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Summary
On episode 606 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Deanna Schober, co-founder of Built Daily and co-host of the Fitness and Sushi podcast with her husband, Tony, who together have helped thousands of women break the yo-yo diet cycle and reach their healthiest weight by repairing their relationship with food, their bodies, and their minds.
Deanna argues that diet culture fights against how the brain is actually wired: restriction and scarcity trigger a survival response that makes cravings worse, not weaker, which is why the harder someone tries to force weight loss, the more resistance they run into. Her approach flips the goal, take care of the whole person first, and weight loss becomes a side effect rather than the target.
The conversation also tackles what people get wrong about emotional eating, why labeling foods “good” or “bad” backfires, and why hitting a “dream body” doesn’t automatically deliver happiness.
Links
- https://idealbodyformula.com
Key Takeaways
- Diet culture works against how the brain is wired for survival. Restriction and scarcity push the brain into a famine-mode response, and fighting that hardwired survival instinct is exhausting, uncomfortable, and hard to sustain, which is why so many diets eventually fail.
- Weight loss should be a side effect, not the goal. Trying to “math yourself” into a better body through calorie counting alone ignores behavior, psychology, and emotion. When someone takes care of the whole person instead, sustainable weight change tends to follow naturally.
- “Healing” isn’t about fixing something broken in you. Deanna frames it as returning to the good relationship with food and body people are born with, one that diet culture, not the individual, damaged in the first place.
- Most “emotional eating” is actually under-eating or restriction. Many people, especially women skipping meals due to work or family pressure, arrive at the end of the day overly hungry and stressed, and label the resulting overeating as emotional when fixing the deprivation resolves much of it.
- Real emotional eating is addressed by feeling emotions physically, not just thinking about them. Simple tools like deep breathing, tapping, a short walk, or physically shaking out the body help complete the stress cycle and calm the nervous system instead of using food to signal safety.
- Labeling foods “good” or “bad” backfires. Telling yourself a food is forbidden makes it more desirable and more likely to be eaten in excess once willpower breaks down; the better question is simply whether a food serves you.
- Extreme, fast-fix diet advice is appealing because it closes an anxiety loop. A strict rule feels exciting and definitive when someone is anxious about their body, but that same appeal is what makes it unsustainable, and it’s often a response to body anxiety rather than an actual health strategy.
- Reaching a “dream body” doesn’t guarantee happiness. Deanna described dieting down to a six-pack and feeling more insecure and on-display than before, reinforcing that happiness can’t be deferred until after weight loss.
- Deanna’s three strategies to get and stay well: think in terms of addition, not subtraction, when it comes to food (focus on nutrient-dense foods to add rather than what to cut out); stop treating your body as a prize or outcome and practice daily self-care instead; and drop all-or-nothing thinking in favor of consistent, imperfect action, since something is always better than nothing.
“No diet ever tells you this is an us problem. They say this is your problem.”
Deanna Schober
Another Episode You May Enjoy
Episode 618 – Food freedom with Alana Van Der Sluys
Episode Notes
Podcast: 40+ Fitness
Episode: 606
Published: 2023-09-05
Host: Allan Misner (aka Coach Allan), author of The Wellness Roadmap
Guest(s): Deanna Schober, the co-founder of Built Daily and co-host of the five-star rated Fitness and Sushi podcast alongside her husband, Tony
Listen & Subscribe: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube (audio only)