Читать книгу Discover Your Nutritional Style - Holli Thompson - Страница 12
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Tell me what you want to be,
and I will tell you what to eat.
I know you’re exposed to a lot of diet hype. You might hear about a popular actress who’s become a vegan, and you’re sure that your skin will glow like hers if you never consume another animal product. Or you clicked on one of those Web ads that promises one weird food trick to lose a pound a week effortlessly, and now you’re out a bunch of money on worthless supplements. Your best friend has given up all grains and lost 10 pounds in a month, and with a high school reunion coming up, you want to as well. Maybe that new diet book encourages you to do a five-day juice fast, and even though it’s January and you live in a frigid climate, you think that sounds fabulous and fun. That 90-day liquid diet worked really well, until it was time to reenter the world of whole foods. Then you gained all the weight back, plus ten more pounds.
No matter what the hot new plan is, and no matter how healthy it seems, no regimen is going to work for everyone all of the time. In fact, any regimen that’s unrelated to the way we eat in the real world and 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 to food was making her miserable—her life had been all about her food since she’d lost weight years ago.
I recommended that Astrid relax about writing everything down and allow herself frequent rewards and splurges. That advice wasn’t what she’d expected to hear from me—she was expecting praise for her rigidity and near-obsession over food and even more rules for what to eat and not eat.
As part of her new goal to relax a bit about food, I asked Astrid to “allow” herself a treat every few days. Her goal was to enjoy, savor, and delight in whatever she was eating. The only thing I wanted her to write down in her little notebooks was how much she enjoyed her organic dark chocolate bar, or the buckwheat pasta with peanut sauce, or whatever she chose as a treat. (We stayed within healthy but delicious boundaries!)
After working with me for a couple of months, Astrid felt more relaxed about her foods. She was no longer gripping her grocery shopping cart, tight-lipped and concerned, as she marched up and down the supermarket aisles. Instead, Astrid was smiling. Releasing her nutrition rubber band to extend out for occasional treats and splurges made her happier than she had been for a long time.
When you eat appropriately for your personal Nutritional Style, your nutrition and food habits are like a giant rubber band. Your Nutritional Style holds you firmly but flexibly in place; it expands and contracts with you. You mostly stick with the fresh, seasonal foods you know are best, but you also cut loose at Sunday morning brunch and indulge in your husband’s homemade waffles with maple syrup. Whatever you choose for your occasional indulgence may not be ideal, but you enjoy it. And because you are comfortable with your Nutritional Style, you easily snap back to your regular pattern the next morning.
During other times of the year, your rubber band stretches a little farther. Maybe it’s during the holidays when, like most people, you eat foods that you normally avoid or that come around only during this season. It starts on Thanksgiving, when you enjoy your mother’s candied sweet potatoes with marshmallows. Without flexibility, you eat too much. The next day you feel horrible and have a stomachache; instead of feeling happy to have enjoyed your family’s traditions, you head to a cocktail party, drink way too much wine, and lose control at the appetizer platter. And so it goes. With flexibility, however, you make yourself and your mother happy by eating a moderate portion, just enough to enjoy the treat but not so much to throw your Nutritional Style out the window.
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.
Sometimes you stretch your rubber band beyond what’s comfortable—you might even think it’s snapped for good. Don’t beat yourself up and decide that you’re just destined to be sick and overweight. All it takes to get things under control again is falling back on your own Nutritional Style. You know that style—it’s full of the foods that satisfy you and keep you healthy. A few days of eating your own way and your rubber band will be strong and flexible once again. You’ll feel resolved to eat well most of the time and enjoy a treat now and then without guilt. Your Nutritional Style is back. You wake up feeling bright-eyed and productive because you’ve returned to the style of eating that makes you feel energized and light.
The importance of the rubber band perspective is that it’s sustainable. It’s not just about avoiding headaches, or a puffy belly the next day. It’s not about losing weight, or whether or not you “cheat” or “go off” a diet. Discovering and eating within your Nutritional Style lets you enjoy delicious, nourishing foods and drinks that will support you for the rest of your life.
JANE Permission to Adapt and Adjust
My client Jane was a classic Modern Vegan when we met. She described herself as “pretty much vegan,” which I took to mean, you’re vegan, except for when you’re not. She had strong vegan intentions for her food, not her entire lifestyle. She loved the idea of being a vegan and not consuming animal flesh. I get that.
Jane shared a story with me that impressed me as a sign of someone who had learned to tune in to her desires and cravings around food, in a healthy way. The week before, Jane had been traveling on business with her associates. She worked for a high-end investment firm and felt the pressures of her job; working with all men in this masculine environment was often challenging.
As she put it, they don’t get my green juice–toting ways, and God forbid that any one of them eat a salad. Ever.
One night on a business trip, the colleagues decided to visit a high-end steak house. She cringed, but said nothing, certain she’d find something to eat there (we’d spent a lot of time on that). When she walked in, Jane couldn’t face eating a cold salad. She felt a craving for some kind of animal protein—plus she knew her colleagues would make negative comments if that was all she ate. She felt guilty, but ordered a salmon steak.
She related the story to me the next day about how badly she felt she needed something more than greens, and how good her body felt after eating the salmon. She realized she hadn’t ruined her life by eating salmon, and she felt great the next day, too. She decided, with some leeway and encouragement from me, to add the occasional piece of fish back into her diet, if that’s what she was feeling the need to eat.
After a few weeks of enjoying fish a couple of times a week, Jane’s energy had improved and she felt more balanced and even-keeled. By working with me, she realized that what she ate didn’t have to be defined by someone else; she didn’t need anyone’s permission to eat what she wanted and felt she needed. Jane is still pretty much a Modern Vegan and doesn’t eat animal foods often, but when she does, she’s fine about it.
