5 Questions with Aaron Flores

Meet the Experts

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Today we’re chatting with weight-neutral dietitian extraordinaire, Aaron Flores. I was lucky enough to get to interview him over zoom, here is a transcript of our interview:

1. Tell us a bit about yourself and your work

My name is Aaron Flores and I'm a dietician and Certified Body Trust Provider. I have a private practice in Calabasas, California, and I see people both in-person and virtually, now all virtually since the pandemic. I work with folks who are experiencing eating disorders or disordered eating. I work with a lot of folks who have body image issues. I work across all sorts of gender identities and mostly with adults, less adolescents, and really focus on how to help people develop behaviors that are rooted in curiosity, compassion, and non-judgment rather than shame. And so within that, there's deconstructing a lot of internal biases around body size. There's always framing this within a weight stigma lens and seeing how our society values different bodies based on body size and understanding that healing from a eating disorder is not just about having a better relationship with food.

We need to be able to name and have, well first have a better relationship with our body, but also name how fatphobia shows up like really almost not allowing people to experience a lot of healing that they really need. I have been a dietician since around 2006, it's a career change for me. I was a video game producer in the dot com boom. In the early nineties, I dropped out of college. When I was about 21, 22 I went into the video game business. I have struggled with food and body image probably since my teenage years, I became a dietician because I wanted to tell everyone how to lose weight. I really thought I was going to be the next Richard Simmons. And because I had lost weight, I figured I could tell everyone else how to also, and it was through a lot of unlearning that brought me to really practicing a complete 180 from how I entered the field.

2. How did learn about the concept of weight-neutral, body affirming care?

The first piece for me was learning about Intuitive Eating. When I was a student at Cal State Northridge I had heard of Intuitive Eating. It wasn't taught to us in school, but I think heard either other students talking about it, or a webinar, something like that. But I for some reason had the book and I started to read it and put it down…. I did not like it because I wasn't ready for it. And then once I was a dietician, I was working at the VA hospital here in Los Angeles and there was a local Los Angeles dietetic organization offering continuing education, an event where Elyse [Resch] (one of the co-authors of Intuitive Eating) came and spoke. And I attended the event and I heard her speak and there was something about how she articulated what Intuitive Eating was that I was like, I think I should go back and read this book.

And I did. Then I wrote her a note and said thank you for writing this book, I feel like in some ways you almost wrote it about me. And she responded and she was like, “You're very welcome and I run a supervision group once a month here in LA and I'd love you to join.” And I did. And I went for many years, maybe four or five years. And for me that was my entry point into unlearning and it was really like my own therapy in a lot of ways. I was undoing all of this on my own, listening to other providers talk about it. But then I also thought about how do I apply this?

It was from that point that I learned about Health at Every Size™. And I learned about ASDAH and the work they were doing and that sort of built on this foundation of intuitive eating. From there I learned about body trust from the folks at BeNourished, Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant. And that was again, another layer to this where what was helpful for me in learning about body trust, it’s framed Health and Every Size and Intuitive Eating within the context of being fat positive and seeing the impact of weight stigma and seeing it from this social justice lens that sort of brought everything together. I'll be honest, that journey took like probably like six years, seven years. Cause again, I came into this thinking I was going to be the dietician who was going to give everyone the meal plan, teach them how to count calories, teach them how to get smaller.

And it took me a long time to, one, reconcile with it in my head, but then also figure out, okay, so this means I'm going to radically do my work differently and I need to figure out what that's going to look like, so it was not a quick process. It was, it took a lot of time. And I would say I'm still definitely in that process in many ways, continuing to think about how do I do this work and how do I make it more inclusive around bodies in a world that really is saying fat bodies are not okay.

3. How have you/do you apply those concepts to your work?

The first thing I do is, I'm very transparent with my clients. When they find me and they say “Oh, I'm interested,” a lot of them will say “I have an eating disorder” or, “I found you through some resource. And 'm interested in working with you,” I try to have a call with them and say “Okay, here's what I do. Here's what I don't do.” And I'm really up front that this will probably feel like nutrition therapy. I'm probably not going to tell you a lot about what to eat. We're going to talk about the why’s and how's, and how it makes you feel, and really try to break down all of the rules that people have around food. The other thing that I do is make space for grieving and understanding that as people reject or change from a dieting mindset into one that is more connected to their values, there's grieving that they’re giving up this idea of ever being smaller.

And for a lot of folks there's a lot there, right? That's a long process. And I wish someone would've told me that I'm going to have to make space for grieving when I was training as a dietician, because it for sure comes up. The amount of times where we need to name the anger, sadness, frustration, bargaining around all of these emotions, it took a lot of learning later to get ready for that and feel comfortable with that. There’s so much shame and blame that shows up around our bodies and around food. And I think that's been the way that most people have experienced or have built a relationship around food in their body is through blame and shame.

And so a lot of what I do is just validate, and say of course you believe this, you've grown up with diet culture - since your birth it's been influencing you. And of course you think that this is the way to go, and if we externalize it a little bit we can also break down why that's flawed and why that isn't working for you, and then come back to what are your values. I come back to curiosity, compassion, and non-judgment and asking how can we build these lenses for making behavior choices and behavior change? How can we frame them within these lenses? So that it's not always my way, right? I'm not going to tell people this is what you have to do. I really want people to know you have a lot of body wisdom. Everyone has so much wisdom about themselves. I just want to help bring that out and partner with it, not override it.

4. What’s one thing that you wish people who are still working from a weight-focused paradigm could learn/know?

So I was there. I was really there and I think the thing… along with all these sort of conceptual topics… the thing that really applied it to me was working with these veterans. Cause I was running a weight loss program at the time and I saw how hard they were working. I saw how like much they were trying and the “results” that they were supposed to be having were not showing up, but they were trying as hard as they could. And they would come to my class every week, and we'd have great conversations and I'd be so happy to see them. And they would hate coming to group because they had to step on the scale. Like they were just like “Oh, I don't wanna be here today. I was bad this week.”

And for dieticians who are practicing from this paradigm, we need to see how much harm we're doing to people's emotions by perpetuating this intervention that is not going to be effective over the long run. And it creates this space. Our professionals feel like “I'm giving you all the information. You're just not applying it. You’re not doing it well enough or hard enough, or maybe you're non-compliant or you don't understand it.” It creates this separation and this division in relationships where it's very easy to get disgruntled. It's very easy to get upset. Because you feel like - I'm telling these people what to do, but it's just not working. But we're telling them the wrong things. And I really wish dieticians and other providers who are really still focused on body size and weight, would be more curious about the deeper things that are happening to people rather than just the number on the scale - that there is something way under that's showing up that we need to honor. That's a hard process, but I think that opens the door a lot to how people can shift.

5. How and where do we find you and your work?

I am on Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/aaronfloresrdn/

I'm not recording new episodes, but I do have a podcast called dieticians unplugged. , so if you go on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast, you can listen to those episodes. I recorded with a, a colleague of mine. Glenys Oyston. There are I think, 85 episodes. So definitely enough hours to get some great information that are that's really useful. ,

https://dietitiansunplugged.libsyn.com/

Them my website is SmashTheWeightriarchy.com and you can go there learn more about my practice and reach out to me.