Episode Summary
In this episode of the Empowered Nutrition Podcast, Erin is joined by Julia Mitchell, a functional nutritionist, bison rancher, and mother of two. Julia combines her expertise in Muscle-Centric Medicine® from her work with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon’s Clinic, regenerative agriculture, and food quality to help individuals optimize their health. As a Certified Nutrition Specialist (CNS) and Licensed Dietitian-Nutritionist (LDN), Julia discusses the importance of building muscle mass and consuming nutrient-dense foods like grass-fed animal proteins to improve body composition and support longevity. She also shares insights from her experience raising grass-fed bison in Alberta, where she practices regenerative agriculture to promote personal health and improve land quality. Throughout the episode, Julia emphasizes the need for sustainable nutrition strategies, understanding macronutrient needs, and the role of resistance training in enhancing metabolic efficiency.
Episode Highlights
- The Muscle Metaphor for Blood Sugar Management: Julia explains how muscle acts like a “sponge” for glucose and fatty acids, emphasizing that larger muscle mass means better capacity to absorb and store nutrients efficiently, preventing excess in the bloodstream.
- Why Cutting Carbs Alone Isn’t Enough: While reducing carbs can help lower blood sugar, it doesn’t improve your body’s ability to handle glucose in the long term. Resistance training is crucial for building muscle mass and improving metabolic efficiency.
- The Danger of Crash Diets and Caloric Restriction: Prolonged caloric restriction or crash dieting can lead to muscle loss, reducing metabolic capacity and making it harder to maintain weight loss in the future. The importance of preserving lean mass while losing fat is emphasized.
- Macro Tracking as a Tool for Awareness: Tracking macronutrients, particularly protein, can help individuals understand their eating habits and ensure they’re meeting their nutritional needs. However, it’s not for everyone and should be used as a learning tool, especially for those without a disordered relationship with food.
- How Tracking Can Prevent Overeating: Julia explains how tracking food intake can help individuals avoid mindless overeating, a common problem in today’s food environment, where calorie-dense foods are easily accessible.
- The Balance of Nutrient Density and Caloric Control: While eating nutrient-dense foods is important, it’s also necessary to be mindful of calorie intake to avoid weight gain. Being curious about your nutrition and learning how to optimize it is key to achieving long-term health goals.
Resources Mentioned
- Follow Julia on Instagram: Stay connected with Julia for more nutrition insights at @juliathenutritionist.
- Dr. Gabrielle Lyon’s Practice: To learn more about Julia’s practice and to work with her directly.
- Follow Dr. Lyon on Instagram: @drgabriellelyon
Connect with Us
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- Follow us on social media for updates and health tips.
- Subscribe to our podcast and leave a review!
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Subtitles:
Hey there and welcome back to the Empowered Nutrition Podcast. I’m so thrilled to introduce to you Julia Mitchell, who is a board certified functional nutritionist. She’s the lead of the nutrition team at Dr. Gabrielle Lyon’s practice, who you probably have heard of, but if not, is a physician in the functional medicine space, but also heavily focused on muscle centric medicine, which we talk about in this episode. But specific to Julia, she’s also a bison rancher and mother of two boys. She combines expertise in muscle centric medicine, regenerative agriculture, nutrient density, and food quality to provide personalized nutrition and wellness solutions. She’s passionate about helping individuals achieve optimal health, which involves sourcing and consuming the highest quality food, including grass fed animal proteins and other foods that improve body composition and longevity while building soil and improving land quality. Alongside her husband, she raises grass fed bison in Alberta, Canada, practicing and promoting regenerative regenerative practices and land stewardship.
We had a great conversation on this podcast that spanned a lot of topics. We, of course, talked about muscles specifically for women and why it’s so important and what the barriers are. We talk heavily about nutrient density and why we think that’s really kind of the missing link with a lot of the way that people think about nutrition and health, and specifically what nutrient density means and what it looks like. We talked about a little bit maybe politics, about where we think the world is going with a new administration, the United States, with respect to the things that might happen around food policy and the FDA. And then we also talked about macro tracking, the upsides, the downsides, the pros and cons, how it can be used as a tool and how it shouldn’t be used. So I hope you enjoy this episode with Julia and definitely don’t miss a chance to follow her on Instagram, and of course to follow Dr. Gabrielle Lyon if you don’t already. Alright, thank you guys, and talk to you soon.
Hi Julia. Welcome to the Empowered Nutrition Podcast. How are you?
Hi, I am well. Thanks so much for having me.
Thank you so much for coming on. I feel like we have so much in common. It’s like I’m surprised we haven’t met at some point already.
Yeah, I’m really grateful to be able to meet you. I’ve listened to several episodes of your podcast on various topics, so I feel honored to be invited on to talk to you.
It’s an honor to talk with you because even though I think, and we’ll get into it, but I think there’s, there’s been some shifts in terms of women’s kind of thinking, raw nutrition and muscle. I think we still have so far to go, so thank you for the fight you’re fighting.
Yeah, it’s, it’s my mission and I’m so passionate about the work I’m doing and so, so grateful to be in the position I’m in. So it makes it really easy to wake every, wake up every day and get to work. So,
Yeah. So tell me your story. You’re obviously a nutrition professional, but you somehow don’t promote veganism and calorie cutting and eating low fat diets. How did you get to where you are?
Yeah, that’s, I love how you, you used that set me up perfectly.
Go.
So I guess my, my entry into the nutrition world really came from a personal interest standpoint, as most nutritionists will tell you, they didn’t get into nutrition because they’ve always like wanted to help other people with their nutrition. It really came from like a deep desire to understand how to eat for themselves. And then yeah, that sort of like snowballed into, well, I feel like I can help others really empower them to find a way of eating that works for them. So that is really where I came from in my early twenties. I was sort of on this like, interesting search for like, kind of the best way to live that would make me feel the healthiest and most resilient kind of version of myself. So I started getting into, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with this world, but like permaculture growing your own food, like homesteading real, like self-sufficiency stuff.
Yeah. I’m, I, I don’t know if I would classify myself as a libertarian per se, but I’m very, I’m a very big proponent of like autonomy and kind of self-sufficiency. Like I view that as a really high value for me. I wanna be able to be as capable as possible to survive on my own without depending on institutions and other people to support me. Yeah. So I really had this like romantic relationship with like self-sufficiency for a while. Sure. And, and it was in my early twenties, so please know that I’ve like come back down to earth after a few years, but in, in my early twenties I was you having kit
Full day, you’re like, okay,
It
Stay alive.
Exactly. Yeah. But in my early twenties, I really was like, you know what, what is this whole world of like homesteading growing your own food? It’s like this is the healthiest food you could eat because you’re growing it yourself. It’s in soil that you manage. It’s like nose, you know, thinking about nose to tail type eating and farm to table type eating. That really inspired me. And so I just kind of dabbled in that as an interest for several years. And then in my mid twenties I had the opportunity to purchase like this little grocery store that I saw so much potential in to be able to be sort of like this little organic kind of local store that promoted supporting the regional economy, the regional food economy. Yeah. So one of my, another one of my high values is like I, I just really hate the idea that food is centralized and that right now in the us you know, most of our food travels like 2,500 miles just to get from where it’s grown to your plate and that’s like an average.
So I really became interested in, in this like regional food kind of support system and I wanted to use my store to build that where I lived. And, and then after a few years I met my husband who is a bison rancher and, and just so happened that he was selling his meat, his bison meat, and I ended up selling it in my store. So that’s how we got, we got connected. So we like, share a lot of mutual interests and passions around growing food, nutrient dense food, regenerative agriculture and all of that. But that was like my foray into it. And so, and then all the while I’m having this like personal evolution of like how to eat best for me. And I think it really came to like this beautiful coalescence of, of concepts with like the regenerative egg kind of grass fed, high quality animal proteins that intersected with this like kind of protein forward, muscle centric approach to nutrition that my now kind of boss and the lady I work for named Dr.
Gabrielle Lyon has been sort of developing and conceptualizing over the last several years. Yeah. And so when I found her I was like, oh my gosh, this is like the holy grail of all the things I’m interested and passionate about that are all coming together in this one thing. I need to reach out to this woman and and work for her. And so I was able to, to do that At the time our practice or her practice didn’t have a nutrition nutritionist on staff. Oh. And so I was able to like start up our nutrition program as the first nutritionist and we’ve really evolved since then. That was only a couple years ago. Now we have a second nutritionist and things are really growing. So, so yeah, that in a long, long backstory is how I got to where I am and it really was just the pursuit of things that I was really passionate about and I find are very important. And then nutrition as it relates to my own personal journey.
Yeah. I love that. It’s so good. You know, one thing you said that stuck out to me is, is nutrient density. And I think if there’s one thing to un tell me what you think about this. And it’s very, it connected obviously to everything else you said, but if there’s one thing that I think is less on the radar of women than muscle, it might be nutrient density and the importance of that. Like if you say it, they’ll probably just nod and agree with you, but I feel like they don’t really understand really what that means or how, how honestly poorly they’re doing on that, even if they’re eating a pretty like healthy diet in their own minds. But what do you think about that?
Yeah, it is a, it is a concept that’s very important. ’cause what, if you think about the fundamental reason why we eat, it’s to acquire nutrients and what’s happened over the years as our soils have become depleted is the food that we’re eating is no longer as nutrient dense as it used to be. Partly because there’s not enough minerals and nutrients held in the soil. But also because when food gets picked, it might be like, well now they’ve picked food that’s like not quite ripe and allow it to ripen over time. But the longer a food stays off sort of the vine or the plant or wherever it comes from and gets to your plate, the less nutrition it actually holds over time. Yeah. So between all of these things, you know, the food that we’re eating, even though we might think it has like the most nutrition possible, a lot has changed since, you know, our grandparents or our great grandparents era in terms of food quality in my opinion.
And so that is like a, a challenge that is systemic and something that we can’t really fight against. But I think just by nature our, our food is like lower quality. Yeah. And then what tends to happen is to, and I don’t know what your position is on the protein leverage hypothesis, but basically we have to eat to satisfy nutritional requirements in the body. And if our food food is less nutrient dense, we just have to eat more of it. And that means it puts us in a situation where we’re in a calorie surplus or we’re overeating just to acquire the nutrients that we need. Yeah. I’ve heard some statistics that, you know, like you’d need to eat the equivalent of seven oranges to get the same vitamin C 50 years ago in one orange or like two pounds of meat to get the same nutrient density as one pound 50 or a hundred years ago. So wow, there is a huge discrepancy now in, in the nutrient content of food. And it’s only getting worse as agriculture continues to be extractive and based on inputs of fertilizers and additives that further deplete the soil rather than thinking about soil first.
Totally. That’s huge. And then like, I think the other main issue, tell me what you think though is if, if I go up to like just kind of an average like patient that we have, if the woman maybe like, you know, walks into our clinic and we eats pretty well and doesn’t understand what the problem is, like I eat healthy, what are, what’s the deal with my health problems? And if I say, okay, what do you think are the most nutrient dense foods? My guess is that she would say something like fruits and vegetables, but actually, I mean, what maybe you should go with this of like that. Is that not even on my probably top 10? Like what would you say?
Right. I do think that, so red meat probably organ meats are Yeah. Up there in terms of nutrient density. If we look at like the, the overall kind of aggregate of all nutrients they would provide, I would say those are like my top two and, and put like seafood and some other like sea-based foods in there as well. Yeah. But you know, I do notice that the more so the higher people’s fiber intake, the higher their diet quality. And when I use the word diet quality, my definition of diet quality is how close are you getting to around the recommended daily allowance for every vitamin and mineral. And so I do notice that those individuals who, who prioritize high quality animal proteins, so eating red meat, eating fish, eating a wide variety of those types of foods. I mean organ meats would be like a total bonus, which not a lot of people do, but I still even love top.
Yeah. Or even eggs. Yeah, eggs too go in there. Yeah. And then they also meet their fiber requirement. Yeah. So like they’re getting around 25 grams of fiber a day. That is a real sweet combination where you’re getting, you’re getting like the most nutrient dense sort of diet. So, so for me, diet quality we focus on a lot in my practice. It sounds like you do too. Yeah. It’s like we’re not just talking about macronutrients. Macronutrients is only the first step. We wanna make sure that people are meeting their macronutrient needs, which is carbohydrates, fats, and protein. And also watching the calories they in, they take in. Because if you’re consistently overeating, that’s gonna lead to a myriad of issues. But then secondarily, once we have that figured out, it is all focused on diet quality, nutrient density. Yeah. Are you getting all the micronutrients that you need to function? Yeah. And I think part
Yeah, go ahead.
Sorry, go ahead. No, you go ahead. Well,
I was just gonna say, don’t get me wrong, I’m not like a proponent of a carnivore diet at all. We, you know, we’re saying like fiber top one of the top three things that needs to happen high on plants for sure. I’m more just talking about this kinda thing. I noticed where it’s like culturally, I think women are so entrenched into like this thinking of these like foods having been vilified that are the more nutrient dense, especially the animal foods. It’s like they’ll give themselves, they’ll get, they’ll, they, they won’t if, if they’re low on like say plants and fiber, they, they know that there’s a problem and they’ll totally be on board if you say, Hey, we need to work on this, no problem. But if you say something like, Hey, you know, like, oh, they’ll be, but they’ll totally give themselves a pass if they’re like, yeah, I just don’t eat red meat and I don’t eat eggs and I don’t eat fish ’cause I just don’t like seafood. And like you, you kinda have to do some convincing to get them to agree with you that that’s a problem.
Yeah. And you know, media and more recent epidemiology that’s been coming out is not helping us in this way. Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve seen, you know, the Lancet, the Lancet, which is a journal that is, you know, well respected, it has a high impact factor. It’s referenced often by the media. It’s come up in the last, I don’t know, I think year saying red meat is associated with not only cancer but cardiovascular disease and type two diabetes. Believe it or not,
That’s such
A joke. So it’s, it’s really hard for I think the average person to read all the things that they’re reading in the media. Yeah. And, and and largely what they’re seeing from government dietary guidelines and recommendations coming from the government and what’s actually true based on emerging science and things we know to be true because we’re clinicians who work with people day in and day out. And we can see the difference that the impact, you know, that happens when somebody starts incorporating some red meat into their diet and how much better their diet quality than becomes and how much better they sometimes feel. Yeah. And you did, you did talk about the carnivore diet being, you’re not a huge proponent, but I do think there are some people out there who really do benefit from a carnivore style diet for certain periods of time or to address like, you know, specific gut issues. I’m sure you’ve, you’ve used the carnivore diet somewhat therapeutically in practice. That’s how I would use it anyways as a temporary thing because it is so nutrient dense. It’s a way to treat certain like gut issues and avoid some problematic foods while still maintaining really high nutrient density.
Yeah. I mean I feel like here I I’ll, I feel like it’s a good litmus test. Like if you feel better on a carnivore diet, you clearly have a health problem that needs to be addressed and probably your gut health.
Yeah.
If you really, really are specialized in gut health, which obviously not everybody can be, you have better ways of addressing that than by keeping somebody on a carnivore diet. But yeah,
I think I use the wrong term there. I wouldn’t say it’s like a therapeutic diet, it’s more like a symptom management tool.
Right. It can totally, exactly. A lot of people feel feel dramatically better when they go on that. I think the mistake that happens there though is that they interpret that as meaning, therefore it is the ideal human diet.
Yeah. Yeah.
But it’s actually just it, that’s the case with a lot of therapeutic diets. It’s, it’s maybe not the, the ideal human diet, but you feel better on it temporarily. In fact, a lot of people who went on vegan diets have told me that they’ve felt better initially. ’cause they’re, they went from eating a bunch of processed junk to eating like cleaner whole more whole foods. But any diet catches up with you in the long run. So if that’s your really, like, it’s not a sign that you’ve discovered the ideal human diet need to jump on Instagram and like tell the whole world it’s a sign that you had some kind of underlying problem in terms of the way you were eating or with your health. It now needs to be addressed. But it’s, it’s hard for people to get help with that. So I can see why they just stay on these diets.
Yeah. And then, and I mean concurrent to that, not only about symptomology, but a lot of the time what comes with these types of diets, elimination diets, carnivore diet being, I would consider it like a kind of elimination diet. Yeah.
It’s, it totally is.
PE people tend to lose weight as well because they’re, I mean, it’s a lot easier to be calorically restricted when you’re on a really restricted diet. Yeah, of course. So then they, they lose a bunch of weight and they think like, this is the key to my weight loss when really it was just sort of the default calorie restricted restriction that came with the diet. So it’s really hard to parse all of these things out. And that’s part of why, you know, the epidemiology is, is so hard to, makes it challenging for us because there is this idea of like healthy user bias that goes into all of these types of studies. Of course people who are eating less red meat are obviously gonna be more health conscious. They’re gonna be drinking less, they’re probably not smoking, they’re probably not eating fast food. And you know, as much as you can control for those in the statistical analysis of those studies, you can’t remove the influence of those factors. Right. And you can’t remove them entirely. So we just, it just paints a, when we take those types of studies and the media blows them up as if they’re conclusive and causal in nature rather than correlational, it really gives people this misconception that there is like a cause and effect to some of this stuff when really there isn’t at all.
Exactly. It’s the, it is their oldest trick in the book and they still get away with it. It’s wild.
Yeah. And we do a lot that, I mean with my work with Dr. Lyon and even in clinic, like you said, is a lot about trying to, trying to explain this to people and, and you know, we, we work, we have a podcast as well, or she has a podcast as well where a lot of guests are coming on that are talking challenging the epidemiology and talking about how we need to think about it differently and more randomized controlled trials are coming out that are showing otherwise or showing kind of like the opposite fact that some of these epidemiology studies are showing. So Yeah, it’s an interesting time. That’s for sure.
Yeah. Well I, I don’t know if you wanna even get into this, but it’s gonna be very interesting in terms of like, I think we’re gonna be seeing some pretty significant changes with like the FDA and like the, the way the federal government is involved in like nutrition guidelines and how research funding starts to flow with like, the new administration here in the United States. And so, like I don’t think anybody really knows what’s gonna happen, but I can tell you like, I don’t know if you’re seeing this, but I’m in a bunch of these dietician groups and I’m cracking up ’cause they’re like freaking out over it. How it’s gonna be like such a disaster when they’re precious. Like dietary guidelines for Americans get like interfered with. I’m like,
You think do that? Well the crazy thing is there, there is a, so I’ve, I’ve been watching on the periphery ’cause I’m Canadian and so I mean I’m, I’m hopeful though because Canada is like we, our culture, right. And some of our stuff is really informed by what happens down there with, with you guys. So, but I am watching on the periphery. I think it’s interesting, you know, the integration of RFK and how Right. He is sort of come in as an advocate now, which I definitely appreciate and his, his perspective is unique and I agree with him on a lot of things. But yeah, it’ll be, I mean there is a new dietary guidelines coming out for 2025 that basically already set like they’re finalizing the details of the dietary guidelines. So I don’t know if much, I mean in the four years that Trump is coming in and the new administration and whatever, I don’t know how much can change given new dietary guidelines are coming out next year. I do know that that based on what I know about the new dietary guidelines, they’re promoting kind of this more precision individ individualized approach to nutrition. But I still don’t think they’re as, like, I still think they’re really, really hesitant about the, the red meat. They’re, they’re definitely gonna be lower in lower in grains I think and less carbohydrate overall. But I definitely think they’re still hesitant to, to put forward red meat and high quality animal proteins as, as like a staple as more of like a, a focus piece.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I agree. I agree on the topic of RFK junior, I, I also agree with a lot of things he says, I don’t know, I’m not, I don’t have deep expertise in some of the things he says. So some of the things he says are wrong. I think that’s likely, he said a lot of stuff. But generally I think what he, one of the main things he’s highlighting that I like is that he, you know, his legal career was bringing these cases to court where he just showed that okay, the FDA is in bed with industry and it’s deep it and it’s, and affecting everything they do. And so when it, when it comes to, so like bringing up things like food additives and chemicals and like, things in food that are not just the, you know, the dietary guidelines for Americans don’t speak to like any of that at all.
But I, I do think it, and like what you brought also to up earlier about like the nutrient density of our food and the quality of our soils and the impact of that. I, I think it’s really important to, to start to highlight that because if we simply just focus on like, you know, the dietary guidelines for Americans are heavily influenced by industry, right? So when you say, okay, it’s gonna be less grain, is it because there’s it, that would be a big fight. You know, the grain industry is, is gigantic. And, and so I think it’s, I think it’s a really valuable thing that, that that concept that they’re bringing of like, why don’t we separate these, this conflict of interest that exists between the agency of the government that should be giving the guidance and the, and the legal protections for the health of, of the, the population versus all these industries that have a financial interest in just selling more of their like grain product or whatever their, their product or their medication or whatever. Like how are these two things so intimately in bed with each other, you know?
Yeah. Yeah. And one thing he does call out a lot is like the, the, the very intense subsidization of agriculture as it is now. Right, right. And, you know, a shift in the way that we think about agriculture, a lot of people just say like, you know, we can’t shift it because it can’t scale or because the transition would be too hard. What people don’t realize is just how much money the government is giving to make the current system that we have actually still function. Yeah. And at the end of the day, the farmers, the ranchers, you know, they’re not really coming out on top. They’re actually, you know, as, as, as important as they are to society, they’re probably like the bottom of the barrel in terms of who’s benefiting in this cha in this supply chain. So the whole thing just needs to get tipped over on its head and re re and assessed and kind of rebuilt from the bottom up in my opinion. It would take a really bold and brave individual to Yeah. To start that process and even Yeah. You know, have those conversations. But to me the system as it is, is broken because we’re literally supporting it with band-aids and tensor bandages and crutches and like all the support
Yeah.
That we could possibly give it. So, I mean, it’s gonna break at some point.
Yeah. I don’t know how it’s gonna go because I mean, this is getting way too, like big, big maybe, but it, the way I see it is kind of like, okay, well there’s like severe like implications of like, let’s say we said, okay, the US government needs to stop subsidizing all these industries that put adverse influences on the American diet. So like, so growing tons of, so like growing tons of corn, growing tons of wheat. Right. Okay, well you do stop doing that. Food is gonna become massively more expensive, right? Yes. It’s more expensive in other virtual countries. We have like super cheap food. Even after the record inflation, we’ve had, well, Americans already are mad about food prices, like when food prices massively increased. ’cause now we’ve shifted away from like basically favoring processed, refined foods. ’cause that’s where most of those crops go.
And now it’s like, oh, you, we are, we’re favoring we’re going back to like hundreds of years ago where like the cheapest food is like raw ingredients and you have to make your own food. Well, to me, our whole like society has shifted now to where like there’s no one in the home that has the time Totally to make meals out of raw ingredients multiple times a day. Even not even once a day. Like women are stretched so thin because we’ve got like raise kids, we’ve gotta hold down a full-time job. We’ve gotta self-care, we’ve gotta exercise, we’ve gotta like try to have a hobby. We’ve gotta like keep our marriage going. It’s just like our society is kind of like shifted to where like the women, the way that women survive and even try to make it is by kind of taking these shortcuts that are, that are enabled by processed foods and by the, the subsidization of these like crops. So I’m not really sure that like, it, it could almost go anti-woman. I think if you like, stop doing this because, well now what are women supposed to do? They’re supposed to like quit their jobs so they can like spend four hours a day cooking. Now they don’t have enough money to pay their mortgage and like, you know what I mean? Like it kind of, you gotta think about stuff like that.
Yeah, I know. It’s, it’s not a problem. I have the answer to because it is so pervasive and, and every single person eats. So it is like fundamental to every single human life in the country on the planet. And I mean, we’ve gotten so far, I think one way that it will be difficult to even come somewhere centrally where we’re a bit more conscious about our land and quality because eventually I think it just gets to the point where we put our ourselves in a little bit of a pickle. Like Yeah. In terms of food quality, I mean, we’ve already sort of seen it. We we’re getting to this point where without the saving grace of these weight loss drugs, the obesity epidemic is going to continue to grow if the pharmaceutical industry comes in and innovates and helps us bring, you know, I’ve, I’ve been reading lately that we’ve passed peak obesity. We’re kind of like on the way down now, but the only reason is because of these GLP one agonists. Yeah. So it’s like, you know, we’re, it’s not a
Peak, it’s just that something a miracle happened. Yes.
It’s like
We’re a natural peak. I mean Yeah.
Yeah. We’re sort of at the precipice. I mean, we’ve pushed ourself to this point where our health is starting to suffer as a result of the way that we’re designing and, and growing our food. So I mean, this is a crazy deep systemic, it is topic that, I mean, I’m not even really an expert in it per se, but I am very interested and passionate about it. But I do think it has pushed our society and, and we, we are seeing the, the effects of, of, you know, two, two centuries of doing things this way and Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I guess like as both of us as nutrition professionals that work primarily with women, I think it’s like, yeah, you can know, you can be aware of these things and know about it and not know what the answer is. But when you have that, like n equals one person in front of you, you, you know, that person that has the ability to shift their nutrition. I I do still feel like even on an individual level though, that is a common friction point of like, okay, well our whole lifestyle is dependent on processed foods, even quote unquote healthy processed foods like a loaf of full grain bread for example. Or like, yeah, precooked, grilled chicken tenders that you heat up in the oven or something. It’s tough even for that one woman to figure out, okay, so what now I’m supposed to cook everything from scratch but still work full time and like, take care of my kids’ homework and their sports and everything. It’s, I think it’s really tough.
It is. I it’s definitely doable. I, I think it requires intentionality and priority, but I’m not sensitive to every single person’s situation. I am one of those people. I am a working mom full-time. Yeah. I’ve got two kids. Although I come from the vantage that food and my family’s health is the most important thing because if we don’t have our health, we have nothing. Yeah. So that’s, that’s what I kind of plan our whole life around. That’s how we prioritize our finances even, you know, I will be really, really kind of diligent about not sort of buying clothes I don’t need or, you know, buying my kids more toys made of plastic, but I will never like scoff at paying money for high quality food. So it’s just about reprioritizing I think. I don’t think it’s impossible. I definitely think it’s difficult, but it does kind of require you to decide, you know, what are the important things in your life and how do you wanna place it on the hierarchy? Even even how you manage your time. You know, there is, there’s not a lot of time to be, to be like a lot of spare time, but we do also waste a lot of time on our phones and doing things that aren’t value add. So really assessing, you know, how do I spend my time? I spend most of my free time cooking food for my family. Same. So same. Yeah.
I was five 30 this morning putting in that instant pot. Yep. Exactly. Yeah, I agree. It’s, it’s not possible, but it’s, it’s kind of like a, it’s a big shift for people that kind of realize like, oh, this isn’t just that I get on some kind of like the, some magic macro ratio. It’s really a lifestyle shift that is a, there’s there you have to be a lot more in it than I think people like would like, they’d like to just have some kind of like simple thing they can do like a hack. But really it is a lifestyle and I, I think it’s probably an unpopular opinion to say that, but just over many years of doing this, I’ve come to that of, you know, if, if you’re not gonna do the lifestyle, you are not, it’s not gonna work. There’s no cheat code,
No there’s no cheat code and you end up, you will end up paying for it at some point with time because being sick is also really time consuming. Yeah. So it’s like you wanna, and I do believe, you know, food is, food is not necessarily medicine. I hate, I don’t love when people say that, but food is definitely a preventative medicine. So if you are able to feed your family whole nutrient dense foods, making sure that your kids aren’t, aren’t eating, you know, whatever, whatever the average 81 grams of sugar per day, trying to minimize that as much as possible, you are gonna benefit in the long run from, from life actually being somewhat easier down the road and, and you having more time for things you enjoy because you are healthy. And so I think it is somewhat like a savings account. You are making an investment in your health in the same ways you’d make an, an investment in like your RSPs.
Yeah. Well, and the other thing about nutrient density is I find that it creates energy in a way, in this in a real sense for people. Like they’ll, they won’t really feel, they’ll feel more energetic and they’ll generally feel better and that will generate more ability to spend more time on your food and the sort of like feed forward cycle to some level.
I totally agree with that. It’s like when you get someone to a position where physiologically they’re, you know, their mitochondria are functioning properly, they’re able to literally create energy in their cells more efficiently. And that comes from nutrient density, but also prioritizing physical activity and resistance training and building muscle, in my opinion, the easier, you know, the more capacity you have just in general.
Right, exactly. Yeah. It feeds into that thing we talked about of just getting away from this idea of like, what do I need to cut out? What do I need to limit? How much do I need to calorie cut? And, and thinking that paradigm shift of like, what, what nutrients do I need to add to feel better and function better and like give my body the machine like the pieces that it needs.
And that’s what I, that’s originally kind of what I felt was one of Dr. Lyons really compelling messages was she’s like, why are we focused so much on what we have to lose? Yeah. We need to focus on what we have to gain. And, and this whole dichotomy is a really interesting mindset shift that I think a lot of women need to make instead of being so scarcity focused, what can I eliminate from my diet? How can I restrict myself? I need to shed, I need to shed pounds and be small. It’s like, let’s shift to an abundance mindset, a growth oriented mindset where we’re really trying to build something positive. Yes. And focus on adding, like you said, adding in the things that we need in order to function well. Because I think when you shift the focus to that, it is so much more positive first of all, because going in trying to like with a negative frame of mind where you’re trying to restrict and, and limit and cut and shrink is like, that is a very reductive kind of negative mindset to be in. But if you shift to sort of like this growth oriented thing where you’re adding in and including and maybe reprioritizing to accommodate that, I think it’s, it’s a much more healthy mindset and psychologically it makes it a lot easier to even adopt behavior change that’s required to do those things.
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. A, a mindset of abundance. What can I gain? What can I grow? And speaking of which also physically, so we can’t not talk about muscle and muscle centric medicine. Do you mind just kind of introducing that? And if you can try to tie in like if I find that if I, if I say to a woman like, it’s important for you to have muscle and we, and, and they’ll, they’ll say, absolutely. Yeah, I totally agree. But then when we start to get into what that means and like what they need to do in order to get it, it’s very difficult to get them to go there. So don’t, maybe you could tie that in, but why is moss so important to women? And maybe go from there.
Yeah. I think partly because, so it’s really important for women out the gate because societally we’ve sort of been led to believe that this isn’t something that we need or, or, or desire. And so like, like standards about around beauty and, and stuff like that don’t really involve like being highly muscled. So I think that’s partly why it needs to be overemphasized for women. But I think this applies to both women and men. It is not just a women conversation, it’s every single person. But the way that we frame it in our practice is, you know, muscle is sort of the target for our health. So muscle is not only a, an organ system that helps us like move. It’s not just for locomotion and being able to like move your body, but it is both metabolically active and active from an endocrinology, endocrinology standpoint.
So it releases chemicals into the body that crosstalk with all of our organs and interface and modulate a lot of things, including our immune system. So it is somewhat like your body armor, like your protective mechanism. The more muscle you have, the more capacity you have to survive basically any disease. And the more muscle you have you, the more you are able to actually physically function as an older adult. So if you think about the, the trajectory of muscle span over someone’s lifetime or the amount of muscle you have, and, and we can talk a little bit about healthy versus unhealthy muscle as well, but healthy muscle over a lifetime. You know, it peaks somewhere in 30, 35 years old, you’re gonna have the most muscle mass you’ll ever have in your whole life from there unless you, you really, really work on it and you focus on eating adequate dietary protein and putting mechanical load on your muscle.
IE resistance training, lifting heavy things, you will progressively lose that muscle over time. And that that is that progression. You get to the point where you have such little muscle mass that you lose your ability to function. You, you move into disability and that progression is basically called sarcopenia and something that a lot of elderly individuals will die with or die from. If you, if you don’t have the physical capacity to hold yourself up and you fall and you break a hip, especially as you get later in life, your ability to bounce back from that injury is very, very low. So it really just having muscle and, and and making that the focus of your health really like buffers against all kinds of things. Chronic disease being one main one, but then just even the, the influence of aging on your body over time.
Yeah.
So, so the way that we practice medicine in the practice muscle is the target for health, the way that we practice nutrition, kind of to go along with that muscle is the target for health. ’cause if you have healthy, robust growing skeletal muscle, everything else pretty much falls in line.
Yeah, absolutely. I’m so with you, I wonder what the biggest barriers are, especially for women. I think the commonly cited thing is they’re afraid that they’re gonna be like unattractive and, and huge, which is to me hilarious. ’cause I’ve been strength training like so much since for 20 years and my 13-year-old can like carry me around the house. Like it’s not like you’re gonna just suddenly turn into like a gigantic male looking crazy like beast. It’s wild to me that that’s the thing. But I, I do think there might be a little bit more to it. I kind of wonder if it’s like, okay, maybe not understanding the actual health benefits and then if, if we talk about health benefits, often the discussion is centered around like, okay, here’s what’s gonna happen to you when you’re 80 then. And it’s like that’s just so far away for them that it’s like, I’ve got bigger fish to fry, I’ve gotta get dinner on the table, I’ve got kick hits to soccer. Like I can’t spend an hour in the gym lifting weights because of my 80-year-old life. So I think that what you kind of brought in is really important around, no, it has like endocrine and like and and and metabolic consequences like right now for your life. And like and literally if you have, if you’re well muscled, like so many health problems will be either, they either will go away or never happen or get dramatically better.
Yeah. I had a really interesting conversation with a client last week actually, and she has a, a hemoglobin A1C of 5.8, so she’s technically like pre-diabetic on the way to like really, you know, developing developed insulin resistance. And we were talking about how to design a diet that would kind of limit her carbohydrates. And she was really, really focused based on what she knew about limiting carbohydrates. Like she needs to go on a low carbohydrate diet. And what I was trying to emphasize to her is that yes, you can go on a low carbohydrate diet forever and your blood sugar will probably come down like your HB one C will lower if you’re not putting that stimulus into the bloodstream to then keep your blood sugar high, your blood sugar will go down. But you’re not, by not addressing the exercise component, by not focusing on resistance training and building muscle, you’re not actually improving your metabolic capacity at all.
You’re just removing a stimulus. Yeah. So it’s like I tried to explain it to her like this, your muscle’s like a sponge and the bigger your sponge, the more food, if you think about food like water, the more you can absorb and hold safely. Right? If you have a small sponge, it can only absorb so much water before it starts to overflow. And it’s that overflowing both of fats of fatty acids and glucose that is really problematic and leads to chronic disease. So the bigger you can make your sponge IE the larger your skeletal muscle base, the, the less you have to worry about your food coming into the system being problematic because you’re more efficient at generating energy from that food and you can kind of handle more in one go because your body has a place to put it. And so I I often use that sponge analogy for, for women and, and say like, you’ve gotta, not only do you need to be building the size of your sponge by lifting weights, but you have to be working out with an intensity that encourages you to really squeeze your sponge out.
Because the more you squeeze your sponge out and let it refill, the more efficient your body gets at doing that because you’re demanding that it do that over and over and over. And obviously it’s gonna become more efficient over time. And so that sponge analogy really hits home for people. Like sometimes it’s like, it’s good they have like this aha moment. Like, whoa, I never thought of it that way. Right. And then in fu in future sessions we, you know, I say like, you know, did you squeeze your sponge out this week? It’s such an interesting prompt to use and it is such a simple kind of thing for people to visualize. But if you are focusing just on what you’re eating and cutting back on foods and going low carb, you’re only addressing kind of the inputs to your system. You’re not addressing how efficient and well functioning your system is at a baseline.
Yeah. And one example of that is we know that, and I’m not anti low carb diet, but we know that someone who’s been on a prolonged low carb diet will typically become more insulin resistant at, at least in the short term. Like say they suddenly eat like a moderate to high carb meal. They’ll be more insulin resistant to that than
You,
Than before because that sort of underlying the sponge as you’re talking about, has not grown. And in fact it may have shrunk.
Yes, totally. Yeah. Especially if there’s an instance of calorie restriction then right then, and that’s the, the, the scary part about fad diets, crash diets, and even these GLP one agonists that are coming out the ozempic drugs to tirzepatide ’cause they are essentially encouraging people to eat so little that they do put muscle masks somewhat at risk. And when you’re eating a calorie restricted diet, you’re gonna lose muscle mass on average on a, a diet that’s calorie restricted of the weight. If you do end up losing weight because you’re cutting your calorie significantly, sometimes up to 40, maybe even 50% of the way you lose is actually muscle mass. Yeah. That is not what we want because no, if you, you cannot eat on a calorie restricted diet forever. You are eventually because of the survival mechanisms in the body going to rebound eating to your, to a normal kind of like to match your energy expenditure eventually. And when you do that, you are actually, your sponge is is then smaller like you’re saying, and, and so you have less capacity then to deal with the food you’re now eating. So it puts people in this really, really kind of downward spiral where they see absolutely results of weight loss. They see the number on the scale dropping, but they don’t really understand the nuance of what’s happening to their body composition. And eventually what that leads to is you’re basically just swapping your muscle mass that you had for fat over time.
Yes, exactly. And then every time they try to lose weight, it gets harder and harder. They keep gaining weight on what used to either help them maintain or help them lose. And yes, the, the whole time, every time they crash diet, they lose their, their sponge shrinks, they lose muscle every time. I know we just have like a few more minutes, but I think this ties into one thing I wanted to ask you of, you know, in in that context of like, okay, I am I someone needs to lose weight, they’re gonna try to do responsibly in terms of like not crash dieting.
What probably the most critical thing to protect lean mass is eating enough protein that people like us can help them give them that number, but in order to actually achieve, like know how much protein they’re eating, I think there’s a really kind, I think you might not agree, but I think macro tracking is kind of a controversial thing in the sense of, like I saw on your Instagram you’re saying like, it’s really important, you’re gonna learn a lot about food, it’s gonna help you to, you know, be more aware of what you’re eating. And I think that’s absolutely true and I do use macro tracking, but then I think there’s like the other side of the coin where it’s like some people will see it as disordered or like overly obsessive or too time consuming or missing the greater point of nutrient density. And so kind of tell me how you tie together the two like sort of conflicting camps.
Yeah, this is a really interesting conversation and, and it is somewhat controversial. There are a lot of dieticians, nutritions out there who take different viewpoints on this. Yeah. I think it depends on where they personally come from as well and their experiences with these tools. To me, i I view it really as a tool. It’s not necessarily appropriate for everyone. I will say I work with people who write out the gate. They say I will not track and that’s okay. We can, we can deal with that. There’s lots of ways that we can quantify food that is not like actually counting calories per se. My my, the trade off is like if someone wants an outcome, if someone is outcome oriented, there are certain variables that are going to dictate that outcome. And so if you have an outcome that you have in mind, you need to control the variables.
So for those people, the trade off is I have an outcome, like I have a weight loss goal or I wanna be a certain something in the future, then we really need to tightly control these things. And tracking to me is a way to do that. If you just wanna develop really good habits, start focusing more on diet quality and nutrient density, it is by no means necessary. But diet nutrient density does not also mean weight management at the same time. Right. Those are, to me two different things. So you can get your diet quality and your nutrient density up really high, but you can overeat to get there. And that is an interesting situation to be in because, you know, I think when I did the math, you only need to overeat by like over your energy expenditure by 60 or 70 calories a day to be gaining one to two pounds, one to two pounds a year.
So I do think if you think about the context of the world today, you can walk into a Walmart and in one box get all the calories you need for like three days. So we live in an a food environment that makes calories very easy to acquire. So sometimes, I mean I, I do believe that, and I don’t know what you think about this and I don’t, there’s no science that I can refer to that backs this up, but I do think we have a tendency to overeat when given the opportunity because we are, we, we’ve dealt with historically as humans, like periods of feast and famine and, and eventually when we do overeat to a certain point we become both insulin and leptin resistant, which then kind of like triggers a cascade of further amplifying that behavior. So I do think when left to our own devices we will overeat kind of in perpetuity if we’re, and and that metabolic dysfunction kind of continues to perpetuate that. Yeah. So there needs to be a check and balance if you cannot. And, and for someone who can do it on their own, like they have really good, you know, they’re, they’re not insulin resistant, they’re metabolically functioning well they’re, they have like
Intact like appetite regulation.
Exactly. Yes, exactly. All of those hormones are working as they should and their signaling is clear to all the cells and everything is working well then I don’t think tracking is necessary for those people. But if you’ve tried year over year to get a handle on your eating and you just cannot seem to manage that or you have specific goals to achieve, I definitely think tracking as a way to just recalibrate your understanding of how much you actually have to be eating and also what foods you’re selecting in order to make that a reality for yourself Yeah. Is a good exercise to do. Even if it is somewhat temporary. Like, you know, me personally, I have, I have tracked in the past, past, do I track every day now? No. Right. But if I do feel, if I do feel like I’ve gone through a period where I’m really dysregulated or it’s holidays or I’ve been really stressed or something disruptive has happened in my life, when I get to the other side of whatever that is, sometimes I will for a day or two just to like kind of snap me back to reality.
Yeah. I’m a hundred percent with you on it And, and, and also as a, a learning tool for a time and I find especially around the world of like what, what it really looks like to get a certain amount of protein. Like I had somebody yesterday of like, I think I’m good on protein, I have peanut butter every morning. I’m like, ha, peanut
Butter is is not protein. No, I think this is a perfect example because peanut butter is low protein but it’s also very expensive calorically.
Yeah.
So that’s like a really dangerous misunderstanding for someone to have. Yeah. I had a client, I had a client once who she, when we did her diet diary, she was eating three avocados worth of guacamole at lunchtime. Yeah. Because she thought that guacamole had a lot of protein. She thought that avocados had a lot of protein.
Okay. And I’m like,
I love avocado. Same. But that’s like a thou that’s like a thousand calories worth of avocado you’re consuming in a day. Yeah. ’cause she’s having three full avocados thinking that they had a lot. So it’s really like, it gives you an idea, it gives you an opportunity to really fundamentally understand what components of like food does it bring to your diet and how impactful are each individual are each of these individual pieces, which I think is sometimes like the difference for someone like that woman Yeah. Or your client, you know, by switching from peanut butter to like eggs or chicken sausage or something different for breakfast. Yeah. She’s gonna fundamentally change her trajectory for the day. And in the same as my client by leaving out those three avocado, you know, she’s, she’s literally cutting out a thousand calories of avocado.
Right. Yeah. It’s really hard to be accurate if you don’t even know what the data is. So yes, it, it can be useful in that way if someone’s safe to do it. And you’re right, it’s not always the right thing for everybody. But yeah, I mean it reminds me of, I used to work in this clinic where they had a bunch of vegan vegetarian people that came there and I wouldn’t even argue against it. I would say, you know, let’s start off by calculating your protein needs and then go ahead and try to track macros for a few weeks. Come back, let me know how it goes. And you know, first it would start off with like, yeah, I think my protein’s probably great, you know, I’m like, okay, good. I’m glad you’re getting the 90 grams of protein that you need on your vegan diet. And then every single time come back getting 25 and they would be shocked. It’s like, okay, well let’s start talking about the foods that are high in protein. It’s like, if you don’t, if you don’t measure something, you, you don’t, you can’t really like say much about it.
Exactly. And and I do think most people who have never gone through this exercise really don’t have any idea what they’re eating. No, no. You know, it’s like, yeah, I’ve used this, I’ve used this analogy before too. It’s like trying to walk around a room in the dark.
Yeah. Yeah. And you’ve
Gotta, you, you’ve gotta turn the lights on so you don’t like triple world the furniture. You need to understand how to navigate that space. And to me, someone who says like, tracking is unuseful or tracking is damaging to me it’s somewhat ignorant because it’s like, it’s just an opportunity to learn more and it’s not a death sentence. Like we’re we’re asking you to, to put your food in a food diary for a few days to see if you can glean anything from it. Yeah. And this is also, this also comes back to the idea of like curiosity. It’s like you wanna be curious about one of the most important things you do every day, which is feeding yourself. Like, let’s, let’s get curious about how to optimize this and make it better or maybe find out, you know, where you’re falling short. It’s all about, it’s not about like, and, and so this is a difficult conversation for people who have sort of a disordered relationship with food Yeah. Or have had eating disorders in the past because, because the relationship with food comes with so much emotion and psychological kind of like baggage. Yeah. It’s really hard to separate that because they can’t view that data very neutrally.
Right. So
For those who who are in that situation, it is not a good strategy because Right. They will, will beat themselves up and it will be really, really difficult to execute for them. It will be almost like too disruptive to even be beneficial. Yeah. But for people who don’t have it, that kind of history and who can use it as a kind of like a tool for gathering data, being curious and viewing it somewhat neutrally, it is so, so beneficial.
I agree. I agree. Julia, I feel like we could talk all day. I know I have to let you go, but real quickly, tell me, tell where can people connect with you? How can they learn more about you and also course about Dr. Lyon and your practice?
Yeah, so my, I guess I have Instagram, I’m sometimes active, sometimes not, but it’s Julia, the nutritionist and then our practice. You can find me and work with me directly one-on-one in our, in our nutrition practice, which is@drgabriellelyon.com and otherwise you can follow dr gabrielle lyon.com.com for her website. But her Instagram is also at Dr. Gabrielle Lyon and she’s totally awesome and everything she puts out is just awesome content so you can follow her as well.
Thank you so much Julia. We’ll make sure to link everything in the show notes and we would love to have you back anytime. Please hit us up ’cause you have obvi. I think we just scratched the service.
Totally. Yeah, I’m happy to come back anytime.
Great, thank you. We’ll talk to you next time then.
Okay, thanks.
Thank
You.
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to the Empower Nutrition podcast. We love offering insight to help you optimize your wellness. If you enjoy this episode, feel free to leave us a rating on whichever platform you stream from and consider subscribing. Also, you can learn more about our practice at www dot Empower Nutrition Health and that link is also in your show notes. Take care and talk to you soon.