Why is food the enemy?
Guest Post by Sarah White from Sassying It Up
Sarah has finally relented and started a blog about her experiences with recovering from disordered eating and weight loss dieting. She is a 30 something stay at home parent who loves fashion, Doctor Who, personal growth and riding my bike. Her blog is filled with amazing photos of gorgeous, plentiful food, wise words and whole bucket load of heart.
Read her amazing words here;
This is a post about how intuitive eating saved my sanity and gave me a healthy relationship with food and exercise. It’s also about the reason that we lose that connection in the first place.
I eat so I don’t die and so do you, any other labels we put on it just aren’t helpful. If they were then why would so many of us struggle with such a twisted view of food and eating?
We have become so scared of food and it isn’t surprising why. We are bombarded constantly with messages that ‘bad food’ is going to make us fat and kill us, while ‘good food’ will make us not just thin, but morally superior to others who act differently. Fear of food has not only become about weight but also status. It’s not good enough just to say you are eating steak, now you have to clarify that it’s grass fed, marbled, kobi steak where the cow was lovingly caressed twice daily. Is the food local, organic, vegan, fairtrade or any other style that plays on an ethical connection to food? One of the important principles of eating intuitively is taking out the false dichotomy of good food or bad food. Of course, some foods have different energy and nutrient values, and there are often intolerances or allergies to consider. Intuitive eating has cemented my love of raw and vegan food but I also eat many different foods that could be labelled in a dogmatic way. So in reality they aren’t absolutely good or bad, just different.
In the process of wanting to keep my body healthy I had to recognise that trying force it into an unnatural size for me was having the opposite effect. Some might feel that they wouldn’t know what to do with food if they weren’t dieting, and feel like they would eat the world – this is an automatic response to restriction. The restrictions that we put upon ourselves not only take the power away from us but put it onto food, where it has no right or desire to be. We need to get that back if we want to have the healthy relationship with food we deserve. It is our right but has been taken away through years of punishing our body for its size, or simply for being hungry in the first place. Whether you call it intuitive eating, competent eating or plain normal eating, there has to be a better solution than weight loss dieting that frankly, didn’t work for me and probably won’t work for you either. A highly restrictive diet can lead to weight loss, but that doesn’t mean it is sustainable for most people in ways that don’t greatly impede not only life but our mental and physical health.
When you truly reject all of the unhelpful doctrines then you can just eat food – things that you enjoy and your body responds to positively, in varying amounts at different times. Similarly with exercise – you can move your body at amounts appropriate for your current fitness levels because you love it and want to keep your heart healthy and your muscles strong. I honestly believe that it is only when this is done, can we become the weight we are meant to be.
Thank you so much Sarah for contributing to my blog. And as someone who suffers from disordered eating this spoke to me. Loudly. It has been a massive contribution to me personally. It gave me something to research, somewhere to go to find a balance. I look forward to listening to all my body has to say. I look forward to taking back the power I handed over to food so willingly.
Brilliant. What did you think?
Suger 
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