Episode #41 Book Report: The Secret Life of Fat
Beth read an excellent book, "The Secret Life of Fat, the Science Behind the Body’s Least Understood Organ, and What it Means For You". It was a great read on an organ that is so vilified and yet not talked about its importance. When we understand how something functions and why things may be going awry, we can look at it objectively instead of thinking something is wrong with us. So tune in to learn about what fat does for us!
A special reminder note - not all excess fat is bad, not everyone's fat beyond "the norm" is sending out inflammation and other health-related alarm signals. Getting lab work is really, really helpful! Data, not drama.
Listen to the Episode
You are listening to Weight a minute, with Beth and Jessica, episode 41.
I'm Jessica Pearson, certified life coach.
And I'm Beth Barnett Boebel, integrative nutrition therapist.
Together we're Path Nutrition and we help clients break free from diet culture and create a healthy relationship with their body and food. Get our free anti-diet toolkit now.
Today we're talking about body fat.
It might be controversial or triggering, but we're going to do our best to keep this on the right side of anti-diet. Yes, this is information. Yes, this, there is this gray area of the desire to love and accept yourself as you are and wanting to pursue physical health and lifestyle change. And so what does that mean without focusing on the scale alone and succumbing to diet culture?
We're gonna unpack that today in a book report. ? Yes. Or Yeah. It is a, it's a book report cause it's not even quite a book review. Yeah. Yeah, it's a book report. I love it. So Beth read this excellent book called The Secret Life of Fat, which is the science behind the Body's Least Understood Organ.
So Fat's an Organ? Yep.
She was really excited about this book. We've been talking about it for the last two weeks. And so we wanted to bring this information to you and share it with you. And first I want to offer a little preface, which is that fat. Whether it is the fat in your food or body fat is and always will be a circumstance.
It is neutral. So while we talk about some of the science around it, I want you all to understand that this is simply information or data. Yes , and then from a body acceptance perspective, your body fat is not good or bad. It just is. You don't ever have to change it if you don't want to. You are 100% worthy and lovable no matter what.
Your mental health is equally important to your physical health. If. , honestly, not more . And we still know that if you desire change, it still requires acceptance of yourself in the present. And yet, we know, as you will learn in this podcast episode, the circumstance of having certain amounts of body fat, high and low can affect your health.
and or your relationship with food and your ability to change those things maybe as easily as you think it should be. Yeah. So I think with this topic, and then when we talked about fructose and things, is that it's not to create this doom and gloom or to. Villa and I is anything it's, there's so much not good information out there in these sound bites.
And what I really want to do is to help people in this neutral way. Hey, this is why your body is doing what it's doing or not doing, and this is why. And so then you can take that information and use it to however it is helpful. For you to make a choice about something that you either consume, don't consume, or change in some way if you want to.
But it's coming because knowledge is really powerful. And I think all the knowledge combined together and not just these little sound bites of things that sound good for now, like legit science. Yeah. Cause I think of diet culture as oh, we read these headlines, or try these diets because somebody else maybe got some information and they're trying to tell you how to do it.
. But we're giving you the information for you to decide for yourself and giving you that empowerment. So that's what we're here to do. Let's start with some of the basics. Beth, what does fat do? Why do we have fat? Yeah, so fat is so I, as I loved the book because, I think fat is the most villainized part of weight loss cuz when people are talking about wanting to lose weight, they're not talking about.
Wanting to lose muscle mass or lose bone health or anything. Everybody's talking about fat. And but it is actually really important. Fat. So it manages our energy stores. We are not eating constantly 24 7. And so in between those meals we need to have energy stores to break down and eat.
And then, there were other times throughout the human lifecycle or human history where we have needed we've. without as much food as the body would really desire. So it actually enables transmission of brain signals. So neuro neurotransmitters are used, fat. Our actual brain size is largely fat dependent.
And talk about that as it goes on, it actually, this part was so interesting to me. I love reading this part of the book, but it actually facilitates the onset of puberty and also aids in. That notification of labor and pregnancy. And then, and in that same vein later in life, women depend on fat for both bone health, along with the estrogen balance that we are left with af once we are in menopause it plays a key role in absorbing certain nutrients that are cl.
Critically important like vitamin E, D and fat soluble vitamin A and K. And those two, vitamin A and K are different than the precursor ones that are found in plant-based foods. So without vitamin E and D and A and K, we will actually die. So we need to have them. It also is really important in protecting our organs.
So there is, that little subcutaneous fat over the top of our abdomen and that is what cushions our organs so that we, when we run into something or get injured, that there's some cushions who our organs don't burst. It really helps us to maintain our body temperature. Is critical in our immune system in a variety of ways.
And to get an idea of how much we rely on fat in our body. At about 14 weeks of gestation, our embryos, embryo starts to manufacture fat even before all systems are functioning and. Fat and bone cells come from the same stem cells, so the body chooses to make bone cells or fat cells through a series of, the communication of what's going on in the body.
So interesting. So just some little love of appreciation there. And with this book, at the beginning of it, like a lot of them when we were talking about fat on a person's body, it comes with the historical commentary about the controver I call controversial, thinking about the moral goodness or bad.
And this one of course had no shortage of historical information in that way. And we talked about this in one of the very first podcasts about fat and if it makes you a good or bad person, they used to think but essentially it was having more fat. Was it? Accepted and was associated with having more money and social status.
And because you would have more access to food as a whole, but so that mean meant you, because you had more access to food. You had more money, but. And with that money you had access to things that were not always inexpensive as they are now, like sugar and meat certain grains and that. So anyways, I'm not gonna spend too much time on that.
Cuz I really wanna stick to the function of fat and what this co book talked about. But essentially the book summarized all of the ways that fat has been a mystery in how it, how and how it actually functioned because it. Even thought of as an organ or a major part of the endocrine system until the 1940s.
And even then took a while to get accepted as such. And it was really thought of not much more than inert blubber. They really didn't think it did anything other than just. Increase and decrease in size, but it didn't have any function. So in each of the examples that were given about research that came out about how fat functioned many of.
The articles that would try to get published in medical journals or to be accepted by the medical community of the time, they often would refuse to believe them and therefore, and say that the data must be wrong. We're not gonna publish this. You need to go back and look at it. But eventually, The researchers push and just keep doing what they knew and believed in.
And it would eventually get published and people would be like, oh, okay. And then, have to keep their words, which this is a whole separate podcast, but it's wow, we did just research for the research sake back then. Uhhuh , where now it seems like everything is funded for a purpose.
And it's are we researching mysteries without being funded by pharmaceuticals? ? I dunno. I'm sure there, I'm sure there are. It is a little bit more challenging because, people do have to, come up with the money. But I'm sure there is some non, I'm sure there's some neutral.
Research going on somewhere. I, it's hard to say. I try, I just, after grad school and, having to help write grants and participate in all the collection of data, I was like, ah, down with this for a while, and just put on my blinders on that and just read PubMed from time to time. For what I really got out of this book as a whole is how hard the body works, particularly leptin, to keep the body fat stores at a certain amount.
That's really, it just works really hard to do that. And then particularly, and then learning more about the different genetic mutations in leptin or when leptin communication gets off either by genetic factors or environmental factors that it really. Works very hard to to try to maintain fat mass, but also how like you can either over store it and that when we, when leptin miscommunicate, like it really creates this insatiable hunger.
which feels very real, right? So like you could be eating like a very solid amount of food and you might not even feel as full. As maybe you are or you're gonna be very hungry. Yeah, very soon after. Yeah. Because leptin is one of our main hunger hormones, but it's from fat. So there are other diff, there are different hunger hormones, but leptin is the one that is produced in fat cells and then it travels to receptors and the brain, and from there the brain will signal, yeah, we're good.
we don't need to eat, or we need a little hunger. Like it'll produce like this nor, normal hunger, not hunger or no, things are not fine. We are losing fat. We need to ramp up the hunger. So this is where leptin is just like pushing, pushing ramp up the hunger, get more calories so we can maintain what we have.
And Leptin, also communicates with us. Like when we exercise, we feel hungrier, right? On those days that we exercise, because we did exert more calories and or we burned more calories, and so then the leptin is we have to replace that . Yeah, you can't redo it. So then we do feel more hungry after we exercise, and so we can easily replace.
What they did. And there's there was a section in there, we were talking about how men and women are different in this case and that women are very good at utilizing fat for energy during exercise, but we are even better at replacing the calories. It is a struggle and I think that's why women get so frustrated because our biological need.
And our bodies is to maintain a fat amount is really there. The body just hasn't caught up with the, the fact that, sometimes there's more than what is actually needed. And this just raises that whole intuitive eating thing can be very challenging. Yes. If we're battling a leptin dysregulation.
Yeah. Becau and, and then also the trigger, a lot of people feel very uncomfortable. Hunger, right? And then the question is like, how much physical hunger would we need to feel and is it safe? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I mean we can talk about this more at the end if you want, or we can inter, I can interject that now cuz what I think about, and one of my philosophies has been when to not go too fast because of that leptin increase, that drive for hunger.
Is there. And so if we go at a slower pace, then the body, you can really work with it much easier. It's not it's not the shiny, fast result that everybody wants, but it is. A path to maintenance that that is actually more doable than the other because when calories are cut, especially in a, quite significantly that hunger does rise in, it will continue depending on the amount.
In degree of restriction. So when they used to do like star, when they did some of the early starvation studies to look at, see what was happening in people's metabolics and hormones and things like that, when people were having to be, their calories were severely restricted. I think this was like post-war world War Two or one.
I'm trying to figure that. All of the reports when they've done these different studies is people just talk about how they were all thoughts were consumed by food. So because they were so restricted in how much food they could have, they would think about food all day. They would fantasize about it.
They would think about memories of food or how they could figure out how to get more food or make the little bit of food that they were allotted. Go further. And so they really weren't able to think about anything else except for food, which sounds like survival mode, right? It was cuz they were doing these basically starvation studies.
So this is, I think another reason why, we go on these. More restrictive diets and stuff like that. It's not that much more cuz then we think about, okay, then when I can get to the end of this week, then I can do da. And you we just become all consumed because the brain and , the leptin and the brain are having a conversation about there is a problem and we need more food because we are dwindling our reserves.
Yeah. Even though that is the person's purpose, our biology was not designed to go in that, that, that pattern. So that was pretty interesting. So then even after the refeeding in these studies and weight was restored, most people gained more than where they were before the study. And it was, like this this additional.
Action of leptin and our genes being able to we need to have these extra reserves in case we go through that again. And then there's studies about reports of family genetics of those that Family lineages that have been through famines and a thrifty gene essentially is what they call it is passed along down the lineage.
And so individuals down the line become very good at storing calories so they have a better chance of surviving another famine. , but we're not really in that situation, even though we might carry those same genes. Wow. Our body is just oh, we've hit the calorie storage jackpot. Like we did it, and so like we talked about generational trauma before, but it's wow.
It can even manifest physically in your genes in the way that you Oh, yeah. Yeah. So even so generational trauma in that way. , to turning on. It changes and it can change, like how we restore fat. It can turn up regulate how our blood pressure and blood sugar regulation, and this is why part of what can happen because the stress on the body is turning these jeans on.
When a person is through going is like pregnant, so even though they're under Yeah, stress their bodies, was able to be, get pregnant and and, but with these genes turned on and then they pass them on. And so that's how, like type two diabetes and some of these things are hereditary is that the gene is turned on.
But again, it doesn't just cuz you have the gene doesn't mean you turn it on, but that, part of the situation. So speaking of genes, so in a way it's it's not that being a certain body size is genetic. It's, it is and it isn't. It is and it isn't. Yeah. It is there. It ha there is a component for sure.
There is a component of it that is genetic, but I wouldn't say that's everyone. I guess like some people say it's my genetics, so therefore I just can't lose weight because everybody in my family is this size. So it doesn't mean that's necessarily true, just maybe it means.
Yes, based on some of those genes, it might be harder for you. Correct. It might just be harder. It just, we'll, we yeah, there's something . We'll get to it. We talk about it and I won't, I'm like, roll all of my mouth. Speaking of genetics so there, there are these very fascinating genetic variations.
in leptin. So one is that the fat does not actually produce leptin at all or adequate, adequately enough. So the brain does not recognize that everything is okay, and the other is that leptin is produced by the fat cells, but the receptors in the brain do not recognize the signal. In both of these cases, individuals do experience that insatiable hunger.
They talk about what the, the people went through and talking about eating everything, and then breaking into cabinets and just like eating non-food. Like they just, it is just this severe biological drive to eat because they're not recognizing it. And then one of the cases in one of the genetic variations, because of the way the brain receives it, the, she wasn't actually able to create more adipose tissue, and so the body didn't have any place, but she had insatiable hunger, so she kept eating and because there was, she wasn't able to create more fat cells, her body, her blood.
Took on whatever it could, but then it started creating like fat deposits in her skin and just like trying to create so in her skin and sh they were, she was talking about like how painful it was. Like she couldn't walk because like it was physically painful on her skin. And then when they would go to the, when she went to the doctor to get blood work, they would draw her blood and it would look like the doctors reported and.
That it looked like cream in. Yeah, in her blood. Cause they would have to, because it was so dangerous. They would my God, filter her blood pull out what fat that she could. And so that was, that started when she was just before puberty. So instead of, gaining the weight. She started losing the weight, but her hunger was there.
So she was hungry all the time, but she couldn't really gain any fat, but it was going in her skin. And then the other case of the leptin gene variation is that they have the insatiable hunger. They eat and eat, and then they, but their body is very good at growing adipose tissues. And so then they grow in size very rapidly.
And in both of these cases with the discovery of leptin in the eighties, early nineties that the leptin injection therapy both reversed. These conditions and so then the, they were both like, they both immediately remembered not being hungry anymore. Like that moment where they were like, I could stop eating, not because I was forced to, but because my body recognized food and I could feel the hunger.
Go away. And so they would stop eating. And so then her the the posts in her skin that the fat deposits all like diminished and her blood started to look normal again. And she went on to live like a totally healthy, normal life. And then the one where they just gained excess fat continuously then the body stopped as well.
and they were able to lose some place. I wish the listeners could see my eyeballs.
They're so big, but I'm also just so glad they got a happy ending. Yeah. There was one that was so sad. It was talking about the different types of fats we've heard about. Some people may have heard about brown fat. It is one of the types of very metabolically active fats that we have when we're babies.
We have more of it and it really helps to , that's part of what helps keep us warm, is it's active and warms us up. And it Plays a role in our metabolism. But unfortunately in this case there was a gene where she had mostly brown fat and not very much white fat. And she could not eat enough to keep up with her energy stores.
And and she and the baby died at like age two. Oh. Cause it couldn't keep, cuz she couldn't store. Enough of the regular kind of white fat, it was all like really just like burn. She was like just basically burning fuel nonstop and could not, they couldn't keep enough calories in her. That's so sad.
And so they weren't able to find the much what change that fat. Yeah, but some other key discoveries that did the book is depressing. It's, it was really depressing, but fascinating at the same time. Other key discoveries about our body fat how body fat increases as leptin increase. So it actually leptin stimulates the hormone cascade to start puberty and later menarchy.
Is that how you say it? I just say menstruation. Yeah, I'm like, I should know this. But, I get, my brain goes into not function mode whenever I record a podcasts. So what would hap what they, this woman discovered, she was looking at population studies and she found that across all these different populations across the world that the average.
Weight for girls increased just before the start of their periods. And it was roughly around 13 pounds, but they didn't know where the, what, where the weight was coming from. Was it blood, was it volume, was it bone? And then they, she discovered that it was actually a percent in and fat.
So they all. Got to about 17% body fat was needed in order to start their period and needed to maintain a 22% body fat percentage in order to have a regular monthly cycle as they approached 16 years of age. And they found that Young athletes and dancers. So this researcher was connected with somebody in New York that had a practice next to the ballet studio and just would see these young women and he would see them and they, they would had irregular periods and he was able to study their body fat based on this woman's research.
Again, no one will listen to this woman and they were like, who cares? Why do we care about this? And it turns out it was really important because, we're related to fertility later on. But anyway, so if in young female athletes and dancers, those that trained very hard before the start of their periods each year of hard training, delayed the start of their period by five months.
So most athletes and dancers have an average 2.3 year. They start their periods 2.3 years later than non intense training teens, or if they started their intense training post. Period. Did it address like the early onset purity? It did not. ? Yeah. No, it didn't talk about that. I was curious about that too.
But I think that it would, could potentially. Be based on, yeah. Cause I didn't talk about like the factors behind that, what would create a, that body fat percentage to rise to get to that point, to then signal. , okay, it's time to start our period. So they found that in this whole, in that group of val of dancers and athletes, that for women they need to ha they tended to have irregular periods with 20% body fat and then a loss of periods at 19% body fat.
So we would hear a lot about that in in female athletes in college, the female athlete triad. And then it's not just. This is low fat. It's not just a problem for women, for men as well. If body fat gets too low, cause it's usually related to calories. Their prostate fluid goes down, libido goes down, and so does sperm production.
So it's all related. And then as women need to be able to become pregnant, That you need to have at least that that 22% body fat seemed to be the magic number for women to be able to conceive. So low body fat was challenging. So they would when they would get to this, 21, 20 2% body fat, then they were able to, ha to conceive.
And it does go the other end, which we can talk about in just a second. . But the other fascinating thing is, as I mentioned before about how the stem cells for fat cells and bone cells are, come from the same stem cell. It appears that under these like anorexic like conditions, so anorexic meaning just not adequate calories, we're not talking about, Forcefully not consuming food to, to look a certain way.
The body will neglect its own skeleton in favor of fat production. So it will tell the stem cells to convert into fat cells, rather into new bone cells. Which is why sometimes like long term, people who are undernourished, that are like having osteoporosis Yes. At a young age. . So it definitely leaves that because then they're not getting the initial, especially when it happens in a really young age, they're not laying down that found even that beginning foundation of bone.
And then if it were to continue through as we lay bone till about age 22 then it would then continue on. So you're not even getting that foundation. Of bone growth. And then as we get older, if we are too lean, they found studies that if those that had a heart attack had worse outcomes than those that were carrying an extra 10 to 15 pounds of fat.
And again, this is one of those studies that they wouldn't publish because they said your data is wrong. But it turns out that having a little bit of extra fat was actually more protective of recovery or survival of a heart attack. And then low B m i with fat was, is equally detrimental for the brain.
There's high rates of dementia as you get older compared to normal b m I and again, like this is the flip side of it was then if it gets over this other amount, this, over fatness, depending on, how the fat's communicating you. Detrimental effects. So related to fertility, if you have excess fat, it can create too much estrogen, which makes it hard to maintain the pregnancy.
And so there is, it seemed to be like the body is really trying to maintain this sweet spot of between 20 and 30% for women. And then for men it's lower. But moving on, other things that can create are fat to miscommunicate besides leptin issues is viruses and bacteria. So there was some really I'm not gonna share with it cause I really want people to read it, but about a certain virus that comes from chickens.
Not from eating chickens, by the way. You have to like, been like, had contact with either like a scratch or something like that, but this virus that happens that alters leptin and hunger and fat storage if you have liposuction, you're taking out so much fat so quickly and the body really fights back on that.
And so if it can't store, Get new get fat back in different places. So say you had it taken from your thighs and your butt, then it will try to put it in your arms and your back. And if it can't put it all there, then it goes to visceral tissue so that the visceral fat. So all the. Metabolically active fat between your organs, not on top of your organs, but the fat in between your organs, which is the kind that is the most dangerous.
And then other things that communicate with fat or plastics. Pesticides. And those are all considered to be obesity gens cuz they have changed the signal in our text hormone binding globulins and other hormones. Yeah, can we just remind to that virus, because you didn't really touch on that story, so Beth told me it was like a very specific story about a man.
Yes. Who got scratched by a chicken. Got scratched. Bunch this chicken, by the way. want people to read it so they could also discover how amazing the story was. But we'll, we're gonna talk about, cause now we've gone too far. . I'm sorry, I didn't wanna be Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Really, I'm just never matched.
Hold a chicken by a chicken. Cuz he worked on a farm as a kid. And so he got scratched by a kid by a chicken. And then he says he, after that, which he didn't put two and two together until well into his adult life, he heard about this study. And he drove from where he was and he became like a, his family was all, Average people.
And he worked really hard on the farm. Like he never sat down and he just kept gaining weight, and they couldn't figure out. So he was always going on these diets and things like that. And it didn't matter really. So then it turned out that once they discovered this and he got put into this study, he was like, oh, okay.
This is why. And so he really talks about. How it was hard in his community because it was a small, rural community. Food was a part of everything, and he's had to tell people, look, it's not that I don't love you, I just can't eat your food. If he's either I eat your food and I die because of the consequences of being.
Obese or not. And so he's there's an eater world and a not eater world and I just can't be a part of the, and so there was no cure for his viral infection. No apparent at this time there is no cure for that particular viral thing though. I don't know. I think that there probably could be like some other way, but.
At this time. And so then what was suggested was, at this time there's not, but we're hoping that there will be a vaccine one day. And I'm like, what? What? , like how many people need a chicken scratch vaccine? . That's why I was, that's why I was like, wait a minute. But again, it's it's, it was only one section of a book it's hard to go, much further than that.
And then our bacteria and our gut also influence that. So we have certain bacteria that are able to really extract out. all of the calories from food and be able to influence how we take those calories and store them and whatnot. So the type of bacteria that we have in our gut does play a big role in that.
So I'll kind of transition to what we think about a lot in Fat in our society. So we mostly hear about the negative effects health-wise of fat. So just as leptin is communicating with our brain about maintaining fat amount, it fat also communicates with our immune system. So when it communicates with our immune system on a chronic basis is what creates that inflammation cascade.
and then it triggers the downstream effects of the metabolic dysfunction of blood, pl, blood sugar dysregulation, heart diseases and so on and so forth. So that's, kind of part of that. And then there is a whole section about the influence of exercise and and that exercise for some doesn't seem to matter, but.
It does matter for most people. So an example was that sumo wrestlers, are very large in what they eat and they eat a lot. They have a high fat mass, but the way and how much they exercise, they have no, none of the downstream inflammation, metabolic. issues. So they're protected by their cardiovascular exercises that they do for sumo wrestling training.
And so once they stop training though, that is when they start having the metabolic issues. Like everybody is so interesting. Yeah. And then I'll digress back a little bit to the liposuction that the few people that do have better success with liposuction exercise before, have a really good exercise routine before and after.
And that minimizes though doesn't completely change how much. Fat, your body will try to gain back. Yeah. So my question about the liposuction was if you, I don't know what the rules are about, like how much you can actually take out. I'm sure there is a percentage. Yeah. You can't just take it off. I don't, you can just like go in and like they don't take like a hundred pounds at a time.
But I'd be curious. Are from a scientific standpoint, if you were trying to maintain the the amount of energy that you're intaking, do you have to eat for the new body fat percentage, not the way that you were in order to maintain that? Probably if you don't, it's yeah, you would, and also though you're still, you're, you still have, leptin is still that happened so fast.
It still wants to fight to get. To that percentage. Yeah. Like, Yeah, does your body perceive, it's whoa, what just happened? Does it think that you had an arm chopped off or, my God, that's what it seems like because of that communication. I don't know. It's so fascinating. Yeah, and I I've only known a few people personally who've been open enough to talk about their experiences with liposuction.
And they've all advised against it. . Yeah. I dunno. Yeah. It's, it seems strange that it still is. A popular choice given what we know about it, but maybe they don't know. I guess there's that apex of we talk about weight loss and health, like where is that line where like losing the actual weight is what might contribute to some health factors, even if you're not making some of these lifestyle changes.
But then eventually it does catch up. I don't know. I dunno. I don't know. All in all, I just, I found it to be really very interesting and it really hit home for me just about how hard our body does want to maintain something. And you know what we really. . And I think that's helpful in the people that struggle, right?
And it's okay, it's not a lack of me. Try not able to get this change that I want. It is really my biology and potentially these other factors that I might need to look at, like bacteri, gut balance and how much plastics and styrofoams do I use or what is my exposure to these different things.
It's just really, it's, I just want people to know. It is not that you aren't trying your body just really is, has a strong regulation. of, trying to maintain this. Yeah. And so this kind of makes me think of like the word willpower and how we talk about how like willpower's not really all that helpful because we know that it's like holding a beach ball underwater.
It will always pop back up. . But it will, this is why it feels like that sometimes, right? , it's it feels hard and there are sometimes things that if, you know, if you do want to. Create a certain result. It might not be effortless, but you don't also don't have to starve in the process.
Yeah. And you don't have to do these extreme diets. There's like ways to nourish yourself in the process. It just, it does take more time and it's gonna take more consistency and there're. It does take some effort. Yeah. And you might experience the physical sensation of hunger here and there, and it doesn't mean that you're actually starving.
And how do we manage all of that? I don't know. I just think it's like really tricky because everybody talks about hunger from the non diet perspective as if you're hungry, just eat. But that's not necessarily always correct. , which is tricky, right? We don't want you to un under undereat.
No. So if you're, if you have that desire to, to change and to lose body fat percentage, you do have to. Go from this amount, amount there does, there has to be a change somewhere. So there are gonna be times where our hunger is over talking to us based on the current situation of what you're trying to do.
And it is challenging and I can't, and it is a very delicate dance to balance, which with each individual's history of their weight and. Diets and things that they've gone through in their life. And so I think that it's, there's not a blanket solution. No, and you were even onto the side note talking about, you were like, based off all of what you've read, you're like, there, there are multiple paths to creating change, right?
Yeah. People talk about yeah, it could be low fat, high carb, it could be low carb, high fat. It could be, it's like these different ratios. There's not one way that just like works. For everybody. Yeah. Or that will work for you maybe cuz of your own even preferences or desires. . And that's where we get caught up in the diet culture of a dog.
We're like, just tell me the one thing that's gonna work. And it's not gonna be, it can't always be the one thing for everybody because there are so many different paths. I think, just to summarize one thing that really I was have to say. I loved the way that she wrote the book cause it was very sciencey, but sciencey in a story.
And so therefore I was able to read it quickly and really enjoy it and absorb it. But the last cha, one of the last chapters was about her, struggle with weight and then how she, based on all the information that she learned about how fat functions, what she did to lose her. Fat and get to, what she felt like was a healthy weight for her.
And it was just really hard to read because, she would intermittent fast or pretty extremely. Or like she talked about, like what she ate in the day and I'm like, I would've died for sure by Tuesday. Like I wouldn't have made it. And and or she had stopped eating by 3:00 PM and then she would, go through these phases of telling her husband about all the food that she missed, that she can't eat and all this other stuff because her body was so like driven towards.
Wanting to eat and, she didn't talk to her husband all the time forever about, the foods that she can't eat that she wished that she could. They did subside over time as her body readjusted. And I don't know I was both like cringe and also in awe that she was able to just be like, I am here to outsmart the biology.
Of what my body thinks it needs, but it's actually not. It's miscommunicating. And I thought that was pretty both amazing and ugh, because of, diet culture as a whole. But it brave on her for talking about what all she did. And there are just not that many people that are willing to do what she did.
One, and she had to do multiple things. Like it wasn't just one because the body readjusts, right? Yeah. And so she would have to do this thing and then move to this thing and that thing, and it was hard. Yeah. One, I wanna follow up on her like, where is she today? How is she doing? What is she doing?
I'll get back to you. I did, I thought, I was like, oh, I do, I need to look up, see what she's at. I did look it up. I looked at in. Current picture looked still, like her, I don't know. I'd have to, yeah. And I had, and I also, I think I'd asked, cause I was like, what was her current weight?
What was she trying to get to? Was this a, I think so she was like short, a petite person. She was like around five feet, five foot one and, had 30, 30 pounds to lose. Yeah. And then the other thing too, which I think is always really interesting to her, she has 25, 30 pounds loose. It's like, what does that mean? But the other interesting thing too is sometimes there are actions like say intermittent fasting or not eating after three or whatever. Like things like we could all have our different opinions about it. , it's like, like, oh, that's really drastic, or, that seems like diet culture, but what really matters the most is what she thought about it.
Correct. . And for her, she didn't have the mind drama. She wasn't approaching it from like a torturous diet, culture mindset. She was like, this is a science experiment. I'm doing this from this particular mindset. Yeah. That is not creating. Emotional turmoil. And she had been, I, she talked about the emotional turmoil that she had been in b in her earlier, early college years.
And this was from a very different place. It still was like, wow. It was amazing cuz I'm like, I don't think I would do this. Yeah. You're like, no, I'm good. I'm good. I'm like I'm willing to do there's certain things that I'm willing to do that others are not, and she was willing to do something that I am not I would rather go phy, find like a physical thing that I can do.
To right to change my metabolics over adjusting my food too. Extremely . But that's me. I have a severe, I have a strong hold on a mo, on food, and I, it's fine. So I just think that's like really important for everyone to know. It's what do we know about ourselves?
And our emotional status, and once we come up to some of these changes, it's if this is emotional taxing, like we either need to coach on that or do the nutritional therapy on it to get you to the next level, or you also get to decide like just no. Hey, this is where the where it stops for me.
And then sometimes it's like finding that acceptance and coaching for the presence self, where it's yeah, I'm not really willing to change, and how do I let that go so that I'm not spending this mental energy thinking that I need to change when I've already decided I'm just not gonna do it.
I know. It was good. I really hope that everybody goes out to. I hope that people read it. I write it on Kendall. You can get in on Audible, whatever you need to do. I thought it was really fascinating because it does go into a lot more detail than what we could cover here. So yeah,
we keep our eyes peeled for things in the media or in real life that come from diet cold speaking of , or that perpetuate diet culture in some way. These are often the subtle ways it creeps in, which is why we are shining a light on it and sharing it with you. And today. Beth has an update. I do. Okay. So we heard my rant from about a week ago, from a previous, a recent podcast about the injectables and medications that are being given to people that can sign up for them online.
They're delivered to their house. And so one of them is the you talked about the report, the article about the women. Doing the ozempic that they, the lady that's what have you done? It turns out that because of the off-label prescribing of the GLP one injectable medications that people are using for weight loss, that there is a global shortage.
Of the medication. So people that have type one, type two diabetes that use these particularly Ozempic and some of the The Ozempic one is there is a shortage of it. So the people that are using that, that have time to have to contact their doctor to fi to get on to find another plan because it is a complicated medication to make and therefore, For, with the shortage they have, they can't just make more.
There has to be, there's a different process that has to happen with the equipment and manufacturing setting to make it and it will take up to, they are saying up to a year for them to be able to get. To, to normals. So cause of the weight loss community of, let's try these very strong prescription medications to lose weight.
People that have that use this four type two diabetes and other insulin related conditions will have to find different medication. . I actually know someone who is getting samples from the doctor because there's not any to prescribe. , but I will say because she's under a doctor's supervision they started her at a really low dose and over time are incrementing it that re increasing it so that she actually has not experienced any of the side effects that we talked about last time. No, I don't know anybody that even at the low. I've not personally met anybody. That's amazing for her. Yeah. So I thought, I was like, oh. I was like, this is a perfect example of why, if you're gonna do it, definitely do it through your doctor and not through some mail order diet website, because it just, it made more sense to do it that way.
Anyway. Yeah. So anyway, she said they're basically working her way up. So by the time it is available again, she'll be at whatever the. Dose or whatever is the dose that's yeah. Out there. So I was like that's cool. I was like, that sounds responsible. and reasonable. Yeah. And she is a person who would be an actual candidate for the drug.
Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that crazy. Also, I also just really quickly wanted to touch on the thing that I got today that I just sent you like 30 minutes ago. So I don't honestly don't know who sent this to me. I am guessing it as a client. I just don't have her number saved in my phone. But it was, looks like, like a trash mag or, no, it's New York Post.
Oh, I can debate what that is, but it's debatable. . Yeah. So it's a New York Post article. It says sweet Success New Yorker loses 90 pounds by eating candy, and there's a before and after a photo. . But then you like actually read the article and it's not as yeah. She started a fitness program of lifting weights and she just happened to add these sour, they look essentially like a, some kind of sour patch kid.
Candy before her workout. So that's how she started losing weight is because of that. She was eating a lot of candy before, right? Which is why she gained a lot of weight. And then, with her trainer, he was like, Hey, if you're gonna have some candy, have this candy right before your workout.
It actually like my, I was like just imagine me just like banging my head on my table right now. Yeah. And then it, like the other thing, the final paragraph is it's a little treat. The candies aren't just fuel. They're motivation. Some days when I don't really feel like working out, I do it anyway, because then I know if I go, I can have the candy, which is like very interesting psychology, that's very very interesting. Pavlovian, yeah. And I don't know, it's just it's just the, it's not even what she's doing that I think is, Worth of drinking. It's the headline. Yeah, . It was the headline for me. It made me so mad. Cause I'm like, really? That's who we're gonna go?
That's the headline we're going for. And it's yeah, you can probably have some candy and lose weight, but they make it sound like, oh, all she did was just sit around and eat candy and she lost 90 pounds. No, she did a pretty big overhaul in her lifestyle. Yeah. Anyway. Okay. I sure hope we gave you something new to think about today and help.
Do you take one more step on your path to freeing yourself from diet culture. Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast and follow us on Instagram at Path underscore nutrition. If you're looking to change your relationship with food and your body from a whole health perspective, please visit our website@pathnutrition.com to get started.
Bye bye everyone.