#146: Julieanna Hever - Lose Weight for the Last Time
We are living in chaotic and challenging times and so much feels out of our control.
This week’s interview also comes at a perfect time because, in the midst of stress and uncertainty, Julieanna Hever invites you to choose yourself again and again, especially if you’re stuck in the cycle of stress eating, yo-yo dieting, and dizzying life schedules.
As the O.G. plant-based dietitian, Julieanna has worked with thousands of clients to lose weight for the last time, and many of these lessons are found in her most recent book, The Choose You Now Diet.
Rip and Julieanna discuss:
Her ten tenets to sustainable weight loss
Exactly how to calculate your goal weight and set a realistic timeframe for weight loss
How to stop counting macros and calories ,and start counting "days of deliciousness"
Her "six daily threes" of must-have daily nutrition
Why it's important to keep a journal and express gratitude
Julieanna encourages you to be free of shame and guilt and, instead, replace it with joy and gratitude all while enjoying copious amounts of beautiful plant-based nutrition.
We could all use a little more joy.
About Julieanna Hever
There is nothing Julieanna loves more than diving into a colossal bowl of salad. Known as The Plant-Based Dietitian, Julieanna has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre from UCLA in and a Master of Science degree in Nutrition from Cal State Northridge, bridging her three biggest passions for food, performing, and helping people.
As a Registered Dietitian, Julieanna has authored seven books, including the brand new Choose You Now Diet, The Healthspan Solution, Plant-Based Nutrition (Idiots Guide), Vegiterranean Diet, and two peer-reviewed journal articles on plant-based nutrition for healthcare professionals (in Journal of Geriatric Cardiology and Permanente Journal). Julieanna is the host of The Choose You Now Podcast.
Past projects have included being the host of What Would Julieanna Do?; giving a TEDx talk; writing as the nutrition columnist for VegNews Magazine; and teaching the eCornell Plant-Based Nutrition Certification Program. She recently co-hosted Science and Saucery and Facebook Watch’s Home Sweat Home, and has appeared on Harry, The Dr. Oz Show, The Steve Harvey Show, Reluctantly Healthy, The Marie Osmond Show, and E! News.
New adventures include speaking, presenting, traveling, helping a wide variety of clients achieve their goals, and sharing her passion for healing and happiness eating a whole-food, plant-based diet.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 Welcome to Julieannaa, the OG plant-based dietitian
6:10 Her lifelong motivation for writing Choose You Now
12:07 The Modern Trifecta of Temptation - There’s nothing sexy about losing weight
15:20 Ten Tenets to Sustainable Weight Loss
15:57 Identify Your Why
17:00 "Be a lighthouse instead of a tugboat"
19:00 Find your goal weight - Hamwi Calculator
20:54 Set a timeline
24:45 Eat whole plant-based foods diet, avoid fat phobia, and stop counting macros
29:00 How to recognize true hunger and satiety
38:35 Don’t break the seal - know your triggers and learn how to avoid those tempting foods
42:15 Stop counting!
44:30 Set a schedule and embrace repetition
49:45 Monitor meal volume
51:50 Why Julieanna wants you to get on the scale daily
57:30 Rip digs into some of the mouth-watering recipes
1:03:25 Why Julieanna recommends a break from exercise when you’re trying to lose rapid fire weight
1:06:09 The benefits of keeping a food journal
1:07:70 Maintenance Phase - getting off the roller coaster for good
1:11:05 Julieanna’s "Six Daily 3s"
1:18:00 How to enjoy a "day of deliciousness" - and stop having “cheat days”
1:20:10 Focus on the things you’re grateful for and write them down. Gratitude makes good things expand
Episode Resources
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Promo Music: Your Love by Atch License: Creative Commons License - Attribution 3.0
Full Video Transcript
Rip Esselstyn:
Today's podcast is brought to you by PLANTSTRONG Foods. Check out our growing assortment of insanely delicious, 100%, whole food, plant-based goodness at plantstrongfoods.com and you can save 10% off your first order with the code RIP10. That's my name, Rip, followed by the number 10.
Julieanna Hever:
You have this opportunity. There's so much going on in the world that we have no control over. There's so much that is out of our hands, but one thing that we get to decide is what we put on our fork and what we put into our body, and it's, really, instead of it being a judgemental thing because I've tried so hard to get rid of guilt and shame, I want to excise that from the weight loss, nutrition paradigm, that's where I started, and it's more of an empowering statement. You get to choose you now and again and again and again, and it all happens in this very moment. We have no control over what happened in the past. Can't redo it. We don't know what's going to happen down the pipeline. No. We're not psychic. All we have is right now.
Rip Esselstyn:
I'm Rip Esselstyn and welcome to the PLANTSTRONG podcast. The mission of PLANTSTRONG is to further the advancement of all things within the plant-based movement. We advocate for the scientifically proven benefits of plant-based living and envision a world that universally understands, promotes, and prescribes plants as a solution to empowering your health, enhancing your performance, restoring the environment and becoming better guardians to the animals we share this planet with. We welcome you wherever you are on your PLANTSTRONG journey and I hope that you enjoy the show.
Rip Esselstyn:
Hello, my PLANTSTRONG papayas. I'm Rip Esselstyn, and thanks for tuning into another episode of the PLANTSTRONG podcast, where each and every week we shine a bright light on stories, research, recipes, and books from some of the preeminent thought leaders and disruptors in the ever growing plant-based movement.
Rip Esselstyn:
Today, my guest is one of the brightest lights and there aren't many who have as much passion as Julieanna Hever. She is the OG, original gangster, plant-based dietician. I had Julieanna as a guest last year, but since then, her most recent book, The Choose You Now Diet, was released and it has been instrumental in helping thousands of people lose weight for the last time.
Rip Esselstyn:
Today, we're going to dig into weight loss and specifically her 10 tenets for lasting weight loss and health gains. I hate to tell you this, but there's nothing sexy or glamorous about losing weight. There isn't a hack to health, but there are small steps that you can take at every single meal to choose you now just by deciding what you put on your fork and into that body of yours. For decades, Julieanna has worked with thousands of clients, and today, we stress the importance and joy of choosing yourself again and again and again.
Rip Esselstyn:
All right. PLANTSTRONG people, we have Julieanna Hever back in the house. Let me get a big PLANTSTRONG kale yeah. Yeah.
Julieanna Hever:
Kale yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
One of the OGs of the plant-based movement, you wrote, God, Plant-Based, what was the title of that first book in 2011?
Julieanna Hever:
Well, they first called it The Complete Idiot's Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition, and now it's Plant-Based Nutrition Idiot's Guide. It's been evolving over the years.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah. As we talked about the first time I had you on the podcast probably 10 months ago, I think you may have been the first person to utilize the term plant-based in a book and, wow, as we talked about in that episode, it's crazy what plant-based anything is doing these days, and you were one of the original gangsters.
Julieanna Hever:
So it was village. It was a village. It's extraordinary how it has evolved. It is just mind-blowing. We have never could have predicted that it would be this ubiquitous.
Rip Esselstyn:
No, no. It is truly exactly where we need to be at this point in time. Yup. As you said, yes, it takes a village and this village is doing everything we can to make it happen. So what I want to talk about today with you, Julieanna, is a topic that I know is very near and dear to your heart. In fact, you wrote a book that literally just came out a few months ago called The Choose You Now Diet. Really, it's all about losing weight for the last time. You also have 75 delicious recipes here, but I want you and I to have a riveting conversation for my listeners that are out there that they're sick and tired of yoyo diets, losing weight, gaining it back, losing weight, whether they're doing whatever dietary plan that's out there, whether they're doing plant-based.
Rip Esselstyn:
In reading your book and the experience that you've had over however many, well, I'm just going to say 15 years coaching literally thousands of different people, you have an amazing roadmap for people, really from soup to nuts, on everything that they can do to make sure they truly are losing weight for the last time. So what I'd love to do with you today is I want to dive in. I think the best way for us to start is maybe you could talk, before we dive into the 10 tenets that you talk about for sustainable weight loss, I'd love for you to just talk about what motivated you to write this book to begin with.
Julieanna Hever:
Thank you so much, Rip. Yes. This was my life. This is the most personal book I've ever written and it's so close to me because it's why everything happened in my life. I started as a dancer in Los Angeles. Like my mom says, I danced before I could walk. I remember growing up in front of the mirrors doing Pas de Bourrées, Pas de Pas de Bourrées and pirouettes and all those little dance moves and watching as a little girl, you start changing. At 10, 11 years old, I started seeing my waist come in. You start to see your body shifting in front of the mirror because they are every day with your colleagues. One day, I must have been around 10, 11, my dance teacher called out to me from across the room in front of all of my fellow ballerinas, "Julieanna, cut out your snacks."
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh, oh, my.
Julieanna Hever:
I wanted the floor to swallow me up is how I describe it. It was like, "Whoa!" I didn't realize what that meant at the time. I didn't realize how profound an impact this would make on the trajectory of my entire life and career, but it started me thinking about nutrition and diet and body image and weight and what am I supposed to eat and all that. Of course, the dance industry is, really, it lends itself to this because you have to be a certain physique to be in ballet.
Julieanna Hever:
Then I further went on. I started reading about all this stuff, and then I further went on. I became an actress because I'm in Los Angeles and that's what we do here, a lot of us. So while I was studying acting, I was actually at an arts high school and I was doing a lot of that and finally, my parents let me get an agent and I was going out and doing a little bit of modeling and a little bit of acting. I had a manager tell me because I was going out for leads. That was just the parts that I was going for and my agent or manager told me, she's like, "You need to lose a few pounds for the camera."
Julieanna Hever:
So I was like, "Okay." I said, "I'm already exercising. I eat really healthy," and I was never overweight, but it's camera.
Julieanna Hever:
So she's like, "I'll hook you up with my trainer. She's amazing."
Julieanna Hever:
I'm like, "Okay."
Julieanna Hever:
So I started with this trainer, fell in love with personal training, fell in love with it. I was like, "Okay. I'm going to do this while I act on the side," but then as soon as I became a personal trainer, everyone started asking me, "Well, what am I supposed to eat?"
Julieanna Hever:
I didn't want to just regurgitate. There's a chapter in the Personal Training handbook that you take, you study to get your certification and I didn't just want to spit out information. I wanted to really understand. Again, I've been studying this my entire life. I was fascinated with nutrition and diet and weight loss and all that. So I was like, "That's it. I'm going back to school." I just graduated from undergrad and I enrolled for a graduate school program in nutrition and to get my RD, and that was it. I absolutely fell in love with it.
Julieanna Hever:
So I felt like at that point I was able to revisit all the things I had bumped up in throughout this reading and learning about this, this curiosity I had, and that was it. I was on a mission to understand this. It took me, I don't know, that was so long ago, and now 17 years as a dietician and working with hundreds or probably thousands of people, definitely hundreds one on one, and this is basically an accumulation of all that I aggregated in my education, in my personal experience, and then these gorgeous, deep conversations with my clients.
Julieanna Hever:
I only take a few clients on at a time and we get so intimate and we go through it like what's underneath it because anyone can follow a diet. I refuse to do meal plans. I'm this anti-dietitian dietician. I'm not going to give you a meal plan because it's like teaching a person to fish rather than giving them a fish or the tofu, whatever we want to call it. So it's like these conversations that have evolved about getting underneath of the why we eat, the way we eat, why we make these decisions.
Julieanna Hever:
I just had a client today. She's a world-renowned psychologist. She understands how important, how primal food is and how important it's to go underneath so that you're solving the issue and you're losing weight for the last time and getting off that awful roller coaster that you alluded to that so many people struggle with.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, and just the title of the book, The Choose You Now, tell me about the title. Why that title?
Julieanna Hever:
Right, right, and that's what evolved out of these conversations that I feel like these people that are my clients become like I'm so vested in them and I know so much about their lives and we get so deep into it, and this whole mindfulness thing that is really coming to the surface globally. I think that no one really has unique ideas. We all have them. They just come to say, "I've learned a lot about that." The idea of being in the moment and present, that together with these conversations with my clients, it's you have this opportunity. There's so much going on in the world that we have no control over. There's so much that is out of our hands, but one thing that we get to decide is what we put on our fork and what we put into our body.
Julieanna Hever:
It's, really, instead of it being a judgemental thing because I've tried so hard to get rid of guilt and shame. I want to exercise that from the weight loss, nutrition paradigm. That's where I started. It's more of an empowering statement. You get to choose you now and again and again and again, and it all happens in this very moment. We have no control over what happened in the past. Can't redo it. We don't know what's going to happen down the pipeline. No. We're not psychic. All we have is right now. So it's choosing you and choosing you now.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah. In a society that is so insanely noisy and disruptive right now and where so many people care what other people think about what they're doing, you got to focus on you. I think it's perfect. You also talk about the modern-day trifecta that we have going on right now when it comes to this ubiquitous temptation, for example. That's everywhere, right?
Julieanna Hever:
Everywhere, and it's hard. I always tell everyone right off the bat, I don't try to pretend or sugarcoat this, there's nothing sexy or fun or entertaining about having to lose weight and having to create this deficit. It sucks and life happens. I was out last night with my best friend and my sister. We had this impromptu party and everyone's eating their impossible salads and they're burgers and they're ... I'm just sitting there like, "I'm not going to eat that stuff," and it's like I had to say no to things that were totally tempting.
Julieanna Hever:
My best friend's like, "Just have a bite, one bite, just one bite," and everyone normalizes this. We come together over food, which is great, and you are beautiful the way you show and talk about coming together and breaking bread as a family. You are the role model family of that, but mostly day to day, I don't have a lot of plant-based friends, barely at all where I live. I have them around the world, but the people that I see day to day, my family, no one's really in that same boat. So personally, I could attest to this bombardment of temptation. For me, you have to want to stay on plant so much so. You have to have such a powerful why and want it so bad that you will say no to these temptations day after day or whenever. Yeah, you plan them accordingly.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. You also talk about the normalization and you touched upon it, but the normalization of overeating in this society where it seems like everywhere you go, you're being asked to basically eat more than we ever should, and you also brilliantly talk about how as a species we have this evolutionary physiology to always want to make sure that we're getting enough to eat, right?
Julieanna Hever:
Oh, my gosh! That's the trifecta is that we're biological beings. We are humans, okay? Our bodies are adapted to survive, which is great. That's why we're here. That's why our generations before led us to be here now and never in history have we had an opportunity where if you've got hyper palatable, high calorically dense food right in front of you, you should eat that to survive. That is built in to our DNA to stay here and thrive because there's not going to be all this high caloric, hyper palatable things available.
Julieanna Hever:
We don't know when it'll be around next, and yet, that's not how we are anymore because now it's 24/7 door dash, all those companies that you can get anything on your doorstep delivered any time. So of course, our biology is fighting with our psychology and our desires, and it's this, what would you call it? This fusion of insanity.
Rip Esselstyn:
It is, it is. It's very antagonistic, and I think it is so important for people to realize that once you understand what's going on and why there's these opposing forces, then you understand, "Oh, I understand why I'm drawn to that, but I also understand why I don't need to eat that, why I don't need to go there."
Rip Esselstyn:
So let's dive into ... So you talk about these 10 tenets of sustainability. The first three that you talk about, it's all about choice, right? You choose. You choose. The first one that you talk about is what's your purpose, what's your why. So talk to me about that.
Julieanna Hever:
Yes. So yes, in fact, this evolved. The 10 tenets to sustainable weight loss evolved because I had a weight loss support group, and I wanted to tell them what to do before I had this book. This is what fleshed out into this whole book. The whole concept started here, but it all starts with choosing, okay? So why? Why do you want this? You have to want it. The way I say it is you could lead a human to healthy, but you can't make them eat. I've had this exemplified around me forever. I think we spoke about last year when my father had a stroke and he came out of the stroke and he was like, "Julie, you have to want it." Even with a second chance at life, he didn't want it. So there was nothing I could do or say to make him want it.
Julieanna Hever:
My clients, too, I have so many clients that come to me, "I really want to lose weight."
Julieanna Hever:
I'm like, "Well, do you really want to lose weight? Do you really want this? What does it look like to you?"
Julieanna Hever:
That's the first thing I have my clients do when they really are ready, you have to be ready for this, I have them write it out because words are so powerful and putting them into writing or typing or whatever where it's more reality, it's creating it, it's making it more visceral. I want people to see and feel what does it look like when you are in the driver's seat, you have full control over what you eat and your body image and how much you weigh because you really do get to decide how much you weigh. Sounds crazy, but you do.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah, and you also talk about how to be a lighthouse instead of a tugboat, which I think is wonderful. I know so many people that they're trying to pressure people or figure out ways to get people to eat this way when the reality is it usually never, never works as you just said, right? You can lead somebody to healthy, but your father even, right?
Julieanna Hever:
Even my father, yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Where is he today?
Julieanna Hever:
Oh, no, he's back eating. Oh, it's awful. I can't even sit there when he is eating. It's been awful, yeah, but he is fine. He had this little miracle thing. So I don't know. I don't know. It's awful for me, but just even professionally, forget my personal part, which is really hard and emotional for me, obviously, because I care so much, but even in my professional life as a dietician with these clients, my first 10 years I was trying to convince everyone, "No, you need to eat plant-based. Look at this study. Look at Dr. Esselstyn's," all these things.
Julieanna Hever:
I realized, "Wait." I was bumping my head against the wall. I'm like, "I really wanted to be successful and help everyone," and I realized, "No, no, no. I have to find the people that want this and then I will love them all the way through this process, but I'm going to stop trying to convince people." Wow. Now, everyone that I work with, we have the results because they already come in knowing. I tell them what to expect. You have to want it. There's no way around it.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, I just had somebody email me this morning saying, "Rip, will you talk to my brother? He's sick. He's got all these issues going on. He really could use your help."
Rip Esselstyn:
I was like, "Listen. The only way that this works is if your brother reaches out to me. If you connect your brother and me and we have a conversation, it's not going to go well, especially if he's going into this conversation kicking and screaming."
Julieanna Hever:
100%. Never worked.
Rip Esselstyn:
Never works, never works. So Julieanna, let's go on to tenet number two, which is find your goal weight. I mean, so you're actually sitting down with your clients and discussing how much weight they want to lose.
Julieanna Hever:
Yup. So we use both objective and subjective decision making. The objective is a formula called the Hamwi formula, and it's really standard, used in nutrition. It's basically a formula based on height and gender. So women should be about 100 pounds per five feet and then five pounds each inch after that. For men, it's 106 pounds and then six pounds per inch after that. So I'm 5'4". I should be one 120 plus or minus 10%, which is a broad range. I don't know math very well off the top of my head, but it's a broad range. So that's a healthy range.
Julieanna Hever:
A lot of my clients that have been overweight or obese their entire lives or for their entire adult life and everyone around them is used to seeing them a certain way, when they start dropping down towards this range, their friends and family will say to them, "Oh, do you have a problem? I think you've lost too much," because they're just not used to seeing them like that. So it's good to have an objective standard to utilize as a baseline.
Julieanna Hever:
Then we add in things like, "How do you feel in your clothes, and how are your workout recoveries, and how do you feel energetically?" Then we figure that out and you really do get to decide. We all wiggle about five to 10 pounds throughout our lives with holidays and celebrations and stress and all this stuff that just we bounce a little bit, but choosing that range, people really get to do and then we work because I get my clients to have a PhD in their body in weight loss, and then I have them a separate PhD in their body in weight maintenance so that they can maintain this and be off the diet roller coaster.
Rip Esselstyn:
So for example, let's say I was to meet with you and we were to determine, so it's a range. So let's say I'm 280 pounds, would we say I want to get down to somewhere between 180 and 200 pounds? Is that how that works?
Julieanna Hever:
Well, how tall are you? It depends on your height.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, using the Hamwi formula, I'm 6'2". I'm 6'2".
Julieanna Hever:
Okay. So for 6'2" you would be ... So I need a calculator. So 106 plus 14 times six.
Rip Esselstyn:
14 times six. So that'd be, let's see, 10 times six, it'd be 84 to that, to a 106. So that's about 190.
Julieanna Hever:
Okay. Great. Then you would add 10% on either side of that and then you get to decide within that window. How do you feel best? Where do you want to live? Where do you feel really good in that?
Rip Esselstyn:
Got it. Huh. All right. All right. So we've figured out my goal weight. What's next? Do I have to choose my timeline? Is that right?
Julieanna Hever:
Totally. Well, I like to rip off the bandaid with my clients that want to rip off the bandaid and it's really extraordinary. This is the thing that I'm so excited about because it is so predictable, and this is what is taking me all this time to really, I could predict to the T what's going on with people. My clients lose between 0.4 and 0.8 pounds of body fat a day starting at the start date until the end date.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow.
Julieanna Hever:
So you could do it. That's rapid fire, right? So we mitigate for the potential risks of rapid weight loss, but it's really, it's wholly safe. The thing I worry about and I have clients, I had someone start yesterday who was on hypertensive meds and it changes so fast. I have people get off the meds so fast that they have to be really careful. So it's very scientific and it's really calculating. We're very conscientious about it, but yeah or there's people that are like, "You know what?" Oh, and I'll have them take a break from exercise just so they're not revving up their appetite because that's a controversial view, which we could talk about.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, now, I do want to talk about it and it's one of my talking points because I've never heard that before. So I'd love to dive into that, yeah, later, later.
Julieanna Hever:
Yeah. We will. Okay. Good. Just the other part of that is that some people are like, "I really want to keep exercising for my sanity," which absolutely get that. It's the most important thing for mental health and mood. So we'll go a little slower, the standard one to two pounds a week. So I'll help anyone where they're at. I just want to help them reach their goals in the easiest way, best way for them at that time.
Rip Esselstyn:
What is a standard timeline that most people pick? Is it six months? Is it a year or is it just-
Julieanna Hever:
It depends. So it depends. If they're going rapid fire, I could calculate for them, "Okay, 0.4 to 0.8 pounds a day will take you this much time." So again, now, let's say they have 20 pounds to lose. I work with people that have 80 to 100 pounds to lose. So then I calculate how long will it take on between 0.4 and 0.8 pounds a day, thank goodness for calculators, to go to that weight at this rate of loss, and then stuff gets in the way. So we compensate or we deal with all the stuff. That's where the good stuff comes in because, again, I published all this in this book not to put myself out of business, but because the stuff that comes out during this process, that's where the magic happens. That's where the transformation occurs.
Rip Esselstyn:
So according to your, I have a calculator here, so if I want to lose 20 pounds, if I'm losing half a pound, if I'm doing that right, half a pound a day of body fat, then it would take me 20 days. No, I'm sorry.
Julieanna Hever:
40.
Rip Esselstyn:
40 days to lose 20 pounds.
Julieanna Hever:
About an average, but I'll give you the range. It could be up to whatever. I'd have to calculate it. I always calculate times 0.4 to 0.8. A lot of people if they're coming to me with standard Western diet, a lot of people are, they want to go plant-based or people on a very high processed vegan diet, those people, especially on the standard Western diet, when they transition that first week or two, they're dropping a pound or 1.2 pounds a day just because there's all this fluid that they're purging from their body.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, I've never seen it that pinpointed like, "Okay. You want to lose 45 pounds. We can do that together in 63 days," right?
Julieanna Hever:
I know, and then the clients at the end are like, "I can't." No one believes me until they're living it. They're like, "Oh, my gosh!" Yeah. I mean, it's so cool.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. It's exciting. Wow. So let's go into tenets number four through 10, which you have under the subset of systemization, and the first one is, of course, duh, eat whole plant-based foods. I don't know what you want to say about that, but I mean, I do like the way you say in your book, avoid the macronutrient confusion that so many people get hung up on.
Julieanna Hever:
Yeah, I know. It's hilarious. The whole plant thing is just, I always say, eat plants, whole plants, nothing but the plants, so help your health. It's the way to do it, but yeah, the macro confusion is something I'm very passionate about. It's just the fact that we're so confused and hung up on carbs, protein, and fat and there is no perfect ratio. No one's ever concluded a perfect ratio. People lose weight and get healthy on all sorts of the spectrum of that. I wish we could stop talking about macros and get back to food. It would change everything.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. You also talk about under that tenet, you talk about fatopia.
Julieanna Hever:
Fatphobia, fatphobia.
Rip Esselstyn:
Fatphobia, fatphobia. Yes.
Julieanna Hever:
People are afraid of fat. We need some essential fats in our diet. I mean, that's why it's essential by definition. So people have this hack of if you cut out fat, what you can't do completely, but if you cut out fat as much as you can, you could eat as much as you want. I think that I get a lot of people that are recovering from that idea and it perpetuates this fear of fat and also this binge thing. I work with a lot of people that are recovering from binging and that's been the fundamental core of their weight problems over their life, and that idea that you could eat as much as you want and then they can't, they're not losing weight and, "Why am I broken? What's wrong with me?" So I think those two things are mitigated by getting rid of the conversation about protein, carbs, and fat.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, and you just mentioned, you said, "Well, why am I broken?" I mean, I hear it all the time, "I've got an overactive thyroid," "I've got a slow metabolism," all these things, and you in the very, very beginning of this book say, "It's the food. I hate to break it to you, but it's the food," and there's no magic secret here. This is easy stuff.
Julieanna Hever:
Simple, but not easy because it's deep and it's socialized and it's biological and we're living in this world where it's weird if you say no to the impossible burger or whatever it is or to say, "I'm not eating dessert." It's amazing. It's amazingly challenging.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. Another thing about eating a whole food plant-based diet that I go into intensely is the whole thing around calorie density. I don't think we need to go too deeply into that, but I'd love for you to just say a few words about calorie density because it's really important.
Julieanna Hever:
Absolutely. I was showing people how to because I've talked about this for years. We've talked about this forever, but in this book, I said how to use it and how to make it doable, how do you actually use this in your life. So volumizing, fluffing everything out with more vegetables and mushrooms and fruits and stuff that are lower calorie density and then I think maximizing something like where you have them as the star of the show like I have a spaghetti squash lasagna. The spaghetti squash is the star of the show or stuffed mushrooms with the mushrooms or the pepper, whatever it is, where you're making these lower calorie density foods the star of the meal, the center of the plate because we're used to seeing differently.
Julieanna Hever:
God, you're so brilliant at talking about this. Still, my mouth waters just listening, thinking about how you talk about food in our interview on my podcast, but yeah. So there's just different ways to just apply food density and then lowering your intake of the higher calorie density food.
Julieanna Hever:
So in practical terms, I have the six daily threes where it's like have one to two ounces of nuts and seeds a day. That's how you would implore. Make that part of your diet rather than 20% fat. Who can calculate that, really?
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Let's move on to the next tenent, which is, and I think that, and before I say it, I'm going to say I think this is just a really, really difficult one for Americans that are so used to just eating more and more and more, and that is recognizing hunger and satiety, and how do you do it. How do you reprogram your eyes, your stomach, all those sensations? So what do you do?
Julieanna Hever:
So literally, I can't tell you how many people I work with that say, "I honestly don't know when I'm really hungry and I don't know how to stop. I don't have an off switch." So I understand that part, but let's talk about recognizing hunger. We eat because of the time of day, because other people are eating, because we're supposed to eat every couple hours to fuel our metabolism, all of the reasons, but what's real hunger? I've heard it described in different ways, but here's how I do it.
Julieanna Hever:
So there's that scale of let's say zero to 10 and zero is you're super empty, hungry, everything sounds amazing, and there's a 10 where you've had Thanksgiving and then you had an extra serving of pie and you're stuffed and nothing sounds good, you don't even want to think about what you're eating for the next week. So I use the celery stick test as a gauge because this to me helps. It's that I love celery, but it's not like something I'd be like, "Ooh, I want celery. I'm craving celery." It's not like a craveable food. Sorry to celery. I don't mean to insult celery, but if you think about it, the hungrier I get, the more that celery stick sounds good.
Julieanna Hever:
I actually had this experience on the plane the other day because I was flying and I had celery with me and I was like, "Oh, am I hungry enough for my celery stick?" So I waited until, "Ooh, that celery stick is starting to sound better and better," and I knew that that was actual hunger.
Rip Esselstyn:
Interesting.
Julieanna Hever:
All the other stuff, the headaches, and the dizziness or all that shakiness, that's not hunger because if you think about it, again, from the adaptive evolutionary perspective, when you're hungry, you need to hunt and gather, you need energy, you need to feel good, you need to be sharp and on it mentally. So all these things that we think of as hunger aren't necessarily hunger. I think it's often from that idea of detoxification symptoms and stuff like that rather than your hunger.
Rip Esselstyn:
Unless your blood sugar has really gotten too low, which I mean, considering that we now have almost a third of Americans that are either pre-diabetic or type two diabetic, which is just so sad.
Julieanna Hever:
Yes, and avoidable for most. Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So now that celery stick, does that also include if you have a little bit of peanut butter on it or has it got to be plain celery stick?
Julieanna Hever:
See, but that sounds amazing. So you have this gift, Rip, of making food sound so delicious. I don't know. You could do all these audio books on food.
Rip Esselstyn:
You're too kind. All right. So that's hunger. What about satiety?
Julieanna Hever:
I think that's the hardest part of all of this. Like I said, I don't have an off switch. I love to eat. I love food so much. I've made it my entire life is food. When something tastes good, I don't want to stop, and I could shut down, I could ignore all those like, "Ooh, I'm getting really full," and I just stop eating. I'm really good at ignoring that, and it's a problem. So I had to teach myself. What I've done is I've studied these naturally lean people and I've looked at how they do things and then I've utilized those behaviors, and it's taking an exogenous stimulus and utilizing it as a tool.
Julieanna Hever:
So for example, when I'm eating something that's really good, I put away the bowl like I'm going to go eat after we hang up. That's why I'm pointing at my big old potato salad that I can't wait to dig into, but I'll put away the extras. So I have an extra step to get more, but also, if I'm really eating because you know that hand-to-mouth behavior, it's like you just keep going. It's like, "Oh, this is really good. It's hard to stop." So what I have to do externally is I put it to the side and I tell myself, it's a mindfulness technique, I say, "Okay. One minute, one minute." So I'll go and I'll answer a text or check my Instagram or whatever just for one minute, just a distraction to stop that behavioral pattern.
Julieanna Hever:
Then I'm like, "Okay. Can I stop now?" It's like a game. It's almost like a game you have to ... It's gamifying this programming that we have to help you get in touch with what you're not really listening to.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, and as you talk about in the book is it takes, I mean, it requires practice and patience. I mean, would you say in working with clients over the years, is this something that some people pick up in a matter of weeks and some people are just months, just depends?
Julieanna Hever:
It's a good question. It's a good question. It depends. It totally depends. It's a great question. I think hunger is a lot easier. For a lot of people that could be days, but the satiety, I mean, I'm still working on it. I've been doing it forever. I'm still learning it myself. It's something that takes very much mindful practice and repetition.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, for myself, for example, I find that like dinner last night, had three different types of potato, a lentil oat loaf, three huge fistful servings of steamed kale on this big plate, and I finished it and I was like, "I could go back for more, but I've got plenty. I mean, I've got plenty of calories, nutrition, green leafies. I'm good to go," and that was it, but I could have easily gone back for another plate, right?
Julieanna Hever:
See, and you're that naturally lean person. So talk about that. What was that like for you, that moment of, "Ah, I'm done"? I wouldn't do that. I'd be like, "Yeah, I'm going to get some more."
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, to your point, basically, we were having a dinner conversation. We were all sitting around the table. So instead of going and getting more, I just sat there for a while, and then about 10 minutes later, my stomach was like, "No, dude. You are good. You don't need anymore. As good as that was and as much as you think you want more, you don't need more," right? So that was the, now that you're bringing it out of me, the internal conversation that I had with myself.
Julieanna Hever:
Yeah. See, it was like you created space like just a few minutes and it told your stomach, told your brain because that's true, too. The receptors, the stretch receptors in the stomach have to tell the brain and sometimes there's a little gap between that. So creating that space is everything. That's where the magic happens.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Dan Buettner talks about that. The Japanese have that term like harei achi kui, which means-
Julieanna Hever:
Hara hachi bu. Hara hachi bu. Yup.
Rip Esselstyn:
Thank you, which you eat until you're 80% full. So it's like a mindfulness technique that I think we could all afford to try and master that.
Julieanna Hever:
Absolutely. I love Hara hachi bu. I talk about that in vegetarian diet and it's exactly right. See, now, most people, including myself, I have to learn what does 80% full mean and feel like? So we practice that in our sessions. I have my clients really tune in. It's all about tuning in, right? There's no right or wrong.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, yeah, and this is interesting and I'm glad we're talking about this because I know for a large majority of let's just say for about 15 years while I was eating a whole food plant-based diet because I was such a avid athlete, I would almost have to eat until my stomach was uncomfortably full in order for me not to lose too much weight. So now that I'm not training nearly as much, I have to recalibrate what does your stomach have, what is that feeling of satiety that I need to where I'm good and I don't need my stomach to hurt anymore, right? I mean, it wasn't this bellyache, but it was this, "Okay. There's some pressure that is talking to me," and I try and stop before I get the pressure. You know what I'm talking about?
Julieanna Hever:
I know exactly what you're talking about. I work with a lot of athletes where that's exactly where it is, especially on a plant-based diet where it's more volume and the caloric density is a benefit for weight loss, but it's maybe a challenge when you're trying to get in enough calorie to perform and compete and train and recover. So it is a whole different mentality and set of issues that you have to manage.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yup. So this next tenet that I want to talk to you about is something that I hear about at our immersion programs, and these typically are people that they have got a relationship with food that needs some serious mending. A lot of these people, they have this really addictive relationship with food where if they're going gangbusters fantastically well and then they have one slice of cheese pepperoni pizza, and they have this downward spiral, and before they know it, they're back to being pre-diabetic, they've gained 40 pounds, and they wake up in the back alley going, "What the hell happened to me?" Right? You call this don't break the seal.
Julieanna Hever:
Yes. I got this from a student slash client once a few years ago and I was like, "That's brilliant. That's exactly what it is." I used to describe it as I know if I have one French fry, well, this is before air fryers and all that where it was like or if I had one piece of vegan pizza or I knew my little triggers, it was like, "That was it. I would have want the whole pizza. I'd want all the French fries."
Julieanna Hever:
Last night, my friends were trying to giving me that impossible burger salad thing and I knew if I had one bite, it would be all over for me because it lights. There's actual chemistry that happens. There's a dopamine hit. It lights up your brain. It feels good. It tastes good and it's like, "Yes, yes, more of that, please." So if you don't have that first bite, you have so much more control and power over the situation.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. So what do you tell your clients? What do they need to do to not take that first bite?
Julieanna Hever:
Right. So first, it comes back to your why, and then I have these things called the emotion to-do list that I have my clients do. So we have a plan. My clients always have a plan. This is what they're eating. This is what time they're eating and they know what they're doing. Now, any other time that they are about to take a bite and break the seal that's not on plan, I say, "Give yourself a minute," again, mindfulness, "One minute, feel what's going on." It's usually, "I'm stressed out. I'm bored. I'm tired," and they're trying to solve these things with food and these things, it takes time to recognize. Most people are like, "Well, it just tastes good," but after time and practice, they start to go, "Oh, I'm stressed."
Julieanna Hever:
So I have them preemptively keep lists of, "What to do when I'm stressed? The things that soothe me include ..." For me, it's taking a hot bath or going out in nature or petting my dog or whatever it is. It doesn't matter or something more extravagant like get a massage or plan a trip or whatever it is for you, that resonates for you. Then I have my clients stop what they're doing before they take that first bite and break the seal and go to their list and pick one of those activities. It sounds really silly, but again, words are so powerful and just having these things set up, it was under that whole category of systematized. It's a system in place to stop you and reroute you, and it's really helpful and it becomes a habit. Everything about food is habit.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. For example, in our house, we sometimes have the the vegan NadaMoo! ice cream or we have the plant-based brownies from Whole Foods or whatever, and I just don't do it. I just don't even have one bite of the brownie or the ice cream because I know if I do, and I know my personality, I will have the whole pint of that NadaMoo! chocolate chunk Cherry Garcia ice cream, whatever, right?
Julieanna Hever:
So what stops you? How do you stop yourself from breaking the seal?
Rip Esselstyn:
I just don't do it. I just don't go there. I just don't go there. I just know. Yeah. I mean, sure, there's a little bit of a draw there, but I don't go there just like I don't have a cigarette, right? I just don't do. That's something I don't do, right? I don't eat red meat anymore. I don't do chicken. So I look at that and I'm like, "I don't do that," right?
Julieanna Hever:
Boundaries. You set boundaries for yourself. Yup.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, that's don't break the seal. Okay. So what about you talk about stop counting. I think so many people are so used to whether it's Weight Watchers counting points or macros as we talked about earlier. So how do you teach your clients to stop counting?
Julieanna Hever:
I know. It's like ripping them away from their security blanket. It's torture for so many people. It's funny to be a dietician that doesn't count. That's what we're taught to do, count calories, count macros, count percentage of RDI, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right, the dietician that doesn't count.
Julieanna Hever:
Yeah. I like to be a little different, but it's really disruptive according to the system, but what does it really matter? First of all, no one needs a perfect diet. There's no such thing. If you're aware of your nutrients, I call them the notable nutrients, and you're aware of hunger satiety and the scale's going down and you're trying for the scale to go down, if you're trying to maintain your weight and then your weight is maintaining or if you're trying to gain weight and the weight's going up, then you're doing it right and eating enough or eating the right amount. So why sit there?
Julieanna Hever:
It drives people crazy. People are obsessed with the counting, and then it doesn't really do anything for them. How many people, I mean, some people have some success, but then it just gets obsessive for a lot of people. So I just find that it's much more helpful. My whole philosophy is just to go within. Your body has a lot of wisdom.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, I really love that and I love that it doesn't make eating a scientific experiment any longer. It seems like it's very liberating and freeing for many people probably for the first time that they can remember, and what a gift, what a gift.
Julieanna Hever:
Yeah. Food can be. I mean, it doesn't have to be so scientific. We have these parameters or boundaries. It should be enjoyable and pleasurable. We should really get in touch with our body. It's a beautiful opportunity to get to know how we feel and how we are in this world and why we eat and enjoy the food and be more present in all parts of our life.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. This next tenet that you talk about, Julieanna, it's one that's gotten to me a lot of attention as of late. It's like you talk about set a schedule and there should be maybe a designated window in which we eat as opposed to this steady state where we're in this fed state all throughout the day. There's intermittent fasting and stuff like that. So I'd love for you to tell me, how do you work with this with your clients, this setting a schedule of when to eat?
Julieanna Hever:
Yes. Well, we are incredibly tied into our circadian rhythms, and I've been so fascinated by the literature coming out on our circadian clocks and the hormonal changes throughout the day and through our monthly cycles, our daily cycle, all those beautiful cycles, and we are creatures of habit. So the other research that I've been really interested in is health span and longevity, and the fasting data is extraordinary, very, very promising in terms of health outcomes and health span and longevity.
Julieanna Hever:
So I tie that into this where there's a lot of physiological benefits to not being in the fed state all the time, but there's a lot of behavioral benefits. In fact, there was a new study that just came out saying that there was no benefit for weight loss with intermittent fasting, yeah, just this last week. I thought, "Oh, gosh, that's interesting."
Julieanna Hever:
So my take on that is I think we need more information. It was a smaller group. It's interesting, though. We have to keep looking at all the data and I'm open to hearing all of it, but even if that were true, even though if you look at the majority of evidence looks very, very supportive, even if that were true, every time you have to make about a decision about food, it makes things more complicated. It's estimated we make about 200 food decisions a day.
Julieanna Hever:
So if we give ourselves some restriction and say, "Okay. I'm just going to eat between 12:00 and 6:00 every day, first bite to last bite," then first of all, you get all that time in the fasted state to do all the metabolic house cleaning that needs to take place, getting rid of cancer cells and virus cells and all that stuff that we're bombarding our systems rather than all of our energy going towards digestion and absorption, which is a very labor-intensive process. So that part is great, but behaviorally speaking, if I know I'm eating at 12:00 and I'm eating at 5:00, I don't have to make any more decisions about that. So I think that psychologically for my clients and the weight loss process is enormously effective.
Rip Esselstyn:
So do you find with a lot of your clients, are you specifically trying to have them eat twice a day, three times a day? What do you find works best?
Julieanna Hever:
What I've found, and this is all anecdote, this is not scientific-
Rip Esselstyn:
I know.
Julieanna Hever:
... but what I've found most of my clients, it's twice a day. Usually, it's the best for most people.
Rip Esselstyn:
That's, what? Usually noon and 5:00?
Julieanna Hever:
Ish. I always tailor it for them. There's some benefit that eating earlier, shifting your window, your fed window earlier in the day is a little bit more efficacious, but a lot of my clients have families and it's important to them to sit down with their spouse and their children or whoever they live with to have dinner. So the we prioritize dinner and then we have the first meal a little bit earlier. So I make it work with their schedule because, again, the science is still emerging and evolving, and I think there's some evidence that you could do. It's an eight-hour window or a 12-hour window. So there's wiggle go room.
Julieanna Hever:
I just want to find what works for everyone individually. This is where the individual variability comes into play and I want to make it work so that's sustainable. If you're fighting it every day, it's like, "Oh, I can't have dinner with my kids. I can't have ..." and everyone's complaining and you're miserable, this is not for life. This is not sustainable. So let's make it sustainable for your life, specifically.
Rip Esselstyn:
I find that really, really fascinating. So I want to dive a little bit deeper into that. So do you tell your clients to have a large variety of different foods to eat from, especially when they're starting out or to keep it super simple and not have too much variety?
Julieanna Hever:
One of the tenets in there is repetition and I proved all of these points back to myself in opposition when I wrote this book. I love and I hate that I have to say this, but I wrote a diet book, a diet cookbook and gained weight while writing it because there was a deadline and 75 recipes and I had to have a lot of variety and ate more frequently and more volume. All the stuff I talk about, I had to do the opposite. So I reverse engineered it and proved my point in the opposite direction, which is crazy ironic, but repetition is okay.
Julieanna Hever:
We mostly are repetitive creatures of habit, anyway. Most of us rotate through the same meals, one or two breakfast, two or three or four lunches, five or six dinners. So variety is it makes you think, "OH, this tastes really good. I forgot how good this is. I'm going to have a couple extra bites," and if you're trying to create a deficit, that gets in the way.
Julieanna Hever:
So repetition during weight loss is a good thing. It's your friend. Find those recipes that you love and just go back and forth. Most of my clients by the end of their process, especially if they have 80 to 100 pounds to lose, they end up with about, I want to say six or even four to six recipes that they know will be effective for weight loss and they love them, they're satiating and all these things that they just tend to gravitate towards. So a little bit of repetition and then we bring back maintenance with the variety, adding in a little bit more variety.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay. Got it. All right. Let's go back to the tenets. So tenet number nine is monitor meal volume, and then you specifically say in there practice radical self-compassion as well I think when you mess up, but what does monitor meal volume mean exactly?
Julieanna Hever:
Simply stated, if you're getting on the scale day after day and it's not going down, you're eating too much. I know it sounds crazy and radical. That's it. You're eating too much. You have to reign it in if you want to lose. So it means look at how much you're eating and maybe you could eat a one bite less and see what happens, but the radical self-compassion piece, I learned this from Catherine, this woman I've worked with for many, many years. She's a spiritual life coach type of psychologist, and she started talking about radical self-compassion a couple years ago and I thought that was brilliant because, oh, my gosh, Rip, we beat ourselves up.
Julieanna Hever:
These conversations I have with people and how hard we are on ourselves and the horrible things we say to ourselves, the stuff that goes on that we don't even say out loud, that we may not even be aware of is happening is so loud. If we could just practice more self, I mean, I do it too. It's like no matter how much you think about it, we don't even recognize how predominant those words are.
Julieanna Hever:
So I try to replace some of it, one sentence and say, "Oh," for me, here's my perfect example. When I am busy and I'm having a crazy day and I make myself get to the gym even though I have so many things I need to do that are more feeling imminent, if I get to the gym or when I get to the gym and I get out of the gym, I give myself an actual pat on the back and I say, "Good job, Jules," because it's some positive reinforcement of the good things. You just say something positive to yourself as much as possible.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. It is so important that we do our best to really love ourselves, right? So many of us, we do, we have a lot of self hate and we're not very kind to ourselves. So important. So you mentioned getting on the scale. You think it's important, especially for sustainable weight loss and as you're going on this journey with weight loss that you actually weigh yourself every single day. Can you tell me why that is?
Julieanna Hever:
Yes. I'm, again, trying to get rid of guilt and shame and radical self-compassion and know that it's a tool. I say that you're not getting on the scale and the scale's looking up at you and saying like my dance teacher said, "Eating too much cookies up there." It's just information and if we could use it as information and as a guideline, a guidepost. So for maintenance, if you get on the scale every day, instead of saying, "Oh, I'll get on the scale Monday," it's like you messed up, whatever, "It was my birthday last week," and so it's like, "Okay." I got on the scale the next day, it's like, "Okay." Own it. This is a number. It's just a number and then you know where you're at.
Julieanna Hever:
If you say, "I'm going to wait till Monday," or "I'm going to wait till January," that's when people gain 20, 30, 40 pounds and don't even recognize it because they're just like, "Ah, lalalala. I don't want to see it," but if you could just look at it as information, and we're gathering and aggregating as much information as possible and giving less weight to the scale, no pun intended. It can be just a tool, just an objective tool.
Rip Esselstyn:
So do you find with a lot of your clients that they get to a point to where they don't need to look at that scale any longer, where they're liberated from it?
Julieanna Hever:
I don't see it as a liberation. I see it as a tool that's a good boundary. I think for maintenance, for the long run so we avoid the roller coaster, I have that as one of the ... I recommend it as I don't ever tell anyone what to do, but I suggest, and I see that it's more helpful to get on the scale and have that information ongoing. It's just data. Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah. That's-
Julieanna Hever:
Well, I just should say that fluid shifts happen, hormonal shifts happen, intestinal content shifts happen, shift happens and so you have to-
Rip Esselstyn:
Shift happens.
Julieanna Hever:
... know that it's not going to be perfect on the scale every day. So you just think about it. It's just information.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. That's good. That's good information. Thank you. So your 10th tenet, I feel like we've talked about it, but just so people think that I'm not overlooking it is master monotony. I think that that is where you talked about how when you increase your diet, your variety, you tend to maybe over consume. Is that correct?
Julieanna Hever:
Totally. I mean, again, we're creatures of habit and a little bit of monotony is okay. Find your recipes that you love and it's good. It's good to have that under your new repertoire of things that you know works, and that's okay. It's temporary. You're not going to go into a nutritional deficit by not having massive variety. Most of us do this anyway. This is a very natural tendency for most people anyway.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, I look at just myself, I literally six days a week have the exact same breakfast. I mean, I change the fruit and some of the toppings, but it's always either oatmeal or it's my-
Julieanna Hever:
The big bowl.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, the big bowl cereal that I make. I can't wait to wake up in the morning and make it, really. Have you eaten yet today? Have you had breakfast?
Julieanna Hever:
No. One more thing about that is that everything about food is habit, right? Everything is habit. So no, I do the time-restricted eating. I eat at 11:00. So I'm way an hour late now, and I'm really hungry, but I usually eat at 11:00 every day. We're just creatures of habit.
Rip Esselstyn:
You're ready for that celery stock.
Julieanna Hever:
Yeah. I've got this really yummy potato salad that I always gravitate towards with this maple mustard dressing that I-
Rip Esselstyn:
Ooh.
Julieanna Hever:
Yeah. So good. Can't wait, not that I want to write you off here because I love talking to you.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. So you mentioned in your book, you call it under the header noteworthy trends that people that you've worked with have had success with. The first one is most people tend to thrive with soups. Why? What's the magic with soups?
Julieanna Hever:
Right. It's so interesting. This is, again, psychology, I think, from my, again, anecdote. It's that if there's a homogenized recipe that you have, it makes it easier because I think it goes back to the whole food decision making thing. So if you have fewer decisions, like the people that want to do the bowls where it's like, "Oh, I'll have a little bowl of avocado and a little beans and a little this and a little that." It's more decisions like, "How much dressing should I put? How much this should I put? How many ..." So when it's just already homogenized into a soup and people go, "Oh, okay. I have about this much. I use this bowl and it's filled to this height with this recipe," and they know that that's satisfying, it's almost this predictability that helps with the habit part of it. So that just seems to help people succeed.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, and speaking of soups, I don't want to leave out that one of the really spectacular things about this book is the recipe section, and the really delicious, oil-free, low-calorie, amazing recipes you have in this book. For example, I've marked some of the chilies and the stews and the curry dishes and the soups that I'm going to make out of here.
Julieanna Hever:
Oh, great.
Rip Esselstyn:
For example, the first one, and I think it's ingenious the way you have done the recipe section, where you have recipes that are in pots and then it's pans, and then it's plates, then it's power bowls, and then it's secret sauces and, really, you've done a really phenomenal job with it. For starters, that Thai green curry, and what I love about it, the first thing I did is I went to see if you have coconut milk in there and you don't, you have coconut extract, right?
Julieanna Hever:
Yup, yup because, oh, my gosh, I spent time in Thailand and I love the curries, and they're so decadent, but they're so decadent and they're all that saturated fat. So I love coconut milk. It's amazing. I use it for a day of deliciousness like when I'm going to Thailand next, whenever that will be, but yeah. So this is a way to get all that hint of that flavor with the creaminess because I usually use a soy or a cashew milk and get all that deliciousness without the saturated fat. So that's fun.
Rip Esselstyn:
That's it. It's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant. Then you got a peanut butter vegetable curry that I absolutely am going to try. I think I might make it with that PB powder, right?
Julieanna Hever:
Yes. Let me know how that comes out. You got to share that with me. That's a great-
Rip Esselstyn:
I will. I will. I will. I'll take a photo. Then you have a jambalaya oats. One of the things that really attracted me to that recipe was you're using oat groats, which I hardly ever see in any recipes any longer. What I love about that is it's the most unprocessed form of an oat. So is that specifically why you used that?
Julieanna Hever:
Yeah. Actually, my friend, Chef Shazi, she's a friend of mine that was trying to inspire me with some different recipe ideas, and that was her idea and I loved it for the same reason you just said. When you look it up online to order it because you don't really find them at the market, really, I had to order it online, it's like you see it in terms of feed for animals. It's not something we normally buy.
Rip Esselstyn:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's intense. Yeah. Just for people, so what's the difference between an oat groat and steel-cut oats?
Julieanna Hever:
It's just like you get that refinement process. That's the original form. I don't know. There's always the original form and then you refine it a little bit and it becomes, I don't know the order, steel-cut and you refine it a little more and you get into a flour and you refine a little more, you puff it and it becomes a ... It just has a different glycemic index effect, a different effect metabolically, but I always am a fan of going to the original form, for sure.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, absolutely. Then you've also got these soups. You have a nacho broccoli soup that I'm just like, "Oh, my God! I can't wait to try that." You've got a one pot staples soup. So it's the same core ingredients and then on the other side of the page, you have five different spice blends that you add to it to give it either Mexican or Italian or whatever. I think it's brilliant.
Julieanna Hever:
Don't you love the idea? People think it's like, "Oh, what do you eat on a plant-based diet?" I always want to say, "Oh, my gosh! You could eat everything and the flavors will ... Anything you love, and you go around the world and you could take the soup or a bowl of rice and beans and you can completely transform it to completely different flavors." So then there's infinite variety.
Rip Esselstyn:
Infinite, infinite. Then in pans, and I just have to say this because I went through every recipe and marked the ones that I want to try. You have a smokey sweet potato mac and cheese that I can't wait to try with my whole family. It just is crazy good-looking.
Julieanna Hever:
Oh, I hope you like it. Yeah. It's hard for me to get my kids to eat the way I want them to eat and that's one way is a mac and cheese world. They love mac and cheese anything. So I hope you like it.
Rip Esselstyn:
Then as I told earlier, last night I had a lentil oat loaf. I love loaves, and you have a spicy chickpea loaf that I'm chosen to try. Looks good-looking. Then another thing, I posted on it on Instagram maybe a week or two ago, but you have potato croutons, and what really drew me to your potato croutons is how you make them and you boil them first, which is brilliant, and then you put them out on the sauce pan, on the parchment paper, and then you bake them, but then you get the soft inside that way and the crunchy outside.
Julieanna Hever:
Yes. Yeah. Those were so much fun. I love rye bread. I grew up eating rye bread. So I made rye potato croutons and put them in my tempeh reuben salad. So it's like you get the rye bread taste and crunch without the bread. It's more wholesome, more nutritious.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Then another one of my favorite dishes and it looks amazing is the saag paneer. I'm probably not pronouncing it right, but-
Julieanna Hever:
I think it's saag or I don't know. It sounds right to me.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, but it's cheesy, it's spinachy, it's very, I think, very popular Indian dish, but it typically comes with cheese that's mixed in with all this spinach and different spices, but yours looks phenomenal
Julieanna Hever:
.. and oil. That used to be my favorite. I always love Indian food, but before I was vegan, that was one of my favorite dishes was saag paneer with the biryani and everything. So yeah. So this is oil-free because it's usually cooked in lots of delicious, all this liquid but immersed in oil. So this is obviously an oil-free vegan version.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. I want to take a break from the recipes for a second because my mouth is starting to water. Let's go back. In the very beginning, we talked about exercise. So tell me why your advice, suggestion to your clients when they're starting to work with you is to not exercise.
Julieanna Hever:
I know it's really disruptive and crazy-sounding because, I mean, especially I was a personal trainer for, I'm still a personal trainer, 20, it's been, oh, my gosh, Rip. This year, I'm renewing my thing this month, and it's since '98. What is that? 24 years. I can't believe it. It's crazy. So yeah, it sounds crazy coming from someone like me, and that's what I learned in grad school. You have to exercise, you have to exercise, but you can out exercise a bad diet.
Julieanna Hever:
The thing where I see the most conflict of this idea with this weight loss process is exercise drives appetite. There's no question about that. I mean, you're an elite athlete. So taking a break from it, you're not going to lose everything. You're not going to lose all your gains by going through it. Again, the people that are rapid firing this weight loss process, it's a finite period of time.
Julieanna Hever:
The people that are always on a diet, the rollercoaster, it's like, of course, you can't stop exercising forever because it's the most important thing for your mental health, for your cardiovascular health, for your immune system, everything. Exercise is extraordinary. I don't want to minimize the beyond powerful benefits to exercising consistently, but with weight loss, if you just take this period of time, you just chill out a little bit. I say, "Please go just binge watch TV and read books and do whatever." Do other things that you wanted to do and just take it easy for a little while. You'll be fine.
Julieanna Hever:
If you need to stretch or do physical therapy or a little bit of walk, get outside, it's all fine, but if you're sitting there hustling and doing intensive cardio and HIIT workouts and all those things that we're doing, it just slows down the process. I found, honestly, back to anecdote, there's science to support this, but back to anecdote with my clients, it halves their rate of loss every time.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow.
Julieanna Hever:
I know. Bizarre.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, it's interesting because I know people that I have worked with who, like one individual, for example, who lost 110 pounds over the span of a year and he had a bum knee. So he literally didn't exercise for that whole year. I mean, it's just, again, more evidence that you can lose the weight and it's all about the food. It's not about the exercise because you can't. Yeah. I mean, yeah. People say-
Julieanna Hever:
I bet his knee was better afterwards because he had a break from all the exercise and 110 pounds less on the knee.
Rip Esselstyn:
I'm sure. I'm sure of that. Okay. Let's talk for a sec about food journals. Do you recommend that your clients keep a food journal and why?
Julieanna Hever:
Well, it's another tool. It's another tool for accountability. If you're going to eat it, you're going to have to write it down. It's like, "Okay." There's something that goes on in your head. That's one part of it. The second part is it's a historical reference so that you can go back to see what works and what doesn't work. Most importantly, for my purposes, by the way, the reason I became a dietician is because I love reading people's food journals. I'm super nosy. I'm fascinated. I love looking in people's carts at the market, the grocery stores, but I can look at trends. If you tell me, "Oh, I'm eating healthy," I'm like, "Really? Let me see your food journal," and there's always a reason for every, I could always look at a food journal and know what the client's going to say ahead of time.
Julieanna Hever:
It's very predictable, fascinating, but you look for trends. I do this with my clients for everything if they have an allergy or an intolerance because I don't do just weight loss. I work with people that are trying to reverse chronic conditions or deal with GI problems or allergies or all sorts of other things that come up. So watching for the trends, watching blood pressure trends and all that stuff, it's really a powerful tool to just write it down because how many of us remember exactly what we ate last week for lunch.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, no, I love everything you just said. I know with the people that we work with when I was writing both my first book and my third book and I had pilot study participants, it was absolutely mandatory that they keep a food journal for course corrections and also for accountability. So big, big fan of that as well.
Rip Esselstyn:
Let's talk about maintenance, maintenance phase. So you've gotten somebody to lose the weight, right? They've lost the 20, 30, 50, 100 pounds, but now the key is keeping it off, right?
Julieanna Hever:
That's everything, yes.
Rip Esselstyn:
So how do you keep your clients from resisting the temptation to return to old habits?
Julieanna Hever:
So this is where the diet begins. This is where the magic happens. This is where you get off the rollercoaster because most people have lost weight. Most people know how to lose weight. It's the making it part of your life. So we set boundaries. So I stepwise into maintenance mode with exercise. So that's where we go, "Okay. Now ..." and it's so funny because all the clients that for years have been like, "I don't want to exercise. I can't exercise," now they're begging me by the end of this, "Please, can I start exercising?" I'm like, "Okay. See?"
Rip Esselstyn:
Nice.
Julieanna Hever:
So we stepwise into it very conscientiously and methodically with exercise and then we set boundaries. So we get on the scale, "I'm going to stick to whole food plant-based. I'm going to stick to twice a day eating." Whatever it is that's worked for them, we set those boundaries and then it's, "These are things I can do. These are things I love to do. These are things that have transformed my life and I'm going to continue these." So we find these and we hone these over the process during weight loss and then we set the standards for here on out.
Rip Esselstyn:
What about do you have any advice or recommendations for people when it comes to eating out or going to friends' homes?
Julieanna Hever:
Oh, yeah. I mean, that's what we navigate throughout the whole process. I mean, that's a constant challenge and it's fascinating because everyone eats or everyone's got an opinion about food and everyone wants to tell you're going to be deficient in protein. I mean, every day, Rip, I hear this every day still. You probably hear it every day, too. It's like, "Really? We've solved the protein thing. We're fine."
Julieanna Hever:
So everyone has to have an opinion. So I try to get my clients to, I always tell people the goal is to just not have the conversation because, really, people don't care about protein and they don't really know what that means and how much you're supposed to have. Most people are just throwing stuff out there that they heard. So the idea is to try to not talk about it, which is really hard.
Julieanna Hever:
Anyone that's plant-based and then someone that's not, they sit down, they want to talk about it. What I do for a living, everyone wants to talk to me about diet no matter how hard I try to like stave off the topic. So trying to not talk about it is really important, and then knowing what you're going to eat, having a plan. If you haven't eaten, are you going to bring food? Are they going to have food for you? Are you going to offer? So just navigating the situation best you can when you're going to someone's house.
Julieanna Hever:
If you're going to a restaurant, you can look up. I always say put on your green goggles, look at the menu ahead of time, look at the menu even at a steakhouse. In my first book, I wrote finding something even at a steakhouse. Look at the side dishes. What do they have in the kitchen? You could piece together a meal, worst case scenario. There's always something, especially nowadays. There's always something.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, but all in all, their safest bet as much as possible, eat at home.
Julieanna Hever:
100%. Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Let's go through these before we ... I want to return to the recipes, and then I'm going to let you have your celery stock.
Julieanna Hever:
Thank you.
Rip Esselstyn:
That is you have the six daily threes, and the first one is three servings of green leafies. You know that at PLANTSTRONG, because of my father's influence, we are huge fans of kale, Swiss chard, blah, blah, blah. So you like them too. Why?
Julieanna Hever:
Kale, yeah, I love them. They're the most nutritionally dense foods. Yeah. Look at that. Cool. I love that shirt. I have to get one like that. I added cruciferous to that category because there's a lot of overlap like kale is a cruciferous and a leafy green, broccoli, cauliflower, all that stuff. Well, cauliflower is a little not green, but yeah. So I have those as the most important category because of they're the most nutritionally dense foods on the planet. You get the most nutritional bang for your caloric buck, and there's this wide array of phytonutrients and health benefits to eating these foods. So you can't get enough of leafy greens. Obviously, we're on the same page about that. I'll never forget my first interview with your dad when I did a movie 12 years ago and he did his leafy green song. It was the most brilliant thing I've ever seen in my life.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. That's his green leafy rap. Okay. You also ask people to do three servings of fruit. When you say a serving, what does that mean? What's a serving?
Julieanna Hever:
Thank you for asking this. So here again without the counting, right? So here I am trying to navigate what you should eat and then also not counting. So the six daily threes is a mnemonic. It's an idea. It's how do we prioritize the foods because I want people to eat vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, mushrooms, nuts, seeds, herbs and spices in infinite tasty combinations, but how do you prioritize them for nutrition? So there's no perfect diet.
Julieanna Hever:
Someone like me who's 115-120 pounds versus 180-pound athlete that needs to eat more, we're not supposed to be eating the same amount of food every day, right? There's a difference. So it's a guideline. There's no perfection. So a serving is about. For fruit, it's one piece or I think it's a cup. I don't have it in front of me. Then for vegetables, it's a cup of raw or a half a cup cooked because they shrink so much, but again, these are foods in the six daily threes like nuts and seeds and mushrooms and the leafy greens that are nutritionally unique, legumes, that you can't get these things elsewhere.
Julieanna Hever:
Notable on there, missing, everyone points this out, and I think it's important, I don't have whole grains on there. Nothing at all wrong with whole grains. They're fabulous, fabulous health benefits, nutritionally dense, wonderful, culinarily diverse, satiating, but there's nothing unique in whole grains that you can't get elsewhere. So that's what that's all about, not you have to eat all of this every single day and be perfect about it. It's just these are things to make sure you're getting on a regular basis.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, and if you're getting your three servings of green leafies, three servings of fruit, three servings of legumes, which we adore, three servings of colored veggies, three servings of nuts and seeds, and three servings of mushrooms, you're not going to have much room for anything else.
Julieanna Hever:
Precisely.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yes. So speaking of which, let's go back into some recipes that I wrote down that I want to make. You have a chili cheese fries that I'm going to make because my kids are going to gobble it right up. Do you know off the top of your head because I know you're not looking at the recipe and I don't want to put you on the spot too much, but what is your cheese sauce made from?
Julieanna Hever:
Oh, no, I know that one because I make it all the time. I put that on everything. It's basic. The main ingredient is, well, cashew. Although I've been mixing up my nuts and seeds now just to get more nutritional variety in there just every time I make it because I use a lot of cashew because it's the creamy neutral one, but I started mixing up my nuts and seeds in those recipes and then roasted red pepper. So that makes it this vibrant color. It's so vibrant, bright orangey. I love the color, and it acts as the liquid because it blends. It makes it blend because there's so much water in a roasted red pepper and so much flavor. Then I think that one, I've done a few versions of this. My first one was in Forks Over Knives book. I think that's hit with a little hit, something hot in there. There's, whatever, it's cayenne or smoked or chipotle, but yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah, paprika or chili powder or cayenne, something like that. Then this one on page 112, this almond crusted tofu. One of my kids' favorite things is tofu, and we love doing a panini-style tofu where we put it in a panini maker. So I cannot wait to try this with my kids. You have Tex-Mex stuffed peppers that I know my wife and I will love. Kids, they haven't expanded their repertoire to where they're going to appreciate that as much.
Julieanna Hever:
I make the stuffing, the fiesta cauliflower rice. Well, they made me take out fiesta, but I love that word fiesta. I use that. I just make that all the time with the cheese and I eat that almost every day just the stuffing without putting ... I make it fancy in the peppers when I have guests and I'm entertaining, but yeah, that's one of my favorite, people.
Rip Esselstyn:
Nice. I had a meeting yesterday with our graphic design team and one of the guys, he showed me this book that he just purchased. It's called Salad Freak, right? Salad Freak. I was like, "I love that," because people have, for whatever reason, been pooing the salad, right? What I love is in your power bowls section, I'd say 80% of your power bowls are all insane salads. So you have a buffalo cauliflower salad or forbidden sushi salad. It's basically like, "Bring on the salad," and these are muscular salads.
Julieanna Hever:
Yeah. I mean, what the heck people just think of? I mean, we have such a sad interpretation of a salad and it could be anything. You could put anything you love into a big bowl, which is what I'm going to do right after this and it's amazing. You have so much, again, infinite variety and it should be hearty and delicious and it doesn't have to be boring and drab.
Rip Esselstyn:
So speaking of boring and drab, one of the things to help prevent plant-based dishes from being boring and drab are secret sauces. You've got a litany of them. You've got a hemp seed ranch dressing, I can't wait to try, a carrot ginger dressing, spicy peanut dressing that to me would go well on just about anything. You have a harissa butternut squash hummus. Wow. Stop me. Then you even have a simple marinara sauce for people just to put on their pasta. So 75 incredible recipes. I can't even imagine how much time you spent getting all these to where they made it into the book, but congrats.
Julieanna Hever:
Thank you so much. It's exciting to hear you talk about it. Again, I could hear you talking about food all the time. It's very fun.
Rip Esselstyn:
Let's talk for a second, and then I do need to let you go because I've got a call that I'm supposed to be on here in five minutes, I mean, this has been so fun, is what about cheat days? What's your philosophy on cheat days? Do you allow your clients to have a cheat Saturday or Sunday when they've been good for five or six or seven days?
Julieanna Hever:
Thank you for ending on this note. I love this. I don't like the concept of cheat days because that whole idea of if you're cheating, you're only cheating yourself, but I like to call it and I put a positive framework on it and I call it a day of deliciousness, and rather than think of it as, "I'm doing something bad," I want you to love your food all the time. 365 days of the year, you should love your food. The way you just talked about it, that's how I feel about it. The reason I love listening to you talk about it all the time is because it's how I feel about food too. Those foods are amazing. They taste delicious. We love to eat. We're not just suffering and eating those celery sticks like rabbits. We're just enjoying our food.
Julieanna Hever:
So I want you to love your food all the time so you don't have to cheat on yourself by eating something that you love because you're always eating foods you love. That's the goal. Find the foods you love. That's the first step that I do with my clients. The second part of that is if it's a holiday, if it's someone's birthday, if you haven't seen, because there's always something to celebrate, but choose it conscientiously. If you're always eating decadent foods, it's not decadent anymore. It's not a treat anymore. Right? It's your day. It's how you eat.
Julieanna Hever:
So if you're going to have something more decadent like the ice cream that's in your freezer or whatever it is, plan it and then don't regret it. Enjoy every bite of it, radical self-compassion, enjoy it, eat it. Just enjoy it. Let it sit in your mouth and chew it and taste it and celebrate it, and then the next meal, you go back to being on plant and then no harm, no foul. It's a win-win situation.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. I like it a lot. Let's wrap up with this. You're a big fan, and I've heard this word a lot lately, gratitude, and you recommend people have a gratitude list for what they're grateful for. What exactly? What's the reason for that?
Julieanna Hever:
Thank you for asking that. Gratitude for you asking that. There's a lot going on in this world and life is not so easy all the time. In fact, it's very challenging a lot of the time for most people. Speaking personally, speaking globally, I could only speak for myself and people I've worked with, if you try to remember the things that you do have because whatever you focus on expands in your world, and if you could focus on the things you're grateful for, that will fill your life more because there's always something to be upset about or stressed about.
Julieanna Hever:
I have a teenage daughter who's always complaining about something and someone and everything, but if you could focus on the things that you're grateful for and remember, and actually write it down because, again, words are so powerful, it has more of the potential to expand and to become the focus of your life. It's just the things that you're grateful for, the little things like I have my fuzzy slippers and I have my vanilla tea and I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful to get to spend time with you here, Rip. Thank you for having me here again. I love talking to you always. It's just these little things or big things, whatever they are collectively, that is who you become, what you focus on. So that's what I try to encourage my clients to focus on more.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. You're so right. Anybody can complain in line and just butch about things that are not going well, but if you pivot and you think about the things you're grateful for, as you've said several times throughout this conversation today, practice radical self-compassion. Let's be grateful for what we have. Let's do our best to love ourselves. I think we're going to be in a better place, and let's follow those 10 tenets for sustainable weight loss. Oh, yeah. All right. I am so grateful for you, Julieanna, for joining me today on the PLANTSTRONG podcast and for putting this brilliant piece of work out into the universe. Huge, huge congrats to you. I so hope to see you soon.
Julieanna Hever:
You brought chills to me. Thank you so much, Rip. I'm so grateful and I hope to see you again soon.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yes. Enjoy your breakfast lunch.
Julieanna Hever:
Thank you.
Rip Esselstyn:
Plantbaseddietician.com is the website where you can learn all about Julieanna's programs and books. Of course, we'll be sure to link to that and all of the resources from today's episode on the episode page at planstrongpodcast.com. Next week, we're in the kitchen with food blogger and father of five, Shane Martin, but until then, choose you now, and now, and now, and always keep it PLANTSTRONG.
Rip Esselstyn:
The PLANTSTRONG podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, Ami Mackey, Patrick Gavin, and Wade Clark. This season is dedicated to all of those courageous true seekers who weren't afraid to look through the lens with clear vision and hold firm to a higher truth, most notably my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. and Ann Crile Esselstyn. Thanks for listening.
