mean, I think it's really about this idea of, and this is from a question that someone asked about, like, what helps you with food fear? Like, i.e. eating bad foods, bad things will happen if I eat X food, etc. I think so much of it is around just that boogeyman of that bad thing that's going to happen that remains undetermined, undefined, nonspecific. I think fear grows and thrives in non-specificity.
Cadence: When we don't really know what we're talking about, you're so much more susceptible to someone saying that nut oils are destroying your digestion. And you're like, I guess? I don't really understand what digestion is actually!
Christina: Right, right, right.
Cadence: Like if you were to be like, tell me what digestion means. What does that actually mean? What happens when we swallow a piece of food and what happens? Where does it go? I don't think many people could really do that.
Christina: “I don't know, but it's bad.”
Cadence: Yeah, exactly. “But it's perilous at every stage!”
Christina: I know we have to kind of wind it down a little bit, but I wanted to make sure that we talked about all the things we wanted to talk about.
Cadence: Yeah, I can actually go for another 15 minutes if we want to answer some specific questions.
Christina: Oh, nice. Okay. Well, I wanted to make sure we talked a little bit about this behemoth topic of handling other people's diet talk, because there were quite a few questions around that. I enjoyed one question that was, “When people around you talk dieting do you dissociate, push back, or a secret third thing?” I love a secret third thing joke. But you know, a lot of like how to deal with parents who are passing on harmful diet culture rhetoric to kids or moms who have disordered eating who always want to talk about it, that kind of thing.
Cadence: I think it's super hard because I notice when it happens around me, a lot of people say things where it's like so quick and it's not the movies, I'm not someone who could just right away like fires off a zinger, you know.
Christina: You mean like in response?
Cadence: Yeah. In reality, I'm really taken aback. I'm just like, oh my god, that's where your headspace is right now? I thought we were just having sushi together. Like, what? And I found recently, we were out with couple friends of ours that, as couple friends tend to go, we're not like super best friends, super intimate friends with them. And the woman in the group at some point was like, oh, I just like to, we went to dim sum, which I love to do. And I didn't realize that she'd never really experienced the whole experience. If people don't know what dim sum is, you go to these cavernous restaurants in, at least in New York, this is my experience. And they have carts that go around with all these amazing dumplings and whatever you want. Endless options. Little cakes, little this and that. And there are little plates with two to four to six little items on there.
Christina: The pinnacle of small plates eating, truly.
Cadence: Yeah, seriously, yeah. And the whole point is you go with a group of people and then there's just so much food on the table and everyone's trying things and it’s super fun, it's just like such a fun experience. And she kind of was like, slowing down and I was like I want to order another one of the shrimp noodle things, those are my favorite, and she was like, “Oh I think I'm done, I really just like to taste different things or something. Like basically she was trying to say like she doesn't eat a lot, she just like, bites things? It was a nonsensical statement. And I didn't have a response. I think what I often do is model my own comfort, you know?
Christina: Well, because like, what are you going to say to that?
Cadence: Exactly. But I want to address this person's question in that sometimes people literally say, “oh, I'm not going to eat that.” “I'm trying to be good” or “I'm cutting out X, Y, Z.” And that's easier to be like, “oh, I don't really engage with food like that.” Like, I don't really believe in that. Anyway, moving on. Or just be like, hope that works for you! Moving on. But I think a lot of times people say things in a more subtle way. Like, “I just like to take bites” or like, you know, some weird subtle thing that is kind of a, yeah, it's a diet. It's a restrictive diet-y way of shading what's happening. And in those situations, I try to just be like, “Well, I like to eat until I'm done eating. That's what I like to do. So I'm going to order my shrimp noodles and I'm going to eat them.” And I'm not going to make a big show of it. And I'm not going to go, “Oh, I ate so much” and I'm not going to go like, “No dinner for me tonight,” you know? I'm literally just going to eat my damn food and move on and hope that you'll notice that that seems like a more relaxed way of being.
Christina: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's tricky. I don't really know. I'm trying to think about what I do. I feel like I want to think more about how to approach situations like this, because as it stands right now, often it's just, as you mentioned, it's so quick that I don't really have time to process what I'm hearing, much less a response. Also, I think it gets really tricky because of autonomy and like, this is your prerogative and this is your body and your experience and who am I to
Cadence: I have this client who has parents that are really bonkers with this stuff, they're always on diets and it's very, very hard for her to go visit them. I think when it's something like that, where it's an intimate relation, it's a parent, it's a partner, it's a super close friend that you see a lot that you do things with. I think you can literally make a boundary and just say, “Hey, you know, I'm glad like whatever, that's how you do stuff. I'm really not in that.” I think there's enough media around diet culture that most people understand that some people are really against dieting. And you can just be like, “I don't want to hear that kind of stuff. It's actually upsetting for me or it's stressful for me.” Like, you know, I think that's fair and still can respect, they can do what they want. And I think it's also okay to internally judge and just be like, it doesn't work. Whatever they're doing is not great. It's not positive. So like, you don't have to share space with it. You just don't. You can just be like, your mom that's cutting out all dairy and wheat and going on weird crash diets every six weeks, it's not good. You don't have to kind of enable that by letting them blabber on about it. You can just be like mom, is there someone else that you can share this with because I actually find it stressful and I'd rather we talked about something else.
Christina: Yeah I agree. I do think in certain relationships that can be a good strategy for sure.
Cadence: Virginia Sole-Smith had something in a [podcast] episode that she had or something. I don't know if it's her quote or someone else, but she, I learned it off of her stuff. If someone literally, if you're at a buffet and someone, whoever it is, is like, “Oh, I'm being bad” or whatever, that kind of thing, or like, “we're all dieting tomorrow”. Her response, which I have memorized so that I can throw it out if I’m ever in that situation, is just to say, “Oh, it's too bad how diet culture makes us feel like we have to earn our food” or whatever the situation is. “It's too bad diet culture makes us feel like certain foods are good or bad.” Because it really puts it on them, like, we already agree, right? It's really too bad, right? It forces them to…it will probably make them be quiet, basically.
Christina: I mean, that's clever. I like that a lot. I also think that it does a good job of framing it as like, we are all on the same side of being affected by this systemic issue.
Cadence: Yeah.
Christina: We might not hold the same beliefs or philosophies, but we are both subject to the same messaging that is objectively harmful. And I think even people who engage in those behaviors often are aware, as we've talked about in this episode already, that like, this is not, you know, this is not it. It's like, all you know is what you don't do.
Cadence: Exactly. Exactly. It's a little opening door of like, there's a little empathy in there that possibly could spark a conversation, or not, but it might just give them a little something to think about, too. if you care, you know, to kind of leave them with that, that they might be like, right.
Christina: Yeah. That's a good one. I'm going to pocket that one for my own life.
Cadence: I really liked this question: How do you figure out how to build a nutrition plan without a nutritionist? I love this question because, kind of to your point earlier about the hierarchy of health, we tend to also outsource our health and our judgment, you know, like positive judgment about what we need to like an authority figure, you know?
Christina: Right. Like you tell me what is good or bad for me.
Cadence: Yeah. The doctor told me I need to do this or that so I guess I do. We really love when people tell us what if we're wrong like we just love all that. And similarly I think there can be kind of like lore that the only way to be healthy is to have an authority figure tell you what to do, which is also why the marketing works for like the one that you fell down. It seems really authoritative right, it was like “I have all the answers” and you're like “Great!”
Christina: I’m like, “Great, I love answers.”
Cadence: Yeah, exactly. And also I want to address that we are not nutritionists, and that's intentional. Like I actually at one point considered getting a nutritional degree.
Christina: Same.
Cadence: And then I realized that it was just really not, again, how I wanted to engage with food. I think that we have too much over focus on grams of protein and how much carbohydrates and all these kinds of things, people are very worried about that. And it's kind of missing the forest for the trees. Really, if you can just, you know, eat a variety of foods regularly, consistently, and eat regularly. Most people really need to eat more, which always like blows peoples’ minds. Even if people consider themselves overweight, usually they're skipping a bunch of meals. There's just like a real lack of consistency. And if you look at any living animal, we both have pets. People have pets out there. Generally, you feed your pets very consistently. And that keeps them healthy. It keeps their weight balanced. It's part of caring for them, right? You don't forget to feed them for a day or just feed them once and then some little snacks of theirs and then be like, whatever, you'll have dinner tomorrow. But we do that to ourselves, which blows my mind. Or I always tell people, if someone was like, could you babysit my eight-year-old, you wouldn't be like, sure, I'm going to feed them nothing but coffee until 1, then we're going to get like a bag of chips, and then I'll make them a sandwich around 4. Then we'll eat some leftovers at 11:30 at night. And then a bottle of wine. Your friend would be like, I'm never speaking to you again. You would be like oh, I'm gonna make them breakfast, and I’m gonna ask them later if they need a snack, and I'm gonna make sure they drink some water, and I'm gonna you know. But for ourselves we're just like, oh yeah, what I just said was totally fine and I'm gonna do that for 15 years. So I think building a nutrition plan without a nutritionist is literally just like what we talked about in the beginning, examining what works for your lifestyle and figuring out, is there a need? Do you literally eat no fruits and vegetables? Well, those are really helpful so let's try and get those in. But maybe you eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Maybe you're overanalyzing your diet. And it's really just like, I've definitely had people in the course that I'm like, we had someone in the course who comes from a cooking restaurant family. Oh my god, her meals were great. She was like, variety, all the things, balance, blah, blah, blah. I had no problems with what she was eating. I was just like, this is great. You eat all kinds of stuff. You're getting everything you need.
Christina: And more importantly, she didn't really have problems with what she was eating, right?
Cadence: Exactly.
Christina: If this is the person you're thinking about, her predominant concern was, “Why don't I look the way that I think eating this way should make me look?”
Cadence: Exactly. Exactly.
Christina: Which is a totally different, like…we're just not having the same conversation anymore.
Cadence: And that’s huge. And that's the kind of thing that we can talk about in the group, you get individual sessions with me. So that's like exactly what we would talk about in an individual session. I would go, actually, everything you eat looks great, balanced. You're eating regularly, you're not starving in the middle of the day. Like everything's great. What's the problem? “Well, how come X, Y, Z?” And I'd be like, all right, let's talk about body types. Let's talk about other things, movement, like whatever. That might be what that person gets out of that course.
Christina: Yeah.
Cadence: And then joining kettlebell classes and Run Club and like addressing that aspect of her life instead. Not intentionally to lose weight, but really just to connect to her body in a different way and develop a different perspective about her body.
Christina: Yeah we're really working them up to that incendiary “you'll just never be skinny” viral video, which, for those who don't know, I would love if you could just explain that one because that's probably the most incendiary thing that you've ever published.
Cadence: I'm going to post it again towards the end of January.
Christina: It’s the perfect time for it, really.
Cadence: And it came actually, that story about the cookies that I used that was like from a real client and I had a conversation with this client who was like tortured about these cookies that her friend brought over. And she has the coolest life. She's like TV-adjacent in LA and her friend brought her to this amazing cooking show competition thing and so they like brought home boxes from all these contestants.
Christina: Amazing.
Cadence: And I was like, this sounds amazing. Like best weekend ever. And she was like, yeah, but now I have this box of cookies here. And I was like, please explain the problem. And then she was like, well, I'm going to eat them. And I was like, yeah…and then? And so I made this Reel, like almost just based off of that conversation where I was just basically like, our perception of ourselves, the less punchy version is that our perception of ourselves that somehow we're supposed to dramatically look different from the way that we look today is for 99% of us just not true. You're never going to be skinny. Very few people are skinny, this idea of skinny. For my body to be skinny, I would have to be very ill. I have had a naturally muscular body always. There’s a picture that I remember from when I was a little kid on a swing set with my arms like this, you know, like holding the swing set ropes with my little delts and biceps. I wasn't even doing sports, that's just my body. My mom can do 10 pushups and she never lifted weights. Like that's, you know, that's just like my genes, you know? So, we have this kind of idea maybe that gets developed when we're teenagers or something that somehow I'm gonna one day be skinny and that this cookie that I’m eating today or my missed workout that's why I'm not I’m not. You know all these little things but it's really like, let's be reasonable about what our body actually is. What does our family look like? What's reasonable for our lifestyle? Of course, Instagram is full of people who've dramatically changed their bodies. Dramatically. They also spend almost like a side job doing that.
Christina: Which is my other favorite Cadence-ism about that being a hobby. Or how do you phrase it? It's just like, body modification is a hobby. The same thing as any other kind of hobby that you invest time and resources and dedicate to.
Cadence: The six-pack with everything defined. That's body modification. It's like a kink that they're interested in. It's the same as someone whose face is covered in piercings, who has tattoos head to toe. You know there are plenty of people out there who are really invested in the appearance of their body as this hobby as like a fetish almost and I would really put I don't think bodybuilders would disagree with me. They're so interested in how can I morph my body, can I get really big, can I lose all my body fat. I follow a guy who regularly posts when he was just this like enormous superhero body and now he's still super muscular but he's like I don't train like that anymore, I'm not competing anymore, it's like not my interest. I'm like a dad now. He's just like I don't have the time to do that anymore. That's like I'm restoring a car in the driveway. It's like I'm still interested in my body and what it can do and looking in a certain way, but I don't have the time, you know, he's like, i'm in a relationship, like my life has more stuff going on than when I was like
Christina: Yeah and I think it's the difference between thinking about it that way versus thinking about it as a like, well if only the stars aligned and all these factors lined up and then yeah, this would happen, this kind of body would happen, and it's like, no.
Cadence: Yeah. If only you signed up for the Instagram ad FODMAP thing, in a year you would be like, tiny Christina. No, literally not true. I always am shocked how tall you are. It's just not going to happen.
Christina: Speaking of that, and then I will speak of it no more, I saved that low-FODMAP sponcon ad just for the purposes of referring to it for this conversation, which I immediately regretted because now guess what I'm getting is just only other versions of that ad, which I'm sure will continue on through the new year.
Cadence: Yeah, exactly.
Christina: But what can I say? I'm only human. Well I don’t know, I feel like that's kind of a lovely place to wrap our thoughts for this part one. And we will be doing a part two at the beginning of, well this is coming out at the beginning of January, we're going to do another one that comes out at the beginning of February where we'll again be soliciting questions on the topic of I think we decided that was going to be around building sustainability and this idea of like, okay, like it's the end of January and whatever thing you decided you were going to do, like the low FODMAP meal plan delivery system got boring within two weeks, shocker, now what? And so I'm really looking forward to, I see that as a conversation around, okay, we know the “don'ts” column. How do we start filling the “do's” column?
Cadence: Yeah, exactly. Very cool. Well thank you so much.
Christina: Thank you. Happy new year. This is technically the last day of 2024, though you'll be seeing it in 2025.
Cadence: Exactly. Thank you so much.
Christina: Thank you.
Busy Body Podcast is produced by Brad Parsons at Train Sound StudioMusic is written by Robert Bryn, performed by the Wild YaksIllustrations and design by Jackie Mendez at Aesthetics_Frames and Me!
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