A Response to “Are We Eating Ourselves to Death?” with Chana Ganz, FNP, RN
Obesity rates in America are on the rise, so the obvious solution is to start eating less and eating better. Simple, right?
Yeah, right. If only life were that simple.
Today’s episode is a conversation with Chana Ganz, a family nurse practitioner. Chana is currently based in Israel, and spends her summers as a family and pediatric nurse practitioner in the US. Her year-round job is treating adult populations with acute and chronic conditions. Additionally, she’s an intuitive eating counselor (yes, she has three jobs!).
This episode was born out of a conversation Chana and I had in response to an episode of Bari Weiss’s Podcast, Honestly, entitled “Eating Ourselves to Death.” Bari is someone who I deeply respect– she’s someone who’s unafraid to say anything. Chana and I talk about what we agree and disagree with in the podcast episode, and answer questions about obesity in America, the diseases associated with obesity, and what the real answers may involve. We also talk about how intuitive eating plays a role in that.
They’re important questions that I know you have … and that most people don’t talk about.
Listen to the Episode Now
What We Agree With
First of all, there was a lot of talk in Weiss’s podcast episode about how our system is broken – and undoubtedly, that’s true.
Medical doctors are generally trained to look at the specific symptoms and treat those, rather than look at the whole person and take a holistic approach. Sometimes they have more of a disease treatment mindset rather than a health promotion mindset. (This is a generalization of the system, people, before you bite my head off.)
There are systemic issues with our food – farm food could be subsidized, and pharmaceutical companies shouldn’t be funded by sugar companies, to name a couple – and there’s a lot of bias and greed that goes on behind the scenes.
And while the food and medical systems are broken, the people who work inside them are not. This isn’t to say doctors and nurse practitioners don’t want to promote health; of course, they do. There are really good doctors out there who look at the whole patient.
But it is possible that due to the limitations of the system, even really good people don’t have the capacity to do what they want to do.
What We Disagree With
The Statistics
Some of the statistics Bari presented with her guest, Dr. Casey Means, seemed a little skewed. The podcast episode talked a lot about growing rates of obesity and health issues in America, but if you do a quick CDC search on Google, you’ll actually find that, among other things, rates of heart disease are decreasing. It’s true that obesity rates are increasing, but if all the other health indicators are not increasing, we have to question what negative factors a larger body actually causes.
She says that 93% of people in the US have metabolic dysfunction, which is astonishing enough… but then, she says 42% of THAT number are obese.
That means more than half of that number are not obese… which means that those people are walking around with metabolic dysfunction, which seems like a separate issue from obesity.
The Solution
If the problem is rising obesity, it seems like the simple answer is eating less and eating better quality foods.
Easy, right?
If only it were that simple. While we as a country are becoming a larger nation, the data doesn’t back up that we are necessarily also becoming a sicker nation.
There are definitely correlations between obesity and disease, but there aren’t necessarily causations, and until we’re sure of the causations, we want to be careful of how we approach the problem.
Let’s take diabetes, for instance. It’s known that higher weight has a correlation with diabetes, but there are studies that show that people with diabetes actually have insulin resistance before weight gain.
The rising insulin in the body is what causes the weight gain, and then diabetes develops. The cause of the rising insulin could be anything – diet, genetics, stress, or more.
Could it also be food? Yes, possibly. But it might not be the only, or even most important, cause. (We should probably do more digging on this one, though.)
Where Intuitive Eating Comes In
Many people are quick to blame processed foods for these issues, but it’s important to not ONLY look at the food as the problem (or even the solution).
Science tells us the facts: certain things – foods, substances, etc. – are not good for your body. Intuitive eating comes in and gives us the answer to the question, “Ok, so what now?”
People hear information about what’s good or not good for their body, and they tend to think the solution is to go on a diet. They have the head knowledge, and think that’s all they need.
But studies show that 80-90% of diets fail, and now they have added stress and anxiety trying to keep up with their diet. It’s a prescription that’s destined for failure.
Diets and information are not enough, and this is where intuitive eating comes in to help people develop a healthy relationship with food.
Defining Intuitive Eating
Intuitive eating is based on the premise that our bodies have their own innate wisdom, and that you don’t need any external rules to tell you what’s good for your body.
Imagine you had a meter on your wrist that told you when it’s time to go to the bathroom. That would be ridiculous, right? We know when we need to go to the bathroom, because we feel it and we respond to the feeling.
In the same way, we don’t need a meter – or rules, or diets – to tell us when and how to eat. Intuitive eating says we actually already know what and when to eat. The process of intuitive eating helps us learn how to listen to our hunger cues, and how to eliminate the external cues that tell us how to eat.
Intuitive eating doesn’t mean eating impulsively – quite the contrary, it’s actually a lot of work to eat intuitively. It means slowing down and listening to your body.
And in the beginning, if you’ve been restricting, you might feel like you really want those foods you’ve been restricting. The goal is to eat those foods so you can take it from a glorified, forbidden, sinful food… to just food.
The information you need is already inside of your body… and listening to your body is the only chance for sustainable change.
More of What We Disagree With
Warning Labels
The podcast episode talks about how high fructose corn syrup affects the body, and suggests that foods containing it should include a warning label… just like the warning label on a pack of cigarettes.
The implication, of course, is that high fructose corn syrup is just as bad for the body as a pack of cigarettes.
The first thing to note is that we don’t need cigarettes to live… but we do need food to live. Putting labels like this onto something we need – even if it’s not the most nutritious food – is not realistic at best, and damaging at worst.
Secondly, nicotine is incredibly addictive… and sugar is not. In fact, there have been studies with rats and sugar that show that the rats only displayed addictive behavior when they were restricted from having sugar. Meaning the restriction is what caused the addictive behavior… fascinating, right?
You don’t need the same kind of warning for sugar. When you learn to listen to your body, you can feel a sugar crash coming on. Your body feels the crash, and you can actually become more sensitized to the crash as you develop a healthy relationship with food and your body.
Outer Influences
As the voices of the external world get louder and more manipulative, the only way to fight that is to make our internal voices louder.
Meaning, we live in a world full of marketing and advertising that is constantly trying to manipulate us to eat certain things… so that other people can make money.
We have to shut out what’s going on outside and tap into what’s going on inside. A really in-tune body can tell which foods help it function optimally and feel best. The choices of what to eat then come much more naturally.
You don’t HAVE to worry about all the information, manipulation, or the systemic failure out there. At the end of the day, you have your own self – your own self isn’t broken, and it really can be trusted.
Tweetable Quotes
“As the voices of the external world get more and more manipulative and louder, the only way to fight that is to make our internal voices louder.” – Chana Ganz, FNP, RN
“You don’t have to worry about all the information out there, all the manipulation out there, or the systemic failure out there. The last thing to hold onto is your own self – your own self isn’t broken, and it really can be trusted.” – Chana Ganz, FNP, RN
Resources:
Bari Weiss’s Podcast, Honestly
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Hey there! I’m Rachelle, the host of the Understanding Disordered Eating Podcast. As a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, I work with clients to make sense of life’s messy emotional experiences.
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