Food is love
Food is joy
Food is life!
Food is not a controlled substance, and we don’t need to go to a pharmacy to get it along with instructions about when and how much to consume. But how is it that food is often treated like the most addictive and deadly drug, to be closely monitored and policed to protect us from its consequences–fat. Fat, the demon that haunts us and brings a lifetime shame, guilt and stress? Or is it wholesome joy and nourishment? We should add food to the long list of things that we must fight against and struggle with, says who? The answer is very simple, but also complicated and requires a closer look. This conflict is universal, yet also unique to black women.
Everyone needs food to survive and is not something we can abstain from, so we know it’s different from an illicit drug. Yet, we are constantly fed the lie that we have a sickness, and that the cure is just around the corner with the next restrictive diet. Eat way less, exercise way more; eliminate carbs, meat and dairy; or drink tons of water and special teas but nothing really “works”. But over and over again we repeat the same silly cycle without question. Until we get sick and tired of being sick and tired. How did we get here, and how do we get out?
Anti-Blackness, Anti-Fatness and Black Women’s Health
Way back when colonizers realized that they wanted to establish a system of human superiority and inferiority it was very handy to flood people with direct and indirect messaging that thinness is health, thinness (among other things) is beautiful, thinness makes people worthy of love and respect and thinness is the often impossible norm that all women should occupy their minds and resources to strive toward. And these messages were a smashing success because once they put them out there they really didn’t need to maintain the effort at maintaining them because black women, and just women in general began to unwittingly police one another and themselves, putting the weight/size stigma on autopilot.
Food has been weaponized against black women, to keep them at the bottom of the manufactured patriarchal white supremacist mainstream Western societal hierarchy. Food is weaponized in the form of diet culture, the standardization of white physical features as symbols of beauty, health, wealth and morality. This weaponization is not a bug or side effect, it’s a feature.
As early as the 18th century, fatness was derided as evidence of African “savagery” and immorality. Slenderness, by contrast, was considered evidence of Christian elevation and Anglo Saxon superiority.
~Sabrina Strings, The Fear of the Black Body
These distinctions between fat and thin bodies were employed to degrade black women and control white women. And to this very day those attitudes prevail and continue to be used to oppress black women by requiring the thin white beauty standards, which often inherently excludes black women and deems them unworthy and despised, especially if they are fat.
We as black women could sit around and whine on the internet about white supremacy and diet culture, or we could put on combat gear and take to the streets but this problem is way too big for all of that. The solution and healing must come from within. By within I mean within our families, our communities and our spiritual selves. We are the ones who can reverse the damage to our health by the chronic stress of body shame, extreme dieting and exercising, weight cycling and unhappiness. We do this with body respect, sensual spirituality (which includes mindfulness, intention, intuition), food freedom and black joy. Right now we are going to focus on food freedom.
What is food freedom?
Food freedom is being free to intentionally and mindfully nourish our bodies, when we want without guilt and stress from external influence from food rules and restrictions, food police, or racist, sexist diet culture. No food is off limits and we never have to eat so-called healthy food that we don’t enjoy. We can eat what we want, when we want, and how much we want without based on internal cues, not external rules. The guardrails of this freedom are determined by paying attention to how different foods make us feel. It’s going through life making decisions about food based on what we like and what makes our bodies feel good and that don’t have anything to do with weight loss. The ten principles of intuitive eating provide the framework for food freedom:
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet or food plan might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.
2. Honor Your Hunger
Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food.
3. Make Peace with Food
Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.
4. Challenge the Food Police
Scream a loud no to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that diet culture has created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loudspeaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the food police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
The Japanese have the wisdom to keep pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our compulsion to comply with diet culture, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence—the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes just the right amount of food for you to decide you’ve had “enough.”
6. Feel Your Fullness
In order to honor your fullness, you need to trust that you will give yourself the foods that you desire. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is.
7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
First, recognize that food restriction, both physically and mentally, can, in and of itself, trigger loss of control, which can feel like emotional eating. Find kind ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger may only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion.
8. Respect Your Body
Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. But mostly, respect your body so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body size or shape. All bodies deserve dignity.
9. Movement—Feel the Difference
Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feelthe difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm.
10. Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition
Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or become unhealthy, from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.
~10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
Soul food is not killing black women!
The lack of food freedom goes an extra harmful step against black women in particular. The stereotype that soul food, or black american food traditions are making black people chronically ill and causing early deaths is a culprit. It promotes the erroneous racist lie that African American culinary culture is bad, unhealthy and inferior to other food cultures. Fried chicken seems to be the number one culprit, followed by macaroni and cheese and rich desserts. It doesn’t matter where it’s coming from, magazines, diet plan literature, social media or the doctor’s office, the message is that we are fat and unhealthy because we enjoy our own cultural cuisine, and that we should abandon it forever if we have any hope of living a decent life.
Black Southern food is seasonal, healthy, nuanced, and rich with culture and meaning. Systemic racism — in the form of food deserts, stress induced by racial terror, and medical negligence — kills us, not the food made by our people’s experienced and loving hands. The idea that Black food is unhealthy and inferior is rooted in anti-Blackness and prejudice against overweight people
It is alleged that our cuisine is too high in fat and salt, and that this is to blame for heart disease and other chronic lifestyle diseases in our communities. But this is not the case. There are many other cuisines that have characteristically high fat, such as French and Alaskan native cuisines, without the health stigma. As for salt, only fast food soul food, just as most heavily processed foods are high in salt. But homemade food? Not really. And even if these accusations were true, how many people do you know eat soul food on a daily basis? Who is in the kitchen all day long preparing a Thanksgiving feast on weekdays, especially if they have day jobs? And this doesn’t count the foods that are purchased from fast food restaurants. I would be hard pressed to find anyone who eats this way more than once a week, on Sunday afternoon. So, even if our food was really so problematic, we don’t eat it often enough to create such negative health outcomes.
What’s missing here is the truth, which is that soul food has always been heavily plant based, and fresh off the land. Our grandparents had gardens and farms and cooked up all kinds of greens, beans, okra, tomatoes, root vegetables and more!
Processed food is not killing us either.
Processed food is actually all food that has been altered in any way from its natural state. That includes chopping, freezing, or blanching. These are all processes, as is removing fiber or adding a bunch of unfamiliar manufactured ingredients. While some ultra processed food is low in nutrition and high on things we don’t really need, it still is not some villain that’s killing us all. Processed food alone probably won’t sustain good health long term, but it simply is not poisonous. This kind of all or nothing thinking is exactly what causes stress about what to eat. The problem with eating too much ultra processed food over time is that it often causes habitual overeating (it’s designed to do that) and therefore takes the place of more nutritious foods on a regular basis.
Consistently overeating, undernourishment, and chronic stress all together is what creates an environment in the body that promotes inflammation and the release of hormones that over time if left unchecked can lead to chronic lifestyle diseases. Simply eating processed food balanced with other food choices does not cause chronic lifestyle diseases. Processed food does have a contributing role, but not the way we think.
The processed food industry has employed ways to sell more of their products with marketing and the actual ingredients themselves to cause people to eat too much (of their products). Advertisements that promote eating for fun rather than for hunger or nourishment are one such tactic. These ads seem to promote eating the snacks purely for the hell of it, and this subconsciously makes it seem okay to do that regularly. Like in this super corny chip ad. Processed snack foods are created with a particular salt, sugar and fat ratio that has been proven to trigger overeating. Further, the high concentration of tastes and flavors overstimulate the taste buds to the point that they become desensitized to natural foods not prepared in a factory. So fruits don’t taste sweet enough and some people can’t detect the flavors in vegetables at all, which makes the factory food seem more attractive than produce so we consistently don’t eat enough produce and fill up on too much processed food over time.
Worrying about what to eat is a fool’s errand. When it comes to health, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), genes, biology, and health behaviors together account for only 25% of population health outcomes. Social determinants of health including race, gender, environment, and access to health services account for the remaining 75%. Let that sink in. Diet, exercise and rest account for less than 25% of all health outcomes! The only thing that agonizing over food brings is stress.
The truth about what we eat is unromantic. There are no dietary villains or miracle cures. There is no paradise past, no noble savage, no magic elixir, no one true diet. The demons are the gurus and fearmongers who make you sick with anxiety, identifying endless toxins and hidden killers, then offering advice that will save you from the nutritional hell they themselves created.
~Alan Levinovitz, The Gluten Lie and other Myths about What you Eat
So, what is healthy eating, really?
Healthy eating is nothing more than a combination of two things, none of which involves food restriction: balance (regularly eating a wide variety of foods), and a positive relationship with food. It’s eating with pleasure, without the stress. Healthy eating is when deciding what to eat isn’t a full time job and what to eat is only a simple question of what we want. It’s trusting that you can eat in a way that supports your health with no instructions, books, checklists or rules involved. Freedom.
But how? We have been programmed to believe that eating and pleasure shouldn’t be in the same sentence together because we fear that we will turn into gluttons and eat ourselves into a 600 lb life in 6 months of eating without rules.
If you can just imagine breathing a sigh of relief, and going about the rest of your days not feeling like every single thing you put in your mouth carries a life or death consequence. Instead, you just eat. Food is neutral and delicious. The focus can be on truly savoring and experiencing pleasure in the present with all the senses, unrushed and unbothered. Fear, guilt and morality have no place in the context of eating. You know what your body needs to feel good and you can just eat it. Trust, confidence and sensuality are the way. There’s no asking, is this good? Is this bad? Is this healthy? Food freedom and intuitive eating are not the only way to live a healthy life. But, it is the best strategy for living the good life and prioritizing happiness and joy over fear and rules. To learn more about how to live your best life without food rules and stress, sign up for LifeBliss Wellness weekly emails below.
I’m LifeBliss Lisa and I coach black women on how to create intentional, healthy, soft lifestyles.