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Guest: Lisa Salisbury

Release Date: 5/1/2023

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Steve Washuta: Have you ever wondered where the term clean your plate came from? Are people simply eating their whole meal? Not because they’re hungry, but because they paid for it? What are the best practices when discussing healthy food habits with children? We discuss all this and much more in the upcoming episode.

Steve Washuta: Welcome to Trulyfit. Welcome to the Trulyfit podcast where we interview experts in fitness and health to expand our wisdom and welcome I’m your host Steve Washuta, co-founder of Trulyfit and author of Fitness Business 101. On today’s episode, I have on Lisa Salisbury. We are discussing clean your plate and everything that goes along with it.

Where did that term come from initially? isn’t it a bad thing to think about portion size related to your plate size? How do we sort of disassociate the amount of money we spent on a meal with how hungry we are? Should we just be eating that meal because we simply paid for it?

We talk about how our parents and our grandparents would have from an evolutionary perspective. Or maybe even an epigenetic perspective have put in these mechanisms into our mind about how we see food and how we go about our day-to-day processes concerning food and eating was a fantastic conversation.

You can find everything about Lisa at well underscore with underscore Lisa on Instagram. With no further ado, here’s Lisa. Hi, Lisa, thank you so much for joining the Trulyfit podcast. Why don’t you give my audience and listeners a little background on who you are. What it is that you do in the health and fitness world.

Lisa Salisbury: Okay, great. Thanks for having me really appreciate the opportunity to be on your podcast. So I am Lisa Salisbury. I run the eat well think well live well podcast and I’m a health coach and a weight loss coach life coach.

Lisa Salisbury:  So primarily, I actually usually introduced myself as a life coach for health and weight loss because I primarily work with a lot of the emotional side of eating, which I specifically didn’t say emotional eating because people have kind of a negative connotation with that, like, oh, I don’t really cry facedown in a in a you know container of ice cream.

Lisa Salisbury: But we there is the emotional side of eating that keeps us eating or keeps us from eating specific things that is really critical. So I consider myself also a recovered chronic Dieter. Most of my clients come from a dieting background, which statistically isn’t that hard to find, because by the time women reach my age, I’m in my late 40s, and we’ve done 40 to 60 diets.

Lisa Salisbury: So these statistics are really staggering how many times a woman has attempted to lose weight. And that’s not necessarily different diets. But like, that’s how many times we’ve started again on Monday kind of attitude. So you might have done, you know, like, for me the South Beach Diet several times.

Lisa Salisbury: So when I finally kind of got off the roller coaster of being on a specific diet with a diet plan and a book in it, and someone else telling me what to do, and started to really just kind of gather all of that information and realize what really worked well for my body and getting in tune with that.

Lisa Salisbury: That’s where I sort of settled down into kind of what I call eating like a normal person, like normal people just eat and they don’t make like a big dramatic deal. We don’t make excuses for being hungry. And we don’t, we’re not dramatic about being hungry either. Just eat when we need to. So that’s the aim for my clients.

Steve Washuta: The emotional term is interesting. I was just thinking about this as you said it. and there’s something about the term emotional. Or emotions that make some people feel and maybe even myself as if they’re not controlling them. When you use the term psychological or mental. It’s like, oh, we can work on this, like a maybe subconscious thing.

But something about emotions brings out like oh, like you’re weak. Like you’re letting this take you over as opposed to the term psychological or mental. Which is really all the same thing unless you disagree, where it really is a lot of these things probably are just subconscious. And it’s not like you’re making the decision to do this. We just have to kind of bring this up front and consciousness, you have to tune into your body so that you can make the better decisions.

Lisa Salisbury: Sure, yeah. The way I define emotions is. Just those are just chemicals that are going through your body because of a thought that you have had. So you have a thought, like, I’m really bored. And then the emotion of boredom actually floods through your body or you’re about to give, you know. Come on a podcast with a new person and my brain is like, Ooh, I’m really nervous.

Lisa Salisbury: And then I feel butterflies in my stomach, right? That emotion of anxiety nerve-like floods through my body. I can feel it in different parts of my body. That’s what emotion is the psychological component is really what I separate into thoughts. So I do actually a lot of work between separating thoughts and emotions because some of our thoughts are happening.

Lisa Salisbury: Most of them, to be honest, are just happening through our habit brain subconsciously and out of the loop, but we can make some decisions about what we’re thinking to feel certain ways.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, I think it’s a great way to describe it. Especially when you’re talking more of a science-based approach. It’s not so abstract. They can really understand that, you know. Everyone’s dealing with this, you have some sort of thought processes or emotions that come up.

We’re going to work through this together to get to a better place. We’ll talk about that more down the road. But what I want to focus on here is you talk about something, and it’s a term that’s been used. Probably for I don’t know. maybe you know that how long 50 to 100 years, clean the plate, all of our parents have said it, at some point, it’s, it’s been around for so long,

Lisa, that at some point, they said, you know, you must clean your plate. Because there are kids in China who are starving, and then you know, now China’s GDP is shot up, you know, 9%, every year for 30 years. So now they say you must clean your plate, because there are kids in Africa starving, right?

That’s how long this term has been around. They’ve been changing the analogies used around it. What exactly does it mean to you? And why do you maybe not like this term?

Lisa Salisbury: Yeah. So before I tell you what it means to me. I’m going to just echo on how long it’s been around. The clean plate club was actually started as a government program during World War One. So you can find like war posters that they put up in elementary schools. And just teaching the kids that they needed to clean their plate. Because there were rations.

Lisa Salisbury: And so the idea was, you take as much as you are needing, but you you finish to demonstrate that you didn’t take more than what you needed. And in that way, we maintain the ability to send food. They send to the troops and to the European countries that needed it. It was resurfaced again after World War Two, which means in the early 40s. So for again, I’m 47.

Lisa Salisbury: So that would be my grandparents, as well as my parents. Both were in the era where they were in the clean plate club in their elementary school, like literally. Like, we call it a club, but it was like, No, literally, they established these across the country. So it’s no wonder when they said. Hey, clean your plate. They’re starving kids and in Europe. that’s what they told them in the 40s.

Lisa Salisbury:  That’s what was happening. So then in the 80s, when I was a child, there were starving kids in Africa. Of course, they said that. So yeah, from a historical perspective, like. It’s not just a collective term that we use, just randomly, it was literally a government program. And what it means to me and what how it affects my clients is now. There’s just all these thoughts that it’s like, well, I should clean my plate, I’m supposed to, I’ve been told.

Lisa Salisbury: So it’s a lot of history in your own life, kind of primary programmers from your childhood. But then we also have these concepts of value and money. And will I need to get my money’s worth out of this. Or if I, if I throw this food away, it’s a waste. And so we have a lot of these types of thoughts that also are. They are part of the I need to clean my plate type things.

Lisa Salisbury: And then the other aspect is just habit, we just do because we always have. And that’s not, that’s not to be taken lightly. Because our brain loves to be efficient. Which means anything it can delegate down to that lower habit brain it will. And eating. A lot of times is down there in that habit brain. And so you clean your plate also, because you always have

Steve Washuta: you have to think about all those cultural things have been passed down, right? So you had maybe grandparents who were in the Great Depression, who passed down those things to your parents.

And it was all about. hey, you know, this, this food costs, someone’s not eating and make sure you clean your plate, maybe, you know. There was a time that my mother was one of nine, where people just had more kids, right? It was more normal to have a larger family.

So you’re competing with other people in your family, and maybe for every bite of food. These things have changed as far as maybe the cultural time timeframe and the finances. And things and things we’re dealing with. But that doesn’t mean that what’s ingrained into your brain from your parents. Their parents before them has changed, right.

So how do you why do you work with clients? Let’s start with throwing out the food for clients to say. Hey, listen, I just I don’t want to throw away food from a financial standpoint. There’s just something ingrained in me this has finished this. It costs money. How do you work with clients who asked that question?

Lisa Salisbury: So there’s a couple ways that this comes up. Number one, it’s two at home. And number two, it’s at restaurants. So when you’re thinking about being at a restaurant, and you say. Well, I paid for this and so I don’t want to throw it out. You have to really consider what you’re paying for. Part of what I pay for when I go to a restaurant is not doing the dishes.

Lisa Salisbury: Part of what I pay for When I go to a restaurant is like not having to hunt and gather all those all the groceries and do the cooking, right, like, there’s a lot more value than just the how much it fills you up. Right. So we got to think of the value of what we’re getting, when we go to a restaurant, it’s far, far more than what the food costs. In fact, I think restaurants, if you watch those, like reality shows about restaurants like food cost is actually pretty minimal for restaurants, like there’s just so much else you’re paying for.

Lisa Salisbury:  So just thinking about the value that we’re getting, and just, you know, maybe it’s just a night out with your partner. So that also has value regardless of how much you eat. When you’re at home, it’s a little different, because you have gone and purchased those groceries and gone to the effort to make the food. So there’s some of that that you are considering as well, it’s not just the dollar amount that you paid for the food.

Lisa Salisbury: So we want to really, if you, if you really want to get serious about thinking about the cost of your food, there are cost calculators that you can actually cost out your dinners. It’s actually crazy how much you save by cooking at home, you’re not actually throwing away when you’re talking about three or four bites on your plate. It’s pennies, when you cost it out, like it is so insignificant.

Lisa Salisbury: So sometimes just gaining the knowledge of what it actually is, helps you to be like this is totally fine. And other times, you can just bring this to your awareness, I think for a lot of my clients, they just don’t have the permission to be like, actually, I can stop. When I’m satisfied, I don’t have to actually clean my plate. Because there’s no one here telling me that it’s a waste, it’s only my brain.

Lisa Salisbury: And when they get the permission, when I say like, Okay, well, we could waste that food in the trash. And we can waste the 25 cents that food costs. Or we can waste the time, effort, and mental energy to get it off your body. If you eat food that your body does not need for the day, you will store it. So you can throw it in the trash.

Lisa Salisbury: Or you can store that extra food on your body because we’re not talking about food that we need. Right, we’re talking about extra excess food. So that becomes a waste of time and energy on your body. So either way, you’re going to waste it.

Steve Washuta: That’s good information. And just to add to your restaurant piece, that’s maybe slightly deviating a bit, but some people just don’t want to go out to eat. And they’ll say things like, well, you know, it’s too expensive and things like this.

But you know, we’re also paying for kind of like a worldly cultured experience, you’re getting to try foods you’ve maybe never tried before, you’re getting to learn about different foods, you’re getting to see different things there.

There is an important part about going out to eat even me as a personal trainer. It was a large discussion I would have with clients about the best restaurants in town, let’s say right? Food is a big conversation piece amongst people.

And if you’re the person who’s only eating at home, cooking your own food, right? All I’m eating is lean chicken and broccoli every day and you’re so food obsessed on the other end of the spectrum, you’re going to lose a lot and that sort of cultural, worldly values and connecting with people as well.

Lisa Salisbury: Yeah, yeah. And that’s a lot of what we pay for when we go out as well is like, I don’t make Indian food at home. Because I don’t know how. So I pay for someone else to know how, you know, I go to this really amazing Indian places because they know how.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, yeah, to show and sometimes those ingredients are actually more expensive. You know, you’re looking at all like, the fine ingredients. And like a Thai meal. It’s like, well, by the time I buy all these ingredients, I don’t make Thai on a regular basis, they’re just going to sit in my cabinet, and it’s probably going to cost me more than to just get it made by somebody who knows what they’re doing.

But you know, going back to the clean your plate mentality, let’s say would you say this is something that a lot of people struggle with the average population, I think I’m so far removed from that, because I’ve always had this, you know, I’ve I’ve always been someone to workout once or twice a day just because I enjoy it.

I’m a personal trainer. I’m always moving around. I don’t necessarily think about what I’m eating. But is this something that the average family is dealing with on a day-to-day basis?

Lisa Salisbury: Yeah, I would say yes, obviously, I haven’t done I mean, this is just like based on my client experience. Sure. I would say yes, because and a couple of reasons for that. I see it on social media. I see people trying to get especially like moms to stop doing this to their kids. Right, like you’re creating unhealthy habits here.

Lisa Salisbury: So I see that as well as just the clients that come to me. I do a unit on wasting food and just tossing You’re clean, I’m always like, I revoke your clean plate club membership. Like, it’s not even a cool club, you don’t get your picture in the yearbook. It’s dumb. You know, like, we talk about that. And for most of them, it’s a struggle.

Lisa Salisbury: And it’s, every once in a while, I’ll have a client that’s like, Oh, it’s fine. I can, I can throw away food. And so we just like, skip that unit with them. That’s fine. But for most, and, and I primarily work with women. For most women, it’s been an issue in the past. And a lot of times too. And this isn’t something I mentioned, as far as the clean plate. mentality is, a lot of it is I want to finish because it tastes cut.

Lisa Salisbury: And so there’s that aspect as well, as is like, well, I’m going to ignore the fact that I’m full because I want to eat more and finish what’s here, because it’s available, and it tastes good. And so we have this misconception that more of this food is going to increase the experience and the enjoyment of it. Which is actually the opposite is true.

Lisa Salisbury: Because once we’ve reached comfortable fullness, the experience of eating more, it’s actually going to decrease the enjoyment is actually going to reduce, the more and more uncomfortable your body gets. The experience of eating that food actually doesn’t get better.

Lisa Salisbury: Does that make sense? Because we think like, well, more of it, it’s like it’s so delicious. I want to keep enjoying it. Yes, it’s enjoyable in the mouth, it’s enjoyable in the brain, but your full body experience of it actually decreases the more powerful and uncomfortable that you get.

Steve Washuta: You know, as a personal trainer, I have ways to let’s say trick my clients, I can get them to work muscles and body parts, not even know that they’re doing it. But ultimately, that’s not always a good thing.

Because I want them to what we call to engage the muscle and understand that they’re activating it and using it, I want to be honest with them about what they’re doing. So I imagine there are sort of tricks, right?

As someone who’s a nutritionist or a dietitian, like maybe, maybe this is one of them making a smaller plate, right, instead of having large plates. If all of my plates are small, then even if I want to, let’s say eat everything off my plate, then maybe that solves part of the problem.

But maybe it doesn’t, right. Maybe that also leads to bad psychological habits, because you’re not understanding the problem. How do you are there tricks to the trade? Do you think it’s just best to explain things to your client rather than try to trick them?

Lisa Salisbury: I think there, you definitely can use tools. I tried to use the word tools, not tricks. I know what you mean, though, I’ve like the other day I woke up and I was like, why am I sore? Right here? What exercise did I do that like made me sore in that spot.

Lisa Salisbury: So I know you mean that sometimes we’re working things we don’t realize but for, for eating. Honestly, the first thing is just really to become aware of this like, just to tell people listen, you do not actually have to eat everything on your plate, like your mom is not going to come and punish you. If you still want dessert like you totally can, it’s up to you like all of this, like part of it is just bringing it to the awareness.

Lisa Salisbury: And then secondly, I just honestly think practice is the biggest thing. And it’s kind of like with exercise where you’re like, Okay, I want you to engage this, this muscle like it takes practice to really focus and concentrate on that.

Lisa Salisbury: We just, I just have my clients practice, the first week we’re doing this, leave two bytes behind it every meal, get used to seeing a little bit of food on your plate, it’s not a lot, it’s not going to be it’s not going to activate that like major I’m wasting area of their brain when it’s just two bytes.

Lisa Salisbury: And it’s probably not going to make a huge difference in their hunger as well. So it’s just a practice of it’s okay to see food on the plate and throw that down the trash, throw that in the sink, like it’s nothing bad happened.

Lisa Salisbury: And so it sort of alleviates some of the anxiety that the brain has about I need to finish that. And it starts to break the habit. So that’s really the first trick or tool that I have my clients use is just, I just want you to leave two bytes behind.

Lisa Salisbury: And it’s it’s a great exercise honestly, for any of us to do because even though I said it doesn’t affect your hunger dramatically, it can add up to quite a bit of food over the course of a week, if you’re leaving two bites behind it every meal, and you can really start to decide, like maybe I’m dishing up a little too much.

Lisa Salisbury: And so then the next week, the idea is to dish up two bites less and see how you do see if you can live to two bites again. Sort of it’s kind of in conjunction with how much you know the total volume that we’re eating as well.

Lisa Salisbury: But I do love that idea of just just giving it some practice to leave some food behind. If you’re at a restaurant. It depends on where you’re at. Right? If you’re at Olive Garden, you probably gonna want to cut that meal in half. Right if you’re like, at a super nice French restaurant, you probably aren’t going to be leaving two bytes behind.

Lisa Salisbury: It’s because the portions are going to be, you know, Tiny. So it just depends on the portions that you’re being served at a restaurant if two bites is appropriate, or, you know, cutting it in half or in thirds.

Steve Washuta: You mentioned at the beginning of that, thought it was funny that your mom’s not going to come out and yell at you if you’re not cleaning your plate, which instantly made me think of also the sort of the reverse. I’m not sure if you work with, let’s say, parents, and children of any sort.

But, you know, what could I be doing as a new father maybe moving forward so that my kid doesn’t have these bad habits or bad nutritional let’s say, your mental landscape sort of built in to their day-to-day processes of foods? Are there things you recommend for parents or, you know, to talk to their kids and how they present food to their children?

Lisa Salisbury: Yeah, I am totally interested in in this. And I actually have a guest scheduled for my podcast to talk about this, because I’m not an expert in childhood nutrition. For the most part, though, what I’ve established at my home, and to be fair, my kids are older. So I don’t have the little ones anymore. I have teenagers and actually two that are out of the house.

Lisa Salisbury: So they get to do what they want. But the teenagers that are home, we no longer have the clean plate rule and haven’t for several years, the idea that if you want dessert, you have to finish your dinner. Be in the reason for that. I think that’s just the first rule to throw out because it, it emphasizes that dessert is a reward. Yeah, somehow we are rewarding the idea of overeating at dinner in order to get this sweet thing.

Lisa Salisbury: So I’ve seen several theories about serving dessert with dinner, like right on the plate at the same time. Yeah, and I don’t, I don’t I haven’t done enough research on that. But I think it’s fascinating. I think it’s like, just to say this is all food. And we’re in practicing eating all of it together. You can eat it in whatever order you want.

Lisa Salisbury: But it eliminates the good bad food mentality, which I think is really, really helpful. I had my one of my teenagers the other day and she’s you know, she’s 17 she’s plenty capable of deciding how much she needs to eat. She, we I had made a dessert. So every night I don’t make a dessert. But I had made like a little this little mango tart.

Lisa Salisbury: And so she knew that that was going to be happening after dinner, and we were clearing dinner before we had dessert. And she had quite a bit of food on her plate. And she was like, I got too much. And I was like, okay, and she’s like, is it okay, like she was super worried about it? And I was like, yeah, it’s totally fine, because she was like, I want to eat a slice of the mango tart.

Lisa Salisbury: And so she made that decision to stop eating. It was like rice and beans, you know, like to stop eating that cajun rice and beans in order to leave space in her body for that mango tart. And I was like, Absolutely, like I am finally breaking through to them.

Steve Washuta: This is gonna seem extremely hypocritical, because we’re sitting here having a conversation, all about food. But I think not talking about food so much is really sometimes the way to go with the kids. Right? So it’s not Yeah, do I present the dessert with the food?

Do I put this in a certain order? How much do I put it? It’s just like, maybe just not have so much conversation surrounding it. Like don’t point it out. Even like when you’re an adult, and you’re with your parents, right? Let’s say you’re in your 30s. Right, we had this with our in-laws. Well, they’ll just sort of point out like, Hey, you didn’t eat all your food. It’s like, okay, well, like I know that.

And also, I’m, you know, I’m 37 years old, and I ate an hour before I came here. You just didn’t know that. So I think you know, the references to what other people are doing with their food all the time at the dinner table eat, including your teenagers,

not yours specifically I’m just saying teenagers in general, seem to be part of the problem too, right? Just it’s so ingrained in us to look at other people’s plates, and then make some sort of judgment and then say it out loud when it’s best to just maybe not be started on at all.

Lisa Salisbury: Totally and, and I think along those lines, too, is I notice people and it’s a factor with my parents as my mom as well, is I didn’t eat very much breakfast. So I’m going to have a whole sandwich for lunch, right? Like this excuse about why I’m eating what I’m eating like, it just can eat. It’s fine. You don’t have to. You don’t have to tell us.

Steve Washuta  

Yeah, and if you’re telling that to yourself, that’s fine. You don’t have to like say it out loud to say like, oh, you know, I had a really hard workout yesterday. So I’m going to like eat this speech. That’s like Not everything has to be you like earned it and like everything’s worth a point.

Steve Washuta: And you’re like crossing off these lists. It’s like you can just live life on a normal basis. But that said, I don’t think Yeah, we’re all a little bit different. I’m sure you can speak to this. There are maybe some clients and some people who do work better. Slightly regimented, doesn’t have to be a strict regimen.

And you can argue otherwise and say no, but like, for instance, I’ve talked about this before. I have all my dinners written down for seven days on a big whiteboard in my kitchen. Now, I don’t eat them all. Exactly an order the portion sizes and on their right. I don’t like how I’m cooking them. But it might be like, Okay, I’m having brought worst and a vegetable and rice on Monday.

And on Tuesday, I’m having, you know, some sort of a chicken case idea. And if I want to make Tuesday’s dinner on Monday, Monday, and on Tuesday, that’s fine. It depends on a lot of different things going on in my life. How much time do I have to cook that week? What did my wife eat for lunch? Was it the same was she also Mexican for lunch, I can’t make Mexican on later on for for dinner.

All of these things vary. But I have a general idea of what I’m going to eat not just from a health perspective, but also, it just makes sure that I’m not running around like a chicken with my head cut off last second trying to search for something to make for dinner.

Lisa Salisbury: Yeah, and planning. Yeah, and you’re,

Steve Washuta: You’re, you’re fine with clients doing things like that, you don’t think that’s a bad thing for them to have a generalized outline?

Lisa Salisbury: Oh, no, for sure, we, um, we do a lot of planning. Because if you’re not doing that, you gotta go to the grocery store every single day, or, you know, be eating frozen food or, right, like, if we’re not planning what we’re having. It’s you go into the kitchen, and you’re like, I can’t make great decisions at this point, because you’re just kind of in desperation mode. So I do have my clients.

Lisa Salisbury: So we create a 24 hour plan every day. So each morning, they just write down what they’re going to have for the day and you just make your food decisions once during in the morning. And then you don’t have to think so much about food along those lines of not having to talk about it so much. You just decide I’m gonna have oatmeal for breakfast, you have leftovers, last night’s case idea for lunch, and making beans and rice for dinner.

Lisa Salisbury: For most of my clients, we plan dinners week at a time because they go to the store. And they plan those, I have a couple clients that like to even do some meal prep as far as like cooking a few meals on the weekends because of their schedules, you can’t possibly you can’t possibly know if you are going to need to cook ahead. If you don’t like look at your calendar, just make some decisions ahead of time, like anytime you can make food decisions ahead of time you’re using your higher brain.

Lisa Salisbury: Because when we make decisions in the moment, we’re almost always using our lower brain, which is it’s that habit part. It’s that part that wants that instant hit of dopamine. And it’s not that we can’t make excellent decisions in the moment, it’s just that we’re very much more likely to make decisions based on our future goals, when we do it ahead, because you cannot use your lower brain to make plans.

Lisa Salisbury:  It’s not its function, you have to use your higher human brain to make plans. So every time we can use our higher brain to make food decisions, it’s they’re going to almost always be better. Like you just don’t plan chocolate cake for breakfast. Right?

Steve Washuta: You just don’t know. Yeah, to share. Yeah, on some of that becomes from like, as a personal trainer in our industry typically will work like 50 to 55 minutes sessions with a client. So if you’re good at what you do, you might have eight appointments back to back to back, right, you might go in in the morning, and not necessarily even book a break, which is a bad thing to do.

I always tell people to book a half-hour break somewhere in between so that they’re not hungry but you know, if you don’t have food on hand, it’s going to be bad, right? If you do get that half-hour break, you’re gonna go to the first place which is typically like fast food, or, or something package vending machine.

Yeah. And yeah, and you’re going to stuff your face as fast as you can, right? That’s even the people I’m sure you work with nine to fivers, who, for some reason, maybe eat lunch at like 1130. And they don’t get done with work until six and haven’t eaten between point A and point B and the second they get home while their dinners in the oven.

They’ve already housed a whole bag of Pringles box of Pringles or whatever, right? So it’s like, okay, well, you could have made a better decision by just having some sort of like nuts on hand that you could evade at three o’clock to hold you over. So you were satiated until dinner, right? There are just those small things that help involve planning and on a day-to-day basis.

And that’s why you hire a professional because you, you need someone I use this term a lot to audit your health habits, both from a personal training standpoint, from a fitness standpoint, and, and from a dieting standpoint, even if you think you’re doing things perfectly, and maybe you are, there’s always a little trick or tidbit here and there that a professional can give you to say, Hey, listen, everything looks great.

But here’s one quick recommendation I would make. I would sub A out sometimes with B or C because you’re missing these micronutrients. And I think people don’t do that enough. They don’t hire someone to even if they’re they know what they’re doing to sort of audit their current program.

Lisa Salisbury: Yeah, totally. There’s so much Should you be sad for professionals and I think he just covered this actually on your podcast recently about hiring someone that is a professional in that area. And one of the things I audit especially is people’s thoughts. This is where you just don’t even realize I had a potential client on a free session the other day, and we were pretty much done.

Lisa Salisbury: And I just said, I’m just going to leave you with one, one last thing. And then I read back to her because I was taking notes. I read back to her, some of the things she said out loud about herself. And I said, Would you ever say those things out loud to another woman? And of course, she laughed out of embarrassment. She’s like, of course not. And I just, it, we don’t realize sometimes what we’re thinking.

Lisa Salisbury: Because we think it’s fact, we think that what we’re saying is, is fact and it’s having a professional, and in my case, a professional life coach, pointing out your thoughts? Like what you just said, right? There is, I’m really crappy at this. And you would like, do you really believe that, and just being aware of your thoughts is really actually hard to do.

Lisa Salisbury: And so just from an audit perspective, that’s another great thing to audit is actually just the way you’re thinking the way you’re thinking about food, the way you’re thinking and talking about yourself. It’s all really important.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, in this day and age, with social media, and the algorithms targeting you and people being such, you know, pigeonholed into these small boxes, seeing the same things over and over, they’re even more likely to slip down that road of thinking, you know, you maybe you used to, let’s say in the 60s or 70s, you’re comparing yourself.

If you live in a small town in Wisconsin, you got 7000 people, to everyone in your town, but now it’s like, okay, if you’re whatever a fitness professional, nutrition, professional, whoever you are, and you’re following these things, let’s say on social media, you’re seeing millions of people who potentially are doing the same thing, or in the same demographic as you are.

And that’s your comp now, right? Not the other 42 kids who are your age in your two-by-two-mile square town, but now it’s the millions of people who do this, which will lead you down a bad place quickly. And I think it’s good to talk out loud to the professionals and say those things sometimes like your client did, so you could have someone kind of walk you back off that ledge and say,

This is what you think that people are presenting this is the norm. Really, you’re doing great, right? We just need to make one or two changes here. And you’ll be back. You’ll be back on track. Yeah, yeah, totally. Speaking about I want to go down this rabbit hole one last time about the parents because it now my mind is going, you know, the clean the plate mentality or just pointing out, you know, you haven’t eaten these sorts of things.

What else? What other things to potentially parents have done over the years or, and I’m not trying to just yell at parents on the parent, that could potentially be bad that you have noticed? Is it like, don’t don’t go for seconds quite yet. Or, you know, pointing out the types of food are there? Is there anything else that comes to mind that you’ve dealt with, with clients who say like, Hey, I’m dealing with a stigma from that’s happened throughout my childhood?

Lisa Salisbury:  I think probably the biggest thing is mom was chronically dieting. That’s probably one of the most common things my clients deal with is, well, you know, Mom was always on a diet. I have a client that’s like, I grew up thinking my mom was fat. She was like, looking back at pictures. She absolutely was not over, you know, not really overweight. But my childhood brain used that word.

Lisa Salisbury: My mom was as fat because she used that word. And so the way that we’re speaking about our bodies, the way that we speak about food, the way that we speak about just the way that we look is it’s important. I one of the reasons that I got off like the major counting and calculate calculating my food is because I realized I was bringing my kitchen scale to the dinner table in front of my children and weighing my portions.

Lisa Salisbury: And what I told them was, I’m making sure I get enough protein, because I’m lifting weights. And I’m pretty sure they knew I was lying. Because what I was doing was trying to limit what I was eating because I was trying to lose weight and I was not happy with my body and it really sent a message and so I think that just the positive speaking about about bodies in general, and not pointing out bodies that are different in a negative way. I again like I don’t want to throw my parents under the bus.

Lisa Salisbury: I had great parents like seriously, I did like if I mean probably none of your listeners really No, we’re gonna look me up. But my dad’s passed. But you know, when my dad would describe a person, you know, I was talking to a woman in the grocery store today, right. But the story would always start with while I was I was behind this heavyset woman in the grocery store today. I was right.

Lisa Salisbury: Like, I was speaking to this gentleman who was incredibly thin. Like, for some reason, their body type was always described. And when you do that, it means to the child, that body type is important. And so, and obviously, it’s going to become very clear which body type the parent prefers. So I would say, just speaking about people without describing their body type is, is huge. And then when it comes to food, I like to just talk about the,, what we get from each type of food.

Lisa Salisbury: For example, by my younger daughter, she’s 15, she wants to start lifting weights, she, she’s a volleyball player, and she’s like, I just really need to get stronger. And I’m like, Absolutely. If you’re going to start lifting weights, we really need to make sure you’re getting enough protein. Because in order to put muscle on, we have to have the fuel there and just talking to her about eating more. But why, and, and what and what that is going to do for her body.

Lisa Salisbury: And we can do that with little ones as as well, this broccoli is really going to give you energy, this apple is going to help you kick and punch in and play with your friends. I mean, kick and punch, like I’m talking about karate, for some reason that came up, like what you know. They’re like, go into their little karate class or, you know, the little. There’s these at my daughter’s gym, they have this like little ninja class.

Lisa Salisbury: And they just kids, they’re all like, you know, punching the bags, and it’s so fun for them, well, they need energy for that, and we can talk to them about that food is what gives us energy, and that we need to make sure we’re getting most of our energy from the dinners mommy makes her daddy makes because we make sure to put the foods in there that give us the best energy. And so we don’t want to fill up on, you know, maybe the snackies or things.

Lisa Salisbury: You can have roles. I mean, I had a role when my kids were young. When they came home from school. you’re welcome to have a snack. After four o’clock, you can choose vegetables or fruit. Because I didn’t want him to be choosing cheeses. Before dinner, I wanted them to be ready to have the protein and vegetables. That I was going to be serving at dinner.

Lisa Salisbury: So if they were starving, you’re welcome to have an apple or carrots. And it’s not the idea like well, if you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re not hungry. It’s just that I was wanting to prioritize nutrient-dense food if they were truly hungry. Does that make sense?

Steve Washuta: Makes perfect sense. Yeah. And I think it’s also naive of some parents. When you were talking initially about they’re on a diet. Amina moms on a diet to not think that your kids don’t notice that you’re eating different foods to them. right? My daughter isn’t even to yet. And if there’s something different on my plate, than that’s our plate, she wants that food, right? It’s the first thing she notices if there’s any sort of differentiation between what I’m eating and what she’s eating.

So kids know right away, they know that you’re eating something different. So obviously, the first question is going to be why. So I think it is, you know. It’s as parents, our kids are sponges, and it’s important to remember that they’re they’re always taking information in and ingesting it in a certain way. And we have to be careful about those decisions that we make. And those conversations we have around food long term to ingrain the proper healthy habits.

Lisa Salisbury: Yeah, my, my parents had a saying whenever they would see us sort of mimicking them in any way or doing what they do rather than doing what what they say. They just had the same between the two of them that was Aren’t you glad you don’t smoke. Which was just their way of of saying, look at our kids doing exactly what we’re doing.

Lisa Salisbury: And I noticed I’ve noticed as I’ve done some of this, like primary program or work with my clients when we’re talking about like, what was demonstrated when you were young. And like, what about exercise? I realized oh, my childhood brain thought exercise was for boys. Because my mom did not exercise but my dad did.

Lisa Salisbury: So men exercise women didn’t and that took some time for me to get over it was okay for me to be like on the swim team because that was co Ed but as far as just exercise for like for exercise. boys did that men did that. Like what a weird thought but that was demonstrated. So you know as much as as we can.

Lisa Salisbury: We got to think about how we’re demonstrating health and the habits of Health has Well, without talking about it, my kids see me in workout clothes before they go to school, they know I’m gonna work out, they don’t have to see me working out, they can, I don’t have to say I’m gonna go and lift weights now they can just see by what I’m wearing.

Steve Washuta: Sure, yeah, makes sense. And you know, the first thing that came to my mind is actually I sort of had the. Maybe not exactly the reverse,. But something else, you know, similar to that where it was juxtaposed a bit where my mother was way more apt to eat vegetables. And my father never left anything on the plate, right.

So if we like me and my sisters had left food on the plates. Those plates were then pushed to him. And he had eaten everything, right. So for me, it was like, oh, all the girls are eating the vegetables and dad. And I just eat as much as we can. So you know. It didn’t form any bad habits for me long term, thankfully. Atleast not consciously, but, but you do notice these things, and maybe make them specific to mom or dad.

And if you happen to be, you know, the son or the daughter. Or maybe more likely to take on those characteristics of said. Parent, this has been fantastic information. Why don’t you give my audience a little insights into where they can find you. If this is general population, let’s say people who want to work with a nutritionist work with someone like you. Or if it’s personal trainers for people in the fitness and health industry that have questions and want to see your content, where do you direct them?

Lisa Salisbury: Sure. So I’m on Instagram, it’s well underscored with underscore Lisa. And then my podcast is eat well think well live well. And we’re going to publish one together as well over there. I also have lots of guests but some solo episodes. Just like you do talking about all of these concepts. I give a lot of my really my best tools on the podcast.

Lisa Salisbury: So if you are interested in applying some of those, obviously, what I think is the most valuable just like I’m sure with personal training is the hands-on coaching. So you can see the exercises but having someone check it with you is and have that accountability is really where it’s at for for getting a lot of progress.

Lisa Salisbury: So I also saw I’d love if you are interested, I do free sessions. So that first session is always free. If you want to see. I just think the best way to decide if coaching works for you is to get some coaching.

Steve Washuta: Couldn’t agree more. I will put all the links in the description of the podcast when it’s released. My guest today has been Lisa Salisbury. Lisa, thank you for joining the Trulyfit podcast. Thanks for having me.

Steve Washuta: Thanks for joining us on the Trulyfit podcast. Please subscribe, rate, and review on your listening platform. Feel free to email us as we’d love to hear from you.

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Thanks again!

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