(A guest post from fellow Eating Psychology Coach, Tanya Marks)
Do you know the critical ingredient that's missing from the typical diet culture approaches to your nutrition and wellbeing?
YOU!
As a nutrition professional, diet culture's false and simplistic definition of "good nutrition" and health frustrates the **** out of me.
Its approaches requires restriction and perfection --- with food and our bodies.
Nope, neither are necessary.
And sadly, diet culture has made healthy eating and feeling good in your unique body harder.
How?
Diet culture doesn't honor that you are a unique person.
Diet culture ignores body diversity and that health can come in a variety of shapes and sizes.
YOU live in a unique body.
Diets and plans have zero compassion for the challenges that YOU face everyday (i.e. if you "fail," it's your fault).
Yet, as a culture, we turn to them year after year because we don't know that there's any other way to eat well (and remember that this is defined as what you eat for the most part, as no perfection is necessary) and feel and be the best version of YOURself.
Good nutrition isn't about deprivation. It's about adding foods in, not taking foods away from you. And, it includes having a healthy relationship with food and your body.
Your nutrition and well-being "success" can be measured in a multitude of ways (see below), rather than being scale focused (which shouldn't dictate whether you're having a good or bad day or your self-worth).
How you nourish yourself is directly influenced by all aspects of your health and well-being - defined as "Deep Health."
The 6 Dimensions of Your Deep Health
Physical (your nutrition, movement, health markers, sleep - feeling vibrant, energized and thriving)
Mental (your emotional, psychological, and social well-being, how you think, feel, and act; helps determine how you handle stress, relate to others, and care for yourself)
Emotional (your ability to experience a full range of emotions and express them appropriately)
Relational (being connected and authentic with others, feeling supported and like you belong)
Environmental (knowing your everyday surroundings support your health and well-being)
Existential (feeling a sense of meaning and purpose in your life)
So let me give you an example of what this looks like in real life:
♡ You work long hours at a stressful job (mental). You sit at a desk all day (environmental) which causes back pain (physical).
♡ You come home anxious (emotional), answer emails all night, which distracts you from time with your partner, kids (relational) which makes you feel awful because your family is your top priority (existential).
♡ Then you sleep poorly, wake up too exhausted to hike before work (what you love to do, aka "me" time), grab coffee and rush out the door to work (all physical). Eating "well" feels impossible. And at the end of your day, you order takeout because by now you're completely spent (in all areas of your health)!
♡ And you’re super hard on yourself (mental) because you’re not (or have never been) at the “ideal weight” (which is a myth by the way) that diet culture says you "should" be.
And finally, on top of all that, you feel like the only way to "take care of yourself" is to white-knuckle it perfectly through a 30 day eating challenge. Ahhhh. That's a lot of pressure, and your stress bucket is already overflowing.
You deserve personalized attention that's thoughtful and compassionate, because your challenges are unique.
Diet culture plans don't address your real challenges and sadly can make your relationship with food and your body worse.
Is there a way out? Yes. The challenges are connected. But so are the solutions and improving one dimension of your health can also improve the others!
The above story is from a real client and the last thing she needed was MORE stress - restricting her food and having her self-worth and confidence go up or down depending on what the scale says. Sigh.
The Deep Health Solution
So together, we collaborated to address her biggest challenge FIRST: an overflowing stress bucket.
She slowly, over time, at her pace, built in doable practices to decrease her daily stress to create mental and physical space to not only improve her relationship to food and her body, but to take care of her "deep health."
She took an honest look at how she was currently using her time; she learned a simple relaxation technique to do while eating anything; she took breaks from sitting all day; she learned to speak up and advocate for herself at work and set email boundaries. She now has time for what matters most - spending time with her spouse and kids. She can wind down before bed and sleeps better which allows her to wake up refreshed and go for a morning hike with a friend before work; her back is happier and she has the energy to grab groceries or prepare a meal-kit for dinner.
She'd fallen to the bottom of a never-ending "to-do" list. She didn't know how to dig out other than force herself to do yet another food challenge that defined success and her whole health by one freakin' number on the scale.
Ultimately, by learning to honor her whole health and by ditching the diet culture BS definitions of "good nutrition" and health, she felt sooooo much better (physical, mental) about herself - not just her own self-worth and confidence (emotional) but because she was now able to live in alignment with her deeper (existential) "why" - to feel mentally and physically well - for her family (relational).
How wonderful!
And I want this "how wonderful" for you too.
To your happiness and health.
If this post resonated with you, please consider sharing it to spread the word. It might be of use to someone you know.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, click HERE to book a session with me, or follow me on Facebook @Nourishing Body & Soul or on Instagram @tlastle.nourishingbodyandsoul.
Comments