Ella Magers:

Juliana is so fabulous to have you here. Thanks for being here.

Julieanna Hever:

Thank you so much for having me, Ella. I’m really excited to meet you.

Ella Magers:

Yeah, me too. And I was thinking about the intro for this interview and I was like, ah, I’m interviewing one of the OGs and for the plant-based movement. And it was funny, I was interviewing Dr. Ferman a few weeks back and I was like, oh, another og. And he gave me this total blank stare and he goes, what’s an og?

Julieanna Hever:

That’s funny. Yes.

Ella Magers:

It was very cute. I was hoping you would be okay with doing a little lightning round for, since I’ve never actually met you, and just some fun questions to get started.

Julieanna Hever:

Sure. I’m in.

Ella Magers:

All right, let’s do it. Okay. I’ve got six of them. What’s your definition of holistic health?

Julieanna Hever:

It would be incorporating all of the humanity of us, like our physical body, our mental wellbeing, our spiritual wellbeing, our community. Basically looking at everything as in an integrative way

Ella Magers:

Besides what and how you eat, because that’s what we’re going to talk about most of this episode. What are the three ways that you keep yourself on the path to holistic health and wellness?

Julieanna Hever:

I have an amazing community of friends and family that I’m so grateful for, and I reach out and talk to them all the time and stay as connected as I can. That’s probably the most important. I try, I’ve up and down with meditation and trying to do kind of that relaxation type of things because I tend to run towards the anxious side. So just that and therapy and talking and doing those kind of things and reading a lot of books and stuff like that. And then of course, exercise. I’m a big advocate for different forms of exercise. I’m getting older as we all are, but I’m older than, I just can’t believe how old I am. I just had a birthday, and so my exercise has changed profoundly over the years, and I’m just having to come to peace with what I can no longer do and what serves me best now. So that’s evolved a lot over the years and I find that really interesting.

Ella Magers:

I find that fascinating too. And I’m in a very similar boat, so let’s put a pin in that and come back to that. I’m really interested in that. Okay. A quirk or fun fact that most people may not know about you.

Julieanna Hever:

Okay. I’ve written now nine books and I still don’t know how to type. I still type with my fingers.

Ella Magers:

Do you really? Yes. Like your pointer fingers.

Julieanna Hever:

Well, I’ve branched out. I can use more, but I, I’ve taken my parents, made me do typing classes. I’ve done computer classes as a kid, but I never committed. And then whenever I look at my sister who’s like insanely fast, I’m so envious of her. But I’ve still written a bunch of things and still it works for me. I just have to look at the keyboard and just stay humble.

Ella Magers:

That’s awesome. I love that. What animal do you feel most aligned with when it comes to your personality?

Julieanna Hever:

Oh my goodness. I never thought about that. I remember hearing about a spirit animal or whatever, but I don’t know. I just love dogs. I’ve always loved dogs so much, and I love how they’re very affectionate. I’m, I’m very affectionate and loyal. I would guess a dog

Ella Magers:

That works well.

Julieanna Hever:

That is okay.

Ella Magers:

That definitely works. Someone you have not yet had on your podcast who you would love to interview and they could be dead or live.

Julieanna Hever:

Oh gosh. I’m no longer recording my podcast, so maybe I can just give myself an out on that. But hopefully I hope to come back to it someday. There’s a lot of people.

Ella Magers:

Okay, well then at the dinner table.

Julieanna Hever:

Okay. That’s a good one too. Oh my gosh, so many. Maybe. I mean, I know it’s really cliche, but I’m really kind of obsessed with what Elon Musk is thinking. I’m always curious about him and then some other healers in the world. Gosh, that’s such a good question. I haven’t been asked that in so long. Maybe someone like Deepak Chopra, I’ve never met him in real life. I’ve met a lot of, I’m honored that I’ve met a lot of amazing, amazing world changing people, but there’s always so many more, and I love learning perspectives from different people. That’s actually what I miss most about the podcast is that it’s an opportunity to have these conversations with amazing people.

Ella Magers:

Yeah, that’s what I love about it too. All right. Last one. I wouldn’t mind

Julieanna Hever:

Interviewing. That would be interesting. Yeah.

Ella Magers:

Okay. What message would you put on a billboard for thousands of or millions of people to see every day?

Julieanna Hever:

Eat more plants.

Ella Magers:

Boom.

Julieanna Hever:

Done. That one’s easy. Done.

Ella Magers:

Yes. Okay, cool. All right. Well, I’d love to talk today not only about nutrition, but also about something that in my opinion, and I think you may agree, maybe even more important, which is actually our relationship with food and eating. Because no matter how much information we have, if we don’t actually implement it or don’t have that relationship in place, then none of that really matters. So would you mind sharing a little bit about your backstory when it comes to your relationship with food?

Julieanna Hever:

Well, I’m really glad you asked this question because as much, that’s literally the conversation I have multiple times a day with my clients, my audiences, and everyone around me. It is. My TEDx talk was about that, how food is not just food. It is our relationships, it’s our culture, it’s our background, our communication of love, our family. It is everything. And it, we break bread, we celebrate over food, we mourn over food. Everything happens around food. And so that is how my journey started and that is why I do what I do. It’s not just a nutrition. Again, that’s fascinating. I love food and nutrition and cooking and all that. I love science and medicine, but what’s so fascinating to me is a human element of it. And that is literally my last book. Choose You Now was the principle was all founded on this.

And it was the first time I told my story in a book and my story began always fascinated. I was grew up as a dancer. My mom says that I danced before I walked, and then I grew up in Los Angeles. So we’re all dancers and actresses and all that in la. Most of us dabble in it. So I remember growing up in front of the dance mirror, I was doing a lot of ballet. I was there, I don’t know, 4, 5, 6 times a week. I was really, really, really enamored and loved dance. So I’m sitting there in my little leotard and tights in the mirror all the time, standing there watching myself grow up and turn from a little girl. Started to see those changes start to happen in my body. And one day my dance teacher called out from across Theri. She was at the record player, not to date me, although I wonder if they still use record players in ballet.

And I was standing there with all my little dance colleagues, I was probably 11 years old. And she said really loudly. She’s like, Juliana, cut out your snacks. And I write about how I just wanted the floor to swallow me up because it was so humiliating and I didn’t even know what that meant at the time because 11 years old still figuring everything out. But I wanted to understand it, and it really did shift the trajectory of my entire career in life because I wanted to understand body image and nutrition and what is healthy and what does that mean, snacking and all of the things. And that’s what led me on this long journey. And so I find that my goal is not only to help people be healthy, but I think even more importantly is to have a fundamentally peaceful relationship with their bodies around food without, my goal is to get rid of all of the guilt and shame that surrounds body image and diet and food that is so prevalent in our culture right now.

Ella Magers:

It’s amazing that you moment has stuck with you all these years, and you can literally identify the moment that things shifted for you and sparked this curiosity. Do you find that many people that you work with can also identify those moments? Are they able and willing to talk about the past? And how important do you think it is to understand where our relationship came from?

Julieanna Hever:

It’s everything. It’s absolutely everything. I tell all my clients that I get really intimate with my clients. I don’t take on a lot of clients at once because we get very, very intimate and we talk about that stuff because what I tell them is it’s, I’m not going to give you a diet because anyone could follow a diet and that doesn’t do anything. The transformation that I work with my clients in this journey, the transformation occurs when you peel through those layers. And I know my story because it’s in retrospect, and I’ve thought a lot about it, but a lot of people don’t necessarily think about where the seeds are planted and then it starts to come out. And a lot of us hide that. A lot of people, they don’t want to think about it or they just didn’t even realize it. And I think that understanding the roots or understanding even societally, how we talk about bodies and diets and how people will say to you, oh, you’re looking too thin, or Why aren’t you eating that? And we have this normalization of unhealthy eating. I think it’s a very, very, the most important conversation to be had when it comes to health, because diet is the number one cause of early death and disability in the world. And changing diet is not so simple. It’s in fact very, very, very disruptive. And especially if you want the transformation, which what’s the point? If not,

Ella Magers:

Right. No, I think this is so important and something that most people go to give me a meal plan, right? Yes. And when they come to you originally, well first getting back to your story. So what happened after that? How was your relationship with your body changed, and what was the journey from there?

Julieanna Hever:

It was horrible. I remember I was on every diet, me and my mom, because it was also, not to date myself again, but it was the eighties. So we were doing the average soup diet and the Atkins diet and the four day diet and the three day diet, and me and my mom and my mom would lose weight to go on a cruise. And it was a whole culture. And I remember being in junior high school and bringing Diet Coke and rice cakes for lunch, and I grew up around this, but I was reading, I was a very curious child. I wanted to know everything. And so I kept reading and reading, and this is before the internet. And so I just kept reading all the books. And another very poignant thing happened on this journey, and that’s when the book Diet for New America was published by John Robbins, and I think I was about 16 when I read that, just stumbling upon just one of the diet books that I was reading.

But he was the first to write about the connection, the interconnections between diet animals, our health and the environment. He told the story on my podcast how the publishers were like, you can’t talk about all that, just choose one. But it was so profound. I say this in audiences that I’ve spoken around the world and everyone’s like, me Too. That was the book. So many people shifted because of that book. So when I read that book, I was like, wow, I don’t want to contribute to what’s happening to animals. To me, that’s what resonated because I loved animals so much. And so I’m like, okay, I’m, I’m not going to eat animals. And my mom was like, you’re going to be a veg. What are you talking about? And I didn’t cook. I was like a little girl. She never taught me how to cook.

So I was eating rice cakes and granola bars and whatever I can get my hands on that didn’t have animal product in it. And then I had what my, I like to refer to as my intervention that was staged by my parents and our family friend Kendra, the nurse. And they took me out to a steakhouse and ordered me a teriyaki steak with a pineapple ring on top. And Kendra proceeded to tell me how I’m going to be deficient in protein and iron and all the things. And I was listening to her. But I remember looking at that steak and trying to cut into it. And all I could think about is once, you know, can’t unknow. And it was a really hard first bite to swallow, but I did. And I went back to normal and everyone, I grew up eating animals and whatever, but I just knew that there had to be more to this story that you weren’t hearing headlines about vegetarians dying from deficiencies.

So I was still, that just planted a lot of seeds and I wanted to learn more. So fast forward I was acting and they told me to lose weight again. And so then I became a trainer because I fell in love with personal training. And then the day I started personal training and people were asking me about nutrition, and I didn’t want to just spit back the information I had memorized in the chapter in the personal training handbook, which is what all that personal trainers really have. And I wanted to know what I was saying and why. And so I signed up and got into grad school and that was it. I absolutely loved it. I learned everything. It was the first time in my life I got straight, I was loving school. And then when I finished, I was ready to go back into the research with this ability to analyze statistics and all that and no physiology and nutrition, all that.

And that was when I’m like, you know what? I’m ready. I’m going for it. And I transitioned my diet finally. This was many, many years later, and my entire health changed. I completely got rid of lifelong sinus infections, acne that no matter what I did for my skin would not go away. Stomach aches that I had my entire life gone. Everything was gone and better. And that was it. So then I transitioned my practice, and I’ll tell you the honest truth, and I’m still on the public eye, and I’ve done tv, I’ve had movies and TV shows, and I’ve done all of that stuff. I’m on stage all the time. And it’s weird because just back to your question, I know this is long winded, but I think it, to tie it back to what you asked me originally, is that every job I’ve ever had, okay, every career I’ve had a dancer, an actress, a personal trainer, and a dietician, people literally look me up and down and decide whether they’re going to listen to me. So to be perfectly honest, you know, teach what you want to learn. And I struggle with the body image to this day, but that’s why I love talking about it, and that’s why I’m trying to make it more of a normal environment and a safe thing to talk about in a safe world to spend my time in. But it’s a constant interesting thing. But I also, that’s why I empathize so easily with all of my clients, and that’s why I’m so grateful and privileged to do work that I do.

Ella Magers:

Yeah, there’s something so refreshing and so powerful about your willingness to talk about it, to get it out there. And Brene Bound says that shame doesn’t live. Shame lives in silence, that it’s survive spoken words. So thank you, number one for doing the work that you do. It’s so important. What do you think? And you didn’t always love cooking either, and I think this is interesting because now you’ve got all these recipes books out there, and you seem very passionate about the cooking angle. Can you share that relationship with just being in the kitchen?

Julieanna Hever:

I have to say, first of all, I’m so grateful for your questions because they’re very unique questions that I don’t often get asked. And I, it’s really, I love this. I love talking about this stuff, and I’m grateful for these questions. So thank you. Yes, my mom, I love my mom dearly. I’m going to go hang out with her tonight. But she is interesting about food and you know, learn from your environment. And she would, it would be a very stressful thing if she was making a recipe. It was like all day, it was about this recipe, and don’t talk to me. I can’t do anything. What am I doing today? I’m making dinner. It was a whole stressful thing about F she would kill me if she heard me say that. I’ve talked about her. There’s a little bit and audiences that she’s witnessed and she gets very mad.

But it’s true. It was my perspective that it was stressful for her. And she had to follow a recipe and which she would entertain. We had a lot of dinner parties and stuff growing up, and it was a whole day, a week of stress and all that. So I was never taught like, oh, this is how you just put food together. And it was a very stressful, and I wasn’t welcome in the kitchen, so I didn’t really appreciate anything about cooking, but I learned how to cook healthy because I was always obsessed with healthy and I was reading and I wasn’t acting, and I had to be on a diet or whatever. So fast forward to, I finished grad school, I started teaching nutrition and blogging, and an agent reached out for me to write a book. And my mom always said I was going to write a book, and I always wanted to write a book, and I didn’t know what it was going to be.

And I was offered, I auditioned, I guess I, I had to write a table contents and a first chapter and all that, but I got this job. So my job was to write a book. I had two toddlers, two little babies that I was a full-time caretaker of. I was home with them, and I had six weeks to write an entire book that I’d never written a book before. And oh, by the way, 50 recipes. And I’m like, wait, well, I’d already signed the contract. Are you talking about I don’t know how to cook, let design recipes. And I have six weeks. It was so, I’m like, I know physiology, I know statistics, I know nutrition, but what are you talking about? But I’m a girl that will take a challenge. I will not say no to a good challenge like that. So I was determined and there weren’t a lot of books out there, but I think we decided, we realized that plant-based nutrition or plant-based in the title, I think my book was the first one to have that in the title.

That’s a whole other story. But that was it. I was on a mission, I, I was up at 4:00 AM typing and in the kitchen, just chaos. But I did it. I got my 50 recipes. I had a girlfriend who was helping me. She’s like, here, try this. And she was helping me on this side. It was really nice. But anyway, now fast forward, that was in like 2009. So now I literally will go to the kitchen to relax. I have nothing to prepare for. I just want to cook. So I’ll make food for the week or for someone else. I’ll bring it to people. It has become my happy place. I put on a blog, I mean a podcast, and I’m chopping, and that is how I relax now. So it’s become something I’m very, very, very passionate about.

Ella Magers:

Is your mom happy that you’re happy in the kitchen now?

Julieanna Hever:

Yes. Well, I don’t think she just, that doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand anything I do. It’s hilarious. She’ll come to my, she came, I was speaking recently, and she was there and she’s like, like, I didn’t know that if you ate leafy green vegetables, you could redo. I mean, stuff I’ve said a million times. Like, oh mom, she, she’s just my mom. She’s very unique.

Ella Magers:

Now, was that the Idiot’s Guide that you were talking about, and I had listened to you talk about this at one point, that it was supposed to be vegan in the title, was that right?

Julieanna Hever:

Did, yes, exactly.

Ella Magers:

Can you talk about that?

Julieanna Hever:

Yes. I was asked to write the complete idiot Skype to Vegan Nutrition. So got the job, started writing it, and I’m like, at this time I was having conversations, some wonderful mentoring type of conversations with Dr. Tko and Campbell. I started teaching at his course and stuff. And then at that same time, that’s when, I don’t know if you were watching this, but when Essel, ston and Ornish were on the news with Sanjay Gupta talking about how they saved Bill Clinton’s, I don’t remember who exactly was there, but I remember plant-based was in the news and I told my agent, there’s my daughter, hi honey. I told my agent that I want to write the plant-based nutrition book. I don’t want to say vegan because I’m not an ethicist and I don’t know about the ethics behind it for anyone else. And I didn’t want to talk about that.

I wanted to talk about it from the whole food plant-based inclusive perspective. And my agent’s like, oh honey, they’re never going to change the title. So I wrote this whole proposal of why and all the reasons that I thought it was going to be a really important term. And I was the first plant-based dietician because it just wasn’t a thing Dr. TCO Campbell coined, but it has since, I mean, it was their best selling title for the Idiots Guides. We had to do a sec, I did a second edition of it. It’s sold over 150,000 copies. It’s, it became a thing. And now plant-based nutrition is, there are plant-based dieticians and plant-based is such a ubiquitous term that it’s quite exciting.

Ella Magers:

Oh, it’s so cool. And I have to tell you, I’m striving to still now, I have a very similar experience when the publisher asked me to write a book and talked about recipes, and they were like, you’ve got to have so many recipes you can use. And I’m somebody who boils peas and just eats a big bowl of peas. So I can totally relate of just being like, oh, no, just because I’m vegan and about nutrition doesn’t mean I know how to cook. So I am definitely want to get to that space of having it be, it sounds like it’s kind of like a meditation or a therapy for you at this point.

Julieanna Hever:

It is. And you know what, I always tell everyone, if I could do this and write books about it and now nine books later, anyone could do it. And so my goal is to make it simple for everyone else too. And I think the simpler foods are healthier anyway, so I love the idea of baking, making a batch of peas and just eating that. And that’s going to be a really good, healthy habit anyway.

Ella Magers:

Yes. Well, I would love to talk to a little, to our audience who maybe is still on the precipice of being vegan, who’s vegan, curious. And I know you talk in that book a little bit about pitfalls, and maybe you can go into just a few of the pitfalls that people have when they decide to go vegan. And one of the things also the car phobia, the fat phobia, these things that really maybe prevent people from taking the leap to go fully. How do you help guide people that are in that place?

Julieanna Hever:

Okay, well, I don’t even know where to begin because there’s so much to talk about there. I’ll try to think of the most important things. I would say that number one, if you’re playing curious, I would say let go of the idea that you have to be perfect because there is literally no such thing as a perfect diet. It doesn’t exist if you want to tell, I call it macro confusion because it is the number one reason people are so confused about nutrition all the way up to the researcher and healthcare professional levels. And I give the example that in 2018, and this is just one example, there was a study published in the Lancet Journal that concluded that both high carbohydrate diets and low carbohydrate diets increase mortality.

What the heck does that? What do you do with that information? And then I always talk about what’s a carb? Nobody knows what a carbon is. Everyone that answers that is wrong because a potato has a better amino acid score than 90% lean beef. It has protein, it has a little fat. The only time you could ever get pure carb would be pure sugar or oil is pure fat, but every food is some combination. The other thing about specifically carbohydrates is in those studies that make everyone so confused, they put, if you have a carbohydrate, carbohydrate meal, I think in my last book I compared a candy bar to, or a donut to whatever it was, two things that were iso caloric. They had the same amount and then the same amount of carbohydrates, but they’re metabolized completely different. A piece of candy is not metabolized the same way as a piece of fruit, even if they have very similar macronutrient ratios.

I don’t know if they do, but I’m just throwing that out there. So it’s irrelevant. Macros are irrelevant. Another part of that, we don’t even ever, we’ve never established the perfect macronutrient nutrient ratio. People do incredible on low fat diets, high carbohydrate diets like the Okinawan, that’s like one of the healthiest populations of all time. But we also see a lot of amazing health benefits from the Mediterranean diet, which is a high-fat diet. So it doesn’t matter. I would tell everyone to stop worrying about macros, just completely stop thinking about it. We need to change the conversation back to food. So I like to say instead of that, just eat a diet based on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, mushrooms, nuts, seeds, herbs and spices and infinite tasty combinations, and keep it super simple. The other thing I tell people that I think is a pitfall is a concern for, well, what exactly should I eat and what?

What should I eat? And I think that most, and how am I going to change over all of my diet? Well, first of all, we are creatures of habit, and most of us consume and rotate through maybe one or two different breakfasts, maybe two to four different types of lunches, maybe five to six different dinners in a week. So if you add all that up, really, you only need a new repertoire of about 10 recipes. It just start simple. The other thing about that is your new favorite recipes that are plant-based. The other thing is that we’ve been eating plant-based things our whole lives. We just never talked about it or thought about it like that, like a pb and j or pasta with marinara sauce or bean and rice burrito, or there’s so many things that can go on and on. So go back to what you’re familiar with.

Don’t make it complicated. And the final thing I would say, I mean there’s a million things we could debunk, but is just, you know, don’t have to reinvent the will. You don’t have to write a book in six weeks and have all new 50 recipes. It’s been done for you. And nowadays with the internet and the search engines that are so incredible and the bazillions of people that are making plant-based recipes out there, all you do is type it into the search engine. Say, let’s say you want to have, I don’t know, a frittata or whatever. So just put in whole food plant-based frittata, and you will get hundreds of recipes. So look for something that looks good, read the recipe, make sure you have all the ingredients. If not, go get them. Make sure you understand the instructions and then just follow it verbatim. Use it as a template, and then if you don’t like it, you could adjust it or you could switch it. I, I remember I started a list of recipes that I loved, and if it met all my criteria, and I loved it, especially if my kids loved it, it got a little hard and it went into a special pile and the other, and I just kept looking and I just slowly built, and then you could just expand your repertoire as your skills and your palette develops.

Ella Magers:

Man, we could talk for hours. We might have to have you back on here because one of the reasons I really wanted to have you particularly on here talk about food and eating is because how you talk about it is so empowering to people and it’s the way you talk about food and making changes and transformation. And so let’s take a pin out of that aging thing, because that’s another thing. There’s certain things, and we talk about aging with grace, what that looks like, and being compassionate to ourselves. Let’s go back to what shifts you’re making for yourself and then thereby helping clients make as you age. I mean, there are things that we just have control over, and there are things that we don’t, I mean, we’ve got to be compassionate to ourselves. What are the things that are most challenging to you and your clients, and how are you helping people overcome that?

Julieanna Hever:

Oh, this is a great topic and I really love to talk about, I was taught this and now I teach it the concept of radical self-compassion and radical self-acceptance, because here we are. And so I was a runner. I ran a marathon. I loved running. My husband got me into running, and we used to run, it was our bonding thing. And I can no longer run. It hurts. Things hurt when I run. Now, I used to be able to do the splits in all three directions up until recently, but then I had an injury that now I can’t do the splits in any direction. And there’s things that it just, it’s so frustrating and sad and it’s like, I want to bring that back so bad. But then you have to get to the point where it’s like, well, why do you, isn’t everything the one thing in life?

And I’m not a master of this by any stretch of the imagination, but the only thing we could rely on in life is change. It’s always going to happen. Nothing stays the same. And my daughter that just came home, she’s going off to college. I mean, I can’t even wrap my brain around the fact that my little baby is going to college now and it’s going to make me cry because I can’t, can’t even imagine. She’s going to be far away from home and I just can’t even imagine. But everything changes and you just have to kind of accept it. But so what I’m doing for myself and what I try to help my clients with is find the things that make you happy. Now. So if I have to do lighter exercise, but it still makes me feel good, it’s not about pushing harder because I’m not going to win any races.

No, I don’t get any more stars in life or more money if I stretch further or if I’m able to run or So it’s like what feels good and I’m trying to renegotiate those things for myself. So definitely the fitness thing has been the hardest for me. I mean, I’m still a trainer technically, and I can’t do it. I used to be crazy strong, so I’m sad and I’m, I’ve mourned that loss, and now I’m just trying to embrace what does feel good. And every day I’m like, okay, what I’m teaching myself this too. It’s like, what do I want to do right now? And it’s weird. My kids live with their dad, so I’m like, I have my own home. And at first I was like, this suck. I live alone for the first time in my life, but this is so cool. So now I’ve kind of changed that too.

I’m like, well, actually I have a little bachelorette pad. I could do whatever I want whenever I want so I can cook at nine o’clock at night or so. I’m embracing all the things that have been dramatically changed. And what I’ve been doing every day is practicing, well, what do I want to do right now? Because I could work more, I could do this. And I’m giving myself more options and reading more. And so I’m just trying to stay more present. And that’s what I wrote about in the last book, and that’s what I’m really trying to work on and teach because it reminds me to do it, to just be more focused on what can I do right now to feel good and do the best that I can right now with what I have and where I am right now.

Ella Magers:

It’s so powerful. I love that. When you were writing this new book, it sounds like this is just was so personal. Was there, was it emotional to write the book? Were there parts that really brought up kind of things inside you that you needed feel like you needed to explore more?

Julieanna Hever:

Yes. I’ve always wanted to write this book. This last book was I’ve always wanted to, because the idiots guys are templates and it’s very factual. No me in it really. But the more I got to write with my voice, the more I felt ownership of my story, my personal story, and I just started lecturing about it. So I gave my talk is the Choosing Now diet, and I gave it for the first time on Zoom, which is not the same. And finally I was just able to give it to a live audience and it felt so vulnerable, talk about Brene Brown and feeling so vulnerable. But then a lot of people afterwards were resonating with the story and then connecting with it. And I feel like, well, I’m not alone. I’m not the only one to have experienced these things. And if I could help someone else because they don’t feel alone by hearing that someone else has gone through it, I feel like that’s what an honor to be able to do that kind of work where you’re be able to connect with other people because I, we all just want to help make the world a better place.

And so if I could be vulnerable and it’s out there, it’s who I am, it’s my truth. And trying to just be comfortable in it.

Ella Magers:

Yeah. Well, I think our philosophies aligned so much. And one thing I’d love to do on this podcast is also talk about the things that I’m less maybe familiar with or different ways of looking at things. And one of those things I think is your philosophy around the scale and weighing ourselves. Could you talk a little bit about that? I’m really interested.

Julieanna Hever:

Yes, I know it’s very controversial and divisive. I would say divisive. A lot of people are passionate about it either way to weigh or not to weigh. So like I said at the very beginning, my goal is to get rid of any guilt or shame surrounding our bodies. And so the way I look at the scale is a form of accountability and information. We’re just looking at it for information because I see, so now I’ve worked with, in 18 years of practicing one-on-one, and even not even including my audiences and the people that I’ve reached out, I’ve talked to me on social media, but my one-on-one clients, I’ve worked with thousands of people at this point in very intimate setting. And every time, and even from my audiences, I could say this too, people that they don’t want to know because it’s like they just don’t want to know or because they have all this judgment about it and then it just, they’re not getting to what they want.

They’re not getting their goals met because they’re not, they’re just don’t want to look at it. And so my goal is like, look, this is just information and if you’re looking at it, you’ll know what happens when you eat this and what happens when that you eat that. But the scale is an inanimate object and it’s not looking up bit you and saying, oh, you got to cut out those snacks my dance teacher did. But it’s basically just information. And if you could look at it and try to dissociate the emotion from it, and I ask my clients to give me the burden of monitoring their rate of loss because most people come to me nowadays. I’m doing a lot of weight loss transformation. And so let me deal with that. I don’t want you to worry about it because there’s going to be fluctuations and stuff happens, but I just want to see that we’re trending down. So I guess my goal is to just not have an emo just to let go of the emotion around it and use it as a source of information.

Ella Magers:

Got it. Yes. It’s taking the charge out of that number and taking the emotion out of it

Julieanna Hever:

Is what I’m hearing. Yeah. Cause honestly, yeah, and I understand why people feel the other way. I totally, I’ve gone back and forth, but it, it’s a charged thing, but it’s still just you and there. I always say the weight loss is just a side benefit of this process of eating healthier. The other things of feeling free, the liberation of is just a number that’s enormous or just not caring about those details don’t matter so much as how you feel. And the goal is to feel good and have healthy labs and to live your best life and have your energy and all that. And this is just one way to monitor and have accountability.

Ella Magers:

Do you have more people at this point coming to you with the main goal being weight loss over like disease prevention or healing from high cholesterol, blood pressure, heart disease at this point?

Julieanna Hever:

Well, it’s so interesting because those are comorbidities. Obesity is intricately laced to all of those other risk factors for disease. It is a risk factor for most diseases, yes. But I think because, especially since I wrote the last book and I’ve been talking a lot about weight loss and a lot of people go to dieticians generically just for weight loss. That tends to be the primary motive. But usually there’s side things that we’re trying to take care of. I, this week I had someone that was on lifelong, his entire adult life was on three blood pressure medications and within the first week got off all of them. And when people get off these me, when I was in grad school and my internship, I was taught that the role of a healthcare provider is to mitigate the progression of the disease or to mitigate the need to increase the dosing of their medication. Never was it even possible that you could do the opposite and get off and recover. And I say results are typical. This is what happens. So again, weight loss is a side effect, but people come, it depends on what the emphasis is, but it all goes together so beautifully.

Ella Magers:

It really does. One of the other things that is I think different about how your approach that is really makes a lot of sense is the stopping exercise when somebody’s on rapid on the plan for rapid weight loss. You talk about exercising appetite, can you explain that? And I think that might surprise a lot of people to hear and how your clients, when you tell them that what their response is,

Julieanna Hever:

That was the headline grabber when I was doing media for this book when it was released last year. And it sounds crazy, especially as a personal trainer, how could I say to limit your exercise, but the research supports it too. If you really look and how many people are killing themselves at the gym and they can’t lose the weight because it’s a hundred percent, the diet exercise is the most important thing for so many things. For avoiding sarcopenia, for bone health, for muscle strength, for heart health, for everything you need to exercise for short. But what I do with my client is we do the rapid weight loss. Most people, I work with people that don’t want to go this fast. I, it’s up to them. I will literally never tell anyone what to do. I will not tell someone what to eat. I will not tell someone what to do with their pacing, their nothing.

I will support you to meet your goals. And I’ll tell you the trends. So the trends are if you cut it out and my clients lose 0.4 to 0.8 pounds a day on this rapid weight loss consistently until the end, maybe the last five pounds are a little slower because every pound is a little bit bigger percentage of your body weight as you get down there. But so some people really want to exercise and go slow, then all you do that, that’s great. It’s still men. A lot of people need it for mental, I mean, we all need it for mental wellbeing to exercise, but if people are willing to just go slow, they’ll walk their dogs or do some yoga or Pilates or stretching or stuff like that and they can still lose the same amount of weight. But I found consistently, now I told you I’ve worked with so many people and I’ve tracked their rate of loss.

It has the rate of loss if they’re really exercising a lot. So you can do it, but it’s easier to, and also it’s just easier just relax. And a lot of people, what’s so cool is a lot of people, especially though I work with people that have to lose a hundred hundred 50 pounds, they’re have a lot of stress on their joints and they have a lot of inflammation. And so during this process that we take off a few months, get the weight off, and all of a sudden their inflammation goes away and they’re better and able to exercise stronger and feel better and lighter. So it’s kind of like a win-win type of healing modality as well.

Ella Magers:

Can we talk a little bit about intermittent fasting next? Because that’s another one that there’s seems to be so much research kind of in, well, I don’t know, maybe more on the Yes, that’s the way to go. You would know. So I would love to hear clear that, clear that up a little bit.

Julieanna Hever:

Well, I think that data is still relatively fresh. The data on fasting are huge centuries of fasting data where people are going for long-term fast, obviously medically supervised if it’s longer. But because of all of that, what’s so interesting, a lot of people don’t want to f I hate fasting. I love to eat. So it’s like torture, whatever. I’m try. I’ve tried to fast. I don’t really like it at all. But what’s so cool is that we’re finding, especially they’re doing, there’s a lot of animal study, a lot of rat Rodan studies on this. And I think the in the information is starting to trickle out in humans now where you can get a lot of, or most of maybe all of, I dunno about all of, but because again, it’s still kind of newish in the human data. The benefits of long-term fasting are longer term fasting by just incorporating it into a little less painful way by just doing a little bit every day.

Or some people, there’s so many ways to do this. People do alternate one, there’s all these different versions of it. We don’t know what’s better, what works. But whatever works for you is what I would recommend. I love it. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I try to eat once or twice a day and I always at the same time, which mitigates the hunger and then I’m fasted for either 18 to 23 hours a day and I feel great and I sleep better. But that’s just end of one experiment. But if you would’ve told me I would’ve loved this several years ago, I would’ve thought that’s insane because I was the personal trainer eating every two hours of chase my metabolism. But the initial data seemed to show that time in the rested state, when you’re not digesting and absorbing, meaning four to six hours after your last bite, that’s when you go into the fasted state and start tapping into glycogen stores.

There’s a lot of time for your body and energy to go and do all the metabolic housework that it really needs to do. Getting rid of bad cells and apoptosis and cancer cells and all the things. So it’s like it gives your body time to do the things it needs to do. And that seems to be why it’s so beneficial. And most people are chronically overfed because we’re eating from the time we wake up until the time we go to bed, and then we barely have enough time to slip into that fasted state before we have to wake up again and start all over because of that four to six hour window. And so that’s not healthy either to be chronically undernourished. And I think that’s one of the biggest problems in leading to all these chronic conditions. So time restricted eating is a really cool thing and a lot of people don’t think that they could do it, myself included, are so blown away with how easy it is once they practice it for a few days and then it just becomes like a, they never want to do anything else because also less time in the kitchen, less time eating, less time.

There’s just more time to do the rest of your things that you want to do in your day. You could still get sufficient nutrition and calorie and have energy and do marathons and all the things.

Ella Magers:

When you do that, do you still try to stop when you’re 80% full? And then how hungry are you? Because I’m not, I do definitely 12 hours between dinner and breakfast, but I generally eat when I’m hungry. So do you still do go by the 80% rule?

Julieanna Hever:

I love these questions so much. You have such great questions. Okay, so yes, I talk about hara huci Boo, 80% full in reran diet. I was a very big proponent of that. And yes, I mean, you don’t ever want to get stuffed, but the thing about hunger, so hunger is a tidier, two very different animals, although it doesn’t, they sounds like it’s the same thing, but it’s like two sides of the same coin, but they’re very, very different. So tidy is a very challenge. I think it’s the most challenging thing for most people just being done stopping when it’s just enough like haha, Chik. But hunger is very interesting because you can get rid of hunger by training your circadian clock, by eating at the same time every day. Now this is, people think, well, weekends are D, just plan as close as you can to every day the same time.

And then your body within three or four days acclimates, and it’s like, oh, I’m eating in an hour and you’ll start being really hungry. I’m not hungry after, I’m just not, especially, that’s why I really like one meal a day. Sometimes I’ll eat just because for social reasons, that second meal. But I usually don’t need to eat the second meal. And I’ve learned how much I need to eat to feel satiated, which foods satiate me the best. But the hunger thing is really interesting, and I never encourage anyone to eat when they’re not hungry. But the 80% thing I think is wonderful, just feeling, just eating. I always say eat until it’s just enough.

Ella Magers:

And then how you’re eating to be able to do that. The mindfulness piece, how do you describe that to clients and help them because it’s so hard to, once you get it, you’ve got it right and then don’t, it’s your natural way of eating. It’s your new automated programming. But to get to that place where that’s your norm is tough for a lot of people. How do you help people get there? And what is mindful eating to you?

Julieanna Hever:

Great question again. And even if you do know how to do it, that doesn’t mean that life’s not going to disrupt you at most of your meals. If you’re at social outing, it’s very hard to be mindful. But I actually did a meditation at my podcast called a Mindful Eating podcast. It was like a 10 minute mindful eating meditation, whatever. And it was about the experience. So here’s what an ideal way of looking at it that I think of when I think of a mindful meal. First of all, you’re choosing what you’re eating from a nourishment perspective, that it’s healthy, that you love it. I feel like if you don’t love your food, you’ll never stick to anything. So you have to find the recipes you love. And I love your food. That’s number one. So you pick according to what you want to eat, you set the setting.

So sometimes I make sure I even have to discipline myself to shut my screen because I’m trying to get stuff done. I’m like, no, no, no, I don’t even ta. You don’t taste your food if you ever Brian Wing’s work or you’re, you’re eating the whole popcorn bag or the soup that keeps refilling and you just keep eating it because you’re not paying attention. So I try to set the stage, put on nice music or make it super quiet. No TVs in the background. No, shut all the screens. If you’re with someone, you want it to be as calm as possible. I know people have kids and lives and work. And so you do this as best as you can, and it’s not a perfect thing. And then the other thing that most people don’t do well enough, myself included most of the time, is chewing.

We don’t chew enough. We swallow too fast. We’re rushing. So if you could really taste your food, and when I was 13, I was acting and I did a play in Japan. We were touring in Japan. It was such an extraordinary opportunity of, oh my gosh, and I was blown away with how beautiful the food was. And I’d walk through those windows at the restaurants and they’d have the little mock, the picture, their food made out of plastic or whatever it was to show what they had at the restaurant. And I was like, wow, that’s so incredible. And I learned that that’s what sushi is all about. It’s about the art in Japanese cuisine is all about what it looks like and the smells and the so everything. It’s just so beautiful. So if you engage all of your senses, really look at your food, smell your food, taste your fu, chew your food, swallow, feel the whole process. It’s a real exciting experience. And you take the food tastes better like that, and you remember it and it’s more satisfying. You eat less. It’s kind of an extraordinary thing if you just tried. And I think you’ll see the difference if you haven’t already.

Ella Magers:

Well, Juliana, this has been so fascinating. I just love your energy and your passion. Can you also talk a little bit about the diet ebook bundle, the Choose You Now diet ebook bundle that you have available?

Julieanna Hever:

Oh yes, thank you. I just put this together because, well, I’m doing these groups. I’ve been doing these groups. I just started one this week like a challenge, a Choose You Now challenge, because I always say transformation can literally can transcend in just a few days. You just need to focus in on it. So I basically put it all into a little packet, a bundle of, I did a 21 day challenge, which is basically a summary of my book of the Choose You Now Diet and is that most of my clients seem to do the best with. And I, before that, I’d done my 10 favorite recipes because those seem to be the ones that my clients just do the best with that filler four buckets. They love it. It’s satisfying. Satiating goes through your GI tract well, and that the scale goes down. And then I did a workbook to help work through a lot of the exercises because my thought that whole principle behind treat you now was whole food, plant-based diet plus time-restricted eating, plus mindfulness. So there’s a lot of exercises. And I would say the more you engage in it, the more you get out of it. So I put that all together in three little eBooks that is now available, my website too.

Ella Magers:

Amazing. And how can people find you and find this ebook bundle?

Julieanna Hever:

Well, thank you. Everything is on plant-based dietician.com. All my social media channels are, you can find them there. And I’m all on all the social media channels and I love answering questions. I love when people reach out. So feel free to reach out.

Ella Magers:

Amazing. We’ll, of course, put all that in the show notes. It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here and for sharing all your wisdom and just your personal, your personality with us.

Julieanna Hever:

Thank you. Honestly, I really loved your questions. I’m really grateful for the opportunity. It’s really wonderful to meet you.

Ella Magers:

That means the world. Thank you.