I recently had an epiphany about our relationship with food and body. This epiphany had multiple parts and has actually been brewing over the past year.  It will take some time to fully flesh out and explain but here is the relatively quick version.

I also want to make it clear that this epiphany has come after practicing intuitive eating for 7-8 years in addition to receiving my own life coaching, sifting through layer after layer of emotions and embracing my own spiritual transformation as part of doing the work required to heal my own relationship with food and body.

My epiphany is: I now understand gentle nutrition in a new way for myself and I have given myself permission to explore it.

(Please be aware that what follows could be triggering to someone who is just getting started with intuitive eating.  There are certain prerequisites to gentle nutrition and I will expand on that in future newsletters.) 

My epiphany might sound strange to some. I mean - gentle nutrition is a main principle in intuitive eating so why would you need permission to explore it? What does that mean? And what is different now that I am embracing it?

As a dieter for 30 years, I aimed to do many things that were "nutritious" from restricting calories to limiting certain food groups. I followed the trends of the day and tried Weight Watchers, Atkins, Paleo, and The Whole 30, for example, right along with everyone else.

As a non-dieter, I rejected and snubbed my nose at these things. These behaviors were punishing and short-lived and unsustainable fads that were designed to make people feel bad about their bodies and spend money on cures.

As a non-dieter, I also came to realize the value in bodies of all shapes and sizes, including my own. 

In addition, I realized that I actually liked some of the things I ate or tried when I was dieting and some things made my body feel good. And some of it was just awful and I never want to try it again (black bean brownies? No thank you.)

I also liked the process of trying new things. It was fun and exciting to explore new ways of being. 

But dieting is full of lots of judgment and In my relief to have found non-dieting, I didn't realize that I was trading one judgment for another. Instead of judging myself and my food, I was now judging diet culture and I was still judging other people for what they do with food.

This is definitely progress! It's better to externalize the shame and blame rather than continue to beat yourself up. These are steps in the direction of peace.

But what I also learned is that the path to peace with anything in life comes from neutrality, not duality. So I went from one side of the spectrum - being a dieter, to the other side - being a non-dieter in a 180-degree radical shift.

While in non-diet land, I was incredibly pleased in many respects and thrilled with my new found freedom from judging myself and yet at times I found myself still wanting to explore new trends in nutrition and felt like it was a dirty secret. By identifying with being a non-dieter, I was closing myself off to options that could possibly be part of my personal definition of gentle nutrition.

For example, there are a lot of external health studies and research that show our bodies function better with certain foods than others.  We are not upholding "diet culture" if we decide to incorporate some of the external wisdom.

It's not what we do, but the motivation behind it that is the real issue. 

I had been really fearful to get sucked back into diet thinking and because of that fear I was actually limiting myself.

While it's true - we could get sucked back into diet mentality, it's also true that once we remove the labels of "diet" and "non-diet" then all possibilities are open to us and we have unlimited choices as to what we want to do with our food and movement. 

Unlimited choices are what true freedom is all about and will contribute to our peace with food.

For example, I can think of one popular non-diet practitioner that does not eat gluten because it doesn't make her feel good. Some might say that was "diety" but it is her listening to her body and making a choice. 

I had been making the mistake of being so vigilant against diets that I was throwing the baby out with the bathwater for years.

Vigilance is never a sign of peace. 

Let's take my conversation about intuitive eating and intermittent fasting from this recent podcast as an example. It's not the fasting that is of concern as much as the mentality and emotions and beliefs behind the fasting.

For example, if I chose to fast (hypothetically) because I wanted a smaller body or better health and I am not going to be happy or satisfied until those things happen, and I believed that only fasting would give me health and I would have to be rigid and strict and execute it perfectly for it to work, then I am operating from a fear-based diet mentality and I am more focused and attached to a particular outcome than I am interested in being in the present moment.

But what if I start to notice that I am not hungry in the morning and I don't tend to eat until almost noon and I'm listening to my body's signals and it feels good in the moment and I am feeling energized and inspired? 

What if I also feel complete freedom to eat earlier on days when my body is signaling that it's hungry? Maybe I would be technically fasting in some fashion but it's flexible and fluid and without expectation of a specific outcome and is all about the present moment and being attuned to my body.

There is no fear of failure or falling off a wagon because there is no expectation. There is no rigidity. I'm attuned and listening to my body. I'm open and curious.  I'm not labeling or judging anything. What I do might change tomorrow and doesn't mean anything special. It is what it is. I'm not trying to get anywhere.

Currently, I don't actually have any desire to arbitrarily monitor my hours of eating, but I do like the idea of not eating breakfast until I really want it. I am taking what works for me and leaving the rest. 

When I allow myself to choose what I want to do based on listening to my body and based on connecting with how I want to feel in my body - choices come with ease and are filled with joy.

Even if you set a schedule and tell yourself you'd like to try something X times a week as an experiment - if it's done with lightness, non-judgment, forgiveness, and without expectation - only curiosity, this is not diet mentality. I mean, how else are we going to find the behaviors that might end up being something we really like if we don't try them?

We also don't have to do any of these things. We get to choose.

It's also imperative that we explore our mental conditioning, emotional intelligence, and spiritual grounding because these things are as important if not more so than what we eat and how we move. 

And we want to make sure our bullshit meters are fully functioning and we are not buying into hype or quick fixes or even the need to fix anything.

This is not about fixing because we are not broken. 

For some people, what I am describing comes totally naturally, because to choose to have a cookie or not to have a cookie IS intuitive eating and isn't "sugar restriction". 

But for recovering chronic dieters, we often have to learn this trust in our bodies all over again which includes accepting the permission to eat without throwing out the permission to not eat.

Keep in mind that as we make our choices we will still all vary in body size or shape or weight. As everyone finds the habits that sustain them the best, their bodies will also settle into a place that comes easily and this could be very different for each person.

It also might not be exactly where you'd want it to be if you have a preconceived notion (i.e. societal conditioning) of what that place is supposed to be. 

Gentle nutrition is never about choosing a behavior to manipulate the body, it's about using the body to choose the behavior.

The image in the book Intuitive Eating - 3rd edition - on page  205 really brought it home for me recently as to what gentle nutrition was trying to say (and I was ready to hear it). The image shows an infinity symbol and describes how authentic health is a dance between inner attunement and external health values.

So the aha moment for me was that - yes, I might very well want to incorporate some behaviors like less red meat or more vegetables based on some of the external health studies I have read or books that are popular. But I also want to do that because it's what my body has been whispering to me. 

I must also be very conscious of running those behaviors by my body and choosing to engage only if it feels light and easy and free and joyful and not because I think it's going to get me somewhere specific in the future and I can't be happy unless it does.

In the end, we may very well end up having some of the same behaviors that we had during our dieting days - but they will be coming from a very different mindset and they have nothing to do with weight or size and everything to do with how we feel in our physical bodies.

To me, this felt like even more freedom because I had been feeling guilty about the desire to pursue some different behaviors and that's when I realized that snubbing my nose at anything or choosing sides between diet and non-diet only ends up limiting my options and making me feel bad for wanting to make conscious choices about what I was doing with my body because maybe that was too "diety".

For that reason, I will no longer be using the tagline "Live Free or Diet" and will be phasing it out of my marketing.  While the phrase still makes me smile, "diet" is an interesting word. It has come to mean "restriction in order to lose weight" but it also means "habitual nourishment". 

I want to habitually nourish myself AND live free, not either/or. 

So what is different for me now? I asked for some vegetarian cookbooks for my birthday recently. The idea of meat has not been appealing for months now and I want my food to be vibrant, delicious, and satisfying and I was eating the same old things that weren't very satisfying anymore. I was finally ready to explore some new options.

I'm also making sure that when I eat something - I am connected with the joy of it and let it be easy. When I connect with joy - sometimes a burger and fries is exactly right and sometimes it's a salad. 

Life is all about the both/and rather than choosing sides. My pursuit is about living free of diet mentality AND feeling great in my body and I know I can have both and it's not asking too much. We can have it all.

There will be more on this to come. I'm curious how this lands for you right now? Have you had the same revelation? Does this seem confusing or contradictory? As always - reach out and let me know if you have any questions!

In the meantime, I hope you are finding gentle and joyful ways to live free - whatever feels best to you!

Photo by Johan Extra on Unsplash