“Gentle nutrition” is my new approach to eating, and I’ve never felt better
“What’s fucked up is I’ve never had an eating disorder. I just have what every woman has, which is shame… I would sell every belonging I have if I could get a lobotomy by a reputable neurosurgeon who could remove the part of my brain where I give a fuck at all. I would love to not think about, “how skinny are you going to be for your wedding; how are you going to lose weight by next week when you go to L.A. and have to be in a bikini; what are you going to do next summer, because it’ll be three summers since you haven’t looked like you looked four summers ago?”
Sam Doll @sam_d0ll
This TikTok video rant would have been hilarious if it hadn’t been ultimately sad, and way too relatable for my younger self. The vast majority of women I know can list several diets they’ve tried over the years—a few of mine include keto, paleo, and Whole30. Those are just the ones I’ve attempted in the past decade. Going all the way back into my teens, I’d guess there are another dozen I could add to the list.
The beginning: my initiation into diet culture
The first time I remember dieting was in grade eight, after my mom told me I had a slight belly forming (she’d been watching me swim at the local pool). I don’t blame her for sharing this observation, because women have been taught for millennia that our value lies mainly in our appearance. She was simply trying to protect me the best way she knew how at that time. And my mother was hardly the worst offender among the parents of my peers in providing this particular brand of love.
Up to that point in my life, I’d always been told I was too skinny, and I was self-conscious about that. Now I had a new flaw to address, and I became a master at sucking in my belly. (It’s taken me decades to undo that training, and teach myself to breathe fully.) But that wasn’t enough, I decided. I needed to look model-perfect.
In my wayward youth I was an avid reader of YM and Seventeen magazines, and those diabolical publications—again, products of their time—gave me the typical 90s dieting advice: to avoid fat at all costs. Salad dressing, butter, peanut butter, ice cream, and avocados were all forbidden. So, basically, anything that made food delicious, and life worth living.
Diets today: different advice, same nonsense
Diet gurus these days love to point out the foolishness of this dated fat-free approach. “How ridiculous! To lose weight, you should absolutely be eating healthy fats with lots of protein, and severely limiting your carbs. And don’t think you can just eat any old vegetable or piece of fruit. If you have a potato, you might as well be scarfing down a doughnut.”
I know all too well the temptation to hand over my dietary choices to the so-called experts. Even though we know the diet industry is a sham, even though North Americans keep dieting more and gaining more weight at the same time, we still look for false hope from them. The ones who quote supposedly scientific studies and offer us prescriptions for finally losing enough weight so we can like ourselves in photos, and feel worthy of taking up space on the planet, and maybe even being seen in a swimsuit.
A newer, gentler way forward
I’ve been actively unravelling these threads in my brain, and taking back the responsibility for feeding my body the nutrition it wants and needs. This is the path I’ve followed to get to a place where I love and appreciate my body more than I ever have (despite being my biggest size to-date), shamelessly wear bikinis, and most importantly, feel healthier and sleep better.
Ditch the scale: I got rid of mine a few years ago, and haven’t looked back. News flash: if you’re a woman, your weight will fluctuate throughout the month, and throughout your lifetime, due to hormonal cycles and changes. If you obsess over the digits on your scale, it’ll only bring you misery. I also got rid of my ‘skinny clothes’ that just made me feel bad, and took up space in my closet.
Follow the right influencers: I ruthlessly went through the accounts I follow on Instagram and unfollowed everyone who gave weight loss advice. I started following women who preach body positivity, and who walk their talk. Yes, there’s a backlash against this movement, with people proclaiming this is a dangerous and toxic trend, and I disagree. True body positivity is NOT promoting unhealthy lifestyles. It’s simply about learning to accept and appreciate your body as it is right now. Ironically, if you want to make lasting, healthy changes in your life, this is where you need to start. Seeing women of all shapes and sizes in my Instagram feed helped a lot.
Learn about intuitive eating and gentle nutrition: I followed @no.food.rules and @thenutritiontea, and read up on the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating. These folks aren’t telling you what to eat—they’re teaching you how to feel into your body to see what she wants and needs. The skeptical response I get from a lot of people about this approach is that if we let our bodies determine what we should be eating, we’ll just eat doughnuts all day. And yes, if you’ve been restricting what you eat, you may go through a period of adjustment where your cravings lead you on a wild junk food ride. But when your body and brain realize that you’re not going back to a restrictive diet, your rebellious inner child calms down and starts craving healthier food. Our bodies are wise—they know what they need to function optimally, and if we give them the chance to lead us, we’ll naturally come into balance.
Get a nutrition-tracking app and use it sparingly: I wouldn’t recommend doing this early on in your diet-ditching journey. You need to be fully free of the desire to track calories and weight loss, because all of the tracking apps I found are designed to track those things first, and nutrition second. I also wouldn’t recommend this for anyone who is obsessive in general, or who is a chronic perfectionist. (Too much information can be dangerous for you.)
After seeing a few different women talk about the importance of specific nutrients for middle-aged women, I decided to install a tracking app (the one I use is Cronometer, but there may be better ones) and customize the settings for my needs: I removed all of the calorie and weight trackers from the app’s home page, and selected the five things I wanted to the app to highlight:
Fibre
Water
Vitamin D
Omega 3
Magnesium
All I do is add the foods I eat, and the app calculates the percentage of the daily recommended amounts of those nutrients I’m getting on a daily basis. It tracks all the other micro and macronutrients too, but I rarely look at those. I don’t worry about using it every day. I don’t worry if the data I’m using is perfectly accurate (e.g. if I add “1 banana, large” and I’m actually eating a small banana according to the app’s measurements). As you can see in the screen capture below, it does tell me the calories in each item but I never look at that.
The idea is to treat it like a game. I eat the foods I want and notice which ones help boost those nutrient levels. I get curious about which nutrients I’m not getting enough of (usually fibre and magnesium) and occasionally research different nutrient-rich foods I can add to my meals that I’ll enjoy.
My digestion, sleep, and overall health have improved a lot since I started doing this in the past few months. I’ll write more about this as time goes on.
To be honest, I think most of my health improvements are due to just getting enough fibre from different sources, drinking enough water, getting adequate sleep, getting outside in the sun, and moving my body in ways that feel good. Simple. But not necessarily easy, if you’ve been on the diet train your whole life, and feel like you need to restrict and punish your body at every turn. If this is where you’re at, I feel for you. And there’s hope, I promise.