Learning
Overcoming The Diet Legacy and Passing on Nourishment to Our Children
by Karen Schachter, contributing editor
It’s a new year! Time to put all those past bad habits behind us starting with the sugar and overeating! And that means, start the January diet again...Right?
Wrong.
Although I am all for healthy eating, I am not a big fan of DIETS. You know, those restrictive things that tell us that our hungers can’t be trusted and induce guilt when we want something yummy.
Why?
First off, diets don’t work. It’s a simple fact that something like 95% of diets FAIL and that we have girls as young as 3rd grade engaging in this unhealthy, not to mention dangerous, national past-time.
Why are we as a culture so obsessed with perpetuating something with such a high failure and frustration rate? With rates of eating disorders and obesity both climbing, while at the same time as diet books continue to flood the market, this is a legacy that needs to change.
Secondly, diets typically mean: I will deprive myself of foods that I love and eat dried out chicken breast or non-fat cottage cheese and boring old salad until I lose this fat and then I can eat yummy foods again and be happy. We control ourselves and our cravings, feel deprived and then, as soon as we’re done or when we can’t take it anymore, we overcompensate by overeating those off limit foods, all over again. Not sustainable and oh, so depriving! Again, not the patterns we want to be passing on to our kids.
As a mom of two children, as someone who is kind of obsessed with healthy eating and as someone who LOVES chocolate, I have struggled myself with this quandary of how do I keep myself healthy and happy without feeling deprived, and pass on a healthy attitude, rather than a depriving one, to my children?
I have found this one simple word to be a guiding light: nourishment.
Now, some people consider nourishmen to be a simple calculation of nutritional value, fat grams, protein, and so on. Blah! That feels so dry and scientific and takes all the deliciousness and pleasure and joy out of this lovely experience.
To me, nourishment happens on a body-soul-mind-relational level. It is far more interesting than what is happening with the vitamins and minerals and enzymes and fat grams; although that is useful to know because certainly those things affect how we feel.
Nourishment is about choosing things that make you feel good It is about loving ourselves enough to be kind to ourselves; it’s about loving our children enough to set limits and say no when certain foods (and activities) may hurt them, and helping them cultivate an attitude of self-care and awareness. It’s about bringing pleasure and presence and slowing down and savoring and a big dose of love back to the table.
Nourishing yourself — and teaching your children to do the same — is an act of generosity. An act of giving rather than taking away. Instead of thinking about what you can’t have or shouldn’t have, you get to think about what you can give to yourself to add to your vibrancy and your aliveness and health. You think about feeding yourself, being gentle and kind, and creating true and sustainable deliciousness.
Cultivating an attitude of nourishment requires cultivating self-trust. When we’ve spent our lives NOT trusting the wisdom of our bodies and instead looking to calorie counts or rigid food plans or the numbers on a scale to determine what we “should” or “can” eat, it can be a new challenge to tune inward. But here’s what I know: your body — when listened to closely — will guide you toward what she needs, both with food and in your life. When you remove the shackles of the rigid diet and the calorie counting, and the shoulds, you begin to know what best serves you.
So this year, consider a new New Year’s resolution: One that values the deep care of your body and spirit, from a place of nourishment rather than deprivation. And know that as you do this for yourself, you are passing on a new legacy to your children as they learn first-hand what it means to care for their own bodies and souls.
