Transcript
WEBVTT
00:00:02.279 --> 00:00:28.949
Hello, and welcome to teenagers untangle the audio hug for parents going through the teenage years. I'm Rachel Richards and today we have a very special guest to help us understand how to talk to our teenagers about eating in a way that will help them to be healthy without developing an eating disorder. At least rash is co author of the intuitive eating workbook, which is now in its fourth edition. I recommend it on the website of the UK is eating disorder charity beat.
00:00:29.519 --> 00:01:06.840
When I originally researched how to talk to teens about eating for episode nine, I discovered that many experts are using mindful or intuitive eating as part of their programme to treat patients who've developed disordered eating patterns. In fact, I really struggled with disordered eating right into my late 20s When I finally realised that the answer was to slow down and look inside, listen to my own body, not what anybody else was telling me I should be doing. Our teens, both boys and girls are very vulnerable to this diets and weight are so much a part of Western culture, that it's hardly surprising that they often struggle to understand how to eat well.
00:01:07.469 --> 00:01:25.500
Given that Elise has written the intuitive eating workbook for teens, I thought, well, she'd be perfect for our podcast. In this interview, she talks about the critical role we play in helping our teenagers develop a healthy relationship with food. I began by asking her to explain what Intuitive Eating actually is.
00:01:25.890 --> 00:01:31.260
It's a very important question because there are so many myths out there in the universe about what it is.
00:01:31.469 --> 00:01:51.239
Some people think Intuitive Eating means just eat whatever you want, anytime without thinking about it. You know, it's a free for all. That is not intuitive eating, Intuitive Eating is officially it's a self care process. That helps people get reconnected with their internal wisdom about eating. I mean, the majority of people are born with all of this wisdom.
00:01:51.780 --> 00:02:41.849
And it's guided by 10 different principles, which are guidelines, they're not rules, there are no rules in intuitive eating. But I have a favourite definition of it that I came up with a while ago. I call it dynamic interplay of instinct, emotion and thought. And this comes from the parts of the brain, that kind of rule us I would say, there's the instinctual part of the brain, that's the survival part. That's the part that wants to keep us alive. So that's where our hunger, our fullness, our you know, taste or satisfaction, all of that it's instinctual. It's innate, it's within us. We also have an emotional part of our brain, the limbic brain. And that can affect our hunger and fullness, it can affect a lot of things. And so we want to make sure we take into consideration emotions. And then we have the cognitive part, the neocortex.
00:02:41.849 --> 00:02:59.009
And that's the rational thinking part of our brains. So intuitive, it incorporates instinct, yes, but we want to look at how emotions are affecting our instinct, our instincts, and how to use that thinking part of our brain to make the best decisions for ourselves to sue their emotions.
00:02:59.849 --> 00:03:19.500
And also, besides emotions, there are things like illness that can affect that can affect our eating instincts. I have had several clients who have unfortunately had COVID and lost their taste and smell, just speaking to someone last night who hasn't had it for six weeks.
00:03:14.520 --> 00:03:45.090
And they talk about noticing texture, noticing the, the aroma of one another, you know, the smell, but they're noticing the texture, and they're noticing what it looks like and using other senses to get some satisfaction. But fortunately, I have not had the illness, or you know the virus and God, I've been able to avoid it. But I know for me, if I didn't have my taste and smell, it would be a very emotionally painful thing for me, because I love to eat.
00:03:45.389 --> 00:03:47.610
And I love to have satisfaction.
00:03:45.389 --> 00:03:47.610
So and
00:03:47.610 --> 00:03:54.900
you mentioned you mentioned how we are you're saying that we all pretty much born with this, but then what do you think happens?
00:03:56.520 --> 00:05:46.980
Okay, so we have a very prevalent diet, culture and wellness culture that is around us all the time influencing us, especially in the world of social media, it's constantly affecting us. So diet culture promotes a culturally thin ideal. And to achieve that ideal. It basically says you have to look at what you eat, only eat certain foods, you know, elevates certain foods and pushes down other foods and picks the people who are death and ideals, the ones who get the most goodies in life. And it's very painful. And it's an I asked people to have a lot of self compassion for living in this world with this influence, to think that the only way you're going to be happy in this world is to be in a smaller body. So often parents who have either lived in larger bodies, their whole lives and it felt you know, some of the effects of that were they've been bullied or they've been just insecure about it. They want to prevent their children from having that this so they start to to control their children's eating, thinking, and I, you know, I understand that their loving parents are not trying to harm their children, thinking that they're going to help them. But in fact, they're increasing the risk of the children developing an eating disorder. I'm a certified eating disorder specialist as well. So I work with many teens, many adults with eating disorders. And often it starts in the home when they're very young, when they're given a message that maybe they shouldn't eat so much, or maybe they shouldn't eat something with sugar in it or, or tea, maybe they should change their bodies. I have 114 year old client, who really hadn't had any eating issues until she had had some some pretty difficult emotional trauma in her life.
00:05:46.980 --> 00:07:17.459
And she ended up going to food as a way to soothe herself and had gained an number of pounds and quite a bit of weight, and was very unhappy. And she told her parents, I'm unhappy. And they said, Well, if you're unhappy, there's something you can do about it. And that began a severe restriction dieting, to the point of anorexia, and we're working together to try to, you know, get her back to a level of balance. And so I think people, I mean, to answer your question, I think young people are often pulled away from the wisdom that they have in their bodies, by parents who are trying to control their eating by doctors, by doctors, so many clients have said, it began when I was 10 years old, and I went to the doctor, and of course, this person was entering puberty, and especially if it's a mob, I think of all genders, but little girls certainly will gain quite a bit of weight to get their first period. And the medical community is often very wait centric, and believing that weight is an indicator of health, they will say to a parent, that or why have them watch it, you know, let's make sure that they're not eating so many cookies or whatever. And they get the message from the paediatrician that they're not okay the way they are. There's many factors that pull people away. And it's, I mentioned diet culture, it's also wellness culture, which is this misbelief, that our, our health is basically determined by what we eat, and how we move our bodies. And that is not the whole picture. So
00:07:17.759 --> 00:07:39.689
interesting, because we also did an episode recently on this is affecting boys as well, where they're starting to dry in bulk, but they're going the opposite direction and thinking the only way that they can prove themselves and show themselves to be strong, you know, healthy men is to be really bulky, which is also set a similar thing where they're not really paying attention to their needs.
00:07:40.319 --> 00:07:58.680
Well, and they're altering their diets trying to gain as much muscle as they can, when they're actually restricting. They're harming themselves. They're often restricting carbohydrates, increasing protein to a level that isn't particularly healthy for their kidneys. And it's very similar. It's just a different manifestation. But
00:07:59.790 --> 00:08:30.209
yeah, well, exactly a talk to me about the diet, diet, and why like, why there's such a problem. Oh, my goodness, everybody has tried to die. Everybody has. I mean, when I was a teenager, I was living with a family who were constantly on diets constantly, everybody was worried about being, you know, fat, and we're not going to eat this. And, you know, it's it's sort of endemic in our culture. And we're all trying to lose weight. We're not I'm not that. But you know, this, this diet, culture is very powerful. Yes. Especially
00:08:30.240 --> 00:09:02.759
in you know, the last. I don't know how many years it goes up and down, though there are there times in history, when people weren't dying, when people who were the smaller people were considered the ones that weren't, you know, the ones that were elevated as the thin people are today. So it's, it's the here and now it's today's world, that people are dying, because they are presented, all of this misinformation that their lives will be so much better, if they are smaller, they'll be healthier if they're smaller.
00:09:03.179 --> 00:09:25.889
And the only way that especially a lot of the medical community, counsellors them is to go on a diet, but 95 to 98% of people who go on diets may lose some weight, but within a period of time they gain it back and two thirds of them gain gain even more weight back. So why is that? Okay? Many reasons. So remember, I was mentioning the instinctual part of the brain.
00:09:26.250 --> 00:10:43.379
That's the part that wants to keep us alive. That's not the part that knows that there's a restaurant on the corner or a grocery store around. It's not the part that can think through that's not the rational part of the brain, it's instinctual. So it senses that the person is eating less because what does the diet do? It tells you to eat less tells you to eat less, it tells you what foods you can eat, how much of them you can have. So once the instinctual part of the brain senses, this lack of nutrition, it will put every force into nature to get you to gain the weight back so The first thing that happens is everything slows down in the body. I'm sorry, you're fighting your own body, then well, you are You can't fool Mother Nature. So you're. So the first thing that happens is you'll slow your metabolism. Because it makes sense. You know, if you're taking in less, you know, energy, the only way to stay alive is to slow down what you need. So the metabolism slows down. And your blood sugar often drops, and which will sometimes cause you to go out and get well why it failed. Why diets fail, is that not only is your metabolism slowing down, but you are given messages to eat more.
00:10:39.870 --> 00:11:41.669
So if your blood sugar drops, you're immediately going to go out and get whichever you can get to get your blood sugar back up. And there's a chemical that the brain the instinctual part of the brain releases, which is called neuropeptide Y. And this chemical basically send you out to get as many calories and carbohydrates as you can get for survival, your fullness, hormones are decreased. Your hunger hormones are increased all of this in the service of trying to get you to stay alive and gain the weight back. So that's from a physiological neurochemical standpoint, from a psychological standpoint, it's powerful. So, Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who he created something called the hierarchy of needs. And he said, and believed that we are We humans are driven by our unmet needs, the things we don't have is what we are the things that we want.
00:11:37.379 --> 00:12:50.519
So when you're dieting, you're not getting, necessarily all the different foods that you would like to have. Or if you are, you're not getting as much as them as you need. So eventually, that level of deprivation is so powerful, that you have a rebound from it, and you're going to get in as much as you can. When people say the diet failed. Now, they say they say they failed. No, it's just that there's a psychological force, that is getting them to go and get what they want. And they didn't have the other psychological piece of it, which I find to be very powerful and is one of the underlying principles of my work is that there's a lack of autonomy when you're on a diet. So you don't get to do what you want to do, you are being told from an outside force, as I said, what to eat, how much to eat, when to eat. And ultimately, if you have a healthy personality, a healthy ego, you are finally going to rebel against it. And that's why from a psychological standpoint, along with the deprivation, diets just aren't going to work.
00:12:47.100 --> 00:13:09.330
If you talk to any one of these people that you said, are on diets, they're going to tell you, it's not their first rodeo, they've done it many times, and then they keep trying new ones, and none of them ever really works. And for the very tiny percentage of the population, you know, that maybe three to 5%, that it might, or two to 5%.
00:13:09.330 --> 00:14:06.389
I think that that it could possibly work for those are the people that either had no emotional connection to food, I once had a person come in to fix my air conditioning and in the place I was living. And he asked me what I did for a living. And I told him and he said, Oh my goodness, I didn't even know I was fat. My wife told me I was fat. And to stop eating potato chips, I just stopped eating potato chips, and I've lost a bunch of weight. Well, this is a person who died. You know, he would didn't have an emotional connection, he wasn't even aware. So that's a tiny part of it. The other part of that tiny percentage is actually disordered eating people who carry on for the rest of their lives, being really carefully it is being very restrained in what they're eating. And they don't let themselves have the bread at dinner. They don't let themselves have a glass of wine or a dessert or, and that's disordered eating. So it really doesn't work for anybody. A diacid natural, though,
00:14:06.659 --> 00:14:08.789
fascinating.
00:14:06.659 --> 00:14:13.769
And of course, that rebellious side is going to come out quite strongly in your teenage years.
00:14:13.769 --> 00:14:16.980
I mean, you're going against everything that it is to be a teenager.
00:14:17.460 --> 00:15:03.179
So wise, yes, Rachel so wise. So I'm very much a proponent of Eric Erickson's model called the eight stages of man. And I always laugh and say, Well, if he were alive today, I'd call him up and say, you know, Dr. Erickson, it's got to be the eight stages of human, but that's my feminist part. In any case. His belief was is that human beings go through a series of stages, the stages he's talking about, they're basically challenges each stage that we have to go through from birth, you know, into becoming an adult that gets us ready to have a healthy personality and live in this world. So the first stage is called trust versus mistrust.
00:14:57.480 --> 00:15:37.470
First, and this is where infants begin to trust. If they're being fed regularly, if they have a caregiver who is attentive to their needs, they cry because the hunger doesn't feel good, they get fed, and they start to trust that hunger is a reliable signal for them. And they also start to trust that they will be cared for in this world. So they accomplish this task. And they end up with trust, if they don't, you know, like orphans in a, in an institution that are fed on not on demand, but you're on a schedule, and they're, and they're not being nurtured.
00:15:34.440 --> 00:15:54.629
They're not going to very much trust in this world. So this is from age from birth until about age 18 months, when this period of time this first stage. The second stage, which is 18 months to three years is called autonomy versus guilt and shame.
00:15:50.190 --> 00:16:11.970
That's the time when you talk about the terrible twos or the, you know, the favourite word of a toddler is No, and that's a sign that you've got a child that is developing their own independence, their own autonomy. In the beginning, day one, they're completely dependent on, you know, the person who's caring for them.
00:16:12.210 --> 00:17:13.619
But as time goes on, when they learn how to walk, they know they can walk out of a room and walk back and somebody will be there, they start to want to do things on their own, they want to play with the toys they want to play with, they want to wear the clothes they want to wear, they want to eat the foods that they want to eat. And if they are too controlled at that age, that's the beginning of this rebelliousness, so to a level that can be detrimental, and it repeats itself in teen years. So a healthy teenager, a healthy teenager is going to rebel in some way. They're not always going to do it in a destructive way. But you know, you hear about my teenage daughter or son or whatever, so difficult. So yes, rebellion is a very reactivity, rebellion is a very important thing to take into consideration. So I am trying to help people start trusting their own internal wisdom, and especially teenagers and parents of teenagers to, you know, search for children also to supply the food. But that's it step back, let them eat what they want to eat, and as much as they want.
00:17:13.619 --> 00:18:20.519
Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it, because with my, both my daughters, because I came from the background I came from, I was very conscious about not mentioning anything about the way they looked. Or I tried not to mention anything about the food, although I did talk about healthy foods. So I'm sure I made lots of mistakes along the way, because I had studied nutritional therapy, and I'm really interested in food. And the real tipping point was when they went to senior school, because before that, they really, I mean, they've told me they weren't conscious at all about what they look like. And I think it was when they started going on social media, and they saw images of what other people consider to be good looking, and started to panic. And the girls around them. I mean, my daughter said to me, what you get is you get an idea of what you should look like a desire to look like that, but no proper information about how that happens. And so she said, I was surrounded by girls who had disordered eating, they were all, you know, in some way or other doing very strange things with their food in order to try and control themselves.
00:18:20.670 --> 00:18:37.529
So as a parent who might be listening to this programme, what what, what can we do to try it? Because I think I think that's a big stage, then I'm sure there are other stages, but I think that's, you know, preparing for that, and when they're going through the what can we be doing?
00:18:38.130 --> 00:18:45.660
Okay, so we start with something I said before, which is self compassion.
00:18:41.250 --> 00:19:22.079
Parents are as affected as you know, everyone is affected by the media and culture. And often parents are modelling behaviours that are promoting some, you know, difficult feelings for their teenagers. So if you have a parent who is weighing themselves in front of, you know, the teenager on a regular basis, or is saying, Oh, my God, I just can't believe my body looks so different. I've got to lose some weight or things that you hear all the time. And when I say complex, have self compassion, people are trying to be good parents. They don't mean to be harming their children.
00:19:22.529 --> 00:20:37.650
And they are as influenced as anyone as I say by what they're hearing out there. But it isn't it is. It is fear based and I am begging parents to start by doing a deep dive into their own relationship with food. Kids, little kids or any age child is going to want to mimic what the parent is doing. I was at dinner one night and I saw a darling little toddler with suspected was his parents. And I saw that what he was doing was he was picking pieces of lettuce off of his mother's salad not not eating what he had in front of him, but picking them And it was that, you know, mommy's eating salad. That's what he wants, if you tried to get that child to eat salad, he'd say no. So we have to be very aware psychologically of how our children are watching us all the time and wanting either to be like us, or the opposite of us, I want whatever stage they're in. But we have to really be committed to healing our own relationships with food on our body, and be committed to not doing the kinds of things that are going to create problems, in terms of eating and body. As I say, weighing oneself saying negative things about oneself.
00:20:32.759 --> 00:20:51.480
That's where it starts. And so if there is a parent who has done that all their lives, and they're now though hearing things out in the media, oh, your kid should be healthier, you should eat, you know, she should only serve them fruits and vegetables and whole grains.
00:20:51.480 --> 00:20:54.690
And, and they think, well, they just want to be good parents.
00:20:54.720 --> 00:21:25.950
Okay, so I'm going to push that on my teenagers, let's say at this point, that teenager in that developmental stage of rebellion, and asserting autonomy, is going to push back against it. And when they get out of their sight, especially when they have a car, and they can drive, I don't know how you're in England, you're just there's so many cars, but they're going to find a way to eat in a different, you know, an opposite way. So one of them so.
00:21:19.380 --> 00:22:33.869
So the parents role is to help their child that teenager feel safe, like that infant that I talked about, that there will be enough food in the house, so it'll be plentiful, it'll be available. If you know, the best of all worlds parents are eating with their children. I mean, I'm realistic, you know, kids have different schedules. And they can't always do that. But at least a few times a week, a few breakfasts a week, especially breakfast is the most important, sit down and eat with them and eat in a way that you are free as an adult, as a parent, as a parent, to not judge food to not be trying to lose your lose weight, but to eat, you know, a wide variety of foods, including the foods that we deem, quote, unquote, unhealthy, people call them junk food, I don't like that word, I think junk means it's gonna go in the garbage can. And I think we all need to have lots of, you know, foods that just give us simply give us pleasure without worrying so much about what they're, you know, nutritional content is. So the parents job is to provide the food, the parents job is to be around as, as well as they can sometimes both parents and you know, everybody's working, and they don't have enough time.
00:22:33.869 --> 00:23:31.559
So again, not to judge oneself, but to do the best you can to be a good role model for your children, and not to say a word to them about how much they should eat, what they should eat, or what their bodies look like, not one word ever. Not no conversation about you mentioned earlier, healthy, you know, healthy eating, no conversation about that. And something I'd like to tell your listeners that might help them accept that comment with a little less worry. And stress is something called the social determinants of health, which most people don't know or have not heard that term. People believe, as I mentioned earlier, that our health is determined. There's the determined by what we eat and how much we move. Yet in population studies, when we've looked at populations of people, we find that actually only 10% of their health is determined or affected by what they eat and how much they move their bodies.
00:23:31.920 --> 00:23:57.150
Other 90% If you're thinking of it and kind of a pie shaped, you know, chart, there's a there's a part that's genetics that we don't have control over. There's a part that has to do with substances are you taking in harmful substances that's going to affect health, but the rest of it the 70% is based on one's social experiences in life? Do they have access to enough food?
00:23:57.420 --> 00:24:11.789
Do they have access to medical care, to mental health care? Do they have access to education to socialisation? Do they have people around them a community?
00:24:05.880 --> 00:24:29.069
What in their lives is causing increased stress? Oppression if people are in marginalised bodies, if they're, you know, all the different forms of marginalisation, race and religion and gender and sexual orientation and larger bodies.
00:24:24.480 --> 00:25:10.049
So you know, people who are walking around in this world and are being judged all the time, their stress levels go up, and that affects their health. So really, that whole 70% of what affects health has to do with stress, because stress increases cortisol, which is our stress hormone. And when we have high levels of regular high levels of cortisol, it's pro inflammatory increases risk of heart disease and diabetes. So we want to lower stress. And so when you think about if you're walking around all the time worried about what you're putting in your mouth, and oh my goodness I shouldn't eat that because it's not healthy, quote unquote. Or I should be exercising this amount of time or else I'm not going to be healthy. There's no science to support that.
00:25:10.619 --> 00:25:14.099
Fascinating.
00:25:10.619 --> 00:25:32.190
And to allay the fears of parents who are going to be listening to this and thinking, Wait a second, you're saying I mustn't say anything? Where are my kids gonna get their information from? How are they supposed to know? So my daughter when she says, Look, I wanted to do X, Y, Zed, but there wasn't any information. And so I've resorted to bad eating, what do you what
00:25:32.190 --> 00:26:38.849
do well, she invited you in you see, she asked you for advice. You weren't caught, you know, orange crossing a boundary and telling her what to do. So as a responsible parent, you sit down with her and you let her know that so much of the information she's getting is from social media, and you know, everything around her and the culture and that what she's learning is not really accurate. And then you can supply her with information that includes we need to eat enough, we need to have sufficient amount of food, we need to eat regularly throughout the day, we need to have variety in what we eat, doesn't have to be at every meal has to be a balanced dietitian, I happen to be a dietician, meal. But that, you know, throughout the day, we get plenty of different types of foods, and that we listen to our body. So that's the whole point of intuitive eating, is being tuned in attuned to what our bodies are telling us. So if if you're hearing out there, oh, don't eat breakfast. And by mid morning, you're so hungry, you can't even think in school. Your energy levels are low, you can't do your sports Well, or you're can't sleep at night, because you haven't had enough to eat.
00:26:35.880 --> 00:26:56.369
Your body's telling you you need more food, your body's telling you you need to eat in the morning, there were studies done of children in school, those who had breakfast did much better in school than those who did not have breakfast. So the first piece of it was this boundary thing she asked you to help her.
00:26:52.079 --> 00:27:39.509
So you were you can then give her some really straightforward information about the things I just said and also inform her that we live in a culture that, you know, just basically idolises people in smaller bodies, and the majority of people in the world are not genetically programmed to be in very small bodies. And so one of the things that I talk with my team clients about, and I'm so impressed with these young people I talk to I talk about social justice, I talk about I asked them, Do you believe that every person you know deserves to have kindness deserves to have equality deserves to be treated, you know, treated? Well deserves respect. And everyone?
00:27:34.980 --> 00:28:16.529
Well, of course, Elise, well, then how do you feel about the fact that you're trying to make yourself smaller, which actually is saying that people in larger bodies are not good enough? And so you're, you know, doing that it's part of oppression in the world, it's part of the anti fatness fat phobia. And they're struck by this because they want to be good people in this world, and they want to accept all people, but they're realising that they have internalised fat phobia, which just perpetuates that anti fat, this in, you know, anti the belief that people should not be in larger bodies. It's complicated. Very complicated.
00:28:16.559 --> 00:28:29.039
Yes. So if you were going to talk to a parent now and say, okay, here are the tips that you can use to help your kid eat more intuitively.
00:28:24.750 --> 00:28:36.509
And I'll say this, because I, I battled a lot with my weight and ease or, you know, the diets and the doing this and doing that.
00:28:33.210 --> 00:28:36.509
And, and I finally cracked it.
00:28:36.539 --> 00:28:51.630
And it was, I'm going to eat what I want, when I want to eat it, and I'm going to eat the thing I want, right then. Right then as a chocolate bar, I'm not going to eat my way through the entire kitchen, pretending I don't want the chocolate bar, I'm gonna eat the chocolate bar.
00:28:48.630 --> 00:28:51.630
And that made me happy. And
00:28:51.630 --> 00:29:00.960
you start by letting them know that they were born with this wisdom that when they were infants, they knew when they were hungry, they cried and you fed them when they were full, you couldn't get another ounce of milk into them.
00:29:01.500 --> 00:30:38.369
That they when they you started feeding them foods is at six months old, or whenever it was that you fed them. They love some foods and the others they spit out they didn't like it. So to assure them that the wisdom is in them that they it's been taken away from them by so many things out there so many influences. Mostly at this age at this time in life, the social medias, what's really affecting them more than anything? When I was young, there was no social media, you know, there were movies and TV, make you feel bad magazines, and social media is really present all the time with them. So you assure them that they will be able to be in touch with this wisdom. As long as they feed themselves sufficiently. sufficiency is important. You need to have enough food if you eat less than your survival part of your brain knows that you need you're not going to be able to tune in to hunger or fullness because you're going To get these messages to eat even more than your body needs, because the survival part of the brain is trying to keep you alive. So eat enough food so that you get accurate messages from your brain around hunger and fullness. Listen to your body, ask yourself, whether you're how you feel as a result. I mean, there's certain foods that sometimes don't agree with some people. slicks are not influenced by hearing out in the culture Oh, that that's not good for you. There's, there's something called the no SIBO effect, we know placebo placebo is you think something's going to make you feel good. So it will know SIBO as you think it's not going to make you feel good.
00:30:35.160 --> 00:32:14.130
And so you don't feel good. So if they're hearing all this misinformation about carbs, or sugar, or whatever that is going to be bad for you, then they're not going to feel well. So we want to, we want to make sure that they're being very clear that they're listening to their body without prejudice, being prejudiced about how they think of foods should make them feel very interesting. There have been a couple of studies that validate this, there was one that was done on gluten. You know, this whole rage about gluten is bad for you. Well, if you have celiac disease, which a tiny proportion of the population has, they cannot eat gluten, gluten is actually poison for their bodies. But the majority of all other people have no problem with gluten. So this researcher recruited a group of people for a study on gluten. And he could these people thought they had problems with gluten. And he put them in these groups and one group who gave them a high gluten intake, and one was kind of medium and one no gluten. They all had stomach aches afterwards, even the group that didn't have gluten, but believed that they would, you know, they figured out this is a study on gluten, so they want to see how I'm going to feel. Same thing with sugar. They did studies with with kids with us, they put them in groups where some had high amount of sugar, some had a little sugar, some had no sugar, they had I guess they may have used I don't know artificial sweeteners, or whatever they did, but they had no sugar. They all the two groups that thought they had all the sugar felt awful, hyperactive, all these, nobody had sugar in the study.
00:32:10.470 --> 00:32:50.309
But when they were told that they had it, you know, so we're very influenced by what we hear out there. And so to be very critical of what they're hearing and go to some sources, real, true scientific sources, to get their information, don't just believe what your girlfriend told you, your boyfriend told you, you know that this is right or wrong. And ultimately, that their bodies will, you know, help them live a life, that they take the care of their bodies in terms of not thinking they have to be perfect not thinking they have to eat in a perfect way, moving their bodies for joy, not feeling like they have to exercise in a drudgery way, then they're going to be just fine.
00:32:50.940 --> 00:33:00.420
So if if somebody was to get your work with the team workbook, what might they expect in terms of the things that the team would go through with that workbook,
00:33:01.140 --> 00:33:14.789
I wrote this book in teen language directed at actual teens. But interestingly, I, I know very much, because I do a lot of inner child work that we all have an inner teen.
00:33:15.269 --> 00:33:22.980
And so it's also directly to the teen. And each of us, I'm pretty old, and in my entertain is quite, quite an act very quick.
00:33:23.849 --> 00:34:22.230
So I talked to them about the concept of autonomy, and the feelings they have when they're trying to be over, you know, when they're being over controlled and what the natural reactions they have to that and help them guide them along to see that this need for autonomy, this need to not be deprived can be fulfilled by being an intuitive eater, that if they're going to follow any of these trends out there, it's taking away their autonomy. It's taking away what makes them the person that they are, and so that sometimes as a teenager, they have very little control of their lives. And so the one area in which they can take complete, you know, mastery of is what they decide to eat and how much of it. As long as you know, there's, there's a lot of people in this world who don't get enough food. So it's a privilege to be able to do this. So as long as you have access to enough food, you're in charge you eat what you want, you eat as much as you want.
00:34:22.469 --> 00:34:50.728
That was Elise rash, author of The intuitive eating workbook for teens, and you can find her contact details in the podcast notes. Full details are on our website, www dot, teenager's untangled.com where you can access all of our episodes and sign up for my newsletter. If you found this helpful, please pass it on to at least one person who might benefit. We always love feedback and you can leave a review on Apple Spotify or our website.
00:34:46.889 --> 00:34:51.179
That's it for now. Thanks for listening
