Jennifer Van Syckle  0:00  
Thank you for joining us for this episode of talking health in the 406, where we're one community under the big sky. I'm your host, Jennifer Vansickle, longtime health care worker turned health educator. On this podcast episode, I found it to be one of the most interesting and insightful ones we've done to date. We all hear about add this powder to your drink, go on this diet, lose weight this way or that way eat this not that. It's confusing, and it's challenging. Today's guest is Paige Redden, a registered dietitian out of Bozeman. She counsels people with eating disorders with diabetes, and more. And not only that, she shares some of her real life experiences with what she counsels on as well.

So Paige, you live in the booming metropolis of Bozeman now, right? I do. So where are you from Bozeman originally or where did you grow up? Tell me about Tell me about your background.

Paige Reddan  1:04  
Well, I like to say that I've been here for 19 years. So I'm feeling like I'm solidly a Bozeman Knight. I grew up in Southern California. And I moved to Northern California for graduate school, stayed there and raised three children for 20 ish years. And moved to Bozeman in 2004, my son had graduated from high school, and he said, You guys are crazy. Go on. I'm staying in California. But my daughters were in high school, just starting high school. And they came and everybody has stayed with a few little hiatuses. Moving to different places the kids have, have moved back to Bozeman, and now I have grandchildren here. And I feel so incredibly lucky.

Jennifer Van Syckle  1:51  
Perfect. And then tell me about your professional background. So you're a registered dietician. I understand it. So tell me what is a registered dietitian to start with? And how did you get into that?

Paige Reddan  2:02  
I actually had an eating disorder through my 20s into my teens and 20s. And there really wasn't any treatment back then for eating disorders unless you were really on death's door. So I decided to go back to college, I had a degree in anthropology and I decided to go back and get a degree in nutrition to try to figure out this food piece on my own. I don't even remember there being a unit in my undergraduate and graduate work for nutrition on eating disorders. But I started slowly to get a grip on my relationship with food. A registered dietitian is sort of like a registered nurse in the sense that we are experts in our field, and you have to be registered, you have to be licensed. We are the ones who talk, I think reasonably to people about food and their relationship to food and their body. There's a huge diet industry and wellness industry that confused people a lot. So most of my day is trying to help people understand the the real science behind how our bodies work, and how we get nourished. Interesting,

Jennifer Van Syckle  3:13  
I got a lot of different points, I want to follow up with you on there, as far as your eating disorder, if we're able to kind of talk about that.

Paige Reddan  3:20  
So for me, it was dieting, starting at the age of what was I 14, I suppose, you know, looking at all the magazines that on one page would have a diet and on the other page would have the recipe for chocolate cake. And you know, Ladies Home Journal and Self Magazine and the Red Book and all those old publications back then we're always encouraging women to keep their figure. And so at the age of 14, somehow I had decided that my figure was worth changing, which when of course I look back now and I had an adorable 14 year old perfectly normal figure, but I started dieting which now we call restricting. And that begets what now I would call binging because if you you're growing child, and you starve all day, you have an apple at lunch, no breakfast, you call for school, you're ravenous. And now I understand there's a part of our brain that says okay, I pulled you through the last eight hours with no nourishment. Now you're going to eat and so there then slowly, friend of mine actually was quite the Dieter as well. And she suggested we use laxatives for those times that we felt we had eaten too much. And then we discovered throwing up so it was the combination of restricting laxatives purging later on in my 20s I started over exercising, just a constant attempt To control the body, but really now, in the work that I do with people with eating disorders, I have such an understanding of how my brain was trying to tried to save me by insisting that I did eat, and all of the attempts that I was trying to us that we're going against the way my brain programs, any of our brains program, right? We have, the brain has to have nourishment. When we deny the brain nourishment, we will overeat, we may binge. What's scary to me today are all the diets from the fitness industry that encouraged cheat days. So basically, you're you're restricting all week, and then you have a cheat day, and that cheat day for many people becomes a binge day. And there's a part of the brain that gets really triggered by that and says, Okay, do that again. Do that again. Do that again. And eating disorders are born very easily that way.

Jennifer Van Syckle  6:01  
Interesting. Oh, yeah. That's funny. You mentioned that because I follow Dwayne Johnson, the rock on Instagram and Facebook. And he does that he you know, he gets up at 3am weightlifting exercises like crazy. Granted, he's got a, you know, some insane muscles. But yeah, Sunday, he'll post pictures of his stacks of pancakes and the couple dozen cookies he eats, and it's his cheat day. And that's fascinating. I

Paige Reddan  6:27  
mean, and you know, then how does the body receive all that food? After having, really, our intestinal tract slows down when there's not a lot of food coming through. So then at the end of the week, you binge and now you know, it's like a traffic jam through a small tunnel. And then, you know, people feel terrible the next day, they are so sick. So then that encourages you to restrict again, right? Oh, I feel terrible. I've done something terrible. I'll restrict again. And this binge restriction cycle just continues and continues without an interruption. And you need a serious interruption to stop. It's real abuse to the body.

Jennifer Van Syckle  7:09  
That's fascinating. Because I mean, it's so spot on, even as adults, and there's constant pressure, even the clothing industry. Okay, how are you ever supposed to button this waistband? Yeah, you know, normal human?

Paige Reddan  7:20  
Yeah. Well, I just recently sent away for three different pairs of jeans, all the exact same size. And two of them I had to send back because there was no way that button was gonna button with any kind of comfort. You know, so we judge our body based on our blue jeans. And we judge our bodies based, you know, that's why I think leggings are wonderful, because we're so much more comfortable, as they hold our body so much more gently than jeans. And it's pretty twisted, to think that our, our discomfort with ourself comes from trying to force ourselves into clothing. And what I spend a lot of time convincing my clients to do is just go buy some new pants, so that you're uncomfortable, you're allowed to be comfortable. When you're focused on literally physically, your clothing being too tight and not feeling good, then where your mind goes is how you're not going to have lunch, or you're going to have a small dinner or tomorrow I'm going to go on a diet or the next day, I'm going to hit the gym, you know, you're trying to fit into something that doesn't deserve to be fit into. Absolutely, and it builds so

Jennifer Van Syckle  8:33  
much. It puts so much pressure on you, you know to as I'm sitting here thinking, you know, we have social media where everything looks perfect. And then yeah, you think you need to look perfect, I gotta get to the gym, I need to eat a salad. But yet, I have a full time job I have to work a household we have to take care of it really adds to the negativity and the stress, right doubt, right.

Paige Reddan  8:52  
Yeah, exactly. Well, and

Jennifer Van Syckle  8:55  
then it makes me wonder to you know, what does the average person do you look online for weight loss, and you do you get the diet industry? keto, do Atkins, buy this cleanse, add this powder to your drink? What does the person do to get guidance on this without needing to go see somebody like you page and, or to find somebody like you,

Paige Reddan  9:17  
if someone's trying to tell you something? Forget it. Right? If they're selling you something, they're just part of it all. I think since COVID, the wellness industry has just exploded with intermittent fasting, being tested for food intolerances, that for blood tests that are very unreliable. We are under a lot of stress in the world today. And we all we take it in, and that stress drops from our brain into our gut. And then we think it's our food that's causing the problem. So I think that for people to first of all, I mean, if someone comes into my office, I'm going to find out what what their life is like, where their stressors are, and start working on those things. First food comes down the road. Because honestly, nine times out of 10, nobody is has an allergy to a food. Very few people have actual intolerances to food. It's the patterns in which they eat by which they eat like not eating breakfast, a little something for lunch, and then big dinner. And eating into the evening, again, kind of causes that clogging up the tunnel. And the gut just can't, can't handle that kind of pattern of eating. And so, you know, really, I tried to help people to realize that they really do need to spread their food out throughout the day, and that they're not going to be starving at night, they're not going to be overeating at night. If their brain got fully nourished throughout the day. I see it happen over and over and over and over, where binging just stops or over eating, or those cravings in the evening, just go away when the brain relaxes, and says, Ah, thanks. And you gave me the nourishment I needed earlier much earlier in the day. So I would say you know if someone's really struggling, honestly find a registered dietician, someone who's not going to sell you anything. No supplements, no protein powder, none of that stuff, because that's not what basic nutrition is all about human bodies, not that complicated.

Jennifer Van Syckle  11:31  
Probably somebody who your health care provider can recommend or if they can bill insurance, there's probably a good tip off that you're dealing with a professional and not someone trained some online because ethically pure of exactly. Yeah, it makes me wonder, kind of staying on the same subject as a parent, what have you see in your child? Kind of what you went through their page? What if you know what if your parents sitting here watching your daughter or your son, start over exercising? You're skipping breakfast and eating that apple at lunch? And?

Paige Reddan  12:03  
Well, we've been through all of that. My children are now in their mid 30s. So you know, definitely they were influenced by the diet and fitness industry when they were in their, I'd say late teens, early to mid 20s. But I'll have to tell you that I too, was learning about what what the diet industry was really filling us with. I mean, for a long time I was I was encouraging people to lose weight thinking that that was the the way to health. Now we know that BMI has very little to do with someone's overall health. So as I was watching my kids diet, as I was watching one of my daughters per gene for a little while, part of our medical system was also growing. And so I was learning alongside them that this is all crazy making. And I would really say the last 15 to 20 years is when we started really looking at the way people are dieting, and how dieting actually has caused what some say there is an event there's not an obesity epidemic. But if there were an obesity epidemic, most people who have gained weight over time, have been on multitude of diets, that they lose 20 pounds, you gain back 25 You lose 30 pounds, you gain back 35 dieting just absolutely does not work. And it's looking at what our stressors are in our life, and making adjustments to those things before we start sort of pointing at food, or that our shape and size is the thing that makes us so unhappy. And I would say that my kids have all really embraced that now. But I definitely you know, 15 years ago were was watching them struggle through what everybody was struggling through. And they don't follow people on Instagram, who claim to eat in a certain way. If anything, they see one and they send it to me and go God can you believe this? This woman says all she eats 25 oranges a day. That's all she eats. We got to use common sense also. And I think things like intermittent fasting, okay, if you want to give up breakfast, that's basically all you're doing is giving up a meal and some people might lose a little weight on it. Some people might not but there's not science behind going 12 or 16 hours without eating you're just basically cutting out a meal. And if you're not eating the amount of calories your brain needs and your brain gets about a third of all your calories all day. If it's depleted. Eat more at the end of the day. A then that breakfast would have provided you.

Jennifer Van Syckle  15:04  
When Should people lose weight, there

Paige Reddan  15:08  
are medical conditions that we know might benefit from some weight loss. And it's generally a pretty small amount of weight loss, five to 10% of total body weight. So it might be five pounds or 15 pounds for a lot of people, certainly not the 25 or 30 pounds that they think they're supposed to lose. The first condition that comes to my mind that benefits from that kind of weight drop is hypertension. If you you have high blood pressure, probably one of the first things your physician talked to you about was losing some weight. But usually people go to that got to lose a lot of weight. And I've got to do it fast, because this is really scary, my blood pressure is high. But any rapid weight loss the brain is not going to appreciate. And we'll try to get that right back on. So what's really recommended now is a weight loss of one to two pounds a month. So hypertension, diabetes, blood sugar control could benefit from some weight loss. And generally, it's going to be much more effective when a person has pre diabetes than when they've actually been finally diagnosed with type two diabetes. Insulin resistance is when your cells the little receptor sites on your cells are misshapen, and because the fat in the cell has misshapen the outside of the cell. So a little bit of weight loss snaps those receptor sites back into shape. The insulin recognizes it blood sugars go down. But it's a pretty small amount of weight. And there's not a lot of proof that weight loss will improve cholesterol, it might. And you'll notice that with each one of these I say it might weight loss might help. It doesn't always help because the way in which we store fat is not the only reason why our blood pressure's up. Or it's not the only reason why our blood sugar is higher, or cholesterol. But it's certainly worth an effort. But I would say if your efforts going to be one of the latest diets don't even bother, because your weight will come off, and it will come back on. I mean, I think it's a 98% chance of regaining weight in a year after going on a rapid weight loss diet. And anything more than a couple of pounds a month is to your brain is considered rapid weight loss. It wants it back

Jennifer Van Syckle  17:44  
one to two pounds a month is that's interesting. And that's a slow process.

Paige Reddan  17:49  
But in six months, you've lost enough that it's probably already beginning to benefit your blood pressure, or your blood sugar. And you've been able to make adjustments in your lifestyle, you've been able to eat some of the food that you've wanted to eat. So that it's not a drastic panic. I know that people who've lost 80 pounds are now in this panic mode of how in the world do I keep this off? What do I do now. And when I work with clients, I spend at least the first month figuring out their lifestyle and what needs to be managed before we even get to that place of how to reduce portions to actually start reducing weight. That's looking at the whole picture. Yeah,

Jennifer Van Syckle  18:35  
and I'm curious if sleep is in that do talk sleep at all number of hours is always

Paige Reddan  18:42  
about sleep. Yeah. People think that if I stay up late, then I'm burning more calories. But the fact is, it's too stressful on the brain in the body to not get at least eight hours of sleep. And so you actually your body goes into more of a stress mode and wants to hold on to fat if you're not getting adequate sleep. And if somebody thinks they have sleep apnea, once you get proper oxygen going into your body through like a CPAP machine, blood pressure can come down, weight can come down blood sugar could come down, because the stress of basically being strangled all night long, gets your body secreting massive amounts of stress hormones, that then puts your body into this panic mode of let's hold on to everything until we understand what the threat is. And the threat is you're not breathing well. You're not getting enough oxygen to your brain, looking at their whole life and what's working and what's not working. It's not just about the weight.

Jennifer Van Syckle  19:47  
Yeah, I can see that even career family. I can see where that would have an influence as well. Like you say the stressors. Yeah. I heard an interesting term at our state diabetes conference a couple weeks ago. I think it was called werewolf eating Where you behave all day, and then when the sun goes down and the moon comes up you exactly you binge you go just eat like crazy.

Paige Reddan  20:08  
People wake up in the middle of the night and will binge. It's not a character flaw. It's not discipline or willpower, it's our brain takes over and says, you know, there is food here. And there was a famine during the day, but I can I know there's food here in this house tonight. So there will be a feast to make up for the famine earlier in the day. And or you can live that way if you want, but that can become an eating disorder. Or you can just wake up in the morning and have breakfast and then have lunch, and then have dinner and have snacks. If you're hungry.

Jennifer Van Syckle  20:46  
Yeah, just like a kid, just like they need snacks. We all probably do still even grownups,

Paige Reddan  20:51  
you know, and look at the way toddlers eat really, because we've all had toddlers who sit at that dinner table. And they're done. They'll have a bite of this, a bite of that, but they don't need anything more, because they feel themself intuitively throughout the day. So really, dinner is just really needs to be minimal for them.

Jennifer Van Syckle  21:12  
That's a really good point. There's a lot we need to look at with kids, like you probably learned from when we first met, you used an interesting term that I had never heard before. And it was disordered eating versus eating disorder. Can you talk a little bit about I think we've probably pretty much have been but disordered eating and does that lead to an eating disorder? Yeah,

Paige Reddan  21:31  
I read recently, about 75% of women have disordered eating. disordered eating is literally, I don't know what to eat. I don't know when to eat. I don't feel good about the way I eat. As opposed to, huh, what do I feel like for breakfast? Ooh, that sounds good. 1030 rolls around, and Ooh, my stomach's hungry, I'm gonna grab some XYZ disordered eating is thinking about, you're making the wrong choice. Thinking about what you could have eaten, that was better for you, but you're not really sure what it was just this overthinking of food, and then resulting in restriction, over eating patterns that just don't feel good. On and Off diets. an eating disorder is when there's a mental health component under it, I can't think of a person that I've worked with with an eating disorder who didn't have anxiety underneath the eating disorder. So the eating disorder is like this cap on the top of a bottle full of toxins, that just kind of seals it off and keeps everything down. Someone actually told me it was like a manhole cover their eating disorder as a manhole cover. And you knew that underneath the street was a sewer of stuff. And that's the anxiety and under anxiety are feelings. And the feelings are the things that we need to get to in order to quiet the anxiety and then no longer need the eating disorder behaviors to quiet down. eating disorder behaviors are very effective in reducing anxiety for a little bit, but a brain that's not fully nourished, will really act out with much more anxiety with depression. suicidality, because it's just not nourished. So disordered eating is a quieter version. But it certainly can flop over into an eating disorder pretty quickly.

Jennifer Van Syckle  23:40  
You're saying and I yeah, I would suspect there's a lot that have disordered eating in the world. Very, very common. I would I would guess, just this thinking, yeah, looking around. Right.

Paige Reddan  23:52  
And you just look at the influencers, and they're telling you what they ate for the day. And somehow you're supposed to eat what they ate. There's so much influence around that if we don't shut that out. And just listen to our own gut instincts about how to nourish ourselves. It really does lead to disordered eating and eating disorders. Very

Jennifer Van Syckle  24:14  
true. Very interesting, for sure. And then page just to kind of shift gears a little bit. So you do you get referrals for eating disorders, but you opened up your private practice thinking it would be more for diabetes education, it was my understanding, but can you tell us how diabetes touched your life? Can you tell us that story?

Paige Reddan  24:34  
Yeah. When I was doing my graduate work in nutrition, a friend asked me if I would take over a diabetes education class at a local nonprofit. This one I was living in Northern California. And I thought, well, you know, I guess I should, and I really didn't know much about diabetes, except for the fact that my brother had been diagnosed when he was 15. But he put You much managed it on his own. It wasn't a huge issue for our family at all. So, as a registered dietician, I went and did my part in the diabetes education class. And I thought, oh my god, I love this. There's actual cause and effect, like you eat this food. And your blood sugar does that, oh, I could really help people, I could really teach them about how carbohydrates increase their blood sugar and how to manage them. And it was just at that time when the American Diabetes Association was talking about this thing called carbohydrate counting. And I thought, Oh, I love this because there's freedom with food, as long as you know what your blood sugar is, and then you learn how to manage your insulin, or medications. And at that time, there were like two different pills for type two diabetes, there was hardly anything. So that just was a whirlwind for me that that was the diabetes education was where I belonged. And as a dietitian, and I became a certified diabetes educator. I worked for this nonprofit for about 12 years. And then I was enticed to move over into industry. For a Johnson and Johnson company by the name of life scan, they had the one touch meters, and I develop medical education for healthcare professionals for doctors and nurses and pharmacists and dieticians, and traveled around the country, conducting live programs. No, everything's over zoom, but live programs. And I absolutely loved that and felt like, my reach was much farther because I was no longer teaching people with diabetes, how to care for themselves, but I was teaching the providers who then would be taking care of the person with diabetes, and that that felt wonderful. In the midst of all that, I wasn't feeling particularly well. And I had had what we thought was gestational diabetes with both of my pregnancies. And I just remember coming home after teaching a diabetes education class and thinking, maybe I had a test my blood sugar, and I just I have not been feeling well. And all the signs and symptoms of hyperglycemia, I was just rattling off in class and thought, Ah, this sounds familiar. So I tested my blood sugars, and I was in the high two hundreds and thought, okay, hold on.

Jennifer Van Syckle  27:40  
And what would normally be page, what would for blood sugar, what

Paige Reddan  27:43  
190. And I thought Hold on, you know, I, I'm normal. Wait, I'm physically active. I was 38 years old. And that was too young to have type two, in my mind, too old to have type one in my mind. And anyway, I went to my doctor, and I was diagnosed with type two diabetes at the time. But it really wasn't until about a year later that an article came out in the New England Journal of Medicine, about this thing called latent autoimmune diabetes in adults, which is basically type one that occurs later on, like when you're 38. So I was diagnosed with type one diabetes, as I was a diabetes educator teaching classes about diabetes. And I was not happy about it at all. I thought I'd much rather be the teacher than the student. But, you know, here I was. We tried various pills for a little while. That didn't work. I got on insulin. That was fine. And then it was about two years later, that I started an insulin pump. And I've been on an insulin pump ever since

Jennifer Van Syckle  28:59  
that year or so in between there when you were diagnosed with type two, were they having a hard time getting it under control? Because they thought you were tight? They were a completely different plan of attack, but type two than type one?

Paige Reddan  29:10  
Yeah. I just remember. I was just went completely blank as to how do I care for myself with diabetes? And yes, I was on a sulfonylurea. Then there was a medication called Wrestlin. That was kind of a new cutting edge medication. Metformin came out a little bit later, I was just trying anything and everything. But basically, I wasn't eating carbohydrates, and I was exercising a lot. I had felt like I had kind of written the wave of the eating disorder and I was on my way down. But I will tell you that there was probably a year there that the over exercising and eating a lot fewer carbohydrates. Really my eating disorder really loved that Like, Oh, that's a plan. Okay, we can do that. And you don't feel well, when you do both those things all the time. So it was a crawling back out of that kind of headspace. And then really, it was going on insulin that freed me up, because I really could eat again. And I didn't have to over exercise to control my blood sugars. And I was just really lucky that that article came out when it did. Because then my doctor actually tested me for my for the antibodies for type one diabetes, because he didn't do it prior to that. And I remember him calling and saying, I owe you an apology, you have type one diabetes. And I said, Well, you don't know me apology. I'm just glad we know it now. And I know, the best way to control it is insulin period.

Jennifer Van Syckle  30:46  
Yeah, yeah. I can think of those 30 year olds, I used to do an ultrasound on him in the ICU, when they would get diagnosed with diabetes, they'd come in diet with diabetic ketoacidosis. They'd be in tough, tough shape. And I mean, it's happening every day. And so it's you we just hope then, providers are up on that and realize that don't box people in based on age. Definitely,

Paige Reddan  31:10  
you definitely. And you know, I've often said to myself, I wonder what kind of a person with diabetes I would have been if I hadn't had all that education. Behind me, if I hadn't had all the support of the healthcare professionals that I worked around who were diabetes educators, I had all that support, and it was still hard. So, you know, I know, when people get diagnosed with type one, or type two, they have occasional visits with their primary care or with their endocrinologist, and basically, they're on their own, to figure out an awful lot of their blood sugar control. And that kind of breaks my heart because I know that it's, it's so hard, and but it's not impossible. And I guess what I would say to people is just get as many appointments as you can get, and get as much support as you can get until you can both figure it out. Because blood sugar control is not mysterious. There's no such thing as brittle diabetes, it's all about managing medications to get your blood sugar under control. It's about knowing how to eat to how much carbohydrate to eat at a time, based on your medication to get your blood sugar in control. If anybody is feeling, you know that it's just this wild ride, then they need to sit down with someone with a diabetes educator who's got the time to spend with them to say, alright, this is the way my diabetes looks, I need help. And it's not about weight loss, it is about managing medications, and knowing how to spread your your carbohydrates out in order to get the control that you really need.

Jennifer Van Syckle  32:59  
That's the thing, too is the diabetes education is available. I mean, it's available at every major medical center. It's available in a lot of your small towns, Big Sandy, mile city, red blood, you've got them. Yeah, they're everywhere. And even if it's not someone local, you can hop on the computer or hop on the phone, the virtual visit, yes.

Paige Reddan  33:22  
And a diabetes educator could be your doctor. But it also could be a nurse, it could be a dietician. I mean, a dietitian can help you with your blood sugar control with your medicine management, as well as the carbohydrate piece. Yeah, and now of course, you can find everybody virtually.

Jennifer Van Syckle  33:41  
Yeah, yeah. And I know, we really push a a team approach, you know, take advantage of your pharmacist, see if your pharmacist can work with their, your your doctor, or, you know, there's a lot of facilities, great places in our state where pretty much the the physician hands over the power of prescribing to a pharmacist, okay, you've got chronic kidney disease, or as your kidneys are starting to show issues. Here's your pharmacy consult. They're going to be the ones to prescribe and let the pharmacist practice at the peak of their license. Yeah. And take advantage of that. Yeah. And then exactly the nutrition so you know, Christmas, how are you going to handle that Thanksgiving? What are you going to do? It's challenging for all of us, but especially just having diabetes, and it's an in particular Yeah. Perfect. And so you have a your own, basically private practice page in Bozeman. And it started with diabetes, primary focus, but then how on earth did you end up kind of becoming more of an eating disorder facility or go to place

Paige Reddan  34:47  
when I decided that I was going to stop traveling and stay and enjoy Bozeman more during the year I decided to open up a private practice and diabetes education was basically what I knew Whoo. Honestly, not I was hardly getting any referrals for diabetes education, people were referring people who are struggling with eating to the dietitian, make sense. But I thought, Oh, I got to shift gears here and learn about disordered eating, learn about eating disorders, so easily 60% of referrals, where people come in with those concerns, as well as people with things like IBS, you know, digestive disorders, to this day, still love a diabetes referral. I love helping people get on insulin pumps and help them manage their insulin. But I would say that, really, the majority of who I see now have eating disorder, disorder eating or some kind of GI issues. So I just got a whole bunch of books and sat down and started reading like crazy. I thought, you know, honestly, I had, I really kind of didn't want to do eating disorders, because I wasn't 100% Sure, I'd figured mine out. And it really helped me see the trajectory of the course of my recovery. Even though I wasn't ported by a dietician, or a therapist, or any kind of eating disorder program. I just knew that I wanted to get rid of those behaviors. And I read as much as I could, and I kind of did my own self recovery. And for anyone who ever wonders if people really do recover from eating disorders, yes, they do. And if it takes a lot of work, I

Jennifer Van Syckle  36:34  
was just going to ask that because I'm sitting here, as I'm listening to thinking, with the eating disorder, I wonder if it's like you hear people who quit smoking, and 30 years later, they say, oh, all I want to do every morning is have a cigarette and a cup of coffee, or somebody who has, you know, recovered from alcoholism. It's a lifelong battle, is it? Do you feel like it's the same? Do you feel like you're constantly having to fight going back into those old habits and those old tendencies? Or

Paige Reddan  37:01  
do you think it easier, the behaviors once you stop actively using them, the request in your mind to use them goes away? What doesn't go away is the influence of our culture, on how we're supposed to look. And you add on top of that, our aging process in a perimenopause and menopause and remind me to give you some really good books at some point here, because I want to be able to recommend some books, but just the natural progression of a woman's body as she becomes less young. And men also, men go through the exact same thing. I think for me, and for a lot of people, it's when winter comes, now you're pulling out your winter clothes. And again, it's the clothing, right, you pull those jeans back on, or the snow pants, the ski pants on and you go, Oh, hmm, these will feel a lot more comfortable. If I lost five pounds, 10 pounds, those can definitely be triggers. Absolutely. And I think that what's important is that we know that our shape and size absolutely is going to change throughout our life, our bodies change and morph. And maybe it's, you know, maybe you buy a new pair of pants, or maybe you get a rubber band, and extend that little waistband just a little bit. Because the comfort is 100% or the discomfort is 100% of what will trigger going back into behaviors. And I think for most people, it's do I have restrictive thoughts? Absolutely.

Jennifer Van Syckle  38:40  
Life's about limit. Life is about living

Paige Reddan  38:43  
and life's about chocolate is, you know, yeah, our brain is always thinking it's always giving us negative and positive. And I think we have to expect that will have those thoughts, very influenced by our culture, but we don't have to act on them. And the more we don't act on them, the less loud they are. They become quieter and quieter and quieter over time. Yeah,

Jennifer Van Syckle  39:07  
well, that just rings so true. I mean, it's unbelievable. Page. Definitely. As you say that. Yeah, you're exactly right, with the winter clothes and the Yeah, this would be better if I just lost five pounds. Maybe if I, you know, lost 7% of my weight, you know, and it's funny. I think I have a husband that travels a lot and he loves to bring home T shirts and I've got him trained where hold the t shirt up. If it's a man's t shirt, a man's cut, I need a medium or maybe even a small. If it's a women's cut, I need a large or an extra large. Yeah. And I got a t shirt recently that somebody gave me and it's a women's medium and it fits my nine year old daughter who is 75 pounds beautifully. And it's like, Are you are you kidding?

Paige Reddan  39:49  
So that's it right? I ordered a t shirt online with a big ol honey bee on it. And the same thing I think it could probably fit my five year old granddaughter clothes Then sizes and that's even happening for men now men's clothing sizes very much are changing at depends on where in the world they're being made. And I think that for us to judge ourselves based on how an article of clothing fits, is just something we we need not due

Jennifer Van Syckle  40:18  
to ourselves. That makes a lot of sense. Absolutely unpaid. You've given a lot of fantastic information. And yeah, we will definitely get those books from you. And we'll have them posted on our website talking health and the 406 dot m t.gov. And actually, if you want to tell us about those books, too, we would love to hear some of the ones you recommend. And when

Paige Reddan  40:39  
it comes to eating, and body image and making sense of the real science, Christy Harrison's book, The anti diet can't recommend that more. If you are confused about the validity of BMI and why does your doctor always bring up BMI? And why is there always a mention to lose another 10 or 15 pounds? She does an incredible job of putting all the science together and the history of when bathroom scales came into our homes. What did we do before that just the health trajectory of heart disease and obesity, and really how even medically we're going to be changing the the words, obesity and morbid obesity, because it implies that everybody who is not at a perfect BMI is somehow unhealthy. She goes into great detail as to how misleading all of that is. She has another book called The Wellness trap if you're at all interested in making sense of what are all these potions that are being sold to us, what is backed by science, what is not backed by science, the wellness trap is just filled with great information that will allow you to clean out your cupboards of all the supplements that perhaps you've purchased over time, and realize that our gut does a fine job of cleaning itself. And we don't need to involve in ourselves and cleaning out our colon except for maybe a colonoscopy every, what 10 years or whatever it is. So the wellness trap is Christie Harrison. And then the book for women, specifically is called the upgrade. And it's Luann Brazel tun. She's a psychiatrist. She talks about the reproductive years of a woman who then moves into her 40s, early 50s. So we call perimenopause, she calls it transition. And then the woman then moves into menopause which she calls the upgrade.

Jennifer Van Syckle  42:57  
That book sounds really fascinating.

Paige Reddan  42:59  
That's fascinating.

Jennifer Van Syckle  43:03  
For myself, and the crew behind the scenes at talking health and the 406 We want to thank page so much for this interesting conversation and taking the time to share with us. If you would like more information on what was discussed today. Visit our website at talking health and the 406 dot m t.gov. Until next time, take care

Transcribed by https://otter.ai