For the Love of Food: Part 4

I’m done being afraid of food and weight.

Where did we leave off?

I’ve been writing this little series – For the Love of Food – since I started blogging in 2016. It’s turned into a sort of food diary for me, showcasing the link between my relationship with food and my awakening journey.

Part 1 was sort of an ode to food – my foodie love story. It was written right before I embarked on my solo-trip around the world when my plan was to be a food and travel blogger (ha!). It was cute and innocent and reading it now makes me cringe a little bit.

Part 2 was written in India, when I realized I wasn’t going to be a food and travel blogger (boo). I was in the midst of a major spiritual transformation and decided to deem chocolate cake as bad (lmao). Still cringing.

Part 3 was all about my Medical Medium journey and how I healed my acne holistically. I was still very much a righteous self-proclaimed conscious foodie. A little less cringe tho.

That leaves us here, in Part 4, what I feel to be a sort of full circle moment. A point in my food journey where I’m done with all of these food labels, restrictions and presumptions.

I just want to EAT. WHATEVER. THE FCK. I WANT. (Whenever the fck I want).  

And then 2020…

(I feel like most good stories these days start off with those three words.)

I was cooped up with family, regressing to my 5 year old self, literally hugging the birthday cake granola. I was resting and eating – like a lot. I wanted to feel guilty for all of the rest and food I was indulging in. 

But instead of asking myself, “Why don’t I have any energy? Why can’t I stop eating?”

I asked myself, “Why do I need so much rest? What does my body need?”

2020 was the year I kinda released the grip I had on this whole conscious Medical Medium foodie thing. Kinda.

I took up baking and coped with all the inner child stuff surfacing with vegan brownies and pumpkin cookies. I allowed myself to live in my fluffy robe and take allllll of the naps and be the couch potato I always dreamed of being.

So much healing took place that year. But I was still afraid of food, teeter-tottering between celery juice and birthday cake granola. But at least it was vegan gluten-free, I guess. 

Hungry with a capital H

By the time 2022 rolled around I was 20 lbs overweight. I think. I don’t know. I stopped stepping on the scale after 15 lbs because it was too depressing. My clothes didn’t fit. My face was a little rounder. My body was unrecognizable to me.

So to deal with that I went to Buenos Aires and ate dulce de leche gelato everyday for three months – naturally.

When I got back from Argentina in March, I had my master detox exercise plan ready to go. Because, you know, I was all dirty from two years of birthday cake granola and dulce de leche gelato and naps – obvs.

With my calorie tracker app, stacked peloton classes, and tried-and-true Medical Medium protocol in hand, getting back to my 2019 body would be manageable.

(We can all kinda guess how this story goes…)

A week in I was miserable. Tired. And Hungry with a capital H.

I spent another week wallowing in self-pity, feeling fat, unattractive and bad for myself.

Something about this whole weight loss journey felt off to me. I hated that I was at war with my body and tying my worth to my weight and my ability to stick to a life-sucking diet. It felt awful.

Anytime I find myself doing something because that’s what I think I should be doing, I have to stop and ask…

“What is this really about?”

That’s when I found myself deep down the rabbit hole of diet culture, beauty standards and the predatory new-age health and wellness industry.

I can’t just be normal…

And count the calories and lose the weight. I had to turn this whole weight loss journey into a metamorphic life lesson and revelation.

Because I’ve accepted that I’m just the type of person who wants to deeply understand the motivations behind my behavior and make sure I do everything out of radical love for myself and others. 

And labeling my extra 20 lbs as wrong, unattractive and unhealthy and using that as a motivation to lose weight didn’t feel very loving. Or a sustainable path to mental or physical health.

I want to make it very clear that I don’t think there is anything wrong with embarking on a weight loss journey – not that you should care what I think. But that’s not what this was about for me.

This was about challenging EVERYTHING I was taught about beauty, my body, a woman's body, food and dieting. This turned out to be one hell of a rude, necessary awakening.

Fck It

Life has a way of bringing you exactly what you need in order to learn that lesson. Just ask. I swear. The teachers, books, podcasts, movies, whatever come perfectly packaged and in the exact words you need to hear.

This is when I remembered an anti-dieting book a close friend had mentioned to me a few months back. 

The F*ck It Diet by Caroline Dooner was the book that really woke me the fck up.

I was rudely awakening to the fact that I had, in fact, been dieting and depriving myself for the last 5 years of my life.

In India I thought chocolate cake and coffee was bad so I avoided it in the name of God (sigh). 

In 2018 I spent a year strictly avoiding gluten, eggs, dairy, soy and canola. 

And not to mention the fear I had around food. I pretentiously deemed anything and everything that wasn’t sold at Whole Foods as bad.

At one point I was even afraid of drinking cold water because apparently it’s COLD WATER that is preventing the proper digestion of my food and therefore depriving me of the necessary nutrients.

WATER.

Not only was I in fact a chronic dieter for the past 5 years (in the name of health and wellness obvs), but I also developed a mild case of orthorexia – an unhealthy focus on eating in a healthy way.

At the moment it didn’t feel like dieting or orthorexia though. It felt like I was passionate about eating clean and protecting myself and the world from the poison at our conventional grocery stores – because it was 100% the Oreos killing us.

Passionate? Maybe. Obsessed and scared and deprived? Definitely. 

Like I said, rude awakening. 

And according to Caroline, when we diet and deprive ourselves of certain foods our bodies go into famine mode and eventually we will need to find balance by spending some time eating all of the foods we deprived ourselves of. 

It’s the deprive-binge-deprive-binge cycle we will spend the rest of our lives in if we think dieting is the answer.

This is why my body was SCREAMING for cheese and gelato and bread this past year – it was reclaiming balance.

Because our bodies are incredibly, highly intelligent and it actually wants to keep us at a healthy weight (read *healthy*, not skinny). 

It will do everything in its power to keep us healthy, forcing us to crave and store fat when we diet because the poor thing thinks we’re in a famine and is trying, ready for this…to protect us!

This is in no way to discredit the Medical Medium protocol or eating “clean” organic foods. It was what I needed at the time. And I 100% credit the protocol and plants to healing my acne. 

But avoiding the “no foods” and eating that way all of the time just wasn’t sustainable for me in the long run. I was tired of being afraid of food, labeling everything that wasn’t organic, vegan, and gluten-free as bad and wallowing in the inevitable guilt that followed when I ate pizza.

I was ready to completely trust my body and support her in doing her job – keeping me healthy and happy.

This meant deleting the calorie tracker app and chilling with the peloton classes and refusing to spend the rest of my life chasing a size 3 as if that is the only measure of health and beauty.

Skinny Doesn't Mean Healthy

Since the day every single woman is born on this planet we are inundated with images of beauty – white, thin, fragile. It keeps the majority of women (who are not white, thin or fragile) in a constant state of changing themselves, grasping for an impossible beauty standard decided by “them”, and never, ever feeling good enough, so that they can continue selling us garbage we don’t need. 

And the diet and health and wellness industry is part of that system. The system doesn’t care about your health or well-being. It cares about making money off of your insecurities.

I can’t help but feel like they almost want us to remain thin and fragile and basically *poof* disappear into thin air and not take up any space. Because God forbid we own our curves and soft bellies and thick thighs and take up space and actually love and trust our bodies.

And stop buying sht to change ourselves.

We have been OBSESSED with women’s bodies since the beginning of time, and when we buy into the notion that our bodies have to look a certain way for us to be *desired* (not loved, two different things), then we are as much part of the problem as the patriarch is.

The only way we can change this belief system around women and weight is to critically think for ourselves, question EVERYTHING we’ve been taught about beauty and bodies, and change that belief within ourselves.

It’s really the only way.

So if I want women to stop obsessing over weight and food and chasing thinness and start feeling worthy as they are, I have to do that with myself first and foremost.

And in the world we live in, that’s not always easy, but absolutely necessary to shake this archaic notion up, create change and build a world where women actually love themselves as they are.

Of course I want to feel good in my body. I want to move her in a way I love and eat nourishing, delicious food. 

But I don’t want to find myself in France feeling bad because I ate buttery croissants and cappuccinos with REAL milk for breakfast spending the rest of my vacation plotting my detox master plan upon my return back home.

I don’t want to go to dinner with friends and low-key judge their juicy burger and cheesy nachos order because I’m really low-key judging myself.

I don’t want to ever find myself crying in a fitting room ever again because my body doesn’t live up to society’s imprisoning beauty standards.

I don’t want to live this one precious life afraid of fcking milkshakes and belly rolls. God no.

Health at Every Size

I now know the obsession with my health and weight was actually really unhealthy. 

I now know this claim to clean, plant-based eating wasn’t a lifestyle, but a diet indeed. 

I now know I don’t have to succumb to the patriarch’s definition of beauty and worth.

The F*ck It Diet wasn’t the only book that helped me to critically think and changed my perspective of food and weight. Health at Every Size and The Blue Zones also left a mark and had me further questioning everything I was taught about health and wellness. (Hint: the world’s longest living people do not detox and drink wine everyday, sooooo yea.)

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life listening to other unconscious people tell me what’s best for MY body or how I should morph myself to look and feel more beautiful.

I want to spend the rest of my days developing the most trusting relationship with my intuition and using Her to guide me to more peace, kindness and love.

And helping others do the same.

So stop dieting. And start honoring yourself where you’re at right here and now. Because regardless of what “they'' want you to believe, you are beautiful and perfect and worthy and AMAZING just as are. You deserve love simply for existing.

And you deserve to eat a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. Yes, with actual butter.