Episode #52:

Make Peace with Food (Part 1) with Sam Blumenthal

When you have health-related goals, one of the most helpful things you can do is begin to make peace with food. Intuitive eating is a way to make peace with both food and your body, guided by 10 principles that my guest this week describes as tools, not rules, that guide your exploration to a better relationship with food and your body.

I’m joined by Sam Blumenthal RDN, an amazing chef and licensed Intuitive Eating Dietician. Sam believes there is value in what we choose to eat, and just as much value in the behaviors surrounding how we choose to eat, and she’s here to take a deep dive into building a peaceful and conscious relationship with food.

Tune in this week to discover how to start making peace with food. We’re discussing how to meet yourself with compassion instead of judgment when it comes to intuitive and mindful eating, why this work is all about addressing behaviors, and how to stop focusing solely on your weight as you make decisions about what you really want to eat.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

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Why making peace with food is a form of self-care.

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How to start looking at food through a compassionate lens instead of a judgmental one.

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Sam’s favorite principles of intuitive eating.

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How to see where your thoughts about food are misaligned with your body.

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Why focusing on your weight doesn’t help create a better relationship with food.

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How to start rebuilding your self-trust when making decisions about what you want to eat.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

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Sam Bluementhal Instagram | TikTok

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Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch

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EP 40: Whole Person Integrative Eating: 4 Person Interview Around the Table with Deborah, Larry, and Reed

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EP 41: Whole Person Integrative Eating with Deborah Kesten

TRANSCRIPT

Sam: You know, it's not really turning down the volume of diet culture, a $72 billion a year industry that makes money off of our insecurities. It's turning up the volume of our intuition because we can't control that, but we can con-trol how we connect to ourselves.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast with Dr. Susan Crockett. You are listening to episode number 52, Make Peace With Food Episode One, an interview with amazing chef and licensed intuitive eating dietitian Sam Blumenthal RDN.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to be-come your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the per-sonal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN ro-botic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Dr. Crockett: I am so honored to have my guests Sam Blumenthal, RDN here. Almost said RND. That would be like research and development. So silly. Sam is an intuitive dietitian.

Sam: Intuitive eating dietitian.

Dr. Crockett: Intuitive eating dietitian. Wait, is there a different kind of dieti-tian than an eating dietitian?

Sam: No.

Dr. Crockett: If it goes along with eating, it's an intuitive eating thing, like the book that you have behind you.

Sam: Correct. Yeah. Intuitive eating, it was created in 1995 by two regis-tered dieticians who were ultimately looking for a way to make peace with food and body.

Dr. Crockett: We all need that.

Sam: Yeah, it's rooted in ten principles. I like to call them tools and not rules, essentially, to help kind of guide that exploration to a more peaceful rela-tionship with food and body.

Dr. Crockett: That's what we're going to talk about today.

Sam: We’re going to talk about some of them today. Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: About making peace with food, which is a topic that all of us need to hear.

Sam: I'd love for an opportunity to introduce a little bit of my mission and my intention.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah.

Sam: So as you all now know, my name is Sam. As you mentioned, I'm a registered dietician who specializes in intuitive eating. The way that I love to describe the work that I do is I totally find value in what we eat, and I think there's also an incredible amount of value in the behaviors surrounding how we eat, not just what.

Dr. Crockett: This keeps coming up. So we did a couple episodes early in the show with a similar kind of theme, the similar kind of theme, with Debo-rah Keston. So we'll put the links below for you. But this is not a repeat of that show. This is just expanding on that.

Sam: Yeah. One could say perhaps another perspective as well. All of these different frameworks and experiences with this topic can all work in tandem together to support a very peaceful and conscious relationship with food. With intuitive eating, another way that I like to describe it is it's really an ap-proach to nutrition from that place of self-care versus self-control.

Dr. Crockett: Gosh, I don't even remember when a food wasn’t an issue about self-control and what I could eat or couldn't eat, or what's on the plate today because of all the things.

Sam: Yeah, and that makes sense given our society and how nutrition is painted in our culture. Solely through this very all or nothing lens that food is either good or it's bad. Food is fuel or medicine. If it's not, it's not worth eat-ing. What I'm excited for the opportunity to do today is kind of unpack that a little bit deeper and explore this through a more compassionate and curious approach versus a lens of judgment.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah. So are you going to tell us about the ten principles of in-tuitive eating?

Sam: So you know what, perhaps we'll get into all ten at another time, but we are going to talk about just a few of them today. What's so interesting, you might be able to tell with that book back there, but it's a pretty thick book. To uncover and get into extreme depth with every single principle, just I don't feel that it would really serve this conversation today. We also don't have the time for that. It takes much longer than bone broth.

Dr. Crockett: Oh okay. More than 24 hours.

Sam: Yes. With that note as well, I truly believe that whatever relationship we've previously had or perhaps even currently have with food has truly served its purpose. Perhaps today, throughout this conversation and after this conversation, maybe we come to find that that purpose is no longer serving us.

Dr. Crockett: And that's okay. It was just a moment. It was a lesson that our soul needed to learn at this stage of our journey. It's okay to let that go and learn something new or decide to think of it differently.

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. The language that you're using really resonates with me. Part of my story that I find to be really valuable in sharing, especially as we start to dive into a lot of the concepts we'll be talking about today, is that for 12 years of my life, I was a very competitive rhythmic gymnast.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, you were a high level athlete.

Sam: Yeah. So when I was about 13 years old, I was on a national team well. With that came so many wonderful opportunities and friendships and travel and competition. Reflecting on that, from the age of five years old when I started, even well beyond after I retired from that athletic identity, food was only ever seen as something to restrict or something to control, to solely shrink and minimize.

Dr. Crockett: Because you had to be as small as possible to be able to compete.

Sam: Yes. From a young age, we're taught that our self-worth and our value lives within the lack of space that we take up. I have a lot of compassion for that younger version of myself, and gratitude because living through these experiences has allowed me to approach this conversation today from that place of experience. I don't think I'd be sitting here with you if I didn't have.

Dr. Crockett: If you hadn't had that experience. I have a similar story, but it's kind of the opposite end of the spectrum. I was really small growing up. Small in height, but also really thin. Actually, until I was about 30. In my 20s, I became a doctor, entered residency, entered this world of surgery. I was shy, and it did not do well for me to be small.

The small stature was a problem. I didn't carry enough weight, physically and emotionally is not the right word. But when you say somebody has gravitas or the weight to be respected, I started putting on weight and have had difficulty taking off weight. Somewhat because now I hold space. I have more space to be. It's the opposite of you needing to be tiny and not take up small space is the I have a stature when I walk into a room.

I mean, there's other reasons that I've struggled with weight. I think that's a real common theme around the stage and age of life and menopause and being women that we can go way off of that today, but we're not going to. But that taking up space or not taking up space is such a, it's an interesting idea.

Because I think most of the time when people talk about our body image or our physical image, and the reasons for unhealthy weights and unhealthy ways that we manage our Earth suit. Very often it's more about the emotion-al eating or overeating or the eating the wrong carbs or the food that's not healthy for us, which certainly plays into it. But I think this concept of stature is an interesting one and needs more discussion.

Sam: Yeah. With that, through our conversation of both intuitive and mindful eating today, what I love to ask those I serve is if you would be willing to put the weight loss piece on the backburner for our conversation today. Be-cause what we have an opportunity to explore is how to heal our health promoting behaviors. Weight itself isn't a behavior.

Dr. Crockett: It's not. It's an end result. It’s a neutral in product of how we behave.

Sam: Perhaps, and sometimes it can be out of our control as well. So what would it feel like? What can we learn? What can we discover? What more can we experience? What fulfillment can we derive when we work on letting go of making eating decisions based on what a scale says? Because in that sense, what we're doing is relying on an external tool to guide our eating decisions. Again, morally there is no bad or good in this conversation. The truth of that, the outcome of that, is that our sense of self trust becomes eroded.

Dr. Crockett: Oh, let that sink in for a second.

Sam: What we have an opportunity to do is start rebuilding that sense of self trust. Prioritizing a number on a scale can be a barrier to that.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, definitely.

Sam: So I'm excited to explore this conversation with putting body size and weight just on the side.

Dr. Crockett: On the side. It’s not even the conversation.

Sam: It's the bone broth that's on the backburner that's cooking right now and perhaps explore this from a totally new perspective. Ultimately, at the end of this conversation, it truly does become somebody's choice to form their own discernment whether or not this line of thinking is something that they're curious about.

Dr. Crockett: Well, I'm super curious.

Sam: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah.

Sam: So let's talk about okay. Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: So we're gonna start by talking a little bit about the language that we use around food.

Sam: This is a tough one and an exciting one, an interesting one all packed in one. So the language that we use to describe food directly affects our re-lationship with food, and therefore our relationship with ourselves. So what I mean by this is we'll start off first with the should. I want you to get curious. For those of you listening, take a moment to get curious. How often do the shoulds show up in your line of thinking.

Dr. Crockett: Oh, gosh. That’s so often. It’s nonstop. That's a lot of suffering.

Sam: Isn't it? To invite in a little bit of humor to this conversation, I like to say we're shoulding all over ourselves when we think through the shoulds. So when the shoulds show up, that's typically a sign that we're living in align-ment with someone else's value.

Dr. Crockett: Okay, right. We’re not in our own alignment, or we call it attun-ement.

Sam: All of this is body attunement. So when the shoulds come up, I like to be playful with myself. I'm like oh, there it is. I notice it, right. I'm noticing I'm thinking that I should eat this, or I shouldn't eat that. Right. Okay, that makes sense. It's valid. This is the world that we live in. This is the water we're all swimming in. I'm learning, or I'm working on swapping the should with what do I want, or what do I need?

Dr. Crockett: That's a very different conversation, isn't it? What does my body want or needed this moment?

Sam: It might feel. I want to validate that if that feels a little foreign or unfa-miliar at first, we don't have experience doing that. Right.

Dr. Crockett: Right. So like when I started doing life coach certification, we have a conversation around emotions. So often, we're not used to even thinking about well, what am I feeling in this moment? I think what you're getting at with the food in the intuitive eating is kind of similar. Like checking in with your body or checking in with your mind, saying what am I really hungry for? What does that even look like?

Sam: Also working to give ourselves unconditional, nonjudgmental permis-sion to do so. I'll be honest. The first time I ever heard of that, I was like wait a minute. So I can just eat.

Dr. Crockett: A Snickers.

Sam: Whatever I want. Yeah, a Snickers, Reese's, Oreos, Cheetos, what traditionally we think as “junk food”, or how my mom phrased it when I was a child, crap, right? If I can just eat whatever I want whenever I want how much of it I want, I'm never going to stop. The truth of the matter is when we work to give ourself permission to do something, something really beautiful happens in that space.

That's where we start to form discernment, which is our ability to say okay, if I know I can have this thing, this Oreo, this Cheeto, this bag of Cheetos, this pack of Oreos, whenever I want, however much of it I want, wherever I want, is right now, is this quantity my loving choice?

Dr. Crockett: Wow, that's a whole different conversation because then you're not fighting with the resistance to the should.

Sam: Exactly. Because when we are living within these barriers and these rules and these shoulds and these expectations that we are welcoming into our lives, we are much more likely to make a choice that's very impulsive and reactive. This like screw this mentality. I already opened the bag. I might as well just finish the whole thing.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah. Might as well eat the whole thing.

Sam: This truly is a skill.

Dr. Crockett: A good one to practice.

Sam: Yeah. Yeah. So that's one of the forms of languages we can start, or one of the many verbiages we can start to tap into and get curious about in the frequency of how often it shows up in our line of thinking, the shoulds.

Dr. Crockett: Okay.

Sam: The second is in the form of morality. So this is in the form of good foods and bad foods.

Dr. Crockett: This is a hard one because as a physician, we live in a world of right and wrong, good and bad, healthy and not healthy, especially as a surgeon. Like my job is to cut out the sickness. So this is a really good con-trast to have a conversation with you. As a life coach, I know the language of neutralizing circumstances, and I know food is a neutral, but I also know as a doctor, when you put different things in your body, you get different re-sults.

Sam: So the way that we can reframe that, because what you're sharing is an incredibly valid, right. So is there a world in which both of these things can be true? The answer is yes. While living in this good or bad framework, as an example, if I eat something that I've labeled as good or society says is good, maybe like a beautiful green salad and a smoothie. When I eat that good thing, how would you imagine I feel? Good, right? I'm on track. I'm do-ing it right.

Dr. Crockett: Got a star.

Sam: But the moment that I cave, heavier quotes, and I eat something that I've labeled as bad, I've been taught to believe is bad, society says is bad. Maybe it's my grandmother's chocolate chip cookies on Thanksgiving. It doesn't matter that my grandma made them. They're cookies. So that's bad, right?

Dr. Crockett: There's guilt and shame. Remorse sometimes.

Sam: A lot of that is rooted in our mindset surrounding the food. The food it-self has.

Dr. Crockett: It's got physical chemical properties. That’s what food is.

Sam: Our perception of it is what is almost eating us alive.

Dr. Crockett: Well, it kind of is. Because if you feel shame and guilt, then that’s stressful. That increases your cortisol levels. This gets into that whole conversation about what the environment is like when you're eating and that level of it's not just the macros in, macros out, and calories in, calories out.

It's all this stuff we've talked about before and eating with other people and using it as a relaxing getaway and your little three, two, one thing that you did, which is super fun. So medically, the stress around food comes out in our metabolic pathways.

Sam: Yes. So with that, labeling that food is bad. When I eat that bad thing, of course, I feel shame. I feel guilt. My diet starts Monday, which our bodies have no idea what day it is.

Dr. Crockett: They don’t.

Sam: Right? That's another external tool we're using, right? So when the good and bad shows up, a similar framework with the shoulds. Playful. Oh, there it is. I notice I'm thinking because, again, we're not our thoughts. We experience thoughts. Inserting that phrase I notice I'm thinking is creating that sense of detachment.

Dr. Crockett: Right? So you become the watcher. So our viewers are very, well, if you've been watching the show for some time, then you're familiar with that concept. In life coaching, we talk about it being the toddler in the backseat. The brain is doing what it's supposed to do, which is responding to the environment around this. There's the subconscious unconscious.

When we notice that it's acting in a way that is not how our higher brain wants to work, our higher consciousness, we can say okay toddler. I hear you, you're doing what you're supposed to do, but I'm going to make a deci-sion to do something differently.

Sam: Absolutely.

Dr. Crockett: That pathway of changing the thought changes our feelings and our actions and our results.

Sam: Yes, this essence that our mindset affects our feelings and then our feelings affect our actions. Oftentimes, when it comes to diet and nutrition, we see this narrative of just changing the action itself. That's not leading to-wards sustainable change.

Kind of the way to do it is starting first with mindset and noticing the lan-guage and the mindset that we have around food first and foremost, and kind of unpacking that and letting that older framework go if we're noticing it's no longer serving us today, especially if we notice that we're having ob-sessive food thoughts 24/7 or we're noticing that we are isolating and not participating in social life and health because whatever's on the menu is not going to fit within.

Dr. Crockett: Those guidelines.

Sam: Exactly.

Dr. Crockett: The should.

Sam: The should. So when the bad and good come up, I see you. That's valid. I notice I'm thinking this. What would it feel like to work on substituting good and bad with nutrient dense and less nutrient dense. Maybe foods that give us long lasting energy or foods that give us short bursts of energy. Be-cause all food is going to give us something.

Now, when I'm sharing I don't believe in good or bad foods, I do also want to make a note that I do believe some foods make our bodies feel good. Some foods might make our bodies feel not so good.

Dr. Crockett: Well, and some of what we are getting into at this point is not even food. It's non-food substances added to our foods, which are making us sick because our bodies are not meant to metabolize all kinds of chemi-cals and dyes and all of that.

So that's, I think, a tangent of this topic. I think when you're talking about neutrality of food as nutrition, we're speaking more of whole food, real foods. Minimally processed or somewhat processed is like a different level. Then the non-food level of stuff that's in our food now is a whole other topic.

Sam: It can be. Yes, I hear what you're saying. It's valid. The fear surround-ing that can also be equally, if not more, detrimental to our health.

Dr. Crockett: Wow.

Sam: We can still make the choice to say no, thank you. That food’s not for me when the intention is coming from a place of self-care versus self-control. So it all comes back to the intention behind it. Oftentimes, we're al-most making choices on autopilot.

Dr. Crockett: We are.

Sam: With the label of saying oh, these additives, this is bad. I cannot have them. I should not have them. Then we're making those choices. Where walking through the journey of making peace with food, learning the frame-work that all foods are emotionally equivalent, even if they're not nutritionally equivalent.

Dr. Crockett: True.

Sam: We can start to form the discernment to say okay, for the most part maybe what fits my pattern of eating and what feels good from a place of self-care is saying no thank you to those foods while also holding compas-sion that maybe it's not feasible for me to have every single meal cooked at home with whole food identifiable ingredients.

Dr. Crockett: It's not. That’s very hard. Yes.

Sam: So sometimes if you're on the road, or you are traveling and the air-port doesn't have any of the foods that you would typically have at home, I would much rather you find something to eat than say I'm not going to eat this thing. I'm going to ignore my hunger, ignore my body's cues, not rebuild that sense of self-trust just because I shouldn't be having those things, which can feel really scary at first. That's why this is not a light switch that flips on and off that you're healed and everything's fine. Like, I'm still work-ing on all this, truly.

Dr. Crockett: You've been aware of this for years.

Sam: Yeah, this is my third year working through this myself, and I fully ex-pect to continue working on this for the rest of my life. Because it's not really turning down the volume of diet culture, a $72 billion a year industry that makes money off of our insecurities.

It's turning up the volume of our intuition because we can't control that, but we can control how we connect to ourselves. Because there will constantly be all this noise surrounding us for the rest of our lives. I can't spend my time, we can't spend our time and energy trying to mute that.

Dr. Crockett: Right. We have to learn to attune to ourselves.

Sam: Exactly.

Dr. Crockett: It’s this one. You asked me about the dots before, about the color scheme.

Sam: Yes.

Dr. Crockett: Each one of them is a topic for what we teach.

Sam: Please start from here. I'm so curious now.

Dr. Crockett: I call them the seven seeds of the soul. So they go, let me see if I can do this, be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. So the be is self-care. We start with self-care because you have to figure out your choices for how you want to be in this world and show up and take care of yourself. It’s that whole mom put on your mask first before you put it on the toddler.

Heal is the light pink one. That's the getting rid of the things that are not aligned with your mind, body, or soul. The dark pink one is love, which is love. The green one is give, which is it has to do not just with money. We talking about money and finances within that, but also how we give of our time and ourselves to others and what we give to the community and the world. That's our coming from inside to out/

Then grow is learn something new every day. Continue to grow and learn, lifelong learning. Pray is whatever your spiritual connecting to, whether you call it God or the universe or nature or plants are. We in this community, in the show, we honor people of all faiths. So that represents communication with our spiritual being.

Then the attunement is a tuning not just like you're talking about to a tune to yourself and be able to listen to your inner voice and make choices that are in alignment with that, but it's also, it's all relationships. So all the rest of them are more internal, like about ourselves. Then this one is us as our-selves interacting with the world and other people around us. That's the re-lationship piece.

Sam: Which all of them are equally valuable forms of nourishment. I love us-ing the term nourishment beyond the realm of food because we don't nec-essarily think of it that way. That's kind of why, not kind of. It's entirely why I like to say there is value in understanding both the difference and balance between feeling full and feeling fulfilled.

Dr. Crockett: That is so cool.

Sam: Yeah. Thank you.

Dr. Crockett: You're welcome. You know, I think I'm going to say thank you for bringing this topic to our conversation today. I'm going to make a part one and part two of this interview because I think we have more to talk about. So we're going to remind our viewers where they can find you.

Sam: If you're on Instagram, I'm fulfilledandfull.rd. Fulfilled is F-U-L-F-I-L-L-E-D. I had spelled it wrong for a while.

Dr. Crockett: Oh.

Sam: F-U-L-L. No. F-U-L-F-I-L-L-E-ED and Full dot rd. Then on TikTok, it's Fulfilled and Full. There, you can find a bunch of different mindful eating tips and skits and things to be helpful reminders for continuing to get curious about the topics that we're talking about today.

Dr. Crockett: That's awesome. We’ll put those links all in the show notes, of course, like we always do. If you found this talk helpful, please share and like and help us grow our community. Go visit Sam’s site, and we’re going to do a part two of this conversation. So catch us next week. Thanks.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.

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