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3 Reasons to Set Your Scale Aside (and get healthier)

Posted on by tmAdmin

Do you love the idea of ditching your scale, but you’re worried about your weight?

If so, you’re not alone. You’ve been taught to focus on your weight (like all of us) – with your BMI number labeling your supposed health status.

And holy moly, as a culture, we spend enormous amounts of time, energy and money focused on weight and worried about what we see in the mirror.

So first, let’s honor that it’s freakin’ hard to live in this perfectionist body culture.♡

Next, I know that you wouldn’t be a part of my community if you didn’t care deeply about your health. Yet you may not know how to take care of your health without focusing on the scale.

Perhaps…

✔️ You’ve been focused on weight loss for a long time and maybe you’ve had some “success” but then you worried about gaining it back. And sure enough, when the diet or food plan ended or you found being hypervigilant with food and/or exercise just got plain exhausting, or life got in the way (because you are an actual human being) – you, like most people, gained it back and maybe more. This is not your fault, my lovely friend. Diets are not designed to be sustainable long term.

OR

✔️ You’re stressed about maintaining your current weight – berating yourself anytime there’s a scale fluctuation. And you too, my friend, it’s not your fault either because weight has been a proxy for health and no body talks about how weight fluctuations are normal. So no wonder you worry.

If not scale focused, what can you do to take care of your health?

You can take the approach I took with my current client, Maureen (and all my clients).

Mo Living Her Best Life

Here’s a shout out to Mo – who is always smiling!

“Mo” was dissatisfied with pandemic weight gain when she started her coaching journey with me. I deeply respect body autonomy. So only Mo gets to decide what’s best for her body. I never dismiss her (or anyones) desire to lose weight.

Instead, I shared with her my reasons for not focusing on her weight and how this approach would make her healthier and yes, much happier 😊 along her well-being journey. You can read Mo’s full story, in her words below in the P.S.

What’s the approach?

It’s taking care of yourself.

“Uh duh, Tanya. That’s what I’ve been trying to do!”

But has your self-care been focused on the number on the scale?

♡ What if your self-care wasn’t about self-control or “shoulds?”

♡ What if you didn’t have to use willpower to white-knuckle it to “be good” and restrict your favorite foods?

♡ What if you put the scale aside and practiced self-care from a place of self-love (instead of body hate or fear)?

TRUTH BOMB: Focusing on your weight can get in the way of you taking care of your whole self, in your unique body.

3 Reasons To Set Your Scale Aside & Get Healthier

#1 Your weight and BMI are not the best indicators of your health.

♡ Consider a woman in the “normal” BMI range and looks “fit” yet she struggles to eat well and move her body because of lack of time, money. She smokes to “deal with” stress and isolates herself. A doctor could miss helping her improve her health if she isn’t asked about her behaviors and life circumstances.

♡ Consider a young man in the “o” BMI category. His behaviors with food and movement are terrific, as are his health labs, yet he’s considered unhealthy by BMI numbers.

♡ Consider a woman in her sixties who falls in the “underweight” category who might be praised by friends and family for “being good” with food and exercise, yet her behaviors are disordered.

It’s kind of a mess, right?!

We know that people can be healthy across the size spectrum. I have patients that are ‘normal BMI’ that have Type 2 diabetes. And I have patients that are well above ‘normal BMI’ that don’t have any health problems. If you hide their weight, if you just compared their labs to each other, you’d think the person with the poorer labs was the heavier person. It’s not always true. – Dr. Gregory Dodell, Central Park Endocrinology, New York City – January 3, 2022, USA TODAY article – Everything you miss when you think weight is about willpower.

So numbers don’t mean what you think they mean.

You could be healthier at a lower or higher weight or maybe you’re already at your healthiest weight range (even though you, diet culture or your BMI label says otherwise).

Want to read more about BMI? The Myths of BMI Can Hurt Your Health

And by the way, weight fluctuations are normal. If the number on the scale goes in a direction you don’t like, it can unnecessarily make you feel crappy about yourself and send you spiraling back into “diety” behaviors – restricting, controlling, “shoulding” on ourselves. No bueno (good)!

That’s why an important part of learning Intuitive Eating (one of my favorite non-diet nutrition tools) calls for setting the scale aside because it gets in the way of you being able to listen to your own body’s signals with hunger, fullness, satisfaction and more!

Ok, let’s move on to the next important reason why you should take the focus off your weight.

#2 Weight is not a behavior

Research shows that it’s your self-care behaviors that impact your health and longevity not your weight class (BMI). This makes a lot of sense especially after reading the above real life stories.

Weight is not a behavior

So how are your self-care behaviors?

Are you taking care of yourself from a place of self-love? If so, great! ✰✰✰✰✰ (5 stars for you)!

But maybe, like all of us, you get in self-care ruts. (Yes, this includes yours truly 🤚). So first, please, please be kind and compassionate with yourself.

Maybe you didn’t sleep well and you’re exhausted, but you feel like you “should” get up early before work to exercise. (FYI, it’s better for your body to get rest than force a workout, yes, really

Then because you’re tired, so you crave carbs, sweets (check out: Why Am I Craving Carbs, Sugar) and then you beat yourself up over it. And when you get home, you order takeout because making dinner just takes waaaaay too much bandwidth.

Or maybe you just started a new job; you’re going through a divorce; you’re caring for an elderly parent or pet or you have to shuttle your kids to a zillion different activities; or you’re injured or ill; or you’re struggling with a mental health challenge and the list goes on……..

Often, your self-care rut is caused by a **combination** of things!

The best part of taking a self-love approach to self-care is that it’s flexible and you!!! get to choose what feels “doable” because you know yourself best. Period. I can’t stress enough how critical personal autonomy is to your success. Nobody likes to be told what to do – even if you think that’s what you need. I promise that you are full of wisdom. My job is to help you bring it forward.

Maybe you start with a gentle improvement to your eating habits, or moving your body in ways that you enjoy, or going to bed earlier, or having the wine a few nights instead of every night, or winding down with hot tea instead, or learning stress management techniques to calm your nervous system, or carving out time to connect with others, or making time for fun, or maybe learning to separate your self-worth from a scale number?

Focusing on the scale can be such an unnecessary strain on your health (which may already be super stressed – so let’s not add to it)!

#3 Your health is complex

Let me tell you two stories to illustrate the many factors that influence your health:

♡ Consider a woman with a higher weight (BMI) who lived healthfully into her hundreds. She drank a couple cocktails and ate fried food daily, smoked, did little to no exercise. But…she slept great, was super social, had little stress, had tons of friends, and a lovely family that adored her and she adored them.

♡ Now let’s consider a man who had a “ideal” body weight (BMI) and lived the life of health as a personal trainer and was “perfect” with his food. Yet he was a stressed about lots of things including maintaining his physique. He ate “healthfully” – but out of fear of getting a disease or gaining weight; he declined social invitations to workout or avoid the “unclean” food at the dinner party. Sadly, he died from a heart attack in his thirties. (His “health” background sounds similar to mine).

Why did one out live the other?

There are waaaay too many factors to consider, but the main point I’m making here is that weight isn’t one of them.

To summarize, the 3 reasons to set the scale aside are:

  • weight (and BMI) are not the best indicators of your health
  • behaviors are far more impactful
  • and your health is full of complexities.

So together, we (like I did with Mo!) will focus on your self-care behaviors and all the factors that influence your health and well-being,  while allowing you to live your best life (and not feel guilty for simply enjoying an ice cream cone). And ultimately, trusting your body weight to settle where it’s healthiest for you. (And don’t worry, if you struggle with body image, I’m here to support you with this too)!

♡ How does that sound dear reader? Reach out and let me know! T

P.S.🤩 Here’s what the lovely “Mo” has to say about her well-being journey:

Mo Winter Biking

“I am fortunate to have found Tanya’s coaching services.

After 20+ years in a fast paced and high-pressure career it took the pandemic to “wake me up” to the fact that my version of wellness was not effective nor sustainable.

After two years in a toxic work environment, I found myself burned out, stressed, anxious, irritable, experiencing weight gain, relying on prescription meds and just an overall lack of joy in life. This overall sense of fragility led me to research and engage with a well-being coach.

I chose Tanya over other providers because I wasn’t looking for traditional therapy or psychology nor was I uneducated about health and wellness. Tanya provided a holistic all-encompassing approach that leveraged the tools I already had at my disposal. I felt Tanya was able to customize her coaching based on my life stage.

♡ There were no rigid rules but a journey that felt organic and customized to my needs.♡

Each week Tanya listened to my needs and empowered me with digestible knowledge based on current science in a range of fields. It was with that information I could adventure out in life experimenting with what worked best for me. Tanya supported me with accountability and creative solutions along the way.

No matter what your well-being goal is, feel confident that Tanya is proven, licensed and offers versatile programs for a wide range of client needs.

After just a short time partnering with with Tanya for weekly coaching, I have benefited from the following results in seven months: improved strength and mobility, reduced aches / pains, improved body composition, menstrual cycle and elimination of PMS symptoms, stabilized mood, reduced anxiety, minimized stress and improved sleep and my nervous system, improved work life balance resulting in a fulfilled life — eventually eliminating previously prescribed meds.

Having Tanya as a virtual coach was easier and more rewarding than I expected and has led me to truly embrace flexible self-care and overall life satisfaction! Thank you Tanya – I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t met you!” – Mo Lang

♡♡♡ Thank you, thank you, thank you Mo, for these kind words! (It’s such a JOY! to be working with Mo by the way).

And if you’re curious about coaching and how we can work together to reach your goals, click here to discuss long term deep health coaching and/or book your first session. ♡ Tanya

Don’t let diet madness ruin the new year

Posted on by tmAdmin

“When I was little, someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up and I said, ‘Small.’

By the time I was 16, I had already experienced being clinically overweight, underweight, and obese. As a child, fat was the first word people used to describe me, which didn’t offend me until I found out it was supposed to” says Blythe Baird in her spoken word poem video When the Fat Girl Gets Skinny which has received over 4 million views.

She describes a teenaged life filled with eating “skinny-pop,” complimenting each other’s thigh gaps, trying diets she and her friends found on the internet, “Googling the calories in the glue of a US stamp” and “hunching naked over a bathroom scale, trying; crying into an empty bowl of Cocoa Puffs because I only feel pretty when I’m hungry.”

When Baird lost weight, her dad was so proud that he carried her before and after photo in his wallet, relieved that he could stop worrying about her getting diabetes and finally see her taking care of herself.

“If you develop an eating disorder when you are already thin to begin with, you go to the hospital. If you develop an eating disorder when you are not thin to begin with, you are a success story” says Baird.

“So when I evaporated, of course everyone congratulated me on getting healthy. Girls at school who never spoke to me before stopped me in the hallway to ask how I did it. I say, “I am sick.” They say, “No, you’re an inspiration.

How could I not fall in love with my illness? With becoming the kind of silhouette people are supposed to fall in love with? Why would I ever want to stop being hungry when anorexia was the most interesting thing about me?”

I share Baird’s story with you with urgency, before the new year, to stress the harms of continually reinforcing the societal norms that we’ve been socialized to accept such as dieting before any major life event, “swimsuit season,” beginning every January or actually just dieting in general.

Think of someone you know whose time, energy, money, physical and emotional health and self-worth – whose life is being stolen by the constant pursuit of maintaining or attaining an “ideal” body shape or size, that is, according to diet culture.

Maybe this person is your best friend, your mother, or you.

Nobody diets for fun

Like Baird, we try to control our bodies to belong, to be accepted as “healthy.” We believe we must “look good to feel good” about ourselves, the diet industry marketing messages promise.

Diet culture equates thinness, muscularity, and particular body shapes with health and moral virtue, according to author of Anti-Diet, Christy Harrison. You can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like this ‘ideal” she says.

And even if you have a small body, you may live with fear of weight gain.

I want you to know that you have a choice. Your only option for love and a content life isn’t to be a slave to the scale and other people’s opinions.

Ditch diet culture

You can choose to opt-out of harmful dieting and diet culture.

Dieting is disordered eating and is one of the strongest predictors for the development of an eating disorder, which can occur across the weight spectrum according to the National Eating Disorders Collaboration.

And you don’t have to be actively “on a diet” to be swept up by the culture of dieting.

Disordered eating habits also include preoccupation with food and your weight, feeling stressed about food and whether you’re eating the “right” or “wrong” foods and rigid food rules. It’s fasting, cleansing, detoxing, skipping meals to save calories, avoiding a type of food or food group, drinking laxative teas.

We can take “healthy” eating too far. There’s a term for this, orthorexia, also disordered eating, which is an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy foods.

The risks associated with disordered eating and dieting include developing a clinical eating disorder, osteoporosis or osteopenia, fatigue and poor sleep quality, gastrointestinal problems, headaches, muscle cramps, feelings of shame, guilt, low self-esteem, depressive or anxious symptoms and behaviors, and nutritional and metabolic problems according to National Eating Disorder Collaboration.

And because diet culture is deeply embedded in Western culture masquerading as health, wellness and fitness, disordered eating habits have become an alarmingly “normal” way to “take care of ourselves.”

Nearly 75% of women reported engaging in disordered eating behaviors in a 2008 survey of over 4,000 women done by UNC and SELF magazine.

“Ideal” weight as myth

But you have another option. You can separate “taking care of yourself” and your “health” from some “ideal” number on the scale.

Think about how we determine a “healthy” weight. It’s measured by BMI (body mass index) – just your height to weight ratio. That’s it. It doesn’t consider your eating or movement habits, muscle mass. It doesn’t factor in a long list of behaviors that impact your health such as smoking. It doesn’t consider your genetics, nor the complexities of health. BMI is a poor determinant of health.

Furthermore, ingrained beliefs that fat poses significant mortality risk are not fact.

Research reported in Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift shows that except at statistical extremes, BMI only weakly predicts longevity. People who are “overweight” or “obese” live at least as long as normal weight people, and often longer.

You can’t determine somebody’s health status just by looking at their body size. A small body may be healthy or not and the same is true for a larger body.

Honor Body Differences

With this knowledge, you can choose to honor that your body, other bodies may want to be different than what you and our culture think they should be.

Baird lamented that her “small’ body was the “most interesting about her,” but now as part of her healing “how lucky it is now to be boring,” says Baird.

“My story may not be as exciting as it used to but at least there is nothing left to count. The calculator in my head finally stopped. Now, I am proud I have stopped seeking revenge on this body.”

As the new year approaches and yet another wave of dieting madness tries to steal your self-worth, I want you to know that you have another option: you can ditch the false belief that there’s only one size that’s “healthy,” worthy of love and belonging and make peace with food and your body.

To your happiness and health,

  • Tanya

♡ Ready to transform your relationship to food and your body? Get started!

P.S. (You can watch Blythe Baird deliver her powerful poem, here).

(This article was originally published in the December 8, 2021 issue of Jackson Hole News and Guide.)

Let’s not cave in to the pressures of diet industry

Posted on by tmAdmin

Thin is “ideal,” and more body fat and weight gain are always “bad.”

Everybody agrees those statements are true. But are they?

Author and registered dietitian Christy Harrison dispels those myths in her book “Anti-Diet” and shares extensive research on the roots of diet culture to show us how we got to today — biased against fat. Spoiler-alert: It was not about health.

For much of human history, higher weights were associated with robust health and beauty, and thinness was equated with poverty, illness and death.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that fatness was observed as a trait often seen in “savage” people, making higher weight a negative attribute. Women were also believed to be at greater “risk” of fatness, a sign of evolutionary “inferiority.” Thus, anti-fatness beliefs were born that had nothing to do with health.

Regardless, the Victorian era brought a preference for hour-glass-shaped women, a visible sign that their husbands had the money to keep them well fed and away from work. Actress Lillian Russell, whose body mass index would have placed in her the “obese” category, was admired for this shape.

But that changed in 1890, when the preference for thin women emerged with the creation of the Gibson Girl, a pen-and-ink drawing, not even a real woman. She was young, white, wealthy, hourglass shaped, impossibly thin and a bit athletic to show that women can do things like tennis and croquet.

Marketers targeted women hoping to achieve that “ideal” look, offering weight-loss products, compression garments, diet pills containing arsenic, industrial toxins, thyroid extract and even tapeworms, according to Amy Ferrell, author of “Fat Shame.”

In the 1920s, ideals for women’s bodies trimmed further with Coco Chanel’s straight and slim flapper dresses. Women had to bind their breasts and restrict their food intake to fit into the dresses. This ushered in products like scales, laxatives and “reducing soaps” that claimed to wash away fat.

Next came the women’s suffrage movement, with opponents portraying suffragists as fat and “uncivilized” to dissuade women from joining. Early feminists played into anti-fatness by fighting back against this messaging by portraying women’s right’s activists as “civilized” and “evolved,” with images of thin, white women. Thus, slimness was related to civility and beauty.

All that changed in the early 1900s. From a strong cultural bias against fat came an insistence on weight loss advice. Some doctors were irritated with these requests, seeing them as problems of vanity, not health. But they found the overwhelming public demand difficult to refuse, and scales became common in doctors’ offices.

Doctors were further influenced by life and health insurance companies, which at the beginning of the 20th century began using the BMI, the height- to-weight ratio, to categorize people as “normal weight,” “overweight” and “underweight” to determine premiums.

While some preliminary data found “overweight” to be less healthy, a 2013 research study in the Journal of American Medical Association found “overweight” as the BMI group with the lowest mortality. Despite this flaw (and many others, including that BMI was never intended as a medical instrument), the BMI is still used to assess health.

Next came World War I and food shortages. Self-discipline with food was expected, and fatness was seen as a moral failure. This set the market for weight loss products ablaze: †he 1920s encouraged smoking and fasting for weight loss. The 1930s introduced diets and pills, gyms and weird gadgets like vibrating belts. The 1940s brought amphetamines for weight loss, while calisthenics and bariatric surgery emerged in the 1950s.

The 1960s brought more diet pills (despite doctors warning against them back in 1943), Overeaters Anonymous, Weight Watchers and Twiggy, the 16-year-old British model who set another impossible standard for the “ideal” woman. From 1970 through the 1990s the market for dieting grew rapidly and now included men, people of color and the elderly.

By June 1992 the narrative shifted when a National Institutes of Health panel of weight-science experts concluded that diets don’t work and that most people who’ve intentionally lost weight regain most or all of it within five years. And a 1995 Washington Post article titled “Losing the Weight Battle” reported that “a decade of dieting mania has actually made people fatter.”

Yet the diet industry flourished. In the mid-1990s the number of dieters skyrocketed, with 44% of women reporting they were trying to lose weight, though 37% of those women were in the “normal” range of BMI.

Then in 1998, approximately 29 million Americans became “overweight” overnight without gaining a single pound. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to lower the cutoff for “normal” weight BMI from 27.8 to 25 to follow World Health Organization guidelines. The WHO report was primarily written by the International Obesity Task Force, which was funded largely by two pharmaceutical companies that make weight-loss drugs, according to “Fat Politics” author J. Eric Oliver. Many “obesity” experts had ties to drug and weight loss companies, including the chair of the NIH panel, Xavier Pi-Sunyer, reports Oliver.

Weight loss became massively profitable and still is. The U.S. weight loss industry reached a record $78 billion in 2019, according to BusinessWire.com.

So you might be thinking, “All this history is enlightening Tanya, but why does it matter?”

Because despite what we’ve learned we’re still stuck in our “thinner is better” beliefs. Because our daughters are searching “healthy eating” on TikTok and following how-to guides to disordered eating to fit the “ideal” body size.

Because you can shop at TJ Maxx today and still buy ridiculous vibrating belts promising to “melt away your fat.” Because we still seek diets like Noom, a “mobile weight-loss company” with revenues over $400 million dollars in 2020. Because we still equate our self-worth, health and beauty to our body size. Sigh. And because we can learn from history and change.

Insanity is doing the same things over and over again expecting different results, Albert Einstein said. It’s time to stop this madness and radically shift from weight to a whole person-centered approach to health and well-being. Be a rebel.

To your happiness and health,

-Tanya