Lately, I’ve been revisiting some concepts from the first courses I took in my natural nutrition program. Going back to basics is something that I always find myself doing when it comes to nutrition, especially when I feel like I need inspiration or some help getting back on course. This kind of rudimentary information is always worth revisiting as certain things will resonate with us more or less during different stages of our lives. I thought it would be fun to explore these concepts together this month to support you in figuring out some next steps in your health and lifestyle!
First, I think it’s helpful to look at the big picture before we get granular. We have been culturally programmed to search for the ideal diet relentlessly. Certain nutrition trends and diets will get a lot of airtime for a couple of years all to be contradicted by the newer and ‘better’ diet later down the line that somehow always has the opposite core principles to the last. In my teens and most of my 20s, I looked longingly through tabloids and gossip websites, reading about which celebrities ate what to weigh x amount. The diet industry has us all wrapped around its finger rendering us helpless to its pendulum swing and product sales. I also know that many people I speak to are even more confused now with all of the health and wellness personalities spewing information on social media. The secret that I want to let you in on, is that all of the information actually lives inside of you! We have been conditioned to believe that the ideal diet is something that we need to find from an external source, we need to be told what to do – we couldn’t possibly know what is best for us, and we definitely cannot trust our instincts. The first step in building our ideal diet, is to unlearn these narratives and get curious about ourselves, our bodies, and our relationship to food.
There is no ‘ideal diet’ because no one person is the same. We are bio-individuals, and we all have unique lifestyles. We have different needs at different times of our lives depending on our age, gender, geography, season, activity level, job, stress, and state of health. What works for me may not work for you or the next person, and who’s to say that it will work for me a year or two from now? This where the fun comes in! I love supporting my clients in becoming observers of themselves to piece together what does and doesn’t work for them. Slowly but surely we begin to craft a way of eating and living that makes them feel empowered so that they want to continue beyond our time together and feel equipped to do so.
While this work is deeply personal and non-linear, we can employ frameworks as useful tools to guide us on our way, which leads me to the ‘10 Components of a Healthy Diet’ (according to Elson M. Haas, MD, author of Staying Healthy with Nutrition), which we will explore together over the next four weeks. There are so many different ways to approach nutrition depending on some of the factors I listed out above (eating for optimal digestion, blood sugar balance, pregnancy, nutrient deficiencies, etc.) but they all hold these core principles as their foundation. As we go through these components, a lot will be covered, and I don’t want you to think that you have to work on every single element at once. Choose one that sticks out to you and then work on it until you have it down. The next level will always reveal itself to you when you are ready. I hope that this mini-series gets you excited about nutrition and inspires you to take some steps in building a practice to support your body in feeling its best! This week, spend some time observing your relationship with food. Try to stay objective and remain curious as opposed to judgemental! This is about gathering data to inform which components you might want to focus on as we work through them in the coming weeks. Some questions to consider:
What are my food habits and patterns?
How do different foods make me feel? Consider digestive responses, and rises and falls in energy and mood
Which foods make me feel good?
Which foods make me feel bad?
I’m excited to take this journey with you and I have some exciting supplementary content planned on Instagram so make sure you’re following me there! Feel free to DM me with any questions that come up along the way. See you next week when I will get into the first three components of a healthy diet which breaks down a core element of my nutrition philosophy :)