The Truth About What It Means To Love Your Body and Eat What You Want

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 have witnessed this for myself and the 1,000s of people I have worked with that often, the last lingering piece in a food and body journey is healing your relationship with your body's image. For many, this was the initiator for why their patterns with food changed. At some point in time, the way you looked was perceived as bad or wrong, and dieting or restricting became the answer to gain control over your body so that you could feel safe, in control, and achieve a body that aligns more with society's ideal of thinness, providing an experience that you belong.

So, as you work to leave diet culture, eat consistent meals, and diversify the kinds of foods you're eating, you will come face-to-face with the original wound of why you felt like you needed to change the way your body looked because of messages you got from family, friends, teachers, doctors or society. Just as we explore here that, healing any food pattern won't be about the food; changing the way you view your body won't be about your body. It will be about unlearning what you've been taught about your body;it will be about processing and grieving past experiences that made you believe your body was less than. And it will be about learning how to feel safe in your body as it is in a world that will continue to tell you that your body needs to change.

I chat about this and more with Dr. Alexis Conason today. Dr. Conason is a clinical psychologist and certified eating disorder specialist consultant in private practice in New York City. She's the owner of Conason Psychological Services, a weight- inclusive therapy practice specializing in the treatment of binge eating disorder, disordered eating, body image concerns, and relationship issues. She is the founder of the anti-diet plan, a weight-inclusive, online mindful eating program designed to help people stop dieting, eat more attuned with their body, and live more peaceful and pleasurable lives. She is the author of The Diet-Free Revolution: 10 Steps to Free Yourself from the Diet Cycle with Mindful Eating and Radical Self-Acceptance. Dr. Conason is a fierce advocate for helping people recognize and question the societal norms that encourage feeling not good enough about themselves so they can stop fixating on shrinking their bodies and reclaim the space that they deserve in the world.

We chat about the anti-diet movement and what it is, diet culture trying to co-opt mindful eating, body image challenges, building resiliency against diet culture, the importance of self-compassion, navigating food choices mindfully, and action steps you can take to practice anti-dieting.

If you feel inspired by our conversation and ready to dive deeper into this anti-diet work, you have two more days to sign up for the Somatic Eating® Program. We start on Monday, October 28, and spend three months together exploring my Somatic Eating® process, which includes creating a safe, secure, and satiated relationship with your food, body, and life. Others have walked away from this program, experiencing a deep internal peace with food, an understanding of what their body is trying to tell them through their food impulses, and a treasure chest worth of somatic practices. You can go to somaticeating.com to learn more and sign up today.

Now, welcome, Alexis! Well, I am thrilled that you are here on the podcast today. I feel like I've been following you on Instagram forever, and just love everything that you put out in the world. And I'm always like liking all of your posts. So, I'm really excited to have you here, and would love to just launch off our conversation with, like, how you got into this anti- diet work.

Alexis Conason 04:38

Well, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here, and I always love hearing that my Instagram account resonates for people because that makes it, you know, all worth it to do this work. In terms of how I got here, I've been doing this work for a while. I got interested in kind of the anti-diet. It, you know, body image space, really, because, like so many of us, all of us, really, I grew up in diet culture and bought into all of that for so many years. And I actually started my career with the intention of going into quote, unquote, obesity research, and weight management. And really, it was like something that I was struggling with so much for myself and really had bought into the idea that if I could lose weight and have my body look a certain way, then my life would be better, and everything would be okay. And then, of course, I couldn't figure out how to do that for myself, so I figured, well, I'll help other people figure out how to do that. And I was really fortunate that, like, pretty early in my career, I became exposed to, you know, messages around like the Health at Every Size movement and weight- inclusive approaches to health, and it really made me just rethink everything I thought I knew, both for myself, personally and also professionally, in terms of how I was working with clients. So, that happened, you know, about 13 years ago or so, and I've been here ever since.

Stephanie Mara 06:06

Something that I just hear in that, and I hear for a lot of practitioners, is getting into this field, just from this deep place of curiosity, of there's got to be something else. Like I know what I've been taught from, like diet culture, or even, like medical community, or something about what health, quote, unquote actually means, but I don't sense that. I'm following all these things, and I don't sense that this is getting me any closer to a deeper relationship with myself or my body or health.

Alexis Conason 06:37

For myself, I honestly like didn't even realize that there was an alternative out there. You know, I was so immersed in it, and we have to remember, I think we take a lot for granted now. There's a lot of issues with social media, but I think in a positive way, it's opened up conversations and made dialogs about anti-diet and weight-inclusive approaches to health really more accessible to a much larger group of people. But when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, when I was in grad school in early to mid-2000s like, this was nowhere, at least to me. I did not have access to these ideas or the communities, or the communications that were going on. So, I was first exposed to messages around weight inclusivity. I was at a training about mindful eating several months into opening my private practice was a very new clinician, and unfortunately, the training was not at all weight-inclusive, but there was a group of Health at Every Size practitioners who were there at the training who rebelled against the instructor, and started really voicing a lot of criticism when, you know, the conversations turned to weight loss and calorie counting and things like that. And I had never heard that before. So, I just remember this moment that someone said to me like, but diets don't work. And I was like, What are you talking about? Like it was so mindblowing to me. It was so simple, but also like it had to literally never occurred to me that that was a possibility.

Stephanie Mara 08:08

I had a very similar experience of also a lot of what we know now of mindful eating or intuitive eating, or Health at Every Size, that has become so much more popularized and well-known. I was probably immersed in diet culture since I was, like, 13 years old, and just this idea, like, really, for me, it was getting exposed to yoga and then going to my first, like, day meditation retreat, and they did the mindful eating exercise of, like, with a raisin or a grape, or you smell it, you touch it, you know, you take a smell of it, and you roll it around in your mouth, and I was like, Is this how I should have been relating with food? Like this is like a totally different thing around how to be in relationship with food that diet culture doesn't teach you how to be an eater.

Alexis Conason 08:54

Yeah. I mean, diet culture is all about listening to this outside set of rules that has nothing to do with connecting us to our body. So, you know, once we're able to kind of see diet culture and see that those rules don't actually have to be there, it gives us an opportunity to start to connect with our body, which it sounds like was kind of the aha moment that you experience. And yeah, I think for so many of us it like really is hard to imagine a way that we could allow our body to guide us in a trusting way.

Stephanie Mara 09:28

Yeah, and I know a lot of what you teach is about anti-diet, and I've had a lot of people come on here just talking about there's become this split of like your either anti-diet or diet culture, and even the way that people are viewing anti-diet has become confusing. And I'm curious, from your perspective and your definition, what do you sense anti-diet and the anti-diet movement is to you?

Alexis Conason 09:56

So, I think that there is so much differing opinions on, like, what is anti-diet? And there's a lot of misinformation out there, and a lot that people pick up, you know, just from social media. Which there's a whole range of different kinds of people talking about anti-diet on social media. You know, anyone from trained professionals, from people who are weight-inclusive, from people who are still promoting a diet mindset people with lived experience. There's just so many different voices out there. It's important to just kind of be like aware of where you're learning. But to me, the anti-diet movement is about rejecting diet culture and the diet mentality. So it's about rejecting the idea that our body is only acceptable if it fits into this very narrow ideal that our society tells us is okay. And it's about rejecting the idea that we have to eat in a certain way in order to obtain that body, and that's the only way that we can be healthy and valued and desirable and successful in our culture. So, I think it's, you know, to me, it's about kind of rejecting that part of our culture that is just so many of us are so immersed in it, because it's everywhere. And my experience was that I wasn't even aware that diet culture existed because it's just the way that things are. And, you know, I think it's really important to learn to recognize diet culture so that we can figure out how we want to relate to it and interact with it in different ways. But I hear so much around you know, anti-diet means that you have to eat a certain way, or anti-diet means that you don't care about your health and you don't pay attention to any like health conditions or medical issues that you have. Anti-diet means that you always have to just be eating like donuts and ice cream all day, every day, and it couldn't be further from the truth. Anti-diet, to me, is the foundation to changing your relationship with food. So I think that we have to be able to move away from those rules of dieting, which then opens up the space for us to figure out how to relate to ourselves, our bodies, our food in a different way where that wisdom comes from us and is much more tailored to like our unique wants, desires, and needs.

Stephanie Mara 12:15

I love that. It's not just throwing out that you are still going to have a relationship with your body, and your body is going to need different things every single day. Some days, that might look like having the cookie and enjoying it and moving on with your life, and other days that's going to look like, Hey, my body wants a salad today just because that's what it wants like, not because it's a diet food. You said something earlier of really starting to be aware of how to catch diet culture, and it becomes so sneaky, like even we were talking about how sometimes diet culture can sneak into mindful eating. And I'm wondering how you kind of guided people in catching and identifying, Oh, that's diet culture has taken over. Oh, diet culture has snuck into that. What are identifiers that maybe people listening to this can start to look out for if they're not aware?

Alexis Conason 13:09

Yeah. So, I think that mindful eating is something that's gotten very much co-opted by diet culture and mindful eating, the way that that I define it and think about it, is really applying mindfulness meditation, which is the practice of being fully present and aware in the current moment with a sense of non-judgmental observation and acceptance and applying that to our relationship with food and our body. And in order to do that, it has to be it's an inherently weight-inclusive, anti-diet practice because how can we listen to our body if we are listening to a set of outside rules and regulations about our eating? So, it always, like, kind of makes me laugh when I see diet companies like Weight Watchers or Noom saying that they do mindful eating, because I think in the context of dieting, like, how can you possibly be eating mindfully because if your body is saying, I'm in the mood for a chocolate chip cookie, but you've gone over your Weight Watchers points, or you've had too many red foods for the day, it's this constant push and pull, which is really what we're trying to avoid in mindful eating because mindful eating is very much about being in alignment with your body and working together with your body to get out of that sense of conflict with yourself. If you are interested in learning about mindful eating, and you see people promoting mindful eating and in the same breath saying that mindful eating is a way that you're good, that it can help you lose weight. Or mindful eating means, you know, only eating a certain amount of food. Or, you know, oftentimes I hear like we can eat all food, all food fits, but we can only eat like a little bit of these foods. We should not eat too much of them, and all of that is really just like more of diet culture. So if you notice mindful eating being put forth in that context around weight loss or dieting or restriction or telling you to eat certain food foods or not eat certain foods, that's definitely a red flag.

Stephanie Mara 15:03

I love those little bullet points of like, yeah, if they're promoting weight loss, diet culture has snuck in. If there are rules around what you can and cannot eat, diet culture is there. If it's you have to abandon your body's messages for the strategy in which you're supposed to eat, that's diet culture.

Alexis Conason 15:25

Exactly.

Stephanie Mara 15:26

Something that I hear also in what you're talking about is like, if there is a way, and this is something I find comes up with, also, a lot of those that I work with that, they'll come to me and say, well, just as a side note, I would really like to lose weight. And I'm like, I totally get that. Let's normalize that absolutely understand in the culture, in the society that we live in, and the thin ideal, and how much we idealize certain body types, that that impulse would be there, and if that is the greatest intention and the only reason that you want to heal your relationship with food, it's going to be really difficult to actually have a different relationship with food, if it's always for the end intention of trying to control your body and its shape. I'm curious about your experience with that.

Alexis Conason 16:17

I completely agree with all of that. You know, I think that anti-diet is such an important part of healing our relationship with food. And it's kind of the beginning, like, I don't think that anti, and I think that's where a lot of people get confused because they go to social media and they see people talking about anti-diet approach, and it's like, Okay, I don't diet anymore. That's it. End of story, you know? And I think people feel really overwhelmed and lost when they're just hearing that they have to, like, throw away the set of rules and structure that has helped their life in some way or given the illusion, I would say, of, like, control in their life around food. Like that, feels really overwhelming and scary to say, well, that thing that you've always relied on, we're not going to do that anymore. And then a lot of people don't realize that that's just the foundation. That's just the beginning, but I think the foundation is important because we can't do the later work of mindful eating if we don't have that foundation of moving away from diet culture. And I think that body acceptance plays a big role in that as well. In terms of that, body dissatisfaction is what keeps us invested in diet culture. So if we keep feeling like our body's not good enough as it is, and the only way that we're going to be happy and healthy and successful, you know, all of these things that we're told in our culture, which, like, as you said, completely understandable of why people want to lose weight, that's all we're told, is that that's going to bring us all the good things in life. And that is part of the belief system that makes us buy into diet culture. Because if we have to change our body to shrink ourselves and become smaller, then we need all these plans and products and experts and gurus and all that stuff in order to do it. And we're buying into diet culture, and that all makes it really difficult to actually listen to what our body is telling us when our body is hard-wired over eons and evolution to guide our eating. Like, it's actually very simple, if we can get out of, you know, get out of our own way and get diet culture out of our own way. But I find, you know, that body image piece is one of the hardest, and I think one of the last to come a lot of the time. Like a lot, you know, I have a lot of clients who can get to the place where they understand, especially if they're struggling with an eating disorder, that dieting has brought them to a place that is no longer healthy or beneficial to them, and trying to use strategies like mindful eating to heal their relationship with food and that piece around body acceptance, or letting go of the sense that our body isn't good enough as it is, is really hard. And I work with clients a lot on just observing that, of just, you know, noticing where that body dissatisfaction comes up. And there's, I think, different places. I posted something recently on Instagram that really defined these different terms around body image that I think we talked about a lot, and a lot of people don't fully understand what they mean, or we have different definitions. But body neutrality, body acceptance, body positivity, body love these are all places that we can be working towards. But it all in my mind, that path starts with the awareness of here's a I'm just feeling really negative about my body right now, or I'm having the desire to lose weight or whatever. And normalizing, like you said, like those urges and desires couldn't be more normal because we're taught them from the youngest ages by not only our culture but often those messages are also carried out by the people who are supposed to care for us the most, like our families.

Stephanie Mara 19:42

Yeah, I completely agree with everything that you just said. I also have often found that the body image piece is the piece that hangs around the longest that you could be eating, consistently starting to pay attention more to your body, honoring its cues, learning what foods really resonate with you, but I still feel like my body should change, and how ingrained that becomes from dieting, from our society, from the family we grew up in. And I love your suggestion. It's something that I resonate with and have guided those I work with as well of just becoming aware and that it's not a matter of, like, successful body image healing is never having a day ever again where you're never going to worry about your body's appearance. What I've felt like it's more showing up for yourself on the day where you're like, Huh, I'm having a really hard day being in this body today with this shape and not engaging in the story of it or doing any compensatory behaviors that then would cause you maybe self-harm. But it's just kind of being with it, of like, Yeah, okay, today is a hard day being in my body, and can I just make space for that? And I often find that just even being with it's okay to have a difficult body image day starts to shift some things. I'm wondering, for you what else you have found to be supportive on this journey? Feels really, really hard, I think, for a lot of individuals, when you get to that point of your healing to say, Okay, maybe this is just my body, and it actually isn't going to change, and if it was, I'd have to do something kind of harmful to myself to make that happen.

Alexis Conason 21:28

I often tell clients it's not if these thoughts come up. It's what we do with them when they do arise because I think it's inevitable in our culture that no matter how long we've worked on body image and body acceptance, there are going to be moments that arise where we don't feel great in our body, and that's okay. It's what we do with those thoughts when it comes up. And I think that there's a lot of misunderstanding around the idea of body love, which is a concept that resonates for me and that I talk about with clients, in terms of, somewhere along the way, we got misled that loving our body means loving what our body looks like, which I think couldn't be further from the truth. You know, I think about body love as really being tied in with self-compassion and the idea of being able to foster a deep, unconditional love for ourselves, including our bodies. And I think about the love that we might have towards like a child or a pet or a beloved friend or family member, where we can hold that love even in moments where we don't like what that person is doing. As a parent, I could tell you, like, there are times my kids are driving me up the wall. I might even really hate what they're doing in that moment, and I still love them. And if we can try to find that sense of deep love for ourselves, I think it withstands those moments where we don't feel good in our body. So to me, like it's about loving your body even when we don't like what our body looks like, or how our body's functioning, or what our body is doing, and being able to observe those moments of saying, like, Oh, I'm not feeling great in my body right now. And instead of going into what we're so habituated to do with diet culture, which is, I don't like my body right now; what's my next diet plan going to be? How am I going to change this? Being able to sit with the feelings of discomfort and thinking about, like, what do I really need right now? Like, okay, this is a vulnerable day for me. Like, I'm struggling. I'm having a hard time. What can I do to be kinder to myself? Like, I need extra care today. And I think that can be really helpful, but it's a very difficult process, and I think there's a lot of loss and mourning that goes on, especially when people get to that phase where they kind of, like, are acknowledging that dieting and restricting and engaging, you know, for people with eating disorders, like engaging in those behaviors is not healthy or desirable anymore. And they kind of know, like I'll often say, like, I know I can never go on another diet, or like, I know I can't diet because it'll bring me right back into where I was in a really disordered relationship with food, and I feel unhappy with my body, and that's a really hard place to be in because I think that a lot of people can feel very like helpless and hopeless in those moments. I think it makes people very vulnerable, especially to what I see is very predatory marketing strategies that try to sell diet programs that are packaged in this, like, anti-diet, like, even some of the like, GLP-1 medications that we're seeing people kind of come in and, like, here you can change your body and you don't have to diet. And I think a lot of people are like, Oh, okay, great. You know, I think it can make people very vulnerable to still wanting to do something to change their body that feels more acceptable. You know, it's a hard place to be, but I do think that that, like compassionate observation can be really important.

Stephanie Mara 24:46

I love your redefinition of body love. Appreciate you sharing that because, yes, I have also found that that has become really confusing in that even like body positivity is kind of also been co-opted a little bit or a lot a bit around that it's all just about still the external appearance, and it's more like every body deserves respect. I also use a similar analogy of like, can we just see this body as a pet? And that, sure, some days, you might be annoyed by your pets if they're whining or whatever it is, but you would still make sure that they are warm and that they have food and water and shelter and that all of their needs are getting met, and you would still show up for that being and love that being, regardless of maybe how annoying they're being that day. And it's the same thing with your body that you're not going to be on the same page with your body every day, and your body's going to age, and it's going to wrinkle and it's going to change. And I even loved your addition of like, it's not always going to be working optimally. And can you still internally feel a sense of, I still love that this body exists, that it's alive for me to be able to be here, and that this external appearance isn't really connected to anything, and it doesn't have to mean anything. We've been taught for it to mean something. We can make our body's appearance mean whatever we want it to mean. It can mean nothing at all.

Alexis Conason 26:22

You know, and I think it's really challenging kind of balancing some of that, like, and we live in this culture that values appearance, especially our women are valued for our appearance. So, you know, I think there's so much work that I do I see as also being about, like, building resiliency for how to cope with a really dysfunctional culture and how to live in a way where we coexist with the fact that, like the reality that we're in this culture and it can make life really difficult if you don't meet these ideals. And contorting our bodies and our lives to meet those ideals can be really harmful to us. How to find that balance and exist in that in-between space?

Stephanie Mara 26:22

I love that. Is there an example that you can provide of what you've seen help build that resiliency to navigating when diet culture is really in your face? I mean, when we're recording this, it's the end of September, but we're coming up on the holiday season here. It's gonna start at the end of October with Halloween, and so as we kind of launch into that, I'm curious about what you've seen build that strength to navigate diet culture when it's really in our face, and in marketing and all the things with a little bit more ease.

Alexis Conason 27:36

In my practice, I use a lot of I pull a lot for mindfulness in my work, and I really think that the combination of, again, you know, like anything else, it starts with education and starting to understand what is diet culture, so that we can observe it when we see it. And I think that when we're not aware, and we're not observing it, not kind of catching where it shows up in our lives, we tend to take it in without, uncritically, like we kind of just take it in, and that's where those messages get internalized. So I think that the more that we can kind of identify, Okay, here's like, a diet culture message coming at us, and I am blocking this like I'm not going to internalize it. A lot of people, when they start getting involved in the anti-diet movement or learning about anti-diet, there's a lot of anger that comes out, and I actually think that can be a really healthy process. We're kind of starting to transfer the anger from being internally directed, like angry at ourselves, at our bodies for not looking a certain way, to being angry at diet culture for telling us those really harmful messages. So starting to identify that having the anger be where it belongs, which is at diet culture, not at ourselves. I think self-compassion is one of the most important things. You know, I really think of it as like our life raft that we could hold on to when we're going through difficult, kind of choppy seas. Self-compassion, I think, just provides a lot of resilience because we start to know that we're not the problem. I think that so much of the messages really make us doubt ourselves and instill us with like, really deep feelings of shame around there's something wrong with me. I'm not good enough. I need to hide. I shouldn't be out in the world. Like these are really deep feelings of shame, and self-compassion can be an antidote to shame, in terms of helping us dispel the shame and recognizing actually, I am deserving of love, I am valuable, I am good enough, and that provides a lot of resilience to a world that's giving us messages telling us that there's something wrong with us all the time.

Stephanie Mara 27:49

Yeah, I completely agree with that, that that self-compassion piece has to be kind of one of your main pillars that you lean on, especially when diet culture starts to ramp up and just to bring around the piece that you said earlier, around just like mindfulness and mindful eating, of just it's being with the body, not judgmentally. Also, bringing in the mindfulness when you're noticing, maybe the impulse to go towards diet culture and just bringing in, like, non- judgmental curiosity. Like, Huh, what's really interesting that I feel really drawn to diet culture today? Like, what's that about? Like, what am I expecting to receive from diet culture today? And just even like, meaning that with self-compassion and curiosity, that, like, of course, on someday you're gonna feel drawn to diet culture. I mean, it's a billion-dollar business that's, like, really great at marketing that knows how to tap into our deepest fears and worries, and so, yeah, I really appreciate that suggestion of just starting to bring in just like this, Of course, like, of course, this is what's happening for me, and how do I show up for myself in this?

Alexis Conason 30:44

Yeah, exactly.

Stephanie Mara 30:45

I'm curious. You mentioned that you have a book before we started recording, and I'd love to hear more about your book and the things that you explore and support people in their relationship with food in there.

Alexis Conason 30:58

So I have a book called The Diet-Free Revolution: 10 Steps to Free Yourself from the Diet Cycle with Mindful Eating and Radical Self-Acceptance. The book was really a passion project for me. When I started pitching the book, it was a long process. So, the time between when I started wanting to write the book and that was actually fulfilled was many years. And when I wanted to write the book, there was so little out there about weight inclusivity and kind of how to heal your relationship with food that wasn't about somehow bringing in like diet mentality and restriction, and especially when it came to mindful eating. And still, I think it still holds true. So many of the books about mindful eating are kind of like these diet books in disguise. So I was really passionate about writing a book about mindful eating that was really from a weight- inclusive perspective, and that I would feel safe and comfortable recommending to clients because I would have so many clients who were working with me, and they would say, I really want to share with my partner, like the work that we're doing. Or can you give me more resources about this approach? And I honestly would have a really hard time, you know, identifying books that didn't have elements of diet culture in them. So that was really part of why I wanted to write the book in the first place and also to share, you know, some of the things that come up again and again and again in my work with clients, like obviously, in therapy, everyone's very unique, and every treatment looks very different. But there were some kind of universalities that were coming up, themes that I found so many people struggling, especially struggling with binge eating and struggling with the diet mentality. So I wanted to put some of that into a book, to share it with more people, and then have it be more accessible for folks. And one thing that I also found was lacking that I wanted to put in was a sense of people feeling lost in all of this. I think that a lot of people, especially who are getting much of their information from social media, you know, like I said before, we get the message, like, we shouldn't be dieting, but then what? Or eat what you want, and what does that really mean? And it can feel really, really overwhelming for people. And I get messages a lot on social media from people who say, like, Oh, I tried the anti-diet approach, or I tried mindful eating, I tried my intuitive eating, and it didn't work for me. I was really out of control around food. And you know, I'm like, Well, what did you do? They're like, Well, I just ate whatever I wanted. And like, what does that really mean? I think that a lot of people can just get really lost and overwhelmed. So I want to provide a structure, which is why the book is written around 10 steps that each builds on the other to provide some structure. Because I don't think that it has to be this free for all in terms of abandoning all the rules and structure and everything that felt kind of safe about diet culture because we have to remember that like there is something that we're getting from diet culture, like there's a sense of safety and hopefulness and like, if we follow these rules, everything will be okay. And then, if we abandon all of that, it can feel really amorphous and scary and overwhelming. So my hope is that the book does provide, like, some structure to kind of scaffold people who are leaving behind diet culture and learning how do we start to trust our bodies again. How do we hear what our bodies are telling us when we've spent so many years saying my body can't be trusted? You know, I shouldn't listen to my body when it's telling me this.

Stephanie Mara 33:43

It makes me think of I heard analogy recently of like boundaries being like the borders of like a river; it needs the edges, or else the river would just be flowing everywhere. And so it's not that structure or scaffolding around your relationship with food is bad. It's just we have to recreate it in a way that supports you in coming closer to yourself rather than further away, which is what diet culture does. It disconnects us from ourselves and our body's wisdom rather than supporting and guiding us back toward ourselves. So I love that you created that and just even get curious about like, well, What does it mean to eat what I want to eat? Like, I'm wondering how you have defined that and explored that.

Alexis Conason 35:07

Yeah, I think that's one of the most interesting things. Like, so many people say, Well, I've tried eating what I want, it doesn't work. And I'm like, Well, what does that mean? And I think that when we've spent so long immersed in diet culture, I think a lot of us think eating what I want really just means eating everything, opposite of what diet culture tells us we shouldn't eat, which is also not really attuned to our bodies. So the way that I think about eating what we want, or when I tell people, it is about eating whatever you want, but how we define that changes, right? So, in mindful eating, eating whatever you want has to do with an awareness. So starting with checking with your body, starting to understand like, when are you hungry? When have you had enough to eat? How does it feel to eat more than feels comfortable to your body? How does it feel to eat less than feels comfortable to your body? What is hunger? You know hunger, fullness, satiation, like? What does that all feel like? And then, what kinds of foods do we enjoy eating? What do we enjoy the taste of? And also, how do certain foods make our bodies feel, and how do we want to feel after eating and taking in all of that guidance and observation with the awareness that we get to make the final choice. So a lot of people also struggle with, well, if I'm eating mindfully, then do I only eat when I'm hungry, or I can never eat when I'm full? I'm like, No, that's a choice that we get to make, but you know, it should be based on like, awareness. Like, do you want this food, and do you think it would be enjoyable, and are you okay with, like, how you're going to feel afterwards? And those are choices that we get to make. And I think if that comes into also like how to manage chronic health conditions, because a lot of people say, Well, I maybe I have diabetes. I can't possibly eat mindfully because I have to be aware of these health conditions. And you know, I think that in mindfulness, it's very much about being aware of how your body feels and how to eat in a way that, for most people, want to eat, in a way that makes their body feel good, in addition to eating foods that are like bring us pleasure and joy.

Stephanie Mara 37:10

Yeah, it's a lot of also, what I explore in more of a somatic approach to food is it has to come back to, How does this feel in my body? What's called that interoceptive awareness. So, knowing the felt sense of your body and that if there is a food that diet culture has told you you shouldn't eat, that we move more into food neutrality with it. Of well, just how does this food feel? Because you may end up still saying no to that food, but it's coming more from your body's feedback of this doesn't support me in feeling the way I want to feel, rather than some rule or some external source telling you you shouldn't eat that. And it's a very different experience of when you're saying yes or no to a food based off of your body's feedback, rather than someone telling you you should or should not eat something.

Alexis Conason 37:58

Yeah, because then it becomes about, Do I want this? Which is, to me very much, about working in alignment with our body and something that feels natural. Versus, I can't have this.

Stephanie Mara 38:02

Absolutely. It's a lot of, and I know sugar is like a big conversation, but it's a lot of what I like to explore with sugar. Of like, if we just neutralize it, it's just a food. And, like, how does it feel in your body? And that it gets to be your choice, and that even if also just want to add in, even if you know a food doesn't maybe always feel the best in your body, it's still your choice to eat it anyway. Like, there's nothing morally wrong about eating a food that maybe isn't, like, the most resonant thing to your body. Sometimes you're going to choose that because it's your favorite cookie during the holidays, or you're out with friends and you want to enjoy that with someone else, and it just gets to come back to it's just your choice, and you won't ever make the wrong choice.

Alexis Conason 38:53

Yeah, I spent a lot of time explaining to people that there's really no wrong way to do mindful eating, which can be very confusing, especially coming out of diet culture, where there's such a strict sense of what's right and wrong. But I completely agree, and I talk to people about that a lot. You know, and I think that it's about making those informed, conscious choices about things versus doing things in a way that feel automatic and kind of out of control. Like, I have a lot of clients who come in, they feel like, you know, they're eating in a way that's like, Oh, my God, why did I just eat that? Now I don't feel good. Why did I do that to myself? Versus the sense of recognizing, Oh, I'm, you know, really in the mood for this food, and it really doesn't usually make my body feel good. But you know what? I'm okay with that because I don't have much to do for the rest of the night, and I really want to eat this. And I'm okay if I have, like, a bit of a tummy ache later. It's a very different choice. One's a choice, and I think one is, like a reaction.

Stephanie Mara 39:46

Oh my gosh. I completely agree with all of that. We've talked about so much today, and I'm curious like I usually like to offer at the end of these podcast episodes of like a baby step, and there's so many different baby steps that people can take or where they can start. And so I'm wondering with you in your work and even what you teach in your book, like, where do you find when someone's moving away from diet culture, maybe they're exploring anti-diet culture, they also are kind of curious about mindful eating, but don't want to do it in a diety way. Like, where can someone gets started? What would be a baby step you would offer someone?

Alexis Conason 40:23

Well, of course, I would recommend my book as a great place to start. That's really I wrote it for people in that place who are, I mean, I think it can be applied to people at different points on the journey, but I really had people in mind who I felt like there's not enough resources for people who are just starting to explore this and want to take it a step further than what they might be reading on social media. I think social media is a great place to get started, but it's tidbits. It's not the whole story. And I think it can be really misleading when people think that, Well, I've stopped dieting, so now my relationship with food should be healed. It's like you've taken a step, but there's more to go. You know, I wish it was so simple. I'm a huge fan of mindfulness meditation. I think that mindfulness practices can start to build that muscle in our brain where we're more aware of everything, including diet culture the way it impacts our life. We're more aware of what's going on in our body. We're more aware of the thoughts and feelings going on around food. So just starting with, like, I often tell people start with just like a three-minute meditation practice. It doesn't have to be long. Meditation has to be something that fits into our lifestyle; otherwise, no one's ever going to do it. And I think there can be a lot of benefit from just a very brief practice starting to get build that into your daily routine. So, those are some places that I would starting to educate yourself on diet culture so that we can observe it and see where it shows up in our lives, and that I do think that social media can do a pretty good job on laying that foundation.

Stephanie Mara 41:49

I love all of those suggestions. Usually, I find the Headspace app is a great introductory place to get started with meditation. I'm wondering if there's any other places that you usually recommend if someone's curious about diving into a meditation practice.

Alexis Conason 42:06

So, I have a free three-minute meditation that I offer. I actually have a free resource that's on my website, on drconason.com, that's a mindful eating toolkit and includes a meditation kind of like how to start building a mindfulness practice, as well as explaining a little bit more about how that mindfulness practice relates to our relationship with food and our body. Because, you know, oftentimes, I will tell clients to start meditating, or we start talking about them. They're like, I came to see you because my eating feels really out of control. Why am I sitting here focusing on my breath for three minutes every day? You know, I think that from an experiential perspective, when we kind of trust it, people start to see how it connects but also can be helpful to kind of lay that out a little bit. And the mindful eating toolkit also includes like some background on diet culture and how we can start to move away from that as well. So I see that as, like, a little bit of a primer for people who are ready to, again, take that next step away from just like reading stuff on social media to learn a little bit more. Like, what do we do in a rather than just like these kind of very ambiguous ways of thinking about it?

Stephanie Mara 42:06

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom today. I really appreciate just all of the kind of new, fresh perspectives that you're offering this whole world of anti-diet and I'm wondering how individuals can keep in touch with you and the work you're doing.

Alexis Conason 43:33

So people can find me on social media, @theantidietplan. I'm online on my website, drconason.com. There, you can find information about my free resources, as well as my coaching and courses that I offer. And if you are in the New York area or a few other states and you're interested in therapy, I do have a weight inclusive group therapy practice based out of New York, and our website is conasonpsychologicalservices.com.

Stephanie Mara 44:03

Awesome. Well, I will put all of those links in the show notes and definitely recommend following you on Instagram. You put out such great information. Thank you again for being here and sharing everything that you did today.

Alexis Conason 44:16

Thank you so much for having me.

Stephanie Mara 44:18

To everyone listening as always, reach out anytime with any questions, support@stephaniemara.com, and I look forward to being in touch with you all again soon. Bye!

Keep in touch with Alexis:

Website: https://drconason.com/

https://www.conasonpsychologicalservices.com/

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

Book: The Diet Free Revolution