How To Create a Sustainable Diet That Includes Your Joy Foods

Stephanie, 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.

Have you ever noticed that diets teach you how NOT to eat? They don't teach you how to eat. They don't teach you about nutrition, what different foods do for your body, and that food is not something to fear but rather embrace, enjoy, and befriend. I went on my first diet when I was 13 years old. All I knew for so many years of my life was how to diet. It wasn't until that all spun out into feeling fearful and confused as to what to eat and what would be best for my body that I saw my very first nutritionist. I will never forget her definition of normal eating. It was, "Sometimes you're going to undereat and sometimes you're going to overeat but when you zoom out and look at your whole month, your body got the nutrition it needed." It was the first time I felt like I could exhale with food and that each meal I was just going to do the best I could to give my body what it needed to thrive.

Today, I'm thrilled to discuss this more with Dr. Sarah Ballantyne. Dr. Sarah is a PhD and the founder of Nutrivore.com and New York Times best-selling author of Nutrivore: The Radical New Science for Getting the Nutrients You Need from the Food You Eat. She creates educational resources to help people improve their day-to-day diet and lifestyle choices, empowered and informed by the most current evidenced-based scientific research. Dr. Sarah began her career as a science communicator and health educator when she launched her original website in 2011. Since then, Dr. Sarah has continued to follow the science—diving deep into immune health, metabolic health, gut microbiome health, nutritional sciences, and the compelling evidence for health at any size—while also observing the harm of healthism, diet culture, dogmatic misinformation and predatory marketing. With Nutrivore, Dr. Sarah has created a positive and inclusive approach to dietary guidance, based in science and devoid of dogma, using nutrient density and sufficiency as its basic principles: Nourishment, not judgment.

We chat about the evolution of nutrition, redefining diet and understanding nutritional needs, ultra processed foods, integrating joy into nutrition, challenging food fears, creating sustainable nutrition practices, and her nutritional approach called Nutrivore. If you've been so incredibly confused about what to feed yourself anymore, this is the episode for you.

Before we dive in, if you're in the giving spirit this holiday season, please consider joining Satiated+ and donating a few dollars each month to support the show and keep it going. Beginning in January, I'm going to start emailing all Satiated+ members every 1st of the month where you can ask me any one question and I will email you back with my best response as a thank you for supporting the show. You can join today by clicking HERE. Now, welcome Dr. Sarah! I am really thrilled that you are here on the podcast today. I was saying before we started recording that I feel like I have been following your research for such a long time, and I'd love to first get started, because I've really seen your evolution, just following your ebb and flow for a while, that I'd love to hear a little bit more, for those that don't know you and your work, about how you got started and kind of your transition into what you're doing now.

Sarah Ballantyne 04:16

So first of all, thank you for having me on the podcast. So I have a PhD in medical biophysics and a background in medical research. I became morbidly obese as a teenager and started collecting diagnoses like some people collect much more fun things like stamps or shoes, but I was like acid reflux, check. Migraine headaches, check. Fibromyalgia, check. Eczema, check. So I racked up a dozen or so diagnoses by my mid 20s, a couple of them are autoimmune. By my early 30s, I was really struggling, and I was in an interesting place in life, where I had my PhD, I was trying to decide what type of career to pursue, I was in academia at the time, and I was also very vulnerable. I had tried every diet. I had already at that point, lost 100 pounds and gained 150. I had very low self esteem. Yeah, I made up for it. You would never know that I had imposter syndrome at the time. Really, I would go, you know, walk into a room and own it. But a lot of that was just covering up just how deeply unhappy I was in my initial forays into like the nutrition and wellness space. I was at a place where I was very susceptible to misinformation and restrictive dieting and that sort of restrictive all of these foods are bad and the cause of all your problems type mindset, which I think, is how most people are learning about diet, right? Most people are learning about diet based on what you avoid, what you're terrified of, right? What are the root causes of all evil foods? Right? Like, what are these horrible things that nobody should be eating, and we're going to moralize those foods. We're going to moralize ourselves when we eat those foods. We're going to judge others. We're going to make assumptions based on their appearances, and assume they're eating these foods, and then assume they're a bad person, right? Like it's that very healthist approach. My initial steps in the wellness community were promoting restrictive dieting, but fortunately for me, I am a scientist, both by training and by nature, and I could never turn off that, oh, but why? Right? That critical thinking of like I want to understand this more. And so as I, you know, was seeing improvements in my own physical health over time, as I was expanding my knowledge and starting to, like, read more and more about foods that I was avoiding because I had learned to be afraid of them, and reading, wow, these are really good for me. I'm not eating this food either. Oh, but this food, like, look at this systematic review and meta analysis, or this umbrella review that shows just how great this food is. But this doesn't jive with this story that I believed, and now I need to try to reconcile these. I need to try to understand what have I been taught that pseudoscience and where science actually is? All of this played out online, because I had an online presence through all of this. So people who followed me for 12, 13, years have kind of like witnessed this journey of sort of being confronted with science that didn't align with my core beliefs about food, and being faced with evidence that says you need to challenge this food fear. You need to face this fear. You need to expand your diet. And I realized, talking like five, six years ago, that I had a learned eating disorder, right? I had traded binge eating disorder, which I developed in my teen years, for orthorexia and still some binging behaviors. Let's you know, let's be real. Like that never fully went away. That's a very uncomfortable realization to realize, not only have I fallen for this misinformation, not only was I vulnerable, gullible like not only did I believe this, I helped spread this. I helped teach other people some things that were wrong, lots of stuff that was right, but also some wrong things. And so that really informed both leaving restrictive dieting in the past, leaving that community, and building Nutrivore. Which kind of lives in the liminal space between diet and anti diet, right? It's not really either or. It's kind of both. It's kind of something different, but it's both informed by the science and the vulnerability to believing misinformation, right? Like, how do we believe that misinformation? The entire diet and weight loss industry is predicated on two things, right? It's predicated on we're never reaching our health goals, because they're first of all ridiculous, like the things that we're told equal healthy is like, not, right? It's actually trading health for weight loss. It's based on the fact that we're never successful, and also that we feel terrible about ourselves and we feel like we're the problem that my failings, my weakness, my lack of discipline, my lack of willpower, are why I need to buy the next thing. I, depending on who's doing the evaluation $130 to $250 billion per year industry, is based on I don't have the knowledge to actually know if what you're selling me is true or not, right. We don't. We don't learn about what a nutrient even is in general, or what different nutrients do in the body, or what types of food have, what types of nutrients, how much of those nutrients we need. That's not a knowledge base that most of us have. So we're very susceptible to, oh, don't eat this food. It has this bad thing, right? We don't also don't learn very much about dose responses or toxicological, toxicological principles, right? Like we just learned, that's this big, scary word that, therefore I should be scared, right? So I'm building Nutrivore as much to kind of address the incredible prevalence there's more misinformation than information about diet nutrition online right now. So to try to, like, create that base knowledge that if I had had that when I first entered this space, I hopefully would not have fallen down the path that I found myself on, but that also helps to counteract that misinformation that's being spread, but that also addresses that bigger psychological issue of the way we are even approaching diet in terms of moralizing foods, having lists of good foods and bad foods, yes foods and no foods, equating health and weight loss, turns out those words mean different things, right? And you certainly can have both, but you can also have one or the other, right? And so shifting that priority towards health that doesn't mean you can't have weight loss goals if you want to have weight loss goals. So that's fine, but have a health goal as first and foremost, right? Like, have health goal is the top priority, and then weight loss is the secondary priority, right? Rather than I'm going to achieve this weight loss no matter what, and I'm going to sacrifice all of these different, you know, factors that are influencing my health in order to achieve this at all costs, because society has told me I'm not worthy unless I do so, Nutrivore I have built to kind of be that, like, nutritional sciences education that I think would completely undermine the entire diet and weight loss industry if we all had it in the best possible way. But then also that, like, positive messaging around weight and health and food, and trying to get us away from that restrictive mindset, that moralization of foods, towards a permissive structure, which is kind of why I say it lives in the world in between diet and anti diet, because it's anti diet in it's philosophy, no food is off the table. Any food can fit into a healthy diet. But it's also nutritional principles, right, understanding how to actually meet our body's nutritional needs and support long term health to the full extent that diet can, which is not everything, like there's lots of things that influence health that we have no control over, but how to improve diet quality in a way that's sustainable for our entire lives, and that requires getting enough joy from our diet that we like it, right, that we want to keep doing it. And so how do we set ourselves up to have that, like sustainable nutrition, right, that high quality, overall eating pattern for our entire lives, that kind of necessitates that we have to heal our relationship with food, heal our relationship with our own bodies, and really, like, ignore the messaging from diet culture that I mean, to be fair, I've been inundated with it my entire life, right? Like we're talking four or five generations now of people who this is all the messaging they've received, like, I think, generationally and societally, we have lost our intuition as to what a balanced, nutritious diet even looks like. So like building back up that intuition through all of the resources that I create. So Nutrivore is kind of a it's the landing place that came out of both the physical health journey and the psychological health journey, the experience of falling for misinformation and being wrong on the internet, and that feels really bad, and so also the experience of admitting to being wrong and correcting the record and putting systems in place to hopefully never have that happen again, but if it does, I will always say so. But like, I how do I also model the redemption arc of a wellness influencer?

Stephanie Mara 14:33

I'm so excited about everything that you're sharing right now, because I feel like I've had a lot more people on the podcast over this past year that's talking about this middle path that people are so confused about they don't want to be on diets anymore, or they keep going back to them because they don't know what else to do. And anti diet feels also like it's not resonating with them where it's like, does all foods fit? Is that the most supportive thing for me? Like, I kind of don't feel great when maybe I eat some of these foods, but then I'm supposed to eat those foods to prove that I'm not on a diet. And it all just gets really, really confusing. So when you started talking about Nutrivore on social media, I got really, really excited about this again, just building onto this middle space that it can be both. And I'm curious about how you sense like dieting is different than nutrition, because I feel like they've kind of become synonymous and there's actually a difference between what is it to make nutrition more of a, I'm going to say priority, or more, of something that feels important to a person while also not feeling like you're on a diet.

Sarah Ballantyne 15:48

I love this question so much. I think it's so insightful. I think one of the challenges in the like nutrition, wellness, health conscious space online, is that the word diet doesn't have a whole lot of synonyms. We don't have a whole lot of other ways to say diet. I had a conversation with my editor not that long ago, and he was like, you're using the word diet too much. I was like, okay, but like, what else can I say? And he was like, well, you could say way of eating. We're using something clunkier than the word diet, just because we're trying to mix up the language. But this isn't like another term for something in English where you've got lots of alternatives. We don't really have alternatives. So like, diet refers to the collection of foods that you eat regularly, right? That's what a diet is. Nutrition refers to the nutrients those foods supply. And when we talk about how food impacts health, we're talking about whether or not the collection of all of the foods that you eat all together, are they supplying nutrients as the raw materials that our bodies need to perform all of the functions of life, right? So, nutrients are the things that we're made of. It's the energy that drives all of the chemical reactions that keep us alive. It's the reagents, right? The starting materials that go into all of the different chemical reactions to make things that are us, and we need to, because they're used up in those chemical reactions, we need to continuously top up our nutrient stores from the foods we eat. So nourishment comes from the diet, but a diet is not necessarily nourishing. To talk about nutrition, what we're really talking about is the nutrients. Are we getting these raw materials that our bodies actually need from our diet? And that's how I frame Nutrivore. So I refer to Nutrivore as simply the goal of getting all of the nutrients our bodies need from the foods we eat. And what's wonderful about adopting that as an overarching principle for choosing foods is there's a few things in terms of just like the practicality of nutrition that's really important and integrated into that philosophy, but also the psychology of diet, that's really important. So in terms of, like, the practicality, if we say, this is my goal, right, get all of the nutrients from the foods that we eat. Well, first of all, if you just look at vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, so you can include non essential nutrients into this calculation, protein, fiber, healthy fats, carbohydrates, right? I need to get a certain amount of all of these different things. How do I mix and match foods to get all of this? As soon as you start that like we would need a crazy computer program to figure out how many actual different ways there are, but let's say millions, as a rough estimate, order of magnitude, millions of different ways of combining foods to actually meet our nutritional needs from the foods we eat. So the liberating thing from that statement is, if you have dietary priorities, you have an allergy or food intolerance, or you have a health condition, and your doctor has said, I want you to eat this way or this way, or you have dietary preferences for religious reasons or moral ethical reasons. You can still meet your nutritional needs with a list of foods that you don't eat for whatever reason. Or you can use the education that is nutrivore to identify here's the foods that I can eat to meet most of my nutritional needs. Here's the one nutrient that I can't get, or the two nutrients that I can't get because I'm allergic to fish and shellfish. There's no good way for me to hit my omega three intake. So that's a great example of when like a supplement strategy may be important, right? So we can also use this education to help identify when supplements are actually helpful, rather than just taking everything, because my favorite wellness influencer told me this would make my life better, right? And so part of it is just the practicality of understanding that Nutrivore can be used as a diet modifier. It can be used to layer emphasis on nutrient dense foods over top of your preferred diet. In terms of just picking choosing foods it also means I don't have to have a dietary structure. I don't have to have a list of foods I eat and a list of foods I don't eat. I can see all of these different ways of choosing foods. I'll just try all of them. I'll mix them up. Like it means that we don't have to have yes foods or no foods, we just understand kind of the patterns right, like, roughly what food groups to pick from for, you know, each meal, and what can swap out for what right, like, just kind of understanding that big picture. It's so liberating, because we don't need to be counting anything in this right. We don't need to be measuring or weighing or logging, like it just gives us this structure for eating a balanced, nutrient, dense health, supportive diet that doesn't require thinking about diet in the way that we've been taught. The other fantastic thing about getting all the nutrients my body needs from the foods I eat is my goal. Does it matter if all of those nutrients come from three quarters of the food I ate and a quarter of the food I ate didn't contribute much nutrition, like no, I got all the nutrients my body needs. So that donut was just there for the pleasure and the joy of it. It's fine, right? So it's surprisingly easy. Most people's diets don't supply all of the nutrients that their bodies need because of this issue with we're not taught this. We don't know this, and we've lost the intuition on how to do this without thinking about it. But when you start doing this, like figuring out how many different combinations of foods hit the daily value of all of the essential nutrients, you realize most people can do this in like 50 to 75% of their energy requirements for the day. So even if you want to have an energy deficit, your energy deficit should not be 25% of your calories. It certainly should not be 50% so even if you want to have an energy deficit, you still have room for we're going to call them empty calories, just because that is a term that everyone is familiar with. I prefer the term quality of life foods like foods you're choosing not because they're nutritious, not because they have a lot of nutrients, but just because they're joyous foods. They're the foods that are just, they're my emotional comfort foods, right? They taste great. I love them. I feel happy when I eat them. Those foods still get to be a part of a healthy diet. And so when you start thinking of it that way, that's where you go, okay, any food can fit into a healthy diet, because even the emptiest of white sugar, right, the emptiest of calories, it can still fit into that whatever percent of energy intake up to our requirements we have left after we've met our nutritional needs from food to layer on top of that additional emphasis on yes, you really can eat empty calories, it's fine. You can eat junk food, you can eat fast food, it's fine. Is this additional body of scientific literature looking at dose responses of ultra processed foods. There's a couple of things to know. First is the definition of ultra processed foods is very confusing, and a lot of foods are categorized as ultra processed foods that you probably don't realize are, and that muddies the waters in the research, right? So, like frozen dinners are categorized as ultra processed foods. Low sodium chicken vegetable soup in a can is categorized as an ultra processed food. Those are nutritious, healthy options. So part of this conversation is like not all ultra processed foods, some of them are beneficial, nutrient dense foods, and some of them are empty calories. But even when you look at those statistics, we see that as long as 20% or fewer of our calories come from ultra processed foods, there's no health harm from that. And the reason why I should categorize this a little bit more. Scientists don't really know the reason why diets over abundant in ultra processed foods increase risk of health problems. Probably all three possibilities are actually it's probably a little bit of everything. So one is, ultra processed foods are not as satiating. A lot of them are engineered to be addictively delicious. And studies that have looked at people eating ultra processed foods versus whole foods show that when you eat a diet that's way over abundant, ultra processed foods, you tend to eat more. So that may just be increasing how much people are eating on average, hyper caloric diets, even if there are whole foods diets, in general, increased risk of health problems. So part of it could just be that too much of these foods drives over eating. There's also a bunch of research showing that the more ultra processed foods people eat, the lower their nutrient intake, because these are foods that have undergone a lot of processing that strips out a lot of the nutrients inherent to the original ingredients. Again, not all ultra processed foods, but a lot of them, don't have a ton to offer us nutritionally, but do offer a lot of energy. So part of it should be we're just missing all of these important nutrients that our bodies actually need. And the third possibility here is that there are additives, preservatives, there are some ingredients used in these foods for which there is an acceptable daily intake set like food dyes, right? So food dyes all, each one has a different acceptable daily intake level, and the acceptable daily intake is the amount of that food or ingredient that we can consume every single day without it causing any harm to health. But there are certain additives where groups of people are exceeding the ADI regularly. Food dyes is one of them, and this is seen more with people with food insecurity and lower socioeconomic status, again, showing some big structural issues with our food supply. But one of the things that those foods are added to ultra processed foods, so like a diet over abundant in ultra processed foods may also increase the likelihood of exceeding the level that is safe for some of these food additives. It's probably a little bit of all of the above that is contributing to the health signal that we see in people who consume a lot of ultra processed foods. That doesn't mean these foods are bad. There's still plenty of situations where if that's the only food you have access to, it is much better to eat those foods than to not eat. We can remove the judgment about these foods, and they're delicious. I mean, we're talking about some of the tastiest things that humans have ever created. It's okay to integrate those foods into a nutrient focused mainly whole foods diet, and if those foods mean that you love what you're eating, that you get joy out of your meals, that you're not feeling like you're missing out or that you're deprived that means that you can eat that way for the rest of your life. So I think it's very important to not moralize these foods, but understand how much of them we can integrate into a diet and still have that diet overall improve health. And I think as much as like studies show 20% is that level, it's probably higher if the rest of the diet is whole foods. I just don't have like a scientific study to point to. But there was a really cool one done last year where, now granted, they were like, selectively picking the like canned soups and the frozen dinners and the things that are ultra processed but actually have a lot of nutrition. This paper, as much, shows how, like, these fuzzy definitions are a problem as well, but they created a diet that was 90ish percent ultra processed foods that more closely aligned with USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans than the average American. I think they were scoring like an 89 on the Healthy Eating Index. Because I think the average American is like 50 something, 53, 58 it's like five and a round number. I feel like, literally, like I was a three or an eight. I don't remember exactly, but again, like coming back to this idea that any food can fit into a healthy diet, if you think about I'm using this judgmental language a little bit provocatively, like a little bit intentionally, right? But like the junkiest of junk food, the food that you have the most diet culture messaging bias ingrained in your brain to make you feel like you should not be eating that. Yeah, you can eat that. Go ahead, just make sure that it's less than 20% of your calories. First of all, over once in a while, it's not a big deal, but over more than once in a while may still be okay, right? Like, if we're still meeting our nutritional needs with the rest of our foods, we're just gonna treat this like the proverbial gravy on top or the icing on the whatever. There's so many food analogies I could reach for I'm trying to reach for all of them all at once. If we're meeting our nutritional needs from the foods we eat, it's okay if we are incorporating some foods that don't contribute much to that mission, but do contribute to that diet being sustainable., that do mean that we are getting enough joy from our diet that we don't feel like this is something that we're have to like white knuckle our way through, right if we're white knuckling our way through a diet doesn't matter how healthy the diet is. It's not sustainable. It doesn't matter how I eat today in terms of my long term health outcomes like my risk of cardiovascular disease or type two diabetes or Alzheimer's disease or chronic kidney disease or osteoporosis, or all of these things that are starting to feel a lot closer than they used to alright. They're starting to feel a lot more real as I approach some bigger some bigger age numbers. But it doesn't matter how I eat today in terms of my risk for those things, it matters how I eat on average over the long term. So keeping that in mind, that's where the permission comes from. That's where the no food off limits comes from. It comes from that science showing, yes, it's fine, it's fine. And the stress of feeling like I'm a bad person if I eat these bad foods, that is what's driving that on again, off again, yo, yo. That is not serving our long term health goals, because it's eroding average eating patterns. So being intentional to yep, my favorite food is I don't but whatever I quote now people are going to accuse me of being paid off by that company, pizza, Oreos, donuts, cake, Doritos, right? Whatever it is. Whatever your vice food is, give yourself permission to incorporate. Be intentional about how you incorporate it. Incorporate it in a way that that still maintains that overall balance of nutrients. That's where Nutrivore is not fully anti diet, because we're still really focused on maintaining that higher diet quality. But that's where we get those anti diet principles still come in, and where we can strike that balance of that in between path.

Stephanie Mara 30:18

Oh my gosh, there were so many gold nuggets in there. Something that you said earlier that made me think, like I went on my first diet my summer before my freshman year of high school, Weight Watchers. And something that I always reflect on during that period of time is that it didn't teach me how to eat. What it was teaching me was how to be afraid of food, and it was teaching me how to try to control my body through food. And so I know for myself, it was actually quite a journey to learn how to be an eater and to relearn, like, what it meant to like a catchy term now is relationship with food. Like, what does that even mean to have a relationship with food.

Sarah Ballantyne 31:01

It's actually a terrible phrase, isn't it, right? Because it just makes food like your bad ex boyfriend, like there's no other way to interpret that phrase. I wish I had a better term for that. I think what I mean when I say relationship with food, how I feel when I'm faced with food choice, right? So it's like that emotional processing that has to happen with food choice and all of the baggage that's brought to that internal monologue. And exactly what you're saying, right, is what we've learned through diet for several generations now is this type of control that strips the joy out of food. We've learned all of these like side messages that are really like, if you prepare those vegetables in a way that they're really tasty, it doesn't count. We're taught that if like the food is yummy, it doesn't count, even if it's really nutritious food. We're taught that if we're full at the end of a really nutritious meal, that that means that we've done something wrong. We're taught to equate health and fitness, also not correct. And so I think what I seek in the psychological aspects of the Nutrivore philosophy is to get to a point where food choices can be back centered on flavor and experience and joy and convenience and what fits within my budget, what do I have time for? And we can stop overthinking the composition, right? So the you know, more whole foods, more fruits and vegetables, higher diversity of foods, like these things that are really important in an overall healthy eating pattern, don't feel like they require effort. I would like us to get to a point where, because there's no judgment on food, because we can intuit what a healthy, balanced meal looks like, because we've gained that experience, we've gained that knowledge base. We can get to a point where the decision making around food is no longer dragged down by I should eat this, I should measure this, I should count this, I should log this. And instead it's, oh, I haven't had broccoli in a while. Oh, broccoli would be really great for dinner tonight. Oh, remember that great recipe where it was like roasted with garlic and lemon I'm gonna make that! We can kind of reclaim, I think, some of the natural, like human nature of nurturing our families with food, nurturing ourselves with food, celebrating with food, food being this like moment for everyone to come together and tell me about your day. It can come back to something that is no longer this anchor weighing us down and causing this like constant stress, and it can just become something very natural where overall healthy eating patterns still supply us with delicious foods that cater to our taste preferences, that still honor our cultures and traditions as no longer burdened by the judgment and the moralization that diet culture has taught us.

Stephanie Mara 34:19

I really love your term quality of life foods, because something that I hear a lot from those I work with is how much they just don't want food to be an issue. Can I just not think about food anymore? And that kind of gives all the power to food, because you're trying to not focus on something that literally is important for us to be alive.

Sarah Ballantyne 34:42

You do have to eat, ideally daily, yeah, ideally several times per day, if you're trying to take back the power from food. Like I understand, right, as somebody who has a history of obesity, like, I know what food noise is. I do experience it and that feeling like food is controlling you, rather than you're controlling food. Like yes, that is a wonderful thing to be able to move past and move beyond. But I don't think that completely letting go of food serves that purpose. I do think, I'm not certified in intuitive eating. This is not my specialty. I've read some of the research, but like, this is my interpretation of from an outsider. Okay, so it's like, I want to preface all of this by saying I am not an expert in intuitive eating, but one of the things that I have experimented with myself in expanding my own diet and facing my own food fears, and that has definitely worked for me, is permission to just like, hey, there's this food that I have been restricting. I'm gonna expand my diet. I'm gonna reincorporate this food. And, holy smokes, this happened with me and peanuts actually. I was like, why am I still afraid of peanuts? I need to face my fear. And I, you know, tested it methodically, made sure I wasn't allergic. I'm fine. We're getting along. Peanuts and I get along great, but then I ate peanuts every single day from three months. It took about three months before I was like, I don't feel like peanuts today, right? Like, it kind of took that amount of time. And that's something that an intuitive eating coach would like help you work through, is working through the permissive structure with foods that you have been restricting due to judgments on foods, will help you work through that permission to the point where the food loses hold. And one of the reasons why that food has that voice and has is calling your name from the pantry is because you've been restricting it. I'm telling you any food that you don't restrict it doesn't call your name. If celery is calling your name, well, that's actually pretty cool. Go ahead and eat the celery. That's awesome, but it's no celery. It's not. It's the foods that we have labeled as I'm not allowed to eat that food. It's always those foods. And there's something about the like Intuitive Eating philosophy to kind of get through that transition from restriction to really unrestricted permission, that yes, did I overdo peanuts for three months? Absolutely yes. I ate them chocolate covered. I ate them candied. I ate them as peanut butter. I ate them straight out of the bag like I enjoyed them in all of their forms. It took doing that and giving myself permission to, yes, I've missed these. I didn't eat these for a decade. I'm going to eat these now. It took that experience of having them every day for them to just to just didn't feel special anymore. They felt like something that I like, that I can keep in my pantry, and it's no longer calling my name. And some days I want some now, and some days I don't, more often I don't, than days that I want it. And I think that experience, I think it's tough. There's the diet culture voice at the back of your head going, you're eating too much, but you're not supposed to. You're overdoing it, and that's why I think it's so helpful in this conversation focus on health instead of weight, because that voice when I say, but like, look at all this research showing that peanuts reduce cardiovascular disease risk, it's fine. Are they calorie dense. Sure, if I was thinking about this in terms of what my waistline was going to do, then that voice might be a little bit harder to quiet down. But since I'm thinking about this in terms of the long term health benefits of me over doing peanuts for three months, I can change that conversation in my head, and I can make that voice settle down much faster. And so I think again, this is why working with an intuitive eating coach may be a really beneficial like professional to take advantage of, but also like eating disorder specialists, rds, therapists, they can all kind of help you navigate this world of moving beyond restriction. That's where the other side is, right? The other side is this food does not call my name from the pantry anymore. I can enjoy it in moderation as part of a diverse, overall, nutrient dense diet and the long term healthy eating pattern. And I've had to do that with a few different foods, right? Like the peanuts is just the most recent example. And I think that that emotional progress is part of how we get to sustainable nutrition, because when food is in control of us, that's part of that old way of thinking that's part of the moralization of food, the restrictive mindset of food, and it's part of, again, what keeps us vulnerable to misinformation and drives the diet yo yo. So having to make that transition, I think, is kind of like a necessary prerequisite to achieve sustainable nutrition.

Stephanie Mara 39:39

Yeah, and you've said the word sustainable a few times, which, I'm a big fan of that word as well, because diets are not sustainable, even anti diet is not really sustainable, because it's all telling you to listen to something outside of yourself, not what works for you and your unique body. And so I'm wondering in your research and creating Nutrivore, one, as people are listening to this, like, what exactly is it? And two, I'm wondering, as you did your research, how it potentially changed, how you connected with food, and maybe saw food out of the realm of like, good or bad, or all or nothing, or everything we learn from diets.

Sarah Ballantyne 40:18

Yeah. So when I use the word sustainable, I am very specifically referring to something that I can sustain, right, that I can do for the rest of my life. There's sustainability in the food supply and the ecological impacts and packaging and sustainability can mean a lot of things. I want to be specific that what I mean when I'm talking about sustainable nutrition is I mean something that I can keep doing. So for something to be something that I can keep doing, it can't be a drain on my financial resources, it can't be a drain on my time resources. It can't be a drain on my energy resources, and it can't deprive me of my favorite flavors. So I would say that this doesn't pull on like any one specific study or one specific field of research. It's kind of like piecing together a puzzle from lots of different areas. It's leveraging the psychology of nutrition in order to achieve the nutritional sciences physiological impact of nutrition. So there's a lot of studies in physiology and nutritional sciences that look at how people eat and how that impacts their risk of type two diabetes or cardiovascular disease or cancer or whatever. And so when you look at those healthy eating patterns, you can start to build right what do all of these look like together? What are the most important things that I can do nutritionally to support my long term health? Eat lots of vegetables, eat some nuts and seeds, eat some legumes, eat fruit, carbs, good healthy fats like olive oil and canola oil. I know that's a that's a big can of worms right there. I'm just gonna throw that out there and, like, run away. Seafood, right? Like eating more seafood and eating more plants than animal foods, but it doesn't necessarily require a plant based diet, just like plant forward say. So those are kind of like, you start to build, right? You build these nutritional patterns that support long term health, and then you're like, okay, now how do I make that something that I can do every day, rather than something I do for a while? And then I break down and eat the thing that I've been missing, and now I'm just eating whatever, because food is going to control of me, instead of the other way around. And then I have to, like, get back on the wagon, or go cold turkey, or rip off the bandaid, or jump in with both feet, right? All these different idioms we have to describe the hard thing of trying to develop that good habit again. So the nutrition part is like those eating patterns, right? Those foods that are really important to incorporate for long term health, because they supply the nutrition and the nutrients that our bodies need. And then there's the sustainability part. How do I make this a thing that I can do day in and day out in order for that healthy nutrition to be sustainable, we have to look at both the psychology and also the practical aspect of implementing those healthy eating patterns. So one of the things that we can do is not engaged with a restrictive mindset. We can focus on what are these important foods that I can add, rather than thinking about anything that we want to take away? Right? Adding those foods is automatically going to kind of relegate the other foods to a smaller proportion of our diet, and probably help us achieve balance without thinking about it too much. But in order to have that sustainability part, this is a thing that I can do every single day for the rest of my life. We have to acknowledge all of the other things that food does for us that's not just supply us with nutrients, supplies with experience, with joy, with connection and bonding and celebration, right? All of these things that food does, and we have to make a place for that. We have to make a place for food beyond just raw nutrition, right? If we just had to think about raw nutrition, we could all just drink our soylent green and like, be done with it, right? So honoring that food is so much more than just the nutrients that it contains. And so that's pulling from that psychology research. But then the practical aspect is this has to fit within my budget, has to fit within my time and energy for food preparation. It has to be food that I enjoy. Has to be food I have access to. I have to be able to get it easily. So with Nutrivore, I try to incorporate all of those different pieces into the educational resources that I create, so that we're looking at these like things that are supporting long term health, but then how to make that affordable enjoyable easy? How do we then make it so that the habits are easy to develop around those foods? Right? That it's not something that feels like it requires willpower because it's delicious. It's not something that feels like a strain and a stress because it's not blowing my budget out of the water, and part of doing that is myth busting, like part of keeping healthy eating easy and affordable is being able to say, no, canned foods are fine. You're fine. You don't need to worry about the BPA in canned foods. Frozen veg are totally fine. Canned vegetables, canned fish, you're good. Like you don't need to worry about the mercury. You can buy non organic. You don't have to buy organic. You can buy the cheap vegetable oil. It's actually good for you. You're fine. And just being able to like give people also permission, not just to eat foods that they like, but permission to buy the foods that they can afford that they have access to, I think so much in the wellness culture, especially the last decade, especially the last decade is, here's the bar for healthy eating. Oh, wait, you've met it. Let me raise it. Oh, wait, you've met this bar. Alert. Now you need the $300 a month supplements I'm selling. Now, there's the next food that you have to be terrified of, right? And it's this, like constant, like raising the barrier to entry and what that does, perfect example of diet culture feeding off of your fears and vulnerabilities with misinformation. There's this growing population of people who are like, that's too much. I can't do it. Why even bother? Oh, if that's what it takes to eat a healthy diet, I can't do that. And so you have this defeatist attitude to improving diet quality that is not supported by the science. What the science says is every small little thing we do counts. The science says that every little tiny change, adding that half serving of vegetables per day counts that that is going to improve long term health outcomes, getting a piece of fruit instead of a snack from the vending machine, that counts. Refilling with water or like unsweet tea instead of soda, right? That counts. Every single one of those things that we do, and if it's only one for now and we tackle the next one in a month, right? Like every single one of those things adds up to improving our long term health. And so this, like perfect, robust mentality that goes along with wellness culture is completely working against our ability to turn these different aspects of long term healthy eating patterns into lifelong healthy habits.

Stephanie Mara 47:00

Oh my gosh, everything that is coming out of your mouth I feel like so many people need to hear all of this, and I'm curious as we start to wrap up, I usually like to offer people who are listening little baby steps like you were even just referencing like we need these tiny, little, doable things that we can move towards and it's not this big overhaul that's going to make this huge difference that we have to do. And so I'm wondering if someone maybe starts to explore looking at their nutrition and wanting to approach it in a way with less fear and more excitement, of like, what's possible for me, and I'm going to use the cliche term of my relationship with nutrition,where would you guide someone in getting started, or even getting started in what you've created around Nutrivore?

Sarah Ballantyne 47:47

My go to answer to this question is probably not the right answer for this audience. So my go to answer is typically, let's work on adding one serving of vegetables per day as a starting point. Right? Most people don't eat enough vegetables. Let's add one serving. That's about the volume of your fist when it's raw, like half a fist when it's cooked. It's not that much. Let's add it to whatever meal makes the most sense, lunch or dinner. It's probably not breakfast right now, right? Like, let's add it where it makes sense. And let's embrace frozen vegetables, canned vegetables, adding a salad to your drive through order, right? Let's embrace the easiest way to do this, right? So what is going to be tasty, easy, right? And set ourselves up for success, right? Set ourselves up to turn this into, oh, yeah, no, I just always have the serving of vegetables with dinner, right? Like, turn this into, just like a normal part of our routine. So that means whatever we're doing, we have to like the taste of it, and it's got to be fast, it's got to be easy. It's got to just kind of fit in seamlessly. But I think when you're talking about a group of people who are already or like are trying to recover from that food fear and the restrictive mindset, who are already making a lot of choices that are really focused on health, probably already eating a lot of vegetables, that's not the challenge here, right? The challenge is actually the transition away from the food fear, rather than the what is the food that I can add that is going to be healthful? It's probably the what food can I add that wait a minute you said, legumes. I heard legumes have lectins. Wait a minute. You said canola oil. I heard canola oil was made from toxic sludge and full of hexane. It's probably more the most triggering food that I've mentioned. Seafood has mercury. Canned seafood has BPA, the frozen vegetables have pfas like, whatever, the like, fear based response that like the thing that made you jump straight to the comment section to like, angry type, whatever, whatever response like, it's probably that. I'm not even going to say go ahead and eat it. I'm just going to say, let's read about it. Let's start learning about it. I have an entire chapter myth busting those types of myths in my book Nutrivore, I'm building a section on my website for myth busting. And right now I have a epic, giant article on vegetable oils, busting every single vegetable oil myth there. I also have a webinar where I go through a dozen food based myths, if you would like to learn by video content. So that's available at YouTube or Nutrivore.com/shop so I have different ways that you can engage with that content. And I will be talking about vegetable oils a lot over the near future, because turns out, this is the myth that everybody wants to believe. Everybody wants a culprit for all their problems. And vegetable oils have become it among the entire wellness community. But I would say, like, it's whatever the thing is that you were like, no, that's not a thing that I can actually eat. That's not a food I have control around. Like maybe we were talking about pizza or donuts or cake, and you're like, I can't add that back in my, I don't have control over that food if I start eating that food, I'm going to eat the whole box. I would say, as much as my normal answer to this is start adding in those nutritionally important foods, I would say, for this audience, what is the food that's moralized, that's bad, that's toxic, that's inflammatory, that is whatever other negative judgment word that we have to apply to it, that when we can overcome our fear of that food integrate it into our diets in a meaningful way, then that unlocks the ability to do that with everything else. So what is that food that in listening to this whole conversation, you went, ugh, not that. I can't eat that. That's bad. I would say that's the food to like come on over to Nutrivore. Learn more about it so that you can feel safe in challenging this fear. I will give you all the scientific citations you need to understand that the fear is unfounded, and understand unfounded fear doesn't mean it's not fear. It's still legit fear. And I've also had to do this journey, as we talked about at the top, like I understand how hard this is, but once you do that first step and that first food, you're like, oh, this was fine, and oh, look at how much money it saved me, and look, and it just tastes great, and it works for me just fine. It makes it so much easier to do the next one, like for me in facing my food fears, most of which I did before I went to therapy to address the rest of it, so most of which I kind of just like stumbled through on my own. The first few I had such a stress response, scared of trying that food, that I couldn't tell how I felt eating that food because my stress was so high, and it took going through that a few times to just feel more comfortable in the activity of expanding my diet and so working through that. What is that first fear that we're gonna we're gonna address and we're gonna work through it, and we're gonna be there together. We're gonna hold hands. You got this, you're gonna be okay. I promise it's gonna be okay. Finding that life on the other side of food fear with that one first food, it paves the way for the next one and the next one, the next one. So I would say in this case, it's the food we're most afraid of.

Stephanie Mara 52:55

Yeah, I actually love all of those suggestions, because it kind of hits any person that's listening to this, where maybe they're like, you know what, I have been maybe consuming more and more of those ultra processed foods because I'm trying to, like, heal my relationship with food. And maybe it would be great to start adding in more vegetables. And then it also addresses, like you were saying that food fear, of, well, I often take this somatic approach, of, let's get curious about the fear and be with the fear and move through the fear. I find that sometimes we have to start with what we have learned and do more of a mental approach of like you said, read about that food. Go to like, you know, scholarly papers like, do not Google search. Do not go to your social media platforms.

Sarah Ballantyne 53:40

Don't ask chat GPT. He doesn't know the answer.

Stephanie Mara 53:46

Actually go and read up on what is the actual research on this food so I can start challenging everything that I've been hearing or have been taught, because even that might not be coming from sound research either.

Sarah Ballantyne 54:02

It's almost certainly not coming from sound, it's almost certainly coming from cherry picked science or not science, right? That's almost certainly not actually where the scientific consensus is. Most of the diet, nutrition information you're going to learn online isn't reflecting scientific consensus, and I hope to be starting to change that and hopefully recruiting more people to also help to change the culture of nutrition information online. But it's a pretty big task. It's going to take a lot of us for a long time to actually really change the landscape of nutrition information related to public health online. But we can do it. We'll get there. It's a big job.

Stephanie Mara 54:42

I so appreciate everything that you're doing and all the wisdom that you shared here today. I'm curious how individuals can keep in touch with you if they want to learn more about your work in Nutrivore.

Sarah Ballantyne 54:53

So my home base is nutrivore.com. From there, you can sign up for my free newsletter. I try to keep it bite sized and super actionable and really fun. And you can also link to me on social media. I'm at Dr Sarah Ballantyne on Tiktok, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest. And those are the six platforms where I'm active. I also have a book called Nutrivore, which is available wherever books are sold, and it might be at your local library, so feel free to you can also put in a request at your library if your library doesn't have a copy. So go check out the book. I would say your favorite social media platform, unless it's X, I'm probably there, yeah, and then come over to the website. I have a whole team. It's not just me, it's a whole team building out that website. We post new content almost every day. I also have a really dynamic Patreon community, if you if you really, really, really, really want to get nerdy, that's the place to dive super deep.

Stephanie Mara 55:45

Awesome. Well, I will put all of those links in the show notes and just thank you so much again for your time and sharing everything that you are trying to change and do in the world. I'd love to have you back in the future and dive deeper into all of these things.

Sarah Ballantyne 55:58

I would love that. Thank you again. This was such a fun conversation.

Stephanie Mara 56:01

Awesome! Well, to everyone who's listening, as always, if you have any questions, email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime, and I look forward to connecting with you all again soon. Bye!

Keep in touch with Dr. Sarah:

Website: https://nutrivore.com/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drsarahballantyne

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drsarahballantyne/

Threads: https://www.threads.net/@drsarahballantyne

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drsarahballantyne/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/drsarahballantyne/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/drsarahballantyne/

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/nutrivore

Nutrivore Book: https://amzn.to/3ARdYQl