Episode #40:

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

For this episode of Becoming Virtuosa, I’m joined by Deborah Kesten, along with her husband Dr. Larry Scherwitz, and Dr. Reed Miloy for a round-table discussion about a topic I love: Whole Person Integrative Eating. Deborah and Larry have a new book all about how food influences health, especially preventing and reversing heart disease and obesity.

Deborah Kesten is an international nutrition researcher and award-winning author. Dr. Larry Scherwitz is a behavioral scientist specializing in research on mind-body medicine, and how lifestyle influences overall health. Dr. Reed Miloy is a doctor of internal medicine as well as a life and wellness coach – my life and wellness coach to be precise!

Tune in this week to hear the incredible research that went into Deborah and Larry’s book Whole Person Integrative Eating and how it covers a completely different approach to food and well-being than what we’ve been taught. We discuss the culture behind the way we eat, the ancient wisdom that has supported the research behind Integrative Eating, and how to understand the common root causes of obesity, heart disease, and overall poor health.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

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What Whole Person Integrative Eating is.

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The benefits of Whole Person Integrative Eating and its ability to prevent heart disease and obesity.

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Why what used to be dietary hearsay is now becoming mainstream.

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The ancient food wisdom that has supported Deborah’s research.

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How we turn to food to self-soothe negative feelings.

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The 7 principles of ancient food wisdom, validated by nutritional science.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

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Deborah Kesten: Website | LinkedIn | Facebook

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Dr. Reed Miloy: Website | Instagram | Twitter

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Dr. Larry Scherwitz: Website | LinkedIn | Facebook

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Whole Person Integrative Eating: A Breakthrough Dietary Lifestyle to Treat the Root Causes of Overeating, Overweight, and Obesity by Deborah Kesten and Larry Scherwitz

TRANSCRIPT

Deborah: That means turning to food, often to assuage and self-medicate negative feelings.

Dr. Crockett: Self soothe.

Deborah: Yes, self soothe.

Dr. Crockett: So this is like our comfort foods.

Deborah: It works because when you have all the cake and cookies, it's never the carrot. It's the carrot cake. Right?

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa the podcast with Dr. Susan Crockett. You are listening to episode number 40, Whole Person Integrative Eating, a roundtable interview with international nutrition researcher and award winning author Deborah Keston NPH along with Dr. Larry Scherwitz and Dr. Reed Miloy.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become 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 personal 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 robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Dr. Crockett: I am so excited today to be joined by my special guests. This is a very, very special interview. This is my brand new friend, exceptional, beautiful, brilliant bohemian friend, Deborah Keston. We're gonna be talking about her new book today. We are joined by her husband Larry Scherwitz PhD on the right and Reed Miloy MD on my left. Welcome to the show.

I wanted to start off the show you guys with just kind of everybody introducing themselves and kind of talking about how y'all met because you've known each other a long time. I'm the newbie at this party. I'm so honored to have you here. So Deborah, how about if you start off telling us a little bit about you?

Deborah Keston: My pleasure. My name is Deborah Keston. I'm a nutrition researcher and award winning author. I do research on how food influences health, especially preventing and reversing heart disease.

Dr. Crockett: Wait, wait. Say that again. What? Whoa, whoa. You’re reversing heart disease with food?

Deborah: I do research on how food and diet can prevent and reverse heart disease and obesity.

Dr. Crockett: This is amazing. That's the topic of your new book that we're gonna be talking about a little bit. Who's this lovely man next to you?

Deborah: This is my husband, Dr. Larry Scherwitz. He is a behavioral scientist, and specializes in research on mind-body medicine and also how lifestyle influences health in terms of preventing health problems and reversing it.

Dr. Crockett: Wow, that’s really cool. Larry, tell us a little bit about your research and your background.

Larry Scherwitz: My name is Larry Scherwitz. I'm a behavioral scientist. Started out with a PhD in social psychology. Met a physician named Dean Ornish, and we worked together for 20 years to see how lifestyle can halt and even reverse coronary heart disease. Later it's been shown to help reverse prostate cancer. So I'm very pleased to be here. My role here with Deborah is to design studies and do data analysis and report on the data. So I'm the backup guy with her writing and research.

Dr. Crockett: What a wonderful partnership you guys have. You and Reed have known each other for, I'm sorry, Dr. Miloy, known each other for quite a while.

Reed: Reed is fine. Thank you, Sue. So I'm Reed Miloy, board certified physician of internal medicine, wellness coach.

Dr. Crockett: Wait, my wellness coach.

Reed: Your wellness coach. Absolutely. Friends with Dr. Scherwitz and his lovely wife for, what, 20 years now. We met at the American Heart Association National Conference. I believe it was around 2000/2001. Larry was interested in meeting me because he knew I was into integrative medicine. I was interested in meeting Larry because I knew about his work with Dean Ornish. So that just immediately created a friendship and collaboration. Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: Just for our viewers that may not understand what this is. Can you explain a little bit about what integrative medicine is?

Reed: Yeah. Well, I mean it medicine, for many years particularly in the West, was practiced as a very traditional allopathic sort of a strategy. Here in the last 20/25 years, we started looking at alternative therapies, and integrating those with established allopathic medicine. It's just like nature. When you cross breed genetics and you kind of mix it up, you get a better, shall we say, result. The thing that's been missing has been the high quality research in regards to alternative therapies.

But over the last couple of decades, we continue to see more and more of the high quality good data rollout. What was when I came out of residency was hearsay has now become mainstream. So we're making significant, because of people like this absolutely.

Dr. Crockett: Amazing. Amazing research.

Reed: Yes. 
Dr. Crockett: Yeah. So cool. So Deborah, I wanted to tell you give us a little bit of background, please, on how you got started and all this. How did this come to be?

Deborah: Well, I used to write for magazines, and I decided I want to do an article on yoga and diet because my husband Dr. Larry Scherwitz with was invited to present at the first international conference on lifestyle and health in New Delhi, India.

Dr. Crockett: Wow.

Deborah: One of the presenters was a cardiologist named Dr. K L. Chopra who’s the father and mentor of well-known thought leader spiritualist Deepak Chopra.

Dr. Crockett: I did not know that that's interesting.

Deborah: You wouldn't.

Dr. Crockett: Until now. You're just full of surprises. Catch them on camera.

Deborah: My first question to him was open ended. Dr. Chopra, please tell me about yoga and diet. His response was the Bhagavad Gita, which is Hindu scripture, espouses cooking with love. We, meaning devout Hindus, believe when you make food and prepare food, your prana, your consciousness, with which you prepare the food is infused into the food. When you ingest food, you ingest the consciousness with which the food was prepared.

Dr. Crockett: Isn't that amazing?

Deborah: Yes. The thought wouldn't let go. I thought if Hinduism, a 4,000 or 5,000 year old religion espouse this, surely other world religions have led with this also. I went on a nutrition journey around the world researching ancient food wisdom, which are the resources we turned to for thousands of years before nutritional science 100 years ago.

Dr. Crockett: That is so cool. So you look cross culturally around the world at Judaism and Buddhism.

Deborah: I looked at world religions, correct. I looked at world religions, major world religions, cultural traditions such as the yogic diet, which is thousands of years old called the Ama yoga. I've looked at Eastern healing systems such as Ayurvedic medicine from India, traditional Chinese medicine, and Tibetan Medicine, and put all of that together after months and months and months of studying all these huge bodies of wisdom about food eating. Larry and I distilled the ancient food wisdom into seven perennial principles validated by nutritional science.

Dr. Crockett: This is the big deal is the validation by science. So are you talking about the…

Deborah: That's what this is.

Dr. Crockett: Okay. So let me do an Oprah moment. All right. So the book is called the Whole Person Integrative Eating. You have a website too.

Deborah: I have a website. Integrativeeating.com.

Dr. Crockett: Okay. This is a breakthrough dietary lifestyle to treat the root causes of overeating, overweight, and obesity, something which you and I are very familiar with in our patient populations. So it's a very fascinating book. I wanted to talk a little bit about your research and what you describe in the book because Reed and I, as physicians, we went back to our education. We're taught about carbs and fats and proteins and micronutrients, and carbs in, carbs out. You'll lose weight. That's our traditional teaching.

Reed: Which isn’t much, to be frankly honest. There's absolutely nothing about the individual, the culture behind how we eat, and what our healthiest eating practice. But to overcome something and transcend something, you must understand it. That's what this book does for so many people. It helps them to understand the seven common, shall we say, root causes of malfeasance with what we put into our body.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah. So much of my past history in dealing with nutrition has been what to eat. I've gone from all kinds of low carb whatever diets to now eating clean, meaning no processed or less processed foods, and getting away from the fast food and the preservatives and all of that. This is a totally different idea. This is an idea more about validating this social part and the emotional part of what's going on. Then you've got also data on how to heal those things, which…

Deborah: That's what Deepak Chopra’s integrative eating program is.

Dr. Crockett: So I'm gonna read a little bit from your book because.

Deborah: That’s very kind. Thank you.

Dr. Crockett: I'd like for our listeners to know what the seven things are. As they're listening to this, I want them to just, in their minds, think about which ones they may be dealing with.

Deborah: Yes. I call these the new normal over eating styles. You will see yourself in one or more.

Dr. Crockett: Yes. I saw myself in one of them. So meet the members of the overeating styles family. Number one, we're all familiar with, I think, which is emotional eating. Right? I'm gonna go through them and then we're going to talk a little bit about them. So emotional eating, food fretting, which is worrying about what to eat.

Deborah: Over-obsessing about the best way to eat. Yes.

Dr. Crockett: Fast foodism, which is our best food culture. Sensory disregard. That's one I'm really guilty of is just eating on the fly and not having any regard for what I'm putting in my mouth. Just getting it in, right.

Deborah: You’ve got it.

Dr. Crockett: Task snacking. I like how you've come up with some of these phrases. Unappetizing atmosphere, which surprised me, and then solo dining. I found the last two really the most surprising because I never really think that that atmosphere around our eating might influence it.

But I wanted to just start conversation around the table with the four of us about the seven different styles, starting with the emotional overeating. Tell me a little bit about your research with that and how you validated that. It seems intuitive to all of us, but I think some of the strength of your work in this book is the science behind it. So.

Deborah: Great question. We did an online course on the Whole Person Integrative Eating Program. We also developed the 74 item questionnaire about what to eat, how to eat, where, with whom, and what your eating behaviors are along with what to eat.

Dr. Crockett: Is that the one that's in the book? The quiz.

Deborah: Yes. The quiz is in the book. I call it what's your over eating style?

Dr. Crockett: Here it is. So I thought this was really funny because as I was going through it at the bottom, here's what they look like. Each of the quizzes. At the bottom of the one that is for the sensory disregards style, it says total sensory disregard and then score. I thought yes, I have total sensory disregard. I win. Ding, ding, ding. I thought that was funny.

Okay, so if you get a copy of the bit, you can go to page 36. You can find out what your own style is. I love taking quizzes, pretty fun. So our listeners can do that, and they can interact with you in this book that way.

Deborah: Correct.

Dr. Crockett: Okay, let's go through each of the styles and just kind of tell us a little bit in more detail than what I did when I went through the seven styles about what you found in each of them.

Deborah: Again, the new normal over eating styles will be familiar to everybody. One is overemotional eating. Stress eating often is the phrase for it also. That means turning to food, often to assuage and self-medicate negative feelings.

Dr. Crockett: Self-soothe.

Deborah: Yes, self-soothe.

Dr. Crockett: So this is like our comfort foods.

Deborah: It works. Because when you have all the cake and cookies, it's never the carrot. It's the carrot cake. Right? It works. It releases serotonin which calms, relaxes, and soothes. The second overeating style, and all seven are statistically significant.

Dr. Crockett: This is big.

Deborah: It's not just cute name. They're all real.

Dr. Crockett: Data behind them.

Deborah: Behind overeating and increasing your risk of overeating. The second major overeating style is one of the six of seven eating behaviors. The first one is task snacking. Okay, eating while you're doing other things.

Dr. Crockett: Like driving or…

Deborah: Well, driving, at your computer, walking down the street when we used to go to shopping malls before COVID, walking and window shopping while you're snacking on a muffin, filling up at the gas tank.

Dr. Crockett: Huh.

Deborah: Yes.

Dr. Crockett: So why do you think this contributes to overeating?

Deborah: Why do I think? I think it's mindless. I think we have learned in the last 100 years since nutritional science as we know what today has evolved. We've learned to, this will be familiar for you. We were told 100 years ago. I think it was by a chemist, Wilbur Olin Atwater. He told us food is fuel, the body is a machine. We have learned to relate to food as something to count. I'll tell you when I would give presentations, I would often ask the audience how many of you familiar with the guideline to not have 30% of calories from fat? Everyone would raise their hand. I said how many of you have a clue if you're doing that?

It's not how we eat, but it's what we've learned. We've learned to just snack all day and eat all day and feel good with that serotonin hit. It's not working. Dr. Phil always says well, how's it working for you? All the dieting and obsessing about food and continuing our relationship to food and doing it alone. It's on our shoulders.

Dr. Crockett: That was one of the seven too is the solo dining.

Deborah: Solo dining. Yes, most of us are going home with our diet book. Again, the moral judgment onto food is something else we've learned. I was good today. I was bad today. I always go what is that? If you have some decadent, delicious chocolate cake, it's called sinful. I think it's just delicious. It's not sinful, but we've learned to project moral judgment on ourself based on what we're eating and on the food itself.

Dr. Crockett: So as we start doing these seven bad habits of.

Deborah: That are normal.

Dr. Crockett: We see ourselves having less awareness of what we're eating. So that whole Hindu prana idea is completely.

Deborah: Completely. Yes, it's completely lost in the consciousness most of us. But isn't the concept, this is not stuff I'm making up. Isn't the concept of cooked was love, made with love still in the culture?

Dr. Crockett: It is.

Deborah: It is. Grandma cooked with love. Yes. So this has traveled. Everything I'm talking about, the antidotes to all these over eating styles such as cooking with love, it's still in the culture. I verified each of the antidotes, which is the Whole Person Integrative Eating Program. I've verified and validated each of the overeating styles with a solution based on science.

Dr. Crockett: Which is really cool. That's a lot of work. That's a whole lot of work.

Deborah: I love. This is the field of nutritional anthropology.

Dr. Crockett: I've never heard that before.

Deborah: That’s the science behind nutritional answer of the whole person integrative eating, looking at the food and eating world of different cultures.

Dr. Crockett: Wow, that is just astonishing.

Reed: We have thousands of cultures globally. We're losing them rapidly. But each of those cultures have come up with their own ways of answering the question of what does it mean to be a human and to have to nourish yourself. They've all got their own strategies for that. The wisdom in those cultures are incredibly powerful interventions for our patients and ourselves. This book helps us to explore some of those. Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: This is so cool. Well, I want to thank you for joining us today. This is such a special day, such a special weekend for me. I'm just honored that we can have this kind of conversation and have a way to bring it to our viewers and our listeners. I wanted to remind our listeners about your website and your book. So the book is called Whole Person Integrative Eating. Your website?

Deborah: The website is integrativeeating.com. Please visit the website. You can find out more about the book, but also the whole program. We have certified specialists who are trained in whole person integrated feeding. So if you want support, you can one, find out about your own personal over eating styles, and two, find a specialist who can help you who has been trained in this.

Dr. Crockett: Oh, thank you so much. Deborah Keston, this has been awesome. Thanks for being here.

Deborah: My utter pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Dr. Crockett: You're welcome. Larry, thank you.

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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