Episode 136 | Jun 26, 2025

Healing Food Shame Through Self-Compassion, With Lydia Knight

Why do so many women struggle with food—and why does dieting often make it worse? In this week’s episode of Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi welcomes Lydia Knight, founder of The She Center and an expert in helping women end disordered eating. Together, they explore how our relationships with food are shaped by thought patterns, not willpower, and how healing begins when we ditch the shame and break the cycle.

“The reality is that we cannot hate ourselves into loving ourselves. It’s not an effective motivator to shame ourselves into saying, ‘I despise my body so much, I’m going to make healthier choices.’ What it’s really about is leaning into loving ourselves where we’re at and focusing on health instead of weight loss. The healthiest—physically, mentally, and emotionally—results come from focusing on love. When we focus on love, it’s a much better motivator to care for ourselves than trying to shame ourselves into change, because that just doesn’t last.”

Lydia Knight

A former health coach herself, Lydia built a top-ranked practice while privately battling a severe eating disorder that began with restrictive dieting and spiraled into binge eating and bulimia. Like many others in the wellness world, she didn’t recognize the signs because the struggle was so normalized. Everything changed when she reframed her disorder as a habit she could break. That shift led to her recovery—and a new purpose: helping thousands of women rewire their relationship with food and reclaim their power.

In this conversation, Lydia and Dr. Sandi unpack why dieting is the number one cause of disordered eating, how food morality can backfire, and why the key to sustainable change lies in shifting thought patterns, not obsessing over food rules. They challenge myths about sugar addiction, orthorexia, and the pressures of diet culture—including how the messages we model for our daughters can shape their own eating behaviors for life. Lydia shares personal stories, neuroscience-backed insights, and practical advice for creating freedom with food—not just temporary fixes.

For health coaches, this episode is a reminder that the real work isn’t in controlling what clients eat, but in guiding them to understand why they eat. Lydia’s perspective reinforces the importance of client-centered coaching that honors each person’s history, mindset, and values. Whether your clients are navigating food shame, emotional eating, or restrictive patterns that look “healthy” on the surface, this conversation offers language, tools, and hope.

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Transcript

Dr. Sandi: Welcome to “Health Coach Talk.” On today’s episode, we discuss eating disorders. This is a subject that I don’t think is talked about enough, and it is often hidden. There are a lot of myths around eating disorders, and it is a big problem. So, I have a guest today who will be talking about her work with people with eating disorders. We get into topics like healthy at any size and how to inspire young women particularly to have a healthy relationship with food.

So, let me tell you about my guest. Her name is Lydia Knight. She is a paradigm shifting author, speaker, and executive coach. Her memoir “Split” chronicles her deprogramming from indoctrination, while her upcoming book “Thought Leader” explores the personal and social impact of your thought patterns. As a founder and CEO of The She Center, a top 2% woman-owned businesses globally, Lydia’s innovative work in eating disorders has been featured on CBS, NBC, and Fox News, among others. She has also conducted leadership and communication trainings for the U.S. Army, Forbes 50 Over 50, Disney, Adobe, and National Geographic.

I welcome Lydia as my guest, and I’m sure you will enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed recording it. Hi, Lydia. How are you doing?

Lydia: So great, excited for our chat today. There’s so many important things that you’re focusing on and I’m happy to contribute.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, so let’s talk about an issue that I think so many women struggle with and that is eating. I’ve had a lot of experience teaching eating psychology. We teach eating psychology in our coaching program and so many people struggle with making those decisions, what to eat, when to eat, how to eat, how much to eat, and for years we’ve been in a dieting mentality and often that can lead, before you know it, to an eating disorder. So, just to begin, can you talk about your background and how you got into this work and what you do exactly, what kind of work are you currently doing, and then we’ll talk about eating disorders.

Lydia: Yes, absolutely. So, like I’m sure so many of you listening, it just started with being healthy. I was a health coach, and I trained other health coaches, and I built this whole practice. I was a business coach for 400 other health coaches, became a top 2% health coach in the world. So, everything was taking off, and I just had this mentality of everyone can be healthy, everyone can be whatever weight they want to be because weight and health were still very connected in my mind at that point.

And what’s interesting that I didn’t know at the time was that the number one cause of disordered eating is restrictive dieting. So, the more that I went into this space of, “Oh, I want to be healthy,” the more I was actually biologically teaching my body to have an eating disorder. And I had the most horrible eating disorder. It started out as anorexia, then it went into binge eating, and then bulimia. And I went through all these phases. I was completely out of control with food. It felt like something else was taking over my body, and I couldn’t control my own actions with food.

And Sandi, for the longest time, I had no idea it was an eating disorder because it was normalized. I was in the health coach world with all these other people that were having the same struggles. And food doesn’t need to be a struggle and naturally isn’t, but it becomes a struggle.

So, just a quick story is, after years of having this eating disorder, trying everything to try to fix it, nothing was working. In fact, everything was making it worse. Then I dusted off some old principles that I didn’t know that I would use again, and I thought, “What if I treated an eating disorder like a habit that I could break?” And within one week, I was completely free from my disordered eating. I have been ever since. We went on to help a thousand women to end their disordered eating. We’ve now coached over 9,000 women since 2010 in the principles of neuroscience to break habits, whether that is our overeating, our disordered eating, imposter syndrome, or overthinking, or holding ourselves back, or perfectionism, because we can break those habits that we’re in cycles with when we understand our own brain. And that’s the work that we do now in empowering women in understanding the relationship with their own brain so they can create habits that align with their highest selves and their highest goals. So, that’s a quick overview of my story and what we do now.

Dr. Sandi: That story I know will resonate with so many of our listeners. And as I look back on the challenges that I had with eating, which started when I went away to college and just started to binge eat and, at that time, it wasn’t talked about and it really was a habit. And the habit for me was paired with writing a paper, for example. At that time, it was on a typewriter. And I remember I would sit down to write a paper or study for an exam, and I would pair that with candy bars. I would keep getting up and going to the vending machine in the dorm, and I would buy a candy bar and then finish that. And then I would an hour later buy another one, or having a bag of M&Ms associated with writing and then not realizing also that it was a sugar addiction. So, do you find that, for example, there’s been studies that sugar is more powerful, more addictive than cocaine? And so even now, one dessert, I can be looking around for anything else that’s sweet. So, have you found that’s a part of it as well?

Lydia: I’m so glad you’re bringing this up. This is really important because how we think about something is a huge determiner of the kind of results we’re able to get. So, yes, Hebb’s Law with neuroscience, it’s “what fires together wires together.” So, anything can become associated, whether it’s studying and M&Ms, or stress and overeating, or the idea that sugar is addictive. And this is such a great myth to bust, because yes, the same centers in our brain light up with cocaine as with sugar. It’s also the exact same center of our brain that lights up when we give somebody a hug or when we receive a compliment.

So, what’s interesting is those pleasure centers in our brain, we don’t say, “Oh, no, hugs are addictive. We should never give each other hugs again.” What happens is that we tend to have this association with, “Oh, no, sugar is addictive,” so we start acting like we’re powerless with sugar and that sugar is addictive. And the truth is that, when we treat our relationship with sugar as a healthy one, that we’re in power of versus enslaved like we’re addicted to something, our behavior around sugar changes so much. So, I’m so glad you brought that up, because those studies are postured in a way where it’s like, “We’re powerless against sugar. Sugar is a drug,” just as much as warm hugs or compliments. So, understanding those things is a great thing for our own empowerment.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. So, it is understanding the power that we have and companies who are working so hard to get that magical combination of sugar, salt, and fat so we will crave something. We will eat the whole bag, for example. But the idea is that you have conscious control. And that’s the big problem with labeling something even as a disorder where you think that you’re damaged. You think that it’s related back to some dark, dirty problem in early childhood, for example, or you start to think that there’s something wrong with you.

And if you start thinking that, “This is a habit,” which is exactly what I did. This was a bad habit. I was associating eating with different emotions. I was associating eating with having to do something hard, like studying, for example, or writing a paper but also pairing it with certain locations. And I’ve seen many women do this as well. I would eat in the car. I would go grocery shopping, and I would buy something that was dessert-like, and I would break into a candy bar or something. And even if it was a health… Because I went through this transition period where, “Oh, it’s okay. It’s got…” First, it was agave. Well, then I found out agave is really bad for you. So, okay, back in the day, brown rice syrup or now it’s monk fruit.

So, there was always some excuse, “Well, it’s better for you.” And what I see is sometimes the more of these health labels on some of these products can lead to overeating as opposed to eating a Snickers bar wouldn’t be good but you can grab a protein bar and think, “Oh, it’s healthy for you, so it’s okay to eat them.”

Lydia: Yeah, and that’s a great thing to bring up. And I know that somebody will resonate with that. And all those things sound very familiar to what I used to do with food as well. So, there’s a great concept here to explore, which is food morality. When we believe that a food, instead of it being like, “This serves me,” or “This is healthier,” “This is not healthy,” but, “If I eat this food that is bad for me, then I am a bad person,” or “If I eat healthy food, then I am a good person,” that food morality makes our behavior with food a lot more extreme.

So, when we have the label of, “Oh, this is a healthy thing to eat,” and we have that justification of, “Oh, well, it’s healthy,” we oftentimes will eat more of it versus if we ate something that we knew was maybe not healthy, like a Snickers bar, but we didn’t have food morality around it as in it didn’t feel like a morally bad choice, then we tend to take a couple bites of the Snickers bar and be like, “Oh, that’s really sweet,” and put it back, versus, “I’m letting myself do a bad thing, so I’m going to do it to the extreme and then make up for it by cutting out sugar.”

So, it’s a beautiful thing to explore in that. And it’s not so much that we’re breaking the habit of what we’re doing with food—although we want that to change—but what’s more effective is breaking the habit of the thought patterns that lead up to the behavior. And that’s really where we have found thousands of examples of the permanent change. It’s how we break the habit of thought versus trying to control our actions.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, that is so important. It is to break the habit. It’s all in our thought pattern. And there are so many ways to do that. So, a number of years ago, I was at a conference and really bonded with somebody who was having the same issues that I was. It happened to be with these bars. And so at these events, the companies that made these great protein bars and they were good for you. They were paleo. They were keto. They were like Bulletproof bars and some of the others. They were really good. And they were donated, so there would be big boxes of them out, and you’re sitting all day in a conference.

So, her name was Trisha. Trisha and I said, “We are going to be accountability partners. We are not going to go out there and get pulled into eating these bars.” And so what we would say like, “We were about to grab one,” and her voice would be, “Wait, I made a promise that I would not eat these.” So, the accountability and I think that goes into the success of doing this in groups, which started with, of course, the diet mentality with Weight Watchers but it was accountability. And so, do you find in your work that being in a group, sharing with others is really important for having a healthier relationship with food?

Lydia: Great question. And there’s an important distinction here—the difference between accountability and community. What we know is that having a community where you can celebrate together, where you can be authentic, where you can have coaching and guidance, that is a huge success factor. And we absolutely know that deprivation drives cravings. Scarcity drives cravings.

So, even if you do a thought experiment of, for instance, there’s a box of these bars that we really like, and they’re only available for this amount of time, and we’re not going to be able to have them after this. And once they’re gone, biologically and psychologically it actually drives up the cravings. So, what can happen and what is one of the most important things to understand about accountability is that if the accountability creates scarcity like, “I made a promise, I’m not going to do this. I’m going to let someone down,” like there’s pressure, it actually drives up the cravings when we put pressure on ourselves of, “No, I can’t have that,” which seems counterintuitive, but this is actually a huge piece of why overeating happens, because we say, “I can’t have that, I shouldn’t have that,” biologically it drives up the craving for that thing.

Then, because we have an increased craving, we eat it and then we feel a morality about it. We feel even worse, which creates a cycle. So, the most effective kind of support is support without judgment and support where it’s about freedom of, “You can have as much as you want, anytime you want. I’m here to support you no matter what you do.” That helps us to make long-term healthy choices way better than having a pressure or an accountability that feels like, “I can’t do this, and it’s a rule,” because psychologically, that works against us.

Dr. Sandi: I think that this is personalized, and so what is so important for health coaching is—and I think you’ve alluded to this—to support the person where they’re at and to see what style works for them, because some people, for example, do well with that kind of… They want that kind of accountability. And others really do well with guiding in the other direction.

So, when you are doing true client-centered coaching, you’re focusing on, “Where are they at? What do they want? What kind of support are you going to give them that’s appropriate for them?” And talking about… Because for some people, this is orthorexia. Orthorexia is where you are paralyzed. You go into a restaurant, for example, or go into a supermarket, and there’s nothing, because you see danger everywhere. And we talk about are you eating purely for nutrition where you’ve lost all joy in eating and you’re so afraid to eat versus the other, which is hedonism, where if it tastes good, it’s good for you, and I don’t care. I don’t read labels. I’m not interested in that. So, do you find that there are people who are having more of an orthorexic type of mentality and really have taken that one step too far where they’re just paralyzed with anxiety?

Lydia: Oh, absolutely. And I’ve been there. I’ll give you an example of one of our clients. This is a very common thing that happens neurologically and psychologically when we have a history of dieting where if you go on one diet, and it’s like, “Well, sugar is bad.” And then, of course, because diets are designed to teach our bodies biologically to gain weight, then once we gain the weight back plus some, we go on another diet, but that diet is, “Carbs are bad.” And then the next diet is, “Fruit is bad.” And then the next diet…

So, what happens is we create a morality around more and more foods, where we’ve got a longer list of “bad” foods for us. So, that feeling like you talked about, when you go into a grocery store and just feel paralyzed, oftentimes that is created by all the morality we have around food, where nothing feels safe. And what we know is that true health and really effortless eating where we’re eating what serves us and our health but it’s not something where we’re having to control ourselves every day or feel like there’s something wrong with us, what happens is it’s about the deprogramming. It’s the letting go of all of that morality where you can see that, “You know what? If I eat carrots that maybe are a little bit starchy, but I eat them with gratitude or I eat a piece of chocolate cake with gratitude, then I can enjoy it and move forward.”

My main eating disorder meal was a huge pile of lettuce with mustard, because it was a way I could eat without eating calories. I couldn’t look at a salad for a long time after that. But eating that, even though it was technically not a caloric thing, the anxiety with which I ate it with was worse for my body than if I would have really enjoyed a dessert with my daughter. So, those are all factors to think about and part letting go of that food morality.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, and I think part of that too is we think we’re so right. I remember back, this was in the early ’90s, and I went through that phase of being vegan and then raw vegan. I remember being so sure and having arguments with my husband when he was eating chicken and beef. I said, “This is awful. Why do you have to have an entrée? Vegetables are good, and you get enough protein.” Well, fast forward to today and now it’s like, I see the value, and I was harming myself, harming my health. But we’re so into the dogma, it becomes like a religion as we get into these isms, whether it’s carnivore or the other extreme, and we’re vegan and everything that is animal food is bad. And that could really be very harmful to focus that way.

And so it is having that diverse diet and how do you navigate because there are some times where there really are foods that are not good for you. So, I do not eat a lot of processed foods. And I can see… For example, I wear a continuous glucose monitor, and I was at an event. And they had these… They were sweetened with, I don’t know, coconut sugar or something, and I could see my CGM, I had the biggest spike imaginable as opposed to when I eat blueberries, for example, and even honey doesn’t cause a spike but something about that did. Or, for me, it’s sweet potatoes. I can see every time I have even a little bit of sweet potato, it causes a spike. So, do you help people have that relationship with food by being food detectives and really looking at the data like a CGM?

Lydia: You know, I think you bring up something so important, which is there are foods that physically will give us physical markers, right? This is a spike in glucose. We know that’s not good for us. And what we always want to focus on and what creates the longest lasting health is what is your actual behavior?

So, I’ll give you an example. So, often we’ll have clients that are coming to us that want… They come to us for freedom, right? They don’t want a temporary fix. They don’t want a crash diet. They want full food freedom for the rest of their lives. And so we talk about relationship with, for instance, sugar. And this often almost always comes up of like, “Well, sugar is bad for me.” “Okay, if sugar is bad for you, then what is the conclusion?” “Well, I shouldn’t eat sugar.” “Okay. Knowing that sugar is bad for you, feeling very strongly that it’s not going to serve you, are you eating sugar or are you not eating sugar?” And most of the time what happens is that we have this feeling of sugar is bad, so I won’t eat it. So, we don’t for a period of time and then we overeat or we binge on sugar. So, we end up eating more sugar because we have this morality of sugar is bad for me.

So, when we look at the actual behavior and we create a relationship with sugar, sweet potatoes or honey or whatever it is, that is a peaceful, autonomous, a free relationship with it, we end up actually eating less of things that are bad for us when we have that internal freedom versus going for a period of deprivation and then eating way more of it overall because we’ve drawn that line in the sand of this is a bad thing. There are lots of different ways to eat that are healthy. There are people all over the world in different cultures that eat in different ways that still have wonderful health markers. So, looking at actual behavior is where we always suggest you start with and then track back with what’s going to be most effective to make your behavior more healthy, not with necessarily the “is this good for me or bad for me” binary, but what is going to be the healthiest relationship for me with this food?

Dr. Sandi: I think it’s important to look at all the different reasons why you eat or not eat particular foods. And looking at, “Well, did you eat because you wanted to please somebody else?” You’re out to dinner, everybody orders dessert. They everybody0 a spoon, and you don’t want to be the odd person out, so you take a bite. Maybe you decided you weren’t but, “Okay, I’m going to eat these others.” Or, the opposite: you restrict yourself because you don’t want to look like a glutton or, for whatever reason, you are with a group of self-conscious people. Nobody gets dessert, and you feel deprived like you were talking about. And then you go home and break out the food at home when you eat alone. Do you eat more alone or with others? What about your family information that you got in terms of, were people on a diet? Do you feel like…? And so exactly… Do you eat out of loneliness, or are you not really aware because you’re answering emails, you’re doing other things at the same time? As we talked, watching TV, “I have to have my popcorn with movies.”

And so there’s so many things that are associated… Holidays. “It’s the 4th of July, so we have to have ice cream.” “I go to a baseball game. We have to have peanuts,” because it’s associated. So, our culture, our religion, our habits, they’re derived from so many different factors: who we’re with or not with. And so, it’s a really complicated but very important subject to explore. And what I love about coaching is that they can really get into these conversations where people start to increase their awareness of what they’re eating and why they’re eating, why they’re choosing to eat certain foods and why they’re not.

Lydia: Yes. And one thing that is great to remember in this principle you bring up, right, is it’s very interesting, this information, and we can understand ourselves better through understanding the reasons that we’re eating. And then when we look at the actual behavior of what makes a change, what we’ve found is that information is not transformation. So, I know for me, I would have spreadsheets and apps where I was tracking, “Well, this emotion was coming up,” or, “This social thing was coming up.” And it can feel really complex. And one thing that is very hopeful is there’s lots of different meaning that we can put on the reasons that we’re eating. But what actually drives the behavior is the thought pattern, which can be lots of different things. But the thought pattern that leads to the behavior. And it’s such a breath of fresh air. If I understand that this is a habit of thought I can break, then I don’t have to go to 25 years of therapy and figure out why. The transformation is in actually changing the habit and the cycle. So, it’s beautiful to get to know ourselves and then look at what makes the biggest difference in our behavior. And I think, like you said, it’s a beautiful way to support people as a coach is to celebrate their results, and that change, and that transformation. And sometimes the information is helpful, and sometimes it overcomplicates things. So, that’s another great thing to have the guidance of a coach as well, to know the difference.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, and to really look at, how do you feel when you eat a certain food? And what were you telling yourself about a certain food? And having that sense of… Starting with your, “What are you wanting to live for?” And then going back to, “Okay, what can I eat for my future self? You know, what I’m eating now, can I do that for my future self?” So, just before this recording, I had lunch, and my focus is on protein. And so I had scrambled eggs. And so what I manage is the grams of protein and really have that as what’s centermost of my attention. And the idea of having ultra-processed food is not even a thought. And looking at that is Frankenfood. I was at a store with some people. We were… I forget the name. The name of the store has “sugar” in it. It’s a store where it’s all candy. And I thought back to, wow, when I was in my 20s or late teens, I would have been obsessed with eating and then felt guilty afterwards for eating so much of it. And now it was nothing because I didn’t see it as food. I just looked at all the fake colorings, and it was just like, “Oh, this isn’t…” It didn’t look like food to me. It was just something else. As Mark Hyman says, “Frankenfoods.” It’s just not real. And so I think it is possible to get to that point, where your really craving… I crave steaks now as opposed to what I craved in my 20s. So, change is possible.

Lydia: Oh, absolutely. And it’s such a beautiful and rewarding journey as we increase our love for ourselves. And like you said, that connection to our future selves, our standards increase. When we love ourselves more, we have higher standards. And I was telling my partner last night, I’m like, “Man, I wish I could enjoy Denny’s again.” Denny’s was like a… Oh, I thought it was so special when I was little. And then you go in there and I’m like, “Oh, everything just tastes so processed and not enjoyable.” But as our palate changes, when our standards increase, it’s a beautiful place especially from a place of self-love to know it’s not about a rule. It’s about, “This is what feels good in my body. If I’m going to have something sweet or fun, this is what I actually want my experience to be.” And having that self-love and our standards both be rising is such a wonderful way to live.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. I can savor a little bit of manuka honey or a tiny square of dark chocolate and really enjoy that. And when I do see beautiful desserts, I look at them as works of art. We were out to dinner, and it was a birthday celebration, and they brought these… They were so beautiful. And often, I’ll take pictures of it. There’s a European bakery close to where I live, and I’ll say, “This is beautiful.” And I just see the art of these desserts, as opposed to, in the past, when I would take a bite and then crave it and end up eating way too much. It was not good for me. But speaking of the future, how can we help raise, particularly, our daughters to be resilient and not fall into that dieting mentality, the traps of needing to be too thin or ultimately developing eating disorders?

Lydia: Absolutely. So, here’s a great myth to bust is we, as women, often think that if our daughters see us eat in a healthy way or if we’re overeating or bingeing, if our daughters don’t see that, then they won’t do it. And so we tend to hide that from them, like, “Oh, I never want my kids to catch me bingeing.” And I know that for our clients that have been caught bingeing by their daughters, how much shame and what a hard experience that is.

Here’s the reality is a much bigger factor of our daughters developing eating disorders is not do they see us binge but do they see us restrict. The number one causd… We’ve seen this. The National Institutes of Health have done studies on this and found the same conclusions that the number one cause of an eating disorder is restrictive dieting. So, it’s actually when our daughters see us hate our bodies, when our daughters see us change into five different outfits before we go out because we’re feeling self-conscious, when our daughters see us, “Well, I’m not eating sugar this week. Well, I’m not eating fat this next week. Oh, I’m not eating processed foods this next week.” When they see us hop around to different moralities of eating, that is actually the number one driver of our daughters developing eating disorders. So, when we focus on ourselves and create peace and freedom in our own relationship with food, that is the biggest gift we can give to raising healthy daughters is to being moms who don’t diet.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, the dieting mentality has been really destructive. But there’s another side to that, and that is the healthy at any size, which can lead to devastating consequences of being metabolically unhealthy. So, how does somebody navigate that?

Lydia: Yes. So, I would suggest that everyone read the book “Health at Every Size.” It’s a really important study of how the diet industry, a $70-billion industry, and part of that is it’s equated weight with health. And the truth is that you can be healthy. You can physically be healthy at any size. And we tend to think that, “Oh, well, if somebody is overweight, or if we’re overweight according to the BMI chart…” which we could go off on that story of how that’s a made-up thing and totally lobbied by the diet industry, but with that, when we come into a place of, “I can create health no matter what my body looks like,” and when we focus on health instead of focusing on weight loss, it leads to our bodies being in the healthiest place.

I understand there’s been a lot of misconception around the body positive movement. Some people misunderstand it as, “Oh, well, that’s just not caring about your health,” or “just eating things that are unhealthy and not caring about it.” The reality is that we cannot hate ourselves into loving ourselves. And it’s not an effective motivator to shame ourselves into saying, “I despise my body so much, I’m going to make healthier choices.” What it really is about is leaning into loving ourselves where we’re at right now and focusing on health instead of weight loss. And the healthiest, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, results come from focusing on love. So, it’s an important thing not to misunderstand, because when we focus on love, that is a much better motivator to care for ourselves than trying to shame ourselves into making healthier choices because that just doesn’t last.

Dr. Sandi: No, absolutely. So, it is focusing on love and not going to any of the extremes. So, having a sense of, “I’m metabolically healthy,” and you said the keyword, it is healthy. And looking at how I’m nurturing myself to be healthy. And that’s the beauty of working with a health coach who has had that training—as a board-certified health coach—to understand that this is personalized. And what is the right path for one person might not be for somebody else.

So, when you are working with a coach, it’s about looking at what is going to work for you. And the focus is on health and metabolic health, as we have at least 7% of people in the United States are metabolically healthy. So, it’s looking at cleaning up our food system, access to healthy food, and then, how do you make those choices that are right for you? But in terms of the diet industry, we have gone in the wrong direction. And of course, we’re still going down that direction, as so many people are seeing GLP-1 agonists as the quick fix. But it has been a delight to talk to you, Lydia. How can people find you?

Lydia: Yes, so we have some great resources and we’re excited to share. If people go to theshecenter.org/podcast, what we have there is we have a free masterclass about food freedom that has the reality of what works for results of getting out of the diet cycle. Yes, but creating permanent food freedom, especially if you’re stuck in a cycle and you’re just like, you’re done. So, again, you can go to theshecenter.org/podcast, and we have our food freedom masterclass with some incredibly powerful principles for ending the cycle of overeating and really going to that permanent place of freedom and health. And you can have both.

Dr. Sandi: Sounds great. Well, thank you so much. It’s been a delight to talk with you.