Nutrition is a serious topic, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be entertaining. On their podcast, Your Diet Sucks, Kylee Van Horn and Zoë Rom, both endurance athletes, bring humor and curiosity to their examination of why we eat the way we do and how we can reevaluate our relationship to food, backed up by research and science.
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Kylee is a registered dietician whose approach to nutrition is radically different from most of the guidance available. As Zoë explains, “The majority of books that are published both in the endurance space and for more general audiences are entirely premised on how to make your body smaller, how to eat less, how to use exercise as punishment or a way of diminishing your body. And Kylee’s approach is all about how to fuel yourself so that you can take up more space in the world so that you can be more powerful and more present.”
That can be a difficult mindset for someone who has been raised with a “less is better” mindset. Kylee works through those ingrained beliefs with her patients. “I oftentimes will ask athletes what their body image story is and what their relationship with food is, like where did that come from? And there’s a long history that sometimes we have to work through before we can actually take steps forward.
“The messaging is oftentimes coming from the fitness space,” she continues. “Like, if you only eat 1200 calories or if you fast, you can get these performance gains or you can lose weight and get faster. And Zoë and I, with the podcast, we’re trying to take some of these ideas that are out there in the fitness and diet culture space and untangle the history of where this is coming from and then look at both sides and let people maybe make their own decisions, but also maybe change the way they’re thinking about things.”
The key to their approach, Zoë says, is to discuss important subjects in a lighthearted way. “Something that was really important for us when we were crafting a vision for this podcast was we wanted to approach serious topics in a way that wasn’t always entirely serious. Serious discussions are important; talking about healing, our relationships, our bodies, that’s serious stuff. But I think that approaching it with a bit of levity can actually help us see things in a more realistic way and approaching with humor and humility can help us better sort through and disentangle the narratives we’ve been handed from our culture and from endurance sports messaging and from media. I think a lot of times poking fun at things allows us to poke holes in the stories we’ve just unthinkingly been handed.”
She offers an example. “In our second episode, Kylee walked me through the history of people fasting for athletic performance, like there was an individual who ran and garnered a lot of media attention for running 100 miles without taking in any calories. You’re allowed to do what you want with your life and body, but that’s pretty silly. Sure, you’re pushing the envelope of human performance, but doing that just for the sake of doing that, I don’t think is always inherently meaningful. I liken it to these very silly marathon records of like, running the fastest marathon with a pineapple on your head. Yes, technically you are doing something new and different, but how valuable is it really?
“And the way that jokes work, the way that comedy works, it interrupts thought patterns, which is what we’re trying to do with the podcast and how we’re approaching these stories about diet culture, about bodies, about food and about science. We like to think we’re rational beings and that we’re convinced when we’re pouring through the research, but that’s not actually how people work. Oftentimes things like humor and emotion are what ultimately end up swaying us. So we wanted to make something that embraced both sides of that, that had an emotive and humorous component, as well as was really grounded in the best available science and research.”
Being in recovery from an eating disorder herself, Zoë knows firsthand how humor can help. “A big part of my process was learning how to encounter my own story with a bit of levity and humor. I totally respect if that’s not everyone’s experience and approach. But for me, humor is premised on being able to see things clearly and to truly understand them. So by the time I’m able to make a joke about something, to me, it signals that I really have sorted something and it enables me to put even more distance between my current self and past selves and past stories I told myself.”
Just as Kaylee asks her patients to reach back into their own lives to discover where their personal beliefs came from, on Your Diet Sucks, she and Zoë investigate the origins of society’s ideas about nutrition. “We want to go deep back in time,” Zoë says. “We have an upcoming episode about the history of diet and influencers, and it took me all the way back to discovering that gladiators actually used to endorse olive oil and wine in ancient Rome. And that is where we think the history of athletic endorsement started because a lot of the stories that we’re talking about aren’t new. Authority has always been here. Power, influence, these aren’t new stories.
“Some of the technology has changed and shifted, but we wanted to go back to start to pull on the strings to find out, where did these things start? When did we decide as a culture that we should take diet advice from athletes? That seems like a bad idea. And it seems like since the time of gladiators, we’ve been outsourcing some of our decision making to athletes for no other reason than power.”
Ultimately, Kaylee and Zoë’s goal is to help others avoid the damaging effects of diet culture. “We just wanted to offer a counter narrative and a fun and lighthearted way of pushing back against all of this stuff because it can be really scary and it can feel super dark,” Zoë says. “But I don’t think that painting it as darker than it is has ever helped anyone heal. Healing and recovery is an amazing, beautiful process. And it’s also hard as f**k.”
“We’re not talking about these topics in this mainstream way that you could just read a book or read an influencer post online,” Kaylee adds. “We’re actually having people think about things a little bit differently. And hopefully that encourages other people to evaluate themselves and then influence others. And it’s kind of this downstream effect.
“I’ve actually had that happen in one-on-one work with clients too, where they’ll say, ‘I started fueling more during my long run. And then the friend that I run with, they were asking me about it because they only do one gel in three hours’ and then it has this downstream effect. So hopefully, that’s the kind of impact that something like this kind of podcast has.”
“Yeah, we are the culture,” Zoë says. “We all are the culture. And if we don’t like the culture we’re in, we have the ability to change it. We do not have to live out the narratives that were handed to us.”
