Feeling tired? Lose weight.
Dealing with depression? Lose weight.
Struggling in your marriage? Lose weight.
Joints hurt? Lose weight.
Crumbling under the weight of systemic sexism? Lose weight.
It seems like the answer to every question for women is weight loss.
Our guest today is Claudine Francois and we are talking about how to ditch fad diets and put your health first.
Podcast Transcript:
Audrea Fink:
Hi, this is Audrea Fink here with Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris and Julie Holton. We are your Think Tank of Three.
Our guest today is Claudine Francois and we are talking about how to ditch fad diets and put your health first.
We are so sick of being told that we have to lose weight to be enough.
Julie Holton:
So sick of being told.
Audrea Fink:
Lose weight to be attractive. Lose weight to be good enough. Lose weight to be healthy.
We aren’t shaming weight loss in general, but we are sick of it being sold to women as a solution to every single problem.
Julie Holton:
Today’s guest knows this so well. She went on a journey to feel better and learn how to take away her aches and pains. In the process, she fell in love with making healthier choices.
We’re not just talking about weight loss. She now helps women feel great about themselves.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
As a former CFO of a multinational company, Claudine found herself in a constant state of stress, which led her into a cycle of overindulging in what, she later discovered, to be harmful foods to her body. She had headaches, migraines, sluggishness, inflammation, bloating, leaky gut, weight pain, you name it.
She decided to take control by creating lasting energy and developing the patience to deal with life. She now helps women go-getters find their own Zen with carefully honed practices and lifestyle strategies.
Claudine thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.
Claudine François:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be with you all.
Audrea Fink:
You have had quite the path from accountant to health coach.
You started off not trying to necessarily switch industries, but rather trying to figure out how to feel better and take care of your body. Tell us a little bit about the journey from accountant to health coach and feeling better in the process.
Claudine François:
Yeah, that wasn’t really in my plan. That wasn’t like the long-term strategy, “Let’s start in accounting, and then we’ll end up in health coaching.”
For anyone who’s been in corporate America, a lot of us know how stressful that can be. And that stress started taking a toll on my body.
And of course, like many women, we don’t think of stress as a bad thing. We just think, “Oh, and that’s going to propel me to keep going. I’m just going to continue to push, push, push and my body will be fine. I’ll be fine.”
Unfortunately, like many women, I discovered that my body would not be fine. The stress started taking a toll on me.
As Reischea mentioned, I had migraines, a leaky gut, all the things, because I thought I could do it all, and just ignore what my body was telling me. Though I was overweight, I was miserable. I had this epiphany. One is that being hungry is counterproductive to losing weight. Hungry is lame. Two, I love food and I love flavor, so like a lot of the common things that you see out there with regards to how women can lose weight is like, “Eat this cardboard-tasting bar.”
Audrea Fink
Steamed broccoli and boiled white chicken breast.
Claudine François:
Yeah, it aint a joy.
Julie Holton:
With pre-made, pre-packaged stuff that’s supposed to be good for you, but it doesn’t taste good, and frankly, probably actually isn’t even good for you.
Claudine François:
Exactly. So I was like, “This is not going to work for me.” If I’m going to find a way to support my body, I have got to do it in a way that has flavor. It has taste. That gets me excited to eat. Then take out all of the inflammatory foods that were causing me the migraines, the weight gain, the bloating, the leaky gut.
I knew I needed to find a way to make it taste fantastic and to make it simple and easy in my lifestyle because how many of us have jobs, husbands, kids, families? We don’t have time to be spending all day in the kitchen every day, so I had to find a way to make it work in my lifestyle, and that’s really how it started.
Julie Holton
And isn’t that the truth, the number one thing that we need to live in this world is our bodies. But yet it’s the last thing I think, especially as women that we make time for. I was just thinking this morning, “Gosh, I really want to get back to yoga classes now that we have classes again, thanks to the break from COVID.” But it’s like, “Oh, but I don’t have time.” How do I find time, when it’s the one thing that I want to do for my body, but there’s no time?
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris
And the whole meal prep thing. It is the bane of my existence. I think the ladies here have heard me say it time and time again. I do all the cooking in this house. It’s not because I’m a great cook, I cook because we need to eat.
And then I’ve got picky kids, which is a whole nother piece of just drama. I reach a point by the end of the week where I’m just like, “Man, pick something for dinner because I’m not doing it.
Claudine François:
Pizza delivery!
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris
I heard a woman once say when I back when my kids were even littler and she said, “I don’t cook on Fridays and Saturdays.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s so wonderful. How can I achieve that?” And that’s what we do.
But health coaching. What exactly is health coaching compared to say life coach, therapist, or a nutritionist?
Claudine François:
That’s a great question. And it’s one that a lot of people ask because you hear all these buzz words. “When would I go to you versus when would I go to you?”
A therapist can be a psychologist or a counselor. It’s basically a mental health professional licensed to help people with different life changes.
A nutritionist, who is also a registered dietician. If you see the letters RD registered dietician, that’s someone who’s trained to follow the USDA food pyramid. The USDA food pyramid is very specific in itself, and so they’re trained to follow that.
And they also follow the specific association’s recommendations, like the Lung Cancer Association or Heart Association, Diabetes, like all of those association recommendations. They would follow those to help someone manage a medical issue through the lens of nutrition.
Health coaching is very similar to life coaching in that you’re helping someone with a very specific facet of their life. In life coaching, it could be something related to a career goal or relationship goal, or a general life change.
But health coaching is specifically health-related. And it does take into consideration the two components. It takes in the nutrition component, as well as the mindset component. How we view something is generally how we do it. Taking that into consideration, especially when it comes to health and nutrition and how we as women honor our bodies, there is a huge mindset component to it.
Julie Holton:
Let’s talk about the big, bad, often ugly D-word: dieting. It seems like every single woman I know, if not men too, have been on at least one if not one unending diet at some point in their life.
Claudine, you are against dieting. And I’d love to hear why, what is it about the diet industry that you’re working against?
Claudine François:
Ooh, you’re asking me a loaded question.
Julie Holton:
Welcome to the Think Tank of Three.
But let’s talk about dieting and the diet industry because there are pros and cons to every industry. When we’re talking about our bodies and our health and you as a health coach, tell us your feelings about the dieting industry.
Claudine François:
For a lot of women, it’s a negative connotation, right? When you hear the word dieting, there’s a negative feeling behind it because it insinuates deprivation. A lot of us know this. If I say to myself, “Oh, I’m not going to eat chocolate.” Okay, I grew up Catholic. For Lent every year I would give up chocolate, and then come Easter it’s like, “I’m going to eat as much chocolate as humanly possible in the next 24 hours.”
When you have this deprivation mentality, you end up going on a binge when you give up the deprivation. That’s why a lot of people who go on diet have this yo-yo experience because they’ll be like, “All right, I’m going to go on this diet to get into this swimsuit or to fit into this dress or go on this vacation. And then when I’m done, I’m just going to go hog wild.”
One, it’s not really good mentally for us. It doesn’t actually teach us how to support our bodies long-term. That is the issue I have with the dieting industry, is that it pushes a lot of women towards these short-term fixes, which are actually more harmful to our bodies physically, but also for our mental, emotional health.
How many of us have gone on a diet, we’ve lost weight, we get really excited, and then we gain it all back and we’re just pissed off at ourselves? We start this whole mental berating ourselves. Okay, there’s a lot of hands and feet being raised. I can see there’s some stuff we need to talk about here.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
I put up my hands. I put up my sandals to represent my feet.
Julie Holton:
I feel very seen right now by Claudine, yes.
Audrea Fink:
And doesn’t the diet industry benefit from diets not working? If I buy into a diet and it works, then I never come back to this industry again. So it behooves them to make short-term fixes, not last a long time.
Claudine François:
Absolutely. You can’t make money on something you only sell once.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
You also had mentioned something, Claudine, before, that being hungry is counterproductive. I used to be a decent athlete. I went through training and everything, but even then I think, “Yeah, well, if you’re hungry, then that means that’s that energy that’s burning and you’re not feeding into that energy.” And I think some people might think, “Well, if I’m hungry, then this is a good thing. That means my body is burning up, using up whatever I had and I might need to get a little bit more. But I’ll just push that off” and not realizing that your body starts to respond to that hunger if you don’t pay attention to it.
Claudine François:
Right. It goes into starvation mode. And when you go into starvation mode, it slows down your metabolism because it’s going to be conserving. It wants to hold on to the fat. It’s like, “I’m going to need this for energy later. Hold on.” It slows everything down.
So I would say you’re right in that weight loss is the difference between what you take in and what you expend, but there is a way to do it so that you’re not allowing your body to go into that starvation mode because we still need nutrients. Our bodies cannot run on fumes.
We still need to support all the functions of our bodies, especially water. I know many of us don’t get enough water and I don’t want to go off on a tangent on water, but everything in our body happens through water.
So it’s not going to happen if we don’t put it in there.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
It’s like that Star Trek episode that referenced humans as mostly bags of water. Yes. I went there.
We kind of went away a little bit, but there was something else with regards to dieting because let’s face it, you talked about the money aspect. If something doesn’t work, if it works once you’re not going to keep coming back to it. It’s also not about women.
Claudine François:
Yeah. That is very true because
Why would you study a woman’s body which changes every 28 days, or changes within 28 days when you can study a man’s body that’s the same every single day?
All those popular diets that are out there, have tested them on men’s bodies. They are designed for men’s bodies because men’s bodies are so much easier.
I mean, bless their hearts, they’re just the same.
They’re so basic, right? Like how easy it is to have a formula where you don’t have any moving constants, the diets are designed for their bodies.
And then the worst part is a lot of women will go on a diet with their husbands or their partners. And they’ll see the guy drop all this weight and then they’re like, “Why can’t I do that?” And it just makes it worse because we’re comparing ourselves to someone, one, for whom this diet was designed, but two, whose body is totally different from ours and it’s not the same formula.
Julie Holton:
It’s so interesting, I just had a conversation with my young niece this weekend, who is of the age, or she’s starting to go through puberty and learning about it as she goes. Her mom’s a nurse, and so they’re having these great conversations. And then she spent the weekend with me. And so suddenly aunt Julie has to step in and not know anything about any of these conversations.
My young niece has all the pressures of the media and the kids at school. And what women are supposed to eat, what they’re not supposed to eat. I asked her actually at one point what her favorite food was because we were planning out some meals for the weekend. And she said salad.
I love salad. Salad is great. But I’m thinking this little girl, a pre-teen, used to say her favorite meal was this fancy seafood pasta her mom would make because it’s so good. And I’m thinking now that is a favorite meal. Salad sounds like something the media is feeding her.
So here she is, getting really close to having her first period, and she was eating nonstop this weekend, just nonstop. She was hungry all the time. She said, “Man, I think this is because I’m going to start my period soon.” And I just thought, “And because you keep wanting to eat salad. You need more nutrients. Your body needs some fuel.”
Countering some of these messages that women and young women get is so hard, because who’s she going to listen to? Mom and aunt Julie, or all the TV shows and the friends at school and the magazines and TikTok and everything else that’s out there? It’s so hard.
Audrea Fink:
Well, it’s not just women. My husband is trying to lose weight. First of all, I don’t think he needs to. I think he looks just fine how he is. But he wants to. So he’s eating salad every day for lunch.
This guy does not enjoy vegetables. Imagine every single day eating salad with almost no dressing and a little bit of chicken breast. That’s his lunch every day. And he hates it. The reason he’s eating it is that he’s been told, “This is the way you look better to some unknown audience, to yourself.” Whatever. And it’s really horribly sad.
I also just read an article that talked about how salad is the diet culture’s champion, but eating that many raw vegetables depending on your digestive tract can actually be really hard on your body. It creates more bloat and you lose energy because you don’t have a lot of fuel in those meals.
Like salad is great. I love a good salad. I’ll eat a salad every day and be happy with it, but not as the only part of my meal. You need a carb, you need fat. Your brain is cushioned by fat. Carbs are fuel. You just maybe don’t need the entire loaf of bread at once.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
It’s interesting, Julie. My son by the time this airs will have turned 11. The messages that these kids are getting, they don’t necessarily hear everything. You say something to my son, and if you haven’t gotten it out in five seconds, which is not possible to get out all of the information in five seconds, he only caught the first couple of words you said.
And so some nutritionist came to their school when he was, I want to say, in the third grade, and somehow all he heard was that fat is bad. That’s all he heard. And all of a sudden, he sat there, he’s like, “Well I can’t have any fat because fat is bad and I don’t want to die, and I’m going to have a heart attack.” And I’m like, “First of all, son…”
Audrea Fink:
That science has been disproven.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
Well, not only that I’m like, “Dude, this is the time in your life where you literally can pretty much eat whatever you want. Because you’re going to lose that in about five to eight years where you’re going to really have to pay attention. Right now if you’re hungry and it’s there, put it in your mouth.”
Claudine François:
That’s a good point, that the new nuance is lost. It’s like saturated fat versus unsaturated fats. Are you eating an avocado? Are you eating a tub of lard?
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
Yes. And those were the things, Claudine, that we were trying to explain to him. But one, I’m mom, so mom doesn’t know what she’s talking about. So, “I don’t know why you’re even trying to advise me about something different than the nutritionist that I met yesterday, what she had to say?” That’s a difficult thing also to battle with young minds that are very impressionable in dealing with all that other stuff that they’re seeing, but not being able to process and understand like you said, Claudine, the nuance.
It’s not just all fat, its specific fats are less healthy than other things. Limit what you’re eating. But you can have that cheeseburger today, as long as I don’t give you a cheeseburger every single day for the next 30 days.
Claudine François:
Well, you’ve gotta put that in a soundbite or on an Instagram post and then you’ll get through.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
You can have a cheeseburger, but just not every day for the next 30 days.
Audrea Fink:
So one of the things that we have not really talked about, but I know is part of your message is that weight loss and health might have nothing to do with food or very little to do with food.
Claudine François:
Are we talking about stress? Is that where we’re going?
Audrea Fink:
Yeah.
Claudine François:
I say this over and over again to the point where I feel like I’m a broken record and if I could scream it from the highest rooftops I would. And that is a stressed body will not lose weight.
If you think about the evolution of our bodies… let’s just go back to the days when we were all living in tents and having to forage for our food. The stress response was designed to give us a quick energy burst so that we could get away from danger.
The tiger example, if we are out hunting and foraging and there’s a tiger about to eat us, our body gives us the cortisol and adrenaline and all this huge energy burst it’s getting from the fat stores that we can run as fast as we can back to the village or wherever we’re going to get away from this tiger.
And that is what the stress response is designed to do, to take these fat stores and allow us to have that quick burst of energy. The problem is that our bodies don’t recognize now that when we’re having this argument with our spouse or we’re stuck in traffic and cursing all the cars in front of us, that stress response is not the same.
And the other challenges that we are now chronically stressed, many of us are stressed all the time. Because as Julie said earlier, we’re not taking the downtime. We’re not taking the time for ourselves to de-stress, to un-stress, to let go, or really least the stress. And so our bodies aren’t giving us the chance to end the cycle of stress.
The whole purpose of that stress response is that everything else stops. When we have that stress response, all of our energy, all of our available energy is going to getting away from that tiger. It’s not handling digestion. It’s not working with your metabolism.
You see women who are having fertility issues, a lot of times there’s stress happening. And if you notice, when couples stop trying to have a baby and the stress is gone, all of a sudden somebody gets pregnant. It’s because all of those functions stop when we have this stress going on.
The same is true for many of us go-getters out there. As women who are just trying to make things happen all the time. We’ve got the high-power job. We’ve got all the responsibilities at home, schlepping the kids everywhere. All the things we’re doing. We’re not giving our bodies a chance to release and restore and just drop all the craziness, so our metabolism has slowed down as a consequence.
And it doesn’t really matter what we do, we’re not going to be able to lose weight because our body is holding onto those fat stores for dear life. It’s like, “I’m not letting this go. I’m going to have to run away from this tiger which happens to be traffic, or my husband not putting away his laundry.” It’s like, “I’m going to need that for this argument.”
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
We do go through that. And then I fall into the trap of, “I just keep can’t. I just can’t deal with you right now.”
Audrea Fink:
We’ve talked about this on a previous podcast, even when we are not actively doing a task, mentally we’re doing the mental labor for it. You get to the point where you’re like, “I can’t.” But that’s because you’ve processed so much of it already.
Things haven’t happened because women and men think differently and act differently within the home. And so like, you just hold onto that stress because it’s part of your life. You’re thinking about it when you’re not thinking about it. And work is the same way, right? At my previous job, if I wasn’t at work, I was still thinking about work. I know Julie does that.
Julie Holton:
What? Me?
Audrea Fink:
She’s working on it.
Julie Holton:
On work or stress? I feel like I’m at church right now because Claudine’s like talking about me in every single answer. She’s like stress, this stress that. And I’m like, “Oh, that’s me.”
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
(Singing) Bring me to church.
Julie Holton:
But Audrea, you also bring up a really good point. Men and women are different. Our bodies are different. This habit of stress and how damaging it can be to our bodies, I think about even my business, how in the world can I reduce stress? I know that’s a really big thing.
As you said earlier, we often think of stress as a powerful motivator. It’s a good thing. So many people have been saying lately, “Oh my gosh, I’m so busy. It gets really stressful.” And they’re like, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” I’m like, “No, it’s good. We’ve got work coming in. We’ve got all these fun projects.” But the reality is it’s still stressful, and it’s stress on my body.
What are some ways Claudine that men and women are different when it comes to stress? And are there any tips specifically for the women in our audience to address stress or reduce stress?
Claudine François:
Well, I’m going to start with your first question, which is how are we different? And part of it is physiological, and part of it is how we’ve been brought up in society. From a physiological perspective, there are two facets.
There’s the fact that men were often hunter-gatherers. So they were the ones actually having to run away from the tiger whereas the women were usually not in that situation. So our bodies weren’t as designed to have that constant stress response over and over again.
But the second part of that is that we tend to not be able to let go of the stress. So like we were talking, we have this mental taker tape going on. There’s constantly the, “All right, whose birthday is it today?” And, “What soccer stuff do I have to pick up for so and so.” But also that we feel that we are responsible for all these things.
How many women do I know that are like, “Oh no, my husband’s got it all happening. I’m just going to sit here on the couch all weekend and watch my shows.”
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
Well, I need one of those. Sign me up.
Claudine François:
Yeah, exactly. So what can we do about it?
I mean, one thing is we can do what we were talking about earlier. We can make time for ourselves. And I know that sounds like this crazy far-off lofty goal for a lot of women and I’ll get to that, but we can make time to take time out for ourselves.
We can do yoga. For me, yoga has been a lifesaver, not because of the physical aspect of it, but because it gets me out of my head. It stops that mental ticker tape because I have to focus on not falling over, right?
Julie Holton:
Right. And you’re having to focus on your breathing, which we say like, we have to just breathe sometimes.
Claudine François:
Yes. And breathing is a physiological way to reduce stress, to stop the stress response. When we get stressed, we start to breathe fast, shallow, fast breaths. If you force yourself to have longer deeper breaths, that’s actually tricking your brain into thinking you’re not stressed.
I know we say, “Just breathe.” And people think, “Ugh, what is that going to do?” It actually physically changes our minds into believing that we’re not stressed.
So breathing is a great way. Yoga is a great way. Taking walks in nature, if you can get out in nature, there’s something about nature that actually calms our bodies. Any form of exercise, even if it’s like dancing to your favorite music in your living room, actually helps release stress.
Audrea Fink:
Put it on TikTok Reisch!
Claudine François:
There are a ton of ways to release stress. And in terms of making the time for it, I find that when I am less stressed, things seem less hard. When you do make the time for yourself, you’re just not as exhausted. So things just happen faster. You actually end up gaining time because you’ve given yourself a mental break.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
I’m very aware of the breathing thing, and often when I tell someone to breathe, I’ll say, “Breathe. Take a deep breath in and out, in and out.” And I will text that. I know how annoying it is for someone to say, “Just breathe.” “Duh, I am breathing.” It’s like, “No, stop. Take a deep breath in and slowly blow it out.”
Audrea Fink:
I just texted Julie last night, “Deep breaths.” And then I was like, “That’s not helpful. I hate when people tell me that.” So I said, “four in, hold for four, out for eight.” Because saying deep breathing is kind of bull.
Julie Holton:
It actually was super helpful too, I will say ladies. Because sometimes I’m like, “Don’t tell me to breathe. I am breathing. I just want all these things that I want and I want them yesterday. And why isn’t anyone listening to me? And I know I need to breathe.”
Claudine François:
There’s actually a whole book called Breath, and what you said about the four in, the four out, the eight… So there are different techniques. There are breathing techniques to give you energy. There are breathing techniques to calm you down. There are breathing techniques for sleeping.
If you really want to go down that rabbit hole, there are so many different ways that you can use your breath to change your physiological response to what you’re experiencing.
Julie Holton:
We just re-listened to our podcast where we returned from our podfade during the pandemic. And we started by taking a deep breath and then we became really fixated on it because it actually felt so good.
And it was unscripted and we weren’t planning to do it, but it reset the tone of that podcast and this whole season because we took that deep breath together as we’re experiencing this pandemic together. And it really is amazing. I challenge everyone who’s listening to just stop at some point during your day and take a deep breath and see how you feel afterward. It makes a huge difference.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
(Singing) Just breathe. What was that song?
Julie Holton:
Faith Hill.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
Faith Hill. I was going to say Evans, I’m like, “Nope, that’s the other Faith.”
Claudine François:
Gotta have Faith.
Audrea Fink:
I want to take a slight tangent. When we first talk before this podcast, we were discussing how damaging the diet industry is. How committed to health you were. How health was really the focus and the aim of what you were doing. Which I love because I’m pretty anti-diet. I’m actually like maybe a little crazy on the far wing of anti-diet.
When we talked, we were on the same page, but then when I checked your website, I saw that there are a lot of tips for losing weight. Losing weight is a lot of the time what’s first and foremost with most health coaches. When we talked about that, you had said, it’s really hard to get people to come to your business from an SEO standpoint when we talk about health. But if we talk about weight loss, people sign up.
Why do you think it’s so hard to be found online if you don’t use diet culture language?
Claudine François:
Well, and it’s not even online, it’s just in general. Women are almost conditioned to respond to weight loss marketing, probably because it is more tangible.
You can say, “Oh, I lost 10 pounds. I lost 20 pounds. I lost 30 pounds.” But how many people are going to say, “I don’t have joint issues anymore, or I don’t get migraines, or I have more energy.” So when we’re talking about a healthy lifestyle, yes, that will lead to weight loss.
But if you say to people, “Who wants to eat kale?” It’s typically not the way that people are going to come to you. Most people are like, “Not so much.”
But if you say to them, “Who wants to lose 10 pounds in four weeks eating delicious food?” Then you’re getting their attention in a way that they want to hear it.
My message in general is about empowering women and helping them to heal themselves from the inside out. It wasn’t until I started talking from the perspective of weight loss that anyone actually started listening.
We mentioned this earlier. I think Julie, you were talking about it with your niece. We’re inundated with pictures of the perfect, and I’m using air quotes here, perfect body. These bodies don’t actually exist. They are airbrushed.
I can take a picture of myself and I can make myself look way different on any app, right? But we’re airbrushed into thinking that this is the ideal that we should be trying to achieve.
But in reality, we should be trying to achieve a body that we feel great in, a body that is free from pain, that is free from brain fog or chronic stress or any of the things that women are experiencing and they just think it’s normal.
They think it’s, “Oh, I’m just getting older.” No, it’s that. We’re not supporting our bodies. And typically many of us are giving to the point of exhaustion. We’re giving to the point of it being detrimental to our bodies because a lot of us are over-givers. We think about everyone else’s needs before our own. if ours even make the list, they’re at the bottom. Helping women get to the ideal body for themselves, with the extra bonus of weight loss.
You know, typically when you take all of the things away that are causing the inflammation, the migraines, the leaky gut, all those things, your body then can release the weight because it’s not having to deal with this constant catch up of it trying to do its normal maintenance process, and it can’t.
To answer your question, I found that my message got across by starting at the weight-loss angle, but in the end, I’m doing the same thing, kind of chicken and egg. Where do you start versus the end result is getting us there?
Audrea Fink:
Right. You’re essentially helping with where we are today. So culturally speaking, we are only able to pick up the weight loss message, but then maybe once working with you, we’re able to switch that to, “Hey, my joints don’t ache.” Which I would be down for.
Claudine François:
Yeah. Well, one lady said to me, she’s like, “I can breathe now. I’m not taking any of my allergy medications because I’m not all stuffed up.” And I’m like, “Yeah. It’s because you got rid of that dairy that was killing.”
Julie Holton:
That’s the thing too is how much we are lacking from a proper education on food. Audrea and I have had a number of conversations that led to us wanting to do this topic on this podcast because there’s so much misinformation out there that keeps getting replayed over and over.
So even when we think we know what we’re supposed to be doing, half the time it’s like, “Oh, I really thought this was good. And it’s actually really bad, and here’s why.” Just like you were talking about the breathing issues or with some of my own digestive issues and it’s like, “Oh my gosh. So sometimes I wonder, do we even recognize some of the war warning signs our body is giving us?
Before this podcast, no joke, we were talking about not getting enough water yet today. Headaches, how we are dealing with headaches and migraines.
Maybe I should have read the script closer. Like you have all these answers here. It’s our body giving us signs that something’s not quite right. And it’s all about, as you are saying, not the fad diets, it’s about really honing in on what it takes to be healthy and to treat our body in a way that we feel good as an outcome.
Audrea Fink:
Well, and every body is different. So even if there was a way of eating, you’re still going to have to tweak it for every body. Some people can and can’t have certain things. Some people don’t have an inflammatory response to dairy. My husband is one of them. It’s annoying. He literally could eat piles of it and be fine. I can’t.
When we approach food from an individual standpoint versus trying to have a blanket diet, that’s also created for men, we end up in a better place. To Julie’s point. We’re not taught how to look at food, how to eat, how to think about food. We’re just taught, lose weight.
Claudine François:
This might be going a little too far, but in America, it’s all about profits. So whatever can make the most profits. I can push all this McDonald’s on you. Maybe, I shouldn’t say McDonald’s, but I can push all this fast food on you, and then we can go to your doctor and you can give you all these medications to fix all the problems that are resulting from your bad lifestyle. And it’s like, all these things are pumping money into the economy.
And I lived in Europe for several years. The focus is much more on quality than quantity. You actually have to apply to have certain ingredients in a food or even certain chemicals, pesticides, all those things you have to apply and you have to show that they are safe. Whereas in the US, you have to prove that they’re harmful.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
Oh yeah. That tells you right there. When you hear you have to prove that it’s harmful, versus we’re proving we’re making sure that it’s safe. That right there encompasses-
Audrea FInk:
The diet industry, the food industry, America.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
Exactly. What would you rather women focus on when it comes to better health?
Claudine François:
Well, the first thing I would say is find the way to release the stress, finding the way that works for you. And it could be multiple things. As I mentioned, yoga is certainly one of the things that gets me out of my head. For some people, it could be meditation, coloring, or knitting. I have a sister who loves to knit and that just helps her unwind in the evenings.
Just something we can do for ourselves, and I think that does two things. One, it does help release stress. But two, if we do something for ourselves every day, we’re subconsciously telling ourselves we are important, that our health matters. And that is a big step for a lot of women because we are so used to putting other people first.
The second thing I would say is sleep. I don’t know about you all. But sleep seemed to be like the one thing that it was almost a badge of honor to say how little sleep you can get. “Oh, I can live on four hours of sleep at night.” No, you can’t.
There’s a human impossibility. Humans need seven to nine hours of sleep a night to function because that’s when your body does all its normal maintenance procedures. It is detoxing you at night. And if you are not letting that happen, that’s when we start to see a lot of problems kick in.
Julie Holton:
I had a doctor give me the best example about sleep. Because when I first started my business, there was no time to sleep. You don’t have to be a business owner to feel that way, whether it’s being a mom and any number of jobs or any number of things that we do.
But anyway, I would feel like my time for me was at night, after everything else was done. And so that was my time, I couldn’t waste it on sleep. But I had a doctor who said, “Look, if your car needed gas to get from A to B, you’re not going to let it get all the way down to E and be like, ‘Well, that’s okay. I can still drive 90 miles to get to where I’m going.'” But that is literally what we’re doing when we don’t get enough sleep at night. We are pushing our bodies to keep going without that rest that it needs to actually regenerate, rejuvenate, and all of those things that sleep does for us.
Claudine François:
But in addition to that, we tend to over-caffeinate when we don’t get enough sleep. Studies have been proven when you don’t get enough sleep, you reach for the comfort foods, you overeat when you get enough sleep because sleep itself is a form of stress on the body. If there are women out there who want to lose weight, the first thing they can do is get a good night’s sleep. Absolutely. Then you’ll eat this salad, maybe with some avocado on it.
Audrea Fink:
There’s a book called Intuitive Eating that talks about this a lot. And it talks about eating slowly, savoring your food, savoring the sensations with your food, and also recognizing hunger cues. So many of us don’t recognize hunger cues. They can show up as a headache. It can show up as brain fog. And if you don’t learn what hunger looks like for you and you don’t learn what full looks like for you, you’re going to have a hard time moderating your intake of food no matter what, because you don’t know what’s in your tank to continue beating this analogy like a dead horse.
Claudine François:
Well, and when we eat junk food, it actually exacerbates that problem because you get that quick high and then you get that crashing low. Like when I was in corporate and I do the caffeine thing, right? I have a huge Starbucks in the morning. And caffeine acts like sugar as well sometimes where it gives you that spike and then you have the crash. And then I’d be like, “Oh, well now I’m tired. Now I have to eat candy or a big, huge blueberry muffin with tons of sugar in it.” And you just keep repeating the cycle.
I would think that I was hungry, but really I was just coming down from this crash. So until I started to eat foods that had more sustaining energy, it wasn’t until then that I started to actually notice, “Oh wait, now I’m hungry. This is what real hunger feels like.”
Julie Holton:
We could continue this conversation all day. This has been just an amazing conversation, Claudine, thank you for sharing your insights with us. Before we go, we are collecting advice from successful women in our communities. Is there a lesson that you’ve learned recently that you wish you had learned earlier in your career?
Claudine François:
Self-care is not selfish, it is self-preservation. And we touched on this, but if I had known earlier in my life/career that giving myself the time and space to regroup and allow my body to do what it needs to do. If I had known what an impact that was going to have on my health, my energy, then that would’ve changed the last decade or so.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
From the lessons that you’ve recently learned, what advice would you offer to any career woman?
Claudine François:
I would say that you are the most important thing on your to-do list. And for a lot of women, that’s hard to hear, because if you take the time to do things that light you up, that energize you, replenish you, if you make those things non-negotiable, you will end up having more time because you won’t be exhausted and burnt out. You will have more great ideas because your brain is able to flow. You will have more positive relationships with people because you’re not tired and pissed off all the time. So you are the most important thing on your to-do list.
Audrea Fink:
Last question. In today’s professional setting, what do you think the most important skill for a woman is?
Claudine François:
Finding a way to love yourself, to love all of yourself. So many of us have this inner critic, this voice inside our heads that’s telling us all the things we’re doing wrong because we so want to do everything right. But if we can find a way to quiet the voice, to love ourselves in all our glory, the way that we are and not listen to all the chirping of outside voices, whether we find a way to do that by taking a relaxing bath or doing five-minute meditations, or even just sitting in your favorite chair, reading a book, giving yourself the space, the downtime will make you feel better, but will relax your body and free up your mind for that unicorn space we were talking about, right? So that everyone else can see how wonderful and amazing you are because you are wonderful and amazing.
Audrea Fink:
Claudine, can you tell our audience what the best way to connect with you is if they either have additional questions or they’re interested in working with you, how should they reach out?
Claudine François:
Absolutely. So if they go to my website, which is ingoodcleantaste.com, there’s a blog, there are recipes and tips on healthy weight loss. They could also set up a complimentary call with me there on the contact page, so we can game-plan how they can use their next 10 pounds eating delicious food.
Julie Holton:
Claudine, I just want to ask you just briefly as we wrap up here, can you give us just kind of a snapshot of when people call you, what should they expect?
Claudine François:
Well, it’s a holistic look at their lifestyle because as we’ve discussed, weight, food, it’s only a part of the equation.
I talk about equations a lot because I spent 20-something years in accounting. The biggest part of the equation could be are you getting enough water? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you finding ways to de-stress? Because it doesn’t really matter what we do on the food angle, if you’re are not finding this downtime that gives your body a chance to release the weight. It’s not going to work.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
Thank you so much Claudine for taking the time to be with us today. It has been a pleasure, lots of lessons, and we just thank you for your time.
Claudine François:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been so fun talking to the three of you. Thank you.
Reischea Canidate-Kapasouris:
And that is all for this episode of Think Tank of Three.