The Culture Wars That Are Undermining Your Eating Recovery

Welcome to the Satiated Podcast, where we explore physical and emotional hunger, satiation, and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host, Stephanie Mara Fox, your Somatic Nutritional Counselor.

There is a lack of nuance in the field of food and body image recovery. You have one side that tells you that you need to eat all foods, all foods fit, and that you need to keep eating all foods to habituate to them so that you're not as drawn to them anymore. And then you have the other side that says you're addicted to food, you need to eliminate these addictive foods from your life and be hypervigilant with not eating them. Or with body image recovery it can feel like you have to move toward unconditionally loving your body as it is right now or not even care about your body because your life is more than just a physical appearance.

I like to explore the messy middle where sometimes you might need to take a food out of your life to start to feel your body again and sometimes eating more of a food will create food safety. Sometimes, you are eating more sugar than your body can handle and it is disrupting how stable you can feel in your body and sometimes you just need to have the damn birthday cake with your friends and move on with your life. Sometimes, tracking your macro intake is going to feel like the most empowering and embodying thing you can do and sometimes throwing all the rules out the window and noticing what does enough of a food feel like in your body is going to bring you into closer and safer relationship with your body. We are drawn to binary either/or thinking because it makes things easier and streamlined. If you just need to eat more ice cream so that you can stop feeling so out of control with ice cream, that gives you a focus and a strategy and a way forward. But the truth is that food recovery is never that simple. This is why I wanted to bring Dr. David Wiss back onto the podcast to chat about this some more.

Dr. David Wiss, is a functional medicine clinician and nutritional psychiatry researcher whose work sits at the intersection of gut health, metabolism, genetics, and mental health. He is the founder and clinical director of FxMed Mental Health, a virtual practice specializing in complex, treatment-resistant cases — built on the conviction that most people labeled treatment-resistant are simply undertested. His approach follows every biological thread until the real picture emerges, integrating science with a deep respect for the body's inherent healing intelligence. Dr. Wiss holds a PhD in Community Health Sciences, has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed publications, and his research has been cited in The New York Times, National Geographic, and The Washington Post. He is a Functional Medicine Certified Professional and the creator of the Wise Mind Nutrition app. We chat about how the field of food recovery is stuck, the trajectory and risk factors for having struggles with food, food addiction and what Dr. Wiss has termed ultra-processed food use disorder, cultural wars occurring in food recovery, what the food recovery field is missing, balancing individual and public health perspectives when it comes to food, and embracing non-binary thinking and nuanced messaging.

These are the kinds of conversations we'll have in the Somatic Eating® Program. Yes, this program is a three month live experience, but it is also a way to enter into community to chat about what feels confusing around food and body image with all of the conflicting messaging we receive. Sometimes I stay over an hour on some calls to talk through all of this confusion. So if you're tired of navigating food and body image recovery alone, go to somaticeating.com/the-somatic-eating-program or click on the link in the show notes. As a reminder this next class starts on October 29th so you have 11 more days to sign up.

Now, welcome Dr. David Wiss! I am thrilled to have you back on the podcast, and really excited to get into our conversation today. For anyone who doesn't know you or missed our first episode together, I'm wondering if you can just reshare a little bit of your background and how you got into the work you're doing today.

Dr. David Wiss 05:14

Yes, absolutely. I had my own mental health journey in my early 20s, where I found wellness, and it transformed my brain, and it made me a different person, and that shaped my career trajectory. I pursued becoming a dietitian early. This was 2010. Working as a trainer through that arc, developed a vision to bridge physical health and mental health, and study the biological basis of mental health, and I started with addictions, and then moved into eating disorders, and have broadened into anxiety, depression, trauma, etc. So I've done a lot of one-on-one counseling. I then pursued my doctorate from UCLA, public health and health psychology. Kind of pivoted away from nutrition and started focusing more on childhood trauma, the biological embedding of adversity, and then built the Wise Mind Nutrition app, which bridges concepts of dialectical behavioral therapy with nutrition education. Was built to be a supportive source of education and accountability for folks on a healing journey. Proceeded to do the Institute of Functional Medicine training, and have really focused a lot on functional medicine and bringing it all together. Functional medicine for mental health is really what I'm into. My latest practice is called FX Med Mental Health, where we do specialty lab testing for treatment-resistant mental health conditions.

Stephanie Mara 06:42

Yeah, I mean, even from the last time we connected, I just hear like so much has evolved in what you've been exploring and learning and piecing together. And what I really wanted to bring you back on here to talk about was the article that you just published because I think it's an important conversation that I want to continue to spread awareness around of how much more nuance needs to be approached in food and body image recovery fields, and it's not talked about enough. I think even at the beginning of your article, you were talking about how in like four decades there has not been much improvement in the food recovery field, and so I'm wondering if you can speak more to that.

Dr. David Wiss 07:25

Yeah, that's a great place to start because it's the real foundation for why these conversations are needed. It seems like when folks like myself have proposed concepts such as addictive eating and the role of trauma, sometimes there's pushback from the entrenched system and says no. This is what we've been doing. This is how we've always done it. This is our focus here. And I understand the need to defend, but if your data doesn't show improvements, then you're just defending the status quo, which I think the data says is not good enough. There's even suggestions that abstinence rates and recovery rates have actually declined over time, and so to me that's the real basis for new conceptual models, new ways to think about these problems. In my background and training, what we do is zoom out and just try to look at life course context and timelines and biology, psychology, social context together, and that's I think what, you know, I really valued about the program I did in public health was like looking at people, but also thinking about groups, generations, and all of the other pieces that contribute to how we show up in our daily lives and how we show up to clinicians who are assessing us.

Stephanie Mara 08:48

Yeah, I completely agree. I think some of the research that I've been reading shows that binge eating disorder recovery is 17%. Like that is so low that it's like, hey, we are missing something. Like, something in this field has to be updated. And something that you wrote about was kind of looking at like the trajectory of how these food behaviors even get created. And I'm wondering if you can share more about that because I think it's important. Because I find that even with a lot of the individuals I work with, there's still this entrenched idea that this has to do with like willpower or weakness, or there's something wrong with a person, rather than this like very wise bodily adaptation that has occurred.

Dr. David Wiss 09:32

Yeah, absolutely. When people like myself think about antecedents, risk factors, right? We end up drawing what we call black box epidemiology. It's like this leads to this, and this goes here, and this is a mediator, and this is a moderator, and you end up with these sort of elaborate schemas that connect dots. And I just want to start off by saying that an arrow. In a diagram doesn't mean that it's deterministic. It just means that the likelihood becomes higher. So, for example, when we say adverse childhood experiences increases the likelihood of an outcome such as substance use disorder or an eating disorder or food addiction, it doesn't mean that the person had to have these specific types of ACEs in order to have those diagnoses or outcomes. It just means when you look at populations, the folks that tend to have more adversity, it clusters with these downstream, quote unquote, disorders. And so, you know, of course, anyone that's intelligent in the research space says, well, is it the ACEs themselves that are mechanistically causing binge eating patterns, or is it you know the context? Are people that have ACEs more socially disadvantaged, right? And so you have this sort of split between biological scientists who like to look at mechanisms and social scientists who like to look at context, and so I've always prided myself in having background and training in both. And I think the sort of eating space is a perfect example of how they're both very active simultaneously. You can't, you know, map out someone's eating disorder trajectory without biology, neurobiology, and you can't map it out without understanding family dynamics and culture and the role of weight stigma in society. So it's very difficult to build models that have all of those things together, and so folks end up sort of picking a silo and saying, "Let's do mechanism research" or "Let's do social science research." And I've always tried to combine them.

Stephanie Mara 11:51

Yeah, it's interesting. I'm curious how you feel about the word addiction because I've had people on here, and even I'm very cautious about saying that someone is addicted to food, and I'm curious about because that was a term that was like in your article around like this addictive to food subtype or you know to ultra processed foods. So I'm curious from your lens of what you've learned and what you researched and wrote about how the word addiction was the thing that encapsulated what you were describing, or do you feel like there is something that some people need to be looking out for that they can be addicted to a certain type of food? I feel like it's a little tricky to navigate because when we get into the conversation of like quote unquote food addiction, I think there's then there's this fear that starts to be produced around food, where then someone finds themselves eating more of that food from a place of scarcity and not really hearing their body's feedback of like, but how does this food even feel in my body?

Dr. David Wiss 12:54

Sure, language matters, semantics matter. I'm always interested in the evolution of our word choices and how we ascribe meaning around them, and semantics are also an easy place where people could like pit an argument against something that they don't understand and to be able to say right like it's the word. In the article, I actually propose using the term ultra processed food use disorder. I don't actually promote the language around addiction so much. We started there with food addiction 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and then you know maybe five or six years ago, many of us pivoted to ultra processed food addiction because it's really specifying foods that were engineered by mega corporations to maximize their profit, and they have actual research laboratories where they manipulate the food to, you know, maximize the neurobiological response. So, like by definition, using addiction neuroscience to produce their products. So that term has some emphasis and interest right now, but I think to be consistent with DSM five, many of us have used the phrase ultra processed food use disorder to look at the 11 criteria, such as loss of control, continue to use despite negative consequences, failure to fulfill major social and familial roles, and you know, in the DSM five, it's severity, mild, moderate, severe, and in order to meet criteria, one has to have clinical significance, which means that there's some level of impairment or distress in their lives, and I think that's an important piece. It's like someone might have reward based eating, or hedonic eating, which are kind of synonyms for addictive eating. I also use the term addiction-like eating to capture it, but it becomes more of a clinical problem when it impacts them and causes distress. There's conflict; they feel impaired in their ability to show up, and so that's an important distinction that does get missed sometimes in the semantic conversations. It's not like just about the food and the way it's engineered, or you know even the person's brain chemistry while eating it or recovering from it or thinking about it, but also how it affects someone's spirit and the way that they show up in their relational health, and that's where it becomes more of a mental health conversation rather than just a you know neurobiological mechanistic one. There are people that have a lot of let's say they use the term hijacked in a lot of the addiction neuroscience. Their cognitive load is overemphasizing, you know, food. You've probably heard and used the term food noise. There's a lot of different ways to describe what can happen when a lot of these things ensue, and I like to juggle around different language over time. But you know, to think about addiction-like eating, ultra-processed food use disorder. I like reward-based eating and hedonic eating, which is more of a pursuit of pleasure or reward. But I landed in the article at ultra-processed food use disorder because it does actually think about it more as a mental and behavioral problem rather than just a weight issue or a food issue.

Stephanie Mara 16:28

Yeah, I mean, I'm curious how you've seen yourself kind of work through the nuance of this conversation because I find that once we start like labeling foods in these ways, I agree with you in that, like, yeah, there are some foods that someone is more likely to, let's say, binge eat on than other foods.

Dr. David Wiss 16:50

Sure.

Stephanie Mara 16:51

And so I think it's like a really fine line to walk because I know that a lot of individuals are like, well, I've tried to just cut those foods out, and then it feels like restriction, and then I end up binge eating on them even more, and so I'm wondering what you've seen and how to kind of like navigate that.

Dr. David Wiss 17:12

Yeah. So the nuance that's missing is a discernment between I think what you're describing, which is like individual health and population health, and sometimes we need different language for public health versus for clinical interventions per se. I think what you're describing is a situation where there is a person that has disordered eating and has maybe restrictive patterns or OCD spectrum patterns of avoidance, compulsion, body image disturbance, to where a certain phrase is triggering to them, not helpful to them, etc. The question is, if that's true for let's be generous and say 10% of the population, does that mean that that language wouldn't be acceptable for the public health conversation for the rest of the 90? And there's a lot of people that would say, yeah, absolutely, because eating disorders are deadly. Therefore, you can't say something in a public health context that's going to marginalize a small percentage of the population. You have to cut this out entirely, and there would be other people that would say we're talking about ultra-processed foods so that we can improve school lunches and that we can get people that are socially disadvantaged better access to foods. That maybe we could get healthier food in the prison system. Maybe we could build guidelines around food that would inform the public's health, right? And so those are the sort of tricky trade-offs, right? Where thinking about you know individual messaging versus public health messaging, and I think that's where a lot of the friction comes. Sometimes you know when you hear something in the news or from the government about ultra-processed foods, that this is translating to like the therapy office. So sometimes clinically, we have to help. I have to help people navigate differences between what might be true at the low-income elementary school versus what might be true in our office at your lunch today. And so, when you confuse and conflate individual and public health, you're always going to have confusion and issues. You know?

Stephanie Mara 19:26

Yeah, I really appreciate you sharing that distinction because I think it gets really confusing for a lot of people, especially with all the messages that are coming out on social media as well. Where it's like, okay, if we take a moment to pause and say, who is this person talking to? What is the intent of this information, and is it going to serve you based off of all the things you're listing, the context of your life, your body, your situation, and sometimes, like learning, I hear just how to filter different things out for one'self to be like, hey, this message isn't a message that I can receive right now, based off of where I'm at.

Dr. David Wiss 20:06

That's right, and it's very sensitive in the food and body recovery space to where, you know, you could get someone who was, let's say, went through a residential eating disorder treatment and learned about body positivity and food positivity, and then they could land on someone's social media account. That's you know walking through the grocery store and saying, don't eat this, eat that, to be able to say, hey, maybe this isn't the right content for me. But because I think the eating disorder field has been so marginalized and people feel so confused, it can turn more into like anger and crusading. Whereas, like if there's an intuitive eating counselor or therapist that's on her channel promoting cupcakes and say just eat the cupcake, I don't think someone that was trying to recover from diabetes using a medical model would necessarily get as upset about that, and they say, oh, there's oh, they're helping people that have issues that are other than mine. Go do your thing, right? So you end up with these culture wars. What side are you on? And my deepest belief is that that is by design that the food space has been intentionally fractured in a way so that people will continue fighting over terminology, things like ultra-processed foods, you know, the sort of obesity medical model versus the eating disorder model. I do believe that they've, and when I say they, I mean power structures put a lot of fuel on these fires intentionally, so that people will be infighting and continue to be confused. That feels very obvious to me, and partially because I study the commercial determinants of health and the corporate structures that drive the food supply and the messaging, and so that has always felt very obvious to me, which is why I've never like I'll say fallen victim to that paradigm where you're like having to pick a side on an issue. That's the kind of divide that we have in our society. It's a trap to me where people feel that you have to sync up with a particular group to have an identity to feel safe as part of a tribe-that to me is like it's the playbook. And I've just watched it play out in the food space for so many years. And you know, if I'm honest with you, it led me to like eventually being exhausted. It's the same way people get exhausted with politics, and at some point you just don't trust any of it. People stop voting. You're just like it's all this big smokescreen for this behind the scenes power grab, money grab, right? And people get burnt out, and it happens to people. And I watched a lot of my colleagues, you know, get burnt out. You know, they were afraid to post a healthy lunch on their Instagram story, or they ate the cupcake at the eating disorder networking lunch, and they didn't want to, but they felt like they had to. It's just this inauthentic space where people are sending out social signals, scanning the environment to look for your in group. If I'm honest, I'm embarrassed by it. It's embarrassing that it's turned into that.

Stephanie Mara 23:29

Yeah, it makes me think of actually a lot of practitioners do talk about how they come from a background of having healed from some kind of food behavior themselves, or body image behavior, and so I wonder about like there are certain things even that you point to in your article around trauma, experiencing adverse childhood experiences, you know, maybe growing up around parents with certain tendencies as well, and how like okay, we can stop the food behavior from happening, and are practitioners doing their deeper inner work as well, or are we all just in these fields playing out the same familial dynamics that we were trying to heal with food, but then the whole industry is trying to like heal it within itself? I don't know if that's actually happening, but it would be really kind of interesting to look at that. But you know what you point to is, and I've sensed and felt this too that if I put out a message that is anti anti diet, like you know now suddenly I'm like promoting the food behaviors that I'm trying to support people in ending, and it's like no, that's not the intention here. It's just there's a lot of as we've been talking about nuance and things that we're missing if you just choose a team.

Dr. David Wiss 24:50

Yeah, and what you described with the industry and the healers has also played out historically in the substance use disorder field I think. And that industry really birthed most of the people that worked in the space had a personal addiction or alcoholism story, and 12-step culture was a big part of that. And so, a lot of people either went to treatment or went to 12-step or both, and then ended up working in treatment. And you know, when the whole staff has a personal story, maybe they have a 12-step background. It does create this really strong bias in the work that they're doing. And so, what what happened is there was a period where you know most of the addiction treatment centers had 12-step culture embedded in, and it was kind of like you know, there was an expectation that people that came in were going to fit into this model, and then you know, maybe 10 years ago, people woke up and like, this is crazy. There's a lot of different things that help people with substance use disorders. Not just that, but it was hard to change because the actual practitioners themselves were the ones that were carrying that own bias, right, and so it's probably safe to say that there's some of that same pattern happening in the eating disorder field, which is that a lot of people have their own story, and that colors the way that they see their clients and their patients. And the phrase that I always use: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? And so it's important to be able to zoom out and see where some of these patterns perpetuate and how we can change people, but also change systems.

Stephanie Mara 26:31

Yeah, I'm curious with even what you've noticed and what you wrote about, what do you feel like we're not talking about enough? Like what the field is kind of missing and not referencing because all of this maybe like infighting in politics is happening.

Dr. David Wiss 26:48

Yeah, I mean one of the parts about the Unified Theory paper-it's called the Unified Theory of Restrictive and Addictive Eating-and then there's a much longer title as well. Was that I didn't want to focus on like the specifics of the nutrition because I knew that that was an area where that's where a lot of the contention and debate lives. Most people can agree that trauma is a risk factor for disordered eating. Most people know that trauma is a risk factor for addictions. Most people know that you can look at you know symptoms rather than diagnoses and find certain patterns. Right? I discerned between patterns of impulsivity versus compulsivity to think about some people as being rigid or overordered versus being underordered or more loss of control, and I think there's a a lot of things that people can agree on with the. So, what does it mean on the plate? Like, what does it have to do with their lunch? I stayed out of that because I've written a lot about that in previous years, but I knew that that would be a place where people might be over focusing. You know, it's like people are putting so much emphasis on food and and weight. And people like myself, I'm more interested in the brain, the biological legacy of trauma, the genetic burdens of yesteryear, the kind of family environment growing up. And so I do believe that, particularly you know, with if someone's a dietitian, for example, they're more focused on lunch. You know, if someone's a therapist, they're more focused maybe on family dynamics and unresolved emotional stuff and cognitive distortions. And so, yeah, I think that life course contextual work is super important. The reason why it's you know a tough sell is because these aren't things that we can easily change. You can't really intervene on an A score. You can't change the number. But like, I don't know. I believe that when you help someone connect the dots in their life and make connections and understand etiology and understand the manifestations and looking at things as causes and consequences and all connected, it helps someone get a stronger intuition about their own roadmap forward. You know, and that's where I think people should focus a little bit more. Less on categories like like diagnoses and more on clusters and pattern recognition. Right. So I think one of the key points of my paper was that I recognized a pattern between restrictive variants such as anorexia nervosa and OCD, they cluster well together versus more addictive phenotypes that cluster more with ADHD symptoms. It doesn't mean that it doesn't cross. The whole point of the paper was to show how they do, but being able to see patterns in terms of developmental, parental, generational, and then you know, seeing how these play out over the lifespan is super, super helpful in understanding how someone got here and what might be some important next steps.

Stephanie Mara 30:15

Yeah, absolutely, I completely agree with that. You know, just having the awareness of what you're working with can cultivate a lot of self compassion, and self compassion is very parasympathetically activating. So you know, if the whole point of this is to feel safer in your body, to feel safer with food, to feel safer to be alive, then yeah, having a little bit of understanding of even what you said, like there are some things that we can't change, like neurodiversity, is not a problem.

Dr. David Wiss 30:44

That's right.

Stephanie Mara 30:45

Like it's not something to fix. Your brain isn't broken. It just functions differently. And when you understand, like, oh, this is just the way my brain works, and here's how it gets overwhelmed, or here's where it forgets to eat, or here's what it feels really drawn to and never wants to stop eating, because that's simply the way that my brain works. I always feel like it opens up an experience of choice where it's like, okay, you can eat that food knowing that like it might feel harder to stop based off of what your brain is getting from that, but you also can choose not to knowing that like, hey, I don't want to be in a situation where I feel like I can't say no, so I can say no now and be like, I just don't want to feel the way that food makes me feel. But that neither path is wrong. It's just understanding yourself, understanding what you're working with, and then giving yourself choice of like you're going to do the best you can.

Dr. David Wiss 31:39

Right. And another option is to not focus so much on the food or the degree of processing, and think about it more as like these are neurochemical imbalances that I'm dealing with. What are some other ways that I can approach neuromodulation through mind body, or doing trauma work, or engaging in other yogic practices and prioritizing sleep and other substance-seeking behaviors. If you need to focus more on dopamine support versus serotonin support, as opposed to like the hyper focus on whether the sauce has sugar in it or not, those are the kind of things that like I got burnt out on. You know what I mean. That's not what I don't want to argue with people about that. Like, you want the sauce? Have the sauce. If you don't, don't. Like, maybe you should have it, and you don't think you should. Maybe you shouldn't have it. Like, sure, but that's not what the intervention is. Intervention is more upstream, and if someone engages in recovery and neuromodulates and grows and does neuroplasticity and whether it's a medication or a psychedelic or some other deeper work that ends up translating into one's relationship with food and so I think people are too focused downstream. In public health, we say go upstream.

Stephanie Mara 32:59

Yeah, thank you for bringing that back around again, you know something that I find myself saying a lot is like this is not a food problem. Like the more that we keep bringing it back to like how do I stop eating X Y Z foods, we're focusing on what has become the answer to something else because like you are feeling drawn to eating those foods and that amount for a reason that may have to do like your naming with ultra processed foods and how they digest in your body, but may have something entirely not to do with the food at all, but just like what's happening inside of your body. And yeah, we talk a lot about here, so thank you for also bringing that in of like, what else? Like, food has been a resource for you for so long. It's become your sole coregulator. Like there are so many other resources out there that sometimes I find, I know this happened to me too. I just forgot. I forgot that I had a choice and there were other things that I could choose besides food. And when I started reminding myself, like the binge eating just slowly kind of went away. When it was like, wait a second, there are other ways to stabilize this body.

Dr. David Wiss 34:05

And again, thank you for that. I want to emphasize the discernment between individual health and population health in the messaging. Right, what I heard from you, and I agree with, is that you know, for certain individuals, it's pretty wise to look at context and make a decision that this is deeper than the food, and that I don't have a food problem. I have an emotion regulation problem. I have a sense of self issue. I have attachment wounds, right? And to look at that healing arc more comprehensively, and so an individual might say, I don't have a food problem, but it would be disingenuous to say that we don't have a food problem in the United States because we do, right? And that's where the kind of tension rises, right? If someone is saying, my therapist told me I don't have an eating problem, but then, like in the headline news, it's like, no, there's some serious problems with the food supply in the U.S. There are things that are known to be harmful, documented that like we're not able to remove from the food supply, right? And those are dialectically true. And that's I think where people struggle is that you can have a real serious public health issue around nutrition and then manage it clinically on your own, based on your own mental health profile, based on your own psychological needs and you know social needs, etc. And I think that's where a lot of folks end up being confused: is like what's true for a person isn't true for a group, and what's true for a group isn't true for a person.

Stephanie Mara 35:38

Yeah, I love this of like just feel it in my body of needing to kind of grow capacity to like hold both.

Dr. David Wiss 35:45

That's it.

Stephanie Mara 35:46

And especially when it comes to, and I've seen this a lot in the food recovery world, is that it's like there's so much focus on yes, the individual without putting it into the context of the world and the public, of like okay, but you are also living in a world that like is having an issue with. I mean, look how many like even just recalls of food are happening right now, and people living in food deserts and like not having access to just nutrition in general. So yeah, it's holding the nuance of both and kind of learning that discernment of like, okay, are they talking about a public health issue or are they talking about a food recovery issue for the individual?

Dr. David Wiss 36:35

Yeah, I do think that that's a key take home from our drop in, right? That people get lost in between those different messages, and an individual should be able to customize a message of food and body recovery for themselves. But that takes a lot of work to feel a strong sense of self and to feel a secure nervous system to be able to say, you know what, this is true for me. And when some people are in early recovery or feeling fractured, they don't have that, and so they take on someone else's, you know, nutritional identity. They join a group, right? They say, I'm going to eat like these people. I'm going to message like these people. And I think that's an important distinction too is and this is also true for alcohol and addiction recovery is like if you landed here, you know you're probably not on a winning streak, and you can just join the collective consciousness and just like tap into the group's power. But at some point in the journey, you will have an intuition that you can use and that you can implement, and it doesn't mean that you have to turn against the group, you can just be your own self, and you can celebrate who you are as a product of being part of a movement, and it doesn't have to create a split. And so, I think there's also a lot of folks that feel an allegiance to an anti-diet movement because it really helped them, and so they end up kind of playing it out over time, which is like this thing is what helped me get through my eating disorder recovery. I have to be obedient to the messaging to make sure that they know that I'm paying respects and paying homage to this movement. And it does kind of happen at the cost of like individual agency and authenticity. And I think these are more advanced topics in recovery. Like that, someone could at some point get to a place where you can like trust your own thinking, and that you don't need someone else's permission. Right? You can just be authentically yourself. That I mean, that's the goal, right? And that's usually what I'm trying to move my clients toward.

Stephanie Mara 38:40

I completely agree with that, and that is kind of the work in recovery is like rediscovering yourself, your beliefs, your voice, setting your boundaries, and feeling safe enough to share that, and that it's just as important perspective as anyone else's. And so I'm curious, like you've named a lot today, and I always kind of like to wrap up with a little bit of a baby step. Like, how do you feel like people could maybe start moving through this in a way of starting to maybe connect with themselves and what they believe? Because I agree with you that having a somatic lens to all of this that I do, like it's hey, let's bring this back to how does this all feel in your body? And I see this with more and more people than the anti diet rules, so to speak, have become just as dogmatic. But then they're nervous about like, oh, but if I leave this, will I be right back where I started? And so I'm wondering if there's any kind of baby step you would offer listeners of how they might explore this for themselves or things they can do in their own life.

Dr. David Wiss 39:47

Yeah, my call to action might be a little lofty.

Stephanie Mara 39:52

That's okay.

Dr. David Wiss 39:54

I think it's important to name where we sort of landed today, and also reflect on my own journey is this is difficult for a lot of people in early phases of recovery, but it's really good to set a vision or an intention to eventually get to a place where the brain isn't functioning categorically, but thinking more along continuums, along spectrums, being able to see a wider range of possibilities, and to truly like embody what we call non-binary thinking, non-dualistic ways of being, and I believe that that isn't a choice that someone can make, but that's a function of our nervous system, our sense of self and safety in the world, and so that's why, if you look at you know the unified theory upstream, you have trauma, developmental trauma as a risk factor. That's why doing the necessary work in that space is critical to eventually landing into like a comfortable long term recovery, because it is the thing that permits one to feel a sense of agency in the world and to not get easily trapped into. I think what society kind of wants for us is to like quote unquote pick a side. If you're in a place where it's not, you know, they want people to pick a side because they want to be able to predict how people are going to behave. I believe in doing trauma work, whether that's deliberate therapeutic work. I mentioned psychedelics as a promising frontier, mind-body stuff, yoga. But like some of these things, they take a long time. We're talking about years, years of good sleep and healthy eating before, like someone can land into a sense of you know safety and not being easily susceptible to a lot of the traps that are out there. But like to me, that's where the progress should be directed.

Stephanie Mara 41:55

Yeah, I absolutely love that and think it's really important. It's something that I feel like is a lot of conversations that I get in with people of like let's see see things more on a spectrum rather than this or that, and I'm wondering if there was anything in particular that helped you step more into non-binary thinking because I think it's really important. But when I imagine someone considering this for themselves, might be like, but how do I do that? And so I'm wondering if there was anything, even from how you stepped more into that, like an example of what that looks like.

Dr. David Wiss 42:30

Yeah, I would say that in my own personal life story, I think like part of it just had to do with maturity, like growing up, having kids, right? Like being in my 40s, I'm no longer like you know susceptible to a lot of the traps of cliques and gangyness that are associated with younger phases of life. I also think that my PhD was deeply transformative in my ability to have metacognition to be able to zoom out, some of the stuff we learn in doctoral training is like: what are some of the underlying theories that drive this way of thinking? What are assumptions that people make that go into this? And then, what do other disciplines think of this? To be able to like zoom out and see how information is produced and then disseminated. You know, was very helpful to me. I operated under you know those biosocial frameworks, and you see how every particular view is limited, and that you need lots of different views, and that's how we are. We're all limited. We're all biased, right? And we're all susceptible to like certain cognitive traps and to groupthink. And so, you know, the combination of parenting, scholarly pursuits, having a strong sense of self, and being drawn toward tension spots in the middle, and seeing them play out, and being like, oh, this is actually more comfortable for me to be sovereign rather than to be susceptible. And then, of course, like I think about like decades of like healing work with nutrition and exercise and yoga and going to the rainforest and connecting to nature. You know what I mean? Of course, that's all a huge part of it.

Stephanie Mara 44:21

Yeah, I hear just an overarching theme of that is like engage, experiment, and get curious. Because the more that we can just step into curiosity of like, is that true? Do I feel like that's true? Does that have to be true? Where is this coming from? Starts to just open up the mind out of these enclosed boxes, and just saying like, hey, what if I could just kind of start viewing this from a different perspective and see what comes out of that? So I loved this conversation. Thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom today. I'm wondering how individuals can keep in touch with you and your work.

Dr. David Wiss 45:01

Yeah. I'll add one final note to our conversation on the spiritual path. Myself, and particularly in my marriage, and on our journey, and I know this could be significant for many others. We end up doing what's called identity work, where you look at how you know identities that we either hold or society ascribes right how those impact our choices and our our ways of thinking and how identities can be helpful but also like cages sometimes and so being able to see how like you know certain professional identities or social identities put me in boxes that limit me that's really important work that I do recommend. My home page is drdavidwiss.com. That's where I house my research and podcasts and things like this. I have Instagram @drdavidwiss. My clinical practice is FX Med Mental Health. That's my specialty lab testing company, and my app is called Wise Mind Nutrition, and that's wisemindnutrition.com. Available on Apple and Google.

Stephanie Mara 46:08

Awesome! I will put all of those links in the show notes. Loved your addition, and just thank you so much again for being here and for doing the work that you're doing. It's really, really important.

Dr. David Wiss 46:18

Thank you, Stephanie.

Stephanie Mara 46:19

Yeah, absolutely. Well, to everyone that is listening, if you have any insights or aha moments from today's conversation, email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime. And I hope you all have a satiating and safety producing rest of the day. Bye!

Keep in touch with Dr. David Wiss:

Website: https://fxmedmentalhealth.com/
Website: https://drdavidwiss.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drdavidwiss