How To Dismantle Diet Culture in Fitness with Guest Heather Caplan

Hola amigos! Welcome back!

David and Heather dismantle diet culture within the fitness culture. Join us to learn about Heather’s approach and her client’s success with anti-diet mentality.

Highlights of this episode:

• Sports nutrition and intuitive eating
• Dismantle diet culture in fitness culture
• Different types of hunger
• Weight conversations
• Sustainable behavior
• Successes and challenges

Announcements:

• David’s new book is being published this April, which highlights real clients’ journeys of finding their peace with food. Curious? Read more about it here: https://orozconutrition.com/one-small-bite-book/
• If you would like to be in the book launch team to get first access to David’s book to write your review on Amazon.com, visit: https://orozco-nutrition.teachable.com/p/launch-team-for-one-small-bite-book

Guest: Heather Caplan

Heather Caplan is an anti-diet weight-inclusive registered dietitian. She hosts the podcast RD Real Talk, covering a range of topics related to anti-diet and weight-inclusive work. In her virtual private practice, she specializes in disordered eating, and bringing intuitive eating to athletes and parents. She’s the founder of Weight Inclusive Nutrition and Dietetics, aka WIND, and co-founder of the Lane 9 Project—a virtual community for athletes experiencing hypothalamic amenorrhea. Her work has been featured on the TODAY show, and in the Washington Post, Outside magazine, EatingWell, and Runner’s World. You can find her online at heathercaplan.com, or hang with her on Instagram @heatherdcRD, where she’s keeping it real about parenting 3 kids under 4, training for her next race, and probably not meal planning.

Episode Show Notes: 

[03:50] How Heather Dismantles Diet Culture

Heather has been a dietitian for 12 years. Her journey started with an interest in healthy eating, which she clarifies now in hindsight was a disordered approach. During her education, she was hyperaware of the focus to help people lose weight and provide medical nutrition therapy. She had an awareness of something being off. She wasn’t feeling good about the service to her patients and clients. She gravitated towards sports nutrition because she could clearly see nutrition as a positive within sports, which was something later challenged. In 2015, she was working for a start up and worked with anti-diet dietitians. She realized focusing on weight was harmful. The language of anti-diet world was so refreshing. Like many anti-diet dietitians, exposure to Christy Harrison’s Food Psych Podcast was an world opener.

David says he waxed and waned about anti-diet work. Heather said from her lived experience, she was all in from the beginning. She felt that weight inclusive space was right, unlike before in her previous dietitian years. With her podcast, RD Real Talk, she definitely learned through the episodes and the process of making them.

She knows not to apply her experience to everyone, yet she has seen a lot of harm from diet culture show up in her private practice. She says that with a diet culture approach, clients are more likely to drop off and not follow the dietitian’s interventions. Knowing everyone is different, Heather gets curious about each client’s different lived experiences.

[10:36] Waiting for Diet Culture to Dismantle

When will the weight inclusive space be more mainstream? Heather and David discuss the 72 billion diet and wellness industry is hard to call out. These are powers of white supremacy and a far-reaching system. They ask how do anti-diet practitioners get the word out about an alternative mindset and provide more resources? Although it’s a growing system, how do we make it more

broadly appealing to everyone? There is such a deep, ingrained association of weight and health, it’s hard to break. They laugh that weight management programs are trying to use HAES. Those programs just don’t get it.

There is a growing body of evidence for a weight inclusive approach to health. Check out Tracy Tylka, Ph.D., Janet Tomiyama, Ph.D., Kendrin Sonneville, Sc.D., R.D., Jeffery Hunger, Ph.D., Lindo Bacon, Ph.D., and Lucy Aphramor, Ph.D., RDN – to name a few. However, the money is in weight management, not weight inclusive research. It’s hard to get funding on a study without weight loss as an outcome. David mentions the bariatric money-making machine. Pharmaceutical, medical technology, and surgeons are heavily invested. Surgeons are required to meet a quota per year. It’s a lot of power and money of a suppressive system. The [anti-diet] work we do is about social justice. Where its subconscious and conscious, diet culture influences us.

[17:50] Challenges to Dismantle Diet Culture

Diet culture doesn’t stop with its old diet approaches. Now, they are listening to anti-diet work and co-opting the language. Heather says this is diet culture’s last breath. It is an act of desperation. Yet, this bait and switch doesn’t work for people. You are not offering what you said you were offering.

[19:32] Heather’s Podcast Dismantles Diet Culture

RD Real Talk started five years ago alongside Heather’s private practice. Feeling isolated, even as an introvert talking to herself, podcasts gave her a chance to have conversations with others. She connects with other providers to chat about anti-diet work. Her private practice is on the side to fuel her passions. She loves to run and races, so her private practice aims to combine fitness and anti-diet work. Her niche is women identifying persons, chronic dieters, under fueling athletes, athletes on all levels, and eating disorders. Her private practice had to take a back seat when she had three kids in four years. She thanks her RD associate, Taryn, who helped keep the business alive. Now, she sees clients one day a week, which is small and she likes it. Its there she works on healing people’s relationship to food and exercise.

[22:59] Dismantling Diet Culture in Sports Nutrition

The Health At Every Size (HAES) approach is not popular yet in sports nutrition. It is common for athletes to say things like, “I want to reach a race weight” – to be faster for a race. Heather finds sometimes people don’t even have a diet mentality, but they will use diet culture language because that is all they know. Heather models a new way of speaking about food and movement. With athletes, it is common to work on the challenge of practical hunger. For example, if you have an early AM race, you may not feel hungry, but that does not mean you will benefit from skipping breakfast. An early race still means eating something before running. For some people, they are sensitive to their stress hormones which can suppress the appetite. Consider personally – what is appetizing enough to where you’ll eat it? It’s an easy gentle guideline that we can play with in real life. David agrees, he hears diet culture in his physically active clients sometimes, like the myth of the “weight to strength ratio.” Heather acknowledges that sometimes, a person calling is simply not a good fit. She is clear about her approach is not weight loss and often times, that’s refreshing for many new clients.

She will have people tell her about their experiences with weight changes. She recognizes that each lived experience brings different outcomes. Your lived experience is true for you. This is important, because it’s a recognition of individual nuances, instead of the diet mentality: “this worked for me, so it will work for you.”

Heather and David are sticking to the anti-diet niche. For clients who aren’t interested, the space is now open for someone who wants it.

[30:51] Challenges of Diet culture in Fitness Culture

Diet culture is so pervasive! Heather says, “I cannot even go for a run sometimes without hearing about weight.” David points out that the elite level is often people who look a certain way so we often only get confirmation bias about performance and weight. David mentions as we age, we think can go back to our former selves. Heather mentions that the fact our bodies change is a huge blind-spot in health education. She laughs recalling how many times she must have told college students – “the number we are biologically adults is…” Meaning that mentally and biologically, most college students are not an adult. Legally, yes. And then as we age, women in menopause are uncomfortable in their bodies, grieving their younger bodies. The change is normal. Diet culture fills in the hope for that body change or reversal to what was.

[35:06] Successes in Practice Dismantling Diet Culture

The big win is the brain space people get back and be more present with LIFE. Kids, friends, etc. Going on a run without thinking about their body changes. Restaurants are fun again, without thinking about the healthiest thing on the menu. That’s all a big win. Their flexibility leads to satisfaction, pleasure, and joy. Presence in their life without the focus on food. Living in rigidity is so painful and stressful.

[36:54] One Small Bite for Dismantling Diet Culture in Fitness

Diet culture says exercise is punishment, discipline, and hard work. It doesn’t have to be that way!

1. Think about what makes it fun! Our day-to-day is probably not fun in the most part, make this time fun! Weight control or control of any kind usually stops the fun. If we aren’t enjoying it, then why do it? This is unsustainable if its more work. We need a lot of things in life, more work isn’t one of them, like things that are refreshing or joyful.

2. Remember, the superstars in fitness aren’t always internally happy.

3. The expectation of it always feeling fun is an extreme too. Resist the temptation of extremes.

Resources

Heather’s Podcast: RD Real Talk

Heather’s Private Practice

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Chop the diet mentality; Fuel Your Body; and Nourish Your Soul!