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A Fall Food Reset | Melissa Urban

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You may notice that your body thrives off some types of foods but feels awful after eating others. Why not experiment to figure out what’s working in your favor and what’s not? Ricki chats with Melissa Urban, the co-founder and CEO of The Whole30 Program, about how to optimize your meal choices and some of her favorite recipes in The New Whole30 book.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Ricki Lake, Melissa

Ricki Lake  00:02

This is The High Life With Me, Ricki Lake, where we get to find out how my guests crack the code to living a full and vibrant life so you can too. Melissa Urban has built her career helping people create lifelong healthy habits. She created the whole 30 program, which, of course, you’ve heard of. It’s a slightly different type of diet. It’s not about losing weight. You’re literally told not to weigh yourself. And yes, at first it tells you to eliminate a bunch of foods, which sounds pretty harsh, but then you get to reintroduce them back one at a time. The idea is to find out what types of food work well with your body and which ones you’re sensitive to and should avoid. It’s all about understanding your body and what works best for you. Melissa has learned a whole lot since she started her business back in 2009 and published the first edition of her book in 2016. Well, I am so excited to talk to her about the challenges she’s faced in life and what led her to whole 30 plus. We’re going to get into the state of diet culture and wellness trends today and some of her favorite recipes. Melissa, thank you so much for being here.

 

Melissa  01:05

Ricki, I am so excited to chat with you today. Thank you for having me.

 

Ricki Lake  01:08

Okay, we always start this podcast with one question, where are you getting your highs from right now? Like, what is bringing you joy these days?

 

Melissa  01:17

It’s the mountains. I live in, Salt Lake City. I’m an avid hiker. I call it going to church. I love going outside and just connecting with nature and connecting with myself and talking to the universe. And so I’m outside as much as I can, you know, enjoying the sunshine and the mountain air.

 

Ricki Lake  01:31

I knew we were going to be friends from the get go, because that is actually what brings me joy, absolutely. So wait, tell me, how did you get started? Like, you didn’t grow up in Utah. You grew up in New Hampshire.

 

Melissa  01:42

Yeah, I grew up in New Hampshire, Southern New Hampshire, right on the border of Massachusetts. My mom still lives there with her big Catholic Portuguese family, and it was me and my younger sister. It was a very traditional household. My dad worked sometimes two jobs so that my mom could stay home with us. I was a really good student. I got straight A’s. You know, my dynamic was like, I was the smart one, and my sister was, like, the pretty fun one, which we kind of still embrace to this day in a laughing manner. But yeah, that, you know, that was my childhood. I spent most of it in New Hampshire with my very nuclear family.

 

Ricki Lake  02:15

And so what got you interested in in food?

 

Melissa  02:18

You know, I’ve not been someone who has ever struggled with my weight genetically that just, you know, wasn’t part of my journey, but I did spend five years addicted to drugs, and that was really where my story started. I think, you know, people look at me today and they assume that I’ve always been healthier, I’ve always been interested in nutrition or fitness, and that could not be further from the truth. You know, I went through a period I had a experience with sexual abuse when I was 16, and that led me to trying as many different things as I could, to try to escape from my own body and from that experience. And when I found drugs, it was like, yeah, this is what I’ve been looking for. And so I spent five years, you know, addicted and kind of moving from place to place. I dropped out of college. I did all of those sort of terrible tropes that you hear about when someone is addicted and drugs become the center of their entire universe. And it wasn’t until I got out of rehab for the second time that I was like, I had better make some changes to my life if I want to maintain this recovery. And that’s where I found fitness and nutrition and all of the things that I do today.

 

Ricki Lake  03:20

Wow, yeah. I mean, just side note, like I also was the victim of sexual abuse as a small child, and I didn’t turn to drugs. I turned to food. I mean, that was when I started sneak eating and and just stuffing my feelings, you know, with me when I was abused, it wasn’t something that was discussed. I came out and told my family, and then the guy, the man, was gone, like it was, like he was fired. He was someone that was working for my parents. And I was very young. I was not 16. I was like, six, but that experience led me to just having all these feelings, and I resorted to just, you know, turning to food. And ultimately, it’s what led me to getting hairspray and being Tracy Turnblad and being fat, because if I didn’t, if I wasn’t obese at that age, I wouldn’t have been right for that role, which wouldn’t have led to all the other things. So you got interested in nutrition after that experience. So did you go and study nutrition? Like, like, how did it turn into whole 30?

 

Melissa  04:17

Yeah, so, you know, I started exercising when I got out of rehab for the second time, because I was like, what would a healthy person with healthy habits do? I have to become this person. I can’t be the person that was snorting heroin a week ago. So I started going to the gym. I started paying attention to what I ate. That led me to, you know, CrossFit and kettlebells and all kinds of different connections within the fitness community and self experimenting with my nutrition and sitting around after a really difficult CrossFit session. One day, I was chatting with some friends, and one of them suggested we do this kind of squeaky clean like, let’s eliminate all of the foods that can potentially be inflammatory and see what happens. And I remember I was eating Thin Mints at the time right out of the sleeve because I had just exercised. And I had earned them.

 

Ricki Lake  05:01

Were they in the freezer first? Because that’s the way.

 

Melissa  05:03

No, I know I was missing out, but, you know, I still associated food with reward. I associated food with comfort with you know, I associated food with punishment. I still had these associations that I didn’t even realize at the time, but I was always up for a good self experiment. I loved this idea of like, giving it a try. And I said, Yeah, sure, let’s, let’s give it a go, and the next 30 days would be so profoundly transformational, not only for my health, but for my emotional relationship with food and my relationship with my body, that I was like, I need to tell some people. I need to write about this.

 

Ricki Lake  05:35

Can you tell me more about it? Like, what were specifically the foods you cut out and what? What did that feel like?

 

Melissa  05:41

Yeah. So we essentially eliminated.

 

Ricki Lake  05:44

You say we this was you and your partner or you and a friend?

 

Melissa  05:47

Yeah, my co founder, the original co founder of the program, okay, we eliminated added sugar. So I wasn’t super strict about reading every label, but my Dunkin Donuts, you know, iced caramel lattes were out and I was drinking my coffee black. We eliminated all forms of grains and legumes. So instead of breads and pastas and cereals, I was eating way more vegetables and fruit with every single meal, lots of potatoes and, you know, different kinds of fruit and really nutrient dense cruciferous vegetables. We were doing meat, seafood and eggs as our protein source. We had eliminated all forms of dairy as well. I was a big, low fat dairy girl, and had no idea what all of that dairy was doing to my digestive system, because the way I felt was just normal. It wasn’t until I eliminated it and reintroduced it that I was like, oh, maybe it’s not normal to, like, have diarrhea every single day, multiple times a day. So those were the foods we eliminated. And I wasn’t really drinking much at the time. But of course, we did not drink any alcohol. So we pulled those out for 30 days, and I was eating essentially, like real whole nutrient dense foods. It was making meals with big salads and, you know, lots of protein and lots way more vegetables than I was normally eating. I was eating lots of healthy fats from like olive oil and avocado and coconut milk. And I think right around day 14 is when I feel like I had a switch flipped. I went into Energizer buddy mode. I had so much energy from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to bed. And I was waking up at 5:30 to go to the gym every morning without an alarm. I had no more 2pm head on desk slump. My mood was better. People noticed at the office that I just was happier and more willing to like engage in conversation and chit chat. My performance in the gym improved. My digestion got so much better. I was sleeping like a baby. All of these things that I had no idea were connected to the food I was eating, because I thought I was already eating pretty well.

 

Ricki Lake  07:46

And you said you don’t weigh yourself during these 30 days. It’s not about the scale.

 

Melissa  07:50

Correct, and I will tell you the scale rule. The idea for like, please don’t step on the scale during your whole 30 came from my first experience, because though I had never been overweight. I was obsessed with that number on the scale. Like everybody else, I thought there was no such thing as too thin. The smaller, the better. I scrutinized my body and every perceived flaw, and I weighed myself religiously. And it wasn’t until I was probably, I don’t even know, it was probably two weeks after my whole 30 was over that I realized I hadn’t stepped on the scale or even thought about it for weeks, and it felt like I had finally freed myself from being tied to the scale and tied to the mirror. And it was so profoundly transformational that we enacted that rule in the whole 30 like, please don’t weigh yourself. It’s not about weight loss. And what about portion control, you’re eating to satiety. There was no portion control. There’s no calorie counting, there’s no calorie tracking, there’s no limiting of meals or fasting or meal timing. I ate when I was hungry, and I began to trust the signals my body was sending me for probably the first time in my life, when I was hungry, I ate, and when I was full, my body said you’ve had enough and you can stop. And if I was hungry in between meals, I would eat a snack. So I was probably fueling myself appropriately for the first time in my life by not artificially restricting how much I was eating or when I was eating. And I wasn’t counting calories for the first time.

 

Ricki Lake  09:18

And so was the 30 day concept, kind of like the 28 day in recovery, like you get that, that habit out of your system, it takes about 30 days.

 

Melissa  09:28

You know, it is based on habit research, but habit research is actually it shows that, depending on how emotionally tied you are to the habit, it can take as few as five or six days for a habit to groove, or as long as eight months. So if you just want to, like, drink a glass of water every morning, you can probably groove that habit pretty quick. There’s not a lot of strong emotional tie to that habit. If you want to quit smoking, that is like an eight month habit to groove, because smoking has such an emotional attachment. Food is obviously deeply emotional for many of us, but we also wanted to make sure that the elimination phase was attainable, because you are pulling out so many foods that so many people are used to eating, so we settled on 30 days. 30 days plus the 10 to 15 day reintroduction period is long enough for you to see tremendous benefits from the protocol, but short enough that it feels attainable for most people, most people say, yeah, I could do that for a month.

 

Ricki Lake  10:22

So you feel amazing. You say you had this, like transformational, new you after the first 30 days, when you started this, how did you reintroduce foods and what happened then?

 

Melissa  10:32

Yeah, so on the whole 30 you reintroduce food groups, one at a time, very carefully and systematically, like a scientific experiment, and compare your experience. So I had spent 30 days without any of these foods in my diet, and the first food group that I brought back was dairy. I really missed my low fat cottage cheese, my low fat yogurt, my shredded cheese on my salads. And so you bring these foods back for one day into the context of an otherwise whole 30 meal. So that one reintroduction group is your only experimental factor, and you see what happens, what happens to your sleep, to your energy, to your digestion, to your cravings, to your joint pain and swelling, or allergies or asthma. And when I brought dairy back in, my digestive system was so unhappy, I did not realize how bloated and just digestively disrupted. I was every single day until I started to feel better. I felt I just thought it was normal. I thought people’s stomachs got bloated and their digestion was wonky, like I thought everybody had that.

 

Ricki Lake  11:32

Is that all the blanket of like dairy items? Or is it specifically whole milk, or specifically like, because they different degrees. You can go to the finer grocery stores, and they say they have that a to that certain type of dairy. Is it different?

 

Melissa  11:45

It is very different. Dairy affects different people in different ways, and different components of dairy affect different people in different ways. Some people are sensitive to the lactose component of dairy, which is the sugar component. That’s not me. I am not lactose intolerant. I happen to be sensitive to the casein and whey components of dairy, which are the milk proteins.

 

Ricki Lake  12:05

How’d you figure that out?

 

Melissa  12:06

Because I reintroduced lactose free versions of cottage cheese and yogurt and didn’t have any improvement in my symptoms. So reintroduction really is more than just that 10 day process. I think about reintroduction as sort of a lifelong process where I’m always experimenting with different factors. If I miss cottage cheese, but I can’t tolerate normal cottage cheese. Could I try a grass fed? Could I try a lactose free and what I determined were there were some cheeses, like harder cheeses that work fine for me, softer cheeses, like goat cheese, did not work well. I can tolerate Greek yogurt way better than cottage cheese. There was a lot of playing around, but what I got from this first whole 30 big picture was that dairy in general, is not well tolerated by my body, and that allowed me to be more conscientious about where and how often and how much I brought back into my diet, because some dairy is just delicious, and I wanted to enjoy it, but now I just I knew how it would affect me. And so those decisions were far more crunchy and just and deliberate.

 

Ricki Lake  13:14

Right? God. I mean, I have so many, like, questions, comments, because I recently just lost 40 pounds. I didn’t follow a whole 30 necessarily, although I think a lot there’s a lot of overlap, but I realized that bread is my weakness. Bread like a baguette, a really delicious I mean, I could just eat it plain, and it’s my favorite thing. And I cut bread and sugar out of my diet and went basically keto. I went strict keto and intermittent fasting for a very and hiking every day and exercising every day, getting enough sleep, low cortisol levels. Like all these, these factors, I wore a glucose monitor for six months and learned so much about what triggers my body. But once I got that bread out of my system, I no longer crave it. And it’s, it feels like a miracle, because it’s the thing that I would like go to sleep dreaming of. And so for you, you said the dairy, certain type of dairy, the way in dairy was what affected you. Was there anything else that you found out that your body wasn’t really tolerant of?

 

Melissa  14:09

So gluten is not especially problematic for me. I did discover that if I eat too much of it, especially in combination with sugar. First of all, gluten reliably makes me break out. I do not ever get skin breakouts unless I consume gluten, which is a real bummer, and vanity is a good enough reason to leave something off your plate, especially if I’m about to go out on like a book tour or do some kind of media. But it makes me break out. And it does leave me bloated, and if I eat too much of it too many days in a row, it can leave me demotivated and feeling a little down. I’ve performed this experiment a number of times, and gluten does have an impact on my mental health if I over consume. So what that lets me do is, you know, I wouldn’t say like bread or cupcakes are my weakness at all. I enjoy them once in a while when they’re worth it. So if my mom bakes her chocolate chip walnut cake, I eat a piece, and I love. It, and it’s delicious, and any potential small negative consequences I just tolerate. And it’s a small price to pay considering how delicious and how much that that dish reminds me of my childhood and my family. But if I am in a meeting and somebody busts out, you know, store bought bagels or donuts or other things that just don’t do it for me, and I know it’s not going to make me feel great. It’s so easy just to say no thanks, and I don’t feel deprived, because I know how it’s going to affect me, and I’m the one making the decision that it’s just not worth it.

 

Ricki Lake  15:33

Okay, we need to take a quick break, and then we’ll continue this conversation with Melissa Urban.

 

Ricki Lake  15:47

Has your body changed? Because 2009 I think back, that’s, you know, that’s a long time ago. As we get older, do you eat foods that you’re more intolerant of change?

 

Melissa  15:58

Yes, so that’s such a good point. There’s kind of two things at play here. The first is that as much as the whole 30 helped me identify the foods that don’t work well in my system, it also identified the foods that work very well in my system. So I learned that rice, oats and oatmeal, black beans, cannellini beans, hummus, these are all foods that work amazingly well for me, and in fact, even help my performance and my focus and mood. I am someone who runs better on a much higher carbohydrate diet. I have experimented. I’ve done genetic testing. Keto does not work for me at all. I need a lot of carbohydrates. Given my activity levels and my genetics, you’re lucky, yeah. So you know this concept of bio individuality, we keep coming back to because what works incredibly well for one person is not going to work exactly the same way for somebody else. So I learned the foods that do and do not work well in my system, and also that has evolved over the years. I am much better able to tolerate dairy today than I was in 2009 in part, I think because I have continued to include dairy in my diet, in small amounts, and it’s quite possible that my body has up regulated the necessary enzymes to help me properly digest it, or my context has changed. I am also menopausal. My uterus is like a rusty old bucket, and so at this point, I’m a very different person than I was 15 years ago. My body has changed. My activity levels have changed, my health context has changed. So that’s why I say reintroduction is a lifelong process, and why people go back to the whole 30 more than once. Because every time you eliminate and reintroduce, it gives you the opportunity to learn more about how foods work in your body in your current context.

 

Ricki Lake  17:44

That is so interesting, yeah. And it’s like we have to advocate for ourselves in everything that we do, right? And it’s like nobody knows our bodies more than ourselves. And you know, it makes so much sense. So wait, it’s changed. The new whole 30 book, there’s changes, right? You said you’ve learned along the way, what is the big difference from what you did back in 2009.

 

Melissa  18:05

So I wrote the flagship book for our program called the whole 30. It came out in 2015 so that was nine years ago, and that book still holds up. It still is sort of, you know, it’s how to do the program. It gives you an extensive FAQ, a bunch of recipes. But in the last nine years, a lot has changed. Our food landscape has changed tremendously.

 

Ricki Lake  18:25

Really, how?

 

Melissa  18:26

oh my gosh, cauliflower did not know in 2015 that it could be pizza dough and tortillas and, you know, wraps and all of these different things.

 

Ricki Lake  18:37

You’re right.

 

Melissa  18:38

The sheer volume of grain free, dairy free, and sort of dietary value specific offerings in grocery stores and in restaurant menus has exploded in the last nine years, you know. So the changing food landscape definitely required some updates to the language. We have nine more years of science as well. So the whole 30 program rules are grounded in high quality research that demonstrates that these food groups are commonly problematic enough to be part of this elimination phase. And so we wanted to go back and look at the science and make sure that we, you know, we’re well documented and and our summary evidence for the whole 30 program rules was solid, I think, more than that. Though, from a personal perspective. I’ve changed a lot in the last nine years. I went through a very public divorce and business split. I had a baby, I got a concussion, and navigated chronic illness as a result of my concussion for several years. So you know, as I’ve changed the way that I’ve talked to myself, I have so much more empathy for myself. These days I show myself so much more grace. Being a parent teaches you to let good enough be good enough, and so and I’ve come to understand also so much better, the enormous amount of privilege that I have, just the way that I walk through the world in an easier fashion than other people, simply because of the way that I was born and all. Of those things have influenced how I talk to whole 30 years too, and how I talk about the program, and I really wanted this new book to reflect that updated approach and that updated language.

 

Ricki Lake  20:11

Wow, that’s beautiful, and it’s like a broader audience you’re reaching now, right? Would you say that the original book was really geared towards kind of health conscious people, more the CrossFit community, right? And now it’s expanding to primarily women, right? Your audience is mostly women, but you’re reaching a broader base.

 

Melissa  20:29

Yes. You know, in the earliest days of whole 30 I was talking to CrossFitters. That was the community that I was in. I owned a CrossFit gym. Those people were they were young, they were privileged, they were fit, they were determined and dedicated, and they responded very well to the extremely harsh, tough love language that I used, both with myself and in the way I wrote about the whole 30. You know, I used to sit in a in a seminar and tell them, this isn’t hard, whole 30 is not hard. And they loved that. They loved that approach. But then they started sending their parents to my workshops, and they started sending cousins and sisters, and our audience grew and expanded to an older crowd, definitely more women, people who didn’t have the same degree of either health education or nutrition education. They weren’t necessarily exercising. They weren’t necessarily paying attention to what they ate right now they were suffering from a lot of common conditions, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. So as our audience grew and expanded, that language just didn’t resonate anymore, and I think it turned a lot of people off, understandably and failing to acknowledge the very real challenges of a program as hard as the whole 30 it just wasn’t doing us any favors. So that language has evolved a lot, and you know, going back all the way to 2016-2017 but I wanted to make sure that that was represented better in the new book.

 

Ricki Lake  21:53

Okay, I have to ask you about seed oils.

 

Melissa  21:55

Yes.

 

Ricki Lake  21:56

Where are you on seed oils?

 

Melissa  21:59

Okay, this conversation requires nuance and context. That is the first thing I will say. It is not as simple as seed oils are toxic and inflammatory, and it’s also not as simple as seed oils in any context and in any kind of food are free for all. But here is what the research shows, and there is a lot of very high quality research on this subject, the likes of which is actually relatively rare. In nutrition science, we have a lot of randomized control trials, lots of meta analysis of randomized control trials, lots of meta analyzes of observational studies, all of which say the same thing, which is polyunsaturated fat rich seed oils or vegetable oils are not inherently inflammatory in the body, and in fact, in some contexts, especially in the presence of a whole food based diet that includes omega three fatty acids, and when replacing saturated fat in the diet, can actually be very protective against heart disease and stroke, and I think or heart disease, and cardiovascular disease at least, so I think that is a bit different than some of the messages that we’ve been hearing around seed oils, which is, they’re poison, they’re toxic. You should always avoid. What I have seen lately, or at least the last couple years, is people going to a restaurant that cooks very high end whole food based, meat, veggies, really healthy stuff, and then freaking out because there could be some canola oil in their vegetables, or people who are saying, well, I gave up seed oils, and I immediately felt healthier. And then my question is, well, were those seed oils in a lot of ultra processed foods? Because we know there are health benefits to reducing Ultra processed foods, but you can’t necessarily connect that directly to the seed oils. There are a lot of confounding factors in that particular conversion. So in the context of the whole 30 if you want to come home and cook your ground chicken and your Brussels and your asparagus in canola oil or sunflower oil. I have no concerns with that whatsoever. And also, they’re not necessary for whole 30 success. And if you have access to in the budget for extra virgin olive oil or avocado oil, you are free to use that as well.

 

Ricki Lake  24:15

Yeah, it’s also about food scarcity too. Like a lot of places those food deserts, you can’t get access to the best quality of anything, right?

 

Melissa  24:23

Thank you for bringing that up.

 

Ricki Lake  24:24

Yes.

 

Melissa  24:25

So often this concept of privilege is left out of this conversation. But you know, I’ve heard comments from people who say stuff like, I would never associate with someone who ate those kinds of foods, and it’s like, oh my gosh, tell me your you have heaps of unacknowledged privilege without telling me, right? We can’t only tell people what the absolute best case scenario is, because I don’t know about you, I can’t even eat according to those standards as someone with as much privilege as I have. So what we have to do is meet people with where they are, acknowledge that there is a vast variety of different lived experiences. And not fear monger around food, because studies show when you fear monger around whole, real, nutrient dense foods, people in historically underserved and disenfranchised communities tend to eat less of it. They eat less produce if you fear monger around the pesticides and conventionally raised produce, and the goal should be, we would like for you to eat more vegetables and fruit in whatever format you find accessible and available.

 

Ricki Lake  25:26

And what about your child? Do you do you feed your child in the same mindset?

 

Melissa  25:31

Yeah, he is 11 now, and he just kind of grew up eating the way that I ate. And so as a kid, he loved, you know, barbacoa, and he sushi is still his favorite food to date. He loves seaweed snacks. But then he, you know, he got exposed to other people’s food when he went to school. So he also likes pizza, and he also likes ice cream, and he also likes those awful blue Takis that leave stains on every single piece of furniture that I own. He doesn’t have any dietary sensitivities. There is no health related reason that we should 100% restrict these foods for him. So we talked to him about nutrition and food and that different foods do different things, and then if he’s at a birthday party, he’s gonna eat the cake, you know.

 

Ricki Lake  26:15

Right.

 

Ricki Lake  26:17

All right. We’ll be right back with more. With Melissa Urban.  How do you think diet culture has changed since your book came out in 2015?

 

Melissa  26:36

I think we are all far more aware of diet culture and the toxic nature of these myths, that size is tied to your worth and value, and that thinness automatically equals health, and that there is morality attached to food, that some foods are good or bad, and that we are good or bad based on what we eat. I grew up with that language. I grew up with my aunts and my cousins saying things like, Oh, you’re so good for passing on dessert, or I’m saving my calories for wine, or I’m going to be so naughty and take a second piece of pie. I think we all grew up with that language, and I think we’re far more aware of it today, and the kind of sneaky and insidious ways that it shows up. So I’d like to think we offer a space that doesn’t include those toxic diet culture references, but still allows you to explore the foods that work best for you.

 

Ricki Lake  27:29

You know, I have a dear friend whose daughter was recently diagnosed with orthorexia, which I had not heard of. Are you familiar with that? And is that becoming really much more common these days because of our obsession with diet culture and our weight.

 

27:46

I think it’s probably always been around. And if you are on the almond mom side of Tiktok, right where Tiktok is, you know.

 

Ricki Lake  27:53

Wait, what’s that? I don’t know what that is. The almond mom?

 

Melissa  27:56

I will tell you almond moms Gen Z are talking about their elder millennial or Gen X, or even baby boomer mothers who were talking about, like, okay, for my snack, I’m gonna have six almonds. Six almonds is, like, the correct amount of calories to include in this snack. And they are calling them almond moms, because these mothers are hyper vigilant about calories, about calorie counting, about calorie restriction. It kind of harkens to like, these old, really toxic diet culture days of the 80s and 90s. And so I think this concept of orthorexia, where you are preoccupied with food, and particularly like healthy food or clean food, and I’m making quotey fingers to a degree that is damaging for both your physical and mental health. I think that concept has always been around, and it has just taken different forms and different iterations across different decades, different food trends, perhaps different communities. I’m acutely aware of it in whole 30 land in that elimination diets are designed to be performed strictly, if you want to accurately evaluate the effect of the absence of these foods, you have to completely eliminate them for 30 days. So it’s not like I’m going to mostly stop eating these foods. You do have to be very conscientious about label reading, and I understand that for some people, this approach is not right. If you have a history of disordered eating or disordered eating habits, the strict restriction phase of the whole 30 can be triggering, and it’s contraindicated if that is your context. But what you get with whole 30 and again, something I don’t think people really expect from me is me saying, when your whole 30 is over, I trust you to make the decisions that are right for you, and I trust you to build your life after whole 30 or food freedom, diet in a way that feels good for you. And I want it to be as broad and joyful and sustainable as possible. Bring back as many foods as you can so that you love eating. You love the cultural association, the Family Association, the comfort of food because. Food is inherently comforting and food is inherently love. I want you to bring that back in, and I don’t want you to focus on perfection, because that doesn’t exist. I want you to let good enough be good enough, and I want you to craft your diet in a way that lets you keep feeling as good as you want to feel whatever that looks like for you and is as broad and joyful as possible. And I think that’s how we can eliminate, or at least moderate the concept of orthorexia in our community.

 

Ricki Lake  30:26

Are you into all the like technology that’s available to us now, like the, you know, the Apple Watch. I have my Apple watch. I got my aura ring. I got a glucose monitor on. Do you like all that stuff? Or is it like, is it? Can you become obsessive with all of it?

 

Melissa  30:39

Yes and yes.

 

Ricki Lake  30:41

Yeah.

 

Melissa  30:41

I have a WOOT band on. I wear a WOOT band regularly. I’ve done experiments with a levels glucose monitor. I wore an aura ring for a while. So I do love some of the insights that this technology can provide. As an example, using the data from my WOOT band, I am able to see how my health efforts are either negatively or positively impacting things like HRV and resting heart rate and my sleep in ways that I may not be able to spot without going kind of behind the scenes into the data, so I can see that my cold showers in the morning have really helped my HRV and my resting heart rate and my nervous system balance. But eating too close to bed is like the worst thing I can do for my sleep besides drinking alcohol.

 

Ricki Lake  31:24

I agree. Yes, I stop eating usually. I mean, I try to, sometimes have to go to dinner, and it’s so, so hard. But you’re right, the difference in my quality of my sleep is night and day, if I digest my food before I go lie down.

 

31:38

Yes, that’s been a huge benefit. But also people can get very anxious ridden when they’re looking at the data. So what I like to do is remind myself that nobody knows my body better than me. And before I wake you know when I wake up, before I look at my whoop data, and before whoop tells me how I’m feeling, I check in with my own body. How am I feeling? How’s my energy? How’s my mood? What do I feel like doing today? Is today a day where I can really get after it? Or is today kind of a more mellow rest and recovery, self care day? Then I look at my data, and I compare how I feel to what the data is telling me, and I make my kind of decisions based on that.

 

Ricki Lake  32:15

What is your favorite thing to make? What do you I mean? I don’t cook. I’m like, I love food, and I want to make everything, but what do you think is your favorite? And what’s the easiest thing?

 

Melissa  32:25

So the easiest is maybe not necessarily my favorite, but there’s a big batch Mexican shredded pork recipe that’s just a slow cooker recipe. I have this every single week. I just throw the stuff in my slow cooker, let the slow cooker do its magic, and then I have delicious, seasoned, cooked protein that I can put into salads or into wraps or over veggies over the course of the week. So I always have some kind of like, shredded meat in the slow cooker situation happening. There’s a breakfast recipe called Melissa’s chicken hash that’s been a community favorite for a long time. It’s for if you just don’t want to eat eggs for breakfast or you can’t eat another egg for breakfast. This is an egg free breakfast alternative. It’s hearty, it’s delicious. It uses apples and butternut squash or sweet potato in the dish. It’s chicken based. There’s apple cider vinegar and toasted walnuts and spinach and so it’s a delicious egg free breakfast that you can prep ahead of time and just kind of reheat the next morning. So we really try to keep our recipes very accessible, even for people who aren’t as familiar with cooking. And then we’ve included some culturally significant kind of family favorite ingredients sprinkled throughout those recipes to give people different flavor profiles.

 

Ricki Lake  33:37

You’re making me hungry. That sounds really good. Oh my gosh, this has been such an enlightening conversation. Melissa urban, thank you so much for being here with me. Your book, The New Whole 30. I love it, I’m gonna, I want to have that, that breakfast chicken, what’d you call it? Melissa’s chicken.

 

Melissa  33:54

Melissa’s chicken hash. I want you to make it.

 

Ricki Lake  33:56

I already know what you think. I’m gonna attempt it. I will, thank you so so much.

 

Melissa  34:01

Thank you, Ricki.

 

CREDITS 34:03

I so enjoyed that interview with Melissa Urban. What Melissa was saying about being intuitive with your body and listening to its signals really spoke to me. Being in perimenopause, I am really paying particular attention to all the signals my body is giving me. I’m literally taking notes and being mindful about how my body is feeling, how my mood is each and every day. Although I feel really good about my wellness routine right now, I am definitely going to suggest the whole 30 for many people in my life, particularly my sister, who’s dealing with autoimmune issues, and I think this, this program can be super helpful for her. So Melissa’s new book is called The New whole 30. We’re going to throw a link up in the show notes. I want to thank you all so much for listening. There is much more of The High Life with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content like rapid fire questions with Karama. Subscribe now in Apple podcasts. The High Life is a production of Lemonada Media. Isabella Kulkarni and Kathryn Barnes, produced our show. Our mixes by James Sparber. Executive Producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer. Additional Lemonada support from Rachel Neel and Steve Nelson. You can find me  @Rickilake on Instagram. Follow The High Life with Ricki Lake, wherever you get your podcasts, or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.

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