S3 E1: Fat and Happy with Laurie Santos
Does Weight-Loss Lead to Happiness? Virgie talks to The Happiness Lab host Laurie Santos about harmful happiness myths like "the perfect body" that contribute to diet culture, and Laurie tells Virgie how the science of happiness can be used to fight them.
Journal with us! In this episode, Laurie teaches us about the "arrival fallacy" (the illusion that once we attain our goal, we will reach lasting happiness) and "hedonic adaptation" (the tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive events). Write about a time in your life where one of these phenomena happened around food or body goals.
Virgie Tovar: [00:00:00] Hey Rebel Eaters! It's been a minute. Welcome to season three of a Rebel Eaters Club. I am Virgie Tovar. This season, we'll be offering you our very best tools for taking on love, happiness, diet culture, and body image with some incredible guests. And we'll do it all as always with snacks!
We're kicking things off with Dr. Laurie Santos. I met Laurie a few years ago when I visited Yale to talk to students about the impact of fatphobia. Laurie teaches there and lives in what is basically a castle. For about a week, Laurie and I were neighbors. That week, I learned so much about her amazing work as a psychology professor. I mean, she teaches the school's most popular class ever! She also hosts a podcast based on the class called The Happiness Lab, where she explores evidence-based ways to improve your wellbeing. It's great. She's great. Oh, when she also has the best hair, like, ever.
Laurie, welcome! Welcome to Rebel Eaters Club. I'm so glad you're here. I'm just thinking about your long, luxurious, beautiful hair. Um, maybe that's weird, but it's just so beautiful. I wish everybody could have the opportunity to experience you in real life. Um, but welcome to the show. Welcome – creepy welcome to Rebel Eaters Club!
Laurie Santos: [00:01:16] I would expect nothing less, Virgie. Thank you.
VT: [00:01:20] Um, Laurie, in Rebel Eaters Club tradition, we begin every conversation with a snack. Do you want to introduce what the snack is?
LS: [00:01:33] Yeah. Um, so it's kind of a weird snack, but, um, it's like, right now, it's like winter, and so there's not really like great produce happening, but there are delicious, delicious pears right now. And so my snack is a pear. Um, I'm really obsessed with Harry & David pears, which are like the most excellent pears in the universe.
VT: [00:01:56] Mm, yeah, so mine arrived yesterday, carefully swaddled, like a little chubby green baby. And when I opened up the tiny box that it was in, it – sort of the aroma just filled the kitchen with this, like floral… pears have a distinct aroma. It's, it's very floral. It sort of, I don't know. It's really beautiful.
LS: [00:02:16] Also, we're, we're missing this a little bit because, but I think like the chubby shape, like the shape of them, like they kind of have like a little butt and the stem is so kind of perky and cute. It just, it's a wonderful creature.
VT: [00:02:28] Yeah. So we might call the pear, you know, a body positive fruit. I don't know. I mean, yeah.
LS: [00:02:33] My pear is like really nicely sliced up. So I made it all sliced and pretty,
VT: [00:02:36] See, I was going to ask you, I like immediately before I was thinking about talking to you, I was like, is this a slice situation? Are we biting into it? Actually, I decided to do a half and half, so I cut half of it. And then I left half of it in case the crunch felt like an important part of the ritual.
LS: [00:02:59] I think if you start with the sliced version, it's good. Right. Because then it's like, you just get to enjoy the pear but not like your face squishing into the middle of the kind of pear-i-ness,
VT: [00:03:08] Yeah.
LS: [00:03:08] It's a thing. It is a thing. Yeah. Especially for good juicy yeah, if you go slice, I think we'll be okay.
VT: [00:03:13] Okay, great. Okay. Should we, I've got the slice.
LS: [00:03:16] Do we do –
VT: [00:03:17] Yeah. I feel like we should do the countdown. I've got some, I've got it in my left hand. I'm looking at it. Um, okay, 3, 2, 1. Um,
LS: [00:03:40] It’s super, it's super juicy. The awesome thing about a pear is that I don't know, you expect it to be kind of hard like an apple, but actually it's sort of more juicy, like on like the orange-y level of juicy spectrum and it's awesome.
VT: [00:03:54] So, I mean, I was also immediately transported to the movie City of Angels with – do you remember that scene in City of Angels where Meg Ryan is talking to Nicolas Cage, who was an angel, but she doesn't know it. And she's talking about what it's like to eat a pear because he doesn't have any senses? Or something…
CLIP: [00:04:13] Sweet. Juicy. Soft on your tongue. Grainy like sugary sand that dissolves in your mouth.
VT: [00:05:29] I think that in terms of my memory, it's like one of the only memories I have of a woman talking on screen lovingly about any food. And I just, it's just so poetic. Um, okay. So can you tell me about what memory or experience is associated with this pear?
LS: [00:05:52] Yeah, well, for me, you know, pears are really complicated. I have a complicated history when it comes to kind of enjoying my eating and really loving food. I feel like, you know, I of course grew up in the diet culture that pretty much everyone grew up in. And there was like, you know, the, you know, “good for you” food that was kind of not delicious and nasty, but that was what you were supposed to eat.
And then there was like the delicious stuff that like, oh my gosh, that was bad for you, right? Like this was my headspace growing up. You know, so what I've kind of come to in my eating is like: feed myself lovingly. Like, that's my move now, right? Like how can I feed myself something that's both delicious and ideally nutritious, but not necessarily nutritious.
Like what can you go for that like maximizes all of that stuff. So you can be nice to your body and also have stuff that tastes fricking good. And one of my earliest experiences, especially with the Harry & David pears came with my roommate, Angie, this is my roommate in graduate school. And her family like would send her, these Harry & David fruits all the time.
And she'd get this box of pears. And again, in my like diet culture brain, that was like, “that's the good for you thing. It's not going to be delicious. It's just like, you know, a healthy thing.” And like, holy crap, it was like a dessert. It was like, this is delicious.
In fact, I might be revealing too much about Angie, but Angie would say that eating the Harry & David fruit was like going down on a woman. As she imagined it. She's straight. So she just had to imagine, um, but it's like juicy. There's like, as you said, this like gritty, like, like all crazy. And so for me, the like, whoa, to think that something that could be – again, with this messed up dichotomy that I grew up with – that, that could be good for my body, that could feel really nutritious was also, you know, so delicious it was like going down on somebody, it's like, you know, world, world mess up. So that's why I pick the pear.
I just think it's fricking delicious. And it reminds us that all these dichotomies that we get in our head from diet culture, they're BS, right? You – just paying attention to your body and what feels good to you should be the way to go and, you know, feed yourself like you'd feed a friend. That's kind of the mantra.
VT: [00:07:48] Oh, I love that. That's really sweet. Um, can you talk about what you learned about food growing up and maybe that was home and maybe it was, you know, the culture at large or school. I just want to know what environment were you steeped into before you started having all these critical thoughts about diet culture?
LS: [00:08:09] Yeah. I mean, you know, I think the environment is so many of us were in right where you just grow up and like just every piece of the environment around you is pushing you towards diet culture. You know, I grew up, my mom was on Weight Watchers. You know, I remember being a young kid and she'd be grilling up like liver and onions ‘cause that's what you ate on Weight Watchers, like in the, you know, late seventies, early eighties and stuff.
And so there was kind of always this air of like, you know, food is this thing, you know, that can affect you negatively or can make you look ugly or that you have this kind of complicated relationship with. And so, yeah, I mean, I kind of, I feel like I kinda got to critically thinking about it, you know, maybe embarrassingly, like in my late thirties where I started to learn more about this stuff in part, you know, because of work of people like you, right? You know, I was like in college, right, where you read all the woke stuff and you know, like, like all the kind of typical stuff. And then, but it was much slower that it started to apply to me.
And it came through recognizing, you know, a lot of what this bad messaging was doing to the way I talk to myself in my head, you know, to the, the way I reacted and was able to enjoy things in the world. It was really mindfully recognizing how these patterns were affecting me and realizing like, wait, I want to switch this stuff around quite explicitly.
VT: [00:09:27] Yes, totally. I mean, I was just writing about, um, you know, how our value system can really be almost like a map to how this work can become integrated. I did this personal value sort a couple of weeks ago where there's just a ton of cards and there's just a ton of different values potentially like maybe 60 potential values that a person can have. And then you're asked to sort them from Very Important to Not Important. And I found that my top values were pleasure, joy, you know, adventure.
And, and I was realizing when I thought – My path to this… I mean, because, you know, similar, similarly I was aware of fat activism. I was aware of sort of some level of critique around diet, culture, and body, um, constructions of body, but it wasn't until, um, a fellow fat person said, “You can have a fabulous life as a fat person!” um, that it got under my skin. That it went from a message that was sort of an idea to something that was in my heart. And it made complete sense because of my value system. I was like, yes, of course something that's going to lead to something feeling exciting and amazing, and very pleasurable is the thing that's going to sell me and get me all in.
LS: [00:10:41] Yeah, totally. Exactly.
VT: [00:10:43] Um, okay, so you host the amazing podcast, The Happiness Lab. Um, as you mentioned, it's about examining the science of happiness and the surprising things that stand between us and maybe our own best life. So Laurie you're basically, I mean, I think of you as a happiness expert, I don't know. Do you identify that way?
LS: [00:11:05] These days, so many people call me that that I'm like, okay, fine. You know, as long as people realize that it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm happy all the time, then fine. Yeah. Sounds great.
VT: [00:11:15] Yeah. I mean, well, so this podcast, your podcast started as the most popular course at Yale, which you teach called ‘Psychology And The Good Life.’ So, Laurie, why are you teaching happiness to super smart young people who are at a extremely well-respected institution in a beautiful part of new England? Explain!
LS: [00:11:38] Well, I think we really have these strong misconceptions when it comes to what it means to be happy, right? I mean, we think happiness is about having, you know, the perfect job, the perfect amount of money, the perfect relationship, the perfect body. You know, my Yale students think it's getting into the perfect school. It's like, perfect, perfect, perfect.
But what the science shows is that, you know, the real route to happiness – And let me define happiness how social scientists think about it. Social scientists think of happiness as kind of two parts: being happy in your life and with your life.
So “with your life” is like you have a sense of meaning and purpose. It's overall the answer to the question, how satisfied are you with your life? That's kind of being happy with your life, but being happy in your life is like positive emotions. You have joy, you eat delicious pears all the time. You know, you have like great friends and like you, you, it's not that you don't experience negative emotion because as we'll probably talk about grief, negative emotion, all of that is part of being happy. In fact, it's part of living a meaningful life, but the ratio is pretty good.
And I think we think we get both of those from all the pursuits I've just talked about, right. Like if only I could get the perfect body right, then I would be happy. But in practice you can ask this, right. There are people who, you know, achieve what they think is the perfect body or at least, you know, lose weight or get plastic surgery or what have you. And we can ask, are they happy? And the answer is like, not really right.
You know, the evidence really suggests that people who go through these changes that they, you know, chose and wanted and in lots of cases worked super hard for… they're not as happy as they expect. Um, and this comes down to a bunch of different cognitive biases and fallacies.
You know, one of the big ones is what's called arrival fallacy. And this is true, you know, in body change domains, but it's also true in just like any domain. Like when I find out I get into Yale, I'm going to be happy. Or when I sell my first book, I'm going to be happy. You know, when your book, Virgie, gets on the New York Times bestseller lists, I will be happy, right. We pick some event that, like, when I arrive at this place, I will finally be happy. And the data suggests that basically never happens.
Um, my colleague at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, who I interviewed for my podcast said “happily ever after only happens, if you have three seconds left to live.”
Like it just doesn't, there's just no, you know, like our life changes and stuff comes up and there's going to be these transitions. And so I think part of it is that we really assume that happiness comes from these kinds of achievements, these accolades, but in practice, that is just not what the science shows. Happiness comes from other things. It comes from social connection. It comes from being present, even if that presence is with negative emotions. Um, it comes from self compassion and giving yourself and other people grace. It comes not from me, me, me, me, me, and focusing on the self, but focusing on others and community. Like people who do that stuff, wind up self-reporting that they're a lot happier.
And this is not like the version of the pursuit of happiness that we've all been sold, but it's what the science really shows.
VT: [00:14:35] Oh, I love that.
Now before we move on, I just want to take a second to acknowledge that happiness isn't the only motivation people have to participate in diet culture. People who are higher on the weight spectrum might get into diet culture because they're being denied basic humanity. Not because they necessarily want the so-called perfect body or partner.
And there's no arguing with the fact that smaller bodied people are afforded more basic humanity and access to all kinds of things. From fashion to friendship, to romance, to a regular day free from street harassment. We also know that ending diet culture isn't just about finding a better path to happiness. It's about something bigger: justice.
The arrival myth doesn't quite capture all of that nuance, but I still think it's important to say that, regardless of size, this work around noticing where the arrival myth does show up in our thinking is useful because we all definitely buy into some version of this myth.
Noticing is a great way to start breaking down some of that external messaging to make room for your desires and values, whatever they may be.
VT: [00:14:52] I had this realization a few years ago related to diet culture and bodies, um, that we've sort of been told and socialized into believing that privilege and happiness are a hundred percent overlaid. Um, that, you know, the acquisition of a certain type of body or a certain type of eating or whatever, um, is, is absolutely, you know, it's a one-to-one ratio of like privilege/happiness. And I think, right, um, diet culture is a really popular or common path that is supposed to lead to happiness.
And I think for a lot of us, the allure of staying in diet culture is the happiness we are supposed to unlock or earn at the end of our journey. And of course the end never seems to ever actually arrive, to your point around the arrival fallacy. But nonetheless, happiness is the carrot in that process.
LS: [00:16:44] Yeah. I mean, there's so, I mean, first off, there's just your – Happiness researchers have studied whether everything correlates with happiness. You know, income, which city you live in, which culture you're from, religion, like, you know, how much you exercise, how much you, like, have social connection. Like they've looked at everything, and they've never found a correlation between being skinny and being happy. Like, it's just, it's just not there, right.
But like, you know, people who really are trying to lose weight and then they get to their goal weight, or they get, you know, to whatever they were, you know – again, the arrival never really comes, but, you know, to the extent that they got to some arrival point that they picked, are they happier? And the answer is no.
And this just, isn't just true in diet culture. It's pretty much a feature of the human brain, right. You know, so take income levels, right. A lot of people think like, oh, if I could only make, I dunno, a hundred thousand dollars, right, then I'll be happier, or I could only do, you know, if I could only like, you know, I don't know, buy this cool new car, then I will be happier.
And the evidence suggests both arrival fallacy – when you get there, you're not as happy as you think – but even once you get the thing, you kind of get used to it really, really quickly. Like there's no kind of race that we can play where we get to the carrot ‘cause as soon as you get to what you think is the carrot, the carrot’s like a little bit further away, and this, this is what scientists call hedonic adaptation.
VT: [00:18:00] Ooh.
LS: [00:18:01] which is just a fancy way – Yeah, it sounds great, right? Hedonic, right, like happiness. Adaptation: you just get used to stuff. What does it mean? So, you know, I don't know, you get the new, the new version of iPhone, which we're really excited by. This happens to me sometimes, cause I'm like a Luddite and I keep technology like forever.
And then I finally get a new one. I'm like, oh my gosh, it's got all these new things. The colors are so awesome. And I can like download these apps that I couldn't download before. And for a second, like a brief moment, you're like, this is so cool. But then you just get used to it. It's just your phone. It doesn't have any like special features anymore, right?
Um, the same is true for sadly pretty much every good thing in life. Um, the flip side of hedonic adaptation is that all the bad things in life you kind of get used to too. Like, there are definitely things in life that you're like, this is just going to be awful and I'll never get through it, but like, actually you get used to that stuff too. Like think a breakup or, you know, like some bad news, right? Like all your rationalization processes kick in and wind up making you feel okay with just a reasonably small amount of time, you know, if you had us predict how long it would take.
And so that's hedonic adaptation, but what it means is that all these things in the ideals of, you know, the kind of diet culture that you talk about: being perfect, getting the perfect dress, like getting the perfect relationship. All this stuff that we think these kinds of changes are going to bring, they don't bring in the way we think. And so hedonic adaptation means we're constantly on this treadmill. People often talk about the hedonic treadmill, where we're like chasing something, thinking that once we get to it, it's going to be great. And either we never get to it because that's the structure of these kind of, you know, privileged chasing things. Or once you do get to it, you're like, okay, that wasn't as awesome as I thought, like move on to the next thing I think is going to be awesome.
And, you know, what we've looked at in the podcast, which is funny – I mean, it's, it's sad-funny, you know, it's a kind of sad-funny – um, is that if you look at people who've achieved these ideals of privilege after lots of hard work, they're still not happy.
And so I interviewed this fantastic guy, Clay Cockrell, who's a wealth psychologist. So he's, he's a mental health professional that works with the 0.00001%, right? So you have to have at least like over a hundred million dollars to like go to this guy.
And already it should be shocking that he has like clients, right? ‘Cause many of us thought if I had a hundred million dollars, a lot of stuff would get sorted out, right. Could fire the therapist, you know, it's like, but no.
And their problems are, “Oh my gosh. If only I could get to a billion dollars.” And so it should kind of remind us that so many of the things we think are going to work – again, a lot of things that we get these values of what's going to work from our culture – we think it's going to work. Our culture told us this is the thing we're supposed to do, but then we get there and we're just not very happy.
VT: [00:20:38] Right! I mean, yes. Like I have so many thoughts and questions. I mean, I call it diet brain, but I notice, I mean, diet brain is what you're talking about, which is like, when I do this, I will get X, Y, Z, and it's okay if I'm miserable on the way, because I'm going to get this thing at the end. But it's like, I've noticed, even though I don't restrict food anymore, the diet brain, which we could call the capitalist brain, we could call it the white supremacist brain, whatever you want to call it, right. It's essentially, it's the same function applied to all these different parts of life. So I'll notice my diet brain showing up in my romantic relationships, my diet brain showing up around work. Um, And it goes back to, you know, not being present, not being okay and accepting where you are right now.
I think all of us have the experience of sort of feeling the arrival fallacy, and maybe it's just there for a second where we're like, “Maybe the game is rigged!” even if it's only for a couple of seconds, but, but from a cognitive science perspective, why do people ignore that sort of maybe moment of like, “Hmm, maybe something isn't right.”
Why are they attached to this fallacy? Why is it so alluring?
LS: [00:21:54] I think it's just, you know, one of the things that's annoying about our brains is that this process of hedonic adaptation, we're blind to it. We just don't know it happens, right. And that means we can't accurately predict what we're going to enjoy and what we're not going to enjoy.
Um, one of my favorite kind of funny studies about this – so a lot of the studies about this have people predict like this wonderful thing is going to happen to you or this really terrible thing is going to happen to you. You know, how happy will you be? Or how sad will you be? And for how long? And what you find is like, as you might expect, people get this wrong.
So, you know, “You're going to lose 50 pounds. How happy to be?” “Oh my gosh, I'll be so happy.” No, you’ll just think you got to lose another 20 or something, right. You never, you know, how – “You're getting into Yale university. How happy will you be?” Like, nope. You know, you're immediately going to move on to the next goalpost, right?
So people are wrong about this, but there are some cases where they can find situations where people have to predict about the same thing over and over again, like literally the exact same thing. And they still get it wrong. And I think this is why diet culture takes hold, you know, for people who are kind of really embedded in it is like, “Oh, I'm gonna lose weight this time.” And then maybe you lose some weight and then you gain it back. But then you're like “This time when I do it, I'm really going to be happy if I get there.” Right? And it's like, you're not! You can't update. It's very sad. Yeah, this is, this is a trick of our brain. And you can kind of know it rationally, but it's very hard to feel it in your body.
VT: [00:23:11] Yes, absolutely. I mean at Rebel Eaters Club, we're really big on listening to our bodies and following our intuition, but it sounds like sometimes those impulses are not actually always aligned with our biggest desires or values. How do we deal with that complexity, Laurie?
LS: [00:23:28] Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, this is a problem, right? Like our brains, our brains are this, like, cloogy like pile of meat that's been evolving over time. Like it's not sorted, right? Like, like we give it like, oh my gosh, the human brain is so, but like, no it's got problems, right.
And, and one problem is that, you know, trauma leads us in all kinds of different directions when it comes to our intuition. I think you, you and this podcast and so many great people have done such good work trying to figure out how to unpack that. But even if you're not going through that, the evidence really shows that we have these brains that sometimes lead us in the wrong directions.
Like, so how I would build a brain. I would build a brain that like was really good at like detecting things that were pleasurable. Like, you know, brain is walking around, finds a pear, is like, “Oh, let me try this. Oh, this is pleasurable. Let's go after this.” Right. Like it would kind of know that. And the amount I worked to get to something would map onto like how pleasurable actually was in reality for me, right. Turns out brain stupid, not designed like that.
We seem to have a system. We seem to have a system for liking stuff. And by that, I mean, you know, the actual enjoyment I get out of the pear, like when I taste it just, there's a sensation, this taste, that feels good, right. You know, you get that probably out of social connection, out of the kind of joyful laughter interactions. I'm getting it out of this conversation with you, right. There's just stuff that feels good, right.
But then we have a separate system that craves stuff. That wants stuff. That's the motivational system that's kicking me in the butt and saying, “Go after that. Go after that. Go after that. Get obsessed with it. You know, beat yourself up if you don't go for it.”
And you'd hope that those are connected. Like you'd hope that my motivational system, my wanting system, as the scientists call it, would only go for stuff that I actually liked, but it turns out not so. There are these interesting disconnects between the system. Even in like local things.
I think when I've had a bad day, I'm like, “I will really like to sit on the couch and scroll through Netflix and like do nothing and not talk to anybody and not leave the house.” But actually, what would I like? I'd probably like calling a friend. I'd probably like going for a walk and like moving my body in a kind way.
Like, there's all this stuff that would feel better. I just don’t want it.
Um, you know, we get a lot of wanting for my phone. Like, I definitely feel like, “Oh, I want to scroll Reddit for like 16 hours,” or “I really want to like, look at it.” Like the wanting system makes me do it, but then if you ask me at the end of it, like, “Hey, how did that feel?” I'm like, “I kind of feel sort of apathetic and nasty,” you know? But I don't have like craving or wanting for talking to other humans necessarily, or like again, doing this stuff that will really give you liking.
That is a disconnect between the wanting and liking system. And I think that that disconnect gets worse when you have different kinds of cultures and systems feeding into your wanting system, right?
The wanting system gets way hooked up in fear. I think trauma plays all kinds of like, you know, you want to like be by yourself and protect yourself, right. It gets fed into that system, and that doesn't necessarily map onto what you're gonna like.
And so I think for me, you know, you could hear about this disconnect and be like, “Oh my gosh, I'm never going to sort out my brains. I should never listen to my intuition, whatever.” But really when you hear about this, it gives you a path forward. Which is, which is presence. Which is mindfulness. Which is like, “Gosh, I really get to take time to figure out and notice what I like and what I don't like.”
And, you know, that's, that's one of the reasons I pick the pears for this, right, is I feel like it's like a pear is one of these cases of like, actually I like the pears. They're fricking really good. They're not, they don't have to get categorized as like “healthy food” in my diet brain. It's like, I can enjoy this.
VT: [00:27:05] Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I'm wondering, like for someone like me who really values intuition, but also knows that other factors like trauma and cultural influences play into the information my body is giving me, how do we arrive at the right answers for us?
LS: [00:27:22] Yeah, well, I think it's, it's really, I mean, from this perspective of this wanting/liking system, it's finding ways to get in tune with the liking. And that means being present and noticing, right.
Like, you know, mindful eating. Like tasting the food and noticing how it feels in your body and really trying to do that in a way where you're really paying attention to the physical sensations of this stuff, right. That can be really powerful.
Taking time to notice how you talk to yourself, right? Like what are the voices in your head saying and realizing they're just thoughts, right?
I mean, for any listener who doesn't know: the thoughts in your head aren't you. They're just your thoughts. And those thoughts can be influenced by all kinds of crap. Your trauma, your culture, you know, like capitalism, blah, blah, blah. It's not you, it's just like a conglomeration, and when you start to recognize that and question it and realize you can change the way you talk to yourself, that can be really, really powerful for breaking some of these things down.
And so I think, you know, real practices where you engage in that kind of presence, whether it be a meditation practice, a breath-based practice, um, all of those things can be powerful.
And I think within that is also the necessity of getting in tune with your negative emotions. Again, misconception, you know, from all this stuff that we have: To be happy, I need to have no negative emotions, no anxiety, no sadness, no anger. Just get rid of those, avoid them and suppress them completely. And then I'll be happy.
Um, first of all, it doesn't work. You know, there's lots of empirical evidence that you just cannot suppress your emotions. You try, but they leak out in your physiology. The body keeps score, as it were. Um, so just doesn't work, but it turns out that the way to get through negative emotions is actually to go through them and not avoid them.
And so practices where you really sit with the sadness and the trauma that comes from, you know, like body-hating culture. Like the time that you sit with whatever came from being part of a like nasty childhood or a traumatic childhood. You know, that you sit with like, just how pissed off and frustrating, like, you know, the fact that we haven't achieved all that we want to achieve in social justice feels like right now, right?
Those are things that we need to take time to literally sit with and allow in our lives. And the odd thing is that by sitting with them, by not rejecting them, by being like, “It's here, let's go. Let's hang out together, you know, negative feelings of frustration, sadness, whatever.” That's how you get through them. That's how you process them and overcome them.
VT: [00:29:48] Yes. And I think, you know, going back to the concept of happiness, like I think that this is how you create a meaningful life.
Um, so, okay. Laurie, um, being a human being is a lot of work in conclusion. Um, I love what you said. I love what you said about the brain, and I think there's an opportunity – immediately when I was thinking about this idea of kind of like our imperfect weird sort of strangely designed brains, I was like, “it's another opportunity for radical self-acceptance”
LS: [00:30:20]Exactly. And I think it's so powerful.
VT: [00:30:20] It's like, “I see you brain!”
LS: [00:30:22] It's yes, yes.
I have this, ‘cause, you know, so one of the things I realize is that the right move is embracing what social scientists call like self-compassion. Like, which in the scientific literature comes with these three parts.
One that we talked about a lot is mindfulness, right? Like noticing what these voices are making you feel like, noticing what you need, um, non-judgmentally. That's like the important part of mindfulness. Um, having a common humanity, realizing, “Hey, everybody goes through this. Lots of folks have trauma. I'm just human with this beat up meat brain that's leading me in the wrong directions. And like, I shouldn't beat myself up.” And then just like a real sense that, you know, you are just human and it's okay. And you need to give yourself some self kindness. That's kind of the third piece.
That the way to get yourself to achieve any goal isn't to drill sergeant yourself. Like the way to get – motivate yourself is with kindness. Like talk to yourself, like you talk to a friend.
And you know, this is why I love this podcast so much is because I think it's really trying to help people cultivate exactly that balanced voice. Like, you know, we're all like reacting to this awful diet culture and like we're all gonna do it differently. And that's cool. And we're like figuring out our journey and our path and that doesn't involve beating ourselves up.
VT: [00:31:34] Yes. Yes. I love this. I'm so excited. Laurie, it's been so fun talking with you.
Laurie, last question: if you had one tool you wanted to pass on to people who are breaking free from diet culture, trying to build their own version of happiness and something meaningful, you know, what is that tool?
LS: [00:31:56] I mean, they already have your podcasts. So I feel like they're doing okay. But yeah, um, my psychological tool, my psychological tool would be to invest in practices that build your self-compassion. Self-compassion as – being mindfulness, an okay recognition of your common humanity, like non-judgmentally recognizing that you're just human and being, um, kind to yourself.
And if you need a good reference for this, I would suggest checking out this lovely book called Fierce Self-Compassion by the researcher Kristin Neff, where she argues that the only way to, you know, come through through trauma to fight privilege, you know, to fight diet culture, all, all the social justice stuff we want to see in the world is to be fiercely self compassionate with ourselves. It's not to beat ourselves up.
So yeah, self compassion would be the one tool.
VT: [00:32:42] Oh, Laurie, you're wonderful! You're a genius. You're doing amazing work. Thank you for being on Rebel Eaters Club!
LS: [00:32:50] Thanks so much for having me. It was super fun.
VT: [00:32:53] Wow. Lori's work. Always blows my mind. I'm going to be thinking about hedonic adaptation a lot this year. Laurie brought up some important questions I'd love to encourage us all to chew on. Like, how do you sort intuition from trauma from cultural influence? And how can we remember to use the tool of self-compassion early and often to push back on the messages we get from diet culture?
If you have thoughts on these questions or the conversation you just heard, or even if you just want to say hi, reach out, shoot us a message at rebeleatersclub@gmail.com.
Rebel Eaters Club is brought to you by Transmitter Media. This episode was written and produced by Isabel Carter. Sarah Nics is Transmitter’s executive editor. Wilson Sayre is our managing producer, and Gretta Cohn is our executive producer. And I'm your host Virgie Tovar. Rick Kwan is our mix engineer. And thanks to Taka Yasuzawa who wrote some of the music we use in the show.
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