What on earth would a podcast about designing human conversations, facilitation, leadership and organizational change have to learn from a coach and an expert on Food and Eating? Quite a lot, as it turns out! One of my favorite design thinking principles is to learn from “alternative worlds” - absorbing how other people and communities are solving similar problems in different contexts.
My guest, Alissa Rumsey, is a registered dietitian, nutrition therapist, certified intuitive eating counselor, and the author of Unapologetic Eating: Make Peace With Food and Transform Your Life.
It’s always interesting to learn from reflective practitioners - people willing to think about how they do what they do. Alissa designs many human conversations in her work and life, from her coaching work to her group programs to her book, and the marketing thereof - a book is a conversation, after all. Alissa’s whole business is a series of conversations designed to shift the larger conversation about food and dieting.
Food and eating can be fraught topics, but Alissa's approach of connecting with and learning to trust your own body is inclusive, empowering, encouraging and wise. She places dieting in a much larger (and longer) conversation about historical racism and gender dynamics. At the core of Alissa’s work is an idea that is of deep interest to me: Interoception.
Interoception
Lately, I’ve been using this word in my coaching calls a lot, and it’s Alissa’s work that put it back at the top of my vocabulary. You might have heard the word proprioception: It’s how you can touch your fingers and toes with your eyes closed: You know where your body is, physically. Proprioception is sometimes described as almost a sixth sense, the sense of self-movement and body position. It’s essential for navigating the world in three dimensions, and survival.
But if proprioception is a sixth sense, there’s a seventh: Interoception: One’s sense of one’s internal state. When we say we feel fine, or feel sad, or angry or hungry, we’re interpreting a multitude of internal sensations and summarizing them into a simple word. It’s how we know what we need and start on the path of getting what we want in response to those needs.
When we feel sad, what are we feeling that lets us know that we are feeling sad? Where is it in your body? Think about that...and feel that!
When we’re hungry, it can be physical hunger (like when I do a 16 hour fast...I know that I’m really hungry at the end!) or “mouth hunger” ...like how it just feels GOOD to eat ALL the popcorn. Or it can be emotional hunger that we soothe through eating.
The challenge is that, unless we are attentive and aware of what’s really going on with ourselves, we can’t take care of ourselves, we can’t give ourselves what we really want and need...and we can’t grow. For example, for me, getting a massage is a much better way for me to soothe my emotional hunger...because I can tell you, no amount of popcorn will do it!
In leadership, facilitation, coaching and transformation work, we need to learn to take deep care of ourselves since we are constantly caring for others.
It’s only when we give ourselves real nourishment, that we can care for and nourish others.
Like the sign in the airplane says “Put your own oxygen mask on first”.
The Work is in You & The Leader you want to be
If you listen back to my episodes with Alisa Cohn (a different spelling and a very different type of coach!) she talks about how “the work is in you”...the idea that as we grow and develop, we have to find new resources in ourselves: ways to be firm and decisive, to be bigger and the CEO others need us to be...while being and staying true to ourselves. As Amy Jen Su (Author of The Leader You Want to Be) said in our conversation about leadership development coaching, “we need to find our own North Star”.
I truly believe that Interoception is an absolute key to personal growth and transformation from the inside out.
Also..we all eat and try to diet, to control ourselves...so stop! Eat ALL the popcorn and mac-n-cheese if you want to...and listen to your body when it says you have had enough.
The Body Keeps Score
If you can learn to listen to your inner signals,you’ll know when your gut tells you your client is gaslighting you, or if the deck isn’t actually right (versus all the changes everyone wants to make!), or when to say what needs to be said.
In my coaching work, I have to hear the voices in my head and trust that sometimes, it’s intuition...and sometimes I’m getting ahead of the conversation - that rushing feeling in my stomach could be my excitement to share my insights instead of bringing them out of the person in front of me. It’s a dance.
I like to joke: If we don’t listen to our intuition, it just might pack up and head off to someplace where it’s more appreciated. So, welcome your Interoception, your body wisdom, and give it a place of pride. Honor it!
Alissa’s book, Unapologetic Eating could also be called “Unapologetic Living”...if you want more of that in your life and work, check out her book. I’ve enjoyed it.
LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES AND RESOURCES
Minute 2
my goal is to really shift how we talk about food and bodies and health in society as a whole, and so I see it ... That's kind of what I'm doing. I'm more writing and social media work. That's kind of where I'm speaking to, but also I see the one-on-one conversations that I have with my clients translating also into this larger conversation, because the more people that are able to just really connect to their own bodies and embrace their own power, the more that they then go on and sort of change that conversation with the people in their own lives too.
Minute 6
and just to define interoception, I kind of define it as this ability to really notice and connect with the physical sensations that arise in your body and also connect those to the emotions that you're feeling, and in my work, a lot of what we're doing is, at least at the start, is ... Because I work with a lot of people who have spent a lot of time dieting, are just very disconnected from their body cues, are really eating based upon what they kind of, quote, think they should eat or shouldn't eat rather than connect it to their own body. So where we typically start is just starting to feel into the body for the physical sensations of hunger, of satiety, of thirst.
Minute 7
I mean, certainly it's a way of respecting your body, of telling your body "Okay. I trust you to tell me what it is that I need to eat," because so many of us don't, and we've been taught to distrust our body, but really, my work is helping people get back to that place of we're born with this inherent ability to ... Our bodies know what we need. For thousands and thousands of years, our body ... It's a survival mechanism when it comes to food and to eating. So it's a way of respecting our body, which then builds more body trust.
Then what I so love about the work that I do is that it starts with this piece, with the food and the eating, but then it gets to this much bigger piece, because when you trust your body to tell you what you need to eat, how much you need to eat, rather than listening to external people, you then are able to just connect more. Again, interoception connects to even more of that body trust and for everything else. So it's the intuition piece around food, but then this bleeds into everything else, just intuition with things with relationships and work and all these other things. So rather than questioning, it's this trust of like "Okay. I understand what my body is feeling right now. I'm understanding what it's communicating to me," because our bodies communicate so much wisdom to us, but we tend ... Most of us as adults tend to live mostly in our head and aren't integrating that body piece.
Minute 9
It's the judgment, the bullying, and it's really like at the root of that is usually shame, and it can become these shame stories that we tell ourselves of like "Oh, I just have no self control. I can't control myself around this thing," or it just becomes so integrated and ... Yeah. Exactly like what you just said. Shame leaves us no room for growth, and so such a huge part of this is really being able to, A, be aware of that conversation you're having with yourself in your head, bring awareness to that, and then start to notice ... Because all of the thoughts and beliefs we have in that inner dialogue ... That all developed from somewhere.
Minute 10
Usually all that development starts in childhood, and so this inner bully or inner critic, whatever you want to call it, developed usually from when you were a child, and it was trying to help you, because children don't really know what's going on and they're trying to survive and they're relying on all these people around them. So these different voices developed to try to help them survive, but then at some point it becomes more harmful than helpful. Once you're an adult and once you kind of know like "Okay. I am safe. I don't need these bully voices anymore," but for most of us, they just still stay in there because they're so integrated. So it's bringing the awareness to it and then starting to notice like "Okay. How are these not helpful to me right now and maybe even harmful?"
Minute 13
So unapologetic eating means eating what you want, when you want, how you want. In a way, that's honoring that interoception that we just talked about but without feeling like you have to explain yourself, or without feeling those shoulds or shouldn'ts, without feeling guilty, without feeling ashamed. It's being in the moment with food and eating in a way that feels good in your body, eating things that you enjoy, fully inhabiting your body when you're eating, like that audible ... that you let out when something is really good.
Or that look on your face, and you're like "This is ..." Your eyes close, and you're like "This is so good," and it's being in the moment with that and without feeling self conscious, without worrying about like "Oh, what are others might be thinking of me?" and really, the ... This is kind of the arc of the book is it goes from unapologetic eating but really getting people to unapologetic living, because exactly what I said before, where you start to ... This starts with food and eating, but then it bleeds into so many other areas of your live, and so I also just see unapologetic eating as getting back to our roots and who we were before society told us who we should be.
Minute 15
Well, I think, to just your first point of "Well, I can't eat whatever I want, because then I'll go off the rails," or whatever, that's so, so common, but I always say we feel that way because, well, A, we've been taught by so many different ways in our society that we can't trust what we eat. In the United States, the diet culture, the diet industry, is a 70-billion-dollar-plus industry. So we're taught and told in so many different ways from so many different sources that like "Oh, you can't trust your body. You need to follow X, Y, Z things, or else you're not going to be healthy," and in reality, that couldn't be farther from the truth, and I always tell people to look at babies and small children.
Minute 17
So I see this with my niece and nephew. I was out there a couple months ago visiting them, and at the time, they were three and a half years old, and so I'm making them dinner one night, and so I make Kraft mac and cheese. I had the Trader Joe's steamed lentils. I roasted some vegetables, and I think I put some hummus on the plate or something like that. So two three and a half year olds, right?
The first night, neither one of them touched the Kraft mac and cheese, neither one of them. My nephew ate all the lentils, and then he asked for yogurt. The only yogurt we had in the fridge was the plain Greek yogurt, and I was like "Ooh, I don't think he's going to like this," and I was like "This one? You sure?" and he was like "Yes. That one," and he ate ... I don't know. He just kept asking for more. He probably had a cup of lentils and a cup of yogurt and didn't eat any of the mac and cheese, and my niece ate all her carrots and just kept asking for more carrots, and when they were done, they're just like "I'm done," and I didn't say "Ooh, you sure you don't want this?" and it's really hard to do this. I'm just like "are you sure you're done?" and they were like "Yep. I'm done," and then the next day, we had leftovers, and that day, they both ate some of the macaroni and cheese, but yeah.
So they're not looking at that plate thinking "Oh, mac and cheese. This is bad for me. I shouldn't be having this. I don't know when I'm going to have this next. So I got to eat it all now." They're just like "Here's the plate of food. What sounds good to me?" They're eating based on their body cues
MORE ABOUT ALISSA
Alissa Rumsey, MS, RD, CDN, CSCS is a registered dietitian, nutrition therapist, certified intuitive eating counselor, and the author of Unapologetic Eating: Make Peace With Food and Transform Your Life. Alissa is passionate about advocating for people to reclaim the space to eat and live unapologetically. She is the founder of Alissa Rumsey Nutrition and Wellness, a weight-inclusive nutrition practice that offers virtual counseling and online programs to help people liberate themselves from dieting, cultivate a peaceful relationship to food and their bodies, and live a more authentic, connected life. Her expertise has been featured in hundreds of media outlets and she speaks regularly at events, online trainings, and conferences around the country. She calls New York City home and spends her free time exploring the city’s food scene and searching for patches of green space to sunbathe in.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Daniel Stillman:
So I will then officially welcome you to The Conversation Factory. Alissa, I'm really excited that we get to have this conversation.
Alissa Rumsey:
Yeah. I am too.
Daniel Stillman:
I was thinking about where to start the conversations, and I'm curious. Do you have a sense when I ask you what conversation do you feel like you design in your work? What are the conversations that you feel like you are attending to and designing on purpose?
Alissa Rumsey:
So I would say there's a range. I would say, in the work that I do one on one with my clients, I'm designing conversations with us in session, where it's very similar to a therapy session or coaching session, where I'm really trying to help them connect and make their own meaning and sort of figure out what's going on and connect the dots for themselves, and within that, there's also a big part of the work that I do tends to be around bringing a lot of awareness or helping them bring a lot of awareness to their inner conversation that's in their head, like their inner thoughts. We often call it the inner critic voice or the judgmental voices or the shoulds that are in there, and really working with them to help them change that kind of conversation or tape that is playing in their head.
Alissa Rumsey:
Then I think that also sort of connects to the larger conversation, which my goal is to really shift how we talk about food and bodies and health in society as a whole, and so I see it ... That's kind of what I'm doing. I'm more writing and social media work. That's kind of where I'm speaking to, but also I see the one-on-one conversations that I have with my clients translating also into this larger conversation, because the more people that are able to just really connect to their own bodies and embrace their own power, the more that they then go on and sort of change that conversation with the people in their own lives too.
Daniel Stillman:
I love that this is where we're starting, because when I think about conversations, thinking about the range and what the range is that we're working on or designing in, this size ... Your sort of highlighted there's the one on one and then there's your social media. There's the one to many, and then you also facilitate or gather groups and build community around the work you do, and then there's this larger societal or cultural conversation around food and dieting, which is just like ... I'm glad that we have the whole conversational range from the way we talk to ourselves to the way the whole culture talks about this topic, and they're all there laid out on the table. That's all part of what you do.
Alissa Rumsey:
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.
Daniel Stillman:
So for me, when we were talking about having you on the podcast, I was like "How does this fit in?" So much of the people who come on the show are talking about organizational change, innovation coaching, or facilitation leadership, and ... Oh. Hey. What's that?
Alissa Rumsey:
Oh. Oh, my gosh. I'm sorry.
Daniel Stillman:
It's okay.
Alissa Rumsey:
That was another call coming in. I don't know why.
Daniel Stillman:
That's totally not a problem.
Alissa Rumsey:
It rang on my computer, which is bizarre. I don't know if it's because my phone. I'm turning off my computer sound just in case. Sorry about that.
Daniel Stillman:
Technology. It's totally fine. We're going to keep this in, because this is all real. So for me, I was like "I don't know. This is kind of off topic," and then Janet and I were reading your book, your book that just came out, because I want to make sure we talk about this. We were at the spa reading this together, and just for anybody listening, we've already had COVID. We got better, and this was an outdoor pool. So it was relatively safe. No COVID shaming. We were reading the book together, and I was like "Oh, my god. This book is a tool to change the larger social conversation about food and dieting and body image," but you spend so much of the book talking about interoception and sensing ourselves and connecting with ourselves, and I love the word, and I've been using it in my coaching calls as well. I say "Well, you know what proprioception is," and they're like "Yeah. Kind of," and I'm like "Yeah. Well, interoception is knowing what you're feeling inside, and that's important." Why is interoception important to you in your work? Can we just unpack that a little bit?
Alissa Rumsey:
Sure. Sure. I love that that was what you pulled out, because that was not what I was expecting you to pull out. So I thought that that was really interesting. So yeah, and just to define interoception, I kind of define it as this ability to really notice and connect with the physical sensations that arise in your body and also connect those to the emotions that you're feeling, and in my work, a lot of what we're doing is, at least at the start, is ... Because I work with a lot of people who have spent a lot of time dieting, are just very disconnected from their body cues, are really eating based upon what they kind of, quote, think they should eat or shouldn't eat rather than connect it to their own body. So where we typically start is just starting to feel into the body for the physical sensations of hunger, of satiety, of thirst.
Daniel Stillman:
Wait. Is that how you pronounce that? [inaudible 00:06:21].
Alissa Rumsey:
Satiety. That's how I pronounce it.
Daniel Stillman:
That's fine. I'll go with yours. So why is it important for us to, instead of eating according to a specific plan or ideal, to eat according to what our bodies are telling us?
Alissa Rumsey:
So I think it's important for many reasons. I mean, certainly it's a way of respecting your body, of telling your body "Okay. I trust you to tell me what it is that I need to eat," because so many of us don't, and we've been taught to distrust our body, but really, my work is helping people get back to that place of we're born with this inherent ability to ... Our bodies know what we need. For thousands and thousands of years, our body ... It's a survival mechanism when it comes to food and to eating. So it's a way of respecting our body, which then builds more body trust.
Alissa Rumsey:
Then what I so love about the work that I do is that it starts with this piece, with the food and the eating, but then it gets to this much bigger piece, because when you trust your body to tell you what you need to eat, how much you need to eat, rather than listening to external people, you then are able to just connect more. Again, interoception connects to even more of that body trust and for everything else. So it's the intuition piece around food, but then this bleeds into everything else, just intuition with things with relationships and work and all these other things. So rather than questioning, it's this trust of like "Okay. I understand what my body is feeling right now. I'm understanding what it's communicating to me," because our bodies communicate so much wisdom to us, but we tend ... Most of us as adults tend to live mostly in our head-
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Alissa Rumsey:
... and aren't integrating that body piece.
Daniel Stillman:
I want to unpack this. I want to go one more layer down, because the way I would language this is there's a dialogue. We have internalized these shoulds. There's these internal voices that are saying "Oh, I shouldn't eat this. I should be eating more of that. I should be doing these things," and there's another part of us that's saying "I want ice cream," and then there's this like "No. You're a bad person for wanting ice cream," and shifting that conversation is non trivial. What I say often is forcing people, aggression, bullying really is not super effective change management technique when it comes to other people, and yet we're having these internal bullying conversations with ourselves.
Alissa Rumsey:
Yes. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. It's the judgment, the bullying, and it's really like at the root of that is usually shame, and it can become these shame stories that we tell ourselves of like "Oh, I just have no self control. I can't control myself around this thing," or it just becomes so integrated and ... Yeah. Exactly like what you just said. Shame leaves us no room for growth, and so such a huge part of this is really being able to, A, be aware of that conversation you're having with yourself in your head, bring awareness to that, and then start to notice ... Because all of the thoughts and beliefs we have in that inner dialogue ... That all developed from somewhere.
Alissa Rumsey:
Usually all that development starts in childhood, and so this inner bully or inner critic, whatever you want to call it, developed usually from when you were a child, and it was trying to help you, because children don't really know what's going on and they're trying to survive and they're relying on all these people around them. So these different voices developed to try to help them survive, but then at some point it becomes more harmful than helpful. Once you're an adult and once you kind of know like "Okay. I am safe. I don't need these bully voices anymore," but for most of us, they just still stay in there because they're so integrated. So it's bringing the awareness to it and then starting to notice like "Okay. How are these not helpful to me right now and maybe even harmful?"
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. We're going to dance around all of these different conversations, because I'm wondering ... The book. I think of books as conversation pieces, really. You're putting a sound out. Has the conversation around the book been what you've hoped it to be? Do you feel like it's creating the conversation around eating that you want to facilitate?
Alissa Rumsey:
That's such a great question, and I would say yeah so far. So the book's only been out for about a month. It's funny. I was just posting on Instagram this morning. It's such a funny thing. You write this book. You spend all this time. You put it out, and just getting the feedback ... I know that, at this point, hundreds, if not maybe thousands, of people have bought the book and are reading it, but you're not hearing from all those people. So I always appreciate when people are giving me feedback, because I'm like "This is so great because it's just out there, and I don't really know," but yes.
Alissa Rumsey:
The feedback I have gotten has been just in the sense of really making people think and really making them kind of uncomfortable in places. I say that right in the introduction like "Look. There are going to be parts of this or maybe many parts of this book that make you feel uncomfortable, and that is okay, and that is part of this process," and yeah. That's the feedback I have been getting is that and also just getting so many messages from people that are like "Oh, my gosh. This resonates so much," or "Oh, this makes so much sense," and so that feels really great as well.
Daniel Stillman:
So the title of the book is Unapologetic Eating, and it's become ... Maybe we're misusing the book at this point in our family. I don't know, but Janet and I can joke now. I am unapologetically eating this ice cream. We can just anchor ourselves on like "I'm eating this," and maybe it's giving us too much license to eat whatever we want, because we're on a mini vacation right now, but what's important, do you think, for people to know about unapologetic eating? Let's just put a flag in the sand there and say for somebody who has no idea. A lot of the people who are listening to this ... This is going to be a very big, new idea for them. This is what my dad used to say. "What? Do you want me to give the 25-word-or-less version?" I'm like "Yes. Yes. I do." For somebody who's new to this conversation, can we give them an invitation into this space?
Alissa Rumsey:
Definitely. So unapologetic eating means eating what you want, when you want, how you want. In a way, that's honoring that interoception that we just talked about but without feeling like you have to explain yourself, or without feeling those shoulds or shouldn'ts, without feeling guilty, without feeling ashamed. It's being in the moment with food and eating in a way that feels good in your body, eating things that you enjoy, fully inhabiting your body when you're eating, like that audible ... that you let out when something is really good.
Daniel Stillman:
Oh, I know.
Alissa Rumsey:
Or that look on your face, and you're like "This is ..." Your eyes close, and you're like "This is so good," and it's being in the moment with that and without feeling self conscious, without worrying about like "Oh, what are others might be thinking of me?" and really, the ... This is kind of the arc of the book is it goes from unapologetic eating but really getting people to unapologetic living, because exactly what I said before, where you start to ... This starts with food and eating, but then it bleeds into so many other areas of your life, and so I also just see unapologetic eating as getting back to our roots and who we were before society told us who we should be.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah, and that was ... I mean, honestly, that's one of the reasons why interoception comes up in my coaching work is for people to ... I used to joke, years to myself, if you don't listen to your intuition, it may go some place else where it will get love and attention. We just constantly silence our intuition. We're not in the habit of connecting with it. I think some people would ... I definitely have this experience of like "Well, but I can't just eat whatever I want. I'll get fat," and then, well, okay. So then there's this whole larger conversation about what fat is and who gets to say what a good body is, and that's a mine field.
Alissa Rumsey:
Yeah. Well, I think, to just your first point of "Well, I can't eat whatever I want, because then I'll go off the rails," or whatever, that's so, so common, but I always say we feel that way because, well, A, we've been taught by so many different ways in our society that we can't trust what we eat. In the United States, the diet culture, the diet industry, is a 70-billion-dollar-plus industry. So we're taught and told in so many different ways from so many different sources that like "Oh, you can't trust your body. You need to follow X, Y, Z things, or else you're not going to be healthy," and in reality, that couldn't be farther from the truth, and I always tell people to look at babies and small children.
Alissa Rumsey:
Before any of that, which unfortunately does start to get in kids' brains very young, but before any of that kind of cultural messaging gets in, if they're given a variety of foods and they're fed consistently throughout the day, they eat a variety of food, and they naturally balance out on a week-to-week basis the calories they need, the nutrients they need, again, assuming there's enough access to food and enough variety provided without any adult intervention. So I see this with my niece and nephew. I was out there a couple months ago visiting them, and at the time, they were three and a half years old, and so I'm making them dinner one night, and so I make Kraft mac and cheese. I had the Trader Joe's steamed lentils. I roasted some vegetables, and I think I put some hummus on the plate or something like that. So two three and a half year olds, right?
Daniel Stillman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Alissa Rumsey:
The first night, neither one of them touched the Kraft mac and cheese, neither one of them. My nephew ate all the lentils, and then he asked for yogurt. The only yogurt we had in the fridge was the plain Greek yogurt, and I was like "Ooh, I don't think he's going to like this," and I was like "This one? You sure?" and he was like "Yes. That one," and he ate ... I don't know. He just kept asking for more. He probably had a cup of lentils and a cup of yogurt and didn't eat any of the mac and cheese, and my niece ate all her carrots and just kept asking for more carrots, and when they were done, they're just like "I'm done," and I didn't say "Ooh, you sure you don't want this?" and it's really hard to do this. Even me [inaudible 00:17:51]. I'm just like "are you sure you're done?" and they were like "Yep. I'm done," and then the next day, we had leftovers, and that day, they both ate some of the macaroni and cheese, but yeah.
Alissa Rumsey:
So they're not looking at that plate thinking "Oh, mac and cheese. This is bad for me. I shouldn't be having this. I don't know when I'm going to have this next. So I got to eat it all now." They're just like "Here's the plate of food. What sounds good to me?" They're eating based on their body cues, and then we just get so disconnected from that for a variety of reasons as we get older, and so really that's my hope with the book is helping people get back to that place where they're not questioning their wants and needs. They're like "Okay. Tonight, I ..." I mean, I literally just had mac and cheese for lunch right before we started recording this, and it's like it's fine, right? I had like 20 minutes to eat. I'm like "What do I have in my fridge?" I have leftover mac and cheese that my partner made, so I was like "Great. This is what I'm eating for lunch. It's going to fuel me. It's going to taste good. It's going to get me through the next few hours of my work day."
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. It'll get you to satiety.
Alissa Rumsey:
Yes.
Daniel Stillman:
What's interesting about this, and I want to just connect this for people who may have listened to ... A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, who's a professor of design thinking, and her work is a lot about decolonizing this idea of innovation, and she actually did the experiment where she was doing a design-thinking innovation project with a bunch of kids, and she was like "Hey. So we just talked to some people about these problems they're having, like what do you want to do now?" They were like "Well, I think we should try to make sense of all of it," and she was like "Yeah. Totally. How could we do that?" and they were like "Well, we could just put it up on the wall, and let's see what's interesting," and like "Yeah. Let's do that, and now what should we do?" Like "Well, it seems like we've got a couple. Maybe we should try some stuff." Like "Oh, yeah. You should totally do that," and meanwhile these kids just invented design thinking by themselves.
Daniel Stillman:
This idea that we have to do it the right way and that there is a right way and that someone else can tell us the right way and that we should be doing it that right way so it's repeatable and perfect every time ... It's a tough balance, because nutrition is a thing. You studied this. You are actually certified. You can tell me, like "Yes. There's ..." But everybody's different in the same way that I would say every organization is different and every team is different. You have to actually pay attention to what's happening, so the idea of how do you get your ...
Daniel Stillman:
I want to flip back around and talk about the change piece, because when clients are coming to you for behavioral change coaching when they are not happy with he way things are, what's the process to get them to start to trust their voice and say "Yeah. I can de-regulate or de-control what I eat and listen and then change from there"? There's the example in the book, which I love, of like "Yes. Let's re-regulate mac and cheese." Mac and cheese seems to come up a lot. It's like "Yeah. I'm going to eat mac and cheese." It sounded almost like when parents are like "Here. Smoke this whole pack of cigarettes." It's like "Yeah. Have mac and cheese as much as you want," and then you're going to be like "You know what? It's lost its power over me, and I'm going to have it when I want to have it or when I need to have it, because it soothes me or because it satisfies me." How do you get them to do those experiments?
Alissa Rumsey:
Well, that's the exact word, experimenting. In our culture, perfectionism is a very common thing, and there's this like "Well, I have to be perfect," or "I have to do it the right way," and it's also very ... There's so much binary thinking, like either I'm doing this right or I'm doing this wrong. That's with everything, but certainly when we think about food and eating, it's like I'm either on the wagon or I'm off the wagon, or I'm either dieting and Monday through Friday everything is super clean and et cetera, et cetera, but then the weekend is just off the rails, and what people don't realize is like-
Daniel Stillman:
Right. So that I can get back to eating celery and kale smoothies-
Alissa Rumsey:
Right. Come Monday morning.
Daniel Stillman:
... Monday through Friday.
Alissa Rumsey:
Yeah, and what people don't realize is that, when it comes to food and eating, the reason we're off the rails on the weekend is because we're trying to over control so much during the week. So really, I see my work as helping people find that gray area, find that area in between, not shooting for perfection, and experimenting and approaching food and approaching our bodies with curiosity rather than judgment. So we do a lot of work around, I mean, certainly, unpacking where their beliefs around food, about bodies, about weight, about health ... where those beliefs came from, how they learned those things.
Alissa Rumsey:
A lot of that goes back to family of origin and caregivers, but certainly also just society and movies and TV and all these different things, so really unpacking that and unpacking the impact that that's had on them, which usually it's been pretty harmful, like disconnected them from their bodies and themselves and lots of shame, and really ... Yeah. Just, I mean, I ask a ton of questions, and because I might be sitting here and be like "Okay. Well, I know exactly what's going on." It is so much more powerful if I'm able to ask them questions and getting them to connect the dots, and they're like "Oh, I wonder if it's because of this," or like "Oh, yeah. What about this?" So much more powerful than if I'm just telling them.
Alissa Rumsey:
So really, I see my work with my clients like I'm not the expert, like I'm there as an equal partner, and like they're the expert of their body and I'm just there to try to help them get back in touch, that interoception part, the intuition part, and also be a place of support, because experimenting and allowing yourself to eat certain foods when you've been telling yourself for so long "Oh, I can't, because I'll just have too much," or "I can't keep that in the house," ... That can be a really scary thing, especially if and when people are concerned with gaining weight or their body changing. So it's also the support of like "Okay. You can do hard things. This is going to be an experiment. Let's see how it goes, and let's see what you learn," because every eating experience is a learning experience, and so really being there to sort of point out patterns that I'm seeing and really trying to help them connect those dots.
Daniel Stillman:
It's so interesting, the idea of having curiosity and maybe even patience with the process. I know when we started this conversation, we were talking about the range. We were talking about this range of large to small, and in my work in trying to understand what we can shift around a conversation, pace is one of them as well, and I imagine there are some people who are like "I want to have a change and I want to have it fast," and you could maybe download ... Can't I just download Alissa's brain, and she could just tell me all the things, and I could do them? But this kind of change is a slower change, having curiosity about yourself and then doing these experiments. How do you help your clients define what a good experiment looks like and how to judge whether or not that experiment was a success for them personally?
Alissa Rumsey:
Well, I would say that even trying to get out of the binary of like "Was it successful or not?" It's just like every time you eat, every time you try something, you're going to learn something about yourself, and so just continuing to try to find that gray area and getting out of that binary thinking. So a lot of times, what I'll tell them is like "Okay." Again, mindfulness is such a huge part of this, because again, if we're not aware of what the thoughts and beliefs behind those thoughts and feelings about those thoughts are, that's in this case with eating or with how they feel about their body, then we can't do anything with it.
Alissa Rumsey:
So we need to really be aware first. So definitely mindfulness is a practice that we work on together, but yeah. Just noticing like "Okay. When that judgmental thought starts to come up, what is it saying? Where did you learn that? What contributed to the development of that thought or that voice?" Again, unpacking how might it have helped you in the past but also how might it have harmed you or held you back, and then just getting curious about ... Let's just say, for food, it's that judgment of like "Oh, I can't believe I just ate all those cookies. Why did I do that? I wasn't even hungry." Let's just say that's the first judgmental thought. I think you're laughing, because it sounds very familiar, right?
Daniel Stillman:
Oh, totally.
Alissa Rumsey:
We've all had these thoughts. So it's like, okay, let's set aside the judgment for a minute. Let's get curious. What might be going on right now? Maybe it was that I didn't have breakfast this morning. So I was really rushed, and my lunch was really fast, and I had a really stressful day, and I just haven't eaten enough today. Or maybe it was my lunch was like eight hours ago. So by the time I had dinner, I was starving, which then makes it really difficult to stop at this comfortable place of fullness, because your body is sort of like "Well, you haven't fed us all day. We don't know if we can trust you to feed us the next time you're hungry. So let's get it in now." Or maybe it's just I had a really crappy day. I was feeling really emotional. Chocolate chip cookies are my favorite thing. This is like me talking. Chocolate chip cookies are my favorite thing.
Daniel Stillman:
Amen.
Alissa Rumsey:
I had a bunch. I really enjoyed them, and I'm feeling better now. Yes. I'm feeling a little bit uncomfortably full, but you know what? It's fine, because there's some emotional stuff going on, and I really needed that comfort in the moment.
Daniel Stillman:
So there's two things I want to prod out. One, thank you for pushing back on my binary thinking around an experiment either being successful or not and just being like "What did I learn?" So in the sense of just being curious, I can say "What was that like? What was it like to just let myself do blank and not worry about it? What did I learn? How did that feel?" That's very different than saying that was bad or good. I know you talked about this in your book as well, where there's just one number that says whether or not I was a successful person or not, right?
Alissa Rumsey:
Yes.
Daniel Stillman:
My weight, and this is so interesting because I'm relating this back to people who might be listening who are thinking about agile transformations of organizations and just have this one OKR, this one thing that we're supposed to measure our whole company's success by, and that's fair. Oh, man. There's so many directions I want to take this, because how do you adapt this? I didn't even think I was going to go here now, but how do you adapt these principles to your business? Because obviously you live by your wits. You live by caring for your clients. A business does have one metric, one ultimate metric of validity, right?
Alissa Rumsey:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Daniel Stillman:
Did people come? Did they show up? Did they support our work with their time and their money? So how do you avoid apologetic businessing?
Alissa Rumsey:
Yeah. You know, I mean, it's a constant kind of thing of just recognizing when that's showing up and when ... Because I think, again, especially in US culture, but in many Western cultures, there's ... I think a lot of the work I've been doing just in the last few years around the decolonization and unlearning and recognizing where white supremacy is showing up in our lives, and there's this really amazing ... I think the website is Showing Up For Racial Justice, and they have characteristics of white supremacy culture, and perfectionism is one of them, sense of urgency, this binary thinking, quantity over quality, only the one right way.
Alissa Rumsey:
So I try to think about decolonizing just my own mind, and therefor with business, and then I think it's also thinking about the capitalistic capitalism society that we live in, where better is always more, like more money, more clients, et cetera, and it's like "Wait. Is that what my business needs to be?" and what I've realized is no, that's not. I did not go to school to become a dietician to make money. No one goes to school to be a dietician to make money. That's not how you make money. So that's never been my goal, but I totally got sucked up when I started my own business six-plus years ago, got sucked into this, like "Okay. The six-figure mark and then the seven-figure mark," and shooting for these things, and it's like "Wait. Why? Why?" and so whenever I catch myself with that, like [inaudible 00:31:47], looking at the book numbers, it's like "Okay. Well, why?" Yes. I am really proud of this book, and I think it can be really life changing, and I want to get it into people's hands. I also didn't write a book to make money, but at the same time, how does that help me, to get caught up in the numbers?
Alissa Rumsey:
So I think it really, again, comes back to this gray area, and I know so many organizations are set up where it is the black and white and the pass fail, but I think it's thinking about how can we maybe measure in a different way, or how can we ... If we didn't hit the numbers, it's not like the end of the world. It doesn't mean you're bad, but where can we start to just look at these different things? So I think it's getting out of this, because what tends to happen with binary thinking is the good or bad, and then it turns into a judgment on you as a person, like "Okay. Either you were good and you're a good person, or you're bad and you're a bad person, you're failing," and again, this shame spiral, which, as we said before, doesn't help anybody.
Daniel Stillman:
Not so helpful.
Alissa Rumsey:
So again, finding this gray area, and just I know for myself it's just been really coming back to my values. I've been doing a lot of values work and just like "Okay. Why did I start my business to begin with?" Again, I mean, yes. It was to make more money than I was making on a clinical dietician's salary, but it wasn't to make a million dollars. That's not why I started my business. I started my business so that I could help people in the way that I wanted to help people, so that I could have more flexibility in my schedule, all these other different reasons. So just trying to kind of keep it value centered really helps me from when I do start to get caught up in the numbers, which I do sometimes, just coming back to like "Okay. Am I doing the work that I want to do? Am I having the impact that I want to have?" without trying to necessarily measure that impact.
Alissa Rumsey:
I do understand measurable goals and stuff like that and how it can be helpful, but for me ... I consider myself a recovering type A person. So for me, I actually find that it's not helpful for me to have measurable goals, because I get way too caught up in the numbers, and I get so stressed out and so anxious. It's not worth the mental health. So yeah. I have some loose goals, but I just personally have found that I do better if I don't have those kinds of things, or else it just gets just way too much.
Daniel Stillman:
That is so interesting, and I love that. I think sometimes people talk about this idea of strong opinions loosely held, and not holding so tight on this is exactly how everything is supposed to go is a more playful in-and-out approach to your own process, which I personally value.
Alissa Rumsey:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think that's a great way to say it too, and again, it's just like for me, at the end of the day, it's like "Okay. Yes. I want to have enough money so I can live the kind of life I want to live," but that is not as much money as our society tells me I should have or should need. So it's again just questioning why, like "Wait. Why do I think this is right or wrong? Why do I think this is the way?" Should is always a warning sign for me. If there's a should anywhere, I'm like "Wait a second." That's not me. The should isn't me.
Daniel Stillman:
So I want to interrogate this, because this is really ... I want to go back to a point ... I think people who are listening to this for the first time, not knowing as much about this topic as you do, certainly, and me a little ... They might be like "How do you decolonize dieting? This is total bullshit. What does this mean?" and while Janet was reading the book, I'm like "You don't know about Kellogg and masturbation?" and she was like "No." I was like "The history of the ideas of what we're supposed to eat and how we're supposed to look are cultural."
Daniel Stillman:
So I'm wondering maybe from your perspective, because I feel like now we're ... We've talked about a couple of ranges in conversation. One is the sizes of the intimacy of the dialogue, the public to the personal to the interior and the fast versus the slow. We didn't touch on this, but you spoke to transferring power from yourself to your clients, giving them ... You could tell them the answer, maybe. Would it help? Probably not, and so it's about giving them the dialogue to pull it out. There's this other range, which is like just stepping way back and taking an historical view of this thing, like "Well, why do we think these are the shoulds?" and it's weird, the history. You actually have a graph. I'll just say I don't think it went back far enough, all the weirdness of food and how we're supposed to look, and so maybe just unpack that a little bit for people. We're sitting in this moment now. Everything we know and think and believe is based on some history, and the history's not all great.
Alissa Rumsey:
Yes. Yeah. I have a line in the book, I think, where I say something to the effect of like "Everything that you think you know about food, about weight, about health, about body fat is something you were taught at some point and something that was created for a reason." So yeah. I love this. I love the zooming out because I think this is so helpful for people, because it's like "Well, but this is healthier," like you said before, like "Isn't nutrition important?" It's like "Okay. Let's ..." Yeah. If we zoom out a little bit, in our society ... I use the term, in the book, diet culture, which really means that thinness is put on a pedestal and thinness is seen as the epitome of health and happiness and like this is the thing we should all be striving for, and if you're not thin or you're not striving to be thin, then something is wrong with you.
Alissa Rumsey:
So there's a lot of anti-fat beliefs. There's a lot of fat phobia, but this fat phobia and these anti-fat beliefs ... They don't exist in a silo. They didn't just come from nowhere, and so yeah. I wasn't sure if I was going to do this, but I ended up starting the book with this information because I really thought that it's so important to understand this foundation about why we think the way we do about bodies and the roots of that, and so the cultural beliefs about body size and then food as well were specifically created to keep certain people down, mainly black people, people of color, women, fat people, and other people, mainly white people, men, cis gender, heterosexual people, on top. So it was really to keep certain people oppressed and not in their power, and
Alissa Rumsey:
so I reference Sabrina Strings' book Fearing the Black Body, and she really lays it out so well there, the colonist roots of diet culture and how, as a lot of us have been, especially white folks in the last year, been learning a lot about and just really putting these pieces together about how our society and our culture in our country here in the US was built upon the control of black people, indigenous people, people of color, and Sabrina Strings really talks about in this book how, to establish social hierarchies where white people were at the top and where they could justify ... This was several hundred years ago, when the transatlantic slave trade was really going, where they could justify keeping black people enslaved. They created this anti-fat bias, this fat phobia. This racial scientific rhetoric linked fatness to greedy Africans, and there was also the protestant wave going through the US too, and so religious discourse, kind of saying overeating is ungodly-
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. It's greed. It's-
Alissa Rumsey:
... and so fatness became stigmatized because it became a way that white people could separate themselves from black people. So it had nothing to do with health. This was hundreds of years before any research started around health around nutrition, and then at that point, who was doing the research in the early 1900s? White men, and already these biases against fat people and against people of color and their cultural foods were already there. So yeah. This was a huge shifting point for me was just understanding where this diet culture that we know it today came from, and it really is rooted in racism and colonialism as well as sexism.
Alissa Rumsey:
So I reference as well Naomi Wolf's book The Beauty Myth, which was actually first written in the '90s, but it's wild. It's still so relevant if you go back and read it today, and she talks about how when we look back at history, every time women gained power and advancement in society, new and more beauty and body ideals came out, and she has this amazing quote in her book where she says "The cultural fixation on thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience," and when you think about ... I mean, I just think about all my clients, and I have a past of dieting and body image issues myself.
Alissa Rumsey:
Just think of how much time that takes to try to diet and be thin and meal plan and all of these things. So it's taking so much time, time that you can't use elsewhere, and also, like I said when we started, you're teaching people that they can't trust themselves, and when you look back at societal control, it's easier to control groups of people when they distrust themselves. So again, why? Why do I believe this? Why do I think thin is better? Why do I think fat isn't as good? We just think it's like "Oh, because it is. Because it's unhealthy," or whatever, but no. It actually goes back so much farther, and I do think having that bigger picture view is so helpful.
Daniel Stillman:
It is, and if we're going to connect this back to you and your business ... Excuse me ... this idea of like "Well, why should a business grow exponentially? What does success look like? What does that mean? What does enoughness look like in our own life?" and I think it's so powerful to be able to step back and say "Why do I believe what I believe not a personal basis, but what was taught to me? What's the water that I'm in?" which we don't even see most of the time.
Alissa Rumsey:
Yes. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. It's like we're all swimming in this, and we've been ... Those of us born in the US ... We were born in it, and especially those of us who have a lot of body privilege. So I have a lot of body privilege. I'm white. I'm thin. I'm cis gender, heterosexual, grew up solid middle class, fairly wealth privileged. I didn't see it. I especially didn't see it because it didn't affect me on a day-to-day basis. I wasn't treated differently because of the body I'm in. So I didn't see it, but you talk to fat people ...
Alissa Rumsey:
This great book, just written, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat, and she just talks about, every single day, the amount of hate she gets just because of her body. She's not doing anything to these people, just walking down the street, and it's just like I didn't see that for so long because I don't experience that. Same thing when black people are like "Hey. We've been dealing with racism for hundreds of years," and white people are like "Wait. What? What? That's still not around anymore," and they're all like "Yes. It is." That's been the whole last year, right?
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Alissa Rumsey:
Is like white people being like "Oh, wait," waking up to this fact, because it's not affecting us. So yeah. It really is taking a look around at this water we've been swimming in and how has it affected how we view ourselves, but also how has it affected how we view other people.
Daniel Stillman:
It's so important, as you said, to step back and to take that wide view. Speaking of taking the wide view, it's almost time for us to say goodbye. This time goes so fast. These are some of my favorite things to talk about, systems change and awareness and wondering why things are the way they are. What haven't we talked about that's important to talk about? What are some closing parting thoughts about, oh, boy, everything that we talked about?
Alissa Rumsey:
I mean, I guess I would say, if I had to sum this up, I would just say ... Because certainly, we all eat, the food piece, but even if the food piece doesn't resonate, that's what I've come to love about the work that I do is that it's so much more than just food. So anything we've talked about today can be extrapolated to all sorts of other areas of life, and I think, really, to me, it comes down to that unlearning and unpacking, like "Okay. What are the things that have been put on me by society that are not mine? This isn't me, and then who is it that I am underneath?"
Alissa Rumsey:
This was a big thing for me the last few years was kind of figuring that out, and that was actually ... I have a couple chapters about that towards the end of the book, and that was what was most fun for me to write. It's like "Okay. If I'm not this, who am I?" So really just doing that work of unlearning and unpacking, asking why, like "Why do I believe this? Why do I think this?" and really just, to me, it's just all about getting back to who you are underneath and being able to be unapologetically yourself no matter what that looks like and especially if that's not something that aligns with what our society tells us we should be or should look like or should do.
Daniel Stillman:
Wow. That's such a powerful idea and such a great place to close out our time. Where can should people are wandering around the internet and want to learn more about these things ... How can we direct them? Where should they go to learn more about all things Alissa Rumsey?
Alissa Rumsey:
So they can go to my website, which is alissarumsey.com. I also hang out a lot over on Instagram. @alissarumseyrd is my handle, and then my book Unapologetic Eating. Everything we spoke about today is in that book. So that's another great place to start as well, and that's available wherever books are sold, so Amazon. You can get it IndieBound, your local book stores, Barnes & Noble, book shop, et cetera.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. Thank you so much for this time. I'm really glad we were able to unpack so many important aspects of listening, curiosity, learning, non-binary thinking. There's so much goodness. I'm really grateful that you were able to share just a little bit of your work with us today.
Alissa Rumsey:
Yeah. Of course. Thank you so much for having me on. This was really fun.
Daniel Stillman:
And scene. Oh, man. There we go.
Alissa Rumsey:
Yay.
Daniel Stillman:
That was good. This is such great stuff. Thank you so much. This is super awesome.
Alissa Rumsey:
You're welcome. You're welcome. Yeah. I feel like we got to a lot of different places. That was really cool.