the foods that make you feel best is going to fail in the end.
Food isn’t meant to be a contest with yourself—or anyone else. You won’t win a prize by doing the longest juice fast, or drinking lemon and cayenne pepper for days, or losing ten pounds in a week only to gain it all back the following month. It’s easy to be influenced by those around you, and the most well-meaning friends might unintentionally make you feel like you’re missing out or doing something wrong. You are unique, evolving all the time, and life is in a constant state of change. What works for someone else—and did it really work?—may not work for you, or might even be harmful.
The idea that your diet can be handed to you wrapped in a bow with written directions and color photos may seem appealing, but the reality is that no one can figure this out for you but you. The best news is that you don’t want anyone else to dictate what you eat any more than you want your mother to choose your bras, or your boss to tell you how to cut your hair.
When it comes to food, you want the freedom and the power to make your own choices. I used to bury my peas in my mashed potatoes when I was a kid, so I wouldn’t have to eat them. It was bad enough having the grown-ups make me eat things when I was a kid; having someone tell me as an adult what to eat would feel absurd.
One of the main reasons diets fail is because they’re too restrictive. No one knows your body like you do. No one else knows what you love to eat, and no one can tell you what your body is going to need next week, never mind months from now.
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN Obsessed with Weight
I wish I had a bag of chia seeds for every woman I’ve met who has a weight problem based on something her mother said or did to her when she was young. Many of my clients had mothers who were obsessed with their own food issues and maintaining their weight. They were unable to avoid sharing their obsession with their daughters.
I’ve listened to beautiful and successful adult women break down in tears as they recalled specific times when their mothers’ behavior toward food made them anxious or obsessive about their own food.
Times when their mothers projected their own behavior onto their daughters, telling them they needed to lose just a tiny bit, so they could look better in clothes. Or gave them smaller portions than their brothers at dinner, because us girls need to watch our weight, right? Or took them shopping at the store that sells clothes for bigger girls, because you won’t look good in normal teenage clothes, sweetie, and then out to a favorite lunch spot for salad, only.
Yes, it happens. Sadly, I’m sure those mothers meant well and loved their daughters dearly. And yet, we are hypersensitive to our mothers’ suggestions. We identify with their choices, and we often choose to either model them or rebel.
For those mothers, food and weight had become obsessive and were tied to distorted emotions of self-acceptance, love, hate, success, and failure. As the daughters of these women struggle with their own identities, they often develop serious issues around eating. At worst, they develop eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia that can be serious and even life-threatening. While I can help someone learn to eat more healthfully and sensibly, or help someone lose weight in a safe way, eating disorders are beyond my scope. When a client comes to me for help with an eating disorder, or if I feel her health or nutritional concerns are really an unrecognized eating disorder, I immediately refer her to an expert therapist.
Clients often come to me after following detailed diets that laid out every food to the last half ounce. They want me to help them stick to the diet. I tell them, “It’s food, not religion. Let’s not talk about guilt and sticking to impossible diets. Let’s talk instead about what you like to eat and what makes you feel happy and healthy. Let’s figure out your Nutritional Style and go from there.” Then we throw out their food diaries and toss the powdery meal packets.
Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat
Enjoying your food is a beautiful, healthful practice. Sadly, it’s something we’ve stopped valuing in our society. Too often we see food as the enemy, something to be wrestled with instead of embraced. Or we see food as a prescription, not sustenance. We eat something we don’t like because it’s supposed to be “good” for us, or avoid something we love because it’s “bad” for us, or follow a diet that’s supposed to prevent aging or illness. This sort of white-knuckle nutrition can’t be kept up for long—it’s far too scary and limiting. Even worse, we see food as a penance. We go on restrictive diets to make up for over-indulging during the holidays or on our birthday. The diet never lasts, of course, and we feel guilty and ashamed for giving up on it.
My goal in this book is to help you regain pleasure in eating by helping you choose the foods you like best and that like you best in return. Learning which foods make you feel good is empowering; you’re not choosing foods based on what you can’t have, you’re choosing based on what makes you feel best and what you love. As we move through the seasons in this book, I invite you to connect with not only what your body needs, but also with what it wants. Not a junk food kind of want, but a true want. With practice, you can learn to listen to your cravings and the signals your body sends and develop a relationship of trust with your body.
By making these choices and learning what your body likes best, you can avoid the sense of failure that comes from “going off” a diet. You’ll avoid the guilt that comes with the inevitable rebellion and rebound, when you find yourself chin-deep in a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. And you’ll avoid the temptation to turn every mouthful into an internal battle that leaves you feeling ashamed because you ate something that you should have avoided. When you understand your own Nutritional Style, you know that very few foods are on the strictly forbidden list. Instead, you understand that flexibility and variety in your food is essential.
Learning about the foods you eat and their effect on you may seem like more work, but that little bit of extra effort enables you to live the life you’re meant to live—easy, graceful, and at a body weight that feels right for you, with glowing skin and vibrant eyes, and a smile on your beautiful face.
Let go of the nutrition dogma, and let me help you learn to listen to your body and discover your own Nutritional Style.
I’m not trying to make you a nutrition fanatic. I don’t believe it’s healthy to obsess over food. I don’t believe in counting . . . fat grams, sugar grams, carbohydrates, vitamin levels, or even calories for that matter. You don’t want to live that way for the rest of your life, so why do it now? It’s time to start eating in a sustainable, life-promoting, and forever way.
ASTRID Stop Counting and Start Enjoying
Astrid came to me for help with her nutrition, wanting to improve what looked on the surface to be a stellar diet. Formerly overweight, her days were now filled with superfood smoothies, green juice, raw salads, healthy proteins, and very little sugar or inflammatory foods. After we spoke about her foods and lifestyle, I had some suggestions for Astrid, but overall I felt her diet was well-balanced and sustainable. She was happy about her body weight, and she worked out every day without fail.
As we spoke more, however, I began to sense a rigidity that concerned me. Astrid related stories about how her girlfriends’ diets weren’t as healthy as hers, how her husband ate too much sugar, and how her neighbors gave their kids processed snacks all the time. She talked about finding the best prices on superfoods and deciding the night before what she would eat the next day. I think the final straw for me was when she shared that she tallied her calories and the foods she’d consumed each day in a small spiral notebook she kept in her handbag.
I believed that Astrid was suffering from mild orthorexia, an overly rigid approach to eating. When I explained this to her, she told me that her approach
