Restrictive eating is a major pain, especially when it causes you to lose your period. Hypothalamic Amenorrhoea (HA) leads to infertility but also a bunch of other lesser known issues. Anti-diet naturopath Phoebe Jobson and I talk all things HA - a condition close to both our hearts as we each have experienced and recovered from this condition.
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In this episode:

• What is HA? Plus some signs, symptoms, and accompanying issues (short and long term)
• All about the food piece – how much, how often, and whether calorie counting to ensure minimum intakes helps or hinders (hint: it depends!)
• Why potatoes are not the devil (and carbs may actually be your secret weapon)
• Guidelines on exercise in HA recovery
• Why rest rocks
• The importance of seeing a psychologist / psychotherapist / counsellor as part of your team 
• Tips on dealing with diet mentality and diet culture 
• Busting some common HA myths
• Partial vs full recovery
• The problem with skipping the nutritional rehabilitation part of healing from HA and jumping straight to herbs, fertility medications and/or injectables
• Body appreciation

About Phoebe:
Phoebe Jobson is a Sydney based Speaker and Naturopath at Nutmeg Naturopathy. Naturopathy encompasses a number of modalities, particularly herbal medicine and nutrition, to help support acute and chronic illnesses and imbalances within the body. Having had her own health challenges in the past and being diagnosed with a Restrictive Eating Disorder, Phoebe knows what it is like to be in a place of dis-eased health. She has learnt how nutrition, herbal medicine and other holistic principles have the power to help and enable our body and mind to thrive. Phoebe is so passionate about supporting individuals and helping them take care of their precious health. We must learn to appreciate and love who we are, nourishing ourselves on a daily basis. Helping others add health, happiness, and soul back into their lives truly makes Phoebe’s heart sing. Each and every one of us is on a different health journey and Phoebe is here to help support, build and energise that journey.

Links:
Phoebe's Website, Instagram & Facebook
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For our collective liberation, it is crucial that our wellness practices go beyond the mainstream representation of individualised, material self-care. Laura Jean, APD talks about community care as a form of self-care that creates space for everyone, including marginalised and oppressed groups of people.

In this episode:

• The "epiphany moment" book that turned both of us onto the non-diet path
• Self-care is an act of liberation, especially for oppressed and marginalised groups of people
• Unshackling ourselves from patriarchal ideas of what it is to be a "good mother"
• Differentiating commodified wellness from community care as accessible, equitable self-care
• "Who benefits?" and "What feels nourishing?" as ways of questioning self-care practices 
• Why emotional and comfort eating are not “bad”
• Food is much more than medicine
• The radical, feminist roots of self-care
• How white supremacy shows up for health practitioners
• Investigating needs, values based living, and self-compassion

About Laura:
Laura Jean is an Accredited Practicing Dietitian who focuses on the ‘whys’ of eating and how body connection can guide our interaction with food. She is passionate about helping women develop a healthier relationship with food and supporting them to become the expert in their own food experiences.

Laura's Website, Instagram & Facebook

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Did you know that many far-flung ‘superfoods’ carry a heavy environmental and social footprint? This episode builds upon a discussion of the over-harvesting of medicinal plants and superfoods that began in episode 15 with Katya Weiss-Andersson about wellness capitalism.

In this episode:
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• WTF is a superfood? (and some brief thoughts on Juice Plus+)
• Rarity breeds desire
• Issues around the sustainable harvesting of quinoa
• Yogis, food and karma
• Cost-effective alternatives to exotic $$$ superfoods

Links:

​Ep 15: Wellness Capitalism: Essential Oil MLMs, Whitewashed Herbalism, and "Naturopreneurs" with Katya Weiss-Andersson

Ep 11. Wildly Accessible Food & Medicine: Foraging Edible Weeds & Bush Foods with Pat Collins
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Original article this episode is based on

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Sure, bulking and cutting (let's just call it B+C) can work in the short term and therefore be “effective” – especially if your definition of effective is short-term weight loss.

(Note I didn't use the more popular term fat loss, because when cutting you won't only lose fat - you will lose some muscle too. Y'know, that tissue most people are trying to build or at least maintain. You don't get to pick which body tissue you reduce when you diet!)

Cut too early or severely (or really, at all) and you will lose muscle mass, meaning performance can suffer. I’ve seen intelligent, experienced powerlifting coaches trying to make it into a lower weight class for a comp cut too early (or cut when they really didn’t need to, hello disordered eating disguised as athleticism) to the detriment of their performance...

...to the point where they couldn’t even compete due to health issues and/or overtraining injuries elicited by the calorie deficit. In which case, what the f*%k is the point?

As I alluded to, "cutting for comp" can be a free pass for some to control or lose weight using disordered eating behaviours.

For experienced and professional athletes who need to make weight, B+C can work for competitive purposes when performance nutrition and loss of the muscle mass that comes with cutting is carefully taken into consideration.

But remember for these folks, their sport is their full time career. They have an entire support team on board: sports coach, strength and conditioning coach, team or personal sports dietitian or nutritionist, and sometimes a personal chef behind them to do all the number crunching and food prep for them. How much support and time do you have?
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Bulking and cutting demands that you ignore the body’s intuition by (usually) tracking macros, which tells you how much protein, carbohydrate and fat you should eat in combination with your training plan.

You may have heard of "If It Fits Your Macros", or IIFYM for short. Macro tracking is closely tied in with bulking and cutting, as it's frequently the diet of choice for people wishing to build muscle and then "reveal" it by losing fat through restrictive dieting. 

As macro tracking is based on strict external rules, very little room is given for those times you feel hungry but have no macros left and aren’t allowed to eat. Or when you’re full but you haven’t hit your numbers for the day.

In short, it's a diet (despite emancipation-themed claims of "flexible dieting", "lifestyle change", etc.) No surprises there.

B+C can also obliterate your connection with your internal cues. And the low carb, low calorie hell of cutting can make you feel really hungry and fatigued - which isn't exactly a recipe for effective training and high athletic performance.

Remember, bodies resist restriction. And for the majority of people the cutting phase (which, let's face it, is just calorie restriction with a fancy #fitspo name) can’t last forever without you developing a long lasting restrictive ED in order to sustain it.

​Which sadly, happens.

After an initial honeymoon phase where some weight loss might occur, most bodies will fight the calorie deficit of a cutting phase by slowing metabolism resulting in weight gain weight. You can probably tell by now that this is not a sustainable way to eat long term. 
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“But the athletes who bulk then cut look so happy, healthy and shredded!” Dig a little deeper and you’ll see that many of these athletes look good enough for a photo shoot once, maybe twice a year. The preparation for something like a bikini competition can be excruciating, and hormonal imbalances, loss of menstrual periods, low sex drive, thyroid dysregulation, exhaustion, constipation, and hair loss are not uncommon. Then there’s the dehydration and outright misery in the final days leading up to comp.

​Not exactly sounding like a healthy - or safe - long term weight control strategy.

The rest of the time, these athletes are in "off-season" mode and look like any other human. Most experienced weight class athletes know B+C is a short term strategy, not a long term form of weight control.

Additionally, the physiological aftermath of years of bulking and cutting can be significant, with the attendant risks of derailed fertility, weight cycling, and eating disorders.

Unless you’re a professional athlete or physique competitor, you don’t have an off-season. Do you have the time to go through the horrendous mood swings of low carb hell or stringent macro counting when you’re busy parenting, working, and all the rest of it?

Only you can answer that. For me, it's a hell no. 

It's time we explored capitalism in it’s indiscriminately elderberry syrup guzzling, MLM essential oil dowsed, $400 supplement protocol pushing form: Wellness Capitalism. 
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In this episode

• The value of healthy skepticism, and where Katya's comes from
• How capitalism takes holistic healthcare - which was traditionally accessible, deeply contextual and collectively empowering - and warps this to make it inaccessible, commodified and whitewashed
• The trouble with smudging
• Cultivating a relationship with the plants you use in your healing
• Essential oils: would a simple tea do? Plus oral ingestion, COVID "cures", and MLMs
• One-size-fits-all herbalism versus constitutional herbal traditions such as Ayurveda and TCM
• Over harvesting of medicinal herbs and "superfoods"
• "Naturopreneurs", supplement-heavy protocols, and Tony Robbins
• Disease mongering in holistic wellness
• Finding a practitioner who will help, not harm
• Katya's recovery from anorexia nervosa and PTSD, and how lived experiences with disordered eating can make us better practitioners
• Astrology, tarot and the truth about cusps!

Links
Katya's website, Instagram, and her podcasts: Kumbaya Confessional and Queer Wellness
The Dream: a podcast exposing the dangers of multi-level marketing
Food Empowerment Project: a resource to help others recognise the power of their food choices

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There has been a phenomenal uptick of rising yoga and wellness influencers posting anti-racism sentiments on social media. Yet in stark contrast to the important message of bringing light to police brutality against BIPOC, or tackling underrepresentation of coloured folks in wellness spaces, these feeds are filled with white, thin, able-bodied, cis-het women striking yoga poses on beaches. The question is: are these influencers for real?
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In this episode:

• The rise of performative activism in yoga social media, and why it comes across as disingenuous
• How white yoga and wellness influencers can leverage their privilege to do better
• My personal experiences of racism growing up, how these pale in comparison to those of BIPOC, and how I'm responding to racial injustice
• The damage done by sentiments like, “No One Is Superior”, "We Are All One", or "I Don't See Colour"
• An example of feigned anti-racism in an Australian context
• Spiritual capitalism and the ways white supremacy manifests IRL white yoga studio culture
• 3 tactics of defence and dismissal used by white wellness influencers to deflect accountability around racism
• Folks who are doing excellent work in allyship, de-centering themselves, raising the voices of BIPOC, and/or speaking out as BIPOC wellness and yoga influencers themselves

Resources mentioned:

• Dianne Bondy on challenging racism and spiritual bypassing, on the triyoga podcast
• Acknowledgment of Country by Georgia Mae Capocchi-Hunter
• Casey's article on The Spiritual, Sexy, Successful Woman Ideal
• Transcript of this episode with links to posts mentioned
• Yoga is Dead podcast

Influencers to follow:

@goodbodyfeel
@nalgonapositivitypride
@mynameisjessamyn
@theunderbellyyoga
@diannebondyyogaofficial
​​@iamchrissyking
​@skillinaction
@rachelcargle
​@accessibleyoga
@amberkarnesofficial
@nicolecardoza

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​There is a lack of representation of women aged 40+ in fitness. Rachelle Ballard-Clayton is shifting that pattern by basing her approach to training womxn on their shifting internal landscape and cyclical patterns.

​In this episode:

• A little pre-interview solo ramble on systemic racism and unrecognised privilege in yoga/wellness/spirituality worlds
• Training womxn and running a fitness business, without body transformations or weight loss challenges (!)
• The importance of strength training – as opposed to just cardio and yoga - for womxn, especially those over 30 years of age
• Movement and the menstrual cycle: adapting your training to the hormonal fluctuations of one’s menstrual cycle - or mood cycle for peri-menopausal womxn
• What movement might look like for a midlife womxn 
• Why we might find ourselves at this stage of life feeling less likely to move, more burnt out than ever and what we can do about that
• Throwing all expectations of what we should be doing out the window
• Understanding what our bodies are doing by tracking cycles
• How to work with and not against your body 
• Why some weight gain around menopause is normal and protective
• “Focus on what you can do, and understand YOU better”

​PLUS, some post interview-thoughts on:

• Rites of Passage in womxn’s lives, also known as the blood mysteries – menarche, childbirth, menopause
• The phenomenal benefits womxn get from strength training
• Better indicators of fitness than six pack or how lean you are
• “Does weight training make you bulky?” 
• #YogaEveryDamnDay – with no other form of movement - is non-sensical
• What yoga is missing that strength training can provide
• What my own personal movement practice looks like

About Rachelle:
​Rachelle Ballard-Clayton owns MEE Active a Womxn’s health and movement coaching practice on the Gold Coast, Australia and delivers her programs worldwide. She creates a safe space for midlife womxn to step off the sidelines & connect deeply with their mind & body.

Rachelle's Website, Instagram & Facebook

Resources mentioned:

• Wild Power by Alexandra Pope
• The Optimised Woman by Miranda Grey
• The work of Jane Hardwicke-Collings
• Casey's articles on why strength training is especially helpful for breastfeeding women here and here
• Will Lifting Weights Make Me Bulky?

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Enhancing a deep connection and awareness within our whole selves is at the heart of healing modalities such as reiki and yoga, as well as HAES and non-diet philosophies. Our bodies are oceans, and there are many parallels between our bodies as feeling, sensuous beings worthy of care and attention, and the kind of bodily care and movement encouraged in non-diet and weight neutral approaches like HAES. Shae Dingle is a non-diet dietitian, reiki practitioner, yoga teacher, and surf coach with oceans of heartful wisdom to share in this deep-diving episode. 

In this episode:

• Travel, yoga, energy healing, working with women’s health and indigenous populations: Shae’s path to becoming the multi-faceted non-diet practitioner she is today
• The experience Shae had that turned her path towards reiki
• Reiki as an intuitive approach and avenue into body connection
• The connections between reiki, yoga and HAES, and what Shae’s reiki sessions look like
• The need to create more inclusivity in the non-diet, Health at Every Size and eating disorder worlds in terms of complementary and alternative healthcare
• Embodied surfing as a form of intuitive movement
• Eating disorders and the sexualisation of women in the surfing space
• Our bodies as oceans

Links:

• Shae's Website, Instagram & Facebook

About Shae:
Shae is an Accredited Practicing Dietitian, certified yoga & meditation instructor, Reiki Therapist, and surf coach.  Shae is passionate about all things that enhance a deep connection and awareness within our whole self, as well as cultural views that shape our connection to how we see our self.  Shae's experience as a dietitian has taken her to a range of health settings around the world with clients of all ages, cultures, and health concerns.  As a dietitian strongly aligned in Health At Every SIze principles and non-diet approaches, Shae aims to support positive relationships with food and body trust.  Her work particularly focuses on supporting eating disorders, disordered eating, body image concerns, and women's health.  Shae is based on the Sunshine Coast and is available online or in-person consults, workshops, and healing sessions.  Shae also holds various women's mindful ocean sessions, as a space to explore body trust, joyful movement and connection.
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