From Body As Project To Body As Home

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Dear listeners, most of us have a strange relationship with our own bodies. We have been told what to eat, what not to eat, what's clean, what's dirty, what's good for us, what's killing us by so many different voices that somewhere along the way we stopped listening to the one voice that actually lives inside our skin. And in that confusion, the body stops being a place of pleasure and starts being a project, a problem to solve, a score to manage. Right. So today we are going to push back on that quietly. We are going to talk about what it actually means to have an honest, healthy, pleasure-aware relationship with our own body. And how many of the rules we follow were never really ours in the first place. So hey daily smells, welcome back to another powerful episode of Pleasure Principles. I'm your host Avik, and this is the podcast where we have grown-up, non-judgmental, real conversations about the parts of life that get either oversensitized or completely avoided. And today that conversation is about our bodies, our health, the myths we have been sold, and what reclaiming a healthier, more honest relationship with food and wellness actually looks like.

The Biggest Myths In Modern Nutrition

SPEAKER_01 1:32

And my guest today is please welcome Victor Idach. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Thank you for having me on, uh, Vic. It's great. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much, Victor, for joining us today. And um, dear listeners, before we delve deep into the discussion, I'd quickly love to introduce you, Victor. So Victor is joining us to talk about health, wellness, nutrition, and the health myths a lot of us are still living inside of, often without realizing it. So uh Victor, thank you so much for being here with us, and I'm really glad to have you here. So uh I definitely want to start with something like I think most of these conversations should start like uh which is like what people get wrong, right? Because the wellness space has uh gotten very loud very fast, and somewhere in all that noise, a lot of us have absorbed ideas about our bodies that are not actually true, right? So if you can tell me, like in your experience, what is the biggest health myth that people are still living inside of? And what does the real vital truth actually look like?

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Um, I wish I could narrow it down to only one health myth, but there are a few of them, and they're all very important. So I'm gonna give you, I'll start with the first one. Uh, number one, uh, and it's starting in the US in the 1950s. Uh, people were told to do the high-carb, low-fat diet, which is often a high seed oil diet as well, and people were told to stay away from uh saturated fats. Now, uh and this is popular by a man named Ansel Keyes, who cherry-picked his data and he and he left out countries that contradicted his data. And also, he also uh was aware of the fact that oxidative stress, which comes from smoking, could also cause heart disease. But he wanted people to focus on saturated fats, fats in general, and uh as well as on cholesterol. And this has led to huge increases of chronic uh diseases, huge uh uh diabetes, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's. And it's and it's caused, it's wreaked so much havoc because people were fed this misinformation. The American Heart Association also uh started saying CDOLs were good, uh saturated fats were bad, but what a lot of people do not know is in 1948 they were given uh $1.8 million by Procter Gamble, which makes Crisco oil. And in today's terms, that's over $20 million. And at that time, the American Heart Association was brand new, so that was a huge influx of money for them. So they were compromising what they were promoting because of that money that they got for Procter Gamble. So unfortunately, much of the advice you get from the American Heart Association is not always unbiased. So people bought into them, so oh, it's from the American Heart Association, the government's doing this, and it's and let's all kinds of issues. Um, two Harvard researchers were paid uh six and a half thousand dollars to blame fat and exonerate sugar as causing health problems. One of those guys, I believe his name was Mark Hedson, was one of the people mainly responsible for the 1977 U.S. uh dietary guidelines, which guess what? Saying high carb guards were fine. So people said figures coming from the government, everything must be good. So people have been following this bad advice for years. They got high carb, high sugar diets. They stayed away from the good fats, which is necessary, they stay, uh they limited their proteins, they started eating high seed oil diets, and this is just wreaked so much high. They stayed away from cholesterol because they said cholesterol was bad for you. It's actually not true. Cholesterol is actually very healthy for you. In fact, it's so important your liver makes 80% of the cholesterol in your body. A big chunk of your brain is cholesterol. And one of the reasons I believe that dementia and Alzheimer's is scared over the last 35 years is because of statin drugs, which lower your cholesterol and takes it away from your brain. Your brain doesn't have it, it can't function as well. Uh, cholesterol is also important for your cells, it's important for making vitamin D, it's important for making the bulb gold blood. And it's and without cholesterol, there'd be no human race because you needed to make progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone. So it's it's the only time cholesterol is a problem is when it gets oxidized. But other than that, it is an extremely important nutrient. So because people have been buying it to these health myths, because they heard it from authorities, um, it's wreaked havoc on their health. So get good, get plenty of cholesterol. It's very important. And the last myth I will tell you is that, and again, so and I will say eat eggs. People say stay away from eggs because get less cholesterol. Number one, the cholesterol in food has a very minimal effect on blood cholesterol. And again, cholesterol is important for you. And the final myth is modern wheat bread is healthy. It's not. It causes inflammation, it leads to higher levels of celiac disease, it destroys the villi in your in your intestine, which means you can't absorb nutrients as well. It's been linked to diabetes and weight gain. And again, it's very inflammatory. And wheat bread act modern wheat bread actually has a higher glycemic index than table sugar. So the only thing you're getting out of it is some extra fiber, but in general, it does very little good for you. So those are some of the helpments that's caused so many health problems for people that people have been believing over the last 60, 70 years.

Cholesterol Eggs And The Low Fat Era

SPEAKER_01 6:58

So, like uh, when you tell someone that, what's the part that's hardest for them to let go of?

SPEAKER_00 7:06

I I think it's just hard for people to believe they've been misled all these years. People hate to admit that they're wrong. And so when you tell them something like the high carb, low-fat diet is very bad for you, and again, it's also a high acetol diet, it's hard for them to let go sometimes. I think no one likes to admit that they've been fooled. So that that's that's the hardest thing. So I I that's the first one I start off with because they gotta change that. They gotta get less carbs, less acetols, more of the good fats, and more of the proteins. Um, the the new uh food current that was uh put out by the US a few months ago, I think it's so much better. It's not perfect, but it has about over 90% of what I think the people need. So I think it's a great start.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

Got it, got it. Yeah, and that definitely ends because I think the myth itself it's uh is not really the problem. The identity build around the myth is so uh people don't just believe a rule about their body, they build uh a version of themselves around following that rule. And uh when you challenge that rule, you're actually challenging the version of them that's uh been performing it, right? So that's a much bigger thing to ask someone to put down. So uh I mean um go underneath because I don't think the wellness confusion is an accident. There are reasons uh we got here, and uh I'd love to understand the deeper pattern, like what's actually going on beneath the

Why Diet Culture Keeps People Stuck

SPEAKER_01 8:38

surface that keeps people stuck in this cycle of trying every new diet, every new protocol, every new rule, and never quite landing in place of peace with their own body. So, what do you have to say?

SPEAKER_00 8:52

There are a whole bunch of things uh that that's going on. Number one is uh one particular diet is um is is not the savior for everyone. Uh various diets work for various different people, just pros and cons to each. Uh I would just tell people in general just focus on the quality of the food you're eating. That's the most important thing. Eat real food. Uh limit the ultra-processed foods, the junk foods, the foods high in sugars and see it all, and these artificial ingredients that didn't exist 100 years ago, with ingredients you can't even pronounce. If you can't pronounce the ingredient, you probably shouldn't eat it. Food should only have a few ingredients in it, not uh 75 ingredients. And then that's the problem. If you go to like these fast food restaurants like McDonald's, like their French fries 50 years ago had three ingredients. It was potatoes, salt, and beef salad. Now they have like 20, 25 ingredients. And and that's the problem with a lot of these fast food places. They had they put so many different ingredients. A lot of them is to make you addict this, you have to keep eating more. So I think the thing they when you're talking to people, uh you got to be careful. I say if you just tell them what they're doing is wrong, they tend to get defense. That's just human nature. You gotta ask them questions and make them realize themselves what they're doing is wrong. So they're asking them, has this help you? Are you feeling better? Has it helped you lose weight? And a lot of times they're gonna say no. So they have to come up with the answer. When they come up with the answer, they're more likely to be it because they're the source of it. If you tell them this is wrong, like everything I'm telling people, a lot of times I say this to someone, do this, do this, do that, people get defenses. But when I start asking them questions, well, uh when you eat these foods, what kind of how do you feel? Uh, what has been the result of eating these foods the last five years? And they say, well, I put on 40 pounds. And then I'll ask them, how does that make you feel? So you got to ask them questions. I think that's something very important because telling people straight out there they're wrong, people get defense, even though deep down they know they're wrong. But you got to be very careful. That's why I just say ask the question. But I say in the beginning, you just gotta look at the kind of food you need. That's the most important thing. I I think calorie counting can be very dangerous because if you try to limit your calories, you're gonna give up after a while, you're gonna go back to binging. And that that's been the result of all these things. People who like cut the calories out, they'll lose some weight, but after a while, they just go back and eat and just put the weight back on. So I just say in general, just eat good quality food. In the end, everything will take care of itself. There's much more to it than that, but that's the first start.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Exactly, exactly. And um okay, and like uh what's part of that pattern people are most reluctant to name up loud.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Uh people are used people again, people uh it's hard to change. You're you get set in a certain pattern, and the most difficult thing in life is to wake up in the morning having to do something different from what you did the day before. Because you get used to it. Your body doesn't like it fears the unknown. It like it knows it likes what it expects. So even if something's not necessarily good for you, uh your body doesn't like your mind, your brain doesn't like new things, things that it's not used to, because it fears the unknown. That's why people get stuck in the comfort zone. You're trying something new. Uh your brain is like, I don't want to try this because it's afraid of what will happen, because it doesn't know what to expect. So you may be doing things you don't necessarily like. People will stay at a job they hate, but they know what's expected, the job, so they'll keep staying there for years, even though they hate that job. So people fear the unknown. So that thing is one reason why people are reluctant to change. So consciously, they want to try something different, they want to do things to make the hell good, but subconsciously, the subconscious mind makes 95% of your decisions. Subconsciously, they fear changing because they don't want to do something new because they don't know what's gonna happen.

Small Daily Choices Guilt And Food Logs

SPEAKER_01 12:38

So um also like and to bring this to uh the everyday now, because I think a lot of listeners hear uh hear uh I mean hear myth and they imagine something dramatic. But the truth is that these myths show up in the smallest moments of uh someone's day, right? And the food they feel guilty for eating, the mirror check before leaving the house, the way they explain themselves at dinner. So what are the ordinary or almost invisible places where you see these health myths playing out in people's real lives?

SPEAKER_00 13:17

Yeah. Well, like I said, those little things all add up because there's a compound effect to do all these little things. I'm just gonna have uh an extra cupcake, or I'm just gonna have a little extra bit of this or that. And then I'll make up for it some more by eating less, or I'll make up for it by exercising more or whatever. And very often they don't do anything about it. So they just try to justify uh their behavior. Now I'm saying is you can do this from time to time. It's okay. You don't have to, you know, be 100% never eat anything. You know, I eat pizza sometimes, but I don't eat pizza every day. You know what I mean? So so once in a while it's okay. And if you fall, and if you're trying to do the right things and you fall off for a couple days, don't give up. That's what happens to a lot of people who say, Oh, I can't do it. Just get back up and go back to the things you were supposed to do. You know, eating the right food, supplementing, exercising, getting enough sleep, lowering the stress. You might fall off for two or three days, but it's okay, just get back up. That's the thing I would say, don't give up. And that's where people hurt themselves because they constantly give up. Just get back up. We're all gonna mess up from time to time. No one's perfect. And so again, just realize all these little things you're doing, it compounds. Like if you eat like junk food for one or two days and you had a heart attack, you would not you would not eat the junk food again. But it doesn't, you don't get the heart attack after a couple of days. It takes years and years of eating the really horrible ultra-processed junk food. That's what causes the problem. So your body's slowly noticing it, but it's very gradual. And that's the thing. People think like, oh, one or two days will make a difference. But but one or two days becomes four or five days, weeks, months, and then years. So that's why it's so important to watch these little things every single day. One great thing to do is keep a food diary of the things you eat. So you will see when I ate this type of food, I may have a bad reaction to it. You don't notice it unless you write it down. So keep a log of the things you're eating, it can make a big difference. Sometimes foods aren't healthy, most people. For some people, it could be an issue. For example, avocados can be high histamine. So people who have histamine issues uh may have issues with avocados. Even though for the vast majority of people, it's good food. It's got lots of nutrients, but for some people, they can have an issue. So you might be one of them. So that's why I would say keep a food diet. Because not just to keep track of the junk foods you eat, because a lot of people are in denial of how much ultra-processed junk foods they're eating, but even occasionally certain foods that are considered good for them, they may it may cause an issue when they eat them on those days. Oh, on this day, this thing happens. So I highly recommend keeping a food box. So you you're gonna be aware of what's going on with your body.

SPEAKER_01 15:54

Very sure. Yeah, exactly. And uh and there's something in um what you just you just said that I want to hold for a second because the way you describe that, the uh cumulative weight of all the small judgments that we make about ourselves throughout the day, has a real cost. And it I I'd say it is isn't the one bad meal, it is the thousand quite criticisms uh that is wrapped around it. So and that's the part most wellness conversation skips uh past entirely. Okay um and also um if I if I if I ask, like um and because the because the show is not just about a new set of rules, it's about a healthy relationship with itself. So if someone listening right now wants to start unwinding this, not with another diet, not with another protocol, but with an actual shift in how they relate to their body. So, what is the doorway that you would point them to? Not the uh big plan, the first honest step. So if you can share.

Holistic First Steps Stress Sleep Sun

SPEAKER_00 17:05

Well, again, I want to in addition to being a certified natural product practitioner, I'm also a certified holistic health coach. So everything uh we look at the body as a whole. So it's not just the physical, which is important, it's also the mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. All those things work together. So it's not like you know, you have doctors, especially might look at the kidney or the stomach and and ignore everything else. Everything works together, all the organs work together, but also the different parts of your of your of your body. Um, you know, the again, the mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, they all work together. So you gotta look at it as oh, that's why, for example, stress is very important. You limit your stress, your health will get better. People who are under high amounts of stress, their immune systems tend to be much worse and they're more susceptible to other disease. They've done studies on this. So if you talk to people who live to be 100 years old, they say one of the things they do is limit the stress. So limiting stress is important. I've just mentioned a few things, you know, limit the stress, get enough sleep, you know, get enough exercise, be out in the sun, um, avoid the ultra-processed junk foods, and eat a good diet and supplement. You can't get all your nutrition simply from the your diet because it's just not in the salt, all throughout the world. They're just you know a bunch of things like over farming and uh the minerals are not in the sauce. So you have to supplement even those things and be patient with yourself. You'll see your health improve over the course of time. And you gotta be patient because we live in an age of instant gratification. Everyone wants results yesterday. And you get you gotta be patient. So if you're me if you're massively overweight, you didn't you did not become that way simple from one to two days of bad eating. It was many, many months and years of bad eating that made you massively obese. So if you want to lose that weight, it's gonna take some time as well. And it's also dangerous to try to lose too much weight at once. It's better to do it gradually.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

Exactly. So what tends to surprise people most when they take that step?

SPEAKER_00 19:00

Well, I think um when they do it on a consistent basis, they're surprised as to how much better they feel, how much more energy they have, because you know, when you when you when you take care of your body, you give it what it needs, you know, you and if you lose some weight, uh your body's gonna feel better, you're gonna have better, more steady energy. So it's one of the things they just say, I just feel better. Because you your body it very often your body has an amazing re ability to recover if you give it the things it needs.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

That's the piece most conversations get fast. Um and I I I am glad that we didn't because the way you describe the first step uh it is not about adding another rule on the top of it or already noisy mind. So it's almost the opposite. Uh so yeah, and um what you also see uh in this part, like I mean um I think that this is where most people uh lose the thread. Like the uh honeymoon of any new approach is uh very easy. The first two weeks always uh feel very different, but sustaining a healthier, more honest relationship with your body over the years, uh, through stress, through grief, holidays, uh uh random days when nothing feels right. Uh that's the part nobody talks about. So uh what have you learned about saying or or and staying in a

Standards Over Motivation Taking Control

SPEAKER_01 20:31

peaceful relationship with your body over the time, not just in the moments that when it's very easy.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

Yeah, here's the thing it can't just be solely motivation. Motivation is external. It's one of the reasons why people uh give up. Like in the United States here, people have a lot of people have New Year's resolutions, they're gonna lose weight, they're gonna be on the diet. And usually by January 9th, there are meant most people off that diet. They they give up because it's very external. It has to be internal. You gotta have standards. You gotta have a big why as to why you want it. You know, not just, oh, I feel good, I'm gonna do it. That's that's that that will not sustain you. You gotta have this important why. Why is it important? I want my health to be better. Uh I want to, you know, walk my daughter down the aisle at her wedding. You know, something like you gotta have these important whys, these reasons for it. And you gotta set standards for yourself. I'm the type of person who commits to eating well, to supplementing, to exercising anything. You gotta make these standards for yourself. It's gotta be internal. When it's internal, you're more likely to do these things. When external, um, when get things get rough, you're gonna give up.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

So if you have to give uh one advice to the listeners today, what that'll be.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Take control of your health. Don't let it don't let uh people who make money off you getting sick take control of your health. You need to take control of your health.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Exactly. And if someone wants to connect with you, uh how they can find you.

SPEAKER_00 21:59

Um, they can find my website, victordadge.com. Dodaj is D-E-T-A-J. Um, they want a free health evaluation, they can go to your freehealth evaluation.com. They can find my book, How to Be Happy, Healthy, and Whole, on Amazon. And I also have a podcast which I talk about, I'll help them always call Value with Victor. And they can also follow me on Facebook and LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

Amazing. So um, dear listeners, what I'll do is I'll put all the links and the details into the show notes for your easy reference so that you can easily reach out to Victor. And um, with this, um, if there is one thing I'm taking from this conversation, is that the real wellness is not a stricter set of rules, it's a softer set of questions. The kind we get to ask ourselves without changing it. And the people who learn to sit with those questions, honestly, they don't just end up hellier, they end up happier. And um thank you so much, Victor. This was the kind of conversational pressure principles was built for. And um uh I I have to say that uh uh dearestness that you are allowed to put it down, you are allowed to ask better questions, and you are allowed to come back to a body that you actually live inside of and not just one that you are constantly trying to fix. So if today's conversation moved something in you, please send it to one person who might need to hear it. And uh we'll see you next time. Thank you so much.