ENCORE: The Science Behind Intuitive Eating & Weight Inclusive Care

The Innovative Therapist

Episode 121. One of the questions I get most often from people when they learn that I'm aligned with the Health at Every Size® movement is some version of this: "But I've worked for many years in XX setting and I've seen how people suffer when they have excess weight on their bodies. How can we really say that people can be healthy at every size?" Today's encore episode is a replay of my conversation with Dr. Jillian Murphy that answers this question incredibly well. I can't wait to share it with you! What To Expect in This Interview: We cover the following topics: Why Health at Every Size® is not just a social movement, but an evidence-based movement rooted heavily in science. She breaks this down in a way that I truly haven’t heard before, so make sure you stay tuned to really understand why and how this isn’t just a “don’t judge people for their body size” movement (though that’s of course very important, too!) We talk about her training as a Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine and where her focus is, as well as the ways that her training, just like pretty much all standard training programs, were steeped in diet culture beliefs. Her experience with orthorexia and how she finally fully cut the diet culture cord. We talk about her work learning about competent eating through the Ellyn Satter Institute and the power of this approach for kids and adults. I’m SO excited for this part of this conversation, because we talk about a nuanced approach to moving towards a flexible, healthy, sustainable relationship with food called Competent Eating that can be really helpful for people who want more structure than Intuitive Eating provides. Super cool. What You Need to Know About Weight Inclusivity, Health at Every Size®, and How You can Immediately Start Improving Your Health The weight-inclusive Health at Every Size® movement is social. All bodies deserve dignity and respect and we don’t current provide that. This is well documented and incredibly harmful. The weight-inclusive Health at Every Size® movement is scientific. Not that social and science are separate per se, but there is immense amounts of evidence that the link between weight and health cannot be fully causal, for many of the reasons that Dr. Murphy outlines so well. She talks about the fact that thinner people have all the conditions we blame on weight (heart disease, diabetes, cancer, PCOS) so for that reason alone we know it can’t only be weight that is the problem. We cannot establish a causal relationship with weight causing the health problems it’s blamed on (e.g., heart disease, diabetes, PCOS, cancer, etc). This doesn’t mean there aren’t co-relations, but we know it isn’t as simple as “fat causes X” as so often is the assumption. There could also be underlying genetic causal relationships that are causing the weight gain and the disease process. We don’t currently have consistently effective ways to lose weight long-term without sacrificing well-being. We don’t cover bariatric surgery at all in this interview, although frankly I’d love to hear Dr. Murphy’s thoughts on that, but when talking about long-term significant weight loss (more than just a handful of pounds, although this depends on current body size), without surgery or medications, the odds of that happens without collateral damage is quite low. So, even if we could establish a causal relationship (e.g., excess weight causes disease), we don’t currently have effective ways to help people lose weight and keep it off, without a sacrifice to well-being, physically and emotionally. There is a much wider arrange of body diversity than the medical community currently allows for. Body diversity is a fact. This results in significant problems including lower quality of care, weight stigma, bad advice, and leaves most people increasingly losing faith in themselves, versus recognizing that the system fails to improve health in the vast majority of folks with these strugg...