Melissa Urban on Overcoming Addiction Beyond the Prescription

You can also check out this episode on Spotify!
On this episode, Melissa Urban talks candidly with Dr. McBride about her struggle with drugs—and how her recovery stemmed from creating healthy boundaries around food, substances, and interpersonal relationships. 
Her latest book, The Book of Boundaries, is about the importance of setting limits on relationships and choices, and putting ourselves back in the driver’s seat of our health and wellbeing.
Melissa is living proof that health is about laddering up from self-awareness to acceptance to agency of our body and mind. 
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The full transcript of the show is here!
Dr. McBride: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to my office. I'm Dr. Lucy McBride, and this is "Beyond the Prescription," the show where I talk with my guests, like I do my patients, pulling the curtain back on what it means to be healthy, redefining health as more than the absence of disease. As a primary care doctor for over 20 years, I've realized that patients are much more than their cholesterol and their weight. Our stories live in our bodies. I'm here to help people tell their story and for you to imagine and potentially get healthier from the inside out. You can subscribe to my weekly newsletter at lucymcbride.com/newsletter and to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's get into it and go beyond the prescription.
Today's guest has been on the New York Times' bestselling list six times. She is the creator of the Whole30, which is not just a diet plan. It's a way to rethink our relationship with food. Melissa Urban joins me today to talk about overcoming addiction and the lessons learned in recovery that inform how she thinks about food, nutrition, body image, and the boundaries we set in our everyday lives. Melissa's newest book is called "The Book of Boundaries," published in October 2022. In it, she describes how we can say yes to things we need and want and no to things we don't to put ourselves back on the driver's seat of our health. Boundaries, in my world and in hers, provide the groundwork for improved health and well-being. Melissa Urban, thank you so much for joining me today.
Melissa: [00:01:48] Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat with you.
Dr. McBride: Here's why I wanted to have you on the show. The way you talk about boundaries and the importance of setting limits on our relationships, our choices, is so important to how we show up in the world, how we relate to food, how we relate to alcohol and other substances, how we relate to other people, and how we feel about our own bodies that it's really at the core of what, in my opinion, health is. 
[00:02:17] Health, as I introduce in this podcast, is about self-awareness, and it's about acceptance, and it's about having agency. And having agency, in my opinion, includes knowing what we need and knowing what we don't need, which is driven, ultimately, by knowing our value and our meaning and our purpose. So that is a wide lens with which to open the conversation and for me to ask you, Melissa. How do you, as an expert in nutrition and eating and health, define health yourself?
Melissa: Well, that's a big question to open with. You're just going right for it.
Dr. McBride: We're going to go right from the top, and then we're going to get granular.
Melissa: [00:02:57] I had to do a piece recently for Oprah Daily where we talked about the concept of wholeness and what does wholeness mean to me, and I think that that can relate very nicely to this idea of what health means to me. So I think, very often, we look at health through a very narrow