Adam Torres and Rachel Smith discuss weight loss.
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Show Notes:
Are there any universal rules for weight loss? In this episode, Adam Torres and Rachel Smith, Founder of Aspect Wellness, explore the post-ozempic era and current state of weight loss.
About Rachel Smith
Rachel graduated from the Midwifery Institute at Philadelphia University in 2006. As an advance practice nurse Rachel has focused her career on health promotion and patient-centered care. As a certified nurse midwife caring for women across the lifespan, she delivered over a thousand gorgeous babies and especially loved guiding couples to create a healthy home environment in which to grow their family. Helping women navigate the hormonal changes that occur in the teenage years, during pregnancy and in mid-life has been uniquely rewarding.
Rachel fell in love with metabolic health and obesity medicine in 2016 after developing a weight management program for a large obstetrical practice. She found she loved working with men as well as women. This was a turning point in her career focus. She trained as a health and wellness coach at Duke University, obtained advanced training in functional medicine and obesity medicine and switched her focus to obesity medicine. She was in the first cohort of nationally board-certified health and wellness coaches through the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaches. Rachel has since added a family nurse practitioner degree from Frontier University as well as a Doctor of Nursing Practice.
Rachel and her husband, Rob are parents to four amazing grown children. In her downtime, Rachel enjoys running, kayaking, sailing, cycling and mountain biking.
She is a member of the Obesity Medicine Association, the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, the American College of Nurse Midwives, the Florida Obesity Society, the Obesity Action Coalition, and the North American Menopause Society.
About ASPECT WELLNESS
Weight Loss Coaching, Medical Weight Loss Presciprtions, Hormone Balancing.
Providing unparalleled support. Uncovering root causes of weight gain and providing evidence-based tools and medications to help you lose weight, balance your hormones, improve your sleep, increase your energy and reclaim your health.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today my guest is Rachel Smith, and she is going to be participating over at the SRQ Women’s Expo coming up later this month.
And she’s also the founder of Aspect Wellness. Rachel, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Adam. It’s a pleasure to be here. All right. So excited to get further into aspect wellness and also to talk about, how you’re not really a typical diet clinic or, and also your approach to weight loss in general in the post ozempic era.
Know you were introduced to us from the SRQ Women’s Expo, so I definitely want to give them a little bit of a plug here. , maybe tell me a little bit more about the Expo and why you’re participating. Thank you Sure. That’s great. I’m super excited about the expo and everyone I talked to in the community is looking forward to it.
It’s something that Juliana and her group, her team has been working on for the last couple of years. I believe this is their fourth expo and it’s really a gathering of especially women and women in business to promote connections and networking. And I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to get out and meet the community and like minded women.
I’m super looking forward to it. I’ll be speaking at the expo and talking about, especially how women balancing so many different roles, whether it is Wife or partner, mother, and career, and how often that means that our personal health goes to the wayside. So how we can better balance that so that we can show up for all of those roles at our very highest level.
Amazing. did you first get interested in health and wellness? Like when did that start for you? From a very young age, although I never wanted to be a nurse. I, I grew up in a family where I had a lot of chronic illness in family members. And so often I think in that type of family dynamic, the children sometimes become caretakers.
So. Falling into that role early on, it motivated me to build a life that looked very different from what I had experienced and became very interested in some of the early work on just the mind body connection. I remember even in seventh grade writing a paper on that and how fascinating that was to me.
And I became a nurse midwife after my first child was born. And that was, it was actually after my third child was born. I was interested in it immediately, but I was so turned off by the idea of becoming a nurse. And I really don’t know why that was at the time, but it took me three experiences as a nurse mid, working with a nurse midwife.
to finally say, you know what? I’m going to take the leap. I’m going to do this. I’ll become a nurse if I have to, to become a nurse for life. And I spent a good portion of my career delivering babies. I’ve delivered over a thousand babies. Really love that work. It’s so dynamic working with women in the childbearing years and helping to shape the health of the family going forward.
Very exciting work. And it’s a lot more glamorous as a title to say you’re a nurse midwife than to say that you help people lose weight. It’s, it’s interesting when you run into people at the grocery store, if you delivered their baby, they want to come up and, and show you that four year old or that preschooler.
Really? Wow. You know, when they run into me at the grocery store now, often they’re, they’re turning the corner so I don’t see what’s in their cart. So it’s a little bit different. But I got excited about weight loss and helping women, especially at the time, because that is where I was specialized at the time, manage their weight across the childbearing spectrum because I was looking, working for a very large OBGYN practice in the Midwest.
And I established a weight management program for them. At the time in the Midwest, I believe Iowa was one of the leading states in terms of the obesity epidemic. If you want to brag about something we were right up close near the top. And so it was a huge problem as obstetrical providers when women come into pregnancy carrying extra weight, that puts so much greater risk on their pregnancy.
And of course, everyone wants a healthy mom, healthy baby. So. Preparing women to go into pregnancy at close to their ideal weight, helping them manage their weight during pregnancy. Those were the goals of the program that I developed there. And my love for that kind of work grew so much that I completely switched my career focus.
I went back to school. I became a nationally board certified health and wellness coach. I was in the first cohort of nationally board certified coaches back in 2016. I went back to school, got another master’s degree in family practice nursing, went on to get my doctoral degree, and I have specialized certification in obesity medicine as well.
So, that’s really the transition, but, you know, it It started way back there as a kid, you know, knowing that I wanted to help people learn how to take control of their health any way that they could. There’s some things we can’t control, but there’s so much that we can. Hmm. So now as you, let’s go further into what you do.
Now you say you’re not a typical like in diet clinic, like what’s different about your approach overall to weight loss? Like what makes you different? I love that question. And I, that’s kind of a tagline that I use and not your typical diet clinic because I really want to differentiate from the standard way that weight loss is done.
And that’s. In two separate ways. So first of all, there’s so many people, especially right now getting into weight loss, whether they have the credentials to do that or not, because so many people are excited about weight loss here over the last couple of years. Because we have new tools and I mentioned ozempic in kind of the topic outlined for today’s talk Because ozempic was the game changer in obesity medicine When ozempic began to be used for weight loss and we saw that our patients who had struggled to lose weight Had many comorbid conditions like hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, osteoarthritis risk for cancer, so many things and could finally Lose weight using this very safe and effective medication.
It was exciting. And I’m also excited about that. I think these tools are amazing. And when they’re used appropriately, very, very safe. Unfortunately. As happens in our culture, we tend to take things a little bit too far or as soon as people realize the money making opportunity, you know, everybody’s jumping on the bandwagon.
So there’s really a lot happening in the industry around these medications and some inappropriate use. Very, very concerning to those of us who are practicing in the field of obesity medicine to ensure that patients are using the medications properly. So, not a diet clinic means, I, I, Absolutely.
I’m not promising rapid weight loss. I am running the other direction from the slogans that I see all the time. Like, , no diet, no exercise, just weight loss. Seriously. That’s how these diet clinics are advertising. And if any consumer falls for that, it’s rather cruel to say, but if you are falling for that rhetoric, you almost, You deserve what you get, which is not the result you’re looking for.
You may have some rapid weight loss, but I promise you, given what we know about how these medications work, if you’re losing 30 pounds in a month, which again, a lot of clinics are advertising, you are losing a massive amount of muscle that’s going to damage your metabolism longterm. You will regain the weight and it’s going to be harder for you to lose it next time.
why do you think people fall for that? By the way, I’m so curious. ’cause that’s your industry. Why do you think people fall for that? I think that we just hope, , we have heard about the successes that other people and very famous people, movie stars Oprah, lots of really interesting people who have talked about these medications and there’s so much excitement.
So I think there’s just this glimmer of hope that, yeah, we know that there never used to be a way to lose 30 pounds in a month, but maybe. Maybe this is that magic pill or that magic shot. So it, it preys a little bit on our hopes and our desperation because, , for many people we’re just frustrated.
We’ve tried a lot of things and there’s some things that obesity medicine, which is the counterpart to, to the diet clinic and obesity medicine practitioner is somebody who has had legitimate training in this field and they know how to. Manage this for patients in a very safe and effective, comprehensive way, but where any obesity medicine practitioners, I think get it wrong is a little bit of overemphasis on the idea that this is a chronic disease.
Yeah. Okay. So, yeah. Let’s talk a little bit more about your approach and like it and a more individualized approach. So, so what do you do? absolutely. I am going to teach to my patients that yes, this is a chronic disease and it’s something that’s not going away. We’re going to have to learn to manage it for the rest of your life because of the way that physiologically your body latches on to the extra weight and it, Really acts to kind of protect that energy reserve almost as if it were your 401k, right?
Of course, you know anybody can take a loan from their 401k, but it’s not a smart move You really want to save and protect that so Physiologically, yes very much looks and acts like a chronic disease However, I believe that humans have an amazing capacity to change and when We can act Actually make comprehensive, dramatic lifestyle change when we can live differently in this world that predisposes us to weight gain, we can walk away from this diagnosis.
And that’s my approach. So it’s, it is. Providing for my patients and clients all of the evidence based tools in terms of the testing and diagnostics to help them understand what’s really going on with them physiologically, providing them the FDA approved medications that will give them a leg up, so to speak, in this, in this journey that we’ll undertake together, but providing them as well with Just a different paradigm in terms of understanding you can change this and here’s how we do it.
So it’s very much the mindset approach and the coaching that goes along with that to help them really make breakthroughs. Wow, is there any universal rules or anything like that for weight loss, like some truisms there? There are, unfortunately. But And I say, unfortunately, because, you know, we want there to be some magic program, some magic plan that’s just going to make it easy.
I think if we’re going to get down to the nitty gritty, we have to understand weight loss will be hard because to put your body into a calorie deficit which is required for fat loss, your body’s going to fight back against that. So think we just have to agree with ourselves. Yes, this is going to be hard and I’m going to do it anyway, and this is the plan that I’m going to follow.
So that’s the universal truth. You have to be in a calorie deficit. We have tools that will help that will make it easier, but this is going to be a challenge and let’s buckle up and let’s do it together. Yeah, and I like to use the word lifestyle when I’m thinking about something like this like your lifestyle kind of needs to change at some point if you want to at least eating right and maybe some other things if you want to have long term results because like you were talking about with the pills and the like magic, you didn’t use this word.
I’m using it kind of like the magic pill side of things. Like , it’s going to come back. So it’s not necessarily like a longterm solution, right? Like, whereas if you start thinking about the lifestyle and everything else, why do you think so many people have a trouble like kind of changing their lifestyle to start getting into this calorie deficit?
Cause it’s not an easy thing. I don’t want to like glance over that like that. It’s not an easy thing, but it’s possible. Yeah, it’s absolutely possible. It’s not easy. And I think the answer is so obvious. It’s just staring us in the face. We live in a world that is in OBC medicine terms, something we call obesogenic.
That means it predisposes us to weight gain. We don’t want to make sure I heard that right. That’s a new word for me. I like new words, Rachel. Thank you. My day. Obesogenic. Is that, did I say it right? Yes. Wow. Okay. Yeah, go ahead, please. A new word for me. Very good. So, if you just look around at what’s normal, look at what the average three year old is eating in a given day.
I’m talking average. You know, maybe the three year olds in your life are eating whole foods and real foods, but what I see a lot is fruit snacks and Lunchables and juice boxes and packaged mac and cheese. This is the problem. The highly processed foods are giving us far more calories and far less nutrition than our bodies require.
And, Everything about the modern world predisposes us to be sedentary. We drive everywhere. We have labor saving devices. That’s great. Most of us don’t want to go back to the era where we’re having to take our rugs out back and beat them with a stick. Right? I like the little iRobot that will vacuum my rugs for me.
But that means I’m not burning the energy that my ancestors did. A hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago, that’s one thing I say to my patients. Look, if I can try and travel you back three hundred years, like some kind of an outlander experiment, we would lose weight. We would all lose weight, and it would be uncomfortable.
We’d be hungry for a while, but we’d be herding sheep, and gardening, and fishing, and gathering, gathering food. And we would lose weight. The modern environment makes that very, very challenging. We’re very, very busy. We’re not sleeping enough. We’re very stressed. All of these things contribute to the metabolic dysregulation, makes this a chronic physiologic disease.
So if somebody’s listening to this and they’re thinking about this, they’ve been, you know, wanting to make a change, where do you suggest people start? Like at the very, like the basic of basic level for people that want to maybe make some changes, where do they start? I think number one is let’s try to eat more whole foods, that is, food as close to its natural state as possible.
So if you could imagine that you had to be a hunter gatherer, that you were going to only eat food that you could have hunted or fished or grown or picked from a tree yourself, that is The, the old metaphor of shopping the periphery of the grocery store. So you do the produce aisle and then you do the butcher shop and then you do the dairy, right?
And pretty much avoid those inner aisle. That’s number one, because it’s going to. Make it a little bit easier for you to control portions when you’re eating real whole foods. The second thing is I would have you focus on protein. Most of us are not getting enough protein in our diet. And if you just want to focus on whole foods and protein, those two things alone would start moving you in the right direction.
It’s a great tip. Well, Rachel, first off, this has been great having you on the show today and learning more about what you’re up to over at Aspect Wellness. I’m sure that many of my listeners may want to follow up. If somebody wants to follow up and connect and learn more about your, your, your company, how do they do that?
Wonderful. They can head on over to my website. It is, Aspect wellness.com. They can find me on Instagram at Aspect Wellness. I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Facebook. Lots of places you can find me. I’m licensed to provide medical care in Florida and Iowa, but I can work with patients across the country in a capacity of a health coach and I, I frequently am doing that for clients all over the country.
So I’d love to hear from you. If you have questions, just reach out. Amazing. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put all that information into the show notes so you can just connect with Rachel. And speaking of the listeners, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe button because we have many more mission based videos coming up.
Individuals coming up on the line and we don’t want you to miss a thing. This is a daily show. So each and every day we’re releasing new episodes for you. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Rachel best of luck in , your speaking engagement over at the SRQ Women’s Expo that’s coming up and , have a lot of fun and thank you for coming on.
Thanks so much. It was fun. Have a good day.
