We hope you are ready for a bit of a roller coaster today. In this episode, we discuss our dislike of diet culture, how it affects us as athletes, combating diet culture in your life, and why we should focus our energy on getting strong and NOT getting small.
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- Dr. Kristin Lander: @drkristinlander
- Mary Morton, PhD: @marymortonphd
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Mary:
Hello everyone. Welcome back. Today, Kristin and I are a bit heated.
Kristin:
We’re exhausted.
Mary:
We’re upset.
Kristin:
We have a lot to say.
Mary:
We’re upset at diet culture.
Kristin:
Yes.
Mary:
We’re going to talk a lot about it. You know, Kristen and I are nutrition coaches. And so we have a lot of experience in working with athletes. I don’t particularly work with athletes in this realm or specifically for this reason because of, you know, they’re trying to fix disordered eating, but Kristen does. But it’s something she and I both experience regularly in conversations within the industry, within people that we know, and this is all about cutting, and when you should do it and why you should do it and should you do it, and we’re just gonna kind of flow with it and see where we go.
Kristin:
Yeah, for sure. So this, I want to just start this by saying that yeah, we’re going to be talking about some of the pitfalls of diet culture. We’re going to be talking about how diet culture seeps into a lot of things, even as strength athletes and I want to make it very clear that I am not fit shaming anyone. If you want to be really ultra lean and you want to diet that is 100% your prerogative.
But, sometimes, that comes at a cost of your performance, your recovery, and your health. And so as a sports nutritionist, my entire job is to keep athletes healthy, to keep them training hard, to keep them meeting and exceeding their goals, to get them recovering really, really well.
I see people coming to me, having done a lot of things that they thought were the right thing. They thought it was the right thing to do because they were influenced by diet culture and they didn’t even know it. And so we have to do a lot of work to get them mentally out of that space so that they can properly fuel their body.
Mary:
Yeah.
Kristin:
So one thing that I see happen a lot with newer lifters, when I take on beginner lifters, is they want to cut a weight class even before their first meet or into their second or third meet because the women that they’re competing against are so much stronger than them. Which breaks my heart because the way to be on par with those women is not to diet down to another weight class – it’s just to spend time getting stronger.
You may be competing against women who’ve been lifting for 10 years. You cannot yourself to that. And that’s the part that I see happening a lot with beginner lifters is that they think like, “Oh, well, my numbers would be really good for the next weight class down so let’s just cut down to that weight class and then I’ll be more competitive. But if you’re a brand new lifter, you’re not supposed to be competitive.
Mary:
And by “brand-new” we don’t mean people who are just like picking up a barbell for the first time. We also mean people who are new to the sport within like two years of being in the sport. If you have just started powerlifting training or weightlifting training within the last two years and you don’t have a history of already lifting, strength training, and now you’re just specializing or you don’t come from other sports like gymnastics. I know we have some very elite weightlifters who came from the sport of gymnastics who kind of exploded in a very short period of time. Those are not the norm. If we were looking at data and all of us were data points in this big graph, those would be what we call outliers. Those are the ones that we can’t define the norm expectation on because they are just unique experiences that we can’t define as normal.
For most of us, it’s going to take a couple of years before we even have the numbers to place, to do anything maybe nationally or internationally if that’s your goal. And I need you guys to understand that is okay. You are not less of a lifter. You are not more of a lifter if you are able to complete those goals in a shorter amount of time, or in a longer amount of time. It just matters that you get there and you keep putting in the work. You know, if you are continually looking at the weight class below you and constantly making yourself smaller, you’re never actually going to get stronger. And if your goal is to get strong and to hit numbers, you have to spend a significant amount of time making that your primary goal. And like Kristin said, if your primary goal is actually to be lean and you just love competing in powerlifting, fucking great! Yeah, love that.
Kristin:
Yeah, do you! That’s awesome.
Mary:
We love to define our goals and make goals priorities, but if your priority goal is strength, if your priority goal is to make an international team or make a national record, or even lift locally and be the strongest local lifter, that means strength is your number one goal. That means that cutting and dieting and looking to the other weight classes should fall to the wayside. If it affects your number one goal, it shouldn’t even be a conversation until maybe it becomes a big conversation, just like it is with elite lifters. Like, “Oh, if I sit two kilos above the weight class I’m going to compete in, I have a competitive advantage cause I can lift like right at the tippy top of my weight class and try to get stronger that way.” But even those lifters eventually have to go up. Even those lifters have to go up.
Kristin:
Right. Yeah. And we’ve talked too about the ideal body fat percentage for putting on strength and it’s not ultra lean.
Mary:
No, it’s not. Especially for women.
Kristin:
Right. And again, if that’s your goal, that’s fine. It’s okay, but you need to be aware of that then that you are probably sacrificing some strength. And if you’re okay with that, cool. Then I’m okay with it. But you can’t have the best of both worlds, right? You cannot be ultra ultra ultra lean year round all of the time, lke you’re about to put on a bikini and step on a physique stage and also be the strongest potentially you ever could possibly be. It’s not going to happen. There’s a trade off. You can’t be constantly dieting.
Now, I want to talk too though, because I know that there are a lot of women that get into lifting because they may be needed to lose weight for health reasons and lifting was the form of exercise they really liked. And so I know that there’s a lot of you out there that that happens too, and then you do find that maybe you are a little bit competitive and like, okay, great. So you may need to be losing weight for potential health reasons. We know with COVID that the people that contract COVID that are obese have worse outcomes. So, we can’t say that body fat percentage doesn’t matter because at the ends of the spectrum it does matter, right? It’s in the middle where it’s like, 5-10 pounds is not really gonna make that much of a difference in terms of your lifting. So, those people that need to lose weight for health reasons that are lifting, great, do you, but don’t diet continuously. You can’t be dieting continuously and also be trying to hit bigger and bigger numbers. That’s going to be a recipe for disaster.
I like to say you have to earn the right to diet. We’re seeing more and more nutrition coaches talking about this and it makes me so happy because this is anti-diet culture here, right? Diet culture is telling you that there is something wrong with you, no matter how you look, there’s something wrong with how you look and it pervades. It’s like this blanket over our heads and we’re trying to look at ourselves in the mirror through that. And it’s really detrimental.
Mary:
I think I can speak for both of us, but correct me if I’m wrong, Kristin – one of the most frustrating things is when we have a client who we are working towards what we think is their number one goal. And let’s say their number one goal is strength and we set up everything so that that’s their number one goal and we’re working towards that. And then every single time something comes up, it’s like, actually the number one goal seems to be aesthetics. Like, “Well, I can’t believe I gained weight this week,” you know, blah, blah, blah. When we’re talking about weight instead of your strength….listen.
I want to help you reach every single goal that you want to do. It’s why I’m a coach. It’s why I do what I do. I want you to be as good as you possibly can be with your goals. I need to know what those goals are. I need to know the honest priority of those goals. If your honest priority is “I want to lose weight first.” Great. Well, I mean, not for me just because of the population I work with, right? But for most macro coaches, let’s say if your number one goal is weight loss, go rate. That means we can go HAM on that. We can really focus on that. Your strength may suffer a little bit. We’re going to try to not have that happen. We’re gonna try to go as slow as possible, but if I know where your priorities are, I can better coach you. If you tell me your priority is strength and yet every conversation we have seems like your priority is weight loss, it’s very frustrating for me as a coach because I don’t know where I stand and I don’t know how to help you and all we want to do, we want to help you.
Kristin said at best what we were texting back and forth. She’s like, “Listen, we’re exhausted. Please help me help you. How can I help you? I can’t give you a magic pill that’s going to make you lose weight and get strong. Listen, if I did, I’d be a billionaire. It’d be over for everyone. Right? I wouldn’t be here. I’d be making so much money, but that pill doesn’t exist.” It doesn’t exist. You kind of get one or the other. Right. And if we end up choosing strength, which a lot of people do, even though, you know, we still have dieting in the back of our mind, then we have another issue. It’s well, okay. So I’m not going to choose to lose weight. How, how do I accept where my body is right now?
Kristin:
Right? Because diet culture teaches us that no matter where our body is right now, we don’t like it.
Mary:
Right. It’s bad.
Kristin:
No matter what, no matter what it looks like, it’s bad. That’s what we’ve been taught. That’s what we’ve been programmed to think.
Mary:
Wait, let me say something. I don’t want to say this as a knock for other coaches, but it is a theme that I see and since we’re hot and heavy right now, let’s just go ahead and say it. Especially in the intuitive eating space, this is a big issue that I see and I don’t like it and it makes me nervous every time I see it:
When skinny passing white women – particularly white women it usually is – contort their body in the mirror and say, “Look, I still have rolls.” It’s like, wait a minute. We’re not like…no. Your body just exists. Like we don’t need to contort our bodies to show that there are still parts of our body that we hate. That’s not what we should be doing. We should be showing how powerful our body is, or how much we’ve accepted our body, or maybe bodies aren’t even part of the conversation.
I hate making my body a part on my social media. And if you choose to do that, that’s fine. But that’s the reason I never make my body a part of a conversation on social media because it shouldn’t be part of the conversation. I am an athlete. I am a coach. I am a foster mom. I’m a wife. My body, as long as it functions, I don’t fucking care what it looks like.
Kristin:
Right? And we need a lot more of that. We need a lot more of that. So pointing out parts of your body that you don’t like are only making this problem worse.
Mary:
It only feeds diet culture. It only shows like, “Look, there are parts of my body that I do hate, look at all these things I hate.” It’s like, that shouldn’t even be a conversation. Your body exists to get you through this life. Take care of it. Be healthy. That’s all that matters.
Kristin:
We spend so much time and energy thinking about what our bodies look like.
Mary:
Oh my God. So much.
Kristin:
And it’s…from someone who’s been there, that’s really exhausting. Focusing, which I think is what brought so many of us to strength training, right? Into lifting is realizing what our body can do, focusing on what it can do and pushing the limits and finding out that we are strong and powerful in ways we did not know.
Mary:
And finding a space that it was not the main topic of conversation. But over the last few years, it has seeped in so deeply that a powerlifting community, a weightlifting community just looks like a diet community. It just looks like a fitness community. It just looks like we idolize really lean people lifting heavy weights and think that that’s the norm.
You guys know we’ve talked about this before: The way that some people say really, really lean and continue to get really, really strong is not natural. You get what I’m throwing down and that’s no hit on them. If that’s what they choose to do, that’s what they choose to do. But you need to have the full picture of the conversation. They’re not just lean and getting strong. They’re having extra help.
Kristin:
Mary’s afraid to say it, but I’m not. They’re using performance enhancing drugs. And that’s a part of the sport in some federations and it’s fine.
Mary:
It’s fine.
Kristin:
It’s fine. I do not care if you do that, I do not care. Just be cautious who you’re looking up to and who you’re following because if you’re trying to look like someone that’s on performance enhancing drugs, and you’re not willing to take the drugs that they’re taking, you’re never gonna look like that person.
Mary:
You’re just beating yourself up.
Kristin:
You’re never to look like anyone else anyway. Even if you did their exact same training regimen, their exact same nutrition regimen, their exact same performance enhancing drug regimen. You’re never going to look like them because you are not them and you have different genetics than them. So, take that with a grain of salt. Just be the best that you can be, support your body, keep it strong, get your body really, really strong. STOP dieting, stop it. Stop stop stop.
Mary:
Yep. And if you do see lifters who are lean and who are very muscular, also keep in mind that maybe they’ve been in the sport for 20 years and they’ve been fueling their body and maybe even dieting and doing all that cycle for 20 years and that’s just how their body looks after 20 years, right? You’re not going to get that amount of muscle overnight or in two years or in three years or in five years. It takes time.
Kristin:
Right. So, if you are listening to this and you’re still like, “Yeah, but I’m still gonna diet,” which is fine. Like I told you, I’m not gonna, I’m not fit shaming anyone if that’s what you want to do, then that’s what you want to do. But you need to earn the right.
So, this is how you earn the right to diet: You have not dieted in three months, six months, 12 months, maybe. You’ve not dieted in a while. That’s number one.
You can’t diet if you just dieted three months ago. You can’t start a new diet if you just unsuccessfully were doing a different diet.
Mary:
Yeah. We can’t jump bandwagons.
Kristin:
So, that’s first and foremost. Number two, you can’t have a lot of stress in your life. So dieting – being in a caloric deficit – is a stressor on the body, plain and simple. You are not giving your body all of the calories that it needs in a day to support all of its processes. That’s how we lose weight. It is a stressor. If you also have work stress, relationship stress,
Mary:
Pandemic stress!
Kristin:
Pandemic stress, all these other stressors, probably not a really good time to put added stress on your body.
Mary:
Right. Yeah. And a lot of my clients are having this conversation right now of like, “Well, I’m very uncomfortable in my body and I want to change it.” And I am not an intuitive eating coach that’s like, “No, you can never diet ever again!” I think there’s a time and a place, but that time and place has to come after you’ve truly recovered. And that could be I always say a minimum a year of no episodes, of restriction-free eating and feeling really confident of where you are. And also with the willingness that if things start to turn south when you diet, you stop immediately. You don’t try to force your way through. You have a really good feel of everything.
Kristin:
Right? Cause you work with a population of people that have a pretty extensive history of disordered eating, maybe even leaning towards eating disorders.
Mary:
Right. And so, I’ve been telling everyone who we’ve been having this conversation with of, “Listen, I get that. You’re uncomfortable in your body. I’ve been there. I get it.” I was able to successfully diet way after I recovered – way, way, way after. Like two years after I recovered. And I get that you’re uncomfortable. First of all, you need to give yourself time to fully recover. But second of all, keep in mind that we’re already starting from a level of stress we’ve never had to deal with ever before. And we’ve been dealing with it for a year nonstop, whether you know that it exists anymore.
This is just like sleeping. When you sleep crappy all the time, you don’t really know you’re sleeping crappy until you have a really good night’s sleep or a good week of sleep. You don’t really know how crappy it feels. We don’t know what life was really like anymore prior to this year of complete stress. So we don’t know, we don’t know what it’s like. So, I tell everyone that have this conversation with whether you’re my client or not like, give yourself, give yourself time and give yourself at least the permission to not do anything drastic until we’re back to a semi-normal, until you can kind of breathe again.
Kristin:
Yeah. You’ve got to be in a good rhythm of life in order to diet. Which also, funny that you mentioned sleep because that’s another one of my requirements: If you’re only sleeping five hours a night, you have not earned the right to diet. You need to sleep. You need to be getting 8-9 hours of sleep a night consistently. Then we can add in this other stressor of a caloric deficit. But if you’re only getting five hours of sleep a night, that’s not enough. Your body’s stressed out. You’re not, it’s not going to be a good scenario for you to be dieting.
Can you diet without having done these things? Sure you can, but you’re probably digging a bigger hole for yourself in the long run. And that’s a problem. Everyone’s thinking about what they want right now. I want this right now. I want to lose 10 pounds yesterday.
Mary:
I want to be as strong as this person today.
Kristin:
Exactly. But we have to think long term. So sports and athletic development is a long-term pursuit. You’re going to be doing this for years. Years, if you do it right. So if you start off by competing and dieting way too early, you’re not going to reach the potential that you think you’re going to reach, that maybe you could have reached. If you just spent time in maintenance, getting stronger. I’m not even, I’m not saying that you have to be in a surplus and gain weight, but certainly you have to spend time at maintenance.
You have to learn how to properly fuel your body for a while. And then once your body’s really well fueled, you’re sleeping well, you’re managing your stress well, then we can go, okay. You’re probably in a really good place to be in a caloric deficit. And even then with some people, I have had this happen with clients, we’ll think, “Okay, you’re ready. Everything has looked good for months. I understand that you want to lose some body fat. You want to lose the baby weight. You want to lose the COVID weight. You want to lose whatever it is, whatever it is, you want to lose it. And I support that. Let’s go, let’s do it. And we’ll see immediately stuff pop up. It’s like, you know, they immediately start binge eating or they immediately start sleeping poorly or they just feel really cranky and crabby. And some of that just happens in the first couple of weeks of being in a caloric deficit and they’ll bounce back. But sometimes they don’t. And those are the people where your body wasn’t ready to start dieting yet. We need to give it more time to be fueled.
I brought up bingeing and I just want to comment on that because one of the things that I see happen most with the population of athletes I work with, not Mary’s population, they’re different populations. Mary works with people that have more of a history of disordered eating than I do. Some people come to me that have some disordered background, I think a lot of us have because of diet culture, but I find that so many people think that maybe they have a binge eating disorder because they can’t stick to their quote unquote diet. They just never really ate at maintenance before. They were never properly fueling their body. Your body has built in mechanisms for survival to get you to eat more and so people mistake that as bingeing when really your body was saying, “Please, I need more food. I need more calories. I need more sources of energy.”
So, make sure that before you diagnose yourself as having that, that you’ve spent some time actually truly at maintenance and fueling your body consistently for a while, because I find 9 times out of 10, those habits go away.
Mary:
Yeah. Well, and also keep in mind that binge eating disorder comes from severe restriction over time and it becomes a habit. Not like a, not like a good habit, right? It’s not a good habit to have, but it’s one that just happens. If you, let’s say you’re dieting for 10 years of your life, you’ve just built 10 years of binge eating as well or nine years of it. And so it becomes a disorder because it becomes a habit. And so, the first step is you have to feel your body and then you work through the binges.
But I also want to say that whenever we say the word “maintenance” on the podcast, in DMS, with conversations with other people, we get this deer in the headlights look of like, “But I don’t want to gain weight. I don’t want to be in a bulk.” And that is diet culture. All that is is diet culture teaching you that if you’re not dieting, you are exploding. If you are not always working to be smaller, you are going to be bigger.
And first of all, there’s nothing wrong with being bigger, nothing wrong at all. It is what it is. Right? But diet culture has taught us that smaller is good, bigger is bad. Hunger is good, fullness is bad. And so if we say “maintenance” immediately, we get the panicked look of, “No, no, no, no, no, no. I, I, I, first of all, you hear, I don’t, I’m not going to change. My body’s not going to change.” Which is not true. It’s not true. It’s so frustrating. Your body’s going to change. It’s just going to take time. You’re going to build muscle. You’re going to fuel properly. You’re going to feel great. It’s going to change maybe.
Kristin:
“Maintenance” does not mean staying the same. I have heard coaches say that and it drives me crazy. It does not mean that your body’s not changing. If you are giving it the stimulus, the training stimulus to put on muscle and put on strength, your body’s going to change. So being at maintenance for 10 years does not mean that your body didn’t change in 10 years. I promise you, if you gave yourself 10 years at maintenance and you trained between three and five days a week, hard and heavy with proper deloads, you will be shocked at what happens to your body in those 10 years. You will be utterly shocked
Mary:
In three months! Your body will change. It will not be the drastic six ab transformation that we see on a lot of these transformation photos, but it will be a big change. And also keep in mind, maintenance calories do not stay the same for your entire life. When you put on muscle, you need more food, you need more food to fuel those muscles, right?
And so if you go back to Kristin’s example, 10 years of heavy pushing and on maintenance, you will probably be eating a lot of food to sustain that muscle growth and to sustain that muscle in itself. And so when we say “maintenance” and we don’t blame you guys for this at all, this is not your fault. This is the culture that we live in. This is the diet culture. This is what they taught us, is that when we say maintenance and you freak out that you’re going to gain weight, or you’re going to stay the same, it’s just not true. It’s just not true.
But also, this brings us to the other thing that we need to talk about in that staying the same and accepting your body, where it is right now. And I know that that is a hard conversation to have. It is a conversation I have, you know, 14 times a week with every single client, whatever it is. It’s a conversation that we have to have, but so many of us have avoided for so long. And so, we have to take the time, especially if we haven’t earned the right to diet, we have to take the time to learn, to accept our body where it is right now.
Kristin:
Yeah, definitely. I have…so there was a time in my life I was ultra lean and decided this is not really a healthy place for me to be. So I am now not ultra lean, right? The things that I don’t like about my body right now are the same exact things that I didn’t like about my body before I was ultra lean and while I was ultra lean. So guess what? I probably need to learn to accept them because I literally could not have lost any more body fat. So, just know that a lot of the stuff that you think you don’t like you, I know this, like some people are going to feel completely deflated when I say this and I don’t want you to feel that way. You might just need to accept because they might not change. That’s as simple as that.
That was actually really powerful for me when I was 15-16% body fat, very, very lean. And there were things that I didn’t like, and I went, “Well, I can’t possibly get any leaner. These things clearly are not going to change. I also feel like crap, so I’m not going to stay here.” It was very powerful for me to recognize that and accept that. I would like for you guys to learn from my mistake and not do that. I don’t know how we get to the point of accepting our bodies, except for tuning out diet culture and recognizing how powerful our bodies are and how wonderful and amazing they are in all of these amazing things that can do that have nothing to do with how they look. I don’t know how we get to that place.
Mary:
This goes back to what I was saying before that if there was a magic pill, if there was some type of secret formula that we could give to you guys that would cure you of this, that would make you love and accept your body the way that it is, I promise you, we would give it to you. I wish it was easier though. Like, I wish we could just give you something that would just make it better cause it’d be so much easier. But there is no such.
The thing that I, what really helped come to terms with, with this was a few things. One was that I realized that while I was losing weight, because I thought that it would make me a more valuable person in society, that people would look up to me more, truly the only opinion of myself that mattered was mine and only I then could change how I felt about my body. If I asked my partner, my husband, if I looked fat in some clothes or if some clothes made me look good over others, his opinion wouldn’t matter. Like, yes, he’d be nice and whatever, but I would always question like, “Well, are you saying that, just to say that? You know, do you really feel that way?” So the only person that I know that I can control that I know I can be honest with right now is myself.
The other thing is I think the industry and especially…so I’m kind of in like the strength industry and the intuitive eating space. One thing that is really exploding in the intuitive eating space is body positivity but also body neutrality. When I tell clients, you know, we have to learn to love our body, sometimes they’re like, I don’t know how to do that. And I’m like, that’s fine. We just need to find our space to be body neutral. You have to find a space to just accept your body. You know, you’re still, there’s still things about my body I don’t like, I don’t love. But I’ve accepted them and I’ve learned that no matter what I do, even at my leanest when I was my youngest, they were the same. They were the things that I kept trying to change and they never changed. And so just being able to be neutral with my body, thank you for being a body. Thank you for existing. Thank you for not hurting. That’s all I can do.
And know that it takes time. Sometimes it’s sold to us as like, you just gotta fake it till you make it. And I hate that saying. I hate that saying so much, but it does take time, right? It takes, it can take months. It can take years. It can take a long time. Some people, it takes decades to accept your body, but it’s not really like it’s not like a weight loss journey where, okay today’s the first day I went in to start loving myself. And then the next day. It’s just every single day you have to push through negative thoughts and you have to find the beauty and either neutrality or positivity.
Kristin:
Yes. And I really like the term neutrality because it’s like, “Okay, yes, I have this cellulite. And what, and what does that mean?” It means nothing other than I have lumpy connective tissue. It’s very, very, very common. It doesn’t mean that I’m less worthy of love or money or work or respect. It doesn’t mean any. It just means that that’s how I’m made. And so what, so I think that is actually a really powerful thing when we catch ourselves, like, “So what if I have that thing? So what does that mean about me?” It doesn’t mean anything about you.
Mary:
Right. And if you’re trying to change your body to be accepted by someone you love or people who are close to you, first of all, no. Second of all, find new people because I can’t tell you the time that I’ve ever thought of valuing Kristin for the way that her body looked.
Kristin:
You don’t?!
Mary:
I don’t, I’m so sorry. I support you in however you want your body to look and whatever you want to do to your body because it’s your body, but I support you because you’re my business partner and my friend, and you have a great mind.
Kristin:
I thought you liked me cause I had jacked arms.
Mary:
Okay. Oh. Well, we’re learning a lot of things today.
Kristin
Totally kidding. I thought that’s why we had this podcast.
Mary:
Yeah, that’s right. I am just trying to get you to a space that can get you close enough I can chop off your arms and keep them as my own.
But this is a great example! This is a great example. Kristin is genetically built in her upper body. She is. Like, she is just built in her upper body. And no matter what I do, I will never look like Kristin in my upper body, ever. Because my arms and my body just does not look like hers. And that’s okay. Sometimes I look at her arms and be like, “I want guns like that.” Yeah!
Kristin:
My dad has totally jacked biceps and I don’t think he’s lifted a weight in like 40 years.
Mary:
RIGHT! It’s totally genetic. This is a great example. Like you can’t compare yourself.
Kristin:
Exactly. Do not compare yourself to other people in terms of how they look, in terms of how they perform, in terms of how strong they are, because you are not them. Their journey is different than your journey.
So, going back to where we started, which was strength, do not confuse performance, nutrition with physique nutrition, which we talked about on the last episode, but all of that, the overarching theme to all of that is diet culture and start becoming aware of how that is seeping into how you think of yourself.
Mary:
Yes. This is a conversation I have with my clients all the time. It’s like, and it’s always, I love my clients dearly because whenever we have this conversation, this is how this comes out: “Well, I, you know, I have to stop eating by seven because, you know, I just have to,” and I always ask them, “Well, why? Why do we, why do we have to do that thing? Why is that thing? Something you have to do? Is it a medical reason?”
“Well, no, no, no. It’s not medical.”
“Okay. Do you just not like being full when you sleep? Cause that’s a valid one.”
“No, no that’s not it.”
“Okay. Then why?”
“Well, I guess because forever I believe that I would put on weight if I ate past seven.”
And you’re like, “There it is.”
There’s the rule that we have arbitrarily built an entire part of our lives around that has no justification in science or anything. And it’s these things. This is why it takes so long to recover from disordered eating because there’s very specific scenarios, there’s very broad scenarios in which these rules will come up and you have to work through them.
If you think that something is a restriction for you or you can’t do something, you have to take a step back and ask yourself, “Can I physically not do that thing?” Like, I can’t do the splits. I am not trained to do the splits. I couldn’t just drop into the splits right now. Is it something that medically I can’t do? Like people say, “Well, I can’t eat wheat.” And I’m like, “Okay, well, do you have a gluten gluten sensitivity? Or are you celiac? Do you have celiac disease?”
“No, I just, you know, I use, I cut out bread for a long time and then I added it back and made my stomach hurt.”
“Yeah, cause you hadn’t had it in a long time. Why don’t we why don’t we get you tested and see if it makes sure that that’s not the case or is the case?”
If it’s not something you physically can’t do and it’s not something that’s medically related, likely it’s founded in diet culture. It’s like 99% of the time.
Kirstin:
Absolutely. And this whole, something else that is founded in diet culture, losing one pound a week.
Mary:
Ohhhhh.
Kristin:
Where did that come from? We’re all different sizes. One pound a week for someone really small is a lot. One pound a week for someone who’s not that small might not be very much. Like what, where does this come from? One pound a week?
A lot of the times people will come to me and they’ll say, I have a meet in six weeks. I need to lose six pounds. And I’m like, Oh, I mean, okay, for some people that’s going to be great for other people. That’s going to be horrific. We can’t do that.. So, I also just want to say that if you do go to a coach and you have a specific amount of weight that you have to lose in a specific amount of time, be prepared to have a conversation about it because weight loss, we think that we can just do all these calculations and do everything perfect and plan it out perfectly and while that is the way that we do it, it doesn’t mean that that’s how your body’s going to respond. It’s very difficult to predict how your body is going to lose weight. It just is. There’s a lot of different things that go into it so it’s like way oversimplified when we say, “Oh, well to lose one pound a week, you just need to cut out 3,500 calories a week” and boom, six weeks, you’ve lost six pounds. Eh. Maybe in six weeks, you lost 10 pounds. Maybe in six weeks, you lost two pounds. There’s a lot of things that go into that.
And some of that is adherence, right? Like adherence to the plan. And that’s one of the things too that I should have put in my prerequisite for dieting. Can you follow a plan right now? Can you, if you’ve got to cut for a meet, can you be strict right now?
And can you be strict for the long haul? However long it is. Can you be that strict and that on point for that long? And preferably not be, if you have a lot of weight to lose, like if you’re at the top of one weight class and you need to go to the top of the next week class down, you need to maybe break that up into several different dieting and cycles.
And remember that, I said that in order to diet, you shouldn’t have dieted at least within the last three months, you shouldn’t have dieted, but I would prefer six months or even longer. So now we’re talking about long-term game plan to get to that weight class so that you get there healthy and so that you get their hitting numbers that you expect to be hitting. Because the worst thing that happens, the worst thing that can happen is when you think, “I’m going to hit these numbers and everything’s going to be great,” and you don’t either even qualify for meet that you were trying to qualify for because your performance suffered so much because you spent so much time dieting, or you just have a really crappy meet because you spent forever dieting and you never put on the strength that you needed to actually compete at that level.
Mary:
And be prepared. So this one’s for you guys listening. This one is directed at you. If you feel called out, that’s because you should feel called out. Okay? And I mean, this peace in love, with so much love. Okay?
If you, when you come to a coach who’s supposed to help you with nutrition, you have to remember in theory, they are the expert in Kristin’s case, she is the expert. I mean, I don’t know if you could know more about coaching macros then my girl, Kristin. So, if you come to a coach and you have expectations that are high for your goals, and that’s great, we support that. We support high expectations. You need to be prepared for them to say no, for them to modify the plan, or for them to have a really concerning discussion with you about is this good for your health? Because they are the experts. There is a reason you hire a coach. You don’t hire a coach to go along with what you want to do. They are there to support you in your goals because they know more about whatever it is – training, nutrition – to help you get there in a better way. It’s like, if you did it yourself, you have to create a new path up the mountain. They have a path up the mountain, they’re cutting it for you. You just have to follow along.
If you come to a coach and you are demanding them to do magic, and then you are upset at them when you can’t follow plans or when they warned you about how this plan will work out, and it works out horribly because either you couldn’t follow it or it was too drastic, or they say no, or they flat out say, no – it is not the coach’s fault. They are the expert. They know where the limits are and they are trying to protect your health.
I think we have this mentality that the customer is always right. The client is always right. And I love you guys so much and this is my eight, my Enneagram eight coming out. I love you so much but that’s not the case. You have goals and we have the expertise to get you there. You have to fucking trust us. We’re not here to sabotage your goals. And if you, and let’s say you can’t follow plan – don’t play the blame game and say, it’s our fault that you couldn’t follow plan. Be honest with us. This is the thing I tell my clients all the time. I can’t help you if you’re not honest with me. If you can’t tell me that you had a binge, this is a no judge zone. I’m not going to chastise you, and Kristin would never chastise someone for having a binge, she would never make anyone feel less than for something falling apart like that. Even if it wasn’t a binge and you just had an off day. If you are dishonest about how you had that day and you blame it on someone else or something else or your coach, I think that says a lot about you. And I mean that was the most loving way.
Kristin:
Yeah, it is, that is a frustrating thing when clients have a difficult time with adhering to their plan, and then obviously then the role of a coach is like, “Well, what can I do to help you adhere to the plan better?” Like what, where do we need to go from here? Where’s the trouble at? And I have that conversation weekly with clients because I mean, the reality is sometimes, sometimes people can just jump into a nutrition plan and do what is expected of them and everything falls in line. But not everyone is wired that way and a lot of people they’re coming from a place where we need to lower expectations here because you’re now maybe an adherence is a difficult issue for you. Maybe you’ve never in your life paid attention to what you’re eating. So, the role of a coach is to say, “Well, let’s back up. If you’re having problems with adherence, where are these problems occurring? And what do we need to do? What do we need to work on to get you from 50% adherence to 70% adherence?” And that’s a difficult thing. It’s a hard thing to do.
Mary:
I’m sorry.
Kristin:
We can’t do the work for you. We want to, we give you these plans and we want to do the work for you, but we cannot. We cannot. You’ve got to do some of the work and I think being really honest with your coach too, and saying like, “Well, this is where I’m struggling. Then we can help you better when we know those things.”
Mary:
Yes. And I’m sorry if you felt called out, but I think this is something that is very perpetuated in the industry. You know, coaches are, this is why Kristin and I get so exhausted and very frustrated even though we love what we do. Coaches don’t have magic. We don’t have magic wands. We can’t make things all better, even though we wish we could. All we can do is support you and your goals. I tell my clients, this is all one big experiment. We’re trying to problem solve together and figure out how we can take the principles that I know work for almost everyone, and how can we make them and mold them to fit your life?
Not everyone’s life is going to be the same. Some people thrive on one thing. Some people thrive on another. It’s just about finding what works for you, and then being able to support your ultimate goal.
For me and my clients, it’s usually number one: Repairing your relationship with food. Everything else falls to the wayside. I’m sorry. Even strength, performance nutrition at the beginning falls to the wayside because sometimes it feels too restrictive. And then once we feel comfortable with that, we start weaving in and adding in some of that performance nutrition stuff so we can then work on your other goal, which is strength.
And for Kristin, it might be, if you come to her and say, my number one goals is aesthetics and to lose weight, fucking great. She can keep you from losing too much strength and maybe even getting a little stronger and losing weight, as long as she knows what your goals are. And if your goal is strength and we’re not worried about weight loss, fucking party time!
Kristin:
I know! Those are my favorite. That’s my favorite. But if you’ve ever come to me and just like, I just want to get really strong and learn how to fuel myself. You might not know this, but like I do a little happy dance at my desk. I’m like, ahhhh!
But you know, what’s funny about that is right now on my Fiercely Fueled app, I have this 8-week performance nutrition program running, so people are going through there, they’re learning the principles of eating for performance. And I think we’re maybe on week three or four, I can’t remember. But at any rate, I can’t tell you how many people signed up for that program thinking it was a weight loss program.
Mary:
Because it’s on nutrition.
Kristin:
It’s on nutrition.
Mary:
And when we think “nutrition”, we think “weight loss.” And that’s the conversation that has to change. Nutrition is not weight loss.
Kristin:
Nowhere in there did I say anything about weight loss. Everything was about performance nutrition. No.
Now, sometimes the flip side happens and that people hear “performance nutrition,” and they think “gain weight.”
Performance nutrition really just means fueling your body in such a fashion where you perform and recover really well on a consistent basis.
Mary:
On a consistent basis.
Kristin:
So that therefore, if you are performing better every day and recovering better every day. Your strength can get exponentially better every day.
Mary:
Every day.
Krisitn:
Every day. But anyway, I thought that was funny. I was like, “Why, how?”
And I was like, nutrition. People just hear nutrition and they think weight loss.
Mary:
When we think of, “we need to take our nutrition seriously,” the first thing, and I had a post about this a week or so ago, the first thing that you think of is “I need to lose weight.” And that’s not what it is.
Kristin:
That’s diet culture.
Mary:
That’s diet culture.
Kristin:
That’s diet culture seeping in to everything that we think about.
Mary:
Fuck diet culture.
Krisitn:
Exactly. Tired of it.
Mary:
But anyway, that was our high horse. You have any questions, you can always DM us and ask us. And we, this whole thing, I know I got a little hot and heavy there, a little heated…everything that I try to say and try to send to you guys and talk to you about you guys, Kristin too, is so you can get better. And so you can see these things too. You can see things through our lens cause we want you to get better. We want you to live a life free of diet culture. We want you to love your body or accept your body, be neutral about your body. We want you to be at peace with what you’re doing, but sometimes we have to have these hard conversations in order to get there.
Kristin:
Yeah. And I definitely, I think that the longer I’m in this industry, the more willing I am to have these hard conversations with people. If you don’t want me to be your coach because I have these hard conversations with you, then okay. Find someone, well and I mean that in the best way, but I have people’s best interests in mind. I’m not going to let you do something that I think is detrimental to your health, into your goals. And if you want to do it anyway, you can easily find someone else who will help you do it.
But I’ve gotten to the point, I feel like after being in this industry for over a decade now where I feel like my work…I’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg with teaching people how to fuel themselves and how to stop dieting all the time. And the longer I do this, I feel like the louder I need to get because the people in the back aren’t hearing me and I’m not picking on anyone. It’s just that diet culture is so much louder. That voice is so much louder and so much more pervasive than the voices of, “Hey, you’re an athlete. You should probably eat to support your needs.”
Mary:
Yep.
Kristin:
It’s boring. It’s not sexy. Except for when you PR like mad, then it becomes sexy.
Mary:
Or when you become a world champion in a few years, then it’s sexy.
Kristin:
Exactly. So spend the time, do the work, learn how to fuel yourself, stop dieting. If you are going to diet, make sure you’re doing it from a healthy place. And we’re tough on you. If we sound tough on you, it’s because we love you and we want you to be strong and reach your potential.
Mary:
Yup. And with that, we hope you guys have a good week and we will talk to you next week. Bye!
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