Diet Culture Lied To You (Here’s What Actually Works )
with Carrie Lupoli
Dr. Wendy Myers
Hi, I am Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. On this show, we talk about everything related to heavy metal and chemical detoxification, biohacking, bioenergetics, and more advanced topics than you’ll hear on other podcasts. Today, we have Carrie Lupoli on the show, and she is gonna be talking about detoxing the toxic diet culture. All of these messages that we are being fed, that our worth is based on this number on the scale, and these myths in the diet culture, that’s all about calories and calories out. Carrie really does a great job of illustrating all the lies that we’ve been told and what you wanna do instead, such as how you can work on changing that negative narrator, that negative inner voice, how you wanna flip that script on negative thinking and think in a more positive way, and how to go about doing that.
We talk about blood sugar regulation and how that really is the secret to losing weight or, more importantly, having a healthy body. People don’t realize how their habits and their diet, when they eat and how much they eat, even if you’re eating a healthy meal, you can eat way too much, and it shoots up your blood sugar. We talk about how that blood sugar can affect your sleep, and when you don’t sleep well, then you have the blood sugar levels of a type two diabetic the next day. I know when I don’t sleep well, I want a snack all day long, and it’s that blood sugar roller coaster. So we talk about lots of really good things that you want and need to hear if you’re concerned about your health, weight loss, and blood sugar management.
Our guest today, Carrie Lupoli, is a certified nutritionist, health coach and award-winning behavior specialist. She founded Disruptive Nutrition and Diet Disruptors, which is a top 70 nutrition podcast, to support thousands of families on their health and wellness journeys. She also co-founded PFC3 to train, certify and support other health professionals. Carrie’s a sought-after international speaker who’s been featured at TEDx in South Africa and on major news outlets like the Today Show, CBS, and ABC. She holds a Bachelor’s of Science, two Master’s degrees, and certifications from the International Board of Nutrition and Fitness Coaching. You can learn more about Carrie’s work at carrielupoli.com. Carrie, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Carrie Lupoli
Hey, thanks for having me. This is great.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the health field?
Carrie Lupoli
Well, if you had told me, maybe like 12 years ago, that I was gonna be a nutritionist, I would’ve laughed because I would’ve said I am the worst person to be able to help somebody with their health. I was in my late thirties, and I was in a very deeply unhealthy place in my mind, in my relationship with food and my body. I was a behavior specialist, and I had been doing that for almost 20 years. It was a moment in my kitchen with my girls. They were really young at the time, and one of ’em started talking about how many calories were in pizza, and it was right there that I knew I was putting on them the same toxic beliefs around diet culture and this cultural conditioning we’ve had as women about our bodies and what we should be doing. I was like, ” Oh my gosh, my kids are talking about calories. It’s like five and six years old. I went down a very deep dive from there to figure out how I could stop the nonsense in my own life.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Is that the moment that you realized that you needed to go and do some diet disruption and teach people about the toxic diet culture?
Carrie Lupoli
Well, I think at that point I didn’t know what was wrong or what was going on. I just knew that there was a problem that needed to be solved. I just felt like this isn’t right. Kids at five and six years old, I swore I never talked about calories. I never did. But how did they adopt that? And because I was a behavior specialist, I analyzed their behavior, my behavior, what was going on, and I came to the realization that it was not just that right. When I started interviewing and talking to other women, it was like everybody was struggling with their own self-worth, their belief that their value was in a number on a scale, and this never-ending search for the perfect diet.
I was like, it’s gotta be easier than this. I was an athlete in college, and we were never really taught about nutrition and all of that. I was in pretty good shape, but I also had an eating disorder, and I started asking, was I healthy? I’d actually argue that I wasn’t, because I had a very unhealthy belief system about my value and about food, and I just went down this really big rabbit hole. One of the very first things I realized was that everything we have been taught is around deprivation, restriction, and punishment. Every woman kind of starts a diet or starts this new approach out of a feeling of frustration with themselves. I thought that was very interesting as a behavior specialist, when you start this new kind of relationship where you’re trying to fix whatever’s going on, and you hate yourself.
You show up differently for people you really like versus people you don’t like. I realized all of us are showing up in a way that we don’t like ourselves very much. So as I continued to evolve in all of that, I then went down this other rabbit hole around what our bodies really need. I saw the power of blood sugar stabilization, and it was the very first time in my life when I worked with a specialist who understood blood sugar, that he didn’t have me count calories, and he didn’t have me track all my food. He had me eating in a way that actually honored my body, and where food was fuel, not something to be scared of.
It was that moment where I was like, “This is wild.” This is the opposite of everything I know. I joke about the BS the diet industry has given us for all of these years. And through a couple of years of really digging in, I realized the BS that we really needed was our belief systems, our behavioral science, and blood sugar. And so when I started putting those together, I became a certified nutritionist because I was absolutely obsessed with what I was learning. There were really very few certifications out there that were teaching anything other than caloric deprivation. I was really like, I need to teach this to others.
I need to have people understand. So I just started working first with friends and family, trying to just really prove that this worked. And when I say work, I don’t just mean losing weight, I mean actually getting healthy from the inside out, your mind, your body, and your lifestyle. 12 years later, here I am doing this work and seeing it transform this toxicity that we all kind of have inside of us, around our belief systems and the diet culture, and turn it into free women.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about that because we all grew up with the magazines, and today it’s social media and you basically are taught to hate yourself, you don’t look good enough and you believe all the filters out there and that you need to look like that. So let’s talk about our belief systems. Let’s go through each one of the BS’s that you talked about. How do we change our belief systems? What should we be adopting?
Carrie Lupoli
I think the very first thing that we need to think about and recognize is our own awareness of what’s going on. I live right outside of New York City and on the subways it says if you see something, say something. I think we don’t see enough of what’s really going on. It’s almost like we’re these zombies, it’s like we eat less, move more. But this is what they’ve always told us, and we all buy into this. I liken it to a corset. It’s like we’ve all been given this metaphorical corset. I don’t know at what age we were all given this corset, but at some point we were all told to put on this corset. And it’s like this mental one made of food rules and cultural conditioning and kind of a belief that smaller is better.
If somebody says, oh you look good. That’s really code for you to look smaller. And when I actually lost all of the weight and got truly healthy, people kept commenting and reaffirming my belief that my value was in what I looked like. I remember when I actually truly got my body to this place of where this quote unquote goal weight, I was like. Oh my gosh, what was it for? I was reaffirmed that people only liked me because of what I looked like, and that made me feel worse. These beliefs that have been ingrained in us from when we were little have convinced us that truth. And I call it truthiness, but it’s not really true. But we believe that how we look determines our value in this world.
When my kids started talking about calories at five and six years old, I think I was like, wait a minute, and I’ve in the last couple of years been reflecting on this, I’m like, wait a minute. At what age is it appropriate to start teaching women about calories in versus calories out? Because it’s clearly not six. Everybody was appalled, but is it 16? Is it 26? Because there’s at some point where the course comes on and you are told to deprive yourself, and this is just the way it is. I remember my mom used to say, beauty hurts. You just have to suck it up. So these beliefs I know have kind of a little tiny bit of increments permeated our being and we don’t even recognize them as anything other than truth.
It’s that level of self-awareness. If you see something, say something that we have to start with being aware of the corset, being aware of this cultural conditioning and this messaging that has been told to us. I think one of the best ways to be aware of it is if a little girl came to you and said anything about how they look or that somebody made fun of them or something negative, what you would say to that little girl is often very different than what we would say to ourselves. I think that’s the first step of realizing a little bit of the brainwashing that we’ve all been given around our value being in a number, in a scale. Let’s be honest, like weight loss, weight loss, weight loss, weight loss, whatever we hear about New Year’s resolutions, it’s never truly healthy. It’s that number on a scale that determines everything.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Damn, that number is a lie.
Carrie Lupoli
It’s a lie.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So let’s also talk about behavior science. What did you mean about that? How should we be behaving by science?
Carrie Lupoli
This is what’s so interesting because I think as a behavior specialist, I innately go right there and as regular people out on the street, we don’t analyze our behavior and we don’t even realize what’s going on in our brain naturally, that’s causing us to behave certain ways. So if we first think about our beliefs, they impact our behavior, our thoughts, and our beliefs, they impact our behavior. We don’t always realize that though the things that we feel, for example, end up being the things that we think. And that connection’s like a magnet. So if we think that we are just super stressed and work was awful, and all of these things happen to us that we feel that way, we just feel that level of stress, we will automatically think, oh my gosh, I’m so stressed.
I don’t wanna cook dinner. I don’t wanna have to do these things. It’s like that feeling and that thinking just unconsciously are connected. I call this the cognitive triangle. So think about three points of a triangle. We have our feelings and we have our thoughts. And without being really aware, those two things often really connect well. That third part of the triangle is our actions, is our behaviors, and it actually takes two points of the triangle to influence the third. So if your feelings are one way and they connect with your thoughts, we really haven’t been taught how to disconnect them, then the actions are going to follow suit.
So if I feel really stressed or really angry or really just overwhelmed and I start thinking about all the things that I’m really stressed about or really overwhelmed about, then I’m not going to act in the way of anybody other than someone who is stressed and overwhelmed and frustrated. They’re all gonna connect. So the very first thing that I often do with my clients is think about, okay, just because you feel a certain way doesn’t mean your thought has to follow suit. We can’t always control our feelings, but we can control our thoughts.
We can control how we think and then that thought can actually change one little piece of what we do. If two points of the triangle influence the third and we can do a little bit differently because we’re thinking a little bit differently, it’s amazing how the feeling comes along. So it’s like that level of self-awareness that’s really important because we unconsciously feel and then think, and then do, and we don’t actually realize that our brain is following this set of loops that we’ve trained it to do. So if we’ve ever had this loop of being super stressed out, then thinking about it, then eating the whole cake because it’s sitting on the counter.
Well, that eating of the cake made us feel a little relaxed, even though it wasn’t healthy for us, it gave us some sort of reward. So the cue is being super stressed. The behavior is that we ate the cake. And then that reward is that feeling of satisfaction for just a moment, and our brain just follows that loop over and over and over again. We need to interrupt that circuit and it’s amazing how when we’re aware of it, we can actually see it happening.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I love flipping that script and just changing how I think. When you start a negative narrative or you start to have negative thoughts or, oh, it’s gonna take so long to get where I want to be physically, or whatever you’re telling yourself, whatever script that is, you can change it in an instant. You can do prayer, you can just change what you’re saying to something more positive and your body literally, chemically will start to change or stress hormones will start to change, and then that your thought or action follows thought every time
Carrie Lupoli
What a lot of people don’t realize is that the way that our brain works is the problem with it is when we’re in the emotion, when we’re in the feeling, it’s like if you’ve ever been really mad at your kid, it’s really hard not to yell at them because you feel that anger. But then afterwards you’re like, oh, I’m really sorry I yelled at you, right? So how do we get in front of it? Because it’s almost like we’re a different person when we feel that anger, for example, or that stress or whatever that emotion is. Then afterwards that’s where I see it like, if we just binge eat on something, then we feel really guilty, this is why our relationship with food is so problematic.
We use it as a source of comfort and then we demonize it as something that has too much power over us. We don’t know how to always reconcile that. There’s a little part in our brain that a lot of us don’t realize. It’s called the amygdala, and that little amygdala is this tiny almond-shaped structure that controls all of our emotions. But then we have the hippocampus, which is like our Wikipedia, like it’s the knowledge center of our brain. If we’ve ever said, I know what to do, or just don’t do it, we know what to do. But very often our emotions keep us from doing it. And when we get emotional, when we actually have these beliefs and these feelings, the amygdala will get bigger in our brain than the hippocampus.
So if it’s actually bigger, that means our emotions are taking over. I call it like a guard dog just starts barking. And the only way to calm a guard dog down is to feed it or let it tire itself out, right? So a lot of the times we feed ourselves or we just tire ourselves out, and that’s when the amygdala gets smaller, and then our knowledge center goes back to where you know it’s in charge, and then we feel guilty.
If we can start to recognize when we’re getting that amygdala hijack and there’s actual physical things that happen in our body, maybe our stomach gets hot or our armpits get sweaty, or we start tapping our toe, if we could actually start to be aware of what our body does as the amygdalas get bigger, get in front of it, because it’s really hard when you’re in the middle of it to then pull back
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Dr. Wendy Myers
You have some tools in your tool bag for stress management, whether that’s exercise or taking a nap or doing some meditation. You’ve gotta figure out what tools you’re gonna use to head off that stress when it happens, or also to prevent it as well, you have to master that nervous system regulation.
Carrie Lupoli
It’s really pivotal and this is why I think the three pieces of BS are really important. I know that there are these belief systems that we have that are dictating everything else from there, the behavioral science of what’s happening in our brain without us even realizing it. But then blood sugar is another really big piece of the equation that can help with exactly what you were just talking about, because our blood sugar is, I call it our body’s love language. When our blood sugar is actually regulated and balanced, everything else in our body is balanced. And so very often we don’t even realize that. I was actually just doing a speaking event and I was a little bit nervous before it. It was the first time I’d ever spoken about this topic in this group.
I was wearing a continuous glucose monitor and that stress level shot my glucose up super, super high. Now our body can balance its blood sugar on its own, but if we’re not helping it along with lifestyle, then it gets really tired. Today we’re under so much chronic stress. It’s not just acute, but it’s chronic that our blood sugar is actually so incredibly dysregulated, which is causing so much dysregulation right down to our cells, and that’s what’s caused metabolic disease in addition to the toxins in our environment and all these other things, which then leads to metabolic complete and total dysfunction. When we can actually control our blood sugar, that can help deal with so much of the things that trip us up in our regular life because when our body is balanced, our entire system is balanced.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I used to use a continuous blood sugar monitor also, and I did it for a few months and it was so illuminating. What foods trigger you? Stressors trigger you. Lack of sleep gives you higher blood sugar and it’s such an important thing to do to just kind of gauge where you’re at and what foods bother you ’cause it could be really, really surprising. Let’s talk about why blood sugar regulation stabilization is such a game changer for so many people for energy, for your mood, for your cravings, ’cause if you’re on this blood sugar rollercoaster, you are not gonna be able to control your cravings. You’re gonna be a slave to caffeine, sweets, and carbs. And it’s just amazing once you tune into that and you realize what’s driving your cravings, and how much you can control that with blood sugar. It’s just a huge game changer.
Carrie Lupoli
It changes everything. I think this is where diet culture actually steps in because we have been taught to eat less, be afraid of carbs. Basically it’s around a food plan. So many people say, Carrie, just tell me what to eat. And I’m like, that right there stops diet culture because do we want health or do we want weight loss? If you go after weight loss, we’ll often do very unhealthy things, but if we truly want health, we will get to the root of what’s causing our weight gain, what’s causing our cravings, and all those cravings, like you talked about, we know are attributed to a dysregulated blood sugar.
We as women who often don’t have a great relationship with our own bodies, believe it’s our fault, our willpower, our lack of discipline, and then we just keep beating ourselves up. And within days of regulating your blood sugar, suddenly when cravings disappear, you’re like, well. Heck, maybe I’m not a complete and total inability to control myself. Maybe I’m not out of control. And so having a balanced blood sugar, whether you are two or 92, is truly the foundation of our bodies. It impacts just about every single system and every single symptom that we are having. For a woman in her fifties menopause, when I went through menopause at 46, I had no idea I was going through it.
My doctor was like, how is that possible? I wasn’t gaining weight, I didn’t have hot flashes, nothing. And he said, remind me of what you teach people again. And before I could answer, he said to me, ’cause it’s all about insulin resistance. And I said, yeah, I teach blood sugar stabilization, but foundationally food matters without a doubt. All these other pieces, like you just said, sleep. Even one night of dysregulated sleep can impact our body like that of a type two diabetic.
I will talk about the six spinning plates. We gotta think about these six plates. There’s only like, you’re at a carnival and you’re spinning plates on a pole and you kind of gotta keep ’em all spinning, but your real job is just not to let any of ’em fall. They don’t have to all be spinning perfectly. And the foundation is nutrition, eating in a way that balances your blood sugar. And yes, there’s certain foods that are gonna spike our blood sugar for some people more than others. If you’re older, if you’re not. But it isn’t about less. It’s about sometimes just pairing food together. So I teach something called PFC3hree, eating a protein, a fat, and a carbohydrate. They’re actually meant to be eaten together. Every three hours you’re ready to eat satisfied. And when I say carbohydrate, there’s so many different carbs, but your body loves fruits and vegetables, and we’ve been taught to kind of demonize those.
But when you eat those three together, I can prove it with thousands and thousands and thousands of clients in their CGMs, our blood sugar never spikes. It just has these beautiful rolling hills. Like I was saying, I was stressed during that speaking event and I was eating perfectly fine and my blood sugar spiked right up. So stress is one of those six spinning plates as well as sleep, hydration, supplementation and exercise. And if we can figure out a way at like just 1% improvement a day to start spinning those plates, our body is naturally going to respond and we’re getting to the root of what’s really causing the issues.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
I wanted to use a CGM because I wanted to really target what was going on with my sleep ’cause you know, if you don’t sleep one night that you’re craving sweets and you wake up really hungry and you just eat more food, you’re just craving more food. And so I wanted to figure out what was going on? I realized that if I eat too large of a dinner or something sweet after dinner, you may want a sweet or something that would spike my blood sugar and then it would stay high throughout the night. It would stay high all night long and I could correlate as using an aura ring. I could correlate when I woke up to the blood sugar spike.
Carrie Lupoli
I love that data. It’s powerful, but this is where we get things so wrong. The diet industry. I’m now a conspiracy theorist. The diet industry, the weight loss industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the food industry, our healthcare system, none of them are actually here for our best interest. The weight loss industry does not profit from us if we don’t keep coming back over and over and over again if we don’t feel like they have the answers. It’s like the marketing genius. It’s genius marketing, right, where they fail 90% of the time, but we keep thinking it’s our fault and this is a perfect example of that.
We are told not to eat at night. And we know the data, like if we eat something like what you were just talking about, that can throw off our sleep. But if we just don’t eat and our body is not nourished, then we actually really dysregulate our sleep as well. It’s not about a deficit, it’s about the right amount of food and keeping your blood sugar stabilized.
There was actually a study done in 2018. That was a long time ago. We know this stuff. Why we’re not actually teaching it and really allowing people to understand this is what bothers me. But in 2018, Stanford did a study where. The majority of people that they monitored with continuous glucose monitoring that were quote unquote healthy people, had diabetic level glucose spikes. It’s happening ’cause of our environment, it’s happening ’cause of our food, because of our stress, because of our lack of movement. And that’s really what’s killing us in so many ways, and if we keep listening to the weight loss industry and the diet culture, we’re just gonna keep going and going. 93% of people have metabolic dysfunction, so, but we know that blood sugar regulation is absolutely getting to the root cause. So they’re not gonna tell us that because then it actually means we don’t need them anymore.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Magnesium glycinate is so important in helping with insulin resistance and blood sugar control. It’s just a super, super simple thing. Maybe 500 milligrams a day or some before bed makes it a huge difference
Carrie Lupoli
I actually do a magnesium lotion before bed and it just absorbs right in, and it’s absolutely incredible. My college age daughter literally cannot live without putting on her magnesium lotion, but that’s one of the spinning plates too, supplements, and I call it supplemental supplements. Now there are certain supplements that absolutely can help us, so I call it like. It’s not even like if you’re tiling a floor, it’s not the tile, but it’s the grout. It’s the stuff that keeps it all from wobbling. And so I put supplements in there like vitamins and minerals. Magnesium is a game changer in every single way, but also things like sauna. I call that supplemental because you can sauna every day, but if you still eat in a way that’s throwing your blood sugar off completely, then it’s not gonna help in the way that it could.
But the longevity studies on sauna are absolutely amazing. I also talk about walking or regular movement. I actually don’t put walking in the exercise category because we should be walking and moving as much as we can. But I put strength training in the exercise category. If we’re strength training, that helps our body be able to handle everything, but especially blood sugar balance. So it’s these little pieces of the puzzle and it’s not, if you eat this many calories, you’re going to lose weight. It drives me crazy.
I follow all sorts of social media people and I have every certification under the sun and I get into these groups just to listen to what traditional nutritionists are saying, and it’s like, well, they’re obviously not at a caloric deficit. If they’re not losing weight, they’re not at a caloric deficit, and I just wanna be like, oh my gosh, people, we’re tying into diet culture here and we’re not telling people what they actually really need.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It’s amazing. I’m like, you can be like St. Jenny Craig, that you can be in a caloric deficit, but they’re feeding you bagel chips and they’re feeding you these sausage biscuits and all this stuff with gluten and chemicals and all these things that spike your blood sugar. Even though they’re technically under 1200 calories, you’re spiking your blood sugar. You’re eating tons of chemicals and chemicals and heavy metals cause diabetes and blood sugar dysregulation.
Carrie Lupoli
I actually did an experiment because I do a bunch of different studies. I’m doing one right now in a hospital, which is really exciting because it’s with residents like doctors who literally have no idea about this. And it’s just very exciting to me to be able to, my number one clients are doctors, like, for them to be able to really understand this. But we did a study and we had clients that ate in the balance of what we know about the portion sizes like protein, fat, and carbs about every three hours, about a palm size of protein, maybe like a fist of carbs and like a thumb of fat. So we had them work and we were really clear about how many grams of protein, fat, and carb we would have them eat. One group had almost all processed foods and another group had the same exact amount of macronutrients, but they were all clean, whole, unprecedented foods.
We had the CGMs on them and they were wildly different even though they were all the same exact macronutrients and the portion sizes. And then the other thing that I think really gets me is this whole word of deficit. This is where diet culture happens without us knowing it. Every single certification pretty much out there teaches the caloric deficit. I keep saying, when you keep telling a woman deficit, what does she think? If she’s not losing weight? ’cause we’re not talking about health, then she thinks deficit and she thinks I just have to eat less. I just have to eat less of it.
It’s really about the right amount of food. I don’t know why we keep using the word deficit and I always say, what thrives in a deficit? Nothing, but we don’t question the narrative because it’s just been around for so long, and so I joke, the name of my book is called From Corset to Crown: Disrupting Everything We’ve Been Told About Weight Loss, Confidence, And Self Worth, because I really think it’s time to disrupt that narrative. We’ve just been kind of bamboozled into believing things as true and they’re just not.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, tell us more about your book.
Carrie Lupoli
I’m excited about it because I really think it’s the book I wish I had when I was going on this journey, and I have now as part of this book writing process, which is crazy. I have now read my own book more times than I could possibly count, and it’s like every time I read it, I’m like, yeah. And it really is helping women see this metaphorical corset that we’ve been told to put on, and I don’t know what age we’ve all put it on. I think I was maybe around eight or nine, but I think everybody’s kind of got a different story.
But at some point we all put this corset on and it’s around really helping them to see that it’s time to take off the corset and put on the crown. And when I think about the crown, my daughter talked about calories when she was six, when she was 16. I had been working so hard to not just change my story, but to change it so that they didn’t grow up with the same disordered thinking that I had. And so when my daughter was 16 and we got an Amazon delivery box in the mail, I was shocked when I opened it because it was a tiara and I was. Hey, who ordered a tiara? And Grace comes running down and she goes, I did. And I said, why? She goes, because I know my value and this is gonna remind me of that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Oh wow.
Carrie Lupoli
I was like, holy cow. This is a kid that didn’t have a single friend at her 14th birthday party. She didn’t talk at all. She had a really sweet voice, but she never used it. She was always too embarrassed. And it was like at that moment, belief. Is what guided her belief in herself and belief then turns into action. She started auditioning for different roles. She didn’t think she could get it originally because she decided to believe in herself. And then she was cast as Bell and Beauty and the Beast and won all sorts of awards and ended up performing on Broadway. Now she’s in college for musical theater.
It was just such an amazing time in our life for me to see the difference of when you believe in your value, how you do things very differently. You show up for yourself very differently. You show up because you love yourself too much and you honor the life and the body that you’ve been given versus feeling like I need to weigh a certain amount so I could feel like. Okay, taking a picture.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
I saw this really interesting meme on social media the other day. It was a guy working out. He is like, oh, I finally lost that five pounds, and then a year later. Finally lost that five pounds a year later, finally lost that five pounds. And it’s just like this never ending cycle or like, I’ll feel good once I lose that five or 10 pounds. And it just never materializes.
Carrie Lupoli
No, it really is about the idea of like, what do you want and why do you want it? And we do this all the time. When someone says, I wanna lose weight, first of all, the goal weight gotta go because that’s out of our control. It’s an outcome goal that is really like, whether you’re one pound off or five pounds, like it’s a number we’ve made up. Let’s be honest, right? It’s not necessarily our ideal or optimal weight, and it’s really about our behaviors. How do we show up for ourselves consistently? Because we love ourselves. So what is your why? If the why is because I wanna have confidence, I’m like, listen, I know plenty of larger women that exude confidence and plenty of smaller women that have no confidence in the world.
Clearly the size of your body is not the determining factor of confidence, it comes from within. So we really gotta ask ourselves, what do we want and why do we want it? When I started really digging into that, for me, I realized I wanna be 80 and be able to kick a soccer ball with my great grandkids. I wanna be able to travel and put the suitcase up overhead without a struggle. If I fall, I absolutely wanna be able to get up without breaking a bone, and I sure as heck will not have my kids have to take care of me the way that we have to take care of our parents, and we can actually reverse the aging process by showing up for ourselves for the right reasons.
I know that each of us are here for a purpose, and it wasn’t to find the right diet. It wasn’t to weigh a certain amount. Diet culture has this believing that it is, but it was to serve others. It was to do something with this life. And I wanna be able to be the healthiest version of myself for as long as possible, so I can serve as long as possible. When you have those as real reasons, you show up to the gym even though you don’t want to, go to the grocery shop instead of going to the takeout because you care too much about this life container that you’ve been given.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Can you talk about eating a good diet versus going on a diet? Because I think there’s so many people out there, they just eat the way they want to eat. They eat their fast food and their subway and this and that, and then they’re like, oh, I gotta go on a diet now. They think of this as like this temporary thing that they need to do. Can you talk about the fallacy in that thinking?
Carrie Lupoli
That’s the perfect example of the diet mentality, right? That’s the diet culture that we have been conditioned to believe through the weight loss industry, that when you’re frustrated enough with your body, then you go and fix what’s wrong with you as opposed to, and I remember saying this once to a potential client and she’s like, that hit me. How you lose weight has to be how you maintain it. We can’t do this thing for a little bit of time. There are three questions that I always ask you, before you ever start any nutritional approach you should be able to answer yes to. One, is it based in science designed for your body to thrive?
All diets are based in science, but if they’re based in restriction and deprivation, they’re not designed for your mind or your body to thrive. Two, would you let your kids do it? We’re all human, we’re physiologically pretty similar. So if you wouldn’t let your kid do it, why are you doing it? What are you modeling for your child? And three, can you do it for the rest of your life? Your body wants a relationship with you like any other relationship and that relationship is built in trust. Trust comes with positive interactions consistently over time. And so if we are consistent with how we are fueling our body, that our body is not gonna be able to be consistent with us. It’ll never work to have a relationship with anybody that’s just temporarily nice to them and the rest of the time that they’re just treating ’em like garbage. We have to reframe our beliefs about our body and what’s important. And if that last question, can I do it for the rest of my life isn’t a yes, then we shouldn’t be doing it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I love that point because I think that people can look at different health influencers, people that are doing keto or people that are doing whatever diet they’re doing, the macros or whatever they’re doing, and their diets are not sustainable long term or they work really well for that person.
Carrie Lupoli
I guess you gotta decide what working means, because I’m like, if working means I can never have a birthday cake or quesadilla because I’m on keto, then that to me isn’t working right? I want food freedom. I wanna be able to like having my body and I synergistically talking to each other. This is where people will always say, well, the diet worked. But then it didn’t, and I’m like, let’s redefine what our definition of working is, because if we could actually define that, I don’t think we would do a lot of the things that we’re doing. So I think it’s just really about taking that step back and asking yourself the questions before we just get blindly kind of swept into the next trendy thing.
Dr. Wendy Myers
That’s such a good point you said about wanting to eat the diet for weight loss. It’s more about the maintenance diet that you’re gonna be eating after that. And it just goes back to a healthy whole foods diet. That’s what you eat. You have to learn how to eat like that period.
Carrie Lupoli
If we’ve been used to eating processed foods and going through the drive-through, I always say, you are what you eat, it’s you are what you absorb. And if we’re not absorbing nutrients with a whole a cleaner diet, whole foods and unprocessed foods, then we’re not absorbing nutrients, we’re not gonna be healthy. But also the food industry has an amazing scientific entire entourage, and they have something called a bliss point. And so they know the exact amount of salt, sugar, and fat to put in a food so that you crave more of it.
So I’ve had so many people tell me, I can’t eat vegetables, I don’t like anything green. And I’m like, that is because your bliss point is so far out of control that you don’t even recognize what real food should taste like anymore. You can do it. We can just slowly start to make choices little by little, and your body naturally wants to go to those more natural foods. I crave a good salad now, which years ago I never would’ve thought was true. But even the thought, like I had to get a colonoscopy and they told me I could drink soda, and I was like, Ooh, I’m gonna have gingerella having scale and like forever I couldn’t even swallow it. I was like, wow, what a difference my body is in. What a different reaction. Because it felt like poison in my body.
Dr. Wendy Myer
Oh yeah. I had the same thing. I used to drink diet Coke at every meal. I can’t even stand the taste. It tastes like chemicals and poison. It’s disgusting.
Carrie Lupoli
So it’s again, our belief systems. If we believe we don’t like vegetables, we’re never gonna eat vegetables, right? If we believe carbs are bad, we’re never gonna eat carbs without feeling guilty. So all of these things have to be a part of this equation, and no diet plan is ever gonna do that. I would say if a nutritionist gives you a meal plan run, because that’s a script and your life is not a script, we actually have to be able to dig into the stuff that really makes change who we are, what we want, and why we want it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I used to be such a perfectionist and especially with my diet, and now I’m just like 9 out of 10. I want to eat good 90% of the time. 10%, I’m just not gonna worry about it. You have to live your life. Sometimes you want some ice cream or whatever, and sometimes you wanna be more restrictive. You got five pounds you’re gonna lose, but for the most part, that maintenance for me, it’s just 10% of the time. I’m gonna just eat the yogurt or the frozen yogurt or whatever.
Carrie Lupoli
I think about it like any other relationship. My husband and I have been married 25, actually 26 years. It’s 2026, and neither one of us have been perfect, but the reason why we are still very happily married is because we’ve consistently shown up for each other. He doesn’t get home and wonder what version of Carrie is he gonna get today? Is he gonna get today someone that’s super mad or super frustrated? That level of mistrust does not build a strong relationship, but if we get into a fight, we’re not getting divorced tomorrow. I think it’s that kind of ebb and flow. You don’t need to be perfect, you just need to be consistent. This is how we have to adopt our relationship with our bodies.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, Carrie, why don’t you tell us more about your book and where we can get it?
Carrie Lupoli
Carrielupoli.com has all the information about the book. It’s officially out in the fall, but what’s super cool is that if we pre-order now, then you can get the ebook version for free, plus a whole bunch of other great bonuses. I really believe it. It was a book of 30 years in the making, really helping a person get a walkthrough step by step, really unpacking our beliefs and questioning them, figuring out what we want and why we truly want it, understanding the science of behavior, and then truly digging into blood sugar. Then how do you bring all that together and actually do it in a way that’s sustainable every day? That’s really what I was going for when I was writing the book. I feel like I accomplished it. We’re really excited about it, my whole team, and I just feel like it is kind of that message that we all wish we had when we were starting off on this journey.
Dr. Wendy Myer
Well, Carrie, thanks so much for coming on the show. That was so good. I just love how you articulated everything. It’s so important for women to hear these words of encouragement and to not beat themselves up. I think we’re so good at beating ourselves up when we don’t follow the diet or we have cravings, which is really our blood sugar. I think people don’t realize your biology is always gonna overcome willpower, and so you’ve gotta do that stress management, that blood sugar regulation, so that you can set the stage for success. So it’s not just about white knuckling it and will powering yourself through a month of not eating sugar or whatever you’re trying to do.
Carrie Lupoli
I always say that diet culture kept us in this cage and then blamed us for not flying, and it’s time for us to actually just step outta the cage, take the corset off, and recognize our value is huge. We just have to step into it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, fantastic. Well, Carrie, thanks for coming on the show. Everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Thanks for tuning in to the Myers Detox Podcast. I love bringing all these guests on to help you and give you those little pieces of the puzzle that you need to meet your health goals. So thank you so much for tuning in every week.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
