EP. 72 — Toxic Diet Culture with Dr. Joshua Wolrich

Jameela: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of I Weigh with Jameela Jamil, so I’m really excited about today’s episode. This is someone I’ve wanted to get on the podcast for a really long time. I met him because we were kind of fighting. We were fighting online and in the DMs and then we became friends and then we became allies. And now I just fucking love him. And he is a real blessing in the world, I believe. His name is Dr. Joshua Wolrich. He is an NHS doctor in the United Kingdom. He has a passion for helping people improve their relationship with food. He is one of very few men in the industry who is actually addressing weight stigma and diet culture. And he’s often on Instagram combating nutrition misinformation and fad diets, all the while reminding us that there’s more to health than just our weight. Now, this is someone who used to struggle with eating disorders. This is someone who then even had an Instagram account that was very fat phobic and dedicated to kind of sharing I’m not going to say misinformation, but not ideal information about food and meals and the virtue around food. And he’s now completely shifted gears to becoming such an incredible ally in the fight against fat phobia, the fight against diet culture. And because he’s actually someone who is studying this, I mean, he’s doing a nutrition master’s at the moment and he is dedicating his entire life to this. And he’s an actual doctor who went to actual medical school. We couldn’t have someone better on our side, especially considering that doctors can sometimes be some of the biggest enemies and and perpetrators of fat phobia. And they often you know, this is something we talk a lot about in this episode. They often can be responsible for harming the health of other people because they are so fat phobic and ignorant about weight loss and and body fat and BMI. And so to have a doctor finally on our side just feels so incredible. And this is a long episode because it’s packed with information like there was nothing I could cut. There was nothing I wanted to cut, every single thing he said. Everything we talked about was so vital to hear. I want to offer a trigger warning because there is a lot of mention of eating disorders. There is a lot of discussion about diet. There is a lot of discussion about weight loss techniques, I guess, but all because we are debunking them and talking about the dangers of them. It’s a hugely informative episode and and one that I, I wish I’d had so much when I was 12 years old. And I just felt so excited the whole time he was talking because it was just fact after fact after fact that was confirming all of my fears about what I have done to my body, what we are doing to our bodies, what billionaires are profiting off of us doing to our bodies. It’s just it’s just so good. And and I do just want to warn you that at one point early on in the episode, we talk a lot about the causes of people being fatter, of people gaining weight and the socioeconomic reasons behind that and all the different reasons, the mental health reasons or the the the genes, the genetics that can lead to that. And I don’t want you to start listening to that, thinking that we are in any way being like, oh, it’s not their fault that they’re fat, as if fat is a bad thing to be or fat is an unhealthy thing to be pushed through. Because we get we get to the point of explaining that that is just something that is important to to know about factually so we can confront how reckless the medical industry is, how reckless the government is, how reckless the diet industry is for deliberately ignoring all of these important socioeconomic or mental health or health factors that lead to, ah, to every generation having more and more people be, on average, much bigger than the generation before them. So it’s a lot about the dangers of detox and diet influences and all of the crazes that are currently taking hold over on Instagram and TikTok right now. And it’s just a giant debunking of the predatory misinformation or vile, disgusting diet industry that both of us are going to dedicate the rest of our lives to trying to destroy. And so this is Dr. Joshua Wolrich. He has a book out called Food Isn’t Medicine. And this episode is a great example of the kind of thing you would find in that book. But the book’s excellent. Once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down. And I’m just thrilled he’s here. So I love you. And if you have been triggered by the onslaught of fat phobia that has occurred throughout in almost in particular during this pandemic and you are having troubling feelings about your body, you are feeling guilty about the way that you look. You feel as though you must be lazy because maybe you’ve gained weight or you are considering starting any one of these vile fad diets that do not work and only harm you then maybe this episode is coming along just at the right time because I. I lost 20 years of my life to diet, culture and eating disorders, and I’m going to spend every moment I can trying to stop anyone else from making such a tragic mistake. If I could take it all back, I would in a heartbeat. And because I can’t, I’m going to try and stop you from doing the same thing. So from Joshua Wolrich and myself with love, this is a great episode about everything diet. Dr. Joshua Wolrich, welcome to Iowa. How are you? [00:05:53][353.6]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:05:54] Thank you for having me. I’m right. I’m not bad. Thank you. I am I’m very excited to talk to you. And it’s an honor. [00:06:00][5.9]

Jameela: [00:06:00] Oh, thank you. Likewise. I’m a big fan of your work. I was we were talking about this on the phone yesterday. But it’s so funny that the first time I came across you is because it’s because at first people were sending me links to your Instagram because they were angry, because they found your Instagram very fat phobic. You had an Instagram account, I think at the time called Unfattening. And and there was a lot of fat phobic content coming out of it. Very you know, it was I think it came from a place of wanting to educate people and help people. And you’ve made a very kind of sharp turn in a different direction over the last couple of years right in front of my very eyes. And now I see you as one of my strongest allies and people I go to for advice and people that I look up to for first for sound guidance when it comes to tackling fat phobia and tackling the diet industry. And I feel like we’re very much so side by side in this fight. And it has been a thrill to watch you make that transformation so fast and also be so humble in owning where that previous fat phobia came from. And to be so open in your story, you have a book called Food Isn’t Medicine, and you reference a lot of that story in that book. And I want to get into that in a bit. But you are a great example. I’m a big lover and big fan of people who are willing to change in front of everyone else and show everyone their workings out is definitely something that I try to stand for. And I really admire the fact that you have done that and and gone on to become such an important voice on the Internet. So thanks. [00:07:46][105.3]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:07:47] I’m not good at compliments, so I don’t know how to respond to that. Thank you. I mean, I’d love to say that it was all deliberate, but a lot of it at the beginning was kind of accidental as I was finding my way into new realms of things that I wasn’t quite sure how to navigate. More recently, it’s been quite deliberate to kind of address certain things that I used to believe and and kind of just apologize publicly for some of them, because I do think that it that it matters. I think there was there are a lot of people that are quite scared of admitting that they’ve been wrong about stuff. And and I think a lot of that is is really important that we kind of encourage people to have a space to be able to do that, because I think if we don’t, we’re just going to have a whole generation still of people who are unwilling to be wrong. And when they realize that they’ve got something wrong, they’ll never talk about it and it doesn’t encourage anybody else or so. Yeah, I’m I’m a big advocate of that now. But it definitely was a was an accidental fall into change initially. [00:08:50][63.2]

Jameela: [00:08:52] OK, so before we talk about how you made that shift from un-fattening to now being such a strong ally to that sort of the the anti diet culture community, can we can we go back a bit through your story and and can you talk to me about your journey with your body or one of very few male voices out there talking about body image? And so I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your your childhood and where your original fat phobia and issues with food and interesting food came from. [00:09:26][34.5]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:09:28] Yeah, it’s something that I am still exploring and still coming to realizations about. But a lot of it I have I have realized over the last couple of years as I’ve been trying to work out where some of this stuff came from and and why I believe certain things. And I for those of those people who don’t know me, I sound relatively middle class. And you would be correct for thinking that I’m relatively middle class and grew up in a nice area. [00:09:55][27.1]

Jameela: [00:09:56] You sound posher than middle class. [00:09:57][0.7]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:09:58] I would I call myself middle class. I think middle class with a good accent. That’s what I’m claiming. But I grew up with with quite large elements of food insecurity, which I’d never really realized until more recently. And a lot of that, if not all of that, was because of the fact that my dad was an alcoholic. And so when I was kind of early teenager going into kind of mid teens like 13, 14, there were periods of time where I specifically remember him getting drunk to the extent where he didn’t remember whether or not he’d fed me and my and my two siblings. And so we’d be sent to bed being told that we’d eaten. And you couldn’t really argue in that kind of fashion that just wasn’t going to go down well is the polite way of putting it. And so I’d just go to bed hungry. And as a 13 year old boy, that wasn’t something that I was willing to accept. I was like, that’s not okay. Like, I want food. [00:10:57][58.5]

Jameela: [00:10:58] Yeah [00:10:58][0.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:11:00] I love food, it’s not like, we didn’t really have a huge amount of money to be buying food. So I developed a knack of stealing full tubes of Pringles from the corner shop near my house. I’m not quite sure how I never got caught doing that. I don’t I don’t recommend it or and also not proud of it. But it was just something that at the time I didn’t really think like twice about it, I didn’t really think about the fact it was bad. It just seemed to make sense. I was like, well, I don’t have food, I need food. And so I would stash these tubes of Pringles in my bedroom and I’d be sent to bed without food and I just eat a tube of Pringles. Then my mom would get home and I’d complain that I hadn’t eaten and she’d give me dinner as well. And so I was this 13, 14 year old boy who was having double dinners and unsurprisingly put on weight and who I ended up. That ended up being what I consider to be kind of a defining factor of my of my school life from then onwards, being bullied for it, being picked on. It was always a consistent theme throughout, like sometimes people come across bullies and you can’t really avoid that necessarily. But whether or not it was my hair was too short, my hair was too long, I didn’t have any friends or had the wrong friends. I knew that being called fat was always going to be a consistent every single day. And it just became something that I kind of took on to myself as well. That’s what I am. And I hated it. And I didn’t. I what I wanted it to change. And I would complain and cry to my mom that, you know, I wanted to lose weight and asking her tips and she wasn’t very good at giving me them. But, you know, I’m 14, I don’t blame her, but I that kind of stayed and so even though I stopped eating double dinners like that was that was kind of the body size that I then lived at and I went through the rest of my schooling and then into medical school and university being being the fat kid, being the fat guy. I got to the end of medical school and I believed when I graduated that I couldn’t be a good doctor because I was fat. And it was a really weird time for me because up until then I’d always just thought I wasn’t attractive because I was fat or I wasn’t worthy of having friends because I was fair or, you know, any multitude of different things where I was lazy because I was fat. I just couldn’t be bothered. I wasn’t trying hard enough all this kind of stuff. I remember lazy being a specific word that I always thought of myself. And I think a lot of it stemmed from kind of being told that because of my size, despite getting good grades and going to medical school and passing all that, I clearly couldn’t have been too lazy. But I got I got I graduated medical school. I honestly thought that I couldn’t be a good doctor. And I thought it was going to be a limiting factor in my my desire to be to be a good doctor, my desire to do well for my patients [00:13:55][174.8]

Jameela: [00:13:56] because of the equation the that thin equals healthy fat equals unhealthy. So you wanted to be sort of a walking example of health so that you feel like people would be able to put their faith in you, that you know explicitly what healthy is. [00:14:09][13.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:14:10] I mean, there’s so much wrong with that full stop. Not only not only that, the fat unhealthy bit, but also the whole kind of personal responsibility of I must be I owe it to other people to be healthy myself, even if that was the defining factor. There’s lots there that I am sure we might touch on. But it was it was I just felt like a hypocrite. And the thing that went through my head at the time was I felt like I was a I was someone running a stop smoking service, but I was that person out the back smoking before I was running the sessions. And that’s such a bad analogy. But actually, it’s a really common one. And it’s one that I mean, over the last few years, anyone that’s come across the cancer research, UK obesity campaigns that they’ve done over the last few years have seen that this whole associating body size with cigarettes is actually something that is an ongoing theme as well, even though it’s horrifically stigmatizing and completely inaccurate. But it was it was how I felt and that was how the un-fattening account on Instagram got started, because I thought I thought, well, what do you do when you want to lose weight? You start an Instagram account. Right. That’s how this works. [00:15:18][67.8]

Jameela: [00:15:19] Yeah for accountability. Yeah. [00:15:22][2.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:15:23] But through shame, I will use shame as a method of accountability [00:15:24][1.6]

Jameela: [00:15:25] Well shame’s amazing. Shame works all the time. It’s done a great job. Yeah. [00:15:29][3.5]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:15:31] Temporarily. And then it backfires because you’re doing it through guilt and it’s and nothing’s. Yeah it was. I wouldn’t recommend it. Please don’t, please don’t follow it. But that was, that’s kind of like a a whistle stop background as to how I ended up becoming someone who started a weight loss account and then weirdly loads people wanted to follow me because I post pictures of I posted pictures of good looking food at the time. I was very confused as to why that was happening, which is why I kind of label myself an unintended influencer, because it was never my plan. It was purely for my friends to tell me off when I ate food that I deemed unhealthy or bad, you know? Yeah. [00:16:09][37.7]

Jameela: [00:16:11] Bloody hell. Can I ask you something? So there’s so much rampant and terrifying fat phobia in the medical industry where it’s happened to me, it’s happened to loads of my friends where because of our size, doctors ignore our symptoms and attribute instantly everything to our weight. So any kind of joint issues, any kind of period issues, or if if you are gaining a lot of weight, they they’re less likely in the experience of myself and a lot of my friends and now people I’ve met on the Internet less likely to investigate any kind of hormonal imbalance or different kind of imbalance or the presence of leptin or, you know, the history of your family. They’ll just immediately shame you about your lifestyle and and give you kind of quick fix advice as to how to remedy the evil that is your fat. So as someone who was a medical student, is that something that’s that’s infused into the young doctors? Like, where does this where does that fat phobia start? Are you taught that at medical school? Why is it so prevalent in the medical industry there? [00:17:18][67.5]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:17:19] So it’s not just you research agrees with you too research states very clearly that the people who live at a larger size, larger body size are subject to poorer medical care, full stop, which is horrific. There’s no excuse for any of this kind of stuff in terms of why I don’t know. It is so [00:17:40][20.8]

Jameela: [00:17:41] Are you taught at med school. [00:17:42][1.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:17:43] So it’s not it’s we’re definitely not. We’re definitely not taught the opposite and health care in general in in the kind of Western world, and I would probably argue more globally, too, but I’m not I’m not privy to how it’s taught all around the globe is taught in a very white centric manner, meaning that we consider weight to be a defining factor in someone’s health. And we consider it to be something that is that is important to address first and foremost. And that’s not necessarily said explicitly at medical school. It’s not necessarily something that is taught specifically, but it’s it’s implied and it’s implicit teaching in the sense that those are the conclusions that are very easy and natural to draw and to come to based on the way that weight is discussed and based on the way that weight and health are talked about. They’re talked about with almost no nuance. And what I mean by that is it’s very black and white. It’s very much fat leads to being unhealthy. Full stop. And there’s no discussions or definitely wasn’t when I was there, there were no discussions around that might be the case in certain circumstances. But here is lots of stuff that shows that it’s not. And actually this is a much bigger picture. And we need to be discussing this in a way that means that we’re being good and appropriate health care professionals. There’s none of that. It’s just. There’s a lot of implying of I know that medical students, for example, and doctors tend to leave believing that fat patients are going to be less compliant. And that’s research wise that has shown that [00:19:21][98.0]

Jameela: [00:19:22] What do you mean? Will you explain that to me? [00:19:22][0.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:19:23] As in as in. So we still have an issue. And you talk a lot about about the patriarchy in the way that our society is set up. And I’m 100 percent on board with the fact that that is a huge issue still. And that issue continues throughout the medical profession. It’s not been that long in the grand scheme of things since women were allowed to be doctors. They’re allowed to go to medical school, which is just if. And at the same time, we also used to not that long ago practiced medicine in a very patriarchal manner in the sense of I am right here is what’s wrong with you. This is what you have to do, go away and do it. No discussion, no collaboration, no patient doctor relationship. It was simply a like I’m going to act like you’re dad this is what you do. [00:20:08][44.7]

Jameela: [00:20:09] Is hierarchy. Yeah. [00:20:09][0.6]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:20:11] Yeah. And that’s not how we’re taught any more. Definitely not. But there is some of that that continues and some of that that stays under the surface. And I see a lot more of that around patients waiting around patient size than I do about a lot of other areas, a lot of other situations in medicine. And I think a lot of that is because we consider weight to be something that is a choice. We consider it. And by we not just doctors, but society in general. And again, doctors are subject to all of this kind of stuff. They might have gone to medical school, but before medical school, they were subject to all of society’s assumptions and and what they were told about weight and all this kind of stuff. So we’re still people like we’re still this is still stuff we grow up learning and kind of it gets ingrained and then we become responsible for someone’s health. And we feel like it’s then our responsibility to point this out to people that, well, you can fix this, you can change this, you can do this. And a lot of them come from very privileged backgrounds. We still have an issue with the fact that there is a pretty top loaded socioeconomic status when it comes to doctors and health care professionals in general. And a lot of that means that in general, they tend not to have struggled as much with their weight. There’s complexity there around poverty and body size, but especially in higher economic countries like the US, the UK. There is a clear kind of association between poverty and body size because of all sorts of reasons around food, apartheid and inequality and all sorts of things. [00:21:44][93.2]

Jameela: [00:21:45] Can we just quickly delve a little bit about that because I think that’s really important. [00:21:47][1.9]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:21:47] Yeah we’re going through loads of topics sorry. [00:21:47][0.0]

Jameela: [00:21:49] No, no, I think that’s really interesting. And I think that and I think I’ve never considered the fact that part of why they are so boldly ignorant around the reasons behind people’s differing body sizes and shapes is because they haven’t actually lived with the inability to definitely access food, especially particularly and I use this, you know, quote unquote, that nutritious food. You know, I grew up extremely poor. And there’s no doubt that for the same price that you can get an organic chicken breasts, you can get five packets of of potato frozen smiley faces. You know, they’re going to feed our family for much longer. And so our diet was a lot of just bread and frozen potato and frozen food and the sort of the Sainsbury’s economics section of just like God knows what is in that fake bolognese, you know, like. So that’s what we ate to survive. [00:22:49][59.8]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:22:51] It’s not that bad to want to clarify. [00:22:52][0.4]

Jameela: [00:22:53] No, no, no, no. I’m just looking back in the 90s, it was pretty dodge. It’s great now. No disrespect now, but like, you know, supermarkets in general, we were eating their cheapest food and we were waiting till it was, you know, almost completely off. It had the little, like, sell today or else it’s not going to be edible tomorrow. And so we didn’t really have a choice about what we ate. We just eat whatever would keep us alive. And it never occurred to me to let you literally just said it now, how how much that must impact their inability to be able to see beyond their own experience. Of course, we weren’t eating sea bass and green beans [00:23:29][36.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:23:31] from Marks and Spencers. [00:23:34][2.9]

Jameela: [00:23:34] Yeah from Marks and Spencers yeah. It’s just like I just have a good salad, you know, salads fucking it was like some of these things are fucking expensive and inaccessible and then school meals are fucking trash and it’s pre Jamie Oliver, come in and you know, like it was just like now thick pasta covered in cheese, covered in cream. So, you know, I was a scholarship child, so I was just eating whatever they had as much of it as I could because I knew that there may not be a lot of food for dinner when I got home. And so I would like to talk about more of the reasons why some people are bigger, you know. We’ve just discussed the you know, the socio economic reasons, but also can you just briefly explain the fat gene, I guess it’s called sometimes by people colloquially on the Internet that leptin or the DNA presence that can sometimes impact your body size. What are the things that impact people’s body shape? [00:24:27][52.6]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:24:29] How much time have we got? Because this is the thing, right? This I [00:24:32][3.5]

Jameela: [00:24:32] mean, I’m willing to go along with you to be an hour. You’ve got longer because I think this is so, so, so important to you to to to inform people who have been otherwise misinformed. [00:24:44][11.9]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:24:45] Yeah, well, it’s one of the things and it’s poverty is a massive one. And people don’t like a lot of the time when I bring that up because they kind of go, well, what, so you can’t be fat unless you’re poor and therefore you’re blaming fat on poor? No, no. We’re just clarifying that there is a big association here. And I think it’s a very important thing to bring up because it gives a very clear picture as to just how much can sometimes be out of our control, regardless as to the conversations around whether or not it’s actually whether it actually defines our health or not, which it doesn’t. But even regardless of those conversations, our body size is not something that is a personal responsibility. There was a big report called The Foresight Report in 2007 in the U.K., which was commissioned by the government. And there were some very, very clever people that were running it. And they looked into all of the different factors that influenced energy balance that influenced this whole it was essentially in response to the conversations of. Oh, yes, but weight loss is simply as easy as eat less and move more right. And that those are the campaigns like. And so this was commissioned to go well, is that actually true? Are we barking up the wrong tree? And they found over 100 different factors that they they show to directly influence the body size at which somebody lives. And the overwhelming majority of those are not things that we consciously choose by any stretch of the imagination. Genetics is a big one, but there are loads of them that impact that as well. Whether or not we feel hungry after, you know, how how tuned we are to our hunger and our fullness is a big one and a lot of that is is done by genetics. But again, a lot that is is dependent on the the type of food and the kinds of foods that we’re eating, which is one of the reasons why if we look at some of the cheaper foods that are available in a in a in a capitalist society, those highly processed foods which are not automatically bad for us, but they don’t really they don’t really kind of do well with. [00:26:59][133.6]

Jameela: [00:26:59] Satisfying. [00:26:59][0.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:27:00] Those cues. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s a reason why we it’s very easy to eat those kind of foods past the point of fullness to the point where you’re physically uncomfortable, like the last time you were physically uncomfortable with fullness. It wasn’t it wasn’t with, like, fresh vegetables. [00:27:15][14.9]

Jameela: [00:27:16] Salads.Yeah. [00:27:16][0.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:27:16] Like, it’s just not the case because those kind of foods tend to have lots of fiber. They have lots of water in them and they fill you up in a different way. And it’s easier to recognize when you’re full. You take something that’s been that’s been highly processed and it’s had a lot of the water taken out, the fiber taken out, still got nutrients in it. But it’s much easier like a tube of Pringles. It’s much easier to just keep eating those. There’s a reason why the whole slogan is once you pop, you just can’t stop like hashtag not sponsored. But it’s like that is there’s a reason why that slogan’s there because, yeah, you just you can just keep eating them. [00:27:47][31.4]

Jameela: [00:27:48] The exercise conversation, like a lot of gyms and especially up until recently, were an unaffordable for some people are working two or three or four jobs, like when do they have time to do the eat less, move more. They’re eating on the go at work. They don’t have a lunch hour. They are extremely stressed. I would like to ask you whether or not stress can have an impact on your size or your hormonal balance, because I’m certainly not an expert and they don’t have time to even go for a fucking walk. They don’t have any time for themselves. And then there’s also the mental health benefits of living, you know, near or below or around the poverty line where you’re not even able to have the time or the sometimes the presence of mind. I say this from personal experience to to eat intuitively or to plan your fucking meals or to prioritize nutrition, because there’s so much going on because your life is so deeply deeply stressful [00:28:46][58.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:28:47] on the scale of importance that that’s lower down there like that that’s not what you want to be focusing on using that that little bit of mental capacity you have left with the fact that, you know, you’re a single parent and you look after two kids and you’ve got three jobs and you’re trying to just make ends meet, which is an awful number of people like you don’t have the mental capacity to be planning, you know, freshly cooked meals all the time to do it or necessarily the actual kind of the actual capacity to. But and I mean, specifically in regards to things like owning a cooker, these are things we don’t consider whatsoever either. There are in the UK specifically I’m not quite sure what the what the the stats are in the US, but in the UK you’ve got I think it’s around fifteen million people who live in areas that would be classified as food apartheids. And there are these big areas in the US as well where the a combination of things like poverty, public transport, lack of big supermarkets, they all mean the access to fresh fruit and vegetables is almost impossible. And you wouldn’t think that in a country that considers itself to be a first world country we’re like oh look we’re so good. [00:29:58][70.6]

Jameela: [00:29:58] A leader. [00:29:59][0.6]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:30:00] Well yeah, nonsense. We have huge inequality when it comes to things like that. And that’s just one factor there. But then you combine that with the fact that there’s many millions of people that don’t have fridges, don’t have freezers, don’t have cookers, and you’re telling them to go and buy fresh fruit and veg because that’s really nutritious for them. And that’s great. And they need to they need to cook this meal. And here’s a meal plan for you. It’s just literally impossible. And that’s just, again, just one factor on top of all of these things that we just we just don’t even consider when we talk about this stuff. One of the best analogies I like to use is, is if you’re talking about poverty and you told someone who was living in poverty, well, you just need to save more and spend less. You would you most people wouldn’t say that they would realize that was ridiculous, they would realize that that’s a really short sighted, stupid thing to say, that just that just increases stigma and makes people feel guilty and shame. It’s exactly the same thing, exactly the same thing. We don’t consider that. And and I’m not quite sure why weight is one of the last things left where we don’t where we believe we have this full control over it. But but it is. And to bring it back to that thing we’re saying about doctors, most doctors don’t have experiences of that kind of stuff. And I was in a weird way, lucky and unlucky to have this unusual for the area in which I lived experience of food insecurity, which only now has given me some insight into understanding and only a limited insight, because, again, it’s it was still a privileged element of food insecurity. Like it wasn’t full on. Like, I just my family can’t afford food. It was different, but it still gave me that added like, oh, this this is actually more complicated. This is not as simple as I would have otherwise been brought up to believe where food is always there and I never have to think about it. Our relationship with food starts as a kid, like it’s it always does, whether or not we believe that our our upbringing was peachy or not, there’s there’s always little bits and little elements there that that impact how we look at food and how we treat. [00:32:22][141.5]

Jameela: [00:32:24] Yeah the coding around it. Treat being the operative word, even like [00:32:27][3.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:32:27] even that. Yeah. Yeah, What we’re taught as we weren’t allowed and what we were allowed and how much value was put on certain foods that was deemed to be unhealthy and where you were allowed to go to McDonald’s as a kid or not. You know, there’s there’s so much stuff there that that we just we just ignore. [00:32:44][16.4]

Jameela: [00:32:45] Can I tell you something, I ate McDonald’s every day because my brother worked there, I think, until I was 21. Every day from childhood till twenty one, I ate some McDonald’s every day. [00:32:57][12.1]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:32:58] What was your favorite? That’s the most important question here. [00:33:01][2.8]

Jameela: [00:33:01] I am Ronald McDonald. Obviously it is like Big Mac or milkshake or chicken nuggets. I use the word chicken very loosely and [00:33:08][7.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:33:09] it’s the days before wraps were actually a thing. [00:33:12][2.7]

Jameela: [00:33:12] I think that’s why I look so much younger than I am, because I’m full of preservatives like I think I’m 62 years I’m 62 years old. [00:33:20][7.6]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:33:22] Doing very well. [00:33:23][0.7]

Jameela: [00:33:24] I’m full of preservatives and when I die, I will not decompose. But yeah, I completely understand. And by the way, just to be very, very clear, we are talking about these important issues because they are things that need to be discussed and need to be explained. And you cannot just magic away someone’s body type, whatever that body type is. I also have friends who are extremely skinny and everyone’s like, oh, well, you just eat more. We are definitely not saying, oh, it’s not their fault they’re fat, it’s because they’re poor. Like, that’s not what this conversation is supposed to be. We’re just talking about the literal inequalities that never get addressed by the fucking government. They never get addressed by the government who have caused this tremendous inequality and this wealth gap. They never get addressed by magazines. They never get addressed by influencers. You know, currently I’m in a I’m in a Marvel show. And because of that, I have a trainer. I have like four trainers who make me who make me come into work, you know, five days a week and exercise and so my mental health has completely changed. And my decisions about what I’m putting into my body have changed in that I’m eating for as much energy as physically possible. I’m not just eating for what’s going to make me feel better after a stressful day. I’m like, how am I going to be able to train more tomorrow? But if I didn’t have these fucking people who I was being forced to go and see every day and it’s being paid for by someone else, my body or my strength or my balance wouldn’t be where it currently is right now. So I’m sure as fucking shit not going to now go onto the front cover of a bunch of magazines being like, hey, you guys should try and look like me. You know, [00:34:59][95.1]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:35:00] But that’s what everyone does. [00:35:01][0.5]

Jameela: [00:35:02] Here’s a six week plan. It’s like, no, this is the second Marvel finishes. I’m not fucking doing any of this, any of this. I’m not eating this much fucking protein. I’m not going to move my body this much. And then my body won’t look like that anymore. I’m done with eggs. And so my point just being that, like, I’m we are both so I think we’re both so frustrated with this conversation about privilege, inequality and and health and DNA and hormones and leptin and ghrelin and all these different things that that influence the way that your body looks, which is frustrated that that conversation is being had, isn’t being had. Sorry. But what we both definitively agree on is also that being fat for whatever reason does not mean you are unhealthy person does not mean you are an unethical person, does not mean you are a lazy person. It is not something that that we are trying to excuse in any way. It doesn’t need an excuse. [00:35:58][55.7]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:35:59] This is only just one example to kind of try and prompt people to think about the complexity. It’s trying to add some of that nuance that was so dreadfully missing for me at medical school. None of this stuff was discussed. And it’s not to say that if somebody if your friend is is larger than you, it means that they must have had something occur in their childhood. That’s not that’s not a requirement. It’s just to show that sometimes that is what has led to a change in our body size. There are lots of things that lead to our body size being different. This is just one of them. [00:36:31][31.7]

Jameela: [00:36:33] It’s a national increase in body size. [00:36:34][0.9]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:36:35] Yeah and I mean, we can’t get around the fact that we are all as a as as countries in general, increasing in in our body size over the years. And there are lots of things that influence that. And one of the biggest, in my humble opinion, is the food environment in which we live. But that’s something that can only be addressed from the top down. That’s only something that can be addressed from from a government level in regards to the way that our food environment is set up. But to talk about that, we have to talk about socioeconomics and poverty, because that’s one of the biggest drivers of how these companies get in and make money through the food environment. And so this isn’t again, I completely agree with you and really worth bringing that up, that this isn’t to say that everybody who’s fat has had something occur in their childhood or has some trauma or, oh, well, we just need to find the trauma and then they won’t be fat anymore. That’s not how this works. It’s just to create some added nuance to this conversation and stuff to touch on this stuff that never normally gets talked about. That never normally only gets acknowledged. [00:37:30][55.0]

Jameela: [00:37:31] Well, if it if it was talked about and if it was acknowledged, then there would it be a multi, multi, multi tens of billion dollar diet industry. The reason this conversation is so important is because we are able to undercut or just cut through their fucking bullshit, because what they are doing is deliberately not informing you about the genetic or the socioeconomic or the emotional or whatever or how bullshit the BMI is, which we will discuss in a second [00:37:58][27.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:37:59] Or the fact that it’s been 18 months of a pandemic. And therefore, for a lot of people, your body size has increased because you’ve survived the mental stress of the last 18 months or 15 months, however long it’s been, it feels like a long time, but that is normal. And instead of talking about you are doing really well and actually you have used food as or may have used food as more of a coping mechanism over the last 15 months to what you are used to, because we all have different mechanisms by which we cope with stress and food is a really good one and an amazing one. [00:38:29][30.1]

Jameela: [00:38:30] Well you stayed in by the way you stayed in to save other people’s lives. [00:38:29][-0.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:38:34] That as well. Yeah. Your lifestyle has changed, like, yeah, that’s normal. They’re not going to tell you that. They’re just going to say, oh, well, it’s just an even worsening of this epidemic we have around body size. No, it’s not. [00:38:43][8.9]

Jameela: [00:38:45] No bollocks. But they want they want to be able to tell you it’s there’s no reason for it. It’s definitely your fault. It’s definitely bad. And they make you feel like it’s an emergency. That’s why everything is all quick fix everything is all fad diet. It’s like lose thirty pounds in thirty days. It’s like in your first week you’ll lose ten pounds. They never tell you it’s just water. You’re just horribly dehydrated like they [00:39:08][23.1]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:39:09] Cos you’ve refused to eat carbs that’s all it is. [00:39:09][0.4]

Jameela: [00:39:10] Yeah exactly. Exactly. And so you so they make this fat that they don’t tell you the cause of and they make it seem like an emergency or something that has to be gotten rid of. And then they sell you these intermittent fasting apps and these diets and this key to this and keto that and and restrictive food patterns that can honestly and I say this again from experience as we know, it’s why the fucking podcast is called I Weigh. Like, I spent I spent 20 years of thirty five years on this planet with an eating disorder, with a severe, severe eating disorder. Once you slip into the world of diet culture, the deep, dark, manipulative, misinforming and corrupt diet industry, once you allow that to suck you in, it’s very hard to pull yourself out sometimes and it can very easily slip into eating disorders. And so that’s why conversations like this are so important. Talk to me about why the BMI is such bollocks, please. [00:40:09][59.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:40:12] Well, it’s just a terrible measure of a actual fat and B health because because fat isn’t a good measure of health either. I often like to be quite clear at the beginning of some of these conversations, because there are there’s a tendency to hear people say that that fat can have no impact on health whatsoever. And I don’t believe that that’s necessarily the case. I don’t think we have evidence to show the fat is irrelevant, but we do have a lot of evidence to show it’s very complicated. And just because it might be having an impact on your health, it doesn’t mean that it justifies any of what is going on at all. But an important bit of nuance that is rarely discussed is where that fat is in the body. And BMI has zero ability to tell you where this weight that is simply your relationship with the earth and gravity is bone, muscle fat, your brain, all of this kind of stuff. It’s just a random number. [00:41:14][62.3]

Jameela: [00:41:15] I don’t have a very heavy brain. My brain is very light. [00:41:17][2.1]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:41:18] Full of water, though. It’s quite heavy, that’s good. full of eggs at the moment. [00:41:22][3.8]

Jameela: [00:41:23] Just full of all the diet shakes that I had as a teenager. Shrunk the brain. [00:41:26][2.7]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:41:27] It’s just a scale that at best, to give it a little bit of give you the nuance, because I do like that word and I like the fact that and I think it’s important at best, it is a population level statistic. But the biggest issue is that we have turned that into an individual one and we’ve turned it into something where we take an entire population and we work out their BMI and we try and link it to things like health despite the fact that we’re ignoring factors like socioeconomics and weight, stigma and other things that we know massively impact health and and outcomes [00:42:04][36.7]

Jameela: [00:42:05] and the fact that bones can be heavy and muscles are three times heavier than fat. And so therefore you can be a big muscular person with no fat anywhere near any of the vital organs. And you could be seen as like, you know, almost towards the obese. Like, I wonder what Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Oh, I wonder what his BMI is. [00:42:21][16.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:42:22] It’s like it’s going to be hugely high. But the problem with taking it into an individual level statistic and any statistic geeks are listening would understand that you take a population level statistic and make it individual and it’s pointless. You throw it out immediately. But we haven’t done that with this and we’ve just allowed it to be used. And so, I mean, it’s clearly it’s clearly rubbish when you go well, your your your BMI is 24. You’re fine, you’re healthy, carry on as normal. Your BMI is twenty five. Oh, shit. We need to start looking at whether or not you’re diabetic, whether you need to go on some sort of plan. It’s like my your BMI might change in twenty four to twenty five overnight depending on what you ate the previous day. So it’s like this continuous scale that is suddenly blocked into chunks, which just makes no sense because our health doesn’t work like that. We don’t suddenly become unwell or unhealthy when something just tips over and our health is so more such more complex than that. [00:43:14][52.0]

Jameela: [00:43:14] I’ve said this a million times. I said this a million times, but at my lowest BMI where I was being congratulated by all of my doctors, I was starving myself. I was drinking like dangerous, non regulated drinks, taking shortcuts over exercising, not sleeping, drinking something like four liters of caffeine a day, thinking somehow that caffeine was speeding up my metabolism or making me more active. I was basically dying whilst being told by doctors that I was at the peak of my health because all they could see was a slim person. So they thought, well, that is a person who is in control. That is a person who is not lazy. This person is thin. Therefore, they must be diligent about their health. They couldn’t have been more wrong. And it’s just it’s so infuriating. [00:44:00][45.8]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:44:01] It is it is something that I mean, we talked about we talked about some of the some of the fact that the doctors have this implicit and explicit bias in health care towards fat people. And the BMI is a way of justifying that BMI is used as this nice value because we as humans forget doctors or not doctors, just humans in general. We like putting things into categories. We like simplicity. We like this. Yes. No. Are you healthy? Yes. No, but health doesn’t work like that. Like our body doesn’t work like that. And we know that we are taught so many different ways to be able to assess health. But we just for some reason still rely on the BMI and just take that and only that and use it as an excuse to not investigate people. The number of stories of people that have just that have a BMI of a certain number and therefore a toll. Well, this is why you have this. This is why you have this symptom. This is why you are you know, you this is why you’ve come to me. This is why you in pain one one specific one, which I just somebody who who I got to know through through the Internet who went to her doctor with months of this abdominal pain, finally saw a specialist. And she said to him, she said, I’m this this pain is so bad that I just can’t even eat, which, you know, any normal human being because we need to investigate this. This is about his response to her was, well, maybe that’s not such a bad thing because she was fat. And so he decided that he his morals would completely go out the window. And I just it blows my mind still that the people who genuinely doctors want to help people like the vast, overwhelming majority of them do. And I don’t understand why that that fact just completely escapes. And she ended up she ended up being diagnosed with bowel cancer and she’s gone through surgery and she’s gotten fortunately she went to a different doctor and she she had somehow out of out of she doesn’t know where it came from. But somehow she had this this this gumption to go back and yell at him in tears, but yell at him and see someone else and was fortunate enough to be able to. And she was properly investigated. But she’s just one example of of thousands, if not millions of people who who are being who are getting substandard, poor, dangerous health care because we have this overreliance on a BMI and we’re being lazy. It’s just laziness. [00:46:33][152.0]

Jameela: [00:46:33] I know they’re the lazy ones. The doctors are the fucking lazy ones. Yeah. I’ve got two friends who are now completely infertile because they of their size, they they did not have their gynecological issues or hormonal issues looked into. And by the time it was finally discovered, it was simply too late and the symptoms had gone on for upwards of 10 years. And every time they would go to the doctor, they would be told that their pain or their symptoms or their weight gain, in spite of the fact that they weren’t even eating very much, was their fault and that they just needed to work harder to be thinner. And therefore, now these irrevocable changes have happened to their body. So it’s infuriating. Talk to me about the dangers of of dieting please, something you and I talk about a lot online. We’re quite relentless, [00:47:20][47.2]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:47:23] but it’s something that this is a topic that I had zero insight in. And it’s one of the one of the things that I was one of the first things that I started vehemently challenging is this this assumption of just prescribing weight loss indiscriminately. Just well, someone is certain size. We’re going to tell them to lose weight. And when they come back to see us, they will have done that. And we just we just assume that that is a we assume that that advice can only be a good thing. And it’s simply not it’s very rarely actually a positive for someone. And people like to bring out the individuals, the few individuals that somehow it has been a positive for them because life is complex. And for some people it has. But we like to we like to bring those people out and put them on a pedestal and be like see? You just need to work harder. But that’s nonsense there. These unicorn’s that for some reason we have no idea why they may have lost weight, how they’ve come through the other side with a better relationship with food, although I’d argue that most of them probably haven’t and they’re lying to themselves. But that’s a longer and separate issue. But for the vast majority of people, not only this, is this dieting process not going to be sustainable, and we know that we have so much evidence to show that that when you take three, four years in the future after starting a diet, pretty much everyone is back to the same way they were, if not more. And ironically, dieting is pretty much one of the biggest predictors of future weight gain, which seems so ridiculous. [00:49:02][99.5]

Jameela: [00:49:04] Why? [00:49:04][0.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:49:04] Well, lots of reasons. One of which I think is because it impacts our relationship with food in such a bad way. So take the way that people tend to do it. And you touched on this already in regards to the way that we tend to look for quick fixes. Right. We tend to look for things that will work as quickly as possible because it’s an effort if and the reason it’s it’s because you’re fighting your normal body’s wish to stay a same kind of body size because that’s healthy and that’s a good idea. But it’s a lot of it’s a struggle. It’s an effort. It’s anxiety inducing. It causes you to have stress during the process. You’ve got no flexibility. You can’t enjoy yourself with friends. Food loses its joy. You end up like it’s anyone that’s dieted knows. It’s not a nice it’s not a nice thing. You’re not a nice person to be around. [00:49:51][47.1]

Jameela: [00:49:52] Nothing restrictive is good for the brain. [00:49:53][1.3]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:49:54] No full stop. And that’s just the brain. And you take the stuff around the body and it has impacts on the body in regards to increasing stress levels which can do things to your blood pressure, which can. And then I know you like to talk about things like hormones as well. And one of one of the things I love, this is an example. One of the things is, is leptin. Leptin’s, this hormone that is produced from our fat. And it’s it helps us feel full. So the more because our body is kind of this this regulator. And so our body likes to stay around the same kind of size. So this concept of a set point where where there’s this kind of breadth of of weight range that our body is most comfortable if we’re not trying to intentionally manipulate it. Leptin is produced by our fat cells and it helps us feel full, and so the more fat we have, more leptin we have and therefore the more full we feel. And so it’s a way of regulating our body size. We know that when we start dieting, when we restrict food, we restrict energy, those leptin levels fall massively and again, that kind of makes sense. It’s one of those things of your body is going, well, hang on a sec. It doesn’t know you’re deliberately trying to do this. It kind of thinks there’s something going on that’s wrong. So it increases your hunger by by stopping the thing that’s helping you feel full to get you to eat more food, to stop you from potentially dying, because that’s what your body thinks is going on. You’re restricting it. You’re starving it. So your body’s going, oh, this isn’t happening. So it drops this leptin. You then start feeling more hungry. And I think this is fascinating. Low levels of leptin also increase your cravings for sugary food. So there’s a there’s a biological and scientific reason as to why we also crave these sweets and this chocolate and this all of these kind of foods that we consider to be bad. And then we add on the whole added context of restriction and, you know, all this guilt and shame that we feel because we’ve labeled these foods a certain way. But your body is actually craving sugar because it’s a good quick source of energy. And so that’s just one thing that leptin does. But when you then start eating again, leptin levels kind of go back up. We found that over the years, the more times you diet put the weight back on diet, put the weight back on, your leptin levels never go up as high as two things happen either they never go up as high as they were originally. And so you’re always feeling a bit more hungry than normal. And we don’t exactly know why. It feels like a bit of a protective mechanism of the body to try and mean that you’re you’re always going to be eating a bit more so that you never go back into those periods of time again. But the second thing that can happen is you can become resistant to it. So the leptin levels can be normal, but you no longer actually recognize them. And so despite the fact that you have more fat and you’re producing more leptin, you’re no longer feeling that full effect of your body recognizing, well, this is what’s going on inside. I have enough energy right now. I’m going to feel full. You become resistant to that, which that’s just one hormone. There are loads of them, but that’s just one. And it’s one of the reasons why it’s so much easier to gain weight and stay at a higher weight than it is to lose weight and stay at a lower weight, because our body is hardwired to do that because one of them keeps us alive and one of them doesn’t. The only thing that going down a lower weight deliberately does is fits the societal ideal of esthetics. It’s not a it’s not a prerequisite for health by any stretch of the imagination. And again, that’s just one example of all of these complexities that are going on. That means that you’ve got someone 10, 15 years who’s been dieting over and over again. They’re at a stage now a lot of the time where their body has reached a new normal, a new set point, almost always a higher set point. And they and not only that, but your metabolism slows down a little bit as well after all these dieting things. And so [00:53:51][238.0]

Jameela: [00:53:52] is that is that a real thing? is that a real thing so metabolism slowing down like I’ve heard of metabolic damage. And then I’ve heard some people say, no, that’s not real. And so I had doctors gaslight me about that. [00:54:02][10.3]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:54:03] I think the word damage is, is it is a scary word. I don’t I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s a good way of describing it [00:54:09][5.8]

Jameela: [00:54:09] Is it metabolic resistance. What is it? [00:54:11][2.2]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:54:11] Well, you become more efficient. And so because your body doesn’t want to lose weight, your metabolism becomes more efficient and you therefore require less overall energy to stay the same weight as you would do if you hadn’t have done all this dieting. So you take two people that are the same size, somebody who’s dieted on and off for the last ten years and someone who’s never dieted and that person who’s never dieted can eat can eat more overall and stay the same weight compared to the person that hasn’t. So it’s not necessarily damage and we don’t have good research to know whether or not it kind of goes back to normal or not. But it feels like this protective mechanism where your body is just doing as much as it can to stop what you are intentionally trying to do, because it knows it’s not good for you and it’s trying to keep you at this higher weight because you are in general going to live longer and survive more. Ironically, if you’re at a higher rate, if you become unwell, if you end up needing to go to ITU, if you have a chronic disease, a lot of the time being fatter actually helps your morbidity and mortality because you have these energy reserves, your body uses them for a good reason. And yes, things can go wrong. But that’s not this conversation isn’t taking place. It’s not that there is no nuance being had in these conversations. It’s only fat is bad. It causes this. You’re going to become unwell. You’re going to get diabetes rather than why are we demonizing something that is normal, that is natural, that actually, ironically, is having the exact opposite effect of what people think they want to do. If we were really wanting to actually reduce people’s body size, which is not a good aim or goal, by the way. But if we were, all the evidence would say we should stop dieting, because that’s one of the biggest reasons why our body size in at an individual level, why our body size increases. So what I, I don’t get it. Like I know I’m meant to get it, [00:56:10][119.3]

Jameela: [00:56:10] I love that you’re saying this. [00:56:10][0.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:56:10] But I don’t. [00:56:10][0.0]

Jameela: [00:56:13] No I love that you’re saying this and you know, and I so appreciate this because I try and talk about this all the time. But I also like very much so you know this I know my place on the Internet as an actress with no schooling and no formal education in any of this. So I always defer to experts and it’s just so nice to have someone come on and just talk about these things in a way that I simply don’t have the expertize to. I really appreciate it. One of the words that started circulating from from you that first caught my attention and made me realize you had changed gear was the term nutri bollocks. And I loved that word. And I love how often you use it and I love why you use it. Will you talk to me about what you mean when you say nutribollocks and then can we just go through and just fucking annihilate some of these nonsense nutritional advices that exist out there together please. [00:57:17][64.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:57:18] Well you’ve just defined it for me. But yes, we can. Let’s do it. So this is this is the second half of my book. I’m kind of the first half is essentially my relationship with food. [00:57:27][8.4]

Jameela: [00:57:27] This is your book Food Isn’t Medicine. Yeah. [00:57:28][1.2]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:57:30] Yeah. So you’re you’re a better PR person than I am. I need to say that. Say the phrase. The first half of the book is my kind of relationship food, my story, talking about the complexity and the nuance around weight. And then the second half is why I think the phrase food is medicine is harmful. And all of these all of this nutribollocks that comes from a lot of these these assumptions around not only our health but our weight. You love the word because you’re British as well. And bollocks is an incredible word. [00:57:56][26.1]

Jameela: [00:57:56] Love the word. Just feels good to say bollocks [00:57:58][2.3]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:57:59] for for for the Americans among among you listening who don’t use the word bollocks in the same context. It essentially means nonsense. It means absolutely bullshit [00:58:07][8.0]

Jameela: [00:58:08] Yeah. [00:58:08][0.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:58:09] And it’s not like the dog’s bollocks. That’s a way of saying something is incredible. I don’t really understand. Language is weird, but basically bollocks nutri bollocks nutrition bollocks. So nutrition bullshit, you’ll have come across it, you know, Keto Diet. [00:58:23][14.2]

Jameela: [00:58:23] Oh no I once. We first met because I once spread a bit of nutri bollocks by accident. That’s how we that’s that was years ago. I someone, I had really bad eczema and people kept on saying celery juice is really good. And I wasn’t aware of this medical medium cunt like I wasn’t sorry. [00:58:42][18.9]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:58:43] No, no, no. It’s the appropriate word. [00:58:45][1.9]

Jameela: [00:58:45] Yeah. I wasn’t I didn’t know who it come from or if it was some sort of like fad. I wasn’t replacing my diet with anything, but I started adding celery juice to my diet every single day, every single morning before I ate anything else, as instructed by influencers on the Internet, who I was taking advice from over eczema. And and I did notice a change. So I just like and so I so I just posted a picture of my celery juice and loads of other people doing it. So I don’t think there’s anything damaging and dangerous. And celery just feels like such an innocuous, like nonsense water vegetable that I really felt like that can’t be bad for anyone. But you slid into my DMs, you were a little bit aggressive and rude, but you you, like, very firmly schooled me on, like, why this is a dangerous new fad and who is behind this fad and why I should not have anything to do with it. And I really appreciate it. [00:59:36][50.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [00:59:38] I was finding my feet in the manner in which I challenge some of this stuff. And I wasn’t trying to make friends with you. [00:59:41][3.4]

Jameela: [00:59:43] You weren’t a charmer. No, you definitely weren’t. But I you but I didn’t shun you, you know, because I really appreciated the fact that you’d informed me. And I immediately, like, took that all down and responded in kind because I recognized I am not an expert, I am an actor and you are a doctor. And so I’m going to listen to you and not put this shit out. [01:00:04][20.9]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:00:05] And also secretly it’s because we’re actually quite similar people in terms of our personalities. [01:00:09][4.0]

Jameela: [01:00:13] Yeah a bit rude, a bit abrasive, deep down, quite kind of just a bit damaged. [01:00:16][2.7]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:00:16] Yeah, yeah true. So so just getting getting to grips with, with the with the appropriate method of communication to get to the outcome. You really wanted that. That’s what, that’s the way I was finding my feet. And still still to this day, you know, I mean, we’re all working on it, right. [01:00:30][14.0]

Jameela: [01:00:31] Totally. And when you so I remember when you when you were when you were telling me, like, you know, why there’s no, like, scientific proof that celery juice has any kind of impact on eczema, psoriasis, or autoimmune conditions. And I mean, this person was telling you that you can cure your, like, cancer or something. The people on the Internet certainly saying you can cure your cancer with celery juice. [01:00:49][17.7]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:00:50] Oh no he has. The medical medium has. [01:00:51][1.6]

Jameela: [01:00:51] I was I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to get sued, but. Yeah, I was wondering if that’s where it came from. [01:00:54][3.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:00:55] He calls it the most most the strongest anti cancer herb in his book. Don’t worry, I’ve looked these things up so that I know full well I can tell tell him off for these things. [01:01:03][8.3]

Jameela: [01:01:03] Right. So I was arguing with you. This is all in DMs. I was like, you know, like I have literally noticed a change in my eczema in the last couple of days. And you just like laid down some facts about multiple different variables that could have caused that. And the fact that I cannot simply just attribute that to five days of celery juice and that and the amount of different things that you were able to go into, all the variables that that could have actually led to that change or I mean, even placebo effect. All of these different things are true, but it’s very irresponsible for me to. And that was just like a big wake up call because I at the time was telling other people off for not promoting diet shakes. Obviously, those terrifying laxative shakes are worse than a juice, but still, I was complicit in the nutribollocks spreading on that day, I never did it again. So thank you for that. [01:01:54][51.1]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:01:55] So you’re you’re most welcome. And I’m glad that we are still talking, despite my mannerisms on at that time. But we’re all we’re like I used to do it. I used to spread the crap, too. Like this is, you know, I mean, I had I had an account called Unfattening. Of course I did. I don’t know whether my account was called that when I first contacted you or not. I don’t know what stage my social media journey. [01:02:16][20.7]

Jameela: [01:02:16] I think you I don’t know. I don’t know. I actually don’t remember. I don’t remember. I remember thinking it was a bit rich. I was like this is this prick who’s upsetting all of my mates online. And all of my friends are fat liberation activists are like complaining about this guy and he’s lecturing me in my DMs. But you were just serving straight up facts and I couldn’t argue with it. And so I you know, I, I sat down. I took my place as someone who isn’t an expert, doesn’t have a right to be spreading any information nutritionally about and now the only advice I ever spread is that don’t take advice from influencers or actresses or anyone, anyone who isn’t specializing in the subject. Anyway. OK, so celery juice. [01:02:59][42.9]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:03:01] So, I mean, it’s it’s a nice vegetable. That’s it. The the claims around it. Complete bullshit. Like, I just don’t like this medical medium guy, like we we’re not going to get sued by him. I mean he can try. Send him my way. He’s just he’s a he is the definition of a charlatan like the very definition. He has zero training in anything health related. But he started and again, I’m someone who’s who who calls himself a Christian and does weird, hocus-pocus stuff. But I just don’t don’t talk to other people about it. But he talks to spirits from the age of four and they tell him stuff that doctors don’t know yet is his justification for this stuff. And so they told him about celery juice and how it cures cancer and how it cures autoimmune diseases and how it cures skin conditions. And I have no idea how he’s managed to suck in people like Sylvester Stallone and Katy Perry and and probably people your friends with as well which is [01:03:59][57.3]

Jameela: [01:03:59] Obviously Gwyneth. [01:03:59][0.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:04:01] Gwyneth Paltrow. Yes. I mean, she’s gone down her own road of [01:04:04][2.9]

Jameela: [01:04:05] Nutribollocks yeah [01:04:06][0.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:04:07] woo but he’s gained this massive following, just promoting made up shit like he’s not even it’s not even slightly true. Like he’s he says that there are magical salt crystals in it that are only there if you juice it, if you put it in a blender or you eat at whole, it doesn’t work. So you have to therefore juice it. [01:04:24][16.9]

Jameela: [01:04:26] So, yeah, exactly. And also there are oxalate that can be there like that. Sometimes it can be very heavy in oxalates. Is that correct? And then that can sometimes be something that isn’t necessarily very good for you depending on your kidney function. I’ve spoken to other doctors about it since and they’ve just explained to me just what a load of shit that is. All right. Keto go keto diet, please, why everyone is fucking talking about it. [01:04:49][22.8]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:04:49] Why why. [01:04:49][0.2]

Jameela: [01:04:49] It’s just the Atkins diet [01:04:49][0.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:04:52] Not why to you like why would you do it. It is. It’s the bastard cousin of the of the Atkins diet. In the politest of terms, it’s look, it’s from a medical perspective, it’s fascinating in the fact that when you stop eating carbs, your body stops being able to use glucose as its main source of energy. And this is the source of energy it wants to use. This is normal. Your brain lives off glucose, which is why whenever you cut carbs out your diet, you feel mentally so shit for a while. It’s because your brain is going, I need glucose, please give it to me and you’re you’re starving it. So it has to work out how it’s going to get energy instead and it gets energy through ketones and ketones are broken down from fat. And so all the fat you eat because you’re eating fat, because you’re not eating carbs gets broken down into energy and you use it that way. Cool. So what like your body has found a way to survive because you’re refusing to give it food that it wants. It’s not a thriving thing. It’s a surviving thing. And what I don’t know why we would be wanting to do that, except for the fascinating thing that for some people, especially pediatric refractory epilepsy, is the thing where refractory tends to be a term where we’ve tried multiple different drugs and these kids are having multiple seizures a day. And there’s nothing that can be done that can that can actually try and reduce them. The keto a very medical strict one can has shown some benefit, not in everyone, but in some. But nobody can stick to it. That’s the other thing, is that the kids don’t like it because it’s horrible, but it has this fancy effect on the brain in a in a seizure perspective. But for any other context, you’re putting yourself through hell for no good reason. And the vast majority of people that are doing it aren’t actually even eating few enough carbs or enough fat to be actually in ketosis, which is the whole argument in the first. So they’re just doing an Atkins diet. [01:06:46][113.8]

Jameela: [01:06:47] Yeah, and we talk about some of the dangers from the Keto diet aside for it can lead a lot of people into disordered eating because there are some people who are so and I am definitely someone who would have considered myself that person, even just a little as six years ago. And I think I would have said that, you know, when you’re talking about oh it is just a miserable existence, it’s just hell I would have been like, I’m willing I’m willing to go through hell to be thin. [01:07:10][22.9]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:07:10] Yeah we justify it. [01:07:10][0.0]

Jameela: [01:07:12] It’s worth it it’s worth it. Right. So talk to me about the actual implications like there, the health implications and the reasons why, the fact that other than the fact that it’s just a bit of a nightmare, which some people are willing to make that sacrifice for, especially those who are very dedicated and skilled at eating disorders. [01:07:25][13.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:07:30] I’ll give you three. So, number one, you are going to almost guaranteed to be deficient in certain nutrients when you do it, because it is so, so hard to get enough nutrients through it because you’re not eating very many vegetables that you’re going to end up deficient in some vitamin of some kind. [01:07:46][16.0]

Jameela: [01:07:47] Also shiting, very irregular. [01:07:49][1.6]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:07:50] I’ll get to that. That’s number three. Number two is that you are almost definitely guaranteed to increase your heart disease risk, because no matter how well supposedly you do it. And again, remember, this is this was designed as a very strict, medically induced diet, which is very hard to do in the general population [01:08:08][18.0]

Jameela: [01:08:08] monitored by doctors not monitored with an app [01:08:10][1.8]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:08:10] With blood tests and the sorts of things. Your your your cholesterol levels almost always increase because of the amount of saturated fat that you tend to eat, whether you want to or not. And that’s not a myth. I know that’s become a thing that people are claiming is a myth recently that saturated fat is a lie and it’s just this food industry bullshit. No, it’s saturated fat increases your your LDL cholesterol, which is the one that you don’t want to increase. And so why why? Like, it’s just not good. You’re increasing your heart disease risk. If you do it for any prolonged period of time, it’s a bad idea. And then thirdly, you’re not having any fiber and so no wonder your bowels are screwed up. Fiber is so good for you. It is the main thing that keeps your gut healthy. And it your your body, your your the bacteria in your gut break down [01:09:02][51.9]

Jameela: [01:09:03] It’s your largest organ like your digestive system, like all of that makes up your largest organ and it’s responsible for so much of your general health. [01:09:10][6.8]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:09:11] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, everything is related in your body. All of the different, all of the different systems in your body, speak to each other. When you when you’re anxious, you get butterflies in the stomach like there’s a reason this stuff is linked and you don’t have any fiber. Your your gut isn’t able to break down what it usually uses for for keeping the the cells of the colon healthy and do it for a long period of time. And you’re increasing your risk of colon cancer along with the fact that your bowels just going to not be functioning very well and people who have either constipation or diarrhea or so is it why why those are three, as far as I’m concerned, very good reasons as to why you should [01:09:46][35.6]

Jameela: [01:09:46] Very compelling reasons. [01:09:47][0.3]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:09:47] have carbs in your diet. [01:09:48][1.1]

Jameela: [01:09:50] Also the weight you’re losing, as I referenced earlier, it’s just the fact that I think carbohydrate. [01:09:55][4.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:09:55] Time and time again [01:09:56][0.7]

Jameela: [01:09:56] You know, to to bind to water, I don’t know. But like, you’re losing water because you don’t have carbohydrates in your system. So a lot of that and and every single friend that I have who has done the Keto diet, which I would say is like 80 percent of my peers have tried it. They all gained all of the weight back and more at a wildly alarming speed because, of course, that introducing carbs, carbs are what, you know, are, you know, carb stick to water as the most layman’s way that anyone’s ever said that. So sorry. But, um, [01:10:30][34.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:10:31] Well let me explain the water thing, because it makes it makes it so. Your your your muscle again. Just like your brain uses sugar and glucose, your muscles store carbs in them so that you have energy if you need to use your muscles, you know, if you need to sprint suddenly and stuff like that, your your body binds every one molecule of carbohydrate to fur molecules of water. So and water weighs a fair bit. So when you then step on the scales again, it’s not always a measure of fat, it’s simply a relationship with the ground and gravity. You you weigh more the next morning if you eat carbs the night before, if you have a good relationship with your body and the scales are something you’re able to step on without it being harmful, it’s a fun little experiment. After a high carb meal at night, you’ll weigh more in the morning. Just fact. Doesn’t mean that anything has happened that is bad and you need to go on a diet or this or that. The same work the other way around. If you stop eating carbs, your body will use the carbs out of your muscles because it wants carbs from somewhere it tries to keep going as much as possible. The glucose, because again, remember, your brain wants it for fuel. And so you end up losing all this water weight because you’re removing the carbs from the muscles. The water has to go with it. You pee the water out and you lose all this weight magically in the first week. And you’re like, oh, my word, it’s incredible. [01:11:42][71.0]

Jameela: [01:11:43] Yeah. [01:11:43][0.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:11:43] And then and then you put the. When you start eating carbs again, your body goes, well, thank goodness sticks it all back into your muscles. And you put all this weight back on, but it’s just water [01:11:53][9.5]

Jameela: [01:11:53] and the reason that all those people came off that diet, even though it was, you know, maybe making them thinner at speed, is because they developed brain fog, terrible headaches, health implications. Some of them had issues with that gallbladders because of how much fat there is that I can’t specifically what. And they and their mood was very, very low, like a lot of them developed kind of something that felt akin to depression because there was a chemical imbalance in their brain from the fact that they were doing something that was kind of like killing your brain slowly. [01:12:26][32.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:12:27] Well, again, imagine imagine if you had a imagine if you had a let’s do do something that you’re doing at the moment. Imagine if you were going to one of your workout sessions to try and bulk up for your Marvel movie. And you hadn’t eaten any food for two days. There’s no way you would be able to do the session. Right. You just wouldn’t be able to function. [01:12:45][18.2]

Jameela: [01:12:46] I’ve never eaten more in my life. [01:12:47][1.1]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:12:50] The keto diet and the brain is the same thing. Your brain lives off glucose for energy. If you don’t give it glucose, your brain is going to feel like shit. And so that’s not that’s not a surprise. But it’s something that is justified, right? It’s it’s called like the even has a name, the Keto flu, where people feel like crap for a week. And the argument is you just need to push through it. Don’t worry. Just push through it until your brain gets used to the ketones. Why why do we justify I mean, I know why, but why do we justify this these things that make us feel so bad, that are doing us such harm? It’s all in the pursuit of thinness because we just we don’t care what what is happening along the way. As long as we get to this oh my word, I feel better because I’m thin now and now my life is fixed. And then. Oh, hang on a sec. No, it’s not an oh my God. Oh, no. I’ve put the weight back on oh shit. I should try the next thing, like let’s go for intermittent fasting next instead, [01:13:46][56.3]

Jameela: [01:13:47] Yeah talk to me about intermittent fasting [01:13:48][1.3]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:13:49] Segue. Yeah. Privileged starvation is is what I would call it. Because because it is. [01:13:56][7.3]

Jameela: [01:13:56] That’s so good. That’s so embarrassing and funny. I love that [01:14:08][11.9]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:14:11] There are people who, who don’t get to eat because they can’t afford to eat or they don’t have the time or this or that. Yeah. And you’re making it a wellness fad. Like you’ve just you’ve just decided that you’re going to skip a meal of the day because it’s cool to do so now. It’s privileged starvation. That’s what it is. You don’t need all this stuff about because you’ll notice that a lot of these things have changed from weight loss being the sole reason why people are told to do it, to like health being the reason or wellness being the reason. And so intermittent fasting is sold on this like it’s really good for your body and aging and your cells. And cancer is all bullshit. You don’t need to do. [01:14:48][37.6]

Jameela: [01:14:49] Do we do we know that it’s can I just ask like do we know this is bullshit? I’m not I don’t do intermittent fasting I’m just asking. [01:14:55][6.1]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:14:56] There’s no it’s as bullshit as going out and eating the mud outside is going to cure you for cancer. There’s no evidence that it’s true and [01:15:02][6.4]

Jameela: [01:15:02] And is that because studies have been done or is that a lack of studies that have led to. No, I’m just trying to like [01:15:08][5.8]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:15:11] Well there are two things. One, we’ve compared groups of people who intermittently fast and people who eat normally. And there hasn’t been any long term benefit to things like metabolic health, insulin, anything along those kind of lines. So there’s been no there’s and there’s one study that that was going on for an entire year. So that’s quite a long study of people following two cohorts of people. There’s that. And then there’s also the fact that despite the fact that you would never hear people admitting this, we do not have a way of measuring what’s known as autophagy. So this is this thing that gets old is the magic of intermittent fasting, which you may or may not have heard of, is the [01:15:47][35.9]

Jameela: [01:15:47] Never heard of that. [01:15:47][0.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:15:48] So this is this is the argument for why we should all be intermittent fasting supposedly. [01:15:50][2.0]

Jameela: [01:15:50] How do you spell it? [01:15:50][0.1]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:15:53] autophagy autophagy, which means self-eating. And so when you when you fast your body moves nutrients around your around your body, so it moves nutrients from areas of your body that you don’t need it to be there. And it moves it to areas in your body it does. That’s again a survival mechanism because it’s like we don’t have any food at the moment. We need to move stuff around. And that’s one of the roles of autophagy. But one of the other roles is to remove cells that are dying and help kind of regenerate things. And so people have gone, oh, autophagy, it must do this one, too. And so it must be good for your cell health and for cancer and this and that. There’s no evidence for any of that. And the reason there’s no evidence for any of that is because we cannot measure autophagy. So these people are literally just making it up and presuming this stuff and then selling it, selling this as a fact when all of the studies have shown that there’s no benefit. And we also already intermittently fast every single day, unless you have a problem, you sleep overnight in the morning. It’s called breakfast because you are breaking your fast overnight. We all intermittently fast. Our bodies do that already. We don’t need to create another period of intermittent fasting during the day. It’s not been shown to have any benefit to us. And all it is, is your refusing to allow yourself to listen to your hunger cues. If you don’t want to eat breakfast, that’s fine. That’s what I’m talking about, is people who are [01:17:27][94.7]

Jameela: [01:17:29] Is that going to start triggering all that leptin nonsense you were talking about. Not that you were talking nonsense, but is that going to start like if you keep going through prolonged periods of food and I mean I mean, people aren’t just doing these kind of like, you know, there’s all kinds of different intermittent fasting. And I’ve had to learn this because I’ve had to go and find out about all these fucking apps. Like it’s it’s the biggest rise. I feel like it’s taken over keto now where TikTok, every 15 seconds sometimes people are getting ads for intermittent fasting in between these videos are very, very thin teenagers dancing. It’s very, very clever and manipulative way of advertising. [01:18:00][30.7]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:18:01] I don’t see that side of TikTok fortunately. [01:18:02][1.1]

Jameela: [01:18:02] There are different there are different forms of intermittent fasting where some people do it for, I don’t know, like they fast for eight hours or sixteen hours or 24 hours or 36 hours. Some people even go so far as to do forty eight hours, which just feels so insane to me. So when you are fasting for these kind of long, let’s say, the kind of more twenty one to twenty, twenty one to thirty six hour periods, are you triggering the leptin response you were talking about earlier? [01:18:31][28.2]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:18:32] I, I don’t know. You’re definitely triggering a bunch of stuff. [01:18:34][2.6]

Jameela: [01:18:35] But you can start to disrupt your hormones. [01:18:36][1.4]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:18:37] Well yeah you could do. I mean you’re definitely triggering a bunch of stuff because that’s a prolonged period of time where your body’s expecting food. So, you know, there are some people who who, you know, would do that during during like an ultramarathon or something. Or they would they would do that because they don’t have the choice to do so. And so they just they work very well eating every few days, for example, because that’s that’s the situation they live in. And their bodies got used to it. But that’s not where that’s not where our body has its optimal function. And if these people are really pursuing this this health, then we need to fuel our bodies consistently like there’s no there hasn’t been shown to have any added benefit to doing this. So if you want to do it, sure. But there are so many side effects and so many downsides here. And again, one of the main ones is your relationship with food. Like, why would you wreck that? Why would you screw that up? Why would you deliberately ignore your hunger cues? Like there’s a reason why this stuff is important and we’re just completely ignoring what our body wants and refusing to feed it? Because. Because why? Like, there isn’t a good reason. There are so many things in life you could do. But if there isn’t a good reason for them and all it has is the risk of something harmful, why are we doing it? It just doesn’t make any sense to me. [01:19:56][78.4]

Jameela: [01:19:56] To benefit a minority of wealthy, greedy people who have created a lie, created a problem that they are then selling you a cure for. That problem didn’t exist. They invented fatness or any kind of body fat or any kind of different body shape as a problem. And further proof of that is the fact that the desired body shape changes every ten years. So they must have shape before. I mean, the fact that the one of the reasons that the key to diet has become successful. It’s so ironic to me that one of the things that they are using to justify why the keto diet can be a good thing is because they are criticizing the former mass information that we should all be on a low fat diet where we should eat very little fat, which is also not good for you. It’s not good to restrict fats completely from your diet. So now the keto kind of crew are saying, well, mainstream mainstream conversation was that we should have low fat diets. They were wrong. We actually should have very high fat diets. They’re actually utilizing the fact that every one was wrong for about 15 fucking years in mainstream culture and society. So 15 years from now, it’s very likely they’re going to come back just like they did after the Atkins diet, after loads of people developed heart problems after the Atkins diet and ended up gaining the weight times ten and I think the guy who invented the Atkins diet died of heart problems. Did he? I can’t remember. [01:21:20][83.7]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:21:20] He did. But but again, that might be may or may not be related. [01:21:23][2.9]

Jameela: [01:21:24] And the irony of that is. [01:21:26][1.2]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:21:26] I know. [01:21:26][0.2]

Jameela: [01:21:28] But yeah. Anyway, so but I so we don’t know that in 15 years they’re going to say, actually, we were wrong again. And similarly, Atkins diet, this time they are very unhealthy. [01:21:39][11.3]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:21:40] The iron of that is that it wasn’t a lot of them will blame nutritional guidelines from the government for the low fat craze. The irony of that is the government guidelines never actually said that the people that promote the low fat craze was the diet industry at the time. It took it took a small amount of advice, which was at the time the government guidelines were we should probably reduce the amount of fat very slightly in our diet because we want to increase carbs and we want to reduce saturated fat and all this kind of stuff. It was good advice at the time. And they took that and ran with it. [01:22:08][28.5]

Jameela: [01:22:09] And they ran with it. [01:22:10][1.5]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:22:10] Yeah. And you ended up with these low fat everything. It was low fat dressings, low fat yogurt, low fat cheese, low fat like meat. And we’re just ignoring all of the fat, which was wasn’t a good thing. And a lot of the time the main reason it wasn’t a good thing is because it just got replaced with things like sugar. And so you had all these yogurts that were just then high sugar, low fat that wasn’t healthier for your teeth or for anything else. So like that, you know, just because we the diet industry got it wrong again. Surprise, surprise. It’s not a justification to now go eat all the fat all the time. Like what’s so hard about balance? Like, I think it’s sexy. I don’t know I don’t know why people don’t think this advice is sexy advice. It’s good advice. Like some carbs, eat some fat eat some protein. [01:23:00][49.3]

Jameela: [01:23:00] It’s because we see virtue in punishment. This is what scares me about intermittent fasting. The idea that you feel that hungry feeling and you start to look at and I really, really used to relate to this with anorexia, that that hunger, that weakness made me feel virtuous. It made me feel as though I am a disciplined, stronger person for that feeling as that I am resisting this feeling. I am losing fat and I’m getting healthier as this like this is not the feeling of my body literally telling me it’s it’s dying. This is the feeling of benefit. This is a there was a smugness to my starvation and that can happen very easily with the intermittent fasting, you know, whether you’re doing it for weight loss or whether you’re doing it for these false health benefits to start to put virtue on restriction of food. Is it such it’s such a slippery slope into eating disordered behavior and an eating disorder doesn’t just have one look. You don’t have to be completely emaciated to be someone who has an eating disorder. You can literally be a very large person and still have an eating disorder, a restrictive eating disorder, not just kind of eating sort of where you’re overeating or, you know, bingeing, et cetera. [01:24:12][71.9]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:24:13] Eating disorders don’t discriminate by size. [01:24:15][2.2]

Jameela: [01:24:16] No. They don’t discriminate by size, age, gender. They can come to you at any time, in any way. And they don’t have to necessarily impact your body because we all respond to restriction of food differently. And so it’s just something that I feel the reason I want to do is come on here is because I think this is so important to stress that aside from all the health implications, we’re suddenly becoming a little bit more health conscious because of this pandemic. I feel as though we’re suddenly starting to talk about our immune systems and our sustainability. And so it feels like this is the right opportunity to take people and say, OK, fine, if you don’t take your mental health seriously. And the fact that this could be a slippery slope into a life of torture and hell one that I have personally experienced, then will you at least think of your physical health and your actual ability to to. To withstand. All of the different environmental things that are coming at us, all of the times are trying to trying to, you know, we’re not trying to, but that can possibly impact our lives or take our lives. Will you at least listen to this doctor who’s telling you that these things are factually dangerous and ineffective? So I really appreciate you. [01:25:25][68.8]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:25:26] Thank you. One one last thing if I can, is that I think a lot of this and some of this kind of justification of of eating disorder behaviors and things like that that we do, a lot of it stems, I believe, from our lack of understanding of the fact that health and weight loss are not the same thing. And so and we’ve touched on that already. But I think it’s I think it’s beneficial to to say, well, so what does health actually look like then? Like what what what is this pursuit of health? If we’re all wanting to pursue health and we’re wanting to be focusing on our health and wanting to get healthier and the first thing we go to is well I need to lose weight. But that’s just that’s just incorrect. So what what is it? And we know we know deep down that it’s the things that we do, not the outcome if our weight changes. So what? It doesn’t really make any difference. It’s more what we’re doing at the time. And we have this if we have the ability and the privilege and the capacity to do so, there are behaviors that we can focus on that may or may not be completely in our control. A lot of them aren’t. But there are things that we can almost all of us can find something. And a lot of that is is sleep is nutrition and that’s balanced nutrition. That’s focusing on nutrition, not focusing on food that you think isn’t going to make you fat. It’s actual nutrition, exercise and again, separating weight loss from that. You talked about that earlier with with the stuff that you’re doing at the moment. Like if you can find joy in movement and joy and exercise, it is it is so freeing. I know you’ve been some of those dance things. [01:27:05][99.3]

Jameela: [01:27:06] Yeah, I on my Instagram. I do dances just to make sure that people can snack during exercise so we don’t look at it as a way to burn off calories. And we can listen to disco, move our bodies in ways that don’t feel painful and punishing, but just joyous because they want to exercise for mental health benefits. That’s all I’m interested in. And I still don’t, even though I’m training and doing this job and my body is sort of getting like bigger and more muscular. I still wear baggy clothes all of the time. And I don’t look in a mirror because I, I just don’t want to be involved. In all of that, I really just don’t want it to impact me. All I’m trying to monitor the fact that from exercising much more than I ever have before with experts who are helping me do this safely, I am feeling really happy, not because my body’s changed, because I really am not looking at that body, but because my mental health is just those chemicals that are making me feel better and less stressed and sleep better every single day. [01:28:02][56.0]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:28:03] Yeah, well, again, that that that’s that’s exactly why I’m talking about that. This stuff improve has the capacity to improve health irrespective as to what happens to your weight. You’re not losing weight at the moment. You’re not. You’re not. And you know, so but this is still making you feel good. And if we can find a way of introducing and focusing on these things, but the only way this stuff is going to be sustainable is if we can remove this pursuit of weight loss. And it’s so much easier said than done. But it’s really, really important. Like if we can actually remove the pursuit from the behaviors that we’re doing, it takes time to remove the desire it really does. Like I still struggle with that because I’m I’m still young. I’m still living in a society that vilifies weight gain and and puts this weight loss stuff up on a pedestal. And so I still have to check myself on a regular basis as to what I am doing and why I’m doing certain things. But it’s the act of checking myself. That means that I am able to focus on this stuff in a way along with a lot of my privilege and my capacity, but able to focus on this stuff in a way that isn’t for weight loss anymore. I used to try and go to sleep, surely only because I thought it was going to help me lose weight. That’s not the point of sleep like sleep. Sleep is really good for us. Full stop. Like your sleep hygiene is great. It’s got to do with weight. Like, you know, the one time the first time I remember craving vegetables and and and it wasn’t because I thought they were low calorie. I remember the first time that I was like, oh, I just want a bowl of veg tonight. And it was so like freeing. It was like, oh my word, this is this is what food should be. It was like I was listening to my body. I was like, my body wants veg. I haven’t had much OK cool. Not well I’m I’m tracking it on my calorie app and it’s telling me that I’ve only got this amount left, so I’m going to put veg in because that will that will, that will work like it was. It’s such a nice feeling if you can get there and it’s so worth the effort to get there so, so worth it because it’s it’s there’s so much joy in this stuff and we just don’t have any joy in this stuff anymore. Where’s the joy in food gone? [01:30:10][127.3]

Jameela: [01:30:11] Profit of a minority of people I hate them so much. I’m going to go after them for the rest of my life. Um, OK. Well, before you leave, because you’re a very busy, actual, real life doctor, will you tell me, Dr. Joshua Wolrich, what do you weigh? [01:30:27][15.9]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:30:28] So they sound cheesy, but but they are the things that matter. [01:30:31][3.1]

Jameela: [01:30:32] They’re always cheesy and that’s what I love [01:30:33][1.2]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:30:36] As of recently. I am a fiancee, [01:30:37][1.6]

Jameela: [01:30:39] Sure congratulate. [01:30:39][0.3]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:30:40] Which is which is exciting. I’m a son. Like, I love my mom, I am a doctor, and I am proud of that, and and that’s something that at times I haven’t been, but I am now I’m reaching a point where I’m proud of it again, which is cool. And I’m a friend. So those those are the four things. Those are the things that I feel you have made me come up with on the spot. But they’re quite nice. [01:31:07][26.7]

Jameela: [01:31:08] Yeah, I agree. And if I will impose one onto you, which I do sometimes you are also a public example of change for the better and for the service of others and and having the humility to do that in front of other people and to guide them towards their own change. And for that, I really appreciate you. And I hope that we stay in touch and I hope everyone goes out and read your book, Food Isn’t Medicine, where a lot of the things that we have touched on today are explained in such a humane and funny and approachable way. So well done in that book is very, very good. And I hope lots of people go out and buy it. And thank you for coming. I really appreciate it. [01:31:49][41.7]

Dr. Wolrich: [01:31:50] Thank you for having me. Anytime. [01:31:51][0.8]

Jameela: [01:31:51] Yeah fuck the diet industry. Goodbye. Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode. I Weigh with Jameela Jamil is produced and research by myself, Jameela Jamil, Erin Finnegan and Kimmie Gregory. It is edited by Andrew Carson. And the beautiful music you are hearing now is made by my boyfriend, James Blake. If you haven’t already, please rate, review and subscribe to the show. It’s a great way to show your support. We also have a bonus series exclusively on Stitcher Premium called Ask Jamila Anything. Check it out. You can get a free month of Stitcher Premium by going to stitcher.com/premium and using the promo code I Weigh. Lastly over at I Weigh we would love to hear from you and share what you weigh at the end of this podcast. You can leave us a voicemail at one eight one eight six six zero five five four three or email us what you weigh. Iweighpodcast@gmail.com and now we would love to pass the mic to one of our fabulous listeners. [01:32:46][55.0]

Listener: [01:32:48] I weigh courage, resilience, empathy and compassion. I’m strong and funny and bubbly and sweet, full of energy and great at singing and writing, and I’m in the process of recovering from depression and anxiety and body dysmorphia can be hard to deal with sometimes. But I managed to pull through up till now and I know I will continue to do so. Thank you. [01:32:48][0.0]

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