The Science Behind Health at Every Size® with Dr. Jillian Murphy

Subscribe to Motivation Made Easy! Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More

Episode 70. Today’s post and episode is actually a replay of my conversation last summer with Dr. Jillian Murphy, ND. I don’t replay episodes all that often, but I realized many people missed this one, and it’s truly a crucial on in understanding this approach, understanding Health at Every Size, Intuitive Eating, and the somewhat less talked about concepts of Competent Eating and Division of Responsibility work lead by Ellyn Satter.

Cutting the Diet Culture Cord

One thing that really becomes evident in the conversation with Dr. Murphy, is that anti-diet, weight inclusive approaches benefit all bodies. Not just people with eating disorders or in a certain body size, but ALL OF US. I’m really excited for you to listen to this interview, because we cover a lot and Dr. Murphy is a WEALTH of knowledge as she’s been practicing naturopathic medicine in the weight inclusive space for a decade.

One thing that was super interesting to me is the fact that even when things feel “mild” in terms of “healthy eating”, how much freedom you can still gain from cutting the diet culture cord.

I seriously learned a ton in this interview. Let’s dive in!

“This isn’t an individual failure; it’s a failure of the system and the information you’ve gotten… you weren’t born eating like this.”
– Jillian Murphy

In the interview, we cover:

Why Health at Every Size is not just a social movement, but an evidence-based movement rooted heavily in science. She breaks this down in a way that I truly haven’t heard before, so make sure you stay tuned to really understand why and how this isn’t just a “don’t judge people for their body size” movement (though that’s of course very important, too!)
We talk about her training as a Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine and where her focus is, as well as the ways that her training, just like pretty much all standard training programs, were steeped in diet culture beliefs.
Her experience with orthorexia and how she finally fully cut the diet culture cord.
We talk about her work learning about competent eating through the Ellyn Satter Institute and the power of this approach for kids and adults. I’m SO excited for this part of this conversation, because we talk about a nuanced approach to moving towards a flexible, healthy, sustainable relationship with food called Competent Eating that can be really helpful for people who want more structure than Intuitive Eating provides. Super cool.

Do you ever worry that you are wasting your life?

I definitely did. In fact, I wrote that in my journal many years ago when I was in the middle of the diet-binge roller coaster ride.

I woke up every day thinking about food, my body, and what I would eat that day to “be healthy”
The notebooks I had filled with calories and points could fill up a spare bedroom
Social events and vacations immediately prompted the thought “they will notice I gained weight” or “I need to lose weight by then”
Deep down I knew I wasn’t living life the way I wanted to, but I didn’t know how to pull myself out of it.

If this is you, I want you to imagine what it would feel like to feel empowered in your body and proud of your choices on a consistent basis. I promise you, it isn’t too late.

Dieting steals our motivation. It makes us ineffective. It keeps us spinning our wheels in a system that was never built to work.

If you are ready take the first step to motivating yourself with what matters to you, download my free Create Powerful Motivation guide (which is quite beautifully designed if I do say so myself), and walk through the 3 simple steps to create motivation that works for YOU in 15 minutes or less. You will get a simple formula to write ONE SENTENCE you can use to motivate yourself on a daily basis.

You can write it on your bathroom mirror, put on the background of your phone, or just read it and repeat it in your mind.

Look, I know how much it hurts to live a life worrying you are missing out, not stepping into the person you were truly meant to be, vibrant, passionate, curious, vulnerable, and brave.

You can listen to the podcast all day, but taking that first step, putting pen the paper (or typing on your phone) is required for true lasing change. It’s time to start living my friend.

It’s 100% free, so what are you waiting for? Grab your free copy of the guide today at DrHondorp.com/Motivate

Meet Dr. Jillian Murphy

Dr. Murphy is a licensed Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine, Coach, and affiliate of the Ellyn Satter Institute based in Kingston, Ontario Canada. She works with diverse, smart, health-conscious women who are DONE WITH DIETING, looking to get out of their heads and reconnect with their bodies. She uses cutting edge eating psychology, in-the-know insight & guidance around diet culture, health, and weight to teach women WHY they stay stuck in negative patterns around food and constant body dissatisfaction and how they can pursue health without falling back down the diet hole.

Jillian also offers in depth courses for professionals & practitioners looking to grow their anti-diet, weight-inclusive businesses, feeling super confident in their practice and process. She currently offers both an 8 week intensive and a year long Mastermind offering up the very best support and education for newbies and highly-seasoned practitioners alike.

You can connect with Jillian at her website FoodFreedomBodyLove.com or on Instagram.

All Bodies Deserve Dignity and Respect

The Health at Every Size® (HAES® ) movement aims to fight for the dignity and respect of all bodies. It’s well documented that this doesn’t occur, and there is no doubt that it’s significantly harming our health.

There is no shortage of strategies for weight loss, but a critical piece of the overall picture that we’re failing to consider is the lasting damage that these strategies have on body image, relationships with food, and self-respect. The approach that is currently being used is doing FAR more harm than good, and that is what HAES® is trying to change.

Using size-focused methods for weight loss can be incredibly devastating in the long run. They aren’t controllable, they don’t consider behavior as a factor, and they are DEFINITELY not sustainable. Dr. Murphy mentions that the best strategies to use are behavior-based, and they zero in on altering mindset rather than using externally-focused “fixes”.

Even though the dignity of diverse bodies is NOT prioritized in the health field currently and the strategies we commonly see reinforce that, there ARE ways we can combat this and make systemic change.

She premises it beautifully for us here:

“We don’t know how to help people lose weight, that the strategies we’ve engaged in have been more harmful than helpful, that there is a much wider range of body diversity than the medical community currently allows for or normalizes, and that its all of these things that lead to the health issues that we’re seeing.”
Dr. Jillian Murphy, ND

Health at Every Size® – The Scientific Facts Behind the Social Justice Movement

In addition to the very important social aspects of the movement, there’s also an immense amount of science.

1. The clear causal relationship hasn’t been established between weight and health outcomes

There are many points to make here.

The fact is that thinner people have all the conditions we blame on weight (heart disease, diabetes, cancer, PCOS) so for that reason alone we know it can’t only be weight that is the problem.

We cannot establish a causal relationship with weight causing the health problems it’s blamed on (e.g., heart disease, diabetes, PCOS, cancer, etc) because we cannot randomly assign two groups of people to be and stay at a certain weight (at least not safely) and study them for extended periods of time with nothing else changing.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t co-relations between weight and health, but we know it isn’t as simple as “fat causes X” as so often is the assumption. There could also be underlying genetic causal relationships that are causing the weight gain and the disease process.

2. There is a much wider array of body diversity than the medical community currently allows for.

Biodiversity is a fact, and yet criteria like the BMI have such a narrow and speculative range for what we deem “healthy.” This causes issues across the weight spectrum, like things being over diagnosed or missed completely.

3. Even if a causal relationship could be established, we don’t have effective ways to help people lose weight long-term without collateral damage.

We didn’t cover bariatric surgery in this interview, and people have mixed feelings/emotions on this, but I do think it’s worth mentioning that I’m talking about behavioral weight loss. We don’t currently have effective ways to help people lose weight and keep it off long term without a sacrifice of well-being, physically and emotionally.

Competent Eating as an Alternative or Complement to Intuitive Eating

Dr. Murphy talks about her training with the Ellyn Satter Institute on concepts like division of responsibility and competent eating and how this was initially done to support her work with children, but how this actually ended up being really useful for adults.

She talks about how some personalities or types of people really benefit from the structure that competent eating naturally provides and how this has become another tool in her toolkit that has been truly helpful to her and her patients.

Dr. Murphy said that this could be useful for various people, including but not limited to:

Neurodiverse people (people with Autism Spectrum Disorders, for example, or food sensitivities)
Certain personality types
People who feel truly overwhelmed and not able to get in touch with their bodies
People with diabetes sometimes, or with certain food restrictions based on a medical condition

Division of Responsibility for Raising Competent Eaters

The division of responsibility for kiddos is, put simply, the parents determining the types and timing of meals and snacks (with a wide variety of foods available, not just “healthy” but also foods that can be seen as “forbidden”) and the kiddos determining the amount.

This is key for raising kids that are intrinsically going to remain intuitive eaters or return to intuitive eating because they have some level of choice and control.

The super cool thing Dr. Murphy shares is that for adults, this can be equally useful, and this was an added bonus that she realized in this space.

What You Need to Know About Weight Inclusivity, Health at Every Size, and How You can Immediately Start Improving Your Health

The weight-inclusive Health at Every Size® movement is social. All bodies deserve dignity and respect and we don’t current provide that. This is well documented and incredibly harmful.
The weight-inclusive Health at Every Size® movement is scientific. Not that social and science are separate per se, but there is immense amounts of evidence that the link between weight and health cannot be fully causal, for many of the reasons that Dr. Murphy outlines so well. She talks about the fact that thinner people have all the conditions we blame on weight (heart disease, diabetes, cancer, PCOS) so for that reason alone we know it can’t only be weight that is the problem. We cannot establish a causal relationship with weight causing the health problems it’s blamed on (e.g., heart disease, diabetes, PCOS, cancer, etc). This doesn’t mean there aren’t co-relations, but we know it isn’t as simple as “fat causes X” as so often is the assumption. There could also be underlying genetic causal relationships that are causing the weight gain and the disease process.
We don’t currently have effective ways to lose weight long-term without sacrificing well-being. We don’t cover bariatric surgery at all in this interview, although frankly I’d love to hear Dr. Murphy’s thoughts on that, but talking about long-term significant weight loss, the odds of that happens without collateral damage is 5ish percent. So, even if we could establish a causal relationship (e.g., excess weight causes disease), we don’t currently have effective ways to help people lose weight and keep it off, without a sacrifice of well-being, physically and emotionally.
There is a much wider arrange of body diversity than the medical community currently allows for. Body diversity is a fact. This results in significant problems including lower quality of care, weight stigma, bad advice, and leaves most people increasingly losing faith in themselves, versus recognizing that the system fails to improve health in the vast majority of folks with these struggles.
You deserve to have full autonomy over your body. One of the reasons the anti-diet movement can feel so loud, is the attempt to try to counteract the loudness of the diet culture and weight centric BS. But it’s normal and understandable to still desire weight loss and smaller bodies because there are social privileges that you will get, including more acceptance, belonging, and even better health care with less judgment and bias. But once you know the data, you can be empowered to make the choice that’s best for you.
Competent Eating is another way to re-learn to trust yourself and build a flexible healthy relationship with food and your body. By providing some structure, we can actually achieve more freedom. Have you noticed this in other areas of your life? The trick is, depending on how entrenched your body image and eating struggles are, you must be truly honest with yourself about this throughout the process. I was thinking after this interview that this really is an example of how we often work with binge eating disorder in cognitive behavioral therapy too, typically focusing on providing structure, but the fact that Intuitive Eating works for some, and a model of competent eating works for others, means that we need to attend to each individual person and how the approach feels for them. Tying back to motivation theory, if it’s increasing autonomy it will likely lead to feelings of improving flexible control and positive self-care and health outcomes. If it feels controlling, like diet mentality or like rigid rules, it’s unlikely to work. We can take a set yourself up for success mindset. I specifically talk about this in my free 3 day Hunger and Satisfaction Journal, “if eating without structure freaks you out,” and give some suggestions for what to do about this. You can grab that here.

Support Independent Bookstores Near You!

Did you know that that if nothing slows their momentum, Amazon will have almost 80% of the book market by the end of 2025?

Look, I love the convenience of Amazon, but I’ve got a super cool way that you can support local bookstores and my blog and podcast simply by buying books like you already do! You can choose any bookstore on the list in the US and Canada (they plan to expand to other counties in the future) OR you can just let the donation get split between all stores. As of this recording, they have raised 15 million dollars for local bookstores. On my bookshop, you will see my absolute favorite books related to health and wellness, courage and vulnerability, and even my favorite fiction and kids books!

My recent favorite related to improving the quality of our lives was Digital Minimalism. Our family actually has decided to do an optional screen free August to re-evaluate the role of screen time in our lives.

So if you believe in supporting local businesses, please consider buying your books through Bookshop from now on!

The Psychology of Wellness Bookshop Link.

Disclaimer: This blog and podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual professional advice or treatment, including medical or mental health advice. It does not constitute a provider patient relationship.

Disclosure: Using the Bookshop.org links in this post means that I would get an affiliate fee if you purchase from the online bookshop (this supports my business, and local bookstores too!).

Credit: This blog post was co-written and edited by Sarah Grace Rapoport and Dr. Shawn Hondorp.