Pam Moore is an occupational therapist-turned-award-winning health and fitness freelance writer, speaker, and podcaster.
A regular contributor to the Washington Post and the author of There’s No Room for Fear in a Burley Trailer,Pam’s writing has been published in The Guardian, Time, Runner’s World, Outside, SELF, and Forbes, among others.
A body-positive health coach, certified personal trainer, six-time marathoner, and two-time Ironman finisher, Pam is also the host of the Real Fit podcast, featuring real conversations with women athletes about body image, confidence, and more. Her mission is to let women know they are already enough.
She lives in Boulder, Colo with her husband and two daughters.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Pam Moore about getting healthy by eating anything you want.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How imposing rules on your diet makes you want to want to eat the bad stuff.
– Why people can’t participate in intuitive eating if their end goal is to be thinner.
– How by the age of four, children become aware that thinner is considered more beautiful in our culture.
– Why many people eat past the point of being full.
– How food is not good or bad and how it’s not a moral obligation to be healthy.
Connect with Pam:
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@PamMooreWriter
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@pammoore303
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LinkedIn
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Links Mentioned:
pam-moore.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
xeroshoes.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
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Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
Word to hear. If you want to get healthy, one of the best things you can do is pretty much eat whatever you want. Oh yeah, that’s what I said. You heard me right. I’m going to tell you more about that on today’s episode of The MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, usually starting feet first, but now we’re going to kind of go gut first on this one. Because feet, they are your foundation, if you want to walk or run or play or hike or do CrossFit or yoga, whatever it is. We’re going to tell you about the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the outright lies you’ve heard about what it takes to do that.
I’m Steven Sashen, CEO of xeroshoes.com, your host of The MOVEMENT Movement podcast. We call it that because we are creating a movement that involves you, and I’ll tell you about how you do that in a second, about natural movement. We’re helping people rediscover that natural movement, doing what your body is built to do, is the better, obvious and healthy choice, pretty much the same way we think about natural food. And the movement part that involves you, that’s just sharing the information you get here or if you grab a pair of Xero Shoes and experience what it’s like to have natural movement. Not rocket science. Doesn’t cost you anything. It’s easy. All you have to do again is spread the word.
You can go to www.jointhemovement… Pardon me. Let’s try that again in English, www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You’ll find all the previous episodes, all the places you can download the podcast, all the ways you can interact with us on YouTube and Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. So let’s jump in and talk about eating whatever you want with Pam Moore. Pam, it is a pleasure to have you here. Why don’t you tell people who the hell you are and what you’re doing here?
Pam Moore:
Yes, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for having me, Steven. It’s so much fun to be here. Let’s see, I am a occupational therapist turned freelance writer. I do health and fitness writing for many outlets including The Washington Post, Runner’s World, Outside, Time, The Guardian, SELF, Women’s Running. And let’s see, I’m also a endurance athlete. I’m a six-time marathoner, two-time Ironman finisher, certified personal trainer. And what else? I have two children. I’m married, I live in Boulder, and been teaching and recycling for a very long time. I don’t necessarily want to say how long. And I’m a weight neutral health coach, and I have a podcast.
Steven Sashen:
Wait. Wait. Hold on. Wait. Wait.
Pam Moore:
Oh, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
A weight neutral health coach, let’s pause there. So I can guess what that may mean, but I want to hear you explain it because I love the idea. I just like the phrase.
Pam Moore:
Sure. I’m here to help people develop more healthy habits and be happier in whatever their movement routine looks like without a goal of weight loss. Should that happen because you change your habits and you’re happy with that, that’s great, but that would not be the goal. If you came to me and you said, “I’m here to lose 20 pounds before my wedding,” I would say, “I don’t think I’m necessarily the right trainer for you.” Or I might say, “Hey, can we dig into that? What’s that really about?” Because then we can talk all about how I got to that, because I wouldn’t have said that years ago.
Yeah. And I also have my own podcast. It’s called the Real Fit podcast, and it features real conversations with women athletes about body image, confidence, and more. And overall, I mean, it’s like I wear a lot of hats, but my overall mission is to help people have more fun with movement, and to tell women in particular that you are already enough. It doesn’t matter how much you weigh, it doesn’t matter how fast you are, how strong you are. What you are is enough, period, now.
Steven Sashen:
I love it. I’m very curious to hear more about weight neutral health coaching, especially given the setup that I said which came from you, which is if you want to be healthy eat whatever you want. And I have to preface this by letting you know I was hanging out with a whole bunch of healers of different kinds at some event one day, and they’re all talking about the different diets they’re on. And finally, I think there was a little pause in the conversation, I said, “Yeah, I’m on the I don’t know when I’m going to get hit by a bus diet.” And they all look at me. There’s another long pause and they went, “Oh, that sounds good.” Yeah, it’s just way better than anything else I could think of.
Now, I mean, that said, I’m not prone to doing something like sitting down with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and eating the whole thing. In fact, I think I have a pint of Ben and Jerry’s that I took two spoonfuls out of and it’s been sitting in my freezer for five years because I just haven’t had the urge for the flavor.
Pam Moore:
By the way, I want to make a caveat. If you have diabetes, if you have a seizure disorder that you’re treating with a ketogenic, there are medical conditions where no, I’m not a doctor, don’t take my advice, and I’m not a dietitian, but I think one of the reasons why you don’t feel compelled to eat the whole pint where most people will be like, “Oh, I can’t.” Or many people I should say, would say, “I can’t even have that in house, I’ll eat the whole thing.” We are inclined to eat the whole thing because we have rules in our head. It’s like you tell a child, “Don’t push that button.” What do they want to do? They only want to push the button. We’re not that far off from those little child brains that want what we know isn’t good for us.
And I’m telling you, I mean, I pretty much eat what I want, and that doesn’t mean that I eat 12 donuts today and macaroni and cheese every night. I have gotten to a place where I trust my body to know what’s going to nourish it, and I do eat my vegetables, and I’m not rigid anymore about what’s good and what’s bad, and I don’t binge anymore.
Steven Sashen:
You reminded me of a story and I’m very curious to hear your take on it. I’m taking a walk with a friend of mine. Actually, and I got to make a note about something that you mentioned that I’ve got to bring up. Hold on. Hold on.
Pam Moore:
Go ahead. Go ahead. The beauty of editing.
Steven Sashen:
No, I’m not going to edit. I’m just making-
Pam Moore:
Oh, you don’t edit? So, if I sound dumb, you’re just going to leave it?
Steven Sashen:
Absolutely, because I trust that it’s not going to happen. And if I sound dumb, I have no problem with that. It happens sometimes.
Pam Moore:
Okay.
Steven Sashen:
My fantasy actually is to do a podcast where the only thing that people respond with is by telling me I have my head completely up my butt. I think that’d be really entertaining. It hasn’t happened yet, unfortunately. So, and now people might just do it for the hell of it. But anyway, here’s the story and I want to hear your comment.
Pam Moore:
Sure.
Steven Sashen:
So I’m taking a walk around Wonderland Lake in Boulder with a female friend of mine, who says, “I’m just trying to listen to my body so I know what to eat.” And I literally fell to the ground laughing. And she says, “What?” I said, “Well, I know what your body wants to eat: french fries, doughnuts and ice cream. It wants calories that are going to sustain you, it wants fat and sugar. That’s what we’re wired to respond to. But what you’re actually saying is you’re saying that you have this idea you can do a thing called listening to your body, which means it’s going to tell you that you want some particular food that if you eat it is going to change your body in some way so that when it changes you’ll eventually be happy.” And I used to think like that, but I can’t find that thought anymore. And especially that last part, once you get to whatever that body shape or size or style or color or whatever you’re thinking is going to change, then you’ll be happy. That’s the part that’s the real problem in my brain.
But the first part is again, I know what I want to eat, it’s mostly chocolate cake. In fact, I said to my wife, “If I’m ever diagnosed with a terminal disease, I want you to know, I’m going to go on the all chocolate cake and Thai hooker diet.” And she says, “I don’t want you going to Thailand and coming back with some disease.” I said, “I’m not going to come back. I’m just going over there.” I said, “I’m doing it for you because you’ll be too distraught to take care of my sexual needs if I have a terminal disease.” So-
Pam Moore:
You are a gem. You are like a real find.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I say these things mostly in jest, but the chocolate cake part, absolutely true. The Thai hooker part, probably not true. And anyway, so but I’m so curious to hear what your response is to the listening to my body to know what to change my body into something that will eventually make me happy?
Pam Moore:
Well, yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there. For one thing-
Steven Sashen:
There is.
Pam Moore:
So what I’m talking about is something called intuitive eating, which is based on research, and it’s there’s a book called Intuitive Eating, and it’s by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, I believe. They’re two dietitians who wrote it in the 90s. It was groundbreaking at the time. I’m kind of sad that I think it is still kind of groundbreaking, because there’s 10 basic principles and one of them is you have to let go of the interest or the motivation to get smaller. You can’t do intuitive eating if you secretly, whether consciously or subconsciously are hoping that it will make you thinner.
It won’t work if you do it that way, okay? It’s not a diet. It’s not even, let’s eat moderately. It is literally going back to getting in touch with the signals that we all had when we were children, when everybody thought that our chubby thighs and our pot bellies were super cute and we weren’t aware. You are aware. By I think, even the age of four they say you’re aware that thinner is considered more beautiful in our culture. But we have these innate drives to know what we want. If you’ve ever seen a baby or a toddler eat, they’ll eat some of one thing and they’ll eat some of other thing, and then they’ll throw something on the floor. And they stop when they’re done and they will not eat more when they’re done. You can’t make them.
Whereas when I was I want to say younger, but I wasn’t that much younger, even like five years ago, I would eat past the point of being full because I felt like well, I was good all week. I ate salads all week, and now I’m presented with dessert at a nice restaurant. I really like this dessert and I’m eating it. Or I’m on vacation. I’m in vacation mode, man. Who cares if I am so uncomfortably full? Or Thanksgiving, it’s like, “Oh my god, today’s the day. I’m going to gorge today and tomorrow I’ll be good.”
And it’s I can tell you honestly since I’ve adopted intuitive eating, once in a while I overeat. It’s not the way I used to, like so uncomfortably full. And I don’t beat myself up about it, I’m just like, “You know what, I ate a little too much. Okay, moving on.” And I’m not nearly as inclined to feel like I have to have dessert just because it’s in front of me or just because my family… My family might go out to ice cream, and once in a while, I might say, “I’m not in the mood. I’m not going to have it.” I never used to do that.
Steven Sashen:
It’s so interesting because what you’re describing in a way is getting over I’m going to call it the derivative thought. And the derivative thought goes like this, the first thought is, “Hey, I’m going to eat a whole bunch.” That’s the first thought. The derivative thought is now all the thinking about how bad I feel because I did the thing. And so, it’s sort of like this is going to be a weird analogy, it’s kind of like when we’re procrastinating. The thing that’s more stressful is the complaining in our mind about procrastinating more than the actual procrastinating. Or if we’re not balancing our checkbook, it’s like it’s more stressful to think about how we haven’t balanced the checkbook than to find out the reality of what happens when we balance the checkbook. So there’s a derivative thought in what you’re describing that you just don’t have of the kind of oh, that was a good, oh, that was bad, oh, I should, oh, I shouldn’t.
Pam Moore:
Yeah, food is not good or bad. Food is not a moral thing. It’s not a moral obligation to be quote-unquote, healthy. And I would argue, I want to actually challenge you. You said the first thought… What did you say the first thought was?
Steven Sashen:
I don’t remember. Something-
Pam Moore:
Something about the food. This is a good food or this is a bad food.
Steven Sashen:
Not so much there’s a good food or bad food, like what I just ate is good or bad.
Pam Moore:
Yeah, that’s right. No.
Steven Sashen:
Good or bad food, but I ate too much or. Because I have a similar thing where every now and then I go, “I know I’m definitely going to gorge myself today and I love that.” I mean, it’s just I’m very aware that I’m going to do it because this is food that I adore. We used to go to this one Chinese buffet down in Broomfield that had six things that were so good and so ridiculously hypercaloric, but I was like, “We’re going to go do that. It’s going to be a blast.”
Pam Moore:
Well, and that’s okay. Food should be joyous. Food is a time. It’s pleasure. It’s lovely. It’s time to be social. It’s there’s so much cultural stuff around food, and we shouldn’t… It’s just so sad to me that we kind of ruin, I’ve ruined so many date nights and birthday parties and things just stressing about food. But I want to go back to that first thought, because I think the first thought isn’t about the food. The first thought is actually thinner is A: better; B: more lovable; C: more healthy.
We have all these misconceptions about what it means to be thin in our culture. And the truth is, the real truth is I was just reading this research that they say about 70% of what you weigh is genetically determined. It’s almost as dependent on your genetics as height is. And you don’t see people walking… You might see the odd person who’s like, “Oh, I gained a quarter of an inch from doing Pilates,” right? But that’s not typical. You don’t see people sitting around like, “Oh my god, I’m so bad. I’m five feet tall.” And I’m five feet tall. I’m just like, “Yeah, five feet tall. That is what it is.” But we are so conditioned to think, and I would even say the first thought isn’t necessarily thin is better, but even before that, it’s I’m not enough. And so-
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I would say it’s not even not as much enough as not right. Like the way I am now there’s something wrong with the way I am now. And by the way, I got to tell you on the height thing, so I do have a variation on that because I used to be 5’6″, but I have a broken spine, I’ve lost a disc. So now I’m 5’4″ in change. And I’ll tell you, the thing that’s so funny about height is if you read any article about human beings, if somebody’s short, they always mentioned that they’re short, and they mention it like it’s the reason that they’re behaving in certain ways. If somebody is tall, it doesn’t get mentioned at all.
So there’s this very entertaining thing about height that happens as well. I’m typically oblivious to it. Last night though, I was hanging out with a whole bunch of people who were all like 6’5″ and all I could think is if the world exploded right now and they only found our skeletons, they would assume these were two totally different species. I mean, we’re just not in the same universe. It was totally hysterical.
But yeah, the not right thing. And backing up to your point about how aware we are even at the age of four. This is definitely not four, this is maybe when I was eight or nine. I have a vivid memory of walking down the hallway in elementary school and pretending that I had muscles to flex. So it’s the opposite for guys. It’s like–
Pam Moore:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Bigger in some way. And I remember even at the time kind of thinking, “This is a little weird, but I’m still I’m going to kind of try and see if I can do it.” But here’s the question that I wrote down a note to. Given everything you’ve said, I mean, Boulder is a place that is hyper-hyper something when it comes to bodies supposed to look a certain way, and bodies that look unusually fit compared to the rest of the planet. So what’s it like having this perspective living in this crazy ass town?
Pam Moore:
It’s freeing. I will say that it’s really freeing. I’m so much happier. I think I’d be happier in any city, but yeah, I’m a lot happier because I think I fell prey to the comparison trap. You look at all the other moms and all the other women, whether at the gym or at the school pickup, and you’re like, “Damn, I want to look like that.” Now I’m just like, “Fuck it. I look like how I look. They look how they look. I don’t know whatever they want. Whatever, it’s their life.”
And I will also say it’s a little bit it can be isolating because I don’t participate in those conversations when my friends start talking about… Like right after I sort of adopted my new mindset and I was really feeling like, “This is good for me,” I remember going out to dinner with a couple friends and they were talking about intermittent fasting, and I was… I’m not here to evangelize the way I do things. You’re asking me about it, and I’m telling you. If someone doesn’t want to hear it or isn’t ready to hear it or is not interested, then it’s not useful. So, anyways, I just got up and went. I was like, “You know what, I had to pee this whole time and this is the part of the conversation that I am not going to be missing.” So I was just like, “I’m going to go to the ladies room.” And when I got back, sure enough, they were done talking about intermittent fasting.
So I try to tune it out. I try really hard not to try to impose my way of thinking on other people, but it can be hard. And I also sometimes I’ll be honest, sometimes I’m a little smug. In my mind I laugh it certain people I know, for example, who they’ll be doing like a cleanse, like what I think of as a very restrictive cleanse. They claim it’s for health, I think it’s for weight loss. And then we’re sitting around and they’re drinking so many Margaritas, and I’m like, “Do you know that alcohol is a neurotoxin? What the hell kind of cleanse is this?”
Steven Sashen:
I love that. I mean, my favorite thing about everyone’s diet, especially if they are trying to diet for weight loss, I go, “This is really simple. The research is very clear, it’s been unequivocal for well over 50 years, calories in calories out.” It’s all about what works for you to handle calories in, calories out if you’re trying to lose weight. Everything else is calories.
Pam Moore:
Yeses and no. Yes and no. There’s also hormones in play. There’s hormones, there’s stress, there’s a lot of things in play. Plus, there’s genetics, because that’s a thing some-
Steven Sashen:
Well, yeah.
Pam Moore:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Even with all of that, I’m not saying that you can become any shape that you want, but in terms of energy balance, energy balance, I mean, it’s thermodynamics, you really can’t violate the laws of physics as much as we think we can. There are things that affect that, but you can’t violate the fundamental laws of physics. But again-
Pam Moore:
Yes. And if you’re chronically hungry, it’s not sustainable.
Steven Sashen:
Not going to work. It’s all about fine tuning.
Pam Moore:
And if you’re not meant to be 20 pounds lighter, you’re just not going to. Yeah, and so as you were saying, number one, we know that 98% of people who go on diets do not maintain the weight loss. And then there’s this multibillion dollar industry telling us, “It’s not the diet that failed, you failed, you weren’t disciplined enough,” number one. And number two, we know science has shown that weight cycling as in losing a significant amount of weight and then gaining it back, that’s bad for your long term health, that’s bad for your metabolism, that contributes to diabetes, that contributes to cardiovascular disease. That’s not good. And weight stigma, going to the doctor and being told you need to lose weight, there’s a direct correlation between people who feel shamed by their doctor and people who then don’t actually want to see their doctor when they really need to for health reasons.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, that’s interesting. It reminds me, I have genetically high cholesterol. And so at one point I went to my doctor and they said, “Your cholesterol is high. You should stop eating meat.” I said, “I haven’t eaten any red meat or anything other than some fish since 1980 because I don’t like it.” I have a genetic thing where I don’t taste savory flavors, so I don’t eat meat because it just tastes like metallic mush to me. So I said, “Yeah-”
Pam Moore:
Oh!
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I know. So I said, “So I don’t do that.” They said, “Well, you should maybe get a little more exercise.” I said, “I’m a nationally-ranked sprinter.” And they’re like, “Oh, then uh…” And that was all they had.
Pam Moore:
Yeah, they just, they don’t get to know you. They don’t understand you. Yeah, that sucks.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I’m really curious about a lot of things. One is… Well, first of all, what’s so interesting about what you’re talking about with intuitive eating is that it violates the number one thing that people use to sell diet books that people believe more often than not, which is there’s a diet that works for everybody. There’s a way of eating that works for everybody. And that blows me away. I said to a bunch of paleo guys at the first paleo conference, I said, “You guys have this idea that this is the way everyone should eat and it’s very high in meat, which I don’t eat. But besides, I mean, it sounds silly that everyone should have the same thing. Why would I as a Masters All American sprinter eat the same thing as some Kenyan distance runner?” I said, “Look I’m a genetic freak.” And they said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Oh, for men over…” That time I was 46. “For men over 45, I’m one of the fastest Jews in the world.” And he was like, “Huh.”
Pam Moore:
Amazing. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
So and I said, “I don’t know one sprinter who isn’t on a high carb diet. I’ve never met a sprinter who’s paleo or keto or any of those things.” Sprinters tend to be on high carb diets. Power athletes, that’s the way we tend to be wired. So that one diet fits all thing is a problem. But anyway, that’s just my little tirade.
I really want to hear about A, your transition and what it was like making this move into intuitive eating, both practically and just psychologically. And as you work with people what you see with them, because I know anyone listening, some people are going to be thinking, “Yeah, that’s not going to work for me. I tried that and I gained 500 pounds,” or whatever thoughts they have. So let’s kind of break that down frame by frame so people can know what that process might be like.
Pam Moore:
Yeah, but really quick, I really appreciate what you said about how there’s no one size fits all diet for everybody. And I think it’s not just diet, and I’m sure you know this as an entrepreneur, there’s always going to be somebody out there selling you something that’s like a five step magic bullet, you’re going to make more money, get more clients, sell more stuff, lose more weight.
Steven Sashen:
You want to hear my fantasy? My fantasy is that someday Lane and I make enough money from with Xero Shoes that I can walk into a bookstore and buy every book that’s one of those quick fixes for whatever, for business success or whatever, and then I buy every one of them and I take them out into the parking lot and burn them.
Pam Moore:
I love it. Can I be part of that?
Steven Sashen:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Pam Moore:
I am so sick of this preying on people’s vulnerabilities, not just in their appearance but in all ways. If anybody is listening and they only have like 10 seconds to listen, here’s what I want them to know.
Steven Sashen:
Hold on. I resent that if anybody is listening thing. So, but what it is it really is just preying on a fundamental human psychological thing. We evolved to do this. We evolved to imagine the thing that we need to be happy in the future and then try to look for some retroactive path to getting there. The problem is we’re really bad at it and it doesn’t work, but our brains are wired to continue to do this because in simpler times you could reliably do that, you could figure out how the rain affected the growth of something and how that led to… I mean, there was cause and effect. It was much, much simpler. Now, we’re talking about things that for which there is no simple cause and effect.
Pam Moore:
There is no. There is no.
Steven Sashen:
But if you can-
Pam Moore:
You have to find your own way. And actually that’s a great segue into your actual question which was how did I find this? Because for me a lot of it was not just what do I want to eat, it was also wait a minute, who even am I and what do I want all around, not just food. But yeah, backing up. I don’t really remember a time when I didn’t think that it would be nice to be a little bit thinner. I never struggle with my weight. I’m not quote-unquote, I don’t like even using the word overweight because that implies that there’s a right weight to be, but for lack of a better word, never been really overweight. I had a phase in college where there was a lot of beer and late night pizza, but overall, I’ve been never had a doctor saying, “You should lose weight,” or anything like that. But always just feeling like, “Ooh, what if I could just take off five pounds?” And always kind of micromanaging my food.
When I was training for my first marathon when I was like 21, I distinctly remember the internet wasn’t what it was, it wasn’t really… I don’t know, I wasn’t googling like, what should you eat after a long run? I remember limiting the amount of even Gatorade I would drink during an 18 mile run, and then waiting as long as I possibly could until I was starving to have my bagel, which I allowed myself a bagel once a week as a huge treat but only after a long run. And then I wondered why I was sore for three days and couldn’t do a run again until Wednesday. I’d be on the elliptical Monday and Tuesday, and Wednesday I’d be like, “I guess I could run.” And I had no idea. I just didn’t know.
So, but that I really remember just obsessing about, I remember getting way too drunk when I was in my 20s because I thought alcohol has so many calories so I’m going to make up for it by not eating a big dinner, which is just terrible, terrible thing to do. Okay, so fast forward and I tried all these different diets, but didn’t admit to myself that they were in fact diets in my mind. I tricked myself into thinking these are for health. Like for example, the Zone Diet, it’s pretty restrictive. I will say the Zone Diet gave me an understanding of how protein can make you feel full for longer. It’s a great way to just make your meals go farther. I did learn that, but it made me crazy.
So I was kind of on and off the Zone for a while, then I’d be making these random rules like, oh, for example, if I knew I was having pizza for dinner, there’s no way I would be having a slice of bread with my soup at lunch. Too many carbs. Even eating a whole banana, they tell you bananas have so many carbs. I was scared to eat an entire banana. And-
Steven Sashen:
By the way, soup is just pizza deconstructed.
Pam Moore:
Oh, I like that. I like that.
Steven Sashen:
I think fundamentally, almost everything is pizza, some kind of bread, some kind of something, saucy something, some kind of cheesy or something topping. A burrito is pizza rolled up. A grilled cheese is pizza depending on how you do it, maybe without the sauce. I mean, almost everything is pizza if you really boil it down.
Pam Moore:
Everything is pizza. You could do a whole podcast on things that actually are pizza.
Steven Sashen:
I want to do that as a book, Everything Is Pizza, and just all the-
Pam Moore:
I love it.
Steven Sashen:
Variations of pizza.
Pam Moore:
I love it. Okay, so yeah, speaking of pizza, I do love pizza, that was a scary food or whatever. And then, let’s see, I got into… So I have a background as an endurance athlete, but then I got into CrossFit. And I think CrossFit is great. I’m not anti-CrossFit really, but just as a byproduct of getting into that culture I started following CrossFit accounts on social media. And a lot of people who do CrossFit also count macros, and they also, these people that want to sell you these macro counting programs, they’re posting a lot of before and after photos on Instagram. And that was very enticing to me. I was like, “You know what…”
I had this warped idea of from partly living in Boulder, partly being on Instagram, partly surrounding myself with these very fit people, going, “Fitness has to look a certain way. It has to be ripped abs, sculpted arms. I’m very fit. Why don’t I look like that?” I thought I should look like that. That’s the way to look. How do I get that look? Oh, okay, I count macros. So I was using this macro counting app, and for the first eight weeks it was heavenly. I was like, “Wow, I’m eating all this food and I’m getting so much more lean. This feels amazing.” But it was like prison because counting macros is it’s like a Tetris game. At the end of the day I’d be like, “I’m just going to eat a Babybel cheese and a spoonful of mayonnaise.” It’s eating the weirdest thing just to get in your macros.
Steven Sashen:
By the way, the phrase, the concept eating a spoonful of mayonnaise, to me is like saying poke your eyes out with knitting needles. There’s no food I like less in the world than mayonnaise other than egg yolks, which is–
Pam Moore:
Oh, I hate egg yolks. Oh, I like them cooked. I don’t like them hard boiled, I like them the other way.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, scrambled eggs is okay. Any other form of egg yolk, again, egg yolks and then mayonnaise. My wife apparently makes great deviled eggs. Whenever she has to make them, I leave the house.
Pam Moore:
Oh, wow, you hate them. Okay, so yeah, so I’m doing this macro counting thing. I’m making myself crazy. I’m measuring my food. I’m weighing my food. If we’re planning to go to Dairy Queen, I’m like, “Ooh, Dairy Queen is good because all the nutrition stats are online and I can modify my dinner to make sure that I don’t overdo my carbs and my fat, and we can go to Dairy Queen as a family and it will be so carefree. And it’s absolutely not carefree. So I’m in this mental prison. And this started, I want to say I was 38, 39, and it was right before… I’m now for context, I’m about to be 43. Right before my 40th birthday. It was the week before. I had been quote-unquote good about counting my macros and then I’m getting really hungry, really, really hungry because I had gone to a new level and it was like, levels of the plan.
And I’m on my computer with this little chat bot thing and I’m like, “I’m really hungry, what should I do?” And it’s not responding and I’m feeling crazier and crazier. And then it’s like, “Well, are you eating a lot of fiber?” And I’m like, “Fiber’s all I fucking eat,” because it’s low calorie. I’ve been eating cabbage. I’ve been eating… And then I just had this moment of clarity where I was like, “I’m about to turn 40 and I’m asking a chat bot that I don’t even know if it’s a human, I don’t know what it is. It might be like, who knows what it is? And I’m asking it what to eat. This makes no sense.
So it started as I was like, “Fuck this. For a week I’m not doing macros, and I need a break.” And then that turned it into a lifetime because over the next few days I just had this, it was almost like a light switch, it was like this thing I’ve been doing asking sources outside of myself what I should eat is sucking the life out of me, it’s getting me out of touch with what I know that I need. Because the thing is we do know what we need, but we don’t listen. So I just, I let that all go and I started reading. I read the Intuitive Eating book. I read The Fuck It Diet by Caroline Dooner. Caroline Dooner, I think. I found this whole corner of the internet that’s all like, #healthateverysize, #ditchdietculture, stuff like that. Just started learning more about how insidious diet culture is and how we’ve all been brainwashed. And so right before my birthday I had this sort of come to Jesus, which I’m also Jewish so I don’t even know, but I had this come to Jesus thing.
Steven Sashen:
Well–
Pam Moore:
Hmm?
Steven Sashen:
I said, “So was Jesus.”
Pam Moore:
Yeah, that’s right. And because it was my birthday, we had our kids stay at their grandparents and my husband and I went to Austin for a long weekend, just the two of us. And it was the best vacation of my life because it was the first time that instead of being in this mental quote-unquote, vacation mode, I was just on vacation. And I just sort of said to myself, “You know what you’re going to eat, instead of stressing like you always do on vacations, you’re going to order what you want, you’re going to eat what you want, you’re going to stop eating when you feel full. And then you can start eating again when you feel hungry. And it’s that simple.”
And I knew that everything kind of had changed for me because on the last day of the trip… Well, actually we went for sushi one night, this really nice multicourse. Oh my god, it was so nice. And after, my husband was still hungry and he got like late night pizza, and I normally would have partook, but I was like, “I’ll have a bite. I’m not into that, you eat that.” And then the next day right before we were leaving, he was like, “I got to try this ice cream place that everyone’s saying is so good.” And I was like, “You know what, have it. I’ll have a bite. I don’t want it.”
And then in the airport, there was this amazing looking cookie, and I looked at it a few times, but I said to myself, and this is what I do when I get a little bit in a funk, I say, “You have full permission to eat whatever you want. If you want 100 of those, whatever it is, you could eat 100 of those, it would be okay.” And when I imagine the full permission to eat 100 of whatever it is, it helps me get in touch with, “Well, okay, do I really want one?” And I remember not eating that cookie, because I was like, “You know what, it looks like a good cookie, but when we get home, if I need something, I live in a foodie town, I can get another really good cookie, it’ll be fine.”
Steven Sashen:
You just made me think of something that I had never put together in my brain before, and that is again, I tend to do very much what you just described, but there are certain foods or certain times where with like the cookie, I’m still putting this together in my brain even as I say it, it’s hard for me to eat the amount of the cookie that I really want because I feel bad throwing away half of a cookie if I just paid two bucks for a cookie. And it’s not like I can’t afford it, and I since I’ve literally never had this thought before, I mean, it’s been in the back of my brain, but I’ve never articulated it in my own brain, let alone to another human being, I’m really going to have to pay attention to that one. It’s making me, literally I’m getting a little warm with the sort of realization that something, this is a big thing for me.
I remember I don’t like eating… This is so funny because the flip side of that is, I don’t like eating the last thing in a refrigerator if I know other people might want it. So and that’s the opposite of throwing it away in some strange way. But I’m going to have to play with buying something where I know I only want half of it, and throwing away the other half because I just bought it for twice the price. I mean, the reality is that $2 cookie, it’s actually a $2 half a cookie. And if I’m okay with that, then I’m going to buy the $2 half a cookie. And I’ve never really thought about it, and I wish I could explain how excited I am in this moment thinking about unwinding that because I just realized that’s part of why I sometimes eat certain things more than I normally would want because I don’t like the idea of-
Pam Moore:
You don’t want to waste it.
Steven Sashen:
Losing money. The money.
Pam Moore:
A, I think that’s really powerful, I don’t think you’re alone.
Steven Sashen:
I doubt it. Yeah.
Pam Moore:
I follow a non-diet dietitian on Instagram, Rachel Goodman, I think her handle is Good Nutrition or something. And she had this great graphic of on one side she’s like… I can’t even remember. But her whole point was, it’s not wasting food if you throw away the extra chicken nugget your kid didn’t want or throwing away the half a cookie that you just weren’t hungry for. She said that’s not any more wasting food than it is eating food that you actually don’t want. That’s kind of a waste too in its own way. So, yeah, she just…
Steven Sashen:
Oh, I love that.
Pam Moore:
And so that’s what this is all about. I think you just kind of showed that a lot of this is about you said you unwound that thought. It’s about being conscious of the thoughts that drive our behavior and then going, “But is that thought serving me?” Because for me, all this time the thought was, “I’m not good enough the way I am. I’ll be better if I’m thinner.” And I’ll tell you what happened when I got thinner with the macro counting, I was probably even more anxious about food than I had been before. I felt good about my body, but it wasn’t worth it because I was more nervous about ruining everything if I were to go to a birthday party or something.
Steven Sashen:
I’m going to loop back that back into the wasting money/wasting food where people who become very wealthy often find that they’re more stressed out because now they have to protect the wealth which they didn’t have before. It’s a different kind of stress. Again, this just goes back to we try to imagine what’s going to make us happy in the future, and we’re almost never right. And then the only thing that is dumber is that we forget that we’re almost never right. So, there’s that same sort of element. I mean, you’re reminding me also like for me, one of the things I lost, I think I lost about 15 pounds during COVID because of one very interesting thing that I started doing, which is cooking more. And when I was cooking more, I would only make like one dish.
Now, the interesting thing is, it’s not like I wasn’t making a lot of food, because I would make enough food for me and for my wife, Lena, and for leftovers that I would leave for her for lunch the next day. And so it was a bunch of food, but for whatever reason, I found myself just stopping when I was full. Versus if I went out to the Thai restaurant, which I almost never do now because I can cook as well as the Thai restaurants that I would go to, I would get three things, and would feel again, obligated to finish half of them or whatever Lena didn’t finish. I mean, just it was so interesting. So it was just really, and I’m not a big fan of the phrase listening to my body, because for me getting full, it’s kind of funny, I have to stand up to tell if I’m full. I can’t tell otherwise.
Pam Moore:
Oh, that’s interesting. And that’s the thing. I think that’s great. It’s like, that’s what works for you. Like you said before, “Not everything works for everybody.” See what’s up. See.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and if I’m the one cooking, I’m usually having to stand up to go get another glass of water or do something that I don’t do if I’m at a restaurant, and I don’t even do if I’m bringing home food so much. So, it just, I was getting some signals that were there all the time, but I either didn’t notice or overrode them or something. And there’s one other part, you’re going to get a kick out of this. The whole idea that you get thinner now, it can make you more anxious, I totally get that. And one of the things that’s funny for me is that every morning as I’m rolling out of bed, every time I pinch around my waist to see if I somehow got magically thinner overnight.
And the thinness for me, first of all there’s definitely a sort of let’s call it neurotic for lack of a better term. There’s definitely a thing there about whatever my weight is and whether I have the body fat that I would like. And as a sprinter, I can justify it by saying, if I weighed five pounds less, I’d have a better strength to weight ratio. I’d be faster, blah, blah, blah. But the biggest thing backing up to what we talked about, first thought and derivative thoughts, is it used to upset me that I had this seeming obsession with checking to see what my body fat was. And now I just don’t care. It’s just this goofy thing that I do. And for no reason because it clearly isn’t going to change from whenever I checked as I rolled into bed to whenever I got out of bed. It’s just this weird obsessive thing that I do the way other people do obsessive things about whatever obsessive thing they do. And so now I just kind of find it entertaining, and it doesn’t really-
Pam Moore:
That’s awesome, you’ve reframed it. And you know what’s funny, maybe it’s not that weird because I’ve noticed it’s funny that you say that because I have a bad habit or a habit, let’s call it a habit. I have a habit of sort of padding my stomach when I get out of bed. Kind of same reason.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, funny.
Pam Moore:
And when I used to not like what I saw in the mirror or think that my pants were too tight where I used to be like, “Okay, that’s it. I’m reeling things in. I’m getting tough on myself. I am salads all day.” Now I’m like, “Okay, number one, if the pants are too tight, that’s just to me all that means is I’m going to select a different pair of pants. If pants are chronically too tight, they go to Goodwill, the end, end of story.” And I am working on training myself, and I’m getting better all the time, instead of going down that negative thought spiral of I’m too big and this is what it means, I’m lazy. I’m disciplined. I’m blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s just oh, maybe I’m bigger. I’m bigger, the end.
Steven Sashen:
No. You-
Pam Moore:
The end. Who cares? It doesn’t say anything about who I am.
Steven Sashen:
Well, the part that you just said that I adore is the what does it mean? Because if we ask that question, the I don’t like the way I look, I don’t like… But the question is, what does that mean? Does it mean someone’s not going to like me, I won’t be able to do something? If we look at the what does it mean? And then investigate that and check, wait, is that actually true, this imagined thing that I have? And if we really look at the meaning part, that’s where the whole thing can fall apart because that was the same thing that happened for me with the pinching to see. It’s like, what does this mean? And now it just doesn’t have a meaning. And so I love that you highlighted that.
And in a similar vein, though, on the back of something you said, it’s not about the food, it’s about the thinking. You reminded me, I was hanging out with a friend who talked about how he was having problems drinking. I said, “Well, let me ask you a question. What are you thinking right before you go for that drink?” And he says, “I’m thinking I can’t handle it.” I said, “Well, what just happened that made you think that?” He said, “Oh, I had this argument with my wife and it’s like I can’t stand this anymore, I can’t handle it.” I said, “Well, I’ve got to ask you this I can’t handle it thought, is that true that you can’t handle it?” And he said, “No, of course I can. I mean, I’ve been handling it for 20 years with this person.” I said, “Oh, so when you’re not aware that that thought is just completely not true, then the obvious next step is to get a drink to kind of quench that thought.” And that was the last time he drank-
Pam Moore:
Right?
Steven Sashen:
Because the next thought I can’t handle it, he called me, he said, “I just had this fight with my wife. This thought I can’t handle it came up, and I started laughing. Of course, I can. And then I didn’t have a drink to make it go away.”
Pam Moore:
I love that.
Steven Sashen:
And I never thought about that with foods so much because we don’t think of food as having that same effect as alcohol or drugs or whatever else we do.
Pam Moore:
Well, I think to some extent, well, haven’t you seen a million articles that are like, “How to stop your emotional eating,” as if emotional eating is the worst sin in the world and you should never do it?
Steven Sashen:
This is what’s my argument, I would say emotional eating makes total sense. It’s the logical conclusion if you believe the thought that leads to that thing.
Pam Moore:
Yes, if you believe I can’t handle this, I’m so stressed out, I deserve a cookie, blah, blah, blah, blah. And here’s the other thing I want to say too, and the book Intuitive Eating gets into this, emotional eating isn’t the worst thing in the world. How can you go from being a baby that either got comfort from being held, like two things, right? Being held or having a bottle or a breast, right? That nourishment that you get as a baby that comforts you, that comes out through your whole life. Now, where you get into trouble, I think if eating the foods that make you feel good are the only way that you can cope, that’s obviously we need to have our deep breaths, we need to have maybe movement, there’s a million ways to cope that aren’t food. But if once in a while you turn to food, we’ve demonized food as comfort food. And that’s not the worst thing if you have other coping tools and you just are consciously making a decision that you want the macaroni and cheese or whatever it is.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s so interesting you say that. It’s something I’ve been thinking about doing a little podcast rant about is that, because I’ve been on a bunch of podcasts lately, entrepreneurial things where people ask me what I do to de-stress, and I said, “I don’t.” They said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, the idea of doing something to de-stress is like doing some thing to beat up the feeling that I might be having, and I don’t do that.” If I’m exhausted from a long difficult day, I’m just exhausted from a long difficult day. I don’t feel the urge to beat up that feeling. It’ll pass. I’ll go to sleep at night and I’ll wake up the next morning and it’ll be gone because I got some sleep. Or I’ll watch TV with Lena and we enjoy ourself and it goes away. I’m not watching TV to make it go away. It’s just an emotional state, it’ll pass. And backing up to what you keep referring to babies, you watch babies, they have an emotional thing and then it changes.
Pam Moore:
Babies are awesome. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Babies are great.
Pam Moore:
Yeah, they let themselves feel it. Babies aren’t like, “Oh, my god, I shouldn’t be crying. I need to man the fuck up.” They’re like you said, they feel it and it passes. And that you just said in five sentences what’s taken me thousands of dollars in therapy to figure out is that when you push against your feelings and you’ve tried to deal with them, like yes, you should deal with them, but pushing them away only gives them more power. You got to like you said, let yourself feel the feeling.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and again, the thing that you said about finding the meaning is really valid. The other version of that, that I’ve been playing with, the thing about the whole distressing thing is it has to go, “Oh, is realizing that the thing that caused my stress isn’t the thing. It isn’t the person who just quit or the container that’s stuck off the Port of Long Beach. It’s realizing that those things, it’s the meaning, it’s the expectation that I had perhaps not even knowingly, that was just the rug just got pulled out from underneath me because of this event that occurred.” So it’s the expectation that is the dashed expectation, the changed expectation, the unplanned changed expectation that’s the upsetting part. The fantasy of the future, really, is the upsetting part.
And once I realized that, it’s not like the stress goes away or the thought about how I wished that expectation was not being changed goes away, it’s just that it diminishes so much that I move on more quickly to what do I need to do next? And as it comes back up-
Pam Moore:
Nice.
Steven Sashen:
It’s just diminished because I recognize the fallacy, the ephemeralness of that expectation or the desire for that expectation still. And there’s that same thing that I’m feeling around this all conversation about food, it’s a similar thing. He thinks.
Pam Moore:
Yeah. No, I think. Oh, and I do want to go back to one thing you said. You said, “We think we know what’s going to make us happy, but most of the time we’re wrong.” I do think that most people on their deathbeds, they won’t say, “Oh, I wish I had been thinner.” They’ll say, “I wish I spent more time with my family.” I think we do know that feeling connected definitely makes us feel better. Would you agree with that?
Steven Sashen:
Absolutely, but we rarely find ourself having the urge to feel connected. We find ourself having the urge to whatever it is, make more money, get a different job, find a different partner, doing something.
Pam Moore:
I don’t know, speak for yourself. Ask my husband, I’m always trying to connect with him, and he’s always like, “Oh, I need a little space.”
Steven Sashen:
We had that, but actually, the connecting thing is I think that’s a more immediate thing. I don’t think we’re projecting super far. Actually, I take it back. I’m going to qualify this dramatically, because I realized when I was about 39. How long have I been with Lena? 20 years. So yeah, so when I was about 39 I realized that for most of my certainly adult life, and probably much of my teenage years I had the idea that I’d be happy if I was with the right person and if I had the right partner. And for some reason when I was about 39, that thought came up and I couldn’t find myself believing it, I couldn’t make myself imagine that. And this is happening while I’m spending time with Lena who was at that time a friend of mine, who for four years prior to I’d been trying to convince her that we should be a couple, and she had no interest in that at all.
And so, and it just hit me, it’s like, I have this idea that I’ll be happy when I’m in this imagined future with the right person, and in specific with Lena, if we’d be a good couple. Which was kind of a funny thing to think I realized, because if you ask my exes, I don’t do couple very well according to them. And so I had no evidence that Lena and I would be a good couple, and I had no evidence for I’d be happy in this imagined future. And then I just couldn’t make myself believe that anymore. And then this is going to relate to food, then the craving stopped. I just found myself not craving this thing and looking for it, and checking to see if I was getting it.
And ironically, and in that moment I then said to her, “When I was believing this idea that we’d be a good couple, and I’d be happy in the imagined future if we were a couple, here’s the obnoxious things that I’ve been doing in the last four years to try to convince you I was right.” And I just gave her a list of the humiliating ways that I was not very subtly but thinking I was being subtle, the way I behave to try to get her on board of this project. And if you ask her, that was a big chunk of what gave her the space to then see if she actually wanted to be with me. Or the way she said it is, “I spent that weekend looking for all the reasons or looking at all the reasons why I didn’t think we should be together, and then I ran out of reasons and I realized that everything I wanted in a relationship I could have with you.” And so, but I think that my getting out of the way, not deliberately just because I could no longer believe the thing that was leading-
Pam Moore:
No, energetically things shifted. You weren’t so set. Yeah, and she felt it, because that’s a scary thing to feel I would think. If I felt like my husband thought he couldn’t be happy without me, that’s a lot of fricking pressure. And I think the reason I met him when I did, to your point, is that I was extremely happy in my own life when I met him. And up to that point, and it wasn’t like I didn’t want to meet somebody, I definitely did. I was definitely thinking like, “Time’s ticking. I got to do this thing.”
I mean, I was 29 when I met him, but all my friends were coupled up and having babies by then pretty much, but I was also at this place in my life where I was doing my thing and living my life and get out of my way, here I come, was kind of my vibe. And I think that that’s why it happened when it happened, and I have zero regrets. And I will also say, even though I do think he’s the perfect partner for me, I can’t say I’m always happy, but it’s not because of him, it’s because that’s life.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and you just said it. People have asked Lena and I why we think we have a great relationship, and I say it’s because we’re very clear that when we’re upset, quote, at the other person, it’s not because of the other person. And we kind of try, well, we’re usually pretty good at only coming back together when that’s very clear or when we’re both very clear that we don’t know what the solution for getting out of whatever mental state we’re in is and one of us is willing to walk up and go, “Yeah, I’m stuck and I wish I weren’t, and I don’t know what to do next.” Yeah, we don’t pretend that the other person is the one who made us something upset or-
Pam Moore:
Yeah. That’s very self-aware. Have you guys read The Untethered Soul by, I think it’s by Michael Singer?
Steven Sashen:
No. I have no idea what that is.
Pam Moore:
You sound like you don’t even need to read it, but it’s really good. It’s for it isn’t really about relationships, but it definitely pertains to… It’s about, what is it even about? It’s spiritual, let’s just say that. It’s good.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. All right. I’ll make a note to self when I’m reading again, when I have time to read again. We have a stack of magazines that’s too high sitting on our kitchen table because we don’t have time for that lately. So, back to food.
Pam Moore:
Yeah, back to food.
Steven Sashen:
So, we got pretty far along in your story of the transition into kind of getting this and is there anything else you want to add to that before I ask you to jump back to from the people that you’ve worked with? And for anyone who’s listening, what might they need to consid
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