[00:00:00] Pam: think about all the mental energy you’re devoting to obsessing about your food and your exercise, and is the food healthy and am I being good today? And will I order dessert when I go out with friends?

All these. Imagine the freedom to just sit down to a restaurant and look at the menu when you get there and decide what sounds good. , it’s life changing, Welcome to another episode of Dear Nina, conversations about friendship. Today’s topic, diet, culture, and friendship. Inspired more emails from my Facebook group. Dear Nina, the group where I often preview topics than any other topic. And what do I mean by diet, culture, and friendship? I’m referring to how the culture of dieting affects friendships, gets in the way of friendship, damages, friendships, and so on.

[00:00:52] Nina: . I want my guest, Pam, more to chime in soon because she has expertise in the field. Pam was my guest way back in episode three when we talked about friends who never initiate contact, which is still, by the way, my most listened to episode, and I don’t know if you know that, Pam, she’s back there smiling.

but today’s topic is really Pam’s. Sweet spot. Pam Moore is an occupational therapist turned intuitive eating coach and health and fitness journalist. As an intuitive eating coach, Pam’s mission is to help women detach their self-worth from their weight and to move their bodies because it feels good and not as a punishment.

Her writing has been published in the Washington Post Runners World Self. The Guardian Time Outside a R p Forbes. Many more places. She’s a certified personal trainer, a six-time marathoner, a two-time Ironman finisher, and her podcast Real Fit Features, conversations with women athletes about body image and enoughness.

Hi Pam.

[00:01:54] Pam: Nina. Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:56] Nina: I will say I got some beautifully written heart-wrenching letters from listeners when I said I wanted to hear what came to their minds when I say the words, diet, culture, and friendship, but I didn’t define diet culture for them. We’re gonna define it here. And the letters I got while all different.

Did have one obvious thing in common, and I would say that’s an initiation into the world of dieting at a young age. But let’s first explore what does that mean, diet culture, as somebody who’s really immersed in writing about it, thinking about it?

[00:02:24] Pam: . Diet culture is, The subtle and not so subtle messages that thinner is more attractive, that thinner is necessarily more healthy. And also the message that some foods are quote unquote good and some are quote unquote bad. So those are examples of maybe more subtle messaging, . And then in terms of less subtle messaging, I just reread a part of a beautiful book by, , Melissa Broder, who’s an author I love, and her essay collection’s So sad. Today. There’s this one essay, I think it’s called, I Wanna Be a Whole Person, but also Really Thin, and she writes that her mother used to say to her, .

I wrote it down cuz it’s so poignant. She wrote, do you want boys to like you or do you wanna be a cht?

[00:03:09] Nina: Wow.

[00:03:10] Pam: yeah. It’s painful and it’s traumatic and I don’t think it’s unusual. A lot of the women that I’ve interviewed on my podcast who. are bigger and grew up always in bigger bodies.

Heard a lot of these comments from their families. You know, um,, somebody that I interviewed told me that because she was in a thinner body, her dad would take her to ice cream, but her mother would not let her older sister in a bigger body go to ice cream.

I mean, just the idea that bigger bodies are somehow wrong. That’s diet culture, and it’s coming at us from everywhere. , it’s coming at us in subtle ways. Like when you see a bag of chips that I kind of remember a chip or a cracker, I used to like, I can’t remember what it was, but the package said, guilt-free.

Or you go to a restaurant and the chocolate cake is called the sinful chocolate cake. It’s just everywhere. That the fact that you look at somebody and you go, my God, you look good if you lost. and you never think to go, gee, maybe they’re depressed.

Maybe they’re really sick. Maybe I’m fueling the eating disorder that thrives on praise for looking a certain way. So I mean, I could go on, but that’s, that’s diet culture in a kind of nutshell.

[00:04:11] Nina: and yeah, I’d say all of that. I absolutely identify with it. I think it was recognizable in all the letters we got. . Another theme in the letters we got, is how friendships built around eating a certain way. That happens.

A friendship can get built around both directions, either eating or not eating, . You can be connected by dieting and you can also be connected by actively not dieting, saying , you know, we’re gonna go all out tonight, or maybe. You and a friend are united against other friends who are constantly dieting or who say they need to diet, but probably, you know, technically don’t, let’s say.

And it gets really complicated. And so once somebody in a pair like that decides to exit that behavior, whether it’s the eating or the not eating, being focused on food or not being focused on food, . what if someone decides like to get off that train? I mean, what happens to the friendship? And before I even let you answer that, I’m gonna read a letter from a listener.

I wish I could read them all cause they were all so good, but we would just be here for two hours. But trust me, listeners, that this letter kind of represents the other ones that the themes in here are repeated, dear Nina, I had a weight problem for 25 years, from age 15 to age 40. I was in the working world and had a lot of friends. We diet and binge together. We all lost weight from time to time, and then we all gained it back. I got heavier over. Work was an opportunity to go to lunch with one particular friend, and we call each other to arrange it, and one of the questions was, are you dieting?

Or Bing the dieting friend, of course, could be no fun at lunch, couldn’t split a dessert, would make a big fuss about the diet. We join and quit. Weight Watchers, et cetera. This was a big part of our relationship, both hating our bodies and wanting to change them while at the same time wanting to keep that connection to the world of dieting women.

When I was 40, I joined a 12 step program geared towards compulsive eating. I’ve been in that program now and in recovery for 22 years and four months. I lost 90 pounds and kept it off for the majority of the last 22. It took me about 18 months to lose the weight. Clearly from the very beginning, there was something very different going on.

There was no gaining a back. None of the drama that fueled that work, friendship and others. This had a profound effect on my friendships that were long built on binging and dieting. Suddenly, I was no longer doing those things I didn’t want to, and I was really changing from the insight. All of that drama was gone about starting a new diet and what diet are you on?

I think I understood at some point that I wasn’t supposed to find a cure for this problem, that these friendships were based on a certain amount of mutual misery and hatred of our bodies. I think that line really, I have to interrupt the letter for a second. I’m gonna read that again. I think I understood at some point I wasn’t supposed to find a cure for this problem, that these friendships were based on a certain amount of mutual misery and hatred of our.

My neighbor friend once revealed to me that she considered us the fat moms of the neighborhood and she didn’t wanna be the only one at Bunco parties. She’d make things, especially for me that I couldn’t or wouldn’t eat. That friendship in particular ended with us meeting for lunch, her getting there early and eating her entire meal before I got there, and then sitting there watching me eat. That friendship ended and so did the work friendship. So I’m gonna end it there. There was more. And there, like I said, there’s more letters, but I think that cover. So much. What do you have to say? I’m gonna just be quiet for a bit.

[00:07:37] Pam: God, so much. I wanna start by saying I have a lot of empathy for this person who wrote the letter. I also have empathy for the bunko neighbor friend who, because, like it or not, the truth is, like we talked about before, diet culture is everywhere and it’s as much as we can talk about self-love and body positivity or body neutrality or all of these things.

The fact of it is, is there is stigma against people in bigger bodies. So if this Bunko friend felt that she was being judged for her size, she wasn’t wrong. So I don’t blame her for wanting to have another friend in the same boat. So there’s that. But I wanna start, I think the best way to do it is like, start from the beginning.

I think it’s really interesting, and again, I’m not blaming the letter writer, but I’m noticing that she wrote, I had a weight problem for 25 years again. , you could call that diet culture. Like who is, who Is it a problem for? Like why is, is weight necessarily a problem or is that just there’s the body.

Diversity is a thing. Everyone’s not meant to be in a thin body as much as all of the women’s magazines and things would like to tell us, eat this, not that. Eat celery when you’re craving a crunch. Eat an apple when you want sweets, blah, blah. you know, you don’t grow up as a baby, you’re a toddler thinking that your weight is a problem.

So I just wanna point that out. I can totally relate to what she’s saying about I, I was never that extreme myself in terms of dieting and binging with friends. But these behaviors, it’s so easy to reinforce them among each other. When you see all your friends doing the same thing, you think it’s normal.

I remember living with a roommate. . Looking back, I’m sure she had a eating disorder, but publicly she was dieting or eating healthy and I was doing it along with her. my eating habits changed drastically when I lived with her. I remember going out of town for a weekend with her and we decided, In advance.

We had fantasized about all the foods we were going to eat on this trip and we ate them and like, we felt sick, but this was our free weekend. And so I, can commiserate with the idea of , oh yeah, this is how we eat together. But this letter reminded me a lot of your other guest that you had on who talked about living as a, as a sober person,

Which episode was that?

[00:09:56] Nina: I don’t remember the number, but it’s Jen Gil Hoy. . She talked about how when she stopped drinking, she really had to evaluate all her friendships and the ones that were based on going out and drinking. You know, when you’re the person who’s decided to change a pretty major relationship to alcohol, it does affect all the relationships around you , in so many ways.

Now you’re kind of the person who makes everyone else think about what they’re doing, and it doesn’t mean everyone she hung out with. An alcoholic. , she genuinely had to change her relationship with alcohol, but it did change their friendships.

[00:10:28] Pam: The idea that she had to reevaluate what are my friendships based on, and in a way, I’m reading this letter and hearing you read it and going, it’s.

almost in a way, I wonder if it’s easier to let go of friendships where the only thing you had in common was the dieting. You know, the on the wagon, off the wagon cycle as opposed to having a friend where you really do have a deep connection and there’s the eating the way you eat together. It could be really hard to continue to relate to that close friend while you are eating one way and they’re eating another way.

, I respect this letter writer for realizing these friendships are no longer serving me. They’re based on something that I don’t want in my life anymore.

[00:11:09] Nina: Yeah, like an unhealthy pattern and you know, food even more than alcohol. I mean, gosh, it’s so hard to. Avoid, I mean, we do go out , for meals with people the episode right before this one is a lot about money and we talk about how going out, like it’s similar to the food issue, it’s related to food and alcohol actually.

But so much of time we spend with friends as adults is going out to do those two things, eat and drink Our issue in that episode was really about how much it’s costing. I mean, and uh, Mia, the guest had written in articles said, how much are your friendships costing you? Literally . We’re saying, , going deeper, how much are your friends costing you in this reinforcing of, just echoing all this diet culture stuff?

, I like your point. I think it’s so important that diet culture isn’t. Being on a diet or not. Cause that’s probably what it might mean to certain people. It’s these messages we receive that there’s something wrong with being a certain size , I hope people are really hearing that and gosh, that’s so hard to undo.

You do this in your work. , let’s just stop for a second to, for pe for you to hear, understand a little bit more what intuitive eating is and how it’s different than what we just read in this letter, this relationship to food that the letter writer and so many of us have.

[00:12:23] Pam: . . . Intuitive eating at its heart is about giving yourself full permission to eat what you want, when you want, at any size. Respecting that when you become an intuitive eater and you let go of food rules, , you might lose weight, you might gain weight, but weight is not the goal.

The goal is to create a better relationship with your body. So where a lot of. people’s reaction to the idea of intuitive eating is they go, oh, that’s like the hunger fullness diet. Right? No, it’s not. Because that’s kind of like making intuitive, eating back into a diet, uh, you might be eating and then being obsessed like, oh wait, where am I on the hunger scale?

Ah, I went over a, a six on the zero to 10 hunger scale. Ah, I messed it up. It’s not like that. It’s trusting yourself to eat the way you might have eaten when you were a toddler. And when you were done, , you knew you were done and you were throwing the food on the floor. And if we overeat and by overeat, I just.

eating more than you’re comfortable with not going, oh shoot. I messed up intuitive eating. I just being curious and going, Hmm, why did I do that? Was I bored? Was I sad? Was I trying to suppress some other emotion? Or did I just really like the food? , and that’s okay too. and going, okay, well if I really felt bad in my body after that, what might I do different next time?

, it’s not a shame spiral, , intuitive eating is rooted in self-compassion. I mean, there’s 10 principles, which we’re not gonna get into, but it’s basically about having a healthy relationship with food and trusting yourself to know what’s best for you and not something outside of yourself, including a program, a number of calories, an article you.

knowing that you are the expert. , obviously, if you have like a medical condition that comes first. I’m not saying eat a peanut if you feel like a peanut, if you have a deathly peanut allergy. If you find a dietician who’s skilled in intuitive eating and diabetes management, I’ve heard that intuitive eating can be an excellent compliment to what you’re doing as even a person managing type two diabetes.

So they’re not necessarily completely incompatible. Does that answer the.

[00:14:20] Nina: Well, yeah, and I, I have to imagine that, I don’t know how much friendships come up in your work, but it probably does. Subconsciously for people, as we are trying to pay attention to what does your body actually want, what does your mind actually want? you may, when you’re alone be able to do that.

I wonder when you’re out and half your friends are on keto or whatever the newest thing is, seems to be like keto is a big one. I mean, I see it, I hear it a lot, or people may not talk about being on it, but , you could tell by the way they order or. , I hate to think of myself as so influenced.

I actually don’t think I’m as much anymore, but I’m 46 now. , it took a long time to not be so influenced by how others are eating, and it affects the friendship, it affects your sense of self, and it’s so confusing and we have to eat many times a day. I, you know, remember having a a, a very close friend growing up I was totally jealous of the way she looked.

. And all she did was talk about how disgusting she was, and she used that specific word all the time. I’m disgusting. I’m disgusting, , , she didn’t say, you are also disgusting.

But it’s hard not to hear it that way. And yet she has embroiled in her own eating issues, obviously, , and image issues. And yet it’s sort of contagious. I do think there is a contag. Thing about, disordered eating, we would at least say like a d maybe not an eating disorder, but disordered eating can definitely spread among a friend group as cer, certainly young.

I think about overnight camp, somebody I remember at overnight camp totally, someone decided, okay, I’m gonna stop eating the sugar cereals. And then of course the whole cabin decides to stop because you don’t wanna be the person who’s doing the unhealthy thing or.

[00:16:01] Pam: And whether we admit it or not, I think a lot of, female friendships have a layer of competition built in. Have you covered that in the podcast? I would love to hear an episode about women’s competitive side.

[00:16:13] Nina: I’m going to have Christie Tate on again. It’s funny, I’m like kind of cycling through guests again. She was on right after your episode and she wrote a new book that’s coming out. You are gonna love it, called B F and Memoir of Friendship and it comes out soon. But , I had a early release copy.

There’s a lot in there, very honest about competition and envy.

[00:16:32] Pam: , I cannot tell you, I’ve had a lot of phases of my life when I was younger, of really not feeling comfortable in my body and not liking the way it looked, and not just really not respecting it, not listening to the cues, overeating, undereating, , sometimes both in the same day or week or whatever, and

I distinctly remember moving in with a roommate who is actually still one of my dearest friends, but I recall she was eating Cozy Shack chocolate pudding for breakfast, and my whole body was jealous to the point where I still remember, I remember what it was. I remember where she was in the kitchen all these years later, and I was so jealous because she was gorgeous and thinner than me, and I thought, prettier than me.

We’d go to bars and guys would flock to her like she was a magnet. And I felt invisible next to her. And I wanted badly to eat Cozy Shack chocolate pudding for breakfast or at any point in time. But I wouldn’t let myself, cuz I had this mentality. number one, if I eat it, I’m, I’m gonna gain weight. Number two, , I was always like trying to be good.

So if I eat it, then I’m gonna eat it for lunch. I might eat it for dinner. I might eat a box of Oreos for dinner. I’m gonna be totally blowing my diet. That was my mentality. Either you’re on the wagon or you’re off the wagon. as an intuitive eater, I know now that if I was in that situation again, I would buy my own chocolate pudding and eat it for breakfast, and then I would go, huh, how did that make me?

Chances are it wouldn’t make me feel great and I probably wouldn’t wanna do it again. And that’s sort of the crux of intuitive eating. People think I could never do that because if I ate whatever I wanted, trust me, all I would eat would be fill in the blank food that you have considered forbidden. You know, whether it’s pizza or macaroni and cheese cake, cookies, ice cream, whatever.

People go, well, that’s all. . And the thing is, that’s not true because one of the reasons we feel compelled to eat these foods is because we think they’re forbidden. And I know anybody who has kids or bit around kids can relate to the fact that you tell a child not to open this box.

All they wanna do is open the box. We’re the same. And so it’s about releasing the emotional charge of the forbidden. When you really, really. the idea that you have permission to eat all foods at any time, however much you want. You can decide from a clearheaded place what and when and how much you wanna eat instead of that crazy, frantic, gotta get it all in, cuz tomorrow I start fresh again.

[00:18:53] Nina: . It must be hard work for the client to undo all those messages. Everything you’re saying resonates so much this idea of being good and being bad, and that’s why it’s probably so tempting.

To do it with people, like, we’re gonna be good together, we’re gonna go on Weight Watchers together. , or we’re gonna be bad together.

And yes, it’s very hard to get out of that all or nothing mindset. , I’m around a lot of teens now in my life and I, I can see how it repeats itself , this is sort of an interesting thing in teen life. Your kids aren’t quite this age yet. Is there weird stuff around that still? I mean the, the social media, because it’s something we talked about earlier because people talk, what’s such a healthier mindset now?

It means a lot more language out there now that does attempt to combat the diet culture. There’s a lot of. Positivity out there. , body positivity and , even. Like if you’re trying to be exercise for, to, to be healthy, keep your heart rate, you know, healthy and all that.

you know, they say, okay, 10 minutes is fine, or just, you know, walk naturally in your life or , get up for 10 minutes every hour. I mean, I feel like there’s a lot of positive messaging out there that you don’t have to like, make yourself nuts over it. I can’t tell if the teens are, are really.

Talk in the talk or if they really mean it, it’s, I don’t

[00:20:07] Pam: Oh, that’s a great question. I don’t know, but one of my earliest memories of really starting to think about, Ooh, can’t gain weight, was in high school. I was. , I guess a late bloomer. I got my first period when I was, I think I was 15, definitely the last among my peer group to get it. Unless everybody else was lying too.

I was lying all the time. You know, people would be like, do you have a tampon? And it’d be like, Ooh, not on me. Never used one, never needed one in my life, but no one needs to know that. which is just funny to me now that, that was so embarrassing to me. But, one of my very close friends knew the truth and she was like, don’t worry about it.

When you get your period, you’re gonna have to start really thinking about what you eat, cuz you’re gonna start putting on weight. And I was like, okay. And then when I did get my period, I remember a different very close friend. , she told me a certain number of fat grams that she felt was appropriate to have.

This was the nineties we didn’t care about carbs, we were concerned about fat. Fat was our enemy,

[00:21:01] Nina: Pam and

I are around the same age. She’s a couple years younger, we’re in the forties and Yep. The nineties was all about watching fat

[00:21:08] Pam: , we were raised on T C B Y and bagels, but not bacon. And so yeah, this friend was like, this is the right amount of fat grams to have every day. You shouldn’t have more than that. That number, . Again, I’m 44. This was when I was 16. I remember that number. . And I remember writing stuff down and thinking if it was a good day or a bad day based on how close I got to that number or did I exceed it.

, not that she tried to brainwash me, I was just very suggestible and I thought, well, if she says it, it must be true. And then I also remember on Friday nights, she’d be like, you know what we should do Friday. Come over, we’ll watch a movie.

We were big dorks, like I was not partying. My, my big event was going to my best friend’s house on Friday night, ordering a pizza, splitting it like a large pizza, and eating an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s.

[00:21:53] Nina: , it’s interesting cuz we are talking about learning about. Diets basically from friends. I mean, I have so many stories like that and I’m sure I negatively influenced people too. . It’s really scary when you think about how much of. Life has, has been dedicated to that and time wasted. I got a couple other letters that one especially comes to mind, which is almost the opposite of this friend, sort of subtly teaching a friend, and that is a friend hiding it from her friend.

She talked about how she had a friend who clearly was dieting, I think this is when they were adults and was being very strict about her eating, but she would sort of lie. and, and the person who wrote me the letter it got in the way of the friendship, took back to this idea of diet culture, getting in the way of friendship.

It did get in the way of her friendship because of course there was probably a little bit of jealousy, I’m guessing about her friend who was suddenly, you know, looking different , but the friend would never sort of admit it. She would always, say, oh, I ate before, or, , she always had like, kinda the right thing to say.

And, the letter writer also specifically said that this friend would constantly be giving out treats to other people. So she, it, it might have been a work friend, I’m not sure, cuz I’m thinking where else would you have such close access to somebody that you, you know, they weren’t living together so she would buy candy bars and all these things and she’d just constantly sharing with friends and it almost felt to the letter. Like the friend was trying to sabotage everyone else. So she wasn’t gonna eat the treats herself, but she was going to give them out to the letter writer and their other mutual friends.

[00:23:25] Pam: There’s a couple things to unpack there with the letter writer whose friend is secretly on a diet and frequently giving out food. One thing I think is fascinating is that not only as women are we supposed to be thin, we’re also not supposed to try too hard.

There’s this perception that we’re supposed to be able to drink like a guy and eat like in a guy and like be one of the guys, but also be skinny and not talk about the fact that we might have starved all day so that we could get in on all those chicken wings and be the cool girl who’s asking to eat the last chicken winning, we’re not supposed to be trying, number one.

Number two, it’s actually not unusual for people with eating disorders to be obsessed with food, including baking and giving out food and thinking about food. are you familiar with, I think it’s called the Minnesota Study. It was done on, a bunch of men, it was an experiment that I think the military might have done to see what happens when you deprive people of food.

. They put these men on something like 1600 calorie a day diets. Don’t quote me on that number, but it was a local diet, not unlike what you might see modern diets telling people to do. And these men. . They were thinking about food, constantly talking about food constantly. I mean, what do we do as women? We think about the menu. We think about like the menu. We’re planning to serve the menu on the restaurant. We’re gonna go to, we pin recipes on Pinterest. We make a big deal out of every time we’re gonna bake a cake or get a cake, you know, They became obsessed with food. Why are so many women obsessed with baking and cooking and food? I’m, I think some of it is the sense of deprivation.

[00:25:03] Nina: Oh my God, that’s so scary. I mean, I really, first of all, can’t believe that it’s taking me this long in my podcasting cycle to even talk about this topic when it is such a huge part of female friendship. It really is. I think I knew it, but talking about it, like really talking it through with you. It and it’s pervasive.

, , it’s huge. , I think it has a place in a lot of my childhood when I think about it, and I’m huge part of it. I’m not blaming other people at all. I mean, I, I sure there are people out there with memories of me and us going on diets together. , it’s like something clicks on at a young age and. It’s easy to blame the mothers and, and the parents, but , I think you could try in your household to have like the perfect bubble of positive. Like I’m sure you’re working really hard on it with your girls. .

You can try to have the right messages, but then you let them loose in the universe and , it sort of feels hopeless, especially the moment they get on social media

[00:26:04] Pam: well, I mean, to your point, it’s so pervasive in our lives and we don’t really talk about it. Women aren’t supposed to actually be on diets and you know, we talk, I think more and more we’re talking about racism. We’re talking about sexism, we’re talking about antisemitism, we’re talking about, you know, transphobia, homophobia, all these isms and phobia.

we don’t talk about sizeism. You know, when people make fun of another kid for being fat, that’s a very common reason for being bullied.

I don’t think that there’s a bigger person out there who hasn’t been made fun of for their size.

I think we have this narrative that the person in a bigger body’s obligation is to lose weight. , it’s not everybody else’s obligation to acknowledge their humanity and that they have every right to exist in their body in whatever size. It’s a basic, I mean, a lot of, to me, intuitive eating overlaps a lot with social justice, and I don’t mean to say that I am a shining example of somebody who has completely unhooked from diet culture.

I am guilty of looking in the mirror and deciding if something looks flattering on me, do I wanna buy this? Does it look flattering? And then I have to stop myself and I go, God, what does flattering even mean? Flattering means thin.

[00:27:14] Nina: Yeah.

. Let’s bring it back to friendship for a second. I’m wondering, especially, I’m gonna use you as an example cause you can really only speak for yourself, but if you have some clients in mind, that’s fine too.

, I know it’s not perfect and it’s always a work in progress, but have had a lot of positive changes in your relationship with food and diet culture. Is it hard to sit back and not say anything? When you hear friends. Kind of still on this train and talking about this, like how do you handle that?

Because I do think that kind of came up if, if you think about it in the letter I read, I mean she basically said, these are my words, not hers. She really was no longer able to be friends with the people who, now that she had a different relationship with food, it’s like she had to let those friendships go

[00:27:56] Pam: . That’s an interesting question. I actually wrote about this for the Washington Post a maybe a year or two ago. It was more about dealing with family, but I think the same principles apply , and this is how I approach it in my own life.

It depends on the relationship and it depends. for, for example, There have been times where I’m at a dinner with a few people and they start going real deep into the keto or the intermittent fasting or whatever, and that’s my time that I’m like, Hey, if I’ve been having fomo, I’ve had to go to the bathroom this whole time.

This is the co part of the conversation that I can miss. And I’ll just quietly be like, excuse me. I’ll be back and hope that, they’re not still talking about it when I get back. .

[00:28:31] Nina: That’s a smart strategy , you don’t wanna be literally working all the time where you’re, and nobody hired you in this friend dinner

[00:28:37] Pam: exactly. , all I can do is live my life and if it comes up and I’m maybe planting a seed, fine. I’m not an an evangelist about this, so, or I try not to be. I hope I’m not so one, you could just leave the situation.

Two, I’ve had clients that have had to tell people in their lives, , I love you. I love our relationship. Please don’t comment on my body anymore. Please don’t comment on my food anymore. It’s not good for me. It’s not healthy for me. , and I think you pick and choose who’s appropriate to have that conversation with, and that might be family or a close

friend who’s gonna stay in your life.

[00:29:07] Nina: However, one of the letters I got specifically talked about, also a lot of weight loss this letter writer had lost a tremendous amount of weight it took many years and lost a lot of weight and just the constant common. , like you said at the beginning, oh, oh, you look great. , just a lot of commentary and, I think that’s a great strategy you just gave since you might just have to blatantly say, please, I, I don’t want it to be a topic.

I don’t want my weight to be a topic of conversation.

[00:29:34] Pam: and you can, , another thing, and again, it depends on the relationship. This happened to me just the other day with a very close friend was talking. Feeling really good when they had cut an entire food group out of their life. Not for medical reasons, but for not, and not even weight loss, but it sounded really restrictive and it sounded like obviously they couldn’t sustain it.

, this is common that people blame themselves when they can’t sustain something super restrictive. But it’s, not human, it’s not normal to say, I will never eat sugar again. So I challenged her a little bit and what I hope was a gentle way I said. , you know, an intuitive eating perspective on that might lend itself to asking yourself more about why am I telling myself this food is completely off limits?

I wonder what would happen if you really, truly believed that it was okay to have this food? Not in moderation, but in, , any amount that you wanted, and then you could tune into how you really felt as opposed to this charge. Can have it can’t have it black and white thing. and I felt comfortable to do that and I don’t think that she felt defensive or anything.

We were just having a conversation. But would I say that to someone I just met that was like, I’m on the whole 30. I would never come in and be like, you are. That’s gonna backfire. I would never say that.

[00:30:47] Nina: Some of the beginnings of my blogging days back in the 2010s, I did used to write about, you know, trying to cut out sugar or trying something like the whole 30. And I think I would write about it to hold myself accountable. And of course none of it worked.

. And by worked, I mean, cuz I don’t think I needed to lose weight at all. It wasn’t really about that. It was about feeling. I didn’t have a sense of control probably in my whole life, with little kids. Just like when I was a teenager, probably trying to have a sense of control of, of whatever was going on.

And then it, this was like an adult version , but there was a lot of focus on food. it kind of embarrasses me. Now. I took all that off my website, I didn’t want my kids to happen upon it, , it felt so normal to me at the time. , when you said whole 30 and intermittent fasting, which we, we focused on keto, but these are like sort of the, in the past 20 years, , in the nineties, we had fat grams and all that fat free,

It was a whole industry.

People made billions of dollars.

[00:31:41] Pam: it still this and this. Clean eating. I, we see a lot of this in Boulder Clean Eating, here’s the other thing I wanna say too. If someone, for example, is on the whole 30, just for example, , , they do have this like rubber band effect, this pendulum thing where maybe the next month they binge because they felt so restricted and now they’re in this shame spiral or whatever.

They’re like, oh, I messed up the whole 30. I can’t da, da da. I’m still not here to say, well, maybe you should try intuitive eating because maybe they should, maybe they shouldn’t. It’s up to whatever you are doing. You have to decide whether the. is worth the perceived benefit. And if you are still happy living this way, then keep doing it.

I’m not gonna try to tell somebody, give up your diets if it’s what you need and it’s serving you. But I would say, think about all the mental energy you’re devoting to obsessing about your food and your exercise, and is the food healthy and am I being good today? And will I order dessert when I go out with friends?

All these. Imagine the freedom to just sit down to a restaurant and look at the menu when you get there and decide what sounds good. , it’s life changing,

[00:32:52] Nina: Take everything Pam just said and imagine the potential of the topics that we would talk about with friends and the depth of those friendships if food were not part of the equation

[00:33:04] Pam: I am sitting here nodding violently.

Yes,

[00:33:06] Nina: the exercise doesn’t bother me as much because I’m really big on doing stuff with friends, and I think that that can be a really healthy, happy thing to do together. To find stuff that, you know, classes you like to do together to go on walks together. Especially walks, because then you can talk and catch up.

I don’t wanna put exercises exactly in the same boat, but if we took food, Off , as something that we are jealous about of each other that we relate to or envy about each other. Wow. The potential. It would just be incredible. Pam, I have a feeling you people might wanna reach out to you cuz you can hire Pam as an intuitive coach.

She does do remote work. She’s in Boulder. You could be with her in person in Boulder, but she can talk to you anywhere and she is just a wonderful, warm person. Can you tell people where to find you?

[00:33:53] Pam: Thank you so much, Nina, for your kind words. I would love to hear from any of your listeners. My website is probably the best way to find me. It’s pam-moore.com, so pam p m dash moore, m o o r e.com. You can also find me on TikTok and Instagram. I’m at Pam Moore 3 0 3. And on Twitter I’m at Pam Moore.

[00:34:15] Nina: All right, Pam, we are gonna say goodbye and let’s see if, this episode can tap your other episode.

[00:34:21] Pam: That would be incredible. Well, thank you so much for having me. I’ve enjoyed our conversation so much.

[00:34:25] Nina: Everybody, thank you for being here with us. We’ll see you back here in a couple weeks when our friendships are going well. We are happier all around. Bye.