Challenging Obesity and Societal Norms Through Innovative Solutions and Hormonal Balance - Joan Breibart

What if the secret to overcoming obesity lies in reexamining our deeply rooted societal norms and embracing innovative medical solutions? We're thrilled to host Joan Breibart, a pioneering force in the fitness world, as she lends her insightful perspective on the evolution of food, diet, and health trends over the decades. Joan Breibart reflects on her childhood experiences during wartime rationing and how the '60s laid the groundwork for the thin-obsessed culture we grapple with today. She challenges us to reconsider our approach to food, free from guilt and societal pressures, amid alarming obesity statistics in America.

Together with Joan Breibart, we take a closer look at the significant shift from smoking to unhealthy eating habits, revealing how this transition has silently fueled America's obesity crisis. We dive into the transformative potential of Ozempic, a groundbreaking drug addressing hormonal imbalances and its implications across various industries, including food and fashion. As we explore the promises and critiques surrounding these developments, Johan and I open a conversation about the broader, often overlooked impacts of obesity and weight loss on our health and society. Join us for an enlightening discussion that dares to challenge conventional wisdom and offers hope in the battle against obesity.

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Chapters

• 0:06 Exploring Obesity and Ozempic With Joanne
• 11:16 The Impact of Ozempic on Obesity

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Hey everyone, welcome back to Pleasure Principles, the show where we dive into what really makes life feel good like body, mind and the soul. And today we are exploring a topic that's been making headlines and sparking debates across the wellness world it's obesity and Ozempic. So joining me is an absolute legend, johan Brevard. So welcome to the show, johan. Thank you, lovely, lovely. So, johan, like before we start our conversation, I'd quickly love to introduce you to all of our listeners.

Speaker 1: 0:47

Dear listeners, johan is an inventor, entrepreneur and a woman who brought Pilates from a niche exercise method to the mainstream fitness phenomenon, and it is today, at 83 years young, she is not only a pioneer in the world of mind-body fitness, but also someone who challenges norms at every turn. So, with 60 years of Pilates practice under her belt and no-nonsense approach to health and wellness, she is here to give us her unfiltered take on Ozempic, the obesity epidemic and why the concept of wellness might need a major rethink. So, dear listeners, grab a cup of coffee or take a deep breath. This conversation is going to get real, raw and ridiculously fascinating. So welcome to the show again, joanne and they're ridiculously fascinating.

Speaker 2: 1:46

So welcome to the show again, Joanne. Oh well, thank you, and that's a good description of me and having this long view.

Speaker 2: 1:53

You know when I meet people we're talking about exercise and diet and fitness and body conditioning and nutrition and of course now wellness, which is just rebranding I always really need to know how old they are, because if they're under 50, they've been born into this world where everybody talked about this, calories and carbs and gluten and this and that and our just on up. And so someone like me I'm 83, I'm almost 84 actually and I was born in 1941, when in America this is hard for people to believe because we are such a rich country and we have more of everything but we had food rationing because of the war, and when I tell that to people and Americans they sort of look and I guess they may have learned it in school but they don't really understand that we had a ration book and we had to go and we can have a limited supply of many different kinds of foods that we would want because of the war effort. So I grew up with scarcity right Now we have just over over over abundance and then after the war we started to have more supplies of food and also people started to go this is not until the late 50s to restaurants In America. Before that people only went to a restaurant to eat on maybe their birthday or anniversary or something. So people were eating at home and they had a very simple American diet so simple you can't believe it. They had a plate. It would have some kind of meat or fish or chicken or something, and then a starch that could be potatoes or rice or noodles, and then they'd have some green thing, which no one wanted, some vegetable right. There were no vegetarians or vegans or keto, none of that stuff. And no one had ever heard of a calorie right. They had never even heard of it.

Speaker 2: 3:58

So if people were, let's say, getting adding pounds to their body and they didn't want it, because at that same time and this is, you know, let's say, the beginning, 1960, twiggy, that skinny model from England, all of a sudden became very popular. Because before that it was people like Marilyn Monroe who was very curvy right, she wasn't fat, but she was curvy. And of course, twiggy was a twig, she was skinny. And at the same time that people were talking about being skinny, really skinny, the Duchess of Windsor was always quoted as saying you can't be too thin or too rich, and that became our mantra quoted as saying you can't be too thin or too rich, and that became our mantra Not you are what you eat, which is what everybody thinks today, but you cannot be too thin or too rich. So everyone started to think about being thinner and they started to manipulate foods.

Speaker 2: 4:59

But before that, if somebody felt they were getting you know pounds and they didn't want them, they would only have one alternative, which is to eat less or to give up desserts. We always knew desserts were fattening. That's what people would say. We didn't know what was the difference between a potato or a shrimp. Nobody knew anything about this kind of thing that people live with today. So that meant that food was enjoyable, and I mean, of course, food is. If you have it, it's a tremendous pleasure, or should be.

Speaker 2: 5:31

Today, 60 years later, most eating in America is just filled with guilt and stress and fear and everything you can imagine. That is the exact opposite of looking forward to a nice meal with wine or beer and having the cuisine. I happen to live in New York City, in Chelsea in particular, and I work in Seoul. I mean, in three or four blocks I can have delicious Indian food, italian food, french food, thai food, even West African right. It's everywhere. So we have so much variety and people should be thinking, oh gosh, tonight I think I'd like to have some curry, I think I'll go to that Indian restaurant around the corner.

Speaker 2: 6:18

No, they're only thinking of what's healthy or unhealthy, or all kinds of nutrient numbers, or it's horrible, it's just ruined it and what people don't know because they're so believing in all this eat healthy, which obviously just ungrammatical also.

Speaker 2: 6:38

But is that, even if they eat what they think is healthy, the stress on their digestive system is making it not healthy? Right, they are stressing their digestive system and their head and all the rest of it, not to mention that, of course, obesity in America is. I mean, essentially, the New York Times finally had to admit the truth. They said that 75% of Americans are overweight or obese. But what they didn't want to say is probably 65% of them are obese. That's a huge number, right, that's the whole country, and all you have to do is look at pictures. But it's going to change now because of these drugs and hopefully it will really change and then people can get back to enjoying food and dining and the social aspects and the taste. But it's not now, not now. They don't enjoy it and that's a problem. So, and I know that we're talking about pleasure, and almost everyone can get pleasure from enjoying a good meal, right yeah?

Speaker 1: 7:48

Exactly. Definitely is yeah Also like because when we are talking about Ozempic and the obesity epidemic, some critics say that the medications are a shortcut and don't address the root causes of the obesity. So what's your take on this argument?

Speaker 2: 8:12

don't address the root causes of the obesity. So what's your take on this argument? That's just, it's wellness bitches trying to stay relevant because they know they're on the run now. So the root causes. No one wants to talk about what the root cause is because it's embarrassing. The root cause was had nothing to do with health. It only had to do with money, because that's America Money, money, money.

Speaker 2: 8:37

So way back in the late 60s, some really clever lawyers in the South South Carolina where they wrote tobacco and we had the major tobacco companies Philip Morris and Reynolds and all the rest of them. They said that's a tunnel into Fort Knox and all the rest of them. And they said that's a tunnel into Fort Knox. Let's sue these companies because the American surgeon general had said that smoking was bad. But only 10 years before that was said, doctors were on television talking about how Camel cigarettes are the best cigarettes. Right, and I, this past weekend, was with my cousin who's retired now, he's 85, but he was the leading vascular surgeon and he told me about how, at the hospitals where the doctors were, they would all sit around and smoke. Right Now of course that's all changed and I'm not saying that smoking is great for your health. But what it was was an adult pacifier.

Speaker 2: 9:35

And at that time that people started just quitting, quitting, quitting quitting and we're talking the 60s, 70s and 80s everyone knew they would gain 10 to 15 pounds. And if they had just accepted that and said, okay, I wasn't fat, so I'm a little bit, you know, more rounded chubby, maybe we would be okay, we would not have this obesity. But instead, because everything here is money and diet companies sprung up and exercise and people were told if you beat up your body and you have to run or do all the strenuous, you know exercise, that'll probably lead to a hip replacement, which, believe me, it has. You would torch all these calories, get rid of them, eat as much as you want, but you could torch the calorie. Well, anyway, one thing after another and you had practically the entire country at one point or another, going on a diet, losing some weight, maybe all of it then regaining it, then going on another diet, then trying this exercise, then stopping that exercise and doing another kind of and same with water. You know, water was going to wash it away. So what happened was people quit smoking, and what we all know about smoking is it depresses your appetite right. It's relaxing, lowers cortisol and it gives you something to put in your mouth that has no calories and is easy to do. And you know, fine, you quit smoking. But you had to accept the fact that if you were going to replace those cigarettes with food, then you would gain some weight.

Speaker 2: 11:16

And interesting is that the New York Times, which is the Bible here, really in December 19, 2004, I can remember and I have the article wrote an article and it was by Gina Collada, who was their number one wellness journalist, health exercise, all the rest of that. And she said the title of it was we took cigarettes out of our mouths and replaced them with bagels, huge, big article. Now I immediately wrote her because she knows me because of Pilates and whatever, and I said, well, wait a second. Yeah, that's true, but you have to understand, and I had said this to her in an earlier email, saying you know, yes, we have beaten. She was congratulating Americans on beating smoking. We've eliminated smoking, people aren't smoking anymore. And I said, yeah, they aren't, but they're also now fat. And she remembered that. And then she wrote this article. And then I went back there and I said this relates to the email I sent you in June 2003, 18 months before, and she publishes the article Now. That article has never been explored since Never, even though some forms of smoking are coming back. I mean, they're legalizing marijuana here and other things like that. But whatever it is.

Speaker 2: 12:44

And the funny thing was we used to say, or people would make comments, that people were smoking. They had evidence for 4,000 years and about a month ago there was another investigation from some archaeologists who discovered something that proved that humans have been smoking for 12 months in beers. Anyway, that is the cause. That was where it started, and then what happened was everything else. You cannot blame it on fast food, because we had, in the 40s and 50s, fast food. We had White Castle hamburgers, just like McDonald's or Burger King or whatever. We had Carvel ice cream stands all over. We had actually what I would call industrial strength soda. There were no diet sodas. If you wanted a Coca-Cola that I affectionately call American Beaujolais, it would be full powers that I affectionately call American Beaujolais, it would be full powers. So all that is skipped over because people want to demonize food and beverage, because it's an easy story for journalists to phone in and all kinds of people who are dieticians or doctors. Those people can jump on board and get on television, and that's really what it is.

Speaker 2: 14:05

But at this moment, this is the first drug, ozempicin, the GLP-1 semaglutide, that is doing something that no other previous diet drug did. The previous ones would be attempting to speed up your metabolism, or, like Orlistat, which is from Roche, which is a huge pharmaceutical company, to take out the fat calories right, reduce them. And since fat has nine calories per gram protein, four carbohydrates, four, obviously fat is to target. You know, which is why we had low fat diet and then the food tasted so terrible, they just put sugar in it. You know, all this is well known. This is the history of us, the 60 year history. But this is the one drug that they finally figured out.

Speaker 2: 14:59

What was the problem? And the problem is not too many calories, it's too much hunger. Everybody in America is hungry. They may weigh, you know, 400 pounds and they don't need to eat, but they're hungry. And that is because of the hormones, and there are four of them, and cortisol is really one of the most important. And what happens is everyone has cortisol, everyone needs cortisol, but if it stays elevated, you know, it's supposed to be rise. Get you up in the morning and then it drops. If it doesn't, if it stays elevated, what happens is it tells your brain you're hungry, and then you're hungry, and you're hungry, hungry, hungry.

Speaker 2: 15:38

And all the people that are on these drugs now keep saying things in their chats my company and people working here. We go into these chat rooms on Facebook for people on ozempitin jar and all these drugs and they say things which are interesting for me to hear, which is I don't feel hungry. That food noise is gone. I'm hardly eating anything now. Meanwhile, one of the largest food retailer in america is walmart um, maybe amazon, a second and they are reporting that people who are buying these drugs at the pharmacy, they're getting their prescription filled and now they're coming out in pill form too. When they're other ones, they are purchasing 25% less food and beverage. That's a huge disruption, right, and it's going to happen.

Speaker 2: 16:31

So what we're seeing is that these drugs turn off something in the brain that shouldn't have been turned off and that's making people ravenously hungry, and that, obviously, is really going to change things here in terms of health, but also the economic situation. I mean, the food business is $1.5 trillion, but right now, whenever you have a disruption. There'll be certain industries that will struggle and others that will prosper. It's pretty clear to me everyone should go out and buy the stock of people who are in the clothing business, because people lose weight and the first thing they want to do is get a new wardrobe, and now, of course, they really need it because it will be permanent. So, you know, it's going to be interesting and these are miracle drugs.

Speaker 2: 17:25

And then, of course, what I call the wellness bitches, which is you know, I have funny codas in my book about this and the anti-wellness diet They'll start saying, oh, there'll be side effects. Side effects, yeah, yeah, we will have reduced diabetes. 50 million people have diabetes, 96 million are pre-diabetic, 96 million. We only have 330 million. That's not like a big country like India or China. 330 million, 100 million Americans have fatty liver disease, right, you know. And then all the other muscular, skeletal problems from carrying all this weight around, and on and on. So, yeah, there are side effects and most of them are going to be good, right, and are needed. And it's interesting because finally they figured out that it's not calories, it's hunger Artificial hunger, but it's hunger Lovely Understood.

Speaker 1: 18:22

That's hunger, but it's hunger Lovely Understood. That's a great discussion, johan, and I have to say that you have given us so much to think about today about obesity, ozempic wellness, culture and how to navigate the health in a way that feels authentic and empowering. So thank you so much for being, for your bold insights and for always keeping it real. So thank you so much. And yeah, and for the listeners, I have to mention that if today's episode sparked something in you, then share it with someone who needs to hear it, and definitely do not forget to leave us a review and subscribe for more conversations that challenge the status quo. So remember that your health and your body are your own and find what works for you, and don't be afraid to question the norms for sure. So until next time, stay curious, stay bold and keep prioritizing what feels good. So till then.