Fad-free Zone: Nutrition and Weight Management

Brad Cooper

Welcome to the latest episode of the Catalyst Health and wellness coaching podcast. My name is Brad Cooper and I’ll be your host. Today’s episode will focus on nutrition and weight management. What we’re going to take an evidence based approach. We’re not just going to simply focus on the headlines that we typically hear about in health and wellness. Our guest today is Dr Tanya holiday. She’s the assistant professor in the Department of Health, kinesiology and recreation at the University of Utah. For Research, focuses on appetite regulation in response to exercise mechanisms, underlying response variation in body mass regulation with lifestyle interventions in weight loss maintenance. Dr Halliday is also a registered dietician, most recently working part time as a coach for medically supervised weight loss program at the Anschutz Health and Wellness Center on the University of Colorado’s Anschutz medical campus. Her personal interests include trail running, hiking, weightlifting, skiing, mountain biking, and traveling, and if you’re on twitter, you’ve got to follow her at nutrition nerd. I’ve been following her for a long time and really present some fascinating research in there. Just a reminder that you can access additional resources including a transcript of this episode at CatalystCoachingInstitute.com, and please never hesitate to reach out to us with any questions you have about the podcast, about your career as a coach or anything else related to those, those areas, the email for that as results@catalystcoachinginstitute.com now on with the latest episode of the Catalyst Health and wellness coaching podcasts.

Brad Cooper

Well, Dr. Holiday. Thank you for joining us today. A lot of questions very timely. Your research is so fascinating. The things that I’ve looked into. Uh, we’ll let folks know how to follow you on twitter in the show notes so they can keep track you like I have because you post a lot of really fascinating stuff, but right out of the gate, what drew you into focusing your research in your career on nutrition, weight loss, and lifestyle interventions?

Dr. Halliday

Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be on your podcast and I have always been very interested in nutrition and particularly sports nutrition at a young age in college at the University of Wyoming. I got the chance to work on a few different research projects and I really just got hooked on the research bug. From there I did move away from sports nutrition specific research simply because I wanted to help people improve their health and hopefully reignite or initiate their love for an active and healthful lifestyle. It’s really people like my parents who were division one swimmers and slowly transitioned their time to be focused on work and raising a family and ensuring that myself and my sister were successful, which was all of them, them devoting little time to themselves. It’s those kinds of people that I want to help kind of get back on the wagon.

Brad Cooper

Awesome. As you know, we’re. We’re talking to either current or future health and wellness coaches, so this is a large part of their. Their client base is people that are struggling with that exact area or previously struggled and they’re kind of back on track. So this is going to be great. Um, I shared your bio before we got started, but take us on a little deeper dive. What if you were to try to identify one of the most intriguing discoveries you’ve made recently in one of these main areas? Any, any thoughts about what that might be?

Dr. Halliday

So, I think that actually my most exciting findings have not happened yet. Um, some of the trials I currently have underway will provide exciting data on appetite regulation in response to exercise at this point. They are rather preliminary though. Um, I also have to feasibility trials in progress that I think will lead to more intriguing trials and then further knowledge generation and both of those trials are focused on weight loss maintenance interventions. As we know there are many ways to lose weight and for the most part they will all work. But really it’s that maintenance of weight loss that is really challenging. And I’m starting to focus some research efforts there in one trial. I’m comparing a reverse diet to standard weight loss maintenance advice and for those of you who maybe haven’t heard of a reverse diet, it is something that has been popularized by the bodybuilding community and involves slowly increasing energy intake, following diet induced weight loss rather than returning straight to a maintenance calorie target. And this has not been studied in any scientific manner and especially not in weight reduced individuals who have had or maybe still have overweight and obesity. So I’m looking to get some feasibility data there and see if this is worth pursuing in the long term. Um, and then the second feasibility style is looking at a mindfulness meditation intervention or how efficacious it is to help support weight loss maintenance. So both of those are ongoing and our short term, but will help us refine our approach and better design future larger trials.

Brad Cooper

Interesting. Interesting. We just did a podcast with a mindfulness expert, I don’t know, two, three weeks ago, and it seems to be coming into all aspects of life. So I’m very curious to see the results of that. I’m also just for our audience folks as health and wellness coaches, you’re hearing all kinds of crazy stuff when it comes to weight and nutritional because you need to follow people Dr. Holiday to get the real stuff that evidence based stuff. So again, we’re trying to keep you on that path and not have you on the crazy train. So next question. What are some of the misconceptions about nutrition and weight loss, that wellness? Speaking of what I just said, what are some of the misconceptions about nutrition and weight loss that wellness coaches might’ve heard from clients? Maybe they seen in the popular press headlines, but you look at those and you know, that doesn’t hold up to evidence based research. That’s just somebody’s opinion out there.

Dr. Halliday

Yeah. So as you said, there’s several, you know, whether it’s a lay article, a book, a blog post, or maybe even, you know, other podcasts, obviously not this one that are circulating out there that really do present inaccurate and misleading intervention information. Neither. One common belief that that I’ve seen that health professionals and the lay population can kind of fall into is that exercise is not effective for weight loss. We always hear, oh, you need to diet to lose weight. Exercise is important during the maintenance, but it doesn’t help with that weight loss, but actually when you look at the mean or the average weight loss and exercise interventions, it is generally less than we would expect based upon the exercise energy expenditure which contributes to this belief, but the true story is that is actually we need to look beyond the main response across participants and when we do that, we look at individual responses.

Dr. Halliday

Typically what we see is that some individuals lose more weight than you would expect based upon the increased energy expenditure. Some lose what you would expect. However, then there are others that don’t lose weight and some may even gain weight during that intervention period. So therefore to say that exercise is ineffective is not totally accurate. I think it’s something we should help individuals to better understand. I think a recent headline I’ve seen which is inaccurate when looking at the actual study is that the consumption of organic food lowers cancer risk. Now, this article was recently published in Jama internal medicine and presented findings from a web based prospective cohort study in France, and so to be fair to the journalists and others, um, who may lack the scientific background, the key points, the abstract and the overall conclusions of this publish articles certainly had spin in them and in my opinion, did not accurately represent the trial.

Dr. Halliday

So it was only on reading that whole published manuscript that you’ve learned that the association between the Higher Self reported organic food intake and the lower self report cancer diagnosis was not statistically significant in younger adults. Men, individuals who had never smoked or those who are current smokers as well as a few other categories. So as health and wellness coaches, it’s important go beyond the headlines on the news of course, but also be on the studies abstract and conclusion on some of these hot items. And this way you can accurately convey that information to your clients as it is often these bigger headlines that your clients are likely to ask you about. And I’ll add in one resource I think is great is the obesity and energetics offering email. This is a weekly email that curated by Dr David Allison as his colleagues on obesity related topics and one of the sections always included is called study verse headline. And so in this they will link to popular headlines about a study and then the actual study and it often was a very short, maybe one or two sentence commentary on the discrepancy between the headline and the study. Um, and I know we all get way too many emails, but this is one that I think really is a great resource on trading the latest articles in the field. So it could be one that your listeners might want to consider subscribing to.

Brad Cooper

So good. Thank you. I mean you made so many valuable points that are not just winning these two specific style, but reminding the coaches and coaches, that’s a way to differentiate yourself. Don’t be like all the other coaches that just grab a headline and run with it, dig in a little more. That will make you better. That’ll make you different. So Dr. Holiday. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good stuff. Next question. Our audience’s current or future health and wellness coaches. Obviously, what advice would you have for them if they’re working with individuals who are looking to improve their nutrition and would like to have more effectively and slash or would like to more effectively manage their weight? So kind of coming back to the core here,

Dr. Halliday

I think the biggest piece of advice I have is to approach every coaching encounter without any preconceived notions or plans for the individual to make sure you take the time to dig deep and understand why each client reached out to you and expressed wanting assistance with nutrition or weight management. Uh, the surface level answers that they give you. Well, I just want to be healthy. I want to lose weight, may not actually be the true underlying reason. And so getting to know your client’s health and wellness history, their current health and especially with our current life challenges are really going to be crucial in setting up that coaching relationship. And so that way you will have a better idea of the goals you and your client will work towards achieving.

Brad Cooper

Beautiful. How have you seen nutrition impact other areas that coaches may be addressing with their clients? Things like stress, life balance, exercise, performance, sleep relationships, financial fitness, in any of those kind of dimensions of wellness. Have you gotten into the crossover of, okay, if you’re eating well then this happens or, or any suggestions along those lines?

Dr. Halliday

Yes, absolutely. And I find it’s really hard to tease apart what comes first in a lot of these of nutrition is just one part of the overall wellness and health puzzle. And I think it is hard to make changes to one of these areas that you mentioned without seeing changes to others. For instance, changes in dietary habits could make exercise feel easier if you’re eating a little bit more intuitively and not going into an exercise session to fall or I’m too hungry and that could also improve your sleep and so many other things. However, I think that changes to these areas such as building up stress, resilience or setting appropriate boundaries in relationships could have a positive impact on nutrition by reducing the emotional eating. Uh, one thing I have looked at in my research program is what I call the spillover effect, and that is how does engagement in one health related behavior influence others?

Dr. Halliday

My focus has been specifically on how exercise influences appetite, energy intake and physical activity. And during my dissertation I examined have resistance exercise specifically influences these outcomes. And what I found was that initiation of resistance exercise. So strength, strength based Merck is associated with an increase in self reported non exercise physical activity and a decrease in energy intake. Although that was self reported energy intake and I can speculate that this may be due to improve to exercise economy, improved strength, and improve the muscle mass from that resistance training that then makes a rubic exercise and activities of daily living easier on the non exercise physical activity side of things on the Diet side, since resistance training is generally considered a more challenging behavior to adopt as compared to an aerobic exercise intervention, uh, that could increase improvements in self efficacy, which they could spill over to improvements in eating habits.

Dr. Halliday

I currently have several trials that are ongoing to look more at the mechanisms of how exercise influences appetite regulation at the hormonal level, the neuronal level, using functional Mri with my colleagues at the University of Colorado, and then also some psychological outcomes. So I’ll definitely report back on our finding as they come available. I, it’s hard for the health and wellness coaches out there knowing that a lot of the areas you, you mentioned in your question are interrelated. It may be worthwhile to not try and change all of them at once. Uh, your, your resources, yourself and your client’s resources. Maybe limited to overhaul many aspects of their life, so it may be worthwhile to hone in on one area that seems the most accessible for our client to focus on in the present. And then by generating some success in that area, there may be positive alterations and other factors occur as part of this spillover effect or having success may allow the client or you know, greater bandwidth or competence to start tackling another area.

Brad Cooper

So a lot of nuggets in there. A couple of follow ups to that. So first of all, any, and I’m, I’m okay with you going into the hypothesis here and not having to have exact outcomes from your specific research, but any hypotheses on the best first step for those folks with that resistance training you said that’s harder to get going than the aerobic. Did you come across some ways that got folks to kind of get that ball rolling a little bit?

Dr. Halliday

So it’s kind of hard to tease apart what might make it easier for a person to do that in the real world versus a research study, um, assembly because people who are enrolling in research that are already, they’re already at a greater kind of level, you know, trying to think of readiness to change. They’re already past pre-contemplation and contemplation or they’re taking action. So, so we bias our sample a little bit there. Um, and they also know they’re enrolling in a study where they’re going to be doing resistance exercise, but how I think it’s been helpful in the research setting at least is we start them off with supervised training. So they’re coming in and meeting with their personal trainer, depending upon the intervention, anywhere from two to four times per week to get them going and they have a lot of contact with the study staff.

Dr. Halliday

And so you have that personal accountability. Um, and so, so for the study I mentioned as part of my dissertation, it was actually, we were trying to see if we could help people maintain that resistance training. And so following the three months of the structured program that they did in our lab, Jim, we then actually transition them out into the community and they could pick whichever jim they wanted in the community that was convenient for them, um, and our trainers went with them for their first couple of sessions to orient them to their new facility and say, okay, well this is the still a leg press machine. I know it looks different than what you did with us, but I’m going to show you how to use it. And so I think initially that supervision and then help on the transition can be really impactful. And so I think it might be worthwhile if you’re working with clients, obviously you might not be able to be there in the gym with them if you’re doing virtual health and wellness coaching. But maybe you can ask them to consider if they could start with a personal training package perhaps at their gym. And a lot of fitness centers will offer something like that as an incentive to get you going. And so that could be a way to help people stick with it over time.

Brad Cooper

Excellent. Very good advice. So I’ve touched on this next question a little bit, but let’s come back in because I think this is the core of what folks are looking for. If we have health and wellness coaches that have been somewhat depending on the headlines to drive their recommendations. Are there some recent, or maybe not so recent, but maybe realized areas of nutrition and lifestyle interventions that would be helpful for our coaches in terms of all these areas you’re talking about?

Dr. Halliday

Yeah. So I’m actually gonna pose a question to the audience. I’ll kind of give everyone a second to silently respond and that question is, is weight cycling? So losing weight, regaining it, losing it again and so on, more harmful than never losing weight to begin with. And I’m going to guess that many people probably think yes, that weight cycling is harmful and I must say that I used to be maybe still have a foot in this camp as well and I always assumed that weight cycling did more harm than good. And while this is certainly not definitive set in stone, I would urge, um, health and wellness professionals to pay attention to research that may emerge on this topic. And I started thinking about this more recently as I saw many Dietitians. I’m a dietitian myself, so I kind of followed that practitioner circle calling for practitioners to not encourage weight loss simply because people had failed previously by regaining the weight. And I thought to myself, you know, I don’t know if that’s a helpful message. Would we ever tell a smoker to not undertake another quit attempt simply because they had relapsed and hopefully, hopefully not, no one would do that.

Dr. Halliday

And so I started to dig into that a little bit more. And you may recall if you didn’t see this, you probably should go look it up. There was a trial last year, I believe in the New England Journal of Medicine that indicated that weight cycling maybe harmful. Um, however, a review paper from a few years before that found no evidence of adverse effects of weight cycling and were recently published paper. Which caveat being this used a mouse model found increased lifespan in weight cycling rodents as compared to rodents who remained consistently obese and so of course that’s an animal model and that type of trial will be more challenging to conduct, if not impossible in a human model, but it’s definitely an emerging area and it’s a lot more recent development so it’s something that I would encourage you to stay on top of and not discourage clients from intentional weight loss efforts simply because past attempts have resulted in weight gain. Rather, what can we learn from their past attempts that weren’t successful longterm in order to create a more supportive or successful environment this next round?

Brad Cooper

Beautiful. That’s great. Because I, you stumped me. I was sitting there thinking, well I don’t know. What should the answer be here.

Dr. Halliday

Yeah. And I don’t think we don’t know, but it’s a good question to ponder. Yeah.

Brad Cooper

Well and, and not to just default to again, what we hear of, well you know, the Yo yo thing is not good. Well it’s not, but what’s the alternative staying where we were. And your example was smoking or I’m thinking of alcoholism or any other things. You’re right. It’s a good question. We’re trying to answer. So let’s, let’s turn to you now. We, we, we love to have our audience get to hear our interviewees talk about a little bit of their own life and what you’re doing. You’re super active. You love skiing, weightlifting, trail running, hiking, the whole, whole nine yards that comes along with Colorado and Utah Combo. But is there a certain area in your own health and wellbeing in any of the dimensions? Doesn’t have to be efficient or exercise that you’d be willing to kind of walk us down your current path?

Dr. Halliday

Yes. So, uh, I have a pretty good habit of exercising and generally very good diet with core splurges here and there. That’s one area that I’m really actively working on is improving my sleep hygiene, specifically the overall quality in the mouth, but also trying to create more structure around sleep. So one step that I’ve taken so far is I downloaded an APP blocker for my cell phone. And so I set rules that blocked me from accessing instagram or twitter early in the morning or late at night, and then I also set a daily limit. I’m on my phone for total internet usage and so this has helped me to limit my screen time and allow my time in bed to be more actual sleep time versus time spent maybe with a blue light screen and I’ve also started being more consistent with yoga classes and that’s helped me to wind down before bed and bring some kind of mindful intention to hire to end my days.

Brad Cooper

And. And you’re doing the yoga as a PM activity? Primarily.

Dr. Halliday

Generally like late afternoon, early evening is when I’ve been going.

Brad Cooper

Very good. Very good.

Dr. Halliday

But I don’t, I don’t do yoga for a workout. Like I’m not doing power yoga. I’m really just there for the stretching and relaxation. You got to get my real workouts and in the gym.

Brad Cooper

Beautiful. All right. So last question is just a wide open. Any additional tips, comments, anything you think would be helpful for either current or future health and wellness coaches that are there listening to this today?

Dr. Halliday

Yeah, so I guess my first, my final tip first infomercial be to never stop learning, which of course if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re obviously not going to do that because here you are listening to Brad and all of his guests and getting up to date information on a regular basis. Um, so the second thing is also important and that is to stay within your scope of practice and in order to do this I would say develop a network of other healthcare professionals that you trust and refer your clients to them. If specialized areas needed in certain areas that you’re not trained or certified to do that, chances are that you, you, you referring out will increase your reputation and credibility. And then it could also result in bi directional referrals. And that is those other referring their patients to you for health coaching services since that is not their specialty or their scope of practice.

Brad Cooper

Great Advice. We just had an episode, a looking at the difference and the similarities between counseling and coaching. It’s the same concept. You have a scope of practice. Make sure you’re functioning within that, so thank you for kind of reemphasizing that Dr Halliday. Really, really appreciate it. Some wonderful insights. We’d love to follow back up with you. I will reference how to find you through twitter on the show notes. Anything else you’d like to share just so people can find you or, or research that you’re working on that you’d like to have folks be aware of is as this comes out.

Dr. Halliday

I think that’s it. Yeah, find me on twitter. I’ll keep updating stuff there and you find yourself in Salt Lake or Denver. Chances are one of those places, so feel free to reach out. That sounds great.

Brad Cooper

All right, so a lot of nuggets in there, Huh? Few of the things that jumped out to me that you may or may not have caught a. first of all, I mentioned this early on, but you can catch her at at nutrition nerd on twitter and again, I’ve been following her for a long time and a lot of good resources there. She talked about the importance of evidence based practice. It was great to hear. Talk about that in the context of what we try to continually emphasize here within this podcast. Very, very critical and if you didn’t catch that worth going back and looking at. She also mentioned a resource that I wanted to restate because I couldn’t catch it the first time. Adjunct we listened to it. Uh, it’s called the obesity and energetics offering email from Dr David Allison and that was the one she mentioned provides you a comparison between what the study actually says and what the headline is saying. So that might be something real valuable for you to seek out. The other point that I jotted down that she mentioned here is she mentioned something that is so core to what we do as coaches. So it was, it was fun to hear her present it from a little different perspective, but exactly what you do as a coach and that’s to never go into a session with a preconceived notion or plan for that individual. You don’t stop with the superficial answer, you know that as coaches, but sometimes we don’t realize how critical it is in other contexts as well. So in any case, some great stuff. Hope you enjoyed it. One exciting announcement that I’ve mentioned in a previous episode, but it should be up on the website by the time you hear this and that is the coaching retreat in September of 2019. I cannot tell you how excited we are about this.

Brad Cooper

Conferences can be pretty exhausting. Good stuff, but oftentimes overwhelming. We wanted to try to take the value of the continuing education and this will be approved by the ICH WC and put it in a setting and structure the schedule so you can actually relax and recharge. So I won’t go into details here. If you’re curious about it, reach out to us or check out the website. We do love hearing from you. I say over and over, whether it’s a suggestion for a future podcast idea, a question about your career, things you’re thinking about, reach out, reach out, reach out, email us at results at CatalystCoachingInstitute.com. We tend to get back to folks same day or a day or two at the most, so happy to chat with you there and then thank you for spreading the word about this podcast. All of you who have subscribed to it, shared it with others, provided a kind rating. It really does make a difference. When we started this, I didn’t have any idea or doing and somehow a lot of are finding us, so I really appreciate you spreading that word. Until next time, let’s all keep working towards what we love to call #better than yesterday. Make it a great rest of your day and I’ll look forward to speaking with you soon. On the next episode of the Catalyst Health and wellness coaching podcast.