I enjoyed this deliciousness for lunch yesterday even after I braved the glaring florescent lights in a fitting room and tried on swimsuits. Note to self: It is much better to order swimsuits online and try them on in the comfort of your own home. This is what I usually do, but I was out running errands and saw a few cute swimsuits with bright, beachy patterns that I thought might be flattering. I thought wrong. One was downright obscene given my much-larger-than-normal nursing breasts. Hello, Grand Canyon of cleavage. Other styles fit my bottom half well and even my waist like they would have before baby number 5, but they were still too tight in the chest/ribcage area. I didn’t like how any of the styles made my arms look. I know. Why in the world would I be focused on how my arms look a tankini? But for some odd reason, I’ve always struggled a bit with loving my arms and shoulders, which just seems so silly. I mean, who cares about someone’s arms and shoulders, right? Now before I go any further, please know that I do have plenty of body kindness and body positive days, but there are still moments when I have to work on loving or at least being grateful for every part of me. And let’s face it, thinner, chiseled arms and/or sculpted shoulders won’t ever make me a better wife/mom/speaker/writer/
After my errands, I was ravenous and was craving a Chipotle salad (this is not a sponsored post :-)). So I grabbed a salad to go and then I enjoyed eating every last bite of it. So what? some of you might be thinking. Well, before I “allowed” myself to “indulge,” I had an inner monologue that went something like this:
You shouldn’t be so hungry right now. You didn’t run this morning. Maybe you should just go home and have a protein shake before it’s *really* lunchtime. But I feel like eating now. I’m hungry, and I want a Chipotle salad, okay? Leave me alone. It’s been a long while since I had one. Fine, go and get the salad, but do you really need guac and cheese? I just don’t get why you’re so hungry. Maybe eat the salad without dressing? Do you really need chicken on the salad? Why not just get the black beans?
And then I basically told my inner food police to SHUT UP, and I listened to my body. But wait, some of you may now be thinking, what about exercising that will power? Isn’t that important? What about limiting what kind of foods you eat and how much you eat of it for the sake of your health and as an exercise in self-control?
Rubbish, I say. If my body is telling me I need something like healthy fats and proteins rather than what could be described as a diet food (i.e., salad without dressing or guacamole or cheese or anything substantial and/or just a protein shake at home), then I need to listen to it and respect it.
My daily caloric needs aren’t fixed. They fluctuate, especially as an active mom of a nursing 15-month-old. I can’t meal plan for tomorrow and then just ignore my body’s signals and cues if I want to really and truly make peace with food and my body. Restricting and food rules have to go out the window. No food can be off limit.
My intuitive eating journey hasn’t been easy, but I will tell you this has been the single biggest missing part of my recovery journey. Before I started really trying to approach food and my body’s signals intuitively, I didn’t realize how many subterranean food rules I still followed. It takes time to retrain myself to eat like I did as a child. I don’t like thinking about food this much, but I know this is necessary for now. I have to trust this process and be patient (and just ask my older kids, patience is definitely not a big strength of mine). My body obviously needed extra protein and fat yesterday. I needed a bigger lunch than I typically eat. I don’t know why because the day before I ran 4 miles at a decent clip and didn’t feel as hungry that day, but I can’t question my hunger cues and satiety levels. I can only respect them.
So many of us subscribe to rigid diets. Or we listen to our inner food police, which Intuitive Eating describes as our “inner judge and jury that determine if you are doing ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The food police scrutinizes every eating action. It keeps food and your body at war.” The book also describes the “nutrition informant,” which is a “voice [that] may tell you to fastidiously count carbohydrate grams, or eat only fat-free foods, often in the name of health. This voice colludes with the Food Police. It operates under the guise of health, but it’s promoting an unconscious diet. It can be a little difficult to identify, because its messages can mimic the sound advice of health authorities.”
In many ways, I thought I’d banished the food police from my life, but I was unknowingly holding on to the ideals of the nutrition informant as a means of achieving better health or even as a way to taking better care of myself. I see this so often. People who believe they have rejected dieting and are only focused on health and think they are really taking good care of their “temples” when they’re often doing exactly the opposite. If we reject a certain food out of guilt or fear or if we don’t follow some nutritional dogma and then feel like a failure, then the food police are still alive and well within us. We are ignoring what our body is telling us. We are questioning our hunger and our cravings and telling ourselves we are weak and possibly even viewing the contents of our pantry as a sign of our morality.
We are also neglecting the truth that health isn’t just about physical health. If you are emotionally miserable with the way you are eating, who cares if your waistline is slimmer? If you’re avoiding social settings because of the fear of banished or “unhealthy” foods being in abundance, who cares if you have a little more energy (you’re probably diverting most of that energy to avoiding foods you’ve determined are “bad” and sharing how much better you feel to anyone who will listen without grain and dairy in your life or whatever)? And have you ever stopped to consider that maybe all those GI issues you’re experiencing are more related to the anxiety you harbor about food rather than you having a physical intolerance to the food itself? (Please know I am not trying to be insensitive to people with true food allergies, etc.)
The most challenging part of intuitive eating for me (and remember, I’m still a relative newbie to this form of eating) is accepting that I cannot be hyper-focused on nutrition right now if I want to truly free myself from dieting and make peace with food. Honoring health is important, and there will be a time for that. One day I hope to pursue healthy eating with absolutely no hidden agenda – the same way a faithful person might embrace spiritual fasting during Lent to ripen the fruit of detachment and with not even one small hope that the fasting will lead to a slimmer shape with swimsuit season right around the corner.
Once I was sitting in a café and I heard a young woman bemoan the cookie she’d indulged in earlier that day. She was speaking as if she’d broken a sacred covenant: Thou shalt not eat “bad” food. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned—with a cookie. She’s not the first woman to berate herself for eating a forbidden food. She’s not the only woman to vilify a cookie either. But here’s the truth: Food is not your friend, and it’s not your enemy either.
Food is not good or bad. It’s not your confidante, your seducer, your betrayer, or your lover. It’s just food.
For today, what are you hungry for? If you want a salad studded with cheese and guac and dressing, go for it. If you have something to celebrate, then eat the damn cake. Enjoy every last crumbly morsel, and then get on with living. The world is waiting for your witness.