Lucy Carey – Finding Food Freedom

Hi and welcome to.

The You World Order Showcase Podcast today we have with us a special guest, Lucy Carey, who is a registered dietitian lifestyle medicine professional who describes herself as OK, hold on to your hats.

A registered dietician, an unregistered writer.

And a normal human good to the show, Lucy.

We're really happy to have you here with us.

I'm happy to be here.

Traveling all the way from New Zealand back in time to join us on a Thursday when it's Friday to your place.

Always exciting.

So I'm dying.

To know is Friday, a good day?

Yes, OK. Something good to look forward to. So you're a registered dietitian. Do you want to tell people what that is? Because I think there's a lot of confusion out there between.

I mean.

Dieting coaches and dietitians and what your doctor may say, and nutritionists and all those things. So.

And yeah.

Yeah, so a.

Registered dietitian. Basically, I'm just registered like with the board and I have to log points every year and do that kind of thing and study for 5 or so years have a masters.

Which is great, and there's a lot of nutrition advice. Like you say that comes from other areas and some dieticians get quite precious about protecting their turf. They're like, ohh, other people shouldn't be talking about nutrition. I'm not one of those. I think we should be talking about nutrition and my real passion.

Everybody should be.

Absolutely. And my passion is to.

Help other nutrition coaches.

Because I want everyone to be singing from the same song book that we dismantling the diet industry and we are taking out this diet mentality that we have, getting rid of diet culture instead of reinforcing it. Because I do think.

Unwittingly, a lot of us are actually.

Benefiting the diet industry and we are perpetuating food beliefs that actually don't serve our clients with all the good intentions, everybody has good intentions. We all want to help our clients. But the way that we're trained and the things that we're taught, a lot of trainings probably actually funded.

Buy food companies and things like that so.

Yeah, milkshakes used to be like the thing to drink. You. You were encouraged to drink at least one milkshake a day.

A lot of.

Guess who came up with that idea?

Everything's changed, right?

So good. Yeah, exactly. We have in New Zealand, we have this, my food plate, you know, like a food pyramid kind of thing. And when it came out, it's ridiculous. It has like 8 slices and you can basically just say, ohh Yep, these are all the different.

Industries who have paid for their slice of the plate. It is not reflective of health at all, and it's super confusing. So I think there's a lot of that going on, but.

When you were trained like that.

It really takes something to get you out of that mindset and that's.

That's where I come in.

And it's really in this day and age where so much processed stuff happens and you know the microwave culture and fast foods because it's convenient and.

Fast people are busy and they don't want to really take time to investigate the Ins and outs of things.

I think having.

Having conversations about food, what a what is food and food preparation and what your plate really should look like.

And should you even.

Have a plate.

Yeah, absolutely. They're all good questions because what we see a lot is that we have this calories in, calories out mindset, right. So we're kind of like, oh, it doesn't matter what we eat as long as we do enough exercise and where that puts a lot of our clients is in this starve binge cycle.

Which I think everybody's familiar with this right, so that we are like, oh, we're going to be healthy. I'm gonna lose weight. I'm gonna be really good. So I'm just not going to eat a lot or I'm going to really restrict what I'm eating. I'm not going to allow to any junk food. I'm only allowed healthy food. And it puts us in this all or nothing mindset.

So when you can't sustain that kind of really restrictive diet.

You might go to come and.

Say, Oh yeah, I'll just have.

One cookie and.

It never ends at one right because as soon as you eat it, it's what I call the ****** effect. So you usually have a cookie and then you go ohh ****** the diet's.

Ruined. And then you.

Eat all the cookies right and you completely binge out on them and you feel guilty and ashamed, and then you go, OK?

I'm gonna restart on Monday. On Monday. I'm gonna be really good. And you just get stuck in the starve binge, starve binge and your mental health is getting worse and worse the whole time as well because you think it's your fault. How many times have I said to a client?

Did your diet work and they say.

Yeah, it worked cause I lost weight. Did you keep that weight off? No, because I didn't have the self-control. Like. No, no, no, no. This diet didn't work because it's not meant to work. Diet industries making money.

Not from you doing the diet once and it working. They're making money off you, doing it over and over and over again. It's designed to fail. It's not your lack of self-control, it's the diet itself and that's a real mind flip for a lot of people.

And a lot of people equate losing weight with getting healthy. And that's kind of the wrong attitude to have in my opinion.

Absolutely, I agree. I think for a lot of people, losing weight is beneficial for their health, yes, but I strongly believe like to my core that focusing on weight loss is very detrimental because it puts you in this all or nothing mindset and it puts so much emphasis on the scales that.

You could be sleeping bitter, just more energy, more vitality, feeling really good. But if this number on the scale hasn't shifted.

That's when you go. Oh, didn't work and you give up.

And her body?

Retains water different times of the month and it, you know, different times of the day when you weigh yourself, you're going to weigh differently and.

MM.

And women are different than men when it comes to how we hold onto weight and when we hold on to weight. And if you're just looking at a number on the scale, it's really not telling you anything.

You could not at all.

You can shift your body composition like I know this woman and I used to tell the story all the.

Time. But she was fluffy fat.

In other words.

She wasn't. She didn't have good muscle tone underneath the layer of fat that she had on her body, so she wasn't really fat. She weighed like 145 lbs. And she's like, OK, I'm going to do the whole I'm not going to eat, and I'm going to.

Exercise like crazy.

Which really stresses your body out more than anything else, and your body will just hang on to the weight.

And she did this for like 6 or 8 weeks and she.

He actually ended up in a worse situation than she was in when she first started, so she decides to hire a coach and the coaches said the first thing he says to his.

Girl, you got to eat.

And she went on to win some bodybuilding competitions.

And she didn't lose any weight.

That is, a coach after my own.

Because so many times we see this, we call it the J curve of dieting, right, you start off usually a just a feeling normal weight just kind of average Joe. And then when you go on the diet you lose the weight. But like you say, it stresses your body out, it puts you into this mode where your body is trying to protect against weight loss because.

You know this. We're coming from evolution of times of famine. The weight loss wasn't a good thing. So protecting against it. So you do put the weight back on plus a little bit more, which is why it's like AJ. And then if you do another diet and another diet and another diet over years, you can end up significantly heavier than when you started. And all you've done is diet.

Which is so just soul destroying thing. All I've done is try to control what I eat and all that's happened is I've got them better.

And when you start.

Shrinking down the number of calories that you put into your body, your body resets, so it only needs a smaller amount because it starts shutting off different things that OK. So they're only we're only getting the X number of calories now, so.

No more daydreaming. That's out of the window. I we can't let you do that because you're not giving us enough calories to, like, operate the rest of the machinery in here. So you know, I'm sure it's something else, but we'll just put daydreaming in there.

Be anything, right? Absolutely. And if you've ever heard of the Minnesota Starvation experiment, this is so fascinating. This was back in World War 2, right? With men who were conscientious objectors to the war. And so they volunteered to be starved. Now, the goal of the study was, you know, everyone was on rations during wartime.

And how we're gonna refeed people safely. So they were all had their calories kind of cut in half.

And they were starved for like 6 months. Simi starved. You know, they were fired. Just not enough. And they were all fit, healthy young men when they started. And what happened is they started to develop.

Not very much.

Eating disorder behavior, right? So they started getting obsessed with their bodies and like, reading cookbooks. One dude actually took his girlfriend out to dinner to watch her eat.

I do believe she was so uncomfortable that she couldn't go through with it, but that all these weird things and one guy actually.

They chopped off and three fingers while chopping wood, and then he couldn't say whether he had done it on purpose or not because did he want out of the experiment or was it an accident? Nobody knows it just things got really weird. And I think what that really flipped on its head.

We think ohh people with eating disorders.

They're just messed up and it manifests some food, but actually when you're being heavily restricted in food that's creating this disorder in your mind and the.

So this is.

We are doing to ourselves with these diets.

Had grown it all.

And it messes with your.

Ability to think rationally.

I mean, you just stick.

Gave an example of that, but how? How many times have we gone on diets that we're really restrictive and we don't really pay attention to how we're thinking about even everyday things and you're operating heavy machinery and driving a car is a big deal. A lot of us have driven for a long time.

You don't think about it, but when you get in the car and you, you haven't eaten enough, you know, I think there should be, like, the don't drive hungry.

Oh, absolutely. The first diet I ever tried, I was about 18 and I heard this ad on the radio, and I think it was Beyoncé who was advertising the Lemon Detox diet, which was just like drinking this disgusting lemon flavoured drink. And that's all you had for like 10 days. You just drunk.

Slogans out there.

Just like watery lemonade then, it was very gross and I lasted less than 24 hours because I went to work and I almost fainted.

Of course I did. I was 18. I was a ton, Sir. I needed. I needed calories. I needed.

Fuel and.

A lot of calories.

Yeah, but the good thing from, yeah, the good thing for me was that that diet was so extreme that I could see that it was ********. But a lot of the diets that people go on aren't quite that extreme. And so they don't see that. It's ********. They think it's some kind of something wrong with them that they couldn't stick with it. I didn't have the willpower.

At that age.

It's my fault. I didn't lose weight and they don't actually see that it's the diet's fault.

So there's a lot of healing that we need to do with a lot of our clients healing their relationship with food in their body.

And their body.

Because you know.

Sometimes your body just looks like what body looks like, and it's not going to look any different if you take a lot of.

Of the fat off of it. And you know, we men were designed to have a certain amount of fat on their bodies to begin with. We went through a period of time where.

Women tried to look like little boys.

Absolutely. And it was weird, right? Yeah.

It was really weird.

And looking back, it's like God.

Yeah, I know. I felt for it too.

And we have to remember, this isn't.

Just women, either. That's who we tend to think of because it's more open that women do a lot of dieting, but so many men diet culture fixed them too. My five year old son was reading a book about superheroes and he said to me.

Mummy, I want big muscles like this when I grow up.

And I was like.

So I had this conversation with my 5 year old which seems so young to be talking about this, but he needs to know that's not real. Men don't actually look like that. You can be strong and it's good to want to be strong and that's great, but it shouldn't be about how you look. It shouldn't be about having huge muscles. And then he said.

Yeah, because if you didn't have any fat, you'd cuddle your mummy and you'd be too hard and she'd say Ouch.

So I was like, yes.

That's true so that you can be cuddly.

So a lot of the men.

That come to me for sports nutrition advice.

And it turns out they are just not eating enough.

So many of them are just like, oh, well, I want to get really big and lose all my fat. Basically a 0% body fat. It's totally unrealistic and they get stalled in their goals and they're starting to really mess with their heads of why am I not making progress?

Because you're not eating enough.

So they need to well.

And the right stuff, it's if.

You can't. Just like eat whatever if.

You want my husband?

'S A bodybuilder and he's in his 60s and he's.

He's pretty ripped.

For a guy in his 60s.

That he goes to the gym three times a week and he drinks protein.

It's the thing that he does, but he knows that if he's going to build muscle, even at 60, that he's going to have to eat a certain amount of protein in order for that muscle to develop.

Totally you need protein. And where I think people go wrong is that we focus on what to cut out of our diet and what to exclude instead of what to focus should always be on what to include and when you're thinking have I had veggies today? Have I had fruit? Have I had enough protein.

All these meals, when your focus is on that, that.

The junk food just kind of sorts itself out.

Yeah, because you're not hungry.

It's. You can still have it, you can still.

Have it totally, but it's for fun. It's not because.

You're binging out on it because you tried to restrict it so heavily in the 1st place. It's just this like extra thing, it's sprinkle on top because you've already filled up on all this nutritious food. So I'm always talking about folks food. Yeah. It's like an extra happy thing. It's for the joy. It's nourishing your soul, not your body.

Right. It's dessert. Like dessert is supposed to be.

Right. Yeah. And you don't?

Need that much of it if you're if.

You're already satisfied.

If the hunger and the thirst part of your urges.

Are already satisfied then, that you know little square chocolate at the end of the day, it's not going to kill you, and it's going to just make.

You feel like hey.

You know this is.

Pleasurable. And I don't have to.

Makes life enjoyable, right?

Guilty, yeah.

So what a lot of people need. Excuse me.

When they're trying to heal from, like, decades of dieting, they're not going to go straight into this intuitive eating. They're not going to be like, oh, I'll just listen to my body and eat nourishing food.

They messed up all those signals so much in their own body that they do need to go through a messy middle period. The messy in between stage where they're probably going to eat a lot more junk and they might even gain weight and they just need to rebuild this trust with their body that when their body is like I'm hungry.

That they actually feed it and so they get weird cravings and they want really sugary stuff.

For a while.

But it settles down and then they start craving more nourishing foods. And then the junk food just does become that little extra treat that sprinkle on top. And it all happens very naturally. But they have to get through this messy period to learn their body, to learn to trust them again. Really.

Yeah. And I think a lot of it has to do with.

Mindset too. There's.

A thought component that we have different relationships with foods and we have thoughts around how food should be or when it should be or how much we should be eating. And you know they get all jumbled up. The older you get and the more you've.

You've heard the different versions of things, and the more diets you've tried, it's just like.

You have this big jumbled mess in your mind about.

And it's often conflicting about what.

You should and shouldn't do.

Absolutely nobody's neutral either, which is what I find a lot with my clients. They they're doing all the work to kind of reject this type mentality. They're going through that messy stage. They're healing their relationship with food, they're working on their body, and they're doing all the right things.

But they have.

They're like support people who are not neutral, who have their own ideas of what you should eat and what, how much you should exercise and what your body.

Should look like and so.

They have to battle not only their own mind, but all these external voices as well, like it. And it can even be a spouse, which I find a lot.

It's a spouse telling their partner.

Oh, that's never going to work. You're just going to get fatter. You just need to have weight loss. Surgery. I've even had one say you just need to poo.

Because they are so.

In this dire culture themselves that they're like pushing it onto your client. And so your clients doing this like makes the battle 10 times harder because they have to deal not only with their own thoughts, but with other people as well.

I had my husband tell me one time.

And he has never said this again.

Oh, you just.

Need to eat less and exercise more and I told him into ever told me that again I am a woman and my body works differently than your body works. Remember, he's the bodybuilder that.

I would leave him. It was just like it was. That was the bottom line comment. Yeah, you're not. You're not going to tell me that?

There's a light in the sand, yes.

Do you?

Yeah. Do you tell a drowning person to just drown less and swim more?

Right.

It just doesn't.

Work like that.

Obviously it wasn't working. You don't think? I didn't think of that, right?

Right. Yeah, because.

Or tried it.

Exactly tried it all you've tried everything and for a lot of people, it takes getting to this place of kind of rock bottom with, like I've tried everything and now I'm in a really bad place. Mentally. My body is not working the way it should and nothing's worked for me so.

I guess I'll give this a go. This like healing my relationship with food thing a go and most people think it's like a bit like woo woo like ohh, I really do this. It seems kind of anti everything I've done.

But nothing you've done worked, so you're like, OK, well, I'm gonna give it a go. And then they actually start to rediscover the joy in food. And then their body and.

Life in general and then that changes everything completely.

It really does and it doesn't have to be like a really long drawn out process, but it's not going to happen overnight either. There's it is a process that you have to go through. How long do your clients generally work with you?

If they've had a really long history, then it might take longer.

But if it's just a short thing, then three or four sessions, they're done.

And they're fine to go off on their own and do the last bit on their own. We're really just planting the seed. What?

Brings people.

Back is that they go to the doctor or they go to see their personal trainer or any other kind of coach and that person.

It's like ohh no, you just. You just need to eat less and exercise more. And it's, ah, puts them right back to the start.

So that's what I want to prevent cause it.

If you can.

Just kill that relationship with food. You start eating more intuitively. Everything's better. Your body composition starts changing naturally. It's all smooth sailing, but it's when we get this. Like the doctor weighing you and saying ohh no, you need to lose weight. That's that puts people back.

Or their personal trainer says Ohh if you want to shift fat, then you're going to have to cut out this and this and this and this from your diet that puts.

People back, so that's when they have to start again. So that's the really heartbreaking bit. So I want everyone to be dismantling the diet industry, not boosting it up.

I'm with you. I'm with you.

Yeah. So do you, do you help people generally one-on-one. Do you help coaches? What is your who is your target?

Audience really, I guess I.

Should ask it that way.

I do help people one-on-one, but my real target, I think there's only so much I can do. one-on-one and I want to have a greater impact than that. So I want to educate more health professionals. So I have a course coming out all about how to heal your clients relationship with food that will launch end of.

True and I think.

Just that just has more impact and that's my.

Goal it's just.

To get as many people as possible on this page so that we can kill off diet culture for good.

Yeah. And it's a huge industry. It needs to, it needs to die a slow and painful death. Absolutely.

It's been. It's so cruel to like.

Tease people with.

An idea that's not really sustainable or achievable.

I mean, you might get to a point where you you've lost all the weight you want, but I always think about the people that are anorexic that have such body dysmorphia. They're so skinny. They're like skeletons, but they still.

Think they're fat? It's like no girl. That's just what your body looks like.

And The thing is that I think it takes a big mindset shift from US coaches that we can be part of the solution or the problem. And I was part of the problem for a long time. My first dietician job was in schools like elementary schools, and I'll go in with all these little.

You know, 678 year old kids to do a nutrition.

Fashion and I'd have all these pictures of fast food, and then I pull out. This is how much fat is in your McDonald's burger. And this is how much fat is in the Wendy's. And they'll go. Ohh.

And then I hold a picture up of clogged arteries and it was the scare tactics and we're kind of taught like.

Ohh, we're just.

Educating people on what's good food and what's bad.

But actually we're just creating eating problems where there were none before.

And those little kids, they.

Have no control over what their moms.

Give them to eat.

Absolutely. And that.

Is like. What are they gonna say? Hello, mom.

That job.

I just had this.

Icky feeling every time I did that and I just. Ohh I'm just.

Making things worse and I ended up quitting because of that, and then slowly my career just got more and more into health professional education and helping disordered eating clients one-on-one, which is great. But I look back in horror.

At the things I used to say to people and I would go and be like I'm a registered dietitian and this is what you should eat. This is what you shouldn't and it was just creating problems.

I had a friend who's a dietician and.

She this is the one thing I remember her saying about food and we didn't have very many.

Conversations about food.

But she was talking about feeding her kids, who were the same age as my kids at the time, and they were young and she was making, I think, spaghetti. And she's like, yeah, I just throw in dried.

And they never know that they're eating all these vegetables because they like spaghetti.

Or throwing in, you know, dried greens into your meatloaf.

Can't really taste it.

That you're getting your greens in there.

Yeah, you know what I think that thinking is more helpful for the parent than the child. And because we're so obsessed with, like, we have to make sure that they eat and eat enough and eat the right things. I think that actually helps.

The mums and dads more than the kid because the kids gonna have to learn to eat vegetables.

Eventually, and hopefully to enjoy them.

I as a as a.

Parent, who's had a lot of kids and watch different.

Ways kids eat over the years.

I do notice that.

If you kind of leave kids alone and you let them eat what they want to eat, then they'll eat the amount that they want to eat.

If you present the things that they should eat.

But you don't make.

A big deal about it eventually they may.

Decide that they'll try it.

But not because you said you have to eat all of the salad on your plate or you have to eat all of the green beans or the all of the whatever.

It's the funny stories about my kids.

Yeah, because that that is just diet mentality, isn't it? Saying you have to eat your broccoli before you can get the ice cream. But like you say, we call it the division of responsibility, right? So the parent is in charge of what and where and when you're going to eat.

But the child is in charge of how much? So it's not to be taken lightly. You know, you're still presenting good food to them, and sometimes some junk food as well, because they're not gonna avoid that either. So we do need to learn how to eat it and not have it be this huge deal to them that they binge on it.

But if you present that to them like you say.

They usually just sort.

Themselves out. We don't know how much they need today. Are they having a growth spirit? Are they not? Are they running around here, are they not? We don't know. They're the only ones that know. But I think we often push kids like ohh, you've had enough. No more for you or like, no, you have to eat more. You have to eat more.

You haven't had anything to eat with shoving spoons at them, you know, and we're just telling them.

You can't trust your body and we sitting them up from a really young age to be lifelong dieters because they don't trust their body and that it knows how much to eat.

Yeah, I can see that a lot.

It is heartbreaking. I think it's Weight Watchers who rebranded to be WWE because I think they're probably trying to get away from the word weight that wasn't trendy, but they launched this huge kids program, the WW kids, whatever. And it's basically like they have to wear like a little Fitbit.

This is like.

I think.

And part of this program I was looking it up online. They say that kids shouldn't have avocado or nuts because they're too high in calories.

What they're just trying to like, get their hooks into the little ones so that they can have them as a customer for life.

It's actually.

And then they have all this process crap that's not really food that they decide. Yeah. My dad used to call it cardboard food. My dad, who's a really good cook. And yeah, that's not really. That's not how we were designed to.

No, and you pay a.

Lot of money for it.

And the shakes and the bars and all that stuff.

It's not real food.

Eat. We were designed to eat.

Food, food. You know, maybe you pick a apple off a tree and eat that. That's fast food.

A lot of the emphasis.

We put it on what we eat and that's how I was trained. That's how most of us were this huge thing of what do you eat? What do you eat? But we need to think of how you eat it as well. Are you sitting down at a table sharing food with your family because that has health benefits in itself. Are you like, eating your salad?

Alone in your car.

Like it's pretty sad, but are you sharing a pizza with your family that actually gonna bring probably more health benefits than the salad alone? Because we know that.

Teenagers will have less symptoms of depression and less suicidal ideation when they eat together with the family. All this kind of stuff comes into play.

So I think we do need to think about how we're eating, not just what we're putting.

In our mouths.

And there's studies around.

How you feel when you're eating something like there's less chance that if you're eating that slice of chocolate cake and you're really enjoying it and you're not worrying about the calories in it, you're just having a great time and you're with family and you're celebrating something that is not as likely to make you fat as.

Eating that same piece of cake and thinking.

Ohh God, I should be eating this. This is terrible and.

It's the same, same calories, same cake, but it has a different result.

Calories are so overrated. I care. I care far more about the intention behind what you're eating than what it actually is that you're eating.

In your body.

Because I think that makes such a difference.

I couldn't agree with you more. I it.

It's really huge and just giving yourself permission to.

Be a human, a real human who like, enjoys life.

I don't think I've had probably on your handful of clients who have ever come to me who haven't cried when I've just said that, you know, you have permission to eat and to enjoy it.

And to be happy.

And it's just.

Breaks them down to think ah.

I can actually enjoy food. I can actually not have to restrict myself all the time. It's a huge, huge.

Barrier that gets broken for them when they give themselves permission to eat.

It's really kind of sad that we reached.

That point in.

Our civilization, where we have to tell people they have permission to eat.

And to feel good about it.

And to enjoy it.

Absolutely I.

As humans, we tend to think we know better than nature.

Right. We we're always like, oh, no, we have.

That with my eyes.

To do this.

We have to do that. We have to do this. OK? You're always like with illusion over hundreds of thousands of years, it's already sorted this **** out.

And we're just stuffing it up.

Yeah, we don't really.

Need to have better ideas. We can just go with the old ideas that did work. They got us here.

And creating you know.

The food that we had up to this point is good. Maybe we don't need to look at some of these other alternatives that people are coming up with like, you know, making bug burgers.

You know, there are cultures that eat bugs.

The thing is, people think they go into the grocery store and they see this plant based section, right. And they, oh, that must be healthier for me. And it's just processed **** and it's not real food.

But it has this great marketing spread.

Plants do not come in a.

Burger shape. OK, it comes with leaves or flowers or, you know, a piece of fruit or a bark.

No, I was in.

The more the more natural it is and the more you're cooking it yourself, the better it's going to be. That's not to say we're not going to have some processed stuff because everybody is time poor and stressed out and we're going, we're gonna do that.

For sure.

Thesis processed.

Yeah. What is your definition of Bossier? Yes.

All cheese is processed by virtue of the fact that you have to like process milk in order to make it.

Cheese. Absolutely. If we're just focusing though on what to include, it's not going to be this massive, damaging thing. If we have some.

More junk food stuff. If we're just focused on, Yep, I've got some veggies in there. It doesn't matter if they were frozen or fresh like.

Got something in there. I've got some good protein in there that isn't this processed. Plant based crap. Some natural protein. And when you're focusing on that then it's just not this big deal. And then you can use some convenient stuff.

Because you might have little kids or whatever like.

There's a gal who used to do semi homemade and I loved her approach because she.

To take natural ingredients, and she would incorporate, you know, they're making spaghetti. So she'd add stuff to it. But, you know, she started with the jar of spaghetti that, you know, Ragu or progress or whoever spent days and days, you know, simmering down those tomatoes to make it yummy and threw a bunch of sugar in there.

You know, everybody loves sugar.

Totally, there are just ways you can incorporate it. I mean, I quite like to bake. I do not really like to cook cause it's a bit of.

A chore to cook.

For my family every night, but I love to bake and I might bake some of my own bread, but I'm not.

Milling the flour. I don't have chickens too, too.

Like my own like.

I have chicken.

And I do mill flour. Not all the time, but I know how. And I do have whole grain.

That I can mill and you know you can.

That'd be awesome, but I have an 18.

Month old and A5.

Year old, that's just not in the cards for me right now and that's OK.

It is OK and I can tell you after many years, maybe even a decade and a half, I had decided about 20 years ago that I really wanted to learn how to make artisan bread. And at this point.

Is so much fun.

I am an expert. I can make it. It doesn't take me anytime at all. I have this yeast that I've been growing for a long time.

It's a sourdough.

And it's I make amazing artisan bread.

Every single time I make.

A loaf. It's perfect.

I love it. And you know what? The act.

Of baking.

Boost your creativity. You do something from start to finish. The act of baking is good for your well-being in itself. It doesn't matter if you are baking perfect artisan bread or if you're baking brownies, but if you're making something that is good for your well-being.

It makes you feel good.

And it makes you feel accomplished as you.

As you learn how.

To do these different skills when it comes to cooking and baking and you can add.

You can try.

Different stuff, you know, sometimes things aren't going to work out the way you intended.

And sometimes they're good.

We're not all.

Gordon Ramsay? That's OK. Yeah.

I'm sure even Gordon Ramsay screws up every.

Once in a while.

I'm sure you have this idea though, because we are on Instagram and YouTube, we have this idea that we have to be this perfect celebrity chef every time we make something. It's not the case and you can't do this half homemade and it's edible. It'll do.

Like it's good enough. It's good enough to eat.

And that's alright.

Yeah. And then everything you make doesn't have to take hours and hours of preparation and doesn't have to like suck up your whole life. It's OK to have leftovers.

No. If we're focusing on how we're eating that food, if we're sitting down with our families and eating that food together and enjoying the conversation together, if we're focusing on including some good nutritious stuff in there, it doesn't all have to be great. But if we're including good stuff in there and we're eating this guilt free.

With no messed up ideas in our mind that we've already gone over our calories for the day or anything like that, then it's healthy, right? That is the most healthy it can be.

OK.

I love that.

So I know you offer a quiz for people who visit your website and we will put the link to your website below, but you want to tell them what your website is.

Right now.

Yes, my website is eat type live.com.

And so you have a quiz this.

Is are you benefiting or dismantling the diet industry? You want to talk about that for just a SEC.

Yeah, so this is.

For nutrition coaches, if you do any kind of nutrition consultations with clients.

Are you actually unintentionally perpetuating this diet mentality, or are you like all over it saying all the right things?

Because I don't think even I say all the right things all the time, everybody slips up and it's a really good reminder, even if you're all about intuitive eating and your practice is all about that. It's a good reminder to us.

To just do this refresher when somebody asks us if carbs are bad.

For us.

What are we going to say? And so it's just really quick and six questions and then you get personalized results emailed to you and just some good tips and tricks and reminders of what we say matters to our clients.

It does matter so much, it matters what we see to ourselves too.

Absolutely. And I do think if you take nothing else from this.

That if you want to help your clients to heal their relationship with food, you need to do it for yourself.

You need to actually live this yourself. You can't be like, do as I say, not as I do. It just doesn't work like that. You need to heal your own relationship with food. You need to get out of a stuff and cycle yourself.

Before you can lead your clients down that path.

Such wise words, Lucy, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been an awesome conversation.

Such a pleasure.