Do you remember when I used to be ‘Stupid Easy Paleo’? A lot of you are curious as to why I am no longer paleo and the complete rebranding I did in 2018. So, I decided to share my real, truthful, nitty-gritty story with you all for this week's episode. Key Takeaways If You Are Starting To See The Cracks In Your Own Relationship With Food and Diets You Should: Be honest with yourself about your disordered eating habits and how diet culture perpetuates them Be gentle with yourself when unlearning what you have been taught by diet culture and discovering what foods you actually enjoy Get rid of the all or nothing mentality when it comes to food and stop restricting yourself How I Got Here In 2018 I had a realization. I realized that I had been carrying my disordered eating and relationship with my body through the various stages of my life, masking it with different diets and exercise regimes.  When I first heard about paleo in 2010, my most significant thought was ‘will this help me get smaller?’. While I did learn some good things from paleo, over time, the rules, restrictions, and arguments I had with people about whether or not something ‘is’ or ‘isn't paleo was making me exhausted. That’s when I realized something had to change. Restriction Isn’t Helping Anybody The more I learned about the origins of diet culture and the harm that comes from approaching ‘taking care of our health’ in a way that is restrictive and an all-or-nothing mentality, I knew I had to burn what I thought I knew down to the ground.  When you are able to take the guilt and shame out of your relationship with food and stop thinking about food 24/7, you can come back to yourself. You are always and have always been worthy no matter your body size or appearance, and my mission is to help you get back to being the intuitive eater that you were born as. Do you see yourself reflected in my story? How is your story different than mine? Share your thoughts with me in the comments on the episode page.   In This Episode Why I do what I do and care about the work that I am doing (12:29) Acknowledging the positive things I learned from paleo (19:10) How to stop letting your relationship with food keep you scared and complacent (28:40) The signs that made me realize that paleo was not for me and something had to change (32:02) Why I decided to rebrand myself and my company and embrace another way (35:55)   Quotes “We always have a choice. We are faced with new information all day, every day, and we get to decide how and if we want to incorporate that information into our new viewpoint of the world and our perspective.” (3:32) “I feel like I wasn't living my life because I was so invested in dieting, and shrinking myself, and making myself smaller.” (12:41) “This is when I started to become aware of the fact that my thinking around food was occupying a lot of my time. Prior to that, it was just something that happened, I didn't have that outside looking in awareness of ‘this is kind of fucked up’.” (23:53) “I started to learn about bigger issues, things like diet culture. And then it all started to make sense.” (33:38) “I think that is my biggest point to you today, is learning to find the wiggle room, removing the guilt and the shame, recognizing that some of these smaller dietary choices are not going to cause you some kind of crazy significant harm.” (44:42)   Featured on the Show Join the Tune In Membership Here Instead of Weight Loss, Focus on This Blog Post Mindful Eating Tool Emotional Eating Workshop 1-1 Intuitive Eating Coaching Jamie Scott P3 Athletica Website Join the Listen To Your Body Newsletter Steph Gaudreau Website Check out the full show notes here! Follow Steph on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | Pinterest I'd really love it if you would take 1 min and leave us a rating and review on iTunes!   Related Episodes LTYB 321: Is Body Positivity for You?