Ever feel like you’re drowning in obligations and losing sight of yourself in the process? In this episode of Thrive Beyond Size, we’re getting real about boundaries: why they matter and how they can completely transform the way you protect your time, energy, and emotional well-being. Whether you’re constantly saying yes to things you don’t have the capacity for or you’re tired of unsolicited comments about your body, setting clear boundaries is the ultimate form of self-care.

I share my own recent struggles with honouring my energy and time and why I believe boundaries are an act of self-care, not selfishness. We’ll talk about how to reclaim your space, push back against the pressure to always say yes, and confidently handle those oh-so-annoying body comments. If you’re ready to protect your peace, set some limits, and prioritize what truly matters to you, this episode will give you the tools (and the permission!) to do just that. Let's get into it.

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About Dr. Michelle Tubman:

Dr. Michelle Tubman is certified by the American Board of Obesity Medicine, which means she understands exactly what's happening in your body when you diet. Although she does not provide any medical advice in her coaching programs, this knowledge gives her an edge over most coaches.

She also holds Level 1 and Level 2 Precision Nutrition coaching certifications which make her skilled at coaching nutrition, dietary change, and habit change in general. Realizing that emotional eating and bingeing are complicated for most of us, she also did training in mind-body and intuitive eating. Peace around food is possible.

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Learn more about Dr. Michelle Tubman and Wayza Health:

• Website: www.wayzahealth.com
• Follow me on Facebook and Instagram
• Email Michelle: michelle@wayzahealth.com

Hey friends, welcome back to Thrive Beyond Size! Today, we’re pulling back the curtain on a hot topic: intuitive eating. With so many programs jumping on the bandwagon, it's time we sift through the confusion and uncover what true intuitive eating is all about and how to spot when diet culture is sneaking in to steal the show. So, we’re going to break it down together and talk about what real intuitive eating is and how to spot when it’s being co-opted by diet culture.

Intuitive eating is about learning to trust your body’s signals, practicing self-compassion, and letting go of the idea that your worth is tied to your weight. But when intuitive eating gets mixed with diet culture, it can lead you right back into the same cycle of restriction and shame that you’re trying to break free from.

I’ll guide you through 10 signs to help identify when claims of "intuitive eating" may not be the real deal. If you see weight loss as the primary goal, labels of “good” and “bad” foods, or any strict rules about when or what you can eat, it’s not true intuitive eating. We’re talking about tuning into your body’s needs, enjoying food without guilt, and reconnecting with your body in a freeing but not restrictive way. By the end of this episode, you’ll have the tools to spot when something’s not quite right and confidently stay true to the empowering principles of intuitive eating!

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About Dr. Michelle Tubman:

Dr. Michelle Tubman is certified by the American Board of Obesity Medicine, which means she understands exactly what's happening in your body when you diet. Although she does not provide any medical advice in her coaching programs, this knowledge gives her an edge over most coaches.

She also holds Level 1 and Level 2 Precision Nutrition coaching certifications which make her skilled at coaching nutrition, dietary change, and habit change in general. Realizing that emotional eating and bingeing are complicated for most of us, she also did training in mind-body and intuitive eating. Peace around food is possible.

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Learn more about Dr. Michelle Tubman and Wayza Health:

• Website: www.wayzahealth.com
• Follow me on Facebook and Instagram
• Email Michelle: michelle@wayzahealth.com

Hello friends, and welcome back to the podcast! I’m going to start with a question so obvious that it sounds laughable: how do you know when you have to pee? That sounds wild, right? But can you feel your heart beating? Not your pulse with your fingers, but just the beating of your heart inside you? How can you tell if you’re hungry? Or full? There is an answer to these questions and it’s a topic called interoception. Interoception is your body’s ability to sense its internal states. Hunger, thirst, pain and even needing to take a deep breath. That’s interoception. It’s your body’s way of communicating needs to your brain. And it’s a key component of intuitive eating which is why I’m going to talk all about it today.

When you are better in tune with your internal signals, you are better able to practice intuitive eating. But we live in a culture that encourages us to ignore our body signals in favour of relying on external rules to guide our eating. Things like the “right time” of day to eat, not snacking between meals, and finishing everything on our plates even if we’re full, are all rigid rules we put in place to control our bodies and they effectively make us a lot less aware of our interoception cues than we should be. How can we develop our internal awareness again? How can we learn to step outside of the rules we’ve arbitrarily laid out so we can tune into our own bodies? That’s what I want to talk about. Being aware of interoception is a skill that 100% can be developed with practice. So join me as I share tips, advice, and practices on how to strengthen your interoceptive awareness.

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About Dr. Michelle Tubman:

Dr. Michelle Tubman is certified by the American Board of Obesity Medicine, which means she understands exactly what's happening in your body when you diet. Although she does not provide any medical advice in her coaching programs, this knowledge gives her an edge over most coaches.

She also holds Level 1 and Level 2 Precision Nutrition coaching certifications which make her skilled at coaching nutrition, dietary change, and habit change in general. Realizing that emotional eating and bingeing are complicated for most of us, she also did training in mind-body and intuitive eating. Peace around food is possible.

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Learn more about Dr. Michelle Tubman and Wayza Health:

• Website: www.wayzahealth.com
• Follow me on Facebook and Instagram
• Email Michelle: michelle@wayzahealth.com

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode. Today I really want to talk about something important that starts with a personal story. The story is from when Rob and I were camping a couple of weeks ago and has to do with how I felt about shopping for and trying on clothes in my favorite clothing store in Canmore. I love a certain brand and I know they fit well but I decided to try on a new brand in my size and it did not flatter at all. It was constricting and felt terrible. And I had already felt out of place walking in because I’d come straight off a hike with Rob and was dusty and in hiking gear. All of this culminated in this thought popping into my head: “I feel fat.” And I want to talk about what we actually mean when we think that. I want to break that down and take away its power today.

The truth is that when we say we “feel fat” we are actually talking about something else. Because fat is not a feeling. It’s not an emotion. But the word ‘fat’ does carry a lot of weight in our thin-obsessed society and it is a loaded term. We use it to express feelings of inadequacy or discomfort or, in my case, even failure. So I want us to think about what we’re really saying when we say “I feel fat”. When I said that, I projected all my feelings onto my body. I projected society’s idea of fatness as equal to being undesirable or worthless onto my own body. But my body was not the problem. My emotions were what I needed to deal with. Let me say that directly to each of you. Just because you feel discomfort in your body doesn’t mean your body is the problem. I want to help you shift your focus away from blaming your body and help you build a more compassionate relationship with it. I want to help reframe what we mean when we say “I feel fat”. Join me in this episode as I unpack what’s really behind that sentence and how we can remove our bodies as the target of our emotions.

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About Dr. Michelle Tubman:

Dr. Michelle Tubman is certified by the American Board of Obesity Medicine, which means she understands exactly what's happening in your body when you diet. Although she does not provide any medical advice in her coaching programs, this knowledge gives her an edge over most coaches.

She also holds Level 1 and Level 2 Precision Nutrition coaching certifications which make her skilled at coaching nutrition, dietary change, and habit change in general. Realizing that emotional eating and bingeing are complicated for most of us, she also did training in mind-body and intuitive eating. Peace around food is possible.

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Learn more about Dr. Michelle Tubman and Wayza Health:

• Website: www.wayzahealth.com
• Follow me on Facebook and Instagram
• Email Michelle: michelle@wayzahealth.com

Hello again, friends! I want to confess something to you all today. I’m not perfect. The past week was terrible for my intuitive eating practice, I just haven’t been doing it, and I’m only just getting back on track now. That’s what I want to confess. What I want to share is my experience with why I fell out of my practice this week and how intuitive eating is a journey and not a destination. I want you to understand what is important to know about yourself and intuitive eating before you start and I believe sharing my struggles with you will be helpful for all of us. So here it is, how the week from hell made me fall out of intuitive eating.

The week started with my husband Rob and I coming home from camping. When we’re camping, I’m really good at intuitive eating. We have to plan what to bring, I’m not stressed, I can listen to my body, it’s a beautiful thing. But we came home hungry to an empty kitchen. Not a big deal. We ordered pizza. And that’s allowed! Waking up for an early day the next morning is when things got tricky, though. We still didn’t have groceries, I didn’t have breakfast, I had a bunch of meetings and I was driving on an empty stomach. I ended up eating drive-thru and because Rob had a similarly busy day, we ordered pizza for dinner again. That’s how the week went. I couldn’t get on top of my schedule and I was so busy I was far too hungry to listen to my body and instead just grabbed whatever food I could to stop the hunger. This is what’s important to know about intuitive eating: you can’t do it when you feel starving. A hungry brain won’t let your body make intuitively good choices. And sometimes it’s just like that. It’s a journey, not a destination. So join me in this episode as I share what I know we’ve all experienced at some point and I encourage you to keep up with your own intuitive eating just like I’m doing.

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About Dr. Michelle Tubman:

Dr. Michelle Tubman is certified by the American Board of Obesity Medicine, which means she understands exactly what's happening in your body when you diet. Although she does not provide any medical advice in her coaching programs, this knowledge gives her an edge over most coaches.

She also holds Level 1 and Level 2 Precision Nutrition coaching certifications which make her skilled at coaching nutrition, dietary change, and habit change in general. Realizing that emotional eating and bingeing are complicated for most of us, she also did training in mind-body and intuitive eating. Peace around food is possible.

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Learn more about Dr. Michelle Tubman and Wayza Health:

• Website: www.wayzahealth.com
• Follow me on Facebook and Instagram
• Email Michelle: michelle@wayzahealth.com

Hello there, friends. Welcome back to Thrive Beyond Size. As you probably guessed from the title, today I want to talk about Simone Biles, the world’s best and most decorated gymnast, who recently blew us away with her grace and incomparable physical skill in Paris. She won 3 gold and 1 silver medal in the Paris Olympics. But I think back on her bowing out of the Tokyo Olympics four years earlier as a different kind of shining example of courage and skill. She stepped down to take care of her mental health. She knew her body was ready but there was a disconnect in her mind and she acknowledged how important it was to be mentally ready too, to have mind and body work in harmony. That was a beautiful decision. But it must have been challenging for her to do. And that’s what I want to talk about, doing the difficult thing that’s best for us.

When I look at my own life struggle with diet culture and weight loss, and I hear the stories I’m privileged to have other women share with me, I often realize that the reason we aren’t taking charge of our health is because it’s too big of a change right now. It’s frightening. It’s hard. And what I now teach people to do is what I had to do myself. That is take a look at where we’ve been for years and years, the way we’ve treated and showed up for our bodies, and make that incredibly challenging decision, much like Simone Biles, to step down from all of that and embrace a new way of thinking. I talk about how part of the fear is the sunk cost fallacy, that we’ve already invested so much of our time into dieting that we don’t want it to be a waste, and part of it is that we’re terrified of giving our bodies what they actually need which is the idea behind intuitive eating. In order to change direction and take care of ourselves mind and body, we need to first make that big bold courageous decision to step away from dieting and embrace something different. Something healthier. So join me because we’re going to talk about exactly that in today’s episode. I’m going to share my journey and we’re going to explore what we can learn from Simone Biles.

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Resources mentioned in this episode:

• CNN: Simone Biles reflects on Tokyo Olympics in ‘Rising’
• Episode 137: Talking About Your Body in Relationships with Rob Issa

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About Dr. Michelle Tubman:

Dr. Michelle Tubman is certified by the American Board of Obesity Medicine, which means she understands exactly what's happening in your body when you diet. Although she does not provide any medical advice in her coaching programs, this knowledge gives her an edge over most coaches.

She also holds Level 1 and Level 2 Precision Nutrition coaching certifications which make her skilled at coaching nutrition, dietary change, and habit change in general. Realizing that emotional eating and bingeing are complicated for most of us, she also did training in mind-body and intuitive eating. Peace around food is possible.

As the old adage goes, how we do one thing is how we do everything. It's very true that how we do food is often how we do life too. And if we've been struggling with food and body image, there's a good chance that other domains of our lives are contributing - relationships, family, work, money, sexuality, stress. Michelle knows that coaching us through all of this is what leads to our true transformation - from the inside out.

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Learn more about Dr. Michelle Tubman and Wayza Health:

• Website: www.wayzahealth.com
• Follow me on Facebook and Instagram
• Email Michelle: michelle@wayzahealth.com

Hello friends! I am so excited to share this week’s episode with you. I interviewed the amazing Diana Dimmock, founder of Accessibility 4 Every Body, who I found in a Facebook group when I asked if anyone would be willing to share their stories of experiencing anti-fat bias or weight discrimination in healthcare. Diana wasn’t only willing, she was so articulate and had so many important points to make and such a strength for advocacy, that I knew I had to have her on the podcast right away. Diana shares personal experiences and also advice on how to advocate for yourself when navigating daily life.

Diana is a consultant who works with people with disabilities and people who live in larger bodies to assist them in learning to advocate for themselves with businesses, governmental agencies, and public spaces. Diana says she takes her life experience as a fat person and her own honed ability to advocate for herself and applies that to other people. We share stories about times when we’ve come up against fat bias or weight discrimination. Diana also shares how advocacy can affect change by relating a story about a business that changed everything to accommodate bigger bodies due to a comment she made. One very important aspect of what we discussed was how to learn to advocate for ourselves, even when it’s hard, even when we’re afraid of being shamed. Diana shared a list of how to prepare and assess your readiness for advocacy, and things to evaluate: 1. Awareness, 2. Get curious, 3. Look at the best options, 4. Capacity, and 5. Follow up. Our conversation is vulnerable but hopeful, full of lived experience and a determination not to be silenced on what we need. Perhaps Diana said it best when she said “Our bodies are not a problem to be fixed.”

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About Diana Dimmock:

Diana Dimmock is the founder of Accessibility 4 Every Body, a consulting service dedicated to educating and advocating for individuals with disabilities as well as promoting inclusivity for people of all body sizes. Accessibility 4 Every Body provides educational resources that raise public awareness and empower individuals to effectively articulate their concerns regarding the inclusion of larger bodies within businesses and regulatory agencies.

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Resources discussed in this episode:

• Bare Affair Waxing in Sherwood Park, Alberta

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Learn more about Diana Dimmock:

• LinkedIn: Diana D
• Facebook: Accessibility 4 Every Body

Learn more about Dr. Michelle Tubman and Wayza Health:

• Website: www.wayzahealth.com
• Follow me on Facebook and Instagram
• Email Michelle: michelle@wayzahealth.com

Welcome back to Thrive Beyond Size! This week I have another great interview for you all, with Coach and Founder of The Ally Method, Allison Yamamoto. Allison’s business is built around helping active women stop over-training and under-fueling in order to regulate their periods and assist them in achieving freedom around food and exercise. While it’s common to not have a period for a while, especially while training hard, it’s not normal and it’s a sign that something is wrong. Allison’s story is compelling, she’s a dynamic speaker and very relatable. I think this episode will resonate with a lot of us.

We tend to applaud when anyone says they’re doing something for their health, even if that thing is contributing to disease or lack of health or wellness. It’s a hustle culture where discipline and overwork are prized, especially in sports training, and we’re celebrated for that. But whether the issue is eating too much or not enough or exercising too much or not enough, we can all learn from what Allison has to share about the underlying causes. Allison first talks about being a cheerleader in college and her interest in running, training, and nutrition after college. She was exhibiting a lot of control over her exercise and food, which earned her praise for being healthy, but she also wasn’t getting a period. We talk about how medical professionals dismissed her lack of period because she was focused on healthy activities, how there are a lot of ways to experience disordered eating, how we compare ourselves to the standards and discipline of others, and how with nearsighted goals we can tend towards over-exercising and falling into behaviors that are too disciplined and rigid to be healthy. Allison shares how she works with women now to understand their motivations and how they can have healthy goals that are not rigid and detrimental to well-being. This is such an important conversation and I’m so grateful for Allison for having this talk with me.

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About Allison Yamamoto:

Allison is a founder and coach who has built a business that helps active women stop overtraining and under-fueling in order to regulate their period and gain freedom around food & exercise.

As a former NCAA cheerleader, health tech executive, and marathoner, Allison struggled with disordered eating and RED-S for years, and her recovery journey inspired her to help others do the same.

Her business Ally has now helped hundreds of others improve their relationship with food, exercise, and their bodies.

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Resources discussed in this episode:

• Free resource from Allison to help us understand what's keeping us trapped in our routines around food and exercise

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Learn more about Allison Yamamoto:

• Website: TheAllyMethod.com
• Instagram
• TikTok

Learn more about Dr. Michelle Tubman and Wayza Health:

• Website: www.wayzahealth.com
• Follow me on Facebook and Instagram
• Email Michelle: michelle@wayzahealth.com