The Difference Between Coddling and Compassion in Nutrition. Discover a Healing Relationship with Food and be a Nutrition Rebel
Welcome to the Satiated Podcast where we explore physical and emotional hunger, satiation and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host Stephanie Mara Fox, your Somatic Nutritional Counselor. I'm so excited to have Michelle Shapiro with us today. Michelle is an Integrative Functional Registered Dietitian in New York City, who helps her clients reverse anxiety, support gut healing and approach weight loss lovingly. She believes in looking for the root cause of any symptom and that you deserve to feel heard and met with compassion in whatever you're navigating in your body. Welcome, Michelle!
Michelle Shapiro 00:41
Oh, my gosh, Stephanie, I'm so excited to be here. I'm a huge fan girl of yours, by the way. So this is like actually an honor. I'm really, really excited to be here.
Stephanie Mara 00:49
Well, Right back at ya. So I'm very excited for this conversation today. And I would love to start out with what got you into this work. I think practitioner's backgrounds are so interesting. And we really get to see here on this podcast, that we're all just human. And we're all also navigating our own things along with supporting others as well.
Michelle Shapiro 01:12
Absolutely. And I think that's the magic of practitioners is that so many of them, it's not a necessary component, it just happens to be that so many of us navigate and support the same issues that we've been through. So that's certainly the case for me. I am a native New Yorker, I was born and raised in Queens and grew up in one of the most incredible diverse neighborhoods. And when I say diverse, I mean of body, mind, spirit, race, creed, orientation in every single way. And really, when I was growing up, I had always occupied a larger body. And I realized, it didn't impact my life much, like it might have been if you lived in a more homogenous suburban neighborhood. And then when I was going away to college, I realized, you know, people in, I was going to the University of Delaware to study nutrition, and I realized, oh, people are not going to just like instantly know me, they're not going to I'm not going to be probably as accepted as I was, you know, growing up in the super diverse place in my larger body, which is a real reality that I had to face. And basically what that led to was me leaving the comfort of this high school I was there was 5000 kids in my high school, I was a class clown with my high school, I had a bunch of friends and really no limits on the life I could lead. I realized that from a very tangible societal perspective, I was going to have a different life when I went away to school. So I said, I'm gonna just lose weight in the most aggressive and harmful way possible, if necessary. And I'm 17 years old, I don't know that it's harmful necessarily at the time, and I was encouraged to lose weight. So I, and this is a major trigger trigger warning and huge alert, I lost, you know, close to 100 pounds in three months, and went off to school and was acknowledged as someone in a normal size body, which was the first time in my life that I had experienced that, even again, in diverse settings or not, there's certainly, you know, stigma in certain environments around people's body size. So as I lost weight, I got incredibly ill, I had gut issues that were newly developed, anxiety, panic attacks, thyroid disorder, all these things that I'd never experienced before in my life. And by the time I got to school, as time went on, I got sicker and sicker. And no one could really pinpoint what was wrong with me. Doctors actually told me you should lose more weight, not one doctor put the piece together, this girl is starving. And her body just went through a drastic, dangerous change, and her body's reacting to it. So I essentially took it upon myself, because the panic attacks were so debilitating for me that I was like, this is the one symptom I can't tolerate. I was like, what can I do to change it? So I basically created what I called my first battle plan, which is where I kind of organize, how am I going to target anxiety from this angle, this angle, this angle, you know, spiritual, lifestyle, water drinking, supplements, and I got to about 70% better. And then I sought the help of a naturopathic physician, Dr. Katchka, who ended up being my business partner later in life by force, of course, I made him because I realized how good he was. And that's where it kind of all came together for me and that appointment, where he sat with me for over two hours and just talked about what I was feeling and all the pieces of my health had come together. And I realized that a lot of my health issues had stemmed from the wrong way that I lost weight. So my goal with my clients is to help them lose weight the right way if they choose to, and only if they choose to, and not harm themselves along the way in the process, also to help clients to reverse their anxiety holistically because I really do like the word reverse, like I'm saying anxiety, as we listened to and lean into anxiety, and of course gut issues so it's always what we heal from we want to treat, and we and we learn these lessons because we want to learn them so badly. So that was certainly true for me.
Stephanie Mara 04:41
Thanks for sharing that powerful journey you've been on. I so resonate. I also went through panic attacks in my early 20s. And individuals kind of give you all this misguided advice to kind of attack the panic attack. Just like try to force it to change. But even those have wisdom to offer. And I'm really hearing you kind of dove into why is this happening? And what wisdom is my body trying to relay to me? I also really appreciate that you are bringing in this very nuanced conversation around what I will delineate as the difference between like weight loss and body positivity. Because you even just framed it as losing weight if you choose to. And I think that a lot of my clients also get really confused on, well, how can you accept your body and also want to change your body? And I know that you talk a little bit about that, and would love to hear more of your thoughts.
Michelle Shapiro 05:44
Yeah, so this is a such a powerful time in the nutrition world, because we're bursting with juicy, amazing information in some ways. And people are really attaching to what I call different like camps of thought, not even schools of thought, different camps of thought. So right now, let's just say like you said, maybe we would like separate into two camps, one being kind of the anti diet culture and body positivity movement. And one would be maybe something along the lines of weight loss or diet culture, let's just say there's kind of these two different camps. So as we've noticed, trends and waves of chronic illness are increasing as time goes on. And we're noticing that maybe maybe weight is a factor in that, maybe not, but the conversation basically has been from the anti diet culture and body positivity movement that you can be healthy at any size, right? This is a HAES as a framework, you can be Healthy At Every Size. And the diet culture movement with the stance that you cannot be healthy at any size, and that weight is causative for health concerns. So I'm probably, and you are too, somewhere in the middle ground where weight may be correlated with either not causing in and of itself, but maybe a cause of or maybe a cycle in some ways other health concerns, it doesn't mean that the weight caused it, it could have been the health concerns caused leaky gut. Either way for me, and my clients, and I know you and your clients, weight gain can be a symptom of something going on. So anything that happens in the body, I really want to learn about it, that's you too, it's curiosity is the most important kind of feature of a good practitioner in my head. So if someone is gaining weight, it's not that weight gain or loss is inherently good or bad. But it is a sign of something. If someone had a balanced weight, their whole life, balance meaning not of a normal body size, quote unquote, but had unmoving weight, and then suddenly started gaining weight, I really want to know why that was happening. Because the body does like to maintain homeostasis on some level. So why would that shift be happening? So I am always eager to find the middle ground between that anti diet culture, body positivity, HAES movement, which is all based on really solid, amazing, incredible ethical principles. And then on the physical plane, if weight is causing some physical issues, which we'll look at that nothing is off the table. And if your clients are coming to you or my clients are coming to me, if what they're prioritizing in their health is important to them, it's important to me. So I really use the principles of functional nutrition to bridge that gap between anti diet culture and nutrition because I feel that conventional nutrition therapies haven't been super supportive for people either.
Stephanie Mara 08:20
Yeah. So what have you found are some of those reasons that a weight change can occur? And I love that you are really bringing this in with a sense of curiosity, that is one of my favorite words, because it's just saying, Oh, the body is changing. Let me just get curious about that, and not make up potentially a story about it that it's good or bad or right or wrong. It's, I wonder why this might be and that can go in either direction, weight gain or weight loss for unexplained reasons, and someone's like, I don't really know what's going on here. And I find that potentially some of the listeners are also curious about, but how can you lose weight in a way that honors your body and takes care of it? Because all we're taught are these examples of dieting, that they fail, they don't work.
Michelle Shapiro 09:12
Absolutely. Right. I think there's that statistic we always hear 98% of diets fail. I'm like, well, I'm not a magician, and my clients 98% of them do not fail. So I don't think that I'm doing something exceptional. I think that if you're following a piece of paper, and it's super restrictive, of course, it's gonna fail. But even the word diet, I'm curious about right? Diet is supposed to be a word that's just the summation of what we eat in a day, right? It's not actually supposed to have this connotation. So I think the first thing we have to do in any of these conversations, which Stephanie you do always, is take the value out of these words, the value out of weight gain, the value out of weight loss, there is no moral value. I use this very crass joke, which is that if you know, morality and weight were defined as being highly correlated or correlated with each other then why was Ted Bundy like underweight? I mean, it's not like, you know, he wasn't he wasn't a better person, he's one of the worst people in the world. It doesn't, it doesn't make you a bad or good person to be any weight size. The problem is also that we have received that messaging our entire lives and as a society, the messaging is that larger is worse. So that work has to be done to where we unpack that. But anytime someone's stepping into a session with either of us, they, I hope they know that, that morality is taken out of the equation right away. So now the morality is taken out of the equation, I would want to know why would someone be gaining weight out of nowhere, and there could be a lot of reasons. So anything that's attacking your mitochondria's ability to work, anything that might be causing a buildup of toxins, basically, like we're storing toxins in our fat cells, right, so anything that's going to mess with our signaling of how our metabolism might function, if the body I know a big kind of components of the Health at Every Size movement is the idea of starvation mode, and that you're actually gonna gain more weight because your metabolism slows down. Adaptive thermogenesis is like a small part of what I'm talking about, but really, at its core, it could be trauma from a physical, mental, spiritual level, it could be a hormone imbalance, it could be your body being attacked by a toxin, it could be, you know, a nutrient deficiency that's leading to your body wanting to hold on to things a little more. I think when people talk about starvation mode, or adaptive thermogenesis, it's always so to me, like too conceptual and high level, I mean, there's very tangible reasons why your body might be gaining weight, and you might not be realizing, and I would say stress is definitely a huge driver of that. Our gut bacteria digest and interpret messages from the food we're eating, which means that if someone if one person needs the same amount of calories than the other person, but one person a better gut bacteria, they're going to get less calories from the same food you're eating. So really, of course, it's always coming down to the gut, we know that, but there's so many different components of if your body is willing to and feels safe to release weight or hold on to weight and if your body again, is trying to send you a signal, there's an emergency going on here, I'm gonna hold on to as much of this as possible. Cortisol, our stress hormone, insulin, these are fat storage or promoting hormones. So there's really so many different things on a hormonal plane, on a toxin plane, detoxification plane, that can be happening that can lead to people gaining weight without them eating any differently or without it being this calories in calories out kind of thing. There's so many different reasons. And it's like the the one thing that I want to double endorse for the Health at Every Size movement and intuitive eating the principles of intuitive eating is that certainly focusing on weight and trying to create weight loss in the body does create a very animalistic fear in our body that is going to start to that because of evolutionary biology. If we were cavewoman, our body would be like, please don't, you're telling me I'm not getting food, I better eat something. So that's definitely a piece. But my issue with these movements is that it's not the whole story. There's a lot of other things going on. Again, it could be what if it's something like mold toxicity? You can't intuitively eat your way out of mold toxicity. There's just not it just won't work basically.
Stephanie Mara 13:02
Yeah, a couple of things I'm hearing in there first is it's not your fault. I think so many individuals kind of blame themselves over, I'm just doing something wrong, I'm not doing it right, I'm eating too much food, I'm not eating the right kind of food. And there might be so many other things that are going on, like you even pointed out that your body is holding on to trauma, it literally doesn't feel safe to be in your body, and to release and so yeah, that I'm hearing so much compassion in that and this piece of compassion is so important on this journey, because then you get to start to bring in curiosity, then you get to come from this place of okay, my body is just trying to talk to me in some way. And it's okay for my body to be where it is at right now. And I know something one of the reasons we connected originally was you put out a fantastic post that I loved on Instagram recently, that was about the difference between kind of coddling and compassion when it comes to nutrition. And I'd love to dive more into that because I think that there's this really fine line that especially people get confused about when it comes to like Health at Every Size, that they're like, Oh, are you just saying I can eat whatever I want to eat whenever I want to eat it.
Michelle Shapiro 14:27
Which isn't true.
Stephanie Mara 14:28
Right. And I think that then individuals go to a place of, well, now I'm doing what you're telling me to do, which is to eat whatever I want, but I don't feel good in my body. But then if I go to a place of trying to focus on what feels good in my body is then that mean not being a Health at Every Size person. Like it gets really confusing for people.
Michelle Shapiro 14:51
It gets extremely confusing for people and Stephanie you know this better than anyone and for anyone listening, the one missing piece of any militant view is that it has to come down to the individual and what they're feeling. So if you're trying to follow a set of principles laid out by someone else it's gonna get hairy anytime because it's not coming from you so the question is, the answer to the question is always the question. You keep asking and you approach with curiosity so we're doing a lot of C's today like compassion, coddling, curiosity, I love that. I'm like a, I like letters lineup and stuff.
Michelle Shapiro 15:25
I'm like C is our letter of the day everybody. And I think that, for me the difference between compassion and coddling like I and I often say that I feel that a compassionate approach is going into the world of what your clients want and feel, not going in with your own agenda. I feel that there is a huge, not I feel, there is a huge number of clients who come to me who tell me that they did work with a distinct Health at Every Size practitioner who worked the principles of intuitive eating with them, and their physical health worsened. Now, their mental health was markedly better. So my concern is are these solutions, psychological solutions for physical problems? You and I both use the principles of intuitive eating, you use Somatic Eating, I use something very similar to I call it like Intentional Eating where people are tapping into their bodies. But we can have that piece of the puzzle and still ask further questions about the physical self. Because the issue is, if your leptin and ghrelin hormones are off, you aren't going to be able to receive those same signals from your body in ways of hunger cues, because the hormones are going to be talking to you, your thoughts aren't talking to you. Even your hunger cues, like you know, a lot of intuitive eating is tapping into like the physical self, of course. But if your hunger cues are off, and your body's telling you you're hungry when you're not, I think that's going to cause a whole other slew of issues for people. So I think that when it comes down to it, the difference between coddling, coddling is saying everything is okay. And there's, in my head, there's a little bit of hopelessness in these movements. And I hate to say it in that if people do want to make a physical change, they're saying 98% of diets fail, you have one solution. And I don't like anyone having one solution, I want people to feel they can come to me, you or 1000 other dietitians and still be able to listen to them. So no one of us is perfect. No one of us has a magic sauce, none at all, the only thing that we might do, I think that's an advantage is really listen to people. So I have been seeing this trend where people are feeling very coddled like you can eat what you want. It's not like the way that people view in this very simplistic view of intuitive eating, eat whatever you want. That is not what Intuitive Eating is at all. It's like a very scientific system with very distinct principles and framework and ways to walk through it. It is not, you know, eat whatever you want. But Gentle Nutrition is one of the last principles for intuitive eating, and the physical piece of it is, is left out. And I think that leaving that out is coddling people. And that if someone, for instance, came to me and said, Michelle, my hemoglobin A1C, which is a marker of blood sugar control, and you know, a test for diabetes, as most people would say, is, you know, 5.7, and they just diagnosed me as prediabetic, like there's a huge cascade of things that happen once your body kind of gets comfortable in insulin resistance, and it can like avalanche really quickly, and it can be like a boulder kind of picking up steam rolling downhill. So for me, it would not be compassionate to say let's focus on the psychological relationship you have with food right now. For me, it would say I would say, here's the information you need to know how can we do this together so I can support you because I don't want my clients ingesting insulin if they don't have to, and having, you know, really serious health concerns if they don't have to. And if there's anything that can be done, I want to do that with my clients. So the difference for me is I'm willing to have those hard conversations. And I think that that's what compassion is, is having hard, honest, deep and and intuitive and feeling conversations without pushing anyone. But people deserve that information. I think coddling is holding back information to make people feel better in the moment.
Stephanie Mara 15:25
Me too. Totally agree with you.
Stephanie Mara 19:08
Yeah, thanks for diving into that because it is complicated. And I think that a lot of emotions can come up for individuals in the process of what I like to explore in my work is something I call Boundary Mentality. And so it's saying, Okay, I've discovered a food actually doesn't make me feel the way I want to feel and it's not that I can't have this food, but that I get to start to set a boundary and say no, because I don't want to feel the way that food makes me feel. And so we have to start putting the power back in the person and less in the food. And there can be something that I call Food Grief comes up in that process of like it's really actually can be quite sad when you discover like a food that maybe you have a lot of really great childhood memories around doesn't really work with the body that you have today anymore and so I think it's such a process of saying, okay, I can eat this food, but actually, if I want to honor and respect the body that I have now and I want it to thrive, I need to start saying no to this food, because it's not supporting this body today.
Michelle Shapiro 20:15
It's a business sentiment, which is like when you say no to something, you say yes to something else, right? It's like, if you say no to eating whatever, let's say processed food, whatever it is, you're saying yes, to maybe feeling good. It's the hardest part, Stephanie. And this is something that I've never spoken on the podcast, because I can never find the words is that what we dictate as normal, and a diet is also dictated by society. And unfortunately, we live in the most distinct culture where food is a marketable commodity, which means that if hostess cupcakes decides that their food is normal to eat for breakfast, we also feel that hostess cupcakes are normal to eat for breakfast. So what's happened with us is that what's become normal in ways of feeling really sick, in ways of eating in a way that's not conducive for human beings. We've really normalized and kind of coddled ourselves into this level. And I don't actually believe we did it, I actually believe food companies did this. Let me take the personal accountability out of this. Food companies did this really successfully, they made it seem normal for us to feel really sick. And for our blood sugar's to be out of control. We are like the sickest and highest health care paying country in the entire world. And there's a reason for it, because food marketing has made the plane for what is safe and correct for us. So I want us to challenge ourselves to think about what actually is normal, quote, unquote, because we compare, oh, I don't get to have the same foods I had in childhood. It's like, well, it wasn't it wasn't that good to have it! Its thing things because those things were so enjoyable and built into these memories. But it doesn't mean that it was awesome for the body when we did it, then it's you know, we were still playing their playbook, essentially. So I have no shame in completely condoning, I'm thinking of another C word, condemning is the word I'm looking for, in condemning any food company, I always say never shame the person, shame the food company. I would like destroy any food company. I think that like the processed food companies, I feel really impassioned that they have let us down so much, and that they've taken so much from us and given so little. And I feel that it's okay to shame those companies without shaming the individual. But we have to understand that, in order for us to listen to ourselves, we really can't use the parameter of what society tells us is normal. Because it's really not normal what's going on here, we, we really shouldn't feel this sick, it really stinks and it's like, breaks my heart on a daily basis. When I I just I can't even look at like chronic illness statistics and things like that, because I'm like, it's these are preventable, chronic illnesses. They're preventable. So, again, that's that other piece of it's compassionate to hear that someone's in pain, and then also compassionate to help troubleshoot solutions for them, too.
Stephanie Mara 23:07
Yeah, yeah, I'm so resonating with everything that you're saying. And I think also for individuals, you kind of have to tap into a little bit of an inner rebel, because when you start saying, no, like, I'm not going to eat this food that doesn't make me feel vibrant, it also, especially in I think most cultures, eating and food is a very community driven thing, you know, we share a meal with someone we like sit down to the table, and that's what makes families feel connected. And when you start saying, you know what, no, I'm going to respect my body, and I'm not going to eat this thing, other individuals might start responding to you in a way that might feel very uncomfortable. Think this is a conversation I have a lot with those that I work with as well that it's not really about you and the change you're making. It's you are being a strong mirror back to that person now that they feel uncomfortable saying no, and they're like, wait I'm just going to make you say yes, so that I don't have to feel uncomfortable. And so there's kind of this a little bit of an inner rebel that needs to come up saying, No, I'm not going to be pushed over anymore into eating this thing that I know actually doesn't serve me long term. And to each their own. If you decide in the moment, it's totally worth it. Go for it. Like that's why it's such an individualized like to the person, to the situation, you have to tune into yourself and say what's going to be the best thing for me right now in this moment. That's why I love the somatic approach because you have to, it's not a plan. You have to tune into the body over and over and over again to make each decision in the moment based off of your body's feedback,
Michelle Shapiro 24:55
Which is this idea of Somatic Eating and this incredible way that you phrase it is so antithetical to Western culture, by the way, in general, because we're told, the big bosses are the people who should be telling us what we should be eating, we don't have the intuitive knowledge to know what we should be eating when in reality, in the way that our ancestors like our ancestors, ancestral nutrition, the way that people ate, it was in this community way, it was checking in with each other and checking in with their own bodies, you would only eat foods of a certain temperature or nature, if it was warm or cold, because that's how your body was feeling. Really, we've kind of like, I don't, you know, I would say like whitewashed kind of these, like, definitely say we've whitewashed in Western culture, a lot of these ancestral nutrition principles that are really at the heart of Somatic Eating. So when I say ancestral nutrition, I do think in the realm of functional nutrition and treating the root cause. And I think all that comes back to coming back to our roots of who we really are even deeper than by, you know, then who we are like in this exact moment, but who we've been historically as a species, and this really connected way too so I just took it one step farther back in time, but I this is why systematic eating model, I think is so absolutely incredible, because you're connecting so, so deeply with yourself. And in those situations with family where you might get pushback, I definitely see that a lot. And the bigger issue, Stephanie, is that people are getting pushback from their own dieticians offices, you know, and that's really where the fear where people are feeling extra upset, because they're trusting people as experts and they're saying, listen, when I eat gluten, whatever food this is not specific thing, gluten is bad or good or anything like that just chose a random thing. You know, I get I'm thinking of myself, I get really bad anxiety when I gluten, right. But then saying that's reminiscent of an eating disorder, you can't cut out gluten or you have an eating disorder, you know, that's disordered eating. I think the line of what disordered eating also has been drawn for people so widely that any food change you make is disordered eating. And in my opinion, that's almost condescending to ancestral traditions themselves, because that's really like a lot, and we think of like, I can think of endless cultures where the way that we eat is very related to how you're feeling, and very related to what's working with your system at the time, like, Oh, you're, you know, this is so silly. I was watching like Game of Thrones or something. And they were like, Oh, they have too much bile, they have to like, eat and you know, give them this because they have too much bile. And I'm like, oh, like people were just like talking about even like, in something as silly as a made up world of Game of Thrones, people were talking about how the body's working that how that influences what we eat. So I think dismissing all of that, in the name of don't have an eating disorder, I think dismisses so much of the rest of our body and our health too.
Stephanie Mara 27:39
Yeah, I have a lot of colleagues and I, myself have worked at an outpatient eating disorder clinic before. And this was one of the pieces that myself and a lot of those that I know, felt conflicted about is that individuals, let's say in an inpatient eating disorder clinic would be taken to like McDonald's and say, Hey, you have to order something on this menu, and you have to eat it so that you can heal your eating disorder. Okay, I understand the concept of that of trying to de-label all foods as it's just food, if that was the only thing you had available, it's better that you eat something than not eating anything at all. And it doesn't teach that trust back in the body of can I listen to it. And if this doesn't feel good to me, I can also say no to a food too, because oftentimes, disordered eating or an eating disorder comes in because boundaries got broken to begin with. So we have to reteach how to listen to the body. And when do we know when to say yes. When do we know when to say no. And I think that that other thing that kind of gets confusing is that really, when we're talking about disordered eating, or an eating disorder, this is on a spectrum, and that ultimately, it's is this impacting your ability to live your life. So for example, if you eat in a particular way that honors and respects your body, and you go out to lunch with a friend, and there's nothing on there that really is what you would typically eat, an eating disorder would say, well, then you just can't eat anything at all. You might as well just get tea and then like, we'll wait to get home to eat kind of our like, quote unquote, safe foods. What I want someone to know is you can go out to eat and even if it isn't the thing that most resonates with your body, you can still enjoy the experience with your friend, eat the thing that you feel like is the best decision in the moment and move on with your life. So when we come to the conversation of saying yes or no to particular foods, it's just gaining clarity of is this actually allowing me to feel more vibrant and free in my life or is it actually diminishing my sense of choice.
Michelle Shapiro 29:59
Absolutely. And I think those two messages come from two different people. Right? It's like, is this coming from a part of me that wishes for long term vitality and health? Or is this coming from the version or part of us that's wishing for me to be thinner, or an angry kid version of me, or whatever that version of me is, I think that's the most key part. And you use this word so beautifully, but it's all about trust with self. If you are suffering from an eating disorder, and are in the hands of these trusted practitioners, who are really the most compassionate and credible people in the world, who are we are 100% there to help people, there's not even a question in the world. And you feel like eating those certain foods is a betrayal of self, even if with the best intentions in mind, if you have to betray yourself to do these things, and even if it's not betraying the ED part of your brain, but it's betraying the authentic part of you that knows, because I do feel that I always feel the client, the patient knows the answers, even more than other people. Even when the ED part of your brain is loud, it's still important that that part of you might still be there and and pull it out. And that's really all the work that I hope to do is to build trust with someone within themselves not to build trust with it's lovely when they build trust with me, and I value it because it helps them build trust with themselves more that's really the goal. But it's how do we in all that we do, in every single recommendation we give, in every single food we recommend and how we eat it, and we're not really in the business of recommending like foods specifically, it's really what the person needs, but how do we in all that builds inner trust within itself. Now, if you do have a symptom that's coming up, you have a rash consistently from eating of food, you're gaining weight when you don't want to and anything like that, again, if you don't want to, if we ignore those signals, that's a major betrayal of self that's a major your body by giving you anxiety, and I love that you said, I honestly, I love my anxiety, because it tells me important messages, I view it as a very sacred messenger to myself. But if we ignore our anxiety, and we ignore our symptoms, our body's going to not trust us at all to take care of it. So it's, it's even more important that in the exact methods that you use, you dive in deeper into what your body's telling you, instead of I have to follow this playbook, you just have to create your own playbook. And that's the work that I'm hoping that a lot of dietitians are doing now, which is let the client make the playbook and you support them in doing that. It has to be on your terms. And I know that that's scary and unpleasant for clients to hear. If you're listening and you're like No, tell me what to do. This is this is hard. And I don't want to. It's the only way out is through. And that's the truth. The only way out is to learn to trust yourself. So that hopefully my goal is my clients don't need me anymore. Unless it's a complicated scientific question where it's like, does this nutrient impact me in this way. Great. But that they have the intuition to trust themselves. Always. And I know you're exactly the same way.
Stephanie Mara 32:47
Yeah, yeah. You know, I tell a story, often just talking about body wisdom, and really listening to it of I've never really been a big coffee drinker. And this was many, many years ago, I discovered like cold brew, I was like, Oh my gosh, this is so different. Oh, this is so good. And I didn't get as like jittery as I normally do from a cup of coffee. And so I started having like, more and more and more of it. And I started to notice a pain in my elbow. And I literally wanted to explore everything else. I'm like, am I typing wrong? Am I like, you know, doing things wrong in like yoga or lifting weights or like is my like, what else is my body trying to tell me? And then finally, after like a couple of weeks of this, I'm like, okay, Stephanie, the only thing that has really changed is that you started drinking coffee. So I was like, Okay, fine, I have to listen. And I took the coffee back out. And within two weeks, the elbow pain was gone, like entirely gone. And so that is how strange the body could talk to us. Why my elbow? I don't know, I'm sure someone could probably explain that to me. But it's these kinds of messages that we would just take as, oh, you know, I just have this ache or this pain. And that's normal. And I just have to live with this that we get to start to utilize it as information of this is how our body is talking to us and get curious about it might not be a food. It could be your stress levels. It could be you just went through something really intense. It could be you changed environments, you moved. There's so many different factors, but it's slowing down and bringing in that curiosity of what might my body be trying to tell me, what has changed recently, and my body needs some extra support right now.
Michelle Shapiro 34:34
Absolutely. And it's so hard, because again, every message we've ever learned is that the body is a vessel that is broken and needs to be fixed with medication. So it's impossible for people to even, this concept you could have your entire podcast just talking about the concept that your body communicates with you, which is basically actually what you do, honestly, is your Somatic Eating. I mean, this is what we do, right? But I think for us to just sit with all thought for a second understand that you and your body are on the same team. And that it's like this unbelievable machine that has mechanisms to communicate with us through pain through discomfort through weird feeling, through healthy feelings, what it wants and needs. And if we really tap into, the options are like are endless for what we can accomplish and feel and experience in our lives. And that's really, if that if anyone leaves with anything, but that from any of your podcasts is like the most important thing is that our body talks and and then it's really interesting because when it comes to betrayal of the body, my body talks to me and I don't always listen, right? So I I'm intolerant to, you have your coffee thing, I have a chocolate thing. I am like totally intolerant to chocolate, I feel like I get like a weird kind of histamine response when I eat chocolate, I don't feel good when I eat chocolate. But I will still eat chocolate. But I will have a conversation with my body and say, Hey, here's what's up, like, you're not gonna like this that much. I'm gonna, my brain's gonna love it. My tongue is gonna love this. We'll deal together later. But there's a way to also engage in these things. And I like to say, say so what after, not before, so after I ate the chocolate, I'm not beating myself up about it. So what I ate some chocolate, you throw your hands in the air. So what. But I don't say so what before, I don't say so what happens if I have a little chocolate, I say, let's talk, the chocolates coming in. It's going to be a weird day, we're not going to feel great. But you know what, it's important to me right now that I eat this chocolate for whatever reason. And this is what's about to happen. But it's still important. So the action that I pave, and if it's a betrayal, I view it as it's an open conversation, it's more of a compromise than a betrayal. So I don't have to eat perfectly according to what my body tells me either. But I do have to respect my body by letting it know what's coming.
Stephanie Mara 36:48
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I am ao in agreeance with all of that, that it's not about, oh, now that I know that this thing doesn't resonate with me that I'm never going to have it ever again. It's not that I've never had a cup of cold brew ever again. I just have the awareness now, that that doesn't necessarily resonate with my body and what I like to call what you're talking about, it's just a sense of ownership, own the decision for yourself, like you're not doing anything wrong or bad, you have the awareness, you're making an empowered decision, it's okay that you're doing this right now. And then even by owning it for yourself, you're potentially shifting your body into a relaxation response to even try to digest that with as much ease as possible. Whereas if you entered into that eating experience in a stress response, your digestion is shut down, making it much more difficult to even try to digest anything coming in.
Michelle Shapiro 37:45
Absolutely. And when you think about also, like, again, going in with that positive response, I also later on if your elbow starting hurting, the fear of the symptom is often worse than the symptoms themselves. What drove you to explore the symptoms was because you were like, Where the heck is this coming from? So I noticed I get a weird histamine kind of response and I'm like, you know what happened earlier today. And I'm like I sure do. Like it was worth every bite, you know, it's like, there's no surprises that of course there's surprises in our health, we can't control every aspect of our health. But when it comes to the patterns that we recognize, there's no surprises in the patterns, I'll know exactly what's gonna happen later. And it's a lot less scary when you're on the same page with your body, your body's like, I'm still gonna send you the signal, you didn't get rid of the signal altogether. But now I know where it's coming from. So I feel a little itchy or a little weird, I know why. When you trust yourself, and you listen to yourself and make every part of healing and every part of sensing in your body less scary, which is, I think a big goal of all this good stuff is that we feel really afraid we feel afraid to gain weight, we feel afraid to have chronic issues and feel afraid to do these things. And ultimately, the fear compounds and creates the issues themselves. So anything that can bring down fear, which is honest and transparent conversation with your body is uh, you know, hole in one.
Stephanie Mara 38:59
Oh my gosh, so well said. I feel like we could just go on and on and on forever in like so many different avenues. I'm absolutely going to have to have you back. I want to leave time just to share with listeners, how can they keep in touch with you? Where can they find you and your work? I love everything that you put out because I really think that you do this beautiful job in blending both this functional nutrition approach with intuition. And so I would love to hear more about how individuals can keep in touch with you.
Michelle Shapiro 39:32
Absolutely. Yay. I said so many absolutelys and I don't normally say that on the podcast because I just literally agree with every single thing you say by the way, like I'm telling you guys, I'm a huge Stephanie fan like I'm a big legitimate fan of you. I like I'm your fan girl like I really when I say absolutely I'm like yes, absolutely. It's not it's repetitive for a reason. So my Instagram is @michelleshapirord. That's mostly on social media where I am and then if you go to the link in my bio, you can go to my website which is michelleshapirord.com too. I also just launched a wellness platform for people looking for functional medicine and nutrition practitioners and that's called Wellness Map that comes with a monthly membership. Really excited about that too because I found that was a huge gap in health care for people and everything is my email is michelleshapirord. It's the same thing everywhere. Michelle Shapiro rd.
Stephanie Mara 40:18
Awesome. I will put all of these links in the show notes and just thank you so much for being here today. This was such a fantastic conversation. And thank you for sharing your wisdom and your expertise and to all the listeners if you have any questions as always reach out anytime I will put both of our contacts in the show notes and looking forward to connecting with you all again soon. Bye!
Michelle Shapiro 40:40
It is my honor Stephanie. Thank you so much.
Stephanie Mara 40:42
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Bye.
Keep in touch with Michelle here:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michelleshapirord/
Website: https://michelleshapirord.com/
Wellness Map: https://www.wellnessmap.co/
Contact: michelleshapirord@gmail.com