Shireen Abdullah: 0:00

This episode unpacks what diet culture really is, how it sneaks into daily life, and how to replace restriction with trust. Think hunger-fullness cues, myth-busting, and metrics beyond the scale. Stay to the end for simple mindset shifts. You can start this week. Podcasting from Dallas, Texas, I am Shireen, and this is the Yumlish Podcast.

Shireen Abdullah: 0:30

Yumlish is working to empower you to take charge of your health through diet and exercise and reduce the risk of chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes and heart disease. We hope to share a unique perspective and a culturally relevant approach to managing these chronic conditions with you each week.

Shireen Abdullah: 0:58

Rebecca Blake is a registered dietitian and clinical nutrition subject matter expert, having worked across traditional healthcare spaces into health technology, and most recently as a full-time solo practitioner focusing on preventive health, hormonal health, and disordered eating. Welcome, Rebecca. 

Rebecca Blake: 1:15

Thank you so much for having me today, Shireen.

Shireen Abdullah: 1:16

 Such a pleasure having you on. So first things first, I’m going to dive right in and understand a little bit more about your background. So help us understand your journey to becoming a dietitian. And then what led you to focus on sort of this area of areas and a lot of your work also being in diet culture. Walk us through that. What led you to this?

Rebecca Blake: 1:34

I really graduated from college all the way back in 98. And as any responsible young woman would do, I moved straight to Manhattan to take on the city, but didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up just yet. And what happened at that point was I found a love for biking. I actually fell in love with long distance cycling. I was, you know, working as a trading assistant in an investment bank. I was not anywhere in the health space at that time.

Rebecca Blake: 2:02

But I always thought I might want to be involved in a counseling field having studied clinical psychology undergrad. So that’s a little piece in there. Anyway, flash forward, got really into biking, started to notice how differently I felt about my own body, how I really was so hungry the days that I would ride. I noticed the changes in my patterns of eating and what my body needed, the way I was able to respond to it. And I think a light bulb just went off at one point and said, hey, you love to yak all day with different people and get into their heads and

Rebecca Blake: 2:32 

See what’s going on with them. And also how intriguing this relationship you’re developing with food in your body. Let’s let’s apply to nutrition grad school. And so I did. So went to NYU, did the grad program there and became a clinical dietitian. And then basically.

Rebecca Blake: 2:47 

started my career in the very conventional way. Big hospital, worked there for several years, kind of climbed through the ranks of being a registered dietitian practicing clinically to running departments, which is a totally different skill set, but you still got to know the nutrition piece. Spent many years in that space, had a bunch of kids, moved out of the city, and I had always been moonlighting in private practice. So that’s always been kind of a piece where I’ve always had, you know, a handful of folks here and there that I’ll take on in the after hours kind of capacity. And

Rebecca Blake: 3:15

Eventually shifted into health care tech after having been an essential worker through the pandemic and dealing with three kids on hybrid schedules at school. And I finally said, all right, I’ve put my time in. I got to make a shift. And I started to work for Carrot Fertility, where I’m still a consultant. And so, you know, developing out some of their preventive health offerings and working sort of more in the in the hormonal health space. Right. So thinking about how does our diet influence our fertility or perhaps lack of fertility into a

Rebecca Blake: 3:45

hormonal shifts that we face in midlife as people with ovaries. Nutrition, of course, has such an important role when we talk about the management of menopause and really deepened my understanding and did a lot of research in that space. And finally,

Rebecca Blake: 4:00

branched off into an opportunity to full-time launch my own full-time private practice. And so I serve as a consultant right now to Montanito, which is a national brand of eating disorder treatment center. I serve as a consultant to Carrot Still, where I work several hours a week. The rest of my time is spent helping as many people as I can through all of the issues that pertain to food and their bodies.

Shireen Abdullah: 4:27

Thank you for walking us through that. One of the key things for the topic of the episode here today, we want to focus a little bit about this term called diet culture. So first, just help us understand, Level said, what does this term diet culture mean? Why does it get used so much? And how does one go about defining it? Yeah.

Rebecca Blake: 4:46

That’s, yeah, that’s a great question. So here’s what I’ll say about diet culture. We are all privy to it, influenced by it, and in many ways victimized by it every single day, knowingly and unknowingly and mostly unknowingly. And diet culture has influenced a number of generations now at this point. It is not new.

Rebecca Blake: 5:06

But it’s also not old. So I always call out to some of my patients struggling with body image things, related issues, that if you walk down the halls of the Louvre or down any of the beautiful art museums we have right here in New York City and plenty of other places in the world, you will see bodies of all delicious shapes and sizes, and more of them will be fleshier than not.

Rebecca Blake: 5:31

And so this is a relatively, in the scheme of history, it’s a relatively new phenomenon. But really, one of the major influences is that it’s a huge moneymaker, right? So for manufacturers of supplements or creators of nutrition diet plans and influencers of all types, be it fitness, food, body style, workouts, et cetera, there’s a moneymaking opportunity. It’s gigantic. It’s billions and billions of dollars.

Rebecca Blake: 6:00

that we spend in the U.S. alone on products designed to help us lose weight or change our body shape. And most of it is motivated by an emphasis and a value that is put on being in a smaller body, and usually a smaller body that was not exactly designed for us to be in.

Shireen Abdullah: 6:20

This concept around diet culture has been around for a little bit. I think recently there’s more awareness, you know, for it as well. What are some subtle ways within which diet culture influences how we think about food and then our bodies as well?

Rebecca Blake: 6:36

Well, just open up your Instagram or your TikTok, and it could be something as simple as you think you’re clicking on what looks like it’s going to be some delicious recipe for a chocolate cake, but it turns out to be how to use pea protein and stevia or monk fruit or some alternative non-nutritive sweetener, and it avoids flour, and it vilifies carbohydrates in some way, shape, or form. And it’s insidious, right? Because the belief is, oh, that looks

Rebecca Blake: 7:05

so delicious and it’s so much better than the original because it’s lower calorie, right? Everything from that to growing up in a household where you saw your mother on Weight Watchers or you heard her mother talking about the importance of being slim and how pretty and slim you look right now in that dress.

Rebecca Blake: 7:23

to really actually the language that we talk to ourselves in, right? There’s this deep, deep-rooted negativity for so many folks that is not body appreciation but very much body criticism.

Shireen Abdullah: 7:38

You know, why do you think that’s still the case? So we understand this term more now, diet culture, it’s around us, it influences us, but yet why are we suckered into it still, I guess? 

Rebecca Blake: 7:52

Yeah, no, that’s a huge, huge and deeply complex question because it’s, by the way, it’s not everyone.

Rebecca Blake: 7:58 

Right. So you can go to other areas of the world where bigger bodies are still, in fact, celebrated. I’m going to use an example of a recent trip to Hawaii where there’s a lot of, you know, that kind of Polynesian type of body style that’s very different. Not, you know, slim, hipped East Coast white girl. Forgive me for lack of delicacy with my language, but sometimes you got to just call it what it is.

Rebecca Blake: 8:23

And they celebrate being in a more robust body. And they celebrate having a hearty appetite. And they wear swimwear that is very revealing at all sizes and shapes. And it is very normalized. Here on the East Coast, we see, especially also the West Coast, we see it a lot in the coasts, tends to be connected with a higher socioeconomic demographic.

Rebecca Blake: 8:44

It tends to be associated with a higher level of education. That is not always the case. I want to be very clear that eating disorders do not know about your socioeconomic status. We can all become victims and suffer any place in your life, regardless of that, even in food insecurity. That’s a whole different potential topic for a different day.

Rebecca Blake: 9:04

It still goes back to an aesthetic that’s being celebrated and images that are being airbrushed and modified. And even we all know there’s apps that you can filter your photos through to make yourself appear slimmer and taller and legs look longer and hips look better.

Rebecca Blake: 9:20

less wide. The glorification of being in a smaller body has a lot of weight behind it, including the comeback of the trad wife aesthetic, the traditional wife aesthetic, which is about the 1950s, 1960s housewife in a very well-fitted dress with a tiny, tiny waistline and an apron, carrying a tray of cookies to her husband as he walks in the door from a hard day at work, but never touching the cookies herself.

Rebecca Blake: 9:48

So there is an idea about the role of patriarchy as it applies to diet culture and that keeping women hungry, slim, and not in power is one of the many

Rebecca Blake: 10:00

many explanations that we have for it. The fashion industry notoriously has stick figures walking around on runways. And only recently in the last decade were standards set on BMI limitations, that you could not have a BMI below a certain number and allowed to be walking in a runway show, because they know how prevalent eating disorders are in that particular community of models.

Shireen Abdullah: 10:25

You touched on social media just a minute ago. You know, within social media, so this is, you know, this is not breaking news, but folks are aware that social media fuels a lot of nutrition related myths, right? Including what we’re talking about with diet culture. What red flags would you teach someone to spot online in the content that they’re consuming? 

Rebecca Blake: 10:45

That’s wonderful. Great question.

Rebecca Blake: 10:48

So are we looking, are we spending a lot of time or even any time at all looking at bodies, body styles, body shapes, body sizes that look nothing like our own? So there’s actually been some recent research that’s very persuasive suggesting that people are unhappier about their own bodies when consistently looking at bodies that don’t look like theirs.

Rebecca Blake: 11:13

but that once we start to normalize our own body shape and size by following accounts that do represent what more normal, well-nourished, adequately fully nourished folks look like, we start to feel better about our own bodies and therefore would rank higher on a happiness scale.

Rebecca Blake: 11:29

That’s one thing. I would also say, are you spending a lot of time looking at fitspo, you know, fit inspiration? Because you may remember many years ago, there was a term that was being used called pro-ana, pro-anorexia. So in the world of social media and in the internet in general, it did, it has been blocked and it has a lot of accounts have been taken down as being so incredibly harmful. But basically following things that are teaching you how to be restrictive.

Rebecca Blake: 11:57

And I will tell you, they’re certainly not hashtagging it pro-Anna anymore, but it is not hard to find. People convincing you of, you know, if I eat these fake noodles that are actually made more of some sort of algae-like substance, I can make it but have like almost no calories per serving, and of course, hardly any carbs, God forbid we should eat a carb, that we can convince ourselves that it’s like eating a bowl of noodles. If you’re following a lot of accounts that are what I eat in a day with the idea of,

Rebecca Blake: 12:25

oh, I could eat all of this food and still stay below a certain calorie number so that I could still sustain a lower body weight than my body actually would naturally want to be at. And part of this is it’s not that it’s not appropriate for anyone to lose weight or to want to optimize their health through diet and nutrition.

Rebecca Blake: 12:44

It’s that it’s very easy to fall down the rabbit hole into a restrictive mentality that isn’t actually honoring our body’s needs because we’ve been so influenced by an aesthetic that we’re trying to achieve that isn’t actually how all bodies were designed to look.

Rebecca Blake: 13:01

What does it mean to redefine health beyond looking at numbers on the scale? 

Rebecca Blake:13:06

I love that. So there’s a term in the biz, the nutrition biz, called health at every size, H-A-E-S. And so many, many, many, especially eating disorder treatment facilities and practitioners are really taking what’s called a HAES approach.

Rebecca Blake: 13:24

Which is that the BMI is only, the body mass index that is, which is a ratio of your weight to your height, is only one marker of health. And in fact, has almost no relevance when placed with all of the other things that we also can and should be looking at to assess someone’s overall health risk.

Rebecca Blake: 13:44

It is not enough to say, oh, their BMI is elevated, therefore they should lose weight. Not all bodies were designed to fit in that BMI chart. And BMI also gets wildly inaccurate and disproportionate as someone gets taller. So it’s known just not to be a very…

Rebecca Blake: 14:02

helpful indicator of health or weight status and does actually create, in my opinion, the perfect stage for an eating disorder to develop. I have worked with many, many adolescent women who the journey started when their pediatrician suggested that their BMI was high. And there the restriction began.

Rebecca Blake: 14:23

And then it didn’t have an off button. And it wasn’t done responsibly. And it wasn’t done with supervision. And it was likely not even necessary because they were still growing. So there’s huge, huge problems with that as a marker. 

Shireen Abdullah: 14:35

Which takes me to the other side of the equation, which is the health care provider, right? So how can health care providers, dieticians communicate this understanding to a broader view of health rather than, again, that BMI, those numbers, and sort of getting fixated on that? How do you go about doing that?

Rebecca Blake: 14:53

We have to understand people’s relationships with food and their bodies in a BMI-blind way. So what does that mean? That means rather than making an assumption that someone needs to lose weight because of their BMI, we should get a deeper understanding of their relationship with food and their bodies.

Rebecca Blake: 15:14

And it may be that there’s nothing to be concerned about. This is just a person whose genetics and lifestyle leads them to be in a bigger body. It is not necessarily a bad thing. But honestly, the fat bias in our country leaves so many folks suffering with undiagnosed and untreated eating disorders because their BMI either falls within normal limits, which is that 19-ish to 24.9-ish range, and above.

Rebecca Blake: 15:44

So one can be suffering with an eating disorder, could be doing major, major maladaptive behaviors that fit into a disordered category. I’m thinking about binging and purging. I’m thinking about binging and not purging. I’m thinking about periods of deep, deep restriction and then periods of binging, the cycling between those two, and still be in a BMI healthy normal.

Rebecca Blake: 16:09

range, which is why the word healthy is atrocious in that scenario. We have to ask better questions. I think to answer your question more directly, we need to ask better questions and we need to encourage folks. We need to work to destigmatize disordered eating. So this is still one of those illnesses that you don’t talk about at the club. You don’t talk about it at Christmas.

Rebecca Blake: 16:33

Right? I mean, not that anyone wants to talk about ill health at family events. But, right, it’s a lot like talking about drug addiction. People don’t want to talk about it. 

Shireen Abdullah: 16:42

You know, there’s certainly that stigma perhaps in talking about it, especially speaking out and, you know, saying it out loud. There is something around providing, and if you can help me understand that perspective a little bit better, which is, you know, people fear, for instance, losing control without the rules. And the rules are the BMI rules or what’s showing up on your scale.

Shireen Abdullah: 17:02

How do you rebuild trust in sort of your internal cues? So be it hunger, fullness, like how do you move away from the quantitative, like sort of fixation on those numbers and then more to like the internal cues and building that relationship or rebuilding that relationship?

Rebecca Blake: 17:20

I love that question. That is because that’s the question, right? So that’s how do we get out of a disordered eating pattern? First of all, early identification and early treatment. So I want to be really clear, anyone that’s listening to this right now, if you suspect a family member, a child, a cousin, a nephew, a niece, if you suspect a

Rebecca Blake: 17:39

Or if any of this is resonating with you, please, please, please reach out for help. Do it sooner than later if you can. An eating disorder treated closer to its appearance is so much easier to treat. And it’s never easy than an eating disorder that’s been sitting and taking over your life for years and years and years. It becomes that much more attached to your identity. And a lot of the work in eating disorder treatment is de-identifying from your eating disorder.

Rebecca Blake: 18:07

which you in fact have learned is keeping you safe, is keeping you small, is keeping you in control, is giving you rules about how much you can weigh, is giving you rules about what your macros should be and how many calories you can consume, right? So how do we start learning to break the rules? I’m going to say you have to work with a really good registered dietitian who can help mentor you into becoming a really, really trusting dietitian

Rebecca Blake: 18:33

eater. And when I say trusting, I mean trusting of yourself. Learning, first of all, one thing that happens in eating disorders is we lose our hunger cues. And that is an unfortunate and very powerful side effect of an eating disorder is that, wow, if I do this long enough, I’m not even hungry. Scary. Very, very scary. And so getting back in touch with hunger and satiety cues with careful, careful mentorship and guidance, and it can happen.

Rebecca Blake: 19:00

Everyone can heal. But you have to want it and you have to keep your eye on the ball. And it’s not linear, right? There may be regressions. There may be periods where you go back to restriction or old behaviors. And it’s about not going back there for long. It’s about saying, I can right this ship again.

Rebecca Blake: 19:19

Just because I binged once doesn’t mean I need to take care of it. I can show myself that I can sit with being a little too full. And once we do that again and again and again, and once we nourish our bodies adequately, day after day after day, the urges to binge, the urges to restrict, the urges to purge after binging or after getting a little too full at a meal, they do get better.

Shireen Abdullah: 19:43

You mentioned if you notice these sort of symptoms in a loved one to get them to help. How can our listeners here support their friends, family, even in their communities in creating healthier, more compassionate food environments?

Rebecca Blake: 19:59

I wish everyone would um we have to really do a serious deep dive into the way we talk about food and our own bodies uh there is a real aspect of eating disorders that can be generational some of that has actually been identified to have a genetic component that’s not the whole story right so if you um if you say negative things about your body in front of your kids

Rebecca Blake: 20:25

You should expect that they will start to scrutinize their own bodies in similar ways. If we talk about carbs negatively or about bread or rice or pasta or cookies or ice cream, and we vilify these things as either bad for our health or as somehow dangerous or negative in any way, we are also setting the stage for something that’s called orthorexia.

Rebecca Blake: 20:51

which is sort of the more underdiagnosed stepsister to anorexia, which is marked by a real preoccupation with healthy eating and can become enormously restrictive and disruptive to life. Under the guise of, oh, well, I just, I only eat organic or I don’t eat anything refined. I only eat this types of, you know, sugars derived from this plant or that source, but not in this form. And more and more and more, it’s like, oh, well, then we’ve added another rule and we’ve added another something else. But no, but I eat.

Rebecca Blake: 21:20

But how inflexible are you? So what I would ask is, are you inflexible? Or do you really believe that everything can fit in your intake? And in fact, everything can fit. And you can still be healthy.

Shireen Abdullah: 21:33

Love that. On that note, Rebecca, thanks so much for this episode. How can our listeners just connect with you, learn more about your work? Where do we go to connect with you? 

Rebecca Blake: 21:42

Absolutely. Thanks for asking. Super easy. I am at RebeccaBlakeNutrition.com. On Insta, I am RebeccaBlakeNutrition. You can find me on email at RebeccaBlakeNutrition at gmail.

Shireen Abdullah: 21:54

Rebecca, with that, thank you so much for your time here today on this episode. To our listeners, thank you for tuning into another episode of the Yumlish podcast. And we want to head over to social media next and continue the conversation there. Help answer this one quick question, which is, what’s one belief about food or your body that you’ve started to unlearn?

Shireen Abdullah: 22:14

And how has it changed the way you approach eating or self-care? Again, head over to Facebook or Instagram. Find us at Yumlish. Find this podcast post. Comment below to tell us again, what is one belief about food or your body that you started to unlearn? And how has it changed the way you approach eating or self-care? We’ll continue the conversation there, Rebecca. Thanks so much again. 

Rebecca Blake: 22:34

Thanks so much, Shireen. It was a pleasure.

Shireen Abdullah: 22:40

Thank you for listening to the Yumlish podcast. Make sure to follow us on social media at Yumlish underscore on Instagram and Twitter and at Yumlish on Facebook and LinkedIn for tips about managing your diabetes and other chronic conditions and to chat and connect with us about your journey and perspective.

Shireen Abdullah: 23:00

You can also visit our website, yumlish.com, for more recipes, advice, and to get involved with all of the exciting opportunities Yumlish has to offer. If you like this week’s show, make sure to subscribe so you can hear more from us every time we post. Thank you again, and we’ll see you next time. Remember, your health always comes first. Stay well.

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Connect with Rebecca Blake!

Website URL: wwwrebeccablakenutrition.com

Instagram URL: https://www.instagram.com/rebeccablakenutrition/

Facebook URL: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61563918696083

LinkedIn URL: Rebecca Blake, MS RD CDN | LinkedIn