489-Greatest Hits: How to Be Healthier Without Losing Weight

Can you be healthier without losing weight?

Yes. Research shows that weight and health are not as tightly linked as most people are told. There is no known disease that occurs exclusively in people at a higher body mass index. Conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer occur across every body size, which means weight loss is not a guaranteed treatment for any of them.

Health itself is defined by the World Health Organization as a state of physical, emotional, and social wellbeing, not merely the absence of disease. Research into the social determinants of health found that only around 15 percent of what influences a person’s health status is within their individual control. Genetics, social status, and access to resources account for far more than food and exercise alone.

A weight neutral approach to health, sometimes called Health at Every Size, focuses on behaviors that are shown to improve wellbeing directly: accepting the body you have, managing the quality of your thoughts, addressing mental health, practicing genuine self-compassion instead of punishment, prioritizing sleep, and practicing gentle, non-restrictive nutrition. A study published in the Journal of Obesity in 2013 found no link between body weight and how women felt about their bodies, but did find a link between body image and the amount of health-promoting behavior women engaged in.

In short, the path to better health does not require intentional weight loss. It requires addressing the factors that are actually shown to move the needle: stress, self-acceptance, mental health, sleep, and a non-restrictive relationship with food.

Transcript

[00:03] Welcome to It’s Beyond the Food podcast, my sisters. I’m your host, Stephanie Dodier, and today we’re gonna talk about how to be healthier without having to lose weight. And the reason why I wanna talk about this today in the month of September is because, um, my social media.

[00:24] I don’t know if you know that, but I have gone viral a few time on social media in the month of August, and since then, my social media account has just been blowing up. For the first time since I’ve opened my Instagram account 11 years ago… Yeah, my Instagram account is 11 years old. Anyway, that’s a topic for another day.

[00:49] Since I opened my account 11 years ago, I’ve just now, in- on September the 5th, passed the 10K follower. If you’re not in business, you’re probably like, “Why is she talking about this?” It’s because it blows people mind that I have a million-dollar business helping people with their health without losing weight, and I have such a small following on social media.

[01:16] So if you are a business person, know that the number of followers has nothing to do with the, uh, success of the business. And if you are any of those new followers that are now navigating yourself to the podcast, hello, welcome in my world. Um, and that’s for you, actually, that I’m putting this episode forward, because with all this influx of new people, I have been redirecting many new follower to this exact episode.

[01:46] It’s a greatest hits episode, so we’re gonna put forward again episode 312 That was originally recorded in January 2022, where I walk through what to do when you want, you have an innate intrinsic desire to be healthier, and you don’t believe in intentional weight loss anymore. So what can you do to help yourself, your health, without having to go back on a diet and lose weight?

[02:23] I’m gonna walk you through seven different action you can take in the spectrum of what we call weight neutral health, and I’m gonna explain that in the podcast episode, on how you can positively impact your mental, emotional, and physical health without having to lose weight. And the number one thing you can do to help reduce stress and be healthier, and again, without having to lose weight.

[02:56] So it’s a classic episode. It’s a classic, meaning that there’s a lot of information in there, a lot of very specific step you can take on how to support your health in a weight neutral lens. So this is a great beginner episode. If you’re new to my world, you’re like, “What is this chick, this nutritionist is talking about, that you can, like, be healthier without losing weight?

[03:25] That doesn’t make sense,” this episode is for you. And it was repurposed with you in mind.

[03:32] Stay tuned for next week because I am going to have another greatest hit where we’re gonna unpack one of the seven thing that you can do to be healthier without having to lose weight, which is what we call gentle nutrition in my world. How we can approach nutrition without restriction, without restrictive eating habits, without cutting off any food, and that’s what I call gentle nutrition.

[04:01] So that’s gonna be next week episode where I’m gonna give you the gentle nutrition 101, the basic step that you can implement to, embrace gentle nutrition in your life. So stay tuned for next week. Okay, enough talking. To my team, it is time to patch in the original recording of how to be healthier without losing weight.

[04:24] Have fun

[04:28] Hello, my sisters. I wanted to do this episode for a number of years, actually. It’s been on my list. I was checking out the lists on my phone. I have a Notepad app, and I write all the different topics I wanna talk on the podcast, and this one has been on there for years, and it’s always been pushed aside for other priority.

[04:56] But based on what happened in the last, I would say, three weeks, this episode needed to get done. So over the last three weeks, I’ve had a lot of conversation on social media, Instagram, Facebook, over our community on email, about the constant stress and shame we experience around our body and our weight, and how easy, simple it can be to no longer stress and feel shame and feel anxiety about our weight.

[05:31] And when I say simple and easy, only when you know how to release this emotion.

[05:37] Now, because of that, because of all the conversation I’ve had around this, many women have been sending me this feedback that this is amazing, I think this is great, I wish I could stop stressing about my weight and my body. And then the conversation always end in this place, “Well, it’s different for me.

[06:04] It’s about my health. I need to lose weight because of my health.” So this episode is designed so that… Not to convince you, because I don’t believe in convincing people. I want you to make your own mind. I want you to use your brain, to use all the evidence that I’m gonna give you, the various podcast episode and studies and research that I’m gonna share with you, for you to make up your own mind.

[06:42] ‘Cause this information is not liberally shared on mass media, for an example, because it doesn’t support the narrative of diet culture, right? The narrative of diet culture must be supported with this argument that, “Well, it’s not just about aesthetic that you need to lose weight, lady. It’s about your health.

[07:04] All of the things you’re experiencing in your health can be solved by you losing weight,” right? We are fed this every day, everywhere we look. But the contrary evidence is not being liberally shared. So that’s why I wanted to create this episode, to give you the resource, but also to explain to you all the other things that you can do to impact your health that have nothing to do with your weight and your health.

[07:39] Now, here’s the thing. Again, it’s not about convincing you. I believe that you can make your own mind about this. But I want you to listen to the podcast, and if you’re still sold by the end of this that you need to lose weight, then I support you in this journey. I just can’t offer you any support as far as coaching or program to help you lose weight because that’s not what we do.

[08:10] But I support you in you making your own decision. What I’m asking is for you to make that decision from an informed space, and that’s what I’m trying to offer you today. So I’m gonna point you out to a number of resources that we have within our business to help you formulate your own opinion cleared of diet culture.

[08:35] So we have, oh, gosh, six or seven podcast episode that we’ve done over the years where we dived into one angle of being healthier without weight loss. So I’m gonna start with podcast 214, where we had an expert talking to us about what’s called set point theory, which is why we can’t control body weight and what happens when we try to control it.

[09:11] So we dived into the science of that. We also have podcast 216 with a colleague of mine where we talked about the history of the BMI index. Just a hint here, the BMI index was created for insurance company It was never created in order to assess health. I’ll leave you on that. You can go listen to 216.

[09:42] Then I did another episode a couple months later, podcast 228, with another colleague of mine, where we talked about the obsession with health and the misunderstanding of health that we have under the concept called healthism. Then podcast 264, where we talked about health goals versus weight loss goals, and in that podcast, I dived into the history of health and weight loss.

[10:14] And you ready for this? Here’s the sneak peek. Association between health and weight is no less than 100 years old. Prior to this, prior to the 1920s, when we went to the doctor, to the physician, weight was never mentioned. It was never part of the diagnoses or the treatment. Weight became an element of diagnoses and treatment in the 1950s.

[10:48] What? Yep, that’s factual information that we’re never told about. Podcast 208, we talked about the concept of a weight neutral approach to health. And then the most recent podcast is 286, where I talked about the science behind diet failure. And here’s the thing, if you’re having the thought, “But it’s different for me, I need to lose weight,” that’s great, but then what’s the solution?

[11:22] And even if your doctor is telling you, “But you need to lose weight,” then the question you need to ask is how? Because the current process of dieting, of restricting food, increasing calorie expenditure, right, or restricting a certain group of food, carbohydrate in the current narrative, is not working. And again, the science is clear, factual information are clear.

[11:53] It doesn’t work. It works, and it doesn’t work, and then it leads, in most cases, to weight gain even more than what was lost. Then why are they telling us that we need to lose weight if they don’t have a solution to propose? And that’s the thing this podcast has anchored around, is even if weight is attached to our health condition, which by the way, no science proves it, but let’s imagine it is just for a minute, then how we’re gonna lose the damn weight when dieting doesn’t work.

[12:23] There’s no solution at the end of it. So I want you to go through this, I want you to ask yourself these question, and then the second thing I want you to do is to bring evidence to your brain in your current social environment. So I want you to think about your family, your friends, your social circle right now.

[12:44] My eyes are closed as I’m saying this, but I want you to think about people in your life and their health condition that you are aware of and their weight. And I want you to, like, think about the people, for an example, that have high blood pressure or diabetes, and I want you to look at their weight.

[13:03] There’s people who have diabetes and blood pressure at any weight range, in the same way there’s people who have cancer, unfortunately, at every weight range. Here’s, here’s a factual information for you. There is not one known disease as of 2022 that is exclusively encountered in people of a higher BMI range, which means that the disease that, quote, “claimed” is based on weight happens at any weight range, and science knows that.

[13:42] The physician knows that. So here’s your opportunity when you go to the doctor and you’re being told it’s about your weight, here’s what you need to respond back: “Well, my dear physician, I want you to propose to me a solution to this condition in the same way that you would in someone in a, quote, ‘normal BMI’.”

[14:06] Because they encountered people with the same condition in a normal BMI. What do they tell them? They certainly are not telling them to lose weight. So what’s the proposition they’re giving them, the solution, right? The treatment. I want that same thing right? Because it exists. Here’s the third point I want us to think about on how we can be healthier without weight loss, is our understanding of health What we think of health and how health is actually defined are two different things.

[14:42] So I’m gonna give you the most recognized definition of health by the World Health Organization. The World Health Organization defines health as a state of physical, emotional, and social wellbeing, not merely the absence of disease. So the World Health Organization recognize that health is more than physical.

[15:07] It has equally important your mental health and your emotional health and your physical health. So is the program, the pursuit of health you have, does it have an equal approach to mental and emotional as it does into the focus of weight? Here’s where I want you to go even further. In the show note, I’ve put the link to the social determinant of health.

[15:39] So the social determinant of health is a research that looked at what influence health, and here’s the actual factual information that was found. Only 15, 1-5, percent of the factor that influence our health status are under our control, which means 85% of the things that impact our health we have no control on.

[16:14] Genetic Your social status, your race, your financial status, your overall biology, right? Your anatomy, how your body was created, right? Social circumstance, right? All of these things have a greater impact on your health than actually food and exercise. What? Yep. That’s actually factual information. So if we spend 90% of our energy trying to control 15% of what impacts our health, what else are we leaving on the table?

[16:59] I can tell you right now, we’re leaving on the table our contentment, our happiness, our enjoyment of life by constantly being obsessed with that small percentage of what impact our health. And that kind of lifestyle in a constant pursuit of health, it leads us to not enjoying our life, and that’s what creates the emotional unwellness and the mental unwellness that then impacts our physical health.

[17:38] Here’s the truth. We can’t hate ourselves to health. We cannot hate, beat the shit out of ourselves to get a better health. That will never work because it will have a negative impact on your mental health and your emotional health, and there’s actually science that support that. There’s a study that was published in the Journal of Obesity, of all places, in 2013.

[18:07] Here’s the thing: it found no link between body weight and the way women felt about their body. That’s what I’ve been saying for years, right? The way the actual fat on your body does not create a healthy or unhealthy body image. However, the study found that there is a link between how women feel about themselves and the healthy activity they engage in.

[18:45] The better women feel about themself, the higher the level of self-esteem, the higher the level of body confidence, the more health-promoting behavior specifically women will engage in. And that study showed the difference between people identified as men and people identified as women. That’s why my programs are only focused on people identified as women because the social narrative impacts how we engage with our body uniquely to women, and that’s what that study showed.

[19:23] The better you feel about your body, the more health-promoting activity you can do. So what could be these health-promoting activity you can engage into that have nothing to do with weight loss? That’s what we call a weight-neutral approach to health, and that sector of medical treatment, medical science, medical approach to health is growing, where people are recognizing in the day-to-day narrative that weight doesn’t equal health, and then they’re engaging as a health provider into a weight-neutral approach to health where to body weight is not taken into account in the treatment.

[20:13] They’re doing everything else to help the person improve their health, but nothing to do with their weight neutral approach to health. You may also have heard of Health at Every Size. Health at Every Size is a, a movement, a philosophy that actually has science supporting it, science supporting that a weight neutral approach to health has more benefit long-term to human health than a health approach centric to body weight.

[20:48] And again, all the link to these study are actually in the show note, and that’s how my practice has changed. For those of you who may not know, I used to be in clinical practice in Toronto, Canada. I had a traditional clinical nutrition practice focused on weight loss and detoxing and cleansing, all that stuff, and it didn’t work for me, didn’t work for my clients.

[21:17] And then I discovered now six years ago, the weight neutral or Health at Every Size approach. I always said the book from Dr. Linda Bacon, who wrote the Health at Every Size philosophy, was presented to me three different time over a period of two years. And the first two times I was in complete denial that anything in that book could be true because I was myself engaged in pursuing health from a weight loss approach.

[21:51] And I felt really offended that a book could pretend that I didn’t have to focus on weight. So I get it. I get when women come to me and say, “No, no, no, no, no.” It’s different for me because I used to be there, but I changed I coached myself out of these thoughts, out of these feelings, and I created new thoughts and new feelings, and that’s where today I’m completely neutral about my weight, and actually my health is better because I’m not stressing about my weight constantly in my body.

[22:28] Because mental health and emotional health contribute more to my overall health than just my physical body. So I’m a walking example of this, so I get it. And that’s why I created this episode, because I get the resistance that you’re feeling. So if we can’t hate ourselves to health, what can we do? The number one place I want you to think about is accepting your body.

[22:56] Why? Because stress, the emotion of stress and shame is recognized in science as a contributor to negative health, specifically around chronic health, like heart condition and blood pressure and autoimmune issue are linked to stress and shame. And that’s what we carry with us as women in today’s society in our body.

[23:28] I can guarantee you That accepting your body in the way that I teach it, in the way that I coach it, will not negatively impact your body because it will open you up to actually engaging with your health from a place of pleasure, from a place of joy, from a place of hope, and your total health behavior will increase instead of you staying in the shame game, in the punishment game, in the willpower game, procrastinating, numbing, and avoiding.

[24:05] So the number one thing we can do in a weight neutral approach to health is accept our body, and that will reduce our total load of stress. The second thing that I highly believe in because I’ve seen the impact on my own body and I see it every day in my student, is your thoughts, the quality of your thoughts.

[24:28] You are in full control of the quality of your thoughts. The only person that can impact the quality of your thought is you. I get it. You may not know how to do it. You may think, “Oh my God, there’s no way I can control my thoughts.” Yes, you can.

[24:45] The third thing is your overall mental health. So if you’re struggling with any type of mental health, put your resources there, put your energy there, put your time there so you can create a different emotional experience in your body because emotion in your physical body affects your tissue.

[25:13] I’m not gonna get into all the science behind that, but it does. Tightness in your body is felt. You feel it. Well, that tightness in your body impacts your health The next thing I want you to think about is redefining self-care and thinking about, instead of thinking of weight loss, I want you to think about how can I take care of myself.

[25:40] And when we think about self-care, we think about self-compassion, being compassionate with ourselves and getting rid of this old model of punishment, but instead approaching ourselves with kindness the same way a mother would approach a child and teaching a child a new behavior.

[26:04] If you’re a mom, think about how you taught your kids how to walk or how to feed themselves. Most of you probably didn’t teach your children by yelling at them, by constantly criticizing them. No, right? You taught them these new behavior from a place of love and kindness and excitement. That’s how you have to approach self-care.

[26:29] That’s how you have to approach learning how to take care of your quality of your thoughts and how to process the emotion and release them so they don’t get stuck in your body, figuratively in your body, right? Because that’s when we say we’re constantly stressing about our weight, like it’s a constant state of stress in your body day in and day out, and we have to process that and release that and release the thought that create the stress in our body.

[27:01] I want you to think about sleep, right? The quality and the quantity of your sleep instead of the quantity of food you eat I want you to think about gentle nutrition because nutrition still exists in the context of intuitive eating, right? But we do approach it by stages, right? We need to first repair the relationship to food that we lost through dieting, so we need to reconnect hunger and fullness, and then step in to gentle nutrition.

[27:41] And gentle nutrition is gentle, right? It’s not aggressive. It’s not restrictive. It’s not you have to do this or otherwise you’re a bad person. It’s about approaching nutrition from a place of kindness and self-compassion. This is all the things that you can do in a weight-neutral approach to health. As I said in the beginning, me today recording this podcast is not here from a place of trying to convince you that you shouldn’t want to lose weight.

[28:16] It’s normal that you want to lose weight in today’s society. I’m here to tell you, you have a choice. As a woman, you have the right to decide what you will do with your body, and it is not true that the only way for you to improve your health is to lose weight. A plethora, I don’t know if that’s even an English word, there’s a plethora of other ways supported by science.

[28:47] We are unfortunately never exposed to this information in mainstream media because mainstream media supports diet culture, therefore the weight loss industry. If you choose to pursue weight loss even after listening to this podcast I respect you. I’m just not the person, the podcast, the environment to support the pursuit of intentional weight loss.

[29:12] If you listen to this podcast, and if you choose to no longer pursue weight loss as a way to be healthier, I am here for you. I can help you understand how you can approach your health from a weight neutral approach, and start engaging with your body from a place of acceptance to free up the space in your brain, to free up the time you’re stuck in procrastinating and numbing and avoiding, and to redirect that time to health-promoting behavior outside of weight loss.

[29:52] So with that in mind, I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next podcast.

[29:59] If you’re loving what you’re learning on the podcast, you have to come and check out Confident, my program on body acceptance and the confidence that grows from it. Come to our website to stephaniedodier.com/confident. This way you can take the concept that I teaching you on the podcast further into actual application in your life so you can feel confident, stop worrying about your weight, other people’s opinion, and care for your wellbeing without weight loss.

[30:34] Come and join me and other women learning how to reshape your confidence, not your body. I’ll see you there