And through my philosophy as a dietitian, all food has a purpose.

Facts do not have opinions.

Just don't let perfection be the enemy of good good.

Self love is really about self-respect and acceptance.

Welcome to the whole few.

I'm Stacey Toth of Real Everything, and I'm here each week to dive deeper into how we can find happiness and health inside and out for self love, body positivity and discovering new ways to be our best selves.

And before we get started, a reminder, this podcast is for general education purposes and is not intended to diagnose, advise or treat any physical or mental illness, and we always recommend that you see a licensed health professional accordingly.

Which, I mean, you could talk to Kathleen, our guest today, but she is a licensed professional. She's not your licensed professional unless you want to sign up for some virtual counseling with her, but Kathleen, I had started following you on Instagram.

Instagram, you are the RD nutritionist, I don't know, probably only a year or two ago when I started branching out from my very small mindset of what I thought health was, which was very much around healthism and orthorexia and all this kind of mindset with dieting and really started to expand the idea that I could be healthy without dieting.

And I love that there are professionals out there like you willing to say these sort of things to help people understand the health is so much more than what we've been taught to believe for so long from a societal perspective. So I really appreciate you coming on to the show today.

Can you maybe introduce yourself to our listeners who might not know you already.

Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. So I'm Kathleen me and I'm a registered dietitian, and I arrived to the anti diet philosophy. I always tell people certainly not the education that I received, but from working with people and listening with people it's the only way forward in my opinion.

And I really just feel passionately about helping people improve their relationship to food and body, and I think we have to do that by what you were talking about expanding how we look at things like health and considering that a really binary definition of health doesn't allow for any nuance and

it's way more complicated than we've made it seem really so I feel like my through my perspective, we can't be restrictive in our behaviors, we have to advocate for respectful care for all people really encouraging connection to the body and also naming the ways in which that is challenging.

Yeah, it feels really important to have this sort of philosophy. So that's the way that I practice.

I love it. And what I'm excited to talk about today is this idea that a lot of people this time of year are being bombarded with the exact opposite of that, right? This idea that, oh, if we splurged over the holidays, if we did too much or whatever, like now we need to punish ourselves for it, or we need to

make it right, whatever the wrong was. And I think those, as you said, binary type concepts are really play into being able to sell someone something, right?

If you can categorize something good, bad, like as simple as that, then it's easier to go into a shame cycle to them say, okay, now it's time to now I just told you all the cookies and all the things.

And now I'm going to take you on this other side of the ride and I'm going to take you on a diet and it's a never ending cycle that people can't get off.

But hopefully I know our listeners are working actively every day to try to get off that cycle. Hopefully we can talk about some of that. And also I would argue to a point where creating boundaries around some of the relationships that people might have when these things are introduced.

And that's an area that I'm still struggling with how to handle like I might subscribe to this concept and be working on it for myself.

And at the same time, that doesn't make it easy or comfortable to create boundaries around like not having these kinds of toxic conversations with other people in our lives.

...