Are you trying to reconnect to your own innate wisdom with your body and food? Do you feel obsessed with food, especially during the holiday season? Has "clean-eating" become the focal point of your life, and does the idea of eating non "clean" foods make you anxious? Listen now for some ways to combat the holiday diet stress, and to free yourself from the guilt around food. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. Key Points: Food is something that connects us to our family and our culture, but diet culture makes food WAY too important and obsessive, and that preoccupation removes the connecting and pleasurable components of food. Use the hashtag #foodpeace to join in my discussion about alternatives to diets throughout the next few weeks, which are bound to be full of diet talk (January is national dieting month!). Finding pleasure in food contributes to your overall quality of life and health!! Food provides a connection to people around us, and when we get in the way of that, EVERYTHING suffers. Orthorexia: a condition in which a person relates to food in a moralized way (think "good" and "bad" foods) that becomes overwhelming and creates a negative relationship to food. Jennifer McGurk joins for some more insight on food peace! Our culture places so much emphasis on health, and conflates weight loss and clean eating with being healthy. WE GIVE FOOD WAY TOO MUCH POWER!!! How do we change our relationship with food and find food peace? How do we take back our power and control in our lives without trying to exercise power and control over our food? The ways in which we relate to food can be a metaphor for other things that we are struggling with in our lives! Orthorexia may not be a full-blown eating disorder, but it IS a form of disordered eating... we don't know enough about it yet to really have a full grasp of its impact on mental health. First step to healing: make a list of pros and cons of eating in this "clean," controlled way. Pros: control Cons: guilt, disconnection from family and friends around food because you can't join them in certain meals, thoughts and emotions are obsessive about food and make you feel out of control, sacrificing parts of your life! So do the cons outweigh the pros?? Recovery from orthorexia takes time! Working with an eating disorder dietitian can help, as well as proper nutrition education (we need "healthy" foods just as much as we need "unhealthy" foods!). Increased moodiness and decreased sleep is a big sign of disordered eating. Carbohydrates are IMPORTANT!!! Taking the focus off the food and focusing more on individual positive health may be a helpful mindset shift. Let's label food not as "healthy" or "unhealthy," but just as what it is. An apple is an apple, plain and simple. Bring food back to the present, rather than interacting with food in an anxiety-driven, future focused, "Is this food going to kill me????" kind of way. ALL FOODS FIT! "Clean eating is washing your food and making sure that it's cooked to the right temperature. There is no such thing as dirty eating unless your food literally comes from the ground and has dirt on it." - Jennifer Orthorexia carries implications for those around us... if some of us are eating "clean," then are the rest of us eating dirty??? NO! Eating "well" doesn't have to be black and white... we can eat our ice pops and also go to the farmers market. "Our relationships are more important than our food choices." - Julie Nutritional health has a lot more to do with our mental health and our emotional health than we've ever realized before... let's cross our fingers for some more research!! Let's give ourselves permission to have fun with food and our family... Just remember, how would it feel to be at peace with food? The importance of mental health as it impacts our physical health cannot be ignored." - Julie Having such rigid rules around food may actually result in negative consequences to our health. Food is just not as black