Host Dr. Flowers, co-host Robin French, and VIP guest Moe Schlachter discuss why getting advice from a registered dietitian matters for achieving our best selves, rather than seeking guidance from anyone else, including your own trainer or doctor. Moe discusses the psychological and behavioral elements of eating. He shares with our audience one thing everyone can do right now to make food really work for you. Dr. Flowers and Moe have a new project…be sure to tune in and listen for details!
Guest Social Media Handles:
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JFHI Social Media Handles:
linkedin.com/company/jflowershealth/
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Listen to the podcast here
Enjoying The Journey To Our Best Selves With Moe Schlachter [Episode 24]
Human Performance Potential
Welcome to Understanding the Human Condition with Dr. James Flowers. We’re excited to have our special guest, Moe Schlachter.
I’m so glad that you’re here. I’m super excited when I found out that you agreed to do this. I know how busy you are. Thanks for making time to come over and be with us.
Thank you. I’m really glad to get the opportunity to talk to you whenever I can. I know how busy you are, and it’s really a pleasure to contribute to this podcast.
That’s so cool.
I thought I’d read a little tiny bio, and then we’ll go from there. Moe Schlachter is revolutionizing the journey to exceptional health and the full realization of human performance potential. He’s a registered dietitian nutritionist and a certified diabetes care and education specialist. Moe is the president of Houston Family Nutrition, Inc., the premier destination for clinical nutrition care and wellness guidance. As a leading expert in his field, Moe is routinely featured on local affiliates of ABC, CBS, and ESPN television and radio. Thank you for agreeing to take this with us. We’re excited.
You left NBC off of here. I was in Los Angeles one day and turned on the 5 O’Clock News, and he was on the NBC National News.
I did leave NBC off of that, and that’s how we connected. It was a series of collisions where I went to a spiritual care networking event, and then met an associate of yours and got to do a presentation at one of the rehab facilities. Through that, we were just playing phone tag and never really connected, but then I get a call from Dr. Flowers, over from Los Angeles, saying that he just saw my face on TV.
That’s cool.
That was very cool.
That’s a great segue to what I asked you earlier about that ESPN Zone thing. You were watching ESPN Zone. You text them while they were live or something?
Yeah. Soon after I opened Houston Family Nutrition, just going to networking meetings and going around town, listening to the guys on ESPN and heard them talking about their New Year’s resolution. It was around January time, and then, just texted in just for kicks saying, if you guys are kicking it around about weight loss, you really ought to talk to a registered dietitian. One thing led to another. I was leading a Houston-wide listener weight loss contest on ESPN radio and really put me and the company on the map.
That’s amazing. See, you just take every opportunity, right? When you see something, grab it. Take the chance. I love how you say full realization of human performance potential. Tell me about that.
In working with clients or clients coming to Houston Family Nutrition and to J. Flowers, typically there’s maybe an ailment that they have in mind or something that they want to fix, but at a certain point, there’s the conversation to be had about what is possible, from a point of strength. It’s not just fixing what’s wrong. Of course, that has to happen when there’s an ailment in place, but the bigger picture is what is possible? What can we achieve? How far can we push our body athletically, or it could just be how much peace can we get from our brain on a day-to-day basis, or how much clarity, how much focus, how much of the things that we love can we immerse into, and how far can we take that?
I see our company helping people do that through the direct care that we are providing, but also through referrals and collaboration with other providers, helping them see their blind spots, knowing what we can help them with, what we can’t help them with, but connecting them with the very best resources so that they can get from wherever they’re at to really reaching their wildest dreams. That’s something I ask every single client on the way in. I said, try, if you can, just remove any kind of limitation. If I was a genie, what would you wish for? What would you like? What is your biggest wish? How can I help you get there? Once someone can verbalize it, we can make it happen. It sounds a little Disney-like, but the truth is, it’s possible.
I couldn’t agree more. I always say if you can see it and visualize it, you can achieve it. You can. As long as you put it in your mind and you can verbalize it, see it, visualize it, put it on the fridge and your mirror or whatever it is, you can get there.
I had an intern come to the clinic. We have interns who rotate in and out with us. She was only going to be with us for four weeks, and it’s a relatively short amount of time. On her first day, I said, what would you like to achieve in this learning experience? What is your biggest wish? It took some coaxing out of her to really get her to dream a little bit bigger than maybe saying something that seemed attainable. I said, what is something that is unattainable that you want to achieve during this experience so that you and I can prove that this concept works? She said, I want to present nutrition in front of pediatric oncology patients.
With coming in with no experience, coming in with not a whole lot of connection. I said, you said it, and we’re going to work towards it. From there, her efforts got behind it. Through networking, through diligence, through being resourceful, we made some calls that introduced her to other people. Lo and behold, she got on someone’s radar, and she got to get her experience. It’s a small little thing, but what was really great was she just let go of any limiting belief. Just said, this is what I want. Just through that, she got there, and it was a remarkable experience.
How old are your patients? What’s the age range?
We’re a family clinic. Houston Family Nutrition, we see members of the family from all stages of life. We’ll see parents who have concerns about an infant, or even expecting mothers, all the way through geriatric years. We’re going to treat each stage of life a little bit differently. Typically, if there’s a nutrition concern for a smaller child, we’ll work more directly with the parents. If it’s an adolescent, we’ll work with the parents and with the child collaboratively. When an adult is on their own, we’ll work one-to-one with the adult, but we’re seeing folks of all ages.
Importance Of Registered Dietitians
What I was thinking is nutrition is such one of those things in the world that, if most, a doctor would never sit with a patient or a friend or anyone else and offer psychiatric advice or counseling advice or medical advice, but everyone offers nutrition advice. Your doctor does. Your physical therapist does. Your chiropractor does. Your counselor does. We all do. Why is it so important to see a registered dietitian rather than listening? Certainly, people can be knowledgeable, but you’re a registered dietitian. Talk to us about the importance of that.
That’s such a great observation by you, because food is both simple and complex at the same time. It’s also something that’s not super important but also critical and very important at the same time. It can be complex, for instance, it could be simple. I should say you don’t need a prescription for it. Everyone eats it. It’s not something that you need any special license to handle and hold and eat, but it is complex because, and here’s proof, there’s a $20 billion diet industry. If food was simple, there wouldn’t be $20 billion in these diets. It’s projected to balloon ten times that amount by the end of the decade. I guess that shows the two sides of it.
Food is both simple and complex at the same time.
It’s also simple in a way, but I guess, critical when it comes to athletic performance. All the major sports teams are investing in their nutrition. You think about nutrition for disease. You think about the very simple fact, as corny as it sounds, you are what you eat, but the truth is, our bodies are only made of the food that we eat. Ourselves under a microscope? It’s all components of food. Food is critical. People give themselves license to kind of advise on food because it has the simple side of it, but when thinking about how important it is, it really is important to seek a registered dietitian. A registered dietitian is the only licensed authority on human nutrition-related conditions.
When you think about the protection you have going to a doctor, the license that hangs on their wall is your evidence that the doctor is going to treat you with the best of what science has to offer. They’re not going to go outside of that. They’re not going to be experimenting on you. The same thing is true with a registered dietitian. We are legally bound by the science because we’re licensed by the same boards that doctors are. Additionally, registered dietitians are trained. We get a master’s degree. We also have a residency. We have to supervise under established practitioners. We also have the licensing exam and continuing education requirements.
When you see a registered dietitian, you’re seeing someone who is active in the field and staying on top of the research because it’s required of them. When you see anyone else, they might be knowledgeable, but they don’t have to be knowledgeable. You might be seeing someone who isn’t quite as knowledgeable and isn’t skilled to identify issues that require critical manipulation of the diet.
Got it, and a lot of people interchange the words nutritionist with dietitian. What’s that all about?
That’s been a pain point for the field. We used to be known as registered dietitians as a way to differentiate ourselves from maybe just nutritionists. Registered dietitian was a legally protected name that nutritionists couldn’t use, but now we want to commandeer the nutritionist’s name, too. We’re known as registered dietitians or registered dietitian nutritionists. The main difference between someone with a registered dietitian part and anyone else is that licensure piece. Additionally, a registered dietitian’s training includes the food science, but also the psychology of human behavior and, finally, the physiology.
The way the human body works, the way the human body interacts with medications and other substances, and also the human body under disease conditions, anyone else, say a personal trainer giving out nutrition advice, typically they don’t have that training on disease states. They don’t have the training on medication. They might not even know to assess for things that are really critical. Whereas, as registered dietitians, our practice starts with assessment before we diagnose and then intervene.
Breaking Bad Habits In Families
Isn’t a lot of what you have to do, though, breaking the bad habits and patterns of families, because doesn’t it really all start with how your parents, what they fed you, and what their eating habits are, and breaking that cycle?
That comes up a lot with both my adult clients and child clients. With my adult clients, I’m taking them back to their own childhood and asking them about their experience at the dinner table growing up, because that nine times out of ten, if someone is identifying as being a picky eater, for example, we just so happen to find that, in childhood, they weren’t exposed to very many fruits and vegetables or the foods that they’re just finding themselves not liking. Now, as an adult, they look around, see other adults eating it, and they don’t know what to make of it. There’s this identity of being picky or maybe allergic or just unable to access those foods.
Sometimes we see families will approach us with a desire to have us help their kids make different choices, but a lot of times, it’s working with the parents on how they are exposing their children to these foods. I worked with a mom. When she came in, she had three kids, all of her kids had different quirks around the dinner table. She found herself making five different dinners. She found herself being in an unfavorable position as a parent to be the food police for some of her kids. It was just a really hard experience for her. In working with her and helping her realize that she is the parent, she has the authority, she’s the gatekeeper of the food. She’s the one who the children are looking at for example.
She realized that, through being a role model, through being a fair, firm, and consistent parent around the dinner table, she was able to find a lot of peace around dinnertime. By the time she left, she was down to making that one dinner. She set the expectations, there wasn’t any drama. She was able to change her style and really resolve everything that she was concerned about early on.
She took back the power.
That’s right. She stepped into the power that she maybe lost some touch with, for sure.
Impact On Patients With Complex Challenges
That’s so cool. Sounds like a lot of the patients that we work with and some that we work with together. Can you think of a patient that you’ve worked with? At J. Flowers, we work with a lot of highly complex people, mental health challenges, addiction challenges, medical challenges, sometimes one of those, sometimes all of those. How have you been able to impact the lives of some of the folks that you’ve seen? Maybe pick one and think about it.
A few come to mind, but first, I also want to just express appreciation for the impact and power that the J. Flowers Institute has on the lives of people who are really stuck, lost. Sometimes they arrive, a lot of times, hopeless. One story, in particular, stands out from my standpoint, someone who arrived by ambulance. The first time that I got to see her, she couldn’t tolerate sitting in an upright position for more than 30 minutes. Our session was really pretty short. As it turns out, it ended up being the most important 30-minute conversation of my career. I saw in this person that she was at a crossroads. She had seen many different medical providers in the past, many qualified and unqualified nutrition providers in the past.
She was so malnourished and so close to losing herself. She was also fighting with all the different messages that had come her way. She was at the crossroads, is food hurting me? Should I be restricting more of my food? Should I be taking away more of my nutrient sources? Should I take a chance on food and see if it can bring me back to my strength? I can’t really tell you exactly what I did to talk her into the path of choosing food, but it turns out that that’s what she did. From that minute, she was committed to getting as much nutrition going through her bloodstream as she possibly could. She is a different person. I got a chance to speak to her for the first time in almost one year. I really just have a before-and-after perspective.
In the meantime, at J. Flowers, we were able to provide food for her and literally spoon-feed her back to health. She wasn’t able to brush her teeth or feed herself. She was literally spoon-fed back to health. I almost didn’t recognize her when talking to her. She’s so vibrant. She’s so full of life. She’s so clear. She’s in such a powerful position. It’s phenomenal.
It gives me goosebumps.
Me too.
I saw a photo. You saw her the first day she arrived. I will never forget that, that day in particular, but I remember calling you about this case. I just saw a photo of her today versus a year ago, and no one who doesn’t know this woman would say it was the same person. Even some people who know her wouldn’t say it’s the same person. Nutrition was such an important part of bringing her back to health. There was a lot of chronic pain, a lot of injury, a lot of trauma, a lot of depression, things like that, but nutrition was critical. You guys brought in a chef and prepared meals. Talk a little bit about that, about what you do, and the lengths that you’ll go to help your clients.
In stepping out, in opening Houston Family Nutrition, I identified the power that we as dietitians, we as counselors, have to impact behavior beyond the office visit. Through evidence-based counseling techniques and understanding human behavior, we can help people move the bar, even if we’re not actually spoon-feeding them. However, there are situations, like the case we just talked about, where that is necessary. We cannot expect the individual, whether it’s a child, someone with a handicap, or someone who is dependent on others for basic life necessities, to take recommendations and execute independently.
We are able to meet clients in that way by connecting them with resources that are either outside of our company, or we have very flexible team members who can counsel on one day, then take a client to a grocery store on another day, and cook for them or with them on another day. We help them learn cooking techniques, help them learn how to shop differently, and also cook for them and feed them if need be, too. For our eating disorder clients, we have one-to-one supervision options where we can have a team member, during mealtime, just sit and coach a client, something that they typically can only access if they’re in a residential facility. We’re bringing that to the outpatient side in order to help bring the structure that works back home.
Upcoming Project
Now that you’re on that subject of eating disorders, you two have been cooking up a little project here, and I could be telling stories out of class, but I’m just going to bring it out and see what you’re willing to share. Share the project that you two have been discussing.
We’ve been talking about this for a long time, several months anyway. There’s such a huge problem in this area, really around the world, the United States, and we have one of the top experts here. Moe just started talking with me and Michael in the office, and it just evolved. Moe, I’d love it if you introduced it and told the audience what we are so excited to do with you.
Eating disorders is really the purest connection of neurobiology, psychology, behavior, and nutrition. One thing that consistently hit me with every case that I collaborated on with J. Flowers is how powerful this care environment is that you’ve created, and also how deep we can go with clients and really help them on that whole-life, whole-health level. Eating disorders are a huge problem in the country. I think statistics will say one in every ten Americans or so might develop an eating disorder in the course of their life. Besides the eating disorder itself, it’s the relapse rates that really struck me. About one in four folks with anorexia, in particular, will relapse, which is staggering.
Eating disorders are the purest connection of neurobiology, psychology, behavior, and nutrition.
The reason, just in seeing clients at my practice, I’ll see folks with anorexia on an outpatient basis, typically about 6, 7, 8 weeks out after residential treatment, because they’ve gone to residential, they’ve restored weight, and we have an individual with anorexia, with an intense desire to be thin, who has discharged from a residential facility, and they’re maybe the biggest they’ve ever been, and they’ve got there really quickly. Then they’re just discharged home, maybe with some guidance and some instruction, but it puts them in a position where relapse is almost inevitable. What we’ve been talking about is almost like a bridge between that residential and home life, where we can give a family an intensive boot camp, a one-week where you come and you learn the rules that need to be in place to keep the child home and prevent that relapse.
I’m so excited about it. An intensive really means every day, Monday through Friday. It can be one week, it can be two weeks, it can be whatever the intensive is built to be, but in this case, we’re looking at doing a one-week intensive in this area, so I’m super excited about it.
You think of a family getting to come in the luxury accommodations. They come here with a mission. We know the disease is there, we know there’s anorexia, we know they’re back to the way they want to be. In an eating disorder facility, just to pull the curtain from behind it, there’s a lot of structure that really helps an individual with anorexia just get from point A to point B. That same structure is sometimes difficult to execute at home for a variety of reasons. Even if there’s no family issue, per se, it’s still difficult to be rigid with your child or hold the line when you also have to share Christmas with them. In a facility, there’s a little bit more of tough love, so to speak. We help families really bridge that gap. We help families be able to have that positive relationship with their child but also instill that structure that is going to be needed for the child to be successful at home.
So cool. You clearly have a passion for this work. How did you develop the passion that you have for this particular area of work?
I started my career as a chef, so finding that I had a knack for food and just enjoyed being around it and exploring it even further led me to the path of being a dietician. At that time, I thought being a dietician is just being a food guru. In some sense, it is, but what really lit my passion on fire was the counseling training and the psychology of human behavior. Just why do we make the choices that we make? The most powerful thing that really struck me was just the realization that I’m spending one hour with a client, and the client is spending 160 whatever hours of his week without me. They’re coming back, and there are certain ways I communicate that can help them actually get things done and certain ways I communicate that aren’t as helpful.
Just learning the power of that really lit my passion on fire. I’ll also say that the opportunity that we have as dieticians to really impact people’s human experience is tremendous. There’s nothing we do as human beings more frequently in our human experience than eating.
The opportunity that we have as dietitians to impact people’s human experience is tremendous.
That’s how some people show love.
Food naturally is in the center of quite a variety of things. What I find is that it’s just a very accessible portal into whatever’s going on with the person. Understanding that food is a human experience, just like showing connection and love and conversation and exploration and joy, and knowing that you can see into someone’s window into their soul through food is really exciting. I’ll say, if someone’s presenting as anxious or disorganized, or if someone is a people pleaser, all that stuff is going to show up in food, in the way they share food with others, the way they allow themselves to eat in front of others, or what food choices they make.
Helping people recognize that gives them an opportunity to work on some maybe issues that are a little tough to work on. Let’s say it’s a relationship issue. If they can work on their stuff, so to speak, through food, it’s a lot safer a lot of times for them to work on some of those skills that they can then translate into other areas of life.
Effects Of COVID-19 On Nutrition
Over the last year, it seems that we’ve ordered from all of these apps to-go food every night. Many people are ordering online and ordering food to pick up and are tired of being at home. What effect has COVID had on your clients and their nutrition?
That’s a great question. In the beginning, it was apparent that it affected people in two very different ways. For some people, right off the bat, they reconnected with cooking. They reconnected with the time that they had to invest in their health and energy. There was an increased motivation to protect self from catching COVID, especially for those who already had underlying conditions. I saw some folks really find a different part of themselves. Conversely, there was a lot of anxiety around it. There was a lot of opportunity to eat for comfort. There was less opportunity to move around and get active. I saw it going a couple of different ways.
Ordering in is one thing, the opportunity again, just the time and availability, is another thing. But what’s really cool is that people are relying on them. People are discovering different parts of themselves in general. It’s really great to see families maybe spending a little bit more time together, eating together a little bit more, and finding ways to enjoy food again in a way that maybe they just weren’t doing when things were a little bit busier.
Did your family eat together as a group?
Sometimes. It wasn’t a ritual. It depends. We were all busy and doing things. Some nights we had dinner together, and some nights we were on our own. Some nights we would eat together, but not at the dining room table.
That was back in the day where we had to remember those little TV tables or whatever, TV trays. Because we loved to watch television and eat at the same time as a family.
What about yours?
We did. We waited till my dad got home, and Mom always had dinner ready, and we ate as a group. There were five of us. It was crazy. It was wild.
My mom grew up in a home, same thing. They all sat down for dinner and ate a formal dinner every single night together as a family. I was like, we did that every once in a while. What about you?
We had it on the weekends, for sure. Family, pretty regimented. It was great. Thinking back on it, I never thought much about it, to be honest. In this work, really understanding that it’s not a typical experience. Some people will have it. Some people won’t. But I do, I can say that there are foods that are normal for me just through that experience that maybe are eyebrow-raising for others. I think tongue comes to mind as one of them, but just knowing that maybe a food that’s a little bit more fringe. The truth is, it gets back to that exposure. A lot of people just, that’s where they learn to eat. It’s not to say that if they don’t do it, then they can’t do it as an adult. The path is a little bit trickier.
The path to healthy eating can be trickier without early exposure to different foods.
Cultural Considerations
We’re running out of time, or we’ve run over our time. What have we not asked? Is there something important, project-wise, that you’d like to mention that we haven’t discussed?
Yeah. I’ll just echo the value of seeing a registered dietitian. If you see your general practitioner every year to find out if there’s anything wrong with you, then you see your registered dietitian every year to find out what you can do to push your health to the next level and get ahead of any negative things. Follow us at HoustonFamilyNutrition.com and Houston Family Nutrition on Instagram and Facebook. I believe that we’re at the cutting edge of bridging the best nutrition science and the best human behavior science and helping people, everyday people, anyone, just get the most out of their health. If you want to get ahead of it, just follow us. You’ll hear from us first. It’s just a pleasure to be with you guys.
It’s so great. One other quick story. I’ll just say, culturally, being Jewish, we had a Jewish family come from Jerusalem for an evaluation, the husband and wife, and you were able to accommodate their needs the entire stay that they were here and coordinate their meals and service and all of that. Talk just a bit about that, because I want everyone to know that whatever it is, you can certainly handle as a registered dietitian.
Robbin was saying before, food being a part of celebration, being part of family, being part of identity. That’s a really good example. When clients come to our clinic, it is important to recognize that the cultural significance of their food is sacred and is to be honored. When I had the opportunity to work with the client that you’re referring to, it was great to be in a position to help the team just understand the culture, which, again, speaks to the value of the communication of the team, the collaboration of the team, where we’re going to meet the client in the place that they’re needing. That is a super important part of the experience. We’re going to make sure that our clients are going to have their needs taken care of. That’s a really good example.
It is important to recognize that the cultural significance of food is sacred.
Cool. Thank you so much for doing this.
If they want to reach you by phone, I know you had the website. What number do they call?
They’re going to call 281-940-5878, and you’re going to talk to Jen, who’s a phenomenal administrative manager and our wellness guru.
Great, and Dr. Flowers, if they want to reach you at the J. Flowers Health Institute?
Everyone look at JFlowersHealth.com or our phone number, 713-783-6655.
Perfect. Thank you again.
Thanks, Moe. Appreciate you so much.
Thank you, Robbin.
Thank you.
