I found the way to heal my relationship with food, to overcome my strange eating habits & beliefs that I rationalised to be normal & healthy and I will not be looking back.
Read on to discover how my eating habits & understanding of nutrition have changed over the course of my life, with all of my education and practical experience learned over the last 2 decades. Can you relate?
I am a naturopathic nutritionist & let me tell you that taking this education has been one of the most eye-opening and valuable experiences of my life.
I grew up in Canada with what is known as a SAD diet (Standard American Diet) full of foods that are packaged, processed, fried, genetically modified to the point of being flavourless, full of high fructose corn syrup, preservatives & E numbers someone approved to be edible to humans. Plus a diet in high in meat & low variety of vegetables. Our family just didn’t know any better and advertising campaigns in North America are so incredibly powerful in influencing what you believe to be healthy and what proper nutrition is.
When I moved out from my parents & lived on my own in my 20s, I fully believed that a portion of vegetables could be found in a fast food cheeseburger. Yep, you’ve read that right! I also drank loads of Redbull and ate all the other crap you can find in convenience stores, pops/soft drinks, chocolate bars, chips/crisps, cookies, pop tarts, candy, you name it!
The turning point for dietary change happened when I started practising yoga.
One time, I went to a yoga class after I had eaten McDonald’s and drank a beer. This particular class has always stuck in my memory because I felt so unbelievably nauseous that I thought I was going to spew during class.
Those of you who know me now may be shocked by this story, but it’s true. At the time I had zero connection between food & how it made me feel.
That class was my first realisation that maybe the food I eat makes me feel a certain way (sick).
Maybe I could start to eat in a way that makes me feel better?!
→ I subsequently went down a rabbit hole online learning about being vegetarian, pescatarian and vegan as I had heard about them in my new yoga community & was curious what they were all about and why someone would chose to eat in such a way?
I decided to stop eating red meat & fast food then and there.
Over the course of a year I eventually removed white meat/chicken, fish/seafood, eggs, dairy/yogurt/butter and lastly, the hardest one for me, cheese.
It was a process transitioning to being vegan, but it was an easy choice for me after I started learning about it more & realised that if I love animals so much maybe I shouldn’t eat them. This is completely a personal choice for everyone & I’m not gonna push veganism on anyone; this was my reasoning for making the change that I still adhere to this day because the positive changes to my life have been so profound.
However, being in the yoga community, being vegan & a even being a scientist didn’t mean that I knew about nutrition!
I searched online for how to be a healthy vegan but I never really understood it well & just carried on (back then you pretty much had to be a ‘healthy’ (eat whole foods) vegan because the vegan products that are available nowadays simply didn’t exist!)
→ As I went further into the vegan and yoga way of life, I developed some weird obsessions because I have OCD tendencies, and kept hearing about things you should/shouldn’t eat from being in the well-intentioned but misinformed ‘wellness’ community.
For example: at one point for about a year, I only ate quinoa or rice with steamed broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, spinach & tofu. I topped this with nutritional yeast, olive oil & sea salt and I convinced myself that this is all I needed to eat to nourish my body as a 6 day per week Ashtanga practitioner who woke up at 3am to practice Mysore for 2 hrs & then taught 5 classes, went to another Rocket yoga class, cycled 30km around the city & went to bed at 10 pm to start again the next day on 5 hours of sleep!!
→ Yes I fully believed at the time that Ashtanga gave me a super power that provided me with more energy (prana) than other people and I didn’t need to eat as much food or need as much sleep.
Oh my how things have changed.
I stopped this behaviour when the pandemic happened and I literally couldn’t do the above anymore.
Then I got a taste of rest and what it felt like to have all the chronic injuries in my body heal, and my nervous system to relax. WTF had I been doing?
→ I had been living in a total chronic stress response for YEARS trying to develop my teaching schedule in London and further my yoga practice and connections in the yoga community.
IT WAS F**KING INSANE, if I may say so now! But regardless - that’s what rationalised to be totally normal, healthy and OK.
During the pandemic I went back to school for two things: to learn about business applied to being a yoga teacher, and to start my three year diploma as a naturopathic nutritionist.
I never wanted to experience again or normalise what I had been doing previously and I wanted to learn 1) how to be independent as a self employed yoga teacher, and 2) what is actually healthy with nutrition, and 3) create a sustainable career path for myself knowing how to age keeping my physical and mental health as a priority before serving others, and then serving others from a place of abundance.