Vitamin A to Z

By Fiona Sutherland

"In a culture of weigh less, and do more, nourishing ourselves can truly be a radical act. It's your food. It's your body. It's your choice."

 There is no one right way to eat, or have a body, yet every day we are exposed to diet culture: dominant messages about what we "should" be eating and how

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debut Books
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780648937579

Fiona Sutherland

Fiona is Director of The Mindful Dietitian and lives in Melbourne, Australia. She has been practicing for over 20 years as a specialist dietitian in the areas of eating disorders, body image, and sports and performance nutrition. Fiona is a committed Health At Every Size® and Non-Diet Dietitian, spending most of her working week supervising other dietitians, or facilitating live and online training events for dietitians and health professionals. She is the host of the podcast "The Mindful Dietitian" and a sports dietitian at The Australian Ballet School and national sporting organisations. Fiona also teaches across dietetic training programs in Melbourne, in Counselling Skills and Weight Inclusive Approaches in Dietetics. Fiona is a committed mindfulness practitioner and yoga teacher, bringing a particular emphasis on embodiment, mindful eating, trauma-informed approaches, and body image to her work and training. She has a "yoga voice" and a "regular person/ occasional bossy-boots voice" and is unapologetically outspoken about diet culture BS. Instagram: @themindfuldietitian Facebook: facebook.com/themindfuldietitian Website: themindfuldietitian.com.au Twitter: @FionaBodyPosAus

Book preview

Introduction

My wish for every human being is that we’re able to navigate life’s challenges feeling equipped with the skills to stand alongside ourselves through the inevitable ups and downs. I dearly want people to stop blaming themselves and start directing energy towards two things…

1.Acknowledging it’s the pretty f**ked up culture we live in that has led us to believe there’s something wrong with us; and

2.Shifting our focus to what truly matters. Then we can get on with doing some really cool stuff with our lives, whatever that means to each of us. To live more joyfully. To be kinder to ourselves. To show up in the world with courage.

I’ve listened to literally thousands of people’s experiences with food, eating and their body during my twenty-year career. I spent my early years being a ‘good dietitian’, dutifully performing what I thought — and was led to believe — was the ‘right’ thing to be doing: writing out meal plans and enthusiastically supporting people with weight loss and other goals. It was only when I really paid attention to the pain embedded in people’s experiences, really listened, that I had a minor #existentialcrisis and realised, in fact, not only was I probably not helping people, I could possibly be harming them. Cue the ‘huh?’ emoji, a shame spiral, and more than a few WTFs.

Since then, there have been plenty more ‘huh?’ moments. Thanks to the patience of my clients, supervisors and teachers, I feel much steadier about my place in seriously shaking sh*t up. In years since the aforementioned #existentialcrisis (the first one, I mean), I’ve had many awkward conversations with my accountant about expenses called ‘Professional Development, Education and Training’. Enter the ‘personal growth’ period. I also have a terrible book-buying issue that I’m sure none of you relate to.

In this book, I’ll be referring to diet culture, which, to be clear, is a system, not a personal failing. A constructed idea, not something that is yours to fix. In her book Anti Diet, my colleague and friend Christy Harrison defines diet culture as a system of beliefs that:

•Equate body size directly to health and moral virtue, which means we can spend our whole life thinking we’re irreparably broken just because we don’t look like the ‘ideal’.

•Promotes body modification (usually in the form of weight loss or muscle gain) as a means of attaining higher status, which means we feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy and money trying to shrink our body, even though the research is very clear that almost no one can sustain intentional weight loss for more than a few years.

•Demonises certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means we’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about our eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from our pleasure, our purpose and our power.

•Oppresses people who don’t match up with its supposed picture of ‘health’, which disproportionately harms women, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of colour, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health.

Diet culture does not necessarily mean being on a diet, it is aligning our thoughts, beliefs, expectations and behaviours with a dominant focus on weight, shape and size. It might show up in the form of food rules, perfectionistic ideas about food choices or body ideals, comparisons to others or a past self (old photos, anyone?), self-critical thoughts, lack of kindness towards ourselves, lack of tolerance for our imperfections, an idealised sense of who we ‘should’ be and how we ‘should’ be living and more. It is an insidious beast. And when we can bring it out into the light, it stands less chance of surviving.

Developing awareness of how diet culture shows up in our lives is not an easy task. In fact, we might notice some surprising and uncomfortable feelings like sadness, anger or grief. It makes sense. When we are brave enough to look at our experiences and our world through a new, different lens, we can be shaking up a part of us in ways that feel new and unexpected. Please, take it easy on yourself and know that you’re not alone. In the words of fabulous Fat Activist Ragen Chastain, ‘it’s our culture that’s f**ked up, you are fine’ (‘Dances With Fat’).

Smashing diet culture is the long game.

The short game? Reading this book, for a start! But I need to be transparent — this is not a book that will tell you what, when and how to eat. There are a million books for that, most of them full of utter sh*t designed to keep you feeling like you’re still doing it wrong. Instead, I’ve put together here an A–Z of concepts and ideas to help you along your personal journey of releasing the BS ideas we’ve built up about food, eating and our bodies so you’re freer to make decisions for yourself, your way. My hope is that these 26 ideas bring together the core components of what could contribute to a life well-lived, with the caveat that you are the captain of your own ship. You are the only one who knows what feels good, what feels right, and what feels important. Each section explores a concept, shares some reflections, and offers you practices to help them land in your life in a real, practical way. Some may resonate more than others, but I hope each acts as a supportive touchpoint for you.

So why vitamins? We often think about vitamins as being those magical, almost imaginary, microscopic little things that do… good stuff… in our body: ‘take your vitamins’ and all that. Which is all well and good, but what about asking ‘what are the elements of a life well-lived?’ I’m not sure we would respond with ‘Riboflavin!’ (Vitamin B2). I imagine we might say connection, friendship, kindness, purpose and so on.

We have been sold