Breaking The Diet Cycle & My Personal Wellness Story
As a wellness coach, sometimes my clients assume that I have it all figured out when it comes to my health and wellness.
Well, I’m here to out myself and say that I most certainly do not. In fact, I would challenge anybody who claims that they do.
Health and wellness are complex and multifaceted and there is no magical finish line. It’s a continous process that involves progress, challenges, set-backs, milestones, widing curves and obstacles. Sometimes the road ahead is smooth and well paved, other times it’s rocky and bumpy and unpleasant. It’s the same for everyone, wellness coach or not.
Even us wellness coaches are on a lifelong healh and wellness journey that requires us to show up everyday to do the work, on ourselves and our mindset, to shed self limiting beliefs and reject the toxic narratives that we’ve held to be true for most of our lives.
We learn important lessons and acquire coping mechanisms along the way through our education, training, client relationships and personal life experiences.
All of this knowledge and experience, coupled with our desire to help others is our only super power, NOT having it all figured out.
My personal Wellness Story and How it led me here
Today, I’d like to share my personal health and wellness story with you, including how I fell into the diet cycle, how I broke out of it, and why it takes daily effrot and practice to keep out of it.
From Growing Up Without Food Rules to Dieting, Restricting & Eliminating
I grew up eating a Lebanese diet interspersed with the standard Canadian diet. We were immigrants and my mom cooked Lebanese food often, which is naturally rich in whole foods and plants. Her days of working in restaurants and our curiosity about “Canadian” food led her to introducing many other foods into the household, including Kraft dinner, hot dogs, Joe Louis and Twinkies, not to mention potato chips. She’d also replicate restaurant meals at home, like Fettuccine Alfredo with Shrimp, Chicken Nuggets with Fries, pancakes, and pineapple upside down cake among other things.
To sum it all up, ALL food was permitted in our household and we didn’t grow up with food rules and limitations.
In fact, it wasn’t until I started University that I would start experimenting with diets.
Vegetarianism was all the rage and celebrities credited it with giving them their best body ever.
Having struggled with body image issues and digestive troubles my whole life, I figured I had nothing to lose. If it had worked for Madonna, why not me? Nevermind that she had (has) a personal chef, personal trainer and millions of dollars to spend on her physical wellness, not to mention plastic surgery. Small details, right?
That was the pivotal moment right there, was when my “healthy eating” fixation began. I was 19.
I spent the next 15 years experimenting with food rules and restrictions without ever realizing I even had a problem. You see, I was never extreme about anything. I wasn’t like those other girls who threw up everything they ate. I didn’t starve myself. I didn’t have a problem. I was doing it for my health.
What I hadn’t realized at the time was that I didn’t need to have a diagnosed eating disorder to have disordered eating habits. The two can be mutually exclusive and in fact, my disordered eating habits were alive and thriving.
I would bounce back and forth from caring a little too much about what I ate, to not caring enough.
From Dieting to “Healthy Eating”
In my 30’s, I began having arthritic psoriasis flare ups and decided to try nutritional therapy. To say that it changed my life wouldn’t be an exaggeration. I learned so much about my body and food and started making connections between what and how I was eating and my physical (and non physical) symptoms. For the first time in my life I felt like I was making food choiceis with rhyme and reason. It felt like I had hit the jackpot.
As beneficial as the changes I made had been, an unfortunate thing happened. A new era in food obsession began as I unwittingly traded the diet narrative for wellness industry neurosis. I may have been operating from a place of greater knowledge, but the end results were similar. Restrictions, rules, and self-control.
In short, I developed an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating, which I justified in the name of health. I even went back to school to study holistic nutrition so I could help other people experience what I had experienced.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I went back to school. I learned so much about nutrition, the inner workings of the human body and discovered my true life’s purpose. It’s what led me here after all.
Shedding the All or Nothing Mentality
Shortly after I started my nutrition program, I got pregnant and food aversions came on strong. That’s when I started really listening to my body and eating intuitively for the first time in my life. My motivation was a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby and food rules were the least of my concern. It was liberating.
Can you imagine that feeling? Trusting your body to know what it needs, when it needs it? For me, it felt priceless!
Unfortunately, by the time we started weaning our daughter Amal, my obsession with healthy eating had returned two fold as I became fixated not only with what I ate, but what I was feeding my daughter. It turned what should have been an enjoyable milestone of raising a baby into a stressful life event for all parties involved.
Thankfully, it didn’t take me long to realize that this obsession was also detrimental to Amal’s relationship with food, not only mine.
That was the moment everything changed.
I slowly and gradually began to loosen my grip and get used to the idea that I could care about what we ate without letting it consume me.
I stopped trying to control every single thing my daughter ate and in doing so, learned to stop controlling everything I ate too.
Daily Effort & Practice
It wasn’t an overnight shift and it has taken a lot of self-introspection on my part. I’ve had to dig deep to understand the connection between my body image issues, my perfectionist tendencies and my relationship with food. It has been a very enlightening process to say the least.
Like all humans, I’m a work in progress. I still battle with my inner voice and struggle with negative body image from time to time, but I’m proud to say that I now make healthier choices for their inherent benefits, and not out of fear or the desire to control what I eat.
I still care about my health and what we eat and still prefer to make deliberate mindful choices when it comes to how I nourish myself and my family, but I no longer it consume me. There’s plenty of felxibility and wiggle room.
The bottom line is, I’ve found balance and consistency in how I nourish and care for myself, and I feel healthier, happier and more connected to my body as a result.
